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Stalin’s articles on Marxism and linguistics were republished in all Soviet newspapers. They were read over the radio and reprinted as pamphlets with print runs in the millions. Linguistic programmes were revamped to include new courses on ‘Stalin’s Teaching about Language’. A wave of anti-Marrite discussions swept the country. Critical books and articles multiplied. One beneficiary of this counter-revolution, Vinogradov, was appointed head of a new Institute of Linguistics.

Worth quoting is Evgeny Dobrenko’s multi-metaphoric summary of these developments:

Stalin’s text is a discursive black hole that sucks in entire scholarly/scientific disciplines; they disintegrate at ever-increasing speed and produce more and more textual fragments. Put another way, one might compare this ever-expanding discourse originating from Stalin’s text to a progressive tumour that continually metastasizes to new organs and tissues. As a sacred object that gives birth to text and procreates discourse, this short text truly engenders oceans of literature.237

STALIN THE PLAGIARISER?

Various bets have been staked on which of Stalin’s writings were plagiarised from other authors. Trotsky’s claim that Lenin, not Stalin, was the author of Marxism and the National Question has already been dealt with. Stephen Kotkin writes that Stalin ‘plagiarized whole cloth’ his first major work, Anarchism or Socialism?, from a deceased Georgian railway worker-intellectual called Giorgi Teliya.238 The only cited evidence for this assertion is that in his 1907 obituary for Teliya, which was republished in his collected works, Stalin mentioned that his dead comrade had written a piece called ‘Anarchism and Social Democracy’.239 As Kotkin himself admits, ‘We shall never know how much of Teliya’s work Stalin borrowed or how much he may have sharpened it.’240 Or, indeed, if he made any use of it at all, except, perhaps, as an idea for his own series of articles.

Kotkin also repeats Roy Medvedev’s claim that Stalin’s 1924 lectures on The Foundations of Leninism – one of the key texts in the Stalinist canon – were heavily based on a manuscript by F. A. Ksenofontov on Lenin’s Doctrine of Revolution.241 Again, this was a hare set running by Stalin himself when he allowed a private letter he had written to Ksenofontov in 1926 to be published in the ninth volume of his collected works.242 Stalin’s purpose was to assert his authorship of the definition of Leninism as ‘the Marxism of the era of imperialism and of proletarian revolution’. Medvedev maintained that Stalin derived that definition from Ksenofontov, and he may be right. But Stalin’s elaboration of the definition in The Foundations of Leninism differs markedly from that of Ksenofontov. It is the broad strokes of the theory and practice of Bolshevism under Lenin’s leadership that interests Stalin, not the close textual analysis and careful formulations favoured by Ksenofontov.

Of several works by Ksenofontov that remain in Stalin’s book collection, the only text that he marked was On the Ideological and Tactical Foundations of Bolshevism (1928).243 Stalin seems to have skipped the first section of the book in which the author reprised his analysis of the nature of Leninism and nor did he show any interest in Ksenofontov’s history of Bolshevik strategy and tactics. Instead, Stalin homed in on his detailed reconstruction of Lenin’s thinking on the New Economic Policy and its relationship to socialist construction – a subject that was very much on his mind at the end of the 1920s, when NEP was in crisis and he was on the verge of breaking with that policy. As so often, Stalin’s reading interests reflected immediate and pressing political concerns.

Admittedly, complexity, depth and subtlety were not strengths of Stalin’s, nor was he an original thinker. His lifelong practice was to utilise other people’s ideas, formulations and information – that was why he read such a lot. His intellectual hallmark was that of a brilliant simplifier, clarifier and populariser. As Dobrenko put it: ‘Stalin never strove for novelty in his thinking but rather aimed at political expediency. In every case, the forcefulness of his thought is in its efficacy, not originality.’244

Ernst Fischer, the Austrian communist art historian who worked for the Comintern and lived in exile in Moscow from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, was among the many intellectuals smitten by Stalin. He ‘was the master of simplistic argument’, recalled Fischer, and intellectuals ‘succumbed’ to this simplisme because of his ability to reconcile ‘the critical reason of the thinker with the élan, the all or nothing, of the man of action’.245

MASTERS OF WAR

The interwar Red Army had at its disposal a talented and innovative group of military strategists: Mikhail Frunze (1885–1925), Boris Shaposhnikov (1882–1945), Alexander Svechin (1878–1938), Vladimir Triandafillov (1894–1931) and Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893–1937).246 Together they fostered a sophisticated discourse about the changing nature of modern warfare, the use of advanced military technology and the development of operational art. Especially important were the doctrines of ‘deep battle’ and ‘deep operations’, which entailed successive and sustained waves of combined arms forces (infantry, armour, airborne) penetrating the full depth of enemy defences and then the envelopment of enemy forces from the rear. These doctrines were similar to the contemporaneous German concept of Blitzkrieg but the Soviets were less tank centric and more inclined to use infantry and artillery for breakthrough operations. From 1936 these ideas were incorporated into successive editions of the Red Army’s Field Service Regulations, which guided the organisation and deployment of military forces and the conduct of combat operations. During the Second World War, Stalin was a diligent reader of these manuals and made numerous textual corrections to draft versions.247

Stalin’s interest in the details of military affairs was longstanding. His library included a copy of a Russian artillery journal dating from 1866, a 1911 history of the Russian army and fleet, and a photocopy of a description of the Madsen 20mm machine gun.248 Heavily marked by Stalin was a 1925 work on artillery – a translation of a book by the French general Frédéric-Georges Herr (1855–1932). Stalin was interested in the extent and organisation of artillery in modern armies, with the types and calibre of artillery and its potential range (up to 200km, according to Herr). He noted Herr’s comment that Germany was continuing to develop its armaments and had the lead when it came to chemical weapons. His attention was also drawn to the importance of technical education and the post-First World War British decision to establish a number of specialist military training schools.249 Ambassador Averell Harriman recalled that Stalin

had an enormous ability to absorb detail. . . . In our negotiations with him [about wartime military supplies from the US] we usually found him extremely well-informed. He had a masterly knowledge of the sort of equipment that was important to him. He knew the calibre of the guns he wanted, the weight of the tanks his roads and bridges would take, and the details of the type of metal he needed to build aircraft.250