A prize for peace also bore Stalin’s name. A rival to the Nobel Peace Prize, it was an international award and among its recipients were a good many writers, for example, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, the American novelist Howard Fast, and the Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg.
Neruda, who also served on the prize committee, was told by a Russian contact that when Stalin was presented with a list of possible winners, he exclaimed, ‘And why isn’t Neruda’s among them?’58
Among the poems penned by Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, was an ‘Ode to Stalin’:
Lenin left an inheritance
of a homeland free and wide.
Stalin populated it
with schools and flour,
printhouses and apples.
Stalin from the Volga
to the snow
of the inaccessible North
put his hand and in his hand a man
he started to build.
The cities were born.
The deserts sang
for the first time with the voice of water.59
Ehrenburg was another beneficiary of Stalin’s patronage but not in relation to the peace prize award: as the Soviet Union’s foremost international peace campaigner in the 1940s and 1950s, he was among the worthiest of its recipients. But Stalin was instrumental in awarding him a first-class literature prize for his 1948 novel The Storm, a story set in wartime France. Reviewers had criticised the novel for portraying the French resistance as more heroic than the Soviet people, so the literature prize committee recommended the award of only a second-class prize. When Stalin asked why, he was told the novel had no real heroes and that one of its main characters was a Soviet citizen who falls in love with a Frenchwoman, which was not a typical situation during the war. ‘But I like this Frenchwoman, she’s a nice girl. And besides, such things do happen in real life,’ said Stalin. ‘As regards heroes, I think that few people are born heroes, it’s ordinary people who become heroes.’
Reflecting on this episode, Ehrenburg wrote in his memoirs: ‘The more I think about Stalin the more it is fully borne in on me how little I understand.’60 Around the same time, Stalin vetted a play by Simonov based on the Kliueva–Roskin affair. Alien Shadow concerned a Soviet microbiologist infatuated with the west who inadvertently betrays state secrets. At Stalin’s insistence, Simonov changed the play’s ending to one in which the government forgives the protagonist’s sins. Some critics considered the play too weak and liberal. The play was awarded a Stalin Prize, but only a second-class one.61
CHAPTER 7
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF THE USSR
If there was anything Stalin loved as much as reading, it was editing. His red or blue pencil marks on documents were as familiar to Soviet officials as his face. The same is true for today’s scholars of the Stalin era. How he processed the paperwork that crossed his desk is fundamental to understanding his thinking and decision-making. Rare were the draft documents that passed by his editorial eye unaltered.
Stalin’s journalistic approach was the hallmark of his editorial style.1 Filling in a party registration questionnaire in October 1921, he listed ‘journalist’ as one of his special skills.2 His political life was founded on writing and editing agitational materials – leaflets, pamphlets, speeches, editorials, short articles – and it showed in the way that he cut, reorganised and sharpened texts he found unsatisfactory. The results were hardly scintillating but he was a highly competent editor and the texts that bore his name, or imprimatur, were invariably clear and accessible to their intended readers, whether party cadres, popular audiences, foreign officials or specialists. Supremely confident, Stalin was comfortable in his role as the Soviet Union’s editor-in-chief.3
Mostly, Stalin edited for clarity and accuracy. But sometimes he felt the need to grapple with substance, particularly if the text was of major political importance. Such was the case with the five key texts considered in this chapter: the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938); the interwar section of volume two of Istoriya Diplomatii (1941); the second edition of his short biography, Joseph Stalin (1947); the polemical booklet Falsifiers of History (1948); and a Soviet textbook on Political Economy (1954).
Stalin’s first foray into full-length book-editing was his involvement in the early stages of the multi-part History of the Civil War in the USSR, the first two volumes of which dealt with pre-revolutionary history and the 1917 revolution. The project was Maxim Gorky’s idea and the aim was to produce a popular and accessible history that would highlight the feats and exploits of the ordinary people who fought for the Bolsheviks.4 Stalin was a titular member of the editorial collective, which was headed by I. I. Mints, a specialist in civil war history. Mints later worked on the History of Diplomacy book (see below) and served on the government’s Commission for the History of the Great Patriotic War. Mints was Jewish and in the late 1940s fell foul of the anti-cosmopolitan purge of suspected Zionists and lost all his academic posts. But he managed to avoid falling victim to more extreme measures.
Extensive consultations and discussions took place with Stalin on the first two volumes of the civil war history. In 1934 Gorky sent him the draft of volume one, which the dictator then edited in some detail, marking hundreds of corrections. Mints recalled that ‘Stalin was pedantically interested in formal exactitude. He replaced “Piter” in one place with “Petrograd”, “February in the Countryside” as a chapter title (he thought it suggested a landscape) with “The February Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution”. . . . Grandiloquence was mandatory, too. “October Revolution” had to be replaced by “The Great October Revolution”. There were dozens of such corrections.’5
Stalin the pedant was also a stickler for correct dates, accurate captions and informative subheadings, as well as making liberal use of adjectival qualifiers such as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’. He insisted the book’s title should include the name of the country in which the civil war took place, i.e. the USSR.6 Stalin was pleased with the result and in summer 1935 he wrote to congratulate Mints and his team: ‘You’ve done your work well – the book reads like a novel.’7 Elaine MacKinnon, the author of an in-depth study of the early years of the project, agrees:
The first two volumes were definitely popular in form, with colourful illustrations, photographs, and a prose style that is more characteristic of fictional narratives than scientific treatises. The characterizations are simplistic and project in animated tone clear images of good and evil, positive and negative. The narratives read like fiction, with many short sentences and continual efforts to build up a sense of tension and drama in the unfolding of events. Enemies are clearly defined. The role of workers, soldiers, and peasants is highlighted, despite innumerable references to Stalin and other Bolshevik leaders.8
In a pre-publication puff piece for the first volume, Mints explained the editorial process to readers of the party journal Bol’shevik. He emphasised Stalin’s personal involvement in the project but gave no details. He did, however, relate numerous examples of changes to the draft made by an unnamed ‘Chief Editor’, such as amending ‘Russia – prison of the peoples’ to ‘Tsarist Russia – prison of the peoples’ and changing ‘October Revolution’ to ‘Great Proletarian Revolution’. The chief editor’s changes, concluded Mints, merited close attention: ‘All these corrections are a model of deep analysis, exceptional clarity and precise formulation.’9