Stalin’s active engagement with philosophical issues was sporadic.19 His earliest major work, Anarchism or Socialism? (1906–7), was a fundamentalist defence of Marxist philosophy against criticisms levelled by various Russian anarchists. He didn’t return to such discourse until the Short Course. In between he read a few philosophy texts, kept abreast of intra-Marxist theoretical disputes and, if the Jan Sten story is to be believed, took a few tutorials in Hegelian dialectics. In 1930 he intervened in a Soviet philosophy debate that pitted so-called ‘mechanists’ against ‘dialecticians’, essentially a dispute about how much credit should be given to Hegel as a dialectician. Stalin sided with the mechanists, who argued that Hegelian dialectics were too formal, too abstract and too detached from political practice.
Anarchism or Socialism? was based primarily on the writings of Marx and Engels. ‘Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx’s proletarian socialism logically flows,’ wrote Stalin. ‘This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.’
Marxism’s method was dialectical and its theory materialistic. Dialectics was based on the idea that in life change was constant. Marxist materialism asserted that when the material conditions of life changed so did people’s consciousness, but only after a time lag. Adroit political intervention during that lag could speed up the changes necessary to achieve the revolutionary transformation of both material life and consciousness.
In Stalin’s Marxist universe, history was inevitably moving in the direction of socialism because it was the only system in which the forces of economic development would be able to reach their full potential. Marxist struggles for socialism were not based on utopian aspirations but on knowledge of the objective dynamics of social development. ‘Proletarian socialism’, Stalin wrote, was a ‘logical deduction from dialectical materialism’. It was a ‘scientific socialism’.20
Stalin railed against anarchist accusations that Marxist dialectics were not a method but a metaphysics. But it is hard not to conclude that the anarchists were right: what Stalin proposed first and foremost was an ontology, a general theory of reality, a description and analysis of what the world was actually like.
The ontological foundations of dialectical and historical materialism were stressed even more by Stalin in the Short Course. Reality is material, knowable and subject to definite laws, argued Stalin. This is true of both nature and the social world. Dialectics revealed that reality – human and physical – was interconnected, integrated and holistic, and in a state of constant movement and change.
Stalin’s ontology sought to make historical materialism a science of history based on the study of the laws of social development. Knowledge of these laws guided the party’s practice: ‘The prime task of historical science is to study and disclose the laws of production, the laws of development of the productive forces and of the relations of production, the laws of economic development of society.’
As he had in Anarchism or Socialism?, Stalin stepped back from the crude economic determinism implicit in his schema. Social ideas, theories, views and political institutions originated in the economic base of society but having arisen they acquired quite a lot of autonomy, including having a determining influence on material life. Indeed, Stalin’s emphasis on the relative autonomy of the social superstructure vis-à-vis its economic base was his distinctive contribution to Marxist philosophy.
Many philosophical holes can be picked in dialectical and historical materialism, but its attractiveness as a mode of thinking should not be underestimated. As the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm recalled in his memoirs:
What made Marxism so irresistible was its comprehensiveness. ‘Dialectical materialism’ provided, if not a ‘theory of everything’, then at least a ‘framework of everything’, linking inorganic and organic nature with human affairs, collective and individual, and providing a guide to the nature of all interactions in a world of constant flux.21
Study of the Short Course was compulsory for virtually all educated Soviet citizens. Between 1938 and 1949 it went through 234 impressions, a total of 35.7 million copies, of which 27.5 million were in Russian, 6.4 million in the other languages of the Soviet Union and 1.8 million in foreign languages.22 Not until after Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin did the Short Course lose its official status as the definitive history of the party.
SHOW DON’T TELL: THE HISTORY OF DIPLOMACY
Stalin’s favourite editing weapon was deletion, his prime targets being quotation-mongering and excessive rhetoric. The goal was to streamline and de-clutter text, avoid repetition, and not lose sight of the wood by focusing on the trees.
Istoriya Diplomatii was commissioned by the Politburo in spring 1940. Its first volume, on the history of diplomacy from ancient times up to the Franco-Prussian war, was sent to the printers at the end of December 1940. The second volume would deal with the late nineteenth century, the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the origins of the Second World War. Stalin was sent the section on the politically tricky interwar years, the period when the Soviet Union became a central actor in the history of diplomacy.23 The typescript was unsigned but the history’s titular editor, V. P. Potemkin, had previously indicated to Stalin that its authors would be Mints and A. M. Pankratova (1897–1957).24
Stalin changed the title from ‘Diplomacy after the First World War and the Socialist Revolution in Russia’ to ‘Diplomacy in Contemporary Times (1919–1940)’. He also indicated that Russia’s exit from the First World War and the 1918 Brest-Litovsk peace treaty should be dealt with separately. Working through the text, he eliminated virtually all quotations from his and Lenin’s writings, thereby turning a propagandistic tract into an approximation of professional history, albeit of the highly partisan variety.
In many of his own articles and speeches, Stalin spelled out his political messages. Such didacticism he deemed unnecessary in this instance. Hence his deletion of many passages in this text that cast the imperialists in a bad light or read like special pleading on behalf of the Soviet government. The story itself was allowed to tell its tale of imperialist predation, hypocrisy and double-dealing on the one hand, and Soviet virtue on the other.
It turned out that these detailed edits were mostly a waste of Stalin’s time. Publication of volume two of Istoriya Diplomatii was disrupted by the outbreak of the Soviet–German war. When publication resumed in 1945, the project had metamorphosed into a much larger, three-volume work. Instead of one long chapter devoted to the interwar period, there were 700 pages in the third volume, mostly written by Mints and Pankratova, with Potemkin credited as the co-author of two chapters on 1938–9. The volume was subtitled ‘Diplomacy in the Period of the Preparation of the Second World War (1919–1939)’. There is no evidence that Stalin had a hand in editing this volume. Presumably, he was far too busy waging war.
But in one important respect, Stalin’s editing did endure: volume three contained hardly any Lenin or Stalin quotes. For the most part, it was a dry and dispassionate diplomatic history that only at the very end let rip a broadside against the ‘methods of bourgeois diplomacy’. This was written by another historian favourite of Stalin’s, E. V. Tarle (1874–1955), a specialist on Napoleon and the 1812 war. Among the aforesaid methods were aggression masquerading as defence; propaganda, disinformation and demagogy; threats and intimidation; and using the protection of weak states as a pretext for war. According to Tarle, Stalin asked him personally to write this chapter.25