The idea that Stalin was a man of many parts and faces – what the Russians call a litsedei – is a staple of his biography.2 Revolutionary, state-builder, moderniser, monster, genius, genocidaire, warlord – these are just a few of his featured lives.3 Concluding his magnificent biography of the young Stalin, Ronald Suny was at pains to distinguish the youthful idealist that populates most of his book’s many pages from the power-mad politician of the post-revolutionary years.4 Yet the story of Stalin’s life as an intellectual is one of continuity. The young Stalin and the mature man are recognisably the same person. Stalin read and marked books in 1952 in much the same way he did in 1922 – actively, methodically and with feeling. The same is true of Stalin the writer. ‘In his first essays written for the clandestine Georgian paper Brdzola’, wrote Isaac Deutscher in 1947, ‘one finds already almost the same range of ideas, the same method of exposition, the same style that would be characteristic for Stalin even thirty years later.’5
Books drew Stalin to the revolution and reading remained essential to his autonomy as a political actor. As Suny showed so well, Stalin’s intellectual and political loyalty to Lenin was a matter of conviction, not faith. He read Lenin and his critics and came to his own conclusions. His rationale for Bolshevik violence, repression and authoritarianism was deeply flawed but it was his own, and it was rooted in reason. That’s why he read Kautsky’s critique of Bolshevism as well as Lenin’s and Trotsky’s defences of the new Soviet regime.
Stalin was a Marxist fundamentalist but some of his ideas did evolve in response to changing circumstances, new experiences and accumulated knowledge. The construction of the world’s first socialist society was for him an intellectual as well as a practical project. Theorisation and strategisation were as important as policy detail. As party leader he was inundated with briefings and documentation, but more often than not it was extra-curricular reading that guided his responses to the challenges of building and defending Soviet socialism.
Stalin’s adoption of the doctrine of socialism in one country in the mid-1920s is inexplicable without reference to his reading and interpretation of Lenin’s writings, as well as his careful critique of the opposing views of Trotsky and Zinoviev. As consequential was his rereading of the lessons of Russian history. Defence of the Tsarist-created Russian state was a central task of Soviet communists by the mid-1930s. Stalin mobilised Russian cultural and historical traditions and embraced the concept of a Russocentric state based on ‘the friendship of the Soviet peoples’. Popular history textbooks he helped to produce played a significant role in fostering Soviet patriotism.
During the Russian Civil War, Stalin shared Lenin’s apocalyptic vision of a cataclysmic clash between socialism and capitalism. But when the civil war ended in Bolshevik victory, they both changed their minds about the possibilities of peaceful co-existence with the imperialists. The Soviets began to practise diplomacy and Stalin started to read about it. The Bolsheviks framed their diplomatic tactics as the ‘exploitation of inter-imperialist contradictions’, but Stalin was also attracted to the memoirs of that conservative master of realpolitik, Otto von Bismarck. At the same time, the threat of war continued to loom large and Stalin remained preoccupied by the danger of internal and external enemies forming an unholy alliance against him. The murderous mass repressions of the 1930s were driven by his perception of a dire existential threat to the Soviet state.
Stalin’s interest in military affairs was a constant and he put his reading of military history and strategic theory to good use during the Second World War. Above all, it provided perspective and enabled him to take a bird’s-eye view of the Soviet war effort. Stalin’s generals marvelled at his strategic acumen and his deep understanding of modern warfare, the defeats and disasters of the early years of the Great Patriotic War notwithstanding.
Words were among Stalin’s most potent weapons during the cold war and he personally rewrote the Soviet counterblast to western propagandising about his short-lived pact with Hitler.
Precisely because ideas were so important to him, he was reluctant to relinquish the doctrine of the inevitability of war under capitalism. But he did reduce it to a theory of little practical significance. Nor did this ideological orthodoxy prevent him from presiding over a massive communist-led peace movement whose raison d’être was that, in the nuclear age, war was not and could not be allowed to become inevitable.6
Stalin’s views on roads to revolution underwent a fundamental transformation from the mid-1930s onwards when the Comintern prioritised anti-fascist unity and began to embrace the idea of a gradual, democratic transition to socialism. ‘Today socialism is possible even under the English monarchy,’ he told Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito in March 1945. ‘Revolution in no longer necessary everywhere.’ In May 1946 Poland’s communist leaders were informed that ‘Lenin never said there was no path to socialism other than the dictatorship of the proletariat, he admitted that it was possible to arrive at the path to socialism utilising the foundations of the bourgeois democratic system such as Parliament’. Czechoslovakia’s communist leader, Klement Gottwald, reported Stalin as saying in July 1946 that ‘experience shows . . . there is not one path to the Soviet system and the dictatorship of the proletariat. . . . After the defeat of Hitler’s Germany . . . there appeared many possibilities and paths open to the socialist movement.’7
Literature was another arena of patriotic mobilisation for Stalin, especially after the Second World War, when he became impatient of foreign influences on Soviet fiction. Promoting patriotism was also at the forefront of his various interventions in postwar scientific debates. Orchestrating discussion of the new Political Economy textbook proved to be his last effort to shape Soviet discourse on a matter of vital importance to the socialist system. It was a less than successful exercise but it showed how to the very end of his life he was grappling with the problems and challenges of the economics of socialism.
After his death the Soviet Union relaunched itself as far less violent, repressive and ideologically orthodox. Yet it remained recognisably Stalin’s system – governed by ideas and led by people whose politics were framed by Marxist-Leninist theory. No post-Stalin Soviet leader was as intellectual as he was, but to one degree or another they all shared his love of reading, as did millions upon millions of their compatriots. The Bolsheviks failed to revolutionise people’s consciousness, but their book culture continued to flourish. Its marks and traces linger on in contemporary Russia, not least in the archival remnants of Stalin’s library.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: THE KREMLIN SCHOLAR
1. D. Shepilov, The Kremlin’s Scholar, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2014 pp.2–3, 6; J. Rubenstein, The Last Days of Stalin, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2016 chap.1.
2. The Russian title of Shepilov’s memoir was Neprimknyvshii, literally: not-joined – a reference to his association with but non-membership of the Molotov-led group on the Presidium (Politburo) that tried to overthrow Khrushchev in 1957.
3. On Stalin’s efforts at learning English, French and German, see M. Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, CEU Press: Budapest 2003 chap.8. In a party registration questionnaire dated October 1921, Stalin stated he could speak German as well as Georgian and Russian but this seems to have been an exaggeration. (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter RGASPI), F.558, Op.4, D.333, L.1.)