11. Personal Comments: Currently a member of the party Central Committee and its Orgburo
J. Stalin9
One curiosity concerns Stalin’s date of birth. According to church records he was born on 6 December 1878 (Old-Style Russian calendar) and that is the year he wrote in the ROSTA questionnaire. However, Stalin’s publicly declared birthday was 21 December 1879 (New-Style Russian calendar) and that was the date extravagantly celebrated as his fiftieth in 1929, and again in 1939 and 1949 as his sixtieth and seventieth birthdays. The reason for this discrepancy remains a mystery but in October 1921 Stalin completed a party registration form in which he put down 1879 as the year of his birth.10 A December 1922 biographical summary prepared by his staff stated that was the year of his birth, as did the opening line of a short biography prepared by Ivan P. Tovstukha, documents that Stalin would certainly have read and approved.11
Tovstukha’s text was published as one of a series of portraits of Bolshevik leaders in the so-called Granat biographical dictionary, prepared to mark the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. A trusted and valued assistant, Tovstukha was a long-time revolutionary activist who started working for the future dictator when Stalin was appointed people’s commissar for nationalities. When Stalin became party general-secretary, Tovstukha followed him into the central party apparatus. Throughout the 1920s, he was one of Stalin’s most important aides and performed a number of key functions, including a stint as director of the Lenin Institute, which was responsible for the publication of the first edition of Lenin’s collected writings. In 1931 he was appointed deputy director of the newly created Institute of Marx, Engels and Lenin (IMEL), the party’s archive-cum-research organisation. Tovstukha died of tuberculosis in 1935 but his memory was preserved by a plaque and by naming one of the archive’s reading rooms after him.12
Tovstukha’s ‘biography’ of his boss, which was little more than an extended chronology of Stalin’s political career, was composed at the height of the internal party succession struggle following Lenin’s death in 1924. It stressed Stalin’s closeness to Lenin, before, during and after the revolution. It was also published as a fourteen-page pamphlet and an expanded version was published in Pravda in 1929 as one of several laudatory pieces marking Stalin’s fiftieth birthday.13
Tovstukha’s account was devoid of any really personal information about Stalin, and the same was true of the other Bolshevik biographies featured in the Granat. In theory, if not in always in practice, the Bolsheviks believed in self-effacement. They lived their lives in and through the collective that was the party. Their individual biographies were part and parcel of the history of the party. Their personalities and private lives were strictly subordinate to their political stories. The absence of interiority in the manner of Bildungsroman was a matter of pride.
In June 1926 Stalin went on a month-long trip to Georgia. In Tbilisi he gave a speech to railway workers in which he summarised his pre-revolutionary political journey. As befits a former seminarian, the speech was steeped in religious imagery. It was the closest he ever came to writing an autobiography.
Stalin was replying to the workers’ greetings and he began by modestly denying he was the ‘legendary warrior-knight’ they thought him to be. The true story of his political life, said Stalin, was that he had been educated by the prolet-ariat. His first teachers were those Tbilisi workers he came into contact with when he was placed in charge of a study circle of railwaymen in 1898. From them he received lessons in practical political work. This was his ‘first baptism in the revolutionary struggle’, when he served as an ‘apprentice in the art of revolution’. His ‘second baptism in the revolutionary struggle’ were the years (1907–9) he spent in Baku organising the oil workers. It was in Baku that he ‘became a journeyman in the art of revolution’. After a period in the wilderness – ‘wandering[s] from one prison or place of exile to another’ – he was sent by the party to Petrograd where in 1917 he received his ‘third baptism in the revolutionary struggle’. It was in Russia, under Lenin’s guidance, that he became ‘a master workman in the art of revolution’.14
Striking about Stalin’s telling of this story was that he cast it entirely in class and political terms. His Georgian background was of no consequence except as an accidental matter of geography. His formative experiences of class struggle could have happened anywhere there were workers and the culminating episode took place in Petrograd – the radical heartland of the Russian proletariat. ‘You know, Papa used to be a Georgian once,’ the young Vasily Stalin told his six-year-old sister, Svetlana, who also recorded in her memoirs that when she was a child her family ‘paid no special attention to anything Georgian – my father had become completely Russian’.15
Tovstukha wanted to write a full biography of Stalin but he had rivals for that honour within the party. One of his competitors was the party official Yemel’yan Yaroslavsky (1878–1943), who fancied himself a historian. Among his later claims to fame was co-authorship with Stalin and others of the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938) that served as the bible of the party’s history until Stalin’s death.
Yaroslavsky’s ambition to publish a biography of Stalin was stymied by Tovstukha and others in IMEL. When he appealed to Stalin for help in August 1935, he was given short shrift. ‘I am against the idea of a biography about me,’ wrote Stalin on Yaroslavsky’s letter. ‘Gorky had a plan like yours, and he also asked me, but I have backed away from this issue. I don’t think the time has come for a Stalin biography!’16
The problem was that the absence of a proper, official biography was a yawning gap in a vista that Stalin himself had opened up in 1931 when he published a letter on ‘Some Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism’ in the journal Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya.17 Stalin’s missive was a long and boring diatribe against a young historian called Anatoly Slutsky who published an article that had the cheek to criticise aspects of Lenin’s policy towards German social democracy before the First World War. Stalin denounced the article and its author as ‘anti-party’ and ‘semi-Trotskyist’. Tedious and tendentious though it was, Stalin’s denunciation of Slutsky was not a purely dogmatic assertion of the party line on Lenin: his criticisms were supported by a detailed textual and historical analysis of the issue.
As punishment for his temerity, Slutsky was expelled from the Society of Marxist Historians and lost his post at the Communist Academy’s Institute of History. He was then expelled from the communist party.18
In his ‘letter’, Stalin took the opportunity to launch a broader attack on the work of party historians, including Yaroslavsky: ‘Who, except hopeless bureaucrats, can rely on written documents alone? Who, except archive rats, does not understand that a party and its leaders must be tested primarily by their deeds . . . Lenin taught us to test revolutionary parties, trends and leaders not by their declarations and resolutions, but by their deeds.’19
In his interview with Emil Ludwig a couple of months later, Stalin reinforced the point that in the study of history, people and their actions mattered most. When the German writer commented that ‘Marxism denies that the individual plays an outstanding role in history’, Stalin responded that ‘Marxism does not at all deny the role played by outstanding individuals or that history is made by people’, though, of course, they do not make history under conditions of their own choosing: ‘And great people are worth anything at all only to the extent that they are able to correctly understand these conditions, to understand how to change them.’ When Ludwig persisted with his argument, saying that ‘Marxism denies the role of heroes, the role of heroic personalities in history’, Stalin replied that ‘Marxism has never denied the role of heroes. On the contrary, it admits that they play a considerable role.’20