49. O. Johnson, ‘The Stalin Prize and the Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?’, Slavic Review, 70/4 (Winter 2011) p.826. See further: P. Akhmanaev, Stalinskie Premii, Russkie Vityazi: Moscow 2016. Details of all the awards made, together with other documentation, may be found in V. F. Svin’in & K. A. Oseev (eds), Stalinskie Premii, Svin’in i Synov’ya: Novosibirsk 2007.
50. Shepilov, The Kremlin’s Scholar, pp.104–9.
51. Davies & Harris, Stalin’s World, pp.270–1.
52. Ibid., p.271.
53. K. Simonov, Glazami Cheloveka Moego Pokoleniya: Razmyshleniya o I. V. Staline, Novosti: Moscow 1989 p.233.
54. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.233, pp.41–101 for Stalin’s editing of the play.
55. Vlast’ i Khudozhestvennaya Intelligentsiya, doc.104 pp.675–81. The author of the report was Vladimir Kruzhkov, the former head of IMEL.
56. M. Zorin, ‘Obsuzhdenie Romana V. Latisa “K Novomu Beregu”, Literaturnaya Gazeta (15 December 1952).
57. Vlast’ i Khudozhestvennaya Intelligentsiya, doc.101. The handwritten draft and typescript of the letter may be found in RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.205, Ll.1929–136. These documents were brought to my attention by Davies & Harris, Stalin’s World, p.263. It seems that Stalin’s original intention was to publish the letter as coming from a group of high-ranking party officials, including himself.
58. P. Neruda, Memoirs, Penguin: London 1977 p.317.
59. https://redcaucasus.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/ode-to-stalin-by-pablo-neruda. Accessed 4 August 2021.
60. I. Ehrenburg, Post-War Years, 1945–1954, MacGibbon & Kee: London 1966 p.46. The story about Stalin and his novel was told to him by Alexander Fadeev, the head of the Soviet Writers’ Union, who worked closely with Ehrenburg in the international peace movement.
61. N. Krementsov, The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War, University of Chicago Press: Chicago 2004 pp.136–43.
CHAPTER 7: EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF THE USSR
1. A point made by Holly Case’s thought-provoking piece ‘The Tyrant as Editor’, Chronicle of Higher Education (7 October 2013).
2. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter RGASPI), F.558, Op.4, D.333, L.1.
3. E. Pollock, Conversations with Stalin on Questions of Political Economy, Cold War International History Project Working Paper No.33 (July 2001) p.9.
4. On the writer’s relationship with Stalin, see L. Spiridonova, ‘Gorky and Stalin (According to New Materials from A. M. Gorky’s Archive)’, Russian Review, 54/3 (July 1995).
5. Mints’s memoir is summarised by R. C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941, Norton: New York 1992 pp.531–2.
6. Stalin’s editing of this first volume may be found in RGASPI, F.558, Op.1, D.3165. It bears out Mints’s recollection.
7. D. Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination and Terror under Stalin, 1927–1941, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2011 p.80.
8. E. MacKinnon, ‘Writing History for Stalin: Isaak Izrailevich Mints and the Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny’, Kritika, 6/1 (2005) p.22.
9. I. Mints, ‘Podgotovka Velikoi Proletarskoi Revolyutsii: K Vykhodu v Svet Pervogo Toma “Istoriya Grazhdanskoi Voiny v SSSR”, Bol’shevik, 12/15 (November 1935) p.30 for the quote.
10. This section on the Short Course leans heavily on the work of David Brandenberger: ‘The Fate of Interwar Soviet Internationalism: A Case Study of the Editing of Stalin’s 1938 Short Course on the History of the ACP(B)’, Revolutionary Russia, 29/1 (2016); ‘Stalin and the Muse of History: The Dictator and His Critics on the Editing of the 1938 Short Course’ in V. Tismaneanu & B. C. Iacob (eds), Ideological Storms: Intellectuals, Dictators and the Totalitarian Temptation, CEU Press: Budapest 2019; Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2019 (co-edited with M. Zelenov); and ‘Kratkii Kurs Istorii VKP (b)’: Tekst i Ego Istoriya v 2 Chastyakh: Chast’ 1, Rosspen: Moscow 2014 (co-edited with M. Zelenov). The former edited volume reproduces the official English-language translation of the Short Course together with the details of Stalin’s editing, while the latter contains the archive documents appertaining to the process of producing the book.
11. Brandenberger & Zelenov, ‘Kratkii Kurs Istorii VKP (b)’, doc.112.
12. Ibid., doc.165.
13. Brandenberger & Zelenov, Stalin’s Master Narrative, pp.17–18.
14. Brandenberger & Zelenov, Kratkii Kurs Istorii VKP (b)’, doc.231 p.429. The conference took place from 27 September to 1 October 1938.
15. Brandenberger & Zelenov, Stalin’s Master Narrative, p.20.
16. Ibid., p.21.
17. Brandenberger & Zelenov, Kratkii Kurs Istorii VKP (b)’, doc.231 p.457.
18. The text of the section may be found in Brandenberger & Zelenov, Stalin’s Master Narrative, pp.48–73.
19. For an overview, see E. van Ree, ‘Stalin as a Marxist Philosopher’, Studies in East European Thought, 52/4 (December 2000). See further G. V. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union, Routledge & Kegan Pauclass="underline" London 1958 chap.10, and Z. A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism, Macmillan: London 1967 chap.8.
20. J. Stalin, ‘Anarchism or Socialism?’ in Works, vol.1, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1952 pp.297–372.
21. Cited by A. Bonfanti, ‘Eric Hobsbawm’s Dialectical Materialism in the Postwar Period 1946–56’, Twentieth Century Communism, 19 (November 2020).
22. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism, p.212. Brandenberger quotes a figure of 40 million copies during Stalin’s time.
23. RGASPI, Op.558, Dd.1602–4. In the archive the typescript is misidentified as being that of a separate book but the pagination indicates that it is part of a larger MS, i.e. Istoriya Diplomatii. Only the chapters dealing with the 1920s are preserved in these files.
24. RGASPI F.558, Op.1, D.5754, L.98. On Pankratova, see R. E. Zelnik, Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet Historiography, University of Washington Press: Seattle 2005.
25. V. P. Potemkin (ed.), Istoriya Diplomatii, vol.3, Ogiz: Moscow-Leningrad 1945 pp.701–64. See further V. V. Aspaturian, ‘Diplomacy in the Mirror of Soviet Scholarship’ in J. Keep & L. Brisby (eds), Contemporary History in the Soviet Mirror, Praeger: New York 1964. Tarle made the claim about Stalin in a letter to the party leader, G. M. Malenkov, in September 1945, to whom he had written complaining about a critical review of his book on the Crimean War that had just appeared in the party’s journal Bol’shevik: I. A. Sheina, ‘Akademik E. V. Tarle i Vlast’: Pis’ma Istorika I. V. Stalinu i G. M. Malenkovu, 1937–1950gg’, Istoricheskii Arkhiv, 3 (2001). Unbeknown to Tarle, but not to Stalin, he had recently come under attack within the party for advocating a soft line on the iniquities of nineteenth-century Tsarist foreign policy. The review reflected that criticism of Tarle, even though it had not and did not become public knowledge. It’s possible that Stalin asked Tarle to write the piece on the methods of bourgeois diplomacy when he met him and Potemkin on 3 June 1941, a meeting that lasted an hour and a half, at which the three men presumably discussed the follow-up to the recently published first volume of Istoriya Diplomatii.