By suggesting that ‘heroes’ can by their actions fundamentally change the existing social order – the pre-eminent example being Lenin’s determination to stage a socialist revolution in 1917 – Stalin gave a voluntaristic spin to the deterministic Marxist orthodoxy that individuals are only important insofar as they personify the historical process and act in accordance with the laws of social development.21 But devotees of his personality cult yearned for an edifying account of their hero’s epic life story.
BERIA AND BARBUSSE
The vacuum created by the absence of an authorised Stalin biography was filled by two publications. Firstly, a book-length lecture by Lavrenty Beria, On the History of the Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia. Secondly, and more surprisingly, a semi-official popular biography of Stalin by the French communist intellectual Henri Barbusse (1873–1935).
Prior to becoming Stalin’s security chief in 1938, Beria headed the Georgian communist party. The Tbilisi branch of IMEL was particularly dedicated to the study of Stalin’s pre-1917 political activities in Transcaucasia and Beria published a (ghost-written) article on this topic in the party’s theoretical journal Bol’shevik in 1934. In July 1935 he delivered a long lecture on the same subject to a party audience in Tbilisi. The text of his lecture was serialised in Pravda and then published as a book. Party members throughout the USSR were instructed to study it carefully. Beria sent an inscribed copy to his ‘Dear, beloved, teacher, the Great Stalin’, who read the book and marked a few of its pages, mainly underlining the dates of events that he had been involved in. As Judith Devlin writes, the book soon became a Stalin cult classic, was issued in eight separate editions and remained in print until Stalin’s death in 1953.22
Beria’s glowing account of the young Stalin’s revolutionary activities was notable for the number of unsigned publications in Georgian that he attributed to Stalin and for his utilisation of unpublished memoirs by Stalin’s old comrades and acquaintances. The limitation of Beria’s rather turgid text was that, apart from Stalin, it was populated by personages that few people had ever heard of – or cared about – and dealt with equally obscure events.
Henri Barbusse was a famous pacifist and anti-war writer. A member of the French communist party from 1923, he helped organise the 1932 Amsterdam World Congress Against War and headed the World Committee Against War and Fascism founded in 1933. While Stalin conversed with a number of prominent western intellectuals in the 1930s, Barbusse was the only one he met in the 1920s as well. Stalin talked to Barbusse four times – in September 1927, October 1932, August 1933 and November 1934. ‘I’m not so busy that I can’t find time to talk to Comrade Barbusse,’ Stalin remarked at their 1932 meeting.23
The idea of writing a biography of Stalin was prompted by conversations that Barbusse had with the communist propaganda impresario Willi Münzenberg, a German revolutionary who worked for the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern), established by the Bolsheviks in March 1919 to spread the revolution.24 In December 1932 the Soviet party’s propaganda section wrote to Stalin recommending that Barbusse’s proposal to write such a book should be accepted. Tovstukha was proposed as the overseer of the project but, in the event, that task was carried out by party propaganda chief Alexei Stetsky.25
Though published in the USSR, as well as France and other countries, Barbusse’s biography was intended mainly for an international audience. It was this propagandistic purpose, together with Barbusse’s fame as a writer and his reliability as a communist, that persuaded Stalin to back the project. No doubt Stalin was impressed, too, by the fact that Barbusse had already written a biography of one of his literary heroes, Emile Zola, a Russian translation of that book having been published in early 1933.
In September 1934 Stetsky sent Barbusse a long list of corrections and queries concerning the manuscript of his biography of Stalin. Stetsky’s letter to Barbusse was in French but was translated into Russian for the benefit of Stalin and other party officials.
Stetsky’s amendments had two main strands. Firstly, there were numerous corrections of factual mistakes about Stalin’s life and the history of Bolshevism. Stalin’s father was a shoemaker who worked in a factory, not a peasant. Stalin went to church school because it was free and accessible, not because his father was particularly religious. It was not Lenin but his brother who was a Narodnik (Populist). Neither Stalin nor Lenin lived in Berlin for several months. Barbusse had got wrong the dates of Stalin’s many arrests, imprisonments, exiles and so on.
Secondly, Stetsky made a sustained effort to persuade Barbusse to endorse the Soviet party view that Trotsky and the Trotskyists were not only Stalin’s political opponents but a malign and insidious influence, a counter-revolutionary force that must be rooted out of the communist movement by any means necessary.
In his covering note to Barbusse, Stetsky also expressed concern about his depiction of Stalin as a practical, commonsensical individual rather than as the greatest Marxist theoretician since Lenin. Stetsky also felt that Barbusse’s portrayal of Stalin as a person was incomplete. The biography did not show Stalin’s ‘style of work, the way he talked or his multifaceted connections with the masses; it does not show the love that surrounds Stalin’. However, Stetsky was confident that Barbusse, with all his great talent, would be able to capture and convey Stalin in all his ‘majesty’.26
The biography was published in French in 1935 (Staline: Un monde nouveau vu à travers un homme – a signed copy may be found in Stalin’s library) and in Russian in 1936. In his preface to the Russian edition, Stetsky wrote that ‘the book has been written with a tremendous amount of love for the Soviet land, its peoples and its leader’. Unfortunately, by this time Barbusse was dead, having passed away during a trip to Moscow in August 1935.
His memorial meeting in Moscow was packed with Soviet intellectuals and party officials and an honour guard escorted Barbusse’s mortal remains to the railway station. An official delegation then accompanied them to Paris on the Siberian Express. Stalin himself issued a statement: ‘I share pain with you, on this occasion of the passing of our friend, the friend of the French working class, the noble son of the French people, the friend of the workers of all countries.’27
Barbusse’s biography of Stalin was a hagiography but it was a clever and interesting one. Rather than a conventional biography, it was a political portrait of Stalin as the personification of the Soviet socialist project. Barbusse’s privately stated aim in writing the book was ‘to provide a complete portrait of the man on whom this social transformation pivots so that the reader may get to know him well’.28 To achieve that goal he wrote a potted history of revolutionary Russia in which Stalin, together with Lenin, is the key figure, while at the same time contrasting the personalities of Trotsky and Stalin. Trotsky is depicted as arrogant, self-important, fractious, impractical, flashy, obstinate and verbose, a man of despotic character, while Stalin