In publishing his "comments," Stalin proclaimed himself historian-in- chief, displacing Mikhail Pokrovsky as the head of the school of Soviet Marxist history. An editorial in Pravda was blunt about it: Pokrovsky's scheme was oversimplified; he did not see "shifts and transitions within the framework of a single formula." Pokrovsky himself admitted that his approach was not scientific, from which Pravda concluded, "That which is not scientific can only be anti-Leninist. An official document with the title, "On the Battlefront of Historical Science," and the subtitle, "At the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the Party," stated that the "erroneous historical views typical of the so-called Pokrovsky school of history" had led to a situation in which there had taken root among historians, "especially Soviet historians," certain "anti-Marxist, anti- Leninist, essentially liquidationist, antiscientific views in regard to historical science."
In 1936 Andr6 Gide, a faithful friend of the Soviet Union, visited the land of socialism by invitation from the highest quarters. His travel notes, Retour de VURSS, contained quite a few critical remarks, although his impressions of the country on the whole were favorable. This led to a scandal among "progressives" around the world and especially in the Soviet Union. Gide was branded forever an enemy of socialism. He had observed quite rightly that "in the USSR everyone knows ahead of time that there is only one opinion on any question, once and for all. ... Every morning Pravda instructs Soviet citizens in what they should know, think, and believe."55 Gide failed to understand the main thing, though; Pravda had a far more important task—to make Soviet citizens remember differently and think differently than they had been made to do the day before.
Stalin's "comments" on historical questions stressed above all that a history of Russia should be written together with a history of the other peoples that had joined the Soviet federation. A famous formula was changed: instead of "Russia, a prisonhouse of nations," it was necessary now to say "tsarism, a prisonhouse of nations." Among Pravdas articles on cultural questions in 1936, it printed a special resolution by the Central Committee on a production of Borodin's comic opera Bogatyri (Epic heroes), updated with a new text by Demyan Bedny. The farce had been received favorably in 1932: 'The play makes some daring incursions into the present day, which heightens its political effectiveness," said a review in Worker and Theater.56 By 1936 everything had changed.
The production... (a) attempts to glorify banditry in Kievan Russia as if it were a positive revolutionary element, which contradicts real history and is completely false in its political implications; (b) it gratuitously slanders the heroes of Russia's folk epics, when in the eyes of the people the most important of those heroes represent the best features of the Russian people themselves; (c) it gives an antihistorical and contemptuous picture of Russia's conversion to Christianity, which in reality was a positive step in the history of the Russian people.57
A decree of the Central Committee and the Sovnarkom was published together with the "comments" announcing the formation of a commission "to review, improve, and where necessary, rework already written history textbooks." On March 3, 1936, a contest began for "the best elementary school textbook presenting a basic course on the history of the USSR, with brief reference to world history." The results were announced in August 1937. Besides announcing the "best textbook," oddly enough the jury subjected all the views presented in the "comments" to scathing criticism, not naming the authors, of course, but only certain persons "active in historical science." This criticism was not purely academic; nine of the ten jurors were arrested in 1937—1938. The tenth was Zhdanov, who had served as chairman of the jury.
From 1934 to 1936 the past was nationalized and totally relativized. Facts only existed to the degree that Stalin mentioned them, and only in the interpretation he gave them. If he said, 'The barbarians and the slaves overthrew the Roman empire with a crash," any professor who dared to tell his students that the empire had lasted another 550 years after the Spartacus revolt would go straight to jail. Once when he casually remarked that the Azerbaijani people must have descended from the Medes, the result was that linguists searched for fifteen years to find words of Median origin in the Azeri language, "although the 'Median language' existed only in myth."58
'The past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished," George Orwell wrote in his account of a society without memory.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and tree and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.59
"Marxist-Leninist history" was the sole "truth about the past," said Pravda on January 27, 1936. "History in the hands of the Bolsheviks must be a concrete science, the objective truth, and thereby serve as a tremendous weapon in the struggle for socialism," Pravda repeated on August 22, 1937. In a similar vein Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: "History is not studied to learn what happened in the past but to learn what behavior will be necessary in the future to fight for the existence of our people."60
In order to assume the role of supreme historian, Stalin had to discredit and destroy the Pokrovsky school. That was one of the reasons why Stalin revived Russian nationalism and patriotism. Pokrovsky had ardently exposed and denounced Russian imperialism and colonialism and the Russian autocracy. For him, "Muscovite imperialism" began in the sixteenth century, when "the southern part of the river route from Europe to Asia, from Kazan to Astrakhan, was seized" by Moscow and when it began its effort "to seize the northern part as well, the outlet to the Baltic Sea."61 Likewise the conquest of the Caucasus and Central Asia were criminal colonial wars: "Making Asians tremble at the Russian name was not achieved easily or cheaply. ... Entire villages were burned to the ground in retaliation for one Russian body found in the vicinity."62 Pokrovsky publicized little-known vices of the "great" Russian tsars, that Peter the Great had been a syphilitic, that the monster Ivan the Terrible "brazenly asserted he was not a Russian at all, but a German, and the entire boyar nobility of his time, imitating their tsar, began to trace their ancestries back to some foreign notable."63
Having completed the edifice of his state, Stalin needed some ideological cement to help hold it in place, something that orthodox Marxism, with its promise of "the withering away of the state" could not provide. The cement he found was patriotism, which he called Soviet, although it sounded more and more like plain old Russian patriotism. What counted most for Stalin was that Russian patriotism had deep roots among the people. Also, Russian history contained useful examples for training his subjects in such virtues as loyalty to the state, and to the ruler, and military courage. Stalin chose what he found useful out of the Russian past: heroes, worthy character traits, enemies to hate, friends to love.