The Vozhd retained his cerebral interests. He told people he read up to five hundred pages a day,1 and the books he chose were of the kind he had enjoyed for years. Among them was Germinal by Émile Zola, whom he had discovered as an adolescent.2 He continued to love Shota Rustaveli’s medieval Georgian epic, Knight in the Panther’s Skin.3 Having found his favourites early in life, he did not abandon them in old age and his resumed support for the fraudulent geneticist Timofei Lysenko continued to prevent progress in Soviet biology and threaten the lives and careers of Lysenko’s academic and political opponents.4
Marxism, architecture, linguistics, genetics and international relations were among Stalin’s intellectual interests. Historical works especially attracted him. He kept up with writings on both the Russian past and the annals of Mesopotamia, ancient Rome and Byzantium.5 When the fancy took him, he held conversations with physicists, biologists and other scientists. He examined the novels winning his annual Stalin Prize and listened to gramophone records of folk and classical music before they appeared in the shops (and gave them ratings from ‘good’ to ‘awful’). In Moscow he attended ballets, operas and concerts. He had his dachas equipped so that he could vet Soviet films before their public release. Volga! Volga! was his favourite film.6 He read, listened and watched mainly for personal delight and self-instruction. Foreign contemporary writers failed to attract him. Living writers had to be Soviet. Not that this saved them from his anger if he disapproved of one of their books. He had never been slow to say what he thought about cultural artefacts regardless of whether he knew much about the subject. Nobody in the USSR was in a position to ignore his predilections. If ever an obsessive intellectual dilettante existed, Stalin was that person.
Yet he made only three public speeches from 1946 onwards and two of these lasted just a few minutes.7 His articles were few and he published no booklets after the war until Marxism and Problems of Linguistics in 1950.8 Not since the end of the Civil War had he written less for the press. The consequence was that his infrequent smaller pieces functioned as the guidelines for what others in communist public life at home and abroad could print or broadcast.
All the same he made plain his desire to counteract the fashion for admiration of foreign culture and science. When President Truman sent him some bottles of Coca-Cola, Stalin reacted angrily and ordered food scientist Mitrofan Lagidze to develop a superior pear-based fizzy drink to send in return. (For once some sympathy with Stalin is in order.)9 Praising only the achievements of the USSR, Stalin aimed to enclose the USSR deeper in intellectual quarantine. The main exception to this was kept secret: he relied heavily on scientific and technological espionage to steal the foreign discoveries needed for the development of Soviet military and industrial might. Otherwise the guiding principle was that everything foreign was inferior and damaging. With this in mind he called Alexander Fadeev and two literary colleagues, Konstantin Simonov and Boris Gorbatov, to the Kremlin along with Molotov and Zhdanov on 13 May 1947. Fadeev, Chairman of the USSR Union of Writers, was expecting to discuss book royalties policy. But Stalin had an ulterior motive. Once policy on royalties had been settled, he handed over a letter for Fadeev to read aloud to the gathering. The contents related to a possible anti-cancer drug developed by two Soviet scientists who had released details about it to American publishers.10 Fadeev was terrified as Stalin did his trick of walking up and down behind the backs of his guests. As Fadeev turned towards him, the sight of Stalin – stern-faced and watchful – agitated him further. Stalin declared: ‘We’ve got to liquidate the spirit of self-humiliation.’
Fadeev was relieved to hear he was not in trouble but was being entrusted with the campaign against foreign influences and fashions. This could not be done by the Ministry of External Affairs without unsettling relations with the West.11 (Just for once the eyewitnesses could record Stalin’s specific calculations.) Stalin was planning to complete the closure of the Soviet intellectual mind. His own mind was already insulated from foreign influences. Now he was plotting the systematic reproduction of his mentality across the USSR.
Simonov wrote down Stalin’s words:12
But here’s the sort of theme which is very important and which writers ought to take an interest in. This is the theme of our Soviet patriotism. If you take average members of our intelligentsia, the scholarly intelligentsia, professors and doctors, their feeling of Soviet patriotism has been inadequately nourished in them. They engage in an unjustified grovelling before foreign culture. They all feel themselves still immature and not quite 100 per cent personalities; they’ve got used to the position of eternal pupils.
Stalin continued:13
This is a backward tradition and it can be traced from Peter the Great. Peter had some good ideas but too many Germans soon established themselves; this was a period of grovelling before the Germans. Just look, for example, at how hard it was for [the eighteenth-century Russian polymath] Lomonosov to breathe, at how hard it was for him to work. First it was the Germans, then the French. There was much grovelling before foreigners, before shits.
Although Stalin was an admirer of Peter the Great, he was setting himself up as a ruler who could finally eradicate the syndrome of the feelings of inferiority characteristic of Russian intellectual life since the Petrine epoch.
By the Second World War he had stopped deluding himself that he could increase his control over the Soviet order, but in most ways he was proud of what he had consolidated.14 He acknowledged that great changes would have to take place before the communism of Marx, Engels and Lenin could be realised. Yet he inserted his own peculiar ideas. In the 1920s he had of course stirred up controversy by saying that socialism could be constructed in a single country surrounded by hostile capitalist states. This had contrasted with the convention of Bolshevik theorists, including Lenin, that there would have to be more than one powerful state committed to socialism before such construction could be completed. Before the war Stalin had gone further by suggesting that the building of communism – the perfect stateless form of society dreamed about by Marxists until his emergence – could be started in the USSR on its own.15
Stalin had explained his idea to the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939: ‘Shall our state also be retained in the period of communism? Yes, it will be retained unless capitalist encirclement is liquidated and unless the danger of military attack from abroad is liquidated.’16 He gave no indication of how the state would, as Lenin had anticipated in The State and Revolution in 1917–18, ‘wither away’. Molotov brought this theoretical inadequacy to Stalin’s attention. The root of the problem could be traced back to the assertion in the USSR Constitution of 1936 that the Soviet state functioned on the principle of from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work. As Molotov had argued, this was not the real state of affairs in the USSR. Socialism was not yet near to completion. It was especially wrong to treat the kolkhozes as a socialist form of economy. Huge unfairness existed in the administration of society. Molotov also rejected the whole contention that socialism could be brought to completion in a single country. Building could start; it could be continued. Yet it could not be consummated.17 Stalin understood what Molotov was saying but fobbed him off: ‘I recognise theory, but I understand things like this: this is life and not theory.’18 Life, as Stalin saw it from the late 1930s, required the spreading of pride in the existing order of state and society even if this involved sullying the purity of Leninist doctrines.
He took intense delight in Soviet achievements. As he and Georgian Communist Party boss Akaki Mgeladze looked at a map, he mused:19
Let’s see what we have here. In the north we have everything in order and normal. Finland has given way to us and we’ve pushed the frontier up from Leningrad. The Baltic region – which consists of truly Russian lands! – is ours again; all the Belorussians are now living with us and so are the Ukrainians and the Moldavians. Everything’s normal in the west.
He was equally pleased about the east: ‘What have we got here? . . . The Kurile Islands are now ours, Sakhalin is wholly ours: doesn’t that look good! And Port Arthur and Dalni [Darien] are both ours. The Chinese Railway is ours. As to China and Mongolia, everything’s in order.’ The only frontier annoying him was the southern one. Presumably he itched to obtain the Straits of the Dardanelles and perhaps also northern Iran. He had come to aspire to the restoration of the Russian Imperial frontiers and regard the foreign policy objectives of the Romanovs as his own; and works on the history of Muscovy and the Russian Empire, including Nikolai Karamzin’s classic nineteenth-century series of volumes, had an increased appeal for him.
Stalin’s passion for things Russian had become hypertrophied. When reading V. V. Piotrovski’s In the Steps of Ancient Cultures, he came across the name ‘Rusa’ in a section on the Assyrians. He took note of this,20 evidently thinking the word might give a clue about the origins of Russian nationhood. Anything with the slightest connection with Russia caught his eye. Like an elderly trainspotter who has to see one last steam engine before giving up the hobby, he had turned from enthusiast into zealot.
Few authors failed to incur some criticism from him. Piotrovski was among them. On the margin of the page where the author had claimed credentials as a pioneer in the historiography of culture, Stalin scoffed: ‘Ha, ha!’21 Stalin had combed purposefully through Piotrovski’s book. The notes he took on the ancient languages of the Middle East were important for him, for he intended to write a lengthy piece on linguistics. To say that this caused surprise among the Soviet intelligentsia is an understatement. The expectation had been that when he took up the pen again he would offer his thoughts on politics or economics. But Stalin went his own way. In the course of his extensive reading he had come across the works of Nikolai Marr. A member of the Russian Imperial Academy before 1917, Marr had made his peace with the Soviet state and adjusted his theories to the kind of Marxism popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. Marr had argued that Marxists should incorporate ‘class principles’ in linguistics as much as in politics. Language was to be regarded as class-specific and as the creation of whichever class happened to be in power. This was the official orthodoxy which Stalin had decided to overthrow.
Articles appeared in Pravda in summer 1950 and were collected in a booklet entitled Marxism and Problems of Linguistics. University faculties across the USSR stopped whatever they were doing to study Stalin’s ideas.22 Much of what he wrote was a healthy antidote to current ideas in Soviet linguistics. Marr had argued that the contemporary Russian language had been a bourgeois phenomenon under capitalism and should be re-created as a socialist phenomenon under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Stalin thought this was claptrap. He insisted that language had its roots in an earlier period of time; in most societies, indeed, it was formed before the capitalist epoch. Recent changes in Russian involved mainly the introduction of new words to the lexicon and the abandonment of old words as political and economic conditions were transformed. Grammatical tidying also took place. But the Russian language written and spoken by Alexander Pushkin in the early nineteenth century contrasted little with the language of the mid-twentieth century.23 While some classes had had their own jargon and some regions their own dialect, the fundamental language had been common to all Russians.24
Stalin’s motives baffled those politicians and intellectuals accustomed to his polemical contributions on world politics, political dictatorship and economic transformation. His usual menace was barely evident. Only once did the anger show itself. This happened when he said that if he had not known about a particular writer’s sincerity, he would have suspected deliberate sabotage.25 Otherwise Stalin kept to the proprieties of a patient, modest teacher.
Marxism and Problems of Linguistics has been unjustly ignored. Despite turning to leading linguisticians such as Arnold Chikobava for advice, Stalin wrote the work by himself; and he did nothing without a purpose.26 It was far from being only about linguistics. The contents also show his abiding interest in questions of Russian nationhood. At one point he stated magisterially that the origins of ‘the Russian national language’ can be traced to the provinces of Kursk and Orël.27 Few linguisticians would nowadays accept this opinion. But it retains an importance in Soviet history, for it demonstrates Stalin’s desire to root Russianness in the territory of the RSFSR. This was especially important for him because some philologists and historians regarded Kiev in contemporary Ukraine as the Russian language’s place of origin. Moreover, he used the language of Russians as an example of the longevity and toughness of a national tongue. Despite all the invasions of the country and the various cultural accretions, the Russian language was conserved over centuries and emerged ‘the victor’ over efforts to eradicate it.28 Frequently praising the works of Alexander Pushkin, Stalin left no doubt about the special nature of Russia and the Russians in his heart.
Yet this fascination with the ‘Russian question’ did not exclude a concern with communism and globalism. Stalin in fact asserted that eventually national languages would disappear as socialism covered the world. In their place would arise a single language for all humanity, evolving from ‘zonal’ languages which in turn had arisen from those of particular nations.29 The widely held notion that Stalin’s ideology had turned into an undiluted nationalism cannot be substantiated. He no longer espoused the case for Esperanto. But his current zeal to play up Russia’s virtues did not put an end to his Marxist belief that the ultimate stage in world history would bring about a society of post-national globalism.
Nevertheless it was his zeal for Russia and the Soviet Union which took up most space in his intellectual considerations. This was clear in his very last book. He had written it in his own hand, refusing as usual to dictate his thoughts to a secretary.30 The book, appearing shortly before the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952, was The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. It followed a public discussion on the topic inaugurated at Stalin’s behest in November 1951; and in preparation for his own contribution he instructed Malenkov to acquaint himself with recent writings on political economy. Malenkov had been required to undertake many difficult tasks in his career but the instant assimilation of the whole corpus of Marxism was one of the most arduous.31 Stalin recognised that he had neither the time nor the energy – nor even perhaps the intellectual capacity – to compose an innovative general conspectus on political economy. But it was well within his mental powers to indicate his preferred framework in so far as the USSR was affected. He aimed to supply guidelines for policies expected to stay in place for many years ahead. The Economic Problems of Socialism was intended by an ailing Leader as his intellectual testament.32
The book outlines several supposed heresies to be avoided by Soviet Marxists. First and foremost, Stalin argued against those who thought that economic transformation could be effected by the mere application of political will. Stalin maintained that ‘laws’ of development conditioned what was possible under socialism as much as under capitalism.33 Stupendous hypocrisy was on display here. If ever there had been an attempt to transform an economy through sheer will and violence, it had been at the end of the 1920s under Stalin’s leadership.
But in 1952 Stalin was determined to avoid further tumult. He very much wanted to end speculation that the kolkhozes might soon be turned into fully state-owned and state-directed collective farms (sovkhozy). For the foreseeable future, he insisted, the existing agricultural organisational framework would be maintained. Ideas about the construction of ‘agrotowns’ were also to be put aside. Similarly he continued to insist that investment in the capital-goods sector of industry had to take precedence in the USSR state budget. Although an increase of goods produced for Soviet consumers was a priority, it still had to take second place to machine tools, armaments and lorries and indeed to iron and steel in general. Stalin was writing exclusively about economics. His was not a general treatise on political economy. Yet while recommending steady maturation rather than any sharp break in economic policies and structures, he offered a firm implicit rationale for the existing system of politics. Stalin was content with his labours in the past few decades. The political institutions, procedures and attitudes which already existed were to remain in place while the Leader was alive and long afterwards.
In international relations, though, he anticipated a more dynamic development. Stalin posed two questions:34
a) Is it possible to assert that the well-known thesis expounded by Stalin before the Second World War about the relative stability of markets in the period of the general crisis of capitalism remains in force?
b) Is it possible to assert that the well-known thesis of Lenin, as expounded by him in spring 1916, that, despite the rotting away of capitalism, ‘on the whole, capitalism is growing immeasurably faster than previously’ remains in force?
As theorist-in-chief of the world communist movement, Stalin answered as follows: ‘I don’t think it is possible to make this assertion. In the light of the new conditions arising in connection with the Second World War, both theses need to be regarded as having lost their force.’35 He looked east for his explanation:36
But at the same time there has occurred a breaking away from the capitalist system by China and other popular-democratic countries in Europe, which together with the Soviet Union have created a single, powerful socialist camp confronting the camp of capitalism. The economic result of the existence of two opposed camps has been that the single, all-embracing world market has fallen apart with the consequence that we now have two parallel world markets also opposing each other.
Stalin asserted that the world had been changed by the numerical increase in communist states. The territorial contraction of the global capitalist market would not end but instead would intensify the rivalries among capitalist economies.37 Although Germany and Japan had been militarily humbled, they would recover industrially and commercially to compete fiercely with the USA, the United Kingdom and France. The victors themselves had conflicting interests. The USA aimed to be the globe’s dominant capitalist power and sought an end to the empires of its Western allies. A Third World War was to be expected. Stalin put it dogmatically: ‘In order to eliminate the inevitability of war it is necessary to annihilate imperialism.’38 In old age he cleaved to the credo that capitalism was doomed. He also continued to believe that socialism had an inherent capacity to nurture technological advance. This was an old Marxist idea. For Marx and Lenin it was axiomatic that capitalist development would eventually enter a cul-de-sac and would actively prevent the development of industrial products of general human benefit.39
The aspect of Stalin’s thought that has captured the greatest attention, however, is his attitude to Jews. No irrefutable evidence of anti-semitism is available in his published works. His denial before the First World War that the Jews were a nation was made on technical grounds; it cannot be proved that he defined nationhood specifically in order to exclude Jews.40 He did not refuse to allow Jewish people the right to cultural self-expression after the October Revolution; indeed his People’s Commissariat for Nationalities’ Affairs gave money and facilities to groups promoting the interests of Jews.41 Yet the charges against him also included the accusation that his supporters highlighted anti-semitic themes in the struggle against Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev in the 1920s.42 Within his family he had opposed his daughter’s dalliance with the Jewish film-maker Alexei Kapler.43 Yet the fact that his followers exploited anti-Jewish feelings in internal party disputes does not make him personally an anti-semite. As a father, moreover, he had much reason to discourage Svetlana from having anything to do with the middle-aged, womanising Kapler.
His campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ cannot be automatically attributed to hatred of Jews as Jews. He moved aggressively against every people in the USSR sharing nationhood with peoples of foreign states. The Greeks, Poles and Koreans had suffered at his hands before the Second World War for this reason.44 Campaigns against cosmopolitanism started up when relations between the Soviet Union and the USA drastically worsened in 1947.45 At first Jews were not the outstanding target. But this did not remain true for long. A warm reception was accorded by twenty thousand Jews to Golda Meir at a Moscow synagogue in September 1948 after the foundation of Israel as a state.46 This infuriated Stalin, who started to regard Jewish people as subversive elements. Yet his motives were of Realpolitik rather than visceral prejudice even though in these last years some of his private statements and public actions were undeniably reminiscent of crude antagonism towards Jews.
Yet Beria and Kaganovich, who was Jewish, absolved their master of anti-semitism.47 (Not that they were moral arbiters on anything.) Certainly Kaganovich felt uncomfortable at times. Stalin’s entourage were crude in their humour. One day Stalin asked: ‘But why do you pull so very gloomy a face when we’re laughing at the Jews? Look at Mikoyan: when we’re laughing at the Armenians, Mikoyan laughs along with us at the Armenians.’ Kaganovich replied:48
You see, comrade Stalin, you have good knowledge of national feelings and character. Evidently what was expressed in the character of the Jews was the fact that they were often given a beating and they reacted like a mimosa. If you touch it, it instantly closes up.
Stalin relented and Kaganovich, hardly the most sensitive of men, was allowed to stay out of the banter. The episode by itself does not exculpate Stalin; and it must be added that some of his remarks to others in the early 1950s were vicious in the extreme about Soviet Jews. Perhaps he turned into an anti-semite right at the end. Or possibly he was using violent language in order to drum up political support. He was too inscrutable to allow a verdict.
What is clear is that the mind of Stalin is irreducible to a single dimension. Some see him as a Russian nationalist. For others the driving force of his ideas was anti-semitism. A further school of thought postulated that in so far as he had ideas they were those of a Realpolitiker; this version of Stalin appears in various guises: the first is a leader who pursued the traditional goals of the tsars, the second is an opportunistic statesman yearning to stand tall alongside the leaders of the other great powers. And there are some – nowadays remarkably few – who describe him as a Marxist.
Stalin’s intellectual thought was really an amalgam of tendencies, and he expressed himself with individuality within each of them. He had started as an adult by looking at the world through a Marxist prism, but it had been Marxism of the Leninist variant – and he had adjusted this variant, at times distorting it, to his liking. Lenin’s Marxism had been a compound of Marx’s doctrines with other elements including Russian socialist terrorism. Stalin’s treatment of Leninism was similarly selective; and, like Lenin, he was loath to acknowledge that anything but the purest legacy of Marx and Engels informed his Marxism–Leninism. But his ideas on rulership were undoubtedly characterised by ideas of Russian nationhood, empire, international geopolitics and a generous dose of xenophobic pride. At any given time these tendencies were in play in his mind even if it was solely the members of his entourage who glimpsed the range of his sources. He did not systematise them. To have done so would have involved him in revealing how much he had drawn from thinkers other than Marx, Engels and Lenin. In any case he shrank from codifying ideas that he sensed would cramp his freedom of action if ever they were to be set in stone.
Stalin was a thoughtful man and throughout his life tried to make sense of the universe as he found it. He had studied a lot and forgotten little. His learning, though, had led to only a few basic changes in his ideas. Stalin’s mind was an accumulator and regurgitator. He was not an original thinker nor even an outstanding writer. Yet he was an intellectual to the end of his days.