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Stalin, Man of the Borderlands
by ALFRED J. RIEBER
We know what Heaven and Hell may bring,
But no man knoweth the mind of the King.
Rudyard Kipling, "The Ballad of the King's Jest."
In his memoirs, the Georgian Menshevik émigré Grigorii Uratadze
described Joseph Stalin, whom he had known in the days of their revolutionary
activity in the Caucasus, as "a man without a biography."1 The
assertion was not without foundation, and little has changed in the intervening
years to alter Uratadze's judgment. Up to the moment when Stalin emerged
as a leading figure in the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government in
1917, the details of his personal and political life remain skimpy and
much disputed.2
But there is more to the mystery of Stalin than the absence of reliable
documentary evidence on his early life. The information about himself that
he allowed to be made public in his own lifetime contains an unresolved
paradox. On three occasions—in 1937, when a large exhibition of Georgian
art in Moscow portrayed Stalin's early career in Transcaucasia—in 1939,
when the documents on his early life appeared—and in 1946, when the early
volumes of his collected works containing the Georgian writings were published—the
propaganda apparatus widely publicized Stalin's Georgian identity at the
very time it was beating the drums of Great Russian nationalism. At the
height of the election campaign to the Supreme Soviet under the new Soviet
constitution, a large exhibition of Georgian paintings opened at the Tretiakov
Gallery, featuring as one of its main themes the history of the Bolshevik
organization, with paintings of high points in Stalin's Transcaucasian
career.3 Two years later, the leading journal of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Molodaia Gvardiia,
published an eighty-page compilation of sources entitled "Childhood and
Youth of the Leader: Documents, Memoirs, Stories," which dealt exclusively
with Stalin's Georgian roots.4
In 1946, the first volumes of Stalin's Collected Works began to
appear, consisting mainly of handouts and brief programmatic statements
that hardly seem worth mentioning, let alone immortalizing. To be sure,
they established Stalin's early revolutionary credentials. But this trivia
also reminded the party and the public that up to the age of twenty-eight
Stalin had written and published exclusively in Georgian.5
Stalin could not escape his ethnic origins. His heavily accented Russian
betrayed him as a man of the borderlands. Self-consciousness about his
pronunciation affected the way in which he dropped his voice in conversation.
There were jokes about his accent even among Georgians, albeit his enemies.
Leon Trotsky inflated Stalin's shaky Russian into something more sinister.
In later days, his faithful translator, Oleg Troyanovskii, found it anachronistic
to give a literal rendering of Stalin's words, "we Russians," and substituted
"we Soviets."6 Stalin could not deny his Georgian identity,
but why advertise it?
Although the material in Molodaia Gvardiia and the Collected
Works may not be entirely accurate, reliable, or complete, it is not
without value as a historical source. It was, after all, assembled under
Stalin's personal guidance.7 As such, it may serve to illuminate
two processes at work. Stalin is here engaged in shaping, indeed, controlling
the presentation of his own image to the world at large, of reinventing
himself in such a way as to endow his life with a powerful political symbolism.
At the same time, his selective texts offer clues to the ways in which
he sought to reconcile his self-presentation with his political aspirations.8
In order to resolve the paradox, then, it becomes necessary to take a new
approach to Stalin's biography.
The aim of this essay is to explore how the politics of personal identity
became the foundations of a Stalinist ideology and a homologue for the
Soviet state system. Most previous treatments of Stalin fall roughly into
three, often overlapping, categories: Stalin as a "great man," as a pathological
criminal, and as a bureaucratic despot.9 Common to all is the
interpretation that Stalin desired to become Russian and that he carried
out a policy of unremitting russification. No full-scale biography of Stalin
can neglect any one of these elements. My approach follows a different
trajectory. It takes as its point of departure the literature on identity
formation in order to explore the relationship between Stalin's struggle
to transform and present his self and his solution to the central problem
of the Bolshevik revolution: how to construct a centralized polyethnic
state on a proletarian class base.10
This approach requires a tripartite strategy: to examine Stalin's representation
of self not only from the perspective of 1939 but throughout the entire
process of his identity formation during his years as a rebellious youth
and putative revolutionary; to explore the ways the social and cultural
matrix of the Caucasus may have shaped his beliefs, attitudes, and politics
in his formative years; and to undertake a rereading of his political writings
as a function of the transformation of his persona within the revolutionary
movement in order to gain insights into his subsequent policies as the
leader of the Soviet Union. The unifying theme that I use to link all three
approaches is the concept of Stalin as "a man of the borderlands."
In this sense, Stalin represents a new type of political leader that emerged
from the wreck of empires and the discrediting of the traditional elites
following the wars and revolutions of the early twentieth century. In the
old regimes, the primary ethnic and regional identities of these future
leaders were peripheral to the traditional power centers. Their political
goals were to build or rebuild the state in order to legitimize their role
as leaders of a new type. The nature of their origins also disposed them
to suspect conventional forms of nationalism. In a period of political
and social uncertainty, they sought to reconstruct in radical ways both
state and society in order to locate themselves at the symbolic and real
centers of power. Their individual prescriptions varied according to local
circumstances and historical precedents, ranging from Adolf Hitler's racial
state, to Josef Pilsudski's revival of the Jagellonian federation, Gyula
Gömbös's identification with Greater Hungary and repression of
his own Swabian minority, and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu's supra-national
Christian fascism.11 Stalin's aims were just as complex and
perhaps even more difficult to achieve. Surely he had a longer distance
to travel from his borderland to the center of power.
In tracing the individual contours of Stalin's identity formation, this
essay utilizes both a metaphor and an analytic category. The metaphor derives
from the work of the Polish émigré sociologist Zygmunt Bauman,
who uses it in a different context to suggest journeys across space and
time that involve more than physical movement. The analytic category stems
from the work of the American sociologist-anthropologist Erving Goffman,
who developed the concept of "frame analysis" as a way of organizing experience
that involved "two basic replicating processes." One is a systematic form
of transforming reality into a copy, or interpretive scheme. The other
fabricates this process, in part or in totality, for improper ends. In
this essay, framing serves a dual function: it enables us to analyze Stalin
in terms of what he makes of himself and what we can make of him.
The trajectory of Stalin's political career from youthful rebel to revolutionary,
state-builder, and imperialist followed an irregular course that transported
him from the periphery to the center of the Russian Empire. It was a rough
and tumble journey across a "space without contours," where "the trails
are blazed by the destination of the pilgrim and there are few other tracks
to reckon with."12 There were no forerunners to emulate and
few guidelines to follow. Along the way, the young Iosif (Soso) Djugashvili
traversed immense distances in the process of identity formation. It has
been argued that "the 'people' themselves play the part of theoreticians
in this field."13 But it should be added, not always in the end
the way they want. Stalin's case was not exceptional. Despite his greatest
efforts, carried to the monstrous extreme of physically eliminating those
who could contest the veracity of his acquired identities, he was unable
to complete the metamorphosis, to shed entirely the mental habits, cultural
outlook, and even the literary evidence of his formative years. His attempt
to cross the wide frontier between two competing ethnic identities—the
Georgian and the Russian—left him suspended, politically triumphant but
personally isolated.
Few travelers across the terrain of ethnic transformation have escaped
the confusions of cultural ambivalence. As a general rule, ethnic identities
are complex and shifting phenomena, which may be experienced differently
by different members of what is assumed to be an ethnic group and may be
shaped by socioeconomic structures. So, too, are they perceived differently
by those observing the process from different vantage points.14
But Stalin's self-presentation also involved his reconciling and integrating
the conflictual components of the geography, community, and class that
shaped his existence from the day of his birth.
In Stalin's case, it is possible to utilize frame analysis to illuminate
how he constructed a social identity that would achieve particular political
ends, and as a mode of analysis to uncover the sources of his multiple
identities. In other words, for the purposes of scholarship, framing can
serve as a critical mode of analyzing "the master builder" at work.15
Applied to the material in Molodaia Gvardiia, it explains how Stalin's
life experiences may be organized in three interpretive frames: the cultural
(traditional Georgian), the social (proletarian), and the political (hegemonic
Russian). It is important for my argument to stress that these frames are
social constructs and do not signify essentialist values or attitudes.
As in most cases of multiple identities, each one contains its own set
of ambiguities; all compete and at times conflict with one another.
There is no denying that the inner part of each frame, what Goffman calls
"untransformed reality," was constructed out of documentary evidence, however
selective. But the outer rim was fashioned by an elaborate "layering of
fabrications" composed of arbitrary slices of real and fictive actions.
They constituted a set of puzzles for those who had to re-transform the
stream of activity into official biographies.16 Once in power,
Stalin consciously manipulated the same technique of "heavy layering" by
constructing ideological pronouncements in such a way as to suggest the
possibility of multiple interpretations. The "correct" one was never clear,
and it could change over time. For example, Stalin could arrange ritualistic
intra-party diskussia on any issue, including his own writing. This enabled
him to give the appearance of open debate, while reserving for himself
the right to intervene at a critical moment as the master interpreter and
thus reaffirm his supreme authority.17
The material in Molodaia Gvardiia supplies abundant references to
Stalin's embeddedness in Georgian traditional culture. Lengthy excerpts
from contemporary ethnographic material describe in great detail the types
of Georgian rattles, baubles, and toys that amused infants at the time
of Soso Djugashvili's birth. His mother was reputed to possess a musical
voice and to be a "great master at reciting folk tales and legends of the
oral tradition." Examples are given of the nursery rhymes of Akakii Tsereteli
and the poetry of Rapiela Eristavi, classical Georgian poets, which presumably
filled young Soso's ears. Later, he was allegedly renowned for his own
recitations of shairi, the sixteen-syllable poetic form used after
the time of the great Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli for presenting epics
of old Georgian literature.18
Only recently has the significance of the oral tradition been appreciated
by historians as a source of creating myths to live by in societies which
are still in the transition to a written culture, such as Georgia in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century.19 In legendary accounts,
according to Albert Bates Lord, "the birth of a god or hero was important
because it explained his special powers and characteristics. Narratives
of his childhood deeds gave early evidence of his extraordinary personality
and strength, proving his divine, or at least 'different' origin." Was
not Stalin in 1939 not only rehearsing his own debt to this tradition but
in fact also creating a new legend in the same spirit? Lord continues:
"In some cultures in many parts of the world the biographical scheme in
oral-traditional literature plays a very large role, second only to creation
myths and sometimes intertwined with them. The miraculously born and magically
equipped god or hero creates order from chaos, thus establishing the cosmos
and he also overcomes monsters that would destroy the universe and return
humanity to chaos and death."20
According to the documents in Molodaia Gvardiia, the young Djugashvili
did not discard the Georgian culture of his childhood when he began to
learn Russian and to attend school, where he led the choir in performances
of Russian folk songs and the works of D. S. Bortnianskii, P. I. Turchaninov,
and Tchaikovsky, or even after he entered the Tbilisi Seminary, the Caucasian
cradle of revolutionaries.21 As they portray him acquiring the
rudiments of a Russian identity, they emphasize nonetheless his deep immersion
in the great works of Georgian national literature.
During his school years, according to the selected reminiscences of his
contemporaries, Soso Djugashvili devoured the writings of the Georgian
critical realists, Ilia Chavchavadze and Akakii Tsereteli. Their form of
social protest was influenced by the Russian radicals of the 1860s, but
they also vigorously promoted Georgian language and culture in the face
of the Russian government's efforts to denigrate it.22 He is
also credited with reading Georgian neo-Romantics such as Aleksandr Qazbegi
(Kazbek), whose idealized tale of resistance to the Russian conquest, The
Patricide, made such an impression that Soso much later adopted the
name of the avenging bandit hero, Koba, as a revolutionary pseudonym.23
The tradition of social bandits in Georgia was a recent invention of the
mid-nineteenth century. In Qazbegi's stories, it took the form of the independent
mountaineer fighting to defend his craggy land.24 But there
were many other examples. Chavchavadze's famous poem "The Bandit Kako,"
in which the hero took blood revenge for his father's death by killing
the guilty landowner, was, according to one of the sources in Molodaia
Gvardiia, the most beloved poem of the schoolboys in Stalin's hometown.
Another tale related by a different source in the same collection places
young Soso at the scene of the execution of two well-known social bandits,
peasants who had escaped from the exploitation of their landlord into the
forests and mountains, robbing only landowners and helping the poor.25
The tales of social bandits built on the medieval epic tradition in Georgian
literature exemplified by the poetry of Shota Rustaveli. Emblematic of
this tradition was a code of courage, loyalty, and patriotism.26
Illustrative examples in the form of twelve aphorisms from Rustaveli's
work were reprinted by the editors of Molodaia Gvardiia. One can
only assume that these were among Stalin's favorites. The dominant trope
of dichotomies, favored by Stalin, is of friends and enemies, trust and
disloyalty, which can be interpreted in two ways: as proofs applied to
one's own conduct or to that of others. Consider, for example, what a temperamentally
suspicious man might make of the salutary warning: "the kinsman of a foe
is dangerous and proves to be an enemy."27
In the nineteenth century, Georgians prided themselves on their warrior
culture and enjoyed a reputation among Russians as excellent horsemen and
brave soldiers.28 In Georgia, Ossetia, and throughout the North
Caucasus, the custom of blood revenge, a particular characteristic of warrior
societies, survived well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries despite
the best efforts of the Russian and later Soviet authorities to suppress
it.29 Fieldwork among the peoples of the North Caucasus, Montenegro,
and other traditional societies suggests commonalities with respect to
a variety of types of blood revenge. In certain areas, for example, vengeance
was symbolic, replacing the blood that had been lost rather than punishing
the specific killer. It was also considered a psychological means of compensating
for a strongly felt personal loss. Warrior "brothers" were "prone to retaliate
homicidally when any one of their group was killed."30 It will
become clear how this tradition provided Stalin with the psychological
response he needed when S. M. Kirov, one of his "warrior brothers," was
assassinated.
There were in the Georgian culture two alternatives open to an individual
who found himself outside the protective cover offered by traditional society.
Exploited, mistreated, or betrayed, the social bandit can become a rebellious
loner who like Koba at the end of Qazbegi's novel wreaks revenge on his
enemies but then fades into the forests.31 In a different social
situation, the individual can undergo a dual socialization inside and outside
the village community. As in other traditional societies undergoing modernization,
the tension between the two increases as the outside world changes more
rapidly. The strong sense of localness, of belonging to the village, can
create defensiveness, even helplessness, outside it, a tension that has
been described by anthropologists as greater in Georgia than among other
peasant societies. Beyond the protection of the village, the child must
learn how to survive in the no man's land where there is neither kin nor
friend. What he seeks then is a substitute for the actual family (which
in Soso's case was dysfunctional in any case) through spiritual kinship,
a kind of brotherhood of warrior companions.32
When Soso was forced to leave his local enclave, his first attempt to create
a family of his own ended in tragedy. His first wife, Ekaterina (Kato)
Svanidze, a Georgian girl from a traditional religious background, died
in 1908 shortly after the birth of their child, Iakov (Iasha). As a substitute,
he painfully assembled a band of brothers from among his closest collaborators
in a foreign land (Baku) bringing them with him as he rose to power: men
such as Kirov, K. E. Voroshilov, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Anastas Mikoian,
and Avel Enukidze. But Stalin did not give up on the idea of reconstituting
a natural kinship system. His second attempt at the age of forty, when
he married seventeen-year-old Nadezhda Allilueva in 1919, can be interpreted
as a psychological imperative to mediate the contradictions of his multiple
identities: proletarian, Georgian, Russian. She was the daughter of a veteran
Marxist railroad worker who, though Russian, found work and a second home
in the Caucasus. Later, during Stalin's years of exile, the Alliluev family
was a source of constant support and refuge. Nadezhda's mother, who was
part Georgian and spoke Russian with a strong accent, ran a Caucasian household.
In 1917, Stalin lived from time to time in their apartment and appeared
to regain some of the high spirits of his youth.33 For him,
they had already become a family before he married young Nadezhda.
In his early years of power, Stalin surrounded himself with an enlarged
family, combining his natural kinship, the relatives of both wives, and
his spiritual kinship, the band of brothers. Throughout the 1920s and early
1930s at Zubalovo, the estate of a former Caucasian industrialist, Stalin
acted out the role of the traditional Georgian pater familia and host with
both groups. He found his relatives and "brothers" places in the Soviet
bureaucracy; at parties and banquets for the family and intimate friends,
he was genial and entertaining, vastly enjoying the games of his own children
and their friends, at least until disaster struck with the death of Nadezhda.34
Stalin's emotional attachment to his Georgian past surfaced again in his
selection of names for his children. His first born, Iakov (Jacob), was
named for the son of the biblical Joseph, it would appear, as a concession
to his religious first wife. But the name of his daughter, Svetlana, recalled
the mother of the heroic Ossetian folk epos, Soslan, who was called "svetozarnaia
Satana" (Bright Satana). Significantly, Stalin persistently referred to
Svetlana as Satanka in letters to his wife.35 To be sure, he
despised the concepts of "feudal honor," the practice of gift giving, and
other survivals of an outmoded class structure.36 But Stalin
was always selective in identifying with things Georgian.
What must have been for him a personal idyll was smashed by two tragic
events, the suicide of his second wife Nadezhda and the murder of Kirov.
He mourned the loss of Nadezhda but also blamed her in bursts of self-pity:
"The children will forget her in a few days, but me she has crippled for
life."37 The death of his wife deprived him of a real and symbolic
center to his kinship group. He virtually abandoned Zubalovo and became
a wanderer again, shifting his residence from place to place.38
Within two years, Kirov was dead. According to the eyewitness account of
Stalin's sister-in-law, Maria Svanidze, who saw Stalin almost daily, the
assassination devastated him: "I am orphaned completely," he lamented.39
After the assassination, his daughter Svetlana reflected, "He ceased to
believe in people; perhaps he never much believed in them."40
The kinship structure was coming apart, and Stalin in his perverse way
was helping to destroy it. Stalin perceived himself as the victim; the
question was, who was the enemy?
Stalin's impulsive initial reaction to Kirov's death took a peculiar form
of vengeance in the code of blood revenge. He retaliated against whoever
was close at hand, in this case, a group of "white guardists," officers
and officials of the old regime who had been imprisoned for years in Leningrad,
hence "innocent" in any modern juridical sense. Yet they represented the
most extreme expression of counter-revolution and as such served as symbolic
objects for Stalin in avenging the death of Leningrad's foremost representative
of Soviet power. Only after this spontaneous, emotional outburst did he
begin to exploit Kirov's death more systematically by widening the circle
of enemies to encompass the "Leningrad terrorist center" of Zinovievites.41
Stalin's campaign against the Old Bolshevik oppositionists cleared the
way for L. P. Beria, who had already prepared his deep infiltration into
the band of brothers, to play the Georgian card. Since the 1920s, Beria
had worked tirelessly to ingratiate himself with Stalin. By the early 1930s,
he had clawed his way up the ladder of power in Georgia, becoming chairman
of the Georgian State Political Directorate (GPU) and then first secretary
of the Georgian party. He had gained the confidence of Stalin and Grigory
Ordzhonikidze through intrigue and denunciation in the complex world of
Georgian Bolshevism. But he had higher ambitions.42 Since early
1933, he had been reworking the history of the Bolshevik organization in
Transcaucasia in order to magnify Stalin's role in the revolutionary struggle
in the Caucasus. He had established a Stalin Institute in Tbilisi to collect
and where necessary to repress all the relevant materials and to organize
the writing of a book, On the History of the Bolshevik Organization
in the Transcaucasus, for which he took full credit.43 Highly
tendentious, it transformed Stalin from a modest, even peripheral figure
into the dominant Bolshevik revolutionary leader of the region.44
In order to rewrite history and demonstrate his loyalty to Stalin, Beria
had to discredit the memoirs of A. S. Enukidze, among others.45
An old friend of Stalin and veteran Bolshevik, Enukidze was secretary of
the Central Executive Committee and thus responsible for security in the
Kremlin. He was also the godfather to Stalin's wife Nadezhda, a relationship
that was taken very seriously in Georgian culture. In light of Beria's
"revelations," Stalin set one of his trusted assistants, Lev Mekhlis, at
work to expose Enukidze's errors.46 Shortly after Kirov's assassination,
Enukidze was obliged to respond to the attacks on his work in a half-page
of self-criticism in Pravda. Within a few months, Beria had launched
a purge of the Transcaucasian party organizations and published his book.
Simultaneously, Enukidze was publicly accused at the June 1935 Party Plenum
of moral laxness and protecting "enemies" within the service personnel
of the Kremlin. A series of speakers including Beria succeeded in gaining
approval for Enukidze's expulsion from the Central Executive Committee
and also the party. Stalin's proposal for a more moderate solution may
have been no more than play acting. Enukidze was arrested and shot in 1937.47
Enukidze was the first Old Bolshevik without an oppositionist past to be
expelled from the party; perhaps even more important, he was the first
of Stalin's inner circle to be condemned. It was the opening of Beria's
campaign to replace Stalin's natural and spiritual kinship systems with
one of his own. For two decades, Stalin had engaged in the brutal repression
of his enemies in his struggle for power. He now began to test the loyalty
of his warrior brothers. Some, like Ordzhonikidze, could not take the strain
and committed suicide. For Stalin, this was more evidence of betrayal.
At the same time, Beria began something new. Once he became head of the
NKVD, he systematically wiped out Stalin's Georgian relatives, whose hatred
for Beria was universal.48 But there was no attempt to touch
the Alliluevs. Stalin allowed most of the Svanidzes to be arrested and
destroyed and gradually abandoned his Georgian lifestyle. At the same time,
he represented himself to the outer world, in the materials of Molodaia
Gvardiia, as a true son of the Georgian people.49 For Stalin,
the Koba image of a solitary and vengeful hero triumphed over the natural
and spiritual kinship system he had constructed to protect himself against
the no man's land of the outer world that then engulfed him.
In defining his Georgian identity, the one element that remained absolutely
constant was language. Until he was twenty-eight years of age, he wrote
and published exclusively in Georgian. This includes not only his early
political writings but also his youthful poetry. That the great leader,
the vozhd', was sufficiently proud of his sentimental and romantic
adolescent effusions to have them mentioned prominently in the materials
for his biography is surprising enough. What is truly astonishing is that
there was no attempt to conceal the original conditions of publication.
The dedication reads "to Prince R. D. Eristov." Famous in his day as a
poet, dramatist, ethnographer, and Georgian patriot, Eristov had been an
early critic of serfdom and was known as "the people's poet" for his celebration
of the peasant way of life (byt'). But in his later years, he turned
more and more to nationalist themes, particularly the Georgian resistance
to the Muslims of Turkey and Persia.50 At first glance, young
Soso's choice of the newspaper Iveriia as the vehicle for his poetic debut
appeared to be another anachronism. Edited by another prince, Ilia Chavchavadze,
Iveriia was a "progressive" organ of the critical Georgian intelligentsia,
but it was also highly nationalist and subsequently one of the main targets
of the early social-democratic press in Georgia.51 Moreover,
the poems were published at a time—from June to December 1895—when, according
to reminiscences in Molodaia Gvardiia, Soso Djugashvili had first
read Karl Marx's Capital.
The sixth and last poem was published the following year, 1896, in Kvali
(The Furrow) a legal, left-wing reformist newspaper identified in the first
volume of Stalin's Collected Works as "an organ of a liberal-nationalist
orientation."52 Yet the memoirists cited in Molodaia Gvardiia
testified that at this very time Stalin had already formed the first illegal,
Marxist circle at the Tbilisi Seminary and become "a propagandist of Marxism."53
Given the discrepancy between the dreamy poet writing for Georgian nationalist
organs and the Marxist novitiate organizing illegal reading circles, there
have been some who have doubted that the verse was really Stalin's.54
Whatever the truth of the matter, the important point is that Stalin claimed
authorship and thereby a place, however modest, in the Georgian national
literary tradition.
For Stalin, the defense of the right of nationalities to use their own
languages was the glue with which he could join ethnicity and class, Georgian
and proletarian, in a sturdy double frame. There can be no mystery about
his lifelong consistency on this issue, notwithstanding the twists and
turns taken by other aspects of his nationality policy. He never forgot,
as he put it in 1904, that "language was the instrument of development
and struggle."55 Once in power, he continued to insist on the
importance of recognizing local languages. For example, in 1925, he wrote
to the Presidium of the Central Committee demanding "complete freedom"
for the submission of documents and applications to it in any language
of any national group of the Russian Republic without exception.56
Despite the 1938 language decree on the compulsory teaching of Russian,
the Molodaia Gvardiia materials stressed how the evils of linguistic
russification under tsarism had sparked a political backlash among disaffected
Georgian youth, Soso Djugashvili among them.57 Stalin's awareness
of the political implications of "linguicide" went beyond his concern as
a ruler over its potential to generate resistance to any established authority,
including the Soviet. His experience as a man of the borderlands had taught
him that defending the right of a nationality to employ its own language
was necessary to offset the centrifugal nationalist forces in Caucasian
political life; later, its purpose was to defend the territorial integrity
of the Soviet Union against right-wing nationalist deviations, which, combined
with foreign intervention, could lead to the disintegration of the state.
To be sure, Stalin reserved for himself the right to determine how many
national languages existed in the Soviet Union, and he counted differently
at different times.58 Nevertheless, even after he called a halt
to political korenizatsiia (the Soviet version of affirmative action)
in the mid to late 1930s, he retained important elements of its cultural
dimensions.59 Until the end of his life, he remained committed
to the defense of national languages as he defined them, a reminder that
there were limits to russification if not to centralization.60
For Stalin, then, his Georgianness was emblematic of the multi-cultural
state over which he ruled.
Crucial to Stalin's revolutionary career was his presentation of self in
the second frame as a symbolic proletarian. Here, too, he sought to transform
the stigma of his class origins into a badge of honor. Born into a poor
but not impoverished family of ex-serfs, his passport identified him as
a peasant until 1917. His father, Vissarion, wandered between the traditional
world of the peasant and the modern urban life of a proletarian, pausing
from time to time at the way station of independent craftsman. The story
presented by the material in Molodaia Gvardiia is that Vissarion
opposed his son's further education and took him off to work in a leather
factory in Tbilisi. Interviews with old factory veterans and ethnographic
documentation give a vivid and horrifying picture of working conditions.
There is no indication how long young Soso was exposed to this dangerous
and unhealthy atmosphere before his mother, "after some time," rescued
him and returned him to school. But other excerpts taken from contemporary
sources paint just as grim a picture of life in the villages like those
surrounding Stalin's hometown.61 The impression is left that
Stalin experienced class exploitation firsthand and not as so many other
Marxist intellectuals only by reading books.
Identifying himself as a proletarian was not only a retrospective tactic.
In his earliest polemics with the Georgian Menshevik leader Noi Zhordaniia,
Stalin took great pains to defend V. I. Lenin's concept of the relationship
between the party and the working class in terms that appeared to dispel
the image of subordination of the latter to the former. His exegesis of
Lenin drew the distinction between the ease with which the workers could
"assimilate" (usvaivat') socialism and their inability to "work
out" (vyrabotat') scientific socialism on their own. Similarly,
he refuted Zhordaniia's claim that Lenin had denigrated the worker as someone
who was "'by virtue of his condition more of a bourgeois than a socialist.'"
The point is, Stalin insisted, "I can be a proletarian and not a bourgeois
by virtue of my condition and not be aware of my condition and therefore
subject myself to bourgeois ideology." By adopting a hard line on matters
of party organization and discipline, Stalin associated himself symbolically
with the tendency of "proletarian steadfastness" (Bolshevik) as opposed
to the tendency of "the intelligentsia to vacillate" (Menshevism).62
Framing himself as a proletarian was for Stalin a complex process that
involved a redefinition of the word itself. The descriptive elements he
most frequently employed were "hard" or "firm" as opposed to "soft" or
"wavering," the underground conspirator as opposed to the "liquidator,"
and the man of practice (praktik) as opposed to the man of theory
(teoretik). His appearance, whether consciously or not, reinforced
the impression. With the exception of those few months when his father
had dragged him off to a Tbilisi leather factory, Stalin was never a manual
worker. But he took on all the trappings of one: his dress, speech, mannerisms,
and public demeanor all suggested a man of humble origins, at least before
World War II. When he was reproached for his coarse and vicious language
in his Caucasus days, "he would excuse himself by claiming to speak the
language of a proletarian and that proletarians did not engage in delicate
manners."63 There are many witnesses to his spartan style of
living, his indifference to amassing wealth even after he rose to a position
of unchallenged power.64
Throughout his early career, Stalin continued to associate himself symbolically,
whenever possible, with workers, as if to erase the stigma of his peasant
origins and passport identity. On March 25, 1907, in the village cemetery
of Chagani, Kutais Province, he gave a funeral oration in which he identified
himself with the life of a young worker and social-democratic activist,
G. P. Teliia. He set the tone from the beginning: "Comrade Teliia did not
belong to the category of 'scholars.'" He was self-educated, taught himself
Russian, worked first as a servant, which did not suit him, then as a worker
in a railroad lathe shop. He became a propagandist, threw himself into
the Tbilisi demonstrations of 1901, gave all his time to socialist self-education,
was relentlessly pursued by the police, went underground, moved from city
to city, established an illegal press in Batum, was sent to prison, which
became his second school. He begins to write and publish, but consumption,
the curse of his imprisonment, carries him off. "Only in the ranks of the
proletariat," Stalin intones, "do we meet such people as Teliia, only the
proletariat gives birth to such heroes as Teliia, and that same proletariat
will strive to revenge itself on the cursed order which claimed our comrade
as a victim, the worker G. Teliia."65
Stalin's identification with the proletariat did not mean that he accepted
workers as his equal. For example, in 1901, Stalin opposed worker participation
in the Tbilisi Committee. The Tbilisi workers, by origin Georgian or related
groups such as Ossetians and Mingrelians, had close ties to their villages
and the mountains and retained much of the independent and militant spirit
of resistance to Russian rule. It was not surprising, then, that they did
not take kindly to any signs of superiority among political agitators like
Stalin. Nor were the workers averse to carrying out acts of individual
terror against government spies and provocateurs, of whom, it was estimated,
there were about 500 in Tbilisi alone. The attempts of some of the social-democratic
propagandists to control these "excesses" were also a source of friction.66
An incident involving Stalin reveals how his presentation of self as a
proletarian was vulnerable to exposure as a deception. One member of the
committee, subsequently a Bolshevik, without referring to Stalin by name,
described a "young, uncouth [nerazborchivyi] intelligentsia comrade
[sic], 'energetic' in all things, [who] invoking conspiratorial
considerations, lack of preparedness, and lack of consciousness of the
workers, came out against admitting workers to the committee." Shortly
afterward, this "young comrade" left Tbilisi for Batum, where the local
comrades reported back on "his unbecoming attitude, hostile and disruptive
agitation against the Tbilisi organization and its activists." In Tbilisi,
this was attributed to individual shortcomings and not to principled stands
of a type who was given to "personal capriciousness and a tendency to despotic
behavior."67 But the reports came from hostile sources. In Batum,
Stalin was careful to live and work in the midst of the working class as
if to underline the difference between himself and the "drawing-room revolutionaries"
such as the future Mensheviks Nikolai Chkheidze and Isidor Ramashvili,
who lived far from the workers' district.68
In 1907, Stalin was more successful at enforcing his claim to be a proletarian
in Baku, where he found a new and receptive audience, the Russian worker.
Twenty-three different nationalities were represented in the city, but
the Russians, who constituted one-quarter of the proletariat, were the
most literate, skilled, and ripe for organization.69 Stalin
found it easier to battle the moderate Russian Mensheviks for the allegiance
of Russian workers in Baku than to compete with the more militant Georgian
Mensheviks on his and their home ground. By shifting the locus of his activities
to Baku, he could also identify himself with a real proletarian center,
which he then compared favorably to the place that had rejected him: in
Baku, "the sharp class position of the Bolsheviks finds a lively resonance
among the workers," as opposed to the "stagnation" in Tbilisi, where the
absence of sharp class conflict has turned the city into "something like
a swamp awaiting an external impulse."70
In his battle with the Mensheviks, Stalin was shrewd enough to realize
that competing for the loyalties of the skilled Russian workers alone would
not enable him to gain the advantage. Stalin soon turned to a source that
offered no interest to the Mensheviks and for which they had only contempt—the
unskilled, largely illiterate, and unorganized Muslim oil field laborers,
who constituted nearly half the working-class population of the city. Many
of them were seasonal Azeri immigrants, both legal and illegal, from the
northern provinces of Iran.71 But in order to penetrate the
unfamiliar world of the Muslim workers, he needed allies. He found them
among a small group of young Azeri radicals who began at the end of 1904
to form conspiratorial circles and to spread nationalist and social-democratic
propaganda among the youth and urban poor. They called themselves Himmat,
or Gummet in Russian (variously translated as Endeavor, Energy, or Mutual
Aid) from their hectographed newspaper of that name.
The leading Bolsheviks in Baku, A. M. Stopani, Alesha Dzhaparidze, Stepan
Shaumian, and Stalin, gave them advice and supported their efforts.72
In return, Himmet generally threw its weight on the side of the Bolshevik-dominated
Union of Oil Workers against the Menshevik-dominated Union of Mechanical
Workers. Once outside of Georgia, Stalin could outmaneuver the Mensheviks
by forging a proletarian alliance between Russians and Muslims, and it
was of little concern to him that the opening to the latter was through
an organization, Himmet, that had weaker credentials as a social-democratic
party than his hated rivals the Georgian Mensheviks.73
Stalin's contempt for "the scholars" was equal to that of Lenin's, but
only Stalin among the very top party leaders liked to boast of a proletarian
pedigree. During the struggle for power, he repeatedly invoked his worker
identity. At the height of his great duel with Trotsky, when he was scrambling
to defend his doctrine of "socialism in one country," Stalin found himself
outclassed at the theoretical level. But he could and did appeal to a party
cadre no longer dominated by intellectuals by offering a different set
of revolutionary credentials through his personal identification with the
social foundations of the "workers and peasants' state" he proposed to
construct in the Soviet Union.
In a speech delivered in Tbilisi at a welcoming ceremony during a visit
to Georgia in June 1926, Stalin constructed a proletarian biography in
three stages by weaving together proletarian and religious imagery.74
As in Bauman's metaphor of the pilgrim, Stalin represented his journey
from Georgia to Russia as a transformation that combined a quantitative
leap in class consciousness with the ritual washing away at each stage
of the original sin of ignorance. He declared that "my first teachers were
the Tbilisi workers." They had given him his lessons in practical work:
"Compared to them I was a greenhorn." He modestly admitted that he may
have read a bit more than they, but, "as a practical worker, I was then
without a doubt just an apprentice." "Here in this circle of comrades I
then [1898] received my fighting, revolutionary baptism." In 1905–1907,
he discovered from the workers of Baku what it was "to lead large masses
of workers." It was here that he received "his second fighting revolutionary
baptism. Here I became a journeyman of the revolution." This was followed
by a period of "wanderings [skitanii] in prisons and exile." In
Petrograd (Stalin wrote Leningrad), "in the circle of Russian workers—the
liberators of subjugated peoples and the skirmishers of the proletarian
struggle of all nations and peoples—I received my third fighting revolutionary
baptism." Only then was Lenin readmitted to the script: "There in Russia
under the guidance of Lenin I became a master of the revolution." In his
rhetorical flights, Stalin forged a link between his self-image as a proletarian
and the development of the state by invoking the image of Russia as "the
metallic country." This theme, too, was taken up and embellished by his
sycophants and the official folklore.75
The extent to which Stalin's efforts to present himself as a symbolic proletarian
affected the outcome of the struggle for power in the party may be glimpsed
in N. I. Bukharin's fearful exchange with the Menshevik émigré
Fedor Dan in Paris in 1933. When asked how he and other members of the
party could have entrusted such a "devil" with their fate, its fate, and
the fate of the country, Bukharin replied: "You do not understand, it was
quite different; he was not trusted, but he was the man whom the party
trusted; this is how it happened: he is like the symbol of the party, the
lower strata [nizy], the workers, the people trust him; perhaps
it is our fault, but that's the way it happened, that is why we all walked
into his jaws . . . knowing probably that he would devour us."76
The three most prominent elements in composing Stalin's Russian frame gradually
emerged in his adaptation of Russian as his preferred political language,
his location of the primary base of world revolution in the Great Russian
core territory, and his self-identification with Russian national heroes
such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. He acquired these dimensions
of his identity in bitter struggles with his political opponents, first
in the local party organizations of the Caucasus and then on the all-Russian
level. Whatever his larger ambitions may have been to play on a national
scene, his more modest efforts to achieve local successes were frustrated
by opponents he came to resent with a bitterness that was only slaked by
his conquest of the Caucasus in 1923.
Stalin's clash with the leaders of Georgian Menshevism illustrates the
complex, even contradictory relationships between his Georgian and Russian
identities. His dealings with them provided much of the momentum that propelled
him from the periphery to the core of empire, from the Caucasian borderlands
to the Great Russian center. To begin with, there were striking differences
between him and them on the basis of social origins, level of formal education,
and their experience of Europe and its languages compared with his provincialism.
Most of them belonged to a European-educated, déclassé nobility.
They fashioned a revolutionary ideology that combined national resistance
and socioeconomic discontent in a very different fashion from their Russian
counterparts and the small number of Georgian Marxists including Stalin
who were excluded from their tightly knit group. With their assistance,
the peasant disturbances that had begun in 1901 reached a climax during
the Revolution of 1905 in the establishment of a virtual peasant socialist
republic in their home district of Kutais Province, formerly the kingdom
of Guriia.77
Stalin's first public clash with the Georgian social democrats came over
the implications of these events for the party's stand on the agrarian
question. As early as the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic
Workers' Party (RSDRP) in 1903, the Georgian delegates portrayed the peasantry
as a genuine revolutionary force and demanded that the special economic
conditions of the Georgian peasants be recognized in the party program.78
The Revolution of 1905 convinced the Georgian Mensheviks more than ever
that unless they met the practical needs of their peasant constituency,
there could be no successful revolutionary outcome in Georgia. At the Fourth
(Stockholm) Unity Congress in 1906, they agitated for a new two-pronged
agrarian platform that would redistribute confiscated state, church, and
landlord land between the peasants and locally elected municipalities.79
Stalin's reaction to these debates was a misguided attempt to carve out
his own position on the agrarian question. He opposed the views of the
Bolshevik majority on nationalization, knowing that endorsement was tantamount
to political suicide in Georgia. But he also rejected municipalization
because it would have meant acknowledging the leadership of the Georgian
Mensheviks in the countryside. He contemptuously dismissed the importance
of the Guriian rising as a purely local phenomenon. "In general a lot of
legends have been spread about Guriia, and it would be entirely unjust
for comrades from the rest of the country to take them for the truth."80
While the Bolsheviks ignored his defection from their ranks, the Georgian
Mensheviks ridiculed him on the floor of the congress.81
To untangle the differences between Stalin and the Georgian Mensheviks
on the national question is more difficult, because in the early debates
within the RSDRP there was no disagreement in principle between the Bolsheviks
and Georgian Mensheviks on this issue.82 Yet Stalin managed
to introduce differences in tone and emphasis that set him apart from his
rivals. Where Stalin went beyond the Georgian Mensheviks and even Lenin
in shaping a different concept of the national question in Georgia was
in what might be called his "borderland thesis." He sought to identify
the condition of underdeveloped class consciousness with the territorial
periphery of the empire. On occasion, Lenin was willing to acknowledge
the special position of the Georgian Mensheviks in return for political
favors.83 But Stalin denounced the Mensheviks, making no exceptions
for the Georgians as representatives of regions that were, with the exception
of southern Russia, "centers of small-scale production": the Caucasus,
Transcaucasian region, and the towns of the western provinces under the
influence of the Bund and the peasant organizations of the "Spilka" (Ukrainian
Social Democratic Union). Thus Menshevik tactics were "the tactics of backward
towns," while the Bolsheviks represented the "advanced towns, the industrial
centers" where revolution and class consciousness were primary. Stalin
offered further evidence for his conclusion by claiming that the Bolsheviks
counted more workers among their delegates, thus refuting the Menshevik
claim that it was a party of intellectuals, and more Russians, whereas
the majority of Mensheviks were Jews and Georgians.84 Subsequently,
Stalin would make his "borderland thesis" the foundation on which he built
his theory of Soviet statehood.
Aside from theoretical considerations, the hard school of practical politics
brought Stalin to the realization that he could not challenge the Georgian
Mensheviks either in his own country or in Transcaucasia as a whole. They
blocked him at every turn in his quest to become a revolutionary leader.85
In 1901, he had been obliged to leave the Tbilisi Committee dominated by
supporters of Zhordaniia under humiliating circumstances. As a result of
the growing Menshevik strength in Georgia, Stalin failed to get elected
as a delegate to the Fourth "Unity" Congress in Stockholm or the Fifth
Congress in London. When he showed up with spurious documents, the Georgian
Mensheviks challenged his credentials both times, humiliating him on the
floor of the congresses.86 Nor was Stalin's attempt to create
a legal Bolshevik press in Georgia any more successful than his other organizing
efforts
in the region.87
For Stalin, then, all roads seemed to lead out of Georgia. Returning from
London to Baku in May 1907, Stalin submitted his first signed article in
Russian on the congress to the illegal Bolshevik newspaper Bakinskii
proletarii; he never again published anything in Georgian.88
The Bolshevik press of Baku, though Russian, was still provincial and attracted
little attention in the political and intellectual core areas of the empire.
But Stalin had taken a decisive step in his quest for his self-identity,
changing his linguistic signposts as he followed the way of the pilgrim.
Stalin's first publication outside Transcaucasia came in February 1910,
when his "Letter from the Caucasus" appeared in the organ of the Bolshevik
Central Committee, Sotsial Demokrat. In journalism as elsewhere
in his activities, the pilgrim's progress was slow. Two years elapsed before
he authored another piece for an all-Russian audience, this time in the
form of a leaflet "For the Party," which bore the signature of the Central
Committee of the RSDRP throughout Russia.89 Shortly afterward,
he began to write regularly for the central Bolshevik organs in St. Petersburg.90
This marked the end of his participation in the provincial press of Transcaucasia.
Thereafter, his attitude toward Georgia was marked by a deep ambivalence.
For Stalin, the pilgrim, Baku was the halfway house to what became his
final destination. It was there that for the first time he had lived through
revolutionary events, immersed himself in mass politics, and played the
role of a Kulturträger of Marxism in its Russian form to the
Muslim world. There, too, he had escaped the stifling atmosphere of Georgian
Menshevism, which represented for him all he despised, opposed, and sought
to destroy. The key to his growing success as a professional revolutionary
was his closer association with things Russian. From this time forward,
he displayed an increasing tendency to frame his activities and his symbolic
gestures in ways best suited to reinforce his Russian identity, but always
with a Georgian accent, style, and proletarian gruffness. Following the
London Congress, Stalin spent a total of only two years or less in his
native region. Once in power, he paid three short visits to his mother,
in 1921, 1927, and 1935, although he continued to correspond with her in
Georgian until the month of her death in 1937.91
This did not mean that Stalin had come to a decision to abandon his Georgian
identity in favor of adopting a Russian one. Rather, he was shifting from
his primary aim of being a Bolshevik in Georgia to becoming a Georgian
in Russian Bolshevism. Nor was this the result of a sudden decision, although
the London Congress appears to have been a crucial turning point. It was,
instead, the outcome of a long and uncertain struggle. For reasons that
can only be guessed at, Stalin himself left behind the evidence with which
this struggle can be traced if not fully plumbed. It lies in his search
for the most appropriate name.92
Choosing a nickname or a pseudonym can be one of the most purposeful and
decisive acts of presenting oneself to the external world. The adoption
of a new public identity that also becomes a very private one is, to borrow
an illuminating phrase of Ludwig von Wittgenstein's, "an occult process."
It acquires the status of a magical formula, a cultural totem.93
The individual receives a baptismal name from his parents without prior
knowledge, discussion, or consent. The adoption of a pseudonym is an act
of will, a "speech act" that creates an alternative identity and, since
others are obliged to use it, legitimizes the descriptive characteristics
associated with it.94
Pseudonyms used in the context of revolutionary activity or underground
resistance are emblems of political and social engagement in the form of
self-begetting. Different from authorial pseudonyms, they are associated
with a collective, a "shadow army" taking its value from the dual process
of initiation and ordination similar to entering a priesthood. They are
a means to reveal or conceal, to instruct or deceive, depending on different
audiences, whether comrades or police. Their primary practical purpose
is to serve as protection; clandestine circumstances require that they
be changed frequently in order to avoid detection.95 The plurality
of revolutionary pseudonyms was a characteristic feature of the Russian
revolutionaries, employed more often when traveling with passports under
an assumed name than when publishing, when the established ideological
identity of the author counted for a great deal. Stalin used many aliases
and party cover names to elude the police, but in almost every case he
immediately discarded them. Some are variations of his given name or patronymic;
others appear to have been selected at random without any deep symbolic
significance.96
The decision to turn the fantasy nickname of boyhood, Koba, into a revolutionary
pseudonym was not taken quickly, a sign of its seriousness. In Volume 1
of Stalin's Collected Works, the signature "Koba" first appears
only on item twenty-three of the published pieces. The rest are either
anonymous or signed by a collective underground group, such as the Tbilisi
Committee, with three exceptions: they bear the signature "I. Besoshvili."
"Beso" is the diminutive for Vissarion, his father's name, and "shvili"
a Georgian suffix meaning son of, so that his name change was transparent
to the few who knew him, and it bore such a close resemblance to his real
name that it could hardly have signified a bold assertion of a new self-image,
to say nothing of an attempt to disguise his ethnic identity.97
It was only later that year, following his first appearance at an international
meeting of social democrats at the Stockholm Conference in April 1906,
that he signed himself Koba. Over the following decade, it was his preferred
pseudonym as an author and in his underground activities. Even after he
became Stalin in public, his former identity remained intact for much longer
in the private sphere. As Pierre Bourdieu suggests, the preservation of
a name from the past "assures continuity across time and unity of personality
across space which are the manifestations of this individuality in different
fields."98
Well into the 1930s, he was still affectionately known as Koba among some
of his oldest Bolshevik comrades, including Bukharin, whose last poignant
note from prison read: "Koba, why do you want me to die?"99
After the great purge trials, there was virtually no one left to call Stalin
Koba. But long before it became impossible to address the vozhd'
informally, Koba had accumulated new layers of meaning. It preserved the
moment of a new birth and also the sense of the fraternity of struggle,
which by the early 1930s was already imbued with a terrible irony. It also
metamorphosed into a term of familiarity, even intimacy, although in Trotsky's
hands it acquired the sharp edge of contempt.100 The question
that has remained up to now is how "Koba" became "Stalin."101
The pseudonym Koba or various abbreviations of it such as "Ko..." remained
Djugashvili's signature from July 13, 1906, to July13, 1909, with one significant
modification and two important exceptions. The modification came in 1907,
when he signed himself Koba Ivanovich in publishing his report on the London
Congress in Bakinskii proletarii, the illegal Bolshevik organ in
Baku.102 By combining his Georgian nom de guerre with a Russian
patronymic, he presented himself for the first time to revolutionary organizations
in Transcaucasia and in Russia as a man who bridged two cultural worlds.
The two important exceptions were his use of the pseudonym "K. Kato" in
March and June 1908 in what may have been a private reference to the most
painful episode in his personal life in the Caucasus. In Georgian, Kato
is an affectionate diminutive for Ekaterina, which was the name of his
first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze. It was also the name of his mother, but
the diminutive used for her in all the sources is "Keko." Kato, on the
other hand, is reserved for his wife. Almost nothing is known about the
marriage; even the date is in question.103 But there is evidence
that in March 1908 Kato gave birth to their first and only child, a son,
Iakov.104 On the eve of his son's birthday, Koba published an
article in the revolutionary press signed K. Kato. Can this be anything
other than his own way of celebrating a joyous occasion? By linking his
wife's name with his own in the form of his symbolic initial, he was able
to create an emotionally powerful aleatory effect.105 Sometime
later, the young mother died, devastating Djugashvili, but until now the
date and causes have been unknown.106 The second time Koba used
K. Kato may explain both. This signature appeared under three articles
published in late April and early May 1908 while he was in prison. Was
this not another commemoration, a terrible one, of his wife's death? If
so, then it appears likely that Kato died from complications resulting
from childbirth shortly after Iakov was born on March 16 and before Koba
was arrested on March 25. Such a deduction would also explain why the stricken
Koba rejected his son, blaming him for his wife's early death. He turned
the infant over to his sister-in-law to be raised in Georgian schools until
the 1920s, when the boy's uncle, Aleksandr Svanidze, insisted that he join
the family in Moscow. According to Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, Stalin
opposed Iakov's coming and ridiculed him at every opportunity, even when
the young man bungled a suicide attempt. When the Germans took Iakov prisoner
during World War II, Stalin refused to accept a German offer to exchange
him for some German officers.107 The episode suggests how Koba
used pseudonyms to mark important emotional stages in his inner life.
His search took another turn in the first article that he published in
an all-Russian organ of the Bolshevik fraction, Sotsial Demokrat,
in January 1910. Here, the initials "K.S." appear for the first time, leading
to speculation that Koba was already thinking of himself as Stalin. But
this was not the case, for the signature on the original manuscript of
December 1909 was K. Stefin.108 It is therefore safe to conclude
that the signature K. St. under the following article in the Collected
Works refers to Stefin and not Stalin. To be sure, Stefin may be considered
a Russian name, although an odd one.
From 1910 to 1913, there is evidence of hesitation. Now writing for all-Russian
publications, Djugashvili appears loath to give up K. as the emblem of
his mythic Georgian past. But he cannot yet find the appropriate Russian
name to go with it until 1913 when for the first time he appends the name
"K. Stalin" to his major theoretical work "Marxism and the National and
Colonial Question." Even after that in January 1917, he reverts to the
initials K.St.109 In the interim, the frequent changes in pseudonyms
hint at a psychodrama that is otherwise hidden from view. After its first
use, K.St. does not show up again for two years. Instead, there is a return
twice to K.S. and then simply S., when he writes for the first time for
the St. Petersburg paper Zvezda. In quick succession, S yields to
S—n; is he getting closer? No, for the next signatures to appear are K.
Salin and K. Solin. Then there is a return to K.S. and to K. Solin twice
more. It is clear by this time that Koba is fascinated with the acoustical
combination of K and S or St. Does Georgian-Ossetian folklore once again
provide a clue? The most popular hero of Ossetian tales is Soslan Stal'noi
(Soslan the Iron Man), with variations in other North Caucasian epics.
The cult of iron or steel was very widely, possibly uniquely, prevalent
in the Caucasian oral tradition, and Soslan the Iron Man was portrayed
as both a defender and occasionally the ruthless destroyer of his kinsmen.110
But the suffix "an" is not Russian, while "in" is and has the added attraction
of identifying its bearer with Lenin.
By the time Koba is writing for Pravda in October 1912, he falls
back on the more ambiguous K.St. three times until the New Year reveals
him as K. Stalin. The new pseudonym referred to all three frames of his
identity: the Georgian hero Koba and thus the heroic attributes of Georgian
heroes, the hard proletarian symbolized by the root word steel, and the
Russian form of the name with its "in" suffix.
Pseudonym
|
Date First Used
|
Number in Collected Works
|
Number in All Verified Published Works
|
Language of Original Article
|
I. Besoshvili
|
Mar. 10, 1906
|
3
|
6
|
Georgian
|
Koba
|
June 21, 1906
|
4
|
10
|
Georgian
|
Comrade K.
|
Aug. 7, 1906
|
1
|
1
|
Georgian
|
Ko . . .
|
Sept. 14, 1906
|
8
|
10
|
Georgian
|
Koba Ivanovich
|
June 20, 1907
|
1
|
1
|
Russian
|
K. Kato
|
Mar. 2, 1908
|
2
|
4
|
Russian
|
K.Ko
|
Aug. 27, 1909
|
1
|
1
|
Russian
|
K.S.
|
Feb. 13, 1910
|
4
|
4
|
Russian
|
S.
|
Apr. 15, 1912
|
1
|
1
|
Russian
|
K. S…n
|
Apr. 15, 1912
|
1
|
1
|
Russian
|
K. Salin
|
Apr. 15, 1912
|
1
|
1
|
Russian
|
K. Solin
|
Apr. 17, 1912
|
3
|
3
|
Russian
|
K.St (Stefin)
|
Oct. 19, 1912
|
6
|
6
|
Russian
|
K. Stalin
|
Dec. 1, 191225
|
25
|
26
|
Russian
|
K.
|
Sept. 12, 1917
|
1
|
1
|
Russian
|
I. or Iosif Djugashvili-Stalin
|
Sept. 2, 1917
|
3
|
9
|
Russian
|
Figure 1: Pseudonyms used by Stalin in his published works, 1906–1917.
Signaling his emergence as the man of steel, his authorship of his 1913
work on the national question performed three additional functions in his
efforts to define and assert his complex persona. It staked his claim to
pronounce on issues that were essential in his deadly conflict with the
Georgian Mensheviks, it applied a uniform finish to all three frames of
experience and myth constructed over the previous decade and a half, and
it announced the end to his pilgrimage from periphery to center. His essay
may not impress by its theoretical originality or stylistic bravura, but
as a statement of his personal and ideological integration it may serve
as a useful guide to Stalin's subsequent actions as a state-builder and
imperial statesman.
Stalin composed his essay on the national question in response to urgent
prompting by Lenin, who was alarmed by the meeting in August 1912 in Vienna
at Trotsky's invitation of anti-Bolshevik social democrats to discuss a
decentralized structure of the party that would meet the demands for national
cultural autonomy of such groups as the Georgian Mensheviks, Bund, and
Latvians. For Lenin (and Stalin as well), there was a real danger that
the RSDRP would disintegrate into a set of loosely grouped national-socialist
parties as in Austria-Hungary.111 With characteristic single-mindedness,
therefore, Lenin immersed himself in the national question, furiously writing
articles and rounding up allies for a verbal onslaught against his opponents.
By one count, he wrote no fewer than thirty articles on the subject between
1912 and 1914. Simultaneously, he was busily urging some of his closest
associates to help him recruit comrades of varied ethnic origin or else
to volunteer themselves to write specialized studies. Stalin was only one
of several Bolsheviks who responded to the call.112 Lenin greeted
all their contributions with enthusiasm, although he was not entirely satisfied
with any one of them.113
Stalin's work on the national question brought into alignment the three
frames of his personal identity that he had struggled to harmonize. The
class interests of the proletariat determined the right to exercise national
self-determination, regional autonomy guarded the rights to use indigenous
languages, and the Russian state provided the "general framework" for political
organization of the whole. Stalin's work both summarized his earlier concepts
and foreshadowed the concept of the state he would propose, defend against
Lenin, and finally impose on the party in the postrevolutionary era.
In politics, Stalin has been most often portrayed as either a pragmatist
or an ideologue. By contrast, the previous analysis has argued that his
approach to both practice and theory was embedded in his experience as
a man of the borderlands who sought to play a major role at center of power.
On the way to becoming a self-proclaimed "master of the revolution," Stalin
had pieced together a complex identity that embodied the rudiments of a
tripartite state-building program. His self-presentation as a symbolic
proletarian served to mediate between his Georgian and Russian identities,
firmly linking periphery to core. As the following pages will demonstrate,
once in power, he sought to combine these three elements in his shaping
of the Soviet state as he had endeavored to integrate them into his own
persona.
Stalin emerged from the cauldron of revolution, civil war, and intervention
more than ever convinced that the relationship between center and periphery
embodied in what I have called his "borderland thesis" held the key to
the construction of the new Soviet state. As early as the debates preceding
Brest-Litovsk in the winter of 1917–1918, Stalin had been skeptical of
the possibility of revolution in the West.114 If war were to
come with the Austro-German imperialists, it would come over resistance
to the Central Powers' occupation of the borderlands. In an unusual non-Marxist
formulation that he would repeat in 1941, it would not be a revolutionary
war but "a fatherland war [otechestvennaia voina] begun in Ukraine
that will have every chance of all-out support from Soviet Russia as a
whole."115
Stalin's solution for the dilemma of revolution confined to the borders
of the old empire was the fusion of the class and national principles in
the form of regional autonomy. The fusion would not be the result of a
spontaneous joining together but of action by the center. At the Third
Congress of Soviets in January 1918, five years before the constitutional
debate that brought him into conflict with Lenin, he made it clear that
"the roots of all conflicts between the periphery and central Russia lie
in the question of power."116 Expanding on earlier themes, he
claimed that the socialist revolution in the Russian Empire had produced
a situation in which a more advanced center, that is, a territorial core
possessing a highly developed proletarian class, was bound to dominate
a backward periphery. For Stalin, the periphery was backward not only in
the economic but also in the cultural meaning of the term. In particular,
"the people of the East," as he called them, lacked the homogeneity of
the central provinces. They were barely emerging from the Middle Ages or
else had just entered the state of capitalism.117 At the constitutional
debates during the Twelfth Congress in 1923, when Stalin was hard pressed
by his critics, he was even more bluntly specific: the center was a proletarian,
the periphery a peasant region.118 This crude image enabled
him to make explicit the link between the new Soviet state structure and
the outside world.
Throughout the Russian civil war, Stalin hammered at the theme of the socioeconomic
backwardness of the periphery posing a mortal threat to the security and
stability of the Soviet state. The lack of a strong local proletariat had
given the local bourgeois nationalists—such as the Georgian Mensheviks—their
opportunity to demand separation from the center, thus weakening the class-based
Soviet power. This in turn had created "a zone of foreign intervention
and occupation" that endangered its very existence.119 In order
to defeat these machinations, Stalin came to the conclusion that the center
could not count solely on physical coercion. He groped his way uncertainly
toward a solution that would reconcile the conflicting identities of class,
ethnicity, and region within a strong state system. He sought to convince
both the unitarists and the autonomists within the party that they could
not survive without one another. As the periphery crumbled away from the
center, he claimed that only his federal solution would protect the separate
republics from foreign domination and the loss of their autonomous rights.
He reassured the nationalities that "there would be no state language."
And he insisted the Soviet power must create local schools, courts, and
administrative organs staffed and run by "local cadres," even if this meant
cooperating with the non-Communist intelligentsia.120
This latter policy, dubbed korenizatsiia from the stem word koren',
was another example of the politics of identity that Stalin employed and
manipulated to further his own ends. In 1925, during his struggle with
Trotsky, he rehabilitated the slogan of "national culture" that he had
previously identified only with nationalism as a right-wing deviation.121
Up to the early 1930s, he pursued korenizatsiia most consistently
in the more underdeveloped republics. When, in his eyes, the policy threatened
to go too far, as in Ukraine, he denounced it, first in 1926 and then more
ferociously after 1928.122 Once Stalin had eliminated his major
rivals in the party and launched collectivization and the first Five Year
Plan, he brutally reshuffled the tripartite components of the state structure.
Many if not all aspects of korenizatsiia and their supporters fell
victim to the new policy. After 1933, ethnic deportations from the borderlands
were stepped up to ensure greater security from external attack. Yet, at
the same time, a policy of ethnic consolidation was undertaken in order
to minimize ethnic conflict within the republics.123 In building
socialism, ethnic identity, so often equated with the peasantry, yielded
primacy of place to proletarian identity. Stalin decreed that the distance
between them would be closed not by a pilgrimage but by a forced march.
In the early years of the Soviet state, however, Stalin's main concern
was to substitute the mutual interdependence of Russia and the borderlands
for the idea held by many Bolsheviks on the mutual interdependence of Russia
and the world revolution. In 1920, he wrote, "Central Russia, the hearth
of world revolution, cannot hold out long without the assistance of the
border regions, which abound in raw materials, fuel, and foodstuffs. The
border regions of Russia, in their turn, are inevitably doomed to imperialist
bondage without the political, military, or organizational support of the
more developed Central Russia."124 Foreshadowing his doctrine
of socialism in one country, he argued that the unity of center and periphery
provided the two "constant conditions" that guaranteed the success and
future development of the revolution, that is, Russia's "vast and boundless
land" and its autarkic resource base.125 Therefore, he trumped
the nationalists by offering a form of association that he dubbed "socialist
federalism," nationalist in form and socialist in content. Before 1917,
Stalin had opposed the concept of federalism as divisive of working-class
unity. Once the Bolsheviks were in power, he came to view it as a formula
for unity within a polyethnic state.126
Stalin's position on federation had shifted in response to the experience
of the civil war, the intra-party debates on the future of the Soviet state,
and his disagreements with Lenin. By 1922, Stalin envisaged three types
of federalist ties: within the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic,
between the Russian republic (RSFSR) and the other Soviet republics such
as Ukraine that had been part of the Russian Empire, and a "confederation"
between the Soviet Union and other soviet republics such as Hungary and
Germany that had not been part of Russia.127 Stalin's tripartite
formula sought to address real problems that had surfaced during the civil
war between the center and periphery. In a letter to Lenin dated September
22, 1922, but only recently published, he argued that his federal plan
would eliminate the chaos of conflicting jurisdictions, which created constant
conflict between the center and the borderlands. The alternatives were
either to grant the republics real independence, which would shatter the
economic unity of the state (and split the proletariat), or to grant them
real autonomy, that is, non-interference "in the areas of language, culture,
justice, internal affairs, agriculture, etc.," which would maintain both
the diversity of ethnic identities and the unity of the proletariat.128
What has gone unnoticed in the abundant literature on this question is
how Stalin's formula foreshadowed the establishment of a ring of dependent
states, subsequently called "popular democracies," outside the borders
of the old Russian Empire. While Lenin's state structure was designed to
accommodate the future voluntary adhesion of independent revolutionary
states in the advanced capitalist countries to a socialist federation,
Stalin took a more limited view based on the old imperial, territorial
principle. In Stalin's eyes, the Russian Revolution and the building of
a socialist state catapulted the Soviet Union into the most advanced stage
of development. Subsequent adherents to the system, particularly those
countries adjacent to the Soviet Union, would have to earn their passage.
In 1928, he made this explicit in his first major speech to the Comintern.
He argued that, in countries with weak capitalism and feudal remnants,
such as "Poland, Romania, etc.," where the peasantry would play a large
role in a revolution, "the victory of the revolution in order that it can
lead to a proletarian dictatorship can and probably will demand some intermediate
stages in the form, let us say, of a dictatorship of the proletariat and
peasantry."129
Later, Stalin changed the terminology of transitional stages but not the
concept. In early 1945, he harshly reminded Tito that "your government
is not Soviet—you have something between de Gaulle's France and the Soviet
Union." In May 1946, he repeated the same message to the Polish communists.
"The democracy that has been established in Poland, in Yugoslavia and partly
in Czechoslovakia is a democracy that draws you close to socialism without
the necessity of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat and the
Soviet system."130 Twenty years earlier, Stalin had constructed
the state system on the basis of the what he perceived to be a special
relationship between Russia and its borderlands that could never be duplicated.
In defending his state-building program against Lenin's critique, Stalin
sought to apply the lessons learned from the experience of framing the
triptych of his personal identity to shaping new Soviet institutions. Only
the compelling force of this deeply rooted conviction could explain his
willingness to confront Lenin during the intra-party debates in the fall
and winter of 1922–1923 over the constitutional question. There was, first
of all, the question of the relationship between the borderlands and the
center. Lenin disagreed with Stalin by insisting on recognizing the formal
independence of the constituent Soviet republics, a position that had little
support among the Bolsheviks except for the Georgians. L. B. Kamenev told
Stalin that "Ilich was preparing for war in defense of independence" and
had asked him to meet with the Georgians. Stalin's response revealed the
deep source of his conflict with Lenin. In Stalin's eyes, the Georgian
Bolsheviks had never traversed the route of his pilgrimage. They remained
rooted in their native soil and were thus exposed to the most pernicious
influences of local nationalism. "It's necessary to be firm with Ilich,"
Stalin told Kamenev. "If a couple of Georgian Mensheviks exercise an influence
on the Georgian communists and consequently on Ilich, then one should ask—what
does that have to do with independence?"131
His opposition to Georgian independence was matched by his concern over
the effect of Lenin's formula on the structure of the Russian republic.
Initially, Stalin feared that Lenin's proposal for a bicameral legislature
(one Russian and one federal) would lead to the removal from the RSFSR
of eight autonomous republics, their declaration of independence together
with the Ukrainian and other independent republics, and a radical reconstruction
of the entire state that was neither timely nor necessary.132
Not only would this encourage the Georgians, but it would move the Russian
republic toward a more purely ethnic unit within a federation of ethnically
defined states. In a note to his colleagues in the Politburo in February
1923, Stalin warned of the dangers. By separating the Russian population
from that of the autonomous republics, such republics as the Bashkir, Kirgiz,
and Tatar would be deprived of their capitals, which were Russian towns,
and would require a serious redrawing of their boundaries.133
Moreover, Stalin added in his speech to the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923,
the creation of a pure Russian republic would strengthen the position of
Great Russians in the state as a whole and weaken "the struggle with Great
Russian chauvinism [that] is our fundamental task." Finally, in much the
same way, he argued against the dissolution of the Transcaucasian Federation
(Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaizhan), because that would play into the hands
of Georgian nationalists.134
At the same time, Stalin was obliged to reverse his position on a bicameral
legislature. Responding to Lenin's pressure, the Politburo endorsed the
concept of bicameralism and then appointed Stalin to present the proposal
as part of his Theses to the Twelfth Congress. This obviously caused Stalin
great embarrassment. He vehemently denied that he was a "master of the
nationality question." He was "sick and tired" of being tagged with responsibility
for it, and had been "forced" to serve as the rapporteur to the congress.135
But he was able to salvage something from his setback. Representation of
the nationalities in the second chamber would still enable the RSFSR to
command a majority if its constituent autonomous republics voted with it.136
Stalin saved his heavy artillery, however, for a dual assault on "Great
Russian chauvinism" and local nationalism. Arguing that the struggle with
the former was the principal task in which Russians should take the lead,
he insisted that the struggle against the latter should be carried out
by indigenous cadres. Otherwise, ethnic conflict would sharply increase.137
It is hard to imagine any more satisfying demonstration of Stalin's determination
to balance core and periphery, to mediate between the two national identities
that he could recognize as potentially conflicting elements within
both his own persona and the body politic of the Soviet state.
Was Stalin merely being disingenuous about the dangers of Great Russian
chauvinism? Throughout his life, he opposed the creation of a Russian Communist
Party corresponding to other republican parties. Ironically, in the 1920s,
it was one of the very few issues on which he agreed with Trotsky, although
he was less specific in his motivations. More than twenty years later in
the notorious Leningrad case, one of the major accusations brought against
the Leningrad party organization was its alleged support for the creation
of a Russian Communist Party and the establishment of a new republican
capital for the RSFSR in Leningrad.138 At that time, Stalin
denounced N. A. Voznesenskii, a member of the Politburo, the head of State
Planning, and a major figure in organizing the war effort, as one of the
top leaders of the Leningrad "conspiracy": "For him," Stalin told Mikoian,
"not only Georgians and Armenians"—by which Stalin clearly meant himself
and Mikoian—"but also Ukrainians, are not people."139
To be sure, Stalin's deep suspicion of loyalties in the borderlands was,
if anything, even greater. In 1936, he ordered the dissolution of the Transcaucasian
Federation into its constituent national parts, the three republics of
Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaizhan. The move appeared to be in accord with
the introduction of the Stalin constitution that proclaimed the existence
of only non-antagonistic classes (and presumably also ethnic groups) in
the USSR. Yet, at the same time, he and Beria unleased a blood purge of
the republican party organizations in Transcaucasia that was among the
most severe in the entire USSR.140 Stalin's oscillation in punishing
alleged representatives of Great Russian chauvinism at the center and local
nationalism at the periphery was another example of his increasingly brutal
method of promoting institutional instability as a means of securing his
own power.141 But it was also another manifestation of the conflict
within his own identity.
By the end of the constitutional debates in 1924, Stalin had emerged as
the main theorist and practical designer of the Soviet state. The shape
of the USSR came closer to his version of a federation than to Lenin's,
although it was a compromise between the two. But in 1924, the process
of state-building was not yet over. Nor had Stalin reached the final station
in his pilgrimage, which would be the complete identification with the
state as its supreme ruler. In his struggle for power with the other epigones
of Lenin—Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin—Stalin's central ideological problem
was how to defend his unique conception of the relationship between core
and periphery against attacks that he was selling out the international
revolution for a mess of nationalist pottage. Outside the party ever since
1918, hostile critics had denounced the drift toward national Bolshevism.
Within the party, Stalin's rivals sought to tar him with the same brush
and forced him to adopt a defensive position with respect to his doctrine
of socialism in one country.142
But Stalin also sought to refute the insinuations by reaffirming his dedication
to the internal, multinational—if not strictly international—task of overcoming
the gap between the core and periphery. In 1925, shortly after he had enunciated
socialism in one country, he developed the theme of economic integration
(smychka) of the predominantly peasant periphery into the more advanced
core in a speech to the future leaders of the Asian republics, the students
at the University of the East. But he warned them of two deviations. One
was to apply mechanically a model that was "fully applicable to the center
but does not correspond with conditions in the so-called periphery." The
other was to exaggerate local conditions and peculiarities.143
"National" Bolshevism of any sort was dangerous; only "Soviet" Bolshevism
as Stalin defined and embodied it was acceptable.
During the earliest days of Soviet state-building, Stalin had arrived at
the point where his presentation of self came closer than other party leaders
to representing the profile of the new party that had emerged from the
civil war. By constructing and disseminating a multiple identity, he could
appeal in the 1920s and 1930s to all sections of the party: the Great Russian
centralizers, the supporters of cultural autonomy among the nationalities
and the lower strata, all of whom, as Bukharin lamented, came to trust
him, a trust he would soon betray. In explaining Stalin's success in the
struggle for power, much has been made of his skills in packing and manipulating
the bureaucracy and of the mistakes of his opponents. But some credit must
be given to his ability to construct an identity for himself that embodied
the aspirations of a growing number of the party rank and file, who, like
him, came from the social and ethnic peripheries of prerevolutionary society.
The paradox of Stalin's self-presentation resolves itself in the construction
of the future socialist state. It was an extension of himself based on
three interlocking frames: the proletariat as the dominant class, the ethno-cultural
region as the territorial unit, and Great Russia as the political center
of the state. Once having created it, Stalin set himself the task of maintaining
a balance among these elements, each of which contained the potential for
conflict and contradiction. Who would be better suited to make the
necessary adjustments than the man whose understanding of their mutual
relationship was born of the struggle to unify them all within the identity
he had constructed for himself? The stability and security of such a state
depended wholly on the ability of the leader in whose image the state was
made to control, through whatever means necessary, the threats that could,
almost inevitably must, arise from the clash of principles that he himself
had defined as essentialist. The entire history of the revolutionary movement
had demonstrated that in a country with such deep class, regional, and
ethnic divisions the resolution of conflict could not be left to debating
societies—whether dumas, soviets, or party congresses—especially in the
hands of intellectuals, whose very nature was to debate fine points, to
split hairs, to sow confusion, and to waver. These manifestations of uncertainty
and confusion were and would continue to be as great a danger to the unity
of the state as they were to the identity of the man who had shaped the
state in his own image.
Alfred J. Rieber is a professor of history at the Central European University
in Budapest. He has taught at Northwestern, the University of Chicago,
Columbia, and Penn. His publications reflect his interests in the political
and social history of imperial Russia, Russian historiography, and Russian
and Soviet foreign policy. In the first category, they include The Politics
of Autocracy (1966), Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia
(1982); in the second, "The Study of the History of Russia in the USA"
(in Russian), Istoricheskie zapiski (2000); and in the third, Stalin
and the French Communist Party, 1941–1947 (1962), "Persistent Factors
in Russian Foreign Policy," in Hugh Ragsdale, Imperial Russian Foreign
Policy (1993), and as editor, contributor, and translator, Forced
Migration in Central and Eastern Europe, 1939–1950 (2000). The current
essay is part of a larger work, "The Cold War as Civil War: Russia and
Its Borderlands," nearing completion.
Notes
The final version of this article owes much to the encouragement and
criticism of William G. Rosenberg and Marsha Siefert. I am also grateful
to the anonymous readers of the American Historical Review. The
support of Michael Grossberg and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom came at crucial
moments .Earlier drafts were presented to the Seminar in Russian Politics
at St. Antony's College, Oxford, the London School of Economics, the Ernest
Gellner Seminar in Prague, and the Faculty Seminar of the Central European
University in Budapest. The comments and questions of the participants
helped sharpen my argument. For research assistance, I wish to thank Badri
Kuteli and Aleksandr S. Stypanin. Kirill Anderson, director of the Russian
State Archive for Social and Political History, kindly gave his permission
to publish the photographs from the Alliluev family album now held by the
archive.
1 Grigorii Uratadze, Vospominaniia gruzinskogo sotsial-demokrata
(Stanford, Calif., 1968), 66. The manuscript is undated but was deposited
at the Russian (now Bakhmeteff) Archive at Columbia University in 1959
shortly before his death in Paris. See the introduction by Leopold Haimson,
v.
2 In recent years, researchers on Stalin have not even benefited
very much from the opening of the Russian archives. There have certainly
not been any startling revelations. Dmitrii Volkogonov, who had access
to the Presidential Archive, which at the time of his writing housed Stalin's
personal archive, virtually ignored Stalin's early years, noting that "the
future 'leader' did not like to recall in public" his pre-October period.
Dmitrii Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia: Politicheskii portret I. V. Stalina,
2 vols., 4 pts. (Moscow, 1989), 1, 1: 33–36. Richard Pipes, who had similar
access, noted in his preface to a new edition of The Formation of the Soviet
Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1997) that he found only snippets of information
that did not change his earlier views of Stalin's nationality policy. The
situation may now change due to the transfer of two large fonds from the
Presidential Archive to the Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial'no-Politicheskoi
Istorii (hereafter, RGASPI), formerly the Russkii Tsentr Khraneniia i Izucheniia
Dokumentov Noveishei Istorii (RTsKhIDNI). They are fond (f.) 71, "Sektor
proizvedenii I. V. Stalina, 1936–1956," which currently has 47 inventories
(opisi) and 41,843 files (dela) dealing with the period 1921–1982, and
f.558, op.11, "Stalin," which had already in 1993 10 inventories and 16,174
files dealing with the period 1866–1986 but which has received additional
material since then. Most of this material deals with the period after
1917. A preliminary sounding of documents dealing with the earlier period
generally confirms the findings of Volkogonov and Pipes, but there are
matters of detail that are revealing.
3 Vystavki sovetskogo izobrazitel'nogo iskusstva: Spravochnik
(Moscow, 1967), 2: 179; Izvestiia, November 17, 1937.
4 Vladimir Kaminskii and I. Vereshchagin, "Detstvo i iunost'
vozhdia: Dokumenty, zapiski, rasskazy," Molodaia Gvardiia 12 (1939): 22–101.
As the subtitle suggests, the collection was made up of brief excerpts,
sometimes only a few sentences, from prerevolutionary histories, almanacs,
periodicals, published and unpublished reminiscences, and oral testimony
from archives in Moscow, Tbilisi, and Gori. The self-effacing editors restricted
themselves to identifying the sources and supplying a few explanatory notes
but did not provide any commentary. Kaminskii devoted the next ten years
to collecting additional material for a work of some 412 pages entitled,
"Stalin, His Life and Activity in the Transcaucasus, 1879–1903." But according
to the reviewers for the Institute of Marx-Engels-Lenin, it contained little
that was new and did not shed further light on "which factors or specific
incidents played a fundamental role in the formation of the personality
of the great leader." RGASPI, f.71, op.10, d.273, list (l.) 1. Although
the review was generally favorable, the work was never published.
5 I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, 13 vols. (Moscow, 1946–52),
vols. 1 and 2. The preparation and publication of Stalin's Collected Works
was an enormous administrative undertaking organized by a special
Sector of the Works of Stalin of the Central Committee established in 1936.
A year earlier, Stalin's first private secretary, Ivan V. Tovstukha,
a Ukrainian who had served under him in the Commissariat of Nationalities,
had already begun to collect Stalin's speeches and articles. He also supervised
the translations from Georgian. The prospectus for Vol. 1 was ready in
1940. RGASPI, f.71, op.10, dela (d.) 6, ll.364, 365, 372. Through
correspondence and the dispatch of expert commissions, masses of documents
were collected from regional organizations. For example, over 400
pages of documents were provided by the Vologda State Archive on Stalin's
years of exile there from 1908 to 1911. RGASPI, f.71, op.10, d.277. Experts
in the Institute of Marx-Engels-Lenin reviewed and commented on the drafts
of each volume. RGASPI, f.71, op.10, d.374–80. Stalin was closely consulted
on the selection of material, and great efforts were expended in verifying
the authors of unsigned documents. Following consultation with Stalin,
a substantial number of proclamations, letters, and articles attributed
to him in the period from 1901 to 1917 were not included in the first two
volumes. RGASPI, f.71, op.10, d.20, ll.917–23. This material still requires
close analysis.
6 For puns at Stalin's expense, see W. H. Roobol, Tsereteli:
A Democrat in the Russian Revolution (The Hague, 1976), 13, n. 52; Trotsky
plunged the knife deeper: "Russian always remained for him not only a language
half-foreign and makeshift, but far worse for his consciousness, conventional
and strained." Leon Trotsky, Stalin, the Man and His Influence (New York,
1941), 20. Personal communication from Oleg Troyanovskii, Washington, 1993.
The publication of Stalin's Collected Works beginning in 1946 required
some editorial work on the early articles written in Russian in order to
eliminate "the poor usage and construction" of the originals. Robert H.
McNeal, ed., Stalin's Works: An Annotated Bibliography (Stanford, Calif.,
1967), 15. Anecdotes by critics and admirers testify to his sensitivity
to language snubs. M. E. Rasuladze, "Vospominaniia o I. V. Stalina," Vostochnyi
Ekspress 1 (1993): 42; Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, "Detstvo," 40.
7 Aside from deciding what to include and exclude from his
Collected Works, Stalin characteristically eliminated his enemies from
the text or else denigrated them. For example, in reviewing the proof sheets
for his second volume, Stalin crossed out all references to L. B. Kamenev,
G. E. Zinoviev, and the names of a whole series of individuals who were
later repressed. The term "comrade" was removed from Trotsky's name. The
director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute insisted that "the inclusion
of facts [drawn from the unsupported memoirs of an old Bolshevik worker]
in the biographical chronicle is possible only after the approval of Comrade
Stalin." RGASPI, f.558, op.11, d.932, ll.5–7.
8 My use of the biographical material that Stalin allowed
to be published differs from all of his biographers, who take them at face
value. See, for example, Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929
(New York, 1973), esp. chap. 3. Whenever possible, Tucker compares the
Molodaia Gvardiia documents with the reminiscences of Stalin's boyhood
acquaintance written in emigration, Joseph Iremaschwili, Stalin und die
Tragödie Georgians (Berlin, 1932). He treats the latter very critically
and refers on several occasions to "Soviet confirmation" of Iremaschwili
rather than the reverse. See also Edward Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin:
The Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary (New York, 1967), particularly
the first three chapters. Smith is if anything even more skeptical about
all other Soviet sources except for the Molodaia Gvardiia material.
9 Representative works in the first category are Isaac Deutscher,
Stalin: A Political Biography (New York, 1949), which compares him to Oliver
Cromwell and Napoleon; E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1924–1926,
2 vols. (New York, 1958), 1: 174–86, which describes Stalin as a man shaped
by his time in contrast to Lenin, who shaped his time; and Bertram Wolfe,
Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History (New York, 1948). Adam
Ulam, who recognized both the tragic and heroic elements of Stalin's reign,
was also moved to call it "preposterous." Stalin: The Man and His Era (New
York, 1973), 14, 741. In the second category, numerous works emphasize
Stalin's pathological personality. The most extreme and fanciful of these
is Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Mind of Stalin: A Psychoanalytic Survey
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1988). Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, and Stalin in
Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York, 1990), fits the
profile of a psychobiography, defined by William McKinley Runyan as "the
use of systematic or formal psychology in biography." See "Alternatives
to Psychoanalytic Psycho-biography," in Runyan, ed., Psychology and Historical
Interpretation (Oxford, 1988), 221. Tucker's model was Karen Horney's "neurotic
character structure." Robert C. Tucker, "A Stalin Biography's Memoir,"
in Runyan, Psychology, 63–81. Philip Pomper, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin:
The Intelligentsia in Power (New York, 1990), is more eclectic. Critical
of such approaches is Ronald Grigor Suny, "Beyond Psychohistory: The Young
Stalin in Georgia," Slavic Review 50 (Spring 1991): 48–58, a sketch for
a forthcoming full-scale biography. Suny seeks to place Stalin in the socio-cultural
matrix of Georgia, which he interprets as an "honor and shame" society,
while maintaining that Stalin later "abandoned his public identification
with Georgia in favor of Russia." A third approach, which identifies Stalin
as a bureaucratic despot, owes much of its inspiration to Trotsky's brilliant
and venomous biography, Stalin. This view has been much elaborated and
expanded in the work of Moshe Lewin, who includes Stalin's pathological
character in his many-sided treatment of the dictator. See among others
"Grappling with Stalinism," in Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System:
Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York, 1985); and most
recently, "Bureaucracy and the Stalinist State," and "Stalin in the Mirror
of the Other," in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorship
in Comparison (Cambridge, 1997), 53–74 and 107–34.
10 My approach to the problem of identity formation follows
from Peter Weinreich's explanation of the absence of any grand theory in
the field: value systems evolve and change both in relation to the individual
biography and the major developments within the socio-historical context.
Weinreich,"Variations in Ethnic Identity: Identity Structure Analysis,"
in Karmela Liebkind, ed., New Identities in Europe: Immigrant Ancestry
and the Ethnic Identity of Youth (Aldershot, 1989), 45, 67. In each case,
and Stalin is no exception, the historian is free to construct his or her
own model by drawing selectively on theoretical insights provided by social
anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists. I have been guided by
the need to bridge the gap between studies of personality and the individual
favored by psychologists and philosophers and the studies of ethnic group
identity conducted by cultural anthropologists and social psychologists.
The sources I have relied on most heavily are Erik Erikson, Identity, Youth
and Crisis (New York, 1968); D. Bannister and F. Fransella, Inquiring Man:
The Theory of Personal Constructs (London, 1971); A. Jacobson-Widding,
ed., Identity: Personal and Socio-Cultural (Stockholm, 1983); G. Breakwell,
ed., Threatened Identities (Chichester, 1983); Anthony P. Cohen, Self Consciousness:
An Alternative Anthropology of Identity (London, 1994).
11 For specialized studies that pay more than casual attention
to the effect of the borderland factor on identity and policy formation,
see Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London, 1998); M. K. Dziewanowski,
Joseph Pilsudski: A European Federalist, 1918–1922 (Stanford, Calif., 1969);
Thomas Spira, German-Hungarian Relations and the Swabian Problem: From
Károly to Gömbös, 1919–1936 (Boulder, Colo., 1977); and
Eugen Weber, "Romania," in Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber, The European Right:
A Historical Profile (Berkeley, Calif., 1966), esp. 516–72. A preliminary
effort to compare Stalin and Hitler on this basis is Alfred J. Rieber,
"The Marginality of Totalitarianism," in Lord Dahrendorf, et al., The Paradoxes
of Unintended Consequences (Budapest, 2000), 265–84. The original man of
the borderlands was Napoleon Bonaparte, but he had no imitators in the
relatively stable conditions of nineteenth-century Europe. After World
War II, Tito's ambition to revive Yugoslavism in the form of a great South
Slav federation imitated Stalin. For insights into Tito's "foreignness"
in his own country, see especially Milovan Djilas, Tito: The Story from
Inside (London, 1981), 61–62. In Asia, the phenomenon also appears in postcolonial
revolutionary struggles of the nationalist and communist varieties. Jawaharlal
Nehru's insistence on retaining predominantly Muslim Kashmir is not unrelated
to his ancestral ties and psychological identification with the province.
References are scattered throughout Nehru, An Autobiography (Oxford, 1980).
See also Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (Cambridge, 1980),
esp. vol. 3. More tenuous but worth exploring further is Mao Zedong's attachment
to Hunan Province, with its strongly defined regional traditions, including
social banditry. For suggestive insights, see Stuart Schram, Mao Tse-tung
(New York, 1966), 17–25, 283; and Jonathan Spence, Mao Zedong (New York,
1999).
12 Zygmunt Bauman, "From Pilgrim to Tourist—or A Short History
of Identity," in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural
Identity (London, 1996), 21. Behind Bauman's key metaphor lies a large
literature first defined by the French novelist Michel Butor as "iterology,"
the science of journeys, in "Le voyage et l'écriture," Romantisme
4 (1972). For a recent summary, see Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson, eds.,
Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement (Oxford,
1998), esp. Rapport, "Home and Movement: A Polemic," 19–38.
13 Edwin Ardener, The Voice of Prophesy and Other Essays
(Oxford, 1989), 67.
14 See, for example, Oonagh O'Brien, "Good to Be French?
Conflicts of Identity in North Catalonia," in Sharon Macdonald, ed., Inside
European Identities: Ethnography in Western Europe (Providence, R.I., 1993),
113–14, and other essays in this collection.
15 The analysis here draws mainly on Erving Goffman's work
but also on George Kelly's theory of personal constructs as interpreted
by several of his disciples, for example, Bannister and Fransella, Inquiring
Man, 31–43. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York,
1959), explores the role of actors whose use of rules, norms, and roles
is largely manipulative and instrumental, masking their real motives, which
are the pursuit of perceived private advantage. In Frame Analysis: An Essay
on the Organization of Experience (1974; rpt. edn., Boston, 1986), Goffman
refines the analysis by introducing the concept of keying or transforming
materials drawn from actual experiences in accord with a schema of interpretation;
the result is a layering between the inner part of the frame, which is
"something that does or could have status as untransformed reality," and
the outer rim, which produces a copy, or in Stalin's case a fabrication,
a "front for improper action." Neither he nor anyone else has yet succeeded
in solving the theoretical problem posed initially by David Hume and Thomas
Hobbes on locating the "man behind the mask." For this and other insights
into the limits of such analysis, see M. Hollis, "Of Masks and Men," in
Michael Carrithers, Stephen Collins, and Steven Lukes, eds., The Category
of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge, 1985), 217–33.
16 Nowhere is this more evident than in the problems faced
by the staff of the Sector of the Works of I. V. Stalin. Two examples suffice.
First, in May 1936, the Institute of Marx-Engels-Lenin received a bulky
package of documents by Lenin and Stalin from Stalin's secretariat commemorating
the fifteenth anniversary of the creation of the Azerbaizhan Soviet Socialist
Republic. The director, V. V. Adoratskii, replied that "it was impossible
to publish the documents in their present form." After two months of verifying
and collating, Adoratskii returned the documents with a large number of
questions and notes indicating that the originals of some were not in the
institute. He vigorously opposed publication in the organ of the institute,
Krasnyi Arkhiv, insisting that they appear in Pravda or Bol'shevik, having
been first approved by the Central Committee. The collection organized
into four volumes was never published. RGASPI, f.558, op.11, d.1198, ll.2–3;
d.1199–1202, the four volumes containing respectively 149, 108, 112, and
110 pages. Second, in June 1956, the head of the KGB reported to Nikita
Khrushchev the results of an investigation into the allegations in Life
magazine that Stalin had been an agent of the tsarist secret police. He
was able to discredit the documents published in Life, but stated that,
according to employees of the Krasnoiarsk Archive Department, "over the
past fifteen years workers [rabotniki] from Moscow had frequently visited
and collected numbers of documents concerning Stalin the contents of which
they were unaware." Moreover, testimony from a local woman established
that Stalin had fathered two illegitimate children, one of whom died, while
the other became a major in the Soviet army and lived, unacknowledged by
Stalin, until 1967. RGASPI, f.558, op.11, d.1288, ll.14–16.
17 See Alexei Kojevnikov, "Rituals of Stalinist Culture at
Work: Science and Intraparty Democracy circa 1948," Russian Review 57 (January
1998): 25–52, for suggestive insights into this process.
18 Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, "Detstvo," 26–34.
19 E. B. Virsiladze, "Nartskii epos i okhotnich'i skazaniia
v Gruzii," in Skazaniia o nartakh—epos narodov Kavkaza (Moscow, 1969),
245–54; M. Ia. Chikovani, "Nartski siuzhety v Gruzii," in Skazaniia, 226–44.
For an analysis of the slow rate of transformation to modernity in the
material culture of Georgian villages, see N. G. Volkov and G. N. Dzhavakhishvili,
Bytovaia kul'tura Gruzii XIX–XX vekov: Traditsii i inovatsii (Tblisi, 1982),
174–222.
20 Albert Bates Lord, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1991), 36.
21 Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, "Detstvo," 31, 36.
22 For a lucid survey of Georgian literary and cultural trends
of this period, see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation,
2d edn. (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), 124–36.
23 Iremaschvili, Stalin, 18; Kaminskii and Vereshchagin,
"Detstvo," 53. The best discussion of the psychological significance of
Koba for Stalin is now Pomper, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, 158–63. See also
Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 79–82.
24 A. Khakhanov, "Iz istorii sovremennoi gruzinskoi literatury:
A. Kazbek," Russkaia Mysl' 12 (1893): 19–32. The author was a leading Georgian
journalist and publicist. The legends of resistance bear all the hallmarks
of social banditry enumerated in E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies
in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1959;
rpt. edn., New York, 1965), chap. 2.
25 Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, "Detstvo," 48–49, 53. Gorkii's
original report was published in the newspaper Nizhegorodskii Listok 327
(November 26, 1896). Following the Revolution of 1905, the Bolsheviks engaged
in a form of social banditry through expropriations or robberies to fill
the party's coffers. Stalin's role in these activities remains obscure,
and he carefully avoided assuming responsibility for them. But as one of
the local leaders of the Baku organization, his involvement although indirect
and supervisory cannot be denied. Trotsky, Stalin, 99–101, reviews the
evidence most thoroughly.
26 Rustaveli's most famous work, "Vepkhistqaosani," has been
translated into many European languages under various titles, for example,
Marjory Scott Wardrop, The Man in the Panther's Skin (London, 1912). The
British scholar of Georgia, David Marshall Lang, The Georgians (New York,
1966), 172–76, uses the term "knight" in his excellent summary of the work,
and this has become standard even for translations published in Georgia,
for example, by Venera Urushadze (Tblisi, 1983).
27 Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, "Detstvo," 54.
28 S. V. Maksimov, Krai kreshchanago sveta (St. Petersburg,
1866), 47–49; Lang, Georgians, 28.
29 Volkov and Dzhavakhishvili, Bytovaia kultura, 215; Sovetskoe
pravo, traditsii, obychai i ikh rol' v formirovanii novogo cheloveka (Nal'chik,
1972), especially the articles by P. T. Nekipelov, "Prestypleniia, sostavliaiushchie
perezhitki mestnykh obuchaev," and K. Ia. Dzhabrailov, "Krovnaia mest':
Nekotorye voprosy genezisa i ugolovno-pravovoi bor'by s neiu na sovremennom
etape"; F. D. Edieva, "Sotsial'nyi dualizm obychaia krovnoi mesti karachaevtsev
v XIX v.," Iz istoriia gorskikh i kochevnykh narodnov Severnogo Kavkaza,
part 1 (Stavropol, 1975); I. L. Babich, Pravovaia kul'tura Adygov (Istoriia
i sovremennost') (Moscow, 2000), esp. chap. 2; I. L. Babich, Mekhanizm
formirovaniia pravovogo pliuralizma na Severnom Kavkaze (Moscow, 2000),
9, 11, 15.
30 Christopher Boehm, Blood Revenge: The Enactment and Management
of Conflict in Montenegro and Other Tribal Societies (Lawrence, Kans.,
1984), 60–62. See also Mary E. Durham, Some Tribal Origins, Laws and Customs
of the Balkans (London, 1928), 160–65.
31 Pomper, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, 160–61, provides a
perceptive analysis of the implications for Stalin's personal development.
32 Tamara Dragadze, Rural Families in Soviet Georgia: A Case
Study in Ratcha Province (London, 1988), 120, 133, 199. Dragadze also links
this tradition to Rustaveli's epic poetry, 158–59.
33 S. Ia. Alliluev, "Moi vospominaniia," Krasnaia letopis'
5 (1923); Alliluev, "Vstrechi s tovarishchem Stalinom," Proletarskaia revoliutsiia
8 (1937); Alliluev, Proidennyi put' (Moscow, 1946); the memoirs of Sergei
Alliluev's daughter and Nadezhda's sister, Anna Sergeevna Allilueva, were
published in two editions, both in the same year, 1946, as Iz vospominanii,
published by Pravda and Vospominaniia, published by Sovietskii pisatel'.
Stalin was angered by revelations of his personal life and ordered both
editions withdrawn from circulation shortly after they appeared. Svetlana
Allilueva, Dvadtsat' pisem k drugu (New York, 1967), 56–57.
34 Stalin also converted the surrounding grounds into a Georgian
garden. Allilueva, Dvadtsat' pisem, 28–33; "Dnevnik Marii Anisimovny Svanidze,"
in Iu. G. Murin, ed., Iosif Stalin v ob"iatiiakh sem'i: Iz lichnogo arkhiva
(Moscow, 1993), 155–59.
35 Mikhail Vaiskopf, Pisatel' Stalin (Moscow, 2001), 196;
Murin, Iosif Stalin v ob"iatiiakh sem'i, 31, 35, 37. After Nadezhda's death,
Stalin preferred to call her Setanka in order to avoid the obvious bad
connotation of Satanka in Russian. For Stalin's identification with Soslan,
see below, n. 110.
36 Stalin's later disavowal en famille of his Georgian roots
expressed his ambivalent feelings about himself as a man of the borderlands
once he had become the leader of the state. Compare Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary,
432–33, who interprets the evidence as proof of his complete russification.
37 "Dnevnik . . . Svanidze," 177. Characteristically, Stalin's
reaction was to rage at the world exactly as he had done when his first
wife died. Iremaschwili, Stalin, 40–41. His ritualistic mourning of Nadezhda
was filled with emotional ambivalence. Allilueva, Dvadtsat' pisem, 99–109.
38 Allilueva, Dvadtsat' pisem, 23, 45.
39 "Dnevnik . . . Svanidze," 168. Shortly after Kirov's death,
at Stalin's birthday party Stalin joined with his Caucasian band of brothers
in singing "mournful, multi-voiced Georgian songs in his high tenor"; 169–70.
Folk music may serve as "a kind of totemic emblem" that reinforces ethnic
self-identity but also transcends the self by expressing deep commitment
to a wider association. J. Blacking, "Concepts of Identity and Folk Concepts
of Self," in Jacobson-Widding, Identity, 52.
40 Allilueva, Dvadtsat' pisem, 74.
41 Iu. N. Zhukov, "Sledstvie i sudebnye protsessy po delu
ob ubiistve Kirova," Voprosy istorii 1, no. 1 (2000): 46–59, based on classified
archival material from the Ezhov fond. Zhukov also exonerates Stalin from
participation in the murder. In this, he agrees with another Russian scholar
who had access to files not open to Westerners: Alla Alekseevna Kirilina,
L'assassinat de Kirov: Destin d'un stalinien, 1888–1934, adapted from the
Russian by Pierre Forgues and Nicolas Werth (Paris, 1995), an expanded
and rewritten version of the original Russian, Rikoshet, ili Skol'ko chelovek
bylo ubito vystrelom v Smol'nom (St. Petersburg, 1993). Western scholars
remain divided over the question of Stalin's responsibility. Robert Conquest,
Stalin and the Kirov Murders (New York, 1989), reviews the "four stories"
that were invented with Stalin's connivance to implicate ever larger numbers
of oppositionists and others he wished to destroy. Conquest also attempts
to prove Stalin's guilt in organizing the killing of Kirov. J. Arch Getty,
"The Politics of Repression Revisited," in Getty and Roberta T. Manning,
eds., Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives (Cambridge, 1993), casts doubt
on some of Conquest's sources. Amy Knight, Who Killed Kirov? The Kremlin's
Greatest Mystery (New York, 1999), using fresh archival material from the
Kirov and Ordzhonikidze files, favors a verdict of Stalin's complicity,
but her case also rests on circumstantial evidence. It is still difficult
to get around Ulam's objection: "it is unlikely that Stalin would have
wanted to establish the precedent of a successful assassination attempt
against a high Soviet official." Ulam, Stalin, 385.
42 Beria was adept at using "rumor mongering," which appealed
to Stalin, as a means of discrediting his superiors in Georgia and then
replacing them. Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (Princeton,
N.J., 1993). Beria appears to have used this technique against his one-time
mentor and another of Stalin's Georgian entourage, Sergo Ordzhonikidze.
Knight, Beria, 74. Stalin's heirs, including Anastas Mikoian and Klim Voroshilov,
blamed Beria for having poisoned Stalin's mind against Sergo. Izvestiia
TsK KPSS, no. 2 (1991): 150, 175, 183. The Russian historian Oleg V. Khlevniuk,
In Stalin's Shadow: The Career of "Sergo" Ordzhonikidze (Armonk, N.Y.,
1995), 107, considered these accusations politically motivated, but his
evidence requires that we accept at face value Beria's protestations of
good will toward Ordzhonikidze. It is not necessary in such matters to
assign sole blame to either Beria or Stalin. They seemed to have fed on
one another's differently motivated but equally murderous impulses.
43 Lavrenti P. Beria, K istorii bol'shevistskikh organizatsii
na Zakavkazii (Moscow, 1934). The work had originally been serialized in
Pravda in eight installments. In 1939, the 4th edition appeared.
44 Tucker, Stalin in Power, 334. For the most complete exposure
of Beria's fabrications, see Knight, Beria, 57–64. In several waves of
de-Stalinization since the Twentieth Party Congress, Soviet historians
have endeavored to correct the record on the basis of the skimpy surviving
evidence in the archives. In addition, a major effort was launched, mainly
by historians in the Caucasian republics, to restore to their proper place
in the revolutionary movement a number of figures whose importance in the
region was at least equal if not superior to that of Stalin in the prerevolutionary
period. G. S. Akopian, Stepan Shaumian, Zhizn' i deiatel'nost' (1878–1918)
(Moscow, 1973), with a laudatory preface by Anastas Mikoian; Stepan Shaumian,
Izbrannye proizvedeniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1978); C. S. Spendarian,
Stat'i, pis'ma, dokumenty (Moscow, 1958); P. A. Dzhaparidze, Izbrannye
stat'i, rechi i pis'ma (1905–1918) (Moscow, 1958); Z. G. Ordzhonikidze,
Puti bol'shevika: Strannitsy iz zhizni G. K. Ordzhonikidze (Moscow, 1956);
V. S. Kirilov and A. Ia. Sverdlov, Grigorii Konstantinovich Ordzhonikidze:
Biografiia (Moscow, 1986); T. Akhmedov, Nariman Narimanov (Baku,1988).
45 A. S. Enukidze, Nashi podpolnye tipografii na Kavkaze
(Moscow, 1925), appeared in a 3d edition under the title Bol'shevistkie
nelegal'nye tipografii in 1934, poor timing on Enukidze's part. Beria's
"revisionist" history claimed that it was Stalin, not Enukidze, who had
founded the illegal printing press in Baku in 1901. This was clearly at
odds with the memories not only of Enukidze but other participants such
as Vako Sturua, "Podpol'naia tipografiia 'Iskra' v Baku," Iz proshlogo:
Stat'i i vospominaniia iz istorii Bakinskoi organizatsii i rabochego dvizheniia
v Baku (Baku, 1923), 137–38, who did not even mention Stalin's participation.
Clearly, Enukidze stood in the way of Stalin's new Georgian pedigree. For
the most complete account of Beria's campaign, see Knight, Beria, 56–64.
46 RGASPI, f.558, op.11, d.728, ll.67, 70–74, 78, 108–13.
It is clear from marginal comments that Mekhlis's analysis had aroused
Stalin's anger. Enukidze's attempt to defend himself in personal correspondence
with Stalin did not save him. RGASPI, f.558, op.11, d.728, ll.114–24.
47 Getty, "Politics of Repression," 51–52, based on the Russian
archives, accepts the view that Stalin was exercising moderation. But it
is hardly likely at this point that Stalin could not have imposed his will.
For Stalin's diabolical charades, see Lewin, "Stalin in the Mirror of the
Other," 123–24.
48 The brother of Stalin's first wife, Alexander Svanidze,
and his wife Maria were arrested in 1937 and shot in 1941 and 1942 respectively;
Alexander's sister, Mariko, was arrested, sentenced to ten years, and then
shot in 1942; Anna Sergeevna (Allilueva) Redens, the sister of Stalin's
second wife, was arrested in 1948 and sentenced to ten years; her husband,
Stanislav Redens, a former associate of Beria in the Caucasus, had already
been arrested and shot in 1938. Pavel Alliluev, the brother of Stalin's
second wife, was demoted in 1937 and died of apparently natural causes
in 1938, but his wife was arrested and executed for having poisoned him.
Murin, Iosif Stalin v ob"iatiiakh sem'i, 193–94; Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia,
1: 2, 581; Allilueva, Dvadtsat' pisem, 54–55.
49 On the timing of the publication of the Molodaia Gvardiia
material, Oleg Kharkhordin provides a complementary line of analysis to
my own. While I stress the ethnic factor, he unearths another dimension
of Stalin's cultural roots. He argues that by the end of the 1930s the
ritual of "self-revelation," rooted in the Orthodox tradition, was widely
used by Stalin as a means of exercising social control. See Kharkhordin,
The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study in Practice (Berkeley,
Calif., 1999), esp. chap. 5 and 270–78. I would suggest taking his argument
one step further. By revealing his own "self" in 1939, Stalin provided
a model for individuation that became an essential part of the reigning
dogma. At the same time, Stalin was also engaged at a less conscious level
in practicing "dissimulation," a divergent tradition embedded in peasant
culture that concealed discordant aspects of an ideal, in his case, Bolshevik,
self.
50 A. Khakhanov, "Iz istorii sovremennoi gruzinskoi literatury,"
Russkaia mysl' 4 (1898): 45–63.
51 In his memoirs, Noi (Noah) Zhordaniia refers contemptuously
to Iveriia in 1897 as an organ concerned "only with cultural tasks, the
rest—social, political and national questions—were of no interest"; Moia
zhizn' (Stanford, Calif., 1968), 24.
52 Stalin, Sochineniia, 1: 398. Less than a decade after
the appearance of his poems, Stalin performed one of his surgical operations
on history by cutting out any mention of the aristocratic, left-wing liberal
nationalists from his brief survey of the growth of Georgian nationalism,
leaving
only the feudal monarchist, the aristocratic-clerical nationalist, and
the bourgeois nationalist. Stalin, Sochineniia, 1: 34–35. But by 1939,
such old, fine distinctions were no longer necessary.
53 Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, "Detstvo," 72–73; Beria, K
istorii, 14.
54 Smith, Young Stalin, 38–42. On the basis of the photocopies
and the original handwritten texts of the poems preserved in the Stalin
archive, it seems reasonably certain that they were in fact written by
the young Soso. RGASPI, f.71, op.10, d.190.
55 Stalin, Sochineniia, 1: 44. In this article, Stalin defends
the nationality planks in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party platform,
including the right of nationalities "to organize their national affairs
according to their wishes" up to and including "the right to separate [otdelitsia]."
Written as a rebuttal to the Georgian federalist-social democrats who sought
to justify the separation of workers into separate parties, it refuted
the idea of "a national spirit." But it cannot be construed as constituting
a departure from the central Bolshevik tenets at that time. Compare Erik
van Ree, "Stalin and the National Question," Revolutionary Russia 7 (December
1994): 218–19.
56 RGASPI, f.558, op.11, d.728, ll.16–17.
57 Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, "Detstvo," 62–66, including
an excerpt from a memoir published in 1907 on the systematic exclusion
of Georgian students from the Tbilisi Seminary, until in 1905 there were
only four left in a graduating class of forty.
58 In 1922, Stalin counted thirty nationalities in the formation
of the USSR; three years later, he raised the number to fifty, and in 1936
he established a "final" figure of "sixty nations, national groups and
peoples." Yet the census of 1926 identified a minimum of 185 linguistic
groups. A. I. Vdovin, "Natsional'naia politika 30-kh godov (ob istoricheskikh
korniakh krizisa mezhnatsionalnykh otnoshenii v SSSR," Vestnik moskovskogo
universiteta, series 8, Istoriia 4 (1992): 21. It is possible that Stalin
was referring only to nationalities that had been granted a form of territorial
autonomy. But the discrepancy is still hard to explain.
59 Yuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How
a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53 (Summer
1994): 414–52; Robert J. Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalism in Russia
and the USSR (Princeton, N.J., 1994), 124–35; Bernard V. Olivier, "Korenizatsiia,"
Central Asian Survey 9, no. 3 (1990): 77–98. The spread of Russian has
been attributed more to sovietization than russification. Roman Szporluk,
"History and Ethnocentrism," in Edward Allworth, ed., Ethnic Russia in
the USSR (New York, 1980), 41–54. Recently, Terry Martin has demonstrated
that it had become clear to Stalin by the end of the 1920s that his own
policy of korenizatsiia, when pushed to extremes, intensified rather than
decreased ethnic rivalries, and had to be checked. Martin, "Borders and
Ethnic Conflict: The Soviet Experiment in Ethno-Territorial Proliferation,"
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 47 (1999), 4: 538–55.
60 His 1950 treatise, "Concerning Marxism in Linguistics,"
stated unequivocally that, contrary to the reigning theory in Soviet linguistics
of N. Ia. Marr, language was not a class phenomenon but belonged to whole
societies. The interbreeding (skreshchivanie) of the national languages
in the USSR(presumably into Russian) would be "a process taking hundreds
of years." I. V. Stalin, Works, Robert H. McNeal, ed., 3 vols. (Stanford,
Calif., 1967), XVI, 3: 142. It is significant that from the beginning of
his campaign to discredit Marr's theories he recruited a leading member
of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, who later recalled: "Stalin hated
ambiguities: He was interested in problems of language actually in connection
with the national question." Arn. Chikobava, "When and How It Happened,"
Ezhegodnik Iberiisko-kavkazskogo iazykoznaniia 12 (Tblisi, 1985): 41. To
be sure, the linguistics controversy was part of a larger campaign of Stalin's
to discredit "ultra-leftists" who had sought, like Marr, who was dead,
and like T. D. Lysenko, who was very much alive, to monopolize a field
of theory, a privilege Stalin reserved for himself. For the best general
discussion, see Yuri Slezkine, "N. Ia. Marr and the National Origins of
Soviet Ethnogenetics," Slavic Review 55 (Winter 1996): 26–62.
61 Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, "Detstvo," 44–45. In his subsequent
and unpublished research, Kaminskii uncovered further details about the
incident. RGASPI, f.71, op.10, d.273, l.4, citing pp. 75–79 of the manuscript.
62 Stalin, Sochineniia, 1: 109, 130. He repeated his attack
and his characterization of the intelligentsia's vacillation in another
polemic with Zhordaniia in August 1905. Stalin, Sochineniia, 1: 160–72.
63 R. Arsenidze, "Iz vospominanii o Staline," Novyi Zhurnal
72 (June 1963): 220. See also A. S. Alliluev, Iz vospominanii, 60. On return
from Siberian exile to Georgia, Stalin showed up in a military tunic, which
became his preferred mode of dress until he assumed the rank of generalissimo
during the Fatherland War. It was emblematic of his pose as a simple soldier
of the revolution.
64 "Dnevnik . . . Svanidze," 163, 178; Volkogonov, Triumf
i tragediia, 1: 1.
65 Stalin, Sochineniia, 2: 27–31, emphasis in original. Teliia
and Djugashvili were the two Caucasian delegates to the Tammerfors Conference
in December 1905, where they first met Lenin.
66 S. T. Arkomed, Rabochee dvizhenie i sotsial'no-demokratiia
na Kavkaze, 2d edn. (Moscow, 1926), 43–63, 74–76. There were no changes
from the first edition, including a preface by Georgi Plekhanov published
in 1910. All Stalin's non-Soviet biographers accept this as a description
of him.
67 Arkomed, Rabochee, 81–84. In 1904, Stalin also attempted
to circumvent the local Batum committee by directly approaching workers'
groups but had no success and left the city. Arsenidze, "Iz vospominanii,"
218–19.
68 RGASPI, f.71, op.10, d.273, l.1.
69 Ronald Grigor Suny, "A Journeyman for the Revolution:
Stalin and the Labor Movement in Baku, June 1907–May 1908," Soviet Studies
3 (1971): 373–94.
70 Stalin, Sochineniia, 2: 188–89. In Baku itself, Stalin
claimed that the Bolshevik-inclined Oil Workers Union had 900 workers,
while the Menshevik-inclined Mechanical Workers Union had only 300. Sochineniia,
2: 184–85. At Stockholm, he boasted that Baku was the only industrial center
in the Caucasus that broke ranks with the Georgian Mensheviks to support
a boycott of elections to the State Duma. Chetvertyi (ob"edinitel'nyi)
s"ezd RSDRP: Aprel'–mai, 1906 goda; Protokoly (Moscow, 1959), 311, 322.
71 Audrey Alstadt, "Muslim Workers and the Labor Movement
in Pre-War Baku," in S. M. Akural, Turkic Culture: Continuity and Change
(Bloomington, Ind., 1987), 83–91; and Cosroe Chaquèri, The Soviet
Socialist Republic of Iran, 1920–1921: Birth of the Trauma (Pittsburgh,
1995), 24–25, who estimates that from 20 to 50 percent of males in northern
Iran between the ages of twenty and forty ended up working for some period
of time across the border, mainly in Transcaucasia.
72 Bala Efendiev, "Istoriia revoliutsionogo dvizheniia tiurkskogo
proletariata," in Iz proshlogo: Stat'i i vospominaniia iz istorii Bakinskoi
organizatsii i rabochego dvizheniia v Baku (Baku, 1923), 39–40; A. M. Stopani,
"Iz proshlogo nashei partii, 1904–1908 g.," in Iz proshlogo, 16.
73 Akhmedov, Nariman Narimanov, and Aidin Balaev, "Plennik
idei ili politicheskii slepets," Azerbaizhan (June 20, 1991).
74 Originally published in the Tbilisi newspaper Zaria Vostoka,
the speech was republished in Kaminskii and Vereshchagin, "Detstvo"; and
in Stalin, Sochineniia, 8: 173–75, which gives a good idea of its centrality
in Stalin's presentation of self. The peculiar mix of images suggests the
deep layering within the proletarian frame. It illustrates once again what
Trotsky called Stalin's "Tbilisi homiletics" or "seminarist rhetoric."
Trotsky, Stalin, 140, 259. But, at another level, it was as if Stalin
were probing a subterranean emotional stratum linking himself to the Caucasian
worker who had only half-forgotten his peasant origins. Beyond his invocation
of a triple baptism and repeated verbal formulas, his unusual use of the
word skitanii (wandering) evokes the secret underground and illegal monasteries
of the Old Believers that sheltered religious wanderers.
75 Vaiskopf, Pisatel' Stalin, 346–48.
76 Lydia Dan, "Bukharin o Staline," Novyi Zhurnal 75 (March
1964): 182 (ellipsis in original).
77 S. F. Jones, "Marxism and Peasant Revolt in the Russian
Empire: The Case of the Gurian Republic," Slavonic and East European Review
67 (July 1989): 403–34.
78 Vtoroi s"ezd RSDRP: Iiul'–avgust, 1903 goda; Protokoly
(Moscow, 1959), 216, 223, 226, 228–29, 233, 240, 423. They pointed out,
for example, that Lenin's position on redistributing the land made no sense
under Georgian conditions. See also Uratadze, Vospominaniia, 89, 153.
79 Chetvertyi s"ezd, 110. The Georgian Mensheviks also sharply
condemned the Bolshevik proposals for nationalization as a measure opposed
to the peasant interests. At the same time, it was clear that their concept
of municipalization differed from that of the Russian Mensheviks to the
extent that they demanded partial redistribution and insisted on working
with the peasants rather than simply imposing solutions on them. Chetvertyi
s"ezd, 83–84 (speech of Beriev [Ramishvili]); 107–09 (Kartvelov [Chichinadze]);
115–16 (Vorob'ev [Lomtatidze]).
80 Stalin, Sochineniia, 1: 237–38.
81 Chetvertyi s"ezd, 116. Stalin's contemptuous dismissal
of the revolution in Guriia ran counter to the ringing endorsement of the
uprising at the Third Congress, composed entirely of Bolsheviks, at which
he had been absent. Tret'yi s"ezd RSDRP, aprel'–mai 1905 goda: Protokoly
(Moscow, 1959), 440–42.
82 Vtoroi s"ezd, 61–62, 77–78; Chetvertyi s"ezd, 435–36,
442–43, where Zhordaniia outflanked the Bolsheviks to the left by opposing
Lenin's endorsement of the proposal to readmit the Bund to the party, in
which case "the Caucasus organization will be destroyed since with this
agreement we will accept the introduction of the national principle into
our ranks."
83 In 1907, Lenin told Zhordaniia: "take your autonomy and
do what you want in Georgia; we will not interfere, and you don't interfere
in Russian affairs." Zhordaniia, Moia zhizn', 53. Irakli Tsereteli
independently confirmed the offer. Zhordaniia, Moia zhizn', 54, editor's
note 41. It is inconceivable that Stalin could ever have subscribed to
this statement. Even after the Soviet conquest of Georgia that overthrew
Zhordaniia's Menshevik government in 1921, Lenin wrote to Ordzhonikidze:
"It is highly important to seek an acceptable compromise for a bloc with
Zhordaniia or Georgian Mensheviks like him, who even before the uprising
were not absolutely hostile to the introduction of the Soviet power in
Georgia under certain conditions." V. I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochineniia,
3d edn. (Moscow, 1937), 40: 367. By contrast, Stalin even opposed a compromise
with the Georgian Bolsheviks!
84 Stalin, Sochineniia, 2: 32–33, 49–51. When in 1913, Zhordaniia's
position had evolved toward the Austro-Marxist position of national cultural
autonomy, Stalin was finally able to attack the Georgian Mensheviks frontally.
Sochineniia, 2: 291–92, 351.
85 Very early in his revolutionary career, Soso Djugashvili
had conceived a deep resentment toward Zhordaniia, and in his discussions
with workers he launched "unusually fierce attacks" against the well-known
Georgian social democrat when no one else dared speak out. Alliluev, Proidennyi
put', 31.
86 A formal written protest was signed by twenty-six Caucasian
delegates with a full and three with a consultative vote. Piatyi (Londonskii)
s"ezd RSDRP, aprel'–mai 1907 goda: Protokoly (Moscow, 1963), 226–32, 241,
540–42. Uratadze also notes that delegates in the Caucasus were elected
on the principle of one for every 300 members, but the Bolsheviks could
not muster the necessary number in either Tbilisi or Baku. Vospominaniia,
159, 181.
87 Uratadze, Vospominaniia, 198; Stalin, Sochineniia, 1:
409, n. 66; 411, n. 79; 413, n. 84.
88 The first volume of Stalin's Collected Works dating from
1901 to 1907 includes twenty items in Georgian and only six in Russian,
but four of these are unsigned collective editorials in Russian language
periodicals, and the other two are his speeches at Stockholm, which were
not published in Georgia at the time. The second volume contains eight
articles in Georgian before the report on the London conference.
89 Stalin, Sochineniia, 2: 188–96, 213–18. The evidence that
Stalin wrote the latter piece is not, however, conclusive. Compare Sochineniia,
2: 395–96, n. 99, which cites a two-line, unpublished letter of appreciation
on behalf of Lenin from his wife, Krupskaia. There are two articles of
doubtful authorship published within this period. See McNeal, Stalin's
Works, 39.
90 Stalin, Sochineniia, 2: 416–20.
91 Murin, Iosif Stalin v ob"iatiiakh sem'i, 1–19. The eighteen
brief notes that have survived are a mixture of conventional Georgian expressions
of health and long life, reports on his own health, news of the children,
and apologies for not writing often. He signed himself, "Your Soso." Only
once does he sound a more somber note in a letter of March 24, 1934. "After
the death of Nadia, of course, my personal life is hard. But, never mind,
a courageous [muzhestvennyi] man should always remain courageous." Murin,
17.
92 The anthropology of naming is very large, but little of
it deals with pseudonyms. See the brief but useful summary in Cohen, Self
Consciousness, 71–79.
93 Ludwig von Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. (Oxford, 1953), paragraphs 2, 7, 27, 38. According
to Charles Peirce, "in contrast to concepts which aim to be wholly transparent,
signs require incorporation of human culture." Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The Savage Mind (New York, 1990), 20. Stalin's choice of the appropriate
"signification of his significant being" was within the context of his
multiple identities.
94 According to John Searle, "if both the speaker and the
hearer associate some identifying description with the name, then the utterance
of the name is sufficient to satisfy the principle of identification, for
both the speaker and the hearer are able to substitute an identifying description."
He then adds, "But the essential fact to keep in mind when dealing with
these problems is that we have the institution of proper names to perform
the speech act of identifying reference." Speech Acts: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, 1969), 171, 174.
95 Nicole Lapierre, Changer de nom (Paris, 1995), 243–45.
I am grateful to Victor Karady for bringing this source to my attention.
96 A list of all Stalin's pseudonyms, aliases, and cover
names can be found in Smith, Young Stalin, 453–54.
97 Stalin, Sochineniia, 1: 213, 229, 235. But the contents
of the articles—a riposte to the Menshevik position opposing the boycott
of Duma elections and the two articles on the agrarian question—taken together
with the first use of an individualized pseudonym suggest that the author
had gained sufficient self-confidence to speak out in his own voice.
98 Pierre Bourdieu, "L'illusion biographique," in Actes de
la recherche en sciences sociales 62/63 (1986): 70. For the importance
of consistency in maintaining identity, see also Glynis M. Breakwell, "Formulations
and Searches," in Breakwell, Threatened Identities, 9–18.
99 Tucker, Stalin in Power, 500.
100 Trotsky, Stalin, 16.
101 Compare Robert Himmer, "On the Origin and Significance
of the Name Stalin," Russian Review 45 (1986): 269–86, who argues that
the choice of the pseudonym Stalin was a conscious effort on Stalin's part
to distinguish himself from Lenin (rather than emulate him) and lay claim
to being a true proletarian and successor to the mantle of leadership.
102 Stalin, Sochineniia, 2: 77. Of the twenty-nine pieces
included in volumes 1 and 2, covering the period July 1906 to July 1909,
fourteen are unsigned, four of the remaining fifteen are signed "Koba,"
six "Ko...," one "Comrade K.," one "K. Ko...," and one "Koba Ivanovich."
Clearly, the letter K has become a form of narcissistic fetishism. If the
name stands for the person, then a part of the name ought to stand symbolically
for the whole name. Bernard Vernier, "Fétichisme du nom, échanges
affectifs intra-familieux et affinites électives," Actes de la recherche
en sciences sociales 78 (1989): 3–6.
103 Iremaschwili, Stalin, 30, remembers the marriage as taking
place in 1903, but his memory for dates has been shown to be unreliable,
and this date in particular conflicts with Djugashvili's arrest and exile.
Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, proposes either 1902 or 1904, and other
biographers generally accept 1904. Stalin's later reluctance to clear up
the point is one of many indications that the fate of the marriage was
extremely painful for him.
104 The only specific reference to the birth date of Iakov
Djugashvili appeared in a German source after he was captured during World
War II. On July 24, 1941, Goebbels' newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, printed
personal information obtained from the prisoner, who claimed to have been
born on March 16, 1908. Smith, Young Stalin, 392, n. 262a, was the first
to discover this reference.
105 Jozef M. Nuttin, "Affective Consequences of Mere Ownership:
The Name Letter Affect in Twelve European Languages," European Journal
of Social Psychology 17 (1987): 383. The article is dated March 2, 1908.
Stalin, Sochineniia, 2: 101. The date of birth given by Iakov to the Germans
when he was captured was March 16. The discrepancy in the two dates represents
the difference in the Julian and Gregorian calendars, which was thirteen
days in the twentieth century. According to Proletarskaia revoliutsiia,
there were two additional articles signed K. Kato published in March. McNeal,
Stalin's Works, 36. Significantly, Stalin omitted these from his Sochineniia,
leaving only the two commemorative dates.
106 Iremaschwili, Stalin, 40, gives a dramatic eyewitness
account of Koba's despair at the gravesite. But as Tucker points out, Iremaschwili
is no more reliable when referring to the date of Kato's death than of
her marriage. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 107–08. Pomper doubts the
entire account as "unconvincing" and "mystical" because Stalin did not
show any more tenderness between 1905 and 1907 [sic] than he had before
or after this time." Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, 171. For all that
Stalin was a moral monster and a mass killer, to deny him any personal
human feelings at all seems to me extreme.
107 Allilueva, Dvadtsat' pisem, 97, 150–54; Svetlana Alliluyeva,
Only One Year (New York, 1969), 370. Tucker attributes Stalin's hostility
to the fact that Iakov, who was thoroughly Georgian in manners and speech
when he arrived in Moscow, was a vivid reminder of the native roots that
Stalin was eager to forget and efface. Stalin as Revolutionary, 433. But
at the time, Stalin was still surrounded by his Georgian kinship system.
108 Stalin, Sochineniia, 2: 187. This is the only time this
pseudonym appears, but it is the beginning of a series of experiments with
the combination of letters S–in, which appears to have had some affective
significance for him. See Nuttin, "Affective Consequences," 384.
109 McNeal, Stalin's Works, 42, item 134, notes that the
first use of "Stalin" was in Pravda on December 1, 1912, but this article
was not included in the Sochineniia, suggesting that in retrospect Stalin
wished to have his last and most lasting pseudonym emblematic of a major
contribution to Marxism, rather than an occasional piece, thus endowing
it with totemic significance.
110 Vaiskopf, Pisatel' Stalin, 183–96. Soslan also bore an
eerie physical resemblance to Koba: "short in stature, dark complexioned,
with steely eyes, lame or 'splayed-toed' recalling the attached toes on
Stalin's foot." Vaiskopf, Pisatel' Stalin, 197. David Soslan, the husband
of the famous Georgian Queen Tamara, provides another heroic point of reference.
Iosif Megrelidze, Rustaveli i fol'klor (Tblisi, 1960), 21, 104, 105, 123,
270.
111 By contrast, the Bolshevik rump meeting in Prague the
same year geographically represented little beyond Russia. Robert Service,
Lenin: A Political Life (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 2: 29. Lenin's effort
to disguise the fact by constituting a Central Committee that looked all-Russian—G.
K. Ordzhonikidze, S. S. Spandarian, F. I. Goloshchekin, G. E. Zinoviev,
R. V. Malinovskii, and D. Shwartzman—was reinforced by the cooptation of
I. S. Belostotskii and Koba despite the fact that there were doubts about
the latter's full adherence to the Prague program. M. A. Moskalev, Biuro
Tsentral'nogo Komiteta RSDRP v Rossii (avgust 1903–mart 1917) (Moscow,
1964), 195, 197.
112 Iu. I. Semenov, "Iz istorii teoreticheskoi razrabotki
V. I. Leninym natsional'nogo voprosa," Narody Azii i Afriki 4 (1966): 107,
114–17. It would be more accurate to describe most of these articles as
touching on the national question, but this does not diminish Lenin's intense
interest in the matter.
113 After Stalin had written his essay, Lenin still found
it necessary to write to Stepan Shaumian: "Do not forget also to seek out
Caucasian comrades who can write articles on the national question in the
Caucasus . . . A popular brochure on the national question is very necessary."
Lenin, Sochineniia, 17: 91. (It is hard to imagine what Stalin's piece
was if not a "popular brochure.") Even more telling was the absence of
any reference to Stalin or his work in Lenin's own theoretical treatise,
"O prave natsii na samoopredeleniia," which appeared a year after Stalin
had completed writing on the national question. Lenin, Sochineniia, 17:
427–74. It is clear that what Lenin admired about Stalin's writing in general
and about the nationality question in particular was his savage attacks
on the Georgian "liquidators" and the Bund. Lenin, Sochineniia, 14: 317,
15: 317, 17: 116.
114 "There is no revolutionary movement in the West, nothing
existed only a potential," he stated. The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution:
Minutes of the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor
Party (Bolsheviks), August 1917–February 1918 (London, 1974), 177–78.
115 Stalin, Sochineniia, 4: 47. Stalin first used the formulation
of a "fatherland war" in his memo to the secretariat of the Ukrainian Soviet
Republic on February 24, 1918. Sochineniia, 4: 42–43.
116 Stalin, Sochineniia, 4: 31.
117 Stalin, Sochineniia, 4: 74–75, 236–37.
118 Dvenadtsatyi s"ezd RKP (b) 17–23 aprelia 1923 goda: Stenograficheskii
otchet (Moscow, 1963), 479, 650.
119 Stalin, Sochineniia, 4: 162, 237, 372. Stalin's concern
over intervention took a characteristically distorted form, perceived as
both a real threat and as a blunt instrument with which to beat his victims.
See, for example, his letter in 1930 to V. R. Menzhinskii, head of the
Combined State Political Directorate (OGPU) on preparations for the show
trial of the Industrial Party. "I. V. Stalin: Pis'ma," in V. S. Lel'chuk,
ed., Sovetskoe obshchestvo: Vozniknovenie, razvitie, istoricheskii final
(Moscow 1997), 1: 426–27.
120 Stalin, Sochineniia, 4: 70, 74, 226–27, 237, 356, 358.
The necessity of forming a bloc in the national republics with indigenous
"revolutionary democrats" was recognized by the other members of the Politburo.
But betraying their Western orientation, some such as Zinoviev argued that
such arrangements could only work if they were supervised by the Russian
Communist Party and the Comintern. Stalin would have nothing to do with
the Comintern interfering in this process. Tainy natsional'noi politiki
TsK RKP: "Chetvertoe soveshchanie TsK RKP s otvetsvennymi rabotnikami natsional'nykh
respublik i oblastei v g. Moskve 9–12 iiunia 1923"; Stenograficheskii otchet
(Moscow, 1992), 227–28 (Zinoviev). This was the meeting at which Stalin
was obliged to defend himself against accusations that he had originally
taken a soft line toward Muslim national communists such as Sultan Galiev
and a hard line against the Ukrainians. Tainy, 80–81 (Stalin); 268 (Frunze);
269 (Rakovskii).
121 Stalin, Sochineniia, 12: 369; Vdovin, "National'naia
politika," 22.
122 James E. Mace, Communism and the Dilemma of National
Liberation: Nationalism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.,
1983); Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 257–58; Olivier, "Korenizatsiia,"
94–95.
123 Terry Martin, "The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,"
Journal of Modern History 70 (December 1998): 813–61; as Slezkine points
out, "What did change [after 1928] was the amount of room allowed for 'national
form.' The ethnic identity of the Great Transformation was the ethnic identity
of NEP minus 'backwardness' as represented and defended by the exploiting
classes." "USSR as a Communal Apartment," 441.
124 Stalin, Sochineniia, 4: 351.
125 Stalin, Sochineniia, 4: 375–81.
126 "Federalism in Russia," he wrote in April 1918, "is destined,
as in America and Switzerland, to serve as a transition to a future, socialist,
unitary state." Sochineniia, 4: 73. Compare Robert H. McNeal, "Stalin's
Conception of Soviet Federalism (1918–1923)," Annals of the Ukrainian Academy
of Arts and Sciences in the U.S. 9, nos. 1–2 (1961): 12–25, which traces
the evolution of Stalin's thinking but concludes that his definition of
federalism was "an empty formula."
127 Lenin, Sochineniia, 25: 624. Lenin's concept of federalism
operated on two levels, one within the RSFSR between Russia and nations
such as the Bashkirs that had never enjoyed either statehood or autonomy
and between the RSFSR and all other Soviet republics including those that
had and those that had never been part of the Russian Empire.
128 "Iz istorii obrazovaniia SSSR," Izvestiia TsK KPSS 9
(1989): 198–200.
129 Stalin, Sochineniia, 11: 155–56. Lest there be any doubt
in the minds of his audience, Stalin repeated his prediction on the future
course of revolution in Poland and Romania three times in the one speech.
Stalin here revised the formula of "the democratic dictatorship of the
proletariat and peasantry," which Lenin had devised for the Russian Revolution
of 1905 and then discarded, by dropping the word democratic.
130 Milovan Djilas, Wartime (New York, 1977), 436: G. P.
Murashko, et al., Vostochnaia Evropa v dokumentakh rossiiskikh arkhivov,
1944–1953 (Moscow-Novosibirsk, 1997), 1: 457–58. To be sure, Stalin reversed
himself a few years later but only in response to his perception that external
pressure in the form of the Marshall Plan and uncertainty about the loyalty
or stability of the popular democracies confronted the Soviet Union with
the prospect of losing its western security belt.
131 "Iz istorii," 208–09. Compare Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks
and the National Question, 1917–1923 (London, 1999), who demonstrates that
the intra-party debates over the nationality question were more complex
than previously assumed. But he goes on to argue less convincingly that
the differences between Lenin and Stalin on the national question and the
constitutional debates have been exaggerated and that at certain points
such as 1920 "Lenin was the centralizer, Stalin the separatist." Smith,
179.
132 "Iz istorii," 208.
133 Cited in S. V. Kulekshov, et al., Nashe Otechestvo (Moscow,
1991), 2: 155.
134 "Iz istorii obrazovaniia SSSR," Izvestiia TsK KPSS 4
(1991): 172–73.
135 "Iz istorii," 170.
136 Compare McNeal, "Stalin's Conception," 21–22, who assumes
that the "minor nationalities" in the RSFSR would be "more tractable."
Given the history of Bashkir-Russian relations, as only one example, this
is a large assumption.
137 "Iz istorii," 173.
138 Vdovin, "National'naia politika," 26, and the literature
cited there.
139 A. I. Mikoian, Tak bylo: Razmyshleniia o minuvshem (Moscow,
1999), 559.
140 Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation, 272–78.
141 See Lewin, "Grappling with Stalinism," 308–09; and Moshe
Lewin, "The Social Background of Stalinism," in Robert C. Tucker, ed.,
Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York, 1977), 129–31,
for a similar distrust of stable bureaucratic structures.
142 For Stalin's sensitivity to accusations of national Bolshevism,
see S. V. Tsakunov, "NEP: Evoliutsiia rezhima i rozhdenie natsional-bolsheviszma,"
in Iu. N. Afanas'ev, Sovetskaia obshchestvo: Vozniknovenie, razvitie, istoricheskii
final (Moscow, 1997), 1: 100–12.
143 Stalin, Sochineniia, 7: 141–42.