Stalin

Distribution of Stalin’s writings inside the USSR reached an estimated 16.5 million copies as of early 1934.¹⁶⁹ His Questions of Leninism alone had been issued, in 17 languages, in more than 8 million copies by then. But the problem of Stalin’s biography remained acute: the only Russian-language text, written by his aide Tovstukha, dated back to the 1920s and was the length of a newspaper essay.¹⁷⁰ Although Mikhail Koltsov had written a lively Life of Stalin

for serialization in the Village Newspaper, it remained unpublished, evidently because Stalin had rejected it.¹⁷¹

Foreign publications, meanwhile, were making the leader of the world proletariat into a bandit/bank robber, and recounting his alleged betrayals of comrades as an undercover agent for the tsarist secret police.¹⁷² A psychoanalytic memoir by a Gori and Tiflis classmate (who had emigrated) alleged that Stalin’s father, Beso, had beaten him, so that, “from childhood on, the realization of his thoughts of revenge became the aim to which everything was subordinated.”¹⁷³

A Comintern official in Germany wrote alarmingly to Moscow about the sullying of Stalin’s image by enemies, singling out in particular Essad Bey.¹⁷⁴ A Baku-born Jew (1905) whose birth name was Lev Nussimbaum, Bey had gone to a Russian gymnasium in Berlin, taken classes in Turkish and Arabic at Friedrich Wilhelm University, begun wearing a turban, reinvented himself as a Muslim prince, and become a bestselling author who frequented the Café Megalomania. His colorful Stalin, published in Berlin in 1931, portrayed an outlaw in vivid orientalist strokes and embellished or invented evidence so that the dubious became possible, the possible probable, and the probable certain. “The difference between poetry and truth,” he wrote, “is not yet recognized in the mountains.”¹⁷⁵

Bey’s competition proved to be another orientalist-fabulist: Beria. No sooner had the regional party organization fallen under his control than it established a Stalin Institute to collect materials pertinent to “Stalin’s biography and his role as theoretician and organizer” of the party in the South Caucasus.¹⁷⁶

But Stalin’s aide Tovstukha, deputy director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow, started trying to transfer all original Stalin-related materials from Georgia.¹⁷⁷ Regime officials, meanwhile, had sounded out Gorky to write the biography, but he demurred.¹⁷⁸ Instead, the apparatus accepted a proposal by the French writer Henri Barbusse to write a book about Stalin, with oversight by Tovstukha (to ensure the desired depiction of the struggle against Trotsky).¹⁷⁹ Anyone taking on Stalin’s life had to confront his constant discouragement. When the latest History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)

referred to him in standard parlance as “the wise leader of all the toilers,” Stalin wrote, “An apotheosis of individuals? What happened to Marxism?”¹⁸⁰ He rejected the Society of Old Bolsheviks’ plan to mount an exhibit about his life as “strengthening a ‘cult of the personality,’ which is harmful and incompatible with the spirit of our party.”¹⁸¹

“CONGRESS OF VICTORS”

The year 1934 dawned. Soviet industry was booming. The capitalist world remained mired in the Great Depression. The United States had recognized the Soviet Union. The famine was mostly over. It was time to gloat. In “The Architect of Socialist Society” (Pravda, January 1, 1934), sycophant supreme Karl Radek depicted a future historian giving lectures in the revolution’s fiftieth year at the School of Interplanetary Communications. The lecturer, looking back from 1967, would emphasize the surprise among the world bourgeoisie that a new leader had succeeded Lenin and built socialism, at a necessarily furious pace, against the fierce resistance of capitalist elements and their facilitators. Stalin was called “the great pupil of great teachers who himself had now become the teacher, . . . the exemplar of the Leninist Party, bone of its bone, blood of its blood.” His success was attributed to his “creative Marxism,” his proximity to cadres, his resolve, and his fealty to Lenin. “He knew that he had fulfilled the oath taken ten years earlier over Lenin’s casket,” the essay observed. “And all the working people of the world and the world revolutionary proletariat knew it, too.”¹⁸²