Stalin Versus Marx

The Stalinist Historical Doctrine

Klaus Mehnert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138719446
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351764001
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1952, this book examines the change from revolutionism to nationalism which took place in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. It describes the course of this change, as shown by Stalin's decrees and writings, and discusses the Stalinist conception of Russian and world history, and its bearing on world revolution.

III
The New Doctrine

We know, then, the reason for the revision of the picture of Russian history. Our next question is, In what does the Stalinist picture of that history essentially consist?

At this point let us return for a moment to the outset of this essay, to the fact that a “History of the U.S.S.R.” begins with the Chaldeans and Assyrians. How can that be possible? The answer is quite simple. For the present-day Soviet historian everything that ever happened within the present-day boundaries of the U.S.S.R. is a part of Soviet history. This very simple contention discards the whole of the past treatment of history—not only of the Soviet Union but of Russia—and opens up to the Soviet historian a wide field of opportunity and one, as will be shown, of importance to international politics.

It results to begin with in an immense extension of “Soviet history”, an extension both in time and in space. In a recent work of Soviet historiography Professor Pankratova, author of the History of the U.S.S.R. already referred to, writes: “Stalin extended the limits of the period of Soviet history by 1500 to 2000 years.” This is not a joke but an entirely serious statement. The view adopted, whether by Stalin himself or with his consent, that Soviet history is to be regarded as equivalent to the history of the present territory of the Soviet Union, makes the archaeological discoveries in Transcaucasia and central Asia, regions very close to the cradle of the history of mankind, elements of Soviet history. Thus regarded, Soviet history begins in the third millennium “before our era”, with the discovery of the oldest copper articles in the mountains of the Caucasus.

The new definition of “Soviet History” enormously extends not only its limits in time but its geographical limits, for it automatically brings into Soviet history not only everything that has ever been brought to light at any time in the regions of the present U.S.S.R., but also the interconnexion of these events with other parts of the world. We have seen this already in the case of the Assyrians. Very useful in this connexion are the Scythians, to whom further reference will be made, and the Caucasian peoples. Professors S. V. Kisselyov, V. I. Avdiev, and M. A. Korostovtsev have discovered that in early times the Caucasian races had close relations with all the ancient cultures of the Middle East, even with that of Egypt. The relations of the races of central Asia belonging today to the Soviet Union, some of which were subjugated by the Tsarist legions no more than a few centuries ago, opened the doors for the Soviets to the whole history of Asia. Professor A. Okladnikov offers evidence of close relations between the Yakuts of north-east Siberia with China actually in the bronze age, and through Alaska, which belonged for some decades to Russia, run threads to the history of America, while Russian voyages of discovery connect Soviet history with the South Pole.

The first essential trait of the new Soviet historical doctrine was thus a matter of form, namely the extension in time and space of what is to be understood as Soviet history. The second and yet more important trait is to be seen in its content. It has reference to the new attitude of Bolshevism to the nation. For the Russian people the great importance of the nation is no new idea; it has led the popular prophets to preach again and again in the past the special mission of the Russians. This messianic conception of the nation is new, however, in the realm of Marxism. To Marx, and also to Pokrovsky, nations were not intrinsically of importance, and when the Bolsheviks—including Stalin in his earlier writings—paid some attention to the characteristics of peoples it was only in order the more quickly to give the influence of Bolshevism access to them through concessions to the formal elements of their national culture—language, popular music, and so on. The present conception of the nation, or, at all events, of the Soviet nation, is distinguished fundamentally, as we shall see, from that of Marx and Pokrovsky and their contemporaries of like mind. From this proceeds a whole chain of consequences, which we will pursue throughout its twelve links.

To avoid misunderstanding, it should be mentioned that the twelve stages through which we shall trace the development of the Soviet historiographical conception are links in thought and not in time. The series 1–12 is a logical series, independent of the time when each link in the chain of thought became visible to the public. Thus, the transformation in the field of philology, here logically given fourth place, would belong in time to the last place. The intrinsic interconnexion of this whole train of thought has never been discovered by the Soviets. They will also emphatically reject the contention in this essay that such an intrinsic interconnexion exists.

1 THE PEOPLES ARE VARIOUS AND ETERNAL

It has become clear again and again from Stalin’s statements and actions that he regards the peoples as differing from one another—not only in their stage of development but also in their nature. He gave the clearest expression to this idea in a speech on April 7th, 1948, during a banquet in honour of a Finnish delegation:

“Many people do not believe that it is possible for the relations between greater and lesser peoples to be on a basis of equality of rights. But we of the Soviet are of the opinion that every people, whether great or small, has its qualitative characteristics, its individuality, which is its own possession and is not to be found in other peoples. These characteristics are the contribution (vklad) which each people brings to the general treasury of world civilisation, filling it and enriching it. In this sense all peoples, small and great alike, are in the same situation.”

Nine months earlier, in an address delivered by Professor V. V. Mavrodin in Leningrad, he used, at the very outset, a phrase that revealed, with the utmost clarity and brevity, the completely altered intellectual outlook: “The people is eternal” (Narod vechen). The fact that the Society for the Propagation of Political and Scientific Knowledge, a propaganda institution formed a little earlier for the ideological influencing of the population, published this particular address as one of its first mass-produced pamphlets, and gave it the title The Forming of the Russian Nation, is proof enough that Mavrodin’s phrase was not merely the chance utterance of an individual professor.

It was a truly sensational phrase in a “Marxist” country. What Mavrodin meant by it is shown by his next sentence, which gave the cue to his whole lecture: “Every people, whose name, language, culture, customs, and physical characteristics disappear in the course of time, lives on in the shape of its remote descendants. The primeval races and peoples are the creative force in the formation of later populations and nations.”¹

This doctrine of the variety and eternity of peoples is the basis of the idea of the special position of the Soviet people, and, within the Soviet people, the Russian people.

2 SPECIAL POSITION OF THE SOVIET AND THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE

On May 24th, 1945, there took place in St. George’s Hall in the Kremlin, a celebration of victory, at which hundreds of marshals, generals, officers, scientists, engineers, writers, and Stakhanovist workers, were present. As the evening approached its climax, Stalin appeared and proposed the following toast:

“Comrades, permit me to propose one more toast, the last one. I drink to the health of our Soviet people, and quite specially the Russian people. I drink quite specially to the health of the Russian people because it is the most eminent of all the nations belonging to the federation of the Soviet Union. I drink to the health of the Russian people, because in this war it has earned general recognition as, of all the peoples of our country, the leading element in the Soviet Union. I drink to the health of the Russian people not only because it is a leading people, but also because it has a clear intelligence, a firm character, and endurance. The Russian people has placed faith in the rightness of the policy of its Government, and has made sacrifice to bring about the smashing of Germany. This faith of the Russian people in the Soviet Government has proved to be the decisive force that brought about the victory over the historic enemy of mankind, over Fascism. Thanks be to it, to the Russian people, for that faith! To the health of the Russian people!”

This toast of Stalin’s has since become one of the guiding elements of Soviet publicity. On its fifth anniversary the following was to be found in the central organ of the party, the Moscow Pravda:

“The Russian people has created the most abundant culture: it has given the world a whole constellation of great scholars, writers, composers, artists, thinkers, and inventors. Russia became the home of Leninism, that peak of the world’s science and civilisation. The Russian people gave mankind that thinker of the highest genius, Lenin. . . . The Russian working class has played an eminent rôle in the history of all mankind. It was the first in the world to carry through a soviet revolution, and thereby to institute a new era. . . . The great Soviet Union is today on the march as the advance guard of the whole of progressive humanity.” (May 24th, 1950.)

It was insisted again and again that the history of the Soviet people is something special, something independent of the general current of history. Professor Rubinstein received a severe reprimand for his work Russian Historiography because he wrote it from the point of view of the “cosmopolitan” (which in current usage is equivalent to “traitorous”), “conception of a single common current of development in the historical science of the world, with the result that Russian historiography is represented as merely a repetition and a species of all the historical schools and tendencies that arose in the West and were taken over later by Russia”. Through these views, it was declared, Rubinstein had brought confusion among the Soviet historians.¹

This special position, this leading position of the Russian people, or the Soviet people and all the peoples regarded as part of Soviet history, has become a basic claim of the Soviet historical doctrine. In dealing with every new publication, therefore, the attention of critics is directed at once to the question whether account is duly taken of that claim. Every limitation, however cautious, however guarded or qualified, every “belittling” of the Russian people is at once severely castigated. Here are a few examples:

Against the ‘belittlers’

In the historical works of a handful of cosmopolitans without a homeland, severed from the people and its aspirations, free play is being given to a bourgeois cosmopolitanism. The contemporary countryless cosmopolitans are distorting the heroic struggle of the Russian people against its oppressors and the foreign robbers, belittling the leading part played by the Russian proletariat in the history of the revolutionary struggle which it has been carrying on for Russia herself and also for the whole world. They are trying to obliterate the Socialist character and the international significance of the Great Socialist October Revolution; they are falsifying and distorting the world-historic part played by the Russian people in the creation of the Socialist society. . . . In his History of the Soviet Union, 1917 to 1925, which has already been subjected to severe criticism in the periodical Kultura i Zhizn, the Academician Mints belittles the leading part played by the Russian people and the working class in the struggle for the setting up of Socialist rule. . . . In just the same way Academician Mints, Professor Razgon gives only a one-sided and superficial consideration of history in reducing to very little the leading part played by the Russian people and the Russian working class in the victory of the Great Socialist October Revolution”.¹

For all future historical works the guiding line is: “The task of future research includes the description of the eminent international position and importance of Russia in the system of States.”²

This amounts to saying that the Soviet historian may only speak of the Russian people in terms of praise. B. Stein, for instance, in his “Sketches of the development of Russian social and economic ideas in the 19th and 20th centuries”, published in 1948 in Leningrad described Russian economists as “talentless and unfitted for independent creative work”;¹ for this he was at once castigated.

The most cautious wording does not save an author from attack. Thus, in the official historical journal, F. A. Garin’s book, The Rout of Napoleon (Moscow 1948), is rejected as unpatriotic. As reason for this the journal reproduces a paragraph from the book. In this Garin quotes a few sentences from the Memoirs of the Comte de Ségur on his impressions of the burning of Moscow. The quotation runs: “Everyone noticed men with repulsive faces, dressed in rags, and furious women, who went past the burning houses and completed the horrible picture of an inferno. These worthless people [Note by Garin: ‘In such wild terms did the Napoleonic General Ségur express himself about the patriots of Moscow’], drunk with vodka and with the success of their crimes, did not even conceal themselves.” “This wild characterisation of Ségur’s”, comments Garin, “shows better than anything else the profound hatred felt even by the enlightened among the foreign robbers for the Russian people.” In spite of his dissenting comments, the author is set down as anti-patriotic for even quoting such a statement about Russian patriots, although it is clear that he is only doing his duty as a chronicler and does not for a moment identify himself with the Count’s views.

3 ETHNOGENESIS—AUTOCHTHONISM—BORROWING

From this attitude of morbidly jealous watching over the special position of the Russian and Soviet people, it becomes clear why three conceptions—ethnogenesis, autochthonism, and borrowing, play an extraordinary part in the vocabulary of the Soviet historians. Whereas earlier Russian historians saw no objection to beginning Russian history no earlier than the time of the foundation of the first State of Kiev in the eighth century, without making it a point of honour to consider what might have happened earlier, the Soviet historians are anxiously concerned to demonstrate, first, that Soviet history began long earlier; second, that it is autochthonous; and third, that the Soviet people has created everything by itself, without borrowing anything from without.

Unlike current practice in Western historical research, the Soviets try to prove that the Eastern Slavs did not come into the light of history relatively late, as historical newcomers, but are as old a civilised people as any other. Accordingly, Professor A. Udaltsov lays down that the predecessors of the Slavs may be traced back to the third millennium B.C., and that they owe their origin and the modifications to be found in their history not, as had been assumed, to migrations of particular races, but to their own inner development. (Vopr. 1st., 1949, no. 2, pp. 14 sqq., “The problem of the origin of the Slavs in the light of contemporary archaeology”.)

The Scythians

Such is the explanation also of the special interest in the Scythians and Antes as the possible ancestors of the Slavs. The incorporation of the Scythians, who lived 2500 years ago in the steppes by the Black Sea, in the Soviet Union has four important advantages.

To begin with, it contributes to carrying Soviet history farther into antiquity. Secondly, it becomes possible with the help of the Scythians, thanks to their close association with the centres of ancient history to their west, to make both Persian and Greek history into a marginal contribution to Soviet history. This leads to the most extraordinary conclusions: according to Scythian legends the Scythians were descended from Heracles, who had himself sprung from the loins of Zeus. Thus the bow is stretched actually from Stalin’s Kremlin to Zeus’ Olympus. The third advantage was temporary, but played a part during the Second World War that should not be underestimated. Various characteristics of the Scythian strategy against Darius, the king of the Persians, were held up before the Russian army and people in 1941 and 1942, in the days of their defeats, as models to emulate. It was said (for instance, in an article by Professor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• I POKROVSKY DIED TWICE
• II TWO WORDS VINDICATED
• III THE NEW DOCTRINE
• IV WHAT IT ALL MEANS