Generation Stalin

French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality

Andrew Sobanet

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253038234
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

A look at how four French writers of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s contributed to the rise of Stalin in their country and abroad. Generation Stalin traces Joseph Stalin's rise as a dominant figure in French political culture from the 1930s through the 1950s. Andrew Sobanet brings to light the crucial role French writers played in building Stalin's cult of personality and in disseminating Stalinist propaganda in the international Communist sphere, including within the USSR. Based on a wide array of sources—literary, cinematic, historical, and archival— Generation Stalin situates in a broad cultural context the work of the most prominent intellectuals affiliated with the French Communist Party, including Goncourt winner Henri Barbusse, Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, renowned poet Paul Eluard, and canonical literary figure Louis Aragon. Generation Stalin arrives at a pivotal moment, with the Stalin cult and elements of Stalinist ideology resurgent in twenty-first-century Russia and authoritarianism on the rise around the world. "This is an outstanding work of intellectual history.... Highly recommended." — Choice "A landmark study, brilliantly written, containing exemplary scholarship. Sobanet establishes himself with this volume as one of the foremost interpreters of French intellectual life. He brings to his study a cornucopia of historical knowledge and the finesse of a first-class literary critic." —Lawrence D. Kritzman, editor of The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought "This is an ambitious project that is well executed, with a readership that is potentially far reaching—with implications for Russian/Stalin studies, French studies, including politics and society, as well as propaganda writing and the role of the media more generally.... Generation Stalin is a very timely book." —Denis M. Provencher, author of Queer French: Globalization, Language, and Sexual Citizenship in France "Sobanet's study of "Generation Stalin" and the four writers he associates with the group, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Paul Eluard, and Louis Aragon, is, quite simply, magisterial. Written in lucid prose informed by meticulous and wide-ranging scholarship including archival material, books, essays, press items, and other relevant documents, the book provides an in-depth study of the rise of the Stalin cult in France." —Carol J. Murphy, author of The Allegorical Impulse in the Works of Julien Gracq: History as Rhetorical Enactment in "Le Rivage des Syrtes" and "Un Balcon en forêt"

ONE

HENRI BARBUSSE AND STALIN’S OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY

ON NOVEMBER 7, 1934, THE French novelist and World War I veteran Henri Barbusse witnessed a spectacle that he described as unprecedented in its magnitude.¹ From a platform atop Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square, standing alongside Stalin and key members of his inner circle, Barbusse saw massive infantry regiments, tanks, planes, and a reported 1.75 million Soviet citizens take part in a six-hour military parade marking the seventeenth anniversary of the October Revolution. It was the sort of spectacle—marked by colorful banners, flags, and large-scale portraits of leaders—that would become routine viewing in Communist countries in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But in 1934, the scope and tenor of the parade made a deep impact on Barbusse, who described it as more perfect, more complete, and more exuberant than previous celebrations of its kind. And the parade’s politico-military function did not escape the former infantryman. In his account of the event, which was published on the front page of L’Humanité, Barbusse remarked, “One could see today—through a few glimpses—on what foundation the Soviet Union’s drive for peace is based.” Furthermore, the French writer made a point of underscoring an element he deemed central to the commemoration. He wrote, “There would be something missing in even a hasty exposé . . . if one did not note the all-powerful love, based on gratitude and trust, that this unlimited mass of people has for Comrade Stalin.”²

Several months later, Barbusse would publish the first official biography of the Soviet leader, Staline: Un monde nouveau vu à travers un homme (1935). The book’s opening pages depict a military parade similar to the one he had recently witnessed, complete with vivid displays of adulation for the general secretary. The text’s overture is typical of the tenor of the biography, and the overall narrative appears to have pleased Aleksei Stetskii, the head of the culture and propaganda department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the foreword to the Russian translation of the biography, Stetskii states, “The book has been written with a tremendous amount of love for the Soviet land, its peoples and its leader.”³ And indeed, Barbusse’s Staline is a monument to the general secretary’s rule and a foundational text for his personality cult. For Barbusse, the biography represented the culmination of more than fifteen years of writing, editorial work, and engagement as a public intellectual in promotion of revolutionary violence, the Soviet Union, and its leadership caste.

Staline is the last book Barbusse published in his lifetime.⁴ Given its place as a capstone to many years of deep involvement in the Communist orbit, it should be considered alongside his Goncourt-winning novel Le Feu (1916) as a career-defining work. To be sure, Le Feu is central to Barbusse’s legacy, as it announced many of the themes that would be central to his writing through the end of his life. It, moreover, led to Barbusse’s lasting reputation as the antiwar “Zola of the trenches” and as one of the “founding fathers of engagement.”⁵ However, contrary to conventional wisdom, Staline is a text more representative of his overall corpus and his work as a public intellectual. That fact is significant not just for Barbusse. For as we will see over the course of this book, Barbusse’s political engagement served as a blueprint for Communist-aligned intellectual activity in France for a generation.

This analysis of Staline will shed light on the ways in which the cult of personality and Soviet policy were promoted in France from the 1920s through the 1950s. I will argue that in addition to serving as a touchstone text for the PCF, Barbusse’s biography of Stalin should be read as a prototype of future official biographies of the general secretary. Furthermore, as I contend, Barbusse’s Staline serves as a case study in the evolution of discourse around French revolutionary traditions, nationalism, and internationalism in Communist circles in the 1920s and early-to-mid-1930s. Throughout the Stalinist era, French political and intellectual history played a role in the ways in which the party’s leadership caste and policies were promoted in philo-Soviet texts. This chapter shows that Staline is an artifact from the moment in France when the Front Populaire movement was taking shape. Crucially, at that time, in accordance with new Comintern tactics and policies, the PCF began to promote a patriotic line, one that involved an embrace of national defense and the promotion of French republican symbols and values. That new orientation, I argue, clashed with Barbusse’s deep-seated antinationalism, and those tensions are reflected in Staline and its reception in party circles.

Despite the importance of Staline to Barbusse’s overall career and to the French Communist Party, the text has received scant scholarly attention.⁶ In order to grasp the importance of the biography to Barbusse and to the party as a whole, it is necessary to place the text in the discursive and cultural context in which it was produced and received. To that end, I will analyze Barbusse’s Staline in light of his other writing on the Soviet Union, his activity as a public intellectual during and after World War I, the history of the PCF, French and Russian archival documents, and other noteworthy biographies of Stalin (those contemporary to Barbusse’s as well as those published very recently). I conclude this chapter with an exploration of the complex legacy of Barbusse’s text itself in the Soviet Union. For while Staline was lauded for nearly two decades within the PCF and should be read as a prototype of future official biographies, the book itself had a limited legacy in the USSR, due to Barbusse’s praise for a number of Soviet figures who would be executed as enemies of the people in the years following its publication.

FROM WAR TO REVOLUTION

In an August 1914 letter to the then-socialist newspaper L’Humanité, a forty-one-year-old Henri Barbusse wrote of his decision to enlist in the infantry despite an official exemption from service on the front lines.⁷ Although not himself a member of the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (the French socialist party, or SFIO), he described his motivations as based in socialist ideals “against our infamous old enemies: militarism, imperialism, the Sword, the Boot, and I will add, the Crown.”⁸ The conflict would be a “social war” that would serve what he called the socialist antimilitarist cause.⁹ The coming war would, in his view, be a violent means of liberating humanity from oppression. A nationalist war effort would therefore serve as a means of achieving socialist internationalist ideals. Significantly, Barbusse wrote, “If I sacrifice my life and if I go to war with joy, it is not only as a Frenchman, but it is above all as a man.”¹⁰

As little as two years later, as Le Feu and subsequent nonfiction writing indicate, although Barbusse’s antimilitarist and antiimperialist views survived his tour of duty, he had abandoned the notion that war itself could purge humanity of oligarchy. Indeed, in Le Feu, the Great War is depicted as a criminal and futile endeavor: “Two armies fighting each other—that’s like one great army committing suicide.”¹¹ Infantrymen struggle to survive horrific conditions on the front, but the reader is never given a clear sense of why the brutal battles are fought. War, moreover, is not a heroic endeavor: one soldier declares that he and his comrades-in-arms are nothing but “murderers.”¹² To make matters worse, noncombatants are depicted as ignorant of the soldiers’ sacrifices and eager to exploit economic opportunities created by the conflict. Wartime society, says the anonymous first-person narrator, is sharply divided into “those who gain and those who grieve.”¹³

Barbusse’s August 1914 declaration that he would go to war “with joy” as both Frenchman and human being quickly became obsolete. From the very first chapter of Le Feu—composed not even two years later, in part while convalescing from his tour of duty on the front lines—Barbusse upends not just the notion of the war as a humanistic social cause, but also the legitimacy of nationalist motivations to go to war.¹⁴ In the novel’s telling opening scene, which takes place in an alpine sanatorium at a significant distance from society and its conflicts, men of various nationalities contemplate the news of the declaration of war. Many take positions against their own countries: a German patient says, for instance, “I hope Germany will be beaten.”¹⁵ In harmony with that opening sequence, a central message of Le Feu is that nationalism is an illusion created by arbitrary frontiers and used by those in power for profit and personal gain. Nationalists and traditionalists distort moral principles, and their abuse of patriotic ideals leads to war.¹⁶ As one soldier asserts, “The Jingoes—they’re vermin.”¹⁷ The novel aims furthermore to show that the workin...