Not a single member of Stalin’s politburo, going back to 1930, had completed university, the despot included, but he adhered ferociously to the transformative power of education, and for him Russian history was among the greatest pedagogical instruments. But his commission to produce a new history textbook for elementary schools had yielded only vague instructions, finalized and signed by him, Zhdanov, and Kirov at his Sochi dacha back in summer 1934; they were published only after significant delay in Pravda (January 27, 1936), which was followed by an open competition. On August 22, 1937, a second-place winner was announced (there was no first-place winner). It was a humble collective at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, led by Andrei Shestakov.181 Shestakov (b. 1877) had grown up one of nine children, the son of a peasant and a fisherman on the White Sea littoral, and finished only the local five-year school before being hired on at the woodcutting factory, but he studied at night.182 He had relocated to Moscow in 1921, by then a skilled mechanic, and took up the study of agrarian history, at age forty-four, at the Institute of Red Professors. By the 1930s, he had become deputy director and then director of the Museum of the Revolution.183 His team worked on their manuscript, A Short Course on the History of the USSR: A Textbook for the Third and Fourth Grades, from March 1936 through July 1937, and, after political vetting, had it published in September 1937 for the start of the new school year and the run-up to the twentieth anniversary of the revolution.
While maintaining the Marxist core of class struggle, the book offered a nationalist narrative of Russia’s “gathering of the lands”—from Kievan Rus, in the tenth century, through the Stalin Constitution of 1936—in the spirit of nineteenth-century historiography. “We love our country and we must know its wonderful history,” the book noted. “Those who know history understand present-day life better, are better able to fight the enemies of our country, and make Socialism stronger.”184 In the last quarter of 1937, 6.5 million Russian-language copies were printed; it was simultaneously translated into the languages of the Soviet peoples.185 Still, parents struggled to obtain copies.186 The USSR counted some 30 million schoolchildren, and the Shestakov text was recommended beyond schools.187 “Not only millions of children and young people will learn according to it,” enthused the party journal Bolshevik, “but so will millions of workers and peasants and hundreds of thousands of party activists, propagandists, and agitators.”188 There were critics. “It has not turned out to be a history of the USSR at all,” Volodymyr Zatonsky, Ukraine’s commissar of enlightenment, wrote of the draft manuscript. “Basically, it is a history of the Russian state.”189 In celebrating a great power, not its nationalities, the text gave a prominent place to personalities, a rebuke to abstract schema such as “feudal epoch.”190 Shestakov portrayed Peter the Great not as an oppressor who built a baroque capital on the bones of the lower orders, but as a dynamic leader who had transformed Russia almost single-handedly by advancing technical training and military skills.191
Stalin had edited Shestakov’s text closely, inserting in the section on ancient Rus that “Christianity in its time was a step forward in the development of Russia in comparison to paganism.” Leafing through the page proofs of the manuscript, Stalin had struck out a reproduction of Ilya Repin’s painting Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son and inserted a laudatory passage on the dreaded oprichnina for strengthening “the autocratic power in the Russian state by destroying the privileges of the boyars.” This marked the Soviet despot’s rethinking of how to fit Ivan, too, into the grand statist narrative.192 Stalin deemed the centralizing Russian state as having been progressive in its time, allowing the Russian people to push forward on the road of capitalist development, while introducing enlightenment to backward regions, but the Soviets had rightly altered the state’s class basis, enabling Soviet propaganda to glorify both the imperial Russian state and the revolutionary movement against it.
