348. Wells was under the spell of Roosevelt’s New Deal and now envisioned a collectivist world-state, with the United States and the USSR converging—if only Stalin would give up Marx. Stalin dismissed Wells’s technocratic enthusiasms, insisting that only classes could make history and that the technical intelligentsia was a mere stratum. For Stalin, any New Deal–Five-Year Plan convergence was a non-starter, and so was the concept of general humanity (“I do not believe in the goodness of the bourgeoisie”). But Stalin also denied capitalism was in its death throes. “It seems to me that I am more to the Left than you, Mr. Stalin,” Wells, twelve years Stalin’s senior, interjected. New Statesman and Nation, Oct. 27, 1934. Wells received a copy of the transcript Stalin had already edited. Wells, as president of the PEN club, added a delicate reference as to whether freedom of thought was possible in the USSR, to which Stalin replied it already existed: Bolshevik “self-criticism.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 3151, l. 1–23; Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 495 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 742, l. 99–104 Sept. 24, 1934), 496n5 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 3151, l. 2–3). Stalin had the edited interview published in the party journal, but not in a mass circulation newspaper. Bol’shevik, 1934, no. 17: 8–18. In the United Kingdom, two prominent public figures jumped on Wells for the interview, George Bernard Shaw (not enough praise of Stalin) and John Maynard Keynes (too much praise of a demagogue): Stalin-Wells Talk: Verbatim Record and Discussion (London: The New Statesman and Nation, 1934). See also Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, 683–702; Cowley, “Interview with Stalin”; Taunton, “Russia and the British Intellectuals,” 209–24; and Lel’chuk, “Beseda I. V. Stalina s angliiskim pisatelem G. Uellsom,” 326–52. Wells correctly recalled his interpreter as Konstantin Umansky; Stalin’s logbook has N. M. Goloded (a government official in Soviet Belorussia). Na prieme, 138.
349. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 792, l. 121–46 (at 121: Nov. 9, 1934).
350. “I accompanied Stalin on his trips to the south, I spent a lot of time with him, we always ate meals together, and practically all his free time he spent with us,” Vlasik would recall. “I mean myself and his secretary Poskryobyshev. In Moscow I saw him far less. I accompanied him on his trips around the city, to the theater, the cinema.” Loginov, Teni Stalina, 106.
351. “O nekotorych voprosakh istorii bol’shevizma,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 1931, no. 6: 3–21 (Oct. 26, 1931); Pikhoia, I. V. Stalin, 128–37 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 2983, l. 1–15). Sochineniia, XII: 84–102. See also Slutskii, “Bol’sheviki o germanskoi sotsial-demokratii”; Dunaevskii, “Bol’sheviki i germanskie levye na mezhdunarodnoi arene,” 504–6 (citing a letter from Slutsky, June 9, 1964); Barber, “Stalin’s Letter to the Editors of Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya,” 39–41; and Tucker, “The Rise of Stalin’s Personality Cult,” 355–8.
352. Enteen, “Marxist Historians During the Cultural Revolution”; Kvashonkin, Sovetskoe rukovodstvo, 189–91 (RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 255, l. 179–82). Popov, Ocherk istorii.
353. “History at long last has been restored” to schools, Andrei Bubnov, the enlightenment commissar, had remarked at the Communist Academy (March 13, 1934). “Peter was Peter, Catherine was Catherine . . . We must give an impression of the epoch, about the events that took place at that time, who ruled, what sort of government there was, what sort of policies were carried out, and how events transpired.” Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, “‘The People Need a Tsar,’” 874 (citing Arkhiv RAN, f. 350, op. 1, d. 905, l. 1–3ob.); Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 32–3. See also Pikhoia, I. V. Stalin, 186 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 1013, l. 4: March 3, 1934). History education was reintroduced as a separate subject in schools, and meant to displace the study of Engels’s Anti-Dühring or Dialectics of Nature. Scott, Behind the Urals, 45.
354. The meeting took place March 20, 1934. Litvin, Bez pravo na mysl’, 55–7 (quoting the unpublished diary of Sergei A. Piontkovsky). D. Osipov in Pravda (April 5, 1934), lambasted schemata without facts as “skeletons in the schools.” See also Pravda and Izvestiya, May 16, 1934: 1; Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika, IX: 137; Suny, Structure of Soviet History, 229.
355. For example: Banac, Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 12–5 (April 7, 1934).
356. Farnsworth, “Conversing with Stalin,” 961 (Kollontai diary, summer 1934: RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 749, l. 105).
