Stalin полностью

258. This was not his first photograph with children, a shift first visible in schoolbooks for children, which had rendered Stalin overtly fatherly. Rasskazy o Staline. Unlike the fatherly tsars, Stalin was called otets, not batushka.

259. Pravda, Aug. 3, 1935 (credited to Vlasik). Stalin visited a children’s home in Moscow as well. Heizer, “Cult of Stalin,” 169; Plamper, Stalin Cult, 44; Plamper, “Georgian Koba or Soviet ‘Father of Peoples,’” 131. Maria Osten wrote to Stalin requesting permission to republish the photograph in her book Hubert in Wonderland, about adopting a son in the Saarland under the Nazis and bringing him to the USSR. “This would be such a pleasure for all little grown-up readers of my book in the USSR and the entire world!” she wrote. Stalin acceded (“I agree”). RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 781, l. 126.

260. Kun, Stalin, 316.

261. During the first Five-Year Plan images of modernity in the borderlands—railroads, factories, workers—had predominated, but in the 1920s, even the most modern architects, who generally eschewed any hint of ornamentation, when outside Russia proper had chosen to incorporate folkloric “national” flourishes in public buildings, such as Moisei Ginzburg’s administrative center in Alma-Ata or others in Baku. Bliznakov, “International Modernism,” 112–30. Ginzburg had lived in Crimea and studied Tatar art there. On females and backwardness, as well as nurturing, see Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 83–4; and Iğmen, Speaking Soviet, 66.

262. The RSFSR was the only union republic without its own Communist party, and although it had state institutions, they often overlapped with those of the USSR (Kalinin was the head of both the RSFSR and the USSR central executive committees of the Soviet). Although there had been some institutions for ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Belorussians in the RSFSR, these were abolished or allowed to lapse, which seems to have further spurred some ethnic Ukrainians and Belorussians in the RSFSR to identify as ethnic Russians. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 403–6.

263. Back on Dec. 15, 1925, at a central Committee plenum, Stalin had lauded the Russians as “the most industrial, the most active, and the most Soviet of all nations in our country,” a statement partly in response to unexpected resistance to the alteration of the party’s name from all-Russian to all-Union, but also reflecting deep conviction. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 205, l. 5. In his furious letter (Dec. 12, 1930) to Bedny over the latter’s mocking Russians warming themselves on stoves, Stalin had called the Russian working class “the advanced guard of Soviet workers, its acknowledged leaders, having conducted a more revolutionary policy and activist politics than any other proletariat of the world could dream of.” On July 6, 1933, at one of his Moscow dachas, in the presence of the portraitists Yevgeny Katsman and Isaak Brodsky, Stalin had toasted Russians as “the boldest Soviet nation, which achieved the socialist revolution before others.” Nevezhin, Zastol’nye, 42 (RGALI, f. 2368, op. 2, d. 36, l. 16). For the impressions of one of the artists (“What a colossal man! To me he seems as immense and beautiful as nature”), see Plamper, Stalin Cult, 92 (RGASPI, f. 74, op. 1, d. 292, l. 92–92ob.: July 15, 1933).

264. Ryutin had derided Stalin’s regime as “national Bolshevism,” a designation originated in a positive sense by the anti-Marxist nationalist émigré Nikolai Ustryalov (b. 1890). “Platforma ‘Soiuza marksistov-lenintsev’ (‘Gruppa Riutina’),” (1990, no. 9), 76.