Stalin полностью

175. Without CC approval young specialists were forbidden from beginning work. Khlevniuk, “Economic Officials in the Great Terror,” 60 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 992, l. 97). In 1938, after the name of Arseny Zverev (b. 1900) was presented on a list of party members who had completed the Moscow Institute of Finance and Economics, he was named finance commissar. Chuev, Sto sorok, 291.

176. “Machiavellian duplicity” is the interpretation offered by Robert Tucker, Stalin in Power, 320. Cf. Fitzpatrick, “Making of a New Elite.”

177. Pravda, Oct. 31, 1937; Nevezhin, Zastol’nye, 117–33; RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 96, l. 148; Bardin, “Ispolin-mudrets,” 54–5. See also Khlevniuk, 1937–i, 104–5.

178. Svetlana Alliluyeva, quoted in Richardson, Long Shadow, 211.

179. Farcically, Getty and Naumov have asserted that “it is not an exaggeration to say that the Riutin Platform began the process that would lead to terror, precisely by terrifying the ruling nomenklatura.” Getty and Naumov, Road to Terror, 54.

180. Stalin might have wanted to clear a path for the rising new generation, but what kind of path? Confessions to crimes people did not commit and mass executions? Khlevniuk, “The Stalinist ‘Party Generals,’” esp. 59–60. See also Rees, “The Great Purges and the XVIII Party Congress of 1939,” 191–211.

181. Artizov, “V ugodu vzgliadam vozhdia,” (on the 1936 competition); Dubrovskii, “A. A. Zhdanov v rabote nad shkol’nym uchebnikom istorii,” 128–43. Mikhail Pokrovsky, before his death in 1932, had entrenched a Marxist orthodoxy based upon Engels deeming tsarist Russia the most reactionary power, the “gendarme of Europe.” Stalin countered that in the nineteenth century all the great powers were gendarmes. Even though almost all members of Pokrovsky’s School would be physically annihilated, the summons to incorporate imperial Russian legacies in a patriotic history of the Soviet Union proved no easy task. The Pokrovsky School had destroyed the careers of most other historians, leaving a wasteland. Shestakov was one of the few Pokrovsky students to endure.

182. Dubrovskii, Istorik i vlast’, 274–5.

183. Kutskii, “A. V. Shestakov.” Shestakov would be elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in 1939. For commentary on Shestakov as of 1929, see Iurganov, Russkoe natsional’noe gosudarstvo, 26n3.

184. Shestakov, Kratkii kurs istorii SSSR; Shestakov, Short History of the USSR, 8.

185. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 260. Another 5.7 million copies would be printed in 1938 and 3 million in 1939.

186. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 67 (citing GARF, f. 2306, op. 69, d. 2640, l. 1).

187. The book mentioned Stanisław Kosior and others who were soon arrested as enemies, but rather than recall and pulp the long-awaited, highly sought textbook, the censors dispatched directives to paste over the offending names and illustrations. Mekhlis would cross out a photograph of Marshal Blyukher in his own copy: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 373, l. 99–99ob., 103ob., 108.

188. A. K., “Kratkii kurs istorii SSSR,” 85–6. The journal of the historical profession called the book “a great victory on the historical front.” “Bol’shaia pobeda na istoricheskom fronte,” Istoricheskii zhurnal, 1937, no. 8: 6. “He who understands history,” a Communist Youth League mass pamphlet of fall 1938 written by Shestakov would advise, “will better understand contemporary life and struggle more effectively with the enemies of our country and strengthen socialism.” Shestakov, “Ob izuchenii istorii SSSR,” 39 (quoting his own Short Course History of the USSR).

189. Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, “‘The People Need a Tsar’” 879 (citing RGASPI, f. 77, op. 1, d. 847, l. 3–4). Zatonsky was arrested in a cinema (where he was with his family) on Nov. 3, 1937. He would be executed July 29, 1938.

190. Harold Denny, the Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, caught the trend with the observation that “there is a legend in Moscow—and the writer does not know whether or not it is true—that Stalin questioned his own son on English history and found that while his son could talk glibly about economic periods he had never heard of Cromwell.” Denny, “No ‘Formalism.’” Denny served in Moscow 1934–39, having replaced Walter Duranty, and he proved no less mendacious regarding Stalin’s crimes. Heilbrunn, “New York Times and the Moscow Show Trials.”

191. Shestakov, Short History of the USSR, 76.

192. Shestakov, Short History of the USSR, 49–50. See also Tucker, Stalin in Power, 282.