98. In the early and mid-1930s, the regime had tried but failed to publish an official four-volume and then a two-volume history of the party. Yaroslavsky and Pyotr Pospelov (b. 1898), a graduate of the Institute of Red Professors, began work on a new text. In the meantime, Yaroslavsky’s wife, Kirsanova, was expelled from the party, and his son-in-law, Marcel Rosenberg, was arrested. Finally, on April 3, Yaroslavsky and Pospelov presented Stalin with a text. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1217, l. 2–24; Khrushchev, Vospominaniia, I: 252; Petrov and Jansen, Stalinskii pitomets, 193; Zelenov and Brandenberger, “Kratkii kurs,” I: 213–8 (d. 1219, l. 1–6). Stalin had the draft circulated among the retinue and, with Zhdanov in tow, received Pospelov (without Yaroslavsky) in the Little Corner on March 4 and 5, 1938, during the Bukharin trial. Stalin made many changes: he transformed all leftist parties other than the Communists into counterrevolutionaries already before Oct. 1917, and all oppositionists (left and right) into foreign agents. From late May 1938, he was engaged in proofreading the revision, then decided to rewrite the text himself. On the author page, he replaced the names of Yaroslavsky and Pospelov with “party commission.” “Of the twelve chapters,” Stalin reported on Aug. 16, 1938, to the inner circle and the authors, “it turned out to be necessary to revise eleven.” (Chapter 5 had been deemed acceptable.) RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1219, l. 36–7.
99. In his summary speech at the Feb.–March 1937 plenum, too, Stalin had included a reference to Antaeus and how Hercules defeated him. Pravda, April 1, 1937. See also Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service, 121.
100. Istoriia Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi partii, 291–2. See also Deutscher, Stalin, 540; and Tucker, “Stalinism as Revolution from Above,” 77–110. The expression “revolution from above” had first appeared as a characterization of Germany’s unification in the “Bismarck” entry in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia published in 1927, a fact now forgotten.
101. Zelenov, “I. V. Stalin v rabote,” 6. A collective farmer would write asking for more biographical detail on Stalin to be inserted in the book. Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis, 210 (citing RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 1, l. 5: I. Shabarov, collective farmer from Rostov). Tucker wrote that if Stalin had written memoirs, they would have amounted to nothing more than a second edition of the Short Course of the History of the Communist Party. Tucker, Stalin in Power, 533, 539.
102. Zelenov, “I. V. Stalin v rabote,” 3, 6, 10–1, 25–7. Stalin deleted extended passages, including on his supposed leading party work in the South Caucasus before 1917.
103. Shestakov, Kratkii kurs, 291. See also Lih, “Melodrama and the Myth.”
104. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1122, l. 3–4. Stalin would elaborate this core axiom two weeks later at the politburo. Khlevniuk et al., Stenogrammy zasedanii politbiuro, III: 693; “I. V. Stalin v rabote nad ‘Kratkim kursom,’” 19.
105. Na prieme, 239–40; Zelenov and Brandenberger, “Kratkii kurs,” I: 373–4 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1219, l. 37); Zelenov, I. V. Stalin, Istoricheskaia ideologiiia, I: 312–91. See also Medvedev, “How the Short Course Was Created”; and Avrich, “Short Course and Soviet Historiography.”
106. Zelenov and Brandenberger, “Kratkii kurs,” I: 375–81 (RGASPI, f. 77, op. 3, d. 159, l. 338–78).
107. Zelenov and Brandenberger, “Kratkii kurs,” I: 425 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 1002, l. 12: Sept. 19, 1938). It would be translated into the languages of Union and autonomous republics the next year and, eventually, reach 42.8 million copies in 67 languages. “Izdanie proizvedenii I. V. Stalina v Sovetskom Soiuze c 7 noiabria 1917 goda na 5 marta 1953: statisticheskie tablitsii,” Sovetskaia bibliografiia: sbornik statei i materialov, vyp. 1 (Moscow: Vsesoiuznaia knizhnaia palata, 1953), 224; Maslov, “‘Kratkii kurs istorii VKP (b)’—Entsiklopediia kul’ta lichnosti,” 51. In 1937–38, the censor withdrew from circulation 16,435 titles, amounting to 24 million volumes. This was a partial accounting (the main censor lacked jurisdiction over military publications). Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis, 222 (citing GARF. F. 9425, op. 1, d. 5, l. 66; d. 11, l. 61).
108. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1122, l. 1–18, 28–111. Stalin’s speeches at the meeting can also be found in Zelenov, I. V. Stalin, Istoricheskaia ideologiiia, I: 394–9 (Sept. 27, 1938), 401–24 (Oct. 1) .
