Stalin: A Biography полностью

Young Vasili Stalin once said to his sister Svetlana: ‘But you know, our father used to be a Georgian.’² The boy had been brought up in Russia speaking Russian and thought of his father as a Russian. Vasili was making a childish error: Stalin had not magically become a Russian. It is true that Stalin once referred to himself as a ‘Russified Georgian Asiatic’ and denied that he was a ‘European’.³ This was a rare attempt at national self-description after the October Revolution, but it has to be treated with circumspection. Georgia, according to the geographers, belongs to Asia since it lies to the south of the peaks of the Caucasus. Consequently the combination of ‘Georgian’ and ‘Asiatic’ is perplexing. Presumably it stemmed to some degree from a Georgian sense of cultural superiority over the peoples of the East. Stalin in any case used the phrase not in public but at a private dinner party in Voroshilov’s apartment. He blurted it out in a light-hearted apology to the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov for interrupting his speech to the guests. By calling himself an Asiatic, a pejorative term among Europeans, Stalin was using humour to lighten the atmosphere. As always his comments must be interpreted in the light of the circumstances of their expression.

Yet there was a core of intrinsic plausibility in Stalin’s quip. Born a Georgian, he retained habits and attitudes of his homeland and continued to cherish Georgian classical poetry. But he was also impressed by the rulers of the great Asian empires. He read avidly about Genghis Khan. His experience with Russia too had imprinted itself on his consciousness. He admired Russian nineteenth-century literature. He was proud of Russia’s past and present power. He resented the loss of those territories such as Sakhalin which had belonged to the Russian Empire. He liked to be among Russians as well as among Georgians. The likelihood is that his subjective identity was neither exclusively Russian nor exclusively Georgian but a fluid, elusive mixture of both. This is not an unusual condition. Many people who travel from country to country semi-assimilate themselves to new cultures without abandoning the culture of their upbringing. Stalin, moreover, was a socialist internationalist. As a Marxist he considered ideas of nationhood to be a temporary and contradictory phenomenon: they both enhanced and vitiated their societies. It is doubtful that Stalin felt a need to fix a national identity for himself in his own mind. Rather his priorities were focused upon ruling and transforming the USSR and securing his personal despotism.

These priorities nudged him towards a change of policy on the national question regardless of the complexities of his own identity. Despite arresting individuals for Russian nationalism in the course of the First Five-Year Plan, he simultaneously ordered the media to avoid offending the national feelings of ordinary Russians and issued a confidential rebuke to the poet Demyan Bedny for poking fun at Russian popular proclivities.⁴ Stalin and Kaganovich, when ordering the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in central Moscow in 1932, specified that this should be done without public announcement and at night: they did not want it getting about that a Georgian and a Jew had given the command.⁵ When Stalin’s official biography appeared in 1938, there was no reference to his Georgian background after the second sentence in the book.⁶

He had reason to be worried about Russian popular resentment at being ruled by alien politicians. Although the NKVD — and previously the OGPU — seems to have reported little on this, Stalin had a lifelong sensitivity to such matters. A clandestine poster had an image of two bands of warriors facing each other across the river. One was a Jewish band led by Trotski, Kamenev and Zinoviev, while the other was Georgian and commanded by Stalin, Ordzhonikidze and Enukidze. Below the image was the inscription: ‘And the Slavs fell into dispute about who was to rule in Old Russia.’⁷ Stalin indeed had several non-Russians in his entourage and not all of them were Georgians. Prominent among them in the early 1930s were Kaganovich (a Jew) and Mikoyan (an Armenian). Consequently Stalin remained wary of popular opinion. The battering of Russia’s peasantry, its Orthodox Church and its village ways of life induced vast hostility to the regime. What is more, the emphasis of official propaganda was on the importance of Stalin in the shaping of policies. This left no doubt about his personal responsibility. Peasants hated him, and no amount of propaganda could mollify their feelings.⁸