By then the regime had abandoned many of its original objections to Russian traditions. The doyen of Soviet historical scholarship in the 1920s had been Mikhail Pokrovski, who had depicted the centuries before 1917 as an epoch of Russia’s oppression of other peoples in the empire. No emperor or general had been accorded any positive qualities. The entire social system was treated as a blockage to social progress. From the mid-1930s all this changed. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great were lauded as initiators of administrative order, economic advance and external influence. The commanders Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov were hailed as rescuers of Russia and Europe from French tyranny. Whereas the Caucasian rebels had once been treated as heroes, historians began to stress that Russian Imperial rule conveyed much benefit to the borderlands. Russian scientific and cultural achievements were also highlighted. The chemist Mendeleev and the physiologist Ivan Pavlov (who died only in 1936) were said to be superior to their foreign counterparts. Russian nineteenth-century literary classics were produced in enormous print-runs, and the centenary of Alexander Pushkin’s death was celebrated with pomp in 1939. It was no longer acceptable to mock or denigrate Russia and the Russians in Stalin’s USSR.
With Zhdanov and Kirov Stalin oversaw production of appropriate historical texts.9 The new orthodoxy was that the USSR was enhancing the best customs of Russian Imperial patriotism and enlightenment without reproducing the negative features of tsarism. Pride in country was to be fostered. Much of this was cynical propaganda to win favour with Russians. But it probably played on chords by then congenial to Stalin. After the October Revolution twentieth-anniversary parade in 1937 he spoke at a private dinner in Voroshilov’s Kremlin flat attended by a couple of dozen leading politicians and military commanders:10
The Russian tsars did many bad things… But there’s one good thing they did: they created an immense state from here to Kamchatka. We’ve been bequeathed this state. And for the first time we, the Bolsheviks, have rendered this state cohesive and reinforced it as a unitary and indivisible state not in the interests of the great landowners and the capitalists but rather to the advantage of workers and of all the peoples that constitute this state.
Stalin was an able actor and may not have believed a word of this. But the likelihood is that the statement with its peculiar mixture of Marxist– Leninist and Russian Imperial sentiments reflected his genuine opinion.
He was also responding to the currents swirling in the political air. Individuals of Russian nationality tended to take the place of the defeated adversaries of the Stalin faction. Jews lost out. In the light of his continued association with Jewish friends (if indeed anyone could be called his friend), it would be difficult to call him an anti-semite; yet the fact remained that his principal enemies Trotski, Zinoviev and Kamenev — prominent members of Lenin’s Politburo — were Jewish by origin. Throughout the hierarchies of state administration the Russians were being promoted. Even in non-Russian Soviet republics they were securing posts. By contrast non-Russians seldom rose to high office outside areas where their nation did not constitute the majority of the local population. From the mid-1930s the Gulag system of camps contained ‘bourgeois nationalists’ of all national and ethnic groups except the Russians. The Russian language was honoured. It became compulsory in all schools and offices even though the Soviet republics were simultaneously allowed to go on teaching the local language too. The alphabets of other languages were altered. Latin and Arabic scripts gave way in most languages to ones based on the Cyrillic model.11
