Not all interpretations of Stalin as a nationalist have him as a Russophile. Some think his indulgences to the Russians were a blind to his drive to enhance the prestige and conditions of the Georgian nation. Supposedly, far from being a Russian nationalist, he had maintained the patriotic enthusiasms of his youth. He had never approved Abkhazia’s separation from Georgia in the constitutional arrangements of 1921–2, despite delighting in taking his vacations on the Abkhazian coast.17 In 1931 he compelled his friend Nestor Lakoba to accept the incorporation of Abkhazia in the Georgian Soviet Republic. Most Georgians regarded Abkhazia as a province of historical Georgia and many of them felt grateful to Stalin for his action. Once incorporated, Abkhazia was exposed to a Georgianising cultural offensive, especially after the murder of Lakoba in December 1936.18 The Abkhaz alphabet was compulsorily changed to a system based on the Georgian script. Abkhaz-language schooling was restricted. Georgian officials were transferred to the Abkhazian party, government and police. Demographic restructuring took place as Mingrelians, living in western Georgia, were allotted housing and jobs in Abkhazia from 1937.19
Stalin himself kept up his interest in the cultural pursuits of his youth. He fostered the publication of the old Georgian literary classics. He continued to read the great thirteen-century epic
Yet these phenomena do not signify that Stalin was a Georgian nationalist. Such an interpretation would fit ill with his policies at the end of the Civil War, with the conquest of Georgia in 1921, with the persecution of the Georgian communist leadership in 1922 and above all with the attacks on Georgia’s peasants, priests, cultural figures and politicians from the late 1920s through to the late 1930s. The fact that many Georgians subsequently forgot about this does not alter this record. Stalin’s attitude can probably be best explained by reference to his long-known approach to the national question in general. Since
Stalin elevated the status of Russians in the USSR and favoured some nations more than others; and he did this for a mixture of ideological and pragmatic reasons. The USSR was a state undergoing an economic and social transformation. Stalin had preconceptions about how to deal with the resultant problems. But he also had to react to circumstances that neither he nor anyone in his entourage had anticipated. Through the 1930s he found provisional solutions to the problems old and new.
Yet Stalin was no more likely to amputate Marxism–Leninism than to cut off his own fingers. What he was doing was more like shaving his beard; for the essential ideology was left largely intact. Stalin was idiosyncratic in the aspects of Russian national identity he chose for approval. He declined to include aspects which had figured prominently in the ideology of most professed nationalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These had praised the religious faith of the Russian people, their rural customs and the simplicity and beauty of their villages. Russia’s peasantry — its unsophisticatedness, endurance and lack of regard for the rest of the world — had been at the core of historical nationalism. None of this appeared in a positive light in Stalin’s thinking. He dredged the Russian past for precedents for the communist preoccupation with state power, strong rulers, terror, industrialisation, towns and cities, secularism and organisational gigantism. There had been trends in this direction in some intellectual circles before 1917, but not in exactly the same form. The version of Russian nationalism which he allowed emerged largely from his own head.22
