Stalin liked to be seen to be restricting the cultic extravaganza. Worship had to be effusive but not totally ridiculous in its extent. He frequently reprimanded his underlings if, unable to guess his opinion, they overstepped the mark of flattery. He was made angry by an attempt to publish his articles from the years before the Great War. Stalin wrote to Kaganovich, Yezhov and Molotov in August 1936 — while he was on holiday by the Black Sea — seeking their help in preventing publication.12 (Obviously he could have given a direct order and it would have been instantly obeyed; but Stalin also wanted to impress on the Politburo that he remained a member of a political team.) He continued to comment scathingly on what was written about him. Stalin exclaimed to one of his physicians, M. G. Shneidorovich, about the inaccuracies in Soviet newspapers: ‘Look, you’re an intelligent man, doctor, and you must understand: there’s not a word of truth in them!’ The physician was beginning to feel he had the Leader’s confidence until Stalin added that doctors were just as unreliable as journalists — and doctors had the means and opportunity to poison him!13
Beria could nevertheless publish a history of Bolshevik party organisations in the Transcaucasus. This had gained Stalin’s sanction. Beria’s book controverted the received opinion that only the Marxists of St Petersburg or the emigration had had a decisive impact on the fate of the party. Although the contents were mostly a historical fiction, the theme of the historical importance of the borderlands was overdue its attention. (Beria, though, was not the authentic author: he commissioned and appropriated the text and then shot the writers.) Beria’s great Caucasian rival, Nestor Lakoba, produced an account of Stalin’s experiences along the Black Sea littoral after the turn of the century.14 Some memoirs also appeared about Stalin in Siberian exile.15 Yet there was little detail about the episodes in his rise to prominence in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party before the Great War and the circumstances of his co-optation to the Central Committee in 1912. Much remained hidden, and Stalin kept it that way. Mystery served his purpose: people would naturally be inclined to assume that he had been more important than was true. He enlarged the space for this to occur by removing his enemies from the history of Bolshevism. Steadily those other Bolsheviks who had been close to Lenin before the October Revolution were eliminated from the textbooks — and in most cases they were physically liquidated.
The grandiose acclaim kept on growing. At the Sixteenth Party Congress in June 1930 Stalin was greeted by ‘stormy, prolonged applause extending into a lengthy ovation’. The Congress rose to its feet shouting ‘Hurrah!’ The same occurred at the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934, when there was a tremendous ovation and shouts of ‘Long live our Stalin!’ By the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939, after the Great Terror, even this was thought inadequate. Congress organisers had arranged chants of ‘Hurrah for our Leader, Teacher and Friend, Comrade Stalin!’
Stalin biographies had been appearing thick and fast. The French writer Henri Barbusse’s 1935 life of the General Secretary was translated into Russian and placed on sale in the USSR.16 It was Barbusse who put into circulation the phrase: ‘Stalin is the Lenin of today.’ But not even Barbusse entirely pleased Stalin. It was this displeasure that led him in 1938 to get the Central Committee to commission
