Stalin too worked on it behind the scenes; he not only wrote a chapter in the Short Course but also edited the book’s entire text five times.17 A line of legitimate succession was traced from Marx and Engels through Lenin to Stalin. Tendentiousness and mendacity were the book’s hallmarks. For every point where disputes had arisen among Marxist revolutionaries it was suggested that only one authentic expression of Marxism was available and that Lenin and his follower Stalin had consistently adopted it. Soviet communism’s history was treated in Manichean terms. There were the forces of rectitude led by Leninism and the forces of deceit and betrayal under the anti-Bolshevik parties — the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Anarchists and nationalists of all types — as well as, subsequently, the Bolshevik factions hostile to Stalin. The Short Course deplored ‘the Trotskyists, the Bukharinites, nationalist deviators and other anti-Leninist groups’. Not once had Lenin made a mistake in doctrine or strategy. By good fortune a man equally infallible, Stalin himself, succeeded him.
The two leading characters of the Short Course were treated differently. It is usually assumed that the book enabled Stalin to supplant Lenin in the mythology of Soviet communism.18 This is untrue. Despite creating his own cult, he still found it useful to acknowledge the superiority of Lenin.19 This was obvious in the handling of the party’s early history. Whereas the official biography gave attention to Stalin’s career as a young revolutionary, his name hardly appeared in the opening chapters of the Short Course.20 In the entire book there were forty-nine citations of Lenin’s works but only eleven of those by Stalin. Evidently Stalin still sensed a continuing need to cloak himself with the mantle of Lenin’s memory.21 The treatment of the October Revolution is remarkable in this respect. Its pages on the seizure of power avoided any reference to Stalin.22 (Later generations of historians have missed this; indeed one wonders whether they have bothered to read the Short Course.) The point is that Stalin in the late 1930s, despite dominating the Soviet political scene, saw the desirability of placing a few limits to the worship of his own greatness. Even the Leader had to be cautious.
What is more, there was little in the writings about Stalin which gave a vivid impression of him. Usually the official eulogies are ascribed to a ‘cult of personality’ since this was the term used by Nikita Khrushchëv when he posthumously denounced Stalin in 1956. A more accurate translation from the Russian would be ‘cult of the individual’. Thus the 1938 biography recited the barest details of the first half of Stalin’s life before proceeding to catalogue his actions at the level of policy. There was scant attention to the family, school and native town of his boyhood. Accounts of his career in the clandestine Bolshevik committees before the Great War were discouraged; even his career in the October Revolution, the Civil War, the NEP and the Five-Year Plans was hardly covered in either the biography or the Short Course. He discouraged all historical and literary attempts to explain how he came to think what he thought or do what he did before the onset of his despotism. He strove instead to get writers, painters and film-makers to present him as the embodiment of the party rather than as a credible actor in history. Despite the preoccupation of the state media with Stalin, extremely little was allowed into the public domain telling of his ancestry, education, beliefs, demeanour or calculations.
His private existence too remained especially secluded. Before 1932 it was never mentioned in the newspapers that he was a married man. When he appeared on top of the Lenin Mausoleum, he was accompanied solely by fellow leading politicians. Pravda had made only a brief announcement of Nadya’s death.23 The same attitude was taken with Stalin’s mother. Pravda carried short articles about his visit to her in 1935 shortly before her death, and her funeral too was reported.24 Otherwise his privacy was closely guarded. A few exceptions existed. In 1939 a series of articles appeared by V. Kaminski and I. Vereshchagin about Stalin’s early life, and these included brief memoirs by some of his schoolboy friends and documents referring to his education.25 Some personal documents also appeared about Stalin’s periods of arrest and imprisonment.26
