Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  15

  THE RETURN OF RUSSIA

  ON JANUARY 30, 1936, THE LEADING SOVIET NEWSPAPER, Pravda, published a front-page photo of Joseph Stalin that became one of his most popular images. The smiling dictator was shown embracing a cheerful young girl who had just presented him with a large bouquet of flowers. The photo would be widely reproduced, appearing in numerous Soviet newspapers and journals as well as on posters. A five-meter statue of Stalin with the girl would be installed in a Moscow subway station with the inscription, “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood.” Besides presenting Stalin as the indulgent head of a happy Soviet family, the photo promoted his image as the father of the Soviet peoples.

  The girl in the photo was a Buriat, a member of the largest indigenous Siberian nationality. On January 27, 1936, three days before the photograph was published, Stalin, his chief lieutenant and head of the Soviet cabinet, Viacheslav Molotov, and other Soviet leaders had welcomed a delegation from the Buriat-Mongol Autonomous Republic of the Russian Federation in the Kremlin. It was a solemn reception, accompanied by the presentation of gifts to the workers and peasants of the region. Suddenly, in the middle of the proceedings, the six-year-old Gelia Markizova, the daughter of the republic’s commissar of agriculture, bored with the speeches of the collective farmers, grabbed two buckets bought in advance by her mother and began walking to the head table. Asked where she was going, she answered, “To Stalin.” With the meeting interrupted, Stalin sat Gelia on the table. She put her arm around his neck, and the moment was captured by a Soviet photographer.

  The Buriat-Mongolian delegation had been deliberately chosen for the special reception. Although the autonomous republic, which was located near Lake Baikal, had a population of less than half a million people—in a country of over 150 million—it had major strategic importance for the rulers in Moscow. The republic was located on the border with Mongolia and Manchukuo, the puppet Manchurian state controlled by Japan. Soviet-Japanese relations had been marked by numerous border incidents. They had reached a new low in November 1935, as Nazi Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, a treaty directed against the Soviet Union that derived its name from the Communist International, the Moscow-directed organization of the world communist movement. Bringing the Buriat leadership to Moscow was the Kremlin’s way of demonstrating its commitment to the region and ensuring the population’s loyalty to the Stalin regime.

  The article on the front page of Pravda accompanying the photograph was titled “One Family of Peoples.” It celebrated the national liberation of the Buriat-Mongols as a consequence of the October Revolution, as well as the economic development of the region allegedly brought by collectivization, and emphasized the Russian role in bringing those benefits to the region. “With the active assistance of the Russian proletariat, Buriat-Mongolia has taken the road of progress and gained every possibility for the further development and growth of its national culture,” stated the unsigned article. Approximately half the population of Buriat-Mongolia consisted of ethnic Russians or Eastern Slavs. One-third was made up of Buriats, part of the Mongol ethnic community, who were settled on all sides of the Mongol-Soviet-Manchukuo border. To strengthen the security of the region, the loyalty of both the Russians and the Buriats in the autonomous republic had to be ensured, and the Pravda article on the Russo-Buriat alliance sought to assist in achieving that end.

  Besides endorsing Russian ties with a key republic, the article praised the Russians as the leading Soviet nation and lashed out against those who called that role into question. “The nation that has given the world such geniuses as Lomonosov, Lobachevsky, Popov, Pushkin, Chernyshevsky, Mendeleev, and such giants of humanity as Lenin and Stalin—a nation that prepared and carried out the October Socialist Revolution under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party—such a nation can be called a ‘nation of Oblomovs’ only by someone who takes no account of what he is talking about.” The reference was to a tradition that had begun with Vladimir Lenin himself, who had referred to negative features of Russian history and national character by associating them with Oblomov, a character in a nineteenth-century novel who became a symbol of laziness and indecisiveness.

  Although the Pravda attack was not directed against Lenin, it signaled a major shift in the Bolshevik treatment of Russia and Russianness. For the first time in such an authoritative publication, the Russians, especially the prerevolutionary Russians, were presented not as an imperial nation of exploiters but as a nation of major literary and cultural figures. In addition to bringing about the October Revolution, they had given the world such figures as Lenin and Stalin, and the latter, an ethnic Georgian, was now presented as a Russian as well. The Russians stood above the other nations of the Soviet Union, guiding them along the road to the bright communist future. Anyone who dissented from that proposition was now dismissed as a “lover of verbal flourishes poorly versed in Leninism.”

  THE PRAVDA ARTICLE’S PRAISE FOR THE RUSSIANS AS THE LEGITIMATE leaders of the peoples of the Soviet Union and its defense of the Russian national character had been provoked by growing tensions with Japan and Germany as well as by an intensification in Stalin’s struggle with his opponents in the party leadership. But the Soviet leader’s reevaluation of the role of the Russian nation in imperial history and in post-1917 socialist construction had been long in the making.

  The attack on national cadres in Ukraine, Belarus, and other non-Russian republics that began with the trial of alleged members of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine in 1930 put an end to the earlier policy presenting Russian great-power chauvinism as the main threat to the regime. The similar “Academy Case” of 1930 in Russia, which featured as its main targets academician Sergei Platonov and Russian historians of the old school who were accused of monarchism and Russian nationalism, involved close to one hundred suspects, as compared to more than four hundred in the case in Ukraine. The Russian defendants were sentenced in camera—that is, in private—while the Ukrainians were put through a highly publicized trial open to the general public. The Soviet propaganda machine was sending a message to society, and that message was loud and clear: non-Russian nationalism constituted the main danger to the regime.

  In 1930, Stalin and his group in the Politburo also began taking steps to stop the practice, previously encouraged by the regime, of presenting prerevolutionary Russia in exclusively negative terms. In December of that year, the Stalin-led party secretariat had issued a resolution on the writings of leading Soviet satirist Demian Bedny, who had blamed the Russian peasantry’s resistance to collectivization on traditional Russian laziness and backwardness. “False notes expressed in sweeping defamation of ‘Russia’ and ‘things Russian’” were now detected in Bedny’s pamphlets. They were deemed to be an attack not on the uncollectivized peasantry but on Russian workers, “the most active and most revolutionary detachment of the global working class.” The resolution read: “The attempt to apply the epithets ‘lazybones’ and ‘habitual stove-sitter’ cannot fail to be redolent of crude falsehood.” In a personal letter to Bedny, Stalin accused him of “libel against our people, discrediting the USSR, discrediting the proletariat of the USSR, discrediting the Russian proletariat.”

  The change of party policy to present non-Russian nationalism as the principal danger to the USSR was sealed in January 1934 with Stalin’s speech to the Seventeenth Party Congress, in which he asserted that “the main danger is represented by the deviation against which people ceased to struggle and that was therefore allowed to develop into a danger to the state.” He illustrated his point with a telling example: “In Ukraine, even quite recently, the deviation toward Ukrainian nationalism did not represent the main danger, but when people ceased to struggle against it and allowed it to develop to such an extent that it closed ranks with the interventionists, that deviation became the main danger.” There were no concomitant references to Russian chauvinism. The decisions made by Stalin and the party in the months following the congress
showed that the party was prepared to rehabilitate some elements of prerevolutionary Russian nationalism.

  In July 1934, the Central Committee decided to begin preparing for state celebrations of the centennial of the death of Alexander Pushkin, a poet all but ignored by officialdom during the previous decade. The Bolshevik regime, which had come to power in opposition to the empire of the tsars and built its reputation by attacking the imperial Russian past, now began to regard itself as a continuator of the cultural and state-building traditions of the tsars. In June 1934, history classes, which had been abolished in the 1920s, were reinstated in Soviet schools by special resolution of the Central Committee. A few months earlier, at a special meeting of the Politburo to discuss history textbooks, Stalin had decided on a new course to be called “The History of the USSR,” putting special emphasis on Russia’s historical mission: “In the past, the Russian people gathered other peoples. It has begun a similar gathering now.” Prerevolutionary Russian history was back in favor, as was the concept of the motherland, which was crucial to the formation of Russian nationalism.

  The article in Pravda that accompanied the publication of the decision to reintroduce history courses was titled “For the Motherland.” It declared love for the motherland as one of the main virtues of the Soviet citizen. That rehabilitated notion was paired with another key Stalinist concept, treason. “Whoever raises his hand against the motherland, whoever betrays it must be annihilated,” thundered the party’s standard-bearing newspaper. This judgment ran counter to the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the theoreticians of the communist movement, who declared in their founding document, The Communist Manifesto (1848): “The working men have no country.” The Pravda article explained this departure from Marxist dogma by the fact that the founders of Marxism had written before the victory of the Russian Revolution, which changed the situation dramatically and endowed the working class with a fatherland. That line of argument had been introduced by Stalin in 1931, when he stated publicly: “In the past, we did not and could not have a fatherland. But now that we have overthrown capitalism, and power belongs to us, to the people, we have a fatherland and will defend its independence.”

  Stalin also criticized Engels’s ideas directly. In his article “The Foreign Policy of Russian Tsardom” (1890), Engels had characterized the Russian Empire as “the mainstay of European reaction, its last fortified position and its great reserve army at once.” Stalin found many of Engels’s observations questionable. “That tsarist rule in Russia was a mighty fortress of all-European (as well as Asian) reaction cannot be doubted. But it may be doubted whether it was the last fortress of that reaction,” wrote Stalin to the members of the Politburo. Stalin noted what he saw as the “shortcomings” of Engels’s article and called it “one-sided”—an unheard-of criticism of a founding father of Marxism in the Soviet Union. He argued against the publication of the Russian translation of the article in Bol’shevik, the party’s leading theoretical journal, since it might be viewed as reflecting the official line. Stalin’s argument won the day, and the article was not published.

  STALIN’S REVISIONIST MEASURES INDICATED THE EVOLUTION OF his thinking on nations and nationalism in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, a country all-important to the Bolsheviks. Through most of 1933, despite Hitler’s vitriolic anticommunist rhetoric, Stalin had tried in vain to preserve the close economic and even political ties with Germany that had been established during the previous decade. Hitler was not interested in cooperating with Stalin, as the Soviet leader understood by the end of 1933. But aside from being a foreign threat, the Nazis were an ideological challenge and an example to emulate. Hitler’s rabid nationalism, which helped him unite Germany around his leadership, made an impression on the communist leadership of the Soviet Union. What followed was a set of changes in Soviet policies at home and abroad.

  Hitler was exalting, consolidating, and mobilizing the German nation. What nation could Stalin mobilize—Russian, Soviet, proletarian? If the answer was “all of the above,” then how should its components be related? For some time, there were no clear answers to those questions, and as the months and years passed a difference of opinion emerged between Stalin and his old ally and then nemesis Nikolai Bukharin. Expelled from the party leadership in 1929, Bukharin was allowed to return to the public arena in early 1934 with his appointment as editor in chief of the second most influential Soviet newspaper, Izvestiia (News). An internationalist by conviction and an opponent of all nationalism, including Russian, Bukharin toed the party line when in July 1934, in connection with the reintroduction of history into the school curriculum, he praised the notion of the Soviet motherland and Soviet patriotism. Nevertheless, he defined the latter in international terms as “love of work, culture, the historical future of humanity, love of the noblest ideas of the age.”

  Bukharin was one of the main promoters of the notion of the Soviet people, which for him was devoid of any particular national coloration. Within that paradigm, he felt as comfortable attacking what he saw as the negative features of the Russian national tradition as he did any other tradition in the USSR. For Stalin, that was a problem. In 1929, Stalin had written a major work on the nationality question, protesting claims that the disappearance and merger of nations could take place in one country before the victory of the world revolution. Nations formed before the October Revolution continued to exist after its victory, argued Stalin. Thus he imagined the Soviet people as a family of nations united and led by the Russians. More than once he publicly used “Russian” and “Soviet” as equivalent terms, and as time passed he began to think of the Russians as the quintessential Soviet people. In July 1933, raising a toast at a meeting with writers, he invited them to “drink to the Soviet people, to the most Soviet nation, to the people who carried out the revolution before anyone else.” He then added: “Once I said to Lenin that the very best people is the Russian people, the most Soviet nation.”

  As far as Stalin was concerned, attacking the Russians not just in the Soviet but also in the historical context was coterminous with attacking the Soviet people as a whole. His first public salvo against Bukharin and the long Bolshevik tradition of negative treatment of imperial Russia was fired with the 1936 Pravda article celebrating the reception of the Buriat delegation at the Kremlin. The trigger was Bukharin’s article in Izvestiia praising Lenin on the anniversary of his death and developing Lenin’s reference to the Oblomov-like characteristics of prerevolutionary Russians, whom Bukharin called a “nation of Oblomovs.” Stalin’s reaction in Pravda to Bukharin’s article left no doubt that party policy had changed. What had been perfectly acceptable for Lenin or Bukharin himself to say in the 1920s and early 1930s was now denounced as a subversion of Leninism.

  The agitated Bukharin wrote directly to Stalin, telling him that he was being attacked for no reason. “I well understand that you [the intimate ty rather than the formal vy] are conducting high policy on a grand scale, preparing the country for victory in warfare as well, and that you want to draw on all that is best, including great national traditions. That is why you were particularly wounded by the ‘nation of Oblomovs.’ For my part, as I explained, I wanted to emphasize particularly the national-liberation role of Bolshevism and the working class.” Bukharin understood the motivation for Stalin’s turn toward Russian nationalism but did not recognize that in Stalin’s mind, the introduction of any new party line required targets for attack, public campaigns unmasking enemies of the regime, and, ultimately, new victims. Stalin was condescending, writing “Big baby” on Bukharin’s letter. Bukharin would be accused of antiparty activities a few months later; he was arrested in February 1937, and shot in March 1938. He was executed for allegedly conspiring against the party and the state, being in the employ of foreign powers, and preparing for the dismemberment of the country.

  Bukharin was not the only target of the “defend Russian history” campaign unleashed by Stalin in early 1936. Very soon another victim
was found in Demian Bedny, the satirist who had already been reprimanded for his criticism of Russian national traditions in 1930. In the fall of 1936, Stalin’s close ally Viacheslav Molotov, the head of the Soviet government, had walked out on a performance of the opera Bogatyri (Heroes), based on Bedny’s libretto. The opera made fun of a key figure of the imperial Russian historical narrative, Prince Vladimir of Kyiv, his retinue, and the baptism of Rus’. In November 1936, the Politburo issued a resolution forbidding any more performances. Bedny’s libretto was deemed “an attempt to exalt the robbers of Kyivan Rus’ as a positive revolutionary element.” It allegedly slandered popular Russian heroes and gave “an anti-historical and mocking depiction of the baptism of Rus’, which was in fact a positive milestone in the history of the Russian people, as it promoted the drawing together of the Slavic peoples with peoples of higher culture.”

  The resolution signaled a dramatic reversal of many of the party’s earlier policies, as it not only endorsed imperial Russian symbols but also praised the advent of Christianity—the main target of the fierce antireligious campaigns launched by the party in the late 1920s and early 1930s—and dismissed the notion of the banditry of pre-Soviet times as foreshadowing modern revolution. According to a report by the secret police, the decision to close down performances of the opera met with general approval from the artistic community. Many Russian artists saw the decision as rehabilitating Russian history and, indeed, the Russian nation. “The history of the great Russian people may not be distorted,” said an actor. The prominent Soviet playwright Konstantin Trenev is alleged to have said, “I am extremely pleased by the resolution. I am proud of it as a Russian. No one may spit in our face.” Another playwright, Vsevolod Vishnevsky, said, “It’s a lesson of history: don’t touch our people. History will prove useful, and very soon at that. The opera Minin [and] Pozharsky: Salvation from the Interventionists is now in preparation.”