The Fate of Interwar Soviet Internationalism: A Case Study of the Editing of Stalin's 1938 Short Course on the History of the ACP(b)

Abstract

Internationalism was a core element of early Bolshevik propaganda; despite the leadership’s growing pragmatism after the October 1917 revolution, the concept remained key to party self-representation. During the late 1930s, however, this engagement with internationalism atrophied – something traditionally explained as a sign of growing pragmatism, xenophobia and the threat of war. This article investigates this turnabout by examining how Stalin and key members of his ideological establishment altered their treatment of internationalism within what was to be the official treatment of the party’s historical experience, the infamous 1938 Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

Notes

1 For an example of the variability of the term, see Friedemann and Hölscher, ‘Internationale, International, Internationalismus,’ 367–97.

2 See, for example, coverage in the exiled Menshevik Sotsialisticheskii vestnik.

3 See, for instance, Ustrialov, ‘Poteriannaia i vozvrashchennaia Rossiia’ (1922), ‘Logika revoliutsii’ (1922), ‘O nashei ideologii’ (1923), 88–92, 93–103, 144–54.

4 Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed; Timasheff, The Great Retreat, chap. 7.

5 On Russian nationalism, see Barghoorn, Soviet Russian Nationalism, 28–34, 148–52, 233–37, 260; Dzyuba, Internationalism or Russification, 65; Kohn, ‘Soviet Communism and Nationalism,’ 57; Szporluk, ‘History and Russian Ethnocentrism,’ 44–45; Pospielovsky, ‘Ethnocentrism, Ethnic Tensions and Marxism/Leninism,’ 127. On etatism, see Black, ‘History and Politics in the Soviet Union,’ 24–25; Shteppa, Soviet Historians and the Soviet State, 124, 134–35; Agurskii, Ideologiia natsional-bol'shevizma, 140–42; Agursky, ‘The Prospect for National Bolshevism,’ 90; Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System, 272–79; Seton Watson, ‘Russian Nationalism in Historical Perspective,’ 25–28; Besançon, ‘Nationalism and Bolshevism in the USSR,’ 4; Simon, Nationalismus und Nationalitätenpolitik in der Sowjetunion, 172–73; Tucker, Stalin in Power, 50–58, 319–28, 479–86; Suny, ‘Stalin and His Stalinism,’ 39; Rees, ‘Stalin and Russian Nationalism,’ 77, 97, 101–03; Brandenberger, National Bolshevism. On mobilizational populism, see Brandenberger, National Bolshevism.

6 On security concerns, see Mehnert, Weltrevolution durch Weltgeschichte, 12–14; Urban, Smena tendentsii v sovetskoi istoriografii, 9–11; Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism, 10–12; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 357; Konstantinov, ‘Dorevoliutsionnaia istoriia Rossii v ideologii VKP(b) 30-kh gg.,’ 226–27; Suny, ‘Stalin and His Stalinism,’ 39; Brooks, ‘Thank You, Comrade Stalin,’ 76. On administrative pragmatism, see Szporluk, ‘Nationalities and the Russian Problem in the USSR,’ 30–31; Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism, 10–12; Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 51–52, 158–59, 178–79; Slezkine, ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment,’ 415–52; Bordiugov and Bukharev, ‘Natsional’naia istoricheskaia mysl’ v usloviiakh sovetskogo vremeni,’ 21–73, esp. 39; Vihavainen, ‘Nationalism and Internationalism,’ 75–97; Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, esp. chap. 11; Kappeler, The Russian Empire, 378–82; Hosking, Russia and the Russians, 432–33; van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, 208–29; Hoffmann, Stalinist Values.

7 Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome.

8 David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment.

9 On ideology, see Drabkin, ‘Ideia mirovoi revoliutsii i ee transformatsii,’ 72–73. On the Great Terror, see Lazitch, ‘Stalin's Massacre of the Foreign Communist Leaders,’ 141–46; McDermott, ‘Stalinist Terror in the Comintern,’ 124; McDermott and Agnew, The Comintern, 145–46, 154–55; Tucker, Stalin in Power, 506, 512, etc.; Chase, Enemy within the Gates; Haslam, ‘The Soviet Union, the Comintern and the Demise of the Popular Front, 1936–39,’ 152–60; Huber and Bayerlein, ‘Première esquisse des structures répressives du Komintern – Le cas des communistes suisses a Moscou,’ 148–49. On foreign policy, see Rieber, ‘Popular Democracy: An Illusion?,’ 106–09.

10 Methodologically, this article conducts a close, comparative reading of two related texts: a party history written under I. V. Stalin's direct supervision between July 1937 and April 1938 and Stalin's subsequent editing of this same manuscript between May and September 1938. Focusing on authorial agency and contingency, this article supplies a case study on how the party's line on internationalist self-representation shifted within the Bolshevik canon during these years.

11 On the Soviet search for the usable past, see Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis, esp. chap. 2.

12 Commager, The Search for a Usable Past and Other Essays in Historiography, 3–27.

13 Roughly speaking, the semantics of Soviet internationalism during the interwar period shifted from the party's contribution to the world revolutionary movement to the world revolutionary movement's contribution to the party. For examples of important textbooks' treatment of internationalism, see Ingulov, Politgramota, 333–67; Iaroslavskii, Istoriia VKP(b), 1: 188–91, 239–52, 267–70; 2: 71–73, 150–53, 296–97, 303–04; Kratkaia istoriia VKP(b), 45–47, 120–27, 130–34, 183–85, 209–15, 240–45, 259–60, 275–77, 319–22; Volin, Politgramota, 337–71; Ingulov, Politbesedy, 346–70; Ingulov and Volin, Politgramota, 247–83; Ingulov, Politbesedy, 330–54; etc.

14 Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis.

15 Stalin, ‘O nedostatkakh partiinoi raboty i merakh likvidatsii trotskistskikh i inykh dvukhrushnikov,’ 2–4; ‘Materialy fevral'sko-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP(b) 1937 g.’ (1994), 13; ‘Materialy fevral'sko-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP(b) 1937 g.’ (1995), 11, 14–15.

16 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskaia istoriia (RGASPI), f. 17, op. 114, d. 800, l. l; f. 558, op. 1, d. 3212, l. 27; f. 17, op. 114, d. 800, l. 2. f. 17, op. 114, d. 840, ll. 46–48.

17 For Iaroslavskii's first manuscript and its critique, see RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 381; op. 11, d. 1219, ll. 21–35. On its revisions, see an undated letter from Pospelov to Iaroslavskii and Stetsky written that autumn – f. 629, op. 1, d. 64, l. 73 (also 74–84); Iaroslavskii to Pospelov (29 August, 13, 19 September 1937), f. 89, op. 12, d. 2, ll. 234–38; f. 629, op. 1, d. 101, ll. 5–6. For Iaroslavskii's account of Zhdanov's collective farm reference, see f. 89, op. 8, d. 807, l. 3.

18 On the completion of the second version, see Pospelov to Stalin (5 November 1937), Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (RGANI), f. 3, op. 22, d. 175, l. 123; the galleys are at RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1208, ll. 2–295. Stalin, Zhdanov and Pospelov met on 4 and 5 March – see Na prieme u Stalina, 232.

19 21 pages of typescript, marginalia and notes survive – see RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1217, ll. 25–46.

20 On the 3 April meeting, see Na prieme u Stalina, 234; for Zhdanov's notes, see RGASPI, f. 77, op. 3, d. 157, ll. 2ob–3ob.

21 The third version's galleys, which date to early April 1938, are at RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, dd. 75–77; the fourth version's galleys, which date to 24 April, are at f. 17, op. 120, d. 383. On the text's maturity, see f. 89, op. 8, d. 831, l. 1; f. 77, op. 1, d. 692, l. 175.

22 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 367–89.

23 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 399, 404ob–05ob.

24 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 416–16ob,

25 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 426ob–27ob.

26 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 427ob–28.

27 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 432ob–48, 266–68. Iaroslavskii and Pospelov were referring obliquely to Stalin's 1925 article ‘Otkiabr'skaia revoliutsiia i taktiki russkikh bol'shevikov,' which was also published as a pamphlet.

28 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 453ob–56ob. Bela Kun, the leader of the Hungarian revolution, went unmentioned, as he had been arrested on charges of Rightist-Trotskyite conspiracy on 28 June 1937.

29 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 463–63ob.

30 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 473ob–78, 482–85. Oddly, Iaroslavskii and Pospelov ignored the 1923 German ‘October’ and 1926 British General Strike.

31 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 476–80. Iaroslavskii and Pospelov were referring to Stalin, ‘K itogam rabot XIV partiinoi konferentsii RKP(b),’ 2–3; Stalin, ‘Otvet tovarishchu Ivanovu Ivanu Filippovichu,’ 1; Stalin, ‘O zadachakh khoziaistvennikov,’ 445.

32 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 481–490ob.

33 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 481ob, 490ob–491.

34 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 494–502ob.

35 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 502ob–11.

36 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 510–11.

37 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 511ob–17.

38 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 519–31.

39 RGASPI, f. 89, op. 8, d. 807, l. 3. Stalin appears to have worked alone on Iaroslavskii and Pospelov's galleys during the spring and summer of 1938 with the aid of only a small pool of typists. Internal evidence suggests that he began editing the latter chapters of his copy of the third version in mid-April and then started again with a copy of the fourth version somewhat later. Stalin's office appointment book reveals that he received few visitors in mid-May, mid-June and early to mid-July, indicating that it was during that time that he worked on the textbook. See Na prieme u Stalina, 236–38. The following textual analysis aggregates together at least four rounds of Stalin's editing – several thousand pages of handwritten marginalia, typescript and publisher's galleys. For Stalin's first, abortive round of editing, see RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 77. For his second round, see unbound pages from the galleys of the fourth version and Stalin's own typescript and handwritten pages and interpolations: op. 11, d. 1209–1211. For Stalin's third round, consisting of only a typescript of Chapter 4 with handwritten editing and interpolations, see d. 1213, ll. 160–237. For Stalin's fourth round – a complete typescript copy of the textbook with additional marginalia sent to Stalin's inner circle between 16 August and 9 September – see d. 1212; d. 1213, ll. 238–314; d. 1214–1216. Other intermediate drafts do not appear to have survived.

40 Compare RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 367–417, 426ob–427 to Istoriia Vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (Bol'shevikov) (hereafter Kratkii kurs), 3–153, 157–58.

41 Compare RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 426ob–428 with Kratkii kurs, 157–60.

42 Compare RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 436ob–448ob, 266–268 with Kratkii kurs, 174–204, 220–21.

43 Compare RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 453ob–456ob with Kratkii kurs, 215–36. Stalin likewise dropped subsequent discussion of foreign communist parties, Comintern membership and the consistency of its official line, apparently believing such detail to be superfluous.

44 Compare RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 473ob–491 with Kratkii kurs, 237–86. Stalin's deletion of Trotsky's 1926–27 confrontation with the Comintern, an entire subsection on the Sixth Comintern Congress and that congress's June 1928 expulsion of N. I. Bukharin further skewed the narrative toward a focus on domestic economic development.

45 Compare RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 494–509ob with Kratkii kurs, 287–320.

46 Compare RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 510–17 with Kratkii kurs, 316–36. Stalin's thesis concerning the emergence of a second world war among capitalist countries may have stemmed from the Sudetenland crisis, which simmered during the summer of 1938.

47 Compare RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 383, ll. 525ob–531 with Kratkii kurs, 337–46.

48 RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1219, ll. 36–37.

49 According to the party historian I. I. Mints, Stalin was a demanding editor who was ‘pedantically interested in formal exactitude’ and unimpressed by metaphorical language, hyperbole and literary devices like foreshadowing. He was highly critical of historical writing that focused on minutiae at the expense of the big picture and did not hesitate to make cuts, at times replacing stricken material with text of his own. For Mints's comments on Stalin's editing, see the summary of a June 1977 interview in Tucker, Stalin in Power, 531–32.

50 RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1219, ll. 36–37.

51 See Brandenberger, ‘Ideological Zig Zag,’ 143–60.

52 It's worth noting that this transformation of the text was only marginally successful. Stalin lacked historical training and ultimately produced a schematic narrative that was as bloodless and inaccessible as those that circulated in the 1920s. See Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis, 205–06, etc.

53 Material associated with the so-called ‘Anti-Soviet Anti-Comintern Rightist-Trotskiite Conspiracy’ was made available in the 1990s to V. I. Piatnitskii, I. A. Piatnitskii's son and several historians; it is inaccessible to researchers today. See Starkov, ‘The Trial That Was Not Held,’ 1297–315; Piatnitskii, Osip Piatnitskii i Komintern na vesakh istorii. A shorter version of Starkov's piece is ‘Die Letzte Schlacht des Komintern-Sekraeters: Osip A. Pjatnickij und der Moskauer Prozeß gegen die Komintern,’ 41–43. For background, see Chase, Enemy within the Gates.

54 Tsentral’nyi arkhiv Federal’noi sluzhby bezopasnosti (TsA FSB), cited in Starkov, ‘The Trial That Was Not Held,’ 1306. Excerpts of Kun's 1 July interrogation and Knorin's 25 June and 1 July interrogations have been published in Bayerlein and Huber, ‘Protokolle des Terrors (I): Bela Kun und Lajos Mad’jar in russischen KGB-Dokumenten. Zwei Schlüsselfälle des Komintern-Terrors,’ 53–71, esp. 63–65; Bayerlein and Huber, ‘Protokolle des Terrors. Teil 11: Abramov-Mirov und Knorin in Verhörprotokollen des NKVD,’ 216–29, esp. 220–26.

55 TsA FSB, cited in Starkov, ‘The Trial That Was Not Held,’ 1307.

56 For a summary of Piatnitskii's ‘breakthrough’ interrogation, see Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii (APRF), f. 3, op. 24, d. 408, ll. 45–63, published in Lubianka, 334–35.

57 TsA FSB, cited in Starkov, ‘The Trial That Was Not Held,’ 1307–08, 1311.

58 According to Stalin's office appointment book, he was briefed by Ezhov eight times in April 1938 (including 14 April), five times in May, six times in June and twice in July (including 26 July). Some of these briefings likely concerned Piatnitskii, at least in passing. See Na prieme u Stalina, 236–238.

59 Piatnitskii, Osip Piatnitskii i Komintern na vesakh istorii, 509.

60 Starkov, ‘The Trial That Was Not Held,’ 1310; Müller, ‘Der Fall des “Antikomintern-Blocks” – ein vierter Moskauer Schauprozeß?’ 187–214; Müller, ‘Der Antikomintern-Block. Prozeßstruktur und Opferperspektive,’ 38–51; Vatlin, Komintern, 353–57.

61 Starkov, ‘The Trial That Was Not Held,’ 1308–10. Piatnitskii appears to have headed a faction that struggled with G. M. Dimitrov and D. Z. Manuilskii over issues such as the Popular Front.

62 RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 77, ll. 303–04. Stalin read the galleys of the third version first in early April, relaying his comments to Zhdanov and Pospelov in oral form. He then appears to have returned to the text at least four times between mid-April and early May, editing each time with different coloured lead and oil pencils.

63 It is curious, of course, that Stalin did not explicitly condemn the Comintern in his interpolations to the Short Course during these months. This may be due to the difficulty that Piatnitskii and his supposed collaborators continued to pose to the investigation even after they began to cooperate with their interrogators. Kun, Knorin and Piatnitskii apparently contradicted and undercut each other's stories so regularly during the spring and summer of 1938 that it became unclear whether they could be counted upon to follow a script in open court. Starkov and Müller conclude that the defendants proved so difficult to control that they ultimately forced Stalin to scuttle his plans for a fourth show trial. This confusion was apparently so debilitating that it also deterred Stalin from mentioning the Comintern conspiracy in the Short Course. See Starkov, ‘The Trial That Was Not Held,’ 1310; Müller, ‘Der Fall des “Antikomintern-Blocks” – ein vierter Moskauer Schauprozeß?’ 199–200.

64 On 19 April Stalin downgraded the Comintern's slogans within the party's official May Day list from second place to second-to-last. He reduced the international content of the sloganeering as well. See RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 1191, l. 23–32; ‘Lozungi k 1 maia,’ 1. This shift was noticed first in Lasswell, Language of Politics, 274–75, 290; the author is grateful to Gleb Albert for alerting him to this source.

65 Most of the archival documentation on these subjects remains classified in the APRF and TsA FSB.

66 RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1219, ll. 36–37.

67 Stalin contended that ‘if we had wanted to work out what sort of international influence or effect our three revolutions had on the international labor movement, we would have had to double the size of the Short Course …  [W]e would then have had to write not a history of the party, but a history of the effect of our three revolutions on the world proletariat …  [T]he Short Course cannot afford to constantly digress from its main theme on revolutionary and party development … ’ RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1122, ll. 28–111, here ll. 32–33.

68 ‘Either you need to write the history of the party,’ Stalin declared, ‘or the history of the congresses. One or the other …  To confuse one with the other – that's nonsense, that's internationalism, that's just to blather on and on [rastekat'sia po drevu], when a person loses his train of thought and begins to wander from topic to topic. The Central Committee just couldn’t … follow after those wandering comrades who just blather on and on.’ RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1122, ll. 28–111, here l. 34.

69 At the same time that Stalin was dismissing this core tenet of traditional party propaganda, he also identified other aspects of the party's past that were now to be considered irrelevant – regional party organizations, the Komsomol, the national question, etc. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1122, ll. 37–40, 41.

70 Ironically, the fact that Stalin cut the Comintern from the Short Course did not exempt the organization from the task of aiding in its translation and distribution abroad. See Brandenberger and Zelenov, ‘V Soedinennykh Shtatakh gotoviatsia k massovomu rasprostraneniiu istorii VKP(b),’ 137–46.