Stalin: A Biography

Stalin sometimes claimed to be disconcerted by the extravagance of his cultic rituals. He asked for limits to the praise and muttered to his propagandists that they were overstepping them. In 1945, discussing plans for the first volume of his collected works, he proposed to restrict the print run to thirty thousand copies because of the paper shortage. Other participants in the meeting got him to agree to three hundred thousand copies, arguing that the public demand would be enormous.¹ Stalin also displayed caution a year later at a similar meeting to discuss the draft second edition of his biography. The flatteries irritated him:²

What should the reader do after reading this book? Get down on his knees and pray to me!… We don’t need idolaters… We already have the teaching of Marx and Lenin. No additional teachings are required… Nowhere is it said clearly that I am Lenin’s pupil… In fact I considered and still consider myself the pupil of Lenin.

The future of the Revolution, Marxism and the USSR had to be considered. ‘And what,’ Stalin exclaimed, ‘if I’m no longer around?… You won’t be inculcating love for the party [through this draft]… What’s going to happen when I’m not here?’³

Yet Stalin did not seriously impede the fanfares: either he was playing psychological games or he could no longer be bothered to keep tight control in the area of propaganda. In 1946 his collected works appeared in a first print run of half a million copies. A million copies of the revised biography had been published by the end of 1947 alone — and ten million copies of the Short Course in party history were put into press at the same time.⁴ The worship of Stalin had become a state industry (and Stalin himself had dropped his half-hearted attempt to restrict the print run).

There was harsh iconographic control. An episode from 1946 illustrates the punitive care taken with the image of the Leader. The artist V. Livanova had painted a poster of ‘9 May — A Worldwide Victory Holiday’ for the Moscow publishing house Art. In line with normal procedure, the editors checked it for visual merit and political reliability before submitting it to the censor I. N. Kleiner in Glavlit, the central censorship body. But things then went wrong. The editors did not wait for a decision but sent the poster to be printed in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. By the time copies of the poster were shipped back for distribution in the USSR, two errors had been discovered. One was that there were only fifteen banners representing the Soviet republics of the USSR instead of sixteen. The other related to Stalin: his marshal’s star had six points instead of five. Investigation proved that the errors had been made by Livanova herself and not by miscreants in Germany (as had been suspected). Glavlit itself got into trouble for having failed to exercise due care. Kleiner was sacked and the terrified leadership of Glavlit, trying to prove its loyalty, asked to be subordinated to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.⁵

Pernicious significance was attributed to these slight errors. Enemies of the Soviet order might be calling for the USSR’s dismemberment by reducing the number of official banners. Perhaps there was an implied call here for Ukraine to break away from the USSR into independence. As for the depiction of Stalin’s marshal’s star with six points, this might suggest a plot to represent him as a friend of international Jewry since the Star of David also had six points.⁶