Stalin: A Biography

Yet he made only three public speeches from 1946 onwards and two of these lasted just a few minutes.⁷ His articles were few and he published no booklets after the war until Marxism and Problems of Linguistics in 1950.⁸ Not since the end of the Civil War had he written less for the press. The consequence was that his infrequent smaller pieces functioned as the guidelines for what others in communist public life at home and abroad could print or broadcast.

All the same he made plain his desire to counteract the fashion for admiration of foreign culture and science. When President Truman sent him some bottles of Coca-Cola, Stalin reacted angrily and ordered food scientist Mitrofan Lagidze to develop a superior pear-based fizzy drink to send in return. (For once some sympathy with Stalin is in order.)⁹ Praising only the achievements of the USSR, Stalin aimed to enclose the USSR deeper in intellectual quarantine. The main exception to this was kept secret: he relied heavily on scientific and technological espionage to steal the foreign discoveries needed for the development of Soviet military and industrial might. Otherwise the guiding principle was that everything foreign was inferior and damaging. With this in mind he called Alexander Fadeev and two literary colleagues, Konstantin Simonov and Boris Gorbatov, to the Kremlin along with Molotov and Zhdanov on 13 May 1947. Fadeev, Chairman of the USSR Union of Writers, was expecting to discuss book royalties policy. But Stalin had an ulterior motive. Once policy on royalties had been settled, he handed over a letter for Fadeev to read aloud to the gathering. The contents related to a possible anti-cancer drug developed by two Soviet scientists who had released details about it to American publishers.¹⁰ Fadeev was terrified as Stalin did his trick of walking up and down behind the backs of his guests. As Fadeev turned towards him, the sight of Stalin — stern-faced and watchful — agitated him further. Stalin declared: ‘We’ve got to liquidate the spirit of self-humiliation.’

Fadeev was relieved to hear he was not in trouble but was being entrusted with the campaign against foreign influences and fashions. This could not be done by the Ministry of External Affairs without unsettling relations with the West.¹¹ (Just for once the eyewitnesses could record Stalin’s specific calculations.) Stalin was planning to complete the closure of the Soviet intellectual mind. His own mind was already insulated from foreign influences. Now he was plotting the systematic reproduction of his mentality across the USSR.

Simonov wrote down Stalin’s words:¹²

But here’s the sort of theme which is very important and which writers ought to take an interest in. This is the theme of our Soviet patriotism. If you take average members of our intelligentsia, the scholarly intelligentsia, professors and doctors, their feeling of Soviet patriotism has been inadequately nourished in them. They engage in an unjustified grovelling before foreign culture. They all feel themselves still immature and not quite 100 per cent personalities; they’ve got used to the position of eternal pupils.

Stalin continued:¹³

This is a backward tradition and it can be traced from Peter the Great. Peter had some good ideas but too many Germans soon established themselves; this was a period of grovelling before the Germans. Just look, for example, at how hard it was for [the eighteenth-century Russian polymath] Lomonosov to breathe, at how hard it was for him to work. First it was the Germans, then the French. There was much grovelling before foreigners, before shits.

Although Stalin was an admirer of Peter the Great, he was setting himself up as a ruler who could finally eradicate the syndrome of the feelings of inferiority characteristic of Russian intellectual life since the Petrine epoch.