Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

At this point Molotov interjected that historical events needed to be shown in their correct light, using the negative example of Demyan Bedny’s comic operetta, The Bogatyrs (1936), which had made fun of Russia’s conversion to Christianity. Stalin agreed: ‘Of course, we aren’t very good Christians, but we can’t deny the progressive role of Christianity at a certain stage. This event had a major significance because it meant the Russian state turning around to close ranks with the West, instead of orienting itself towards the East. . . . We can’t just toss out history.’²⁰¹

Eisenstein and Cherkasov were keen to get as much guidance as they could about how they should rework the film. They were given a few pointers but basically Stalin was happy to leave the matter in their artistic hands, insisting only that they be as historically accurate as possible. There was general agreement when Eisenstein suggested that it would be better not to hurry production of the film.²⁰² In the event, Eisenstein, who had been ill for some time, died of a heart attack in February 1948. The film remained unrevised and was not released until five years after Stalin’s death.

Do his remarks to Eisenstein and Cherkasov reveal, as Robert Tucker argued, that Stalin saw himself as a latter-day Tsar and modelled his terror on that of Ivan’s? Hardly. Stalin had plenty of reasons of his own for conducting the purges. More plausible is Maureen Perrie’s suggestion that rather than driving the Great Terror, the historical parallel with Ivan the Terrible’s regime provided retrospective justification for the brutal repressions of the 1930s.²⁰³ For Stalin, history was a guide, not a straitjacket. More often than not, it was the present that framed his view of the past and determined the use-value of history.

SCIENCE & SOCIETY

The immediate context for Stalin’s stance on Ivan the Terrible was the Zhdanovshchina – the campaign against western capitalist cultural influences launched in summer 1946. Primarily a domestic campaign, it was prompted in part by Stalin’s disquiet at the postwar deterioration of diplomatic relations with the west and his growing frustration with what he saw as western obstruction of his efforts to secure the just rewards of that costly Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Stalin was determined to expand Soviet and communist influence in Europe, aiming to create a reliable bulwark of communist-controlled or influenced governments in central and eastern Europe to act as a barrier to future German aggression against the Soviet Union. Stalin thought he could achieve this while continuing to collaborate with Britain and the United States. Western political leaders had other ideas. In March 1946 Churchill declared that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended across Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Behind that screen, all the ‘ancient states’ of central and eastern Europe were succumbing to communist totalitarian control. A year later, US President Harry Truman called for a global defence of the ‘free world’ by the United States and requested funding from Congress ‘to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’.

Party ideology chief Zhdanov fronted the anti-western cultural campaign but Stalin vetted and edited all his major statements on the matter, including this version of an August 1946 speech:

Some of our literary people have come to see themselves not as teachers but as pupils [and] . . . have slipped into a tone of servility and cringing before philistine foreign literature. Is such servility becoming of us Soviet patriots, who are building the Soviet system, which is a hundred times higher and better than any bourgeois system? Is it becoming of our vanguard Soviet literature . . . to cringe before the narrow-minded and philistine bourgeois literature of the west?²⁰⁴

When officials from the Soviet Writers’ Union went to see Stalin about some practical matters in May 1947, they found him preoccupied with the intelligentsia’s inadequate patriotic education: ‘if you take our middle intelligentsia – the scientific intelligentsia, professors and doctors – they don’t exactly have developed feelings of Soviet patriotism. They engage in an unjustified admiration of foreign culture. . . . This backward tradition began with Peter . . . there was much grovelling before foreigners, before shits.’²⁰⁵