Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

It’s not clear how much Stalin knew about Pavlov or his work. His library contained a copy of the Russian edition of Pavlov’s Twenty Years of Experience of the Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activities of Animals, but it is unmarked.²²¹ What we do know is that he agreed wholeheartedly with a long memo sent to him by Yury Zhdanov in September 1949 that criticised ‘anti-Pavlovian revisionism’ among Soviet physiologists and psychologists. Zhdanov, the chastened former critic of Lysenko, was by this time married to Stalin’s daughter Svetlana (though not for very much longer). He wanted to ‘unmask’ the revisionists and restructure research and teaching institutes to ensure orthodox, patriotic scientists were in charge. To that end, he proposed to convene a scientific discussion meeting that would smoke out the western-influenced anti-Pavlov elements. Stalin agreed with this strategy and kindly offered some tactical advice:

It is necessary first of all to quietly gather together the supporters of Pavlov, to organise them, allocate roles and then convene the conference of physiologists . . . where you should engage the opposition in a general battle. Without this the cause may collapse. Remember: for complete success you need to beat the enemy for sure.²²²

A joint Academy of Sciences and Academy of Medical Sciences ‘Scientific Session on the Physiological Teachings of Academician I. P. Pavlov’ duly took place in June 1950. With more than a thousand people in attendance, the leading doubters were criticised and subsequently demoted and a true believer placed in charge of a new Pavlov Institute of Physiology. This proved to be a temporary victory since within a couple of years of Stalin’s death the status quo ante had been restored. Zhdanov’s central committee Science Council was abolished and party interference in strictly scientific matters became frowned upon. Pavlovianism remained dominant but its critics recovered their place and status within the Academy.

Stalin believed himself to be a master of dialectical materialism – the Marxist methodology for understanding all aspects of human existence, including the natural world. He knew his limits, however, and generally stuck to subjects such as history, politics, economics and philosophy. However, in 1950 he intervened in a debate about linguistics focused on the views of the Anglo-Georgian language historian and theorist Nikolai Marr (1865–1934).

Marr specialised in the languages of the Caucasus but believed all the world’s languages were related and had a common root in four basic syllables – SAL, BER, ROSH, YON. After the revolution he adapted his theories to Marxist categories. All languages were class-based, he argued, and changed in accordance with transformations of the economic bases of societies. In compliance with the Marxist base–superstructure metaphor, language was categorised as an aspect of the cultural-ideological superstructure of a society which in turn rested on a class-based socio-economic mode of production. All aspects of the superstructure, including language, were shaped and determined by class relations and the dynamics of the economic base. Different classes spoke different languages and the language of homologous classes in different countries had more in common with each other than with their compatriots who belonged to a different class. Language, Marr insisted, was a class question, not an national or ethnic one.

In the 1920s Marr was centrally involved in discussions about the Latinisation of the Cyrillic alphabet and was consulted by Stalin’s staff about this matter.²²³ Latinisation was a project promoted by enlightenment commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky, as part of the Bolsheviks’ modernisation ethos. Cyrillic was deemed backward, bourgeois and chauvinistic, while the Latin alphabet was deemed modern and the core of a future world language. A number of minority, non-Cyrillic Soviet languages were Latinised in the 1920s but Stalin and the Politburo baulked when it came to Russian and vetoed the idea in a resolution passed in January 1930. Such a policy would have been hugely disruptive and ran counter to the emerging trend of resuscitating Russian history and culture as the foundation of a Soviet patriotism.²²⁴