The Thinking Reed

It is important that this was mentioned as an example; Stalin did not ascribe any special qualities to the Russian language; these were simply assumed. This is, in general, a notable feature of the statocratic ideology: the main thing lies between the lines; the main thing is not said, only implied. But the significance of such ‘slips of the tongue’ at the beginning of the 1950s can hardly be overestimated. ‘In this way,’ as the Austrian Scharndorf observes, ‘Great-Russian chauvinism received its theoretical foundation.’12 The Soviet statocracy, born of the Bolshevik Revolution, had hitherto concealed its nationalism behind ‘internationalist’ phraseology. After the war the ideological situation changed. ‘From defence,’ writes Boffa, ‘nationalism went over to the offensive.’13

The 1940s saw an intensive rethinking of history on Russian nationalist lines. As an example we may take the struggle for priority: the attempt to show that everything had always been first invented by Russian craftsmen. Even serious academic publications were obliged to repeat this blatant falsehood. There were even quite anecdotal items, such as the story about ‘Kryakutnoy of Nerekhta’, who was said to have risen into the air in a balloon long before the Montgolfier brothers… An article about the daring balloonist appeared in Izvestiya on 16 July 1949 and four years later, in 1953, Kryakutnoy, ‘eighteenth-century Russian inventor, who built the first hot-air balloon in the world’, already figured in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia.,14 All this, as L. Reznikov wrote later in Voprosy Literatury, was ‘fantasy of the first water’. The fact was that ‘Kryakutnoy had been invented by the well-known nineteenth-century forger A. Sulukadzev.’15 It is strange that exposure of this falsification had to wait until 1981, when Reznikov published his article.16 Everyone knew perfectly well about Sulukadzev in 1949 and 1953, but contempt for truth was so great in Stalinist society that even the sedate Great Soviet Encyclopaedia did not shrink from printing a notorious lie, provided it corresponded to ‘Party directives’ — in this case the fight for ‘priority’.

All the peoples of the USSR had to acknowledge that they were ‘younger brothers’ of the Russians, although some of them (for example, the Tadzhiks and the Armenians) went back a thousand years earlier. It was suddenly discovered that the cultural traditions of all the peoples of our country had been linked with Russia long before the conquest of these peoples by the Muscovite Tsars and that everything that was best (!) in their history and culture was due to the Russians. Thus, for example, in Tadzhikistan in the 1950s a certain Radzhabov specialized in working up this idea. Firdousi’s poetry would never have been written, according to him, had the poet not been influenced by… Kiev Rus. Through provincial backwardness this sort of ‘research’ continued in some places even after Stalin’s death.17