52. VOZHD AND INTELLECTUAL
The Vozhd retained his cerebral interests. He told people he read up to five hundred pages a day,1 and the books he chose were of the kind he had enjoyed for years. Among them was Germinal by Émile Zola, whom he had discovered as an adolescent.2 He continued to love Shota Rustaveli’s medieval Georgian epic, Knight in the Panther’s Skin.3 Having found his favourites early in life, he did not abandon them in old age and his resumed support for the fraudulent geneticist Timofei Lysenko continued to prevent progress in Soviet biology and threaten the lives and careers of Lysenko’s academic and political opponents.4
Marxism, architecture, linguistics, genetics and international relations were among Stalin’s intellectual interests. Historical works especially attracted him. He kept up with writings on both the Russian past and the annals of Mesopotamia, ancient Rome and Byzantium.5 When the fancy took him, he held conversations with physicists, biologists and other scientists. He examined the novels winning his annual Stalin Prize and listened to gramophone records of folk and classical music before they appeared in the shops (and gave them ratings from ‘good’ to ‘awful’). In Moscow he attended ballets, operas and concerts. He had his dachas equipped so that he could vet Soviet films before their public release. Volga! Volga! was his favourite film.6 He read, listened and watched mainly for personal delight and self-instruction. Foreign contemporary writers failed to attract him. Living writers had to be Soviet. Not that this saved them from his anger if he disapproved of one of their books. He had never been slow to say what he thought about cultural artefacts regardless of whether he knew much about the subject. Nobody in the USSR was in a position to ignore his predilections. If ever an obsessive intellectual dilettante existed, Stalin was that person.
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.
By the Second World War he had stopped deluding himself that he could increase his control over the Soviet order, but in most ways he was proud of what he had consolidated.14 He acknowledged that great changes would have to take place before the communism of Marx, Engels and Lenin could be realised. Yet he inserted his own peculiar ideas. In the 1920s he had of course stirred up controversy by saying that socialism could be constructed in a single country surrounded by hostile capitalist states. This had contrasted with the convention of Bolshevik theorists, including Lenin, that there would have to be more than one powerful state committed to socialism before such construction could be completed. Before the war Stalin had gone further by suggesting that the building of communism — the perfect stateless form of society dreamed about by Marxists until his emergence — could be started in the USSR on its own.15
Stalin had explained his idea to the Eighteenth Party Congress in March 1939: ‘Shall our state also be retained in the period of communism? Yes, it will be retained unless capitalist encirclement is liquidated and unless the danger of military attack from abroad is liquidated.’16 He gave no indication of how the state would, as Lenin had anticipated in The State and Revolution in 1917–18, ‘wither away’. Molotov brought this theoretical inadequacy to Stalin’s attention. The root of the problem could be traced back to the assertion in the USSR Constitution of 1936 that the Soviet state functioned on the principle of from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work. As Molotov had argued, this was not the real state of affairs in the USSR. Socialism was not yet near to completion. It was especially wrong to treat the kolkhozes as a socialist form of economy. Huge unfairness existed in the administration of society. Molotov also rejected the whole contention that socialism could be brought to completion in a single country. Building could start; it could be continued. Yet it could not be consummated.17 Stalin understood what Molotov was saying but fobbed him off: ‘I recognise theory, but I understand things like this: this is life and not theory.’18 Life, as Stalin saw it from the late 1930s, required the spreading of pride in the existing order of state and society even if this involved sullying the purity of Leninist doctrines.