Any research is possible under conditions when the researcher has a map and a compass.
A map is information about what has already been done by other researchers, what can be used in addition to what has already been used previously. For the historian, for example, this is evidence obtained from documents found in the archives. And what if all the archives are repeatedly falsified for different purposes? What then?
The compass is the goal of the study. You cannot research everything by wandering around the entire created map. On this map, one or another route is always planned, and on the way they achieve something, in accordance with the available opportunities.
The compass for us is an attempt to collect grains of some truth about a certain - early - period of Stalin's life.
We, of course, are not interested in this truth in itself, but in its possible impact on the identity of a post-Soviet person. But when doing research, you can't think about the desired results all the time. You have to follow a certain route, trying to achieve the desired truth. And here the question arises of what kind of truth is it, what it is, is it possible in principle, what is its quality, if it is possible.
When you start tackling a topic that has been dealt with by many researchers who had both greater competence and greater opportunities, you ask yourself what your contribution should be to the study of such a topic. Or, using strict scientific terminology, what is the novelty, and at the same time the relevance of the research being conducted. Trying to answer this question, you say to yourself: “There are experienced, highly qualified and highly gifted investigators - yes, not researchers, but investigators who are skilled in everything related to detecting a criminal from the traces he leaves. These investigators are fluent in all known methods of investigation, they have their own discoveries in this area, at their service various kinds of laboratories … But what will they do if the criminal leaves no trace,or erases them completely? If there are no traces, then what will the deduction of Sherlock Holmes or the super-perfect criminological laboratory give?"
This comparison is not made because we regard Stalin as a criminal. For us, Stalin is an outstanding Soviet politician, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the army that defeated Nazism. But this comparison is necessary in order to emphasize the difference between those who conduct an investigation of anything, based on the presence of certain traces, and those who are convinced that all traces are either erased or are knowingly false. In other words, we are talking about the difference between those who investigate something, and those who suddenly find that, by and large, they have to explore nothing.
We do not want to say that after Stalin there was no information left. Some crumbs remained, but there are so few of them, and they are so crushed by an array of false information that it is time to talk about the use of a special method, a research method, nothing. And that the novelty, and at the same time the relevance can be precisely the use of such a method. “But you will be all enveloped in emptiness,” Mephistopheles said to Faust. When you start researching Stalin, you suddenly realize that you are surrounded by just such a void. And you are surprised that other researchers do not seem to feel this.
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When the surprise passes, you understand the reason why this feeling of emptiness, this collision with a non-standard object named nothing is absent from other researchers. You understand that they do not have it precisely because of their experience, because they are conditioned by their own research skills, and depend on it. And when you depend on the skill associated with an object called something, even seeing an object called nothing, you dismiss the exoticism of the new object and say to yourself: “I will work with it as if it were something. Because I don't know how to work in another way. And, in principle, it is impossible to work differently. Therefore, I will pretend that there is no difference between the biography of Napoleon, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. And even if I understand that this difference exists, I will still pretend that it is not,because otherwise the whole set of my classic professional opportunities should be discarded, and I identify myself with this set and will never agree to discard it."
When you understand all this, then a bold thought arises: “What if we work with an object called nothing, without turning this object into something? What if you start exploring the void without pretending to be filled with something? After all, there are physicists who study the physical vacuum without turning it into a physical substance. So why is it impossible to explore the historical vacuum without turning it into historical substance?"
Such a bold thought not only does not obviate the need to get acquainted with someone else's research experience, but, on the contrary, requires the most thorough acquaintance. If only because just watching how nothing plays its game with those who explore it as something, you begin to face this nothing.
Therefore, this part of the study will talk about what are the attempts to study Stalin's personality, carried out by those who are convinced that they are operating with a certain amount of more or less objective information. A review of such attempts will give us both a map and the possibility of detecting white spots under layers of various paints superimposed on a dubious texture by various researchers, very respected by us.
I foresee that such an indication of the originality of the method will seem to someone to be an excuse for their own arbitrariness. And what can we be asked: "Do you want to rely not on the strict biographical calculations of brilliant professionals, but on the data of spiritualistic seances in which the spirit of Stalin is evoked?"
Of course, we do not want to rely on data from the seances. But in order to fully clarify our understanding of the dead end of the situation, we will answer such an ironic question ironically. And let's say: “If the data of spiritualistic seances can communicate something significant with a probability of one billion, then the data of superprofessional historians from the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, offered to Soviet society in the late 30s or early 50s of the XX century, reflect the truth simply in zero degree. Therefore, the data of the seances is more truthful than the data of superprofessional historians. These historians will report on Stalin what they were ordered to. They will be ordered to give one false interpretation of Stalin's role (for example, in the defense of Tsaritsyn) - they will give this interpretation, they will order to give the opposite - they will give the opposite. They will professionally construct the lie ordered by them - with a plus sign or with a minus sign. And if we want to deal with the personality of Stalin, then we must extract the truth from several modifications of lies."
But is in a different position, for example, a historian who works with the archives of the Inquisition? After all, these archives provide the most valuable historical material. So what? Are we going to call all the testimony given under torture true? This means that we must in a special way extract the truth from what is obviously not true. We should not become data specialists per se, but data specialists under torture. But working with such data is a different profession.
Quantum mechanics arose when a philosophical and methodological revision of the concept of "exact data" was made. The creators of quantum mechanics abandoned the concept of precision as such, replacing it with a probabilistic approach. It was an agonizing refusal, and some, including Albert Einstein, never agreed with the refusal. Meanwhile, on the basis of this refusal, carried out on the basis of the philosophical constructions of Mach and Avenarius, new, most valuable information was obtained, and on the basis of this information a most complex technique was created. And it would not have been created if someone did not have the courage to abandon the concept of objectivity in its classical sense.
To begin with, we propose to at least classify the varieties of lies, the imprint of which lies on certain data about Stalin. And admit that there is:
the bias of the lifetime of apologetics
the bias of the era of Khrushchev's blasphemy against Stalin
the bias of the era of Brezhnev's attempts to correct Khrushchev's lies and return to pre-Khrushchev's apologetics
blatant perestroika bias, it is also - "exposure of Stalinism"
the bias of the post-perestroika era, which develops the perestroika lie
the bias of those fighters against perestroika and post-perestroika lies, who are convinced that a slanderous wedge must be knocked out with an apologetic anticline
the bias of the CIA and other intelligence agencies involved in the Cold War
the opposite bias (which is again an anticline designed to knock a wedge), carried out by our workers on the ideological front, sincerely believe that they should participate in the Cold War
the bias of Stalin's enemies, who realized their just and unjust claims against him to the detriment of the truth. Such are, for example, Trotsky or the victims of Stalin's repressions
the bias of our special services or near-special services players who were preparing perestroika
market bias that requires authors to be sensational in the name of commercial success
bias in the spirit of fantasy, fake or conspiracy theories, in which deep human inadequacy is bizarrely intertwined with an order and orientation towards one's own, obsessed reader in one direction or another
We should not abandon all biased material, but acknowledge its bias and begin to extract the truth from this bias in a complex way.
We should not reject the principle of getting used to the personality, defended by certain historical schools and rejected by other schools, but recognize that in our case it is mandatory.
We must verify our information by this implantation, constantly asking ourselves the question of how a person could and could not act with such properties, a person, of course, is very large, very strong-willed, very dominant, very talented, very ascetic, and so on.
We should especially appreciate the grain of some kind of credibility that is born of the non-participation of witnesses in apologetic or defamatory games. And also because the testimonies given by such people were born very late - when the main defamatory or apologetic games were no longer prescribed to everyone with the utmost categoricality.
We must admit that in the case of Stalin we have to deal not only with the difference between fakes and archival materials, but also with all kinds of erasures and forgeries of archives.
That we are thus not in the world of classical history, analogous to the world of classical physics, but in a kind of behind the looking glass historical world, analogous to the quantum world, which was not called strange for nothing. And that we must learn to speak the language of this looking-glass world, correctly interpret the signals received from there, and so on. But in order to do this, it is necessary, first of all, to recognize the phenomenon of the Looking Glass itself, that is, to change the research approach. Is it possible? We are convinced that it is possible. If, for example, Stalin's enemies reject certain negative information about whom they hate, then this is essential. If apologists overlook apologetic information, then this is also significant. Once we recognize that the world is strange, we will begin to search in a strange way in a strange world for a strange truth.
Having briefly stipulated such methodological aspects, let us proceed to the consideration of all the material in order to apply the methodological principle just stated.
Many researchers were engaged in the study of Stalin's personality, the creation of his psychological and political portrait, a detailed examination of individual periods of Stalin's life. And therefore we can say that Stalin was studied by historians more thoroughly and in a multifaceted way than other major politicians, such as Napoleon or Caesar. There is, as it were, a separate direction in Sovietology, which is also the political history of the USSR.
But, firstly, Sovietology is not a completely ordinary political history of a certain state at a certain period of its existence. Sovietology is the most important direction of the Cold War strategy. That is, a war in which both the history of the Soviet state in general and the history of individual figures who played a significant role in the life of this state are subject to purposeful and consistent multidimensional distortion. The task of Sovietology is not to understand the USSR, but to destroy the USSR by creating in Soviet citizens a misconception about their own history.
A particularly important section of Sovietology is Stalin studies, that is, a description of Stalin's personality, designed to demonize this politician and, with the help of this demonization, deal a merciless blow to the values of Soviet citizens, to everything that can be called their Soviet identity.
History has always been and will be a hostage of politics to a greater or lesser extent. But she was never a hostage of politics to the extent that the architects of the Cold War and those of our compatriots who agreed to become the executors of the plans of these architects made her such a hostage.
It would seem that the Soviet Union collapsed, and the task of the architects of the Cold War has been brilliantly accomplished. But we all see that the Cold War continues and even gets worse. Because it was originally conceived and unleashed not only for the collapse of the USSR, but also for the elimination of Russia. Accordingly, the image of Stalin continues to remain a hostage of the ongoing Cold War.
Secondly, one can discuss the scale of the bloody deeds committed by Stalin as head of the Soviet state, compare these deeds with the deeds of other individuals (Napoleon or Mao Zedong). But the fact that Stalin shed a lot of blood is beyond doubt. Because of this, the image of Stalin is distorted not only by the Cold War troops, but also by those who, to a greater or lesser extent, continue to take revenge on the person who broke the life of this or that family, and therefore the life of the one who carries out this belated revenge.
Third, Stalin became extremely popular in post-Soviet Russia. This popularity is generated by the logic "by contradiction": "If you curse him, then, hating you, we begin to admire him because you curse him." The growth of Stalin's popularity cannot but arouse concern among the forces, for which the question of attitudes towards Stalin is closely linked with the question of preserving the existing post-Soviet order of life, that is, what can at a stretch be called "post-Soviet capitalism."
In the course of the creation of this capitalism, groups have formed that are at war with Stalin not because the West orders them, but because these are their economic, and therefore political, interests.
But all these reasons, alas, do not exhaust the obstacles standing in the way of the study of Stalin's personality.
The main obstacles are Stalin himself and his political system. Stalin was a very secretive person, and he absolutely did not want anyone to allow themselves to dig into his personal history. And the political system created by Stalin made it possible to fill this secrecy of Stalin with real meaning, to turn it into a total extermination of everything that somehow correlates with such an unwanted truth for the leader. The system uprooted everything that would allow it to rely on any factual material when conducting research on Stalin's personality. Stalin kept no diaries. His personal correspondence also provides extremely scant information, because he is subjectively extremely secretive and does not want to confess anything to anyone. Because he does not have those to whom he could confess. Because he is first a revolutionary and then a ruler. And such roles do not involve confession in the same way.
At the same time, everything that could be used to reveal the personality was thoroughly and ferociously rooted out by Stalin himself and his system. Neither Stalin nor the system can be blamed for this. Both Stalin and the system understood that any confession would be used by enemies, turned into a destructive myth, turned inside out. But Stalin's secrecy went further: he did not want not only the touch of one or another enemy to the sphere of his intimacy, to his personal world, he did not want the exact opposite - that such things would begin to be savored by the palace sycophants.
Stalin's secrecy gave rise to a paucity of material about his personality, and the specificity of the era led to the fact that what was scarce was eradicated.
As a result, we are doomed to a significant degree to guess on the coffee grounds. It is difficult for us to even establish the year of Stalin's birth. And also everything that can be called reference unconditional data. In the case of Stalin, nothing is unconditional, and it’s time to ask ourselves whether it is possible at all to create a full, reliable biography of Stalin, or whether we should in this case talk not about the biographical, but about the hagiographic method.
In the narrow sense of the word, hagiography (from the Greek "agio" - "saint" and "grapio" - "I write") is a theological discipline that studies the lives of saints. But here we use this word broadly, meaning that a whole class of research works is possible in which valuable information is given about a certain person - real or legendary - but this information does not always belong to the class of those that can be called historical in the strict sense of this the words.
Political hagiography is a fusion of objective historical information, analysts of conflicts about certain moments in the life and activities of a person, revealing something significant, albeit problematic, and finally, an analyst of all that legendary that has a certain political basis. Legends are always created for some reason, by someone. And identifying the legendary creator can indirectly provide us with certain paraobjective information. Which, of course, is much worse than the information received in case you suddenly got hold of Stalin's personal diary. But which acquire significance if there are no personal diaries and cannot be, and all materials, including archival materials, are flagrantly distorted.
And finally, hagiography is a meaningless metaphor for our research (that is, a kind of metaphorical compass) for us also because it is more spiritually oriented than ordinary history. That is, on what can be called an internal messianic message, but can be called a real subtle impact on history, and therefore on the person who creates it. And the point here is not even whether such a subtle effect takes place, but whether this or that person believes in it. Because this faith becomes an integral part of the life of a given person.
The last thing we want to talk about is Stalin's holiness. Although it is known that in certain Russian Orthodox churches, non-canonical icons of Stalin have already appeared, and, as they say in such cases, it is not over yet. But this is not our path and not our concept of values.
We are just talking about a special, hagiographic genre of research into Stalin's personality - because it seems to us that another, strictly historical method, much more desirable for us, is impossible.
We remain faithful to the historical method and bring our hagiographic and, in this sense, hagiographic research closer to biographical research as much as possible. But we know that biography is impossible. And that the attempt to ignore this impossibility removes us from the truth further than its recognition.
This is our research compass.
Now about the map - that is, the used system of what, in a less complicated case, could be called historical sources, and in the case of Stalin, alas, we have to call them hagiographic sources (in the broad sense of the word, which is stipulated above).
We emphasize once again that neither the memories of his relatives and friends, stored in the archives, nor even more so memoir literature can tell us nothing for sure about his personality. During Stalin's life, society was dominated by what was later called the personality cult. After the XX Congress, the so-called debunking of the personality cult began. In both the first and second cases, objectivity was sacrificed to one or another ideological order.
During Stalin's life, there was not only an ideological order to praise the father of nations, but also something else. Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky called this “other” “the glory of the name”. Tvardovsky's poem "Beyond the Distance" speaks of the glory of the name of Stalin, inextricably linked with the exploits of the people. That
Country, power
In the harsh working days of labor, Tu held the glory of the name
On the towers of world construction projects.
And
her courage from the Volga shores
Carried her courage to the black walls of the Reichstag
On the hot crown of the trunks …
For this reason, everything connected with Stalin was not only subjected to tendentious ideological processing, produced by servile officialdom, but was also shrouded in a fog of spontaneous popular veneration. Sacralization of the image took place during his lifetime, various episodes of his biography acquired the character of legends. As a result, a bizarre alloy was created, inside which there was no room for truth.
In subsequent periods, the same alloy was further processed. The officialdom carried out a new order and slandered Stalin. And new and new legends were born in society: both with the plus sign and with the minus sign.
As a result, Stalin's real life turned out to be a fusion of myths, false praise and equally false slander. How to break through to the truth if it is shrouded in such a fog? And can this be done without taking up the legends of Stalin, without making them the subject of special consideration?
There are many legends about Stalin.
There are legends about the family of a "wonderful child" in different variations: either the "wonderful child" - the son of simple parents, or a certain princess, or Przewalski, associated with Tibet.
There is a certain legend about how and when Stalin “turned to the path of salvation,” that is, went into the revolution, and what torments (exile, hard labor) he endured along the way.
There is a legend about his death.
In a sense, a certain biographical canon is defined, which is usually observed in the lives of the saints. So you can't talk about Stalin's biography. We can talk about specific hagiography.
Until now, there has been no such - sufficiently detailed - hagiography. We see our attempt to create it as the only possible way to move towards truth.
At the same time, we proceed from the assumption that the blatant lack of objectivity can be overcome to a greater or lesser extent only by classifying the non-objective - highlighting the degrees of bias, forms of bias, and so on. Perhaps, in this case, something will be revealed to us. There is no other way to the truth in the case of Stalin's biography and cannot be.
So what are they - forms of bias, pseudo-objectivity, apologetics, innuendo, mythologization, and so on?
Let's start by looking at the most objective one.
Lifetime apologetics
Even before Stalin came to power in 1929, a number of biographical materials were published about him.
The first biographical sketch about Stalin was published in 1923. Its author was the correspondent of the newspaper "Pravda", Bolshevik Georgy Leonidovich Shidlovsky. The essay "Dzhugashvili Iosif Vissarionovich" was published in "Materials for a biographical dictionary of the Social Democrats who joined the Russian labor movement from 1880 to 1905" edited by Vladimir Ivanovich Nevsky. It should be noted here that a dictionary entry imposes certain restrictions on the author: he cannot compose it with the plus or minus sign - he is neutral. But for us he gives some initial ideas about Stalin's life, shows the main milestones of his life: birth, joining the organization, moving around the country, arrests, exile.
Even in such a rather dry historical sketch, interesting details can be found. Shidlovsky cites a little-known fact that Stalin at one time worked as an accountant. References to Stalin's work as an accountant can also be found in the book of the emigrant Mark Aldanov, The Murder of Uritsky, written in 1930. True, where exactly he worked as an accountant, these sources do not say. Perhaps, according to Leon Trotsky, at the Tiflis Observatory after being expelled from the theological seminary.
The years 1925-1927 for Stalin were the years of an acute political struggle against the opposition: Lev Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev. Naturally, the materials published at that time could not be apologetic, but the slightest clue was used by Stalin's opponents to discredit him. For example, to launch rumors about Stalin's work for the tsarist secret police.
Thus, in the book by Sevasti Talakvadze "On the history of the Communist Party of Georgia" it is said that in 1905 the Mensheviks called Stalin _ [! "An agent of the government, a spy-provocateur." This turned out to be enough to sow doubts in the readers on the principle "there is no smoke without fire".
In December 1925, during the XIV Congress of the CPSU (b), at which Lev Kamenev raised the question of Stalin's removal from the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b), the Transcaucasian Regional Committee of the CPSU (b) in the newspaper Zarya Vostoka published two very specific documents. First, this is Stalin's letter to VS Bobrovsky dated January 24, 1911, in which Stalin calls the sharp struggle between the Lenin-Plekhanov and Trotsky-Martov-Bogdanov blocs on the issue of the need to unite with the Mensheviks "a storm in a glass of water." In his book on Stalin, Trotsky caustically noted: "Stalin clearly flatters the mood of theoretical indifference and the sense of the supposed superiority of myopic practitioners."
In addition, the "Dawn of the East" published a "Letter from the head of the Tiflis security department, captain Karpov," in which it was reported that IV Dzhugashvili "was arrested in 1905 and escaped from prison." This arrest is not mentioned in Shidlovsky's essay, which, like any lack of agreement, fed rumors about Stalin's desire to hide something.
In 1927, an essay was published in the Granat encyclopedia, written by Ivan Pavlovich Tovstukha, who served as First Assistant to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) I. V. Stalin. Naturally, this essay could not but agree with the head of Tovstukha. On the issue of arrests and exile, the author, for some reason, follows the tradition of “fogging up”. There is no mention of Stalin's arrest in 1905 in the essay, the exact dates of his exile are not indicated. The text says that Stalin fled from exile in 1908 to the Vologda province "in a few months", just as indefinitely he remains in exile in 1911, 1912 and 1913. But the essay emphasizes the working origin of Stalin: "Georgian by nationality, the son of a shoemaker, a worker of the shoe factory Adelkhanov in Tiflis, by registration - a peasant in the Tiflis province and district, the village of Didi-Lilo." Besides,in the essay of Stalin's secretary, in more detail than in the description of Shidlovsky, it tells about the Tiflis Theological Seminary, it is noted that Stalin was expelled from the seminary for "unreliability." Tovstukha describes Stalin's tremendous work in building the organization of Transcaucasia, his services in the Civil War. Before us appears not the faceless Dzhugashvili of Shidlovsky, but the emerging hero of the revolution and the future leader of the Soviet state - Joseph Stalin.and the emerging hero of the revolution and the future leader of the Soviet state - Joseph Stalin.and the emerging hero of the revolution and the future leader of the Soviet state - Joseph Stalin.
By 1929, Stalin, who headed the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, finally defeated the opposition and actually became the head of state. Since that time, accordingly, in the Soviet press there has not and could not have been anything defaming or offending him: all biographical information was carefully verified and agreed upon.
Noteworthy biographical materials of this time include the report of the First Secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee Lavrenty Beria "On the history of the Bolshevik organization of Transcaucasia" dated July 21, 1935, with which he spoke in Tiflis before a meeting of the party activists. This report interests us from the point of view of official information about Stalin's comrades and mentors - not only those with whom he began his party work, but also those with whom he subsequently fought.
In 1937, the publishing house of the Central Committee of the Komsomol "Young Guard" published a "hagiographic" collection of memoirs "Tales of Old Workers of Transcaucasia about the Great Stalin", in which friends of Stalin's childhood and youth, his comrades in political struggle talk about his studies at a theological school, about Stalin's work in an illegal position in Batum, Baku, Tiflis. In the book, Stalin appears ideal from all points of view: serious, intelligent, fearless, fair - a real national hero.
In 1937, the book “Batumi Demonstration of 1902” was published, consisting of the memoirs of Stalin's comrades from work in Batum - participants in the Batumi demonstration at the Mantashev plant. Note that this book was also used by Mikhail Bulgakov to write his famous, rather apologetic play "Batum". Natalya Kirtava, a participant in the 1902 Batumi demonstration, whose memories are also included in this book, are called by some biographers Stalin's first love.
In 1939, the Soviet party leader, Stalin's ally Emelyan Yaroslavsky published the book "On Comrade Stalin." The book, I must say, is remarkable. It is a brief summary of all previous publications, all known information of an official nature related to the political biography of Stalin. In addition, in Yaroslavsky - perhaps for the first time in the Soviet press - you can find facts about Stalin's youthful passion for poetry, about his literary preferences.
In the same year 1939, the year of Stalin's sixtieth birthday, his first official short biography appeared. The second edition of the CV was published in 1947. Stalin made his own edits to the layout of the first edition of his short biography: in particular, he made about 20 corrections in the pre-revolutionary period. It is striking that Stalin corrected the number of his arrests, exile and escapes. So, at first, the number of arrests was eight, the number of exiles was seven, and the number of escapes was six. In the second edition, these figures are reduced by one: "From 1902 to 1913, Stalin was arrested seven times, was in exile six times, escaped from exile five times."
In addition, when the biography was about organizing strikes and demonstrations, about joint work, Stalin added the names of other organizers next to his last name, if the authors did not have any mention of them.
About his personal life, about the work of Stalin in the early years, nothing is said in his brief biography.
But in the same jubilee 1939, the poem of the Georgian Soviet poet Georgy Leonidze “Stalin. Childhood and adolescence”. Leonidze also received theological education: in 1918 he graduated from the Tbilisi Theological Seminary. In 1939-1951, Georgy Leonidze was director of the State Literary Museum of the Georgian SSR. The peculiarity of Leonidze's poem is that he showed with great skill how Georgian legends and ancient traditions influenced Stalin from early childhood, in particular, about the hero Amirani, chained to a rock, who stole fire for people. Leonidze also tells a lot of details about Stalin's family: about his grandmother, grandfather, great-grandfather Zaza Dzhugashvili, who raised a peasant uprising in the early 19th century. It should be noted that in 1941 Georgy Leonidze was awarded the Stalin Prize for this poem.
More lifetime biographies of Stalin in the Soviet Union were not published.
Today's archives contain various, unquestionably apologetic memories of Stalin's friends and comrades in the revolutionary struggle, for example, Giorgi Elisabedashvili, Peter Kapanadze, Sergei Alilluev. Can they, cleaned up and emasculated, shed light on anything? Certainly. Behind the dense veil of praise, one can see some grains of the present: little Stalin's love for Georgian culture, his hobbies. Comparing the memories, one can understand something about his family, about his studies at the seminary, about his revolutionary path and personal life, which is especially valuable.
Apologetic biographies were published not only in the Soviet Union, but also abroad.
Among apologetic foreign biographies, an important place is occupied by the book "Stalin: The New World Seen Through Man", written by Henri Barbusse, a writer and a member of the French Communist Party. It was published in Paris in 1935. By that time, Henri Barbusse was already famous. The anti-war novel Fire: A Platoon's Diary, based on the personal experience of Barbusse who fought in the First World War, received in 1916 France's highest literary award, the Goncourt Prize.
Henri Barbusse received the October Revolution in Russia with enthusiasm. In 1923 he became a member of the French Communist Party.
In 1927, Barbusse visited the USSR for the first time. He visited Kharkov, Rostov-on-Don, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan … Henri Barbusse wrote several books and a number of articles in which he showed the Western and Soviet readers the achievements of Soviet power. The writer sincerely admired how the country is transforming literally before our eyes.
In 1927, 1932, 1933 and 1934. Barbusse met and talked with Stalin. In the 20s and 30s, he kept up a lively correspondence with him. On December 8, 1932, the propaganda department sent a letter to Stalin's secretariat, where it recommended Henri Barbusse as a Stalinist biographer. Note that it was planned to write the biography under the tacit supervision of the department of culture and propaganda of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b). This is indirectly confirmed by the phrase from the above letter: “Comrade. Manuilsky believes that Henri Barbusse can and should be entrusted with this matter, he will write what he will be advised, in particular, about the fight against Trotskyism. " The first edition of the biography was criticized by the head of the department of culture and propaganda of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) A. I. Stetsky. Having highly appreciated the work of Barbyus, Stetsky made a number of comments regarding the coverage of the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky,some questions of an ideological nature. It cannot be fully assumed that this biography was written "under the dictation in the Kremlin," as Trotsky quipped. But the influence of the CPSU (b) on it cannot be denied.
Still, perhaps, it is worth mentioning the work published in 1942 by the English writer and public figure Ivor Montague. The publisher was the British Communist Party. Unfortunately, Montague's book is not original. Stalin's personal life is practically not considered in it. The data are mainly from a short biography and previously published biographical works. This book is rather an educational program for the British communists.
It is clear that there are few biographies praising Stalin abroad. Those who hated him and the October Revolution wrote much more about Stalin.
Among foreign authors claiming a certain neutrality, one can single out the British writer Stephen Graham, who was considered a well-known expert on Russia in the West: before the October Revolution, he traveled a lot across the Russian Empire, was in Ukraine, in the Transcaucasus, studied Russian, was fond of Russian history and literature. … He penned research on Ivan the Terrible, Boris Godunov, Peter I, Alexander II. In his book dedicated to Stalin (1931), he did not just talk about him, about his political career before 1917. Approaching the study comprehensively, Graham analyzed the historical context in which the Bolshevik organization of the Transcaucasus operated, the state of the Russian Empire before 1917, and described the prerequisites for the October Revolution.
Foreign biographies of Stalin's opponents
One of the first to create his own version of the life of Joseph Stalin in 1931 was the famous adventurer, hoaxer, adventurer Lev Nussimbaum (Kurban Said, Essad-Bey), who was born in 1905 into the family of an oil tycoon. American journalist Tom Reiss, who worked for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for a long time, published a book about Nussimbaum in 2005. According to him, Leo's mother, who committed suicide when the boy was 6 years old, sympathized with the revolutionary movement and, in particular, was associated with Leonid Krasin and a certain "Pockmarked", "Seminary". Tom Reiss claims that "Pockmarked" was most likely Joseph Dzhugashvili and that in Baku Lev Nussimbaum personally communicated with him and even hinted that "Seminarist", that is, the Bolshevik Dzhugashvili, became the cause of the discord in the family of little Leo, which ended in tragedy.
Essad Bay was not inspired by the ideas of Bolshevism. He considered Stalin to be his personal enemy, who drove his mother to suicide: "He took away from me my homeland, my home, everything in general."
In 1931, Isaac Don Levin's book "Stalin" was also published. The book can hardly be called a full-fledged biography. There are relatively few direct dates and biographical details, and even those are often in rather vague or inaccurate form.
We can say that Don Levin uses the figure of Stalin and his biography only as a rather schematic framework around which a subjective description of the history of Bolshevism is built. Before the revolution, the material was presented in a generally neutral way. Then in places in the text there are negative evaluative epithets attributing to the revolution a destructive and monstrous character, and to Stalin the role of an evil mysterious genius who managed to usurp power.
Another famous book about Stalin, which cannot be ignored, was written in 1938–1940 by his political opponent, Leon Trotsky. Trotsky's book "Stalin" was published in the USA in 1946. In his book, Trotsky sought to portray Stalin as a calculating, ruthless, power-hungry man. The author searches for the origins of the negative qualities of Stalin's character in childhood, providing the reader with biographical details allegedly known to him. For example, he gives a portrait of a family in which a father severely beats his own son, refutes Stalin's "proletarian" origin, speaks rather acrimoniously about the conditions in which little Stalin lived, etc.
At the same time, Trotsky, like many foreign authors, often relies on the memoirs of Joseph Iremashvili "Stalin and the Tragedy of Georgia", published in Berlin in 1932. Iosif Iremashvili is a close childhood friend of Stalin, who later became his political opponent. The objectivity of Iremashvili's recollections is often questioned by historians. Indeed, could someone who had become a Menshevik since 1903 have written truthfully about Stalin? The one who was exiled abroad and waged a fierce struggle against the Bolsheviks while in Germany?
Further, the biography of Stalin, written by the defector Sergei Dmitrievsky in 1931, deserves interest. I would like to include it in this section, despite the fact that it is specifically apologetic. Like Henri Barbusse, Dmitrievsky paints a close to ideal image of Stalin, along the way accusing Trotsky of false propaganda. This is all the more interesting because Dmitrievsky is not a member of the Communist Party, moreover, he is a defector.
In this regard, one cannot but recall that Dmitrievsky put forward his own theory of national communism, which was quite close to the ideas of Hitler. And it was important for him to make Stalin an icon of his ideology like Hitler. Stalin as a "people's monarch" was supposed to remain in power after Dmitrievsky's expected "Great National Revolution of the Russian people." Dmitrievsky believed that Stalin completely rejected Western Marxism. And before him, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself allegedly took the first steps in this direction.
This is how Trotsky described Dmitrievsky in his book Stalin: “Dmitrievsky is a former Soviet diplomat, chauvinist and anti-Semite who temporarily joined the Stalinist faction during its struggle against Trotskyism, then deserted abroad to the side of the right wing of the White emigration. It is remarkable that even as an open fascist, Dmitrievsky continues to put Stalin high, hate his opponents and repeat all the Kremlin legends."
The biography of Stalin by the French communist-anti-Stalinist Boris Souvarin, published in 1935, is quite well known. Souvarine was a Trotskyist and, as expected, wrote a biography that was not laudatory. Stalin appears to him as a "tyrant", a wild "Asian", an upstart, incapable of theoretical constructions.
In 1938, a book by defector Suren Erzinkyan, The Way of Stalin, was published, which contains a rather exotic version of Stalin's origin. The book states that his mother was a Caucasian Jew and that, therefore, Stalin was Jewish. This very rare version will find its followers in post-perestroika Russia.
Among the biographies published in subsequent years, the work "Stalin: Tsar of All Russia" by Lyons Eugene (1940) should be noted. Its author is an American journalist who emigrated with his family from the Russian Empire to the United States in 1907. From 1928 to 1934 he worked as a journalist for United Press International in Moscow. It is noteworthy that Lyons Eugene, while working in Moscow, was quite loyal to the Soviet regime. He became the first foreign journalist to interview Stalin. Nevertheless, having left for the USA in 1934, he began to write sharply anti-Stalinist books, to which the above biography belongs. Lyons himself notes that his task was to convey his personal impressions of the work "in the shadow of Stalin's power" and that he mainly relied on the books of Boris Souvarin and Isaac Don Levin. The author also expressed his gratitude to Charles Malamute, the translator of Trotsky's book "Stalin" into English.
In 1949, a large-scale study of the Polish and British historian, publicist Isaac Deutscher, "The Political Biography of Stalin", was published in England. Isaac Deutscher examines the path of Stalin's formation as a leader and a politician, starting from childhood, describes the period of his work in a revolutionary organization, the war. It should be noted that Deutscher is a staunch Trotskyist. And, naturally, for him the Stalinist regime is a political perversion, a retreat from Marxism-Leninism. Despite this, Deutscher also notes Stalin's merits, and also puts him on a par with such great people as Napoleon and Oliver Cromwell.
Of interest to us are the few interviews with Stalin. For example, Stalin's interview with journalist and writer Emil Ludwig on December 13, 1931. The interview turned out to be very interesting: Ludwig asked Stalin questions about fate, history, Marxist theory and Lenin. Stalin outlined his view of domestic and foreign policy in an interview with the English writer Herbert Wells in 1934.
Non-apologetic Western biographies (as well as apologetic ones) are extremely tendentious. However, at least they did not pass the Soviet censorship (although, perhaps, they did pass the anti-Soviet one). Be that as it may, they sometimes contain quite interesting facts that could not be published in Soviet biographies for censorship reasons. Therefore, they are of great value for our research.
Cold War biographies of Stalin
After the exposure of the personality cult of Stalin in the USSR, no one undertook to write his biography. During Khrushchev's time, everything positive about Stalin was taboo. In 1961, Stalin's body was taken out of the Mausoleum, his name was erased from the people's memory, the image of the Father and Teacher was destroyed. This caused enormous damage to the moral and psychological state of the Soviet people.
At the time of Brezhnev, Stalin was mildly rehabilitated in the USSR. The image of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief began to appear in books and films. An example of this is the book by Yuri Bondarev "Hot Snow", published in 1970. In the same year, a monument to Stalin appeared at the Kremlin wall. However, as before, no one seriously studied the biography of Stalin. The image of Stalin the revolutionary was not needed - the image of Stalin the sovereign, the wise and calm Stalin with a pipe was needed. The revolutionary fire was extinguished.
But abroad, one after another, biographies of Stalin appeared, written by people who seriously participated in the Cold War. Often, the authors of such biographies were associated with British or American intelligence. These authors just understood how much the image of Stalin the Father meant to the Soviet people. And that it is anti-Stalinism, even in the conditions of the debunked cult of personality, will play its role in the destruction of the Soviet state.
In 1956, the year when the famous XX Congress of the CPSU took place with its debunking of the personality cult of Stalin, a book by Isaac Don Levin, already known to us, "Stalin's greatest secret" was published. First, in the Life magazine, and then in this book, Don Levin published a letter allegedly discovered by him from the head of the Special Department of the Police Department, Eremin, addressed to the head of the Yenisei security department A. F. as proof of Stalin's work for the tsarist secret police. However, the authenticity of this letter was disputed not only by Stalin's apologists, but also by his opponents, the Mensheviks. Thus, the above-mentioned Boris Souvarin, as well as the Menshevik, Bundist who emigrated from the Soviet Union to Germany, Grigory Aronson, criticized the "letter of Eremin".
Despite the fact that the document is an obvious forgery, it was repeatedly consulted by both foreign and Russian authors during and after perestroika. The "letter" first appeared in the Soviet press on March 30, 1989, in Moskovskaya Pravda. Two doctors of historical sciences: Georgy Arutyunov and Fyodor Volkov - published an article "Before the Court of History", where they provided the reader with this document and "proved" that Stalin worked for the tsarist secret police.
As for the personality of Don Levin himself, she is not without interest. Don Levin was born in 1892 in Belarus. From 1911 he worked as a columnist for the Kansas City Star and the New York Tribune. In 1917 he covered the October Revolution in the American press. In the 1920s he went to Russia to cover the events of the Civil War. From the very beginning, he sharply criticized the Soviet regime and until his death remained its implacable enemy.
From 1946 to 1950 Don Levin was the editor of the monthly anti-communist magazine Plain Talk. In 1951, he co-founded the American Committee for the Liberation from Bolshevism, headquartered in Munich. And it should be noted that this committee was under the direct control of the CIA.
As part of the QKACTIVE project in 1953, the committee founded the radio station "Liberation" "to reduce the threat to world security." Subsequently, it was renamed into the infamous radio station "Freedom".
In 1967, Edward Ellis Smith's remarkable work Young Stalin appears. A short biography of Smith, found on the California online archive site, states that he was a historian, writer, Foreign Service, and CIA agent. Smith graduated from the University of West Virginia in 1939 and was sent to Germany to fight in World War II. After the war, he studied at the US Navy School, where he learned Russian. From 1946 to 1947, Smith attended the Pentagon Intelligence School and the counterintelligence school at the Holabird War Camp. From 1948 to 1950, Edward Smith served as Assistant Defense Attaché in Moscow. In September 1950 he returned to the United States and was assigned to the CIA.
In 1953, Smith arrived in Moscow again, but as a military attaché. Historian Alexander Kolpakidi, who in the post-Soviet years began to consider various special services plots, reports that in Moscow, Smith was recruited by the KGB and became a double agent. In 1956, Smith confessed to working for the KGB to his superiors, then he was recalled to the United States and fired from the CIA. After his dismissal, Smith became a director of the bank, which clearly indicates that his dismissal was not too scandalous. After leaving the CIA, Smith wrote several books that brought him fame. One of these books is called Young Stalin.
Smith again reproduces the myth that young Dzhugashvili worked for the Tsarist secret police. At the same time, even the CIA was forced to admit that the evidence base presented by Smith is, to put it mildly, very shaky. In his report, the CIA wrote that Smith conducted a large-scale study, but "his conclusions are awkward and do not stem from the facts he cited." The CIA report also noted that Smith distorts the facts, trying to tie them to his hypothesis, and sometimes, where evidence is lacking, he thinks out and constructs something himself. Moreover, he constructs something not entirely successful. “This over-enthusiasm for approaching the facts… undermines the reader's credibility,” the report says. All this as a whole, as the author of the report writes, undermines the confidence of even the reader who initially trusted the hypothesis of Stalin's work for the tsarist secret police.
Moreover, the propagandistic ambiguity of this work, which compromises anti-Stalinism, made Americans disown it publicly. In 1968, The American Historical Review magazine published a review of Smith's book, written by the famous American diplomat George Kennan. This recall, like the CIA report, underscores the lack of validity for Smith's conclusions.
In 1971, Roy Medvedev's study “To the Court of History. About Stalin and Stalinism.
Roy Alexandrovich Medvedev is a famous Soviet and Russian publicist, teacher, historian, author of many political biographies. He belongs to the so-called left-wing dissidents, that is, to dissidents who sought to cleanse socialism of Soviet and, above all, Stalinist distortions. In 1969, Medvedev was expelled from the CPSU for his book "To the Court of History." In 1989 (that is, 18 years after the publication of Medvedev's work in New York), Medvedev was reinstated in the party, while retaining his party experience. The restoration of Medvedev took place on the initiative of the so-called architect of perestroika A. N. Yakovlev. Roy Medvedev, assessing his worldview, wrote: “I have never betrayed either my convictions or the ideals of youth. In this I see my father's influence, he was able to instill in me his commitment to socialism."
Roy Alexandrovich's father - Alexander Romanovich Medvedev, a Soviet military leader, regimental commissar, in the 30s served as a senior lecturer in the department of dialectical and historical materialism at the V. I. Lenin Military-Political Academy. He was the deputy head of the department. In 1938 he was arrested and died in 1941 in Kolyma. In 1956 he was rehabilitated. According to Medvedev, the death of his father left an imprint on his entire future life.
Medvedev notes that his position is akin to the positions of foreign communist parties (Italian, Spanish): he fought to democratize the party's policies. Stalin's policy, in his opinion, distorted the "socialist essence of the Soviet state."
Medvedev's book “Towards the Court of History. About Stalin and Stalinism”was written without using archival data, since the author did not have access to the archives. It is a collection of personal assessments of Roy Aleksandrovich himself, who does not hide his extremely negative assessment of Stalin, as well as some dialogues between Medvedev and those who, at different stages, became the interlocutors of this left dissident. Medvedev himself characterizes the sources on which he relied when creating his biography of Stalin: “I met and talked in detail with the past Stalinist prisons and camps of the old Bolsheviks, including the few surviving members of the opposition, as well as miraculously surviving former Socialist-Revolutionaries, anarchists and Mensheviks, non-party technical specialists, with former military men, scientists, writers, journalists, party workers,ordinary workers and peasants, with those who were called “kulaks”, and those who “dispossessed” them, with priests and ordinary believers, with former Chekists, with emigrants who returned to the Soviet Union and those who were going to leave the USSR”.
If a book about Medvedev himself was written on the basis of such meetings with those who crossed paths with Roy Alexandrovich and had reason to be offended at him, would Roy Alexandrovich call such a book objective?
The assessment of the manuscript of Roy Medvedev was given by Yuri Andropov: "A new version of the manuscript of R. A. Medvedev" Before the Court of History "was promptly obtained … The book … is based on biased but reliable facts, supplied with skillfully made commentary and catchy demagogic conclusions …" At the same time, noted Andropov, "one should not exclude the possibility of involving Medvedev in writing a work on the period of interest to him in the life of our state under the appropriate party control."
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov never threw words to the wind. His participation in the fate of Medvedev is quite obvious. Because of this, spiteful critics sometimes call Medvedev a "special dissident." The connection with Andropov and Yakovlev could not but leave an imprint on the work of Roy Medvedev. This does not at all follow the insincerity of Medvedev himself. Here one should rather speak of "masterfully controlled" sincerity.
In 1973, Robert Tucker published his book Stalin the Revolutionary 1879-1929: History and Personality in New York, which is considered one of the most detailed biographies of the young Stalin.
Tucker is a famous American Sovietologist, in 1942-1944. worked in the Office of Strategic Services. In 1944, Tucker began working as a translator for the US Embassy in Moscow. He married a Soviet citizen Evgenia Pestretsova. In 1953, after Stalin's death, he and his wife left for the United States.
Robert Tucker referred his book to the genre of "psychohistory", seeking to explain Stalin's actions by personal qualities that were formed in childhood and adolescence. To do this, he turned to the neo-Freudian school, in particular to the works of Karen Horney and Eric Erickson. “Characteristics and motivation are not permanent qualities. They develop and change throughout life, in which there are usually critical moments and future-defining decisions. Moreover, the individuality formed in adolescence, or (as Erickson put it) "psychosocial identity" has a perspective, or programmatic, dimension. It contains not only the individual's sense of who and what he is, but also his goals, clear or rudimentary ideas about what he should, can and will be able to achieve,”writes Tucker.
Tucker's book, being one of the most ambitious studies of Stalin's biography, is deliberately biased due to the psychohistorical approach itself, which in principle excludes objectivity and sacrifices it to one or another interpretation of the hero's motives. In this case, everything depends on how motives are identified and interpreted: when using Erickson's psychology, motives will be identified and interpreted in one way, when using other psychological models, which are innumerable, - in a different way. It should also be noted that the idea of discovering the sources of Stalin's political motivation by immersing himself in the hero's childhood and adolescent misadventures is not new. And Trotsky, and Iremashvili, and the same Roy Medvedev, on whom, among other things, Tucker relies, believed that the sources of Stalin's tyranny should be sought precisely in childhood.
It is noteworthy that Tucker criticizes the version of Isaac Don Levin and Edward Smith that Stalin was an agent of the tsarist secret police, calling Eremin's letter untrustworthy, and Edward Smith's arguments unconvincing.
In 1980, the book "Stalin: A Portrait of a Tyrant" was published in New York, written by the son of the famous repressed Bolshevik Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko - Anton. This book is filled with anti-Stalinist clichés, literally saturated with hatred of the Stalinist era and of Stalin personally.
Anton Vladimirovich's mother, Rozalia Borisovna Katsnelson, was arrested in 1929 as an enemy of the people and in 1936 committed suicide in the Khanty-Mansiysk prison. Father - a famous Bolshevik, one of the organizers of the October Revolution of 1917, Soviet diplomat Vladimir Aleksandrovich Antonov-Ovseenko was arrested in 1937 for belonging to a Trotskyist organization, in February 1938 he was shot. Anton Vladimirovich himself was arrested in the 40s. After the publication of the book “Stalin. Portrait of a Tyrant”Antonov-Ovseenko was under the threat of arrest, but in 1982 Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov interceded for the author of the book, asked to limit himself to suggestion. In 1984, Antonov-Ovseenko was nevertheless arrested for anti-Soviet propaganda. True, it is difficult to call this a full-scale arrest: they expelled from Moscow, took away the archive. Two years later, they were allowed to return. In 1990 he wrote a number of anti-Stalinist books. Since 1995, Anton Vladimirovich headed the Union of Organizations of Victims of Political Repression of the Moscow Region, founded the State Museum of the History of the Gulag. From 2001 to 2011 he was its director.
What objectivity can be expected from a person who first declares that "writing the truth about Stalin is the duty of every honest person", and then said: "Stalinism is a whole era (not about Stalinism we should talk about Stalinism). The era when the most heinous, bloody crime took place on Earth. Stalinism - political banditry turned into state policy?
Soviet and Russian historian Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov, who studied in detail the question of Stalinist repressions, wrote about Anton Vladimirovich: “One cannot take seriously, for example, the statements of the famous publicist A. V. Antonov-Ovseenko, who assured the readers of Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1991, that after the war, 16 million prisoners were held in the camps and colonies of the GULAG. As of the date he indicated, the camps and colonies of the Gulag contained not 16 million, but 1.6 million prisoners. You should still pay attention to the comma between the numbers."
We also note that in 1989, Anton Vladimirovich Antonov-Ovseenko, in his article in the Voprosy istorii magazine, spoke about the alleged frivolity of Stalin's mother. Among the possible fathers, he names a certain "prosperous prince", as well as a merchant, a friend of the Dzhugashvili family, Yakov Egnatashvili.
Antonov-Ovseenko's book Stalin: Portrait of a Tyrant was published in Russia in 1994. In the 1990s, he was noted for a number of anti-Stalinist books: "Stalin without a mask" (1990), "Theater of Joseph Stalin" (1995).
We see that the biographies written by people associated with the CIA, who worked for the collapse of the USSR, are filled with all sorts of negative assessments, myths, and conjectures. And that these assessments, myths and conjectures, created in the era of the bipolar world, were used in perestroika and post-perestroika times to impose a guilt complex on the now citizens of post-Soviet Russia - after all, their great-grandfathers once adored Stalin, with his name they went on the attack, his name is steadfastly associated with the victory in the Great Patriotic War.
Biographies of Stalin in perestroika and post-perestroika times
During the years of perestroika and post-perestroika, a huge number of books were published, clearly and moderately anti-Stalinist. All of them are filled with both reliable facts and an incredible amount of speculation. At the same time, one gets the impression that if, before perestroika, the authors of such books exposed the personality cult of Stalin, focusing precisely on his tough policy in the countryside, on the scale of repression, then in the perestroika years, the emphasis in anti-Stalinist publications shifts to the intimate-personal sphere: the authors begin that is called, delving into dirty linen, in the tragic family history of Stalin.
Here, in our opinion, it is not worth dividing books into Russian and foreign ones, since during the period of perestroika any anti-Stalinist book published found its readers in Russia and abroad.
In 1989, the book of the Soviet historian Dmitry Volkogonov “Triumph and Tragedy. Political portrait of Stalin”.
Dmitry Antonovich Volkogonov since 1971 worked in the Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army and the Navy, in the early 1980s he was the head of the Special Propaganda Directorate, and in the late 1980s he served as Deputy Head of the Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army and the Military the navy. In the 1990s, Volkogonov was a member of the commission for determining the list of documents in the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation and for declassifying documents. By virtue of his position, Volkogonov had the opportunity to familiarize himself with quite important and interesting materials. However, the worldview mobility of Volkogonov, who in 1989 still wrote about Lenin that “the genius of this man was great”, and in 1992 he already characterized the same Lenin as “an unattractive person and a primitive philosopher”,- could not but affect the biography of Stalin written by Volkogonov. Volkogonov's opponents repeatedly cite strong evidence that this author does not shy away from compilations, is inclined to change his position under the influence of the conjuncture, and tends to a propagandistic manner of presentation. And that his works are purely journalistic in nature, stuffed with gossip, myths, speculation and gross errors.
Volkogonov himself writes that the basis of Stalin's political biography was not only archives, but also "personal conversations with people who knew Stalin closely, analysis of the documents of the Headquarters and personal correspondence." Volkogonov is interested in the political portrait of Stalin after 1917.
That is, again, as in the case of Medvedev, we are dealing with the author's desire to collect, by definition, irresponsible interviews.
Abroad, in 1990, a large-scale study of the famous English Sovietologist Robert Conquest “Stalin - the Conqueror of Nations” was published. Conquest, who at one time worked in the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Ministry, created to combat Soviet propaganda, by that time was known as the author of anti-Stalinist books, including sensational and controversial ones. These include The Great Terror: The Stalinist Purges of the 1930s (1968), which described tens of millions of victims of Stalin's repression, and The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and Terror by Hunger (1986) about the Holodomor in Ukraine.
In Stalin, the Conqueror of Nations, Conquest, like all his predecessors in the West, refers to Stalin's childhood, seeking to find in it the origins of Stalin's despotism. Conquest describes Stalin's childhood and youth experiences, analyzes his traumas. Conquest's book features alternative versions of paternity. In this work, as in Antonov-Ovseenko, the names of the Russian traveler Nikolai Przhevalsky and the wealthy merchant, a friend of the Dzhugashvili family, Yakov Egnatashvili, are named.
In 1990, the second volume of Robert Tucker's book “Stalin in Power. 1928-1941 ". The author, relying, among other things, on the work of A. V. Antonov-Ovseenko, already familiar to us, accuses Stalin of the cruelties of collectivization and industrialization, the desire to conclude an agreement with the Nazis and the murder of Kirov. It should be noted that in this book the author, using very dubious evidence, carefully hints that Vissarion Dzhugashvili was not Stalin's real father. As a possible father, he names a certain "priest".
In 1992, the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation issued a Resolution “On the temporary procedure for access to archival documents and their use”. The decree gave access to archival documents to all individuals, regardless of their citizenship. Secret documents have become available, since their creation 30 years have passed, as well as documents of a personal nature, if 75 years have passed since their creation.
Small collections of documents from Stalin's personal archive are published, such as "Stalin in the arms of a family" edited by Yuri Murin, letters are published in the open press. Biographers have the opportunity to discover some completely new facets of Stalin's life. It becomes possible to get acquainted with his personal biographical profiles.
In 1997, a very popular book by Edward Radzinsky "Stalin" was published in Russia. The author claims that he had access to the archive that existed under the leadership of the Communist Party, under a special Secret Department. This archive, according to Radzinsky, formed the basis of the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, created during the reign of Gorbachev. Radzinsky claims that in his work he relied on documents from the former Central Party Archive (now called the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Contemporary History (RCHIDNI)), and also used the secret funds of the Central State Archive of the October Revolution (now the State Archives of the Russian Federation).
And again we are dealing with the collection of information related to the category of rumors. Radzinsky, by definition, does not have enough archival documents. Because - and this is the scientific tragedy of the situation - with any secrecy of information, they represent a carefully filtered and distorted array of data. And Stalin himself, and his entourage, and the party as a whole, and the anti-Stalinist groups in the party, afraid of discovering that they also had a stigma in the cannon, all cleaned the archives ruthlessly and saturated them with false information. Archival information about Stalin is the largest of all historical hoaxes. They are both distorted and sterilized. And, we repeat, the degree of secrecy in this case does not change anything. Rather, even on the contrary - the more secret the information, the more it was combed, filtered, distorted,viewed through a magnifying glass so that the sterilization is as thorough as possible. Therefore, Radzinsky first creates advertising for himself by the fact that he has access to terribly classified information, and then, since this information is not interesting, he begins to be interesting, collecting various rumors, setting out unverified hypotheses, citing dubious evidence.
Miklos Kun is a Hungarian historian, the grandson of the famous Hungarian communist and politician Bela Kun, in 2003 he published the book Stalin: an Unknown Portrait in Hungary. Kuhn researched the available archives of Russia, and also published in his book a number of letters from Stalin to his associates and a long interview with Kira Alliluyeva, Stalin's niece, about the entire Svanidze-Alliluyev-Dzhugashvili family.
In 2007, a book by the authoritative English historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore "Young Stalin" was published in the UK. It appears in Russian in 2014. As the author himself writes, “this book is the result of almost ten years of research about Stalin, conducted in twenty-three cities and nine countries, mainly in the recently opened archives of Moscow, Tbilisi and Batumi, but also in St. Petersburg, Baku, Vologda, Siberia., Berlin, Stockholm, London, Paris, Tampere, Helsinki, Krakow, Vienna and Stanford (California)”. The translator's foreword says that Montefiore received permission to work with the Georgian archives, which contained, among other things, the memoirs of Stalin's mother.
In the preface to his book, Simon Montefiore notes that in the West there are only two serious works dedicated to Stalin - Smith's Young Stalin and Stalin. The path to power. 1879-1928. History and Personality "Tucker. In addition to these authors, Montefiore mentions Kuhn, saying that his book is "a real feat of a researcher who has penetrated the very essence of the subject."
Montefiore's book contains a lot of information about the personal life of young Stalin (which is especially interesting for us), about his childhood and adolescent experiences, about versions of his origin and becoming as a politician.
Earlier, in 2003, Montefiore published the book "The Court of the Red Monarch: The History of Stalin's Rise to Power" about Stalin's mature years and about his political career, about his entourage. We must pay tribute to the author: he does not demonize Stalin, as Western authors usually do, he shows him, although cruel, harsh and despotic, but a man.
In 2017, a book by Russian historian, professor at the Higher School of Economics Oleg Khlevnyuk, Stalin: The Life of One Leader, was published. The author pays little attention to the pre-revolutionary biography of the Soviet leader. The book is replete with reproduction of known facts and value judgments, mostly negative. The description of the day of Stalin's death runs through the whole book. Apparently, the author, unable to attract attention with new information, decided to create a hybrid of a biography and a novel in the style of black grotesque.
Nevertheless, Khlevnyuk's book received a positive review from Simon Sebag-Montefiore, as well as the well-known journalist Nikolai Svanidze, one of the ideologists of the new wave of Russian de-Sovietization and de-Stalinization. And for this new wave of Conquest is no longer enough, fresh work is needed, corresponding to the new state of Russian society, its alienation from ideological passions and inclination to assess the personality through family and household details.