Preliminary Programme

After a period when the study of Stalinist ideas was unfashionable and 'revisionists' emphasised institutional and social history, recent historiography of Stalinism has returned to the ideological and the cultural. But unlike the older literature, which was interested in seeing the politics of the Stalinist period as the direct outcome of the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin, recent literature has looked at Bolshevik ideas in a more productive way, relating them both to non-Marxist ideological trends, and to political practices. And yet there is profound disagreement over the nature of Stalinist political ideas. For many (Kotkin, Van Ree) Stalinism was an extreme version of the enlightenment project. For others (Fitzpatrick, Martin), it was a 'neo-traditionalist', hierarchical and conservative 'Great Retreat' from revolutionary values. For others (Halfin, Kharkhordin) it can best be understood as a quasi-religious, eschatological attitude towards politics. This paper will firstly argue that in its attempts to find a single essence of Stalinism much of this literature has exaggerated the coherence of Stalinist political ideas. Indeed, it is possible to find all three of these models of Stalinist ideology within the statements on politics between 1928 and 1953. But I shall also argue that one of the most influential strains within Stalinism is what might be called a 'romantic' attitude towards politics. While Stalin and Stalinist ideologists always claimed that they were encouraging the population to use their reason to understand the laws of history and thus act in accordance with them, they also commonly used a less rationalistic language: men had to be 'heroes', 'enthusiasts', using their 'energies' to transform the world. Sometimes they used religious language to express these ideas: men were to have 'faith' in the socialist cause and were to guard against the ideological dangers posed by sceptical 'apostates'. But the eschatological element of this language is less evident than some scholars have assumed. The Stalinists were less interested in creating a heaven on earth populated by the spiritually pure, than using the 'energies' of the people to achieve the regime's goals: the establishment of a unified, economically powerful and militarily strong state. Political romanticism was therefore closely linked with strategies of mobilization.

This paper will examine the origins of these approaches to politics among the Bolshevik 'left' at the turn of the century and in the 1920s. While it may not be useful to draw straight lines of influence between these radical groups and the Stalinists, it is possible to see at least a coincidence of outlook between former Vperedists and the Stalinists, as the sympathy between Maksim Gor'kii and Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s shows. The paper will then argue that this approach to politics became influential at times during the 1930s, although it became less so after World War II as Stalin decided to emphasize the more technocratic elements of Bolshevism. (Show less)

This paper argues that the views on human nature and the world, as well as the resulting political ideas of Jossif V. Dzhugashvili, alias "Stalin", should, with regard to the established denotations of the relevant Western terms, be classified as "right-wing," rather than "left-wing."
Such a conceptualization had been proposed by several authors (e.g. R.C. Tucker and A. James Gregor in the 1960s) earlier. It influenced, however, only partly mainstream research on Stalinism. Recent research on Stalin's thought (E. van Ree), cultural policies (D. Brandenberger) and antisemitism (A. Bortschtschagowski, L. Luks, A. Lustiger, G. Kostyrchenko) as well as some other publications (e.g. in "Slavic Review") have provided substantial new evidence supporting the idea that Stalin's view of human nature was fundamentally pessimistic, and his politics, therefore, essentially anti-egalitarian.
The paper uses this new evidence for a comprehensive reinterpretation of the Stalin period in Soviet history. (Show less)

Stalinism was a radical nationalist tendency; radical nationalism to be defined here as an amal-gam of chauvinism and anti-cosmopolitanism. The present paper discusses its precursors among the European radical Left in the century before the October Revolution. Based on a survey of “revolutionary democrats” (Jacobins, Blanquists, romantic nationalists etc.) and socialists (Marx-ists, anarchists, populists, syndicalists) in France, Italy, Germany, Poland and Russia, I will conclude that radical nationalism was no exceptional but a mainstream phenomenon among the Left. This conclusion adds to Mikhail Agursky’s thesis of the significant chauvinist element in Russian and German socialist movements. I distinguish two main schools - the one (with philosophical bases in Herder, Rousseau and Hegel) relatively firmly holding on to universalism, the other (integrating racist analyses of Saint-Simon and others) developing a “selective universalism”. Stalin’s chauvinism and anti-cosmopolitanism (even in his anti-Semitic last years) remained part of the first “school”. It represented a fusion of European Marxist nationalism and Slav chauvinism, the latter again in a left-wing translation. His adopting radical nationalism was influenced by the same factors/challenges as had earlier caused it to become influential among the European radical Left, namely the formation of the nation and war. (Show less)