Stalin’s Short Course

 Guest: David Brandenberger is a Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Richmond specializing in Stalin-era propaganda, ideology and nationalism. He’s the author National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 and Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination and Terror under Stalin, 1928-1941. His most recent book co-authored with Mikhail Zelenov is Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course published by Yale University Press. Music: Funkadelic, “Freak of the Week,” Ultimate Funkadelic, 1997. If you like these transcripts and want to read more, then support them by becoming a patron of the SRB Podcast. This abridged version of the interview has been edited for clarity. Look out for the full audio version soon. You’ve just completed editing Stalin’s Master Narrative, a Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course that includes all of Stalin’s edits and contributions. What is the Short Course? I ought to initially begin by crediting my co-editor in this project, Mikhail Zelenov, who works at RGASPI, the central party archive in Moscow. The Short Course was a textbook on party history that was designed for mass consumption and indoctrination in the USSR. It’s focused on Party history rather USSR history, but it did both. Because it was edited by an official Central Committee commission, the Short Course immediately became the centerpiece of the Party canon when it emerged from the printing presses in September 1938. And it stayed at the center of the Party canon straight through until 1956 when Khrushchev denounced it as part of the Stalin cult. Before it was withdrawn from circulation in 1956, the USSR had published upwards of 40 million copies in a variety of languages making it one of the most frequently published titles in the 20th century, short of Harry Potter, and maybe Mao’s Little Red Book. It bears mentioning, though, that the Short Course‘s influence doesn’t end in 1956. It’s got an afterlife of sorts. Insofar as, even after the text was withdrawn, the way it structured Party history and Soviet history, to a certain extent, remained central to the Soviet canon into the Gorbachev period. So, the breadth and depth of the impact of this text is pretty big. Why was did this the Short Course need to be written? The origins of the whole project go back probably 10 years before 1938, back to the late 1920s when the Party leadership under Stalin began to express increasing frustration over the lack of a concrete official, single, linear line on Party history. There were lots of official, or semi-official texts, written by leading Bolsheviks, but they contradicted each other. Stalin asked for clarification and then he spurred this forward in a search for a usable past in 1931 when he denounced all the contemporary existing Party history. He called it all overly scholastic and said what was necessary was a more approachable catechism, specifically for the purposes of mass indoctrination and mobilization. So, he made this call in 1931. It took even the most official Party historians better part of six years to do it. They delivered a prototype to him, a finished prototype, only in April 1938. Ironically, though, even after all the attention that Stalin had paid to the process, when these court historians delivered the text to him in April of 1938, he finds it unsatisfactory. He refuses to authorize its publication and sits down during the summer o...