Writing about Young Stalin for 30 Years: Why Bother?

my name is johannes von modka i'm the current director of kris and i'm very happy to welcome everyone to today's crease noon lecture and in particular i'm happy to welcome ron suni the william h sewell distinguished university professor of history and professor of political science here um and i'll do a brief introduction and then pass the screen mic over to ron but i i will say that i've been in this business of introducing people at events for quite a while um but i don't think i've run across a cv like like ron's before to which it literally is impossible to do justice because it runs to over 100 pages at this point and that's not because he put in any things that kind of fluff it up but because he's been extremely extremely active throughout his career so it's a great privilege ron to have you here um uh ron as i said is a professor here at the university of michigan uh and he is emeritus professor of political science and history at the university of chicago here at michigan he was the first holder of the alex manoogian chair in modern armenian history and he also founded the armenian studies program um he's the author of far too many books to list although i'm gonna spool off a few titles for those of you who aren't um directly familiar with uh professor suny's work because it gives you a sense of the breadth um they include the baku commune class and nationality and russian revolution the making of the uh of the georgian nation looking toward ararat armenia in modern history the revenge of the past nationalism revolution and the collapse of the soviet union the soviet experiment and many many more um many of these are single authored but i think it's remarkable also and should be remarked that um throughout his career ron has been a consummate collaborator there are a lot of titles that um he put together with colleagues particularly here in the history department um and it's also worth noting that much of this work has been translated into many different languages um ron has held all the awards and fellowships there are to hold so i won't go into those but i will say that in perusing this long cv i discovered completely serendipitously because i'm not going to pretend that i read every line but i discovered that on september 13 2006 ron gave a brown bag talk at crease and brown bag i think is synonymous with chris noon lecture which is what we're doing today called making stalin the evolution of a bolshevik so welcome ron and we look forward to hearing how stalin has further evolved thank you johannes uh i'm going to share with you guys now my screen and my slide which i think will help illustrate the lecture it's a pleasure to be invited to crease i'm an old christian one of my national identities i go way back i guess only mauricio is around to remember when i first came uh but it's a pleasure to be back and thank you liz thank you johannes thank you margosa for inviting me to do this so i called this talk writing about young stalin for 30 years why bother and the idea of the talk is that i think it's worth looking at the young stalin and i'm going to try to explain to you why i would decide to do that and end this almost 900 page biography with the october revolution rather than go on into the soviet period i begin my big book which i urge you to buy if you don't want to read it just keep lifting it and it'll build up your upper arms i begin this book with two preliminary epigrams followed by a well-known dialogue between lev trotsky and the old bolshevik vladimir smirnoff so i start with one from dmitry volkagonov a general who was one of the first soviet historians to actually get into the archives and write during the gorbachev period a large biography of stalin and volkagona wrote the following no one can be regarded as a born criminal one cannot look at stalin in the same light in 1918 1924 and 1937 it's the same person and yet it's not in the ten years after he succeeded lennon he changed markedly yet that's the difficulty of creating his political portrait while apparently struggling for the ideals of socialism however twistedly understood he committed crime after crime unquote and then more briefly i quote a an old russian proverb do not expect more from the truth than it actually contains now the story in the spring of 1924 stalin's nemesis and rival trotsky told the old bolshevik smirnoff i quote stalin will become dictator of the ussr stalin smirnoff reacted but he's a mediocrity a colonist colorless non-entity a mediocrity yes trotsky muse non-entity no the dialectics of history have already hooked him and will raise him up he's needed by all of them by the tired radicals by the bureaucrats by the nep men the upstarts the sneaks by all the worms that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the manured revolution unquote now as you can guess this book has been come has has come over a very long period and as a historian of the south caucasus what we used to call trans caucasia and the russian revolution i've been working on topics like this for more than 40 years and it's really been a painstaking thing a joy in some ways but i had to learn not only russian but armenian we didn't speak armenian at home my parents did but not with us kids and georgian a very very difficult language and at the moment i'm working on turkish this was a time in the early 1980s when scholarly attention almost exclusively focused on central russia the kremlin some of you remember that you looked at the lenin mausoleum and who stood where it was kremlinology when few and very few dealt with other parts of the soviet union maybe there were some nostalgic and narcissistic nationalists who paid attention to non-russians but so i wanted to sort of strategically draw in my fellow historians and social scientists perhaps even a broader public to look seriously at the region in which i had investigated and invested so much time to understand it and the way to do that appeared to me was to look closely at the early life of the major figure the best known the most important to emerge from transcaucasia namely joseph stalin so that was my macguffin as as alfred hitchcock might call it or my gimmick beside the region and its culture another interest of mine had always been when i first began teaching at oberlin college and then the university of michigan and still later at chicago had always been marxism especially the damaged and distorted history of the soviet union particularly russian social democracy even more narrowly bolshevism the most radical wing and stalin was precisely the vehicle to open up what i considered obscured histories so i signed my first contract in 1987 with a wonderful editor at oxford university press nancy lane who was both supportive and patient i produced a manuscript of several hundred pages in the 80s and early 90s and then i suddenly realized wait a minute something's going on here gorbachev and then the fall of the soviet union and the steady opening of archives first in russia and then eventually after a long time in georgia where the archives of the party had to be rescued by two young friends of mine because they were moldering in the basement this the abandoned basement of the old institute of marxism leninism so i went off and did some other things that johannes was talking about i wrote the soviet experiment nancy wanted me to write a textbook of the soviet union i didn't want to do that uh but when the history came to an end i thought well it has a beginning middle and then maybe i'll write it and i'm happy i did it's the best-selling textbook on soviet history many of my students will know it in america and it pays my local ann arbor taxes twice a year i also made an excursion into armenian history again having taught armenian history at michigan for 13 years before i went to chicago and i wrote a book in 19 2015 the 100th anniversary of the genocide called they can live in the desert but nowhere else a history of the armenian genocide then i went back to stalin and with another wonderful editor bregita von reinberg the book appeared from princeton at the end of last year so was it worth it well absolutely did i find things that were new and surprising repeatedly and let me share with you now some of the things i think i found in this endeavor and maybe uh that will encourage some of you to pick up the book literally pick it up and build up your arms and maybe even read it so i'm going to concentrate in this talk if i get through it on three themes i'm going to talk about first the biography from boy to man the evolution of a georgian uh peasant boy actually a son of a of a shoemaker a cobbler soso jugashvili through his self uh aggrandizement as a hero who was called koba to finally after 1913 stalin then i will try to get to i won't get probably very far but it's a big part of the book the history the origins of bolshevism and menshivism which i tried to revise in this work now that we have different archives the cold war is over one can uh explore these things in a different way and then try to give you some idea of the overall arc of the book so that's ambitious let's see what i can do and i begin with a kind of warning because you know the telling of stalin's life has always been more than just a biography there is of course wonder at the achievement of this son of a georgian cobbler who ascended the heights of world power and by the his end of his life was one of the most powerful men in the world he was of course the architect of an industrial revolution in a backward country he was the destroyer of millions of people and lives uh he was the leader of a state that stopped the bloody expansion of fascism that in fact by liberating auschwitz the red army ended the holocaust credit they're not usually given to and incidentally save the world for liberal democracy and capitalism not one of his intentions stalin's story is the making of the soviet union and so people who look at stalin of course are going to tell a bigger story their own way of evaluating that whole experience the inheritance of his life and such a story it's very hard to separate from an evaluation of that young boy who becomes a revolutionary the book covers more than half of his life which was spent before the revolution and it tried in its telling to tell a story that was not simply um a story uh that leads to the demon dictator but rather a series of developments or cultures through which this figure moves from an early romantic georgian nationalist someone who had apparently a beautiful singing voice imagine stalin beautiful singing voice was known as bulbuli the nightingale a romantic poet whose early works were published in leading journals in georgia then sent by his mother to a religious school because she wanted him to be educated she was very ambitious for him and later to the t fleece seminary in order for him to become a priest uh jugashvili was always upset by stalin when he in the 30s said mama uh uh you know i'm kind of tsar in this country now and she said regrettably oh i always thought you would be a priest so she was a little disappointed in her social um but that that's an extraordinary story and i try to tell it as he moves through these various uh um cultures these various uh uh imperatives of different levels of life the seminary the underground revolution georgia to baku to the international socialist movement to petersburg to exile uh living as an outlaw for decades all of these things and particularly going through the crucible of the 1905-1907 revolution which was particularly hard uh very very uh brutal in the periphery of the empire that is in georgia and the caucasus now one of the earliest uh experience of this poor boy he was born in that house not in the columned museum that's around it but in the little house which was has been rebuilt and uh rebuilt uh inside uh the fir one of the earliest tellings of stalin's early life has always been a kind of psychoanalytical taking and that arose from a story told by a boyhood friend of his uh iremashvili who later became a menshevik and an enemy of stalin published in 1931 which argued that stalin became brutalized by the treatment of his alcoholic father this is the only extant picture we have of besso vessel jugashvili undeserved terrible beatings made the boy writes the idol mashemily as hard and heartless as the father himself since all men who had authority over others either through power or age reminded him of his father there soon arose a feeling of revenge against all men who stood above him even from his youth the realization of his thoughts of revenge became the goal toward which everything else was aimed well stalin himself didn't in his own writings tell us this story in fact when a german biographer who write wrote popular biographies of great leaders emil ludwig asked him about this what pushed you into opposition uh perhaps the bad treatment by your parents stalin did not take up the bait he said no no my parents were uneducated people but they treated me not badly at all this could have been deception this could have been a kind of denial of the way he lived but when you actually do the research you find out it wasn't besso who beat him it was his adored mother it was keke uh who was uh who he loved very much precisely for her mujist her masculine manly manner her character it was so-so's mother not the father who abandoned the family and her orthodox faith and insisting in her own ambition to send him to a seminary that was key to his upbringing his love of learning which continued through his life his dogmatic style his rigid and certain ideas about what he knew and what he could accomplish she gave him a kind of confidence even arrogance which served him well in the revolutionary movement and in the brutal infighting within the party that took place after the revolution so this biography does not want to reduce the complexity of a biographical subject to a single ex planetary key in this case parental abuse which i think simply impoverishes explanation and it leaves out what i'm most concerned with which is context and culture politics and ideas there have been no biographies of the young stalin of any seriousness there have been some but not very serious which deal with his ideas with the intricacies of the social democratic movement with the imperatives of revolutionary life in the czarist autocratic police state with the revolution so rather than reduce his motives to suspicion rationalization compensation or sublimation i tried to develop an idea which i borrowed from another historian jude stacy who writes on china and mal i tried to work out an idea of what was what she called and what i thought was very useful a double realization a double realization crisis in other words as he went through these um various cultures and movements as he moved from the ethnocultural setting of georgia the revolutionary intelligentsia another imagined community the marxist movement the underground the prison exile all the way up to the upper circles of russian social democracy and then on to the fire of civil war the inner workings of the soviet system and the political cultures of socialism each of them imprinted something on stalin and changed him along the way so he was being modified to what he had been he was not born a criminal he did not as simon as sibo montefiore argues become a georgian or caucasian bandit rather than a gangster out to enrich himself he was both the product and the participant in evolving culture of the underground revolutionary and this is a complex culture because it combines idealism utopian ambitions ideology which acts as a frame through which you see and understand the world as well as resentment and ambition strong enough to impel him to risk the uh rec and uh the id the fate of a political outlaw along the way this young boy hardened himself accepted the necessities of deception ruthlessness and violence all these means justified by the end of political and social liberation and there's the sense of that double realization crisis an ambitious educated rather intelligent boy from the rough streets of glory the town he grew up in through the seminary who has both social you could say class resentments about the privileges he doesn't have and others have so resentment a powerful emotion about others getting things you think they don't deserve but you deserve as well as a second kind of inferiority being a georgian a provincial georgian son of a shoemaker in a society as he moves on from gori here's the gorist sikher the fortress of gordi to the larger city here is the young boy in the seminary of tiflice where he meets the armenian bourgeoisie the capitalist class of another ethnicity and the russian autocracy the bureaucracy the soldiers the policemen who enforce the existing order so ethnic and class or ethnic and social resentments and locations lead him away from georgia to in fact become a rebel identifying with the caucasian hero of alexandre kasbecki's novel the patricide with koba with a revenger with someone who can write the unnatural order that capitalism and autocracy have brought to the caucuses and to russia you have to do this by becoming non-georgian in a way identifying with an internationalist social democratic movement in which ethnicity is downplayed in which you yourself develop an a a a an identification with the struggle that unites all of the displaced and based peoples of the empire so in rapid succession as the book tells sausage left the largely georgian town of his birth gordy and entered the big city the seminary and the seminary is very important here is that seminary the georgian spiritual seminary the only major school that had any courses in the 1880s and 1890s in the georgian language it was run by reactionary russian priests so stalin's educational experience was about the debasing and the marginalization of georgian culture which he at that point was still defending as a young you could say nationalist and poet we have lots of evidence in his own writings of that period that seminary was particularly successful not so much in producing priests which it did but in producing revolutionaries almost all the major georgian figures uh came out of this who made up the menshevik and bolshevik movement came out of this seminary not a very successful enterprise it was in the seminary that uh young soso jugashvili understood uh that and lost his religion moved away from his mother and understood that his fate and the future of this country was now uh in the hands of young people intellectuals workers whomever who were going to be able to overthrow autocracy and move beyond capitalism from an early age the son of an alcoholic and abusive father and mother mother was not alcoholic of course it's also new physical violence he bored himself he witnessed it the beatings of his mother in fact uh in the street and since the gory streets which were pretty rough was his first schooling his first university and then already in gauri but in more inti anti-fleece he became an intelligence this beautiful word you know we translated maybe political intellectual oppositional intellectual the intelligentsian delegancy a word we borrow from russian into english in that particular form the intelligentsia was itself a kind of like-minded community of people who felt a debt to the people to ordinary people who were ready to sacrifice personal life for the cause uh and stalin identified as an intelligent and very quickly migrated through marxism to its most radical wing that is bolshevism uh and in bolshevism he found his mentor that is vladimir lenin and what was lenin's position in this early uh revolutionary movement here's a very uh idealized portrait i wanted to use this on the cover of the book but my editors found something a little grimmer of stalin to put on the book i like this one very much and here the young stalin a intellectual certainly uh is carrying stodyat lenin's book of 1902 and berzola the georgia newspaper of the militant faction of of georgian social democracy those who ultimately would go over to bolshevism so why lenin why that form of marxism in particular now if you know anything about that early those early 20th century years about marxism there was uh um a there were conflicts within the party about whether you could achieve a revolutionary consciousness among russian and georgian armenian et cetera workers simply by agitating and propagandizing the workers teaching them the intricacies of capitalism uh and working in a trade unionist or uh movement to better their position within the exploitative system that was then existing in the economy of the czarist empire and lenin rejected this view lenin did not believe in any kind of automatic or spontaneous generation of consciousness but made a fearsome argument that in order to move workers from the dominance the sort of bourgeois hegemony of existing ideas into a revolutionary consciousness you needed social democrats you needed people who could in fact bring the theories and understandings of marxism to the working class and give them a larger vision so that they would see that their plight and their power their indeed role in history was to work as a representative of all social classes for the liberation of society that's a very ambitious program uh now most people interpret that as an elitist program where intellectuals will dominate the working class it's not quite right and not what lenin intended he said social democrats are the ones who can study this and move between classes are the ones who can bring this broader theoretical understanding to workers who spontaneously would gravitate towards socialism but are held back by the hegemony of bourgeois culture and bourgeois ideas so what lenin wanted was to generate in fact worker bolsheviks worker social democrats and here was a young man who came from the lower classes whose father though he had been more an artisan but occasionally an industrial worker was a kind of worker intelligence and so it was lenin who particularly promoted people like stalin who appreciated this young man's practical uh qualities his toughness even his ruthlessness remember marxism is both a kind of combination of idealism uh secular humanism a dream of a better world beyond capitalism and liberal democracy at the same time a theory of war of class war marxists understand that you will never ever overthrow capitalism and the rule of the property classes who will not willingly give up their privileges and property in power without violence without revolution and so it's a theory of class war and this very much appealed uh this message to this young worker intelligent who in the seminary in seminary moved relatively rapidly by his third year we're now in the late uh 1890s to a marxist atheist revolutionary and it's around that time that stalin young stalin now read a story by alexander kasbecki and argued that he wanted to emulate the hero of this novel an avenger named koba a man of the mountains who has all of the values of purity and integrity that village and and uh uh valley georgians are losing under russian russian influence and vengeance is a central theme in this story the patricide that he read but vengeance is not based on a personal disposition rather in caucasian society vengeance is a socially sanctioned even sacred instrument required to restore a lost moral balance and the story is precisely about the difficulty the impossibility to maintain the principles of honor and friendship and sacrifice with its associated obligations of the mountaineers with the degradation that was taking place under russian autocratic rule and koba the avenger cries out at the end of his eye and he takes vengeance against the injustices of his society and that name koba would continue to be used by stalin and his closest uh comrades to the end of his life there was a very sad episode where bucharin his close collaborator in the 20s was imprisoned about to be executed and he writes several plaintiff letters to stalin in the 1930s before he was executed in 1938 and he he addresses him but of course does not reach him and those letters by the way were held by stalin and kept in a drawer in his desk so what attracted chugashvili to kazbeki and to koba this tale is very attractive to young people it has passion and danger and rapid reversals and violence and it's a well-told adventure story but along with its romantic evocations of georgia's natural beauty and the barely suppressed sexuality of several episodes it gave soso now koba a vision of russian oppression and georgian resistance that perfectly matched his own experience both in gory and in the this seminary and so it justified the struggle against injustice and taking up weapons violence was inscribed in what had to be done and koba represented a noble man an ideal a person of honor unwilling to submit to injustice and so stalin or now still koba turns away from the comforts of society embraces the freedom of the outlaw and through this rebellion koba becomes in one sense authentically georgian and a revolutionary but he moves quickly he leaves the seminary gets his only real job briefly as a meteorologist and enters the revolutionary movement now georgia was a peculiar and particular place in the russian empire it was a place where marxism led by neue jordania was the major ideological position of the national liberation movement not georgian nationalism but a marxism that combined a kind of ethnic revolt and class revolt so the mensheviks that is all of whom would become extraordinarily important uh other in the menshevik movement they would be a dominant strain menshevism is a kind of combination of uh russian jewish socialists like marthaphin axelrod and these georgians who gave him their social base um this movement in georgia was aimed at the armenian bourgeoisie right but it was capitalism and the russian autocracy but not ethnicized but autocracy and so it combined just these kinds of social and ethnic liberation uh goals that stalin himself was moving toward but what stalin does is move from georgia because he adopts lenin's view he's a bolshevik in a country in which mentionism the more moderate the more democratic wing of social democracy dominates and so he leaves georgia and goes to baku uh well first before he goes to baku he initiates but doesn't really carry out a a uh bank robbery the so-called chief lease x in 1907 on this central square yet one square in tibilisi um it's a turns out to be a fiasco but it's a major event and he moves on uh into becoming an agitator underground man a committee man very much concerned with the intricacies of social democratic politics in baku and from baku he goes to saint petersburg in 1913 he writes his pamphlet under the direction and mentorship of lenin marxism and the national question becomes the major theorist of nationalism and and the reformation of russia after the revolution uh to deal with the non-russian peoples and then from 13 to 17 he lives in exile in one of the harshest parts of of central uh siberia and then becomes uh someone who comes into his own in the revolutionary year always promoted by lenin there is in the book much of his personal life insofar as one can find it he didn't leave a diary he didn't leave intimate letters he was not introspective he was a creature of the social democratic movement which denied personality which which reduced people in terms of their personal interventions even though later he would become the center of a gargantuan grotesque cult of personality uh in the 1930s this scene here is of his first wife who died in 1907 because of the harsh conditions that they lived with in uh in baku and stalin mentions in ira mashabili's a memoir that his heart his heart turned into stone after losing his wife and this is who he becomes then a romantic sincere revolutionary outlaw who lives in the underground and who lives through that experience that as i try to show in the book eliminates uh aspects of of empathy which he may have enjoyed or may have known earlier over time and i end with this the humane sensibilities of the romantic poet gave way to hard strategic choices feelings for others and i can show this we're displaced or suspended and even trunked no reference here to any particular person and we're trumped by personal and political interests what originated as empathy for the plight of one's people the georgians a social class the proletariat or humanity more broadly was converted into a rational choice of instruments to reach a preferred end empathy was replaced by an instrumental cruelty and once in power those earlier emotions and ideals were subordinated to a desire to hold on to that power so arduously and painfully acquired power after the revolution became a key motivation to the imperatives of the new conditions in which the bolsheviks and minority party found themselves forced to make unanticipated choices the boy from gori had become a great man that is a powerful arbitrator of the fate of millions but if you examine his biography as i bet you will find if you examine many biographies of political people you find a quite ordinary person who is placed in extraordinary circumstances now he would understand that he was something like a czar as he told his mother but the passage through gauri tiflis baku saint petersburg siberia fashioned a man who in a world he could not have anticipated was determined now to stamp his will on the soviet people whether it was fate or luck he had survived the trials of the revolutionary outlaw and emerged a tempered leader he was damaged he was destroyed in some ways he was revived and had become something different as trotsky mentioned history had hooked him and lifted him high and now a revolutionary made by revolutions for the remainder of his life after october 1917 he became the maker and breaker of revolutions thank you thank you very much ron um thanks for sharing those images too uh fascinating to see and um fascinating to listen and learn um uh i want to remind the audience that you can ask questions uh by using the q a function you may also raise your hand and we'll uh we can promote you to a speaking role so that you can ask ron directly um but before we go there i also thought the more the longer the zooming and the pandemic goes on the more i miss audiences and i just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the audience which has become anonymous in a new way i miss going to events like this one and looking around and discovering friends or new people or finding out who's in the audience which is harder right now so i just want to acknowledge that there are a lot of people here and they come from you know there's your christians are here um uh both colleagues and staff um and of course a lot of students um uh um including uh kris m.a students who had when we asked them i think at some point last semester who are the people you'd like to hear from in the noon lectures had specifically said we'd love to hear from ron suny so i want to acknowledge that and and bring that up so i invite you all to uh ask questions in the uh q a or by raising your hand right now people are shy so i'm gonna get us started um shy seems weird if you're anonymous but anyway um so uh um i i was really taken by the epigraph from the beginning and it it resonated through the whole talk this idea that i think it's trotsky you quote that somebody gets picked up by the dialectic of history and and and and and becomes uh uh somehow um uh uh a different figure thereby so my question is i mean this might be uh too broad but but i do i did find myself wondering based on that quote about your decision to write biography right as a historian um to to tackle history from the biographic side um uh where you know many of these events could be told as a as a social history could be told as a national history could be i mean as a cultural history there were there are there are obviously other ways of telling this um and well it seems obvious to me that stalin is an interesting figure i mean that's not what that's not my question right but my question is what what drives you as a historian to pick the biographical angle to meet this moment that trotsky then identifies where kind of history and biography or you know the forces of history and the individual enter this dance that's an excellent question johannes and it was a problem because if you think about my own inclination as a social historian i would even say a socialist historian though this is not britain this is america and you have to be careful about those things uh i would say was not to do biography but was to do talk about and i would say my earlier work is like this about larger forces about uh social and political conjunctures in history about the environmental context political social economic in which things occurred so biography was not that kind of choice it was a tactical a strategic choice to get people interested in and to see also to answer the question of why does someone become a revolutionary the making of the bolshevik like that earlier talk and and also to be able to explore and expose the histories of which i'm very interested in which is labor socialism marxism and the fate of this revolution right i'm not a person who rejects the russian revolution i'm a person who thinks that it was a revolution that went off the rails that something happened why did it happen is it about these characters was it lemon was it leninism was it what is to be done which has been used as a part of the argument or was it in fact the social context that mixed with the agency of certain individuals who made certain harsh choices so my wonderful mentor um uh moisha levine when i asked him this question what about you know stalin and lenin and so much he said you know he said yeah social forces of course they're important but if a person is the head of a party and takes power or if he is the head of a state and is an autocrat he or she is a social force catherine degree was a social force they had effects they made choices that would affect other things so you cannot leave out you know mark said it best of course men make their own history but they don't make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but they are makers of history they create a reality that also shapes them so it seems to me biography is appropriate and the other thing is people read biographies they don't read histories there's waku commune and they're forced to read the soviet experiment um so i tried to bring those two things together great thanks um owen johnson has a question and if you unmute yourself i think you should be able to [Music] speak there you go owen yeah thank you um as you said i'm owen johnson i'm a retired faculty member at indiana university i was a grad student uh at michigan when i first met ron sunny i think he was a visiting professor from oberlin if i recall correctly my question how difficult in writing this book was it for you to separate myths about stalin's youth from the reality excellent question owen because there are so many myths so even when you get into the archive and even when you can read georgian and you sit there and tediously go through these memoirs you realize that so many of them are hagiographic so many of them are written with other purposes than telling the story and so you have to make decisions all the time right i mean look we're living in an age of of non-truths of of truthiness of alternative facts and so every scholar every social scientist uh every uh uh historian has to in fact be able to make those forms of judgment see what's plausible what doesn't fit can this be collaborated what any good journalist would do as well and so i won't say that i i made absolutely all the right choices what i tried to do at the beginning of every chapter i think almost every chapter there are one or two epigrams and these epigrams often contradict each other and so their idea of doing that was to show that their that stalin is a multifaceted figure who had different reactions on different kinds of people but there seems to be certain things that continue both by friend and foe the hardening the toughness the smirking smile as he lurked in a corner and waited for the debate to go on till he would intervene the idea of surrounding himself with close comrades who he dominated and who felt were absolutely loyal to him right uh that that occurs already in gauri you see it again in tiflice and then you see it in the 1920s after the revolution so there are there are those kind of things the suspiciousness the fear you know he was a person who came out of society in which honor uh was very important trust was very important in terms of friendship because as a poor person moving up into fleece uh he had to rely on friends there was no family background except his mother and his mother was impoverished but the opposite of trust and honor is dishonor uh and betrayal and so those those play a big role and he writes about that often right we have some early letters that betray his own inner life not very much but it's there and he's accused of being an intriguer of of a deceiver of falsifying things he's a politician in the worst sense of the word that is he's able to manipulate to step back to intervene when necessary to change his mind but fundamentally there's a kind of dogmatism that that continues a kind of rigidity as he accepts as he moves from orthodoxy russian orthodoxy georgian orthodoxy to marxism it's a very particular marxism it ain't my marxism that's for sure but it's a very particular marxism thanks uh um picking up on the title that you yourself gave this writing about young stalin for 30 years somebody asks how has your own evaluation of stalin's place in soviet history changed in the years of writing this book he's worse than i thought it's not just me it's the whole profession that is there's no excuse anymore for stalin that is we know too much the archives have all been revealed he was unbelievably brutal right uh and unbelievably callous and he uh that when stage it was that he lost that empathy uh it's certainly already evident uh in after the revolution of 1905 1907 and maybe even earlier right uh so that that that that's true there now there are other ways i mean i always try to look at you know different sides of the issue he's smarter than you think okay trotsky was right he wasn't a theorist his writing is wooden and it reads a kind of um what would be the word dogmatically or kind of dry but he's a very effective propagandist he does what other politicians who will remain nameless do repeating the same things over and over again punching them in he sort of understood how to communicate with uh with with ordinary people and he was effective that even though he was in no way charismatic uh in his speaking or anything like trotsky or xenov or even lenin to some extent so those are those are things i noticed um and there was one other finding it's not so much about stalin personally but about leninism and bolshevism as you read through carefully the volumes and volumes on on russian social democracy from say 1900 to 1917 you realize that the main aim of that movement this will come as a surprise to many of you was to create a democracy the one word that appears over and over again is democracy democratic because remember they had the idea this is a backward peasant country we will make a bourgeois democratic revolution the bourgeoisie will come to power they will expand the realm of the possible for workers to organize they will expand the realm of the possible uh development of capitalism and a proletariat and then later perhaps with help from the west we can make a socialist revolution so until early 1917 in lenin's april theses this is a project about making a democracy lenin deviates from that in 1905 briefly and again deviates fundamentally in 1917 when he has this really sort of grandiose gamble that we can make this revolution we can create the spark to destroy the nexus of world capitalism in the context of an imperialist war which is destroying millions of people and we can they get the west can help us towards socialism and of course that didn't happen the bolsheviks ended up a small party on a sea of peasants and they had to retreat and that's what the new economic policy is a retreat that lenin calculated was necessary for a long period of development cooperation with the peasantry not violence against the peasantry he's very strong on that after 1921 and of course stalin stops that stalin changes that socialism in one country forced collectivization and the creation of a of a autocratic police state the main thing i'll say one more thing about that just because students sometimes ask me after they read they've read the soviet experiment and and i say to them so what do you think the dominant emotion of this book is what's the what's the thrust the affective thrust of this book the soviet experiment and they look and they say well may it be nostalgia i don't know i say it's regret it's regret that a revolution that was popular and bottom up and involved you know hundreds of thousands of people in the streets ultimately resulted not in their emancipation though in their significant development let's not uh be overly negative to that whole terrible experience uh but it ended up not in the liberation of the people but in a new kind of autocracy yeah i'm fascinated by your i mean you're bringing in these affective categories both in the biography and now in your own disposition um there's a somewhat related question uh which is uh whether you're aware of any attempts to analyze whether stalin had some clinical psychological for example sociopathic tendencies would that explain anything about his choices fears and behavior in other words can one psychoanalysis i mean you make the point about empathy about resentment um to what degree our psychoanalytic and clinical category is useful yeah that was very popular during the cold war so it was important to you know western intelligence and policymakers to figure out who stalin was since he was so clearly the major depart decision maker in foreign policy particularly and was so powerful but of course no one got him on the couch and no one could really get into his mind which was complex and which changed over time by the end of his life whatever paranoid tendencies he had uh were exaggerated and had become extreme and we see that from khrushchev's memoirs and from other things that we know he may have had a series of strokes uh in the in the late 1940s so he's again somewhat different creature but it's that uh despite desperate and a brutal uh tyrant of the 30s that is the most difficult to explain why the great purges now lenin and bolshevism use terror they believed that violence and terror were necessary in the context of a revolution and for the working class or its agent in this case taking power and lenin defended the use of terror uh in in the civil war years and then moved away from it because now in nap and and the slower development of that's going to take place in the absence of a international revolution there had to be compromise there had to be smichka the link between the workers and the peasants etc and stalin in the 30s makes a choice to institute violence by the state by the town against the countryside by the army and police against ornipia against his own intelligentsia against old bolsheviks and against kulaks and and millions of other people in a time of peace there's no internal civil war in russia there's a foreign danger right which they they understand and after he has won his political victories stalin has no significant opposition after 1933-34 and yet he turns on the party itself and destroys every single one of lenin's major comrades who did not die before 1930 the last one being trotsky in 1940 with an ice pick to the back of his head um i uh um max spielberg picks up on the on uh on on the point that i think he may quite forcefully that the seminary seminary more or less drummed religion out of young stalin he asked um uh thank you for the really engaging discussion i was wondering how stalin's time at the seminary and his relationship with religion during his early years later impacted his political policy decisions on religion when he finally consolidated power and imposed his will throughout the 1930s specifically his anti-religious campaigns it's very interesting some of my students i'm teaching of course i'm teaching a russian history course and soviet history course and also a course called left turn the opposition to the world as it is and students are very interested in why can you be also religious and also a marxist right and of course one of marx's earliest writings some of his earliest writings on the jewish question the critique of the philosophy of right by hegel and so forth are against religion religion is a delusion it's something that people need he understands it's an opiate in in capitalism that helps you bear the horrors of the world but it's something ultimately that you have to liberate yourself from to find real consciousness and understand the world and liberate the human mind and so forth so that that goes into bolshevism of course and and once stalin leaves the seminary which is very shaping in many ways you know as i tried to indicate and i do more of this in the in the in the book uh he carries of course that atheistic uh view uh onward he is not particularly active as far as i know and this is a subject i would have to investigate more as i go into the second volume but in terms of my own teaching and reading so far in anti-religious campaigns and what he's most famous for is during world war ii making a concorda with the orthodox church that is employing the orthodox church in the fight against fascism and so the old seminarian in a sense becomes i wouldn't say a defender of the church the church has to be emasculated cannot proselytize and so on but uses the church as czars did as well earlier as an instrument of state power and he saw that as valuable as he turned to a more conservative nationalistic russo-centric point of view stalin's revolution from above in 19 early 1930s i argue in my own work and elsewhere is a counter-revolution it moves further away from the 1917. it's more about state power and nation-building uh and control from above than it is anything like the empowerment of of the working class or ordinary people so is the but are his um are his years are they even years at the seminary or the months or however long he spends there three years so is that still part of his bona fides when he makes this concordant i mean is you know does it matter does he refer to it does it matter that he has this under his belt in order to negotiate with or force the church there's one instance in which emilia ludwig asks him in the 30s he had several interviews with stalin not many people had those interviews uh what about the seminary what what do you think was isn't there some good to this and he said he uses the word and he means it in a certain way they were too jesuitical uh you know jess or the pope is a jesuit you know and he's a good pope and he's kind of a marxist in my view but to be that beside the point uh he he didn't like the the sneakiness and the the control and the searches it's very strange because since these are things that his own police would carry out um that that was carried out in the seminary one other thing to say about the seminary years is there there's the seminary which has a negative influence in terms of his education and psyche but there's another university that he's attending at the same time and i use university metaphorically and that is oppositional bookstore and a intelligentsia culture that was alive and well was illegal and the seminarians were fighting against it but these young students in the seminary had set up their own reading groups and they were reading whatever they could find sometimes pamphlets sometimes marx if they could get it which they hand copied over and over again and so what what is that tradition against this ruthless um dogmatic russian orthodox culture as practiced in georgia doesn't always have to be that way but it was was this russian humanism this idea of russian literature they read this stuff uh and how it influenced parts of the georgian intelligentsia and those things as well uh cheniszewskis what is to be done uh you know other other works like that certain kinds of marxist pamphlets were very much an alternative education to what he was getting in the seminar very interesting gregory parker of the eisenberg institute uh asks uh you mentioned that people actually read biographies how did you approach this project given that it will reach a wider non-expert audience than a typical academic monograph yes it it is written so that it's clear i mean i in my teaching i always advocate like everything else we do yes clarity right this talk today was very broad because i was trying to summarize some of the bigger points of the book uh the the devil is in the detail and uh and but everything is explained any ordinary educated person uh interested will not find anything obscure in the book there are theoretical points that are to be made this things about affective dispositions and the role of emotions in one's psychological makeup but everything is is is is their clarity and and to be explained so um i hope it'll be an audience that will be broad it'll be undergraduates graduate students scholars and educated readers outside that's what i aimed for great sam brazil in the crease m.a asks do you often describe stalin as an ordinary person placed in extraordinary circumstances what about after the loss of empathy that followed his wife's death that seems an extreme reaction is that an ordinary response to his experiences or did he somehow become extraordinary i guess in that moment apparently he if the record is right if the things that that are in the memoirs and even in his opponent itomashvili are correct then he suffered greatly that loss and felt guilty about it because he had taken this woman who gave birth to a son uh jacob uh to baku and the conditions of heat and and cholera and the dirty air and so forth had a terrible effect on her quickly and she died and she and he was uh castigated by members of her family precisely for for doing that so apparently he felt very bad about that later his second wife who he also was quite abusive to in many ways at least verbally if not physically a committed suicide uh this is not yet ali in the early 1930s svetlana's mother and uh again it is said that at that point uh he wanted to resign this seems far-fetched to me but there are such accounts and was convinced by his comrades to continue sounds a little bit when ivan the terrible left moscow for the monastery saying i'm not coming back and they all came out of moscow to come back and he gleefully went back that was for my friend val you should mention yeah he's here also that we val and i wrote a wonderful book together this is part of what crease and what being at the university of michigan means called russia's empires so i was asked to write a textbook i did just done the textbook the soviet experiment i wasn't going to write another one but i convinced val sometimes she was reluctant at first and together we wrote what is kind of a book size essay on all of russian history from the primeval ooze to putin uh with the around the idea of empire when was russian empire it wasn't at first when did it become what does it mean what are the limits and and imperatives of empire is russia today an empire or is it more like a nation-state and that animates that book which i hope people will read great um arkell minassian asks who's a kris alumnus asks uh a question that i think you've answered but i want to read it so if you want to add something please do since beginning to write about stalin 30 years ago how much did the current book evolve from the original manuscript you wrote for oxford press is there anything you want to add on that question that you haven't said yet well that book had did not have soviet archives that those those were based on what we had available and i was thinking of how i could give it a different take because of my interest in nationalism nationality and so forth um so this this is is archivally based almost too archivally based in some ways because it took so long to do and so forth but and then the second thing is getting back to the book that val and i wrote and the whole evolution after 1991 of much of the study of nations and nationalism is very much embedded in an understanding of empire that is stalin is a creature of empire he creates another kind of empire so the that understanding the framing of this story in terms of the periphery of an empire and of an empire wide non-nationalist self-described internationalist movement social democracy and how that worked is something that was not there at all in the earlier book earlier manuscript herb eagle asks while were other of stalin's early comrades similar similarly shaped and similarly motivated hardened without empathy so that they were inclined to become facilitators of his vision i think so but not all my favorite bolshevik is one that many of you may not have heard about unless you read the baku commune was an armenian no surprise named stephan xiomyang now he would be called had he survived after 1918. he was murdered and executed by anti-bolsheviks in the deserts of turkistan uh would probably have been among those who were softball bolsheviks who had other visions like and others and one of the things that we know from this history is that there were at least until stalin establishes firmly his dictatorship there were many different bolshevisms there were those that robert daniels in a beautiful early book called the conscience of the revolution there are many lenins lenin himself shifted into a much more moderate figure in the last years of his of his life um but they're defeated and as stalin emerges the harder bolsheviks and those who are willing to follow him uh become the ones who survive if you want to survive under stalinism then you have to become almost a kind of criminal you have to be willing to do criminal activities and and those who couldn't do that they're eliminated by stalin if you wanted to survive under trump you had to be ready to cut those kind of corners and do things which were probably semi illegal uh and many of them suffered for that that is there were those who hitched their stars uh their wagons to stalin star who paid that price and almost many of them lost their lives and the few were survived into the post-styling period immediately in 1953 overthrew the as much as they could they couldn't do it all much of the stalinist legacy um there was a question from paul kubichuk which might maybe will end on this one but you i imagine you could go on on this one hi ron thank you for your presentation i'm wondering if you can elaborate a bit on lenin's relationship with stalin aside from his ruthlessness perhaps what did lenin see in stalin did you uncover anything in your work that sheds new light on their relationship lenin as i said was an admirer of this kind of bolshevik proletarian intelligent that is someone who combined both the class characteristics of a non-intellectual stalin and lenin both shared a critique of intellectuals intellectuals were wishy-washy uh they were indecisive they were their heads were in the air and so forth and uh they there's a lot in stalin and in lenin where they criticize intellectuals what they want are uh worker intellectuals if they can get them and there weren't that many and stalin was one of them so that was important there was one pre-revolutionary moment where they had a big dispute not an overwhelming dispute interestingly enough stalin after 1907 was very concerned about the unity of the party and he was afraid that lenin was too militant in driving out dissident bolsheviks very important ones in fact who disagreed with him about of all things ontology and epistemology questions of the material nature of the world and and and linden who was busily in the library trying to figure out uh marxist uh um uh ontologies and epistemologies uh was driving very important uh people like bulgarianov very very incredible figure later the head of the prolly cult uh out of the party and stalin was opposed to that and wrote against it and thought this was a disease of the emigration of those who were had lost touch with the the uh imperatives of the movement uh within russia but besides that there was general admiration uh of stalin by lenin until the very last years of his life and marcia levine's wonderful book which stands up so well lenin's last struggle describes that conflict where uh stalin wanted a more centralized soviet union uh was coming down hard on his own georgian national bolsheviks and lennon was defending them against stalin and or johnny kids very worth reading still thank you ron we'll end on this note from shannon pike who says thank you so much for your continued lectures i'm a kris graduate from eight 1989 and so much appreciate for professor suny's lectures outstanding scholar i'm going to second that and thank you for sharing your vast knowledge and the the the incredible work that's gone into this book which shows also in the way you you know it's like i feel like a huge archive has been processed and has you know you you've given that to us on a silver platter and i i feel really grateful for it and um i'm sure so does the audience so thank you for coming back to kris um and we look forward to more thank you very much thank you thank you liz thank you everybody bye everybody

Channel: umcrees

Views: 564

Keywords: Stalin, Soviet Union, history, Russia, Republic of Georgia, Lenin, communism, Ronald G. Suny, University of Michigan

Id: oSHEPePg6I0

Length: 73min 35sec (4415 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021