Stalin: A Biography

Yet Lenin tolerated Stalin, and much of his positive attitude is attributable to Stalin’s booklet Marxism and the National Question. Stalin’s later enemies unceremoniously dismissed the work. It was said that Stalin either did not really write it or wrote it only with decisive help from others. Supposedly his ghost writer was Lenin. That Lenin and others assisted with their suggestions about the draft is undeniable. This is a quite normal procedure for sensible writers: it is better to have necessary criticism before than after publication. Another hypothesis was that Stalin’s inability to read foreign languages, except for a few phrases with the help of a German–Russian dictionary, meant that he could not have read the works by Austrian Marxists appearing in his footnotes. Anyone who has read Marxism and the National Question, however, will know that most of the references to books by Otto Bauer, Karl Renner and others are made to the widely available Russian translations. The other point is that Lenin was a proud author. If he had really written the book, he would have published it under one of his own pseudonyms.

Lenin liked Marxism and the National Question because Stalin agreed with him about the basic solution. An additional advantage was that Stalin was not a Russian but a Georgian. After the turn of the century the Marxists of the Habsburg Monarchy — especially Bauer and Renner — argued that the empire was a patchwork quilt of nationalities and that nation-states could not neatly be cut out of it. Their answer was to offer every nation a representative body of its own at the centre of the empire with the mission to enhance national interests. The Mensheviks, with encouragement from the Jewish Bund as well as from Noe Zhordania, adopted Bauer’s plan as the future basis of state structure in the Russian Empire once the Romanovs had been overthrown. Stalin, however, adhered to the official Bolshevik position that administrative autonomy should be given to non-Russians in areas where they lived in concentration. The Finns in Finland and the Ukrainians in Ukraine were the usual examples. Thus the Bolsheviks hoped to maintain a centralised state while acceding to national and ethnic aspirations.

Stalin was not simply parroting Lenin’s earlier writings. There is a passage in Marxism and the National Question which merits close attention since it deals with Georgia. It deserves to be quoted in full:¹³

Let us take the Georgians. The Georgians of the years before the Great Reforms [of the 1860s] lived in a common territory and spoke a common language but strictly speaking they did not constitute a nation since, being split into a whole range of principalities cut off from each other, they could not live a common economic life and they waged wars among themselves for centuries and devastated each other, fomenting trouble between the Persians and the Turks. The ephemeral and accidental unification of the principalities which a successful tsar was occasionally able to carry out at best covered only the surface of the administrative sphere — and it was quickly wrecked on the caprices of the dukes and the indifference of the peasants.

So much for the idea that Georgians were a primordial nation, fully developed before their incorporation in the Russian Empire.

Stalin’s argument continued as follows:¹⁴