"Simplistic, Pseudosocialist Racism": Debates over the Direction of Soviet Ideology within Stalin's Creative Intelligentsia, 1936-39

Over the past 15 years, new research has begun to reevaluate Soviet-era ideology, taking the regime's ostensible commitment to Marxism-Leninism far more seriously than much of what was published during the Cold War. Foundational texts have been reread, biographies rewritten, historical experiences reassessed, and fictional and cinematic texts reviewed, leading some commentators to proclaim the "return of ideology."¹ A number of studies have even reexamined the most ideologically controversial aspects of the Stalinist 1930s—the revision of proletarian internationalism into patriotic etatism; the revival of differentiated wage scales and social, professional, military, and educational hierarchies; the reinforcing of the family and gender-based division of labor; and the rehabilitation of Russian state history, the Russian Orthodox Church, and ultimately, the Russian people itself. Ultimately, this research offers a number of new perspectives on what for years has been regarded on both the right and the left as a retreat from, if not a total betrayal of, the revolution.²

Much of this renewed interest in ideology can be traced back to Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain, which proposes that Stalinist "civilization" ought to be regarded as a noncapitalist form of European modernity rather than as a despotic clique ruling over a captive society.³ This interpretation has been expanded and developed by David Hoffmann, who argues that the ideological transformations of the Stalin period were broadly consistent with the Party's professed commitment to building socialism in the USSR.⁴ According to this reasoning, even the most controversial policy shifts—like the rehabilitation of Russian national symbols and iconography—ought to be seen as compatible with the party line. As Kotkin puts it, the increasingly populist emphasis on Russian history and historical personalities should be viewed as a mobilizational issue, part of "a strategic shift from the task of building socialism to that of defending socialism."⁵

Erik van Ree reaches a similar conclusion about Stalinism's ideological consistency, denying that the philosophical contours of the official line ever amounted to an abandonment of Marxism-Leninism. For van Ree, Marxist thought during the first part of the 20th century was heterogeneous enough to accommodate I. V. Stalin's "national Bolshevism" alongside other international currents. Stalin's emphasis on etatism, for instance, dovetailed with positions taken by Georg Vollmar and Karl Kautsky, as well as V. I. Lenin himself. The ethnocentric dimensions of the official line evoked Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Austro-Marxists like Otto Bauer and Karl Renner. Even appeals to patriotism can be traced back to Marx and Engels. Whether Stalin co-opted these concepts without attribution or developed variants on his own, van Ree contends that they were consistent with Marxist thought at the time and no more heretical than other thinkers' attempts to adapt the ideology to the changing international scene.⁶

Terry Martin and Matthew Lenoe agree with the notion that the transformations of the 1930s occurred within a Marxist-Leninist context but contend that their distinctiveness was symptomatic of neotraditionalism rather than pan-European patterns of modernization or ideological orthodoxy. For Martin and Lenoe, the emergence of "pre-modern" political and social practices—hierarchy, ascribed status groups, informal and personalistic relationships, a primordialist understanding of nationality, an inclination toward populism, and so on—suggest a unique path of development. While not disputing the ideological goal of socialist construction, they suggest that the Soviet "experiment" was more influenced by its own uniqueness and internal complexity than it was by larger philosophical or transnational continuities.⁷ David Priestland sees evidence of a different kind of neotraditionalism within the policy reversals of the 1930s. In his view, Bolshevism is best understood as having alternated between two major currents—revivalism (a sort of romanticism that prioritized political belief, ideological discipline, and cultural indoctrination) and technicism (a rationalistic drive that stressed economic empiricism, technocratic discipline, and a more laissez-faire approach to culture). These two currents, in turn, were expressed in a variety of elitist, populist, gradualist, and neotraditionalist modes. Relevant to the discussion here is Priestland's contention...