Rare archival materials from the Stalin era

(NB: An interesting letter and an interesting archive. The comment “The Western view, undoubtedly biased by the Soviet contribution to the Allied victory in 1945, has undoubtedly minimized the terrible dictatorship that Stalin imposed on Russia” is misleading – Churchill began using the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’ as early as 1946; and the animosity was demonstrated in the crushing of the Greek communist uprising in 1944. Nonetheless, the implications of this letter are ominous.

Beneath this is a link to an article by the Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk, Letters to Stalin Practices of Selection and Reaction, which is a detailed study of the following themes:

Bureaucratic Systematization of Letters to Stalin
Selection Criteria for Letters Reported to Stalin
Practices of Responding to Stalin’s Mail

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Extremely rare letter from Joseph STALIN developing his iron fist in Russia. Joseph Stalin’s letters are rare, remarkably rare. Those written in ink, as is the case here, are even more so, since from 1933, Stalin will only write in pencil. We are thus in the presence of one of the last letters written in ink.

At the beginning of the massive industrialization of Russia, Stalin wrote to the propaganda author Marietta Shaginyan: he offered to ensure the release of her book and to suppress any hostile reaction to it! This signed autograph letter, of remarkable rarity, is a new testimony to the omnipotence of the Soviet tyrant.

The Western view, undoubtedly biased by the Soviet contribution to the Allied victory in 1945, has undoubtedly minimized the terrible dictatorship that Stalin imposed on Russia and the Soviet bloc. Let us therefore recall the journey of Iossif Vissarionovitch Djougashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin. From an anonymous Bolshevik insurgent of the October Revolution, Stalin became in a few years the despotic leader of the USSR. Establishing a regime of terror and the most successful personal dictatorship of the modern era, he is considered by historians to be the greatest mass criminal of all time, responsible to varying degrees for the deportation and death of many of twenty million souls.

To rise to the head of this Empire, Stalin demonstrated exceptional political acumen: intriguing, maneuvering, and relying on the all-powerful bureaucracy of the Party and its police apparatus. Installed at the top of the State, he established an unprecedented climate of terror, suppressing all opponents, rigging trials, incessantly resorting to propaganda and encouraging a frenzy of denunciations of all kinds.

In 1931, the year this letter was written, Stalin had just begun what he called the “collectivization” of land, five-year plans that in effect abolished private property and starved his people. The peasant revolts that followed were drowned in blood. This is precisely the subject of the novel Hydrocentral discussed in this letter. Marietta Sergeevna Shaginyan (1888-1982), the recipient of this missive, was a Soviet writer and activist of Armenian origin. She was one of the “Companions of Travel” of the 1920s led by the Sérapion Brothers and became one of the most prolific communist writers of the time, experimenting with satirical-fantastic fiction. The content of Hydrocentra l was precisely linked to Stalin’s economic and political goals at the time. Marietta Shaginyan was one of the most interesting Soviet authors for the Stalinist system: she was read and adhered to the Communist Party line.

Behind the words, and beyond their initial meaning, several ideas appear, and implicitly, the personality of their author, the all-powerful Stalin. “Just tell me concretely who I should put pressure on”.

What appears very clearly in this letter is the work of propaganda carried out by Stalin to serve his person and his regime. By offering support for an official message, and proposing, as we can read, the removal of any opposing person and any dissenting voice: “Regarding the acceleration of the release of “Hydrocentale” and your protection against attacks beyond the scope of a “critical” review – then I will do it without fail .” “Critical criticism” must not exist in the USSR! This letter perfectly illustrates the organization set up and controlled by Stalin for the suppression of fundamental freedoms in Russia, and freedom of expression in the first place.

Even more terrifying to note: the character trait of J. Stalin underlying this letter: his absolute and constant concern to control EVERYTHING, his control over the smallest details. Consider that he is then one of the most influential men in the world. Despite everything, he practices direct intervention, in a matter of apparently low importance, taking up his pen to respond personally to the request of a novel author, and directly offering him his services . “I must apologize to you for not having the opportunity, at present, to read your work, or even to give it a preface.”

His biographers, and in particular Montefiore, have placed great emphasis on this behavior and this way of leading. Endowed with a prodigious brain, capable of putting in two dozen hours of work per day, the Little Father of Peoples wanted to establish proximity with each writer, each general, each factory director… all with one goal: maintain its influence, control, and maintain an infernal dissuasive pressure on any potential opponent. It is also this impressive daily work that is discussed in this letter. “I am deprived of the possibility of satisfying [you] due to a daily overload of practical work which exceeds expectations,” Stalin apologizes.

His involvement in literary publications also says a lot about the Soviet system. The disguise of the truth in an official message truly responds to a desire for brainwashing. In the words of Andrei Zhdanov, “Writers must become engineers of souls.“

Paranoid, in search of absolute control, Stalin managed to control everything. Warned of all the attempts that could be prepared against him from the moment they began to be organized, Stalin had understood, before Adolf Hitler, the need for a state police force – the GPU – allowing him to control employees and managers. Hitler copied Stalin and the Gestapo modeled itself very closely on the GPU.

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Oleg Khlevniuk: Letters to Stalin Practices of Selection and Reaction

This article examines selection procedures for common citizens’ letters to Stalin, and the practices of reacting to these letters. Letters to power in general and to Stalin in particular were one of the key channels of communication between state and society in the USSR. The author analyses the dynamics of letter‑writing (including the volume of letters), the bureaucratic mechanisms (including Stalin’s personal involvement), the contents of the letters (including changes in dominant themes), and some of the consequences of letter‑writing (for both the authors’ lives and wider Stalinist policy). The study is based on materials from Stalin’s personal archives and some documents of the Special Sector of the Central Committee (TsK) of the VKP(b).

Stalin lived in the epoch of mail, telephone, and telegraph. The habit of keeping up correspondence was an integral part of his character. Letters served as an important means of constructing relationships, of political intervention, and as a source of information. For many years, only published responses by Stalin to a select few correspondents indicated that he received letters and exhibited interest in them. After the opening of his archives, it became possible to examine Stalin’s correspondence with his closest associates and members of the Soviet elite. Soon after the so‑called “letters to power” became the subject of academic scrutiny, along with the plentiful requests, complaints, denunciations and initiatives submitted by Soviet citizens to authorities and leaders.

It is commonly accepted that this body of documents comprises one of the most valuable new source bases of the archival revolution of the early 1990s. In their capacity as historical sources, “letters to power” (along with diaries) are used primarily to reconstruct popular opinion, emotions, and discourses. At the same time, as noted by Sheila Fitzpatrick in the mid‑1990s, “we have only incomplete and non‑systematic information on the responses of the authorities to citizens’ letters.” The situation has remained practically unchanged since then. The absence of studies on the practices of response to “letters to power” is a weak spot in historiography. In other words, we know rather well what and how the Soviet citizens wrote, but we do not have a good idea of who read the letters and what consequences they had.

Three key questions require further investigation. First – what techniques did the Soviet authorities use to process letters ? Second – to what extent were ordinary citizens’ letters a vital source of information for Soviet leaders ? Third – how did Soviet leaders react to signals from below, and what role did “letters to power” play in the practices of political and everyday administration ? Only an investigation of these problems will allow us to validate a popular notion of mutual influence between power and the people, and deepen an understanding of the motives and mechanisms of political decision‑making in the Stalinist system.

The study of these questions was always limited by the state of archives. Documents of technical departments that handled the letters were poorly preserved. It is difficult to reconstruct the sample of letters that the Soviet leadership actually read. It is quite rare that we can establish cases when “signals from below” led to specific decisions…

https://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/8185?lang=en

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