Stephen Kotkin: evaluation

Transcript context

…I have some questions about Stalin. If we take some of the great Soviet creators — Pasternak, Shostakovich, Bulgakov, Eisenstein — did Stalin understand they were geniuses? For all the bad treatment, he didn’t quite crush them the way maybe he could have. What was Stalin’s attitude toward them? Stalin was one of those people for whom high culture was a mark of your advancement, civilization, what the Germans called Bildung and what the Russians called kulturnost from Kultur, the German word, meaning what we probably would call edification, potentially. Stalin’s generation was about people acquiring some familiarity with high culture in all its forms, whether opera, painting, novels, or poetry. It was a literacy-acquisition culture, where acquisition of literacy meant in the first instance reading and writing, of course, which Stalin learned from the Orthodox Church schools he attended. But also literacy in a broader sense: Who are the great musicians? What’s the classical canon in music? Who are the great artists? Who are the great novelists? Both Russian, but also more than Russian — pan-European. Not quite Asian, global stuff — that didn’t have the same resonance. The world wasn’t globalized in the same way, and much of the undeveloped world was under colonial rule, as you know. For Stalin, that was an important mark of his rise as an individual and as his self-worth. He was predominantly self-educated, but not completely so. He had just as much education as the vast majority of revolutionaries at his level. Some completed university. Most did not complete university. He went to a seminary rather than a gymnasium, and so, therefore, university was inaccessible to him. Trotsky put on the airs of being more educated than Stalin. Certainly, Trotsky was more adept at foreign languages based upon exile in Europe. Trotsky spoke multiple languages and read multiple languages fluently. That wasn’t the case for Stalin. Stalin had a working bazaar- or market-level knowledge of Persian, Armenian, the languages that you would expect someone in the Caucasus who went to the marketplace. He grew in that milieu and acquired that affinity for that culture. Then your question is about his judgment. Could he judge, for example, that Bulgakov was a superior writer, or Eisenstein was a superior filmmaker? The answer is yes, he made those judgements. Not very many adherents to Marxism-Leninism or to Communism, members of the Communist Party, shared those tastes with him, that those bourgeois or potentially bourgeois-inclined writers or writers who predated the revolution in origin, who might have criticized Communism and certainly didn’t adhere to Marxism-Leninism, that they were valued in pure cultural terms. Stalin, yes, of course, he also had his prejudices and his blind spots. Some high culture that you and I might appreciate, he didn’t appreciate. He loved Chekhov the most because the heroes in Chekhov were not the only main characters — also the villains, and Stalin would remark that Chekhov’s villains were credible. They were believable villains. They were full-bodied villains in addition to the heroes. ot the only main characters — also the villains, and Stalin would remark that Chekhov’s villains were credible. They were believable villains. They were full-bodied villains in addition to the heroes. Yes, nontrivial because he’s the arbiter of what, if anything, of high culture is distributed, shown, allowed, and so his tastes were critical as the despot in the system. Those writers didn’t thrive the way they would’ve thrived in an open society. But on the other hand, there’s something about cultural production under despotic conditions, hothouse despotic conditions that also brings out different sides of these people.…

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