Stalin’s belatedly completed corpus

Nail Satlıgan

In a talk delivered during the seminar series "Half a Century of Socialism in Turkey", held in the autumn of 2005, Nail Satlıgan (1950-2013) discussed why the process of “de-Stalinisation” -launched in the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev era and sending shockwaves across the world- failed to find a comparable echo in Turkey. Satlıgan emphasised that one of the most tangible consequences of this process in Soviet political and cultural life was “the removal of Stalin from the canon of Marxist classics”, and went on to say:

This [de-Stalinisation] means the following: Stalin will no longer enjoy the same status as Marx, Engels and Lenin; his books will no longer be printed or republished. There will be no new editions -Marxism and the National Question, for example, or Dialectical and Historical Materialism- none of these will be reissued. Nor will A Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union -of which Dialectical and Historical Materialism forms a part- be republished. (p. 43)

Indeed, as Satlıgan points out, across the Soviet Union and its allied regimes in Eastern Europe, the publication of Stalin’s works came to an abrupt halt. Not only were plans for new editions of previously published works quietly dropped, but the Collected Works (Sochineniya) series -bringing together Stalin’s writings from 1901 to 1934 in chronological order- was suddenly discontinued in 1951, after reaching its thirteenth volume.

Stalin’s Collected Works, published in the Soviet Union (13 volumes, in Russian)

A word of caution is in order here. Anyone reading Satlıgan’s talk might assume that the decision to stop publishing Stalin’s books came only after Khrushchev’s famous “Secret Speech” at the CPSU’s 20th Congress in 1956. In fact, the policy of discontinuing Stalin’s corpus -and his individual works- had already begun in 1955, a full year earlier. Under the Soviet publishing schedule, the fourteenth volume, expected that year, was quietly removed from the programme indefinitely rather than being sent to press, with no public explanation whatsoever.

For the sake of completeness, one further point should be made: it would be wrong to suggest that, during the Brezhnev era and afterwards, Stalin’s writings and speeches disappeared entirely from print in the Soviet Union. They did resurface from time to time -but only in highly limited forms: occasional quotations for historical reference, short selected texts, or narrowly defined documents such as Stalin’s wartime correspondence with Roosevelt and Churchill. What the Soviet state never did again, after the thirteenth volume, was to publish an official, comprehensive, chronological corpus of his works.

Why was publication halted?

Had they been published, these final volumes would have covered the years 1934-1953 -years that would have laid bare the appalling period in which Stalin spearheaded an unprecedented machinery of state terror. The release of such documents could only have complicated the Soviet bureaucracy’s attempts to purge itself of the Stalin era’s crimes -crimes from which countless Stalinist officials had themselves suffered- and it might have called the new leadership’s legitimacy into question. The failure to complete the Sochineniya series was therefore no accident: it was a conscious state policy of controlling historical memory. To protect the legitimacy of the Soviet project, the “new” leadership opted to make bibliographically “invisible” the very figure it had spent decades praising to the skies as its harshest and most faithful enforcer.

The Hoover Institution steps in

So, who finished the work the Soviet Union had left incomplete? In 1967, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University moved to fill that gap through a major scholarly initiative.

At a time when the Soviet archives remained closed, the historian Robert H. McNeal and his team painstakingly combed through Stalin’s newspaper articles, pamphlets, official orders and speeches to compile this “unofficial” continuation. As a result, under McNeal’s editorship, volumes 14, 15 and 16 of Stalin’s corpus were published in the original Russian.

The title page of Volume 14, published by the Hoover Institution

The Hoover edition was designed to mirror the Soviet edition exactly:

Volume 14: 1934-1940

Volume 15: 1941-1945 (the war years)

Volume 16: 1946-1953 (up to Stalin’s death)

Indeed, these volumes were produced in the same format as the original series -bound in burgundy cloth with gilt lettering- so that, when placed on library shelves alongside the Soviet edition, they would appear as a “continuous set”. The Hoover Institution’s aim was certainly not to express admiration for Stalin’s writings. Rather, the abrupt termination of Stalin’s Collected Works had left a serious gap in Soviet studies.

As a scholarly by-product of this work, McNeal also published a bibliography the same year, entitled Stalin’s Works: An Annotated Bibliography.

The publication of these three volumes elicited no response from the Soviet authorities. The Soviet Union did not follow suit, and made no attempt either to complete the Sochineniya series or to republish it.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the partial opening of the archives in the 1990s, volumes 14-18 (and subsequent ones) of Stalin’s Collected Works also began to be published in Russia, under the editorship of the Stalinist historian Professor Richard Kosolapov (1930-2020). This finally remedied the limitations of the Hoover Institution’s volumes, which had necessarily been based on publicly available sources.

[*] The written version of Satlıgan’s talk was published under the title “TKP, Mihri Belli, Hikmet Kıvılcımlı” in issue no. 2 (November 2006) of the journal Devrimci Marksizm [Revolutionary Marxism].

[**] Robert H. McNeal, Stalin's Works: An Annotated Bibliography, Hoover Institution Press, California, 1967.