Introducing a New Primary Source for the Study of History from Medieval Kyiv Rus’ to the Soviet Union
In 2023, Vladimir Putin mandated a new patriotic history curriculum for the Russian public schools that rewrites key elements of twentieth- and twenty-first century history in order to reinforce his rule and justify the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Many commentators have judged this historical revisionism to be dramatic enough to evoke associations with the rewriting of history that took place under Joseph Stalin during the 1930s. And indeed, the similarity of these curricular materials turns out to be more than just rhetorical, insofar as both instill a belief in statism and authority, as well as intense suspicion of those who would oppose Moscow, whether foreign or domestic.
Amid all this nostalgia for the Stalinist past, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Russian publishers have rereleased some of the most famous textbooks of the period to flank the new public school curriculum. Coincidentally, I’ve also just published a critical edition of perhaps the most important of those texts with Stanford University Press—Andrei Shestakov’s 1937 Short History of the USSR. Aside from drawing attention to the scholarly merits of the book, I’d like outline here several ways in which this central piece the Stalinist canon can play a constructive role in college-level classrooms today.
Stalin’s Usable Past: A Critical Edition of the 1937 Short History of the USSR, edited by David Brandenberger (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2024).
Personally edited by Stalin, the 1937 Short History of the USSR was designed to supply the Soviet Union with what historians refer to today as a “usable past”—a mobilizational narrative designed to unite society around a common set of political beliefs. Appearing in million-copy print runs through 1955, this historical narrative governed how Soviets were to understand the past not only in public schools and adult indoctrination courses, but on the printed page, the theatrical stage and the silver screen.
My new book, Stalin’s Usable Past, supplies a critical edition of the Short History that both analyzes this all-important text and places it within its proper historical context. In so doing, Stalin’s Usable Past realizes three objectives: it identifies the ideological origins of this official historical line; it characterizes the nature and scope of Stalin’s personal involvement in the narrative’s construction; and it documents in unprecedented detail the dictator’s plans for the transformation of Soviet society’s historical imagination.
Stalin’s Usable Past begins with a thorough, archivally-based investigation of the sea changes in ideology and propaganda that rocked the USSR during the 1930s. It then turns to the origin and development of the Short History itself, supplying a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Stalin’s editing of the book. This critical edition then reproduces the textbook itself—all 15 chapters and 130 illustrations—highlighting the dictator’s ubiquitous textual interpolations and deletions. Stalin’s Usable Past then concludes with an appendix that traces further changes to this narrative made between 1938 and 1955, when it was finally removed from circulation.
The layout of Stalin’s Usable Past harnesses techniques commonly found in critical editions of poetry in order to recreate the appearance of the original publication while highlighting Stalin’s textual additions in italics and restoring his deletions in a typeface that is literally struck out. This graphic approach to the book’s layout produces a narrative that is not only highly readable, but which conveys some of the violence with which Stalin wielded his editor’s red pencil.
Example 1: In commentary on Muscovy during the 17th century, Stalin deleted detail on social and ethnic history and added commentary concerning Marxism’s teachings on the futility of peasant uprisings. See Stalin’s Usable Past, 152-153.
Example 2: In commentary on the origins of the Bolshevik movement, Stalin left a passage on Lenin’s early revolutionary career undisturbed but deleted several paragraphs about himself as well as a picture of his humble childhood home. See Stalin’s Usable Past, 230-231.
Intriguing for professional historians, Stalin’s Usable Past is something that I have found surprisingly accessible to college-level students as well. In so far as I have successfully used the Shestakov text in manuscript form in the survey courses I teach on Russo-Soviet history, as well as in seminars on the October 1917 Revolution and Stalinism, I’d like to take a moment to share some thoughts about how Shestakov’s Short History can be used to generate classroom discussion and debate.
Many lesson plans use short in-class primary source readings to develop skills ranging from close reading to critical analysis. Stalin’s Usable Past contains hundreds of passages that can be excerpted in order to provoke class discussion on how Stalinist historians politicized history between the 1930s and the 1950s. Examples of such topics might include:
- how did Stalin-era historians describe the origins of eastern European and Eurasian society?
- how did public education in the USSR treat the issue of national identity formation?
- why did the atheistic USSR characterize Kyiv Rus’s 10th century adoption of Christianity as a positive, historically progressive development?
- why did Stalin and his court historians rehabilitate Ivan the Terrible?
- why was Stalin considerably less enthusiastic about peasant rebels such as Razin or Pugachev?
- how did Shestakov address the colonization of Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia?
- and how did Stalin and his historians treat the War of 1812? Or the Crimean War?
Turning to the origins of the Russian revolutionary movement, the October 1917 revolution and the early years of the USSR, Stalin’s Usable Past offers other tantalizing opportunities for in-class primary source analysis. Such exercises might revolve around questions such as:
- how did Stalin and his court historians characterize the Bolsheviks’ political opponents, from the liberal Kadets to the more militant Mensheviks and Socialists-Revolutionaries?
- how did Stalin explain the Bolsheviks’ defeat in the 1905 Revolution?
- how does the Shestakov textbook explain the origins of the First World War?
- what, according to Shestakov, catalyzed the February and October 1917 revolutions?
- how did Stalin rewrite the October 1917 revolution and then recast the Civil War?
- what did Shestakov leave out of his treatment of the New Economic Policy, collectivization and industrialization?
- Stalin was known for his personality cult—why did he systematically cut textbook references to his role in the revolution and leadership of the Soviet state?
- how did Stalin rewrite the history of the Great Terror in 1937 as the purges were tearing the USSR apart?
- why did Stalin delete virtually all mention of the Comintern? The German working class’s resistance to Hitler? The anti-fascist struggle during the Spanish Civil War?
- why did the dictator rewrite Shestakov’s commentary on socialist state-planning’s promise of prosperity?
- and why did Stalin cut all commentary on the vanguard role that the communist party was to play in the Soviet future?
Because the Short History offers so many opportunities for students to engage in primary source analysis, I’ve gone further than to just use it as a resource for regular in-class exercises. Since 2019, I’ve begun treating Shestakov’s narrative as a required textbook within the survey courses that I teach stretching from medieval Rus’ to the fall of the USSR. For several years, I first paired the Short History with Geoffrey Hosking’s Russian History—A Very Short Introduction and had students read either complementary selections from each book for every class meeting or alternate between the two textbooks as needed. In class discussion, I’d interweave the two narratives into a double helix, stressing both the similarities and differences in how the texts treat specific issues and how they compete to explain the broader longue durée.
More recently, I’ve redeveloped this course around a juxtaposition of Shestakov’s textbook and Paul Bushkovitch’s widely-used Concise History of Russia, making use of similar pedagogical strategies. I’m also presently planning a more advanced colloquium course for majors that will pair the Short History with the revisionist New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia once its second volume is published.
There are at least a half-dozen advantages to such an intensive engagement with the Short History. First, the textbook is so accessible that students can finish their reading assignments efficiently, conserving time for other reading or writing exercises. Second, such accessibility allows for other primary materials to be substituted for the Shestakov text when necessary—students find it easy to follow the Short History’s narrative even after skipping several chapters. Third, systematic engagement with competing historical narratives allows even inexperienced students a sophisticated introduction to historiographic issues concerning agency, causation and emplotment. Fourth, regular use of Shestakov’s textbook offers students a surprisingly rigorous introduction to Marxism-Leninism and historical materialism. Fifth, sustained exposure to the Short History provides students with explanations for the russocentric biases inherent within much of the field’s mainstream scholarship. And, sixth, the fact that the Short History regularly challenges students to analyze and interpret Stalin’s editing hones their skills in close reading and comparative analysis within an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue.
Below I provide a general table of contents for Stalin’s Usable Past, followed by another table listing each of the Short History’s chapter titles and subheadings. I also provide a link to a sample syllabus here.
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