Stalin’s 1947 Toast to the Russian People Exists in Three Different Versions

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 15 – For many Russian nationalists, Joseph Stalin’s toast to the Russian people in May 1947 is a key document, one that they argue shows the Soviet dictator’s move from communist internationalism to Russian national patriotism and that provides the basis for linking Stalinism and nationalism.

            But many are not aware that there are three versions of the speech, including a stenogram, an archival version edited by Stalin himself, and a third in the published articles about it in the Soviet press. Those differences have sparked debate about what Stalin intended, Nikolay Syromyatnikov says (russian7.ru/post/za-russkiy-narod-zachem-stalin-pravi/).

            Stalin delivered his speech to the commanders of the Red Army in the Great Kremlin Palace. The next day a text was published in the Soviet press and for decades, that printed version was the only one known to exist. But at the end of the 1990s, the release of the archives of Stalin and Molotov revealed that there were two other variants.

            In Stalin’s archive was a typewritten text out of which he had excluded by his own hand, the original words about the forced retreat of the Red Army in the early years of the war and about “the temporary loss of control” over the situation. His corrected version was the one that was then published in the press.

            The sudden availability of three text at the end of the 1990s, Syromyatnikov continues, gave rise as many as ten different interpretations of what Stalin had actually said at the meeting and what his intentions were in saying it.

            The chief point of disagreement concerned Stalin’s reference to the ethnic Russian people and thus his apparent stress on “the mono-ethnic nature” of the Soviet state.  Some view that as a radical departure from past practice while others point to certain continuities from the pre-Soviet past.

            Grigory Burdey, a historian at Saratov State University, says that Stalin’s focus on the ethnic Russians alone had the effect of demeaning all the other peoples. He may have done that because of his recent deportations of nations from the North Caucasus and because of the nationalist resistance in the Baltic states, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.

            Moscow historian Vilyam Pokhlebkin in contrast suggests that what Stalin was trying to do was to echo Aleksandr I in 1812 and thus put in place the idea that the two “Fatherland Wars” were equivalent.  But that message was apparently too clever for most Soviet citizens and so many missed it at least at the time.

            Another historian, Vladimir Nevezhkin, suggested that Stalin’s excision of the words about problems at the start of the war was another effort on his part to stress that he had made no mistakes then or ever.

            S.N. Zemlyana of the Moscow Institute of Philosophy in contrast insisted that Stalin by his toast wanted to move the core principle of the state away from the previously dominant communist ideology and toward Russian patriotism or even nationalism (ng.ru/kafedra/2006-11-02/4_hungary56.htm).

            Valery Ganichev, the head of the Russian Writers Union, agreed (lgz.ru/article/N33-34--6237---2009-08-26-/Togda-i-s%D0%B5ychas9884/). But writer Igor Shafarevich argued in his 2000 book, the Russian People at the Turn of Millenia, that no one should make all that much of what Stalin said or didn’t say about Russians or non-Russians.