The Short Course on Party History

By David Brandenberger and M. V. Zelenov

Click here to view the 9 documents associated with this project.

The Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the central text of the Stalin-era canon, was compulsory reading for people throughout the USSR between 1938 and 1956. Over forty million copies of the textbook circulated during those years, with hundreds of thousands more being issued by publishing houses in eastern Europe, Communist China and even the western world. But despite the breadth and depth of this textbook’s impact on the twentieth century, it is only recently that the Short Course has become a subject of scholarly interest—either as a text or within its larger historical context. This digital collection of documents from Stalin’s personal archive and other former Soviet archival repositories makes a wide array of materials associated with the textbook accessible to internet-based audiences for the first time.

Although first published in 1938, the Short Course is best dated back to 1931, when I. V. Stalin issued his famous letter to the journal Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, scolding party historians for their excessive scholasticism and failure to properly frame the service of people like V. I. Lenin to the cause.[1] In the wake of this intervention, Stalin called upon party historians and the party’s ideological establishment to transform their approach to party education and indoctrination and embrace a more accessible, mobilizational approach to the Bolsheviks’ historical experience.

But as experienced as these communist cadres were with party agitation and propaganda, they struggled to retool during the early 1930s. Even veteran party historians such as E. M. Iaroslavskii, V. G. Knorin and P. N. Pospelov failed to supply Stalin with the sort of instructional material he demanded. Part of the problem was the relentless political pressure that these historians fell under; another part likely stemmed from their devotion to orthodox Marxism-Leninism and their discomfort with more populist forms of history revolving around individualism, heroism and patriotism. Indeed, many of these true believers likely found these themes to contradict their long-held commitment to historical materialism and class analysis.[2] Unsuccessful bids to supply the party with a new generation of textbooks between 1931 and 1934 were followed by a new wave of reorganization and recrimination between 1934 and 1935.[3] Unfortunately, this process resulted in little more than another wave of unsuccessful catechistic texts between 1935 and 1936 that satisfied no one.[4]

After the start of the Great Terror in the fall of 1936, the demand for better party educational materials mounted, now not only from above, but from below as well, inasmuch as Soviets at the grassroots increasingly sought out instructional materials that could help them make sense of the purges. Stalin himself gave voice to this crisis in early 1937 at the famous February-March 1937 Central Committee plenum, arguing that the party’s historical experience was key to explaining the Terror. Many of the party’s endemic problems with internal dissent and enemy infiltration apparently stemmed from party members’ poor understanding of their own history. According to the general secretary, party members’ failure to appreciate the Bolsheviks’ quarter-century experience with internal oppositionist movements had resulted in scandalously low levels of vigilance in the mid-1930s. This, in Stalin’s mind, was utterly unacceptable in the face of existential threats that the USSR faced both at home and abroad.[5]

It was for this reason that Stalin renewed his calls for reform in party education and indoctrination.[6] Particularly important was the task of finally releasing a new party history—something that Stalin anticipated as serving as the core of a new two-tier educational system.[7] Iaroslavskii, Knorin and Pospelov were drafted to compile curricular materials for this system: Iaroslavskii and Knorin were to redraft older, obsolete texts for mass use, and both of them were to work with Pospelov as an authorial brigade in order to compose a definitive new party history for more advanced party members.[8] Unforgiving deadlines were set for early July for the lower-level textbook revisions and mid-August for the new master narrative. New educational courses were to be launched that September.[9]

A difficult task under any circumstances, the compilation of these new curricular materials was complicated by rolling purges within the ideological establishment that culminated in Knorin’s arrest on June 22, 1937. Iaroslavskii hurriedly submitted his revised textbook manuscript in early July and signaled his readiness to move on to the more ambitious project in tandem with Pospelov.[10] It didn’t take long for Stalin and his ideological lieutenant, A. I. Stetskii, to conclude, however, that what Iaroslavskii had submitted was too inaccessible and complex for mass use within the party educational system.[11] This realization must have frustrated Stalin and his comrades-in-arms; that said, they had few other choices than to return to Iaroslavskii with the request that he further simplify and popularize his new manuscript. Along the way, Pospelov was reassigned to this project and plans for a more sophisticated text were put on hold, as was the launch of the two-tiered party educational courses that fall. Pospelov proved indispensible and eventually took the lead in Iaroslavskii’s revisions when the more senior historian proved unable to make the radical transformations required.[12]

It thus came to pass that during some of the most harrowing months of the Great Terror—the fall of 1937—Iaroslavskii and Pospelov hurriedly developed a second variant of Iaroslavskii’s July manuscript.[13] This second variant, completed in November 1937, emerged almost totally transformed, inasmuch as Pospelov and his team of assistants from the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute (IMEL) had had to effectively rewrite Iaroslavskii’s original manuscript in order to make the enormous cuts requested by the party leadership.[14] In many ways, this second variant of the text came close to satisfying Stalin’s designs for the text, insofar as it was now a more manageable, efficient narrative. That said, the general secretary disliked its wordy, vapid introduction.[15] Worse, by the time Stalin found time to seriously look at the text—in late February-early March 1938—it had lapsed into obsolescence, inasmuch as it had been written before the Third Moscow Show Trial. Now, in the wake of N. I. Bukharin and his defendants’ confessions, rumors circulated about the existence of an omnipresent conspiracy within Soviet society. Stalin met personally with Pospelov and A. A. Zhdanov in early March and April 1938 in order to instruct them on how party history would have to be rewritten yet again.[16] Ultimately this trial would force Iaroslavskii and Pospelov to develop first a third and then a fourth variant of their party history between March and April 1938 in order to fully expose the massive plot that ostensibly had united leftist Trotskyites and rightist Bukharinites with bourgeois nationalists in the republics and imperialists and fascists abroad.[17]

Completed in late April 1938, the fourth variant of Iaroslavskii and Pospelov’s prototype presented precisely what Stalin had requested: a paranoiac, claustrophobic view of party history within which conspiracy and internal opposition had dogged the Bolsheviks from the earliest days of the movement. Such forces had attempted to assassinate Lenin and undermine the October 1917 revolution; more recently, oppositionists on the left and on the right had systematically undermined industrialization, collectivization and the construction of socialism in one country in league with the USSR’s enemies abroad in Nazi Germany, nationalist Poland and imperialist Japan. Iaroslavskii and his party handlers—particular Zhdanov, but Stalin as well—appear to have assumed that this variant was virtually complete and would require little more than proofreading within the party leadership.[18]

When Stalin turned to proof Iaroslavskii and Pospelov’s fourth variant that May, he took a quick dislike to it, despite having skimmed it as recently as earlier that March. Although he would explain his frustration to his comrades-in-arms later that August in terms of the manuscript’s tendency to under-theorize the party’s historical experience and present instead an mind-numbingly empirical accounting of the past, a close examination of his editing during the summer of 1938 reveals that he objected to a lot more than just the text’s downplaying of theory.[19] First, the manuscript was still so wordy and detailed that it frequently lost sight of the forest for the trees. Second, it was dominated by an obsequious version of the personality cult that exaggerated Stalin’s personal role in the party’s leadership to a ridiculous degree. Perhaps most striking, though, was the evident displeasure with which Stalin regarded the manuscript’s claustrophobic discussion of the omnipresent conspiracy, which it blamed for everything from revolutionary-era setbacks to the trials and tribulations of the first Five-Year Plan. Ultimately, Stalin would spend the rest of the summer at work on the manuscript, purging it of its excesses and interpolating into it a new theoretical red thread concerning the party’s historical uniqueness and the building of socialism in one country.[20]

Completed in September 1938, the Short Course was published to great fanfare in the USSR, first in Pravda and other newspapers and then as a textbook in the months that followed. In November 1938, the party leadership announced in a major Central Committee resolution that all party education and indoctrinational efforts would henceforth be organized around the Short Course—a transformative decision that led to the withdrawal of all competing educational material from libraries and reading rooms throughout the country.[21] Never revised and only haltingly supplemented with auxiliary materials, the Short Course would dominate party education and indoctrination efforts through Stalin’s death in 1953.

The stabilization of party history in 1938 can be read as a Stalinist version of Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1992 “the end of history” thesis, according to which Soviet society was held to have reached “the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution.”[22] Better, however, would be to see the party’s inability to update the Short Course after 1938 as an ideological ossification of sorts. Indeed, calls were made within the ideological establishment as early as 1944 for a return to party history;[23] between 1945 and 1949, the IMEL not only planned to release the Short Course as the fifteenth volume in Stalin’s Works,[24] but it made two attempts to draft new chapters for a proposed second edition of the textbook that would cover at least the 1939-1945 period.[25] Stalin, too, appears to have briefly considered revisions to the core of the Short Course during the postwar years before tabling both his efforts and the IMEL proposals.[26]

Why Stalin allowed party history to ossify during these years is difficult to say. By the mid-to-late 1940s, much had changed since the Short Course had originally been issued and it is possible that Stalin lacked the time to embark upon a massive new editorial project. It is also possible that Stalin delayed his revisions to the Short Course due to his preoccupation with other major ideological projects underway during these years in the fields of philosophy, biology, genetics and political economy.[27] It is also possible that Stalin struggled during these years to connect the Short Course and its key themes—particularly Socialism in One Country—to what was a very different postwar world.

While extant archival evidence does not allow for a precise explanation for this ossification of party history, the notion that it may have stemmed from Stalin’s failure to connect the Short Course to the postwar circumstances is supported by the fact that the IMEL continued to struggle with this problem after the general secretary’s death in 1953.[28] Indeed, even after the advent of the post-Stalin Thaw, the party leadership and its ideological establishment spent another three years trying to extend the Short Course into the postwar period before N. S. Khrushchev and A. I. Mikoian denounced this textbook’s stranglehold on party history during the 1956 Twentieth Party Congress.[29] And even after Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” formally ended the Short Course’s monopoly on the past, party history would never stray too far from the text’s precepts and postulates, confining its reform of party education and indoctrination after 1956 to an exorcising of Stalin’s cult of personality. Other defining features of the Short Course’s history narrative—particularly its tightly centralized narrative and its disregard for grassroots agency—would continue to structure party history until the late 1980s.

This collection supplies an array of archival documents designed to provide background and context to the Short Course—both concerning its pre-1938 origins, its Terror-era publication, and its ideological reign over the course of the next 18 years of Soviet history. Inasmuch as the Short Course was a project jointly supervised by Stalin and the party’s Central Committee, it is natural that any analysis of related archival documents would begin with that institution’s former holdings, grouped largely at RGASPI (Rossiiskii gosodarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no–politicheskoi istorii, or the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History). Most important are the massive holdings of the party’s Central Committee (f. 17). The main political and bureaucratic products of this institution are the protocols of its administrative bodies, where one finds recorded these bodies’ resolutions and the method in which they were approved (either by live vote or telephone poll). All Politburo, Orgburo and Central Committee Secretariat resolutions that were connected to the development of historical scholarship or curricular materials were surveyed for potential inclusion within this collection. Draft Politburo resolutions (f. 17, op. 163) were similarly surveyed, as were draft resolutions from the Orgburo and the Central Committee Secretariat (f. 17, op. 114, 116) and their associated materials.

The implementation of these Central Committee resolutions was supervised by the Department of Culture and Propaganda and its various incarnations. This party organ was tasked with supervising all state activities connected with scholarship, education (both state and party schools) and the press (both newspapers and artistic literature). This department was also tasked with monitoring textbooks on the history of the party and the history of the Comintern; other sectors of this department answered for the supervision of the public schools, scholarly research establishments, propaganda, scholarly publications, creative literature, and the fine arts. The department was run by A. I. Stetskii until his arrest in April 1938; it was supervised first by V. M. Molotov, until 1934, and then by Stalin. It underwent periodic reorganization during the mid-1930s and was profoundly restructured in 1939 as the Directorate of Propaganda and Agitation, after which it was first supervised by A. A. Zhdanov and then by G. F. Aleksandrov after 1940.

Not all archival documents connected with the Central Committee’s Agitprop department (f. 17, op. 120, 125) have survived to the present day. Among those that do, the most important for the reconstruction of the history of the Short Course are four copies of Iaroslavskii and Pospelov’s fourth variant of their prototype party history (f. 17, op. 120, d. 383), upon which the Short Course was based. There is also a stenographic report of a meeting of Moscow and Leningrad propagandists from September 27-October 1, 1938, at which the promotion and dissemination of the Short Course was discussed (f. 17, op. 120, d. 307). Discussion of the publication of the Short Course in non-Russian republican and foreign languages is also reflected in the archival documents surveyed here (f. 17, op. 120, d. 258). Internal correspondence and letters from readers were also collected by Agitprop and today reflect aspects of the textbook’s popular reception (f. 17, op. 125, d. 1). Other documents register factual and stylistic corrections to be made to any subsequent edition of the Short Course (f. 17, op. 125, d. 10) and a variety of stillborn plans for an array of complementary textbooks on other subjects (f. 17, op. 125, d. 26). Still other documents from this body reflect the party’s monitoring and control of the use of the Short Course in Soviet society both during and after the war, through the mid-1950s (f. 17, op. 125, d. 221, 254).

Another body under the jurisdiction of the Central Committee associated with scholarly research and publication—the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute (IMEL in Russian)—emerged in its mature form in 1931, under the direction of V. V. Adoratskii. Its archival record group (f. 71) has survived in more complete form than that associated with Agitprop and was thoroughly surveyed during the assembly of this collection. Correspondence between the Central Committee and the IMEL (f. 71, op. 3) was examined, as were the IMEL leadership’s internal decisions, instructions and committee protocols (f. 71, op. 4). The IMEL’s sector devoted to party history was likewise surveyed (f. 71, op. 2), as was its party committee, the files of which (f. 212, op. 3) are stored in the former Moscow party archive (Tsentral’noe khranenie dokumentov obshchestvenno–politicheskoi istorii Moskvy, or the Central Archive for Documents on the Socio-Political History of Moscow).

Aside from these institutional collections associated with the Central Committee, a number of personal collections tied to particular leaders were examined at RGASPI. No personal collections linked to Stetskii or his deputy V. G. Knorin are known to exist at RGASPI, in all likelihood due to their arrest in April 1938 and June 1937, respectively. V. M. Molotov’s collection (f. 82), although elaborate, contains nothing of importance to the study of the Short Course. Adoratskii’s personal collection (f. 559) was evidently also purged of many of its contents at some point and contains little of any documentation relevant to the history of the Short Course.

Other personal collections at RGASPI have much to offer, however. Particularly notable is Pospelov’s personal archive (f. 629). In this fond, material was surveyed covering Pospelov’s work assisting Iaroslavskii in the editing of his early Short Course prototypes (f. 629, op. 1, d. 64) during the fall of 1937. One speech was also identified as containing valuable retrospective information on editing the text in tandem with Iaroslavskii between August 1937 and April 1938, and then with Stalin in August and early September 1938 (f. 629, op. 1, d. 13).

Zhdanov’s personal collection (f. 77) likewise contains material relevant to the study of the Short Course. These documents include early drafts of Pospelov’s revisions to the conclusion of the second variant of Iaroslavskii and Pospelov’s manuscript (f. 77, op. 4, d. 24) and Zhdanov’s own editing of Stalin’s August 1938 draft (f. 77, op. 4, d. 22-24). Zhdanov’s files also contain copies of the Central Committee’s consideration of its October-November resolution concerning the place of the Short Course in the party’s educational and indoctrinational system (f. 77, op. 4, d. 4-5). Of similar interest are Zhdanov’s notebooks, which contain marginalia on the editing of the party history (f. 77, op. 3, d. 157-159).

Iaroslavskii’s personal collection (f. 89) likewise contains important material for reconstructing the history of the Short Course. Drafts (e.g. f. 89, op. 11, d. 57), correspondence (e.g. f. 89, op. 1, d. 84; op. 8, d. 827; op. 12, d. 2) and speeches (e.g. f. 89, op. 8, d. 807, 831) all contribute to the historical record surrounding his contributions to the subject in important ways.

Most important among the personal archives to the study of the Short Course is that of Stalin himself (f. 558). It is in this collection that one may find three of Iaroslavskii and Pospelov’s four variants of their party history (f. 558, op. 3, d. 381; f. 558, op. 11, d. 1208; f. 558, op. 3, d. 77), occasionally with fleeting marginalia. Evidence of Stalin’s own editing of the Short Course, although incompletely preserved, is also located in this collection, in the form of an early draft from the summer of 1938 (f. 558, op. 11, d. 1209-1211) and a typescript from later that August (f. 558, op. 11, d. 1212-1216). Other materials of interest in this collection include Stalin’s early thoughts on the writing of party history from April 1937 (f. 558, op. 1, d. 3212) and a summary of reviews of his August draft written by members of the Politburo as well as Iaroslavskii and Pospelov (f. 558, op. 11, d. 1219). The original copies of these latter reviews are housed at another archive, RGANI (detailed below).

Stalin’s personal archive also contains the only known stenographic records of many of his most important speeches, inasmuch as his contributions were typically extracted from conference proceedings that are stored in other archival collections. Relevant to the study of the Short Course are Stalin’s speeches from the September 27-October 1 1938 meeting of Moscow and Leningrad propaganda specialists (f. 558, op. 11, d. 1122), as well as Stalin’s speech to the Politburo later that October (evidently misfiled at f. 17, op. 163, d. 1218). Evidence of the popular resonance enjoyed by the Short Course is visible in letters sent both to Stalin and other party institutions that are likewise stored in the general secretary’s archive (f. 558, op. 11, d. 1220). Stalin’s personal archive also contains his personal correspondence with important party historians and members of the party’s ideological establishment. Inasmuch as the record-keeping files of Stalin’s personal secretariat do not appear to have survived, it is unclear to what extent these collections of correspondence reflect all of the general secretary’s communications with such people.

This SDI collection features a smaller selection of materials drawn from archives aside from RGASPI. Most important is RGANI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii, or the Russian State Archive of Current History), the former current archive of the Central Committee. This archive contains newly-declassified material from the APRF (Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii, or the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation), particularly thematic files that were compiled from materials under Politburo consideration during this period. Most important are three files (f. 3, op. 22, d. 174-176) that concern the writing of party history between 1931 and 1958. As with other thematic files from the Presidential Archive, these files assemble in chronological order copies of all Politburo, Orgburo and Central Committee Secretariat resolutions as well as a portion of the materials that contributed to these decisions. These files also contain other materials, such as letters to and from Stalin. Some of these materials duplicate others held at RGASPI; all RGANI materials cited in this collection are not to be found in complete form at RGASPI, such as the original copies of the reviews of Stalin’s August Short Course manuscript, written by his Politburo comrades-in-arms and Iaroslavskii and Pospelov (f. 3, op. 22, d. 174a, 174b, 174v, 174g).

Likewise represented in this collection are materials connected with the promotion of the Short Course abroad. These have been preserved in the former holdings of the Comintern and the Communist Youth International (RGASPI, f. 495, op. 14, d. 126; op. 73, d. 67; etc.).

Finally, select materials in this collection stem from the former archive of the Red Army (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv, or the Russian State Military Archive). Most of these materials, which focus on the reform of the party educational and indoctrinational system during the spring of 1937, originate within the personal papers of Ia. B. Gamarnik, and are stored with the collection of the army’s Political Directorate (f. 9, op. 29, d. 323). They represent copies of material that was apparently not retained within more central collections at RGASPI and RGANI.

[1] I. V. Stalin, “O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii bol’shevizma,” Proletarskaia revoliutsiia 6 (1931): 3-21; Stalin’s archival version is at RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 2983, l. 1-15.

[2] David Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination and Terror under Stalin, 1928-1941 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), chaps. 2-5.

[3] For examples, see Stalin’s March 27, 1935 speech to the Orgburo about party propaganda (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1118, l. 90, 94–99); undated Central Committee resolution “O reorganizatsii Kul’tpropa TsK VKP(b),” Pravda, 14 May 1935, 1; Central Committee resolution of June 14, 1935 “O propagandistskoi rabote v blizhaishee vremia,” Pravda, 15 June 1935, 1; Politburo resolution of 21 June 1935 “O posobii po istorii partii dlia propagandistov (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 965, l. 42); Politburo resolution of 21 June 1935 “O populiarnom uchebnike po istorii partii” (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 965, l. 42).

[4] Knorin, Iaroslavskii and Pospelov failed to provide a satisfactory two-volume text in late 1935 entitled History of the ACP(b): A Popular Textbook (the galleys of its first volume are at RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 74); Iaroslavskii subsequently released the first volume of his marginal Ocherki po istorii VKP(b), ed. E. M. Iaroslavskii, 2 vols. (Moscow: Partizdat, 1936).

[5] “Materialy fevral’sko-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP(b) 1937 g.,” Voprosy istorii 3 (1995): 14-15.

[6] Resolution of the TsK VKP(b) Plenum of 5 March 1937 “Po dokladu I. V. Stalina ‘O nedostatkakh partiinoi raboty i merakh likvidatsii trotskistskikh i inykh dvukhrushnikov v partorganizatsiiakh,’” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 613, l. 19; Orgburo resolution of March 25, 1937 “O vypolnenii resheniia Plenuma TsK ob organizatsii partiinykh kursov, leninskikh kursov i kursov po istorii i politike partii,” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 114, d. 623. l. 1.

[7] For Stalin’s instructions on the new text, see “K izucheniiu istorii VKP(b),” Pravda, 6 May 1937, 4 (the archival copy of this letter is at РГАСПИ. Ф. 558. Оп. 1. Д. 3212. Л. 1–11; also 12-35).

[8] Politburo resolution of 16 April 1937 “Ob uchebnike po istorii VKP(b),” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 986, l. 2.

[9] Politiburo resolution of May 11, 1937 “Ob organizatsii partiinykh kursov,” RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 987. l. 51–54; Politburo resolution of June 28, 1937 “O leninskikh kursakh,” RGASPI, 17, op. 3. d, 989, l. 14–15.

[10] Iaroslavskii to Stalin (1 July 1937), RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 1203, l. 1; Iaroslavskii’s 800-page typescript is at RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 1203-1207; the galleys are at RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 381

[11] Stetskii’s report on Iaroslavskii’s manuscript is at RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1219, ll. 21-35. Iaroslavskii’s protests against this evaluation are contained in his marginalia on another copy of the report at l. 7–20 and in an August 29, 1937 letter to Stalin, at RGANI, f. 3, op. 22, d. 174, l. 117–121.

[12] Pospelov’s plans for the manuscript revisions are at RGASPI, f. 629, op. 1, d. 64, l. 78–78ob; he explains the needed revisions to Iaroslavskii and Stetskii in an undated letter at f. 629, op. 1, d. 64, l. 73.

[13] Some correspondence survives: Iaroslavskii to Pospelov (29 August, 13, 19 September 1937), RGASPI, f. 89, op. 12, d. 2, ll. 234-238; f. 629, op. 1, d. 101, ll. 5-6; also d. 64, l. 78; for Iaroslavskii’s later reminiscences, see f. 89, op. 8, d. 807, ll. 1-2.

[14] The second variant is at RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1208. See Pospelov to Stalin (November 5, 1937), RGANI, f. 3, op. 22, d. 174, l. 123; Iaroslavskii to Stalin (November 10, 1937), f. 3, op. 22, d. 174, l. 124; Stetskii to Stalin (January 26, 1938), f. 3, op. 22, d. 174, l. 125.

[15] This is clear from the fact that not only did Stalin toy with the text’s introduction, but he then instructed Pospelov to develop a new one. See RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1208, l. 1; d. 1217. l. 2–24.

[16] See Stalin’s undated comments on Iaroslavskii and Pospelov’s conclusion, likely dating to early March 1938: RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1217, l. 26–28.

[17] The galleys for the third variant are at RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 77; the galleys for the fourth variant are at f. 17, op. 120, d. 383.

[18] For Iaroslavskii’s speech at the Third Krasnogvardeiskii District Party Conference during mid-May 1938, see RGASPI, f. 89, op. 8, d. 831, l. 1–5; for Zhdanov’s speech at the Seventh Leningrad region conference on June 9, 1938, see f. 77, op. 1, d. 692, l. 173–178; for Stalin’s initiative to publish an array of similar short courses on other subjects, see Politburo resolution of April 25, 1938 “Ob izdaniiakh ‘Kratkikh kursov’ i ‘uchebnikov’ dlia prepodavaniia v partiinykh i komsomol’skikh shkolakh, kursakh i kruzhkakh,” f. 17, op. 3, d. 998, l. 1; d. 789, l; op. 163, d. 1189, l. 3-4ob.

[19] Stalin to the members of the Politburo and Iaroslavskii and Pospelov (August 16, 1938), RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1219, l. 37.

[20] For Stalin’s first round, composed of the last chapters of the galleys to Iaroslavskii and Pospelov’s third version, unbound pages from the galleys of their fourth version, and Stalin’s own typescript and hand-written pages and interpolations, see RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 77; op. 11, d. 1209, ll. 1-147; d. 1210, ll. 148-328; d. 1211, ll. 329-392. For Stalin’s second round, consisting of only Chapter 4 in typescript with handwritten editing and interpolations, see d. 1213, ll. 160-237. A complete copy of Stalin’s third round of revisions—a typescript sent to members of his inner circle with additional marginalia added between August 16 and September 9—is at d. 1212, ll. 1-157; d. 1213, ll. 238-314; d. 1214, ll. 315-444; d. 1215, ll. 445-576; d. 1216, ll. 568-670. Other drafts, including intermediate copies of several chapters, have proven impossible to locate.

[21] Central Committee resolution of November 14, 1938 “O postanovke partiinoi propagandy v sviazi s vypuskom ‘Kratkogo kursa istorii VKP(b),’” Pravda, 15 November 1938, 1-2.

[22] Fukuyama, of course, was referring to late twentieth-century capitalism in his seminal work. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), xi.

[23] See G. F. Aleksandrov to A. S. Shcherbakov (March 31, 1944), RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 221, ll. 28-90; B. M. Volin to Malenkov (December 5, 1944), f. 17, op. 125, d. 254, ll. 220-221.

[24] “Ob izdanii Sochinenii I. V. Stalina,” Pravda, 20 January 1946, 2; for the resolution slating the 1938 edition to serve as vol. 15, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 1055, l. 66.

[25] See the material assembled by V. Kryuchkov, Aleksandrov, and P. N. Fedoseyev at RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1222, l. 1-205; d. 1223, ll. 1-140.

[26] Stalin’s postwar edition copy is at RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1221.

[27] See Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

[28] See the planning documents at RGASPI, f. 71, op. 4, d. 179, ll. 92-94; RGASPI, f. 71, op. 4, d. 183, ll. 68, 84; d. 151, l. 245; TsAOPIM, f. 212, op. 3, d. 37, ll. 3-4.

[29] N. S. Khrushchev, “Otchetnyi doklad Tsentral’nogo komiteta Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo soiuza XX s”ezdu partii 14 fevralia 1956 g.” and “Rech’ A. I. Mikoiana,” in XX s”ezd Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo soiuza: stenograficheskii otchet, 2 vols. (Moscow: Izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1956), 1: 101-102, 114, 325-326; “‘O kul’te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh:’ Doklad Pervogo sekretaria TsK KPSS tov. Khrushcheva N. S. XX s”ezdu Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza 25 fevralia 1956 goda,” in Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva o kul’te lichnosti na XX s”ezde KPSS—dokumenty, ed. K. Aimermakher (Moscow: Rosspen, 2002), 51-119.