Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality
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Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253038227 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/11/2018 |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
ON E HENRI BARBUSSE AND STALIN'S OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY
On November 7, 1934, the French novelist and World War I veteran Henri Barbusse witnessed a spectacle that he described as unprecedented in its magnitude. From a platform atop Lenin's Mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square, standing alongside Stalin and key members of his inner circle, Barbusse saw massive infantry regiments, tanks, planes, and a reported 1.75 million Soviet citizens take part in a six-hour military parade marking the seventeenth anniversary of the October Revolution. It was the sort of spectacle — marked by colorful banners, f lags, and large-scale portraits of leaders — that would become routine viewing in Communist countries in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But in 1934, the scope and tenor of the parade made a deep impact on Barbusse, who described it as more perfect, more complete, and more exuberant than previous celebrations of its kind. And the parade's politico-military function did not escape the former infantryman. In his account of the event, which was published on the front page of L'Humanité, Barbusse remarked, "One could see today — through a few glimpses — on what foundation the Soviet Union's drive for peace is based." Furthermore, the French writer made a point of underscoring an element he deemed central to the commemoration. He wrote, "There would be something missing in even a hasty exposé ... if one did not note the all-powerful love, based on gratitude and trust, that this unlimited mass of people has for Comrade Stalin."
Several months later, Barbusse would publish the first official biography of the Soviet leader, Staline: Un monde nouveau vu à travers un homme (1935). The book's opening pages depict a military parade similar to the one he had recently witnessed, complete with vivid displays of adulation for the general secretary. The text's overture is typical of the tenor of the biography, and the overall narrative appears to have pleased Aleksei Stetskii, the head of the culture and propaganda department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the foreword to the Russian translation of the biography, Stetskii states, "The book has been written with a tremendous amount of love for the Soviet land, its peoples and its leader." And indeed, Barbusse's Staline is a monument to the general secretary's rule and a foundational text for his personality cult. For Barbusse, the biography represented the culmination of more than fifteen years of writing, editorial work, and engagement as a public intellectual in promotion of revolutionary violence, the Soviet Union, and its leadership caste.
Staline is the last book Barbusse published in his lifetime. Given its place as a capstone to many years of deep involvement in the Communist orbit, it should be considered alongside his Goncourt-winning novel Le Feu (1916) as a career-defining work. To be sure, Le Feu is central to Barbusse's legacy, as it announced many of the themes that would be central to his writing through the end of his life. It, moreover, led to Barbusse's lasting reputation as the antiwar "Zola of the trenches" and as one of the "founding fathers of engagement." However, contrary to conventional wisdom, Staline is a text more representative of his overall corpus and his work as a public intellectual. That fact is significant not just for Barbusse. For as we will see over the course of this book, Barbusse's political engagement served as a blueprint for Communist-aligned intellectual activity in France for a generation.
This analysis of Staline will shed light on the ways in which the cult of personality and Soviet policy were promoted in France from the 1920s through the 1950s. I will argue that in addition to serving as a touchstone text for the PCF, Barbusse's biography of Stalin should be read as a prototype of future official biographies of the general secretary. Furthermore, as I contend, Barbusse's Staline serves as a case study in the evolution of discourse around French revolutionary traditions, nationalism, and internationalism in Communist circles in the 1920s and early-to-mid-1930s. Throughout the Stalinist era, French political and intellectual history played a role in the ways in which the party's leadership caste and policies were promoted in philo-Soviet texts. This chapter shows that Staline is an artifact from the moment in France when the Front Populaire movement was taking shape. Crucially, at that time, in accordance with new Comintern tactics and policies, the PCF began to promote a patriotic line, one that involved an embrace of national defense and the promotion of French republican symbols and values. That new orientation, I argue, clashed with Barbusse's deep-seated antinationalism, and those tensions are reflected in Staline and its reception in party circles.
Despite the importance of Staline to Barbusse's overall career and to the French Communist Party, the text has received scant scholarly attention. In order to grasp the importance of the biography to Barbusse and to the party as a whole, it is necessary to place the text in the discursive and cultural context in which it was produced and received. To that end, I will analyze Barbusse's Staline in light of his other writing on the Soviet Union, his activity as a public intellectual during and after World War I, the history of the PCF, French and Russian archival documents, and other noteworthy biographies of Stalin (those contemporary to Barbusse's as well as those published very recently). I conclude this chapter with an exploration of the complex legacy of Barbusse's text itself in the Soviet Union. For while Staline was lauded for nearly two decades within the PCF and should be read as a prototype of future official biographies, the book itself had a limited legacy in the USSR, due to Barbusse's praise for a number of Soviet figures who would be executed as enemies of the people in the years following its publication.
From War to R evolution
In an August 1914 letter to the then-socialist newspaper L'Humanité, a forty-one-year-old Henri Barbusse wrote of his decision to enlist in the infantry despite an official exemption from service on the front lines. Although not himself a member of the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (the French socialist party, or SFIO), he described his motivations as based in socialist ideals "against our infamous old enemies: militarism, imperial- ism, the Sword, the Boot, and I will add, the Crown." The conflict would be a "social war" that would serve what he called the socialist antimilitarist cause. The coming war would, in his view, be a violent means of liberating humanity from oppression. A nationalist war effort would therefore serve as a means of achieving socialist internationalist ideals. Significantly, Barbusse wrote, "If I sacrifice my life and if I go to war with joy, it is not only as a Frenchman, but it is above all as a man."
As little as two years later, as Le Feu and subsequent nonfiction writing indicate, although Barbusse's antimilitarist and antiimperialist views survived his tour of duty, he had abandoned the notion that war itself could purge humanity of oligarchy. Indeed, in Le Feu, the Great War is depicted as a criminal and futile endeavor: "Two armies fighting each other — that's like one great army committing suicide." Infantrymen struggle to survive horrific conditions on the front, but the reader is never given a clear sense of why the brutal battles are fought. War, moreover, is not a heroic endeavor: one soldier declares that he and his comrades-in-arms are nothing but "murderers." To make matters worse, noncombatants are depicted as ignorant of the soldiers' sacrifices and eager to exploit economic opportunities created by the conflict. Wartime society, says the anonymous first-person narrator, is sharply divided into "those who gain and those who grieve."
Barbusse's August 1914 declaration that he would go to war "with joy" as both Frenchman and human being quickly became obsolete. From the very first chapter of Le Feu — composed not even two years later, in part while convalescing from his tour of duty on the front lines — Barbusse upends not just the notion of the war as a humanistic social cause, but also the legitimacy of nationalist motivations to go to war. In the novel's telling opening scene, which takes place in an alpine sanatorium at a significant distance from society and its conflicts, men of various nationalities contemplate the news of the declaration of war. Many take positions against their own countries: a German patient says, for instance, "I hope Germany will be beaten." In harmony with that opening sequence, a central message of Le Feu is that nationalism is an illusion created by arbitrary frontiers and used by those in power for profit and personal gain. Nationalists and traditionalists distort moral principles, and their abuse of patriotic ideals leads to war. As one soldier asserts, "The Jingoes — they're vermin." The novel aims furthermore to show that the working class is disproportionately victimized by war and nationalism. An underlying premise of combat in Le Feu is that French and German soldiers on opposite sides of the front lines have more in common with each other than they do with their officers and political leaders, not to mention the profiteering and disengaged civilians back home. Overall, Barbusse paints a bleak picture of soldiers' daily life in Le Feu.
The experience of war is eloquently described as "that endless monotony of misery, broken by poignant tragedies." There is a glimmer of hope, however, that emerges in the novel's final chapter. Titled "The Dawn," the chapter introduces many of the concepts and themes that would come to dominate Barbusse's writing for the remainder of his life and that, moreover, foreshadow his turn to Communism. Through the narrator's commentary and the political discussions among the main characters, Barbusse underscores the notion that militarism — "the spirit of war," in the language of the soldiers — must be vanquished. To that end, the reader is told, peoples of all nations should abandon the nationalism promoted by their governments and religious figures ("with the morphine of their Paradise") and unite in a quest for total equality. Indeed, equality is the sole republican value that is espoused by the narrator and his fellow soldiers, with "fraternity" and "liberty" dismissed as mere words. For its part, equality — "the great human formula" — can lead to justice. The narrator sees the desire to quash militarism and pursue a pure form of equality as the potential source of a future, yet unspecified "Revolution." A continuation and expansion of the French Revolution, this new revolution would emancipate "the peoples" from their bellicose and greedy "masters."
Le Feu became a touchstone for the World War I generation. For years after its publication, its core principles were embraced by the French socialist press and, later, the French Communist press. More broadly, the novel became one of the most widely discussed and important works of fiction produced in the first decades of the twentieth century. It established Barbusse as a major literary figure of his day and a distinguished heir of his idol, Emile Zola. It is indeed telling that Barbusse, who prior to the war wrote in relative obscurity, was selected to give a speech at Zola's home in Médan in 1919 at the annual ceremony in honor of the author of "J'accuse!" The 1919 event was the first such gathering since 1913 — the Médan pilgrimages had been suspended due to the war — rendering Barbusse's role even more meaningful.
For a brief period after the publication of Le Feu, Barbusse expressed views regarding the French republic that were more moderate than those expressed in his 1916 war novel. That shift away from the more radical stance he took in Le Feu is part of the author's broader display of respect for Western institutions, values, and leaders in his work from 1917–19. For instance, in a July 1917 text addressed to war veterans, he expresses hope for a flourishing of French republican values: democracy, equality, liberty, and a society working for the interests of all. In this same time period, Barbusse made a distinction between reactionary nationalism (i.e., the jingoism criticized in Le Feu) and what he saw as a superior form of patriotism that embraced liberal democratic traditions. Barbusse described Woodrow Wilson as a guiding light, an embrace that, as his later work shows, is typical of his tendency to view politics through the lens of figureheads and "great" men. Barbusse praised Wilson's vision of internationalism as the best means of continuing the work of "the Great France of 1789." Indeed, in a December 1917 article, he praised the United States' stated goals for the war, which included establishing free and open international trade, self-determination for colonies, and the establishment of a "defensive league for the people." Barbusse repeatedly expressed admiration for the League of Nations, and he asserted his belief that if Wilson's vision were realized, the world would be fundamentally more just, peaceful, and democratic. In this same phase, while Barbusse heaped praise upon the French Revolution — calling it "the splendid and indelible glory of our country" — he held a dim view of the Russian Revolution. Just weeks after the Bolsheviks took power, Barbusse referred to their act as a "murderous split."
Much would change. Over the course of the year 1919, Barbusse's viewpoint underwent a fundamental shift. He began to speak in reverential terms about the seismic events taking place in the "north" and predicted that the day was coming when "there would be just one terrestrial fatherland as there is only one God." Barbusse expressed anger about the enduring imperialist and conservative status quo in the West. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that it was also in this same formative time frame that Barbusse made some of his first postwar intimations that radical societal transformation may involve — and justify — the use of violence. This new form of violence would be distinct from the "social war" Barbusse thought would democratize the international landscape when he volunteered for the infantry in 1914. Indeed, this violence would be revolutionary in nature. In September 1919, he wrote, "The dishonest morality of nationalists and reactionaries must be destroyed ... that which is up must come down, that which is held down must be raised up." He continued, "Human society must overturn itself completely, and then the world will finally be right-side up." The notion that the world must change "in one way or another" was indicative of Barbusse's permanent shift away from a belief in Western democracy and in the ability of the French republic to realize its ideals.
This transformation is consecrated in a front-page article in L'Humanité (October 12, 1919) bearing the Zola-inspired title "Nous accusons!" (We accuse) and accompanied by a large portrait of Barbusse in his military uniform. In that watershed text, Barbusse makes clear that he is not simply against the West but that he is for the defense of "the natural law of the Republic of Soviets in Russia," which he described as intimately linked with liberty, justice, and truth. For Barbusse, the Russian Revolution came to represent the only solution to rid definitively the world of war and exploitation. And as for the Bolsheviks' "murderous split" that Barbusse had decried two years earlier, their dictatorial measures, he now argued, are "temporary and justified consequences of all successful revolutions."
Barbusse's revolutionary convictions would harden in the ensuing few years, as did his tendency to view the world as divided into inherently hostile binaries: exploiters vs. exploited, reactionaries vs. revolutionaries, warmongers vs. proponents of peace, nationalism vs. internationalism. He composed two manifestos in this period — Lueur dans l'abîme (The light in the abyss, 1920) and Le Couteau entre les dents (A knife between my teeth, 1921) — both of which are essential to grasping the political positions that inform his subsequent writing. Both texts reveal a passionate commitment to supporting the Russian Revolution, couched in an increasingly uncompromising and absolutist political discourse. Barbusse evokes the themes that are common to the bulk of his postwar body of work: World War I represents the end of a civilization in decay; nationalism is based on arbitrary distinctions that impede the rise of a just internationalist order; a small minority controls and manipulates the popular masses for profit; governments and mainstream newspapers cannot be trusted; and reformists in favor of incremental social change — as opposed to total revolution — are reactionary.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Henri Barbusse and Stalin's Official Biography2. Romain Rolland and the Politics of Terror3. Paul Eluard and Stalin's 70th Birthday4. Louis Aragon and the Great Patriotic WarConclusionWorks CitedIndexWhat People are Saying About This
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Generation Stalin is a landmark study, brilliantly written, containing exemplary scholarship. Sobanet establishes himself with this volume as one of the foremost interpreters of French intellectual life. He brings to his study a cornucopia of historical knowledge and the finesse of a first-class literary critic.
"Andrew Sobanet's study of 'Generation Stalin' and the four writers he associates with the group, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Paul Eluard, and Louis Aragon, is, quite simply, magisterial. Written in lucid prose informed by meticulous and wide-ranging scholarship including archival material, books, essays, press items, and other relevant documents, the book provides an in-depth study of the rise of the Stalin cult in France.
Generation Stalin is a landmark study, brilliantly written, containing exemplary scholarship. Sobanet establishes himself with this volume as one of the foremost interpreters of French intellectual life. He brings to his study a cornucopia of historical knowledge and the finesse of a first-class literary critic.
This is an ambitious project that is well executed, with a readership that is potentially far reaching—with implications for Russian/Stalin studies, French studies, including politics and society, as well as propaganda writing and the role of the media more generally. . . . Generation Stalin is a very timely book.