‘The workers have no fatherland,’ declared Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto

The founders of Marxism did not ignore the existence of nation-states or nationalism, but they considered them secondary and transitional phenomena Marx understood the grand design of human history as the succession of distinc­tive modes of production determining the forms of social organization primitive, slave, feudal, capitalist, and communist For the traditional nineteenth-century narrative of the rise of nation states, Marx substituted the story of the struggle between exploited classes and their exploiters According to the Communist Mani­festo., ‘The history of all hitherto existing society [was] the history of class struggles ’’

Early Soviet ideology discarded the historical narratives and commemorative rituals of the Russian Empire Moreover, it rejected the very notion of ‘national history’ The new regime went as far as declaring history irrelevant, dropping it from the Soviet school curriculum and replacing it with subjects such as ‘social science’ and ‘political literacy ’ The Bolsheviks identified with a past represented by the revolutionary movements of all peoples and in all times, from Spartacus and the Paris Commune to the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 The leading official historian of the time, Mikhail Pokrovsky (1868-1932), produced several Marxist surveys of Russian history, emphasizing economic structures, class struggle, and the tsarist empire’s reactionary colonial policies Yet until approximately 1928 the state did not enforce the Pokrovskian concept of history The authorities tolerated non-Marxist historical scholarship, which flourished in the relaxed cultural atmosphere of the time The ‘socialist offensive’ in history began simulta­neously with industrialization, the collectivization of agriculture, and a cultural revolution, resulting in a purge of‘old specialists’ during the period 1928-32 The practitioners of Pokrovskian class history emerged triumphant, if only briefly ²

By the early 1930s Stalin’s pragmatic doctrine of ‘building socialism in one country’ firmly replaced the early ideal of the world revolution as the core of Soviet ideology In February 1931 Stalin publicly revised the Communist Manifestos famous dictum in his address to the conference of industrial managers ‘In the past, we did not have and could not have had a fatherland But now that we have overthrown capitalism and power belongs to the workers, we do have a fatherland and will defend its independence ’³ Soviet ideologues proceeded to rehabilitate the notion of ‘patriotism ’ While the early Soviet encyclopedias defined it as an ‘extremely reactionary ideology,’ serving the needs of imperialists, newspapers in the 1930s hailed and promoted ‘love for the Fatherland ’⁴

A part of the Stalinist ‘Great Retreat’ to traditional social and cultural values, the new patriotism restored to Soviet historical memory the ideas of statehood and nationhood In 1931 the authorities reintroduced history as a school subject In 1934 the party leadership specified that it expected teachers to offer a more traditional political history in which ‘historical events were presented in historical, chronological succession and the memorization of important historical phenom­ena, historic figures, and chronological dates was mandatory ’⁵ Beginning in 1936, the official press began denouncing the late Pokrovsky and his students for their preoccupation with ‘abstract sociologism ’ The authorities restored surviving old specialists to their positions, and university history departments returned to their traditional structure and curricula

The state-sponsored rehabilitation of Russian patriotism, national pride, and tsarist heroes became perhaps the most visible aspect of the Stalinist ‘Great Retreat’ From 1937 official propaganda elevated Russians to the status of the ‘great Russian people ’ Russian classical music and literature, previously labelled ‘of the gentry’ or ‘bourgeois,’ were also endorsed by the regime An unprecedentedly extravagant commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Pushkin’s death (1937) marked the official appropriation of Russian national culture, while the former canonical tsarist opera, Mikhail Glinka’s Life for the Tsar, was edited and staged in 1939 as a Stalinist patriotic spectacle entitled Ivan Susanin, a pompous celebration of Russian national pride Often acting on direct hints from the Politburo, Russian writers, filmmakers, and historians reinstalled as national heroes Prince Aleksandr Nevsky, Tsar Ivan the Terrible, and Emperor Peter the Great Princes, tsars, and generals, previously condemned in the press as defenders of their class interests and exploiters of the people, were now praised as great statesmen, patriots, and military leaders ⁶

During Stalinism, there was a gradual transition from a revolutionary notion of time, implying a radical break with the past to an official historical memory valuing the continuity of great-power traditions In the new historical narratives, the state and the nation increasingly replaced classes as subjects of history How­ever, students of the ‘Great Retreat’ in Stalinist ideology have generally ignored the multinational nature of this transformation For Ukrainians and other Soviet nationalities, restoring the nation as the subject of history posed a question Which nation’