Joseph Stalin on editing
Words and people
The man for whom the Stalinist form of totalitarianism was named, Joseph Stalin became a revolutionary in 1900, at the age of 22, and eventually joined the Bolshevik wing of the revolutionary movement. Winning the power struggle during Lenin’s decline and after his death, he ruled the Soviet Union as a dictator from the late 1920s until his death in 1953. This is taken from Holly Case’s “The Tyrant as Editor” in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Having left seminary after reading Lenin, he became a newspaper editor and then the first editor of the Bolshevik publication Pravda (truth) and then again in 1917 when he returned from exile. Lenin admired him and he “admired Lenin, and rejected 47 articles he submitted to Pravda.”
Djugashvili (later Stalin) was a ruthless person, and a serious editor. The Soviet historian Mikhail Gefter has written about coming across a manuscript on the German statesman Otto von Bismarck edited by Stalin’s own hand. The marked-up copy dated from 1940, when the Soviet Union was allied with Nazi Germany.
Knowing that Stalin had been responsible for so much death and suffering, Gefter searched “for traces of those horrible things in the book.” He found none. What he saw instead was “reasonable editing, pointing to quite a good taste and an understanding of history.” . . .
Stalin always seemed to have a blue pencil on hand, and many of the ways he used it stand in direct contrast to common assumptions about his person and thoughts. He edited ideology out or played it down, cut references to himself and his achievements, and even exhibited flexibility of mind, reversing some of his own prior edits. . . .
Even when not wielding his blue pencil, Stalin’s editorial zeal was all-consuming. He excised people — indeed whole peoples — out of the manuscript of worldly existence, had them vanished from photographs and lexicons, changed their words and the meanings of their words, edited conversations as they happened, backing his interlocutors into more desirable (to him) formulations.
“The Poles have been visiting here,” he told the former Comintern chief Georgi Dimitrov in 1948. “I ask them: What do you think of Dimitrov’s statement? They say: A good thing. And I tell them that it isn’t a good thing. Then they reply that they, too, think it isn’t a good thing.”
All editors, wrote the cultural historian Jacques Barzun, “show a common bias: . . . what the editor would prefer is preferable.” . . . [Stalin] knew that editing was a higher power.
Naimark [Stanford historian Norman Naimark] argues that editing is as much a part of Stalinist ideology as anything he said or wrote. This insight warrants amplification. Under Stalinism, anyone could speak or write, but since Stalin was the supreme gatekeeper of the censorship hierarchy and the gulag system, the power to edit was power itself.
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