Stalin: authoritarian populist or great Russian chauvinist?

Abstract

David Brandenberger argues that contemporary Russian identity was mainly a result of a “historical accident.” He maintains that this national identity was a product of the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, which is more commonly cited, and that in terms of the state formulating a conception of what it meant to be Russian, the first decade of the Soviet period achieved little. However, by the late 1920s Soviet ideologists began to seek something more appealing than the mundane party slogans and eventually added non-proletarian, historical Russian heroes to the Soviet pantheon, particularly after the purges when the latter group was sorely depleted. This campaign was largely successful in inducing an understanding of national identity from a non-proletarian past as is evident today. He perceives this process as the formation of a Soviet populism, designed to mobilize society “on the mass level” and compares Stalin's USSR with Latin American dictatorships in this regard. Stalin, he argues, “was an authoritarian populist rather than a nationalist.” By 1953, Russians had a much better idea about their identity than in the period before 1937.