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IN A SIGNIFICANT DEPARTURE from the materialist proletarian internationalism characteristic of the first IS years of Soviet rule, the role of the state, individual and Russian ethnos underwent a major rehabilitation in the mid-to-late 1930s. While it would be rather simplistic to accept N. Timasheff s description of this ideological transformation as a `great retreat',' the era's flux in state ideology is as dramatic as it is puzzling. Although some of the changes may have been related to the emerging cult of personality,2 it would be unwise to limit oneself to identifying this as the sole or even central ideological innovation of the era. Equally important-and distinct from the cult-is the development of a state-oriented patriotic ideology reminiscent of tsarist `great power' (velikoderzhavnye) and russocentric traditions, something which M. N. Ryutin referred to as `national Bolshevism'.3 Statements of Stalin's typically associated with the personality cult-`don't forget that we are living in Russia, the land of the tsars ... the Russian people like it when one person stands at the head of the state' and `the people need a tsar'-are actually better understood as symptomatic of the party hierarchy's etatist view of history.4 This article details the emergence of national Bolshevism as a statist component of official Soviet ideology between 1931 and 1941.
The phenomenon of national Bolshevik discourse in interwar Soviet ideological tracts and the official press is something which has received considerable scholarly attention. Although it is problematic to trace a smooth, linear rise in `great power' patriotic appeals and russocentric language during the 1930s, by the end of the decade the prominence of national Bolshevism was unmistakable. L. V. Shaporina wrote in her diary in 1939 about her confusion concerning the changing repertoire of the Leningrad Puppet Theatre:
What should we be doing? The only thing I know for sure is that in the theatre we ought to be concentrating only on things Russian. Russian history, the Russian epic, song. To teach it in the schools. To familiarise children with this, the only wealth that is left to them.5 While Timasheff accurately described national Bolshevism's symptoms in 1946, he failed to accurately diagnose its cause. Following Timasheff, a number of commentators have linked the phenomenon to nationalist sympathies in the party hierarchy,6 eroding...