Stalin and the Silences of the Official History of His Role in the Prerevolutionary Bolshevik Underground

Abstract

At the height of his cult of personality in 1938, Stalin deleted almost all references to his prerevolutionary career within the Bolshevik underground from the canonical Short Course on party history. Recognizing the challenge that this editing poses to traditional understandings of the personality cult, this article analyzes Stalin’s excisions from this all-important text and then looks to recent research by Ronald Grigor Suny, Stephen Kotkin, Erik van Ree, Ol’ga Edel’man and others in order to explain the peculiar nature of this official historical narrative.