Epilogue De-Stalinization: Images of Ivan IV since 1953

Abstract

The ‘de-Stalinization’ of Groznyi began almost immediately after Stalin’s death in March 1953. At this time, criticisms of Stalin’s ‘cult of the individual’ were made primarily to boost the claims of collective leadership within the Party.¹ The term appeared in a Pravda editorial in June 1953 which also stressed that the people rather than heroes were the makers of history,² and this theme was promptly taken up by historians. An editorial in the journal Voprosy istorii criticized ‘bourgeois’ historiography for its stress on ‘great men’, and complained that the role of the people had been neglected in the writing of history: military commanders did not, after all, win wars without a contribution from the masses. History textbooks had exaggerated the role of Ivan III and Ivan IV at the expense of the socio-economic history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and they had not shown the role played by the people in the creation of the centralized Russian state. A new crime — ‘personification’ — was detected in the history syllabuses of higher educational institutions, exemplified in the use of such terms as ‘The domestic policy of Ivan IV’ or ‘The noble empire of Catherine II’.³ Soon afterwards, similar points were made by the editors of a posthumous publication of S. V. Bakhrushin’s works. The preface to the second volume, published in 1954, criticized Bakhrushin for exaggerating the significance of Ivan Groznyi as an individual, and for creating the impression that certain phenomena had occurred as the result of the influence of his personality, rather than of objective historical development.⁴