The title is not a joke. The “father of nations” made a contribution to philology as well. Indeed, totalitarian leaders who come from parties founded on an idea are always called on to give the impression that they are well-read and well-thought (and sometimes they really are.) This fact deprives culture of the magical aura that is sometimes attributed though it does not always warrant it.
Books and ideas offer something to ideological politicians that they do not offer traditional politicians, and the latter do not necessarily - at least not rhetorically - attach the same degree of importance to them. Churchill, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Kreisky, and others were also intellectuals, but they did not rely as heavily on intellectual premises in justifying their policies, emphasizing concrete achievements that can be measured in facts and figures instead.
As for Stalin, he published “Marxism and Problems of Linguistics” in 1950, a pamphlet that many Marxists and Communists consider the best text he has ever written. However, among those who did not praise it out of fear, the debate seemed like that of a closed cell, seemingly trivial or rudimentary to outsiders: Ideological parties impose a theory intended to be turned into a quasi-religious creed; anyone who reconsiders it, in response to circumstances that demand its reconsideration, has his very ordinary ideas considered extraordinary, touching on genius.
Stalin’s pamphlet began as a long article published in the “Pravda” newspaper that he was said to have worked on and written years before the 1917 revolution. Questions that comrades supposedly posed, and his answers to them, were then added to this article. “Pravda,” with Stalin’s blessing, of course, had opened a debate around linguistic questions in the multilingual Soviet Union, and in Marxist theory, publishing articles that would pave the way for Stalin’s, which subsequently became a book.
In the beginning, the author humbly states that he is not an expert in linguistics, but he also asserts that he is well-versed in the Marxist view on the matter. As is well known, the latter shortens the distance between different fields of knowledge and allows for issuing fatwas about debates within these fields, provided that they are strictly bound by its quasi-religious teachings. Without his contribution lacking thoughts on the rules and structure of language, Stalin stresses that language is not part of the “superstructure” (state, politics, law, culture...), which Marxism tells us arises from economic relations, or the “substructure” or “base.” Thus, language does not reflect the interests of the ruling class, nor does it safeguard them; rather, everyone, regardless of their social class, can use it to make communicating easier. Indeed, if the superstructure is the product of a particular era and mode of production, then language is the product of many eras, and it coexists with several modes of production.
Major historical events, such as the Bolshevik Revolution, add terms that arise “in connection with the rise of the new socialist production,” while terms that are no longer fit for the times are dropped. However, neither this nor that noticeably changes it, as language is not produced by a particular class but by all classes; in exactly the same vein, it serves them all as well.
Stalin reiterates other arguments to emphasize this same idea. He explains what Frederick Engels meant when he spoke of the class-based differences in dialect (not languages) in Britain, what Marx’s son-in-law and the French Communist Paul Lafargue meant in his discussion of the French language before and after the revolution, and what Lenin meant in what he said about there being two class cultures under capitalism, etc. In all of his explanations of the texts he goes over, Stalin repudiates the idea that the authors intended to argue for going from one language to another or that “class languages” split the same language.
However, the bad guy in Stalin’s story is the linguist Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, an expert on Caucasian languages who died 16 years before Stalin’s pamphlet was published. Marr introduced an “erroneous and non-Marxist” formula to linguistics with his emphasis on the “class character” of language, ruining Soviet linguistics and contradicting the history of all nations and languages. Marr rose to prominence because of this “Japhetic Theory” (it takes its name from Japheth, one of Noah’s sons), which suggests that the languages of the Caucasus are linked to Semitic languages of the Middle East and that they had been prevalent throughout Europe before the Indo-European languages arrived.
He formulated this theory before the 1917 revolution. And when the revolution broke out, Marr enthusiastically supported it and volunteered to work for its regime. Thus, he blended his original theory with Marxism and class struggle, arguing that divergent linguistic levels mirror and correspond to different social classes. The British bourgeoisie, for example, speaks English that is closer to the French spoken by the French bourgeoisie than it is to the English spoken by the working class in England. As for the idea that sharing a single language plays a role in uniting those who speak it, he saw it as nothing more than false consciousness of bourgeois nationalism. Marr also claimed that modern languages have a tendency, with the emergence of a communist society, to merge and become one language, basing his argument on a campaign in Russia that made waves in the twenties and thirties.
The aim of the campaign was to replace the Cyrillic alphabet with the Latin alphabet, and then replace the traditional writing systems of Soviet languages with Latin writing systems or create writing systems based on Latin for Soviet languages for which no writing system had been developed yet. This gravitation towards Latinisation, which goes back centuries, was a feature of the Europeanization of some members of the Russian intelligentsia. It was then inherited by the first cohort of Bolsheviks, before the rise of Stalinism and its Asian and Eastern undercurrents.
In fact, Marr’s theory became the official theory adopted in Russia - it was “proletarian science” (as opposed to “bourgeois science).” Thus, the author of this theory was tasked with managing the National Library of Russia between 1926 and 1930, and he continued to run the Japhetic Institute of the Academy of Sciences until he died in 1934. Though some have claimed that Arnold Chikobava, the linguist known for being highly critical of Marr and his theories, was the source of the ideas in Stalin’s pamphlet, if not the author of his book, the fact remains that the intervention bearing the leader’s signature buried Marr’s theory, and Russian linguists then began to stress the need to prioritize the Russian language and for research to focus on it.
By then, sharing commonalities with the Latin world more broadly was no longer desirable, while assimilating non-Russians into the Russian language and culture became the order of the day. As for Stalin putting his grip on life, including language, it solves the rest of the puzzle of how culture and ideas were employed to make a linguist out of him.
