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Russian
Professor offers glimpse into Stalin's early years
By Elizabeth Solly '05
On Oct. 20, the Russian Area Studies Concentration
Program sponsored a lecture and reception in Bartley Hall. Dr. Alfred Rieber,
a history professor at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, gave a presentation
titled “Stalin’s Early Years in Georgia: New Discoveries by a Veteran
Archive Rat.”
Rieber has devoted much of his unconventional
academic career to studying Russian history and Stalin in particular, and
has published several books on these subjects. Though born and educated in
the United States, Rieber moved to Russia to teach history at Central
European University in Budapest. After spending this year in Pennsylvania,
he will teach in Wales next year, and then return to Budapest.
Rieber donned the uniform of a Red Army officer in
the 1918 Russian Civil War to get into character for his presentation. He
began by introducing the role of the historian, which he said was to unearth
the facts and put them into context. With that in mind, he then laid out the
format for his argument: to explore Stalin’s early years in the contexts of
Gori, Stalin’s rural birthplace; Tblisi, the urban capital of Georgia; and
Batumi, a port on the Black Sea where he traveled as a young adult.
Within these contexts, Rieber discussed historian
Vladimir Kaminskit’s collection of unpublished documents on Stalin’s
upbringing, to reach some unusual conclusions. First, he concluded that Gori,
as a boisterous, rough frontier town, played a pivotal role in shaping
Stalin’s combative worldview. Stalin, having grown up in this survival of
the fittest environment that was replete with heroes and villains, saw
himself as a bandit championing the rights of the poor.
Next, moving into Stalin’s later years in Tblisi,
Rieber argued the myth of Stalin as a young Marxist revolutionary. He
alleges, in considering the new evidence presented by Kaminskit, that
history has grossly exaggerated Stalin’s participation in the Marxist
movement. For example, the common assumption that Stalin was kicked out of
his seminary for Marxist agitation is false. New evidence indicates he was
kicked out merely for missing a final exam.
To
conclude, Rieber presented Stalin’s two key strengths that led him to power.
First, Stalin excelled at galvanizing the unskilled workers, impassioning
them through speaking about practical matters on their level. Most
importantly, he was able to form a loose association of multiple identities
that allowed him to shift between groups at his leisure. |
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