The 1930s witnessed a return of sorts by the Soviet state towards its Great Russian past. Both during the Revolution and the 1920s, the state had looked at the historical past of tsardom and its various forms of commemoration of it with a rather jaundiced eye. The Soviet government of the 1920s devoted relatively little effort to historic preservation and sometimes sold off the valuables in museums and archives abroad to foreign parties as a way to raise needed hard currency. This 1920s leeriness towards the Great Russian past covered two interconnected ideological bases for the bolsheviks. One, valorizing the past was one of the chief legitimization tactics of the tsarist empire and upheld the Great Russian culture and its past as superior to the non-Russian subjects of the empire. Lenin and his cohorts were deeply concerned that Great Russian chauvinism would undermine the Bolshevik experiment and took active measures to discourage it ranging from promoting national cadres of non-Russians into the nascent Communist Party and the state apparatus (korenizatsiia/ indiginization) to engaging in an iconolcastic approach to the mores and celebration of the past. Secondly, the Bolshevik state was one that was self-consciously and avowedly new and took great pains to advertise that the results of 1917 was a solid break from the tsarist past. The state embellished tales of the tsarist past as a time of decadence and wanton cruelty in which the new Soviet state had transcended.

The shift towards the Great Russian past in the Stalin period caught a number of contemporaries by surprise and a number of Stalin's opponents abroad connected this shift in cultural policy with Stalin dictatorship. The Russian emigre sociologist Nicholas Timasheff in a famous 1946 book collectively termed these policies "the Great Retreat" in which the state backed away from the modernism and internationalism of the 1920s when it recognized that such sentiments had little persuasive power outside a narrow circle of intellectuals and true believers, and instead embraced a more conservative culture and society. For example, the Stalin state backed away from the relatively liberal divorce laws of the 1920s and recriminalized abortion in 1936. Soviet art policy under Stalin moved away from the avante garde experimentalism and into more recognizable forms and aesthetics. Although Timasheff was more neutral about the Great Retreat, he connected it with the imperative to fight fascism and saw it as a normalizing factor for the USSR's international position, Stalin's opponents, particularly the factions surrounding Trotsky, took up the paradigm of Great Retreat as part of Stalin's larger betrayal of the grand ideals of 1917 in exchange for the USSR becoming just another normal state, and a dictatorship to boot.

There certainly was a good deal of justification to the charge that the Stalin turn served the Stalin dictatorship and emerging cult of personality. The titular hero of the Eisenstein film Alexander Nevsky shared many of the treats associated with Stalin such as his personal remoteness and stalwart and decisive leadership. The state's rehabilitation of the two tsars, Peter I and Ivan IV, was in no small measure because they were two historical figures that built up the Russian state from comparative backwardsness. History textbooks and fictional portrayals toned down Ivan IV's personal cruelty and emphasized his étatisme. Stalin famously harangued Eisenstein over his portrayal of Ivan IV's degeneracy into cruelty when the latter was preparing for Ivan the Terrible, Part II with the dictator noting that the such cruelty was often necessary for a leader.

However, the idea of that the cultural politics of the Great Retreat represented a complete break with the 1920s practices obscures some important lines of continuity between the Stalin and Lenin eras. Some of the policies of the Stalin state were the rather logical responses to the consequences of the more liberal Lenin decade. Liberalized family law, for example, created a larger number of divorces and broken families than the Soviet state expected and the authorities connected the rise of various social ills such as youth hooliganism in part to the breakdown of the family. The writers of the Lenin-era family laws expected that the new socialist society would eliminate the social conditions that led to the breakdown of the family; higher divorce rates were not expected by these men and women who conceived of these reforms. The Lenin state also was just as willing to instrumentalize the tsarist past as its successor. In former imperial cities like Leningrad and Moscow, the state appropriated various palaces and historical art treasures and reopened them as museums for the masses. This reinvested the surviving relics of the tsarist past with a new, somewhat politicized, meaning in which the Soviet state was the national curator of the past and preserved what it felt was relevant for the present. The cultural politics of the 1920s practiced a highly selective and politicized reappropriation of the past and created a pattern subsequent Soviet governments followed.

The Stalin state's reappropriation and celebration of tsarist military figures highlights this process. Historical personages like Suvorov and Bagration imparted a useful heritage to the growing Red Army of the 1930s and had added importance with Barbarossa as these men had fought off invaders before and won. Drawing connection to these figures served a useful propaganda purpose, as in this famous poster which dramatically superimposed the advancing Red Army in front of Nevsky, Suvorov, and an anonymous fighter of 1917 urging them onward. But there was more to the celebration of the martial past than an exigent need for a historical narrative in wartime. The biographical background of these men made them relatively safe figures for the Soviet state to celebrate. Although the Russian imperial army upheld the Romanovs, many of its leading figures did not come from the elite nobility, but rather from the provinces and margins of Russian elite society. Bagration was Georgian-born and Suvorov was alleged to have Armenian background, a convenient point that the Stalinist histories emphasized in that it drew parallels between the present Soviet state's attempt to draw together non-Russians and Great Russians together in a grand project. Additionally, the Russian imperial army was an institution of its own during the tsarist period and even though being a part of the nobility was a usual precondition for officer status, the officer academies and other forms of training emphasized technical skills and practical knowledge for its cadets. So while these men may have belonged to an innately counter-revolutionary class and upheld a counter-revolutionary order, the Soviet state maintained these generals were more akin to specialists than the nobility. Biographical accounts of the generals from the Soviet era, which sometimes verged on hagiography, emphasized the generals' common sense and plainspoken qualities as well as their sympathies for progressive politics and dislike for tsarist discipline. In short, they were the idealized picture of a Red Army general, but in tsarist garb. In a process of appropriation similar to the state's approach to cultural luminaries like Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Tchaikovsky, state media portrayed these historical figures as individuals whose biographies show they would have been Bolsheviks had they been alive during 1917; but had the singular misfortune of having been born when the social preconditions of Russia were not present for such a movement.

The Stalin state's approach to commemorating the past was often laden with ideological meaning, and in this regard, it was not too dissimilar from its Leninist predecessor. In the post-Civil War period, the Russian past and its heroes was still too closely associated with the departed Romanov state to be employed easily by the state, but the Bolsheviks established a pattern of depoliticizing the past and then repoliticizing it that the Stalin dictatorship was able to capitalize upon to meet either the immediate needs of the moment like the war, or to appease Stalin's emerging cult of personality.

Sources

Brandenberger, David. National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Hoffmann, David Lloyd. "Was There a" Great Retreat" from Soviet Socialism? Stalinist Culture Reconsidered." Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 4 (2004): 651-674.

Lenoe, Matthew Edward. "In Defense of Timasheff's Great Retreat." Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 4 (2004): 721-730.

Maddox, Steven. Saving Stalin's Imperial City: Historic Preservation in Leningrad, 1930-1950. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2015.

Platt, Kevin M. F., and David Brandenberger. Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature As Stalinist Propaganda. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.

They were keen on Alexander Nevsky, especially during the Second World War. The image of a Russian hero driving the Teutonic Knights back from the gates of Pskov was useful as it was emotive and nationalist. There was even an Eisenstein film on it with some pretty great music by Prokofiev.