History, Nation, and Local Foundations of the Stalin Cult

This chapter presents the role of the Caucasus in Joseph Stalin's foundational writing on the “national question.” It examines the rewriting of Stalin's own revolutionary history in the Caucasus by Lavrenti Beria, and the foundation that these works provided for the construction of a national cult in Georgia that would revise history books and amalgamate subnational groups into a single, Georgian nationality. The chapter also looks at how Georgians played an outsized role in the formation of the Soviet polity and its nationality apparatus, with the Georgian example as a central arena for debate about all-Union affairs. By the late Stalin era, understandings of Georgian national identity were closely intertwined with pride in Stalin as a conational, following two decades of constructing a consolidated Georgian nationality via census categories and historical writing which drew on the foundations of the Stalin cult. The chapter recounts how Stalin clearly inhabited a “deep Georgian ethnic consciousness” into his late twenties and chronicles the time when he ascended to power in Moscow by the mid-1920s.