Stalin's first secretary, keeper of his archive and author of his first biography
Bazhanov recalled Tovstukha matching ballot handwriting against registration forms: who crossed out Stalin's name? "He had only half a lung, but Stalin had complete confidence in him."
Stalin's first personal secretary (1918–1935) and head of the CC Secret Department (1926–1930), Tovstukha ran Stalin's private secretariat and controlled access to the Lenin Institute archive. He authored the first official biography of Stalin for the Granat Encyclopedia (1922) and directed the first edition of Lenin's Collected Works. As an émigré he joined the French Socialist Party and worked as a labourer; after returning he became secretary at the People's Commissariat for Nationalities, where his lifelong attachment to Stalin began. His management of the documentary record, above all selective access to Lenin's and Trotsky's papers, was a decisive ideological tool for the Stalin faction.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1905–09Revolutionary activity in Chernigov Social-Democratic organisation
- 1909–11Arrested for possession of banned books; exiled to Siberia
- 1912–17Fled abroad; labourer in Austria and France; joined French Socialist Party and Paris RSDLP(b) section
- 1917–18Secretary, Inspectorate Department, Central Staff of the Red Guard
- 1918–21Secretary and collegium member, People's Commissariat for Nationalities; attached to Stalin
- 1921–24Responsible worker in CC apparatus; organized and ran Stalin's personal secretariat
- 1922Wrote the first official biography of Stalin for the Granat Encyclopedia
- 1924–26Assistant director, Lenin Institute; prepared the first edition of Lenin's Collected Works
- 1926–30Head of the CC Secret Department and First Assistant to the General Secretary
- 1930–31Deputy director, Lenin Institute; editorial board of Proletarian Revolution
- 1931–35Deputy director and head of archives, Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute
- 1934–35Candidate member, CC VKP(b); member, Central Executive Committee of the USSR
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905began revolutionary movement
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionRed Guard
- 1923–1927The Succession Struggle and the Left OppositionArchivist supplying documents to Stalin's factionHe supplied Lenin Institute documents to Stalin, providing a major polemical weapon in the succession struggle.
Compiler and Gatekeeper of the Lenin Canon
Tovstukha's most enduring achievement was laying the scholarly foundations for the collected works of Lenin. From the early 1920s he studied Lenin's life and activity at the Lenin Institute, tracing the fate of each manuscript, and wrote the detailed commentary to the first edition of the Collected Works, reconstructing both the destiny of Lenin's papers and the history of their earliest publication. He personally compiled the list of Lenin articles and letters still unfound, in 1925 corrected and annotated the third volume of the Leninsky Sbornik (Lenin Miscellany), and the research group he initiated produced the party's fundamental reference work, the VKP(b) Resolutions of Congresses, Conferences and Central Committee Plenums. This scholarly labour effectively founded Soviet Marxist-Leninist bibliographic scholarship.
But the scholar and editor was at the same time a gatekeeper of the record. As assistant director of the Lenin Institute he had access to every document bearing on Lenin's sharp pre-1917 clashes with Trotsky, and his ability to supply Stalin with this material was rated a polemical weapon of the first importance in the succession struggle. In Edward Radzinsky's research, a former colleague testified that, under cover of preparing a full biography for Stalin's 50th birthday in 1929, Tovstukha withdrew from the archives all documents on Stalin, above all his pre-revolutionary career, so that they would never be published. He is also widely credited with altering Stalin's birth date from the actual 18 December 1878 (6 December Old Style) to 21 December 1879.
The hand that established a canonical text and the hand that erased whatever lay outside it were one and the same in Tovstukha. His apparatus of annotation for the Lenin corpus set a norm for later Soviet historiography, while the archive he locked down decided the official narrative of Stalin's biography.