Talk:Ivan Tovstukha

A VIP behind the curtain
Tovstukha was unknown to the wider public and rarely appears in standard histories of the Soviet Union, but he may have been a very important insider, a "spider" and a key associate of Stalin. Danish Sovietologist and historian Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, who around 1980 wrote two groundbreaking pre-Glasnost books about party structures and Stalin's methods of controlling the communist party, pointed out that Tovstukha has clear connections to some key channels that Stalin seems to have used to control his party brothers, steer decisions etc, and also that the guy was treated as a top-rate man in the ritual life of the party. When he died in 1935, he was buried in the Kremlin Wall, and half of Pravda was given over to a eulogy over him. Even if the entire paper was normally just four pages, those were very considerable honours that would never have been accorded a mere archivist.

And Tovstukha's work on collecting and editing Lenin's works, manuscripts, letters etc was obviosuly not just about philology. In a political culture where the words of Lenin were rapidly getting the aura of Holy Writ and being used as arguments for this or that policy, control over the writings and papers of Lenin and of what was published and quoted was clearly very important for political success, something Stalin knew very well. See N E Rosenfeldt, Knowledge and Power (University of Copenhagen 1978) and same, Stalinstyrets nervecenter ("The Nerve Centre of Stalin's Rule"; University of Copenhegen 1980) 195.67.149.174 (talk) 16:19, 16 October 2018 (UTC)