means that, despite Stalin’s best efforts, it did not ‘eliminate’ them. We shall
therefore inspect the Russian language not for an abrupt change, a linguistic
leap, but for the effects of political and social changes. For, as we have seen,
languages are not subject to historical change as single, solid objects, but are
layered like the social structure in Althusser’s description of it; and its different
strata develop at different speeds. Accordingly, more rapid changes will occur
at the lexical level than at the syntactical level, and so on. And it is precisely
these changes that the Marrists, over and above their master’s elucubrations,
sought to bring out. And this is precisely what Stalin wanted to put a stop
to, as the secondary theses defended in the rest of the text indicate. It therefore
emerges that Stalin’s ‘good sense’ is not only the naturalisation of a historical
and theoretical construct, but an instrument for defending a politics.
We are familiar with the second thesis, albeit not in a Marxist context. For
Stalin, a language is an instrument of communication serving all the people: ‘the
role of language as an auxiliary, as a means of intercourse between people,
consists not in serving one class to the detriment of other classes, but in
equally serving all society, all classes of society’.^15 Here, we have the expression
of what, by way of a pastiche of Althusser, I propose to call a SPL, a
Spontaneous Philosophy of Leaders. And we must grant Stalin one merit: the
desire to theorise his linguistic policy, which is closely bound up with his
nationalities policy. It is sometimes suggested that Stalin was not the author
of this text, any more than he was the author of the history of the Bolshevik
Party that he signed; and that the real author was the anti-Marrist academician
Vinogradov. But there is no need to go to such extremes: Stalin’s theoretical
interest in the nationalities question is indisputable, as was his ability to write
his own texts on the subject. (The comparison is interesting: one can scarcely
imagine Tony Blair or Jacques Chirac publishing theoretical interventions, let
alone George W. Bush.) In truth, the real author of the text is of little moment:
what matters, beyond the authority of the signature, is the collective voice
that makes itself heard in it – the Marxist version of the ideology of communication.
The ‘Marxist’ supplement to the rawest formulation of this ideology consists
in the mention of ‘all society’ – an ecumenicism that owes nothing to the
Marxist conception of the class struggle and everything to the idea that, under
the ‘socialist mode of production’, it was in the process of withering away.
78 • Chapter Four
(^15) Stalin 1973, p. 409.