Stalin’s Ideological Turn of the 1930s Through the Eyes of Contemporaries: Nikolai Ustrialov & Vasily Shulgin

“Stalin’s turn” – or, more precisely, the political, cultural and ideological shift of the 1930s under Joseph Stalin – refers to a series of policy and ideological changes implemented by Soviet leadership, marking a transition from internationalism to statism, or state-centrism, and patriotism. A significant contribution to scholarship on this topic can be found in the works by Nikolai Ustryalov and his conception of National Bolshevism. This study demonstrates that statism and a national orientation in Soviet politics were central to Ustrialov’s political thought beginning in the 1920s. His National Bolshevik ideas became deeply embedded in Soviet political ideology from its early stages and effectively shaped the policies of the Soviet leadership. The author argues that Ustrialov not only influenced, but actively contributed to the formation of “Stalin’s turn”. In contrast, Vasily Shulgin’s journalistic writings present a sharply divergent perspective on the soviet state and its policies. The article critically examines Shulgin’s early-1920s works, which, despite certain alignments with Ustrialov’s assessments – particularly regarding the Bolsheviks as the inheritors of imperial Russia’s state traditions – ultimately reveal profound ideological incompatibility. This opposition is especially evident in Shulgin’s later writings, including his critiques of the Soviet Constitution of 1936. The study concludes that while both Nikolai Ustrialov and Vasily Shulgin sought to serve Russia, their interpretations of nationalism diverged fundamentally, leading to opposing political and intellectual trajectories.

Keywords: USSR; “Stalin’s turn” of the 1930s; Marxism; internationalism; nationalism; National Bolshevism; Joseph Stalin; Nikolai Ustrialov; Vasily Shulgin