Man of Steel
The Metallization of Dzhugashvili
The USSR’s most infamous leader, Joseph Stalin, was not always Stalin. Born as Ioseb Besarionis dze Dzhugashvili, the future ruler adopted a number of pseudonyms throughout his life, eventually taking Stalin, meaning “man of steel,” in 1912, now immortalized in history. The name has a larger-than-life quality, something that might seem more appropriate for a professional wrestler or superhero than for a world political leader. However, the boldness of Dzhugashvili’s chosen name was not at odds with the revolutionary culture of his socialist movement, which sought to transform society entirely under a heroic proletarian leadership.
Dzhugashvili was first Soso. This was a nickname Ioseb used in childhood and among close friends, which he carried into his early revolutionary years. After that, there was Koba, a name taken from a Georgian folk hero known for his cunning and defiance, which Dzhugashvili adopted to signal the attributes he sought to project as a fearsome Georgian revolutionary. This is revealing of Dzhugashvili’s style of self-representation, as his carefully constructed image was meant to exude militancy and strength.
These earlier names, Soso and Koba, continued to be used by those close to him, but “Stalin” is how he became known as a political leader and on the world stage. But why Stalin? It was not his first choice when deciding upon a properly Bolshevik pseudonym; he toyed with names like Stefin, and then Salin and Solin. None of these proved quite right. Hellebust (2003, 94) speculates that Salin may have been indebted to his time in the seminary, given the possible reference to the Latin Sal Terrae, or “salt of the earth.” Salt, like steel, was a hardy and valuable substance, but it was steel that better captured the persona Dzhugashvili wanted to embody, given its cultural significance in the Bolshevik and Soviet worldview, in which modernization and industry held a central role.
Metallization
The imagery of metal was woven into the cultural and literary landscape of Bolshevism and Soviet socialism, as this symbolism was a powerful way of conveying the transformative nature of revolutionary socialism. One Soviet artist, having survived the ravages of Stalin’s terror, had enthusiastically pronounced that, “Now I am . . . proven and tested in the hottest fire . . . Now I am not just a Stalinist artist but also a Bolshevik of Stalinist steel!” (Hellbeck 2006, 337). Indeed, Hellebust (2023, 22) writes that, “there is no better metaphor for revolution than that of the blast furnace, where the destructive energy of fire effects a creative transformation of raw material into something different and radically improved.” Though the metaphor’s resonance was more than just literary flair, it spoke to the immediate political objectives of the Bolsheviks, which were grounded in a Marxist Promethean outlook. Russia’s revolutionaries viewed heavy industry, particularly metallurgy and steel production, as the engine through which both society and the state could be forged anew. It is unsurprising that Russian metalworkers, particularly in St. Petersburg, were celebrated as the most socially advanced and politically radical among the Russian proletariat.
Nowhere in the early Bolshevik cultural sphere was the theme of metallization more evident than in fiction and poetry, where the notion of metallization, that is the transfiguration of flesh into metal, emerges as a central motif. This is best exemplified in the work of Aleksei Gastev, whose writings dreamed up a utopian reordering of humans as machines or machine-like entities. He was perhaps most well known for his experiments with metronomes and timed labor, which, through his Central Institute of Labor, trained workers to move with mechanical precision, narrowing the gap between man and machine. Gastev eventually fell out of favour as his hyper‑Taylorism clashed with Stalin’s romantic labour heroism (he was killed in Stalin’s purges), but his prominence during the 1910s provides insight into the symbolic and cultural power of metal at the time, the period when Stalin adopted his name.
Gastev’s human-industrial fantasy never came to fruition, yet it nonetheless came alive in his poetry, extolling apocalyptic, techno-futurist dreams, even if they sometimes read like nightmares. In one piece, called Gates, he depicts a factory that quite literally ingests its workers, initiating their transformation, which they embrace “without fear, unblinking.” This process culminates in their collective voice in song, and the workers become one with the machines while ritualistically summoning an “iron demon of the age.” Similarly, in We Grow Out of Iron, Gastev describes a cacophony of industrial noises—singing, hammer blows, bells, and the roar of machines—which become the soundtrack to a metallic metamorphosis: Gastev’s narrator transforms into a gigantic titan, whose shoulders are likened to the iron girders of a factory ceiling. Bearing a vivid apocalyptic tone and quasi-religious imagery, these writings framed socialist construction as an eschatological rupture with the old world. As extreme as these writings may appear to the modern reader, the writing of Gastev was not fringe or marginal, but highly celebrated, defining works of art during this period of revolutionary Bolshevism/the early USSR. Hellebust (2003, 51) writes:
Reviews of the first edition praise him for his style, calling the book a cornerstone in the edifice of proletarian literature. Obviously, Gastev and his ideas received a good deal of official support, at least during the first years of the Revolution … the Bolshevik cultural commissar Lunacharsky did not hesitate to name him “the most gifted proletarian writer. The first decade of the Revolution was the reign of what Kleinbort dubs the “metallic theme,” with Gastev its flag bearer
Gastev’s metallized vision inspired younger poets to explore flesh-to-metal transformations in their own ways. In a harrowing poem by Gerasimov, a worker’s fall onto yellow-hot sheet metal becomes a kind of crucifixion, and a “bloody angel” ascends in a “gory resurrection.” Related to this is Vladimir Kirillov’s Iron Messiah, which envisions a mighty colossus, who, channeling the power of the working class, as well as that of the machines, railways, and electricity they’ve built, emerges as a kind of mechanical Jesus (Hellebust 2003, 55).
Here he is, savior, lord of the earth,
Master of titanic strength,
In the noise of countless steel machines,
In the radiance of electric suns.
Hellebust (2003, 62) recounts how one Soviet poet remarked that workers did not fear God “for we are God.” Indeed, the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary fervor fuelled industrial dreams of a mechanized society, with its locomotives, factories, steel mills, and furnaces, smashing the old world and creating something entirely new in its own proletarian vision. Miracles of creation were real, but they required no higher power—only the workers’ own tools and collective effort. Ironically, the radically atheist Marxist revolutionaries’ fiery zeal “only served to stimulate the ‘sacralization of political vision’” (Hellebust 2003, 62). While most explicit in Gastev and his direct followers, such themes recur throughout the cultural production of the early period of revolutionary Bolshevism, and persist, albeit in more subdued and metaphorical form, in the later Socialist Realism period. The metallurgical futurism of proletarian poetry reflected the same industrial-messianic political culture in which Dzhugashvili became Stalin, the “man of steel.”
The Power of a Name
Beyond the symbolic aptness of steel in the Soviet context, why “Stalin,” specifically? This has been subject to different viewpoints by historians. The scholar Robert Tucker was of the position that Dzhugashvili chose the name based on its similarity to “Lenin.” In comparison with the names of other leading Bolsheviks, Zinoviev, Molotov, Trotsky, for example, it is Stalin’s name which alone bears such close resemblance to Lenin’s. This does make sense if one considers the extent to which Stalin was known to admire Lenin. Tucker (1973, 135) writes:
On his return to the Caucasus, he acquired the reputation of being a “second Lenin” not only by forcefully defending Leninist positions but also by emulating Lenin’s mode of argument and mannerisms. From Arsenidze, who knew Djugashvili in those years and whose bias as a memoirist is not in his favor, comes valuable corroborating testimony: “He worshiped Lenin. He lived by his arguments and by his thoughts. He copied him peerlessly, to such a degree that we jestingly called him ‘Lenin’s left foot.’” It is likely, moreover, that the identification with Lenin played a part in Djugashvili’s decision to adopt “Stalin” as his party name.
Just as Dzhugashvili initially adopted the name of Koba in honour of a Georgian hero, he was now able to signal his fidelity to another beloved figure. Tucker (1973, 136) pointedly asks, “Why not, then, carve out a place of eminence alongside that of the mountain eagle? Why not become Lenin’s partner, his right-hand man, his alter ego, Lenin II?” For Tucker, Stalin’s adoption of a Lenin-like name is not reducible to the power of Lenin’s political arguments, but also spoke to Dzhugashvili’s emotional need for a psychosocial identity as a rebellious young man. Of course, Tucker’s line of thinking, while interesting, is also quite speculative. We do not know the inner thought process of Stalin, and Tucker’s psychosocial approach has obvious limitations. Suny (1991, 48) comments that “Stalin is without doubt one of the least hospitable subjects for the psychohistorian,” noting that he “left no intimate letters, no secret diary, and few witnesses to his inner life,” and that “Bolshevik political culture was hostile to open personal expression and imposed on Stalin and other adherents an enforced modesty.” Though, as Kotkin (2014, 714) observes, Tucker’s use of psychology was likely a means of compensation for his lack of access to archival sources at the time of his writing of these volumes. And while Tucker certainly veers too far into the nebulous territory of psychohistory in grounding Stalin’s supposed deep-seated desire to emulate Lenin, Stalin’s unwavering fidelity to the original Bolshevik leader is still nonetheless widely accepted in the historiography, with some exceptions. Robert Himmer (1986, 284), for example, takes the position that Dzhugashvili’s adoption of the name Stalin, on the contrary, was an “adverse judgement” of Lenin, drawing attention to a perceived political antagonism between the two.
