I am grateful to Andreas Umland and David Marples for their thoughtful responses to my piece and appreciate the invitation of the editors of Nationalities Papers to briefly reply. Because “Stalin's Populism” is an essay rather than an article devoted to empirical research, historiography or contemporary politics, some of the objections that Umland and Marples raise are a function of genre more than anything else. Other issues require more detailed engagement, however. As both responses indicate, “Stalin's Populism” elaborates upon an argument that I've advanced in a number of places about the USSR's rehabilitation of Russian historical heroes, imagery and iconography during the 1930s and 1940s. An enduring source of debate over the past half-century, this development has been variously attributed to Stalin's retreat from world revolution, his low confidence in proletarian internationalism, his wavering commitment to Marxism and his insecurity during the Second World War. It's also been seen as evidence of a turn toward nationalism and even fascism. I have long been frustrated by the schematicism of such accounts and offer here a more contingent interpretation situated specifically within the historical contours of the Stalinist 1930s. I have also grown frustrated by the hyperbole of the traditional literature's focus on Stalin's personal failings and ideological apostasy and suggest here that the policy changes in question display all the hallmarks of authoritarian populism, inasmuch as they advanced claims of Soviet state legitimacy and authority rather than Russian political autonomy or self-rule. Indeed, it is this official emphasis on party and state legitimacy and union-wide mobilization that leads me to use terms like “national Bolshevism” and russocentrism rather than Russian nationalism in regard to the Stalinist party line.