One of the greatest privileges of political power under Stalin was the possession of a private library. Stalin’s closest henchmen – Voroshilov, Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Anastas Mikoyan – ‘had the same libraries as the one in father’s apartment in the Kremlin’, Svetlana Alliluyeva records. By regulation, publishers were obliged to send free copies of all newly published books to these men. After the purges of 1937 and 1938, she says, the most valuable books in these private libraries were the Soviet publications of the 1920s and 1930s, which had been completely withdrawn from public circulation. In these few collections alone, the ‘works of authors who later had been arrested and perished still stood on the shelves’. There were ‘Party publications reflecting struggles among its various factions and trends – Trotsky and Bukharin – publications that had vanished leaving no trace in public libraries’. After 1930, to own such books was to be guilty of a crime punishable by execution or the Gulag.
According to Alliluyeva, Voroshilov’s library was utterly destroyed when his splendid three-storey dacha burned to the ground one day after the war (his grandson had been playing with matches under the New Year tree). ‘The government decided to confiscate my father’s library,’ Alliluyeva says, ‘disposing of it at its discretion.’ As it turns out, Stalin’s library was kept as part of his personal archive in the institution now known as RGASPI – the Russian State Archive of Social Political History on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, which had begun as David Ryazanov’s Marx–Engels Institute. Stalin’s library was recently opened to researchers, and revealed Stalin to have been a responsive reader, passionately engaged with the contents of his books on political theory (there were no other kinds of book in the library). He marked everything he read abundantly: underlining, annotating, arguing in the margins, exclaiming. ‘Stop it, Koba, don’t make a fool of yourself. Everyone knows that theory is not exactly your field,’ Ryazanov had once said contemptuously to Stalin (whose Party nickname was ‘Koba’) at a Party meeting. For the rest of his life, Stalin, who hated Ryazanov for his bookish superiority, studied political theory late into the night, attacking his books with his pen, striving for mastery.
What happened to Molotov’s precious library? Alliluyeva says that ‘after being kicked out of the Politburo and the Kremlin’, Kaganovich and Molotov were allowed to keep their libraries as personal property, and that they ‘sold the most valuable and rare items, taking the rest with them … to their new modest dwellings’. Chuev continues the story. When Molotov and his ‘anti-Party group’ of Stalinists were defeated by Khrushchev at the Central Committee Plenum in 1957, Molotov was driven out of his mansion on the Lenin Hills. He took almost nothing with him from there or from his dacha, Chuev records, leaving everything, ‘including an enormous library, which was packed into fifty-seven large boxes and transported to the cellars of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’. The cellars flooded and Molotov’s books ‘perished’.
Were the books that I found in No. 3, the home Molotov moved into after his disgrace, an especially treasured few, saved from the flood? The bookcases in the study looked as though they should contain multi-volume sets of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin. The same kind of bookcase appears in a 1949 painting of Stalin, a Soviet icon – ‘The Great Stalin is the Light of Communism!’ – now sold, in postmodern spirit, as a curiosity in Moscow bookshops. The Generalissimo stands, pipe in hand, a sage expression in his eyes, staring into the middle distance (where the communist future, which only he can see properly beyond the frame, is laid out), a volume of Lenin open in his hand. In the glass-fronted bookcases behind Stalin, in descending order, are the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin. On the lower shelves are his own works, including the History of the Communist Party (rumoured to have been ghosted by Emilian Yaroslavsky). The painting, with its arrangement of bookcase, eyes, hand and pipe, captures all the aura of the nineteenth-century book, the whole paradox of Marxism–Leninism. For how can this ideology solve the problem at its own heart? If all thought is just a reflection of economic relations, how is it that these few men of books – prophets and carriers of light – can see through the illusion into the true mystery of the historical process?
Instead of these prophets, what I found in the shelves of the Molotov apartment was a rich and civilised eclectica of books to which a nomenklatura family would have had access by closed subscription in the later Soviet period, when good books were in deficit and the only affordable ones on general sale were the unreadable memoirs of Red Army generals and Party officials, and ‘table books’ of scientific atheism. Here, by contrast, were the Russian classics – Pushkin, Nekrasov, Dostoevsky, Chekhov – in fine editions; a reprint of Vladimir Dal’s classic Dictionary of the Great Russian Language; an 1877 edition of Guizot’s History of France as Told to My Grandchildren, each of its five volumes hand-inscribed in Greek; a life of Edgar Allan Poe; a translation of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur; a large volume in glossy colour on the work of the great medieval icon painter Andrei Rublev; a book on the émigré Ivan Bunin (Varlam Shalamov’s sentence in the far northern Gulag was extended after a stool-pigeon overheard him praising Bunin’s prose); the works of the ‘foreign sympathisers’ George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, and an illustrated edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, translated, in his final illness, by Akhmatova’s lifelong friend, the scholar Mikhail Lozinsky, in which the pages of Inferno had been stuck together by damp.
Books like this were once a precious commodity, a black-market currency. Before trips to the USSR in the 1980s, my friends and I would visit a small white house in Pimlico in London. Its front room was filled with Russian Bibles published in the West, and Soviet editions of literary works, including the four nightingale poets, whose works the state publishers now grudgingly put out in small print runs to be exported for foreign currency. The bookstore, which gave out these books for free, wanted them smuggled back into Russia to play their subtle part in the winning of the Cold War. This cultivated undercover operation was funded, we supposed, by MI6 or the CIA. The woman who handed over the books (as many as we could carry) once pressed on me a Russian translation of Brideshead Revisited with the assurance that Evelyn Waugh (‘Ivlin Vo’; she thought he was female) was extremely popular in the USSR.
‘Let us talk of the physiology of reading,’ Mandelstam wrote in Journey to Armenia. ‘It is a rich, inexhaustible and, it would seem, forbidden theme. Out of the whole material world, of all physical bodies, a book is the one object that inspires man with the highest degree of confidence. When a book is firmly established on a reader’s desk it is like a canvas stretched on a frame.’ The wide leather-skinned desk standing among the bookshelves of this once most exalted of apparatchiks still had the aura of confidence in the Marxist ideology of the book, of the opening of books for the discovery of firm knowledge. I took down from the shelf the first volume (‘A to Actualism’) of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and opened it on the desk.