As he describes the pleasures of book collecting in his beguiling short essay ‘Unpacking My Library’, Walter Benjamin quotes Hegeclass="underline" ‘it is only when it is dark that the owl of Minerva begins its flight’, to which Benjamin adds that it is ‘only in extinction that the collector can be comprehended’. In the intimate relationship of ownership, a person lives inside his possessions, makes of them a dwelling place for his spirit.
Aside from the Lemke Herzen, the books in the apartment that had clearly belonged to Molotov (rather than to his intellectually accomplished daughter, Svetlana, an academic historian, and her husband, Alexei Nikonov, also a historian as well as an agent of the secret police) had been pushed into the tomblike obscurity of the bottom shelves of one of those tall glass-fronted bookcases that can be found in so many Russian apartments, where books on the upper shelves are turned to display their faces like pictures. I knelt down, slid the wooden flap back into the bookcase along its metal runners, and pulled out handfuls of books, laying them in piles on the parquet around me, arranging and rearranging by date, author and subject matter, never finding an ordered system, overwhelmed by their number and the dust that soon filled the airless back corridor. Many of the books contained traces of intimate habitation. In the front page of one of the oldest of them, The Tasks of Socialists in the Battle with Hunger in Russia by Georgy Plekhanov, the ‘father of Russian Marxism’, published in St Petersburg in 1906, the year in which Molotov was officially said to have joined the Bolshevik Party (in fact, he probably joined in 1908 or 1909), was the name ‘V. Skryabin’. The pages of the book on the battle with hunger were uncut, as were the pages in his many editions of Plekhanov, all edited by David Ryazanov, inscribed ‘To Molotov’. ‘I was raised on Plekhanov, not on Lenin,’ Molotov told Chuev; ‘it was with good reason that Lenin valued him so highly … and Stalin too, when he said that Hitler wanted to wipe out the country of Plekhanov and Lenin, and named Plekhanov first’.
Though many were in a state of extreme decay (particularly those published in the early 1920s before the revival of the market economy under the NEP), the books had clearly once been objects of careful preservation. All the signs suggested that Molotov had possessed these books as a true collector possesses: poring over them, ordering them, living in them. The library had been catalogued, and later recatalogued, the numbers marked in purple ink on the inside covers and middle pages – 5651, 5652, 7366 – and many of the books had been rebound in cardboard dustjackets (also dark purple). If I followed the system correctly, his library had once contained well over ten thousand books, of which a few hundred were left here. As the uncut pages of his considerable Plekhanov collection attest, Molotov must have had multiple copies of many works. Besides, the non-reading of books, as Benjamin said, is characteristic of collectors, who can become invalids if they lose their books and, in order to acquire them, can quite easily turn into criminals.
Chuev confirms that Molotov was a diligent reader, though a slow one. He read a ‘striking amount’, he says, not only works of political and economic theory, but also (unlike Stalin) imaginative literature. He subscribed to periodicals, regularly visited Moscow’s main bookshop, ‘House of the Book’ on the Arbat, spent many hours in the Lenin Library (where his own collected speeches had been removed from the catalogue), and would always ask what he should read next. He talked about poetry, including the early twentieth-century Symbolist poets Valery Bryusov and Alexander Blok, and knew a great deal by heart, quoting Pushkin and Pasternak’s lyric verse. ‘Everyone should read poetry,’ Molotov told Chuev. He tried hard to restrain his pleasure in verse, he said, limiting the time he devoted to reading it, turning back to prose because ‘one does need to get hold of facts’.
Here were the treasures that Svetlana Alliluyeva remembered from the libraries of her father’s henchmen: the publications of the twenties and thirties, the works of men who had been arrested and shot. Publications from the earliest years of Soviet rule gave a dim image of a new regime in the process of being theorised into existence at urgent speed. From the ‘war communism’ of 1918 was a book on ‘tax entitlements of local Soviets’ published by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs in the new capital, Moscow, outlining ‘extreme revolutionary taxation’, and from 1919, a heavily annotated book on Syndicates and Trusts in Russia. There were precious books from the NEP period with brilliant constructivist designs on their covers. The addresses of their publishers – Petrovka Street, Vozdvizhenka, Kuznetsky Lane – drew a map of Moscow in the early 1920s, the Moscow of the first post-revolutionary edition of All Moscow, its streets vibrant with small shops, ‘trusts’, and publishing houses employing the most inventive graphic designers in the world to create their books. There were textbooks and courses of lectures on the history of the revolutionary movement, works of legal theory – Basic Questions of the Theory of the Soviet State and The Revolutionary Role of Law and the State, published by the People’s Commissariat of Justice; a course of Political Literacy, edited by Nikolai Bukharin, its binding gone, its pages tied together with string, and Bukharin’s Theory of Historical Materialism, a popular textbook of Marxist sociology, published in 1923. A book of articles and lectures by Mikhail Frunze, entitled On New Paths, had been published in 1925, the year the Red Army commander died under the surgeon’s knife. Towards the Question of the Stabilisation of World Capitalism, also published in 1925, had the names of three authors on the cover: Trotsky, Karl Radek and the economist Evgeny Varga. By 1947, when Molotov, as foreign minister, commissioned Varga to write him a report on America’s Marshall Plan, the other two authors had been murdered: Radek by a common criminal in an Arctic labour camp, Trotsky in Mexico by an assassin sent by Stalin.
There were a few works of literature in lovely editions from the NEP years. In the cover of a 1923 edition of Joseph Conrad’s novel Within the Tides (all pages cut), the publisher Frenkel advertised a list of popular works of literature and philosophy, including a new edition of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. There were two novels by Anatole France, one inscribed to Molotov, either by its translator, P. S. Neiman, or its editor, B. V. Himmelfarb (the ink had faded almost to invisibility), published in 1925 by a small press called Contemporary Problems at No. 40 Sivtsev Vrazhek Lane. Among four editions of the stories of the popular Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore was one with a placid blue Buddha on its cover. The graphomane Yaroslavsky’s name appeared on the covers of dozens of books, few of which had their pages cut. As well as the tenth edition of 1938, Molotov possessed early NEP-era editions of Yaroslavsky’s classic, The Bible for Believers and Unbelievers (first published in 1922 as a series of articles in the journal Atheist), which declared that the proletarian revolution had exposed the ‘harmful role of the Bible’ and the ‘deception of religion’, and that the peasants on Soviet collective farms were the true ‘inheritors of the earth’. I leafed through the decayed pages of a seven-volume magnum opus entitled Christ by the revolutionary elder Nikolai Morozov. This veteran of tsarist prisons, cherished by the Bolshevik regime, had spent the later part of his life on a scientific refutation of the Christian story, based on ‘astronomical’ analysis of the Gospels and the Book of Revelation. According to Morozov, it could be demonstrated beyond any possible doubt that Christ had been nailed to the cross on 20 March AD 368, and survived. Morozov sent each large, magnificently illustrated volume to Molotov, tenderly inscribed: ‘To dear Comrade Molotov, with heartfelt greetings … November 1925’; ‘To deeply respected and dear Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, with all my heart … January 1933’. The first pages of the first volume were heavily marked in purple ink, with abundant marginal question marks beside passages on early Christian heresies and schisms. In the later volumes, the pages had not even been cut.