STALIN’S LIBRARY
Also by Geoffrey Roberts
The Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact with Hitler
The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War
The Soviet Union in World Politics, 1945–1991
Ireland and the Second World War (co-edited with Brian Girvin)
The History and Narrative Reader (editor)
Victory at Stalingrad: The Battle That Changed History
Stalin – His Times and Ours (editor)
Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953
Molotov: Stalin’s Cold Warrior
Stalin’s Generaclass="underline" The Life of Georgy Zhukov
Churchill and Stalin: Comrades-in-Arms during the Second World War (with Martin Folly & Oleg Rzheshevsky)
Copyright © 2022 Geoffrey Roberts
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With thanks to Moscow friends
CONTENTS
List of Plates
Introduction: The Kremlin Scholar
1. Bloody Tyrant and Bookworm
2. The Search for the Stalin Biographers’ Stone
3. Reading, Writing and Revolution
4. The Life and Fate of a Dictator’s Library
5. Bah Humbug! Stalin’s Pometki
6. Reverse Engineering: Stalin and Soviet Literature
7. Editor-in-Chief of the USSR
Conclusion: The Dictator Who Loved Books
Notes
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Index
PLATES
1. Stalin working in his Kremlin office, 1938.
2. Shushanika Manuchar’yants, 1960s.
3. Nadezhda Alliluyeva, 1917.
4. Stalin with his two youngest children, Vasily and Svetlana, 1935.
5. Stalin’s handwritten library classification scheme, May 1925. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.
6. Title page of Nikolai Bukharin’s Revolutsionnyi Teoretik. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.
7. Page from Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.
8. Page from Karl Kautsky’s Terrorism and Communism. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.
9. Front cover of Lenin, Conspirationalism, and October. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.
10. Front cover of Andrei Shestakov’s Short Course History of the USSR. RGASPI.
11. Stalin’s doodles on the back cover of Alexei Tolstoy’s Ivan Grozny. RGASPI.
12. Page from an article on contemporary military art. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.
13. Pages from a draft of the Short Course History of the CPSU. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.
14. Page from a report on the discussion of the Political Economy textbook. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.
INTRODUCTION
The Kremlin Scholar
This book explores the intellectual life and biography of one of history’s bloodiest dictators: Joseph Stalin. Uniquely, it does so through the prism of his personal library. A dedicated reader and self-improver, Stalin’s accumulation of books was a lifelong passion. In the mid-1920s he acquired an identity for his library in the form of an ex-libris stamp – Biblioteka I. V. Stalina – the Library of J. V. Stalin. He also devised his own library classification scheme and engaged the services of a librarian. The centrepiece of his main Moscow dacha (country house) was a grand library room, though most of his vast collection was housed in an adjoining building with books delivered to him by staff. Dmitry Shepilov, who visited the dacha the day after the dictator died, recalled ‘a large writing desk, with a second desk placed against it to form a T, both were piled high with books, manuscripts and papers, as were the little tables around the room’. Stalin himself lay dead on the couch in his library, where he had been struck down by a stroke a few days earlier.1
Shepilov, an economist by background, was editor-in-chief of Pravda. In 1956–7 he served as Soviet foreign minister, but lost office when he supported a failed attempt to oust from power Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor as leader of the communist party. Shepilov was mainly an apparatchik and the title of the English edition of his memoirs, The Kremlin’s Scholar, was something of a misnomer. But it was an appellation that could more justifiably have been applied to his dead boss.2
By the time of his death, Stalin’s library contained some 25,000 books, periodicals and pamphlets. The collection might have been preserved intact but the plan to turn his dacha into a Stalin Museum was shelved following Khrushchev’s denunciation of him and his personality cult at the 20th party congress in February 1956. Instead, the dictator’s books were dispersed to other libraries, though important remnants and traces of his library survived in the communist party’s archives, notably a collection of nearly 400 texts that he had marked and annotated. Rediscovered when Soviet communism disintegrated in the late 1980s, these pometki – or markings – revealed that Stalin was a serious intellectual who valued ideas as much as power. A true believer in the power of words, he read not only to learn but also to acquire a higher communist consciousness, seen as central to the utopian goals of Soviet socialism. An ideologue as well as an intellectual, Stalin’s professed belief in Marxism-Leninism was wholly authentic, as can be seen from the library.
History was Stalin’s favourite subject, followed closely by Marxist theory, and then fiction. Lenin was his favourite author but he also read, and sometimes appreciated, a great deal of writing by Leon Trotsky and other arch-enemies. As an internationalist, Stalin’s interests were global, but he lacked command of any languages except Russian and his native Georgian, so his reading of foreign books was limited to those that had been translated.3 He was very interested in ancient history and preoccupied with the lessons of Tsarist rule in Russia, especially the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and the Greats, Peter and Catherine. He read a good deal of military history and greatly admired Tsarist hero-generals such as Alexander Suvorov, the eighteenth-century strategist who never lost a battle, and Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, who defeated Napoleon in 1812. More surprising, perhaps, was his fascination with Germany’s ‘Iron Chancellor’, Otto von Bismarck. He also had high personal regard for other bourgeois statesmen, like fellow history buff Winston Churchill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the US president whose country’s constitution he studied.