While Stalin composed no memoirs and kept no diary he left a well-marked literary trail not only in the books he wrote and edited but in those he read as well. Through an examination of these books it is possible to build a composite, nuanced picture of the reading life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously intellectual dictator.
This book’s first chapter, ‘Bloody Tyrant and Bookworm’, provides an overview of Stalin, the Bolshevik intellectual who revered written texts. Like all the Bolshevik leaders, he believed that reading could help transform not just people’s ideas and consciousness but human nature itself.
‘It is impossible to know somebody “inside out”,’ wrote Stalin to the poet Demyan Bedny in 1924,4 but through his library we can get to know him from the outside in. In viewing the world through Stalin’s eyes we can picture his personality as well as his most intimate thoughts.
Stalin was no psychopath but an emotionally intelligent and feeling intellectual. Indeed, it was the power of his emotional attachment to deeply held beliefs that enabled him to sustain decades of brutal rule.
Chapter Two, ‘The Search for the Stalin Biographers’ Stone’, broaches the issue of his biography by examining the dictator’s own sparse accounts of his early life and his responses to official efforts to construct authorised versions of his personal story. Equally important is the chapter’s treatment of Stalin’s extensive involvement in the project to publish his collected works. Stalin viewed his many articles, speeches, lectures, pamphlets and booklets as a vital intellectual legacy. These were the works that he wanted to frame the writing of his biography. Incomplete at the time of his death in March 1953, the project was cancelled by Khrushchev, but the thirteen published volumes remain an essential source for understanding Stalin’s life and thought, not least for those biographers who view Stalin as he saw himself – as an activist political intellectual.
Chapter Three, ‘Reading, Writing and Revolution’, is dedicated to the young Stalin. It examines Stalin’s formation as an underground revolutionary, paying particular attention to his education, intellectual life and reading habits. Stalin’s engagement with books began at an early age. He attended a church school and received his higher education in a seminary. He aspired to go to university to become a professor but in the face of Tsarist oppression opted for the life of a political activist.
The book the young Stalin read and studied most intensively was perforce the Christian Bible, but there is no evidence his religious upbringing had any profound, long-term effects. In becoming a Bolshevik, Stalin swapped a religious faith for a secular one but the absence of a deity in his new ideology meant that Marxism’s claims to truth were rooted in science, not revelation. Stalin was as hostile to the church as any other Bolshevik and pursued a policy of harsh anti-religious repression when he gained power. For reasons of expediency there was a reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Church and other faiths during the Second World War, but there is no evidence that Stalin retained any religious beliefs.
The chapter ends with Stalin’s appointment as the party’s general-secretary in 1922 and the ensuing controversy about ‘Lenin’s Testament’ after the death of Bolshevism’s founder in 1924. Stalin survived the criticisms levelled at him by Lenin in the so-called testament and emerged politically stronger and intellectually more confident. And his dedication to Lenin’s memory was unabated.
Chapter Four, ‘The Life and Fate of a Dictator’s Library’, begins in 1925 and tells the story of the creation, fragmentation and part resurrection of Stalin’s personal library. It explores the dictator’s reading interests and what he learned from books. It continues the treatment of Stalin’s biography with a section on family life and his wife’s suicide in 1932. It recounts what happened to the library after his death and summarises the scholarly reimagining of Stalin prompted by the rediscovery of the library’s remnants.
Chapter Five, ‘Bah Humbug! Stalin’s Pometki’, is a detailed, thematic exploration of Stalin’s many marks and notes in the books he read. It begins by locating Stalin’s markings within the venerable humanist tradition of writing in books as a means to assimilate new ideas and information. Stalin could be a highly active, engaged and methodical reader. The material traces of his reading reveal his interests, thoughts and emotional responses to the texts that he marked.
Stalin’s life was one long performance in which he played many different parts. There was certainly an element of performance in his book markings, since he must have suspected that they would become an object of study. But they are the closest we will ever get to the spontaneous Stalin, an intellectual immersed in thinking.
Among the surprises of this chapter is that during the early post-revolutionary years, Stalin had a higher regard for Trotsky than most people think. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, Stalin learned more from Trotsky than anyone else.
Stalin’s pometki are examined alongside the analysis of some key episodes in his biography: the intra-party power struggles of the 1920s, the Great Terror of 1937–8, the spymania of the 1930s and 1940s, the emergence of a Soviet patriotism, military affairs and the Great Patriotic War, and his interventions in postwar debates in philosophy, science, psychology and linguistics.
The title of Chapter Six, ‘Reverse Engineering: Stalin and Soviet Literature’, references Stalin’s famous statement that the role of writers in a socialist society was to be ‘engineers of the human soul’. Stalin read a lot of fiction and his library contained many thousands of novels, plays and volumes of poetry. Alas, because he didn’t mark, stamp or autograph works of fiction, only a handful of these texts survived the dispersal of his library. However, from the late 1920s onwards, he had a lot to say about literature – not only poetry, novels and short stories, but plays and film scripts. From these remarks it is possible to infer what kind of literature he liked and how he read it.
Stalin was also an inveterate editor. Mostly, he edited documents, hundreds of which crossed his desk or passed through his office on a daily basis. But, as shown in Chapter Seven, ‘Editor-in-Chief of the USSR’, he was also involved in some notable book projects, including the revision of the postwar edition of his official Short Biography. In his 1956 denunciation, Khrushchev claimed Stalin embellished the biography to inflate his sense of self-importance. In reality, Stalin toned down the adulation. Even more striking was the way he reduced his personal presence in the notorious Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938) – a party textbook that denounced his enemies as degenerates, assassins and spies. Stalin’s editing of these and other books was detailed enough for him to be considered a de facto co-author. Although there was nothing sophisticated about Stalin’s editing, he was highly adept at marshalling material to convey simple and clear political messages.
Stalin retained considerable intellectual powers to the very end of his life. ‘I’m seventy years old,’ he told his errant son Vasily, pointing to the books he was reading on history, literature and military affairs. ‘Yet I go on learning just the same.’5 By the early 1950s, however, with both his physical health and his intellect in decline, he was past his prime.