According to Roy and Zhores Medvedev, in the 1920s Stalin ordered 500 books a year for his library.21 That seems a lot of books for a busy politician but it was commensurate with his ambitions for the library and in his lichnyi fond (personal file series) are to be found many publishers’ lists and catalogues.
The broader context of Stalin’s extensive book acquisition was that the Bolsheviks had inherited a vast publishing industry when they seized power. In 1913 Tsarist Russia published 34,000 titles; only Germany printed more. Numbers declined drastically during the civil war but in 1925 the Soviet Union published 20,000 titles and had surpassed the Tsarist peak by 1928. That same year the Soviets printed 270 million copies of books – more than double the rate produced in Tsarist times.
The book trade was ‘municipalised’ by the Bolsheviks in 1918 (i.e. taken over by various city Soviets) but in 1921 a number of private publishers were allowed to resume operations as part of the New Economic Policy’s revival of commercial activities.22 They continued to operate throughout the 1920s. Although dwarfed by state publishers, private companies had a good market share of some categories of books such as belles-lettres titles, children’s literature and foreign translations. There was also little or no control over the importation of books printed abroad, including those produced by Russian émigré publishers hostile to the Soviet regime.23
Other than his own orders, Stalin’s most numerous source of books were the unsolicited copies sent to him by publishers and authors. Soviet publishers were expected to supply top Bolsheviks with copies of their books and authors needed little incentive to gift their works to the party’s general-secretary, particularly after the Stalin cult took off at the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s the Kremlin was deluged with gifts for Stalin, including many hundreds, if not thousands, of books. Even in the 1920s, a steady stream of publications flowed his way, as shown by a surviving ‘Register of Literature sent to Stalin in his Apartment, April–December 1926’.24 Scores of books were sent to him during this nine-month period alone.
As you would expect, many of these books concerned Marxist philosophy, economics and politics but there were also texts on Russian history, the sociology of art, child psychology, sport and religion. Literature was represented by Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Pushkin, as well as Russian translations of Jack London, and of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Among the memoirs received by Stalin were those by Lenin’s widow Krupskaya, and Anton Denikin, the Tsarist general who had fought the Bolsheviks during the civil war. Among the oddities that found their way to Stalin’s flat were books on syphilis, the law of murder, Jewish ritual slaughter, and hypnosis. Many journals – scientific and cultural as well as political – were also routinely sent to him.
By far the most important tome that Stalin received in this particular batch of books was the first volume of Boris Shaposhnikov’s Mozg Armii (Brain of the Army), a study of general staffs before the First World War. Widely read and discussed in Soviet military circles, it was a book that came to be seen as the template for the functioning of Stalin’s high command during the Second World War. In 1929 Shaposhnikov reportedly sent Stalin an inscribed, specially bound copy of the three volumes of Mozg Armii.25
Stalin also liked to borrow books from other libraries, both personal and institutional. The Soviet poet Demyan Bedny, whose own library was said to contain 30,000 volumes, complained about Stalin leaving greasy fingermarks on books he borrowed from him.26 A favourite source was the main state repository, the Lenin Library; after Stalin’s death, seventy-two unreturned books were found in his private collection. Borrowing but not returning books was an old habit of Stalin’s. When he dropped out of the seminary in 1898, the authorities demanded a payment of 18 roubles and 15 kopeks for eighteen books he’d taken away from the seminary’s main library.27
Most of the Lenin Library books Stalin borrowed were returned, fines unpaid, in 1956, three years after his death. But twenty-four texts, which had been marked by him, were retained by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (the renamed IMEL), among them two volumes of Herodotus’s classic Histories. However, like some other items noted on the retained list, they seem to have disappeared from the archive.28
UNHAPPY FAMILY
Grand though Stalin’s Kremlin accommodations were by the standards of ordinary Soviet citizens, they were not big enough to house a large-scale personal library. At the height of his power Stalin could easily have carved out or had constructed a convenient space for his books but he showed no inclination to do so. Instead, the books were mainly kept at the places he spent most of his leisure and reading time from the 1920s through to the 1950s – his two Moscow dachas.
The first Moscow dacha, allocated to him by the state in the early 1920s, was not far from a village called Usovo, about 20 miles outside Moscow. It was called the Zubalovo dacha because before the 1917 revolution the house and its estate belonged to the Zubalov brothers, who were Armenian oil magnates. On the estate were three separate houses, each occupied by a high-ranking Bolshevik and their family. Stalin’s dacha was a relatively modest two-storey house that contained a large room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases.
Stalin and his extended family (which consisted mostly of his in-laws) spent a lot of time there at the weekends and during the summer. By all accounts the 1920s were a fairly happy time for the Stalin family. As his daughter Svetlana fondly recalled:
My father transformed Zubalovo from a dark country place that was densely overgrown, with a gloomy gabled house and a lot of old furniture, into a sunny, abundant estate with flower and vegetable gardens and all sorts of useful out-buildings. The house was rebuilt and the high Gothic gables removed; the rooms were remodelled and the musty old furniture carted away. . . . My mother and father lived upstairs, and the children and my grandmother, grandfather and anyone who happened to be staying with us downstairs.29
The Stalin family idyll ended abruptly in November 1932 when Svetlana’s mother Nadezhda (‘Nadya’) Alliluyeva committed suicide. As Svetlana’s biographer Rosemary Sullivan has remarked, ‘Nadya is an elusive figure in the Stalin universe’30 and the reasons and circumstances of her death remain unclear.
Stalin’s romance with her began in 1917 when he returned to St Petersburg from exile. Aged sixteen, Nadya was the daughter of an Old Bolshevik family that Stalin had known for a long time. When the Bolsheviks made Moscow their capital in March 1918, she followed Stalin there and worked with him in the Nationalities Commissariat. She joined the Bolshevik party and when Stalin was despatched to the front during the civil war, she went with him. They registered their marriage in March 1919. Nadya was the forty-year-old Stalin’s second wife. They had two children, Vasily (b.1921) and Svetlana (b.1926). Stalin also had a son, Yakov, from his marriage to Ekaterina (Kato) Svanidze (1885–1907), whose mother died of typhus a few months after he was born. Brought up by his mother’s relatives, in the 1920s, Yakov went to live with his father. Stalin didn’t get on with Yakov but relations improved when he became an artillery officer in the late 1930s. Like millions of other Soviet soldiers, Yakov was taken prisoner by the Germans in summer 1941. He died in captivity in 1943, possibly while trying to escape.
Soviet soldiers were not allowed to surrender unless severely wounded. To encourage soldiers to fight to the death, their families suffered if they were captured, and Stalin’s son was no exception. While Yakov was a POW, his wife Yulia, a ballerina, was under arrest and their daughter Galina brought up by other members of the extended Stalin family.