The decision to establish a Stalin Museum at Blizhnyaya was taken by the Soviet leadership in September 1953 but the plan was dropped after Khrushchev’s secret speech.54 The dacha was then placed at the disposal of the central committee and used to accommodate vacationing party apparatchiks and visiting foreign communists. An intriguing coda to the Stalin museum project was that in 2014 an exhibition on ‘The Myth of the Beloved Leader’ was mounted in a Moscow museum adjacent to Red Square. Ostensibly about Lenin, the exhibition was devoted mainly to Stalin and included many of the personal artefacts that had been assembled for the aborted Stalin Museum.
Stalin remained popular in Georgia and in 1957 a museum in his honour was opened in his hometown of Gori. Among its exhibits was a reproduction of Stalin’s childhood house and the railway carriage that transported him to the Potsdam Conference. The museum’s main building was palatial but badly maintained in post-Soviet times (when I visited in December 2015 the power failed and it was freezing). Among its exhibits are Stalin’s desk from his Kremlin office, a box made by his son Vasily, and, in a respectfully darkened space, the dictator’s death mask. The latter was one of ten such plaster casts of Stalin’s face (and hands) that were distributed to various museums and archives after his death.55
The museum’s continued existence has been a matter of intermittent political controversy in independent Georgia but, so far, the locals’ desire to attract tourists and celebrate their most famous son has trumped all political considerations.
Svetlana did not mention in her memoirs that while she relinquished any claim she may have had to Blizhnyaya, she tried to trade this off for some time and space in another of Stalin’s dachas.56 She also had an eye on her father’s library and in March 1955 wrote to the party leadership:
I would like to ask the government to consider the possibility of letting me have part of the library. It is huge and has many books of no interest to me but I would be very grateful if I could be permitted to take some books. I’m interested in the history books and Russian and translated literature. I know this part of the library very well since in the past I used it a lot.57
Svetlana had quite an eventful personal life, including three husbands, two children by different fathers and an Indian communist lover, Brajesh Singh, who died in 1966. Svetlana was granted permission to take his ashes back to India, where, in Delhi, she sensationally defected to the United States. The following year Svetlana published a memoir of her life as Stalin’s daughter called 20 Letters to a Friend, which remains a unique, though not always reliable, source of information and insight about her father.
The loss of Stalin’s library books rankled Svetlana so much that when she published a second memoir two years later, she complained bitterly that the Soviet government had ‘decided to confiscate my father’s [library], disposing of it at its discretion. . . . In the USSR the State twists the law whichever way it wants, including laws governing private property.’58
DISCOVERING STALIN’S LIBRARY
As part of the preparations for the short-lived Stalin Museum project, staff from the then Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute (formerly IMEL, later IM-L) were allowed to examine Stalin’s library books. Among them was the bibliographer Yevgenia Zolotukhina, who recalled that ‘the atmosphere at the dacha was stiff and formal, the only agreeable room was the library, which had a cosy feel. . . . The books were housed in a neighbouring building and brought to Stalin according to his requirements.’
Zolotukhina described Stalin’s Kremlin apartment as ‘a suite of vaulted rooms’, with a spiral staircase that led to his study:
The [apartment’s] library was furnished with a large number of old-fashioned bookcases that were filled with books on a great variety of subjects. . . . Clearly Stalin was an educated person. He got extremely irritated whenever he came across grammar and spelling mistakes, which he would carefully correct with a red pencil. These books, therefore, all the ones he marked, were transferred to the Central Party Archive.
Zolotukhina was struck by ‘the large assortment of books about Pushkin, all published during the Soviet period, as well as individual old editions – a number of books had slips from second-hand bookshops’.59 Stalin was also ‘interested in books about Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible’ and ‘read all the emigre literature that appeared in Russian . . . including the celebrated biographies by Raymond Gul of Voroshilov and others.60 In the postwar years he became interested in books and magazines about architecture, which must have been related to the construction of tall buildings in Moscow. These books could be found on his bedside table.’61
In 1957 Stalin’s apartment and dacha were visited by Yury Sharapov, head of IM-L’s library.62 Sharapov’s mission was to sort through Stalin’s books with a view to incorporating them into the Institute, a task which took several months to complete. In the Kremlin he found ‘a tall Swedish bookcase with detachable shelves. It was crammed with books and booklets, many with bookmarks in them. Literature written by emigres and White Guards, works by the opposition – those whom Stalin regarded as ideological adversaries or simply enemies – I must give Stalin his due – he read them all with great attention.’
At Blizhnyaya, Sharapov found that the bulk of Stalin’s books were kept in a separate wooden house with a large cellar. He started with the books on military matters, noting that Stalin was more interested in history than strategy and tactics: ‘The pages of old books about the wars waged by the Assyrians, Ancient Greeks and Romans were covered with his notes.’
There was a special section for fiction in the library and Sharapov recalled with disdain what Stalin had written in a copy of Maxim Gorky’s Death and the Maiden in 1931: ‘This piece is stronger than Goethe’s Faust (love conquers death).’63 More happily, he noted that Stalin had studied the great nineteenth-century Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin in some depth.
The only Shchedrin book that remains in Stalin’s library is a 1931 edition of previously unpublished writings, which he read and marked in some detail.64 In 1936 Stalin put his knowledge of Shchedrin to good use in a mockery of foreign critics’ claims that the new Soviet constitution was a façade with no substance, a fraud like the fake ‘Potemkin Villages’ built to impress Catherine the Great as she travelled through the Russian countryside:
In one of his tales the great Russian writer Shchedrin portrays a pig-headed official, very narrowminded and obtuse, but self-confident and zealous to the extreme. After this bureaucrat had established ‘order and tranquillity’ in the region ‘under his charge,’ having exterminated thousands of its inhabitants and burned down scores of towns in the process, he looked around him, and on the horizon espied America – a country little known, of course, where, it appears, there are liberties of some sort or other which serve to agitate the people, and where the state is administered in a different way. The bureaucrat espied America and became indignant:
What country is that, how did it get there, by what right does it exist? (Laughter and applause.) Of course, it was discovered accidentally several centuries ago, but couldn’t it be shut up again so that not a ghost of it remains? (General laughter.) Thereupon he wrote an order: ‘Shut America up again!’ (General laughter.)65
Final decisions on what to do with Stalin’s book collection were not taken until January 1963. Prompted perhaps by the renewal of the anti-Stalin campaign at the 22nd congress of the CPSU in 1961, IM-L’s directorate resolved (1) to retain in the Institute’s archive all those texts containing Stalin’s pometki; (2) to house in IM-L’s own library, as a separate collection, books inscribed to Stalin and those with his library’s stamp; and (3) to disperse the remaining unmarked and unstamped books (those in good condition anyway) into the Institute’s own library and to other scientific and specialist libraries. It was also decided to place in a special file any letters or notes from authors and publishers found inside Stalin’s books.66