Work began on cataloguing the books but it does not seem to have included listing which books were dispersed to libraries. In the absence of such a register it is impossible to know precisely which books were in Stalin’s library when he died or how many of them there were. But an idea of the numbers involved may be gleaned from a 1993 newspaper article by the historian Leonid Spirin, who had worked in IM-L for a number of years.67
According to Spirin, the bulk of Stalin’s library consisted of the classics of Russian, Soviet and world literature – Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Mayakovsky, Hugo, Shakespeare, France. These and other unstamped books, about 11,000 in all, were transferred to the Lenin Library in the 1960s. Another 3,000 unstamped non-fiction books – socialist writings mostly – were added to IM-L’s library or given to other libraries, leaving a non-fiction remnant of 5,500. So, according to Spirin’s figures, there were about 19,500 books in Stalin’s personal library.
Spirin’s number of 5,500 non-fiction titles correlates with the catalogue of Stalin’s stamped books prepared by IM-L’s library. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the library separated from IM-L and became the Gosudarstvennaya Obshchestvenno-Politicheskaya Biblioteka – the State Socio-Political Library (SSPL). Located on Wilhelm Pieck Street in Moscow, this is where the only extant catalogue of Stalin’s library may be found, together with the books themselves.
The handwritten SSPL card indexes divide Stalin’s books into seven categories:
1. Books with the Library of J. V. Stalin stamp (3,747)
2. Books with the author’s autograph (with and without stamp) (587)
3. Books inscribed to Stalin (with and without stamp) (189)
4. Books with an identifiable subject classification (without stamp or autograph) (102)
5. Books with no identifiers (347)
6. Books belonging to members of Stalin’s family (34)
7. Books bearing the stamps of other libraries (49)
All but a few of the books listed in this catalogue were published before the early 1930s, which strongly suggests that rather being the non-fiction remnant of the library as a whole they are a subset of it and were retrieved from a particular location – Stalin’s apartment, perhaps, or his first dacha at Zubalovo. Spirin’s 5,500 figure needs to be revised significantly upwards to take account of the many books that Stalin acquired in subsequent years. While Spirin’s 11,000 figure for fiction etc. seems about right, his estimate of 3,000 non-fiction books in addition to those in those in the SSPL is far too low. Stalin must have acquired as least as many non-fiction books in the 1930s and 1940s as he did in the 1920s, and probably a lot more. Hence a better estimate of the size of Stalin’s library may be that it contained some 25,000 books, pamphlets and periodicals.68
The one cataloguing exercise undertaken by the IM-L archive itself was listing all texts with Stalin’s pometki. In the version of the pometki list finalised in July 1963, there were 300 such titles.69 However, a handwritten amendment of unknown date changed this number to 397 whereas the opis’ (inventory) made available to researchers in the 1990s lists 391 such items.70 To be added to this total are upwards of a hundred books in other sections of Stalin’s lichnyi fond, many of which also contain his markings and annotations.
STALIN’S BOOKS
Despite its limitations, the SSPL catalogue is the best guide we have to the contents and character of Stalin’s library.71 What it shows is that it was overwhelmingly a Soviet library – a collection of post-1917 texts published in Soviet Russia. Most of the texts are books but there are also a large number of short, pamphlet-type publications. Nearly all the texts are in Russian and the great majority are written by Bolsheviks or other varieties of Marxists and Socialists. In the first section of the catalogue, which lists books with Stalin’s library stamp, the most heavily featured author is Lenin (243 publications) and there are also numerous works about Lenin and Leninism. The most favoured authors after Lenin are Stalin (95), Zinoviev (55), Bukharin (50), Marx (50), Kamenev (37), Molotov (33), Trotsky (28), Kautsky (28), Engels (25), Rykov (24), Plekhanov (23), Lozovsky (22), Rosa Luxemburg (14) and Radek (14). Five of these authors (Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev, Rykov and Lozovsky) were purged and executed by Stalin, while Radek died in the Gulag and Trotsky was assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940. But their books remained part of Stalin’s collection. The catalogue also lists hundreds of reports of communist party congresses and conferences, as well organisations such as the Comintern and Soviet trade unions.
Apart from the works of Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Luxemburg, there are very few foreign translations in Stalin’s collection. Notable exceptions include Russian translations of Winston Churchill’s book about the First World War, The World Crisis; three books by the German revisionist social democrat Eduard Bernstein; two books by Keynes, including The Economic Consequences of the Peace; Jean Jaurès’s History of the Great French Revolution; Tomáš Masaryk’s World Revolution; the German economist Karl Wilhelm Bucher’s Work and Rhythm; an early work by Karl Wittfogel on the ‘awakening’ of China; John Hobson’s Imperialism; Werner Sombart’s book about modern capitalism; some works of the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk; the Italian Marxist Antonio Labriola on historical materialism; John Reed’s Insurgent Mexico; several works by the American writer Upton Sinclair, and the letters of executed US anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Among the many works on economics in the collection is a translation of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations: in his heavily marked copies of David Rozenberg’s three volumes of commentary on Marx’s Capital, Stalin displayed a particular interest in the sections on trade and Adam Smith.72
There is very little fiction listed in the catalogue but Stalin’s interest in the history of the ancient world is reflected in the presence of a translation of Flaubert’s Salammbô, a novel set in Carthage at the time of the First Punic War.
Three slightly off-beat authors who feature in the collection are L. N. Voitolovsky, an early Soviet theorist of the social psychology of crowd behaviour; Moisey Ostrogorsky, the author of one of the founding texts of western political sociology, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties; and Victor Vinogradov, a Soviet literary theorist, who wrote a book about the evolution of naturalism in Russian literature.
Among Stalin’s philosophy books was Moris G. Leiteizen’s Nietzsche and Finance Capital (1928).73 Nietzsche was one of those ‘petty-bourgeois’ ‘idealist’ philosophers whose works the Bolsheviks banned from public libraries. Because of his appropriation by fascist and Nazi thinkers, he was totally rejected by official Soviet culture after Hitler came to power, and there is no evidence that he was read by Stalin.
As the title of his book indicates, Leiteizen was highly critical of Nietzsche but also detected a certain affinity between Bolshevism and the nihilist German philosopher, a point endorsed by enlightenment commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky in his introduction to the volume. Leiteizen expressed this idea and sentiment in terms that Stalin might well have appreciated: