Anatoly Lunacharsky, Soviet commissar for enlightenment in the 1920s, described himself as an ‘intellectual among Bolsheviks and a Bolshevik among intellectuals’.6 The same was true for Stalin, except that he was more Bolshevik than intellectual and lacked the scepticism that might have led him to moderate his deadly pursuit of socialist utopia.
CHAPTER 1
BLOODY TYRANT AND BOOKWORM
A bloody tyrant, a machine politician, a paranoid personality, a heartless bureaucrat, and an ideological fanatic. To a degree, Stalin was all those stereotypes. But he was also an intellectual who devoted himself to endless reading, writing and editing – solitary activities punctuated by the meetings he attended and the speeches he gave. Texts, written and spoken, were his world.
Given the scale of his misdeeds as Soviet ruler, it is natural to imagine Stalin as a monster, to see him in the mind’s eye furiously denouncing opponents, betraying former comrades, poring over coerced confessions, ordering executions, turning a deaf ear to pleas of innocence and coldly ignoring the colossal human costs of his communist dystopia. Moral revulsion, however, is no substitute for explaining how and why Stalin was able to do what he did.
This book views Stalin through a different lens – as a dedicated idealist and as an activist intellectual who valued ideas as much as power, who was ceaseless in his own efforts at self-education, a restless mind, reading for the revolution to the very end of his life. It tells the story of the creation, fragmentation and part resurrection of his personal library. It explores the books Stalin read, how he read them and what they taught him.
Isaac Deutscher, one of Stalin’s earliest and greatest biographers, thought that his ‘socialism was cold, sober and rough’.1 A key insight of this study of Stalin’s life as a reader is the emotional power that imbued his ideas. In the marked books of Stalin’s personal library we can glimpse his feelings as well as the ideas to which he attached so much significance. It was not psychosis but the vigour of Stalin’s personal belief system that enabled him to initiate and sustain the barbarous methods he used to modernise and communise Soviet Russia. While Stalin hated his enemies – the bourgeoisie, kulaks, capitalists, imperialists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, traitors – he detested their ideas even more.
As in Al Alvarez’s definition of an intellectual, Stalin was someone to whom ideas were emotionally important.2 This view of the nature of Stalin’s intellectuality chimes with the idea that while he was an ‘Enlightenment revolutionary’ – a ‘scientific socialist’ who believed that socialism was a rational goal to be secured by reason – he was also a post-Enlightenment romantic who saw socialism as a human creation that could only be achieved through struggle, mobilisation and personal commitment.3 Because he felt so strongly himself about what he was trying to achieve, it is not surprising that Stalin considered ‘emotionally charged mobilization . . . a vital instrument to accomplish ultra-rationalist goals’ and ‘was keenly aware of the mobilizational role of the emotions’.4 For Stalin, striving to build socialism was a highly personal and voluntaristic project, and when the results of struggle disappointed, he invariably found the people, not the cause, to be wanting. He would surely have agreed with Fidel Castro’s comment that while socialism had many defects and shortcomings, ‘these deficiencies are not in the system, they are in the people’.5
It is sometimes said that Stalin was a psychopath who lacked empathy for the victims of his many crimes against humanity. ‘One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic’ is an oft-cited apocryphal statement attributed to him. It encapsulates the idea that as an intellectual he could both rationalise and abstract himself from his terrible rule. Actually, Stalin had a high degree of emotional intelligence. What he lacked was compassion or sympathy for those he deemed enemies of the revolution. If anything, he had too much human empathy and used it to imagine the worst in people, inventing a mass of fictitious acts of betrayal and treachery – a critical ingredient of the Great Terror that swept through Soviet society in the 1930s, engulfing millions of innocent victims arrested, imprisoned, deported or shot for political crimes. Many lesser terrors followed, culminating with the grotesque ‘Doctors’ Plot’ of the early 1950s, when scores of medics, many of them Jewish, were arrested for allegedly conspiring to murder Soviet leaders. Among those swept up in the last waves of unwarranted arrests were his long-time private secretary, Alexander Poskrebyshev, and the chief of his personal security detail, General Nikolai Vlasik, the former guardian of his young children.6
Like many politicians and public figures, Stalin was a subject constructed from the outside inwards; a politically driven personality, someone whose inner mental life was shaped by his public persona and by the ideological universe he chose to inhabit. Stalin was akin to a method actor who interiorised many roles in a performance that he sustained for a lifetime.
This interiorisation of his political selves began with a youthful flirtation with nationalism and populism that resulted in an enduring romantic streak in his personal make-up. Then, as a hardened Bolshevik agitator and propagandist, he reinvented himself as an intelligent and praktik, dedicated to enlightening and organising the masses.7 His experience of the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 and 1917 habituated him to political violence. But it was the Russian Civil War, during which he implemented the harshest measures of Bolshevik repression, that inured him to large-scale loss of human life and marked his transition from romantic revolutionary to ruthless practitioner of realpolitik. Appointed the party’s general-secretary in April 1922, he then positioned himself as the consummate administrator of a Soviet state apparatus that he helped create as well as serve.
The Soviet regime was nothing if not bureaucratic and what Stalin mostly read were the myriad of documents that crossed his desk every day. Yet he always found time for his personal collection of books, pamphlets and periodicals. On documents he scrawled decisions and directives for action. His innermost interests and feelings were reserved for the pometki – the annotations and markings he made in his library’s many books. Stalin was quick to pass judgement on authors but he respected their books. This showed in the care with which he marked and annotated them, even those of his enemies. Stalin rarely read to confirm what he already knew or believed. He read to learn something new. Affairs of state abbreviated and disrupted his reading life but did not curtail it completely. In the midst of even the deepest national and international crises, he could be found reading, marking and often editing this or that book.
READING FOR THE REVOLUTION
Stalin learned to read and annotate at school and in a seminary but found his true métier in the radical bookshops of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Books converted him to socialism and guided him into the revolutionary underground of Tsarist Russia. Stalin believed in the transformative power of ideas for the simple reason that, if reading had radically changed his life, then so, too, could it change the lives of others.
Stalin was a voracious reader from an early age. As a young political activist and aspirant intellectual, his reading naturally focused on left-wing publications, especially the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and of Vladimir Lenin, the leader of Stalin’s Bolshevik faction in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. But he also devoured the classics of Russian and western fiction – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller, Heine, Hugo, Thackeray and Balzac.8