Nietzsche is the most distant thinker for us but at the same time he is close to us. Reading his works, one breathes pure and sharp mountain air. There is clarity and lucidity of concept, there is nothing hiding behind a beautiful sentence. There is the same nakedness and unambiguity of class relations, the same struggle against all illusions and ideals, the Nietzschean struggle against petty gods and first of all against the most haughty and deceptive one of them – democracy. . . . What brings us together is Nietzsche’s struggle against the individualism and anarchy of capitalist society, his passionate dream of world unification, his struggle against nationalism . . .74
The unstamped books listed in the SSPL catalogue are much the same as those that were stamped but do include c.150 foreign-language books, mostly in French, German or English. These include John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World (1919); Alfred Kurella’s Mussolini: Ohne Maske (1931); a book about the Spanish civil war, Garibaldini in Spagna (1937); a signed copy of the 1935 edition of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation; and various translations of works by Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin and Radek. We know from other sources that Stalin was sent many other books in foreign languages, which have since disappeared from his collection. But there is no sign he read any of them.
Marxist and Bolshevik writings predominate among the 391 marked books, periodicals and pamphlets retained by the IM-L archive, especially the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin himself. Erik van Ree estimated that about three-quarters of these titles are concerned with communist ideology and tactics.75 The other major categories are history (36), economics (27) and military affairs (23).
Unlike the SSPL collection, the marked collection in the party archive contains a number of pre-1917 publications, including several works by the classical historian Robert Vipper (1859–1954) and the Tsarist military strategist Genrikh Leer (1829–1904).
If revolutionary history and military history are included, then historical works are by far the largest category of books in the marked collection, apart from the Marxist classics.
One marked book that combined various of Stalin’s interests is a 1923 text on the history of revolutionary armies by Nikolai Lukin (1885–1940), based on his lectures to the Red Army’s General Staff Academy. A former pupil of Vipper’s, Lukin was active in the revolutionary movement from 1905 onwards. He had personal connections to Nikolai Bukharin and joined his Left Communist group after the 1917 revolution. Lukin had quite a distinguished career as a Soviet historian, but it was not without controversy, and in 1938 he was arrested and sentenced to ten years hard labour. He died in captivity.
His book dealt with the French Revolution and the Paris Commune but it was the chapter on Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army that most interested Stalin. He noted Lukin’s point that the peculiarity of the English Revolution was the participation of part of the regime’s army on the side of the rebellious population. Cromwell’s task was to create a new army based on those soldiers and officers who had the courage to side with the revolution. He did this by establishing a unified command backed by a representative military council. Among Cromwell’s most ardent supporters were the New Model Army’s chaplains, who mobilised the troops’ religious enthusiasm for the Puritan revolt against the monarchy. Beside this passage Stalin wrote ‘politotdel’ (the political department) and later noted the use of the term commissar to denote representatives of rank-and-file soldiers.76
Stalin made good use of his knowledge of English history in an interview with H. G. Wells in July 1934: ‘Recall the history of England in the seventeenth century. Did not many say that the old social system had decayed? But did it not, nevertheless, require a Cromwell to crush it by force?’ When Wells objected that Cromwell acted constitutionally, Stalin retorted: ‘In the name of the constitution he resorted to violence, beheaded the king, dispersed Parliament, arrested some and beheaded others!’ In that same interview he lectured Wells about nineteenth-century British history and the role of the radical Chartist movement in the democratic political reforms of that era.77
Boris Ilizarov, a scholar who has done more work on Stalin’s library than any other Russian historian, believes that Stalin wasn’t much interested in history before 1917 and didn’t become seriously interested in reading history books until the 1930s, when he became involved in discussions about the production of new textbooks for Soviet schools.78
Ilizarov may be right that the young Stalin was more immediately preoccupied with Marxist politics and philosophy. However, the study of history featured in both his school and seminary education and it was a branch of knowledge foundational to Marxism, a theory of human affairs that combined an account of social change with a teleological vision of humanity’s progression from ancient slavery to communism. All revolutionary socialists of Stalin’s generation were interested in seismic events like the French Revolution and in past popular struggles from which they could derive lessons for their own day. His first significant piece of writing, Anarchism or Socialism? (1907), cited both Arthur Arnould’s and Olivier Lissagaray’s histories of the Paris Commune.79 His tract on Marxism and the National Question (1913) had a big historical content and in the 1920s he made many references to history. In a 1926 speech he observed that neither Ivan the Terrible nor Peter the Great were true industrialisers because they didn’t develop the heavy industry necessary for economic growth and national independence. In 1928 he alluded to a parallel between Peter’s efforts to modernise Russia and those of the Bolsheviks, although in his discussion with Emil Ludwig in 1931 he denied the comparison, pointing out that Peter had striven to strengthen the upper-class character of the Russian state whereas he served the workers.80 Stalin’s most dramatic pronouncement on Russian history was his February 1931 speech on the urgency of the drive for modernisation and industrialisation:
The history of old Russia consisted, among other things, in her being beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers. She was beaten by the Polish-Lithuanian lords. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. Everyone gave her a beating for her backwardness. For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for state backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and could be done with impunity. . . . Such is the law of the exploiters: beat the backward because you are weak – so you are in the wrong and therefore can be beaten and enslaved. . . . We have fallen behind the advanced countries by 50 to 100 years. We must close that gap in 10 years. Either we do this or we will be crushed.81
Memoirs and diaries were another category of books that interested Stalin. Among the books he read and annotated are the memoirs of the British intelligence agent R. H. Bruce Lockhart, the First World War German General Erich Ludendorff, and Annabelle Bucar, who defected to the Soviet Union from the American embassy in Moscow in 1948 and then became a star of Radio Moscow’s English-language broadcasting service.
Perhaps the quirkiest author in Stalin’s library was ‘Professor Taid O’Conroy’, whose book The Menace of Japan (1933) was published in Russian in 1934.82 Born Timothy Conroy in Ballincollig, County Cork, Ireland in 1883, he ran away to sea at the age of fifteen and joined the Royal Navy. Having served in South Africa, Somaliland and the Persian Gulf, he then spent a year teaching English at a Berlitz school in Copenhagen before moving to Russia in 1909 to teach at the Imperial Court in St Petersburg. After the First World War he ended up in Japan, where he married a waitress, described by the publisher of his book as descended from a venerable Japanese aristocratic family. He and his wife left Japan in 1932. In London, O’Conroy contacted the Foreign Office and submitted a briefing document on Japan that eventually became his book. He died in 1935 from liver failure.83