Stalin’s deviation from the traditional Marxist theory of the state under socialism was no secret. At the 18th party congress in March 1939, he mounted a spirited public defence of his revision of the views of Marx, Engels and Lenin. What the three great teachers had not anticipated, Stalin told the delegates, was that socialism would triumph in a single state that would then have to co-exist with powerful capitalist states. Under conditions of capitalist encirclement, the Soviet Union needed a strong state apparatus to defend itself against external threats and internal subversion. Only when capitalism was liquidated globally would the state, in accordance with Marxist theory, wither away.96
In December 1994 another former IM-L staffer, the journalist and politician Boris Slavin, published an article in Pravda that examined some of the comments Stalin had written in his library books. Slavin was particularly interested in his reading of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, noting Stalin’s adherence to the classical Marxist definition of freedom as the recognition of necessity. Slavin also noted Stalin’s favourite philosophical aphorisms: ‘Lots of learning does not teach understanding’ (Heraclitus); ‘Marxism is a guide to action, not a dogma’ (Lenin); and ‘Freedom lies beyond the realm of material necessity’ (Marx).97
Dutch historian Erik van Ree, who was interested in Stalin’s political thought, was the first western scholar to extensively research his library books. His presumption before he set out for Moscow in 1994 was that the key to understanding the evolution of Stalin’s thinking was the impact of Russian political traditions on his Marxism. That belief was ‘shaken’ by his encounter with the contents of Stalin’s private library, which were overwhelmingly Marxist and betrayed little or no sign of non-Marxist influences. Van Ree’s conclusion, after studying every single one of Stalin’s annotations, was that Stalin was primarily a creature of the rationalist and utopian west European revolutionary tradition that began with the Enlightenment. While the dictator did absorb some Russian traditions – autocracy and the strong state, for example – he fitted them into a Marxist framework. Stalin admired some of the Tsars – Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great – but thought that, armed with Marxist theory, he could do a better job of creating a powerful, protective Soviet state. The end result in Stalin’s thinking was what van Ree termed ‘revolutionary patriotism’ – the primacy of the defence of the socialist fatherland. Revolution abroad remained a key goal but its pursuit was adapted to the reality of Soviet co-existence with a hostile capitalist world composed of competing nation states.98
Among the first Russian scholars to explore Stalin’s library books were Boris Ilizarov and Yevgeny Gromov. Ilizarov started working on the library in the late 1990s, when the books still contained what he imagined to be the detritus of Stalin’s pipe!99 Suitably inspired, he went on to publish a series of groundbreaking articles and books, both on Stalin’s reading life and, most importantly, on the history of the library.100
In 2003 Gromov published a wide-ranging study of Stalin’s relations with Soviet writers and artists that drew extensively on the holdings of his lichnyi fond. Among the documents referenced by Gromov was Stalin’s marking of Gorky’s novel Mother, which is a propagandistic story of revolutionary factory workers in early twentieth-century Russia. Running through the novel is the role of radical books and subversive literature in fomenting revolution. The chapter that attracted Stalin relates how an elderly peasant-turned-factory worker, Mikhail Rybin, having been won over to the revolutionary cause, went to a comrade’s house to pick up some illegal books for distribution among the people. Stalin side-marked several pages of this chapter, but what really excited him was Rybin’s peroration:
Give me your help! Let me have books – such books that when a man has read them he will not be able to rest. Put a prickly hedgehog to his brains. Tell those city folks who write for you to write for the villagers also. Let them write such hot truth that it will scald the village, that the people will even rush to their death.101
Another Russian historian who took a great interest in Stalin’s library was Roy Medvedev. It was Medvedev who interviewed the bibliographer Zolotukhina about her knowledge of the library and in 2005 he published a book entitled Chto Chital Stalin? (What Did Stalin Read?)
Medvedev and his twin brother Zhores were famous Soviet-era dissidents. Roy was expelled from the Soviet communist party in 1969 and Zhores, a plant biologist, was exiled to the west in the 1970s. Both were ‘loyal oppositionists’ who believed in the Soviet system but wanted to reform and democratise it. Of critical importance for the Medvedevs was the ‘destalinisation’ process begun by Khrushchev at the 20th party congress, not least the need to tell the whole truth about the massive Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. To this end Roy wrote a long book about Stalinist repression, Let History Judge. He was unable to publish the book in the USSR but it was translated and published in the west in the early 1970s. Medvedev’s verdict on the dictator, much influenced by Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin, was damning: ‘boorishness and self-importance, pathological conceit and callousness, mistrust and stealth, an inability to take the criticism of his comrades and a craving for influence and power’.102 His assessment of Stalin’s theoretical legacy was that it was poor: what was of interest in his writings was unoriginal and what was original was wrong. ‘He did not derive theoretical positions from concrete reality; he forced theory to fit his wishes, subordinated it to transient situations – in a word he politicised theory.’103
As a dissident, Medvedev had no access to Soviet archives. Instead, he utilised documentation from the public sphere together with a great number of unpublished memoir sources. One memoir that he cited was E. P. Frolov’s story about his friend Jan Sten, a party philosopher who in the 1920s was recruited by Stalin to teach him Hegelian dialectics. Sten ‘often told me in confidence about these lessons’, recalled Frolov, ‘about the difficulties he, as a teacher, was having because of his student’s inability to master the material’.104
During the post-Lenin succession struggles Sten backed Stalin against the Trotsky-Zinoviev United Opposition. A pamphlet he wrote on ‘The Question of the Stabilisation of Capitalism’ (1926) is preserved in Stalin’s library. Stalin read the text attentively and evidently agreed with Sten’s critique of the United Opposition. Contrary to Trotsky and Zinoviev, Sten argued that capitalism had successfully stabilised itself economically and politically following the intense crisis it experienced immediately after the First World War. Such stabilisation would not last, said Sten, but it could endure for some time yet, something the United Opposition had failed to grasp.105
Sten’s critique of Trotsky and Zinoviev echoed the views of Nikolai Bukharin, a former ‘Left Communist’, who came to favour a more moderate course than the one canvassed by the United Opposition, which favoured more radical foreign and domestic policies because it believed the crisis of capitalism was ongoing. Stalin was allied to Bukharin in the mid-1920s but changed his mind at the end of the decade in response to crises in town–country trade relations that threatened to cut food supplies to the cities. Stalin also believed the world economic depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s signalled a return of the revolutionary wave. Hence his abandonment of the New Economic Policy and his embrace of more militant policies. This policy turn meant Stalin fell out with Bukharin and his supporters, including Sten. Like so many opponents and critics of Stalin, Sten was expelled from the party in the 1930s, accused of counter-revolutionary activities, arrested and shot. He was exonerated and posthumously readmitted to the party in 1988.