While Frolov’s tale is reminiscent of the legend that Ivan the Terrible was educated by a philosopher known as Maximus the Greek, the story is not implausible. Hegel’s philosophy is notoriously difficult to understand and Stalin habitually consulted experts. The story is usually told against him, as a way of puncturing his intellectual pretensions, but his apparent willingness to be tutored in philosophy shows how serious the middle-aged Stalin was about developing intellectually.
STALIN REVIVIFIED
Roy Medvedev continued his studies of Stalin and Stalinism after the USSR’s collapse but his views of the dictator changed markedly. The critique of Stalinist terror remained in his writings but was balanced by greater appreciation of the more positive aspects of Stalin’s political leadership and intellectual endeavours:
Stalin was a ruler, a dictator and a tyrant. But under the mantle of the despot’s ‘cult of personality’ there was also a real person. He certainly was cruel and vindictive but he had other qualities as welclass="underline" Stalin was a thinking, calculating, hard-working man possessed of an iron will and a considerable intellect; undoubtedly he was a patriot, concerned to uphold historic Russian statehood.106
Medvedev’s changed view reflected the post-Soviet rehabilitation of Stalin’s historical reputation in Russia. By the early twenty-first century, most Russians believed that Stalin had done more good than harm to their country, not the least of his achievements being the defeat of Hitler. When Russia’s main TV channel staged a competition and viewers’ poll in 2008 to name the greatest figure in Russian history, Stalin came third (519,071 votes), after Alexander Nevsky (524,575) and Peter Stolypin (523,766), but rumours were rife that the ballot had been rigged to stop him coming first. According to a March 2018 opinion poll, Stalin was voted the greatest leader of all time for Russians: 38 per cent of 1,600 respondents granted him the number one rank – an amazing jump since 1989, when he received just 12 per cent of the vote.107
To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, personal book collections are often beset by the disorder that springs from the haphazard way that books are bought, borrowed or otherwise acquired. Cataloguing may mask the confusion but the underlying disorder remains. In the 1920s a degree of order was imposed on Stalin’s library by stamping, numbering and classifying the books. At Blizhnyaya he had a library room that housed part of his collection, while other books resided on the many shelves and bookcases of various other homes and workspaces. The shelving of these books was far from random but his library ended up as chaotically organised as many of our own. While Soviet archivists could have centralised, catalogued and preserved the library intact after his death, post-1956 political developments prompted its disassembly. But as Walter Benjamin also said, it is not books that come alive by being collected, it is the collector.108 Among the remnants of his library, in the pages of its surviving books, Stalin lived on.
CHAPTER 5
BAH HUMBUG! STALIN’S POMETKI
Stalin read books in diverse ways – selectively or comprehensively, cursorily or with avid attention. Some he read cover to cover, others he merely skimmed. Sometimes he would begin reading a book, lose interest after a few pages and jump from the introduction to the conclusion. Some books he read in a single sitting, others he dipped in and out of.
Most of the books in what remains of his collection are unmarked by him except for an autograph or the imprint of his library stamp, so it is impossible to know for sure how much of it he actually read. Erik van Ree suggests that Stalin habitually marked the books he did read.1 But even the most inveterate of annotators do not write in all their books. Only those books or parts of books whose pages remained ‘uncut’ can be safely eliminated from his reading life, assuming he didn’t read another copy of the same text.
It is rare for readers (unless they are educators) to mark fiction books, and Stalin was no exception. The texts he marked were nearly all non-fiction. Pometki, the Russian word for such markings, encompasses both the verbal and non-verbal signs that appear on the pages. The closest English word is marginalia, but Stalin’s marks are to be found between the lines and on the front, inside and back covers as well as in the margins. Marginalia also implies annotation – the use of words – but 80 per cent of Stalin’s surviving pometki consist of what H. J. Jackson has called ‘signs of attention’.2
Stalin marked the text of the pages, paragraphs and phrases that interested him by underlining them or by vertical lines in the side margin. To add emphasis, he double-lined or enclosed the passages in round brackets. To provide structure he numbered the points that interested him – numbering that could reach into the high double-digits and be spread over hundreds of pages of a single text. As an alternative or supplement to these signs of attention, Stalin wrote subheadings or rubrics in the margin. Indeed, much of his marginalia consists of repetition of words and phrases from the text itself.
His style of pometki is both normal and conventional, as anyone who marks their books will attest. As Jackson pointed out, readers marking books is a venerable tradition that stretches back to the dawn of the print era. For Erasmus, it was the essential study skill of a humanist education:
Carefully observe when reading writers whether any striking word occurs, if diction is archaic or novel, if some argument shows brilliant invention or has been skilfully adapted from elsewhere, if there is any brilliance in the style, if there is any adage, historical parallel, or maxim worth committing to memory. Such a passage should be indicated by some appropriate mark. For not only must a variety of marks be employed but appropriate ones at that, so that they will immediately indicate their purpose.3
Virginia Woolf was not alone in complaining that marking books was an abomination, an intrusion designed to impose one’s own interpretation on other readers. In his classic riposte to this accusation, Mortimer J. Adler insisted that ‘marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love’. As an active process of reading, marking means that ‘your marks and notes become an integral part of the book and stay there forever’. But he was clear that the reader should only mark their own books, not those that belonged to others or were borrowed from public libraries.4 Stalin recognised no such distinction and freely marked any book that came into his possession, including those he borrowed from the Lenin Library and other state institutions.
As well as marking nearly 900 texts in his personal library Lenin filled notebooks with quotations, summaries and commentaries on the books he read. Stalin’s research notes were solely marked in the texts themselves. To aid retrieval of the most important or useful material, he sometimes inserted thin strips of paper between the relevant pages. Some of these now yellowing and disintegrating bookmarks can still be found in the Russian archival collection of Stalin’s library books.5
As Jackson also points out, the next step up from non-verbal signs is to enter into a one-way conversation with the text in the form of a brief word or phrase. When so moved, Stalin could be highly expressive.
Charles Dickens may well have been among the writers read by Stalin. Dickens was studied in Soviet schools and his writings used to teach English. The Bolsheviks didn’t like all his novels (the anti-revolutionary A Tale of Two Cities, for example) but they relished his bleak descriptions of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Appealing to puritanical Bolsheviks like Stalin would have been the complete absence in Dickens of any mention of physical sexuality.6 As far as we know, Stalin never wrote Scrooge’s famous expletive ‘bah humbug’ in the margin of any of his books, but he used plenty of Russian equivalents. Among his choice expressions of disdain were ‘ha ha’, ‘gibberish’, ‘nonsense’, ‘rubbish’, ‘fool’, ‘scumbag’, ‘scoundrel’ and ‘piss off’.