But he could also be effusive – ‘yes-yes’, ‘agreed’, ‘good’, ‘spot on’, ‘that’s right’ – and pensive, which he sometimes signalled by writing m-da in the margin, a difficult to translate expression which indicates a combination of puzzlement and pondering what is being said. A free translation would be a polite ‘really?’ or ‘are you sure?’ Like Lenin, his most frequent annotation was NB (in Latin script) or its Russian equivalent Vn (vnimanie – attention).
Stalin’s pometki varied according to his mood and purpose. They were usually informational and highly structured and disciplined. Typically, he used coloured pencils – blue, green, red – to make his marks. Occasionally, for no discernible reason, he would mark a book with two or three colours. Sometimes he used abbreviations but mostly he wrote out words in full, though not always legibly. Stalin’s style of annotation did not change much over the years, except that as he got older he became less wordy.
While Stalin read mainly to learn something new, he also reread many of his own writings. One example is his February 1946 election speech, delivered in the theatre of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow. Stalin gave the speech not long after the great Soviet victory over Nazi Germany but his theme was that, contra Catherine the Great, victors should be judged and criticised.
In a pamphlet that reproduced the text of his speech, Stalin marked the opening paragraphs in which he had said the war was not an accident or a function of personalities, it had been the inevitable result of a fundamental crisis of the capitalist system. He also marked the paragraphs in which he stated that the war had demonstrated the superiority of the Soviet social system and the viability of its multinational character. He went on to highlight the role of the communist party in securing victory and how crucial it had been to industrialise the country before the war. The final paragraph that he marked was one at the very end of the speech in which he pointed out that the communists were contesting the elections to the Supreme Soviet as part of a bloc with non-party members.7
Stalin did not use speechwriters. He composed his own speeches and often edited those of his colleagues. But he had a habit of recycling elements of his speeches. His reports to the 17th and 18th party congresses in 1934 and 1939 look and feel so similar because he took a copy of his 1934 speech and used it as a template for the one he delivered in 1939.8 It may be that he reread his 1946 election speech thinking he could use parts of it at the forthcoming party congress, preparations for which were already under way by 1947–8.
The same reason might explain why he read and marked a pamphlet containing Andrei Zhdanov’s September 1947 speech ‘On the International Situation’. Delivered at the inaugural conference of the Cominform, it was, in effect, the Soviet declaration of the cold war. The postwar world, Zhdanov told delegates from European communist parties, had split into two polarised camps – a camp of imperialism, reaction and war, and a camp of socialism, democracy and peace. Stalin knew this speech very well, since Zhdanov had extensively consulted him about its contents. Yet he made quite a few marks in the pamphlet. One theme was past and present imperialist efforts to destroy or weaken the Soviet Union. Another was the growing power and influence of the United States as a result of the war. A key marked paragraph was that, since its abandonment of President Franklin Roosevelt’s policy of co-operation with the Soviet Union, the United States was heading towards a policy of military adventurism.9
In the event, the 19th party congress did not take place until October 1952 and Stalin chose not to deliver the main report. Instead, he edited – in great detail – the speech that was given by his deputy, Georgy Malenkov.10
In tracking Stalin’s pometki, it is tempting to be always on the lookout for deeper meanings and significant connections, both political and psychological. Yet, sometimes, Stalin just read for pleasure and interest, his markings signalling little more than his level of engagement with the text.
Librarian-archivist Yury Sharapov was one of the last people to view the bulk of Stalin’s book collection intact. It was his 1988 memoir that revealed the existence of the dictator’s library and Stalin’s habit of marking books. As he astutely observed, ‘notes made in the margins of books, periodicals or any text . . . form quite a dangerous genre. They betray the author completely – his emotional nature, his intellect, leanings and habits.’11 As the foremost interpretor of Lenin’s pometki, he knew what he was talking about.
It has also proved to be a dangerous genre for scholars searching the library for smoking-gun marginalia that would substantiate their various theories of Stalin’s psychology and motivation. One example is the graphic annotation of a couple of pages of a Russian edition of Anatole France’s Under the Rose, a series of humanist dialogues about the existence and meaning of God. But it turned out that these were made by Svetlana, not Stalin.12 Svetlana’s style of annotation was similar to her father’s but more florid and irreverent, and harder to make sense of. Examining these markings, a perplexed Yevgeny Gromov concluded that ‘it’s hard to understand what Stalin wanted to express’.13
Another example of the perils of over-interpreting Stalin’s pometki is his multiple scribbling of the word uchitel’ (teacher) on the back cover of Alexei Tolstoy’s 1942 play, Ivan Grozny. Stalin could be a bit of a doodler and the word ‘teacher’ features among several other, unrelated and barely legible words and phrases on the back cover.14 Yet some have chosen to take this as prima facie evidence that Stalin considered Ivan the Terrible his teacher and exemplar.15 As we see below, Stalin did have a lot of time for the Terrible, but he looked down on all the Tsars, even the Greats such as Peter and Catherine. His one and only true hero and role model was Lenin.
Another mountain made out of a molehill is Stalin’s underlining of this quotation in a 1916 Russian history textbook: ‘The death of the defeated is necessary for the tranquillity of the victors’ – attributed to Genghis Khan.16 Is that why Stalin killed all those Old Bolsheviks, asked two Russian historians.17 That Stalin might have been interested in Genghis Khan’s motivation for what the book’s author terms the ‘Tatar Pogroms’ does not seem to have occurred to them.
Another apparently smoking gun spotted by some is the text written at the back of Stalin’s heavily marked 1939 edition of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism:
1) Weakness, 2) Idleness, 3) Stupidity. These are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else, in the absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly virtue. NB! If a man is (1) strong (spiritually), 2) active, 3) clever (or capable), then he is good, regardless of any other ‘vices’!18
According to Donald Rayfield, this was ‘the most significant statement’ Stalin ever made: ‘Stalin’s comment gives a Machiavellian gloss to the credo of a Dostoevskian satanic anti-hero and is an epigraph to his whole career.’19 Robert Service saw the inscription as ‘intriguing’ and thinks that Stalin, in ‘communing with himself’ and in using ‘the religious language of the spirit and of sin and vice’, was ‘reverting to the discourse of the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary’, his early schooling having ‘left an indelible imprint’.20 Slavoj Žižek considered it ‘as concise as ever a formulation of immoral ethics’.21