All very interesting, except the handwriting is not Stalin’s. Who wrote those words and how they came to be inscribed in a book in his library remains mysterious, as does their intended meaning.
In truth, no smoking guns are to be found anywhere in the remains of Stalin’s library. His pometki reveal preoccupations not secrets, and the way he engaged with ideas, arguments and facts.
JOINED AT THE HIP: STALIN, LENIN AND TROTSKY
Stalin revered Lenin. He first met him in December 1905 at a party conference in Tampere, Finland, then an autonomous province of Tsarist Russia. In January 1924, at a memorial meeting for the recently deceased founder of the Soviet state, Stalin recalled that what captivated him about Lenin was the ‘irresistible force of logic’ in his speeches. Other features of Lenin’s political practice that so impressed Stalin were ‘no whining over defeat’; ‘no boasting in victory’; ‘fidelity to principle’; ‘faith in the masses’; and ‘the insight of genius, the ability to rapidly grasp and divine the inner meaning of impending events’.22
There were hundreds of works by Lenin in Stalin’s book collection, dozens of them marked and annotated. Lenin was Stalin’s most-read author. In Stalin’s own collected writings there are many more references to Lenin than any other person.23 Stalin was renowned as the master of the Lenin quote. He didn’t just pore over Lenin’s original writings, he read summaries and condensations by other authors, being particularly fond of publications that provided excerpts of Lenin’s writings on the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ and other vital issues of the day.24 Another useful crib were collections containing notes and plans for his major speeches, which gave Stalin insight into how Lenin constructed and presented arguments.25 In a book about the reasons for Bolshevik victory in the civil war, Stalin simply highlighted all the quotes from Lenin: the Bolsheviks had won because of international working-class solidarity, because they were united whereas their opponents were divided, and because soldiers had refused to fight against the Soviet government. Lenin’s reference to the failure of Winston Churchill’s prediction that the allies would take Petrograd in September 1919 and Moscow by December was double-lined in the margin.26
In his comprehensive study of Stalin’s political thought, Erik van Ree concluded that his ‘notes in Lenin’s writings are remarkable for their lack of criticism. In the most intensively read books by his predecessor there is no hint of it all.’ The same was true of Marx: ‘I did not find a single critical remark by Stalin.’ While Stalin’s reading of Engels was more critical, his markings of Engels’s books was always attentive and respectful. ‘Only idiots can doubt that Engels was and remains our teacher,’ he wrote to the Politburo in August 1934. ‘But it does not follow from this at all, that we must cover up Engel’s short-comings.’ As van Ree also pointed out, the marked books in his library show that Stalin kept on reading Marx, Engels and Lenin until the very end of his life.27
Stalin’s toast to scientists at a reception for higher education workers in May 1938 is one of his many fulsome tributes to Lenin:
In the course of its development science has known not a few courageous men who were able to break down the old and create the new. . . . Such scientists as Galileo, Darwin . . . I should like to dwell on one of these eminent men of science, one who at the same time was the greatest man of modern times. I am referring to Lenin, our teacher, our tutor. (Applause.) Remember 1917. A scientific analysis of the social development of Russia and of the international situation brought Lenin to the conclusion that the only way out of the situation lay in the victory of socialism in Russia. This conclusion came as a complete surprise to many men of science. . . . Scientists of all kinds set up a howl that Lenin was destroying science. But Lenin was not afraid to go against the current, against the force of routine. And Lenin won (Applause).28
When Stalin devised his library classification schema in May 1925, Trotsky had already emerged as his fiercest rival and a leading opponent in the post-Lenin succession power struggles. Yet Stalin placed Trotsky sixth in the list of Marxist authors whose books were to be separated from the general, subject-based classification scheme. Apart from Marx, Engels and Lenin, only Kautsky (the chief theoretician of German social democracy) and Plekhanov (the founding father of Russian Marxism) were listed ahead of Trotsky. After Trotsky’s name came those of Stalin’s then close allies – Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev.
More than forty of Trotsky’s books and pamphlets, including some quite hefty tomes, may be found among the remnants of Stalin’s library, but he was particularly interested in his rival’s ‘factional’ polemics – The New Course (1923) and The Lessons of October (1924). Stalin combed through these and other writings seeking ammunition for his critique of Trotsky and Trotskyism. His withering attacks on Trotsky’s views made his name as a top-class polemicist and consolidated his authority as the party’s general-secretary. At the 15th party conference in November 1926, he was scathing in his criticism of Trotsky’s statement in The New Course that ‘Leninism, as a system of revolutionary action, presumes a revolutionary instinct trained by reflection and experience which, in the social sphere, is equivalent to muscular sensation in physical labour.’ Stalin’s commented: ‘Leninism as “muscular sensation in physical labour”. New and original and very profound, is it not? Can you make head or tail of it? (Laughter).’29
Trotsky, for all his undoubted brilliance as a Marxist intellectual and orator, was an easy target for Stalin. He had a history of criticising Lenin and the Bolsheviks and only joined up with the group in summer 1917. Trotsky tried to airbrush these criticisms but Stalin insisted on reminding the party of his past errors.
He was particularly fond of quoting Trotsky’s 1915 attack on Lenin’s view that proletarian revolution and socialism were possible in a single country, even in culturally backward and economically underdeveloped peasant Russia. At stake was the belief that it would be possible to build socialism in Soviet Russia, Trotsky’s view being that the Russian Revolution needed successful revolutions in more advanced countries if it was not going to be crushed by imperialism and capitalism. Stalin accepted the socialist revolution in Russia would not be ‘finally’ victorious until there was a world revolution, but also believed that Soviet socialism would survive and thrive on its own. The great majority of the Bolshevik party agreed with Stalin, preferring his doctrine of socialism in one country to Trotsky’s advocacy of world revolution as the primary goal.
Like all the leading Bolsheviks, Stalin quoted Lenin selectively to suit his argument. In 1915, for example, Lenin was speculating on the possibility of an advanced country adopting socialism without the support of revolutions in other countries. But Lenin’s views on this matter did evolve post-1917 in response to the reality of a revolution in ‘backward’ Russia that had brought the Bolsheviks to power.30 For Stalin and his supporters within the party, the fact of their successful revolution was all-important, and they did not take kindly to Trotsky’s suggestion in Tasks in the East (1924) that the centre of world revolution could shift to Asia in the absence of European revolutions: ‘Fool!’ wrote Stalin in the margin. ‘With the existence of the Soviet Union the centre cannot be in the East.’31