Duly noted by Stalin was the main culprit, George F. Kennan, the former chargé d’affaires in the Moscow embassy who had recently found fame as the outed anonymous author of the ‘X’ article on ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’. Published by the influential American journal Foreign Affairs in July 1947, the article argued that the Soviet Union was a messianic, expansionist state that should be contained by the adroit deployment of countervailing power. It was widely seen as a key influence on the American turn towards confrontation with the Soviet Union in the late 1940s.
Kennan was characterised by Bucar as the representative of aggressive anti-Soviet circles in the United States and as a key figure in efforts to reverse President Roosevelt’s policy of co-operation with the USSR. Another sentence underlined by Stalin was Kennan’s supposed statement that ‘war between the USA and the Soviet Union was inevitable’ and that the United States could not tolerate the continued existence of a successful socialist system. The policy of containing communism that Kennan favoured was, wrote Bucar, being used by him to justify America’s domination of the whole world.92
Kennan, who spoke fluent Russian, met Stalin on at least two occasions and penned this memorable portrait of the Soviet dictator:
His words were few. They generally sounded reasonable and sensible; indeed they often were. . . . Stalin’s greatness as a dissimulator was an integral part of his greatness as a statesman. So was his gift for simple, plausible, ostensibly innocuous utterance. Wholly unoriginal in every creative sense, he had always been the aptest of pupils. He possessed unbelievably acute powers of observation. . . . I was never in doubt, when visiting him, that I was in the presence of one of the world’s most remarkable men – a man great, if you will, primarily in his iniquity: ruthless, cynical, cunning, endlessly dangerous; but for all of this – one of the truly great men of the age.93
Kennan returned to Moscow in May 1952 as the US ambassador but on a stopover in Berlin in September he complained to reporters about his personal isolation in Moscow, comparing it to how the Germans had treated him in Berlin after Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941. Pravda attacked his ‘slanderous’ remarks and he was declared persona non grata as a diplomat – the only US ambassador ever expelled from the Soviet Union. Such an extreme sanction could only have been imposed (though not necessarily proposed) by Stalin himself. It was an unfortunate move, since Kennan had abrogated his hard-line views on Stalin and the Soviets. As a Russophile, the expulsion hurt Kennan deeply, but that did not stop him becoming the foremost western advocate of détente with the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s.94
BISMARCK, NOT MACHIAVELLI
Among the books Stalin borrowed and failed to return to the Lenin Library was a Russian edition of the memoirs of Otto von Bismarck.95 When he was sent a list of books on foreign policy earmarked for reissue or translation into Russian, the item that caught his eye was a new, three-volume translation of Bismarck’s memoirs, the first volume of which was ready and with the publisher. Stalin wrote in the margin: ‘Definitely translate the second volume as well and publish it together with the first.’96
Appealing to Stalin would have been Bismarck’s political realism, pragmatism and tactical flexibility. Another trait the two men had in common was the ability to combine strategic vision with successful short-term manoeuvring in complex situations. Their politics may have been polar opposites but, like Stalin, the ‘Iron Chancellor’ was a concentrator and centraliser of state power. As a devotee of Marxist teleology, Stalin may well have appreciated Bismarck’s aphorism that ‘political judgement is the ability to hear the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history’.97
The introduction to the first volume of Bismarck’s translated memoirs was written by the historian Arkady Yerusalimsky (1901–1965), a specialist on German foreign policy, who was summoned to Stalin’s Kremlin office for a discussion about his piece. Stalin had a pre-publication ‘dummy’ of the book, which he had marked, including entitling Yerusalimsky’s introductory article ‘Bismarck as Diplomat’. To make the changes required by Stalin, Yerusalimsky took the dummy away with him and it eventually ended up in the hands of the Soviet historian and dissident Mikhail Gefter (1918–1995). According to Gefter, Yerusalimsky told him that Stalin didn’t like his emphasis on Bismarck’s warning that Germany should not go to war with Russia. ‘Why are you scaring them?’ asked Stalin. ‘Let them try.’98
Fellow dissident Roy Medvedev reports that Gefter showed him Stalin’s copy of the first volume of a 1940 edition of Bismarck’s ‘collected works’ in the 1960s. In that book, recalled Medvedev, Stalin had marked the editor’s observation that Bismarck had always warned against Germany becoming involved in a two-front war against Russia and western powers. In the margin Stalin wrote, ‘Don’t frighten Hitler’. It seems likely that the book in question was, in fact, this first volume of Bismarck’s memoirs.99
Yerusalimsky’s meeting with Stalin, on 23 September 1940, lasted thirty-five minutes and was recorded in Stalin’s appointments diary. The next day deputy foreign commissar Solomon Lozovsky wrote to Stalin that the requested changes to Yerusalimsky’s introduction would be completed by the end of the day. However, the proposal to move the explanatory notes from the end of the book to the end of each chapter would necessitate pulping the 50,000 copies that had already been printed. He proposed instead – and Stalin agreed – that those copies should be published as they stood but the notes would be shifted in time for the next print run.
All three volumes were published in 1940–41.100 After Stalin’s death, volumes 1 and 2 were listed by IMEL as marked books in his personal library.101 But, like the Bismarck book he borrowed from the Lenin Library, they are no longer listed as part of the archive’s holdings. There are various reports of items from Stalin’s book collection ending up in private hands and that may have been the fate of these Bismarck volumes.
Nikolai Ryzhkov, prime minister of the USSR from 1985 to 1991, wrote in his 1992 memoir that he came into possession of Stalin’s copy of an 1869 Russian edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Heavily marked by Stalin, wrote Ryzhkov, the book was the ‘dictator’s textbook’: ‘Sometimes I think about gathering together all Stalin’s underlinings, putting them in order and publishing them as his digest of Machiavelli. Then there would be no need for Medvedev, Volkogonov, Cohen . . . or any of the other biographies and interpretations of Stalin.’102
Another story about Stalin and Machiavelli is that during his final exile in Siberia, when his then good friend and comrade Lev Kamenev was researching the Italian philosopher’s writings, Stalin apparently found a copy of The Prince in the local library and plied Kamenev with questions about the history and politics of Machiavelli’s era.
This story’s source was Boris Nikolaevsky, a Menshevik historian and activist who was exiled abroad by the Bolsheviks in the early 1920s.103
In the 1930s Kamenev contributed a preface to a Russian translation of The Prince. At Kamenev’s show trial in August 1936, prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky quoted his laudatory words about Machiavelli as ‘a master of political aphorism and a brilliant dialectician’. Machiavelli, said Vyshinsky, was Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s ‘spiritual predecessor’, though he ‘was a puppy and a yokel compared to them’. We don’t know if Stalin read Kamenev’s Machiavelli piece, but he did read his 1933 biography of the nineteenth-century revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky and marked this sentence: ‘A politician is always dealing with power – challenging, exercising or implementing it’.104