Another Stalin and Machiavelli story was related by Fedor Burlatsky, who worked in the Soviet Academy of Sciences during the 1950s. His source was Stalin’s private secretary, Alexander Poskrebyshev, who told him that Stalin periodically borrowed The Prince from the central committee library and then returned it after a few days.105
While none of these claims has been verified, it is possible, likely even, that Stalin did read Machiavelli, but it was history that informed Stalin’s knowledge and understanding of the exercise of power, not philosophy or political theory.
Another book about the ‘Iron Chancellor’ that attracted Stalin’s attention was Wolfgang Windelband’s Bismarck and the European Great Powers, 1879–1885. Information about the issue of a German edition was recorded in a TASS bulletin from Berlin in December 1940. Stalin wrote on the bulletin that it should be translated into Russian.106 And so it was. In February 1941 Beria sent Stalin a three-volume translation of Windelband’s book.107 This was for private use by Stalin but, again, there is no discernible trace of the volumes in the Russian archives.
Stalin was interested in Bismarck’s domestic as well as his foreign policy. His copy of volume 16 of the first edition of the Bol’shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya (Great Soviet Encyclopaedia), published in 1929, contains a heavily underlined section on the periodisation of the Bismarck era, which the editors divided into the struggle for German unification (1871–96), social reforms and the conflict between socialists and conservatives (1878–86) and Bismarck’s ‘Iron Chancellorship’ (1887–90).108
Stalin’s interest in diplomacy was longstanding; it was one of the headings of the classification scheme that he devised for his library in 1925. In the Soviet system, foreign policy-making was a function of the Politburo and, as general-secretary, Stalin was involved in foreign policy decisions great and small. In September 1935, for example, he reacted strongly against a suggestion from his Foreign Commissariat that Soviet exports to Italy should be banned because of the growing Italo-Abyssinian crisis, which culminated with Mussolini’s attack on Abyssinia a month later. According to Stalin:
The conflict is not only between Italy and Abyssinia, but also between Italy and France on one side, and England on the other. The old entente is no more. Instead, two ententes have emerged: the entente of Italy and France, on one side, and the entente of England and Germany, on the other. The more intense the tussle between them, the better for the USSR. We can sell bread to both so that they can fight. We don’t profit if one of them beats the other just now. We benefit if the fight is lengthier, without a quick victory for one or the other.109
Books on international relations in Stalin’s library included a 1931 Russian translation of the diary of the British diplomat Viscount D’Abernon, who served in the Berlin embassy in the 1920s. Stalin does not appear to have read the diary itself but he did pay close attention to the book’s introduction, written by a leading Soviet diplomat and historian, Boris Shtein, and noted Shtein’s analysis of Britain’s policy of juggling support for France against Germany without driving the Germans into an alliance with Russia.110 In December 1940 Stalin was sent the ‘dummy’ of a Russian edition of Harold Nicolson’s classic Diplomacy, together with a note from the publisher seeking permission for a print run of 50,000 copies.111 What caught Stalin’s eye in his copy of the published book was the preface by A. A. Troyanovsky, a former ambassador who taught at the Soviets’ Higher Diplomatic School. Stalin evidently did not like what Troyanovsky had to say about contemporary British foreign policy – basically, that it was anti-Soviet. This suggests that he read the book after the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 when there was an anti-Hitler coalition with Britain’s Winston Churchill. Stalin crossed through pages 20–25 of the book, with a view, perhaps, to its reissue with a more politically expedient preface.112
Stalin’s only extensive public statement on an aspect of diplomatic history was his 1934 critique of Engels’s ‘The Foreign Policy of Russian Tsardom’ (1890), prompted by the proposed inclusion of the article in a special issue of the party’s journal, Bol’shevik. Stalin was against republication because he thought it would confuse people’s thinking about the origins of the First World War, though he wasn’t against the article appearing in a future number of the same journal.
Engels thought Tsarist Russia’s predatory foreign policy was a function of its diplomacy, whereas Stalin believed it was driven by class interests and domestic pressures. Engels had exaggerated the importance of Russia’s striving to control Constantinople and the Black Sea straits and omitted the role of Anglo-German rivalries in precipitating the First World War. Politically, Stalin worried that Engels’s article lent credence to claims that the war with reactionary Tsarist Russia was not an imperialist war but a war of liberation and a struggle against Russian barbarism. In Stalin’s view, Tsarist Russia was no better or worse than any of the other great capitalist powers.113 Interestingly, Stalin’s article was reprinted by Bol’shevik in May 1941.
With the advent of the Second World War, Stalin became directly and heavily involved in the conduct of diplomacy. His interest in the writing of a Soviet history of diplomacy was one sign of his growing engagement with diplomatic affairs. Put in charge of that project was Vladimir Potemkin (1874–1946), a prominent Soviet diplomat of the 1920s and 1930s. Potemkin had an hour-long meeting with Stalin in May 1940, the same day the Politburo passed a resolution mandating production of the history.114 Potemkin sent Stalin a progress report in October which listed the names and topics of the historians who had been recruited to the project. It would be a two-volume Marxist history of diplomacy, wrote Potemkin, one based on original research and written for a broad popular audience. It would be adorned by maps and other illustrations.115
When the first volume of Istoriya Diplomatii was published in early 1941 – half a million copies of it – Stalin phoned Potemkin to personally congratulate him and his team.116 Publication of the second volume was disrupted by the outbreak of war in June 1941 and by the time publication resumed in 1945, the work had expanded into three volumes. Potemkin sent Stalin a copy of volume 3 in December 1945 but the second volume of the trilogy, subtitled ‘Diplomacy in New Times (1872–1919)’, is the only one now to be found in Stalin’s library.117 Stalin’s markings of the book, which were mostly informational, suggest that he read a good deal of it, though he didn’t pay much attention to the section on Bismarck’s foreign policy from 1885 to 1890, perhaps because the master of realpolitik was past his best by this time. Or maybe Stalin felt he knew enough about Bismarck already.118
In 1913 Stalin had declared that ‘a diplomat’s words must contradict his deeds – otherwise what sort of a diplomat is he? Words are one thing – deeds something entirely different. Fine words are a mask to cover shady deeds. A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.’119 Three decades later he had changed his tune. In an April 1941 meeting with the Japanese foreign minister, with whom he had just agreed a neutrality pact, Stalin said that he appreciated his visitor’s plain speaking: ‘It is well known that Napoleon’s Talleyrand said that speech was given to diplomats so that they could conceal their thoughts. We Russian Bolsheviks see things differently and think that in the diplomatic arena one should be sincere and honest.’120 In a similar vein, Stalin told British foreign minister Anthony Eden, in December 1941, that he preferred ‘agreements’ to ‘declarations’ because ‘a declaration is algebra’ while ‘agreements are simple, practical arithmetic’. When Eden laughed, Stalin hastened to reassure him that he meant no disrespect for algebra, which he considered to be a fine science.121