Charkviani recalled that as well as Georgian history, they talked about the history of Rome, especially General Sulla, who seized power in the first century BC but was renowned as much for his reforms as his repressions. Indeed, Sulla, quipped Stalin, had been able to rule Rome from his villa.136
Stalin’s interest in the Roman Empire was no passing whim. He possessed a number of books on the classical history of Greece and Rome. As we know, among the books Stalin borrowed from but did not return to the Lenin Library were two volumes of Herodotus’s Histories.137 In his copy of Alexander Svechin’s history of military strategy it is the Roman section that is the most marked.138 Reading a translation of Viscount D’Abernon’s diary, he picked out from the book’s introduction Edward Gibbon’s aphorism that the Romans believed troops should fear their own officers more than the enemy.139 At the 17th party congress in January 1934, Stalin used Roman history to mock Nazi racism:
It is well-known that ancient Rome looked upon the ancestors of the present-day Germans and French in the same way as the representatives of the ‘superior race’ now look upon the Slavonic tribes. It is well-known that ancient Rome treated them as an ‘inferior race’, as ‘barbarians’, destined to live in eternal subordination to the ‘superior race’. . . . Ancient Rome had some grounds for this, which cannot be said of the representatives of the ‘superior race’ today. . . . The upshot was that the non-Romans . . . united against the common enemy, hurled themselves against Rome, and bore her down with a crash. . . . What guarantee is there that the fascist literary politicians in Berlin will be more fortunate than the old and experienced conquerors in Rome?140
Among Stalin’s ancient history books were three by Robert Vipper: Drevnyaya Evropa i Vostok (Ancient Europe and the East, 1923), Istoriya Gretsii v Klassicheskuyu Epokhu (Greece in the Classical Epoch, 1908) and Ocherki Istorii Rimskoi Imperii (Essays on the History of the Roman Empire, 1908).
Stalin liked Vipper’s book on ancient Europe so much that he wanted its first chapter on the Stone Age to be retitled ‘Prehistorical Times’ and added to a school textbook on ancient history.141 The chapter in Vipper’s book on Greece that captured Stalin’s attention was the one on Sparta and Athens. It was Sparta that interested Stalin: its mythical and historical origins; its strategic position and military power; the ‘spartan’ life of its citizens; the city-state’s authoritarian political structure; and its diplomatic manoeuvres during the various wars that it fought.142
Vipper’s book on the Roman Empire was, as far as we know, the most heavily marked text in Stalin’s whole collection, nearly every one of its 389 pages having words and paragraphs underlined or margin-lined. Alas, these pometki are probably not Stalin’s. The markings are similar to but not quite the same as his. Absent are the brackets, numbered points and rubrics in the margin that would be expected if this detailed set of markings was Stalin’s. The few scattered words in the margins do not appear to be in his writing.143 The best guess is that the book belonged originally to a student or a teacher or, even, a historian marking up an important secondary source. This doesn’t mean that Stalin didn’t read the book. Given his evident regard for Vipper’s work and his interest in the subject-matter, it is highly likely he did and may even have added some marks of his own.
Over what lines might Stalin’s eyes have lingered? The markings of the unknown reader focused on military and political history: Rome’s near defeat in the Second Punic War; the difference between Greek and Roman democracy; the structure of Roman political and military power; the fall of the Roman Republic; the seizures of power by Sulla and Julius Caesar; the overseas expansion of the empire; and the imperial slogan ‘better Caesar’s power than a free people’.144
Roman history has been a rich repository of lessons for rulers throughout the ages, but, as a Marxist, Stalin would also have appreciated Vipper’s effort to tell the deeper story. Based on Vipper’s lectures at Moscow University in 1899, the book’s aim was to describe Roman polity and society and explain the class forces that drove the imperial expansion and the political crises that led to the Republic’s downfall. Economic and financial issues are addressed as much as the power plays and political manoeuvres of Rome’s rulers. Combining theme and chronology, events and processes, the general and the particular, was a feature of Vipper’s historical writings, as was his exploration of the material basis of politics and ideologies.145
Vipper’s type of historical writing may well have been behind a seminal outburst by Stalin at a meeting of the Politburo in March 1934, occasioned by a discussion of the poor state of history teaching in Soviet schools. No formal record of Stalin’s remarks was kept but his sentiments were conveyed in a speech a few days later by the head of the party’s education and propaganda department, Alexei Stetsky. In school textbooks, Stalin complained, history was replaced by sociology and class struggle by periodisation and the classification of economic systems. Also unacceptable to him was that Russia’s history was reduced to that of revolutionary movements:
We cannot write such history! Peter was Peter, Catherine was Catherine. They rested on certain classes, expressed their moods and interests, but they acted, they were historical figures. While they were not our people, it is necessary to present the historical epoch, what happened, who ruled, what sort of government there was, the policies that were conducted and how events transpired.146
A couple of weeks later, at a special Politburo session attended by a number of historians, people’s commissar for enlightenment Andrei Bubnov gave a report on the preparation of new textbooks. There is no stenographic record of the ensuing discussion but there are reliable eyewitness accounts of what Stalin said.
As he often did, Stalin strode around the meeting smoking his pipe, at one point picking up a textbook on the history of feudalism, saying: ‘I was asked by my son to explain what was written in this book. I had a look and I also couldn’t understand it.’ Soviet school history textbooks, said Stalin, were not fit for purpose:
They talk about the ‘epoch of feudalism’, the ‘epoch of industrial capitalism’, the ‘epoch of formations’ – all epochs and no facts, no events, no people, no concrete information, no names, no titles, no content. . . . We need textbooks with facts, events and names. History must be history. We need textbooks about the ancient world, the middle ages, modern times, the history of the USSR, the history of colonised and enslaved people.
Stalin also attacked the late Mikhail Pokrovsky (1868–1932), dean of Soviet historians in the 1920s, who favoured broad-themed sociological history and downplayed the role of personalities in shaping the course of events. He decried Russian oppression of the non-Russian peoples and criticised the work of Vipper, deriding Latin and Greek as ‘dead languages of no practical use whatsoever’. ‘Tsars, ministers, reformers, etc. . . . will never be taught again’, he predicted in 1927.147 Ivan IV he vilified as a ‘hysterical despot’ and Peter the Great as ‘a cruel, egotistical, syphilitic tyrant’.148
Stalin blamed Pokrovsky’s ‘un-Marxist’ approach to history for the sorry state of Soviet historiography. As an antidote, he proposed the translation and adaptation of French and German texts such as the works of Max Weber and Friedrich Schlosser on the ancient world. He also suggested the assembled historians should make use of a textbook by Vipper.149 Stalin didn’t say which of Vipper’s many textbooks he had in mind but they might have included his 1902 textbook on ancient history, which was another of those books he borrowed from the Lenin Library but failed to return.150