4. D. Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, Viking: London 2004 p.44.
5. S. Alliluyeva, 20 Letters to a Friend, Penguin: Harmondsworth 1968 p.187.
6. S. Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organisation of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1970 pp.1–2.
CHAPTER 1: BLOODY TYRANT AND BOOKWORM
1. I. Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, 2nd edn, Penguin: Harmondsworth 1966 p.44.
2. A. Alvarez, Under Pressure: The Writer in Society: Eastern Europe and the USA, Penguin: London 1965 p.11.
3. See D. Priestland, ‘Stalin as Bolshevik Romantic: Ideology and Mobilisation, 1917–1939’ in S. Davies & J. Harris (eds), Stalin: A New History, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2005.
4. E. van Ree, ‘Heroes and Merchants: Stalin’s Understanding of National Character’, Kritika, 8/1 (Winter 2007) p.62.
5. Cited by P. Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick NJ 1998 p.xxxv.
6. J. Brent & V. P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953, HarperCollins: New York 2003.
7. Intelligent – a member of the intelligentsia, the educated stratum of society engaged in intellectual, critical or creative work. The Bolsheviks believed that the role of the radical section of the intelligentsia should be to teach and lead the working class and its peasant allies towards its historic mission of overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with socialism. Stalin never referred to himself as an intelligent or an intellectual. His self-definition was politicaclass="underline" he was a Marxist and a revolutionary socialist. In Soviet times the concept of the intelligentsia was broadened to include administrative and technical cadres, the group as a whole being deemed an ally of the working class and the peasantry in the building of socialism. My use of the term ‘intellectual’ in this book is purely descriptive.
8. For a summary of reports of the fiction read by the young Stalin, see I. R. Makaryk, ‘Stalin and Shakespeare’ in N. Khomenko (ed.), The Shakespeare International Yearbook, vol. 18, Special Section on Soviet Shakespeare, Routledge: London July 2020 p.46. I am grateful to Professor Makaryk for a copy of her article.
9. Cited by E. van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, Routledge: London 2002 p.186.
10. A. Sergeev & E. Glushik, Besedy o Staline, Krymskii Most: Moscow 2006 pp.55–7. Sergeev was the son of an Old Bolshevik who died in a train accident in 1921. Adopted by Stalin, he was a companion and friend of Vasily’s. His memoirs derive from conversations with the co-author of the book cited here.
11. Another Kipling fan, President Vladimir Putin referenced The Jungle Book in his annual address to the Russian Federation in April 2021 when he mentioned Tabaquis the jackal, and Shere Khan the tiger, warning other countries that they shouldn’t treat Russia like these two treated other animals in Kipling’s fairy tale, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/65418. Accessed 4 August 2021.
12. A. Sergeev & E. Glushik, Kak Zhil, Rabotal i Vospityval Detei I. V. Stalin, Krymskii Most: Moscow 2011 p.18. Stalin’s inscription was drawn to my attention by Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2019 p.611. Slezkine’s book is the history of a building complex across the river from the Kremlin that housed government officials and other members of the Soviet elite. Artem Sergeev lived there with his mother when he wasn’t staying with Stalin.
13. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter RGASPI), F.558, Op.3, D.52.
14. Yu. G. Murin (ed.), Iosif Stalin v Ob”yatiyakh Sem’i, Rodina: Moscow 1993 doc.84.
15. D. Brandenberger & M. Zelenov (eds), Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2019.
16. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.76.The book was inscribed ‘To Vasya from Stalin’.
17. Murin (ed.), Iosif Stalin v Ob”yatiyakh Sem’i, doc.94. Vasily joined the air force in 1940 and rose to the rank of general. After Stalin’s death he was arrested for anti-Soviet slander and misappropriation of state funds and sentenced to eight years in prison. He spent the rest of his life in and out of gaol. Like his paternal grandfather Beso Dzhugashvili, he had a drink problem and died of causes related to alcohol abuse in 1962, a few days short of his forty-first birthday.
18. S. Alliluyeva, Only One Year, Penguin: London 1971 p.318.
19. Twenty or so of Svetlana’s books may be found in Moscow’s Gosudarstvennaya Obshchestvenno-Politicheskaya Biblioteka (State Socio-Political Library – hereafter SSPL) as part of a collection of books from Stalin’s personal library, which the dictator himself did not mark. Many of her books contain pometki similar to her father’s, including the interjections ‘wrong’, ‘nonsense’ and ‘ha, ha, ha!’, which she wrote in the margin of Lenin’s hallowed text on materialist philosophy.
20. Quoted by R. Debray, ‘Socialism: A Life-Cycle’, New Left Review, 46 (July–August 2007).
21. K. Clark, Moscow, The Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA 2011 p.13.
22. Literaturnaya Gazeta, 17 August 1934. My citation is from RGASPI, F.71, Op.10, D.170, L.162.
23. S. Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras, Palgrave Macmillan: London 2000 p.12.
24. M. David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929, Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY & London 1997.
25. J. Pateman, ‘Lenin on Library Organisation in Socialist Society’, Library & Information History, 35/2 (2019). I am grateful to the author for a copy of his article. Statistics are from E. Shishmareva and I. Malin, ‘The Story of Soviet Libraries’, USSR [information bulletin of the Soviet embassy in the USA], 6/53 (24 July 1946).
26. S. McMeekin, Stalin’s War, Allen Lane: London 2021 p.625.
27. D. Fainberg, Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore 2020 p.50.
28. P. Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1985 p.249.
29. P. Corrigan, ‘Walking the Razor’s Edge: The Origins of Soviet Censorship’ in L. Douds, J. Harris & P. Whitewood (eds), The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation, 1917–41, Bloomsbury Academic: London 2020 p.209.
30. A. Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928–1939, St Martin’s Press: New York 1991 p.19.
31. H. Ermolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature, 1917–1991, Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham MD 1997 p.57.
32. J. Arch Getty & O. V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 1999 docs16 & 44.