7. G. Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2006 pp.247–8.
FURTHER READING
The primary source for this book has been the many thousands of files in Stalin’s lichnyi fond, or personal file series. A good deal of this archive has been digitised and documents may be viewed online at Yale’s Stalin Digital Archive (stalindigitalarchive.com) or its Russian government equivalent (sovdoc.rusarchives.ru) – a facility that proved to be priceless during the last phase of my research. Unfortunately, only a third of Stalin’s marked library books (those containing his pometki) are available online. The rest may be viewed in Moscow’s Russian State Archive of Social-Political History (RGASPI is its Russian acronym). There are another hundred or so marked books in other sections of Stalin’s archive, mostly undigitised. Several thousand unmarked books from Stalin’s collection may be found in the special collections section of the Centre for Social-Political History of the Russian State Historical Library (formerly the State Socio-Political Library) in Moscow. I had a look at a few of these but mostly studied the handwritten card catalogues of their titles.
Throughout the book, I have allowed Stalin to speak with his own voice so that readers may judge for themselves his qualities as an intellectual. Fifty years ago, when I began to amass my own personal library, I bought a second-hand set of the thirteen volumes of the English edition of Stalin’s collected works. I can’t say I paid them much attention in the ensuing decades but it proved a prescient purchase. These works, together with many other writings by Stalin, are now available on www.marxists.org.
It will be evident from my endnotes that I have benefited enormously from the researches of other scholars. The quality of work on Stalin and his era is truly astounding. It has been a great pleasure to read and make copious use of this research. Below is a list of English-language books focused on Stalin that I have found the most useful and reliable. I have excluded books by authors who published before the collapse of the USSR and didn’t have the opportunity to work in the Russian archives. But older works by Isaac Deutscher, Robert McNeal, Ian Grey, Robert Tucker and many others can still be read with great profit.
Brandenberger, D., & 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
Davies, S., & J. Harris, Stalin’s World: Dictating the Soviet Order, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2014
Fitzpatrick, S., On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2015
Getty, J. Arch, & O. V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 1999
Kemp-Welch, A., Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928–1939, St Martin’s Press: New York 1991
Khlevniuk, O., Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2015
Kotkin, S., Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928, Allen Lane: London 2014
—, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1928–1941, Penguin: London 2017
Kun, M., Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, CEU Press: Budapest 2003
Kuromiya, H., Stalin, Pearson: Harlow 2005
Medvedev, R., and Z. Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin: His Life, Death and Legacy, Overlook Press: Woodstock NY 2004
Pollock, E., Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2006
Rayfield, D., Stalin and His Hangmen, Viking: London 2004.
Read, C., Stalin: From the Caucasus to the Kremlin, Routledge: London 2017
Ree, E. van, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, Routledge: London 2002
Rieber, A. J., Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015
Roberts, G., Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2006
Rubenstein, J., The Last Days of Stalin, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2016
Service, R., Stalin: A Biography, Macmillan: London 2004
Suny, R. G., Stalin: Passage to Revolution, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2020
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Never have I felt so pleased to express my heartfelt gratitude to the many people who have helped me to complete a book. First and foremost, there is my partner and editor extraordinaire, Celia Weston. Celia’s approach to editing is similar to Stalin’s: books should be finely sculpted so they contain no superfluous words. But even more important than the editing has been her intellectual companionship. She has interrogated and supported me during every phase of this exploration into the inner intellectual life of a learned dictator.
My biggest technical challenge was deciphering Stalin’s handwriting. In that regard, the help of Alexander Pozdeyev was indispensable. And both he and Alexandra Urakova were always on hand to discuss translation issues.
Sasha and Alexandra are among the Moscow friends to whom this book is dedicated. Another is Sergey Listikov, who has been helping me to access Russian archives for a quarter of a century. The late Oleg Rzheshevsky was also a welcoming and helpful host in Moscow.
Supportive from beginning to end was Erik van Ree. It was his pathbreaking book on Stalin’s political thought that encouraged me to take Stalin seriously as an intellectual. His own research on Stalin’s library has been invaluable, as has his advice and his answers to my many questions.
During the pandemic, when I was actually writing the book, David Brandenberger was amazingly generous with his time and resources. His writings on Soviet politics, culture and society in the 1930s and 1940s have been hugely influential in shaping my own views.
Jim Cornelius, Judith Devlin, Alfred J. Rieber and James Ryan read the book’s draft and their astute and expert feedback was gratefully received. The same is true of the three publishers’ reviews, who saved me from untold errors and prompted me to revamp the book’s structure. Be it on my own head that I took most but not all of the advice of these friends and colleagues and any remaining errors are, of course, mine.
A number of people responded to my various pleas for help: Michael Carley, Holly Case, Michael David-Fox, Susan Grant, Francis King, Mark Kramer, Irene Makaryk, Evan Mawdsley, Bruce Menning, Kevin Morgan, Vladimir Nevezhin, Pamela Neville-Sington, Joe Patman, Ethan Pollock, Malcolm Spencer, Dmitry Surzhik, John Turner, David C. Wojhan and Alexey Zadorozhny. A special thanks to Ronald Suny for sharing the manuscript of his definitive biography of the young Stalin.
While most of the Russian-language texts in my personal book collection were bought in Moscow and then shipped back home to Ireland, in recent times I relied heavily on the highly efficient services of Leonid Mejibovski of Esterum Books. I have him to thank for the prized acquisition of the memoirs of Lenin’s librarian, Shushanika Manuchar’yants, who served Stalin in the same capacity.
Over the years I received much assistance from Russian librarians and archivists but particular thanks are due to Dr Irina Novichenko, head of special collections at the Russian Historical Library’s Centre for Socio-Political History (formerly the State Socio-Political Library). On the very last day of my research for this book – in Moscow in September 2021 – she was instrumental in helping me to answer some nagging questions about Stalin’s library.