Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

CHAPTER 4

THE LIFE AND FATE OF A DICTATOR’S LIBRARY

In May 1925 Stalin entrusted his staff with a highly important mission: the classification of his personal book collection:

My advice (and request):

1. Classify the books not by author but by subject-matter:

a. Philosophy

b. Psychology

c. Sociology

d. Political Economy

e. Finance

f. Industry

g. Agriculture

h. Co-operation

i. Russian History

j. History of Other Countries

k. Diplomacy

l. External and Internal Trade

m. Military Affairs

n. The National Question

o. Congresses and Conferences

p. The Position of the Workers

q. The Position of the Peasants

r. The Komsomol

s. The History of Revolutions in Other Countries

t. 1905

u. February Revolution 1917

v. October Revolution 1917

w. Lenin and Leninism

x. History of the RKP (B) and the International

y. Discussions in the RKP (articles, pamphlets)

z. Trade Unions

aa. Fiction

bb. Art Criticism

cc. Political Journals

dd. Science Journals

ee. Dictionaries

ff. Memoirs

2. Exclude from this classification and arrange separately books by

a. Lenin

b. Marx

c. Engels

d. Kautsky

e. Plekhanov

f. Trotsky

g. Bukharin

h. Zinoviev

i. Kamenev

j. Lafargue

k. Luxemburg

l. Radek

3. All the rest can be classified by author (putting to one side: textbooks, small journals, anti-religious trash, etc.).¹

Stalin evidently had in mind a rather grandiose personal library, one that would contain a vast and diverse store of human knowledge, not only the humanities and social science but aesthetics, fiction and the natural sciences. His proposed schema combined conventional library classification with categories that reflected his particular interests in the history, theory and leadership of revolutionary movements, including the works of anti-Bolshevik socialist critics such as Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, as well as the writings of internal rivals such as Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev. Naturally, pride of place went to the founders of Marxism – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – and to its pre-eminent modern exponent, Vladimir Lenin.

The inclusion of the French socialist Paul Lafargue in the list of revolutionary writers with a separate classification might seem odd to contemporary eyes but there were a number of his books in Stalin’s library. Lafargue was famous among revolutionaries of Stalin’s generation as the author of the radical tract The Right to Be Lazy (1880). He was also married to Marx’s second daughter, Laura. Indeed, the couple committed suicide together in 1911. Shortly after, the Bolshevik journal Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment) published an obituary by Kautsky and in its next issue carried an analysis of Lafargue’s contribution to the international socialist movement, articles that Stalin may well have read.² In his 1950 intervention in the Soviet linguistics debate about the monogenetic language theories of Georgia-born Nikolai Marr, Stalin quoted with approval Lafargue’s pamphlet Language and Revolution.³

STALIN’S LIBRARIAN

Stalin’s classification scheme is listed in the Russian archival register as intended for an unnamed ‘librarian’. However, the document in question, which was handwritten by Stalin, contains no addressee. Stalin’s secretary and aide, Ivan P. Tovstukha, was identified as the recipient by General Dmitry Volkogonov in his groundbreaking 1989 Soviet biography of Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy. Volkogonov, who served in the Soviet army’s main political administration and headed the Defence Ministry’s Institute of Military History from 1988 to 1991, was able to secure unprecedented access to confidential party and state archives. Although he started work on the biography in the 1970s, he was only able to publish it when the reforming Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR.

According to Volkogonov, Stalin called in Tovstukha and asked his trusted assistant to sort out a decent personal library for him. When Tovstukha wanted to know what books it should contain, Stalin started to dictate something but then decided to dash off the above-cited note.⁴

Volkogonov often failed to cite the sources for his stories about Stalin, and this was one such example. But that didn’t deter other historians from repeating this highly improbable story.⁵ Stalin did habitually issue detailed on-the-spot instructions to his staff, usually in the form of dictation. When he handwrote such instructions they were invariably immediately edited and corrected by him. This note had no such corrections and has the air of careful not spontaneous composition by Stalin.

It is possible that Stalin did ask a high-level functionary to supervise if not carry out the classification of his books, but the actual recipient of his ‘request’ was probably a librarian called Shushanika Manuchar’yants. She was certainly one recipient of the note because, on 3 July 1925, she wrote to Stalin asking him if he wanted to expand his categories to include Transport, Education, Statistics, Popular Science and Law. Manuchar’yants also wanted to know if items such as reports, surveys and popular tracts were to be kept separate and whether to order some adjustable shelving that she thought would be ideal for his library.

As was his custom, Stalin replied by writing his answers in the margins of her typed memo. To the first question, he answered nuzhno (one should) but added in brackets after Law, isklyuchaya dekrety – ‘excluding decrees’. The answer to the second and third questions was a simple da (yes).⁶

Manuchar’yants had been Lenin’s librarian and after his death in 1924 continued to work for his sister Maria and his widow Nadezhda Krupskaya. It seems likely she served as Stalin’s librarian as well, which would explain why he presented her with a signed copy of his book Voprosy Leninizma (Problems of Leninism) in 1926.⁷ In all probability, it was Shushanika who prompted Stalin to devise his classification scheme and have created his ex-libris stamp – Biblioteka I. V. Stalina – which had the same simple design as the one she used when working as Lenin’s librarian.

Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s transport commissar in the 1930s, also had an ex-libris stamp. Like Stalin, Kaganovich was from a modest, non-intellectual background. He, too, numbered as well as stamped his books, indicating an intention to build up a substantial collection.⁸

When she went to work for Lenin in 1920, Manuchar’yants was surprised there were not more books in his office, but she soon learned that he kept to hand only those volumes he needed for current work or for reference purposes. Even so, there were about 2,000 books, many of them in foreign languages, and another 3,000 were kept in a room adjacent to Lenin’s small Kremlin flat. The books were shelved in alphabetical order on six bookcases, one of which contained the classics of Marxism, while another was filled with counter-revolutionary ‘White Guard’ literature that had been published abroad. On other shelves were collections of encyclopaedias, dictionaries and journals, military books and maps, Russian and foreign literature, texts on communism and Soviet foreign policy, and the writings of Russian revolutionary democrats.

Lenin was a fast reader and had a habit of writing in his books with a red or black pencil. Manuchar’yants’s recollection of her daily routine as Lenin’s librarian was as follows:

Have a look at the newly received books and take the most essential to the table beside Lenin’s desk. Register the new books and fill out the cards for the catalogue. Tidy up the bookshelves and bring to Lenin the books he has asked for. Order books that he needs from other libraries.⁹

Among Shushanika’s co-workers in Lenin’s office was Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. According to Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, hundreds of the history and art books in her father’s library belonged to her mother, a sub-collection to which she (unsuccessfully) laid claim in a 1955 letter to the party leadership.¹⁰ Maybe it was Nadezhda’s idea to ask Shushanika to organise their books.

Manuchar’yants’s memoir did not refer to working for Stalin, nor even mention his name, except once in passing. Such reminiscences were prohibited in the USSR after Khrushchev denounced the dictator; the only exceptions were military-related memoirs concerning Stalin’s role as supreme commander during the Second World War.

In 1930 Manuchar’yants went to work at the Lenin Institute, which in 1931 became the core of the newly formed Institute of Marx, Engels and Lenin (IMEL). Initially, she worked on Lenin-related projects but in 1940 transferred to the section responsible for the publication of Stalin’s collected writings and remained there until retirement in 1955. She died in 1969, just before publication of the second edition of her book in the Lenin centenary year of 1970.

Manuchar’yants’s transfer to IMEL may have saved her life. In 1935 a great number of Kremlin support staff – cleaners, guards, administrators and librarians – were implicated in a (concocted) conspiracy to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders. Among those arrested and shot was the librarian Nina Rozenfel’d, the former wife of Lev Kamenev’s brother.

‘You’ve heard what went on in the Kremlin,’ Stalin told a meeting of the central committee’s Orgburo in March 1935:

A single person who has access to the apartments of our leaders – a cleaning woman who cleans the rooms, or a librarian who visits an apartment under the pretext of bringing the books in order. Who are they? Often, we don’t know that. There exists a very great variety of poisons which are very easy to apply. The poison is put in a book – you take the book, you read and write. Or the poison is put on a pillow – you go to bed and breathe. And a month later it’s all over.¹¹

Manuchar’yants’s departure from the Kremlin coincided with a fateful development in the life of the dictator’s library since after she left the system of stamping new acquisitions atrophied. As we shall see, after Stalin’s death only those books bearing his pometki (markings or annotations) or other identifiers were retained in the archives. The rest were dispersed and disappeared into other libraries.

COLLECTING AND BORROWING BOOKS

Classification of a personal book collection often entails the creation of a catalogue but the only known catalogues of Stalin’s books are those constructed after his death as part of the process of transferring the remnants of his library’s holdings for archiving by IMEL. Classification also implies a central location or locations where the library’s holdings may be accessed. Stalin’s library, however, was a personal, working archive that was sprawled across his offices, apartments and dachas.

From the early 1920s Stalin had accommodation and an office in the Kremlin and another working space just a few minutes away in the party’s central committee building on Staraya Ploshchad’ (Old Square). These spaces certainly contained many of his books. Transport Commissar I. V. Kovalev noted that during meetings Stalin was fond of plucking a volume of Lenin’s off the shelves, saying, ‘Let’s have a look at what Vladimir Ilyich has to say on this matter.’¹² A. P. Balashov, who worked in the central committee building, sometimes borrowed books from Stalin’s collection: ‘There were cupboards with a splendid library. Stalin was sent two copies of every book published by the central publishers, often signed copies. Many authors themselves sent their books. Stalin passed one copy on to us and we divided them among ourselves.’¹³ Stalin’s daughter Svetlana recalled that in his Kremlin apartment ‘there was no room for pictures on the walls – they were lined with books’,¹⁴ while his adopted son Artem Sergeev remembered that ‘Stalin read a lot. Every time we saw each other he would ask me what I was reading and what I thought about it. At the entrance to his office there was a mountain of books. He would look through them and set aside those which he would put in his library.’¹⁵ Svetlana’s first husband (from 1944 to 1947), Grigory Morozov, was allowed to use the library in Stalin’s Kremlin flat:

As an avid and an inquisitive reader I spent a lot of happy times there. It has to be said that the collection was unique. Encyclopaedias, textbooks, volumes by well-known scholars, [literary] classics, the works of party leaders. Stalin read them all attentively, as evidenced by the numerous and sometimes detailed notes in the margins.¹⁶

During the Second World War, a British interpreter, Major A. H. Birse, had occasion to visit Stalin’s Kremlin bedroom, where he observed a large bookcase: ‘I had a look at the books. They were a collection of Marxist literature, with a good many historical works, but I could see no Russian classics. There were a few books in Georgian.’¹⁷

Sergo Beria, the son of Stalin’s security commissar Lavrenty Beria, claimed that when Stalin visited someone from his inner circle,

he went to the man’s library and even opened his books to check whether they had been read. . . . Stalin liked to give advice on reading and was indignant at the gaps in my knowledge of literature. For example, I had not read Germinal (I had read only Nana) whereas he worshipped Zola.

Sergo also recalled that Stalin told him that he read 500 pages a day. This is a recurrent claim of memoirists and Stalin may well have said something like that to someone, but his enormous workload meant that it was highly unlikely to be true. Except on holiday or on days that he spent outside the office, he simply would not have had time for such extensive reading. According to another memoir account, Stalin said he read ‘a set quota – about 300 pages of literary or other writing every day’.¹⁸

Beria junior also says Stalin used bookmarks and ‘hated the practice of underlining or writing notes in books’.¹⁹ Many of the surviving books from Stalin’s library have paper tags tucked into their pages, so Beria is probably right, but to say he ‘hated’ to mark texts is demonstrably false since there are hundreds of texts that prove the contrary.²⁰

According to Roy and Zhores Medvedev, in the 1920s Stalin ordered 500 books a year for his library.²¹ That seems a lot of books for a busy politician but it was commensurate with his ambitions for the library and in his lichnyi fond (personal file series) are to be found many publishers’ lists and catalogues.

The broader context of Stalin’s extensive book acquisition was that the Bolsheviks had inherited a vast publishing industry when they seized power. In 1913 Tsarist Russia published 34,000 titles; only Germany printed more. Numbers declined drastically during the civil war but in 1925 the Soviet Union published 20,000 titles and had surpassed the Tsarist peak by 1928. That same year the Soviets printed 270 million copies of books – more than double the rate produced in Tsarist times.

The book trade was ‘municipalised’ by the Bolsheviks in 1918 (i.e. taken over by various city Soviets) but in 1921 a number of private publishers were allowed to resume operations as part of the New Economic Policy’s revival of commercial activities.²² They continued to operate throughout the 1920s. Although dwarfed by state publishers, private companies had a good market share of some categories of books such as belles-lettres titles, children’s literature and foreign translations. There was also little or no control over the importation of books printed abroad, including those produced by Russian émigré publishers hostile to the Soviet regime.²³

Other than his own orders, Stalin’s most numerous source of books were the unsolicited copies sent to him by publishers and authors. Soviet publishers were expected to supply top Bolsheviks with copies of their books and authors needed little incentive to gift their works to the party’s general-secretary, particularly after the Stalin cult took off at the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s the Kremlin was deluged with gifts for Stalin, including many hundreds, if not thousands, of books. Even in the 1920s, a steady stream of publications flowed his way, as shown by a surviving ‘Register of Literature sent to Stalin in his Apartment, April–December 1926’.²⁴ Scores of books were sent to him during this nine-month period alone.

As you would expect, many of these books concerned Marxist philosophy, economics and politics but there were also texts on Russian history, the sociology of art, child psychology, sport and religion. Literature was represented by Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Pushkin, as well as Russian translations of Jack London, and of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Among the memoirs received by Stalin were those by Lenin’s widow Krupskaya, and Anton Denikin, the Tsarist general who had fought the Bolsheviks during the civil war. Among the oddities that found their way to Stalin’s flat were books on syphilis, the law of murder, Jewish ritual slaughter, and hypnosis. Many journals – scientific and cultural as well as political – were also routinely sent to him.

By far the most important tome that Stalin received in this particular batch of books was the first volume of Boris Shaposhnikov’s Mozg Armii (Brain of the Army), a study of general staffs before the First World War. Widely read and discussed in Soviet military circles, it was a book that came to be seen as the template for the functioning of Stalin’s high command during the Second World War. In 1929 Shaposhnikov reportedly sent Stalin an inscribed, specially bound copy of the three volumes of Mozg Armii.²⁵

Stalin also liked to borrow books from other libraries, both personal and institutional. The Soviet poet Demyan Bedny, whose own library was said to contain 30,000 volumes, complained about Stalin leaving greasy fingermarks on books he borrowed from him.²⁶ A favourite source was the main state repository, the Lenin Library; after Stalin’s death, seventy-two unreturned books were found in his private collection. Borrowing but not returning books was an old habit of Stalin’s. When he dropped out of the seminary in 1898, the authorities demanded a payment of 18 roubles and 15 kopeks for eighteen books he’d taken away from the seminary’s main library.²⁷

Most of the Lenin Library books Stalin borrowed were returned, fines unpaid, in 1956, three years after his death. But twenty-four texts, which had been marked by him, were retained by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (the renamed IMEL), among them two volumes of Herodotus’s classic Histories. However, like some other items noted on the retained list, they seem to have disappeared from the archive.²⁸

UNHAPPY FAMILY

Grand though Stalin’s Kremlin accommodations were by the standards of ordinary Soviet citizens, they were not big enough to house a large-scale personal library. At the height of his power Stalin could easily have carved out or had constructed a convenient space for his books but he showed no inclination to do so. Instead, the books were mainly kept at the places he spent most of his leisure and reading time from the 1920s through to the 1950s – his two Moscow dachas.

The first Moscow dacha, allocated to him by the state in the early 1920s, was not far from a village called Usovo, about 20 miles outside Moscow. It was called the Zubalovo dacha because before the 1917 revolution the house and its estate belonged to the Zubalov brothers, who were Armenian oil magnates. On the estate were three separate houses, each occupied by a high-ranking Bolshevik and their family. Stalin’s dacha was a relatively modest two-storey house that contained a large room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

Stalin and his extended family (which consisted mostly of his in-laws) spent a lot of time there at the weekends and during the summer. By all accounts the 1920s were a fairly happy time for the Stalin family. As his daughter Svetlana fondly recalled:

My father transformed Zubalovo from a dark country place that was densely overgrown, with a gloomy gabled house and a lot of old furniture, into a sunny, abundant estate with flower and vegetable gardens and all sorts of useful out-buildings. The house was rebuilt and the high Gothic gables removed; the rooms were remodelled and the musty old furniture carted away. . . . My mother and father lived upstairs, and the children and my grandmother, grandfather and anyone who happened to be staying with us downstairs.²⁹

The Stalin family idyll ended abruptly in November 1932 when Svetlana’s mother Nadezhda (‘Nadya’) Alliluyeva committed suicide. As Svetlana’s biographer Rosemary Sullivan has remarked, ‘Nadya is an elusive figure in the Stalin universe’³⁰ and the reasons and circumstances of her death remain unclear.

Stalin’s romance with her began in 1917 when he returned to St Petersburg from exile. Aged sixteen, Nadya was the daughter of an Old Bolshevik family that Stalin had known for a long time. When the Bolsheviks made Moscow their capital in March 1918, she followed Stalin there and worked with him in the Nationalities Commissariat. She joined the Bolshevik party and when Stalin was despatched to the front during the civil war, she went with him. They registered their marriage in March 1919. Nadya was the forty-year-old Stalin’s second wife. They had two children, Vasily (b.1921) and Svetlana (b.1926). Stalin also had a son, Yakov, from his marriage to Ekaterina (Kato) Svanidze (1885–1907), whose mother died of typhus a few months after he was born. Brought up by his mother’s relatives, in the 1920s, Yakov went to live with his father. Stalin didn’t get on with Yakov but relations improved when he became an artillery officer in the late 1930s. Like millions of other Soviet soldiers, Yakov was taken prisoner by the Germans in summer 1941. He died in captivity in 1943, possibly while trying to escape.

Soviet soldiers were not allowed to surrender unless severely wounded. To encourage soldiers to fight to the death, their families suffered if they were captured, and Stalin’s son was no exception. While Yakov was a POW, his wife Yulia, a ballerina, was under arrest and their daughter Galina brought up by other members of the extended Stalin family.

After Vasily’s birth, Nadya was expelled from the party for inactivity, but since she’d worked in Lenin’s office, her membership was soon restored.³¹ Nadya hired servants to look after her children and strove for a political and professional life independent of Stalin. In 1929 she enrolled in the textile production faculty of the Industrial Academy in Moscow.

It is claimed that Nadya had some health issues, physical and mental. There is also much talk about her political differences with Stalin, notably over the violent ‘revolution from above’ he unleashed at the end of the 1920s, but there is no probative evidence to support such speculation. The conspiracy theory that Stalin had her murdered because of these supposed differences may be safely dismissed.

Hard evidence about the Stalin marriage is sparse and the memoir literature overdetermined by post hoc speculation about what led to Nadya’s suicide. Their surviving correspondence from the late 1920s and early 1930, conducted while Stalin was on holiday at his dacha in Sochi and Nadya was in Moscow studying, suggests theirs was a happy if not always smooth marriage.³²

Their marriage breakdown appears to have been gradual rather than sudden, and gender inequality may have played a role. As radical socialists, the Bolsheviks were committed to female emancipation and sought to mobilise Soviet women in support of the communist project. But while there were many female activists and leaders throughout Soviet society, there were hardly any at the top levels of politics and power. One exception was Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina – a good friend of Nadya’s – who ran the fisheries industry in the 1930s and also looked after Soviet cosmetics.³³ Another was Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai, who later became ambassador to Sweden – the only female Soviet diplomat of that rank. An early diary of hers was part of Stalin’s book collection. Among the very few other female authors that featured in his library were Lenin’s widow Krupskaya, the German communist Clara Zetkin, and the Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, whose book on the General Strike as a revolutionary tactic was copiously marked by him. He was particularly interested in her treatment of the experience of strikes in Russia, especially in the Caucasus, where he himself had been active.³⁴

The early years of the Stalin marriage coincided with the most liberationist and egalitarian phase of Bolshevik policy and practice on gender issues. However, from the early 1930s there developed a more conservative approach towards ‘the woman question’ and a reversion to more traditional gender relations.³⁵

Soviet political culture from the outset was heavily male-dominated and Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, affected a tough, coarse macho style. ‘Today I read the section of international affairs,’ Stalin wrote to Soviet premier Vyacheslav Molotov in January 1933, congratulating him on a speech. ‘It came out well. The confident, contemptuous tone with the respect to the “great” powers, the belief in our own strength, the delicate but plain spitting in the pot of the swaggering “great powers” – very good. Let them eat it.’³⁶ For a young and ambitious female activist like Nadya, this was an inhospitable climate, even with the privileges that came from being Stalin’s wife. Matters came to a head at a private party in the Kremlin to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. After a drunken row with Stalin, Nadya left the room and shot herself with a revolver that her brother had brought back from Berlin as a souvenir.

Her suicide was obfuscated but not her death, which was announced in Pravda: ‘On the night of 9 of November, active and dedicated Party member Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva died’. The dedication that followed was signed by top Soviet leaders and their wives:

We have lost a dear, beloved comrade with a beautiful soul. A young Bolshevik filled with strength and boundlessly dedicated to the Party and the Revolution, is no more. . . . The memory of Nadezhda Sergeevna, dedicated Bolshevik, close friend and faithful helper to Comrade Stalin, will remain forever dear to us.³⁷

Further tributes were paid when she was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery on 12 November and a few days later Stalin replied publicly to all the sympathy messages he had received: ‘With heartfelt gratitude to all organisations, comrades, and individuals who have expressed their condolences on the occasion of the death of my close friend and comrade Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva-Stalina.’³⁸

As Sheila Fitzpatrick has written, ‘Stalin’s reactions [to Nadya’s suicide] are variously reported but grief, guilt and a sense of betrayal were all evidently present.’³⁹ After his wife’s death, Stalin gradually withdrew from the family life that he had enjoyed in the 1920s. He moved into another apartment in the Kremlin, one that was located directly below his office. He stopped going to Zubalovo, although many of his books remained there.

STALIN’S MAPS

A grand, new Moscow dacha was constructed for Stalin in 1933–4.⁴⁰ The Kuntsevo mansion was only ten or so minutes’ drive from the Kremlin using a fast highway reserved for government vehicles – hence the dacha’s colloquial name ‘Blizhnyaya’ (Nearby). Post-Nadya, Stalin’s daily life settled into a new pattern. Rarely staying overnight in his Kremlin apartment, he worked in his office until late and was then driven to Blizhnyaya. Not until the early hours of the morning did he go to bed.

The main house at Kuntsevo contained Stalin’s study and work spaces, a bedroom for Svetlana, a billiard room, a bath house, extensive servants’ quarters and a small dining room as well as a grand hall for large-scale banquets and events. The centrepiece of the dacha, however, was its library, a 30-square-metre room with four large bookcases whose shelves were deep enough to take two rows of books. But the bulk of Stalin’s collection, including those books transferred from his Kremlin apartment and office, were stored in a separate building nearby.

The dacha’s vestibule displayed three large multicoloured maps: a world map, a map of Europe and one of European Russia. As Molotov recalled: ‘Stalin loved maps . . . all maps.’⁴¹ The Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas reported that when he visited the dacha in June 1944, Stalin stopped before the world map and pointed at the Soviet Union, which was coloured red, exclaiming that the capitalists would ‘never accept the idea that so great a space should be red, never, never!’ Djilas misremembered that Stalin had encircled Stalingrad in blue on the world map. Actually, the city was marked by Stalin on the map of European Russia as part of a line drawing showing the German invasion’s deepest penetration into the USSR.⁴²

In his attack on Stalin’s war record at the 20th party congress, Khrushchev accused him of planning military operations on a globe. Stalin did have a big globe in or near his Kremlin office, but Khrushchev’s calumny has been rejected by members of the Soviet high command who worked with him closely during the war. Moreover, Stalin’s lichnyi fond contains nearly 200 maps with his pometki, including many large-scale maps used for planning and plotting military operations. There are also maps of many different countries and parts of the world, as well as numerous political, economic, administrative, road and physical geography maps of the USSR and its regions.⁴³

The dacha maps were conventional political maps (Mercator projection) that divided the world into differently coloured nations, states and empires. That political cartography was his chief preoccupation.

As a native Georgian, Stalin was, to use Alfred J. Rieber’s memorable phrase, a ‘man of the borderlands’.⁴⁴ It was Stalin’s Georgian origins and background and his early experience of political activity in the multi-ethnic borderlands of the Russian Empire that shaped his approach to the creation and protection of the Soviet system. The Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 with a strong sense that the durability of their revolution depended on its spread to other countries. Stalin shared that outlook but felt the political and economic interdependence of Russia and its borderlands was just as important.

The danger posed by the porous borders of its multi-ethnic periphery underpinned Stalin’s commitment to a strong, centralised Soviet state. He was a centraliser who subordinated the periphery of the former Russian Empire to its advanced proletarian Russian core. National and ethnic minorities were allowed regional and cultural autonomy but denied the possibility of self-government. This practice chimed with the view he had expressed in Marxism and the National Question (1913) and other writings: the Bolsheviks supported national self-determination in theory but reserved the right to repress nationalist movements if they threatened the interests of the working class and endangered the socialist revolution.

As Rieber also showed, Stalin’s borderlands policy was central to his domestic as well as his foreign policy. Forced collectivisation of agriculture and accelerated industrialisation were part of the struggle to secure the backward and underdeveloped borderlands. The Great Terror of the 1930s was in large part an ethnic purge of perceived nationalist elements in the borderlands.⁴⁵

The sweep of Stalin’s interests is captured by an anecdote about a map of the USSR’s new borders that was brought to him just after the war:

The map was small – like those for school textbooks. Stalin pinned it to the wall: ‘Let’s see what we have here. . . . Everything is all right to the north. Finland has offended us, so we moved the border from Leningrad. Baltic States – that’s age-old Russian land! – and they are ours again. All the Belorussians live together now, Ukrainians together, Moldovans together. It’s OK to the west.’ And he turned to the eastern borders. ‘What do we have here? The Kuril Islands belong to us now, Sakhalin is completely ours – you see, good! And Port Arthur’s ours, and Dairen is ours’ – Stalin moved his pipe across China – ‘and the Chinese Eastern Railway is ours. China, Mongolia – everything is in order. But I don’t like our border right here!’ Stalin said and pointed south of the Caucasus.⁴⁶

Stalin was adamant that he would keep all these territories, not least because of his strategic goal of ethno-political stability along Soviet borders.

Stalin’s ambitions south of the Caucasus centred on claims that Turkey should return the provinces of Kars and Ardahan to the USSR. These areas of eastern Turkey with Armenian and Georgian populations had been part of the Tsarist Empire from 1878 until 1921, when a Soviet–Turkish treaty transferred the two districts to Turkey. While there was communist-inspired nationalist agitation for the return of these territories to Georgia and Armenia, Stalin’s main aim was to put pressure on Turkey to share control of the Black Sea straits with the USSR.

He also sponsored an Azerbaijani separatist movement in Iran, which threatened to split the country by linking up with Soviet Azerbaijan. In this case his motives were mostly economic – to secure a Soviet oil concession in northern Iran.

Stalin focused on the countries and territories that bordered the USSR, but his geopolitical outlook was global. As a Bolshevik internationalist he paid attention to revolutionary struggles across the world. Among the remnants of his library are many books on Britain, France, Germany, China and the United States and a good number of texts on Ireland, India, Indochina, Indonesia, Italy, Japan and Mexico (including a translation of John Reed’s book on the Mexican Revolution) as well as volumes on imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and oil and world politics.

The USSR was primarily a land power but in the 1930s Stalin embraced the idea of building a powerful ocean-going navy and his collection contained a 1932 Russian translation of Some Principles of Maritime Strategy by Julian Stafford Corbett, a British sea-power theorist who emphasised the importance of wartime control of the seas, as opposed to large-scale fleet actions. In various conversations with Churchill during the war, Stalin lamented that while the United States controlled the Panama Canal and Britain the Suez Canal, the Soviet Union had no control over the Black Sea straits.⁴⁷

LIFE AND DEATH AT THE DACHA

Blizhnyaya served many purposes for Stalin. It was an extension of his Kremlin office, a playground for his children and a reception for visiting foreign communists. It was a place to party with his political cronies and listen to his extensive collection of gramophone records (he liked to watch his comrades dance, apparently).⁴⁸ It was a secure and secluded spot in which he could relax and do some gardening. But, above all, time spent at the dacha was a break from affairs of state and the opportunity to browse his books.

Never was downtime more necessary than during the war when Stalin worked twelve- to fifteen-hour shifts in the Kremlin. ‘Many allied visitors who called at the Kremlin during the war were astonished to see on how many issues, great and small, military, political or diplomatic, Stalin took the final decision,’ wrote Isaac Deutscher in his 1948 biography. ‘He was in effect his own commander-in-chief, his own minister of defence, his own quartermaster, his own foreign minister, and even his own chef de protocole. . . . Thus he went on, day after day, throughout four years of hostilities – a prodigy of patience, tenacity, and vigilance, almost omnipresent, almost omniscient.’⁴⁹ Research in the Russian archives has amply borne out Deutscher’s graphic picture of Stalin as the ever-busy warlord.⁵⁰

By the end of the Second World War, Stalin was sixty-six years old. Four years of intense toil as supreme commander had exacted a personal toll and he began to take long vacations by the Black Sea. Aside from these vacations, the pattern of his working life was much the same as before, although he did step back from the day-to-day running of the country, leaving a little more time for leisure and reading when he was on holiday or at Blizhnyaya. Svetlana had long since left home and in 1951 the dacha’s library was enlarged by the incorporation of what had been her bedroom.

Given how much time Stalin spent at Blizhnyaya, the chances were that he would die there, and so he did in March 1953 at the age of seventy-three. There are many conspiracy theories about his death but the truth is that he suffered a stroke on 1 March and died four days later.⁵¹ On the day of his death Soviet leaders established a subgroup tasked with ‘putting the documents and papers of Comrade Stalin, his archive as well as all current materials, in proper order’.⁵² The group consisted of head of government Georgy Malenkov, security chief Lavrenty Beria and deputy party leader Nikita Khrushchev. Two days later Beria’s security personnel removed all Stalin’s belongings and furniture from the dacha.

When Stalin fell ill, Svetlana was summoned to Blizhnyaya from a French class. ‘Strange things happened at Kuntsevo after my father died,’ she recalled:

The very next day . . . Beria had the whole household, servants and bodyguards, called together and told that my father’s belongings were to be removed right away. . . . In 1955, when Beria himself had ‘fallen’, they started to restore the dacha. My father’s things were brought back. The former servants and commandants were invited back and helped put everything where it belonged and make the house look as it had before. They were preparing to open a museum, like the one in Lenin’s house in Leninskiye Gorki.⁵³

The decision to establish a Stalin Museum at Blizhnyaya was taken by the Soviet leadership in September 1953 but the plan was dropped after Khrushchev’s secret speech.⁵⁴ The dacha was then placed at the disposal of the central committee and used to accommodate vacationing party apparatchiks and visiting foreign communists. An intriguing coda to the Stalin museum project was that in 2014 an exhibition on ‘The Myth of the Beloved Leader’ was mounted in a Moscow museum adjacent to Red Square. Ostensibly about Lenin, the exhibition was devoted mainly to Stalin and included many of the personal artefacts that had been assembled for the aborted Stalin Museum.

Stalin remained popular in Georgia and in 1957 a museum in his honour was opened in his hometown of Gori. Among its exhibits was a reproduction of Stalin’s childhood house and the railway carriage that transported him to the Potsdam Conference. The museum’s main building was palatial but badly maintained in post-Soviet times (when I visited in December 2015 the power failed and it was freezing). Among its exhibits are Stalin’s desk from his Kremlin office, a box made by his son Vasily, and, in a respectfully darkened space, the dictator’s death mask. The latter was one of ten such plaster casts of Stalin’s face (and hands) that were distributed to various museums and archives after his death.⁵⁵

The museum’s continued existence has been a matter of intermittent political controversy in independent Georgia but, so far, the locals’ desire to attract tourists and celebrate their most famous son has trumped all political considerations.

Svetlana did not mention in her memoirs that while she relinquished any claim she may have had to Blizhnyaya, she tried to trade this off for some time and space in another of Stalin’s dachas.⁵⁶ She also had an eye on her father’s library and in March 1955 wrote to the party leadership:

I would like to ask the government to consider the possibility of letting me have part of the library. It is huge and has many books of no interest to me but I would be very grateful if I could be permitted to take some books. I’m interested in the history books and Russian and translated literature. I know this part of the library very well since in the past I used it a lot.⁵⁷

Svetlana had quite an eventful personal life, including three husbands, two children by different fathers and an Indian communist lover, Brajesh Singh, who died in 1966. Svetlana was granted permission to take his ashes back to India, where, in Delhi, she sensationally defected to the United States. The following year Svetlana published a memoir of her life as Stalin’s daughter called 20 Letters to a Friend, which remains a unique, though not always reliable, source of information and insight about her father.

The loss of Stalin’s library books rankled Svetlana so much that when she published a second memoir two years later, she complained bitterly that the Soviet government had ‘decided to confiscate my father’s [library], disposing of it at its discretion. . . . In the USSR the State twists the law whichever way it wants, including laws governing private property.’⁵⁸

DISCOVERING STALIN’S LIBRARY

As part of the preparations for the short-lived Stalin Museum project, staff from the then Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute (formerly IMEL, later IM-L) were allowed to examine Stalin’s library books. Among them was the bibliographer Yevgenia Zolotukhina, who recalled that ‘the atmosphere at the dacha was stiff and formal, the only agreeable room was the library, which had a cosy feel. . . . The books were housed in a neighbouring building and brought to Stalin according to his requirements.’

Zolotukhina described Stalin’s Kremlin apartment as ‘a suite of vaulted rooms’, with a spiral staircase that led to his study:

The [apartment’s] library was furnished with a large number of old-fashioned bookcases that were filled with books on a great variety of subjects. . . . Clearly Stalin was an educated person. He got extremely irritated whenever he came across grammar and spelling mistakes, which he would carefully correct with a red pencil. These books, therefore, all the ones he marked, were transferred to the Central Party Archive.

Zolotukhina was struck by ‘the large assortment of books about Pushkin, all published during the Soviet period, as well as individual old editions – a number of books had slips from second-hand bookshops’.⁵⁹ Stalin was also ‘interested in books about Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible’ and ‘read all the emigre literature that appeared in Russian . . . including the celebrated biographies by Raymond Gul of Voroshilov and others.⁶⁰ In the postwar years he became interested in books and magazines about architecture, which must have been related to the construction of tall buildings in Moscow. These books could be found on his bedside table.’⁶¹

In 1957 Stalin’s apartment and dacha were visited by Yury Sharapov, head of IM-L’s library.⁶² Sharapov’s mission was to sort through Stalin’s books with a view to incorporating them into the Institute, a task which took several months to complete. In the Kremlin he found ‘a tall Swedish bookcase with detachable shelves. It was crammed with books and booklets, many with bookmarks in them. Literature written by emigres and White Guards, works by the opposition – those whom Stalin regarded as ideological adversaries or simply enemies – I must give Stalin his due – he read them all with great attention.’

At Blizhnyaya, Sharapov found that the bulk of Stalin’s books were kept in a separate wooden house with a large cellar. He started with the books on military matters, noting that Stalin was more interested in history than strategy and tactics: ‘The pages of old books about the wars waged by the Assyrians, Ancient Greeks and Romans were covered with his notes.’

There was a special section for fiction in the library and Sharapov recalled with disdain what Stalin had written in a copy of Maxim Gorky’s Death and the Maiden in 1931: ‘This piece is stronger than Goethe’s Faust (love conquers death).’⁶³ More happily, he noted that Stalin had studied the great nineteenth-century Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin in some depth.

The only Shchedrin book that remains in Stalin’s library is a 1931 edition of previously unpublished writings, which he read and marked in some detail.⁶⁴ In 1936 Stalin put his knowledge of Shchedrin to good use in a mockery of foreign critics’ claims that the new Soviet constitution was a façade with no substance, a fraud like the fake ‘Potemkin Villages’ built to impress Catherine the Great as she travelled through the Russian countryside:

In one of his tales the great Russian writer Shchedrin portrays a pig-headed official, very narrowminded and obtuse, but self-confident and zealous to the extreme. After this bureaucrat had established ‘order and tranquillity’ in the region ‘under his charge,’ having exterminated thousands of its inhabitants and burned down scores of towns in the process, he looked around him, and on the horizon espied America – a country little known, of course, where, it appears, there are liberties of some sort or other which serve to agitate the people, and where the state is administered in a different way. The bureaucrat espied America and became indignant:

What country is that, how did it get there, by what right does it exist? (Laughter and applause.) Of course, it was discovered accidentally several centuries ago, but couldn’t it be shut up again so that not a ghost of it remains? (General laughter.) Thereupon he wrote an order: ‘Shut America up again!’ (General laughter.)⁶⁵

Final decisions on what to do with Stalin’s book collection were not taken until January 1963. Prompted perhaps by the renewal of the anti-Stalin campaign at the 22nd congress of the CPSU in 1961, IM-L’s directorate resolved (1) to retain in the Institute’s archive all those texts containing Stalin’s pometki; (2) to house in IM-L’s own library, as a separate collection, books inscribed to Stalin and those with his library’s stamp; and (3) to disperse the remaining unmarked and unstamped books (those in good condition anyway) into the Institute’s own library and to other scientific and specialist libraries. It was also decided to place in a special file any letters or notes from authors and publishers found inside Stalin’s books.⁶⁶

Work began on cataloguing the books but it does not seem to have included listing which books were dispersed to libraries. In the absence of such a register it is impossible to know precisely which books were in Stalin’s library when he died or how many of them there were. But an idea of the numbers involved may be gleaned from a 1993 newspaper article by the historian Leonid Spirin, who had worked in IM-L for a number of years.⁶⁷

According to Spirin, the bulk of Stalin’s library consisted of the classics of Russian, Soviet and world literature – Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Mayakovsky, Hugo, Shakespeare, France. These and other unstamped books, about 11,000 in all, were transferred to the Lenin Library in the 1960s. Another 3,000 unstamped non-fiction books – socialist writings mostly – were added to IM-L’s library or given to other libraries, leaving a non-fiction remnant of 5,500. So, according to Spirin’s figures, there were about 19,500 books in Stalin’s personal library.

Spirin’s number of 5,500 non-fiction titles correlates with the catalogue of Stalin’s stamped books prepared by IM-L’s library. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the library separated from IM-L and became the Gosudarstvennaya Obshchestvenno-Politicheskaya Biblioteka – the State Socio-Political Library (SSPL). Located on Wilhelm Pieck Street in Moscow, this is where the only extant catalogue of Stalin’s library may be found, together with the books themselves.

The handwritten SSPL card indexes divide Stalin’s books into seven categories:

1. Books with the Library of J. V. Stalin stamp (3,747)

2. Books with the author’s autograph (with and without stamp) (587)

3. Books inscribed to Stalin (with and without stamp) (189)

4. Books with an identifiable subject classification (without stamp or autograph) (102)

5. Books with no identifiers (347)

6. Books belonging to members of Stalin’s family (34)

7. Books bearing the stamps of other libraries (49)

All but a few of the books listed in this catalogue were published before the early 1930s, which strongly suggests that rather being the non-fiction remnant of the library as a whole they are a subset of it and were retrieved from a particular location – Stalin’s apartment, perhaps, or his first dacha at Zubalovo. Spirin’s 5,500 figure needs to be revised significantly upwards to take account of the many books that Stalin acquired in subsequent years. While Spirin’s 11,000 figure for fiction etc. seems about right, his estimate of 3,000 non-fiction books in addition to those in those in the SSPL is far too low. Stalin must have acquired as least as many non-fiction books in the 1930s and 1940s as he did in the 1920s, and probably a lot more. Hence a better estimate of the size of Stalin’s library may be that it contained some 25,000 books, pamphlets and periodicals.⁶⁸

The one cataloguing exercise undertaken by the IM-L archive itself was listing all texts with Stalin’s pometki. In the version of the pometki list finalised in July 1963, there were 300 such titles.⁶⁹ However, a handwritten amendment of unknown date changed this number to 397 whereas the opis’ (inventory) made available to researchers in the 1990s lists 391 such items.⁷⁰ To be added to this total are upwards of a hundred books in other sections of Stalin’s lichnyi fond, many of which also contain his markings and annotations.

STALIN’S BOOKS

Despite its limitations, the SSPL catalogue is the best guide we have to the contents and character of Stalin’s library.⁷¹ What it shows is that it was overwhelmingly a Soviet library – a collection of post-1917 texts published in Soviet Russia. Most of the texts are books but there are also a large number of short, pamphlet-type publications. Nearly all the texts are in Russian and the great majority are written by Bolsheviks or other varieties of Marxists and Socialists. In the first section of the catalogue, which lists books with Stalin’s library stamp, the most heavily featured author is Lenin (243 publications) and there are also numerous works about Lenin and Leninism. The most favoured authors after Lenin are Stalin (95), Zinoviev (55), Bukharin (50), Marx (50), Kamenev (37), Molotov (33), Trotsky (28), Kautsky (28), Engels (25), Rykov (24), Plekhanov (23), Lozovsky (22), Rosa Luxemburg (14) and Radek (14). Five of these authors (Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev, Rykov and Lozovsky) were purged and executed by Stalin, while Radek died in the Gulag and Trotsky was assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940. But their books remained part of Stalin’s collection. The catalogue also lists hundreds of reports of communist party congresses and conferences, as well organisations such as the Comintern and Soviet trade unions.

Apart from the works of Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Luxemburg, there are very few foreign translations in Stalin’s collection. Notable exceptions include Russian translations of Winston Churchill’s book about the First World War, The World Crisis; three books by the German revisionist social democrat Eduard Bernstein; two books by Keynes, including The Economic Consequences of the Peace; Jean Jaurès’s History of the Great French Revolution; Tomáš Masaryk’s World Revolution; the German economist Karl Wilhelm Bucher’s Work and Rhythm; an early work by Karl Wittfogel on the ‘awakening’ of China; John Hobson’s Imperialism; Werner Sombart’s book about modern capitalism; some works of the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk; the Italian Marxist Antonio Labriola on historical materialism; John Reed’s Insurgent Mexico; several works by the American writer Upton Sinclair, and the letters of executed US anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Among the many works on economics in the collection is a translation of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations: in his heavily marked copies of David Rozenberg’s three volumes of commentary on Marx’s Capital, Stalin displayed a particular interest in the sections on trade and Adam Smith.⁷²

There is very little fiction listed in the catalogue but Stalin’s interest in the history of the ancient world is reflected in the presence of a translation of Flaubert’s Salammbô, a novel set in Carthage at the time of the First Punic War.

Three slightly off-beat authors who feature in the collection are L. N. Voitolovsky, an early Soviet theorist of the social psychology of crowd behaviour; Moisey Ostrogorsky, the author of one of the founding texts of western political sociology, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties; and Victor Vinogradov, a Soviet literary theorist, who wrote a book about the evolution of naturalism in Russian literature.

Among Stalin’s philosophy books was Moris G. Leiteizen’s Nietzsche and Finance Capital (1928).⁷³ Nietzsche was one of those ‘petty-bourgeois’ ‘idealist’ philosophers whose works the Bolsheviks banned from public libraries. Because of his appropriation by fascist and Nazi thinkers, he was totally rejected by official Soviet culture after Hitler came to power, and there is no evidence that he was read by Stalin.

As the title of his book indicates, Leiteizen was highly critical of Nietzsche but also detected a certain affinity between Bolshevism and the nihilist German philosopher, a point endorsed by enlightenment commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky in his introduction to the volume. Leiteizen expressed this idea and sentiment in terms that Stalin might well have appreciated:

Nietzsche is the most distant thinker for us but at the same time he is close to us. Reading his works, one breathes pure and sharp mountain air. There is clarity and lucidity of concept, there is nothing hiding behind a beautiful sentence. There is the same nakedness and unambiguity of class relations, the same struggle against all illusions and ideals, the Nietzschean struggle against petty gods and first of all against the most haughty and deceptive one of them – democracy. . . . What brings us together is Nietzsche’s struggle against the individualism and anarchy of capitalist society, his passionate dream of world unification, his struggle against nationalism . . .⁷⁴

The unstamped books listed in the SSPL catalogue are much the same as those that were stamped but do include c.150 foreign-language books, mostly in French, German or English. These include John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World (1919); Alfred Kurella’s Mussolini: Ohne Maske (1931); a book about the Spanish civil war, Garibaldini in Spagna (1937); a signed copy of the 1935 edition of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation; and various translations of works by Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin and Radek. We know from other sources that Stalin was sent many other books in foreign languages, which have since disappeared from his collection. But there is no sign he read any of them.

Marxist and Bolshevik writings predominate among the 391 marked books, periodicals and pamphlets retained by the IM-L archive, especially the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin himself. Erik van Ree estimated that about three-quarters of these titles are concerned with communist ideology and tactics.⁷⁵ The other major categories are history (36), economics (27) and military affairs (23).

Unlike the SSPL collection, the marked collection in the party archive contains a number of pre-1917 publications, including several works by the classical historian Robert Vipper (1859–1954) and the Tsarist military strategist Genrikh Leer (1829–1904).

If revolutionary history and military history are included, then historical works are by far the largest category of books in the marked collection, apart from the Marxist classics.

One marked book that combined various of Stalin’s interests is a 1923 text on the history of revolutionary armies by Nikolai Lukin (1885–1940), based on his lectures to the Red Army’s General Staff Academy. A former pupil of Vipper’s, Lukin was active in the revolutionary movement from 1905 onwards. He had personal connections to Nikolai Bukharin and joined his Left Communist group after the 1917 revolution. Lukin had quite a distinguished career as a Soviet historian, but it was not without controversy, and in 1938 he was arrested and sentenced to ten years hard labour. He died in captivity.

His book dealt with the French Revolution and the Paris Commune but it was the chapter on Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army that most interested Stalin. He noted Lukin’s point that the peculiarity of the English Revolution was the participation of part of the regime’s army on the side of the rebellious population. Cromwell’s task was to create a new army based on those soldiers and officers who had the courage to side with the revolution. He did this by establishing a unified command backed by a representative military council. Among Cromwell’s most ardent supporters were the New Model Army’s chaplains, who mobilised the troops’ religious enthusiasm for the Puritan revolt against the monarchy. Beside this passage Stalin wrote ‘politotdel’ (the political department) and later noted the use of the term commissar to denote representatives of rank-and-file soldiers.⁷⁶

Stalin made good use of his knowledge of English history in an interview with H. G. Wells in July 1934: ‘Recall the history of England in the seventeenth century. Did not many say that the old social system had decayed? But did it not, nevertheless, require a Cromwell to crush it by force?’ When Wells objected that Cromwell acted constitutionally, Stalin retorted: ‘In the name of the constitution he resorted to violence, beheaded the king, dispersed Parliament, arrested some and beheaded others!’ In that same interview he lectured Wells about nineteenth-century British history and the role of the radical Chartist movement in the democratic political reforms of that era.⁷⁷

Boris Ilizarov, a scholar who has done more work on Stalin’s library than any other Russian historian, believes that Stalin wasn’t much interested in history before 1917 and didn’t become seriously interested in reading history books until the 1930s, when he became involved in discussions about the production of new textbooks for Soviet schools.⁷⁸

Ilizarov may be right that the young Stalin was more immediately preoccupied with Marxist politics and philosophy. However, the study of history featured in both his school and seminary education and it was a branch of knowledge foundational to Marxism, a theory of human affairs that combined an account of social change with a teleological vision of humanity’s progression from ancient slavery to communism. All revolutionary socialists of Stalin’s generation were interested in seismic events like the French Revolution and in past popular struggles from which they could derive lessons for their own day. His first significant piece of writing, Anarchism or Socialism? (1907), cited both Arthur Arnould’s and Olivier Lissagaray’s histories of the Paris Commune.⁷⁹ His tract on Marxism and the National Question (1913) had a big historical content and in the 1920s he made many references to history. In a 1926 speech he observed that neither Ivan the Terrible nor Peter the Great were true industrialisers because they didn’t develop the heavy industry necessary for economic growth and national independence. In 1928 he alluded to a parallel between Peter’s efforts to modernise Russia and those of the Bolsheviks, although in his discussion with Emil Ludwig in 1931 he denied the comparison, pointing out that Peter had striven to strengthen the upper-class character of the Russian state whereas he served the workers.⁸⁰ Stalin’s most dramatic pronouncement on Russian history was his February 1931 speech on the urgency of the drive for modernisation and industrialisation:

The history of old Russia consisted, among other things, in her being beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers. She was beaten by the Polish-Lithuanian lords. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. Everyone gave her a beating for her backwardness. For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for state backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and could be done with impunity. . . . Such is the law of the exploiters: beat the backward because you are weak – so you are in the wrong and therefore can be beaten and enslaved. . . . We have fallen behind the advanced countries by 50 to 100 years. We must close that gap in 10 years. Either we do this or we will be crushed.⁸¹

Memoirs and diaries were another category of books that interested Stalin. Among the books he read and annotated are the memoirs of the British intelligence agent R. H. Bruce Lockhart, the First World War German General Erich Ludendorff, and Annabelle Bucar, who defected to the Soviet Union from the American embassy in Moscow in 1948 and then became a star of Radio Moscow’s English-language broadcasting service.

Perhaps the quirkiest author in Stalin’s library was ‘Professor Taid O’Conroy’, whose book The Menace of Japan (1933) was published in Russian in 1934.⁸² Born Timothy Conroy in Ballincollig, County Cork, Ireland in 1883, he ran away to sea at the age of fifteen and joined the Royal Navy. Having served in South Africa, Somaliland and the Persian Gulf, he then spent a year teaching English at a Berlitz school in Copenhagen before moving to Russia in 1909 to teach at the Imperial Court in St Petersburg. After the First World War he ended up in Japan, where he married a waitress, described by the publisher of his book as descended from a venerable Japanese aristocratic family. He and his wife left Japan in 1932. In London, O’Conroy contacted the Foreign Office and submitted a briefing document on Japan that eventually became his book. He died in 1935 from liver failure.⁸³

As the title of his book indicates, O’Conroy’s main message concerned the danger of Japanese militarism now that Japan had invaded and occupied Manchuria (in 1931). Stalin had no need of his counsel in that regard. There were two Soviet-authored books in his library dating from 1933 that detailed the militarisation of Japanese society and the build-up of Japan’s armed forces. Both books he read and marked heavily.⁸⁴ Stalin also had at his disposal numerous news reports from TASS’s Tokyo office. TASS bulletins from various countries were one of Stalin’s most important sources of international information and in the early 1930s he paid particular attention to reporting from and about Japan.⁸⁵ During the Second World War, Stalin’s staff produced an information bulletin for him that contained translated and summarised material from the foreign press, particularly reports on the Soviet Union.⁸⁶

REIMAGINING STALIN

Sharapov’s 1988 memoir was the first public inkling that Stalin had an extensive private library. It was published in English in Moscow News under the headline ‘Stalin’s Personal Library’.

The idea that Stalin was a bit of an intellectual who read and collected a lot of books was not uncommon, Trotsky’s caricature of him as a mediocrity notwithstanding. He was, after all, a published author whose pretensions as a Marxist theorist were well known. The Stalin cult proclaimed him to be a genius and a succession of bedazzled western intellectuals, diplomats and politicians had publicly hailed his knowledge and erudition. Cult images often depicted him reading, writing or standing by books. But the discovery of his personal library focused attention on the intellectual aspect of Stalin’s persona and identity. Crucially, his biographers now had a source they could use to explore the workings of his mind alongside their studies of his exercise of power.

In a chapter in his 1989 biography entitled ‘Stalin’s Mind’, Dmitry Volkogonov counterposed Stalin as an ‘exceptional intellect’ to Trotsky’s disparaging characterisation. It was Volkogonov who first published Stalin’s 1925 library classification schema, revealed the existence of the ex-libris label and noted his habit of writing in books: ‘Lenin’s Collected Works, for instance, are covered with underlinings, ticks and exclamation marks in the margins’. Stalin, wrote Volkogonov, sought ammunition against his rivals from wherever he could, including their own writings. He kept a special collection of hostile émigré literature and insisted on maintaining subscriptions to White émigré publications.⁸⁷

Volkogonov’s claim that Stalin read and underlined key passages in Hitler’s Mein Kampf cannot be verified, since there is no copy of the book in what remains of Stalin’s collection, but it rings true.⁸⁸ Not that he needed to read Mein Kampf to find out what Hitler had said about ‘Lebensraum’ and German expansion into Russia, since these words of the Führer were cited widely in the Soviet press. He was also very well briefed about internal developments in Nazi Germany. In 1936, for example, he was sent detailed documentation about that year’s Nuremberg Rally.⁸⁹ An avid reader of confidential TASS bulletins from around the world, Stalin scrawled ‘ha ha’ across the report of an October 1939 Turkish news story that he had been invited by Hitler to visit Berlin. Reportedly, Stalin had declined the invitation but the possibility remained that Hitler might visit him in Moscow.⁹⁰

Subsequent Stalin biographies featured themes similar to those of Volkogonov. In a chapter on ‘Vozhd and Intellectual’, Robert Service considered Stalin to be a thoughtful man who had studied a lot: ‘his learning, though, had led to only a few basic changes in his ideas. Stalin’s mind was an accumulator and regurgitator. He was not an original thinker nor even an outstanding writer. Yet he was an intellectual until the end of his days.’⁹¹ According to Donald Rayfield, author of Stalin and His Hangmen, ‘the most common mistake of Stalin’s opponents was to underestimate how exceptionally well read he was’.⁹² In a section called ‘A World of Reading and Contemplation’, the Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk’s post-Soviet biography explored Stalin’s pometki, noting that ‘he liked books. Reading played a major role in shaping his ideas. . . . Stalin loved history and constantly used historical example and analogies in his articles, speeches and conversation.’ But while Stalin loved history, ‘he was not particularly interested in scholarly discussions and actual historical evidence, choosing instead to adapt the facts to his preferred narrative. . . . In the end Stalin’s self-education, political experience, and character formed a mind that was in many ways repellent but ideally suited to holding onto power.’⁹³ Stephen Kotkin’s multi-volume biography of the dictator is replete with references to Stalin as intellectual and reader, beginning with his observation that the young Stalin ‘devoured books, which, as a Marxist, he did so in order to change the world’.⁹⁴

Nikolai Simonov, a senior IM-L researcher, was the first scholar to explore some of Stalin’s pometki in depth. His article ‘Reflections on Stalin’s Markings in the Margins of Marxist Literature’ appeared in the party’s theoretical journal Kommunist in December 1990.⁹⁵ Published at the tail end of the Gorbachev era, Simonov’s analysis echoed the late Soviet orthodoxy that Stalin was not a Leninist. His focus was Stalin’s views on the theory of the state under socialism and he used the marginalia in his library books to show that the dictator disagreed with Marx, Engels and Lenin on this question.

According to classical Marxist doctrine, the capitalist state (the government, civil service, judiciary, police and armed forces) was a bourgeois instrument of class oppression that would wither away under socialism when antagonistic classes were abolished. Stalin’s view was that socialism needed a strong state to ensure the proletariat could hold onto power.

Simonov cited Stalin’s detailed annotations of Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (1920) to show that while he approved of his future rival’s staunch defence of revolutionary violence during the civil war, it didn’t go far enough. According to Trotsky, the dictatorship of the proletariat was exercised by the communist party. Stalin considered Trotsky’s reasoning ‘inexact’ and preferred the idea of the party as a political apparatus that dominated the state and other public organisations such as the trade unions. According to Simonov, classical Marxism viewed the state ‘mechanistically’ as a temporary, artificial instrument of capitalist class power, whereas Stalin’s ‘organicist’ view of state saw it as a long-term entity whose continued existence as a coercive force was essential to the protection of the Soviet socialist system. Classical Marxism pointed towards a process of democratisation and a reduction of the state’s power over citizens, while Stalin’s theory of the state provided a rationalisation for his repressive rule under the guise of defending socialism against its enemies.

Stalin’s deviation from the traditional Marxist theory of the state under socialism was no secret. At the 18th party congress in March 1939, he mounted a spirited public defence of his revision of the views of Marx, Engels and Lenin. What the three great teachers had not anticipated, Stalin told the delegates, was that socialism would triumph in a single state that would then have to co-exist with powerful capitalist states. Under conditions of capitalist encirclement, the Soviet Union needed a strong state apparatus to defend itself against external threats and internal subversion. Only when capitalism was liquidated globally would the state, in accordance with Marxist theory, wither away.⁹⁶

In December 1994 another former IM-L staffer, the journalist and politician Boris Slavin, published an article in Pravda that examined some of the comments Stalin had written in his library books. Slavin was particularly interested in his reading of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, noting Stalin’s adherence to the classical Marxist definition of freedom as the recognition of necessity. Slavin also noted Stalin’s favourite philosophical aphorisms: ‘Lots of learning does not teach understanding’ (Heraclitus); ‘Marxism is a guide to action, not a dogma’ (Lenin); and ‘Freedom lies beyond the realm of material necessity’ (Marx).⁹⁷

Dutch historian Erik van Ree, who was interested in Stalin’s political thought, was the first western scholar to extensively research his library books. His presumption before he set out for Moscow in 1994 was that the key to understanding the evolution of Stalin’s thinking was the impact of Russian political traditions on his Marxism. That belief was ‘shaken’ by his encounter with the contents of Stalin’s private library, which were overwhelmingly Marxist and betrayed little or no sign of non-Marxist influences. Van Ree’s conclusion, after studying every single one of Stalin’s annotations, was that Stalin was primarily a creature of the rationalist and utopian west European revolutionary tradition that began with the Enlightenment. While the dictator did absorb some Russian traditions – autocracy and the strong state, for example – he fitted them into a Marxist framework. Stalin admired some of the Tsars – Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great – but thought that, armed with Marxist theory, he could do a better job of creating a powerful, protective Soviet state. The end result in Stalin’s thinking was what van Ree termed ‘revolutionary patriotism’ – the primacy of the defence of the socialist fatherland. Revolution abroad remained a key goal but its pursuit was adapted to the reality of Soviet co-existence with a hostile capitalist world composed of competing nation states.⁹⁸

Among the first Russian scholars to explore Stalin’s library books were Boris Ilizarov and Yevgeny Gromov. Ilizarov started working on the library in the late 1990s, when the books still contained what he imagined to be the detritus of Stalin’s pipe!⁹⁹ Suitably inspired, he went on to publish a series of groundbreaking articles and books, both on Stalin’s reading life and, most importantly, on the history of the library.¹⁰⁰

In 2003 Gromov published a wide-ranging study of Stalin’s relations with Soviet writers and artists that drew extensively on the holdings of his lichnyi fond. Among the documents referenced by Gromov was Stalin’s marking of Gorky’s novel Mother, which is a propagandistic story of revolutionary factory workers in early twentieth-century Russia. Running through the novel is the role of radical books and subversive literature in fomenting revolution. The chapter that attracted Stalin relates how an elderly peasant-turned-factory worker, Mikhail Rybin, having been won over to the revolutionary cause, went to a comrade’s house to pick up some illegal books for distribution among the people. Stalin side-marked several pages of this chapter, but what really excited him was Rybin’s peroration:

Give me your help! Let me have books – such books that when a man has read them he will not be able to rest. Put a prickly hedgehog to his brains. Tell those city folks who write for you to write for the villagers also. Let them write such hot truth that it will scald the village, that the people will even rush to their death.¹⁰¹

Another Russian historian who took a great interest in Stalin’s library was Roy Medvedev. It was Medvedev who interviewed the bibliographer Zolotukhina about her knowledge of the library and in 2005 he published a book entitled Chto Chital Stalin? (What Did Stalin Read?)

Medvedev and his twin brother Zhores were famous Soviet-era dissidents. Roy was expelled from the Soviet communist party in 1969 and Zhores, a plant biologist, was exiled to the west in the 1970s. Both were ‘loyal oppositionists’ who believed in the Soviet system but wanted to reform and democratise it. Of critical importance for the Medvedevs was the ‘destalinisation’ process begun by Khrushchev at the 20th party congress, not least the need to tell the whole truth about the massive Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. To this end Roy wrote a long book about Stalinist repression, Let History Judge. He was unable to publish the book in the USSR but it was translated and published in the west in the early 1970s. Medvedev’s verdict on the dictator, much influenced by Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin, was damning: ‘boorishness and self-importance, pathological conceit and callousness, mistrust and stealth, an inability to take the criticism of his comrades and a craving for influence and power’.¹⁰² His assessment of Stalin’s theoretical legacy was that it was poor: what was of interest in his writings was unoriginal and what was original was wrong. ‘He did not derive theoretical positions from concrete reality; he forced theory to fit his wishes, subordinated it to transient situations – in a word he politicised theory.’¹⁰³

As a dissident, Medvedev had no access to Soviet archives. Instead, he utilised documentation from the public sphere together with a great number of unpublished memoir sources. One memoir that he cited was E. P. Frolov’s story about his friend Jan Sten, a party philosopher who in the 1920s was recruited by Stalin to teach him Hegelian dialectics. Sten ‘often told me in confidence about these lessons’, recalled Frolov, ‘about the difficulties he, as a teacher, was having because of his student’s inability to master the material’.¹⁰⁴

During the post-Lenin succession struggles Sten backed Stalin against the Trotsky-Zinoviev United Opposition. A pamphlet he wrote on ‘The Question of the Stabilisation of Capitalism’ (1926) is preserved in Stalin’s library. Stalin read the text attentively and evidently agreed with Sten’s critique of the United Opposition. Contrary to Trotsky and Zinoviev, Sten argued that capitalism had successfully stabilised itself economically and politically following the intense crisis it experienced immediately after the First World War. Such stabilisation would not last, said Sten, but it could endure for some time yet, something the United Opposition had failed to grasp.¹⁰⁵

Sten’s critique of Trotsky and Zinoviev echoed the views of Nikolai Bukharin, a former ‘Left Communist’, who came to favour a more moderate course than the one canvassed by the United Opposition, which favoured more radical foreign and domestic policies because it believed the crisis of capitalism was ongoing. Stalin was allied to Bukharin in the mid-1920s but changed his mind at the end of the decade in response to crises in town–country trade relations that threatened to cut food supplies to the cities. Stalin also believed the world economic depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s signalled a return of the revolutionary wave. Hence his abandonment of the New Economic Policy and his embrace of more militant policies. This policy turn meant Stalin fell out with Bukharin and his supporters, including Sten. Like so many opponents and critics of Stalin, Sten was expelled from the party in the 1930s, accused of counter-revolutionary activities, arrested and shot. He was exonerated and posthumously readmitted to the party in 1988.

While Frolov’s tale is reminiscent of the legend that Ivan the Terrible was educated by a philosopher known as Maximus the Greek, the story is not implausible. Hegel’s philosophy is notoriously difficult to understand and Stalin habitually consulted experts. The story is usually told against him, as a way of puncturing his intellectual pretensions, but his apparent willingness to be tutored in philosophy shows how serious the middle-aged Stalin was about developing intellectually.

STALIN REVIVIFIED

Roy Medvedev continued his studies of Stalin and Stalinism after the USSR’s collapse but his views of the dictator changed markedly. The critique of Stalinist terror remained in his writings but was balanced by greater appreciation of the more positive aspects of Stalin’s political leadership and intellectual endeavours:

Stalin was a ruler, a dictator and a tyrant. But under the mantle of the despot’s ‘cult of personality’ there was also a real person. He certainly was cruel and vindictive but he had other qualities as well: Stalin was a thinking, calculating, hard-working man possessed of an iron will and a considerable intellect; undoubtedly he was a patriot, concerned to uphold historic Russian statehood.¹⁰⁶

Medvedev’s changed view reflected the post-Soviet rehabilitation of Stalin’s historical reputation in Russia. By the early twenty-first century, most Russians believed that Stalin had done more good than harm to their country, not the least of his achievements being the defeat of Hitler. When Russia’s main TV channel staged a competition and viewers’ poll in 2008 to name the greatest figure in Russian history, Stalin came third (519,071 votes), after Alexander Nevsky (524,575) and Peter Stolypin (523,766), but rumours were rife that the ballot had been rigged to stop him coming first. According to a March 2018 opinion poll, Stalin was voted the greatest leader of all time for Russians: 38 per cent of 1,600 respondents granted him the number one rank – an amazing jump since 1989, when he received just 12 per cent of the vote.¹⁰⁷

To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, personal book collections are often beset by the disorder that springs from the haphazard way that books are bought, borrowed or otherwise acquired. Cataloguing may mask the confusion but the underlying disorder remains. In the 1920s a degree of order was imposed on Stalin’s library by stamping, numbering and classifying the books. At Blizhnyaya he had a library room that housed part of his collection, while other books resided on the many shelves and bookcases of various other homes and workspaces. The shelving of these books was far from random but his library ended up as chaotically organised as many of our own. While Soviet archivists could have centralised, catalogued and preserved the library intact after his death, post-1956 political developments prompted its disassembly. But as Walter Benjamin also said, it is not books that come alive by being collected, it is the collector.¹⁰⁸ Among the remnants of his library, in the pages of its surviving books, Stalin lived on.