Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Before the Second World War, Clausewitz had been a figure of high esteem in Soviet military discourse, principally because Lenin viewed him favourably. In 1923 Pravda published Lenin’s ‘Notebook on Clausewitz’, which was reprinted in a 1931 collection of Lenin’s writings owned by Stalin.²⁸¹

Then, in 1945, Voennaya Mysl’ (Military Thought) – a journal published by the People’s Commissariat of Defence – carried an article by a Colonel G. Meshcheryakov on ‘Clausewitz and German Military Ideology’. Stalin read the article, noting three points. First, that Clausewitz’s ‘reactionary ideas’ had been popularised in Germany after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71. Second, that Clausewitz had borrowed from Hegel his reactionary philosophical system as well as his dialectical method. In Clausewitz’s writings, Hegel’s concept of the absolute spirit, wrote Meshcheryakov, was transformed into that of absolute war. Third, Clausewitz favoured short, decisive wars because that was the only way that a small country like Prussia could win the total wars of the contemporary era.²⁸²

Colonel Yevgeny Razin, a lecturer at the Frunze Academy and the author of a four-volume textbook history of operational art, took exception to Meshcheryakov’s article and wrote to Stalin. Meshcheryakov, complained Razin, had revised the positive view of Clausewitz held not only by Lenin but by Engels, too. Attached to his letter was his own short thesis on war and the art of war. Stalin replied almost immediately but his response was not published until March 1947.

Unfortunately for Razin, Stalin agreed with Meshcheryakov’s critique of Clausewitz. Indeed, in a private meeting with the journal’s editors in March 1945, Stalin himself had spoken of German military ideology as an ideology of attack, plunder and the struggle for world domination.²⁸³

‘In the interests of our cause and the modern science of war, we are obliged not only to criticise Clausewitz,’ wrote Stalin to Razin, ‘but also Moltke, Schlieffen, Ludendorff, Keitel and other exponents of German military ideology. During the last thirty years Germany has twice forced a bloody war on the rest of the world and twice has suffered defeat.’ Clausewitz was out of date, said Stalin; he ‘was a representative of the time of manufacture in war, but now we are in the machine age of war’. As to Razin’s own ideas, Stalin was scathing:

The thesis contains too much philosophy and abstract statements. The terminology taken from Clausewitz, talking of the grammar and logic of war hurts one’s ears. . . . The hymns of praise to Stalin also pain the ears, it hurts to read them. Also, the chapter on counter-offensive (not to be confused with counter-attack) is missing. I am talking of the counter-offensive after a successful but indecisive enemy offensive, during which the defenders assemble their forces to turn to a counter-offensive and strike a decisive blow to the enemy and inflict defeat upon him. . . . Our brilliant Commander, Kutuzov, executed this when he destroyed Napoleon and his army by a well-prepared counter-offensive.²⁸⁴

According to Roy Medvedev, the publication of Stalin’s letter led to the colonel’s arrest, but Stalin relented when he came across Razin’s military art textbook while doing some homework in preparation for a meeting with China’s communist leader, Mao Tse Tung, who was considered an expert on ‘people’s war’. Stalin was so impressed by Razin’s book that he was released from prison, promoted to major-general and restored to his position at the Frunze Academy.²⁸⁵ A different version of Razin’s fate is that he was already under arrest for some wartime misdemeanours when he wrote to Stalin and Stalin’s letter actually led to his release. Either story could be true, such were the vagaries of the Soviet system, especially when Stalin was involved. What is certain is that Razin did return to teaching and to publishing books about military affairs. He died in 1964. As far as we know, he kept his own counsel, and never wrote or spoke about his famous exchange with Stalin.

IMAGINING AMERIKA

Stalin was fascinated by SShA (Soedinennye Shtaty Ameriki). From the First World War onwards, the United States was the world’s most advanced and powerful capitalist country. Soviet socialism aimed to catch up with and then surpass the USA. Stalin was confident the rationally planned and socially controlled Soviet economy would prevail in competition with American free enterprise capitalism but he was still keen to import superior US technology, mass production techniques and work organisation methods. ‘Do it the Ford way’ and ‘create Russian Americans’ were among the more surprising Bolshevik slogans of the 1920s.²⁸⁶ In his 1924 lectures on The Foundations of Leninism, Stalin talked about the ideal ‘style of work’ being a combination of ‘Russian revolutionary sweep and American efficiency’. American efficiency, said Stalin, was the ‘indomitable force which neither knows nor recognises obstacles’ and ‘with business-like perseverance brushes aside all obstacles’.²⁸⁷ In correspondence with the poet Demyan Bedny that same year, he explained Bolshevik ‘philosophy’ with a quote from Walt Whitman: ‘We are alive. Our scarlet blood boils with the fire of unused strength.’²⁸⁸

When Emil Ludwig commented that in the Soviet Union ‘everything American is held in very high esteem’, Stalin demurred, but said he respected ‘the efficiency that Americans display in everything – in industry, in technology, in literature and in life’. Compared with the old European capitalist countries, remarked Stalin, there was an element of democracy in American industrial practices, which he attributed to the absence of feudal remnants in a young country like the United States.

Keen not only to import but to make the best use of western technology, the Bolsheviks launched a campaign to bring ‘Foreign Languages to the Masses’. Soviet workers were exhorted and supported to learn key foreign languages, such as English and German, that would enable them to understand and use scientific and technical knowledge and products from the United States and western Europe. The Politburo also ensured that foreign languages were taught in Soviet schools and instructed party members to regard foreign language study as a fundamental duty.²⁸⁹

Stalin didn’t exempt himself from this duty. Holidaying by the Black Sea in September 1930, he wrote home to his wife Nadya, who was in Moscow, and asked her to search for his copy of a self-study English-language book by A. A. Meskovsky, a text that was based on the methods of the American educator Richard S. Rosenthal. Nadya couldn’t find it and, fearing Stalin would be annoyed, she sent him another textbook instead.²⁹⁰ Stalin never attended classes or employed language tutors: home study was his preferred method of learning foreign languages, though he never got very far with any of them except Russian.

Stalin was confident that in time Soviet workers would be able to emulate the efficiency and technical expertise of their American counterparts. ‘I consider it impossible to assume that the workers of any particular nation are incapable of mastering new technique,’ he told visiting American progressive Raymond Robins in May 1933, noting that in the United States, ‘negroes’ were considered ‘bottom category men’ yet could master technique just as well as whites.²⁹¹

By no means were all Soviet images of America positive. In August 1917 Stalin published an editorial in the party press on ‘American Billions’, in which he accused US capitalists of financing counter-revolution in Russia. ‘It used to be said in Russia that the light of socialism came from the West,’ he wrote. ‘And it was true . . . it was there . . . that we learned revolution and socialism.’ But now it was not ‘socialism and emancipation that the West is exporting to Russia so much as subjection and counter-revolution.’²⁹²

Thousands of American troops fought on Soviet soil on the anti-Bolshevik side during the Russian Civil War. President Woodrow Wilson may have been a liberal hero in the west; to the Bolsheviks he was the ringleader of a global counter-revolutionary coalition.

During the 1930s Stalin was keen to import American know-how and expertise in many different spheres. In 1935 he sponsored a trip by a group of film professionals to Hollywood, the intent being to industrialise Soviet moviemaking along American lines. In 1936 Stalin’s trade commissar, Anastas Mikoyan, spent two months in America studying its food industry. When it was decided to build a gigantic Palace of the Soviets in the centre of Moscow, the project’s engineers and architects were sent on fact-finding tours of the United States and American consultants were hired to provide further input. While the palace was never built, the project did pave the way for the series of skyscrapers (called ‘tall buildings’ by the Soviets) that were erected in Moscow after the war.²⁹³

Of enduring interest to Stalin was the US Constitution. In March 1917 he published an article in Pravda entitled ‘Against Federalism’, a response to proposals that post-Tsarist Russia should become a federal state. Stalin pointed out that the US was federal only in theory. Originally, the United States was a confederation and became a federation as a result of the American civil war. That federal structure did not last long, however, and the US soon became, in effect, a unitary state. Indeed, Stalin favoured a similar set-up in Russia – not a federal state but a strong, centralised one that would allow regions degrees of autonomy.

Following two years of public consultation and discussion, the USSR adopted a new constitution in December 1936.²⁹⁴ Stalin’s speech on the draft showed he’d done some comparative research on the constitutions of other states.²⁹⁵ One of his sources was a section on the United States in a 1935 book, Konstitutsii Burzhuaznykh Stran (Constitutions of the Bourgeois Countries), in which he noted the US Constitution was based on the principle of balance between the Executive, the Judiciary and the Legislature. When the Soviet author of this piece, M. Tanin, commented that America’s entry into the First World War had resulted in a presidency that amounted to a ‘democratic Caesarism’, Stalin circled the phrase and wrote NB in the margin. Then he marked passages describing the role of the different branches of government and the fact that American women had not been able to vote until the ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution in 1920. In relation to American ‘Negroes’ he marked a paragraph which stated that, while they had the formal right to vote, it was exceedingly difficult for them to do so in many southern states.

The book reproduced (in Russian translation) the full text of the American Constitution. What caught Stalin’s eye was its first paragraph: ‘We the People of the United States . . .’²⁹⁶

A year after the 1936 constitution was adopted, there were elections to the newly created Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. In his election speech, Stalin highlighted the differences between Soviet and bourgeois-democratic elections:

Universal elections exist and are held in some capitalist countries, too, so-called democratic countries. But in what atmosphere are elections held there? In an atmosphere of class conflicts, in an atmosphere of class enmity, in an atmosphere of pressure brought to bear on the electors by the capitalists, landlords, bankers and other capitalist sharks. Such elections, even if they are universal, equal, secret and direct, cannot be called altogether free and altogether democratic elections.

Here, in our country, on the contrary, elections are held in an entirely different atmosphere. Here there are no capitalists and no landlords and, consequently, no pressure is exerted by propertied classes on non-propertied classes. Here elections are held in an atmosphere of collaboration between the workers, the peasants and the intelligentsia, in an atmosphere of mutual confidence between them, in an atmosphere, I would say, of mutual friendship; because there are no capitalists in our country, no landlords, no exploitation and nobody, in fact, to bring pressure to bear on people in order to distort their will.

That is why our elections are the only really free and really democratic elections in the whole world.²⁹⁷

Implicit here was the theoretical rationale of the one-party Soviet system: competitive party elections in capitalist democracies reflected the existence of antagonistic classes, whereas in the Soviet Union class relations were non-antagonistic, so there was no need for more than one political party. Hence Soviet electors could only vote for candidates pre-selected by the communist party. They could vote against candidates (who required a majority to get elected) but in practice it was difficult to do so without identifying yourself as a dissident. Unsurprisingly, 98 per cent of the 90 million votes in the 1937 election were cast in favour of the party’s candidates.

A decade or so later, Stalin read with evident interest a 1945 book, Osnovy Inostrannogo Gosudarstvennogo Prava (Fundamentals of Foreign State Law). Written by N. P. Farberov, it was based on the author’s lectures to the Higher Intelligence School of the Red Army. Stalin followed closely Farberov’s discussion of different federal and confederal systems and the nature and basis of state sovereignty. He also noted sections on the role of parliaments, cabinet government and the difference between constitutional referendums and ‘factual’ referendums. On the US, Stalin was drawn to details of eligibility to vote and to stand in congressional elections. He showed no particular interest in the role of the Supreme Court but marked the fact that the US Constitution had only been amended twenty-one times in its 157-year history.²⁹⁸

Soviet–American economic relations were hampered by the US’s refusal to recognise the USSR diplomatically because of a dispute about the Soviets’ refusal to pay Tsarist-era debts. When diplomatic relations were established in 1933, Stalin was enthusiastic, especially about newly elected US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom he described as a realist and ‘a determined and courageous politician’.²⁹⁹ He repeated this characterisation in his interview with H. G. Wells in July 1934, adding that ‘Roosevelt stands out as one of the strongest figures among all the captains of the contemporary capitalist world’.³⁰⁰

These remarks presaged the close working relationship that Roosevelt and Stalin enjoyed during the Second World War. Stalin was impressed by Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional support for the Soviet war effort and by his determination to send as much American aid to the USSR as possible. Roosevelt’s motive was transparent. ‘Nothing could be worse’, he said in March 1942, ‘than to have the Russians collapse.’ Better to ‘lose New Zealand, Australia or anything else’. Why? Because ‘the Russians are today killing more Germans and destroying more equipment than you and I put together’, he wrote to Winston Churchill later that year.³⁰¹

Stalin was genuinely upset when Roosevelt died unexpectedly in April 1945, shortly after the two men had met, along with Winston Churchill, at the Yalta conference. ‘When I entered Marshal Stalin’s office I noticed that he was deeply distressed at the news,’ reported American ambassador Averell Harriman. ‘He greeted me in silence and stood holding my hand for about 30 seconds before asking me to sit down.’ ‘President Roosevelt has died but his cause must live on,’ Stalin told Harriman.³⁰²

Stalin’s enthusiasm for the United States knew no bounds during the war, when the awesome power of American industrial capitalism flooded the USSR with billions of dollars’ worth of Lend-Lease supplies. For a while after the war he hoped for an American loan that would help pay for the reconstruction of the ravaged Soviet economy. ‘Had I been born and brought up in America,’ Stalin told the head of the American Chamber of Commerce in June 1944, ‘I would probably have been a businessman.’ Stalin’s fervour cooled considerably when the cold war broke out in the mid-1940s, but as late as April 1947 he told the visiting US Republican politician Harold Stassen, ‘I am not a propagandist, I am a man of business,’ pointing out that he and Roosevelt had never indulged in the name-calling game of ‘totalitarians’ v. ‘monopoly capitalists’.³⁰³

Stalin was puzzled as well as impressed by the United States, finding it difficult to understand why the working class movement in the world’s leading capitalist country was so weak politically. When asked why he thought this was the case by a visiting American labour delegation in 1927, Stalin had no answer except to blame reactionary trade union leaders for not forming an independent proletarian party to compete with the Democrats and Republicans.³⁰⁴

One of the last articles Stalin ever read was A. A. Poletaev’s ‘V. I. Lenin and the American Workers Movement’, published in a 1952 issue of Voprosy Istorii (Questions of History) devoted to Lenin.

Poletaev’s article seems to have been the only one that Stalin read in that issue of the journal and the first passage he marked was a 1907 citation from Lenin on the characteristics of the ‘Anglo-American workers’ movement’. There were four, and Stalin, as he often did, went to the trouble of numbering them: the fact that the proletariats of these two countries had no important social-national democratic tasks to fulfil; the complete subordination of the proletariat to bourgeois policy; the sectarianism and isolation of the socialist movement; and the lack of support for the left in elections.

Stalin picked up on the sectarianism point later in the article, noting the ‘dogmatism’ of both De Leon’s American Socialist Party and the British Social Democratic Federation. He also underlined Lenin’s point that what was needed in the United States was a mass Marxist party that would form an alliance between workers, farmers and ‘toiling negroes’.

Always on the lookout for points with contemporary resonance, Stalin noted this graphic passage in Poletaev’s article:

The American bourgeoisie have more than once warmed their hands with the flames of war in Europe, thereby profiting from the blood and suffering of millions of people. US monopolies have rapidly developed into a mighty fortress of capital with a vice-like grip not only on the American people but the peoples of Europe and Asia.³⁰⁵

Another Voprosy Istorii article that Stalin read during these early cold war years was an article on American intervention in Siberia during the civil war. Beside the paragraph citing the official US claim that the intervention was prompted by ‘love’ for the Russian people, Stalin wrote ‘ha ha’.³⁰⁶

A country that had once been a beacon of hope for Stalin, then a business partner and wartime ally, had reverted to being ‘Enemy Number One’.³⁰⁷