Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: THE KREMLIN SCHOLAR

1. D. Shepilov, The Kremlin’s Scholar, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2014 pp.2–3, 6; J. Rubenstein, The Last Days of Stalin, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2016 chap.1.

2. The Russian title of Shepilov’s memoir was Neprimknyvshii, literally: not-joined – a reference to his association with but non-membership of the Molotov-led group on the Presidium (Politburo) that tried to overthrow Khrushchev in 1957.

3. On Stalin’s efforts at learning English, French and German, see M. Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, CEU Press: Budapest 2003 chap.8. In a party registration questionnaire dated October 1921, Stalin stated he could speak German as well as Georgian and Russian but this seems to have been an exaggeration. (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter RGASPI), F.558, Op.4, D.333, L.1.)

4. D. Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, Viking: London 2004 p.44.

5. S. Alliluyeva, 20 Letters to a Friend, Penguin: Harmondsworth 1968 p.187.

6. S. Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organisation of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1970 pp.1–2.

CHAPTER 1: BLOODY TYRANT AND BOOKWORM

1. I. Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, 2nd edn, Penguin: Harmondsworth 1966 p.44.

2. A. Alvarez, Under Pressure: The Writer in Society: Eastern Europe and the USA, Penguin: London 1965 p.11.

3. See D. Priestland, ‘Stalin as Bolshevik Romantic: Ideology and Mobilisation, 1917–1939’ in S. Davies & J. Harris (eds), Stalin: A New History, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2005.

4. E. van Ree, ‘Heroes and Merchants: Stalin’s Understanding of National Character’, Kritika, 8/1 (Winter 2007) p.62.

5. Cited by P. Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick NJ 1998 p.xxxv.

6. J. Brent & V. P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953, HarperCollins: New York 2003.

7. Intelligent – a member of the intelligentsia, the educated stratum of society engaged in intellectual, critical or creative work. The Bolsheviks believed that the role of the radical section of the intelligentsia should be to teach and lead the working class and its peasant allies towards its historic mission of overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with socialism. Stalin never referred to himself as an intelligent or an intellectual. His self-definition was political: he was a Marxist and a revolutionary socialist. In Soviet times the concept of the intelligentsia was broadened to include administrative and technical cadres, the group as a whole being deemed an ally of the working class and the peasantry in the building of socialism. My use of the term ‘intellectual’ in this book is purely descriptive.

8. For a summary of reports of the fiction read by the young Stalin, see I. R. Makaryk, ‘Stalin and Shakespeare’ in N. Khomenko (ed.), The Shakespeare International Yearbook, vol. 18, Special Section on Soviet Shakespeare, Routledge: London July 2020 p.46. I am grateful to Professor Makaryk for a copy of her article.

9. Cited by E. van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, Routledge: London 2002 p.186.

10. A. Sergeev & E. Glushik, Besedy o Staline, Krymskii Most: Moscow 2006 pp.55–7. Sergeev was the son of an Old Bolshevik who died in a train accident in 1921. Adopted by Stalin, he was a companion and friend of Vasily’s. His memoirs derive from conversations with the co-author of the book cited here.

11. Another Kipling fan, President Vladimir Putin referenced The Jungle Book in his annual address to the Russian Federation in April 2021 when he mentioned Tabaquis the jackal, and Shere Khan the tiger, warning other countries that they shouldn’t treat Russia like these two treated other animals in Kipling’s fairy tale, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/65418. Accessed 4 August 2021.

12. A. Sergeev & E. Glushik, Kak Zhil, Rabotal i Vospityval Detei I. V. Stalin, Krymskii Most: Moscow 2011 p.18. Stalin’s inscription was drawn to my attention by Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2019 p.611. Slezkine’s book is the history of a building complex across the river from the Kremlin that housed government officials and other members of the Soviet elite. Artem Sergeev lived there with his mother when he wasn’t staying with Stalin.

13. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter RGASPI), F.558, Op.3, D.52.

14. Yu. G. Murin (ed.), Iosif Stalin v Ob”yatiyakh Sem’i, Rodina: Moscow 1993 doc.84.

15. D. Brandenberger & M. Zelenov (eds), Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2019.

16. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.76.The book was inscribed ‘To Vasya from Stalin’.

17. Murin (ed.), Iosif Stalin v Ob”yatiyakh Sem’i, doc.94. Vasily joined the air force in 1940 and rose to the rank of general. After Stalin’s death he was arrested for anti-Soviet slander and misappropriation of state funds and sentenced to eight years in prison. He spent the rest of his life in and out of gaol. Like his paternal grandfather Beso Dzhugashvili, he had a drink problem and died of causes related to alcohol abuse in 1962, a few days short of his forty-first birthday.

18. S. Alliluyeva, Only One Year, Penguin: London 1971 p.318.

19. Twenty or so of Svetlana’s books may be found in Moscow’s Gosudarstvennaya Obshchestvenno-Politicheskaya Biblioteka (State Socio-Political Library – hereafter SSPL) as part of a collection of books from Stalin’s personal library, which the dictator himself did not mark. Many of her books contain pometki similar to her father’s, including the interjections ‘wrong’, ‘nonsense’ and ‘ha, ha, ha!’, which she wrote in the margin of Lenin’s hallowed text on materialist philosophy.

20. Quoted by R. Debray, ‘Socialism: A Life-Cycle’, New Left Review, 46 (July–August 2007).

21. K. Clark, Moscow, The Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA 2011 p.13.

22. Literaturnaya Gazeta, 17 August 1934. My citation is from RGASPI, F.71, Op.10, D.170, L.162.

23. S. Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras, Palgrave Macmillan: London 2000 p.12.

24. M. David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929, Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY & London 1997.

25. J. Pateman, ‘Lenin on Library Organisation in Socialist Society’, Library & Information History, 35/2 (2019). I am grateful to the author for a copy of his article. Statistics are from E. Shishmareva and I. Malin, ‘The Story of Soviet Libraries’, USSR [information bulletin of the Soviet embassy in the USA], 6/53 (24 July 1946).

26. S. McMeekin, Stalin’s War, Allen Lane: London 2021 p.625.

27. D. Fainberg, Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore 2020 p.50.

28. P. Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1985 p.249.

29. P. Corrigan, ‘Walking the Razor’s Edge: The Origins of Soviet Censorship’ in L. Douds, J. Harris & P. Whitewood (eds), The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation, 1917–41, Bloomsbury Academic: London 2020 p.209.

30. A. Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928–1939, St Martin’s Press: New York 1991 p.19.

31. H. Ermolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature, 1917–1991, Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham MD 1997 p.57.

32. J. Arch Getty & O. V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 1999 docs16 & 44.

33. V. S. Astrakhanskii, ‘Biblioteka G. K. Zhukova’, Arkhivno-Informatsionnyi Byulleten’, 13 (1996); Alliluyeva, Only One Year, p.348.

34. S. Alliluyeva, 20 Letters to a Friend, Penguin: Harmondsworth 1968 pp.150–1.

35. Molotov’s grandson, Vyacheslav Nikonov, a prominent pro-Putin political commentator in post-Soviet Russia, wrote a two-volume biography of him: Molotov, Molodaya Gvardiya: Moscow 2016. A popular, abridged version has been published in French: Molotov: notre cause est juste, L’Harmattan: Paris 2020.

36. R. Polonsky, Molotov’s Magic Lantern, Faber and Faber: London 2010 chap.2.

37. On Molotov: G. Roberts, Molotov: Stalin’s Cold Warrior, Potomac Books: Washington DC 2012.

38. J. Brent, Inside the Stalin Archives, Atlas & Co.: New York 2008 pp.299–302.

39. Stalin’s letters to his mother, wife and children may be found in Murin (ed.), Iosif Stalin v Ob”yatiyakh Sem’i.

40. S. Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928, Allen Lane: London 2014 p.597.

41. H. Kuromiya, Stalin, Pearson: Harlow 2005 p.137.

42. A. Werth, Russia: The Post-War Years, Robert Hale: London 1971 p.250.

43. RGASPI F.558, Op.3, D.46, L.15.

CHAPTER 2: THE SEARCH FOR THE STALIN BIOGRAPHERS’ STONE

1. Stalin’s staff kept a diary of visitors to his Kremlin office from 1924 to 1953 but not those to his apartment, dachas or elsewhere in the Kremlin: Na Prieme u Stalina: Tetradi (Zhurnaly) Zapisei Lits, Prinyatykh I. V. Stalinym (1924–1953), Novyi Khronograf: Moscow 2008.

2. Cited by R. H. McNeal, Stalin: Man and Ruler, Macmillan: London 1989 p.9 (Papermac edition).

3. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/dec/13a.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021. Not long after the interview, Stalin was asked about his impression of Ludwig. He replied: ‘Nedalekii chelovek’ (a dull man); Mezhdu Molotom i Nakoval’nei: Soyuz Sovetskikh Pisatelei SSSR, 1, Rosspen: Moscow 2010 p.156.

4. Recalled by Bulgakov’s widow in a conversation with Edvard Radzinsky in the 1960s. E. Radzinsky, Stalin, Sceptre Books: London 1997 pp.9–11. Elena Bulgakova’s recollection was recorded by Radzinsky in his diary.

5. G. Safarov, Taktika Bol’shevizma: Osnovnye Etapy Razvitiya Taktiki R.K.P., Priboi: Petrograd 1923. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter RGASPI), F.558. Op.3, D.309. Lenin volumes: Dd.115–18; Stalin volume: D.324. Safarov signed the resolution on the shooting of the Tsar and his family in July 1918. In the 1920s he was a member of the opposition to Stalin within the Bolshevik party and in the 1930s a victim of the purges. He was executed in the Gulag in 1942.

6. https://revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv12n2/cpi2.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

7. Cited in M. Folly, G. Roberts & O. Rzheshevsky, Churchill and Stalin: Comrades-in-Arms During the Second World War, Pen & Sword Books: Barnsley 2019 pp.1–2.

8. R. G. Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2020 p.2.

9. RGASPI, F.558, Op.1, D.4507. Stalin seems to have written 1879 and then changed the 9 to an 8, as if he wasn’t sure himself. An article based on the questionnaire was published in the Swedish social democratic newspaper Folkets Dagblad Politike in August 1921.

10. Ibid., Op.4, D.333, L.1.

11. Ibid., Op.1, D.4343, Ll.1–3. See further: ‘Kogda Rodilsya I. V. Stalin’, Izvestiya TsK KPSS, 11 (1990) pp.132–4. ‘Old-Style’ and ‘New-Style’ refer to the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar after the Bolsheviks seized power, which meant that birth and other dates before January 1918 were twelve or thirteen days behind those of the new calendar.

12. On Tovstukha: N. E. Rosenfeldt, The ‘Special’ World: Stalin’s Power Apparatus and the Soviet System’s Secret Structures of Communication, Museum Tusculanum Press: Copenhagen 2009 passim; V. G. Mosolov, IMEL: Tsitadel’ Partiinoi Ortodoksii, Novyi Khronograf: Moscow 2010 chap.3; V. A. Torchinov & A. M. Leontuk, Vokrug Stalina: Istoriko-Biograficheskii Spravochnik, Filologicheskii Fakul’tet Sankt-Peterburgskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta: St Petersburg 2000 pp.481–3.

13. D. Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination and Terror under Stalin, 1927–1941, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2011 p.55. An English translation of Tovstukha’s dictionary piece may found in G. Haupt & J-J. Marie (eds), Makers of the Russian Revolution: Biographies of Bolshevik Leaders, Allen & Unwin: London 1974 pp.65–75. This book also contains translations of the other Granat biographies of top Bolsheviks.

14. ‘Reply to the Greetings of the Workers in the Chief Railway Workshops in Tiflis’ in J. V. Stalin, Works, vol.8, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1954 pp.182–4 (emphasis added). This speech and its religious connotations were brought to my attention by A. J. Rieber, ‘Stalin: Man of the Borderlands’, American Historical Review (December 2001) p.1673.

15. S. Alliluyeva, 20 Letters to a Friend, Penguin: Harmondsworth 1968 p.35. My downplaying of the significance of Stalin’s Georgian roots and identity would be contested by Alfred J. Rieber, Ronald Suny and many others.

16. Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis, p.60.

17. J. Stalin, ‘Some Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism’ in J. V. Stalin, Works, vol.13, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1955 pp.86–104. On the letter and its background and broader consequences see J. Barber, Soviet Historians in Crisis, 1928–1932, Macmillan: London 1981 esp. chap.10.

18. Slutsky was arrested in 1937 and survived twenty years in the Gulag. He continued to work as a historian and published a book about Franz Mehring, Marx’s first biographer. Employed in the 1960s by the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute for History, he died in 1979.

19. Stalin, Works, vol.13 p.99.

20. Ibid., pp.107–8.

21. See L. Yaresh, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’ in C. E. Black (ed.), Rewriting Russian History, Vintage: New York 1962.

22. J. Devlin, ‘Beria and the Development of the Stalin Cult’ in G. Roberts (ed.), Stalin: His Times and Ours, IAREES: Dublin 2005 pp.33–5. The copy of the book that Stalin marked may be viewed at RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.704. For an English translation of the 4th Russian edition of the book see L. Beria, On the History of the Bolshevik Organizations in Transcaucasia, Lawrence and Wishart: London n.d.

23. A. Sobanet, ‘Henri Barbusse and Stalin’s Official Biography’ in his Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland and the Cult of Personality, Indiana University Press: Bloomington 2018 p.57.

24. Bol’shaya Tsenzura: Pisateli i Zhurnalisty v Strane Sovetov, 1917–1956, Demokratiya: Moscow 2005 doc.201.

25. Ibid., doc.200.

26. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.699, doc.17. Also published in ibid., doc.256.

27. Sobanet, ‘Henri Barbusse’, pp.41, 83. At the time of his death Barbusse was working on a screenplay of Stalin’s life.

28. Barbusse letter of February 1934. Cited by K. Morgan, ‘Pseudo-Facts and Pseudo-Leaders: Henri Barbusse and the Dilemmas of Representing the Pre-War Stalin Cult’ (forthcoming article).

29. H. Barbusse, Stalin: A New World Seen Through One Man, Macmillan: London 1935 pp.175–6.

30. Sobanet, ‘Henri Barbusse’, pp.86–7.

31. S. Davies & J. Harris, Stalin’s World: Dictating the Soviet Order, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2014 pp.149, 158–9.

32. Cited by D. Brandenberger, ‘Stalin as Symbol: A Case Study of the Personality Cult and its Construction’ in S. Davies & J. Harris (eds), Stalin: A New History, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2005 p.261.

33. The relevant documents may be found here: RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.1509. They are also published in I.V. Stalin, Istoricheskaya Ideologiya v SSSR v 1920–1950-e gody, Nauka-Piter: St Petersburg 2006 docs 226–9. This episode was brought to my attention by Davies & Harris, Stalin’s World, pp.152–3.

34. The unfortunate Moskalev seems to have come to Stalin’s notice again in 1942 as a result of a book he wrote about the dictator’s period of exile in Siberia. Stalin apparently didn’t like the book and it was withdrawn from publication. According to Simon Sebag Montefiore (Young Stalin, Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London 2007 p.241), Moskalev was commissioned to write the book by the then Krasnoyarsk party secretary, Konstantin Chernenko, who was destined to be the Soviet Union’s penultimate leader. In the late 1940s Moskalev, who was Jewish, fell victim to the anti-cosmopolitan purge and was arrested. Rehabilitated after Stalin’s death, he resumed work as a historian and published a number of books about early Bolshevik and Soviet history, including one about Lenin’s exile in Siberia.

35. RGASPI, F558, Op.1, D.3226; Brandenberger, ‘Stalin as Symbol’, pp.262–3.

36. RGASPI, F558, Op.11, D.905, doc.4. This is the key file on the history of the publication of Stalin’s Works. Many of the documents have been published in I. V. Stalin, Trudy, vol.1, Prometei Info: Moscow 2013.

37. Ibid., doc.6.

38. Many details may be found in S. Yu. Rychenkov, ‘K Istorii Podgotovki Pervogo Izdaniya Sochinenii I. V. Stalina’ in Stalin, Trudy, pp.274–302. On the purge of IMEL: Mosolov, IMEL, pp.312–41.

39. Stalin’s selections and corrections may be viewed in RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, Dd.907 ff.

40. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.941, doc.1. This twelve-page document, which IMEL sent to Stalin at the end of December 1945, concerned editorial changes to his writings for 1917–1920. It had three columns: in the left-hand column was the original text, in the middle column was the text proposed for publication, in the right-hand column there was space for explanation of the changes, though in the cited case no comment was deemed necessary. Most of the proposed changes were minor. The document was brought to my attention by Mosolov, IMEL, pp.442–3. The 1918 text as published may be found in J. Stalin, Works, vol.4, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1953 pp.155–7.

41. Stalin, Trudy, pp.376–84.

42. Ibid., pp.385–406.

43. Ibid., pp.485–7.

44. Ibid., pp.506–11.

45. Stalin is referring to a strike and demonstration in Batumi in March 1902 that resulted in bloodshed when the authorities opened fire and killed thirteen protesters and wounded many more.

46. ‘Na Priemu u I. V. Stalina: Zapis’ V. D. Mochalova’ in Stalin, Trudy, pp.512–22. It is not clear when Mochalov wrote up his report. The time, place and duration of the meeting recorded by Mochalov is confirmed by Stalin’s appointments diary: Na Prieme u Stalina p.465. Post-IMEL, Mochalov, who died in 1970, had a distinguished academic career, including serving as chief editor of one the top Soviet history journals, Istoriya SSSR.

47. Konushaya’s memoir may be found in I. V. Stalin, Sochineniya, vol.16, Pisatel’: Moscow 1997 pp.231–6.

48. Cited by Mosolov, IMEL, p.439.

49. RGASPI, F.558 Op.11, D.906, Ll.7–8, 25ff.

50. J. Stalin, Works, vol. 1, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1952 pp.xvii–xxi.

51. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, Dd.1221–5; Brandenberger, Propaganda State, p.255.

52. Stalin’s response to Ribbentrop was specifically listed for exclusion from his works: RGASPI, F.71, Op.10, D.170, L.162.

53. See G. Roberts, ‘Stalin, the Pact with Nazi Germany and the Origins of Postwar Soviet Diplomatic Historiography: A Research Note’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 4/4 (Fall 2002), and V. Pechatnov, ‘How Soviet Cold Warriors Viewed World War II: The Inside Story of the 1957 Edition of the Big Three Correspondence’, Cold War History, 14/1 (2014).

54. R. H. McNeal, Stalin’s Works: An Annotated Bibliography, Hoover Institution: Stanford CA 1967 p.16.

55. See RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, Dd.1100 ff.

56. O. Edel’man, Stalin, Koba i Soso: Molodoi Stalin v Istoricheskikh Istochnikakh, Izdatel’skii Dom Vysshei Shkoly Ekonomiki: Moscow 2016 p.74.

57. McNeal’s Introduction to J. F. Matlock, An Index to the Collected Works of J. V. Stalin, Johnson Reprint Corporation: New York 1971 p.v. Matlock was US ambassador to Moscow, 1987–91.

CHAPTER 3: READING, WRITING AND REVOLUTION

1. R. G. Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2020 pp.26–7.

2. R. G. Suny, ‘Beyond Psychohistory: The Young Stalin in Georgia’, Slavic Review, 50/1 (Spring 1991) p.52.

3. R. Brackman, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life, Frank Cass: London 2001. For a summary: R. Brackman, ‘Stalin’s Greatest Secret’, Times Higher Education Supplement (26 April 2001).

4. R. C. Tucker, ‘A Stalin Biographer’s Memoir’ in S. Baron & C. Pletsch (eds), Introspection in Biography, Routledge: New York 1985.

5. ‘Rech’ Stalina I. V. na Soveshchanii Komandnogo Sostava’, 22 March 1938, Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter RGASPI), F.558, Op.11, D.1121, Ll.49–50. Stalin told another version of his father’s story in an early article as an illustration of how a former shoemaker fallen on hard times could acquire working-class consciousness (J. Stalin, Works, vol.1, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1952 pp.317–18).

6. S. Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928, Allen Lane: London 2014 pp.21, 26.

7. My Dear Son: The Memoirs of Stalin’s Mother (Kindle edition).

8. R. H. McNeal, Stalin: Man and Ruler, Macmillan: London 1988 p.4; I. Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, Penguin: Harmondsworth 1966 p.36. The informant was G. Glurdzhidze, who was a teacher in Gori at the time he was interviewed about Stalin’s childhood in 1939.

9. RGASPI, F.558, Op.4, D.5; O. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2015 p.15.

10. R. Service, Stalin: A Biography, Macmillan: London 2004 p.35.

11. RGASPI, F.558, Op.4, D.600. The texts (in Russian) may also be found in I. Stalin, Sochineniya, vol.17, Severnaya Korona: Tver’ 2004 pp.1–6. For translation of some extracts, including the one cited here, see Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, pp.57–9.

12. Suny, ibid., pp.64–6.

13. Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, p.37.

14. A. J. Rieber, ‘Stalin as Georgian: The Formative Years’ in S. Davies & J. Harris (eds), Stalin: A New History, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2005 p.36.

15. According to the 1922 chronology prepared by his staff, Stalin was excluded from the seminary for ‘unreliability’.

16. RGASPI, F.558, Op.4, D.65; M. Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, CEU Press: Budapest 2003 p.31.

17. J. Stalin, Works, vol.2, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1953, p.368.

18. Cited by R. Boer, ‘Religion and Socialism: A. V. Lunacharsky and the God-Builders’, Political Theology, 15/2 (March 2014) p.205. See also S. Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organisation of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1970 pp.4–5. For context and the relationship between the contemporaneous ‘God-seeking’ and ‘God-building’ movements see E. Clowes, ‘From Beyond the Abyss: Nietzschean Myth in Zamiatin’s “We” and Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago”’ in B. Glatzer Rosenthal (ed.), Nietzsche and Soviet Culture, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1994.

19. He may have read a review of the 1911 volume published in the January 1912 issue of the Bolshevik journal Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment) and underlined the reviewer’s phrase that, for Lunacharsky, ‘Marxism is a religion’. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.274, p.86 of the journal. This copy of Prosveshchenie is one of nineteen in Stalin’s library. Dating from 1911 to 1914, they contain quite a few scattered markings but, as Yevgeny Gromov pointed out, it is not certain that they all belong to Stalin (Stalin: Iskusstvo i Vlast’, Eksmo: Moscow 2003 p.59). The best bet is that the marking of several articles on Marxism and the National Question (including his own piece) are Stalin’s. Certainly, these particular markings correspond to the arguments and points that Stalin subsequently made in discussions about this question. Boris Ilizarov (Pochetnyi Akademik Stalin i Akademik Marr, Veche: Moscow 2012 p.113) believes Stalin may have had these copies of the journal with him in Turukhansk and then brought them home with him, but more likely is that he obtained them soon after he returned to Petrograd from exile in 1917.

20. For detailed studies of Bolshevik policy on religion during the Stalin era, see I. A. Kurlyandskii, Stalin, Vlast’, Religiya, Kuchkovo Pole: Moscow 2011, and A. Rokkuchchi, Stalin i Patriarkh: Pravoslavnaya Tserkov’ i Sovetskaya Vlast’, 1917–1958, Rosspen: Moscow 2016. Roccucci’s (sic) book is also published in Italian: Stalin e il Patriarca: La Chiesa Ortodossa e il Potere Sovietico, Einaudi: Turin 2011.

21. See J. Ryan, ‘Cleansing NEP Russia: State Violence Against the Russian Orthodox Church in 1922’, Europe-Asia Studies, 65/9 (November 2013).

22. D. Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless, Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY1998 p.39.

23. J. Stalin, Works, vol.10, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1954 pp.138–9.

24. See L. H. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 1918–1929, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1992.

25. V. Smolkin, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2018 p.46.

26. Ibid., pp.47–9.

27. F. Corley (ed.), Religion in the Soviet Union: An Archival Reader, Macmillan: Basingstoke 1996 doc.89.

28. See Smolkin, A Sacred Space is Never Empty, chap.2.

29. R. Boer, ‘Sergei and the “Divinely Appointed” Stalin’, Social Sciences (April 2018) p.15.

30. Smolkin, A Sacred Space is Never Empty, p.53.

31. See S. Merritt Miner, Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism and Alliance Politics, 1941–1945, University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill 2003.

32. Ibid., p.6. See also Boer’s Stalin: From Theology to the Philosophy of Socialism in Power, Springer: Singapore 2017.

33. J. Stalin, Works, vol.4, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1953 p.406.

34. In relation to communism as a political religion I have followed closely the argument of Erik van Ree in his ‘Stalinist Ritual and Belief System: Reflections on “Political Religion”’, Politics, Religion and Ideology, 17/2–3 (June 2016).

35. I owe the Napoleon reference to Patrick Geoghegan’s Robert Emmet: A Life, Four Courts Press: Dublin 2004. According to Donald Rayfield, Stalin wrote ‘stupidity!’ beside this remark in one of Konstantine Gamsakhurdia’s historical novels: ‘If brought up by the path of historical patriotism, we can make a Napoleon out of any bandit.’ D. Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, Viking: London 2004 p.16.

36. Stalin, Works, vol. 1, p.57.

37. See E. van Ree, ‘The Stalinist Self: The Case of Ioseb Jughashvili (1898–1907)’, Kritika, 11/2 (Spring 2010).

38. Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, p.138. For the purposes of quotation, I have changed the order of this passage.

39. R. M. Slusser, Stalin in October: The Man Who Missed the Revolution, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore 1987.

40. Stalin, Works, vol.1 pp.133–9.

41. S. Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin, Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London 2007. For a more sober treatment of the Tbilisi robbery, see Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, chap.17.

42. Cited by Suny in ibid., p.361.

43. L. Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification, Pioneer Publishers: New York 1962 p.181.

44. See J. Ryan, Lenin’s Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence, Routledge: London 2012 chaps 1–2.

45. On the Malinovsky affair see I. Halfin, Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918–1928, University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh 2007 pp.1–17.

46. I. Deutscher, ‘Writing a Biography of Stalin’, The Listener, https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1947/writing-stalin.htm (25 December 1947).

47. See Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, chap.23. Roy Medvedev suggests that later in life Stalin had trouble writing in Georgian and that this explains the paucity and brevity of his letters to his mother in the 1920s and 1930s. See his essay on ‘Stalin’s Mother’ in R. & Z. Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin: His Life, Death and Legacy, Overlook Press: Woodstock NY 2004. At school and in the seminary Stalin studied ancient Greek but his command of that language is uncertain.

48. For a comprehensive collection of Stalin’s writings on the national question, see J. Stalin, Marxism and the National-Colonial Question, Proletarian Publishers: San Francisco 1975.

49. For the view that Stalin’s philosophical and political differences with Lenin were greater than suggested here see R. C. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics, 1904–1914, Indiana University Press: Bloomington 1986 pp.119–23.

50. Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, pp.415–19.

51. For Onufrieva’s testimony and the police reports on Stalin’s library visits: RGASPI, F.558, Op.4, D.647, Ll.52–8. A copy of Stalin’s dedication on the front page of the Kogan book may be found here: RGASPI, Op.1, D.32. I was drawn to this source by Y. Gromov, Stalin: Iskusstvo i Vlast’, Eksmo: Moscow 2003 pp.36–8. See also Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, pp.465–7.

52. RGASPI, F.558, Op.4, D.138, Ll.3–5.

53. Stalin’s letters may be found here: Bol’shevistskoe Rukovodstvo: Perepiska, 1912–1927, Rosspen: Moscow 1996. For many citations from these letters, see Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, chap.24.

54. Stalin’s marked copy of the 1938 edition may be found here: RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.251.

55. Service, Stalin: A Biography, p.128.

56. J. Stalin, Works, vol.3, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1953 pp.199–200.

57. Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, p.652.

58. The quote may be found in Trotsky’s autobiography, My Life, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/mylife/ch29.htm.

59. C. Read, Stalin: From the Caucasus to the Kremlin, Routledge: London 2017 p.40.

60. On the increasing authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks during their first year in power, see A. Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd, Indiana University Press: Bloomington 2007.

61. McNeal, Stalin: Man and Ruler, p.63.

62. Read, Stalin: From the Caucasus to the Kremlin, p.71.

63. J. Stalin, Works, vol.4, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1953 pp.351–2.

64. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, p.60.

65. Service, Stalin: A Biography, p.177.

66. I. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921, Oxford University Press: London 1970 p.467.

67. Stalin, Sochineniya, vol.17, pp.122–3.

68. Ibid., p.133. Budenny’s memoirs of the civil war stopped short of this episode: S. Budyonny (sic), The Path of Valour, Progress Publishers: Moscow 1972.

69. W. J. Spahr, Stalin’s Lieutenants: A Study of Command under Duress, Presidio Press: Novato CA 1997 p.145.

70. A. Seaton, Stalin as Military Commander, Combined Publishing: Conshohocken PA 1998 pp.76–7.

71. Stalin, Works, vol.4, pp.358–62.

72. Stalin, Sochineniya, vol.17, pp.135–6.

73. Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, pp.395–400.

74. The federation was dissolved into its constituent parts in 1936 as part of the reorganisation of the federal structure that accompanied the adoption of a new Soviet constitution.

75. Service, Stalin: A Biography, pp.186–90.

76. See L. Douds, Inside Lenin’s Government: Ideology, Power and Practice in the Early Soviet State, Bloomsbury Academic: London 2018.

77. Ibid., pp.165–8.

78. For a sustained questioning of the assumption that Lenin was the author of the words attributed to him, see Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, chap.11. Kotkin’s analysis is based mainly on the findings of the Russian historian Valentin Sakharov: Politicheskoe Zaveshchanie Lenina: Real’nost’ Istorii i Mify Politik, Moskovskii Universitet 2003. For a completely different view, one which emphasises Stalin’s manipulation of the text of the will and its presentation to the party, see Y. Buranov, Lenin’s Will: Falsified and Forbidden, Prometheus Books: Amherst NY 1994.

79. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/vol02/no01/lenin.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

80. Cited by Read, Stalin: From the Caucasus to the Kremlin, p.102. The comment is said to have been occasioned by Stalin’s rudeness to Lenin’s wife.

81. Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, pp.528–9.

82. Buranov, Lenin’s Will, p.201. Stalin repeated this point at the October 1927 plenum of the party but without quoting Lenin’s Testament directly.

83. Stalin, Works, vol.10, p.53.

84. I. Banac (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2003 p.66.

85. J. Harris, ‘Discipline versus Democracy: The 1923 Party Controversy’ in L. Douds, J. Harris & P. Whitewood (eds), The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation, 1917–41, Bloomsbury Academic: London 2020 p.111.

86. Interview with Barack Obama, New York Times (16 January 2017); rbth.com. Accessed 30 August 2021.

CHAPTER 4: THE LIFE AND FATE OF A DICTATOR’S LIBRARY

1. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter RGASPI) F.558, Op.1, D.2510.

2. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, Dd.273–4.

3. J. V. Stalin, Concerning Marxism in Linguistics, Soviet News Booklet: London 1950 pp.11–12, 20.

4. D. Volkogonov, Triumf i Tragediya: Politicheskii Portret I. V. Stalina, Book One, Part Two, Novosti: Moscow 1989 pp.118–20. In English: Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, pb edition Phoenix Press: London 2000 pp.225–6.

5. Donald Rayfield states that Stalin’s classification scheme was prompted by his wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who ‘took the lead from Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s satrap in Leningrad’ and had a librarian classify and reshelve his books. ‘Stalin was furious. He jotted down his own classification of books and had his secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev rearrange them accordingly.’ (D. Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, Viking: London 2004 p.21). Rayfield cites no source but it seems to derive from a memoir by the assassinated Kirov’s widow, S. L. [Maria] Markus, who recalled that when she suggested to her husband that a librarian should tidy up his books he told her that when Stalin’s wife had done the same thing, he had not then been able to find anything! RGASPI, F.558, Op.4, D.649, L.213. This document was drawn to my attention by Y. Gromov, Stalin: Iskusstvo i Vlast’, Eksmo: Moscow 2003 p.59, which misprints the page number of the cited document as L.217.

6. RGASPI F.558, Op.1, D.2723. The existence of this note was drawn to my attention by M. Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, CEU Press: Budapest 2003 p.311 n.8.

7. RGASPI F.558, Op.1, D.2764.

8. Ekslibrisy i Shtempeli Chastnykh Kollektsii v Fondakh Istoricheskoi Biblioteki, GPIB: Moscow 2009 p.61. On the history of Russian bookplates and ex-libris stamps: W. E. Butler, ‘The Ballard Collection of Russian Bookplates’, Yale University Library Gazette, 60/3–4 (April 1986).

9. Sh. Manuchar’yants, V Biblioteke Vladimira Il’icha, 2nd edn, Politizdat: Moscow 1970 p.14.

10. B. Ilizarov, Tainaya Zhizn’ Stalina, Veche: Moscow 2003 p.163. The source is a letter from Svetlana to the party leadership in 1955 in which she tried to claim ownership of her mother’s books.

11. Cited by E. van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, Routledge: London 2002 p.120.

12. Cited by O. V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2015 p.96.

13. S. Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928, Allen Lane: London 2014 p.431.

14. Cited in R. Richardson, The Long Shadow: Inside Stalin’s Family, Little, Brown & Co.: London 1993 p.85.

15. A. Sergeev & E. Glushik, Besedy o Staline, Krymskii Most: Moscow 2006 p.23.

16. ‘Chuzhoi v Sem’e Stalina’, Rossiiskaya Gazeta (12 June 2002). Morozov, who had a distinguished career as an academic specialising in international law, died in 2001.

17. A. H. Birse, Memoirs of an Interpreter, Michael Joseph: London 1967 p.103. Birse was with Churchill, and Stalin’s bedroom was en route to a bathroom where the PM washed his hands.

18. D. Shepilov, The Kremlin’s Scholar, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2014 p.105.

19. S. Beria, Beria, My Father, Duckworth: London 2001 pp.142–3. This book, which is based on interviews Beria gave to the French historian Françoise Thom, is completely different to one with the same title that he published in Russian: S. Beria, Moi Otets – Lavrentii Beriya, Sovremennik: Moscow 1994.

20. A few of Stalin’s books that he supposedly marked have no discernible markings. Could it be they had tags which have subsequently disintegrated or dropped out or were inadvertently removed by researchers?

21. Zh. & R. Medvedev, Neizvestnyi Stalin, 4th edn, Vremya: Moscow 2011 p.80. In English: R. & Z. Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, Overlook Press: Woodstock NY 2004 p.97. The English translation states that the books were ordered from the ‘Kremlin Library Service’. These words do not appear in any of the Russian editions of the book.

22. S. Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke 2000 p.27.

23. P. Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1985 pp.239–47.

24. M. Viltsan, ‘K Voprosu ob Intellekte Stalina’, Pravda-5 (Ezhenedel’naya Gazeta) (27 September–4 October 1996).

25. W. J. Spahr, Stalin’s Lieutenants: A Study of Command under Duress, Presidio Press: Novato CA 1997 pp.154–5. Spahr’s reference is to a novel by the Soviet military journalist and writer Ivan Stadniuk, Voina (War), published in 1981. While the story rings true, there are no known copies of Shaposhnikov’s book in Stalin’s personal archive. Shaposhnikov’s book was published in three volumes between 1927 and 1929 so the volume that we know Stalin received, presumably towards the end of 1926, must have been a pre-publication advance copy. Shaposhnikov met Stalin about what seems to have been a personal matter in June 1927 (RGASPI, F.558, Op.4, D.5853t, L.11). This out-of-sequence file may be found at the very end of Opis’ 4.

26. N. Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, Harvill Press: London 1999 p.26.

27. A. V. Ostrovskii, Kto Stoyal za Spinoi Stalina?, Olma-Press: St Petersburg 2002 p.155.

28. The archive document listing the seventy-two books was on display at an exhibition on the history of Stalin’s lichnyi fond in the foyer of RGASPI in October 2018.

29. S. Alliluyeva, 20 Letters to a Friend, Penguin: Harmondsworth 1968 pp.37–8.

30. R. Sullivan, Stalin’s Daughter, Fourth Estate: London 2015 p.22.

31. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, p.252.

32. Their letters may be found in Yu. G. Murin (ed.), Iosif Stalin v Ob”yatiyakh Sem’i, Rodina: Moscow 1993 docs. 30–59.

33. On Polina: K. Schlögel, The Scent of Empires: Chanel No.5 and Red Moscow, Polity: London 2021 pp.96–125.

34. R. Lyuksemburg, Vseobshchaya Zabastovka i Nemetskaya Sotsial-Demokratiya, Kiev 1906. Stalin’s copy: RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.196. Another book in Stalin’s library, one that he marked in a few places, was this anti-Luxemburg tract: I. Narvskii, K Istorii Bor’by Bol’shevizma s Luksemburgianstvom, Partizdat: Moscow 1932 (D.227).

35. On gender relations at the top level of the party, see M. Delaloi (Delaloye), Usy i Yubki: Gendernye Otnosheniya vnutri Kremlevskogo Kruga v Stalinskuyu Epokhu (1928–1953), Rosspen: Moscow 2018. A French variant of this book is the same author’s Une Histoire érotique du Kremlin, Payot: Paris 2016. On Soviet policy on women: W. Z. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1993.

36. L. T. Lih et al. (eds), Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, Yale University Press: New Haven & London 1995 p.232.

37. Cited by L. Vasilieva, Kremlin Wives, Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London 1994 p.68.

38. Cited by S. Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1928–1941, Penguin: London 2017 p.112.

39. S. Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2015 p.80.

40. The material on the dacha is based on S. Devyatov, A. Shefov & Yu. Yur’ev, Blizhnyaya Dacha Stalina, Kremlin Multimedia: Moscow 2011. The book contains a chapter on the dacha’s library room and a treatment of Stalin’s library. The authors state (p.192) that Shushanika Manuchar’yants was Stalin’s librarian in the 1930s but they cite no source.

41. F. Chuev, Sto Sorok Besed s Molotovym, Terra: Moscow 1991 p.296.

42. M. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, Penguin: London 2014 pp.54, 105.

43. RGASPI, F558, Op.11 D.504–692. The maps have yet to be declassified but the type of map is described in Op.11 – which is the document that lists the contents of this subset of Stalin’s lichnyi fond.

44. A. J. Rieber, ‘Stalin: Man of the Borderlands’, American Historical Review (December 2001).

45. A. J. Rieber, Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

46. A. Resis (ed.), Molotov Remembers, Ivan R. Dee: Chicago 1993 p.8. The anecdote is Felix Chuev’s, the Soviet journalist whose conversations with Molotov are the subject of this book. Chuev’s sources are Molotov and Akaki Mgeladze, who was leader of the Abkhazian communist party from 1943 to 1951 and the Georgian communist party from 1952 to 1953.

47. See M. Folly, G. Roberts & O. Rzheshevsky, Churchill and Stalin: Comrades-in-Arms during the Second World War, Pen & Sword Books: Barnsley 2019.

48. Stalin’s extensive record collection disappeared after his death. According to Roy and Zhores Medvedev, Stalin was sent a copy of virtually every record produced in the USSR. After listening to records he would write on the sleeve ‘good’, ‘so-so’, ‘bad’ or ‘rubbish’. The collection is known to have included recordings of opera, ballet and folk songs. Medvedev & Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, p.100. Reports about dancing at the dacha may be found in various memoirs.

49. I. Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, Penguin: Harmondsworth 1966 pp.456, 457.

50. G. Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2006.

51. On Stalin’s death, see J. Rubenstein, The Last Days of Stalin, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2016. Medical evidence relating to Stalin’s death may be found in I. I. Chigirin, Stalin: Bolezni i Smert’: Dokumenty, Dostoinstvo: Moscow 2016.

52. Medvedev & Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, p.90.

53. Alliluyeva, 20 Letters to a Friend, pp.13, 28–9.

54. Bol’shaya Tsenzura: Pisateli i Zhurnalisty v Strane Sovetov, 1917–1956, Demokratiya: Moscow 2005 doc.469.

55. Ibid., doc.467.

56. Murin, Iosif Stalin v Ob”yatiyakh Sem’i, doc.113.

57. Ilizarov, Tainaya Zhizn’ Stalina, p.163.

58. S. Alliluyeva, Only One Year, Penguin: London 1971 p.348.

59. Among Stalin’s Pushkin collection was a rare edition of Yevgeny Onegin, published in St Petersburg in 1837. This book was donated to the Lenin Library in the 1970s.

60. Gul fought for the ‘Whites’ during the Russian Civil War and then emigrated to Germany, France and the United States. In 1933 he published a book (in Russian) called Red Marshals: Voroshilov, Budenny, Blyukher, Kotovskii.

61. Cited by Medvedev & Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, p.97.

62. Yu. Sharapov, ‘Stalin’s Personal Library: Meditations on Notes in the Margins’, Moscow News, 38 (1988). In the Russian edition of the newspaper the article was headlined ‘Pyat’sot Stranits v Den’ (500 Pages a Day).

63. When the dissident poet Osip Mandelstam learned about Stalin’s inscription from the Soviet press, he turned to his wife Nadezhda and said, ‘We are finished!’ (N. Mandelstam, Hope against Hope: A Memoir, p.339). When, in 1934, Stalin learned from Bukharin that Mandelstam had been exiled, Stalin wrote at the top of the letter: ‘Who gave them the right to arrest Mandelstam? Disgraceful.’ (RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.70, L.167). Subsequently, Mandelstam’s situation improved, perhaps as a result of a telephone conversation between Stalin and Boris Pasternak, who was a friend of Mandelstam’s. The poet was arrested again in 1938 and died in the Gulag that same year.

64. Neizdannyi Shchedrin, Leningrad 1931 (RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.231); Gromov, Stalin: Iskusstvo i Vlast’, p.161.

65. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

66. ‘Reshenie: Direktsii Instituta Marksizma Leninizma pri TsK KPSS ot 9 Yanvarya 1963’. This document was on display at the exhibition on the history of Stalin’s lichnyi fond in the foyer of RGASPI in October 2018. The many letters and notes from publishers and authors may be found in RGASPI, F.558, Op.1, Dd.5754–5.

67. L. Spirin, ‘Glazami Knig Lichnaya Biblioteka Stalina’, Nezavisimaya Gazeta (25 May 1993). Spirin died in November 1993.

68. An electronic version of the SSPL catalogue is under construction by the library.

69. The document was on display at the exhibition on the history of Stalin’s lichnyi fond in the foyer of RGASPI in October 2018.

70. The catalogue of the marked texts from Stalin’s library is available on Yale’s Stalin Digital Archive.

71. The first section of the SSPL catalogue – Books with the Library of J. V. Stalin stamp – may be viewed on Yale’s Stalin Digital Archive. The catalogue was transcribed by Professor Yury Nikiforov in conjunction with the present author.

72. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, Dd.301–3.

73. M. G. Leiteizen, Nitsshe i Finansovyi Kapital, Gosizdat: Moscow 1924.

74. Cited by M. Agursky, ‘Nietzschean Roots of Stalinist Culture’ in B. Glatzer Rosenthal (ed.), Nietzsche and Soviet Culture, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1994 p.272. Agursky (1933–1991), a Soviet-era dissident who emigrated to Israel in the mid-1970s, argued that many of Stalin’s supporters were open or closet Nietzscheans who saw him as the embodiment of the ‘will to power’ of Nietzsche’s ‘superman’. Agursky claimed, without any direct evidence, that Nietzscheanism influenced Stalin, too. His weakest argument is that Stalin’s Marxism had no real content; his strongest is that Stalin, like Nietzsche, supported the Lamarckian alternative to Darwinism (i.e. that acquired characteristics could be inherited).

75. E. van Ree, ‘Stalin and Marxism: A Research Note’, Studies in East European Thought, 49/1 (1997).

76. N. Lukin, Iz Istorii Revolyutsionnykh Armii, Gosizdat: Moscow 1923. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.192 pp.33–4 of the book for the passage with Stalin’s marginal comment.

77. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1934/07/23.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

78. B. Ilizarov, Stalin, Ivan Groznyi i Drugie, Veche: Moscow 2019 pp.49–50, 56, 69–71.

79. J. Stalin, Works, vol.1, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1952 pp.369–71.

80. See M. Perrie, ‘The Tsar, the Emperor, the Leader: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Anatoli Rybakov’s Stalin’ in N. Lampert & G. T. Rittersporn (eds), Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath, Macmillan: London 1992 pp.80–1.

81. Cited by R. Service, Stalin: A Biography, Macmillan: London 2004 pp.273–4.

82. T. O’Conroy, The Menace of Japan, Hurst & Blackett: London 1933; T. O’Konroi, Yaponskaya Ugroza, Gossotsizdat: Moscow 1934. Stalin’s copy of the book may be found here: RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.98. The book is marked but probably not by Stalin.

83. On O’Conroy’s biography: P. O’Connor, ‘Timothy or Taid or Taig Conroy or O’Conroy (1883–1935)’ in H. Cortazzi (ed.), Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, vol.4, Routledge: London 2002.

84. O. Tanin & E. Iogan, Voenno-Fashistskoe Dvizhenie v Yaponii, Khabarovsk 1933; Voenno-Morskie Sily Yaponii, RKKA: Moscow 1933. The latter was a secret publication of Red Army Intelligence that was sent to Stalin in September 1933 (RGASPI, F.558. Op.1, D.5754, L.217). Stalin’s copies of these books: ibid., Op.3, Dd.48–9.

85. Ibid., Op.11, D.206. I am grateful to Malcolm Spencer for pointing out the TASS bulletins, which he makes illuminating use of in his Stalinism and the Soviet-Finnish War, 1939–40, Palgrave: London 2018.

86. RGASPI, F.71, Op.10, Dd.327–8.

87. Volkogonov, Stalin, chap.23.

88. According to Boris Ilizarov, who sourced a copy in the archive of the Mikhail Kalinin, the Russian translation of Mein Kampf was quite good.

89. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, Dd.301–2.

90. Ibid., D.207, doc.35.

91. Service, Stalin, pp.569–70.

92. Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, p.20.

93. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, pp.93–8.

94. Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, p.10.

95. N. Simonov, ‘Razmyshleniya o Pometkakh Stalina na Polyakh Marksistskoi Literatury’, Kommunist, 18 (December 1990).

96. J. Stalin, Leninism, Allen & Unwin: London 1940 pp.656–63.

97. B. Slavin, ‘Chelovek Absolyutnoi Vlasti: O Maloizvestnykh i Neizvestnykh Vystupleniyakh I. V. Stalina i Ego Zametkakh na Polyakh Knig’, Pravda (21 December 1994). I am very grateful to Vladimir Nevezhin for obtaining a copy of this article for me.

98. Ree, Political Thought, esp. pp.14–17.

99. Ilizarov, Stalin, Ivan Groznyi, p.72.

100. In addition to the Ilizarov books already cited, there is Pochetnyi Akademik Stalin i Akademik Marr, Veche: Moscow 2012.

101. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.53, L.123; Gromov, Stalin: Iskusstvo i Vlast’, pp.10–13. The translation of Gorky is taken from http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/gorkymother.pdf p.399. Accessed 4 August 2021.

102. R. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, Macmillan: London 1972 p.3.

103. Ibid., p.512.

104. Ibid., p.224.

105. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.348.

106. Medvedev & Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, p.8. The book was originally published in Russian in 2001.

107. I. R. Makaryk, ‘Stalin and Shakespeare’ in N. Khomenko (ed.), The Shakespeare International Yearbook, vol. 18, Special Section on Soviet Shakespeare, Routledge: London July 2020 p.45.

108. W. Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting’ in his Illuminations, Random House: New York 2002.

CHAPTER 5: BAH HUMBUG! STALIN’S POMETKI

1. E. van Ree, ‘Stalin and Marxism: A Research Note’, Studies in East European Thought, 49/1 (1996) p.25.

2. H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2001 p.28.

3. Ibid., p.48.

4. M. J. Adler, ‘How to Mark a Book’, Saturday Review of Literature (6 July 1941).

5. While these bookmarks are real, they may have been placed there by archivists as a way of identifying the location of Stalin’s pometki. However, not all the books have these strips of paper and those that do miss some of Stalin’s markings. For many examples of Lenin’s pometki, see the catalogue of the c.9,000 books in his personal library: Biblioteka V. I. Lenina v Kremle, Moscow 1961.

6. The absence of sex in the works of a Victorian novelist is not so surprising but it was brought to my attention by David Lodge’s ‘Dickens Our Contemporary’ in his Consciousness and the Novel, Vintage: London 2018 p.128.

7. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter RGASPI), F.558, Op.3, D.346.

8. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.342. Mikhail Vaiskopf notes the similarities between Stalin’s speeches at the 16th and 17th party congresses (Pisatel’ Stalin, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie: Moscow 2001 pp.36–7).

9. Ibid., D.62, pp.5, 7, 9–13, 16–20, 23–4, 30–3, 36–40 of the pamphlet for the markings.

10. Ibid., F.592, Op.1, Dd.6–9.

11. Y. Sharapov, ‘Stalin’s Personal Library’, Moscow News, 38 (1988).

12. The relevant pages were on display at an exhibition on the history of Stalin’s personal archive in Moscow in October 2018 and the handwriting was identified by the archivists as being Svetlana’s.

13. Y. Gromov, Stalin: Iskusstvo i Vlast’, Eksmo: Moscow 2003 p.47.

14. RGASPI F.558, Op.3, D.350. As Svetlana Lokhova points out, Stalin doodled Uchitel’ on a number of books. S. Lokhova, ‘Stalin’s Library’ in L. F. Gearon (ed.), The Routledge International Handbook of Universities, Security and Intelligence Studies, Routledge: London 2020 p.428.

15. For example: E. Radzinsky, Stalin, Hodder & Stoughton: London 1997 p.454. See further the negative comments of Boris Ilizarov on Radzinsky’s hypothesis in his Stalin, Ivan Groznyi i Drugie, Veche: Moscow 2019 p.28.

16. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.11. p.33 of the book for the marking.

17. O. Volobuev & S. Kuleshov, Ochishchenie: Istoriya i Perestroika, Novosti: Moscow 1989 p.146.

18. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.167. The first person to cite the quoted text seems to have been B. Slavin, ‘Chelovek Absolyutnoi Vlasti: O Maloizvestnykh i Neizvestnykh Vystupleniyakh I. V. Stalina i Ego Zametkakh na Polyakh Knig’, Pravda (21 December 1994).

19. D. Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, Viking: London 2004 p.22. On the facing page is a photograph of the cited text.

20. R. Service, Stalin: A Biography, Macmillan: London 2004 p.342.

21. S. Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Verso Books: London 2013. Žižek quotes this text in a number of his publications.

22. J. Stalin, Works, vol.6, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1953 pp.54–66.

23. See J. F. Matlock, An Index to the Collected Works of J. V. Stalin, Johnson Reprint Corporation: New York 1971 pp.145–6.

24. For example: Put’ k Leninu: Sobranie Vyderzhek iz Sochinenii V. I. Lenina, vols 1–2, Voenizdat: Moscow 1924. RGASPI, F.558 Op.3, Dd.295–6.

25. Leninskii Sbornik, vols 2, 4, 13, Lenin Institute: Moscow-Leningrad 1924, 1925, 1930. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, Dd.183–5.

26. I. Baz’, Pochemu My Pobedili v Grazhdanskoi Voine, Moscow 1930. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.10.

27. E. van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Patriotism, Routledge: London 2002 p.258; Ree, ‘Stalin and Marxism: A Research Note’.

28. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/05/17.htm. I owe this reference to E. Dobrenko, Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2020 pp.362–3.

29. Ibid., p.267. Stalin lifted the quote from his copy of The New Course, which he read and marked in detail. The booklet was stamped as item 884 in his library. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.1577. An English translation may be found here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/newcourse/index.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

30. On the socialism in one country debate see E. van Ree, Boundaries of Utopia: Imagining Communism from Plato to Stalin, Routledge: London 2015 chaps 14–15.

31. Cited by van Ree, Political Thought, n.64 pp.321–2.

32. An English translation may be found here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lessons/1924-les.pdf.

33. J. Stalin, Works, vol.6, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1953 pp.338–73.

34. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/hrr/index.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

35. RGASPI, F558, Op.3, D.362.

36. Ibid., D.318. Dmitry Volkogonov’s perception of Stalin’s marking of Smolensky’s book is completely different to mine: ‘underlined in those places which criticise his arch-enemy: “Trotsky is prickly and impatient”, he has “an imperious nature which loves to dominate”, “he loves political power”, “Trotsky is a political adventurist of genius”.’ (D. Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, Phoenix Press: London 2000 pp.226–7).

37. RGASPI, Op.3, D364. The book has Stalin’s library stamp and is numbered 898. The English translations of Trotsky’s text in what follows derive from https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/index.htm.

38. Stalin wrote the word without hyphenation.

39. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.91.

40. Cited by Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin p.306, n.57.

41. Ibid., p.315 n.5.

42. See Stalin’s marking of a 1923 edition of Kautsky’s The Agrarian Question: RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.86. Other Kautsky works marked by Stalin may be found here: RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, Dd.87, 88, 89, 90, 92 and Op.1, D.1576.

43. Y. Buranov, Lenin’s Will: Falsified and Forbidden, Prometheus Books: Amherst NY 1994 pp.150, 151.

44. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3 Dd.357, 359, 360, 361; Op.11, D.1577.

45. On the evolution of Trotsky’s economic thinking in the 1920s, see Richard B. Day’s classic Leon Trotsky and the Politics of Economic Isolation, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1973.

46. For a judicious overview of Trotsky’s factional activities in the 1920s, see I. D. Thatcher, Trotsky, Routledge: London 2003 chaps 5–6.

47. See J. Harris, ‘Discipline versus Democracy: The 1923 Party Controversy’ in L. Douds, J. Harris & P. Whitewood (eds), The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation, 1917–41, Bloomsbury Academic: London 2020. Many of the relevant documents may be found in V. Vilkova, The Struggle for Power: Russia in 1923, from the Secret Archives of the Former Soviet Union, Prometheus Books: Amherst NY 1996.

48. See S. F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938, Oxford University Press: Oxford 1971.

49. I. Halfin, Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918–1928, University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh 2007.

50. Ibid., p.250.

51. M. David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning Among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929, Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY and London 1997 p.117. Stalin’s copy of the text may be found among the collection of his library books in the State Socio-Political Library. Ironically, Kanatchikov himself became a member of the United Opposition. He recanted and then held several responsible party posts but was arrested and executed in 1937.

52. Volkogonov, Stalin, p.260.

53. S. Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1928–1941, Penguin: London 2017 p.787.

54. Many relevant documents may be found in Politburo i Lev Trotsky, 1922–1940gg: Sbornik Dokumentov, IstLit: Moscow 2017.

55. J. Stalin, Works, vol.12, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1955 p.358.

56. Ibid., vol.13 p.101.

57. Ibid., p.113.

58. Ibid., p.354.

59. J. Arch Getty & O. V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 1999 pp.140–1.

60. See J. Arch Getty, ‘The Politics of Repression Revisited’ in J. Arch Getty and R. T. Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1993. Also: M. E. Lenoe, The Kirov Murder and Soviet History, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2010.

61. Thatcher, Trotsky, pp.190–1.

62. Cited by Y. Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2019 p.716.

63. Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror, doc.37.

64. M. Lenoe, ‘Fear, Loathing, Conspiracy: The Kirov Murder as Impetus for Terror’ in J. Harris (ed.), The Anatomy of Terror, Oxford University Press: Oxford 2013 p.208. Some of the interrogation documents may be found here: Lubyanka: Stalin i VChK-GPU-OGPU-NKVD (Yanvar’ 1922–Dekabr’ 1936), Materik: Moscow 2003 docs.494, 505, 506–9, 511–14. English translations of these documents may be found in D. R. Shearer & V. Khaustov (eds), Stalin and the Lubianka: A Documentary History of the Political Police and Security Organs in the Soviet Union, 1922–1953, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2015.

65. I have merged and separated by the ellipsis two quotations from Stalin’s conversion with Rolland: from the archive document (RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.795, doc.1 Ll.10–11.) and from H. Kuromiya, Stalin, Pearson Longman: Harlow 2005 p.116. I am grateful to Michael David-Fox for the archival reference.

66. Ibid., L.12. Rolland wanted to publish the transcript of the interview but Stalin didn’t respond to his requests. An English translation of the French version of the transcript may be found here: https://mltoday.com/from-the-archives-1935-interview-of-stalin-by-romain-rolland.

67. W. Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2007 p.72.

68. D. M. Crowe, ‘Late Imperial and Soviet “Show” Trials, 1878–1938’ in D. M. Crowe (ed.), Stalin’s Soviet Justice: ‘Show’ Trials, War Crimes Trials and Nuremberg, Bloomsbury Academic: London 2019, and W. Chase, ‘Stalin as Producer: The Moscow Show Trials and the Construction of Mortal Threats’ in S. Davies & J. Harris (eds), Stalin: A New History, Cambridge: Cambridge 2005.

69. Ibid., pp.105–8.

70. Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror, pp.565–6.

71. The full text (in Russian) of Stalin’s speech to the plenum may be found in Lubyanka: Stalin i Glavnoe Upravlenie Gosbezopastnosti NKVD, 1937–1938, Demokratiya: Moscow 2004 doc.31. For a translated extract see https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1937/03/03.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

72. P. Whitewood, ‘Stalin’s Purge of the Red Army and the Misperception of Security Threats’ in J. Ryan & S. Grant (eds), Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions and Controversies, Bloomsbury Academic: London 2020 p.49. See also the same author’s The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Soviet Military, University Press of Kansas: Lawrence 2015.

73. Lubyanka: Stalin i Glavnoe Upravlenie, doc.92.

74. Shearer & Khaustov, Stalin and the Lubianka, doc.104.

75. Ibid., doc.109 and J. Harris, The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s, Oxford University Press: Oxford 2016 pp.176–7. For an analysis of what prompted these Politburo decisions, see also J. Arch Getty, ‘Pre-Election Fever: The Origins of the 1937 Mass Operations’ in Harris, The Anatomy of Terror. According to other figures, the plan was to repress 268,950 kulaks, including 75,950 executions. In the event, 767,397 people were repressed, of which 386,798 were executed.

76. On Stalin and Spain see O. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2015 pp.153–6. Also: D. Kowalsky, ‘Stalin and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939: The New Historiography’ in Ryan & Grant (eds), Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism.

77. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, p.155.

78. I. Banac (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2003 p.67.

79. Bol’shaya Tsenzura: Pisateli i Zhurnalisty v Strane Sovetov, 1917–1956, doc.373. Stalin’s handwritten corrections to the draft of the article may be viewed here: RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.1124, doc.6. The article was published in Pravda on 24 August, though not precisely in the form prescribed by Stalin.

80. See the documents in Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror, chap.12.

81. Stalin’s report to the 18th party congress in J. Stalin, Leninism, Allen & Unwin: London 1940, esp. pp.656–62.

82. The original of the document was on display at an exhibition in Moscow in 2016.

83. M. Folly, G. Roberts & O. Rzheshevsky, Churchill and Stalin: Comrades-in-Arms during the Second World War, Pen & Sword Books: Barnsley 2019 doc.38 p.145.

84. RGASPI, F558, Op.3, D.26 p.198 of the book for Stalin’s underlining.

85. Ch. Rossel’, Razvedka i Kontr-Razvedka, Moscow: Voenizdat 1937; RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.743.

86. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, p.155.

87. W. Bedell Smith, Moscow Mission, 1946–1949, Heinemann: London 1950 pp.176–7.

88. RGASPI, F.558, Op.1, D.5754, L.126. Cited by M. Lavrent’eva, Osobennosti Tekhnologii i Metodov Informatsionno-Psikhologicheskikh Voin SSSR s Velikobritanniei i SShA v Period, 1939–1953 gg, Candidate’s Dissertation, Rossiiskii Universitet Druzhby Narodov, Moscow 2020 p.127.

89. Ibid., Op.11, D.1605.

90. It was initially published by Pravda in February–March 1948. It was published in English in a supplement to the journal New Times in March 1948.

91. For reasons that remain unclear, the film was not completed. Dovzhenko died in 1956 and there were rumours the project had been abandoned because Bucar had redefected to the west. That was not true. In the 1950s she started working for the English-language branch of Radio Moscow and remained there for the rest of her working life. Remembered with affection by her Soviet colleagues, she died in Moscow in 1998. Stalin i Kosmopolitizm, 1945–1953: Dokumenty, Demokratiya: Moscow 2005 docs.120 & 182; R. Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959, Oxford University Press: Oxford 2019 p.24; A. Kozovoi, ‘“This Film Is Harmful”: Resizing America for the Soviet Screen’ in S. Autio-Saramo & B. Humphreys (eds), Winter Kept Us Warm: Cold War Interactions Reconsidered, Aleksanteri Cold War Series 1 (2010); https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1949v05/d335; https://www.themoscowtimes.com/archive/moscow-mailbag-voice-of-russias-voices-that-came-from-afar. Dovzhenko’s unfinished film may be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUpaqunbR9w.

92. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.28. The cited text marked by Stalin may be found on pp.43–7 of the book.

93. G. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950, Hutchinson: London 1968 pp.279–80.

94. See, for example, Kennan’s Reith Lectures: Russia, the Atom and the West, Oxford University Press: London 1958.

95. I am grateful to Vladimir Nevezhin for pointing me in this direction and providing me with a copy of his article ‘I. V. Stalin o Vneshnei Politike i Diplomatii: Po Materialam Lichnogo Arkhiva Vozhdya (1939–1941)’, Rossiiskaya Istoriya, 6 (2019).

96. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.200, L.13.

97. https://minimalistquotes.com/otto-von-bismarck-quote-45423/. Accessed 4 August 2021.

98. M. Ya. Gefter, ‘Stalin Umer Vchera’, Rabochii Klass i Sovremennyi Mir, no.1, 1988. I am grateful to Holly Case for this reference and to Vladimir Nevezhin for obtaining for me a copy of the Gefter interview. Yerusalimsky’s introduction was subsequently published as a separate pamphlet under the title (in Russian) ‘Bismarck as Diplomat’.

99. R. Medvedev, Chto Chital Stalin?, Prava Cheloveka: Moscow 2005 p.81.

100. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11.760 L.145.

101. A handwritten archive register listing these two volumes as having been marked by Stalin was on display at an exhibition on the history of Stalin’s lichnyi fond in the foyer of RGASPI in October 2018.

102. N. Ryzhkov, Perestroika: Istoriya Predatel’stv, Novosti: Moscow 1992 pp.354–5. Stephen Cohen, who died in 2020, was an American historian who wrote a biography of the Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, which was translated into Russian and published in the USSR during the Gorbachev era.

103. R. G. Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2020 p.584.

104. Kuromiya, Stalin, p.120. RGASPI, F.588, Op.3, D.84, p.51. Vyshinsky’s remarks on Kamenev and Zinoviev may be found here: https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/law/1936/moscow-trials/22/double-dealing.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

105. http://www.florentine-society.ru/Machiavelli_Nikitski_Club.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021. I am grateful to David Brandenberger for this reference.

106. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.208, L.33.

107. Ibid., Op.1, D.5754, Ll.124–5.

108. Ibid., Op.3, D.18 pp.35–6 of the encyclopaedia.

109. Stalin i Kaganovich: Perepiska, 1931–1936 gg., Rosspen: Moscow 2001 doc.621. I am grateful to Michael Carley for this reference. Stalin’s remark about Anglo-German entente was prompted by the recent naval agreement between the two states.

110. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.267, pp.32–3 of the book for Stalin’s annotation.

111. Ibid., Op.1, D.5755, L.142.

112. Ibid., Op.3, D.232.

113. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1934/07/19.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

114. Nevezhin, ‘I. V. Stalin o Vneshnei Politike’, p.71.

115. RGASPI F.558, Op.1, D.5754, Ll.98–100.

116. Nevezhin, ‘I. V. Stalin o Vneshnei Politike’, pp.72–3.

117. RGASPI, F.558, Op.1, D.5754, L.101.

118. Ibid., Op.3, D.79.

119. J. Stalin, Works, vol.2, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1953 p.285.

120. Dokumenty Vneshnei Politiki, 1941, part two, Mezhdunarodnaya Otnosheniya: Moscow 1998 p.563.

121. Folly, Roberts & Rzheshevsky, Churchill and Stalin, p.88.

122. Ibid., pp.75–6.

123. Ivan Mikhailovich Maiskii: Dnevnik Diplomata, London, 1934–1943, book 1, Nauka: Moscow 2006 p.111. I am grateful to Michael Carley for this reference. Maisky’s diary entry was based on a story he had heard about what was said at the Stalin–Laval meeting. There is no known official Soviet or French record of the conversation.

124. S. Alliluyeva, 20 Letters to a Friend, Penguin: Harmondsworth 1968 p.161.

125. The third author of the book – Ivan Dzhavakhishvili – had died in 1940. Stalin’s marked copy of this Georgian-language book may be found in RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.382. Donald Rayfield, who attributes authorship of the book to Dzhavakhishvili (Javakhishvili), reports that Stalin wrote in the margin: ‘Why does the author fail to mention that Mithridates and the Pontic Empire were a Georgian ruler and a Georgian state?’ D. Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, p.16.

126. ‘Novye Rechi Stalina o Gruzii, Istorii i Natsional’nostyakh (1945)’, Issledovaniya po Istorii Russkoi Mysli: Ezhegodnik 2019, Modest Kolerov: Moscow 2019 pp. 491–525. Berdzenishvili’s recollection is dated December 1945 but the bulk of it seems to have been composed before that date. It was first published in 1998.

127. Ibid., p.504. Joseph Orbeli (1887–1961) was an Armenian orientalist who served as head of the Hermitage Museum from 1934 to 1951. Boris Turaev’s (1868–1920) two-volume history of the ‘Ancient East’ was in Stalin’s library, as was Nikolai Pavlov-Sil’vanskii’s (1869–1908) book on feudalism in Ancient Rus’. Vasily Struve (1889–1965) was an Egyptologist and Assyriologist.

128. L. R. Tillett, The Great Friendship: Soviet Historians and the Non-Russian Nationalities, University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill 1969.

129. ‘Novye Rechi Stalina’, p.506.

130. Ibid., p.515. See further: E. van Ree, ‘Heroes and Merchants: Stalin’s Understanding of National Character’, Kritika, 8/1 (Winter 2007).

131. J. Hellbeck, Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich, paperback ed., PublicAffairs: New York 2016 p.437.

132. Alliluyeva, 20 Letters to a Friend, pp.140, 163.

133. Zh. Medvedev, Stalin i Evreiskaya Problema: Novyi Analiz, Prava Cheloveka: Moscow 2003.

134. F. Chuev, Tak Govoril Kaganovich: Ispoved’ Stalinskogo Apostola, Otechestvo: Moscow 1992 p.89.

135. G. Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia, Prometheus Books: Amherst NY 1995.

136. ‘Novye Rechi Stalina’, p.494.

137. Apparently, Stalin marked these two books but they have disappeared from the archive.

138. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.311.

139. Ibid., D.267, p.25 of the book. Stalin does not appear to have read the diary itself, only the introduction by Boris Shtein, a Soviet diplomat.

140. Stalin, Leninism, pp.479–80.

141. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.37, p.5 of Vipper’s book; D.97, p.3 of S. I. Kovalev et al., Istoriya Drevnego Mira: Drevnii Vostok i Gretsiya, Gosudarstvennoe Uchebno-Pedagogicheskoe Izdatel’stvo: Moscow 1937.

142. Ibid., D.36. Stalin’s markings may be found in chap.4 of the book on pp.120–4, 126–7, 130–1, 133–7.

143. As Boris Ilizarov (Stalin, Ivan Groznyi, p.75) points out, the marginalia are written in the old Russian script, i.e. the one in use before the reform and rationalisation of the Cyrillic alphabet in 1917–18, so they won’t have been made by Svetlana and are unlikely to belong to Stalin’s young wife, Nadezhda.

144. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.38, passim.

145. On Vipper: H. Graham, ‘R. Iu. Vipper: A Russian Historian in Three Worlds’, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, 28/1 (March 1986). Also the translation of the entry on Vipper in The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia: https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Robert+Iurevich+Vipper. Accessed 4 August 2021.

146. Cited by A. Dubrovsky, Vlast’ i Istoricheskaya Mysl’ v SSSR (1930–1950-e gg.), Rosspen: Moscow 2017 pp.150–1. See also D. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956, Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA 2002 pp.32–3. Stalin’s comments did not come out of the blue. Already in August 1932 the party central committee had issued a decree noting the poor state of the history curriculum (M. Pundeff (ed.), History in the USSR: Selected Readings, Chandler Publishing Co.: San Francisco 1967 doc.18).

147. Cited by D. Dorotich, ‘A Turning Point in the Soviet School: The Seventeenth Party Congress and the Teaching of History’, History of Education Quarterly (Fall 1967) p.299.

148. K. M. F. Platt, Terror and Greatness: Ivan and Peter as Russian Myths, Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY 2011 p.182.

149. Dubrovsky, Vlast’ i Istoricheskaya Mysl’, pp.157–9; Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, pp.34–5.

150. Ilizarov, Stalin, Ivan Groznyi, p.68.

151. I.V. Stalin, Istoricheskaya Ideologiya v SSSR v 1920–1950-e gody, Nauka-Piter: St Petersburg 2006 doc.79.

152. ‘O Prepodavanii Grazhdanskoi Istorii v Shkolakh SSSR’, Pravda (16 May 1934). The decree, which was published on the newspaper’s front page, was hand-edited and corrected by Stalin. For an English text of the full decree: Pundeff, History in the USSR, doc.20.

153. ‘Na Fronte Istoricheskoi Nauki’, Pravda (27 January 1936); Tillett, The Great Friendship, pp.42–3. For the full English text of the Pravda editorial and the two notes of Stalin, Zhdanov and Kirov: Pundeff, History in the USSR, doc.21.

154. ‘Postanovlenie Zhuri Pravitel’stvennoi Komissii po Konkursu na Luchshii Uchebnik dlya 3 i 4 Klassov Srednei Shkoly po Istorii SSSR’, Pravda (22 August 1937).

155. The details of the process may be followed in the books by Brandenberger and Dubrovsky cited above. Much of the documentary basis of their research may be found in this publication of the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation: S. Kudryashov (ed.), Istoriyu – v Shkolu: Sozdanie Pervykh Sovetskikh Uchebnikov, APRF: Moscow 2008.

156. Svetlana’s copy of the book is stored in the State Socio-Political Library in Moscow as part of its holdings of books from Stalin’s personal library.

157. Tillett, The Great Friendship, p.50.

158. Dubrovsky, Vlast’ i Istoricheskaya Mysl’, p.240.

159. The dummies may be found here: RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, Dd.374–5, Op.11, D.1584.

160. Dubrovsky, Vlast’ i Istoricheskaya Mysl’, p.239.

161. Ibid., pp.235–6.

162. A. Shestakov (ed.), Kratkii Kurs Istoriya SSSR, Uchpedgiz: Moscow 1937 p.42. A detailed summary and analysis of the book may be found in Platt, Terror and Greatness, chap.5.

163. Ibid., p.37.

164. Ilizarov, Stalin, Ivan Groznyi, pp.100–1

165. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, p.51.

166. Stalin, Leninism, p.5.

167. Dimitrov, Diary, p.65.

168. Both citations from I. Paperno, ‘Nietzscheanism and the Return of Pushkin’ in B. Glatzer Rosenthal (ed.), Nietzsche and Soviet Culture, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1994 pp.225–6. See further K. Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin, Indiana University Press: Bloomington 2000 chap. 5 on the Pushkin centennial.

169. Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades, p.159.

170. R. Yu. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, Del’fin: Moscow 1922. For an English-language text that makes a similar argument to Vipper’s, see I. Grey, Ivan the Terrible, Hodder & Stoughton: London 1964. Ian Grey (1918–1996) was a New Zealand-born historian who served as a Royal Navy interpreter in Russia during the Second World War. After the war he worked in the Soviet section of the British Foreign Office and then for the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. He published a number of books on Russian history, including a fine but neglected biography of Stalin: Stalin: Man of History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London 1979.

171. S. F. Platonov, Ivan Groznyi, Brokgauz-Efron: Peterburg 1923. This book is available on the internet: http://elib.shpl.ru/ru/nodes/4720-platonov-s-f-ivan-groznyy-pg-1923-obrazy-chelovechestva#mode/inspect/page/3/zoom/4. Accessed 4 August 2021.

172. S. F. Platonov, Proshloe Russkogo Severa, Obelisk: Berlin 1924. The book is in Stalin’s library collection in the State Social-Political Library in Moscow.

173. RGASPI, F558, Op.1, D.3165 p.42 of the book. This reference was drawn to my attention by L. Maximenkov, ‘Stalin’s Meeting with a Delegation of Ukrainian Writers on 12 February 1929’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 16/3–4 (December 1992), p.368.

174. Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism, Lawrence & Wishart: London 1977 pp.43–4.

175. M. Perrie, ‘R. Yu. Vipper and the Stalinisation of Ivan the Terrible’, paper presented to the Soviet Industrialisation Project Series, University of Birmingham, December 1999 p.5.

176. Graham, ‘R. Iu. Vipper: A Russian Historian in Three Worlds’, pp.29–30.

177. Perrie, ‘R. Yu. Vipper and the Stalinisation of Ivan the Terrible’, p.10.

178. M. Perrie, ‘The Tsar, the Emperor, the Leader: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Anatolii Rybakov’s Stalin’ in N. Lampert & G. T. Rittersporn (eds), Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath, Macmillan: Basingstoke 1992 pp.85–6.

179. Vlast’ i Khudozhestvennaya Intelligenstiya, 1917–1953, Demokratiya: Moscow 2002 doc.3, p.478.

180. Platt, Terror and Greatness, p.210.

181. There does not appear to be a copy of Tolstoy’s Peter book in Stalin’s archive, but we know that the publishers sent him a copy of the postwar edition in November 1947: RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.5754, L.64.

182. Ibid., Op.11, D.717, Ll.99–100.

183. R. Wipper (sic), Ivan Grozny, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1947.

184. Perrie, ‘R. Yu. Vipper and the Stalinisation of Ivan the Terrible’, p.13.

185. Ibid., p.11.

186. Cited by A. G. Mazour, The Writing of History in the Soviet Union, Stanford University: Stanford CA 1971 p.67.

187. ‘“Ivan Groznyi”: Na Lektsii Doktora Istoricheskikh Nauk Professor R. Yu. Vippera’, Pravda (19 September 1943).

188. Mezhdu Molotom i Nakoval’nei: Soyuz Sovetskikh Pisatelei SSSR, vol.1, Rosspen: Moscow 2010 doc.278, n.1.

189. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.350. This was the same copy on which Stalin doodled ‘Teacher’ on the back cover.

190. Vlast’ i Khudozhestvennaya Intelligenstiya, doc.3, p.478. For an English translation of this document, see K. Clark et al. (eds), Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2007 doc.170.

191. A translation of this document, together with an explanation of its provenance, may be found in K. M. F. Platt & D. Brandenberger (eds), Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda, University of Wisconsin Press: Madison 2006 pp.179–89. Additional clarification may be found in Ilizarov, Stalin, Ivan Groznyi, pp.270–9.

192. Vlast’ i Khudozhestvennaya Intelligenstiya, docs 13 (pp.486–7), 16 (p.500) and 18 (p.501).

193. ‘P’esa Al. Tolstogo “Ivan Groznyi” v Malom Teatre’, Pravda (27 October 1944); ‘Novaya Postanovka P’esy Al. Tolstogo na Stsene Malogo Teatra’, Pravda (30 May 1945).

194. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.351 p.57 of the play.

195. W. Averell Harriman, ‘Stalin at War’ in G. R. Urban (ed.), Stalinism: Its Impact on Russia and the World, Wildwood House: Aldershot 1985 pp.40–2.

196. Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, doc.172.

197. Eisenstein’s background thinking about Ivan and his film is revealed in an article he published in Literatura i Iskusstvo (Literature and Art) in July 1942, summarised by Platt, Terror and Greatness, pp.212–13.

198. Kremlevskii Kinoteatr, 1928–1953, Rosspen: Moscow 2005 doc.257.

199. Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, doc.177. On this whole episode, see further M. Belodubrovskaya, Not According to Plan: Filmmaking Under Stalin, Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY 2017, and D. Brandenberger & K. M. F. Platt, ‘Terribly Pragmatic: Rewriting the History of Ivan IV’s Reign, 1937–1956’ in Platt & Brandenberger, Epic Revisionism.

200. In May 1944 Cherkasov presented Zhdanov with a signed photograph of himself as Ivan the Terrible, which carried the inscription, ‘We are standing at the edge of the sea and will continue to stand there.’ This is a reference to Ivan’s expansion of Russia to the Baltic. In 1944 Zhdanov was the head of the Leningrad communist party and the Red Army was in the process of recapturing the Baltic coastal lands from the Germans. See Platt, Terror and Greatness, p.214.

201. Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, pp.441–2.

202. Vlast’ i Khudozhestvennaya Intelligenstiya, doc.34, pp.612–19. For an English translation of the entire discussion: Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, doc.175. Irena Makaryk speculates that Stalin might have derived his view of Hamlet as a weak-willed character from Turgenev’s essay ‘Hamlet and Don Quixote’ and his short story ‘Hamlet of the Shchigrov District’. See her ‘Stalin and Shakespeare’ in N. Khomenko (ed.), The Shakespeare International Yearbook, vol. 18, Special Section on Soviet Shakespeare, Routledge: London July 2020 pp.46–7. The only other known Stalin reference to a specific work of Shakespeare is an ambiguous marginal comment on Pyotr Kogan’s Essays on the History of West European Literature (1909) in which he appears to say the author has ignored The Tempest, a play which has a bearing on the Bard’s character. However, it is not certain the crabbed handwriting is Stalin’s (RGASPI, Op.1, D.32, p.158 of the book).

203. R. C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941, paperback edn, Norton: New York 1992 pp.276–9; Perrie, ‘The Tsar, the Emperor, the Leader’, p.89.

204. Cited by Y. Gorlizki & O. Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953, Oxford University Press: Oxford 2004 pp.34–5.

205. Cited by Service, Stalin: A Biography, pp.561–2.

206. On the Alexandrov episode see chap.2 of E. Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2006.

207. G. Alexandrov, Filosofskie Predshestvenniki Marksizma, Politizdat: Moscow 1940. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.1. The markings may possibly be Svetlana’s.

208. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.237, pp.76–7 of the book.

209. Dobrenko, Late Stalinism, pp.396–402; Gorlizki & Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, pp.36–8.

210. On the Lysenko affair, see chap.3 of Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars.

211. Cited by J. Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2000 pp.213–14.

212. Platt, Terror and Greatness, p.177.

213. V. A. Nevezhin, Zastol’nye Rechi Stalina, AIRO: Moscow-St Petersburg 2003 doc.107.

214. On the Pushkin centenary: Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades, chap.5.

215. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1947/09/08.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

216. J. Brunstedt, The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2021 pp.37–8, 107–8.

217. Rol’ Russkoi Nauki v Razvetii Mirovoi Nauki i Kul’tury, MGU: Moscow 1946; RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.368, pp.29–36 of the book for Stalin’s markings.

218. A. Popovskii, ‘Zametki o Russkoi Nauke’, Novyi Mir, 3 (March 1948), RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.234, pp.174–85 for Stalin’s markings.

219. Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin!, pp.213–14.

220. Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, p.144. This section on Pavlov draws on chap.6 of Pollock’s book.

221. I. P. Pavlov, Dvadtsatiletnii Opyt Ob”ektivnogo Izucheniya Vysshei Nervnoi Deyatel’nosti Zhivotnykh, LenMendizdat: Leningrad 1932. Copy in the Stalin collection in the SSPL.

222. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.762, doc.9, l.27. The final two sentences were hand-inserted by Stalin into the draft of his letter to Zhdanov dated 6 October. This document was drawn to my attention by Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, p.146.

223. B. S. Ilizarov, Pochetnyi Akademik Stalin i Akademik Marr, Veche: Moscow 2012 pp.145–7.

224. On the Latinisation campaign, see chap.5 of Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939, Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY 2001.

225. R. Medvedev, ‘Stalin and Linguistics’ in R. & Z. Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin: His Life, Death and Legacy, Overlook Press: Woodstock NY 2004 p.211.

226. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.773, docs 6–7.

227. On Marr and his ideas: Y. Slezkine, ‘N. Ia. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics’, Slavic Review, 55/4 (Winter 1996).

228. Ilizarov, Pochetnyi Akademik Stalin p.186. The book may be found in the Stalin collection in the SSPL. The book was inscribed by the author not to Stalin but to another fellow Georgian, Lavrenty Beria.

229. N. Marr (ed.), Tristan i Izol’da: Ot Geroini Lyubvi Feodal’noi Evropy do Bogini Materiarkhal’noi Afrevrazii, Akad.Nauk: Leningrad 1932; N. Marr, Izvlechenie iz Svansko-Russkogo Slovarya, Petrograd 1922 (RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.212); N. Marr, O Yazyke i Istorii Abkhazov, Moscow-Leningrad 1938 (RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.213). A copy of the first book may be found in the Stalin collection of the SSPL. Its presence there was brought to my attention by Ilizarov Pochetnyi Akademik Stalin p.184, which also contains (pp.185–7) a detailed analysis of Stalin’s marks in the Abkhazia book.

230. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.1250, doc.1. See also Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, p.112. I am generally indebted to Pollock’s coverage of the linguistics controversy in chap.5 of his book.

231. The drafts of Chikobava’s article, as edited by Stalin, may be found here: RGASPI, F558, Op.11, D.1251, doc.1. The cited additions by him may be seen on Ll.138–9, 162. See also Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, pp.112–14 and p.116, which contains a photocopy of the insertion by Stalin of the sentences about the withering away of national languages.

232. Translations of all the contributions published by Pravda may be found in The Soviet Linguistics Controversy, Columbia University Slavic Studies, King’s Crown Press: New York 1951. This booklet may be found on the Internet.

233. Medvedev & Medvedev, Unknown Stalin, p.215. Among the books Stalin consulted was a 1912 introductory textbook on linguistics by D. N. Kudryavsky.

234. RGASPI F.558, Op.3, D.19, p.378 of the book. It is not certain that Stalin read these entries at this time but it is highly likely that he did. Ilizarov (Pochetnyi Akademik Stalin, pp.202–10) provides a detailed analysis of these pometki but it does not add anything to Stalin’s stated views on language and linguistics. As Ilizarov points out (p.203), Stalin did not mark the encyclopaedia entry on Japhetic languages.

235. My summary and quotations derive from J. V. Stalin, Concerning Marxism in Linguistics, Soviet News Booklet: London 1950.

236. G. B. Fedorov (ed.), Po Sledam Drevnikh Kul’tur, Gosizdat: Moscow 1951. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.246, pp.8, 71–112 for Stalin’s markings.

237. Dobrenko, Late Stalinism, p.385.

238. Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, p.544.

239. J. Stalin, Works, vol.2, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1953 pp.28–32.

240. Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, p.753 n.88.

241. Ibid., pp.544–5; R. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, Macmillan: London 1972, pp.509–10.

242. J. Stalin, Works, vol.9, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1954 pp.156–8.

243. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.105.

244. E. Dobrenko, Late Stalinism, p.358.

245. E. Fischer, An Opposing Man, Allen Lane: London 1974 p.261.

246. Some readings may be found here: H. F. Scott & W. F. Scott (eds), The Soviet Art of War, Westview Press: Boulder CO 1982. Tukhachevsky and Svechin perished in the purges.

247. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, Dd.253–6, Op.11, Dd.494–9.

248. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, Dd.9, 80. The photocopy may be found in the Stalin collection in SSPL.

249. Artilleriya v Proshlom, Nastoyashchem i Budushchem, Voenizdat: Moscow 1925. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.380.

250. Urban, Stalinism, p.43.

251. On Leer: P. Von Wahlde, ‘A Pioneer of Russian Strategic Thought: G. A. Leer, 1929–1904’, Military Affairs (December 1971); D. A. Rich, The Tsar’s Colonels: Professionalism, Strategy, and Subversion in Late Imperial Russia, Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA 1998 pp.55–6; J. W. Steinberg, All The Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898–1914, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore 2010 pp.47–52.

252. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, Dd.108–11. Previously, the books belonged to Tsarist institutional libraries.

253. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.224, for Stalin’s markings of chapter one of Moltke’s book, and D.195, pp.264–81 for his marking of Ludendorff’s text.

254. Svechin’s key work is available in an English translation: A. A. Svechin, Strategy, East View Press: Minneapolis 1992. Svechin’s views were controversial, particularly his advocacy of preparations for a war of attrition that would wear the enemy down over time, as opposed to one of manoeuvre and the annihilation of enemy forces in decisive battles. In the 1920s and 1930s Svechin was criticised by a number of reviewers and discussants who advocated the latter strategy. Stalin’s marked copy of the first edition of Svechin’s history of military art may be found here: RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, Dd.311–12. His copy of Svechin’s strategy book, together with a later edition of the military art history, is in the Stalin collection in SSPL.

255. Ibid., D.94, pp.v, vii, viii for Stalin’s markings. Stalin had another, unmarked, copy of On War. This may be found in the SSPL Stalin collection.

256. Ibid., p.35 of the book.

257. G. Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2006 p.110.

258. O. Rzheshevsky, ‘Shaposhnikov’ in H. Shukman (ed.), Stalin’s Generals, Phoenix Press: London 1997.

259. The general sections of the three volumes of Mozg Armii were republished in 1974 and reprinted in 1982: B. M. Shaposhnikov, Vospominaniya [i] Voenno-Nauchnye Trudy, Voenizdat: Moscow 1982. The volume also contains Shaposhnikov’s memoir of his early life. Some extracts from Mozg Armii in English may be found in Scott & Scott, The Soviet Art of War, pp.46–50.

260. Shaposhnikov, Vospominaniya, p.507.

261. G. K. Zhukov, Vospominaniya i Razmyshleniya, vol.1, Novosti: Moscow 1990 p.367.

262. Na Prieme Stalina, Novyi Khronograf: Moscow 2008 pp.337–40.

263. M. Bragin, Polkovodets Kutuzov, Molodaya Gvardiya: Moscow 1941. An English translation called Field Marshal Kutuzov was published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1944.

264. Talking to Stalin in August 1942, Churchill remarked that his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough had put an end to the menace to freedom posed by the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). In response, Stalin said that Wellington was the greater British general because he had defeated Napoleon. Churchill’s interpreter, Major Birse, recalled that Stalin ‘then proceeded to exhibit his knowledge of history by reference to Wellington’s invasion of Spain . . . quoting chapter and verse with regard to some of the battles. I imagine that he had made a special study of the Napoleonic wars, which in many respects paralleled the one then in progress’ (A. H. Birse, Memoirs of an Interpreter, Michael Joseph: London 1967 pp.103).

265. ‘Zapis’ Besedy I. V. Stalina s Otvetstvennymi Redaktorami Zhurnalov “Voennaya Mysl’” i “Voennyi Vestnik”, 5 Marta 1945 goda’, Voenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal, 3 (2004) pp.3–4.

266. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.25.

267. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/oral-histories/harrima1. Accessed 4 August 2021.

268. K. Osipov, Suvorov, Gospolizdat: Moscow 1941. The book contains a note by Osipov dated 28 June 1941. It was also translated and published in English during the war: Alexander Suvorov: A Biography, Hutchinson & Co.: London n.d.

269. RGASPI F.558. Op.11, D.204, n.2.

270. RGASPI, F.558, op.11, D.1599. Osipov’s second book on Suvorov, as corrected by Stalin, was published in various editions during the war. He also gave many public lectures on Suvorov.

271. Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, doc.130. Russian text: I.V. Stalin: Istoricheskaya Ideologiya v SSSR v 1920–1950 e gody (Sbornik Dokumentov i Materialov), vol.1, Nauka-Piter: St Petersburg 2006 doc.221.

272. The stenograms of Stalin’s speech may be found here: Zimnyaya Voina, 1939–1940: I.V. Stalin i Finskaya Kampaniya, Nauka: Moscow 1999 pp.272–82. In English: A. O. Chubaryan & H. Shukman (eds), Stalin and the Soviet–Finnish War, 1939–1940, Frank Cass: London 2001 pp.263–74. See further: M. L. G. Spencer, Stalinism and the Soviet–Finnish War, 1939–40, Palgrave: London 2018.

273. Istoriya Russkoi Armii i Flota, Obrazovanie: Moscow 1911. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, F.80, pp.7–23 for Stalin’s markings. He read the book in the mid-late 1930s.

274. ‘Kratkaya Zapis’ Vystupleniya na Vypuske Slushatelei Akademii Krasnoi Armii, 5 Maya 1941 goda’, I. Stalin, Sochineniya, vol.18, Soyuz: Tver’ 2006 pp.213–18.

275. Dimitrov, Diary, p.160.

276. E. Mawdsley, ‘Explaining Military Failure: Stalin, the Red Army, and the First Period of the Patriotic War’ in G. Roberts (ed.), Stalin: His Times and Ours, IAREES: Dublin 2005 p.138.

277. I. Stalin, O Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voine Sovetskogo Soyuza, Moscow 1950 p.205.

278. Ibid., pp.271–303.

279. https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116179.pdf. Accessed 4 August 2021.

280. E. Mawdsley, ‘Stalin: Victors Are Not Judged’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 19 (2006) p.715.

281. D. E. Davis & W. S. G. Kohn, ‘Lenin’s ‘Notebook on Clausewitz’, http://www.clausewitz.com/bibl/DavisKohn-LeninsNotebookOnClausewitz.pdf. Accessed 4 August 2021. Stalin’s unmarked copy of the 1931 volume is located in the Stalin collection in the SSPL.

282. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.47.

283. ‘Zapis’ Besedy’, p.3.

284. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1946/02/23.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

285. R. Medvedev, ‘Generalissimo Stalin, General Clausewitz and Colonel Razin’ in Medvedev & Medvedev, Unknown Stalin, p.188.

286. A. M. Ball, Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia, Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham MD 2003 p.24.

287. J. Stalin, Works, vol.6, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1953 pp.194–5.

288. Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, p.43.

289. B. O’Keeffe, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia, Bloomsbury Academic: London 2021 pp.148–51.

290. Yu. G. Murin (ed.), Iosif Stalin v Ob”yatiyakh Sem’i, Rodina: Moscow 1993 docs 46–7.

291. J. Stalin, Works, vol.13, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1955 p.271.

292. Ibid., vol.3 (1953) pp.250–3.

293. K. Zubovich, Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2021 chap.2; Belodubrovskaya, Not According to Plan, p.27.

294. S. Lomb, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the 1936 Draft, Routledge: New York 2018.

295. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

296. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.143.

297. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1937/12/11.htm.

298. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.369.

299. Stalin, Works, vol.13, p.284.

300. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1934/07/23.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

301. Cited by M. Edele, ‘Better to Lose Australia’, Inside Story, https://insidestory.org.au/better-to-lose-australia (25 May 2021).

302. Roberts, Stalin’s Wars, p.267.

303. G. Roberts, ‘Why Roosevelt Was Right about Stalin’, History News Network, http://hnn.us/articles/36194.html (19 March 2007). For a radically different view of Stalin’s attitude to Roosevelt: R. H. McNeal, ‘Roosevelt through Stalin’s Spectacles’, International Journal, 18/2 (Spring 1963).

304. J. Stalin, Works, vol.10, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1954 pp.141 ff.

305. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.41, pp.82–4 of the article for the quotes marked by Stalin.

306. A. Girshfel’d, ‘O Roli SShA v Organizatsii Antisovetskoi Interventsii v Sibiri i na Dal’nem Vostoke’, Voprosy Istorii, 8 (August 1948) p.15 of the article for the Stalin notation.

307. Magnúsdóttir, Enemy Number One.

CHAPTER 6: REVERSE ENGINEERING: STALIN AND SOVIET LITERATURE

1. This chapter is focused on Stalin’s general attitudes to fictional literature. On his relations with individual Soviet writers, see: A. Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928–1939, St Martin’s Press: New York 1991; B. J. Boeck, Stalin’s Scribe: Literature, Ambition and Survival, Pegasus Books: New York 2019; Y. Gromov, Stalin: Iskusstvo i Vlast’, Eksmo: Moscow 2003; B. Frezinskii, Pisateli i Sovetskie Vozhdi, Ellis Lak: Moscow 2008; and B. Sarnov, Stalin i Pisateli, 4 vols, Eksmo: Moscow 2010–11.

2. A. Gromyko, Memories, Hutchinson: London 1989 p.101.

3. K. Clark et al. (eds), Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2007 doc.18.

4. Ibid., doc.19.

5. Ibid., doc.20.

6. Vlast’ i Khudozhestvennaya Intelligentsiya, 1917–1953, Demokratiya: Moscow 2002 doc.46, p.40.

7. Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, doc.21.

8. J. Barber, ‘The Establishment of Intellectual Orthodoxy in the U.S.S.R. 1928–1934’, Past & Present, 83 (May, 1979) p.159.

9. L. Maximenkov & L. Heretz, ‘Stalin’s Meeting with a Delegation of Ukrainian Writers on 12 February 1929’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 16/3–4 (December 1992). This publication contains the Russian transcript of the meeting, together with an English translation. A substantial extract from the transcript may be found in Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, doc.27. The archive typescript may be found here: Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter RGASPI), F.558, Op.1, D.4490.

10. Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, doc.33.

11. Stalin’s reply was private at the time but published in his collected works after the war: J. Stalin, Works, vol.13, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1955 pp.26–7.

12. N. Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, Harvill Press: London 1999 p.26. Reputedly, Bedny was betrayed by his secretary, who copied this entry from his diary and sent it to Stalin.

13. R. V. Daniels, ‘Soviet Thought in the 1930s: The Cultural Counterrevolution’ in his Trotsky, Stalin and Socialism, Westview Press: Boulder CO 1991 p.143.

14. Mezhdu Molotom i Nakoval’nei: Soyuz Sovetskikh Pisatelei SSSR, vol.1, Rosspen: Moscow 2010 doc.29.

15. S. Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1928–1941, Penguin: London 2017 pp.151–2. See further Michael David-Fox’s chapter ‘Gorky’s Gulag’ in his Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy & Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941, Oxford University Press: Oxford 2012.

16. In making this point, Stalin doubtless had in mind what Lenin said in October 1920: ‘Proletarian culture is not something that springs from nowhere, is not an invention of people who call themselves specialists in proletarian culture. This is complete nonsense. Proletarian culture must be a logical development of those funds of knowledge which humanity has worked out under the yoke of capitalist society’ (R. K. Dasgupta, ‘Lenin on Literature’, Indian Literature, 13/3 (September 1970) p.21. See further: A. T. Rubinstein, ‘Lenin on Literature, Language, and Censorship’, Science & Society, 59/3 (Fall 1995). Stalin certainly read Lenin’s speech because he marked it in vol.17 of the 1st edition of Lenin’s collected works published in 1923 (RGASPI, Op.3, D.131, pp. 313–29). On Marx: S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, Verso: London 1976.

17. Bol’shaya Tsenzura: Pisateli i Zhurnalisty v Strane Sovetov, 1917–1956, Demokratiya: Moscow 2005 doc.196; S. Davies & J. Harris, Stalin’s World: Dictating the Soviet Order, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2014 pp.250–1.

18. Stalin’s remarks are those recorded by the literary critic K. L. Zelinsky. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.1116, doc.3, Ll.32–3; Mezhdu Molotom i Nakoval’nei, doc.38; C. A. Ruder, Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal, University Press of Florida: Gainesville 1998 p.44; Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, pp.130–1. The authorship of the term ‘socialist realism’ is unclear. One possibility is that it emerged in exchanges between Stalin and the journalist Ivan Gronsky in 1932–3. According to Gronsky, he suggested the term ‘proletarian socialist realism’ but Stalin thought it sounded better without the first adjective (Kemp-Welch p.132).

19. RGASPI, F.71, Op.10, D.170, L.162.

20. Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism, Lawrence and Wishart: London 1977 pp.21–2. The quoted passage has been truncated and ellipses omitted.

21. Ibid., pp.252–5.

22. Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, doc.123.

23. Bol’shaya Tsenzura, doc.327.

24. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.251. This connection was brought to my attention by ibid., p.455, n.11. The translation of Plekhanov derives from https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1895/monist. Accessed 4 August 2021.

25. I. R. Makaryk, ‘Stalin and Shakespeare’ in N. Khomenko (ed.), The Shakespeare International Yearbook, vol. 18, Special Section on Soviet Shakespeare, Routledge: London 2020.

26. Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, doc.129.

27. Ibid., doc.131

28. On this whole episode, see M. Belodubrovskaya, Not According to Plan: Filmmaking under Stalin, Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY 2017 pp.41–2, 83–4, 192–3.

29. Davies & Harris, Stalin’s World, pp.254–5.

30. The transcript of the meeting may be found in G. L. Bondareva (ed.), Kremlevskii Kinoteatr, 1928–1953, Rosspen: Moscow 2005 doc.214. This is the key documentary collection of Soviet film-making during the Stalin era. See further, J. Miller, Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion under Stalin, I. B. Tauris: London 2010 especially pp.60–9.

31. Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, doc.132. The last three sentences added and translated by me from the Russian transcript.

32. S. Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Empire of Memory: Russian–Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination, Toronto University Press: Toronto 2004 pp.40, 54–5.

33. Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, doc.177.

34. Ibid., p.455. Stalin’s comments took the form of an anonymous report on the film that was published in Soviet newspapers.

35. S. Alliluyeva, 20 Letters to a Friend, Penguin: Harmondsworth 1968 p.129.

36. Cited by A. M. Ball, Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-Century Russia, Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham MD 2003 p.87.

37. A. Mikoyan, Tak Bylo, Moscow: Vagrius 1999 pp.533–4.

38. Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, doc.163.

39. Bol’shaya Tsenzura, doc.414.

40. Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, docs 153–5.

41. Vlast’ i Khudozhestvennaya Intelligentsiya, docs 14, 22 pp.565, 598.

42. Clark et al., Soviet Culture and Power, doc.162.

43. N. Mitchison, ‘AWPA Writers Visit to the USSR’, Authors World Peace Appeal, Bulletin no.7 (1952) p.9. The AWPA was a 1950s non-aligned peace movement.

44. M. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, Penguin: London 2014 p.111.

45. Ibid., pp.77–8.

46. S. Alliluyeva, Only One Year, Penguin: London 1971 p.336.

47. D. Shepilov, The Kremlin’s Scholar, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2014 p.92. Only two volumes of Dostoevsky’s collected writing and his diary for 1873–6 survived the dispersal of Stalin’s library. These books may be found in the SSPL’s collection of Stalin’s books. According to Boris Ilizarov, Stalin marked parts of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. However, upon inspection of the book in the library it is practically certain that these are not Stalin’s markings.

48. R. L. Strong, ‘The Soviet Interpretation of Gogol’, American Slavic and East European Review, 14/4 (December 1955) pp.528–9, 533.

49. O. Johnson, ‘The Stalin Prize and the Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?’, Slavic Review, 70/4 (Winter 2011) p.826. See further: P. Akhmanaev, Stalinskie Premii, Russkie Vityazi: Moscow 2016. Details of all the awards made, together with other documentation, may be found in V. F. Svin’in & K. A. Oseev (eds), Stalinskie Premii, Svin’in i Synov’ya: Novosibirsk 2007.

50. Shepilov, The Kremlin’s Scholar, pp.104–9.

51. Davies & Harris, Stalin’s World, pp.270–1.

52. Ibid., p.271.

53. K. Simonov, Glazami Cheloveka Moego Pokoleniya: Razmyshleniya o I. V. Staline, Novosti: Moscow 1989 p.233.

54. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.233, pp.41–101 for Stalin’s editing of the play.

55. Vlast’ i Khudozhestvennaya Intelligentsiya, doc.104 pp.675–81. The author of the report was Vladimir Kruzhkov, the former head of IMEL.

56. M. Zorin, ‘Obsuzhdenie Romana V. Latisa “K Novomu Beregu”, Literaturnaya Gazeta (15 December 1952).

57. Vlast’ i Khudozhestvennaya Intelligentsiya, doc.101. The handwritten draft and typescript of the letter may be found in RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.205, Ll.1929–136. These documents were brought to my attention by Davies & Harris, Stalin’s World, p.263. It seems that Stalin’s original intention was to publish the letter as coming from a group of high-ranking party officials, including himself.

58. P. Neruda, Memoirs, Penguin: London 1977 p.317.

59. https://redcaucasus.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/ode-to-stalin-by-pablo-neruda. Accessed 4 August 2021.

60. I. Ehrenburg, Post-War Years, 1945–1954, MacGibbon & Kee: London 1966 p.46. The story about Stalin and his novel was told to him by Alexander Fadeev, the head of the Soviet Writers’ Union, who worked closely with Ehrenburg in the international peace movement.

61. N. Krementsov, The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War, University of Chicago Press: Chicago 2004 pp.136–43.

CHAPTER 7: EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF THE USSR

1. A point made by Holly Case’s thought-provoking piece ‘The Tyrant as Editor’, Chronicle of Higher Education (7 October 2013).

2. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter RGASPI), F.558, Op.4, D.333, L.1.

3. E. Pollock, Conversations with Stalin on Questions of Political Economy, Cold War International History Project Working Paper No.33 (July 2001) p.9.

4. On the writer’s relationship with Stalin, see L. Spiridonova, ‘Gorky and Stalin (According to New Materials from A. M. Gorky’s Archive)’, Russian Review, 54/3 (July 1995).

5. Mints’s memoir is summarised by R. C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941, Norton: New York 1992 pp.531–2.

6. Stalin’s editing of this first volume may be found in RGASPI, F.558, Op.1, D.3165. It bears out Mints’s recollection.

7. D. Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination and Terror under Stalin, 1927–1941, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2011 p.80.

8. E. MacKinnon, ‘Writing History for Stalin: Isaak Izrailevich Mints and the Istoriia grazhdanskoi voiny’, Kritika, 6/1 (2005) p.22.

9. I. Mints, ‘Podgotovka Velikoi Proletarskoi Revolyutsii: K Vykhodu v Svet Pervogo Toma “Istoriya Grazhdanskoi Voiny v SSSR”, Bol’shevik, 12/15 (November 1935) p.30 for the quote.

10. This section on the Short Course leans heavily on the work of David Brandenberger: ‘The Fate of Interwar Soviet Internationalism: A Case Study of the Editing of Stalin’s 1938 Short Course on the History of the ACP(B)’, Revolutionary Russia, 29/1 (2016); ‘Stalin and the Muse of History: The Dictator and His Critics on the Editing of the 1938 Short Course’ in V. Tismaneanu & B. C. Iacob (eds), Ideological Storms: Intellectuals, Dictators and the Totalitarian Temptation, CEU Press: Budapest 2019; Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2019 (co-edited with M. Zelenov); and ‘Kratkii Kurs Istorii VKP (b)’: Tekst i Ego Istoriya v 2 Chastyakh: Chast’ 1, Rosspen: Moscow 2014 (co-edited with M. Zelenov). The former edited volume reproduces the official English-language translation of the Short Course together with the details of Stalin’s editing, while the latter contains the archive documents appertaining to the process of producing the book.

11. Brandenberger & Zelenov, ‘Kratkii Kurs Istorii VKP (b)’, doc.112.

12. Ibid., doc.165.

13. Brandenberger & Zelenov, Stalin’s Master Narrative, pp.17–18.

14. Brandenberger & Zelenov, Kratkii Kurs Istorii VKP (b)’, doc.231 p.429. The conference took place from 27 September to 1 October 1938.

15. Brandenberger & Zelenov, Stalin’s Master Narrative, p.20.

16. Ibid., p.21.

17. Brandenberger & Zelenov, Kratkii Kurs Istorii VKP (b)’, doc.231 p.457.

18. The text of the section may be found in Brandenberger & Zelenov, Stalin’s Master Narrative, pp.48–73.

19. For an overview, see E. van Ree, ‘Stalin as a Marxist Philosopher’, Studies in East European Thought, 52/4 (December 2000). See further G. V. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union, Routledge & Kegan Paul: London 1958 chap.10, and Z. A. Jordan, The Evolution of Dialectical Materialism, Macmillan: London 1967 chap.8.

20. J. Stalin, ‘Anarchism or Socialism?’ in Works, vol.1, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1952 pp.297–372.

21. Cited by A. Bonfanti, ‘Eric Hobsbawm’s Dialectical Materialism in the Postwar Period 1946–56’, Twentieth Century Communism, 19 (November 2020).

22. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism, p.212. Brandenberger quotes a figure of 40 million copies during Stalin’s time.

23. RGASPI, Op.558, Dd.1602–4. In the archive the typescript is misidentified as being that of a separate book but the pagination indicates that it is part of a larger MS, i.e. Istoriya Diplomatii. Only the chapters dealing with the 1920s are preserved in these files.

24. RGASPI F.558, Op.1, D.5754, L.98. On Pankratova, see R. E. Zelnik, Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet Historiography, University of Washington Press: Seattle 2005.

25. V. P. Potemkin (ed.), Istoriya Diplomatii, vol.3, Ogiz: Moscow-Leningrad 1945 pp.701–64. See further V. V. Aspaturian, ‘Diplomacy in the Mirror of Soviet Scholarship’ in J. Keep & L. Brisby (eds), Contemporary History in the Soviet Mirror, Praeger: New York 1964. Tarle made the claim about Stalin in a letter to the party leader, G. M. Malenkov, in September 1945, to whom he had written complaining about a critical review of his book on the Crimean War that had just appeared in the party’s journal Bol’shevik: I. A. Sheina, ‘Akademik E. V. Tarle i Vlast’: Pis’ma Istorika I. V. Stalinu i G. M. Malenkovu, 1937–1950gg’, Istoricheskii Arkhiv, 3 (2001). Unbeknown to Tarle, but not to Stalin, he had recently come under attack within the party for advocating a soft line on the iniquities of nineteenth-century Tsarist foreign policy. The review reflected that criticism of Tarle, even though it had not and did not become public knowledge. It’s possible that Stalin asked Tarle to write the piece on the methods of bourgeois diplomacy when he met him and Potemkin on 3 June 1941, a meeting that lasted an hour and a half, at which the three men presumably discussed the follow-up to the recently published first volume of Istoriya Diplomatii.

26. M. Beloff, ‘A Soviet History of Diplomacy’, Soviet Studies, 1/2 (October 1949). In a 1941 book on the history of Soviet foreign policy by A. A. Troyanovskii & B. E. Shtein, Stalin deleted a reference that attributed the direction of diplomacy to him and Lenin and substituted the party. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.390, p.6 of the book.

27. Ibid., Op.11, Dd.221–2. The Simon & Schuster letter may be found in D.221, doc.19. The letter was translated into Russian and its salient points marked by either Stalin or his staff. Stalin did not reply. The letter was brought to my attention by S. McMeekin, Stalin’s War, Allen Lane: London 2021 p.455. McMeekin mischaracterises the letter as a proposal that Stalin should write an autobiography.

28. Ibid., D.1280, Ll.4–9.

29. D. Brandenberger, ‘Stalin as Symbol: A Case Study of the Personality Cult and Its Construction’, in S. Davies & J. Harris (eds), Stalin: A New History, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2005 p.265.

30. I. Stalin, Sochineniya, vol.17, Severnaya Korona: Tver 2004 pp.630–3. The meeting took place during the evening of 23 December 1946 and lasted for an hour and a quarter.

31. Brandenberger, ‘Stalin as Symbol’.

32. Bol’shaya Tsenzura: Pisateli i Zhurnalisty v Strane Sovetov, 1917–1956, Demokratiya: Moscow 2005 doc.416.

33. My summary of Stalin’s editing of the Short Biography is based on S. Davies & J. Harris, Stalin’s World: Dictating the Soviet Order, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2014 pp.155–6; V. A. Belyanov, ‘I. V. Stalin Sam o Sebe: Redaktsionnaya Pravka Sobstvennoi Biografii’, Izvestiya TsK KPSS, 9 (1990); and RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.1280. The latter file contains one of the dummies of the Short Biography corrected by Stalin. There are other makety in Dd.1281–2, not seen by me.

34. During the war, Stalin was more modest about his contribution. Upon receipt of a 1943 General Staff history of the battle for Moscow, he deleted a reference to the ‘leadership of comrade Stalin’. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.300, p.4 of the book. This was one of a number of internal studies of the battles and campaigns of the Great Patriotic War that were not published until post-Soviet times.

35. Joseph Stalin: A Short Biography, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1949 p.89.

36. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.1284.

37. J. Degras (ed.), Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, vol.3 (1933–1941), Oxford University Press: London 1953 p.492.

38. ‘Captain H. H. Balfour Moscow Diary 1941’, Harriman Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, container 64.

39. W. S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol.1, Cassell: London 1948 p.344.

40. Istoriya Diplomatii, vol.3 pp.668–9, 672, 680, 682.

41. See F. Hirsch, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II, Oxford University Press: New York 2020 passim.

42. RGASPI F.558, Op.11, Dd.239–42. Stalin did not mark the translation.

43. Ibid., D.243, doc.1, L.1. Reportedly, the historians group consisted of V. M. Khvostov (1905–1972), G. A. Deborin (1907–1987) and B. E. Shtein (1892–1961).

44. Fal’sifikatory Istorii (Istoricheskaya Spravka), Ogiz: Moscow 1948. In English: Falsifiers of History (Historical Survey), Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1948.

45. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.243, docs.1, 5, 5a.

46. Falsifiers of History (Historical Survey), p.41.

47. Ibid., p.43.

48. Ibid., pp.47–8.

49. Ibid., p.51. Stalin was being a little unfair to Truman. In that same speech he said that on no account did he want Hitler to win. During the war he was a highly effective overseer of Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease aid to Britain and the Soviet Union.

50. Ibid., p.52.

51. See G. Roberts, Molotov: Stalin’s Cold Warrior, Potomac Books: Washington DC 2012 chap.2.

52. Falsifiers of History, p.59.

53. E. Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2006 p.169. In this section I follow in the footsteps of chap.7 of Pollock’s book: ‘“Everyone Is Waiting”: Stalin and the Economic Problems of Communism’. See also the memoirs of Dmitry Shepilov, who was heavily involved in the textbook discussion and production: The Kremlin’s Scholar, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2014.

54. An English translation of the record of Stalin’s January 1941 meeting with the economists may be found in Pollock, Conversations with Stalin.

55. English translation of Stalin’s February, April and May conversations with economists may be found in ibid.

56. They are published in Stalinskoe Ekonomicheskoe Nasledstvo: Plany i Diskussii, 1947–1955gg, Rosspen: Moscow 2017.

57. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, Dd.1242–6.

58. J. Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1952. For a nit-picking scholastic critique, see N. Leites, ‘Stalin as Intellectual’, World Politics, 6/1 (October 1953).

59. See K. D. Roh, Stalin’s Economic Advisors: The Varga Institute and the Making of Soviet Foreign Policy, I. B. Tauris: London 2018.

60. Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, p.192.

61. Ibid., p.207.

62. An English translation of the textbook may be found here: https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/index.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

63. R. B. Day, Cold War Capitalism: The View from Moscow, 1945–1975, M. E. Sharpe: Armonk NY 1995 pp.83–4.

CONCLUSION: THE DICTATOR WHO LOVED BOOKS

1. F. Chuev, Tak Govoril Kaganovich: Ispoved’ Stalinskogo Apostola, Otechestvo: Moscow 1992 pp.154, 190. The conversation took place in 1991.

2. Litsedei: Russian for an actor. I owe this reference to S. Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London 2003 p.3, who, in turn, derived it from V. Zubok & C. Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev, Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA 1996 p.21.

3. C. Read, ‘The Many Lives of Joseph Stalin: Writing the Biography of a “Monster”’ in J. Ryan & S. Grant (eds), Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions and Controversies, Bloomsbury Academic: London 2021.

4. R. G. Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2020 pp.668–95.

5. I. Deutscher, ‘Writing a Biography of Stalin’, The Listener, https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1947/writing-stalin.htm (25 December 1947).

6. G. Roberts, ‘Working Towards the Vozhd’? Stalin and the Peace Movement’ in Grant & Ryan, Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism.

7. G. Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2006 pp.247–8.