Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Dostoevsky’s vision of the Church’s cruel love was attractive; Tolstoi’s more Quakerish Christianity, with its leanings toward self-reliance and sentiment, irritated him. Stalin energetically marked up his (and his daughter’s) copies of Tolstoi’s work: one passage that provoked his mockery (“Ha-ha-ha” he scrawled in red) runs, “The sole, undoubted means of salvation from the evil people suffer from is that they should admit themselves to be guilty before God and therefore incapable of punishing or correcting other people.” ¹⁴

The most common mistake of Stalin’s opponents was to underestimate how exceptionally well read he was. That he was erudite we now know from the remnants of his library of 20,000 volumes, from the slips of paper and letters in which he asked for books, and from the recollections of those who knew him in his early years. What the seminary did not make its pupils read, it banned them from reading, thus stimulating the trainee priests to read even more. In 1910 the Tsarist secret police observed the exiled Stalin visiting the library in Vologda seventeen times in 107 days. By the time Stalin was thirty he had read quantities of classical, Western, and Russian literature, philosophy, and political theory. In four years’ exile, from 1913 to 1917, in the Siberian wilderness—unsociable, uncommunicative—Stalin read whatever he could scrounge from fellow exiles. Even in the chaos of revolution and the pursuit of power, he read. He read all Russian émigré periodicals from the 1920s to his death.

Once he had an office and an apartment in the Kremlin, as well as dachas around Moscow and on the Black Sea, Stalin built up his library. Some books he ordered, some he purloined from the state library; most came from the publisher or the author. Reading up to 500 pages a day, making notes in the margins and, despite his frequent laments about memory lapses, able to recall innumerable phrases and arguments years later, Stalin was a phenomenal, and dangerous, reader. As he got older, he quickly lost patience—typically he heavily annotated a book for around the first hundred pages. But if ever a devil could quote scripture to his purpose, it was Stalin.

A complete list of the books that a poet reads, Osip Mandelstam wrote, is his biography. Stalin liked books that gave an overview of European history, literature, linguistics. He was attached to books by authoritarian figures: Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, Otto von Bismarck’s memoirs. In the mid-1920s, when the bulk of Stalin’s books were in the Kremlin, Nadezhda Allilueva-Stalina, his second wife, took a lead from Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s satrap in Leningrad and fellow bibliophile. She had a librarian classify and reshelve them. Stalin was furious. He jotted down his own classification of books and had his secretary Aleksandr Poskriobyshev rearrange them accordingly.

All that hampered Stalin were his linguistic limitations: only in Georgian and Russian could he cope without a dictionary. Yet here too Stalin was underestimated by his opponents. In the seminary he had learned a lot of Greek (visitors were amazed to find Stalin in his Kremlin office perusing Plato in the original) and afterward a little French and German. For a while, in Siberian exile, he even toyed with Esperanto.¹⁵ Stalin’s interest in Marxism and his first prolonged stay in Berlin impelled him to struggle with German periodicals.

People wrote to Stalin not only in Russian and Georgian, but also, from Baku, in Azeri Turkish (then written in Arabic script). When on the run from the police, Stalin sometimes went under the name Zakhariants or Melikiants; either would have been foolish without a smattering of colloquial Armenian. In 1926 during the British General Strike, and afterward, Stalin perused the British press. His letters to his wife from Sochi express annoyance at her forgetting to send him his copy of A Model Complete Teach-Yourself English Course.¹⁶ In languages, as in many other subjects, Stalin’s tactics were to conceal, not display, his knowledge.

Stalin had an intimidatingly detailed recall of what he read and heard. He showed an uncanny instinct for inconsistencies and things left unsaid, although his evaluations of what he believed a writer had meant are often naive, even weird. Stalin’s throwaway remarks and angry scrawls in red pencil give us insight into his motives at points in his endless war on opposition and dissent.