Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

STALIN’S LIBRARY

Also by Geoffrey Roberts

The Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact with Hitler

The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War

The Soviet Union in World Politics, 1945–1991

Ireland and the Second World War (co-edited with Brian Girvin)

The History and Narrative Reader (editor)

Victory at Stalingrad: The Battle That Changed History

Stalin – His Times and Ours (editor)

Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953

Molotov: Stalin’s Cold Warrior

Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov

Churchill and Stalin: Comrades-in-Arms during the Second World War (with Martin Folly & Oleg Rzheshevsky)

Copyright © 2022 Geoffrey Roberts

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With thanks to Moscow friends

CONTENTS

List of Plates

 

Introduction: The Kremlin Scholar

 

1. Bloody Tyrant and Bookworm

2. The Search for the Stalin Biographers’ Stone

3. Reading, Writing and Revolution

4. The Life and Fate of a Dictator’s Library

5. Bah Humbug! Stalin’s Pometki

6. Reverse Engineering: Stalin and Soviet Literature

7. Editor-in-Chief of the USSR

 

Conclusion: The Dictator Who Loved Books

 

Notes

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Index

PLATES

1. Stalin working in his Kremlin office, 1938.

2. Shushanika Manuchar’yants, 1960s.

3. Nadezhda Alliluyeva, 1917.

4. Stalin with his two youngest children, Vasily and Svetlana, 1935.

5. Stalin’s handwritten library classification scheme, May 1925. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.

6. Title page of Nikolai Bukharin’s Revolutsionnyi Teoretik. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.

7. Page from Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.

8. Page from Karl Kautsky’s Terrorism and Communism. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.

9. Front cover of Lenin, Conspirationalism, and October. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.

10. Front cover of Andrei Shestakov’s Short Course History of the USSR. RGASPI.

11. Stalin’s doodles on the back cover of Alexei Tolstoy’s Ivan Grozny. RGASPI.

12. Page from an article on contemporary military art. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.

13. Pages from a draft of the Short Course History of the CPSU. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.

14. Page from a report on the discussion of the Political Economy textbook. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.

INTRODUCTION

The Kremlin Scholar