Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Nobody was prepared for what we found. . . . To see the works in his library is somehow to be brought face-to-face with Stalin. To see the words his eyes saw. To touch the pages he touched and smelled. The marks he made on them trace the marks he made on the Russian nation. . . . Not a single work I inspected was not read by him. Not a single work was not copiously annotated, underlined, argued with, appreciated, disdained, studied. . . . We see him thinking, reacting, imagining in private. [Original emphasis.]³⁸

By the time I started to examine Stalin’s library books in the 2010s – the whole collection, not just a sample – I had travelled to Moscow every year since 1996 to do research in Russian archives. I had already seen hundreds of documents composed, edited or written on by Stalin. The novelty of trying to decipher the dictator’s often unreadable scribblings had long worn off. I was interested in practicalities and particularities, not generalities. What did Stalin’s pometki actually mean and what could they tell us about the modes and substance of his private thinking?

But Brent had a point. Apart from private photographs and some hastily written and often perfunctory letters to family members, Stalin’s library books are among the best means we have of accessing the dictator’s inner life.³⁹

In Stalin’s lichnyi fond there are many thousands of files containing tens of thousands of documents – memoranda, reports, drafts, records of conversations, and handwritten notes. Invaluable to historians though these files are, they constitute Stalin’s official papers rather than his private ones. Only in his personal library, in the way he read, marked and wrote in his books, do we get really close to the spontaneous Stalin – the intellectual immersed in his own thoughts.

THE PARANOIA IS POLITICAL

Since the discovery in the archives of the residue of his personal library many people have searched its holdings hoping to glimpse Stalin’s true nature – the key to the character that made his rule so monstrous. But while Stalin’s books do indeed reveal his private thoughts and feelings, the key to understanding his capacity to countenance mass murder is hidden in plain sight: the politics and ideology of ruthless class war in defence of the revolution and the pursuit of communist utopia.

Stalin’s oft-noted paranoia was political not personal; it reflected the fact that post-1917 popular support for the Bolsheviks was often flimsy, while internationally the Soviet state remained isolated and vulnerable to renewed attack by the grand coalition of capitalist powers that had already sought its overthrow during the Russian Civil War. As Stephen Kotkin put it, ‘The problems of the revolution brought out the paranoia in Stalin and Stalin brought out the paranoia inherent in the revolution.’⁴⁰

Apart from his writings on nationalism, Stalin’s main contribution to the evolution of Marxist political theory was his propagation of the view that under socialism the class struggle intensified – an idea that derived from Lenin’s writings during the civil war. The stronger the Soviet Union became, said Stalin, the more desperate the capitalists were to crush the socialist system through a combination of external force and internal subversion. Significantly, when this concept dropped out of the Soviet political lexicon after Stalin’s death, the USSR rapidly transitioned to a softer and far less violent authoritarianism.

Stalin was too intelligent and self-aware to believe the panegyrics of his own personality cult. He famously chided Vasily for trading off the family name: ‘You are not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and in the portraits, not you, not even me!’⁴¹ Still, there is no doubt that he saw himself as a great intellectual and as Lenin’s rightful heir as head of state, leader of the party and guardian of Marxist orthodoxy – ‘the Lenin of today’, as the cult slogan put it. There was no one whose books he read more assiduously and admiringly than those of Lenin. ‘Lenin is our teacher,’ Stalin proudly told the US Republican politician Harold Stassen in 1947.⁴²

Stalin’s personal library offers many fascinating insights into his private thinking but more than anything it reveals someone whose inner mental life was shaped by his public persona and by the ideological universe he inhabited. The view from his library is that from an inside window looking out. By following the way Stalin read books, we can glimpse the world through his eyes. We may not get to peer into his soul, but we do get to wear his spectacles.