Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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