Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

These remarks presaged the close working relationship that Roosevelt and Stalin enjoyed during the Second World War. Stalin was impressed by Roosevelt’s policy of unconditional support for the Soviet war effort and by his determination to send as much American aid to the USSR as possible. Roosevelt’s motive was transparent. ‘Nothing could be worse’, he said in March 1942, ‘than to have the Russians collapse.’ Better to ‘lose New Zealand, Australia or anything else’. Why? Because ‘the Russians are today killing more Germans and destroying more equipment than you and I put together’, he wrote to Winston Churchill later that year.³⁰¹

Stalin was genuinely upset when Roosevelt died unexpectedly in April 1945, shortly after the two men had met, along with Winston Churchill, at the Yalta conference. ‘When I entered Marshal Stalin’s office I noticed that he was deeply distressed at the news,’ reported American ambassador Averell Harriman. ‘He greeted me in silence and stood holding my hand for about 30 seconds before asking me to sit down.’ ‘President Roosevelt has died but his cause must live on,’ Stalin told Harriman.³⁰²

Stalin’s enthusiasm for the United States knew no bounds during the war, when the awesome power of American industrial capitalism flooded the USSR with billions of dollars’ worth of Lend-Lease supplies. For a while after the war he hoped for an American loan that would help pay for the reconstruction of the ravaged Soviet economy. ‘Had I been born and brought up in America,’ Stalin told the head of the American Chamber of Commerce in June 1944, ‘I would probably have been a businessman.’ Stalin’s fervour cooled considerably when the cold war broke out in the mid-1940s, but as late as April 1947 he told the visiting US Republican politician Harold Stassen, ‘I am not a propagandist, I am a man of business,’ pointing out that he and Roosevelt had never indulged in the name-calling game of ‘totalitarians’ v. ‘monopoly capitalists’.³⁰³

Stalin was puzzled as well as impressed by the United States, finding it difficult to understand why the working class movement in the world’s leading capitalist country was so weak politically. When asked why he thought this was the case by a visiting American labour delegation in 1927, Stalin had no answer except to blame reactionary trade union leaders for not forming an independent proletarian party to compete with the Democrats and Republicans.³⁰⁴

One of the last articles Stalin ever read was A. A. Poletaev’s ‘V. I. Lenin and the American Workers Movement’, published in a 1952 issue of Voprosy Istorii (Questions of History) devoted to Lenin.

Poletaev’s article seems to have been the only one that Stalin read in that issue of the journal and the first passage he marked was a 1907 citation from Lenin on the characteristics of the ‘Anglo-American workers’ movement’. There were four, and Stalin, as he often did, went to the trouble of numbering them: the fact that the proletariats of these two countries had no important social-national democratic tasks to fulfil; the complete subordination of the proletariat to bourgeois policy; the sectarianism and isolation of the socialist movement; and the lack of support for the left in elections.

Stalin picked up on the sectarianism point later in the article, noting the ‘dogmatism’ of both De Leon’s American Socialist Party and the British Social Democratic Federation. He also underlined Lenin’s point that what was needed in the United States was a mass Marxist party that would form an alliance between workers, farmers and ‘toiling negroes’.

Always on the lookout for points with contemporary resonance, Stalin noted this graphic passage in Poletaev’s article:

The American bourgeoisie have more than once warmed their hands with the flames of war in Europe, thereby profiting from the blood and suffering of millions of people. US monopolies have rapidly developed into a mighty fortress of capital with a vice-like grip not only on the American people but the peoples of Europe and Asia.³⁰⁵

Another Voprosy Istorii article that Stalin read during these early cold war years was an article on American intervention in Siberia during the civil war. Beside the paragraph citing the official US claim that the intervention was prompted by ‘love’ for the Russian people, Stalin wrote ‘ha ha’.³⁰⁶

A country that had once been a beacon of hope for Stalin, then a business partner and wartime ally, had reverted to being ‘Enemy Number One’.³⁰⁷

CHAPTER 6

REVERSE ENGINEERING

Stalin and Soviet Literature