Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin read literature for leisure, pleasure and edification. As a young man his first love was poetry, and patriotic poems were his earliest published writing. Radical fiction guided the young Stalin to the revolutionary cause. Like Marx and Lenin, he valued the enlightening role of literary classics, and quickly grasped the mobilisational power of theatre and film. Famously, he described writers in a socialist society as ‘engineers of the human soul’. For Stalin, literature was the means to win hearts as well as minds.

Tragically, his vast collection of novels, plays and poems was dispersed after his death: it is the gaping hole among the archival remnants of Stalin’s library. Yet we know quite a lot about how he read and appreciated literature because from the late 1920s he was highly active in this realm of Soviet cultural policy. His various interventions reveal how he felt about fiction as well as what he saw as its political function. From his policy pronouncements and detailed criticisms of particular texts we can identify his preferences as a reader.¹

Andrei Gromyko was Soviet ambassador to the United States during the Second World War. He attended the Yalta and Potsdam summits in 1945 and served as deputy foreign minister after the war. He recollected of Stalin:

As to his taste in literature, I can state that he read a great deal. This came out in his speeches: he had a good knowledge of the Russian classics, especially Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin. Also, to my own knowledge, he had read Shakespeare, Heine, Balzac, Hugo, Guy de Maupassant – whom he particularly liked – and many other western European writers.²

FROM NEP TO RAPP

A letter from Trotsky prompted Stalin’s first foray in the field of cultural politics. Trotsky wrote to the Politburo in June 1922 that the party needed to foster relations with young writers. Trotsky proposed a register of writers, and the preparation of dossiers to guide party relations with specific individuals, the aim being to give material support and provide an alternative to bourgeois role models and publishing houses. Trotsky also suggested the creation of a non-party literary journal that would allow scope for ‘individual deviations’.³

In response, Stalin asked deputy party agitprop chief Ya. A. Yakovlev to report on the situation among writers. Yakovlev’s report highlighted the political struggle between the Bolsheviks and counter-revolutionary elements in relation to young writers. He also identified a number of writers who were close to the Bolsheviks politically and suggested organising a non-party association to gather them together, perhaps as a ‘Society for the Development of Russian Culture’. Yakovlev emphasised it would be necessary for the party writers in such a society to avoid ‘unjustifiable communist arrogance’.⁴

In forwarding the report to the Politburo on 3 July 1922, Stalin endorsed Trotsky’s approach, as well as Yakovlev’s ‘Society’ idea. Such a society, wrote Stalin, would contribute to the development of a ‘Soviet culture’ by bringing together ‘Soviet-inclined’ writers.⁵ The resultant Politburo resolution combined Trotsky’s and Stalin’s proposals, i.e. various supports for young writers were to be put in place, including a non-party literary publishing house (rather than a journal), and the possibility of establishing a suitable society for sympathetic writers would be investigated.⁶

This relatively liberal approach to literary affairs was typical of the moderate politics of the NEP era and represented pushback against militants who wanted to impose a uniform ‘proletarian’ culture on all writers. A wide-ranging Politburo resolution ‘On Party Policy in the Sphere of Literature’, dated June 1925, pointed out that it would take the proletariat time to develop its own literature. In the meantime, there had to be an alliance with pro-Soviet ‘fellow traveller’ writers. The party would combat counter-revolutionary manifestations in literature but also be on guard against ‘communist conceit’. It would steer writers’ political preferences but not insist on any particular literary form; it would, indeed, stand for ‘free competition among the various groups and trends in this sphere’.⁷

At the end of the 1920s Stalin executed a sharp left turn in pursuit of accelerated industrialisation and the forced collectivisation of agriculture. He attacked Bukharin and the so-called Right Opposition, who wanted to continue the moderate economics and politics of the NEP years. Internationally, the Comintern declared world revolution imminent. In the cultural field, the militant campaign was spearheaded by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (Russian acronym: RAPP). Formed in 1928, the association aimed to achieve ‘proletarian hegemony’ over Soviet literature. In practice that meant pushing for a class-struggle line in creative works and attacking as politically deviant anyone who disagreed with RAPP’s approach.