Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Shakespeare was a ubiquitous figure in Soviet culture in the 1930s. The 1934 writers’ congress was adorned by a huge portrait of Shakespeare, and Gorky urged those present to emulate the great Bard. Writers should ‘Shakespeare-ise more’, demanded the party. There was a project to translate Shakespeare into all the languages of the USSR. ‘Stalin Learning English. Wants to Read Shakespeare’, claimed the headline of a Tasmanian newspaper in September 1936.²⁵

STALIN AT THE MOVIES

In the mid-1930s Stalin began to review film scripts and view and preview films in the Kremlin’s new cinema. The transition to ‘talkies’ had made the medium more attractive to the text-obsessed Stalin, a particular influence being Chapaev (1934), the story of a Red Army commander who died a heroic death during the Russian Civil War – one of the most popular Soviet films of all time, which he is said to have watched thirty-eight times.

His general take on the scripts he read was that films should be historically accurate and aesthetically true to life, as well as politically progressive.

Stalin’s response to Fridrikh Ermler’s script The Great Citizen – a fictionalised account of the Kirov assassination – was that the politics that had led to murder should be at the centre of the screenplay, i.e. the struggle for the victory of socialism in the USSR versus the restoration of capitalism.²⁶

Asked to choose between two screenplays about Giorgi Saakadze, a military commander who battled for Georgia’s unity and independence in the early seventeenth century, Stalin opted for the one he thought was a better piece of history. However, he complained that even this version ended with an inaccuracy – with Saakadze’s victory when, in fact, he had ultimately suffered defeat at the hands of the country’s feudal princes. ‘I think that this historical truth should be restored in the screenplay,’ wrote Stalin. ‘And if it is restored, the screenplay . . . could be characterised as one of the best works of Soviet cinematography.’²⁷

In September 1940 Stalin was drawn into a controversy about a film called Zakon Zhizni (The Law of Life), based on a novel by Alexander Avdeenko, who also wrote the screenplay. Since the story concerned a morally corrupt Komsomol official, it went through quite an extensive process of censorship before being released, whereupon it was reviewed positively in Izvestiya and other publications. However, a Pravda review objected that such corruption was not typical of Soviet society and complained about the film’s main protagonist being too richly drawn while other Komsomol members were depicted as his dupes.²⁸

Stalin was among Avdeenko’s critics at a specially convened meeting of the central committee but he also told the comrades that ‘you have to give freedom of art. You have to let people express themselves. . . . There is one artistic line, but it can be reflected in different ways, various methods, approaches and ways of writing.’²⁹ Towards the end of the meeting, he made some general remarks about truthfulness and objectivity in literature.³⁰ He was all in favour of both but that didn’t mean fiction should be impartial:

Literature cannot be a camera. That’s not how truthfulness should be understood. There cannot be literature without passion, it sympathises with someone, despises someone. . . . There are different ways of writing – the way of Gogol or of Shakespeare. They have outstanding heroes – negative and positive. When you read Shakespeare or Gogol, or Griboedov, you find one hero with negative features. All the negative features are concentrated in one individual. I would prefer a different manner of writing – the manner of Chekhov, who has no heroes but rather grey people . . .

I would prefer we were given enemies not as monsters but as people hostile to our society but not lacking all human traits. . . . I would prefer it if enemies were shown to be strong. . . . Trotsky was an enemy but he was a capable person, undoubtedly he should be depicted as an enemy with negative features, but as one who also has positive qualities. . . . We need truthfulness depicting the enemy in a full-fledged way. . . . It’s not that comrade Avdeenko presents enemies in a good light but that the victors, who beat them, are sidelined and lack colour. That’s the problem. That’s the fundamental inobjectivity and untruthfulness.³¹

Stalin’s remark about the recently assassinated Trotsky was macabre, to say the least. There was no mention of his good points in the Pravda obituary that Stalin had personally edited and entitled ‘Death of an International Spy’.