Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin was a fanatic who had no secret doubts. ‘The most important thing is knowledge of Marxism,’ he scribbled in the margin of an obscure military theory journal in the 1940s.⁴³ He meant it: in the thousands upon thousands of annotated pages in Stalin’s library, there is not a single hint that he harboured any reservations about the communist cause. The energy and enthusiasm he applied to annotating arcane points of Marxist philosophy and economics is eloquent – and sometimes mind-numbing – testimony to his belief that communism was the way, the truth and the future.

While Stalin was undoubtedly a very dogmatic Marxist, he was not a blind prisoner of his ideology. He was capable of seeing and reaching outside the Marxian framework to engage with a diverse range of authors and perspectives. The vehemence with which he viewed his political opponents never prevented him from paying careful attention to what they wrote.

CHAPTER 2

THE SEARCH FOR THE STALIN BIOGRAPHERS’ STONE

Stalin kept no diary, wrote no memoirs and evinced little interest in his personal history, yet he went to a great deal of trouble to shape both his biography and the documentary trail that would be followed by his biographers.¹

‘It is difficult to describe the process,’ Stalin told an admiring American visitor, Jerome Davis, in 1926, when asked how he became a Bolshevik. ‘First one becomes convinced that existing conditions are wrong and unjust. Then one resolves to do the best one can to remedy them. Under the Tsar’s regime any attempt genuinely to help the people put one outside the pale of the law; one found himself hunted and hounded as a revolutionist.’²

Emil Ludwig, a German writer who had authored many biographies of famous people, asked Stalin a similar question in 1931, and received an equally terse and uninformative reply:

Ludwig: What drove you to become a rebel? Was it, perhaps, because your parents treated you badly?

Stalin: No. My parents were uneducated people, but they did not treat me badly by any means. It was different in the theological seminary of which I was then a student. In protest against the humiliating regime and the Jesuitical methods that prevailed in the seminary, I was ready to become, and eventually did become, a revolutionary, a believer in Marxism as the only genuinely revolutionary doctrine.³

In 1939 the Soviet dramatist Mikhail Bulgakov wanted to write a play about Stalin’s youth, with the intention to stage it as part of the celebrations of Stalin’s sixtieth birthday. But Stalin vetoed the project, saying that ‘all young people are alike, why write a play about the young Stalin?’⁴

Stalin was occasionally more forthcoming about his early life, but not his childhood. It was the years he spent in the Bolshevik underground, a period that spanned his youth and early adulthood, that interested him. He loved to read and reflect on his writings from that time and to the end of his life remained engaged with the debates, splits, strategies, tactics and factional battles of Russia’s revolutionary socialist movement. In the 1920s he marked copiously those volumes of the first edition of Lenin’s collected works that dealt with the 1905 revolution. After the Second World War he reread with evident interest his own 1905 article on ‘The Proletarian Class and the Proletarian Party’, which had been republished in the first volume of his collected works. It was about the rules of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party and Stalin took the trouble to write out at the end of his article the three conditions of party membership: agreement with its programme, material support and participation in one of its organisations. Heavily marked, too, was his copy of Georgy Safarov’s detailed 1923 study of the pre-1917 evolution of Bolshevik strategy and tactics.⁵

For Stalin, the party’s history was not even past, let alone dead. His formative, life-changing experiences as an illegal political activist in Tsarist Russia remained eternally interesting and relevant. Speaking to visiting Indian communists in 1951, he was keen to share lessons he had learned decades earlier. He urged them to eschew the tactics of the peasant-based revolution that had recently brought the Chinese communists to power and instead to emulate the worker–peasant alliance that had secured victory for the Bolsheviks. He warned of the dangers of premature uprisings, pointing out that in July 1917 the Bolsheviks had restrained an insurrectionary workers’ movement in Petrograd because it would have been defeated by counter-revolutionary forces. He argued against individual acts of terrorism, which had the effect of dividing the progressive movement into the heroes of such actions and the crowds who cheered them from the sidelines but did not themselves participate in revolutionary struggles. ‘We are against the theory of the hero and the crowd,’ he told them.⁶