Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin complained about the timidity of Soviet writers and critics, but in the authoritarian system he had done so much to create, the safest option was always to keep your head down and avoid saying anything that could be construed as overly critical. Those like Zoshchenko, who were deemed to have overstepped the mark, often found themselves facing official ire, not least from Stalin himself.

A prize for peace also bore Stalin’s name. A rival to the Nobel Peace Prize, it was an international award and among its recipients were a good many writers, for example, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, the American novelist Howard Fast, and the Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg.

Neruda, who also served on the prize committee, was told by a Russian contact that when Stalin was presented with a list of possible winners, he exclaimed, ‘And why isn’t Neruda’s among them?’⁵⁸

Among the poems penned by Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, was an ‘Ode to Stalin’:

Lenin left an inheritance

of a homeland free and wide.

Stalin populated it

with schools and flour,

printhouses and apples.

Stalin from the Volga

to the snow

of the inaccessible North

put his hand and in his hand a man

he started to build.

The cities were born.

The deserts sang

for the first time with the voice of water.⁵⁹

Ehrenburg was another beneficiary of Stalin’s patronage but not in relation to the peace prize award: as the Soviet Union’s foremost international peace campaigner in the 1940s and 1950s, he was among the worthiest of its recipients. But Stalin was instrumental in awarding him a first-class literature prize for his 1948 novel The Storm, a story set in wartime France. Reviewers had criticised the novel for portraying the French resistance as more heroic than the Soviet people, so the literature prize committee recommended the award of only a second-class prize. When Stalin asked why, he was told the novel had no real heroes and that one of its main characters was a Soviet citizen who falls in love with a Frenchwoman, which was not a typical situation during the war. ‘But I like this Frenchwoman, she’s a nice girl. And besides, such things do happen in real life,’ said Stalin. ‘As regards heroes, I think that few people are born heroes, it’s ordinary people who become heroes.’

Reflecting on this episode, Ehrenburg wrote in his memoirs: ‘The more I think about Stalin the more it is fully borne in on me how little I understand.’⁶⁰ Around the same time, Stalin vetted a play by Simonov based on the Kliueva–Roskin affair. Alien Shadow concerned a Soviet microbiologist infatuated with the west who inadvertently betrays state secrets. At Stalin’s insistence, Simonov changed the play’s ending to one in which the government forgives the protagonist’s sins. Some critics considered the play too weak and liberal. The play was awarded a Stalin Prize, but only a second-class one.⁶¹

CHAPTER 7

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF THE USSR

If there was anything Stalin loved as much as reading, it was editing. His red or blue pencil marks on documents were as familiar to Soviet officials as his face. The same is true for today’s scholars of the Stalin era. How he processed the paperwork that crossed his desk is fundamental to understanding his thinking and decision-making. Rare were the draft documents that passed by his editorial eye unaltered.

Stalin’s journalistic approach was the hallmark of his editorial style.¹ Filling in a party registration questionnaire in October 1921, he listed ‘journalist’ as one of his special skills.² His political life was founded on writing and editing agitational materials – leaflets, pamphlets, speeches, editorials, short articles – and it showed in the way that he cut, reorganised and sharpened texts he found unsatisfactory. The results were hardly scintillating but he was a highly competent editor and the texts that bore his name, or imprimatur, were invariably clear and accessible to their intended readers, whether party cadres, popular audiences, foreign officials or specialists. Supremely confident, Stalin was comfortable in his role as the Soviet Union’s editor-in-chief.³

Mostly, Stalin edited for clarity and accuracy. But sometimes he felt the need to grapple with substance, particularly if the text was of major political importance. Such was the case with the five key texts considered in this chapter: the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938); the interwar section of volume two of Istoriya Diplomatii (1941); the second edition of his short biography, Joseph Stalin (1947); the polemical booklet Falsifiers of History (1948); and a Soviet textbook on Political Economy (1954).