Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin’s first foray into full-length book-editing was his involvement in the early stages of the multi-part History of the Civil War in the USSR, the first two volumes of which dealt with pre-revolutionary history and the 1917 revolution. The project was Maxim Gorky’s idea and the aim was to produce a popular and accessible history that would highlight the feats and exploits of the ordinary people who fought for the Bolsheviks.⁴ Stalin was a titular member of the editorial collective, which was headed by I. I. Mints, a specialist in civil war history. Mints later worked on the History of Diplomacy book (see below) and served on the government’s Commission for the History of the Great Patriotic War. Mints was Jewish and in the late 1940s fell foul of the anti-cosmopolitan purge of suspected Zionists and lost all his academic posts. But he managed to avoid falling victim to more extreme measures.

Extensive consultations and discussions took place with Stalin on the first two volumes of the civil war history. In 1934 Gorky sent him the draft of volume one, which the dictator then edited in some detail, marking hundreds of corrections. Mints recalled that ‘Stalin was pedantically interested in formal exactitude. He replaced “Piter” in one place with “Petrograd”, “February in the Countryside” as a chapter title (he thought it suggested a landscape) with “The February Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution”. . . . Grandiloquence was mandatory, too. “October Revolution” had to be replaced by “The Great October Revolution”. There were dozens of such corrections.’⁵

Stalin the pedant was also a stickler for correct dates, accurate captions and informative subheadings, as well as making liberal use of adjectival qualifiers such as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’. He insisted the book’s title should include the name of the country in which the civil war took place, i.e. the USSR.⁶ Stalin was pleased with the result and in summer 1935 he wrote to congratulate Mints and his team: ‘You’ve done your work well – the book reads like a novel.’⁷ Elaine MacKinnon, the author of an in-depth study of the early years of the project, agrees:

The first two volumes were definitely popular in form, with colourful illustrations, photographs, and a prose style that is more characteristic of fictional narratives than scientific treatises. The characterizations are simplistic and project in animated tone clear images of good and evil, positive and negative. The narratives read like fiction, with many short sentences and continual efforts to build up a sense of tension and drama in the unfolding of events. Enemies are clearly defined. The role of workers, soldiers, and peasants is highlighted, despite innumerable references to Stalin and other Bolshevik leaders.⁸

In a pre-publication puff piece for the first volume, Mints explained the editorial process to readers of the party journal Bol’shevik. He emphasised Stalin’s personal involvement in the project but gave no details. He did, however, relate numerous examples of changes to the draft made by an unnamed ‘Chief Editor’, such as amending ‘Russia – prison of the peoples’ to ‘Tsarist Russia – prison of the peoples’ and changing ‘October Revolution’ to ‘Great Proletarian Revolution’. The chief editor’s changes, concluded Mints, merited close attention: ‘All these corrections are a model of deep analysis, exceptional clarity and precise formulation.’⁹

KEEP IT SIMPLE: THE SHORT COURSE HISTORY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION

The civil war book fulfilled Stalin’s desire for heroic history to inspire the Soviet masses, but in the mid-1930s he was focused on a more important editing project – one aimed at key party members and activists: a new history of the party itself: a book that would explain clearly and credibly the complicated and tumultuous history of the party, its divisions and schisms, and its denouement in the Great Terror. How had the party succeeded in its historic mission while incubating clusters of high-level traitors, spies, assassins and saboteurs? The book also needed to educate members in matters theoretical, equip them with knowledge and understanding to shield them from malign influences and enable them to correctly implement the party line.¹⁰

The Short History arose from Stalin’s dissatisfaction with extant textbook histories of the party which did not connect its history with that of the country or provide a Marxist explanation of internal factional struggles. Crucial was to depict the struggle against anti-Bolshevik tendencies as a principled struggle for Leninism and as a battle that stopped the party from degenerating into a reformist, social-democratic organisation.