Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Appended to this memorandum of Stalin’s, which dates from spring 1937, was his schema for the periodisation of the new party history.¹¹ The writing task eventually fell to party propaganda chief Pyotr Pospelov and court historian Yemel’yan Yaroslavsky. Their final draft, presented to Stalin in spring 1938, cleaved closely to his preferred chapterisation but the boss was not happy with the results of their labour. As he later explained to his Politburo colleagues, eleven of the draft’s twelve chapters required fundamental revision, principally to strengthen its treatment of the party’s theoretical development – so necessary because of the ‘weakness of our cadres in the sphere of theory’.¹²

When the Short Course was published in September 1938, initially in Pravda and then as a book, Stalin was identified as the author of the section on dialectical and historical materialism, while the rest was attributed to an anonymous commission of the central committee. After the Second World War, Stalin was credited as author of the whole book and it was earmarked for publication as volume 15 of his collected works. As the prime editor of Pospelov and Yaroslavsky’s draft, he cut scores of pages, deleted hundreds of paragraphs and interpolated masses of his own text. He also made thousands of minor corrections. The Short Course was truly a history of the party as Stalin saw it and wanted it to be seen.

The end product of Stalin’s efforts was a biased, distorted and simplistic account of the party’s history, one manufactured by omission, elision and rhetorical tricks. Stalin was a past master at using such devices to present versions of events that were self-serving but credible. That doesn’t mean he didn’t believe in the essential truth of his version of the party’s history.

Pospelov and Yaroslavsky wrote reams of invective directed against Trotsky and other opponents of Stalin, which he deleted, substituting a pithy narrative thread that conveyed a sustained critique of the opposition while at the same time dimming the spotlight on them. It told a story of how misguided opponents became a bunch of careerists and opportunists and then resorted to treachery. When the anti-party and anti-Soviet line of these oppositionists was roundly rejected by the great majority of party members, they allied themselves with foreign capitalists and imperialists and engaged in terrorism and sabotage. Only in the mid-1930s did the extent of their ‘monstrous moral and political depravity’, of their ‘despicable villainy and treachery’ become fully apparent.

Numerous laudatory accounts of his own role in the history of the party were deleted by Stalin. He disappeared almost entirely from the party’s pre-revolutionary history, leaving Lenin as its one and only commanding figure. Stalin allowed himself to feature more heavily in the chapters dealing with the 1920s and 1930s, but given the centrality of his role in these years, it would have been difficult to do otherwise. Stalin also cut references to many other individuals, reducing Pospelov and Yaroslavsky’s text to an essentially institutional history of the party, its policies, factions and major actions. For Stalin that was the whole edifying point: to engage readers with the history of the party as a collective body, as an institution. He wanted his people to love the party, not Big Brother.

To supplement his editorial efforts, Stalin held a series of meetings in his Kremlin office to review each segment of the book before it was published by Pravda. In attendance were Molotov, Zhdanov and Pravda editor I. Ya. Rovinsky, as well as Yaroslavsky and Pospelov.¹³

Following publication, Stalin explained to a conference of leading party propagandists that the book’s main purpose was to educate cadres in matters of theory, specifically the laws of historical development. To illustrate the importance of theory, Stalin offered a rather dramatic example: ‘When we talk about the saboteurs, about the Trotskyists, you have to keep in mind that . . . not all of them were spies . . . among them were our people who went crazy. Why? They weren’t real Marxists, they were weak in theory.’¹⁴

The book was ‘addressed to our cadres’, said Stalin, ‘not to ordinary workers on the shop floor, nor to ordinary employees in institutions, but to cadres who Lenin described as professional revolutionaries. This book is addressed to our administrative cadres. They most of all need to go and work on their theory; after that everyone else can.’¹⁵

Stalin defended the book’s de-personalisation:

[Originally], this draft textbook was for the most part based on exemplary individuals – those who were the most heroic, those who escaped from exile and how many times they escaped, those who suffered in the name of the cause, etc., etc.