Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

But should a textbook really be designed like that? Can we really use such a thing to train and educate our cadres? We ought to base our cadres’ training on ideas, on theory. . . . If we possess such knowledge, then we’ll have real cadres, but if people don’t possess this knowledge, they won’t be cadres – they’ll be just empty spaces.

What do exemplary individuals really give us? I don’t want to pit ideas and individuals against one another – sometimes it’s necessary to refer to individuals, but we should refer to them only as much as is really necessary. It is ideas that really matter, not individuals – ideas in a theoretical context.¹⁶

At the end of the conference Stalin talked delegates through some of the book’s historical content, making this general point about studying the past:

History should be truthful, it must be written as it was, without adding anything. What we have nowadays is history from 500 years ago being criticised from the point of view of the present. How can that be chronological? Religion had a positive significance in the time of Vladimir the Saint. At that time there was paganism, and Christianity was a step forward. Now our wise men say from the point of view of the new situation in the twentieth century that Vladimir was a scoundrel, the pagans were scoundrels and religion was vile i.e. they don’t want to evaluate events dialectically so that everything has its time and place.¹⁷

The Short Course addressed fundamental theory in its section on dialectical and historical materialism. Written by Stalin, it was the culmination and synthesis of his studies of Marxist philosophy. It was inserted into chapter four of the book, which dealt with the party’s history from 1908 to 1912, the pretext being that such a digression was necessary to understand the importance of Lenin’s major theoretical work, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.¹⁸

Stalin’s active engagement with philosophical issues was sporadic.¹⁹ His earliest major work, Anarchism or Socialism? (1906–7), was a fundamentalist defence of Marxist philosophy against criticisms levelled by various Russian anarchists. He didn’t return to such discourse until the Short Course. In between he read a few philosophy texts, kept abreast of intra-Marxist theoretical disputes and, if the Jan Sten story is to be believed, took a few tutorials in Hegelian dialectics. In 1930 he intervened in a Soviet philosophy debate that pitted so-called ‘mechanists’ against ‘dialecticians’, essentially a dispute about how much credit should be given to Hegel as a dialectician. Stalin sided with the mechanists, who argued that Hegelian dialectics were too formal, too abstract and too detached from political practice.

Anarchism or Socialism? was based primarily on the writings of Marx and Engels. ‘Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx’s proletarian socialism logically flows,’ wrote Stalin. ‘This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.’

Marxism’s method was dialectical and its theory materialistic. Dialectics was based on the idea that in life change was constant. Marxist materialism asserted that when the material conditions of life changed so did people’s consciousness, but only after a time lag. Adroit political intervention during that lag could speed up the changes necessary to achieve the revolutionary transformation of both material life and consciousness.

In Stalin’s Marxist universe, history was inevitably moving in the direction of socialism because it was the only system in which the forces of economic development would be able to reach their full potential. Marxist struggles for socialism were not based on utopian aspirations but on knowledge of the objective dynamics of social development. ‘Proletarian socialism’, Stalin wrote, was a ‘logical deduction from dialectical materialism’. It was a ‘scientific socialism’.²⁰

Stalin railed against anarchist accusations that Marxist dialectics were not a method but a metaphysics. But it is hard not to conclude that the anarchists were right: what Stalin proposed first and foremost was an ontology, a general theory of reality, a description and analysis of what the world was actually like.

The ontological foundations of dialectical and historical materialism were stressed even more by Stalin in the Short Course. Reality is material, knowable and subject to definite laws, argued Stalin. This is true of both nature and the social world. Dialectics revealed that reality – human and physical – was interconnected, integrated and holistic, and in a state of constant movement and change.