Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin’s ontology sought to make historical materialism a science of history based on the study of the laws of social development. Knowledge of these laws guided the party’s practice: ‘The prime task of historical science is to study and disclose the laws of production, the laws of development of the productive forces and of the relations of production, the laws of economic development of society.’

As he had in Anarchism or Socialism?, Stalin stepped back from the crude economic determinism implicit in his schema. Social ideas, theories, views and political institutions originated in the economic base of society but having arisen they acquired quite a lot of autonomy, including having a determining influence on material life. Indeed, Stalin’s emphasis on the relative autonomy of the social superstructure vis-à-vis its economic base was his distinctive contribution to Marxist philosophy.

Many philosophical holes can be picked in dialectical and historical materialism, but its attractiveness as a mode of thinking should not be underestimated. As the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm recalled in his memoirs:

What made Marxism so irresistible was its comprehensiveness. ‘Dialectical materialism’ provided, if not a ‘theory of everything’, then at least a ‘framework of everything’, linking inorganic and organic nature with human affairs, collective and individual, and providing a guide to the nature of all interactions in a world of constant flux.²¹

Study of the Short Course was compulsory for virtually all educated Soviet citizens. Between 1938 and 1949 it went through 234 impressions, a total of 35.7 million copies, of which 27.5 million were in Russian, 6.4 million in the other languages of the Soviet Union and 1.8 million in foreign languages.²² Not until after Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin did the Short Course lose its official status as the definitive history of the party.

SHOW DON’T TELL: THE HISTORY OF DIPLOMACY

Stalin’s favourite editing weapon was deletion, his prime targets being quotation-mongering and excessive rhetoric. The goal was to streamline and de-clutter text, avoid repetition, and not lose sight of the wood by focusing on the trees.

Istoriya Diplomatii was commissioned by the Politburo in spring 1940. Its first volume, on the history of diplomacy from ancient times up to the Franco-Prussian war, was sent to the printers at the end of December 1940. The second volume would deal with the late nineteenth century, the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the origins of the Second World War. Stalin was sent the section on the politically tricky interwar years, the period when the Soviet Union became a central actor in the history of diplomacy.²³ The typescript was unsigned but the history’s titular editor, V. P. Potemkin, had previously indicated to Stalin that its authors would be Mints and A. M. Pankratova (1897–1957).²⁴

Stalin changed the title from ‘Diplomacy after the First World War and the Socialist Revolution in Russia’ to ‘Diplomacy in Contemporary Times (1919–1940)’. He also indicated that Russia’s exit from the First World War and the 1918 Brest-Litovsk peace treaty should be dealt with separately. Working through the text, he eliminated virtually all quotations from his and Lenin’s writings, thereby turning a propagandistic tract into an approximation of professional history, albeit of the highly partisan variety.

In many of his own articles and speeches, Stalin spelled out his political messages. Such didacticism he deemed unnecessary in this instance. Hence his deletion of many passages in this text that cast the imperialists in a bad light or read like special pleading on behalf of the Soviet government. The story itself was allowed to tell its tale of imperialist predation, hypocrisy and double-dealing on the one hand, and Soviet virtue on the other.

It turned out that these detailed edits were mostly a waste of Stalin’s time. Publication of volume two of Istoriya Diplomatii was disrupted by the outbreak of the Soviet–German war. When publication resumed in 1945, the project had metamorphosed into a much larger, three-volume work. Instead of one long chapter devoted to the interwar period, there were 700 pages in the third volume, mostly written by Mints and Pankratova, with Potemkin credited as the co-author of two chapters on 1938–9. The volume was subtitled ‘Diplomacy in the Period of the Preparation of the Second World War (1919–1939)’. There is no evidence that Stalin had a hand in editing this volume. Presumably, he was far too busy waging war.