Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

But in one important respect, Stalin’s editing did endure: volume three contained hardly any Lenin or Stalin quotes. For the most part, it was a dry and dispassionate diplomatic history that only at the very end let rip a broadside against the ‘methods of bourgeois diplomacy’. This was written by another historian favourite of Stalin’s, E. V. Tarle (1874–1955), a specialist on Napoleon and the 1812 war. Among the aforesaid methods were aggression masquerading as defence; propaganda, disinformation and demagogy; threats and intimidation; and using the protection of weak states as a pretext for war. According to Tarle, Stalin asked him personally to write this chapter.²⁵

British historian Max Beloff’s highly critical review of volume three bemoaned its poor use of sources. Sources that suited the proffered interpretation were cited with no effort made to assess their accuracy and reliability, while the sources on Soviet foreign policy consisted entirely of official pronouncements.²⁶

LESS IS MORE: THE SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Stalin’s role during the Second World War was the culminating episode of his biography. Preparations for that ‘inevitable war’ drove his brutal push to modernise Russia. The Soviet victory over Nazi Germany was by far his greatest achievement. From near defeat in 1941 the USSR emerged as a mighty socialist state that controlled half of Europe and had the power to compete for global supremacy against the war’s other great victor, the United States.

The momentous nature of the war made it imperative to revise Stalin’s Short Biography, published by the Institute of Marx, Engels and Lenin (IMEL) in 1939. There was also a great deal of interest in his biography internationally. The Stalin cult had gone global. Stalin was Time Man of the Year in both 1939 and 1942. During the war, Stalin was inundated with questions and requests for interviews from foreign journalists. In January 1943 New York publishers Simon & Schuster wrote to Stalin suggesting that he write them a book about Soviet war and peace aims.²⁷ Soon after the war the Kremlin received enquiries from a British publisher wishing to issue a photographic biography of Stalin and from an American company that wanted to include him in its Biographical Encyclopedia of the World.²⁸

A redraft of the Short Biography was sent to Stalin for approval in late 1946. Stalin had affected disinterest in the first edition but was greatly interested this time, perhaps because the new version dealt with his military leadership. The draft landed on his desk while he was still revelling in his feats as supreme commander and jostling to snatch the limelight of victory from generals such as his deputy, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, whom he had recently dismissed as commander-in-chief of Soviet ground forces.

Stalin was not satisfied with the new edition and at the end of December he called in the editorial team for what David Brandenberger rightly calls ‘a collective dressing-down’.²⁹

The editorial team was headed by Agitprop chief Georgy Alexandrov, and included the historian Vasily Mochalov, who also played a key role in the production of Stalin’s collected works. Twelve months previously, Mochalov had been summoned to Stalin’s Kremlin office to discuss that project. As we learned in Chapter Two, he wrote a report of that memorable encounter, and he did the same for this meeting.

The need for a biography of Lenin that would teach people Marxism-Leninism was Stalin’s first comment. As to his own biography, it was full of mistakes. ‘I have all kinds of teachings,’ said Stalin sarcastically – about the war, communism, industrialisation, collectivisation, etc. ‘What are people supposed to do after reading this biography? Get down on their knees and pray to me?’ The biography should instil in people a love of the party. It should feature other party cadres. The chapter on the Great Patriotic War wasn’t bad, although it, too, needed to mention other prominent personalities.³⁰

Mochalov’s account tallies with that of Pravda editor P. N. Pospelov. ‘There is some idiocy in the biography draft,’ complained Stalin to Pospelov. ‘And it is Alexandrov who is responsible for this idiocy.’³¹ Pospelov took particular note of Stalin’s demand that it should reference leading figures who had worked with him in Baku, name those who had also taken up Lenin’s banner after his death, and mention the members of his Supreme Command during the war. Something should also be added about the role of women, said Stalin. The tone of the biography was ‘SRish’ i.e. too focused on him as a hero. To prove that point, he quoted the line, ‘No one in the world ever led such broad masses.’ And nowhere did the biography state what Stalin had told Emil Ludwig in 1931 – that he considered himself merely a pupil of Lenin’s.³²