Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

For his ‘unmarxian’ sins, Yaroshenko was excluded from the party, arrested, imprisoned and then, after Stalin’s death, released, rehabilitated and readmitted. The Political Economy textbook published in 1954 reflected Stalin’s fundamentalist view, but post-Stalin Soviet economics was overwhelmingly focused on the task identified by Yaroshenko: how to improve planning to make socialism more economically productive and better able to meet the economic needs of state and society. Stalin’s focus on scientific economic laws became increasingly irrelevant in Soviet economic discourse, and his last writings little more than a historical curiosity.⁶²

Stalin’s legacy for the economic study of capitalism was just as woeful, as Richard B. Day explained:

He left behind a community of researchers whose thinking was frozen in analogies from the 1930s. The capitalist countries were entering one of the longest periods of economic growth in history; the Stalinist view held that they were languishing in a chronic depression. . . . Working class living standards would soon surpass anything imaginable in the 1930s; Stalinists predicted absolute impoverishment and unemployment for tens of millions. Capitalist countries were incorporating welfare-state measures into the fabric of modern life; Stalinist doctrine claimed that control of the state by the monopolies and their reactionary political agents inevitably produced a one-sided war economy.⁶³

All these examples of Stalin as editor show that he was a Bolshevik first and an intellectual second. In theory, he stood for truth and intellectual rigour. In practice, his beliefs were politically driven dogma. He extolled the rigours of historical science but put them aside when it was expedient to do so. He thought Marxist philosophy was both rational and empirically verifiable but its ontological foundations were beyond questioning. Marxism-Leninism was, he claimed, a creative approach to understanding the world, a guide to practice and an instrument of progressive change, but unwavering was his fundamentalist belief that socialism was inevitable as well as desirable.

Stalin’s unremitting pursuit of socialism and communism enabled his greatest achievements but at the cost of equally great misdeeds. Had he been more intellectual and less Bolshevik, he might have moderated his actions and achieved more at less cost to humanity.

CONCLUSION

The Dictator Who Loved Books

‘I saw no less than five or six different Stalins,’ recalled the dictator’s loyal lieutenant, Lazar Kaganovich, in conversation with the Soviet writer Felix Chuev. The postwar Stalin was different from the prewar person, said Kaganovich, and before 1932 [the year Nadya committed suicide] he was somebody else entirely. But he backtracked when Chuev asked him how Stalin was different. ‘He was different but he was one,’ replied Kaganovich. He was tough, resolute and calm, a self-controlled person who never said anything without first thinking things over. ‘Always I saw him thinking. He talked to you but he was always thinking, always purposeful.’¹

The idea that Stalin was a man of many parts and faces – what the Russians call a litsedei – is a staple of his biography.² Revolutionary, state-builder, moderniser, monster, genius, genocidaire, warlord – these are just a few of his featured lives.³ Concluding his magnificent biography of the young Stalin, Ronald Suny was at pains to distinguish the youthful idealist that populates most of his book’s many pages from the power-mad politician of the post-revolutionary years.⁴ Yet the story of Stalin’s life as an intellectual is one of continuity. The young Stalin and the mature man are recognisably the same person. Stalin read and marked books in 1952 in much the same way he did in 1922 – actively, methodically and with feeling. The same is true of Stalin the writer. ‘In his first essays written for the clandestine Georgian paper Brdzola’, wrote Isaac Deutscher in 1947, ‘one finds already almost the same range of ideas, the same method of exposition, the same style that would be characteristic for Stalin even thirty years later.’⁵

Books drew Stalin to the revolution and reading remained essential to his autonomy as a political actor. As Suny showed so well, Stalin’s intellectual and political loyalty to Lenin was a matter of conviction, not faith. He read Lenin and his critics and came to his own conclusions. His rationale for Bolshevik violence, repression and authoritarianism was deeply flawed but it was his own, and it was rooted in reason. That’s why he read Kautsky’s critique of Bolshevism as well as Lenin’s and Trotsky’s defences of the new Soviet regime.