Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin was a Marxist fundamentalist but some of his ideas did evolve in response to changing circumstances, new experiences and accumulated knowledge. The construction of the world’s first socialist society was for him an intellectual as well as a practical project. Theorisation and strategisation were as important as policy detail. As party leader he was inundated with briefings and documentation, but more often than not it was extra-curricular reading that guided his responses to the challenges of building and defending Soviet socialism.

Stalin’s adoption of the doctrine of socialism in one country in the mid-1920s is inexplicable without reference to his reading and interpretation of Lenin’s writings, as well as his careful critique of the opposing views of Trotsky and Zinoviev. As consequential was his rereading of the lessons of Russian history. Defence of the Tsarist-created Russian state was a central task of Soviet communists by the mid-1930s. Stalin mobilised Russian cultural and historical traditions and embraced the concept of a Russocentric state based on ‘the friendship of the Soviet peoples’. Popular history textbooks he helped to produce played a significant role in fostering Soviet patriotism.

During the Russian Civil War, Stalin shared Lenin’s apocalyptic vision of a cataclysmic clash between socialism and capitalism. But when the civil war ended in Bolshevik victory, they both changed their minds about the possibilities of peaceful co-existence with the imperialists. The Soviets began to practise diplomacy and Stalin started to read about it. The Bolsheviks framed their diplomatic tactics as the ‘exploitation of inter-imperialist contradictions’, but Stalin was also attracted to the memoirs of that conservative master of realpolitik, Otto von Bismarck. At the same time, the threat of war continued to loom large and Stalin remained preoccupied by the danger of internal and external enemies forming an unholy alliance against him. The murderous mass repressions of the 1930s were driven by his perception of a dire existential threat to the Soviet state.

Stalin’s interest in military affairs was a constant and he put his reading of military history and strategic theory to good use during the Second World War. Above all, it provided perspective and enabled him to take a bird’s-eye view of the Soviet war effort. Stalin’s generals marvelled at his strategic acumen and his deep understanding of modern warfare, the defeats and disasters of the early years of the Great Patriotic War notwithstanding.

Words were among Stalin’s most potent weapons during the cold war and he personally rewrote the Soviet counterblast to western propagandising about his short-lived pact with Hitler.

Precisely because ideas were so important to him, he was reluctant to relinquish the doctrine of the inevitability of war under capitalism. But he did reduce it to a theory of little practical significance. Nor did this ideological orthodoxy prevent him from presiding over a massive communist-led peace movement whose raison d’être was that, in the nuclear age, war was not and could not be allowed to become inevitable.⁶

Stalin’s views on roads to revolution underwent a fundamental transformation from the mid-1930s onwards when the Comintern prioritised anti-fascist unity and began to embrace the idea of a gradual, democratic transition to socialism. ‘Today socialism is possible even under the English monarchy,’ he told Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito in March 1945. ‘Revolution in no longer necessary everywhere.’ In May 1946 Poland’s communist leaders were informed that ‘Lenin never said there was no path to socialism other than the dictatorship of the proletariat, he admitted that it was possible to arrive at the path to socialism utilising the foundations of the bourgeois democratic system such as Parliament’. Czechoslovakia’s communist leader, Klement Gottwald, reported Stalin as saying in July 1946 that ‘experience shows . . . there is not one path to the Soviet system and the dictatorship of the proletariat. . . . After the defeat of Hitler’s Germany . . . there appeared many possibilities and paths open to the socialist movement.’⁷

Literature was another arena of patriotic mobilisation for Stalin, especially after the Second World War, when he became impatient of foreign influences on Soviet fiction. Promoting patriotism was also at the forefront of his various interventions in postwar scientific debates. Orchestrating discussion of the new Political Economy textbook proved to be his last effort to shape Soviet discourse on a matter of vital importance to the socialist system. It was a less than successful exercise but it showed how to the very end of his life he was grappling with the problems and challenges of the economics of socialism.