Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

11. Another Kipling fan, President Vladimir Putin referenced The Jungle Book in his annual address to the Russian Federation in April 2021 when he mentioned Tabaquis the jackal, and Shere Khan the tiger, warning other countries that they shouldn’t treat Russia like these two treated other animals in Kipling’s fairy tale, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/65418. Accessed 4 August 2021.

12. A. Sergeev & E. Glushik, Kak Zhil, Rabotal i Vospityval Detei I. V. Stalin, Krymskii Most: Moscow 2011 p.18. Stalin’s inscription was drawn to my attention by Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2019 p.611. Slezkine’s book is the history of a building complex across the river from the Kremlin that housed government officials and other members of the Soviet elite. Artem Sergeev lived there with his mother when he wasn’t staying with Stalin.

13. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter RGASPI), F.558, Op.3, D.52.

14. Yu. G. Murin (ed.), Iosif Stalin v Ob”yatiyakh Sem’i, Rodina: Moscow 1993 doc.84.

15. D. Brandenberger & M. Zelenov (eds), Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2019.

16. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.76.The book was inscribed ‘To Vasya from Stalin’.

17. Murin (ed.), Iosif Stalin v Ob”yatiyakh Sem’i, doc.94. Vasily joined the air force in 1940 and rose to the rank of general. After Stalin’s death he was arrested for anti-Soviet slander and misappropriation of state funds and sentenced to eight years in prison. He spent the rest of his life in and out of gaol. Like his paternal grandfather Beso Dzhugashvili, he had a drink problem and died of causes related to alcohol abuse in 1962, a few days short of his forty-first birthday.

18. S. Alliluyeva, Only One Year, Penguin: London 1971 p.318.

19. Twenty or so of Svetlana’s books may be found in Moscow’s Gosudarstvennaya Obshchestvenno-Politicheskaya Biblioteka (State Socio-Political Library – hereafter SSPL) as part of a collection of books from Stalin’s personal library, which the dictator himself did not mark. Many of her books contain pometki similar to her father’s, including the interjections ‘wrong’, ‘nonsense’ and ‘ha, ha, ha!’, which she wrote in the margin of Lenin’s hallowed text on materialist philosophy.

20. Quoted by R. Debray, ‘Socialism: A Life-Cycle’, New Left Review, 46 (July–August 2007).

21. K. Clark, Moscow, The Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA 2011 p.13.

22. Literaturnaya Gazeta, 17 August 1934. My citation is from RGASPI, F.71, Op.10, D.170, L.162.

23. S. Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras, Palgrave Macmillan: London 2000 p.12.

24. M. David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929, Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY & London 1997.

25. J. Pateman, ‘Lenin on Library Organisation in Socialist Society’, Library & Information History, 35/2 (2019). I am grateful to the author for a copy of his article. Statistics are from E. Shishmareva and I. Malin, ‘The Story of Soviet Libraries’, USSR [information bulletin of the Soviet embassy in the USA], 6/53 (24 July 1946).

26. S. McMeekin, Stalin’s War, Allen Lane: London 2021 p.625.

27. D. Fainberg, Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore 2020 p.50.

28. P. Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1985 p.249.

29. P. Corrigan, ‘Walking the Razor’s Edge: The Origins of Soviet Censorship’ in L. Douds, J. Harris & P. Whitewood (eds), The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation, 1917–41, Bloomsbury Academic: London 2020 p.209.