Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

12. On Tovstukha: N. E. Rosenfeldt, The ‘Special’ World: Stalin’s Power Apparatus and the Soviet System’s Secret Structures of Communication, Museum Tusculanum Press: Copenhagen 2009 passim; V. G. Mosolov, IMEL: Tsitadel’ Partiinoi Ortodoksii, Novyi Khronograf: Moscow 2010 chap.3; V. A. Torchinov & A. M. Leontuk, Vokrug Stalina: Istoriko-Biograficheskii Spravochnik, Filologicheskii Fakul’tet Sankt-Peterburgskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta: St Petersburg 2000 pp.481–3.

13. D. Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination and Terror under Stalin, 1927–1941, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2011 p.55. An English translation of Tovstukha’s dictionary piece may found in G. Haupt & J-J. Marie (eds), Makers of the Russian Revolution: Biographies of Bolshevik Leaders, Allen & Unwin: London 1974 pp.65–75. This book also contains translations of the other Granat biographies of top Bolsheviks.

14. ‘Reply to the Greetings of the Workers in the Chief Railway Workshops in Tiflis’ in J. V. Stalin, Works, vol.8, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1954 pp.182–4 (emphasis added). This speech and its religious connotations were brought to my attention by A. J. Rieber, ‘Stalin: Man of the Borderlands’, American Historical Review (December 2001) p.1673.

15. S. Alliluyeva, 20 Letters to a Friend, Penguin: Harmondsworth 1968 p.35. My downplaying of the significance of Stalin’s Georgian roots and identity would be contested by Alfred J. Rieber, Ronald Suny and many others.

16. Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis, p.60.

17. J. Stalin, ‘Some Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism’ in J. V. Stalin, Works, vol.13, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1955 pp.86–104. On the letter and its background and broader consequences see J. Barber, Soviet Historians in Crisis, 1928–1932, Macmillan: London 1981 esp. chap.10.

18. Slutsky was arrested in 1937 and survived twenty years in the Gulag. He continued to work as a historian and published a book about Franz Mehring, Marx’s first biographer. Employed in the 1960s by the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute for History, he died in 1979.

19. Stalin, Works, vol.13 p.99.

20. Ibid., pp.107–8.

21. See L. Yaresh, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’ in C. E. Black (ed.), Rewriting Russian History, Vintage: New York 1962.

22. J. Devlin, ‘Beria and the Development of the Stalin Cult’ in G. Roberts (ed.), Stalin: His Times and Ours, IAREES: Dublin 2005 pp.33–5. The copy of the book that Stalin marked may be viewed at RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.704. For an English translation of the 4th Russian edition of the book see L. Beria, On the History of the Bolshevik Organizations in Transcaucasia, Lawrence and Wishart: London n.d.

23. A. Sobanet, ‘Henri Barbusse and Stalin’s Official Biography’ in his Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland and the Cult of Personality, Indiana University Press: Bloomington 2018 p.57.

24. Bol’shaya Tsenzura: Pisateli i Zhurnalisty v Strane Sovetov, 1917–1956, Demokratiya: Moscow 2005 doc.201.

25. Ibid., doc.200.

26. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.699, doc.17. Also published in ibid., doc.256.

27. Sobanet, ‘Henri Barbusse’, pp.41, 83. At the time of his death Barbusse was working on a screenplay of Stalin’s life.

28. Barbusse letter of February 1934. Cited by K. Morgan, ‘Pseudo-Facts and Pseudo-Leaders: Henri Barbusse and the Dilemmas of Representing the Pre-War Stalin Cult’ (forthcoming article).

29. H. Barbusse, Stalin: A New World Seen Through One Man, Macmillan: London 1935 pp.175–6.

30. Sobanet, ‘Henri Barbusse’, pp.86–7.

31. S. Davies & J. Harris, Stalin’s World: Dictating the Soviet Order, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2014 pp.149, 158–9.

32. Cited by D. Brandenberger, ‘Stalin as Symbol: A Case Study of the Personality Cult and its Construction’ in S. Davies & J. Harris (eds), Stalin: A New History, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2005 p.261.