Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

10. Literary activities. Books, pamphlets, major articles. What newspapers and journals have you edited? Pamphlets: (1) About the Bolsheviks (in Georgian) 1904, (2) Anarchism or Socialism? (in Georgian) 1906, (3) Marxism and the National Question (in Russian) 1913. Edited the Georgian Bolshevik newspaper ‘New Times’ (1906), and Russian newspapers: ‘The Baku Proletarian’ (1908), ‘The Star’ in St Petersburg [at the time of the Lena massacre] (1912) and the central party organ ‘The Worker’s Way’ during the days of Kerensky in 1917

11. Personal Comments: Currently a member of the party Central Committee and its Orgburo

J. Stalin⁹

One curiosity concerns Stalin’s date of birth. According to church records he was born on 6 December 1878 (Old-Style Russian calendar) and that is the year he wrote in the ROSTA questionnaire. However, Stalin’s publicly declared birthday was 21 December 1879 (New-Style Russian calendar) and that was the date extravagantly celebrated as his fiftieth in 1929, and again in 1939 and 1949 as his sixtieth and seventieth birthdays. The reason for this discrepancy remains a mystery but in October 1921 Stalin completed a party registration form in which he put down 1879 as the year of his birth.¹⁰ A December 1922 biographical summary prepared by his staff stated that was the year of his birth, as did the opening line of a short biography prepared by Ivan P. Tovstukha, documents that Stalin would certainly have read and approved.¹¹

Tovstukha’s text was published as one of a series of portraits of Bolshevik leaders in the so-called Granat biographical dictionary, prepared to mark the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. A trusted and valued assistant, Tovstukha was a long-time revolutionary activist who started working for the future dictator when Stalin was appointed people’s commissar for nationalities. When Stalin became party general-secretary, Tovstukha followed him into the central party apparatus. Throughout the 1920s, he was one of Stalin’s most important aides and performed a number of key functions, including a stint as director of the Lenin Institute, which was responsible for the publication of the first edition of Lenin’s collected writings. In 1931 he was appointed deputy director of the newly created Institute of Marx, Engels and Lenin (IMEL), the party’s archive-cum-research organisation. Tovstukha died of tuberculosis in 1935 but his memory was preserved by a plaque and by naming one of the archive’s reading rooms after him.¹²

Tovstukha’s ‘biography’ of his boss, which was little more than an extended chronology of Stalin’s political career, was composed at the height of the internal party succession struggle following Lenin’s death in 1924. It stressed Stalin’s closeness to Lenin, before, during and after the revolution. It was also published as a fourteen-page pamphlet and an expanded version was published in Pravda in 1929 as one of several laudatory pieces marking Stalin’s fiftieth birthday.¹³

Tovstukha’s account was devoid of any really personal information about Stalin, and the same was true of the other Bolshevik biographies featured in the Granat. In theory, if not in always in practice, the Bolsheviks believed in self-effacement. They lived their lives in and through the collective that was the party. Their individual biographies were part and parcel of the history of the party. Their personalities and private lives were strictly subordinate to their political stories. The absence of interiority in the manner of Bildungsroman was a matter of pride.

In June 1926 Stalin went on a month-long trip to Georgia. In Tbilisi he gave a speech to railway workers in which he summarised his pre-revolutionary political journey. As befits a former seminarian, the speech was steeped in religious imagery. It was the closest he ever came to writing an autobiography.