Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

2. R. G. Suny, ‘Beyond Psychohistory: The Young Stalin in Georgia’, Slavic Review, 50/1 (Spring 1991) p.52.

3. R. Brackman, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life, Frank Cass: London 2001. For a summary: R. Brackman, ‘Stalin’s Greatest Secret’, Times Higher Education Supplement (26 April 2001).

4. R. C. Tucker, ‘A Stalin Biographer’s Memoir’ in S. Baron & C. Pletsch (eds), Introspection in Biography, Routledge: New York 1985.

5. ‘Rech’ Stalina I. V. na Soveshchanii Komandnogo Sostava’, 22 March 1938, Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter RGASPI), F.558, Op.11, D.1121, Ll.49–50. Stalin told another version of his father’s story in an early article as an illustration of how a former shoemaker fallen on hard times could acquire working-class consciousness (J. Stalin, Works, vol.1, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1952 pp.317–18).

6. S. Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928, Allen Lane: London 2014 pp.21, 26.

7. My Dear Son: The Memoirs of Stalin’s Mother (Kindle edition).

8. R. H. McNeal, Stalin: Man and Ruler, Macmillan: London 1988 p.4; I. Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, Penguin: Harmondsworth 1966 p.36. The informant was G. Glurdzhidze, who was a teacher in Gori at the time he was interviewed about Stalin’s childhood in 1939.

9. RGASPI, F.558, Op.4, D.5; O. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2015 p.15.

10. R. Service, Stalin: A Biography, Macmillan: London 2004 p.35.

11. RGASPI, F.558, Op.4, D.600. The texts (in Russian) may also be found in I. Stalin, Sochineniya, vol.17, Severnaya Korona: Tver’ 2004 pp.1–6. For translation of some extracts, including the one cited here, see Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution, pp.57–9.

12. Suny, ibid., pp.64–6.

13. Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, p.37.

14. A. J. Rieber, ‘Stalin as Georgian: The Formative Years’ in S. Davies & J. Harris (eds), Stalin: A New History, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2005 p.36.

15. According to the 1922 chronology prepared by his staff, Stalin was excluded from the seminary for ‘unreliability’.

16. RGASPI, F.558, Op.4, D.65; M. Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, CEU Press: Budapest 2003 p.31.

17. J. Stalin, Works, vol.2, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1953, p.368.

18. Cited by R. Boer, ‘Religion and Socialism: A. V. Lunacharsky and the God-Builders’, Political Theology, 15/2 (March 2014) p.205. See also S. Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organisation of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1970 pp.4–5. For context and the relationship between the contemporaneous ‘God-seeking’ and ‘God-building’ movements see E. Clowes, ‘From Beyond the Abyss: Nietzschean Myth in Zamiatin’s “We” and Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago”’ in B. Glatzer Rosenthal (ed.), Nietzsche and Soviet Culture, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1994.

19. He may have read a review of the 1911 volume published in the January 1912 issue of the Bolshevik journal Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment) and underlined the reviewer’s phrase that, for Lunacharsky, ‘Marxism is a religion’. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.274, p.86 of the journal. This copy of Prosveshchenie is one of nineteen in Stalin’s library. Dating from 1911 to 1914, they contain quite a few scattered markings but, as Yevgeny Gromov pointed out, it is not certain that they all belong to Stalin (Stalin: Iskusstvo i Vlast’, Eksmo: Moscow 2003 p.59). The best bet is that the marking of several articles on Marxism and the National Question (including his own piece) are Stalin’s. Certainly, these particular markings correspond to the arguments and points that Stalin subsequently made in discussions about this question. Boris Ilizarov (Pochetnyi Akademik Stalin i Akademik Marr, Veche: Moscow 2012 p.113) believes Stalin may have had these copies of the journal with him in Turukhansk and then brought them home with him, but more likely is that he obtained them soon after he returned to Petrograd from exile in 1917.