Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

78. For a sustained questioning of the assumption that Lenin was the author of the words attributed to him, see Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, chap.11. Kotkin’s analysis is based mainly on the findings of the Russian historian Valentin Sakharov: Politicheskoe Zaveshchanie Lenina: Real’nost’ Istorii i Mify Politik, Moskovskii Universitet 2003. For a completely different view, one which emphasises Stalin’s manipulation of the text of the will and its presentation to the party, see Y. Buranov, Lenin’s Will: Falsified and Forbidden, Prometheus Books: Amherst NY 1994.

79. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/vol02/no01/lenin.htm. Accessed 4 August 2021.

80. Cited by Read, Stalin: From the Caucasus to the Kremlin, p.102. The comment is said to have been occasioned by Stalin’s rudeness to Lenin’s wife.

81. Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, pp.528–9.

82. Buranov, Lenin’s Will, p.201. Stalin repeated this point at the October 1927 plenum of the party but without quoting Lenin’s Testament directly.

83. Stalin, Works, vol.10, p.53.

84. I. Banac (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2003 p.66.

85. J. Harris, ‘Discipline versus Democracy: The 1923 Party Controversy’ in L. Douds, J. Harris & P. Whitewood (eds), The Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation, 1917–41, Bloomsbury Academic: London 2020 p.111.

86. Interview with Barack Obama, New York Times (16 January 2017); rbth.com. Accessed 30 August 2021.

CHAPTER 4: THE LIFE AND FATE OF A DICTATOR’S LIBRARY

1. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (hereafter RGASPI) F.558, Op.1, D.2510.

2. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, Dd.273–4.

3. J. V. Stalin, Concerning Marxism in Linguistics, Soviet News Booklet: London 1950 pp.11–12, 20.

4. D. Volkogonov, Triumf i Tragediya: Politicheskii Portret I. V. Stalina, Book One, Part Two, Novosti: Moscow 1989 pp.118–20. In English: Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, pb edition Phoenix Press: London 2000 pp.225–6.

5. Donald Rayfield states that Stalin’s classification scheme was prompted by his wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who ‘took the lead from Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s satrap in Leningrad’ and had a librarian classify and reshelve his books. ‘Stalin was furious. He jotted down his own classification of books and had his secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev rearrange them accordingly.’ (D. Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, Viking: London 2004 p.21). Rayfield cites no source but it seems to derive from a memoir by the assassinated Kirov’s widow, S. L. [Maria] Markus, who recalled that when she suggested to her husband that a librarian should tidy up his books he told her that when Stalin’s wife had done the same thing, he had not then been able to find anything! RGASPI, F.558, Op.4, D.649, L.213. This document was drawn to my attention by Y. Gromov, Stalin: Iskusstvo i Vlast’, Eksmo: Moscow 2003 p.59, which misprints the page number of the cited document as L.217.

6. RGASPI F.558, Op.1, D.2723. The existence of this note was drawn to my attention by M. Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, CEU Press: Budapest 2003 p.311 n.8.

7. RGASPI F.558, Op.1, D.2764.

8. Ekslibrisy i Shtempeli Chastnykh Kollektsii v Fondakh Istoricheskoi Biblioteki, GPIB: Moscow 2009 p.61. On the history of Russian bookplates and ex-libris stamps: W. E. Butler, ‘The Ballard Collection of Russian Bookplates’, Yale University Library Gazette, 60/3–4 (April 1986).

9. Sh. Manuchar’yants, V Biblioteke Vladimira Il’icha, 2nd edn, Politizdat: Moscow 1970 p.14.

10. B. Ilizarov, Tainaya Zhizn’ Stalina, Veche: Moscow 2003 p.163. The source is a letter from Svetlana to the party leadership in 1955 in which she tried to claim ownership of her mother’s books.

11. Cited by E. van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, Routledge: London 2002 p.120.

12. Cited by O. V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2015 p.96.

13. S. Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928, Allen Lane: London 2014 p.431.