Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin was replying to the workers’ greetings and he began by modestly denying he was the ‘legendary warrior-knight’ they thought him to be. The true story of his political life, said Stalin, was that he had been educated by the prolet-ariat. His first teachers were those Tbilisi workers he came into contact with when he was placed in charge of a study circle of railwaymen in 1898. From them he received lessons in practical political work. This was his ‘first baptism in the revolutionary struggle’, when he served as an ‘apprentice in the art of revolution’. His ‘second baptism in the revolutionary struggle’ were the years (1907–9) he spent in Baku organising the oil workers. It was in Baku that he ‘became a journeyman in the art of revolution’. After a period in the wilderness – ‘wandering[s] from one prison or place of exile to another’ – he was sent by the party to Petrograd where in 1917 he received his ‘third baptism in the revolutionary struggle’. It was in Russia, under Lenin’s guidance, that he became ‘a master workman in the art of revolution’.¹⁴

Striking about Stalin’s telling of this story was that he cast it entirely in class and political terms. His Georgian background was of no consequence except as an accidental matter of geography. His formative experiences of class struggle could have happened anywhere there were workers and the culminating episode took place in Petrograd – the radical heartland of the Russian proletariat. ‘You know, Papa used to be a Georgian once,’ the young Vasily Stalin told his six-year-old sister, Svetlana, who also recorded in her memoirs that when she was a child her family ‘paid no special attention to anything Georgian – my father had become completely Russian’.¹⁵

Tovstukha wanted to write a full biography of Stalin but he had rivals for that honour within the party. One of his competitors was the party official Yemel’yan Yaroslavsky (1878–1943), who fancied himself a historian. Among his later claims to fame was co-authorship with Stalin and others of the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938) that served as the bible of the party’s history until Stalin’s death.

Yaroslavsky’s ambition to publish a biography of Stalin was stymied by Tovstukha and others in IMEL. When he appealed to Stalin for help in August 1935, he was given short shrift. ‘I am against the idea of a biography about me,’ wrote Stalin on Yaroslavsky’s letter. ‘Gorky had a plan like yours, and he also asked me, but I have backed away from this issue. I don’t think the time has come for a Stalin biography!’¹⁶

The problem was that the absence of a proper, official biography was a yawning gap in a vista that Stalin himself had opened up in 1931 when he published a letter on ‘Some Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism’ in the journal Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya.¹⁷ Stalin’s missive was a long and boring diatribe against a young historian called Anatoly Slutsky who published an article that had the cheek to criticise aspects of Lenin’s policy towards German social democracy before the First World War. Stalin denounced the article and its author as ‘anti-party’ and ‘semi-Trotskyist’. Tedious and tendentious though it was, Stalin’s denunciation of Slutsky was not a purely dogmatic assertion of the party line on Lenin: his criticisms were supported by a detailed textual and historical analysis of the issue.

As punishment for his temerity, Slutsky was expelled from the Society of Marxist Historians and lost his post at the Communist Academy’s Institute of History. He was then expelled from the communist party.¹⁸

In his ‘letter’, Stalin took the opportunity to launch a broader attack on the work of party historians, including Yaroslavsky: ‘Who, except hopeless bureaucrats, can rely on written documents alone? Who, except archive rats, does not understand that a party and its leaders must be tested primarily by their deeds . . . Lenin taught us to test revolutionary parties, trends and leaders not by their declarations and resolutions, but by their deeds.’¹⁹