Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

In his interview with Emil Ludwig a couple of months later, Stalin reinforced the point that in the study of history, people and their actions mattered most. When the German writer commented that ‘Marxism denies that the individual plays an outstanding role in history’, Stalin responded that ‘Marxism does not at all deny the role played by outstanding individuals or that history is made by people’, though, of course, they do not make history under conditions of their own choosing: ‘And great people are worth anything at all only to the extent that they are able to correctly understand these conditions, to understand how to change them.’ When Ludwig persisted with his argument, saying that ‘Marxism denies the role of heroes, the role of heroic personalities in history’, Stalin replied that ‘Marxism has never denied the role of heroes. On the contrary, it admits that they play a considerable role.’²⁰

By suggesting that ‘heroes’ can by their actions fundamentally change the existing social order – the pre-eminent example being Lenin’s determination to stage a socialist revolution in 1917 – Stalin gave a voluntaristic spin to the deterministic Marxist orthodoxy that individuals are only important insofar as they personify the historical process and act in accordance with the laws of social development.²¹ But devotees of his personality cult yearned for an edifying account of their hero’s epic life story.

BERIA AND BARBUSSE

The vacuum created by the absence of an authorised Stalin biography was filled by two publications. Firstly, a book-length lecture by Lavrenty Beria, On the History of the Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia. Secondly, and more surprisingly, a semi-official popular biography of Stalin by the French communist intellectual Henri Barbusse (1873–1935).

Prior to becoming Stalin’s security chief in 1938, Beria headed the Georgian communist party. The Tbilisi branch of IMEL was particularly dedicated to the study of Stalin’s pre-1917 political activities in Transcaucasia and Beria published a (ghost-written) article on this topic in the party’s theoretical journal Bol’shevik in 1934. In July 1935 he delivered a long lecture on the same subject to a party audience in Tbilisi. The text of his lecture was serialised in Pravda and then published as a book. Party members throughout the USSR were instructed to study it carefully. Beria sent an inscribed copy to his ‘Dear, beloved, teacher, the Great Stalin’, who read the book and marked a few of its pages, mainly underlining the dates of events that he had been involved in. As Judith Devlin writes, the book soon became a Stalin cult classic, was issued in eight separate editions and remained in print until Stalin’s death in 1953.²²

Beria’s glowing account of the young Stalin’s revolutionary activities was notable for the number of unsigned publications in Georgian that he attributed to Stalin and for his utilisation of unpublished memoirs by Stalin’s old comrades and acquaintances. The limitation of Beria’s rather turgid text was that, apart from Stalin, it was populated by personages that few people had ever heard of – or cared about – and dealt with equally obscure events.

Henri Barbusse was a famous pacifist and anti-war writer. A member of the French communist party from 1923, he helped organise the 1932 Amsterdam World Congress Against War and headed the World Committee Against War and Fascism founded in 1933. While Stalin conversed with a number of prominent western intellectuals in the 1930s, Barbusse was the only one he met in the 1920s as well. Stalin talked to Barbusse four times – in September 1927, October 1932, August 1933 and November 1934. ‘I’m not so busy that I can’t find time to talk to Comrade Barbusse,’ Stalin remarked at their 1932 meeting.²³

The idea of writing a biography of Stalin was prompted by conversations that Barbusse had with the communist propaganda impresario Willi Münzenberg, a German revolutionary who worked for the Moscow-based Communist International (Comintern), established by the Bolsheviks in March 1919 to spread the revolution.²⁴ In December 1932 the Soviet party’s propaganda section wrote to Stalin recommending that Barbusse’s proposal to write such a book should be accepted. Tovstukha was proposed as the overseer of the project but, in the event, that task was carried out by party propaganda chief Alexei Stetsky.²⁵

Though published in the USSR, as well as France and other countries, Barbusse’s biography was intended mainly for an international audience. It was this propagandistic purpose, together with Barbusse’s fame as a writer and his reliability as a communist, that persuaded Stalin to back the project. No doubt Stalin was impressed, too, by the fact that Barbusse had already written a biography of one of his literary heroes, Emile Zola, a Russian translation of that book having been published in early 1933.