Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

25. V. P. Potemkin (ed.), Istoriya Diplomatii, vol.3, Ogiz: Moscow-Leningrad 1945 pp.701–64. See further V. V. Aspaturian, ‘Diplomacy in the Mirror of Soviet Scholarship’ in J. Keep & L. Brisby (eds), Contemporary History in the Soviet Mirror, Praeger: New York 1964. Tarle made the claim about Stalin in a letter to the party leader, G. M. Malenkov, in September 1945, to whom he had written complaining about a critical review of his book on the Crimean War that had just appeared in the party’s journal Bol’shevik: I. A. Sheina, ‘Akademik E. V. Tarle i Vlast’: Pis’ma Istorika I. V. Stalinu i G. M. Malenkovu, 1937–1950gg’, Istoricheskii Arkhiv, 3 (2001). Unbeknown to Tarle, but not to Stalin, he had recently come under attack within the party for advocating a soft line on the iniquities of nineteenth-century Tsarist foreign policy. The review reflected that criticism of Tarle, even though it had not and did not become public knowledge. It’s possible that Stalin asked Tarle to write the piece on the methods of bourgeois diplomacy when he met him and Potemkin on 3 June 1941, a meeting that lasted an hour and a half, at which the three men presumably discussed the follow-up to the recently published first volume of Istoriya Diplomatii.

26. M. Beloff, ‘A Soviet History of Diplomacy’, Soviet Studies, 1/2 (October 1949). In a 1941 book on the history of Soviet foreign policy by A. A. Troyanovskii & B. E. Shtein, Stalin deleted a reference that attributed the direction of diplomacy to him and Lenin and substituted the party. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.390, p.6 of the book.

27. Ibid., Op.11, Dd.221–2. The Simon & Schuster letter may be found in D.221, doc.19. The letter was translated into Russian and its salient points marked by either Stalin or his staff. Stalin did not reply. The letter was brought to my attention by S. McMeekin, Stalin’s War, Allen Lane: London 2021 p.455. McMeekin mischaracterises the letter as a proposal that Stalin should write an autobiography.

28. Ibid., D.1280, Ll.4–9.

29. D. Brandenberger, ‘Stalin as Symbol: A Case Study of the Personality Cult and Its Construction’, in S. Davies & J. Harris (eds), Stalin: A New History, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2005 p.265.

30. I. Stalin, Sochineniya, vol.17, Severnaya Korona: Tver 2004 pp.630–3. The meeting took place during the evening of 23 December 1946 and lasted for an hour and a quarter.

31. Brandenberger, ‘Stalin as Symbol’.

32. Bol’shaya Tsenzura: Pisateli i Zhurnalisty v Strane Sovetov, 1917–1956, Demokratiya: Moscow 2005 doc.416.

33. My summary of Stalin’s editing of the Short Biography is based on S. Davies & J. Harris, Stalin’s World: Dictating the Soviet Order, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2014 pp.155–6; V. A. Belyanov, ‘I. V. Stalin Sam o Sebe: Redaktsionnaya Pravka Sobstvennoi Biografii’, Izvestiya TsK KPSS, 9 (1990); and RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.1280. The latter file contains one of the dummies of the Short Biography corrected by Stalin. There are other makety in Dd.1281–2, not seen by me.

34. During the war, Stalin was more modest about his contribution. Upon receipt of a 1943 General Staff history of the battle for Moscow, he deleted a reference to the ‘leadership of comrade Stalin’. RGASPI, F.558, Op.3, D.300, p.4 of the book. This was one of a number of internal studies of the battles and campaigns of the Great Patriotic War that were not published until post-Soviet times.

35. Joseph Stalin: A Short Biography, Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1949 p.89.

36. RGASPI, F.558, Op.11, D.1284.

37. J. Degras (ed.), Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, vol.3 (1933–1941), Oxford University Press: London 1953 p.492.

38. ‘Captain H. H. Balfour Moscow Diary 1941’, Harriman Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, container 64.

39. W. S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol.1, Cassell: London 1948 p.344.

40. Istoriya Diplomatii, vol.3 pp.668–9, 672, 680, 682.

41. See F. Hirsch, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II, Oxford University Press: New York 2020 passim.

42. RGASPI F.558, Op.11, Dd.239–42. Stalin did not mark the translation.

43. Ibid., D.243, doc.1, L.1. Reportedly, the historians group consisted of V. M. Khvostov (1905–1972), G. A. Deborin (1907–1987) and B. E. Shtein (1892–1961).