Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

The primary source for this book has been the many thousands of files in Stalin’s lichnyi fond, or personal file series. A good deal of this archive has been digitised and documents may be viewed online at Yale’s Stalin Digital Archive (stalindigitalarchive.com) or its Russian government equivalent (sovdoc.rusarchives.ru) – a facility that proved to be priceless during the last phase of my research. Unfortunately, only a third of Stalin’s marked library books (those containing his pometki) are available online. The rest may be viewed in Moscow’s Russian State Archive of Social-Political History (RGASPI is its Russian acronym). There are another hundred or so marked books in other sections of Stalin’s archive, mostly undigitised. Several thousand unmarked books from Stalin’s collection may be found in the special collections section of the Centre for Social-Political History of the Russian State Historical Library (formerly the State Socio-Political Library) in Moscow. I had a look at a few of these but mostly studied the handwritten card catalogues of their titles.

Throughout the book, I have allowed Stalin to speak with his own voice so that readers may judge for themselves his qualities as an intellectual. Fifty years ago, when I began to amass my own personal library, I bought a second-hand set of the thirteen volumes of the English edition of Stalin’s collected works. I can’t say I paid them much attention in the ensuing decades but it proved a prescient purchase. These works, together with many other writings by Stalin, are now available on www.marxists.org.

It will be evident from my endnotes that I have benefited enormously from the researches of other scholars. The quality of work on Stalin and his era is truly astounding. It has been a great pleasure to read and make copious use of this research. Below is a list of English-language books focused on Stalin that I have found the most useful and reliable. I have excluded books by authors who published before the collapse of the USSR and didn’t have the opportunity to work in the Russian archives. But older works by Isaac Deutscher, Robert McNeal, Ian Grey, Robert Tucker and many others can still be read with great profit.

 

Brandenberger, D., & M. Zelenov (eds), Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2019

Davies, S., & J. Harris, Stalin’s World: Dictating the Soviet Order, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2014

Fitzpatrick, S., On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2015

Getty, J. Arch, & O. V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 1999

Kemp-Welch, A., Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928–1939, St Martin’s Press: New York 1991

Khlevniuk, O., Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2015

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

—, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1928–1941, Penguin: London 2017

Kun, M., Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, CEU Press: Budapest 2003

Kuromiya, H., Stalin, Pearson: Harlow 2005

Medvedev, R., and Z. Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin: His Life, Death and Legacy, Overlook Press: Woodstock NY 2004

Pollock, E., Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2006

Rayfield, D., Stalin and His Hangmen, Viking: London 2004.

Read, C., Stalin: From the Caucasus to the Kremlin, Routledge: London 2017

Ree, E. van, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, Routledge: London 2002

Rieber, A. J., Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015

Roberts, G., Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2006

Rubenstein, J., The Last Days of Stalin, Yale University Press: London & New Haven 2016

Service, R., Stalin: A Biography, Macmillan: London 2004