Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Suny, R. G., Stalin: Passage to Revolution, Princeton University Press: Princeton 2020

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Never have I felt so pleased to express my heartfelt gratitude to the many people who have helped me to complete a book. First and foremost, there is my partner and editor extraordinaire, Celia Weston. Celia’s approach to editing is similar to Stalin’s: books should be finely sculpted so they contain no superfluous words. But even more important than the editing has been her intellectual companionship. She has interrogated and supported me during every phase of this exploration into the inner intellectual life of a learned dictator.

My biggest technical challenge was deciphering Stalin’s handwriting. In that regard, the help of Alexander Pozdeyev was indispensable. And both he and Alexandra Urakova were always on hand to discuss translation issues.

Sasha and Alexandra are among the Moscow friends to whom this book is dedicated. Another is Sergey Listikov, who has been helping me to access Russian archives for a quarter of a century. The late Oleg Rzheshevsky was also a welcoming and helpful host in Moscow.

Supportive from beginning to end was Erik van Ree. It was his pathbreaking book on Stalin’s political thought that encouraged me to take Stalin seriously as an intellectual. His own research on Stalin’s library has been invaluable, as has his advice and his answers to my many questions.

During the pandemic, when I was actually writing the book, David Brandenberger was amazingly generous with his time and resources. His writings on Soviet politics, culture and society in the 1930s and 1940s have been hugely influential in shaping my own views.

Jim Cornelius, Judith Devlin, Alfred J. Rieber and James Ryan read the book’s draft and their astute and expert feedback was gratefully received. The same is true of the three publishers’ reviews, who saved me from untold errors and prompted me to revamp the book’s structure. Be it on my own head that I took most but not all of the advice of these friends and colleagues and any remaining errors are, of course, mine.

A number of people responded to my various pleas for help: Michael Carley, Holly Case, Michael David-Fox, Susan Grant, Francis King, Mark Kramer, Irene Makaryk, Evan Mawdsley, Bruce Menning, Kevin Morgan, Vladimir Nevezhin, Pamela Neville-Sington, Joe Patman, Ethan Pollock, Malcolm Spencer, Dmitry Surzhik, John Turner, David C. Wojhan and Alexey Zadorozhny. A special thanks to Ronald Suny for sharing the manuscript of his definitive biography of the young Stalin.

While most of the Russian-language texts in my personal book collection were bought in Moscow and then shipped back home to Ireland, in recent times I relied heavily on the highly efficient services of Leonid Mejibovski of Esterum Books. I have him to thank for the prized acquisition of the memoirs of Lenin’s librarian, Shushanika Manuchar’yants, who served Stalin in the same capacity.

Over the years I received much assistance from Russian librarians and archivists but particular thanks are due to Dr Irina Novichenko, head of special collections at the Russian Historical Library’s Centre for Socio-Political History (formerly the State Socio-Political Library). On the very last day of my research for this book – in Moscow in September 2021 – she was instrumental in helping me to answer some nagging questions about Stalin’s library.

I was fortunate in being able to present my ideas about Stalin’s library to a number of probing audiences, the first being at the Dublin History Festival in 2016. This was followed by talks at the University of Tampere, University College Cork, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, the Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest and the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies. A scheduled appearance at New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia in March 2018 was thwarted by an emergency tooth extraction!

My earliest published pieces on the library were commissioned by Vadim Staklo for Yale’s Stalin Digital Archive. He was also instrumental in commissioning a Russian colleague, Yury Nikiforov, to transcribe the major part of the catalogue of Stalin’s surviving library books. The UK’s Society for Cooperation in Russian and Soviet Studies (formerly the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR) published an article by me on the library in their Bulletin. Another piece was published on the Irish Times website under the headline ‘Bloody Tyrant and Bookworm’.

Facundo Garcia, interviewed me about the project in 2019 and published an article about Stalin’s library in the Argentinian newspaper Página/12. I was also interviewed on the radio in Ireland, a country fortunate to have outstanding programmes such as Newstalk’s Talking History, and The History Show produced by its public broadcaster, RTÉ.