Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

In September 1934 Stetsky sent Barbusse a long list of corrections and queries concerning the manuscript of his biography of Stalin. Stetsky’s letter to Barbusse was in French but was translated into Russian for the benefit of Stalin and other party officials.

Stetsky’s amendments had two main strands. Firstly, there were numerous corrections of factual mistakes about Stalin’s life and the history of Bolshevism. Stalin’s father was a shoemaker who worked in a factory, not a peasant. Stalin went to church school because it was free and accessible, not because his father was particularly religious. It was not Lenin but his brother who was a Narodnik (Populist). Neither Stalin nor Lenin lived in Berlin for several months. Barbusse had got wrong the dates of Stalin’s many arrests, imprisonments, exiles and so on.

Secondly, Stetsky made a sustained effort to persuade Barbusse to endorse the Soviet party view that Trotsky and the Trotskyists were not only Stalin’s political opponents but a malign and insidious influence, a counter-revolutionary force that must be rooted out of the communist movement by any means necessary.

In his covering note to Barbusse, Stetsky also expressed concern about his depiction of Stalin as a practical, commonsensical individual rather than as the greatest Marxist theoretician since Lenin. Stetsky also felt that Barbusse’s portrayal of Stalin as a person was incomplete. The biography did not show Stalin’s ‘style of work, the way he talked or his multifaceted connections with the masses; it does not show the love that surrounds Stalin’. However, Stetsky was confident that Barbusse, with all his great talent, would be able to capture and convey Stalin in all his ‘majesty’.²⁶

The biography was published in French in 1935 (Staline: Un monde nouveau vu à travers un homme – a signed copy may be found in Stalin’s library) and in Russian in 1936. In his preface to the Russian edition, Stetsky wrote that ‘the book has been written with a tremendous amount of love for the Soviet land, its peoples and its leader’. Unfortunately, by this time Barbusse was dead, having passed away during a trip to Moscow in August 1935.

His memorial meeting in Moscow was packed with Soviet intellectuals and party officials and an honour guard escorted Barbusse’s mortal remains to the railway station. An official delegation then accompanied them to Paris on the Siberian Express. Stalin himself issued a statement: ‘I share pain with you, on this occasion of the passing of our friend, the friend of the French working class, the noble son of the French people, the friend of the workers of all countries.’²⁷

Barbusse’s biography of Stalin was a hagiography but it was a clever and interesting one. Rather than a conventional biography, it was a political portrait of Stalin as the personification of the Soviet socialist project. Barbusse’s privately stated aim in writing the book was ‘to provide a complete portrait of the man on whom this social transformation pivots so that the reader may get to know him well’.²⁸ To achieve that goal he wrote a potted history of revolutionary Russia in which Stalin, together with Lenin, is the key figure, while at the same time contrasting the personalities of Trotsky and Stalin. Trotsky is depicted as arrogant, self-important, fractious, impractical, flashy, obstinate and verbose, a man of despotic character, while Stalin

relies with all his weight upon reason and practical common sense. He is impeccably and inexorably methodical. He knows. He thoroughly understands Leninism. . . . He does not try to show off and is not worried by a desire to be original. He merely tries to do everything that he can do. He does not believe in eloquence or sensationalism. When he speaks he merely tries to combine simplicity with clearness.²⁹

As this quotation shows, Stetsky did not succeed in shifting Barbusse from his view that Stalin was primarily a praktik – a man of action. He was more successful in relation to Barbusse’s treatment of Trotsky, though he would probably have wished that Stalin’s rival did not loom so large in the book. Barbusse’s conclusion was the orthodox one that by the time Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov was assassinated in December 1934, Trotsky had become a counter-revolutionary. But Barbusse plotted Trotsky’s alleged path to counter-revolution carefully and plausibly. His account of the disputes with Lenin and Stalin that led Trotsky to a counter-revolutionary position was highly effective compared to the hysterical denunciations and polemics of Soviet propagandists.

Barbusse’s book, Andrew Sobanet suggests, may have provided a template for the plot of the official Soviet Short Biography of Stalin that was to be published in 1939: