Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

The technical challenge was that Stalin’s earliest writings were in Georgian, many of them published anonymously or under pseudonyms. They had to be identified, authenticated as Stalin’s and then translated into Russian. There was a bit of a turf war between IMEL and its Tbilisi affiliate, which was controlled by the Georgian communist party. Needless to say, the Georgian comrades were keen to assert custodianship of their native son’s youthful writings. Then there was the disruptive impact of the Great Terror. In the mid-1930s many IMEL staff were arrested or dismissed from their posts as ‘enemies of the people’. The terror also cut a swathe through the ranks of party historians. Among party officials, Stetsky was a prominent victim; he was arrested and shot in 1938. During the Great Patriotic War, many IMEL staffers served in the armed forces, often as political officers in charge of propaganda, education and morale. The section responsible for Stalin’s works was reduced to three people and evacuated to Ufa. Among its additional responsibilities was the urgent preparation of special wartime collections of Stalin’s writings, with stirring titles like ‘Articles and Speeches about Ukraine’ and ‘The Military Correspondence of Lenin and Stalin’.³⁸

There is no evidence that Stalin was unduly worried about the delays. This was a project for posterity; in the meantime there were millions upon millions of copies of Stalin’s books already circulating in the USSR: The Foundations of Leninism, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, Problems of Leninism and Dialectical and Historical Materialism. During the war these Stalinist classics were joined by a collection of Stalin’s speeches, On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union.

IMEL sent Stalin regular progress reports and consulted him about matters great and small, including the technicalities of translating his Georgian writings. He was often remiss or slow to reply to queries and not until the eve of the first volume’s publication in 1946 did he become intensively involved in the process and take charge of curating his own intellectual legacy. Stalin was sent a ‘dummy’ (in Russian, maket) of each volume, from which he would make the final selection of documents to be published. He used the opportunity to correct and edit texts. Stalin’s handwritten amendments were stylistic rather than substantive. It was a case of him glossing rather than rewriting his personal history.³⁹

Besides, politically embarrassing or dubious statements had already been weeded out by the time the proofs arrived on Stalin’s desk. More often than not, weeding took the form of omission and elision rather than the direct doctoring of documents. History was not so much altered by Stalin’s underlings as distorted. The trickiest issue was how to deal with favourable mentions in his writings of people who were at the time Stalin’s comrades-in-arms but later became political opponents or, worse still, ‘enemies of the state’. Among them were the many former leaders of the party who had been accused of treason and arraigned at a series of gruesome show trials in the 1930s. Where possible, favourable references to them were excluded, and those texts that featured Stalin’s polemics against them omitted ‘comrade’ when referring to them. One egregious example of such censorship was this omission from an article by Stalin on the Bolshevik seizure of power that was originally published by Pravda in November 1918:

All the practical work of organising the insurrection was conducted under the ingenious leadership of the Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Comrade Trotsky. It is safe to say that the rapid switching of the [Petrograd] garrison to the side of the Soviet was due to the work of the party’s Military-Revolutionary Committee, above all Comrade Trotsky.⁴⁰

A key figure in the preparation of Stalin’s works was a young historian called Vasily Mochalov, who specialised in the history of the labour movement in the Caucasus. He knew Georgian very well and was appointed head of IMEL’s Stalin section in 1940. Frustrated by the slow progress, he wrote to Stalin and the Politburo in August 1944 to urge the appointment of extra staff and the imposition of short deadlines for the publication of the first two or three volumes.⁴¹