Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

This book explores the intellectual life and biography of one of history’s bloodiest dictators: Joseph Stalin. Uniquely, it does so through the prism of his personal library. A dedicated reader and self-improver, Stalin’s accumulation of books was a lifelong passion. In the mid-1920s he acquired an identity for his library in the form of an ex-libris stamp – Biblioteka I. V. Stalina – the Library of J. V. Stalin. He also devised his own library classification scheme and engaged the services of a librarian. The centrepiece of his main Moscow dacha (country house) was a grand library room, though most of his vast collection was housed in an adjoining building with books delivered to him by staff. Dmitry Shepilov, who visited the dacha the day after the dictator died, recalled ‘a large writing desk, with a second desk placed against it to form a T, both were piled high with books, manuscripts and papers, as were the little tables around the room’. Stalin himself lay dead on the couch in his library, where he had been struck down by a stroke a few days earlier.¹

Shepilov, an economist by background, was editor-in-chief of Pravda. In 1956–7 he served as Soviet foreign minister, but lost office when he supported a failed attempt to oust from power Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor as leader of the communist party. Shepilov was mainly an apparatchik and the title of the English edition of his memoirs, The Kremlin’s Scholar, was something of a misnomer. But it was an appellation that could more justifiably have been applied to his dead boss.²

By the time of his death, Stalin’s library contained some 25,000 books, periodicals and pamphlets. The collection might have been preserved intact but the plan to turn his dacha into a Stalin Museum was shelved following Khrushchev’s denunciation of him and his personality cult at the 20th party congress in February 1956. Instead, the dictator’s books were dispersed to other libraries, though important remnants and traces of his library survived in the communist party’s archives, notably a collection of nearly 400 texts that he had marked and annotated. Rediscovered when Soviet communism disintegrated in the late 1980s, these pometki – or markings – revealed that Stalin was a serious intellectual who valued ideas as much as power. A true believer in the power of words, he read not only to learn but also to acquire a higher communist consciousness, seen as central to the utopian goals of Soviet socialism. An ideologue as well as an intellectual, Stalin’s professed belief in Marxism-Leninism was wholly authentic, as can be seen from the library.

History was Stalin’s favourite subject, followed closely by Marxist theory, and then fiction. Lenin was his favourite author but he also read, and sometimes appreciated, a great deal of writing by Leon Trotsky and other arch-enemies. As an internationalist, Stalin’s interests were global, but he lacked command of any languages except Russian and his native Georgian, so his reading of foreign books was limited to those that had been translated.³ He was very interested in ancient history and preoccupied with the lessons of Tsarist rule in Russia, especially the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and the Greats, Peter and Catherine. He read a good deal of military history and greatly admired Tsarist hero-generals such as Alexander Suvorov, the eighteenth-century strategist who never lost a battle, and Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, who defeated Napoleon in 1812. More surprising, perhaps, was his fascination with Germany’s ‘Iron Chancellor’, Otto von Bismarck. He also had high personal regard for other bourgeois statesmen, like fellow history buff Winston Churchill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the US president whose country’s constitution he studied.

While Stalin composed no memoirs and kept no diary he left a well-marked literary trail not only in the books he wrote and edited but in those he read as well. Through an examination of these books it is possible to build a composite, nuanced picture of the reading life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously intellectual dictator.

This book’s first chapter, ‘Bloody Tyrant and Bookworm’, provides an overview of Stalin, the Bolshevik intellectual who revered written texts. Like all the Bolshevik leaders, he believed that reading could help transform not just people’s ideas and consciousness but human nature itself.

‘It is impossible to know somebody “inside out”,’ wrote Stalin to the poet Demyan Bedny in 1924,⁴ but through his library we can get to know him from the outside in. In viewing the world through Stalin’s eyes we can picture his personality as well as his most intimate thoughts.

Stalin was no psychopath but an emotionally intelligent and feeling intellectual. Indeed, it was the power of his emotional attachment to deeply held beliefs that enabled him to sustain decades of brutal rule.