Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

While Stalin did not reply to Mochalov’s letter, it provoked a flurry of Politburo decisions to speed up the project, which did not please Mochalov’s superiors in IMEL.⁴² His letter cast them in a bad light and added to the pressure to produce results. Mochalov was also in conflict with the Georgian comrades about translation issues and about which unsigned publications to attribute to Stalin. According to his Tbilisi colleagues, Mochalov’s knowledge of the languages and history of the Caucasus was inadequate and had led to mistakes in the editing and translation of Stalin’s early writings.

In October 1944 Mochalov was told by IMEL’s newly appointed director, Vladimir Kruzhkov, that the Institute no longer required his services. When Mochalov asked why, he was told it was because of a personality clash between him and Kruzhkov.⁴³ In his correspondence with the Politburo, Kruzhkov blamed Mochalov, and former IMEL director M. B. Mitin, for the lack of progress in the publication of Stalin’s collected works.⁴⁴ Undaunted, Mochalov continued to participate in the Institute’s discussions about the preparation of the Sochineniya and to register his objections to IMEL’s handling of the project. He also reached out to Stalin again, asking for a meeting to discuss the publication. His efforts were rewarded by a summons to meet Stalin on 28 December 1945. Also in attendance was Kruzhkov, and Pyotr Shariya, the Georgian communist party’s propaganda chief and the former head of IMEL’s Tbilisi office.

Mochalov wrote quite a detailed report of the meeting, which took place in Stalin’s Kremlin office in the evening and lasted for ninety minutes.

Stalin began the meeting by asking about the disagreements between Kruzhkov and Mochalov. Kruzhkov claimed these had been resolved but Mochalov restated his objections to including in the first two volumes several articles whose authorship was uncertain, including two articles published in the Georgian newspaper Brdzola (Struggle), which he thought had a ‘calm tone’ compared to other articles attributed to Stalin.

When Stalin asked if his objections were the reason he had been kicked out of IMEL, Mochalov replied that it was for Kruzhkov to say, but, in his view, the director was obviously not happy about the letter he had written to the party leadership. Mochalov also mentioned his differences with Shariya, who favoured old-style translation as opposed to the ‘new translation’ that Mochalov advocated.

Stalin responded by saying that while some of the translation was poor, part of it was quite artistic and it seemed to be the work of a different translator. ‘Translation’, opined Stalin, ‘is more difficult than writing.’ He then mused on the need to amend his writings, taking as an example his articles on ‘Anarchism or Socialism?’, which he had written on the hoof in instalments for different newspapers.

About his articles in Brdzola, Stalin agreed their tones were different. The calm tone, he explained, was because he ‘aspired to be a professor and wanted to go to university. . . . The Batumi shootings changed everything for me. I started to curse. . . . The tone changed.’⁴⁵

Discussing the size of the print run, Stalin modestly suggested that 30,000–40,000 copies would be enough. When someone pointed out the print run for Lenin’s collected works was half a million, Stalin said that he was no Lenin, but was eventually persuaded to accept a figure of 300,000. Stalin wanted each volume to be no more than 300–360 pages long. He preferred the small-scale format of Lenin’s works but was indifferent as to whether the cover should be grey or claret (the colour actually chosen).⁴⁶

According to Mochalov’s wife, Raisa Konushaya (who also worked at IMEL), he returned home from the meeting ‘ashen-faced but bright-eyed’. He told her that Stalin had supported his position and publications that were not his would be excluded from the first two volumes of the works.⁴⁷ However, Shariya’s recollection was that Stalin let Mochalov have his say and then proceeded to claim the authorship of the disputed unsigned publications.⁴⁸

Not long after the meeting in Stalin’s office, the Politburo passed another resolution on the publication of his works. There would be sixteen volumes, each with a print run of 500,000, priced at six roubles a book. The first three volumes would be published in 1946, volumes four to ten in 1947 and the rest in 1948. Resolutions were also passed on the speedy translation of the series into various languages, with print runs in the tens and, in some cases, hundreds of thousands.⁴⁹ The edition was announced publicly in Pravda on 20 January 1946 and the first volume went on sale in July.