Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin contributed a preface to the first volume in which he urged his readers to regard his early writings as the work ‘of a young Marxist not yet moulded into a finished Marxist-Leninist’. He highlighted two youthful errors. He admitted to having been wrong to advocate the distribution of landlords’ lands to the peasants as private property rather than taking them into state ownership, as Lenin favoured. This first mistake he linked to his failure to appreciate fully Lenin’s view that the popular overthrow of Tsarist autocracy would be rapidly followed by a socialist revolution in Russia. Stalin also admitted he had been wrong to go along with the then prevailing view among Marxists that socialist revolutions required the majority of the population in any given state to be working class, whereas Lenin had shown that the victory of socialism was possible even in a predominantly peasant country like Russia.⁵⁰

Thirteen volumes of the Works covering the period 1901–34 were published between 1946 and 1949. Publication then stalled and the project was cancelled after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th party congress.

It is hard to understand why the final three volumes were not published while Stalin was alive. ‘Dummies’ of all the volumes were available to him from 1946 onwards. One possibility is that Stalin couldn’t make up his mind about whether to update the 1938 Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was slated for publication as volume fifteen of his works (its authorship now having been attributed to him rather than an anonymous party commission). In October 1946 Kruzhkov sent him the dummy of that book, together with a note detailing what corrections had been made to the original. In January 1947 party propaganda chief Georgy Alexandrov (1908–1961) and Pyotr Fedoseev (1908–1990), editor of the party’s journal, Bol’shevik, sent him drafts of two chapters that extended the CPSU’s history to 1945, taking their cues from Stalin’s February 1946 election speech in which he had characterised the war and analysed the reasons for the Soviet victory. In August 1948 another party official submitted a draft of two additional chapters of the Short Course, seemingly at Stalin’s own request. In 1951 yet another dummy of volume fifteen, containing just the corrected 1938 text, was sent to Stalin but it, too, was never published.⁵¹

Volume fourteen, covering the period 1934–40, was also problematic, not least because of Stalin’s effusive reply to sixtieth birthday greetings from Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop: ‘The friendship between the peoples of Germany and of the Soviet Union, cemented by blood, has every basis for being lasting and firm.’ Such embarrassments could be glossed over but publication of the volume would inevitably draw attention to the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939–41.⁵²

Far better for Stalin’s public image was the proposed publication of an edition of his wartime correspondence with Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. His long-time deputy, Vyacheslav Molotov, was put in charge of this important project in the late 1940s and two volumes of correspondence were ready for printing by 1952. There was no tampering with these documents, since copies of his private messages to Churchill and Roosevelt were readily available in western archives. Again, publication was delayed for no obvious reason and the volumes did not appear until 1957. Most likely, this was because of the favourable treatment of Tito in the correspondence. Tito, the communist leader of a mass partisan movement in Yugoslavia, was then a Soviet hero and a Stalin favourite. The two men fell out after the war and Tito was excommunicated from the communist movement on grounds that he was, in fact, an imperi—alist agent bent on the restoration of capitalism in Yugoslavia. After Stalin’s death, this impediment to the publication of the correspondence was removed by Khrushchev’s disavowal of the Stalin–Tito split and the restoration of fraternal relations with socialist Yugoslavia.⁵³