Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

As the American historian Robert H. McNeal observed, ‘Stalin’s Sochineniya falls far short of the standards one would hope for in a definitive collection of a statesman’s papers.’⁵⁴ The Works, as they are called in the English translation, claimed to contain ‘nearly all’ of Stalin’s writings, yet McNeal identified 895 separate writings that had been signed by or identified as Stalin’s for the period covered by the thirteen published volumes, only 480 of which appeared in the Sochineniya. McNeal’s figure was inflated by an excessive number of unsigned pre-1917 publications attributed to Stalin by Beria and other Soviet authors, but there is no doubt that many documents that were verifiably his were omitted from the Sochineniya. In the Russian archives there are lists of nearly a hundred such items left out of the volumes.⁵⁵ While some documents may have been omitted because they were deemed trivial or repetitive, in many cases the motivation was plainly political. The analysis of these unpublished texts awaits their historian, but it is difficult to disagree with Olga Edel’man’s comment that they do not reveal a Stalin substantially different from the one that presents himself in those that were published.⁵⁶

Their limitations notwithstanding, the thirteen published volumes of Stalin’s Sochineniya were destined to become the single most important source for his biography – ‘fundamental’ to ‘the study of the man and his age’, as McNeal put it.⁵⁷ They have been particularly important for those biographers who see Stalin as he saw himself – primarily a political activist and theorist, whose driving force was his unstinting commitment to the communist ideology that shaped his personality as well as his behaviour. But not everyone agrees that politics is the Stalin biographers’ stone.

CHAPTER 3

READING, WRITING AND REVOLUTION

Among the best-known stories about Stalin’s childhood is that he was beaten and brutalised by his drunken father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili (Beso). The source of this story is Joseph Iremashvili, a Georgian childhood friend of Stalin’s. Like Stalin, Iremashvili became a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, but he was allied with the Mensheviks, the opponents of Lenin’s (and Stalin’s) Bolshevik faction. By the time the memoir was published in 1932, he was living in exile in Germany. According to Iremashvili, ‘undeserved beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as his father himself. Since all men who had authority over others either through power or age reminded him of his father there soon arose a feeling of revenge against all men who stood above him.’¹

Another boyhood friend of Stalin’s, Soso Davrishev, who had emigrated to France, also recalled that Beso beat his son, but his memoir was not published until many years after Iremashvili’s. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, recalled he’d told her that as a child he was beaten by his mother. Svetlana repeated this claim in a second memoir but also highlighted Beso’s violent behaviour:

Fights, crudeness were not a rare phenomenon in this poor, semi-literate family where the head of the family drank. The mother beat the little boy, the husband beat her. But the boy loved his mother and defended her, once he threw a knife at his father [who] then chased him.²

Based on these reports, innumerable pathological theories of Stalin’s personality have been constructed. The most extreme is Roman Brackman’s, who speculates it was Stalin’s patricide that started him down the path of a mass-murderous political life. But medical records show Beso was not murdered but died in hospital of TB, colitis and chronic pneumonia in 1909 – the year of death stated by Stalin in the personal questionnaire for ROSTA that he completed in 1920.

Brackman is also a leading exponent of another conspiracy theory: that Stalin was, in fact, an agent of the Okhrana, the Tsarist security police. The point of departure for this hypothesis is the so-called ‘Eremin letter’ of July 1913, in which a Tsarist police colonel of that name recorded that Stalin was one of his agents. The source of the document, published in English by Life magazine in 1956, was Alexander Orlov, an officer in Stalin’s security police who defected to the west in the 1930s. While Brackman, like most scholars, accepted that the Eremin letter was an obvious forgery, he argued that the document was, in fact, manufactured by Stalin himself as a means of discrediting the idea that he actually was a police agent. For Brackman, the Great Terror of the 1930s is above all a cover-up operation by Stalin, designed to kill anyone who had knowledge of his past treachery. All the evidence he adduces in support of this hypothesis is circumstantial and speculative but for Brackman the absence of direct evidence is in itself proof of cover-up and conspiracy.³