Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

More credible, but no less speculative, is Robert Tucker’s synthesis of political biography and insights gleaned from the German psychoanalyst Karen Horney’s analysis of the neurotic personality. According to Tucker, Stalin was a neurotic who responded to childhood trauma by creating an idealised image of himself. Far from being merely a political device to manipulate and mobilise the masses, the Stalin personality cult reflected ‘Stalin’s own monstrously inflated vision of himself as the greatest genius of Russian and world history’. Stalin’s lust for power and the purging of his political enemies was psychodynamic and reflected the striving for the fame and glory that would match his exalted self-image.

Tucker formulated this hypothesis in the early 1950s while serving as a diplomat in the US embassy in Moscow. As he admitted himself, there was no direct evidence to support his theory and the prevailing wisdom among his then colleagues was that neither Stalin nor other Soviet leaders took the personality cult too seriously. But Tucker took heart from Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th party congress. Included in Khrushchev’s indictment was, to use Tucker’s words, a depiction of Stalin ‘as a man of colossal grandiosity’ who had ‘a profound insecurity that caused him to need constant affirmation of his imagined greatness’.⁴

Evidence cited by Khrushchev and highlighted by Tucker was Stalin’s editing of his official Soviet biography, in which he marked passages containing insufficient praise. Like many of Khrushchev’s claims about Stalin, this was way off the mark. Stalin did indeed edit the second, postwar edition of his Short Biography but he actually toned down the adulation and insisted that other revolutionaries should be accorded more prominence. The same was true of many other texts that Stalin edited. While Stalin had a high opinion of himself, it fell far short of the extremities of his personality cult.

Stalin’s own view of his family history was much more relaxed than many of his biographers. In a March 1938 speech to a meeting of high-ranking air force officers, he used his own background to illustrate the point that class credentials were no guarantee of honesty. Workers could be scoundrels and non-proletarians could be good people:

For example, I’m not the son of workers. My father was not born a worker. He was a master with apprentices, he was an exploiter. We didn’t live badly. I was ten when he went bust and had to join the proletariat. I couldn’t say that he was glad to join the workers. He cursed his bad luck all the time, but for me it turned out to be a good thing. For sure, that is funny [laughter]. When I was ten I was not happy that my father had lost everything. I didn’t know that 40 years later it would be a plus for me. But in no way was it an advantage I had earned.⁵

SOSO THE STUDIOUS

Stalin’s benign recollection chimes with the views of those historians who believe he had a relatively privileged childhood. While both his parents had been born serfs and his family was not well off, it was not among the poorest and it had the connections to secure Stalin entry into a church school in his home-town of Gori in Georgia and then into a prestigious seminary in the province’s capital, Tbilisi. His father had a drink problem and his parents’ marriage broke up, but he was the only surviving child of a doting and strong-willed mother who wanted him to become a priest. As a young child, Stalin, or Soso as he was then called, suffered from smallpox and was left with a permanently pockmarked face. He also had an abnormality which reduced the use of his left arm, a condition that may have been genetic or the result of an accident. Adding to Soso’s woes was an accident he had aged eleven, when a runaway horse-drawn carriage ran over his legs, which left him with a permanently inhibited gait.

Stalin is said to have been the leader of a children’s street-gang in Gori but, as Stephen Kotkin has pointed out, Soso was one of the town’s best pupils. Far from being a street ruffian, he was a dedicated ‘bookworm’ and ‘autodidact’, which turned out to be a lifelong trait.⁶ This fundamental fact about Stalin’s early life was captured in a cult painting by the Georgian artist Apollon Kutateladze, Comrade Stalin with Mother (1930), which shows a well-dressed, studious boy reading a book, while being overlooked by an encouraging and supportive mother.