Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

One source of forbidden secular books was the Georgian Literary Society’s ‘Cheap Library’ run by Iveria editor Ilia Chavchavadze. In November 1896 the seminary inspector wrote in the conduct book: ‘It appears that Dzhugashvili has a ticket to the Cheap Library, from which he borrows books. Today I confiscated Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea in which I found the said library ticket.’ In response the principal confined Stalin to the punishment cell for a ‘prolonged period’, noting that he had already warned him about the possession of Hugo’s book on the French Revolution, Ninety-Three. Another entry into the conduct book, dated March 1897, stated:

At 11 p.m. I took away from Joseph Dzhugashvili Letourneau’s Literary Evolution of the Nations, which he had borrowed from the Cheap Library . . . Dzhugashvili was discovered reading the said book on the chapel stairs. This is the thirteenth time this student has been discovered reading books borrowed from the Cheap Library.¹³

One writer favoured by rebellious students like Soso was the Georgian Alexander Qazbegi, whose fictional hero Koba was an outlaw who resisted Russian rule in Georgia. That character provided Soso with his first pseudonym when he joined the illegal revolutionary underground. Not until 1913 did Koba become the more Bolshevik-sounding Stalin – the ‘man of steel’.

According to his official Soviet Short Biography (1939), Stalin led Marxist study circles in his third and fourth years at the seminary and it was this subversive activity that led him to join the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1898 and then to his expulsion from the seminary in May 1899. However, as Alfred J. Rieber has highlighted, the seminary’s records show Soso was a troublesome student but not a radical activist.¹⁴ He was not expelled from the seminary for political activity but dismissed for failing to appear at examinations.¹⁵ When Soso dropped out, the seminary issued him with a document testifying to his good behaviour during his four years as a student priest. Four months later the seminary authorities, at Soso’s own request, issued a final report card on him, which showed a marked improvement in his grades.¹⁶

Exegesis of the Holy Script: 4

History of the Bible: 4

Ecclesiastical history: 3

Homiletics: 3

Russian literature: 4

History of Russian literature: 4

Universal secular history: 4

Russian secular history: 4

Algebra: 4

Geometry: 4

Easter liturgy: 4

Physics: 4

Logic: 5

Psychology: 4

Greek: 4

Ecclesiastical singing (Slavic): 5

Ecclesiastical singing (Georgian): 4

 

Since he had failed to graduate, Stalin could neither go to university nor become a priest. He was qualified to teach in a church school but instead got himself a job at the Tbilisi Meteorological Observatory, where he lived on the premises and kept records of instrument readings. This was the first and last normal job he ever had.

Stalin continued his studies of radical thought and extended the scope of his political involvement. A key influence was Lado Ketskhoveli, whose younger brother Vano also worked at the Observatory. Lado, from Gori, had been expelled from the Tbilisi seminary for leading a student strike in 1893. In 1896 he was expelled from a seminary in Kiev and the next year he returned to Tbilisi where he joined a group of Georgian Marxists and contacted Stalin’s cohort of seminarians. Lado became the young Stalin’s mentor, and the conduit for his connection to both the illegal revolutionary movement and workers’ study circles. An intellectual as well as an activist, Lado was Stalin’s first political role model.

AN ORTHODOX STALIN?

By the time he dropped out of the seminary, Stalin had spent a decade being educated by the church. There was no book that he studied more intensively than the Bible. He was well versed on matters theological, had a detailed knowledge of church history and an intimate acquaintance with the rituals of Eastern Orthodoxy. While his education had a significant secular component, immersion in Christian thinking was at its core.

Many have wondered about the long-term impact on Stalin of his religious education, the most radical claim being that he remained a secret believer who continued to pray and read the Bible. Like the conspiracy theory that he was a secret police agent, the hypothesis of a hidden ‘Orthodox Stalin’ has no evidentiary basis. When it came to religion, Stalin was a model of Bolshevik orthodoxy.

Having left the seminary, he turned his back on all religion. As a Marxist socialist he was a self-proclaimed atheist and the movement to which he belonged made no bones about its anti-clericalism or that it wanted to destroy organised religion and eradicate supernatural thinking at all levels of society. The Bolsheviks saw the Russian Orthodox Church as integral to the capitalist status quo and a fundamental obstacle to their modernising project of socialist enlightenment.