Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Here I stand on the border line between the old capitalist world and the new socialist world. Here, on this border line, I unite the efforts of the proletarians of the West and the peasants of the East in order to shatter the old world. May the god of history be my aid!³³

But the political religion analogy cannot be pushed too far. Communism had no deity, not even Stalin at the peak of his personality cult was deemed a god. The agent of humanity’s fate was the party and the people, according to communist ideology. Communism had no churches or temples. Lenin’s body was embalmed and put on public display in Red Square, as was Stalin’s for a time, but their bodies were not deified like the remains of saints. For a conscious, committed Marxist like Stalin, communism was based on science and empirically verifiable laws of social development. To paraphrase Lenin, Marxism was not deemed true because it was omnipotent; it was omnipotent because it was true, or so Stalin believed.³⁴

BOLSHEVIK INTELLECTUAL

According to Napoleon, understanding a person requires you to know something about their world when they were twenty years old.³⁵ Stalin’s world at that age was the fringe of a vast land empire that stretched thousands of miles across ten time zones from Warsaw to Vladivostok, from the Arctic Ocean to the Caspian and Black Seas. According to the 1897 census, 125 million people lived in Russia, most of them peasants, although state-led industrialisation was creating a significant urban working class. Within Russia’s borders were more than 100 nationalities and ethnic groups. Nearly half the population were ethnic Russians, but there were also large numbers of Ukrainians, Belorussians and Jews, as well as various Turkic and central Asian groups. Stalin’s Georgians, whose territory had been a Russian protectorate since 1783, numbered about a million. Nearly 70 per cent of Tsarist Russia’s population were affiliated to the Eastern Orthodox Church, though there were many adherents of other Christian traditions, and of Islam and other faiths.

The Russian Tsarist Empire, ruled by the Romanov dynasty for nearly 300 years, was an autocracy in which there was no parliament and political parties were banned. Radical opponents of the Tsar were subject to surveillance, harassment, arrest, imprisonment and exile. Strikes were illegal, as were trade unions, and the nascent underground labour movement was riddled with spies and informers, and plagued by fake organisations set up by the Okhrana. Insidious misinformation was spread by Tsarist agents that named leftist activists as being in cahoots with the authorities, while labour unrest was met with violence and harsh repression. Stalin observed and experienced this first-hand as a political agitator in Tbilisi, Baku and Batumi. Indeed, his first arrest – in Batumi in 1902 – was the result of a strike and demonstration in which many protesters were killed or wounded. While Stalin was under arrest, his childhood friend and close comrade Lado Ketskhoveli was shot and killed by a prison guard.

The political movement Stalin joined believed the working masses were exploited and oppressed by a capitalist system that must be overthrown by a democratic revolution followed by a socialist one. While some radicals thought peasant revolts were the key to revolutionary change in Russia, Marxists like Stalin looked to the urban working class as agents of social transformation. The role of political activists like himself was to educate and recruit workers to the socialist cause and to encourage, support and guide their social, political and economic struggles.

Quite early on in Stalin’s political life, the party that he had joined – the RSDLP – split into two main factions. Stalin sided with Lenin’s Bolshevik faction, so called because it claimed a majority at the party’s second congress in 1903 when the first split occurred. Opposed were the Mensheviks, the supposed minority headed by Julius Martov. In truth, support for each faction was quite evenly balanced and many party members, Leon Trotsky, for example, preferred not to choose between them.