Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Disagreement about the conditions of party membership was the initial reason for the split. Should the RSDLP be a relatively open party, broad-based and engaged in as much legal activity as possible, as the Mensheviks argued? Or should it be the disciplined, highly centralised and clandestine cadre party that Lenin favoured? In part, this was a dispute about tactics in conditions of illegality and Tsarist repression. But more important were underlying differences about the role of the party. While the Mensheviks envisaged socialist consciousness spreading and embedding spontaneously through the experience of popular struggles to improve conditions and rights, the Bolsheviks thought party members should transmit ‘scientific socialism’ to the masses. A related issue was assessment of the prospects for socialist revolution in Russia. Socialism was a distant goal for the Mensheviks, hence spreading socialist consciousness and recruiting advanced workers into the party was less important to them than day-to-day social and economic struggles and the agitation for political reform that would feed into a democratic revolution in Russia. Believing that socialist revolution could occur sooner than the Mensheviks thought, the Bolsheviks sought a higher level of socialist consciousness among the toiling masses. Lenin believed there were good prospects for an effective alliance between the working class and the poorer peasants. Stalin’s spin on Lenin’s position was expressed in a letter written in 1904: ‘We must raise the proletariat to a consciousness of its true interests, to a consciousness of the socialist idea, and not break this idea up into small change, or adjust it to the spontaneous movement.’³⁶

Stalin’s support for Lenin was by no means obvious and automatic. In his neck of the woods – Georgia and Transcaucasia – the Mensheviks were the dominant faction. Much of Stalin’s early political life was devoted to fighting and losing factional battles with the local Mensheviks. It was the Mensheviks who came to power in Georgia as result of the 1917 revolutions, where they remained in control until forced out of office by the Bolsheviks in 1921.

While Stalin could easily have found favour with Mensheviks as an authentic man of the people immersed in the daily class struggles of the toiling masses, he was highly educated and committed to proselytising socialism. Stalin saw himself as neither a worker nor a peasant but as, in effect, an intellectual whose task it was to spread enlightenment and socialist consciousness. It was this fundamental choice of an intellectual identity that motivated his fanatical, lifelong commitment to reading and self-improvement. While Stalin respected ordinary workers, he did not revere them like some middle-class socialists. The good worker was someone like himself, an educated person who was able to grasp the truth proffered by the party. And it was through such workers that the larger population of the working class could be reached and educated.³⁷

Stalin’s biographers have tended to neglect the niceties of the politics, day-to-day struggles, factions and personalities of the Russian revolutionary underground. Yet this constituted nearly half his adult life. That was the political and social environment in which his character and personality was formed. As a young revolutionary, Stalin adopted beliefs, acquired attitudes, underwent experiences and made choices.

There is no shortage of evidence about the life of the young Stalin. The problem is that much of it consists of highly partisan and biased memoirs, very little of his primary personal documentation from this early period having survived. Typically, how memoirists recall Stalin correlates with how they see and judge his later life. Perceptions of Stalin, even by those who knew him personally, are overdetermined by later knowledge of his life and persona after the Bolsheviks seized power, and clung to it through civil war, terror and mass violence.

Historians are as divided as the memoirists in assessing the young Stalin’s personality. Most agree that while many traits of the mature Stalin may be detected as nascent in his youth, he continued after the revolution to embrace new roles and identities.