Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin’s general attitude to political violence was the same as Lenin’s: instrumental. Violence was generally abhorrent but acceptable if it furthered the revolutionary cause. Individual acts of terror were only permissible if part of a mass terror campaign underpinned by a popular movement. Moreover, individual assassinations and expropriations were less important than organised guerrilla warfare and preparations for armed insurrection.⁴⁴

When the 1905–7 revolutionary period passed, the Bolsheviks abjured armed struggle in favour of non-violent political agitation, notably during elections to the State Duma or parliament established by Tsar Nicholas II as concession to the popular revolt. Duma elections were indirect rather than based on universal suffrage and the institution itself was pretty powerless. Leftist parties boycotted elections to the first Duma, which sat in 1906, but participated in those for the second Duma in 1907. For the third Duma the franchise was rigged in favour of conservative parties, but social democrats, including the Bolsheviks, were able to contest the fourth Duma elections in 1912.

The Bolsheviks secured mandates for six deputies, while the Mensheviks won seven seats. Roman Malinovsky, the leader of the Bolshevik Duma faction, proved to be highly effective. Unfortunately, he was also an agent of the Okhrana. Among his many betrayals was one of his ‘best friends’, Joseph Stalin, who was arrested in St Petersburg in February 1913. Malinovsky resigned his Duma role in 1914 but was not definitively unmasked as a police spy until 1917, when documentary proof was discovered in Tsarist archives. A year later he was tried and executed by the Bolsheviks. Malinovsky was not the first police spy caught by the Bolsheviks, but his exposure was the most shocking, not least to Stalin.⁴⁵

The idea that Lenin not Stalin was the true author of Marxism and the National Question derives from Trotsky’s biography of his arch-enemy, which was published posthumously in 1941, a text that Isaac Deutscher, who wrote biographies of both men, described as ‘a book of queer fascination, full of profound insight and blind passion’.⁴⁶

The article was Lenin’s idea and he edited Stalin’s draft. Stalin also had some help with the translation of German-language sources; though Stalin studied English, French, German and Esperanto, he never mastered any foreign language except Russian. But there is no doubt that Stalin was the prime author of this Marxist classic, which set out the fundamentals of Bolshevik policy on the national question.⁴⁷

As internationalists, the Bolsheviks opposed nationalism because they believed it was divisive and diverted from class struggle. But they acknowledged the appeal of nationalist sentiment and accepted the political utility of nationalist-motivated mobilisation against capitalist and imperialist oppression. Hence the Bolsheviks supported the right to national self-determination and would fight for it themselves if national independence ended oppression and, as Stalin put it, ‘removed the grounds of strife between nations’.

Stalin’s piece was published in three parts in the pro-Bolshevik journal Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment) in early 1913. It was signed ‘K. Stalin’ – a pseudonym he had just started to use but which became permanent and displaced Koba as his underground party name.

After seizing power in 1917, the Bolsheviks continued to uphold the right to national self-determination, and enshrined it in successive versions of the Soviet constitution. However, an important shift in Bolshevik discourse effectively ruled out secession by the nations that constituted the Soviet Union. As people’s commissar for nationality affairs, Stalin was the chief articulator of the caveat that national self-determination would not be allowed to endanger the revolution or impede the development of socialism.⁴⁸