Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

The title of Chapter Six, ‘Reverse Engineering: Stalin and Soviet Literature’, references Stalin’s famous statement that the role of writers in a socialist society was to be ‘engineers of the human soul’. Stalin read a lot of fiction and his library contained many thousands of novels, plays and volumes of poetry. Alas, because he didn’t mark, stamp or autograph works of fiction, only a handful of these texts survived the dispersal of his library. However, from the late 1920s onwards, he had a lot to say about literature – not only poetry, novels and short stories, but plays and film scripts. From these remarks it is possible to infer what kind of literature he liked and how he read it.

Stalin was also an inveterate editor. Mostly, he edited documents, hundreds of which crossed his desk or passed through his office on a daily basis. But, as shown in Chapter Seven, ‘Editor-in-Chief of the USSR’, he was also involved in some notable book projects, including the revision of the postwar edition of his official Short Biography. In his 1956 denunciation, Khrushchev claimed Stalin embellished the biography to inflate his sense of self-importance. In reality, Stalin toned down the adulation. Even more striking was the way he reduced his personal presence in the notorious Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938) – a party textbook that denounced his enemies as degenerates, assassins and spies. Stalin’s editing of these and other books was detailed enough for him to be considered a de facto co-author. Although there was nothing sophisticated about Stalin’s editing, he was highly adept at marshalling material to convey simple and clear political messages.

Stalin retained considerable intellectual powers to the very end of his life. ‘I’m seventy years old,’ he told his errant son Vasily, pointing to the books he was reading on history, literature and military affairs. ‘Yet I go on learning just the same.’⁵ By the early 1950s, however, with both his physical health and his intellect in decline, he was past his prime.

Anatoly Lunacharsky, Soviet commissar for enlightenment in the 1920s, described himself as an ‘intellectual among Bolsheviks and a Bolshevik among intellectuals’.⁶ The same was true for Stalin, except that he was more Bolshevik than intellectual and lacked the scepticism that might have led him to moderate his deadly pursuit of socialist utopia.

CHAPTER 1

BLOODY TYRANT AND BOOKWORM

A bloody tyrant, a machine politician, a paranoid personality, a heartless bureaucrat, and an ideological fanatic. To a degree, Stalin was all those stereotypes. But he was also an intellectual who devoted himself to endless reading, writing and editing – solitary activities punctuated by the meetings he attended and the speeches he gave. Texts, written and spoken, were his world.

Given the scale of his misdeeds as Soviet ruler, it is natural to imagine Stalin as a monster, to see him in the mind’s eye furiously denouncing opponents, betraying former comrades, poring over coerced confessions, ordering executions, turning a deaf ear to pleas of innocence and coldly ignoring the colossal human costs of his communist dystopia. Moral revulsion, however, is no substitute for explaining how and why Stalin was able to do what he did.

This book views Stalin through a different lens – as a dedicated idealist and as an activist intellectual who valued ideas as much as power, who was ceaseless in his own efforts at self-education, a restless mind, reading for the revolution to the very end of his life. It tells the story of the creation, fragmentation and part resurrection of his personal library. It explores the books Stalin read, how he read them and what they taught him.

Isaac Deutscher, one of Stalin’s earliest and greatest biographers, thought that his ‘socialism was cold, sober and rough’.¹ A key insight of this study of Stalin’s life as a reader is the emotional power that imbued his ideas. In the marked books of Stalin’s personal library we can glimpse his feelings as well as the ideas to which he attached so much significance. It was not psychosis but the vigour of Stalin’s personal belief system that enabled him to initiate and sustain the barbarous methods he used to modernise and communise Soviet Russia. While Stalin hated his enemies – the bourgeoisie, kulaks, capitalists, imperialists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, traitors – he detested their ideas even more.