Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

As for many political leaders, the vast bulk of Stalin’s reading life was taken up by reports, briefings and correspondence. When President Barack Obama left office, he complained that while such material was good for working the analytical side of the brain he sometimes lost track of ‘not just the poetry of fiction, but also the depth of fiction. Fiction was useful as a reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day.’ In a similar vein, President Vladimir Putin said that he kept a volume of Mikhail Lermontov’s poetry on his desk in order ‘to have something to think about, to take my mind off things and, generally speaking, to find myself in a different world – a worthwhile, beautiful and interesting one’.⁸⁶

Stalin certainly shared Obama’s liking for Shakespeare and, quite possibly, Putin’s penchant for Lermontov. But armed with his Marxist outlook on life, he found the poetry of non-fiction equally appealing.

CHAPTER 4

THE LIFE AND FATE OF A DICTATOR’S LIBRARY

In May 1925 Stalin entrusted his staff with a highly important mission: the classification of his personal book collection:

My advice (and request):

 

1. Classify the books not by author but by subject-matter:

a. Philosophy

b. Psychology

c. Sociology

d. Political Economy

e. Finance

f. Industry

g. Agriculture

h. Co-operation

i. Russian History

j. History of Other Countries

k. Diplomacy

l. External and Internal Trade

m. Military Affairs

n. The National Question

o. Congresses and Conferences

p. The Position of the Workers

q. The Position of the Peasants

r. The Komsomol

s. The History of Revolutions in Other Countries

t. 1905

u. February Revolution 1917

v. October Revolution 1917

w. Lenin and Leninism

x. History of the RKP (B) and the International

y. Discussions in the RKP (articles, pamphlets)

z. Trade Unions

aa. Fiction

bb. Art Criticism

cc. Political Journals

dd. Science Journals

ee. Dictionaries

ff. Memoirs

2. Exclude from this classification and arrange separately books by

a. Lenin

b. Marx

c. Engels

d. Kautsky

e. Plekhanov

f. Trotsky

g. Bukharin

h. Zinoviev

i. Kamenev

j. Lafargue

k. Luxemburg

l. Radek

3. All the rest can be classified by author (putting to one side: textbooks, small journals, anti-religious trash, etc.).¹

 

Stalin evidently had in mind a rather grandiose personal library, one that would contain a vast and diverse store of human knowledge, not only the humanities and social science but aesthetics, fiction and the natural sciences. His proposed schema combined conventional library classification with categories that reflected his particular interests in the history, theory and leadership of revolutionary movements, including the works of anti-Bolshevik socialist critics such as Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, as well as the writings of internal rivals such as Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev. Naturally, pride of place went to the founders of Marxism – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – and to its pre-eminent modern exponent, Vladimir Lenin.

The inclusion of the French socialist Paul Lafargue in the list of revolutionary writers with a separate classification might seem odd to contemporary eyes but there were a number of his books in Stalin’s library. Lafargue was famous among revolutionaries of Stalin’s generation as the author of the radical tract The Right to Be Lazy (1880). He was also married to Marx’s second daughter, Laura. Indeed, the couple committed suicide together in 1911. Shortly after, the Bolshevik journal Prosveshchenie (Enlightenment) published an obituary by Kautsky and in its next issue carried an analysis of Lafargue’s contribution to the international socialist movement, articles that Stalin may well have read.² In his 1950 intervention in the Soviet linguistics debate about the monogenetic language theories of Georgia-born Nikolai Marr, Stalin quoted with approval Lafargue’s pamphlet Language and Revolution.³

STALIN’S LIBRARIAN

Stalin’s classification scheme is listed in the Russian archival register as intended for an unnamed ‘librarian’. However, the document in question, which was handwritten by Stalin, contains no addressee. Stalin’s secretary and aide, Ivan P. Tovstukha, was identified as the recipient by General Dmitry Volkogonov in his groundbreaking 1989 Soviet biography of Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy. Volkogonov, who served in the Soviet army’s main political administration and headed the Defence Ministry’s Institute of Military History from 1988 to 1991, was able to secure unprecedented access to confidential party and state archives. Although he started work on the biography in the 1970s, he was only able to publish it when the reforming Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR.