Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

In 1930 Manuchar’yants went to work at the Lenin Institute, which in 1931 became the core of the newly formed Institute of Marx, Engels and Lenin (IMEL). Initially, she worked on Lenin-related projects but in 1940 transferred to the section responsible for the publication of Stalin’s collected writings and remained there until retirement in 1955. She died in 1969, just before publication of the second edition of her book in the Lenin centenary year of 1970.

Manuchar’yants’s transfer to IMEL may have saved her life. In 1935 a great number of Kremlin support staff – cleaners, guards, administrators and librarians – were implicated in a (concocted) conspiracy to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders. Among those arrested and shot was the librarian Nina Rozenfel’d, the former wife of Lev Kamenev’s brother.

‘You’ve heard what went on in the Kremlin,’ Stalin told a meeting of the central committee’s Orgburo in March 1935:

A single person who has access to the apartments of our leaders – a cleaning woman who cleans the rooms, or a librarian who visits an apartment under the pretext of bringing the books in order. Who are they? Often, we don’t know that. There exists a very great variety of poisons which are very easy to apply. The poison is put in a book – you take the book, you read and write. Or the poison is put on a pillow – you go to bed and breathe. And a month later it’s all over.¹¹

Manuchar’yants’s departure from the Kremlin coincided with a fateful development in the life of the dictator’s library since after she left the system of stamping new acquisitions atrophied. As we shall see, after Stalin’s death only those books bearing his pometki (markings or annotations) or other identifiers were retained in the archives. The rest were dispersed and disappeared into other libraries.

COLLECTING AND BORROWING BOOKS

Classification of a personal book collection often entails the creation of a catalogue but the only known catalogues of Stalin’s books are those constructed after his death as part of the process of transferring the remnants of his library’s holdings for archiving by IMEL. Classification also implies a central location or locations where the library’s holdings may be accessed. Stalin’s library, however, was a personal, working archive that was sprawled across his offices, apartments and dachas.

From the early 1920s Stalin had accommodation and an office in the Kremlin and another working space just a few minutes away in the party’s central committee building on Staraya Ploshchad’ (Old Square). These spaces certainly contained many of his books. Transport Commissar I. V. Kovalev noted that during meetings Stalin was fond of plucking a volume of Lenin’s off the shelves, saying, ‘Let’s have a look at what Vladimir Ilyich has to say on this matter.’¹² A. P. Balashov, who worked in the central committee building, sometimes borrowed books from Stalin’s collection: ‘There were cupboards with a splendid library. Stalin was sent two copies of every book published by the central publishers, often signed copies. Many authors themselves sent their books. Stalin passed one copy on to us and we divided them among ourselves.’¹³ Stalin’s daughter Svetlana recalled that in his Kremlin apartment ‘there was no room for pictures on the walls – they were lined with books’,¹⁴ while his adopted son Artem Sergeev remembered that ‘Stalin read a lot. Every time we saw each other he would ask me what I was reading and what I thought about it. At the entrance to his office there was a mountain of books. He would look through them and set aside those which he would put in his library.’¹⁵ Svetlana’s first husband (from 1944 to 1947), Grigory Morozov, was allowed to use the library in Stalin’s Kremlin flat:

As an avid and an inquisitive reader I spent a lot of happy times there. It has to be said that the collection was unique. Encyclopaedias, textbooks, volumes by well-known scholars, [literary] classics, the works of party leaders. Stalin read them all attentively, as evidenced by the numerous and sometimes detailed notes in the margins.¹⁶

During the Second World War, a British interpreter, Major A. H. Birse, had occasion to visit Stalin’s Kremlin bedroom, where he observed a large bookcase: ‘I had a look at the books. They were a collection of Marxist literature, with a good many historical works, but I could see no Russian classics. There were a few books in Georgian.’¹⁷

Sergo Beria, the son of Stalin’s security commissar Lavrenty Beria, claimed that when Stalin visited someone from his inner circle,

he went to the man’s library and even opened his books to check whether they had been read. . . . Stalin liked to give advice on reading and was indignant at the gaps in my knowledge of literature. For example, I had not read Germinal (I had read only Nana) whereas he worshipped Zola.