Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Sergo also recalled that Stalin told him that he read 500 pages a day. This is a recurrent claim of memoirists and Stalin may well have said something like that to someone, but his enormous workload meant that it was highly unlikely to be true. Except on holiday or on days that he spent outside the office, he simply would not have had time for such extensive reading. According to another memoir account, Stalin said he read ‘a set quota – about 300 pages of literary or other writing every day’.¹⁸

Beria junior also says Stalin used bookmarks and ‘hated the practice of underlining or writing notes in books’.¹⁹ Many of the surviving books from Stalin’s library have paper tags tucked into their pages, so Beria is probably right, but to say he ‘hated’ to mark texts is demonstrably false since there are hundreds of texts that prove the contrary.²⁰

According to Roy and Zhores Medvedev, in the 1920s Stalin ordered 500 books a year for his library.²¹ That seems a lot of books for a busy politician but it was commensurate with his ambitions for the library and in his lichnyi fond (personal file series) are to be found many publishers’ lists and catalogues.

The broader context of Stalin’s extensive book acquisition was that the Bolsheviks had inherited a vast publishing industry when they seized power. In 1913 Tsarist Russia published 34,000 titles; only Germany printed more. Numbers declined drastically during the civil war but in 1925 the Soviet Union published 20,000 titles and had surpassed the Tsarist peak by 1928. That same year the Soviets printed 270 million copies of books – more than double the rate produced in Tsarist times.

The book trade was ‘municipalised’ by the Bolsheviks in 1918 (i.e. taken over by various city Soviets) but in 1921 a number of private publishers were allowed to resume operations as part of the New Economic Policy’s revival of commercial activities.²² They continued to operate throughout the 1920s. Although dwarfed by state publishers, private companies had a good market share of some categories of books such as belles-lettres titles, children’s literature and foreign translations. There was also little or no control over the importation of books printed abroad, including those produced by Russian émigré publishers hostile to the Soviet regime.²³

Other than his own orders, Stalin’s most numerous source of books were the unsolicited copies sent to him by publishers and authors. Soviet publishers were expected to supply top Bolsheviks with copies of their books and authors needed little incentive to gift their works to the party’s general-secretary, particularly after the Stalin cult took off at the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s the Kremlin was deluged with gifts for Stalin, including many hundreds, if not thousands, of books. Even in the 1920s, a steady stream of publications flowed his way, as shown by a surviving ‘Register of Literature sent to Stalin in his Apartment, April–December 1926’.²⁴ Scores of books were sent to him during this nine-month period alone.

As you would expect, many of these books concerned Marxist philosophy, economics and politics but there were also texts on Russian history, the sociology of art, child psychology, sport and religion. Literature was represented by Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Pushkin, as well as Russian translations of Jack London, and of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Among the memoirs received by Stalin were those by Lenin’s widow Krupskaya, and Anton Denikin, the Tsarist general who had fought the Bolsheviks during the civil war. Among the oddities that found their way to Stalin’s flat were books on syphilis, the law of murder, Jewish ritual slaughter, and hypnosis. Many journals – scientific and cultural as well as political – were also routinely sent to him.

By far the most important tome that Stalin received in this particular batch of books was the first volume of Boris Shaposhnikov’s Mozg Armii (Brain of the Army), a study of general staffs before the First World War. Widely read and discussed in Soviet military circles, it was a book that came to be seen as the template for the functioning of Stalin’s high command during the Second World War. In 1929 Shaposhnikov reportedly sent Stalin an inscribed, specially bound copy of the three volumes of Mozg Armii.²⁵