Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin also liked to borrow books from other libraries, both personal and institutional. The Soviet poet Demyan Bedny, whose own library was said to contain 30,000 volumes, complained about Stalin leaving greasy fingermarks on books he borrowed from him.²⁶ A favourite source was the main state repository, the Lenin Library; after Stalin’s death, seventy-two unreturned books were found in his private collection. Borrowing but not returning books was an old habit of Stalin’s. When he dropped out of the seminary in 1898, the authorities demanded a payment of 18 roubles and 15 kopeks for eighteen books he’d taken away from the seminary’s main library.²⁷

Most of the Lenin Library books Stalin borrowed were returned, fines unpaid, in 1956, three years after his death. But twenty-four texts, which had been marked by him, were retained by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (the renamed IMEL), among them two volumes of Herodotus’s classic Histories. However, like some other items noted on the retained list, they seem to have disappeared from the archive.²⁸

UNHAPPY FAMILY

Grand though Stalin’s Kremlin accommodations were by the standards of ordinary Soviet citizens, they were not big enough to house a large-scale personal library. At the height of his power Stalin could easily have carved out or had constructed a convenient space for his books but he showed no inclination to do so. Instead, the books were mainly kept at the places he spent most of his leisure and reading time from the 1920s through to the 1950s – his two Moscow dachas.

The first Moscow dacha, allocated to him by the state in the early 1920s, was not far from a village called Usovo, about 20 miles outside Moscow. It was called the Zubalovo dacha because before the 1917 revolution the house and its estate belonged to the Zubalov brothers, who were Armenian oil magnates. On the estate were three separate houses, each occupied by a high-ranking Bolshevik and their family. Stalin’s dacha was a relatively modest two-storey house that contained a large room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

Stalin and his extended family (which consisted mostly of his in-laws) spent a lot of time there at the weekends and during the summer. By all accounts the 1920s were a fairly happy time for the Stalin family. As his daughter Svetlana fondly recalled:

My father transformed Zubalovo from a dark country place that was densely overgrown, with a gloomy gabled house and a lot of old furniture, into a sunny, abundant estate with flower and vegetable gardens and all sorts of useful out-buildings. The house was rebuilt and the high Gothic gables removed; the rooms were remodelled and the musty old furniture carted away. . . . My mother and father lived upstairs, and the children and my grandmother, grandfather and anyone who happened to be staying with us downstairs.²⁹

The Stalin family idyll ended abruptly in November 1932 when Svetlana’s mother Nadezhda (‘Nadya’) Alliluyeva committed suicide. As Svetlana’s biographer Rosemary Sullivan has remarked, ‘Nadya is an elusive figure in the Stalin universe’³⁰ and the reasons and circumstances of her death remain unclear.

Stalin’s romance with her began in 1917 when he returned to St Petersburg from exile. Aged sixteen, Nadya was the daughter of an Old Bolshevik family that Stalin had known for a long time. When the Bolsheviks made Moscow their capital in March 1918, she followed Stalin there and worked with him in the Nationalities Commissariat. She joined the Bolshevik party and when Stalin was despatched to the front during the civil war, she went with him. They registered their marriage in March 1919. Nadya was the forty-year-old Stalin’s second wife. They had two children, Vasily (b.1921) and Svetlana (b.1926). Stalin also had a son, Yakov, from his marriage to Ekaterina (Kato) Svanidze (1885–1907), whose mother died of typhus a few months after he was born. Brought up by his mother’s relatives, in the 1920s, Yakov went to live with his father. Stalin didn’t get on with Yakov but relations improved when he became an artillery officer in the late 1930s. Like millions of other Soviet soldiers, Yakov was taken prisoner by the Germans in summer 1941. He died in captivity in 1943, possibly while trying to escape.

Soviet soldiers were not allowed to surrender unless severely wounded. To encourage soldiers to fight to the death, their families suffered if they were captured, and Stalin’s son was no exception. While Yakov was a POW, his wife Yulia, a ballerina, was under arrest and their daughter Galina brought up by other members of the extended Stalin family.

After Vasily’s birth, Nadya was expelled from the party for inactivity, but since she’d worked in Lenin’s office, her membership was soon restored.³¹ Nadya hired servants to look after her children and strove for a political and professional life independent of Stalin. In 1929 she enrolled in the textile production faculty of the Industrial Academy in Moscow.