Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

A grand, new Moscow dacha was constructed for Stalin in 1933–4.⁴⁰ The Kuntsevo mansion was only ten or so minutes’ drive from the Kremlin using a fast highway reserved for government vehicles – hence the dacha’s colloquial name ‘Blizhnyaya’ (Nearby). Post-Nadya, Stalin’s daily life settled into a new pattern. Rarely staying overnight in his Kremlin apartment, he worked in his office until late and was then driven to Blizhnyaya. Not until the early hours of the morning did he go to bed.

The main house at Kuntsevo contained Stalin’s study and work spaces, a bedroom for Svetlana, a billiard room, a bath house, extensive servants’ quarters and a small dining room as well as a grand hall for large-scale banquets and events. The centrepiece of the dacha, however, was its library, a 30-square-metre room with four large bookcases whose shelves were deep enough to take two rows of books. But the bulk of Stalin’s collection, including those books transferred from his Kremlin apartment and office, were stored in a separate building nearby.

The dacha’s vestibule displayed three large multicoloured maps: a world map, a map of Europe and one of European Russia. As Molotov recalled: ‘Stalin loved maps . . . all maps.’⁴¹ The Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas reported that when he visited the dacha in June 1944, Stalin stopped before the world map and pointed at the Soviet Union, which was coloured red, exclaiming that the capitalists would ‘never accept the idea that so great a space should be red, never, never!’ Djilas misremembered that Stalin had encircled Stalingrad in blue on the world map. Actually, the city was marked by Stalin on the map of European Russia as part of a line drawing showing the German invasion’s deepest penetration into the USSR.⁴²

In his attack on Stalin’s war record at the 20th party congress, Khrushchev accused him of planning military operations on a globe. Stalin did have a big globe in or near his Kremlin office, but Khrushchev’s calumny has been rejected by members of the Soviet high command who worked with him closely during the war. Moreover, Stalin’s lichnyi fond contains nearly 200 maps with his pometki, including many large-scale maps used for planning and plotting military operations. There are also maps of many different countries and parts of the world, as well as numerous political, economic, administrative, road and physical geography maps of the USSR and its regions.⁴³

The dacha maps were conventional political maps (Mercator projection) that divided the world into differently coloured nations, states and empires. That political cartography was his chief preoccupation.

As a native Georgian, Stalin was, to use Alfred J. Rieber’s memorable phrase, a ‘man of the borderlands’.⁴⁴ It was Stalin’s Georgian origins and background and his early experience of political activity in the multi-ethnic borderlands of the Russian Empire that shaped his approach to the creation and protection of the Soviet system. The Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 with a strong sense that the durability of their revolution depended on its spread to other countries. Stalin shared that outlook but felt the political and economic interdependence of Russia and its borderlands was just as important.

The danger posed by the porous borders of its multi-ethnic periphery underpinned Stalin’s commitment to a strong, centralised Soviet state. He was a centraliser who subordinated the periphery of the former Russian Empire to its advanced proletarian Russian core. National and ethnic minorities were allowed regional and cultural autonomy but denied the possibility of self-government. This practice chimed with the view he had expressed in Marxism and the National Question (1913) and other writings: the Bolsheviks supported national self-determination in theory but reserved the right to repress nationalist movements if they threatened the interests of the working class and endangered the socialist revolution.

As Rieber also showed, Stalin’s borderlands policy was central to his domestic as well as his foreign policy. Forced collectivisation of agriculture and accelerated industrialisation were part of the struggle to secure the backward and underdeveloped borderlands. The Great Terror of the 1930s was in large part an ethnic purge of perceived nationalist elements in the borderlands.⁴⁵

The sweep of Stalin’s interests is captured by an anecdote about a map of the USSR’s new borders that was brought to him just after the war: