Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Given how much time Stalin spent at Blizhnyaya, the chances were that he would die there, and so he did in March 1953 at the age of seventy-three. There are many conspiracy theories about his death but the truth is that he suffered a stroke on 1 March and died four days later.⁵¹ On the day of his death Soviet leaders established a subgroup tasked with ‘putting the documents and papers of Comrade Stalin, his archive as well as all current materials, in proper order’.⁵² The group consisted of head of government Georgy Malenkov, security chief Lavrenty Beria and deputy party leader Nikita Khrushchev. Two days later Beria’s security personnel removed all Stalin’s belongings and furniture from the dacha.

When Stalin fell ill, Svetlana was summoned to Blizhnyaya from a French class. ‘Strange things happened at Kuntsevo after my father died,’ she recalled:

The very next day . . . Beria had the whole household, servants and bodyguards, called together and told that my father’s belongings were to be removed right away. . . . In 1955, when Beria himself had ‘fallen’, they started to restore the dacha. My father’s things were brought back. The former servants and commandants were invited back and helped put everything where it belonged and make the house look as it had before. They were preparing to open a museum, like the one in Lenin’s house in Leninskiye Gorki.⁵³

The decision to establish a Stalin Museum at Blizhnyaya was taken by the Soviet leadership in September 1953 but the plan was dropped after Khrushchev’s secret speech.⁵⁴ The dacha was then placed at the disposal of the central committee and used to accommodate vacationing party apparatchiks and visiting foreign communists. An intriguing coda to the Stalin museum project was that in 2014 an exhibition on ‘The Myth of the Beloved Leader’ was mounted in a Moscow museum adjacent to Red Square. Ostensibly about Lenin, the exhibition was devoted mainly to Stalin and included many of the personal artefacts that had been assembled for the aborted Stalin Museum.

Stalin remained popular in Georgia and in 1957 a museum in his honour was opened in his hometown of Gori. Among its exhibits was a reproduction of Stalin’s childhood house and the railway carriage that transported him to the Potsdam Conference. The museum’s main building was palatial but badly maintained in post-Soviet times (when I visited in December 2015 the power failed and it was freezing). Among its exhibits are Stalin’s desk from his Kremlin office, a box made by his son Vasily, and, in a respectfully darkened space, the dictator’s death mask. The latter was one of ten such plaster casts of Stalin’s face (and hands) that were distributed to various museums and archives after his death.⁵⁵

The museum’s continued existence has been a matter of intermittent political controversy in independent Georgia but, so far, the locals’ desire to attract tourists and celebrate their most famous son has trumped all political considerations.

Svetlana did not mention in her memoirs that while she relinquished any claim she may have had to Blizhnyaya, she tried to trade this off for some time and space in another of Stalin’s dachas.⁵⁶ She also had an eye on her father’s library and in March 1955 wrote to the party leadership:

I would like to ask the government to consider the possibility of letting me have part of the library. It is huge and has many books of no interest to me but I would be very grateful if I could be permitted to take some books. I’m interested in the history books and Russian and translated literature. I know this part of the library very well since in the past I used it a lot.⁵⁷

Svetlana had quite an eventful personal life, including three husbands, two children by different fathers and an Indian communist lover, Brajesh Singh, who died in 1966. Svetlana was granted permission to take his ashes back to India, where, in Delhi, she sensationally defected to the United States. The following year Svetlana published a memoir of her life as Stalin’s daughter called 20 Letters to a Friend, which remains a unique, though not always reliable, source of information and insight about her father.

The loss of Stalin’s library books rankled Svetlana so much that when she published a second memoir two years later, she complained bitterly that the Soviet government had ‘decided to confiscate my father’s [library], disposing of it at its discretion. . . . In the USSR the State twists the law whichever way it wants, including laws governing private property.’⁵⁸

DISCOVERING STALIN’S LIBRARY