Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

As part of the preparations for the short-lived Stalin Museum project, staff from the then Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute (formerly IMEL, later IM-L) were allowed to examine Stalin’s library books. Among them was the bibliographer Yevgenia Zolotukhina, who recalled that ‘the atmosphere at the dacha was stiff and formal, the only agreeable room was the library, which had a cosy feel. . . . The books were housed in a neighbouring building and brought to Stalin according to his requirements.’

Zolotukhina described Stalin’s Kremlin apartment as ‘a suite of vaulted rooms’, with a spiral staircase that led to his study:

The [apartment’s] library was furnished with a large number of old-fashioned bookcases that were filled with books on a great variety of subjects. . . . Clearly Stalin was an educated person. He got extremely irritated whenever he came across grammar and spelling mistakes, which he would carefully correct with a red pencil. These books, therefore, all the ones he marked, were transferred to the Central Party Archive.

Zolotukhina was struck by ‘the large assortment of books about Pushkin, all published during the Soviet period, as well as individual old editions – a number of books had slips from second-hand bookshops’.⁵⁹ Stalin was also ‘interested in books about Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible’ and ‘read all the emigre literature that appeared in Russian . . . including the celebrated biographies by Raymond Gul of Voroshilov and others.⁶⁰ In the postwar years he became interested in books and magazines about architecture, which must have been related to the construction of tall buildings in Moscow. These books could be found on his bedside table.’⁶¹

In 1957 Stalin’s apartment and dacha were visited by Yury Sharapov, head of IM-L’s library.⁶² Sharapov’s mission was to sort through Stalin’s books with a view to incorporating them into the Institute, a task which took several months to complete. In the Kremlin he found ‘a tall Swedish bookcase with detachable shelves. It was crammed with books and booklets, many with bookmarks in them. Literature written by emigres and White Guards, works by the opposition – those whom Stalin regarded as ideological adversaries or simply enemies – I must give Stalin his due – he read them all with great attention.’

At Blizhnyaya, Sharapov found that the bulk of Stalin’s books were kept in a separate wooden house with a large cellar. He started with the books on military matters, noting that Stalin was more interested in history than strategy and tactics: ‘The pages of old books about the wars waged by the Assyrians, Ancient Greeks and Romans were covered with his notes.’

There was a special section for fiction in the library and Sharapov recalled with disdain what Stalin had written in a copy of Maxim Gorky’s Death and the Maiden in 1931: ‘This piece is stronger than Goethe’s Faust (love conquers death).’⁶³ More happily, he noted that Stalin had studied the great nineteenth-century Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin in some depth.

The only Shchedrin book that remains in Stalin’s library is a 1931 edition of previously unpublished writings, which he read and marked in some detail.⁶⁴ In 1936 Stalin put his knowledge of Shchedrin to good use in a mockery of foreign critics’ claims that the new Soviet constitution was a façade with no substance, a fraud like the fake ‘Potemkin Villages’ built to impress Catherine the Great as she travelled through the Russian countryside:

In one of his tales the great Russian writer Shchedrin portrays a pig-headed official, very narrowminded and obtuse, but self-confident and zealous to the extreme. After this bureaucrat had established ‘order and tranquillity’ in the region ‘under his charge,’ having exterminated thousands of its inhabitants and burned down scores of towns in the process, he looked around him, and on the horizon espied America – a country little known, of course, where, it appears, there are liberties of some sort or other which serve to agitate the people, and where the state is administered in a different way. The bureaucrat espied America and became indignant:

What country is that, how did it get there, by what right does it exist? (Laughter and applause.) Of course, it was discovered accidentally several centuries ago, but couldn’t it be shut up again so that not a ghost of it remains? (General laughter.) Thereupon he wrote an order: ‘Shut America up again!’ (General laughter.)⁶⁵