Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Final decisions on what to do with Stalin’s book collection were not taken until January 1963. Prompted perhaps by the renewal of the anti-Stalin campaign at the 22nd congress of the CPSU in 1961, IM-L’s directorate resolved (1) to retain in the Institute’s archive all those texts containing Stalin’s pometki; (2) to house in IM-L’s own library, as a separate collection, books inscribed to Stalin and those with his library’s stamp; and (3) to disperse the remaining unmarked and unstamped books (those in good condition anyway) into the Institute’s own library and to other scientific and specialist libraries. It was also decided to place in a special file any letters or notes from authors and publishers found inside Stalin’s books.⁶⁶

Work began on cataloguing the books but it does not seem to have included listing which books were dispersed to libraries. In the absence of such a register it is impossible to know precisely which books were in Stalin’s library when he died or how many of them there were. But an idea of the numbers involved may be gleaned from a 1993 newspaper article by the historian Leonid Spirin, who had worked in IM-L for a number of years.⁶⁷

According to Spirin, the bulk of Stalin’s library consisted of the classics of Russian, Soviet and world literature – Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Mayakovsky, Hugo, Shakespeare, France. These and other unstamped books, about 11,000 in all, were transferred to the Lenin Library in the 1960s. Another 3,000 unstamped non-fiction books – socialist writings mostly – were added to IM-L’s library or given to other libraries, leaving a non-fiction remnant of 5,500. So, according to Spirin’s figures, there were about 19,500 books in Stalin’s personal library.

Spirin’s number of 5,500 non-fiction titles correlates with the catalogue of Stalin’s stamped books prepared by IM-L’s library. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the library separated from IM-L and became the Gosudarstvennaya Obshchestvenno-Politicheskaya Biblioteka – the State Socio-Political Library (SSPL). Located on Wilhelm Pieck Street in Moscow, this is where the only extant catalogue of Stalin’s library may be found, together with the books themselves.

The handwritten SSPL card indexes divide Stalin’s books into seven categories:

1. Books with the Library of J. V. Stalin stamp (3,747)

2. Books with the author’s autograph (with and without stamp) (587)

3. Books inscribed to Stalin (with and without stamp) (189)

4. Books with an identifiable subject classification (without stamp or autograph) (102)

5. Books with no identifiers (347)

6. Books belonging to members of Stalin’s family (34)

7. Books bearing the stamps of other libraries (49)

All but a few of the books listed in this catalogue were published before the early 1930s, which strongly suggests that rather being the non-fiction remnant of the library as a whole they are a subset of it and were retrieved from a particular location – Stalin’s apartment, perhaps, or his first dacha at Zubalovo. Spirin’s 5,500 figure needs to be revised significantly upwards to take account of the many books that Stalin acquired in subsequent years. While Spirin’s 11,000 figure for fiction etc. seems about right, his estimate of 3,000 non-fiction books in addition to those in those in the SSPL is far too low. Stalin must have acquired as least as many non-fiction books in the 1930s and 1940s as he did in the 1920s, and probably a lot more. Hence a better estimate of the size of Stalin’s library may be that it contained some 25,000 books, pamphlets and periodicals.⁶⁸

The one cataloguing exercise undertaken by the IM-L archive itself was listing all texts with Stalin’s pometki. In the version of the pometki list finalised in July 1963, there were 300 such titles.⁶⁹ However, a handwritten amendment of unknown date changed this number to 397 whereas the opis’ (inventory) made available to researchers in the 1990s lists 391 such items.⁷⁰ To be added to this total are upwards of a hundred books in other sections of Stalin’s lichnyi fond, many of which also contain his markings and annotations.

STALIN’S BOOKS