Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Despite its limitations, the SSPL catalogue is the best guide we have to the contents and character of Stalin’s library.⁷¹ What it shows is that it was overwhelmingly a Soviet library – a collection of post-1917 texts published in Soviet Russia. Most of the texts are books but there are also a large number of short, pamphlet-type publications. Nearly all the texts are in Russian and the great majority are written by Bolsheviks or other varieties of Marxists and Socialists. In the first section of the catalogue, which lists books with Stalin’s library stamp, the most heavily featured author is Lenin (243 publications) and there are also numerous works about Lenin and Leninism. The most favoured authors after Lenin are Stalin (95), Zinoviev (55), Bukharin (50), Marx (50), Kamenev (37), Molotov (33), Trotsky (28), Kautsky (28), Engels (25), Rykov (24), Plekhanov (23), Lozovsky (22), Rosa Luxemburg (14) and Radek (14). Five of these authors (Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev, Rykov and Lozovsky) were purged and executed by Stalin, while Radek died in the Gulag and Trotsky was assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940. But their books remained part of Stalin’s collection. The catalogue also lists hundreds of reports of communist party congresses and conferences, as well organisations such as the Comintern and Soviet trade unions.

Apart from the works of Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Luxemburg, there are very few foreign translations in Stalin’s collection. Notable exceptions include Russian translations of Winston Churchill’s book about the First World War, The World Crisis; three books by the German revisionist social democrat Eduard Bernstein; two books by Keynes, including The Economic Consequences of the Peace; Jean Jaurès’s History of the Great French Revolution; Tomáš Masaryk’s World Revolution; the German economist Karl Wilhelm Bucher’s Work and Rhythm; an early work by Karl Wittfogel on the ‘awakening’ of China; John Hobson’s Imperialism; Werner Sombart’s book about modern capitalism; some works of the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk; the Italian Marxist Antonio Labriola on historical materialism; John Reed’s Insurgent Mexico; several works by the American writer Upton Sinclair, and the letters of executed US anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Among the many works on economics in the collection is a translation of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations: in his heavily marked copies of David Rozenberg’s three volumes of commentary on Marx’s Capital, Stalin displayed a particular interest in the sections on trade and Adam Smith.⁷²

There is very little fiction listed in the catalogue but Stalin’s interest in the history of the ancient world is reflected in the presence of a translation of Flaubert’s Salammbô, a novel set in Carthage at the time of the First Punic War.

Three slightly off-beat authors who feature in the collection are L. N. Voitolovsky, an early Soviet theorist of the social psychology of crowd behaviour; Moisey Ostrogorsky, the author of one of the founding texts of western political sociology, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties; and Victor Vinogradov, a Soviet literary theorist, who wrote a book about the evolution of naturalism in Russian literature.

Among Stalin’s philosophy books was Moris G. Leiteizen’s Nietzsche and Finance Capital (1928).⁷³ Nietzsche was one of those ‘petty-bourgeois’ ‘idealist’ philosophers whose works the Bolsheviks banned from public libraries. Because of his appropriation by fascist and Nazi thinkers, he was totally rejected by official Soviet culture after Hitler came to power, and there is no evidence that he was read by Stalin.

As the title of his book indicates, Leiteizen was highly critical of Nietzsche but also detected a certain affinity between Bolshevism and the nihilist German philosopher, a point endorsed by enlightenment commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky in his introduction to the volume. Leiteizen expressed this idea and sentiment in terms that Stalin might well have appreciated:

Nietzsche is the most distant thinker for us but at the same time he is close to us. Reading his works, one breathes pure and sharp mountain air. There is clarity and lucidity of concept, there is nothing hiding behind a beautiful sentence. There is the same nakedness and unambiguity of class relations, the same struggle against all illusions and ideals, the Nietzschean struggle against petty gods and first of all against the most haughty and deceptive one of them – democracy. . . . What brings us together is Nietzsche’s struggle against the individualism and anarchy of capitalist society, his passionate dream of world unification, his struggle against nationalism . . .⁷⁴