Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

The unstamped books listed in the SSPL catalogue are much the same as those that were stamped but do include c.150 foreign-language books, mostly in French, German or English. These include John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World (1919); Alfred Kurella’s Mussolini: Ohne Maske (1931); a book about the Spanish civil war, Garibaldini in Spagna (1937); a signed copy of the 1935 edition of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation; and various translations of works by Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin and Radek. We know from other sources that Stalin was sent many other books in foreign languages, which have since disappeared from his collection. But there is no sign he read any of them.

Marxist and Bolshevik writings predominate among the 391 marked books, periodicals and pamphlets retained by the IM-L archive, especially the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin himself. Erik van Ree estimated that about three-quarters of these titles are concerned with communist ideology and tactics.⁷⁵ The other major categories are history (36), economics (27) and military affairs (23).

Unlike the SSPL collection, the marked collection in the party archive contains a number of pre-1917 publications, including several works by the classical historian Robert Vipper (1859–1954) and the Tsarist military strategist Genrikh Leer (1829–1904).

If revolutionary history and military history are included, then historical works are by far the largest category of books in the marked collection, apart from the Marxist classics.

One marked book that combined various of Stalin’s interests is a 1923 text on the history of revolutionary armies by Nikolai Lukin (1885–1940), based on his lectures to the Red Army’s General Staff Academy. A former pupil of Vipper’s, Lukin was active in the revolutionary movement from 1905 onwards. He had personal connections to Nikolai Bukharin and joined his Left Communist group after the 1917 revolution. Lukin had quite a distinguished career as a Soviet historian, but it was not without controversy, and in 1938 he was arrested and sentenced to ten years hard labour. He died in captivity.

His book dealt with the French Revolution and the Paris Commune but it was the chapter on Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army that most interested Stalin. He noted Lukin’s point that the peculiarity of the English Revolution was the participation of part of the regime’s army on the side of the rebellious population. Cromwell’s task was to create a new army based on those soldiers and officers who had the courage to side with the revolution. He did this by establishing a unified command backed by a representative military council. Among Cromwell’s most ardent supporters were the New Model Army’s chaplains, who mobilised the troops’ religious enthusiasm for the Puritan revolt against the monarchy. Beside this passage Stalin wrote ‘politotdel’ (the political department) and later noted the use of the term commissar to denote representatives of rank-and-file soldiers.⁷⁶

Stalin made good use of his knowledge of English history in an interview with H. G. Wells in July 1934: ‘Recall the history of England in the seventeenth century. Did not many say that the old social system had decayed? But did it not, nevertheless, require a Cromwell to crush it by force?’ When Wells objected that Cromwell acted constitutionally, Stalin retorted: ‘In the name of the constitution he resorted to violence, beheaded the king, dispersed Parliament, arrested some and beheaded others!’ In that same interview he lectured Wells about nineteenth-century British history and the role of the radical Chartist movement in the democratic political reforms of that era.⁷⁷

Boris Ilizarov, a scholar who has done more work on Stalin’s library than any other Russian historian, believes that Stalin wasn’t much interested in history before 1917 and didn’t become seriously interested in reading history books until the 1930s, when he became involved in discussions about the production of new textbooks for Soviet schools.⁷⁸