Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Ilizarov may be right that the young Stalin was more immediately preoccupied with Marxist politics and philosophy. However, the study of history featured in both his school and seminary education and it was a branch of knowledge foundational to Marxism, a theory of human affairs that combined an account of social change with a teleological vision of humanity’s progression from ancient slavery to communism. All revolutionary socialists of Stalin’s generation were interested in seismic events like the French Revolution and in past popular struggles from which they could derive lessons for their own day. His first significant piece of writing, Anarchism or Socialism? (1907), cited both Arthur Arnould’s and Olivier Lissagaray’s histories of the Paris Commune.⁷⁹ His tract on Marxism and the National Question (1913) had a big historical content and in the 1920s he made many references to history. In a 1926 speech he observed that neither Ivan the Terrible nor Peter the Great were true industrialisers because they didn’t develop the heavy industry necessary for economic growth and national independence. In 1928 he alluded to a parallel between Peter’s efforts to modernise Russia and those of the Bolsheviks, although in his discussion with Emil Ludwig in 1931 he denied the comparison, pointing out that Peter had striven to strengthen the upper-class character of the Russian state whereas he served the workers.⁸⁰ Stalin’s most dramatic pronouncement on Russian history was his February 1931 speech on the urgency of the drive for modernisation and industrialisation:

The history of old Russia consisted, among other things, in her being beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers. She was beaten by the Polish-Lithuanian lords. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. Everyone gave her a beating for her backwardness. For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for state backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and could be done with impunity. . . . Such is the law of the exploiters: beat the backward because you are weak – so you are in the wrong and therefore can be beaten and enslaved. . . . We have fallen behind the advanced countries by 50 to 100 years. We must close that gap in 10 years. Either we do this or we will be crushed.⁸¹

Memoirs and diaries were another category of books that interested Stalin. Among the books he read and annotated are the memoirs of the British intelligence agent R. H. Bruce Lockhart, the First World War German General Erich Ludendorff, and Annabelle Bucar, who defected to the Soviet Union from the American embassy in Moscow in 1948 and then became a star of Radio Moscow’s English-language broadcasting service.

Perhaps the quirkiest author in Stalin’s library was ‘Professor Taid O’Conroy’, whose book The Menace of Japan (1933) was published in Russian in 1934.⁸² Born Timothy Conroy in Ballincollig, County Cork, Ireland in 1883, he ran away to sea at the age of fifteen and joined the Royal Navy. Having served in South Africa, Somaliland and the Persian Gulf, he then spent a year teaching English at a Berlitz school in Copenhagen before moving to Russia in 1909 to teach at the Imperial Court in St Petersburg. After the First World War he ended up in Japan, where he married a waitress, described by the publisher of his book as descended from a venerable Japanese aristocratic family. He and his wife left Japan in 1932. In London, O’Conroy contacted the Foreign Office and submitted a briefing document on Japan that eventually became his book. He died in 1935 from liver failure.⁸³

As the title of his book indicates, O’Conroy’s main message concerned the danger of Japanese militarism now that Japan had invaded and occupied Manchuria (in 1931). Stalin had no need of his counsel in that regard. There were two Soviet-authored books in his library dating from 1933 that detailed the militarisation of Japanese society and the build-up of Japan’s armed forces. Both books he read and marked heavily.⁸⁴ Stalin also had at his disposal numerous news reports from TASS’s Tokyo office. TASS bulletins from various countries were one of Stalin’s most important sources of international information and in the early 1930s he paid particular attention to reporting from and about Japan.⁸⁵ During the Second World War, Stalin’s staff produced an information bulletin for him that contained translated and summarised material from the foreign press, particularly reports on the Soviet Union.⁸⁶

REIMAGINING STALIN

Sharapov’s 1988 memoir was the first public inkling that Stalin had an extensive private library. It was published in English in Moscow News under the headline ‘Stalin’s Personal Library’.