Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

The idea that Stalin was a bit of an intellectual who read and collected a lot of books was not uncommon, Trotsky’s caricature of him as a mediocrity notwithstanding. He was, after all, a published author whose pretensions as a Marxist theorist were well known. The Stalin cult proclaimed him to be a genius and a succession of bedazzled western intellectuals, diplomats and politicians had publicly hailed his knowledge and erudition. Cult images often depicted him reading, writing or standing by books. But the discovery of his personal library focused attention on the intellectual aspect of Stalin’s persona and identity. Crucially, his biographers now had a source they could use to explore the workings of his mind alongside their studies of his exercise of power.

In a chapter in his 1989 biography entitled ‘Stalin’s Mind’, Dmitry Volkogonov counterposed Stalin as an ‘exceptional intellect’ to Trotsky’s disparaging characterisation. It was Volkogonov who first published Stalin’s 1925 library classification schema, revealed the existence of the ex-libris label and noted his habit of writing in books: ‘Lenin’s Collected Works, for instance, are covered with underlinings, ticks and exclamation marks in the margins’. Stalin, wrote Volkogonov, sought ammunition against his rivals from wherever he could, including their own writings. He kept a special collection of hostile émigré literature and insisted on maintaining subscriptions to White émigré publications.⁸⁷

Volkogonov’s claim that Stalin read and underlined key passages in Hitler’s Mein Kampf cannot be verified, since there is no copy of the book in what remains of Stalin’s collection, but it rings true.⁸⁸ Not that he needed to read Mein Kampf to find out what Hitler had said about ‘Lebensraum’ and German expansion into Russia, since these words of the Führer were cited widely in the Soviet press. He was also very well briefed about internal developments in Nazi Germany. In 1936, for example, he was sent detailed documentation about that year’s Nuremberg Rally.⁸⁹ An avid reader of confidential TASS bulletins from around the world, Stalin scrawled ‘ha ha’ across the report of an October 1939 Turkish news story that he had been invited by Hitler to visit Berlin. Reportedly, Stalin had declined the invitation but the possibility remained that Hitler might visit him in Moscow.⁹⁰

Subsequent Stalin biographies featured themes similar to those of Volkogonov. In a chapter on ‘Vozhd and Intellectual’, Robert Service considered Stalin to be a thoughtful man who had studied a lot: ‘his learning, though, had led to only a few basic changes in his ideas. Stalin’s mind was an accumulator and regurgitator. He was not an original thinker nor even an outstanding writer. Yet he was an intellectual until the end of his days.’⁹¹ According to Donald Rayfield, author of Stalin and His Hangmen, ‘the most common mistake of Stalin’s opponents was to underestimate how exceptionally well read he was’.⁹² In a section called ‘A World of Reading and Contemplation’, the Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk’s post-Soviet biography explored Stalin’s pometki, noting that ‘he liked books. Reading played a major role in shaping his ideas. . . . Stalin loved history and constantly used historical example and analogies in his articles, speeches and conversation.’ But while Stalin loved history, ‘he was not particularly interested in scholarly discussions and actual historical evidence, choosing instead to adapt the facts to his preferred narrative. . . . In the end Stalin’s self-education, political experience, and character formed a mind that was in many ways repellent but ideally suited to holding onto power.’⁹³ Stephen Kotkin’s multi-volume biography of the dictator is replete with references to Stalin as intellectual and reader, beginning with his observation that the young Stalin ‘devoured books, which, as a Marxist, he did so in order to change the world’.⁹⁴

Nikolai Simonov, a senior IM-L researcher, was the first scholar to explore some of Stalin’s pometki in depth. His article ‘Reflections on Stalin’s Markings in the Margins of Marxist Literature’ appeared in the party’s theoretical journal Kommunist in December 1990.⁹⁵ Published at the tail end of the Gorbachev era, Simonov’s analysis echoed the late Soviet orthodoxy that Stalin was not a Leninist. His focus was Stalin’s views on the theory of the state under socialism and he used the marginalia in his library books to show that the dictator disagreed with Marx, Engels and Lenin on this question.

According to classical Marxist doctrine, the capitalist state (the government, civil service, judiciary, police and armed forces) was a bourgeois instrument of class oppression that would wither away under socialism when antagonistic classes were abolished. Stalin’s view was that socialism needed a strong state to ensure the proletariat could hold onto power.