Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

In 2003 Gromov published a wide-ranging study of Stalin’s relations with Soviet writers and artists that drew extensively on the holdings of his lichnyi fond. Among the documents referenced by Gromov was Stalin’s marking of Gorky’s novel Mother, which is a propagandistic story of revolutionary factory workers in early twentieth-century Russia. Running through the novel is the role of radical books and subversive literature in fomenting revolution. The chapter that attracted Stalin relates how an elderly peasant-turned-factory worker, Mikhail Rybin, having been won over to the revolutionary cause, went to a comrade’s house to pick up some illegal books for distribution among the people. Stalin side-marked several pages of this chapter, but what really excited him was Rybin’s peroration:

Give me your help! Let me have books – such books that when a man has read them he will not be able to rest. Put a prickly hedgehog to his brains. Tell those city folks who write for you to write for the villagers also. Let them write such hot truth that it will scald the village, that the people will even rush to their death.¹⁰¹

Another Russian historian who took a great interest in Stalin’s library was Roy Medvedev. It was Medvedev who interviewed the bibliographer Zolotukhina about her knowledge of the library and in 2005 he published a book entitled Chto Chital Stalin? (What Did Stalin Read?)

Medvedev and his twin brother Zhores were famous Soviet-era dissidents. Roy was expelled from the Soviet communist party in 1969 and Zhores, a plant biologist, was exiled to the west in the 1970s. Both were ‘loyal oppositionists’ who believed in the Soviet system but wanted to reform and democratise it. Of critical importance for the Medvedevs was the ‘destalinisation’ process begun by Khrushchev at the 20th party congress, not least the need to tell the whole truth about the massive Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. To this end Roy wrote a long book about Stalinist repression, Let History Judge. He was unable to publish the book in the USSR but it was translated and published in the west in the early 1970s. Medvedev’s verdict on the dictator, much influenced by Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin, was damning: ‘boorishness and self-importance, pathological conceit and callousness, mistrust and stealth, an inability to take the criticism of his comrades and a craving for influence and power’.¹⁰² His assessment of Stalin’s theoretical legacy was that it was poor: what was of interest in his writings was unoriginal and what was original was wrong. ‘He did not derive theoretical positions from concrete reality; he forced theory to fit his wishes, subordinated it to transient situations – in a word he politicised theory.’¹⁰³

As a dissident, Medvedev had no access to Soviet archives. Instead, he utilised documentation from the public sphere together with a great number of unpublished memoir sources. One memoir that he cited was E. P. Frolov’s story about his friend Jan Sten, a party philosopher who in the 1920s was recruited by Stalin to teach him Hegelian dialectics. Sten ‘often told me in confidence about these lessons’, recalled Frolov, ‘about the difficulties he, as a teacher, was having because of his student’s inability to master the material’.¹⁰⁴

During the post-Lenin succession struggles Sten backed Stalin against the Trotsky-Zinoviev United Opposition. A pamphlet he wrote on ‘The Question of the Stabilisation of Capitalism’ (1926) is preserved in Stalin’s library. Stalin read the text attentively and evidently agreed with Sten’s critique of the United Opposition. Contrary to Trotsky and Zinoviev, Sten argued that capitalism had successfully stabilised itself economically and politically following the intense crisis it experienced immediately after the First World War. Such stabilisation would not last, said Sten, but it could endure for some time yet, something the United Opposition had failed to grasp.¹⁰⁵