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
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
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,
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 Instead, he utilised documentation from the public sphere together with a great number of unpublished memoir sources.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