Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Sten’s critique of Trotsky and Zinoviev echoed the views of Nikolai Bukharin, a former ‘Left Communist’, who came to favour a more moderate course than the one canvassed by the United Opposition, which favoured more radical foreign and domestic policies because it believed the crisis of capitalism was ongoing. Stalin was allied to Bukharin in the mid-1920s but changed his mind at the end of the decade in response to crises in town–country trade relations that threatened to cut food supplies to the cities. Stalin also believed the world economic depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s signalled a return of the revolutionary wave. Hence his abandonment of the New Economic Policy and his embrace of more militant policies. This policy turn meant Stalin fell out with Bukharin and his supporters, including Sten. Like so many opponents and critics of Stalin, Sten was expelled from the party in the 1930s, accused of counter-revolutionary activities, arrested and shot. He was exonerated and posthumously readmitted to the party in 1988.

While Frolov’s tale is reminiscent of the legend that Ivan the Terrible was educated by a philosopher known as Maximus the Greek, the story is not implausible. Hegel’s philosophy is notoriously difficult to understand and Stalin habitually consulted experts. The story is usually told against him, as a way of puncturing his intellectual pretensions, but his apparent willingness to be tutored in philosophy shows how serious the middle-aged Stalin was about developing intellectually.

STALIN REVIVIFIED

Roy Medvedev continued his studies of Stalin and Stalinism after the USSR’s collapse but his views of the dictator changed markedly. The critique of Stalinist terror remained in his writings but was balanced by greater appreciation of the more positive aspects of Stalin’s political leadership and intellectual endeavours:

Stalin was a ruler, a dictator and a tyrant. But under the mantle of the despot’s ‘cult of personality’ there was also a real person. He certainly was cruel and vindictive but he had other qualities as well: Stalin was a thinking, calculating, hard-working man possessed of an iron will and a considerable intellect; undoubtedly he was a patriot, concerned to uphold historic Russian statehood.¹⁰⁶

Medvedev’s changed view reflected the post-Soviet rehabilitation of Stalin’s historical reputation in Russia. By the early twenty-first century, most Russians believed that Stalin had done more good than harm to their country, not the least of his achievements being the defeat of Hitler. When Russia’s main TV channel staged a competition and viewers’ poll in 2008 to name the greatest figure in Russian history, Stalin came third (519,071 votes), after Alexander Nevsky (524,575) and Peter Stolypin (523,766), but rumours were rife that the ballot had been rigged to stop him coming first. According to a March 2018 opinion poll, Stalin was voted the greatest leader of all time for Russians: 38 per cent of 1,600 respondents granted him the number one rank – an amazing jump since 1989, when he received just 12 per cent of the vote.¹⁰⁷

To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, personal book collections are often beset by the disorder that springs from the haphazard way that books are bought, borrowed or otherwise acquired. Cataloguing may mask the confusion but the underlying disorder remains. In the 1920s a degree of order was imposed on Stalin’s library by stamping, numbering and classifying the books. At Blizhnyaya he had a library room that housed part of his collection, while other books resided on the many shelves and bookcases of various other homes and workspaces. The shelving of these books was far from random but his library ended up as chaotically organised as many of our own. While Soviet archivists could have centralised, catalogued and preserved the library intact after his death, post-1956 political developments prompted its disassembly. But as Walter Benjamin also said, it is not books that come alive by being collected, it is the collector.¹⁰⁸ Among the remnants of his library, in the pages of its surviving books, Stalin lived on.

CHAPTER 5

BAH HUMBUG! STALIN’S POMETKI

Stalin read books in diverse ways – selectively or comprehensively, cursorily or with avid attention. Some he read cover to cover, others he merely skimmed. Sometimes he would begin reading a book, lose interest after a few pages and jump from the introduction to the conclusion. Some books he read in a single sitting, others he dipped in and out of.