Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Most of the books in what remains of his collection are unmarked by him except for an autograph or the imprint of his library stamp, so it is impossible to know for sure how much of it he actually read. Erik van Ree suggests that Stalin habitually marked the books he did read.¹ But even the most inveterate of annotators do not write in all their books. Only those books or parts of books whose pages remained ‘uncut’ can be safely eliminated from his reading life, assuming he didn’t read another copy of the same text.

It is rare for readers (unless they are educators) to mark fiction books, and Stalin was no exception. The texts he marked were nearly all non-fiction. Pometki, the Russian word for such markings, encompasses both the verbal and non-verbal signs that appear on the pages. The closest English word is marginalia, but Stalin’s marks are to be found between the lines and on the front, inside and back covers as well as in the margins. Marginalia also implies annotation – the use of words – but 80 per cent of Stalin’s surviving pometki consist of what H. J. Jackson has called ‘signs of attention’.²

Stalin marked the text of the pages, paragraphs and phrases that interested him by underlining them or by vertical lines in the side margin. To add emphasis, he double-lined or enclosed the passages in round brackets. To provide structure he numbered the points that interested him – numbering that could reach into the high double-digits and be spread over hundreds of pages of a single text. As an alternative or supplement to these signs of attention, Stalin wrote subheadings or rubrics in the margin. Indeed, much of his marginalia consists of repetition of words and phrases from the text itself.

His style of pometki is both normal and conventional, as anyone who marks their books will attest. As Jackson pointed out, readers marking books is a venerable tradition that stretches back to the dawn of the print era. For Erasmus, it was the essential study skill of a humanist education:

Carefully observe when reading writers whether any striking word occurs, if diction is archaic or novel, if some argument shows brilliant invention or has been skilfully adapted from elsewhere, if there is any brilliance in the style, if there is any adage, historical parallel, or maxim worth committing to memory. Such a passage should be indicated by some appropriate mark. For not only must a variety of marks be employed but appropriate ones at that, so that they will immediately indicate their purpose.³

Virginia Woolf was not alone in complaining that marking books was an abomination, an intrusion designed to impose one’s own interpretation on other readers. In his classic riposte to this accusation, Mortimer J. Adler insisted that ‘marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love’. As an active process of reading, marking means that ‘your marks and notes become an integral part of the book and stay there forever’. But he was clear that the reader should only mark their own books, not those that belonged to others or were borrowed from public libraries.⁴ Stalin recognised no such distinction and freely marked any book that came into his possession, including those he borrowed from the Lenin Library and other state institutions.

As well as marking nearly 900 texts in his personal library Lenin filled notebooks with quotations, summaries and commentaries on the books he read. Stalin’s research notes were solely marked in the texts themselves. To aid retrieval of the most important or useful material, he sometimes inserted thin strips of paper between the relevant pages. Some of these now yellowing and disintegrating bookmarks can still be found in the Russian archival collection of Stalin’s library books.⁵

As Jackson also points out, the next step up from non-verbal signs is to enter into a one-way conversation with the text in the form of a brief word or phrase. When so moved, Stalin could be highly expressive.

Charles Dickens may well have been among the writers read by Stalin. Dickens was studied in Soviet schools and his writings used to teach English. The Bolsheviks didn’t like all his novels (the anti-revolutionary A Tale of Two Cities, for example) but they relished his bleak descriptions of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Appealing to puritanical Bolsheviks like Stalin would have been the complete absence in Dickens of any mention of physical sexuality.⁶ As far as we know, Stalin never wrote Scrooge’s famous expletive ‘bah humbug’ in the margin of any of his books, but he used plenty of Russian equivalents. Among his choice expressions of disdain were ‘ha ha’, ‘gibberish’, ‘nonsense’, ‘rubbish’, ‘fool’, ‘scumbag’, ‘scoundrel’ and ‘piss off’.