Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

It has also proved to be a dangerous genre for scholars searching the library for smoking-gun marginalia that would substantiate their various theories of Stalin’s psychology and motivation. One example is the graphic annotation of a couple of pages of a Russian edition of Anatole France’s Under the Rose, a series of humanist dialogues about the existence and meaning of God. But it turned out that these were made by Svetlana, not Stalin.¹² Svetlana’s style of annotation was similar to her father’s but more florid and irreverent, and harder to make sense of. Examining these markings, a perplexed Yevgeny Gromov concluded that ‘it’s hard to understand what Stalin wanted to express’.¹³

Another example of the perils of over-interpreting Stalin’s pometki is his multiple scribbling of the word uchitel’ (teacher) on the back cover of Alexei Tolstoy’s 1942 play, Ivan Grozny. Stalin could be a bit of a doodler and the word ‘teacher’ features among several other, unrelated and barely legible words and phrases on the back cover.¹⁴ Yet some have chosen to take this as prima facie evidence that Stalin considered Ivan the Terrible his teacher and exemplar.¹⁵ As we see below, Stalin did have a lot of time for the Terrible, but he looked down on all the Tsars, even the Greats such as Peter and Catherine. His one and only true hero and role model was Lenin.

Another mountain made out of a molehill is Stalin’s underlining of this quotation in a 1916 Russian history textbook: ‘The death of the defeated is necessary for the tranquillity of the victors’ – attributed to Genghis Khan.¹⁶ Is that why Stalin killed all those Old Bolsheviks, asked two Russian historians.¹⁷ That Stalin might have been interested in Genghis Khan’s motivation for what the book’s author terms the ‘Tatar Pogroms’ does not seem to have occurred to them.

Another apparently smoking gun spotted by some is the text written at the back of Stalin’s heavily marked 1939 edition of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism:

1) Weakness, 2) Idleness, 3) Stupidity. These are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else, in the absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly virtue. NB! If a man is (1) strong (spiritually), 2) active, 3) clever (or capable), then he is good, regardless of any other ‘vices’!¹⁸

According to Donald Rayfield, this was ‘the most significant statement’ Stalin ever made: ‘Stalin’s comment gives a Machiavellian gloss to the credo of a Dostoevskian satanic anti-hero and is an epigraph to his whole career.’¹⁹ Robert Service saw the inscription as ‘intriguing’ and thinks that Stalin, in ‘communing with himself’ and in using ‘the religious language of the spirit and of sin and vice’, was ‘reverting to the discourse of the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary’, his early schooling having ‘left an indelible imprint’.²⁰ Slavoj Žižek considered it ‘as concise as ever a formulation of immoral ethics’.²¹

All very interesting, except the handwriting is not Stalin’s. Who wrote those words and how they came to be inscribed in a book in his library remains mysterious, as does their intended meaning.

In truth, no smoking guns are to be found anywhere in the remains of Stalin’s library. His pometki reveal preoccupations not secrets, and the way he engaged with ideas, arguments and facts.

JOINED AT THE HIP: STALIN, LENIN AND TROTSKY

Stalin revered Lenin. He first met him in December 1905 at a party conference in Tampere, Finland, then an autonomous province of Tsarist Russia. In January 1924, at a memorial meeting for the recently deceased founder of the Soviet state, Stalin recalled that what captivated him about Lenin was the ‘irresistible force of logic’ in his speeches. Other features of Lenin’s political practice that so impressed Stalin were ‘no whining over defeat’; ‘no boasting in victory’; ‘fidelity to principle’; ‘faith in the masses’; and ‘the insight of genius, the ability to rapidly grasp and divine the inner meaning of impending events’.²²