Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Beside the following underlined paragraph, Stalin wrote two expressions of approval, NB and tak:

The Red Terror is not distinguishable from the armed insurrection, the direct continuation of which it represents. The State terror of a revolutionary class can be condemned ‘morally’ only by a man who, as a principle, rejects (in words) every form of violence whatsoever – consequently, every war and every rising. For this one has to be merely and simply a hypocritical Quaker.

When Trotsky wrote that ‘Kautsky has not the least idea of what a revolution is in practice. He thinks that theoretically to reconcile is the same as practically to accomplish’, Stalin underlined the two sentences, and in the margin wrote another of his favourite exclamations of approval – metko (spot on).

According to Trotsky, Kautsky believed the Russian working class had seized power prematurely. To which Trotsky responded: ‘No one gives the proletariat the opportunity of choosing whether it will or will not . . . take power immediately or postpone the moment. Under certain conditions the working class is bound to take power, under the threat of political self-annihilation for a whole historical period.’ This was underlined by Stalin, too, and in the margin he wrote tak!

Trotsky’s clinching argument in favour of the Bolshevik dictatorship was underlined, bracketed and crossed through by Stalin:

We have more than once been accused of having substituted for the dictatorship of the Soviets the dictatorship of our party. Yet it can be said with complete justice that the dictatorship of the Soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party. It is thanks to the clarity of its theoretical vision and its strong revolutionary organisation that the party has afforded to the Soviets the possibility of becoming transformed from shapeless parliaments of labour into the apparatus of the supremacy of labour. In this ‘substitution’ of the power of the party for the power of the working class there is nothing accidental, and in reality there is no substitution at all. The Communists express the fundamental interests of the working class.

Actually, Stalin was not convinced by Trotsky’s wording here. In the margin he wrote: ‘dictatorship of the party – not exact’, his preferred formulation being that the proletariat ruled through the party. He also expressed doubts about Trotsky’s view that under socialism compulsory labour service was the natural concomitant of the socialisation of the means of production. Stalin signalled scepticism by writing m-da in the margin several times.³⁸ By the time of the 10th party congress in March 1921, Stalin’s questioning of Trotsky’s position had hardened into outright opposition to his proposals for the militarisation of labour.

Stalin had his own copy of the Russian translation of Kautsky’s original text, which he read as attentively as Trotsky’s rejoinder.³⁹ The margins of the Kautsky book were liberally sprinkled with the ridiculing ‘ha ha’ and ‘hee hee’ as well as choice insults such svoloch’ (swine) and lzhets (liar). When Kautsky argued that Bolshevik intransigence was based on their claim to a monopoly of truth, Stalin responded that he was a durak (fool) for believing that all knowledge was provisional and limited. The same kind of invective may be found written in other Kautsky books that Stalin read. ‘Only he can mix up the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of a clique’, he wrote in a 1922 copy of Kautsky’s The Proletarian Revolution and Its Programme.⁴⁰ ‘Rubbish’, ‘nonsense’, wrote Stalin, when Kautsky claimed that another revolutionary crisis in nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary would have doomed the Czechs to Germanisation.⁴¹ Yet he read and marked many sections of Kautsky’s Terrorism and Communism without further comment. There were even a few NBs and one or two m-das in the margin. The same indicators of positive interest in the substantive detail of Kautsky’s many writings may be found in Stalin’s reading and marking of other works, particularly those that dealt with economic affairs and the ‘Agrarian Question’, Kautsky being an acknowledged Marxist expert on these topics.⁴² Always on the lookout for useful information and arguments, Stalin was willing to learn from even the most despised opponents.