Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Kamenev and Zinoviev, together with many of their supporters, quickly recanted their opposition to the majority line and were soon readmitted to the party. Trotsky stood his ground, declaring that the party, like the French Revolution in 1794, had been captured by counter-revolutionary ‘Thermidorian forces’. In January 1928 he was exiled to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan.

A philosophical as well as a political logic underlay what Igal Halfin has called the ‘demonization’ of the Bolshevik opposition to Stalin’s majority faction in the party.⁴⁹ Kautsky was right. The Bolsheviks believed their movement was armed with a scientific theory of society and history that gave them – and only them – access to absolute truth. Their party and its leaders had proven themselves in the crucible of revolution and civil war and were now building the world’s first socialist society – an endeavour that would lead all of humanity to a classless and oppression-free utopia. Within this Weltanschauung, opposition to the party majority was inconceivable except as a deviation expressive of the insidious influence of class enemies.

As Trotsky put it at the 13th party congress in May 1924:

Comrades, none of us wishes to be or can be right when against the Party. In the last instance the Party is always right because it is the only historical instrument in the hands of the working class. . . . The English have a saying: ‘My country, right or wrong.’ We may say, and with much greater justice: ‘My party, right or wrong.’⁵⁰

Demonisation of dissent within the party was a gradual process that took place over several years. Initially, dissenters were deemed a ‘petty-bourgeois deviation’ that was objectively but not knowingly counter-revolutionary. Then the opposition came to be characterised as anti-party and actively counter-revolutionary.

One widely distributed critique of Trotskyism in the mid-1920s was Semen Kanatchikov’s History of One Deviation, which portrayed Trotsky as an isolated individualist who had rejected party discipline and gathered around himself ‘loners’ prone to hysterical panic. We don’t know if Stalin read the book but there was certainly a copy in his library, together with several other Kanatchikov publications.⁵¹

Trotsky was exiled to Alma-Ata in 1928 for ‘counter-revolutionary activities’, but was allowed to continue his factionalising by post. Accused of being involved in ‘anti-Soviet’ activities, he was exiled to Turkey in 1929 and deprived of his Soviet citizenship in 1932.

Trotsky published a number of notable books after he was expelled from the Soviet Union: The History of the Russian Revolution (1930); My Life (1930); The Permanent Revolution (1931); The Revolution Betrayed (1936); and The Stalin School of Falsification (1937). Apart from a 1931 German-language book on fascism, no post-expulsion works by Trotsky are to be found among the remnants of Stalin’s library. Dmitry Volkogonov claimed that ‘Stalin read the translation of The Revolution Betrayed in a single night, seething with bile’, but, typically, cites no source.⁵² Stephen Kotkin reports that ‘the omnipotent dictator . . . maintained a collection of everything written by and about Trotsky in a special cupboard in his study at the Near Dacha’, but he provides no evidence either.⁵³ Certainly, Stalin was kept well informed about Trotsky’s activities abroad and about his efforts to stay in touch with oppositionists who remained in the USSR. He also received a stream of reports from his security services about their repression of so-called ‘Trotskyist groups’.⁵⁴

STALIN’S TERROR

At the beginning of the 1930s Stalin was seemingly sanguine about the threat posed by Trotsky and Trotskyism. ‘The gentlemen in the Trotsky camp chattered about the “degeneration” of the Soviet regime, about “Thermidor”, about the “inevitable victory” of Trotskyism,’ Stalin told delegates to the 16th party congress in June 1930. ‘But, actually, what happened? What happened was the collapse, the end of Trotskyism.’⁵⁵ In his 1931 letter to Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya, Stalin expressed concern not about the strength of Trotskyism but about its misidentification as a faction of communism, when, ‘as a matter of fact, Trotskyism is the advanced detachment of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie’.⁵⁶ Talking to Emil Ludwig in December 1931, Stalin insisted that Trotsky had been largely forgotten by Soviet workers and if they did remember him it was ‘with bitterness, with exasperation, with hatred’.⁵⁷ At the 17th party congress in January 1934 – the so-called ‘Congress of Victors’ – Stalin said nothing about Trotsky except that ‘the anti-Leninist group of Trotskyists has been smashed and scattered. Its organisers are now to be found in the backyards of bourgeois parties abroad.’⁵⁸