Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin also gave Vasily a book whose composition he himself supervised, crafted and edited, the canonical Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938) – a book that was read and studied by tens of millions of Soviet citizens.¹⁵ Vasily read this book quite thoroughly, underlining paragraphs on virtually every page with different coloured pencils.¹⁶ His efforts paid off when he passed a state exam on the book with flying colours in 1939.¹⁷

Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, was more studious. In 1937 he gave the eleven-year-old a textbook history of the USSR and in 1938 her own a copy of the Short Course. Father ‘commanded’ me to read it, recalled Svetlana, because ‘he wanted me to make a study of the party’s history – his version of it’. Unlike her brother, she never did get around to reading it – ‘it bored me so’ – and when Stalin found out ‘he grew very angry’.¹⁸ But other books in her own personal collection that she did read included Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, and Stalin’s Problems of Leninism.¹⁹

BOLSHEVIK BOOK CULTURE

Stalin’s presents to his children and his stricture to Vasily and Artem about taking care of their books were expressive of the Bolsheviks’ print-based political culture and their valorisation of written texts. No book-burning dictator, Stalin would have sympathised with Victor Hugo’s response to the Communards, who set fire to the Louvre library in 1871:

Have you forgotten that your liberator

Is the book? The book is there on the heights;

It gleams; because it shines and illuminates,

It destroys the scaffold, war and famine;

It speaks: No more slaves and no more pariahs.²⁰

Stalin and the Soviets, to use Katerina Clark’s words, had an ‘extraordinary reverence for the book, which functioned as a cult object in a secular faith’.²¹ Under Stalin’s tutelage, Moscow aspired to become a socialist ‘Rome’, a radical centre of world culture based primarily, though by no means exclusively, on the printed word.

After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917, one of their first acts was to nationalise the publishing industry. For the Bolsheviks, words were the expressions of ideas that, allied to radical action, could become a material force capable of transforming not only societies but human nature itself. Under Stalin, Soviet writers were charged with helping to fashion the thoughts and feelings of the new Soviet men and women constructing socialism and communism. ‘To build socialism we need civil, electrical and mechanical engineers,’ Stalin was reported as saying in August 1934, as Soviet writers gathered for a national congress. ‘We need them to build houses, automobiles and tractors. But no less important, we need engineers of the human soul, writer-engineers building the human spirit.’²²

According to Lenin, communism was ‘Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country’, i.e. people’s democracy and advanced industrialisation. But there was also a third, critical element – mass literacy and cultural enlightenment. As Lenin said, ‘an illiterate person stands outside of politics, and must first learn the alphabet. Without this there can be no politics.’²³

Reading and writing were seen by the Soviet regime as a means of collective and individual self-emancipation from both bourgeois ideology and cultural backwardness and then the achievement of a higher, communist consciousness. Bolshevik leaders and activists were not exempted from this revolution of the mind. The creation of a new consciousness attuned to the collectivist culture of the Soviet socialist system was their personal mission, too. In power, the Bolsheviks remained committed to a permanent revolution of reading, learning and self-improvement. They believed that under socialism people should read a lot, and would read even more as society progressed to communism.²⁴

Public libraries were to be central to the realisation of Lenin’s vision. He envisaged a vast network of tens of thousands of libraries, reading rooms and mobile units that would bring books and revolutionary literature to within a ten-minute walk from every person’s home. Decrees were issued to create a public library service on ‘Swiss-American’ lines – quick and free access to bookshelves, inter-library loans, long opening hours and easy borrowing facilities. Private libraries were nationalised, together with the expropriation of major book collections owned by individuals. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed or ransacked 4,000 Soviet libraries but by the war’s end there were still 80,000 of them in the USSR, with 1,500 in Moscow alone. To satisfy demand, Soviet public libraries required the printing of at least 100,000 copies of any popular book.²⁵