Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 had reinforced Stalin’s fears concerning the interaction of foreign and domestic threats. General Francisco Franco’s military mutiny against the country’s leftist government was supported by troops and munitions from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Stalin backed the Republic’s democratically elected government and some 2,000 Soviet military personnel served in Spain alongside the Comintern’s 40,000 volunteers in the International Brigades. He was convinced that Franco’s military successes were the result of sabotage and subversion behind the front lines.⁷⁶

Spanish communists were in the vanguard of the anti-fascist struggle but there was also a strong anarchist movement and a small but vocal semi-Trotskyist party called POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). In the context of the unfolding Great Terror in the USSR, the POUM leftists, who sought a more radical revolution in Spain than the communists, were categorised as Nazi and fascist agents provocateurs. In May 1937 a POUM revolt in Barcelona was put down viciously, including the abduction and execution by Soviet agents of their leader, Andrés Nin.

Stalin became obsessed with the damage that ‘wreckers and spies’ could do if the Soviet Union was attacked by foreign powers and considered Spain an object lesson in that regard. ‘They want to turn the USSR into another Spain,’ he told the Military Council in June 1937.⁷⁷

In November 1937 Stalin received into his Kremlin office the head of the Communist International, Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian who was in Berlin in 1933 when Hitler came to power and was arrested by the Nazis for complicity in the burning down of the Reichstag. Deported to the Soviet Union in February 1934, it was Dimitrov who, with Stalin’s support, steered the Comintern towards the politics of anti-fascist unity. He delivered the main report at the Comintern’s 7th World Congress in Moscow in August 1935 and was elected its general-secretary, a position he retained until the organisation was dissolved in 1943. Dimitrov developed a close working relationship with Stalin and his notes on their confidential conversations in his personal diary are highly revealing.

Stalin told Dimitrov that the Comintern’s policy on the struggle against Trotskyism did not go far enough: ‘Trotskyites must be hunted down, shot, destroyed. These are international provocateurs, fascism’s most vicious agents.’⁷⁸

After several attempts, the NKVD did finally manage to assassinate Trotsky, in Mexico in August 1940. Stalin himself edited the Pravda article about his death. He changed the headline from ‘Inglorious Death of Trotsky’ to ‘Death of an International Spy’ and added this sentence to the end of the unsigned article: ‘Trotsky was a victim of his own intrigues, treachery and treason. Thus ended ingloriously the life of this despicable person, who went to his grave with “international spy” stamped on his forehead.’⁷⁹

Stalin’s orchestration of the Great Terror was an awesome demonstration of his power within the Soviet system. Equally, only he had the power to end the purge. In summer 1938, the Politburo took steps to curb arrests and executions and curtail the activities of the NKVD. In November 1938 Yezhov resigned, confessing that he had failed to root out traitors within the NKVD who had conspired to target innocent people. Arrested in April 1939, he was shot in February 1940. His successor as security chief was Lavrenty Beria, the head of the Georgian communist party.⁸⁰

At the 18th party congress in March 1939, Stalin declared victory over the enemies of the people and an end to mass purges. The party had ‘blundered’ in not unmasking sooner top-level foreign intelligence agents like Trotsky and Bukharin, he admitted. This resulted from an underestimation of the dangers posed by the capitalist encirclement of the Soviet Union. He linked this deficiency to the Marxist theory of the withering away of the state under socialism, a doctrine that needed to be updated in the light of historical experience. A strong Soviet state was necessary to protect the socialist system from internal and external enemies.⁸¹

SPYMANIA

Stalin disdained spies, even the ones who spied for him. A spy, he once said, ‘should be full of poison and gall; he must not believe anyone’. Intensely suspicious, he didn’t even trust his own spies, fearful they might have been ‘turned’ by the enemy. Famously – and disastrously – he discounted numerous warnings from Soviet spies that the Germans would attack the USSR in summer 1941, thinking he had a better grasp of Hitler’s intentions than did they. On one report from a high-level informant in the German air force, Stalin told his intelligence chief that he should tell him ‘to go fuck his mother. This is a disinformer, not a “source”’ – a comment written in green rather than his usual red or blue.⁸²