Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

The cultural cold war was as intense as the east–west political struggle and in 1949 the Soviets published a book called The Truth about American Diplomats. Its nominal author was Annabelle Bucar, an American citizen employed by the United States Information Service in the US embassy in Moscow until she left her post in February 1948, ostensibly because she had fallen in love with an opera star, Konstantin Lapshin, said by some to be the nearest Soviet equivalent to Frank Sinatra. Walter Bedell Smith, the US ambassador at that time, claimed in his memoirs that she defected because Soviet citizens were not allowed to marry foreigners.⁸⁷

Concocted to counter western propaganda about Soviet spies, minister for state security Victor Abakumov sent Stalin a dummy of the Russian translation and asked permission to publish it with a big print run.⁸⁸ Stalin made one or two minor factual corrections and wrote on the book’s front cover, ‘And will it be published in English, French and Spanish?’⁸⁹

The book caused a sensation.⁹⁰ The initial 10,000 copies of the Russian edition were snapped up, as were the 100,000 copies of a second printing. In March 1949 the Politburo decreed 200,000 more copies should be printed. It was also published in many other languages, including those requested by Stalin. A film based on the book, Proshchai, Amerika! (Farewell, America), was to be made by a well-known Soviet filmmaker, Alexander Dovzhenko, a Stalin favourite.⁹¹

Bucar’s book detailed how the American embassy in Moscow was a nest of spies: ‘The American diplomatic service is an intelligence organisation’, a sentence that Stalin underlined in his copy of the published book. Stalin’s reading and marking of the book as if it was a briefing document from his intelligence officials was not unreasonable, since they were the main source of its information and analyses, not Bucar, who had been a low-level member of the embassy’s staff. The chapter to which Stalin paid most attention was entitled ‘The Leadership of the Anti-Soviet Clique in the State Department’.

Duly noted by Stalin was the main culprit, George F. Kennan, the former chargé d’affaires in the Moscow embassy who had recently found fame as the outed anonymous author of the ‘X’ article on ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’. Published by the influential American journal Foreign Affairs in July 1947, the article argued that the Soviet Union was a messianic, expansionist state that should be contained by the adroit deployment of countervailing power. It was widely seen as a key influence on the American turn towards confrontation with the Soviet Union in the late 1940s.

Kennan was characterised by Bucar as the representative of aggressive anti-Soviet circles in the United States and as a key figure in efforts to reverse President Roosevelt’s policy of co-operation with the USSR. Another sentence underlined by Stalin was Kennan’s supposed statement that ‘war between the USA and the Soviet Union was inevitable’ and that the United States could not tolerate the continued existence of a successful socialist system. The policy of containing communism that Kennan favoured was, wrote Bucar, being used by him to justify America’s domination of the whole world.⁹²

Kennan, who spoke fluent Russian, met Stalin on at least two occasions and penned this memorable portrait of the Soviet dictator:

His words were few. They generally sounded reasonable and sensible; indeed they often were. . . . Stalin’s greatness as a dissimulator was an integral part of his greatness as a statesman. So was his gift for simple, plausible, ostensibly innocuous utterance. Wholly unoriginal in every creative sense, he had always been the aptest of pupils. He possessed unbelievably acute powers of observation. . . . I was never in doubt, when visiting him, that I was in the presence of one of the world’s most remarkable men – a man great, if you will, primarily in his iniquity: ruthless, cynical, cunning, endlessly dangerous; but for all of this – one of the truly great men of the age.⁹³

Kennan returned to Moscow in May 1952 as the US ambassador but on a stopover in Berlin in September he complained to reporters about his personal isolation in Moscow, comparing it to how the Germans had treated him in Berlin after Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941. Pravda attacked his ‘slanderous’ remarks and he was declared persona non grata as a diplomat – the only US ambassador ever expelled from the Soviet Union. Such an extreme sanction could only have been imposed (though not necessarily proposed) by Stalin himself. It was an unfortunate move, since Kennan had abrogated his hard-line views on Stalin and the Soviets. As a Russophile, the expulsion hurt Kennan deeply, but that did not stop him becoming the foremost western advocate of détente with the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s.⁹⁴

BISMARCK, NOT MACHIAVELLI