Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Among the books Stalin borrowed and failed to return to the Lenin Library was a Russian edition of the memoirs of Otto von Bismarck.⁹⁵ When he was sent a list of books on foreign policy earmarked for reissue or translation into Russian, the item that caught his eye was a new, three-volume translation of Bismarck’s memoirs, the first volume of which was ready and with the publisher. Stalin wrote in the margin: ‘Definitely translate the second volume as well and publish it together with the first.’⁹⁶

Appealing to Stalin would have been Bismarck’s political realism, pragmatism and tactical flexibility. Another trait the two men had in common was the ability to combine strategic vision with successful short-term manoeuvring in complex situations. Their politics may have been polar opposites but, like Stalin, the ‘Iron Chancellor’ was a concentrator and centraliser of state power. As a devotee of Marxist teleology, Stalin may well have appreciated Bismarck’s aphorism that ‘political judgement is the ability to hear the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history’.⁹⁷

The introduction to the first volume of Bismarck’s translated memoirs was written by the historian Arkady Yerusalimsky (1901–1965), a specialist on German foreign policy, who was summoned to Stalin’s Kremlin office for a discussion about his piece. Stalin had a pre-publication ‘dummy’ of the book, which he had marked, including entitling Yerusalimsky’s introductory article ‘Bismarck as Diplomat’. To make the changes required by Stalin, Yerusalimsky took the dummy away with him and it eventually ended up in the hands of the Soviet historian and dissident Mikhail Gefter (1918–1995). According to Gefter, Yerusalimsky told him that Stalin didn’t like his emphasis on Bismarck’s warning that Germany should not go to war with Russia. ‘Why are you scaring them?’ asked Stalin. ‘Let them try.’⁹⁸

Fellow dissident Roy Medvedev reports that Gefter showed him Stalin’s copy of the first volume of a 1940 edition of Bismarck’s ‘collected works’ in the 1960s. In that book, recalled Medvedev, Stalin had marked the editor’s observation that Bismarck had always warned against Germany becoming involved in a two-front war against Russia and western powers. In the margin Stalin wrote, ‘Don’t frighten Hitler’. It seems likely that the book in question was, in fact, this first volume of Bismarck’s memoirs.⁹⁹

Yerusalimsky’s meeting with Stalin, on 23 September 1940, lasted thirty-five minutes and was recorded in Stalin’s appointments diary. The next day deputy foreign commissar Solomon Lozovsky wrote to Stalin that the requested changes to Yerusalimsky’s introduction would be completed by the end of the day. However, the proposal to move the explanatory notes from the end of the book to the end of each chapter would necessitate pulping the 50,000 copies that had already been printed. He proposed instead – and Stalin agreed – that those copies should be published as they stood but the notes would be shifted in time for the next print run.

All three volumes were published in 1940–41.¹⁰⁰ After Stalin’s death, volumes 1 and 2 were listed by IMEL as marked books in his personal library.¹⁰¹ But, like the Bismarck book he borrowed from the Lenin Library, they are no longer listed as part of the archive’s holdings. There are various reports of items from Stalin’s book collection ending up in private hands and that may have been the fate of these Bismarck volumes.

Nikolai Ryzhkov, prime minister of the USSR from 1985 to 1991, wrote in his 1992 memoir that he came into possession of Stalin’s copy of an 1869 Russian edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince. Heavily marked by Stalin, wrote Ryzhkov, the book was the ‘dictator’s textbook’: ‘Sometimes I think about gathering together all Stalin’s underlinings, putting them in order and publishing them as his digest of Machiavelli. Then there would be no need for Medvedev, Volkogonov, Cohen . . . or any of the other biographies and interpretations of Stalin.’¹⁰²

Another story about Stalin and Machiavelli is that during his final exile in Siberia, when his then good friend and comrade Lev Kamenev was researching the Italian philosopher’s writings, Stalin apparently found a copy of The Prince in the local library and plied Kamenev with questions about the history and politics of Machiavelli’s era.

This story’s source was Boris Nikolaevsky, a Menshevik historian and activist who was exiled abroad by the Bolsheviks in the early 1920s.¹⁰³