Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

In the 1930s Kamenev contributed a preface to a Russian translation of The Prince. At Kamenev’s show trial in August 1936, prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky quoted his laudatory words about Machiavelli as ‘a master of political aphorism and a brilliant dialectician’. Machiavelli, said Vyshinsky, was Kamenev’s and Zinoviev’s ‘spiritual predecessor’, though he ‘was a puppy and a yokel compared to them’. We don’t know if Stalin read Kamenev’s Machiavelli piece, but he did read his 1933 biography of the nineteenth-century revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky and marked this sentence: ‘A politician is always dealing with power – challenging, exercising or implementing it’.¹⁰⁴

Another Stalin and Machiavelli story was related by Fedor Burlatsky, who worked in the Soviet Academy of Sciences during the 1950s. His source was Stalin’s private secretary, Alexander Poskrebyshev, who told him that Stalin periodically borrowed The Prince from the central committee library and then returned it after a few days.¹⁰⁵

While none of these claims has been verified, it is possible, likely even, that Stalin did read Machiavelli, but it was history that informed Stalin’s knowledge and understanding of the exercise of power, not philosophy or political theory.

Another book about the ‘Iron Chancellor’ that attracted Stalin’s attention was Wolfgang Windelband’s Bismarck and the European Great Powers, 1879–1885. Information about the issue of a German edition was recorded in a TASS bulletin from Berlin in December 1940. Stalin wrote on the bulletin that it should be translated into Russian.¹⁰⁶ And so it was. In February 1941 Beria sent Stalin a three-volume translation of Windelband’s book.¹⁰⁷ This was for private use by Stalin but, again, there is no discernible trace of the volumes in the Russian archives.

Stalin was interested in Bismarck’s domestic as well as his foreign policy. His copy of volume 16 of the first edition of the Bol’shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya (Great Soviet Encyclopaedia), published in 1929, contains a heavily underlined section on the periodisation of the Bismarck era, which the editors divided into the struggle for German unification (1871–96), social reforms and the conflict between socialists and conservatives (1878–86) and Bismarck’s ‘Iron Chancellorship’ (1887–90).¹⁰⁸

Stalin’s interest in diplomacy was longstanding; it was one of the headings of the classification scheme that he devised for his library in 1925. In the Soviet system, foreign policy-making was a function of the Politburo and, as general-secretary, Stalin was involved in foreign policy decisions great and small. In September 1935, for example, he reacted strongly against a suggestion from his Foreign Commissariat that Soviet exports to Italy should be banned because of the growing Italo-Abyssinian crisis, which culminated with Mussolini’s attack on Abyssinia a month later. According to Stalin:

The conflict is not only between Italy and Abyssinia, but also between Italy and France on one side, and England on the other. The old entente is no more. Instead, two ententes have emerged: the entente of Italy and France, on one side, and the entente of England and Germany, on the other. The more intense the tussle between them, the better for the USSR. We can sell bread to both so that they can fight. We don’t profit if one of them beats the other just now. We benefit if the fight is lengthier, without a quick victory for one or the other.¹⁰⁹

Books on international relations in Stalin’s library included a 1931 Russian translation of the diary of the British diplomat Viscount D’Abernon, who served in the Berlin embassy in the 1920s. Stalin does not appear to have read the diary itself but he did pay close attention to the book’s introduction, written by a leading Soviet diplomat and historian, Boris Shtein, and noted Shtein’s analysis of Britain’s policy of juggling support for France against Germany without driving the Germans into an alliance with Russia.¹¹⁰ In December 1940 Stalin was sent the ‘dummy’ of a Russian edition of Harold Nicolson’s classic Diplomacy, together with a note from the publisher seeking permission for a print run of 50,000 copies.¹¹¹ What caught Stalin’s eye in his copy of the published book was the preface by A. A. Troyanovsky, a former ambassador who taught at the Soviets’ Higher Diplomatic School. Stalin evidently did not like what Troyanovsky had to say about contemporary British foreign policy – basically, that it was anti-Soviet. This suggests that he read the book after the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 when there was an anti-Hitler coalition with Britain’s Winston Churchill. Stalin crossed through pages 20–25 of the book, with a view, perhaps, to its reissue with a more politically expedient preface.¹¹²