Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin’s only extensive public statement on an aspect of diplomatic history was his 1934 critique of Engels’s ‘The Foreign Policy of Russian Tsardom’ (1890), prompted by the proposed inclusion of the article in a special issue of the party’s journal, Bol’shevik. Stalin was against republication because he thought it would confuse people’s thinking about the origins of the First World War, though he wasn’t against the article appearing in a future number of the same journal.

Engels thought Tsarist Russia’s predatory foreign policy was a function of its diplomacy, whereas Stalin believed it was driven by class interests and domestic pressures. Engels had exaggerated the importance of Russia’s striving to control Constantinople and the Black Sea straits and omitted the role of Anglo-German rivalries in precipitating the First World War. Politically, Stalin worried that Engels’s article lent credence to claims that the war with reactionary Tsarist Russia was not an imperialist war but a war of liberation and a struggle against Russian barbarism. In Stalin’s view, Tsarist Russia was no better or worse than any of the other great capitalist powers.¹¹³ Interestingly, Stalin’s article was reprinted by Bol’shevik in May 1941.

With the advent of the Second World War, Stalin became directly and heavily involved in the conduct of diplomacy. His interest in the writing of a Soviet history of diplomacy was one sign of his growing engagement with diplomatic affairs. Put in charge of that project was Vladimir Potemkin (1874–1946), a prominent Soviet diplomat of the 1920s and 1930s. Potemkin had an hour-long meeting with Stalin in May 1940, the same day the Politburo passed a resolution mandating production of the history.¹¹⁴ Potemkin sent Stalin a progress report in October which listed the names and topics of the historians who had been recruited to the project. It would be a two-volume Marxist history of diplomacy, wrote Potemkin, one based on original research and written for a broad popular audience. It would be adorned by maps and other illustrations.¹¹⁵

When the first volume of Istoriya Diplomatii was published in early 1941 – half a million copies of it – Stalin phoned Potemkin to personally congratulate him and his team.¹¹⁶ Publication of the second volume was disrupted by the outbreak of war in June 1941 and by the time publication resumed in 1945, the work had expanded into three volumes. Potemkin sent Stalin a copy of volume 3 in December 1945 but the second volume of the trilogy, subtitled ‘Diplomacy in New Times (1872–1919)’, is the only one now to be found in Stalin’s library.¹¹⁷ Stalin’s markings of the book, which were mostly informational, suggest that he read a good deal of it, though he didn’t pay much attention to the section on Bismarck’s foreign policy from 1885 to 1890, perhaps because the master of realpolitik was past his best by this time. Or maybe Stalin felt he knew enough about Bismarck already.¹¹⁸

In 1913 Stalin had declared that ‘a diplomat’s words must contradict his deeds – otherwise what sort of a diplomat is he? Words are one thing – deeds something entirely different. Fine words are a mask to cover shady deeds. A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.’¹¹⁹ Three decades later he had changed his tune. In an April 1941 meeting with the Japanese foreign minister, with whom he had just agreed a neutrality pact, Stalin said that he appreciated his visitor’s plain speaking: ‘It is well known that Napoleon’s Talleyrand said that speech was given to diplomats so that they could conceal their thoughts. We Russian Bolsheviks see things differently and think that in the diplomatic arena one should be sincere and honest.’¹²⁰ In a similar vein, Stalin told British foreign minister Anthony Eden, in December 1941, that he preferred ‘agreements’ to ‘declarations’ because ‘a declaration is algebra’ while ‘agreements are simple, practical arithmetic’. When Eden laughed, Stalin hastened to reassure him that he meant no disrespect for algebra, which he considered to be a fine science.¹²¹

In May 1942 Stalin sent Molotov to London to meet British premier Winston Churchill, as a follow-up to the discussions with Eden about the conclusion of an Anglo-Soviet wartime treaty of alliance. Stalin wanted to include a clause that committed the British to recognise the USSR’s borders at the time of the German attack in June 1941. The British baulked at such a proposal since a lot of this territory had been gained as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Molotov counselled rejection of the draft treaty as an ‘empty declaration’. Stalin disagreed: ‘We do not consider it an empty declaration. . . . It lacks the question of the security of frontiers, but this is not too bad perhaps, for it gives us a free hand. The question of frontiers . . . will be decided by force.’¹²²