Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

The extent to which Stalin was anti-Semitic remains contentious. Zhores Medvedev judged that Stalin was not so much personally anti-Semitic as politically hostile to Jewish nationalism, which he saw as a threat to the Soviet system, hence his purging of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee after the war.¹³³ Officially the Soviet state was opposed to all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism, and Stalin made many public statements to that effect. In 1947 the Soviet Union voted in favour of partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states and in 1948 established diplomatic relations with newly created Israel. In Georgia anti-Semitism was not as widespread as elsewhere in Tsarist Russia. Stalin was surrounded by Jewish officials or officials with Jewish wives and he continued to fete Jewish writers and artists such as Ilya Ehrenburg. Lazar Kaganovich, Stalin’s transport commissar and the highest-ranking Jew in his entourage, did not think he was anti-Semitic and recalled that Stalin proposed a toast to him at a reception for the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in September 1939.¹³⁴ On the other hand, there is little doubt that Stalin used or acquiesced in anti-Semitism in order to promote his anti-cosmopolitan campaign of the late 1940s and early 1950s.¹³⁵ Among Stalin’s other prejudices was anti-homosexuality and in 1934 sex between men was outlawed.

Witness to Stalin’s discussions with the Georgian historians was the first secretary of Georgia’s communist party, Kandid Charkviani. It was he who sent Stalin a copy of the textbook. In an interview many years later, Charkviani was asked if Stalin’s contributions to the discussion were ‘categorical’. No, he replied, it was a discussion, not a polemic. While Stalin considered his own views to be the most plausible, he did not insist on having the final word.

Charkviani recalled that as well as Georgian history, they talked about the history of Rome, especially General Sulla, who seized power in the first century BC but was renowned as much for his reforms as his repressions. Indeed, Sulla, quipped Stalin, had been able to rule Rome from his villa.¹³⁶

Stalin’s interest in the Roman Empire was no passing whim. He possessed a number of books on the classical history of Greece and Rome. As we know, among the books Stalin borrowed from but did not return to the Lenin Library were two volumes of Herodotus’s Histories.¹³⁷ In his copy of Alexander Svechin’s history of military strategy it is the Roman section that is the most marked.¹³⁸ Reading a translation of Viscount D’Abernon’s diary, he picked out from the book’s introduction Edward Gibbon’s aphorism that the Romans believed troops should fear their own officers more than the enemy.¹³⁹ At the 17th party congress in January 1934, Stalin used Roman history to mock Nazi racism:

It is well-known that ancient Rome looked upon the ancestors of the present-day Germans and French in the same way as the representatives of the ‘superior race’ now look upon the Slavonic tribes. It is well-known that ancient Rome treated them as an ‘inferior race’, as ‘barbarians’, destined to live in eternal subordination to the ‘superior race’. . . . Ancient Rome had some grounds for this, which cannot be said of the representatives of the ‘superior race’ today. . . . The upshot was that the non-Romans . . . united against the common enemy, hurled themselves against Rome, and bore her down with a crash. . . . What guarantee is there that the fascist literary politicians in Berlin will be more fortunate than the old and experienced conquerors in Rome?¹⁴⁰

Among Stalin’s ancient history books were three by Robert Vipper: Drevnyaya Evropa i Vostok (Ancient Europe and the East, 1923), Istoriya Gretsii v Klassicheskuyu Epokhu (Greece in the Classical Epoch, 1908) and Ocherki Istorii Rimskoi Imperii (Essays on the History of the Roman Empire, 1908).

Stalin liked Vipper’s book on ancient Europe so much that he wanted its first chapter on the Stone Age to be retitled ‘Prehistorical Times’ and added to a school textbook on ancient history.¹⁴¹ The chapter in Vipper’s book on Greece that captured Stalin’s attention was the one on Sparta and Athens. It was Sparta that interested Stalin: its mythical and historical origins; its strategic position and military power; the ‘spartan’ life of its citizens; the city-state’s authoritarian political structure; and its diplomatic manoeuvres during the various wars that it fought.¹⁴²