Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Vipper’s book on the Roman Empire was, as far as we know, the most heavily marked text in Stalin’s whole collection, nearly every one of its 389 pages having words and paragraphs underlined or margin-lined. Alas, these pometki are probably not Stalin’s. The markings are similar to but not quite the same as his. Absent are the brackets, numbered points and rubrics in the margin that would be expected if this detailed set of markings was Stalin’s. The few scattered words in the margins do not appear to be in his writing.¹⁴³ The best guess is that the book belonged originally to a student or a teacher or, even, a historian marking up an important secondary source. This doesn’t mean that Stalin didn’t read the book. Given his evident regard for Vipper’s work and his interest in the subject-matter, it is highly likely he did and may even have added some marks of his own.

Over what lines might Stalin’s eyes have lingered? The markings of the unknown reader focused on military and political history: Rome’s near defeat in the Second Punic War; the difference between Greek and Roman democracy; the structure of Roman political and military power; the fall of the Roman Republic; the seizures of power by Sulla and Julius Caesar; the overseas expansion of the empire; and the imperial slogan ‘better Caesar’s power than a free people’.¹⁴⁴

Roman history has been a rich repository of lessons for rulers throughout the ages, but, as a Marxist, Stalin would also have appreciated Vipper’s effort to tell the deeper story. Based on Vipper’s lectures at Moscow University in 1899, the book’s aim was to describe Roman polity and society and explain the class forces that drove the imperial expansion and the political crises that led to the Republic’s downfall. Economic and financial issues are addressed as much as the power plays and political manoeuvres of Rome’s rulers. Combining theme and chronology, events and processes, the general and the particular, was a feature of Vipper’s historical writings, as was his exploration of the material basis of politics and ideologies.¹⁴⁵

Vipper’s type of historical writing may well have been behind a seminal outburst by Stalin at a meeting of the Politburo in March 1934, occasioned by a discussion of the poor state of history teaching in Soviet schools. No formal record of Stalin’s remarks was kept but his sentiments were conveyed in a speech a few days later by the head of the party’s education and propaganda department, Alexei Stetsky. In school textbooks, Stalin complained, history was replaced by sociology and class struggle by periodisation and the classification of economic systems. Also unacceptable to him was that Russia’s history was reduced to that of revolutionary movements:

We cannot write such history! Peter was Peter, Catherine was Catherine. They rested on certain classes, expressed their moods and interests, but they acted, they were historical figures. While they were not our people, it is necessary to present the historical epoch, what happened, who ruled, what sort of government there was, the policies that were conducted and how events transpired.¹⁴⁶

A couple of weeks later, at a special Politburo session attended by a number of historians, people’s commissar for enlightenment Andrei Bubnov gave a report on the preparation of new textbooks. There is no stenographic record of the ensuing discussion but there are reliable eyewitness accounts of what Stalin said.

As he often did, Stalin strode around the meeting smoking his pipe, at one point picking up a textbook on the history of feudalism, saying: ‘I was asked by my son to explain what was written in this book. I had a look and I also couldn’t understand it.’ Soviet school history textbooks, said Stalin, were not fit for purpose:

They talk about the ‘epoch of feudalism’, the ‘epoch of industrial capitalism’, the ‘epoch of formations’ – all epochs and no facts, no events, no people, no concrete information, no names, no titles, no content. . . . We need textbooks with facts, events and names. History must be history. We need textbooks about the ancient world, the middle ages, modern times, the history of the USSR, the history of colonised and enslaved people.

Stalin also attacked the late Mikhail Pokrovsky (1868–1932), dean of Soviet historians in the 1920s, who favoured broad-themed sociological history and downplayed the role of personalities in shaping the course of events. He decried Russian oppression of the non-Russian peoples and criticised the work of Vipper, deriding Latin and Greek as ‘dead languages of no practical use whatsoever’. ‘Tsars, ministers, reformers, etc. . . . will never be taught again’, he predicted in 1927.¹⁴⁷ Ivan IV he vilified as a ‘hysterical despot’ and Peter the Great as ‘a cruel, egotistical, syphilitic tyrant’.¹⁴⁸