Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin blamed Pokrovsky’s ‘un-Marxist’ approach to history for the sorry state of Soviet historiography. As an antidote, he proposed the translation and adaptation of French and German texts such as the works of Max Weber and Friedrich Schlosser on the ancient world. He also suggested the assembled historians should make use of a textbook by Vipper.¹⁴⁹ Stalin didn’t say which of Vipper’s many textbooks he had in mind but they might have included his 1902 textbook on ancient history, which was another of those books he borrowed from the Lenin Library but failed to return.¹⁵⁰

By the end of March the Politburo had resolved to establish groups of historians to work on new textbooks.¹⁵¹ Stalin’s preferred outcome to that process was signalled by the publication in May 1934 of a state decree ‘On the Teaching of Civic History in the Schools of the USSR’:

Instead of civic history being taught in a lively and engaging way, with an account of the most important events and facts in chronological order, and with sketches of historical figures, pupils are given abstract definitions of socio-economic formations that replace consecutive exposition with abstract sociological schemas.

The decisive condition for the lasting assimilation of a course of history is the maintenance of chronological sequence in the exposition of historical events, with due emphasis on memorisation by pupils of important facts, names and dates. Only such a course of history can provide pupils with the accessible, clear and concrete historical materials that will enable them to correctly analyse and summarise historical events and lead them to a Marxist understanding of history.¹⁵²

The history of the USSR was of most interest to Stalin, although the title of the proposed textbook was something of a misnomer since much of it would be devoted to the pre-revolutionary history of Tsarist Russia. Progress on the project was so slow and unsatisfactory that in January 1936 the party leadership decided to organise a public competition and invited submissions of various textbooks, in the first instance those on modern history and the history of the Soviet Union. To guide contestants, Pravda republished two sets of notes, jointly authored by Stalin, the late Kirov and party ideology chief Andrei Zhdanov, which commented on previously submitted outlines of proposed books. The main criticisms of the outline for a book on the history of the USSR were, first, that it was not a history of the Soviet Union and all its peoples but of ‘Great Russia’ and the Russians; second, it had not emphasised enough that internally Tsarism was a ‘prison of people’ and externally a reactionary ‘international gendarme’; and, third, the authors had ‘forgotten that Russian revolutionaries regarded themselves as disciples and followers of the noted leaders of bourgeois-revolutionary and Marxist thought in the West’.¹⁵³

It took a year to whittle down the many submissions on Soviet history to a shortlist of seven, none of which were adjudged popular and accessible enough. Eventually, a twelve-strong group headed by Andrei Shestakov (1877–1941), a Moscow-based agrarian historian, was awarded a second-class prize (worth 75,000 roubles). The result of the competition was announced in August 1937, just in time for the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution.¹⁵⁴ It meant that Shestakov’s book would become a designated secondary school text on the history of Russia and the USSR.¹⁵⁵

Millions of copies of the 223-page Kratkii Kurs Istorii SSSR (Short Course History of the USSR) were printed. Among its first recipients was Stalin’s eleven-year-old daughter, who was given an inscribed copy: ‘To Svetlana Stalina from J. Stalin 30/8/1937’. She appears to have read it attentively, paying particular attention to its many coloured maps, such as the one on the USSR that she used to trace the events of the Russian Civil War, including the role played by her father in the defence of Tsaritsyn.¹⁵⁶

Shestakov’s book was aimed at third- and fourth-grade pupils. Textbooks with similar approaches and themes were then produced for use by older pupils and university students.¹⁵⁷

Stalin was so heavily involved in the preparation of the Shestakov book that Russian historian Alexander Dubrovsky considers him not merely an editor but one of the book’s de facto authors.¹⁵⁸