Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Among the booty extracted by the Red Army from Germany at the end of the war were thirteen railway wagons filled with books for Moscow University and 760,000 books for the state’s main depository, the Lenin Library. By 1948, more than 2.5 million ‘trophy books’ had been claimed or put on display by 279 separate Moscow cultural institutions.²⁶

Lenin preferred individuals to access and read books in the controlled, social environment of a public library rather than through accumulating a personal collection. However, that preference did not apply to Bolshevik party members who were encouraged to collect, read and retain the authorised writings of Lenin and other Soviet leaders.

The Bolsheviks were keenly aware that words could equally well be used to subvert the Soviet system as to buttress it. Censorship was abolished when they came to power but was reintroduced in 1922.²⁷ As the regime became progressively more authoritarian, an elaborate system of censorship was created to control the output of newspapers, magazines, publishing houses and printers. The communists could not easily control what Soviet citizens thought, said or wrote, but they could effectively control what they read. At its peak, Glavlit, the Soviet censorship organisation, had many thousands of employees located in offices all over the country. It is no coincidence that the communist system collapsed in the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost and liberated Soviet political discourse from censorship. Gorbachev’s intellectual revolution – the power of the words he unleashed – would have horrified but not surprised Stalin.

Public libraries were subject to censorship, too. From its earliest days the Bolshevik regime sent circulars (informally known as the Talmud) to librarians instructing them what books to remove from their shelves. In charge of the library purge during the early years was Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. One party directive instructed libraries to withdraw not only counter-revolutionary books, but also pro-Soviet material that articulated now out-of-date policy positions from the revolutionary and civil war period. ‘Soviet Russia already in 1923 was disowning its utopian past,’ observed Peter Kenez.²⁸ In 1925 the Leningrad region’s censorship office banned 448 books for political and ideological reasons. Of these books, 255 had been issued by the private publishers then still in existence.²⁹

Krupskaya prescribed as well as proscribed books, circulating to libraries lists of recommendations for mass consumption, especially children’s literature. The Bolsheviks were particularly keen to get the masses reading the classics of fiction. In 1918 they set up a ‘People’s Library’ of mass editions of books to be circulated free of charge. That same year they adopted the writer Maxim Gorky’s proposal to translate the classics of world literature into Russian. Gorky envisaged thousands of such translations, an ambition prosaically stymied by paper shortages during the Russian Civil War.³⁰

The 1930s saw successive purges of library book stocks. In 1938–9, ‘16,453 titles and 24,138,799 copies of printed works were removed from libraries and the book trade network’.³¹ Sometimes local censorship was so extreme it had to be curbed. In 1933 the party leadership condemned ‘the widespread practice of organising “closed stacks” in libraries’ that had led to significant reserves of books being withdrawn from circulation. It decreed that books could only be removed from libraries upon special instruction of the central committee. In 1935 the central committee passed a resolution that curtailed the ‘wholesale purge of libraries and the indiscriminate removal of books’ that was ‘plundering and damaging library resources’. It also directed that two copies of each withdrawn book were to be kept in the ‘special library collections’ of a number of central libraries, academic institutions and higher party bodies.³²

STALIN’S LIBRARY

His peripatetic lifestyle as an underground revolutionary meant Stalin did not begin to collect books and build a permanent personal library until after the 1917 revolution. But his collection quickly grew to many thousands of volumes.

He had an ex-libris stamp that identified the books as belonging to him but the library was more a concept than a physical reality. It never became a specific building or had a single location as it could so easily have done. Stalin loved books for their ideas and information. He did not collect them for profit or aesthetics or as a monument to his cult image as a latter-day Renaissance man. His library was a living archive and its holdings were scattered across various domestic and work spaces. As Paul Lafargue said of Marx, books were tools of the mind for Stalin, not items of luxury.