Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

When editing a maket (dummy) of the book, Stalin paid much attention to the sections on revolutionary Russia and the Soviet period.¹⁵⁹ As he habitually did, Stalin toned down and reduced the coverage and adulation of him and his life. Finding his date of birth in the book’s chronology of important historical events, he crossed it out and wrote beside it ‘Bastards!’¹⁶⁰ Left in by Stalin was this entry: ‘1870–1924 Life of the Genius Leader of the Proletariat – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’. The chronology ended with entries on the Kirov assassination of December 1934 and adoption of a new Soviet constitution in 1936.

Stalin’s most important changes were to the book’s treatment of Ivan IV (the Terrible) (1530–1584). He struck out a statement that Ivan had ordered the execution of all those living in Kazan following a siege of the city by his forces. Allowed to stand, however, was the sentence ‘Kazan was plundered and burnt’. Nor did he like the implications of the authors’ claim that Ivan wanted to expand Russia to the Baltic Sea to establish contact with the educated peoples of western Europe, so he excised the word ‘educated’. Stalin did approve of their view that Ivan had established the autonomous power of Tsarism by destroying the aristocratic boyars, but added that in so doing he had completed the task of forging a scattered collection of principalities into a single strong state that had been initiated by Ivan I in the fourteenth century.¹⁶¹ The chapter’s concluding verdict on Ivan IV was that under his rule the domain of Russia expanded exponentially and his ‘kingdom became one of the strongest states in the world’.¹⁶²

The dummy contained many illustrations, some of which Stalin didn’t like. A notable excision was Ilya Repin’s famous painting of Ivan the Terrible and his dying son – which alluded to the claim that he had been killed by his father following a family row. Instead, the book carried a photograph of Victor Vasnetsov’s 1897 painting of Ivan, which depicted a stern-looking but majestic Tsar.¹⁶³

After publication Shestakov was at pains to point out the book had been prepared with the direct participation of the central committee of the communist party.¹⁶⁴ Among the party leadership’s many contributions was a directive from Zhdanov that its authors needed to revise the manuscript in order to ‘strengthen throughout elements of Soviet patriotism and love for the socialist motherland’.¹⁶⁵ The end result was a stirring story of a thousand-year struggle by Russia and its Soviet successor to build a strong state to defend its population from outside incursions.

The dissemination of this new narrative of continuity in Russian and Soviet history was part of Stalin’s efforts to imbue the USSR with a patriotic as well as a communist identity. David Brandenberger labels this repositioning by Stalin ‘national bolshevism’, while for Erik van Ree it was a form of ‘revolutionary patriotism’. Stalin preferred the idea of ‘Soviet patriotism’ – the dual loyalty of citizens to the socialist system, which looked after their welfare, and to the state that protected them.

Stalin’s patriotism was far from being merely a political device to mobilise the population and strengthen support for the Soviet system: it was integral to his changing views of the Tsars and Russian history.

Decidedly negative was the view of Tsarism expounded in Stalin’s 1924 lecture on The Foundations of Leninism, where he characterised the Tsarist state as ‘the home of every kind of oppression – capitalist, colonial, militarist – in its most inhumane and barbarous form’. Tsarism was the ‘watchdog of imperialism’ in eastern Europe and the ‘agent of Western imperialism’ in Russia itself. Russian nationalism was aggressive and oppressive and Tsarist Russia was ‘the most faithful ally of Western imperialism in the partition of Turkey, Persia, China, etc.’¹⁶⁶

While Stalin never ceased criticising the Tsars, his view of the state they had created shifted radically in the 1930s. During the course of a toast to the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, he said:

The Russian Tsars did a great deal that was bad. They robbed and enslaved the people. They waged wars and seized territories in the interests of landowners. But they did one thing that was good – they amassed an enormous state, all the way to Kamchatka. We have inherited that state. And, for the first time, we, the Bolsheviks, have consolidated and strengthened that state as a united and indivisible state, not in the interests of the landowners and the capitalists, but for the benefit of the workers, of all the peoples that make up that state. We have united the state in such a way that if any part were isolated from the common socialist state, it would not only inflict harm on the latter but would be unable to exist independently and would inevitably fall under foreign subjugation.¹⁶⁷