Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Vipper was not a Marxist, or even a Bolshevik sympathiser, and neither he nor his views on Ivan the Terrible were welcomed by the Pokrovsky-led Soviet historical establishment. In an article on Ivan IV for the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia in 1933, Pokrovsky’s pupil M. V. Nechkina attacked Vipper’s book as a product of the counter-revolutionary intelligentsia and a veiled appeal for a fight against Bolshevism.¹⁷⁵ But the tide was already turning in Vipper’s favour. Following Stalin’s favourable reference to him during the history-teaching discussion and the publication of Shestakov’s book, Vipper’s textbook on the History of the Middle Ages was reprinted and placed on the syllabus of the higher party school for propagandists. In a 1938 article about Soviet historical writing on the ancient world, A. V. Mishulin commented that Vipper ‘unquestionably represented the peak of bourgeois science in ancient history. It would be utterly unjust if we failed to take his contributions to ancient history into consideration as we proceed to reconstruct the teaching of world history.’¹⁷⁶ In a 1939 volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia that dealt with the Oprichnina, both Vipper and Platonov received favourable mentions.¹⁷⁷ That same year saw the publication of the USSR history textbook for university students. Its section on the sixteenth century was written by S. V. Bakhrushin:

No-one denies the great and strong intellect of Ivan IV. . . . He was well-educated for his day . . . and possessed literary talent. . . . He was an outstanding strategist and a capable leader of military action. Ivan the Terrible correctly understood the requirements of domestic and foreign policy. . . . In many cases his cruel actions were provoked by the stubborn opposition of the great feudal lords to his endeavours and by outright treason on their part. . . . Ivan the Terrible recognised the necessity of creating a strong state and did not hesitate to take harsh measures.¹⁷⁸

A campaign to ‘restore the true image of Ivan IV in Russian history, which has been distorted by aristocratic and bourgeois historiography’, was launched by the party at the end of 1940.¹⁷⁹ As Kevin Platt points out, with the outbreak of war in June 1941, ‘the campaign to rehabilitate Ivan took on an overtly mobilizational character’.¹⁸⁰

The renowned cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) was commissioned to direct a film about Ivan IV, and Alexei Tolstoy (1883–1945) to write a play.

The director of Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October: 10 Days that Shook the World (1928), Eisenstein’s most recent film had been Alexander Nevsky (1938), a patriotic biopic of the thirteenth-century Russian prince who had defeated the Teutonic Knights at the Battle on the Ice on Lake Chudskoe. Tolstoy, whose origins were aristocratic, was distantly related to both Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy. Primarily a science fiction writer and historical novelist, his Peter the Great book was awarded a Stalin Prize in 1941.¹⁸¹

This was the propitious background against which Vipper, who had emigrated to Latvia in the early 1920s, returned to Moscow in May 1941. Upon arrival he sent Stalin a telegram expressing fulsome thanks for helping him and his family’s joyful return to the land of socialism and pledging eternal loyalty to the country’s ‘great leader’.¹⁸² He was given a post at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History but was then evacuated to Tashkent, where he joined Bakhrushin and other historians. In 1942 he published a second edition of his Ivan Grozny. By Soviet standards it was a very small print run (15,000), possibly because of wartime paper shortages, but the book was well received. A third edition (5,000 copies) was published in 1944 and in 1947 it was issued in English.¹⁸³

Apart from the mandatory quotation of Lenin and Stalin, the main addition to the book’s wartime editions was a new chapter called ‘The Struggle Against Treason’, in which Vipper clarified that the traitors Ivan had put to death were real, not imagined, enemies of the state.¹⁸⁴

Bakhrushin developed his textbook chapter into a book and I. I. Smirnov published a short ‘scholarly-popular’ study of Ivan Groznyi in 1944.¹⁸⁵ In 1947 Bakhrushin wrote, ‘In the light of new research, Ivan the Terrible appears as a majestic and powerful figure, as one of the greatest statesmen in Russian history.’¹⁸⁶

While there are no signs of these books in Stalin’s archive, he would certainly have been sent copies and he would surely have read Pravda’s report of Vipper’s lecture to an audience in Moscow’s Kolonnyi Zal (Hall of Columns) in September 1943.