Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Averell Harriman, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Second World War, said Tolstoy once told him that to understand Stalin’s Kremlin you had to understand Ivan’s reign. Harriman clarified that Tolstoy did not mean Stalin was like Ivan the Terrible, rather that to appreciate Stalin’s Russia you needed to know something about Russia’s past. Harriman, who spent a lot of time with Stalin during the war, saw no traces of a court like that of Ivan IV. In his view, Stalin was a popular war leader; he was the one who held the country together: ‘So I’d like to emphasise my great admiration for Stalin the national leader in an emergency – one of the historic occasions where one man made so much difference. This in no sense minimises my revulsion against his cruelties; but I have to give you the constructive side as well as the other.’¹⁹⁵

Sergei Eisenstein’s film commission also ran into political trouble. At first, all went well. Stalin approved Eisenstein’s screenplay, commenting that ‘it did not work out badly. Com. Eisenstein has coped with his assignment. Ivan the Terrible, as a progressive force for his era, and the Oprichnina as his logical instrument, did not come out badly. The screenplay should be put into production as quickly as possible.’¹⁹⁶ Part one of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible premiered in January 1945, and in 1946 he, too, was awarded a Stalin Prize.¹⁹⁷

Unfortunately, Stalin did not like Eisenstein’s part two film and in March 1946 its screening was prohibited on grounds that it was historically and artistically flawed.¹⁹⁸ Stalin considered the film ‘a vile thing’, and explained why at a meeting of the central committee’s Orgburo in August 1946:

The man got completely distracted from the history. He depicted the Oprichniki as rotten scoundrels, degenerates, something like the American Ku Klux Klan. Eisenstein didn’t realise that the troops of the Oprichnina were progressive troops. Ivan the Terrible relied on them to gather Russia into a single centralised state, against the feudal princes, who wanted to fragment and weaken it. Eisenstein has an old attitude toward the Oprichnina. The attitude of old historians towards the Oprichnina was crudely negative because they equated the repressions of Ivan the Terrible with the repressions of Nicholas II. . . . In our era there is a different view. . . . Eisenstein can’t help but know this because there is a literature to this effect, whereas he depicted degenerates of some kind. Ivan the Terrible was a man with a will and character, but in Eisenstein he’s a weak-willed Hamlet.¹⁹⁹

As leading Soviet artists, writers and scientists often did when they came under such attack, Eisenstein petitioned for a meeting to plead his case. Because Stalin was on a prolonged holiday by the Black Sea, a meeting with Eisenstein did not take place until February 1947. Also present in Stalin’s Kremlin office were Molotov, Zhdanov and N. K. Cherkasov, the film’s lead actor.²⁰⁰ After the meeting, Eisenstein and Cherkasov reported the conversation to the writer Boris Agapov, and it is his notes that constitute the only known record of their conversation with Stalin.

Stalin’s opening gambit was to ask Eisenstein if he had studied history. More or less, was the reply. ‘More or less? I also know a bit about history,’ said Stalin. ‘You have misrepresented the Oprichnina. The Oprichnina was a King’s army . . . a regular army, a progressive army. You have depicted the Oprichniki as the Ku Klux Klan. Your Tsar comes across as indecisive like Hamlet. Everybody tells him what to do and he doesn’t take any decision himself.’ Ivan, Stalin continued,

was a great and wise ruler. . . . His wisdom was to take a national point of view and not allow foreigners into the country, protecting it from foreign influences. . . . Peter I was also a great ruler but he was too liberal towards foreigners, he opened the gates to foreign influences and permitted the Germanisation of Russia. Catherine allowed it even more. . . . Was the court of Alexander I a Russian court? Was the court of Nicholas I a Russian court? They were German courts.

Stalin made the same point again later in the conversation: ‘Ivan Groznyi was a more nationalist Tsar, more far-sighted. He did not allow foreign influence into the country. Unlike Peter, who opened the gate to Europe and allowed in too many foreigners.’

On Ivan’s cruelty, Stalin had this to say:

Ivan the Terrible was very cruel. One can show this cruelty but it is also necessary to show why he had to be so cruel. One of his mistakes was not to finish off the five big feudal families. If he had destroyed these five boyar families there would not have even been a Time of Troubles. . . . But when Ivan Groznyi executed someone he felt sorry and prayed for a long time. God hindered him in this matter. . . . It was necessary to be decisive.