Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

It was not only artists who came under attack for servility to the west. In 1947 there was a public discussion of a book on the history of western philosophy by Georgy Alexandrov, who was head of the party’s propaganda department. That position did not save him from criticism and nor did the fact that his book had been awarded a Stalin Prize in 1946. He was accused of underestimating the Russian contribution to philosophy and of failing to emphasise Marxism’s ideological break with the western tradition. While Stalin was not involved in the public discussion he had voiced his views in private meetings and Zhdanov made it clear that it was the vozhd’ himself who had drawn attention to the book’s flaws. As a result of this controversy, Alexandrov lost his party post, though he was given an only somewhat less important new job as director of an Institute of Philosophy.²⁰⁶

Alexandrov’s 1940 book on the philosophical forerunners of Marxism features in Stalin’s library but the markings in it are not his.²⁰⁷ A piece by Alexandrov that Stalin did read was a co-authored article by him on the same topic that appeared in a 1939 volume of essays on dialectical and historical materialism. Marked by Stalin was the section on Feuerbach, including the citation of Marx’s famous thesis that ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’²⁰⁸

In the natural sciences, the campaign against pernicious western influences took the form of so-called ‘honour courts’. The first victims were a biologist, Grigory Roskin, and a microbiologist, Nina Klyueva, who had developed a new method of cancer therapy using a single-celled microorganism, Trypanosoma cruzi. Their sin was to give a copy of the manuscript of their book on treatment methods to American medical colleagues. On Stalin’s initiative the government passed a resolution on the formation of honour courts to assess whether such actions were anti-patriotic. No criminal sanctions were imposed on the two scientists but their ‘trial’ in June 1947 was attended by the cream of the Soviet medical establishment as well as hundreds of other onlookers. A year later the central committee sent a secret circular to party members that recounted the affair and criticised ‘slavishness and servility before things foreign’ and warned against ‘kowtowing and servility before the bourgeois culture of the west’.²⁰⁹

The patriotic imperative was also evident in the so-called Lysenko affair. Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet biologist who specialised in plant science, believed acquired characteristics could be inherited and were hence influenced by environmental changes. This was contrary to Soviet geneticists who contended inheritance was strictly a function of genes and nothing to do with environmental influences or the scientific manipulation of nature. This longstanding debate between the two factions took a new turn in April 1948, when Andrei Zhdanov’s son Yury, who was in charge of the science section of the central committee, gave a lecture criticising Lysenko’s views. Lysenko complained to Stalin and the result was a public apology by Yury Zhdanov and official endorsement of his position via the publication in Pravda of proceedings from a conference of July–August 1948 that expounded Lysenko’s views and trounced those of his geneticist critics.

Politically astute, Lysenko couched his position in terms of ‘Soviet’ versus ‘western’ science, and of ‘materialist, progressive and patriotic’ biology versus ‘reactionary, scholastic and foreign’ biology. It was Lysenko’s patriotism that appealed to Stalin more than anything.²¹⁰

Stalin also supported Lysenko’s position because it chimed with his own voluntaristic brand of Marxism, notably the belief that the natural world could be radically transformed by active human intervention. In line with this modernist vision, the Soviet press announced in October 1948 ‘The Great Stalinist Plan to Transform Nature’, a project for the mass planting of trees and grasslands and the creation of 44,000 new ponds and reservoirs. ‘Capitalism’, editorialised Pravda, ‘is incapable not only of the planned transformation of nature but of preventing the predatory use of its riches.’²¹¹

There was a strong element of Russocentrism in Stalin’s postwar patriotic campaign, a trend that had begun to emerge during the war. When the Soviet leadership decided to adopt a new national anthem (to replace the communist ‘Internationale’), they organised a public competition. One submission deemed worthy of Stalin’s attention contained this pithy verse:

Since the Terrible Tsar, our state has been glorious

It bears the potent might of Peter.

The glory of Suvorov shines behind us

And the winds of Kutuzov’s glory blow.

As our forebears loved the Russian land,

So we, too, love the Soviet land.²¹²

It didn’t make the cut but the winning anthem did contain this key verse:

The unbreakable union of free republics