Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Has been joined for ever by Great Russia

Long live the united and mighty Soviet Union

Created by the will of the peoples

At a military reception in the Kremlin in May 1945, Stalin proposed a toast to the health of the Soviet people but ‘above all to the Russian people’:

I drink above all to the health of the Russian people because they are the most prominent of the nations that make up the Soviet Union . . . I drink to the health of the Russian people not only because they are the leading people but because they have common sense, social and political common sense, and endurance. Our government made not a few mistakes, we were in a desperate position in 1941–1942 . . . Another people would have said: go to hell, you have betrayed our hopes, we are organising another government. . . . But the Russian people didn’t do that . . . they showed unconditional trust in our government. . . . For the trust in our government shown by the Russian people we say a big thank you.²¹³

The 110th anniversary of Pushkin’s death was commemorated with as much fanfare as his centenary a decade earlier.²¹⁴ In September 1947 Stalin issued greetings to Moscow on the 800th anniversary of the city’s foundation:

The services which Moscow has rendered are not only that it thrice in the history of our country liberated her from foreign oppression – from the Mongol yoke, from the Polish–Lithuanian invasion, and from French incursion. The service Moscow rendered is primarily that it became the basis for uniting disunited Russia into a single state, with single government and a single leadership.²¹⁵

Stalin’s Russocentrism should not be overstated. As Jonathan Brunstedt has pointed out, in his February 1946 election speech, Stalin made no special mention of the wartime role of the Russian people. Instead, he emphasised that the war had demonstrated the strength of Soviet multinationalism and the unity of the peoples of the USSR. In 1947 he rejected a reference to the leading role of the Russian people in the draft of a newly proposed party programme. In his greetings to Moscow the city’s historical contribution to Russian statehood was counter-balanced by celebration of its role in Soviet socialist construction. The Russians most lauded by Stalin were the post-revolutionary generations. As Zhdanov put it in August 1946: ‘We are no longer the Russians we were before 1917. Our Russia (Rus’) is no longer the same . . . We have changed and have grown along with the great transformations that have radically altered the face of our country.’²¹⁶

The international status of Russian science was very much on Stalin’s mind after the war. In a 1946 book about the role of Russian scientists in the development of world science, he marked their contributions to fields such as electronic communications, atomic physics, seismology and magnetism.²¹⁷ In a 1948 journal article he highlighted claims concerning the Russian contribution to medical science.²¹⁸

Responding to a session of the Soviet Academy of Sciences devoted to the history of Russian science, a Pravda columnist claimed in January 1948 that ‘throughout its history, the Great Russian People have enriched national and world technology with outstanding discoveries and inventions’. A headline in Komsomol’skaya Pravda that same month proclaimed, ‘The Aeroplane Is a Russian Invention’. According to the author of this article:

It is impossible to find one area in which the Russian people have not blazed new paths. A. S. Popov invented radio. A. N. Lodygin created the incandescent bulb. I. I. Pozunov built the world’s first steam engine. The first locomotive, invented by the Cherepanovs, moved on Russian land. The serf Fedor Blinov flew over Russian land in a plane heavier than air, created by the genius Aleksandr Fedorovich Mozhaiskii, twenty-one years before the Wright Brothers.²¹⁹

When the centenary of Ivan Pavlov’s birth was celebrated in September 1949, the headline of Pravda’s front-page editorial was a ‘A Great Son of the Russian People’.²²⁰ Immortalised by his research on conditioned reflexes that gave rise to the concept of a Pavlovian response, the physiologist-cum-psychologist Ivan P. Pavlov (1849–1936) was in his time the Soviet Union’s most famous scientist. He was the first Russian awarded a Nobel Prize – for Medicine in 1904 – and, unlike many other eminent Tsarist-era scientists, he opted to stay in the country after the 1917 revolution. Although not a Bolshevik, his materialist scientific research methods were deemed compatible with Marxism and seen as far preferable to the introspection and subjectivism of Freudianism. While his approach was dominant among Soviet physiologists, and remained so after his death, there were sceptics and doubters who questioned some of Pavlov’s more mechanistic and reductionist research.