Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Marr was selected to represent Soviet scientists at the 16th party congress in June 1930, telling delegates that he was dedicated to using all his ‘revolutionary creativity to be a warrior on the scientific front for the unequivocal general line of proletarian scientific theory’. He joined the party immediately after the congress and within a year had become a member of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Union Congress of Soviets.²²⁵ When Marr sought an audience with the dictator in 1932, he was politely turned down but Stalin said that he might be able to spare forty to fifty minutes at some point in the future.²²⁶ That meeting never took place because in October 1933 Marr had a debilitating stroke and in December 1934 he died.²²⁷

The Marrites were strongly entrenched in the Soviet linguistics establishment but had critics such as Victor Vinogradov (1894–1969) and Arnold Chikobava (1898–1985). Vinogradov was a Russianist literary and grammar scholar who believed languages were best studied as members of family groups such as the Indo-European – a traditionalist approach despised by Marr’s supporters. Chikobava, a Georgian linguist and philologist, also valorised the national-cultural character of different languages. Vinogradov’s study of the evolution of Russian literary naturalism was part of Stalin’s book collection, as was Chikobava’s Georgian text on ancient nominal stems in the Kartvelian language of the South Caucasus.²²⁸

Among Marr’s books in Stalin’s library was the edited volume Tristan and Isolde: From the Heroic Love of Feudal Europe to the Goddess of Matriarchal AfroEurAsia (1932), his Svan-Russian dictionary (1922) and a collection of essays about the language and the history of Abkhazia (1938).²²⁹

Like the Pavlovites, the Marrites tried to use the Lysenko affair to promote themselves and their theories as the epitome of patriotic Soviet linguistics. Meetings were held, articles were published and there were orchestrated attacks on Marr’s critics. Stalin’s involvement was precipitated by a December 1949 letter from Georgian communist leader Kandid Charkviani.²³⁰ Prompted, and probably drafted by Chikobava, it contained a detailed critique of Marr’s views, which Stalin read carefully. Marr was a vulgar not a dialectical materialist, wrote Charkviani. His theories were not and should not be the basis for a proper Marxist-Leninist analysis of the origins, relations and roles of language and languages. Marr was wrong to believe that all languages were class-based from their inception and that there was no such thing as a non-class language. During the Latinisation debates Marr had adopted a ‘cosmopolitan’ position that disrespected local languages. He thought the main goal of Soviet linguistics was to work towards a single world language, whereas Stalin had stated that during the transition to world socialism national languages would persist.

Included with Charkviani’s letter were writings by Chikobava containing further criticism of Marr’s views. Also in Stalin’s possession was a long Chikobava article about various theories of language, which concluded that while Marr had played a positive role in combatting idealist western language theorists (for example Ferdinand de Saussure), he had not provided a Marxist-Leninist resolution of the fundamental questions involved in the study of languages. Ironically, this 1941 article was published (in Russian) in the journal of the Georgian Academy of Sciences’ ‘N. Ya. Marr Institute for Language, History and Material Culture’.

Charkviani and Chikobava travelled to Moscow in April 1950, where they met Stalin at his dacha and had a long conversation about Marr. Stalin asked Chikobava to write an article for Pravda on Soviet linguistics. His article, ‘Some Problems of Soviet Linguistics’, published on 9 May, was extensively edited by Stalin. Stalin did his usual editorial job of sharpening and polishing the prose and inserted a few sentences of his own. In a section on the origins of language, Stalin added that Marr had rejected the idea that language

originated as means of communication by people, as an implement which arose from a persistent need for communication. Academician Marr forgets that people in the most ancient times lived and supported themselves in hordes, in groups and not individually. Academician Marr does not take into consideration the fact that it was just this circumstance that brought about their need for communicating, their need to have a common means of communication such as language.

Inserted into a section criticising Marr’s advocacy of artificial methods to quicken the formation of a world language, were these lines by Stalin: