Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin was not alone in this endeavour. All the top Bolshevik leaders – Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin – collected books. Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s library reportedly contained 20,000 books, while the extensive collection of Stalin’s defence commissar, Kliment Voroshilov, was lost when his dacha (country house) burned down after the Second World War.³³

There was little danger to Stalin’s collection given the level of security and surveillance that surrounded him and his books. During the Second World War, as Hitler’s armies approached Moscow, his library was boxed up and shipped to Kuibyshev (Samara) in south-east Russia, where many government departments were evacuated in anticipation of the capital’s fall to the Wehrmacht. Svetlana was also sent to Kuibyshev but returned to Moscow in summer 1942, recalling that Stalin’s apartment was ‘empty and depressing. My father’s library was in Kuibyshev and the bookshelves in the dining room were empty.’³⁴

In the 1990s the author Rachel Polonsky chanced upon the remnants of the library of Stalin’s foremost deputy, his long-serving prime minister and foreign commissar, Vyacheslav Molotov. The books were stored in Molotov’s old apartment, located just across the road from the Kremlin. In a story emblematic of post-communist Moscow, the upmarket apartment had been rented out by Molotov’s grandson to an American investment banker who was a neighbour of Polonsky’s.³⁵ There were only a few hundred books left of Molotov’s collection but the library’s surviving catalogue indicated to her there had once been ten thousand.

Polonsky was surprised by the eclecticism and cultural range of Molotov’s books. There were, of course, various Marxist texts, together with Soviet war memoirs, books about economics and agriculture (a preoccupation of Molotov when he was Soviet premier), the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and a Russian translation of Winston Churchill’s History of the Second World War. Books about Russian history and the correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II shared space on the shelves with a biography of Edgar Allan Poe and Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. Alongside the classics of Russian literature and letters were works by Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Anatole France, as well as Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and an illustrated edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy.³⁶ Stalin’s library was equally diverse and more than twice the size of Molotov’s.

While Molotov long outlived Stalin, dying aged ninety-six in 1986, he survived in office for little more than four years after his old boss’s death. In 1957 he lost a bitter power struggle with Stalin’s successor as party leader, Nikita Khrushchev. Ejected from the party leadership, Molotov was demoted to an ambassadorship in the People’s Republic of Mongolia.³⁷

One issue in contention between Molotov and Khrushchev was Stalin’s historical legacy. While Molotov accepted that Stalin made many mistakes, he defended his constructive role in building socialism in the USSR. Khrushchev, on the other hand, wanted to denounce Stalin and the cult of his personality wholesale, and he did so at a closed session of the 20th congress of the Soviet communist party in February 1956.

Khrushchev’s so-called secret speech sealed the fate of the dictator’s personal library. A plan to turn Stalin’s Moscow dacha into a museum celebrating his life was shelved and his books mostly dispersed to other libraries. However, Soviet archivists and librarians retrieved and retained some important remnants of the library, notably nearly 400 items that Stalin had read, marked and annotated. Preserved, too, were several thousand other books that identifiably belonged to his library. Rediscovered in post-Soviet times, these remnants came to be seen as a repository of the traces of Stalin’s deepest and most intimate thoughts.

Jonathan Brent’s encounter with the surviving books in Stalin’s library in the early 2000s verged on the religious. A Yale University Press editor, Brent was in Moscow to negotiate the creation of Yale’s Stalin Digital Archive (SDA), which was to contain images of all the documents in the dictator’s personal file series, or lichnyi fond, as it is called in Russian. The annotated books were to be one segment of the series and he was shown some specimens: