Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin published five contributions on this matter in Pravda. In his final pronouncement he reiterated his view that eventually all languages would merge into a common world language. But that process would only take place after the global victory of socialism. In the meantime, hundreds of languages would continue to co-exist and there was no question of suppressing any of them or of asserting the superiority of any one language.

Boris Piotrovsky was among many Marr disciples who sensibly kept their heads down during the linguistics discussion. Doubtless that helped save his job as a deputy director of the Hermitage Museum. It didn’t save him from Stalin’s scorn. He ridiculed Piotrovsky’s contribution to a 1951 book on the history of ancient cultures and wrote ‘ha ha’ beside the editor’s claim that Piotrovsky had provided the first scientific account of the rise and fall of Armenia’s Urartu civilisation.²³⁶

Stalin’s articles on Marxism and linguistics were republished in all Soviet newspapers. They were read over the radio and reprinted as pamphlets with print runs in the millions. Linguistic programmes were revamped to include new courses on ‘Stalin’s Teaching about Language’. A wave of anti-Marrite discussions swept the country. Critical books and articles multiplied. One beneficiary of this counter-revolution, Vinogradov, was appointed head of a new Institute of Linguistics.

Worth quoting is Evgeny Dobrenko’s multi-metaphoric summary of these developments:

Stalin’s text is a discursive black hole that sucks in entire scholarly/scientific disciplines; they disintegrate at ever-increasing speed and produce more and more textual fragments. Put another way, one might compare this ever-expanding discourse originating from Stalin’s text to a progressive tumour that continually metastasizes to new organs and tissues. As a sacred object that gives birth to text and procreates discourse, this short text truly engenders oceans of literature.²³⁷

STALIN THE PLAGIARISER?

Various bets have been staked on which of Stalin’s writings were plagiarised from other authors. Trotsky’s claim that Lenin, not Stalin, was the author of Marxism and the National Question has already been dealt with. Stephen Kotkin writes that Stalin ‘plagiarized whole cloth’ his first major work, Anarchism or Socialism?, from a deceased Georgian railway worker-intellectual called Giorgi Teliya.²³⁸ The only cited evidence for this assertion is that in his 1907 obituary for Teliya, which was republished in his collected works, Stalin mentioned that his dead comrade had written a piece called ‘Anarchism and Social Democracy’.²³⁹ As Kotkin himself admits, ‘We shall never know how much of Teliya’s work Stalin borrowed or how much he may have sharpened it.’²⁴⁰ Or, indeed, if he made any use of it at all, except, perhaps, as an idea for his own series of articles.

Kotkin also repeats Roy Medvedev’s claim that Stalin’s 1924 lectures on The Foundations of Leninism – one of the key texts in the Stalinist canon – were heavily based on a manuscript by F. A. Ksenofontov on Lenin’s Doctrine of Revolution.²⁴¹ Again, this was a hare set running by Stalin himself when he allowed a private letter he had written to Ksenofontov in 1926 to be published in the ninth volume of his collected works.²⁴² Stalin’s purpose was to assert his authorship of the definition of Leninism as ‘the Marxism of the era of imperialism and of proletarian revolution’. Medvedev maintained that Stalin derived that definition from Ksenofontov, and he may be right. But Stalin’s elaboration of the definition in The Foundations of Leninism differs markedly from that of Ksenofontov. It is the broad strokes of the theory and practice of Bolshevism under Lenin’s leadership that interests Stalin, not the close textual analysis and careful formulations favoured by Ksenofontov.

Of several works by Ksenofontov that remain in Stalin’s book collection, the only text that he marked was On the Ideological and Tactical Foundations of Bolshevism (1928).²⁴³ Stalin seems to have skipped the first section of the book in which the author reprised his analysis of the nature of Leninism and nor did he show any interest in Ksenofontov’s history of Bolshevik strategy and tactics. Instead, Stalin homed in on his detailed reconstruction of Lenin’s thinking on the New Economic Policy and its relationship to socialist construction – a subject that was very much on his mind at the end of the 1920s, when NEP was in crisis and he was on the verge of breaking with that policy. As so often, Stalin’s reading interests reflected immediate and pressing political concerns.