Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Admittedly, complexity, depth and subtlety were not strengths of Stalin’s, nor was he an original thinker. His lifelong practice was to utilise other people’s ideas, formulations and information – that was why he read such a lot. His intellectual hallmark was that of a brilliant simplifier, clarifier and populariser. As Dobrenko put it: ‘Stalin never strove for novelty in his thinking but rather aimed at political expediency. In every case, the forcefulness of his thought is in its efficacy, not originality.’²⁴⁴

Ernst Fischer, the Austrian communist art historian who worked for the Comintern and lived in exile in Moscow from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, was among the many intellectuals smitten by Stalin. He ‘was the master of simplistic argument’, recalled Fischer, and intellectuals ‘succumbed’ to this simplisme because of his ability to reconcile ‘the critical reason of the thinker with the élan, the all or nothing, of the man of action’.²⁴⁵

MASTERS OF WAR

The interwar Red Army had at its disposal a talented and innovative group of military strategists: Mikhail Frunze (1885–1925), Boris Shaposhnikov (1882–1945), Alexander Svechin (1878–1938), Vladimir Triandafillov (1894–1931) and Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893–1937).²⁴⁶ Together they fostered a sophisticated discourse about the changing nature of modern warfare, the use of advanced military technology and the development of operational art. Especially important were the doctrines of ‘deep battle’ and ‘deep operations’, which entailed successive and sustained waves of combined arms forces (infantry, armour, airborne) penetrating the full depth of enemy defences and then the envelopment of enemy forces from the rear. These doctrines were similar to the contemporaneous German concept of Blitzkrieg but the Soviets were less tank centric and more inclined to use infantry and artillery for breakthrough operations. From 1936 these ideas were incorporated into successive editions of the Red Army’s Field Service Regulations, which guided the organisation and deployment of military forces and the conduct of combat operations. During the Second World War, Stalin was a diligent reader of these manuals and made numerous textual corrections to draft versions.²⁴⁷

Stalin’s interest in the details of military affairs was longstanding. His library included a copy of a Russian artillery journal dating from 1866, a 1911 history of the Russian army and fleet, and a photocopy of a description of the Madsen 20mm machine gun.²⁴⁸ Heavily marked by Stalin was a 1925 work on artillery – a translation of a book by the French general Frédéric-Georges Herr (1855–1932). Stalin was interested in the extent and organisation of artillery in modern armies, with the types and calibre of artillery and its potential range (up to 200km, according to Herr). He noted Herr’s comment that Germany was continuing to develop its armaments and had the lead when it came to chemical weapons. His attention was also drawn to the importance of technical education and the post-First World War British decision to establish a number of specialist military training schools.²⁴⁹ Ambassador Averell Harriman recalled that Stalin

had an enormous ability to absorb detail. . . . In our negotiations with him [about wartime military supplies from the US] we usually found him extremely well-informed. He had a masterly knowledge of the sort of equipment that was important to him. He knew the calibre of the guns he wanted, the weight of the tanks his roads and bridges would take, and the details of the type of metal he needed to build aircraft.²⁵⁰

Stalin was fond of talking about the impact on warfare of new technology and of hectoring his top commanders to break with their fixation on experiences during the Russian Civil War. Yet, judging by the books in his library, a favourite strategist was a nineteenth-century Tsarist General Staff officer called Genrikh Leer (1829–1904).

Leer was the closest Russian equivalent of Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), the great Prussian strategic theorist. Leer taught at the Tsarist General Staff Academy from 1858 to 1898, the last ten years as its chief. He published a number of books on strategy, tactics and military history. Leer believed that military strategy should be taught as a science based on historical experience and as one that could derive from empirical data enduring rules and precepts about the conduct of war.²⁵¹

Stalin possessed four of Leer’s works: The Experience of Critical-Historical Research on the Laws of the Art of the Conduct of War (1869); Strategy (Part One: Main Operations) (1885); Combined Operations (1892); and The Method of Military Science (1894).²⁵²