Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

All these books were stamped as belonging to the office library of the Defence Commissariat, which dates their earliest acquisition by Stalin to the mid-1930s, which was a period in which he read a number of military-related books, including the memoirs of Helmuth von Moltke (1800–1891), who was chief of the Prussian General Staff, and General Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s military supremo during the First World War. In Moltke’s memoirs he was drawn to the chapter on preparations for war, while in Ludendorff’s it was the stress on importance of popular support during wartime.²⁵³

An obscure figure in the twentieth century, Leer was quite well known in nineteenth-century Russia. His name came up in Soviet military theory debates in the 1920s, often coupled with that of Clausewitz. Stalin might have picked up on Leer from Svechin’s writings. Stalin read and marked the latter’s two-volume history of military art (from the Defence Commissariat library, too) and also had a copy of Svechin’s own book on strategy. Svechin disagreed with Leer’s scientific approach but agreed with him about the importance of the study of history. And it was military history that interested Stalin most.²⁵⁴

Apart from Svechin’s strategy book, which approached the subject conceptually rather than historically, the alternative to Leer’s writings would have been Clausewitz’s On War. Although Stalin also ‘borrowed’ a copy of a 1932 Russian translation of this classic text from the Defence Commissariat, he does not appear to have paid it much attention, except to read the publisher’s preface, which praised Clausewitz as a fine student of history and a master of the dialectical study of war. Stalin also marked the comment that lumped Leer and Svechin together as logicians and metaphysicians, compared to Clausewitz, who had liberated the theory of war from such ‘bourgeois’ methods.²⁵⁵

All four Leer books are heavily marked, three of them by the same hand, but it is not Stalin’s. The fourth book, Strategiya, was marked by multiple readers, one of whom might have been Stalin. According to Leer, the chief tasks of military art were twofold: to prepare the means of war and then to rationally deploy them. That required close attention to the economic, political and geographical character of the theatre of war as well as to its strictly military aspects. In the conduct of war the choice of strategic direction was all-important, as was the safeguarding of the forces and supplies tasked to carry out operations.

An underlined Leer passage that might well have stuck in his Stalin’s mind was that after his defeat by Napoleon at the battle of Borodino in 1812, Kutuzov faced a choice between saving his army and saving Moscow.²⁵⁶ Kutuzov chose the former and then conducted a harassing campaign against Napoleon’s forces when they retreated from Moscow. A similar dilemma confronted Stalin as Hitler’s armies approached Moscow in October 1941. In the event, he decided that to save his army he had to save Moscow so he remained in the capital and organised its defence. On 7 November 1941, he addressed troops parading through Red Square on their way to the front:

Remember the year 1918, when we celebrated the first anniversary of the October Revolution. Three-quarters of our country was . . . in the hands of foreign interventionists. The Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East were temporarily lost to us. We had no allies, we had no Red Army . . . there was a shortage of food, of armaments. . . . Fourteen states were pressing against our country. But we did not become despondent, we did not lose heart. In the fire of war we forged the Red Army and converted our country into a military camp. The spirit of the great Lenin animated us. . . . And what happened? We routed the interventionists, recovered our lost territory, and achieved victory.

Stalin returned to the patriotic theme in his peroration:

A great liberation mission has fallen to your lot. Be worthy of this mission. . . . Let the manly images of our great ancestors – Alexander Nevsky [who defeated the Swedes], Dimitry Donskoy [who beat the Tartars], Kuz’ma Minin and Dimitry Pozharsky [who drove the Poles out of Moscow], Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov [the Russian hero generals of the Napoleonic Wars] – inspire you in this war. May the victorious banner of the great Lenin be your lodestar.²⁵⁷