Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

In 1942 the Red Army created two new medals for higher-ranking officers – the Orders of Kutuzov and Suvorov. At a meeting with the editors of Voennaya Mysl’ (Military Thought) and Voennyi Vestnik (Military Herald) three years later, Stalin complained about the Soviet officer corps’ narrow horizons, urging them to study the exploits of Russian military commanders such as Peter the Great, Kutuzov and Suvorov. He also criticised civilian historians who placed Kutuzov below Suvorov in the pantheon of military greats: ‘Kutuzov commanded bigger armies than Suvorov, dealt with more difficult political and strategic problems and successfully fought against stronger opponents.’²⁶⁵

Stalin certainly read Bragin’s book. His marks – underlinings and margin-linings – are scattered throughout its 270 pages.²⁶⁶ The marks were made with different coloured pencils, indicating that he dipped in and out of its pages. Two themes of Bragin’s were of particular interest to him. Firstly, what Kutuzov had learned from Suvorov: the maxim that the harder troops trained, the easier it would go for them in battle; the importance of the performance of ordinary front-line soldiers; and the need to avoid pointless offensives. Secondly, the parallels between 1812 and 1941. When Bragin quoted Napoleon – ‘I cannot rest on my success in Europe when half a million children are being born in Russia every year’ – Stalin underlined it. He noted, too, that when Napoleon invaded in June 1812 he did so without declaring war and had most of Europe at his disposal while Russia stood alone. Stalin also marked the section which noted how everyone expected Napoleon to win the initial battles. Kutuzov’s own account of his defeat of Napoleon, how he had drawn the French emperor into capturing Moscow and then worn Napoleon’s army down after it withdrew from the city, were double margin-lined by Stalin.

Bragin concluded by asserting Russia’s military prowess. After 1812 the victorious Russian army penetrated deep into Europe: ‘It entered Germany and seized Berlin, it entered France and took Paris and demonstrated the power of Russian arms to the whole world.’ When, at the end of the Second World War, Harriman said to Stalin, ‘Generalissimo, this must be a great satisfaction to you to be here in Berlin,’ he replied, ‘Tsar Alexander got to Paris.’²⁶⁷

Another book published just as Hitler invaded Russia was a biography of Suvorov by ‘K. Osipov’ – the pseudonym of the Soviet writer and literary critic Joseph Kuperman.²⁶⁸ Stalin’s copy has been lost but we can presume he read it, since in January 1942 he edited the draft of a review by the military historian Colonel Nikolai Podorozhny.²⁶⁹ Stalin changed the review’s title, ‘The Unsurpassed Master of War’, to ‘Suvorov’, but retained the phrase in the first paragraph. As might be expected, Stalin edited the piece with an eye to current events. He inserted a paragraph attributing to Suvorov the idea that if you can frighten the enemy and make them panic, you have won the battle without even setting eyes on them. Another addition cited Suvorov’s belief that victory was not won by capturing territory but by destroying enemy forces.

1.  Stalin working in his Kremlin office in 1938.

2.  Shushanika Manuchar’yants, Lenin’s and Stalin’s librarian (photo dating from the 1960s).

3.  An early photo of Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, in 1917.

4.  Stalin with his two youngest children, Vasily and Svetlana, in 1935.

5.  Stalin’s handwritten library classification scheme, May 1925.

6.  Title page of Nikolai Bukharin’s pamphlet about Lenin, Revolutsionnyi Teoretik, with Stalin’s ex-libris stamp.

7.  Stalin’s numbering of some of Lenin’s arguments against political opponents in his polemic One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

8.  In the margin of Karl Kautsky’s Terrorism and Communism, Stalin notes: ‘With Kautsky, statics overwhelm dynamics. He does not understand that under the rule of the [proletariat] things must be different.’ At the bottom of the page he wrote ‘ha-ha’ beside Kautsky’s statement that it was desperation which drove the proletariat to take power in Paris and then lead the French Revolution at home and abroad.

9.  On the front cover of Lenin, Conspiratorialism, and October (1924), Stalin wrote: ‘Tell Molotov that Trotsky lied to Il’ich [Lenin] about the course of the insurrection.’

10.  Stalin proposed to change the name of Shestakov’s school textbook from Short Course History of the USSR to History of the USSR; A Short Course, but the original title was retained.

11.  Stalin’s doodles on the back cover of Alexei Tolstoy’s 1942 play Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible). The word uchitel’ (teacher) appears several times, as it does on other books in Stalin’s library.