Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Colonel Yevgeny Razin, a lecturer at the Frunze Academy and the author of a four-volume textbook history of operational art, took exception to Meshcheryakov’s article and wrote to Stalin. Meshcheryakov, complained Razin, had revised the positive view of Clausewitz held not only by Lenin but by Engels, too. Attached to his letter was his own short thesis on war and the art of war. Stalin replied almost immediately but his response was not published until March 1947.

Unfortunately for Razin, Stalin agreed with Meshcheryakov’s critique of Clausewitz. Indeed, in a private meeting with the journal’s editors in March 1945, Stalin himself had spoken of German military ideology as an ideology of attack, plunder and the struggle for world domination.²⁸³

‘In the interests of our cause and the modern science of war, we are obliged not only to criticise Clausewitz,’ wrote Stalin to Razin, ‘but also Moltke, Schlieffen, Ludendorff, Keitel and other exponents of German military ideology. During the last thirty years Germany has twice forced a bloody war on the rest of the world and twice has suffered defeat.’ Clausewitz was out of date, said Stalin; he ‘was a representative of the time of manufacture in war, but now we are in the machine age of war’. As to Razin’s own ideas, Stalin was scathing:

The thesis contains too much philosophy and abstract statements. The terminology taken from Clausewitz, talking of the grammar and logic of war hurts one’s ears. . . . The hymns of praise to Stalin also pain the ears, it hurts to read them. Also, the chapter on counter-offensive (not to be confused with counter-attack) is missing. I am talking of the counter-offensive after a successful but indecisive enemy offensive, during which the defenders assemble their forces to turn to a counter-offensive and strike a decisive blow to the enemy and inflict defeat upon him. . . . Our brilliant Commander, Kutuzov, executed this when he destroyed Napoleon and his army by a well-prepared counter-offensive.²⁸⁴

According to Roy Medvedev, the publication of Stalin’s letter led to the colonel’s arrest, but Stalin relented when he came across Razin’s military art textbook while doing some homework in preparation for a meeting with China’s communist leader, Mao Tse Tung, who was considered an expert on ‘people’s war’. Stalin was so impressed by Razin’s book that he was released from prison, promoted to major-general and restored to his position at the Frunze Academy.²⁸⁵ A different version of Razin’s fate is that he was already under arrest for some wartime misdemeanours when he wrote to Stalin and Stalin’s letter actually led to his release. Either story could be true, such were the vagaries of the Soviet system, especially when Stalin was involved. What is certain is that Razin did return to teaching and to publishing books about military affairs. He died in 1964. As far as we know, he kept his own counsel, and never wrote or spoke about his famous exchange with Stalin.

IMAGINING AMERIKA

Stalin was fascinated by SShA (Soedinennye Shtaty Ameriki). From the First World War onwards, the United States was the world’s most advanced and powerful capitalist country. Soviet socialism aimed to catch up with and then surpass the USA. Stalin was confident the rationally planned and socially controlled Soviet economy would prevail in competition with American free enterprise capitalism but he was still keen to import superior US technology, mass production techniques and work organisation methods. ‘Do it the Ford way’ and ‘create Russian Americans’ were among the more surprising Bolshevik slogans of the 1920s.²⁸⁶ In his 1924 lectures on The Foundations of Leninism, Stalin talked about the ideal ‘style of work’ being a combination of ‘Russian revolutionary sweep and American efficiency’. American efficiency, said Stalin, was the ‘indomitable force which neither knows nor recognises obstacles’ and ‘with business-like perseverance brushes aside all obstacles’.²⁸⁷ In correspondence with the poet Demyan Bedny that same year, he explained Bolshevik ‘philosophy’ with a quote from Walt Whitman: ‘We are alive. Our scarlet blood boils with the fire of unused strength.’²⁸⁸

When Emil Ludwig commented that in the Soviet Union ‘everything American is held in very high esteem’, Stalin demurred, but said he respected ‘the efficiency that Americans display in everything – in industry, in technology, in literature and in life’. Compared with the old European capitalist countries, remarked Stalin, there was an element of democracy in American industrial practices, which he attributed to the absence of feudal remnants in a young country like the United States.