Stalin’s library: a dictator and his books

Abstract

Canonedefine a life fromapersonal library?GeoffreyRoberts, Emeritus Professor ofHistory at University College Cork and an expert on Russian dictator, Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), thinks you can. Roberts notes that Stalin did not keep a diary nor write a memoir, but ‘he left a wellmarked literary trail not only in the books he wrote and edited but in those he read as well’. Roberts aims to provide a ‘picture of the reading life of the twentieth century’s most selfconsciously intellectual dictator’ and thus provide a ‘key to the character that made his rule so monstrous’. Roberts concludes Stalin was ‘a Bolshevik first and an intellectual second’. Stalin was a voracious reader from his childhood onwards. In May 1925 he commissioned staff to classify his personal book collection which was intended to be a working library. By the time of his death in 1953 Stalin had assembled 25,000 books in his huge Moscow dacha. It was, however, dispersed after Nikita Khrushchev’s dramatic denunciation of Stalin at the Soviet Communist Party’s 20th congress in February 1956. Lenin envisaged a huge Russian public library network as the means to bring books in general and revolutionary literature to as many people as possible. Even though the Nazis destroyed 4000 Soviet libraries during the SecondWorld War, there were still 80,000 libraries remaining in 1945 and 1500 in Moscow alone. Stalin’s use of a personal ex-libris stamp, ‘Biblioteka I. V. Stalina’, enables Roberts to track down a number of Stalin’s books in the Moscow libraries, although Roberts especially focuses on the 400 books annotated by Stalin. Stalin was often particularly annoyed by grammatical errors in books, which he corrected in red pencil. His non-regard for the physical nature of books was evidenced by often leaving greasy finger marks on them. Stalin originally praised the writings of political rival Leon Trotsky, but this changed over time. Stalin writes ‘Fool!’ in the margins of Trotsky’s books, as he did with those of the Marxist theorist, Karl Kautsky. The political writer he most admired was Vladimir Lenin for whom there are no marginal criticisms, as indeed there weren’t for Karl Marx. Roberts notes that Stalin was ‘a very dogmatic Marxist... a fanatic who had no secret doubts’. Stalin’s mindset to approve mass murder is thus ‘hidden in plain sight’. During his 30 years in office (1922–1953), Stalin collected books over a vast range of subjects. History was his favourite, followed by Marxist theory and then literature. Roberts’ last chapter overviews the Soviet history publications that Stalin was personally involved with, either as editor or contributor. Stalin assembled thousands of novels, plays and poetry, and was ‘conservative and conventional’ in his fictional taste – although his library did include works by Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy and Chekhov. Although he once described writers in a socialist society as ‘engineers of the human soul’, approximately 1500 writers died during Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’ purge. Stalin’s library proves that to read widely, and assemble a large library, is no guarantee of a belief in a democratic society and a belief in human rights. You can clearly be at the same time, as Roberts first chapter is titled, a ‘Bloody Tyrant and Bookworm’.