The fascinating history of Stalin’s library

In 1972 the Jeffrey Roberts, the British author of the book Stalin’s library, he was 20 years old and had just begun to build his own, personal library. One of his first acquisitions was a second-hand thirteen-volume English-language collection of the Answer of Stalin. Little did Roberts know at the time that publishing the Answers of Soviet leaders was an industry down memory lane. USSRthe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Complete Works of Stalin was scheduled to be published in sixteen volumes. Thirteen were eventually issued between 1946 and 1949. The remaining three were eaten up by the de-Stalinization frenzy. Completion of the project was canceled after Stalin’s repudiation by Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress in 1956.

The acquisition, however, proved prophetic. In the years that followed Roberts emerged as a leading historian of Soviet history. And in 2022, fifty years after that purchase, Roberts published her fascinating story “Stalin’s library”. Roberts, who is currently his professor emeritus University College Cork of Ireland, shows in the book how Stalin, “the bloodthirsty tyrant, the machinist politician, the paranoid personality, the fanatical ideologue, the revolutionary, the founder of the state, the modernizer, the monster, the genius, the genocidal, the warlord”, he was also an intellectual, devoted to endless reading, writing and editing. Roberts tells us that the books led Stalin to the revolution and were absolutely essential to “his autonomy as a political actor.”

Roberts writes that since the discovery of the remains of Stalin’s personal library, many have turned to the books to find what it was that made “his rule so horrific.” But there is nothing hidden there, writes Roberts. Everything is in plain sight.

Stalin, for those who do not know his biography, had received a high-quality education from Orthodox Church of Georgia. It was intended for a priest. In 1888 he entered the church school of Gori in Georgia. He was such a good student that the church council had exempted him from tuition, provided him with free textbooks, and given him as a prize the Georgian edition of Psalms of David with special dedication. In May 1894 he took exams at the Theological School of Tbilisi, getting excellent grades in all subjects, which was a five (5), except for Greek and Arithmetic where he got a four (4). It was in this school that Stalin came into contact with Marxist study groups for the first time, and was even put in charge of them. In 1898 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and in May 1899 he left the Theological School. However, until then, the book he had studied more than any other was the Bible. Various theories about the secretly “Orthodox Stalin”, when he himself was now a Bolshevik, were based on this long schooling. But it was never proven that he secretly remained faithful, that he prayed and that he read the Bible.

Stalin began to build his personal library after the revolution of 1917. He could find and read everything, although from 1922 the Soviet government established an elaborate and harsh system of censorship. The censorship service, the Glavlit, employed thousands of employees. One of their tasks was to clear the libraries of dangerous books. During the first years, the leader of the purges was Lenin’s companion, Nadezhda Krupskaya. In the 1930s and at the height of the Stalinist terror, 16,453 titles and more than 24 million copies were removed from libraries and the book trade network.

From 1917 to 1925 Stalin’s library reached thousands of titles. In May 1925 he decided to classify it and proposed the categories himself: not by author but by topic. He suggested 31 thematic sections, such as philosophy, psychology, Russian history, diplomacy, The position of the workers, trade unions but also fiction, art criticism, dictionaries, memoirs, etc. By name he requested that the books of Lenin, Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev but also the books of the French socialist Paul Lafargue. Stalin and his whole generation admired Lafargue because of his book The right to laziness. Lafargue was married to Marx’s second daughter, Laura. The two committed suicide together in 1911. But despite the suicide, which was considered an anti-revolutionary act, Stalin had many of Lafargue’s books in his library.

It is said that Stalin’s librarian was Susanika Manutsarianswho was also his librarian Lenin until his death in 1924. In fact, Susanika had created the seal ex libris of Stalin “Biblioteka IV Stalina”. Susanika’s colleague in Lenin’s office was Nadezhda Allelugeva, Stalin’s second wife and mother of his children Vasily and Svetlana. Nadezhda committed suicide in 1932. She was “a fleeting figure in the Stalinist universe.” The causes and circumstances of death were not known and her suicide was hushed up. From the 1930s the women’s issue and gender relations were treated very conservatively compared to the early years of the revolution. Stalin was also homophobic (in 1934 homosexuality was banned). And while he was not anti-Semitic, he exploited or accepted anti-Semitism, as Roberts writes, to advance the campaign against him. cosmopolitanism during the late 1940s and until his death in 1953.

Stalin’s library was considered something sacred. During his World War IIas Hitler’s troops approached Moscow, the library had placed in crates sent to Samara, in southeastern Russia. After Stalin’s death, there was a plan to convert his dacha near the Moscow in a museum dedicated to his life, where his library would also find a place. Khrushchev, however, canceled this plan and initiated the dismantling of the library. Fortunately some archivists rescued some four hundred books read and commented on by Stalin himself as well as a few thousand identified as part of his collection. The tragic irony is that these very important remains of the dictator’s library are now accessible thanks to the Americans. In the early 2000s Jonathan Brent, his publisher Yale University Presswent to Moscow and negotiated the creation of the Stalin digital archive, the Yale’s Stalin Digital Archive.

It is natural that many titles from the library concern Marxist philosophy, economics, politics, etc., but there are also titles on Roman and ancient Greek history. Stalin was also interested in biographies of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible; perhaps he identified with them. But literature is very interesting. His works Turgenevof Dostoyevskyof Pushkintranslations into Russian of his works Jack London or his Mark Twainsuch as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Hugoof Shakespeareof Flaubert. In Maxim Gorky’s book Death and the daughter there is Stalin’s comment that “this play is stronger than Goethe’s Faust.” She loved him too Dickens. Roberts observes that “one element of Dickens that puritan Bolsheviks such as Stalin appreciated was the complete absence from his works of embodied sexuality.” Many of Stalin’s comments (the “pometki”) in the margins of the pages were of the type “ha ha”, “arlumps”, “fool”, “bastard”, “leave us” but also “yes, yes”, “I agree “, “right”, “that’s right”. Stalin’s literary taste, like Lenin’s, was conventional and conservative.

Roberts writes that since the discovery of the remains of Stalin’s personal library, many have turned to the books to find what it was that made “his rule so horrific.” But there is nothing hidden there, writes Roberts. Everything is in plain sight. Stalin’s much-discussed insanity was not personal but political. Say, the mass murderous repression he unleashed in the 1930s was fueled by his perception of a dire existential threat facing the Soviet state.

Jeffrey Roberts’ book (in the very good translation of Vangelis Tsirba) helps us to understand today’s Russia as well. To understand Putin himself, a kind of Stalinist leader.

BUY THE BOOK HERE

The article was published in LIFO print