Stalin’s Library by Geoffrey Roberts – a resumé and review – Part 4
Roberts calculates that the size of Stalin’s library at some 25,000 books, pamphlets and periodicals.
In Stalin’s collection, “Apart from the works of Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Luxemburg, there are few foreign translations in Stalin’s collection. Notable exceptions include Russian translations of Winston Churchill’s book about the First World War, ‘The World Crisis’; three books by the German revisionist social democrat Eduard Bernstein; two books by Keynes, including ‘The economic consequences of the peace’; Jean Jaurès’s ‘History of the great French revolution’; Tomáš Masaryk’s ‘World revolution’; the German economist Karl Wilhelm Bucher’s ‘Work and rhythm’; an early work by Karl Wittfogel on the ‘awakening’ of China; John Hobson’s ‘Imperialism’; Werner Sombart’s book about modern capitalism; some works of the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk; the Italian Marxist Antonio Labriola on historical materialism; John Reed’s ‘Insurgent Mexico’; several works by the American writer Upton Sinclair, and the letters of executed US anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Among the many works on economics in the collection is a translation of Adam Smith’s ‘The wealth of nations’; in his heavily marked copies of David Rozenberg’s three volumes of commentary on Marx’s ‘Capital’, Stalin displayed a particular interest in the sections on trade and Adam Smith” (p.86).
Some of the writers in Stalin’s collection were purged, but their writings remained part of the collection.
Included in the collection are about 150 foreign language books, mostly in French, German and English, including a book about the Spanish civil war; a signed copy of the 1935 edition of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet communism: a new civilisation; various translations of works by Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin and Radek.
One book that combined Stalin’s interests is the 1923 text on the history of revolutionary armies by Nikolai Lukin (1885-1940) based on his lectures to the Red Army’s General Staff Academy. This book dealt with the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, but it was the chapter on Cromwell and his New Model Army that most interested Stalin. Stalin made good use of his knowledge of English history in an interview with HG Wells in July 1934:
“’Recall the history of England in the seventeenth century. Did not many say that the old social system had decayed? But did it not, nevertheless, require a Cromwell to crush it by force?’ When Wells objected that Cromwell acted constitutionally, Stalin retorted: ‘In the name of the constitution he resorted to violence, beheaded the king, dispersed Parliament, arrested some and beheaded others!’ In that same interview he lectured Wells about eighteenth-century British history and the role of the radical Chartist movement in the democratic political reforms of that era” (p.88).
Stalin’s most striking pronouncement on Russian history came in his February 1931 speech on the urgency of the drive for modernisation and industrialisation:
“The history of old Russia consisted, among other things, in her being beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol Khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal rulers. She was beaten by the Polish-Lithuanian lords. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. Everyone gave her a beating for her backwardness. For military back-wardness, for cultural backwardness, for state backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. They beat her because it was profitable and could be done with impunity … Such is the law of the exploiters: beat the backward because you are weak – so you are in the wrong and therefore can be beaten and enslaved ., We have fallen behind the advanced countries by 50 to 100 years. We must close that gap in 10 years. Either we do this or we will be crushed” (p.89).
Memoirs and diaries were another category of books that interested Stalin – among them the memoirs of the British spy RH Bruce-Lockhart, the First World War German General, Erich Ludendorff, and Annabelle Bucart, who defected to the Soviet Union from the American embassy in Moscow in 1948, thereafter becoming a star of Radio Moscow’s English language broadcasting.
TASS bulletins from various countries were one of Stalin’s most important sources of international information in the early 1930s and he paid special attention to reporting from and about Japan. During the Second World War his staff produced an information bulletin for him containing translated and summarised material from the foreign press, particularly reports on the Soviet Union (see p.90).
In the light of the foregoing, notwithstanding the denigration of Stalin as a mediocre tyrant, Stalin emerges as an intellectual giant, committed in every fibre of his body to the cause of socialism and the liberation of humanity who, in the midst of unbelievable burden of his responsibilities, found time to read a monumental amount of books and have such a large collection of books covering various aspects of human knowledge.
“The idea that Stalin was an intellectual who had read and collected a lot of books was not uncommon, Trotsky’s caricature of him as a mediocrity notwithstanding. He was, after all, a published author”, whose reputation as a Marxist theoretician was acknowledged and “a succession of bedazzled Western intellectuals, diplomats and politicians had publicly hailed his knowledge and erudition … But the discovery of his personal library focused attention on the intellectual aspect of Stalin’s persona and identity. Crucially his biographers now had a source they could use to explore the workings of his mind alongside their studies of his exercise of power” (p.90).
One of the common failings of Stalin’s opponents had been to underestimate Stalin’s intellect and erudition. The discovery of his library put an end to that nonsense and shed light on the multi-faceted talents of this intellectual and revolutionary giant.
After the collapse of the USSR, Russian people began to appreciate Stalin’s contribution and to discard the calumnies about him spread by Khrushchevites, Trotskyites, bourgeois academics and suchlike scoundrels. No wonder, then, that, according to a March 2018 opinion poll, Stalin was voted “the greatest leader of all times for Russians” (p.96).
TO BE CONTINUED