Stalin’s Library by Geoffrey Roberts – a resumé and review – Part 6
Spymania
For obvious reasons, Stalin was distrustful of spies – Soviet fears of foreign intelligence operations were perennial. The cultural Cold War was as fierce as the east-west political struggle. In 1949, the Soviet Union published a book entitled The truth about American diplomats, written by Annabelle Bucar, an employee at the American embassy in Moscow who had defected to the USSR in February 1948. Having read the book in its Russian translation, Stalin gave permission for the book to be published as long as it was published in English, Spanish and French as well.
This book caused a sensation; its three prints, published in quick succession, numbering in all just over 300,000 copies, were lapped up by the readership.
Bucar’s book gave details of how the US embassy in Moscow was a nest of spies: “The American diplomatic service is an intelligence organisation”, she wrote, a sentence which Stalin underlined in his copy of the book. The chapter which most attracted his attention was entitled ‘The leadership of the anti-Soviet clique in the state department’.
Duly noted by Stalin was the chief culprit, George F Kennan, the former chargé d’affaires in the Moscow embassy, who had published an anonymous article in the influential magazine Foreign Affairs in 1947, in which he argued that the USSR was a messianic, expansionist state that should be contained by skilful deployment of countervailing power. Kennan’s article was widely regarded as a key influence for America to turn towards confrontation with the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. The book characterised Kennan as the representative of aggressive anti-Soviet circles in the US.
Another sentence in the book underlined by Stalin was Kennan’s statement that “war between the USA and the Soviet Union was inevitable” and that the US could not bear the continued existence of a successful socialist system. The policy of containing communism advocated by Kennan, wrote Bucar, was a guise to justify American world domination.
It is interesting to note Kennan’s observation of Stalin, whom he met on two occasions, and penned his portrait of Stalin in the following words::
“His words were few. They generally sounded reasonable; indeed they often were … Stalin’s greatness as a dissimulator was an integral part of his greatness as a statesman. So was his gift for simple, plausible, ostensibly innocuous utterance. Wholly unoriginal in every creative sense, he had always been the aptest of pupils. He possessed unbelievably acute powers of observation … I was never in doubt, when visiting him, that I was in the presence of one of the world’s most remarkable men – a man great, if you will, primarily in his iniquity: ruthless, cynical, cunning, endlessly dangerous, but for all of this – one of the truly great men of the age” (p.121).
Kennan returned to Moscow in 1952 as the US ambassador. Pravda quite correctly attacked his slanderous words and he was declared persona non grata as a diplomat – the only US ambassador ever expelled from the USSR. He supposedly dropped his headline anti-Soviet views soon thereafter and is regarded as being the foremost advocate of détente with the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s – not hard to believe as the Soviet Union by that time had recovered from the devastation of the Second World War and become a powerful nuclear state.
Stalin read a Russian edition of the memoirs of Otto von Bismarck. With his approval it was published in the Soviet Union. Stalin was deeply interested in diplomatic history; so reading Bismarck’s biography would have made sense. Another book about Bismarck that attracted Stalin’s interest was Wolfgang Windelband’s Bismarck and the European great powers, 1879-1885. At Stalin’s suggestion it was translated into Russian and published.
Stalin’s interest in diplomacy was legendary. As the foreign policy decisions in the Soviet Union were the function of the Politburo, and as General Secretary, he was closely involved in these decisions.
Books on international relations in Stalin’s library included a Russian translation of the diary of the British diplomat Viscount D’Abernon. With the start of the Second World War, Stalin became intimately and directly involved in the conduct of diplomacy. He became keen to have written a Soviet history of diplomacy. Vladimir Potemkin, a prominent Soviet diplomat in the 1920s and 1030s, was put in charge of the project. He had an hour-long meeting with Stalin in May 1940; the same day the Politburo passed a resolution mandating the production of the history.
When the first volume was published in early 1941, with a print run of half a million copies, Stalin telephoned Potemkin to personally congratulate him and his team:
“It is well-known that Napoleon’s Talleyrand said the speech was given to diplomats so that they could conceal their thoughts. We Russian Bolsheviks see things differently and think that in the diplomatic arena one should be sincere and honest”, he told the visiting Japanese foreign minister in April 1941, with whom he had just agreed a neutrality pact.
He had also read Machiavelli’s The prince and his copy of the book was heavily marked.
Caesars and Tsars
In October 1945 Stalin retreated to his dacha near Sochi on the Black Sea – the first of a series of long holidays he gook in the postwar years. There, he invited two Georgian historians, Nikolai Berdzenishvili and Simon Dzanshiya, to discuss their textbook History of Georgia. When they arrived, Stalin was ready and waiting for them with a copy of their book in his hand. Their conversation lasted an incredible four days, with wide ranging discussions on the origin of Georgia and its connections with the people of the Ancient East, the feudal era in Georgian history; the formation of Georgian society during the struggle against Tsarism; and the 18th century monarchy of Heraclius II whom Stalin considered a modernisers and state-builder.
“Berdzenishvili wrote a near contemporary account of his encounter with the man he considered a genius. He was bowled over by Stalin’s knowledge and erudition, wondering where he found the time to read so much about the Ancient East. He waxed lyrical about Stalin as both a Georgian and a Soviet patriot, and dutifully noted his preferences when it came to historians: ‘he likes Turaev and Pavlov and does not like Struve and Orbeli’” (p.127).
Stalin’s interest in the Roman Empire was not a fleeting whim. He possessed a number of books on the history of Greece and Rome in classical times. He read Herodotus’s Histories. At the 17th Party Congress in January 1934, he made excellent use of Roman history to mock Nazi racism:
“It is well known that ancient Rome looked upon the ancestors of the present-day Germans and French in the same way as the representatives of the ‘superior race’ now look upon the Slavonic tribes. It is well-known that ancient Rome treated them as an ‘inferior race’, as ‘barbarians’ destined to live in eternal subordination to the ‘superior race’ … Ancient Rome had some grounds for this, which cannot be said of the representatives of the ‘superior race’ today … The upshot was that the non-Romans … united against the common enemy, hurled themselves against Rome, and bore her down with a crush … What guarantee is there that the fascist literary politicians in Berlin will be more fortunate than the old and experienced conquerors in Rome?” (p.129).
Included in Stalin’s books on ancient history were three books by Robert Vipper in Russian, namely Ancient Europe and the East; Greece in classical times; and Essays on the history of the Roman Empire. He liked very much the section on Sparta in Vipper’s book on Greece.
“Roman history has been a rich repository of lessons for rulers throughout the ages, but, as a Marxist, Stalin would also have appreciated Vipper’s effort to tell the deeper story. Based on Vipper’s lectures at Moscow University in 1899, the book’s aim was to describe Roman polity and society and explain the class forces that drove the imperial expansion and the political crises that led to the Republic’s downfall. Economic and financial issues are addressed as much as the power plays and political manoeuvres of Rome’s rulers. Combining theme and chronology, events and processes, the general and the particular, was a feature of Vipper’s historical writings, as was his exploration of the material basis of politics and ideologies” (p.130).
At a Politburo meeting attended by a number of historians, discussing the preparation of new textbooks, expressing his dissatisfaction with Soviet school history textbooks, Stalin apparently said:
“They talk about the ‘epoch of feudalism’, the ‘epoch of industrial capitalism’, the ‘epoch of formations’ – all epochs and no facts, no events, no people, no concrete information, no names, no titles, no content … We need textbooks about the ancient world, the middle ages, modern times, the history of the USSR, the history of colonised and enslaved people” (p.131).
TO BE CONTINUED