Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

While Stalin did not have any really major disagreements with Lenin before 1917, there were some important differences of emphasis and perspective.⁴⁹ Stalin spent a lot of time in prison and in internal exile; unlike Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, he was never an émigré revolutionary living abroad. It was Stalin’s presence on the ground in Russia and his work as a grassroots agitator, propagandist and journalist, that made him so valuable to Lenin and lubricated his rise to the top of the Bolshevik party. None was fiercer in their criticism of the Mensheviks, but for practical reasons Stalin often favoured party unity. He disdained internal splits within the Bolshevik faction and his attitude to schisms on matters of theory was much the same. Responding to a philosophical dispute about the nature of Marxist materialism, Stalin described it as ‘a storm in a glass of water’. As Ronald Suny has noted, Stalin ‘worked through these philosophical distinctions . . . and came to his own conclusions. But his paramount concern was that these disputes over materialism and perception not lead to further factional fractures.’ Philosophical discussion was important, wrote Stalin in a 1908 letter from prison, ‘but I think that if our party is not a sect – and it has not been a sect for a long time – it cannot break up into groups according to philosophical (gnoseological) tendencies’.

⁵⁰

Stalin spent several years in exile. Opportunities for political activity were limited, which meant there was plenty of time for reading and study. During his time in Vologda (northern Russia) between 1908 and 1912, the police observed him entering and spending time in local libraries on numerous occasions. Another witness to his activities in Vologda was Polina Onufrieva, the girlfriend of Petr Chizhikov, a political activist who worked closely with Stalin. According to her 1944 testimony, the three of them spent a lot of time together and talked at length about literature and art. Stalin, recalled Polina, was very well informed about both Russian and foreign literature. He became her intellectual mentor and gave her a copy of P. S. Kogan’s Ocherki po Istorii Zapadno-Evropeiskikh Literatur (1909) (Essays on the History of West European Literature), which he inscribed: ‘To intelligent, nasty Polia from oddball Joseph’.⁵¹

In February 1912 Stalin disappeared from his digs in Vologda. A few weeks later his landlady informed the police and enclosed a list of the things he had left behind in his room, which included quite a few books. Among them were books about accountancy, arithmetic, astronomy and hypnotism. The philosophy texts included works by or about Voltaire, Auguste Comte, Karl Kautsky and the Menshevik philosopher Pavel Yushkevich. Literature was represented by a Russian poets’ collection and an unnamed work by Oscar Wilde.⁵²

Stalin’s longest exile was to Turukhansk in Siberia. He was deported there in July 1913 and stayed for nearly four years. A few of Stalin’s letters from this period have survived, including some that he wrote to his great friend Roman Malinovsky. It was a harsh place of confinement and Stalin was often in bad health. As you might expect, he complained about his material conditions to his friends and comrades and pleaded for their financial support. But most of all he badgered them to send him books and journals, especially those necessary to continue his studies of the national question.⁵³

As Stalin’s landlady’s list indicates, he had various interests and read many different kinds of books. But it was Marxist literature that preoccupied him, especially the classic works of Marx and Engels. His first major published work was a series of newspaper articles on Anarchism or Socialism? (1906–7) in which he deployed their views to counter the argument of anarchist philosophers that Marxism was too metaphysical. In Marxism and the National Question (1913), he criticised the so-called Austro-Marxist view that nations were a psychological construct rather than, as he believed, historical entities based on land, language and economic life. Apart from Lenin, his favourite Russian Marxist was Georgy Plekhanov, one of the founders of Russia’s revolutionary socialist movement, who wrote a highly influential historical theory text that Stalin read again in later life – The Monist View of History

.⁵⁴

WAR AND REVOLUTION