Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Trotsky, for all his undoubted brilliance as a Marxist intellectual and orator, was an easy target for Stalin. He had a history of criticising Lenin and the Bolsheviks and only joined up with the group in summer 1917. Trotsky tried to airbrush these criticisms but Stalin insisted on reminding the party of his past errors.

He was particularly fond of quoting Trotsky’s 1915 attack on Lenin’s view that proletarian revolution and socialism were possible in a single country, even in culturally backward and economically underdeveloped peasant Russia. At stake was the belief that it would be possible to build socialism in Soviet Russia, Trotsky’s view being that the Russian Revolution needed successful revolutions in more advanced countries if it was not going to be crushed by imperialism and capitalism. Stalin accepted the socialist revolution in Russia would not be ‘finally’ victorious until there was a world revolution, but also believed that Soviet socialism would survive and thrive on its own. The great majority of the Bolshevik party agreed with Stalin, preferring his doctrine of socialism in one country to Trotsky’s advocacy of world revolution as the primary goal.

Like all the leading Bolsheviks, Stalin quoted Lenin selectively to suit his argument. In 1915, for example, Lenin was speculating on the possibility of an advanced

country adopting socialism without the support of revolutions in other countries. But Lenin’s views on this matter did evolve post-1917 in response to the reality of a revolution in ‘backward’ Russia that had brought the Bolsheviks to power.³⁰ For Stalin and his supporters within the party, the fact of their successful revolution was all-important, and they did not take kindly to Trotsky’s suggestion in Tasks in the East (1924) that the centre of world revolution could shift to Asia in the absence of European revolutions: ‘Fool!’ wrote Stalin in the margin. ‘With the existence of the Soviet Union the centre cannot be in the East.’³¹

Another favourite target of Stalin’s was The Lessons of October, in which Trotsky dredged up the Kamenev–Zinoviev conflicts with Lenin in 1917. The party was split in 1917, argued Trotsky, and the same rightist Old Bolsheviks were holding it back after the revolution. Only Lenin’s incessant pressure for an insurrection to seize power had saved the day.³²

Kamenev and Zinoviev were old friends and comrades of Stalin’s and his allies in the struggle against Trotsky, so he rose to their defence, even though he personally was not targeted in The Lessons of October

. In a 1924 speech on ‘Trotskyism or Leninism?’ he accepted there were disagreements in the party in 1917 and admitted that Lenin had correctly steered the Bolsheviks towards a more radical policy of opposing and then overthrowing the Provisional Government. But he denied the party was split and pointed out that when the central committee endorsed Lenin’s proposal for an insurrection it established a political oversight group that included Kamenev and Zinoviev, even though they had voted against the proposed putsch. Stalin also decried what he called the ‘legend’ of Trotsky’s special role in 1917:

I am far from denying Trotsky’s undoubtedly important role in the uprising. I must say, however, that Trotsky did not play any special role. . . . Trotsky did, indeed, fight well in October; but Trotsky was not the only one . . . when the enemy is isolated and uprising is growing, it is not difficult to fight well. At such moments even backward people become heroes.³³

The Lessons of October was not Trotsky’s first attempt to write the history of the Russian Revolution. During the 1918 Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations he spent time drafting a short book called Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsiya

, published later that year and then translated into many languages, appearing in English as History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk.³⁴ It was a pro-Bolshevik propaganda effort by Trotsky so he played down differences within the party. This account of the revolution was much to Stalin’s liking. He read and marked the text in detail and with evident satisfaction at its contents. He was particularly interested in Trotsky’s treatment of the ‘July Days’, when the Bolsheviks had drawn back from a premature uprising – an episode that had embedded itself in the party’s historical memory as an object lesson that sometimes political retreats were necessary in order to live and fight another day.³⁵ And, as we have already seen, in his November 1918 Pravda article on the first anniversary of the revolution, Stalin was fulsome in his praise of Trotsky’s role in organising the insurrection.