Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

A 1921 pamphlet on Trotsky by an M. Smolensky, published in Berlin, was part of a series designed to explain Bolshevik ideas to the workers of the world. According to its author, ‘Trotsky was, perhaps, both the most brilliant and the most paradoxical figure in the Bolshevik leadership.’ Stalin did not mark that particular comment but he did underline the author’s next observation – that while Lenin was a socialist ‘bible scholar’ devoted to the sacred texts of Marxism, Trotsky saw it as a method of analysis: ‘if Lenin’s Marxism was dogmatically orthodox, Trotsky’s was methodological’. There followed a series of faint ticks in the margin by Stalin which seemingly expressed approval of a variety of Trotsky’s quoted views. He also margin-lined Trotsky’s contention that there were currently two socialist ideologies in contention with each other – that of the Second (socialist) International and that of the Third (communist) International.³⁶

Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (1920) was a reply to a publication of the same name by Karl Kautsky, the ‘renegade’ the Bolsheviks had once much admired, not least for his staunch defence of revolutionary Marxism against the ‘revisionism’ of Eduard Bernstein, who favoured a more moderate and reformist socialist movement. In his pamphlet, Kautsky criticised the violence and dictatorial methods that the Bolsheviks used to gain and hold power, particularly during the ongoing Russian Civil War. In his reply to Kautsky, Trotsky laid out in stark terms the rationale for the Bolsheviks’ violent seizure of power, their subsequent suppression of Russian constitutional democracy, and their use of ‘Red Terror’ in the civil war. Stalin needed no lessons in realpolitik from Machiavelli, or even Lenin, when he had Trotsky’s text to hand.

We can be fairly sure that Stalin read Trotsky’s book quite close to the time of its publication. The Bolsheviks, including Lenin, were keen to refute Kautsky’s critique, not least because it had undermined their standing in the international socialist movement.

Stalin’s heavily underlined copy of the book was peppered throughout by expressions of approval such as NB and tak (in this context, yes).

³⁷ ‘The problem’, wrote Trotsky, ‘is to make a civil war a short one; and this is attained only by resoluteness in action. But it is just against revolutionary resoluteness that Kautsky’s whole book is directed.’ NB, wrote Stalin in the margin. He made the same annotation at the head of Chapter Two on the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ and wrote out Trotsky’s statement in the first paragraph that ‘the political autocracy of the proletariat is the “sole form” in which it can realise its control of the state’. In the same chapter, Stalin underlined, double margin-lined and wrote NB alongside Trotsky’s barb that ‘the man who repudiates terrorism in principle i.e. repudiates measures of suppression and intimidation towards determined and armed counter-revolution, must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The man who repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the socialist revolution and digs the grave of socialism.’

Trotsky next mounted a prolonged defence of the argument that the interests of socialist revolution trumped the democratic process because the latter was merely a façade behind which the bourgeoisie hid its power. Stalin agreed wholeheartedly and was particularly taken by Trotsky’s quotation of Paul Lafargue’s view that parliamentary democracy constituted little more than an illusion of popular self-government. ‘When the proletariat of Europe and America seizes the State, it will have to organise a revolutionary government and govern society as a dictatorship, until the bourgeoisie has disappeared as a class’ is among the Lafargue quotes underlined by Stalin.

Trotsky justified the Bolsheviks’ dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, saying they signed the decree authorising elections to that body, expecting it to vote to dissolve itself in favour of the more representative Soviets. But ‘the Constituent Assembly placed itself across the path of the revolutionary movement, and was swept aside’ (underlined by Stalin).

Stalin liked to number points made by authors and did this to Trotsky’s list of three previous revolutions that had experienced violence, terror and civil war – the sixteenth-century religious Reformation that split the Catholic Church, the English revolutions of the seventeenth century and the French Revolution in the eighteenth century. Trotsky concluded from his historical analysis that ‘the degree of ferocity of the struggle depends on a series of internal and international circumstances. The more ferocious and dangerous is the resistance of the class enemy who has been overthrown, the more inevitably does the system of repression take the form of a system of terror.’ The underlining of the last subclause is Stalin’s.