Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and his Books By GeoffreyRoberts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022, viii + 259 pp. $30.00. ISBN 978‐0‐300‐17904‐0

Abstract

Taking advantage of a fascinating source base, Stalin's Library surveys for the first time in English the dictator’s notes and scribblings that he left on the margins of hundreds of volumes from his private book collection. In this work, Geoffrey Roberts argues persuasively that such notes are critical for any thorough appreciation of Stalin as thinker, insofar as his comments were extemporaneous, unrehearsed, and not subject to subsequent editing or censorship. In many senses the “unvarnished truth,” they shed light on how the general secretary reacted to some of the most important ideas in the books that he read. Building on work of Russian researchers such as Boris Ilizarov, Roberts contends that Stalin’s marginalia reveals him to have been a self-made intellectual of sorts—a voracious reader with the ability to assimilate and retain enormous amounts of information on a huge variety of subjects. Stalin’s Library finally puts to rest Lev Trotsky’s famously dismissive appraisal of Stalin as an intellectual mediocrity. Aside from surveying Stalin’s interaction with his favorite books, Stalin’s Library also examines how Stalin intervened as agent, referee, editor, and publisher in the broader realm of Soviet mass culture. Aside from editing famous political tracts such as the 1938 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, the dictator shaped dozens of other volumes ranging from his own collected works to the belle lettres. Although elements of this latter story have been discussed in a variety of other English-language monographs, never before have they been assembled together for such a sweeping treatment. Stalin’s Library reinforces the impression created elsewhere that Stalin was a polymath of sorts with seemingly limitless time, energy, and concentration. According to Roberts, over the course of a quarter century in power Stalin accumulated a library containing some 25,000 books. After his death, this collection was broken up, with those volumes containing marginalia and underlining being transferred to the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute (IMEL) for safe keeping (some 400 volumes in all). Of the rest, those belonging to other collections were returned (73 long-overdue books were sent back to the Lenin Library alone!) and everything else was divided among the IMEL library and other important research collections. Roberts’s reconstruction of this collection leads him to agree with earlier Russian studies of Stalin’s library by Ilizarov, Roi Medvedev, Dmitrii Volkogonov, and others that Stalin was an avid reader with eclectic tastes. Although his library did not contain some of the volumes that past biographers like Adam Ulam, Robert Tucker, and Edvard Radzinsky have imaged him reading (titles like Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, Sergei Nechaev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary, and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf), it did include a surprising array of banned books by Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinov'ev, and Lev Kamenev. Stalin’s massive literary holdings included the expected classics, such as Saltykov-Shchedrin and Gorky, as well as foreign authors such as Victor Hugo. That said, most titles bearing traces of Stalin’s marginalia were non-fiction, and all were Russian. According to Roberts, the majority of Stalin’s notes in the margins of these books were of a spontaneous, emotional nature, with underlinings and exclamations like “yes-yes” and “NB” alternating with “nonsense,” “hah-hah” and “piss off” (p. 99). Less frequently, Stalin engaged with the material that he read with more lengthy commentary and critique. Unfortunately, the fact that this marginalia is impossible to date with any precision makes such notes difficult to contextualize or connect to specific episodes in their author’s life. More straightforward is Roberts’s analysis of about one hundred typescripts and publisher’s galleys that the general secretary vetted for publication between the 1920s and early 1950s. Referring to Stalin as “The Editor in Chief of the USSR,” Roberts contends that Stalin was surprisingly effective at providing authors with the feedback necessary to bring their work into alignment with the official line. That said, Roberts does not go as far as people like Alexei Yurchak to suggest that Stalin’s editing had assumed a hegemonic quality within Soviet mass culture by the time of his death in 1953. A survey of hundreds of titles rather than a close analysis of a smaller selection of canonical classics, Stalin’s Library has more to say about the breadth of the general secretary’s reading tastes than it does about the depth of his intellectual engagement with specific issues. For more on the latter, readers should consult Erik van Ree’s The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin (2002) and his supplementary articles, as well as a recent volume by the present reviewer and Mikhail Zelenov entitled Stalin’s Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the Short Course on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course (2019).