Theory Brief #10: Geoffrey Roberts (2022), Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books
Unpacking the puzzle of a murderous dictator who was also a voracious reader.
Geoffrey Roberts (2022), Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books. New Haven: Yale University Press.
One of the many surprising facts about Stalin’s life was his bibliophilia, verging on bibliomania. The man “responsible for about a million purposive killings,” on one historian’s estimate, was a voracious reader, accruing over 25,000 volumes in his personal library. From his austere Kremlin office, where he spent his days crayoning official documents with nyets, question marks, exclamation points, and (chilling) onomatopoietic laughter—with scribbles of “ha-ha-ha” occasionally forewarning an unfortunate author’s imminent departure to the Gulag—and in between running the sprawling Soviet state apparatus, Stalin somehow found the time to accrue and read thousands of books.
That he was not simply a book hoarder but a book reader is attested by the fact that much of his personal library bears the annotations attributed to his own hand—the so-called pometki, or “marks”—from which Roberts attempts to divine Stalin’s deeper truth, who built a system of which we still have no good theory, as the philosopher Slavoj Žižek points out. Stalin the murderer of millions still remains something of a mystery. The promise of his books’ many pometki would seem to be to pull back the curtain on this mystery. The fact that Stalin’s personal library has long since been dispersed, however, complicates Roberts’s forensic investigations and goes some way toward explaining why the author is compelled to fall back on the secondary literature to develop his arguments.
Roberts thinks of an intellectual as “someone for whom ‘ideas are emotionally important,’” and on this criterion Stalin was surely an intellectual. Ideas mattered to him in a way probably unparalleled by any other leader in modern political history. He was a passionate ideas man—passionate unto the extermination of enemies, real or imagined. Books pulled Stalin out of the Orthodox Christianity of his youth—he was enrolled in seminary in his native Georgia before joining the party—and into robber Bolshevism. “Stalin believed in the transformative power of ideas for the simple reason that, if reading had radically changed his life, then so, too, could it change the lives of others.” For one who professed the verities of “dialectical materialism,” Stalin’s idealism seems surprising.
But then again, perhaps not: As Roberts writes, Stalin spent a decade trained by the church, and “there was no book that he studied more intensively than the Bible.” And there was something of the odium theologicum, or theological hatred, about the ferocity with which Stalin was willing to displace and kill (suspected) political enemies—some 700,000 persons alone during the so-called Great Purge, or Bol’shoi terror, of 1936-1938. Ideas and books mattered to history because they mattered to Stalin’s own personal history: Man and universe were one and the same, self-mirroring and co-equal.
The overall impression of Stalin the reader—unfortunately, one might say—is that of a man with an outsize intellect. How else could one man personally hold a state covering one-sixth of Earth’s land surface together from behind his desk? Brutality alone does not cover it. Dictatorships are inefficient because they centralize the coordination function of the state into the hands, and mind, of a single individual, likely enormously taxing on an individual’s brain. But Stalin was no doubt an unusually gifted one-man information-processing unit. There were fantastical contemporary claims about Stalin’s prodigious reading abilities, most of them dismissed by the author of Stalin’s Library. Legends that he read 300 or 500 pages a day are waved aside: He “simply would not have had time for such extensive reading” amid pressing affairs of state.
But that he was capable of Stakhanovite feats of cognitive labor is beyond doubt. The dictatorial model of Stalin’s regime required that the leader possess extraordinary intellectual capabilities—Stalin was the subject who had to know, lest he be dethroned or worse. The U.S. ambassador, Averell Harriman, “recalled that Stalin had an enormous ability to absorb detail.” During wartime negotiations over American military supplies, the U.S. side “usually found him extremely well-informed. He had a masterly knowledge of the sort of equipment that was important to him.” How could he not? Under the Stalinist hermeneutics of absolute suspicion, Stalin’s generalized distrust meant shouldering the burdensome role of information clearing-house himself and in person. He “valued mundane intelligence-gathering activities such as compiling press cuttings from bourgeois newspapers.” Reading was not so much a distraction from matters of state, but a key to unlocking state power: Stalin did a great of deal of “just sitting in my office and reading all day,” Warren Buffett-style.
Roberts writes of Stalin the editor as well. Wielding the Soviet state as his personal instrument meant controlling (and expanding) its burgeoning publishing industry. Five years after Stalin’s death, Soviet authorities claimed to have published some 1.3 million titles since the 1917 revolution “in a total edition of almost 20 billion copies.” Even allowing for the unreliability of official Soviet statistics, the USSR under Stalin’s leadership became a society of avid readers. In this nation of readers, Stalin was not only vozhd, or leader, of the proletariat, but its editor-in-chief as well. Fittingly, “Stalin’s favourite editing weapon was deletion, his prime targets being quotation-mongering and excessive rhetoric. The goal was to streamline and de-clutter text, avoid repetition, and not lose sight of the wood by focusing on the trees.” Admirable goals, perhaps, until one recalls that this love of deletion extended to human affairs, and life, too. A Soviet contemporary quoted by Roberts, remarked that Stalin corrected spelling and grammar mistakes not just in manuscripts but in printed books as well. Was Stalin’s obsessive corrections of grammatical errors a microcosmic form of his “correction” of the country’s population? Stalin’s red pencil cut a word here, corrected a syntax error there—or dispatched an unsuspecting official to Siberia.
In places, Roberts seems methodologically naïve—the notion that “the spontaneous Stalin,” as Roberts phrases it, is on display in the pometki seems dubious: “Only in his personal library, in the way he read, marked and wrote in his books, do we get really close to the spontaneous Stalin – the intellectual immersed in his own thoughts.” But Stalin the infamous paranoiac may well have suspected that these annotations would be read by others. More importantly, was there really an “authentic” core to Stalin’s personality, separable from his public political acts? The “truth” of Stalin resides in his public-facing actions, far more so than in the secret, inward musings he betrayed in the course of his private readings. There is also an at times distasteful idealization of Stalin the reader, as if the author has enjoyed privileged access to the inner workings of the Soviet ruler’s mind:“Stalin rarely read to confirm what he already knew or believed. He read to learn something new.” But all readers read in part to confirm what they always already knew all along.
Stalin’s marginal scribblings could be violent, categorical, mirroring his political absolutism:
Among his choice expressions of disdain were ‘ha ha’, ‘gibberish’, ‘nonsense’, ‘rubbish’, ‘fool’, ‘scumbag’, ‘scoundrel’ and ‘piss off’. But he could also be effusive – ‘yes-yes’, ‘agreed’, ‘good’, ‘spot on’, ‘that’s right’ – and pensive, which he sometimes signalled by writing m-da in the margin, a difficult to translate expression which indicates a combination of puzzlement and pondering what is being said. […] Like Lenin, his most frequent annotation was NB (in Latin script) or its Russian equivalent Vn (vnimanie – attention).
“Attention.” A famous slogan of Lenin’s in the Soviet Union was his (alleged) injunction to “study, study, study” (“uchit’sya, uchit’sya, uchit’sya”), alternately rendered as “learn, learn, learn.” There is, of course, something admirable about this ascetic Bolshevik thirst for knowledge. The British science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard would, much later, write extravagantly of being “starved for information,” and spoke of his huge appetite for data in the pre-digital age. How real was it? To Stalin, it no doubt felt real: One does not accrue 25,000 books and pour one’s life-energy into studying them without an openness to their message. And this is the mystery of Stalin, which Stalin’s Library does not dissolve, but deepen: his seeming intellectual curiosity, his terrifying capacity for violence.
It is incredible that Stalin, a ruler of some 160 million souls, took the time to study obscure tomes of relatively arcane knowledge, from linguistics and classical literature to ethnology. “He ridiculed Piotrovsky’s contribution to a 1951 book on the history of ancient cultures and wrote ‘ha ha’ beside the editor’s claim that Piotrovsky had provided the first scientific account of the rise and fall of Armenia’s Urartu civilisation.” The Bolsheviks were readers and, therefore, it has to be said, quite strange authoritarians. They cared about ideas, even if their theories said they ought not to. And Stalin, specifically, was both a capable and omnivorous reader. That this was no hindrance to his murderous politics tells us something profound: No amount of book learning, high culture, or intellectual sophistication can in itself be sufficient to save a man’s soul. For that, one needs something like a heart as well. A library alone, no matter how large, is not enough.