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Slàinte mhath!

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Treat Your (S)helf: Stalin’s Library: A dictator and his Books by Geoffrey Roberts (2022)

Stalin read books in diverse ways - selectively or comprehensively, cursorily or with avid attention. Some he read cover to cover, others he merely skimmed. Sometimes he would begin reading a book, lose interest after a few pages, and jump from the introduction to the conclusion. Some books he read in a single sitting, others he dipped in and out of.

- Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and his Books (2022)

For decades after his death in 1953, the fragmentary sources available to scholars on Joseph Stalin’s life made his personality something of an enigma. Was he simply the monstrous tyrant depicted by Nikita Khrushchev in his secret speech to the Soviet communist party’s 20th congress in 1956? Was he the intellectual mediocrity portrayed in Leon Trotsky’s biography Stalin, published posthumously after the Soviet dictator arranged his rival’s assassination in Mexico in 1940?

 An opportunity to gain a more rounded picture of Stalin arrived from the late 1980s onwards, when previously sealed archives began to be opened as a result of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among other discoveries, it emerged that Stalin had owned a vast library of 25,000 books, periodicals and pamphlets, including 400 or so texts that he personally marked and annotated. This collection is the subject of Geoffrey Roberts’s Stalin’s Library, a truly fascinating study that leaves no doubt that Stalin took ideas as seriously as political power itself.

For sure, Stalin was “a very dogmatic Marxist” and “a fanatic who had no secret doubts”, writes Roberts, emeritus professor of history at University College Cork and a specialist on Soviet foreign and military policy. Yet Stalin also had a “fanatical, life-long commitment to reading and self-improvement”. As Donald Rayfield wrote in his 2005 book Stalin and His Hangmen, the most common mistake made by the dictator’s opponents was to underestimate how widely read he was.

In his own book, Geoffrey Roberts finds no smoking guns, but suggests: “By following the way Stalin read books, we can glimpse the world through his eyes. We may not get to peer into his soul, but we do get to wear his spectacles.”

In the pantheon of dictators Joseph Stalin’s reputation for brutality is rivalled only by that of Hitler, so it’s surprising to learn and even alarming to know that Josef Stalin was a voracious reader, who set himself a daily quota of between 300 and 500 pages. When he died of a stroke in his library in 1953, the desk and tables that surrounded him were piled high with books, many of them heavily marked with his handwriting in the margins.

As he read, he made notes in red, blue and green pencils, underlining sections that interested him or numbering points that he felt were important. Sometimes he was effusive, noting: “yes-yes”, “agreed”, ‘“good”, “spot on”, “that’s right”. Sometimes he expressed disdain, scribbling: “ha ha”, “gibberish”, ‘“nonsense”, “rubbish”, “scumbag”, “scoundrels” and “piss off”. He became extremely irritated whenever he came across grammatical or spelling mistakes, and would correct errors with his red pencil.

Despite amassing a personal library estimated at about 25,000 books, he also read widely from the collections of friends. The Soviet poet Demyan Bedny complained that Stalin left greasy fingermarks on the books he borrowed.

Stalin kept no diary and wrote no memoirs, so these scribblings in the margins become invested with greater significance than perhaps they deserve. It would be tempting to read too much into Stalin’s decision to underline a line attributed to Genghis Khan, “The death of the defeated is necessary for the peace of mind of the victors”, or assuming that the doodled word “Teacher” on the cover of a play about Ivan the Terrible means that Stalin viewed this tyrant as a role model.

The texts he marked were nearly all nonfiction. Pometki, the Russian word for such markings, encompasses both the verbal and nonverbal signs that appear on the pages. The closest English word is marginalia, but Stalin’s marks are to be found between the lines and on the front, inside, and back covers as well as in the margins. Marginalia also implies annotation - the use of words - but 80 percent of Stalin’s surviving pometki consist of what as Roberts cites British writer H.J. Jackson called “signs of attention.”

The conventional image portrays Stalin as nothing more than a bloody tyrant, a machine politician, a heartless bureaucrat and an ideological fanatic. Yet Stalin was also an intellectual who believed in the transformative power of ideas and a bookworm who amassed a significant personal library.

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