Stalin’s Library, by Geoffrey Roberts, Yale University Press, 259 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0300179040
Full biographies and biographical papers on Stalin have been produced on an almost industrial scale in many languages and in many countries, as well as at many periods during his life and after his death. There have, therefore, been almost as many Stalins as there have been biographies.
In Stalin’s Library, Geoffrey Roberts, emeritus professor of history at University College Cork, has brought readers yet another Stalin and has done so ingeniously through a meticulous research of the dictator’s library of more than 25,000 books, maps and documents. Through these, Stalin has spoken to Roberts from beyond the grave, particularly through his pometki, the annotations he inserted in the margins of books he read. As Roberts puts it: “We may not get to peer into his soul, but we do get to wear his spectacles.”
Up to now we have known the Stalin of the Second World War, where he was “Uncle Joe”, a friend in the struggle against Hitler and the Nazis. He was the man to whom Churchill presented a jewelled sword to commemorate the victory at Stalingrad that turned the Wehrmacht back towards home and led finally to Red Army soldiers hoisting the flag of the Soviet Union over the Reichstag in Berlin.
When the war ended, Uncle Joe became the stage-hand who rolled the iron curtain down on eastern and central Europe, slicing Germany and its capital in two. At the same time he was idolised in the USSR and by Communists elsewhere as the leader who had saved the Soviet Union from oblivion. When he died in 1953 there was universal grief. Andrei Sakharov, who later become Russia’s leading dissident and won the Nobel Peace Prize, was a thirty-one-year-old nuclear scientist at the time and wrote: “I am immensely impressed by the death of a great man. I keep thinking of his humanity.” He was, in fact, thinking of the Stalin that was portrayed to citizens through the internal Soviet propaganda system. That was the only information available about “the great man” at the time.
Another Nobel Prize winner, the poet and literature laureate Joseph Brodsky, writing in the 1970s, remembered being told of Stalin’s death as a schoolboy: “All of us were herded to the school hall and told to kneel and the secretary of the Party organisation, a manly woman with a row of medals on her chest, screamed from the stage as she wrung her hands – ‘Cry children, cry. Stalin has died’ ‑ she started wailing first. There was nothing else to do so we started sniffling and then literally howling.” The youngsters in Brodsky’s school were not alone. Crowds surged out of workplaces and apartment blocks throughout the USSR in genuine tears at the death of the Stalin they knew from what they had been told day in and day out throughout their lives.
In 1956, three years after his death, another Stalin emerged. His image as a genius, a hero and a man of steel, was systematically demolished by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, in what paradoxically became known as the “secret speech” but which in fact was widely published. Communist parties throughout the world instantly lost members. Riots had to be put down in Stalin’s native Georgia, where his status was closer to a that of a god than a genius.
After the Soviet Union came to an end in 1991 historians gained access to Soviet archives and were able to research even more reliable sources of information, but their interpretations were sometimes skewed by their own backgrounds and by how they wanted Stalin to appear. Simon Sebag Monte
