Stalin’s Library – A Dictator and His Books
By Geoffrey Roberts
Yale University Press £25

IT IS said, with insight, that you can obtain a true understanding of an individual from the books they read. Here Roberts has examined what remains of Stalin’s library to attempt just that.

Over the decades Stalin has been heaped with hyperbolic obloquies, from monster, tyrant, psychopath to mass murderer. There is, of course, no getting around the fact that during Stalin’s leadership of the Soviet Union many thousands were imprisoned and executed, many of them his loyal supporters.

He presided over a ruthless, authoritarian form of top-down socialism. On the other hand, it has to be recognised that he dragged an impoverished, ignorant and illiterate empire, comprising ethnically diverse peoples and nationalities, into the 20th century.

He established an educational system the envy of the wider world, eradicated illiteracy, industrialised the country and made it one of the most powerful globally. In 1931 Stalin gave a speech in which he emphasised that Russia had been beaten time and time again by invaders because it was a backward country, going on to say that “we have fallen behind the advanced countries by 50-100 years. We must close that gap in 10 years. Either we do this or we will be crushed.” This goes someway in explaining his ruthless pursuit of modernisation.

While it is easy to blame individuals for what happens in history, they rarely act alone but invariably with others and in a specific context. Stalin was no exception and also did not act alone but was supported by the apparatus of the Soviet Communist Party, an all-powerful secret service as well as by communist parties internationally.

The young Soviet Union was attacked and invaded by many countries in an attempt to strangle the revolution in its cradle. It faced continuous aggression, sabotage and vilification. Stalin may have been mistrustful and paranoid, but he had good reason to be.
While many deaths can, of course, be attributed to his regime, the numbers are often wildly exaggerated and conflated with the many deaths that came about as a result of famine and the ravages of war, not least those wreaked by the Nazis.

It may be that comparisons of acts of inhumanity are meaningless but if we do, for a moment, place Stalin’s misdeeds on the scales of history and weigh them against those of imperialism, we obtain a more balanced picture.

Hundreds of thousands were killed during the slave trade, many Britons were driven off their land to become wage slaves in factories; the numerous brutalities and massacres carried out throughout the British empire, the use of poison gas by Churchill in 1920 to exterminate rebellious Iraqi civilians, the use of Agent Orange by the US in Vietnam, the collusion between the US and Britain in the murder of up to two million Indonesian progressives and communists in 1965-6, not to mention more recent mass killings and atrocities.

Such crimes also weigh heavily in the scales but none of these events is considered comparable with Stalin’s crimes. Why not?
Everything that Stalin did, he carried it out with the sole aim of protecting the Soviet Union as, in his view, the centre of world revolution.

Roberts sets out to give a more objective picture of Stalin as an individual on the basis of his reading, but also on the established facts of his life. He explains how, out of the chaos of the civil war, the wars of intervention and antagonism of the outside world, decision-making had to be rapid and decisive and how this led inexorably to a de facto dictatorship of the party, something that was not planned but became almost inevitable.

Stalin’s library was enormous. Roberts estimates it to have held around 25,000 volumes on a wide range of subjects, from military history, psychiatry and architecture to sociology, industry and politics. He was a voracious reader and made numerous notes in many of the books he read. Surprisingly, he also appears to have been an avid student of Trotsky’s writings, reading and re-reading his works, alongside those of Lenin and other leading Marxists.

Roberts demonstrates that labelling Stalin simplistically as a tyrant or monster fails to comprehend a complex individual — an intellectual, a man dedicated to a cause. Stalin was prepared to use any means to achieve that goal. While his historical role will undoubtedly remain controversial, he cannot be placed fatuously alongside Hitler simply as a fanatical mass murderer.

Roberts does not confine himself to the significance of Stalin’s library but covers the wider context with interesting and relevant events and anecdotes. He provides useful insights into Stalin’s methods of working and of his literary inspiration. He remains sceptical of the numerous conspiracy theories and of allegations made about Stalin without firm evidence.

Stalin did not read only those works he agreed with but also works by his opponents and Russian emigre writers. He involved himself in all aspects of Soviet life, often making detailed interventions, whether on discussing the teaching of languages in schools, military tactics or reviewing film and theatrical scripts.

Roberts provides an excellent summary of the evolution of the Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Stalin and the impact of Trotsky. He also covers key disputes and differences in the central committee. A number of chapters are devoted to specific books that Stalin read and made notes on and which clearly had a particular relevance for him, whether biographies of Bismarck or Machiavelli’s The Prince.

Whatever one may think of Stalin’s methodology and ruthlessness, it is hard to imagine the Soviet Union being able to survive many years beyond 1917 with any other leader. He was a capable and efficient administrator, essential qualities in a leader at that time.

A balanced and informative book, in which Roberts punctures many myths about Stalin. A must read for anyone interested in an accurate, non-partisan history of Stalin’s Soviet Union and the Stalin phenomenon.