Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and his Books by Geoffrey Roberts (review)

Reviewed by: Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and his Books by Geoffrey Roberts Colin Higgins Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and his Books. By Geoffrey Roberts. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2022. viii+264 pp. £25. ISBN 978–0–300–17904–9. Stalin, like Pushkin, died in his library. During the dictator’s life, he amassed a collection of 25,000 volumes. His staff arranged these books according to a classification Stalin himself devised, and he heavily annotated hundreds of them. In this provocative, revisionist biography focused on Stalin’s collection, Geoffrey Roberts would have us believe that ‘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’ (p. 16). It is tempting to think that this might be true. Stalin wrote no diary, published no memoirs, and his steadfast adherence to Marxist principles made him sceptical of those who evinced interest in his personal history. Stalin’s bibliophilia may feel like a revelation, but it will not surprise readers with even a passing knowledge of Bolshevik intellectual history. Marx wrote about books as tools. Lenin famously remarked that the Russian workers who made up the rank and file of the revolutionary movement had the character and willpower to ‘study, study, study’. When Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin’s brother, was arrested [End Page 421] attempting to assassinate the tsar, his bomb was found hidden inside a copy of L. P. Grinberg’s 1842 Dictionary of Medical Terminology. In its foundations, its practice, and its self-presentation, Bolshevism was a movement based upon avid reading. The Soviet Union had more libraries per capita than any nation in history. Roberts’s information about the 400 books we know Stalin annotated, mostly works of Marxist theory, genuinely contributes to our understanding of why he pursued his policies with such ruthless determination and confidence, particularly during the 1930s. Stalin’s reading shows his absolute dedication to Leninism as a political ideology and revolutionary blueprint. Roberts writes of Stalin that ‘books converted him to socialism’ (p. 8), which may well be true. Though it defies the pop-culture interpretation of Stalin as a tyrannical monster, this would be a typical Bolshevik pathway. Books, after all, effected the intellectual parturition, augmentation, and consummation of an entire generation of Russian revolutionaries. But using these pometki, or markings, to explain how Stalin’s mind worked, what he was like, or to justify an indulgent revision of how we should think about the deaths he caused, feels like a false step. Despite Roberts’s scholarship, and his genuine insights, our knowledge of the contents of Stalin’s library is more limited than we would like; most of the books have been lost, including all his works of literature. Knowledge of whether Stalin marked up his own novels and books of poems could be revelatory (contrast Lenin, who did not read literature). And Roberts engages with the history of, and literature on, marginalia only cursorily. Can we really read somebody’s mind by casting an eye over part of their library? What meaning can we usefully apply to the annotations? Did Stalin read these books more carefully than the others? Did he care about them more? Did these books shape his attitudes, or reflect them? Why do people write inside their books anyway? None of these questions can be answered fully. If Stalin is one of the most complex historical figures of the twentieth century, he is at the same time one of the simplest. Driven by the certainty of an ideology he assumed as a young man, from adherence to which he never shifted, Stalin read in order to gather information, not to have his ideas challenged or to broaden his mind. Roberts tries to use Stalin’s library to humanize him (while clumsily tying Stalin’s marginalia to a humanist tradition). But he fails to refer to the Gulags, the murdered Jewish poets, the suppression of Osip Mandelʹshtam, or of many other major figures in the dramatic, cinematic, musical, and visual arts. Stalin certainly read books. He was a man of his...