A compelling intellectual biography of Stalin told through his personal library In this engaging life of the twentieth century's most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, this book explores all aspects of Stalin's tumultuous life and politics. Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Based on his wide-ranging research in Russian archives, Roberts tells the story of the creation, fragmentation, and resurrection of Stalin's personal library. As a true believer in communist ideology, Stalin was a fanatical idealist who hated his enemies—the bourgeoisie, kulaks, capitalists, imperialists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, traitors—but detested their ideas even more.
STALIN’S LIBRARY
Also by Geoffrey Roberts
Copyright © 2022 Geoffrey Roberts
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With thanks to Moscow friends
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Kremlin Scholar
1. Bloody Tyrant and Bookworm
2. The Search for the Stalin Biographers’ Stone
3. Reading, Writing and Revolution
4. The Life and Fate of a Dictator’s Library
5. Bah Humbug! Stalin’s
6. Reverse Engineering: Stalin and Soviet Literature
7. Editor-in-Chief of the USSR
Conclusion: The Dictator Who Loved Books
PLATES
1. Stalin working in his Kremlin office, 1938.
2. Shushanika Manuchar’yants, 1960s.
3. Nadezhda Alliluyeva, 1917.
4. Stalin with his two youngest children, Vasily and Svetlana, 1935.
5. Stalin’s handwritten library classification scheme, May 1925. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.
6. Title page of Nikolai Bukharin’s
7. Page from Lenin’s
8. Page from Karl Kautsky’s
9. Front cover of
10. Front cover of Andrei Shestakov’s
11. Stalin’s doodles on the back cover of Alexei Tolstoy’s
12. Page from an article on contemporary military art. Stalin Digital Archive, Yale University Press.
13. Pages from a draft of the
14. Page from a report on the discussion of the
INTRODUCTION
The Kremlin Scholar
