The Bolsheviks put a huge premium on education and spreading knowledge among the population. By 1928, the number of books published in the USSR surpassed the Tsarist peak of 34,000 titles, which was second to Germany’s. That same year, the Soviet Union printed 270 million copies of books – more than double the rate of Tsarist times.
In addition to his own vast collection, Stalin liked to borrow books from other libraries, both personal and institutional – a favourite source being the Lenin Library.
Death of Stalin’s wife
There is a lot of gossip about Stalin’s family life, but “By all accounts the 1920s were a fairly happy time for the Stalin family”, but the family idyll ended abruptly when Nadezhda (‘Nadya’) Alli-luyeva died in November 1932 – the reason and circumstances of her death remained unclear. However, the stories about her bad relations with Stalin and political differences between them are the work of the fevered imagination of Soviet emigrés and Stalin’s political opponents. Her death was announced in Pravda:
“On the night of 9 November, active and dedicated Party member Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva died”. The dedication that followed was signed by top Soviet leaders and their wives.
“We have lost a dear, beloved Comrade with a beautiful soul. A young Bolshevik with strength and boundlessly dedicated to the Party and the Revolution, is no more … The memory of Nadezhda Sergeyevna, dedicated Bolshevik, close friend and faithful helper to Comrade Stalin, will remain forever dear to us.”
Further tributes came at the time of her burial at Novodevichy cemetery on 12 November, and a few days later Stalin publicly replied to all the sympathy messages he had received.
“With heartfelt gratitude to all organisations, comrades and individuals who have expressed their condolences on the death of my close friend and comrade Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva – Stalin” (pp.76-77).
Stalin’s dacha
A new dacha was constructed for Stalin in 1933-34 – the Kuntsevo mansion only 10 minutes drive from the Kremlin. Hence its colloquial name ‘Blizhnaya” (close by). After Nadya’s death, Stalin’s daily life acquired a new pattern. Hardly ever staying overnight in his Kremlin apartment, he worked in the Kremlin apartment until late and was then driven to Blizhnaya. Not until the early hours of the morning did he go to bed.
Apart from the rooms, the “centrepiece of the [new] dacha, however, was its library, a 30-square metre room with four large bookcases whose shelves were deep enough to take two rows of books. But the bulk of Stalin’s collection … were stored in a separate building nearby”.
Questions of geography
“The dacha’s vestibule displayed three large multicoloured maps: a world map, a map of Europe and one of European Russia. The Yugoslav, Djilas, reported that during his visit to the dacha in June 1944, Stalin stopped before the world map and pointed at the USSR, which was coloured red, exclaiming that the capitalists could ‘never accept the idea that so great a space should be red, never, never!”.
At the 20th Party Congress, where Khrushchev launched his slanderous anti-Stalin campaign, he accused Stalin of planning military operations on a globe. While Stalin did have a big globe in or near his Kremlin office, “…Khrushchev’s calumny has been rejected by members of the Soviet high command who worked with him closely during the war” (pp.77-78).
While Stalin focused on countries and territories bordering the Soviet Union, “his geopolitical outlook was global. As a Bolshevik internationalist he paid attention to revolutionary struggles across the world, Among the remnants of his library are many books on Britain, France, Germany, China and the United States and a good number of texts on Ireland, India, Indochina, Indonesia, Italy, Japan and Mexico (including a translation of John Reed’s book on the Mexican revolution) as well as volumes on imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and oil and world politics” (p.79).
A tireless worker
His dacha was a secure extension of his Kremlin office which served as a place where his children could play, and where he could receive visiting foreign communists; where he could listen to his vast collection of gramophone records; it was a place to relax and do some gardening. “But, above all, the time spent at the dacha was a break from affairs of state and an opportunity to browse his books.
“Never was downtime more necessary than during the war when Stalin worked twelve to fifteen-hour shifts in the Kremlin”. Roberts goes on to quote the following paragraph from Deutscher’s biography of Stalin which gives a graphic picture of the workload that Stalin carried on his shoulders during the long years of the war: “He was in effect his own commander-in-chief, his own minister of defence, his own quartermaster, his own foreign minister, and even his own chef de protocole … Thus he went on, day after day, throughout four years of hostilities – a prodigy of patience, tenacity, and vigilance, almost omnipresent, almost omniscient”.
Roberts adds that: “Research in the Russian archive has amply borne out Deutscher’s graphic picture of Stalin as the ever-busy warlord”. The last word in this sentence is a gratuitous insult mind-lessly hurled at Stalin. There can only be one of two explanations. First that Roberts does not know the difference between a wartime leader and a warlord, which is unlikely considering that he is an erudite person and a serious scholar. Why should this epithet be applied to Stalin and not to Churchill and Roosevelt, we may ask.
The second, and plausible reason, for this, as well as other anti-Stalin slurs sprinkled in the pages of his book, is that he is attempting to please his publishers, as well as academia and the powers that be, and to assure them that, while he may have portrayed Stalin truthfully as an erudite, first class intellectual and theoretician, apart from being the brilliant leader of socialist construction and commander-in-chief of the Red Army and its crowning achievement in the Great Patriotic War resulting in the defeat of Nazi Germany, he, Roberts, is by no means partial to Stalin.
Stalin died at his dacha on 5 March 1953. A decision was taken by the Soviet leadership in September 1953 to establish a Stalin museum at his dacha, but the plan was dropped after Khrush-chev’s anti-Stalin ‘secret’ speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU(B).
But Stalin remained popular in Georgia where in 1957 a museum in his honour was opened in his home town of Gori, which continues to exist to celebrate Georgia’s most glorious son – notwith-standing the downfall of the USSR.
According to biographer Yevgenia Zolotukhina, “… Stalin was an educated person. He got extremely irritated whenever he came across grammar and spelling mistakes, which he would care-fully correct with … a red pencil” (p.82).
He read all the emigré literature that appeared in Russian, written by White Guards, works by the opposition – those whom Stalin regarded as ideological opponents or simply as enemies, and he read them with great attention.
He read fiction and often used characters from these works to mock foreign critics of the Soviet Constitution, for example, who claimed that the Constitution was a fraud. Like the fake ‘Potemkin villages’ built to impress Catherine the Great as she travelled through the Russian countryside:
“In one of his tales the great Russian writer Shchedrin portrays a pig-headed official, very narrowminded and obtuse, but self-confident and zealous to the extreme. After this bureaucrat had established ‘order and tranquillity’ in the region ‘under his charge’, having exterminated thousands of its inhabitants and burned down scores of towns in the process, he looked around him, and on the horizon espied America – a country little known, of course, where, it appears, there are liberties of some sort or other which serve to agitate the people, and where the state is administered in a different way. The bureaucrat espied America and became indignant:
“What country is that, how did it get there, by what right does it exist? (Laughter and applause). Of course, it was discovered accidentally several centuries ago, but couldn’t it be shut up again so that not a ghost of it remains! (General laughter). Thereupon he wrote an order: ‘Shut America up again!’ (General laughter)” (pp.83-84)
TO BE CONTINUED
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