Stalin remains a controversial figure in modern history. His reign of terror in the 1930s saw tens of thousands of innocent men and women marched off to their death. The forced collectivization following the failure of the New Economic Policy saw at least 10 million peasants die of starvation and the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union was achieved at a huge human cost. The German attack on Soviet Union after the collapse of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact consumed another 25 to 30 million lives. When we face such statistics we can only remember what Stalin once said: The death of an individual is a tragedy but the death of millions is a statistic. Cynical though this statement is, it contains the sad truth.
What kind of a man was Stalin. This book, by Geoffrey Roberts published by the Yale University Press is based on an analysis of the books in Stalin's Library. The Stalin Digital Archive created by Yale University contains a complete catalogue of his Collection of nearly 25,000 books. These books were distributed over three buildings : the dacha where he lived, the Kremlin Office where he worked and an annexe which he used for his official entertainment and meeting party colleagues. After his death in 1953, when Soviet Union lurched suddenly towards destalinization his library was dismantled and books distributed to a number of different libraries. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 provided the opportunity for scholars to reexamine the legacy of Stalin. Yale University was first to grab the opportunity and a number of documents, papers, letters and books of the Russian statesman were regathered collated and catalogued. The book under review is a product of that endeavour.
Stalin was a well educated and well read man. This came as a shock to me even though I have read the Biography of Stalin by Issac Deutcher. As a Marxist, he believed that books were the tools of the mind and his Library contained a rich collection of classics of European Literature. Apart from Georgian and Russian, Stalin could read French but was not adept at English or German. It seems that he made an attempt to learn English as he told H G Wells when he met him before the War. Stalin covered the margins of the books he read with notations--pometki--and these marginal notations are used by the author to probe and explore the mind of Stalin as a reader, thinker and ideologue.
Geoffrey Robert has written an interesting book but a large chunk of the space is taken up by regurgitating the history and life story of Stalin which is by now widely known. He does take time out to dispel some of the myths that have grown around Stalin. He was not an agent of the Tsarist secret police, Okhrana. And unlike the picture of a dour blood thirsty tyrant, Stalin seems to have been intellectually engaged and as the author points out, did not take his own personality cult seriously as he was too intelligent and self aware go be taken in by panegyrics of his sycophants.
A book of this sort raises an obvious question. Is Stalin being normalized and humanized by such efforts. As a human being Stalin was cold and brutal as his own daughter Svetlana recalled in her Autobiography. When his eldest son was captured by the Germans during World War II, Stalin did not treat his daughter in law and granddaughter any different. They were imprisoned as were other families of Soviet PoWs in German camps. This son was shot by the Germans and only after that was his daughter in law released from prison. Stalin had read the works of Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin very carefully and the copies of their work were preserved carefully in his collection.
