Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books

by Geoffrey Roberts

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.

Genres: History, Biography, Books About Books, Russia, Nonfiction, Politics, Literature

288 pages, Paperback

First published February 8, 2022

About the author

Geoffrey Roberts was born in Deptford, south London in 1952. A pupil of Addey and Stanhope Grammar School, he left aged 16 and started his working life as a clerk with the Greater London Council. In the 1970s, he was an International Relations undergraduate at North Staffordshire Polytechnic and postgraduate research student at the London School of Economics. In the 1980s, he worked in the Education Department of NALGO, the public sector trade union. He returned to academic life in the 1990s following the publication of his acclaimed first book The Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact with Hitler, 1989.

Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and teaches History and International Relations at University College Cork, Ireland. He has won many academic awards and prizes, including a Fulbright Scholarship to Harvard University and a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship. He is a regular commentator on history and current affairs for British and Irish newspapers and a contributor to the History News Service, which syndicates articles to American media outlets. He has many radio and TV appearances to his credit and has acted as an historical consultant for documentary series such as Simon Berthon's highly praised Warlords, broadcast in 2005.

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF @ 30% (the annex starts at 78%). This book hardly deals with Stalin's library; mostly, it's a shaky biography / history book, interspersed with mentions that Stalin was a voracious reader who accumulated a large library. I expected this to be an investigation into the question how specific texts were read and interpreted by Stalin, as he was keen on annotating his volumes, and how his reading shaped his politics and policies and thus: world history. But no: The book meanders and lacks focus and depth.

The underlying concept is so good, though!

[Mircea Petcu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stalin a citit mult. A avut și-o bibliotecă pe măsură. Se estimează că, la momentul morții, biblioteca lui Stalin cuprindea peste 25 000 de volume. Circa jumătate erau cărți de literatură rusă și universală. La categoria non-ficțiune predominau cărțile de filosofie marxistă și istorie. În mod curios, biblioteca cuprindea și cărțile rivalilor, cum ar fi cele ale lui Troțki, Buharin, Kautsky (menșevic) sau Denikin (general al Armatei Albe). Pe cele din urmă Stalin le adnota copios.

Nu doar Stalin a avut o bibliotecă impresionantă. Kliment Voroșilov, comisarul apărării, a strâns peste 20 000 de cărți, iar Molotov peste 10 000.

Cititul avea un rol important în ideologia comunistă. Liderii sovietici erau de părere ca prin educarea maselor se va ajunge mai ușor la comunism, acea utopie fără clase și fără stat. Doar în Moscova existau peste o mie de biblioteci publice.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Old Bolsheviks and their contemporaries in other revolutionary groups before the October Revolution all felt the need to have credibility as intellectuals and theoreticians, and though Stalin was a notoriously practical man who wouldn't let a little thing like a few million lives stand in the way of industrializing his country and building socialism, he was no exception. He read voraciously and like his mentor, Lenin, compulsively annotated books as he read them. I knew all of this so I thought that looking at him through the lens of his library would open up new insights into a man who was obviously smart and calculating but who calculated his way into killing so many in cold blood. Normally you think that reading broadens the mind and helps to create empathy and compassion for others, but it evidently didn't work that way for Iosif Vissarionovich.

The information to be gotten from his library was unfortunately thinner than I would have wished, in large part because the bulk of his library has been broken up and distributed elsewhere with no surviving catalog, and there turns out to be not enough of a through line in his surviving annotations to tell a complete story and make a book. So Mr. Roberts had to fill out the book with more discussion of things that Stalin wrote and edited and his relationships with writers and with other people whose books he collected. It was reasonably interesting, but ended up going down a lot of the same roads as other books that I have read on Stalin.

I was interested in Mr. Roberts' take on the famous Short Course on the History of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks), which I read recently. Mr. Roberts found it to be horribly biased and untruthful. Of course the skewering of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin in the book is pure fantasy, but I found most of the parts about the founding of the party, Lenin's writings and the October Revolution to be more or less accurate. And I enjoyed the explanation of dialectical materialism, which I had never understood before reading that book. According to Mr. Roberts, that part was written by Stalin himself.

[Phillip Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joseph Stalin is known as the Soviet leader that was responsible for purges, gulags, collectivationization of agriculture, and being a totalitarian. What was not known was that he was an avid reader with a huge collection of books on Marxism, history, military strategy. and classic literature. Stalin saw writers as engineers of the soul who could create a socialist mentality in the masses and this was the reason he carefully oversaw everything that was for mass consumption. Geoffrey Roberts does not depict Stalin as a psychopath but as a man who thought his Marxist-Leninist goals as being more important than anything else and himself as the sole authority on them. I am not a fan of this dictator that persecuted scientists for not following the accepted Marxist Lysenko pseudoscience but he was a well read leader. Stalin was totalitarian about everything as evidenced by all the books and films that could not be seen unless he approved them. Soviet media was a huge propaganda machine in the service of the State run by a leader who knew the power of words.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am very uncertain how to rate this book, three stars for me is a compromise, it is signaling reservations, but it is interesting and informative. The problem is that it isn't really about Stalin's books. It is a sort of biography/examination of Stalin and his beliefs and actions through his library, sort of, because there is a lot more packed into its 200 pages. For example he provides a commentary on various of the recent full scale Stalin biographies, or over certain issues in his life. This is interesting because, in that now vanished era immediately post Glasnot in the 1980s and 90s a lot of new information came out of the Soviet/Russian archives which are no longer so easily accessed (and ceased to be long before the invasion of Ukraine).

The problem is that while he may be correct to say that Simon Sebag Montefiore in his 'Young Stalin' was wrong to place Stalin in prominent role in the infamous 1907 Tiblisi coach robbery, he doesn't really provide a cogent argument about why Montefiore is wrong. His named source is an interview Stalin conducted in the German writer Emil Ludwig in the 1930s but that only opens up the need to explain who Ludwig was (which he doesn't do, Ludwig was a internationally known and popular writer of 'psychological biographies' which were best sellers. Ludwig was as influential in his time as the author John Gunther but like him is, almost, totally forgotten today) and really can we trust what Stalin, or any leader, says in an interview specifically for foreign consumption?

There are good and interesting things in the book, particularly the examples of Stalin's editing and changes to books like 'History of the USSR: A Short Course' and his other markings and underlinnings in various books but extrapolate from them to explain, or attempt to explain, the Great Terror, etc. is stretching things. But that doesn't mean that seeing Stalin through his books and marginalia, isn't interesting. Unlike Hitler we know that Stalin was a reader and thinker, even if also the perpetrator of horrors. Professor Roberts attempts to provide an 'explanation' from books to deeds is not sufficiently deep or comprehensive to be convincing.

But it is interesting, and if you have read other books on Stalin this is worth reading but again this throws up problems. A great deal of the book is written for those who know little or nothing about Stalin or his times. If you already have read authors like Kotkin or Montefiore, Suny, or many others there will be times this book will frustrate you, as it did me, but there are insights that will be welcome.

A bit of curate's egg of a book. I can't praise it but neither can I dismiss it.

[KamRun · Rating 3 out of 5]

تا ۶ روز آینده به کامپیوتر دسترسی ندارم و نمی‌تونم ریویویی برای کتاب بنویسم

[Kid Ferrous · Rating 4 out of 5]

A voracious reader, Josef Stalin had his own library of some 25,000 books, for which he employed the services of a librarian. He developed his own classification system and ex-libris stamp, and was fond of annotating and marking the books he read. He was a great respecter of books, if not of the people who wrote them. Whilst Stalin despised his political opponents, he paid close attention to their writings.
A surprising portrait of the infamous Russian leader emerges from the scholarly pages of “Stalin’s Library” by Geoffrey Roberts - that of an intellectual and deep thinking bookworm and autodidact who revered books, even berating his own children when they treated them poorly. Roberts discovers a tantalising (though not a complete) insight into the real Stalin by analysing the way he read his books and the marks he made in them. It is also an attempt to provide a verifiable biography of Stalin, debunking many “conspiracy theories” and incorrect yet widely believed facts about him.
Stalin was, conversely, shy of allowing books to be written about himself, vetoing many biographies and pamphlets, and those that were published were vigorously marked up if he disagreed with them. However, Stalin was more enthusiastic about the creation of his collected writings, a popular publication running to thirteen volumes until they were halted by Khrushchev. There is a revealing chapter on these books, their legacy and the unpublished final volumes, and very interesting details of the specific genres of books that Stalin favourited and the historical attempts to study his library. The longest chapter in the book is devoted to an rich and illuminating study of Stalin’s “potemki”, the marks, annotations and sometimes angry crossings-out that he added to many of the books he read.
Geoffrey Roberts has written a very readable and intelligent book; ostensibly pro-Stalin only in regard to establishing a factual biographical life of the man, and thoroughly researched. While there is much about Stalin’s library itself and its legacy and how his reading influenced him as a political leader, the book is also a history of Stalin’s rise to power and beyond. While this does create something of an identity crisis at times, this book is excellent throughout and is highly recommend to anyone searching for a slightly different take on Stalin’s life and times.

[Dorin · Rating 1 out of 5]

După cartea asta nu rămâi cu nimic. Stalin probabil a citit, dar putea și să nu citească. În unele cărți a mai însemnat lucruri, sau poate nu el a făcut-o, iar în altele nu a însemnat nimic. Poate îi plăcea ceva, dar putea să-i placă și altceva. Cam așa merge toată cartea. Foarte multe pasaje/pagini nu spun nimic. Să exemplific:

Stalin își citea cărțile în diverse moduri, fie selectiv sau cuprinzător, fie superficial sau cu o atenție avidă. Pe unele le citea din scoarță în scoarță, în timp ce pe altele doar le răsfoia. Uneori începea să citească o carte, își pierdea interesul după câteva pagini și trecea de la introducere la concluzie. Pe unele le citea pe nerăsuflate, iar pe altele le parcurgea din când în când, în funcție de timpul avut la dispoziție și de interes.

Ce aflăm din acest paragraf? Absolut nimic. Toată cartea e plină de poate, probabil, presupunem etc.

Cert e că Stalin a avut o bibliotecă. Din această bibliotecă s-au păstrat puține cărți despre care să afirmăm cu siguranță că au fost ale lui. Se mai știe că Stalin citea cu creionul/pixul în mână și mai făcea unele însemnări – pometki. Să nu se creadă că erau comentarii care să merite/necesite analize aprofundate. Însemnările astea, pe care mizează autorul, sunt de cele mai multe ori niște sublinieri banale, ca atunci când citești un suport de curs și îți pare că ceva e important și ți-ar putea folosi ulterior, sau cuvinte scurte de aprobare sau dezaprobare: Da, Nu, Aha, HaHa, Tak Tak etc.

Merită să citești o carte despre aceste lucruri? NU! Mai ales că, de fapt, cartea, în cea mai mare parte, nu e despre asta. E despre cum Stalin edita texte, comanda cărți, lucrări, manuale și cum își impunea viziunea asupra lor. Putea s-o facă fie subtil, ca și cum ar fi ideea altora, fie tăia și rescria el paragrafe întregi. (See what I did there?) Ideea e că nimic important nu se publica fără cunoștința și acordul lui.

Stalin avea cărți. Le primea pentru că era Stalin. Mai împrumuta și de la alții. Citea, cică, mult (greu de probat). Dar nu era vreun intelectual. Voia – cu falsă modestie – să pară, să fie considerat un intelectual, dar e greu să-l numești astfel. Tot ce citea el era corupt dpdv ideologic. Idei din afară nu accepta, totul era tras prin filtrul ideologic marxist-leninist. Nu știa limbi străine (în afară de rusă) și astfel nu era expus la literatură din afară. Comanda unele traduceri, dar doar pentru lucrări acceptabile pentru ideologia sa.

Cărțile umanizează un om. Pe Stalin cărțile n-au cum să-l umanizeze. A fost un tiran și un criminal. Lucrurile pe care le-a făcut și milioanele pe care le-a omorât îmi demonstrează, de fapt, cât de îngust era universul lui intelectual. Un om care citește (nu care deține, pur și simplu, cărți) n-ar fi în stare de unele lucruri.

Ideea de bază a cărții a fost bună. Realizarea – foarte rea.

[Gabi Basalici · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading it, specially that it gives lots of details about the historical context. As other mentioned, there are lots of biographical parts that are not linked necessarily to his library, but for me worked because otherwise lots of the events would have been unclear.

It is fascinating to see a different face of Stalin, not the one we already have, as him being a tyrant, but someone who had lots of curiosities and a huge appetite for reading.

[Carlos Martinez · Rating 4 out of 5]

pretty fascinating tbh

[Maddie Robert · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think Geoffrey Roberts could have said he wanted to kiss Stalin on the lips in fewer words.

[Dave Hansen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book because of curiosity. What were the reading habits of a paranoid, short, brilliant, bloodthirsty, dedicated, well read, manipulative, world leader? During the "Great Purge" from 1935-1940, 1,920,635 persons were arrested in the Soviet Union for anti-Soviet activity. Of those 688,503 were shot, virtually all under the direction of Stalin and virtually all without evidence.

It turns out Stalin was extremely well read. Much of his reading was of history, Communist theory, Russian and European classics, technical books and articles, and writings of his friends and enemies. He was also a lover of Russian poetry. He was also a prolific note taker and marker of books he read. When he died there were approximately 25,000 books and articles in his library.

I found the book to be quite interesting although it really didn't get to his reading habits until about half way through the book. Unless you have a big interest in the Soviet Union, the Bolshevik revolution or Stalin, this is not a book I would highly recommend.

[Hamid · Rating 2 out of 5]

Should be a fascinating subject but not much really revealed into the depths of Stalin's thoughts revealed through notes. Some cursory references to moments where he'll laugh in the margins but it's mostly absent. Instead we have a potted biography of Stalin - which can't compete with the myriad excellent biographies already published - and a broad argument that goes: 'Stalin wasn't stupid and he liked to read'. Feels like a missed opportunity but at least it was fairly short.

[Angel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quick impressions: To be honest, this book is really a political biography of Stalin with a bit of a literacy narrative

(Full review with reading notes available on my blog soon.)

[Jordan Schneider · Rating 2 out of 5]

there was so little of stalin's library in this book!

[Eren Buğlalılar · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book on Stalin's intellectual activities. In the last decades, the new scholarship on Stalin began to shed light on communist leader's intellectual qualities and challenged the myth that Stalin was a subpar intellectual. Roberts' book (2022) starts from Stalin's library, which was broken up by the Khrushchev government, and the notes Stalin made on the books he read, and then gradually expands into the scholarly and literary activities within the CPSU under the leadership of Stalin.

Stalin's notes offer interesting insights, such as "during the early post-revolutionary years, Stalin had a higher regard for Trotsky than most people think. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, Stalin learned more from Trotsky than anyone else." Apparently Stalin consistently "reduced his personal presence" in texts such as Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and his Short Biography "and insisted that other revolutionaries should be accorded more prominence."

The book is quite episodic with loosely connected chapters, so rather than presenting a holistic picture of Stalin's thought, it is an anecdotal study with many interesting remarks and quotes. I liked the honesty of this one: "‘Why did we prevail over Trotsky and the rest?’ Stalin asked in 1937. ‘Trotsky, as we know, was the most popular man in our country after Lenin. Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov, Tomsky were all popular. We were little known. . . . But the middle cadres supported us, explained our positions to the masses. Meanwhile Trotsky completely ignored those cadres.’

[Adnamy · Rating 3 out of 5]

OMG finished finally.
The problem with this book is that the author assumes a thorough knowledge of Stalin. He has written many books on the topic, but many readers have not. There is a plethora of unpronounceable names littered in no particular order throughout. Their significance is not often explained - not to mention that from the get-go he says the library is dispersed - the total catalogue lost, & even more importantly he does not know which of the thousands of books Stalin actually read & marked. He was sent all important texts, fiction manuscripts, historical texts etc etc.
How many shoes did Emelda Marcos actually wear?
A lot.
Stalin read a lot. He was a man of conviction. He also wrote a lot, edited a lot, rewrote other people’s works a lot. Busy guy!!!
I was exhausted.
But the author exhausted me as well by going back & forth not explaining things clearly, & not until the very end giving a purpose to the book. The conclusion explained part of the book, but it was not enough.
Maybe a scholar of Stalin & the times & socialism - particularly dialectical materialism would find this book edifying, but apart from learning about Paul Larfargue - very interesting philosopher & funny sort of, ……I found the book confusing.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s hard to imagine Stalin curling up with a good book, but in fact he was a voracious reader and amassed a library of over 25,000 books, journals and pamphlets. This was dispersed upon his death but author Geoffrey Roberts has tracked down many of the actual books and what makes this significant is that Stalin marked and annotated his books thus giving us today an insight into his reactions and thoughts. He was an autodidact and an intellectual, an aspect of his character that we tend to overlook. Most of his reading matter was Marxist because above all he was an idealist and ideological fanatic, never doubting that he was correct in his thinking and much of his world-view is confirmed in the many comments and annotations he made in his books. He wasn’t alone in liking to read. Many of the early Bolsheviks were also great readers and also collected large libraries. This meticulously researched account of Stalin and his books is an unusual and original way of examining the dictator and is an insightful, intelligent and eminently readable exploration of the man who ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist. A must-read for anyone interested in Stalin and Russian history.

[iainiainiainiain · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most non-ideological western biography of Stalin.

Focuses on Stalin's personal library which was opened up to western historians after the fall of the Soviet Union.

It looks at his books, what he wrote in them, what his policy was on literature, on writing, and on the arts, what his lifelong relationship with the written word was.

It doesn't overstep into fictional territory (in fact the author takes great pleasure in attacking mainstream historians/academics who are happy to write nonsense — he even takes frequent aim at Khruschchev's speech), and it doesn't feel overly long or contrived.

One of the most interesting things I've ever read. Roberts is content to try and tell you what we *can* truly say about Stalin the man, his thoughts, his actions, and his books.

[Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt like the author was trying to portray Stalin as a humble scholar who was dragged into politics, rather than as a ruthless genocidal dictator. I consider this more lazy propaganda than anything else. The author literally copied and pasted whole sections of the book like a freshman needing a higher word count.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting in parts, less so in others. A decent, short, read but not anything seminal. Ironically, less focused on Stalin's Library than you'd expect - more focused on being another biography of the man, in which case you can read plenty of other more developed, insightful, and interesting works.

[An Seachránaí · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author has his anti-Stalin opinions but still provides a relatively unbiased investigation into Stalin and how books shaped him.

[Carlos Brandao · Rating 5 out of 5]

Um estudo exaustivo de quem foi Estaline.
Um contributo indispensável para perceber melhor a História da Europa do Séc.XX e um pouco melhor a eclosão da guerra fria.
Apresenta nos uma personagem incontornável da História que no jogo político internacional fez sempre bandeira do Marxismo Leninismo.
Em suma - incontornável.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Multifacetted and scholarly

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very solid one volume biography of Stalin. There are dozens of good Stalin biographies out there. This one, rather uniquely, avoids spending much time on Stalin’s worst crimes in order to examine another dimension of elite Soviet culture in more detail.

[Eve · Rating 2 out of 5]

So the thing is that this author is a revisionist who believes that we can merely edit capitalism to achieve socialism (if the author even wants socialism). further, partly because the author is a biographer of stalin, he does too much idol worship of stalin's opinions & conflates them with socialist findings. Like to mention what is used to support revisionism the author mentions the relationships stalin had with warsaw pact countries that did not have a revolution but were merely liberation from the nazis by the USSR. while we could maybe argue from this book that stalin had thought there would be a different outcome with usa between 1945-1950, the gist is that the biographer... this book was literally reviewed by the WSJ & yet the biographer thinks himself a marxist theorhetician because he conflates Stalin's biography with socialist findings.

Besides that, I had been wondering for a while what the deal with Stalin's library was from the first time I heard about it when researching religion in the USSR. So this was exactly the sort of book I'd been wanting to read for a while, and among the cold war bullshit books my library's audiobook app had, this was a pretty decent choice. But it was still a bit cold war bullshit.

There's also a quote about war rape conflating rape with sleeping around. While I think I've heard of that quote before, there are at least 2 things that came to mind: I think based on how the book says the original press release regarding Stalin's wife's death by shooting didn't say whether it was by suicide, accident, or murder, I think it that speaks volumes to him shooter her dead. The clarification of it being suicide in the 1980s was probably in order to facilitate rehabilitation. I'm not sure why that rehabilitation was done & how it relates to Russian Nationalism, but that is a mood. Secondly, we have established that the czarist state was a settler colonial project.


I've also seen reviews attack the author for refusing to hold the USSR on the same level as Hitler & Nazi Germany, and to that I say the USAmerican bourgeoisie paid/invested in Nazi Germany's holocaust infrastructure. The USAmerican bourgeoisie paid Hayek to write "The Road To Serfdom" to conflate the Nazis with the USSR instead of the reality of USA backing the Nazis. To refute that shit, look up "the night of long knives". If you still conflate nazis with LGBTQIA+ people, then read "the pink triangle" by richard plant.

Besides that though, a thing we can definitely see with USSR being a fatal flaw is that it was built from a settler empire. We saw this try to get combatted with "the national question" & federalism instead of unitary system, but that would be like saying racism ended in 1965 as boomers raised under a mccarthyist state were misled to believe. Obviously USA then weaponized that against USSR during the cold war, but still. For another example, the Soviets had a lot of discourse about how to apply anti-classism to other fields of study, but they hadn't yet approached it towards pedagogy like we say start to be done circa the 1960s. The USSR had been experimenting with new ways to raise kids for a socialist society instead of a capitalist one, but I'm not sure of those outcomes. Point being, I'm not quite sure how European scholars dealt with it when they still had a lot of racism, but when we look at the anti-racism in USA due to settler colonialism instead of extractivist colonialism, I think there's been more progress made in USA about these sorts of topics. Anyways, that was what was going through my mind as the book recounts how Stalin directed pedagogy. However, to put it more charitably, Stalin was more of a listener than a creative mind, so like with any official, if they were saying it or doing it then there were people behind them with that.

The author kind of touches upon this, and in fact, I would argue that the lens of seeing Stalin as a student was to answer a similar question of how did our elders/previous generations get it wrong, such as in the book "Locking Up Our Own" by James Forman Jr. I've recently started reading "Braiding Sweetgrass" & Robin Wall Kimmerer made a point about needing political solidarity being taught by how nut-trees all release their nuts at the same time when talking about going from the commons to private property. (she mentions a specific council, "the council of pecans" i think, and based on how she relays/summarizes it the people who studied USA's constitution didn't pick up on the Eminent Domain clause.) But seriously that example given by Kimmerer is a good example of how shopping commercials combined with then selling utility bonds due to cash flow problems meant that "The Washington Consensus" was Catatroika (we had similar events happen in USA history too). But while the usage of Stalin as an intellectual (partly to speak to how "evil" is banal) in order to connect with students who are anti-revisionist was an interesting move, the author still praises revisionism himself. So while the biographer did a good job at having a materialist analysis in evaluating Stalin's life, he does this in the hope of using idol worship to support revisionists if not outright capitalists.

Since I hear Stalin & Obama get called token representation used to refute racial chauvinism in racial supremacist societies, I feel the urge to say something like: he's not my hero, i'm a communiust you idiot (hi Ash Sarkar!). But bluntly, "idiot" implies that the author's misdirection was a mistake, like hon, there's an entire club that makes money off this shit. Beyond that, the discussion of fiction works in Stalin's library did bring up pop culture & celebrity culture references I am still unfamiliar with (I listened to the audiobook & so I still need to get ahold of the citations), and it would've been really interesting to explore that angle of fame, because people act like celebrity culture isn't a subset of hero worship & that in addition to that umbrella there's politics etc. Like, IDK how else to explain when people complain about Stalin trying to be modest as a celeb rity in what's supposed to be a socialist society, that this isn't exclusive to the realm of politicians.

I also want to put into the hat too as I've gone over why the biographer is an unreliable narrator (though more reliable than is the norm in a McCarthyist USA), that jobs such as at capitalist/bourgeois institutions (let alone media outlets) cannot speak against their employers' interests. Social media is used by employers to montior employees. Social media is still full of fascist bullshit.

So basically this book is 1 star. especially due to its attempt to mislead its readers into being complicit with fascist, but I added a star because it's an uncommon, but rather interesting topic. If access to Stalins annotated books were ever digitized for easier accessibility, & or if an anti-revisionist were do like take the basic prompt of this book & redo it, then I would/will put this back down to 1 star. Until then, it's 2 stars.

---
elaboration on social media being fascist

While I could get into how this means researchers are at odds with intellectual property holders (especially ones who fund the means of research), I think a more articulate example is that Twitter & Facebook are used by employers to monitor their employees to the point that like how religion/churches were used socially in the early & mid 1900s (to the point that Judy Garland saying that going to church doesn't make you a good person was an uncommon opinion in her era & how circa the 2010s people not having facebook or twitter are considered suspicious) & yet the GOP & conservatives are not censored/deplatformed in USA. Even though Twitter was like their algorithms couldn't tell the difference between Nazis & GOP people (to be even clearer, Twitter had to make algorithms for France & Germany that do ban nazis because in those countries it's considered obstructing an investigation/of justice. So when people talk about when will the last holocaust perpetrator be investigated/tried, they're basically asking when can people be openly nazi again (which is daunting considering how commonplace supporting the nazis during the holocaust was even if they only got 30-40% of the vote in 1932.)

[Upandatom786 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really interesting intellectual history of Stalin. I didn't realize just how voracious a reader he was, this book does a good job exploring the different directions his reading life took. The author, almost despite himself, comes off as sympathetic to Stalin as a thinker and a man of action, even though he disagrees ideologically with regards to the use of political violence. These sorts of authors often have the most interesting takes on Stalin, I feel - they are not beholden to the childish name calling of most modern western writing on Stalin, and so can better understand him in the context of the world at the time.

[Vuk Prlainović · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite what the book's name implies, this almost reads like a regular biography – albeit with a stronger emphasis on Stalin's intellectual endeavours. Fortunately, this focus allows it not to get bogged down in various minutiae that will put the more casual reader to sleep, as is usually the case with more comprehensive works (looking at you, Kotkin). Any minor quibbles I have with it aside, I feel it's actually the perfect book for introducing people to the modern (or revisionist, if you like) historical narrative on Stalin and the USSR in general.

[Ady ZYN · Rating 5 out of 5]

Avem aici altă perspectivă asupra personalității liderului soveitic Iosif Visarionovici Stalin. Până acum omul a fost cunoscut doar prin influența nefastă asupra istoriei lumii, prin dictatura sa nemiloasă și politica externă sovietică prin care a influențat destinele atâtor oameni și popoare. Dar Geoffrey Roberts ne călăuzește pe un drum mai intim, o încercare de reconstrucție din interior spre exterior a dictatorului, iar luminile care sparg întunericul sunt cărțile. Când a murit, în martie 1953, Stalin avea deja o bibliotecă cuprinzătoare. Aproape 25000 de cărți, periodice și broșuri se găseau în biblioteca lui.

Stalin ne apare de data asta nu doar un fanatic al marxismului, ci și-un fanatic al ideilor care transpar din rândurile cărților. Fanatismul puterii era egalat doar de fanatismul față de cărți, căci autoeducarea era una din pietrele unghiulare ale doctrinei comuniste. El citea foarte mult, adnota cu sârguință și edita. Era dornic să afle lucruri noi. „Rare erau ocaziile în care Stalin citea ca să confirme lucrurile pe care le știa sau le credea deja, el preferând să citească pentru a învăța lucruri noi”. Citea cu mare pasiune mai ales autorii pe care-i considera dușmanii lui. Dar Lenin rămâne autorul lui de căpâi.

Primul sfert al cărții cuprinde descrierea avântului lui Stalin în materie de lectură și adunat cărți; problemele biografiei, sau biografiilor sale și impresiile lui despre cultul presonalității, care este dăunător și contravine spiritului partidului. Totuși, comunismul fiind un curent dictatorial, biografia lui Stalin era o necesitate ideologică chiar; apoi, înainte să intrăm în tematica cărților, avem prezentată istoria Rusiei din prima jumătate a secolului XX și mai ales perioada revoluționară începând din 1917 dar avându-l în prim plan pe Stalin. Evoluția sa și rolul lui în desfășurarea revoluției sunt prezentate destul de detaliat autorul descriind succint imaginea acelor momente importante în istoria Rusiei.

Din carte aflăm că biblioteca conținea în mare parte clasici ruși, sovietici și ai literaturii universale precum Gogol, Pușkin, Tolstoi, Cehov, Gorki, Hugo, Shakespeare și France. 11000 din acestea vor fi transferate la Biblioteca Lenin în anii 60. Literatura socialistă, aproape 3000 au fost donate altor biblioteci rămânând un rest de 5500 de cărți de non ficțiune.

Cărțile îl ajutau pe Stalin să înțeleagă lumea; citea istorie modernă și antică, studia economiștii englezi, capitalismul, principiile democrației. Iar cărțile lui ne ajută să-l înțelegem pe el dincolo de imaginea deformată prezentată de inamicul politic Troțki pentru care Stalin era un mediocru. "îi plăceau cărțile. Stalin iubea istoria și folosea constant exemple și analogii istorice în articolele, discursurile și conversațiile sale".

Istoricul olandez Erik van Ree ajunge să-i cunoască biblioteca, dar înainte, considera că tradițiile politice rusești, anterioare revoluției, ar fi influențat marxismul lui Stalin. Doar că biblioteca îi revela istoricului o bogată literatură marxistă, iar citindu-i adnotările, van Ree concluzionă că: "Stalin era, în primul rând, o creație a tradiției revoluționare raționaliste și utopice vest-europene, care a început odată cu iluminismul".

Stalin nu era un gânditor original lipsindu-i complexitatea, profunzimea și subtilitatea ideilor, în schimb forța gândirii lui rezida în randamentul ei. Citea mult nu ca să creeze, ci ca să preia ideile și formulările altora reușind să le clarifice și simplifice cu scopul final de a le pune în practică prin putere politică. „Stalin nu căuta niciodată noutate în gândirea sa, ci a urmărit, mai degrabă oportunitatea politică. În toate cazurile, forța gândirii sale consta în randamentul ei, și nu în originalitatea acesteia”.

Nucleul cărții este capitolul 5, „Bleah! Aiureli! Pometki-urile lui Stalin”. Aici găsim referințe despre activitatea dictatorului și literatura în care-și găsea sursele și resursele. Relațiile sale cu Lenin și Troțki care sunt reprezentate interesul lui față de scrierile lor, admirative sau critice. Găsim literatura militară care a avut un loc special în cadrul instruirii sale de lider. Istoria rusiei și chiar lingvistica l-au făcut pe Stalin să se implice în diverse polemici științifice din domeniu. Chiar și America a fost o sursă de fascinație pentru Stalin și chiar dacă a devenit în cele din urmă inamicul mortal al orânduirii lui comuniste, a găsit în ea elemente de admirație. În cele din urmă este un capitol foarte bogat de informații ce ne arată că acțiunea și livrescul au reușit să traseze un capitol important în istoria universală prin energia intelectuală a unui dictator sângeros.

Cartea prezintă în cele din urmă influența lui Stalin asupra vieții culturale științifice postrevoluționare sovietice din perspectiva intelectualului care dirijează din centru întreaga societate și viață socială transformându-le într-o distopie eminamente platonică mai ales când raportăm atitudinea de educație controlată precum recomanda și Platon în celebrul dialog Republica. „Ordinea sovietică nu poate permite ca tineretul să fie educat în spiritul îndiferenței față de politica sovietică. Puterea literaturii sovietice constă în faptul că este o literatură care nu are și nu poate avea alte interese în afară de interesul poporului, de interesul statului. Scopul literaturii sovietice este acela de a ajuta statul să educe corespunzător tineretul”, suna o rezoluție a Orgburu-lui.

[Paul Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

A quixotic, insubstantial little book. The contents and annotations of Stalin's book collection is interesting in an ephemeral way but either author or publisher seems to have decided that this alone does not a book constitute, so we have random digressions into Stalin's views and interactions with various 'literary' subjects. As interesting as I find Stalin taking time out of his busy schedule to stage a ludicrous fake debate about linguistic theory in the pages of Pravda, a competent editor would surely see this was not a digression this book needed to make.

More baffling is that this book also contains a bare-bones potted history of the life, career and times of the man written in such a manner that it contains too little information to be useful to somebody unfamiliar or engaging to somebody already acquainted with the subject matter.

The author takes the time to grind axes with various assertions of Stalin's views or general psychology made by various Western biographers and historians, often dismissing them as lacking solid evidence. Fine in and of itself, if an unusual vehicle to address these points. What makes this amusing is that on the rare occasion this book actually attempts any kind of original thought, theory or supposition as opposed to a weird synthesis of well known histography and biblio-ephemera, these positions usually lack any evidence to support them, with circumstantial overextrapolation of Stalin's marginalia at best and pop-psychology at worst used to justify the arguments made.

One thing of note is the lens through which this book views Stalin. While not any kind of Tankie 'Holodomor was good, actually' sort of apologist, the author is willing to give the benefit of the doubt and frame Stalin's decisions and viewpoints by the geo-political context of the time and his firmly held, sincere Marxist-Leninist beliefs. This is an interesting contrast to the usual Western treatment of the subject which rarely gets beyond screeching 'History's Greatest Monster' and unnuanced parallels with Hitler.

While interesting at times due to the different ploughs it furrows than the usual fare of Stalinography inherent in its premise, this book ultimately lacked a clear editorial direction and is too often a poor example of written history to be worth recommending.