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Stalin was an avid and voracious reader. In his recent book, Professor Geoffrey Roberts tells us about the life of Joseph Stalin through the books that the dictator read, collected, annotated, and banned. This book draws an extraordinary vivid portrait of Stalin as an intellectual who could never satiate his curiosity; who ardently believed in ideas; and who believed in mysterious powers of reading.
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Stalin was an avid and voracious reader. In his recent book, Professor Geoffrey Roberts tells us about the life of Joseph Stalin through the books that the dictator read, collected, annotated, and banned. This book draws an extraordinary vivid portrait of Stalin as an intellectual who could never satiate his curiosity; who ardently believed in ideas; and who believed in mysterious powers of reading.
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Geoffrey Roberts, a historian, wrote a book called "Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books" exploring Joseph Stalin's personal library and the annotations he made in his books. The collection consisted of approximately 25,000 texts, but only about 500 books were marked by Stalin. The books in his library were mainly Marxist and socialist literature, with a focus on history, philosophy, politics, and economics. However, there were also surprises such as Stalin's interest in foreign constitutional law and the history of the Roman Empire. Some of the markings in the books were not actually made by Stalin, but by others who had access to his collection. The book provides a unique insight into Stalin's intellectual interests and reveals a more personal and intimate side of the dictator. So how did he become this dictator who presided over this highly authoritarian, repressive and terroristic system? How did he become this person who could be responsible for the deaths of millions of people? I wanted to answer that question myself. And I felt that maybe looking at Stalin through the prism of this library, I would arrive at an answer. Because people often want to compare Stalin and Hitler, don't they? It would be interesting as part of the book to do a comparison between Stalin and Hitler as readers and, you know, the comparison between Hitler's library and Stalin's library. Okay, but in fact there is no comparison. Hitler wasn't the serious reader like Stalin was. Hitler didn't have a personal library. He had one, but not in the sense that Stalin had. And also he didn't actually make many, hardly any marks in his book, so there's not much evidence. But where I did think there was a comparison was between Napoleon and Stalin. Stalin was a very fast reader. We know that because of the phenomenal amount of documents that he got through, went across his desk and he read. We know that for a fact. And he had a good memory, a phenomenal kind of memory, yes. Lots of evidence for Stalin's memory as well. Hello everyone, welcome to the Artidote podcast, where I, Vasik Armenikos, ask questions to best-selling non-fiction authors about their books and ideas. Imagine being able to explore Joseph Stalin's personal library, to see what books did he have on the shelves, what books did he annotate, what notes did he leave on the margins of books that he enjoyed reading. Also, try to imagine what kind of a treasure trove it is for a historian to have access to Stalin's personal library and all the notes that Stalin left on the margins of those books. That is what a British historian, Geoffrey Roberts, who wrote multiple books on Stalin, had access to. His recent book is called Stalin's Library, A Dictator and His Books, which explores the life of Joseph Stalin through the dictator's library. I recommended Geoffrey Roberts's book in one of my newsletters, and I've received so many requests and questions about his book and generally about his work that I had to invite him to Artidote podcast to ask all those questions that you send me. Thank you all for sending them, and I hope that you'll enjoy listening to this episode, to this interview, as much as I enjoyed talking to Professor Roberts. Hello, everyone. Welcome to my podcast. My guest today is Geoffrey Roberts, who is Emeritus Professor of History at University College Cork and member at Royal Irish Academy. Welcome to my podcast, Dr. Roberts. Thank you for the invitation. Dr. Roberts, if you could give kind of a brief introduction to yourself about your research and what do you do to our listeners who are not yet familiar with you, that would be… Okay. Well, I'm a historian who specializes in the history of the Soviet Union. I've written a number of books about Soviet history, particularly focused on Stalin. I wrote a book about Stalin as war leader called Stalin's Wars. I wrote another book about a biography of Georgi Zhukov, who was Stalin's deputy supreme commander in war. I wrote a book about Stalin's foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. Okay, my latest book is this book about Stalin as an intellectual, as a reader, and it's called Stalin's Library, a Dictator and His Books. What made you to write a book that explores this side of Stalin? Was there a particular reason? It was basic. Yeah, yeah. I started working on this book about 10 years ago, and the reason for it was the source, right? And the source was a number of books in Stalin's own private book collection, his personal library, several hundred books, which he had marked in some way. He had written in them, he had made markings in them. And that source had been around for about, for a decade or so already, 15 years. But this source was just about to be digitized, yeah? It was going to become easily accessible to me, right? And I was attracted to the source because there's nothing like it. Okay, so since, you know, when the Soviet Union collapsed, one of the consequences of that was that the Russian archives opened up to researchers, including foreign researchers, including myself. All the books I've written about Soviet history, most of them anyway, have been based on first-hand archival research in Moscow. So there's an enormous amount of confidential material about Stalin, about his life, about his political activities, you know, what was going on in the Politburo, his conversations. So a huge amount of information came out of those archives, thousands upon thousands of files. But nothing like this particular source, his personal library, what survived of his personal library, these several hundred books, which we know that he read, at least to a certain extent, because he'd marked them. And in this kind of like source, you'd get, this is the only real source where you have like a spontaneous Stalin, Stalin alone with the privacy of his own thoughts. So it's a very revealing source, yes? The most intimate revealing source about Stalin. That's what attracted me to the project. And also the fact that this stuff was going to become accessible and digitalized. Now, I have to say that the plan about the accessibility didn't work out because not all of these books, and we're talking about 500 books, right, actually, nearly 500 texts, not all those books were digitized. In the event, only about 150 or so of those were digitized, so I could get them on screen at home. The other 350 books, I had to go to Moscow to actually look in the archive, look at them in person. But that, okay, so that slowed the research down. But in a way, that was a good thing, because there's no substitute for actually having the physical objects in your hands, the books themselves. And you learn things about the books and about Stalin as a reader that you don't learn if you're just looking at digital images on screen. So now that's the answer to the question, there was this really interesting source that I could look into, but a source that could also take me in all kinds of different directions. So it was also an opportunity to use this source, to use a book focused on Stalin's personal library as a way of exploring all kinds of different aspects of Stalin's life and career, aspects which I hadn't, you know, I've written lots of books about Stalin or Stalin related, but this book enabled me to do much more wide-ranging research than I'd given to have been able to do. It must be incredible to have those pages of books that Stalin read and annotated in your own hands, and to have this first-hand source, it is an incredible kind of a historical privilege, I assume, for a historian like you. Oh yeah, absolutely. So when I first started my research, solid history research, 1970s, 1980s, the Russian archives were mostly closed, or at least they were closed to scholars like me who were working in particular topics. So there was no access to the archives in Moscow, Prussia, in the Soviet Union. We didn't expect to ever have that access. So what we worked on was published material from the archives. So it's published a lot of documents, a lot of, you know, particularly from the diplomatic archives. So we had, like, first-hand primary sources we could work with, and, you know, my early articles and books were based on this material. But the Soviet Union collapses, and of course, we not only get access to a much wider range of sources in Russia, but also direct access in the archive. Yeah, so when I first went to the archives in 1996, it was a huge kind of thrill being in the archive and actually seeing the originals of these, you know, actually having direct access to this material, right? And that included material that Stalin had looked at and actually had written on, made comments on, stuff like that. Yeah, so that was a kind of huge thrill, and that thrill never quite leaves you, you know. I first went to Russia in 1996 to do archive research, and I returned there every year subsequent to that, you know, once or twice, sometimes three times a year. And it was always exciting to be in those archives, to be handling that material, including lots of material which had been in Stalin's hands. Okay, and of course that includes the books. Okay, so one of the questions, okay, by the time I started looking at these books, which is about 10 years or so ago, I'd already spent 15 years working in the Russian archives. So it wasn't such an immediate, you know, it wasn't a novelty for me to be having my hands, you know, physical objects which Stalin had had in his hands and had looked at and interacted with in some way. Yeah, but nevertheless, yeah, it's always a thrill. You said like there are 500 volumes from his library that have survived. What kind of books are they? Are they books like just solely on Marxism, or there are books like on literature, history? What kind of books have survived from his collection? It's not just 500. Okay, so Stalin's personal library is a private book collection. I estimate to be about 25,000 texts when he died in 1953. About five and a half thousand of those, of the items from that collection, survived to the present day. The 500 books that I mentioned that are marked, that Stalin marked in some way, and another 5,000 which are also identifiably belonging, had belonged to Stalin. And the most important identifier was that Stalin had an ex-libris stamp, so his own personal books were stamped as actually being from his library, so identified as being from it. Now you might ask what happened to, you know, okay, so 25,000 books, we still have, we have access to five and a half thousands. What happened to the other 19,500? What happens was that after Stalin's death, and actually more specifically, after Stalin was denounced as a dictator by Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, decisions were taken to disperse his private effects, including his book collection. So all those books which had nothing that identified them as having belonged to Stalin, were just given, you know, they were got rid of. Mostly they were given away to other libraries, so they disappeared onto the shelves of various other libraries. Now unfortunately, among that 19,500 books were nearly all of Stalin's literature, fiction collection. You know, we can be fairly certain that Stalin possessed thousands of fiction books, literature, you know, poems, plays, novels, short stories. But almost all that stuff, you know, 99% of that stuff disappeared because Stalin didn't mark or didn't mark his literature books with his stamp. Yes, his exhibit stamp, nor did he write in fiction books. There are one or two examples where he did write, but mostly he didn't. So the remnant of Stalin's library that we have is nearly all of it, you know, 99% of it, a non-fiction remnant of that 25,000 books. So that's what I'm mainly working with, not the non-fiction or part of the non-fiction component of Stalin's library. But having said that, there is in my book, there is a chapter about Stalin and Soviet literature, but that's a chapter that's based on not the books that he read and marked, it's based on what he said about Soviet literature, not just Soviet literature, world literature, his preferences as a reader. Okay, now you asked the question, what kind of books do you find in it? Yeah, mostly, so we're talking about, it's not just the 500 books they mark, also the 500 books, the 5,000 other books that we know were part of his collection. Yeah, mostly, it's the kind of library you'd expect a Marxist to have, yes, and a Soviet Marxist. And in Stalin's case, the Soviet Marxist, who, okay, Stalin, of course, was Georgian, that was his first language, but Stalin obviously knew Russian, but that was the only foreign languages that Stalin signed, right? So it's mostly Marxist and socialist, and it's almost, you know, all of it is in Russian. Okay, there are a few hundred books in other languages, English, French, German, but there's no evidence that Stalin actually read any of these things. So, no, a Russian language library, a Soviet library, mostly books published in the Soviet Union during Stalin's era, and a Marxist and socialist library. But having said that, there's all kinds of, like, um, non-Marxist literature in the collection, you know, just loads of stuff, you know. Think about Stalin, okay, Stalin was a Marxist, right? So, and he was the kind of Marxist who believed that, you know, Marxism was a universal ideology and framework of knowledge through which you could understand everything that goes on in the world, at least in terms of human affairs and social. So there's that kind of Marxist Stalin was interested in all different kinds of things, you know, philosophy, history, politics, economics, you know, literature, psychology, sociology, a whole kind of range, you know. In fact, we have a, there's a document from 1925 where Stalin sets out his, how he wants his library to be classified, you know, the subject classifications, and it lists all these subjects that I've just mentioned. So, mainly a Marxist, Soviet socialist library, but not entirely. Okay, one last point on that. Stalin's favourite subject was history, history in all different kinds of varieties, and his favourite historian was a guy called Yuri Vipa, who wasn't a Marxist. Okay, Vipa was a historian that was interested in economic and social history, which Marxist historians tend to be interested. But basically, Vipa was a fairly traditional narrative, you know, historian, you know, told a story about the past, and a lot of that story was based on politics, yeah, on the political narrative. Okay, so he, I think he's Stalin's favourite, favourite author. And the kind of history that Vipa wrote, this narrative history, was the kind of history that Stalin wanted to be taught in Soviet schools, right, and Stalin gets involved in the creation of new history textbooks for Soviet schools. And these history textbooks are very much in the Vipa narrative mode, rather than the dry and dusty abstract Marxist historical works, which Stalin was very critical of. It kind of reminds me of one of the volumes that my grandfather, who lived in Armenia during the Stalin time, had in his library once I picked up the history of Rome, and there was a very long 30 or 40 page introduction about the importance of the Marxist theory and how to interpret this book through the lens. And I think at the bottom, it was written, like, with the approval of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, you know, but the introduction was written. Were there any volumes in that, in what you explored, that really surprised you that Stalin had there? Something that was completely unexpected, you said, like, how come this Marxist person had this, read this? There was a book about law, constitutional law, right? The constitutions, the legal systems of different foreign countries, published in 1945. Stalin took a huge interest in this particular book and marked it up in some detail. And there was another book which dealt with the constitutions of the so-called bourgeois countries, which I think Stalin read in the 1930s. So yeah, Stalin's interest in foreign constitutional law, the constitutional structures, institutions, practices of different foreign capitalist countries. So that was one surprise. I mean, I suppose another surprise was, I mean, I mentioned Vipa. And Vipa, okay, Vipa was a historian who specialised in early Christian history, early Christianity, that was his specialty. But he also wrote lots of books about the classical world, about ancient history. And one of these books was about the history of the Roman Empire, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, published around the turn of the 1920th century, around about 1900, something around then. Okay, and this book is, it was and still is in Stalin's collection. And it's about 300 pages long, and every page was marked in detail. Very few words, but lots of markings, lots of underlines. And I was very, very excited when I found this. This is one of the first books I found in the archive and looked at 10 years ago. Because, oh, Stalin's really interested in the history of the Roman Empire. What does this tell about Stalin's mentality and his thinking? What was it about, you know, Roman history that interested Stalin? Really interesting topic, yeah. Okay, problem was that, fast forward 10 years, when I'd like been through, looked at hundreds of these texts, which Stalin had marked, when I looked at this book again, I had to come to the conclusion that these markings weren't actually Stalin's markings. This is a second hand book, and it belonged to some other people before it found its way into Stalin's collection. And it was they, whoever they were, or maybe just one person who had marked the book, not Stalin, at least that's my opinion. So, you know, there's a lot kind of like, it's a bit of a minefield, working through this material, because the fact that it's in a collection, which is labelled as containing Stalin's, or what the Russians call pametki, which is markings, doesn't mean to say that they are actually Stalin's markings. There are several cases, anyway, where the markings are definitely not Stalin's. There's someone else, it's not clear who else. In one case, it turns out the markings are by Stalin's daughter, Svetlana. Yeah, because lots of people had access to the books in Stalin's private collection, particularly family members. Yeah, so this big discovery, this huge surprise, turned out not to be such a discovery. But having said that, because the marks in the book aren't Stalin's didn't mean to say that he didn't read. In fact, I would be very surprised if he didn't read. I think because of his high regard for Dieppe, I think he would have read that book about history of Roman Empire, irrespective of whether he made any marks in it. From the way he annotated, how did he, what was, like, kind of his structure and purpose? Was he annotating certain ideas? Was he annotating, like, quotes or passages? What was the structure like? Actually, go back to your earlier question, you asked me what was the most surprising about his library. Two other things, right. The first was the extent to which his library was so familiar to me, right? In the sense that I had, in fact, still have, I've still got these books, I had the same library myself. Not the same books, but the same kind of books. You know, in my case, it was the library of a British Marxist in the 1970s, yes? And the kind of books I accumulated and read in the 1970s were broadly similar to the kind of books that Stalin accumulated and read as well, from a Marxist kind of perspective. So, the kind of stuff that Stalin was interested in, all this stuff about Marxist theory, Marxist philosophy, economics, the labour theory, but all these kind of issues, I was interested in. You know, and I had lots of books, and I worked through this material, which made me very well-equipped to actually go through Stalin's Marx books, because, you know, one problem I didn't have was actually understanding the texts I was reading, in terms of their content, in fact, I'm in Russian, but also understanding what Stalin was interested in, and what was going on. But the second thing that really surprised, that was a surprise, oh Jesus, Stalin's library is the same as my library, to a huge extent. But the second thing is how Stalin marked his books in the same way I do. Stalin annotated his books, marked his books, in the same way, not just me, but the same way most people do. You know, most people, those who do mark books, of course not everyone does, and lots of people disapprove of it, I think, you know, but anyway, but those of us who do mark books, we all do more or less the same thing, you know, we underline sentences, we put lines in the margin, yeah, and we write comments in the margin, you know, mostly short kind of comments, or short phrases or words, but sometimes more elaborate comments. So Stalin's, you know, markings are just normal, kind of like conventional, the ways that me, maybe even you, or anyone listening might mark, mark their books, so it's a very kind of like normal kind of way. That's so interesting to imagine that he was sitting down with a pencil and marking out certain passages that he wanted to remember. Yeah, let me just carry on that, yeah, the other thing, but okay, so Stalin was similar to me as a reader in the way he marked his books, but Stalin was much better at it than me in a sense that he was much, tends to be much neater, much more structured, yes, so, you know, he would often, he would number points, yeah, or number paragraphs, yes, or he would like write subheadings in the margin indicating what the subject matter of this particular paragraph or page is, pages were, so he was a much more, yes, he was a much more systematic, you know, marker of the books he chose to mark than is the, you know, the case with me. One of the questions that I got from my readers and listeners about your book is, people were curious to know how Stalin was different from someone like Lenin in terms of his reading habits, style, annotation, library, because Lenin was a huge reader himself, and I was wondering what differentiated them, if anything? Lenin was Stalin's role model, yeah, Lenin, he accumulated quite a big collection of books, he had 9,000 books in his personal library by the time he died in 1924, and Lenin, yeah, you know, worked surrounded by books, not just when he was like, you know, a revolutionary politician, you know, that kind of politician, but when he was actually the head of the Soviet state, when he was running the country, he worked surrounded by books and used books as part of informing his policies and his thinking about what was going on, and Stalin did exactly the same, Stalin worked surrounded by books both in his office and his home and in his various dachas, and let's, okay, and Lenin also marked his books, yeah, Lenin's Prometki, and Lenin's Prometki markings, remember the Russian word, are very, very similar to Stalin's Prometki, very, very similar, but that's not, but the only thing here is that it's okay, so Lenin marks his books, and he marked his books in the same way that Stalin did, and I did, okay, so it's a lot similar, okay, but there's one difference is that Lenin also used to, he also took notes from books, yeah, and he had, Lenin had lots of notebooks, his research notes from the books he was reading, Stalin didn't do that, yeah, you know, he just marked the books, and sometimes he would insert strips of paper in the text he was reading, either as a way of retrieving the pages that he'd marked when he'd read the book, or in fact sometimes as a substitute for marking the book, as indicating he was interested in what was in this particular section, and that point, remember I was saying earlier that, okay, you know, I was disappointed when all of Stalin's marked books weren't digitized, which meant I had to go to Moscow to look at the archive, well that's one of the things I discovered by working on the books themselves in the archive, was Stalin's habit of using these thin strips of paper to mark various places in books, yeah, so I suppose, yeah, Lenin in that sense was a much deeper, systematic intellectual than Stalin was, yeah, Stalin, you know, was an intellectual, engaged with ideas, engaged with words, engaged with text, and he kind of responded by actually, you know, by actually marking some of the texts that he wrote, but he wasn't a scholar like Lenin was in the sense of, you know, taking lots of notes from books as part of his research, as part of his, you know, constructing, you know, reconstructing that material that he's reading. I hope you enjoyed listening to my conversation with Professor Roberts, and if you would like to send your own questions to the future guests, you can do it easily by subscribing to my monthly newsletter. Each month I share with you some of my favorite reads, I tell you about future guests, and also share with you episodes that I have released, and I'm kind of an old-fashioned person, and that's the reason why I have this newsletter. Newsletter feels like sending a letter to a friend who has similar interests like you. Sometimes YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, they kind of decide for us what is interesting, and what is not, and that's the reason why I prefer my newsletter. My newsletter is sent from my personal email address, so you can send me your thoughts about books, you can tell me who would you like to hear on Archduke Podcast. So, if you find all of this, all of what I said interesting, and would like to send your questions to the future guests, please consider subscribing to my monthly newsletter. I'll link it down in the description of this episode, and I hope to see you there. Let's continue with the rest of this interview. It's incredible to hear, like, different styles of reading, you know, that Lenin was reading, annotating books, and then he kept a notebook where he was elaborating on those ideas, while Stalin was annotating his books and classifying, but there was, there is no kind of a notebook where he explored those ideas. It's a function of the context here, it's a function of the context here. So, Lenin spent a lot of time in exile, yeah, where he did a lot of reading, and he did a lot of writing. So, Lenin had the, because he was in exile in Switzerland and other kind of places, he had the possibility and the luxury, if you like, of being able to do that kind of research, you know, to actually, and often he was, Lenin, of course, was borrowing library books, so he couldn't actually mark them, or he shouldn't mark them. So, he was, so Lenin developed certain kind of, like, scholarly habits, right, and because he was that kind of, you know, he was that kind of, he was a Marxist theoretician, much more so than Stalin ever was, right. So, that's the kind of thing he did, and that practice of Lenin's continued after the revolution, you know, when the Bolsheviks seized power, and when Lenin's, Stalin didn't have that luxury, Stalin was never in exile, Stalin was always in Russia, in Tsarist Russia. Yeah, he was exiled, but it was to, you know, Siberia and places like that. He was also in prison. Okay, yeah, he did certainly, one of the things he mainly, actually mostly did when he was in prison was, he read, he read books, we know that for a fact, we have documentary evidence about that, but he didn't have the luxury, I don't think, that Lenin had of, you know, taking notes and having notebooks, because, of course, you know, Stalin was moving around a lot, yes, you know, so he, you know, he couldn't, like, he couldn't build up a personal archive, whether in the form of books or in the form of notes and stuff, and stuff like that. So, after the revolution, Stalin was able to begin to build up a personal archive in the form of this personal, personal library. And, of course, by that time, Stalin is pretty busy, yeah, Stalin has, you know, I mean, in April 1922, he becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party, yeah, which is hugely burdensome administrative post. I mean, quite simply, Stalin didn't have the time to actually take notes from books and construct that kind of archive, right? He only had the time to actually read them, which he did a lot, and then also to mark them. So, I think it's, like, practical constraints that explains, and also explains that difference between Lenin and Stalin, rather than anything more fundamental than that, Joseph. You mentioned in, I think it was somewhere in the middle of your book, that there are, there are rumors by certain historians that Stalin once said that he reads 500 pages a day, something along that. Is that true? Or what do you think? Is it possible? How is it possible? Stalin was a very fast, fast reader. We know that, because the phenomenal amount of documents that he got through, went across his desk that he read, we know that for a fact. And he had a good memory, phenomenal kind of memory, yes. Lots of evidence for Stalin's memory as well. But he would never have been able to read 500, or there's another testimony that it's 300 pages every day, when he was also consuming all these, all these documents as well, all this paperwork that was passing through his desk. The thing about the Soviet system was highly bureaucratic, it was paper-based, everything, every decision was recorded, every decision was rationalized, reported on, a hugely bureaucratic kind of system. So Stalin didn't have the time. He could have read three, four, 500 pages a day, I think. Maybe sometimes he did, but not every day. Yeah, mostly Stalin read, read paperwork, documents, yes, resolutions, reports, that kind of thing, transcripts. Did you by any chance discover the secret of his extraordinary memory and fast reading skills while going through archives? Really? I don't think it was that, okay, I don't think it was, I don't think it was that exceptional. Yeah, he could read pretty fast. He had a good memory. Yeah, his memory, and he retained his, those kind of abilities, I think, until, as he got older as well. But I don't think it was that, you know, definite. But certainly, what's certainly the case is that Stalin is a very studious person from a very young age. Yeah, he's a very studious boy. He was a good student when he's been educated by the church, first in a church school, then in a seminary. He was always engaged with reading from, from, you know, a very kind of early, early age. So he was that kind of person. There are two questions. One is like very broad. And one is more specific and connected to that broad question that I constantly read from the emails that I got about your book. And that is, how did Stalin's taste in books change over his life? And the other question that people were really interested in is, how come a boy who is going to a religious school, he reads a lot, he wants to become a poet, seems to be very sensitive? And how come that kind of person becomes who we know Stalin as, you know, like, I guess, like, the broad question is, how did his taste change over time? And the second, how did it evolve from the childhood kind of thing? That's an interesting question, actually, about how did his taste change over time? I'm not sure that it did change, actually, except perhaps that I think the older he got, the more history he read. Yeah, I think what you got more and more, I think now before, okay, before the revolution, you know, Paul 1917, he also, when he was a political activist in Russia, he had mostly illegal political activity. Yeah. Yeah, he read history then as well as interesting history. But I think the focus then was on immediate political issues. Yes. And his reading was about stuff that will actually inform his politics and political decision making, political action. So more, more, more interested in philosophy, politics and economics than history at that time. So, but that interest continued all the way through. Yeah, I would say Stalin had very broad reading interests, but obviously within this framework of him being a Marxist, so a big focus on Marxist related stuff. I think that remained the case for his whole life. But yeah, having said that, I think he got more and more into history as he got older. So that would be the change that I would say. Yeah, do you have a question? Yeah. That's the question everyone wants to ask. How did Stalin become Stalin? And that's a matter of his life story, his biography, and the historical times through which he moves and the kind of like the contingencies, yes, that actually impact on him personally. And kind of in a way, going back to your original question was all, how did I come to write this book? And I said, well, it's because there was this interesting source. But there's another answer to that, you know, to that question, which was that it was a way of avoiding writing a biography of Stalin. A biography of Stalin, I wanted to write a wide ranging book about Stalin, you know, exploring different aspects of his thinking, life, career, all of that. But I didn't want to do a biography, partly because there were already so many biographies out there. Also, because I thought it would be a huge kind of like task to do a serious biography of Stalin, given the enormous amount of material from the archives that was available. Okay, I was familiar with that material, I knew a lot of it already, but it still seemed too high amounting to climb. So I thought, okay, I won't write a biography. I'll write this book about Stalin's library, yeah, which would be an interesting source, wide ranging approach, I can go in whatever directions it takes me. But actually, in order to write this book about Stalin's library, in effect, I had to write a kind of biography of Stalin. So that's what you find in the book. There is a biography, not complete biography, there's some gaps. But okay, my book is an intellectual portrait of Stalin. But what you will also find that is effectively my biography of Stalin. So in a sense, you'll, yeah, you'll finally answer that question in the book. But okay, but so how does Stalin become Stalin? I think what they mean is, you know, the question they're asked is, well, how did he become this dictator who presided over this highly authoritarian, repressive and terroristic system? How did he become this person who could be responsible for the deaths of millions of people? Yeah. Now, that's, that's a good question. Yeah. In fact, that's the question I want the answer, know the answer to. In fact, yeah, okay. So I wrote this book for various reasons, because the library source, I want to avoid writing a biography, I want to do a wide-ranging measurement. But also the evidence around, I wanted to answer that question myself. And I felt that maybe looking at Stalin through the prism of this library, I would arrive at an answer, an answer to that question, right? Okay, so how did that happen? I think the Civil War, yeah, the Civil War is, is important here. Yeah, the Civil War that takes place after the Bolshevik seizure, but it's Stalin's experience during the Civil War. I think that's when he makes a transition from being an ideal, a tough, but idealistic, utopian kind of revolutioner into a much more pragmatic, practical, hard-headed defender of the revolution, and of socialism, and being prepared to do whatever it took to do that, use whatever violence he needs to defend the revolution to. So that has a huge impact, I think, on Stalin as the character of his political action, and not just Timokovs, but Lenin, Trotsky, all the Bolsheviks. So I think that that's a very important moment of transition. And so the Bolsheviks win the Civil War. And because they believe in the revolution, they believe that the revolution is the future, not just for Russia, but for all of humanity. They believe that what they're doing is safeguarding the future human utopia in the form of socialism and communism, right? Yeah, they're prepared to do whatever's necessary to hang on to power, and to protect the revolution, and to build socialism. And once they've taken that decision, then, you know, in a sense, all of the repressive society is what logically flows from that stance that they took, that they're not willing to relinquish power, because the power they have is so important for the future of socialism. Okay, and then later on, you get another transition in the 1930s, where, you know, the system undergoes a series of shocks, upheavals, also a massive series of waves of political terror, over which Stalin presides. Okay, and why does that happen? Okay, again, you'll find the answer to that in the book. I have a whole section called, you know, Stalin's terror. But essentially, it happens because Stalin thinks that the Soviet system is under dire attack, existential attack, from an alliance between the internal enemies of the revolution and the external enemies of the revolution. And the internal enemies of the revolution include a number of groups and individuals who are traitors, who were once the Bolsheviks themselves, or communists themselves, they betrayed the system. And that's how you explain these show trials of former Bolshevik leaders in the 1930s. Okay, but the particular, okay, but there's a particular kind of answer, I have that question to answer, which I give in the book. And it's something that I came to as a result of this research. And what it is, is this, okay, Stalin was this intellectual, he believed in certain ideas, and these ideas drove his politics, right? And these ideas enabled him to rationalise what he was doing politically, including some very nasty and brutal stuff. And I mentioned just now, including the idea that the system was under attack from its class enemies, outside external class enemies and internal class enemies, right? Okay, so it's that. But what I, the conclusion I came to during the course of writing this book was that Stalin didn't just think this stuff, he felt it. He felt it, it was an emotional thing, right? And what I discovered, you know, exploring Stalin's personal library, and the way he read books, and the way he marked them, was the huge amount of emotional force that imbued his ideas. And it's the depth of his emotional feed and commitment to these ideas, to what he believes, and what he's trying to do, that explains how he can do all this really bad stuff, yeah? Explains how he can deal with this stuff, preside over a system in which millions of people are killed, right? Because of his actions, or inactions. And he can do that, and he's not actually a monster. He's not a monster, he's not a psychopath, he's not a lunatic, he's not a madman, he doesn't have blood thirst, he's not a very nice person in lots and lots of ways. But, you know, the ways in which he's not nice are like normal, ordinary human ways in which human beings can be pretty bad people, and pretty nice people, yeah? He's able to do this because of, you know, his feelings kind of protect him from the enormity of, and the barbarity actually, of what he's actually doing in order to pursue his social goals. So it's kind of, he's possessed with great ideas that he kind of worships, of revolution, of changing the world. Yeah, yeah, but they're not abstractions, they're felt ideas. They're felt ideas, yeah? There's a definition, and this is what Stark Ruff is trying to do, there was some particular definition of how do you define an intellectual? An intellectual is someone for whom ideas are emotionally important, you know? And I thought, well I haven't read that definition in a book. I thought, oh yeah, that's Stark Ruff. Yeah, it's the emotional importance of these ideas, of Stark Ruff. But by what do you mean? I think it's like, okay, lots of people who are intellectuals and to whom ideas are important, right, invest a lot of feeling in those ideas, yeah? So it's not an unusual kind of thing to do, okay? So Stark's not like, unique or unusual in that respect, in the sense of being a feeling intellectual. An intellectual has a lot of emotional depth to his ideology, right? Okay, I think what I can do in my book, I can show that. I can show that. I can demonstrate that, right? I can take you on a journey through his life as a reader, which actually shows that ideas were, that Stalin was an intellectual for whom ideas were emotional. Yeah, that's what I found in your book, so interesting and kind of exciting to see the person who believes that books and writers can be engineers of human souls, and see how books kind of engineered him in some sense, you know? He knew that the books engineer his human souls and nation by his own practice, by reading through from his childhood and seeing what kind of impact the books had on him. You're my ideal reader, yeah? I'm trying to do the book, I'm just trying to show. I'm not trying to tell you this, that, or the other about Stalin, I'm trying to show you stuff about him, yeah? And then you can read that and put your own kind of spin on it, yeah, and find different things. So that's really great, yeah, so yeah, I'm really pleased. Same here, because there are many, I've interviewed a biographer of Napoleon, of a person who has written the biography of Napoleon called Napoleon and his Gardens, and her name is Ruth Skerr, and she very well explored Napoleon as an intellectual as well, how he evolved in his passion for gardening, but also for intellectual pursuits, and I found her approach and your approach to Stalin, you know, like she writes about Napoleon, you write about Stalin, but both of their books reveal kind of a side of those personalities that haven't been explored, because they reveal so much depth about the person, what were they like, what they believed in, what drove them, so very incredible book for all our listeners who haven't read your book, I would really recommend them. Well, now I'm going to read that Napoleon book, Napoleon and his Gardens, yeah? Yeah, yeah, Napoleon and his Gardens. It's interesting, because Stalin liked gardening as well, that's what he, that was what Stalin did in his downtime, okay, he read, yeah, when he went to his dacha, the big Moscow dacha he had, okay, he went there and he read, but the other thing he did was he tended his garden, yeah, so that's interesting, but the other thing was, yeah, because people often want to like compare Stalin and Hitler, don't they, yeah, so then that was one of my initial ideas, it'd be interesting as part of the book to do a comparison between Stalin and Hitler as readers, and, you know, a comparison between Hitler's library and Stalin's library, okay, but in fact there is no comparison, Hitler wasn't the serious reader like Stalin was, Hitler didn't have a personal library, he had one, but not in the sense that Stalin had, and also Hitler didn't actually make many, hardly any marks in his book, so there's not much evidence, but where I did think there was a comparison was between Napoleon and Stalin as intellectuals, that kind of interested me, and I was toying with the idea for a long time of putting something in the book comparing Stalin and Napoleon, yeah, but maybe I'll go back to that at some point in the future. Wonderful book, the Napoleon and his gardens, and… Yeah, no, as soon as we finish this conversation I'm going to go online and order a copy. That's great, we've exchanged books, and I think that you just said, like, really made me want to ask you a question in terms of, do you think that Stalin and Hitler were possessed by the ideas in a similar way? You said that Stalin felt the ideas, you know, that he was really passionate about them, he believed in those ideas, do you think there are any, even on the surface, similarities by Hitler being passionate and, like, absorbed in this idea of National Socialism and Stalin in a sense? I'm not sure that Hitler was actually passionate about the ideas as such, yeah, I'm not sure he was that kind of fanatic and that kind of ideologist, obviously very emotional about it and committed in terms of… I think it was more of a feeling thing, whereas for Stalin it's much more about an intellectual ideas, yeah. Okay, so, okay, but an intellectual ideas which is underpinned by this strong emotional commitment, yeah, but I think probably, yeah, in Stalin the emotional commitment is the underpinning, yeah, whereas I think in Hitler's case it's probably the other way around, is that it's the emotional commitment to National Socialism, that's the thing, rather than the ideas themselves. Now, that was true, that wasn't true of other Nazis, and you can point to other Nazis who were fanatics and ideologists and intellectuals in the same way that Stalin was, but I don't think it's true of Hitler. You've sent me an article that you wrote for Yale about Shoshanik Manucharyants, the person who organized the libraries of Lenin at first and then moved to our organizing Stalin's library, and she's the author of the ex-libris stamps that Stalin had. Could you please tell a little bit about her story, because she worked for Stalin, and poor Lenin first, and organized his library, and then moved to Stalin. I think like it reveals a lot about, not only her, but also about the libraries of the people that she curated. Yeah, Shoshanika, and there's some issue about what her actual name was, I mean, Shoshanika Manucharyants, that's how it appears in Russian, that was a Russian name, but some people who are Armenian, especially, say no, it's not Shoshanika, it's Shushanik, because she was Armenian by background, she was ethnic Armenian, she wasn't born in Armenia, she was born in Stavropol, but nevertheless she was Armenian, which explains her name. She was a young woman who went to St. Petersburg in the early part of the 20th century, went to actually study at a women's university in St. Petersburg. Now I have to say, before I started looking into Shoshanika's biography, I had no idea that there was a women's university in St. Petersburg, but there was, she went there to study, and while she's there she gets involved with socialist radicals, yes, the opposition, radical revolutionary opposition to Tsarism, including the Bolsheviks, and she ends up marrying a Bolshevik activist, someone who, he gets expelled from, you know, exiled from Russia for his political activities, and she goes with him into exile, and they end up on the island of Capri, where Maxim Gorky, you know, the writer, there's a kind of colony of emigre Russian intellectuals and activists and radicals of various kinds. Okay, but then she returns, returns to Russia in 1917 after the outbreak of the revolution, she joins, she becomes a member of the Bolshevik party herself, and then she eventually ends up in, working for Lenin, in Lenin's office, when Lenin was the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, I effectively, when Lenin was the Soviet Union's first prime minister. Okay, and the job she does for Lenin, because she had a bit of experience of this previously, was that she was his librarian, his personal librarian, so she organized, processed his books, serviced it in relation to books, and one of the people she worked with was Stein's wife, Stein's second wife, Stein's young wife, Nadia, Nadezhda Aloeva, who Stein married in 1919, I think, so Nadia worked in Lenin's office as well before she went on and had her first child, so they were our friends, I think, and that might be the thing that connected Shushanika with Stalin later on, because when Lenin dies in 1924, and not long after that, Shushanika starts acting for Stalin's library as well, she starts organizing, sorting out Stalin's private book collection, okay, and you might believe that this was Nadia's suggestion to her husband, well, he should ask Shushanika, or they should ask Shushanika to actually sort out their book collection, because it wasn't Stalin who had books, Nadia had her own books, her own book collection, okay, so Nadia becomes, acts as Stalin's personal librarian, not for very long, I'm not sure exactly how long, might have only been for a few months, but no more than a year or two, but her kind of involvement with Stalin's book collection is absolutely crucial from the point of view of the historical fate of this collection, because she was the one who devised Stalin's ex-libris stamp, yes, and Stalin's ex-libris stamp was of the same style as Lenin's ex-libris stamp, yeah, which I presume Shushanika was responsible for when she was Lenin's librarian, so basically Shushanika does for Stalin what she had done for Lenin, she gets him an ex-libris stamp, she organises, catalogues and categorises books, I mean, one of the first things she does, she says to Stalin, okay, you want me to organise your book collection, but how do you want me to sort it out, what categories do you want me to use, and this is what prompts Stalin to write quite a long note to her, saying, oh, this is what I want you to do with my books, okay, she does that, and then she gets a stamp made, she stamps the book, so she actually numbers the books that Stalin has in his collection at that time, I'm not sure how many, but I think they're talking about possibly a couple of thousand books, that's the sort of number, mid-1920s, Stalin's personal library has about 2,000 books in it, that's just my guess, okay, but then Shushanika moves on, she actually leaves the Kremlin in 1930 and she goes to work at the institute of, the Marx-Engels-Lenin institute, but the system that she started in 1925 of stamping the books coming in, being accessed in Stalin's personal library, that continued for a few years after her departure, until the early 1930s, and that's why we have about 5,000 books with this stamp on them, and that's why a substantial collection of books survived the dispersal of Stalin's personal texts after 1956. If it hadn't been for Shushanika and her ex-library staff and her work in stamping Stalin's books, numbering some of them, and then that system being continued after she stopped being Stalin's librarian, if it hadn't been for that, then okay, we would have had 400 or 500 texts with Stalin, but we wouldn't have these other 5,000 books, which gives us an enormous insight into the depth of Stalin's library and its character. So it's really Shushanika, her involvement with Stalin in the mid-1920s, as his personal librarian, is what actually saves a substantial part of his collection for posterity. Without that, without Shushanika, then I wouldn't have been able to write my book, for example. Okay, so I was very glad to discover Shushanika, because this story I've just told you, it's in the book, not quite the whole story, but she and her role in preserving the historical legacy or preserving this remnant of Stalin's library, that's one of my discoveries as part of this research. So I was really pleased to be able to discover her role and to actually, which would be hidden from history, and to bring that into the open. It's incredible how those hidden pieces of history just appear, how one person with her job kind of like preserved a library that helped you to build and write your book. It's just incredible. I'll link the story for the Yale University Press. That story I wrote, it's okay, it's the fullest account I gave of Shushanika's role in the process. But in a way, it also gives a quite good summary of the book, the whole book as well. So if you can't afford the book, or you don't have the time to actually read the book, then you can just read this article. And I also did, I published another piece recently, which you'll find on my website, which is a Q&A about the book. I'll send you the link to that after we finish our conversation. I think people might be interested in that piece as well. As a person who has read both your book and the article itself, I know that like they complement both to each other. So if some of our listeners haven't yet read your book, I would like that article about Yale on Yale University Press is a good introduction kind of to your book. And I'm sure that it will spark further curiosity to read it. It is an incredible read. I think it will spark people's curiosity to go further. Towards the end of our interview and our conversation, I wanted to ask you kind of a strange question that I ask all the biographers in some sense. If, for example, I had magical powers and I would right now disappear and bring back Stalin alive, and he will sit in front of you right now, imagine I'm Stalin, then what would be the question that you would like to ask him? Is there a question that you kind of stumbled upon during your research that you wanted to ask him if you could? I want to ask, what do you think about my book? It could occur to you as a reader of your life as an intellectual. Actually, there is another variation on that question. And I'm going to answer this question rather than the one you've asked me. The question you could have asked me, say, well, what do you think Stalin would have made of your book? What do you think he would have thought about your book, my book, Stalin's library, had you read it? My answer to that is this. I'd like to think that, and how would Stalin have marked this book? I'd like to think that Stalin would have marked the book by using his favourite annotation, which was Note Bene, NB. That was Stalin's favourite annotation. Hundreds, thousands of examples of that. Because when Stalin's reading, he's reading to learn, to acquire new information and ideas. And that's what he's marking the book up as. And NB, obviously, everyone does it. It's a very, very useful abbreviation to actually indicate. So I'm hoping he would read my book and mark it NB. Oh, yeah, really important book. Yeah, yeah, Roberts has really, really sussed out my mind and the way I read books. Yeah, he's done a great, great job here. Okay. But I would hope that would be the case, NB. But I think more likely the case would have been that Stalin would have written on my book somewhere, maybe on the front cover, would be his second favourite annotation, which was Ha, ha, ha, ha. A derisive laugh, right? So I think he would probably have written Ha, ha. Okay, so Roberts really thinks he can get inside my head by reading, you know, my library books and by looking at my pamphlet. He really believes that to say Ha, ha. That's my answer to your question. That's a very interesting point to make. You know, what would someone like Stalin, Napoleon or any historical personality about whom a biography was written, what would they think about those biographies? Would they say like, oh, this is good, this is fair, this is not? That's a question for your future interview. But if I want to go back to the question you asked, the question you'd like to ask him. Yeah, yeah, still, okay. So, you know, as I said earlier, one reason I wrote the book, or did this research, I want to ask this question, you know, why did Stalin prosecute, persecute, execute all these people who'd been formerly so close to him, his former close comrades, who he now, in the 1930s, who he now said were traitors, yes? And, you know, saboteurs, assassins, conspirators. And he had lots of them, the top leaders anyway, put on these show trials, yes? And then they were found guilty and then mostly they were executed. So, I asked my, you know, I wrote the book in order to, how do you explain that? Okay, and you'll find the answer. I gave him the book and I was talking about earlier, but I'm still not quite convinced. I've quite put my finger on the answer. So, I'd like to say, say, did you really believe all these crazy charges that you made against these people, people like Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev? Do you really believe that they were involved in these conspiracies with the Nazis, the fascists and the foreign powers and they they betrayed? Do you really believe that's the story that's told, you know, in this course? Or was it just all pretense? Did you know? Did you know better? I'd like, you know, I'd like to, that's the question I would ask. Do you really believe that was the story? It is also, personally to me, it was very interesting that such a huge reader was also a person who banned the books. I mean, I do understand that he understood the influence of the books, that the ideas that certain books contain can go against the revolution, but as a person who was a thinking, who was intellectual, it is difficult to, if you are, if you believe in human capacities of critical thinking, and if you believe that Marxism is the right way of going to ban someone from reading other books, you know, if it is the truth, why do you ban? Of course, it's a simple question. There are many layers there, but it was interesting that the person who was such a huge reader also banned many books. I agree, they did ban the books completely, you know, they just restricted access, access to them, but yeah, yeah, yeah, but okay, so you said it yourself, is that, you know, Bolshevik, Stalin believed in the power of words, the power of ideas, the power of books, the power of text. They believed that they could change the world, change people's thinking, their consciousness, indeed actually be part of changing human nature. So they described this huge kind of power to books, which they tried to utilize themselves, but at the same time, they were, they were afraid, they feared that the books might be used to subvert socialism, subvert Soviet power, so they wanted to control what books people read, you know, how they read them, yeah. So there was this kind of like, which kind of indicates in ways what you were saying, a certain lack of confidence and ascribing power to their, a huge amount of power to their enemies, actually, to the ideologies of their enemies, okay, which might lead you to think, well, maybe, you know, there was a certain element of doubt among the Bolsheviks about the truth of their ideology, right, and I think that was true of some Bolsheviks. I don't think it was true of Stalin. I mean, the other thing was quite clear from this, his library books, how he read, you know, so we had thousands upon thousands of, you know, pages where Stalin, in hundreds of texts, where Stalin's interacting with the text, with what he's reading, various kind of ways, and there's no, for all this kind of material, right, and not just in the library, but in all the other material, all the other documents which he marked, he wrote on, or he interacted with, there was no hint whatsoever that Stalin had any doubts about the truth of his ideology, the truth of his position, yeah, none whatsoever, yeah. No, he was a fanatic without any, without any secret doubts. I think if I've proved one thing in my book, I've proved, I've proved that fact. So it's the kind of thing, yeah, there's no doubt, there's no, you know, no hesitation, 100% commitment to ideology, and yet there is this fear that the ideology is vulnerable and fragile from, you know, subversion by class and political enemies. Thank you so much, Geoffrey Roberts, for your time. It is an incredible story, and there are so many sides that we could discuss. I'm just very wary of your time, and I'm so grateful for this wonderful conversation. I think, like, personalities such as Stalin need to be explored to understand, because they reveal so much also about ourselves in some sense. I would encourage everybody to buy, get your wonderful book, Stalin and His Library. I got so many questions about this book when I shared it in my newsletter, so I'm quite sure that many people would be interested to go deeper and read your book. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. I'm assuming if you hear this, that you have listened and enjoyed my interview with Professor Roberts. Welcome to the club, you're officially a nerd. And if you are a nerd, once again, consider subscribing to my newsletter, and send me a personal email. Tell me what kind of books you've enjoyed reading recently, who you would like to hear from on this podcast. I might invite that guest, and you can send your own questions, and ask your favorite author questions that you are really curious about. Once again, thank you for all your support, and I hope to see you on my newsletter, and until the next time, this was Vasek Armenikas, and Art Dov Podcast.
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