He took with him 18 library books, for which the monks demanded payment of 18 roubles and 15 kopeks. When, 54 years later, the same voracious bookworm died, he had 72 unreturned volumes from the Lenin Library in Moscow on his packed shelves. At the time, the librarians probably had too many other issues with Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aka Stalin, to worry about collecting his unpaid fines.
Those squirrelled library loans formed a tiny part of a vast collection amassed by the Soviet dictator, estimated by historian Geoffrey Roberts at 25,000 items. Joseph Stalin’s books, as Roberts recounts in his new study Stalin’s Library, belonged to “a serious intellectual who valued ideas as much as power”. He spent a lifetime as a “highly active, engaged and methodical reader”. His tastes and interests spanned not only politics, economics and history but literature of many kinds. The book-loving shoemaker’s son from Georgia grew into an absolute ruler who deployed his library not as a prestige adornment but a “working archive”. Its bulging shelves stretched across his Kremlin offices and quarters, and around his dachas outside central Moscow.
Stalin not only read, quickly and hungrily: he claimed to devour 500 pages each day and, in the Twenties, ordered 500 new titles every year — not to mention the piles of works submitted to him by hopeful or fearful authors. He annotated with passion and vigour. Hundreds of volumes crawl with his distinctive markings and marginalia (the so-called pometki), their pages festooned with emphatic interjections: “ha ha”, “gibberish”, “rubbish”, “fool”, “scumbag”; and, more rarely, “agreed”, “spot on”, or the noncommittal doubt conveyed by the Russian “m-da”.
Stalin also drafted, wrote, and re-wrote, keenly and tirelessly — everything from Communist Party propaganda to Soviet legal edicts and textbooks in history, Marxist-Leninist philosophy and economics. He loved to edit and, as Roberts shows, he did it very well, slicing through the verbiage of sycophants to achieve greater “clarity and accuracy”. Although not an original thinker, “his intellectual hallmark was that of a brilliant simplifier, clarifier and populariser”. Robert Service, in his biography, calls the dictator “an accumulator and regurgitator” of ideas.
An example of why you should never trust intellectuals.
I read a lot. I used to read a lot of rubbish because I didn’t know any better. Tossed a lot of stupid, stupid stuff into the donation boxes. That included most of my college textbooks. The world is overflowing with bullshit.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Good ideas are precious and rare. Bad ideas have killed millions.
Usually out-front political guys spend their time talking and meeting.
Stalin never struck me as the book-worm sort.
Adolf Hitler also had an extensive library spread across his residences and offices. Just the chunk the Americans hauled off was sizeable; unfortunately, most of it went into various basements and long-term storage at the Library of Congress, and last time I looked, nobody had even bothered to post a catalog of the collection, assuming one was ever made.
(Famously, all the documents related to the Japanese A-bomb projects are *still* uncataloged… the LOC isn’t all that good at such things, apparently.)
TRX,
Hitler’s Private Library by Timothy Ryback was an interesting read.
If you’re not reading I, Stalin by Martin Van Creveld, you are missing out.
Bomag, Stalin did both. Stalin was an excellent organizer, but he won because he went to all the meetings.
And, yes, he read voraciously, but he won because he won the meetings — that and doing without hesitation whatever Lenin needed done. Trotsky gave speeches, fiery writing. Stalin went to the meetings.
He also read up and read reports, wiretaps, biographies on everyone and everyone he met with. He read many letters from the people, including the camp inmates, daily.
TRX says, “Famously, all the documents related to the Japanese A-bomb projects are *still* uncataloged.”
There’s a reason for that. The Japanese made nukes during the war and there is at least one Japanese scientist that said they exploded one in a test right before Hiroshima.
https://www.historynet.com/book-review-japans-secret-war-japans-race-against-time-to-build-its-own-atomic-bomb-robert-k-wilcox-wwii/
Further confirmation comes from the enormous resources put into the ultra long range submarine that Japan built carrying only three airplanes. The only military use for such a vessel would be if it carried nukes. This sub confirms to me that even of they were not able to build a nuke they were trying their best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400-class_submarine
“Tossed a lot of stupid, stupid stuff into the donation boxes.”
Instead of donating poison and trash, I threw it out. For example, David Frum books I bought in the ’90s are in the landfill now.