An Interview with Geoffrey Roberts about ‘Stalin’s Library’ – Yale University Press London Blog
An interview with Geoffrey Roberts by Jiwan Lee of NermerBooks upon the publication of the Korean edition of Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books in March 2024. The book has been or will also be published in Arabic, French, Greek, Japanese, Portuguese and Romanian. The interview is republished with permission.
Jiwan Lee: Your reputation as a leading authority in the field of Soviet military and foreign policy precedes you. Stalin’s Wars, which was translated into Korean, received exceptional reviews. The approach taken in Stalin’s Library, which delves into Stalin’s intellectual life and biography through the lens of his reading habits, appears notably distinct from previous studies. What inspired you to undertake the writing of Stalin’s Library?
Geoffrey Roberts: I wrote the book because of a fantastic source – the remnants of Stalin’s personal library and the many hundreds of books that he marked or annotated. No source is more revealing of Stalin’s most intimate thoughts, feelings and beliefs.
I wanted to write a wide-ranging book about Stalin’s life and career but not a conventional biography. There are many good biographies of Stalin but none that portray in detail his life as a working intellectual. Reading, writing, editing and marking texts were Stalin’s life from the early 19320s onwards. By exploring his engagement as a reader we can see the world though his eyes.
JL: Prior characterizations of Stalin have often been ambivalent, ranging from portrayals of him as an ideological fanatic with expansionistic foreign policies to those depicting him as a moderate realist politician. Your research appears to transcend these dichotomies by portraying Stalin as a leader deeply committed to his socialist convictions. Could you expand on this perspective? How would you assess Stalin’s legacy?
GR: The most important thing that the evidence of Stalin’s personal library shows us is the depth and authenticity of his ideology and political beliefs. No one was more adept at utilising power than Stalin but that was a means not an end. Defending the Russian Revolution and building Soviet socialism was his all-consuming aim. Stalin really was an idealist, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be ruthless and pragmatic. He was a practical intellectual who read to learn and to inform his practice as a politician.
JL: Chapters 3 and 4 of your book shed light on the intersection of Stalin’s personal life and Soviet history. What sets Stalin’s Library apart from other biographies of Stalin? In what ways did you endeavour to address shortcomings in existing research?
GR: There are many very good biographies of Stalin, most recently those by Stephen Kotkin and Oleg Khlevniuk. There is also Erik van Ree’s important study of Stalin’s political thought and Sarah Davies & James Harris’s Stalin’s World. These and other studies also see Stalin as primarily an intellectual and make some use of the materials in Stalin’s personal library but not in the sustained and systematic way that I do in my book.
In my book your will find many small discoveries that you won’t find elsewhere in the literature about Stalin but most important is the book’s big idea: that Stalin was a feeling intellectual. He cared about books and ideas. It was the emotional force of his ideology that kept him going for so many decades as a thinking, acting and engaged intellectual who was capable of fantastic achievements as well gross misdeeds such as the Great Terror of the 1930s.
JL: Your meticulous research into Stalin’s reading history is evident throughout the book. Which of Stalin’s “pometki” (markings and annotations) left the most significant impression on you?
GR: The most shocking thing to me personally was how similar his pometki were to the markings you will find in my personal book collection!
I was intrigued by the care and attention that Stalin paid to some of Trotsky’s writings, and to those of other political opponents such as Karl Kautsky. Stalin read to learn even from his enemies. He also had a wicked sense of humour: “ha ha” or “hee hee” was a very common annotation of statements he found ridiculous or amusing, but by far his most frequent marginal comment was NB.
Apart from Marxist theory, Stalin read more history than anything else, though he also read a lot of fictional literature – plays, films scripts, poetry and short stories as well as novels. While he believed that Marxist ideology was the key to understanding everything about the social and human world, his favourite historian was a non-Marxist – Yuri Vipper, who wrote mainly about ancient Greece and Rome and early Christianity.
People wonder how influenced Stalin was by the ideas of Machiavelli but it seems to me that he was more interested in the practical realpolitik of 19th century Germany’s ‘Iron Chancellor’, Otto von Bismarck.
Stalin’s most surprising interest, perhaps, was books about the constitutional law of capitalist countries – a sources for his thinking about Soviet constitutional reform. He thought the Soviet political and legal system was superior to that of the West but was concerned to study alternative systems.
JL: Chapter 5 includes explanations of Stalin’s relationship with Lenin, the motivations of Great Terror, Stalin’s anti-Semitism and Russocentrism, and Stalin’s role as a wartime leader. Those are issues that are still controversial. Were there any issues you wanted to emphasize in particular?
GR: One of the reasons I wrote the book was to achieve a better understanding of the Great Terror. The mass repressions of the mid-1930s showed Stalin’s determination to eradicate those he saw as enemies of the Soviet system – a determination that was driven by emotions as well as ideological belief in the struggle against class enemies.
I wouldn’t say the Great Terror was driven by Stalin’s views of history – for example his positive evaluation of Ivan the Terrible’s brutal role in creating a strong and centralised Russian state – but they certainly provided him with a long-term perspective that situated his repressive actions as part of centuries of Russian history.
Important, too, in this regard, is Stalin’s view of himself as a Soviet patriot rather than a Russocentrist. Stalin was a Georgian who had a very high regard for Russian culture and history but he was also committed to maintaining the multinational and multi-ethnic nature of the sprawling state the Bolsheviks had seized from the Tsars.
Stalin had his personal prejudices but he was not anti-Semitic in any meaningful sense. Some of his closest comrades were Jewish or had Jewish wives. In principle, he was opposed to all forms of racism. The USSR supported the establishment of an independent Jewish state in Palestine in 1948 His subsequent antagonism towards Israel was political and based on hostility to Jewish nationalism in the form of Zionism – which he saw as a potential threat to the internal stability of the Soviet system.
As for Stalin’s war leadership, I have written a whole book about that.
JL: I was deeply impressed by Stalin’s views on history and art. According to Stalin’s Library, he did not favour the convergence of historical facts into discussions of abstract socio-economic formations, and he was opposed to the subordination of art to communist ideology. I thought that Stalin was able to take this attitude because he followed the virtues of ‘scientific socialism’ – what is your assessment of this aspect of Stalin?
GR: Yes, Stalin could be very virtuous when it came to what he said about what constituted good art and history. The problem was that, more often than not, he deemed political and ideological criteria were more important. In the end, Stalin always came down in favour of politically correct art. Similarly, while he often preached the virtues of rigorous historical methodology, he was not always consistent in its application, for example to the history of communism. The communist party and its immediate political needs always ruled supreme for Stalin. For Stalin it was not the truth that was revolutionary; it was the revolution that determined what was deemed true.
About the Book
Stalin’s Library
A Dictator and his Books
Geoffrey Roberts
“A truly fascinating study that leaves no doubt that Stalin took ideas as seriously as political power itself.”—Tony Barber, Financial Times
“Roberts’ book is not only a study of Stalin’s library. Written in a lively and attractive style, it provides substantial and judicious background material about Stalin’s career and his known interventions in film, literature, and foreign policy that will be new to Stalin specialists and interesting for non-specialists, advanced undergraduates, and for the general public.”—J. Arch Getty, Slavic Review
About the Author
Geoffrey Roberts is emeritus professor of history at University College Cork and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. A leading Soviet history expert, his many books include an award-winning biography of Zhukov, Stalin’s general, and the acclaimed Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War.
