Stalin. d.5th Match 1953 Intellectual or gravedigger?
J V Stalin died on 5th March 1953 aged 74. The anniversary passed unremarked for many years aside from hardline pro-Stalinists. Nowadays there is a certain fashion for Stalin if not Stalinism amongst a new layer of activists.
As a lifelong anti-Stalinist I struggle with any view of Stalin that doesn’t begin with him as the gravedigger of the Russian Revolution.
In that sense Geoffrey Roberts recent book on Stalin’s Library is challenging (the Guardian review below reaches a broadly similar conclusion). I heard the author speak at a Socialist History Society launch of the book and without question it was interesting. It is based on archival research and focused on looking at the marginal notes and comments Stalin made in books which were part of his extensive library.
These books form a minority of the library-itself incomplete as it was partly broken up after 1956- and as Roberts notes there have been previous studies of them. He seeks to use them to see if it’s possible to grasp Stalin’s perspective on the world. I’m not sure he reaches a conclusion beyond the point that Stalin was in his view an ‘intellectual’
I’m not sure Lenin agreed on that but it’s certainly true that Stalin came out of a Bolshevik culture that prized learning and study. How that related to his lengthy period in charge of the USSR seems problematic. One recalls for example that Harold Shipman was a Guardian reader..
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