What did Stalin want? What did Viper do for Ivan the Terrible?

If I ask that question just quickly, Stalin was, you know, okay, you could say he was a Soviet and indeed a Russian patriot, but Stalin was also an internationalist, yeah? He had global interests in terms of history.

So he's interested in the history of lots of different countries, not just the history of Russia.

Yeah, but going back to WIPA.

Okay, so WIPA specializes in the history of early Christianity.

He wrote this book about the Roman Empire, which we discussed earlier.

But Vipa also wrote a very famous book about Ivan the Terrible, Ivan Grozny, Ivan III.

Why not, Professor?

What was it that attracted him? Had he read Lenin at this point? Or did he see something in Lenin's eyes? I'm trying to imagine what that painting is supposed to convey.

OK, so Stalin drops out of the seminary where he was trained to be a priest because he no longer wants to be a priest because his whole outlook on life has changed through reading, actually.

And he now considers himself to be a socialist.

And he gravitates towards the revolutionary movement in Russia.

And the movement that he joins, the party he joins, is the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party.

uh kind of marxist based organization but that that and that party not long after so stalin joins in 1898 and a few years later not many years later that party splits it splits into two factions right uh a so-called bolshevik faction or majority faction headed by lenin and there's also a faction called dementia or the minority fashion okay so stalin aligns himself with lenin lenin's bolshevik faction And from then on, Lenny is a completely committed supporter of Bolshevism and a completely committed supporter of Lenny.

Now, I'm not sure I'd use the word devotion, actually.

Is there an organizing principle here, why he detailed these subjects and then singled out these certain authors to be separate from the other subjects? How did he explain it to the librarian?

Um, so did you have a chance, like maybe tell us about Brian, maybe you have something else, but for me it would be interesting, how did you find his books, you know, how did you look through all that? What was your sort of methodology and what did you find in that? And what were you maybe hoping to find in the, in the beginning? Were you, um, did you have sort of some idea before you even started?

Hmm.

Yes, g- good question.

Um, yeah, as, important point to note that, you know, Stalin's Library is not, I didn't write the book for other historians or other scholars, yeah? Okay, it, it's a scholarly book, but I wrote it for a general readership, yes, for general readers, people interested in history, right? So, so, you know, I, I, as and the same is true of all or most of my books.

They're, they're meant to be, you know, they- they're accessible, right, to a broad range of readers, and that's how I conceived, um, Stalin's Library as well, which is not to say I don't think there's, there isn't a hell of a lot in it for, for, for other scholars, for other specialists in it.

I, I, I, I think, I think there is a lot for them as well, but that, but that, that's import- important to understand.

Um, w- how did I come to write this particular book? Well, I, I said it was to do with a source, but there's a, there's a particular story about the source, which is that when I took on the project, supposedly all these books were going to be digitized and form part of the Stalin Digital Archive.

And then by being able to place how he got to certain conclusions within the d- world of discussions at the time in relation to the kind of political conditions that he's functioning in, you know, you get this different kind of picture of the, uh, the decision-making, the analysis and the, the frameworks through which Stalin's, like, political practice, if you will, comes from.

And so why don't we start there? Why did you write about her?

Well, I met Kathy through her letters.

And I'll tell the story in the book.

My first trip to the United States, September 2001, I was in Washington, D.C., working in the Library of Congress on a file of Avril Harman's papers in the Library of Congress.

And in those papers, dispersed throughout those papers in hundreds of different files, copies of some of Cathy's letters.

So that's what I came across.

I can't remember whether or not I discovered her letters before the terror attacks or after the terror attacks.

What kind of world was she living in?

Zhukov was placed in charge of its defense.

Of course, there is this famous photo of advanced German units being within the sight of the Kremlin, yes? And they're there, and in the distance there's the Kremlin.

That's what nowadays we would call like fake news, yes? It's a fake photo, obviously.

It's a propaganda photo.

Okay, so but why is it that the Germans are approaching Moscow when initially during the autumn where you have the famous Rasputitsa, the time of bad roads because of the rain and stuff like that, mud and things like that.

And then following that, because of like wintry conditions.which develop in October, November.

Why is it that they're approaching at that point? Well, they're approaching at that point because their advance on Moscow has been held up for about two months in the Smolensk area.

Zhukov would once again be called on by Stalin as the Soviet Union faced another crisis.

Was it-- Did you-- Didn't you report that Lenin wanted a, a Marxist s... um, a Marxist party in America? He thought that that would be a success?

Yeah.

O- obviously, you know, Stalin's a Marxist, and he's a socialist.

His as- his aspiration, in fact, he sees it inevitable, is that socialism is going to spread throughout the globe, for the whole world, yes, including to, uh, you know, to, to, to, to the United States.

So there's no doubt about what end goal that Stalin has in mind.

It's a socialist America.

But in the meantime, you know, but that's part of a long, uh, of a historical process, which might be quite a long one.

In practice, he was driven by dogma and expedience." Um, what is dogma? What was dogma to him, Professor? We have a couple of minutes.

What did Stalin want? What did Vipa do for S- for Ivan the Terrible?

[chuckles] Okay.

If I ask that question just quickly, um, Stalin was, uh, you know...

Okay, I, you could say he was a Soviet and indeed a Russian patriot, if you like, but Stalin was also an internationalist, yeah? He was-- He had glo- global interests in terms of history.

So he's interested in history in lots of different countries, not just the, the history of Russia.

Yeah, but, but, but going back to, to Vipa.

Okay, so, so Vipa, uh, specialized in, in, in history of early Christianity.

Why not, Professor?

What did Stalin think of Bismarck? Did he divide his life between early and late? Was he attracted to the Iron Chancellor? Was he attracted to the reformer? What about Bismarck?

It's, it's, it's very difficult to know what Stalin thought about Bismarck in, in detail, because the Bismarck books that Stalin, um, uh, read, and in some cases, marked, they disappeared from, from the archive.

[chuckles] Now, we don't know, we don't know, we don't know where they are.

What, what we can say with certainty is that Stalin was very interested in, um, um, uh, Bismarck.

He was very insistent that, um, uh, you know, um, uh, Bismarck's memoirs should be translated into Russian.

In fact, there should be a new edition of Bismarck memoirs.

He was interested in other books, uh, a-about, about Bismarck and about treatments o-of Bismarck, and he was very keen to actually, you know, discuss, uh, you know, Bismarck's memoirs and Bi- Bismarck.

Yeah.

Are, are the books still being discovered, scattered around the Soviet Union, Professor?

No, no. Um, [clear throat] okay, so, so about five and a half thousand of, um, books from Stalin's personal library survives, actually, what you quite rightly called the scattering, um, after his death.

Um, five thousand of those books are in, uh, you got five-- yeah, five thousand books are, are actually in a, in a library, uh, in, in, in, in Moscow, so and you can go and view them there.

And, and there's another five hundred books which are kept in, uh, an archive, and that five hundred books are the books that, um, w-w-as you say, with Stalin's palmetki, with his markings, with his, uh, with annotations.

Again, they're, they're open to researchers.

Yeah, and now-- okay, so the idea that Stalin, you know, had a lot of books, read a lot of books, that wasn't, uh, particularly, well, a particular revelation.

Um, but, but yeah, but there was this nineteen eighty-eight memoir by, um, Sharapov, Yuri Sharapov, who, after Stalin's death, had been given the job of sifting through his books and, you know, seeing what was there and trying to sort them out in, in, various ways.

Do you find, because you've looked at these books, do you find there is a basis for that scale of condemnation in the Stalin, the book reader, Professor?

And in this change, Professor, from the scattering of books in the apartment or in the dacha where he raised his children to this new one, does the nature of the library change, or is it-- does it just get larger?

Hmm.

Yeah, uh, yeah, as you say, uh, you know, Nadia, Nadezhda.

Nadia was, uh, Stalin's second wife.

Um, she was quite young when she married, uh, Sta- um, Stalin.

She was eighteen, nineteen, I think.

Yeah, when she married Stalin in nineteen nineteen.

Okay.

How-- Is there an organizing principle here, why he, why he detailed these subjects and then singled out these, uh, these se-- certain authors to be separate from the other subjects? How did, how did he explain it to the librarian?

Yeah.

Well, well, as we were discussing earlier, you know, um, Stalin was a great admirer of Lenin, and he, he considered himself to be Lenin's disciple.

So the thing about Lenin, for starters, Lenin was Stalin's role model, yeah? And the thing about Stalin-- Lenin was that he was an intellectual, uh, but he was also a practical, uh, uh, man of action.

And, and Lenin, uh, was also a, a huge reader as well, of course, and he had a huge personal library, uh, and he, he worked surrounded by books.

Yes? So, so Lenin's very much Stalin's, uh, role model in relation to Stalin's library as well.

The, the, the aspiration to build up a huge, um, uh, you know, personal, personal, uh, book, book collection.

So what was his thinking about that, that stamp that he had put in his book? Were those special when he-- when it said, "From the library of, of Stalin?"

What was it that attracted him? Had he read Lenin at this point, or did he see some- something in Lenin's eyes? I'm trying to imagine what that painting is supposed to convey.

Uh, okay, so, so, so Stalin drops out of seminary, um, where he was trained to be a priest, because he no, he no longer wants to be a priest, because his, his whole outlook on life has changed through reading, actually.

And, and he now considers himself to be a socialist.

Um, and he gravitates towards the revolutionary movement in Russia, and the movement that he joins, the party he joins, is the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party, uh, a kind of Marxist-based organization.

But that, that... and that party, not long after-- so Stalin joins in eighteen ninety-eight, and a few years later, not many years later, that party splits.

It splits into two factions, right? Uh, a, a, a so-called Bolshevik faction or majority faction, headed by Lenin, and there's also a faction called Mensheviks, or the, or the, or the minority faction.

Okay, so Stalin aligns himself with Lenin, Lenin's Bolshevik faction, and from, from then on, um, you know, Lenin is, is, is a completely, uh, committed supporter of Bolshevism and a completely, um, committed, um, supporter of Lenin.

Is that true, Professor?

Does that mean they were illiterate, and who taught him to read? Where did he learn to read?

Um, yeah, a- actually, Stalin was definitely born in 1878, but for some reason, he made his official birthday another date in, um, eighteen sometime.

There are lots of like theories as to why he did that, but none that make, make sense to me.

Yeah, so he's born in Georgia, uh, in a, in a, in a small town, a small place, uh, called, uh, you know, called Gori, which is about a couple of hundred miles from, um, the Georgian capital of, uh, Tbilisi.

His parents aren't that poor, actually.

Um, they're not, not well off, but his father, you know, was a shoemaker, but he was a shoe- a shoemaker who had apprentices, uh, you know, working for him.

And, and Stalin used to like to tell the story about how his father's small business went bust, and that's when, you know [chuckles] the, the family, the, the family be, uh, uh, became poor.

In other words, this is a g- this is a precocious young man.

Is that correct, Professor?

Yeah, I'm glad you raised this, uh, this question about Stalin's views on the United States and America 'cause I... to my mind, that's one of the most interesting and original parts of my book, is my treatment of Stalin and, and that subject.

Yeah, so no, actually Stalin had a lot of good things to say about, uh, about the United States in the 1920s and 1930s.

He kind of saw it as kind of a progressive, uh, form of... advanced form of capitalism.

He was hugely impressed by, uh, American, um, productive power.

He was a huge fan of, um, of, of, uh, pre- of President, President Roos- Roosevelt.

And of course, the United States and, um, the Soviet Union were very close allies, uh, dur- during, during the second World War.

In practice, he was driven by dogma and expedience." Um, what is dogma? What was dogma to him, Professor? We have a couple of minutes.

What did Stalin want... what did Rieper do for s- for Ivan the Terrible?

Yeah, okay.

For us, that question is quickly, uh, Stalin was a... you know, okay, I... you could say he was a Soviet and indeed T- a Russian patriot if you like, but Stalin was also an internationalist.

Yeah.

He was...

he had glo- uh, global interest in terms of history, so his interested in history in lots of different countries, not just the, the history of Russia.

Yeah.

Why not, professor?

What did Stalin think of Bismarck? Did he divide his life between early and late? Was he attracted to the Iron Chancellor? Was he attracted to the reformer? What about Bismarck?

It's, it's, it's very difficult to know what Stalin thought about Bismarck in, in detail, because the Bismarck books that Stalin, um, uh, y- uh, re- read, and in some cases marked, they disappeared from, from the archive.

You know, (laughs) we don't know, we don't know, we don't know where they are.

What, what we can say with certainty is that Stalin was very interested in, um, um, uh, uh, Bismarck.

He was very insistent that, um, uh, uh, you know, um, uh, uh, Bismarck's memoirs should be translated into Russian.

In fact, there should be a new edition of Bismarck's memoirs.

He was interested in other books, uh, a- ab- about Bismarck and about treatments o- of Bismarck.

What do we know what part-

Are, are there books still being discovered scattered around the Soviet Union, professor?

No, no. Um, okay, so, so about five and a half thousand, um, books from Stalin's personal library survives, actually, what you quite w- rightly called scattering, um, after his death.

Um, 5,000 of those books are in, uh, you've got f- yeah, 5,000 books are, are actually in a, in a library, uh, in, in, in, in Moscow, so, and you can go and view them there.

A- and there's another 500 books which are kept in, uh, an archive, and that 500 books are the books that, um, with, with, with, as you say, with Stalin's (ukrainian), with his markings, with his, uh, with an annotation.

Again, they're, they're open to researchers.

Yeah.

And knowl- okay, so the idea that Stalin, you know, had a lot of books, read a lot of books, that wasn't, uh, particularly, well, a particular revelation.

A professor, and I read just a little of it, uh, "Roy Medvedev, uh, finds Stalin and Stalin's library boorishness and self-important, pathological conceit and callousness, mistrust and stealth, an inability to take criticism of comrades, and a, and, and a, in- and a craving for influence and power, a condemnation of Stalin." Do you find, because you've looked at these books, do you find there's a basis for that scale of condemnation in the Stalin the book reader, Professor?

And in this change, Professor, from the scattering of books in the apartment or in the dacha where he raised his children to this new one, does the nature of the library change or is it... does it just get larger?

Mm.

Yeah, uh, y- y- as you say, uh, you know, Nadia, Nadezhda Nadia, was, uh, Stalin's second wife.

Um, she was quite young when she married, uh, St- um, Stalin.

She was 18, 19, I think, yeah, when she married Stalin in 1919 so he was, like, considerably, um, older.

They had, uh, they had two children, uh, in the 1920s.

There's a lot of evidence to show that they had a lot of... uh, you know, real evidence, documentary evidence, not just people's claims or memoirs, that they had, you know, a reasonably happy, um, family, family life in the 1920s, yeah? But, but, but whatev- for whatever reason, things went wrong and then, uh, there's this episode in 1932 and, and Nadia, um, uh, shoots herself.

Did Stalin ever write anything like that? That when he went to his library, he was with friends, people he was comfortable with, the books?

Is there an organizing principle here of why he, why he detailed these subjects and then singled out these, uh, these, uh, certain authors to be separate from the other subjects? How, how did he explain it to the librarian?

Yeah.

Well, well, as we were discussing earlier, you know, um, Stalin was great admirer of Lenin and he, he considered himself to be Lenin's disciple.

So the thing about Lenin for starts, Lenin was Stalin's role model, yeah? And the thing about, Sta- Lenin was that he was an intellectual, uh, but he was also a practical a- a- a man of action.

And Lenin, uh, was also a, a huge reader as well, of course, and he had a huge personal library, uh, and he, he worked surrounded by books, yes? So, so Lenin's very much Stalin's, uh, role model in relation to Stalin's library as well.

The, the, the aspiration to build up a huge, um, uh, you know, personal, personal, uh, book, book collection.

And that actually leads him after Lenin's death to employ, um, you know, the, the person, um, who had been Lenin's personal library and a woman called, uh, Shushanika Manikjaran, right? To organize his bo- book collection to actually help transform it into a, um, a, um, a, a, a definite personal library with an identity of its own.

when it said, "From the library of, of Stalin?"

What was it that attracted him? Had he read Lenin at this point or did he see some- something in Lenin's eyes? I'm trying to imagine what that painting is supposed to convey.

O- oh, okay.

So, so, so Stalin drops out of seminary, um, where he was trained to be a priest because he no l- he no longer wants to be a priest because his, his whole li- look on life has changed, from reading actually.

Uh, and he now considers himself to be a socialist.

Um, and he gravitates towards the revolutionary movement in Russia and the movement that he joins, the party he joins is the Russian Social Democratic and Labor Party, uh, become Marxist-based organization.

But that, that, and that party no longer...

So Stalin joins in 1898 and then a few years later, not many years later, that party splits, it splits into two factions, right? Uh, uh, a so-called Bolshevik faction or majority faction headed by Lenin and there's also a faction called Mensheviks or the, or the, or the minority faction.

Is that true, Professor?

Does that mean they were illiterate and who taught him to read? Where did he learn to read?

Mm-hmm.

Um, y- yeah, a- actually Stalin was definitely born in 1878, but for some reason he made his official birthday another date in, um, 1879.

There are lots of, like, theories as to why he did that, but none that make, make sense to me.

Yeah, so he's born in Georgia, uh, in a, in a, in a small town, small place, uh, called, uh, you know, called Gori, which is about couple hundred miles from, um, the Georgian capital of, uh, Tbilisi.

His parents aren't that poor, actually.

Um, they're not... not well off, but his father, you know, was a shoemaker, but he was a shoe- a shoemaker who had apprentices, uh, uh, you know, working for him.

In other words, this is a g- this is a, a precocious young man.