B. S. Ilizarov

Stalin's secret life

Dedicated to the memory of my father

But woke up, staggered,

Filled with fear

A bowl filled with poison was raised above the ground

And they said: “Drink, damned,

undiluted fate,

we do not want heavenly truth,

easier for us earthly lies.

Joseph Stalin

(translated from Georgian by F. Chuev)

Man or evil demon

In the soul, as in a pocket, climbed,

He spat there and spoiled,

Ruined everything, ruined everything

And, giggling, he disappeared.

Fool, you believe us all, -

Whispers the most vile beast, -

Though vomit on a platter

People will bow with a bow,

Eat and don't scratch their teeth.

Fedor Sologub

I will not hide anything from you: I was horrified by the great idle power, which deliberately went into abomination.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (from preparatory materials for the novel "Demons")

Each of us human beings is one of countless experiments...

Sigmund Freud. Leonardo da Vinci. childhood memory

Preface to the fourth edition

Ten years have passed since the first publication of this book. I am grateful to fate and the publishing house for seeing the updated edition during my lifetime. Updated, not in the sense that it revised the views on the Stalin era and the history of Russia in the twentieth century. In parallel with this, my new book comes out: “Honorary Academician Stalin and Academician Marr. On the linguistic discussion of 1950 and the problems associated with it. Despite the fact that the same character runs through both books, they deal with related but different issues. The book, which the reader holds in his hands, analyzes the hidden spiritual and moral breaks of Stalin's nature as part of his biography; the second book is more devoted to the history of the intellect, and in the area in which Stalin considered himself the first of the foremost, that is, in the field of the national question, language and related political and cultural problems. But the first and second books are not only about Stalin, his era and the people whose life and fate he influenced, they are about all of us (including Stalin, of course), forced from the moment of birth until the moment of death to face a choice: good or evil. A statesman, like any person born on earth, is not free from this fateful choice both for himself and for the country. It seems to me that this is a new aspect for modern historical science. In this regard, I added a final paragraph in which I outlined my understanding of the problem of choice (the problem of morality) in relation to the historical "hero" in general and, to Stalin, in particular. Since the forthcoming new book is devoted to the relationship between Stalin and Academician Marr, the author of the Japhetic theory of the origin of language and thought, I have transferred from this book a small fragment that is directly related to the linguistic discussion of 1950.

Immediately after the publication of the first edition, in 2002, I began to receive various responses. But both positive and negative were often superficial, and therefore unproductive, and only in recent years have I become acquainted with opinions concerning the very essence of the issues raised in the book.

The patriarch of modern Russian literature, Daniil Granin, shared the following thoughts in a recent interview:

(correspondent) “- How can you characterize the personality of Stalin in a few words?

– You know, I had different periods in this regard: before and after the 20th Congress, where all the cruelties of Stalin were exposed, and especially the “Leningrad case”, which I encountered a little, but then I was convinced that everything here is much more complicated. In what sense? Well, at least in the fact that Iosif Vissarionovich loved and knew literature very much, read a lot ... There are wonderful studies on this subject, in particular, the historian Boris Ilizarov studied the marks made by Stalin on the margins of books ...

– ...with a red pencil?

No, they are multi-colored. All these inscriptions: “So it is!”, “Where to go?”, “Is it really that too?”, “It's terrible!”, “We will withstand” - are remarkable in that they reflect the genuine feeling of the reader. There is no window dressing here, nothing designed for the public (by the way, this reader's reaction was well shown in "Eugene Onegin" by Pushkin).

So, judging by the way Ilizarov describes Stalin's marks on Tolstoy's Resurrection, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, on the works of Anatole France, and so on, the leader was not just a book reader, but a thoughtful reader who somehow assimilated everything, worried, although it did not affect him.

– Was he a villain after all?

- Well, the explanation is too simple - there is an unimaginable, monstrous perversion. You see, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky are the greatest humanists, humanists, no one wrote better than them about the problems of conscience and goodness, but this did not affect Kobe in any way. The ennobling influence of literature, art, which we so love to talk about, ended here - he came to his Kremlin office ...

– ... and completely forgot Tolstoy and Dostoevsky ...

- ... and signed execution lists for hundreds of people, and not abstract ones, but those whom he knew, with whom he was friends.

And here is the opposite opinion of Yuri Emelyanov, a journalist who was not too lazy to write a thick book devoted to the “exposures” of anti-Stalinist statements, starting with Trotsky, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, many famous Russian and foreign historians, publicists of the twentieth century, whose apotheosis was, according to the author, my book:

“Perhaps the most striking example of the moral and intellectual fall of an anti-Stalinist was Boris Ilizarov’s book “The Secret Life of Stalin. Based on the materials of his library and archive”. There is no doubt that Ilizarov obviously undertook a difficult task: to try to interpret the character of Stalin and reveal his thoughts, sorting out the notes that he left on the margins of books. However, a person was admitted to the books from the Stalinist library, clearly unable to understand either the meaning of Stalin's notes or the content of the works that Stalin commented on.

Reporting that he struggled for five years to decipher Stalin's marks on several dozen books, Ilizarov only signed his intellectual helplessness ....

But it is possible that Ilizarov would have achieved something in his work, if not for his position. Having proclaimed the principle of “emotionally illuminated scientific history,” Ilizarov does not hide his hatred of Stalin from the very first page of the book,” etc., etc.

The reader can judge for himself what is true in Emelyanov's writings, and what is envious propaganda nonsense. I also want to draw attention to the fact that I relied not only on numerous Stalinist notes, but also on previously unknown materials from Stalin's personal archive and documents from other archives. But I agree on one thing: the critic thanks the editor-in-chief of the Veche publishing house S.N. Dmitriev. For my part, I express my gratitude to S.N. Dmitriev for many years of cooperation and a wise publishing policy that allows different authors with different views to freely address sophisticated modern readers.

Stalin on Victory Day: blame or praise?

Victory Day is also Remembrance Day. We have no right to forget about those without whom our time would be much less prosperous. About burned cities and burned destinies. And last but not least, it is worth remembering that our soldiers “boldly entered foreign capitals, but returned in fear to their own,” according to a survivor of military childhood Joseph Brodsky. Why did our fathers and grandfathers win then? Should we now praise the lush-moustached generalissimo or blaspheme? Expresses his opinion Boris Ilizarov, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, familiar to our readers from the material "Stalin's Mystery".

What do you think helped the Russians win the war?

To begin with, I will correct you: it was not the Russians who won, but the entire Soviet people, all the peoples of the Soviet Union. Which of them shed more blood is another question. And many factors helped the Victory. Without a doubt, desperation helped. When the Germans were on the Volga, the end was close, no matter how much they called "Not a step back!" Of course, colossal military success helped. Our generals were Stalin's fosterlings and did not spare the people, did not regret at all, but still managed to seize the moment, lie in wait for the Germans when they drove themselves into the trap of Stalingrad. The Germans became so insolent after the first successes that they did not calculate their forces. Then - after all, there is a spirit in our people that is difficult to convey in words: they endure, endure, but rise at the extreme point. More Pushkin spoke of our capacity for merciless rebellion. Another prerequisite for Victory is space. If the country ended beyond the Volga, we would not have won the war, there would have been no reserve. There were also allies, we were not alone on this earth. In addition, there was a great idea of ​​social justice. Then she has not yet outlived its usefulness among the people. Now you can smile, mock, spit, but then this idea still carried a big charge.

The closer Victory Day is, the more often the ghost of Stalin resurrects in the media space. Just in Yakutsk, even a bronze bust of the Generalissimo was solemnly opened ...

The choice of location is particularly striking. What does Yakutia have to do with Stalin? He had never even been there. Not in exile, not as leader. Although his hands reached there. People suffered all over the country, including in Yakutia. But there is nothing particularly surprising here. Now the Stalinists have actively bred. It is strange that a monument to Stalin was not erected in the capital yet.

My opinion is unlikely to be original. I believe that we won this war in many respects despite Stalin. Huge guilt, 99% of the blame for all the losses and defeats that we suffered in the first three years, lies with him personally. Because he is an incompetent commander in chief, an incompetent statesman, an incompetent person, insignificant in mental abilities. Although when it came to power, he showed miracles of resourcefulness. Yes, he read smart books, but did not become kinder or wiser, he built an empire, but after three decades it collapsed. It seems to me that this was a historical failure for our country. We still can't get out of it. Therefore, it is unacceptable to appeal to this figure and call it light. He is a symbol of our failures - that is how his name should be associated with Victory.

My teacher, wonderful person, professor Brzhestovskaya lived through the entire war. She said this: "We covered the Germans with our blood, we simply drowned them in our blood." I read speeches Goebbels in the Reichstag after the defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad. He declared "total war": let everyone in Germany, young and old, stand up under arms - women, children, and the elderly. Goebbels said: “We need little. Now there are three Russians for every German killed, and we need to ensure that there are nine Russians for every German killed. Then the war will be won." Our losses were colossal. And the responsibility lies with the leadership. Stalin himself said at the end of the war: “What a patient Russian people! What a wonderful Russian people!” He said that any other people would have expelled their government, but ours suffered - and we achieved Victory. He spoke correctly.

You speak of Stalin as a statesman. But there is another aspect. The soldiers at the front did not know all the Kremlin background. For them, Stalin was a god. A living person has turned into a mythical image. Some veterans still cannot part with him ...

Of course, there was no such propaganda machine as there was in the Soviet Union anywhere. The Nazis only tried to get closer to her. But I don't know which veterans we're talking about. Is it only about the Smershevites or the guards of the Gulag. Of course, those who received excess rations will bow before Stalin and still shed tears.

You are exaggerating. Literally a year ago we were at a Victory Day rally at the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences. Academician Chelyshev, an Indologist, spoke there. He is already over 90 years old. He was offended by the view that the Soviet people won in spite of Stalin. For him, this is a great person.

You know, I met different veterans. I remember the academician Samsonova. He died several years ago. He also went through the entire war, studied that era. And he was a very ardent anti-Stalinist. It's good that everyone thinks differently and can openly express their opinion. They have their views, I have mine - and thank God. The main thing is that no one imposes admiration for the leader, for the irrational force of evil. Sometimes you look around and you start to go crazy: is it all serious? Previously, they were afraid to speak out in favor of Stalin, now they are afraid to speak out against.

In many ways, with the filing of power ...

Of course, Stalinism is ideologically beneficial. After all, what is the difference between a great statesman and a nonentity? Only one - talent. He always does something new. Paradigms are laid for decades or centuries to come. And if a person is not capable of anything, he imitates - Stalin, Lenin,Hitler,Napoleon. Although now the process has moved into a new phase. Previously, Stalin was raised to the shield, but now he is already in the way, obscuring the new leader.

I wonder how the war will be reflected in a single history textbook. Are you related to him in any way?

I categorically refused to participate in these cases. Recently, at our Academy of Sciences, they started publishing a multi-volume History of Russia. It looks like a tracing paper of what happened when Brezhnev and even earlier, Khrushchev. And the best forces are involved. It's horrible.

As far as I understand, there is not even an understanding yet: what does “single” mean? Level all points of view? As the party orders, will they write like that?

But how? This already happened under Joseph Vissarionovich. In 1934, a special commission was formed, headed by Stalin, Zhdanov And Kirov. A textbook for elementary school was created. The Secretary General himself corrected the text, wrote separate chapters. This book became the foundation for textbooks at all levels of higher education and for the "Brief History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks".

What can be a single textbook in our unpredictable past? We do not know our own history, because the archives have not yet been opened. The mass of material is still under wraps. A huge number of documents have not been studied, no matter what era you take. Not only war, but also collectivization with industrialization. Previously, history was exclusively partisan, deceitful from beginning to end, although it was often written by talented people. Now mountains of books, volumes and volumes, lie dead weight. Perhaps now is the next round.

Is it worth it to worry about a single textbook? On the Internet, access to information is open to everyone.

No, there is a danger. This is an attempt to return to unanimity. Stalin also started with a school textbook. There was no Internet then - but there were newspapers and books. They were sent to special guards and began to be destroyed, as people were destroyed. Now they will also find how to regulate the sources of information. The people were brought up on the blood shed in the 20s and 30s. Memory is alive even in descendants. Fear returns immediately. If they want, they will force everyone to study from one textbook, to think this way and not otherwise. Everyone will again repeat ready-made formulations, with the exception of a desperate minority, whose vote is not decisive.

I remember very well how I passed exams at school and at the institute. Like it or not, you will not say what you think, but what is written in the textbook. My father was very radical in relation to the authorities. We in the family discussed everything freely, without regard to ideology. But as soon as I went beyond the threshold of the house, I said "as it should be." And where to go? When he was still a boy and did not understand all this, he once spoke foolishly about the execution of the royal family, showed compassion: “Why did they kill the prince with the grand duchesses?” Work began immediately on the pioneer line.

Do you think it can all come back?

It's probably inevitable. Ten years ago, nothing like this would have been unimaginable. But if the head rots, the whole society begins to rot.

Historical portraiture is a method of a special historical genre. A portrait can depict not only the face and figure of a person, but also the face of an era, and even the essence of a historical phenomenon. It does not matter what is portrayed by the historian, but it is important how. A person is able to capture at once a sufficient minimum of features of the perceived in order to understand in the first approximation what is in front of him, and the brain fixes "reference points" on the visible. This is how a sketch, "gestalt", of the future full-blooded image is formed. From the position of the layout of the material in time, i.e. in terms of composition or construction, historical works can be roughly divided into three types:

- chronological studies, relatively consistently describing the events in order - from the earliest to the latest;

Retrospective works, where events begin to set forth from the moment of a fixed state, and then turn the logic of development back to their source;

Historical portraiture, when the historian, before the eyes of the reader, calls out of oblivion the image of a person or any historical phenomenon. From reference points - to strokes, from drawings - to a sketch, from it - to the background and writing details, and with their help - to the interpretation of the whole image. Here, too, there is a chronology of the disclosure of the image, i.e. its formation and implementation in the process of cognition. Although this method is fraught with many more traps and dangers for the historian than any other, it also has many advantages. The main thing is the free movement in time of the living space of your hero (object).

Recently, a kind of publication has been carried out. Two historical portraits of Ivan the Terrible were united under one cover. One portrait belongs to the famous Russian historian of the XX century. Academician S.F. Platonov, another - no less famous academician R.Yu. Vipper. Platonov's classic work is written in the vein of "biochronicles": everything that is known about the hero, from birth to death. Vipper, breaking down the chronology, gave a portrait of Ivan against the stingy background of the 16th century, highlighting only the most essential in it and tracing the posthumous fate of the image of the tsar. Two approaches - two genres, one object - two results.

Whipper is not a model, despite the wonderful intensity of feelings that is still palpable when reading a book. Therefore, for us, it could remain an ordinary historiographical signature, a tick in the margins of a future portrait of Stalin. If not for one circumstance, Stalin read Wipper's books with rapture.

Unfortunately, this particular book is not in the modern archive of the leader. It is quite possible that its first edition of 1922, with Stalin's critical remarks, is still in the historian's archive. In any case, the Soviet reissues of "Ivan the Terrible" (2nd Tashkent, 1942; 3rd Moscow-Leningrad, 1944) bear traces of improvements in the spirit of Stalin's "Marxism." But three books by Vipper: "Essays on the History of the Roman Empire" (M., 1908), "Ancient Europe and the East" (M., 1916) and "History of Greece in the classical era. IX-IV centuries BC." (M., 1916) dotted with Stalin's hand. Without any discounts, Wipper can be called Stalin's favorite historian. It should be noted that even 10 years before the release of Ivan the Terrible, Vipper painted a portrait of Ancient Rome, showing the reader the essence of its imperialist existence. Stalin, like a fairy tale, was fascinated by this scientific monograph.

The reader is presented with an attempt to build an intellectual and spiritual image of Stalin. I do not claim to be an exact match to the original. First of all, I would like to understand the way of thinking and the nature of the feelings of the person who bore the pseudonym "Stalin". Perhaps, having understood it, historically yesterday, we will understand something in ourselves today.

* * *

The historical portrayal of Stalin is, on the one hand, not such a complicated craft, but on the other, it is almost unbearable. Throughout his long life, looking back at future generations, he purposefully packaged his past and present into thousands of completely decent, retouched, varnished and verbally sterilized shells: photographs, newsreels, biographies, writings ... Even the repressions unprecedented in world history initiated by him he clothed in the shell of "documented" and "evidence" trials, mixed in one heap of real criminals with millions of innocents.

Opening this kind of shell is not so difficult. The recipe is known. One would like to declare that by removing them, we will, no doubt, get to the real Stalin - it is enough just to "peel" his image out of these hardened shells and shrouds. But let's not be naive - there is no "genuine" Stalin, like Caesar Borgia, Ivan IV, Genghis Khan and other personalities of the past in the historical space. But there is something else.

Any professional historian knows a lot more about his hero than he knew about himself. The researcher sees it against the background: era, country, family, things, documents, other people, various ideas and opinions. But for the portrayed "background" this is not a stage, it is his destiny, his life, his organic whole, which can only be understood from within, i.e. living in this era, in this time, in this environment, not knowing what awaits tomorrow or even in a moment.

The historian looks at his hero from the future, so he immediately sees his fate and all his deeds from beginning to end. But the researcher, with full knowledge of the matter, prescribing the details of the "background" and the details of the portrait against this background, cannot know what was going on, for example, in the soul and head of the portrayed Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, let's say, on March 5, 1953 at 21 o'clock. 47 min., i.e. three minutes before the last heartbeat.

What did he feel and think, and was he able to feel and think at the moment when he raised for the last time his left hand, which was not extended at the elbow, with a finger stretched upwards, either threatening or calling someone? The historian will never be able to learn about these minutes, or about thousands of other minutes and moments of the inner, otherwise true life of his hero. So it is unlikely that it will ever be possible to write out the true image of Stalin, like any other historical character. If we hypothetically assume that such a problem can be solved without resorting to the inevitable conjectures, then the historian can safely assume the divine function of resurrection by the word. However, as with all rules, there may be some exceptions.

There are almost no sources that directly reflect the hidden intellectual and spiritual life of a person. Draft and preparatory materials of people who are accustomed to expressing their thoughts in writing indicate some internal processes only with an interrupted dotted line; fixed spontaneous comments and statements adjoin here. Much, of course, depends on temperament, but it is they that enable the historian to look into the soul of his hero.

Stalin read extremely much and commented on what he read a lot. I read not only as the highest state and party official reads documents. He also read as an editor-in-chief and as the chief political and spiritual censor of a huge power. He read as an ordinary interested, but also passionate person, immediately commenting on a book, article, manuscript of a textbook, novel or film script. These are small, but still loopholes that can help penetrate the Stalinist soul.

REFERENCE POINTS

Let's outline the first reference points of the future portrait. On the opposite sides of the still unstained historical canvas, let's put polar signs "+" and "-". We will refer to the plus everything that relates to how he saw himself (both physically and psychologically), and to the minus - how others saw him at different times from the outside. This idea of ​​playing with the poles does not belong to me, but to Stalin. As in an electric field, these conventional signs carry no load individually, but when connected together, they acquire exceptional significance. Being already closer to the end of his life, Stalin took credit for the ability to comprehensively take into account all the pluses and minuses: "Stalin is wise, unhurried in solving complex political issues, where a comprehensive consideration of all the pluses and minuses is required". It would seem that we are talking about the elementary balance necessary for any person when making serious decisions. In fact, everything is more complicated here.

Like all people from time immemorial, he was tormented by the question of the meaning of life, the essence of which boils down to faith or disbelief in God. As for many, faith and disbelief in God for him rested on the dilemma of reason and feeling. Like many, in modern times he believed that his thoughts about God and ideas about him were generated exclusively by human, i.e. his own illusory consciousness.

Once he read Anatole France's unfinished book "The Last Pages", fragments of which were published before the war in the USSR. Stalin made notes in the text and in the margins, and also left a few remarks. Frans talked about God: "The thoughts that we attribute to him come from ourselves; we would have them if we did not attribute them to him. And we would not be better off for this." "People obey their own inventions. They themselves create gods and obey them." Stalin marked the first thesis with a blue pencil with two horizontal lines in the margins and underlined the first sentence of the last fragment, and wrote next to it: "Known truth!". Even before Frans, Stalin had more than once to deal with similar thoughts expressed by Marx or Engels, and perhaps Feuerbach.

Like many in the 20th century, he more often drove away from himself thoughts about religion, about faith, but there were moments in his life when these thoughts nevertheless broke through into his consciousness and disturbed him. France wrote: "Christianity is a return to the most primitive barbarism: the idea of ​​redemption..." The phrase is cut off. And a former student of the Orthodox seminary, Joseph Stalin, mockingly struck in the margins: "So him!!!".

As for many people of the 19th-20th centuries, the Judeo-Christian God for Stalin died in his youth, when he embarked on the path of Marxism. Bypassing the stages of internal evolution, we note now only that already in his mature years he designated for himself as a basic point of support the idea of ​​annihilation, mutual annihilation at the contact of reason and feeling, the transformation into "nothing" of positive and negative life poles.

"God is the crossroads of all human contradictions" France concluded. Stalin underlined it in agreement and directed two arrows. One to Frans' thesis: "The existence of God is a truth prompted by feeling ... Every time his mind(person. - B.I. ) comes into conflict with feeling, reason is defeated. I already looped these two theses with an arrow, and on the side, slightly snickering, attributed: "Where to go?"

Then, from the same thesis about God as the crossroads of all contradictions, he directed the arrow to his own understanding of the essence of the contradiction: "Mind - feelings". And already from him another pencil arrow down the page, where he brought out the final result: "Is that also (+/-)?!.. It's terrible!" Terrible! So, despite all the ridicule and snickering, he was intimidated by this absolute zero? From this entry it is clear that the idea of ​​the "insignificance" of that being, where the mind is destroyed by feeling and - on the contrary, came to him far from the first time. And not the last.

I think that here, as at the bottom of a fabulous ocean, the key to the deepest secret of the Stalinist soul is hidden. This is the secret of unlimited inner freedom, which he achieved by becoming an unprecedentedly unlimited ruler. More precisely, he became an unlimited ruler when he realized that the feelings, due to which God is spontaneously born in the soul of a person (conscience, compassion, etc.), are rationally destroyed by the critical mind, but he, in turn, is destroyed by feelings (God) . Let's not simplify - before us is not familiar materialism, and even more so not humanism in its extreme manifestations, when a person is not simply equated with God, but, generating him, rises above him.

For now, I will only state as a guess that both in his youth and in his mature years - all his life Stalin was gnawed by doubts whether God is the same reality as man? He in every possible way avoided open statements on this subject, but categorically forbade atheistic literature to subscribe to his personal library. In truth, she was almost all base. But he, having become the ruler, treated the church as an organization with cold pragmatism.

Stalin, fearful of his own thought, demonstrates with a drawing his understanding of complete freedom. This is freedom from any consequences of one's actions, no matter who they are generated - by his mind (human) or his feelings (divine). Colliding in reality, they mutually annihilate, like electric charges. Therefore, there is no need and no one to look back: neither at God, nor at humanity. Absolutely free! From good and evil, from guilt for both.

Everything he did, his whole life, was devoted to achieving and then maintaining absolute personal freedom. Of course, not everything is so straightforward and simple - he never succeeded in completely freeing himself from feelings of guilt and remorse, like any person. And we will find a lot of clear evidence of this.

I really want to point to Nietzsche as a Stalinist source with his famous statement about the superman who stepped on the other side of good and evil, but Nietzsche's works have not yet been found among the books with Stalin's marks. The whiff of Nietzscheanism is quite palpable.

Years will pass, and after the bloody Patriotic War, Stalin's hand will again reach out to draw a similar anagram. Stalin reads G. Alexandrov's book "The Philosophical Predecessors of Marxism" (Moscow, 1940). On one of the pages the author expounds Fichte's philosophical system, which resolves the dialectical contradiction between "I" and "not-I". According to Fichte, as a result of the resolution of this contradiction in consciousness, as a dialectical synthesis, the human personality is born. Just like on the pages of Anatoly France's book, Stalin explodes again with a neat inscription and a familiar drawing in the margins: "That's wonderful! 'I' and 'not-I'. That's (+/-)!", i.e. - zero, nothing.

And if in the book of Frans he wrote: "It's horrible!", here he is already delighted: "It's wonderful!"

(+/-) this is the first reference point of the future portrait. Let's denote the second reference point by his favorite word - "Teacher".

While working with Stalin's archive and library, I came across a rare edition of A.N. Tolstoy "Ivan the Terrible". On one of the pages, in Stalin's hand, it is written: "Teacher". The thought involuntarily flashed - Stalin calls the despot Grozny his teacher. However, it soon became clear that he was in a hurry. Behind this Stalinist litter is something more than a direct reference to the medieval bloody tsar as a teacher. Yes, and the litter does not look quite normal.

Firstly, there are many other Stalinist inscriptions in the book, both on the covers and on the page with a list of actors in the drama who have nothing to do with Grozny. The word "teacher" is repeated several times, surrounded by dozens of other marks and bizarre pencil outlines, reflecting the variety of Stalin's inherent motor skills. The play fell into the hands of Stalin in the midst of the second year of the war, most likely in the summer-autumn of 1942. The book was published in an edition of only 200 copies. as an initial option for theatrical needs.

As you know, the military situation at that time was very difficult. Perhaps that is why the words written by Stalin sound like spells addressed to himself, and possibly to someone only then known to him: "Survive", "Can't? - I'll help!", "I'll help." Elsewhere he reminds himself: "Talk to Shaposhn."(Shaposhnikov - Chief of the General Staff. - B.I. ), "Nitroglitz[erin] factory" and others. And interspersed - some numbers, treble clefs and many times: "Teacher", and a stroke in the form of a capital letter leads to it from below "T". The last one is not at all clear.

Secondly, when I randomly looked through a dozen other books from Stalin's library, I became convinced that very many of them had similar entries. Therefore, I carefully studied the entire surviving part of the Stalinist library from the point of view of the nature of the inscriptions. And again I almost fell into the same trap as before, first finding familiar words in the margins of several books by Lenin, and then on one of Trotsky's books the same stroke in the form of a capital letter "T" .

The fact that Stalin could consider Lenin, Trotsky and Grozny as his ideological teachers at the same time did not particularly contradict the entire modern image of Stalin. The "progressive" oprichny tsar, the "brilliant Leader", "Judas Trotsky" have long been bizarrely combined in our minds thanks to Stalin's "teacher's" genius and domestic history teachers. But when I saw the same inscriptions on other books that had nothing to do with leaders, or tsars, or special eras and were published long before Stalin, at least in his thoughts, dared to identify himself with the tsar Ivan, had to abandon too straightforward analogies. Stalin's attitude towards some of his royal predecessors and historical heroes was not at all as simple as it now seems to us from the light hand of writers and journalists.

Attending meetings, working on documents in his office or reading a book in the country, Stalin, like any other person, from time to time was distracted from his surroundings and, in thought, mechanically wrote or drew something on what he had at hand. If it was at meetings of the government or the Politburo, then, according to a long-standing general secretary habit, he marked something in his notebook as a keepsake. Companions, suspicious, like the leader himself, intimidated to the extreme, thought that he was fixing something on their account. Perhaps sometimes it was.

Many people write about the features of Stalin's memory. For the most part, more often military commanders, they note Stalin's phenomenal ability to remember details, names, numbers. Surely he himself contributed to the spread of an overestimation of his mnemonic abilities. He was well aware that the historical tradition ascribes a unique memory to Gaius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Peter I and a number of other historical figures. Hence the origins of the legend about the phenomenal Stalinist memory.

But those who knew him closely and left their memories, in particular Molotov, Khrushchev, Mikoyan, note the strangeness of the leader's memory, especially in the post-war period. On the one hand, he was obviously forgetful and could at one moment forget the name of the interlocutor - his old colleague. Once he forgot Bulganin's name in his presence. On the other hand, when he really needed it, he recalled the events of many years ago. Here is how this feature was noted, for example, by Mikoyan: "In the last years of his life, Stalin's memory was greatly weakened - he used to have a very good memory, so I was surprised that he remembered this proposal from Molotov(raise the price of bread. - B.I. ),expressed by him in my presence to Stalin at the end of 1946 or at the beginning of 1947, that is, six years ago " .

In 1923, when he was only 43 years old, he complained to doctors for the first time about a severe weakening of his memory, and this was still at the very beginning of his public career. Later this complaint was repeated. Considering the shortcomings of memory, as well as the huge flow of information that he closed on himself, bringing the idea of ​​centralizing state administration to complete absurdity, he had to record a lot "for memory" in special notebooks. In the very ones that, according to some modern researchers, disappeared without a trace from Stalin's office in the Kremlin after his death.

But in addition to writing "for memory", in the same notebooks or on separate sheets of paper and, quite reliably, on the covers of books he read, he often unconsciously drew the usual pencil outlines, and inside them he wrote almost the same words and abbreviations. Most often, these were the same fluently capitalized words: "Teacher", "Teaching", connected from below by a single stroke already familiar to us with some kind of abbreviated name or title: "Tr", "Tifus...". Sometimes, but already in the form of a shorter anagram, these combinations are also found in the margins of books, replacing the sign "NB".

An interesting observation on this subject is contained in the book of memoirs of the former Soviet diplomat A. Barmin, on the eve of the war he became a defector:

“At party events and business meetings, he usually listens in silence, smokes a pipe or a cigarette. Listening, he draws meaningless patterns on a sheet of his notebook. Two of Stalin’s personal secretaries, Poskrebyshev and Dvinsky, once wrote in Pravda that sometimes in such cases Stalin writes in his notebook: "Lenin - teacher - friend." They claimed: "At the end of the working day, we found slips of paper with these words on his desk." It cannot be ruled out that Stalin himself inspires such publicity stunts, but this does not mean at all that we should believe in his sentimentality..

Barmin is right, Stalin, most likely, rationally used his corrosive syndrome, deliberately leaving scribbled pieces of paper for the secretaries. But in the inscriptions on the books there is no mention of the name of Lenin, but the favorite word "Teacher" we meet several times on the pasted map and on the last cover of S.G. Lozinsky "History of the Ancient World. Greece and Rome" (Pg., 1923), on the covers of the book by N.N. Popov "Petty-bourgeois anti-Soviet parties" (M., 1924), on A. Lvov's strange brochure "Cinematic ulcer is curable" (M., 1924).

He signed especially beautifully on the cover of A. Gastev's unread book "Planning Prerequisites" (Moscow, 1926), on the layout of the first volume of the textbook "History of the Ancient World", prepared in 1937 by a team of authors. Even on the margins of Erra's book "Artillery in the past, present and future" (M., 1925), trying the pen, he wrote, and then crossed out the same outlines - "Teacher". There is no need to go on listing other books. We only note that chronologically they cover almost the entire period of Stalin's rule, have almost nothing to do with the meaning of what is printed in the book, and, most likely, through the motor skills of Stalin's hand, reflect his psychological attitude.

A teacher is like a preacher. And without becoming an Orthodox priest, he taught with rapture all his life, taught, drummed. Not without reason at numerous congresses and conferences, at meetings of shock workers, advanced collective farmers, graduates of military schools, etc. film and photo cameras captured him in an instructive pose with his torso leaning forward and with the index finger of his right hand raised up.

I did not set out to specifically analyze the frequency statistics of the use of the word "teacher" in Stalinist propaganda. Propaganda clichés "leader and teacher", "teacher" of peoples "were used primarily in relation to Stalin himself. But sometimes the first of them was used in relation to Lenin. It seems to me , his "Short Biography".

The second (and last) edition of the biography, carefully edited by Stalin himself, states for the first time under 1902 that "Batumi workers already then called(his. - B.I. ) workers' teacher". Stalin is 23 years old. But then already "teacher and friend" Stalin is called Lenin until the latter's death.

Lenin is dead, and the biography quotes Stalin's odd opus, written in rhythmic prose style: "Remember, love, study Ilyich, our teacher, our leader". Unusually and at the same time somehow very familiar is the call to "love" the one who is called "teacher". Later, all these and other excellent epithets with key concepts will be applicable only to Stalin. "teacher of millions", "teacher of nations" .

In the history of mankind, the "teachers of the nations" were called the prophets, and above all Jesus of Nazareth. According to the gospel tradition of Jesus, as soon as he began preaching at the age of 33, they began to call the "Teacher" ("rebbe" in Hebrew) of ordinary people. Then he passed the rite of initiation (baptism) from John the Baptist, like Stalin from Lenin. I hope that such a blasphemous comparison will be forgiven me, but it lies on the surface. And just as the Teacher from Nazareth, being second in time after John, became the first by virtue of his divine grace, so the "Teacher" from Tiflis exalted himself above everyone, including his great predecessor. The same mysterious abbreviation mentioned above: "T", "Tif.", in a number of Stalinist litters it is quite clearly deciphered as "Tiflis". We know only one "Teacher from Tiflis".

This is the second reference point of Stalin's portrait. The third point will be his physical appearance with serious illnesses hidden from most human eyes. The fourth is an unquenchable thirst for immortality.

PROFILE AGAINST THE LIBRARY

If the book is not new, it can say a lot about who read it and what they thought, and sometimes what they did. The pages of the Old Believer books of my maternal grandmother are dripped with wax from candles lit during prayers and night vigils. There are a lot of marks on the pages, made in different handwritings over the past three centuries. My father, originally from the Caucasus, whose best years were during the era of Stalinism, collected and lost several excellent libraries throughout his life. In the Soviet era, the only accumulation that was not prosecuted was the library. For the library of unauthorized books, they were not only imprisoned, but also shot. The initiative in this almost entirely belonged to Stalin. Just as in ancient China or medieval Europe they could be burned alive for a book, so in the country of victorious socialism, only for the possession of a book that belonged to the pen of an "enemy of the people" and other "ideological" enemies, they were erased into camp dust. In this sense, not only the members of the Central Committee, but even the members of the Politburo were not completely safe.

Perhaps after Hitler came to power, i.e. after 1933, and most likely on the eve of the well-known negotiations on peace and friendship with Nazi Germany in 1939, the Fuhrer's book "My Struggle" was translated and published for members of the Soviet ruling elite. Of course, Stalin also read it and left curious notes on it. In the fund of the nominal head of state M.I. Kalinin also preserved a copy of this book. Good translation, very sensible and balanced comments. excellent and by modern standards printing. Cover in light mustard color with an elegant black swastika in the upper left corner, no imprint, but it is possible that it was printed in a friendly way in Germany at the time. Kalinin read the whole book, leaving several dozen significant but dull notes that reveal his genuine interest. But on the first page of the book he wrote: "Polysyllabic, meaningless ... for small shopkeepers" etc.

He wrote what was accepted in the light of the then Soviet propaganda. The "all-Union headman" was afraid not to read (the leader ordered!), And to read as he wanted - they would check and they could misinterpret, and his wife was in the camp.

No one has yet calculated exactly how many tens of thousands of titles of books were burned, banned and kept in "special depositories" during the years of Soviet power. This kind of Gulag for books and any "harmful" printed matter (let's add - for archives too) began to form under Lenin on the initiative of such enlightened personalities as N.K. Krupskaya, A.V., Lunacharsky, M.P. Pokrovsky ... But Stalin gave this phenomenon a special scope, organization and systematic. He managed to ensure that by the mid-30s he himself became the only free reader in the country. And he used this freedom on a grand scale and with great sense.

Barmin, who closely observed Stalin in the 1930s, because he was familiar with members of his family and entourage, recalled:

“With each mail from Moscow, lists of books began to arrive for the leadership, secretaries of the party cell and librarians, which should be immediately burned. These were books that mentioned Marxist theorists and other publicists who were considered compromised by the past process. and third-rate figures over the past fifteen years have already been exposed in some kind of heresy, I thought with amazement what would be left on the shelves of our libraries! It was enough for a preface by Bukharin, Radek or Preobrazhensky to any classical work - and it flew into the oven! In this Tempe, I thought, we'll burn more books than the Nazis, and definitely more Marxist literature.

A huge number of books were burned only because they were edited by the well-known Soviet bibliographer Ryazanov, the founder of the Marx-Lenin Institute, recently expelled from the country. The first editions of Lenin's works, edited by Kamenev and containing positive reviews of today's "traitors", were withdrawn from circulation.

Stalin personally cleaned and republished the only volume of his "works" - a compilation of articles and speeches - the previous editions were slowly withdrawn from shops and libraries " .

Barmin is wrong - D.B. Ryazanov was not expelled from the USSR, he was exiled to the Volga region, and then shot. He is also inaccurate in relation to Stalin's writings. Before the release in 1946 of the first volume of collected works (during Stalin's lifetime 13 volumes were published and 3 volumes were prepared for publication), he published two dozen collections and separate brochures with articles, reports and texts of speeches. Most of them have been preserved with the author's edits. Stalin himself paid the most attention to two collections of articles and speeches: On the Roads to October, which until 1932 went through three editions in different versions, and then was withdrawn, and no less famous than The History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. Brief course" - "Questions of Leninism". From 1931, when the first edition appeared, until the 11th in 1947, the last collection was constantly edited. Everything else in Barmin's remark is pure truth.

Lists of books subject to seizure were compiled up to the last day of the existence of the USSR.

Stalin ruled and confiscated not only other people's books, but also his own works. I had to do this because in early editions he positively assessed, justified, defended and pushed one against the other his short-lived allies - Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov ... Even Trotsky's "eternal" enemy in 1918 he somehow carelessly highly appreciated for October 1917. When the latter convicted him textually of betraying the idea of ​​​​the world revolution and in the transition in 1924 to the position of "national socialism", Stalin had to clean out his own publications on this subject as well.

Organizing purges in public and private libraries together with their owners. etching names and facts from the pages of books, he nevertheless treated his personal library with great care. The books of all the repressed, and not only the figures of the first row, but also their students and adherents, Stalin carefully collected, read and kept. For what? As it turned out, he was an absolute pragmatist. In the process of state building, widely wasting human material, he at the same time tried to rationally use his physical and intellectual capabilities. Former Bolshevik leaders, leaders and just intellectuals were of little use as a regular camp workforce. But their intellectual power was used by Stalin to the limit both during his lifetime and, in particular, on the eve of the execution, and even more so after. It is no coincidence that his oldest and most devoted colleague V.M. Molotov several times returned in his thoughts about the past to the problem of utilizing the intelligence of enemies: “Stalin, in general, knew how to use both the Trotskyites and the rightists, but when it was necessary, then, of course, chips flew ... But not to use such persons is also wrong. But for how long you can use it, you can make a mistake here: either it's too early to deal with them, or it's too late". What a fine fellow Vyacheslav Mikhailovich - in his old age he pulled out a secret key to understanding the phenomenon of Stalinism. More precisely - to the source of his intellectual power.

Stalin's genius (without quotes!) lay in the unmistakable definition of this moment. For example, Bukharin and Radek, who for the last three or four years have been removed from serious state affairs, have worked very actively in the competition commission for evaluating new school and university textbooks on world and Russian history. Educated and talented people, they did everything they could to strengthen the framework of the historiosophy of Stalinism. They participated in the literary pogrom of the "school" of M.N. Pokrovsky, and Bukharin pored over the "Stalinist" constitution.

Many, while under investigation in prison, creatively wrote shooting testimonies against themselves and even (like Radek) wrote scripts for trials against themselves. And before that, and often after the killing of "double-dealers and spies" (Stalin perfectly felt the intonational music of the Russian language, hence the ominously hissing sounds of his two favorite words), the leader studied their works with colored pencils in his hands. In addition to those already mentioned, here is a list of the names of enemies and their accomplices, whose books bear traces of his thoughtful work: G. Safarov, E. Kviring, F. Ksenofontov, G. Evdokimov, A. Bubnov, Jan Steen, I. Stukov, V Sorin, S. Semkovsky, etc. For the most part, these are journalistic works on the history of the party, mixed with personal feelings. Some of the books bear inscriptions of the authors, since almost all of them were active members of the anti-Trotskyist campaign at first. On the covers and pages of other books there is a commentary by Stalin himself, interested in and sharply hostile towards Trotsky. So on Quiring's book "Lenin, conspiracy, October", published at the height of the struggle in 1924, he drew to himself with a simple pencil: "Tell Molotov that Tr.(Trotsky. - B.I. ) lied to Ilyich about the ways of the uprising(so in the text. - B.I. )". Quiring criticized Trotsky's book on Lenin.

* * *

Stalin was an avid bibliophile. In the pre-revolutionary years, during the underground, exile and wandering life of a professional revolutionary, he had few opportunities to systematically read, and most importantly, to keep books. But everyone who met him then noted his ever-growing erudition. In his early works, newspaper and magazine articles published in Georgian and then in Russian, he quoted not only Marxist classics, but also a fairly wide range of other foreign philosophers and historians, though published in the same two languages ​​accessible to him.

Of the pre-revolutionary works of Stalin, a rather large work deserves special attention, showing the acquaintance of the 16-17-year-old author with the basics of the Marxist doctrine, its primary sources and the ability to work with literature on the chosen topic. First of all, this refers to the book published in Tiflis in Georgian in 1906-1907. series of articles under the general title "Anarchism or Socialism?".

Recognized master of Marxism G.V. Plekhanov 12 years earlier had published a pamphlet with a similar title, Anarchism and Socialism. In these articles, Stalin does not mention Plekhanov, but he has clearly assimilated both his interpretation of Bernstein's "opportunism" and the so-called "monistic" approach to the history of nature and society. Plekhanov's books will again enter the circle of his scientific interests in the late 1930s. In 1938, simultaneously with the "History of the CPSU (b.). A Short Course" one of Plekhanov's best works "On the Development of a Monistic View of History" was republished. A copy of this edition with notes has been preserved in Stalin's library.

In the articles, Stalin revealed knowledge of some of the works of Marx and Engels, quoted Kropotkin, Bernstein, Kautsky, Victor Considerant (follower of Fourier), mentioned Proudhon, Spencer, Darwin and Cuvier, and also referred to books by French historians and memoirists: P. Louis "History of Socialism in France", A. Arnoux "People's History of the Paris Commune", E. Lissagare "History of the Paris Commune".

It is very important to note that in the work Anarchism or Socialism? Stalin for the first time formulates his understanding of the foundations of dialectics and historical materialism. Almost 40 years later, he will again present his view on these problems, which will be forced to "assimilate" billions of subjects. This will happen after 1938, when not only the "History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. A Short Course" will be published, but also his official biography, new school and university history textbooks, in the preparation of which he will take a direct part.

The list of authors mentioned by him is huge, but most likely he read the primary sources only those that were published in Russian and Georgian, since the young Stalin refers to Russian translations of French historians, Kautsky and the Russian-speaking Kropotkin. By this time, many of the key works of Marx, Engels, Proudhon, and even Bernstein had been translated into Russian. Much has been translated into Georgian as well. Let us recall that the Georgians in the Social Democratic movement occupied the second or third place in terms of numbers after Russians and Jews, especially in the Menshevik wing. And these were highly educated people.

Another interesting detail - in this work, young Stalin, for the first time, probably cited an autobiographical fact. Just as Marx in Capital drew a certain tailor to illustrate his political and economic research, so Stalin used the image of his late shoemaker father. Explaining to the reader how the petty-bourgeois consciousness is transformed into a socialist one, Stalin, without naming a name, described his fate on several pages: he worked in his own tiny workshop, but went bankrupt. Trying to save money to open a new business, he went to work at Adelkhanov's shoe factory in Tiflis, but soon realized that he had no prospects for opening his own business, as a result of which the consciousness of Vissarion Ivanovich Dzhugashvili (that's right, in the Russian transcription "Ivanovich", will be written in future biographies of the leader, the patronymic of the parent) from the petty-bourgeois is transformed into the proletarian and our kindest shoemaker "soon joins socialist ideas" .

Let's leave on the author's conscience a picture of the evolution of the consciousness of a father who, according to rumors, was killed in a drunken fight when his son was still a child. Another thing is more important - already in his youth, Stalin learned and inspired others: "The change in the material position of the shoemaker was eventually followed by a change in his consciousness.""Consciousness" for him was already directly derived from the material situation of a person. On this postulate, which followed from the parable of the shoemaker, the entire official philosophy of the life of Russian society in the 20th century will soon be based.

We also note that the use of the image of the deceased father, who, as they say, treated both him and his mother cruelly during his lifetime, indicates that Stalin, like any person who lost a parent early, idealized him, albeit in the spirit of a new "materialistic" faith.

Many, many years later, when Stalin was already 73 years old, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR sent him a gift from the polka J. Moravskaya: a letter and a book by E. Lissagare "History of the Paris Commune" with a volume of more than 500 pages, published in St. Petersburg in the very distant 1906 The package arrived on January 11, 1953. He had just over a month and a half to live. But, as eyewitnesses recall, he was active and continued, albeit not as before, but still read a lot. Most likely, the message of youth did not have time to fall into his hands, or he considered it necessary to ignore it, as always wary when it came to his pre-revolutionary biography. And this is symbolic: for many, the beginning of life and its end are illuminated by one light. But we don't realize it.

Other European languages, except for Russian, Stalin did not know. And, apparently, it hurt his pride very much. There is evidence that he tried to learn German when he was abroad. In exile in the Turukhansk region, he took up the study of the newly invented Esperanto, it was assumed that this was the language of the future world International. It is symptomatic that later he mercilessly persecuted all Esperantists. And not only because of the failure that befell him. After the war, he came to grips with questions of linguistics. It was not in vain that Stalin took up questions of linguistics, Molotov noted. - He believed that when the world communist system won, and he led everything towards this, the language of Pushkin and Lenin would become the main language of interethnic communication.. Note that this is not about the world revolution, but about the victory of the "system", the pinnacle of which was to be the Stalinist USSR. Personal failure in mastering foreign languages ​​has become an indirect factor in global power politics.

Even before the revolution, Stalin apparently tried to learn English. Nothing came of all this. Probably, even in the seminary he learned the rudiments of Latin, Old Church Slavonic and Russian church language. The latter circumstance facilitated the assimilation of the Russian literary language, but affected the nature of its style. Traces of an unsatisfied craving for foreign languages ​​are found on the pages of books from his libraries all the time. There is no litter only in Esperanto. In a beautiful, even handwriting, he wrote in the margins well-known Latin sayings, though not always related to the meaning of what was being read. I noted them with pleasure if they met in the text. For example, in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, he circled the concluding phrase with a wavy line: "Dixi et salvavi animan meam"(I said and saved my soul) . The second edition of G. Alexandrov's book "Philosophical Predecessors of Marxism", doomed by him in 1947 to pogrom and desecration, decorated with quotations and comments on them with his own hand:

"Much knowledge does not teach you to be smart." Heraclitus. Those. study, and do not be amateurish in vain";

"Marxism is not a dogma, but a guide to action. Lenin";

"Freedom lies on the other side of material production. (K. Marx)".

Translated individual words or proper names into German or English. And you will not always understand - did he really know how they are written in their native languages, or, sparing no time, deliberately rummaged through reference books? For example, all in the same book by Alexandrov (and not only in it), under the engraved portrait of Holbach, he reproduced the Russian inscription in English: "Pol Henri Holbach". Judging by the inaccuracies, he wrote as it seemed right. In thoughtfulness, he generally liked to strike with a pencil and a pen. Sometimes purely mechanical, but sometimes, as it turns out, with deep overtones.

Since he himself did not translate from European languages, nevertheless, many Russian words borrowed from other languages ​​required explanations. Apparently, it was not desirable to turn to someone for help from an "outstanding" specialist in the field of linguistics, therefore, only at the Near Dacha in Kuntsevo, his library accumulated almost a dozen explanatory dictionaries of foreign words by the end of his life. Among them are two dictionaries of foreign words of the pre-revolutionary edition of F. Pavlenkov, "The Complete Explanatory Dictionary of All Common Foreign Words" by N. Dubrovsky, published in Moscow in 1905 in the 21st edition, two dictionaries compiled by Bourdon and Mikhelson and published, respectively, in 1899 and 1907 So all his life he did not shy away from rough and preparatory work.

In his youth, his political activities in the Caucasus included not only organizing demonstrations, strikes, clashes with the police, robbing banks to replenish the party cash desk, but also verbal agitation and propaganda of Marxism, as well as arranging printing houses, publishing newspapers and leaflets, and distributing printed materials.

In 1889-1901. a small room at the Tiflis observatory, where he worked according to his official biography as a "computer-observer", and according to modern biographers - as a night watchman, was turned into a warehouse of illegal literature. This, of course, is not a library, but the habit of having books at hand, and several copies of the same title at once, has been preserved for life. He carried the most significant works for him with him, there could be two or three copies at once. He read them all several times with a pencil in his hand.

It is quite obvious that even if he wanted to collect a significant library, the life circumstances of that time would not have allowed him to do so. However, he managed to keep, until the dizzying rise of his political career in 1922, several Marxist books and, perhaps, some pamphlets of Lenin, and, most importantly, a fairly complete set of the Bolshevik legal journal Enlightenment for 1911-1914. Separate issues of this magazine he kept all his life in several copies. And this is no coincidence. All prominent Bolshevik publicists were published in the journal: Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Pokrovsky, Steklov, and others. The works of Marx and Engels, Bebel, Mehring, Kautsky, and even ideological opponents of Bolshevism such as Pavel Axelrod and many others, were published at that time, unknown to the Russian reader. Most likely this magazine was the main source of his political self-education.

The official biography, which he himself corrected and completed, is a little fib on the issue of young Stalin's reading circle and his intellectual exercises. It states that as early as 1896-1898, i.e. between the 17th and 19th years of his life "Stalin works hard and hard on himself. He studies Marx's Capital, the Communist Manifesto" and other works of Marx and Engels, gets acquainted with Lenin's works directed against populism, "legal Marxism "and" Economism ". Even then, Lenin's work made a deep impression on Stalin. "I must see him at all costs," Stalin said after reading Tulin's (Lenin's) work.. So it is said in the latest edition of his official biography.

She, of course, is silent about the fact that in exile beyond the Arctic Circle, when one of the exiled comrades died, Stalin, violating traditions, single-handedly took possession of the library of the deceased, which aroused the indignation of his colleagues. On the contrary, they willingly shared with him. So, Ya.M. Sverdlov gave him to read an extensive monograph by the Frenchman A. Olara "The Political History of the French Revolution". For the new generations of Russian revolutionaries, the French Revolution was, if not a model, then at least a "training aid." For Stalin too.

However, later he also used other aspects of the revolution - the lessons of its victorious wars against all of Europe, the phenomenon of Napoleon (and Cromwell), the fight against "enemies of the people", the mechanism for organizing mass psychoses. Without any doubt, in the revolution he was excited by fierce struggle, civil and foreign wars, irreconcilable confrontation. Therefore, the revolutionary theme smoothly flowed into the military one and vice versa. The book by G.E. Zinoviev "War and the Crisis of Socialism": about national revolutions and national wars, about wars of liberation and offensive, predatory wars. What Stalin then said and wrote about just and unjust wars in many respects echoes the thoughts of Zinoviev. This should also include the course of lectures by the talented historian N. Lukin (N. Antonov), who was destroyed by him at the very end of the 30s, "From the History of Revolutionary Armies", as well as the memoirs of Bismarck and Ludendorff, military-historical monographs by G. Leer and A Candle. Even when studying such seemingly specific publications of the middle of the 19th century as the Artillery Journal, he first of all paid attention to articles on the history of wars and the history of weapons.

The pseudonym "Tulin" Lenin most often used in the publications of the thin party magazine "Enlightenment". Yes, and the first acquaintance with all these already politically high-profile names of the theoreticians of the revolution and their works - for the most part from the same source. But a correction is needed - man "tremendous theoretical power" as it was said about Stalin in the official biography, whose profile on banners and posters floated on the faces of the great predecessors - Marx, Engels, Lenin, he could not fully master the main book of Marxism - "Capital" throughout his long life. Stalin's library has preserved several volumes of various editions of this fundamental work, published in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s. But judging by the notes, there are good reasons to believe that he did not advance in the development of this work beyond a few, mainly introductory and concluding sections. And in the same youthful article "Anarchism or socialism?" only the "Afterword" to "Capital" is mentioned. He learned the theory of surplus value, as they say, from "second hand" - from the books of interpreters of Marxism, which are also present there.

Other works of Marx and Engels, which were easier to digest, he, as usual, read and re-read more than once during his life as General Secretary. Here are several editions of "Anti-Dühring" and "German Ideology", "The Civil War in France", "The Dialectics of Nature", "Ludwig Feuerbach", "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" and a collection of the so-called "Historical Works" of Marx and etc.

In 1913, the journal Enlightenment also published the first notable work of Stalin himself in Russian, Marxism and the National Question. He wrote it in Vienna in late 1912 - early 1913 under the supervision of Lenin. Contrary to the opinion of Trotsky and many who wrote about Stalin after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Lenin protected the "wonderful Georgian" all his life (with the exception of a few months before his death). Thanks to Lenin, even before the revolution, Stalin made a rather successful party career: he was co-opted to the Central Committee, was a delegate to several foreign party congresses, led, together with other prominent figures of the RSDLP (b), the central party publications, in particular Pravda, took the highest administrative post in parties. Lenin clearly loved and encouraged Stalin. Thus, while Stalin was working on the pamphlet Marxism and the National Question, Lenin, exaggerating, wrote to M. Gorkov: "We have one wonderful Georgian who sat down and writes a long article for Enlightenment, having collected all the Austrian and other materials".

What are these "all" materials? There are indeed Austrian materials, but there are not so many of them and almost all of them are translated. In his now world-famous work, Stalin widely quoted two Austrian authors: O. Bauer "The National Question and Social Democracy" by the Serp publishing house in 1909 and R. Springer "The National Problem" by the Public Benefit publishing house in 1909. In addition, he used works in Russian: the Bundist V. Kossovsky "Questions of Nationality" (1907), the collection "Debates on the National Question at the Brunnin Party Tag" (1906), as well as the studies of K. Marx "On the Jewish Question" and K. Kautsky "Kishinev Massacre and the Jewish Question" (1902). In addition, he quoted information publications of the Bund, reports on its conferences, the Georgian newspaper Chveni Tskhovreba (Our Life) and the Russian newspaper Our Word.

Acquaintance with the German language is manifested only in two cases: to an optional quotation from J. Strasser's book "Der Arbeiter und die Nation" and to the note: "In the Russian translation of M. Panin (see Bauer's book in Panin's translation), instead of "national features" it says "national individualities." Panin translated this place incorrectly, in the German text there is no word "individuality", it says "nationalen Eigenart", i.e. about features, which are far from the same thing"

The work "Marxism and the national question" created his reputation as a Bolshevik interpreter of national problems and served as a justification for entering the first Soviet government as the people's commissar for nationalities. Let us pay attention to the fact that the main blow in this work is directed not so much against the "opportunism" of O. Bauer and R. Springer, but rather against their interpretation of the "Jewish question" and against the policy of the Jewish Social Democratic Labor Party (Bund).

Thus, not only the national but also the Jewish question entered the sphere of his fundamental interests, which eventually turned into one of the cornerstones of Stalin's policy and the historical division of his ideology. It was here that he formulated the "Marxist" concept of "nation" (the famous five signs) in such a way that it excluded Jews (and Gypsies), and, it should be noted, only them, from the composition of "full-fledged" nations. Neither Lenin nor himself, thinking then about the struggle for the unity of the social democratic movement among the peoples of the Russian Empire, did not suspect the far-reaching consequences of such an interpretation for the entire history of the 20th century. and the political fate of Stalin himself.

* * *

The revolution did not bring settled life into his life. During the civil war, often playing the role of Lenin's confidant, Stalin traveled all over the country and fronts, having no permanent home. Even in the capital, he had a permanent living room only in the middle of the civil war. But even at this time he found the opportunity to read and collect books. Which of the surviving editions of the Stalinist libraries date back to this time is difficult to establish now. Based on what is in modern archives, it can be assumed that he continued to read and collect the works of Lenin, Marx, Engels, Luxembourg, Kautsky, as well as other theorists and publicists: Zinoviev, Trotsky, Bukharin, Bogdanov ...

Part of the books dating back to this time can be separated from the rest of the works of future "enemies" not only by the year of publication, but also by the benevolent intonation that still shines through the marks preserved on their pages. The real circle of his intellectual interests, of course, was wider. Judging by the articles of Stalin himself published at that time, this included the works of prominent figures of European social democracy, as well as journalistic and artistic works in Russian.

Although he, as People's Commissar for Nationalities, was simultaneously involved in these issues, there are no clear traces of such activity among the surviving books he read. However, from the texts of the reports that Stalin made at various forums as People's Commissar, it follows that he, together with his small staff, worked through a large literature on national problems.

But gradually, as Stalin turned into a powerful General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) and, in connection with this, the opportunity to lead a settled life appeared, he began to acquire various libraries. Yes, and the position required. We somehow forgot that in those years, more than ever before, and even more so later, the political struggle in Russia was closely connected with the intellectual struggle. In this struggle, they operated with the most abstract philosophical ideas and concepts, political economic terms, data from world and Russian history. Journalism, and literary and scientific work in general, was a form of the political life of the Bolshevik leaders, and not the work of a servile party or state apparatus.

It was natural for many Bolshevik leaders to know both domestic and world literary classics, poetry and music. as well as several European languages. All the leaders often had huge personal libraries and archives, the basis of which was laid back in exile. What, for example, are the libraries of Lenin or Trotsky that have come down to our time worth? Book collections of other leaders have to be judged by indirect data. Together with people, their personal libraries were sent to the "expenditure".

All politicians of the first row were European-educated people. Of these, only Stalin remained a half-educated seminarian, but he stubbornly filled in the gaps in education all his life, not only finding time to study in official party institutions, but also reading, reading, reading ... And this can be judged not only based on the memoirs of contemporaries, often causing legitimate doubts. Almost all the memoirs written in the USSR during his lifetime. obviously flattered, exaggerated or, unwillingly, blurted out "extra". He hated memoirists, especially from close relatives. Many he imprisoned or destroyed simply because they, as he put it, "knew too much and talked too much." Memoirs about Stalin and the era, written abroad or after his death in Russia, are often more balanced, but they are not without lies. More reliable witnesses are the books of his libraries.

It is absolutely certain that Lenin was his main theoretical source, and not only because he used Lenin, his party journalism as the main ideological weapon in the fight against various oppositions. Convincing others and himself that he was rightfully his spiritual heir, Stalin was forced to constantly study Lenin's texts. He didn't accept everything, of course. Rarely, but one can find Stalin's critical remarks on the pages of Lenin's works (as well as against Engels and other theorists, with the exception of Marx). But on the whole, Lenin's legacy was for him a source from which he drew for his ever-changing politically opportunistic doctrines.

Here, of course, it is tempting to refer again to church education with its biblical dogma. But the methods of church dogmatism are not much different from the principles of Talmudism, on which his main political opponents were brought up in their youth. Zinoviev was no different from Stalin in this respect, writing in the same dogmatic-citative spirit the book Leninism, published in 1926. The book is anti-Trotskyist, but Stalin used it against Zinoviev himself. On occasion, the far more gifted Kamenev and Bukharin also juggled with quotations. Trotsky, who in principle disliked this style of ideological existence, was forced to resort to it, appealing to the authority of Lenin.

Stalin collected the works of Lenin throughout his Kremlin life. Having received power, he searched for and collected both pre-revolutionary and lifetime editions of Lenin (including the rarest ones) and their subsequent reprints. As usual, holding several copies at hand, he read and reread with a pencil in his hand: "The Childhood Disease of 'Leftism' in Communism", "What are 'Friends of the People'...", "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky", "Two Tactics ...", "State and Revolution", "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism", "Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism", etc. All four editions of the collected works of Lenin, moreover, in various "factories" were read by him more than once. True, not all volumes have left marks, but those works that excited him with something are dotted up and down.

* * *

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he had at least two libraries: one in his office in the Kremlin, the other in a dacha near Moscow in Zubalovo. Stalin lived at the dacha from 1919 to 1932. Not only the family, but also relatives from the first marriage, as well as relatives of the second wife of Nadezhda Alliluyeva, were also there. Before my wife's suicide, the largest library was here, in the country. According to his daughter Svetlana, her mother also took part in its acquisition. Apart from parents and children, no one touched these books, however, like the books of other collections. There was no special room for the library - it was located in a large dining room. Svetlana Alliluyeva writes: "Father came to have dinner and, passing by my room along the corridor, still in his coat, he usually called loudly," Mistress! a carved antique sideboard with mother's cups, and above the table with fresh magazines and newspapers hung her large portrait" .

The fate of this library is not entirely clear. Although the dacha soon fell into disrepair, the books do not appear to have been taken anywhere until 1943, when Stalin ordered the dacha where his youngest son Vasily had a drinking bout to be closed down. According to S. Alliluyeva, after the death of her father, books from the dacha in Zubalovo ended up in the library of Stalin's Kremlin apartment.

In the first half of the 1930s, Stalin already had two libraries in the Kremlin. However, the oldest, which existed until his death, is in his office. The study and the library were well described by the famous aircraft designer A.S. Yakovlev. His memoirs refer to the spring of 1939:

“The first impression of Stalin’s office was engraved in my memory for the rest of my life. To be honest, I was somehow disappointed, I was struck by its exceptional simplicity and modesty. A large room with a vaulted ceiling overlooked the Kremlin courtyard with three windows. On the right, in the corner, as you enter, there is a display case with Lenin's death mask. To the left, there is a large standing clock in an ebony case with inlaid work. A carpet path to the desk is laid across the entire office. Above the desk is a portrait of V. I. Lenin, speaking from the podium, the work of the artist Gerasimov.

There are books and papers on the desk... Behind the table is an armchair, to the left of it there is a table with telephones of different colors, to the right, in the wall between the windows, there is a black leather sofa and a glass bookcase. I noticed some books: the collected works of Lenin, the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. ..

A door was opened from the office to another room, the walls of which, as I noticed, were completely hung with geographical maps, and in the middle stood a huge globe. .

It was a lounge where few outsiders were invited. Similar descriptions of the cabinet were left by G.K. Zhukov and V.M. Molotov.

Another library was located in the Kremlin apartment, which was equipped in the mezzanine of the Senate building built by Kazakov. Once it was just a corridor, with, according to her daughter, dull rooms departing from it. It was assumed that the main official of the country would be able to get into this apartment directly from his Kremlin office, which was located on the second floor of the same building. But Stalin came to the apartment only for dinner, and in the evening he left for the Middle Dacha. This library consisted of several tens of thousands of books placed in oak cabinets. In 1957, the library of Stalin was taken over by the head of the library of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU Yu. Sharapov. He later recalled:

"In the Kremlin, a tall Swedish cabinet with sliding shelves caught my eye, all stuffed with books and brochures with bookmarks. It was emigrant, White Guard literature and the writings of the opposition, those whom Stalin considered his ideological opponents and simply enemies" .

In earlier years, Stalin had other apartments in the Kremlin, where, apparently, he could not do without libraries. One was in the building that stood on the site of the current Palace of Congresses, here he lived in the same apartment with Molotov. In 1923, he also had housing in a two-story detached wing in the Kremlin, and he received the very first Kremlin room on Lenin's personal order. After 1922, Stalin also had a special office in the building of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on the former Nogin Square. Most likely he had books everywhere, but nothing is known about this.

The nearest dacha in Kuntsevo ("Volynskoye") is Stalin's favorite home. First, a one-story house was built there according to the project of the famous Stalinist architect Merzhanov. Meetings with the closest associates were held in this house, foreign guests were received, and banquets were held. Here Stalin lived alone. After the war, in 1948, the dacha was rebuilt: a second floor appeared, where no one had ever lived and where a large banquet hall was located. The owner himself always lived downstairs and practically in the same room. "She served him all,- writes S. Alliluyeva. - He slept on the couch (they made a bed for him there), on the table nearby were telephones necessary for work, a large dining table was littered with papers, newspapers, books. Here, on the edge, they laid food for him if there was no one else" Of course, there was also a separate bedroom, where, as they say, there was a large bookcase next to the wooden bed.

In addition to these rooms, on the ground floor of the cottage there was another banquet hall with a piano, where members of the Politburo were invited at night, as well as several children's rooms and a billiard room. Over time, the owner ordered all the children's rooms to be combined into one, where he ordered a sofa to be brought in, a carpet to be laid and a table to be placed, as in other living rooms, there was also another bookcase.

In the huge hallway on the first floor, maps were hung all over the walls. From the time of the Civil War, Stalin loved to work with maps no less than with books. Molotov recalled: "He was very fond of geographical maps, here was Asia, Europe, all the maps. Here we trampled for a long time ... How would the Arctic Ocean, the Siberian rivers, the wealth of Siberia be used - he was very interested in this, especially the mouth of the Ob ... How would build a port there. Stalin's archival fund now contains almost 200 very different maps: military, geographical, political and economic, historically related to various parts of the world, territories of the USSR, individual republics and regions. Most of them have markings made by Stalin's hand. And in the book, whether it was contemporary or ancient, if there were maps in it, he always marked something with colored soft pencils.

With the outbreak of war, in 1941, just like the Near Dacha, a house in Kuibyshev was equipped for the leader, where the government was supposed to move if the capital was surrendered to the Germans. The library was moved there from the Kremlin apartment, and the Near Dacha was mined. During the war, even his bomb shelter in the Kremlin was equipped on the same principle as the dacha. He had his own office with books and maps in the bomb shelter of the General Staff. Throughout the war, the library from the Kremlin apartment was located in Kuibyshev.

Towards the end of his life, Stalin was seized by the itch of rebuilding his old home and building new dachas. At the Near Dacha, in addition to rebuilding the old house, he ordered the construction of a separate wooden outbuilding, half dug into the ground. Racks of unplaned pine boards were built in it, on which most of the books of his library were located, primarily literature, which he began to collect back in the 1920s: books on civil history, the history of wars, various versions of the charters of the Red Army, and also fiction.

With a demonstrative undemanding to everyday comfort, Stalin, like the ancient Roman emperors, loved to build new villas. (It is no coincidence that the history of Imperial Rome worried him so much). He had three dachas in the Caucasus: one in Sochi, near the sulfur springs of Matsesta; another in Abkhazia, high in the mountains near the city of Gagra, according to the plan, it resembled Hitler's "Eagle's Nest" in the Alps, and a house on the Black Sea coast in the "Green Cape" area on the territory of a huge park. In addition to dachas in the Caucasus, there was a dacha in the Crimea.

Everywhere, apparently, Stalin equipped his dwellings according to the same habitual scheme with obligatory sofas, carpets, billiards, a gramophone or other musical devices and a library. Unlike books, gramophone records with Italian singers, Russian opera arias, Georgian, Ukrainian and Russian folk songs, with recordings of his beloved Pyatnitsky choir, he ordered not only in the USSR, but also abroad. According to an inventory of the property of the Near Dacha, made after Stalin's death, his collection included 93 gramophone records of opera music, 8 ballet music, 507 Russian and Ukrainian songs. The fate of the records from the Stalinist record libraries is unknown, perhaps they are still in the former dacha of the leader.

Stalin had a small but pleasant voice, perhaps still in the seminary. During the feasts, he, along with party comrades, especially sincerely performed Russian folk and White Guard songs. If Trotsky had known about this at the time when he began to write a biography of Stalin in the late 1930s, he would no doubt have played it up as direct evidence of the counter-revolutionary degeneration of Stalinism. However, Molotov spoke about the leader's song preferences almost three decades after his death. Needless to say, for the performance of the White Guard song folklore, even in a very narrow circle, ordinary mortals would have been convicted under the article "counter-revolutionary agitation and propaganda."

In the suburbs, he had several more dachas. Before the Lenin museum was organized in Gorki near Moscow, he, having evicted Krupskaya from there, settled there himself. The old manor estate "Lipki" on the 200th kilometer of the Dmitrovskoye highway (Dalnaya dacha) was also adapted for one of the dachas. Another one is a new house built before the war in Semenovsky. And everything was equipped there exactly the same as in Kuntsevo.

What happened to the contents of these dachas and to the books is difficult to ascertain now. In the Caucasus, the furnishings of Stalin's estates began to be taken apart in the very first year after the death of the owner. It is also known that immediately after the death of Stalin, the entire furnishings of the Middle Dacha, including the library, were transported to the warehouses of the MGB on the orders of Beria. He was appointed a member of the commission for the preservation of the heritage of the leader. After the execution of Beria, the situation at the Near Dacha was restored. It was assumed that there would be a memorial museum, which was supposed to open in September 1953. The museum was opened for a very short time, and then everything that was connected with the name of Stalin and his era began to be deliberately destroyed and hidden.

Almost in the same way that Stalin destroyed genuine evidence of his great revolutionary comrades-in-arms, his not-so-great comrades-in-arms began to scrape out the memory of him, both literally and figuratively. Not only countless and ugly plaster busts, concrete, granite and marble monuments were demolished, skillfully made Florentine mosaics and gilded smalts were cut down, countless collective farms, factories, settlements were renamed. Most importantly, documents and other sources that shed light on Stalin's personality, on his spiritual and intellectual world were carefully concealed. This happens right up to our time, i.e. nearly 50 years after his death.

The historian knows that in order for a society to outlive any difficult social phenomenon, it must be comprehended by society from the most diverse positions. And for this, the veil of "mystery" must be torn off from him, and this primarily applies to the archives. But who listens to a historian, and even more so in Russia, and even in the 20th century? The reader should take into account that the image of Stalin himself as the main ideologist of the philosophy of the history of Russia in the 20th century is firmly soldered into the generalized image of the Russian historian. That is why Stalinism, albeit in other guises, has not yet died. Like Bonapartism in France, Stalinism in Russia will never completely die.

Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, judging by her memoirs, loved her father in Stalin, but hated the bloody tyrant in him. Exactly two years after the death of her father, on March 5, 1955, apparently realizing that the apartment and office in the Kremlin would not be preserved unchanged, just as there would be no museum in the Middle Dacha, she sent a letter to the member of the presidium and secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU N. A. Bulganin, in which she wrote that a large library remained in her father's apartment in the Kremlin. Her mother, N.S., began to collect her. Alliluyeva. The library was replenished in the pre-war and post-war years and consisted of many hundreds of volumes, mainly of fiction and historical literature. What is the fate of this library now - she does not know, since she has not been at her former apartment for a long time. S. Alliluyeva asked that part of this library be transferred to her. "The library is colossal, there are many books in it that do not interest me, but if I were allowed to select some of the books myself, I would be deeply grateful to you. I am interested in books on history, as well as Russian and translated fiction, I know this library well, so used it as always, she wrote.

The letter was reported to Khrushchev, sent to all members of the party's Areopagus, and sent on March 10 without an answer to the archive (of Stalin!). Such was the form of boorish refusal practiced to this day.

Until 1956, the library at the Near Dacha was still in its original form. But in February of the same year, the director of the State Library. IN AND. Lenin (GBL) P. Bogachev took an unthinkable step in Stalin's time: he sent a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU with a request to return the books belonging to the GBL, which are located "in the Library of I.V. Stalin ... taken by subscription in past years." At the same time, a list on three sheets containing 72 items was attached. By the end of the summer, it turned out that 62 books had Stalin's marks, so a reasonable decision was made to send books with marks to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU (IML), replacing them with GBL with similar copies from the Institute's library.

In addition to the dictionaries mentioned above and several geography courses, this list included books by both ancient and modern historians: Herodotus, Xenophon, P. Vinogradov, R. Wipper, I. Velyaminov, D. Ilovaisky, K.A. Ivanov, Guerrero, N. Kareev, and most importantly - 12 volumes of Karamzin's "History of the Russian State" and the second edition of the six-volume "History of Russia from Ancient Times" by S.M. Solovyov (St. Petersburg, 1896).

And also: the fifth volume of "History of the Russian Army and Navy" (St. Petersburg, 1912), "Essays on the history of natural science in excerpts from the original works of Dr. F. Dannemann" (St. Petersburg, 1897), "Memoirs of Prince Bismarck. (Thoughts and memoirs)" (St. Petersburg, 1899), from a dozen issues of the "Bulletin of Foreign Literature" for 1894, "Literary Notes" for 1992, "Scientific Review" for 1894, "Proceedings of the Lenin Public Library of the USSR" , issue. 3 (M., 1934) with materials about Pushkin, P.V. Annenkov, I.S. Turgenev and A.V. Sukhovo-Kobylin, two pre-revolutionary editions of A. Bogdanov's book "A Short Course in Economics", a novel by V.I. Kryzhanovskaya (Rochester) "Web" (St. Petersburg, 1908), G. Leonidze's book "Stalin. Childhood and adolescence" (Tbilisi, 1939, in Georgian), etc.

Later, after the 20th Congress, some of the books from Stalin's libraries (in the Kremlin apartment and in the Middle Dacha) were transferred to the IML library. Only 5.5 thousand out of more than 20 thousand volumes were received there. These were books with the stamp of Stalin's library and his remarks in the margins and underlining in the text. Then, those books on which marks were found, about 400 copies, were transferred in 1963 to the Central Party Archive (now - RGA SPI). In the library of the IML there were books with dedicatory inscriptions of the authors and with stamps "Library of I.V. Stalin". The remaining books without marks, inscriptions and stamps were transferred to various public libraries, but mainly to the GBL.

Amazing thing! Of the 62 books known to have had "underlining individual sentences ... which, by their nature, are a conclusion to the above" or had Stalinist "marginal notes", in the RGA SPI I managed to find only one - the fifth volume of the History of the Russian Army and Navy. The GBL library cipher on its cover and in the list provided by Bogachev are the same. Where the rest of the books from this list disappeared is unknown. It is especially unfortunate that we do not now know how Stalin perceived the works of such historians as Karamzin and Solovyov. Let's hope they show up.

In addition, it is already known that some copies with Stalin's marks are in private hands. V.M. Molotov showed his memoirist F. Chuev a book with the leader's marks. The well-known historian M. Gefter showed Roy and Zhores Medvedev the first volume of the collected works of Bismarck, prepared for publication in 1940. The introductory article was dotted with Stalin's marks. There is other evidence that books with his marks are in private hands. We can say with confidence that a significant number of unpublished for various reasons manuscripts of books, film scripts, books sent to various competitions, with notes, comments and reviews of Stalin are currently in the state archives, in the funds of various Soviet organizations and in personal funds of figures of Soviet culture and are waiting for the researcher.

Of considerable scientific value are the famous collections of books by famous people that have come down to us unchanged: the libraries of Voltaire, Diderot, Lincoln, Lenin, and others. other, often unexpected, marginalia. A book, like everything that a human hand has touched, has a special, often mysterious, life. At the same time, due to thoughtlessness, unique libraries are being cashed out. The same thing happened with the Stalinist libraries. They were cashed out despite the protests of experts. It is also good that the staff of the NML library found it possible to compile a general catalog .

ON THE BACKGROUND OF THE ARCHIVE AND THE POST-DEATH FUN

Some of the books, including translations in typewritten form, art and party magazines with marginalities from Stalin's Kremlin office, shared the fate of the leader's personal archival fund. Until recently, it was concentrated in two places. Open to everyone with the collapse of the USSR and the CPSU, the Central Party Archive (now the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, RGA SPI) keeps fund 558, where materials related to Stalin’s activities as head of the party and government, memoirs and works were artificially combined about him, documents relating to family members, greetings in connection with anniversaries, materials related to his illness and death. Books with marks are also concentrated there as an independent part. The former Museum of the October Revolution stores gifts to the leader, which at one time made up special expositions. But the most valuable part of the archive, which Stalin and his assistants began to collect back in 1922 in the Kremlin office, was after his death, first in the so-called "Special Folder" of the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, which after 1991 was reincarnated as the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation ( AP RF). Only in 1999, the Stalinist archive from the AP of the Russian Federation, together with books and magazines, was partially transferred to the RGA SPI.

On what basis cases and books were selected from the Administrative Office of the Russian Federation, and most importantly, on what basis some of them are still there and accessible only to the "elite" - it is not clear. The first President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin twice ordered the transfer of Stalin's archive to the RGA SPI, but out of 1,703 cases, 300 still remain in the Administrative Office of the Russian Federation. They combine documents relating to negotiations with fascist Germany on the eve of the war, materials from the Doctors' Case, the Katyn Case, the Korean War, and others. The current archive bears traces of outright seizures.

The history of Stalin's archive, even more than the history of his libraries, is full of obscurities. On the night of March 4-5, 1953, when Stalin was still breathing, a decision was made at a meeting of the Bureau of the Presidium of the Central Committee: "Instruct comrades Malenkov G.M., Beria L.P., Khrushchev N.S. to take measures to ensure that the documents and papers of Comrade Stalin, both current and archival, are put in proper order." Whether this wording concealed the usual practice of that time, when, after the death of a major figure, his archive and apartment were sealed and guarded, and a special government commission dealt with their further fate, or whether former comrades-in-arms showed special interest and caution - it's hard to say. Whether the commission really did anything, whether it looked through the papers or just sealed the safes, tables and cabinets, is unknown. In any case, this measure is quite logical and reasonable, in particular from the point of view of the bureaucratic succession of leadership. However, on March 5, another commission headed by Khrushchev was created to organize the funeral, but with an expanded composition.

All the property of the Middle Dacha, including documents and books, was taken out by people from the department of Beria and by his order on completely legal grounds. And although at that time he had not been the Minister of State Security for a long time (this position was held by SD Ignatiev), he acted as a member of the government commission and, no doubt, with the consent of its two other members. Almost certainly the same thing was done with the documents kept in the Kremlin office. However, if the removal of property from the Near Dacha did not go unnoticed by many, in particular S. Alliluyeva, then the removal of documents from the Kremlin apartment, office and other dachas was “noticed” only in April of that year. Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev headed the commission only ex officio as members of the government, but the specific work was to be carried out by people assigned to the commission from the special services and the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute. When in April 1953 the institute's employees came to the Kremlin, it turned out that the cabinets and safes with documents and money - Stalin held about a dozen paid government positions - were empty. After that, rumors spread, acquiring legends about the allegedly deliberate destruction of part of Stalin's archive, first by Beria, and then by Khrushchev.

They talk especially hard about the disappearance of numerous envelopes, which many saw at Stalin's dacha and in the apartment. There were envelopes, but most likely they contained papers with the texts of official government and party decrees sent to Stalin for signature. Often he was too lazy to look through them, and they accumulated in his hundreds, as long as one of the members of the government did not pay his attention to one or another act of state. Then Stalin found it in a pile of papers, studied it and, if he had no questions, signed it. Naturally, after his death, all envelopes with documents were transferred to the appropriate institutions.

Until 1957, no one either secretly or openly raised the issue of destroying part of Stalin's archive. No charges were brought at the trial of Beria, although it would be easy to blame him for the disappearance of part of the leader's archive, if Khrushchev and others needed it. By the way, the court also talked about the archives, but about the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of Azerbaijan, which Beria secretly kept for 20 years. Let's note, kept - did not destroy.

Beria was sitting in the bunker of the Moscow Military District, and on September 18, 1953, the presidium of the Central Committee instructed the leaders of the heritage commission, Malenkov and Khrushchev, to do "report on the materials of the archive of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin at a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU on December 3, 1953" It is not known what the commission was doing until the end of April 1955, most likely nothing, but on April 28, at the next meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee, it was decided to reconsider the composition of the commission and include new members in addition to Khrushchev (chairman) and Malenkov: Bulganin, Kaganovich, Molotov, Pospelov and Suslov. It is quite obvious that some of the members of the presidium were especially concerned about the problem of the archive. It was Molotov.

The commission, in the composition in which it was formed in the spring of 1955, never met. Molotov many years later recalled that in 1957, when he was expelled from the party and state bodies at the plenum of the Central Committee, he tried to make claims to Khrushchev:

“They yelled, they yelled. I didn’t talk about him, but about his leadership on purpose, now I don’t remember everything that was said before, including about the fact that in 1953 a commission on Stalin’s archive was appointed, the chairman is Khrushchev, I - Member of the Commission Now(1970 - B.I. ) since 1957, we, the members of the commission, have never met, Mikoyan was there, or someone else. The archive of Stalin is entrusted to us, the commission. You see how Khrushchev behaves" .

His memory let him down in some ways - until 1955 he was not a member of the commission, and Mikoyan was not listed in it either.

Why did Molotov, decades later, worry about the fate of Stalin's archive? Why are rumors about the purges carried out in it still being fueled? There are two such reasons, and they are very traditional for the posthumous fate of dictators. Firstly, this is the problem of the heir, and therefore a possible will, and secondly, the "secret" of the leader's death.

Prior to perestroika, there was no information about the fate of the archive in the open press. Then came the biographies of Stalin written by Volkogonov and Radzinsky, who made extensive use of the materials of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation, where Stalin's fund "discovered". People who considered themselves strongholds of the struggle for democracy never even once raised the question of the doubtfulness of the very system of "chosen ones" and "trusted ones." Considering that after the August events of 1991 Volkogonov headed the commission of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation for the transfer of the archives of the CPSU and the KGB of the USSR to the state archives of the Russian Federation, one of the tasks of which was to open these very archives for science and the public, then his position in in relation to the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation and the Stalin Foundation is incomprehensible and alien to me. While serving on this commission, I closely observed how easily the general maneuvered between different opinions.

Despite the fact that part of Stalin's archive remained "secret", the pages of the magazine "Istochnik", published by the administration of the President of the Russian Federation, published many interesting documents from Stalin's and other funds. It is quite obvious that the point here is not the protection of state interests, but the mercenary monopoly of a group of officials on state information. For the same reasons, some of the books of the Stalinist library are still stuck there. Under the pretext of secrecy, the books most likely settled in the so-called "Collection". Meanwhile, back in the early 1990s, Volkogonov in a monograph quoted some pages of Hitler's Mein Kampf, marked with Stalin's pencil, and mentioned the translation of Conrad Heiden's book "History of National Socialism in Germany", published in Zurich in 1934. Heiden's book - one of the earliest and most vivid descriptions of the formation of Nazism in Germany - was published in 1935 by the propaganda department of the RCP (b). recently it was partially republished in Russia. These and other books on the history and practice of Nazism, studied by Stalin, as well as many other things, are still in the RF AP.

It is not known what happened to the Stalinist archive during the years of Khrushchev's rule. True, there were deaf accusations of him that the Stalin fund was "cleaned", like other archives of the country, in order to destroy traces of Khrushchev's activities during the years of repressions. However, there is still no evidence of the purge of the Stalinist archive.

In the second half of the 60s, two strange leaks occurred from the archives of the USSR. In March 1966, the American magazine Life published a photograph of a document by the "Special Section of the Police Department" of Tsarist Russia about Stalin. The second came to light in 1967, when Stanford University in the USA published his works in Russian in three volumes. In fact, these were volumes 14, 15 and 16 of the collected works of Stalin, fully prepared by the IML, but not in time to be published before his death. It has already been said that only 13 volumes covering the pre-war period were published during Stalin's lifetime. In 1997, the so-called 15th volume of Stalin's works was published in Russia, edited by R. Kosolapov. This is a falsified version of the layout of the original 16th volume of essays containing wartime materials. It is absolutely unthinkable to assume that such "leaks" in those years could have taken place without the knowledge of the highest party organs and special services. It seems that the struggle for the rehabilitation of Stalin, which began at the top after the removal of Khrushchev, was reflected here.

It has now become known that the scientific and technical processing of the Stalin archive was carried out only in 1977-1978. At the same time, the documents of the fund were reorganized, complexes were identified that, as the archive workers of the Central Committee of the CPSU believed, did not have a direct relationship to the work of the Central Committee apparatus. The very posing of this question is flawed. It is known that Stalin was both party, and state, and military, and diplomatic, and scientific, and so on. doer. If we follow this logic, the entire Stalin fund should have been cashed out in full.

"Specialists" from the archives of the Central Committee, violating the principle of indivisibility of the archival fund, transferred to other repositories the files of the provincial gendarmerie departments for 1873-1915, the files of the South-Western Front for 1918-1920, the documents of the Secretariat of the NK RCT for 1918-1922. and the Secretariat of the Narkomnats for 1920-1923. Then they were transferred to the IML Party Archive by order of K.U. Chernenko, pre-revolutionary printed publications, such as Iskra, Brdzola, Leaflet of the struggle of the proletariat, folders of the newspapers Pravda, Worker and Soldier, Rabochy Put and others - a total of 29 titles of printed publications in which Stalin participated in one way or another. I am convinced that many of these documents bear Stalinist marks, which makes them especially valuable. As a result of the reckless actions of party functionaries and archivists, it is unlikely that it will be possible to establish exactly which of the printed publications belonged personally to Stalin and from what time, and which of them he received already in Soviet times and from what sources.

At the same time, the novel by A.S. Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" with Stalin's notes of the edition of 1837. The edition, of course, is rare, lifetime, but not a single one. Stalin loved poetry, he himself wrote poems in his youth, which were published by the great Georgian poet Ilya Chavchavadze. They even entered the Georgian textbook "Mother tongue", published in 1912. Later, Stalin himself provided patronage to many poets (like most other Bolshevik leaders of the "Leninist" set) and ruined quite a few of them, understanding the power of poetic speech. multiplied by satire and sarcasm.

Why Stalin kept at hand the documents of the People's Commissariats, which he headed, and the periodicals in which he collaborated, can be understood, given that he himself took part in the work of writing his own official biography and publishing collections and collected works: the thought and about the future memorial. Already during the celebration of the 70th anniversary, it was persistently proposed to open the Stalin Museum. But how he used the materials of the gendarme departments is more difficult to understand. Most likely it was a source of searching for experienced "specialists" or a source of blackmailing his former and current associates, or maybe he was personally involved in the search for and destruction of material compromising him? Perhaps all together. Even before the revolution, rumors circulated in party circles about his provocative activities, about connections with the police. It is quite natural that during the years of the struggle against the opposition these rumors intensified and from time to time still come to life on the pages of various publications. Radzinsky and Volkov are developing this version especially stubbornly. But neither they nor others found anything conclusive, and most likely never will be.

The part of Stalin's fund transferred to the RGA SPI in 1999, along with a variety of documentation characterizing party, state and military activities, also contains his extensive correspondence, biographical materials, photographs and photographs, materials of family members, lifetime publications about Stalin himself. But we are primarily interested in documents that give an idea not about the work of Stalin the bureaucrat, the cunning intriguer, the organizer of terror, political trials and ideological campaigns, the military and diplomatic figure, i.e. again, a bureaucrat, albeit in specific areas, but sources characterizing his internal spiritual and intellectual activity. To do this, we will analyze the circle of his reading, consider the nature of his editing of textbooks on history, political economy, geography, philosophy, etc. Through all this, we will enter the system of his true, i.e. secret interests, views and opinions and compare them with officially proclaimed dogmas and attitudes intended for general assimilation.

Stalin's autograph, RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, house 2510

We will be able to read books, magazines and some documents with his eyes, following the movement of his disproportionately large hand wringing several pages of the book “for memory” at once, like a hospitable Caucasian at the festive table wringing the corner of delicious lavash. We can imagine the tight grip of fingers gripping a faceted thick colored pencil, underlining entire paragraphs word by word, and often entire chapters page by page. Let's decipher his remarks written in the margins, on separate sheets or across the entire page: textbook, scientific research, monograph or journal article on ancient and modern world history, Russian history, party history, history of philosophy, history of wars and military affairs, problems of linguistics , political economy, teaching history at school or problems of biology, literature, drama, diplomacy, etc. Throughout his life, with the fearlessness of an amateur and the impunity of a dictator, he invaded almost all spheres of the spiritual and intellectual life of society, forcing him to adopt his own system of views, prejudices, phobias.

He was a neat and clean person, but on some of the surviving books there are traces of accidentally spilled tea or from a hot glass holder, he cleaned his pipe - there are yellow nicotine stains on the pages, and between them there are ashes from a crumbled cigarette. In addition to the fact that he wrote in a businesslike way, underlined and folded the pages, without thinking about whether the book belonged to him personally or received from the public library on loan, he made hundreds of paper bookmarks. Most often, the strips were cut from pinkish or white writing paper, but sometimes, like any person who reads a lot, he used what was at hand - a torn off corner of a newspaper or a leaf of a loose-leaf calendar. Thanks to these random bookmarks, it is possible to establish a specific date when he thought about this or that page. Putting "in order", someone straightened the folded corners of the pages, wanting to facilitate the work of the researcher, inserted their own bookmarks to indicate those places where there is a Stalinist text. So far, both can still be distinguished. But soon everything will smooth out and fade equally.

Stalin's libraries were replenished thanks to a system of orders, which the owner, through secretaries and even through security guards, sent to various libraries, both to state public ones and to party and departmental ones. Much he received directly from publishers or from authors as a gift. All books were recorded in special annual registers, which are now stored in the RGA SPI. 80% of the books with Stalin's notes, and sometimes extended handwritten inserts, questions and comments, are books from public and special libraries.

L.B. Kamenev, by 1932, being a beaten-killed oppositionist and already foreseeing the grave cold behind him, publicly announced his retirement from big politics and plunged into a long-conceived scientific work on N.G. Chernyshevsky. In May 1933, Kamenev submitted his book to the press, and in the same year it was published with a circulation of 40,000 copies in the 13th edition of the Life of Remarkable People series. Unlucky number. Kamenev was arrested and never released again before being shot. Whether the author managed to hold a copy of his book in his hands and whether it appeared on the shelves is now unknown. But Stalin requested this book and most likely received the author's copy - it was delivered to him straight from the "Book Depository of the USOGUGB N.K.V.D.", the stamp of which still flaunts on the cover. Apparently, it was no longer possible to find the book in other repositories. It is possible that this copy ended up in the NKVD along with the author and his library. In any case, the archives and libraries of Kamenev and Zinoviev were confiscated at the same time.

The so-called "Kremlin case" is also connected with the name of Kamenev. It seems to me that it would be more correct to call it by analogy with the "case of doctors" - "the case of librarians." At the June 1935 plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, a report was heard from the secretary of the Central Committee N.I. Yezhov "On the Staff of the Secretariat of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and Comrade A. Yenukidze". Yezhov said that with the connivance of Yenukidze, Kamenev organized a whole network of terrorist groups on the territory of the Kremlin in order to kill Stalin. The people who fell into the number of "conspirators" were mainly close and distant relatives of prominent and less well-known oppositionists, as well as many librarians of the Kremlin and Moscow libraries.

In addition to Kamenev himself, his brother (an illustrator of books), his brother's ex-wife, an employee of the government library in the Kremlin, two more relatives and Trotsky's youngest son, Sergei, were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment with a dozen other employees of the same government library, as well as the library of the Central Executive Committee USSR, the libraries of the Komakademiya, the State Library. IN AND. Lenin, the library of the All-Union Academy of Light Industry. Only 18 people. Stalin periodically removed the employees of his libraries, irritated by the systematization of his books that they were imposing. He himself preferred to arrange them in the way that was more convenient and familiar to him. At the same time, apparently, his especially trusting attitude to the book also played an important role.

And yet our story is not so much about the book as about the reader, about a man who wrote a lot, whose name, almost 50 years after his death, causes in anyone living in the territory of what was once called the USSR, a feeling of unsettling confusion. This feeling is akin to the feeling of a religious person, when he feels the presence of not only God, but also the devil.

ON THE BACKGROUND OF FAMILY AND NEIGHBORHOODS

As is known: "A book is the best gift." Maybe Stalin was the author of such an obsessively popular slogan of the Soviet era? Don't know. But a special attitude towards the book was expressed, in particular, in the fact that when he gave something to his close or respected people (for that short time while he "respected" them), then it was a book. Most often a book written by him. In the RGA SPI, where most of the books with autographs and notes from various libraries of Stalin were collected, there are about a dozen publications donated by him at different times to different people, sometimes with dedicatory inscriptions. These books did not remain with the addressees, but were returned either by the previous owners, or through the efforts of the people of the Beria department, or were never handed over for some special reasons of the owner. Most often, the gifts were meaningful, and sometimes not without an element of didactics and moralizing.

In 1922-1924, at that very blessed time for him, when he was appointed to the highest administrative post in the party, and his second young wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, gave birth to his second obviously desired son, Vasily, he made several gifts and at the same time received them himself . He presented his wife with a volume of Lenin's works.

His closest friend and diligent executor of plans, Molotov, presented him with his essay: "Lenin and the Party during the Revolution", scrawling on the title in his scratchy and easily soiled handwriting: "To dear comrade Stalin. In memory of the joint work of 16/IV V. Molotov. 1924."

And the famous proletarian poet Demyan Bedny, who lived next door to Stalin in the Kremlin in a huge and, as they said, luxuriously furnished apartment, presented them in 1922 with the long-wanted Minutes of the United Congress of the Russian Socialist Labor Party. The poet wrote on a gift dedicated to the neighbor's birthday: "Stalin - D. Poor with strong love. 22/XII 22. Moscow. Kremlin"

Love by Stalin's standards will indeed be long enough, although it will undergo various evolutions. In any case, until Stalin's death, a portrait of Poor Man hung at his Near Dacha. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that when in 1925 Stalin published his first rather weak collection of articles "On the Roads to October", selected from various pre-revolutionary publications, he made "alaverdi" in Caucasian style - a return gift to the poet, on which beautifully written with a thin pen: "To dear friend Demyan from the author. 20/1-25". It seems that this is so far the only documentary evidence that Stalin, on the way to personal dictatorship, sincerely called someone his friend. But the spiritual impulse was obviously crushed in the bud: the book never got to its destination, and the author, after some time, thickly obscured the dedication with red ink. But you can still read the dedication.

The custom of giving gifts to close people is as natural as the custom of celebrating family dates. Such was the gift to the eldest son of B. Andreev's book "The Conquest of Nature", published by the state publishing house in 1927. On the cover it is written in pencil in a surprisingly clear, firm and, without any exaggeration, beautiful handwriting: "Yasha! Be sure to read this book. I.St.". The book was most likely donated to the 20th birthday of his son in 1928. Under the signature is a semicircular, cutting line in the same pencil. If we recall the complex relationship between the father and the eldest son, about which his favorite daughter Svetlana writes a lot and with bitterness, then this prickly, urging particle becomes clear "ka". There are no other marks in the book, which is strange. Almost everything read by Stalin is scribbled with colored pencils and pens in the full sense of the word up and down. Only in the inventory of the property of the Near Dacha there are 127 soft pencils so beloved by him. Since I have seen most of what is today preserved from Stalin's libraries, I am sure that Andreev's book, published in the popular series "Worker's Bookshelf", was carefully reviewed by Stalin to the end. How could she attract him? It simply and very competently provides information for an unprepared reader from the history of physics, aeronautics, radio, anthropology, the history of technology, energy, etc. All this, no doubt, was interesting for a person who did not have time to get technical knowledge even within the framework of an ordinary school, so he recruited them wherever possible. Any source, even the seemingly most primitive one, was acceptable to him. In this respect, he was no exception.

First half of the 20th century with its terrible social upheavals and wars, it has given rise in all countries of the developed world to a huge layer of half-educated, amateurs, but often intelligent and even extremely talented people. These were very different people, suffice it to say that such a wonderful poet and publicist as Ilya Ehrenburg did not formally even have a completed secondary education. The greatest genius of the 20th century also had a rather modest education. A. Einstein. According to one of the best biographers of Hitler, W. Mather, the future "Fuhrer" of Germany was a very well-read person, although he did not advance beyond the gymnasium. Only during the war, under the influence of completely natural propaganda, did a legend emerge about the stupid ignorance of the leaders of the "Third Reich" and their allies. The same and completely unfair opinion began to dominate about Stalin after his death.

It is much more terrible that all these "Fuhrers", "Duces" and leaders, being intelligent people who have mastered, albeit superficially, but extensive knowledge, were completely devoid of any moral and ethical foundations. Maybe just a hypertrophied intellect devoured their human soul? But let's not forget that the greatest book speaks of the devil as a knowledgeable and even wise enemy of mankind. It is not for nothing that the devil decided to measure his strength with the creator.

A lively mind, not fading, but on the contrary, growing every year, despite numerous illnesses, curiosity, the obvious pleasure that he received from life as the winner of all his real and imaginary enemies, the boundlessness of the opening political and life prospects, gave rise to a new surge of confidence in their genius abilities. Stalin's knowledge became more and more extensive and universal. Here the effect of leadership, leaderism began to work.

The intellectual and spiritual worlds of man never coincide. At the same time, they are surprisingly plastic, never change. Throughout life, their volume and intensity can sharply increase and expand, and just as sharply decrease and even fall. Hereditary abilities, genetics - these are just prerequisites, in the future a lot is determined by the environment and a person's own will. Stalin clearly had abilities. Everyone, both comrades-in-arms and enemies, noted his absolutely incredible willpower. (True, this still needs to be sorted out. Is it possible to confuse complete spiritual deadness with will?) Having become the only super-dictator due to his political talent, he consciously, and more often intuitively acted in two directions at once - he constantly raised his intellectual level and, using mechanisms repression, sharply reduced it in all spheres of public life. First of all, this affected the ruling and intellectual elites.

When the first grandiose construction projects began in Moscow, he gave instructions to architects and often made seemingly fantastic, but in fact competent decisions. According to Albert Speer, a talented fascist architect and head of the German military industry, Hitler, as a young man, was offended by Stalin during his rapprochement with Moscow, believing that he was stealing his architectural ideas. It may well be that it was so, but let's not forget that the first plans for the reconstruction of Moscow and monumental projects began to be carried out when Hitler was just reaching power in Germany.

Not a single metro station project was accepted without Stalin's personal approval. Stalin considered decisions on the design of water channels, railways and hydrodams, on the production of certain types of weapons, the publication of books and textbooks, the construction of new factories, etc. And these were not formal decisions, many of which are made by any head of state. The most talented designers in their memoirs unanimously note that he amazed his interlocutors with a subtle understanding of the design features of certain machines.

During the Second World War, Stalin, like Hitler, took over the supreme command. G.K. Zhukov, A.V. Vasilevsky, K.K. Rokossovsky and other military leaders, who had no reason to lie after the death and dethronement of the dictator, unanimously noted Stalin's ability to learn quickly. It is well known that it was he who made all the strategic decisions during the war. Therefore, in the biography, Stalin had the right to write about himself:

"The range of issues that occupy Stalin's attention is immense: the most complex issues of the theory of Marxism-Leninism - and school textbooks for children; the problems of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union - and everyday concern for the improvement of the proletarian capital; the creation of the Great Northern Sea Route - and the drainage of the marshes of Colchis; problems of development Soviet literature and art - and editing the charter of collective farm life and, finally, the solution of the most difficult questions of the theory and practice of military art" .

It should be noted that not only the development of the theory of Marxism and successes in the war were included in the list of the most important deeds of the leader, but, which is especially noteworthy for us, the work on school textbooks, primarily history textbooks.

But no one ever mentioned that it was he who made certain fundamentally original proposals either on military plans, or on construction, or in something else. Yes, he had the ability to accurately evaluate someone else's thought, but there was no creative potential in him. Even his well-known "scientific" works on the national question, on political economy and linguistics are insignificant in their base and conclusions. His research on linguistics is based on several articles from one volume of the TSB devoted to the Japhetic concept of Academician J. Marr, his own two small separate works and quotations from the classics of Marxism.

Incapable of genuine creativity, he, without suspecting it, was one of the first practical existentialists. No one else, namely Stalin, made the discovery that if you put a person, especially a talented one, on the verge of life and death, he will be able to perform creative and labor feats. And hundreds of thousands of creators went through Beria's "sharashki", camps, prisons, "purges" and really created Soviet, or rather Stalinist science, technology and even culture. During the years of Stalinism, almost the entire population of the USSR was put on the verge of life and death. Hence, the frantic pace of building "socialism" and even success in the war.

While in the humanities Stalin no doubt considered himself a profound connoisseur and even a genius, the technical and exact sciences were less close and understandable to him. In any case, there are almost no publications on the exact sciences among the books with Stalin's marks. With a certain stretch, this includes several books on the artillery weapons of European countries and a technical review of the naval forces of pre-war Japan.

Andreev's book is an exception. Apparently, she fell into his hands not by chance. He was no doubt particularly interested in two problems - the social role of the machine (the new "slave" in the terminology of the author) in the capitalist and new socialist societies and ... a lie detector. Having become acquainted with the principle of its action, he, of course, realized that it was not necessary for him, even harmful. It was during these years that his favorite accusation against the "enemies of the people" was the accusation of insincerity, false flattery, and deceit. As for flattery, it is still visible to the naked eye, if you read the transcripts of speeches at the congresses of the party of Kamenev and, especially, Zinoviev, and other prominent figures of various opposition groups. As in all times, flattery was extorted by fear. But there was no deception - there was no longer a struggle for leadership, and there never was a betrayal of national interests, espionage and other terrible nonsense. Maybe Stalin believed in the effectiveness of the lie detector and therefore rejected it. His favorite "political" weapon could have been knocked out of his hands - the victims' own "confessions", or rather, self-incriminations made under the influence of torture, beatings, and intimidation. Until the end of the Soviet era, the lie detector, first invented in Russia, remained a banned interrogation tool and was the subject of public ridicule.

* * *

Stalin was a very inquisitive person and wanted to see the same curiosity in his children. Andreev’s book does not contain his usual notes, comments and underlinings, not only because it is a gift, but because it is still 1928. He has already reached the pinnacle of power, but at this peak, although he dominates, he has not yet fully mastered with your loneliness. At the same time, for an unloved 20-year-old son, in 1928 he was, of course, a father, but already "Stalin". Are there many people who would sign their appeals to children and households with an official stroke and, moreover, a pseudonym?

The attitude towards the youngest son was different, although here he signed the same way. On the translation of the fantastic book of the German ace Major Gelders "Air War of 1936", published by the State Military Publishing House in 1932, he still inscribed with a sweeping oblique pen: "Vaska Krasky from I. Stalin. As a keepsake. 24/III 34 Moscow ". "Kraskom" stands for "red commander", the father clearly pushed his son, who was 12 years old, to the career of a military pilot, placing high hopes on a very dynamic (unlike the eldest) younger son. Vasily will become a pilot, but his aging father will never be a joy. And while rude "Vaska" And "for memory" sound quite human, paternally warm.

Six years later, when Stalin turns into a bloody mess what was then called "oppositions", their leaders, when the repressed will be counted not by hundreds of thousands, but by millions, and he will look for his own kind among famous historical characters, but will not be able to find him , he will make another gift to his youngest son. And this time a gift with "meaning".

In 1938, after many years of efforts by a team of authors, one might even say the entire propaganda apparatus of the party, including Stalin himself, after numerous revisions, a truly world-famous work, The History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. A Short Course, was published. Stalin became so accustomed to its text, so perfected it in his own way, that he convinced himself that he could claim authorship. Others were easier to "convince". Therefore, in the official biography it is stated: In 1938, the book "History of the CPSU (b.)" was published. Short course, written by Comrade Stalin and approved by the commission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks" .

Its first editions were published in large circulations and by several factories. Of course, the most simple and cheap was the mass edition in cardboard cover. But at the same time, "A Short Course" was also published in more expensive bindings and larger than usual formats. In the archives of Stalin, both the first and intermediate versions of the book, as well as the final, published copies of the "Short Course" have been preserved. A special, possibly deluxe edition was released in a dark crimson brocade binding (royal color!), printed on expensive coated paper in beautiful large type. I don’t know if there were other similar copies, and if there were, then who got them, but on the first page of the “raspberry” edition, which is stored in the archive, it is written in a sweeping way in my favorite red very soft pencil: "Vase from Stalin."

Of course, a gift is a gift, and the giver's business is how to arrange it for his son. But let's pay attention to the fact that this specific book was presented to an 18-year-old boy with a primitive didactic meaning. Numerous witnesses note that Stalin was a highly secretive person. Even people very close to him were never admitted to his spiritual movements, and even more so to doubts and hesitations. And his second wife, Nadezhda, whom everyone who knew them claims he no doubt loved, was not admitted to his deep political plans. His relatives were not trusted at all. He did not trust the children when they grew up, and Varenka Istomina - either an illegitimate wife, or an official concubine who appeared with him after Nadezhda Alliluyeva - did not trust any of his serious thoughts and reflections. But he trusted the book a lot, perhaps rightly believing that hardly anyone would dare to open it without the knowledge of the owner. And while he was alive, the world lived according to his laws.

If he really was lonely, especially after the death of his wife and the destruction of not only all his former comrades, but also the closest people, then, apparently, the book, to some extent, replaced his friends and confidants. In almost none of the publications, and there are at least 500 of them only in the RGA SPI today, there is nothing that would speak of his deliberateness or that he is drawn in advance to future descendants and researchers of his life. No, he really worked with the book, often sincerely lived by what he found there. But the gift to Vasily contains a clear desire to show his son how to read and appreciate the "creativity" of his father, how it is "supposed" to work with a book.

The crimson copy of the "Short Course" is all lined with multi-colored soft pencils, painted with different and also multi-colored arrows and circles: red, purple, blue, green, simple and lilac pencil. Here is the whole range of colors that he usually used, reading, as he himself claimed, at least 500 pages a day. This edition lacks only traces of ink and the so-called "chemical pencil", and in other cases he often used them. Contrary to popular belief, the color of the pencil did not play a special role and did not give any special significance to the marks, more precisely, Stalin used various pencils not so much to highlight something sharper, but in order not to get confused himself. He was an industrious reader and, as already mentioned, he had a rare habit of reading books of particular importance several times. It seems that the color of the pencil allowed him to immediately see in which of the next visits he was thinking about the text and what he thought before.

In a gift to his son, everything is somewhat different, especially in the first chapters. With a red pencil, he underlined everything that relates to Lenin and the Bolsheviks; enemies. Here's what it looks like in one of the paragraphs:

“Lenin’s wording said that anyone who recognizes the party’s program, supports the party financially and is a member of one of the organizations can be a member of the party.”- emphasized red pencil.

And the next sentence: "Martov's wording, considering the recognition of the program and the material support of the party as necessary conditions for membership in the party, did not, however, consider participation in one of its organizations of the party as a condition for membership in the party" - lilac pencil .

It begs the thought that lies on the surface - it seems that from childhood he divided the whole world into two incompatible halves, as in the Gospel. Apparently, he also wanted to impress his son with these color signatures on the "correct" reading and interpretation of this truly sacred text. Looking ahead, we note that the "Short Course" was created from a historical void, from a single mental construction, but thanks to the special power of the "author", this wild construction was able to create a full-blooded (literally!) historical reality. The fundamentals of the construction of the "Short Course" are still piled up in the minds of those who lived on the territory of the USSR, and even those who are now studying in Russia and in many CIS countries. But this topic requires a special and more detailed discussion.

Before us in 1938 is no longer a father, but a Leader and Teacher, even for the youngest son. Stalin wanted to leave Vasily and his descendants as an example of how the Leader worked with the book, how this book should be understood, how "separate the important from the secondary"(his favorite expression!).

The General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, legendaryly vigilant at night in his Kremlin office and thinking about all of humanity at once, was not too lazy to draw a book of 300 pages to the very end, gradually losing the idea of ​​the meaning of what was planned. Like a true "teacher", the extremely busy statesman spent, apparently, more than one hour of his precious time, painting the text with various pencils, circling the dates that, as he believed, his son should remember (this is what he always did for himself). I highlighted the numbers of the points in the conclusions with the same red pencil. He especially liked to put such numbers both in his manuscripts and books, and in the published texts of other authors. This love of points gave his speeches and writing a special didactic persuasiveness, and his thoughts, even the most flat ones, a tangible weight,

This strange drawing shows something else. He seemed to anticipate in advance the "academic" editions of his works. By this time, he had patiently worked through many similar publications - the preparatory and draft works of Lenin, Marx and Engels. They graphically transmitted various kinds of handwritten notes in the margins or in the very text of books and manuscripts. And so the professional editor gave full rein to his irresistible predilection. His habit of correcting, editing and correcting what was written and printed was as organic as the desire for undivided dominance, for intellectual primacy or for "Teaching".

In essence, his political career began as an editorial career. Editing various Bolshevik publications in the Caucasus and central Russia, in particular Pravda in 1917, he easily joined the work of the secretariat and organizing bureau of the Central Committee after his appointment as general secretary. After all, Lenin, and the members of the Politburo who unanimously supported him, rightly believed that Stalin, as general secretary of the party, would take over all the paperwork, bureaucratic, organizational work in the party. And this work is essentially editorial, as it is connected with the preparation of various party documents, circulars, correspondence, and so on. By this they hoped to free their hands for revolutionary, theoretical and "leader" work. Other purely political goals were also pursued.

Lenin, in his declining health, assumed that in the person of Stalin he would acquire a confidant, something like a locum tenens under the wayward party Areopagus. He initially suited Trotsky, since he saw in Stalin a transient figure during Lenin's illness. Trotsky's opponents - Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and others - were satisfied in Stalin by his dislike for Trotsky and his readiness to push the party "stranger" from the first positions together with them, hence the constant talk about "collective leadership". They especially intensified after the death of Lenin. (By the way, just like after Stalin's death.) But in reality, no one wanted this. As you know, everyone miscalculated, and not least because Stalin sincerely loved "paper" work, constantly improving and pulling together all the threads of the all-embracing party and state apparatus. Gradually, he began to turn into a "man - the state."

STALINISM: "MAN-STATE" OR "CREATOR"

"Man - state" is a unique phenomenon in history. Many strong personalities set themselves the goal of achieving absolute personal domination, and therefore absolute personal freedom from society. But almost no one, not even the most famous dictators, has been able to do this. All of them, one way or another, were proteges of some forces: military, political, clerical, or - bureaucracy, capital, oligarchy or ochlocracy. In these cases, the ruler personified one of the forces or a whole group of forces, acting in varying degrees in their interests.

But "man - the state" creates a political system in which not only the basic institutions of society are subordinate to him. All material, spiritual and cultural spheres are subordinated to the will of one person, and the state or party-state (church-state) apparatus is completely enslaved. It is not a person who is a protege of the apparatus, voluntarily or involuntarily expressing its interests, but, on the contrary, a leader, dictator, emperor, president, secretary general - whatever he may be called - completely subjugates him with terror, intrigue, intellect, spiritual and moral corruption - all possible means. A person who has achieved all this acquires not just power over the country, its institutions and resources, but control over all the people of this country from baby to old man. His power is so unlimited that he can freely not only interfere in current events, but also change the past in the public consciousness at his own discretion, i.e. history, and build the future according to your own plan. And this is not a metaphor, this is the real result of Stalin's activities.

If there were no other states in the world except the USSR, or if Stalin had achieved world domination, then the history of mankind would for the first time become manageable under him. Stalin proved in practice the possibility within the framework of one controlled country, i.e. planned, predictable and engineered life of mankind. Stalin proved in practice the possibility of the "end of history" as an unpredictable spontaneous process in which billions of people and colossal social forces take part. He proved (albeit only for a moment, by historical standards) that the will of one far from brilliant person can subdue them. He also proved that there are no moral and ethical prohibitions in social engineering. All these evidence taken together is "Stalinism".

It would be nice to understand what kind of society was designed and put into practice by him and what historical models and samples were chosen at the same time, and what was truly innovative?

Trotsky was profoundly wrong in portraying Stalin in the tradition of classical social democracy as a protege of a new party bureaucracy, essentially a new exploiting class. Only once in 1923-1924, i.e. for a very short time, Stalin was supported by the party and state apparatus. But even then Lenin wrote in his Testament: "Stalin, having become General Secretary, concentrated immense power in his hands" .

All subsequent years, Stalin destroyed this apparatus, pacified, reshaped and subjugated himself personally in the most cruel way. He did the same with other sections of society. Not Molotov, not Kaganovich, not Zhdanov, not Malenkov, not Beria or Khrushchev and others like them nurtured the Leader in their midst and held him on their shoulders, but, on the contrary, he put them all forward and "pushed" them at his own discretion. All of them slavishly, even with love, served him and were mortally afraid all their lives. Of course, they, like the majority of our people, were the slaves of the new Nebuchadnezzar, not only social slaves (they exploited them mercilessly, they could send them to death and torment at any time!), but also spiritual ones.

For all their perspicacity and intelligence, Trotsky and Djilas were hopelessly mistaken in explaining the phenomenon of Stalin's rise by the support of his bourgeois counter-revolutionary bureaucracy, i.e. "new class". Here the usual Marxist cliché has affected - to look for hidden class and group forces and interests in any historical phenomenon. The phenomenon of Stalin is fundamentally different: with the help of millions of helpers, assistants and servants, he designed and rebuilt the entire country at his own discretion, changing the "master plans" more than once.

Bukharin, who played the role of a political Trojan horse under the cunning Ulisses-Stalin, spoke with stupid confusion in 1928: about his recent friend Kobe: "He's gone crazy. He thinks that he can do anything, that he alone can keep everything, that everyone else is just getting in the way.". Despite everything, not despite the most severe illnesses and stresses, Stalin perfectly weighed everything and calculated well. He was really only hindered by all these smart people and talkers. And he proved that he was able to keep everything alone. And kept - 30 years! It would seem that it is here that he will be able to fully show his creative abilities. An, no!

Contrary to his official opinion, which became obligatory for all inhabitants of the USSR at all times, it was not the content that often determined the form for him, but the form of expression was more significant. As for many people from the East, for him intonation prevailed over the meaning of what was said. The East is wise - often it is true. Therefore, his official speeches are usually intonationally colorless. This is done deliberately - they have little sincerity and real truth, but a lot of teachings. (Again "Teaching"!) Intonation can insidiously betray the speaker. Most of his published articles and reports are also colorless intonation.

But when he exploded not with toast, but with rage, rattling hissing sounds appeared in his intonation, then the Georgian accent not only did not interfere, but gave his speech a particularly sinister shade. This intonation is felt not only on phonograms and records with his voice, but also in writing. Of course, it is no coincidence that in the official collected works a mass of letters, notes, remarks filled with anger and intolerance was published. Transcripts of his speeches, especially at closed meetings, where primitive explanations were given for the reasons for the next deaths, keep the deathly silence of the hall, reverently afraid to miss even one Word.

His distorted inner world is well illustrated by two external details. After the war, when all fears for the country, for power, for himself were gone, and he again felt alone, but also free, magazine reproductions from photographs of children were hung on the walls of a dacha near Moscow: a boy on skis, a girl with a goat .. .

Svetlana writes about this in her memoirs with indignant bewilderment: after all, the walls of his dwelling could be decorated with masterpieces of world art. At the same time, one of the walls of the Kremlin office was occupied by a bright panel donated by the Chinese delegation: it depicted a fiery red tiger, according to Chinese tradition, this animal symbolizes the emperor. Many noted the similarity of Stalin in moments of anger with a tiger, lion or panther. Even relevant photos have been published. He knew about this similarity and apparently liked it. However, the resemblance to a lion was also noticed in Trotsky. Hence the Russian personal name he adopted. And Hitler, in the tradition of the "Nordic" myth, identified himself with a dire wolf. Indeed, to each his own!

Reproductions from photographs speak not so much of the tasteless artistic predilections of the owner, but that he received positive emotions not from living art, but from a copy in the square.

In general, he liked to consider in books not only maps, but also pictures, drawings, photographs. All school textbooks on history were carefully studied by him not only in terms of content, but also in terms of pictorial range.

Of course, he was a complete formalist in everything that concerned creativity - both state, and political, and scientific. As a result, the eternally hungry, ruined to the last extreme country, turned into a huge concentration camp, is declared a long-awaited paradise for working people. And everyone who is "free", and even in the camps, must strictly repeat this formality until they believe it too. Propaganda claims that the country has the most complete democracy in the world and the most honest political system. And in this, not believing, they believe formally.

Science is the most delicate matter, from which both the atomic fungus and the antibiotic fungus grow at the same time. But Stalin boldly and prudently invades this most delicate fabric. The formalism of once and for all frozen schemes of textbooks for primary, secondary and higher schools, the formalism of party meetings, "spontaneous" rallies of workers and well-organized colorful demonstrations, the formalism of trials, the formalism of "realistic" art in all its manifestations. Even his closest associates spent most of their lives in the formal, invented by him and others like him, i.e. in the world he created.

The only one who from beginning to end was a true, living and absolutely free creator of this world, it was only him - Stalin.

Notes

1. Translated from Georgian by F. Chuev.

2. Tolstoy A.N. A holiday of ideas, thoughts, images. - Collection. op. in 10 volumes, v. 10. M., 1959, p. 48.

18. Ibid., p. 65, 92-93, 95; I.V. Stalin about himself..., p. 127.60. Stalin I.V. Works. T. 15. 1941-1945, M.. 1997.74. RGA SPI. f. 558, op. 3, d. 52.

75. Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Brief biography, p. 163.

76. RGA SPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 76, l. eleven.

77. Lenin V.I. Full coll. cit., vol. 45, p. 345.

78. Trotsky L. Portraits of revolutionaries. M.. 1991, p. 181.

B. S. Ilizarov

Stalin's secret life

Dedicated to the memory of my father

But woke up, staggered,

Filled with fear

A bowl filled with poison was raised above the ground

And they said: - Drink, damned,

undiluted fate,

we do not want heavenly truth,

easier for us earthly lies.

Joseph Stalin

(translated from Georgian by F. Chuev)

Man or evil demon

In the soul, as in a pocket, climbed,

He spat there and spoiled,

Ruined everything, ruined everything

And, giggling, he disappeared.

Fool, you believe us all, -

Whispers the most vile beast, -

Though vomit on a platter

People will bow with a bow,

Eat and don't scratch their teeth.

Fedor Sologub

I will not hide anything from you: I was horrified by the great idle power, which deliberately went into abomination.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (from preparatory materials for the novel "Demons")

Each of us human beings is one of countless experiments...

Sigmund Freud. Leonardo da Vinci. childhood memory

Preface to the fourth edition

Ten years have passed since the first publication of this book. I am grateful to fate and the publishing house for seeing the updated edition during my lifetime. Updated, not in the sense that it revised the views on the Stalin era and the history of Russia in the twentieth century. In parallel with this, my new book comes out: “Honorary Academician Stalin and Academician Marr. On the linguistic discussion of 1950 and the problems associated with it. Despite the fact that the same character runs through both books, they deal with related but different issues. The book, which the reader holds in his hands, analyzes the hidden spiritual and moral breaks of Stalin's nature as part of his biography; the second book is more devoted to the history of the intellect, and in the area in which Stalin considered himself the first of the foremost, that is, in the field of the national question, language and related political and cultural problems. But the first and second books are not only about Stalin, his era and the people whose life and fate he influenced, they are about all of us (including Stalin, of course), forced from the moment of birth until the moment of death to face a choice: good or evil. A statesman, like any person born on earth, is not free from this fateful choice both for himself and for the country. It seems to me that this is a new aspect for modern historical science. In this regard, I added a final paragraph in which I outlined my understanding of the problem of choice (the problem of morality) in relation to the historical "hero" in general and, to Stalin, in particular. Since the forthcoming new book is devoted to Stalin's relationship with Academician Marr, the author of the Japhetic theory of the origin of language and thought, I transferred from this book a small fragment directly related to the linguistic discussion of 1950.

Immediately after the publication of the first edition, in 2002, I began to receive various responses. But both positive and negative were often superficial, and therefore unproductive, and only in recent years have I become acquainted with opinions concerning the very essence of the issues raised in the book.

The patriarch of modern Russian literature, Daniil Granin, shared the following thoughts in a recent interview:

(correspondent) “- How can you characterize the personality of Stalin in a few words?

You know, I had different periods in this regard: before and after the 20th Congress, where all the cruelties of Stalin were exposed, and especially the “Leningrad case”, which I encountered a little, but then I was convinced that everything here is much more complicated. In what sense? Well, at least in the fact that Iosif Vissarionovich loved and knew literature very much, read a lot ... There are wonderful studies on this subject, in particular, the historian Boris Ilizarov studied the marks made by Stalin on the margins of books ...

– ...with a red pencil?

No, colorful. All these inscriptions: “So it is!”, “Where to go?”, “Is it really that too?”, “It's terrible!”, “We will withstand” - are remarkable in that they reflect the genuine feeling of the reader. There is no window dressing here, nothing designed for the public (by the way, this reader's reaction was well shown in "Eugene Onegin" by Pushkin).

So, judging by the way Ilizarov describes Stalin's marks on Tolstoy's Resurrection, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, on the works of Anatole France, and so on, the leader was not just a book reader, but a thoughtful reader who somehow assimilated everything, worried, although it did not affect him.

– Was he a villain after all?

Well, the explanation is too simple - there is an unimaginable, monstrous perversity. You see, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky are the greatest humanists, human scientists, no one wrote better than them about the problems of conscience and goodness, but this did not affect Kobe in any way. The ennobling influence of literature, art, which we so love to talk about, ended here - he came to his Kremlin office ...

– ... and completely forgot Tolstoy and Dostoevsky ...

- ... and signed execution lists for hundreds of people, and not abstract ones, but those whom he knew, with whom he was friends.

And here is the opposite opinion of Yuri Emelyanov, a journalist who was not too lazy to write a thick book devoted to the “exposures” of anti-Stalinist statements, starting with Trotsky, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, many famous Russian and foreign historians, publicists of the twentieth century, whose apotheosis was, according to the author, my book:

“Perhaps the most striking example of the moral and intellectual fall of an anti-Stalinist was Boris Ilizarov’s book “The Secret Life of Stalin. Based on the materials of his library and archive”. There is no doubt that Ilizarov obviously undertook a difficult task: to try to interpret the character of Stalin and reveal his thoughts, sorting out the notes that he left on the margins of books. However, a person was admitted to the books from the Stalinist library, clearly unable to understand either the meaning of Stalin's notes or the content of the works that Stalin commented on.

Reporting that he struggled for five years to decipher Stalin's marks on several dozen books, Ilizarov only signed his intellectual helplessness ....

But it is possible that Ilizarov would have achieved something in his work, if not for his position. Having proclaimed the principle of “emotionally illuminated scientific history,” Ilizarov does not hide his hatred of Stalin from the very first page of the book,” etc., etc.

The reader can judge for himself what is true in Emelyanov's writings, and what is envious propaganda nonsense. I also want to draw attention to the fact that I relied not only on numerous Stalinist notes, but also on previously unknown materials from Stalin's personal archive and documents from other archives. But I agree on one thing: the critic thanks the editor-in-chief of the Veche publishing house S.N. Dmitriev. For my part, I express my gratitude to S.N. Dmitriev for many years of cooperation and a wise publishing policy that allows different authors with different views to freely address sophisticated modern readers.

November 2011

Preface to the first edition

Before you is the first part of a long-conceived book about the spiritual, intellectual and physical appearance of I.V. Stalin, a man who largely determined the history of Russia and the whole world in the twentieth century. Almost everything that is stated here is written on the basis of new or little-known sources.

I want to warn you - in the book the reader will meet with an unfamiliar Stalin. Those who are accustomed to a long-established positive or sharply negative image of this person, it is better not to open the book, so as not to disturb the soul with doubts. At the same time, I did not at all strive to take, as it were, a “third”, middle position, when, “on the one hand”, my hero “did this and that and thought positively”, and “on the other hand, this and that and something…negative.” I examine the figure of Stalin without "sacred" awe and no less "sanctified" scornful disdain. For me, Stalin, who recently stepped down from the world stage by historical standards, is an older contemporary, whom I now know, albeit indirectly, through sources and documents, but much more thoroughly than if it happened directly upon acquaintance, in real life.

Now I know that Stalin was much simpler, more mundane, and sometimes, as a person brought up in a certain environment and acting under certain historical conditions, - more vulgar, primitive, stupider, more insidious and angrier than those who knew little about it, and most importantly - his comrades-in-arms and contemporaries, and some of my contemporaries, Stalin's apologists, who had little courage and wished to know. At the same time, this was a much more complex, contradictory, versatile and outstanding nature than other of our contemporaries write about him, who survived the “cult of personality”, his exposure and carefully monitor every attempt at his historical rehabilitation. Having become more thoroughly acquainted with some previously hidden sides of Stalin's nature, I consider this wariness to be completely justified. I am convinced that Stalin, Stalinism as a phenomenon of world-historical proportions, should be taken extremely seriously, no less seriously than Hitler and Nazism. Just as seriously as Stalin was treated by all his famous contemporaries - from Trotsky and Churchill to Roosevelt and the same Hitler.