Stalin's Library

Monuments fall but his reading life is explored

Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books. (Yale University Press, 2022) by Geoffrey Roberts

Joseph Stalin, born Ioseb Besarionis dzе Jughashvili (1878-1953) was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922-1953. He was born in Gori, Georgia.

Stalin was an avid reader from an early age. He amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated, revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings and beliefs. In 2022 Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books by Geoffrey Roberts will be published by Yale University Press.¹

Many statues of Stalin were erected. Most have been taken down² —most strikingly the 6 meter statue in his birthplace, Gori, Georgia.

Just after midnight on June 25, 2010, the Stalin monument in the main square in Gori, Georgia, was surreptitiously removed. … The Georgian government explained that the statue would be moved to the nearby Stalin Museum, and announced a competition for artists to design the new monument that would take its place, which would be dedicated to those who died fighting Russia. So, after 58 years, suddenly, the Stalin monument in the center of Gori, the birthplace of Stalin, was gone.³

1. Roberts, Geoffrey (forthcoming in 2022). Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books will be published by Yale University Press.

2. Statues of Joseph Stalin. Wikimedia Commons.

3. Kabachnik, Peter, Alexi Gugushvili, and Ana Kirvalidze. 2020. “What about the Monument?: Public Opinion and Contentious Politics in Stalin’s Homeland.” Problems of Post-Communism 67 (3): 264–76.