We long to believe in the trans­formative power of books.

Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and his Books
geoffrey roberts
(YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 272 PP, £25)
tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064

We long to believe in the trans­formative power of books. Stalin certainly did. As a young seminarian he sang like a “nightingale” in the choir, read the Bible and was on track for sainthood, until some devil directed him to some tasty volumes of Marxist literature. He ditched the old religion for communism and started expediting heaven on earth by means of famine, firing squad or slow death in the Gulag. But this book doesn’t dwell on those horrors. It focuses on Stalin as he thought of himself: journalist, editor and intellectual. He could read, he claimed, 500 pages a day, and he absorbed like a sponge detail on an impressive range of subjects: history, both ancient and modern, philosophy, politics, economics, linguistics, genetics, fiction and poetry and, above all, Marxist theory. Every text for the shaping of the Soviet soul was commissioned by him and had to undergo his rigorous editing.

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