Authors

Discussion

This roudtable is devoted to Geoffrey Roberts’s new book, Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books (Yale UP, 2022). Through analysis of the books preserved from Stalin’s personal library, and the pometki (annotations) inscribed on them in Stalin’s hand, Roberts paints a picture of the dictator’s ‘inner mental life.’ Building on other recent studies that underline the logocentrism of Soviet rule, and that take Stalin seriously as a man of letters, the great merit of Roberts’s book is its in-depth intellectual biography of Stalin that pieces together the threads of his worldview. The Stalin that emerges is not a psychotic tyrant. Rather, we see a political leader possessed of considerable emotional-intellectual fervour, for whom ideas were at least as important as political power, and for whom the world was very much shaped by the printed word. Participants will discuss their impressions of the book and its significance, with a response from the author.