5/8: Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books Hardcover –by Geoffrey Roberts (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 28 December 2022
⏱️ 9 minutes
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5/8: Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books Hardcover –by Geoffrey Roberts (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Library-Dictator-his-Books/dp/0300179049/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Based on his wide-ranging research in Russian archives, Roberts tells the story of the creation, fragmentation, and resurrection of Stalin’s personal library. As a true believer in communist ideology, Stalin was a fanatical idealist who hated his enemies—the bourgeoisie, kulaks, capitalists, imperialists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, traitors—but detested their ideas even more.
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| 0:00.0 | Fasten your seatbelts. Easy jets, big orange sail is now on. With up to 20% of 700,000 seats |
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| 0:24.0 | The time and spend required a natural protected, travel restrictions and season sees up live. |
| 0:31.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchler. |
| 0:40.0 | Professor Jeffrey Roberts of University College Cork, a Meredith's professor of history. |
| 0:46.0 | Member of the Royal Irish Academy is here to introduce us to the themes in Stalin's Library, the professor's new book, |
| 0:54.0 | Stalin's Library, a dictator in his books. We're now in the Datshe, outside of Moscow. |
| 1:01.0 | It's entitled Nearby, Bliege Nyayaya. And the collection, sometimes numbered as much as 25,000. |
| 1:11.0 | Disappears after Stalin is condemned by Nikita Kurschev in 1956. It disappears, it's scattered everywhere. |
| 1:19.0 | Some parts of it have exly braised stamps that you can say this was a member of Stalin's Library. |
| 1:25.0 | Some don't have any markings at all. In fact, we're borrowed and never returned. |
| 1:29.0 | Some are the books of his children's, for example, his daughter's fetlana. |
| 1:33.0 | Sometimes they're borrowed books that were marked up by someone else. And the professor's done the detective work of what is Stalin's pametky, marginally, and markings. |
| 1:43.0 | And what is somebody else's? And what can we make conclusions? |
| 1:47.0 | The important theme I come to, professor, no smoking gun. So let's enjoy ourselves. |
| 1:52.0 | No smoking gun. We're not looking for a magical theory to be vindicated by Stalin's own handwriting. |
| 2:00.0 | We're just accumulating evidence. The first time we know about this library is Yuri Sharapov's 1988 memoir. |
| 2:08.0 | This is the hint. Since then, people have been looking in all directions. |
| 2:13.0 | You tell me that the archivists in Moscow keep most of it. Are the books still being discovered, scattered around the Soviet Union, professor? |
| 2:22.0 | No, no. Okay, so about five and a half thousand books from Stalin's personal library survives and actually what he wrote, wrote he called the scattering after his death. |
| 2:36.0 | Five thousand of those books are in a library in Moscow. So you can go and do them there. |
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