6/8: (Mutiny like Progozhin and Surovikin was what Stalin feared) : 6/8: Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books –by Geoffrey Roberts
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 16 July 2023
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Yalta 1945
6/8: (Mutiny like Progozhin and Surovikin was what Stalin feared) : 6/8: Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books –by Geoffrey Roberts
https://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Library-Dictator-his-Books/dp/0300179049/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
In this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, this book explores all aspects of Stalin’s tumultuous life and politics.
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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batsworth, Professor Jeffer Roberts, University College |
| 0:09.4 | Corps, Emeritus Professor of History and the Author of Stalin's Library. A dictator in |
| 0:15.4 | this book, we meet large figures in Stalin's Library and the first to come across, because |
| 0:22.3 | it seems so logical, given the time between the 19th and the 20th century that Stalin rose |
| 0:28.8 | to power. Bismarck. The challenge of dealing with Bismarck, Bismarck and Machiavelli, is that |
| 0:36.7 | you don't know whether Stalin thought he was Bismarck, learned from Bismarck, you learned |
| 0:42.9 | what not to do from Bismarck. Professor, you've looked at this very carefully now. What did |
| 0:49.3 | Stalin think of Bismarck? Did he divide his life between early and late? Was he attracted |
| 0:55.0 | to the Iron Chancellor? Was he attracted to the reformer? What about Bismarck? It's very difficult |
| 1:02.4 | to know what Stalin thought about Bismarck in detail, because the Bismarck books that Stalin |
| 1:11.8 | read, in some cases, Marx, they disappeared from the archive. We don't know, we don't know, |
| 1:18.1 | we don't know where to go. What we can say with certainty is that Stalin was very interested in |
| 1:25.2 | Bismarck. He was very insistent that Bismarck's memoirs should be translated to Russia, in fact, |
| 1:33.6 | there should be a new addition to Bismarck's memoirs. He was interested in other books about |
| 1:38.8 | Bismarck and about treatments of Bismarck. I think it was very keen to actually discuss |
| 1:45.1 | Bismarck's memoirs and Bismarck's memoirs. So we know that he had a huge kind of |
| 1:51.6 | interest in Bismarck. My sub-assistation is that he saw Bismarck as a practical, pragmatic politician, |
| 2:03.6 | but someone who had also had a project, a rather grand scale project, which this project |
| 2:09.4 | is as emerged, anyway, of unifying Germany into a single state and building up Germany as a |
| 2:16.4 | great pal. Some people say that Bismarck carried out a revolution from above in Prussia and in the |
| 2:24.6 | wider German space. You could see a parallel there with Stalin's revolution from above. At the end |
| 2:30.7 | of 1920s, when he introduced click-tellization and the five-year plans and industrialization, |
... |
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