This is CBS I In The World. I'm John Batchett with Professor Jeffrey Roberts, who's very

generous to help me understand his new book, Stalin's Library. A dictator in his books,

the professor has witnessed these books. I have to imagine them, and Stalin writing

in the margins, writing underlining, writing notes to himself, doodling in some instance.

Stalin was also a keen copy editor and an editor-in-chief of documents. In the course of his career,

he was a very busy manager of information. He was a knowledge worker. He also was a great

fan of history. What kind of history is revelatory? Professor Rome, what a surprise. Rome is important

to Stalin, especially as told by an historian who was not a socialist, if I understand, not

a Bolshevik, Robert Vipper, who was Robert Vipper to Stalin.

Well, Vipper was a Russian historian, a pre-Rebel history, you know, Russian historian. He

specialized in the history of early Christian history, actually. But he also wrote about

the ancient world in general, and particularly about the rise and fall of the Russian Empire

and Stalin was very interested in Vipper's historical works, and he marked them extensively.

History was Stalin's favorite subject. Vipper, I would say, was his favorite historian.

And then people were not a Marxist historian. Stalin had a rather disdainstful attitude to

a lot of Marxist historians. He thought they were just abstract, yes. What he liked was

like informative narrative history, the kind of history that Vipper, Vipper, and then later

on in the 1930s, that's the kind of history that Stalin wants to be taught to Soviet school

children. Okay, it's narrative history with a kind of socialist Bolshevik communist

kind of like spins with, but nevertheless, it's narrative history as we would understand.

And it has a payoff, which is the Soviet Union. That's the idea. This Hollywood movie is

going down happily now, a detail about history. It has a payoff in the Second World War,

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