This is CBSI and the World. I'm John Bachelor with Jeffrey Roberts, professor at the University of College Cork and a Maritus professor of history in his new book is Stalin's library, a dictator in his books. Stalin is now a young man, eager for more about

Marxism and in 1905 he travels to Petersburg, outside of Petersburg.

There's a very famous painting, you can all witness it, of Stalin standing at a table where

Lenin is seated and writing out documents or signing books.

Lenin is famous.

His name is Olyanoff.

He's the son of a middle class educator.

And Stalin is the wayward son of a poor cobbler and at this point he's also traveled from Georgia

all the way to Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire. Professor, the capital of the Russian Empire.

Professor, the fact of the matter is that Stalin adored Lenin, celebrated Lenin,

made Lenin into the center of his world.

What was it that attracted him?

Had he read Lenin at this point?

Or did he see something in Lenin's eyes?

I'm trying to imagine what that painting is supposed to convey.

Okay so so Stalin drops out of a seminary where he was trying to be a priest because he no

longer wants to be a priest because his old outlook on life has changed

for reading actually and he now considers himself to be a socialist and he gravitates

towards the revolutionary burden in Russia and the movement movement, the party joins is the Russian

Social Democratic and the Labour Party, kind of Marxist-based organisation. But

that party, not a long long, so someone joins in 1898, a few years later, not many years later,

that party splits, it splits into two factions, right? A so-called Bolstrich faction or majority

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