THE KREMLIN IS ALWAYS WELL-INFORMED, THEN AND NOW: 4/8: Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books –by Geoffrey Roberts
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2024
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
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.
1916 BEREZHANY MARKET SQUARE
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh, he's cute. Mr. I can never sleep when I'm traveling. He's hugging his pillow like a sloth on a branch. |
| 0:10.0 | He couldn't sleep before. Now listen to him. Sounds like an elephant with a chest infection. |
| 0:15.0 | Well, they call him a dreamer. And now they're right. |
| 0:19.0 | All aboard, Mr. I can never sleep when I'm traveling. |
| 0:23.0 | Find all the comfort you need in the quiet lounge. |
| 0:26.0 | Piando Ferries, there is another way. This is the |
| 0:39.7 | the CBS I in the world. I'm John Bachelor Professor Jeffrey Roberts, the author of the new book Stalin's library, a dictator in his books. |
| 0:43.0 | The tragedy is the suicide of Nade, his second wife. |
| 0:46.3 | His first wife died of typhus after childbirth. |
| 0:50.2 | So he has a child by his first wife, and he has two children by his second wife. |
| 0:55.0 | But Nadeh, and we know very little about the cause, I don't believe there was a suicide note. |
| 1:00.0 | After an argument or some kind of friction at a party she went in another |
| 1:06.0 | room and shot herself with a pistol that had been brought from Europe I believe and |
| 1:10.0 | we don't have a great deal of an explanation for this but it looks to have changed the library |
| 1:17.0 | because Stalin then moves from the family dacha which was in a compound of other dachches to Bliznaya the one we've talked |
| 1:26.4 | about the vast room and in this change professor from the scattering of books in the |
| 1:31.8 | apartment or in the dacha where he raised his |
| 1:35.4 | children to this new one does the nature of the library change or does it just |
| 1:40.4 | get larger? Yeah, as you say, Nadia, Nadezdia was the Starling's second wife, she was quite young |
| 1:50.0 | when she married Stylen and she was 18-19, I think, yeah, when she married St19 I think yeah when she married starting in 19 so he was like considerably |
| 1:57.2 | older they had they had two children in the 1920s there's a lot of women |
| 2:02.4 | to show that they had a lot of |
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