WHAT ARE PUTIN AND XI READING BESIDE STALIN'S SHORT COURSE? 4/8: Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books Hardcover –by Geoffrey Roberts
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2024
⏱️ 7 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=
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.
1941 MOSCOW
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a |
| 0:05.0 | CBS I in the world. I'm John Bachelor |
| 0:07.5 | Professor Jeffrey Roberts, the author of the new book Stalin's library, a dictator in his books. The tragedy is the suicide of Nadeh, his second wife. His |
| 0:16.7 | first wife died of typhus after childbirth. So he has a child by his first wife and he has two children by his second wife. |
| 0:25.6 | But Nadeh, and we know very little about the cause, I don't believe there was a suicide note |
| 0:31.0 | after an argument or some kind of friction at a party she went in |
| 0:36.3 | another room and shot herself with a pistol that had been brought from Europe I |
| 0:40.1 | believe and we don't have a great deal of an explanation for this but it looks to |
| 0:46.0 | have changed the library because Stalin then moves from the family dacha which was in a compound of other dachches to Blitsnaya, the one we've talked about, the vast room. |
| 0:59.0 | And in this change, professor, from the scattering of books in the apartment or in the dacha where he raised |
| 1:06.1 | his children to this new one does the nature of the library change or does it just |
| 1:11.5 | get larger? Yeah as you say, you know, Nardia, Nardia was Stalin's second wife, she was quite young |
| 1:20.9 | when she married Stalinist, she was 18,, I think, yeah, when she married starting in 19, so he was like considerably older. |
| 1:29.3 | They had two children in the 1920s. |
| 1:32.7 | There's a lot of evidence to show that they had a lot of, |
| 1:35.0 | you know, real evidence, documentary evidence, not just people's claims or memoirs. |
| 1:39.2 | They had, you know, reasonably happy family, family life in the 1920s yeah but but whatever reason things went wrong and then there's this episode in |
| 1:49.0 | 1932 and Nadia shoots herself. |
| 1:53.2 | By all the counts, both the evidence we have, |
| 1:57.2 | you know, started was very upset, |
| 1:58.8 | but by Nardius death and that changes the pattern of his the family life until that point he'd been kind of like he had quite he'd been quite involved in an extended family of his in-laws, you know, mainly Nardius relatives. |
| 2:19.0 | After, he becomes a much more isolated and it's and a separate kind of figure from from from his phone. Yeah, he still has relationships with his children and so on but yeah he becomes much more isolated figure. Okay, and part of that process of Stalin's, |
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