This is a series of cb-s I in the world. I'm John Bachelor 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

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, Vippur was a... Stalin.

Vipa was a Russian historian, you have pre-revolution, Russian history.

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 full of the Russian Empire.

Stalin was very interested in In Vieber's historical works

and he marked them extensively.

Yeah, no, history. History was Stalin's favorite subject, yeah.

Vipa, I would say, was his favorite historian and people wasn't you know a Marxist a Marxist

historian and selling had a rather disdainful attitude to a lot of Marxist historians

he thought they were they were just too, they were too abstract, yes?

What he liked was like, you know, informative narrative history. The kind of history that Vippa, the Vepra, and then later on in the 1930s, that's the kind of history that

Starling wants to be taught to Soviet school children.

Okay, it's narrative history with a kind of

socialist, Bolst Street, communist, kind of like spin to it, but nevertheless it's

narrative history as we would understand it. And it has a payoff which is the

...