The last page of this book carries a line of Russian that most readers will skip: podpisano k pechati 13/XI-1970. Signed to press, 13 November 1970. That single line does more dating work than the spine. It places the volume inside the Lenin centenary — Lenin was born 22 April 1870, and the Soviet publishing houses spent that year and the next pouring out commemorative editions in every language they could reach. Unlike several titles in this series, there is no concealed lag here. The latest source the volume cites is a Moscow edition of 1967; nothing in it postdates the manuscript; the English is not a reprint of an older translation but a fresh production for the anniversary. This is a 1971 book that was finished in late 1970, and it should be read as an anniversary object.
It is also, unusually, a book with a named compiler: the title page credits A. Z. Okorokov, Cand. Sc. (Hist.). The publishers' note sets out the plan plainly. The materials fall into two parts, "Lenin on Books" and "Books in Lenin's Life"; the first prints forty-six items by Lenin, the second thirteen memoirs by people who knew him. The translations, we are told, "are taken from the English edition of V. I. Lenin's Collected Works prepared by Progress Publishers, Moscow, unless otherwise stated". And the note opens with a claim that is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing: "The catalogue of Lenin's private library in the Kremlin lists more than 8,400 titles." A further "900 books, magazines and newspapers with Lenin's marks on them have been collected in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism."
Those are not decorative figures. They point at something real, and the honest place to begin with this volume is with what it gets right.
Lenin was a formidable reader, and the evidence for it in this book is first-hand and largely undamaged. Shushanik Manucharyants, who was his librarian in the Kremlin from 1920 to 1924, contributes a memoir that is worth more than most of what has been written about Lenin's mind. She records the marks he wrote on books to route them through his own system — "Lenin", "Lenin's copy", "To Lenin's table", "Please return, Lenin's copy", "To my library", "Keep on the shelf", "Keep secret". She records that in May 1922 he asked her to gather the literature on the scientific management of labour, that he was plainly preparing to write on it, that he was struck down before he could, and that the books stayed where he had left them: "But Lenin never wrote this work." A working librarian's account of a working reader.
Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich supplies the single most interesting fact in the volume. In June 1919 he began bringing Lenin the Knizhnaya Letopis, the Book Chamber's register of everything published, and watched him work through it, underlining and numbering titles. Bonch-Bruyevich then counted:
Out of 74 books which he marked relating to the positions of the various parties on the most burning issues of the day (the remaining three were Bolshevik publications) 71 were written by authors of parties and groups hostile to us — the Plekhanovites, the Bogdanovites, the Popular Socialists and the Cadets among them.
Seventy-one out of seventy-four. In the middle of a civil war, the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars was reading his opponents, in bulk, in the original. That is the standard the Institute of Marxism-Leninism set for itself when it put his name on its building, and it is the standard by which the Institute's own later output — volumes that characterise Trotsky at length and cite no work of his — is most fairly judged. Lenin read his enemies. His editors did not.
The same is true of one of the most engaging items in Part One. In November 1921 Lenin reviewed A Dozen Knives in the Back of the Revolution by Arkady Averchenko, an émigré satirist writing from Paris in a state of frank hatred. Lenin calls it "this extremely capably written book", praises "Grass Trampled by Jackboots" without qualification, notes drily that Averchenko's story about the domestic lives of the Bolshevik leaders is bad because he does not know his subject — "I assure you that Lenin and Trotsky have many faults in all respects, including their home life" — and ends: "In my opinion some of these stories are worth reprinting. Talent should be encouraged." That a Moscow house printed that sentence in 1971, Trotsky's name and all, is a small fact that deserves recording, since so much else in this catalogue could not manage it.
Beyond these there is real material throughout: Lenin's 1913 comparison of the New York Public Library with the Russian provision, with the branch statistics quoted; his four demands of November 1917 for the Petrograd Public Library, including opening hours "from 8.00 a.m. to 11.00 p.m. daily, not excluding Sundays and holidays"; the 1896 letter from the remand prison working out how to get statistical yearbooks delivered to a cell; the request to the Director of the British Museum, signed with the alias Jacob Richter. Where this book prints Lenin, it prints him accurately. There is no sign anywhere in these fifty thousand words of a sentence altered or a word doctored.
The falsification, as so often in this series, is entirely a matter of what is cut.
Twenty-two of the forty-six Lenin items carry the marker "(Excerpt)". The volume deserves credit for how it handles them: it gives a Collected Works citation under every single item, and where the cut is internal it prints the discontinuity in the page numbers. The speech to the Third Komsomol Congress is sourced to "Vol. 31, pp. 283–96, 298–99" — a reader with the Collected Works to hand is being told, in the citation itself, that pages 296 to 298 have been removed. An editor concealing a cut does not do that.
Which makes it possible to check every one of them. And one of them is not like the others.
The volume prints "On the Significance of Militant Materialism", marked "(Excerpt from the Article)", and sources it to Collected Works, Vol. 33, pp. 229–34. The article occupies pp. 227–36. So two pages have been taken off the front and two off the back, and the citation says so.
Here is what is on the two pages at the front. The article's first sentence, in Lenin's original, is: "Comrade Trotsky has already said everything necessary, and said it very well, about the general purposes of Pod Znamenem Marksizma in issue No. 1-2 of that journal." Then comes Lenin's statement that the journal must unite Communists and non-Communists in a common front against philosophical reaction; then his borrowing from Joseph Dietzgen of the phrase that "the professors of philosophy in modern society are in the majority of cases nothing but 'graduated flunkeys of clericalism'"; and then a sentence about the atheist work of the state institutions, which is "being carried on with extreme apathy and very unsatisfactorily, and is apparently suffering from the general conditions of our truly Russian (even though Soviet) bureaucratic ways".
Three things go with those two pages. Trotsky's name goes. Lenin's admission that his own state's institutions were already sunk in bureaucracy goes. And the phrase "graduated flunkeys of clericalism" survives in the text this volume prints — but stripped of Dietzgen and of the professors it was aimed at, so that the reader meets a quotation with no owner and no target.
The two pages at the back matter more. In the original, Lenin turns to a concrete case:
I was recently sent a copy of Ekonomist No. 1 (1922), published by the Eleventh Department of the Russian Technical Society. The young Communist who sent me this journal (he probably had no time to read it) rashly expressed considerable agreement with it. In reality the journal is — I do not know to what extent deliberately — an organ of the modern feudalists, disguised of course under a cloak of science, democracy and so forth.
He then names a contributor, quotes him, and demolishes him on the statistics of divorce in Petrograd. The contributor is P. A. Sorokin. And the article ends:
The working class of Russia proved able to win power; but it has not yet learned to utilise it, for otherwise it would have long ago very politely dispatched such teachers and members of learned societies to countries with a bourgeois "democracy". That is the proper place for such feudalists. But it will learn, given the will to learn.
Lenin wrote that in March 1922. In September 1922 the Soviet state expelled some two hundred intellectuals — philosophers, economists, sociologists, theologians — most of them by steamer from Petrograd to Stettin, in the operation now generally called the philosophers' ships. Pitirim Sorokin was among those expelled that autumn. The article printed in this volume is the article that called for it, and the call is the part that has been removed.
This is the pattern that recurs across the Progress catalogue, and it recurs here in its purest form: the quotation is accurate, the source is given, and the cut is at the turn. A reader of Lenin and Books meets Lenin the friend of good popular science and honest translation. The Lenin who wanted the editors of a scientific journal put on a boat is on pages 234 to 236, and the citation admits their existence without disclosing their content.
There is a further coincidence, and it is inside this same book. Sixty-odd pages later, Manucharyants remembers a small embarrassment:
Once one of the comrades had brought in two magazines, The Economist and New Russia. Lenin showed them to me (I had just come into the conference room) and said: "And I haven't yet had these!"
The Economist here is Ekonomist — the journal in question, brought late to the man who was about to write that its contributors belonged abroad. The volume prints the librarian's anecdote about Lenin wanting the journal and cuts, from Lenin's own text, what he thought should be done with the people who wrote it. Neither the compiler nor the reader is meant to put the two together.
The other cuts are less dramatic and more revealing of method. The speech to the Third Komsomol Congress loses pages 296–98: a stretch of about nine hundred words in which Lenin comes down from the philosophy of "learn" to the practice of it — the literacy brigades going into the villages, the suburban vegetable gardens in a starving year, the house-to-house sanitary inspections, the League as "a shock force". "We shall unite and go into the rural districts to abolish illiteracy, so that there shall be no illiterates among our young people." In a book about books, the passage cut from the speech about learning is the passage about the campaign against illiteracy. The consistent casualty in these anthologies is Lenin the practical organiser, and this is a textbook instance.
Against that, two items are printed straight and should be recognised as such. "Party Organisation and Party Literature" (1905) appears complete and verbatim, including everything that later Soviet usage found awkward: "Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions", and "Freedom of speech and the press must be complete. But then freedom of association must be complete too." Lenin's argument there is narrow and defensible — a voluntary association may decide who writes in its name — and its context is a party newly emerging into legality under a still-standing autocracy, "the captivity of the feudal censorship". The volume prints all of it. What the volume then does is frame it: the introduction to Part One presents the selection as giving "Lenin's ideas on partisanship of literature". A 1905 article about who may publish under a party's masthead is thereby offered as a doctrine about literature. That extension is not made in Lenin's text. It is made in the editorial sentence above it, and it is the extension on which forty years of Soviet literary administration rested.
Thesis 8 of the 1919 Comintern theses is likewise printed complete, and it is the volume's best moment of nerve. Lenin's case is that freedom of the press under capitalism is the freedom of those who own the presses: "In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion." He then promises what the new system will provide — no impediment to any working man or group of working men "for enjoying and practising equal rights in the use of public printing-presses and public stocks of paper". That promise is on the page. Whether it was kept is the question the whole book is arranged not to raise.
Which brings us to what is absent, and here one has to be careful, because a book has no obligation to be about a subject it did not choose.
But this book chose. It is an anthology about books, publishing, libraries and readers, drawn from a man who governed Russia for six years, and it runs chronologically to November 1922. Three things belong inside that frame and are not in it.
The first is a document. On 5 August 1921 Lenin wrote to Gavril Myasnikov, a Bolshevik metalworker from Perm who had circulated an article demanding "freedom of the press, from the monarchists to the anarchists, inclusively". Lenin's reply is in the Collected Works, vol. 32, it is entirely about the press, and it is the most direct thing he ever wrote on the subject after October:
Freedom of the press in the R.S.F.S.R., which is surrounded by the bourgeois enemies of the whole world, means freedom of political organisation for the bourgeoisie and its most loyal servants, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. […] We have no wish to commit suicide, and therefore, we will not do this.
The letter was available, catalogued, translated and on the compiler's shelf. It is on the volume's declared subject more squarely than half of what it does print. It is not here. Myasnikov was expelled from the party in February 1922, six months after receiving it.
The second is an institution. Glavlit — the Main Administration for Literary Affairs and Publishing, the body that ran preliminary censorship of everything printed in the Soviet Union for the next sixty-nine years — was created by decree of the Council of People's Commissars on 6 June 1922. Lenin was chairman of that Council. The word "Glavlit" occurs zero times in these 50,282 words. So does the word "purge". The volume prints Lenin's instructions on how the State Publishing House should register the names of responsible editors, and prints his 1919 reprimand to Vorovsky for a slovenly Comintern pamphlet, and stops there. This is not chronology: the body existed, in Lenin's lifetime, under his own Council, five months before the volume's last dated item.
The third is a person, and she is the presiding voice of Part Two. Nadezhda Krupskaya supplies four of the thirteen memoirs — on Chernyshevsky, on Marx, on libraries, on Lenin's favourite books. She is the volume's authority on what Lenin read and loved, including the volume's three separate essays on Tolstoi. On 9 April 1924 she published an article in Pravda, in her own name, that begins:
One was last spring. I signed a circular excluding unnecessary and harmful books from the people's libraries.
The article defends the circular — "The circular itself was not in error" — and criticises the list of prohibited books that was appended to it, which she says was compiled by the Commission for Book Revision and attached without her having seen it. Her objections to the list are instructive. Excluding Plato, Kant and Mach from village libraries was pointless rather than wrong, because "the masses do not read Kant". And: "The prohibition of certain works of Tolstoi and Kropotkin was a mistake" — not because withdrawing books is wrong, but because the reader of 1924 is "already sufficiently saturated with collectivistic psychology" to be safe from them. (I quote from the English translation printed in The Living Age in 1924.)
So the woman who tells us in this book which books Lenin loved had, within a year of his death, signed the order withdrawing books from the libraries he had wanted opened; and among the authors withdrawn was Tolstoi, on whom this volume prints three of Lenin's essays. None of that is here. Note that it need not have been printed as an indictment — the Institute could have printed it as a correction, since it is a document in which Krupskaya publicly repudiates a list. It is simply not printed.
That is also where the sharpest test of these volumes applies. It is not that Soviet editions never admit error; this one does, repeatedly and without embarrassment. The biographical note on Lunacharsky states that after 1907 "he followed the path of revisionism, joining the Machists and organising the Vperyod anti-party group together with A. A. Bogdanov". Krupskaya's own Pravda article opens by conceding that "some errors have been made". Error is admissible. What is never admissible is the category. No one who stayed inside is ever the object of the charge; the circular is never wrong, only its appendix; the practice of removing books from libraries is never the thing under examination, only the choice of which books. That distinction — error yes, classification never — is what separates these volumes from the tradition that produced them, and it survives contact with a candid book in a way that cruder tests do not.
One smaller thing is worth flagging in fairness. The decree on Academician Pavlov of 24 January 1921 appears as an "(Excerpt)" consisting of point 2 alone, the clause authorising a de luxe edition of Pavlov's work and leaving him the property right in it at home and abroad. The omitted points set up a commission under Gorky and granted Pavlov and his wife a special ration and the lifetime use of their flat. For an anthology about books, printing the publishing clause is a defensible choice. It does, however, remove the reason the decree is remembered: in the famine winter of 1921 the Soviet government was feeding a non-Bolshevik scientist at double the academic rate.
The reply to this book existed, and some of it was in print in the same year.
Intercontinental Press, the weekly of the Fourth International, devoted its issue of 20 April 1970 (vol. 8, no. 15) to the centenary, two days before the anniversary itself. It carried Ernest Mandel on "Lenin's Heritage" and, alongside it, a report on the Frankfurt book fair. The occasion was the appearance of Trotsky's Der junge Lenin in German, and the response to it in the January 1970 issue of the World Marxist Review, the international journal of the pro-Moscow parties, where Friedrich Hitzer and Oscar Neumann wrote that "the card played against Lenin in this, Lenin centenary, year is called Trotsky". Intercontinental Press set that beside "the scores of dreary hagiographical works the Communist parties have turned out for Lenin's one hundredth birthday this April 22". The present volume is one of those works, and it is a better one than most; but the frame is accurate. It went to press in the year in which the official movement understood its own Lenin publishing as an operation against a name.
On the substance, the answer had been given in August 1938, by Trotsky, in an article on freedom of the press written for a Mexican audience and against a Stalinist trade-union campaign to ban the reactionary papers. He concedes the whole of Lenin's Thesis 8 and more: a victorious proletariat may find itself forced to take exceptional measures against a bourgeoisie in open revolt, and in a civil war it will not tolerate the enemy's propaganda centres inside its own camp. And then:
Nevertheless, even in this case, if exceptional measures are prolonged long enough to create a permanent situation, then they carry the danger of going out of control and, giving a political monopoly to the workers' bureaucracy, becoming a source of its degeneration.
What follows is the positive doctrine this book leaves out — not policing opinion but socialising the means of forming it: "It is the duty of the workers' state to put in their hands, to all according to their numeric importance, the technical means necessary for this, printing presses, paper, means of transportation." That is Lenin's 1919 promise of "public printing-presses and public stocks of paper", restated in 1938 by a man who had watched what happened to it. Read alongside Thesis 8 as this volume prints it, the two texts make one argument with nineteen years and a bureaucracy between them.
Read this book, then, for the librarian and the register. Manucharyants's shelf, Bonch-Bruyevich's count of seventy-one books out of seventy-four, the letters ordering zemstvo (local-council) statistics into a Siberian village — these are real evidence about a real reader, and they are the reason the volume is worth reprinting. Its subject was a good idea for a book.
But the volume was compiled by an institution that had made an accommodation with its own subject, and the accommodation shows in one place above all. Between pages 234 and 236 of volume 33 of the Collected Works stands the sentence in which Lenin proposes that a group of Russian scholars be sent abroad, and within six months some two hundred of them were. That is a fact about Lenin and books. It is the hardest fact about Lenin and books. The compilers knew where it was — they printed the page numbers on either side of it — and they left it out.