[Also on Substack] This Christian Individualist’s path from the one man to the other over the past fifty years was paved with books. Yours truly, the young Stalinist, was a bibliophile, but so was Stalin the mass murderer. Geoffrey Roberts’s Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books [1] is surprising me (I’m more than halfway through it) with his description of a life that resonates with me at so many points that I’m forced to reevaluate—not repudiate, but painfully re-examine at some cost to my self-image—the love on whose altar I sacrificed much else of value.
Roberts documents, in a profuse but captivating way, what I had surmised from earlier study: that Josef Dzhugashvili (1878/9—1953) gave himself over to his love of books. Omnivorous reading, which had propped up his familial inheritance of the Russian Orthodox faith, also helped him rationalize and then cement his conversion to Marxism and eventually his revolutionary discipleship under V. I. Lenin.
Roberts’s Stalin is a flesh-and-blood historical actor with strong feelings in all the areas of life that we all know from the inside. I’m grateful to Roberts for permitting me to infer that, even at my most foolish, perhaps I was not willing to cross certain lines (e.g., murder, bank robbery) to prove my commitment to The Cause. The truth of that is known only to God, to Whose mercy I entrust myself.
In the history of professing Christians in this dispensation, there have been romantic idealists who, had they the means, would not have hesitated to use them to annihilate “enemies of the Faith,” that is, fellow believers who interpreted Scripture differently. I’m thinking particularly of the ironically named Pope Innocent III (r. 1198—1216), who wiped out the professing Christian dualist sect, the Cathars, and made outcasts of Jews and Muslims (Saracens) living in “Christian lands.” I shudder to think what he would have done with more effective weaponry. (After all, weren’t those hapless tens of thousands a threat to the “souls” of every Catholic they ideologically infected?)
I’m not singling out leaders of the religious society in which I was raised. The great Protestant Reformers Luther and Calvin would not have extended the hand of fellowship to Otis Q. Sellers or to any believer he influenced. Nay, they would have immolated us all or entombed us alive, just as surely as Martin V, let alone Innocent III, would have caused recent occupants of the Papal throne to be incinerated as “heretics.”[2]
In my eighth decade, I view life stages, not as arithmetical deductions, but as seasons I’ve passed through. That’s true for my enemies and heroes alike. As a teenager, I grasped abstractly what it meant to be in one’s twenties, thirties, and so forth. Now I understand those ages viscerally. Things that were merely facts in a biography now represent existential turning points.
The same goes for the loss of friends and the illnesses and deaths of loved ones. Every historical actor I ever read about or personally knew suffered something about which they had to suppress their feelings as they answered this naif’s questions. Lovers live as though they’ll continue along the same lines until some unknown and distant endpoint. No, death may very well overtake one or the other, sometimes when one is in advanced age and grieving the loss unimaginably. My libertarian genius friend Murray Rothbard (1926—1995) left Joey (1928—1999) too soon. Fay Aptheker (1905—1999) predeceased my erstwhile friend and ideological apothecary Herbert (1915—2003) when he was physically and mentally at his most vulnerable.
Stalin’s bibliophilia had no “aesthetic” dimension. It served his commitment to communist revolution and to securing its gains, whatever the cost. The communist vision effectively functioned as his “Absolute,” a pseudo-transcendent object against which he measured everything else. But since the latter cannot function in one’s life as a genuine Absolute, Stalin was bound to distort his relationship to reality—his family, his friends and comrades, and to truth itself.
By contrast, another bookworm, Otis Q. Sellers (1901—1992), consecrated his life, not to the demonic fantasy of communism, but to the God Whose Logos is the Truth and revealed to His people truths of the enscripturated, propositional kind—the One on Whom “Koba” the ex-seminarian fatefully turned his back, just two years before Sellers’s nativity in the new century.[3]
Notes
[1] Yale University Press, 2025.
[2] Although Jan Hus was executed in 1415 and Martin V was not elected pope until 1417—both events occurring while the Council of Constance was in session—what Martin did immediately after his election leaves no doubt that he endorsed the council’s ghastly sentence. Before becoming Pope Martin V, Cardinal Oddo Colonna was an influential member of the Roman Curia. On behalf of then-Pope John XXIII, he (Colonna) had investigated the Czech reformer’s writings, branded Hus a heretic, and issued his excommunication, demonstrating a longstanding personal and theological opposition to Hus well before the execution. (That “John XXIII” was Baldassarre Cossa, whom Angelo Roncalli (1881—1963), the “good” John XXIII, r. 1958—1963), later declared an “anti-pope,” thereby settling a five-century “debate” over Cossa’s status and regularizing the papal chronology.) On February 22, 1418, just months after his election, Martin V promulgated Inter cunctas, the papal bull recognizing the decisions of the Council of Constance, including its condemnation of the thirty “heretical” articles of Jan Hus. That execrable screed also mandated that the Holy Inquisition interrogate and hand over to secular authorities any suspected Hussite—the very mechanism that had led to Hus’s being burned at the stake.
[3] In April or May 1899, Dzhugashvili left or was expelled from the seminary in Tiflis in his native Georgia. Officially, it was because he missed his final exams. “Uncle Joe” said it was because he ran Marxist propaganda circles within the seminary walls. By 1899, he had taken on the alias “Koba” (the fictional Caucasian bandit of Alexander Kazbegi’s 1882 The Patricide (მამის მკვლელი, mamis mkvleli) and traded in his mother’s Russian Orthodox Christian faith for Marxism. The ex-seminarian, having abandoned any path toward the priesthood, briefly took a job as a meteorologist, and transformed himself into a dedicated agitator for atheism.