Yale U. press to publish Stalin's library.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: UP FRONT - Yale University Press - Russian State Archive of Contemporary History

The Russian State Archive of Contemporary History and Yale University Press have made an agreement to digitize Joseph Stalin's personal library and some 440,000 other documents belonging to the late Soviet dictator, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Yale University Press also will publish books--in both Russian and English--featuring research culled from the library, which Russian authorities declassified in 2005.

Stalin ruled the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. According to The Chronicle, the collection illustrates how completely the dictator controlled Soviet life--from the price of sausage and the distribution of nails among factories to matters related to atomic energy and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The archive includes Stalin's hand-annotated copies of books by Lenin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Leon Trotsky. Other highlights include correspondence between Stalin and important party officials between 1919 and 1952--a time that encompassed the Great Terror of the 1930s, World War II, and the beginnings of the Cold War. Researchers will also find letters from Stalin to foreign leaders, such as U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman. Also among the documents is a note to Stalin from American author and politician Upton Sinclair, begging the dictator to spare the life of a young Soviet cinematographer.

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"The important thing about this material is that Stalin never thought anybody else would read it, so this is a...