JF Ptak Science Books Post 2216 History of Blank, Empty, and Missing Things series
I don’t mean this post to be snarky or irreverent, really, because we’re dealing with one of the most fantastically murderous people in the history of humans. Since the seven book titles that I have been able to find so far are so, well, unusual, that pulling the individual words out and alphabetizing them might prove to be an insight into the mind of grown-up Soso, Joseph Stalin. I found the titles while researching Stalin’s report card from when he was a child, and found “Stalin’s Library Card”, by David Wojahn, a poem in seven parts that treats each of the books borrowed by Stalin in 1926, when he was 47 years old.
Stalin in 1926 had been General Secretary of the CPSU for two years, in spite of several years of bickering and argument with the stroke-ridden Lenin, who for some years before his death (in 1924) grew more stratigraphically dissatisfied with Stalin and warned the resat of the leadership against him. After maneuvering against Zinoview, and Kaneneov, and Trotsky, and Bukharin and all of the people below them, Stalin was by this time solidifying his power. Purges, manufactured famines, internal deportations of millions, executions, imprisonment, and stupid decisions at the beginning of the German invasion of the USSR in WWII, Stalin had his had in causing the death of many millions of people.
What did he have in mind in 1926 with these books1? Well, I think we know. There are 36 words used in the titles, including six repetetives, leaving 30 unique words. There’s certainly enough for haiku if you wanted the taint, and a poem like that could be one that would be difficult to unremember, not (in spirit but of course not in equivalence) unlike the unremembered masses who were forced into “non-personhood” by Stalin, who when he finally died was left out of the very next printing of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia as the Vast Un-nameable.
I’m cataloging this entry in the History of Blank, Empty, and Missing Things series because Stalin caused so muuch of that to happen to so many people, to nearly an entire country. And then he became missing, himself.