Book review: Stalin was a voracious reader with a steady critique in the margins

During his life Stalin amassed a personal library estimated at about 20,000 books

Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, circa 1930: He had a huge collection of Russian and international classics: Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Hugo, and Shakespeare. Picture: Getty

Stalin was a voracious reader, who set himself a daily quota of between 300 and 500 pages. 

When he died of a stroke in his library in 1953, the desk and tables that surrounded him were piled high with books, many of them heavily marked with his handwriting in the margins.