From "Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books" by Geoffrey Roberts -

THE GIFT OF BOOKS

When Stalin’s two younger sons, Vasily and an adopted son, Artem Sergeev, allowed the pages of an old and badly bound history textbook they were studying outdoors to blow apart in the wind, he collared the boys, telling them that it contained thousands of years of history – knowledge that people had shed blood to collect and store, material that scientists and historians then spent decades working on. Having insisted that Vasily and Artem glue the book back together, Stalin told them: ‘You did good. Now you know how to treat books.’

When Artem was seven, Stalin gave him a copy of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and, when he was eight, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. In the Defoe book, Stalin wrote: ‘To my little friend, Tomik, with the wish that he grows up to be a conscious, steadfast and fearless Bolshevik.’

Vasily was destined to serve in the air force and on his thirteenth birthday, in March 1934, Stalin presented him with a Russian translation of Air War 1936 – a fantasy about a future conflict between Britain and France by ‘Major Helders’, which was the pseudonym of the German aviator Robert Knauss.

The young Vasily was not the most diligent of pupils, preferring sports to study. In June 1938 Stalin wrote a stinging letter to one of his teachers. Vasily was a ‘spoilt youth of average abilities’, wrote Stalin, who was ‘not always truthful’ and loved to ‘blackmail’ weak ‘leaders’, even though he was weak-willed himself. He also liked to remind people whose son he was. Stalin advised the teacher to take Vasily by the scruff of his neck and not to put up with any more nonsense from him."