The scientific novelty of the article consists in the attempt to state for the first time the motives for correspondence selection for I.V. Stalin, and the attempt to find out the reasons for choosing some of the letters out of many others and why they were considered to be of great interest by the staff of the Special Sector of the Central Committee of the CPSU. The author analyses 46 letters dating back to 1947 which were taken from the F. 558 of the State Archive of the History of Social and Political Sciences. The full texts of these letters were included into the summary of the correspondence meant for I. Stalin personally. The author classified the groups of letters and detected the motives in accordance with the classification. It is obvious that the reconstruction of the motives cannot but has some element of a hypothetical character, so the author considers this article as an attempt to work out one of the aspects of the methodology of analyzing epistolary sources. In the appendix to the article there is a summary table of correspondence where the author gives brief information about the authors and the content of the correspondence.