JOIN USRise of an autocrat
Readers plunging into Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Paradoxes of Power expecting a detailed dissection of the cobbler’s son and seminarian from Georgia who evolved into the monster called Stalin may be disconcerted to find that, as a boy called Iosif Dzhugashvili (Jughashvili in this book), he plays a relatively minor role in early chapters.
The narrative focuses largely on the disintegration of czarist Russia. What we do learn about the life of Soso, as Stalin’s family referred to him, is served up as a relatively acceptable childhood given the time and place, denouncing the popular Freudian analyses that spot early evidence of a psychopath stemming from his absentee father, physical defects, beatings, religious education or doting mother.
But Stalin is far more than the story of the man. Paradoxes of Power, even at almost 1,000 pages, is only the first of three volumes that, in Kotkin’s somewhat understated explanation, tell “the story of Russia’s power in the world and Stalin’s power in Russia.” Kotkin’s stunningly ambitious project is nothing less than to write an exhaustive history of Russia and the world around it, from the collapse of the czarist empire through the end of World War II. The first volume ends in 1928, on the eve of the savage collectivisation of Russia’s peasant agriculture, with fascism rising to the west.
It becomes immediately clear that Kotkin, a professor of history at Princeton, has done prodigious research, not only among the troves of scholarly works about Stalin, but also in the archives that have become accessible since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And while the often intimidating torrent of fact and detail will tax the general reader, there are enough juicy details, colourful personalities and anecdotes to keep the story moving at a lively pace. Ministers of the doomed czarist order, and Nicholas II himself, come to life here, as do peripheral figures like Kaiser Wilhelm II and Benito Mussolini, and, of course, the main figures: Lenin, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Trotsky and the other young Bolshevik zealots who somehow navigated through the rubble of czarism and war to create a revolutionary state, only to hand it in the end to Stalin.
Sometimes Kotkin’s efforts to entertain get a bit out of line, as when he discusses Stalin’s reputation as a ladies’ man with a crass reference to his sex organ. More important, he is not shy about assailing what he regards as false interpretations by other historians. His Stalin is not a disciple who deviates from Lenin; he is Lenin’s true disciple, in pitiless class warfare, in the inability to compromise, and, above all, in unshakable ideological conviction. Lenin’s Testament, which questioned Stalin’s ability to govern the Soviet Union, plays a major part in the manoeuvring of his rivals to block his assent, but Kotkin leans toward the theory that the document was a forgery, possibly by Lenin’s wife.
There is little equivocation in Kotkin’s judgments. Scholars who argue collectivisation was necessary to force Russian peasants into a modern state are “dead wrong”. The conclusion by British historian E H Carr that Stalin was a product of circumstances, and not the other way around, is “utterly, eternally wrong.” On the contrary, it is one of Kotkin’s major theses that Stalin “reveals how, on extremely rare occasions, a single individual’s decisions can radically transform an entire country’s political and socio-economic structures, with global repercussions.” Or, as he puts it in a more graphic passage: “The Bolshevik putsch could have been prevented by a pair of bullets” — one for Lenin and one for Stalin.
Kotkin’s involvement in his subject is so intense that at times he leaps from his historian’s perch right into the fray. He dismisses as “gobbledygook” Trotsky’s explanation that he did not want a senior post because people would say the Soviet Union was being ruled by a Jew. Then, amid the endless back-stabbing among top Bolsheviks, Kotkin exclaims, “What in the world was Bukharin doing spilling his guts out to Kamenev?”
A work of this scope, ambition and intensity is bound to attract challenge, debate and criticism. I would have wished for more attention to the role of culture and religion in the fall of the Russian empire and the rise of Soviet power, given their central places in Russian identity and sense of messianic destiny. Kotkin notes that Stalin wrote poetry and often attended the theatre — Mikhail Bulgakov was his favourite playwright — but there is no discussion of what this meant to him, or of the role writers, poets, composers and artists played in those fateful years.
What was striking throughout the book were the many troubling echoes with Russia today. Kotkin argues convincingly that Stalin was that rare individual whose decisions radically changed history, and his next volume, on collectivisation, promises to further develop the thesis. But it is hard when looking at the path Russia is plotting today not to wonder how much of that terrible era was Stalin’s implacable will, and how much was a Russia that seems forever dreaming of a special destiny and forever meekly surrendering all power to autocrats.
“The Russian Revolution — against the tyranny, corruption and, not least, incompetence of czarism — sparked soaring hopes for a new world of abundance, social justice and peace,” Kotkin writes. “But all that was precluded by the Bolsheviks, who unwittingly yet relentlessly reproduced the pathologies and predations of the old regime state in new forms.” Is that not what is happening today, after the soaring hopes raised by the collapse of the Bolshevik state?
Of course, President Vladimir Putin is not even a pale shadow of Stalin, and today’s Russia is a far cry from Stalin’s totalitarian state, but then the young Dzhugashvili gave no sign that he would become Stalin, just as Putin, as a low-ranking KGB officer, showed no early evidence of what he would evolve into. Yet, much of what Putin has shaped — the restoration of strong central authority around one man, the intolerance of opposition, the cultivation of self-pity and victimhood, the “hand of Washington” behind every problem (for Stalin, it was the hand of England) and the creation of a state of siege in Russia — all have precedents in Stalin.
This reader, for one, still hopes for more evidence that Stalin was indeed singular, a historical malignancy, and not a product of circumstances of the kind that might already be shaping the next chapter of Russian history. And that only whets the appetite for the next instalment, in which Stalin decides to starve Russia almost to death to bring peasants under state control. That, Kotkin has already declared, was an assault on the peasantry for which there was no political or social logic and that only Stalin could have done. It is a testament to Kotkin’s skill that even after almost a thousand pages, one wants more.