Note: I originally published this article on Medium on September 4, 2020, when I was a nobody academic and weeks before I started this Substack. Since I had no audience at the time, very few people have ever seen it. I always thought that I should one day post it here, and have finally gotten around to it. Stalin lived one of the most incredible lives ever recorded, a rags to riches story that seemingly has more in common with tales of ancient quasi-history than what we would think was possible in the era stretching from late Victorian England to the Eisenhower administration. Kotkin does the story justice through (so far) two gripping volumes that inspired me to grapple with deep questions regarding power, history, politics, and human nature. The original post has undergone a light stylistic edit before being posted here. For more on Stalin, see my interview with Sean McMeekin, author of Stalin’s War, and my thread on Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Over a lifetime, one can at best hope to achieve a very selective understanding of history. No matter how smart and well-read you are, even if you devote your life to the field, there will always remain huge gaps in your knowledge. There will be entire regions of the world, civilizations, and historical eras that you know close to nothing about. Given that one must be selective, if one is interested in history and how it can inform the social sciences, how do you go about deciding which works are worth reading?
Allow me to make the case for understanding the life of Joseph Stalin. It is difficult to think of many people who lived lives more interesting than that of the Soviet dictator. The son of a cobbler and seamstress living from the outskirts of the Russian empire, he would grow up to be at the center of three once-in-a-lifetime type geopolitical events: the Russian Revolution, World War II, and the beginning of the Cold War. Stalin was also the preeminent force behind the drive to build the first communist great power in world history. This included the 1936–1938 purge of the country’s leadership that was perhaps unlike anything documented history had seen before or since. Twenty years after the Russian Revolution, Stalin would wipe out the vast majority of its more prominent figures still alive, in addition to much of the country’s military and intelligence leadership.
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A good read for our host on Soviet Central planning, is the book "Red Plenty" by Spufford. A extract which discusses the evolution of officials over time:
Baggy two-piece suits are not the obvious costume for philosopher kings: but that, in theory, was what the apparatchiks who rule the Soviet Union in the 1960s were supposed to be. Lenin’s state made the same bet that Plato had twenty-five centuries earlier, when he proposed that enlightened intelligence gives absolute powers would serve the public good better than the grubby politicking of republics.
But the Soviet experiment had run into exactly the difficulty that Plato’s admirers encountered, back in the fifth century BC, when they attempted to mould philosophical monarchies for Syracuse and Macedonia. The recipe called for rule by heavily-armed virtue—or in the Leninist case, not exactly virtue, but a sort of intentionally post-ethical counterpart to it, self-righteously brutal. Wisdom was to be set where it could be ruthless. Once such a system existed, though, the qualities required to rise in it had much more to do with ruthlessness than wisdom. Lenin’s core of Bolsheviks, and the socialists like Trotsky who joined them, were many of them highly educated people, literate in multiple European languages, learned in the scholastic traditions of Marxism; and they preserved these attributes even as they murdered and lied and tortured and terrorized. They were social scientists who thought principle required them to behave like gangsters. But their successors – the vydvizhentsy who refilled the Central Committee in the thirties – were not the most selfless people in Soviet society, or the most principled, or the most scrupulous. They were the most ambitious, the most domineering, the most manipulative, the most greedy, the most sycophantic: people whose adherence to Bolshevik ideas was inseparable from the power that came with them. Gradually their loyalty to the ideas became more and more instrumental, more and more a matter of what the ideas would let them grip in their two hands…
Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khruschev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.
Good piece of writing and great insights. I think we're living in a time when we urgently need to understand Stalin and his normality. Doing this especially undermines the belief that by making childhoods less traumatic we will automatically reduce the chances of more Stalin's in the future. It's not true. Ideology is inherently dangerous because it offers the individual the chance to casually drop taking responsibility for their behaviour.