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.
For sure, I totally agree. I was just saying that detraumatising kids is likely not an effective route to stop dictators and the extremities of Totalitarianism. For other stuff, maybe it's great.
Interesting. I started reading Paradoxes of Power a couple years ago and got up to the point where Lenin dies and Stalin takes over, but then I thought the narrative bogged down in details of Stalin appointing various party apparatchiks to committees, councils, ministries, and whatnot, and I got bored and never finished it.
Anywho, fun fact: in David Chandler's The Campaigns of Napoleon, he describes how Napoleon seemed to honestly believe, based on his personal correspondence and private conversations, that he had been chosen by God to spread the ideals of the French Revolution across Europe, from Portugal to Moscow. And yet, he crowns himself Emperor of France, makes his generals into a brand new class of nobles, installs his relatives and friends as puppet rulers of conquered territories, and turns those territories into vassal states to feed further conquests with conscripts and cash. Not much liberty, fraternity or equality goin' on in say, Spain under Joey Bonaparte. Seems like a clear parallel with Stalin putting an ideological window-dressing on his own self interest.
I would suggest that Stalin was merely a sociopath who did whatever he could to gain and maintain power. Imagined internal enemies allowed him to do all the internal purges and keep everyone in fear of being next. Caution in foreign policy, to a point, was he did not want to risk his position in the Soviet Union to foreign forces.
Stalin showed Lenin he was willing to kill without concern during the Russian Civil War. Stalin was willing to do whatever was necessary, even engaging in mass murder, to keep the Bolsheviks in power. Given that the Bolsheviks were a rather small portion of the country, especially at the very beginning, mass slaughter was necessary for the Bolsheviks to succeed. Marxism was merely the moral veneer to justify mass murder.
And Lenin had been a paid revolutionary funded by Russia's enemies, Stalin knew that such was very possible and a huge risk. Better to keep killing off tens of thousands than risk threats to power.
Stalin did use his tools to protect the Soviet Union against foreign threats as much as possible. In the 1930s, the threat from Japan was much bigger than any threat from Hitler. He used his agents in the FDR administration to push Japan and the US towards war. Stalin knew he could only play nice with Hitler for so long, and he did play to betray Hitler in 1941. Stalin even got lend-lease goods from the US while still at peace with Hitler, and while the British were planning to attack Soviet territory. Hitler just attacked first and much more effectively, but Germany was just a such a smaller country and did not have the huge internal reserves of materials, factories and people that the Soviet Union had.
Stalin likely did not save the Soviet Union from Hitler, as the Soviet Union had too many advantages. However, a more rational leader might have been willing to enter into a peace with Hitler rather than continue fighting. A premature peace would have allowed Germany to grow sufficiently to win a long-term conflict with the Soviet Union, especially if Germany had consolidated the gains in what is now Ukraine and Belarus.
Largely agree with your first paragraph: terror was ultimately to Stalin's political benefit. In foreign policy, he was less aggressive than Trotsky hoped to be, as his primary concern (unlike Trotsky's) was his own internal power. Which probably has something to do with why he beat Trotsky.
But I don't think there was ever any world in which Japan was a bigger threat to the USSR than Germany. I'll contend that Russian/Soviet expansion into the Far East was always an imperialist dick-measuring contest, of negative value to the central government.
Japan would have had to penetrate about 4,000 miles of thinly-populated steppe from Manchukuo before reaching anything of real economic value to the Soviet state in 1940 (say, Yekaterinburg). Meanwhile Berlin to Moscow or St. Petersburg is 1000 miles -- and the territory in between had actual value.
A wiser leader probably would have joined the West in fighting Hitler in 1939, since Germany posed the only viable external threat to his regime. Of course, Stalin probably had memories of 1914 and the mistake Nicholas made by entering the war, but Hitler's Germany in 1939 was a lot weaker than the Kaiser's in 1914.
For that same reason, a wiser leader would not have made peace in 1943-44 and allowed Germany to regain some breathing room and keep Ukraine. But perhaps a weaker leader would have.
Japan and the Soviet Union fought a very serious war with huge battles in the Far East, just prior to WW2. For this reason, Stalin had his agents in America push FDR towards sanctions against Japan, and ultimately towards attempting to push Japan to attack American assets. Yes, the Far East was very far indeed from the heart of the Soviet empire, but let's look at it more closely.
Japan was creating a large empire in Asia and was in the process of conquering China. Japan had a huge army in China that could have turned towards the Soviet Union once it conquered and incorporated China. If the US and Japan never go to war, then the US delays entry into the European conflict even longer. Japan has time to consolidate its huge empire and rule everything from southeast Asia to Manchuria, with the ability to claim Siberia and maybe central Asia from the Soviet Union. All of trans-Ural Soviet Union was at risk to a rising Japanese empire. And every successful invasion of Russia has come from the east, not the west.
Germany meanwhile is a relatively small country in the middle of Europe. While it had huge potential and an able workforce and military potential, it lacked resources. Germany was really only able to achieve so much in the 1930s economically because Stalin sold Germany so many goods. Germany did not look like a serious threat to France in 1939 because France had built massive fortifications, had a huge empire and huge military might.
What hurt France was that it was a broken country psychologically. Even so, the defeat of France in 1940 was not so much militarily, but shattering the will of the French people and leadership. A good book on this is "The Strange Defeat". France could have held the lines and fought tooth and nail for every inch, but it was broken as a people.
So, Germany's main strength under Hilter was its Will to Power, its collective strength and force of will, much more so than its military prowess. Even with all that, the Soviet Union was just too vast and had too many resources. As long as Stalin was stubborn and unwilling to surrender, the Soviet Union was going to win.
No matter what Germany did, it was not going to conquer the world. There were just not enough Germans and German allies to do so.
France and the UK should not have declared war on Germany in 1939 with the invasion of Poland. They should have just built up their own armies and air forces and navies and prepared for conflict. The division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union had no real impact of either France or the UK. Even if Germany had been allowed to consolidate the gains and built up its armies, it was still too weak to fight against an enemy that with the will to resist.
So, again, Japan was a much bigger threat to the Soviet Union than Germany.
Successful invasions of Russia came from the east because those were nomadic Eurasian steppe peoples doing what they do naturally. They could accomplish this logistically because they could graze their flocks on the eastern or western parts of that vast steppe; it made little difference. They didn't need to maintain 4000-mile-long supply chains across hostile, economically unproductive country (and to them, unpopulated pasture WAS economically productive country).
It's a rather different logistical task to move and supply industrialized armies across that same hostile, desolate 4000 miles from a rice-cultivating Pacific nation. Whatever challenges Japanese armies had operating in northwest Manchuria (still too many to beat the USSR) would be multiplied dramatically if they wanted to threaten the Urals, if they could even get there with anything resembling an intact force.
This is a legitimate point -- the speed and ease of the French collapse was a fluke that shocked even the Wehrmacht. But still, Germany had knocked France out in 1871 and came close in 1914; it shouldn't have been beyond the scope of imagination to see it happening again.
But imagine if, instead of the non-aggression pact with Hitler, Stalin had sought some sort of defensive arrangement with the West. Even if it was to be triggered only if Warsaw fell. Even if all it amounted to was saber-rattling that forced Germany to maintain a larger garrison in the east, combined with a trade embargo, in order to maximize the odds of the Western front turning into an attritional grind. Stalin could even think about playing both sides, relaxing the trade embargo once Germany was safely in a losing position in order to maximize the West's eventual exhaustion and therefore his own opportunity space.
This is a reasonable point taken. I wasn't familiar with the evidence for earnest Soviet outreach to the West prior to signing the pact with Germany, and while I've only scanned this article so far, it seems to be of interest in supporting this view:
On the latter points, I fully recognize that Germany in 1939 was weaker than in 1914 -- yet even without the benefit of hindsight it still seems a wise exercise to ask, "what if?" -- to recognize that Prussian militarism was not yet extinguished, and that as long as it existed it had a clear tendency to outperform in practice its supposed capabilities on paper (Russia, we might say, has long shown the opposite tendency, which 2022 proved true yet again).
One of Kotkin's central arguments, and one of the main reasons he rejects any explanations for Stalin's actions grounded in his personal psychology, is that Stalin was really successful. He kept the revolution alive against powerful reactionary forces in Russian society, and he forced probably the biggest change any society has ever undergone on Russia, against factions in his own party. Like Kotkin says, probably no one has ever affected history more, or moved it in a less probable direction.
A change of that magnitude and under conditions so unstable is naturally going to be brutal.
Kotkin's impressed that he even manages to hold the USSR together.
But, in hindsight, those obviously were the actions necessary to develop the USSR fast enough that it could survive the Great Power struggle.
"Others can and did modernize through the use of market forces."
But nowhere near as quickly, look at the trajectory under the Tsar. The Soviets under Stalin still arguable hold the record for fastest industrialisation in history, and the USSR grew rapidly under Stalin, growth only slowed later, after his death. If industrialisation had been delayed only 5 or 10 years probably they would have been defeated in WW2. An they went from a peasant economy to super power in 20 years etc. etc.
It's open to debate whether the purges weakened the Red Army, but clearly not fataly, and the alternative might have been total collapse or another civil war.
He supressed world communist revolution, in Spain etc., at the behest of the UK and France to court them for an alliance.
Like Kotkin says, there's no reason attribute Stalin's actions to anything but callous prudence and maybe paranoia.
Could be why he's becoming popular again; Putin may see himself as a tough but effective Stalin figure. Who knows, he may win against Ukraine and coalesce an anti-American world alliance.
Nice one - thanks much. Understanding Stalin’s evolution as a leader certainly isn’t something that can be achieved without recognizing the interplay of the ideological and personal. If there are lessons to be learned perhaps the most important is that we should recognize something akin to this dynamic at play in much less dramatic ways and institutional settings as well.
Sadism as a motivator is underappreciated. One does wonder if a few million lives would have been saved if early 20th century Russia had a functioning BDSM scene.
Eh, missing the point. It seems you're still trying to revert back to psychological speculation to explain him away.
Very little proof of sadism on Stalin's part, closest would be his call to Pasternak about Mandelstam's poem. Beria, on the other hand, participated personally in interrogation beatings and overall had more of the typical sociopathic traits - that's what sadism looks like.
Stalin's despotism was a natural outgrowth, a logical conclusion of Leninthink: zero-sum "who whom" thinking that breeds extreme solutions (https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/10/leninthink). One should understand that Communism had been a logical development starting already from the French Revolution, whose goal had been the total subjugation of society under an ideal, a la Robespierre. It was Stalin who drove that idea into its conclusion - and what a miserable stagnating one that turned out to be.
Kotkin stresses that the Great Purge made little sense from a powerplay perspective, therefore one cannot ascribe personal motives on Stalin's part - at least without falling into some Freudian "subconscious egoism" or whatever. The closest Kotkin came to grasping a motivation behind it was when he speculated that it was probably Stalin's way of "refreshing" the apparatus, to create social mobility on the part of the younger, more idealist, more Stalinist generations. To forestall stagnation on the part of aging bureaucrats, who would only be concerned in perpetuating the bureaucracy. Funnily enough, that's exactly where USSR ended up after Stalin's death regardless.
And that's the most miserable thing of all. All of the vigorous, lunatic attempts on the part of Stalin to subjugate humanity under an ideology, to have everyone "on the same page", ended up in utter stagnation a la Brezhnev's gerontocracy. Had Stalin seen this was the inevitable outcome of his vision, despite all his killings, all his sacrifices (even personal), he would've probably blown his brains out or succumbed to indignant alcoholism like a proper Russian (and his dad).
Finally, the idea that he started as an idealist and somehow turned into a shortsighted powergrubber is disproved by the fact that it was already in 1918 in the battle of Tsaritsyn, that Stalin developed the exact same modus operandi of public cangaroo courts, agitation by made up conspiracies, indiscriminate executions of loyal people, etc. All of Stalin's actions followed from his explicit rationale, which Kotkin demonstrates repeatedly. Eg Stalin's quote "For many centuries the people in Russia were under a tsar. The Russian people are tsarist. For many centuries the Russian people, especially the Russian peasants, have been accustomed to one person being at the head. And now there should be one" (1926).
Amazing how everyone claims Communism "impoverished" the Soviet Union, yet it became a superpower in record time and the world 2nd largest economy. In fact, almost everywhere Communism has been tried standards of living and GDP have skyrocketed. When Capitalism was forced upon the fmr Soviet Union in the 1990s, GDP dropped more than ever in the history of the world during peacetime. Mass crime, poverty, homelessness, unemployment, child prostitution, etc became rampant. Funny how that doesn't count against capitalism.
Good read. I want to comment on the “great man” theory that you think Stalin’s life seems to provide support for. I agree history turns on chancy events including who gets in power, but I do think that many times, certain Hobbesian conditions get repeated in history that guarantee that only the most ruthless individuals can end up leaders. It’s quite possible that a murderous dictator was soon going to take the reins of post-Bolshevik Revolution Russia if it wasn’t Stalin, in the same way that if Saddam Hussein never existed, only someone equally as ruthless may have been able to hold that ethnically and religiously conflicted country together. Whoever emerges out of the current conflict in Sudan is someone who was willing to do a lot of murdering and is going to continue doing so.
The only leaders that tend to emerge alive from a Hobbesian jungle are Leviathans who don’t let a conscience get in the way of their plans. It is easier to recognize those conditions than define them of course. The French Revolution turned into a blood-letting while the American Revolution did not. But when you see it, you see it, and I expect the Soviet Union looked like such a tinder box to many at the time.
A fun complement (a strange idea, I know, for discussions of Stalin) to the serious works discussed here is Harry Turtledove's novel Joe Steel, about a Stalin whose parents had emigrated to the US and who grows up here. He, of course, ends up as president. Things don't go well for FDR, among others.
It very cringe to say it, but Stalin's apparent progression from killing for ideological reasons, to killing for power, to killing for killing is strong corroboration for the principle of 'absolute power corrupts absolutely'. There is good evidence that rising up a social hierarchy boosts serotonin, and there is also good evidence both that serotonin boosts aggression and that an excess of serotonin makes you go potty. So there may well be a biochemical mechanism for this cliché, which is perhaps the only truly serious challenge to NRX monarchist political theory, though the problem might simply be solvable through medication.
Great essay. I've always been fascinated by Stalin's purge, and one burning question I've never seen answered is how did he pull it off operationally? When they executioners realize they quickly become the executed, why did none conspire? When the inner circle and other powerful Russians with access to Stalin realized that they were as endangered as the dodo, why did none of them play the odds and put a bullet in the old man's head? Was there something unique about the Russian character that made them particularly vulnerable, a tragic stoicism borne out of centuries of oppression, despair and heartache? Was this why Stalin didn't dabble outside Russia?
Love to read this but the ending confuses me. You spend a lot of time arguing that Stalin seems to have been largely motivated by sadism despite his idealism in his younger days. Then at the end you argue that idealism with bad facts is worse than anything else, despite Stalin's sadism leading to far more death and human misery than other communist dictators. Surely idealism with bad facts is bad, but sadism is worse. Idealism often leads to sadism as the struggle for power creates destruction and paranoia, but it's not guaranteed to always be a Stalin level of horror.
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.
"They were social scientists who thought principle required them to behave like gangsters."
this is such a great comment, thank you. (the whole thing, not just the part i quoted.)
Beware the philosopher kings! Cool on paper, terrifying in power.
God preserve us from the enlightened intelligentsia
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.
For sure, I totally agree. I was just saying that detraumatising kids is likely not an effective route to stop dictators and the extremities of Totalitarianism. For other stuff, maybe it's great.
Interesting. I started reading Paradoxes of Power a couple years ago and got up to the point where Lenin dies and Stalin takes over, but then I thought the narrative bogged down in details of Stalin appointing various party apparatchiks to committees, councils, ministries, and whatnot, and I got bored and never finished it.
Anywho, fun fact: in David Chandler's The Campaigns of Napoleon, he describes how Napoleon seemed to honestly believe, based on his personal correspondence and private conversations, that he had been chosen by God to spread the ideals of the French Revolution across Europe, from Portugal to Moscow. And yet, he crowns himself Emperor of France, makes his generals into a brand new class of nobles, installs his relatives and friends as puppet rulers of conquered territories, and turns those territories into vassal states to feed further conquests with conscripts and cash. Not much liberty, fraternity or equality goin' on in say, Spain under Joey Bonaparte. Seems like a clear parallel with Stalin putting an ideological window-dressing on his own self interest.
I would suggest that Stalin was merely a sociopath who did whatever he could to gain and maintain power. Imagined internal enemies allowed him to do all the internal purges and keep everyone in fear of being next. Caution in foreign policy, to a point, was he did not want to risk his position in the Soviet Union to foreign forces.
Stalin showed Lenin he was willing to kill without concern during the Russian Civil War. Stalin was willing to do whatever was necessary, even engaging in mass murder, to keep the Bolsheviks in power. Given that the Bolsheviks were a rather small portion of the country, especially at the very beginning, mass slaughter was necessary for the Bolsheviks to succeed. Marxism was merely the moral veneer to justify mass murder.
And Lenin had been a paid revolutionary funded by Russia's enemies, Stalin knew that such was very possible and a huge risk. Better to keep killing off tens of thousands than risk threats to power.
Stalin did use his tools to protect the Soviet Union against foreign threats as much as possible. In the 1930s, the threat from Japan was much bigger than any threat from Hitler. He used his agents in the FDR administration to push Japan and the US towards war. Stalin knew he could only play nice with Hitler for so long, and he did play to betray Hitler in 1941. Stalin even got lend-lease goods from the US while still at peace with Hitler, and while the British were planning to attack Soviet territory. Hitler just attacked first and much more effectively, but Germany was just a such a smaller country and did not have the huge internal reserves of materials, factories and people that the Soviet Union had.
Stalin likely did not save the Soviet Union from Hitler, as the Soviet Union had too many advantages. However, a more rational leader might have been willing to enter into a peace with Hitler rather than continue fighting. A premature peace would have allowed Germany to grow sufficiently to win a long-term conflict with the Soviet Union, especially if Germany had consolidated the gains in what is now Ukraine and Belarus.
Largely agree with your first paragraph: terror was ultimately to Stalin's political benefit. In foreign policy, he was less aggressive than Trotsky hoped to be, as his primary concern (unlike Trotsky's) was his own internal power. Which probably has something to do with why he beat Trotsky.
But I don't think there was ever any world in which Japan was a bigger threat to the USSR than Germany. I'll contend that Russian/Soviet expansion into the Far East was always an imperialist dick-measuring contest, of negative value to the central government.
Japan would have had to penetrate about 4,000 miles of thinly-populated steppe from Manchukuo before reaching anything of real economic value to the Soviet state in 1940 (say, Yekaterinburg). Meanwhile Berlin to Moscow or St. Petersburg is 1000 miles -- and the territory in between had actual value.
A wiser leader probably would have joined the West in fighting Hitler in 1939, since Germany posed the only viable external threat to his regime. Of course, Stalin probably had memories of 1914 and the mistake Nicholas made by entering the war, but Hitler's Germany in 1939 was a lot weaker than the Kaiser's in 1914.
For that same reason, a wiser leader would not have made peace in 1943-44 and allowed Germany to regain some breathing room and keep Ukraine. But perhaps a weaker leader would have.
Japan and the Soviet Union fought a very serious war with huge battles in the Far East, just prior to WW2. For this reason, Stalin had his agents in America push FDR towards sanctions against Japan, and ultimately towards attempting to push Japan to attack American assets. Yes, the Far East was very far indeed from the heart of the Soviet empire, but let's look at it more closely.
Japan was creating a large empire in Asia and was in the process of conquering China. Japan had a huge army in China that could have turned towards the Soviet Union once it conquered and incorporated China. If the US and Japan never go to war, then the US delays entry into the European conflict even longer. Japan has time to consolidate its huge empire and rule everything from southeast Asia to Manchuria, with the ability to claim Siberia and maybe central Asia from the Soviet Union. All of trans-Ural Soviet Union was at risk to a rising Japanese empire. And every successful invasion of Russia has come from the east, not the west.
Germany meanwhile is a relatively small country in the middle of Europe. While it had huge potential and an able workforce and military potential, it lacked resources. Germany was really only able to achieve so much in the 1930s economically because Stalin sold Germany so many goods. Germany did not look like a serious threat to France in 1939 because France had built massive fortifications, had a huge empire and huge military might.
What hurt France was that it was a broken country psychologically. Even so, the defeat of France in 1940 was not so much militarily, but shattering the will of the French people and leadership. A good book on this is "The Strange Defeat". France could have held the lines and fought tooth and nail for every inch, but it was broken as a people.
So, Germany's main strength under Hilter was its Will to Power, its collective strength and force of will, much more so than its military prowess. Even with all that, the Soviet Union was just too vast and had too many resources. As long as Stalin was stubborn and unwilling to surrender, the Soviet Union was going to win.
No matter what Germany did, it was not going to conquer the world. There were just not enough Germans and German allies to do so.
France and the UK should not have declared war on Germany in 1939 with the invasion of Poland. They should have just built up their own armies and air forces and navies and prepared for conflict. The division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union had no real impact of either France or the UK. Even if Germany had been allowed to consolidate the gains and built up its armies, it was still too weak to fight against an enemy that with the will to resist.
So, again, Japan was a much bigger threat to the Soviet Union than Germany.
Successful invasions of Russia came from the east because those were nomadic Eurasian steppe peoples doing what they do naturally. They could accomplish this logistically because they could graze their flocks on the eastern or western parts of that vast steppe; it made little difference. They didn't need to maintain 4000-mile-long supply chains across hostile, economically unproductive country (and to them, unpopulated pasture WAS economically productive country).
It's a rather different logistical task to move and supply industrialized armies across that same hostile, desolate 4000 miles from a rice-cultivating Pacific nation. Whatever challenges Japanese armies had operating in northwest Manchuria (still too many to beat the USSR) would be multiplied dramatically if they wanted to threaten the Urals, if they could even get there with anything resembling an intact force.
This is a legitimate point -- the speed and ease of the French collapse was a fluke that shocked even the Wehrmacht. But still, Germany had knocked France out in 1871 and came close in 1914; it shouldn't have been beyond the scope of imagination to see it happening again.
But imagine if, instead of the non-aggression pact with Hitler, Stalin had sought some sort of defensive arrangement with the West. Even if it was to be triggered only if Warsaw fell. Even if all it amounted to was saber-rattling that forced Germany to maintain a larger garrison in the east, combined with a trade embargo, in order to maximize the odds of the Western front turning into an attritional grind. Stalin could even think about playing both sides, relaxing the trade embargo once Germany was safely in a losing position in order to maximize the West's eventual exhaustion and therefore his own opportunity space.
This is a reasonable point taken. I wasn't familiar with the evidence for earnest Soviet outreach to the West prior to signing the pact with Germany, and while I've only scanned this article so far, it seems to be of interest in supporting this view:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/152863?seq=1
On the latter points, I fully recognize that Germany in 1939 was weaker than in 1914 -- yet even without the benefit of hindsight it still seems a wise exercise to ask, "what if?" -- to recognize that Prussian militarism was not yet extinguished, and that as long as it existed it had a clear tendency to outperform in practice its supposed capabilities on paper (Russia, we might say, has long shown the opposite tendency, which 2022 proved true yet again).
One of Kotkin's central arguments, and one of the main reasons he rejects any explanations for Stalin's actions grounded in his personal psychology, is that Stalin was really successful. He kept the revolution alive against powerful reactionary forces in Russian society, and he forced probably the biggest change any society has ever undergone on Russia, against factions in his own party. Like Kotkin says, probably no one has ever affected history more, or moved it in a less probable direction.
A change of that magnitude and under conditions so unstable is naturally going to be brutal.
Kotkin's impressed that he even manages to hold the USSR together.
But, in hindsight, those obviously were the actions necessary to develop the USSR fast enough that it could survive the Great Power struggle.
"Others can and did modernize through the use of market forces."
But nowhere near as quickly, look at the trajectory under the Tsar. The Soviets under Stalin still arguable hold the record for fastest industrialisation in history, and the USSR grew rapidly under Stalin, growth only slowed later, after his death. If industrialisation had been delayed only 5 or 10 years probably they would have been defeated in WW2. An they went from a peasant economy to super power in 20 years etc. etc.
It's open to debate whether the purges weakened the Red Army, but clearly not fataly, and the alternative might have been total collapse or another civil war.
He supressed world communist revolution, in Spain etc., at the behest of the UK and France to court them for an alliance.
Like Kotkin says, there's no reason attribute Stalin's actions to anything but callous prudence and maybe paranoia.
Could be why he's becoming popular again; Putin may see himself as a tough but effective Stalin figure. Who knows, he may win against Ukraine and coalesce an anti-American world alliance.
Nice one - thanks much. Understanding Stalin’s evolution as a leader certainly isn’t something that can be achieved without recognizing the interplay of the ideological and personal. If there are lessons to be learned perhaps the most important is that we should recognize something akin to this dynamic at play in much less dramatic ways and institutional settings as well.
Sadism as a motivator is underappreciated. One does wonder if a few million lives would have been saved if early 20th century Russia had a functioning BDSM scene.
Eh, missing the point. It seems you're still trying to revert back to psychological speculation to explain him away.
Very little proof of sadism on Stalin's part, closest would be his call to Pasternak about Mandelstam's poem. Beria, on the other hand, participated personally in interrogation beatings and overall had more of the typical sociopathic traits - that's what sadism looks like.
Stalin's despotism was a natural outgrowth, a logical conclusion of Leninthink: zero-sum "who whom" thinking that breeds extreme solutions (https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/10/leninthink). One should understand that Communism had been a logical development starting already from the French Revolution, whose goal had been the total subjugation of society under an ideal, a la Robespierre. It was Stalin who drove that idea into its conclusion - and what a miserable stagnating one that turned out to be.
Kotkin stresses that the Great Purge made little sense from a powerplay perspective, therefore one cannot ascribe personal motives on Stalin's part - at least without falling into some Freudian "subconscious egoism" or whatever. The closest Kotkin came to grasping a motivation behind it was when he speculated that it was probably Stalin's way of "refreshing" the apparatus, to create social mobility on the part of the younger, more idealist, more Stalinist generations. To forestall stagnation on the part of aging bureaucrats, who would only be concerned in perpetuating the bureaucracy. Funnily enough, that's exactly where USSR ended up after Stalin's death regardless.
And that's the most miserable thing of all. All of the vigorous, lunatic attempts on the part of Stalin to subjugate humanity under an ideology, to have everyone "on the same page", ended up in utter stagnation a la Brezhnev's gerontocracy. Had Stalin seen this was the inevitable outcome of his vision, despite all his killings, all his sacrifices (even personal), he would've probably blown his brains out or succumbed to indignant alcoholism like a proper Russian (and his dad).
Finally, the idea that he started as an idealist and somehow turned into a shortsighted powergrubber is disproved by the fact that it was already in 1918 in the battle of Tsaritsyn, that Stalin developed the exact same modus operandi of public cangaroo courts, agitation by made up conspiracies, indiscriminate executions of loyal people, etc. All of Stalin's actions followed from his explicit rationale, which Kotkin demonstrates repeatedly. Eg Stalin's quote "For many centuries the people in Russia were under a tsar. The Russian people are tsarist. For many centuries the Russian people, especially the Russian peasants, have been accustomed to one person being at the head. And now there should be one" (1926).
Amazing how everyone claims Communism "impoverished" the Soviet Union, yet it became a superpower in record time and the world 2nd largest economy. In fact, almost everywhere Communism has been tried standards of living and GDP have skyrocketed. When Capitalism was forced upon the fmr Soviet Union in the 1990s, GDP dropped more than ever in the history of the world during peacetime. Mass crime, poverty, homelessness, unemployment, child prostitution, etc became rampant. Funny how that doesn't count against capitalism.
Good read. I want to comment on the “great man” theory that you think Stalin’s life seems to provide support for. I agree history turns on chancy events including who gets in power, but I do think that many times, certain Hobbesian conditions get repeated in history that guarantee that only the most ruthless individuals can end up leaders. It’s quite possible that a murderous dictator was soon going to take the reins of post-Bolshevik Revolution Russia if it wasn’t Stalin, in the same way that if Saddam Hussein never existed, only someone equally as ruthless may have been able to hold that ethnically and religiously conflicted country together. Whoever emerges out of the current conflict in Sudan is someone who was willing to do a lot of murdering and is going to continue doing so.
The only leaders that tend to emerge alive from a Hobbesian jungle are Leviathans who don’t let a conscience get in the way of their plans. It is easier to recognize those conditions than define them of course. The French Revolution turned into a blood-letting while the American Revolution did not. But when you see it, you see it, and I expect the Soviet Union looked like such a tinder box to many at the time.
A fun complement (a strange idea, I know, for discussions of Stalin) to the serious works discussed here is Harry Turtledove's novel Joe Steel, about a Stalin whose parents had emigrated to the US and who grows up here. He, of course, ends up as president. Things don't go well for FDR, among others.
Richard--It would be useful for you to do a review of Peter Turchin’s new book when it comes out given your comments about him above:
https://www.amazon.com/End-Times-Counter-Elites-Political-Disintegration-ebook/dp/B0BF8PBQK9
It very cringe to say it, but Stalin's apparent progression from killing for ideological reasons, to killing for power, to killing for killing is strong corroboration for the principle of 'absolute power corrupts absolutely'. There is good evidence that rising up a social hierarchy boosts serotonin, and there is also good evidence both that serotonin boosts aggression and that an excess of serotonin makes you go potty. So there may well be a biochemical mechanism for this cliché, which is perhaps the only truly serious challenge to NRX monarchist political theory, though the problem might simply be solvable through medication.
Fascinating! Where do you find the time to not only read a 1000 page book but also to write about it?!
Great essay. I've always been fascinated by Stalin's purge, and one burning question I've never seen answered is how did he pull it off operationally? When they executioners realize they quickly become the executed, why did none conspire? When the inner circle and other powerful Russians with access to Stalin realized that they were as endangered as the dodo, why did none of them play the odds and put a bullet in the old man's head? Was there something unique about the Russian character that made them particularly vulnerable, a tragic stoicism borne out of centuries of oppression, despair and heartache? Was this why Stalin didn't dabble outside Russia?
Love to read this but the ending confuses me. You spend a lot of time arguing that Stalin seems to have been largely motivated by sadism despite his idealism in his younger days. Then at the end you argue that idealism with bad facts is worse than anything else, despite Stalin's sadism leading to far more death and human misery than other communist dictators. Surely idealism with bad facts is bad, but sadism is worse. Idealism often leads to sadism as the struggle for power creates destruction and paranoia, but it's not guaranteed to always be a Stalin level of horror.