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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.

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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.

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Apr 10, 2023·edited Apr 10, 2023

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Apr 11, 2023·edited Apr 11, 2023

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.

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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).

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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.

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May 16, 2023·edited May 16, 2023

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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Fascinating! Where do you find the time to not only read a 1000 page book but also to write about it?!

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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?

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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.

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