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Stalin #2
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941
Pulitzer Prize-finalist Stephen Kotkin continues his definitive biography of Stalin, from collectivization and the Great Terror through to the coming of the conflict with Hitler's Germany that is the signal event of modern world history.
When we left Stalin at the end of Stalin: Paradoxes of Power: 1878-1928, it was 1928, and he had finally climbed the mountaintop and achieved dictatorial power of the Soviet empire. The vastest peasant economy in the world would be transformed into socialist modernity, whatever it took.
What it took, or what Stalin believed it took, was the most relentless campaign of shock industrialization the world has ever seen. This is the story of the five year plans, the new factory towns, and the integration of an entire system of penal labor into the larger economy. With the Great Depression throwing global capital into crisis, the Soviet Union's New Man looked like nothing so much as the man of the future. As the shadows of the 30's deepen, Stalin's drive to militarize Soviet society takes on increasing urgency, and the ambition of Nazi Germany becomes the predominant geopolitical reality he faces when Hitler claims that communism is a global "Judeo-Bolshevik" conspiracy to bring the Slavic race to power.
But just because they're out to get you doesn't mean you're not paranoid. Stalin's paranoia is increasingly one of the most horrible facts of life for his entire country. Stalin's obsessions drive him to violently purge almost a million people, including military leadership, diplomatic corps and intelligence apparatus, to say nothing of a generation of artistic talent. And then came the pact that shocked the world, and demoralized leftists everywhere: Stalin's pact with Hitler in 1939, the carve-up of Poland, and Stalin's utter inability to see Hitler's build-up to the invasion of the USSR. Yet for all that, in just 12 years of total power, Stalin has taken this country from a peasant economy to a formidable modern war machine that rivaled anything else in the world. When the invasion came, Stalin wasn't ready, but his country would prove to be prepared. That is a dimension of the Stalin story that has never adequately been reckoned with before, and it looms large here.
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler: 1929-1941 is, like its predecessor, nothing less than a history of the world from Stalin's desk. It is also, like its predecessor, a landmark achievement in the annals of its field, and in the biographer's art.
When we left Stalin at the end of Stalin: Paradoxes of Power: 1878-1928, it was 1928, and he had finally climbed the mountaintop and achieved dictatorial power of the Soviet empire. The vastest peasant economy in the world would be transformed into socialist modernity, whatever it took.
What it took, or what Stalin believed it took, was the most relentless campaign of shock industrialization the world has ever seen. This is the story of the five year plans, the new factory towns, and the integration of an entire system of penal labor into the larger economy. With the Great Depression throwing global capital into crisis, the Soviet Union's New Man looked like nothing so much as the man of the future. As the shadows of the 30's deepen, Stalin's drive to militarize Soviet society takes on increasing urgency, and the ambition of Nazi Germany becomes the predominant geopolitical reality he faces when Hitler claims that communism is a global "Judeo-Bolshevik" conspiracy to bring the Slavic race to power.
But just because they're out to get you doesn't mean you're not paranoid. Stalin's paranoia is increasingly one of the most horrible facts of life for his entire country. Stalin's obsessions drive him to violently purge almost a million people, including military leadership, diplomatic corps and intelligence apparatus, to say nothing of a generation of artistic talent. And then came the pact that shocked the world, and demoralized leftists everywhere: Stalin's pact with Hitler in 1939, the carve-up of Poland, and Stalin's utter inability to see Hitler's build-up to the invasion of the USSR. Yet for all that, in just 12 years of total power, Stalin has taken this country from a peasant economy to a formidable modern war machine that rivaled anything else in the world. When the invasion came, Stalin wasn't ready, but his country would prove to be prepared. That is a dimension of the Stalin story that has never adequately been reckoned with before, and it looms large here.
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler: 1929-1941 is, like its predecessor, nothing less than a history of the world from Stalin's desk. It is also, like its predecessor, a landmark achievement in the annals of its field, and in the biographer's art.
1184 pages, Hardcover
First published October 10, 2017
About the author
Stephen Kotkin
38 books638 followersStephen Mark Kotkin is an American historian, academic, and author. He is the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. For 33 years, Kotkin taught at Princeton University, where he attained the title of John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs, and he took emeritus status from Princeton University in 2022. He was the director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the co-director of the certificate program in History and the Practice of Diplomacy. He has won a number of awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He is the husband of curator and art historian Soyoung Lee.
Kotkin's most prominent book project is his three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin, of which the first two volumes have been published as Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (2014) and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (2017), while the third volume remains to be published.
Kotkin's most prominent book project is his three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin, of which the first two volumes have been published as Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (2014) and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (2017), while the third volume remains to be published.
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September 11, 2020
“Iosif Stalin was a human being. He collected watches. He played skittles and billiards. He loved gardening and Russian steam baths. He owned suits and ties but never wore them…He wore a semi-military tunic of either gray or khaki color, buttoned at the top, along with baggy khaki trousers that he tucked into his tall leather boots. He did not use a briefcase, but he sometimes carried documents inside folders or wrapped in newspapers. He liked colored pencils…He drank Borjomi mineral water and red Khvanchkara and white Tsinandali wines from his native Georgia. He smoked a pipe, using tobacco from Herzegovina Flor brand cigarettes, which he would unroll and slide in…He kept his desk in order. His dachas had runners atop the carpets, and he strove to keep the narrow coverings. ‘I remember, once he spilled a few ashes from his pipe on the carpet,’ recalled Artyom Sergeyev, who for a time lived in the Stalin household after his own father’s death, ‘and he himself, with a brush and knife, gathered them up…’”
- Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941
The hardest task for a biographer of a man like Joseph Stalin – responsible both directly and indirectly for the deaths of millions of people – is creating a portrayal that avoids turning the subject into a snarling, inhuman creature, while also never allowing that person’s human dimensions to veer into sympathy or rationalization. So far, in an ongoing, multi-volume work on the dictator’s momentous, bloodstained existence, Stephen Kotkin has expertly threaded that needle. Kotkin continues to find the humanity in the Soviet dictator, while always reminding us that his personal quirks – whether that was his enjoyment of colored pencils or his occasionally warm sense of humor – do not compensate for the fact that he was an ice-cold killer who never seemed all that troubled about turning vast swaths of his own country into boneyards.
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler is the second of a proposed three-volume biography. The first entry, Paradoxes of Power, took us from Stalin’s unremarkable birth in a backwater of the Russian Empire, to his ascendancy as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This volume follows Stalin from his consolidation of power in 1929 to the Soviet Union’s entry into the Second World War in 1941.
When Waiting for Hitler opens, Stalin has reversed course on the New Economic Policy (a hybrid system of state controlled capitalism), determined to transform a mostly peasant economy into the lodestar of socialism. Stalin’s brutal collectivization policies transformed individual property into state-controlled entities, and caused famines resulting in the deaths of between five and seven million people. Despite this staggering toll, Stalin didn’t flinch from either the fatalities or the criticism. Between 1931-33, he also arrested, deported, incarcerated, or executed another four to five million people.
According to Kotkin, collectivization was not necessary for the modernity of the Soviet Union. It was, however, quite necessary in order to follow the dictates of Marxism-Leninism. After being outflanked on the left by Leon Trotsky, Stalin managed to tame Trotsky’s wing of the Communist Party, reverse his own thinking to bring it more in line with Trotsky, and also send hunters to assassinate his former comrade, who was now on the run. Stalin was nothing if not ideologically flexible.
By the time that the “growing pains” of collectivization had begun to recede, a new challenge rose in the west, in the form of a funny-looking Austrian painter who had risen to the Chancellorship of Germany.
***
Like its predecessor, Waiting for Hitler is a huge book. The hardcover version has 960 pages of text. There are also 159 pages of endnotes. Those endnotes, I should add, are triple-columned and in eight-point font, requiring a magnifying glass for easy reading. (The endnotes are annotated and occasionally illuminating – and witty! – but I just couldn’t get through them all while also carrying on my life). In short, this is massively researched and information dense tome.
All this information is packed into a chronological narrative that can be overwhelming at times. Kotkin tries to touch on everything, and he tries to do so while remaining faithful to the timeline and not jumping around too much. As such, his chapters are long, and are subdivided into shorter discussions on various thematic topics. This makes things more manageable. Still, Kotkin has a habit of introducing a person once, and then never reintroducing that person again, even when they reappear dozens – or hundreds – of pages later. A dramatis personae would have been super helpful in this regard, but alas, I ended up having to make my own.
I confess that I struggled with the first couple hundred pages of Waiting for Hitler. The collectivization sections are lucid, but not vivid, and it seemed to unbalance the book. That is, Kotkin relates the results of collectivization by recounting statistics, rather than taking the time to imagine what four-to-five million people starving to death actually entails. I get that economics is a dry, impersonal discipline. The results of economic policies, however, are extremely personal. In avoiding that – by sticking as close to Stalin as Stalin’s pseudo-military tunic – the impact of Stalin’s choices falls flat. Those deaths – as the apocryphal Stalin might have said – are just numbers. Instead of looking behind those numbers, we are treated to an extensive recounting of Stalin’s interest in the arts (his attendance of plays, his tweaking of screenplays, etc.). This irritated me to such an extent that I actually set this down for a while.
Obviously, I eventually picked the book up again and pushed on. It was the right choice, because as we get into the mid-1930s, Waiting for Hitler drastically improves.
***
Any novelist knows that good fiction requires both a compelling protagonist and a worthy antagonist. To that end, history has surpassed fiction and generously provided for the storytellers of this era. Rightly perceiving that perhaps the best way of understanding Stalin is by comparing him to his fellow homicidal tyrant – Adolf Hitler – Kotkin greatly widens his lens. Suddenly, instead of being stuck in Stalin’s “Little Corner” office – as we are during the collectivization discussion earlier in the book – we are thrust into the wider world of geopolitical alliances, assaults, and betrayals.
Starting in 1936, the world became increasingly violent and complex. A civil war in Spain became a proxy fight between fascists and communists worldwide. Japan began moving deeper into China, which was already divided between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists. Hitler began swallowing up chunks of Europe, annexing Austria, then moving into the Sudetenland, before eventually occupying much of Czechoslovakia. Ultimately, in one of the great historical twists, Stalin and Hitler joined forces to feast upon the sacrificial lamb of Poland (though, as Kotkin points out, Poland had eagerly joined the earlier carving of Czechoslovakia, grabbing a choice bit for herself). Later still, the Soviet Union took on Finland, taking a blow to the chin before overwhelming the Finns in the Winter War.
Kotkin does a remarkable job of summarizing and explaining these events, each of which are worthy of their own books. In doing so, he is able to show a wily, undogmatic Stalin willing to play a long game for his own ends. For instance, it might seem odd to anyone who conceptualizes Communism as a monolithic bloc, marching in lockstep towards world domination, but Stalin actually interceded in China to protect Chiang Kai-shek at Mao’s expense. To Stalin, spreading the revolution was not as important as keeping Japan tied down in a titanic Asian land war.
***
As most people know, Stalin’s abilities as a four-dimensional chess-master deserted him when it came to Hitler. Waiting for Hitler concludes with the spectacularly flaming denouement of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Even after all the warnings Stalin received, the Red Army was initially routed when Hitler’s Wehrmacht poured across the border of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
It is a testament to Kotkin’s ability to inhabit his biographical target that Stalin’s reactions to the Nazi troop buildup and invasion almost feel like the inevitable outcomes of his character. And that is the essential triumph of this book in particular, and this whole project in general. We get really close to being inside Stalin’s head.
The inner workings of a totalitarian killer like Stalin – Kotkin refers to him often as “the despot” – are always going to be elusive. It is hard to comprehend him, because we have no basis in our own lives for comparison. If we knew that a family down the street was so hungry they were going to die, it would probably make it really hard to sleep at night. Many of us – most, if able – would go down the street and bring that family some food. That really feels – to most of us – like fundamental human decency. It is the baseline price for sharing this earth. Stalin did not think or feel like that. It did not matter that a family might be starving; it did not matter that tens of thousands of families were starving, and that millions would die. He did not care. Moreover, unlike many of his willing executioners, he did not descend into alcoholism, he did not suffer endless nightmares, his hands did not tremble. Stalin – and this is a good thing! – is not like you or me.
Kotkin works really, really hard to reverse-translate Stalin’s words and actions into internal motivations. During the Great Terror – the name given to Stalin’s purges of wealthy peasants, party functionaries, and Red Army officers – you can almost feel Kotkin’s frustration as he tries to bang away at a door that will not open (and that is likely not even a door). The riddle seems to madden him, as he tries to figure out what made the dictator tick. Fear? Paranoia? Sublime strategic motivations? A base lust for absolute, unquestioned power? It is impossible to say, but it is to Kotkin’s credit in this remarkable volume that he tries so damn hard to find out.
- Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941
The hardest task for a biographer of a man like Joseph Stalin – responsible both directly and indirectly for the deaths of millions of people – is creating a portrayal that avoids turning the subject into a snarling, inhuman creature, while also never allowing that person’s human dimensions to veer into sympathy or rationalization. So far, in an ongoing, multi-volume work on the dictator’s momentous, bloodstained existence, Stephen Kotkin has expertly threaded that needle. Kotkin continues to find the humanity in the Soviet dictator, while always reminding us that his personal quirks – whether that was his enjoyment of colored pencils or his occasionally warm sense of humor – do not compensate for the fact that he was an ice-cold killer who never seemed all that troubled about turning vast swaths of his own country into boneyards.
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler is the second of a proposed three-volume biography. The first entry, Paradoxes of Power, took us from Stalin’s unremarkable birth in a backwater of the Russian Empire, to his ascendancy as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This volume follows Stalin from his consolidation of power in 1929 to the Soviet Union’s entry into the Second World War in 1941.
When Waiting for Hitler opens, Stalin has reversed course on the New Economic Policy (a hybrid system of state controlled capitalism), determined to transform a mostly peasant economy into the lodestar of socialism. Stalin’s brutal collectivization policies transformed individual property into state-controlled entities, and caused famines resulting in the deaths of between five and seven million people. Despite this staggering toll, Stalin didn’t flinch from either the fatalities or the criticism. Between 1931-33, he also arrested, deported, incarcerated, or executed another four to five million people.
According to Kotkin, collectivization was not necessary for the modernity of the Soviet Union. It was, however, quite necessary in order to follow the dictates of Marxism-Leninism. After being outflanked on the left by Leon Trotsky, Stalin managed to tame Trotsky’s wing of the Communist Party, reverse his own thinking to bring it more in line with Trotsky, and also send hunters to assassinate his former comrade, who was now on the run. Stalin was nothing if not ideologically flexible.
By the time that the “growing pains” of collectivization had begun to recede, a new challenge rose in the west, in the form of a funny-looking Austrian painter who had risen to the Chancellorship of Germany.
***
Like its predecessor, Waiting for Hitler is a huge book. The hardcover version has 960 pages of text. There are also 159 pages of endnotes. Those endnotes, I should add, are triple-columned and in eight-point font, requiring a magnifying glass for easy reading. (The endnotes are annotated and occasionally illuminating – and witty! – but I just couldn’t get through them all while also carrying on my life). In short, this is massively researched and information dense tome.
All this information is packed into a chronological narrative that can be overwhelming at times. Kotkin tries to touch on everything, and he tries to do so while remaining faithful to the timeline and not jumping around too much. As such, his chapters are long, and are subdivided into shorter discussions on various thematic topics. This makes things more manageable. Still, Kotkin has a habit of introducing a person once, and then never reintroducing that person again, even when they reappear dozens – or hundreds – of pages later. A dramatis personae would have been super helpful in this regard, but alas, I ended up having to make my own.
I confess that I struggled with the first couple hundred pages of Waiting for Hitler. The collectivization sections are lucid, but not vivid, and it seemed to unbalance the book. That is, Kotkin relates the results of collectivization by recounting statistics, rather than taking the time to imagine what four-to-five million people starving to death actually entails. I get that economics is a dry, impersonal discipline. The results of economic policies, however, are extremely personal. In avoiding that – by sticking as close to Stalin as Stalin’s pseudo-military tunic – the impact of Stalin’s choices falls flat. Those deaths – as the apocryphal Stalin might have said – are just numbers. Instead of looking behind those numbers, we are treated to an extensive recounting of Stalin’s interest in the arts (his attendance of plays, his tweaking of screenplays, etc.). This irritated me to such an extent that I actually set this down for a while.
Obviously, I eventually picked the book up again and pushed on. It was the right choice, because as we get into the mid-1930s, Waiting for Hitler drastically improves.
***
Any novelist knows that good fiction requires both a compelling protagonist and a worthy antagonist. To that end, history has surpassed fiction and generously provided for the storytellers of this era. Rightly perceiving that perhaps the best way of understanding Stalin is by comparing him to his fellow homicidal tyrant – Adolf Hitler – Kotkin greatly widens his lens. Suddenly, instead of being stuck in Stalin’s “Little Corner” office – as we are during the collectivization discussion earlier in the book – we are thrust into the wider world of geopolitical alliances, assaults, and betrayals.
Starting in 1936, the world became increasingly violent and complex. A civil war in Spain became a proxy fight between fascists and communists worldwide. Japan began moving deeper into China, which was already divided between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists. Hitler began swallowing up chunks of Europe, annexing Austria, then moving into the Sudetenland, before eventually occupying much of Czechoslovakia. Ultimately, in one of the great historical twists, Stalin and Hitler joined forces to feast upon the sacrificial lamb of Poland (though, as Kotkin points out, Poland had eagerly joined the earlier carving of Czechoslovakia, grabbing a choice bit for herself). Later still, the Soviet Union took on Finland, taking a blow to the chin before overwhelming the Finns in the Winter War.
Kotkin does a remarkable job of summarizing and explaining these events, each of which are worthy of their own books. In doing so, he is able to show a wily, undogmatic Stalin willing to play a long game for his own ends. For instance, it might seem odd to anyone who conceptualizes Communism as a monolithic bloc, marching in lockstep towards world domination, but Stalin actually interceded in China to protect Chiang Kai-shek at Mao’s expense. To Stalin, spreading the revolution was not as important as keeping Japan tied down in a titanic Asian land war.
***
As most people know, Stalin’s abilities as a four-dimensional chess-master deserted him when it came to Hitler. Waiting for Hitler concludes with the spectacularly flaming denouement of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Even after all the warnings Stalin received, the Red Army was initially routed when Hitler’s Wehrmacht poured across the border of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
It is a testament to Kotkin’s ability to inhabit his biographical target that Stalin’s reactions to the Nazi troop buildup and invasion almost feel like the inevitable outcomes of his character. And that is the essential triumph of this book in particular, and this whole project in general. We get really close to being inside Stalin’s head.
The inner workings of a totalitarian killer like Stalin – Kotkin refers to him often as “the despot” – are always going to be elusive. It is hard to comprehend him, because we have no basis in our own lives for comparison. If we knew that a family down the street was so hungry they were going to die, it would probably make it really hard to sleep at night. Many of us – most, if able – would go down the street and bring that family some food. That really feels – to most of us – like fundamental human decency. It is the baseline price for sharing this earth. Stalin did not think or feel like that. It did not matter that a family might be starving; it did not matter that tens of thousands of families were starving, and that millions would die. He did not care. Moreover, unlike many of his willing executioners, he did not descend into alcoholism, he did not suffer endless nightmares, his hands did not tremble. Stalin – and this is a good thing! – is not like you or me.
Kotkin works really, really hard to reverse-translate Stalin’s words and actions into internal motivations. During the Great Terror – the name given to Stalin’s purges of wealthy peasants, party functionaries, and Red Army officers – you can almost feel Kotkin’s frustration as he tries to bang away at a door that will not open (and that is likely not even a door). The riddle seems to madden him, as he tries to figure out what made the dictator tick. Fear? Paranoia? Sublime strategic motivations? A base lust for absolute, unquestioned power? It is impossible to say, but it is to Kotkin’s credit in this remarkable volume that he tries so damn hard to find out.
November 24, 2017
This is a difficult book to review.
One can only admire Kotkin's very close attention to archival material, extensive reading of the second hand sources, his no-BS, nonsentimental approach to his study material. Waiting for Hitler, at times reads like day-to-day account/or logbook of what Stalin did between 1928 and 1941. And, for the most part, this is the main strength of the book.
Kotkin rejects two prevalent views on Stalin phenomenon. One is Stalin was a "psychopath, sadistic and paranoiac killer who enjoyed killing and torturing people". Kotkin convincingly shows that far from being mentally unstable individual, Stalin was quiet an ordinary figure in his daily life. He was seen by others who knew him personally perhaps little too cynical, manipulative and at times coarse. But he was often kind to people around him, good listener and had a good sense of humor. His policies, for good and bad, are not derived from his mental disorder but from his convictions and his interpretation of Marxism and Leninism. He did not conduct collectivizations and show trials out of his impulses, he was planning them in his mind for years.
The other argument Kotkin rejects is that the one that put forward by the leftist historians such as E.H Carr and Hobsbawn that Stalin's policies like forced collectivizations, grain procurement and even show trials were, despite their unnecessary and criminal extremities, basically necessary to transform rural Russia to industrial world power and defeat Nazism. Kotkin however, argues that these policies and the ways in which they were conducted simply did not work. Collectivization and extreme grain procurements not only starve the entire country and killed at least 3 million people in Ukraine, North Caucasus and Kazakhstan, but also hamper Soviet agricultural production. The Union was producing and selling less grain after collectivization (I have some criticism about the way he argues this, check the ending paragraph). The situation improved only after mechanization was properly introduced and Stalin gave concessions to peasants to keep their lot and animals. Even if some sort of collectivization was necessary, the way that Stalin conducted it was criminally negligent and counter-productive. (Kotkin rejects the view that it was an intentional genocide) In addition, again with a convincing archival backing, Kotkin demonstrates that Stalin and his growing number of apparatchiks enjoyed luxury cars, big apartments, country retreats, festy dinners while unintentionally starving peasants because of his pure ignorance and incompetence. Kotkin does not explicitly try to convince the reader for his claim, he just lays what Stalin did/said and what was going on in the countryside meanwhile. All factual, hard to refute.
Similar to collectivization, show trials were not necessary. As of 1936, Stalin's power was not in danger. Old Bolsheviks, like Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin, were already out of the Central Committee and accepted their fate. There was not any organised resistance to the party, not a real plot to overthrow Stalin. Yet Stalin decided to conduct Robespierresque terror not only against suspected enemies, old Tsarist officials, bourgeois, remnants of the small merchant class (the big bourgeois had already fled decades ago), but also to the party, Old Bolsheviks, civil war heroes, military commanders, the type that were shouting "long live the party" when their back was on the wall. Between 1936 and 1939, according to NVKD reports, over 600.000 people (Kotkin estimates the real number is around 800.000) were shot and 2 million were arrested. The purge paralyzed Soviet white-collar, managerial class and more consequentially left the army in disarray. (The country paid the price dearly in the first years of the war.) Yet the terror completely eliminate any future risk of the will in the Central committee to commit what Lenin allegedly wrote in his testament: "Remove Stalin." This was a self-serving mass murder, not a necessity.
In addition, one of the main aim of the book is to reveal Stalin's daily actions and policy decisions within its international/diplomatic context. That is why he gives good amount of attention to international diplomacy of the 1930s, or Stalin's dealings with raising fascism/Nazism in the West and Japanese aggression in the East. If you are interested in the history of Soviet diplomacy in the 1930s, this book is a gem for you.
Like any other book of this scale, Waiting for Hitler have some problems. First, Kotkin's almost obsessive degree of microscopic focus of Stalin's day to day life and his archive-fetishism makes the book hard to follow sometimes at crucial points. For instance, few paragraphs after his argument that collectivization not being beneficial to state, Kotkin in a way praises Stalin for achieving industrialization, producing tanks, locomotives, planes, tractors etc without answering how was he able to achieve that. He seemingly decided to give much more weight on the diplomatic side of the Stalin's 1930s rather than economics, but without the latter, especially the chapter on the collectivization and famine is rather weak.
Overall, it is a goodread if you really care about the topic and have little bit of knowledge about the literature. But if you are a casual reader, go to a book store, read a chapter and only then decide if you want to buy the book.
One can only admire Kotkin's very close attention to archival material, extensive reading of the second hand sources, his no-BS, nonsentimental approach to his study material. Waiting for Hitler, at times reads like day-to-day account/or logbook of what Stalin did between 1928 and 1941. And, for the most part, this is the main strength of the book.
Kotkin rejects two prevalent views on Stalin phenomenon. One is Stalin was a "psychopath, sadistic and paranoiac killer who enjoyed killing and torturing people". Kotkin convincingly shows that far from being mentally unstable individual, Stalin was quiet an ordinary figure in his daily life. He was seen by others who knew him personally perhaps little too cynical, manipulative and at times coarse. But he was often kind to people around him, good listener and had a good sense of humor. His policies, for good and bad, are not derived from his mental disorder but from his convictions and his interpretation of Marxism and Leninism. He did not conduct collectivizations and show trials out of his impulses, he was planning them in his mind for years.
The other argument Kotkin rejects is that the one that put forward by the leftist historians such as E.H Carr and Hobsbawn that Stalin's policies like forced collectivizations, grain procurement and even show trials were, despite their unnecessary and criminal extremities, basically necessary to transform rural Russia to industrial world power and defeat Nazism. Kotkin however, argues that these policies and the ways in which they were conducted simply did not work. Collectivization and extreme grain procurements not only starve the entire country and killed at least 3 million people in Ukraine, North Caucasus and Kazakhstan, but also hamper Soviet agricultural production. The Union was producing and selling less grain after collectivization (I have some criticism about the way he argues this, check the ending paragraph). The situation improved only after mechanization was properly introduced and Stalin gave concessions to peasants to keep their lot and animals. Even if some sort of collectivization was necessary, the way that Stalin conducted it was criminally negligent and counter-productive. (Kotkin rejects the view that it was an intentional genocide) In addition, again with a convincing archival backing, Kotkin demonstrates that Stalin and his growing number of apparatchiks enjoyed luxury cars, big apartments, country retreats, festy dinners while unintentionally starving peasants because of his pure ignorance and incompetence. Kotkin does not explicitly try to convince the reader for his claim, he just lays what Stalin did/said and what was going on in the countryside meanwhile. All factual, hard to refute.
Similar to collectivization, show trials were not necessary. As of 1936, Stalin's power was not in danger. Old Bolsheviks, like Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin, were already out of the Central Committee and accepted their fate. There was not any organised resistance to the party, not a real plot to overthrow Stalin. Yet Stalin decided to conduct Robespierresque terror not only against suspected enemies, old Tsarist officials, bourgeois, remnants of the small merchant class (the big bourgeois had already fled decades ago), but also to the party, Old Bolsheviks, civil war heroes, military commanders, the type that were shouting "long live the party" when their back was on the wall. Between 1936 and 1939, according to NVKD reports, over 600.000 people (Kotkin estimates the real number is around 800.000) were shot and 2 million were arrested. The purge paralyzed Soviet white-collar, managerial class and more consequentially left the army in disarray. (The country paid the price dearly in the first years of the war.) Yet the terror completely eliminate any future risk of the will in the Central committee to commit what Lenin allegedly wrote in his testament: "Remove Stalin." This was a self-serving mass murder, not a necessity.
In addition, one of the main aim of the book is to reveal Stalin's daily actions and policy decisions within its international/diplomatic context. That is why he gives good amount of attention to international diplomacy of the 1930s, or Stalin's dealings with raising fascism/Nazism in the West and Japanese aggression in the East. If you are interested in the history of Soviet diplomacy in the 1930s, this book is a gem for you.
Like any other book of this scale, Waiting for Hitler have some problems. First, Kotkin's almost obsessive degree of microscopic focus of Stalin's day to day life and his archive-fetishism makes the book hard to follow sometimes at crucial points. For instance, few paragraphs after his argument that collectivization not being beneficial to state, Kotkin in a way praises Stalin for achieving industrialization, producing tanks, locomotives, planes, tractors etc without answering how was he able to achieve that. He seemingly decided to give much more weight on the diplomatic side of the Stalin's 1930s rather than economics, but without the latter, especially the chapter on the collectivization and famine is rather weak.
Overall, it is a goodread if you really care about the topic and have little bit of knowledge about the literature. But if you are a casual reader, go to a book store, read a chapter and only then decide if you want to buy the book.
July 24, 2022
A Long Obsession.
Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler is part two of a three volumed look into the life of ‘Man of Steel’, Joseph Stalin. Having been fixated on Kotkin’s first volume Paradoxes of Power I knew I had to tackle the meatier follow up. I have to say, it isn’t as good and toyed with awarding the book 3 stars. It probably lies around 3.5 stars for me. The book is heavy, it’s slow burn and it’s long 905 reading pages, ignoring the notes and epilogue on Soviet Administration (itself interesting and worth using as referral material). The problem is that the detail becomes to bogged down, almost as though Kotkin can’t decide what is relevant or what detail to use, so throws it all on the page. As a result I felt I was loosing my way with the narrative as anecdotes and world events slip in and between what Stalin was doing. This actually really worked in the first volume, as Kotkin’s philosophy is that ‘to understand Stalin you have to understand the world he was in.’ Although the style is still enjoyable, here it’s too much and not as effective. In a crazy way it feels lazy, even though a huge amount of work has gone into this publication.
The book follows from where we left off, Stalin has outmanoeuvred Lev Bronstein, aka Leon Trotsky and inherited power from Lenin. He now tightens his grip, establishes his dictatorship within a dictatorship. He instigates collectivisation which in turn causes the famine and nearly ends his reign. This is one of those turning points in history, only Stalin could have done this, knowing millions would die. But as he said to the Politburo ‘are we not socialists comrades?’ He truest believe in the Leninist-Marxist cause. From there we see the interactions with the Spanish and Chinese Civil Wars, Nazi-Soviet relations and are of course the Reign of Terror. If you were to close your eyes and think of the most ridiculously opinionated or farfetched person you know and gave them power and influence, this is how it might end us. The sheer instantly and suffering is beyond imagination. Everything shocks and surprises.
Within all of this Stalin becomes more and more isolated. His second wife Nadezhda commits suicide, his best friend Sergi Kirov is assassinated and the despot himself becomes more suspicious. There is one amazing picture in the book of Felix Dzierzynski’s funeral in 1926, where everyone in the picture (around 50 people) apart from Vyacheslav Molotov aka ‘The Hammer’ are either executed or imprisoned by Stalin. The book explores why Molotov, so close to the regime survives and how and why other famous figures rise to the top: Lavrentiy Beria, Nikita Khrushchev and Georgy Zhukov.
Ultimately the volume is entitled Waiting for Hitler and it really does feel like Stalin spent these years (1929-1941) obsessing, thinking about and seeking out his despotic contemporary. It all comes to a head with the launch of Operation Barbarossa and the invasion of the Soviet Union June 22nd 1941. With this the fate of the Second World War changed. The USSR teetering of the edge of lying down further with the Nazis and carving even more of Eastern Europe up to ultimately breaking the German war machine and taking the blunt of the causalities to bring the Third Reich to its knees.
Overall I’m glad I waded through it. However it is by far from a masterpiece. On an endnote I also found it strange that Kotkin had a weird hang-up on Winston Churchill as he couldn’t help adding the prefix ‘imperialist’ everywhere he was mentioned. I found this annoying and unnecessary. He also in one place adds ‘The imperialist Churchill uses gas against the Kurds.’ He did, it was non-lethal and there is absolutely no necessity or context from Kotkin here. This had to be mentioned, as this the overbearing style I talked about above. To understand WWII or Russia you must understand Stalin and Kotkin is the expert so dip your toe, but with caution.
Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Waiting for Hitler is part two of a three volumed look into the life of ‘Man of Steel’, Joseph Stalin. Having been fixated on Kotkin’s first volume Paradoxes of Power I knew I had to tackle the meatier follow up. I have to say, it isn’t as good and toyed with awarding the book 3 stars. It probably lies around 3.5 stars for me. The book is heavy, it’s slow burn and it’s long 905 reading pages, ignoring the notes and epilogue on Soviet Administration (itself interesting and worth using as referral material). The problem is that the detail becomes to bogged down, almost as though Kotkin can’t decide what is relevant or what detail to use, so throws it all on the page. As a result I felt I was loosing my way with the narrative as anecdotes and world events slip in and between what Stalin was doing. This actually really worked in the first volume, as Kotkin’s philosophy is that ‘to understand Stalin you have to understand the world he was in.’ Although the style is still enjoyable, here it’s too much and not as effective. In a crazy way it feels lazy, even though a huge amount of work has gone into this publication.
The book follows from where we left off, Stalin has outmanoeuvred Lev Bronstein, aka Leon Trotsky and inherited power from Lenin. He now tightens his grip, establishes his dictatorship within a dictatorship. He instigates collectivisation which in turn causes the famine and nearly ends his reign. This is one of those turning points in history, only Stalin could have done this, knowing millions would die. But as he said to the Politburo ‘are we not socialists comrades?’ He truest believe in the Leninist-Marxist cause. From there we see the interactions with the Spanish and Chinese Civil Wars, Nazi-Soviet relations and are of course the Reign of Terror. If you were to close your eyes and think of the most ridiculously opinionated or farfetched person you know and gave them power and influence, this is how it might end us. The sheer instantly and suffering is beyond imagination. Everything shocks and surprises.
Within all of this Stalin becomes more and more isolated. His second wife Nadezhda commits suicide, his best friend Sergi Kirov is assassinated and the despot himself becomes more suspicious. There is one amazing picture in the book of Felix Dzierzynski’s funeral in 1926, where everyone in the picture (around 50 people) apart from Vyacheslav Molotov aka ‘The Hammer’ are either executed or imprisoned by Stalin. The book explores why Molotov, so close to the regime survives and how and why other famous figures rise to the top: Lavrentiy Beria, Nikita Khrushchev and Georgy Zhukov.
Ultimately the volume is entitled Waiting for Hitler and it really does feel like Stalin spent these years (1929-1941) obsessing, thinking about and seeking out his despotic contemporary. It all comes to a head with the launch of Operation Barbarossa and the invasion of the Soviet Union June 22nd 1941. With this the fate of the Second World War changed. The USSR teetering of the edge of lying down further with the Nazis and carving even more of Eastern Europe up to ultimately breaking the German war machine and taking the blunt of the causalities to bring the Third Reich to its knees.
Overall I’m glad I waded through it. However it is by far from a masterpiece. On an endnote I also found it strange that Kotkin had a weird hang-up on Winston Churchill as he couldn’t help adding the prefix ‘imperialist’ everywhere he was mentioned. I found this annoying and unnecessary. He also in one place adds ‘The imperialist Churchill uses gas against the Kurds.’ He did, it was non-lethal and there is absolutely no necessity or context from Kotkin here. This had to be mentioned, as this the overbearing style I talked about above. To understand WWII or Russia you must understand Stalin and Kotkin is the expert so dip your toe, but with caution.
June 22, 2020
I just finished that damn thing.
Wholly mother of god this book was L O N G.
It was LONGER than volume I, which was itself extremely extremely very very long.
This book covers Stains horrendous mass murder and incarceration binge otherwise known as ‘the terrors’.
And it was interesting.
Extremely well researched and written.
And VERRY VERY detailed.
But it stops just as Hitler is about to invade.
In other words.
There’s another volume after this one.
And despite how incredibly good this book is.
The thought of 1000 more pages of Staline is beyond aversive.
I literally don’t ever want to think about Staline ever again for the rest of my days.
But I’m 2000(+) pages in.
And the best part is in the next book.
So......
I’m going to have to do volume 3 I guess.
In Sum:
If your thinking about reading this series.
If you’re not extremely interested in Stalin.
Don’t do it.
You won’t be able to stop and you won’t want to continue.
It’s not cute.
Wholly mother of god this book was L O N G.
It was LONGER than volume I, which was itself extremely extremely very very long.
This book covers Stains horrendous mass murder and incarceration binge otherwise known as ‘the terrors’.
And it was interesting.
Extremely well researched and written.
And VERRY VERY detailed.
But it stops just as Hitler is about to invade.
In other words.
There’s another volume after this one.
And despite how incredibly good this book is.
The thought of 1000 more pages of Staline is beyond aversive.
I literally don’t ever want to think about Staline ever again for the rest of my days.
But I’m 2000(+) pages in.
And the best part is in the next book.
So......
I’m going to have to do volume 3 I guess.
In Sum:
If your thinking about reading this series.
If you’re not extremely interested in Stalin.
Don’t do it.
You won’t be able to stop and you won’t want to continue.
It’s not cute.
March 3, 2022
This was a slow read. The level of detail is both impressive and daunting.
Stalin was a cruel despot, responsible for the deaths of millions. He dragged the Soviet Union into a position of strength from one of weakness, albeit the weakness was caused in large part by the Bolshevik takeover in 1917 - and liquidating the cream of the revolutionaries almost cost him his throne when Hitler invaded.
Breakneck industrialisation in the 20s and 30s probably saved the country in WW2
Clearly Stalin had good qualities, he was hard working and charismatic, capable of inspiring huge loyalty. Yet he was also capricious and cruel, who enjoyed toying with his inner circle.
A monster, and a giant of the 20C.
Stalin was a cruel despot, responsible for the deaths of millions. He dragged the Soviet Union into a position of strength from one of weakness, albeit the weakness was caused in large part by the Bolshevik takeover in 1917 - and liquidating the cream of the revolutionaries almost cost him his throne when Hitler invaded.
Breakneck industrialisation in the 20s and 30s probably saved the country in WW2
Clearly Stalin had good qualities, he was hard working and charismatic, capable of inspiring huge loyalty. Yet he was also capricious and cruel, who enjoyed toying with his inner circle.
A monster, and a giant of the 20C.
Read
March 31, 2021This book, at just over 900 pages of text, is as much a beast as the man, Stalin. I spoke too soon about limited blood oozing in my commentary about volume 1 – it oozes here big time and the war has yet to begin. As for the unchallenged criticism present in the earlier work, look what happened to Trotsky in 1940. No one is safe. Professor Kotkin again produced a definitive work, perhaps an overwhelming one if we really attempt to appreciate the enormity of all that happened during these years.
Professor Kotkin’s detailed research offers remarkable insight into Stalin’s thought process. I felt Stalin reacting to 2nd, if not 3rd, order considerations in his machinations; to him, it wasn’t a matter of what someone did, it was a matter of what someone could do, or what someone could eventually conceive of doing – that’s all that was needed to be condemned to preserve the revolution and, naturally, his self. Even the executioners were executed, and their successors, too. Notably, Stalin did not delegate the devious orchestrations; lengthy daily reports were made containing arrest and killing lists, many he personally reviewed and commented on with one of his colored pencils. Writing of a plenum in 1937 amid the terror, Professor Kotkin remarked, “This is what a slaughterhouse would sound like if the pigs, cows, and sheep could talk.” Imagine being there.
Naturally, given the time period covered in this work, there are abundant references to Adolf Hitler, whose murderous actions are well chronicled and understood, unlike Stalin whose records have largely remained hidden from public review until recently. The two despots after 1933 are portrayed as something of dance partners. When tallied, though, I think Stalin outdid Hitler in the atrocity department. In part this owed to differences in the sheer size of their respective states, and in part tenure, since Stalin ruled nearly three times as long as Hitler. And yet despite those differences, Hitler knew limitations, where Stalin knew none, none at all.
Absorbing the implications of Stalin’s rule is difficult, I believe, because we’ve so few first person accounts available, and almost nothing in the photographic or film archives. I’m so overwhelmed with the scale of this dark decade Professor Kotkin so ably describes that I’m challenged to condense my thoughts meaningfully. Stalin’s handiwork speaks to an exponential banality of evil. Justice? None was to be had. The standard literary model has bad actors ultimately meeting their deserts, heroes emerge, Richard III is left begging for a horse. Not in this tale. Murders, imprisonment, torture, starvation beget more murders, imprisonment, torture, starvation, year after year, without consequence to the ultimate perpetrator. It’s not often we now encounter personally any semblance of the horrors recounted here. I suppose victims of violent crime or family abuse may have an inkling of the feelings experienced in those years. Coming to terms with the larger implications of Stalin’s reign, for me, is a mighty difficult undertaking, brought front of mind with Professor Kotkin’s excellent book. Maybe best to avoid dwelling on these thoughts, right?
Professor Kotkin’s detailed research offers remarkable insight into Stalin’s thought process. I felt Stalin reacting to 2nd, if not 3rd, order considerations in his machinations; to him, it wasn’t a matter of what someone did, it was a matter of what someone could do, or what someone could eventually conceive of doing – that’s all that was needed to be condemned to preserve the revolution and, naturally, his self. Even the executioners were executed, and their successors, too. Notably, Stalin did not delegate the devious orchestrations; lengthy daily reports were made containing arrest and killing lists, many he personally reviewed and commented on with one of his colored pencils. Writing of a plenum in 1937 amid the terror, Professor Kotkin remarked, “This is what a slaughterhouse would sound like if the pigs, cows, and sheep could talk.” Imagine being there.
Naturally, given the time period covered in this work, there are abundant references to Adolf Hitler, whose murderous actions are well chronicled and understood, unlike Stalin whose records have largely remained hidden from public review until recently. The two despots after 1933 are portrayed as something of dance partners. When tallied, though, I think Stalin outdid Hitler in the atrocity department. In part this owed to differences in the sheer size of their respective states, and in part tenure, since Stalin ruled nearly three times as long as Hitler. And yet despite those differences, Hitler knew limitations, where Stalin knew none, none at all.
Absorbing the implications of Stalin’s rule is difficult, I believe, because we’ve so few first person accounts available, and almost nothing in the photographic or film archives. I’m so overwhelmed with the scale of this dark decade Professor Kotkin so ably describes that I’m challenged to condense my thoughts meaningfully. Stalin’s handiwork speaks to an exponential banality of evil. Justice? None was to be had. The standard literary model has bad actors ultimately meeting their deserts, heroes emerge, Richard III is left begging for a horse. Not in this tale. Murders, imprisonment, torture, starvation beget more murders, imprisonment, torture, starvation, year after year, without consequence to the ultimate perpetrator. It’s not often we now encounter personally any semblance of the horrors recounted here. I suppose victims of violent crime or family abuse may have an inkling of the feelings experienced in those years. Coming to terms with the larger implications of Stalin’s reign, for me, is a mighty difficult undertaking, brought front of mind with Professor Kotkin’s excellent book. Maybe best to avoid dwelling on these thoughts, right?
Read
March 10, 2019This was even better than Volume I if that is even possible. Volume II gets into the meat of the dictatorship leading up to World War II. The primary focus is the infamous purge - when Stalin killed just about everybody. The only rational reason for his unbelievable cruelty and sheer disregard for human life: because he could. There was really no rhyme or reason for completely decimating the entire “cabinet” and the military. The best estimate is 750,000 people were sent to the Gulag to die or were more often just killed outright in prisons after “confessing” to various and assundry fabricated crimes against the State/ideology. I thought my outrage was spent when he starved the citizens as a result of collectivization in such a cavalier, cold-hearted manner. What he did during the Great Purge left me incredulous, sickened and sorrowful.
One of the best parts of Stephen Kotkin obvious commitment to make this series of biographies about Joseph Stalin thorough is his deep, deep understanding of the peoples, cultures, lifestyles, personalities and atmosphere that operated in Soviet Russia. He also makes sure to provide full backgrounds of not only those in Stalin’s immediate sphere but all of the major and minor players who play a role in world politics and government. Hitler, Franco, Churchill, Roosevelt, Mao Zedong, etc. etc. He really fleshes out everyone from the era 1929-1941 by providing their backgrounds, education and roles in the world.
I practically stalked Stephen Kotkin and his publisher online to catch the release date for this book. Luckily a client gave me a $50 Barnes & Noble Gift Card so I did not need to get a library book which would be subject to a cup of coffee. This is an absolutely outstanding book and I cannot wait for Volume III. So I am back to stalking Stephen Kotkin!
One of the best parts of Stephen Kotkin obvious commitment to make this series of biographies about Joseph Stalin thorough is his deep, deep understanding of the peoples, cultures, lifestyles, personalities and atmosphere that operated in Soviet Russia. He also makes sure to provide full backgrounds of not only those in Stalin’s immediate sphere but all of the major and minor players who play a role in world politics and government. Hitler, Franco, Churchill, Roosevelt, Mao Zedong, etc. etc. He really fleshes out everyone from the era 1929-1941 by providing their backgrounds, education and roles in the world.
I practically stalked Stephen Kotkin and his publisher online to catch the release date for this book. Luckily a client gave me a $50 Barnes & Noble Gift Card so I did not need to get a library book which would be subject to a cup of coffee. This is an absolutely outstanding book and I cannot wait for Volume III. So I am back to stalking Stephen Kotkin!
June 26, 2019
فرض کنید کسی بگه حکومت رو به من بسپرید تا ظرف ۳۰ سال یه کشور کشاورزی رو به یه ابرقدرت تبدیل کنم؛ اما از شما ۱۰ میلیون نفر کشته میشن (جدا از ۲۰ میلیون نفری که طی جنگ میمیرن). نظرتون چیه؟
نویسنده، قبل از این جلد، یه جلد کتاب دیگه در مورد استالین نوشته که مربوط به زمان تولد تا ۱۹۲۹ (اوایل حکومت دیکتاتوری استالین) هست، این جلد در مورد ۱۹۲۹ تا ۱۹۴۱ و حمله هیتلره، و قراره که یه جلد دیگه برای ۱۹۴۱ تا ۱۹۵۳ (مرگ استالین) هم بنویسه. من جلد اول رو نخوندم (دقت نکرده بودم که جلد اول داره!) و یه مقداری شروع کتاب برام سخت بود چون هنوز نمیدونستم کی به کیه، اما خود استالین کمک میکنه و دونه دونه آدمهای قبلی رو میکشه و شخصیتهای تازه به داستان اضافه میکنه که خوندنش راحتتر بشه.
خوندن این کتاب برای من به شدت جذاب بود چون به نظرم رسید استالین هم یه شخصیت بحثبرانگیزه مثل رضاخانه: یه جامعه عقبمونده رو به ابرقدرت صنعتی تبدیل کرد؛ اما برای این صنعتی کردن چون چیز دیگهای نداشت، از پول صادرات محصولات کشاورزی استفاده کرد تا از اروپا (به خصوص آلمان نازی) و آمریکا ماشینآلات صنعتی بخره و انتقال تکنولوژی انجام بده. به دلایل مختلف تولیدات کشاورزی تو اون سالها کم بوده اما استالین، مثل یه دیکتاتور خوب و وظیفهشناس، عقب موندن از برنامه رو قبول نمیکنه و حجم بسیار بالایی گندم و… صادر میکنه تا درآمد صادراتی و در نتیجهاش واردات ماشینآلات کم نشه. نتیجه؟ حدود ۶ میلیون نفر در اثر قحطی کشته میشن. به عبارت دقیقتر:
استالین با برداشتن غذا از سفره مردم کشورش و ایجاد قحطی و کشتن ۶ میلیون نفر، کشورش و ارتش رو صنعتی میکنه. و اگه این کار رو نکرده بود شوروی قطعا تو جنگ جهانی دوم باخته بود و به احتمال زیاد جمعیت بسیار بیشتری از روسها کشته میشدن. حالا بیاید در مورد dilemma ها صحبت کنیم 😁
کتاب به شدت پر جزییات نوشته شده و تا حد زیادی اینکه تو هر فصل تمرکز کتاب روی چیه بر میگرده به اینکه تمرکز استالین تو اون زمان روی چی بوده. این رو از این جهت گفتم که بگم بسته به اینکه علاقهتون به چیه، ممکنه بعضی از فصلهای کتاب خستهکننده بشه، اما اگه به کلیات ماجراهای اون سالها علاقه دارید کتاب به شدت کشش داره و به مرور که جلوتر میاید براتون مشخص میشه چرا اینقدر با جزییات نوشته شده: این جزییات برای فهمیدن شخصیت استالین لازم هستن.
کتاب برای توصیف شخصیت استالین به شدت روی کلمه «اراده» مانور میده، و واقعا عجیبه: این آدم رهبر شوروی میشه با اینکه لنین به وضوح نوشته بود استالین نباید رهبر باشه، موفق میشه تروتسکی (مهمترین متحد لنین) رو کنار بزنه و در نهایت ترور کنه با اینکه تروتسکی از نظر تئوریک و عملی به شدت قویتر از استالین بود، موفق میشه (عملا تنهایی) هیتلر رو شکست بده در حالی که هیتلر کل اروپا رو گرفته بود، و... قضیه تعجببرانگیزتر میشه اگه دقت کنید که این آدم هیچوقت چیزی تحت عنوان متحد و یار نداشته، و اگر هم کسی میخواسته مریدش بشه قطعا طی چند سال به دستور استالین کشته میشده (به استثنای بریا) و این آدم نه فقط کشورش رو تنها در برابر کل دنیا میدیده، بلکه تو کشورش هم خودش رو علیه همه مردم میدیده، و با این مدل ذهنی تونسته به این موفقیتهای عجیب برسه. هیچ بخشی از این پاراگراف برام منطقی نیست 😁
نویسنده، قبل از این جلد، یه جلد کتاب دیگه در مورد استالین نوشته که مربوط به زمان تولد تا ۱۹۲۹ (اوایل حکومت دیکتاتوری استالین) هست، این جلد در مورد ۱۹۲۹ تا ۱۹۴۱ و حمله هیتلره، و قراره که یه جلد دیگه برای ۱۹۴۱ تا ۱۹۵۳ (مرگ استالین) هم بنویسه. من جلد اول رو نخوندم (دقت نکرده بودم که جلد اول داره!) و یه مقداری شروع کتاب برام سخت بود چون هنوز نمیدونستم کی به کیه، اما خود استالین کمک میکنه و دونه دونه آدمهای قبلی رو میکشه و شخصیتهای تازه به داستان اضافه میکنه که خوندنش راحتتر بشه.
خوندن این کتاب برای من به شدت جذاب بود چون به نظرم رسید استالین هم یه شخصیت بحثبرانگیزه مثل رضاخانه: یه جامعه عقبمونده رو به ابرقدرت صنعتی تبدیل کرد؛ اما برای این صنعتی کردن چون چیز دیگهای نداشت، از پول صادرات محصولات کشاورزی استفاده کرد تا از اروپا (به خصوص آلمان نازی) و آمریکا ماشینآلات صنعتی بخره و انتقال تکنولوژی انجام بده. به دلایل مختلف تولیدات کشاورزی تو اون سالها کم بوده اما استالین، مثل یه دیکتاتور خوب و وظیفهشناس، عقب موندن از برنامه رو قبول نمیکنه و حجم بسیار بالایی گندم و… صادر میکنه تا درآمد صادراتی و در نتیجهاش واردات ماشینآلات کم نشه. نتیجه؟ حدود ۶ میلیون نفر در اثر قحطی کشته میشن. به عبارت دقیقتر:
استالین با برداشتن غذا از سفره مردم کشورش و ایجاد قحطی و کشتن ۶ میلیون نفر، کشورش و ارتش رو صنعتی میکنه. و اگه این کار رو نکرده بود شوروی قطعا تو جنگ جهانی دوم باخته بود و به احتمال زیاد جمعیت بسیار بیشتری از روسها کشته میشدن. حالا بیاید در مورد dilemma ها صحبت کنیم 😁
کتاب به شدت پر جزییات نوشته شده و تا حد زیادی اینکه تو هر فصل تمرکز کتاب روی چیه بر میگرده به اینکه تمرکز استالین تو اون زمان روی چی بوده. این رو از این جهت گفتم که بگم بسته به اینکه علاقهتون به چیه، ممکنه بعضی از فصلهای کتاب خستهکننده بشه، اما اگه به کلیات ماجراهای اون سالها علاقه دارید کتاب به شدت کشش داره و به مرور که جلوتر میاید براتون مشخص میشه چرا اینقدر با جزییات نوشته شده: این جزییات برای فهمیدن شخصیت استالین لازم هستن.
کتاب برای توصیف شخصیت استالین به شدت روی کلمه «اراده» مانور میده، و واقعا عجیبه: این آدم رهبر شوروی میشه با اینکه لنین به وضوح نوشته بود استالین نباید رهبر باشه، موفق میشه تروتسکی (مهمترین متحد لنین) رو کنار بزنه و در نهایت ترور کنه با اینکه تروتسکی از نظر تئوریک و عملی به شدت قویتر از استالین بود، موفق میشه (عملا تنهایی) هیتلر رو شکست بده در حالی که هیتلر کل اروپا رو گرفته بود، و... قضیه تعجببرانگیزتر میشه اگه دقت کنید که این آدم هیچوقت چیزی تحت عنوان متحد و یار نداشته، و اگر هم کسی میخواسته مریدش بشه قطعا طی چند سال به دستور استالین کشته میشده (به استثنای بریا) و این آدم نه فقط کشورش رو تنها در برابر کل دنیا میدیده، بلکه تو کشورش هم خودش رو علیه همه مردم میدیده، و با این مدل ذهنی تونسته به این موفقیتهای عجیب برسه. هیچ بخشی از این پاراگراف برام منطقی نیست 😁
December 30, 2017
I doubt that anybody will write a better or more comprehensive biography of the "despot," as Kotkin calls the Soviet dictator, at least for many years to come. The book will interest specialists and history enthusiasts alike. It is the product of meticulous and exhaustive research and attempts to resolve several of the historical mysteries surrounding Stalin's reign. Of the two, Stalin is by far more important to world history than Lenin, and he also led a more interesting life. Say what you will, but stories about armored car robbers are always more interesting than those about losers, cheats, and cowards on the lam.
This is the second volume of Kotkin's planned three volume biography of Stalin (see Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928), covering his ascension to supreme Russian leader through the eve of Germany's invasion in June 1941. This period includes collectivization, the Terror, and the Pact of Steel.
Collectivization of agriculture was the event that precipitated the other two. Lenin made the first, unsuccessful attempt at collectivization; Stalin "succeeded" in making it a reality. The purpose, of course, was to drain resources from rural agriculture and divert them to urban industry. The resulting famines were horrible, made worse by the wholesale murder of recalcitrant peasants as well as local communist officials who were unable to meet Stalin’s demands. Party officials and others openly criticized Stalin for the brutality of collectivization, and it was those critics who were systematically tortured, imprisoned, and executed during the Terror.
Stalin never knew a peasant or anything else about rural agriculture. He viewed the mega-deaths as statistics, not human tragedy, and he rejected Party criticisms of the famines as ignorant at best and sabotage at worst. The Terror (1936-38), on the other hand, was personal, as it engulfed Stalin’s friends, indeed, many of his closest associates, as well masses of ordinary Soviet citizens. Indeed, the Terror was aimed at eliminating Party cadres in all levels of government—military, secret police, apparatchiks and nomenklatura—as much if not more than ordinary citizens. Stalin replaced them with young, ideologically committed, and inexperienced individuals who were solely obedient to the despot, with names like Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Beria. In constructing the “Soviet Man,” Stalin apparently felt the need to eliminate a whole generation of older Bolsheviks who didn’t necessarily revere or fear the despot. The military was especially devastated in the years immediately preceding World War II.
The Pact of Steel with Germany (1939) shocked communists and fascists alike. Both Hitler and Stalin viewed the agreement as a temporary expedient at best, with the additional benefit of keeping Great Britain guessing about the dictators’ end game. Hitler thought the agreement might force Britain to come to terms, while Stalin saw it as a means to preclude an Anglo-German alliance aimed against the USSR. Stalin also hoped the Germans would use their considerable influence in Tokyo to prevent an attack by Japan on Russia’s eastern territories. In the meantime, both the Nazis and communists derived huge benefits from the deal: food and fuel for Germany; advanced technology for Russia.
In the months before Operation BARBAROSSA, German (and British) disinformation, combined with Stalin’s own paranoia, overloaded the NKVD/NKGB, now depleted of its most experienced operators during the Terror, making informed decision-making nearly impossible. Stalin (and everybody else) saw the German military build-up on Russia’s western borders, and the Soviets responded as best they could. Stalin ultimately saw the aggression as an effort by the Nazis to force more economic and political concessions from Moscow, not as a prelude to an actual invasion, which would be madness (Germany again fighting a two-front war). Stalin welcomed new German demands as providing an opportunity for stalling, gaining an additional year for military preparations. Stalin was wrong about Hitler.
Stalin was a sociopath, utterly ruthless, and a conspiratorial paranoid, traits that helped make the Soviet Union a global superpower after World War II.
This is the second volume of Kotkin's planned three volume biography of Stalin (see Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928), covering his ascension to supreme Russian leader through the eve of Germany's invasion in June 1941. This period includes collectivization, the Terror, and the Pact of Steel.
Collectivization of agriculture was the event that precipitated the other two. Lenin made the first, unsuccessful attempt at collectivization; Stalin "succeeded" in making it a reality. The purpose, of course, was to drain resources from rural agriculture and divert them to urban industry. The resulting famines were horrible, made worse by the wholesale murder of recalcitrant peasants as well as local communist officials who were unable to meet Stalin’s demands. Party officials and others openly criticized Stalin for the brutality of collectivization, and it was those critics who were systematically tortured, imprisoned, and executed during the Terror.
Stalin never knew a peasant or anything else about rural agriculture. He viewed the mega-deaths as statistics, not human tragedy, and he rejected Party criticisms of the famines as ignorant at best and sabotage at worst. The Terror (1936-38), on the other hand, was personal, as it engulfed Stalin’s friends, indeed, many of his closest associates, as well masses of ordinary Soviet citizens. Indeed, the Terror was aimed at eliminating Party cadres in all levels of government—military, secret police, apparatchiks and nomenklatura—as much if not more than ordinary citizens. Stalin replaced them with young, ideologically committed, and inexperienced individuals who were solely obedient to the despot, with names like Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Beria. In constructing the “Soviet Man,” Stalin apparently felt the need to eliminate a whole generation of older Bolsheviks who didn’t necessarily revere or fear the despot. The military was especially devastated in the years immediately preceding World War II.
The Pact of Steel with Germany (1939) shocked communists and fascists alike. Both Hitler and Stalin viewed the agreement as a temporary expedient at best, with the additional benefit of keeping Great Britain guessing about the dictators’ end game. Hitler thought the agreement might force Britain to come to terms, while Stalin saw it as a means to preclude an Anglo-German alliance aimed against the USSR. Stalin also hoped the Germans would use their considerable influence in Tokyo to prevent an attack by Japan on Russia’s eastern territories. In the meantime, both the Nazis and communists derived huge benefits from the deal: food and fuel for Germany; advanced technology for Russia.
In the months before Operation BARBAROSSA, German (and British) disinformation, combined with Stalin’s own paranoia, overloaded the NKVD/NKGB, now depleted of its most experienced operators during the Terror, making informed decision-making nearly impossible. Stalin (and everybody else) saw the German military build-up on Russia’s western borders, and the Soviets responded as best they could. Stalin ultimately saw the aggression as an effort by the Nazis to force more economic and political concessions from Moscow, not as a prelude to an actual invasion, which would be madness (Germany again fighting a two-front war). Stalin welcomed new German demands as providing an opportunity for stalling, gaining an additional year for military preparations. Stalin was wrong about Hitler.
Stalin was a sociopath, utterly ruthless, and a conspiratorial paranoid, traits that helped make the Soviet Union a global superpower after World War II.
January 26, 2023
A tour de force! Everyone interested in International relations must read this. The first 25℅ of the book contains collectivization and then it jumps to the terror, Kotkin lays it all out in the most graphic way, beating with rubber truncheons, eyes popping, and blood splattering it was all horrifying yet phenomenal at the same time. The remaining book highlights the clash between the titan in the kremlin and the titan with the swastika and by god, this book has some gold content in it Kotkin goes into detail about military formations and tactics, logistics, spy games, and the great game played between the powers. Spanish civil war and winter war are also covered in great detail. Kotkin goes into full overload mode by the end of the book giving hour-by-hour details of Stalin's activities on July 21 and 22 the atmosphere got so tense that I began to sweat while reading it(lol!). This was a phenomenal book, I am sure the upcoming final volume will be as good as this one if not better.
August 11, 2022
Amongst the histories/biographies I’ve read, there is no equal to this.
March 31, 2018
I liked this book a lot. Once Kotkin is done, it will most likely be the series for anyone who's interested in delving deeper into who Stalin was and what he did. Kotkin's meticulous style and attention to detail is very much appreciated, especially when dealing with controversial topics such as these.
However, I was not comfortable giving this second installment more than three stars. There are a couple of reasons for that.
The first reason is the most important one, and one I think greatly diminished my enjoyment of the book. Kotkin has no understanding of Marxism whatsoever. Don't get me wrong, he did his research and has demonstrated throughout the book that he knows marxist terminology. However, he has no idea what those terms actually mean in the context of a materialist worldview. To him, it's just quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo that is used by both well-intentioned extremists and careerist bureaucrats alike as a manta. He approaches Marxism as someone who does not recognise the validity of anything that's not good old American Liberalism. This renders him woefully under equipped to analyze Stalin's thought process, which is a huge setback if you're writing a biography.
Kotkin's dim view of non-capitalist modes of production in general has him making some quite hilarious remarks at certain points of the book. In the middle of a segment on the widespread corruption in the higher ranks of the party, I was treated to this silly non-sequitur: A Soviet worker needed to labor for sixty-two hours to purchase a loaf of bread, versus about seventeen minutes for an American. Mind you, I'm not taking this sentence out of context because there is no context whatsoever (the sub-chapter is about corruption in the party). I'm still baffled as to why Kotkin felt such a need to insert this ridiculous snippet here, without so much as a follow-up sentence to clarify what is meant by this, because I find it hard to believe a Soviet factory worker had bread once in every three days.
A few instances where Kotkin indulged in the age-old art of biographical psychoanalysis really stood out. Frankly, I did not expect him to stoop to such practices, normally reserved for gutter-academia. I was especially irked when he wrote something along the lines of Stalin not caring one fig about the lives of Red Army soldiers. Whether that claim is true or not, nobody will ever know, not even Kotkin. The reason why this irked me is because you'll never see such claims in biographies about other people on the side of the Allies in WWII (I will eat my hat if anyone thought to write such a thing in a Churchill biography, for instance.)
In spite of all this, when Kotkin sticks to presenting established facts, he is able to do so in an enjoyable way without losing hold of the narrative (even though I would say the Moscow Trials section did overstay its welcome somewhat). I would say the last quarter of the book is the high point, with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact section being a treasure trove of information you're not likely to get in mainstream pop-history.
In any case, I will be looking forward to volume III with great interest, despite the faults of its predecessors.
However, I was not comfortable giving this second installment more than three stars. There are a couple of reasons for that.
The first reason is the most important one, and one I think greatly diminished my enjoyment of the book. Kotkin has no understanding of Marxism whatsoever. Don't get me wrong, he did his research and has demonstrated throughout the book that he knows marxist terminology. However, he has no idea what those terms actually mean in the context of a materialist worldview. To him, it's just quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo that is used by both well-intentioned extremists and careerist bureaucrats alike as a manta. He approaches Marxism as someone who does not recognise the validity of anything that's not good old American Liberalism. This renders him woefully under equipped to analyze Stalin's thought process, which is a huge setback if you're writing a biography.
Kotkin's dim view of non-capitalist modes of production in general has him making some quite hilarious remarks at certain points of the book. In the middle of a segment on the widespread corruption in the higher ranks of the party, I was treated to this silly non-sequitur: A Soviet worker needed to labor for sixty-two hours to purchase a loaf of bread, versus about seventeen minutes for an American. Mind you, I'm not taking this sentence out of context because there is no context whatsoever (the sub-chapter is about corruption in the party). I'm still baffled as to why Kotkin felt such a need to insert this ridiculous snippet here, without so much as a follow-up sentence to clarify what is meant by this, because I find it hard to believe a Soviet factory worker had bread once in every three days.
A few instances where Kotkin indulged in the age-old art of biographical psychoanalysis really stood out. Frankly, I did not expect him to stoop to such practices, normally reserved for gutter-academia. I was especially irked when he wrote something along the lines of Stalin not caring one fig about the lives of Red Army soldiers. Whether that claim is true or not, nobody will ever know, not even Kotkin. The reason why this irked me is because you'll never see such claims in biographies about other people on the side of the Allies in WWII (I will eat my hat if anyone thought to write such a thing in a Churchill biography, for instance.)
In spite of all this, when Kotkin sticks to presenting established facts, he is able to do so in an enjoyable way without losing hold of the narrative (even though I would say the Moscow Trials section did overstay its welcome somewhat). I would say the last quarter of the book is the high point, with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact section being a treasure trove of information you're not likely to get in mainstream pop-history.
In any case, I will be looking forward to volume III with great interest, despite the faults of its predecessors.
November 5, 2019
STALIN PART 2
Holy frick, you guys. Are y’all into details? Because whoa shoot is this the book for you. It is relentless in its detail. Meetings and dudes and other meetings that happen simultaneously with different dudes. Everybody’s name is Fuckanovich or Zukaplansky. So if you’re into tedium, seek your Mecca in these pages.
Overall though, it was a pretty interesting bog to wade through. A lot of crazy stuff went down on this guy’s watch. But its Talmudic breadth made it hard for me to encapsulate the whole thing. Also, I didn’t take my usual notes as I went along. So what I’m shitting out here remains partially to completely undigested.
Stalin was kind of a hanger on during the Russian revolution. He didn’t invent communism. The whole kill-the-Tsar-and-his-family thing wasn’t his idea. He didn’t come up with the ultimate plan for a government to fill the void left by all the dead autocrats. He was just a guy who had a combination of right-place-right-time luck and ambition to worm his into inner circles of power. Dude liked power. He got himself into the position of becoming the next head guy after Lenin even though when Lenin died there was supposedly a memo from him that said “don’t put Stalin in charge.”
Still he persisted.
The beginning 600 pages or so are about his ascent to power which involved a bunch of cabinet shuffling and treachery. Dudes that were big shit during the revolution become threats to him so he’s keeping a close eye on them and figuring out ways to declare them enemies of the revolution. “Distrust is the disease of the tyrant.” - this book.
At the same time the Soviet Union is becoming a thing. See, first it was just a Russian revolution to a commie way of life. But it spread to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and all those fun places. So old Joe and his buds wrangle them into the budding USSR. This is big shit. It feels like the potential for a worldwide commie revolution could become an actual thing. Hopes are high.
Ukraine has always been sorta nebulous. It’s borders aren’t super firm, there’s a bunch of Russians that live there, etc. I’ve already read and reviewed a bunch of books about this shit but essentially it’s Russia’s breadbasket and even though a lot of Ukrainians want to do their own thing, Russia can’t let it happen if it wants to be the king shit of commie mountain. So there’s forced collectivization of the farms there and everybody starves. The commies also purge the place of successful farmers in the process of ‘dekulakization’. Kulaks. They’re any farmer that’s not the absolute bottom rung. They get killed or sent to the Gulag to die. So everybody who’s good at growing food in the food-growing place is no longer around. Cue more starving. The commies blame it on anybody and everybody that isn’t super into communism or at least their specific brand thereof. (This is thing they like/need to do all the time. The commies can’t be fallible because otherwise people would lost interest in being permanently the working poor. No can do.)
[I ADDED THIS LATER DURING A SECOND PASS: Stalin and his boys try to shape the creative output of the state. Making sure that the novels and poems coming out of a super-literary civilization reflect the values of the party and commie preferences. Remembered this and thought it was interesting. ]
Anyway.
Stalin sees the USSR through a period of super industrialization. This means initiating a lot of nonsense projects like building canals that aren’t needed. They build one to the white sea no one uses and one that drains the Aral Sea and turns that area into yet another Soviet shitpit. And factories! And mining! There was this guy who worked super hard in a coal mine and mined WAY more than his quota. This made him a hero and everyone was encouraged to follow his lead. People who did were called Stakhanovites and the drive to out-produce everyone actually ended up making things less efficient so that the next shift that came on after them would get accused of wrecking and thrown in the Gulag or something equally bummer-y.
(Side note: I’m not a fan of commie shit, but I’m sure they must have some spin on US history that makes it seem just as atarded. Better press on.)
Another brief aside: Stalin’s buddy Yezhov likes to hang out with his drinking buddies and have farting contests. (I underlined this. In pen.)
Pressing on… So the Caucasus is a pain in the ass. Stalin’s old stomping ground of Georgia is shifty and then there’s Islams and tribal shit and … it’s … well it’s just a perpetual pain in the nitz. Still is. Japan is still a worry so the commies have to wring hands about that. There’s some tit-fer-tat warring and saber rattling (yeah, I glazed over during this shit. So … ‘Please to forgive, my friend.’) They try to get Mongolia on board but Mongolia’s not having it.
Meanwhile, China starts having its own thing. They haven’t become the commie nightmare they’d become in the 50s. It’s still like 1930-something. But there’s some shit going on. Japan is trying to move in. Ching Chang Shek isn’t a commie but he’s fighting for something so he’s better than the other guys. It seems hard for the USSR to pick side in China at this time.
Spain has a civil war and it’s a threat to the global communist takeover because Franco is a nationalist (the opposite of a commie), and he’s trying to muscle his way to the top of Spanish bossiness. For real though, Franco is a fuck. Here’s a fun quote from the tome: “To induce Republic-held territory to surrender, Nationalist troops engaged in gang rapes of women, marching with panties flying from their bayonets. Some women had their hair shaved off and their mouths force-fed castor oil, a laxative, so that, when paraded through the streets, they would soil themselves.” Fun fact. Kotkin is a master of the comma.
Swivel attention over to Germany. Hitler is coming up. He’s a vegetarian and a teetotaler and prone to fits of farting. (This part of my copy of the book is SUPER-highlighted.) Hitler is open to having his minions do his bidding more or less independently. But Stalin’s guys won’t do anything he doesn’t tell them to do specifically. Most likely because he’ll accuse them of something and have them killed or sent to the danged Gulag. So there’s some comparison-y pages and it’s probably pretty profound.
Swivel back to commie-land. Trotsky! That shit. He was charismatic to people and had some original ideas. Therefore he’s a threat. Stalin gets a Spaniard commie in Mexico to punch a hole in dude’s head with an ice axe. Like a legit hole. Trotsky was Snowball in Animal Farm. Awww.
So now things in Europe are looking warlike. Hitler has an agenda and he’s a power junkie too. He’s grabbing up all these bits of Europe and everybody is just kind of sitting tight, not wanting to engage. In the USSR military training was low because most soldiers had to also work on collective farms and or on the big industrial projects. Also Stalin exiled, imprisoned or killed any good military guys because they also could have been a threat.
Stalin decides to take Finland and create some up-north buffer zone. But the Finns are fucking badasses and shoot his shitty troops to shit from trees and snow piles. There was one old boy named Simo (nicknamed The White Death) who racked up at least 505 dead Russkies. So there’s that.
By this point in the book I am gettin’ super sick of Stalin stories. Though that one about the killer Finn was pretty tight.
I can’t remember the context but the author brings up the fact that Churchill floated the idea of gassing people at one point. Rebels in India or Iraq. Kotkin was just sort of ‘just sayin’ this I think. So we the readers in the west don’t start getting all high and mighty reading about these central and eastern European scumbags. Another fun fact.
War is heating up but so far the USSR is in a treaty-ish sitch with Germany. Germany is saying the UK is its only enemy. Fucking Rudolf Hess parachuted on his own into Scotland with a bunch of pills and no ID(?). Evidently tries to convince some British uppity that the krauts mean business. It sounds bonkers but is evidently history.
Then the book winds down and tries to sum up the state that Stalin and the USSR are in. One ever-present notion I found interesting was that Stalin was alway finding enemies. Anyone could be someone against him. An enemy of the revolution, a white, a kulak, a wrecker. He thought his doctors were out to get him. The Jews were scapegoats. Along with Trotskyites, people with foreign relatives, smart people, clever people, whoever. Doesn’t matter. An infallible person/regime needs an enemy at all time to explain its imperfections (mass starvation, technological backwardness, general miasma, and so on). Also, it’s clear that whatever Stalin didn’t want to believe, he regarded as MISINFORMATION. Crop reports, science, reality, anything. If it didn’t fit his view it was, for lack of a better phrase, fake news. Yeah. Nothing is new under the danged sun I guess.
He was a fascinating and influential piece of demonic shit with a human veneer with probably the core of a frightened, inadequate-feeling, outsider boy. Fuck, why do these shitheads always seem to take the reins?
Anyway, this book was a push. I am definitely more informed about Stalin’s middle years than I was … A YEAR AGO … but heck. Dunno if I’m gonna be picking this one up again anytime before the inevitable heat death of the universe but I made it. And I leave you with three bits I typed verbatim from the end of this beast. Enjoy. Or don’t. Hopefully Ken Burns will just make this a doc you can stream at the gym.
“Stalin personified the soviet mindset. Emotionally galvanized people. He was a student of historical forces and enabled people who came from nothing to feel world historically significant.”
And:
“Stalin’s regime was not merely a statist modernization but a purported transcendence of private property and markets. Of class antagonisms and existential alienation. A renewal of the social whole rent by the bourgeoisie. A quest for social justice on a global scale. In worldview and practice it was a conspiracy that perceived conspiracy everywhere and in everything, gaslighting itself. In administration, it constituted a crusade for planning and control that generated a proliferation of improvised illegalities. A drive for order and a system in which propaganda and myths about the system were the most systemized part. Amid the cultivated opacities and patent falsehoods, even most high officials were reduced to Kremlinology. The fanatical hyper-centralization was often self defeating as well. But the cult of the parties and especially Stalin’s infallibility proved to be the most dangerous flaw of his fallible rule.”
And as a bonus:
"Stalin became haunted not by the peasants horrors under collectivization but by the party criticism of him regarding those horrors which would become the dark spur of his mass murders in the wanton terror made possible by bolshevism but driven by him. The pandemonium of widespread accusations of treason that he fomented reflected not reality or even potential threats but his own demons."
Peace out. Gonna read some Danielle Steel now.
-Mitz
Holy frick, you guys. Are y’all into details? Because whoa shoot is this the book for you. It is relentless in its detail. Meetings and dudes and other meetings that happen simultaneously with different dudes. Everybody’s name is Fuckanovich or Zukaplansky. So if you’re into tedium, seek your Mecca in these pages.
Overall though, it was a pretty interesting bog to wade through. A lot of crazy stuff went down on this guy’s watch. But its Talmudic breadth made it hard for me to encapsulate the whole thing. Also, I didn’t take my usual notes as I went along. So what I’m shitting out here remains partially to completely undigested.
Stalin was kind of a hanger on during the Russian revolution. He didn’t invent communism. The whole kill-the-Tsar-and-his-family thing wasn’t his idea. He didn’t come up with the ultimate plan for a government to fill the void left by all the dead autocrats. He was just a guy who had a combination of right-place-right-time luck and ambition to worm his into inner circles of power. Dude liked power. He got himself into the position of becoming the next head guy after Lenin even though when Lenin died there was supposedly a memo from him that said “don’t put Stalin in charge.”
Still he persisted.
The beginning 600 pages or so are about his ascent to power which involved a bunch of cabinet shuffling and treachery. Dudes that were big shit during the revolution become threats to him so he’s keeping a close eye on them and figuring out ways to declare them enemies of the revolution. “Distrust is the disease of the tyrant.” - this book.
At the same time the Soviet Union is becoming a thing. See, first it was just a Russian revolution to a commie way of life. But it spread to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and all those fun places. So old Joe and his buds wrangle them into the budding USSR. This is big shit. It feels like the potential for a worldwide commie revolution could become an actual thing. Hopes are high.
Ukraine has always been sorta nebulous. It’s borders aren’t super firm, there’s a bunch of Russians that live there, etc. I’ve already read and reviewed a bunch of books about this shit but essentially it’s Russia’s breadbasket and even though a lot of Ukrainians want to do their own thing, Russia can’t let it happen if it wants to be the king shit of commie mountain. So there’s forced collectivization of the farms there and everybody starves. The commies also purge the place of successful farmers in the process of ‘dekulakization’. Kulaks. They’re any farmer that’s not the absolute bottom rung. They get killed or sent to the Gulag to die. So everybody who’s good at growing food in the food-growing place is no longer around. Cue more starving. The commies blame it on anybody and everybody that isn’t super into communism or at least their specific brand thereof. (This is thing they like/need to do all the time. The commies can’t be fallible because otherwise people would lost interest in being permanently the working poor. No can do.)
[I ADDED THIS LATER DURING A SECOND PASS: Stalin and his boys try to shape the creative output of the state. Making sure that the novels and poems coming out of a super-literary civilization reflect the values of the party and commie preferences. Remembered this and thought it was interesting. ]
Anyway.
Stalin sees the USSR through a period of super industrialization. This means initiating a lot of nonsense projects like building canals that aren’t needed. They build one to the white sea no one uses and one that drains the Aral Sea and turns that area into yet another Soviet shitpit. And factories! And mining! There was this guy who worked super hard in a coal mine and mined WAY more than his quota. This made him a hero and everyone was encouraged to follow his lead. People who did were called Stakhanovites and the drive to out-produce everyone actually ended up making things less efficient so that the next shift that came on after them would get accused of wrecking and thrown in the Gulag or something equally bummer-y.
(Side note: I’m not a fan of commie shit, but I’m sure they must have some spin on US history that makes it seem just as atarded. Better press on.)
Another brief aside: Stalin’s buddy Yezhov likes to hang out with his drinking buddies and have farting contests. (I underlined this. In pen.)
Pressing on… So the Caucasus is a pain in the ass. Stalin’s old stomping ground of Georgia is shifty and then there’s Islams and tribal shit and … it’s … well it’s just a perpetual pain in the nitz. Still is. Japan is still a worry so the commies have to wring hands about that. There’s some tit-fer-tat warring and saber rattling (yeah, I glazed over during this shit. So … ‘Please to forgive, my friend.’) They try to get Mongolia on board but Mongolia’s not having it.
Meanwhile, China starts having its own thing. They haven’t become the commie nightmare they’d become in the 50s. It’s still like 1930-something. But there’s some shit going on. Japan is trying to move in. Ching Chang Shek isn’t a commie but he’s fighting for something so he’s better than the other guys. It seems hard for the USSR to pick side in China at this time.
Spain has a civil war and it’s a threat to the global communist takeover because Franco is a nationalist (the opposite of a commie), and he’s trying to muscle his way to the top of Spanish bossiness. For real though, Franco is a fuck. Here’s a fun quote from the tome: “To induce Republic-held territory to surrender, Nationalist troops engaged in gang rapes of women, marching with panties flying from their bayonets. Some women had their hair shaved off and their mouths force-fed castor oil, a laxative, so that, when paraded through the streets, they would soil themselves.” Fun fact. Kotkin is a master of the comma.
Swivel attention over to Germany. Hitler is coming up. He’s a vegetarian and a teetotaler and prone to fits of farting. (This part of my copy of the book is SUPER-highlighted.) Hitler is open to having his minions do his bidding more or less independently. But Stalin’s guys won’t do anything he doesn’t tell them to do specifically. Most likely because he’ll accuse them of something and have them killed or sent to the danged Gulag. So there’s some comparison-y pages and it’s probably pretty profound.
Swivel back to commie-land. Trotsky! That shit. He was charismatic to people and had some original ideas. Therefore he’s a threat. Stalin gets a Spaniard commie in Mexico to punch a hole in dude’s head with an ice axe. Like a legit hole. Trotsky was Snowball in Animal Farm. Awww.
So now things in Europe are looking warlike. Hitler has an agenda and he’s a power junkie too. He’s grabbing up all these bits of Europe and everybody is just kind of sitting tight, not wanting to engage. In the USSR military training was low because most soldiers had to also work on collective farms and or on the big industrial projects. Also Stalin exiled, imprisoned or killed any good military guys because they also could have been a threat.
Stalin decides to take Finland and create some up-north buffer zone. But the Finns are fucking badasses and shoot his shitty troops to shit from trees and snow piles. There was one old boy named Simo (nicknamed The White Death) who racked up at least 505 dead Russkies. So there’s that.
By this point in the book I am gettin’ super sick of Stalin stories. Though that one about the killer Finn was pretty tight.
I can’t remember the context but the author brings up the fact that Churchill floated the idea of gassing people at one point. Rebels in India or Iraq. Kotkin was just sort of ‘just sayin’ this I think. So we the readers in the west don’t start getting all high and mighty reading about these central and eastern European scumbags. Another fun fact.
War is heating up but so far the USSR is in a treaty-ish sitch with Germany. Germany is saying the UK is its only enemy. Fucking Rudolf Hess parachuted on his own into Scotland with a bunch of pills and no ID(?). Evidently tries to convince some British uppity that the krauts mean business. It sounds bonkers but is evidently history.
Then the book winds down and tries to sum up the state that Stalin and the USSR are in. One ever-present notion I found interesting was that Stalin was alway finding enemies. Anyone could be someone against him. An enemy of the revolution, a white, a kulak, a wrecker. He thought his doctors were out to get him. The Jews were scapegoats. Along with Trotskyites, people with foreign relatives, smart people, clever people, whoever. Doesn’t matter. An infallible person/regime needs an enemy at all time to explain its imperfections (mass starvation, technological backwardness, general miasma, and so on). Also, it’s clear that whatever Stalin didn’t want to believe, he regarded as MISINFORMATION. Crop reports, science, reality, anything. If it didn’t fit his view it was, for lack of a better phrase, fake news. Yeah. Nothing is new under the danged sun I guess.
He was a fascinating and influential piece of demonic shit with a human veneer with probably the core of a frightened, inadequate-feeling, outsider boy. Fuck, why do these shitheads always seem to take the reins?
Anyway, this book was a push. I am definitely more informed about Stalin’s middle years than I was … A YEAR AGO … but heck. Dunno if I’m gonna be picking this one up again anytime before the inevitable heat death of the universe but I made it. And I leave you with three bits I typed verbatim from the end of this beast. Enjoy. Or don’t. Hopefully Ken Burns will just make this a doc you can stream at the gym.
“Stalin personified the soviet mindset. Emotionally galvanized people. He was a student of historical forces and enabled people who came from nothing to feel world historically significant.”
And:
“Stalin’s regime was not merely a statist modernization but a purported transcendence of private property and markets. Of class antagonisms and existential alienation. A renewal of the social whole rent by the bourgeoisie. A quest for social justice on a global scale. In worldview and practice it was a conspiracy that perceived conspiracy everywhere and in everything, gaslighting itself. In administration, it constituted a crusade for planning and control that generated a proliferation of improvised illegalities. A drive for order and a system in which propaganda and myths about the system were the most systemized part. Amid the cultivated opacities and patent falsehoods, even most high officials were reduced to Kremlinology. The fanatical hyper-centralization was often self defeating as well. But the cult of the parties and especially Stalin’s infallibility proved to be the most dangerous flaw of his fallible rule.”
And as a bonus:
"Stalin became haunted not by the peasants horrors under collectivization but by the party criticism of him regarding those horrors which would become the dark spur of his mass murders in the wanton terror made possible by bolshevism but driven by him. The pandemonium of widespread accusations of treason that he fomented reflected not reality or even potential threats but his own demons."
Peace out. Gonna read some Danielle Steel now.
-Mitz
March 8, 2018
„Stalin. Waiting For Hitler“ ist für sich genommen schon ein ungeheures Werk. 900 eng bedruckte Seiten plus einem 200 Seiten umfassenden Anhang in einer Schriftgröße, die eigentlich niemand mehr lesen kann. (Im Normaldruck würde der Umfang des Buchs sich wohl noch mal verdoppeln.) Vier Minuten habe ich pro Seite gebraucht. Dabei war das Historiker-Englisch nicht einmal das Problem. Aber konnte ich es nicht lassen, den einen oder anderen Character doch noch intensiver in der Wikipedia zu studieren. Vier Monate habe ich mir Zeit gelassen (mit einer Handvoll belletristischer Verschnaufpausen, wenn es gar zu düster wurde).
Und dabei ist dies nur der zweite Teil der umfangreichsten Stalin-Biographie, die je geschrieben wurde. (Und es ist nicht anzunehmen, dass sich noch einmal jemand diese Fleißarbeit aufbürdet.)
Im ersten Teil sahen wir, wie sich ein junger, ideologisch beseelter Mann in den Tumulten seiner Zeit im Zentrum einer Großmacht wiederfindet. Stalin weiß seine Macht zu nutzen, aber sie ist ihm nicht, wie es der populäre Mythos will, Selbstzweck. Er nutzt sie aus, weil er durch und durch Kommunist ist.
Der zweite Band beginnt mit der schonungslosen Durchsetzung der landwirtschaftlichen Kollektivierung in der Sowjetunion. Kotkin zeigt, dass wenn Stalin wirklich nur der zynische Machtmensch wäre, er dieses Unternehmen gar nicht eingegangen wäre. Denn nie wurde ein politischer Schritt mehr opponiert als diese radikale Verstaatlichung, die zu einer der größten Hungerkatastrophen des 20. Jahrhunderts führte.
Die Folgen dieser Maßnahme sind noch nicht überwunden, da fällt sein Freund Kirow einem Attentat zum Opfer. (Kotkin beweist anhand der neu zugänglichen Dokumente, dass Stalin nicht der Drahtzieher dieses Anschlags war.) Aber ähnlich wie der Reichstagsbrand für Hitler nutzt Stalin die Gelegenheit aus, um alte Rechnungen zu begleichen. Es beginnen die Jahre des Terrors. Stalin schlägt erst links zu, dann rechts, dann im „Zentrum“. Es ist in den 30er Jahren in der Sowjetunion lebensgefährlich, ein Kommunist zu sein. Und je höher man in der Machtpyramide steht, umso unwahrscheinlicher ist es, dass man das Jahrzehnt überlebt. Vom alten Politbüro überlebt Stalin allein. Von den knapp 2.000 Delegierten des „Parteitags der Sieger“ überlebte nicht einmal die Hälfte. Es gab keine gesellschaftliche Sphäre, die der Terror unberührt ließ. Fabrikdirektoren wurden bei kleineren und größeren Problemen der Sabotage bezichtigt, vom Land fliehende Bauern erschoss man kurzerhand, das Militär erlitt kurz vor Beginn des zweiten Weltkriegs einen enormen Aderlass, ethnische Minderheiten wurden der Spionage beschuldigt, und schließlich wendete der Terror sich gegen die eigenen Bluthunde – der NKWD brachte seine eigenen Leute um, bis auch Jagoda und Jeschow hingerichtet wurden. Über allem schwebte der Geist Trotzkis. Dieser wäre ein völlig bedeutungsloser Intellektueller geblieben, hätte ihm Stalin selbst nicht diese Wichtigkeit verliehen. Ein Trotzkist zu sein war in den 30er Jahren in der Sowjetunion ein schlimmeres Verbrechen als der Faschismus.
Kotkin theoretisiert redlicherweise kaum über das, was er nicht belegen kann. Und so bleiben auch Stalins Motive für dieses sinnlose Morden etwas im Unklaren, aber es zeichnen sich doch Konturen ab. Stalin wurde in einer Atmosphäre der Konspiration politisch sozialisiert. Die Partei selbst war konspirativ organisiert, und Russland war nach der Revolution von potentiellen Feinden umzingelt. Dazu gesellte sich bei Stalin eine Düsternis des Denkens, das noch verschärft wurde, seit sich seine Frau das Leben nahm.
Stalin hatte praktisch kaum noch ein Privatleben. Im Gegensatz zu Hitler (und erst Recht zu Mussolini regierte er wirklich und delegierte nicht nur). Er las Bücher und Massen an Dokumenten. Selbst in sein georgisches Urlaubsdomizil ließ er sich regelmäßig Unterlagen schicken und arbeitete praktisch pausenlos. Sein Gedächtnis war phänomenal. Auf jeden Gesprächspartner, ob Künstler, Diplomat oder Flugzeugkonstrukteur stellte er sich ein. Allerdings, und dies ist die Achillesferse des Systems, ließ Stalin kaum andere Sichtweisen zu. (Die einzige Ausnahme war Molotow.) So entwickelte sich die Parteidiktatur zum Despotismus. So konnte und wollte Stalin im Gefolge des Pakts mit Hitler nicht sehen, dass die Sowjetunion als nächstes angegriffen würde. Das weltweite Netzwerk an sowjetischen Spionen arbeitete unentwegt unter Einsatz des Lebens aller Beteiligten. Aber der, der die angemessenen Entscheidungen treffen konnte, hielt alles für Desinformation.
Kotkin schlägt, wie schon im ersten Band einen riesigen Bogen – die Ereignisse, von denen die Rede ist, haben teilweise kaum mehr mit Stalin direkt zu tun, sondern dienen eher dazu, sein Handeln und Denken einzuordnen. Darauf muss man sich einlassen. Belohnt wird man mit einer spannenden und analytisch präzisen Biographie.
Und dabei ist dies nur der zweite Teil der umfangreichsten Stalin-Biographie, die je geschrieben wurde. (Und es ist nicht anzunehmen, dass sich noch einmal jemand diese Fleißarbeit aufbürdet.)
Im ersten Teil sahen wir, wie sich ein junger, ideologisch beseelter Mann in den Tumulten seiner Zeit im Zentrum einer Großmacht wiederfindet. Stalin weiß seine Macht zu nutzen, aber sie ist ihm nicht, wie es der populäre Mythos will, Selbstzweck. Er nutzt sie aus, weil er durch und durch Kommunist ist.
Der zweite Band beginnt mit der schonungslosen Durchsetzung der landwirtschaftlichen Kollektivierung in der Sowjetunion. Kotkin zeigt, dass wenn Stalin wirklich nur der zynische Machtmensch wäre, er dieses Unternehmen gar nicht eingegangen wäre. Denn nie wurde ein politischer Schritt mehr opponiert als diese radikale Verstaatlichung, die zu einer der größten Hungerkatastrophen des 20. Jahrhunderts führte.
Die Folgen dieser Maßnahme sind noch nicht überwunden, da fällt sein Freund Kirow einem Attentat zum Opfer. (Kotkin beweist anhand der neu zugänglichen Dokumente, dass Stalin nicht der Drahtzieher dieses Anschlags war.) Aber ähnlich wie der Reichstagsbrand für Hitler nutzt Stalin die Gelegenheit aus, um alte Rechnungen zu begleichen. Es beginnen die Jahre des Terrors. Stalin schlägt erst links zu, dann rechts, dann im „Zentrum“. Es ist in den 30er Jahren in der Sowjetunion lebensgefährlich, ein Kommunist zu sein. Und je höher man in der Machtpyramide steht, umso unwahrscheinlicher ist es, dass man das Jahrzehnt überlebt. Vom alten Politbüro überlebt Stalin allein. Von den knapp 2.000 Delegierten des „Parteitags der Sieger“ überlebte nicht einmal die Hälfte. Es gab keine gesellschaftliche Sphäre, die der Terror unberührt ließ. Fabrikdirektoren wurden bei kleineren und größeren Problemen der Sabotage bezichtigt, vom Land fliehende Bauern erschoss man kurzerhand, das Militär erlitt kurz vor Beginn des zweiten Weltkriegs einen enormen Aderlass, ethnische Minderheiten wurden der Spionage beschuldigt, und schließlich wendete der Terror sich gegen die eigenen Bluthunde – der NKWD brachte seine eigenen Leute um, bis auch Jagoda und Jeschow hingerichtet wurden. Über allem schwebte der Geist Trotzkis. Dieser wäre ein völlig bedeutungsloser Intellektueller geblieben, hätte ihm Stalin selbst nicht diese Wichtigkeit verliehen. Ein Trotzkist zu sein war in den 30er Jahren in der Sowjetunion ein schlimmeres Verbrechen als der Faschismus.
Kotkin theoretisiert redlicherweise kaum über das, was er nicht belegen kann. Und so bleiben auch Stalins Motive für dieses sinnlose Morden etwas im Unklaren, aber es zeichnen sich doch Konturen ab. Stalin wurde in einer Atmosphäre der Konspiration politisch sozialisiert. Die Partei selbst war konspirativ organisiert, und Russland war nach der Revolution von potentiellen Feinden umzingelt. Dazu gesellte sich bei Stalin eine Düsternis des Denkens, das noch verschärft wurde, seit sich seine Frau das Leben nahm.
Stalin hatte praktisch kaum noch ein Privatleben. Im Gegensatz zu Hitler (und erst Recht zu Mussolini regierte er wirklich und delegierte nicht nur). Er las Bücher und Massen an Dokumenten. Selbst in sein georgisches Urlaubsdomizil ließ er sich regelmäßig Unterlagen schicken und arbeitete praktisch pausenlos. Sein Gedächtnis war phänomenal. Auf jeden Gesprächspartner, ob Künstler, Diplomat oder Flugzeugkonstrukteur stellte er sich ein. Allerdings, und dies ist die Achillesferse des Systems, ließ Stalin kaum andere Sichtweisen zu. (Die einzige Ausnahme war Molotow.) So entwickelte sich die Parteidiktatur zum Despotismus. So konnte und wollte Stalin im Gefolge des Pakts mit Hitler nicht sehen, dass die Sowjetunion als nächstes angegriffen würde. Das weltweite Netzwerk an sowjetischen Spionen arbeitete unentwegt unter Einsatz des Lebens aller Beteiligten. Aber der, der die angemessenen Entscheidungen treffen konnte, hielt alles für Desinformation.
Kotkin schlägt, wie schon im ersten Band einen riesigen Bogen – die Ereignisse, von denen die Rede ist, haben teilweise kaum mehr mit Stalin direkt zu tun, sondern dienen eher dazu, sein Handeln und Denken einzuordnen. Darauf muss man sich einlassen. Belohnt wird man mit einer spannenden und analytisch präzisen Biographie.
December 6, 2017
Hard going, but worth it. Kotkin's attention to detail provides many revelations.
February 28, 2018
Stephen Kotkin is a historian who has written several outstanding books on Russian history and is now in the process of distilling his lifetime work into a monumental three part biography of Stalin. Volume 1 dealt with Stalin’s early life and his progress from relatively peripheral disciple of Lenin in 1917 to Lenin’s handpicked general secretary of communist party in 1922, to undisputed (though not yet completely all-powerful) boss and ruler of the Soviet Union by 1928. By the end of that volume, Stalin was firmly ensconced in this position, having successfully seen off the challenge from Trotsky, who lost out partly because almost nobody around him liked him, but mostly because he was neither as hardworking, nor as competent, iron-willed or crafty as Stalin. It is true that Trotsky imagined himself as the real “Marxist intellectual” in this fight, but the autodidact Stalin was no intellectual slouch, and Trotsky’s low opinion of him in this arena is also a (small) part of why he lost this fight; he underestimated his opponent. Of course, both of them believed fully in the Marxist-Leninist picture of history and society, complete with the necessity of class war, the central role of the proletariat and the idiocy of the peasants, so it is easy to dismiss the intellectual output of both parties as equally delusional, but that is not how it looked in the 1920s, so we should leave such retrospective wisdom out of the discussion. In any case, by 1928, Stalin had kicked Trotsky out of the Soviet Union, and had defanged or sidelined all his other rivals within the Bolshevik leadership.
Stalin with Lenin
The next phase was building socialism; As Kotkin makes abundantly clear, Stalin was power hungry and ultimately became one of history’s greatest (or vilest) despots, but he was not just power hungry. He was also an idealist who believed in the revolution and its ideals and many (if not all) of his most vicious campaigns make no sense without this crucial aspect of his personality. If all he had wanted was personal power, there was no need to collectivize the peasantry and force the industrialization of Russia at such tremendous human cost. Even the purges of 1937-39 were about more than personal power, though by the that time the personal and political were inseparable, as Stalin (and many other dedicated communists in the Soviet Union) clearly felt that his person was essential to defending and completing the work of the great Bolshevik revolution. Any way, whether all good communists felt the need for a purge or not (and surprisingly, several, including many who fell victim to it, did express approval of the idea of a purge), they all agreed that private agriculture had to go. The only question was, how quickly could this be done? and what level of coercion was justified? Many of them shrank from the massive human cost, but almost none believed that socialism could be built without it.
The Senior Bolshevik leadership in 1925
The first third of the book deals with Stalin’s attempt to fulfill this fundamental premise of Marxism-Leninism by forced collectivization and industrialization, at tremendous human cost. As Kotkin makes clear, the policy itself was not a Stalinist aberration, but the will to carry it through (and it could not have been carried through without massive coercion and cruelty) in the face of such colossal human suffering did owe much to Stalin. Kotkin describes this time, with its immense challenges, its horrendous cruelties, its massive tragedies and, yes, its heroic achievements, in great detail. He is no fan of Stalin, but he is not some sort of anti-communist propagandist who is willing to entertain any smear in the service of the larger anti-communist project. For example, he makes clear that while suffering in the Ukraine was immense, it was not a systematic attempt to eradicate Ukraine or Ukrainians, it was part and parcel of what happened to peasants everywhere in the USSR. The highest death rates were not in Ukraine, they were in Kazakhstan (where up to half of the Kazakh population were killed via starvation, exposure and illness as the Soviets forcibly “de-nomadized”, collectivized and rationalized (“modernized”) their society) and many parts of Russia saw suffering and death on the same scale as Ukraine. And while Jews, Poles and other peripheral nationalities played a disproportionate role in the Soviet regime, their gravitation to the Bolshevik party is not a total surprise, given that they tended to be oppressed by the Czarist order (and in the case of the Jews, were disproportionately intellectuals; and the pre-1917 Bolshevik party was not really a proletarian party, it was a party of (mostly impoverished, certainly disaffected) intellectuals. They were also proportionately less among the victims in this stage because they were disproportionately urban, while the suffering in this phase, was mostly rural.
The living and the dead in Ukraine
By 1934, the worse was over and the party celebrated at its congress of victors. But the celebration did not last. Hardly had the Soviet Union started to emerge from the terror of collectivization when it was pushed into the terror of the great purges of 1937-38. Kotkin argues that the ability to carry out such purges and the tendency to conduct them was built into the Leninist system (a fact that is also borne out by the experience of other Leninist revolutions), but the scale and cruelty of this particular purge did owe much to the personality and personal demons of Stalin. Starting with the Kirov assassination, Stalin turned on the party, the military and the state apparatus itself, using the NKVD to unleash a widening reign of terror that eventually led to 1.6 million arrests (out of a total adult population of 100 million) and over 800,000 executions. The terror (unlike, for example, Mao’s decentralized, bottom-up purge of the Chinese communist party in the cultural revolution) was highly bureacratized and tightly controlled from above by Stalin and his NKVD chief Yezhov. People were not killed by crazed mobs or local “people’s courts”, they were arrested and tortured by a vast and well organized system of oppression and terror. Quotas were set from above, arrests were duly recorded, as were confessions. Show trials were conducted in some cases, but most people were “sentenced” by special tribunals that decided the fate of hundreds of thousands, but even during this industrial scale slaughter, lists were made, and they were duly presented to higher ups and signed by them. At least 383 execution lists signed personally by Stalin have survived, containing the names of more than 43,000 “enemies of the people” and frequently marked with comments and underlined in various colors.
Stalin, with his prodigious appetite for work, personally read the confessions of most high officials, in many cases having personally ordered their arrests. Confessions obtained by torture and sometimes splattered with the blood of the victims were duly presented to him, and marked up by him in multi-colored pencils, and circulated among select members of his inner circle with his comments. In his absence, his leading henchmen (e.g. Molotov, Voroshilov, Zhdanov and Mikoyan) signed off on death lists, but the big man generally kept a very close eye on things. He also took sadistic pleasure in forcing his closest and most loyal colleagues to denounce (and therefore, condemn to torture and execution) some of their favorites and even close relatives and friends. Some, like the heavy industry commissar Ordonikidze tried to resist the extension of the massacre to their own domains (though they all supported the purging of other departments) and Ordonikidze ended up killing himself, but most of them joined in, and not just from an instinct for self preservation. There was genuine enthusiasm on the part of some for at least some part of the terror.
The book is incredibly detailed (and well sourced and documented) but even this book is enough to fully grasp all aspects of the terror. The interested reader will have to read several other books to get a truly well rounded picture of this horror. Suffice it to say that the scale of the purge defies explanation; Stalin executed almost his entire military high command, half of his central committee, tens of thousands of loyal party functionaries and scores of thousands of lower level officials, engineers and managers. He decimated his own army and intelligence service, decapitated the foreign service and undermined intelligence gathering operations all over the world; the sheer scale and indiscriminate nature of it is examined from operational, ideological or even personal psychological angles, but by all of these criteria, it still fails to make sense.
THE ORIGINAL MEMBERS OF THE C.P. CENTRAL COMMITTEE (names in red all executed on Stalin’s orders) The Central Committee of the Communist Party in The names in red were later executed on Stalin s orders. SOURCE:
Most of those killed were loyal party members and almost all of them were innocent of the fantastic crimes they were forced to confess to by NKVD torturers. The details are horrendous but they are also worth reading. There have been other reigns of terror in history, but none that really matches this one in its ferocity, its apparent pointlessness, and its iterative cycle of auto-annihilation, with betrayers and accusers soon ending up facing the same fate as the friends and colleagues they had just betrayed. Ultimately, Yezhov and Frinovsky, the very top people in the NKVD who carried out the worst of the terror, were themselves arrested and tortured (and duly confessed to the same fantastic crimes), before being shot by the same executioners (over the course of the terror, the NKVD arrested more than 20,000 of its own employees as suspected traitors).
A picture of Stalin with NKVD chief Yezhov, who was later excised from the picture after his own execution
Kotkin explores many factors that led to the purge, but no single factor fully explains it: Stalin’s increasing personal paranoia, the fundamentally paranoid nature of the Leninist state, the existence of a coercive apparatus that could extract confessions from anyone, and that then ended up arresting and getting confessions from everyone named in the first fake confession; even the urge to replace existing functionaries with younger and better men, all these probably played a role, but no explanation is fully satisfactory. No wonder Yuri Slezkine fell back on a primarily religious explanation, more akin to scapegoating and witch hunts than rational statecraft.
Through all this, Kotkin also provides us with a very balanced and nuanced analysis of world affairs and the strategic challenges faced (and frequently, met) by Stalin and the nascent Soviet state. In the first part of the book the main threat is from an increasingly aggressive and expansionist Japan, and Stalin worked hard to try and stiffen Chinese resistance (including pressurizing the Chinese communists to cooperate with the Nationalist regime in the struggle against Japan). In the second half of the book, the threat is from Germany and the last part reads almost like a thriller, as Germany, the Soviet Union and the Western powers all play games with each other as the international order falls apart; Hitler moves relentlessly towards his goal of reversing Versailles (achieved without war and more easily than he might have imagined possible) and then towards European domination. All major powers miscalculate, misstep, miscegnate and betray smaller states at various points in the story, with Hitler and Stalin appearing first as early winners (Hitler in his lightning wars, Stalin in his non-aggression pact and subsequent re-expansion of the Soviet Union to the widest Czarist frontiers and beyond, in Poland, the Baltics, Finland and Bessarabia), and then as inevitable opponents headed for the greatest military clash in human history.
The last few chapters are a relentless drumbeat of Nazi preparations for an invasion of the Soviet Union, all delivered to Stalin but so mixed up with disinformation and confusing signals that Kotkin makes Stalin’s unwillingness to believe this flood of evidence a little more understandable than it is in more propagandistic or superficial descriptions of this crucial period. Stalin’s stubborn miscalculation will of course greatly magnify the scale of early Soviet defeats and will cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of ill prepared and ill-positioned Soviet troops, but Kotkin also makes clear that the logic of total war and zero-sum international competition that had gripped Europe (overwhelmingly, but not entirely thanks to Hitler) made the overall clash inevitable, and all these setbacks and miscalculations will eventually become mere details in a much bigger drama. In the end, it was Hitler who miscalculated most fatally, not Stalin, but that is subject of the next volume, and we must wait for it.
There is much more in this amazing book; for example, we learn in great detail about Stalin’s daily routine (he was an insomniac and the high command adjusted to his schedule, the day starting at 3 or 4 PM, with meetings until late into the night, frequently followed by long sessions of chatting, eating, drinking, listening to music and dancing; he never danced, but he did make his subordinates dance), his personal life (loving letters to his wife, but also arguments, and finally her depression and suicide, followed by his very real grief), his children (his sons were mostly neglected but when he could, he doted on his daughter; he did not try to promote any of his children and scolded school and military academy officials who tried to curry favor by writing gushing reports about them), how he picked his office director (Proskryobishev, like Stalin, the son of a cobbler, who was told upon his selection “you have a frightful look about you, you will terrify people”), who he relaxed with (first Lakoba (who was later sidelined and probably poisoned by Beria), then Kirov (who was shot by a down and out expelled party member, Kotkin thinks without Stalin’s involvement) and so on. We learn how prepared he was at meetings (very well prepared indeed), what he liked to drink (mostly Georgian wine), what he smoked (cigarette tobacco in a pipe), his taste in the arts (he gravitated towards folk music, but also enjoyed classical music, ballet and theater; he read widely, assiduously promoted writers and artists, was very interested in the cinema, and so on), and his mastery of detail (including detailed knowledge of modern weapons and an ability to ask pertinent and very probing questions of technical personnel who presented him with information). I could go on and on, but this is an 1100 page book and you will have to read it to get the full benefit of it (and I strongly recommend that you do).
Stalin with Lenin
The next phase was building socialism; As Kotkin makes abundantly clear, Stalin was power hungry and ultimately became one of history’s greatest (or vilest) despots, but he was not just power hungry. He was also an idealist who believed in the revolution and its ideals and many (if not all) of his most vicious campaigns make no sense without this crucial aspect of his personality. If all he had wanted was personal power, there was no need to collectivize the peasantry and force the industrialization of Russia at such tremendous human cost. Even the purges of 1937-39 were about more than personal power, though by the that time the personal and political were inseparable, as Stalin (and many other dedicated communists in the Soviet Union) clearly felt that his person was essential to defending and completing the work of the great Bolshevik revolution. Any way, whether all good communists felt the need for a purge or not (and surprisingly, several, including many who fell victim to it, did express approval of the idea of a purge), they all agreed that private agriculture had to go. The only question was, how quickly could this be done? and what level of coercion was justified? Many of them shrank from the massive human cost, but almost none believed that socialism could be built without it.
The Senior Bolshevik leadership in 1925
The first third of the book deals with Stalin’s attempt to fulfill this fundamental premise of Marxism-Leninism by forced collectivization and industrialization, at tremendous human cost. As Kotkin makes clear, the policy itself was not a Stalinist aberration, but the will to carry it through (and it could not have been carried through without massive coercion and cruelty) in the face of such colossal human suffering did owe much to Stalin. Kotkin describes this time, with its immense challenges, its horrendous cruelties, its massive tragedies and, yes, its heroic achievements, in great detail. He is no fan of Stalin, but he is not some sort of anti-communist propagandist who is willing to entertain any smear in the service of the larger anti-communist project. For example, he makes clear that while suffering in the Ukraine was immense, it was not a systematic attempt to eradicate Ukraine or Ukrainians, it was part and parcel of what happened to peasants everywhere in the USSR. The highest death rates were not in Ukraine, they were in Kazakhstan (where up to half of the Kazakh population were killed via starvation, exposure and illness as the Soviets forcibly “de-nomadized”, collectivized and rationalized (“modernized”) their society) and many parts of Russia saw suffering and death on the same scale as Ukraine. And while Jews, Poles and other peripheral nationalities played a disproportionate role in the Soviet regime, their gravitation to the Bolshevik party is not a total surprise, given that they tended to be oppressed by the Czarist order (and in the case of the Jews, were disproportionately intellectuals; and the pre-1917 Bolshevik party was not really a proletarian party, it was a party of (mostly impoverished, certainly disaffected) intellectuals. They were also proportionately less among the victims in this stage because they were disproportionately urban, while the suffering in this phase, was mostly rural.
The living and the dead in Ukraine
By 1934, the worse was over and the party celebrated at its congress of victors. But the celebration did not last. Hardly had the Soviet Union started to emerge from the terror of collectivization when it was pushed into the terror of the great purges of 1937-38. Kotkin argues that the ability to carry out such purges and the tendency to conduct them was built into the Leninist system (a fact that is also borne out by the experience of other Leninist revolutions), but the scale and cruelty of this particular purge did owe much to the personality and personal demons of Stalin. Starting with the Kirov assassination, Stalin turned on the party, the military and the state apparatus itself, using the NKVD to unleash a widening reign of terror that eventually led to 1.6 million arrests (out of a total adult population of 100 million) and over 800,000 executions. The terror (unlike, for example, Mao’s decentralized, bottom-up purge of the Chinese communist party in the cultural revolution) was highly bureacratized and tightly controlled from above by Stalin and his NKVD chief Yezhov. People were not killed by crazed mobs or local “people’s courts”, they were arrested and tortured by a vast and well organized system of oppression and terror. Quotas were set from above, arrests were duly recorded, as were confessions. Show trials were conducted in some cases, but most people were “sentenced” by special tribunals that decided the fate of hundreds of thousands, but even during this industrial scale slaughter, lists were made, and they were duly presented to higher ups and signed by them. At least 383 execution lists signed personally by Stalin have survived, containing the names of more than 43,000 “enemies of the people” and frequently marked with comments and underlined in various colors.
Stalin, with his prodigious appetite for work, personally read the confessions of most high officials, in many cases having personally ordered their arrests. Confessions obtained by torture and sometimes splattered with the blood of the victims were duly presented to him, and marked up by him in multi-colored pencils, and circulated among select members of his inner circle with his comments. In his absence, his leading henchmen (e.g. Molotov, Voroshilov, Zhdanov and Mikoyan) signed off on death lists, but the big man generally kept a very close eye on things. He also took sadistic pleasure in forcing his closest and most loyal colleagues to denounce (and therefore, condemn to torture and execution) some of their favorites and even close relatives and friends. Some, like the heavy industry commissar Ordonikidze tried to resist the extension of the massacre to their own domains (though they all supported the purging of other departments) and Ordonikidze ended up killing himself, but most of them joined in, and not just from an instinct for self preservation. There was genuine enthusiasm on the part of some for at least some part of the terror.
The book is incredibly detailed (and well sourced and documented) but even this book is enough to fully grasp all aspects of the terror. The interested reader will have to read several other books to get a truly well rounded picture of this horror. Suffice it to say that the scale of the purge defies explanation; Stalin executed almost his entire military high command, half of his central committee, tens of thousands of loyal party functionaries and scores of thousands of lower level officials, engineers and managers. He decimated his own army and intelligence service, decapitated the foreign service and undermined intelligence gathering operations all over the world; the sheer scale and indiscriminate nature of it is examined from operational, ideological or even personal psychological angles, but by all of these criteria, it still fails to make sense.
THE ORIGINAL MEMBERS OF THE C.P. CENTRAL COMMITTEE (names in red all executed on Stalin’s orders) The Central Committee of the Communist Party in The names in red were later executed on Stalin s orders. SOURCE:
Most of those killed were loyal party members and almost all of them were innocent of the fantastic crimes they were forced to confess to by NKVD torturers. The details are horrendous but they are also worth reading. There have been other reigns of terror in history, but none that really matches this one in its ferocity, its apparent pointlessness, and its iterative cycle of auto-annihilation, with betrayers and accusers soon ending up facing the same fate as the friends and colleagues they had just betrayed. Ultimately, Yezhov and Frinovsky, the very top people in the NKVD who carried out the worst of the terror, were themselves arrested and tortured (and duly confessed to the same fantastic crimes), before being shot by the same executioners (over the course of the terror, the NKVD arrested more than 20,000 of its own employees as suspected traitors).
A picture of Stalin with NKVD chief Yezhov, who was later excised from the picture after his own execution
Kotkin explores many factors that led to the purge, but no single factor fully explains it: Stalin’s increasing personal paranoia, the fundamentally paranoid nature of the Leninist state, the existence of a coercive apparatus that could extract confessions from anyone, and that then ended up arresting and getting confessions from everyone named in the first fake confession; even the urge to replace existing functionaries with younger and better men, all these probably played a role, but no explanation is fully satisfactory. No wonder Yuri Slezkine fell back on a primarily religious explanation, more akin to scapegoating and witch hunts than rational statecraft.
Through all this, Kotkin also provides us with a very balanced and nuanced analysis of world affairs and the strategic challenges faced (and frequently, met) by Stalin and the nascent Soviet state. In the first part of the book the main threat is from an increasingly aggressive and expansionist Japan, and Stalin worked hard to try and stiffen Chinese resistance (including pressurizing the Chinese communists to cooperate with the Nationalist regime in the struggle against Japan). In the second half of the book, the threat is from Germany and the last part reads almost like a thriller, as Germany, the Soviet Union and the Western powers all play games with each other as the international order falls apart; Hitler moves relentlessly towards his goal of reversing Versailles (achieved without war and more easily than he might have imagined possible) and then towards European domination. All major powers miscalculate, misstep, miscegnate and betray smaller states at various points in the story, with Hitler and Stalin appearing first as early winners (Hitler in his lightning wars, Stalin in his non-aggression pact and subsequent re-expansion of the Soviet Union to the widest Czarist frontiers and beyond, in Poland, the Baltics, Finland and Bessarabia), and then as inevitable opponents headed for the greatest military clash in human history.
The last few chapters are a relentless drumbeat of Nazi preparations for an invasion of the Soviet Union, all delivered to Stalin but so mixed up with disinformation and confusing signals that Kotkin makes Stalin’s unwillingness to believe this flood of evidence a little more understandable than it is in more propagandistic or superficial descriptions of this crucial period. Stalin’s stubborn miscalculation will of course greatly magnify the scale of early Soviet defeats and will cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of ill prepared and ill-positioned Soviet troops, but Kotkin also makes clear that the logic of total war and zero-sum international competition that had gripped Europe (overwhelmingly, but not entirely thanks to Hitler) made the overall clash inevitable, and all these setbacks and miscalculations will eventually become mere details in a much bigger drama. In the end, it was Hitler who miscalculated most fatally, not Stalin, but that is subject of the next volume, and we must wait for it.
There is much more in this amazing book; for example, we learn in great detail about Stalin’s daily routine (he was an insomniac and the high command adjusted to his schedule, the day starting at 3 or 4 PM, with meetings until late into the night, frequently followed by long sessions of chatting, eating, drinking, listening to music and dancing; he never danced, but he did make his subordinates dance), his personal life (loving letters to his wife, but also arguments, and finally her depression and suicide, followed by his very real grief), his children (his sons were mostly neglected but when he could, he doted on his daughter; he did not try to promote any of his children and scolded school and military academy officials who tried to curry favor by writing gushing reports about them), how he picked his office director (Proskryobishev, like Stalin, the son of a cobbler, who was told upon his selection “you have a frightful look about you, you will terrify people”), who he relaxed with (first Lakoba (who was later sidelined and probably poisoned by Beria), then Kirov (who was shot by a down and out expelled party member, Kotkin thinks without Stalin’s involvement) and so on. We learn how prepared he was at meetings (very well prepared indeed), what he liked to drink (mostly Georgian wine), what he smoked (cigarette tobacco in a pipe), his taste in the arts (he gravitated towards folk music, but also enjoyed classical music, ballet and theater; he read widely, assiduously promoted writers and artists, was very interested in the cinema, and so on), and his mastery of detail (including detailed knowledge of modern weapons and an ability to ask pertinent and very probing questions of technical personnel who presented him with information). I could go on and on, but this is an 1100 page book and you will have to read it to get the full benefit of it (and I strongly recommend that you do).
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January 8, 2022Dude was a bit paranoid. Could have been nicer to his co-workers. Seems like collectivisation was a bit of a whiff.
(In both volumes Kotkin’s antipathy to Marxism tends to push him into reductive arguments. He presents all of interwar European socialism as a binary between the social democrats and the Bolsheviks whom he contrasts unfavourably with the parliamentary socialism of the SPD and the SFIO - yet neither of those parties (at the height of their interwar power no less) had managed to implement even a down payment on the meliorist project of the postwar period largely because they were chained to fiscal conservatism and austerity by a mixture of timidity and their own terrible economic dogmas. Sure, they weren’t causing famines but nor were they effective in their own terms and disillusionment with the social democrats swelled communist ranks in the 30s.
He also presents a counterfactual case that the Bolshevik Revolution gave rise to fascism by serving as a lightning rod (as if the European right would have welcomed a SR/Menshevik Soviet Union), which he presents as a mitigating factor for the decision of European conservatives to jump into bed with fascists. Thus in addition to their genuinely harmful adherence to Moscow’s ‘social fascist’ line, the Communist parties are also responsible for the much more relevant actions of the mainstream European right in enabling fascism. Seems a bit much.
If this sounds extraneous to a Stalin biography to you, it is, but Kotkin goes there, so blame him)
(In both volumes Kotkin’s antipathy to Marxism tends to push him into reductive arguments. He presents all of interwar European socialism as a binary between the social democrats and the Bolsheviks whom he contrasts unfavourably with the parliamentary socialism of the SPD and the SFIO - yet neither of those parties (at the height of their interwar power no less) had managed to implement even a down payment on the meliorist project of the postwar period largely because they were chained to fiscal conservatism and austerity by a mixture of timidity and their own terrible economic dogmas. Sure, they weren’t causing famines but nor were they effective in their own terms and disillusionment with the social democrats swelled communist ranks in the 30s.
He also presents a counterfactual case that the Bolshevik Revolution gave rise to fascism by serving as a lightning rod (as if the European right would have welcomed a SR/Menshevik Soviet Union), which he presents as a mitigating factor for the decision of European conservatives to jump into bed with fascists. Thus in addition to their genuinely harmful adherence to Moscow’s ‘social fascist’ line, the Communist parties are also responsible for the much more relevant actions of the mainstream European right in enabling fascism. Seems a bit much.
If this sounds extraneous to a Stalin biography to you, it is, but Kotkin goes there, so blame him)
June 28, 2018
Huge and time consuming, but makes you understand the big picture much better.
August 21, 2023
It took me all summer to get through this one.
Stephen Kotkin picks up where he left off with the first volume of his Stalin biography. This continues his three-level analysis of Stalin’s life, personal, domestic politics, and international affairs, but is much less concerned about the first. The book concentrates upon three main episodes: 1929 to 1933, the collectivization of agriculture; 1936 to 38, mass terror; and 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop rapprochement with Germany. During this period, Stalin manufactured crises and enemies to consolidate his power. His personality had been shaped by his rise to power in the Soviet Communist system, Although Lenin’s appointed heir, he felt insecure because of Lenin’s damning testament. The extremism, conspiracies, lies and power struggles soaked in violence characteristic of the Soviet system had a deep impact upon his character. “[H]e will go from being a dictator to being impatient with dictatorship and forging a despotism in mass bloodshed." Stalin’s aim was to make the Soviet Union a modern, powerful, socialist country, and he succeeded, but at the cost of millions of lives.
As for Stalin’s personal life, Kotkin writes about the suicide of Stalin’s wife and his relationships with his children. The death of Stalin’s mother occurred in this time period, as well. Further, Stalin’s vacations and friendships are explored, and the lives of the people closest to him are narrated. All in all, though, Kotkin does not find most of the motivations for Stalin’s behavior arising from these.
The responsibility for the deaths of millions during the collectivization of agriculture was Stalin’s. Up to 100 million people were affected by being forced into collective farms or having all their goods confiscated and sent to another part of the country to live, or to the gulag, or just killed. Perhaps 12 million people starved to death. While there is general agreement about that, there is a debate about the reasons why Stalin undertook this. Anne Applebaum, in “Red Famine: Stalin’s War in Ukraine”, claims that the famine was mainly directed at Ukraine and was about repressing Ukrainian nationalism. Kotkin, on the other hand, sees the motivations as collectivization and denomadization. Ukraine was not the worst-affected part of the country. For Stalin, as well, collectivization was necessary to bring in his version of a communist utopia. Those who resisted could be killed or starved. Rich peasants were class enemies and had to be eliminated. Not only that, but the countryside had to be starved to feed the cities and to export the food necessary to pay for the advanced technologies the country needed to industrialize. And in Kotkin’s narration, Stalin succeeded. By 1933, collectivization had been achieved, there was a bumper harvest, and the Five-Year plans were beginning to show results. Though there were great inefficiencies and waste due to the top-down command and control system, by 1940, there were gigantic coal mines, steel foundries, and textile, tractor, tank, and aircraft factories. Gold mines. Canals. Shipbuilding. Stalin’s “lunatic gamble” had paid off.
Kotkin shows how Stalin overcame resistance. If key figures in the politburo had gone against him, he could have been brought down. If there was enough unrest in the country, the situation may have turned against him. The rightists had support. They wanted to go slow, keep Lenin’s New Economic Plan, and seemed reasonable. They were a real danger to Stalin. However, in the politburo and party, people thought there was no alternative to Stalin: he was Lenin’s appointed successor, and he was a competent leader. Stalin could be fierce, deadly, and withering in criticism, but he could also turn on the charm and be witty, engaging, and supportive in person. Plus, people in positions of power were given very luxurious reasons to stay. While the peasants starved, the leaders lived in villas and apartments and ate caviar and drank wine. Kotkin further details how Stalin centralized state propaganda, turning the arts, film, theater, literature, painting, sculpture, to support the regime. Culture was dedicated to Communist propaganda. People internalized this propaganda to normalize and accept the situation.
Moving along to the Great Terror of 1936-1938, Stalin purged the Russian government, Communist Party, and military. People were fired, thrown out of the party, sent to the gulag, tortured, and shot. About 830,000 were killed. They were killed because they opposed some of his policies now or had in the past, or they knew people who had opposed him, or they were just “objective class enemies” (they hadn’t done anything, but because of their class origins, he thought they might in the future), or for no reason at all. He killed off all the old Bolsheviks, the people he had fought alongside in the Revolution. He killed off most of the military leadership. He used the secret police to carry out his purges: he made up lists of people to be taken away and distributed quotas to the regions (we don’t know how many people are guilty, but you will find a certain number guilty) and then purged the secret police in turn. All of this seriously hobbled the efficient functioning of Soviet politics, the economy, and the military. Something that is not really spoken of is that Hitler, evil as he was, never did anything like this. In fact, Hitler and the people around him puzzled at why Stalin was doing it.
Kotkin finds Stalin’s motives as being driven not by secret demons but by plainly spoken public aims. Stalin led the terror to break the will of any possible opponents, to consolidate his power absolutely and without question. He was suspicious and, because he lied so much, he expected others were doing the same. But that is not all. He believed that as real socialism approached, the class enemies would become more intractable. They plotted secretly and would act in concert with foreign enemies. They would do anything to prevent the USSR from leading the world to a socialist utopia. Enemies in the party and military were the most dangerous of all. Better to err on the side of caution. He brought into being a new generation of young leaders beholden to and in awe of him. Personally, I feel bad for the normal people who got caught up in this, but as for the victims in the Communist Party itself, generally they were a bunch of murderers who died by the sword they lived by. Whatever.
The terror was halted when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, which brings us to the final third of the book. It was refreshing and informative to read a book detailing the build-up to World War Two from the Russian side. Kotkin looks at Soviet participation in the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese Civil War and resistance to the Japanese, and European developments up to 1941 including the “appeasement” of Germany, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and dismemberment of Poland, the Winter War with Finland, and how Soviet-German relations broke down over Eastern Europe.
I am not going to give a detailed account of these events, but I will tell you interesting things I learned from the book. First, Stalin repeatedly supported the Spanish Republican government against Spanish Communist Party demands for a coup.
I did know that he supported the Chinese Nationalist Government against Chinese Communist Party calls for the same thing, but I did not know about the Soviet defeat of the Japanese at Nomonhan village on the Mongolian – Manchukuo border in 1939. There was a border battle of tens of thousands of troops there and the Soviets decisively beat the Japanese. This took place just before the German invasion of Poland. The Japanese were demoralized by this and Germany’s non-aggression pact with the USSR. The Soviets and Japanese signed a cease fire effectively recognizing the Soviets’ victory. This took place September Sept 15. On the 17th, Stalin ordered the invasion of Poland from the Russian side, and in the end, the Japanese and Soviets signed a non-aggression pact that allowed the Japanese to concentrate on acquiring territories in the south, for the Soviets to concentrate upon the Nazis in the west, and it held until almost the end of World War One.
In the negotiations that led to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, negotiations were being carried out on all sides that is, the British and French were negotiating with the both Germans and the Soviets, while the Germans were also negotiating with the Soviets, so, from Stalin’s perspective, he was hosting a bidding war for his alliance. The Germans offered not just peace and a part of Eastern Europe, but lots of advanced technology and weapons in return for Soviet raw materials. In the end, the British and French had nothing to offer Stalin because any Soviet participation against Germany would require Soviet troops to go through Poland or Romania, with the probable result that Stalin would take control of these countries. This I knew. Kotkin, however, points out the hypocrisy of the French and British, who had colonized about a third of the world, when they absolutely would not countenance Soviet imperialism in Eastern Europe.
More stuff I didn’t know. When the Germans invaded Poland, the British had promised the Poles that they would bomb German airfields, but they didn’t. Also, the French had promised the Poles that they would invade Germany from the West, but they didn’t. Because the German Army was fighting in Poland, they could have easily taken the Ruhr. Did they remember the disaster that happened in World War One when they tried to invade Germany? Lastly, German and Russian forces met and fought as the Germans pressed over the border that they had agreed with the Soviets in the middle of Poland.
Stalin pressed neutral and democratic Finland for territorial handovers for Soviet naval bases in the approaches to Leningrad in 1938-9 because he was worried that Finland could be invaded or coerced by an unfriendly power and used as a springboard for invasion into the USSR. He did not want war; he wanted negotiations. In the end, however, he invaded because Finland would not agree to his land swap demands. This led to the USSR holding parts of Finland’s territory and the Finnish government drawing closer to Germany. In 1940, Finland allowed German troops into the country and these invaded in 1941 with everyone else.
I disagree with Kotkin’s continued condemnations of Britain and France’s policy of appeasement in the 1930s. It is easy to dismiss it because it didn’t work, but there are more things that need to be taken into account than appear in this book. It is true that the French could have easily prevented Hitler’s first move of reoccupying the Rhineland. However, at that time, the British government and public widely believed that certain aspects of the Versailles Treaty were unjust and had to be corrected. This was a good example, and the French could not afford to alienate their only ally. Generally, when an establishment power makes corrections in their policy for the just aims of a revisionist power in the name of peace, their diplomacy is applauded. The Anchluss with Austria can be seen in the same light. Further, if one reads Cain and Hopkin’s argument in “British Imperialism”, the British knew that rearmament and war would be ruinously expensive and leave them dangerously dependent upon the Americans, which is exactly what happened.
After Hitler took France, Stalin faced a conundrum. He had gambled on a war between the imperialists and fascist that would bury them both but ended up with an empowered Germany, his nightmare. But there were very sincere negotiations going on between Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviets for a 4-party pact to fight the British. The main reason that these did not succeed is because Hitler was intent on gaining influence in Eastern Europe while deflecting the Soviets towards British-controlled Persia. There is some very serious alternative history there. The story continues to detail the developments all through 1940 and until the summer 1941 Operation Barbarossa. There was much conflicting information about German intentions available to Stalin. Historians have made much of transparent German preparations for battle that Stalin ignored, but Kotkin emphasizes the advantageous economic cooperation between the Germans and Russians, and the very effective German disinformation campaigns that kept everyone guessing his true intentions. Stalin fell for it.
Stalin used his position as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR to gain absolute power through a series of bloodbaths. That is a normal interpretation. Kotkin points out, in addition, that Stalin was diligent, intelligent, detail-oriented, and overwhelmed with work. He frequently amazed specialists with the depth of his knowledge in their fields. He had the ability to spot and develop talent, and to command loyalty. In this book, Stalin’s great foil was Hitler. Like Hitler, Stalin was a great political opportunist who capitalized on others’ mistakes. Also like Hitler, he was a gambler and some of those gambles paid off while others ended in disaster. Finally, the “process of acquiring and exercising supreme power in the shadow of Lenin’s supposed testament calling for his removal and the criticisms in the party made Stalin who he was.” The book ends in 1941, with Germany’s invasion of Russia. By this time, Stalin had been revealed to be a supremely competent ideologue and mass murderer who forced his country to become a modern, industrialized, militarily strong communist power through the sacrifice and bloodshed of millions. He could also make mistakes.
Stephen Kotkin picks up where he left off with the first volume of his Stalin biography. This continues his three-level analysis of Stalin’s life, personal, domestic politics, and international affairs, but is much less concerned about the first. The book concentrates upon three main episodes: 1929 to 1933, the collectivization of agriculture; 1936 to 38, mass terror; and 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop rapprochement with Germany. During this period, Stalin manufactured crises and enemies to consolidate his power. His personality had been shaped by his rise to power in the Soviet Communist system, Although Lenin’s appointed heir, he felt insecure because of Lenin’s damning testament. The extremism, conspiracies, lies and power struggles soaked in violence characteristic of the Soviet system had a deep impact upon his character. “[H]e will go from being a dictator to being impatient with dictatorship and forging a despotism in mass bloodshed." Stalin’s aim was to make the Soviet Union a modern, powerful, socialist country, and he succeeded, but at the cost of millions of lives.
As for Stalin’s personal life, Kotkin writes about the suicide of Stalin’s wife and his relationships with his children. The death of Stalin’s mother occurred in this time period, as well. Further, Stalin’s vacations and friendships are explored, and the lives of the people closest to him are narrated. All in all, though, Kotkin does not find most of the motivations for Stalin’s behavior arising from these.
The responsibility for the deaths of millions during the collectivization of agriculture was Stalin’s. Up to 100 million people were affected by being forced into collective farms or having all their goods confiscated and sent to another part of the country to live, or to the gulag, or just killed. Perhaps 12 million people starved to death. While there is general agreement about that, there is a debate about the reasons why Stalin undertook this. Anne Applebaum, in “Red Famine: Stalin’s War in Ukraine”, claims that the famine was mainly directed at Ukraine and was about repressing Ukrainian nationalism. Kotkin, on the other hand, sees the motivations as collectivization and denomadization. Ukraine was not the worst-affected part of the country. For Stalin, as well, collectivization was necessary to bring in his version of a communist utopia. Those who resisted could be killed or starved. Rich peasants were class enemies and had to be eliminated. Not only that, but the countryside had to be starved to feed the cities and to export the food necessary to pay for the advanced technologies the country needed to industrialize. And in Kotkin’s narration, Stalin succeeded. By 1933, collectivization had been achieved, there was a bumper harvest, and the Five-Year plans were beginning to show results. Though there were great inefficiencies and waste due to the top-down command and control system, by 1940, there were gigantic coal mines, steel foundries, and textile, tractor, tank, and aircraft factories. Gold mines. Canals. Shipbuilding. Stalin’s “lunatic gamble” had paid off.
Kotkin shows how Stalin overcame resistance. If key figures in the politburo had gone against him, he could have been brought down. If there was enough unrest in the country, the situation may have turned against him. The rightists had support. They wanted to go slow, keep Lenin’s New Economic Plan, and seemed reasonable. They were a real danger to Stalin. However, in the politburo and party, people thought there was no alternative to Stalin: he was Lenin’s appointed successor, and he was a competent leader. Stalin could be fierce, deadly, and withering in criticism, but he could also turn on the charm and be witty, engaging, and supportive in person. Plus, people in positions of power were given very luxurious reasons to stay. While the peasants starved, the leaders lived in villas and apartments and ate caviar and drank wine. Kotkin further details how Stalin centralized state propaganda, turning the arts, film, theater, literature, painting, sculpture, to support the regime. Culture was dedicated to Communist propaganda. People internalized this propaganda to normalize and accept the situation.
Moving along to the Great Terror of 1936-1938, Stalin purged the Russian government, Communist Party, and military. People were fired, thrown out of the party, sent to the gulag, tortured, and shot. About 830,000 were killed. They were killed because they opposed some of his policies now or had in the past, or they knew people who had opposed him, or they were just “objective class enemies” (they hadn’t done anything, but because of their class origins, he thought they might in the future), or for no reason at all. He killed off all the old Bolsheviks, the people he had fought alongside in the Revolution. He killed off most of the military leadership. He used the secret police to carry out his purges: he made up lists of people to be taken away and distributed quotas to the regions (we don’t know how many people are guilty, but you will find a certain number guilty) and then purged the secret police in turn. All of this seriously hobbled the efficient functioning of Soviet politics, the economy, and the military. Something that is not really spoken of is that Hitler, evil as he was, never did anything like this. In fact, Hitler and the people around him puzzled at why Stalin was doing it.
Kotkin finds Stalin’s motives as being driven not by secret demons but by plainly spoken public aims. Stalin led the terror to break the will of any possible opponents, to consolidate his power absolutely and without question. He was suspicious and, because he lied so much, he expected others were doing the same. But that is not all. He believed that as real socialism approached, the class enemies would become more intractable. They plotted secretly and would act in concert with foreign enemies. They would do anything to prevent the USSR from leading the world to a socialist utopia. Enemies in the party and military were the most dangerous of all. Better to err on the side of caution. He brought into being a new generation of young leaders beholden to and in awe of him. Personally, I feel bad for the normal people who got caught up in this, but as for the victims in the Communist Party itself, generally they were a bunch of murderers who died by the sword they lived by. Whatever.
The terror was halted when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, which brings us to the final third of the book. It was refreshing and informative to read a book detailing the build-up to World War Two from the Russian side. Kotkin looks at Soviet participation in the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese Civil War and resistance to the Japanese, and European developments up to 1941 including the “appeasement” of Germany, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and dismemberment of Poland, the Winter War with Finland, and how Soviet-German relations broke down over Eastern Europe.
I am not going to give a detailed account of these events, but I will tell you interesting things I learned from the book. First, Stalin repeatedly supported the Spanish Republican government against Spanish Communist Party demands for a coup.
I did know that he supported the Chinese Nationalist Government against Chinese Communist Party calls for the same thing, but I did not know about the Soviet defeat of the Japanese at Nomonhan village on the Mongolian – Manchukuo border in 1939. There was a border battle of tens of thousands of troops there and the Soviets decisively beat the Japanese. This took place just before the German invasion of Poland. The Japanese were demoralized by this and Germany’s non-aggression pact with the USSR. The Soviets and Japanese signed a cease fire effectively recognizing the Soviets’ victory. This took place September Sept 15. On the 17th, Stalin ordered the invasion of Poland from the Russian side, and in the end, the Japanese and Soviets signed a non-aggression pact that allowed the Japanese to concentrate on acquiring territories in the south, for the Soviets to concentrate upon the Nazis in the west, and it held until almost the end of World War One.
In the negotiations that led to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, negotiations were being carried out on all sides that is, the British and French were negotiating with the both Germans and the Soviets, while the Germans were also negotiating with the Soviets, so, from Stalin’s perspective, he was hosting a bidding war for his alliance. The Germans offered not just peace and a part of Eastern Europe, but lots of advanced technology and weapons in return for Soviet raw materials. In the end, the British and French had nothing to offer Stalin because any Soviet participation against Germany would require Soviet troops to go through Poland or Romania, with the probable result that Stalin would take control of these countries. This I knew. Kotkin, however, points out the hypocrisy of the French and British, who had colonized about a third of the world, when they absolutely would not countenance Soviet imperialism in Eastern Europe.
More stuff I didn’t know. When the Germans invaded Poland, the British had promised the Poles that they would bomb German airfields, but they didn’t. Also, the French had promised the Poles that they would invade Germany from the West, but they didn’t. Because the German Army was fighting in Poland, they could have easily taken the Ruhr. Did they remember the disaster that happened in World War One when they tried to invade Germany? Lastly, German and Russian forces met and fought as the Germans pressed over the border that they had agreed with the Soviets in the middle of Poland.
Stalin pressed neutral and democratic Finland for territorial handovers for Soviet naval bases in the approaches to Leningrad in 1938-9 because he was worried that Finland could be invaded or coerced by an unfriendly power and used as a springboard for invasion into the USSR. He did not want war; he wanted negotiations. In the end, however, he invaded because Finland would not agree to his land swap demands. This led to the USSR holding parts of Finland’s territory and the Finnish government drawing closer to Germany. In 1940, Finland allowed German troops into the country and these invaded in 1941 with everyone else.
I disagree with Kotkin’s continued condemnations of Britain and France’s policy of appeasement in the 1930s. It is easy to dismiss it because it didn’t work, but there are more things that need to be taken into account than appear in this book. It is true that the French could have easily prevented Hitler’s first move of reoccupying the Rhineland. However, at that time, the British government and public widely believed that certain aspects of the Versailles Treaty were unjust and had to be corrected. This was a good example, and the French could not afford to alienate their only ally. Generally, when an establishment power makes corrections in their policy for the just aims of a revisionist power in the name of peace, their diplomacy is applauded. The Anchluss with Austria can be seen in the same light. Further, if one reads Cain and Hopkin’s argument in “British Imperialism”, the British knew that rearmament and war would be ruinously expensive and leave them dangerously dependent upon the Americans, which is exactly what happened.
After Hitler took France, Stalin faced a conundrum. He had gambled on a war between the imperialists and fascist that would bury them both but ended up with an empowered Germany, his nightmare. But there were very sincere negotiations going on between Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviets for a 4-party pact to fight the British. The main reason that these did not succeed is because Hitler was intent on gaining influence in Eastern Europe while deflecting the Soviets towards British-controlled Persia. There is some very serious alternative history there. The story continues to detail the developments all through 1940 and until the summer 1941 Operation Barbarossa. There was much conflicting information about German intentions available to Stalin. Historians have made much of transparent German preparations for battle that Stalin ignored, but Kotkin emphasizes the advantageous economic cooperation between the Germans and Russians, and the very effective German disinformation campaigns that kept everyone guessing his true intentions. Stalin fell for it.
Stalin used his position as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR to gain absolute power through a series of bloodbaths. That is a normal interpretation. Kotkin points out, in addition, that Stalin was diligent, intelligent, detail-oriented, and overwhelmed with work. He frequently amazed specialists with the depth of his knowledge in their fields. He had the ability to spot and develop talent, and to command loyalty. In this book, Stalin’s great foil was Hitler. Like Hitler, Stalin was a great political opportunist who capitalized on others’ mistakes. Also like Hitler, he was a gambler and some of those gambles paid off while others ended in disaster. Finally, the “process of acquiring and exercising supreme power in the shadow of Lenin’s supposed testament calling for his removal and the criticisms in the party made Stalin who he was.” The book ends in 1941, with Germany’s invasion of Russia. By this time, Stalin had been revealed to be a supremely competent ideologue and mass murderer who forced his country to become a modern, industrialized, militarily strong communist power through the sacrifice and bloodshed of millions. He could also make mistakes.
May 20, 2018
Kotkin’s biography of Stalin is finally doing justice to one of the most extraordinary despots in history. Although heavily biographed (I know the word doesn’t exist, but it should) since his own days, only today is it possible to write about him as he deserves. This second volume is even better than the first, perhaps because it covers the most interesting period in the Vozhd’s life, a period neatly bookended by Trotsky’s exile, collectivization and the first wrecker trials, on one side, and the Nazi invasion of the Motherland, on the other. In between the story is so rich that even with nearly 100 pages per year, the book is almost too short. Here we see many key episodes of Soviet history: the Ukrainian holodomor (Kotkin persuasively argues that Stalin did by intend to exterminate Ukrainians and that in fact other peoples, like the Kazakhs, lost a greater portion of their population through famine); Nadia Stalina’s suicide; Kirov’s murder; the great show trials (Kamenev/ Zinoviev, Piatakov/Rykov, Bukharin/Tomsky); Ordkzhonikidze’s suicide; the Terror; the Nomonhan incident; the Hitler/Stalin pact; the Soviet/Finnish War. And this is just domestically. Kotkin covers also the Great Depression, the Nazi route to power, the Spanish Civil War, The Chinese Civil War and the Japanese invasion. The treatment of Mongolia is exceptionally thorough and shows how Stalin exported Bolshevism into a medieval society.
The author doesn’t shy away from brutality. He shows an NKVD interrogator who beat prisoners so badly that their eyeballs popped out. Rokossovsky, later and hero in WWII was thought to be a Polish spy, so he had all his toes smashed with a hammer. Before they executed the brilliant Marshall Tukhachevsky, his captors urinated in his mouth. Entire families are swallowed by the NKVD and chewed into oblivion. Yet Kotkin also shows Stalin’s brilliant, many faceted brain. Unlike Hitler, he was no gambler but an opportunist. He was perfectly happy to live within the status quo (unlike Trotski) but as soon as he saw and opportunity he moved in like a flash. He was an unspeakably wicked man but also the most brilliant leader of the XX century. His great mistakes (collectivization, the Terror, not anticipating Hitler’s invasion) are shown to be integral to the Marxist-Leninist worldview rather than to specific flaws in Stalin’s mindset.
It is remarkable that a historical deterministic, who believed (or said he believed) that individuals are irrelevant and only social processes matter should have branded his country and his time more than anyone else for centuries. I await eagerly volume III.
The author doesn’t shy away from brutality. He shows an NKVD interrogator who beat prisoners so badly that their eyeballs popped out. Rokossovsky, later and hero in WWII was thought to be a Polish spy, so he had all his toes smashed with a hammer. Before they executed the brilliant Marshall Tukhachevsky, his captors urinated in his mouth. Entire families are swallowed by the NKVD and chewed into oblivion. Yet Kotkin also shows Stalin’s brilliant, many faceted brain. Unlike Hitler, he was no gambler but an opportunist. He was perfectly happy to live within the status quo (unlike Trotski) but as soon as he saw and opportunity he moved in like a flash. He was an unspeakably wicked man but also the most brilliant leader of the XX century. His great mistakes (collectivization, the Terror, not anticipating Hitler’s invasion) are shown to be integral to the Marxist-Leninist worldview rather than to specific flaws in Stalin’s mindset.
It is remarkable that a historical deterministic, who believed (or said he believed) that individuals are irrelevant and only social processes matter should have branded his country and his time more than anyone else for centuries. I await eagerly volume III.
July 1, 2022
Una excelente biografía sobre uno de los personajes más complejos del sigo XX (probablemente el personaje central de ese sigo, o al menos del "Siglo corto" de Hobsbawm) Este tomo cubre el periodo de sus crímenes más notorios: El Holodomor, el Gran Terror, su colaboración con Hitler etc... y dedica buena atención a sus motivaciones para realizarlos. Pese a ello, no deja de ser un personaje enormemente complejo, su psicología nos es difícil tan penetrar en su psicología como lo fue a sus contemporáneos (Con la diferencia de que a muchos de ellos les costó la vida) Para el lector español tiene especial interés la atención que se dedica a las entretelas de la intervención soviética en la Guerra Civil Española (No es un tema principal del libro pero, dada su extensión, queda ampliamente cubierta)
October 17, 2020
Like the first book in the series, it is impressively well researched. So much so that the sections on The Terror seem almost to drag on interminably, but it really is important to the story to understand how Stalin's purging of the military elite and his inner circle were more than just statistics.
The sheer scope of the book may be daunting to someone who is not as familiar with many of the names and the political dynamics of the era. I was a TA in college for a Russian/Soviet foreign policy class so I am way into this stuff. This series is very much concerned with the political machinations of the Stalin regime and thus it is not for someone who is not interested in how totalitarian regimes come to be. But if you can handle the lists of names that come and go and enjoy learning about personality and political history, it's fantastic.
It is a fascinating study of how just one man could shape, gut, and re-constitute a government responsible for an empire that stretched from reconstituted Poland to the Pacific Ocean. Absolutely incredible.
The sheer scope of the book may be daunting to someone who is not as familiar with many of the names and the political dynamics of the era. I was a TA in college for a Russian/Soviet foreign policy class so I am way into this stuff. This series is very much concerned with the political machinations of the Stalin regime and thus it is not for someone who is not interested in how totalitarian regimes come to be. But if you can handle the lists of names that come and go and enjoy learning about personality and political history, it's fantastic.
It is a fascinating study of how just one man could shape, gut, and re-constitute a government responsible for an empire that stretched from reconstituted Poland to the Pacific Ocean. Absolutely incredible.
January 15, 2024
The inescapable conclusion of this book is (to some) shocking: Stalin was a communist. He wasn't an insincere or false ideologue, but a true believer. His faith in Marxism was absolute; his revolutionary experience tested; and his knowledge of Lenin - personal and political - was unmatched. Naturally, he felt that this was adequate qualification for personal dictatorship.
The person he became was not shaped by trauma or tragedy. It was a character conceived in the consolidation of power. Stalin consistently failed to take accountability, admit his faults, and correct his growing 'cult of personality'. When one subordinate prompted him on the "vulgar and excessive cult made out of him", Stalin suggested that it was possible that foreign agents may be behind it - in an effort to discredit him!
MASS PERSECUTION
In his mind, the executions and arrests, consolidation of the Secretariat, undermining of collective leadership and soviet democracy - to name only a few crimes - were completely self-justifying necessities on the road to communism. To simply say these crimes happened, or "there were unintentional accidents/excesses", fails to comprehend the intentionality behind the violence, and masks the inconceivable scale of destruction.
The Great Purge, as it is now called, would claim political dissidents and party functionaries alike. Denunciations and subsequent arrests were capricious, arbitrary and often deeply personal. From the safety of the Little Corner, Stalin's personal mafia would remake the Party in his image. Among this gang, Molotov (his consigliere), Voroshilov (military), Beria (NKVD), and Khruschev - to name a few - were shielded from this onslaught while the people suffered. These, his closest supporters, the surviving cadres, would all harbour guilt in their later years, and join in his post-death denunciation.
Purge mania would work a fever pitch that exceeded McCarthyist hysertia.
It wouldn't even spare the Old Bolsheviks, party members who had joined before the Revolution, and who's commitment to the regime was unquestionable. Well-meaning revolutionaries such as, Sokolnikov, Kamanev, Zinoviev, Tomsky, Bukharin, Rykov were disposed of in waves of purges, denounced as 'Trotskyites', foreign agents, class enemies and 'rightists'.
These confessions were provably coerced by the NKVD under Yagoda, Yezhov and later Beria. Of the 32 people who joined the Politburo between 1919 and 1940, 15 would be executed or assassinated on Stalin's orders. He would even underline and edit their confessions.
The number of Soviet loyalists (not even to mention the dissidents) lost in these purges was titanic. The party bureaucracy was cleansed and the officer corps decimated. Marshall Zhukov, the man with greatest claim to have defeated Hitler on the Eastern Front, would reflect that, in the midst of mania, his "unexpected posting to the Mongolia-Manchuko frontier had saved his life".
INDUSTRIAL DISEASE
And for what reason? There were many, but one drew his ire like no other: criticism.
The all-to-common myth of Stalin as a good economic manager and necessary force of Soviet industrialization is provably false. It echoes similarly the well-spun myth of the ‘good Hitler years’, and must be laid to rest in the same mass grave. Chronic underinvestment in consumption, mass famine, and institutional inefficiency, are not signs of effective development.
Stalin did not understand the role of incentives in economic management; and very simple economic concepts, he failed to grasp. He reflexively ignored proven economic managers like Rykov and Sokolnikov, who had overseen tangible diversification and output improvements under the NEP. Instead preferring a dogmatic adherence to unbridled (and untested) Marxism.
All successful communist expansions have adhered to NEP principles (i.e., Doi Moi, Dengism). In the debates between Hu Yaobang and Zhou Ziyang in the chambers of the PRC, it was efficiency, not mere output, that emerged as the authentic catalyst of China's economic miracle. Fixation on output diminishes the critical role of efficiency in powering long-term development. This was a critical factor that Stalin did not understand - despite warning.
Failure to meet targets often meant exile or execution on charges of 'wrecking' and sabotage; and factory managers and industry commissars conspired to save their necks - distorting stats, buying back output to meet new procurement targets, and literally robbing other factories. Soviet industrialisation looked more like a mad scramble of ‘egg in the nest’, a necrotic network kept alive by the same underground markets it sort to root out. For a summary from the author himself, this podcast is recommended: on Stalin's economics
All this being said, 1940 GDP per capita, was effectively no different from projected trends during the Tsarist era. Per capita statistics, it must be said, naturally discount the people who died along the way to reach an on-trend level of economic development. In fact, it increases GDP per capita.
FAMINE STATE
None of Stalin's ambitious 5 year plans would ever be reached.
It was so bad that contemporaries thought that it was a deliberate policy of genocide. It was not. It was pure incompetence.
At the famine’s height, reports of cannibalism in Ukraine averaged 10 per day. Gangs roamed the streets hunting orphans to make human Holubtsi.
Reports on the Holodomor were smothered. The party exercised a complete chokehold on the press, while pro-Soviet Western journalists like Walter Durranty would deny it outright.
Stalin had to be kicked and dragged at every step to reduce work quotas and procurement targets as the famine mounted. He frothed at the party's failures, blaming 'wreckers' and 'saboteurs' who he believed infested the party apparatus. Almost nothing would stop his policy of exporting grain (while the population starved), at chronically low world prices (during the Great Depression) for state-of-the-art factories/machines (which workers couldn't maintain).
The tyrannical Tsarist government exercised more honesty in the 1891-92 famine which claimed the lives of 500,000 people. They would at least publicly admit to a “failed harvest”.
RUSSIAN SUPREMACY
Stalinomics can only be seen as a success through the lens of Russian colonialism. The disproportionate suffering and starvations of its ethnic minorities (i.e., Kazakhs, Tartars, Dagestanis and Ukrainians) can be discounted - if in service of the Soviet state.
The 8th Party Congress had long since established Russian supremacy as fact.
Stalin actively rehabilitated the Tsarist legacy he helped to overthrow. Tyrants of serfdom such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great were suddenly recast as national heroes. Russian chauvinism was conveniently repurposed as a handy weapon of soviet unity and minority repression. Nationalism of any other kind, from the many constituent parts of the Soviet Union, was repressed outright.
Wasn't it Augustus who called himself the 'first among equals'?
GRAND STRATEGY
Stalin's injustices in foreign policy (from 1929 - 1941) are numerous, but all self-serving. A distinction can be drawn however between his: 1. more benign anti-fascist policy in Asia (excluding his micro-meddling in internal Mongolian politics and ethnic cleansing of Soviet Koreans); and 2. pro-fascist coziness to enable his sweeping irredentism in Europe.
The obvious failure is the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and Kotkin dedicates significant time to its conception and negotiation.
Needless to say, Stalin was complicit in the Nazi invasion of Poland - directly abetting it. The pact contained secret protocols which redefined the borders of Eastern Europe - with complete disregard to the self-determination of the countries it circumscribed (the Baltics and Romania) and deleted (Poland). Stalin swooped in from the East under the pretension of protecting ethnic Ukrainian and Belorussian minorities, and to replace the disintegrating state (which he had conspired to destroy).
In November 1939, at the opening of the Winter War, a Soviet village (Mainila) on the border with Finland was shelled by an unknown attacker. This attack resulted in 4 Soviet deaths. We now know, through extensive investigation by Russian and Finnish historians, that this was a false flag attack orchestrated by Stalin as a pretext for invasion. It mirrors uncannily the Gleiwitz incident which Germany used as a pretext to invade Poland. The difference being that Hitler executed criminals (after dressing them in German uniforms), rather than firing on his own men.
In June 1940, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were invaded, occupied and annexed under the Soviet Union. This violated express non-aggression pacts which Stalin himself had signed with the leaders of these countries - which already included coerced concessions.
This is just a short selection.
UNCLE JOSEF
Stalin himself is charismatic: likeable, well-humoured and hard working.
He was also an incessant scribbler, cartoon wolves howled at the margins of his personal communiques and paperwork. Perhaps someday, these doodled dossiers will find their way into an art exhibition, depicting the lighter strokes of the despot's pen.
NOTES ON THE TEXT
As before, Kotkin is detailed and comprehensive but clearly at some cost - the book is too long. Every line is well sourced, and the bibliography runs over 200 pages in miniscule text. Kotkin has direct access to the Soviet archives, and each claim can be correlated therein. It is a biography founded in the paper, binder, and file cabinet reality of the party apparatus. It is important reading for a greater understanding of the origins of the Second World War.
”Stalin systematically studied works on autocratic rule… Even as his reading widened, it remained anchored in Marx and Lenin"
The person he became was not shaped by trauma or tragedy. It was a character conceived in the consolidation of power. Stalin consistently failed to take accountability, admit his faults, and correct his growing 'cult of personality'. When one subordinate prompted him on the "vulgar and excessive cult made out of him", Stalin suggested that it was possible that foreign agents may be behind it - in an effort to discredit him!
MASS PERSECUTION
In his mind, the executions and arrests, consolidation of the Secretariat, undermining of collective leadership and soviet democracy - to name only a few crimes - were completely self-justifying necessities on the road to communism. To simply say these crimes happened, or "there were unintentional accidents/excesses", fails to comprehend the intentionality behind the violence, and masks the inconceivable scale of destruction.
"The total who perished directly at the hands of the Soviet secret police in 1937-38 was likely closer to 830,000.”
The Great Purge, as it is now called, would claim political dissidents and party functionaries alike. Denunciations and subsequent arrests were capricious, arbitrary and often deeply personal. From the safety of the Little Corner, Stalin's personal mafia would remake the Party in his image. Among this gang, Molotov (his consigliere), Voroshilov (military), Beria (NKVD), and Khruschev - to name a few - were shielded from this onslaught while the people suffered. These, his closest supporters, the surviving cadres, would all harbour guilt in their later years, and join in his post-death denunciation.
Purge mania would work a fever pitch that exceeded McCarthyist hysertia.
"The frenzy never escaped Stalin's ability to shape and ultimately stop it. Still, often the denouncers were denounced right back by those they had aimed at, in a circular firing squad. And if a person defended someone accused of being an enemy of the people, well, then, that was proof that he or she, too, was an enemy. Even if one merely inquired about a co-worker who had suddenly stopped showing up, one could be accused of harbouring "ties" or "sympathies"."
It wouldn't even spare the Old Bolsheviks, party members who had joined before the Revolution, and who's commitment to the regime was unquestionable. Well-meaning revolutionaries such as, Sokolnikov, Kamanev, Zinoviev, Tomsky, Bukharin, Rykov were disposed of in waves of purges, denounced as 'Trotskyites', foreign agents, class enemies and 'rightists'.
"Sokolnikov had joined the party in 1905, at age seventeen, been with Lenin on the sealed train in April 1917, signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which had ended up saving the fledgling regime in 1918, led the civil war conquest of Turkestan in 1920, masterminded the NEP stabilization as finance commissar, and served as an effective ambassador to Britain. But it turned out he had all along been working to overthrow Soviet power."
"Yagoda was charged with embezzlement and leading a conspiracy on behalf of Nazi Germany to assassinate Stalin. Had Yagoda been a long-standing foreign agent, he let pass countless opportunities to have Stalin, and entourage killed."
These confessions were provably coerced by the NKVD under Yagoda, Yezhov and later Beria. Of the 32 people who joined the Politburo between 1919 and 1940, 15 would be executed or assassinated on Stalin's orders. He would even underline and edit their confessions.
"Bukharin, Krestinsky, Rykov, Cristian Rakovski - staunch Bolsheviks - confessed they had plotted to assassinate Lenin and Stalin since 1918; had murdered Kirov, Mezynski, Kuibyshev, Gorky, Gorky's son Maxim; had conspired with Nazi Germany, Japan, and Great Britain to partition the Soviet Union, hand over territory (Ukraine, Belorussia), and abolish collective farms."
The number of Soviet loyalists (not even to mention the dissidents) lost in these purges was titanic. The party bureaucracy was cleansed and the officer corps decimated. Marshall Zhukov, the man with greatest claim to have defeated Hitler on the Eastern Front, would reflect that, in the midst of mania, his "unexpected posting to the Mongolia-Manchuko frontier had saved his life".
INDUSTRIAL DISEASE
And for what reason? There were many, but one drew his ire like no other: criticism.
"Stalin seems to have been haunted not by the millions of peasants and nomads who had starved but by the Communist officials who had dared to criticise his rule because of it… Opposition to collectivization became the leitmotif of the interrogation protocols he demanded and underlined…"
The all-to-common myth of Stalin as a good economic manager and necessary force of Soviet industrialization is provably false. It echoes similarly the well-spun myth of the ‘good Hitler years’, and must be laid to rest in the same mass grave. Chronic underinvestment in consumption, mass famine, and institutional inefficiency, are not signs of effective development.
Stalin did not understand the role of incentives in economic management; and very simple economic concepts, he failed to grasp. He reflexively ignored proven economic managers like Rykov and Sokolnikov, who had overseen tangible diversification and output improvements under the NEP. Instead preferring a dogmatic adherence to unbridled (and untested) Marxism.
"Setting maximal quantitative targets and goading each factory to meet them, where some would succeed and others not, and where even success would be at varied levels, rendered coherence useless. Over fulfilling the output targets of nuts only led to waste if they exceeded production of bolts; an increased supply of bricks provided no extra utility with insufficient mortar. Hoarding and wheeling and dealing via illegal markets - a shadow economy - became indispensable to the working of the “planned” economy but rendered shortages and corruption endemic."
All successful communist expansions have adhered to NEP principles (i.e., Doi Moi, Dengism). In the debates between Hu Yaobang and Zhou Ziyang in the chambers of the PRC, it was efficiency, not mere output, that emerged as the authentic catalyst of China's economic miracle. Fixation on output diminishes the critical role of efficiency in powering long-term development. This was a critical factor that Stalin did not understand - despite warning.
""We buy up materials we do not need", noted the head of supply at Moscow’s electrical engineering plant, “so that we can barter them for what we do need”."
Failure to meet targets often meant exile or execution on charges of 'wrecking' and sabotage; and factory managers and industry commissars conspired to save their necks - distorting stats, buying back output to meet new procurement targets, and literally robbing other factories. Soviet industrialisation looked more like a mad scramble of ‘egg in the nest’, a necrotic network kept alive by the same underground markets it sort to root out. For a summary from the author himself, this podcast is recommended: on Stalin's economics
"With no legal market mechanisms to control quality, defective goods proliferated. Even priority industrial customers suffered anywhere from 8 to 80 percent defective inputs, with no alternative suppliers, and one factory’s poor inputs became another factory’s low quality output"
All this being said, 1940 GDP per capita, was effectively no different from projected trends during the Tsarist era. Per capita statistics, it must be said, naturally discount the people who died along the way to reach an on-trend level of economic development. In fact, it increases GDP per capita.
FAMINE STATE
None of Stalin's ambitious 5 year plans would ever be reached.
"In 1931 - 33, famine and related epidemics probably killed between 5 and 7 million people. Perhaps 10 million more starved nearly to death"
It was so bad that contemporaries thought that it was a deliberate policy of genocide. It was not. It was pure incompetence.
"It resulted from Stalin’s policies of forced collectivization-dekulakization, as well as the pitiless and incompetent management of the sowing and procurement campaigns, all of which put the country on a knife-edge, highly susceptible to drought and sudden torrential rains. Stalin appears to have genuinely imagined that increasing the scale of farms, mechanization, and collective efficiency would boost agricultural output. He dismissed the loss of better-off peasants from villages, only belatedly recognised the crucial role of incentives, and wildly overestimated the influx of machines. He twice deluded himself - partly from false reporting by frightened statisticians, partly from his own magical thinking - that the country was on the verge of a recovery harvest"
At the famine’s height, reports of cannibalism in Ukraine averaged 10 per day. Gangs roamed the streets hunting orphans to make human Holubtsi.
"Regional party bosses, given the floor, uttered the truth: drought and a poor harvest had rendered even the reduced quotas impossible. Stalin exploded, sarcastically mocking one speakers’ “exactitude” in adducing lower crop yields."
Reports on the Holodomor were smothered. The party exercised a complete chokehold on the press, while pro-Soviet Western journalists like Walter Durranty would deny it outright.
"The Soviet agricultural press in November 1932 carried headlines of peasants dying from starvation in Poland, Czechoslovakia, China, and the United States. Not a word about the famine in the Soviet Union."
Stalin had to be kicked and dragged at every step to reduce work quotas and procurement targets as the famine mounted. He frothed at the party's failures, blaming 'wreckers' and 'saboteurs' who he believed infested the party apparatus. Almost nothing would stop his policy of exporting grain (while the population starved), at chronically low world prices (during the Great Depression) for state-of-the-art factories/machines (which workers couldn't maintain).
The tyrannical Tsarist government exercised more honesty in the 1891-92 famine which claimed the lives of 500,000 people. They would at least publicly admit to a “failed harvest”.
RUSSIAN SUPREMACY
Stalinomics can only be seen as a success through the lens of Russian colonialism. The disproportionate suffering and starvations of its ethnic minorities (i.e., Kazakhs, Tartars, Dagestanis and Ukrainians) can be discounted - if in service of the Soviet state.
"In the Kazakh autonomous republic, probably between 35 and 40 percent of the titular nation - as compared with 8 to 9 percent of Slavs there - perished from starvation or disease, not because the regime targeted Kazakhs by ethnicity, but because regime policy there consisted of forced denomadization."
The 8th Party Congress had long since established Russian supremacy as fact.
"All decisions of the Russian Communist Party are unconditionally binding on all branches of the party, regardless of their national composition… The Central Committee of the Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian Communist parties enjoy the rights of regional committees of the party and are wholly subordination to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party" - Resolution of the 8th Party Congress, 1918
Stalin actively rehabilitated the Tsarist legacy he helped to overthrow. Tyrants of serfdom such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great were suddenly recast as national heroes. Russian chauvinism was conveniently repurposed as a handy weapon of soviet unity and minority repression. Nationalism of any other kind, from the many constituent parts of the Soviet Union, was repressed outright.
"But first among equals are the Russian people, the Russian workers, the Russian toilers, whose role throughout the whole Great Proletarian Socialist Revolution has been exceptionally large…" - Pravda, 1936
Wasn't it Augustus who called himself the 'first among equals'?
GRAND STRATEGY
Stalin's injustices in foreign policy (from 1929 - 1941) are numerous, but all self-serving. A distinction can be drawn however between his: 1. more benign anti-fascist policy in Asia (excluding his micro-meddling in internal Mongolian politics and ethnic cleansing of Soviet Koreans); and 2. pro-fascist coziness to enable his sweeping irredentism in Europe.
The obvious failure is the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and Kotkin dedicates significant time to its conception and negotiation.
"In his most revealing comment on the Pact, Stalin would explain that "the USSR had wanted to change the old equilibrium… England and France had wanted to preserve it. Germany had also wanted to make a change in the equilibrium, and this common desire to get rid of the old equilibrium had created the basis for rapprochement with Germany"
Needless to say, Stalin was complicit in the Nazi invasion of Poland - directly abetting it. The pact contained secret protocols which redefined the borders of Eastern Europe - with complete disregard to the self-determination of the countries it circumscribed (the Baltics and Romania) and deleted (Poland). Stalin swooped in from the East under the pretension of protecting ethnic Ukrainian and Belorussian minorities, and to replace the disintegrating state (which he had conspired to destroy).
"Many of the Polish army's now 190,000 troops, taken prisoner by the Soviets, were interned in Gulag camps, with the intention of exploiting them as slave laborers. Thousands of Polish officers were separated into special camps."
"On March 5, in the name of the politburo, Stalin approved a troika and a "special procedure" for executing the 21,857 captured or arrested Polish officers, civil servants and intellectuals… The officers of the Polish army - some of whom were ethnic Ukrainian and Jewish - were murdered at several sites, including near Smolensk, in the Katyn Forest."
In November 1939, at the opening of the Winter War, a Soviet village (Mainila) on the border with Finland was shelled by an unknown attacker. This attack resulted in 4 Soviet deaths. We now know, through extensive investigation by Russian and Finnish historians, that this was a false flag attack orchestrated by Stalin as a pretext for invasion. It mirrors uncannily the Gleiwitz incident which Germany used as a pretext to invade Poland. The difference being that Hitler executed criminals (after dressing them in German uniforms), rather than firing on his own men.
In June 1940, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were invaded, occupied and annexed under the Soviet Union. This violated express non-aggression pacts which Stalin himself had signed with the leaders of these countries - which already included coerced concessions.
This is just a short selection.
UNCLE JOSEF
Stalin himself is charismatic: likeable, well-humoured and hard working.
"Of all the dictators, Stalin was, in personal intercourse, seemingly most like a normal human being… In conference as we saw him… his voice was low and even, his manner serene, his delivery unemphatic, his sense of humour quietly playful, his exposition concise in form, conciliatory in tone but unbending in substance. He had a rock-like quality which made him appear to be more securely founded than his rivals" - William Strang
He was also an incessant scribbler, cartoon wolves howled at the margins of his personal communiques and paperwork. Perhaps someday, these doodled dossiers will find their way into an art exhibition, depicting the lighter strokes of the despot's pen.
NOTES ON THE TEXT
As before, Kotkin is detailed and comprehensive but clearly at some cost - the book is too long. Every line is well sourced, and the bibliography runs over 200 pages in miniscule text. Kotkin has direct access to the Soviet archives, and each claim can be correlated therein. It is a biography founded in the paper, binder, and file cabinet reality of the party apparatus. It is important reading for a greater understanding of the origins of the Second World War.
Read
March 15, 2021Stalin: Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941 is the second part of the author's series on Stalin. Beware this is a very thick book filled with way more information than you can easily absorb. The book's content is amazing and interesting. But it is somewhat boring as it is a detailed history book. From both of the Stalin books, I learned way more about Stalin than I ever learned in school or other casual sources. If you are a fan of world history, this book is worth reading.
January 22, 2018
... and you think you have a tough boss??
This is the second volume of Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Stalin (out of a projected three volumes). It is an outstanding biography and I cannot wait for the next volume.
Kotkin picks up the story with the consolidation of power by Stalin and the move into the 1930s. The story is one of continuing violence, terror, and depravity. Stalin was one of the most accomplished killers - literally with millions of victims - in history and the book covers the period during which he perfected his skills. The story begins with rapid industrialization, the beginnings of collectivization, and the mass famines of the early 1930s that directly resulted from collectivization. These processes themselves were fraught with turmoil within the Communist Party, leading to the start of the pursues and show trials. These developments accelerated into the Great Terror of 1937-38 during which most of the Old Bolsheviks who had come to power with Lenin and Stalin were purged and murdered so spies and “wreckers” - along with lots of other Soviet citizens. This included a blood purge of the Soviet military just as Hitler was remilitarizing and subverting the Versailles settlement.
The last part of the book combines political and diplomatic history as Stalin works to escape the drive towards war. This culminates in the Nazi-Soviet Nonagression Pact of 1939, which is a good candidate for an immediate cause of the outbreak of WW2 in Europe, and the period between the signing of the pact and the eventual attack of the USSR with Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. I do not want to give too much away, but it is difficult to imagine a more stressful period of time in the modern era (or any other time).
Kotkin continues his story with a comprehensive and balanced view of Stalin and the central role he played in this history. He does not excuse Stalin - throughout the book he is referred to as “the despot”. He does not totally demonize him either - this is a complex picture of a strange man with a large set of skills who made quite an impact on the world. There is too much going on here for a stereotype or a cartoon portrayal to be interesting or useful. That Stalin acted like a monster and killed millions does not take away from his pivotal importance to world history in the 20th century.
In telling Stalin’s story, Kotkin seems to imitate a series of Russian nesting dolls, with Stalin playing interpersonal roles, family roles, party roles, and geopolitical roles. Kotkin has produced a long book with an extensive set of plots and subplots that are linked together effectively. The style is very readable and the earthier dimensions of famine, torture, prison life, and executions are downplayed.
Most of the stories in the book have been covered well elsewhere and will not be new to avid readers of 20th century European and Russian history. Some parts of the story are especially well done. One example would be the extended discussion of the Great Terror - a truly difficult event to comprehend - both now and when it was taking place. Kotkin even brings up the implications of the Terror for staffing and training in the Soviet government when the generation being replaced was imprisoned and murdered by the boss. The diplomatic history around the Nazi-Soviet Pact is also well done and effectively linked to the rest of the story.
I typically do not spend my time on multi-volume histories but this work is a worthy exception. Stalin’s story ties a lot of history together. It is not very uplifting, however, and I ended up scratching my head in parts trying to understand how human could ensure these situations. It is a good book to read as the centennial of the Russian Revolution passes.
This is the second volume of Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Stalin (out of a projected three volumes). It is an outstanding biography and I cannot wait for the next volume.
Kotkin picks up the story with the consolidation of power by Stalin and the move into the 1930s. The story is one of continuing violence, terror, and depravity. Stalin was one of the most accomplished killers - literally with millions of victims - in history and the book covers the period during which he perfected his skills. The story begins with rapid industrialization, the beginnings of collectivization, and the mass famines of the early 1930s that directly resulted from collectivization. These processes themselves were fraught with turmoil within the Communist Party, leading to the start of the pursues and show trials. These developments accelerated into the Great Terror of 1937-38 during which most of the Old Bolsheviks who had come to power with Lenin and Stalin were purged and murdered so spies and “wreckers” - along with lots of other Soviet citizens. This included a blood purge of the Soviet military just as Hitler was remilitarizing and subverting the Versailles settlement.
The last part of the book combines political and diplomatic history as Stalin works to escape the drive towards war. This culminates in the Nazi-Soviet Nonagression Pact of 1939, which is a good candidate for an immediate cause of the outbreak of WW2 in Europe, and the period between the signing of the pact and the eventual attack of the USSR with Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. I do not want to give too much away, but it is difficult to imagine a more stressful period of time in the modern era (or any other time).
Kotkin continues his story with a comprehensive and balanced view of Stalin and the central role he played in this history. He does not excuse Stalin - throughout the book he is referred to as “the despot”. He does not totally demonize him either - this is a complex picture of a strange man with a large set of skills who made quite an impact on the world. There is too much going on here for a stereotype or a cartoon portrayal to be interesting or useful. That Stalin acted like a monster and killed millions does not take away from his pivotal importance to world history in the 20th century.
In telling Stalin’s story, Kotkin seems to imitate a series of Russian nesting dolls, with Stalin playing interpersonal roles, family roles, party roles, and geopolitical roles. Kotkin has produced a long book with an extensive set of plots and subplots that are linked together effectively. The style is very readable and the earthier dimensions of famine, torture, prison life, and executions are downplayed.
Most of the stories in the book have been covered well elsewhere and will not be new to avid readers of 20th century European and Russian history. Some parts of the story are especially well done. One example would be the extended discussion of the Great Terror - a truly difficult event to comprehend - both now and when it was taking place. Kotkin even brings up the implications of the Terror for staffing and training in the Soviet government when the generation being replaced was imprisoned and murdered by the boss. The diplomatic history around the Nazi-Soviet Pact is also well done and effectively linked to the rest of the story.
I typically do not spend my time on multi-volume histories but this work is a worthy exception. Stalin’s story ties a lot of history together. It is not very uplifting, however, and I ended up scratching my head in parts trying to understand how human could ensure these situations. It is a good book to read as the centennial of the Russian Revolution passes.
October 11, 2019
This book is really three books - and at almost 1200 pages it could well be.
I have spent most of the month reading about the despots Mao and Stalin - one in Wild Swans which is a partially fictionalized account of three generations of Chinese women (see review elsewhere) and then reading this book on Stalin. As noted this is the second volume of a three volume set - which focuses on what I think are the most interesting periods of Stalin's life - namely the period after Lenin and before WWII gets underway. Kotkin is nothing if not detail oriented. His research for this volume is exhaustive. There are some things which I wish he would have spent a bit more time on - especially the plot(S) to kill Trotsky. But you cannot fault this volume for lack of detail. There are parts of the volume that are a hard trek.
The second contribution I got from the book is a clearer idea of how truly evil Joseph Stalin was. If you were a member of the Politburo in 1928 (at the start of the period covered by the book) you had one chance in eight to be in the position in 1940. Let that sink in - even with a couple of deaths by natural causes - Stalin had wiped out his own leadership in 12 years. In 1937 and 1938 he caused more than 800,000 people in his country to perish. He systematically went through all elements of Soviet society and created terror and mayhem. Many times he did this without a clear rationale as to why he was doing it or what he was seeking to create - except uncertainty.
The third contribution of the book was unexpected. The author added a coda at the end to try to reconcile all the facts we had learned about Stalin and to see if it is possible to reconstruct how the relationships between Hitler/Stalin/and Churchill worked. In Kotkin's telling the three interacted in not unexpected but asymmetrical ways.
I don't think I will read the other two parts of his narrative. But this part certainly delivered on its promise to provide detail and insight about the tyrant.
I have spent most of the month reading about the despots Mao and Stalin - one in Wild Swans which is a partially fictionalized account of three generations of Chinese women (see review elsewhere) and then reading this book on Stalin. As noted this is the second volume of a three volume set - which focuses on what I think are the most interesting periods of Stalin's life - namely the period after Lenin and before WWII gets underway. Kotkin is nothing if not detail oriented. His research for this volume is exhaustive. There are some things which I wish he would have spent a bit more time on - especially the plot(S) to kill Trotsky. But you cannot fault this volume for lack of detail. There are parts of the volume that are a hard trek.
The second contribution I got from the book is a clearer idea of how truly evil Joseph Stalin was. If you were a member of the Politburo in 1928 (at the start of the period covered by the book) you had one chance in eight to be in the position in 1940. Let that sink in - even with a couple of deaths by natural causes - Stalin had wiped out his own leadership in 12 years. In 1937 and 1938 he caused more than 800,000 people in his country to perish. He systematically went through all elements of Soviet society and created terror and mayhem. Many times he did this without a clear rationale as to why he was doing it or what he was seeking to create - except uncertainty.
The third contribution of the book was unexpected. The author added a coda at the end to try to reconcile all the facts we had learned about Stalin and to see if it is possible to reconstruct how the relationships between Hitler/Stalin/and Churchill worked. In Kotkin's telling the three interacted in not unexpected but asymmetrical ways.
I don't think I will read the other two parts of his narrative. But this part certainly delivered on its promise to provide detail and insight about the tyrant.
January 19, 2019
Een gigantisch werk, dit boek, zowel letterlijk als figuurlijk. Klein gedrukt, anders zou het boek helemaal onzinnig dik geworden zijn, en daardoor vermoeiend om te lezen. Maar ongelofelijk interessant. De schrijver moet vele archieven doorgespit hebben. Ik dacht, dat ik het allemaal zo'n beetje wel wist, maar in dit boek staan toch nog veel nieuwe feiten en vooral bijzondere details. Het blijft volslagen onbegrijpelijk, dat deze man zo lang zijn gang heeft kunnen gaan en "gewoon" in zijn bed is gestorven. Goed geschreven, alles wordt in korte paragrafen besproken en het blijft overzichtelijk ondanks de vele feiten en gebeurtenissen, die vermeld worden.
August 8, 2020
Heavy reading but excellent book
This is an excellent book with immense amount of information. I enjoyed this more than volume one. One caveat is the book is unlike other typical biographies. It reads more like Stalin’s diary, saying he did this that day, and he did that the other day, jumping from one topic to another. Each chapter doesn’t contain a single topic but rather more or less explains what Stalin did in chronological order. It can be confusing initially and it certainly required me some time to get used to.
This is an excellent book with immense amount of information. I enjoyed this more than volume one. One caveat is the book is unlike other typical biographies. It reads more like Stalin’s diary, saying he did this that day, and he did that the other day, jumping from one topic to another. Each chapter doesn’t contain a single topic but rather more or less explains what Stalin did in chronological order. It can be confusing initially and it certainly required me some time to get used to.
February 19, 2024
Through each book my hate of the Soviet Union grows stronger
May 17, 2023
A good entry-level overview that leads one to excellent reference reading.
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