It’s hard to write about the great evildoers of history. “Absolute evil” is not a useful concept, at least from the standpoint of a biographer. You can only make the portrait work, as John Milton did in Paradise Lost, by showing the cracks and contradictions that make the monster (his Satan) human. The demonic versions of Stalin and Hitler that most of us have internalised are not helpful in working out what made them tick. The assumption that the man who kills (or causes to be killed) a million people is a million times more evil than the man who kills one is another stumbling block. We can’t imagine a person a million times worse than a cold-blooded axe murderer, so the whole thing becomes unreal. Moral philosophers may be needed to straighten this out, but my own feeling is that the premise is wrong: evil, as a quality of a person, is not quantifiable, and we can’t obtain an index through multiplication. Perhaps the only reasonable way to handle the problem analytically is to postulate what has been called a Power Amplification Factor – if you’re Joe Blow, your actions, however murderous, tend to be relatively local and quantitatively limited in their impact, but if you’re Stalin or Hitler, you get the global impact and multiples in the millions.
Added complications arise when the evil in question is related to a state leader’s responsibility for mass deaths. A general tacit assumption is that wars fall into a special category, in which mass deaths can occur without automatically bringing moral odium on the leaders who gave the orders. But revolutionaries, or leaders who still have revolutionary transformation on their mind, think they fall into that category of exemption, too. They see the deaths they cause in the same “necessary” light as those caused in war. It’s a dilemma for historians, who are likely to have an aversion to letting revolutionaries claim the exemption, especially once the revolution is won and they are in power.
Stephen Kotkin, whose first book, Magnetic Mountain (1995), had the bold subtitle “Stalinism as a Civilisation”, is not one to shrink before challenges. His expansive study is just the first of a projected three volumes. The title gives nothing away: you can’t get much blander than “Paradoxes of Power” as a subtitle, and the brief preface is almost anodyne. He tells us, however, that “accident in history is rife”, dropping a clue that this is not going to be a story of historical inevitability or psychological determinism. “The story emanates from Stalin’s office,” he writes, rather puzzlingly, “but not from his point of view.” Who, if not Stalin, is looking out from his office? Is it Kotkin, an invisible watcher, who has quietly drawn up a chair next to Stalin at his desk? At any rate, the message seems to be that in the intimate relationship between biographer and subject, this biographer is keeping the upper hand.
Stalin makes only cameo appearances in the first 300 pages, which range over the Russian empire, Russian absolutism, the European state system, modernity and geopolitics before getting to the revolution. It’s an expansive interpretation of context, and one of the effects is to make the young Stalin, born in obscurity on the periphery of the Russian empire, look pretty small. Whenever Stalin does make an appearance, however, his aspirations and determination to make something of himself are evident, and quite sympathetically described. Kotkin’s Stalin is a striver and an autodidact of talent and determination. There were setbacks and difficulties as he was growing up, but Kotkin dismisses the idea of childhood trauma: lots of people, including many fellow revolutionaries, had it worse. As happened with many bright young men in late imperial Russia, Stalin’s aspirations for betterment got deflected into the revolutionary movement.
His revolutionary activity doesn’t amount to much. The figure that catches the eye in these early chapters is Pyotr Durnovo, Nicholas II’s interior minister, who saved the empire after the 1905 revolution by savage repression. Kotkin drops another clue here, remarking that this was a moment “in the play of large-scale historical structures when personality proved decisive: a lesser interior minister could not have managed”. As for Stalin, he was out in Siberian exile “battling mosquitos and boredom” for much of the last imperial decade, and thus missed the first world war. The life of a once-promising young man seemed on the road to nowhere. Then came the miracle: the collapse of the Tsarist autocracy in February 1917. Revolutionaries like Stalin could claim little credit, but they were beneficiaries. Still a relatively obscure figure from the underground, “wearing Siberian valenki” – felt boots – “and carrying little more than a typewriter”, he arrived on 12 March 1917 in the capital, St Petersburg, to join the revolution.
From his civil war leadership at the battle of Tsaritsyn in 1918 and the notorious clashes with Trotsky, Stalin starts to claim more of the author’s attention, and what kind of biography Kotkin is writing becomes clearer. Unlike a number of Stalin studies, this is not an etiology of evil. The author does not appear to be watching his subject narrowly for early signs of the monstrous deformations that will later emerge. He tries to look at him at various stages of his career without the benefit of too much hindsight. In contrast to many who have written on Soviet politics of the 1920s, he is not a partisan of Stalin’s opponents, either collectively or in the person of Trotsky or Bukharin; nor does he proceed from the common assumptions that Stalin must be measured against Lenin, and that to a greater or lesser degree he will fall short.
The theme of Stalin’s departure from or betrayal of Leninism has had a long innings, particularly on the non-communist left. But from Kotkin’s standpoint, Lenin is scarcely an exemplary figure. A man with an idée fixe, Lenin is as often wildly wrong as he is right: “deranged fanatic” is one characterisation that the author seems to endorse. Kotkin is not interested in the old argument about continuity or discontinuity between Lenin and Stalin: like Richard Pipes, whose work is often cited in the early Soviet chapters, he thinks continuity is self-evident and wants us to see that much of what is thought of as the worst of Stalin’s rule is present or latent in Lenin. Indeed, when it comes to comparison between Lenin and Stalin, Lenin generally comes off worse in this study. With regard to empire, for example, which is always important to Kotkin, Lenin, who had “never set foot in Georgia, or even Ukraine, for that matter”, compares poorly to Stalin, with his “first-hand experience of the varied realm” and understanding that there was more to inter-ethnic relations within the empire than just Russian oppression.
A series of strokes put Lenin out of action in the two years before his death in January 1924, and a covert succession struggle began with Stalin and Trotsky as first-round contenders. From his sickbed, Lenin – or persons acting on his behalf – intervened with a document known to history as his “Testament”, which gave confused but critical assessments of Trotsky, Stalin and others in the leadership. At some point, a postscript was added that was strongly anti-Stalin, calling for his removal as general secretary of the party on the grounds that he was too rude. The rudeness was to Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and Kotkin follows the Russian historian Valentin Sakharov in suggesting that she or others in the household, not the stricken Lenin, were the actual authors of these documents. Regardless, it was a great blow to Stalin, not just politically but also personally. He survived the political fallout, but the testament was to hang over him like “a sword of Damocles”, generating a “sense of victimhood and self-pity” that is crucial to Kotkin’s portrayal.
The story of Stalin’s defeat of his opponents in the succession struggle is told in familiar terms, and Kotkin adds little by way of political analysis, though his account is enlivened by extensive quotation from the raucous politburo debates that first became accessible to historians after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like Lenin, Stalin’s competitors get rough handling from Kotkin. Trotsky was not simply “relentlessly condescending” and a poor political strategist, but “just not the leader people thought he was, or that Stalin turned out to be … Stalin’s abilities and resolve were an order of magnitude greater”. Zinoviev, the butt of most historians, is even worse, while Kamenev is rather unfairly dismissed as “an inveterate intriguer”. Once Stalin had dealt with these leaders of the so-called left opposition, it was the turn of the right, but the rightist Bukharin, “not a person of strong character or perspicacity”, gets the back of Kotkin’s hand too. Only Aleksei Rykov and sometime finance commissar Grigory Sokolnikov look relatively good, although not as potential leaders because they had no organised factions behind them. This is a version of the political struggles of the 1920s in which Stalin, though a gifted faction-fighter, is as much sinned (plotted) against as sinning.
In this connection, Kotkin pauses to consider whether Stalin’s opponents already saw him as a potential monster, someone who should be stopped at all costs. The answer is no. Kamenev’s failure to move against him in 1923 indicates that “the monstrous Stalin either did not yet exist or was not visible to someone who worked with him very closely”. “Stalin’s menace was far more evident” five years later, but Rykov still passed up a similar opportunity, at least partly because he and others in the politburo “had come to see not only a prickly, self-centred, often morose, vindictive person in Stalin, but also an indomitable communist and leader of inner strength, utterly dedicated to Lenin’s ideas, able to carry the entire apparatus, the country, and the cause of the world revolution on his back”.
The key moment in Kotkin’s volume is Stalin’s decision to go for all-out collectivisation of peasant agriculture. The standard story says the grain procurements crisis of 1927 made it necessary for the Bolsheviks to take radical action. But this argument has always had the weakness of not explaining why collectivisation was the radical action necessary, and Kotkin will have none of it. On the contrary, he says, collectivisation was a wild gamble – a move arising out of Stalin’s conviction that Russia could not achieve socialism without doing away with small-scale peasant farming. Nor was there anything necessary about sticking to all-out collectivisation through thick and thin. That happened because “right through mass rebellion, mass starvation, cannibalism, the destruction of the country’s livestock, and unprecedented political destabilisation, Stalin did not flinch. Feints in the form of tactical retreats notwithstanding, he would keep going even when told to his face by officials in the inner regime that a catastrophe was unfolding – full speed ahead to socialism.”
Now finally we see the crux of Kotkin’s interpretation: Stalin was a man acting out of deeply held ideological convictions whose actions are only understandable in these terms, not in terms of maximisation of personal power. What newly anointed leader for whom maintenance of power was the main objective would have risked such a step? Stalin “put everything on the line, including his personal power”. That the outcome was something short of complete disaster was simply his good luck, in Kotkin’s interpretation: the Great Depression made western powers more (rather than, as others have argued, less) interested in economic cooperation with the Soviet Union. He may be right about the Depression, though I’d like to see it argued through with evidence rather than simply asserted. But, right or wrong on this point, he seems to me to be spot-on with his argument about the significance of the collectivisation decision. It’s not that other historians and Stalin biographers haven’t noted the importance of the “great break” initiated by collectivisation – along with rapid planned industrialisation and cultural revolution, to both of which Kotkin pays less attention – in 1928-9. The “great break” has been part of the conventional wisdom of western scholars for decades: Robert C Tucker, Kotkin’s predecessor at Princeton, made it the centrepiece of the transition to the second volume of his Stalin biography, Stalin in Power, and it’s prominent in Adam Ulam’s Stalin, published in 1973. But what scholars haven’t seen, or at least explicitly acknowledged, is its significance for an understanding of Stalin and his motives, namely that it makes the argument that he was in it just for personal power untenable.
In his final chapter, Kotkin tackles the question that is often asked but seldom answered: what if there had been no Stalin? His answer is that “if Stalin had died, the likelihood of forced wholesale collectivisation – the only kind – would have been near zero, and the likelihood that the Soviet regime would have been transformed into something else or fallen apart would have been high”. In other words, EH Carr is “utterly, eternally wrong” in saying that “Stalin illustrates the thesis that circumstances make the man, not the man the circumstances”. On the contrary, Kotkin writes, Stalin made history, “rearranging the entire socioeconomic landscape of one sixth of the earth”, and his case “reveals how, on extremely rare occasions, a single individual’s decisions can radically transform an entire country’s political and socioeconomic structures, with global repercussions”. One could go even further with this argument, though Kotkin may be wise not to. If a Soviet Union without Stalin had fallen apart, the second world war (assuming it had occurred) would have played out very differently.
While Kotkin’s book is primarily a work of synthesis, it draws on a lot of recent archival research, some of it by the author. He is an engaging interlocutor with a sharp, irreverent wit that compensates for a few longueurs in his leisurely narrative, making the book a good read as well as an original and largely convincing interpretation of Stalin that should provoke lively arguments in the field. Of course, this is just volume one: the hardest bit, on the purges and terror of the 1930s, is still to come. Having given us a human character, albeit one whose menace is growing, how will Kotkin handle the menace full-blown in volume two? Will he try to keep Stalin human or let him morph into a monster? That’s a tricky decision for the author. For readers, it’s something to look forward to.
Sheila Fitzpatrick has just completed her book on Stalin and the leadership team, which, formed in the 1920s, largely survived three tumultuous decades and outlived him. On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics will be published by Princeton next year.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion