The Stalinist Transformation of Russia

A Thematic Review of Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin: Paradoxes of Power

Monsters captivate us. Stephen Kotkin’s soon-to-be three volume set on Stalin is testament to this.

Volume 1: Stalin, Paradoxes of Power tells the tale of Stalin's rise, his consolidation of dictatorship, and how early 20th century geopolitical history influenced these processes.

This essay is a thematic review and analysis of the book. It draws out themes and insights—mostly Kotkin’s, a few of my own—focused on Soviet state and institution building, how intra-party disputes worked in the earliest Leninist system, how specific instruments within the Leninist apparatus were originally birthed and used (e.g. OrgBureau), the nature of top-level decision making, among other things.

It is long. Reader discretion advised.

---

1. The Making of a Bolshevik

The man who would become among the most vile dictators in human history had a fairly normal upbringing and, throughout his youth, evinced little evidence of socio or psychopathy. As a youth he did suffer from multiple diseases, a crippled arm and a limp (caused by an accident), and a permanently pock marked face from smallpox. The kids made up nicknames for him (pocky). His dad abandoned the family and despite being born into the middle class, would mostly grow up poor.

But Iosef Jughashvili—Stalin’s real name—also had many blessings, including benefactors who helped put him through good schools. He also had affectionate nicknames, some given to him (Soso) and others he would choose for himself (Koba, a heroic character from a Georgian novel). By the standards of his time and place, his childhood was not particularly bad.

Kotkin does not believe, after excavating the sources on his early life and placing them into context, that one is liable to find the seeds of the future monster there. The fundamental issue was rather this: he would grow up in a period of revolutionary ferment.

Stalin became a revolutionary because he lived in revolutionary times.

The would be Stalin, like Hitler, was born on the periphery of Empire. Iosef was born in Gori, a small-town in Georgia. While Hitler was born in central European Austria, Stalin’s birthplace was on the periphery of an Empire that was itself a periphery. Russia, situated uneasily on the outer flank of Europe and sprawling into the Eurasian steppe, existed in a difficult, expansive, and not clearly delineated geographical area—the latter of which contributed to its seemingly ceaseless expansion. Geopolitical exigencies can transcend empires, and perhaps even regime type.

The early 20th century was an era of radical upheaval (the great changes unseen in a century the CPC now harkens back to 百年未有之大变局). Modernity, rather than a simple sociological development, is reframed by Kotkin as an enforced geopolitical imperative. From 1905 to 1911, Mexico, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, China, Russia, and more would experience revolutions (p. 131). Industrialization ripped countries apart and reshaped traditional structures internally. Colonial great powers tore the world apart externally. The “deal” facing many a traditional empire was simple, if brutal: either you modernize, or you die.

Suffering would find its way into the lives of many ordinary people, including Stalin.

Tsarist Russia: Trapped Between Tradition and Modernity

The Tsarist regime should have died in 1905, Kotkin argues. Floundering after the regime’s shocking defeats against Japan, massive strikes broke out numbering in the millions, shuttering rail and infrastructure. The Tsar caved to concessions, including a Duma (Parliament) that would be narrowly elected. But in Tocquevillian fashion, opposition only became more intense (p. 85).

In one of the most interesting parts of the book, Kotkin submits that it was Pyotr Durnovo, the newly appointed interior minister and head of police, who singularly bought the Tsarist regime another decade. He mobilized nearly 300,000 police / militia to suppress domestic unrest. The show of strength brought the masses back on-sides—willing to protest in the streets when the regime seemed weak, they were subdued quickly once the regime showed even modest resolve [this insight dovetails with Kotkin’s earlier book Uncivil Society, where he argued the proximate reason Eastern bloc communist regimes fell apart was that nobody was interested in or willing to defend them when push came to shove in the late 1980s].

Durnovo’s efforts to rescue Russia’s autocracy when it should have fallen may have created “the perverse consequence of preparing the country for a far worse crash during a far worse war” (p. 87). Perhaps, Kotkin suggests, there would have been no Stalinist dictatorship had the regime simply collapsed in 1905. Unfortunately, though, violence sometimes is an answer. Without it, the regime almost certainly would have died then and there in 1905.

Russia's authoritarian government institutions lacked bureaucratic rationality. Even simple rationalizing efforts like instituting a Council of Ministers (1857) were undermined by incompetent Tsars that guarded autocratic prerogatives by, for example, having ministers report directly to them instead of the prime minister (p. 60). “For some, including Nicholas II, the mere existence of a prime minister was an affront to autocracy” (p. 101). Not to speak of representative institutions, such as a parliament, which were rejected until conditions were already revolutionary (1905).

The politics in the Tsarist autocracy were archaic and haphazard (p. 120) Almost completely incompatible with the kinds of modernizing state and bureaucratic institutions (authoritarian or democratic) that have proved necessary in all other places for facilitating modernizing industrialization.

Serfdom, an economic system more akin to slavery than European feudalism, had only formally ended in 1860. But it left impactful legacies and in many places persisted de facto. A disempowered mass of Russian peasants had only just been afforded independent agency by the time the Bolsheviks arrived. A stark contrast to China, where small holding, agentic farming was a deep historical legacy. Indeed, Russian serfdom was much more despotic than the Chinese peasant, landed-gentry, dynastic state triadic relationship—a fact likely relevant to each country’s subsequent trajectory.

The machinations involving Rasputin were just the most obscene example of autocratic incompetence. Rasputin was an uneducated mystic from Siberia who managed to rise into the heart of court politics. He advocated bacchanal while posing as a “holy man.” He was there principally because of the Tsar’s wife, Tsaritsa Alexandra. As Kotkin notes, “whatever Nicholas II’s personal shortcomings, Alexandra was several magnitudes below him as would-be autocrat” (p. 159). She kept the “Siberian tramp” around not only because she believed he helped treat her son’s incurable hemophilia, but also because she “used the pretend monk” to “voice her personnel and policy preferences as ‘God’s will,’ thereby rendering what she wanted more palatable to the pious Nicholas II” (p. 160)

Despite the credulity of the bumbling autocrats, Rasputin was seen as a lustful, crazed lunatic by the elites and masses alike. Worse for the regime, Tsaritsa Alexandra’s Germanic roots combined to give rise to widespread rumors of treason. Lurid and treacherous tales, some true but many not, pervaded elite circles and discredited the regime.

The regime’s incompetent existence also forestalled rightist coalitions from independently organizing and vying for power, yielding the field to the leftists. Kotkin reminds us that the lack of a rightist coalition is particularly surprising given the array of social interests in Russia that leaned not only conservative, but downright supportive of monarchist autocracy and serfdom.

“If anyone alive had been informed during the Romanov tercentenary celebrations of 1913 that soon a fascist right-wing dictatorship and a socialist left-wing dictatorship would assume power in different countries, would he or she have guessed that the hopelessly schismatic Russian Social Democrats dispersed across Siberia and Europe would be the ones to seize and hold power, and not the German Social Democrats, who in the 1912 elections had become the largest political party in the German parliament? Conversely, would anyone have predicted that Germany would eventually develop a successful anti-Semitic fascism rather than imperial Russia, the home of the world’s largest population of Jews and of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion?” (p. 129).

Repression via the political police, the okhrana, was one of the only things that kept things from unraveling and arguably one of the few effective institutions the regime possessed. The okhrana were legendary for brutality. But also tactically effective, infiltrating revolutionary organizations and sowing chaos, confusion, and dissension among the ranks of would be revolutionary organizations.

Allegations would dog Stalin all his life that he was a secret okhrana agent. Though unsubstantiated, they stemmed in part from the fact that he was often able to escape internal exile and prison quickly.

Kotkin notes that in comparison to political police in France and other European countries, Russia’s were not especially nefarious. They were, however, a harbinger for an even darker political police state to come. In another Tocquevilian symmetry, the Bolsheviks would “relentlessly reproduce the pathologies and predations of the old regime state in new forms (even more than had their French Revolution forerunners)”. (p. 736)

A select number of skilled statesmen, Sergei Witte and Pyotr Stolypin, did manage to rise above the morass and push through some modernizing and industrializing efforts—not least of which was the Trans-siberian railroad (p. 68-69). But the country was economically and politically backward, trapped between an incompetent autocracy and an entrenched nobility and landed gentry that preferred to uphold the retarding institutions of serfdom and Tsarism. Witte and Stolypin’s nascent financial, industrial, and political institution building did end up furnishing the Soviet Party-state with some basic building blocks—but they were limited.

Most fundamentally, Tsarist autocracy was its own worst enemy. "The tsarist political system and conditions in the empire promoted militancy," Kotkin notes. This context prodded a young Stalin, like so many of his youthful and ambitious contemporaries, into diverting his life course away from traditional pathways (agricultural, clergy, craftsman, etc.) and emerging commercial occupations to rather dive headlong into revolution.

Unwilling to liberalize, and even unwilling to rationalize, ferment spread. The ancien regime would eventually die in a liminal space between tradition and modernity—but it would take a global conflagration to push it over the edge.

The old world was dying. The new struggled to be born. It was the time of Stalin.

2. Marxist Machiavelli

Stalin, a successful student, made it out of his hometown and to one of the few Georgian seminary schools. It was there, in his teens, that he began to read Marx. Soon he would fully exchange the ecclesiastical Orthodox Christianity of his youth for the quasi-religious sociology of Marx (p. 107).

He was a diligent reader and a precocious ideologue. He cherished books even as a youth and later on maintained an “enormous library” on eclectic subjects that was, Kotkin notes, “not for demonstration but for work.” His ravenous reading was married to a “searing ambition to be a person of consequence…he worked at it relentlessly” (p. 463). Stalin’s intellectual diet was heavy on Marx and other Marxist thinkers, none more important than Lenin.

Jughashvili fell in with the Bolshevik faction against the Mensheviks, favoring the former’s two distinguishing Leninist conceits: 1) that a period of bourgeois capitalist revolution could be skipped and a socialist revolution directly launched and 2) that an exclusive Party structure comprising only “professional revolutionaries” was needed to accomplish this, rather than one more inclusive of broad swaths of workers (p. 81).

The rapaciousness of early modernization helped radicalize and dispose him toward Leninism. In the Georgian capital of Tiflis he saw first-hand the cruel working conditions and exploitation of newly urbanized workers—a universal dark side of industrialization experienced round the world. This period included a brief reunion with his estranged father, who worked in a massive shoe factory dedicated to supplying the Russian army. Exposed not only to the viciousness of Tsarism, but also to the undeniable exploitation of early urbanization and industrialization, he began agitating and organizing.

His early days in the underground revolution left him hardened. His first personal hero and mentor, a young Marxist named Lado, was shot in the head by the okhranka in his early 20s. Already a committed Marxist, he also began forging a pragmatic and conspiratorial mindset. Kotkin repeatedly shows that for Stalin, as for Lenin and many radicals in their circles, the rotten state of the present combined with a belief in a magnificent communist future justified nearly all means of gaining power in the name of the exploited.

Contrary to some popular interpretations, Kotkin takes pains to argue the point that Stalin was a true believing Marxist, not simply a maniacal and cynical Machiavellian. While Stalin was, to be sure a man who “lived for the revolution and Russian state power” (p. 667), he self-justified his actions via recourse to what seems like an unyielding, genuine belief in Marxism and communism—and the future cornucopia of social justice and abundance they would usher in. As if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Kotkin specifically decries the misguided interpretation of Stalin offered by the first major Soviet defector, Boris Bazhanov. Bazhanov wrote that “he had only one passion, absolute and devouring: lust for power.” Bazhanov, Kotkin plainly states, “got Stalin wrong” (p. 667).

“The fundamental fact about [Stalin],” Kotkin maintains, “was that he viewed the world through Marxism” (p. 462). One of the dictator’s arch cronies, Lazar Kaganovich, enunciated: “Stalin was an ideological person…For him the idea was the main thing” (p. 661).

Humans rationally organizing society. Self-created abundance. Science and utopia, in the here and now. Freedom from spontaneity, disorder and randomness. Social justice. An end to capitalism and the imperialism and war it was seen as inevitably and perpetually creating. The heroic spirit, the big push. Immanentizing the eschaton. These were things the young, self-styled Koba could abide.

Stalin understood and interpreted his world ideologically. His goals were ideological. But because goals could only be achieved through power, the two became inseparable. Stalin lusted for power so he could turn communist dreams into reality. He became a Marxist Machiavelli.

3. Rolling The Iron Dice. Or, How Regimes Die.

Perhaps the most important event to the Bolsheviks rise to power, and thus Stalin’s ability to become one of history’s most notorious dictators, was the first world war. The Bolsheviks had helped form the first Soviets (local workers counsels) in 1905 in response to massive unrest following Russia’s embarrassment against Japan. But Durnovo’s violence rendered their early coup plotting stillborn. The okhranka killed many revolutionaries, and scattered many of the rest into forced internal (Stalin) or external (Lenin, Trotsky) exile. Stalin did “little or nothing” in years of tedious and lonely exile (p. 138). But World War 1 would enable these revolutionaries to come back with a vengeance.

Contrary to popular and superficially plausible accounts, Kotkin contends that Russia did not delve headlong into the war because of a web of alliances. Yes, Germany was allied with Austria-Hungary, which was chomping at the bit to attack Serbia, whose military intelligence had ostensibly trained the terrorists that assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

And yes, “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans” did seem to be setting off war in 1914,  just as Bismarck had warned in 1888. But Kotkin argues that there were two unrelated reasons, one external and one domestic, for Russia’s choice to ultimately “roll the iron dice.”

Externally: status, prestige, and reputation preoccupied the Tsar and his entourage. “Russia and Serbia did not even have a formal alliance, and Cousin Nicky [the nickname German ruler Kaiser Wilhem used for his cousin Tsar Nicholas II] would never go to war out of some supposed Pan-Slavic romantic nonsense…the bottom line was that Russia would not allow German power to humiliate Serbia because of the repercussions for Russia’s reputation” (p.144). Russia and its leadership thought its prestige would be devastated should a group perceived to be under Russian protection get slaughtered with German help. It was more about identity and status than alliance.

Domestically, meanwhile, a bumbling Cousin Nicky saw a chance to reclaim greater authority: “the decision for war was Nicholas II’s sideways coup against the Duma he despised. War would allow his reclamation of unmediated mystical union between Tsar and people…[and he] fantasized about a domestic patriotic upsurge” (p. 145). The Tsar, in other words, wanted to reclaim power that had begun to be rationalized (into more technocratic state bodies) or liberalized (via parliament). Foreign policy decisions, it is true, are mostly domestic policy by other means.

Cousin Nicky would come to regret his choice to roll the iron dice in 1914. Three years later he would abdicate under duress as masses thronged the streets.

Kotkin, however, helpfully reminds us that “revolution results not from determined crowds in the street but from elite abandonment of the existing  political order.” Elite loss of faith  in the regime, and fragmentation at the top, causes authoritarian regimes to crumble. Fractious elites can leverage popular unrest to their benefit, but without elite disaffection purely bottom up popular revolts rarely succeed. One Tsarist official wrote similarly: “Every revolution begins at the top, and our government had succeeded in transforming the most loyal elements of the country into critics.” With masses having seized capital streets, Kotkin writes, “elites seized the opportunity to abandon the autocrat” (p. 166).

Regime insiders, aids closest to the Tsar, organized in early February 1917 for all the generals to unanimously call on Tsar Nicholas to abdicate, which he did. Not much more than a year later he would be dead, along with his whole family (wife and five children). Brutally murdered in the basement of a house somewhere in Siberia. Tsarism, along with the Russian Empire, was dust and ashes. Such is the fate of those who roll the iron dice and lose.

The fatal flaw, ultimately, of the Tsarist regime “had proven to be its inability to incorporate the masses into the polity.” The mass mobilization of Russian army conscripts created a newly active strata in society, capable of participating—however obliquely—in the political arena,  demanding certain recompense for their service (which was often compelled in the most barbaric of ways).  Ironically, these Russian conscripts, Kotkin avers, “would steamroll not Germany but the country’s own political system” (p. 175). “Of all the failures of Russia’s autocracy with regard to modernity, none would be as great as its failure at authoritarian mass politics” (p. 130).

Thus did the February Revolution of 1917 bring down Tsarism.

The haphazard creation of a Provisional Government following the Tsar’s February 1917 resignation—manifestation of compromises among more or less regime-adjacent elements—was beset by the stultifying political legacy and civil society vacuum under Tsarism, and faced a devastating war and newly mobilized masses. A situation likely more conducive to radicals than moderates.

Yet the Provision Government, Kotkin argues, was not an earnest effort at incorporating the masses and encouraging political participation. Rather than seek to reconstitute the Duma to ground its rule, the Provisional Government tried to rule by decree. “The Provisional Government was not a well-intentioned but hapless bunch that would be undone by unprecedented economic collapse and Bolshevik sedition. The rebellious old-regime insiders had long claimed to want a constitutional monarchy with a ‘responsible’ government, by which they meant a government rooted in parliamentary majorities, but in their great historical moment, they immediately created another central government suspended in the air” (p. 179). In fact, an illegitimate “abdication manifesto” issued not by the Tsar but by “non-Tsar Mikhail Romanov provided the only “constitution” that would ever undergird the unelected Provisional Government” (p. 178). As a result, Kotkin argues, the “February Revolution was a liberal coup” (p. 180).

Still, however illegitimate its base, impotent its structures, and unequal to the moment its leader—Alexander Kerensky—the structural deck was stacked against it and all moderates.

4. The Rising Star of the Organizational Tsar

During the war the soon to be leaders of the Marxist-Leninist state had been either writing or idle. Lenin and Trotsky (and Zinoviev) were authoring texts in comfortable foreign exile, Stalin (as well as Kamenev) in mind numbingly boring Siberian exile. Stalin himself did not find time to write anything—a serious lacuna among the intellectual-revolutionary leaders—though he did find time to “engage in the exiled revolutionary’s pastime of seducing and abandoning peasant girls.” In particular, Kotkin notes, he “impregnated one of his landlord’s daughters, the thirteen year-old Lidiya Pereprygina.” The later Stalin would “recall his dog in Siberia, Tishka, but not his female companions and bastards” (p. 155). A rather telling example of the grotesque coldness already in the man’s heart.

Stalin got his training in Party building in the post-February 1917 chaos. After Tsarism’s collapse, Stalin quickly returned to Moscow where he began contributing to what would culminate as the Bolshevik coup of October 1917. He was far from the organizational mastermind he would become. His main contribution was as an agitator and propagandist. He wrote 40 lead articles in Pravda during that period (p. 176).

Yakov Sverdlov—who had twice roomed together with Stalin in Siberian exile—was then the disputed organizational mastermind of the Bolshevik Party. He almost single handedly worked to keep together the far flung Bolshevik organization in the run up to the October coup. In exile, Trotsky would call Sverdlov “the general secretary of the October insurrection”’ (p. 224). Sverdlov had a quasi-photographic memory, an internalized rolodex of party members, a keen understanding of how to use and allocate men for purpose, and an indefatigable attention to detail.

Sverdlov, the first head of the Secretariat, worked largely behind the scenes on matters of personnel and organization. He relied on “manipulation of rules, suasion, and favors” to get things done. In effect, he “provided a kind of school in party building for Stalin as they left speechifying to the orators, such as Zinoviev” and Trotsky. He “showed his helpmate Stalin how to organize a loyal Leninist faction” p. 194).”

But in 1919, at just 33 years of age, Sverdlov would die. An unimaginably boost to Stalin’s star—as he soon became the inheritor of Sverdlov’s organizational throne.

5. A Coup and A Revolution

The October Revolution—the Bolshevik Revolution—occurred primarily in St. Petersburg and Moscow, as well as a few other cities. A simultaneously peasant revolution in the countryside, however, occurred largely autonomously. These two separate “revolutions”, as Kotkin frames it, were destined for a tragic clash.   

In the cities, it was a coup. And without Lenin, it never would have happened. That is amply confirmed in Kotkin’s research, as elsewhere. The vast majority of Bolsheviks in 1917 were in favor of letting the Provisional Government consolidate its rule, settle things, and let bourgeois capitalism progress before they would ultimately overthrow it. This was an ironic position the Bolsheviks were taking: advocating for the persistence of a regime/system they were publicly claiming was doomed to fail and eventually be overthrown, by them!

Lenin, after arriving from Germany in March, was forced into retreat to Finland in May. But from there he wrote devastating critiques of the attitudes and positions of the Bolsheviks currently in Russia. He was demanding a seizure of power in the name of the Bolsheviks. Most thought him unwell and even insane in his isolated insistence—including his own wife. At a decisive moment in October, he snuck back into St. Petersburg and rallied the revolutionaries himself, where they were organized in the Smolny, an old money all girls boarding school (comically, the female headmaster was still in residence).

Trotsky, newly converted to the Bolshevik cause, assisted him—Lenin seemed to be the only person the egotistical Trotsky ever deferred to (though he often did not, viewing him as more of an equal—a stance Stalin would later exploit). Most Bolsheviks involved, and most historians I’ve read, agree that without Lenin, it is highly unlikely there would have been such a coup. Largely by force of will and personality, Lenin changed history.

Stalin played a lesser but still useful role. Zinoviev and Kamenev’s determined opposition to the Bolshevik coup against the Provisional Government would dog both their future power struggles with Stalin. Stalin’s choice to faithfully ally himself with the seemingly crazed Lenin proved a masterful stroke of luck for his future power struggle.

The coup, however, haphazard worked. In St. Petersburg the resistance was so minimal, supporters of the Provisional Government so scattered, a few thousand poorly organized Bolshevik supporters with guns pulled it off. The first of what would prove a litany of instances wherein weakness of the opposition was the most decisive factor.

In practice, of course, the coup was not just against the flailing Provisional Government, but also the nascently emerging democratic Soviets as well as the Constituent Assembly—a planned meeting of multiple other parties in late 1917 (including Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and others) that was intended to create a genuinely democratic government. Lenin and the Bolsheviks would use strong arm tactics to dissolve it, along with Russia’s hope for democratic governance.

The mass mobilization at the front, and the unspeakably awful conditions, were fomenting revolutionary energy. Peasants began their own upheaval. “October may have been a coup in the capital,” one historian has written, “but at the front it was a revolution.” (p. 224).

In the countryside, the peasants began seizing land en masse, killing landed gentry, and upending the remnants of de facto serfdom. Only 11 percent of gentry landowners would remain by the 1920s (p. 190). The Reds encouraged this insofar as it helped undermine their Civil War enemy, the Whites, who were filled with upper class elements of the old order.

But when the peasants new found autonomy led them to deny Bolshevik demands for grain requisition, the guns would just as soon be turned on them again.

6. Civil War Forges the Party-state and Stalin.

“Civil war was not something that deformed the Bolsheviks; it formed them…the civil war provided the opportunity to develop and to validate the struggle against “exploiting classes” and “enemies” (domestic and international)…The “seizure of power” would be enacted anew, every day.”

“From bottom to top, and places in between, the ideas and practices of revolutionary class war produced the Soviet state” (p. 291). Lenin himself averred: “The Civil War has taught and tempered us (p. 336). Ultimately, Kotkin writes, “it was a combination of ideas or habits of thought, especially profound antipathy to markets and all things bourgeois, as well as no-holds-barred revolutionary methods, which exacerbated the catastrophe in a self-reinforcing loop” (p. 290). Despite Stalin and Lenin’s idolatry of power, their view of the state itself did not drive Bolshevik state building (Lenin, echoing Marx, wrote a tract about the inevitable withering away of the state—a view that would itself whither away under Stalin).

The roots of Trotsky’s demise and Stalin’s aggrandizement, at the formers expense, is found in their stance toward old regime professionals and former Tsarist military officers. Trotsky advocated in favor of their use, Stalin against. In Kotkin’s telling, while this stance undoubtedly was crucial to Red victory in the civil war—and Trotsky himself played the largest role in this victory—it sowed the seeds of Trotsky’s unpopularity within the party-state. “The engagement of former Tsarist officers, and of ‘bourgeois’ specialists in  other realms, helped focus the widely gathering negativity about Trotsky, who became a lightning rod, widely disliked in the regime that he helped bring to victory, much earlier than usually recognized” (p. 340). Stalin would exploit this and seek to develop and push up new, more loyal cadres at the specialists expense.

During the Civil War, Stalin’s deployment to Tsaritsyn by Lenin and the Military Revolutionary Committee to requisition grain offered a glimpse at Stalin’s future rule. “The Tsaritsyn episode of 1918…provided a preview of Stalin’s recourse to publicizing conspiracies by “enemies” and enacting summary executions in order to enforce discipline and rally political support” (p. 340) A former Tsarist military officer who defected from the Reds wrote an exposé that summed up Stalin’s reign of terror: “clever, smart, educated, and extremely shifty, [Stalin] is the evil genius of Tsaritsyn and its inhabitants. All manner of requisitioning, apartment evictions, searches accompanied by shameless thievery, arrests, and other violence used against civilians became everyday phenomena in the life of Tsaritsyn.” That included extensive use of the Cheka—the Soviet secret police copy of the okhranka. The officer went on: “Stalin’s energy could be envied by any of the old administrators, and his ability to get things done in whatever circumstance was something to go to school for” (p. 307)

Both his military incompetence, as well as a brutal bureaucratic competence were on display, as Kotkin writes: “Stalin revealed himself in depth: rabidly partisan toward class thinking and autodidacts; headstrong and prickly; attentive to political lessons but militarily ignorant” (p. 306). Trotsky would conclude that “The ability ‘to exert pressure’ was what Lenin prized so highly in Stalin” (p. 335).

7. On Stalin’s Inevitability from Marx and Lenin.

Stalin, Kotkin submits, did not come to power despite Lenin, but because of him.

In 1911, when a Menshevik “poured poison into Lenin’s ear about Jughashvili” and his questionable past illegal activities, Lenin is said to have exclaimed “This is exactly the kind of person I need!” (p. 123).

Many of Stalin’s most dangerous pathologies were also Lenin’s. “Lenin could not have been put off by Stalin’s use of indiscriminate terror designed to deter enemies and rally the worker base because Lenin was the principal promoter of shoot first, ask questions later as a way to impart political lessons…Lenin was also not naïve: he saw through Stalin’s self-centered, intrigue-prone personality, but Lenin valued Stalin’s combination of unwavering revolutionary convictions and get-things-done style, a fitting skill set for all-out revolutionary class warfare…Stalin was both the highest ranking member of Lenin’s grouping and the belated builder of his own faction, which overlapped Lenin’s” (p. 341). Lenin, the arch factionalist who outlawed factions, would only make life easier for the most well placed member of his own.

Like Marx, Lenin saw rule of law, separation of powers, and the entire edifice of state as a mere mask for class interest and power. Such is the dangerous core of Marx’s philosophy: if at root all politics is just the enactment of power by a certain class, then all that matters is that the righteous class has all the power. Thus did Marx argue for a dictatorship of the proletariat. This thinking leaves one a mere hop, skip, and a jump away from Stalinism.

For Lenin, much like Marx: “Behind mundane disagreement he saw not legitimate opinion but malevolent forces. His conception of politics did not even allow for politics. Lenin railed against the idea that society was made up of multiple interests that deserved competitive political representation…He repudiated any separation of powers among executive, legislature, and judicial branches as a bourgeois sham. He rejected the idea of rule of law as an instrument of class domination, not a protection against the state. He dismissed the self-organization of society to hold the state in check.”

“The upshot,” Kotkin continues, “was brutal intensification of Tsarism’s many debilitating features: emasculation of parliament, metastasizing of parasitic state functionaries…in short unaccountable executive power, which was vastly enhanced in its grim arbitrariness by a radiant ideology of social justice and progress.”

“But then, Lenin fell fatally ill” (p. 410).

Lenin’s death would seed the most dramatic period for the regime: succession.

In one of the most striking stances in the book, Kotkin calls into question the veracity of the “Lenin Testament” — which supposedly had Lenin calling for Stalin to be removed as General Secretary because he was too “rude.” Kotkin in fact suggests that Lenin’s Testament was most likely a forgery written up by Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, when Lenin was already too incapacitated to have done so himself.

Yet mere months prior to the supposed Testament, Lenin had just pushed to make Stalin the person who organized all the arrangements, paperwork, meetings, etc. of the Central Committee, on top of his existing position as head of the OrgBureau, which decides personnel. Lenin’s last indisputable act was to give Stalin his powerful Party position! Stalin was also Lenin’s closest associate (Lenin had no friends aside from his female caretakers—and Stalin was one of only two people allowed into Lenin’s private apartment) [p. 226].

“Lenin never named a successor. But in a momentous act in March 1922, he created a new post “general secretary” of the party, expressly for Stalin. Stories would be invented, for understandable reasons, about how Lenin had never really intended to give Stalin so much power. These stories, however, are belied by the facts” (p. 411). Stalin was “no accidental figure raised up by circumstances. Lenin put him in the inner circle” (p. 124).

Lenin, in other words, had intentionally given Stalin control over the Party apparatus—the instrument of power and influence more central than the state, the military, or any other.

“What stands out most about Stalin’s ascendancy is that, structurally, he was handed the possibility of a personal dictatorship, and he began to realize that just by fulfilling the duties of general secretary” (p. 425).

Stalin’s consolidation of a “dictatorship within the dictatorship” — which took off after the 11th Party Congress in 1922 — was not accidental, but followed logically from Lenin’s actions and fit perfectly within the institutional set up Lenin had pioneered.

8. The Praxis of Dictatorship

By the 8th Party Congress in 1919 the Bolsheviks had formalized the major elements of power that would characterize Leninist regimes: the organization bureau (Orgburo) which determines personnel, the Politburo (a select group from the Central Committee) that determines policy, and a Secretariat that organizes and manages the activities of the central committee and Politburo.

By 1923, Stalin—Sverdlov’s heir—was the only leader simultaneously in the Politburo, the Secretariat, and the Orgburo. Stalin’s overlapping positions in the party gave him hugely asymmetric organizational advantages. “Despite the politburo’s decision-making power, none of its members had the wherewithal to ensure that Stalin was implementing its formal decisions (and not implementing others)” (p. 687).

Politburo meetings, wherein Stalin was just one of 7 or 9 leading members, were sprawling and occurred only a few times a month. But Orgburo meetings were daily and the Secretariat was constantly working, and he had much more influence in those settings. The Orgburo “met more frequently than any party body, and its sessions sometimes lasted days—they were known as orgies. And the party secretariat was essentially in continuous session” (p. 430).

Bureaucratic Control Far and Wide

Still, Stalin was constrained by the country’s “great distances and by mutual [local] protection rackets.” So he utilized purges, discipline campaigns, and centralized appointment powers to consolidate personnel-based control. “Stalin could never centralize the whole country himself, but he could effectively centralize the bosses who were centralizing their own provinces” (p. 432).

He also made use of Lenin’s recent creation: the Control Commission—forerunner to China’s CCDI. Created in 1918 and originally called the Commissariat for State Control, and then Workers and Peoples Inspectorate, Stalin would be appointed its head (on top of his duties as nationalities commissar) and given broad investigatory powers to oversee state administration (p. 322). The Inspectorate would be merged with the Central Control Commission, and Stalin in late 1923 named his ally Kuibyshev to head it. Particular attention was paid to disciplining the bureaucracy to ensure its attentiveness to central directives. The apparatus “had been established as a neutral court of appeal, but under Stalin became a bludgeon to punish party members. Kuibyshev viciously went after local resistance, perceived and real, to central directives and lined up officials behind Stalin in the regions and the center” (p. 454).

Personnel Power

Stalin’s influence over personnel decisions in the Orgburo was critical to his consolidation of power, most importantly with regard to the selection of regional party secretaries. These secretaries would become the core of the Central Committee, the Party’s highest formal authority. In what has been described as a system of “circular power,” Stalin’s ability to shape the composition of the Central Committee allowed him to reinforce and legitimize his own dominance.

He developed the “nomenklatura” system, or lists of appointments across the country that only the Party center (Orgburo) controlled and could not be altered without its approval. The central nomenklatura initially included ~4,000 positions of republic, province, and state-run industry leaders. In turn, “provincial party organizations emulated the center with their own nomenklatura of appointments.” Stalin, by controlling selection of local leaders, was then able to enact trickle down influence.

In the post–Civil War period, he increasingly favored the promotion of younger, loyal cadres over the more independent veterans of the Society of Old Bolsheviks (p. 453). “Stalin put a premium on competence, which he interpreted in terms of loyalty.” He wanted people to faithfully and energetically execute his decisions. “We need to assemble functionaries so that people who occupy these positions are capable of implementing directives, comprehending those directives, accepting those directives as their own and bringing them to life,” Stalin said at the 1923 12th Party Congress (p. 433).

“The Soviet state emerged as a labyrinth of patron-client relationships that cut across formal institutions. But Stalin’s patron-client relationships were strongly institutional…the vast collection of personal followings that composed the party-state converged on a single person, the party’s leader” (p. 469).

However, consolidating the dictatorship required not just bureaucratic machinations, but people skills: “[Stalin] demonstrated surpassing organizational abilities…[but] too often often his power, including over personnel, has been viewed as that of an impersonal machine. What Trotsky and others missed or refused to acknowledge was that Stalin had a deft political touch: he recalled names and  episodes of people’s biographies, impressing them with his familiarity, concern, and attentiveness, no matter where they stood in the hierarchy, even if they were just service staff…he was, for all his moodiness, a people person, a ward-boss style politician, albeit one in command of instruments beyond a ward boss’s dreams—the Communist party’s reach, discipline, and radiant-future ideology” (p. 424-5). This tyrant of history was also a people person.

Bukharin would note that Stalin “is like the symbol of the party, the lower strata trust him.” Indeed, Kotkin avers, “if Stalin had limited contact with the masses, he had an extraordinary degree of contact with young regime functionaries.” “Stalin identified with these people.” He also “developed a romantic view of the Soviet system that he would hold his entire life … Thrust into power, Stalin found himself on a lifelong quest not only for personal glory but also for deciphering the secrets to ruling over men and things in order to further Russian power in the world” (p. 469).

Kotkin fingers the following Stalin loyalists as particularly influential: Vyacheslav Skryabin “Molotov”; Valerian Kuibyshev; and Lazar Kaganovich. “Molotov, Kuibyshev, and Kaganovich constituted the innermost core of Stalin’s political clan. Observers began to say these men walked under Stalin’s wing” (p. 456).

Information, Informants, and Ideology

In addition to control over personnel, Stalin uniquely controlled the flow of information throughout the regime, largely by dint of his General Secretary position in the Secretariat. “Only Stalin, in the name of the Central Committee, could issue directives to every locale and institution, while anything sent to the politburo or Central Committee from commissariats, secret police, or the military went to the party secretariat” (p. 434). He even instituted a special phone system, the “vertushka system,” which “reinforced the party apparatus as a nodal point” (p. 433). “Stalin dominated all official channels and established informal sources of information, while his personal functionaries performed tasks often not formally specified” (p. 687).

As important to control over personnel and information flows was control over the power ministry: the secret police, or the Cheka, which became the OGPU. He cultivated of special reports, information channels, and informants via the secret police that only he saw. While some reports, such as secret police mood summaries, were distributed to politburo members until the early 1920s, Stalin was even earlier creating reports that only he saw (p. 441). “Above all, Stalin alone had the means to secretly monitor the other top officials for their own “security” and to recruit their subordinates as informants, because he alone, in the name of the Central Committee, liaisoned with the OGPU” (p. 687).

Ideology was both a wellspring for commitment to the cause as well as a vital instrument of power. Stalin’s command of the Marxist-Leninist canon, grounded in years of rigorous study and sincere conviction, gave him a critical source of influence in a Party-state that often resembled a theocracy: a system in which many were genuinely motivated by belief. His mastery of Leninist texts became especially powerful after Lenin’s death, when Party elites obsequiously scrambled to build a reputation as Lenin’s most “faithful pupil.” As one Soviet literary critic observed: “Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, even Trotsky are much less familiar with the texts of Lenin’s writings than Stalin… Unlike them, Stalin studied Lenin’s texts and knew the printed Lenin intimately. He had no trouble selecting a quotation from Lenin if he needed it” (p. 591). Kotkin declares that “Stalin’s role as guardian of the ideology was as important in his ascendancy as brute bureaucratic force” (p. 419). Knowledge of the cannon was quite literally power.

By the mid-1920s, no one in the Party leadership stood outside the web of organizational control and information flow that Stalin could manipulate at will. Between 1922 and 1928, his “dictatorship within the dictatorship” materialized.

Welcome to the Dark Side

Stalin molded political power, but the pursuit and use of power also molded him.

His multiple fierce political struggles shaped his personality: “The Trotsky struggle had exerted a deep influence on Stalin’s character. No less profound an impact came in Stalin’s struggle with Lenin’s dictation” (p. 735).

Stalin’s information diet, which he largely curated, also warped his mind. It wasn’t that he was getting bad information per se, but rather that the material he was most routinely submerged in fed his dark side. “Stalin lived immersed in the grim OGPU summaries of the country’s political mood, which his worldview shaped in a feedback loop, and which brimmed with antiregime quotations from eavesdropped conversations and other reminders that the USSR was encircled by hostile forces and honeycombed with internal enemies” (p. 668).

9. The New Economic Policy

The New Economic Policy was a pivot point around which the contest for power was fought. It was also—and this Kotkin calls the “far more important story”—a series of “attempts in the Bolshevik inner circle to overcome the unforeseen yet inbuilt structural circumstance of the ability of the party’s general secretary to build a dictatorship within the dictatorship” (p. 474).

Lenin admitted the need for markets, amid mass starvation of 5-7 million brought on in part by requisition policies, failed state development, lingering effects of civil war, and poor weather conditions. Stalin became one of Lenin’s most staunch supporters in his turn toward markets. Trotsky would oppose the NEP, favoring instead a beefed up economic planning agency, which he wanted to head, and a speedier rush into forced industrialization. Trotsky would argue for an “economic dictatorship” and propose to vastly expand the powers of the “tiny state planning commission, which did not do economic planning, only ad hoc consultation with managers.” Trotsky stated that “Without the emancipation of the party, as a party, from direct governing and supervision, it is impossible to cleanse the party from bureaucratism and the economy from dissoluteness” (p. 481). Provincial party organizations in his view were improperly concerning themselves with economic issues such as agricultural or factory leasing.

Viewed from the perspective of a fight for power, of course, Trotsky was effectively fighting against Stalin’s party-based control and advocating for state mechanisms more pliable to his own will. From an ideational perspective, Kotkin argues that Stalin remained a committed leftist, a believer in military encirclement by the capitalist word, and was likely much more inclined towards Trotsky’s position than he let on at first.

The Trotsky vs. Stalin positioning on NEP thus reflected political logic more than anything, per Kotkin: “Trotsky’s desire for a dictatorship of industry and an end to the party’s oversight of the economy had both a policy aspect (planning, super industrialization) and a political aspect: it was his answer to Stalin’s dictatorship of the party apparatus. But Stalin, who did not like the NEP anymore than Trotsky did, crucially, like Lenin, and because of Lenin understood the necessity of flexible tactics for the greater cause: Stalin accepted the NEP. To put the matter  another way, in 1922, Stalin could have his party dictatorship and Lenin’s NEP. Trotsky could not have his economic dictatorship and the NEP. This means that the charges of Trotskyism that Stalin would level, with all manner of distortions, nonetheless had some basis: Trotsky on the economy was forcefully pushing against Lenin’s foundational policy” (p. 487). “Attacks on Trotsky, in other words, translated into strong support for the NEP” (p. 569).

In Kotkin’s account, policy positioning is largely subordinated to power positioning, aligning closely with Torigian’s argument in Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion. During succession struggles, policy stances appear more as epiphenomena—tools of elite maneuvering rather than genuine ideological commitments. Kotkin’s evidence thus stands in marked contrast to the assumptions of rational choice and selectorate theory as advanced by Bueno de Mesquita, which treat policy as a central axis of strategic behavior.

In 1928, well after kicking Trotsky out of the party, Stalin would attack Bukharin and turn decisively against the NEP. In that situation, Kotkin describes Bukharin’s eventual messy plotting against Stalin as having “been goaded by desperation.” Kamenev, for example, said Bukharin’s “lips sometimes shook from emotion. Sometimes he gave the impression of a person who knows he is doomed” (p. 715).

10. The Mystery of Collectivization

Despite his exhaustive research, Kotkin struggles to pinpoint exactly why and when Stalin decided to make his insane mad dash away from NEP and toward forced collectivization of the entire countryside. An even more extreme variant of the Trotskyite position he had just been attacking. What’s more, the party still had little penetration of the countryside, much like its Tsarist forebear (and even in 1917/8 it was much less popular than the SRs in the countryside). In Siberia, there were “only 1,331 party cells even in its 4,009 village soviets (and far from every village had a functioning soviet). Moreover,  what constituted a “party cell” remained unclear…[one] rural party cell was found to be holding seances to communicate with the spirit of Karl Marx” (p. 675).

What would impel Stalin to rush head long into forced collectivization of 120 million people? It was “not merely the unmodernized technical level of small, divided plots of Soviet agriculture, which produced harvests insufficient to support the kinds of grain exports necessary to finance imports of machines.” And the “dilemma was not even just the fact that the regime lacked control over the food supply or the countryside, rendering it hostage to the actions and decisions of the peasantry.”

Rather the core issue behind Stalin’s abandoning of NEP, in Kotkin’s view, was ideological. “Exactly when Stalin had concluded that it was not time to force the village onto the path of socialism remains unclear,” but NEP had always “amounted to grudgingly tolerated capitalism in a country that had had an avowedly anticapitalist or socialist revolution” (p. 672-3). And by 1928 Stalin apparently determined it was time to return to the party’s heroic revolutionary spirit and make good on the ideology.

The village was “the key to Russia’s destiny” – just as under the Tsars (p. 675). “Stalin had connected the ideological dots, reaching the full logic of a class-based outlook. Everything would be improvised, of course. But Stalin would not improvise the introduction of the rule of law and a constitutional order; he would not improvise granting the peasants freedom; he would not improvise restricting police power. He would improvise a program of building socialism: forcing into being large-scale collective farms, absent private property” (p. 676). Stalin had exiled the left, only so he could then enact leftism.

A slightly different perspective, mine not Kotkin’s, would suggest that ideology and power are often so interlinked—what are dreams without the power to see them through?—that it’s often impossible to fully distinguish them. Stalin, Kotkin himself notes, lived for revolution AND Russian state power. The headlong rush into collectivization was not just ideologically motivated at its core, but also a drive to further Party-state power: to temper, discipline, and even expand the organizational weapon of the Party-state.

Stalin himself noted of the problems around NEP: “the cause is in ourselves, in our organizations” (p. 680). “Soviet officialdom,” Kotkin writes, “was becoming dependent materially, and hence, in his Marxist mind, politically, on the rural wealthy.” Half of new communists in Siberia “had joined the party since 1924, during the New Economic Policy” (p. 681).

Stalin was thus looking upon a massively expanded party-state apparatus that was beset by lack of ideological commitment, as well as drunkenness and other petty ailments. This was no longer the small, tight-knit band of revolutionaries.

Ideology and power were bloodily linked. Officials “who not only possessed strong stomachs for bloodshed against their own people, but could shift with the new political winds” would rise high under Stalin (p. 683).

Rash political efforts would, I imagine Stalin believing, mobilize and condition new party members, deepen top-down control, and contribute to a socialist breakthrough. Kuibyshev, head of the Central Control Commission and loyal Stalinist, would push the party-state apparatus particularly hard to fulfill “unrealistic industrialized goals” (p. 686). Stalin commended his own undertakings, saying he had “wound everyone up, the way it’s supposed to be done” (p. 684).

Kotkin sums it all up: “For Stalin, Shakhty [a show trial against old regime technocrats and engineers] and the “emergency-ism” in the village were of a piece.  He was unleashing a new topsy-turvy of class warfare to expand the regime’s social base and his own political leverage in order to accelerate industrialization and to collectivize agriculture” (p. 688).

Collectivization, ideology, and the dark rise of the Bolshevik police state, according to Kotkin, were interlinked. It was not merely “circumstance” that led events to unfold as they did, “but intentional political monopoly as well as Communist convictions, which deepened the debilitating circumstances cited to justify ever more statization and violence” (p. 736).

In his sole explicit rebuke of a historian, he cites E.H. Carr who said: “More than almost any other great man in history, Stalin illustrates the thesis that circumstances make the man, not the man the circumstances.”

Kotkin’s response: “Utterly, eternally wrong” (p. 739).

Political circumstances shaped Stalin, but Stalin also uniquely shaped Soviet political evolution. “Stalin’s marked personal traits, which colored his momentous political decisions, emerged as a result of politics” (p. 735).

Without Stalin and his leftist conviction to revivify the revolution and the party-state apparatus, “the likelihood of forced wholesale collectivization—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” (p. 739)

11. A New Class, A Cultural Revolution.

Stalin understood something about creating a new coterie of people loyal to him, and loyal to the regime. In a passage reminiscent of Jerry Hough’s views, Kotkin writes: “Stalin was  going to wager on young, male strivers from the urban lower orders to spearhead a socialist remake of the village many of them had only recently left behind…It was a mass mobilization whose message was seductive: the regime would not allow worker dreams to be surrendered, lost in a lack of vigilance, sold for Judas coins” (p. 697).

Heightening tensions and contradictions to create a trial by fire for new party-state recruits. A pact sealed in blood. “About one third of party members by the late 1920s had once been Youth League members. Stalin’s apparatus was dispatching armed Youth League militants, among, others, to villages, where they measured “surpluses” by the eye, smashed villagers on the head with revolvers, and locked peasants in  latrines until they yielded their grain stores.” Predictably, “the siege Stalin was imposing generated evidence of the need for a siege” (p. 707).

A propaganda pamphlet circulated after the Shakhty trials evidenced the other part of this emergent cultural revolution: it “exhorted the party to bring the workers close to  production, enhance self-criticism to fight bureaucratism, become better “commissars” watching over bourgeois specialists, and produce new Soviet cadres of engineers” (p. 709).

A new youthful generation was being cultivated and unleashed against the peasants and the extensive remnants of what Stalin considered the unreliable, bourgeois, old regime technocrats. Stalin would cultivate a new expert class out of the recently urbanized. One loyal to him and his goals.

And he would heighten tensions and spur campaigns—collectivization, de-kulakization—to assist in this goal. Creating artificial distinctions between poor peasants and rich peasants (kulaks), and demanding blood-letting of the latter. Something akin to the blooding of new recruits in the Japanese imperial army.

12. Conjuring Enemies and Stoking Tensions.

Stalin recognized the benefits of conflict and heightened tensions in securing himself and his regime. In line with the books subtitle, paradoxes of power, the regime fed on a combustible mix of anxiety and aspiration.

Mao asserted after his bombing of Jinmen and Matsui islands that heightening tensions can help the cause—a rising tension he put to use mobilizing for the great leap forward. This type of strategy, however, was also Stalin’s specialty. Stalin appreciated this early on but demonstrated it throughout his career, stoking fears of war, conjuring internal enemies, cultivating siege mentality.

Kotkin writes of “the paradoxes of Stalin’s vertiginous ascent.” A “supremacy-insecurity dyad defined his inner regime, and shaped his character. It also paralleled the Bolshevik dictatorship’s own fraught relationship to the outside world: the  supposed global inevitability of the revolutionary cause amid perilous capitalist encirclement. Of course, such a combination of aggressive ambition and siege mentality was well known from the long sweep of Russia’s history, a great power whose aspirations always seemed to exceed its capabilities in that complicated Eurasian space. But this predicament also derived from Lenin’s handiwork—a monopoly party’s seizure of power and a cynical approach to international relations. Both the revolution as a whole, and Stalin’s personal dictatorship within it, found themselves locked in a kind of in-built, structural paranoia, triumphant yet enveloped by ill-wishers and enemies. The revolution’s predicament and Stalin’s personality began to reinforce each other” (p. 530).

Stalin saw Soviet economic development as inevitably leading to conflict with capitalist  states—which were also destined to be overthrown by socialist revolution. This inevitable view of conflict was core to Stalin’s worldview and the regimes approach to international relations.

Many leaders viewed war as potentially immediately on the horizon. But Stalin above all was “driving the USSR into a state of siege” (p. 624). A Soviet official (Chicherin) told the American foreign correspondent and Soviet sympathizer Louis Fischer the following in June 1927: “Everybody in Moscow was talking war.  I tried to dissuade them.  ‘Nobody is planning to attack us,’ I insisted. Then a colleague enlightened me. He said, ‘Shh. We know that. But we need this against Trotsky’” (p. 635).

13. Lost Chances

In Stalin’s early life he could have died many times, whether by disease, accident (he was partially run over by a horse carriage as a child) or political police. Many family (first wife, illness), idols (Lado, ohkranka bullet) and associates would die. As fate would have it, Stalin did not.

Luck would continue to play a major factor in Stalin’s rise, but equally important were the missteps and overall weakness of his opponents.

The Lenin Testament, which called for Stalin to be removed from general secretary post Lenin had just made for him, despite being of questionable authenticity was widely credited—and it should have “radicalized the political dynamic” more than it in fact did, as it was “perhaps the most momentous document of the entire regime’s history” (p. 505). A key reason it did not was because those few power players initially in possession of its knowledge, Zinoviev and Bukharin, held a secret conspiratorial cave meeting rather than coordinating more intensively to figure out how to actually remove Stalin.

In 1923, one of the last moments to strike Stalin down, people froze. “Zinoviev’s behavior is the grand  mystery,” Lenin’s wife “Krupskaya had handed him a letter from Lenin advising that they remove Stalin.” Yet “Zinoviev did no such thing. He had been afforded an opportunity to alter the course of history, and did not seize it…He could have demanded a Central  Committee plenum on the subject, even an extraordinary party congress. Instead, Zinoviev had called a meeting in a cave, then signed his name to some letters to Stalin Bukharin wrote, then did not even one of them.” This  “was arguably the most consequential action (or  inaction)  by a politburo member after Lenin had become irreversibly sidelined” (p. 513). Lev Kamenev, too, chose to tepidly support Stalin at this moment against the complaints of Zinoviev and Bukharin.

Another missed turning point was Zinoviev and Kamenev’s near recruitment of the head of the OGPU secret police, Felix Dzierzynski, to their faction in 1925. As the “head of the political police and someone whose stout reputation made him invulnerable to removal” he “occupied a potentially decisive position.” Ultimately, he chose not to support their faction, and even wrote an exculpatory letter to Stalin expecting to be relieved of his duties: “I am leaving the [opposition] faction, remaining a Leninist, for I do not wish to be a participant in a schism, which brings death to the party” (p. 577-578). What would have happened had the head of the secret police sided against Stalin at this point? A provocative but academic question.

Kotkin does not give Stalin particularly high marks for his political maneuvering.  “Stalin’s shifting political alliance to undercut rivals—with Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky; with Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky against Zinoviev and Kamenev—hardly constituted evidence of special genius: it was no more than Personal Dictatorship 101” (p. 564).

More important for Kotkin was the questionable quality of Stalin’s rivals. “That Stalin was fortunate in his rivals, from Trotsky on down, has long been understood” (p. 531). “Even had Trotsky been more adept politically, his biography (a former Menshevik, an intellectual), his personality (condescending, aloof) and his position (war commissar) afforded him little chance to succeed Lenin, especially against a formidable rival” (p. 590-1). Bukharin—see final subsection—was even more hopeless.

Resignation Warfare

Stalin offers to resign many, many times. “There had been clear resignation statements on six known occasions” (p. 658) In a plenum in May 1924, in response to ongoing clamoring over the so-called Lenin Testimony calling for Stalin to be removed, Stalin offered to step down (p. 547). The plenum did have the power, in fact, to remove him. But due to the circularity of power—his OrgBuro empowered appointment of the central committee members—the hall was packed with  supporters.  The plenum voted to retain him, as did the next post-congress Central Committee—the latter voting unanimously to reelect him general secretary (p. 548).

The subsequent 13^th Party Congress could have been another turning point, but again it was not (p. 552). In December 1927, Stalin theatrically calls to be dismissed as General Secretary: “Now it is time, in my view, to heed Lenin’s instructions. Therefore I ask the plenum to relieve me of the post of Central Committee General Secretary. I assure you, comrades, the party will only gain from this” (p. 594). By this time, however, “Stalin had appointed the provincial party bosses who composed two thirds of the voting members of the Central Committee.” Though Kotkin suggests “that body could still act against him if he manifestly failed to safeguard the revolution” (p. 637).

Bukharin: No Alternative

Kotkin is not kind to Bukharin. He strenuously rejects the idea put forward by some, most forthrightly Stephen Cohen, that Bukharin was the last best hope for a more moderate regime. In fact, he takes pains to suggest Bukharin was neither a particularly decent human, nor a shrewd enough political operator to run the regime.

Kotkin routinely describes Bukharin as vicious, or some other unkind term. “As for Bukharin, having saved Trotsky, he turned his fluent viciousness against Kamenev and Zinoviev with gusto. Wholly under Stalin’s patronage, Bukharin became half of an emerging duumvirate” (p. 564).  “Bukharin’s typically inflammatory rhetoric” (p. 570). Bukharin “was not a person of strong character or perspciacity” (p. 686). Ultimately Kotkin concludes “Bukharin presented no genuine alternative to Stalin, even leaving aside the fact that he lacked political heft or an organizational power base” (p. 728).

Was there an alternative? The only member of the Central Committee to reject the anti-capitalist/market dogma, and thus central planning, was former finance minister Sokolnikov—who basically favored market socialism. But he “was a mere individual, not a faction.” Ultimately a “Rykov-Sokolnikov political-intellectual leadership,” the only viable alternative Kotkin sees by 1928, “would have offered a genuine alternative to Stalin only if Rykov and others in a ruling coalition came around to capitulating on the commitment to anti-capitalism in the village” (p. 730). Otherwise a coercive planning regime would have been in the offing all the same.

Conclusion

“History, for better and for worse, is made by those who never give up” (p. 739).