many thanks for this wonderfully readable, even captivating review! It left me determined to read the actual book (as well as parts II and III). Some thoughts I recorded while reading:
(i) Stalin's "ethnic minority" status as a native of Georgia is not really discussed in detail in your review. (By the way, that is not a criticism.) From other reading, I believe it to be a well-established fact that a disproportionate share of the first-generation Bolsheviks were members of groups that constituted ethnic minorities in the Russian Empire. Whether this matters / mattered in any way and, if so, in which way exactly it mattered seems to me to be an interesting question. If Kotkin discusses this aspect in his biography, this might make for a worthwhile extension should you decide to revise your article.
As a footnote of sorts on this point, Hitler was originally an Austrian (Austro-Hungarian) national and did not acquire German citizenship until shortly before his takeover of power, but to the best of my recollection, his outsider status in this respect (which, of course, is not quite the same thing as being a member of an ethnic minority) does not appear to have been a topic of much discussion either at the time or in the later biographies. I find this curious although perhaps it is not. His decidedly unblond hair does not seem to have been a topic of much discussion either (except in jokes).
(ii) Not clear from your review (and this observation also is not, of course, a criticism): Did Stalin actually have something like a long-term strategy, a "career plan" if you will? Your review and presumably the biography point out factors that helped Stalin's rise (both features and abilities of Stalin himself and external circumstances) and you do clearly point out the importance of chance and happenstance, but it would be interesting to know whether Stalin had a more or less long-term strategy which he then executed (more or less well) or whether his rise and later role owe more to the skillful exploitation of opportunities for advancement as these presented themselves. (The two are not mutually exclusive of course.)
(iii) The passage on Stalin as a committed Marxist made me wonder what your views are on Mao's ideological commitment to Marxism - since you know a lot about China, maybe worth discussing that in a paragraph or two if you decided to extend the article? A more general "comparison" (for lack of a better term) with Mao's rise and role would probably also be much appreciated by readers who found your original review interesting, but might exceed the scope.
(iv) This fourth point is the only one on which I hope for a (brief) response from you. The review (and the biography) discuss a great many factors (in the sense of cause-and-effect relationships) that played a role in the events described. With the benefit of hindsight, the outcome (Stalin's rise to essentially dictatorial control of the Soviet Union) and the many intermediate outcomes (e.g., the Bolshevik coup aka the October revolution succeeding) may appear preordained, but they are / were anything but. To give but one example of one element of the big puzzle: the Okhrana / Okhranka one the one hand were apparently rather effective in suppressing open dissent, yet may - on the other hand - have increased alienation with the ancien régime. The question is about whether you have ever seen any work trying to describe these relationships in a structured manner - it could be a simple flowchart-like construction with boxes linking to other boxes with arrows indicating an effect of some sort. The idea behind such a representation would be to identify the factors that matter and how they matter and possibly use the relationships depicted in such a representation in different contexts as a basis for, for example, forecasting events. If my outline here is not particularly clear, that is likely because my thoughts on the subject are not yet particularly clear ... so feel free to just ignore my request for pointers in the direction of other authors who might have done work along these lines.
No answer to these comments expected (although I do hope for a brief response on point (iv)), but I trust that you find these to be of interest. They have not been written by an AI chatbot ;-) It is my way of saying "thank you" for a great piece of work.
1) Excellent point on ethnic background—it’s certainly worth discussing, and Kotkin addresses it at several moments. What strikes me most is how Stalin, though ethnically Georgian, came to fully internalize and assert a belief in Russian great-power identity. There’s an interesting parallel with Hitler, who—as you noted—was Austrian by birth (from the border region of Austria and Germany), yet embraced German nationalism with fervor. I’m currently reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which also touches on this. Hitler expressed disgust toward the multiethnic character of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which likely shaped his nationalist zeal.
2) Kotkin notes that Stalin spent two critical decades of his life—ages 18 to 38—as a penniless revolutionary, possessing little real power and only a modest degree of prestige. If Stalin had anything resembling a “career plan,” it seems to have been a vague but driving ambition to (1) become a person of consequence and (2) make revolution.
3) As best I understand it, Stalin was considerably more well-versed in Marxism than Mao—particularly before the Yan’an period. In China, Marxist thought had barely penetrated the intellectual scene before Li Dazhao began writing about it in the late 1910s. While Mao worked briefly as a librarian’s assistant under Li, it seems unlikely he was reading much Marx or Lenin at that time. Stalin, by contrast, was embedded in the quite literary intellectual-revolutionary tradition where close reading of Marx and other theorists became a form of status signaling (though Stalin was considered weak in this regard, but only in regard to the towering heights of intellectual revolutionaries like Trotsky, Bukharin, and Lenin). Mao would even weaponize this kind of intellectualism against the returned Chinese communists who had studied in the Soviet Union—like Wang Ming. I’ve seen several scholars argue that Mao may have only seriously read The Short Course (if that). Though, based on some of his writings, he definitely read Lenin and probably some of Marx—but this still likely pales in comparison to Stalin’s extensive, repeated readings of Marx and Lenin (and copious marginalia), and his commissioning and micromanaging of textbooks on them. Stalin’s path to the top was being an unground revolutionary, being small time organizer, being a slavish devotee of Lenin, and then working during the Civil War period to become a bureaucratic mastermind. Mao, by contrast, made his way to the top by organizing peasant revolutions, usurping leadership during the Long March and fighting off the returnees, and then consolidating in Yan’an and over the course of the revolution. In some ways that oversimplified path to power shows how Marxism-Leninism as ideology would be more important to Stalin than Mao.
4) Unfortunately your last point is one I have the worst answer on. I think it could be interesting but I can’t recall any such structured framing. Probably some political science book has done. I asked chatgpt to make one lol
many thanks for the swift and extraordinarily detailed reply which is much appreciated! On point (iv) I shall give the AI chatbots a try as well, but I suspect that it is worth putting some time and effort into drafting something myself. If and when I have a diagram (or similar) worth looking at and / or I come across a source that provides a convincing example of what I have in mind, I may take the liberty of getting in touch again. In the meantime, many thanks again for both the review(s) and your answer and please try to keep posting. I suspect that you have a day job and find it impressive that you manage to publish on Substack as you do.
Dear Mr. Sine,
many thanks for this wonderfully readable, even captivating review! It left me determined to read the actual book (as well as parts II and III). Some thoughts I recorded while reading:
(i) Stalin's "ethnic minority" status as a native of Georgia is not really discussed in detail in your review. (By the way, that is not a criticism.) From other reading, I believe it to be a well-established fact that a disproportionate share of the first-generation Bolsheviks were members of groups that constituted ethnic minorities in the Russian Empire. Whether this matters / mattered in any way and, if so, in which way exactly it mattered seems to me to be an interesting question. If Kotkin discusses this aspect in his biography, this might make for a worthwhile extension should you decide to revise your article.
As a footnote of sorts on this point, Hitler was originally an Austrian (Austro-Hungarian) national and did not acquire German citizenship until shortly before his takeover of power, but to the best of my recollection, his outsider status in this respect (which, of course, is not quite the same thing as being a member of an ethnic minority) does not appear to have been a topic of much discussion either at the time or in the later biographies. I find this curious although perhaps it is not. His decidedly unblond hair does not seem to have been a topic of much discussion either (except in jokes).
(ii) Not clear from your review (and this observation also is not, of course, a criticism): Did Stalin actually have something like a long-term strategy, a "career plan" if you will? Your review and presumably the biography point out factors that helped Stalin's rise (both features and abilities of Stalin himself and external circumstances) and you do clearly point out the importance of chance and happenstance, but it would be interesting to know whether Stalin had a more or less long-term strategy which he then executed (more or less well) or whether his rise and later role owe more to the skillful exploitation of opportunities for advancement as these presented themselves. (The two are not mutually exclusive of course.)
(iii) The passage on Stalin as a committed Marxist made me wonder what your views are on Mao's ideological commitment to Marxism - since you know a lot about China, maybe worth discussing that in a paragraph or two if you decided to extend the article? A more general "comparison" (for lack of a better term) with Mao's rise and role would probably also be much appreciated by readers who found your original review interesting, but might exceed the scope.
(iv) This fourth point is the only one on which I hope for a (brief) response from you. The review (and the biography) discuss a great many factors (in the sense of cause-and-effect relationships) that played a role in the events described. With the benefit of hindsight, the outcome (Stalin's rise to essentially dictatorial control of the Soviet Union) and the many intermediate outcomes (e.g., the Bolshevik coup aka the October revolution succeeding) may appear preordained, but they are / were anything but. To give but one example of one element of the big puzzle: the Okhrana / Okhranka one the one hand were apparently rather effective in suppressing open dissent, yet may - on the other hand - have increased alienation with the ancien régime. The question is about whether you have ever seen any work trying to describe these relationships in a structured manner - it could be a simple flowchart-like construction with boxes linking to other boxes with arrows indicating an effect of some sort. The idea behind such a representation would be to identify the factors that matter and how they matter and possibly use the relationships depicted in such a representation in different contexts as a basis for, for example, forecasting events. If my outline here is not particularly clear, that is likely because my thoughts on the subject are not yet particularly clear ... so feel free to just ignore my request for pointers in the direction of other authors who might have done work along these lines.
No answer to these comments expected (although I do hope for a brief response on point (iv)), but I trust that you find these to be of interest. They have not been written by an AI chatbot ;-) It is my way of saying "thank you" for a great piece of work.
Many thanks again and best wishes,
Xiao Xi
1) Excellent point on ethnic background—it’s certainly worth discussing, and Kotkin addresses it at several moments. What strikes me most is how Stalin, though ethnically Georgian, came to fully internalize and assert a belief in Russian great-power identity. There’s an interesting parallel with Hitler, who—as you noted—was Austrian by birth (from the border region of Austria and Germany), yet embraced German nationalism with fervor. I’m currently reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which also touches on this. Hitler expressed disgust toward the multiethnic character of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which likely shaped his nationalist zeal.
2) Kotkin notes that Stalin spent two critical decades of his life—ages 18 to 38—as a penniless revolutionary, possessing little real power and only a modest degree of prestige. If Stalin had anything resembling a “career plan,” it seems to have been a vague but driving ambition to (1) become a person of consequence and (2) make revolution.
3) As best I understand it, Stalin was considerably more well-versed in Marxism than Mao—particularly before the Yan’an period. In China, Marxist thought had barely penetrated the intellectual scene before Li Dazhao began writing about it in the late 1910s. While Mao worked briefly as a librarian’s assistant under Li, it seems unlikely he was reading much Marx or Lenin at that time. Stalin, by contrast, was embedded in the quite literary intellectual-revolutionary tradition where close reading of Marx and other theorists became a form of status signaling (though Stalin was considered weak in this regard, but only in regard to the towering heights of intellectual revolutionaries like Trotsky, Bukharin, and Lenin). Mao would even weaponize this kind of intellectualism against the returned Chinese communists who had studied in the Soviet Union—like Wang Ming. I’ve seen several scholars argue that Mao may have only seriously read The Short Course (if that). Though, based on some of his writings, he definitely read Lenin and probably some of Marx—but this still likely pales in comparison to Stalin’s extensive, repeated readings of Marx and Lenin (and copious marginalia), and his commissioning and micromanaging of textbooks on them. Stalin’s path to the top was being an unground revolutionary, being small time organizer, being a slavish devotee of Lenin, and then working during the Civil War period to become a bureaucratic mastermind. Mao, by contrast, made his way to the top by organizing peasant revolutions, usurping leadership during the Long March and fighting off the returnees, and then consolidating in Yan’an and over the course of the revolution. In some ways that oversimplified path to power shows how Marxism-Leninism as ideology would be more important to Stalin than Mao.
4) Unfortunately your last point is one I have the worst answer on. I think it could be interesting but I can’t recall any such structured framing. Probably some political science book has done. I asked chatgpt to make one lol
Dear Mr. Sine,
many thanks for the swift and extraordinarily detailed reply which is much appreciated! On point (iv) I shall give the AI chatbots a try as well, but I suspect that it is worth putting some time and effort into drafting something myself. If and when I have a diagram (or similar) worth looking at and / or I come across a source that provides a convincing example of what I have in mind, I may take the liberty of getting in touch again. In the meantime, many thanks again for both the review(s) and your answer and please try to keep posting. I suspect that you have a day job and find it impressive that you manage to publish on Substack as you do.
Best wishes,
Xiao Xi