Book review: The House That Stalin Built
Stephen Kotkin’s meticulous biography of Joseph Stalin
dispenses with the myth that he was an intellectual dullard, showing that he
was quite shrewd as well as forceful.
Stephen Kotkin, Stalin:
Volume 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928
Reviewed by Jack Matlock, Jr
ANYONE UNFAMILIAR with the quality of Stephen Kotkin’s four
earlier books on the Soviet Union might well question whether we need a new,
voluminous tome about the first fifty years of Joseph Stalin’s life. Stalin,
like Hitler, has been the subject of numerous biographies, ranging from Boris
Souvarine’s pioneering work to Robert C. Tucker’s multivolume study. Is there
anything important to add?
The answer is an emphatic yes, and not just because Kotkin’s Stalin is
the product of a careful review of how a tyrant gained control of a country and
exercised power. It dispenses with the myth that he was an intellectual
dullard, showing that he was quite shrewd as well as forceful. What’s more, it
contains essential background information for policy makers in the world today,
illuminating some of the causes of the strife that persists despite the end of
the Cold War.
In order to explain Stalin, Kotkin (a former valued
colleague of mine at Princeton University) provides a brilliant political
history of Russia in the early twentieth century. By casting his research net
widely and examining evidence that has only recently become available as a
result of the opening of Soviet archives, he illustrates the complexity of
motives and fundamental unpredictability of events as they unfolded during the
1920s. In addition, Kotkin has supplemented the main text with 120 pages of
notes containing relevant commentary of great interest, along with source
citations. The level of detail is microscopic and the judgments crackling. This
is a landmark achievement that is unlikely to be surpassed anytime soon.
Pace theoreticians of every school: history does not move in
predictable patterns. Human beings make history, but the makers and shakers
often fail to understand the potential effects of their actions. The most
carefully planned projects can bring results that are the opposite of those
intended. Once in a while, the wildest gambles pay off, but the payoff may not
resemble the prize that was sought.
Stalin, whose party nickname was Koba, succeeded, against
incalculable odds, in helping to create a Bolshevik dictatorship in the world’s
largest country; through adroit maneuvering, he positioned himself in absolute
control of that dictatorship.
The result, however, bore no resemblance to the proletarian
utopia predicted by Karl Marx. In fact, the Bolsheviks were turning Marxism on
its head by launching a revolution in Russia. Marx always thought that the
revolution would come in Western Europe. The notion that a Communist revolution
would emerge in Russia, where there was no real proletariat, would have
dumbfounded him.
According to Kotkin, the Russian empire’s dissolution in
wartime meant that “the revolution’s survival was suddenly inextricably linked
to the circumstance that vast stretches of Russian Eurasia had little or no
proletariat.” The regime scrambled to come up with a theory justifying tactical
alliances with local “‘bourgeois’ nationalists,” a term that had as much
bearing on reality as did the later employment of “kulak,” which implied that
any peasant who owned a cow or two was somehow part of the exploitative class.
KOTKIN’S STALIN provides many examples of
other logically perverse sequences of events. None is more striking than the
success and durability of Vladimir Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia on
November 7, 1917 (under the current calendar). Nobody expected it to last, not
even Lenin himself, it seems, unless it sparked a successful revolution in
Germany—which, of course, it failed to do. A full-scale uprising was simply not
in the cards: after Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated, there were the violent Spartacist
uprisings, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, as well as an abortive
Bavarian Soviet republic. But the German revolutionaries couldn’t hold on.
Bolshevik rule did not look much more secure.
Kotkin points out that Lenin’s “regime” initially consisted
“at the top, of just four people: Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Stalin, each of
whom had a criminal record for political offenses and none of whom had any
administrative experience.” He considers their creation of “one of the world’s
strongest dictatorships” as “beyond fantastic,” and notes that the whole
Bolshevik enterprise would almost certainly have been thwarted if just two
people, Lenin and Trotsky, had been assassinated in 1917 or 1918. Lenin’s
leadership was not that of typical transformative leaders, who “almost always”
succeed “by cobbling broad coalitions.” Lenin did the opposite, “refusing
cooperation and creating ever more enemies.”
The Bolsheviks did not succeed by organizing or managing an
effective administration, but rather by implementing policies that virtually
guaranteed war and chaos. They clung to power initially by “denying others a
role in presiding over chaos,” but it was more than that, as Kotkin’s account
demonstrates. In the cauldron of civil war and foreign invasion, the Bolsheviks
forged a system of repression designed to eliminate not only active opponents
but also presumed future adversaries. As he worked to establish a Bolshevik
dictatorship over what, from 1922, was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
Stalin systematically maneuvered to eradicate any potential rival from the
Communist Party leadership. By 1928, when this volume ends, Stalin was poised
to conduct the forced collectivization that would result in millions of deaths
and an agricultural system unable for decades to feed the country.
While Kotkin’s Stalin does not quite
“approximate a history of the world,” as the author avers in its initial
chapter, it covers most of what one needs to know about politics in Russia over
the first quarter of the twentieth century. It is also uncommonly entertaining,
incorporating descriptions of the personalities involved and covering
supporting casts along with the principal actors. Even Lenin’s driver in 1917
makes a cameo appearance. The verbal portraits of Czar Nicolas II, his family
and court, and key Russian politicians of the prewar period—Sergei Witte, Paul
Miliukov, Pyotr Stolypin and Pyotr Durnovo, among others—are keen and tightly
drawn. Virtually every person with significant interaction with Stalin is
identified and characterized in some fashion.
Kotkin’s narrative is peppered with acute observations and
unexpected comparisons. Some of his juxtapositions may seem strained, such as
his comparison of the Bolshevik Revolution to Dadaism, but they keep the reader
alert and intellectually involved. Others are right on target. For example,
refusing to blame the failings of czarist Russia on “backwardness,” he observes
that “the biggest problem for imperial Russia was not the nation but the
autocracy.”
STALIN WAS the most influential Bolshevik leader in
designing the governing structure of the USSR. He concluded that federalism
would allow the Bolsheviks to cement their power and spread their credo:
writing in Pravda on April 9, 1918, he stated, “Soviet power
has not yet succeeded in becoming a people’s power to the same extent in the
border regions inhabited by culturally backward elements.” It was important to
liberate the masses from “bourgeois” nationalists, he said, by championing
“schools, courts, administrations, organs of power and social, political, and
cultural institutions in which the laboring masses . . . use their own
language.” By July 1918 Soviet Russia became a new entity—the Russian Soviet
Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR).
Stalin and Lenin had disagreed over the substance of the new
Soviet republic. Stalin wanted to incorporate Ukraine, Belarus and the
Transcaucasian Federation into the RSFSR, giving them the same “autonomous”
status as Tataria and Bashkiria. Lenin insisted on bringing the RSFSR into a
broader union with Ukraine and the other Bolshevik-ruled national republics, so
that it would be suitable for the subsequent addition of Poland, Germany and
other “socialist” states that he expected to result from proletarian revolutions.
Stalin bowed to Lenin’s wishes. If he had not done so, one wonders whether, in
1991, the RSFSR would have broken up as easily as did the USSR.
A relevant feature of the USSR was the separation of the
formal government, a federation, from the real political power, the unitary
Communist Party, commanded from a single center, Moscow. The geographical
borders of the union republics were a sham, so far as political control was
concerned. They were designed to give non-Russians the illusion that they had
political autonomy. In some cases borders were drawn in a calculated way to
foster internal division, the better to exercise external control from Moscow.
It is these borders, further modified by changes during and after World War II,
that the USSR’s successor states inherited. It is important to understand their
origin if one is to comprehend the emotions involved in much of the conflict
that has emerged in the post-Soviet space following the Soviet collapse.
For example, the “frozen conflicts” in the South Caucasus
have roots in Stalin’s policy of creating pseudo-autonomous governments that
were in fact controlled from Moscow by a unitary Communist Party. When Moscow’s
heavy hand was lifted in the early 1990s, Armenia and Azerbaijan faced off in a
struggle over Nagorno-Karabakh, an area with an Armenian majority that Stalin
had made into an “autonomous” enclave in Azerbaijan. Once independent, Armenia
seized control of it and established a corridor to it through Azerbaijani
territory, but Azerbaijan still claims sovereignty over it. Likewise, tensions
between Georgian leaders and the non-Georgian residents of Abkhazia and South
Ossetia led to sporadic fighting, ethnic cleansing, the Russian invasion in
2008 and Russia’s recognition of the entities as “independent,” which neither
Georgia nor most of the rest of the world accepts.
Some of the conditions that helped lead to Ukraine’s current
fractured state were created during and after World War II, when Stalin
attached large portions of eastern Poland and smaller portions of eastern
Czechoslovakia and Romania to Ukraine. (He was not responsible, however, for
transferring Crimea to Kiev’s jurisdiction. That happened after Stalin died,
when Nikita Khrushchev was in control of the Communist Party.) As in the 1920s,
borders were drawn or changed to suit Moscow’s convenience, without
consultation with the residents or their consent. Nevertheless, when the Soviet
Union collapsed, what had been local administrative boundaries became international
frontiers overnight.
IN ASSESSING Stalin’s character, Kotkin rejects both
Trotsky’s view (that Stalin was a plodding, second-rate apparatchik) and the
psychological interpretation that attributes Stalin’s behavior as an adult to
his reaction to abuse he experienced as a child. In fact, Kotkin argues, Stalin
was hardworking, a prolific journalist and propagandist, with a knack for
getting things done and political skills far superior to Trotsky’s. Nor were
his childhood experiences any more trying than those of other Georgian students
in Tbilisi’s Russian Orthodox seminary, many of whom became Mensheviks.
Stalin’s battle against Trotsky began in 1917, and the
fallout from Lenin’s “Testament” (which purported to recommend that Stalin be
replaced as the party’s general secretary) haunted him in his subsequent
struggle with Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin.
One of the
most valuable features of Kotkin’s study is his acute analysis of the Lenin
“Testament.” There are reasons to suspect its authenticity. This paper with “a
few typed lines, no signature, no identifying initials” surfaced after the
Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923—several months after Lenin died. There is
no record of it in the logs kept of Lenin’s dictation. Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda
Krupskaya, had a legitimate grudge against Stalin and cooperated with Trotsky
to spread the “Testament” initially. But Krupskaya was the only person, aside
from his physicians, who saw Lenin regularly following his incapacitation.
Lenin may well have expressed similar thoughts to her, perhaps in response to
her complaints about Stalin’s behavior.
Whether the “Testament” was authentic or not, Stalin managed
to neutralize its impact by maneuvering to prevent anyone else from taking
advantage of it. Put bluntly, Trotsky’s political skills were no match for
Stalin’s. He famously wrote, “Stalin did not create the apparatus. The
apparatus created him.” This was wrong. Stalin’s construction of a Soviet
apparatus, Kotkin says, “was a colossal feat.” Kotkin adds, “He demonstrated
surpassing organizational abilities, a mammoth appetite for work, a strategic
mind, and an unscrupulousness that recalled his master teacher, Lenin.” When
Lenin appointed Stalin general secretary in 1922, he had, more or less, handed
him the keys to the Bolshevik kingdom. Stalin immediately began to construct a
personal dictatorship within a dictatorship.
In a marvelous set piece, Kotkin vividly describes Trotsky’s
internal exile in January 1928, which coincided with the expulsion of several
dozen other “bawlers and neurasthenics of the Left,” as Stalin dubbed them.
Trotsky himself was trundled out of his Moscow apartment by Stalin’s goons. He
wore a fur coat over pajamas and socks as he was brought to the train station
where a single rail coach with him, his family members and a secret police
convoy left Moscow. After he arrived at the last station on the Central Asian
rail line, Kotkin writes, “a bus laden with the luggage hauled them the final
150 miles across snowy mountains, and arrived in Alma-Ata at 3:00 a.m. on
January 25. He and family were billeted at the Hotel Seven Rivers on—what
else—Gogol Street.”
It was merely the first in a series of crushing blows that
Stalin would deal to the old Bolsheviks. Overall, his character was filled with
traits usually considered contradictory. He was, in Kotkin’s words, “Closed and
gregarious, vindictive and solicitous,” “an ideologue who was flexibly
pragmatic” and “a precocious geostrategic thinker . . . who was, however, prone
to egregious strategic blunders.” The contrasting features of the old boy’s
character echo George Kennan’s observation that if one is confronted with
contradictory statements about Russia, the wisest assumption is that both are
true.
In 1928, Stalin was poised to launch a massive program of
forced collectivization, creating a human catastrophe that transformed the
Soviet Union. If Stalin had not lived to carry it through, Kotkin is convinced,
and is convincing in his arguments, then no other Bolshevik leader would have
done so. “More than almost any other great man in history,” wrote the British
historian E. H. Carr, “Stalin illustrates the thesis that circumstances make
the man, not the man the circumstances.” Not so. In human history, individual
leaders matter. Kotkin’s work, the first of a projected trilogy, shows why.
See also
Book
review: new biography of Stalin Reviewed by Donald Rayfield
