On Kotkin's 2 volumes on Stalin - notes and questions

In order to understand Stalin, Kotkin basically wrote a whole world history of the 19th/20th century.

I just interviewed historian Stephen Koktin yesterday. The full episode should be out next Thursday on my podcast.

I spend a long time researching, and it's impossible to explore more than a small fraction of my curiosities during the interview. This was especially true for Kotkin. These 1000-page-each volumes basically compile all of late 19th/early 20th century history. Naturally, reading them inspired lots of thoughts that I wasn't able to exhaust during the interview itself (which was excellent and will be out next Thursday). So I thought I'd just release my notes publicly.

You can buy volume 1 here and volume 2 here.

Notes

One of Kotkin’s interesting takes from this book:

Even the package of attributes that we call modernity was a result not of some inherent sociological process, a move out of tradition, but of a vicious geopolitical competition in which a state had to match the other great powers in modern steel production, modern militaries, and a modern, mass-based political system, or be crushed and potentially colonized.

Part 1 starts by laying out the geopolitical context the tsarist government found itself in during the late 19th century. Bismarck had unified Germany and had put it at the leading edge in key modern industries like steel and chemicals. Britain controlled the seas, kickstarted the industrial revolution, and had a global empire. Japan was going through the Meiji reformation, whose implications would become clear to the world when they beat Russia in a war in 1905.

Meanwhile, what would happen to you if you failed to modernize was made amply clear by the example of Qing dynasty China. What had been the foremost power for almost all of recorded history now couldn’t even prevent a tiny island all the way across the world from forcing opium into its markets.

Russia, like every other country, wanted to avoid such a fate. Its long land borders rendered it permeable to invasion from almost all of Eurasia. Imperial Russia had expanded 50,000 square kilometers per year for 450+ years (to put that in perspective, that's adding an area the size of Slovakia or Costa Rica every single year, for four and a half centuries). This is the classic continental power trap that Sarah Paine talks about. You have to conquer more territory in order to defend the territory you already have. What this meant is that by the end of the 19th century, Imperial Russia had dominion over dozens of different nations, including Georgia, from which Stalin hailed.

China, of course, was also a very big country, but that didn't help much when the more indiscriminate industrialized British came knocking. Russia knew it was at least a generation behind. By 1900, Russia had the world's fourth or fifth largest industrial power. However, the vast majority of the population remained rural peasants living in conditions that had changed little since emancipation.

Russia had a Bismark like figure in Finance Minister Sergey Witte (1892-1903). He kickstarted Russia’s belated industrialization, but failed to prevent a war with Japan which Russia lost, and which was catastrophic for the Tsar’s image. In 1905, the tsarist government almost fell, and was only barely rescued by a brutal crackdown followed by concessions from Nicholas II to form a parliament-like Duma. This was a fucked institution from the very start. Nicholas has still retained more or less all the powers he had before and turned the Duma into a debating club. Kotkin thinks that history would have been much better if the government was just allowed to fall then instead.

Despite remaining an autarchy, Russia did have another great reformer in Peter Stolypin who pursued land reform and further industrialization. In terms of economic output, the effect seemed to have been pretty good. In the 20 years preceding the Bolshevik Revolution, median incomes in Russia had risen 50%. The problem was that this new government had the support of nobody. The liberals and constitutionalists in the Duma felt that it was too little, too late, and also politically illegitimate. Meanwhile, the aristocracy felt that all these reforms were against their own interests. The regime's last chance at survival floundered because there was no constituency which felt bought into the project.

Before we move on to the Bolshevik revolution, some questions about Kotkin’s take on modernization:

• Does he think that countries adopt leading-edge technologies faster than you might expect, given domestic opposition to displacement and automation? Because of this overwhelming geo-political pressure to modernize? If so, does he think that we are overrating the regulatory or political barriers to the adoption of AI? America, will we feel compelled to race on AI against China the same way that late 19th century Russia felt compelled to race against Germany on industrialization?

• Does he think this vicious geopolitical competition still incentivizes the adoption of modernity, given that wars of colonization and territorial conquest have subsided? Sure, this is obviously not true in some parts of the world, but there's no amount of fucking up that some European country could do which would actually get its territory physically dismembered by another country in Europe.

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The defeat of Tsarism came not when Kolchak was routed, not when the February Revolution was raging, but much earlier! It was overthrown without hope of restoration once Russian literature adopted the convention that anyone who depicted a gendarme or policeman with any hint of sympathy was a lickspittle and a reactionary thug

Sozenitsn, Gulag Archipeligo

I remain quite confused about how repressive the tsarist regime actually was. The whole revolution was apparently motivated by how the autocracy and their secret police, Okhrana, behaved. But then you have all these people who are literally calling for the overthrow of the government just hanging around. People like Stalin and Lenin who are literally calling for the overthrow of the government are just spending time in exile, living on government stipends, robbing banks, writing articles for Pravda, and having affairs with farmers’ wives. Here is a passage from the Gulag Archipelago:

Let us examine, for instance, some generally known biographical facts about Lenin. In spring, 1887, his brother was executed for an attempt on the life of Alexander III. And what happened to him? In the autumn of that very year Vladimir Ulyanov was admitted to the Imperial University at Kazan, and what is more, to the Law Faculty! Surprising, isn’t it?...

Then a few years later this same young revolutionary was arrested for founding in the capital a “League of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class”—no less! He had repeatedly made “seditious” speeches to workers, had written political leaflets. Was he tortured, starved? No, they created for him conditions conducive to intellectual work…

But then, of course, he was condemned by a three-man tribunal and shot? No, he wasn’t even jailed, only banished. To Yakutya, then, for life? No, to a land of plenty, Minusinsk, and for three years…

He asked for an allowance from the state, and they paid him more than he needed. It would have been impossible to create better conditions than Lenin enjoyed in his one and only period of banishment…

Tsardom was always weak and irresolute in pursuit of its enemies. The most important special feature of persecution (if you can call it that) in Tsarist times was perhaps just this: that the revolutionary’s relatives never suffered in the least.

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Kotkin on what Trotsky could have done in the position he found himself in in 1924, despite being censured by the Central Committee, and missing Lenin’s funeral, and generally finding himself getting sidelined:

In the name of the greater cause of safeguarding the revolution, he [Trotsky] could have violated party discipline by reading aloud on Red Square from Lenin’s purported dictation, using as his mantra Lenin’s summons to “remove Stalin” as general secretary, then flown from factory to factory to rally workers, just as in 1917—let them arrest him. Of course, to do all that, Trotsky needed to perceive Lenin’s death as a strategic opportunity, and he needed a persuasive story line about how the grand socialist dream could be revived, why all those harsh exchanges he had had with Lenin were incidental, and why he (Trotsky) was uniquely qualified to carry forward the sacred Leninist cause. A tall order, to put it mildly. But who could doubt that if Lenin had found that others were conspiring against him, he would have mounted a coup against his own party?

This is such a good question, and one I will ask Kotkin about.

Keep in mind that Trotsky is no naive pushover. He was the primary organizer and tactical leader of the armed insurrection that overthrew Russia's Provisional Government in October 1917. Trotsky directed the Red Guards to seize post offices, telegraph stations, railway stations, bridges, and state banks, effectively paralyzing the Provisional Government's ability to govern. And then of course came the successful assault on the Winter Palace.

Same goes for all the old Bolsheviks, who we know were sooner or later purged, exiled, and/or killed by Stalin. In May 1924, why did Khamanev only read Lenin’s last testament, which called for the removal of Stalin from the position of General Secretary, in front of a small closed session of the Central Committee instead of the full 1,300 Congress? Once Zinoviev broke with Stalin on socialism in one country in 1925, why didn’t he go back to his power base in Leningrad and start an insurrection? Bukharin was Lenin’s golden boy, and the fucking editor of Pravda for god’s sake. All of Russia could have woken up to Lenin’s testament printed on the front pages. What is going to do, kill you? By the time the show trial is being scheduled, that’s guaranteed anyways. How did these hardened revolutionaries who had overthrown a regime which had lasted for hundreds of years get cucked by Stalin?

I just remembered how OpenAI’s board tried to kick Sam out: all they said was, “He has not been consistently candid.” What is the lesson here? No half measures. If you come for the king, you best not miss.

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There’s an important lesson in here about the instability of collective leadership. It supposedly worked in China between 1976 with the death of Mao and 2012 with the appointment of Xi as general secretary? But is it fair to call the period that Deng was paramount leader collective leadership? When the premier Li Peng wanted to reverse economic liberation after the Tiananmen Square protests, Deng came out of retirement and went on his Southern tour and declared that, "Whoever is not for reform must step down." Was that really collective leadership? Just because we like what he did doesn’t make it collective leadership.

Stalin’s strategy (which according to my previous guest Victor Shih is also Xi’s) was the align the main members of the party against the next person he wanted to purge. Rinse and repeat. Stalin aligns Khamanev and Zinoviev against Trotsky, then Bukharin against Khamanev and Zinoviev, and by the time it’s Bukharin’s turn, Stalin is basically god dictator already..

An obvious question at this point: at some point you should catch on right? If you’re Bukharin in 1930, and you know you have this independent credibility and power base, what, you think that’s just gonna be fine by Stalin for the next however many decades until you peacefully retire?

Anyways, back to our original question, why doesn’t collective leadership seem to work in practice? Why does it always devolve into one man rule? Will ask Kotkin.

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Was Bukharin the Soviet Deng? Killed of course during the great terror, unlike Deng, who was merely rusticated and thus could eventually return.

“the well-off upper stratum of the peasantry and the middle peasant who strives to become well-off are now afraid to accumulate. The situation is created such that a peasant is afraid to mount a metal roof over his house so as not to be called a kulak; if he purchases machinery he does so in a way that the Communists do not see. Higher technology becomes conspiratorial.” Poor peasants, meanwhile, complained that Soviet power hindered their hiring by the better-off peasants. (Most peasants who hired labor themselves worked; they were not rentier landlords.) Party attitudes were holding down production on which the state’s well-being and industrialization hopes rested. Bukharin dismissed the fantasy of collective farms, because the peasants were just not joining them. “That we should in all ways propagandize among the peasants formation of collective farms is true, but it is not true when people maintain that there is a highway to the movement of the peasant mass toward the path of socialism,” he stated. Rather, the answer was to benefit from economic incentives. “It is necessary to say to the entire peasantry, to all its strata: ‘Enrich yourselves, accumulate, develop your farms,’” he told the party activists. “Only idiots can say that we should always have the poor; now we need to conduct policy in such a way that the poor would vanish.”

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NEP’s dilemma was not merely that the rate of industrial growth seemed too low, making people wonder how long under the NEP it would take before the USSR became a truly industrial country. The dilemma was not merely the unmodernized technical level and small, divided plots of Soviet agriculture, which produced harvests insufficient to support the kind of grain exports necessary to finance imports of machines, including for agriculture. 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. All these were profound problems, but the core dilemma of the NEP was ideological: seven years into the NEP, socialism (non-capitalism) was not in sight. NEP amounted to grudgingly tolerated capitalism in a country that had had an avowedly anticapitalist or socialist revolution.

There is this morbid contrarian curiosity about whether collectivization was necessary for Russia’s industrialization. In many cases, I don't even think it's motivated by actual Marxism. There's something appealing about this revisionist mentality of "Are taboo bad things in history good actually?"

But the reality is that there's every reason to expect Russia to have industrialized more successfully without this brutal enslavement of a hundred million peasants. There's not only the example of how almost every other country industrialized, from America to Europe, but also the basic 101 story of how it would have happened is totally credible. More successful peasants would use their profits to mechanize or drive other efficiency gains. Their growing wealth would stimulate a growing consumer economy. Perhaps most importantly, a government not dedicated to the overthrow of wealthy democracies abroad would have been much more capable of attracting foreign direct investment from abroad to support industrialization.

Only in 1928 did Soviet Russia's industrial output recover to the level it was at in 1913 - the point at which it was already a generation or two behind Germany, Britain, and America. And just when things were stabilizing, Stalin launches the first five-year plan, which reduced grain production by over 32% and led to the halving of overall livestock.

The traditional story of what should happen with developing countries is that both the pareto frontier expands and they move from agriculture to industry, as a smaller number of people can handle the food demands of the country. Communist collectivization definitely had the move to industry along the Pareto frontier. But this was coupled to a catastrophic implosion of the Pareto frontier. While Russia was able to produce less grain overall after collectivization, the Soviet government had control over it. It could now export this grain to fuel its military-industrial goals.

Thus, the correct way to understand collectivization is not as a rapid, though costly, speed run to industrialization. Rather, it is as a policy which reduces economic output and even harms industrialization but lets the state control the full economy.

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I'm curious if Kotkin thinks that a lesson from this period of history is that one should fall over themselves to support the lesser of two evils.

The Russian examples seem to support this. Arguably, liberals should have backed the authoritarian (but reformist) Stolypin, and the Provisional Government factions should have united more decisively to prevent the greater evil of the Bolsheviks.

Yet this lesson seems to directly contradict the German example, where conservatives did support what they perceived as the lesser evil, Hitler, to stop the Communists, leading to a catastrophic outcome.

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Stalin has an inhuman appetite for administration and micromanagement over an empire that streches 11 time zones, from economy to foreign policy to even arrest lists and film edits. He went through dozens of often lengthy memos and documents, and this doesn’t even include his 70 hours of meetings a week. I found it funny how often he marks up memos and letters with the following two phrases:

Regarding something he thought must be changed: “Is it possible that we can allow X? Of course it is not.”

Regarding a supposed blocker to his will: “Is it possible to do X? Of course it is.”

Questions

Tsarist regime

• I remain quite confused about how repressive the tsarist regime actually was. The whole revolution was apparently motivated by how the autocracy and their secret police, Okhrana, behaved. But then you have all these people who are literally calling for the overthrow of the government just hanging around. Lenin’s brother had tried to kill the tsar Alexander III for god’s sake! People like Stalin and Lenin are just spending time in exile, living on government stipends, robbing banks, writing articles for Pravda, and having affairs with farmers’ wives.

• Given how much the war with Japan had weakened the regime, why did Nicholas think that fighting World War I would be good for strengthening his control and image?

• I feel like the revolution of 1905 is understudied. How close did the regime get to falling? Why didn’t Wite’s reforms for the decade prior do anything to placate people? How useful were those reforms in the first place? And Kotkin says it would have been better if the regime were allowed to fall then. What likely would have replaced it? Why not think there might have been another leftist revolution afterwards?

• Why is the tsarist regime sending people to Siberia instead of just killing them?

• Would the hoped for reforms from Wite and Stoyplin have actually caused modernization, even if they had actually been implemented?

Rise of socialism

• You say that by 1917 some kind of leftist revolution was inevitable, but it didn’t have to end with the Bolsheviks. Why was Russia radicalized in the left-wing direction by World War I, whereas Germany was radicalized in the right-wing direction? Not to mention that Germany had a much more vibrant social democratic tradition than Russia. This is related to the whole question of why communism happened first in peasant societies, which was the opposite of Marx's prediction.

• What distinguished the people like Churchill who immediately saw the folly of both socialism and fascism? What were they able to see that others missed?

• It’s interesting to me that other leaders of the revolution like Trotsky, Lenin, etc have written extensive manifestos. And Stalin is considered the ‘outstanding mediocrity’ because despite having many articles to his name, he isn’t a prominent intellectual. It seems that these other leaders thought that intellectualizing was all you needed, and day-to-day administrative ability was a peripheral concern.

• Do you think a lesson from this period of history is that one should fall over themselves to support the lesser of two evils?

  • The Russian examples seem to support this. Arguably, liberals should have backed the authoritarian (but reformist) Stolypin, and the Provisional Government factions should have united more decisively to prevent the greater evil of the Bolsheviks.

  • Yet this lesson seems to directly contradict the German example, where conservatives under Franz von Papen did support what they perceived as the lesser evil, Hitler, to stop the Communists, leading to a catastrophic outcome.

• Why did Marxist revolutions always happen in places Marx thought worst for them? Marx saw industrialization as a prerequisite for revolution; most actual Marxist revolutionaries came from agricultural soceities and ended up doing really terrible things to try and jump start industrialization. What did Marx and Engels not understand here?

Stalin

• So Stalin ends up being this inhuman administrator and micromanager. But he’s happy spending over a decade plus before the Bolshevik revolution just hanging out in Siberia, impregnating farmer girls, and other small time shenanigans. Wouldn’t you think that someone who has that much aptitude for organization and leadership would get up to something more ambitious, even if revolutionary?

• There’s an interesting book called Stalin’s Library, which goes through Stalin’s wide and diverse readings of literature, science, history, and economics. And the book notes that in none of Stalin’s extensive markups does he even hint at doubting Marxism. How can this be? How can someone who has been exposed to so many different ideas not even come across something which makes him doubt his principles? Does this make us question the whole value of humanistic education?

  • What's the best way to think about what Marxism and Stalinism were? How did so many people who consider themselves part of the intelligentsia develop this almost religious attitude towards criticism of the party? Why were they so convinced that history was inevitably headed in this direction? Is Marxism a replacement religion, a secular apocalyptic cult, the psychological equivalent to a spiritual experience?

Political dynamics, terror, dictatorship within dictatorship

• How do we explain the surplus of sadism in Russia, which allowed Stalin to enforce collectivization and the great terror? The 25 thousanders, the tens of thousands of interrogators and torturers in the gulag system.

• What if the Politburo members had simply accepted Stalin's resignation? Would there be any face-saving way for him to still come back? Or would that have been it? Moses tried to pull a similar trick on every single mayor in New York City until Governor Rockefeller actually just accepted it, and nothing bad happened. His bluff was called.

• Did any old Bolsheviks ever express regret about the whole revolution once fruits of the revolution turned sour? Not just about letting Stalin get so much power, but the whole Marxist uprising thing in general?

• Suppose someone else had won the succession struggle after Lenin. What would Stalin have done if he had found himself as a Politburo member serving someone else’s dictatorship within a dictatorship in 1930? Would he have been able to instigate the kind of conspiracy that nobody dared assemble against Stalin?

• Say what you will about the Bolshevik revolutionaries, they certainly had balls. Why did so many of them fold to pressure? Why did Old Bolsheviks like Nikolai Bukharin and Grigory Zinoviev, who had faced down the Tsar, confess to fabricated charges of treason during Stalin's public Moscow Trials? Knowing execution was certain, why didn't they use that final platform to expose Stalin's tyranny? Similarly, during the Cultural Revolution, why didn't a figure like Premier Liu Shaoqi, once Mao's designated successor, use a final speech at a party plenum to launch a desperate, last-stand denunciation of Mao as he was being systematically purged and humiliated? In all these cases, there was an extensive period where they were basically a dead man walking, but still in their normal positions of power.

• Stalin is personally choreographing many of these show trials. So at some level he must have known that they were mistaken. Why does he do it nonetheless?

• Why doesn’t the (more than) decimitation of the Red Army instigate a military coup?

• Relatedly, in Tsarist Russia, ministers - and even tsars - are getting assassinated left and right. In your coda for the first volume, you talk about how easy it would have been for someone to assassinate Stalin. This is someone who a 100 million peasants he has enslaved have something against, and who dozens of top leaders have good reason to fear. Why does no one even try to kill him?

Stalin’s foreign policy

• So you say that Stalin was hoping for a war between the capitalist powers because he thought it would expand the reach of communism, just as the First World War had. Given how outrageously successful he was in using the Second World War to increase the global footprint of Communism, did Stalin wish for a Third World War?

• Stalin seems oddly good at foreign policy. I think in a lot of alternate worlds, either Chiang Kai-Shek completely wipes out the Chinese Communist Party instead of creating a united front with them (which gave the communists a lot of unearned prestige, given that they were supplying literally 1/40 of the troops as the nationalists), or alternatively, he is just killed and kidnapped by the Communists, which would likely force a Japan collaborationist government in China.

  • One big update from your biographies was that Stalin was very reluctant to promote socialist or communist parties abroad, including in Spain and China.

  • He seems much more successful and less ideological with foreign policy than domestic policy.

• If Bolsheviks don’t take power in Russia, does Communism just not become a historical force. Maybe Europe still goes social democratic, but you don’t have brutal leftist dictators take control in China, North Korea, parts of Africa and South America? Or do you think this kind of Marxist-Leninist political philosophy is enough of an attractor state that it would have arisen independently?

• If Stalin is supposed to be this dedicated Marxist, why is he running a more pragmatic, less ideological foreign policy? Half hearted support of Communists during Spanish Civil War, trying to get Mao to stop at the Yangtze River when chasing down Chaing Kai Shek

Socialist economic policy

• Why doesn’t communism have a bigger impact on the longer run growth trajectory of Russia? Do you suspect that without communism, Russia might have been hyperbolic instead? Do you think without communism, due its large population (1.29x US in 1939) and resources, Russia might have ended up with a bigger economy than even America (which it never had during the real Cold War).

• • Is it possible that while less than optimal, communism actually was somewhat workable in the early 20th century because technology just required massive investment, didn’t require that much signal from consumer demand?

• Was Stalin right that communism wouldn’t survive in the long run if most of the economy (which was agriculture at that point) was run on a capitalist basis? Of course, it would have been a good thing if communism collapsed. But nonetheless, given his political philosophy, was he empirically correct about the right next action?

• As of 1924, did the communists really believe that you could just get socialism without coercion? How exactly was that supposed to happen? To the extent it was supposed to be from state companies just freely out-competing small peasants, as Bukharin hoped, isn't that just capitalism?

Modernity

• You have an interesting take that “the package of attributes that we call modernity was a result not of some inherent sociological process, a move out of tradition, but of a vicious geopolitical competition in which a state had to match the other great powers”.

  • Do you think that countries adopt tech faster than we might expect because of this overwhelming geo-political pressure to modernize? If so, do you think that we are overrating the regulatory or political backlash to the adoption of AI? Will we feel compelled to race on AI against China the same way that late 19th century Russia felt compelled to race against Germany on industrialization?

• Do you think this vicious geopolitical competition still leads to the adoption of more advanced government/tech, given that wars of colonization and territorial conquest have subsided? There's no amount of fucking up that some European country could do today which would actually get its territory physically dismembered by another country in Europe.

• You note how the early 20th century had seen more technological change than any time before (and probably even since) - planes, tanks, cars, airplanes, radio, extension of railways and steamships, further mechanization, etc etc. Is there any way this pace of change is implicated in the chaos and extremism in Russia (and Europe overall)?

Collapse of Soviet Union

• At a high level, how do you think about the differences between the regime change in 1917 and 1991? Why doesn’t the latter produce any kind of grand ideology?

• Does China today share to any significant degree the weaknesses of the Eastern block before 1989? There is falling productivity in the last-ditch effort to make up for it by investing heavily in some technological miracles. But certainly they have the opposite of Polish disease, in that people are concerned they’re exporting too much, right?

China

• China has preserved the Leninist core of the Soviet system (with party control over state, cadres running everything, state subsidization of militarily relevant heavy industries and technologies) but not the Marxism. Does it disprove Stalin's claim that political monopoly cannot survive capitalism?

• Why does collective leadership always seem to devolve into one person dictatorship in practice? Why is it an unstable political equilibrium? Soviet Union under Stalin, China now under Xi, etc.

• Say you are Xi Jinping. What lessons from Stalin would you be heeding? What lessons should you be heeding but maybe are not?

• Xi Jinping makes a big deal about how the Soviet Union fell in part because it repudiated Stalin (ergo, China must not repudiate Mao). What do you think of this judgement?

History as a discipline

• Every morning you wake up, you get to choose whether you will either go through the next many dozen papers in the Stalin archive and write the next few pages of the meetings he conducted on some given day, or whether you will go on some podcast and attract a million people through your personality and reservoir of scholarship. How do you make that choice?

Special thanks to Ege Erdil and Tanner Greer (see his here), but also many others, for excellent suggestions for questions.