Stalin
By Stephen Kotkin
Penguin, 976 pp., $40
For all the blood on his hands, Josef Stalin is indisputably one of the most important historical figures of the 20th century.
But where many biographers agree with Leon Trotsky's waspish dismissal of Stalin as an "outstanding mediocrity" (another observer called him "a grey blur") raised to power by a bloated bureaucratic caste, Princeton University historian Stephen Kotkin lets us know his portrait will be different.
His Stalin is the man valued by Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin for his "combination of unwavering revolutionary convictions and get-things-done style," an "indomitable . . . leader of inner strength, utterly dedicated to Lenin's ideas, able to carry the entire apparatus, the country, and the cause of the world revolution on his back."
This will not be Kotkin's only swipe at conventional wisdom in his big new biography, "Stalin, Volume 1: The Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928" (Penguin, 976 pp., $40).
The early going is familiar. Born Ioseb (or Iosif in Russian) Jughashvili in tsarist Georgia in 1878, the young Stalin attends a seminary, picking up a flair for liturgical cadences that he will use to his advantage later, before turning to revolutionary politics, occasional banditry, Siberian exile and a leadership role with the Bolsheviks inside Russia while Lenin was in exile before the upheavals of 1917.
In another deviation from standard accounts, Kotkin remains unimpressed by speculation that Stalin's cruelty and paranoia sprang ineluctably from his rough upbringing: "Do we really need to locate the wellsprings of Stalin's politics or even his troubled soul in beatings he allegedly received as a child in Gori?"
His demons were not given, Kotkin writes, but "emerged as a result of politics," especially the ruthless power struggle with Trotsky and others to succeed Lenin after the latter's death in January 1924.
Lucidly written and prodigiously sourced, this is a vast book amid a vaster project; two more volumes are promised. And so it has its longueurs, depending on the reader's interests. For me, it was the exhaustive accounts of the Civil War campaigns of 1918-21 and the unrest in the countryside.
Others might be tempted to nod off trying to follow the byzantine intraparty conflicts of the 1920s. But to me, that is the most compelling part of the book – and it's where Kotkin makes his boldest claims.
As Robert Service detailed in his recent biography of Trotsky, the leader of the Red Army was more or less finished politically by the time he launched his quixotic "Left Opposition" in the fall of 1923, though his international stature remained undiminished for several years. Kotkin does add some crucial details that partially support Trotsky's claims that Stalin and his allies nonetheless resorted to various dirty tricks to freeze him out.
When opposition resolutions were winning protest votes in Moscow party organizations, for example, Stalin's top aide "threw the winning tallies in the trash and reported false returns for publication in Pravda."
Still, Kotkin rejects the core of Trotsky's analysis of Stalin with a rhetorical trope that is repeated several times throughout the book: "Trotsky famously wrote that 'Stalin did not create the apparatus. The apparatus created him.' This was exactly backward. Stalin created the apparatus, and it was a colossal feat."
At the center of this power struggle – which dragged on another four years, until late 1927 – was Stalin's creation of a "personal dictatorship within the dictatorship." And that turned on Lenin's so-called "Testament," a document he dictated in December 1922 and January 1923, giving his acidic take on those who would supplant him as he lay crippled by the series of strokes that would eventually kill him.
The document famously notes that Stalin, "having become general secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands; and I am not sure that he will always be able to use that power with sufficient caution." It goes on to suggest "the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin."
In the book's most provocative claim, Kotkin brands the Testament (most likely) a forgery. (As a good historian, he wobbles.)
There are a number of reasons to disagree. Kotkin wonders why, if Lenin created the post of general secretary expressly for Stalin in the spring of 1922, he would call for his removal within a year. But Lenin's earlier move was made with the idea that he would be there to check Stalin's authority. After his health began to fail, that concentration of power might look very different indeed.
But the biggest objection to Kotkin's thesis is the most obvious: Even in the heat of his bitter, seemingly endless battles with the opposition, when the Testament was repeatedly thrown in his face, Stalin never called it a fake, which would have been the easiest way to discredit it.
Kotkin himself seems aware of this difficulty, but his explanation doesn't quite convince: "Stalin himself never publicly voiced suspicions about the authenticity of Lenin's dictation. He could not escape the fact that . . . [it] comported with a widespread view of his own character." In other words, it "rang true."
And in fact, one of the "Paradoxes of Power" of Kotkin's subtitle is the continuing hold this "dictation" had on Stalin, both as a threat and a challenge, even as his power grew.
The Testament "is important as a key to Stalin's psyche and behavior," Kotkin writes. "The Testament helped bring out his demons, his sense of persecution and victimhood . . . but also his sense of personal destiny and iron determination."
Another, related paradox is how Stalin could feel powerless just as his personal dictatorship edged toward total: "Even Stalin's absolute power did not delight him absolutely. He exulted in it, yet it roused his self-pity."
Kotkin makes an intriguing suggestion about Stalin's decision to assume all of it, "the giddy pleasure and the torment" of absolute leadership, on his shoulders alone.
"For centuries the people in Russia were under a tsar," Stalin said at a dinner in 1926. "The Russian people are tsarist. For many centuries the Russian people, especially the Russian peasants, have been accustomed to one person being at the head. And now there should be one."
Although this account comes from a third party, and so is hearsay, it does (to paraphrase Kotkin) ring true.
Kotkin leaves us in 1928, on the verge of Stalin's massive push toward collective agriculture and forced industrialization that would exact a price in millions of lives.
He ends with a remarkable chapter called "If Stalin Had Died," which argues that, of all the contenders to succeed Lenin, only Stalin could have carried through such a radical, bloody "revolution from above." And he frames it with one of his many patented rhetorical reversals.
" 'More than almost any other great man in history,' wrote the historian E.H. Carr, 'Stalin illustrates the thesis that circumstances make the man, not the man the circumstances.' Utterly, eternally wrong. Stalin made history, rearranging the entire socioeconomic landscape of one sixth of the earth. Right through mass rebellion, mass starvation, cannibalism . . . Stalin did not flinch."
Kotkin's next volume will tell the story of those years. It's a testament to his skill that, even after arguing with his wilder ideas and after 900-plus pages, we'll be waiting for more.
Kappes is features editor of The Plain Dealer.