Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

by Stephen Kotkin

Later in life, during his dictatorship, Stalin would vividly recall the seminary’s “spying, penetrating into the soul, humiliation.”

Irony is astounding

savagery of their customs, medieval pedagogy, and the law of the fist.”30

Marx’s revision of French socialist thought (Fourier, Saint-Simon) and British political economy (Ricardo, Smith) rested on what the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had called the dialectic: that is, on a supposedly in-built logic of contradictions whereby forms clashed with their opposites, so that historical progress was achieved through negation and transcendence (Aufhebung).

Marx argued that history proceeded in stages—feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism (when everything would be plentiful)—and

and that the decisive motor was classes, such as the proletariat, who would push aside capitalism, just as the bourgeoisie had supposedly pushed aside feudalism and feudal lords.

By the 1870s, critics on the left had attacked Marx’s vision for the organization—to “centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class”—as authoritarian, provoking recriminations and splits.

The Second International also adopted the red flag, which had appeared in France as a stark contrast to the white flag of the Bourbon dynasty

intelligentsia. The latter—literally, the intelligence of the realm—were

thinkers such as Herzen and Bakunin imagined the empire’s peasants to be inherently socialist and therefore, they argued, in Russia socialism could appear essentially before capitalism.

“bourgeois revolution” first, before a socialist revolution, even if the proletariat had to help the bourgeoisie achieve the bourgeois revolution.

May Day had been established as a holiday by socialists around the world in order to commemorate the Haymarket riots in Chicago in 1886, when police had fired on strikers who sought an eight-hour workday.

Jughashvili would lament that workers often did not appreciate the importance of studying and self-improvement.

He argued that inviting workers to join the party was incompatible with “conspiracy” and would expose members to arrest.

Lenin’s advocacy for an intelligentsia-centric party would soon come to divide the Iskra group.

him. They would likely have been even angrier had they known that while wallowing for a year in the Batum remand prison in 1902–3, the future Stalin twice begged the Caucasus governor-general for release,

“Everything that allows the triumph of the revolution is moral, and everything that stands in its way is immoral.”

Almost in the blink of an eye, a pious boy from Gori, Jughashvili had gone from smuggling Victor Hugo into the Tiflis seminary to becoming a participant—albeit a completely obscure one—in a global socialist movement. That was largely thanks not to some Caucasus outlaw culture, but to tsarist Russia’s profound injustices and repression.

Kvali. The tsarist political system and conditions in the empire promoted militancy.

Under the tsar’s regime, any attempt genuinely to help the people put one outside the pale of the law; one found oneself hunted and hounded as a revolutionist.”

Still, he did prove adept at cultivating a tight-knit group of young men like himself. “Koba distinguished himself from all other Bolsheviks,” one hostile Georgian emigre recalled, “by his unquestionably greater energy, indefatigable capacity for hard work, unconquerable lust for power, and above all his enormous, particularistic organizational talent” aimed at forging “disciples through whom he could . . . hold the whole organization in his grasp.”

Later, Stalin would not erase Lado’s independent revolutionary exploits or existence, even as almost everyone else connected to the dictator at one time or another would be airbrushed.

But he undercut all his own state building by involving himself in everything.

Above all, Peter built up his own persona, partly via court hazing rituals—dildo debauches, mock weddings—which accentuated the centrality of and access to the autocrat’s person.

True, Russia’s gentry accumulated as much wealth as their counterparts in Austria or even England. And unlike in Austria or England, the Russian gentry also produced cultural figures of world distinction—Lermontov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Skryabin, Mussorgsky.

But a still greater difference was that England’s aristocracy acquired political experience as a ruling class in a constitutional monarchy. Russia’s serf owners were all-powerful on their estates, but, ultimately, they lived under the autocrat’s sufferance. Elite status in Russia was predicated on rendering service in exchange for rewards—which could be withdrawn.

Multitudes of observers, including Karl Marx, asserted that “modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy.”10 They were wrong: the post-Petrine Russian state and its capital, St. Petersburg, more closely resembled European absolutism than ancient Muscovy.

Sycophancy could reach breathtaking heights.

As late as the 1790s, when Prussia—with 1 percent of Russia’s size in land—had 14,000 officials, the tsarist empire had only 16,000 and just a single university,

Many a deputy undertook machinations to depose his superior, which reinforced the inclination to hire mediocrities into the upper ranks, at least as top deputies, nowhere more so than in the tsars’ appointments of ministers.

From the top down the Russian state was mired in incompetenet goverment, due to its increased size in so short a time and the worry of having a subordinate overthrow you. This led to the stacking of state offices with people less than competent, further exacerbating the tension between the goverment adn the lower classes who were most vunerable to this incompetence.

At the same time, unlike the absolutism in Prussia, Austria, Britain, or France, Russia’s autocracy endured deep into modern times.

The inflexible autocracy had many enemies, including Iosif Jughashvili. But its most dangerous enemy was itself.

After that the pace picked up, as terrorist-assassins pursued what they called disorganization—provoking the police to make arrests and shed blood, which, in twisted terrorist logic, would galvanize society to revolt.

In response, the tsarist authorities had reorganized the political police, creating a formidable new body, the Okhrannoe otdelenie, which the terrorists promptly dubbed the okhranka— meaning, pejoratively, “the little security agency.”

Even working along with Russia’s regular Department of Police and Special Corps of Gendarmes, the shadowy okhranka never attained the societal coverage of its better-endowed French counterpart.

Many okhranka operatives were highly educated, forming a kind of “police intelligentsia,” compiling libraries of revolutionary works in order to discredit the revolutionaries’ ideas.

Adroitly sowing discord among naturally fractious revolutionaries and stage-managing terrorists, however, could never redress the tsarist order’s most profound vulnerability. The autocracy’s core problem was not that it fell under political assault, or that authoritarianism was ipso facto incompatible with modernity, but that Russia’s autocracy was deliberately archaic. Tsarism choked on the very modernity that it desperately needed and, to an extent, pursued in order to compete as a great power.

What we designate modernity was not something natural or automatic. It involved a set of difficult-to-attain attributes—mass production, mass culture, mass politics—that the greatest powers mastered. Those states, in turn, forced other countries to attain modernity as well, or suffer the consequences, including defeat in war and possible colonial conquest.

Modernity, in other words, was not a sociological process—moving from “traditional” to “modern” society—but a geopolitical process: a matter of acquiring what it took to join the great powers, or fall victim to them.

As some countries succeeded at modern industry, the world became divided between advantaged industrializers (Western Europe, North America, Japan) and disadvantaged raw material suppliers (Africa, South America, much of Asia).

But in many ways, the new world economy rested upon peasants in the tropics who supplied the primary products (raw materials) necessary for industrial countries and, in turn, consumed many of the goods produced from their raw materials.

Imperial Russia faced the modernity challenge with considerable success. It became the world’s fourth or fifth largest industrial power, thanks to textiles, and Europe’s top agricultural producer, an achievement of Russia’s sheer size. But here was the rub: Russia’s per capita GDP stood at just 20 percent of Britain’s and 40 percent of Germany’s.

Russia’s average lifespan at birth was a mere thirty years, higher than in British India (twenty-three), but no better than in China, and well below Britain (fifty-two), Germany (forty-nine) and Japan (fifty-one).

Russia was the 3rd world of the Great Powers.

(Treatment of state revenue as private income was perhaps most outlandish in the Caucasus, a sinkhole of imperial finance.)

59 At the same time, however, Russia’s army budget eclipsed state expenditure on education by a factor of ten. And even then, the war ministry incessantly complained of insufficient resources.

But the autocracy came to dread the very students it desperately needed.

the autocracy fell back upon repressing the workers whom the state’s own vital industrialization was creating.

Imperial Russia had more than 100 million rural inhabitants living under extremely diverse conditions. Every country undergoing the modernization compelled by the international system was torn by social tensions. But Russia’s tensions were magnified by the autocratic system’s refusal to incorporate the masses into the political system, even by authoritarian means. And many would-be revolutionaries who had abandoned peasant-oriented Populism for worker-centric Marxism faced a rethinking.

The Russian empire—unlike the world’s other great continental power—was not safely nestled between the two great oceans and two harmless neighbors in Canada and Mexico. Russia simultaneously abutted Europe, the Near East, and the Far East.

In many ways, Russian governance, and even Russian politics, pivoted on the two great ministries, internal affairs and finance, and the rivalry between them.

Like Stalin would, Witte lopsidedly prioritized heavy and large-scale industry at the expense of light industry and the welfare of the overwhelmingly rural population.