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

by Stephen Kotkin

former American president (1901–9) confided in his wife, “I’m absolutely certain now, we’re all in for it.”3 After the death of the kaiser’s predecessor and grandfather (at age ninety-one), the inexperienced Wilhelm II had dismissed the seventy-five-year-old chancellor Otto von Bismarck.4 The young kaiser, who proved to be both arrogant and insecure, proceeded to plot coups against Germany’s constitution and parliament, and to engage in a blustering foreign policy, exacerbating the paradox of Bismarck’s unification: namely, that Germany seemed to threaten its neighbors while itself being vulnerable to those neighbors on two fronts. Wilhelm II—known as All Highest Warlord—had declined to renew Bismarck’s so-called German-Russian Reinsurance Treaty, thereby unwittingly spurring Russian reconciliation with France, and raising the prospect for Germany of a two-front war.5 Wilhelm II’s belated attempt to correct this mistake, by manipulating Nicholas II into the Treaty of Bjorko, had failed. Then there was the kaiser’s naval program. As of 1913, Britain accounted for 15 percent of international trade, but Germany came in second at 13 percent, and in this increasingly interdependent world of global trade, especially of vital food imports, Germany had every right to build a navy.6 But Wilhelm II and his entourage had unleashed a sixty-battleship fantasy for the North Sea.7 This had spurred Britain’s reconciliation with France—despite a near Franco-British war in 1898 over colonie...