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

by Stephen Kotkin

With the war raging, he wrote his foundational Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), adapting the ideas of the Brit John Hobson and the Austrian Rudolf Hilferding, arguing that capitalism was doomed but for its recourse to exploitation abroad. But it was hardly necessary to read Lenin to appreciate the link between the Great War and colonial rapaciousness. Between 1876 and 1915, gigantic swaths of the world’s territory had changed hands, usually violently.66 France had amassed a global empire 20 times its size, and Britain 140 times, colonizing hundreds of millions of people. Outside Europe, only Japan had managed to stave off the European onslaught and, with its own overseas colonies, emulate Europe’s rapaciousness. In German-controlled South-West Africa, when the colonized Herero rebelled (1904–7), suppression escalated into extermination—and almost succeeded: Germany wiped out up to 75 percent of the natives.67 The most notorious of all was tiny Belgium’s empire—80 times its size—which, in the pursuit of rubber and glory, enslaved, mutilated, and slaughtered perhaps half of Congo’s population, as many as 10 million people, in the decades before 1914.68 But this was the thing about the Great War: even in countries that practiced rule of law, politicians and generals used their own citizens no better, and often worse, than they had their colonial subjects.