If Stalin had died, the likelihood of forced wholesale collectivization—the only kind—would have been near zero, and the likelihood that the Soviet regime would have been transformed into something else or fallen apart would have been high. “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.”43 Utterly, eternally wrong. Stalin made history, rearranging the entire socioeconomic landscape of one sixth of the earth.
