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

by Stephen Kotkin

Behind mundane disagreement he saw not legitimate opinion but malevolent forces. His conception of politics did not even allow for politics.6 Lenin railed against the idea that every society was made up of multiple interests that deserved competitive political representation and balancing as naively inviting in the “wrong” interests (“bourgeois” or “petit bourgeois”).

He rejected the rule of law as an instrument of class domination, not a protection against the state.9 He dismissed the self-organization of society to hold the state in check.10 The upshot was a brutal intensification of tsarism’s many debilitating features: emasculation of parliament, metastasizing of parasitic state functionaries, persecution and shakedowns of private citizens and entrepreneurs—in short, unaccountable executive power, which was vastly enhanced in its grim arbitrariness by a radiant ideology of social justice and progress. But then, Lenin fell fatally ill.

Rarely in world history has one man played such an outsized role and, suddenly, been sidelined—an outcome evocative, in very different political ways, of Abraham Lincoln’s civil war victory and emancipation of the slaves, followed by his assassination. Lenin’s early departure was an unintentional revolutionary shock second only to the seizure of power, and it unexpectedly cleared a path for Stalin to supreme power.

Lenin never named a successor. But in a momentous act in March 1922, he created a new post, “general secretary” of the party, expressly for Stalin.

Lenin had by no means intended to hand over supreme power to Stalin.

Beyond the fact that Stalin’s ascendancy inside the regime owed a great deal to Lenin’s actions, the Communist regime had come into being as a result of a coup, and, while claiming to rule in the name of the proletariat, executed proletarians who dared to question the party’s self-assigned monopoly. It was the party that had usurped power. In effect, those scholars who intentionally or unintentionally echo Trotsky and his supporters are accusing Stalin of stealing what had already been stolen.78

Lenin’s secretariat took on an essentially limitless range of issues, setting a precedent, and no one did more than Lenin to establish a living example of one-man rule at the top.

Trotsky and other critics of Stalin’s regime also asserted that his triumph reflected no special abilities, just special circumstances. This is manifestly false. Still, we must be careful not to err in the opposite direction and lionize him. He was brilliantly adept at administration and manipulation, but we shall observe Stalin learning on the job, and often failing. That was not merely because of his plentiful shortcomings but also because Lenin had helped conjure into being both an ideologically blinkered dictatorship and a costly global antagonism. Managing the severely difficult challenge of Russian power in the world, now further complicated by the Leninist Communist dictatorship, would have confounded any would-be successor. Stalin’s efforts were strenuous but the results decidedly mixed.

Stalin could never centralize the whole country himself, but he could effectively centralize the bosses who were centralizing their own provinces.

An estimated 5 to 7 million people lost their lives between 1921 and 1923 from starvation and related diseases, amounting to 50,000 deaths per week.173 In the worst famine-stricken areas, the GPU would post guards at cemeteries to prevent the starving from digging up corpses to eat.

Employing 300 field agents who engaged up to 100,000 Soviet helpers at 19,000 field kitchens, the ARA at its height fed nearly 11 million people daily.180 Gorky wrote to Hoover that “your help will enter history as a unique, gigantic achievement, worthy of the greatest glory, which will long remain in the memory of millions of Russians . . . whom you have saved from death.”

That a finance commissariat existed under a Communist regime was a surprise. During the civil war the regime had collected no taxes, funding itself by confiscating grain and other goods and printing paper money.190 Confusion enveloped the country’s monetary base.

The resulting runaway inflation made vodka a major means of exchange and store of value, as barter took over the economy. Things were not as bad as Weimar Germany’s hyperinflation, where the Mark went from 60 to $1 in 1921 to 4.2 trillion to $1 two years later, but a top tsarist-era economist estimated that between 1914 and 1923 the ruble depreciated by 50 million times.

But by 1924, the Soviet currency would be stabilized and the economy remonetized, a stunning turn of events achieved by a rebuilt finance commissariat.

Without the macroeconomic achievements of Ilinka, 9, Stalin would not have enjoyed the stability that rescued the Soviet regime and enabled him to concentrate on building his personal dictatorship.

Sokolnikov enforced balance of payments discipline as well, and by 1924 the Soviets would manage a trade surplus.206 Sokolnikov oversaw introduction of a regular budgetary system, with revenues from customs duties, transport, and especially direct taxation (the agricultural tax in kind, an income tax), but also new excise taxes on common items such as matches, candles, tobacco, wines, coffee, sugar, and salt. Taxing salt had been abolished as far back as 1881, making its revival by Sokolnikov extraordinary. The regime, in 1923, also reintroduced the monopoly on vodka sales (the tsars’ derided “drunken budget”), bringing in significant revenues.

This dynamic could be seen all across the Soviet system—Stalin looking for personal animosities to manipulate to his benefit; officials appealing for his favor against political rivals.

But while Stalin was proud of his immersion in the Marxist and Russian intelligentsia traditions, he was also a self-styled praktik: a practitioner, a doer, the closest a non-proletarian revolutionary could get to assuming the identity of a proletarian. That said, Stalin returned again and again to the touchstone of Lenin’s writings. The fundamental fact about him was that he viewed the world through Marxism.

But how well Trotsky understood Stalin remains doubtful. The two did not socialize. (“I was never in Stalin’s apartment,” Trotsky admitted, which, however, did not inhibit his assurances that he had Stalin figured out.)274 Beyond doubt, Stalin possessed a searing ambition to be a person of consequence; indeed, he worked at it relentlessly. Stalin subscribed to a substantial number of periodicals, and soon he would instruct Tovstukha to organize his enormous library according to subjects: philosophy, psychology, sociology, political economy, Russian history, history of other countries, diplomacy, military affairs, belles lettres, literary criticism, memoirs. This was not for demonstration but for work.

In a remarkably short time, Stalin had people everywhere that mattered, and the extent to which functionaries serving the cause understood themselves also to be serving him personally was extraordinary.

To be sure, the capacity of the dictatorship as of 1922–24 was limited, but it was greater than that of tsarism, for unlike the autocracy, the Soviet regime actively promoted mass mobilization on its behalf. And yet, the Soviet state, too, had failed so far to discover the secret to fully integrating the mobilized masses into an authoritarian polity.

Trotsky persisted in exposing the despair of Lenin’s position, demanding immediate industrialization through planning. Lenin in effect was saying be patient: the regime was fully secure for now and in time would win out if it performed its job of regulating capitalist relations. Trotsky was saying build socialism in the economy now, or else the opportunity would be lost forever.

Lenin’s dictation to Stalin also called for granting law-making but not executive functions to the state planning commission and noted he was prepared to “move toward Trotsky’s position to a certain degree and under certain conditions.”

Lenin’s preferred form of a USSR was ultimately a bet on world revolution, while Stalin’s proposal—annexation into the RSFSR—would have been a bet on historic Russia, without excluding world revolution.

On January 17, Stalin proposed that Trotsky become head of the state planning commission as well as deputy chairman of the government.91 Trotsky refused this, too.92 By refusing to become Lenin’s top deputy with Lenin seriously ill, Trotsky in effect was refusing to take over the government. It seems inexplicable. One part of the explanation consists of Trotsky’s continued insistence on replacing Sokolnikov’s “dictatorship of finances” (as Trotsky wrote in this exchange of letters) with a “dictatorship of industry,” which, however, Lenin adamantly refused. No less fundamentally, Trotsky understood that Stalin, as head of the party, could control the government (through the nomenklatura process, among other levers), and he was just not going to take a position subordinated to Stalin, even if Trotsky refrained from saying as much explicitly. Trotsky’s desire for a dictatorship of industry and an end to the party’s oversight of the economy had both a policy aspect (planning, super industrialization) and a political aspect: it was his answer to Stalin’s dictatorship of the party apparatus. But Stalin, who did not like the NEP any more than Trotsky did, crucially, like Lenin, and because of Lenin, understood the necessity of flexible tactics for the greater cause: Stalin accepted the NEP. To put the matter another way, in 1922, Stalin could have his party dictatorship and Lenin’s NEP. Trotsky could not have his economic dictatorship and the NEP.

These were extraordinary pieces of paper, consisting of barbed evaluations of six people. (When Stalin was handed and read the dictation, he is said to have exclaimed of Lenin, “He shit on himself and he shit on us!”

Trotsky united instead of divided his enemies with a relentlessly condescending personality.287 By nature aloof as well, he was clueless about the consequences, even in hindsight, as when he would recall that he had refused to socialize with others in the ruling group because he “hated to inflict such boredom on myself. The visiting of each other’s homes, the assiduous attendance at the ballet, the drinking-parties at which people who were absent were pulled to pieces, had no attraction for me. . . . It was for this reason that many group conversations would stop the moment I appeared.”

More than anyone he had brought the USSR into being. It was he who schemed to bring to heel the Muslim Communists of the populous East. He was the one who defended the anathema of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. Objectively, no one was more central to the Communist enterprise on a day-to-day basis, a conclusion Stalin likely reached himself. But during these years, his power was gravely threatened by a sheet of paper calling for his removal.

Compared with the preening Trotsky, Stalin could appear as the revolution’s hardworking, underappreciated foot soldier. Compared with Trotsky’s popularity among Russia’s small cosmopolitan intelligentsia, as the master of multiple European languages and author of fluent works about culture as well as politics, Stalin could be the representative of the far vaster middling sort, whose aspirations he captured like a tuning fork.13 Stalin walked into a golden opportunity to become the orthodox Leninist as well as a household name by battling, and besting, the world-renowned Trotsky.

hard reality. Soviet military expenditures in fiscal 1926–27 reached a mere 41 percent of the 1913 level.114 The Red Army essentially had no tanks, other than the ancient Western-made ones it had captured from the Whites during the civil war.

Shortages had become endemic and the rift in the understanding of socialism between the masses, for whom it meant freedom, abundance, and social justice, and the party regime, for whom it meant tighter political control and sacrifices for industrialization, filled police surveillance reports.

Modern Russian power, in its Soviet guise, too, still rested upon wheat and rye. For all the dreams of modernity, by 1928 industry had barely regained 1913 tsarist levels even with the prolonged recuperation provided by the partially legalized markets of the New Economic Policy.4 By contrast, industry in Britain and Germany was 10 percent greater than in 1913; in France, 40 percent, in the United States, a whopping 75 percent.5 Russia had lost ground.

Three quarters of all grain was sown by hand, nearly half reaped with sickles and scythes, and two fifths threshed with chains or similarly manual devices.10 Russian agriculture was just not advancing, while among the great powers, mechanization was well under way.

On July 12, Molotov closed out the Soviet party plenum with a report on the training of new specialists, pointing out the backwardness of the Soviet science laboratories and technical learning, giving examples of one Moscow school with equipment dating to 1847 and textbooks to 1895. He divulged that the vast Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic had a mere 117 students studying for Ph.D.s in technical subjects.

The regime’s urban shock troops would break peasant resistance, but the country’s inventory of horses would plummet from 35 million to 17 million, cattle from 70 million to 38 million, pigs from 26 million to 12 million, sheep and goats from 147 million to 50 million. In Kazakhstan, the losses would be still more staggering: cattle from 7.5 million to 1.6 million, sheep from 21.9 million to 1.7 million. Countrywide, nearly 40 million people would suffer severe hunger or starvation and between 5 and 7 million people would die in the horrific famine, whose existence the regime denied.2 “All the dogs have been eaten,” one eyewitness would be told in a Ukrainian village. “We have eaten everything we could lay our hands on—cats, dogs, field mice, birds—when it’s light tomorrow, you will see that the trees have been stripped of bark, for that too has been eaten. And the horse manure has been eaten. Yes, the horse manure. We fight over it. Sometimes there are whole grains in it.”3

Forced wholesale collectivization only seemed necessary within the straitjacket of Communist ideology and its repudiation of capitalism. And economically, collectivization failed to deliver. Stalin assumed it would increase both the state’s share of low-cost grain purchases and the overall size of the harvest, but although procurements doubled immediately, harvests shrank. Over the longer term, collective farming would not prove superior to large-scale capitalist farming or even to smaller-scale capitalist farming when the latter was provided with machinery, fertilizer, agronomy, and effective distribution.5 In the short term, collectivization would contribute nothing on net to Soviet industrial growth.6

The Depression afforded Stalin unprecedented leverage: suddenly, the capitalists needed the Soviet market as much as the Soviets needed their advanced technology. Without the Great Depression would the capitalists have developed such overwhelming incentives to pursue the Soviet market no matter what? Indeed, the capitalist powers not only sold their best technology to the Communist regime, they continued doing so even after the Soviets were found to be violating contracts by purchasing designs for one factory and using them for others, trickery that was amply recorded in indignant internal foreign company records; the capitalist had no other customers for massive capital goods. Scholars who write of Moscow facing an “uncooperative world economy” have it exactly backward.28 Ideology and the party monopoly were the constraints; the global economy, the enabler. In fact, the global economic crisis was a double gift. Nothing did more to legitimate Stalin’s system. But Stalin had no idea that a Great Depression was around the corner, and that it would bring the foreign capitalists on bended knee.

Without Lenin, Trotsky never again demonstrated the leadership that he had in 1917 and during the civil war under Lenin’s authority. On the very uneven playing field of the personal dictatorship that Stalin inherited by dint of his appointment as general secretary and Lenin’s stroke, Trotsky was still capable of brilliant polemics, but not of building an ever-wider faction, dividing his enemies, subsuming his convictions to necessary tactical considerations. More than that, Trotsky had never been an indefatigable, nitty-gritty administrator or a strategist capable of ruthlessly opportunistic improvisation. Whatever the overlap between his and Stalin’s core beliefs, Stalin’s abilities and resolve were an order of magnitude greater.

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.