Status Updates From Stalin: Paradoxes of Power,...

Onto Chapter 4: Constitutional Autocracy

Tsar Nicholas II’s need for autocratic power reveals its dire consequences for the first time.

“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.

Also Kotkin dabbles in light “what-if” on the final page, which I dislike.

Kotkin so far does an excellent job at setting the stage in which young Stalin (Koba) was to be born into. The industrialization of Germany, the increasing size of American industry following the civil war, and the Meiji Restoration all begin to influence global power whilst relatively local changes in the Russian Empire brought in an unimaginable swath of people into its operations.