Stephen Kotkin: Stalin's Rise to Power | AI Podcast Clips

First of all, you've described a fascinating thought which is Stalin as having amassed arguably more power than any man in history. It's an interesting thing to think about. But can you tell about his journey to getting that power after the Russian Revolution? How does that perhaps echo to our current discussion about institutions and so on? And just in general, the story I think is fascinating of how one man is able to get more power than any other man in history.

It is a great story, not necessarily from a moral point of view, but if you're interested in power, for sure, it's an incredible story. So we have to remember that Stalin is also a product of circumstances, not solely his own individual drive, which is very strong. But for example, World War I breaks the czarist regime, the czarist order, Imperial Russian state. Stalin has no participation whatsoever in World War I. He spends World War I in exile in Siberia until the downfall of the the czarist autocracy. In February 1917, Stalin is in eastern Siberian exile. He's only able to leave Eastern Siberia when that regime falls. He never fights in the war. He's called up briefly towards the end of the war and is disqualified on physical grounds because of physical deformities from being drafted. The war continues. After the czarist regime has been toppled in the capital and there's been a revolution, the war continues and that war is very radicalizing. The peasants begin to seize the land after the Tsar falls, essentially destroying much of the gentry class. Stalin has nothing to do with that. The peasants have their own revolution, seizing the land not in law, but in fact de facto, not de jure land ownership. So there are these really large processes underway that Stalin is alive during but not a driver of. The most improbable thing happens, which is a very small group of people around the. The figure of Vladimir Lenin announces that it has seized power. Now, by this time in October 1917, the government that has replaced the czar, the so called provisional government has failed. And so there's not so much power to seize from the provisional government. What Lenin does is he does a coup on the left, that is to say Soviets or councils as we would call them in English, which represent people's power or the masses participating in politics, a kind of radical grassroots democracy are extremely popular all over the country and not dominated by any one group, but predominantly socialist or predominantly leftist. Russia has an election during the war, a free and fair election for the most part, despite the war at the end of 1917, in December 1917 and 3/4/plus of the country votes socialist in some form or another. So the battle was over the definition of socialism and who had the right to participate in defining socialism, not only what it would be, but but who had the right to decide. So there's a coup by Lenin's group known as the Bolsheviks, against all the other socialists. And so Lenin declares a seizure of power whereby the old government has failed people's power. The councils known as the Soviets are going to take their place and Lenin seizes power in the name of the Soviets. So it's a couple against the left, against the rest of the left, not against the Provisional Government that has replaced the Czar which has already failed. And so Stalin is able to come to power along with Lenin in this crazy seizure of power on the left against the rest of the left in October 1917, which we know is the October Revolution. And I call the October Coup, as many other historians call the October Revolution happened after the seizure of power. What's interesting about this episode is that the leftists who seize power in the name of the Soviets, in the name of the masses, in the name of people's power, they retain their hold. Many times in history there's a seizure of power by the left and they fail. They collapse, they're cleaned out by an army, or what we call forces of order, by counter revolutionary forces. Lenin's revolution. Lenin's coup is successful. It is able to hold power, not just seize power. They win a civil war and they're entrenched in the heart of the country already by 1921. Stalin is part of that group. Lenin needs somebody to run this new regime in the kind of nitty gritty way like Lenin is the leader, the undisputed leader in the Bolshevik party which changes their name to Communists in 1918. He makes Stalin the general secretary of the Communist Party. He creates a new position which hadn't existed before, A kind of day to day political manager, a right hand man. Not because Lenin is looking to replace himself, he's looking to institutionalize a helpmate, a right hand man. He does this in the spring of 1922. Stalin is named to this position which Lenin has created expressly for Stalin. So there's been a coup on the left whereby the Bolsheviks who become communists have seized power against the rest of the socialists and anarchists and the entire left. And then there's an institutionalization of a position known as General Secretary of the Communist Party. Right hand man of Lenin. Less than six weeks after Lenin has created this position and installed Stalin, Lenin has a stroke, a major Stroke and never really returns as a full actor to power before he dies of a fourth stroke in January 1924. So a position is created for Stalin to run things on Lenin's behalf. And then Lenin has a stroke. And so Stalin now has this new position, General Secretary, but he's the right hand of a person who's no longer exercising day to day control over affairs. Stalin then uses this new position to create a personal dictatorship inside the Bolshevik dictatorship, which is the remarkable story I tried to tell.

So is there anything nefarious about any of what you just described? So it seems conveniently that the position is created just for Stalin. There was a few other brilliant people, arguably more brilliant than Stalin, in the vicinity of Lenin. Why was Stalin chosen? Why did Lenin all of a sudden fall ill? It's perhaps a conspiratorial question, but is there anything nefarious about any of this historical trajectory to power that Stalin took in creating the personal dictatorship?

So history is full of contingency and surprise after something happens. We all think it's inevitable it had to happen that way. Everything was leading up to it. So Hitler seizes power in Germany in 1933, and the Nazi regime gets institutionalized by several of his moves after being named Chancellor. And so all German history becomes a story of the Nazi rise to power, Hitler's rise to power. Every trend, tendency is bent into that outcome. Things which don't seem related to that outcome all of a sudden get bent in that direction. And other trends that were going on are no longer examined because they didn't lead to that outcome. But Hitler's becoming Chancellor of Germany in 1933 was not inevitable, it was contingent. He was offered the position by the traditional conservatives. He's part of the radical right, and the traditional right named him Chancellor. The Nazi Party never outright won an election that was free and fair before Hitler came to power. And in fact, its votes on the eve of Hitler becoming Chancellor declined relative to the previous election. So there's contingency in history. And so Lenin's illness, his stroke, the neurological and blood problems that he had, were not a structure in history. In other words, if Lenin had been a healthier figure, Stalin might never have become the Stalin that we know. That's not to say that all history is accidental, just that we need to relate the structural, the larger structural factors to the contingent factors. Why did Lenin pick Stalin? Well, Stalin was a very effective organizer, and the position was an organizational position. Stalin could get things done. He would carry out assignments, no matter how difficult. He wouldn't complain that it was hard work or too much work. He wouldn't go off womanizing and drinking and ignore his responsibilities. Lenin chose Stalin among other options because he thought Stalin was the better option. Once again, he wasn't choosing his successor because he didn't know he was going to have this stroke. Lenin had some serious illnesses, but he had never had a major stroke before. So the choice was made based upon Stalin's organizational skills and promise against the others who were in the regime. Now, they can seem more brilliant than Stalin, but he was more effective, and I'm not sure they were very brilliant.

Well, he was exceptionally competent, actually, at the tasks for running a governor of the executive branch. Right. Of. Of a dictator.

Yes. He turned out to be very adept at being a dictator.

Yes.

And so if he had been chosen by Lenin and had not been very good, he would have been pushed aside by others. You can get a position by accident. You can be named because you're someone's friend or someone's relative. But to hold that position, to hold that position in difficult circumstances and then to build effectively a superpower on all that bloodshed. Right. You have to be skilled in some way. It can't be just accident that brings you to power, because if accident brings you to power, it won't last. Just like we discovered with Putin, he had some qualities that we didn't foresee at the beginning, and he's been able to hold power, not just be named into. Now, Putin and Stalin are very different people. These are very different regimes. I wouldn't put them in the same sentence. My point is not that one resembles the other. My point is that when people come to power for contingent reasons, they don't stay in power unless they're able to manage it. And Stalin was able to build a personal dictatorship inside that dictatorship. He was cunning, he was ruthless, and he was a workaholic. He was very diligent. He had a phenomenal memory. And so he could remember people's names and faces and events. And this was very advantageous for him as he built the machine that became the Soviet state and bureaucracy.

One of the things, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, you've made me realize, is this wasn't some kind of manipulative personality trying to gain more power solely like kind of an evil picture of a person, but he truly believed in communism.

The.

The. He, you know, as far as I can understand, again, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but he wanted to build a better world by building, by having infusing communism into the country and perhaps into the whole world. So maybe my question is, what role does communism as an idea, as an ideology play in all of this? In his rise to power in the people of the time, in the Russian people, actually, just the whole 20th century.

You're right. Stalin was a true believer, and this is very important. He was also hungry for power and for personal power, but just as you said, not for power's sake, not only for power. He was interested in enacting communism in reality and also in building a powerful state. He was a statist, a traditional Russian statist in the imperial sense. And this won him a lot of followers. The fact that they knew he was a hardcore true believing Communist won him a lot of followers among the communists. And the fact that he was a hardcore defender of Russian state interests, now in the Soviet guise, also won him a lot of followers. Sometimes those groups overlapped the communists and the Russian patriots, and sometimes they were completely different groups. But both of them shared an admiration for Stalin's dedication to those goals and his abilities to enact them. And so it's very important to understand that however thirsty he was for power, and he was very thirsty for power, that he was also driven by ideals. Now, I don't necessarily think that everyone around Stalin shared those ideals. We have to be careful not to make everybody into a communist true believer, not to make everybody into a great statist Russian patriot. But they were widespread and powerful attractions for a lot of people. And so Stalin's ability to communicate to people, those that he was dedicated to, those pursuits and his ability to drive towards them were part of his appeal. However, he also resorted to manipulation. He also resorted to violence. He lied. He spoke out of all sides of his mouth. He slandered other people. He sabotaged potential rivals. He used every underhanded method and then some in order to build his personal dictatorship. Now, he justified this, as you said, by appeals to communism and to Soviet.

Politics, to himself as well, too, to.

Himself and to others. And so he justified it in his own mind and to others. But certainly any means right were acceptable to him to achieve these ends. And he identified his personal power with communism and with Russian glory in the world. So he felt that he was the only one who could be trusted, who could be relied upon to build these things. Now, we put ourselves back in that time period. The Great Depression was a very difficult time for the capitalist system. There was mass unemployment, a lot of hardship, fascism, Nazism, Imperial Japan. There were a lot of associations that were negative with the kind of capitalist system that was not 100%, not a monolith, but had a lot of authoritarian incarnations. There was imperialism colonies that even the democratic rule of law capitalist states had non democratic, non rule of law colonies under their rule. So the image and reality of capitalism during that time period between World War I and World War II was very different from how it would become later. And so in that time period, in that interwar conjuncture after World War I, before World War II, communism held some appeal inside the Soviet Union for sure, but even outside the Soviet Union, because the image and reality of capitalism disappointed many people. Now, in the end, communism was significantly worse. Many more victims and the system of course would eventually implode. But nonetheless there were real problems that communism tried to address. It didn't solve those problems. It was not a solution. But it didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of the context of that interwar period. And so Stalin's rule, some people saw it as potentially a better option than imperialism, Fascism and Great Depression. Having said that, they were wrong. It turned out that Stalin wasn't a better alternative to markets and private property and rule of law and democracy. However, that didn't become clearer to people until after World War II. After Nazism had been defeated, Imperial Japan had been defeated, the Fascist Italy had been defeated, and, and decolonization had happened around the world. And there was a middle class economic boom in the period from the late 40s through the 70s that created a kind of mass middle class in many societies. So capitalism rose from the ashes, as it were, and this changed the game for Stalin and Communism. Communism is about an alternative to capitalism. And if that alternative is not superior, there's no reason for communism to exist. But if capitalism is in foul odor, if people have a bad opinion, a strong critique of capitalism, there can be appeal to alternatives. And that's kind of what happened with Stalin's rule. But after World War II, the communist.