Stephen Kotkin: Stalin's Rise to Power

00:00:00.000 | - First of all, you've described a fascinating thought,

00:00:04.500 | which is Stalin is having amassed arguably more power

00:00:09.360 | than any man in history.

00:00:10.960 | It's an interesting thing to think about.

00:00:14.020 | But can you tell about his journey to getting that power

00:00:17.260 | after the Russian Revolution?

00:00:19.580 | How does that perhaps echo to our current discussion

00:00:24.100 | about institutions and so on?

00:00:27.500 | And just in general, the story I think is fascinating

00:00:31.180 | of how one man is able to get more power

00:00:34.400 | than any other man in history.

00:00:36.120 | - It is a great story.

00:00:39.100 | Not necessarily from a moral point of view,

00:00:42.360 | but if you're interested in power,

00:00:44.060 | for sure it's an incredible story.

00:00:45.960 | So we have to remember that Stalin

00:00:49.440 | is also a product of circumstances,

00:00:52.500 | not solely his own individual drive, which is very strong.

00:00:57.220 | For example, World War I breaks the Tsarist regime,

00:01:02.220 | the Tsarist order, Imperial Russian State.

00:01:05.340 | Stalin has no participation whatsoever in World War I.

00:01:10.580 | He spends World War I in exile in Siberia.

00:01:14.980 | Until the downfall of the Tsarist autocracy

00:01:19.940 | in February 1917, Stalin is in Eastern Siberian exile.

00:01:25.940 | He's only able to leave Eastern Siberia

00:01:28.900 | when that regime falls.

00:01:30.440 | He never fights in the war.

00:01:33.220 | He's called up briefly towards the end of the war

00:01:37.780 | and is disqualified on physical grounds

00:01:40.560 | because of physical deformities from being drafted.

00:01:43.700 | The war continues after the Tsarist regime

00:01:47.740 | has been toppled in the capital

00:01:50.660 | and there's been a revolution.

00:01:54.520 | The war continues and that war is very radicalizing.

00:01:58.620 | The peasants begin to seize the land after the Tsar falls,

00:02:03.440 | essentially destroying much of the gentry class.

00:02:07.780 | Stalin has nothing to do with that.

00:02:09.540 | The peasants have their own revolution,

00:02:12.180 | seizing the land, not in law, but in fact,

00:02:16.140 | de facto, not de jure land ownership.

00:02:19.100 | So there are these really large processes underway

00:02:23.700 | that Stalin is alive during, but not a driver of.

00:02:28.700 | The most improbable thing happens,

00:02:31.880 | which is a very small group of people

00:02:34.400 | around the figure of Vladimir Lenin

00:02:37.760 | announces that it has seized power.

00:02:41.720 | Now by this time in October 1917,

00:02:45.960 | the government that has replaced the Tsar,

00:02:49.280 | the so-called provisional government, has failed.

00:02:53.160 | And so there's not so much power to seize

00:02:56.040 | from the provisional government.

00:02:58.160 | What Lenin does is he does a coup on the left.

00:03:01.280 | That is to say, Soviets or councils,

00:03:07.120 | as we would call them in English,

00:03:09.080 | which represent people's power

00:03:11.040 | or the masses participating in politics,

00:03:13.600 | a kind of radical grassroots democracy,

00:03:16.560 | are extremely popular all over the country

00:03:19.800 | and not dominated by any one group.

00:03:22.920 | But predominantly socialist or predominantly leftist.

00:03:27.080 | Russia has an election during the war,

00:03:31.440 | a free and fair election for the most part,

00:03:33.880 | despite the war, at the end of 1917, in December 1917,

00:03:39.800 | and three quarters plus of the country votes socialist

00:03:44.600 | in some form or another.

00:03:46.900 | So the battle was over the definition of socialism

00:03:49.840 | and who had the right to participate in defining socialism.

00:03:54.240 | Not only what it would be, but who had the right to decide.

00:03:58.360 | So there's a coup by Lenin's group known as the Bolsheviks

00:04:02.640 | against all the other socialists.

00:04:05.200 | And so Lenin declares a seizure of power,

00:04:09.420 | whereby the old government has failed,

00:04:12.880 | people's power, the councils known as the Soviets,

00:04:16.220 | are gonna take their place.

00:04:18.680 | And Lenin seizes power in the name of the Soviets.

00:04:22.520 | So it's a coup against the left,

00:04:25.000 | against the rest of the left.

00:04:27.000 | Not against the provisional government

00:04:28.960 | that has replaced the czar, which has already failed.

00:04:32.120 | And so Stalin is able to come to power along with Lenin

00:04:35.960 | in this crazy seizure of power on the left

00:04:41.640 | against the rest of the left in October 1917,

00:04:45.000 | which we know is the October Revolution.

00:04:47.800 | And I call the October coup as many other historians call.

00:04:52.660 | The October Revolution happened after the seizure of power.

00:04:57.600 | What's interesting about this episode

00:05:00.000 | is that the leftists who seize power

00:05:02.840 | in the name of the Soviets, in the name of the masses,

00:05:05.640 | in the name of people's power, they retain their hold.

00:05:10.360 | Many times in history there's a seizure of power

00:05:12.880 | by the left and they fail.

00:05:15.420 | They collapse, they're cleaned out by an army

00:05:19.060 | or what we call forces of order,

00:05:21.500 | by counter-revolutionary forces.

00:05:23.760 | Lenin's revolution, Lenin's coup is successful.

00:05:27.960 | It is able to hold power and not just seize power.

00:05:31.660 | They win a civil war and they're entrenched

00:05:36.360 | in the heart of the country already by 1921.

00:05:40.380 | Stalin is part of that group.

00:05:42.640 | Lenin needs somebody to run this new regime

00:05:46.640 | in the kind of nitty gritty way.

00:05:48.280 | Lenin is the leader, the undisputed leader

00:05:51.660 | in the Bolshevik Party, which changes their name

00:05:54.460 | to communists in 1918.

00:05:57.000 | He makes Stalin the general secretary

00:06:01.860 | of the Communist Party.

00:06:03.420 | He creates a new position, which hadn't existed before,

00:06:08.900 | a kind of day-to-day political manager,

00:06:11.980 | a right-hand man.

00:06:13.780 | Not because Lenin is looking to replace himself,

00:06:16.560 | he's looking to institutionalize a helpmate,

00:06:19.340 | a right-hand man.

00:06:20.400 | He does this in the spring of 1922.

00:06:24.700 | Stalin is named to this position,

00:06:28.480 | which Lenin has created expressly for Stalin.

00:06:31.500 | So there's been a coup on the left,

00:06:33.900 | whereby the Bolsheviks, who become communists,

00:06:38.020 | have seized power against the rest of the socialists

00:06:40.940 | and anarchists and the entire left.

00:06:44.300 | And then there's an institutionalization of a position

00:06:47.700 | known as general secretary of the Communist Party,

00:06:50.820 | right-hand man of Lenin.

00:06:52.220 | Less than six weeks after Lenin has created this position

00:06:56.660 | and installed Stalin, Lenin has a stroke,

00:07:00.520 | a major stroke, and never really returns as a full actor

00:07:08.100 | to power before he dies of a fourth stroke in January 1924.

00:07:13.100 | So a position is created for Stalin

00:07:16.260 | to run things on Lenin's behalf,

00:07:19.300 | and then Lenin has a stroke.

00:07:20.960 | And so Stalin now has this new position general secretary,

00:07:26.460 | but he's the right hand of a person

00:07:28.900 | who's no longer exercising day-to-day control over affairs.

00:07:33.900 | Stalin then uses this new position

00:07:36.420 | to create a personal dictatorship

00:07:39.060 | inside the Bolshevik dictatorship,

00:07:41.940 | which is the remarkable story I tried to tell.

00:07:44.780 | - So is there anything nefarious

00:07:47.200 | about any of what you just described?

00:07:50.100 | So it seems conveniently

00:07:52.260 | that the position is created just for Stalin.

00:07:56.100 | There was a few other brilliant people,

00:07:58.560 | arguably more brilliant than Stalin

00:08:00.500 | in the vicinity of Lenin.

00:08:02.140 | Why was Stalin chosen?

00:08:04.620 | Why did Lenin all of a sudden fall ill?

00:08:09.620 | It's perhaps a conspiratorial question,

00:08:12.720 | but is there anything nefarious

00:08:14.180 | about any of this historical trajectory to power

00:08:18.860 | that Stalin took in creating the personal dictatorship?

00:08:21.740 | - So history is full of contingency and surprise.

00:08:24.960 | After something happens, we all think it's inevitable.

00:08:30.620 | It had to happen that way.

00:08:32.760 | Everything was leading up to it.

00:08:35.220 | So Hitler seizes power in Germany in 1933,

00:08:39.640 | and the Nazi regime gets institutionalized

00:08:43.940 | by several of his moves after being named chancellor.

00:08:47.380 | And so all German history becomes a story

00:08:50.980 | of the Nazi rise to power, Hitler's rise to power.

00:08:54.260 | Every trend, tendency is bent into that outcome.

00:08:59.260 | Things which don't seem related to that outcome.

00:09:02.420 | All of a sudden get bent in that direction.

00:09:05.740 | And other trends that were going on are no longer examined

00:09:09.800 | because they didn't lead to that outcome.

00:09:12.460 | But Hitler's becoming chancellor of Germany in 1933

00:09:16.740 | was not inevitable, it was contingent.

00:09:19.420 | He was offered the position

00:09:20.900 | by the traditional conservatives.

00:09:23.580 | He's part of the radical right,

00:09:24.980 | and the traditional right named him chancellor.

00:09:28.840 | The Nazi party never outright won an election

00:09:32.440 | that was free and fair before Hitler came to power.

00:09:35.680 | And in fact, its votes on the eve

00:09:38.360 | of Hitler becoming chancellor declined

00:09:40.520 | relative to the previous election.

00:09:43.320 | So there's contingency in history,

00:09:45.560 | and so Lenin's illness, his stroke,

00:09:49.280 | the neurological and blood problems that he had

00:09:55.520 | were not a structure in history.

00:09:59.120 | In other words, if Lenin had been a healthier figure,

00:10:02.840 | Stalin might never have become the Stalin that we know.

00:10:06.880 | That's not to say that all history is accidental,

00:10:09.920 | just that we need to relate the structural,

00:10:12.120 | the larger structural factors to the contingent factors.

00:10:16.800 | Why did Lenin pick Stalin?

00:10:19.080 | Well, Stalin was a very effective organizer,

00:10:21.880 | and the position was an organizational position.

00:10:25.360 | Stalin could get things done.

00:10:27.440 | He would carry out assignments, no matter how difficult.

00:10:30.600 | He wouldn't complain that it was hard work or too much work.

00:10:34.960 | He wouldn't go off womanizing and drinking

00:10:37.680 | and ignore his responsibilities.

00:10:41.200 | Lenin chose Stalin among other options

00:10:43.920 | because he thought Stalin was the better option.

00:10:47.080 | Once again, he wasn't choosing his successor

00:10:49.340 | because he didn't know he was gonna have this stroke.

00:10:52.880 | Lenin had some serious illnesses,

00:10:55.920 | but he had never had a major stroke before.

00:10:58.700 | So the choice was made based upon Stalin's

00:11:03.800 | organizational skills and promise

00:11:06.320 | against the others who were in the regime.

00:11:12.040 | Now, they can seem more brilliant than Stalin,

00:11:14.720 | but he was more effective,

00:11:16.240 | and I'm not sure they were very brilliant.

00:11:18.840 | - Well, he was exceptionally competent,

00:11:21.040 | actually, at the tasks for running a government,

00:11:23.480 | the executive branch, right, of a dictator.

00:11:26.280 | - Yes, he turned out to be very adept at being a dictator.

00:11:30.760 | And so if he had been chosen by Lenin

00:11:34.340 | and had not been very good,

00:11:36.000 | he would have been pushed aside by others.

00:11:39.160 | You can get a position by accident.

00:11:42.860 | You can be named because you're someone's friend

00:11:46.920 | or someone's relative, but to hold that position,

00:11:51.320 | to hold that position in difficult circumstances,

00:11:54.560 | and then to build effectively a superpower

00:11:57.200 | on all that bloodshed, right,

00:11:59.680 | you have to be skilled in some way.

00:12:03.100 | It can't be just accident that brings you to power

00:12:07.000 | because if accident brings you to power, it won't last.

00:12:11.240 | Just like we discovered with Putin,

00:12:13.680 | he had some qualities that we didn't foresee

00:12:16.160 | at the beginning, and he's been able to hold power,

00:12:20.320 | not just be named.

00:12:21.840 | Now, Putin and Stalin are very different people.

00:12:25.240 | These are very different regimes.

00:12:27.320 | I wouldn't put them in the same sentence.

00:12:29.960 | My point is not that one resembles the other.

00:12:32.620 | My point is that when people come to power

00:12:37.000 | for contingent reasons, they don't stay in power

00:12:40.880 | unless they're able to manage it.

00:12:42.960 | And Stalin was able to build a personal dictatorship

00:12:46.640 | inside that dictatorship.

00:12:48.200 | He was cunning, he was ruthless, and he was a workaholic.

00:12:52.680 | He was very diligent.

00:12:54.080 | He had a phenomenal memory, and so he could remember

00:12:57.840 | people's names and faces and events,

00:13:00.440 | and this was very advantageous for him

00:13:03.680 | as he built the machine that became

00:13:06.640 | the Soviet state and bureaucracy.

00:13:09.080 | - One of the things, maybe you can correct me

00:13:11.120 | if I'm wrong, you've made me realize

00:13:13.960 | is this wasn't some kind of manipulative personality

00:13:17.840 | trying to gain more power solely,

00:13:21.760 | like kind of an evil picture of a person,

00:13:24.380 | but he truly believed in communism.

00:13:26.460 | As far as I can understand, again,

00:13:31.060 | you can correct me if I'm wrong,

00:13:32.200 | but he wanted to build a better world

00:13:34.120 | by having, infusing communism into the country,

00:13:41.600 | perhaps into the whole world.

00:13:45.100 | So maybe my question is what role does communism

00:13:50.100 | as an idea, as an ideology play in all of this,

00:13:54.500 | in his rise to power, in the people of the time,

00:13:58.280 | in the Russian people, actually just the whole

00:14:00.160 | 20th century?

00:14:01.280 | - You're right.

00:14:03.480 | Stalin was a true believer, and this is very important.

00:14:06.960 | He was also hungry for power and for personal power,

00:14:10.680 | but just as you said, not for power's sake,

00:14:14.160 | not only for power.

00:14:15.840 | He was interested in enacting communism in reality,

00:14:20.760 | and also in building a powerful state.

00:14:23.520 | He was a statist, a traditional Russian statist

00:14:27.080 | in the imperial sense.

00:14:29.520 | And this won him a lot of followers.

00:14:33.000 | The fact that they knew he was a hardcore,

00:14:35.120 | true believing communist, won him a lot of followers

00:14:38.960 | among the communists.

00:14:40.800 | And the fact that he was a hardcore defender

00:14:44.480 | of Russian state interests, now in the Soviet guise,

00:14:48.300 | also won him a lot of followers.

00:14:50.520 | Sometimes those groups overlapped,

00:14:53.160 | the communists and the Russian patriots,

00:14:55.920 | and sometimes they were completely different groups,

00:14:58.500 | but both of them shared an admiration

00:15:01.200 | for Stalin's dedication to those goals

00:15:05.320 | and his abilities to enact them.

00:15:08.120 | And so it's very important to understand

00:15:10.640 | that however thirsty he was for power,

00:15:14.000 | and he was very thirsty for power,

00:15:16.140 | that he was also driven by ideals.

00:15:21.520 | Now, I don't necessarily think that everyone

00:15:26.520 | around Stalin shared those ideals.

00:15:30.320 | We have to be careful not to make everybody

00:15:32.820 | into a communist true believer,

00:15:34.840 | not to make everybody into a great statist Russian patriot,

00:15:39.240 | but they were widespread and powerful attractions

00:15:43.960 | for a lot of people.

00:15:46.840 | And so Stalin's ability to communicate to people

00:15:50.840 | that he was dedicated to those pursuits

00:15:54.640 | and his ability to drive towards them

00:15:57.440 | were part of his appeal.

00:15:59.000 | However, he also resorted to manipulation.

00:16:02.400 | He also resorted to violence.

00:16:05.160 | He lied, he spoke out of all sides of his mouth.

00:16:08.760 | He slandered other people.

00:16:10.840 | He sabotaged potential rivals.

00:16:14.520 | He used every underhanded method,

00:16:18.120 | and then some, in order to build his personal dictatorship.

00:16:22.680 | Now, he justified this, as you said,

00:16:24.680 | by appeals to communism and to Soviet power.

00:16:28.280 | - To himself as well, too.

00:16:29.740 | - To himself and to others.

00:16:31.640 | And so he justified it in his own mind and to others,

00:16:35.180 | but certainly any means, right,

00:16:38.580 | were acceptable to him to achieve these ends.

00:16:43.580 | And he identified his personal power with communism

00:16:47.960 | and with Russian glory in the world.

00:16:50.420 | So he felt that he was the only one who could be trusted,

00:16:55.120 | who could be relied upon to build these things.

00:16:58.080 | Now, we put ourselves back in that time period.

00:17:03.040 | The Great Depression was a very difficult time

00:17:06.300 | for the capitalist system.

00:17:07.720 | There was mass unemployment, a lot of hardship,

00:17:12.060 | fascism, Nazism, Imperial Japan.

00:17:17.060 | There were a lot of associations that were negative

00:17:21.740 | with the kind of capitalist system

00:17:24.060 | that was not 100%, not a monolith,

00:17:29.380 | but had a lot of authoritarian incarnations.

00:17:33.480 | There was imperialism, colonies that even

00:17:36.600 | the democratic rule of law capitalist states

00:17:40.200 | had non-democratic, non-rule of law colonies

00:17:43.200 | under their rule.

00:17:44.880 | So the image and reality of capitalism

00:17:48.700 | during that time period between World War I

00:17:51.720 | and World War II was very different

00:17:54.440 | from how it would become later.

00:17:56.520 | And so in that time period, in that interwar conjuncture

00:18:01.060 | after World War I, before World War II,

00:18:03.460 | communism held some appeal inside the Soviet Union for sure,

00:18:09.340 | but even outside the Soviet Union,

00:18:11.720 | because the image and reality of capitalism

00:18:14.200 | disappointed many people.

00:18:16.300 | Now, in the end, communism was significantly worse.

00:18:19.840 | Many more victims and the system, of course,

00:18:23.180 | would eventually implode.

00:18:25.700 | But nonetheless, there were real problems

00:18:27.660 | that communism tried to address.

00:18:30.220 | It didn't solve those problems.

00:18:32.020 | It was not a solution, but it didn't come out of nowhere.

00:18:36.240 | It came out of the context of that interwar period.

00:18:39.900 | And so Stalin's rule, some people saw it

00:18:44.200 | as potentially a better option than imperialism,

00:18:48.540 | fascism, and Great Depression.

00:18:51.540 | Having said that, they were wrong.

00:18:53.860 | It turned out that Stalin wasn't a better alternative

00:18:56.980 | to markets and private property

00:18:59.580 | and rule of law and democracy.

00:19:01.440 | However, that didn't become clearer to people

00:19:06.260 | until after World War II,

00:19:08.980 | after Nazism had been defeated,

00:19:11.560 | Imperial Japan had been defeated,

00:19:13.980 | Fascist Italy had been defeated,

00:19:16.160 | and decolonization had happened around the world,

00:19:19.420 | and there was a middle-class economic boom

00:19:22.960 | in the period from the late '40s through the '70s

00:19:26.740 | that created a kind of mass middle class in many societies.

00:19:30.100 | So capitalism rose from the ashes, as it were,

00:19:33.700 | and this changed the game for Stalin and communism.

00:19:38.900 | Communism is about an alternative to capitalism,

00:19:45.100 | and if that alternative is not superior,

00:19:48.640 | there's no reason for communism to exist.

00:19:51.800 | But if capitalism is in foul odor,

00:19:54.620 | if people have a bad opinion,

00:19:58.540 | a strong critique of capitalism,

00:20:00.520 | there can be appeal to alternatives,

00:20:02.500 | and that's kind of what happened with Stalin's rule.

00:20:05.980 | But after World War II, the context changed a lot.

00:20:10.200 | Capitalism was very different, much more successful,

00:20:13.900 | nonviolent compared to what it was in the interwar period,

00:20:19.180 | and the Soviet Union had a tough time competing

00:20:22.220 | against that new context.

00:20:24.080 | (silence)

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00:20:28.400 | (silence)

00:20:30.560 | (silence)

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00:20:39.200 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

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