[Russia] Stalin and the power of absolute conviction

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Title: Ordinary boy to arch-dictator: Stalin and the power of absolute conviction
Author: Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 20:00:00 -0400
Link: http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2014/10/ordinary-boy-arch-dictator-stalin-and-power-absolute-conviction

Stalin emerges from Stephen Kotkin’s book as that most frightening of figures –
a man of absolute conviction.

Stalin: Paradoxes of Power (1878-1928)
Stephen Kotkin
Allen Lane, 976pp, £30

Stephen Kotkin half accepts the Great Man view of history. The revolution of
February 1917, which swept away the centuries-old Russian imperial autocracy,
was, he concedes, the product of “immense structural forces”. So far, so
Marxist. But the October revolution that followed it, the seizure of power by
the Bolshevik faction, could have been stopped, Kotkin declares, with two
bullets – one for Lenin, one for Trotsky.

Individuals matter: some world-changing events are brought about by them. It
is, accordingly, approximately half correct to call this hugely ambitious and
compelling steamroller of a book a biography. It is a history of the Russian
Revolution in which its ostensible subject – Ioseb “Soso” Jughashvili, who
later renamed himself Stalin (“man of steel”) – goes unmentioned for whole
chapters. But it is also, even when the man himself is not present, an account
of his life, because that life, as Kotkin sees it, was bound up in the
tremendous events of which it was part. To use the antithetical idiom that
Kotkin favours, history made Stalin, but Stalin also made history, “rearranging
the entire socioeconomic landscape of one-sixth of the earth”.

Kotkin’s subject is immense, and his book is commensurate with it. At more than
900 pages, this is only the first of a projected three volumes. Kotkin uses the
word “diligence” several times of Stalin’s unremitting commitment to work and
it is a quality that he, too, has in spades. He tells us how many horses there
were in the Soviet Union in 1928. He explains the complex absurdities of
imperial Russia, where “leading nobles could own minor nobles as well as
priests, while priests could own minor nobles”. He tells us who said what to
whom at plenum after plenum, conference after conference. He also explains
exhaustively what these speeches signified, seldom the same thing as their
apparent meaning. But these minutiae, wearisome though they sometimes become,
are never padding. They are there to give substance and cogency to Kotkin’s
arguments. This is a big book not only because the author’s exhaustive
researches (the notes and bibliography of this volume alone run to 180 pages)
have allowed him to produce a meticulous record of mightily complicated events,
but also because he is always ready with explanations and comparisons.

He doesn’t think much of biography as a genre. Freudianism, he writes
brusquely, has led to biographers paying far too much attention to traumatic
childhoods. Stalin’s was full of misfortune. His father tried to strangle his
mother, while denouncing her as a “whore” (“a common enough epithet”, says
Kotkin briskly). Little Soso contracted smallpox. He was twice run down by a
horse-drawn phaeton, accidents that left him with a limp and a withered left
arm. He was set to work as a child: “The future leader of the world proletariat
had an early brush with factory life, which was nasty.” His father beat him.
Kotkin can scarcely be bothered with all this. “Do we really need to locate the
wellsprings of Stalin’s politics or even his troubled soul in beatings he
allegedly received as a child?” Here is Kotkin on Jughashvili’s early
womanising, a subject on which smaller-minded authors have loved to dwell: “The
young Stalin had a penis, and used it.” So that’s that, then. On, please, to
more important matters.

From 1901 to 1917 Stalin was essentially out of action. A revolutionary
agitator serving one penal sentence after another, he was a lawbreaker, but
Kotkin is dismissive of the image – at once glamourising and reductive – of
Stalin as “some kind of Mafia don of the Caucasus”. Before 1917 he was not yet
anybody special and his tribulations in Siberia or under cover are
unremarkable: “He spent most of his time, like other prisoners and exiles,
bored out of his mind.”

It is a historical commonplace that the First World War precipitated the demise
of three empires – the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian. It is one of
Kotkin’s theses that whatever may have happened to the first two, the imperium
of Russia survived, and reopened under new management. He calls one chapter
“Tsarism’s Most Dangerous Enemy”; the answer to the implied riddle is tsarism
itself.

Kotkin examines Russia’s autocracy in depth. To understand a revolution, he
believes, you must understand that which it turns upside down. In tsarist
Russia “politics was essentially illegal”. The only way of expressing dissent
was by “tossing a ‘pomegranate’ [a bomb] at an official’s carriage and watching
the body parts fly”. Violent protest provoked violent repression. Fear
generated fear. In January 1917 the French ambassador to St Petersburg wrote:
“I am obliged to report that at the present moment the Russian empire is run by
lunatics.” It was the tsarist “lunatics” who handed Russia first to Kerensky’s
provisional government and then to the Bolsheviks. As Kotkin notes: “Revolution
results not from determined crowds in the street . . . but from the elite
abandonment of the existing order.”

On 24 February 1917 Tsar Nicholas II settled down to read Caesar’s Gallic Wars,
writing to his wife how relieved he was to have “no ministers and no fidgety
questions to think over”. Two weeks later he abdicated. The Romanovs were swept
into the “dustbin of history” but autocracy lived on. When the Bolsheviks began
to eliminate their rivals they did so with a ruthlessness they had learned from
the preceding regime. When Lenin died seven years later the hysterical crowds
queuing in the freezing cold to lament over his embalmed body were expressing
emotions conditioned by centuries in which Russians worshipped their
“tsar-father”.

Stalin had been one of Lenin’s closest aides from the beginning, one of the
gang of four (with Trotsky and Sverdlov) who in the autumn of 1917 set
themselves to rule a realm spanning 11 time zones. Each of them had a criminal
record; none of them had any administrative experience. Their headquarters was
in a girls’ school; the headmistress still occupied the room next door. The
chancellery was a single typist. The communications network was a cubbyhole for
a telephone operator. That from such lowly beginnings they would create the
“world’s strongest dictatorship is beyond fantastic”, Kotkin writes. And yet
somehow (the war helped) they made it work. Lenin died a tsar-father. Who would
be his heir?

“Accident in history is rife; unintended consequences and perverse outcomes are
the rule,” the author says. What a world-changer needs is not a five-year plan,
nor any plan at all, but “an aptitude for seizing opportunities”. Explicitly
disinherited by Lenin’s “testament” (a memo the stricken leader may, or may
not, have dictated to his wife), Stalin yet managed “brutally, artfully,
indefatigably”, to build “a personal dictatorship”. Kotkin’s account of that
building is detailed, terrifying and utterly gripping.

What Stalin had was a blend of “zealous Marxist convictions and great-power
sensibilities” as well as “sociopathic tendencies and exceptional diligence and
resolve”. The Marxist zeal is the most potent ingredient in that mix, and the
most often overlooked. Liberal, secular scholars find faith baffling, and too
often dismiss it as a blind for something else. But Stalin was a true believer.
He was an obsessive student. A man who shared his exile in 1908 said that if
you pricked his head “the whole of Karl Marx’s Capital would come hissing out
of it like gas from a container”. Later he made himself a master of Leninism.
He emerges from Kotkin’s book as that most frightening of figures – a man of
absolute conviction.

This story has been told over and over again, by eyewitnesses and participants,
and subsequently by a legion of historians, variously partisan and
punctiliously scholarly. Kotkin can be generous – “beautifully rendered”, he
says of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s version of Stalin’s 1907 bank robbery (known
to Stalinists as an “appropriation”). But he can also be combative. Even the
once-revered historian E H Carr, was, in his opinion, “utterly, eternally
wrong”.

Kotkin is a writer of huge self-confidence. His style swings from the Augustan
to the racy. He loves a balanced sentence: “Instead of principles, there were
objectives; instead of morality, means.” He can write like Joseph Addison; but
he can also write like a prizefighter (no insult intended). He makes
tendentious assertions without pausing to defend them. Recalling perceived
slights, he writes, is “common among narcissists (another word for many a
professional revolutionary)”. He alludes to Russia’s “ad hoc empire”, adding
“there is no other kind”. He makes the point that “one-third of the religiously
Eastern Orthodox were schismatics”: no wonder that “sectarianism among
revolutionaries was as common as cuckolding”. Leaving the provocative bit about
cuckolding aside, this is a revelatory, gosh-yes remark, but Kotkin doesn’t
even grant it a full sentence.

His viewpoint is godlike: all the world falls within his purview. He makes
comparisons across decades and continents. He sees that Stalin’s “pharaonic”
five-year plans were no more colossally hubristic than the construction of the
Panama Canal. When Russia is defeated by the Japanese in 1905 Kotkin is ready
with a parallel to Italy’s defeat by Ethiopia in 1896, another shocking
“victory of a non-white people over a white people”. He writes about Peter the
Great and Chiang Kai-shek and Henry Ford; about steel manufacture, about the
sociological consequences of China’s 19th-century switch from subsistence
farming to cotton production. There are passages when it seems that even in
this enormous book he hasn’t quite got space to say all that is racing through
his mind. Sweeping generalisations and startling aperçus are tossed off like
sparks from speeding wheels. The reader has to hang on tight, and is rewarded
with an exhilarating ride.

This volume leaves Stalin at the end of 1928. That year brought the trial of
“wreckers” at the Shakhty coal mines in the northern Caucasus. Fifty engineers,
including half a dozen Germans, were accused of sabotage. Litvinoff begged
Stalin to desist – the Soviet Union desperately needed a German loan. Stalin
went ahead. Nearly 100 journalists, and tens of thousands of Soviet citizens,
saw the accused, in cages, retract confessions extorted under torture, only to
retract their retractions after a 40-minute “break”.

The opposition was silenced. Trotsky was hustled out of his apartment and into
exile without time to change his clothes, visibly wearing pyjamas beneath his
fur coat. Meanwhile, in the countryside, Stalin’s armed squads were hunting
through dirt-poor villages for non-existent “hidden grain”. The
collectivisation of Soviet farming, which would lead to the deaths by
starvation of millions, was about to begin.

On meeting Lenin for the first time in 1905, Stalin wrote that he had expected
to see “the mountain eagle of our party”. Instead, he saw “the most ordinary
individual”. Something similar was said of him. A police report of 1904 notes
that the 26-year-old Jughashvili “gives the appearance of an ordinary person”.
Just over 20 years later, this “ordinary person” had the power of life or death
over 200 million people. How he gained that power, and how he used it, is a
titanic subject. Kotkin’s book has the energy to grapple with it.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s “The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio – Poet, Seducer and
Preacher of War” (Fourth Estate) won the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff
Cooper Prize and the Costa Biography of the Year Award