Stephen Kotkin on Dwarkesh Patel: Why Stalin Needed Terror

To compete geopolitically, regimes like czarist Russia, Iran, China, and Putin’s Russia must import modern industry and educated elites—while simultaneously repressing workers and intellectuals whose political ideas threaten autocratic rule. This structural contradiction often radicalizes opposition rather than stabilizing the regime.

Where peasants lacked secure land (Russia, China), they became a radical force seizing estates and undermining the existing order, enabling socialist parties to seize and hold power. In Central Europe, better land distribution meant peasants usually defended order, helping crush urban leftist revolts and paving the way for right-wing or fascist regimes instead.

All Bolshevik leaders wanted to abolish capitalist relations in the countryside, but only Stalin was willing and able to push through collectivization and mass killing at any cost—expanding the secret police as he went. Having seen him “succeed” at the impossible, many elites accepted his indispensability even as he later killed them.

The ideology offers a simple, total solution to war, exploitation, and inequality, casting any dissent as complicity with evil capitalism. It also places intellectuals and “lumpen-intellectuals” in charge of the state, giving them unprecedented power to direct the economy and society without electoral accountability.

In Stalin’s USSR and today’s Russia, China, and Iran, potential plotters know the leader uses provocateurs and dense surveillance; any move to conspire might be a trap. Rational self-preservation often means denouncing would-be co-conspirators, so even widely hated leaders can endure until the repressive apparatus itself defects.