Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history

The thing about Stalin's terror is, the police are also murdered while they are doing the murdering. You're murdering your intellectuals, your scientists, your cultural figures. You're murdering your loyal party elites, and the whole thing doesn't collapse. The people around Stalin can see that he is unusually good at dictatorship. He is just carrying this entire system on his back, through thick and thin, liquidating the kulaks, collectivizing agriculture, building a military-industrial complex, defeating Hitler in war. How much better are you gonna do than Stalin? Stalin goes into the underground, and for 20 years of his life, he's a penniless, jobless revolutionary dedicated to fighting the genuine injustices of the czar's regime. What he'll produce is a much more unjust regime than the one he's fighting against.

My guest today is Stephen Kotkin, who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of two-thirds of his three-volume Stalin biographies, um, the first one, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, the second one, Stalin Waiting for Hitler. Thank you for coming on my podcast.

Thank you for the honor of the invitation.

Let's begin with the czar's regime. So first question: how repressive was the czar's regime actually? Because presumably, the motivation behind the revolution is to get rid of this autocracy, but y- you just have these examples of these... Lenin's brother tries to kill the czar, and he himself is writing these long manifestos about taking down capitalism and overthrowing the government, and him and people like Stalin are just in exile in Siberia living off government money, um, robbing banks, small shenanigans. I- it honestly sounds more forgiving than, uh, many countries today, so how, how bad was it really?

So you have to put yourself back in the time period to judge the level of repression based upon what norms were, what other regimes did, rather than take the 20th century regimes as the guide...

Yeah.

... and go back, but we need to widen the aperture a little bit here. So this is the czar's regime's problem. It needs to be able to compete in the international system. That means it needs a modern military and modern industry to underwrite that modern military.

Mm-hmm.

So it needs armaments. It needs steel. It needs chemicals. For that, you need workers. So you want the workers only to work in the industry. You don't want them, for example, to have a labor movement or to go on strike or to have ideas about how politics should be organized. Similarly, with the intellectual side, you need the engineers. You need the engineers in order to design and build the modern attributes that you need to compete as a global power, but you don't want those educated people to have their own ideas and values about politics, about whether you'd want an autocratic government like the Russian regime has or you'd want some other type of government. So all of these countries in the modern period have this dilemma, importing modernization but keeping out the political side, the value side that goes along with that.