Abstract
Reviewed by: Ian D. Thatcher, Ulster University Coleraine, UK
With an array of serviceable biographies to hand, how does one write a new ‘life’ of Joseph Stalin? Stephen Kotkin’s answer is to deny originality. This book will avoid ‘what is known as filling the gaps in the record of Stalin’s life’ (9). This is rather a monumental work of synthesis in which Kotkin locates his subject within a much broader context of Russian domestic and international history. This is why the text – only the first of a projected three-volume study – is so long. By its conclusion it will run to several thousand pages. The first instalment includes 121 pages of small-type, densely written notes and a similarly compressed 49-page bibliography. The result of this undoubted erudition is a biography of Stalin that, in the author’s estimation, ‘comes to approximate a history of the world’ (4), by which is meant the major events in Russian and Soviet and European-American diplomatic history. Indeed the focus is so much on the wider picture that one wonders if this is a general history rather than a biography of Stalin, who is not the central dramatis persona for much of the book.
Kotkin’s contextualization will satisfy a novice, but specialists will be aware of greater complexity. No mention is made, for example, of the Democratic Conference and the Pre-Parliament as alternatives to rule by the Petrograd Soviet in late summer/early autumn 1917 (218). A reader seeking first and foremost an account of Stalin’s life will have to be patient given the numerous detours into Witte, Stolypin, the nature and challenges of autocratic rule, the vicissitudes of international relations, and state-building Bolshevik-style. The lack of attention to Stalin is because of Kotkin’s belief that ‘world history is driven by geopolitics’ (4), combined with the assertion that for much of the period covered in this volume Stalin had no influence on (geo-political) matters of import. ‘His life story from 1909 through early 1917 contains few moments of note’ (137), so it is far more consequential and interesting for Kotkin to describe and analyse in depth the ‘momentous history’ that produced 1917 and Stalin’s later regime (138). Somewhat bizarrely given this approach, E. H. Carr is later taken to task for asserting that ‘circumstances make the man, not man the circumstances’ (739).
When Kotkin does discuss Stalin the resulting picture is very familiar: the emphasis that Stalin gave to his education and book learning; his development as an agitator, writer and editor; the loyal Lenin lieutenant who nevertheless voiced independent views; the disputes with Trotsky over military strategy in the Russian Civil War; and the combination in Stalin of a ‘thirst for absolute power’ and an ‘absolute dedication to the cause’ (307). There are some questions that Kotkin could have posed but did not. For example, if Stalin’s hostility towards Trotsky was at a height in the late summer of 1918 (307), why did he in the first anniversary article of the October Revolution heap such praise upon Trotsky as its main organizer? And why was it precisely Stalin who was commissioned to write this important piece?
Rather than focus upon what did happen, Kotkin is often concerned with what might have happened if other decisions and outcomes had occurred. The final chapter is ‘If Stalin Had Died’. Such speculative counter-factual history may appeal to some, but this reviewer agrees with E. P. Thompson’s famous dismissal of it as ‘Geschichtenscheissenschlopff’. Ultimately why was this book written and for what purpose?
On the question of ‘why’ it appears that we have a ‘literary agent’ to thank (xiii). One of the advance reviews in the book’s blurb declares that only ‘Tolstoy might have matched’ Kotkin’s prose. The style is typical of a melding of general history and popular crime fiction that literary agents and publishing houses seem to think equals an academic blockbuster. The essential ingredients include sex and gore, which are littered throughout the text. We are informed, for example, that the ‘young Stalin had a penis, and he used it’ (8). Violent acts are described in soft graphic terms, in sufficient detail to satisfy lurid tastes without being overly offensive to middle-class sensibilities. The Tsarist Governor Ivan Blok complains, for instance, that he is looked upon by locals as ‘some kind of monster, a drinker of human blood’. ‘Moments later’, writes Kotkin, ‘Blok was decapitated by a bomb. Placed in a traditional open casket, his twisted body was stuffed into his dress uniform, a ball of batting substituted for his head’ (74). In one paragraph about Rasputin sex and gore come together: ‘in public … he approached female singers in a restaurant and exposed his penis while striking up a conversation … a would-be female assassin … had taken a knife to the mystic’s stomach on June 29, 1914 … but Rasputin, his entrails hanging out, survived’ (160).
In a book so wide ranging it is hard to avoid some mistakes, and there are very few. Trotsky’s originality in 1917 was to refer to ‘dual powerlessness’ and not the ‘dual power’ of popular parlance attributed here (182). Kotkin writes that ‘Lenin coined the pejorative term “Trotskyism”’ in October 1909 (531), but as Trotsky’s autobiography points out, this honour belongs to the liberal Professor Milyukov who employed it as early as 1905–06. Better editing could have improved and tightened the text. There is no need, for example, to be told twice in the same paragraph that peasants knew that Trotsky was a Jew, with a different footnote to each sentence (340).
Kotkin’s academic reputation rests upon his thesis book, the masterly (1995) study of Magnitogorsk. Although there is little in his Stalin that will surprise an established academic, it is a remarkable personal achievement to have produced a massive tome of popular history for the mass market.
The similarities in this respect with Khlevniuk’s ‘new biography’ are striking. The idea was not the author’s, but was put to him by the editorial staff at Yale (379). The book contains no originality, but will appeal to the general reader. Khlevniuk’s academic reputation, to which the volume under review will add little, rests on previous studies.
Khlevniuk is supposedly writing about the historical Stalin but a major concern is with Stalin’s influence in contemporary Russia and in particular with ‘apologists for Stalin’ (x–xi). The book’s final sentence is: ‘Could it really be that Russia in the twenty-first century is in danger of repeating the mistakes of the twentieth?’ (379). If by this Khlevniuk means collectivization, mad rush industrialization, the Great Terror, Imperial overstretch, and homage to the classics of Marxism, then it seems that the answer is a fairly clear ‘no’. As Khlevniuk sees this as a danger (and he lives in Russia not I), to off-set it he paints the darkest possible picture of Stalin and Stalinism. Khlevniuk views Stalin as a man driven by the pursuit of ‘sole power’, for which he had the key skills of ‘deceit, patience, and subversion’ (104). This is sufficient to explain the monumental changes effected under Stalin and the scale of repression: it was all part of Stalin’s desire for absolute control. This continued to his dying day, before which Stalin kept subordinates in a state of uncertainty and blocked any sensible reform of the dysfunctional Stalinist political and economic system. Regarding the scale of society’s suffering, Khlevniuk opts for the highest possible number of victims of Stalinism, some 60 million (38), claiming that the majority of the Soviet population suffered from some form of repression (323).
Khlevniuk has written not a biography, but a damning indictment of the period 1917–1953. He notes that historians ‘are compelled not to deal with simple schemes and political conjecture but with concrete facts’ (xi). He is not always consistent on the latter, for example the speculation about the unknown and unknowable content of Stalin’s mind. The book has been annoyingly divided between recurring revisits to the last days of Stalin’s life (pp. 1–9, 33–41, 92–99, 142–9, 189–197, 250–60, 310–16) and a general chronological survey of major events (pp. 11–32, 42–91, 100–141, 150–188, 198–249, 261–309, 317–330). In the former sections, Khlevniuk moves from pointless unanswerable questions (‘Did Stalin look back on his triumphs after parting with his guests for the last time in his life on February 28? Did his thoughts take him to earlier times – his childhood, youth, the revolution?’ (9)) to the banal (‘After his guests departed in the early morning hours of 1 March, Stalin most likely went to bed’ (33)). In the chronological narrative there is the simple schema of emerging and triumphant dictator fighting and scheming against all opponents, real and imagined, to secure personal power (for what remains a mystery), which produces further simplifications, for example the claim that following the establishment of the PRC ‘One could now talk about socialist encirclement of the Western world’ (292).
For all the undoubted scholarly achievements of these two distinguished intellectuals, from beyond the grave Stalin continues to defeat his biographers.