- Kotkin, Stephen.
Stalin, Vol. 2: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941.
New York: Penguin Press, 2017.
ISBN 978-1-59420-380-0.
-
This is the second volume in the author's monumental projected
three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin. The first volume,
Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928
(December 2018) covers the period from Stalin's birth through
the consolidation of his sole power atop the Soviet state after
the death of Lenin. The third volume, which will cover the
period from the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 through
the death of Stalin in 1953 has yet to be published.
As this volume begins in 1928, Stalin is securely in the
supreme position of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, and having over the years staffed the senior ranks
of the party and the Soviet state (which the party operated
like the puppet it was) with loyalists who owed their positions
to him, had no serious rivals who might challenge him. (It is
often claimed that Stalin was paranoid and feared a coup, but
would a despot fearing for his position regularly take
summer holidays, months in length, in Sochi, far from the capital?)
By 1928, the Soviet Union had largely recovered from the damage
inflicted by the Great War, Bolshevik revolution, and subsequent
civil war. Industrial and agricultural production were back to
around their 1914 levels, and most measures of well-being had
similarly recovered. To be sure, compared to the developed
industrial economies of countries such as Germany, France, or
Britain, Russia remained a backward economy largely based upon
primitive agriculture, but at least it had undone the damage
inflicted by years of turbulence and conflict.
But in the eyes of Stalin and his close associates, who were ardent
Marxists, there was a dangerous and potentially deadly internal
contradiction in the Soviet system as it then stood. In 1921, in
response to the chaos and famine following the 1917 revolution and
years-long civil war, Lenin had proclaimed the
New
Economic Policy (NEP), which tempered the pure
collectivism of original Bolshevik doctrine by introducing a
mixed economy, where large enterprises would continue to be
owned and managed by the state, but small-scale businesses
could be privately owned and run for profit. More importantly,
agriculture, which had previously been managed under a top-down
system of coercive requisitioning of grain and other products
by the state, was replaced by a market system where farmers
could sell their products freely, subject to a tax, payable in
product, proportional to their production (and thus creating an
incentive to increase production).
The NEP was a great success, and shortages of agricultural
products were largely eliminated. There was grousing about
the growing prosperity of the so-called
NEPmen, but the
results of freeing the economy from the shackles of state
control were evident to all. But according to Marxist doctrine, it was
a dagger pointed at the heart of the socialist state.
By 1928, the Soviet economy could be described, in Marxist
terms, as socialism in the industrial cities and capitalism in
the agrarian countryside. But, according to Marx, the
form of politics was determined by the organisation of the
means of production—paraphrasing Brietbart, politics is
downstream of economics. This meant that preserving capitalism
in a large sector of the country, one employing a large
majority of its population and necessary to feed the cities,
was an existential risk. In such a situation it would only be
normal for the capitalist peasants to eventually prevail over
the less numerous urbanised workers and destroy socialism.
Stalin was a Marxist. He was not an opportunist who used
Marxism-Leninism to further his own ambitions. He really
believed this stuff. And so, in 1928, he proclaimed an
end to the NEP and began the forced collectivisation of Soviet
agriculture. Private ownership of land would be abolished, and
the 120 million peasants essentially enslaved as “workers”
on collective or state farms, with planting, quotas to
be delivered, and management essentially controlled by the party.
After an initial lucky year, the inevitable catastrophe ensued. Between 1931
and 1933 famine and epidemics resulting from it killed between
five and seven million people. The country lost around half of
its cattle and two thirds of its sheep. In 1929, the average
family in Kazakhstan owned 22.6 cattle; in 1933 3.7. This was
a calamity on the same order as the Jewish Holocaust in Germany,
and just as man-made: during this period there was a global glut
of food, but Stalin refused to admit the magnitude of the
disaster for fear of inciting enemies to attack and because doing so
would concede the failure of his collectivisation project.
In addition to the famine, the process of collectivisation
resulted in between four and five million people being arrested,
executed, deported to other regions, or jailed.
Many in the starving countryside said, “If only Stalin
knew, he would do something.” But the evidence is
overwhelming: Stalin knew, and did nothing. Marxist theory
said that agriculture must be collectivised, and by pure force
of will he pushed through the project, whatever the cost. Many
in the senior Soviet leadership questioned this single-minded
pursuit of a theoretical goal at horrendous human cost, but they
did not act to stop it. But Stalin remembered their opposition
and would settle scores with them later.
By 1936, it appeared that the worst of the period of
collectivisation was over. The peasants, preferring to live
in slavery than starve to death, had acquiesced to their fate
and resumed production, and the weather co-operated in
producing good harvests. And then, in 1937, a new horror
was unleashed upon the Soviet people, also completely man-made
and driven by the will of Stalin, the
Great Terror.
Starting slowly in the aftermath of the assassination of
Sergey Kirov
in 1934, by 1937 the absurd devouring of those most
loyal to the Soviet regime, all over Stalin's signature, reached
a crescendo. In 1937 and 1938 1,557,259 people would be
arrested and 681,692 executed, the overwhelming majority for
political offences, this in a country with a working-age population
of 100 million. Counting deaths from other causes as a
result of the secret police, the overall death toll was probably
around 830,000. This was so bizarre, and so unprecedented in
human history, it is difficult to find any comparable situation, even in
Nazi Germany. As the author remarks,
To be sure, the greater number of victims were ordinary Soviet
people, but what regime liquidates colossal numbers of
loyal officials? Could Hitler—had
he been so inclined—have compelled the imprisonment or
execution of huge swaths of Nazi factory and farm bosses, as well
as almost all of the Nazi provincial Gauleiters and their
staffs, several times over? Could he have executed the personnel
of the Nazi central ministries, thousands of his Wehrmacht
officers—including almost his entire high command—as
well as the Reich's diplomatic corps and its espionage agents, its
celebrated cultural figures, and the leadership of Nazi parties
throughout the world (had such parties existed)? Could Hitler
also have decimated the Gestapo even while it was carrying
out a mass bloodletting? And could the German people have been
told, and would the German people have found plausible, that almost
everyone who had come to power with the Nazi revolution turned out
to be a foreign agent and saboteur?
Stalin did all of these things. The damage inflicted upon the Soviet
military, at a time of growing threats, was horrendous. The terror
executed or imprisoned three of the five marshals of the Soviet Union,
13 of 15 full generals, 8 of the 9 admirals of the Navy, and 154 of
186 division commanders. Senior managers, diplomats, spies, and
party and government officials were wiped out in comparable
numbers in the all-consuming cataclysm. At the very moment the
Soviet state was facing threats from Nazi Germany in the west and
Imperial Japan in the east, it destroyed those most qualified to
defend it in a paroxysm of paranoia and purification from phantasmic
enemies.
And then, it all stopped, or largely tapered off. This did nothing
for those who had been executed, or who were still confined in the
camps spread all over the vast country, but at least there was a
respite from the knocks in the middle of the night and the
cascading denunciations for fantastically absurd imagined
“crimes”. (In June 1937, eight high-ranking Red
Army officers, including
Marshal Tukachevsky,
were denounced as “Gestapo agents”. Three of those
accused were Jews.)
But now the international situation took priority over
domestic “enemies”. The Bolsheviks, and Stalin in
particular, had always viewed the Soviet Union as surrounded
by enemies. As the vanguard of the proletarian revolution, by
definition those states on its borders must be reactionary
capitalist-imperialist or fascist regimes hostile to or
actively bent upon the destruction of the peoples' state.
With Hitler on the march in Europe and Japan expanding its
puppet state in China, potentially hostile powers were
advancing toward Soviet borders from two directions. Worse,
there was a loose alliance between Germany and Japan, raising
the possibility of a two-front war which would engage Soviet
forces in conflicts on both ends of its territory. What Stalin feared most,
however, was an alliance of the capitalist states (in which
he included Germany, despite its claim to be “National
Socialist”) against the Soviet Union. In particular, he dreaded
some kind of arrangement between Britain and Germany which might
give Britain supremacy on the seas and its far-flung
colonies, while acknowledging German domination of continental
Europe and a free hand to expand toward the East at the
expense of the Soviet Union.
Stalin was faced with an extraordinarily difficult choice: make
some kind of deal with Britain (and possibly France) in the hope
of deterring a German attack upon the Soviet Union, or cut a deal
with Germany, linking the German and Soviet economies in a trade
arrangement which the Germans would be loath to destroy by
aggression, lest they lose access to the raw materials which the
Soviet Union could supply to their war machine. Stalin's ultimate
calculation, again grounded in Marxist theory, was that the
imperialist powers were fated to eventually fall upon one another
in a destructive war for domination, and that by standing aloof, the
Soviet Union stood to gain by encouraging socialist revolutions in
what remained of them after that war had run its course.
Stalin evaluated his options and made his choice. On August
27, 1939, a
“non-aggression treaty”
was signed in Moscow between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
But the treaty went far beyond what was made public. Secret
protocols defined “spheres of influence”, including
how Poland would be divided among the two parties in the case of
war. Stalin viewed this treaty as a triumph: yes, doctrinaire
communists (including many in the West) would be aghast at a
deal with fascist Germany, but at a blow, Stalin had eliminated
the threat of an anti-Soviet alliance between Germany and Britain,
linked Germany and the Soviet Union in a trade arrangement whose
benefits to Germany would deter aggression and, in the case of war
between Germany and Britain and France (for which he hoped), might
provide an opportunity to recover territory once in the czar's
empire which had been lost after the 1917 revolution.
Initially, this strategy appeared to be working swimmingly. The
Soviets were shipping raw materials they had in abundance to
Germany and receiving high-technology industrial equipment and
weapons which they could immediately put to work and/or reverse-engineer
to make domestically. In some cases, they even received blueprints
or complete factories for making strategic products. As the
German economy became increasingly dependent upon Soviet shipments,
Stalin perceived this as leverage over the actions of Germany,
and responded to delays in delivery of weapons by slowing down
shipments of raw materials essential to German war production.
On September 1st, 1939,
Nazi Germany
invaded Poland, just a week
after the signing of the pact between Germany and the Soviet Union.
On September 3rd, France and Britain declared war on Germany. Here
was the “war among the imperialists” of which Stalin had
dreamed. The Soviet Union could stand aside, continue to trade with
Nazi Germany, while the combatants bled each other white, and then,
in the aftermath, support socialist revolutions in their
countries. On September 17th the Soviet Union, pursuant to the
secret protocol,
invaded
Poland from the east and joined the Nazi forces in eradicating
that nation. Ominously, greater Germany and the Soviet Union now
shared a border.
After the start of hostilities, a state of “phoney
war” existed until Germany struck against Denmark,
Norway, and France in April and May 1940. At first, this
appeared precisely what Stalin had hoped for: a general
conflict among the “imperialist powers” with
the Soviet Union not only uninvolved, but having reclaimed
territory in Poland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia which
had once belonged to the Tsars. Now there was every reason to
expect a long war of attrition in which the Nazis and their
opponents would grind each other down, as in the previous
world war, paving the road for socialist revolutions everywhere.
But then, disaster ensued. In less than six weeks, France collapsed
and Britain evacuated its expeditionary force from the Continent.
Now, it appeared, Germany reigned supreme, and might turn its
now largely idle army toward conquest in the East. After consolidating
the position in the west and indefinitely deferring an invasion of Britain
due to inability to obtain air and sea superiority in the
English Channel, Hitler began to concentrate his forces on
the eastern frontier. Disinformation, spread where Soviet
spy networks would pick it up and deliver it to Stalin, whose
prejudices it confirmed, said that the troop concentrations were
in preparation for an assault on British positions in the Near
East or to blackmail the Soviet Union to obtain, for example, a
long term lease on its breadbasket, the Ukraine.
Hitler, acutely aware that it was a two-front war which spelled
disaster to Germany in the last war, rationalised his attack on the
Soviet Union as follows. Yes, Britain had not been defeated, but
their only hope was an eventual alliance with the Soviet Union,
opening a second front against Germany. Knocking out the
Soviet Union (which should be no more difficult than the victory
over France, which took just six weeks), would preclude this possibility
and force Britain to come to terms. Meanwhile, Germany would have
secured access to raw materials in Soviet territory for which it
was previously paying market prices, but were now available for the cost
of extraction and shipping.
The volume concludes on June 21st, 1941, the eve of the Nazi invasion of
the Soviet Union. There could not have been more signs that this
was coming: Soviet spies around the world sent evidence, and Britain
even shared (without identifying the source) decrypted German
messages about troop dispositions and war plans. But none of
this disabused Stalin of his idée
fixe: Germany would not attack because Soviet exports were
so important. Indeed, in 1940, 40 percent of nickel, 55 percent of
manganese, 65 percent of chromium, 67% of asbestos, 34% of petroleum,
and a million tonnes of grain and timber which supported the Nazi
war machine were delivered by the Soviet Union. Hours before the
Nazi onslaught began, well after the order for it was given, a
Soviet train delivering grain, manganese, and oil crossed the
border between Soviet-occupied and German-occupied Poland, bound
for Germany. Stalin's delusion persisted until reality intruded
with dawn.
This is a magisterial work. It is unlikely it will
ever be equalled. There is abundant rich detail on every page.
Want to know what the telephone number for the Latvian consulate
in Leningrad was 1934? It's right here on page 206 (5-50-63).
Too often, discussions of Stalin assume he was a kind of
murderous madman. This book is a salutary antidote. Everything
Stalin did made perfect sense when viewed in the context of the
beliefs which Stalin held, shared by his Bolshevik
contemporaries and those he promoted to the inner circle. Yes,
they seem crazy, and they were, but no less crazy than
politicians in the United States advocating the abolition of air
travel and the extermination of cows in order to save a planet
which has managed just fine for billions of years without the
intervention of bug-eyed, arm-waving ignoramuses.
Reading this book is a major investment of time. It is 1154
pages, with 910 pages of main text and illustrations, and will
noticeably bend spacetime in its vicinity. But there is so much
wisdom, backed with detail, that you will savour every
page and, when you reach the end, crave the publication of the
next volume. If you want to understand totalitarian
dictatorship, you have to ultimately understand Stalin, who
succeeded at it for more than thirty years until ultimately
felled by illness, not conquest or coup, and who built the
primitive agrarian nation he took over into a superpower. Some
of us thought that the death of Stalin and, decades later, the
demise of the Soviet Union, brought an end to all that. And
yet, today, in the West, we have politicians advocating central
planning, collectivisation, and limitations on free speech which
are entirely consistent with the policies of Uncle Joe. After
reading this book and thinking about it for a while, I have
become convinced that Stalin was a patriot who believed that what
he was doing was in the best interest of the Soviet people. He
was sure the (laughably absurd) theories he believed and applied
were the best way to build the future. And he was willing to
force them into being whatever the cost may be. So it is today,
and let us hope those made aware of the costs documented in this
history will be immunised against the siren song of collectivist
utopia.
Author Stephen Kotkin did a two-part Uncommon
Knowledge interview about the book in 2018. In the first
part he discusses
collectivisation
and the terror. In the second, he discusses
Stalin
and Hitler, and the events leading up to the Nazi invasion
of the Soviet Union.
May 2019 