The other “significant issue” for Kotkin was the signature appended to it, “Stalin” (“Man of Steel”): “That strong sonorous pseudonym was not only superior to Oddball Osip, Pockmarked Oska, or the very Caucasus specific Koba, but also Russifying.”. Peasants were free. The Mensheviks also saw it — but only after the split. Incredibly, Kotkin simply ignores the determining role Stalin (and Kamenev) did play among the Bolsheviks in the first weeks of the revolution, before Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership abroad had set foot in Russia. Lenin’s line of argument persuaded Stalin; the Menshevik one did not. For the first time, a “right” opposition emerged, led by Nikolai Bukharin. Yet Stalin kept his position. Even so, Kotkin’s conclusions on selected issues can be tested for internal coherence, on the one hand, and fidelity to the historical record, on the other. Stephen Kotkin Princeton Professor | Author | Historian I am the John P. Birkelund ’52 Professor in History and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and history department of Princeton University, where I have taught since 1989. This byline is mine, but I want my name removed. Review of Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 by Stephen Kotkin (Penguin Random House, 2015). The Mensheviks decided that Lenin’s approach was disastrously un-Marxist only after they refused to recognize the leadership the London Congress had elected — Lenin, Martov, Plekhanov — rather than those members the Congress had not elected — Vera Zazulich, Alexander Potresov, and Pavel Axelrod. Stalin never questioned it. His “April Theses” called for “All Power to the Soviets” and would guide the Bolsheviks for the next seven months. The great chronicler of the Russian Revolution N. A. Sukhanov characterized Stalin’s role in the period of dual power — February to October 1917 — as insignificant, “a grey blur, emitting a dim light now and then and not leaving any trace.” Kotkin rejects this view: on the contrary, Stalin was “deeply engaged in all deliberations and actions in the innermost circle of the Bolshevik leadership.”. Rather, he hemmed and hawed for eighteen months, now pushing for the robbery of some peasants, now pulling back from such robbery, hoping to muddle through. Through analytical legerdemain, however, Kotkin interprets Stalin’s choice for militant action among the many over quiet propaganda among the few as favoring, somehow, a conspiratorial, “intelligentsia-centered party” — Bolshevism — over an open, democratic, “worker-centric” party — Menshevism. With their support, Lenin argued for, and executed, a strategic reorientation. Kvali, a legal Marxist periodical published in Tiflis, pushed this line. But Kotkin mischaracterizes Stalin’s political choice at that point, just as he does with the earlier one. The Great Turn actually occurred only in the period covered by his second volume, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1928–1941. The famous Order No. Insofar as political principle was involved — and not mere jockeying for bureaucratic advantage — none of the factions questioned the necessity of the New Economic Policy (NEP) adopted in 1921, or of single-party rule. Foreknowledge of the 1930s seriously distorts Kotkin and the quasi-universal understanding by historians of the first post-October decade. Kotkin does not lay out fully before his readers Lenin’s explanations for his stance — the explanations Stalin himself read — only the “Lenin-is-a-Blanquist” line of his Menshevik opponents, which Stalin also read. But Kotkin’s a-rational, Triumph-of-the-Will Lenin did not motivate Stalin either. Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928, is the first of a projected three-volume biography of the Soviet despot written by Stephen Kotkin, John P. Birkelund Professor of History and International Studies at Princeton University, and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Kotkin’s lack of a theoretically informed structural analysis combine with his disinterest in explication de textes — Stalin’s above all — and a determination to write on an encyclopedic scale to generate a recurring pattern of Rolodex empiricism. Historian Stephen Kotkin on Stalin and his new biography on the Soviet dictator. Here, Kotkin is in his element. Democratically elected, its proceedings public, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries led it. The “construction of political order on the basis of class rather than common humanity and individual liberty was (and always will be) ruinous,” he warns. Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928, is the first of a projected three-volume biography of the Soviet despot written by Stephen Kotkin, John P. Birkelund Professor of History and International Studies at Princeton University, and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. In any event, Stalin, with Bukharin’s support, routed the Zinoviev-Kamenev Opposition of 1925–26, followed by the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Trotsky or United Opposition of 1926–27. Cossacks attacked once again. No one among the Iskrists then saw in Lenin’s widely-disseminated pamphlet a sinister, conspiratorial call for a Blanquist party of intellectuals to make the revolution behind the backs of workers. Nor does he dwell on the fact that Stalin did not genuflect before Lenin but could think for himself. Stolypin combined the offices of prime minister and minister of interior from 1906 to 1911, when a Socialist Revolutionary bullet put an end to his career. Or his opponents in the Right Opposition? As head of the Party’s personnel department, Stalin used his power of appointment to promote, demote, transfer, fire, and hire. It was a change in strategy — one, moreover, that was opposed by other “Marxists.” Of the many questions that can be posed, let me pose this one: who was the authentic Marxist? These facts are not in dispute, but a politically tendentious teleology mars Kotkin’s placement of them in the broader historical context. Such are the limitations of psycho-history. Having examined from afar the balance of class forces and concluded that it favored a Soviet-led socialist revolution, he campaigned for “All Power to the Soviets,” jettisoning the idea of critical support to the Provisional Government — let alone joining it, as the Mensheviks were eventually to do, in the process formally implementing the 1905 Bolshevik slogan, but now devoid of a revolutionary politics pushing beyond bourgeois democracy. Neither can any other historian. Though “willing to explain to assembled crowds his rationale for upholding the law,” Kotkin writes, Stolypin “personally” led troops in repression when these pedagogical methods did not persuade. Kotkin can only spare a few lines for it here. Our new issue is out now. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on modern authoritarian regimes, global history (1850-present), and Soviet-Eurasian history. Stephen Kotkinプリンストン大学教授(歴史学)で、フーバー研究所の研究員。このエッセーは同氏の最近の著作。Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929―1941（Penguin、2017）からの抜粋。この著作はソビエトの指導者をテーマと Within that political monopoly, Stalin assumed an evermore prominent role. Catalyst, a new journal published by Jacobin, is out now. Either way, the result would be the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” that the Bolsheviks had been calling for since 1905. Kotkin’s teleology leads to incoherence. Remarkably, Stephen Kotkin's epic new biography shows us how much we still have to learn. If Stalin is Kotkin’s antihero, Kotkin’s wishful counter-world-history has P. A. Stolypin as hero, the man who could have saved Russia and the planet from Stalin and Stalinism. In February 1902, Stalin helped organize a mass walkout, distributing leaflets. The solid, unrelieved, Kadet-eating polemics the cadres had read in the Bolshevik press over the last decade or so had not gone down the memory hole, and many among them had presaged, if in institutionally ambiguous terms, Lenin’s unconditional rejection of the Kadet-dominated Provisional Government. Stephen Kotkin is a professor of history at Princeton university and one of the great historians of our time, specializing in Russian and Soviet history. In times of revolution Bolshevism “incarnates bedlam” — its zealots are “obsessed.”. What Mueller Found-and Didn’t Find-About Trump and Russia, Book review of Putin's World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest by Angela Stent, Stalin’s Propaganda and Putin’s Information Wars, Defending the Nation With Secretary of Defense James Mattis, "Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power" Book Review - TNC, China, US rivalry looks volatile - Top1000Funds.com. The issue now was the kind of mass-agitation politics they needed to develop, and the type of organization required to develop it. But why did the son of ex-serfs “succeed” while the big Saratov landowner came up short? Clearly, Stalin was in the thick of the workers’ movement, risking life and limb. Some favored continuing with legal, propagandistic work among a few workers, as Stalin had been doing for the past two years. Kotkin divines the outcome of forced industrialization and forced collectivization at the conclusion of this book because he has the benefit of hindsight. Overruling the local Bolsheviks upon his arrival in the capital, Stalin decided the 1905 slogan was now best expressed by “critical support” for the existing, Kadet-led Provisional Government “insofar as” it carried the “bourgeois-democratic” revolution to the very end. This would mean holding elections to a constituent assembly, which, once convened, would write up a constitution for a democratic republic, the ideal political form of the capitalist state for the workers’ movement. In 1908, Stalin wrote a series of articles titled “Anarchism or Socialism” for the Baku Proletarian. What did Stalin understand by “Marxism” if, according to Kotkin, he also invoked the same doctrine to justify destroying the NEP? Already, Kotkin is determined to establish Stalin’s sympathy for the Bolshevik “dictatorship” of the intellectuals in contrast to the Menshevik “democracy” of the workers, a standard theme in the field. 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