The Staff Job That Became a Dictatorship: Stalin's Improbable Road to Power

Fridman opens by asking Kotkin how Stalin amassed what he describes as arguably more power than any man in history, and how that journey after the Russian Revolution connects to questions about institutions. Kotkin frames Stalin as a product of circumstances as well as a man of strong individual drive. The story, he says, is not morally edifying but is extraordinary if one is interested in power.

Kotkin begins with World War I, which broke the Czarist regime and Imperial Russia. Stalin played no part in the war: he was in exile in eastern Siberia until the Czarist autocracy fell in February 1917, and he could leave only when that regime collapsed. He was called up briefly toward the end of the war but disqualified on physical grounds because of physical deformities.

The war continued after the Czar's regime was toppled and became deeply radicalizing. After the Czar fell, peasants began seizing land, effectively destroying much of the gentry class. Stalin had nothing to do with that peasant revolution, which unfolded de facto rather than through legal land ownership.

Kotkin stresses that these were large processes underway while Stalin was alive but not driving them. The peasants had their own revolution, seizing land in fact rather than in law. Against that backdrop, the most improbable development was that a very small group around Lenin announced a seizure of power.

By October 1917 the provisional government that had replaced the Tsar had failed, so there was not much power left to seize from it. Kotkin argues that Lenin instead carried out a coup on the left, in the name of the Soviets—councils that represented popular participation and radical grassroots democracy. Those councils were popular across the country and predominantly socialist or leftist, but not dominated by one group.

Russia held a free and fair election during the war at the end of 1917, in December, and more than three-quarters of the country voted for socialists of one form or another. The battle was therefore over the definition of socialism and over who had the right to define it. Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power in the name of the Soviets against the rest of the left, not against the already failed provisional government.

Kotkin calls the October Revolution a coup and notes that, in his telling, the revolution happened after the seizure of power. The leftists who took power in the name of the masses often fail in history, collapsing or being cleaned out by armies or counter-revolutionary forces. Lenin's group, however, would prove able to hold power.

Lenin declared that the old government had failed and that the Soviets would take its place, seizing power in their name. Stalin came to power alongside Lenin in this seizure of power on the left against the rest of the left. Kotkin emphasizes that Lenin's coup succeeded where many similar left seizures failed: the Bolsheviks held power, won a civil war, and were entrenched by 1921.

Kotkin notes that Lenin was the undisputed leader of the Bolshevik Party, which renamed itself communist in 1918. By 1921 Stalin was part of the group running the new regime, and Lenin needed someone to handle the nitty-gritty of administration. Lenin created the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party and installed Stalin as a day-to-day political manager and right-hand man.

Kotkin dates the creation of the General Secretary position to the spring of 1920 and says Lenin created it expressly for Stalin. The role had not existed before and was not intended to make Stalin a successor; Lenin wanted to institutionalize a helpmate. Less than six weeks after creating the position and installing Stalin, Lenin suffered a major stroke and never fully returned as an actor in power before dying of a fourth stroke in January 1924.

That timing was decisive. Stalin now held a new General Secretary's position, but he was the right hand of a leader no longer exercising day-to-day control. Kotkin says Stalin used the position to build a personal dictatorship inside the Bolshevik dictatorship.

Fridman asks whether anything in this trajectory was nefarious, why the position seemed made for Stalin, and why Lenin fell ill. Kotkin treats the sequence as a story of contingency and surprise, not a conspiracy in which every step was designed. He does not deny Stalin's ambition, but he insists that the opening came from an administrative appointment and a medical catastrophe.

Kotkin argues that history is full of contingency and surprise, even though after an event people tend to see it as inevitable. He uses Hitler's rise as an example: once Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and the Nazi regime was institutionalized, all of German history seemed to bend toward that outcome. Trends that did not lead there were no longer examined.

Hitler's appointment was contingent, Kotkin says. The traditional conservatives named him chancellor even though he was part of the radical right. The Nazi Party never outright won a free and fair election before Hitler came to power, and its vote had declined on the eve of his appointment.

By the same logic, Lenin's strokes and his neurological and blood problems were not a structure in history. If Lenin had been healthier, Kotkin says, Stalin might never have become the Stalin we know. That does not make all history accidental; it means structural factors must be related to contingent ones.

Kotkin rejects the idea that Lenin was choosing a successor when he picked Stalin. Lenin had serious illnesses but had never had a major stroke before, so he was choosing an organizer for an organizational job. The choice rested on Stalin's effectiveness and promise relative to others in the regime.

Kotkin says Lenin chose Stalin because Stalin was a very effective organizer who could get things done. He carried out assignments no matter how difficult, did not complain that the work was too hard or too much, and did not go off womanizing and drinking while ignoring responsibilities. Lenin was selecting the better option for running the executive work, not naming a successor.

Other figures around Lenin may have been more brilliant, but Kotkin says Stalin was more effective. He was exceptionally competent at the tasks of running the executive branch of a dictatorship. If he had not been good at the job, others would have pushed him aside.

Kotkin concedes that accident, friendship, or relatives can get someone a position. Holding that position in difficult circumstances and building a superpower on bloodshed requires skill. An accident can bring someone to power, but it will not keep him there.

Kotkin compares this to Putin, who also had qualities not foreseen at the beginning and who has been able to hold power rather than merely be named. He insists that Putin and Stalin are very different people and that their regimes are very different, and he would not put them in the same sentence. His point is that contingent arrivals do not stay in power unless they can manage power; Stalin was cunning, ruthless, a workaholic, diligent, and had a phenomenal memory for names, faces, and events, which helped him build the Soviet state and bureaucracy.

Fridman asks whether Stalin was more than a manipulative personality seeking power—whether he truly believed in communism. Kotkin agrees that Stalin was a true believer and says this is very important. Stalin was hungry for power and personal power, but not only for power: he wanted to enact communism in reality and build a powerful state.

Kotkin describes Stalin as a statist in the traditional Russian Imperial sense. Stalin's hardcore communist conviction won him followers among communists, and his defense of Russian state interests won him followers among Russian patriots. Sometimes those groups overlapped and sometimes they were completely different, but both admired his dedication and his ability to enact those goals.

Kotkin cautions against making everyone around Stalin a communist believer or a great Russian patriot. Still, those attractions were widespread and powerful for many people. Stalin's ability to communicate his dedication and drive toward those pursuits was part of his appeal.

At the same time, Kotkin says Stalin resorted to manipulation and violence. He lied, spoke out of all sides of his mouth, slandered people, sabotaged potential rivals, and used every underhanded method and then some to build his personal dictatorship. He justified this by appeals to communism and the Soviet fatherland, to himself and to others, and identified his personal power with communism and Russian glory; he felt he was the only one who could be trusted to build those things.

Kotkin places Stalin's rule in the interwar context between World War I and World War II. The Great Depression was a difficult time for the capitalist system, with mass unemployment and hardship. Fascism, Nazism, and imperial Japan were looming, and capitalism had many authoritarian incarnations.

Even democratic capitalist states with rule of law had non-democratic colonies under their rule. The image and reality of capitalism in that period were therefore very different from what they later became. In that interwar conjuncture, communism held appeal inside the Soviet Union and even outside it because capitalism disappointed many people.

Kotkin does not soften the verdict: communism was significantly worse, produced many more victims, and eventually imploded. But it tried to address real problems, did not solve them, and did not come out of nowhere. It emerged from the context of the interwar period.

Some people saw Stalin's rule as potentially better than imperialism, fascism, and the Great Depression. Kotkin says they were wrong: Stalin was not a better alternative to markets, private property, rule of law, and democracy. That became clearer only after World War II.

After World War II, Nazism, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy were defeated, decolonization unfolded around the world, and a middle-class economic boom from the late 1940s through the 1970s created mass middle classes in many societies. Capitalism rose from the ashes, as Kotkin puts it, and changed the game for Stalin and communism. The comparison that had made communism attractive no longer looked the same.

Communism was defined as an alternative to capitalism, so if the alternative was not superior there was no reason for communism to exist. If capitalism was in foul odor and people had a strong critique of it, alternatives could appeal. That is what happened with Stalin's rule in the earlier period.

After World War II the context changed a lot: capitalism was much more successful than in the interwar period. The Soviet Union had a tough time competing against that new context. Kotkin's account ends with that shift in the comparative benchmark rather than with Stalin's personality alone.