Lenin Wanted an Assistant. Stalin Built a Dictatorship

Lex Fridman opens with a blunt question: do all human beings crave power? Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton historian of Russia and Stalin, knocks the premise apart. People crave security, love, and adventure; they crave power too, he says, but not equally. Some want to stand out from the schoolyard onward and often land in leadership roles. Those roles still come in many forms: a board seat, a consultative body, a ministry inside a separation of powers.

What is rare is the hunger for unconstrained authority, including the power of life and death over other people. Those people, Kotkin says, are not the ones you meet in ordinary life. Most never get the chance to live that dream. George Washington is the counterexample he reaches for first. Washington could have exercised far greater power than he did and chose not to, because he wanted the country to grow strong institutions rather than an oversized individual.

Ambition is not the same as despotism. Kotkin points to the president of MIT, who must consult the administration, faculty, students, and trustees. Those constraints make the institution stronger and the decisions better. They do not mean the president lacks ambition. Despotic power is something else: unlimited, or barely limited, executive authority. Even the person who holds it is damaged by it.

Fridman asks why absolute power is bad for the mind. Kotkin’s answer is plainer than the proverb. People make more mistakes when they are not challenged, when they do not have to explain themselves, win votes, or face anyone who can block them. They also drift toward extremism. In the United States, Congress holds the power of the purse; presidents cannot spend at will. The resulting stalemate infuriates people who want government to “get things done.” Kotkin calls that frustration the system working as designed.

Unconstrained executives can look brilliant for a while. Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Papa Doc and Baby Doc in Haiti, and corporate chiefs unbound by shareholders or boards all generated dynamism and then paid for it. In the cases Kotkin studies, the only checks on a Russian or Soviet leader are circumstantial: distance across thousands of miles, the fact that a day has twenty-four hours. Those are not institutional vetoes. Technology and will can punch through them.

Fridman wonders whether Russians are psychologically drawn to authoritarian leaders in a way Americans are not. Kotkin says the gap is smaller than it looks. Plenty of Americans would take a strongman when they feel blocked or want a political wrong corrected fast; it is not a majority, not even a plurality, but it is real, and people later regret the impulse. In Russia the craving for an iron hand is real too, especially when post-Soviet constraints on executive power failed to work as imagined. He doubts it is simply culture. Citizens can now see that life in constrained systems is not worse, and sometimes better. Measuring any of this under an authoritarian regime is hard, because the environment shapes what people are willing to say.

Why does Vladimir Putin still look popular from a distance? Kotkin gives him credit for reading the psychology of people who lost the post-communist transition: pensions eaten by inflation, stagnant wages, abandoned regions. Putin was clumsy in public at the start, with none of today’s instinct for traditional values and the Orthodox Church. He grew into the job. That is not the whole story. Kotkin asks his own children whether he is a good dad. They have no other father to compare him with. If they reject him, they still get him. “With Putin today, he’s the only dad that the Russian people have.” Introduce rival fathers who might be more loving, funnier, or richer, and the incumbent would have to win favor in a real field.

Denial of alternatives does not automatically produce love; plenty of authoritarians suppress rivals and remain disliked. Putin also had to court the winners of the transition, the skilled, entrepreneurial urbanites. He did that through Dmitry Medvedev, the technically literate “reformer” who served as president for a few years because the constitution barred Putin from three consecutive terms. Russians called the maneuver *castling*, the chess move that swaps king and rook. It let Putin speak to the losers of the 1990s while Medvedev spoke to the cities. When the swap ended, urban protests erupted, not only in the capital. The annexation of Crimea then delivered a sharp bump. Kotkin says the trend has turned down again, even if the numbers still look high next to other world leaders.

The more interesting fact, he argues, is that Putin is unpopular inside the state administration. Bureaucrats are well informed. They see human capital draining away, infrastructure rotting, an economy that is neither growing nor diversifying, and a country that is not investing in its future. They also see a narrow clique stealing everything in sight. They do not yet oppose this in public, because they have families, careers, and children who need school and jobs. Kotkin will not dress that up as simple cowardice; he is not sure how brave anyone would be with those stakes. If an alternative appears, possibly from inside the regime, the shift could be fast. Many of those officials are corrupt, he adds, and many are also patriotic. They credit Putin with pulling a nearly failing state out of 1990s chaos and with standing up to the West. The methods — seizing property, jailing people for political reasons — fixed a problem and created larger long-term ones, while the beneficiary circle kept narrowing.

Putin’s first two terms delivered a full decade of growth averaging about 7 percent a year. The usual dismissal is that it was only oil. Kotkin’s arithmetic undercuts that. Average oil was $35 a barrel in the first term and $70 in the second, roughly $50 across the decade: decent, not a windfall. Later, when oil sat above $100 a barrel, Russia stagnated. So the boom needs another explanation, and Putin does deserve some of the credit. He cut taxes, allowed land to be bought and sold, and deregulated large parts of the economy. An entrepreneurial burst followed, including small and medium businesses.

Two other forces stacked on top of policy. China’s breakneck growth created insatiable demand for almost everything the Soviet Union used to make: fertilizer, chemicals, metals, steel, cement. Soviet-era industry had fallen off a cliff in the 1990s, a collapse worse than the American Great Depression, and much of it came back online in the 2000s. The China–Russia effect was often indirect, through global commodity prices rather than bilateral trade. You can resurrect that industrial base once. It happened to occur in Putin’s first two terms. The 1998 ruble crash also helped, making Russian goods cheap abroad and imports expensive, which revived domestic manufacturing.

Households felt it. Real disposable income grew faster than GDP, in some years around 10 percent. Russians were grateful, Kotkin says, and they were right to be. People who refuse Putin any credit dump the whole story on oil, which cannot carry the numbers. None of this, he immediately adds, made the model sustainable. The methods used to consolidate political power were not the methods that keep an economy compounding.

Asked whether Putin might hold power as long as Stalin, Kotkin’s first answer is “let’s hope not,” and not for America’s sake. The primary victims of Putin’s power, he says, are Russians. Since 1991, some five to ten million people have left not just Russia but the former Soviet space entirely. They are not the poor, the uneducated, or the losers of the transition. They are the more dynamic slice: better educated, more entrepreneurial. Sitting at MIT, Kotkin notes, you can see Russians good enough for the Institute, including Fridman himself.

From the regime’s point of view, the exodus is not all downside. People who dislike you, once gone, stop complaining, protesting, and voting against you. Opposition thins. For a patriot of the country, it is a huge loss. Hemorrhaging that much human capital is damage in itself, and Kotkin says it has accelerated over the previous seven or eight years of Putin’s rule. Those people are not coming back of their own volition, and even if they wanted to, they would be unwelcome.

He does not want a system in which a leader hangs on, then names a successor the way Boris Yeltsin named Putin. Every leader makes mistakes; the point of democracies, markets, and rule of law is a corrective mechanism so errors do not compound. Putin looks healthy enough to last as long as Stalin. Events, a heart attack, or a palace insurrection by ambitious insiders could cut that short. For anyone patriotic about Russia, a Stalin-length tenure is not an outcome to wish for.

Is a revolution required? Is violence required? Kotkin is emphatic that Russia is not a failed country. It is a middle-income state with huge potential, and it has reversed ugly trajectories before. Violence rarely produces a nonviolent, sustainable, positive outcome. Societal upheaval is not a reliable path to better institutions either. People protested across the Middle East, he notes, and protest did not automatically yield a better system, because the jump from the street to strong, consolidated institutions is colossal, not a small step.

What history shows in cases like this is a patriotic group inside the power structure that can see the country declining relative to richer neighbors and wants a new trajectory. If they can unseat the current regime in a coalition, they get a power-sharing arrangement that is frustrating because nothing happens overnight. That frustration is the point. Constraints on forcing change immediately are what make change last. Russia needs courts, democratic institutions, open markets rather than monopolies, and banks that lend on business plans rather than political loyalty or bribes. “Every time Russia seems to need a miracle. And that’s the problem. The solution would be not needing a miracle.”

Fridman raises Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and outspoken critic who treats Putin as an enemy of the free world. Kotkin does not dismiss impressive individuals. He relocates the problem. “We don’t need individuals… we need institutions”: a Duma that functions, a court system, separation of powers, an impartial civil service and judiciary. Andrei Sakharov, the physicist who helped build the hydrogen bomb and later tried to put humane limits on what his science had made possible, became a moral leader, not a head of state. Even if he had, Kotkin says, he still would not have delivered a judiciary, a civil service, or a working parliament. You need a group of leaders, divided enough that no one can destroy the others, and interested in building institutions rather than personal power.

The conversation then turns to Stalin, Kotkin’s home ground. Stalin was a product of circumstances as well as of a fierce personal drive. World War I broke the tsarist order; Stalin spent that war in Siberian exile and never fought. He was briefly called up and disqualified for physical deformities. After the tsar fell, peasants seized land and in fact destroyed much of the gentry. Stalin did not drive those processes. The improbable event was that a small group around Vladimir Lenin announced it had seized power.

By October 1917 the Provisional Government that had replaced the tsar had already failed, so there was not much power left to grab from it. What Lenin staged, Kotkin says, was a coup on the left. Soviets — councils, a form of radical grassroots democracy — were wildly popular, not owned by any one faction, but predominantly socialist. In December 1917, in the middle of the war, Russia held a largely free election; more than three quarters of the country voted socialist in some form. The fight was over who got to define socialism. Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in the name of the Soviets, against the rest of the left, not against a still-functioning bourgeois government. Many historians, Kotkin included, call it the October coup. The revolution happened after the seizure.

Leftist seizures often collapse under the army or “forces of order.” Lenin’s held. They won a civil war and were entrenched in the heart of the country by 1921. Lenin then needed someone to run the new regime in the nitty-gritty. In spring 1922 he created a post that had not existed: general secretary of the Communist Party, a day-to-day political manager, a right hand. He was not looking for a successor. He was institutionalizing a helpmate, and he named Stalin to it. Less than six weeks later Lenin had a major stroke. He never fully returned before dying of a fourth stroke in January 1924. Stalin now held a job designed to serve a man who was no longer running daily affairs, and he used it to build a personal dictatorship inside the Bolshevik dictatorship.

Fridman asks the conspiratorial question: was any of this too convenient? Kotkin answers with method. History is full of contingency; after something happens, everyone decides it was inevitable. Once Hitler became chancellor in 1933, all of German history was bent into a story of the Nazi rise, and trends that did not lead there stopped being examined. Hitler’s appointment was not destiny. Traditional conservatives offered him the job. The Nazi Party never outright won a free and fair election before he came to power, and on the eve of the chancellorship its vote declined relative to the previous election.

Lenin’s illness was the same kind of fact. Neurological and blood problems are not a historical structure. If Lenin had been healthier, Stalin might never have become the Stalin we know. That is not an argument that history is all accident. Structural forces and contingent ones have to be held together. Lenin picked Stalin because the new job was organizational and Stalin was an effective organizer. He got things done, did not complain that the work was too hard, and did not wander off womanizing and drinking. Lenin was choosing a helper, not an heir; he had never had a major stroke before.

Accident can put you in a chair. It cannot keep you there, and it cannot build a superpower on the far side of bloodshed. Stalin was cunning, ruthless, and a workaholic, with a phenomenal memory for names, faces, and events, all advantages as he assembled the machine that became the Soviet state. Kotkin refuses to put Putin and Stalin in the same sentence as similar men or similar regimes. The narrower point is that people who arrive for contingent reasons stay only if they can manage the job. Putin, too, had qualities that were not obvious at the start.

Fridman offers a simplified villain: a manipulator who wanted power for its own sake. Kotkin rejects it. Stalin was a true believer, and that matters. He was hungry for personal power, but not only for power. He wanted to enact communism in reality and to build a powerful state. He was a traditional Russian statist in the imperial sense. Hard-core communists followed him because they knew he meant it. Russian patriots followed him because he was a hard-core defender of state interests in Soviet guise. Sometimes those groups overlapped; sometimes they did not. Both admired his dedication and his ability to deliver.

Kotkin warns against baptizing everyone around Stalin as a communist or a Russian patriot. The attractions were still widespread. Alongside them, Stalin used every underhanded method: manipulation, violence, lying, speaking out of every side of his mouth, slander, sabotage of rivals. He justified all of it, to himself and to others, as the road to communism and Soviet glory. He identified his personal power with communism and with Russia’s standing in the world. He felt he was the only one who could be trusted to build those things.

Why did communism persuade so many people then? Kotkin puts the interwar world on the table. The Great Depression hit capitalism with mass unemployment. Fascism, Nazism, and imperial Japan were rising. Even democratic, rule-of-law capitalist states ran colonies without democracy or rule of law. Capitalism’s image between the wars was not the postwar boom. Communism tried to answer real problems. It did not solve them. It produced far more victims and eventually imploded. People who saw Stalin as a better option than imperialism, fascism, and depression were wrong, but that only became widely clear after Nazism, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy were defeated, decolonization began, and a mass middle class grew from the late 1940s through the 1970s.

In the Marxist schema, the bourgeoisie destroyed feudalism and created capitalism; the working class was supposed to destroy capitalism and, after a socialist stage, reach communism. Marx argued that capitalism had been progressive, then came to serve only the narrow interests of capitalists, so the universal class had to overthrow it. That meant no markets, no private property, no “bourgeois” parliaments. Marx also promised greater freedom, not only greater abundance. “Everywhere this was tried, it produced tyranny and mass violence, death and shortages,” Kotkin says. There is no historical exception.

Defenders reply that you cannot blame Marx, because he wanted freedom. Kotkin’s analogy: you announce you will drop a nuclear bomb and also minimize civilian casualties. The bomb is the elimination of markets, private property, and parliaments. The bomb goes off. You get famine, deportation, unconstrained executive power, and shortages rather than abundance. You keep saying you asked for fewer civilian deaths. That, he says, is the difference between history and philosophy. Marx was not mainly a theorist of inequality. He was a theorist of alienation, dehumanization, and fetters on productivity.

Socialists who understood that you cannot drop the bomb and spare the civilians became social democrats: they used the state to regulate markets and redistribute income, not to destroy private property. In Marxist terms that was apostasy, denounced as revisionism, because it accepted capitalism in principle and tried to fix it. The rift is a civil war on the left almost from the beginning: Leninists who would transcend capitalism versus social democrats who would regulate it. Kotkin says he is not taking a political position. He is describing a confusion that still shows up when one camp cites Marx to abolish capitalism and another admits inequities but thinks regulation can address them. History’s lesson is that eliminating capitalism produces a worse world. The problems can be real. The solution is worse.

Do we have enough history to choose? Kotkin points to a different template. The American Revolution was not about class, workers, or abolishing markets. It was about the category *citizen*. In theory everyone could belong. In practice the founding fell short of its own ideals: men without property were not full citizens, women were not, people imported from Africa were slaves. The category could still expand. Slaves were emancipated and gained the vote; non-property-owning men became full citizens; women got the vote. Kotkin’s own mother could get a credit card in her name in the 1970s without his father co-signing. It took a long time. The promise was fixable.

The same founding also institutionalized the constraints on executive power that opened the conversation, because the framers feared tyranny. Inside universal citizenship and separated powers, ordinary left-right politics grew: redistribution and government action on one side, smaller government on the other. Kotkin has no quarrel with that spectrum. He calls it a gift to the country and to the world. The danger is at the extremes. The far left and the far right both refuse the legitimacy of capitalism or of democratic rule-of-law institutions. Both want to strip constraints on executive power, control the public sphere or weaken independent media, and take away markets or private property. Redistribution then becomes the original Marxist project of transcending capitalism.

He is not asking anyone to become a social democrat. Libertarians, conservatives, centrists, and split-ticket voters all fit inside normal politics. What he likes, politically and economically, is competition rather than concentrated power. Equality of outcome, he argues, is unreachable and produces perverse consequences. Equality of opportunity is the health of a society, and that is where the United States has fallen down: school systems are not providing it for the majority. Invest in infrastructure and human capital, he says, and remember that governance is the variable that makes the rest possible.

If Kotkin could sit down with Putin, off camera, he would not begin with morality plays. He would ask where Putin thinks Russia is going in twenty-five or fifty years, whether current trends produce a high-tech, high-skill, well-infrastructured great power, and whether it bothers him if they do not. That is the mystery. Putin is clever, information-rich, and has now served longer than Leonid Brezhnev’s eighteen years, yet Kotkin has no idea whether the man believes the country is on the right path or simply does not care about that horizon. Direct questions often fail. Sideways ones work better: what does a typical day look like, where are the highs and lows, how do you know your actions have the intended effect, how do you get people to tell you things you will not want to hear.

Once you exercise power at that level, Kotkin says, it becomes almost necessary, a drug, an aphrodisiac. You go to the gym, endorphins fire, and even when you are sore the chemical change carries the day; stop for a while and the body misses the hit. University presidents, secretaries of state, and CEOs know a version of this. The people he admires most can step away, give up the drug, and be stronger for walking off when they still had the option to stay. With someone like Putin you begin to conflate personal power with the nation’s well-being, and you can no longer imagine being an ordinary citizen or running something much smaller than a country.

On Stalin the questions multiply. What is it like to hold life-and-death power over hundreds of millions, to decide novels, films, turbines, submarines, pacts with Hitler, deals with Churchill and Roosevelt, occupations of Mongolia and North Korea? Does he ever think a single person should not have that much? Does he wish for a simpler life, or is he too chemically caught to live without it? On particular dates, was a decision planned or seat-of-the-pants, a lesson absorbed from a book with pencil marks or just a reflex? The closer you get to Stalin, Kotkin says, the more elusive he can become. Fridman’s last question is whether evil and war will always exist. Unfortunately yes: conflicting interests are an enduring fact. The human job is to put them in institutions that can settle them peacefully, not as zero-sum. That cannot be done on a planetary scale, so some conflict will turn violent. What must be avoided is war among the strongest powers. At least 55 million people died in World War II; a war between the United States and China could mean 155 million, 255 million, 555 million. Yemen and Syria are colossal for the people in them and still not planetary. Remembering history is part of how you keep the worst from happening. Fridman closes with Stalin’s line, spoken shortly before Lenin’s death: what matters is not who in the party votes, but who counts the votes, and how.