The dictator was not ‘demonic’, as biographer Stephen Kotin would have it, but pathological, psychopathic, paranoid, criminal and perverse. That is one of a few small quibbles with an author whose magisterial, three-volume work will deservedly be recognised as the gold standard.
Putting Simon Sebag Montefiore’s popular work on Stalin into the shade, Stephen Kotkin’s projected three-volume biography will run to well over 3000 pages, all rooted in primary Russian archival sources and a vast array of Russian-language research publications. Birkelund Professor in History at Princeton University, Kotkin is also the author of the highly influential Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. You read that correctly. The just-published second volume of his Stalin biography is 1154 pages long and covers the period from 1929 to 1941 (collectivisation of agriculture, the Terror, the Nazi–Soviet Pact). The dominant point of view, given largely but not solely via documents flowing in and out of Stalin’s office (the “Little Corner” in the Kremlin), is from his desk: his appointment books, the notes and transcripts of meetings and conversations in there, his speeches, writings, annotations, just about everything that was his or was close to him. This is an interiorised biography, with the ideological motivations and personal complexities seen from inside-out. If being inside Stalin, day in, day out, puts you off, avoid this work.
With so many pages at his disposal, Kotkin can cover the entirety of Stalin’s private and public world, including his powerful influence on art, literature, music and cinema—some of the most interesting sections in this volume are on these subjects. Rather than attempt a comprehensive distillation of the book, which for most of its length is familiarly and compellingly dark, it’s more interesting to focus on surprising and out-of-the-way revelations, and to consider some questions Kotkin leaves up in the air, particularly in relation the Great Terror of 1937-38.
This mammoth work in many ways complicates our view of Stalin, which is good, because human nature is complex, and he was not demonic. Nothing diminishes the murderous nature of his regime, with which we’re adequately familiar. Stalin admired everything about Ivan the Terrible (in many ways his preferred historical model), vastly outdoing him in terror and death-dealing. Whether a Trotsky, a post-dated Lenin, a Bukharin or a Voroshilov could have held the country together through the Great Patriotic War, overseeing the creation of armies and marshals to crush the myriad divisions of Grossdeutschland and its capital into dust … Conceivably not.
In 1932 Stalin adopted “socialist realism” as the plastic-arts and literary aesthetic of the USSR, an ideological widening, and Kotkin reveals the process. As a prelude, Stalin disbanded the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. This was around the time Maxim Gorky returned permanently from his preferred residence in Fascist Italy. The self-styled “proletarians” were mutually hostile zealots fixated on “the correct line”, excoriating one another for the slightest imagined deviation, and mostly under-achievers (Demyan Bedny was typical). In contrast, many non-party writers, like Mikhail Bulgakov, were publishing brilliant work. So Stalin set up a new Union of Soviet Writers, open to non-party as well as party members, and the other arts were supposed to be organised similarly. Stalin wanted Gorky, denounced by the “proletarians” as “a man without class consciousness”, to head the new union.
