2016/02/01 by David Brandenberger · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Aristocracy (class) #Bureaucracy #Chinese history and philosophy #Civilization #Communism #Communism, Protests, Social Movements #Economic history #Feudalism #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #History #Ideology #Law #Marxist philosophy #Philosophy #Political science #Politics #Power (physics)
paper · doi:10.1093/ahr/121.1.333
openalex publication_date 2016/02/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Over the course of the past quarter-century, Stephen Kotkin has made a number of agenda-setting contributions to the study of the Stalin period. Particularly notable are his Foucault-inspired study of Magnitogorsk (Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization [1995]) and his comparative corrective to Soviet exceptionalism (“Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture,” Kritika 2, no. 1 [2001]: 111–164). In Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, Kotkin synthesizes an enormous amount of newly published research together with his own archival findings in order to offer a well-timed bid to overturn the canon once again. Explicitly rejecting traditional views of Joseph Stalin as a mediocrity (Leon D. Trotsky) or an upward climber with a marginal revolutionary record (Nikolai N. Sukhanov), Kotkin also implicitly positions his view of Stalin against more recent characterizations of the general secretary as a cynical master of bureaucratic infighting (Isaac Deutscher); a Machiavellian despot (Adam Ulam, E. A. Rees); a mafia don (Edvard S. Radzinskii, Simon Sebag Montefiore); an insecure tyrant (Robert Tucker); an Old Russian tsar (J. Arch Getty); a pragmatic strongman (Robert Service, Oleg V. Khlevniuk); a consummate politician (Hiroaki Kuromiya); Vladimir I. Lenin’s treacherous heir (Dmitrii A. Volkogonov); and a Marxist true believer (Erik van Ree). According to Kotkin, Stalin was the paradoxical embodiment of the Bolshevik Revolution: an upstart driven by a fusion of Leninist vanguardism, political realism, and bureaucratic savvy. Kotkin’s Stalin was supremely capable, while at the same time firmly rooted in the Bolshevik ideological experience, a depiction that avoids the mistake made by many of the general secretary’s would-be biographers who portray him as standing somehow outside of his historical place and time. Such biographers have often thought of Stalin as a historical free agent of sorts: suspicious, prescient, hyperbolically tyrannical, and implausibly cold-blooded. Kotkin recontextualizes the general secretary within the first three decades of the twentieth century in order to narrate his rise to power without excessive indulgence in psychoanalytical speculation or moralistic preaching. By the end of this volume, Kotkin makes it clear that he thinks Stalin deserved the appellation often ascribed to him by his contemporaries as Lenin’s best disciple, both in terms of ideological vision and administrative talent.