Grasping Reality · Economics & Policy
TIER 4 Mon, 29 Dec 2025 01:45:36 +0000
The third volume of Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin biography—Stalin: Totalitarian Superpower—may, but probably will not, come out in July 2026, things being as they are. But I have already started getting ready, putting volumes 1 and 2 (Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941) on my bedside table, along with Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization and Tolstoy’s War & Peace.
So far, two things of note:
(1) “Deep, active reading” is much easier—and more fruitful—when a capable LLM sits at your elbow: Reading has always been a joint production between author, text, and the reader’s prior scaffolding: what you already know, what associations spring to mind, which gaps you can bridge. An LLM, judiciously prompted, supplies scaffolding on demand. It can surface the hidden priors, name the unstated interlocutors, and map the argumentative terrain the author assumes, thereby lowering the cognitive transaction costs of comprehension. The risk—always—of confabulation is real; but so too, historically, were the risks of misremembered seminar notes and half-digested secondary sources. Net-net, the marginal productivity of your attention rises. You can spend less time decoding the context and more time evaluating the claims.
Situating the author in their proper mise-en-scène is now tractable in minutes rather than weeks. Intellectual work occurs in conversations—institutions, journals, polemics, funding regimes, ideological wars of position. With a few prompts, an LLM can reconstruct the immediate discursive neighborhood: who the author is disagreeing with, which schools they borrow from, which case studies are canonical, and what counts as a “win” in that subfield. This is not just garnish; it changes interpretation.
You no longer have to argue in your own mind with a pale shadow of the author, animated by your partial memory and wishful reconstruction. You can spin-up a serviceable proxy—call it “Author*, footnoted”—that can crisply restate their position, test how it survives steelmanning, and explore counterfactuals (“what if they accepted X?”). The point is not ventriloquism; it is triangulation. By iterating the author’s commitments against alternative premises, you learn where their results are robust and where they are leverage-sensitive. In the Old Régime, that labor was expensive and failure-prone; now it is cheap. If you keep a falsification mindset—verify quotes, check references, demand page numbers—the exercise saves you from arguing with your own projection and, therefore, from flattering your own prejudices.
Hence Platon’s character Sokrates’s dismissal of reading in the Phaidros—book is to mind as painting is to animal—no longer holds. The painted animal does not move; the written text, historically, did not answer back. Today, the text can be made to move. Not the original author, granted, but a dynamic, interrogable model that reconstructs the argument space and responds within it. That changes the epistemic game. A book is now an interface to a live discourse, not merely a frozen artifact. The safeguard is humility: treat the model as a fast index plus an argumentative simulator, not an oracle. But once you do, the asymmetry that worried Plato—passive reader, inert text—erodes. We get something closer to dialectic: a quick, cheap, approximate Sokrates, always on tap, who is good enough to raise better questions and bad enough to force you to check the footnotes.
(2) A very nice conversation a decade ago between Stephen Kotkin and Slavoj Žižek about Stalin:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=torL-Q6htQo>
My take on their conversation, and on the picture of Stalin that emerges from it:
Stephen Kotkin is convinced that politics, not childhood psychopathic demons, made the man, for it was the experience of building and operating a personal dictatorship that shaped his character; and it was the placement of that character against the wider sweep of geopolitics, ideology, and institutions that explain that character’s choices and the horrible genocidal outcomes. Start with the cataclysm of World War I, which normalized mass violence in politics. Continue with the very hard man Vladimir Lenin—a product of imperial Russia in his ruthlessness, his contempt for softness, his extremism in principle, and his devious tactical pragmatism. Note that a Trotsky who publicly saw himself as Lenin’s equal could not gain control of Lenin’s party in the face of a Stalin who saw himself as Lenin’s immediate pupil, and add the importance of personnel and patronage that enables the General Secretary to construct a personal dictatorship within a bureaucratic state.
For the Bolsheviki, the 1920s presented a structural contradiction: Urban Russia was a Bolshevik single-party dictatorship with state ownership of industry’s “commanding heights”, The countryside—home to more than 85% of the population and 70% of the wealth—remained marketized under the NEP, capitalist-like and socially distinct. The regime repeatedly undermined its own quasi-market because, as Communists, they aimed not to ameliorate capitalism but to eradicate all of it, down to the village market and the private blacksmith forge. Viewed through communist lenses that equated capitalism with imperialist war and wage slavery, forced collectivization and the terror-famine became, tragically, the only effective instrument for doing the job. Party, ideology, siege mentality, youthful mobilization all mattered. But would they have done the job without Stalin? Could anyone else have “gone all the way,” reënserfing a hundred million peasants, collectivizing agriculture, and persisting through the catastrophe of five to seven million dead by starvation, tens of millions starving yet surviving, with cannibalism emerging and régime destabilization a growing threat.
But then comes Kotkin’s hardest problem. The terror-famine of collectivization and forced industrialization has at least a simulacrum of means-ends logic, given the ends, given permissibility of all means given what means had already been used in World War I. But after the success of the collectivization of agriculture and the restabilization of the régime, Stalin then, in Kotkin’s term: crashes the plane. Having consolidated power and built socialism’s foundations, he turns the purging scythe on loyal elites—friends, factory heads, diplomats, intelligence, and the Red Army officer corps—at a scale unmatched by fascist analogues, and Communist analogues too. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a veritable tea party in comparison.
How can political explanation take us to where we want to go? Similar dictatorships did not produce coordinated mass murder of loyal elites.
The revolution was real—mass, participatory, energized by the injustices of tsarism. Yet institutions govern, not brilliant ideas. Lenin and his cohort deliberately built a dictatorship. The methods and core ideas of reigning communism—class absolutism, anti-market dogma, siege geopolitics—were at odds with freedom, abundance, and happiness. Stalin’s story, in Kotkin’s telling, is thus the convergence of structure, ideology, and political technique—made decisive by one man’s willingness to go further than anyone else.
And my notes on the event below the fold:
Stephen Kotkin: Why another Stalin biography?:
Widen the lens a little bit—open up to the full sweep of history; not a book about “Stalin in history” but about Russian power in the world, and then Stalin’s power in Russia. Kotkin believes the wider view, the big sweep of history, enables us to understand Stalin better.
Put politics at the center—instead of a weird, demonic personality formed in childhood or elsewhere: Kotkin demonstrates that politics is what formed Stalin’s personality; it is the experience of building a personal dictatorship and exercising power made him the kind of person he became.
Be comprehensive & scrupulous—taking nothing for granted: going back and reading everything, including the avalanche of new materials that have appeared in the last fifteen years…
Stephen Kotkin: World War I created a conjuncture that made mass violence part of everyday politics, producing Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler, and then World War II. We must explain World War I’s origins and what it did to civilization and political systems, add Isaiah Berlin’s utopianism-overreach points, and then proceed…
Stephen Kotkin: Lenin was a hard man, a very hard man. But he was a product of imperial Russia. His hard line against freedom came from fighting a regime with no freedom and no politics…
Stephen Kotkin: Stalin was a better Leninist than Trotsky. Lenin was extreme in principles, but he compromised tactically to realize them—the ultimate pragmatist. Trotsky lacked this pragmatism and flexibility. Moreover, Trotsky constantly tried to make himself Lenin’s equal—or better. Trotsky wrote pamphlets after 1917 recalling how he had “corrected” Lenin in arguments. Stalin’s pamphlets said he was Lenin’s pupil and heir, faithfully executing what Lenin taught. That positioning—pupil vs. equal—and the ability to retreat tactically or go sideways when the frontal path was blocked: that was Leninist, and Stalin absorbed it…
Stephen Kotkin: The regime couldn’t manage the quasi‑market and kept ruining its own NEP. A Communist régime in a capitalist world, with a capitalist‑like countryside, was a minoritarian regime in trouble. It looks to me—acknowledging we can’t know—that without Stalin, the regime would have collapsed or been forced to soften the one‑party dictatorship. You’d get a new crisis spawning violence—maybe a military or right‑wing dictatorship—or an evolution toward accepting the capitalist‑like countryside as permanent, yielding a mixed economy and a mixed polity…
Stephen Kotkin: Could Bukharin have been a Russian Deng Xiaoping—conceding markets while retaining the party monopoly? The Chinese have shown central control can be retained while abandoning economic ideology. Whether that was possible in the 1920s is unclear. International conditions mattered: repudiated tsarist debts, poor infrastructure, limited access to foreign finance. Bukharin was not a significant politician with the necessary skill. Figures existed—Rykov, Sokolnikov—who might have avoided collapse by grudgingly accepting markets, like Deng later did. Alexei Rykov was effective: Stalin relied on him to run the economy through the ’20s, Rykov chaired Politburo meetings by tradition, and he opposed forced collectivization on catastrophic‑risk grounds Had Stalin died, Rykov likely had the strength to take power. Unfortunately for them, Stalin did not die. Rykov believed that while markets and private property would have to be eradicated eventually, there was no safe immediate path. But that is not being prepared to do a Deng Xiaoping in the ’20s, or evidence that he would have had the base in the nomenklatura to carry it through…
Stephen Kotkin: Behind closed doors the Bosheviki spoke in terms of class warfare, kulaks, finance capital, socialist revolution. Communists behind closed doors were Communists. They were not trying to ameliorate the market, fix capitalism on the edges, redistribute a little income. They were there to destroy, eradicate, transcend capitalism—markets, private property. That they were communists matters: You get different outcomes if your system is based on the Federalist Papers as opposed to Marx and Lenin…
Stephen Kotkin: Many factors are at play: state‑to‑state relations, geopolitics, the international system. Stalin had the idea that the small countries formerly part of the Russian Empire were not sovereign. for they would be used by Britain or later Nazi Germany to invade the Soviet Union and overthrow it. We can’t explain Stalin without geopolitics…
Stephen Kotkin: What would have happened had Stalin died or not existed? In the 1920s the regime was a single‑party dictatorship. Industry—the “commanding heights”—was state‑owned. Only about 10% of GDP was artisanal manufacturing. There was no political NEP—one party and censorship. But there was a market in the countryside, where more than 80% of people lived and most wealth was produced. So there were two revolutions: the urban Bolshevik single‑party dictatorship, aiming at industrial modernity; and the peasant revolution—separate, strong, capitalist‑like under the New Economic Policy. All through the 1920s the Bolsheviks wrung their hands: what to do about the peasant capitalist‑like countryside? Confront it? How? They had almost no Communists in the villages; red flags and slogans vanished outside the cities…
Stephen Kotkin: From the Communist point of view, they saw no other way than forced collectivization and the associated terror-famine to eliminate capitalism, markets, and private property in the countryside. Voluntary collectivization as of 1928 was about one percent of arable land—only peasants who couldn’t farm at all joined collectives. If you believe capitalism is imperialist war, wage slavery, injustice, and alienation, you try to overcome it—and it turned out the answer was worse than the phenomenon they were critiquing…
Stephen Kotkin: You’re still left with “how did he do this?” Enslaving 100 million peasants, collectivizing agriculture, eradicating markets and private property. Others in the regime didn’t think he could do it; they predicted catastrophe—and they were right. Famine: five to seven million dead from starvation; at least forty million starved but survived; cannibalism; the regime destabilized; his personal dictatorship destabilized. He kept going. I don’t think somebody else could have done this. In that sense, his contribution is colossal. He couldn’t have done it without the Party, ideology, the siege mindset, and millions of young people who wanted to build a new world. Many factors enabled it—but I don’t think anybody else could have gone all the way the way as he did. Nevertheless, he was able to pull it off…
Stephen Kotkin: Volume Two covers 1929 to 1941. Stalin crashed the plane. The plane was flying fine—no mechanical difficulties—and all the people on the plane were loyal. He drove it into the Alps, and smashed it. Stalin has immense power. He’s collectivized agriculture, eradicated capitalism, built socialism’s foundations are built. Then come the Great Purges—first in the party itself, and everybody starts to be murdered. All the loyal people: closest friends and advisers; factory heads; collective farm heads; diplomats; foreign intelligence officers; the Red Army officer corps. One hundred fifty out of one hundred eighty division commanders executed as foreign spies. None of these men had defected, marched on the capital, or betrayed the country. They were loyal—and he murdered them. Not just a few—big numbers. The 1920s makes sense to me. But then he crashed the plane. Where did that come from? Where did those demons—those snakes in his head—come from? Hitler doesn’t murder his officer corps. In 1938, when he wants top officers removed, he retires them—with honors—the same year Stalin cuts through his own officer corps like a scythe. Hitler doesn’t murder his diplomats, foreign intelligence agents, Gauleiters, provincial officials, or factory bosses. The Night of the Long Knives in 1934? Fewer than a hundred. Stalin’s execution lists have thousands of names, his signature on single‑night packets. This makes it harder: how do we get from the Stalin who builds a personal dictatorship to the Stalin who crashes the fully functional plane?…
Stephen Kotkin: The problem in Stalin biographies is that once you hit the Great Terror point, you go back and inflate earlier traits to “explain” later behavior—aha! he put the cat in the microwave! we knew he would murder us all!! If your explanation is rooted in politics, good—but similar dictatorial politics elsewhere did not yield coordinated mass murder of loyal élites. I don’t know how much we can exclude demonic personality…
Stephen Kotkin: There was a very real revolution: mass participatory; building a new world; injustices and tsarist oppression were severe, the tsarist regime unjust, thank God they overthrew it. The revolution produced dynamism, energy, craziness. But brilliant ideas don’t govern; institutions do; and so the shards of the old regime become the building blocks of the new. In the 1920s, instead of free and open institutions, they built a dictatorship—on purpose, not accident. It’s what Lenin wanted, and what Lenin, Stalin, and others implanted. They were not cynics or mere seekers of personal power; not sadists for sadism’s sake. But the methods and core ideas of the reigning Communists were in conflict with the freedom, abundance, and happiness the revolution aimed at. It’s a tragic story…
Slavoj Žižek: Pople lump Stalinism and fascism together as “totalitarian,” yes, but the systems function differently. Take the purges: why the compulsion for public confessions—Bukharin and others—admitting sins? Even in the darkest terror—up to the early 1950s—once a year on Stalin’s birthday, prisoners had to sign a collective telegram to Stalin with good wishes. You cannot imagine Nazis collecting Jews in Auschwitz to send a birthday telegram to Hitler. Perhaps an explanation: a perverted remainder of Enlightenment within Stalinism. Even the “lowest trash” is forced to participate in universal Reason—staged, of course—yet it presumes a universe of universal Enlightenment truth…
Slavoj Žižek: Imagine your only source of informations about post-World War II Germany was the work of Habermas. Žižek doubts if you woud have ever learned that there were two Germanies. But you would have learned a lot about fascism. But you would learn the basic insight of the Frankfurt School “Dialectic of Enlightment”—that the horrors of the 20th century are not simply archaic revenant survivals, but are the product of the immanent antagonisms of modernity. Here, Žižek thinks, Stalinism is much clearer example than fascism. And Stalinism still for me remains an enigma…
Slavoj Žižek: Tragedy is good, decent people doing horrible things. For this, you need politics—not the psychoanalytic approach looking for personal trauma. Western Marxism has no consistent theory of Stalinism. For Žižek, Stalinism is a clearer example than fascism of modernity’s immanent dialectic-of-Enlightenment Frankfurt School antagonisms. There must have been a certain structure of power that made it possible for a guy like Stalin to take over. Žižek distrusts the simplistic view that “if only Lenin survived three or four more years with Trotsky, it would have been totally different…”
Slavoj Žižek: Perhaps to understand Stalinism, demystify the idolized “Golden 1920s”—formalists, futurists, “relative freedom.” There were ominous ideological currents: a Gnostic Bolshevism; the “new man” project—Trotsky spoke of literally constructing a biologically more rational human. The 1920s need rediscovery without idolatry…
Kotkin, Stephen. 1995. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. <https://archive.org/details/magneticmountain0000kotk>.
Kotkin, Stephen. 2014. Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. New York: Penguin <https://archive.org/details/stalin0000kotk_v8a9>.
Kotkin, Stephen. 2017. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941. New York: Penguin <https://history.princeton.edu/about/publications/stalin-waiting-hitler-1929-1941>.
Kotkin, Stephen & Slavoj Žižek. 2015. On Stalinism. LIVE from NYPL <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=torL-Q6htQo>.
Platon. -370. Phaidros. Athenai. <https://archive.org/details/platonsphaidros00plat>.