Jul 10, 2025, 12:50 PM ETInterview

Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history

The Czarist regime faced a structural geopolitical dilemma: modernization requires importing engineers, industrial workers, and intellectuals to compete militarily and economically, yet these groups inherently generate political ideas that threaten autocratic rule.
Stephen Kotkin argues modernization is not an inevitable sociological process but a reactive geopolitical necessity driven by the threat of invasion or colonization by superior powers.
Contemporary authoritarian regimes (Iran, China, Russia, North Korea) face the same paradox of needing to import the technical attributes of modernity while suppressing the political freedoms (separation of powers, property rights) that accompany it.
The Czarist state was classified by Kotkin as a "vegetarian regime" compared to the "carnivorous" repression of Stalin and Hitler, yet it still repressed the very classes it needed for global competition.

Stalin spent 20 years as a penniless, jobless revolutionary (ages ~18 to 38) dedicated to fighting genuine Tsarist injustices, including imprisonment and Siberian exile.
A core paradox identified by Kotkin is that Stalin, fighting against Tsarist tyranny, constructed a regime of far greater injustice, bloodshed, and repression than the one he overthrew.
Stalin's rise was enabled by his willingness to force through collectivization and rapid industrialization when others in the Bolshevik leadership deemed it impossible or suicidal.
The Great Terror is described as a system where the police also murdered the police, yet the regime did not collapse because Stalin successfully carried the entire system through "thick and thin."

A leftist revolution in Russia was inevitable due to the "peasant land hunger" and the failure of the Tsarist state to distribute land, unlike in Central Europe (Germany, Italy) where peasants were more established landowners.
In Russia, the peasant army was ready to seize land for themselves, meaning there were no "forces of order" to suppress urban leftist revolts, unlike in Germany where the army crushed the Bavarian Soviet Republic.
The 1928 Soviet collectivization effectively enslaved 100 million peasants, reversing their de facto land ownership and annihilating the peasant revolution that had initially helped the Bolsheviks seize power.
In China, a similar dynamic occurred where the Communist Party's inability to satisfy land demands initially fueled radicalism, leading to the Cultural Revolution's destruction of state planning capacity.

Kotkin attributes the endurance of Stalinist terror to the genuine ideological belief of young people and intellectuals who viewed the eradication of capitalism as a necessary step to build a world without war and imperialism.
The Marxist-Leninist system empowers the intellectual class to act as the "vanguard," giving them absolute decision-making power over society, a level of agency unavailable in decentralized market systems.
Many high-ranking Bolsheviks who died in the purges were not cowards but "true believers" who sacrificed themselves for the "New World," often believing their deaths were necessary for the cause.
The system survived despite internal contradictions because the ideology provided a narrative where "Stalin" or "Mao" were the problem, never the system itself, allowing for a "second wind" of belief after de-Stalinization.

The Soviet Union failed because it could not open politically without liquidating its monopoly on power; Gorbachev's attempts at political reform inadvertently destroyed the regime.
China avoided the Soviet fate by not attempting political liberalization, but it faces a dilemma where economic liberalization eventually creates independent wealth sources (capitalists) that threaten Party control.
Jiang Zemin's "Three Represents" policy attempted to co-opt millionaires into the Party, but this failed by corrupting the Party with capital rather than transforming it; Xi Jinping has since reasserted Party control over the private sector.
China's economic miracle is attributed not to Party policy alone, but to geopolitical factors: access to the US domestic market, Hong Kong's financial system, Taiwanese FDI, and Japanese technology transfer following World War II.
Kotkin notes that China lifted 800 million people out of poverty through private entrepreneurialism, while the Party initially put them in poverty through forced collectivization.

Authoritarian regimes rely on a "bargain" of freedom for prosperity, but this deal collapses if the regime fails to deliver economic growth, as citizens cannot sue the state in court for non-performance.
Repression relies on human agents (soldiers, police) who possess agency; regimes fail when these agents lose the will to suppress their own communities, a phenomenon described as a "political bank run."
Unlike the Czarist regime, which faced constant assassination attempts from society, Stalin was virtually never targeted by internal or external assassins because elites saw him as the only one capable of maintaining the system's logic.
Authoritarian regimes (Iran, Russia, China) cannot grant each other political legitimacy; they are opportunistic alliances that dissolve when self-interest diverges.
Long-term regime stability requires political legitimacy derived from citizen agency (voting, rule of law), which technology and economic growth alone cannot permanently replicate.

The immediate risk is World War III, but the long-term historical argument suggests that systems based on genuine legitimacy will outlast those relying solely on repression and technology.
China's strategy involves using technology (surveillance, AI) to make its dictatorship more efficient and immune to challenges, but this does not solve the underlying deficit of political legitimacy.
Kotkin warns that while the US and China may have a "Cold War" with tensions, avoiding a "hot war" is essential to prevent the massive death toll associated with great power conflicts.
The "long run" of history favors systems that enable citizens and provide opportunity, whereas the "short run" of geopolitics is currently defined by the survival of fragile, illegitimate authoritarian regimes.