Stephen Kotkin on Stalinism as (Mostly) Politics & (Lessly) Psychopathology
From Imperial Russia & World War I to Lenin, the antinomies of NEP, & collectivization-terror as the only path to True Communism—but, then, incomprhensibly, with the Great Terror Stalin crashed the plane. Why? Plus a few preliminary notes on MAMLM LLM-assisted “deep” active reading…
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>
Slavoj Žižek and Stephen Kotkin discuss Kotkin’s monumental biography of Joseph Stalin. Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 covers the Soviet dictator’s youth, from his humble origins in Georgia as the son of a shoemaker to his days as a revolutionary organizer in Lenin’s inner circle.
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: