Koba's Country.

• Author: Matlock, Jack F., Jr.
• Position: Stalin, vol. 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 - Book review

Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 976 pp., $40.00.

Anyone unfamiliar with the quality of Stephen Kotkin's four earlier books on the Soviet Union might well question whether we need a new, voluminous tome about the first fifty years of Joseph Stalin's life. Stalin, like Hitler, has been the subject of numerous biographies, ranging from Boris Souvarine's pioneering work to Robert C. Tucker's multivolume study. Is there anything important to add?

The answer is an emphatic yes, and not just because Kotkin's Stalin is the product of a careful review of how a tyrant gained control of a country and exercised power. It dispenses with the myth that he was an intellectual dullard, showing that he was quite shrewd as well as forceful. What's more, it contains essential background information for policy makers in the world today, illuminating some of the causes of the strife that persists despite the end of the Cold War.

In order to explain Stalin, Kotkin (a former valued colleague of mine at Princeton University) provides a brilliant political history of Russia in the early twentieth century. By casting his research net widely and examining evidence that has only recently become available as a result of the opening of Soviet archives, he illustrates the complexity of motives and fundamental unpredictability of events as they unfolded during the 1920s. In addition, Kotkin has supplemented the main text with 120 pages of notes containing relevant commentary of great interest, along with source citations. The level of detail is microscopic and the judgments crackling. This is a landmark achievement that is unlikely to be surpassed anytime soon.

Pace theoreticians of every school: history does not move in predictable patterns. Human beings make history, but the makers and shakers often fail to understand the potential effects of their actions. The most carefully planned projects can bring results that are the opposite of those intended. Once in a while, the wildest gambles pay off, but the payoff may not resemble the prize that was sought.

Stalin, whose party nickname was Koba, succeeded, against incalculable odds, in helping to create a Bolshevik dictatorship in the world's largest country; through adroit maneuvering, he positioned himself in absolute control of that dictatorship. The result, however, bore no resemblance to the proletarian Utopia predicted by Karl Marx. In fact, the Bolsheviks were turning Marxism on its head by launching a revolution in Russia. Marx always thought that the revolution would come in Western Europe. The notion that a Communist revolution would emerge in Russia, where there was no real proletariat, would have dumbfounded him. According to Kotkin, the Russian empire's dissolution in wartime meant that "the revolution's survival was suddenly inextricably linked to the circumstance that vast stretches of Russian Eurasia had little or no proletariat." The regime scrambled to come up with a theory justifying tactical alliances with local "'bourgeois' nationalists," a term that had as much bearing on reality as did the...