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

Stephen Kotkin, author of a multi-volume Stalin biography, argues that the tsarist regime faced a fundamental dilemma common to authoritarian modernizers: it needed to import modern industry, technology, and educated professionals to compete geopolitically, but doing so threatened its own autocratic rule by creating an educated class and organized workers with independent political ideas.

• This dilemma persists today in regimes like China, Iran, and Russia, which must import modernity (AI, advanced military tech) while suppressing the political freedoms, property rights, and separation of powers that accompany it.
• The tsarist regime was repressive by the standards of its time, but “vegetarian” compared to the “carnivorous” regimes of Stalin or Hitler. Its repression targeted the very people—engineers, intellectuals, workers—it needed to survive as a great power.

The tsarist regime’s refusal to allow meaningful political participation made some form of revolution inevitable, but the specific outcome—Bolshevik dictatorship—was not.

• In 1905, under pressure from defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and mass unrest, the tsar conceded a quasi-parliament (the Duma), but immediately tried to roll back those concessions once the crisis passed. Interior Minister Pyotr Durnovo warned that overthrowing the tsar would not produce constitutional order but chaos and social revolution—a prediction proven correct.
• Constitutional revolutions in the early 20th century (Russia, China, Mexico, Iran, Portugal) all failed because they occurred in the “mass age,” when peasants, workers, and nationalities were already politically organized. Constitutional order had succeeded earlier in Britain and the US because it was established before mass politics, with restricted franchises that could be democratized over time.
• The irony: those fighting tsarist injustice (like Stalin, who spent 20 years as a pennileless revolutionary) produced a far worse regime. The peasants who seized land in 1917–18 brought the Bolsheviks to power in the cities, only to have Stalin violently re-enserf them through collectivization.

Why communist revolutions happened in peasant societies, not industrialized ones (contrary to Marxist prediction):

• In Russia and China, peasants were land-hungry and had no stake in the existing order, so they became a radical revolutionary force. In Germany and Italy, peasants already held significant land and served as the “forces of order” that crushed urban leftist revolts (e.g., the Bavarian Soviet Republic).
• The distribution of land determined whether the right or left won: where peasants had enough land to be conservative, fascism prevailed; where they didn’t, communist revolution succeeded.
• This pattern repeated across peasant societies: Mexico, Iran, Portugal, China, and Russia all followed variants of this dynamic.

How Stalin’s regime survived collectivization and the Great Terror despite destroying its own base:

• The tsarist secret police (Okhranka) was small, focused on surveillance and infiltration of a few thousand intellectuals, and relied on the army for repression. Stalin built a massive secret police (NKVD) during collectivization itself—a chicken-and-egg process where the apparatus expanded as it carried out the enslavement of 100 million peasants.
• Ideology was central: true believers like Lev Kopelev participated in grain seizures from starving villagers because they saw themselves as building a world-historical new world, ending capitalism, imperialism, and war. Even when they knew some victims were innocent, they believed enemies were real and hidden, and overcompensating was necessary to catch the guilty.
• Marxism-Leninism was especially attractive because it empowered intellectuals and lumpen-intellectuals to make all decisions through the state, without needing elections, mandates, or private-sector accountability. It offered total transformation, simplicity, and personal empowerment.
• Party loyalty was itself a theocratic principle: even when members knew Stalin was wrong (as Khrushchev later admitted), they submitted because the party was the vehicle for history’s march toward justice. Many held contradictory thoughts simultaneously—belief, cynicism, fear, and sacrifice coexisted.
• The system survived self-destruction (purging loyalists, officers, scientists, and even the police doing the purging) because it suppressed all political alternatives. There was nowhere else to go—no opposition party, no independent institution. Hitler, by contrast, largely spared his own officer corps and party officials.

The left’s unresolved civil war:

• A fundamental split exists on the left between those who believe capitalism must be eradicated to achieve justice (the Leninist position) and those who accept capitalism, markets, and private property while redistributing income (the social democratic position, e.g., Eduard Bernstein, Swedish Social Democrats).
• Many who claim to accept capitalism still flirt with anti-capitalist rhetoric, giving the right ammunition to paint the entire left as anti-market. The left has never fully repudiated the Leninist path, despite its record of gulags, famine, and dictatorship.
• Marx promised that abolishing private property and markets would bring freedom, abundance, and peace. It delivered the opposite. Defenders argue “Stalin deformed Marx,” but Kotkin compares this to ordering a nuclear strike and claiming no one was supposed to die—the logic of the ideology drives toward the outcome.
• Khrushchev’s Secret Speech denouncing Stalin gave the system a “second wind” by blaming the man, not the system. Xi Jinping’s family suffered under the Cultural Revolution, yet he chose to strengthen the Communist Party monopoly rather than dismantle it. Failures become reasons to try again, not reasons to abandon the ideology.

Does the CCP deserve credit for China’s growth?

• Kotkin argues the Communist Party put a billion people into poverty through its policies; the Chinese people lifted themselves out of poverty through their own entrepreneurialism and hard work when grudgingly allowed to do so.
• Deng Xiaoping’s reforms began not from proactive policy brilliance but from the regime being “flat on its back” after the Cultural Revolution had annihilated state capacity. Concessions (special economic zones, limited market activity) were grudging, incremental, and driven by society pushing against restrictions.
• The real “secret sauce” of China’s growth was geopolitical reorientation: Deng divorced the Soviet model and married the US, gaining most-favored-nation status in 1980 and eventual WTO admission. China exported to the insatiable American middle class, following the Japan–South Korea–Taiwan model.
• Critical advantages the Soviets lacked: British Hong Kong (a rule-of-law financial hub that routed capital into China), overseas Chinese FDI, Taiwanese investment (itself a product of the unfinished civil war), and Japanese war-guilt-driven technology transfer.
• Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” (bringing capitalists into the party) failed—it corrupted the party instead of controlling capitalists. Xi Jinping responded by reasserting party control over the private sector, destroying uncooperative tech bosses, and recentralizing power.
• The party’s dilemma: too much economic liberalization creates independent power centers that threaten its monopoly; too little produces unemployment and stagnation. It cannot resolve this permanently.

Why didn’t someone kill Stalin?

• Stalin was not “Stalin” when he first held power—he became Stalin through the process of building the dictatorship. In the 1920s, he resigned six times and colleagues begged him to stay. They didn’t know what he would become.
• A collective action problem prevented conspiracy: any potential co-conspirator couldn’t trust that the other wasn’t a Stalinist provocateur. The secret police enmeshed everyone in surveillance—drivers, maids, phone lines were all monitored.
• Unlike Hitler (who faced multiple assassination attempts from both inside and outside the regime), Stalin had virtually no serious attempts. He stayed out of public, had heavy security, and the system’s logic made him seem irreplaceable—he was carrying the revolution, defeating Hitler, building the military-industrial complex.
• Some regime insiders killed themselves rather than kill Stalin. The mentality of true believers, combined with the lack of trust and the system’s walling-off of elites from society, made assassination practically impossible despite the logical incentive.

Tech as the latest authoritarian fantasy:

• In the 1970s–80s, Soviet leaders hoped computers would perfect central planning and avoid the need for structural reform. It didn’t work.
• China today is similarly seduced by the idea that technology (AI, surveillance, digital control) can make its dictatorship function better—boosting productivity, managing demographics, and spotting dissent before it happens.
• The fundamental problem tech cannot solve is political legitimacy. Regimes like Iran’s have maybe 20% popular support; the majority despises them. No amount of technology, economic growth, or repression can manufacture genuine legitimacy.
• Repression depends on people doing the repressing—and those people have agency. The tsarist regime fell when the peasant army refused to shoot striking workers in 1917. A “political bank run” can happen at any point in the chain of command when enforcers stop believing in the system.
• Kotkin’s conclusion: in the short run, the risk of hot war (US-China conflict) is existential. In the long run, systems rooted in real citizenship, rule of law, and popular legitimacy are more durable. The task is to elongate the short run—avoid World War III and reach the competition phase where systemic superiority prevails.