Throughout the 1930s the USSR prepared for war. Kotkin writes with verve and imagination and pages of brilliant synopses intersperse the narrative.
While for specialists the book is a treasure trove some readers may find the detail daunting, but it is far from dull. The depth of Kotkin’s scholarship and his command of Russian archival sources are truly impressive. Its 900 pages of text and 200 pages of small-type endnotes seek to record Stalin’s every important utterance and action. The book provides a chronicle as well as a biography of Stalin’s life. Hundreds of books and articles have been written about Stalin’s terror and Kotkin’s account ranks among the very best. Stalin’s terror resists rational analysis: it is a story to be told and behold. One of the many attractions of Kotkin’s second volume is the way he pieces together the deadly interaction of Stalin’s ideas, personality and political manoeuvres. Stalin’s ideology is a necessary but not sufficient explanation of the Great Terror. Indeed, he staged show trials in which high-ranking party leaders – Stalin’s comrades-in-arms in the 1920s – were condemned to death for acts of treason and collusion with foreign foes. The Red Army’s high command was also decapitated, while Soviet diplomats suffered an equally devastating purge.Īlthough the scale of Soviet state violence against its citizenry remained hidden, Stalin’s campaign against “enemies of the people” was no secret. Harder to fathom is the Great Terror of 1937-1938, when more than 1.5 million people were arrested and nearly 700,000 executed, including hundreds of thousands of loyal party members and state officials. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images The Great Terror Photograph: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images The rationale was that establishing control of food supplies was essential to support industrialisation and rearmament – tasks made more imperative by Hitler’s rise. Peasants were the largest category of victim, with millions killed, deported or starved to death during the drive to forcibly collectivise Soviet agriculture. In the 1930s, however, Stalin was peerless in his deployment of mass terror to destroy both real and imagined enemies of the Soviet regime. But in this he was no different from other communist leaders, such as arch-rival Leon Trotsky, whose defence of “Red Terror” he applauded. Stalin’s propensity to use political violence had come to the fore during the civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution. Stalin’s paranoia was political and ideological, honed by the isolation of the Soviet state and the siege mentality required to survive in a hostile capitalist world. Stephen Kotkin’s key insight in the first volume of his groundbreaking biography was that Joseph Stalin’s personality was moulded and driven by the politics of ruthless class war in defence of the revolution and the pursuit of communist utopia.
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