My Amazon Review of Steven Kotkin's "Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941"

From Passenger to Engineer on the Locomotive of History

This is Princeton history professor Steven Kotkin’s second volume in his magisterial biography of Iosif Stalin. The Stalin of the first volume is a Stalin who is a passenger on the locomotive of history and thus the first volume is more history than biography. (My review of the first volume appears at:  https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2015/01/my-amazon-review-of-stalin-volume-i.html) In the second volume Stalin is in command making history and this is where the story bogs down. Simply put there is too much detail for the lay reader and the book runs 1173 pages in the print edition. You need a scorecard to keep up with all of the players and you have keep names like Sergo Ordzhonikidze (a Politburo member in the mid-1930’s) in your head. Hence I reluctantly give the second volume four stars.

Kotkin breaks up his book into three broad epochs, the mass collectivization of agriculture (1929 -1934), the purge trials (1934 – 1939) and the great three card monte game between the Soviet Union, Germany and Britain (1939 -1941) as war envelops Europe.  Throughout it all Stalin is omni-present; he seems to see all and know all, at least in his own mind, and his attention to detail and memory is phenomenal. For example he knows the specifications of most of the combat aircraft under his control.

In Phase I, Stalin fearing the more or less capitalistic agricultural sector is a threat to the regime, decided to collectivize all of Russian agriculture and along the way causes the mass starvation of at least five million people.  It is basically an anti-Kulak (wealthier peasants) pogrom. He uses the proceeds to fund industry to modernize the Soviet state. The reasoning is more political than economic because under the Tsars Russia was well on its way to becoming a modern economy until world War I and the revolution upended it.

Kotkin like everybody else does not have a complete explanation for why Stalin’s purges, coupes against the party and the army if you will, reached into every nook and cranny of the Soviet state. It hardly makes sense, that with war clouds looming and his foreign minister Maxim Litvinov travelling throughout Europe urging collective security. In June 1934 Stalin looked approvingly at Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives where Hitler took out both his left and right opposition in a swift coup.

The purges start with the assassination of Leningrad Party boss Sergey Kirov in late 1934. Contrary to other historians Kotkin makes the case that Kirov was the victim of a lone assassin not a Stalin plot. From there huge swaths of the party and the army are taken out including the Bolshevik triumvirate of Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Why did Stalin do this? There is no sane explanation, but a partial explanation is that Stalin wanted to create a new nomenclatura that would be loyal to him. By taking out the older party members, Stalin opened up opportunity for a new leadership that was thrilled to be part of the state building process. It also allowed those of very humble origins to rise up and live the Soviet communist dream. During this period we also see the origins of the Soviet-Chinese split where Stalin supports Chiang Kai Shek over Mao. Put bluntly it was in the Russian state interest to keep Japan occupied in China rather than have it turn its forces on Siberia. For Stalin the Chinese revolution would have to wait.

The final section of the book deals with the power politics of the three card monte game (Kotkin’s words) being played by Russia, Germany and Britain. Although Kotkin doesn’t believe that Stalin was the all-knowing policy realist that Kissinger ascribed to him, Stalin did a pretty good job in understanding the correlation of forces. His big mistake was that he failed to recognize that Hitler would win a swift victory in the West leaving the Soviet Union open to attack. World War II was not going to be a rerun of the trench warfare of World War I.

It is at this point that Kotkin writes history like a thriller. We get a day by day feel of the tri-party diplomacy and the buildup of German forces in the East. All sides are putting out disinformation and all parties were thrown for a loop when Rudolf Hess ends up in the English country-side. Stalin perceives it as potential Anglo-German coalition against him. Stalin is continually warned by Generals Zhukov and Timoshenko that Hitler plans to attack, but Stalin ever the realist believes that Hitler would not want to fight a two front war and believes instead that the troop build-up is part of an elaborate blackmail plot.  But as Kotkin notes Marxism-Leninism never anticipated a Hitler and Stalin did not learn from his early 1930’s policy of equating social democracy with fascism. Kotkin is at his best here.

I have one last quibble. I would have liked to know Kotkin’s take on Stalin’s role in the intra-party split in American communism in 1929. Why would the great leader involve himself in such a petty squabble? Nevertheless I highly recommend “Stalin: Waiting for Hitler..." for those willing to slog through this very long book.

The complete Amazon URL appears at:  Because of a screw up on my part and the complete inflexibility of Amazon's rules I was unable to post this review on their website.
















for Hitler…” for all those willing to slog through this very long book.