Uncommon Knowledge: Part 1: Stephen Kotkin on Stalin’s Rise to Power

born to a poor cobbler he rose to become the undisputed ruler of the biggest nation on earth and to attempt a world revolution with us today the man who knows Joseph Stalin perhaps better than anyone ever has Steven kotkin author of Stalin uncommon knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson the John P berkland professor in history and international affairs at Princeton University Steven Kotkin is also a fellow at the Hoover Institution here at Stanford dr. Kotkin is the author of a number of books most recently Stalin paradoxes of power 1878 to 1928 note that this book is volume one of a projected three volume series about Joseph Stalin and his time the review in the New York Times called Stalin quote masterful close quote which shows that even the New York Times can from time to time get something just exactly right Steven cotton welcome thank you Peter first things first Stalin Volume one paradoxes of power 1878 to 1928 he's born in 1878 got it why do you end valium one in 1928 1928 is when Stalin makes the decision to collectivise agriculture or that is to enslave the peasantry a hundred million plus people in Eurasia and the question is not only why did he do that but how was it possible that he could accumulate the power to be able to enslave a hundred million people so the book tries to put in context this decision the so called collectivization of Agriculture and to give it a sense of the sweep of Russian history the geopolitics of the time Stalin's personality and of course the mechanisms of power right let me quote the book to you Stephen Stalin quote subjects of biography often are portrayed as forming their personalities including their views about Authority and obedience that is about power in childhood and especially the family but do we really need to locate the Wellsprings of Stalin's politics or even his troubled soul in beatings he allegedly received as a child in gory close quote begin with a little boy in gory you know so Stalin is born in a market town it's not a big city but it's also not a complete backwater it's an ancient trading center on the trade routes Near East Europe Russia and in that market town his parents are strivers the father is a cobbler who's looking to become a kind of self standing artisan with his own business the mother takes various different jobs in order to help with the education of a child because of the Russian Orthodox Church which generally is not a front and center story in among Russian historians because of the Russian Orthodox Church there's a school in the town as a result of which there's the possibility of a future for the young kids because little Yosef Jew gosh really learns to read and write at a time when that might not have been standard it's the russian orthodox church and he's georgian so his native language is georgian but his mother sends him to a priest who has several sons and that priest teaches him russian and so he's able on the basis of this knowledge of russian to enter the school in fact he does well at the school how closely related are the two languages I've never disliked Italian in Spanish no they're not related at all they're two entirely different languages and knowing one helps you nothing with learning the other so that was Anna see so it's a big accomplishment he does very well at school he studies hard he's the teacher's pet he sings in the choir he wants to become a priest or a monk which is not unusual for outstanding students in a parish school run by by the church there's no University in the Caucasus the Tsarist regime is afraid of university students because university students have their own ideas including ideas about politics and so they refuse to open a university locally and so the highest educational institutions locally are the gymnasium or the elite high schools and the seminary the orthodox seminary where they train priests in t fleece which is the capital of Georgia and the capital of the South Caucasus and Stalin gets admitted into the seminary which is not easy and in fact he gets a state scholarship because he's an outstanding student he then once again does very well at school near the top of his class again the teacher's pet teacher's pet means of course that he snitches on the other students as you know from school yourself right and however he ends up giving all of that up he's on the pathway to success he's got a bright future but instead he joins the revolutionary on the ground and spends the next two decades of his life on the run in prison and exile stuck there without money before we get him at we get him into the seminary I just want to make sure I understand this correctly so even as for example if you read up on the early years of Ronald Reagan you see right from the get-go charm yes people liked him from the time he was a little guess and with Stalin what you see right from the get-go is smarts and a certain mission is that right correct he's often the leader of the stuff that happens in the streets you know kids play in the street every kid growing up in this epoch is playing in the streets but he's often the self-appointed or the chosen leader of the group of children he's not physically as adept as some of the other kids some accidents have happened to him he's got a couple of birth defects how big is he how tall is he he's about five foot seven eventually as a fully grown adult he's a slight child but he's stocky he's wiry and muscular he's one of the smaller kids at school he's about two inches shorter than Hitler if people know Hitler's height Hitler's not a giant either it was a five nine but Stalin's about Churchill five six as I recalled everybody yes so it's it's it's not especially small but he's not very large either but he's physically active in other words what we're talking about his force of personality not a physical presence force of personality and ambition and the ambition expresses itself through reading and acquiring knowledge and bettering himself he wants to be somebody of significance and being somebody of significance through education that obviously comes from his mother very strongly stressing education for him now there are all sorts of stories about Stalin's childhood these stories are mostly reminiscences of people later in life so after he's murdered many many hundreds of thousands of people they remember ah you know I knew when we were on the playground when he was 11 and he said I'm going to get all you guys that he was going to kill everybody in the country right so those reminiscences fill up a lot of the biographies some of them could be true but I refuse to use any of them the only sources I'll use about Stalin are the ones where it's said in real time and recorded in real time what did they say about him in 1915 what did they say about him in 1920 in 1925 what so back to the seminary because it it could almost be the case I find myself thinking as I'm reading that early chapter he's just going to use the seminary to get ahead but that isn't quite you push against that this is one place where you do quote a later reminiscence but it seems to fit the evidence of the time yes Stalin was very much a believer this is someone later remembering what it was like in the old days Stalin was very much a believer going to all the services singing the church choir he not only observed all religious rites but all was reminded us to observe them yes and he had a real believer and comes out a communist how did that happen that's the moment that is that's certainly a great story I'll use the reminiscences if there's more than one of them okay backed up by another one and moreover remembering that he was religious is something that is published while he's a communist dictator and so if it's published while he's a communist dictator it goes against the communist militant godlessness and so it rings of truth because it doesn't fit the regime ideology images interested asleep right yeah okay so what happens is Tsarist Russia is not a pretty place it's very oppressive politics are illegal they don't have a parliament they don't have a constitution until 1905 oh six after losing the war with the Japanese they don't have a legal parliament you cannot participate in politics and so if you don't like what you see if you see injustice if you see incompetence if you see embezzlement there's kind of no way to organize against it because all political activity as I said is illegal and so under these circumstances you get a revolutionary underground meaning opposition to Czarist regime social injustice and incompetence takes the form of underground politics not always because of choice but because there's kind of no other option and even when they the Czar will grant a constitution and a quasi Parliament the 1905 oh six events still many things are illegal censorship political associations which are not sanctioned by the authorities so there's a very large population of people who feel the Czarist regime is oppressive and want to do something about it and the end of the revolution so he does that too but remember it's a risk he's giving up a successful life a successful trajectory for a life of fighting for justice but that's not a profession that's not going to pay him a salary that's not going to make him the owner of a house or a farm or anything else and so he's going to lead a life of impoverishment of prison and exile of police harassment and persecution for more than twenty years essentially from about 1898 nineteen years until 1917 when unexpectedly there's a revolution in Russia but no one expected that to happen so it's a big commitment to be an underground revolutionary fighting for social justice because you see that the Czarist regime it wasn't a phase he wasn't just a hot-headed young man he didn't grow out of it it became a career minute commitment some people did give it up so he didn't obviously we need to come to the revolution which is worth shows and shows and volumes and volumes on its own we need to do that briefly but before we get to the revolution I don't even know how to frame the question tightly how bad was the Czarist regime I've always been struck that Stalin is placed in exile in Siberia half a dozen times yeah and it seems to be the case he's able to wander off there not that I mean politics may be illegal but there's a it almost seems a little bit unserious go to exile this is the fifth time we're said this is like they're no more serious about their revolutionaries than we are about visa holders in this country right yeah but they didn't have telephones right and the distances are very large the communications are very primitive and the officials are susceptible to bribery in addition to the fact that they drink and may be incompetent the Czarist regime is a failure it cannot live up to its own aims and ambitions it wants to be one of the great powers in the world and being one of the great powers in the world means competing with Britain competing with France right competing with Germany Czarist Russia's better government raises more revenue bigger army more competent administration than the Ottoman Empire then the Ching dynasty in China but that's not the league it's playing in it's playing in the absolute top leagues and the pressure to play in that top league with a less educated population a less literate population with a great deal more territory to cover and overall with less industry and modernity to compete and so the Czar's regime is in a cooker it's fighting for its survival when it wants to be it has the ambitions of being one of the great powers now inside that it's got these opponents the opponents are not only the revolutionaries in the underground the opponents are in the establishment one of the stories about the revolution that I try to tell is revolutions happen when the establishment revolts against the political system people in the street can revolt or not revolt peasants workers can go on strike or rebel that's not a revolution a revolution is when your establishment cuts and runs and the Czarist regime loses its establishment this means that it's not as tight as an authoritarian regime would be today when you say it loses his establishment you're talking about rich land holders who have big houses in Petersburg and Moscow you're talking about the top army officials you're talking about the handful of industrialists yes it's a very small elite given that like contrast with the size of the country maybe a few hundred families intermarried and so forth he loses them yes the ministers the local governors for example right if you feel that the regime is incompetent if you feel that the regime loses a war with Japan which is an Asiatic country that they said at the time right you begin to lose confidence in the ability of this regime going forward and you might not go out on a limb to the same extent in addition the officials that are in the far off remote locales are not your best people they're in far-off locales often because they're not as good as those officials who have been drawn to provincial capitals let alone the court society and so many of the police that Stalin deals with are local people who have some education two or three years or no education and his ax can take them because he's smart soft sweet talks them or he outsmarts them or he bribes them or he just manages somehow to collude with other officials to get and so this back and forth in and out of exile is not a sign that the Czar's regime didn't take the prisoner seriously it's a sign that the prisoners were not so stupid the official officials were not so competent and overall the regime had a brittleness a rickety quality and so this didn't mean that the revolutionaries were going to come to power right most people assumed that the constitutionalists would come to power those people that we would call the liberal in the classical sense for rule of law private property you know constitutional Democrats as the party was called this was the vision that most people had for changing czars Russia some had the revolutionary socialist vision but they were in the underground in Siberia in European exile right they were oppressed by the police now I'm going to do it something very dirty which is try to compress into three sentences volumes of history 1905 revolution takes place a Duma is established the Tsar granted official standing there's back and forth back and forth is this society going to become liberal in the classical sense is it going to become parliamentary like the great nations of Western Europe or is it not it doesn't work very well and then the whole experiment gets buried in the one at with the outbreak of the First World War fair enough crude but fair enough offering at top speed you got it Peter okay and then in 1917 the country suffers not one but two revolutions can you distinguish for us the February from the October Revolution of 1917 1917 revolutions take place during the War World War one is still going now the Germans are going to win on the Eastern Front this is something people forget in march 1918 is going to be a tree a peace treaty acknowledging German victory in World War one so pressed loosely blue tops brest-litovsk treaty you're exactly right but until then right the war is continuing so the revolutionary events take place during the war because the perception is the Czarist regime and especially nicholas ii bazaar are not managing the war properly the generals begin to think that they need to restore order get a grip on the situation politically in order to win the war effort now the generals are not looking for power themselves it's not a military coup they latch on to a faction inside the duma or the quasi parliament but it's the generals who talk nicholas ii into abdicating now they think he should abdicate in favor of his son who's a teenager but also a hemophiliac and there's no cure for hemophilia and if the son bumps into a chair he can bleed to death and so Nicholas is very afraid of what could happen to his son moreover an abdicate Azzaro abdicates has to leave the country and so Nicholas would have to leave his son Alexei the teenage hemophiliac and go into exile which he refuses to do so at the last minute Nicholas talked in a wit by his generals who were trying to preserve the system and fight the war better while the capital st. Petersburg renamed Petrograd during the war while the capital is in flames the garrison is in revolt in the capital Nikolas is at the front the generals talk a minute abdicating he abdicates at the last minute he abdicates in favor of his brother his brother hasn't been consulted when the brother is consulted he says I don't think so I'm not going to take over so Russia becomes a republic biaxin meaning no monarchy the 300 plus year-old Romanov dynasty ends because Nikolas abdicated at the last second in favor of his brother not his son with the me Kyle Grand Duke yes exactly right so stop there for a moment if Michal had said Thank You Nikolas all my life I sort of wished I had been born first this is a great job yes the generals would have rallied this would that would have stopped the revolution we don't know of course because that's a counter fact but it's an interesting thought you've just had the generals thought that Alexei who was a kind of cherubic teenage young teenage boy would rally the nation that they would see this guy Alexei and they'd say welcome patriotic to whether me Kyle had the political touch or not you know political touch is a gift and you either have it or you don't in one of our famous political families here in the United States one of them the male had the political touch and we see the other one the female lacks the political touch she just doesn't have it and it's visible every day right I mean voters can see where the and so where the Michal was up to the task of stepping in nicholas ii shoes how do you had that ambition is unclear to me but nonetheless the intention was not to validate the garrisons revolt in the capital but instead to restore order win the war on the Eastern Front against Germany in Austria and survive this is a conservative and attempt at a conservative revolution now the Duma faction that the generals latch on to Nikolas has never liked the Duma he conceded it grudgingly in 1906 he's been trying scheming with various courtiers to abolish it he Pro ROG's the Duma during the war which means he just says we you don't need to meet go home I'll handle the war myself don't call us we'll call you yes that's exactly right and so they're kind of itching because they feel that they can do a better job with the war effort that Nicholas can and also they're in favor of a constitutional monarchy meaning where they themselves had the kind of power that you have like in Britain for example where the Parliament is supreme and so they're ambitious in the Duma they collude with the generals they take over and form something called the provisional government the provisional government the downfall others are sometimes known as the February revolution but because they have a different calendar in Eastern Orthodoxy it actually takes place in march on the western calendar but it's known as the February revolution so here we have no more Tsar the generals are now going to continue to fight the war effort the duma is going to try to rule but in fact the provisional government the members of the duma that have announced themselves as provisional their provisional because there's supposed to be a constitutional convention right and and that's going to validate their power but in the meantime their provisional they don't call the duma into session so the members of the duma that had been prologue by nicolas ii conduct themselves a coup against their own duma and rule as a self-appointed body kind of french revolution style they're unable to win the war they continue the war they can't fix the food crisis because the war is a difficult problem to manage a total war one society against another society mobilization of all resources problems with transport problems with getting the grain to the cities and to the army no because armies and cities don't grow their own grain the army was as i recall they had by this time roughly three million men deployed is that the right number he have about 5 million at the peak okay and you have 15 million who serve in the army at any given point on so at a very minimum they have to solve the problem of feeding 5 million men and then the industrial cities need food because the reason that there was an uprising in the capital which the generals then were motivated to take nicolas down was because the women were marching for bread it wasn't just the workers striking in the cap in the get in the factories and so what you've got here is you've got a difficult wartime situation that the self-appointed man of the provisional government are not up to handling the provisional government goes through several incarnations including alexander kerensky who becomes the prime minister the head of it in the in the middle here we're talking about the summer of 1917 karen ski will eventually go into exile and spend the rest of his life here at the Hoover Institution with an office on the second floor of the Hoover tower writing his memoirs about how it wasn't his fault but in the meantime the war is going on and they decide to go on the offensive even though the army is in regs and they don't have enough rifles and there's all sorts of other problems they decide to go on the offensive the offensive works a little bit at first but then the soldiers decide they don't want to do it they essentially have a soldier strike the offensive fails the provisional government is on the verge of dissolution and at this point Stalin's going to enter the picture because these ragtag underground revolutionaries who are in far-off Siberia or European exile once the Czar Falls and freedom is declared they flock back to the capital Petrograd and they make their own plans for revolution and that's where you're going to get the October coup in 1970 which is a coup there's no question it's a coup yes all right so 1917 the second revolution the coup takes place Lenin stands by himself he's clearly the acknowledged leader of this but then in the next level you've got Stalin Trotsky Bukharian Rykov Zinoviev Kamenev others Kaganovich so Stalin at this point in 1917 is one of a dozen 18 people under Lenin and within five years he becomes the undisputed dictator of this country how did that happen yeah thank you that's a really big story to hear so what we have here is by the way he's still fairly young by.ya born in 1878 so he's 39 years old in 1970 about to be 39 he's close to Lenin Lenin is his meal ticket Lenin is his mentor Stalin early on his first meetings with Lenin he's actually not that impressed this is information that will subsequently be suppressed by the Soviet authorities but we now have it again nonetheless he hitches his wagon to Lenin and Lenin as you said is the singular figure he's the guy that's going to take these people to power will determination but also tactical flexibility what people don't understand about Lenin is that he had very deep ideas that he would not relinquish but he was willing to do whatever was necessary in order to realize those ideas including repudiate those ideas for a time what we call ultimate tactical flexibility and Stalin went to school he studied Lenin he became Lenin's pupil there are a handful of people around Lenin Stalin is not alone but there are only four people inside the inner regime already from October November 1917 and Stalin is one of those four people and these four people that we get limited from a dozen or half-dozen to four because Lenin effectively selects them yes he does and there Trotsky somebody named Yakov Sverdlov who's going to die in 1919 looks like from disease natural death one of the few when you're sorry yes there's an epidemic he just dies from disease in 1919 he's the kind of Stalin before Stalin in many ways he's a great organizer he's not really a public speaker he's not really a charismatic figure but he gets things done he's a do or a practical type spirit loaf Stalin Trotsky and Lenin this is your regime in 1917 they're the ones in power to sign government decrees and they're the ones who meet most often with Lenin on our closest to Lenin so what we have is where loaves going to die as we said in 1919 Trotsky Stalin and Lenin nobody it thinks that Lenin is going anywhere it's clear that he's the acknowledged leader by everybody it's clear that he has these political capabilities he makes a lot of mistakes and he does things that still relatively young vigorous there's no cloud of coral ill-health correct but it turns out he's got several illnesses debilitating illnesses and he's going to pass from the scene so people often ask him Peter when the Stalin get in power when to stall and become a dictator and I think that's an excellent question I tried to answer in the book once again with the original primary documents only taking stuff that was said in real time and following close the levers of power so what happens is Lenin who's the head of the government which means he's kind of the equivalent of Prime Minister chairman of the Council of people's commissar or the government in the Soviet case commissar instead of ministers Lenin appoints Stalin General Secretary of the Communist Party now this is a new position entirely new that he's created only for Stalin it's clear that Lenin's done this we have the documents in his hand it's clear that he's chosen style and it's clear that he knows what he's doing Stalin is already performing these functions for Lenin right-hand man organizer head of the party while Lenin runs the government and makes the big policy decisions this happens in April 1922 so the civil war has happened the Reds have won the Civil War Trotsky had a prominent role as the head of the army the commissar for war everybody knows try very interesting because Trotsky is not only an intellectual and an orator he's the flashy figure yes but it turns out he is able to take this ragtag up operation this failure that the Germans smashed yeah and turn them into an effective fighting forces the Red Army and he's brutal yes Truong he's a doer and a talker Trotsky is effective during the Civil War there's no question what but once again under Lenin's leadership all right Stalin has a very prominent role in the civil war - not as prominent as Trotsky's role and Stalin is not as well known as Trotsky but in terms of being close to Lenin Stalin is at least as close to Lenin if not more than Trotsky is and Lenin relies on both of them but in April 1922 Lenin makes Stalin General Secretary of the Communist Party right Trotsky remains the war commissar at this point now the Communist Party is in many ways the ideological and personel heart of the regime and so it's a very important position Stalin will begin to take the position seriously and make it into something and create a personnel machine and an ideological machine which doesn't really yet exist this is something he's got to create remember dictatorship is a career nation right it's something that you got to make and sustain it's an achievement it's not something that just happens but what happens Stalin appointed general secretary of the party in April 1922 and in May 1922 Lenin has a stroke he has a debilitating stroke so the number one guy has a stroke and the number two guy who was never intended by Lenin to be number one because Lenin didn't intent the step aside is all of a sudden in this position where he's got the levers of power in his hands the general secretary of the party controls liaison with the secret police controls the liaison with the military controls the liaison with foreign policy with the embassies abroad has the cipher codes communicates all the information to the local party organizations around the country receives all the secret information so it's the Clearing House it's the center of power because the Communist Party right was loyal was trusted was the movement was what Lenin relied on now Stalin could have said you know this is not right it's unfair to me it's unfair to the other guys that I have all of this power all of a sudden should I control the secret police by myself that's not fair why don't I share should I control all the cipher codes by myself why not share in other words Stalin could have been a different kind of personality he could have been self effacing he could have been more collegial but instead of course he was who we know he came to be ruthless cunning ambitious and so he grabs these levers that have been put into his hands by Lenin and with Lenin's stroke Stalin is going to create a personal dictatorship inside the Bolshevik dictatorship

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 194,324

Rating: 4.8302207 out of 5

Keywords: Kotkin, revolution, Stalin, Lenin

Id: 3MzPzfEVjNE

Length: 33min 25sec (2005 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2015