Stalin

I am reading a biography of Stalin by Stephen Kotkin, although for the first half you would be forgiven for wondering if Stalin has missed the train. It is really a book about everything else. The long, creaking lead up to the revolution, the revolution itself, and the immediate aftermath. Stalin is somewhere in the background, taking notes, while an entire political ecosystem collapses in slow motion.

Kotkin does this deliberately, and to be fair he earns it. What he is really describing is not a man, but a milieu. An uncontrolled spillage of factions. Factions splitting into factions, which immediately split again over the wording of a resolution nobody could implement anyway. Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Left SRs, Right SRs, anarchists who despised organisation but somehow ran three committees each. Everyone agreed the old system was rotten. Nobody agreed what should replace it, or who was in charge while they argued.

And then there were the committees. Endless committees. Workers’ committees, soldiers’ committees, peasants’ committees, regional committees, central committees, executive committees, provisional committees, emergency committees, committees to investigate why the last committee had failed to meet. They sprouted like wheat in spring. Wheat at least feeds people. These fed paper.

The theory was collective leadership. The reality was perfect cover. Nothing was ever anyone’s fault. It was the committee’s decision, or the sub committee’s interpretation, or sabotage by a rival committee. Meanwhile trains stopped running, cities starved, and men argued furiously about whether the revolution had been sufficiently revolutionary.

Layered on top of this was the farce of post war diplomacy. After WWI, while Russia was bleeding and barely holding together, the factions were busy pussy-footing with the Germans. Peace, no peace, revolutionary war, neither war nor peace. Trotsky even gave the world a policy that meant precisely nothing and stuck to it until German troops advanced briskly to concentrate minds. Lenin wanted to sign anything to stop the haemorrhage. Others preferred to posture about international revolution while giving away territory by the week. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk eventually emerged from weeks of argument, walkouts and moral grandstanding. Everyone hated it. Everyone signed it. Everyone later claimed it proved they had been right all along.

Only gradually does Stalin drift into clearer view. He is not arguing theory or dazzling anyone with intellect. He is counting. Who appoints whom. Who controls which committee. Who owes their position to whom. While others were busy denouncing each other or practising interpretive diplomacy with Berlin, Stalin quietly mastered the only skill that mattered in a system obsessed with committees.

Kotkin makes clear that this was not accidental. Stalin did not rise because he had the best ideas. He rose because he understood the machinery. Lenin eventually noticed the problem and warned that Stalin was rude, power hungry, and dangerous. This was filed under “to be discussed later”, which in revolutionary terms means “ignored until it is far too late”.

Trotsky would have argued better. Bukharin would have fed people better. Martov might even have avoided the whole blood soaked farce. But none of them mastered the true art of the revolution, which was not ideology but control of appointments, paperwork and process. Stalin did. He took the committee jungle Kotkin spends hundreds of pages patiently describing and turned it into a single trunk, then used it as a cudgel.

By the time the book finally becomes recognisably about Stalin, the committees are still there in name. They issue unanimous decisions, clap on cue, and approve outcomes they did not design. The wheat has been harvested. The field belongs to one man.

Kotkin’s unspoken joke is that you cannot understand Stalin without first wading through the chaos that made him possible. The lesson is simple. Revolutions that believe history is on their side tend to drown in paperwork and posturing on the way there. And the man who survives is rarely the one with the best ideas, but the one who understands that committees are not about decisions, but about power.