How did you become interested in Russia?
It was something of an accident. I was a PhD student at Berkeley and had never studied Russian. I started out in French history, shifted veryon to Hapsburg history and began learning Czech. Then my prospective adviser on central Europe told me he didn’t want to deal with graduate students. I was at a loss. But I met Michel Foucault over lunches and dinners while he was visiting Berkeley, and he said wouldn’t it be interesting if someone were to apply his theories of power to the Stalin phenomenon. I was a young impressionable postgrad. So I set about beginning to learn the alphabet, and did three years’ worth of Russian language study in a very intensive single year, including going to Leningrad in summer 1984, catching the final Chernenko wheeze.
What was your first research about?
I came from the Annales school of history, the idea of studying the total history of a single place, the way Pierre Chaunu had done with Seville and the Atlantic. I picked Magnitogorsk. I wrote Magnetic Mountain, a total immersion – society, economy, politics, culture – based on excavation of local source materials, a street level view of the Stalin phenomenon from the inside. You could feel what the system was like for the people who built and lived it. I was interested in the way the aspirations of the regime and of the society relate and overlap. You can’t have Stalin unless you have millions of people engaged in the system. Stalin didn’t eliminate society; he conjured into being a whole society.
What inspired you to write on Stalin?
I started wondering after Magnitogorsk if I could use the same approach for the regime, a total history from the inside. It didn’t seem possible because of the unavailabilityof military and secret police materials in what was a military-police dictatorship. Then Dmitry Volkogonov came along. He assembled not just Communist party but also military and secret police archival materials for his own books, and then he deposited his collection in the US. I read 55 microfilms of these formerly secret documents in the late 1990s at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. That both persuaded and enabled me to embark on this book. Subsequently many additional materials from the military and secret police archives came into the public realm through published document collections. After him there was an avalanche.
How easy is it to gain access to the archives now?
Russia always moves in two directions at once, and while access is increasingly restricted for some materials, including reclassification of documents that we already have scanned on our laptops, there is ever more declassification going on. . Our challenge is less access than volume: we are overwhelmed with material. My Stalin vol. I has something like 4,000 endnotes. The challenge is in the synthesis.
What was missing in previous works on Stalin?
A more sophisticated understanding of the relationship of the society and the big state building process. This wasn’t just the whim of a leader. It’s like the Putin problem: we personify Russia, with Putin as the subject of every sentence, suggesting there is no larger value system, no society, no outside world. That part seemed missing: a more sophisticated understanding of power and the relationship of the masses to the regime, and of the Soviet Union to the world. At the same there had been a lot of cynicism about and minimisation of communist ideas. But from the secret archives, what we’ve learnt is that behind closed doors when these guys didn’t expect anyone to overhear, they talked like Communists: of class warfare, kulaks, global imperialism, finance capital. It was not just about personal power, careerism, and control. They were to a great degree true believers. There was a deep intellectual and emotional commitment to Marxism. This applies in spades to Stalin.
What surprised you during your research?
Russia always moves in two directions at once, and while access is increasingly restricted for some materials, including reclassification of documents that we already have scanned on our laptops, there is ever more declassification going on. Our challenge is less access than volume: we are overwhelmed with material. My Stalin vol. I has something like 4,000 endnotes. The challenge is in the synthesis.
Does that have particular resonance today?
The Putin regime is similar, with Russia pushed back even more than where it had stood in the interwar years. Now, the independent near abroad includes Ukraine and Belarus too. For Russia, the west is always both a source of resources (technology, investment) and a perceived threat. The imperialism we associate with the country to them looks like a defensive move. Russia sees an imperative to protect its ownsecurity by controlling nearby territories, especially ones it used to control, in order that some outside power cannot wield these borderlands against them. That helped me understand Stalin’s behaviour. Today, the Communist ideology is all gone and for a long time nothing took its place. Now, though, we see filling the vacuum a sense of Russia once again as a providential power, with a supposed special destiny, a traditional socially conservative place, standing up to the west, which is seen as treacherous, mendacious, decadent. There is, once again, deep grievance combined with vaulting aspiration. Russia’s place in the world somehow remains the core question.
Has Russia come to terms with its Stalinist past?
The Nazis lost the war, Hitler became irredeemable and Germans came to grips with the defeat and their past. The Japanese have not to the same degree. The Soviet Union didn’t engage in that kind of process except in spurts. The horrors of the regime did not become part of the national dialogue in large measure because the country won World War II. Stalin will remain to a degree a redeemable figure despite his murderous savagery. It’s awesome to behold the power he accumulated and horrific how he exercised it. You read interrogation documents with dried blood on them as a result of their being signed after torture. There is no way to judge it other than horrifying. But the amount of power and the mobilisation of society he was able to achieve are breathtaking. He is the gold standard of dictatorship.
How has Russian writing on Stalin evolved?
There’s a whole wall of Stalin books in Russian bookshops. They are often trashy: his secret meetings with Hitler (which never took place), the memoir of his love child or secret relative (who is no relation). Even more we see books on Generalissimo Stalin: how he crushed Hitler, arbitrated the post-war settlement, fought the Cold War. Not long ago, there was much more ambivalence. But they’ve subtracted the Communism and kept the bit about how he took Russia from peasant country to nuclear-armed superpower. Putin is very fond of doing this. If you say didn’t many people die under Stalinism, Putin will point out there is a statue of Cromwell in front of the British parliament. It’s a cheap analogy that lets Stalin off the hook.
What has been the reaction to the book in Russia?
So far it has more or less been appreciated by professional historians. I feel a certain gratification but you can’t tell for 20-30 years. For a history book, you want it to be like wine in a cellar, as good or even better with time. And for wider culture resonance, it will require translation. It would be a serious corrective to most of what they’ve got right now. I’m in final negotiations on translation into Russian. The problem is the size. This is one of those books that if you drop it on your foot, you need to go to the emergency room.
What is your next book?
I have a draft of volume 2, subtitled Waiting for Hitler. I cut 300 pages out of volume 1 before publication (I know this seems unimaginable), even though it felt like sacrificing a limb. I’m going through the same process with volume 2. I have so many discoveries, so many set pieces, but some have to go or the reader will be bludgeoned to death. Then there is volume 3. If it only takes me 5 or 6 years I would be very happy. I might need a year or so off in psychological rehabilitation. The intimacy with this regime is thrilling for the study of power, but it’s atragic, brutal history.
Stephen Kotkin is an American historian, academic and author. He is currently a professor in history and international affairs at Princeton University and a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.