Stephen Kotkin: evaluation

Transcript context

…What do you think of the hypothesis — I think it comes from James Hughes — that it was Stalin’s visit to Siberia and his time there that gave him a sense of what was wrong with the Soviet Union, that you needed to crush the kulaks to be quite oppressive. Is that true? No, it’s not true, sadly. I’ve been to that same place where Stalin went in Barnaul in 1928. For a while, in the museum, not on display but in the back room, they had the wooden sled that carried him from the railhead to the gigantic barn where he gave the speech that he was going to move forward on collectivization. It was a decision he had already reached, and it was a trip that he took in order to break the party’s affiliation with the kulaks. Many of the party officials in the provinces in the ’20s had grown rich by liaison with the richer peasants. They had married their daughters to kulaks. They were typical corrupt officials at the provincial level, and Stalin wanted to teach them a lesson that that wouldn’t fly anymore. He went out there and delivered a searing speech, which, of course, then was nationally publicized, about how the collective is at full speed forward on collectivization and the kulaks were an enemy. People didn’t understand. They didn’t believe — how could he be doing this? You have to remember, for Marxist-Leninists, the base determines the superstructure. The nature of the economy — or what they would call social relations, socioeconomic conditions — determines the kind of politics you have. If you have a Communist Party in power, and you have de facto market relations in the countryside with a proto- or quasi-bourgeois class of richer peasants — meaning they had more than two cows — known as kulaks, either the base would triumph, or the superstructure, the Communist Party, would have to get rid of the base over the long term. They were all Marxist-Leninists in the Communist Party, and they all agreed with this, even the corrupt ones who were feeding well in the liaison with the kulaks. What they never imagined was that you could do this, that you could collectivize agriculture across all of Soviet Eurasia through those multiple, multiple time zones. Where would you get the wherewithal, the capacity to implement that, to take people’s property away from them? Voluntary collectivization as of 1928, when Stalin makes that trip to Siberia — it’s Western Siberia — voluntary collectivization is 1 percent of arable land. One percent, meaning that the people who couldn’t farm themselves, individually or as a household, as a family — they went into collectives voluntarily because they were incapable of managing on their own. For you to be able to make 99 percent collective, as opposed to 1 percent collective, you needed to take people’s property away from them and force them into these collective arrangements. Now, the property wasn’t de jure property, it was only de facto property, but de facto property is still property. So, Stalin made that trip in order to announce that this was now going to happen. The others around him were very skeptical that this was feasible. o property, but de facto property is still property. So, Stalin made that trip in order to announce that this was now going to happen. The others around him were very skeptical that this was feasible. They didn’t have a soft spot for the kulaks — don’t get me wrong — in the Central Committee, in the central Apparatus in Moscow, or other party bastions, like Leningrad or Kyiv in Soviet Ukraine or Novosibirsk in Western Siberia. But they had skepticism that this could be done. Stalin did it. That was the thing that shocked them all. In the process of doing it, he caused famine, and he was undermining, potentially, the party’s own rule. He just kept going all the way through because he had the courage of his convictions. And then, when they complained about him, he made a mental note of that, and he exacted his version of revenge on them a few years later for their criticisms of him when he did this. He did this because he believed, in true Marxist-Leninist fashion, that this had to be done. He felt himself to be a man of destiny, and therefore he could do this. And he was looking to find the shock troops, to galvanize the half-educated youth to take violence out on these kulaks, and to force the villagers into these collective arrangements. What he did — and this is what totalitarianism is — he galvanized people’s agency, and those people, using their agency, destroyed their own agency. They disempowered themselves by taking up his call.…

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