Finished Kotkin's Stalin: Waiting For Hitler, 1928-1941 yesterday (it rules when my boss goes on vacation and they've closed access to the boat I get assigned to work on). I'll be starting Reaganland on Monday and finally get to Parenti's Inventing Reality in my spare time.
Does Kotkin mostly play it straight and give a dispassionate, accurate depiction of Stalin? IIRC Kotkin doesnt have any real communist leanings. I'm just aware of his book essentially refuting Anne Applebaum's book on the Holodomor. Worth noting Kotkin is a well-respected academic historian at Princeton and Applebaum is... a journalist with zero historian credentials and a clear axe to grind against the USSR.
Kotkin is not popular among the hardcore ML crowd for obvious reasons. Nevertheless I actually really like his books because he can be quite nuanced and even-handed in the most surprising circumstances. He is, however, an ardent anti-communist and is ideologically very much a Liberal who puts markets and "rule of law" on a pedestal (this is most on display in the epilogue of Armageddon Averted, where he essentially places blame for the catastrophic economic collapse of Russia in the 1990s on it being a continuation of the collapse of the communist economy and Russia's inherent lack of market institutions and rule of law as a legacy of tsarist and communist repression; while there is certainly an aspect of truth to this claim I personally find it also an exercise in apologia for the role of neoliberal ideology, the influence of American "experts", and unchecked liberalization of the economy that is inherent to a capitalist class regime rising spontaneously where there was not one before).
Again, he comes to certain particular conclusions that I strongly disagree with (two examples off the top of my head are his blunt statement that factional infighting played no role in the 37-38 terror, and that Stalin's force march industrialization resulted in economic growth nearly identical to projected growth under the tsarist system - see Robert Allen for the rebuttal of that one) but he also produces sweeping and highly nuanced breakdowns of historical events that are often controversial. For examples: he pretty much places the most blame for Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact coming into existence on the British playing stupid games and outlines exactly why it was very much in Stalin's interest to come to rapprochement with Hitler at that precise moment in time; he places a significant amount of blame for the Winter War in Finland precipitating on Finnish intransigence and inability to understand Stalin's legitimate security concerns; and he outlines the extensive and highly successful German disinformation campaign that effectively trapped Stalin in a "congratulations, you played yourself" self-deception that explains his bizarre behavior in the lead-up to Operation Barbarossa.
Probably most importantly, Kotkin produces his receipts. He clearly perused the Soviet archives extensively and cites a massive amount of documentation, including handwritten annotations and signatures by Stalin himself, even as he constructs a vicious condemnatory narrative denouncing Stalin and communism as a whole during events such as the collectivization/dekulakization and the 37-38 terror. I've read a lot of Getty when it comes to the latter event but Kotkin's breakdown of events surprisingly did influence my existing opinion of it. It's not pretty. But it's important to confront these things and understand why they happened, even if they challenge your convictions. And that's why I think it's important that every self-respecting Leninist needs to read and rely on respected academics like Kotkin and not hacks like Grover Furr.
Finished Kotkin's Stalin: Waiting For Hitler, 1928-1941 yesterday (it rules when my boss goes on vacation and they've closed access to the boat I get assigned to work on). I'll be starting Reaganland on Monday and finally get to Parenti's Inventing Reality in my spare time.
Does Kotkin mostly play it straight and give a dispassionate, accurate depiction of Stalin? IIRC Kotkin doesnt have any real communist leanings. I'm just aware of his book essentially refuting Anne Applebaum's book on the Holodomor. Worth noting Kotkin is a well-respected academic historian at Princeton and Applebaum is... a journalist with zero historian credentials and a clear axe to grind against the USSR.
Kotkin is not popular among the hardcore ML crowd for obvious reasons. Nevertheless I actually really like his books because he can be quite nuanced and even-handed in the most surprising circumstances. He is, however, an ardent anti-communist and is ideologically very much a Liberal who puts markets and "rule of law" on a pedestal (this is most on display in the epilogue of Armageddon Averted, where he essentially places blame for the catastrophic economic collapse of Russia in the 1990s on it being a continuation of the collapse of the communist economy and Russia's inherent lack of market institutions and rule of law as a legacy of tsarist and communist repression; while there is certainly an aspect of truth to this claim I personally find it also an exercise in apologia for the role of neoliberal ideology, the influence of American "experts", and unchecked liberalization of the economy that is inherent to a capitalist class regime rising spontaneously where there was not one before).
Again, he comes to certain particular conclusions that I strongly disagree with (two examples off the top of my head are his blunt statement that factional infighting played no role in the 37-38 terror, and that Stalin's force march industrialization resulted in economic growth nearly identical to projected growth under the tsarist system - see Robert Allen for the rebuttal of that one) but he also produces sweeping and highly nuanced breakdowns of historical events that are often controversial. For examples: he pretty much places the most blame for Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact coming into existence on the British playing stupid games and outlines exactly why it was very much in Stalin's interest to come to rapprochement with Hitler at that precise moment in time; he places a significant amount of blame for the Winter War in Finland precipitating on Finnish intransigence and inability to understand Stalin's legitimate security concerns; and he outlines the extensive and highly successful German disinformation campaign that effectively trapped Stalin in a "congratulations, you played yourself" self-deception that explains his bizarre behavior in the lead-up to Operation Barbarossa.
Probably most importantly, Kotkin produces his receipts. He clearly perused the Soviet archives extensively and cites a massive amount of documentation, including handwritten annotations and signatures by Stalin himself, even as he constructs a vicious condemnatory narrative denouncing Stalin and communism as a whole during events such as the collectivization/dekulakization and the 37-38 terror. I've read a lot of Getty when it comes to the latter event but Kotkin's breakdown of events surprisingly did influence my existing opinion of it. It's not pretty. But it's important to confront these things and understand why they happened, even if they challenge your convictions. And that's why I think it's important that every self-respecting Leninist needs to read and rely on respected academics like Kotkin and not hacks like Grover Furr.
You should check out the Soviet Century by Moshe Lewin, one of the best histories of the Soviet Union.