JOHN CHUCKMAN REVIEW OF STEPHEN KOTKIN'S STALIN: WAITING FOR HITLER

How can a major biography be both a real disappointment and perhaps of some significance to read?

If you want to understand that, you should read Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin. I found I could manage only getting through Volume Two: Waiting for Hitler, as I will explain.

Or I should say, try to read it, because Kotkin is part of that special class of writers with the academic style one finds in social studies journals filled with articles from academics trying to notch up one more publication. It is almost as dry and lumbering as some of the stuff one can read from the Soviets.

Imagine using awkward neologisms like “dekulakization” over and over? There’s several of them repeated here often, like unwelcome old friends. I also object to the author’s invariable use of “regime” for Stalin’s government. Yes, it was what many of us do indeed think as a “regime,” but that word selection in a biography is unnecessarily loaded.

It was, no matter what, a “government,” and its actions, if skillfully related, should speak for themselves. Show, don’t tell, is the master story-teller’s motto. But Kotkin is pretty much incapable of doing so, and that is a weakness of the book.

Stalin was an interesting figure (I’ve read several biographies) and his era was filled with huge and tumultuous events, so you couldn’t ask for better material. But Kotkin manages never to bring any of it to life. His recitation is rather lumbering. Bringing an important historical figure and his or her era to life, always providing the author is also accurate with facts and displays a good sense of perspective and relative importance, is my idea of the ultimate achievement in biography.

I can think of any number of fine biographies that achieve this, but Kotkin simply fails to do so. We never for a minute forget we are reading a rather dry academic’s summarizing of a huge volume of old documents.

I am not exaggerating when I say that only in some of the many letters and notes quoted from Stalin do we get a sense of life. Stalin was a pretty good writer, and it comes through, even in translation. Of course, it is also a bugbear of mine when an author quotes too much, my view being who needs the author then. We could just as well be given a series of selected documents. I wouldn’t say Kotkin goes too far in this, but the thought does cross your mind while reading, and it shouldn’t.
Kotkin is associated with an extremely right-wing institution, the Hoover Institution, so I attribute things like using the word “regime” to that bias.

Sure, Stalin was terrifying creature, but I avoid authors who in any way preach or sermonize, as so many at the Hoover Institution indeed do.

Its very name, like so many privately endowed American think-tanks, is often a guarantee of nothing that an open mind wants to be exposed to.

But I had read in a Russian source that there was balance in this new biography. So, I decided it must have value.

After all, no matter what you think of communism or Russia, Stalin was one of the giants of the 20th century, a man who greatly shaped the world into which we were born.
It is important to understand how that came to be and what are the factors which made such a role for a single human being possible.

But the way that the biography disappoints comes as a surprise.

It is packed with facts, it reflects scholarship, but it is not well-written, and it just doesn’t quite “gel” in creating a vivid, living portrait.

It has too much of the academic thesis in its writing, which is a very limited type of writing, interesting to a very limited number of people.

So, I cannot say the book is not worth reading, but it is nevertheless quite disappointing and not a little boring. If you want one that is not, read Montefiore. He may not have enjoyed quite the same access to archives, but he paints a lively and interesting portrait.