Hi and welcome to Ones and Twos, FP's economics podcast. Every week we take a couple data points, use them to try to explain the world. I'm Cameron Abadi, FP's deputy editor with you in Berlin, Germany. Joining me as always is FP's economics columnist and Columbia University professor Adam Tooze with us this week in New York. Hi Adam.
So this week we are wrapping up our miniseries on Soviet economic thinkers. For anyone who's missed those episodes, you're welcome to scroll back wherever you get your podcasts. You'll find episodes on Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky. This week we are ending with the bookend that is Joseph Stalin. A lot to discuss there obviously and, as usual, I was expecting to start with the question we usually use when discussing figures in our heterodox economist occasional series, namely how might Stalin's biography have affected his thinking on economics. But as I was reading about Stalin, another question, or a more preliminary question, was raised in my mind, which is: are we entirely correct in describing Stalin here as a thinker at all? By which I wonder whether he is interested in economics in the same ways that the previous thinkers even in just this series—the theorists like Trotsky and Lenin—that very clearly was an aspect of their lives, thinking theoretically about economics. Was Stalin analogous in that way, as opposed to kind of fusing economics with politics in a more pragmatic vein? Is this a category mistake? Is Stalin a heterodox thinker at all?
I think there's so much wrapped up in that. So much is wrapped up in clichés around Stalin the man and who he was. I think he was obviously somebody who could be incredibly cruel and vindictive. I think he's really quite unlike somebody like Hitler that he's often compared to. Stalin had a truly cold-blooded element of his character, whereas Hitler was a much more sentimental figure. Stalin was not an economist at all, and unlike Lenin or Luxemburg in particular, who really struggled with the phenomenon of academic economics—Luxemburg particularly so, she had a PhD—Stalin was somebody who had to think about the economy and did so in really rather a structured way, but he's not a theorist in that sense. He was mocked within the Bolshevik party at people's cost as somebody who really couldn't hang with the high level of theoretical activity within the party. So at that level, not an economist, a dangerous man, not a thinker in the mode of a Trotsky or Lenin or a Luxemburg, but that sets the bar spectacularly high. Stalin is also a measure of just how far we have fallen. Stalin the thug, the administrator, the ghost, the pale administrator—his intellectual output compared to any contemporary political figure is just stupendous and awe-inspiring. He read hundreds of pages every day, and we know he actually read because he annotated. His annotations are kind of thuggish, but his favorite topic of conversation when he wasn't making death lists and engaged in party infighting was books that he was reading. He had a personal collection of 20,000.
Thinking and writing was essentially part of his metabolism as a human being, as a political actor. So yes, not Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, not the iconic intellectual radicals and the truly original thinkers in theory, but a different kind of politician, political animal from what we're used to. In this AI age, I can't help thinking of Stalin as a little bit algorithmic. He spends a lot of time sucking stuff up and then synthesizing it and figuring out the main currents to swim within. But having said all of that, and the reason why he matters and why his thought ends up mattering, is that the Bolshevik party, the Communist Party in the '20s, is in a state of flux. We'll speak more about the divisions within the party in a minute, but the truly original thing that comes out with Stalin and his faction—and he absolutely articulates what the project is here, and in retrospect it seems so conventional what he's doing that it's easy to underestimate how radical it is—if Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg take Marxism out of the 19th century and put it in the mid-19th century, the age of Queen Victoria and the Great Exhibition and the 1848 revolution where Marx and Engels come from—they're born in the aftermath of Hegel in the early 1800s in Germany—Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky turned Marxism into a 20th-century global politics. And what Stalin does in the Soviet Union in the '20s and '30s is turn the ideology of the Communist Party into the hard DNA of a national developmentalism that now seems familiar and you could say is anticipated by Hamilton and List and these nationalist thinkers of the 19th century, but no one had done it the way that the Soviet Union does it, and with the radical social transformative revolutionary ambition.
Stalin really is the bona fide, and one has to say he's the theoretician of the second phase of the Soviet revolution. The only people on a par with him are those coming along in the peasant revolutionary projects—the Mao Zedongs and the Ho Chi Minhs of East Asia and Southeast Asia. They will, if you like, add a fourth-generation Marxist revolutionary project. But this vision of utter economic and social transformation in one gigantic country—we're going to talk about socialism in one country in a minute—and the stupendous rates of change, the growth rates which even on the knockdown Western revised pessimistic figures imply growth rates of 5-6% per annum across large parts of the Soviet economy, the moving of tens of millions of people more or less forced under more or less coercive conditions over the space of less than a generation, 10 to 15 years, from the countryside to the city to really stamp a new society out of the ground—we've seen that replicated again and again, even in the West, in Western Europe in the '50s and '60s, or now in East Asia and China most spectacularly in the last generation, but the Soviet Union is the archetype of that. This is the first time this has ever been done, and it wasn't on the radar of Marx and Engels in the 19th century. It wasn't even on the radar of a Trotsky or a Lenin or a Luxemburg 10-15 years before. So this is the kind of extreme radicalism of a Stalin, which puts him alongside the Dengs and the Xi Jinpings of the present moment, who are not cultural radicals, not rethinking our relationship to art and culture the way that Trotsky was doing or exploding our understanding of the world in the way Lenin and Luxemburg did, but in terms of what they are going to do with power and how it's going to materially transform the world, are setting radically new standards. Stalin is the first figure that does this. He really does deserve—heterodox doesn't even come remotely close to describing what this kind of vision of economic change is because it's the revolution from the top down, or by way of the party and its coercive apparatus carried to everywhere within a giant society in the space of less than a generation.
So, let's get into some of the factional differences at the time that Stalin was taking power. We talked pretty expansively in our last episode about Leon Trotsky and his concept of permanent revolution, what that means, how he theorized that idea and its necessity. Stalin had a concept that he explicitly opposed to this, if I understand correctly, namely socialism in one country that you were just mentioning. So yeah, what exactly was he rejecting in Trotsky's thought and what was he opposing to it? It seems to me some idea of Soviet economic autarky. Is that basically what he was providing in opposition to Trotsky's concept?
It's really good to be doing this in a series because the obvious juxtaposition is the permanent revolution concept, that incredibly radical idea that I was trying to grasp in the Trotsky episode, and that extraordinary phrase of Trotsky's that revolution is camp life, like a permanent, itinerant, homeless, provisional kind of existence. I think the best way to grasp the shock—it really is a shock—and the radicalism of Stalin's position is to say no to that. Isaac Deutscher's brilliant biography of Stalin—also, of course, the great biographer of Trotsky—describes the kind of mood within the Soviet Union in the 1920s, which is a sort of combination of pride, exhaustion, complacency. They make the revolution in '17, they fight their way through the civil war, they go through the horror of the civil war and the famine that followed. They stabilize. Then Lenin dies, and the question is what's next? The permanent revolution gang, the Trotskys of this world, are saying relentless more struggle forever: "Comrades, we've only just begun. This is the beginning. And furthermore, nothing that we're doing here makes any sense or is going to be stable or can count for the long run unless we make revolution in the advanced world, and we start talking about revolution in Asia as well. Nothing here can be taken for granted." It's just this relentless, surging push.
Stalin's position is, "Hey, come on, we control one-sixth of the planet. There's 160-odd million people here. We have done something. We have stabilized. Stop telling me that we have to constantly stir the world up to preserve our position here. No, we can preserve our position in the Soviet Union. We can defend the Soviet Union." This is also tied to a rather sanguine estimation they have of the stability of the West. They believe that because the West is stabilizing, they're going to be able to do deals with the West that will mean that they don't have to constantly worry about counterrevolutionary, Iran-Contra-style mobilizations of Western resources to unseat the Bolsheviks in power. And so what Stalin's proposition is—and again, we have to think historically here—Russians had learned Marxism; Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky had all preached relentlessly to the point of cliché that revolution had to be global, and here's someone coming along saying, "No, actually, we can just do it here. This is a really powerful thing that we've created, and it's ours, and we made it, and nowhere else has it. Aren't we missing the obvious point that we should do it here?" Now does it mean autarky, or this idea of self-sufficiency economically that was thrown into the debate in the 1920s and '30s because the fascists are quite into autarky—they speak about it a lot anyway? It emphatically doesn't. What it does mean, though, is that we're not going to allow the Soviet economy to become sucked willy-nilly into global international trade and financial relationships. We're not going to do principled opening up and reform like Deng Xiaoping will do in China in the '80s. We're not going to open the floodgates to external influence. We're going to manage this.
What they end up doing is building an extraordinarily powerful bilateral relationship with the Weimar Republic, with Germany, with the new German state created after the revolution there, which was of course the revolution of 1918-1919, the one which claims the life of Rosa Luxemburg and is widely seen, of course, as the great disappointment of revolutionary politics in the '20s. Because if revolution wasn't going to be in Britain—and after the general strike's failure in '26, it's not going to be in Britain—and it's not going to be in Germany either, and you're not going to be able to get to Germany because Trotsky's Red Army was stopped in Poland in 1920, the idea that—and the Stalinists openly advocate this, as do others in the Soviet system at the time—the solution for the Soviet Union's development as socialism in one country could be an intense bilateral deal with the Weimar Republic, it's to compound the heresies. The idea there is straightforward: it's a division of labor idea. In other words, the Soviet Union will develop agriculture, raw materials, oil, and exchange that for the uniquely prized and highly sophisticated engineering products of German industry. This is hugely significant for both sides. The Soviet Union is by far the largest market for German mechanical engineering over the late '20s into the early 1930s. It's underpinned by a German export credit, so the German government is underpinning this trade. A very large share of Russian grain exports and other raw material exports go to Germany in exchange. So it's more like a balanced trade or managed trade kind of vision than autarky. And it's hugely politically sensitive because the Soviets keep on exporting grain to Germany even as their own agricultural system is turned into absolute crisis by collectivization. It's not true that Russian peasants, Ukrainian peasants in particular, starve en masse because of exports to Germany, but at the margin, the Soviet regime is giving high priority to whatever they can earn hard-currency-earning exports, and in particular what they really want is mechanical engineering equipment for industrialization in exchange.
Okay. So let's take a closer look then at one aspect of this policy that falls under this general strategy, namely the collectivization drive that Stalin pursued in the late '20s and early '30s that you're sort of alluding to here. I'm curious about what the economic logic of this collectivization policy really was. This was a bid to consolidate private farms into large state-controlled collectives, and it seemed to have all sorts of failures in its aftermath, or at least involve all sorts of brutal repression and famines, millions of deaths. It's uncontroversial to say, but I'm curious whether that is not entirely an accident. In other words, did Stalin's policy, as part of which he declared a kind of liquidation of the kulaks as a class, did it always involve a kind of exterminationist logic? That is to say, did Stalin have an understanding of economic development along the lines that you've been describing that required destruction of parts of the social structure? Or even if it didn't necessarily require it, did he just inherently accept potentially unlimited human costs for political and economic goals?
I'm sure we'll come back to the question of violence because it runs through this whole series of conversations, and one shouldn't underestimate the element of violence in the thinking of Lenin and Trotsky in particular. There's an old leftist kind of move of saying the Russian experiment was betrayed by Stalin and really the Bolshevik revolution was more benign, more democratic, and it's really when the Georgian-Russian Stalin takes over that the barbarism of Russia swamps the emancipatory logic of Bolshevism. Eric Hobsbawm, for instance, is borderline guilty of this. We shouldn't accept those kinds of apologetics. But we should also understand the collectivization project as part of a longstanding conversation within global leftist thought about where the peasantry fit in. We saw how with Lenin in particular, he develops this theory of an alliance between the Russian peasantry—not the whole of the peasantry, because he believes it's becoming capitalist, and that means you can split the peasants into poor peasants, working-class peasants effectively, though they're not workers in the sense they would be in a factory, but nevertheless they're disadvantaged and exploited and oppressed by rich peasants. And so the idea is you split the countryside and ally the poor peasants with the working class, and that's your revolutionary agent.
From a more managerial economic point of view, the other way of looking at the agrarian question—you see this in people like Kautsky—is what about capitalism in the countryside? What kind of a future do we see through it? The answer in almost all of this thinking is larger-scale farms. If they look to North America with the ultimate settler-colonial kind of paradise of large-scale farming, you see not necessarily higher productivity per acre or hectare, but you see much higher productivity per farmer in the US because there's so much land for every farmer, and the problem of European and much of Asian agriculture is there's just too many people in the farms. And so from the early 1900s onwards, as they seriously begin to think about world revolution and what it would look like, they start thinking about modernizing agriculture by making the farm units bigger. Then you need to add a couple more elements to this story, which are: the first effect of the Russian Revolution—what it delivered for most Russians, 80%-plus of whom were agrarian in 1917—is that they basically took the land from the landowners. They expelled, and in often cases killed, the aristocratic and gentry landlords. In a grassroots, bottom-up land reform—they did a land redistribution—the result of that is that the Soviet Union goes from having 16 million farms to 25 to 26 million farms by the early 1920s. That also, of course, is a power question, and this lurks at the background of your question, Cam. It's all very well to have a revolutionary project that says we're going to ally ourselves with the poorer peasants, but if you actually give more peasants more land, then fewer of them are poorer. More of them are now actually landholding.
And then a kind of power struggle develops that is a struggle of landowning peasants against radical politicians. But it's also an economic struggle between the countryside, which sells agricultural output—and it sells it either to domestic urban markets, the farmers don't need it themselves, you've got to sell it to an urban client, or you export it. And as farms get smaller and smaller, less and less of the Russian farmers are interested in exporting, and the question is more and more salient: do they just retreat into self-sufficiency and feed themselves or their local village, or are they still willing to sell grain to the city? You can see all of these layers compounding themselves in this problem. The crisis of the early 1920s that shook the Bolshevik regime and shapes all of these people's biographies and politics was one of civil war, was one of outside intervention, but it was also reasonably enough understood as an economic meltdown in which the countryside, newly provisioned with all of the land of the aristocrats, decided basically that it was less interested in doing business with the cities, especially if you're in a world of hyperinflation where money is not worth anything and you take your valuable grain and go sell it for some fake paper rubles and you can't buy anything for it because the cities are melting down because there's a revolution going on and civil war and there's nothing to buy. And so you end up with a famine in the cities, which is where the revolution is supposed to be coming out of.
You begin to see how congested this problem is. The solution of the New Economic Policy adopted from '21 onwards was to say, "Okay, we need to back off and we need to go to first principles. How do we get people in the countryside to sell things to the city? We need to give them a currency that they can do this in," so they actually create a gold-backed currency for the Soviet Union. "And we need to have markets. And then we need to move from forced requisitioning"—where Trotsky and Stalin and their merry men go out into the countryside and basically just seize grain—"and we need to move to a money-based taxation system or some controlled marketing system where farmers are required to deliver so and such quantity for a certain price." This is the stabilization of the '20s. And this is what all of the politics after Lenin's death are about. The two big questions are foreign policy—socialism in one country—and the other question is what to do with the countryside, where the vast majority of people live, newly empowered by the revolution you've made. In a sense, you're doing your radical cultural urban revolution in the cities—all of the culture everyone likes, you go to the MoMA in New York and you see all this '20s Soviet art, that's all being done in the cities at a time when in the countryside the famous kulaks, the upper-class peasants, are having a market economy ball thanks to the revolution that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the rest all made.
So how do we escape from this? This becomes more and more pressing as you look at the grain market and go, "Oh damn, we're not getting enough grain as we would like to force the development of the socialist bit of Russian society. And secondly, the longer we do this, the more those peasants are going to turn into Western-style peasants, and then they're going to be conservative and they'll be voting against the revolution, and what on earth have we done?" And so, back and forth over the '20s over this question of setting the prices so as to get the goods from the countryside to the city, prioritizing industry: do you extract more resources from the countryside so as to feed industrialization? Is the future of Russian society actually in the cities? Are you going to make this big break? Can you thereby increase the productivity of farms, release the labor, release the food, escape this impasse? There is this huge factional struggle basically between more or less radical politics on this: Bukharin is on one side; Trotsky and the left wing of the party on the other side. Stalin holds this whole thing at arm's length and then in '28 makes this dramatic move towards: we're going to prioritize massive industrialization, and not just collectivization, but forced collectivization of the entire countryside on a timescale that's going to be defined by a five-year plan. And that is the break.
Now, that's going to be violent. Everyone understands it's violent. Everyone understands that the logic here is, in their own terms, one of class war. They devoutly believe that there is a kulak class out there that opposes the revolution, that is going to try and extract concessions from the revolution. When they announce this policy, a large part of the peasant population in Russia, A, because they are still religiously devout, is thinking, "This is maybe the apocalypse and the end of the world, because how can this be?" And, B, responds by various types of sabotage and protest—obviously hyped up in the Bolshevik reporting on this, but clearly real because we can see it in the statistics. One thing a peasant does if they think the end of the world is coming and they're about to have all of their resources stripped away is kill their draft animals and eat them. But when you do that, you of course dramatically undermine the productivity of the agricultural system. And so then you end up in what is really a resumption of the civil war, but this time not against the political enemies of Bolshevism, the Whites as opposed to the Reds, but a flat-out socioeconomic war where you divide the vast bulk of Russian society and Soviet society. I shouldn't keep saying Russian, because really the struggle is intense in Central Asia; it's incredibly intense in Ukraine, where for Ukraine this becomes, as you were asking, truly the Holodomor, Ukraine's holocaust.
It's quite clear that the Soviet leadership from the top down—if you ask me, did they set out to have millions of people starve to death deliberately, I don't think the reasonable answer is yes. If you ask, were they willing to push what they understood to be a political struggle to the limit and absolutely countenance the deaths of millions of people if necessary and exacerbate that by dekulakization, which was the politically driven commissars going into villages and singling out rich landowners and saying, "Right, off to the gulag in the hundreds of thousands and ultimately the millions"—absolutely so. They would have liked this to go more smoothly, and in the face of opposition, what they did was ramp up the coercion. Is this a project of state-building and consolidation? Absolutely it is. Do they want to consolidate the Soviet Union's grip and the largely Russian-speaking party's grip over Ukraine? Of course they do. Absolutely they do. And the same in Central Asia. So this is a really violent process of state-building. And from the regime's point of view, it works. What I mean by that is not that it necessarily produces huge leaps towards high productivity—initially, of course, it doesn't; it leads to chaos, mass death, disintegration—but by the mid-'30s the relationship between the countryside and the cities is restored, the productivity levels are acceptable, and crucially, when the big test of the Soviet regime comes—because you have to understand the Soviet regime as being shaped by the prospect of war—they are able, even during World War II under the most dramatic pressure of the German invasion and the most savage land war that the world's ever seen, they're still able to maintain their control of the countryside such that they're able to go on feeding Russia's cities, the Soviet Union's cities. At this point, it largely is Russia because the Germans capture so much of the non-Russian bit of the western Soviet Union. So the political logic—it isn't an economic logic first and foremost, but if the lesson of the first revolution of 1917 was that if you don't control this relationship between city and countryside, you will face upheaval because the cities will starve, which is what brought down the tsar—in the '40s, what the Stalinist regime demonstrates...
is that collectivization, which really imposed for the first time, again never done before anywhere in the world ever in the long history of settled civilizations since the beginning of the Neolithic, had a state imposed power on peasants in the way that the Soviet regime imposed power on the peasantry from the collectivization drive onwards. And that is the essential metabolic core of of the Soviet regime's survival and success in World War II.
Yeah. No, that genuinely seems like a novel approach to economic issues and—
Ultraviolent. I mean, really, you know, to be clear, there's no—
Yeah. I mean, it understands doing this because this was the great threshold of power, right? Since there've been peasants and landlords, this has been the central question. Can you assert power into the territory, really over the entire zone of the territory?
And they have commissars in every village, right? Literally every village, there's a tractor station, there's political party control. This is unprecedented.
Yeah, I mean just the preliminary relationship to the underlying society to just see it as sort of malleable, or something that one not as a constraint that one needs to work with, but rather something that one can kind of treat as—
More like a battle. There is opposition, right? So it's not infinitely malleable. You can't just sit on the whiteboard and just go—
