Stalin’s great conundrum was the state. He studied the art of rule via books rather than contemporary examples, and was conversant with German philosophy (Fichte, Hegel), Russia’s revolutionary tradition (nihilism, the People’s Will, Plekhanov), and the French Revolution (Jacobinism, Robespierre, Thermidor).337 Machiavelli was known to him via the socialist revolutionary tradition in a way that the Florentine was not for the Nazis. Stalin underlined a variety of passages in his 1869 Russian translation of The Prince (“It is unnatural that the armed should submit to the unarmed”; “Princes may, without dread, be severe in wartime”).338 He also underlined a passage noting that “Chinggis Khan killed many people, saying, ‘The deaths of the vanquished are necessary for the conquerors’ peace of mind.’”339 But Stalin never extolled the Mongolian khan, except privately to Mongols, and he had discovered his saying in Vasily Klyuchevsky’s Course of Russian History (1916). Stalin systematically studied works on autocratic rule, such as Vatslav Vorovsky’s On the Nature of Absolutism, in volume 1 of his Works (1933) and Mikhail Olminsky’s The State, Bureaucracy, and Absolutism in the History of Russia, third edition (1925).340 He had become passionately devoted to the study of ancient Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, marking up Robert Vipper’s Essays on the History of the Roman Empire (originally Berlin, 1923), especially passages on Augustus.341 Stalin had taken to studying up on how to be a despot.
Even as his reading had widened, it remained anchored in Marx and Lenin.342 But of the many gaping holes in Marx’s oeuvre, by far the greatest was the relative inattention to the state, and not just in the transition period from capitalism to socialism (and on to communism), but in general—a gap Lenin did not fill.343 To the extent that Stalin allowed himself rare criticisms of Lenin, it was on the question of the state.344 In his copy of a 1935 reissue of Lenin’s State and Revolution, for example, Stalin had marked the passage about the survival (rather than withering) of the state in the initial stage of a classless society—so on that, Lenin was correct—but when Lenin quoted Engels about the class-oppressive nature of all states, including socialist ones, Stalin wrote in the margin, “No!”345 In his copy of a 1937 reissue of Marx’s The Civil War in France, next to the passage about how all states had a “class character,” Stalin would write, “Not only.”346 But what else, exactly? And what to say about the issue of his personal dictatorship, which was not anticipated in Marxist theory, to put it mildly? In the ideologized Communist context, these questions demanded an answer. Marxism-Leninism did not explain the operation of “bureaucracy,” except as an inherent degeneration that should not have existed in the first place.
Not coincidentally, the Soviet state and its functionaries happened to be the grand theme of Trotsky’s anti-Stalin Marxist writings. Stalin was made to wonder: should he proactively prevent the consolidation of a bureaucratic “class” by deliberately upending it? If so, how would that help the Soviet state manage the economy or the country’s defense? Should he ensure that the revolutionary regime not “degenerate,” as revolutionaries turned into bureaucrats, and instead remove them so that new, younger leaders could come to the fore to regenerate the revolution?347 In the event, Stalin decided to force a radical reinvention of the Soviet elite, in the mold of the young striver he had once been, executing or incarcerating those he deemed to be of a bygone epoch while promoting and nurturing hundreds of thousands of new people.348
