By Luke Sayers, NYU Jordan Center, 9/13/22
I disagree with the writer’s assertion that Stalin was not psychopathic. The level of power and repression Stalin attained required a degree of ruthlessness – combined with being an ideologue – that most average people simply do not possess. In psychology there is what is known as the Dark Triad of negative personality traits, comprised of the psychopath, the narcissist and the Mach (short for Machiavellian). Machs tend to be extremely manipulative, ruthless and highly intelligent. They often lack the impulsiveness of the psychopath and the insecure ego and need for approval of the narcissist. Based on my study of Stalin, I tend to think he was a Mach. Interestingly, Machiavelli was one of Stalin’s favorite political philosophers. – Natylie
Joseph Stalin loved to read books. His vast personal library contained roughly 25,000 volumes, about 400 of which the dictator personally marked and annotated. Most of these books were held in a large library room in his private dacha outside of Moscow, though he eventually needed to move into an adjoining building to make room for his ever-expanding collection. He developed his own library classification system and enlisted the services of a private librarian to help him manage his books. As a good Marxist, his favorite subject was history; his favorite author was Lenin.
In Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books (Yale University Press, 2022), Geoffrey Roberts provides a unique look at Stalin by examining the contents of his personal library. His is an intellectual biography of Stalin, told through analysis of the books he read, the pamphlets he wrote, and the projects he edited.
Stalin would often escape from the demands of running the Soviet Union to find solace in his collection of books. Roberts unpacks this interest in books to show that Stalin was an intellectually rigorous and genuinely curious individual, whose library was not a showpiece but a place of serious thought, reflection, and learning.
Throughout his life, Stalin sought constantly to learn something new. He studied a variety of foreign languages, although he only ever mastered Russian, in addition to his native Georgian. He read extensively in history, often conversing with his guests about topics ranging from Oliver Cromwell to Otto von Bismarck. If a guest made a mistake, he was quick to scold them for their lack of historical perspective.
The first thing Stalin would do when visiting others was to inspect their libraries. He wanted to know what other people were thinking and which authors they were reading. Some of his personal favorites apparently included Lenin, Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, along with future “enemies of the people” Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Trotsky. Though these last three authors would eventually be purged or exiled and executed (Zinoviev in 1936, Bukharin in 1938, and Trotsky in 1940), their volumes lived on in Stalin’s collection because he thought it important to understand his rivals and studied them carefully. As Roberts points out, he probably learned more from Trotsky than from almost anyone else.
Stalin was not only a voracious reader, but also a prolific writer and an astute editor. He authored works like Anarchism and Socialism? (1907), Foundations of Leninism (1924), Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), Marxism and the National Question (1942), as well as various essays on Bolshevism and the proletariat. His contributions to theory may have been minimal—although his perspective on “socialism in one country” certainly had a profound influence on Soviet politics—but he achieved much as an efficient simplifier and popularizer of Party ideology.
As editor, he directed the production of the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938), a textbook Roberts thinks expresses Stalin’s own views of Party history. He also oversaw the writing of his own biography (still in progress when he died in 1953), but what may come as a surprise is that, unlike the Short Course, this text downplayed Stalin’s role in the Revolution. Not only was performative modesty an important part of the dictator’s self-presentation, but also, in the Marxist terms of Dialectical Materialism, the Revolution realized not the ambitions of any single person, but the triumphant progress of historical Spirit.
In Roberts’ estimation, Stalin may not have been an original thinker, but he was certainly a serious one. He fashioned himself after the manner of Lenin or Marx, becoming a self-styled philosopher-dictator who could lead the people to communist utopia through rigorous thought and consistent application of Marxist theory to politics.
One of Roberts’ goals in Stalin’s Library is to debunk various conspiracy theories about Stalin. Stalin’s legacy of violence has understandably generated much dubious conjecture—who wouldn’t want an easy explanation for the apparent madness of Stalinist brutality? Some speculate that Stalin was abused as a child or that he felt an almost religious devotion to authoritarian figures in history, such as Ivan the Terrible or Genghis Khan. Others think Stalin planted false flags during the Kremlin Affair surrounding the 1934 killing of Sergei Kirov in order to justify the purges of the 1930s.
In Roberts’ view, however, such theories are not based on hard evidence; in fact, Stalin’s library holds the key to explaining some of the apparent paradoxes such theories claim to reveal. Furthermore, these conspiracy theories distract from the consistency and stability of Stalin’s mind. He was not a psychopath but an ideologue, not personally traumatized but politically driven.
By contrast, Roberts portrays Stalin as a surprisingly normal person. Stalin was confident, direct, extremely efficient in his work, and dedicated to a few guiding ideological principles. He was an intelligent man who, tragically, used his talent to commit some of the worst crimes in history, but he was not the maniacal and irrational brute that many imagine him to have been.
Roberts never defends Stalin or his crimes, but he does affirm Stalin’s rationality, arguing that Stalin’s actions can be understood in light of his ideas. His steadfast pursuit of communist utopia, as expressed in the Marxist ideology and the politics of class warfare, produced the politics of purge and famine that defined the Soviet 1930s. It was a political principle, not personal psychosis, that led Stalin to act as he did.
This attention to rationality is what makes Roberts’ study of Stalin so relevant today, as the world seeks to understand the seemingly impenetrable actions of authoritarian rulers the world over, not least in Russia itself. Dismissing what we do not understand as madness, illness, egoism, or simple despotism, unfortunately, causes us to see possible rational explanations—both realist and ideological—for contemporary global politics.
Perhaps what Roberts discovers about Stalin’s intellectual and political motives is equally true of other world leaders today: the key to understanding their behavior may be hiding in plain sight, in the ideas they discuss, the speeches they make, and the books they read.
by Kyle Anzalone and Connor Freeman, Libertarian Institute, 9/20/22
Two new polls from Morning Consult and Concerned Veterans for America show at least a plurality of Americans are tired of interventionism. The results show twice as many Americans want to send less aid to Ukraine than those who would support sending more. Meanwhile, only 17% of Americans are concerned about defending democracy around the globe.
The Joe Biden White House built its foreign policy around the idea it would move away from fighting wars against terrorists in the Middle East, and refocus the Department of Defense on “Great Power Competition.” The administration marketed the policy as “autocracy versus democracy” with the White House leading the Western countries against Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and other ostensibly bad countries.
The White House has faced some criticism for claiming to promote democracy and selling weapons to brutal tyrants in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE and apartheid Israel. Though Morning Consult’s polling released last week shows the White House’s idea of promoting democracy is not resonating with the American people.
The poll asked Americans about their views on the country’s most pressing foreign policy challenges. Only 17% of respondents told the pollsters that “upholding global democracy” was a top five concern, ranking 11th behind drugs, climate, immigration, terrorism and the economic crisis.
The poll was backed by another by Concerned Veterans for America that found US citizens do not want increased involvement in Ukraine. “Only 15% of the American public support sending more military and financial aid to Ukraine than wealthy European countries, with almost twice as many people (34%) wanting to send less assistance,” CVA wrote. Additionally, a majority of Americans only want the assistance to continue if Europeans match the American commitment.
The poll shows Americans are firmly opposed to military intervention in Ukraine. Over 55% of respondents oppose direct American military intervention while only 14% percent support fighting a war for Kiev. The results for Ukraine were similar to Americans wanting a scaled-back role in the world, with 42% of respondents saying they want a smaller role and only 7% supported more intervention.
By Ted Snider, Antiwar.com, 9/21/22
As a child growing up in Leningrad, Vladimir Putin lived in a run-down five-story building. He and his parents shared an apartment with two other families. The yard was filled with garbage, and the garbage was filled with rats.
“Putin and his friends used to chase after them with sticks, until one day a large rat, which he had cornered, turned and attacked him, giving him the fright of his life. The memory stayed with him, and years later he would draw the lesson: ‘No one should be cornered. No one should be put in a situation where they have no way out.”
The story is recounted in Philip Short’s biography, Putin. Several lessons from childhood can be found in the biography that seem to have been formative for Putin. Three of them stand out.
No One Should be Cornered
Despite the repeated promises of the US, Germany, the UK and NATO that NATO would not move further east, NATO kept moving east. NATO kept encroaching, moving closer and closer to a Russia that had been explicitly left out of the European Union and now saw the US led military alliance devouring territory as it moved right up to its borders. Russia was being cornered.
As early as 2008, when NATO first announced at the Bucharest summit that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO, the Russian leadership made clear that they saw this decision as an existential threat. Putin warned that NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine was “a direct threat” to Russian security. John Mearsheimer quotes a Russian journalist who reported that Putin “flew into a rage” and warned that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.”
Over a decade later, Putin was issuing the same plea to the US. On December 2, 2021, Putin asked the US for immediate negotiations and sent a proposal on mutual security guarantees. He asked the US for “reliable and long-term security guarantees” that “would exclude any further NATO moves eastward and the deployment of weapons systems that threaten us in close vicinity to Russian territory.”
The US declined and closed the door. Russia had no way out.
With NATO crowding Russia’s borders, Ukraine being flooded with lethal NATO weapons and tens of thousands of elite Ukrainian troops massing along the eastern border with Donbas, like that rat in Putin’s yard, Russia was cornered. With its warnings and pleas for immediate negotiations being ignored, Russia saw no way out.
That does not justify the invasion of Ukraine. But the next move had been learned by Putin in his childhood.
Never Bluff
There were many rules taught by the KGB that Putin had already learned as a child “scrapping with the other kids.” One of them was “Don’t reach for a weapon unless you are prepared to use it . . . It was the same on the street. [There] relations were clarified with fists. You didn’t get involved unless you were prepared to see it through.”
When Putin said in 2008 that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions,” the West ignored him, thinking it was a bluff. But Putin learned as a child not to bluff. You don’t threaten action unless you are “prepared to see it through.”
With the US becoming increasingly directly involved in the war, not only providing weapons, training and targeting intelligence, but even going so far as war-gaming with and advising the Ukrainian military, Russia set a new red line.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked the US to go beyond the HIMARS rocket systems with their 50 mile range and provide “a missile system with a range of 190 miles, which could reach far into Russian territory.”
On September 15, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova declared that if the US agrees to supply those longer range missiles to the Ukrainian army, “it would cross the red line and become an actual party to the conflict.” The Russian spokeswoman then added that “In such a scenario, we would have to come up with an adequate response.” Russia, she reminded the West, “reserves the right to defend its territory using any means available.”
A week later, on September 21, Putin repeated that warning himself. On top of the threat of longer range missiles, Putin said some leading NATO countries had talked about the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Russia and said, “I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. Putin then said, “This is not a bluff.”
As a child, Putin learned that you “Don’t reach for a weapon unless you are prepared to use it.”
Recognizing that providing Ukraine with longer range guided missiles that could strike Russian territory “would likely be seen by Moscow as a major provocation,” that that provocation could lead to World War III and that the benefits “during the next stage of the war” “would be minimal,” Biden seems to be resisting Zelensky’s latest request.
Never Back Down
Putin is not spontaneous or rash. His ex-wife, Lyudmila, said that “Everything he did was always thought through.” A Swedish diplomat who knew him said that “he sizes up his opponents coldly and soberly, and anticipates his own and others’ actions well before he makes the first chess move.”
When you do make that move, you commit to the sequence of moves it sets off. “If something happens,” Putin once said, “you should proceed from the fact that there is no retreat. It is necessary to carry it through to the end.” The KGB taught that rule, but Putin says that he already knew it because he “learnt it much earlier, scrapping with kids.”
Putin would repeat that “carry it through to the end” formulation. “If you want to win a fight,” he said, “you have to carry it through to the end, as if it were the most decisive battle of your life.”
Though the US and its NATO allies repeatedly commit to arming and aiding Ukraine for the duration, Putin has shown no sign of retreating or backing down. Having seemingly now concluded that Russia is fighting, not a regional war against Ukraine, but a protracted global war against “the entire Western military machine,” on September 21, Putin ordered a partial mobilization of up to 300,000 reserves. The mobilization will include only military reservists “who served in the armed forces and have specific military occupational specialties and corresponding experience,” representing about 1% of Russia’s full potential.
Russia sees NATO encroachment and NATO presence in Ukraine as an existential threat. Putin learned as a child that “there is no retreat” and that “you have to carry it through to the end, as if it were the most decisive battle of your life.”
Sputnik, 9/21/22
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made public remarks after Putin’s speech. I have not yet been able to find a transcript of Shoigu’s remarks but this is a summary report from Sputnik. – Natylie
Both Russian president Vladimir Putin and Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu delivered speeches on Wednesday in the wake of announcements by the Donbass Republics as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions that they are planning to hold votes on joining Russia on September 23-27.
In his TV address on Wednesday, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that Russia was at war with the collective West rather than Ukraine.
“In reality, we are fighting the collective West plus NATO. When we speak about it, we mean not only the weapons being supplied [to Kiev] in huge batches, but also about systems of communication and information processing systems,” Shoigu said.
The Western states as well as NATO, he said, are supplying Kiev with “huge” amounts of weapons.
The minister went on to stress that the Ukrainian forces are increasingly using Western weapons to target civilian infrastructure, including hospitals.
He stressed that more than 70 military satellites and 200 civilian satellites are working to aid Ukraine and added that some 150 Western military specialists have been deployed to Kiev, de facto leading Ukrainian forces.
Military Losses of Russia and Ukraine
Touching upon the issue of the military costs of the armed conflict in Ukraine, Sergei Shoigu estimated that Kiev has lost half of its army, which originally had about 200,000 troops at the initial stage of Moscow’s special operation.
“Over this time, their losses amount to over 100,000 [military casualties]. This includes 61,207 deaths and 49,368 troops who were injured,” Shoigu said.
Over 2,000 foreign mercenaries were eliminated in Ukraine in the past months by Russians, the minister said, adding that 1,000 remain at the combat zone.
Russian losses, Shoigu noted, amount to 5,937, noting that the servicemen were “courageously fulfilling their duties.”
Partial Mobilization
Shoigu has also provided details on the military’s plans, explaining that partial mobilization in Russia is necessary to hold a 1,000-kilometer wide line of control and the liberated territories.
“Naturally, what is behind, and what is there, along this line, it must be secured, these territories must be controlled. And, of course, first of all, this is what this work is being done for – I mean, partial mobilization,” Shoigu said.
He said that only one percent out of Russia’s 25 million-strong military reserve will be subject to partial mobilization. He specified that reserve servicemen who have military professions and combat experience will be mobilized, adding that this will not concern students.
Sergei Shoigu said that the Russian forces fully control the territory of the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), partially control the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, and added that they are advancing in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).
The LPR and the DPR as well as the Russian-held parts of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions have announced they would hold referendums to join Russia from September 23-27.
The move was followed by President Putin signing a decree on the partial mobilization in Russia.
Below is an interview Shoigu gave to Russian media today.
Link here.