Stephen Kotkin

So he goes and tries it.

He creates even more destabilization than they had predicted.

But he just powers through and gets there to the end and succeeds.

And most of them are grateful that he's pulled this off because they thought it couldn't be done.

So your question is, who else could have become Stalin in that position?

Who else among the Marxist-Leninists could have been the guy who says, whether we can do this or not, we have to do this because we can't have a socioeconomic base that's capitalist and the communist regime will survive.

They were all ready to say that, but they weren't all ready to do that.

Moreover, after he does it, they had criticized him during the process while he was doing it.

He was the only one in his mind who was Marxist-Leninist enough to get it done, and they were all carping at him.

So this is where you begin to see the paranoia, suspicion being magnified, where he then, in a few years after collectivization is more or less finished, he's going to go after them.

So you needed a person...

who could have felt in their head that this was not only necessary but doable, undertake those risks, power through no matter how much famine and resistance and upheaval and criticism there was, and then come out the other side of that as the victor with this gigantic secret police that was really small but got really big in the process of doing the very thing that people said you couldn't do.

Yeah.

And then having all of that and not destroying any rivals and going from dictatorship to despotism, right?

So you would need a person

who was capable of being Stalin in that group, not from outside that group, but inside that group, and then would either not use that power to destroy everybody else, not yearn for despotism, but be satisfied with dictatorship, where others exercised power in their domains, and yet still able to hold on to the system.

So was there such a person in the circle and could, if the answer is no, could that person have emerged in the process of doing it?

This is a question for every single dictatorship.

Why didn't somebody just kill Stalin?

Yeah.