De-Stalinizing Stalin

Losurdo, Rockhill, and Soviet History

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In recent weeks, the work of controversial scholar Gabriel Rockhill (2025) has sparked a flurry of scathing reviews challenging his controversial conception of “Western Marxism,” which he views as an ideology consciously manipulated in certain directions by “powerful external forces,” namely the CIA and other Western imperialist institutions (Thakor 2026). For Rockhill, Western Marxism cannot be described simply as the theoretical output of the West’s workers’ and socialist movements, because its current form is entangled in an imperialist, conspiratorial formation encompassing networks of academic elites and shadowy CIA influence. This, he argues, has produced a “compatible left” that is not only unwilling or unable to confront Western imperialism but is, in many ways, complicit in furthering these imperial interests, which are often directed against the state-building efforts of socialist projects associated with the “East” (Rockhill 2025, 62).

In this reading, the revolutionary state-building projects associated with Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Xi Jinping must be distinguished from a Western form of Marxism confined to the walls of academia and subordinated to serving the very powers it purports to critique. Gabriel Rockhill is building on Domenico Losurdo’s theorization of bifurcated Marxisms, as articulated in his 2017 work Western Marxism and, to a lesser extent, his Stalin biography. For both Rockhill and Losurdo, Stalin is one of the “good” Marxists, representative of “Eastern Marxism.” This Marxism, unlike its Western variant, is grounded in a pragmatic, revolutionary vision of state-building. It is socialism in power, and power, Losurdo argues, invariably involves compromises and complexities that do not neatly align with the “utopian” and “messianic” theories of Western Marxism. Losurdo underscores how these theories continue to centre the abolition of the state, which he sees as the very vehicle of socialist and Third World development. The “self-neutralizing Eurocentrism” underlying Western Marxism reveals its practical limitations relative to its far more successful Eastern counterpart (Hakamäki and Engel-Di Mauro 2023, xi).

Losurdo states plainly that “Stalin was … the incarnation of Eastern Marxism,” contrasting his developmental focus on building socialism in Russia with Leon Trotsky’s call to spread revolution to the West (Losurdo 2025, 68). He frames this as a misplaced priority, removed from the realities of consolidating the gains of a revolution. For Losurdo, the Stalin-Trotsky split is emblematic of diverging Marxist worldviews that have fundamentally different orientations towards revolution and class struggle. The latter has shaped the contemporary academic establishment, in which Western “professional intellectuals” have become “ensconced in elite networks,” writes Gabriel Rockhill, pontificating on philosophical debates and aesthetic questions while the East takes the lead in building real socialism (Rockhill 2025, 75).

From its disavowal of the orthodox Marxist conception of the “withering of the state” to the vast generalizations entailed in splitting Marxism into two broad, antagonistic camps, this is a controversial reading that has provoked a highly polarized response on the left. Firstly, these traditions are far too diverse and interrelated to be seriously claimed as distinct theoretical traditions operating from different premises. Rockhill’s critique of “Western Marxism” is clearly a partisan reaction to the anti-Stalinist and anti-CCP orientation dominant in left academia and publishing, and the theoretical framework he constructs around that political conclusion is not especially convincing.

As I will argue in this piece, the claim that Stalin’s “SiOC” was a new innovation, the beginning of an “Eastern Marxist” state-building project, is problematic, as the evidence shows that Stalin did not create the idea of socialist development in a single country, which was already established, in less developed form, within the German Marxist intellectual tradition. This precedent was set in the work of Vollmar and Kautsky:

In several important instances, Stalin seemed to continue on suggestions present in Kautsky’s works. The main ones were the concept of socialism in one country, pioneered by Vollmar, and the continued existence of bureaucratic apparatuses, commodity and money relations, and wide wage differentials under socialism. We may assume that his reading of the Erfurter Programm and others of Kautsky’s works was of some influence here (Van Ree 2002, 261)

Indeed, Van Ree (2005, 18), a specialist in Stalin’s political thought, writes that “Stalinist ideology contained little that was not prefigured in the Western revolutionary movement,” and that Western Marxism was “more permeated with ‘Stalinist’ elements than we would like to think.” Nor was “Eastern Marxism” always the principled bastion of anti-imperialism that Rockhill and Losurdo claim. It is telling that Mao’s highly questionable Sino-Soviet split foreign policy, including rapprochement with the United States and the CCP’s early support of the American War on Terror framework, are not meaningfully addressed in his work. Indeed, Jiang Zemin called George W. Bush within hours of 9/11, expressing support for fighting “terrorism” alongside the U.S. At the very least, these examples complicate the notion of a uniformly anti-imperialist “Eastern Marxism” and reveal how state-building imperatives can lead to awkward alignments with imperial forces. Stalin’s support of Israel perhaps being the most egregious example.

This is not to say that Rockhill does not point out compelling facts or connections between certain academics and American institutions. He does, but such revelations are incorporated within a broader political critique that is ideologically committed to defending his vaguely defined “Eastern Marxism” against the betrayals of “Western Marxists,” which oddly includes non-Marxists like Foucault and Derrida (Wolfe 2026). The forceful response of Rockhill’s critics reflects the long recurrent anxiety around the “mainstreaming” of Stalinism, or the more frightening sounding “Neo-Stalinism,” on Left movements. As Soviet history and the historical Stalin become instrumentalized towards these different political perspectives, the reality of Stalin’s Marxism becomes lost. The purpose of the article is to move beyond this ideological tug-of-war to locate the truth of Stalinism.

Stalin: Western or Eastern Marxist?

My intention is not to retread familiar ground with yet another attack on the credibility of Rockhill or Losurdo’s scholarship. Rather, my aim is more narrow: to interrogate their interpretation of Stalin as the “incarnation” of Eastern Marxism. In fact, I would argue that Stalin defies any such simple binary categorisation. If anything, the available evidence suggests a closer cultural and intellectual affinity to Western Marxism and the European ideas that shaped that ideological current. Despite Stalin’s eventual post-war drift into Cold War isolation, it remains a little-known fact that Stalin in the 1930s was a cultural patron of European arts, architecture, film, theatre, and philosophy, facilitating mass translations of European texts and inviting various visiting theorists to participate in the cultural life of the USSR. This was concurrent with the height of the Stalinist terror throughout the 1930s. Katerina Clark (2011, 16) writes:

in 1932 … the Soviet cultural world became more cosmopolitan, more open to products from the West. The horizon of Soviet culture widened as translation took off. The huge spate of translations published in the 1930s cannot be ignored by those who write of nationalism tout court. The infamous years 1937 and 1938 produced a harvest of translated works by major western European and American writers. Though we have to recognize that, given the length of time it takes to translate, this harvest was probably sown around 1935

This was part of a conscious project of socialist cosmopolitanism in which the USSR sought to represent itself as the New Rome and, by extension, the inheritor of Western civilisation. Continental Europe, with the USSR at the helm, was to be elevated to the new heights of universalist socialism. The USSR was not alone in its ambition of becoming a new Rome. Both Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy cast themselves as rightful heirs to a purified Western or classical civilization, though along hyper-nationalist and racial lines, projecting imperial dominance through military force and ethnic hierarchy. By contrast, the Bolshevik project drew on a different lineage. It mobilized universalist currents rooted in German Marxism and French Jacobinism, reworking ideas from these traditions into a Soviet vision of cosmopolitanism and pan-European fraternity. The fact that few would associate the Stalin years of breakneck industrialization and mass terror with a rich intercultural transmission with Europe is perhaps demonstrative of the extent to which Soviet history is so often viewed solely through the prism of the gulag and famine, a topic Losurdo himself has covered in depth. As a result, the fascinating cultural histories of the Soviet project have been pushed to the margins, displaced by the evocation of totalitarian nightmares deeply imprinted in the popular historical-cultural imagination.

The primary interface for Soviet cultural exchange with the West was VOKS, one of many cultural institutions that facilitated dialogue through initiatives like book exchanges, artistic tours, and exhibitions, all of which were carried out in coordination with Comintern and other relevant state organs. What is particularly noteworthy is that throughout the 1920s VOKS was “negotiating for links with the Institute for Social Research (i.e., the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist critical theory),” one of the main targets of Rockhill’s ire (Clark 2011, 39). It may perhaps come as a surprise to see the Soviet state engaging with these philosophies, which were presumably far removed from the concrete realities of pragmatic state-building praised by Losurdo. Stalin’s “socialism in one country” is often treated as a total disavowal of internationalism and world revolution, marking an inward turn towards state development. But as Stalin articulated and codified “socialism in one country,” the Soviet state was simultaneously strengthening cultural ties with Europe, which, at this point, the Soviets saw themselves as not only being a part of, but as its cultural capital via Moscow. Clark (2011, 10) writes that Stalin “aspired to generate a superior civilization, to make their country a primus inter pares in a cultural confederation within their world, continental Europe.” While Moscow never attained this status in reality, the fact that it was a major ambition is nonetheless revealing of Soviet cultural priorities in the region. I will also mention that the Soviet fascination with European civilization and the Western intellectual heritage should not be confused with Eurocentric racism or chauvinism, as the Soviets explicitly sought to create a universal project superseding European colonial domination. Indeed, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism were major planks of the Bolshevik revolution, and the Soviet state’s multi-national character was a point of pride. Thus, despite an intellectual heritage rooted in the West, Stalin’s brand of Marxism resists such a simplistic binary categorization of Western or Eastern Marxism. Even as it developed out of the former, the Soviet state’s universalist character also encompassed the latter.

One Stalin biographer once, somewhat pejoratively, described Trotsky as a “café intellectual,” contrasting Trotsky’s intellectual preoccupations with Stalin’s early background as a professional revolutionary scrapping his way through the “wild west” of the Caucasus (Read 2016, 151). Stalin’s beginnings on the revolutionary frontlines of the “East” are important, as his Georgian roots undoubtedly shaped his militant political outlook as a revolutionary turned statesman. Yet, despite this, we know that Stalin still made a conscious effort to shift public perception away from these origins as he grew more comfortable in the seat of power, associating himself with the dominant Russian Marxism, which, in the 1920s and 1930s, he saw as the most advanced part of European civilization.

Stalin’s development and circulation of European theoretical work within the USSR reflects a conscious effort to situate Soviet modernization within a European transnational intellectual framework rather than an isolated national project. Europe, as the cradle of Marxist theory, was essential to the Soviet self-understanding as being at the forefront of historical progress. These “café intellectuals” who articulated Marxist theory had a central role to play in the development of socialism. Indeed, Katerina Clark (2011, 28) describes Stalinist society as resembling Plato’s utopian political ideal of rule by philosopher-kings, in which a cultured elite would guide and transform society according to a universal historical vision:

Nevertheless, Moscow of the 1930s had several utopia-like features. One of them was the elevation of intellectuals to an elite existence, a position classically elaborated in the philosopher kings of Plato’s Republic. Thanks to the new importance of culture intellectuals enjoyed an enhanced status, both materially and in power and prestige. They were, as Ivan Szelenyi said of their postwar eastern European counterparts, “intellectuals on the road to class power”

These utopian dimensions of Stalinism are noteworthy. It is clear that Stalin and his leading bureaucrats were, in Clark’s (2011, 10) words, the “inheritors of a messianic tradition,” undermining Losurdo’s insistence that Stalin was fundamentally a pragmatist who disavowed messianism. Moreover, Clark’s research challenges the notion that Stalin came to reject internationalism, or that his rule represented a break with Western Marxism and its theoretical ambitions, as Soviet-European cultural exchange in the 1930s was “inextricably bound up with Soviet internationalism” (Clark 2011, 5). Stalin remained serious about world revolution even as its urgency was deprioritized in light of the more immediate pressures of survival, diplomacy, and war. Van Ree (2005, 9) writes:

the world revolution always remained on his agenda as a secondary and subordinate goal, to be pursued through the world communist movement, which he attempted to guide towards victory in the long run. Stalin never changed this basic framework

On a similar note, historian Lars Lih (2023, 365) writes:

Stalin was not hypocritical in his support for world revolution, since from his point of view no sacrifice of state interests was involved. His caution about revolutionary prospects in particular cases did not mean he dismissed all revolutionary prospects for the foreseeable future. His caution about revolutionary prospects in particular cases did not mean he dismissed all revolutionary prospects for the foreseeable future

Notably, in tracing out the origins of Stalin’s SiOC, Van Ree notes that towards the end of Lenin’s life, the revolutionary leader had contemplated the possibility of realizing a “complete socialist society” in Russia, a testament to some level of continuity between Leninism and Stalinism on that topic. Of course, Lenin did not have the same systematized doctrine of “socialism in one country,” but he showed an openness to the possibility of nation-based socialist production in a way that did not repudiate the necessity of global revolution:

In his 1923 article Lenin accomplished a shift in definition. He defined co-operative property on land owned by a proletarian state as socialist, and as ‘completely socialist’ for that matter … Now, once this system was defined as a fully socialist one, the creation of a “complete socialist society” in backward Russia was at one stroke deemed possible. (Van Ree 1998, 96).

Socialism in One Country was not an “Eastern” deviation invented by Stalin, but one that was thoroughly rooted in a broader Western Marxist tradition, even if rejected by Marx and Engels, who were explicit that socialism could not endure in a national context. SiOC in the Marxist tradition was first articulated by German intellectuals such as Vollmar and Kautsky, and Lenin’s own thoughts around establishing socialist production in a single country were certainly shaped by the Kautskyian legacy, as Van Ree (2011, 86) observes that Kautsky:

could not have been more explicit in his thesis that a socialist economy would have to be organised as a relatively autarkic whole within a national framework.

For Lenin, socialist production within a single country was bound up with the prospect of war, writing “that an isolated socialist state must orient itself towards war, overtake the imperialists economically as well as militarily and ready itself to defeat them on the battlefield” (Van Ree 2010, 173). The development of a nation’s productive forces enabled a powerful military, which in turn supported the spread of revolution. Van Ree is correct to note that this “obviously anticipated Stalinism in some of its essential elements” (Van Ree 2010, 173). Therefore, the supposed Stalinist break with Leninism on “Socialism in One Country” is better understood less as a rupture than as a development of existing tendencies, not an inevitability but a historically plausible trajectory already latent in Lenin’s thought.

In tying this back to Stalin’s European cultural renaissance, Soviet newspapers and journals aimed at non-Russian European audiences circulated both within and beyond Stalin’s USSR as a way of constructing a shared cultural horizon between Soviet and European leftist spheres, one that framed the USSR as the legitimate centre of an expansive international revolutionary culture. An exemplary publication was the 1931 The Literature of World Revolution, which brought key Western texts into Soviet circulation and made them accessible to a wider readership. The Soviets used these journals to discuss modernist writers such as Joyce and Dos Passos, appropriating Western literary techniques in service of a Soviet cultural project explicitly premised on European foundations, though this engagement with literary modernism was not without significant internal debate and controversy. These developments echo Stalin’s claim in 1919, in Principles of Leninism, that “the October Revolution has at the same time created a powerful and open centre of the world revolutionary movement, around which it can now rally and organise a united revolutionary front of the proletarians and of the oppressed peoples of all countries against capitalism.” Moscow, as the cultural and literary centre of the socialist world, was thus conceived as a beacon of hope for revolutionary movements internationally, radiating the promise of transformation far beyond its own borders.

Stalin as Messiah

One of Rockhill and Losurdo’s major issues with Western Marxism is its “traffic in magical thinking and a belief in the most suspect forms of idealist, utopian salvation” (Losurdo 2024, 23). In this framing, Stalin, as the incarnation of Eastern Marxism, allegedly rejected the idealistic horizons of Western theorists to pursue a pragmatic state-building project. Yet one aspect of Stalinism that Losurdo sorely neglects is its millenarian core. For him, Lenin’s death marked a transition from the overtly utopian early Bolshevik period to the more rational order of Stalinism, which supposedly recognized the hollowness of the “messianic expectations” of communism (Losurdo 2023, 121). What Losurdo derides as “magical thinking” is nevertheless clearly present in Stalin’s own thought and points to a deeper continuity with revolutionary Bolshevik political culture of the 1910s and 1920s. Katerina Clark (2011, 125) even notes that “in some senses the thirties were more utopian than the twenties.” Secularised messianic ideas continued to shape Stalin’s governing ideology. Perhaps nowhere is this apocalyptic logic more visible than in the terror of the 1930s.

Halfin (2009, 257) notes how autobiographies of the era perceived the state’s rapid development as directly leading into the communist future and accordingly “communicated a sense of great personal excitement in the face of the looming classless society.” Losurdo is wrong to treat state-building as separate from the messianic ideal; the two were intimately bound together. Indeed, it was Trotsky (1920) who had noted that “Just as the lamp before going out shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state assumes the most extreme form of dictatorship before disappearing altogether.” Faced with endless enemies obstructing the movement of history, or so they believed, it is unsurprising that such fervent believers would be willing to go to such violent lengths to ensure this promised tomorrow. The leadership themselves were not cynical exploiters of messianic dreams but genuine believers, and it was this conviction that enabled the repression. Soviet officialdom came to understand mass terror as a kind of hyper-moralism, a necessary service to humanity that cleansed the party of impurity. With stone faces, the vanguard of progress carried out staggering violence as the price of ushering in a new phase of history. Halfin (2009, 2) writes:

What transpired in Soviet Russia in 1936–38 cannot be comprehended by recourse to typical explanations such as personal interest and ambition. The true Communist acted for society, not for his own sake. Iurii Piatakov, the deputy head of the Heavy Industry Commissariat, famously stated: “I am ready to sacrifice my pride and self-esteem and everything else … But because we are steeped in the idea of violence, we Bolsheviks know how to direct it against ourselves. If the Party so demands … I can by an act of will expunge from my brain within twenty- four hours ideas that I have cherished for years . . . , reorient myself, and come to agree with the Party inwardly, with my whole mind.

The leadership framed the hunt for wreckers and saboteurs as a Manichaean crusade in which “good communists could realize purity, morality, and their place in the greatest society in history” through the destruction of enemies (Halfin 2009). Stalin’s own ideology played no small part in these developments. There is a voluntaristic, irrationalist strain in Stalin’s thinking that is difficult to reconcile with Losurdo’s reading of Stalin as a purely pragmatist moderniser. Stalin’s ideology was never static, shifting in different directions throughout his tenure, but David Priestland sees a recurring dominant theme of Bolshevik romanticism or populism in his thought. Stalin was sceptical of bourgeois specialists and their influence, as he believed an “excessively scientistic worldview would inhibit the mobilization” of workers. In this voluntarist view associated with left Bolshevism, Soviet citizens, following their class instincts, could remake society through the sheer collective force of will. David Priestland (2005, 201) writes that Stalin believed cadres could allegedly produce “miracles,” a notion that is best exemplified by the Stakhanovite movement, whose exemplary workers were celebrated for surpassing production norms and held up as living proof that conscious effort and socialist commitment could overcome all material constraints. This stands in contrast to the views of Lenin and Trotsky, who placed greater emphasis on technical specialists, seeing expertise as essential to socialist construction. Priestland (2005, 200) writes:

Like the left before [Stalin], he often implied that it was not enough for society to be run as if it were a machine, operated by experts; tekhnika and ‘machines’ were ‘dead’ unless they were infused with ‘soul’ and operated by cadres who ‘believed’. His language was also full of romantic themes: Soviet people were to be self-sacrificing, ‘active’, ‘energetic’ fighters who swam ‘against the current’. They were to reject narrow ‘pragmatism’, ‘empiricism’, petty-bourgeois philistinism (obyva-
tel’shchina), ‘routine’, and a ‘dead’, ‘mechanical’ approach to life.

Stalin’s belief in the seemingly boundless power of workers had an almost religious quality. In times of crisis he leaned on populist mobilization as a way of steering the state through turmoil, a strategy with a purifying logic that sought to expunge the saboteurs and wreckers he claimed were harboured within a specialist class tainted by those with pre-revolutionary origins. In the years building toward the terror, the state encouraged active citizen participation in mass violence against suspect elements and bureaucrats who were allegedly unresponsive to the needs of the proletariat (Goldman 2007). This strategy of mobilization and class struggle could genuinely strike fear into the middle bureaucracy and bring citizens into alignment with the leadership’s transformative political vision, but it did not possess the near-superhuman efficacy Stalin believed it did, and it was certainly not a catch-all solution to the regime’s political problems. Stalin’s faith in the workers revealed ideological fidelity to a left Bolshevik conception of class struggle and historical progress, but it also severely undermined stability and state-building imperatives. Unable to control its own excesses, the self-consuming logic of the terror led to violence spiralling out of control.

In the late 1930s, this had the effect of producing mass violence on an unimaginable scale. It may be reasonable to speculate that a different leader who leaned onto the technicist side of the Bolshevik technicist-populist debate would have seen far less bloodshed. In this way, Stalin was a kind of apocalyptic leader whose faith in the transformative power of class struggle and the communist future impeded state-building goals by causing mass instability and repressing those with expert knowledge. Priestland (2005, 201) writes:

It is certainly possible to discern a ‘zig-zag’ pattern in the politics of the 1920s and 1930s: in 1927–8 and after 1935 Stalin seems to have moved away from tekhnika towards politika when the threat from abroad appeared to be particularly dangerous. But whatever the reasons for his behaviour, Stalin’s attempts to mobilise the Soviet Union undermined its ability to defend itself … His ambition to be the vospitatel’ of the Soviet people almost led to the ruin of the system he was so desperate to preserve.

Contra Losurdo, Priestland (2005, 201) writes that “Stalin’s approach cannot be explained as a conventional ‘rational’ response to external threats.” Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Stalinist era, which Priestland glosses over in this passage, was that Stalin continually emerged from every successive crisis, from collectivization to World War II, stronger than he had been when he entered it, a pattern that could only have appeared, to true believers and enemies alike, as vindication of his faith in the triumphant march of communist inevitability. Losurdo correctly gives credit for Stalin’s historic victories but misapprehends how he arrived there. Stalin, no matter what one makes of him, was a force of nature, a leader who had “[rearranged] the entire socioeconomic landscape of one sixth of the earth” in line with his own eschatological vision of how the world ought to be (Kotkin 2014, 1138). He devoted his life to his faith, and it appears as if the gods of history heeded his prayers. What should be emphasized is that none of this was inevitable, and there was considerable potential for things to go terribly wrong. That they did not speaks to a combination of Stalin’s political cunning, iron nerves, unwavering persistence, and no small measure of luck.

Stalin’s devotion to his cause is perhaps best exemplified by the collectivization drive. It was not the policy of a pragmatic, cautious modernizer, but the choice of a leader driven by an uncompromising commitment to a radical vision of a non-market society, which he realized rapidly through sheer brute force and staggering indifference to the loss of human life. Kotkin (2015, 1138) writes:

[Stalin] would keep going even when told to his face by officials in the inner regime that a catastrophe was unfolding—full speed ahead to socialism. This required extraordinary maneuvering, browbeating, and violence on his part. It also required deep conviction that it had to be done.

One cannot overstate how important the messianic impulse of Stalinism was in driving this project, and it is indicative of a deeper commitment to a socialist teleology in which history is understood as oriented toward the eventual transformation of society along communist lines. As for collectivization, a purely pragmatic modernizer would not have gone the full way, almost certainly curtailing these policies in the face of realities on the ground. Stalin did not. In this sense, Stalinism did not simply proficiently protect and administer a new social order, as Losurdo argues, but also exacerbated and, in some cases, engendered major crises as part of an ideological mission of total transformation. Losurdo sees the violence of Stalinism as a result of a permanent state of exception, where the multitude of Soviet enemies essentially justifies severe repression. The Soviets did have very real political problems and were indeed threatened by many external and internal enemies (I have written about the “real” anti-Stalin conspiracies at length elsewhere); that does not change the fact that Stalinist violence was wildly disproportionate to the actual threat. For instance, there was never any evidence that Soviet production was plagued by intractable sabotage by Western infiltrators hiding in plain sight, yet the Soviets genuinely believed this and repressed many based on this faulty belief. Obviously, this was damaging to the Soviet economic goals, and the failure to reach these goals, in turn, strengthened their belief in these economic conspiracies. Losurdo acknowledges “excesses,” but does not address the gap between real and perceived threats, a gap that was turned into a yawning chasm as a result of the Soviets’ messianic tendencies.

Stalin’s politics were animated by a form of “true belief” in the Marxist capacity to radically reshape social relations. What Losurdo derides as “magical thinking” in the Marxist tradition has always been a major component of revolutionary traditions across a wide array of historical contexts, one that Losurdo wishes to shed for his own political reasons. He, then, projects this disavowal back onto his preferred historical figures. By erasing Stalin's messianic and utopian impulses rooted in the Western Marxist tradition, Losurdo creates a defanged Stalin, one I find infinitely less interesting. The attempt to save him from his reputation only ends up diminishing him; we are left with a portrait of a man emptied of everything that made him singular. In reality, the Soviet leader was an apocalyptic ruler whose triumphs and tragedies owed much to his ability to harness revolutionary teleology into a totalizing political program that remade the world.

BONUS CHAPTER: Stalin’s Aesthetic Utopia

Or “The Proto-Stalinism of the Russian Avant-Garde”

As Boris Groys’s (1992) work has shown, Stalinism as a political society became a kind of “total work of art,” in which all fields of representation were subordinated to a unified ideological vision. Art, theatre, education, architecture, and literature, were drawn into a single project of the social transformation of everyday life. The Soviet state did not merely govern society as rational technocrats, but sought to stage and remake reality itself. Stalinist USSR, as Vuković (2017, 10) writes, was a “society in which images and representations mediate all social and economic relations.”