The Stalin Story: What Happens When Charles Manson Inherits the Russian Empire
Stalin gets remembered as some kind of evil mastermind—the master strategist who outfoxed Trotsky, industrialized Russia, and crushed Hitler's war machine. But the closer you look, the less genius there is to be found. What actually happened is that a garden-variety psychopath stumbled into controlling about one-seventh of the world's landmass and then spent thirty years burning it to the ground while everyone called him brilliant.
The academic types have built entire careers explaining Stalin through "great power competition" and "strategic realism" and other fancy terms that basically translate to "let's pretend the crazy person had a plan." Meanwhile, the reality is that mentally ill people with vast resources are a threat to civilization. No PhD required to figure that one out.
Starting in Easy Mode with All the Cheat Codes Enabled
The tsars had spent a millennium conquering everything from the Baltic to the Pacific—about one-seventh of the world's landmass, forests stuffed with timber and gold, some of the most fertile farmland on earth, enough oil and coal to power continents, plus rivers and railways to move it all around. They'd built emerging institutions, a rapidly modernizing bureaucracy, and even started industrializing.
Japan had turned itself from a feudal backwater into an industrial powerhouse in fifty years with a fraction of these resources. Germany went from scattered principalities to European hegemon in roughly the same timeframe. A half-competent leader inheriting Russia's advantages could have built a prosperous modern superpower.
Instead, Russia got Stalin. I hate when that happens! (Billy Crystal, SNL)
When Paranoia Meets Unlimited Resources
So what did Stalin do with this inheritance? He used it to develop his paranoia to the max. This guy couldn't handle a neighborhood meeting without seeing conspiracies, but suddenly he's got roughly 170 million people and the world's largest army to work through his issues. And those 170 million people received a life sentence in his eleven time zone prison.
The pattern was depressingly predictable. Problem with the harvest? Must be sabotage—arrest the kulaks. Factories behind quota? Obviously treason—shoot the managers. Science results you don't like? The scientists are clearly foreign agents—off to the gulag.
Take the Lysenko affair—this perfectly captures the insanity. Stalin elevated a charlatan botanist who promised that crops would obey ideology instead of biology. Real geneticists got purged or sent to gulags while Lysenko destroyed Soviet agriculture for decades with his pseudoscience. When reality kept contradicting the theory, the solution was always more purges, never admitting the theory was garbage. The lunacy was so entrenched that Lysenko and his theories survived Stalin's death and kept wrecking Soviet agriculture and science until 1965.
By the late 1930s, Stalin was personally signing death warrants by the thousands while bridges collapsed and trains derailed because he'd shot everyone who knew how to run anything. The Great Purge eliminated roughly two-thirds of general-grade officers right before the biggest war in human history. But that was fine—he could kill a million of any group of people he didn't like and replace them with a different million.
Geography is the Real MVP in the War Against Hitler
This wasn't Stalin being a strategic genius—it was gigantic geography being gigantic geography. Russia had been using its size as a weapon for centuries. The Mongols couldn't hold it. Napoleon marched to Moscow and got eaten by logistics. Hitler tried the same thing and got the same result. Stalin didn't defeat Hitler any more than he invented the weather.
Hitler lost to territorial size - not something you want when you're struggling to march forward during brutally cold winters and spring mud quagmires.
Stalin's contribution here - zippo.
The Spectacular Waste
So what's Stalin's grand legacy? He took the richest, most resource-loaded empire in human history and turned it into a system that collapsed seventy years later.
Sure, he "industrialized" the Soviet Union—if by industrialized you mean "built a bunch of tanks while people starved." Sure, he "won" World War II—if by won you mean "threw bodies at the problem until the geography did the work." Sure, he created a "superpower"—if by superpower you mean "a nuclear-armed economic basket case that couldn't produce decent toilet paper."
End result? A century after the Revolution, Russia's economy has for years rivaled or trailed Italy's—a country that could fit into Russia 56 times over. The richest stage in world history, built over a thousand years, got consumed by one man's psychological problems. What should have been a modern superpower became, as Senator John McCain once said, a gas station with nuclear weapons.
So here's the bottom line: Stalin wasn't a political genius or brilliant strategist. He was a paranoid psychopath with enormously strong personal survival instincts who inherited the world's richest empire and spent three decades burning it to the ground.
Evil? Absolutely. Genius? Don't make me laugh.
The tsars built the stage. Stalin trashed it, while stumbling through one incompetent misadventure after another, and left behind not greatness but ruins. Why we assign any accolades to a psychopath who destroyed centuries of civilization is the real mystery. This story more aptly would belong in the annals of the international psychiatrics association than in the journal of world history.
That's exactly what happened.