Persecution Complex Print A young Bolshevik revolutionary's unlikely and bloody rise to power

[alice malice]

Marxists have had an especially hard time explaining these unpleasant
facts, not only because it is hard to justify killing millions but
also because they are committed to denying the role of individuals in
history. What matters is “objective” social forces. English historian
E. H. Carr, for instance, held that, above all, Stalin’s career showed
that “great men” do not make circumstances, but are made by them—an
argument that, in light of the evidence, takes one’s breath away.
Kotkin calls it “utterly, eternally wrong.”

Generally speaking, even non-Marxist historians favor explanations
showing why a course of events was bound, or at least likely, to
happen. Otherwise, what have historians contributed? In their view,
the better the explanation, the less the role assigned to chance,
contingency, and personality. Least of all do historians like to
entertain counterfactuals, alternative paths that could have been
taken but were not.

By contrast, Kotkin repeatedly stresses that what took place could
easily have been different and was often, at the time it occurred,
extremely unlikely. The possibility that the young revolutionary we
know as Stalin would command unprecedented control over a sixth of the
earth would have seemed, as Kotkin puts it, “beyond fantastic.”

https://theamericanscholar.org/persecution-complex/#.VKAcLQCA
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