Stephen Kotkin on Collectivization

Stephen Kotkin at 47:00:

And in the process of doing it, [Stalin] caused famine and was undermining, potentially, the party's own rule. He just kept going all the way through because he had the courage of his conviction. And then when they complained about him he made a mental note of that and he enacted his version of revenge on them a few years later for their criticisms of him when he did this. So he did this because he believed in the Marxist/Leninist fashion that this had to be done. He himself felt a man of destiny and therefore he could do this and he was looking to find the shock troops to galvanize the half-educated youth to take violence out on these gulags and to force the villagers into these collective arrangements. And so what he did and so this is what totalitarianism is: he galvanized people's agency and those people using their agency destroyed their own agency. They disempowered themselves by by taking up this call.