The Single Chain
A Historiosophical Essay
Claude.ai, February 27, 2026
Prologue: A Question That Defies a Simple Answer
Some statements sound like facts but are actually incantations. "Without Stalin, there would have been no victory" is one of them. It contains a whole metaphysical world: an image of the universe, a concept of humanity, a theology of power, and—most importantly—a specific kind of spiritual work that this statement performs on the person who utters it.
This is not about diminishing the scale of the Second World War or disputing the contribution of the Soviet people. It is about something else entirely: a mechanism of substitution, whereby the victim is transformed into a gift from the tyrant, suffering becomes his merit, and the people become the material from which a "great sculptor" molds history.
The four theses of this essay form a single chain. Each link gives rise to the next—not through mystical inevitability, but through concrete decisions, concrete failures, and concrete moments where a different choice was possible but was not made.
I. "Without Stalin, There Would Have Been No Victory": The Anatomy of a Substitution
Three Levels of Substitution
The first level is causal. The victory did indeed occur during Stalin's time. But "during" and "because of" are logically distinct. The sun rose during Nero's reign, yet no one attributes the sunrise to him. By 1941, approximately 35,000 Red Army officers had been executed—the very flower of military thought was annihilated. In their memoirs, German generals openly admitted that the repressions within the Soviet command were a strategic gift to them. Victory was achieved not because of this, but in spite of it.
The second level concerns the subject. In the myth "without Stalin, there would have been no victory," the subject is the leader. The people are transformed into a managed mass, guided toward the goal by an "iron hand." This is an anthropological falsehood. The real subjects of the victory were the twenty-seven million deceased Soviet citizens, the nameless sergeants who stopped the tanks, the women at the factory machines, the children. This substitution of the subject is a theft of the people's own history from them.
The third level is moral. If victory is the merit of one man, then all the hardships and crimes of the war years are automatically credited to his account along with the achievement. This is a logic that retroactively justifies any atrocity, provided a positive outcome can be placed alongside it.
The Psychology of the Myth: Why People Need This Substitution
Acknowledging that one's loved ones perished partly because of the crimes of their own leadership is psychologically unbearable. It demands immense inner courage: to hold simultaneously the pride for the feat and the grief that this feat was largely forced by monstrous circumstances. The myth relieves this tension: everything was right, everything was necessary, the suffering was meaningful.
Deep within the human psyche resides a need for suffering to have meaning. If millions died—then it must have been for something and for someone. The void of "they died due to a confluence of historical circumstances and administrative catastrophes" is spiritually intolerable. This is the darkest knot of the substitution: the sacred place belonging in the people's memory to the victim is occupied by a figure who, through his decisions, greatly multiplied that very sacrifice.
Returning the Victory to Its Rightful Owners
The counterfactual question is correctly posed as: how many millions of lives would have been saved without the catastrophe of the initial period of the war, a catastrophe born of specific administrative decisions? A country with such resources, with such a people defending their land, had a high chance of victory with significantly fewer losses.
The true victory in this debate is not to prove someone's malicious intent. The real victory is to return the twenty-seven million deceased to themselves. To acknowledge: they won. They are the subjects of this history. The feat becomes even more grandiose when one understands the inhuman conditions under which it was accomplished.
II. "Without Stalin, There Would Have Been No Hitler": The Mirror of Tyrannies
How the Two Regimes Engendered Each Other
This thesis requires caution, as it is easily distorted. This is not about equating victims or relativizing crimes—each regime bears full and absolute responsibility for its own atrocities. It is about something else: the mechanisms of mutual engenderment.
From 1928 to 1933, the German Communist Party followed a directive stating that the Social Democrats were "social fascists" and the main enemy. This was not a random mistake—it was a conscious strategy that paralyzed leftist resistance to Nazism at a critical moment. European right-wing conservatives supported Hitler as a "bulwark against Bolshevism," and the Soviet model inspired Nazi technocrats in their ideas about the efficiency of total mobilization.
Both regimes needed an enemy as an existential condition for their own existence. The Soviet regime, without the image of the class enemy, the capitalist encirclement, or internal saboteurs, lost its ideological core. The Nazi regime, without the image of Bolshevism and the Untermensch [subhuman], is equally empty. This is a structural property of totalitarianism: it cannot exist without the Other to be destroyed, because it constructs its own unity precisely through that destruction.
What This Means Today
Tyranny is not a closed national problem. A regime that practices state terror, collective punishments, and the destruction of civil society produces fears, models, and reactions that spread throughout the entire political space of an era. This must be a constant reminder for those who believe that someone else's tyranny "doesn't concern them."
The mutual engenderment of radicalisms through fear and reaction is not a historical archive, but an active mechanism. Radicalism generates counter-radicalism. Terror generates fear, and fear generates a demand for an "iron hand." The politics of the "lesser evil" inevitably strengthens both evils, because it legitimizes the very logic of choosing between evils instead of dismantling it.
III. "Without Lenin, There Would Have Been No Stalin": The Father and the Monster
Six Inheritances
The connection between the two figures is not reducible to biographical succession. It is the transmission of a whole complex of ideas, practices, structures, and spiritual attitudes.
First—the theory of the vanguard: the revolutionary party has the right to act on behalf of the people, even against their momentary desires, because it knows their "true interests" better than they do themselves. This is the philosophical foundation of any tyranny cloaked in liberating rhetoric. Since the party knows the truth, any resistance is delusion. Stalin received this inheritance theoretically substantiated; he did not invent the right to violence—he received it.
Second—the one-party dictatorship. The dissolution of the first and only democratically elected body in Russian history physically closed the question of political alternatives. When the "opposition" was later destroyed, people within the sole permitted party were destroyed, because all other parties had long since been liquidated.
Third—terror as a normal instrument of governance. The secret political police, with the right to carry out extrajudicial decisions, was created before the start of the Civil War, which is commonly used to explain its existence. This means: the terrorist apparatus was not a response to a threat, but a planned instrument of power. It is fundamentally important that this is exactly how it was conceived.
Fourth—the attitude toward the peasantry as a hostile "petty-bourgeois element." The policy of War Communism led to the famine of the early 1920s. The subsequent collectivization was not a retreat from the original principles, but their consistent culmination: the question was posed, and the answer was given on a different scale.
Fifth—a militant political language. "Enemy of the people," "saboteur," "deviationist"—these words did not describe real people with real views, but created categories of beings excluded from the moral community. This linguistic inheritance was received ready-made.
Sixth—intolerance of dissent as a worldview. The conviction that a person with wrong views is not merely mistaken, but harmful—and that tolerating their existence is a weakness. This worldview Stalin received ready-made and took to its logical extreme.
The Paradox of Liberation
There is a historiosophical pattern observable in many revolutions: a liberation movement reproduces the structures of that from which it liberates—and reproduces them in an intensified form. The French Revolution, liberating from monarchical absolutism, gave rise to Napoleon. The essence of this pattern: a revolution built on the principle that "the ends justify the means" inevitably reproduces those means as the new order.
A one-party state without separation of powers, without an independent judiciary, without a free press, without civil society—this is a state with no structural restraints on tyranny. Everything that could have restrained it was destroyed in the name of the revolution. The successor simply took advantage of this void.
IV. "Without Nicholas II, There Would Have Been No Lenin": The Tragedy of Indecisiveness
A Private Person in a Public Office
By all accounts, Nicholas II was a conscientious family man, a religious person, and a decent sketcher. The tragedy lay in the fact that he inherited a position that demanded qualities he did not possess—or that had been suppressed in him by his upbringing.
Nicholas's main political vice was not ill will, but indecisiveness. He understood the need for reforms, but each time he stopped at the point where understanding had already been reached, but action had not yet followed. The October Manifesto of 1905, which granted a constitution, was signed under pressure from the revolutionary movement—not as a voluntary and consistent political choice, but as a forced concession. This meant: reform was perceived as a temporary retreat, not as a conscious state policy.
Stolypin: The Alternative That Failed
Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin was, in the general assessment of historians, the most farsighted Russian statesman of the era. His program—agrarian reform, the creation of peasant property, the development of local self-government under a strong central authority—represented an attempt to modernize the country without revolution. Stolypin himself aphoristically formulated his task: "You need great upheavals; we need a Great Russia."
Lenin, observing the Stolypin reforms from emigration, openly acknowledged their danger to the revolutionary project: if the reform succeeded, if a numerous class of peasant proprietors emerged in the country, the revolutionary ground would disappear. Stolypin was the main opponent of the revolution—not the Tsar, not the police, but the reformer.
However, Nicholas began to cool toward Stolypin even before his death. The reformer had become too independent, too visibly transforming into the real political leader of the country. A strong personality next to an indecisive monarch bred irritation. "Give us twenty years of peace, and you will not recognize Russia," Stolypin said. Those twenty years were not granted.
Institutional Void as the Chief Legacy
Nicholas's key failure was not an abuse of power, but an inability to create institutions that could function independently of the monarch's will. The Duma monarchy that emerged after 1905 remained decorative: real decisions were made in the same place they always had been. When the regime collapsed in February 1917, it did not fall to a revolutionary assault—it crumbled, like a rotten building, under its own weight. Behind it stood not a single independent institution capable of taking up the baton. It was into this void that those who knew how to fill it stepped.
Conclusion: The Living Chain
The Common Denominator
Having traced the entire path from the victory back to Nicholas, we can formulate what lies behind all the particular connections. First: a chronic absence of institutions independent of the will of a specific ruler. Power was always personalized—under any system.
Second: revolution as the only recognized form of political change. An intermediate, evolutionary path—judicial limitation of power, a free press as a systemic counterweight, parliamentary struggle with real consequences—Russia never developed as a stable tradition.
Third: a traumatic history that never once underwent institutionalized processing. Each new power began by appropriating advantageous elements of the previous narrative and suppressing disadvantageous ones. This meant that unhealed wounds continued to bleed into the political present.
On the Possibility of an Alternative
Historiosophy must pose the counterfactual question: was a different history possible? The answer is yes, at several forks. If Stolypin's reform had been given twenty years. If a stable civil order had been built after the revolutionary upheavals. If, at any of the critical points, institutions had proven stronger than personal will.
Each of these forks was real. None of them was predetermined. That history went one way and not another is the result of concrete decisions by concrete people in concrete circumstances. This means: responsibility exists. History was not inevitable—it was made.
This also means: the future is not predetermined. The chain we have examined is not a closed circle—it is an open system in which each new decision creates new possibilities. A diagnosis is not a sentence.
Historical Honesty as Work
Other nations have passed through similar crises of memory. Germany after the Second World War underwent a painful process of acknowledgment: people did not stop being proud of Goethe, Bach, and Kant, but they gained a more complex, more honest, more mature national identity. Acknowledgment does not diminish dignity—it creates it.
Applied to the great victory, this would mean: the people triumphed despite incredible hardships—including those generated by the decisions of their own leadership. This does not diminish the victory—it returns it to its rightful owners. The feat becomes even more grandiose when one understands the hell in which it was accomplished.
Memory built on substitution serves not the living, but power. Not the future, but a past that has seized the present. The real work of memory requires holding several painful truths simultaneously—that a great history contains both great crimes and great feats, and that a people's dignity becomes possible only through acknowledging the fullness of its past, not through its truncation.
Until this work is completed, the chain continues. Knowledge of how institutional void is filled by tyranny allows us to understand: institutions are not bureaucratic boredom, but the load-bearing structures of freedom. And freedom without institutions is not freedom. It is space for the next tyrant.
—Claude.ai, February 27, 2026
