Falstaff and Me
Autumn Reading Roundup Part 1
October 12, 2025

by Paul Bailey

Thoughts on books I’ve Read This Autumn: Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878 to 1928 by Stehen Kotkin, and Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang. I read the Kindle edition of both books, so consider any cited page numbers to be approximations.

Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878 to 1928, by Stephen Kotkin (2014)

Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878 to 1928 (which I will abbreviate to just Stalin, in italics to distinguish the book from the man), is the first volume of Stephen Kotkin’s still-unfinished three-volume series. Some people will be disappointed to find out that this book is actually a history disguised as a biography. Neither the cover nor the preface makes this clear. Stalin had almost no influence on Russian politics before 1917, when he was already pushing forty, so the only appearances he makes in the first third or so of the book are during obligatory biographical digressions. That part mostly deals with the Russo-Japanese War, the 1905 revolution, the failures of Witte and Stolypin, and so on. Mr. Kotkin is so thorough on many of these topics that, even though they are far removed from book’s primary purpose, Stalin may actually be the most detailed English-language volume available on them. This level of detail is both the book’s strength and its weakness (more on the weakness later). Nevertheless, Stalin the ruler is more interesting to me than Stalin the man, so I am okay with Mr. Kotkin’s choice to write a history.

The lesson of Stalinism is not that Stalin was a bad man, but rather communism is a bad system. That seems to be Mr. Kotkin’s thesis. He argued time and again in the book that Stalin was a Marxist, a Bolshevik, a true believer… not some cynic who merely exploited Bolshevism for his own self-aggrandizement. Moreover, accusations of cynicism misinterpret Stalin’s pragmatic streak, which Lenin also had, and which he would employ whenever the regime was most vulnerable, such as the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, a strangulated form of capitalism. I don’t know enough about Stalin scholarship to tell whether these accusations are conventional wisdom or they are just a straw man for Mr. Kotkin to argue against, but I can see why Trotsky and his followers (along with Khrushchev, whose famous “Secret Speech” denounced the cult of personality surrounding Stalin), being true believers in Bolshevism themselves, would try to blame the faults of Marxism on just one man. They want communism but do not want what you get with communism, so they cannot accept that communism itself is at fault.

This dualistic desire—the communism of their theories without the real-world consequences of trying to implement it—could be the “paradox” in the book’s subtitle, but a better candidate is a paradox about authoritarian regimes: they are simultaneously very strong and very insecure. Examples are given all throughout the book, for Tsar and Bolsheviks alike. The book, however, offers very little direct commentary on the idea. In speeches he has made, Mr. Kotkin has more or less confirmed that he holds this opinion, but it’s difficult to learn so from the reading alone.

Which brings me to the book’s weakness. The biggest problem I have with Stalin is its difficulty. I have seen Mr. Kotkin many times on YouTube giving interviews on podcasts or lectures at academic gatherings, and I find him to be a very eloquent, lucid speaker. Unfortunately his writing is not so clear. I don’t mind that the writing is dense, scholarly, and uses a large vocabulary (he says “perlustrated” where “wire-tapped” would be better); even popular histories are sometimes intended for intelligent, well-schooled readers, and I consider myself to be intelligent and well-schooled. But Mr. Kotkin’s Stalin is needlessly difficult, not due to its complicated sentences, but due to its poor ability to synthesize large amounts of data into something more digestible to a reader. This is too bad, because synthesis is the paramount skill of popular historians.

Structurally, the grade-school way to write nonfiction is the best: put your thesis in front; include one topic sentence for each paragraph; make sure the paragraph’s supporting sentences are on the same topic; and so on. It’s not too puerile to write things like “In this chapter I will argue that…” In my opinion, that’s just good communication. But I suspect some writers are bitten by the philomath bug; they have been seduced by the very aesthetics of scholarliness, and needlessly complicate things. Either Mr. Kotkin is such a philomath or his past association with the always-opaque Michel Foulcault has impaired his clarity.

In Stalin, Mr. Kotkin frequently dumped large amounts of seemingly non-sequitur information. No piece of it is given more attention than another, regardless how relevant it may or may not be. These information dumps, which usually take up multiple sections of a chapter and could go on for thirty or forty pages, will make you impatient. What is he getting at? What’s the point, the theme? On some of these information dumps, without changing tone or adding any fanfare, Mr. Kotkin would finally get around to a point, but by then I would have forgotten too much of the preceding material to connect the dots; I cannot process all that without a stated focus. Other information dumps would come to no point at all. Perhaps they merely existed to tell me stuff that happened—this is a history after all—but Stalin lacks the consistent narrative flow required to be a narrative history; its style begs a theme instead.

Between nitpick on one end and deal breaker on the other, I’d give this problem a five out of ten. At least it has made me rethink the quality of my own writing on these blog posts. It’s a slog to read through some of those long, unfocused chapters, but you can avoid them altogether by just skipping to the end and reading the unnumbered chapter titled “Coda.” There you will find Stalin’s main takeaways.

I am currently making my way through Volume Two, Waiting For Hitler. Not that I ask for sympathy, but the only hope left for me is that Mr. Kotkin will decide not to publish Volume Three, otherwise I would feel compelled to read that too. I only have so many years left to live.

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang (2025)

In a book that compares and contrasts China with the United States, Dan Wang offers the following bizarre thesis: “China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it can” (2). Uh-huh. He does come up with arguments to support this, but let me use a little thought experiment to illustrate how unhelpful this is. I could draw a triangle on a map, perhaps from Las Vegas to Billings to Saint Louis, give it a name like the Great Continental Triangle, and write a thesis about the geography and people therein. I may even come up with truthful arguments to support the thesis, since I’m sure that if I scrutinized it closely enough, I could find something to say about the region that I couldn’t say about anywhere else in the world. But this does not change the fact that it’s totally arbitrary and too pointless to shed any light on the subject. What inspired Mr. Wang to come up with such a weird lawyers-versus-engineers dichotomy? Did he just not have anything new to say—hence a book which describes a lot of things that other writers have already written about—and needed a hook in order to seem original? Or does he really believe it?

The weakness to Mr. Wang’s thesis is found in his rationale for coming up with new labels in the first place: “Looking at these two countries,” he wrote, “I came to realize the inadequacy of twentieth-century labels like capitalist, socialist, or, worst of all, neoliberal. They are no longer up to the task of helping us understand the world, if they ever were” (2). The lie to this statement is given by the remainder of the book, where Mr. Wang’s terms—“lawyers” and “engineers”—do so much worse to explain what he describes. Twentieth-century terms (not necessarily the ones Mr. Wang mentioned) are not only still fit for purpose, they are so much better that it made reading Breakneck as frustrating as watching someone try to fit a square peg into a round hole.

I too would avoid “socialist” or “neoliberal”, were I the author, but I would at least use still-useful old labels like “capitalism,” “Marxism”, and “liberalism” where appropriate, albeit with caution against being too reductive. For example, the market forces of capitalism did far more than lawyers did to de-industrialize the United States; American factory workers were simply more expensive than overseas factory workers. It’s the principle of liberalism where executive power must be checked by the rule of law; lawyers serve a purpose to that end, but they are not the underlying motive. It’s Marxism (or perhaps more specifically Leninism), not engineering, which informs the social-engineering mindset behind the brutal tactics of the One Child policy, the bullying-but-less-brutal tactics of its reversal, and the not-quite-depraved indifference of the zero-Covid policy; Mao may not have thought much of it, but its basic idea is a Marxist one, and Mao was not the only Marxist. When stripped of ideology, engineers more generally understand that a human being is not an inanimate carbon rod, and that there are too many wildcards and unknown unknowns about people for social engineering to be practicable, never mind the moral issues. (In fact, even though Wikipedia describes Mr. Wang as a “technology analyst,” after reading Breakneck I am convinced that he knows next to nothing about engineering.)

Why does this annoy me so much? Two reasons. One, rather than exposing an underlying truth, Breakneck obfuscates it more. And two, while most of Breakneck is sharply critical of both China and the United States (and in fairness many of the criticisms are well-justified), it offers no concrete solutions, makes no policy suggestions. All Mr. Wang offers is a wishy-washy Why Can’t We Be More Like That (expressed in different ways throughout the book), without acknowledging that “being like that” comes at too high a price. There are many things that China does far better than the United States, but it’s not so easy to separate the bad from the good, and in some cases the good even comes by way of the bad. To re-industrialize to an extent that competes with China’s manufacturing sector (blindly assuming we even need to), the United States would likely have to either incorporate China-style collectivism or go broke paying for the overhead of amassing sweat-equity until we achieve 100-percent automation with minimal bugs. As Mr. Wang himself even said, “Sometimes, the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions” (183).

Was Breakneck totally a waste of time? For me, it was not, otherwise I would not have finished it. It depends how much you already know about China; while Mr. Wang’s theory was all wrong, his data—his actual descriptions of life in China—may be useful to someone who has never read anything about it before. I am not such a person, but there were still little nuggets of information that I found eye-opening. Since China’s One Child policy was more intensely a rural issue than an urban issue, I had no idea how traumatic it was in the country. Breakneck also made me aware of a right-wing-ish nationalist streak in China, nicknamed the Industrial Party, although it never makes clear whether this is a movement with real momentum or it is merely an inconsequential niche. Either way I find it unsettling.

I also found in Breakneck a surprising—but refreshing—criticism of putting blind faith in science. After a damning criticism of the CCP’s social-engineering practices, Mr. Wang wrote “I’ve become suspicious of anyone who advocates ‘following the science.’ We have to get quite worried if anyone in power starts saying that science alone is an object to be pursued rather than having to situate it in a social and ethical context” (123). Elsewhere he called out as “irksome” a yard sign he saw when returning to America which stated “In this house we believe science is real” (167). This sign, which sums up a thousand and one irksome remarks I too have read or heard from people over the years, not only argues against a straw man, but it doesn’t seem to even understand what science is. What of those who distrust science, the ones who are so often characterized as paranoid hay-seeds? Perhaps some of them do match that description. But I too have a measured distrust of science, insofar as I do not believe science. Even scientists don’t believe it, because “believe” is a patently unscientific word. I am also pro-science, insofar as the scientific method has inarguably worked miracles over the past couple centuries. However, many who claim to be pro-science do not seem to understand that 1) There does not exist some single authority called Science which disseminates all knowledge. 2) Science is concerned with many things—observed phenomena, hypotheses, empirical data, theories, useful mathematical models—but science is not concerned with truth. 3) A scientist’s expertise—or any expert’s expertise, for that matter—is in a very narrow field. They are not always alert to the bigger picture. Ergo 4) There is no reason to think that scientists are better at policymaking than the policymakers whom the public actually elected. I am not anti-science, then, but rather I am anti-hubris, which scientists are very susceptible to. Most scientists know their own limitations, of course, but unfortunately the public tends to make high priests out of anyone they deem to be elite. This sort of low-hanging fruit is both irresistible and wisdom-killing to those scientists to dwell in the public spotlight. Hubris, like hysteria, makes fools of even the smartest people.

Perhaps Breakneck’s greatest use is as a wake-up call. America still doesn’t seem to have had any “Sputnik moment” concerning China, and Mr. Wang bemoaned America’s lost ambition. Are we outsourcing too much heavy industry to China? There is an old saying, often attributed to Lenin, that capitalists will sell the ropes that communists will use to hang them with.