Stephen Kotkin — How Do We Explain Stalin?

My guest today is Stephen Kotkin, who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of two thirds of his three volume Stalin biographies. The first one, Stalin Paradoxes of Power. The second one, Stalin Waiting for Hitler. Thank you for coming on my podcast. Thank

you for the honor of the invitation.

Let's begin with the SARS regime. So first question, how repressive was the SARS regime actually? Because presumably, the motivation behind the revolution is to get rid of this autocracy. But you just have these examples of these, Lenin's brother tries to kill the czar and he himself is writing these long manifestos about taking down capitalism and overthrowing the government. And him and people like Stalin are just in exile in Siberia living off government money, robbing banks, small shenanigans. Honestly, it sounds more forgiving than, many countries today. So how how bad was it really?

So you have to put yourself back in the time period to judge the level of repression based upon what norms were, what other regimes did rather than take the twentieth century regimes as the guide Yeah. And go back. But we need to widen the aperture a little bit here. So this is the czarist regime's problem. It needs to be able to compete in the international system. That means it needs a modern military and modern industry to underwrite that modern military. So it needs armaments. It needs steel. It needs chemicals. For that, you need workers. So you want the workers only to work in the indust

I know this was one of the most interesting takes in your, first volume that modernization is this is not this inevitable process, but is instigated by this ruthless geopolitical competition. Do you think that that still applies in today's world? Because, yes, there are pockets of conflict in The Middle East or in Ukraine, which would motivate the key powers there to want to have modern militaries and modern technologies. But through most of the world, the odds that if France falls behind technologically, if their AI is worse, that Germany is gonna take over is just sort of unthinkable. So thi

If you have an autocratic regime, it is existential for you every day. So you wanna compete. France can compete or fail to compete, and its political system is not at risk. No one's gonna say the regime is illegitimate because someone else beat them in AI. Students are gonna protest in the streets. That's not gonna mean that the regime is gonna fall. There may be a change of government, but the system remains. You have this dilemma for the authoritarians. So you think about Peter the Great. I need to compete against the great powers, so I need to have a navy. To get a navy, I need to have the

was thinking, is one of the key lessons from your volumes that you should be tripping over yourself in order to embrace a lesser of two evils and whether that applies through all the examples you give? And this is maybe a general question about how much can you actually learn from history because for every seeming lesson, there's an equal and opposite lesson that you can also learn. So during the czarist regime, in retrospect, we can say that the liberals and the constitutionalists should have cooperated with Steuben or White. And even though it was an autocratic regime, they were actually doi

So the czar's regime is undertaking this repression of people who have legitimate claims, and that repression is quite severe by the standards of the day. Okay. It's not gonna be everybody murdered or everybody deported to the waste of Siberia, which we're gonna see in the twentieth century whe