Stephen Kotkin: Stalin, Putin, and the Nature of Power
Guests: Stephen Kotkin
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents10 chapters
§01Transcript · 00:00–09:57§02Transcript · 09:59–20:18§03Transcript · 20:20–31:12§04Transcript · 31:15–41:57§05Transcript · 42:00–52:50§06Transcript · 52:53–1:03:49§07Transcript · 1:03:52–1:14:40§08Transcript · 1:14:42–1:25:41§09Transcript · 1:25:43–1:35:59§10Transcript · 1:36:01–1:37:15§01Transcript · 00:00–09:57
The following is a conversation with Stephen Kotkin,
a professor of history at Princeton University
and one of the great historians of our time,
specializing in Russian and Soviet history.
He has written many books on Stalin in the Soviet Union,
including the first two of a three-volume work on Stalin,
and he's currently working on volume three.
You may have noticed that I've been speaking
with not just computer scientists,
but physicists, engineers, historians, neuroscientists,
and soon, much more.
To me, artificial intelligence is much bigger
than deep learning, bigger than computing.
It is our civilization's journey
into understanding the human mind
and creating echoes of it in the machine.
To me, that journey must include a deep, historical,
and psychological understanding of power.
Technology puts some of the greatest power
in the history of our civilization
into the hands of engineers and computer scientists.
This power must not be abused.
And the best way to understand
how such abuse can be avoided
is to not be blind to the lessons of history.
As Stephen Kotkin brilliantly articulates,
Stalin was arguably one of the most powerful humans
in history.
I've read many books on Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Putin,
and the wars of the 20th century.
I hope you understand the value of such knowledge
to all of us, especially to engineers and scientists
who build the tools of power in the 21st century.
This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,
give us five stars on Apple Podcast,
follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
or simply connect with me on Twitter,
@lexfriedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N.
I recently started doing ads at the end of the introduction.
I'll do one or two minutes after introducing the episode
and never any ads in the middle
that can break the flow of the conversation.
I hope that works for you
and doesn't hurt the listening experience.
This show is presented by Cash App,
the number one finance app in the App Store.
I personally use Cash App to send money to friends,
but you can also use it to buy, sell,
and deposit Bitcoin in just seconds.
Cash App also has an investing feature.
You can buy fractions of a stock, say $1 worth,
no matter what the stock price is.
Brokerage services are provided by Cash App Investing,
a subsidiary of Square and member SIPC.
I'm excited to be working with Cash App
to support one of my favorite organizations called FIRST,
best known for their FIRST Robotics and LEGO competitions.
They educate and inspire hundreds of thousands of students
in over 110 countries
and have a perfect rating at Charity Navigator,
which means the donated money is used
to maximum effectiveness.
When you get Cash App from the App Store at Google Play
and use code LEXPODCAST,
you'll get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST,
which again is an organization
that I've personally seen inspire girls and boys
to dream of engineering a better world.
And now here's my conversation with Stephen Kotkin.
Do all human beings crave power?
- No.
Human beings crave security.
They crave love.
They crave adventure.
They crave power, but not equally.
- Some human beings nevertheless do crave power.
- For sure.
- Is that deeply in the psychology of people?
Is it something you're born with?
Is it something you develop?
- Some people crave a position of leadership
or of standing out, of being recognized.
And that could be starting out in the school years
on the schoolyard.
It could be within their own family,
not just in their peer group.
Those kind of people we often see
craving leadership positions from a young age
often end up in positions of power,
but they can be varied positions of power.
You can have power in an institution
where your power is purposefully limited.
For example, there's a board or a consultative body
or a separation of powers.
Not everyone craves power whereby they're the sole power
or they're their unconstrained power.
That's a little bit less usual.
We may think that everybody does, but not everybody does.
Those people who do crave that kind of power,
unconstrained, the ability to decide
as much as life or death of other people,
those people are not everyday people.
They're not the people you encounter
in your daily life for the most part.
Those are extraordinary people.
Most of them don't have the opportunity to live that dream.
Very few of them, in fact, end up with the opportunity
to live that dream.
- So percentage-wise, in your sense,
if we think of George Washington, for example,
would most people given the choice of absolute power
over a country versus maybe the capped power
that the United States presidential role,
at least at the founding of the country, represented,
what do you think most people would choose?
- Well, Washington was in a position
to exercise far greater power than he did.
And in fact, he didn't take that option.
He was more interested in seeing institutionalization.
Of seeing the country develop strong institutions
rather than an individual leader like himself
have excess power.
So that's very important.
So like I said, not everyone craves unconstrained power
even if they're very ambitious.
And of course, Washington was very ambitious.
He was a successful general before he was a president.
So that clearly comes from the influences on your life,
where you grow up, how you grow up, how you raised,
what kind of values are imparted to you along the way.
You can understand power as the ability to share
or you can understand or the ability to advance something
for the collective in a collective process,
not an individual process.
So power comes in many different varieties
and ambition doesn't always equate to despotic power.
Despotic power is something different
from ordinary institutional power that we see.
The president of MIT does not have unconstrained power.
The president of MIT rightly must consult
with other members of the administration,
with the faculty members,
to a certain extent with the student body
and certainly with the trustees of MIT.
Those constraints make the institution strong and enduring
and make the decisions better than they would be
if he had unconstrained power.
But you can't say that the president is not ambitious.
Of course, the president is ambitious.
We worry about unconstrained power.
We worry about executive authority that's not limited.
That's the definition of authoritarianism
or tyranny, unlimited or barely limited executive authority.
Executive authority is necessary
to carry out many functions.
We all understand that.
That's why MIT has an executive, has a president.
But unlimited or largely unconstrained executive power
is detrimental to even the person who exercises that power.
- So what do you think, it's an interesting notion.
We kind of take it for granted
that constraints on executive power is a good thing.
But why is that necessarily true?
So what is it about absolute power
that does something bad to the human mind?
So, you know, the popular saying
of absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Is that the case, that the power in itself
is the thing that corrupts the mind in some kind of way
where it leads to a bad leadership over time?
- People make more mistakes when they're not challenged,
when they don't have to explain things
and get others to vote and go along with it,
when they can make a decision
without anybody being able to block their decision
or to have input necessarily on their decision.
You're more prone to mistakes.
You're more prone to extremism.
There's a temptation there.
For example, we have separation of powers
in the United States.
The Congress, right, has authority
that the president doesn't have,
as for example in budgeting, the so-called power of the purse.
This can be very frustrating.
People wanna see things happen
and they complain that there's a do-nothing Congress
or that the situation is stalemated.
But actually, that's potentially a good thing.
In fact, that's how our system was designed.
Our system was designed to prevent things happening
in government.
And there's frustration with that,
but ultimately that's the strength
of the institutions we have.
And so when you see unconstrained executive authority,
there can be a lot of dynamism,
a lot of things can get done quickly,
but those things can be like, for example,
§02Transcript · 09:59–20:18
what happened in China under Mao
or what happened in the Soviet Union under Stalin
or what happened in Haiti under Papa Doc and then Baby Doc
or fill in the blank, right?
What happens sometimes in corporations
where a corporate leader is not constrained
by the shareholders, by the board or by anything.
And they can seem to be a genius for a while,
but eventually it catches up to them.
And so the idea of constraints on executive power
is absolutely fundamental to the American system,
American way of thinking, and not only America,
obviously large other parts of the world
that have a similar system, not an identical system,
but a similar system of checks and balances
on executive power.
And so the case that I study,
the only checks and balances on executive power
are circumstantial.
So for example, distances in the country,
it's hard to do something over 5,000 miles
or the amount of time in a day,
it's hard for a leader to get to every single thing
the leader wants to get to
because there are only 24 hours in a day.
Those are circumstantial constraints on executive power.
They're not institutional constraints on executive power.
One of the constraints on executive power
the United States has versus Russia
may be something you've implied
and actually spoke directly to
is there's something in the Russian people
and the Soviet people that are attracted
to authoritarian power, psychologically speaking,
or at least the kind of leaders
that sought authoritarian power throughout its history.
And that desire for that kind of human
is a lack of a constraint.
In America, it seems as people,
we desire somebody not like Stalin,
somebody more like George Washington.
So that's another constraint,
the belief of the people,
what they admire in a leader, what they seek in a leader.
So maybe you can speak to,
well, first of all,
can you speak briefly to that psychology of,
is there a difference between the Russian people
and the American people
in terms of just what we find attractive in a leader?
- Not as great a difference as it might seem.
There are unfortunately many Americans
who would be happy with an authoritarian leader
in the country.
It's by no means a majority.
It's not even a plurality,
but nonetheless, it's a real sentiment in the population.
Sometimes because they feel frustrated,
because things are not getting done.
Sometimes because they're against
something that's happening in the political realm,
and they feel it has to be corrected and corrected quickly.
It's a kind of impulse.
People can regret the impulse later on,
that the impulse is motivated
by reaction to their environment.
In the Russian case, we have also people who crave,
sometimes known as a strong hand,
an iron hand, an authoritarian leader.
Because they want things to be done
and be done more quickly that align with their desires.
But I'm not sure it's a majority in the country today.
Certainly in Stalin's time,
this was a widespread sentiment.
And people had few alternatives
that they understood or could appeal to.
Nowadays in the globalized world,
the citizens of Russia can see how
other systems have constraints on executive power.
And the life isn't so bad there.
In fact, the life might even be better.
So the impatience, the impulse of quality,
the frustration does sometimes,
and people reinforce their craving
for the unconstrained executive
to quote, "Get things done," or "Shake things up."
Yes, that's true.
But in the Russian case, I'm not sure it's cultural today.
I think it might be more having to do
with the failures, the functional failures
of the kind of political system
that they tried to institute after the Soviet collapse.
And so it may be frustration with the version
of constraints on executive power they got
and how it didn't work the way it was imagined,
which has led to a sense in which
non-constrained executive power could fix things.
But I'm not sure that that's a majority sentiment
in the Russian case, although it's hard to measure
because under authoritarian regimes,
a public opinion is shaped by the environments
in which people live, which is very constrained
in terms of public opinion.
- But on that point, why, at least from a distance,
does there seem to nevertheless be support
for the current Russian president, Vladimir Putin?
Is that have to do with the fact that measuring,
getting good metrics and statistics on support
is difficult in authoritarian governments,
or is there still something appealing
to that kind of power to the people?
- I think we have to give credit to President Putin
for understanding the psychology of the Russians
to whom he appeals.
Many of them were the losers
in the transition from communism.
They were the ones whose pensions were destroyed by inflation
or whose salaries didn't go up
or whose regions were abandoned.
They were not the winners for the most part.
And so I think there's an understanding
on his part of their psychology.
Putin has grown in the position.
He was not a public politician when he first started out.
He was quite poor in public settings.
He didn't have the kind of political instincts
that he has now.
He didn't have the appeal to traditional values
and the Orthodox Church
and some of the other dimensions of his rule today.
So yes, we have to give some credit to Putin himself
for this, in addition to the frustrations
and the mass of the people.
But let's think about it this way in addition,
without taking away the fact
that he's become a better retail politician over time.
And that sentiment has shifted because of the disappointments
with the transition with the population.
When I ask my kids, am I a good dad?
My kids don't have any other dad to measure me against.
I'm the only dad they know
and I'm the only dad they can choose or not choose.
If they don't choose me, they still get me as dad, right?
So with Putin today, he's the only dad
that the Russian people have.
Now, if my kids were introduced to alternative fathers,
they might be better than me.
They might be more loving, more giving, funnier, richer,
whatever it might be, they might be more appealing.
There are some blood ties there for sure
that I have with my kids,
but they would at least be able to choose alternatives
and then I would have to win their favor
in that constellation of alternatives.
If President Putin were up against real alternatives,
if the population had real choice
and that choice could express itself and have resources
and have media and everything else the way he does,
maybe he would be very popular
and maybe his popularity would not be as great
as it currently is.
So the absence of alternatives is another factor
that reinforces his authority and his popularity.
Having said that, there are many authoritarian leaders
who deny any alternatives to the population
and are not very popular.
So denial of alternatives
doesn't guarantee you the popularity.
You still have to figure out the mass psychology
and be able to appeal to it.
So in the Russian case, the winners from the transition
live primarily in the big cities
and are self-employed or entrepreneurial.
Even if they're not self-employed,
they're able to change careers.
They have tremendous skills and talent
and education and knowledge,
as well as these entrepreneurial or dynamic personalities.
Putin also appealed to them.
He did that with Medvedev, and it was a very clever ruse.
He himself appealed to the losers from the transition,
the small towns, the rural,
the people who were not well off,
and he had them for the most part.
Not all, we don't wanna generalize
to say that he had every one of them
because those people have views of their own,
sometimes in contradiction with the president of Russia.
And then he appealed to the opposite people,
the successful urban base,
through the so-called reformer Medvedev,
the new generation, the technically literate
prime minister who for a time was president.
And so that worked very successfully for Putin.
He was able to bridge a big divide in the society
and gain a greater mass support
than he would otherwise have had by himself.
That ruse only worked through the time
that Medvedev was temporarily president for a few years
because of the constitution,
§03Transcript · 20:20–31:12
Putin couldn't do three consecutive terms
and stepped aside in what they call castling in chess.
When this was over, Putin had difficulty
with his popularity.
There were mass protests in the urban areas,
precisely that group of the population
that he had been able to win in part
because of the Medvedev castling
and now had had their delusions exposed
and were disillusioned.
And there were these mass protests in the urban areas,
not just in the capital, by the way.
And Putin had to, as it were,
come up with a new way to fix his popularity,
which happened to be the annexation of Crimea,
from which he got a very significant bump.
However, the trend is back in the other direction.
It's diminishing again, although it's still high
relative to other leaders around the world.
So I wouldn't say that he's unpopular
with the mass in Russia.
There is some popularity there, there is some success.
But I would say it's tough for us to gauge
because of the lack of alternatives.
And Putin is unpopular inside the state administration.
- At every level, the bureaucracy of the leadership?
- Because those people are well-informed
and they understand that the country is declining,
that the human capital is declining,
the infrastructure is declining,
the economy is not really growing,
it's not really diversifying,
Russia's not investing in its future.
The state officials understand all of that,
and then they see that the Putin clique
is stealing everything in sight.
So between the failure to invest in a future
and the corruption of a narrow group around the president,
there's disillusionment in the state apparatus
'cause they see this more clearly or more closely
than the mass of the population.
They can't necessarily yet oppose this in public
because they're people, they have families,
they have careers, they have children
who wanna go to school or want a job.
And so there are constraints on their ability
to oppose the regime based upon what we might call cowardice
or other people might call realism.
I don't know how courageous people can be
when their family, children, career are on the line.
So it's very interesting dynamic to see
the disillusionment inside the government
with the president, which is not yet fully public
for the most part, but could become public.
And once again, if there's an alternative,
if an alternative appears, things could shift quickly.
And that alternative could come from inside the regime.
- From inside the regime, but the leadership,
the party, the people that are now,
as you're saying, opposed to Putin,
nevertheless, maybe you can correct me,
but it feels like there's structurally is deeply corrupt.
So each of the people we're talking about
are don't feel like a George Washington.
- Once again, the circumstances don't permit them
to act that way necessarily.
George Washington did great things,
but in certain circumstances.
A lot of the state officials in Russia
for certain are corrupt, there's no question.
Many of them, however, are patriotic.
And many of them feel badly
about where the country has been going.
They would prefer that the country was less corrupt.
They would prefer that there were greater investment
in all sorts of areas of Russia.
They might even themselves steal less
if they could be guaranteed
that everybody else would steal less.
There's a deep and abiding patriotism inside Russia,
as well as inside the Russian regime.
So they understand that Putin in many ways
rescued the Russian state from the chaos of the 1990s.
They understand that Russia was in very bad shape
as an incoherent failing state almost when Putin took over.
And that he did some important things
for Russia's stability and consolidation.
There's also some appreciation
that Putin stood up to the West
and stood up to more powerful countries
and regained a sense of pride and maneuverability
for Russia and the international system.
People appreciate that and it's real.
It's not imagined that Putin accomplished that.
The problem is the methods that he accomplished it with.
He used the kind of methods, that is to say,
taking other people's property,
putting other people in jail for political reasons.
He used the kind of methods that are not conducive
to long-term growth and stability.
So he fixed the problem, but he fixed the problem
and then created even bigger
long-term problems potentially.
And moreover, all authoritarian regimes
that use those methods are tempted to keep using them
and using them and using them
until they're the only ones who are the beneficiaries.
And the group narrows and narrows.
The elite gets smaller and narrower.
The interest groups get excluded from power
and their ability to continue
enjoying the fruits of the system.
And the resentment grows.
And so that's the situation we have in Russia.
Russia is a place that is stuck.
It was to a certain extent rescued.
It was rescued with methods that were not conducive
to long-term success and stability.
- The rescue you're referring to
is the sort of the economic growth
when Putin first took off the system?
- Yes, they had 10 years.
They had a full decade of an average of 7% growth a year,
which was phenomenal and is not attributable
predominantly to oil prices.
During President Putin's first term as president,
the average price of oil was $35 a barrel.
During his second term as president,
the average price was $70 a barrel.
So during those two terms,
when Russia was growing at about 7% a year,
oil prices were averaging somewhere around $50 a barrel,
which is fine, but is not the reason
because later on, when oil prices were over $100 a barrel,
Russia stagnated.
- So the initial growth,
do you think Putin deserves some credit for that?
- Yes, he does, because he introduced
some important liberalizing measures.
He lowered taxes.
He allowed land to be bought and sold.
He deregulated many areas of the economy.
And so there was a kind of entrepreneurial burst
that was partly attributable,
partly attributable to government policy
during his first term.
But also he was consolidating political power.
And as I said, the methods he used overall
for the long term were not able
to continue, sustain that success.
In addition, we have to remember
that China played a really big role
in the success of Russia
in the first two terms of Putin's presidency,
because China's phenomenal growth
created insatiable demand for just about everything
that the Soviet Union used to produce.
So fertilizers, cement, fill in the blank,
chemicals, metals, China had insatiable demand
for everything the Soviet Union once produced.
And so China's raising of global demand overall
brought Soviet era industry back from the dead.
And so there was something that happened.
Soviet era industry fell off a cliff in the 1990s.
There was a decline in manufacturing
and industrial production greater
than in the Great Depression in the US.
But a lot of that came back online in the 2000s.
And that had to do with China's phenomenal growth.
The trade between China and Russia was not always direct.
So this was an indirect effect,
but raising global prices for the commodities
and the products, the kind of lower end,
lower value products in manufacturing,
not high end stuff, but lower end stuff,
like steel or iron or cement or fertilizer,
where the value added is not spectacular,
but nonetheless, which had been destroyed by the 1990s
after the Soviet collapse, this was brought back to life.
Now you can do that once.
You can bring Soviet era industry back to life once.
And that happened during Putin's first two terms,
in addition to the liberalizing policies,
which spurred entrepreneurialism
in some small and medium business.
The crash of the ruble in 1998,
which made Russian products much cheaper abroad
and made imports much more expensive,
also facilitated the resuscitation,
the revival of domestic manufacturing.
So all of this came together for that spectacular 10 year,
7% on average economic growth,
and moreover, people's wages after inflation,
their disposable income grew more even than GDP grew.
So disposable income after inflation, that is real income,
was growing greater than 7%, in some cases 10% a year.
So there was a boom and the Russian people felt it,
and it happened during Putin's first two terms,
and people were grateful, rightly so, for that.
And those who don't wanna give Putin credit
§04Transcript · 31:15–41:57
give oil prices all the credit.
But I don't think that oil prices can explain this.
Having said that, that doesn't mean
that this was sustainable over the long term.
- Right.
So you've briefly mentioned,
sort of implying the possibility,
Stalin held power for, let's say, 30 years.
You briefly mentioned that, as a question,
will Putin be able to beat that record,
to beat that?
So can you talk about your sense of,
is it possible that Putin holds power
for that kind of duration?
- Let's hope not.
Let's hope not for Russia's sake.
The primary victims of President Putin's power are Russians.
They're not Ukrainians, although to a certain extent,
Ukraine has suffered because of Putin's actions.
And they're not Americans.
They're Russians.
Moreover, Russia has lost a great deal of human talent.
Millions and millions of people have left Russia
since 1991 overall.
Somewhere between five and 10 million people
have left the country,
and are beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union.
So they left the Soviet space entirely.
Moreover, the people who left are not the poor people.
They're not the uneducated.
They're not the losers.
The people who've left are the more dynamic parts
of the population.
The better educated, the more entrepreneurial.
So that human capital loss that Russia has suffered
is phenomenal.
And in fact, right here where we're sitting at MIT,
we have examples of people who are qualified,
good enough for MIT,
and have left Russia to come to MIT.
- You're looking at one of them.
And the other aspect, just to quickly comment,
is those same people, like me,
I'm not welcome back.
- No, you're not under the current regime.
It was a big loss for Russia if you're patriotic,
but not from the point of view of the Putin regime.
That has to do also factors into popularity.
If the people who don't like you leave,
they're not there to complain, to protest,
to vote against you.
And so your opposition declines when you let them leave.
However, it's very costly in human capital terms.
Hemorrhaging that much human capital is damaging.
It's self-damaging.
And we've seen it accelerate.
It was already high, but we've seen it accelerate
in the last, oh, seven to eight years
of President Putin's rule.
And those people are not going back of their own volition,
but even if they wanted to go back,
as you just said, they'd be unwelcome.
That's a big cost to pay for this regime.
And so whatever benefits this regime might
or might not have given to the country,
the disadvantages, the downside,
the costs are also really high.
So we don't want Putin lasting in power as long as Stalin.
It would be better if Russia were able to choose
among options, to choose a new leader among options.
Many people speculate that President Putin
will name a successor the way Yeltsin named Putin
as his successor, President Boris Yeltsin.
And then Putin will leave the stage
and allow the successor to take over.
That might seem like a good solution,
but once again, we don't need a system
where you hang on for as long as possible
then nominate who's gonna take over.
We need a system that has the kind of corrective mechanisms
that democracies and markets have along with rule of law.
A corrective mechanism is really important
because all leaders make mistakes.
But when you can't correct for the mistakes,
then the mistakes get compounded.
Putin could well, he seems to be healthy.
He could well last as many years as Stalin.
It's hard to predict because events intercede sometimes
and create circumstances that are unforeseen
and leaders get overthrown or have a heart attack
or whatever.
There's a palace insurrection where ambitious leaders
on the inside for both personal power and patriotic reasons
try to push aside an aging leader.
There are many scenarios in which Putin
could not last that long, but unfortunately right now,
you could also imagine potentially him lasting that long,
which as I said, is not an outcome if you're patriotic
about Russia, is not an outcome
you would wish out to the country.
- I guess a very difficult question,
but what practically do you feel is a way out
of the Putin regime, is the way out of the corruption
that's deeply underlies the state?
If you look from a history perspective,
is a revolution required?
Is violence required?
From a violence within or external to the country?
Do you see, or is a powerful,
is a inspiring leader enough to step in
and bring democracy and kind of the free world to Russia?
- So Russia is not a failed country.
It's a middle income country with a tremendous potential
and has proven many times in the past
that when it gets in a bad way,
it can reverse its trajectory.
Moreover, violence is rarely ever a solution.
Violence rarely, it may break an existing trend,
but it's rare that violence produces
a non-violent sustainable positive outcome.
It happens, but it doesn't happen frequently.
Societal upheaval is not a way always
to institutionalize a better path forward
because you need institutions.
People can protest as they did throughout the Middle East
and the protests didn't necessarily lead to better systems
because the step from protest to new, strong,
consolidated institutions is a colossal leap,
not a small step.
What we need and what we see from history
in situations like this is a group
within the power structures, which is a patriotic,
that sees things going down,
that is to say that sees things not being developing
relative to neighbors, relative to richer countries,
relative to more successful countries,
and they want to change the trajectory of Russia.
And if they can, in a coalition fashion,
unseat the current regime
for a new power sharing arrangement,
which once again can be frustrating
because you can't do changes immediately,
you can't do things overnight, but that's the point.
Constraints on your ability
to change everything immediately
and to force change overnight
is what leads to long-term success, potentially.
That's the sustainability of change.
So Russia needs stronger institutions.
It needs court system as well as democratic institutions.
It needs functioning, open, dynamic markets
rather than monopolies.
It needs meritocracy and banks to award loans
on the basis of business plans,
not on the basis of political criteria
or corrupt bribery or whatever it might be.
So Russia needs those kind of functioning institutions
that take time, are sometimes slow,
don't lead to a revolutionary transformation,
but lead to potentially long-term sustainable growth
without upheaval, without violence,
without getting into a situation
where all of a sudden you need a miracle again.
Every time Russia seems to need a miracle,
and that's the problem.
The solution would be not needing a miracle.
Now, having said that, the potential is there.
The civilization that we call Russia
is amazingly impressive.
It has delivered world-class culture,
world-class science.
It's a great power.
It's not a great power with a strong base right now,
but nonetheless, it is a great power as it acts in the world.
So I wouldn't underestimate Russia's abilities here,
and I wouldn't write off Russia.
I don't see it under the current regime,
a renewal of the country.
But if we can have, from within the regime,
an evolution rather than a revolution
in a positive direction,
and maybe get a George Washington figure
who is strong enough to push through institutionalization
rather than personalism.
- So if I could ask about one particular individual,
it'd be just interesting to get your comment,
but also as a representative of potential leaders.
I just on this podcast talked to Garry Kasparov,
who I'm not sure if you're familiar with his ongoings.
So besides being a world-class chess player,
he's also a very outspoken activist,
sort of seeing Putin,
truly seeing Putin as an enemy of the free world,
of democracy, of balanced government in Russia.
What do you think of people like him specifically,
or just people like him trying as leaders
to step in to run for president,
to symbolize a new chapter in Russia's future?
- So we don't need individuals.
Some individuals are very impressive,
§05Transcript · 42:00–52:50
and they have courage, and they protest,
and they criticize, and they organize.
We need institutions.
We need a Duma, or a parliament that functions.
We need a court system that functions,
that is to say where there are a separation of powers,
impartial professional civil service,
impartial professional judiciary.
Those are the things Russia needs.
It's rare that you get that from an individual
no matter how impressive, right?
We had Andrei Sakharov,
who was an extraordinary individual,
who developed the hydrogen bomb under Soviet regime,
was a world-class physicist,
was then upset about how his scientific knowledge
and scientific achievements were being put to use,
and rebelled to try to put limits, constraints,
civilizing, humane limits and constraints
on some of the implications of his extraordinary science.
But Sakharov, even if he had become the leader
of the country, which he did not become,
he was more of a moral or spiritual leader,
it still wouldn't have given you a judiciary.
It still wouldn't have given you a civil service.
It still wouldn't have given you a Duma,
or functioning parliament.
You need a leader in coalition with other leaders.
You need a bunch of leaders.
A whole group, and they have to be divided a little bit
so that not one of them can destroy all the others.
And they have to be interested in creating institutions,
not just, or not solely or predominantly
in their personal power.
And so I have no objection to outstanding individuals
and to the work that they do.
But I think in institutional terms,
and they need to think that way too
in order to be successful.
- So if we go back to the echoes of that
after the Russian Revolution with Stalin,
with Lenin and Stalin, maybe you can correct me,
but there was a group of people there
in that same kind of way,
looking to establish institutions
that were built in a,
beautifully built around an ideology
that they believed is good for the world.
So sort of echoing that idea
of what we're talking about what Russia needs now,
can you, first of all,
you've described a fascinating thought,
which is Stalin is having amassed
arguably more power than any man in history.
Which is an interesting thing to think about.
But can you tell about his journey
to getting that power after the Russian Revolution?
How does that perhaps echo to our current discussion
about institutions and so on?
And just in general,
the story I think is fascinating
of how one man is able to get more power
than any other man in history.
- It is a great story.
Not necessarily from a moral point of view,
but if you're interested in power,
for sure it's an incredible story.
We have to remember that Stalin
is also a product of circumstances,
not solely his own individual drive,
which is very strong.
For example, World War I breaks the Tsarist regime,
the Tsarist order, Imperial Russian State.
Stalin has no participation whatsoever in World War I.
He spends World War I in exile in Siberia.
Until the downfall of the Tsarist autocracy
in February 1917,
Stalin is in Eastern Siberian exile.
He's only able to leave Eastern Siberia
when that regime falls.
He never fights in the war.
He's called up briefly towards the end of the war
and is disqualified on physical grounds
because of physical deformities from being drafted.
The war continues after the Tsarist regime
has been toppled in the capital
and there's been a revolution.
The war continues and that war is very radicalizing.
The peasants begin to seize the land after the Tsar falls,
essentially destroying much of the gentry class.
Stalin has nothing to do with that.
The peasants have their own revolution,
seizing the land, not in law, but in fact,
de facto, not de jure land ownership.
So there are these really large processes underway
that Stalin is alive during, but not a driver of.
The most improbable thing happens,
which is a very small group of people
around the figure of Vladimir Lenin
announces that it has seized power.
Now by this time in October 1917,
the government that has replaced the Tsar,
the so-called provisional government, has failed.
And so there's not so much power to seize
from the provisional government.
What Lenin does is he does a coup on the left.
That is to say, Soviets or councils,
as we would call them in English,
which represent people's power
or the masses participating in politics,
a kind of radical grassroots democracy,
are extremely popular all over the country
and not dominated by any one group,
but predominantly socialist or predominantly leftist.
Russia has an election during the war,
a free and fair election for the most part,
despite the war, at the end of 1917, in December 1917,
and three quarters plus of the country votes socialist
in some form or another.
So the battle was over the definition of socialism
and who had the right to participate in defining socialism,
not only what it would be, but who had the right to decide.
So there's a coup by Lenin's group known as the Bolsheviks
against all the other socialists.
And so Lenin declares a seizure of power
whereby the old government has failed,
people's power, the councils known as the Soviets
are gonna take their place,
and Lenin seizes power in the name of the Soviets.
So it's a coup against the left,
against the rest of the left,
not against the provisional government
that has replaced the Tsar, which has already failed.
And so Stalin is able to come to power along with Lenin
in this crazy seizure of power on the left
against the rest of the left in October 1917,
which we know as the October Revolution,
and I call the October coup as many other historians call.
The October Revolution happened after the seizure of power.
What's interesting about this episode
is that the leftists who seize power
in the name of the Soviets, in the name of the masses,
in the name of people's power, they retain their hold.
Many times in history,
there's a seizure of power by the left, and they fail.
They collapse, they're cleaned out by an army
or what we call forces of order,
by counter-revolutionary forces.
Lenin's revolution, Lenin's coup is successful.
It is able to hold power, not just seize power.
They win a civil war,
and they're entrenched in the heart of the country
already by 1921.
Stalin is part of that group.
Lenin needs somebody to run this new regime
in the kind of nitty gritty way.
Lenin is the leader,
the undisputed leader in the Bolshevik Party,
which changes their name to Communists in 1918.
He makes Stalin the general secretary
of the Communist Party.
He creates a new position, which hadn't existed before,
a kind of day-to-day political manager, a right-hand man.
Not because Lenin is looking to replace himself,
he's looking to institutionalize a helpmate,
a right-hand man.
He does this in the spring of 1922.
Stalin is named to this position,
which Lenin has created expressly for Stalin.
So there's been a coup on the left,
whereby the Bolsheviks, who become Communists,
have seized power against the rest of the Socialists
and Anarchists and the entire left.
And then there's an institutionalization of a position
known as General Secretary of the Communist Party,
right-hand man of Lenin.
Less than six weeks after Lenin has created this position
and installed Stalin, Lenin has a stroke,
a major stroke, and never really returns as a full actor
to power before he dies of a fourth stroke in January 1924.
So a position is created for Stalin
to run things on Lenin's behalf,
and then Lenin has a stroke.
And so Stalin now has this new position General Secretary,
but he's the right hand of a person
who's no longer exercising day-to-day control over affairs.
Stalin then uses this new position
to create a personal dictatorship
inside the Bolshevik dictatorship,
which is the remarkable story I tried to tell.
- So is there anything nefarious
about any of what you just described?
So it seems conveniently
that the position is created just for Stalin.
There was a few other brilliant people,
arguably more brilliant than Stalin
in the vicinity of Lenin.
Why was Stalin chosen?
Why did Lenin all of a sudden fall ill?
It's perhaps a conspiratorial question,
§06Transcript · 52:53–1:03:49
but is there anything nefarious
about any of this historical trajectory to power
that Stalin took in creating the personal dictatorship?
- So history is full of contingency and surprise.
After something happens, we all think it's inevitable.
It had to happen that way.
Everything was leading up to it.
So Hitler seizes power in Germany in 1933,
and the Nazi regime gets institutionalized
by several of his moves after being named chancellor.
And so all German history becomes a story
of the Nazi rise to power, Hitler's rise to power.
Every trend, tendency is bent into that outcome.
Things which don't seem related to that outcome
all of a sudden get bent in that direction.
And other trends that were going on are no longer examined
because they didn't lead to that outcome.
But Hitler's becoming chancellor of Germany in 1933
was not inevitable, it was contingent.
He was offered the position
by the traditional conservatives.
He's part of the radical right,
and the traditional right named him chancellor.
The Nazi party never outright won an election
that was free and fair before Hitler came to power.
And in fact, its votes on the eve
of Hitler becoming chancellor
declined relative to the previous election.
So there's contingency in history,
and so Lenin's illness, his stroke,
the neurological and blood problems that he had
were not a structure in history.
In other words, if Lenin had been a healthier figure,
Stalin might never have become the Stalin that we know.
That's not to say that all history is accidental,
just that we need to relate the structural,
the larger structural factors to the contingent factors.
Why did Lenin pick Stalin?
Well, Stalin was a very effective organizer,
and the position was an organizational position.
Stalin could get things done.
He would carry out assignments no matter how difficult.
He wouldn't complain that it was hard work or too much work.
He wouldn't go off womanizing and drinking
and ignore his responsibilities.
Lenin chose Stalin among other options
because he thought Stalin was the better option.
Once again, he wasn't choosing his successor
because he didn't know he was gonna have this stroke.
Lenin had some serious illnesses,
but he had never had a major stroke before.
So the choice was made based upon
Stalin's organizational skills and promise
against the others who were in the regime.
Now, they can seem more brilliant than Stalin,
but he was more effective,
and I'm not sure they were very brilliant.
- Well, he was exceptionally competent,
actually, at the tasks for running a government,
the executive branch, right, of a dictator.
- Yes, he turned out to be very adept at being a dictator.
And so if he had been chosen by Lenin
and had not been very good,
he would have been pushed aside by others.
You can get a position by accident.
You can be named because you're someone's friend
or someone's relative, but to hold that position,
to hold that position in difficult circumstances,
and then to build effectively a superpower
on all that bloodshed, right,
you have to be skilled in some way.
It can't be just accident that brings you to power,
because if accident brings you to power, it won't last.
Just like we discovered with Putin,
he had some qualities that we didn't foresee
at the beginning, and he's been able to hold power,
not just be named.
Now, Putin and Stalin are very different people.
These are very different regimes.
I wouldn't put them in the same sentence.
My point is not that one resembles the other.
My point is that when people come to power
for contingent reasons, they don't stay in power
unless they're able to manage it.
And Stalin was able to build a personal dictatorship
inside that dictatorship.
He was cunning, he was ruthless, and he was a workaholic.
He was very diligent.
He had a phenomenal memory,
and so he could remember people's names
and faces and events, and this was very advantageous for him
as he built the machine that became
the Soviet state and bureaucracy.
- One of the things, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong,
but you've made me realize is this wasn't some kind
of manipulative personality trying to gain more power solely,
like kind of an evil picture of a person,
but he truly believed in communism.
As far as I can understand, again,
you can correct me if I'm wrong,
but he wanted to build a better world
by having, infusing communism into the country,
perhaps into the whole world.
So maybe my question is what role does communism
as an idea, as an ideology play in all of this,
in his rise to power, in the people of the time,
in the Russian people, actually just the whole
20th century?
- You're right.
Stalin was a true believer, and this is very important.
He was also hungry for power and for personal power,
but just as you said, not for power's sake,
not only for power.
He was interested in enacting communism in reality,
and also in building a powerful state.
He was a statist, a traditional Russian statist
in the imperial sense, and this won him a lot of followers.
The fact that they knew he was a hardcore,
true believing communist won him a lot of followers
among the communists, and the fact that he was
a hardcore defender of Russian state interests,
now in the Soviet guise, also won him a lot of followers.
Sometimes those groups overlapped.
The communists and the Russian patriots,
and sometimes they were completely different groups,
but both of them shared an admiration for Stalin's
dedication to those goals, and his abilities to enact them.
And so it's very important to understand
that however thirsty he was for power,
and he was very thirsty for power,
that he was also driven by ideals.
Now, I don't necessarily think that everyone
around Stalin shared those ideals.
We have to be careful not to make everybody
into a communist true believer,
not to make everybody into a great statist Russian patriot,
but they were widespread and powerful attractions
for a lot of people.
And so Stalin's ability to communicate to people
that he was dedicated to those pursuits,
and his ability to drive towards them
were part of his appeal.
However, he also resorted to manipulation.
He also resorted to violence.
He lied, he spoke out of all sides of his mouth,
he slandered other people, he sabotaged potential rivals.
He used every underhanded method, and then some,
in order to build his personal dictatorship.
Now, he justified this, as you said,
by appeals to communism and to Soviet power.
- To himself as well, too.
- To himself and to others.
And so he justified it in his own mind and to others,
but certainly any means, right,
were acceptable to him to achieve these ends.
And he identified his personal power with communism
and with Russian glory in the world.
So he felt that he was the only one who could be trusted,
who could be relied upon to build these things.
Now, we put ourselves back in that time period.
The Great Depression was a very difficult time
for the capitalist system.
There was mass unemployment, a lot of hardship,
fascism, Nazism, Imperial Japan.
There were a lot of associations that were negative
with the kind of capitalist system
that was not 100%, not a monolith,
but had a lot of authoritarian incarnations.
There was imperialism, colonies that even
the democratic rule of law capitalist states
had non-democratic, non-rule of law colonies
under their rule.
So the image and reality of capitalism
during that time period between World War I
and World War II was very different
from how it would become later.
And so in that time period, in that interwar conjuncture
after World War I, before World War II,
communism held some appeal inside the Soviet Union for sure,
but even outside the Soviet Union,
because the image and reality of capitalism
disappointed many people.
Now in the end, communism was significantly worse.
Many more victims and the system of course
would eventually implode.
But nonetheless, there were real problems
that communism tried to address.
It didn't solve those problems, it was not a solution,
but it didn't come out of nowhere.
It came out of the context of that interwar period.
And so Stalin's rule, some people saw it
as potentially a better option than imperialism,
fascism, and Great Depression.
Having said that, they were wrong.
It turned out that Stalin wasn't a better alternative
to markets and private property
and rule of law and democracy.
However, that didn't become clearer to people
until after World War II,
after Nazism had been defeated,
§07Transcript · 1:03:52–1:14:40
Imperial Japan had been defeated,
a fascist Italy had been defeated,
and decolonization had happened around the world.
And there was a middle class economic boom
in the period from the late 40s through the 70s
that created a kind of mass middle class in many societies.
So capitalism rose from the ashes as it were.
And this changed the game for Stalin and communism.
Communism is about an alternative to capitalism.
And if that alternative is not superior,
there's no reason for communism to exist.
But if capitalism is in foul odor,
if people have a bad opinion,
a strong critique of capitalism,
there can be appeal to alternatives.
And that's kind of what happened with Stalin's rule.
But after World War II, the context changed a lot.
Capitalism was very different, much more successful,
non-violent compared to what it was in the interwar period.
And the Soviet Union had a tough time competing
against that new context.
Now today, we see similarly that the image and reality
of capitalism is on the question again,
which leads some people to find an answer
in socialism as an alternative.
- So you just kind of painted a beautiful picture
of comparison.
This is the way we think about ideologies
'cause we, is what's working better.
Do you separate in your mind the ideals of communism
to the Stalinist implementation of communism?
And again, capitalism and American implementation
of capitalism.
And as we look at now the 21st century where yes,
this idea of socialism being a potential political system
that we would, or economic system we would operate under
in the United States, rising up again as an idea.
So how do we think about that again in the 21st century,
about these ideas, fundamental deep ideas
of communism and capitalism?
- Yeah, so in the Marxist schema,
there was something called feudalism,
which was supposedly destroyed by the bourgeoisie
who created capitalism.
And then the working class was supposed
to destroy capitalism and create socialism.
But socialism wasn't the end stage.
The end stage was gonna be communism.
So that's why the communist party in the Soviet Union
first built socialism, transcending capitalism.
The next stage was socialism and the end game,
the final stage was communism.
So their version of socialism was derived from Marx.
And Marx argued that the problem was capitalism
had been very beneficial for a while.
It had produced greater wealth and greater opportunity
than feudalism had, but then it had come to serve
only the narrow interests of the so-called bourgeoisie
or the capitalists themselves.
And so for humanity's sake, the universal class,
the working class, needed to overthrow capitalism
in order for greater productivity,
greater wealth to be produced,
for all of humanity to flourish and on a higher level.
So you couldn't have socialism
unless you destroyed capitalism.
So that meant no markets, no private property,
no so-called parliaments or bourgeois parliaments
as they were called.
So you got socialism in Marx's schema
by transcending, by eliminating capitalism.
Now, Marx also called for freedom.
He said that this elimination of markets
and private property and bourgeois parliaments
would produce greater freedom
in addition to greater abundance.
However, everywhere this was tried,
it produced tyranny and mass violence, death and shortages.
Everywhere it was tried.
There's no exception in historical terms.
And so it's very interesting.
Marx insisted that capitalism had to be eliminated.
You couldn't have markets.
Markets were chaos, you needed planning.
You couldn't have hiring of wage labor.
That was wage slavery.
You couldn't have private property
'cause that was a form of theft.
So in the Marxist scheme,
somehow you were gonna eliminate capitalism
and get to freedom.
It turned out you didn't get to freedom.
So then people said, well, you can't blame Marx
because he said we needed freedom.
He was pro-freedom.
So it's kind of like dropping a nuclear bomb.
You say you're gonna drop a nuclear bomb,
but you wanna minimize civilian casualties.
So the dropping of the nuclear bomb
is the elimination of markets,
private property and parliaments.
But you're gonna bring freedom
or you're gonna minimize civilian casualties.
So you drop the nuclear bomb,
you eliminate the capitalism
and you get famine, deportation,
no constraints on executive power
and not abundance, but shortages.
And people say, well, that's not what Marx said.
That's not what I said.
I said I wanted to minimize civilian casualties.
The nuclear bomb goes off
and there's mass civilian casualties.
And you keep saying, but I said,
drop the bomb, but minimize civilian casualties.
So that's where we are.
That's history, not philosophy.
I'm speaking about historical examples,
all the cases that we have.
Marx was not a theorist of inequality.
Marx was a theorist of alienation,
of dehumanization, of fundamental constraints
or what he called fetters on productivity and on wealth,
which he all attributed to capitalism.
Marx wasn't bothered by inequality.
He was bothered by something deeper, something worse.
Those socialists who figured this out,
who understood that if you drop the nuclear bomb,
there was no way to minimize civilian casualties.
Those socialists who came to understand
that if you eliminated capitalism,
markets, private property and parliaments,
if you eliminated that, you wouldn't get freedom.
Those Marxists, those socialists
became what we would call social Democrats
or people who would use the state to regulate the market,
not to eliminate the market.
They would use the state to redistribute income,
not to destroy private property and markets.
And so this in the Marxist schema was apostasy
because they were accepting markets and private property.
They were accepting alienation and wage slavery.
They were accepting capitalism in principle,
but they wanted to fix it.
They wanted to ameliorate, they wanted to regulate.
And so they became what was denounced as revisionists,
not true Marxists, not real revolutionaries,
but parliamentary road, parliamentarians.
We know this as normal politics,
normal social democratic politics from the European case
or from the American case,
but they are not asking to eliminate capitalism,
blaming capitalism, blaming markets and private property.
So this rift among the socialists,
the ones who were for elimination of capitalism,
transcending capitalism,
otherwise you could never ever get to abundance
and freedom in the Marxist schema,
versus those who accept capitalism,
but want to regulate and redistribute.
That rift on the left has been with us
almost from the beginning.
It's a kind of civil war on the left
between the Leninists and the social democrats
or the revisionists as they're known pejoratively
by the Leninists.
We have the same confusion today in the world today,
where people also cite Marx saying capitalism is a dead end,
and we need to drop that nuclear bomb and get freedom,
get no civilian casualties,
versus those who say, yes, there are inequities,
there's a lack of equality of opportunity.
There are many other issues that we need to deal with,
and we can fix those issues, we can regulate,
we can redistribute.
I'm not advocating this as a political position.
I'm not taking a political position myself.
I'm just saying that there's a confusion on the left
between those who accept capitalism and want to regulate it,
versus those who think capitalism is inherently evil,
and if we eliminate it, we'll get to a better world,
when in fact history shows
that if you eliminate capitalism, you get to a worse world.
The problems might be real, but the solutions are worse.
- From history's lessons,
now we have deep, painful lessons,
but there's not that many of them.
You know, our history is relatively short as a human species.
Do we have a good answer on the left of Leninists,
Marxists versus social democrat,
versus capitalism versus any anarchy?
You know, do we have sufficient samples from history
to make better decisions about the future
of our politics and economics?
- For sure.
We have the American Revolution,
which was a revolution not about class, not about workers,
not about a so-called universal class of the working class,
elimination of capitalism, markets, and the bourgeoisie,
but was about the category citizen.
§08Transcript · 1:14:42–1:25:41
It was about universal humanity,
where everyone in theory could be part of it as a citizen.
The revolution fell short of its own ideals.
Not everyone was a citizen.
For example, if you didn't own property,
you were a male but didn't own property,
you didn't have full rights of a citizen.
If you were a female, whether you owned property or not,
you weren't a full citizen.
If you were imported from Africa against your will,
you were a slave and not a citizen.
And so not everyone was afforded the rights in actuality
that were declared in principle.
However, over time, the category citizen could expand
and slaves could be emancipated
and they could get the right to vote.
They could become citizens.
Non-property owning males could get the right to vote
and become full citizens.
Females could get the right to vote
and become full citizens.
In fact, eventually my mother was able to get a credit card
in her own name in the 1970s without my father
having to co-sign the paperwork.
It took a long time, but nonetheless,
the category citizen can expand
and it can become a universal category.
So we have that, the citizen universal humanity model
of the American Revolution, which was deeply flawed
at the time it was introduced, but fixable over time.
We also had that separation of powers
and constraint on executive power
that we began this conversation with.
That was also institutionalized in the American Revolution
because they were afraid of tyranny.
They were afraid of unconstrained executive power.
So they built a system that would contain that,
constrain it institutionally, not circumstantially.
So that's a great gift.
Within that universal category of citizen,
which has over time come closer
to fulfilling its original promise,
and within those institutional constraints,
that separation of powers, constraint on executive power.
Within that, we've developed
what we might call normal politics, left-right politics.
People can be in favor of redistribution
and government action, and people can be in favor
of small government, hands-off government,
no redistribution or less redistribution.
That's the normal left-right political spectrum
where you respect the institutions
and separation of powers,
and you respect the universal category of citizenship
and equality before the law and everything else.
I don't see any problems with that whatsoever.
I see that as a great gift, not just to this country,
but around the world and other places
besides the United States have developed this.
The problems arise at the extremes,
the far left and the far right,
that don't recognize the legitimacy either of capitalism
or of democratic rule of law institutions,
and they wanna eliminate constraints on executive power.
They wanna control the public sphere
or diminish the independence of the media.
They wanna take away markets or private property,
and redistribution becomes something bigger
than just redistribution.
It becomes actually that original Marxist idea
of transcending capitalism.
So I'm not bothered by the left or the right.
I think they're normal, and we should have that debate.
We're a gigantic, diverse country
of many different political points of view.
I'm troubled only by the extremes
that are against the system, class system,
that wanna get rid of it, and supposedly
that will be the bright path to the future.
History tells us that the far left
and the far right are wrong about that.
But once again, this doesn't mean
that you have to be a social democrat.
You could be a libertarian.
You could be a conservative.
You could be a centrist.
You could be conservative on some issues
and liberal on other issues.
All of that comes under what I would presume
to be normal politics, and I see that
as the important corrective mechanism,
normal politics and market economies,
non-monopolistic, open, free, and dynamic market economies.
I don't like concentrations of power politically,
and I don't like concentrations of power economically.
I like competition in the political realm.
I like competition in the economic realm.
This is not perfect.
It constantly needs to be protected and reinvented,
and there are flaws that are fundamental
and need to be adjusted and addressed and everything else,
especially equality of opportunity.
Equality of outcome is unreachable and is a mistake
because it produces perverse and unintended consequences.
Equality of outcome attempts,
attempts to make people equal on the outcome side,
but attempts to make them more equal on the front end,
on the opportunity side, that's really, really important
for a healthy society.
That's where we've fallen down.
Our schools are not providing equality of opportunity
for the majority of people in all of our school systems,
and so I see problems there.
I see a need to invest in ourselves,
invest in infrastructure, invest in human capital,
create greater equality of opportunity,
but also to make sure that we have good governance
'cause governance is the variable that enables you
to do all these other things.
- I've watched quite a bit, returning back to Putin.
I've watched quite a few interviews with Putin
and conversations, especially because I speak Russian
fluently, I can understand.
Often the translations lose a lot.
I find the man putting morality aside
very deep and interesting,
and I found almost no interview with him
to get at that depth.
I was very hopeful for the Oliver Stone documentary
and with him, and to me, 'cause I deeply respect
Oliver Stone as a filmmaker in general,
but it was a complete failure in my eyes, that interview.
I mean, I suppose you could toss it up
to a language barrier, but a complete lack
of diving deep into the person is what I saw.
So my question is a strange one,
but if you were to sit down with Putin
and have a conversation,
or perhaps if you were to sit down with Stalin
and have a conversation,
what kind of questions would you ask?
This wouldn't be televised, unless you want it to be.
So this is only you, so you're allowed to ask
about some of the questions that are
sort of not socially acceptable.
Meaning, putting morality aside,
getting at the depth of the human character,
what would you ask?
- So once again, they're very different personalities
and very different time periods and very different regimes.
So what I would talk to Stalin about and Putin about
are not in the same category, necessarily.
So let's take Putin.
So I would ask him where he thinks this is going,
where he thinks Russia's gonna be in 25 years or 50 years.
What's the long-term vision?
What does he anticipate the current trends
are gonna produce?
Is he under the illusion that Russia is on the up swing,
that things are actually going pretty well,
that in 25 years, Russia's gonna still be a great power
with a tremendous dynamic economy and a lot of high tech
and a lot of human capital and wonderful infrastructure
and a very high standard of living and a secure borders
and sense of security at home?
Does he think the current path is leading
in that direction?
And if not, if he understands that the current trajectory
does not provide for those kinds of circumstances,
does it bother him?
Does he worry about that?
Does he care about the future 25 or 50 years from now?
- Deep down, what do you think his answer is?
The honest answer.
- Either he thinks he's on that trajectory already
or he doesn't care about that long-term trajectory.
So that's the mystery for me with him.
He's clever.
He has tremendous sources of information.
He has great experience now as a world leader
having served for effectively longer than Leonid Brezhnev's
long 18 year reign.
And so Putin has accumulated a great deal of experience
at the highest level compared to where he started.
And so I'm interested to understand how he sees
this long-term evolution or non-evolution of Russia
and whether he believes he's got them
on the right trajectory or whether,
if he doesn't believe that, he cares.
I have no idea because I've never spoken to him about this,
but I would love to hear the answer.
Sometimes you have to ask questions not directly like that,
but you have to come a little bit sideways.
You can elicit answers from people
by making them feel comfortable
in coming sideways with them.
- Anna, just a quick question.
So that's talking about Russia, Putin's role in Russia.
Do you think it's interesting to ask,
and you could say the same for Stalin,
§09Transcript · 1:25:43–1:35:59
the more personal question of how do you feel yourself
about this whole thing, about your life, about your legacy,
looking at the person that's one of the most powerful
and important people in the history of civilization,
both Putin and Stalin, you could argue.
- Yeah.
Once you experience power at that level,
it becomes something that's almost necessary for you
as a human being.
It's a drug, it's an aphrodisiac, it's a feeling.
You know, you go to the gym to exercise,
and the endorphins, the chemicals get released,
and even if you're tired or you're sore,
you get this massive chemical change
which has very dynamic effects on how you feel
and the kind of level of energy you have
for the rest of the day.
And if you do that for a long time
and then you don't do it for a while,
you're like a drug addict not getting your fix.
You miss it, your body misses that release of endorphins
to a certain extent.
That's how power works for people like Putin.
That's how power works for people who run universities
or are secretaries of state
or run corporations, fill in the blank.
In whatever ways power is exercised,
it becomes almost a drug for people.
It becomes something that's difficult for them to give up.
It becomes a part of who they are.
It becomes necessary for their sense of self and wellbeing.
The greatest people, the people I admire the most,
are the ones that can step away from power,
can give it up, can give up the drug,
can be satisfied, can be stronger even
by walking away from continued power
when they had the option to continue.
So with a person like Putin,
once again, I don't know him personally
so I have no basis to judge this.
This is a general statement observable with many people
and in historical terms.
With a person like Putin who's exercised
this much power for this long,
it's something that becomes a part of who you are
and you have a hard time imagining yourself without it.
You begin to conflate your personal power
with the wellbeing of the nation.
You begin to think that the more power you have,
the better off the country is, this conflation.
You begin to be able to not imagine.
You can no longer imagine what it would be like
just to be an ordinary citizen or an ordinary person
running a company even,
something much smaller than a country.
So I anticipate that, without knowing for sure,
that he would be in that category of person.
But you'd wanna explore that with questions with him
about, so what's his day look like from beginning to end?
Just take me through a typical day of yours.
What do you do in a day?
How does it start?
What are the ups?
What are the downs?
What are the parts of the day
you look forward to the most?
What are the parts of the day
you don't look forward to that much?
What do you consider a good day?
What do you consider a bad day?
How do you know that what you're doing
is having the effects that you intend?
How do you follow up?
How do you gather the information, the reaction?
How do you get people to tell you to your face
things that they know are uncomfortable
or that you might not wanna hear?
Those kind of questions.
- And through that window,
through that kind of questioning,
you get a window into a man with power.
So let me ask about Stalin,
'cause you've done more research.
In another amazing interview you've had,
the introduction was that you know more about Stalin
than Stalin himself.
You've done an incredible amount of research on Stalin.
So if you could talk to him, get sort of direct research,
what questions would you ask of Stalin?
- I have so many questions,
I don't even know where I would begin.
The thing about studying a person like Stalin,
who's an immense creature, right?
He's exercising the power of life and death
over hundreds of millions of people.
He's making decisions about novels and films
and turbines and submarines and pacts with Hitler
or deals with Churchill and Roosevelt
and occupation of Mongolia or occupation of North Korea.
He's making phenomenally consequential decisions
over all spheres of life, all areas of endeavor
and over much of the globe,
much of the land mass of the earth.
And so what's that like?
Does he sometimes reflect on the amount of power
and responsibility he has that he can exercise?
Does he sometimes think about what it means
that a single person has that kind of power?
And does it have an effect on his relations with others,
his sense of self, the kinds of things he values in life?
Does he sometimes think it's a mistake
that he's accumulated this much power?
Does he sometimes wish he had a simpler life?
Or is he once again so drunk, so enamored,
so caught up with chemically and spiritually
with exercising this kind of power
that he couldn't live without it?
And then what were you thinking, I would ask him,
in certain decisions that he made?
What were you thinking on certain dates
and certain circumstances where you made a decision
and could have made a different decision?
Can you recall your thought processes?
Can you bring the decision back?
Was it seat of the pants?
Was it something you'd been planning?
Did you just improvise or did you have a strategy?
What were you guided by?
Whose examples did you look to?
When you picked up these books that you read
and you read the books and you made pencil marks in them,
is it because you absorbed the lesson there?
Or did it really not become a permanent lesson
and it was just something that you checked
and it was like a reflex?
So I have many specific questions
about many specific events and people and circumstances
that I have tried to figure out
with the surviving source materials
that we have in abundance.
But I would still like to delve into his mindset
and reconstruct his mind.
The closer you get to Stalin in some ways,
the more elusive he can become.
- And especially around World War II,
you've already illuminated a lot of interesting aspects
about Stalin's role in the war,
but it'd be interesting to ask even more questions
about how seat of the pants or deliberate
some of the decisions have been.
If I could ask just one quick question,
one last quick question.
(mouse clicking)
And you're constrained in time in answering it.
Do you think there will always be evil in the world?
Do you think there will always be war?
- Unfortunately, yes.
There are conflicting interests,
conflicting goals that people have.
Most of the time,
those conflicts can be resolved peacefully.
That's why we build strong institutions,
to resolve different interests and conflicts peacefully.
But the fact, the enduring fact of conflicting interests
and conflicting desires, that can never be changed.
So the job that we have for humanity's sake
is to make those conflicting interests,
those conflicting desires,
to put them in a context where they can be resolved
peacefully and not in a zero sum fashion.
So we can't get there on the global scale.
So there's always gonna be the kind of conflict
that sometimes gets violent.
What we don't want is a conflict
among the strongest powers.
Great power conflict is unbelievably bad.
There are no words to describe it.
At least 55 million people died in World War II.
If we have a World War III,
a war between the United States and China
or whatever it might be,
who knows what the number could be?
155 million, 255 million, 555 million.
I don't even wanna think about it.
And so it's horrible when wars break out
in the humanitarian catastrophes.
For example, Yemen and Syria
and several other places I could name today.
It's just horrible what you see there.
And the scale is colossal for those places.
But it's not planetary scale.
And so avoiding planetary scale destruction
is really important for us.
And so having those different interests
be somehow managed in a way that they don't,
that no one sees advantage in a violent resolution.
- And a part of that is remembering history.
So they should read your books.
Stephen, thank you so much.
It was a huge honor talking to you today.
§10Transcript · 1:36:01–1:37:15
I really enjoyed it.
- Thank you for the opportunity.
My pleasure.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Stephen Kotkin.
And thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App.
Download it and use code LEXPODCAST.
You'll get $10 and $10 will go to FIRST,
a STEM education nonprofit
that inspires hundreds of thousands of young minds
to become future leaders and innovators.
If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube,
give it five stars on Apple Podcast,
support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter.
And now let me leave you with words from Joseph Stalin.
Spoken shortly before the death of Lenin
and at the beginning of Stalin's rise to power.
First, in Russian.
(speaking in foreign language)
I consider it completely unimportant
who in the party will vote or how,
but what is extraordinarily important
is who will count the votes and how.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)