The following is a conversation with Steven 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
the three-volume work on Stalin, and he is 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 Steven 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 in Apple Podcasts, follow us
Spotify, support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter. Alex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N.
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here's my conversation with Steven 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. What words 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.
Most 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, most
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.
The 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. 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? What is
it about absolute power that does something bad to the human mind? 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 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 want to 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.
There's frustration with that, but ultimately that's the strength of the institutions we have.
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, what happened in China under Mao,
or what happened in the Soviet Union under Stalin, or what happened in Haiti under
the Papa Doc and then Baby Doc, or fill in the blank. 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.
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. The case that I study, the only checks and balances on executive power
are circumstantial. 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 that 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.
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. That's another
constraint, the belief of the people, what they admire in a leader, what they seek in a leader.
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 impulsive 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 environment 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 in 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.
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. 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. 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 want to 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.
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 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 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 is 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 because they see this more clearly
or more closely than the mass of the population. They can't necessarily yet oppose this in public
because there are people, they have families, they have careers, they have children who want to 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, they're 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, right? 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.
He fixed the problem, but he fixed the problem and then created even bigger long-term problems,
potentially. 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. 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.
That's the situation we have. 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 were referring to is the economic growth when Putin first took office.
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. 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 and lower value products
in manufacturing, not high end stuff, but lower end stuff like steel or iron or cement or
iron or fertilizer, where the value added is not spectacular, but nonetheless,
which had been destroyed by the 1990s and 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 a 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 want to give Putin credit 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've 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 5 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 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, Boris, 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
than to nominate who's going to 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. It's not an
outcome you would wish on 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? Is from violence within or external to the
country? Is a powerful, inspiring leader enough to step in and bring democracy and the free world
to Russia? Russia is not a failed country. It's a middle income country with 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. It may break an existing trend, but it's rare
that violence produces a nonviolent, 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, and that is to say that sees things
not developing relative to neighbors, relative to richer countries, relative to more successful
countries. 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. 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. Russian 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. 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. 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 the spot has talked to Gary Kasparov, who I'm not sure if you're familiar with his
ongoings. Besides being a world-class chess player, he's also a very outspoken activist,
sort of 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? We don't need individuals. Some individuals are very impressive 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. 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
a mass arguably more power than any man in history. It's 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. So we have to remember that Stalin is also a product of circumstances,
not solely his own individual drive, which is very strong. But 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 going to 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 is 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 and 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, 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 going to 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 of the
executive branch 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 in difficult
circumstances and then to build effectively a superpower on all that bloodshed,
you have to be skilled in some way. It can't be just the 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
in bureaucracy. One of the things, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, 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 and 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 status, a traditional Russian status 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 guys 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. 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
status Russian patriot, but they were widespread and powerful attractions for a lot of people.
And so Stalin's ability to communicate to people those 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 and to others. And so he justified it in his own mind
and to others. But certainly any means 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 capital
estates 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, imperial
Japan had been defeated, 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 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,
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, not nonviolent 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 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 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,
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 going to 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 in 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 because that was a form of theft.
So in the Marxist scheme, somehow you were going to 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 going to drop a nuclear bomb,
but you want to minimize civilian casualties. So the dropping of the nuclear bomb is the
elimination of markets, private property, and parliaments. But you're going to bring
freedom or you're going to 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 dropped 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
are 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.
Our history is relatively short as a human species. Do we have a good answer on the left of
Leninus Marxist versus Social Democrat versus capitalism versus any anarchy? 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 in the bourgeoisie, but was about the category citizen.
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 own 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 cosign 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 in 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 want to eliminate constraints on executive power. They want to control the public sphere or
diminish the independence of the media. They want to take away markets or private property,
and redistribution becomes something bigger than just redistribution. It becomes actually
that original Marxist idea of transcending capitalism. 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, cross-system, that want to get rid of it, and supposedly that will be
the right 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 because 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,
because I deeply respect Oliver Stone as a filmmaker in general, but it was a complete
failure in my eyes that interview. I suppose you could toss it up to a language barrier,
but a complete lack of diving deep into the person as what I saw. 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. You're allowed to ask about some of the
questions that are not socially acceptable, meaning putting morality aside, getting into depth of
the human character. What would you ask? Once again, they're very different personalities
and very different time periods and very different regimes. What I would talk to Stalin about in
Putin about are not in the same category necessarily. Let's take Putin. I would ask him
where he thinks this is going, where he thinks Russia is going to be in 25 years or 50 years.
What's the long-term vision? What does he anticipate the current trends are going to produce?
Is he under the illusion that Russia is on the upswing, that things are actually going pretty well,
that in 25 years Russia is going to 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 border and a sense of security at home. Does he think the
current path is leading in that direction? 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?
So 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
laying at 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. On just a quick question. So that's talking about Russia and Putin's role in Russia.
Do you think it's interesting to ask, and you could say the same for Stalin, 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? 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 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 well-being. 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.
All right. 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 well-being 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 want to 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 are you doing 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 want to hear those kind of questions?
And through that window, through that kind of question, you get a window into a man with power.
So let me ask about stalling because you've done more recently.
As in another amazing interview you've had, the introduction was that you know more about
stalling than stalling himself. You've done incredible amount of research on stalling. So
if you could talk to him, get sort of direct research, what questions would you ask of stalling?
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,
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 packs 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 seed 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 would be interesting to ask even more questions about how seed of the
pants or deliberate some of the decisions have been. If I could ask just one quick question, one
last quick question, 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 going to 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 want to think about it. 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 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. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for the opportunity.
My pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Stephen Kotkin. And thank you
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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. I consider it completely unimportant who and 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.