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EPISODE LINKS:
Stephen's Website: https://history.princeton.edu/people/stephen-kotkin
Stalin: 1878-1928 (Vol 1): https://amzn.to/3NvokpC
Stalin: 1929-1941 (Vol 2): https://amzn.to/3wIYqsT

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Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:19 - Putin and Stalin
13:09 - Putin vs the West
36:01 - Response to Oliver Stone
47:07 - Russian invasion of Ukraine
1:26:35 - Putin's plan for the war
1:34:33 - Henry Kissinger
1:40:28 - Nuclear war
1:51:01 - Parallels to World War II
2:13:47 - China
2:21:55 - World War III
2:29:24 - Navalny
2:33:41 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Stephen Kotkin, his second time on the podcast.

Stephen is 1 of the greatest historians of all time, specializing in 20th and 21st century history of Russia and Eastern Europe.

And he has written what is widely considered to be the definitive biography of Stalin in 3 volumes, 2 of which have been published and the third focused on World War II and the years after he is in the midst of writing now.

This conversation includes a response to my previous podcast episode with Oliver Stone that was focused on Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine.

Stephen provides a hard-hitting criticism of Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, weighed

and contextualized deeply in the complex geopolitics and history of our world, all with an intensity and rigor, but also wit and humor that makes Stephen 1 of my favorite human beings.

Please also allow me to mention something that has been apparent and has weighed heavy on my heart and mind.

This conversation with Stephen Kotkin makes it more dangerous for me to travel in Russia.

The previous conversation with Oliver Stone makes it more dangerous for me to travel in Ukraine.

I will nevertheless travel to both Ukraine and Russia.

I need to once again see with my own eyes the land of my ancestors, where they suffered but flourished, and eventually gave birth to silly old me.

I need to hear directly the pain, anger, and hope from both Ukrainians and Russians.

I won't give details to my travel plans in terms of location and timing, but the trip is very soon.

I'm truly grateful for every day I'm alive, and I

hope to spend each such day adding a bit of love to the world.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and now, Dear friends, here's Stephen Kotkin.

You are 1 of the great historians of our time specializing in the man, the leader, the historical figure of Stalin.

If you can perhaps think about the echo of 80 years between Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin.

What are the similarities and differences between the man and the historical figure, the historical trajectory of Stalin and Putin?

It's very nice to be here again with you.

I see this podcast stuff is doing you right.

So we can't really put very easily Vladimir Putin in the same sentence with Joseph Stalin.

Stalin is a singular figure and his category is really small.

And even in that category, Stalin is the dominant figure, both by how long he was in power and also by the amount of power, the military industrial complex he helped build and commanded.

However, Putin's in the same building as Stalin.

He uses some of the same offices as Stalin used.

On some of those television broadcasts that we see of Putin at meetings and Putin inside the Kremlin, Stalin used to sit in those rooms and hold meetings in those rooms.

That's the Imperial Senate built by Catherine the Great, an 18th century building inside the Kremlin.

It's a domed building and you can see it on the panorama, the top of the building at least, you can see it on the panorama when you look over the Kremlin wall from many sites inside Moscow.

So if he's not comparable to Stalin, he still works, as I said, in those same buildings, those same offices, partly.

And so therefore he's got some of the problems that Stalin had, which was managing Russian power in the world from a position of weakness vis-a-vis the West, but from an ambition, a grandiosity in fact.

And so this combination of weakness and grandeur, right, of not being as strong as the West, but aspiring to be as great or greater than the West.

That's the dilemma of Russian history for the past many centuries.

Russia is smaller now compared to when Stalin was in that Kremlin.

It's got pushed back to borders almost the time of Peter the Great.

It's farther from the main European capitals now than any time since that 18th century.

And the West has only grown stronger in that period of time.

The irony of being in that position, of sitting in the Kremlin trying to manage Russian power in the world, trying to be a providential power, a country with a special mission in the world, a country which imagines itself to be a whole civilization, and yet not having the capabilities to meet those aspirations, and falling farther and farther behind the West.

The irony of all of that is the attempted solutions put Russia in a worse place every single time.

So you try to manage the gap with the West, you try to realize these aspirations, you try to raise your capabilities, and you build a strong state.

The quest to build a strong state and use coercive modernization to try somehow, if not to close the gap with the West, at least to manage it.

And the result is different versions of personalist rule.

And moreover, that autocracy undertakes measures which then worsen the very geopolitical dilemma that gave rise to this Personalist rule in the first place and so I call this Russia's perpetual geopolitics.

I've been writing about this for many many years What's important about this analysis is?

This is not a story of eternal Russian cultural proclivity to aggression.

It's not something that's in the mother's milk.

It's not something that can't be changed.

Russia doesn't have an innate cultural tendency to aggression.

It's a strategic choice to try to match the power of the West, which from Russia's vantage point is actually unmatchable.

But it's a choice that's made again and again, and Putin has made this choice just as Stalin made the choice, right?

Stalin presided over the World War II victory, and then he lost the peace.

There was, of course, other rulers who succeeded him.

He was still the most important person in the country after he died, because they were trying to manage that system that he built, and more importantly, manage that growing gap with the West.

By the time the 90s rolled around, former Soviet troops, now Russian troops, withdrew from all those advanced positions that they had achieved as a result of the World War II victory, and it was Napoleon in reverse.

They went on the same roads, but not from Moscow back to Paris, but instead from Warsaw and from East Berlin and from Tallinn and Riga and all the other places of former Warsaw Pact and former Soviet republics in the Baltic region, they went back to Russia in retreat.

And so Stalin in the fullness of time lost the peace.

And Putin in his own way inheriting some of this, attempting to reverse it when, as I said, Russia was smaller, farther away, weaker, the West was bigger and stronger and had absorbed those former Warsaw Pact countries and Baltic states because they voluntarily begged to join the West.

It's a voluntary sphere of influence that the West conducts.

And so that dilemma is where you can put Putin and Stalin in the same sentence and the terrible outcome for Russia in the fullness of time also has echoes.

But of course, Putin hasn't murdered 18 to 20 million people and the scale of his abilities to cause grief with the nuclear weapons aside is nothing like Stalin's And so we have to be careful, right?

Only Mao put bigger numbers on the board from a tragic point of view than Stalin.

And numbers matter here, if we compare these singular figures.

Yeah, Mao killed more people than Stalin because Mao had more people to kill.

The most amazing thing about Mao is he watched Stalin do it.

He watched Stalin collectivize agriculture and famine result.

He watched Stalin impose this communist monopoly and all of those people sent to prison or given a bullet in the back of the neck.

He watched all of that and then he did it again himself in China.

Do you think he saw the human cost directly that when you say he saw, do you think he was focused on the policies or was he also aware distinctly as a human being of the human costs in the lives of peasants and the lives of the working class and the lives of the poor?

I think the prima facie evidence is that he didn't value human life.

Otherwise, I don't think after seeing the amount of lives that were taken in the Soviet experiment, he would have done something similar after that.

I think the answer, Lex, is it's very hard to get inside Miles' head and figure out what he was really thinking, but if you just look at the results that happened, the policies that were undertaken and the consequences of them, you would have to conclude that there was, let's say, no value or little value placed on human life.

Unfortunately, that's characteristic not only of communist dictators, right, of post-communist dictators as well, but the scale of the horrors that they inflict, as horrific as they are, just can't compare.

And so we're in a situation where Eurasia, that is to say The ancient civilizations of Eurasia, which would be Russia, Iran, China, all have some version of non-democratic, illiberal, autocratic regimes.

And they're all pushing up against the greater power of the West in some form.

Sometimes they coordinate their actions and sometimes they don't.

But this is a very longstanding phenomenon, Lex, that predates Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or the latest incarnation of the supreme leader in Iran.

So we'll talk about this, I think, really powerful framework of 5 dimensions of authoritarian regimes that you've put together.

But first, let's go to this Napoleon and reverse retreat from Warsaw, back.

Putin has called, from the perspective of Putin, this retreat, this collapse of Stalin is 1 of the great tragedies of that region of Russia.

Do you think there's a sense where as Putin sits now in power for 22 plus years, he really dreams of a return to the power, the influence, the land of Stalin.

So while you said that they're not in the same place in terms of the numbers of people that suffer due to their regime, do you think he hopes to have the same power, the same influence for a nation that was in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s of the 20th century under Stalin?

A handful of Western leaders have met with him for short periods of time.

Those inside Russia barely meet with him.

His own minions in the regime barely have face time with him.

It could be that he has delusions of reconquering Russian influence, if not direct control over the territories that broke away, but it's not going to happen.

Let's talk a little bit about this guy, Nikolai Potrushev.

Nikolai Potrushev is probably not well known to your listeners.

He's the head of Russia's security council.

And so you could probably call him the second most important or second most powerful man in Russia, certainly inside the regime.

Arguably Navalny is the second most important person in the country, and we'll talk about that later, I'm sure.

Yes, but Patrushev is a version of Putin's right-hand man.

And Patrushev has been giving interviews in the press, you probably saw the interview with Nizavisimaya Gazeta not that long ago.

He writes also his own blog-like interventions in the public sphere using the few channels that are left.

And what's interesting about Patrushev, and this could well reflect similar thinking to Putin's, which is why I'm bringing this up, is that he's got this conspiratorial theory that the West has been on a forever campaign to destroy Russia, just like it destroyed the Soviet Union, and that everything the West does is meant to dismember Russia, and that Russia is fighting an existential battle against the West.

And so, for example, the CIA and the American government wanted to bring down the Soviet Union.

Never mind that the Bush administration, the first Bush, the father, was trying desperately to hold the Soviet Union together because they were afraid of the chaos that might ensue and the nukes that might get loose as a result of a Soviet collapse.

And it wasn't until the very last moment where Bush decided, his administration decided to back those Republican leaders who were breaking away from Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union.

Never mind that Bill Clinton's administration following George Bush sent boatloads of money, Western taxpayer money to Russia.

We don't know exactly how much because it came from different sources.

People talk about how there was no Marshall Plan.

It was tens of billions of dollars from various sources, from the IMF and other sources.

Just like the German money that went to Gorbachev for unification disappeared even before the Soviet collapse.

The money disappeared, but the West sent the money.

And then you could go all the way, Obama's administration, George Bush trying to do business deals and reset the relations, and Obama administration trying to reset the relations, and doing nothing after the Georgian war and slapping Putin on the wrist following the seizure, and you could go on and you could go on all the way through the Trump administration telling Putin That he's right, Trump believes Putin and doesn't believe US intelligence about Russian efforts to interfere in American domestic politics.

So despite all the empirics of it, you have Patrushev and likely Putin talking about this multi-decade Western conspiracy to bring Russia down.

At the same time as that's happening, the Germans are voluntarily increasing their dependence on Russian energy.

Voluntarily increasing their dependence on Russia.

So here's the conspiracy to bring Russia down.

The French, who fantasize about themselves as a diplomatic superpower, are constantly, the French leaders are constantly running to the Kremlin to ask what Russia needs, what concessions from the West Russia needs to feel respected again.

The British provide all manner of money laundering and reputation laundering services for the whole Russian oligarchy, including the state officials, who are looting the state and using the West, British institutions, to launder their money.

So all of this is happening and yet Patrushev imagines this conspiracy to bring Russia down by the West.

And so that's what we've got in the Kremlin again.

Stalin had that same conspiratorial mentality of the West.

Everything that happened in the world was part of a Western conspiracy directed against the Soviet Union and now directed against Russia, even though the West is trying to appease, the West is offering its services, the West is trying to change Russia through investment in a positive way, but Instead the West is what's changing.

Western services are being corrupted by the relationship with Russia.

So you have to ask yourself, who are these people in power in the Kremlin who imagine that while they're availing themselves of every service and every blandishment of the West, while they're availing themselves of this, that they're fighting a conspiracy by the West to bring them down.

So This is what they call the Abyssinia, right, in Russian, which is a term, as you know, that means those who are resentful, or you might call them the losers, the losers in the transition.

So when the Soviet Union fell and there was a diminishment, a very substantial diminution in Russian power and influence in the world, a lot of people lost out.

They weren't able to loot the state in the 90s, and they were on the outside.

They were the losers in the transition domestically.

And for them, they wanted to reverse being on the losing side.

And so they began to expropriate, to steal the money, steal the property from those first thieves who stole in the 90s.

And The 2000s and on have been about re-stealing, taking the losers in the transition, taking the money from the winners and reversing this resentment, this loser status.

Those are your Potrushev's and your Putin's, but at the same time this blows out to let's reverse the losses being on the losing side, the roiling resentment at the decline of their power internationally.

So you have a profound psychological whole generation of people who are on the losing end domestically and reverse that domestically.

Remember all the companies that are now owned by Putin cronies because they were taken away from whoever stole them in the first place.

And now they're trying to do that on the international scale.

It's 1 thing to put domestic opponents in jail.

It's 1 thing to take away someone's property domestically, but you're not going to reverse the power of the West with the diminished Russia that you have.

And so that project, that Patrushev project, which we see him expressing again and again, he speaks about it publicly.

It's not something that we need to go looking for a quest, the secret, we can't find it, what are they thinking?

And Putin has spoken the same way for a long time.

People point to the 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference that Putin delivered and certainly your listeners could use a snippet or 2 of that just like they could use a couple of quotes from Potrushev to contextualize what we're talking about, but it predates the 2007 Munich speech, the reaction to Ukraine's uprising in

attempt to steal the election inside Ukraine, right, which the Ukrainian people rose up valiantly against and risked their lives and overturned.

So there were public statements from Putin already back then, the statements about Khodorkovsky in

This is a longstanding psychological, deeply psychological issue, which is about managing Russian power in the world, as I was saying, the gap with the West, but has this further dimension of feeling like losers and wanting to reverse that.

So there's that resentment that fuels this narrative, fuels this geopolitics and internal policy.

But so Resentment is behind some of the worst things that have ever been done in human history.

Hitler was probably fueled by resentment.

So resentment is a really powerful force, yes.

Just to maybe not push back, but to give fuller context on the West.

You said there's a narrative from Putin's Russia that the West is somehow an enemy, you position everything against the West, but is there a degree, and to what degree is the West willing to feed that narrative?

That it's also convenient for the West to have an enemy.

It seems like in the place, in the span, it seems like in geopolitics, having an enemy is useful for forming a narrative.

Now, having an enemy for the basic respect of humanity is not good, but in terms of maintaining power, if you're a leader in a game of geopolitics, it seems to be good to have an enemy.

It seems to be good to have something like a cold war.

We can always point your finger and says, all our actions are fighting this evil, whatever that evil is.

So you've made it seem that the West is trying.

There's a lot of forces within the West that are trying to reach out a friendly hand, trying to help, sending money, sending compassion, trying to sort of.

Trying to integrate Russia into global institutions.

Which was a longstanding multi-decade effort across multiple countries and multiple administrations in those countries.

But is there also warmongers in the West?

People talk about the Cold War, and they're usually looking to assign blame for the Cold War, as if it's some kind of mistake, a misunderstanding, or a search for an enemy that was convenient to rally domestic politics.

So, Lex, there's a coup in Czechoslovakia and somebody installs a communist regime in February

Where they try to strangle West Berlin so that they can swallow West Berlin and add it to East Berlin.

How about Korean War, invasion of South Korea by North Korea?

How about the murders and the show trials up and down Eastern Europe in the late 40s after the imposition of the clone regimes.

Yeah, it's very convenient to have an enemy.

There was some threats to people's freedom.

There was some aggression and violence on a mass scale, like collectivization of Eastern Europe.

We don't have to blame someone for the Cold War.

The Truman administration deserves credit for standing up to Stalin's regime, for standing up to these actions, for saying, yeah, we're not just going to take this.

We're not going to let this expand to further territories.

We're going to create the NATO alliance and we're going to rally democratic liberal regimes to stand up to this illiberalism, this violence and this aggression.

And So yeah, Lex, it's always convenient to have an enemy, but there was an enemy.

Nikolai Leonov, who recently died, he died in April 2022 and he had a major funeral.

He was the last head analyst of the Soviet KGB.

And Leonov is 1 of the most important figures for understanding the Soviet collapse.

And he has the best memoir on the Soviet collapse, which is known in Russian as Likholetia.

You will understand that and you'll help your podcast listeners understand.

There's a singularity to that kind of expression, Likholetia.

Leonov just died, but 1 of the things he, and in fact, the people who were supposedly arrested by Putin as scapegoats for the Ukraine war, the main 1, Sergei Beseda, gave the eulogy at Leonov's funeral in April 2022, showing that it's a lie, that all of these people have been arrested and purged and other nonsense in social media.

But to get back to what Leonov said and get back to your enemy point, Leonov said, you know, the West spent all this time blackening the image of the Soviet Union.

All these resources and propaganda and covert operations to blacken the Soviet image.

And then Leonov wrote in the next sentence, and you know what?

We gave them a lot of material to work with to blacken our image

yeah that so the you're saying a kind of sobering reality which it is possible to some degree to draw a line between the good guys and the bad guys.

It's a lot better than unfreedom, and a guy like you understands that really well.

Well, so yes, but those are all, there's words like justice, freedom.

Love, you can use a lot of words that Hitler himself used to describe why he is actually creating a better world than those he's fighting.

The question is on the ground, what is actually increasing the amount of freedom in the world?

When we use words like freedom, we're talking about rule of law.

We're talking about protection of civil liberties.

We're talking about protection of private property.

We're talking about an independent and well-funded judiciary.

We're talking about an impartial, non-corrupt, competent civil service.

We're talking about separation of powers where the executive branch's power is limited, usually by an elected parliament.

In fact, yes, let's talk about elections.

Let's talk about freedom of speech and freedom of the public sphere.

We're not talking about freedom as a slogan here.

We're talking about a huge array of institutions and practices and norms ultimately, right?

And if they exist, you know and you live under them.

And if they don't exist, you fully understand that as well, right?

Ukraine was a flawed democracy before Russia invaded.

It's utterly corrupt, many ways dysfunctional, especially the elites were dysfunctional.

The gas industry in Ukraine was absolutely terrible because of the corruption that it generated, the oligarch problem, a handful of people stealing the state resources, and yet Ukraine had an open public sphere and it had a parliament that functioned.

And so despite its flaws, it was still a democracy.

The regime in Moscow, you can't say that, Lex.

You could say, oh, well, there were oligarchs in Ukraine and there were oligarchs in Russia.

There's corruption in Ukraine, there's corruption in Russia.

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Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Stalin, Hitler, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine | Lex Fridman Podcast #289