The following is a conversation with Stephen Kotkin, a professor

of history at Princeton University and 1 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 2 of a three-volume work on Stalin, and he's currently working on volume 3.

You may have noticed that I've been speaking with not just computer scientists, but physicists, engineers, historians, neuroscientists, and soon much more.

To me, artificial intelligence is much bigger than deep learning, bigger than computing.

It is our civilization's journey into understanding the human mind and creating echoes of it in the machine.

To me, that journey must include a deep historical and psychological understanding of power.

Technology puts some of the greatest power in the history of our civilization into the hands of engineers and computer scientists.

This power must not be abused and the best way to understand how such abuse can be avoided is to not be blind to the lessons of history.

As Stephen Kotkin brilliantly articulates, Stalin was arguably 1 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 5 stars on Apple Podcast, follow us on 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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And now, here's my conversation with Stephen Kotkin.

Human beings crave security, they crave love, they crave adventure, they crave power, but not equally.

Some human beings nevertheless do crave power.

Is that deeply in the psychology of people?

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.

We may think that everybody does, but not everybody does.

Those people who do crave that kind of power, unconstrained, the ability to decide as much as life or death of other people, Those people are not everyday people.

They're not the people you encounter in your daily life for the most part.

Most of them don't have the opportunity to live that dream.

Very few of them, in fact, end up with the opportunity to live that dream.

So percentage wise, in your sense, if we think of George Washington for example, would most people given the choice of absolute power over a country versus maybe the capped power that the United States presidential role, at least at the founding of the country, represented.

What do you think most people would choose?

Well, Washington was in a position to exercise far greater power than he did.

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 like I said, not everyone craves unconstrained power even if they're very ambitious and of course Washington was very ambitious.

He was a successful general before he was a president.

So that clearly comes from the influences on your life, where you grow up, how you grow up, how you raised, what kind of values are imparted to you along the way, you can understand power as the ability to share or you can understand or the ability to advance something for the collective in a collective process, not an individual process.

So power comes in many different varieties and ambition doesn't always equate to despotic power.

Despotic power is something different from ordinary institutional power that we see.

The president of MIT does not have unconstrained power.

The president of MIT rightly must consult with other members of the administration, with the faculty members, to a certain extent with the student body and certainly with the trustees of MIT.

Those constraints make the institution strong and enduring and make the decisions better than they would be if he had unconstrained power.

But you can't say that the president is not ambitious.

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.

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.

We kind of take it for granted that constraints on executive power is a good thing.

So what is it about absolute power that does something bad to the human mind.

So, you know, the popular saying of absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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.

For example, we have separation of powers in the United States.

The Congress, right, has authority that the president doesn't have, as for example in budgeting, the so-called power of the purse.

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.

And there's frustration with that, but ultimately that's the strength of the institutions we have.

And so when you see unconstrained executive authority, there can be a lot of dynamism, a lot of things can get done quickly, but those things can be like, for example, what happened in China under Mao, or what happened in the Soviet Union under Stalin, or what happened in Haiti under Papa Doc and then Baby Doc, or fill in the blank, right?

What happens sometimes in corporations where a corporate leader is not constrained by the shareholders, by the board, or by anything.

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.

And so the case that I study, the only checks and balances on executive power are circumstantial.

So for example, distances in the country.

It's hard to do something over 5,000 miles.

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.

1 of the constraints on executive power the United States has versus Russia may be something you've implied and actually spoke directly to is There's something in the Russian people and the Soviet people that are attracted to authoritarian power, psychologically speaking, or at least the kind of leaders that sought authoritarian power throughout its history.

And that desire for that kind of human is a lack of a constraint.

In America, it seems as people, we desire somebody not like Stalin, somebody more like George Washington.

So that's another constraint, the belief of the people, what they admire in a leader, what they seek in a leader.

So maybe you can speak to, well, first of all, can you speak briefly to that psychology of, Is there a difference between the Russian people and the American people in terms of just what we find attractive in a leader?

Not as great a difference as it might seem.

There are unfortunately many Americans who would be happy with an authoritarian leader in the country.

It's by no means a majority, it's not even a plurality, but nonetheless it's a real sentiment in the population.

Sometimes because they feel frustrated, because things are not getting done, sometimes because they're against something that's happening in the political realm and they feel it has to be corrected and corrected quickly.

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.

So the impatience, the impulsive quality, the frustration does sometimes in people reinforce their craving for the unconstrained executive to quote get things done or shake things up or, 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, public opinion is shaped by the environments in which people live, which is very constrained in terms of public opinion.

But on that point, why at least from a distance does there seem to nevertheless be support for the current Russian president, Vladimir Putin?

Is that have to do with the fact that measuring, getting good metrics and statistics on support is difficult in authoritarian governments or is there still something appealing to that kind of power to the people?

I think we have to give credit to President Putin for understanding the psychology of the Russians Who 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.

He was not a public politician when he first started out.

He didn't have the kind of political instincts that he has now.

He didn't have the appeal to traditional values and the Orthodox Church and some of the other dimensions of his rule today.

So yes, we have to give some credit to Putin himself for this, in addition to the frustrations and the mass of the people.

But let's think about it this way, in addition, without taking away the fact that he's become a better retail politician over time, and that sentiment has shifted because of the disappointments with the transition with the population.

My kids don't have any other dad to measure me against.

I'm the only dad they know and I'm the only dad they can choose or not choose.

If they don't choose me, they still get me as dad, right?

So with Putin today, He's the only dad that the Russian people have.

Now if my kids were introduced to alternative fathers, they might be better than me.

They might be more loving, more giving, funnier, richer, whatever it might be.

There are some blood ties there for sure that I have with my kids, but they would at least be able to choose alternatives and then I would have to win their favor in that constellation of alternatives.

If President Putin were up against real alternatives, if the population had real choice and that choice could express itself and have resources and have media and everything else the way he does, maybe he would be very popular and maybe his popularity would not be as great as it currently is.

So the absence of alternatives is another factor that reinforces his authority and his popularity.

Having said that, there are many authoritarian leaders who deny any alternatives to the population and are not very popular.

So denial of alternatives doesn't guarantee you the popularity.

You still have to figure out the mass psychology and be able to appeal to it.

So in the Russian case, the winners from the transition live primarily in the big cities and are self-employed or entrepreneurial.

Even if they're not self-employed, they're able to change careers.

They have tremendous skills and talent and education and knowledge, as well as these entrepreneurial or dynamic personalities.

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 1 of them because those people have views of their own sometimes in contradiction with the president of Russia.

And then he appealed to the opposite people, the successful urban base through the so-called reformer Medvedev, the new generation, the technically literate prime minister who for a time was president.

And so that worked very successfully for Putin.

He was able to bridge a big divide in the society and gain a greater mass support than he would otherwise have had by himself.

That ruse only worked through the time that Medvedev was temporarily president for a few years because of the constitution, Putin couldn't do 3 consecutive terms and stepped aside in what they call castling in chess.

When this was over, Putin had difficulty with his popularity.

There were mass protests in the urban areas, precisely that group of the population that he had been able to win in part because of the Medvedev castling, and now had had their delusions exposed and were disillusioned.

And there were these mass protests in the urban areas, not just in the capital, by the way.

And Putin had to, as it were, come up with a new way to fix his popularity, which happened to be the annexation of Crimea, from which he got a very significant bump.

However, the trend is back in the other direction.

It's diminishing again, although it's still high relative to other leaders around the world.

So I wouldn't say that he's unpopular with the mass in Russia.

There is some popularity there, there is some success, but I would say it's tough for us to gauge because of the lack of alternatives.

And Putin is unpopular inside the state administration.

At every level, the bureaucracy of leadership.

Because those people are well informed and they understand that the country is declining, that the human capital is declining, the infrastructure is declining, the economy is not really growing, it's not really diversifying, Russia's not investing in its future.

The state officials understand all of that and then they see that the Putin clique is stealing everything in sight.

So between the failure to invest in a future and the corruption of a narrow group around the president, there's disillusionment in the state apparatus 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 they're 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, 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 don't feel like a George Washington.

Once again, the circumstances don't permit them to act that way necessarily.

George Washington did great things, but in certain circumstances.

A lot of the state officials in Russia, for certain, are corrupt.

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.

It's not imagined that Putin accomplished that.

The problem is the methods that he accomplished it with.

He used the kind of methods, that is to say, taking other people's property, putting other people in jail for political reasons.

He used the kind of methods that are not conducive to long-term growth and stability.

So he fixed the problem, but he fixed the problem and then created even bigger long-term problems potentially.

And moreover, all authoritarian regimes that use those methods are tempted to keep using them and using them and using them until they're the only ones who are the beneficiaries.

The interest groups get excluded from power and their ability to continue enjoying the fruits of the system and the resentment grows.

And so that's the situation we have in Russia.

It was rescued with methods that were not conducive to long-term success and stability.

The rescue referring to is the sort of the economic growth when Putin first took office?

Yes, they had 10 years, they had a full decade of an average of 7% growth a year, which was phenomenal and is not attributable predominantly to oil prices.

During President Putin's first term as president, the average price of oil was $35 a barrel.

During his second term as president, the average price was $70 a barrel.

So during those 2 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 2 terms of Putin's presidency, because China's phenomenal growth created insatiable demand for just about everything that the Soviet Union used to produce.

So fertilizers, cement, fill in the blank, chemicals, metals.

China had insatiable demand for everything the Soviet Union once produced.

And so China's raising of global demand overall brought Soviet era industry back from the dead.

And so there was something that happened.

Soviet era industry fell off a cliff in the 1990s.

There was a decline in manufacturing and industrial production greater than in the Great Depression in the US.

But a lot of that came back online in the 2000s and that had to do with China's phenomenal growth.

The trade between China and Russia was not always direct, so this was an indirect effect.

But raising global prices for the commodities and the products, the kind of lower end, lower value products in manufacturing, not high end stuff, but lower end stuff like steel or iron or cement or fertilizer, where the value added is not spectacular, but nonetheless, which had been destroyed by the 1990s and after the Soviet collapse, this was brought back to life.

You can bring Soviet era industry back to life once.

And that happened during Putin's first 2 terms, in addition to the liberalizing policies which spurred entrepreneurialism and 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 2 terms and people were grateful, rightly so, for that.

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Stephen Kotkin: Stalin, Putin, and the Nature of Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #63