Peter Robinson: So Stephen, I said five questions as if I could limit myself to five questions when I've got you at the table. In 1900, Stalin chose mass agitation, rejecting quiet pedagogy among autodidact workers by small circles of Social Democratic propagandists. No one among the Iskrists then saw in Lenins widely-disseminated pamphlet a sinister, conspiratorial call for a Blanquist party of intellectuals to make the revolution behind the backs of workers. Yet Stalin kept his position. Let's imagine that this Russia thing stays where it is, and it's a country of a hundred plus million people and it's got a substantial sized economy, and there's a strategic culture there that may change, may not change. An aerial view taken with a drone of damage at site of an overnight missile strike on a residential district in Kramatorsk, Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, on 2 February 2023. Deutscher gave a detailed account, spanning scores of pages, of just what Stalin had to say and how he said it in the more than forty lead articles he wrote for Bolshevik papers like Pravda, Proletariat, and Workers Path. Why did we get to where we are? The rebuilding of Ukraine alone is just the phenomenally complex and expensive proposition. I'm familiar with the history and the current situation, but I wanna have Western siv on our college campuses and I wanna have the European club as our partner. Peter Robinson: I know, I thought I, I overreached. But Kotkins a-rational, Triumph-of-the-Will Lenin did not motivate Stalin either. There go your munitions, right? Florida International University, a public institution, has adopted a radical "diversity, equity, and inclusion" program that condemns the United States as a system of "white supremacy . And then the Ukraine War comes, that is to say Russia has a full scale invasion of Ukraine. Peter Robinson: Is there some possibility, I have an ally, Zelensky, who wants it back and there's a man sitting in Moscow who has tactical nuclear weapons. But this time it didnt work. In any event, Stalin, with Bukharins support, routed the Zinoviev-Kamenev Opposition of 192526, followed by the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Trotsky or United Opposition of 192627. Stephen Mark Kotkin (born February 17, 1959)[1] is an American historian, academic, and author. Whether the change is the direction that we would prefer or not is a political debate. Until that time what did Stalin appreciate in Lenin? Stephen Kotkin: Because this is a single person regime and people inside that regime don't know. You're just over. And then the Right, they detest the European Union, and yet they want Western civilization to be taught on the college campus. It turns out nobody's gonna read ever again. Is that a good solution? I will do what I need to do to defend my country, and it is my country." A few headlines then a quotation. We're not ramping up production, that's one hand, and we're not destroying his production, that's the other hand. Russian troops entered Ukrainian territory on 24 February 2022, starting a . They have degraded their military in front of the world's eyes. When we make a mistake and we make some doozies, and we've made some doozies recently and we'll make more mistakes, we can correct them. That was the pessimistic thinking. The October Revolution was a malicious freak of history, a putsch of Bolshevik squadristi that could have been prevented by a pair of bullets one for that deranged fanatic, Lenin, master of the abusive, pithy phrase, the other for Trotsky, that grandiloquent orator. Today we would speak of a drone strike on individuals who cause offense, drawn from an approved kill list. We've demobilized after wars previously. The Fourth Congress of the RSDLP met in Stockholm in April 1906. What did Stalin understand by Marxism if, according to Kotkin, he also invoked the same doctrine to justify destroying the NEP? So here's question four, and I'm asking it of a man who's devoted his professional life to the study of history, but also to the instruction of undergraduates. He's speaking here about television, Facebook, Twitter, all of it. And Henry Kissinger also. Whilst he was a masterful intriguer who crafted a personal as well as political dictatorship, it turns out Joseph Stalin was a true believer . It's failing for him. We thought it would be quick. They have some of the same bureaucratic nightmares without the prosperity and the rule of law. Okay. Stalin by Stephen Kotkin: 9780143127864 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books A magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding of Stalin and his world The product of a decade of intrepid research, Stalin. On the one hand the argument is, Xi Jinping is less likely today to go into Taiwan because he's looked at what happened to Russia. Not so. That has produced a new situation. They are pacifist nations. It introduced special field courts that used summary justice to send more than 3,000 accused political opponents to the gallows. Stolypin strung them up in demonstrative public executions so that people would get the point.. Stephen Kotkin: Peter, I noticed you didn't quote Senator Tom Cotton on this question, but we'll take it from here. So it's a very strange situation that we find ourselves in. He attacked the political strategy of reformism and economism advocated by the anti-Iskrist paper, Rabochee Delo. All right, back to Ukraine and what comes next? So it is a cost that we pay or it's an investment. Review of Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 18781928 by Stephen Kotkin (Penguin Random House, 2015). But the key to us is we don't try to overturn the status quo. Stephen Kotkin: Okay. He studied Russian and Soviet history under Reginald E. Zelnik and Martin Malia at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his M.A. Nationalism, the new issue of Jacobin is out now. Back in the Caucasus, Stalin wrote a pamphlet about the Fourth Congress resolutions the Mensheviks had passed in favor of participation in the upcoming Duma elections. Peter Robinson: Not that much, surprisingly. Stephen Kotkin is a professor of history at Princeton and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This could go on for quite some time. Both sides have the will to continue fighting. So, France is this magnificent country. So what's on Xi Jinping's mind? Stephen Kotkin: And there was this other guy who was no good. Wouldn't the whole tone of the relationship be better if those countries had not, over the last six decades, been infantalized by our taking care of them? Kotkin pointed out that the purported dictations were not logged in the customary manner by Lenin's secretariat at the time they were supposedly given; that they were typed, with no shorthand originals in the archives, and that Lenin did not affix his initials to them;[22][23] that by the alleged dates of the dictations, Lenin had lost much of his power of speech following a series of small strokes on December 15-16, 1922, raising questions about his ability to dictate anything as detailed and intelligible as the Testament[24][25] and that the dictation given in December 1922 is suspiciously responsive to debates that took place at the 12th Communist Party Congress in April 1923. More and more people got the right to vote there. Kotkin, though, is undeterred, and personalities, great and small, crowd his book throughout. Peter Robinson: what he also sees is that Putin got away with it. Indeed, in the days and weeks after the overthrow of the tsar, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks momentarily drew nearer to one another politically, mutually ignoring the supposed worker-centric democratic affinities of one, and the intelligentsia-centric dictatorial affinities of the other portentous affinities that have preoccupied generations of liberal American historians, exemplified in the work of Leopold Haimson. Stephen Kotkin: I'm sorry you put me in that sentence. That Sevastopol is their main naval port on the Black Sea and it was established by Catherine the Great. Lots of them. I don't know how it's gonna change. "I'm sick of Joe Biden focusing on the border of a country," Ukraine, "I don't care about while he lets the border of his own country become a total war zone." Stephen Kotkin aspires to give us the definitive picture of Stalin and to bury socialism with his crimes. Okay, so that's the first point. You tell me. Where Taiwan is allowed to be independent, to build its own tremendously powerful economy, to integrate deeply with the West as long as they don't pretend they're actually independent. what are the terms of sharing the planet? How do you win a war of attrition, which is what we're in in Ukraine? that understands deeply both the United States and China having a long entangled history with China going back. Let's give them a love of history and appreciation of why they should continue to read it. It's a deep degradation of their human capital. Stephen Kotkin: because we have entertainment, social media, the infotainment complex, et cetera. Yes, they need better military training. The other way that wars go, and this is probably more typical, is what we call a war of attrition. He studied Russian and Soviet history under Reginald E. Zelnik and Martin Malia at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned an M.A. So in any case, he's not a private equity mogul. Stephen Kotkin: Those of us who are complaining that people don't know history, that's on us. Stuff that we have in stock, right? It's changed the tone to a very great extent, both in security terms and just in wider terms of who has a voice, who should have a voice, what's the center of gravity in Europe, and how should Europe operate. So that's the first and most important point. Or maybe it's not. Clearly, Stalin was in the thick of the workers movement, risking life and limb. Throughout our over one-hundred-year history, our work has directly led to policies that have produced greater freedom, democracy, and opportunity in the United States and the world. Peter Robinson: So he does this, and back in Washington they recognize the importance. No surprise, I don't know how you send a memo to a large group of people and expect it not to get leaked, but here's the quotation. If it happens, it fails and the Ukrainian counter offensive is massively successful beyond everyone's wildest dreams and they take back the territory. That story is also still unfolding. How could he set in motion things that he set in motion when the system is so big and he's just a single? But Johnson understood power and he knew how to use power. Maybe it's unsatisfying, but life is unsatisfying. And now we're in this new phase. What Xi Jinping think about the Ukrainian thing? And there's some savings in the short-term on that. And Russia is projected to grow its economy in 2023. Sure, we get that. The EU has been in existence for six decades. This also tells you why the Chinese can't take Taiwan. It's tough to bring Putin to the table over this. That's the first and deepest point. Emotional display is now privileged over self-command, changing the kinds of people and arguments that are taken seriously in public life. 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