Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Stephen Kotkin, a professor of history at Princeton
00:00:04 University and one of the great historians of our time, specializing in Russian and Soviet
00:00:10 history.
00:00:11 He has written many books on Stalin and the Soviet Union, including the first two of a
00:00:15 three volume work on Stalin, and he is currently working on volume three.
00:00:21 You may have noticed that I’ve been speaking with not just computer scientists, but physicists,
00:00:25 engineers, historians, neuroscientists, and soon much more.
00:00:29 To me, artificial intelligence is much bigger than deep learning, bigger than computing.
00:00:34 It is our civilization’s journey into understanding the human mind and creating echoes of it in
00:00:40 the machine.
00:00:41 To me, that journey must include a deep historical and psychological understanding of power.
00:00:50 Technology puts some of the greatest power in the history of our civilization into the
00:00:53 hands of engineers and computer scientists.
00:00:56 This power must not be abused.
00:00:59 And the best way to understand how such abuse can be avoided is to not be blind to the lessons
00:01:04 of history.
00:01:05 As Stephen Kotkin brilliantly articulates, Stalin was arguably one of the most powerful
00:01:12 humans in history.
00:01:14 I’ve read many books on Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Putin, and the wars of the 20th century.
00:01:20 I hope you understand the value of such knowledge to all of us, especially to engineers and
00:01:25 scientists who built the tools of power in the 21st century.
00:01:31 This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
00:01:33 If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it 5 stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify,
00:01:39 support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F R
00:01:44 I D M A N.
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00:01:51 after introducing the episode, and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow
00:01:55 of the conversation.
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00:03:05 And now, here’s my conversation with Stephen Kotkin.
00:03:11 Do all human beings crave power?
00:03:13 No.
00:03:15 Human beings crave security.
00:03:18 They crave love.
00:03:20 They crave adventure.
00:03:22 They crave power, but not equally.
00:03:26 Some human beings nevertheless do crave power.
00:03:29 For sure.
00:03:30 What words is that deeply in the psychology of people?
00:03:34 Is it something you’re born with?
00:03:36 Is it something you develop?
00:03:38 Some people crave a position of leadership or of standing out, of being recognized, and
00:03:49 that could be starting out in the school years on the schoolyard.
00:03:53 It could be within their own family, not just in their peer group.
00:03:58 Those kind of people we often see craving leadership positions from a young age often
00:04:04 end up in positions of power.
00:04:06 But they can be varied positions of power.
00:04:09 You can have power in an institution where your power is purposefully limited.
00:04:15 For example, there’s a board or a consultative body or a separation of powers.
00:04:21 Not everyone craves power whereby they’re the sole power or they’re their unconstrained
00:04:27 power.
00:04:29 That’s a little bit less usual.
00:04:30 We may think that everybody does, but not everybody does.
00:04:35 Those people who do crave that kind of power, unconstrained, the ability to decide as much
00:04:44 as life or death of other people, those people are not everyday people.
00:04:49 They’re not the people you encounter in your daily life for the most part.
00:04:54 Those are extraordinary people.
00:04:57 Most of them don’t have the opportunity to live that dream.
00:05:01 Very few of them, in fact, end up with the opportunity to live that dream.
00:05:05 So percentage wise, in your sense, if we think of George Washington, for example, would most
00:05:13 people given the choice of absolute power over a country versus maybe the capped power
00:05:20 that the United States presidential role, at least at the founding of the country represented,
00:05:27 what do you think most people would choose?
00:05:29 Well, Washington was in a position to exercise far greater power than he did.
00:05:36 And in fact, he didn’t take that option.
00:05:40 He was more interested in seeing institutionalization, of seeing the country develop strong institutions
00:05:49 rather than an individual leader like himself have excess power.
00:05:54 So that’s very important.
00:05:56 So like I said, not everyone craves unconstrained power, even if they’re very ambitious.
00:06:01 And of course, Washington was very ambitious.
00:06:03 He was a successful general before he was a president.
00:06:08 So that clearly comes from the influences on your life, where you grow up, how you grow
00:06:14 up, how you raised, what kind of values are imparted to you along the way.
00:06:20 You can understand power as the ability to share, or you can understand or the ability
00:06:27 to advance something for the collective in a collective process, not an individual process.
00:06:34 So power comes in many different varieties.
00:06:38 And ambition doesn’t always equate to despotic power.
00:06:43 Right power is something different from ordinary institutional power that we see.
00:06:51 The president of MIT does not have unconstrained power.
00:06:55 The president of MIT rightly must consult with other members of the administration,
00:07:01 with the faculty members, to a certain extent with the student body and certainly with the
00:07:07 trustees of MIT.
00:07:10 Those constraints make the institution strong and enduring and make the decisions better
00:07:17 than they would be if he had unconstrained power.
00:07:21 But you can’t say that the president is not ambitious.
00:07:24 Of course, the president is ambitious.
00:07:27 We worry about unconstrained power.
00:07:29 We worry about executive authority that’s not limited.
00:07:33 That’s the definition of authoritarianism or tyranny.
00:07:37 Unlimited or barely limited executive authority.
00:07:42 Executive authority is necessary to carry out many functions.
00:07:46 We all understand that.
00:07:47 That’s why MIT has an executive, has a president.
00:07:51 But unlimited or largely unconstrained executive power is detrimental to even the person who
00:08:00 exercises that power.
00:08:02 So what do you think?
00:08:04 It’s an interesting notion.
00:08:06 We kind of take it for granted that constraints on executive power is a good thing.
00:08:11 But why is that necessarily true?
00:08:14 So what is it about absolute power that does something bad to the human mind?
00:08:21 So you know, the popular saying of absolute power corrupts absolutely.
00:08:27 Is that the case?
00:08:28 That the power in itself is the thing that corrupts the mind in some kind of way where
00:08:35 it leads to a bad leadership over time?
00:08:39 People make more mistakes when they’re not challenged.
00:08:42 When they don’t have to explain things and get others to vote and go along with it.
00:08:48 When they can make a decision without anybody being able to block their decision or to have
00:08:54 input necessarily on their decision.
00:08:57 You’re more prone to mistakes.
00:08:59 You’re more prone to extremism.
00:09:02 There’s a temptation there.
00:09:04 For example, we have separation of powers in the United States.
00:09:08 The Congress, right, has authority that the president doesn’t have.
00:09:15 As for example, in budgeting, the so called power of the purse.
00:09:19 This can be very frustrating.
00:09:21 People want to see things happen and they complain that there’s a do nothing Congress
00:09:26 or that the situation is stalemated.
00:09:30 But actually that’s potentially a good thing.
00:09:33 In fact, that’s how our system was designed.
00:09:37 Our system was designed to prevent things happening in government.
00:09:42 And there’s frustration with that, but ultimately that’s the strength of the institutions we
00:09:47 have.
00:09:48 And so when you see unconstrained executive authority, there can be a lot of dynamism.
00:09:54 A lot of things can get done quickly.
00:09:57 But those things can be like, for example, what happened in China under Mao or what happened
00:10:02 in the Soviet Union under Stalin or what happened in Haiti under Papa Doc and then Baby Doc
00:10:08 or fill in the blank, right?
00:10:10 What happens sometimes in corporations where a corporate leader is not constrained by the
00:10:18 shareholders, by the board or by anything.
00:10:21 And they can seem to be a genius for a while, but eventually it catches up to them.
00:10:26 And so the idea of constraints on executive power is absolutely fundamental to the American
00:10:32 system, American way of thinking.
00:10:35 And not only America, obviously large other parts of the world that have a similar system,
00:10:42 not an identical system, but a similar system of checks and balances on executive power.
00:10:48 And so the case that I study, the only checks and balances on executive power are circumstantial.
00:10:56 So for example, distances in the country, it’s hard to do something over 5,000 miles
00:11:04 or the amount of time in a day, it’s hard for a leader to get to every single thing
00:11:09 the leader wants to get to because there are only 24 hours in a day.
00:11:13 Those are circumstantial constraints on executive power.
00:11:16 They’re not institutional constraints on executive power.
00:11:20 One of the constraints on executive power that United States has versus Russia, maybe
00:11:27 something you’ve implied and actually spoke directly to is there’s something in the Russian
00:11:30 people and the Soviet people that are attracted to authoritarian power, psychologically speaking,
00:11:38 or at least the kind of leaders that sought authoritarian power throughout its history.
00:11:45 And that desire for that kind of human is a lack of a constraint.
00:11:51 In America, it seems as people, we desire somebody not like Stalin, somebody more like
00:11:58 George Washington.
00:11:59 So that’s another constraint, the belief of the people, what they admire in a leader,
00:12:04 what they seek in a leader.
00:12:06 So maybe you can speak to, well, first of all, can you speak briefly to that psychology
00:12:14 of, is there a difference between the Russian people and the American people in terms of
00:12:20 just what we find attractive in a leader?
00:12:24 Not as great a difference as it might seem.
00:12:27 There are unfortunately many Americans who would be happy with an authoritarian leader
00:12:34 in the country.
00:12:35 It’s by no means a majority.
00:12:38 It’s not even a plurality, but nonetheless, it’s a real sentiment in the population.
00:12:44 Sometimes because they feel frustrated because things are not getting done.
00:12:48 Sometimes because they’re against something that’s happening in the political realm and
00:12:54 they feel it has to be corrected and corrected quickly.
00:12:57 It’s a kind of impulse.
00:12:59 People can regret the impulse later on, that the impulse is motivated by reaction to their
00:13:05 environment.
00:13:07 In the Russian case, we have also people who crave, sometimes known as a strong hand, an
00:13:13 iron hand, an authoritarian leader, because they want things to be done and be done more
00:13:18 quickly that align with their desires.
00:13:23 But I’m not sure it’s a majority in the country today.
00:13:28 Certainly in Stalin’s time, this was a widespread sentiment and people had few alternatives
00:13:34 that they understood or could appeal to.
00:13:37 Nowadays in the globalized world, the citizens of Russia can see how other systems have constraints
00:13:43 on executive power and the life isn’t so bad there.
00:13:47 In fact, the life might even be better.
00:13:50 So the impatience, the impulsive quality, the frustration does sometimes in people reinforce
00:13:58 their craving for the unconstrained executive to quote, get things done or shake things
00:14:05 up.
00:14:06 Yes, that’s true.
00:14:08 But in the Russian case, I’m not sure it’s cultural today.
00:14:12 I think it might be more having to do with the failures, the functional failures of the
00:14:20 kind of political system that they tried to institute after the Soviet collapse.
00:14:27 And so it may be frustration with the version of constraints on executive power they got
00:14:34 and how it didn’t work the way it was imagined, which has led to a sense in which nonconstrained
00:14:43 executive power could fix things.
00:14:45 But I’m not sure that that’s a majority sentiment in the Russian case, although it’s hard to
00:14:51 measure because under authoritarian regimes, a public opinion is shaped by the environment
00:15:00 in which people live, which is very constrained in terms of public opinion.
00:15:04 But on that point, why at least from a distance does there seem to nevertheless be support
00:15:11 for the current Russian president Vladimir Putin?
00:15:15 Is that have to do with the fact that measuring, getting good metrics and statistics on support
00:15:23 is difficult in authoritarian governments, or is there still something appealing to that
00:15:28 kind of power to the people?
00:15:30 I think we have to give credit to President Putin for understanding the psychology of
00:15:36 the Russians to whom he appeals.
00:15:41 Many of them were the losers in the transition from communism.
00:15:46 They were the ones whose pensions were destroyed by inflation or whose salaries didn’t go up
00:15:52 or whose regions were abandoned.
00:15:55 They were not the winners for the most part, and so I think there’s an understanding on
00:16:00 his part of their psychology.
00:16:02 Putin has grown in the position.
00:16:04 He was not a public politician when he first started out.
00:16:08 He was quite poor in public settings.
00:16:10 He didn’t have the kind of political instincts that he has now.
00:16:14 He didn’t have the appeal to traditional values and the Orthodox Church and some of the other
00:16:20 dimensions of his rule today.
00:16:24 So yes, we have to give some credit to Putin himself for this in addition to the frustrations
00:16:31 and the mass of the people.
00:16:34 But let’s think about it this way in addition, without taking away the fact that he’s become
00:16:39 a better retail politician over time and that sentiment has shifted because of the disappointments
00:16:46 with the transition with the population.
00:16:51 When I ask my kids, am I a good dad?
00:16:57 My kids don’t have any other dad to measure me against.
00:17:01 I’m the only dad they know, and I’m the only dad they can choose or not choose.
00:17:08 If they don’t choose me, they still get me as dad, right?
00:17:13 So with Putin today, he’s the only dad that the Russian people have.
00:17:18 Now, if my kids were introduced to alternative fathers, they might be better than me.
00:17:24 They might be more loving, more giving, funnier, richer, whatever it might be.
00:17:32 They might be more appealing.
00:17:34 There are some blood ties there for sure that I have with my kids, but they would at least
00:17:39 be able to choose alternatives and then I would have to win their favor in that constellation
00:17:47 of alternatives.
00:17:48 If President Putin were up against real alternatives, if the population had real choice and that
00:17:55 choice could express itself and have resources and have media and everything else the way
00:18:01 he does, maybe he would be very popular and maybe his popularity would not be as great
00:18:08 as it currently is.
00:18:10 So the absence of alternatives is another factor that reinforces his authority and his
00:18:18 popularity.
00:18:19 Having said that, there are many authoritarian leaders who deny any alternatives to the
00:18:25 population and are not very popular.
00:18:29 So denial of alternatives doesn’t guarantee you the popularity.
00:18:33 You still have to figure out the mass psychology and be able to appeal to it.
00:18:39 So in the Russian case, the winners from the transition live primarily in the big cities
00:18:49 and are self employed or entrepreneurial.
00:18:56 Even if they’re not self employed, they’re able to change careers.
00:19:00 They have tremendous skills and talent and education and knowledge as well as these entrepreneurial
00:19:08 or dynamic personalities.
00:19:12 Putin also appealed to them.
00:19:13 He did that with Medvedev and it was a very clever ruse.
00:19:18 He himself appealed to the losers from the transition, the small towns, the rural, the
00:19:27 people who were not well off and he had them for the most part.
00:19:32 Not all.
00:19:33 We don’t want to generalize to say that he had every one of them because those people
00:19:36 have views of their own, sometimes in contradiction with the president of Russia.
00:19:42 And then he appealed to the opposite people, the successful urban base through the so called
00:19:47 reformer Medvedev, the new generation, the technically literate prime minister who for
00:19:54 a time was president.
00:19:56 And so that worked very successfully for Putin.
00:19:59 He was able to bridge a big divide in the society and gain a greater mass support than
00:20:07 he would otherwise have had by himself.
00:20:09 That ruse only worked through the time that Medvedev was temporarily president for a few
00:20:17 years because of the Constitution, Putin couldn’t do three consecutive terms and stepped aside
00:20:25 in what they call castling in chess.
00:20:30 When this was over, Putin had difficulty with his popularity.
00:20:35 There were mass protests in the urban areas, precisely that group of the population that
00:20:41 he had been able to win in part because of the Medvedev castling and now had had their
00:20:48 delusions exposed and were disillusioned, and there were these mass protests in the
00:20:55 urban areas, not just in the capital, by the way.
00:20:59 And Putin had to, as it were, come up with a new way to fix his popularity, which happened
00:21:03 to be the annexation of Crimea, from which he got a very significant bump.
00:21:10 However, the trend is back in the other direction.
00:21:15 It’s diminishing again, although it’s still high relative to other leaders around the
00:21:21 world.
00:21:22 So I wouldn’t say that he’s unpopular with the mass in Russia.
00:21:28 There is some popularity there, there is some success, but I would say it’s tough for us
00:21:32 to gauge because of the lack of alternatives.
00:21:36 And Putin is unpopular inside the state administration.
00:21:42 At every level, the bureaucracy of the leadership.
00:21:45 Because those people are well informed, and they understand that the country is declining,
00:21:51 that the human capital is declining, the infrastructure is declining, the economy is not really growing,
00:21:57 it’s not really diversifying, Russia’s not investing in its future.
00:22:02 The state officials understand all of that, and then they see that the Putin clique is
00:22:07 stealing everything in sight.
00:22:10 So between the failure to invest in a future and the corruption of a narrow group around
00:22:16 the president, there’s disillusionment in the state apparatus because they see this
00:22:22 more clearly or more closely than the mass of the population.
00:22:27 They can’t necessarily yet oppose this in public because they’re people, they have families,
00:22:38 they have careers, they have children who want to go to school or want a job.
00:22:43 And so there are constraints on their ability to oppose the regime based upon what we might
00:22:49 call cowardice or other people might call realism.
00:22:52 I don’t know how courageous people can be when their family, children, career are on
00:22:59 the line.
00:23:01 So it’s very interesting dynamic to see the disillusionment inside the government with
00:23:06 the president, which is not yet fully public for the most part, but could become public.
00:23:13 And once again, if there’s an alternative, if an alternative appears, things could shift
00:23:17 quickly.
00:23:18 And that alternative could come from inside the regime.
00:23:22 From inside the regime.
00:23:23 But the leadership, the party, the people that are now, as you’re saying, opposed to
00:23:29 Putin, nevertheless, maybe you can correct me, but it feels like there’s, structurally
00:23:37 is deeply corrupt.
00:23:39 So each of the people we’re talking about are, don’t feel like a George Washington.
00:23:47 Once again, the circumstances don’t permit them to act that way necessarily, right?
00:23:53 George Washington did great things, but in certain circumstances.
00:23:57 A lot of the state officials in Russia for certain are corrupt.
00:24:03 There’s no question.
00:24:04 Many of them, however, are patriotic and many of them feel badly about where the country
00:24:12 has been going.
00:24:14 They would prefer that the country was less corrupt.
00:24:17 They would prefer that there were greater investment in all sorts of areas of Russia.
00:24:24 They might even themselves steal less if they could be guaranteed that everybody else would
00:24:30 steal less.
00:24:32 There’s a deep and abiding patriotism inside Russia, as well as inside the Russian regime.
00:24:40 So they understand that Putin in many ways rescued the Russian state from the chaos of
00:24:46 the 1990s.
00:24:47 They understand that Russia was in very bad shape as an incoherent failing state almost
00:24:55 when Putin took over and that he did some important things for Russia’s stability and
00:25:03 consolidation.
00:25:05 There’s also some appreciation that Putin stood up to the West and stood up to more
00:25:12 powerful countries and regained a sense of pride and maneuverability for Russia in the
00:25:19 international system.
00:25:21 People appreciate that and it’s real.
00:25:23 It’s not imagined that Putin accomplished that.
00:25:27 The problem is the methods that he accomplished it with.
00:25:32 He used the kind of methods, that is to say, taking other people’s property, putting other
00:25:37 people in jail for political reasons.
00:25:40 He used the kind of methods that are not conducive to long term growth and stability.
00:25:46 So he fixed the problem, but he fixed the problem and then created even bigger long
00:25:50 term problems potentially.
00:25:53 And moreover, all authoritarian regimes that use those methods are tempted to keep using
00:26:00 them and using them and using them until they’re the only ones who are the beneficiaries and
00:26:05 the group narrows and narrows.
00:26:08 The elite gets smaller and narrower.
00:26:11 The interest groups get excluded from power and their ability to continue enjoying the
00:26:18 fruits of the system and the resentment grows.
00:26:22 And so that’s the situation we have in Russia is a place that is stuck.
00:26:28 It was to a certain extent rescued.
00:26:31 It was rescued with methods that were not conducive to long term success and stability.
00:26:37 The rescue you’re referring to is the sort of the economic growth when Putin first took
00:26:43 office.
00:26:44 Yes, they had 10 years.
00:26:45 They had a full decade of an average of 7% growth a year, which was phenomenal and is
00:26:50 not attributable predominantly to oil prices.
00:26:55 During President Putin’s first term as president, the average price of oil was $35 a barrel.
00:27:03 During his second term as president, the average price was $70 a barrel.
00:27:08 So during those two terms, when Russia was growing at about 7% a year, oil prices were
00:27:16 averaging somewhere around $50 a barrel, which is fine, but is not the reason because later
00:27:24 on when oil prices were over $100 a barrel, Russia stagnated.
00:27:30 So the initial growth, do you think Putin deserves some credit for that?
00:27:34 Yes, he does because he introduced some important liberalizing measures.
00:27:40 He lowered taxes.
00:27:42 He allowed land to be bought and sold.
00:27:45 He deregulated many areas of the economy.
00:27:50 And so there was a kind of entrepreneurial burst that was partly attributable, partly
00:27:57 attributable to government policy during his first term.
00:28:01 But also he was consolidating political power.
00:28:05 And as I said, the methods he used overall for the long term were not able to continue
00:28:12 sustain that success.
00:28:14 In addition, we have to remember that China played a really big role in the success of
00:28:21 Russia in the first two terms of Putin’s presidency because China’s phenomenal growth created
00:28:30 insatiable demand for just about everything that the Soviet Union used to produce.
00:28:37 So fertilizers, cement, fill in the blank, chemicals, metals, China had insatiable demand
00:28:46 for everything the Soviet Union once produced.
00:28:50 And so China’s raising of global demand overall brought Soviet era industry back from the
00:29:00 dead.
00:29:02 And so there was something that happened.
00:29:04 Soviet era industry fell off a cliff in the 1990s.
00:29:09 There was a decline in manufacturing and industrial production greater than in the Great Depression
00:29:14 in the US.
00:29:16 But a lot of that came back online in the 2000s.
00:29:21 And that had to do with China’s phenomenal growth.
00:29:23 The trade between China and Russia was not always direct.
00:29:28 So this was an indirect effect.
00:29:30 But raising global prices for the commodities and the products, the kind of lower end, lower
00:29:38 value products in manufacturing, not high end stuff, but lower end stuff like steel
00:29:45 or iron or cement or fertilizer, where the value added is not spectacular, but nonetheless,
00:29:53 which had been destroyed by the 1990s and after the Soviet collapse, this was brought
00:29:59 back to life.
00:30:00 Now, you can do that once.
00:30:02 You can bring Soviet era industry back to life once.
00:30:06 And that happened during Putin’s first two terms, in addition to the liberalizing policies,
00:30:12 which spurred entrepreneurialism in some small and medium business.
00:30:17 The crash of the ruble in 1998, which made Russian products much cheaper abroad and made
00:30:24 imports much more expensive, also facilitated the resuscitation, the revival of domestic
00:30:31 manufacturing.
00:30:33 So all of this came together for that spectacular 10 year, 7% on average economic growth.
00:30:43 And moreover, people’s wages after inflation, their disposable income grew more even than
00:30:51 GDP grew.
00:30:52 So disposable income after inflation, that is real income, was growing greater than 7%.
00:30:59 In some cases, 10% a year.
00:31:01 So there was a boom, and the Russian people felt it, and it happened during Putin’s first
00:31:06 two terms, and people were grateful, rightly so, for that.
00:31:12 And those who don’t want to give Putin credit, give oil prices all the credit.
00:31:19 But I don’t think that oil prices can explain this.
00:31:23 Having said that, that doesn’t mean that this was sustainable over the long term.
00:31:29 So you’ve briefly mentioned, sort of implying the possibility, you know, Stalin held power
00:31:35 for, let’s say, 30 years.
00:31:38 You briefly mentioned that as a question, will Putin be able to beat that record, to
00:31:45 beat that?
00:31:46 So can you talk about your sense of, is it possible that Putin holds power for that kind
00:31:52 of duration?
00:31:54 Let’s hope not.
00:31:55 Let’s hope not for Russia’s sake.
00:31:59 The primary victims of President Putin’s power are Russians.
00:32:05 They’re not Ukrainians, although to a certain extent, Ukraine has suffered because of Putin’s
00:32:11 actions.
00:32:12 And they’re not Americans, they’re Russians.
00:32:15 Moreover, Russia has lost a great deal of human talent.
00:32:20 Tens of millions of people have left Russia since 1991 overall.
00:32:27 Somewhere between five and 10 million people have left the country and are beyond the borders
00:32:33 of the former Soviet Union.
00:32:35 So they left the Soviet space entirely.
00:32:38 Moreover, the people who left are not the poor people.
00:32:41 They’re not the uneducated.
00:32:44 They’re not the losers.
00:32:45 The people who’ve left are the more dynamic parts of the population.
00:32:50 The better educated, the more entrepreneurial.
00:32:53 So that human capital loss that Russia has suffered is phenomenal.
00:32:58 And in fact, right here where we’re sitting at MIT, we have examples of people who are
00:33:04 qualified good enough for MIT and have left Russia to come to MIT.
00:33:10 You’re looking at one of them.
00:33:12 And the other aspect, just to quickly comment, is those same people like me, I’m not welcome
00:33:19 back.
00:33:20 No, you’re not under the current regime.
00:33:22 It was a big loss for Russia if you’re patriotic, but not from the point of view of the Putin
00:33:28 regime.
00:33:29 That has to do, also factors into popularity.
00:33:33 If the people who don’t like you leave, they’re not there to complain, to protest, to vote
00:33:39 against you.
00:33:41 And so your opposition declines when you let them leave.
00:33:46 However, it’s very costly in human capital terms.
00:33:49 Hemorrhaging that much human capital is damaging, it’s self damaging.
00:33:55 And we’ve seen it accelerate.
00:33:57 It was already high, but we’ve seen it accelerate in the last seven to eight years of President
00:34:04 Putin’s rule.
00:34:07 And those people are not going back of their own volition.
00:34:11 But even if they wanted to go back, as you just said, they’d be unwelcome.
00:34:15 That’s a big cost to pay for this regime.
00:34:19 And so whatever benefits this regime might or might not have given to the country, the
00:34:25 disadvantages, the downside, the costs are also really high.
00:34:30 So we don’t want Putin lasting in power as long as Stalin.
00:34:34 It would be better if Russia were able to choose among options, to choose a new leader
00:34:40 among options.
00:34:42 Many people speculate that President Putin will name a successor the way Yeltsin named
00:34:48 Putin as his successor, President Boris Yeltsin.
00:34:52 And then Putin will leave the stage and allow the successor to take over.
00:34:58 That might seem like a good solution, but once again, we don’t need a system where you
00:35:05 hang on for as long as possible and then nominate who’s going to take over.
00:35:09 We need a system that has the kind of corrective mechanisms that democracies and markets have
00:35:17 along with rule of law.
00:35:19 A corrective mechanism is really important because all leaders make mistakes.
00:35:25 But when you can’t correct for the mistakes, then the mistakes get compounded.
00:35:32 Putin could well, he seems to be healthy, he could well last as many years as Stalin.
00:35:38 It’s hard to predict because events intercede sometimes and create circumstances that are
00:35:44 unforeseen and leaders get overthrown or have a heart attack or whatever.
00:35:51 There’s a palace insurrection where ambitious leaders on the inside for both personal power
00:35:59 and patriotic reasons try to push aside an aging leader.
00:36:04 There are many scenarios in which Putin could not last that long, but unfortunately, right
00:36:09 now, you could also imagine potentially him lasting that long, which as I said, is not
00:36:16 an outcome if you’re patriotic about Russia, it’s not an outcome you would wish out to
00:36:21 the country.
00:36:22 It’s, I guess, a very difficult question, but what practically do you feel is a way
00:36:29 out of the Putin regime, is a way out of the corruption that’s deeply underlies the state?
00:36:38 Is a, if you look from a history perspective, is a revolution required?
00:36:44 Is violence required?
00:36:47 Is from violence within or external to the country?
00:36:54 Do you see, or is a powerful, is a inspiring leader enough to step in and bring democracy
00:37:05 and kind of the free world to Russia?
00:37:09 So Russia is not a failed country.
00:37:11 It’s a middle income country with tremendous potential and has proven many times in the
00:37:17 past that when it gets in a bad way, it can reverse its trajectory.
00:37:24 Moreover, violence is rarely ever a solution.
00:37:29 Violence rarely, it may break an existing trend, but it’s rare that violence produces
00:37:35 a nonviolent, sustainable, positive outcome.
00:37:38 It happens, but it doesn’t happen frequently.
00:37:42 Mental upheaval is not a way always to institutionalize a better path forward because you need institutions.
00:37:53 People can protest as they did throughout the Middle East, and the protests didn’t necessarily
00:37:59 lead to better systems because the step from protest to new, strong, consolidated institutions
00:38:08 is a colossal leap, not a small step.
00:38:11 What we need and what we see from history and situations like this is a group within
00:38:18 the power structures, which is a patriotic that sees things going down.
00:38:25 That is to say that sees things not being developing relative to neighbors, relative
00:38:31 to richer countries, relative to more successful countries, and they want to change the trajectory
00:38:38 of Russia.
00:38:40 And if they can, in a coalition fashion, unseat the current regime for a new power sharing
00:38:49 arrangement, which once again can be frustrating because you can’t do changes immediately,
00:38:56 you can’t do things overnight, but that’s the point.
00:39:00 Constraints on your ability to change everything immediately and to force change overnight
00:39:04 is what leads to long term success potentially.
00:39:08 That’s the sustainability of change.
00:39:12 So Russia needs stronger institutions.
00:39:14 It needs court system as well as democratic institutions.
00:39:20 It needs functioning, open, dynamic markets rather than monopolies.
00:39:26 It needs meritocracy and banks to award loans on the basis of business plans, not on the
00:39:33 basis of political criteria or corrupt bribery or whatever it might be.
00:39:39 So Russia needs those kind of functioning institutions that take time, are sometimes
00:39:47 slow, don’t lead to a revolutionary transformation, but lead to potentially long term sustainable
00:39:55 growth without upheaval, without violence, without getting into a situation where all
00:40:01 of a sudden you need a miracle again.
00:40:04 Every time Russia seems to need a miracle, and that’s the problem, the solution would
00:40:11 be not needing a miracle.
00:40:14 Now having said that, the potential is there.
00:40:17 The civilization that we call Russia is amazingly impressive.
00:40:22 It has delivered world class culture, world class science.
00:40:28 It’s a great power.
00:40:30 It’s not a great power with a strong base right now, but nonetheless it is a great power
00:40:34 as it acts in the world.
00:40:36 So I wouldn’t underestimate Russia’s abilities here and I wouldn’t write off Russia.
00:40:41 I don’t see it under the current regime, a renewal of the country.
00:40:46 But if we can have from within the regime an evolution rather than a revolution in a
00:40:52 positive direction, and maybe get a George Washington figure who is strong enough to
00:41:00 push through institutionalization rather than personalism.
00:41:06 So if I could ask about one particular individual, it’d be just interesting to get your comment,
00:41:12 but also as a representative of potential leaders, I just on this podcast talked to
00:41:16 Gary Kasparov, who I’m not sure if you’re familiar with his, his ongoings.
00:41:23 So besides being a world class chess player, he’s also a very outspoken activist, sort
00:41:28 of seeing Putin, truly seeing Putin as an enemy of the free world of democracy, of balanced
00:41:38 government in Russia.
00:41:40 What do you think of people like him specifically, or just people like him trying as leaders
00:41:47 to step in, to run for president, to symbolize a new chapter in Russia’s future?
00:41:55 So we don’t need individuals.
00:41:58 Some individuals are very impressive and they have courage and they protest and they criticize
00:42:04 and they organize.
00:42:07 We need institutions.
00:42:08 We need a Duma or a parliament that functions.
00:42:12 We need a court system that functions.
00:42:15 That is to say where there are a separation of powers, impartial professional civil service,
00:42:24 impartial professional judiciary.
00:42:28 Those are the things Russia needs.
00:42:30 It’s rare that you get that from an individual, no matter how impressive, right?
00:42:35 We had Andrei Sakharov, who was an extraordinary individual, who developed the hydrogen bomb
00:42:43 under a Soviet regime, was a world class physicist, was then upset about how his scientific knowledge
00:42:53 and scientific achievements were being put to use and rebelled to try to put limits,
00:43:01 constraints, civilizing humane limits and constraints on some of the implications of
00:43:08 his extraordinary science.
00:43:10 But Sakharov, even if he had become the leader of the country, which he did not become, he
00:43:16 was more of a moral or spiritual leader, it still wouldn’t have given you a judiciary.
00:43:22 It still wouldn’t have given you a civil service.
00:43:25 It still wouldn’t have given you a Duma or functioning parliament.
00:43:29 You need a leader in coalition with other leaders.
00:43:32 You need a bunch of leaders, a whole group, and they have to be divided a little bit so
00:43:39 that not one of them can destroy all the others.
00:43:42 And they have to be interested in creating institutions, not solely or predominantly
00:43:50 in their personal power.
00:43:52 And so I have no objection to outstanding individuals and to the work that they do.
00:43:58 But I think in institutional terms, and they need to think that way too in order to be
00:44:04 successful.
00:44:05 So if we go back to the echoes of that after the Russian Revolution with Stalin, with Lenin
00:44:11 and Stalin, maybe you can correct me, but there was a group of people there in that
00:44:18 same kind of way looking to establish institutions that were beautifully built around an ideology
00:44:30 that they believed is good for the world.
00:44:34 So sort of echoing that idea of what we’re talking about, what Russia needs now, can
00:44:41 you, first of all, you’ve described a fascinating thought, which is Stalin is having amassed
00:44:48 arguably more power than any man in history, which is an interesting thing to think about.
00:44:54 But can you tell about his journey to getting that power after the Russian Revolution?
00:45:00 How does that perhaps echo to our current discussion about institutions and so on?
00:45:08 And just in general, the story I think is fascinating of how one man is able to get
00:45:14 more power than any other man in history.
00:45:17 It is a great story, not necessarily from a moral point of view, but if you’re interested
00:45:24 in power, for sure it’s an incredible story.
00:45:27 So we have to remember that Stalin is also a product of circumstances, not solely his
00:45:34 own individual drive, which is very strong.
00:45:38 For example, World War I breaks the czarist regime, the czarist order, imperial Russian
00:45:46 state.
00:45:47 Stalin has no participation whatsoever in World War I.
00:45:51 He spends World War I in exile in Siberia.
00:45:56 Until the downfall of the czarist autocracy in February 1917, Stalin is in Eastern Siberian
00:46:06 exile.
00:46:07 He’s only able to leave Eastern Siberia when that regime falls.
00:46:12 He never fights in the war.
00:46:15 He’s called up briefly towards the end of the war and is disqualified on physical grounds
00:46:21 because of physical deformities from being drafted.
00:46:25 The war continues after the czarist regime has been toppled in the capital and there’s
00:46:32 been a revolution.
00:46:35 The war continues and that war is very radicalizing.
00:46:40 The peasants begin to seize the land after the czar falls, essentially destroying much
00:46:47 of the gentry class.
00:46:49 Stalin has nothing to do with that.
00:46:50 The peasants have their own revolution, seizing the land, not in law, but in fact, de facto
00:46:57 not de jure land ownership.
00:47:00 So there are these really large processes underway that Stalin is alive during, but
00:47:08 not a driver of.
00:47:10 The most improbable thing happens, which is a very small group of people around the figure
00:47:17 of Vladimir Lenin announces that it has seized power.
00:47:23 Now by this time in October 1917, the government that has replaced the czar, the so called
00:47:30 provisional government, has failed.
00:47:34 And so there’s not so much power to seize from the provisional government.
00:47:39 What Lenin does is he does a coup on the left.
00:47:43 That is to say, Soviets or councils, as we would call them in English, which represent
00:47:51 people’s power or the masses participating in politics, a kind of radical grassroots
00:47:56 democracy are extremely popular all over the country and not dominated by any one group,
00:48:04 but predominantly socialist or predominantly leftist.
00:48:09 Russia has an election during the war, a free and fair election for the most part, despite
00:48:16 the war at the end of 1917, in December 1917, and three quarters plus of the country votes
00:48:24 socialist in some form or another.
00:48:27 So the battle was over the definition of socialism and who had the right to participate in defining
00:48:34 socialism, not only what it would be, but who had the right to decide.
00:48:39 So there’s a coup by Lenin’s group known as the Bolsheviks against all the other socialists.
00:48:47 And so Lenin declares a seizure of power whereby the old government has failed, people’s power,
00:48:54 the councils known as the Soviets are going to take their place, and Lenin seizes power
00:49:01 in the name of the Soviets.
00:49:03 So it’s a coup against the left, against the rest of the left, not against the provisional
00:49:09 government that has replaced the czar, which has already failed.
00:49:13 And so Stalin is able to come to power along with Lenin in this crazy seizure of power
00:49:21 on the left against the rest of the left in October 1917, which we know is the October
00:49:27 Revolution, and I call the October coup as many other historians call.
00:49:35 The October Revolution happened after the seizure of power.
00:49:38 What’s interesting about this episode is that the leftists who seize power in the name of
00:49:44 the Soviets, in the name of the masses, in the name of people’s power, they retain their
00:49:49 hold.
00:49:51 Many times in history, there’s a seizure of power by the left, and they fail.
00:49:56 They collapse.
00:49:58 They’re cleaned out by an army or what we call forces of order, by counter revolutionary
00:50:03 forces.
00:50:04 Lenin’s revolution, Lenin’s coup is successful.
00:50:09 It is able to hold power, not just seize power.
00:50:12 They win a civil war, and they’re entrenched in the heart of the country already by 1921.
00:50:21 Stalin is part of that group.
00:50:23 Lenin needs somebody to run.
00:50:26 This new regime in the kind of nitty gritty way, Lenin is the leader, the undisputed leader
00:50:32 in the Bolshevik party, which changes their name to communists in 1918.
00:50:38 He makes Stalin the general secretary of the communist party.
00:50:45 He creates a new position, which hadn’t existed before, a kind of day to day political manager,
00:50:52 a right hand man.
00:50:54 Not because Lenin is looking to replace himself.
00:50:57 He’s looking to institutionalize a helpmate, a right hand man.
00:51:02 He does this in the spring of 1922.
00:51:08 Stalin is named to this position, which Lenin has created expressly for Stalin.
00:51:12 So there has been a coup on the left whereby the Bolsheviks who become communists have
00:51:19 seized power against the rest of the socialists and anarchists and the entire left.
00:51:25 And then there’s an institutionalization of a position known as general secretary of the
00:51:30 communist party, right hand man of Lenin.
00:51:34 Less than six weeks after Lenin has created this position and installed Stalin, Lenin
00:51:40 has a stroke, a major stroke, and never really returns as a full actor to power before he
00:51:50 dies of a fourth stroke in January 1924.
00:51:55 So a position is created for Stalin to run things on Lenin’s behalf.
00:52:00 And then Lenin has a stroke.
00:52:02 And so Stalin now has this new position general secretary, but he’s the right hand of a person
00:52:09 who’s no longer exercising day to day control over affairs.
00:52:15 Stalin then uses this new position to create a personal dictatorship inside the Bolshevik
00:52:21 dictatorship, which is the remarkable story I tried to tell.
00:52:25 So is there anything nefarious about any of what you just described?
00:52:30 So it seems conveniently that the position is created just for Stalin.
00:52:37 There was a few other brilliant people, arguably more brilliant than Stalin in the vicinity
00:52:42 of Lenin.
00:52:43 Why was Stalin chosen?
00:52:45 Why did Lenin all of a sudden fall ill?
00:52:51 It’s perhaps a conspiratorial question, but is there anything nefarious about any of this
00:52:56 historical trajectory to power that Stalin took in creating the personal dictatorship?
00:53:02 So history is full of contingency and surprise.
00:53:07 After something happens, we all think it’s inevitable.
00:53:11 It had to happen that way.
00:53:14 Everything was leading up to it.
00:53:16 So Hitler seizes power in Germany in 1933, and the Nazi regime gets institutionalized
00:53:24 by several of his moves after being named chancellor.
00:53:29 And so all German history becomes a story of the Nazi rise to power, Hitler’s rise to
00:53:34 power.
00:53:35 Every trend tendency is bent into that outcome.
00:53:40 Things which don’t seem related to that outcome all of a sudden get bent in that direction.
00:53:46 And other trends that were going on are no longer examined because they didn’t lead to
00:53:51 that outcome.
00:53:53 But Hitler’s becoming chancellor of Germany in 1933 was not inevitable.
00:53:58 It was contingent.
00:54:00 He was offered the position by the traditional conservatives.
00:54:04 He’s part of the radical right and the traditional right named him chancellor.
00:54:09 The Nazi party never outright won an election that was free and fair before Hitler came
00:54:15 to power.
00:54:16 And in fact, its votes on the eve of Hitler becoming chancellor declined relative to the
00:54:22 previous election.
00:54:24 So there’s contingency in history, and so Lenin’s illness, his stroke, the neurological
00:54:33 and blood problems that he had were not a structure in history.
00:54:40 In other words, if Lenin had been a healthier figure, Stalin might never have become the
00:54:45 Stalin that we know.
00:54:47 That’s not to say that all history is accidental, just that we need to relate the structural,
00:54:53 the larger structural factors to the contingent factors.
00:54:57 Why did Lenin pick Stalin?
00:54:59 Well, Stalin was a very effective organizer, and the position was an organizational position.
00:55:06 Stalin could get things done.
00:55:08 He would carry out assignments no matter how difficult.
00:55:11 He wouldn’t complain that it was hard work or too much work.
00:55:16 He wouldn’t go off womanizing and drinking and ignore his responsibilities.
00:55:22 Lenin chose Stalin among other options because he thought Stalin was the better option.
00:55:28 Once again, he wasn’t choosing his successor because he didn’t know he was going to have
00:55:32 this stroke.
00:55:34 Lenin had some serious illnesses, but he had never had a major stroke before.
00:55:40 So the choice was made based upon Stalin’s organizational skills and promise against
00:55:50 the others who were in the regime.
00:55:52 Now, they can seem more brilliant than Stalin, but he was more effective, and I’m not sure
00:55:57 they were very brilliant.
00:55:59 Well, he was exceptionally competent actually at the tasks for running a government, the
00:56:04 executive branch, right, of a dictator.
00:56:07 Yes.
00:56:08 He turned out to be very adept at being a dictator.
00:56:11 And so if he had been chosen by Lenin and had not been very good, he would have been
00:56:18 pushed aside by others.
00:56:20 Yeah.
00:56:21 You can get a position by accident.
00:56:24 You can be named because you’re someone’s friend or someone’s relative, but to hold
00:56:30 that position, to hold that position in difficult circumstances, and then to build effectively
00:56:36 a superpower on all that bloodshed, right, you have to be skilled in some way.
00:56:44 It can’t be just the accident that brings you to power because if accident brings you
00:56:49 to power, it won’t last.
00:56:52 Just like we discovered with Putin, he had some qualities that we didn’t foresee at the
00:56:57 beginning, and he’s been able to hold power, not just be named.
00:57:02 Now, Putin and Stalin are very different people.
00:57:06 These are very different regimes.
00:57:08 I wouldn’t put them in the same sentence.
00:57:10 My point is not that one resembles the other.
00:57:14 My point is that when people come to power for contingent reasons, they don’t stay in
00:57:20 power unless they’re able to manage it.
00:57:23 And Stalin was able to build a personal dictatorship inside that dictatorship.
00:57:29 He was cunning, he was ruthless, and he was a workaholic.
00:57:33 He was very diligent.
00:57:35 He had a phenomenal memory, and so he could remember people’s names and faces and events.
00:57:41 And this was very advantageous for him as he built the machine that became the Soviet
00:57:48 state and bureaucracy.
00:57:50 One of the things, maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong, what you’ve made me realize
00:57:54 is this wasn’t some kind of manipulative personality trying to gain more power solely, like kind
00:58:02 of an evil picture of a person, but he truly believed in communism.
00:58:10 As far as I can understand, again, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but he wanted to
00:58:13 build a better world by infusing communism into the country, perhaps into the whole world.
00:58:26 So maybe my question is what role does communism as an idea, as an ideology play in all of
00:58:35 this?
00:58:36 What was the power in the people of the time, in the Russian people, actually just the whole
00:58:41 20th century?
00:58:43 You’re right.
00:58:44 Stalin was a true believer, and this is very important.
00:58:48 He was also hungry for power and for personal power, but just as you said, not for power’s
00:58:54 sake, not only for power.
00:58:57 He was interested in enacting communism in reality and also in building a powerful state.
00:59:04 He was a statist, a traditional Russian statist in the imperial sense, and this won him a
00:59:11 lot of followers.
00:59:14 The fact that they knew he was a hardcore true believing communist won him a lot of
00:59:19 followers among the communists, and the fact that he was a hardcore defender of Russian
00:59:26 state interests now in the Soviet guise also won him a lot of followers.
00:59:32 Sometimes those groups overlapped, the communists and the Russian patriots, and sometimes they
00:59:37 were completely different groups, but both of them shared an admiration for Stalin’s
00:59:43 dedication to those goals and his abilities to enact them.
00:59:48 And so it’s very important to understand that however thirsty he was for power, and he was
00:59:55 very thirsty for power, that he was also driven by ideals.
01:00:02 Now I don’t necessarily think that everyone around Stalin shared those ideals.
01:00:11 We have to be careful not to make everybody into a communist true believer, not to make
01:00:16 everybody into a great statist Russian patriot, but they were widespread and powerful attractions
01:00:25 for a lot of people.
01:00:27 And so Stalin’s ability to communicate to people that he was dedicated to those pursuits
01:00:35 and his ability to drive towards them were part of his appeal.
01:00:40 Where he also resorted to manipulation, he also resorted to violence, he lied, he spoke
01:00:47 out of all sides of his mouth, he slandered other people, he sabotaged potential rivals.
01:00:55 He used every underhanded method, and then some, in order to build his personal dictatorship.
01:01:03 Now he justified this, as you said, by appeals to communism and to Soviet power.
01:01:09 To himself as well too.
01:01:10 To himself and to others.
01:01:12 And so he justified it in his own mind and to others, but certainly any means, right,
01:01:20 were acceptable to him to achieve these ends.
01:01:24 And he identified his personal power with communism and with Russian glory in the world.
01:01:31 So he felt that he was the only one who could be trusted, who could be relied upon to build
01:01:37 these things.
01:01:38 Now, we put ourselves back in that time period.
01:01:43 The Great Depression was a very difficult time for the capitalist system.
01:01:48 There was mass unemployment, a lot of hardship, fascism, Nazism, Imperial Japan.
01:01:58 There were a lot of associations that were negative with the kind of capitalist system
01:02:04 that was not a hundred percent, not a monolith, but had a lot of authoritarian incarnations.
01:02:14 There was imperialism, colonies that even the democratic rule of law capitalist states
01:02:21 had non democratic, non rule of law colonies under their rule.
01:02:25 So the image and reality of capitalism during that time period between World War I and World
01:02:32 War II was very different from how it would become later.
01:02:37 And so in that time period, in that interwar conjuncture after World War I, before World
01:02:43 War II, communism held some appeal inside the Soviet Union for sure, but even outside
01:02:51 the Soviet Union because the image and reality of capitalism disappointed many people.
01:02:56 Now, in the end, communism was significantly worse.
01:03:01 Many more victims and the system of course would eventually implode.
01:03:06 But nonetheless, there were real problems that communism tried to address.
01:03:11 It didn’t solve those problems.
01:03:12 It was not a solution, but it didn’t come out of nowhere.
01:03:17 It came out of the context of that interwar period.
01:03:20 And so Stalin’s rule, some people saw it as potentially a better option than imperialism,
01:03:29 fascism and Great Depression.
01:03:32 Having said that, they were wrong.
01:03:34 It turned out that Stalin wasn’t a better alternative to markets and private property
01:03:40 and rule of law and democracy.
01:03:43 However, that didn’t become clearer to people until after World War II, after Nazism had
01:03:51 been defeated, Imperial Japan had been defeated, a fascist Italy had been defeated and decolonization
01:03:58 had happened around the world, and there was a middle class economic boom in the period
01:04:04 from the late 40s through the 70s that created a kind of mass middle class in many societies.
01:04:11 So capitalism rose from the ashes as it were, and this changed the game for Stalin and communism.
01:04:21 Capitalism is about an alternative to capitalism, and if that alternative is not superior, there’s
01:04:29 no reason for communism to exist.
01:04:32 But if capitalism is in foul odor, if people have a bad opinion, a strong critique of capitalism,
01:04:41 there can be appeal to alternatives, and that’s kind of what happened with Stalin’s rule.
01:04:47 But after World War II, the context changed a lot, capitalism was very different, much
01:04:52 more successful, nonviolent compared to what it was in the interwar period.
01:05:00 And the Soviet Union had a tough time competing against that new context.
01:05:05 Now today we see similarly that the image and reality of capitalism is on the question
01:05:12 again, which leads some people to find an answer in socialism as an alternative.
01:05:19 So you just kind of painted a beautiful picture of comparison.
01:05:23 This is the way we think about ideologies because we, is what’s working better.
01:05:29 Do you separate in your mind the ideals of communism to the Stalinist implementation
01:05:34 of communism, and again, capitalism and American implementation of capitalism?
01:05:41 And as we look at now the 21st century where, yes, this idea of socialism being a potential
01:05:51 political system that we would, or economic system we would operate under in the United
01:05:56 States rising up again as an idea.
01:05:59 So how do we think about that again in the 21st century, about these ideas, fundamental
01:06:05 deep ideas of communism and capitalism?
01:06:07 Yeah, so in the Marxist schema, there was something called feudalism, which was supposedly
01:06:14 destroyed by the bourgeoisie who created capitalism.
01:06:19 And then the working class was supposed to destroy capitalism and create socialism.
01:06:25 But socialism wasn’t the end stage.
01:06:27 The end stage was going to be communism.
01:06:29 So that’s why the communist party in the Soviet Union first built socialism transcending capitalism.
01:06:37 The next stage was socialism and the end game, the final stage was communism.
01:06:43 So their version of socialism was derived from Marx.
01:06:47 And Marx argued that the problem was capitalism had been very beneficial for a while.
01:06:57 It had produced greater wealth and greater opportunity than feudalism had.
01:07:03 But then it had come to serve only the narrow interests of the so called bourgeoisie or
01:07:08 the capitalists themselves.
01:07:11 And so for humanity’s sake, the universal class, the working class needed to overthrow
01:07:17 capitalism in order for greater productivity, greater wealth to be produced for all of humanity
01:07:24 to flourish and on a higher level.
01:07:27 So you couldn’t have socialism unless you destroyed capitalism.
01:07:32 So that meant no markets, no private property, no so called parliaments or bourgeois parliaments
01:07:40 as they were called.
01:07:42 So you got socialism in Marx’s schema by transcending, by eliminating capitalism.
01:07:50 Now Marx also called for freedom.
01:07:55 He said that this elimination of markets and private property and bourgeois parliaments
01:08:00 would produce greater freedom in addition to greater abundance.
01:08:04 However, everywhere this was tried, it produced tyranny and mass violence, death and shortages.
01:08:15 Everywhere it was tried.
01:08:16 There’s no exception in historical terms.
01:08:19 And so it’s very interesting.
01:08:22 Marx insisted that capitalism had to be eliminated.
01:08:26 You couldn’t have markets.
01:08:28 Markets were chaos.
01:08:29 You needed planning.
01:08:31 You couldn’t have hiring of wage labor.
01:08:35 That was wage slavery.
01:08:37 You couldn’t have private property because that was a form of theft.
01:08:43 So in the Marxist scheme, somehow you were going to eliminate capitalism and get to freedom.
01:08:50 It turned out you didn’t get to freedom.
01:08:52 So then people said, well, you can’t blame Marx because he said we needed freedom.
01:08:58 He was pro freedom.
01:09:00 So it’s kind of like dropping a nuclear bomb.
01:09:04 You say you’re going to drop a nuclear bomb, but you want to minimize civilian casualties.
01:09:13 So the dropping of the nuclear bomb is the elimination of markets, private property and
01:09:18 parliaments.
01:09:21 But you’re going to bring freedom or you’re going to minimize civilian casualties.
01:09:25 So you drop the nuclear bomb, you eliminate the capitalism and you get famine, deportation,
01:09:34 no constraints on executive power and not abundance, but shortages.
01:09:40 And people say, well, that’s not what Mark said.
01:09:43 That’s not what I said.
01:09:44 I said, I wanted to minimize civilian casualties.
01:09:47 The nuclear bomb goes off and there’s mass civilian casualties.
01:09:52 And you keep saying, but I said, drop the bomb, but minimize civilian casualties.
01:09:58 So that’s where we are.
01:09:59 That’s history, not philosophy.
01:10:01 I’m speaking about historical examples, all the cases that we have.
01:10:07 Marx was not a theorist of inequality.
01:10:11 Marx was a theorist of alienation, of dehumanization, of fundamental constraints or what he called
01:10:22 fetters on productivity and on wealth, which he all attributed to capitalism.
01:10:29 Marx wasn’t bothered by inequality.
01:10:31 He was bothered by something deeper, something worse, right?
01:10:37 Those socialists who figured this out, who understood that if you drop the nuclear bomb,
01:10:44 there was no way to minimize civilian casualties.
01:10:48 All socialists who came to understand that if you eliminated capitalism, markets, private
01:10:54 property and parliaments, if you eliminated that, you wouldn’t get freedom.
01:11:00 Those Marxists, those socialists became what we would call social Democrats or people who
01:11:07 would use the state to regulate the market, not to eliminate the market.
01:11:14 They would use the state to redistribute income, not to destroy private property and markets.
01:11:22 And so this in the Marxist schema was apostasy because they were accepting markets and private
01:11:29 property.
01:11:30 They were accepting alienation and wage slavery.
01:11:33 They were accepting capitalism in principle, but they wanted to fix it.
01:11:38 They wanted to ameliorate.
01:11:40 They wanted to regulate.
01:11:42 And so they became what was denounced as revisionists, not true Marxists, not real revolutionaries,
01:11:50 but parliamentary road, parliamentarians.
01:11:54 We know this as normal politics, normal social democratic politics from the European case
01:12:01 or from the American case, but they are not asking to eliminate capitalism, blaming capitalism,
01:12:09 blaming markets and private property.
01:12:11 So this rift among the socialists, the ones who are for elimination of capitalism, transcending
01:12:20 capitalism, otherwise you could never, ever get to abundance and freedom in the Marxist
01:12:27 schema versus those who accept capitalism, but want to regulate and redistribute.
01:12:34 That rift on the left has been with us almost from the beginning.
01:12:39 It’s a kind of civil war on the left between the Leninists and the social democrats or
01:12:45 the revisionists as they’re known pejoratively by the Leninists.
01:12:50 We have the same confusion today in the world today where people also cite Marx saying capitalism
01:13:00 is a dead end and we need to drop that nuclear bomb and get freedom, get no civilian casualties
01:13:08 versus those who say, yes, there are inequities.
01:13:13 There’s a lack of equality of opportunity.
01:13:18 There are many other issues that we need to deal with and we can fix those issues.
01:13:22 We can regulate, we can redistribute.
01:13:24 I’m not advocating this as a political position.
01:13:27 I’m not taking a political position myself.
01:13:30 I’m just saying that there’s a confusion on the left between those who accept capitalism
01:13:36 and want to regulate it versus those who think capitalism is inherently evil and if we eliminate
01:13:42 it we’ll get to a better world when in fact history shows that if you eliminate capitalism
01:13:48 you get to a worse world.
01:13:50 The problems might be real, but the solutions are worse.
01:13:54 From history’s lessons, now we have deep painful lessons, but there’s not that many of them.
01:14:00 You know, our history is relatively short as a human species.
01:14:04 Do we have a good answer on the left of Leninist, Marxist versus Social Democrat versus capitalism
01:14:13 versus any anarchy?
01:14:18 Do we have sufficient samples from history to make better decisions about the future
01:14:23 of our politics and economics?
01:14:25 For sure.
01:14:26 We have the American Revolution, which was a revolution not about class, not about workers,
01:14:34 not about a so called universal class of the working class, elimination of capitalism markets
01:14:39 and the bourgeoisie, but was about the category citizen.
01:14:44 It was about universal humanity where everyone in theory could be part of it as a citizen.
01:14:52 The revolution fell short of its own ideals.
01:14:55 Not everyone was a citizen.
01:14:58 For example, if you didn’t own property, you were a male but didn’t own property.
01:15:03 You didn’t have full rights of a citizen.
01:15:06 If you were a female, whether you own property or not, you weren’t a full citizen.
01:15:11 If you were imported from Africa against your will, you were a slave and not a citizen.
01:15:18 And so not everyone was afforded the rights in actuality that were declared in principle.
01:15:27 However, over time, the category citizen could expand and slaves could be emancipated and
01:15:35 they could get the right to vote.
01:15:37 They could become citizens.
01:15:40 Nonproperty owning males could get the right to vote and become full citizens.
01:15:45 Females could get the right to vote and become full citizens.
01:15:49 In fact, eventually my mother was able to get a credit card in her own name in the 1970s
01:15:55 without my father having to co sign the paperwork.
01:15:59 It took a long time.
01:16:02 But nonetheless, the category citizen can expand and it can become a universal category.
01:16:09 So we have that, the citizen universal humanity model of the American Revolution, which was
01:16:17 deeply flawed at the time it was introduced, but fixable over time.
01:16:23 We also had that separation of powers and constraint on executive power that we began
01:16:28 this conversation with.
01:16:30 That was also institutionalized in the American Revolution because they were afraid of tyranny.
01:16:37 They were afraid of unconstrained executive power.
01:16:41 So they built a system that would contain that, constrain it institutionally, not circumstantially.
01:16:48 So that’s a great gift.
01:16:50 Within that universal category of citizen, which has over time come closer to fulfilling
01:16:58 its original promise.
01:17:00 And within those institutional constraints, that separation of powers, constraint on executive
01:17:05 power, within that we’ve developed what we might call normal politics, left right politics.
01:17:14 People can be in favor of redistribution, and government action and people can be in
01:17:20 favor of small government, hands off government, no redistribution or less redistribution.
01:17:29 That’s the normal left right political spectrum, where you respect the institutions and separation
01:17:35 of powers.
01:17:37 And you respect the universal category of citizenship and equality before the law and
01:17:42 everything else.
01:17:44 I don’t see any problems with that whatsoever.
01:17:49 I see that as a great gift, not just to this country, but around the world and other places
01:17:55 besides the United States have developed this.
01:18:00 The problems arise at the extremes, the far left and the far right that don’t recognize
01:18:07 the legitimacy either of capitalism or of democratic rule of law institutions.
01:18:14 And they want to eliminate constraints on executive power.
01:18:17 They want to control the public sphere or diminish the independence of the media.
01:18:23 They want to take away markets or private property and redistribution becomes something
01:18:28 bigger than just redistribution.
01:18:30 It becomes actually that original Marxist idea of transcending capitalism.
01:18:37 So I’m not bothered by the left or the right.
01:18:41 I think they’re normal and we should have that debate.
01:18:45 We’re a gigantic, diverse country of many different political points of view.
01:18:50 I’m troubled only by the extremes that are against the system qua system that want to
01:18:57 get rid of it and supposedly that will be the bright path to the future.
01:19:03 History tells us that the far left and the far right are wrong about that.
01:19:08 But once again, this doesn’t mean that you have to be a social democrat.
01:19:13 You could be a libertarian.
01:19:15 You could be a conservative.
01:19:17 You could be a centrist.
01:19:19 You could be conservative on some issues and liberal on other issues.
01:19:24 All of that comes under what I would presume to be normal politics.
01:19:28 And I see that as the important corrective mechanism.
01:19:31 Normal politics and market economies, non monopolistic, open, free and dynamic market
01:19:39 economies.
01:19:40 I don’t like concentrations of power politically and I don’t like concentrations of power economically.
01:19:47 I like competition in the political realm.
01:19:50 I like competition in the economic realm.
01:19:53 This is not perfect.
01:19:55 It’s constantly needs to be protected and reinvented and there are flaws that are fundamental
01:20:03 and need to be adjusted and addressed and everything else, especially equality of opportunity.
01:20:11 Equality of outcome is unreachable and is a mistake because it produces perverse and
01:20:18 unintended consequences.
01:20:20 Equality of outcome attempts, attempts to make people equal on the outcome side, but
01:20:27 attempts to make them more equal on the front end, on the opportunity side.
01:20:33 That’s really, really important for a healthy society.
01:20:36 That’s where we’ve fallen down.
01:20:38 Our schools are not providing equality of opportunity for the majority of people in
01:20:46 all of our school systems.
01:20:49 And so I see problems there.
01:20:51 I see a need to invest in ourselves, invest in infrastructure, invest in human capital,
01:20:59 create greater equality of opportunity, but also to make sure that we have good governance
01:21:05 because governance is the variable that enables you to do all these other things.
01:21:11 I’ve watched quite a bit, returning back to Putin, I’ve watched quite a few interviews
01:21:17 with Putin and conversations, especially because I speak Russian fluently, I can understand
01:21:24 often the translations lose a lot.
01:21:30 I find the man putting morality aside very deep and interesting.
01:21:40 And I found almost no interview with him to get at that depth.
01:21:46 I was very hopeful for the Oliver Stone documentary and with him, and to me, because I deeply
01:21:54 respect Oliver Stone as a filmmaker in general, but it was a complete failure in my eyes,
01:22:00 that interview.
01:22:03 The lack of, I mean, I suppose you could toss it up to a language barrier, but a complete
01:22:11 lack of diving deep into the person is what I saw.
01:22:16 My question is a strange one, but if you were to sit down with Putin and have a conversation,
01:22:25 or perhaps if you were to sit down with Stalin and have a conversation, what kind of questions
01:22:30 would you ask?
01:22:32 This wouldn’t be televised unless you want it to be.
01:22:36 So this is only you, so you’re allowed to ask about some of the questions that are sort
01:22:43 of not socially acceptable, meaning putting morality aside, getting into depth of the
01:22:49 human character.
01:22:50 What would you ask?
01:22:52 So once again, they’re very different personalities and very different time periods and very different
01:22:57 regimes.
01:22:58 So what I would talk to Stalin about and Putin about are not in the same category necessarily.
01:23:08 So let’s take Putin.
01:23:11 So I would ask him where he thinks this is going, where he thinks Russia is going to
01:23:16 be in 25 years or 50 years.
01:23:20 What’s the long term vision?
01:23:23 What does he anticipate the current trends are going to produce?
01:23:26 Is he under the illusion that Russia is on the upswing, that things are actually going
01:23:35 pretty well, that in 25 years Russia is going to still be a great power with a tremendous
01:23:41 dynamic economy and a lot of high tech and a lot of human capital and wonderful infrastructure
01:23:48 and a very high standard of living and a secure borders and sense of security at home.
01:23:56 Does he think the current path is leading in that direction and if not, if he understands
01:24:05 that the current trajectory does not provide for those kinds of circumstances, does it
01:24:12 bother him?
01:24:14 Does he worry about that?
01:24:16 Does he care about the future 25 or 50 years from now?
01:24:20 Deep down, what do you think his answer is?
01:24:22 The honest answer?
01:24:23 He thinks he’s on that trajectory already or he doesn’t care about that long term trajectory.
01:24:29 So that’s the mystery for me with him.
01:24:31 He’s clever.
01:24:33 He has tremendous sources of information.
01:24:36 He has great experience now as a world leader having served for effectively longer than
01:24:42 Leonid Brezhnev’s long 18 year reign.
01:24:47 And so Putin has accumulated a great deal of experience at the highest level compared
01:24:53 to where he started.
01:24:55 And so I’m interested to understand how he sees this long term evolution or non evolution
01:25:03 of Russia and whether he believes he’s got them on the right trajectory or whether if
01:25:10 he doesn’t believe that he cares.
01:25:12 I have no idea because I’ve never spoken to him about this, but I would love to hear the
01:25:16 answer.
01:25:18 Sometimes you have to ask questions not directly like that, but you have to come a little bit
01:25:23 sideways.
01:25:25 You can elicit answers from people by making them feel comfortable and coming sideways
01:25:30 with them.
01:25:31 And just a quick question.
01:25:33 So that’s talking about Russia, Putin’s role in Russia.
01:25:38 Do you think it’s interesting to ask, and you could say the same for Stalin, the more
01:25:43 personal question of how do you feel yourself about this whole thing?
01:25:50 About your life, about your legacy, looking at the person that’s one of the most powerful
01:25:59 and important people in the history of civilization, both Putin and Stalin, you could argue.
01:26:04 Yeah.
01:26:05 Once you experience power at that level, it becomes something that’s almost necessary
01:26:11 for you as a human being.
01:26:14 It’s a drug.
01:26:15 It’s an aphrodisiac.
01:26:17 It’s a feeling.
01:26:18 You know, you go to the gym to exercise and the endorphins, the chemicals get released.
01:26:26 And even if you’re tired or you’re sore, you get this massive chemical change, which has
01:26:34 very dynamic effects on how you feel and the kind of level of energy you have for the rest
01:26:39 of the day.
01:26:41 And if you do that for a long time and then you don’t do it for a while, you’re like a
01:26:46 drug addict not getting your fix.
01:26:49 You miss it.
01:26:50 Your body misses that release of endorphins to a certain extent.
01:26:55 That’s how power works for people like Putin.
01:26:58 That’s how power works for people who run universities or are secretaries of state or
01:27:04 run corporations, fill in the blank.
01:27:08 In whatever ways power is exercised, it becomes almost a drug for people.
01:27:14 It becomes something that’s difficult for them to give up.
01:27:17 It becomes a part of who they are.
01:27:20 It becomes necessary for their sense of self and well being.
01:27:25 The greatest people, the people I admire the most are the ones that can step away from
01:27:30 power, can give up the drug, can be satisfied, can be stronger even by walking away from
01:27:40 continued power when they had the option to continue.
01:27:45 So with a person like Putin, once again, I don’t know him personally, so I have no basis
01:27:51 to judge this.
01:27:52 This is a general statement observable with many people and in historical terms.
01:28:00 With a person like Putin who’s exercised this much power for this long, it’s something that
01:28:05 becomes a part of who you are and you have a hard time imagining yourself without it.
01:28:11 You begin to conflate your personal power with the well being of the nation.
01:28:17 You begin to think that the more power you have, the better off the country is this conflation.
01:28:22 You begin to be able to not imagine, you can no longer imagine what it would be like just
01:28:30 to be an ordinary citizen or an ordinary person running a company even, something much smaller
01:28:38 than a country.
01:28:39 So I anticipate that without knowing for sure that he would be in that category of person,
01:28:47 but you’d want to explore that with questions with him about, so what’s his day look like
01:28:56 from beginning to end?
01:28:57 Just take me through a typical day of yours.
01:28:59 What do you do on a day?
01:29:00 How does it start?
01:29:02 What are the ups?
01:29:03 What are the downs?
01:29:04 What are the parts of the day you look forward to the most?
01:29:07 What are the parts of the day you don’t look forward to that much?
01:29:11 What do you consider a good day?
01:29:13 What do you consider a bad day?
01:29:16 How do you know that what you’re doing is having the effects that you intend?
01:29:22 How do you follow up?
01:29:23 How do you gather the information, the reaction?
01:29:26 How do you get people to tell you to your face things that they know are uncomfortable
01:29:31 or that you might not want to hear?
01:29:34 Those kind of questions.
01:29:35 And through that window, through that kind of questioning, you get a window into a man
01:29:40 with power.
01:29:42 So let me ask about Stalin because you’ve done more research, there’s another amazing
01:29:48 interview you’ve had, the introduction was that you know more about Stalin than Stalin
01:29:56 himself.
01:29:57 You’ve done an incredible amount of research on Stalin.
01:30:00 So if you could talk to him, get sort of direct research, what question would you ask of Stalin?
01:30:07 I have so many questions, I don’t even know where I would begin.
01:30:12 The thing about studying a person like Stalin, who’s an immense creature, right?
01:30:18 He’s exercising the power of life and death over hundreds of millions of people.
01:30:23 He’s making decisions about novels and films and turbines and submarines and packs with
01:30:31 Hitler or deals with Churchill and Roosevelt and occupation of Mongolia or occupation of
01:30:39 North Korea.
01:30:41 He’s making phenomenally consequential decisions over all spheres of life, all areas of endeavor
01:30:49 and over much of the globe, much of the landmass of the earth.
01:30:56 And so what’s that like?
01:30:59 Does he sometimes reflect on the amount of power and responsibility he has that he can
01:31:06 exercise?
01:31:07 Does he sometimes think about what it means that a single person has that kind of power?
01:31:14 And does it have an effect on his relations with others, his sense of self, the kinds
01:31:20 of things he values in life?
01:31:22 Does he sometimes think it’s a mistake that he’s accumulated this much power?
01:31:27 Does he sometimes wish he had a simpler life?
01:31:30 Or is he once again so drunk, so enamored, so caught up with chemically and spiritually
01:31:41 with exercising this kind of power that he couldn’t live without it?
01:31:45 And then what were you thinking, I would ask him, in certain decisions that he made?
01:31:51 What were you thinking on certain dates and certain circumstances where you made a decision
01:31:56 and could have made a different decision?
01:31:59 Can you recall your thought processes?
01:32:02 Can you bring the decision back?
01:32:04 Was it seat of the pants?
01:32:06 Was it something you’d been planning?
01:32:08 Did you just improvise or did you have a strategy?
01:32:12 What were you guided by?
01:32:15 Whose examples did you look to?
01:32:17 When you picked up these books that you read and you read the books and you made pencil
01:32:20 marks in them, is it because you absorbed the lesson there?
01:32:25 Or did it really not become a permanent lesson and it was just something that you checked
01:32:29 and it was like a reflex?
01:32:32 So I have many specific questions about many specific events and people and circumstances
01:32:39 that I have tried to figure out with the surviving source materials that we have in abundance.
01:32:47 But I would still like to delve into his mindset and reconstruct his mind.
01:32:53 The closer you get to Stalin, in some ways, the more elusive he can become.
01:33:00 And especially around World War II, you’ve already illuminated a lot of interesting aspects
01:33:06 about Stalin’s role in the war, but it would be interesting to ask even more questions
01:33:11 about how seat of the pants or deliberate some of the decisions have been.
01:33:15 If I could ask just one quick question, one last quick question, and you’re constrained
01:33:23 in time and answering it, do you think there will always be evil in the world?
01:33:28 Do you think there will always be war?
01:33:31 Unfortunately, yes.
01:33:33 There are conflicting interests, conflicting goals that people have.
01:33:40 Most of the time, those conflicts can be resolved peacefully.
01:33:44 That’s why we build strong institutions to resolve different interests and conflicts
01:33:50 peacefully.
01:33:52 But the fact, the enduring fact of conflicting interests and conflicting desires, that can
01:34:02 never be changed.
01:34:04 So the job that we have for humanity’s sake is to make those conflicting interests, those
01:34:14 conflicting desires, to make them, to put them in a context where they can be resolved
01:34:20 peacefully, and not in a zero sum fashion.
01:34:25 So we can’t get there on the global scale.
01:34:30 So there’s always going to be the kind of conflict that sometimes gets violent.
01:34:37 What we don’t want is a conflict among the strongest powers.
01:34:43 Great power conflict is unbelievably bad.
01:34:48 There are no words to describe it.
01:34:50 At least 55 million people died in World War II.
01:34:55 If we have a World War III, a war between the United States and China, or whatever it
01:35:01 might be, who knows what the number could be?
01:35:05 155 million, 255 million, 555 million, I don’t even want to think about it.
01:35:14 And so it’s horrible when wars break out in the humanitarian catastrophes.
01:35:20 For example, Yemen and Syria and several other places I could name today.
01:35:26 It’s just horrible what you see there.
01:35:28 And the scale is colossal for those places.
01:35:32 But it’s not planetary scale.
01:35:34 And so avoiding planetary scale destruction is really important for us.
01:35:41 And so having those different interests be somehow managed in a way that they don’t,
01:35:49 that no one sees advantage in a violent resolution.
01:35:54 And a part of that is remembering history, so they should read your books.
01:35:58 Stephen, thank you so much.
01:35:59 It was a huge honor talking to you today.
01:36:01 I really enjoyed it.
01:36:02 Thank you for the opportunity.
01:36:03 My pleasure.
01:36:04 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Stephen Kotkin.
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01:36:23 If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on Apple Podcast, support
01:36:28 it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter.
01:36:32 And now let me leave you with words from Joseph Stalin, spoken shortly before the death of
01:36:37 Lenin and at the beginning of Stalin’s rise to power.
01:36:41 FIRST IN RUSSIAN
01:36:42 Я считаю, что совершенно неважно, кто и как будет в партии голосовать.
01:36:50 Но вот что чрезвычайно важно, это кто и как будет считать голоса.
01:36:56 I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote or how, but what is extraordinarily
01:37:04 important is who will count the votes and how.
01:37:09 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.