Conversations with Tyler - Stephen Kotkin on Stalin, Power, and the Art of Biography

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

Donate to Conversations with Tyler Give Crypto Other Ways to Give In his landmark multi-volume biography of Stalin, Stephen Kotkin shows how totalitarian power worked not just through terror from above, but through millions of everyday decisions from below. Currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution after 33 years at Princeton, Kotkin brings both deep archival work and personal experience to his understanding of Soviet life, having lived in Magnitogorsk during the 1980s and seen firsthand how power operates in closed societies. Tyler sat down with Stephen to discuss the state of Russian Buddhism today, how shamanism persists in modern Siberia, whether Siberia might ever break away from Russia, what happened to the science city Akademgorodok, why Soviet obsession with cybernetics wasn't just a mistake, what life was really like in 1980s Magnitogorsk, how modernist urban planning failed there, why Prokofiev returned to the USSR in 1936, what Stalin actually understood about artistic genius, how Stalin's Georgian background influenced him (or not), what Michel Foucault taught him about power, why he risked his tenure case to study Japanese, how his wife's work as a curator opened his eyes to Korean folk art, how he's progressing on the next Stalin volume, and much more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded November 13th, 2024. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: [e-mail] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.

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at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit Conversationswithtyler.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm chatting with Stephen Kotkin,

who's a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, but he was also a professor of history at Princeton University for over 30 years. He's one of the best and best known scholars of Russian and Soviet history, perhaps best known for his multi-volume biographies of Stalin. Stephen, welcome. Thank you so much for the honor of the invitation, pilot. Let me start in another direction. What's the state of Russian Buddhism today? Yeah, I wish I knew. It's an excellent question. I haven't been to Russia since January 2020. We had the pandemic. of course and now the war. I can say that there was a lively, no longer underground Buddhist presence in Russia.

It obviously predates the Soviet period. It goes way back. The Russian army was involved in inner Asia. Conflict over a long time and had firsthand contact with Buddhist peoples. But where things are today, just in general across the board, just on Buddhism. It's not so simple. How much shamanism do you think is still around in Siberia? Culturally, significantly, but how deep the belief system is is a tougher question, right? You know, it's always the problem between practicing versus raised in the tradition. So just about everyone in Siberia from a non-European background from non-European descent

will have had some exposure to shamanism in cultural terms. But how many of them will visit shamans for those big life traditions, life changes, those moments where there's births or deaths or that's a harder thing to pin down. I've traveled to Siberia probably more than a dozen times voluntarily, I should say. And I encountered quite a bit of it there. And of course, the anthropologist did a good job gathering artifacts and retaining the artifacts. There are some museums. Again, it's been a while, but my last visit there, which is probably seven or eight years ago now, there was still evidence that it was alive. Can you imagine a future where,

for some kind of cultural or historic reason, Siberia peels off from the more western parts of Russia proper. And I don't mean because of a Chinese invasion, but because of Siberia itself. Like what's in it for them, the current Union? Not much, but there are not very many people there. So it's a colossal space, and it's far more empty than Canada.

So think about Canada, which is roughly, not exactly, but roughly equivalent in location. And Canada itself has not a large population, but think about Canada with a far less, much less denser population even than it has now, with effectively no Toronto, no Montreal, no Vancouver, but only provincial cities and unpopulated or sparsely populated areas in between. Connection, connectivity, governance, economy, all of those would be supreme challenges without the current connection or orientation, if you will, that they have towards European Russia. I've been told that in Siberia, it gets colder as you move eastward and not just as you move northward.

Is that true? And if so, how has it influenced Siberian history? Western Siberia and eastern Siberia are dramatically different. landscapes, flora and fauna, weather patterns. We think of everything east of the Urals as a coherent unit more or less. In fact, historically there have been three units, Western Siberia, eastern Siberia, and the Russian, then Soviet, and now again Russian Far East. And they're quite distinct, as you just mentioned, not just in the weather patterns.

The rivers are really the determining factor there. the rivers are colossal in Siberia, and they set the living patterns, the landscape. They've shaped the history quite a bit. You know Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world, and a tremendously important water source. If you're dependent on the Himalayas for your water, which is one way to describe Asia, that is to say almost every important river in Asia,

comes from that mountain range. As those glaciers are reduced in size or potentially vanish, as the snow-capped glacial areas of the Himalayas no longer feed the river systems in the same way, the Siberian river systems are all of a sudden supremely important as a strategic resource, not just as a basic resource. And Lake Baikal becomes a way in which you could imagine that water-starved populations that are really large on the southern side of the mountains, i.e. China, become much more interested in the water sources of Siberia. So ironically, the resource we think least about, everyone will think about coal and oil and gas and gold and you name it.

You could go right through the whole periodic table for Siberia. But it's the water over time that might prove to be among these. most and maybe even the most important resource. And that could determine the kind of future that you're poking at for the region as a whole. So if we can desalinate water at a reasonable cost, Siberia becomes much more irrelevant? Potentially. Again, with technology, that's true of just about anything and everything. If we can move away from hydrocarbons that changes geopolitics rather dramatically, at least potentially, right? So similar with technologies of managing. water. De-solonization, you would know better than I, but it's the scale that we're talking about.

We're not talking about something the size of Israel, right? The something the size of Israel is a neighborhood in a Chinese urban agglomeration. Now, Colin Thuberen, in his famous travel book on Siberia, he called the place, and I quote, dull and poor, unquote. Agree or disagree? I think he's right about the poor part. I wouldn't say it's dull, quite the contrary. If you've ever seen real taiga, which is dense forest, not tundra,

which is not forested, but if you've seen taiga, which is thick ancient trees, forest, and all of the ecosystem of that, meaning not just the forest, canopies up top, which you can barely see from the ground, but the entire ground. And everything that's living there and growing there and happening there, it's a wonder.

So from a pure ecological point of view, I think dull would be almost a criminal appellation for Siberia. We don't want to put anybody in jail over what they say. We've been practicing that at universities now for a while and it hasn't worked. But you get my point. just ecologically, it's not dull, and then one could go on, the people, of course, and etc. Is Siberian butter very good? Yes, especially when it's sold under the Danish label, as you know. So all the Russian exiles feasted on Siberian butter in European exile before the revolution, but of course it came packaged as Danish butter. How did you become

so interested in the Ob River Valley? Travel. G.K. Chesterson, the writer, has this line about history is really travel. And you know travel. It gives you a wider perspective, widens your horizons and teaches you about your homeland, your home country, and all your experiences prior to that. So in some ways, history and travel overlap, at least in Chesterson's formulation.

And I just went there. And having gone there, I discovered that you had a kind of Palimcess you had multiple layers that were not visible and not well known, including the Buddhist layer. There was a genocide by the Qing troops against the Jungars in Inner Asia, and it affected greatly the origins of the Dalai Lama as an institution, a pan-Buddhist institution throughout Asia. And all of this stuff is visible in that river valley, the orb and the Irtish, the Irtish, the ear tissue is effectively a tributary of the old.

And so if you start from that point of view, you go through the set, you have the agricultural settlement and transforming the land into farmland. You have the Soviet industrialization, that kind of toxic civilization that they built, right up through plans to reverse the rivers with exploding nuclear devices, the kind of scientific lunacy that you see often in,

these projects where the rivers don't flow the way you want them to flow and you think that there won't be second and third order consequences to reversing the flow of a river. And so the region turned out to have so much history layered in, not all of which was visible to the naked eye, but all of which would be visible if you dug deeply into the source materials. And you traveled around a little bit, place names, for example, showed me the the Buddhist, the Jungar prehist, prehist, with many of the place names, which the origins were clearly not Russian words. And so if you poked into the etymology, you discovered that history, even though there were no visible signs, not even cemeteries, visible signs of their presence just a few centuries before. Whatever happened to the science city in Siberia, it's Akadem-Gor-Dok, or has it pronounced?

Yes, Akadjadjadok, or we would call it academic city. Still there, and it's still really large and important. So it still produces science? Yes, it does. It's had a number of triumphs over the generations. It's had some really high-powered institutes, cybernetics, for example, a big presence out there. It no longer has the same level of funding that it had in the Soviet period when budget constraints were a little bit different. but it's still important.

The problem for the Siberian academic city is its remoteness from other centers like manufacturing centers. Most of the Siberian region around it is old-fashioned metal industry and mining, the kind of stuff that we would call dirty industry today, steel plants dependent on cooking coal, for example, very much mid-20th century style industry.

And so the scientific achievements could not easily translate into a new productive economy, what you might call precision manufacturing or knowledge economy. So they had the science belt, but they didn't have it connected very well to applications in an industrial economy that was forward-looking. So they fell into a little bit of a rut. Why were the Soviets so obsessed with cybernetics and AI, say in the 1960s? Is it that they understood where things were going, or it just was a big stupid mistake?

You can never rule out big stupid mistakes, if we're honest, certainly, about our own lives and analogizing from them. The Soviets were interested in cybernetics because it was about more efficient ways of gathering and using information. So the planned economy at core, which was a fantasy, never a reality. In practice, the planned economy was central control over some scarce commodities, resources, products so that you could prioritize.

And you could therefore supply those privileged factors. in your supply change with the scarce resources to produce predominantly military industrial products, but not exclusively. And the rest of the stuff come with May that was black market, including black market factory or factory. So cybernetics was a solution whereby you could make planning work better. You could kind of optimize the information you are getting from the localities, and then you could optimize the way that you organize things. was a fantasy in a different light, and it's the same one that the Chinese Communist Party has today, which is to say if your authoritarian politics and your productive economy don't mesh very

well, turn to technology, turn to technological solutions to get beyond the fact that you refuse to do the structural reforms on the institutional side to ensure that the productivity the dynamism continues. And so it's this eternal fantasy that science and tech will enable you not to have to give up central control, power, communist party monopoly. From the scientific point of view, it was fascinating because that's who they were, right? They were exceptional world-class mathematicians, world-class physicists, world-class physicists, world-class computer scientists. And so for them, it was the same thing it would be for scientists anywhere. Now, in the 1980s, you went to live in Magnitogorsk, in the Ural Mountains.

Other than your work and your curiosity as a historian of Soviet Union, what was the best thing about living there, just as a citizen of Magnitogorsk? Was there anything you liked? For sure. It was a harsh environment. Pollution wouldn't begin to describe the orange air in the town. It was a one company town, one industry town. They had a gigantic integrated steel plant, and they had next to no pollution controls because they had installed pollution controls, but they didn't use them because it lowered their output and they were paid and got their bonuses based on quantitative output. So the place was harsh as harsh could be, but at the same time the people were astonishing. There is something that for foreigners that's really captivating about

all Slavic cultures, the Russian one included, which is the degree of hospitality and the warmth inside people's homes. So outside there's mismanagement, corruption, unbreathable air, undrinkable water, no places to shop because the goods have all been stolen. but inside people's homes, there's everything and anything. In a modest way, because the size is not comparable to the kind of middle-class life we would imagine here or in Europe or in Japan. But inside, despite the constrained circumstances in terms of the amount of space, the warmest and best people you could imagine, and the conversation, which was about novels and plays and poetry and science. and the meaning of life and philosophical turns,

and that was even before you started drinking. The early plans for Magnitogorsk, they incorporated various ideas of utopian urban design. Did any of those come to fruition? Did you see any of that when you're actually living there, like a rationally constructed and built city along some kind of different principles? Yes, and it's still there to this day.

They built a city according to the, European modernism, and they discovered that it wasn't very livable. So they had these fantastic buildings that looked like your Bauhaus from Germany or your Wierstetter from Austria, which were not ornamental, but still elegant. They were spare on the ornaments, but still they had an industrial design elegance. The problem was family. didn't want to live with one bathroom down the hall for everybody. They didn't like that efficiency, as people in your profession might call it.

They didn't want to live where their children were raised collectively by somebody else. They wanted to live as self-contained nuclear family units, where they had a kitchen and toilet facilities and showers and baths, inside their own space rather than sharing that with others. So it was this fantastic modernist project that was brought to fruition at scale, and the people in it didn't want to live that way. The regime soon enough changed its mind, the central regime, and stopped facilitating construction architecture

by the imported German architects or the Soviet. emulation of them, and instead turned away from this building of modernist communal apartments towards family, self-contained family apartments, which were infinitely more popular. And then, of course, came the Stalinist Baroque ornamentation outside the apartments to differentiate those buildings. You have kind of three phases. The spare, modern, ideologically inflected European, This is the way people should live, the 20s and 30s. Then you have the Stalinist Baroque indulgent family apartments, which are very expensive to build.

And then you have the Khrushchev, a five-story cement blocks, very poorly constructed in prefabricated fashion. So those are, that's a very basic history of the buildings there. But that first piece that you asked about, was built and is still there. And which of those did you live in? Neither.

None of them. I lived in the self-contained American cottages built for the U.S. and other foreign engineers, hired on contract to help build and launch, and initially it was thought to manage the steel plant. Remember, the steel plant is not a carbon copy, but derived from the Gary Indiana plant. that was built a few decades earlier in central United States.

And so they had a colony, which they called the American colony, even though there were also Italians and Germans and others there. And they had built these self-contained cottages, meaning the kind of house that you and I would see in an American suburb. And that's the place, it was removed from the town a little bit, isolated for security purposes, and also to keep the Americans isolated from the local population, as well as vice versa. And those cottages also survived.

I don't know if they're still there, but they survived into the mid to late 90s, and I stayed in one of those, and I was under, of course, 24-7 surveillance. Now, Magnitogosk had been a closed city. So what was it that people wanted to talk to you about or hear about? What were their questions? Everything and anything. But priority? They wanted to hear about the Pope or about the Beatles or about the president or what?

Well, the principle was just curiosity. And so they had been marinated in propaganda, not just denied information. We have a wrong view of censorship that it's only suppression. It's also promotion of certain kinds of information and certain kinds of ways of thinking. And so both the denial of the information and the promotion, the marination that they went through. So they would ask me the simple questions that would seem silly in some way,

but fully understandable to me, were workers ever allowed to go on holiday? Or were recreational resorts solely for the bourgeoisie? Those kinds of questions. Because that was the information they were marinated in. Also, they wanted to know specific questions about people, individuals, was Ronald Reagan, really a dangerous guy who wanted war.

Reagan, of course, was president back then when I was in Magnetic Corps. And so it ran the gamut. They also wanted help in finding some children's clothes because there were no children's clothes available. They wanted medicines because medicines were in very short supply. They wanted me to carry correspondence out and then mail it when I was finally back in the U.S.

to some relatives they might have abroad that they wanted to obviate the censorship. So their isolation was really profound. Now, some things had penetrated through it. If you watch a foreign film, for example, and you watch a French film, and you see how the French live. the apartments that they have, the furniture that they have, if they walk through a store, some type of store, just as part of the moving,

if you see them on the street and they pass a grocery store, and you see the fruit arrayed on the street in front of the store. So you'll see oranges, you'll see bananas, you'll see things, the most exotic things imaginable for the people isolated in the, you know, Ural Mountain area in a closed city, and they would then ask me, is that what shops are really like? Do people really have apartments with seven and eight rooms? Is it really possible to go on a trip without asking permission, an exit visa, for example?

For them to travel, they needed not just a visa from the place they were going to, but they needed an exit visa to be able to leave their country. So this was all pretty remarkable that I, as a young man, was plopped down into this. Remember, I could speak the language, and so I could converse without an interpreter. I didn't need minders, and I was also not afraid. So I would just go places. I would just travel around, either walk or take mass transit, and chat people up. When I was taken to, there was an observation platform outside town where you could see all of Magnita Gorsk in front of you.

And the mayor and various other dignitaries took me to their. They were very proud, and I understood that pride, not civic pride. And then I turned around, and the other side of the platform showed what looked to me like a prison complex. And I said, oh, that must be the prison. And they all got red-faced, and they said to me, oh, no, we don't have a prison here. you know, because this is their normal way of denying reality so that they don't get into trouble and a foreigner doesn't get the wrong impression. And I said, yeah, you're right.

It's only in places like New York City where we have, you know, where I'm from, where we have prison. Out here in Magnita Gorse, you couldn't possibly have a prison because you don't have any criminals, whereas in New York we have as many prisons as you could imagine. And that broke the ice. and then they said, well, yeah, you know, it's not just New York. Actually, we do have a prison and that's it. And so we began to get to know each other, get to understand each other, whereby I didn't make fun of them,

and they feared me less and less. In other words, I appreciated them for who and what they were, and they appreciated the fact that I had this curiosity, this willingness to learn, this open-mindedness, about learning who they are, what they are, When I took them to the cemetery, actually the other way around, I should say, they took me to the cemetery for a commemoration. And we were there for the solemn part of it.

And then afterwards, I asked if we could take a walk. And they said, why would you want to walk through there? It's muddy. And I said, let's just take a walk. So I walked with them through their cemetery after the solemn ceremony. And I started to narrate. the lives of the people whose headstones we were passing. Because I had been in the archives, and I knew the families, I knew the history,

and they were astonished because they themselves didn't know their own history, certainly not to the degree I knew it. And so they began to see my appreciation, my respect for their history. That is to say, I didn't validate Stalinism, enslavement of the peasantry, Goulog, all of that is beyond validation. It should be condemned and was condemned. But then at the same time, you have understanding. You have empathy, right?

Radical empathy, whereby you're not trying to validate what they did, but you're trying to appreciate how they could do this, who did it, why they did it. And as I walked them through the cemetery for a long time, and there were almost no headstones where I couldn't make some type of comment, sometimes I knew a lot, sometimes I knew just a little piece, sometimes I was wrong, I guessed, because the names were similar. You know, you'd walk through a cemetery and you'd see the name Smith, for example, on our side. And you might imagine it was one smith, but it was a different smith.

So that happened to me. After that cemetery walk where I was respectful during the solemn part of their ceremony, and then I was like a teacher, that's why I had the Freudian slip that I took them out to the cemetery when, in fact, they took. took me out. And that went a really long way in establishing the kind of trust, mutual trust. And gradually over time, things melted, and I got more and more access to the documentation. In the archives, they would only let me read newspapers at first. They had full runs of the local newspapers, which are rare. They were not allowed to be exported, so our libraries in the U.S. didn't have local newspapers from the Soviet Union, to any great extent, certainly not full runs.

And even the central libraries, the Library of Congress equivalents in the Soviet Union didn't always have full runs of very local newspapers, some of which were fly by night. And I would sit with the archivists, call them over. They had been sitting in this archive their whole lives, and there were a number of them, five or six, they were all women, because this was considered. women's work. And no one came to work on their history. Who would do that? And so there I was the only person besides the archivists. And I would call them over and I would say, look at this. And I would then explain what I had discovered in their history. And some of them were really sharp and knew their

history well and had done a lot of research. And even those people I could teach things to. By that point, they were bringing me stuff, sometimes things which weren't necessarily approved to bring me, but they would ask me, how do you interpret this? Because they were working on some project, and they couldn't figure it out, and maybe I could figure it out for them. So by the time I left the city the first time, I went back twice. I was there in 87, 1987 and 1989, both obviously prior to the Soviet Union collapsing in 1991. And they were now recruited to my side. So the, The local secret police, the KGB, as it was then called, were very concerned that an American agent was recruiting local people. But I wasn't trying to recruit them for anything.

I was just interacting with them on the basis of mutual interest and empathy. And so the city became in some ways conquered by me. And the fear that that produced in those who have the sort of deep suspicion that every American is an agent. The CIA is unbelievably capable, an octopus, everything that happens in the Soviet Union that goes wrong is a result of the foreign plots and all of this kind of stuff. So that small number of people who had high positions of authority were scared. I scared the bejesus out of them,

but I befriended so many of the other people from all walks of life, including from the propaganda apparatus, several of whom were conducting surveillance on me. The local newspaper, some of them were not, some of them were. But I didn't care because I had nothing to hide and only to gain from the interactions with the people. So it was quite remarkable to be plopped down in that isolated town and that time period. And it was forever for me. I have some questions about Stalin. So if we take some of the great Soviet creators, Pasternak, Shostakov, Bologov, Eisenstein, did Stalin understand they were geniuses?

Because for all the bad treatment, he didn't quite crush them the way maybe he could have. What was Stalin's attitude toward them? Stalin was one of those people for whom high culture was a mark of your advancement, civilization, what the Germans call building, and what the Russians call culturnist, from culture, the German world,

meaning what we probably would call edification, potentially. And so Stalin's generation was about people acquiring some familiarity with high culture in all its forms, whether opera, painting, novels, and poetry. It was a literacy acquisition culture, where acquisition of literacy meant, in the first instance, reading and writing, of course, which Stalin learned from the Orthodox Church schools he attended, but also literacy in a broader sense. Who are the great musicians? What's the classical canon in music? Who were the great artists? Who were the great novelists? Both Russian, but also more than Russian, pan-European, not quite Asian, global stuff that didn't have the same resonance. The world wasn't

globalized in the same way, and much of the undeveloped world was under colonial rule, as you know. So for Stalin, that was an important mark of his rise as an individual and as his self-work. He was predominantly self-educated, but not completely so. He had just as much education as the vast majority of revolutionaries at his level. Some completed university. most did not complete university. He went to a seminary rather than a gymnasium, and so therefore university was inaccessible to him.

But Trotsky put on the airs of being more educated than Stalin, and certainly Trotsky was more adept at foreign languages based upon exile in Europe. Trotsky spoke multiple languages and read multiple languages fluently. That wasn't the case for Stalin. Stalin had a kind of working bizarre or market-level, knowledge of Persian, Armenian, the languages that you would expect someone in the caucuses who went to the marketplace. So he grew in that milieu and acquired that affinity for that culture.

And then your question is about his judgment. Could he judge, for example, that Bulgakov was a superior writer or Eisenstein was a superior filmmaker? And the answer is yes. He made those judgments and not very many adherence to Marxism-Leninism or to communism, members of the Communist Party, shared those tastes with him that those bourgeois or potentially bourgeois-in-in-clined writers or writers who predated the revolution in origin, who might have criticized communism and certainly didn't adhere to Marxism, Leninism, that they were valued in pure cultural terms. So Stalin, yes, of course, he also had his prejudices and his blind spots. So some high culture that you and I might appreciate, he didn't appreciate.

He loved Chekhov the most because the heroes in Chekhov were not only the main characters, also the villains. And Stalin would remark that Chechhov's villains were credible. they were believable villain. They were full-bodied villains in addition to the heroes. So yes, non-trivial because he's the arbiter of what, if anything, of high culture is distributed, shown, allowed. And so his tastes were critical as the despot in the system.

And so those writers didn't thrive the way they would have thrived in an open society. But on the other hand, there's something about, cultural production under despotic conditions, hot-house despotic conditions, it also brings out different sides of these people. Why did Prakofi have returned in 1936? Was he just stupid? He wasn't making it in Europe? Or how do you make sense of that? I wouldn't have gone back. Some people who went back were arrested and executed or sent to prison labor and remote waste to return to your original questions about Siberia.

But exile is difficult. Losing your native language is difficult for people. Immigration or exile, immigrants often go voluntarily, meaning they're looking to assimilate, they're looking to settle into the new culture. They certainly want their children to be completely assimilated in many cases.

For exile, it's a little bit different. Often you didn't leave voluntarily. Often you were kicked out or you barely escaped. You nurtured hopes to go back at some point. Either the regime would change or it would soften if it didn't fall. Moreover, if you're a really accomplished player, you have an exceptional talent. That talent and the appreciation of that talent is different at home than it is abroad. There's this fantastic scene in Mephisto, the film, about

an actor who remains in aggrandized Nazi Germany, not greater Germany under the Nazis. And he goes on stage, and the Nazis rule there. So there are swastikas on the curtains

and other indications of the Nazi regime. And someone asks him, this is Klaus Maria Brantauer, the actor who plays the part. This fantastic film. Someone says, you know, how come you didn't, you're doing this? And how come you didn't leave? And he rebukes the question and says, you know, not everybody can emigrate. Not everybody can leave.

For some people, the German language and the theater is our life. and we may or may not like the Nazi regime, but why should we give that up? And it's a moral dilemma, obviously. That's why the question was posed. But there's not necessarily a single answer or a single black and white answer, despite the fact that you can be seen as a collaborator for the kind of stuff he did. So Prokofiev goes back to do music. To do music, to appreciative audiences. He's supremely talented, and everybody there knows.

that? And so does he fully understand how bad the regime is? 1936, the regime is about to descend into the frenzy of the mass arrests, the so-called Great Terror of Stalin,

36 to 38? So Prokofiev doesn't understand all of that, but who did at the time? But what he does understand is that it's a musical culture and he is a master musician. What do you think of the hypothesis?

I think it comes from James Hughes, that it was Stalin's visit to Siberia and his time there that gave him a sense of what was wrong with the Soviet Union, that you needed to crush the Kulox to be quite oppressive. Is that true? No, it's not true, sadly. I've been to that same place where Stalin went in Bornau in 1928.

for a while in the museum, not on display, but in the back room. They had the wooden sled that carried him from the railhead to the gigantic barn where he gave the speech that he was going to move forward on collectivization. It was a decision he had already reached, and it was a trip that he took in order to break the parties of affiliation with the Kulax. Many of party officials in the provinces in the 20s had grown rich by liaison with the richer peasants. They had married their daughters to Kulox. They were typical corrupt officials at the provincial level.

And Stalin wanted to teach them a lesson that that wouldn't fly anymore. And he went out there and delivered. a searing speech, which of course then was nationally publicized about how the collective is a full speed forward on collectivization and the Kulocks were an enemy. people didn't understand. They didn't believe the, how could he be doing this? So you have to remember, for Marxist-Leninists, the base determines the superstructure. So the nature of the economy, or what they would call social relations, socio-economic conditions, determines the kind of politics you have. So if you have a communist party in power

and you have de facto market relations in the countryside with a proto or quasi-bujo class, richer peasants, meaning they had more than the two cows, known as Kulaks. Either the base would triumph or the superstructure, the Communist Party, would have to get rid of the base over the long term. They were all Marxist-Leninists in the Communist Party,

and they all agreed with this, even the corrupt ones who were feeding well in the liaison with the Kulaks. What they never imagined was that you could do this, that you could collectivize agriculture across all of Soviet Eurasia through those multiple, multiple time zones. Where would you get the wherewithal, the capacity to implement that to take people's property away from them. So voluntary collectivization as of 1928, when Stalin makes that trip to Siberia, it's Western Siberia, voluntary collectivization is 1% of arable land, 1%, meaning that the people who couldn't farm themselves individually or as a household, as a family, they went into collectives voluntarily because they were incapable of managing on their

own. So for you to be able to make 99% collective, as opposed to 1% collective, you needed to take people's property away from them and force them into these collective arrangements. Now, the property wasn't a de jure property. It was only de facto property, but de facto property is still property. And so Stalin made that trip in order to announce that this was now going to happen. and the others around him were very skeptical that this was feasible. They didn't have a soft spot for the Kulox. Don't get me wrong. In the central committee, in the central apparatus in Moscow or other party,

Bastions like Leningrad or Kiev in Soviet Ukraine or Novosibirsk in Western Siberia. But they had the skepticism that this could be done. And so Stalin did it. That was the thing that shocked them all. and when in the process of doing it, he caused famine. And he was undermining potentially the party's own rule. He just kept going all the way through because he had the courage of his conviction. And then when they complained about him, he made a mental note of that.

And he exacted his version of revenge on them a few years later for their criticisms of him when he did this. So he did this because he believed in true Marxist-Leninist fashion that this had to be done. He felt himself to be a man of destiny and therefore he could do this. And he was looking to find the shock troops to galvanize the half-educated youth to take violence out on these coolocks and to force the villagers into these collective arrangements. And so what he did, and this is what totalitarianism is, he galvanized people's agency, and those people using their agency destroyed their own agency. They disempowered themselves by taking up his call.

Do you think Georgian blood feud culture influenced Stalin at all in this? Yes, so there were a lot of Georgians, and there's one Stalin. You know, so people argue that he got into fights on the schoolyard and that the fights were nasty. And therefore, he became a certain type of person. They argue that his father beat him, and therefore he became a certain type of person. The problem with arguments like that, Tyler, is that I got into fights in the school yard when I was his age. people beat me up because I was a half Catholic, half Jew at a Catholic school. This was an angle with New Jersey, right?

And I was small, and people knew that they could maybe take me on, bully style, because I wasn't as big as they were. My father also disciplined me with the proverbial belt when I got out of hand. And I didn't go on to collectivize agriculture. I'm not responsible for the deaths of 18 to 20 million people. so you're not going to be able to explain Stalin as a phenomenon or even as a personality with those types of tropes. So what explains Stalin, at least in my view, what I argued and continue to argue in the biography, is the experience of getting into power and then exercising power.

It's building and running the dictatorship. It's managing Russian power in the world that makes Stalin who he is. Not because there's some kind of DNA there. I don't go for cultural DNA-like arguments. But it's about your geography. It's about your capabilities as a great power relative to other great powers. It's about the institutions that you've inherited, not only the ones that you've created.

And so this mix of Stalin building a dictatorship inside the dictatorship and exercising that power creates the kind of person that we know Estab. You know how I know that? I refuse to use sources that were retrospective. If you survive the Stalin collectivization, terror, and you wrote a memoir, you looked back on those days in the schoolyard, that Georgian revenge culture, and you said, oh, I remember when he was 11 and, you know, he put the cat in the microwave. I knew right then that we were all going to die. And so that retrospective memoir approach where you know what happened and then you go back

and find the, I refuse to do that. So I only looked prospectively at what people said about him in real time. And he resigned six times in the 1920s from the dictatorship, from the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party. Three times we have a written document and three times we have solid testimony that he did it orally for multiple sources who were present. And all six times, there might have been more, but we have six documented times. All six times those people who work most closely with him refused to allow him to resign. because he was carrying the regime on his shoulders. He was the only person in that group capable of doing so. He was dedicated like nobody else to the cause.

And they didn't see the Stalin that we would later see. In fact, those people in the room with him, those six times, he murdered almost all of them in less than a decade in some cases and in less than two decades in other cases. and yet they didn't perceive that he was going to murder them because otherwise they would have contrived to get him out, let alone accepted his multiple resignation. So when you look at Stalin in real time,

you see a transformation in his personality in symbiosis or in some relationship with building and running that dictatorship at that time period. And so I'm very hesitant. Of course he has a personality. Of course he has these experiences as a youth. Of course they inform him, right? He goes through church school.

And so he has a liturgical way of expressing himself. Meaning, like the liturgy, he enunciates points and repeats them over and over again. Sometimes it reads just like a catechism, his Marxism, Leninism. So you could say that it's likely that his Orthodox upbringing, his church school experiences, including at the seminary, influenced him. So I don't deny that there's a personality and influences.

But you're trying to explain one of the three bloodiest dictators in the history of our planet, right? Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. It's a very small category. You can't put anybody else in that category, in my view. And in explaining people like that, life experiences when they're young or trips to Siberia or Georgian cult, there were a lot of Georgians who grew up in that time period who are gentle as gentle could be. And some of them are Communist Party members.

What did you learn from Michelle Foucault about power or indeed anything else? Yeah, I was very lucky. I went to Berkeley for a PhD program in 1981. I finished in 1988, and then my first job was at Princeton University in 1989. And in the middle of it, I went for French history, and I switched into Hobsborg history, and then finally I switched into Russian Soviet history. And I started learning the Russian alphabet my third year of the PhD program when I was supposed to take my PhD exams.

So it was a radical shift. And Foucault, I met him because he came to Berkeley in the 80s, just like Derrida came, just like Habermas came, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist came through. It was California. They were Europeans, and there was a wow factor for them. Foucault was also openly gay, and San Francisco gay culture was extraordinarily attractive to him. It was unfortunately the epoch of the AIDS epidemic. So one time I was at lunch with him and he said to me,

wouldn't it be amazing if somebody applied my theories to Stalinism? And I'm sitting there. Okay, I'm 23 years old. Imagine if you had traveled to Switzerland in the late 19th century and you went up in those Engadine Mountains and you were at some cafe in the mountain air and there's this guy with a huge forehead and hair up in the air, sitting there, and you went and introduced yourself, and you said, you know, hello, I'm Tyler,

and he said, hello, I'm Friedrich Nietzsche. You would say, well, geez, you know, I mean, this is interesting. I should have more conversations with you. So that's the experience I had. I had read Foucault in seminar because it was very fashionable to do so, obviously, especially at Berkeley, especially in a culture that tilts one way politically, and I think you'll guess which way that might be. But I didn't understand what he said. So I went up to him as a naive with this book, Madness and Civilization, which we had been forced to read.

And I started asking him questions. What does this mean? What does this mean? What is this passage? This is indecipherable. And he patiently explained to the moron that I was, what he was trying to say. And it sounded much more interesting

coming from him verbally sitting across just a few feet away than it had on the page. And I was lucky to become the class coordinator for his course at Berkeley. And so he gave these lectures about the truth, the problem of the truth teller in ancient Greece.

It was very far removed from it. I had no classical training. Yes, I had Latin in high school because I went to Catholic school and it was a required subject and I started as an altar boy with the Latin Mass, which quickly changed because of what happened in Vatican 2, but no Greek. So it was, it was completely Greek to me. You'll forgive me for, that wasn't planned that I just happened spontaneously. Anyway, so I just kept asking him more questions and I invited him to go to things and so we would have lunches and dinners and I introduced him to this place

Little Joe's in a little Italy part of San Francisco which unfortunately is no longer there was quite a landmark back then and then he would repair after dinner to the bathhouses in San Francisco by himself I was not part of that I'm neither openly nor closeted gay so so that was a different part of Foucault that I didn't partake in but others did anyway so I would ask him these things and he would just explain stuff to me. So I would say, what's happening in Poland? You know, this is the 1980s. And he would say things to me like the idea of civil society is the opiate of the intellectual class. And everybody was completely enamored of the concept of civil society in the 80s, especially via the Polish case. And so I would ask him to elucidate more. You know, so what does that

mean and how does that work? And he told me once that class in France came from disease in Paris, that it wasn't because of who was a factory worker, who wasn't a factory worker, but it was your neighborhoods in Paris and who died from cholera and who didn't die from cholera. And a colleague of ours, who was another fellow graduate student at Berkeley, ended up writing a dissertation using that aside, that throwaway line. I was able to ask him these questions about everything and anything. And what he showed me, this is your question, what he showed, me was how power works, not in terms of bureaucracy, not in terms of the large mechanisms of governance, like a secret police, but how all of that is enforced, enacted through daily life.

In other words, the micro versions of power. And so it's connected to the big structures, but it's little people doing this. That's why I said totalitarianism is using your agency to destroy your own agency. And that means denouncing your neighbors, right? Being encouraged to denounce your neighbors for heresies and participating in that culture of denunciation, which loosens all social trust and social bonds and puts you in a situation of dependency on the state.

So you're a gung-ho activist using your agency, and the next thing you know, you have no power whatsoever. And so those are the kind of things that I could talk to him about. And after he passed away from AIDS in the summer of 1984, it was the AIDS epidemic, horrific. He passed away and we had a memorial for him. I was still a PhD student remember. I didn't finish until 88.

And there was this guy Michel Desertre, who wrote a tribute to Foucault in French that he was going to deliver at the event. It was called the laughter of Foucault. And I had these conversations with Dissertot about his analysis of Foucault, the pleasure of analytic work, which had been a hallmark of Foucault. And this laughter of Foucault, and DeSertot taught me a phrase called the Little Tactics of the Habitat, which became one of the core ideas of my book, my dissertation, and then book Magnetic Mountain, about this micropower stone.

So even though Foucault was gone, I was able to extend the beginning of the conversations with Foucault through Dissertot. And I learned how power works in everyday life and how the language that you use and the practices like denunciation that you enact or partake in helps form those totalitarian structures. So it's not just the secret because the secret police are not there every minute of every day. So what's in your head? How are you motivated? What type of behavior are you motivated for? And so we say, okay, what would Stalin do in this situation? Many people approach their lives.

They've never met Stalin. They'll never meet Stalin, but they imagine what Stalin might do. And so that gets implanted in their way of thinking. It becomes second nature. And I learned to discuss and analyze that through full call. I have to say I didn't share his analysis that Western society was imprisoning, that the daily life practices of free societies were a form of imprisonment in its own way. I never shared that view.

So it wasn't for me his analysis of the West that I liked. It was the analytical toolkit that I adapted from him, to apply to actual totalitarianism, the Soviet case. Much of that is a theme in Vasily Grossman's life and fate, right? The passivity of people, denunciations, the logic of decentralized control. Yes, I read Grossman later. So remember, I'm an ignoramus like most graduate students, but even more so, because I don't know any Russian history.

I have no Russian history training. I'm learning the Russian alphabet. bit. And so I don't have that deep and rich feel for the place that I would only develop later on by reading Life and Fate and Much Else, everything that Vasili Grossman wrote. So what I had was French history. I had the Annal School. The Annal School founded by Mark Block and Lucien Fev in the 20s. It was the journal was called Anal and it was known as the Annal School. And Brodell, Fernal, on Brodell became one of the most famous proponents of the school, although Pierre Shonu, I prefer much more. I like Shonu's Seville and the Atlantic, much more than I like Brodell's

Philip and the Mediterranean. Fav was my favorite by far, and Fav decided, unlike Block, Fav decided to continue to publish during the Vichy days. And Block went into the resistance was eventually killed. And Fev had the whiff of that Showspieler, that actor in the Mephisto, a movie that I was talking about. But anyway, it's this fabulous historical eruption that comes from the French.

And what they do is they do total history, meaning they take a place, they go into the judicial archives, which record daily life, and they do economy, society, culture, and politics all rolled into one. So that's what I decided to do. But in the Soviet case, and I became the first case study of any Soviet place based upon archival material with this magnetic mountain project. But I did it, Anal school style, splicing in the theories of micro-power and micropolitics from Foucault and

Dissertl. So then I had to learn, okay, so I start learning the Russian alphabet. as a PhD student at Berkeley instead of taking my exam. I had this professor Sergei Kasatkin, an emigre who was well out in years, probably 70s, maybe even older, I'd never asked him, who had immigrated in the Civil War in 1990,

out through Harbin, and then became an orientalist. He wrote a Mongol-Mongol dictionary, not a Mongol-Russian, but Mongol-Mongol-Diction. and new Chinese, new Japanese, work for British intelligence in World War II. And he ends up at the end of life later days at Berkeley teaching intensive Russian for beginners. So I took Russian two hours a day, five days a week, with a tiny number of other students

and Sergei Kasatkin in the classroom. So that's my level of understanding. Vasili Grossman is very far at that point. I'm trying to figure out how Jaron's work, you know, how the past tense work, how you use verbs in Russian, which are very different. Russian is much closer to Greek, to ancient Greek than it is to English, in its grammar and some of the behavior of the language. So mastering that and then getting on a plane and going and Gorbachev comes into power and I have to do PhD research. And then I finished this and four years later, I'm assistant professor of Russian Soviet history of Princeton University. So this is like some kind of, you know, fantasy, dystopia.

Talk about novel, right? This is just unimaginable. I don't even know if a novelist could have imagined this life. And then I have to backfill. And I have to start reading the Bulgakov. And I have to start reading the Grossman. And of course, I have to read them in the original Russian now. So I don't read them in translation.

I don't go through the point where I read them in translation when I was a kid. and now I'm a professional reading. The first time I ever read them was Russian language. Just like I read Kunderer's book of laughter and forgetting, after I learned Czech, it was part of my Czech language training at Berkeley. I studied Czech before Russian because I did Habsburg history. So all the backfill, I discovered this amazing ancient civilization with all of these layers, like music and graphic arts and literature

and poetry and theater. That was a bonus. I had gone into this only because it was a problem of how power work and the connection between geopolitics institutions, daily life, ideas, and I discovered a world that I had not appreciated,

not even anticipated. Okay, sure. I wasn't totally ignorant in the way that maybe I'm portraying it. I was predominantly ignorant. So I'm not exaggerating my ignorance here, but it was deep. I had studied European intellectual history, University of Rochester as an undergraduate. So I knew the German, the French, British, some Italian stuff.

I studied German and French languages as an undergraduate. So I was not a complete unwashed ignoramus, but Russia was a world that I would only discover later. and it was a stroke of luck. What do you like best in Korean art? Yeah, it's funny. You should ask that question. When I was an assistant professor at Princeton, I got a sabbatical, and I went to Japan,

and it had no obvious relationship to my work, and I was an assistant professor in tenure track. And you can imagine what the senior faculty told me. They said, are you out of your mind? You know, you're coming up for tenure. End the next year, you've got to submit your file for tenure. The end of your fifth year, and this is your fourth year, and you're going to Japan. And I went to Japan for language boot camp.

I enrolled in a language boot camp that was 18 months for Asians to go to Japanese university. So from Mongolia, from Korea, from Hong Kong, from everywhere across Asia. was an amazing mix of people. It was astonishing school. And there were two non-Asians in the school, myself in this class that I was in, and the cultural attach at the Austrian embassy in Tokyo. And I'm sitting there with these Hong Kong people,

and the teacher says something, and nobody in the class understands a word. And then everyone looking puzzled at the teacher, and then the teacher goes up to the board and writes a couple of characters. And you hear this loud, side from all the Hong Kongers, oh, that's what it means, what she's trying to say, because they can read. They can read the characters. They're not identical, but they're close enough. They've been

changed in slightly different ways in the different cultures that used them. Anyway, so I got introduced to Asia. I had a supervisor at Tokyo University Social Science Institute, Shaq Canada was called. And so I would go to language boot camp for half the day, from sort of early morning until about right after lunch, one o'clock or so. And then I would go over to an office at Tokyo University, this very privileged, amazing place where I had this Russianist who was also a Koreanist. Wada Haruki is a gem of a scholar. He was sort of pro-engagement or sunshine policy, kind of anti-Cold War. what would you expect, a little bit pink on the outside, red on the inside, but so air you died and such a gentleman, and I remember I'm speaking Japanese after a while,

and so that's really helpful. And he introduced me to this other professor named Hamashta, who was in the Oriental Institute next door, and had a seminar in Japanese language about the Chinese tributary system over a millennium. So I had this immersion in East Asian stuff as a result of the curiosity of wanting to do the Japanese language. I did rewrite my dissertation. I did have a completed manuscript when I came back from the end of that trip in Japan. Somehow I was voted up for tenure at Princeton and spent 33 years there, as you alluded to it. But I got this bug that, well, I had this bug earlier and I was able to live.

it with this year and july i ended up two and a half years in japan my dormitory at Tokyo university was at a place called comaba comaba to daimai was the stop and it was at the mingekha folk art it was at the folk art museum the japanese folk art and so i fell in love with japanese furniture and folk art and i discovered the Koreans had the same thing so i met my wife who's Korean, South Korean citizens still to this day, in Kanazawa, Japan, the backside of Japan, not the Pacific side, at a Japanese language program, an advanced program, not the beginner one that I had started the previous time in Tokyo. And she was a PhD student at Columbia, writing a dissertation about how Korean ceramics influenced Japanese ceramics. So it was a cultural transfer from

Korea to somewhere else, which was not typical, and the Japanese acquired Korean culture, which is not something that they would admit, because for them they were the superior, remember the colonial rule there. Anyway, so I began to learn more and more about Korean culture, including Korean folk art and Korean furniture. And so that's the piece. The stuff that my wife taught me, which is early modern, what we would call early modern ceramics is still has a place in my heart.

But it's really the craftsmanship, what we put in the folk museums, but is the high quality furniture and other accoutrements that maybe one day were in the kitchen and now are on display in a museum case. And our house has some of these artifacts that we were able to purchase in antique shops in Seoul as well as in Tokyo, because you can purchase Korean art and artifacts in Japan because of the colonial period, the Japanese took a lot of stuff back.

And so I had this fabulous new world that opened up to me just because I had this curiosity. I could have learned Chinese, and I took a trip in 87 to both China and Japan to compare them, to decide which East Asian language I was going to take up when I had the opportunity. And I spent two months in China,

traveling the whole thing all the way from Harbin, Trans-Siberian Railroad Harbin, all the way down to Hong Kong, Xi'an and the Terracotta Warriors, Shanghai and the Boond. This is China 87, so it had just begun to open up, and foreigners were few and far between, and it was a poor country, and it was amazing. And I got to Japan, and it was 80s Japan,

this modernity that worked, all the stuff about Japan is number one, Japan won the Cold War. We're turning Japanese now as the pop song had it. And I was captivated and so instead of choosing the China piece, I chose the Japanese piece, but it was a selection. I chose it only theoretically because I couldn't enact that yet. It was only later on when I had the privilege of being an assistant professor at Princeton with a sabbatical year that I decided to boldly go to Japan. And then I said I had that summer in Kanazawa. where I met my wife.

And then I had another year in Hokkaido, the Northern Island, where I was at the Slavic Research Center for the full year and met a huge number of amazing people. And so that all stays with me, including the arts item, because my wife is an accomplished curator, we do a lot of travel together where I'll give a lecture about some geopolitical issue. And my wife will have meetings that I'll trapes along to

with the museum directors and the other. curators. And so I have a very privileged, very lucky ability to experience that art world, including the Korean art that you asked about. Last question with two related parts. First, when is your final stall and volume coming out? And what will you do next? Yeah. The final Stalin volume is taking me longer than I thought. Part of it was accidental. I had three separate unrelated cancers that put me in a tunnel for about 18 months of medical care. They were detected early and I had the finest imaginable doctors. So again, luck in my life and luck are synonymous here.

It wasn't one cancer that spread. It was three separate cancers that arose. But after I had the first one, which was caught early, they were looking to see that I didn't have it anymore. and the microscopic quality of the surveillance enabled them to discover the incipient other cancer in a very early stage. And then that happened again, a third time after the second cancer, the treatment had been conducted and they were looking to see that it was successful. So that set me back a little bit, 18 months, maybe two years.

It teaches you a lot about life when you go through something like that. I won't go into the details, but I'm sure you understand. The bigger reason that it's taken me longer is the difficulty of the subject. Each one of these three volumes has been harder than the previous one. The first one I thought I'm never going to finish this thing. It's just so hard. And I pulled it off and then I said, okay, I can do this. And then I took the second one on and it was not quite exponentially harder,

but it was significantly hard. And now the third one, I'm feeling the same thing. World War II is so much bigger than anything else that's come up in the first two volumes. And it took me forever to get to the truth about the war. So much of what we think to be true, including, of course, about Stalin's behavior and Soviet society during the war in various battles.

I discovered really didn't have solid evidence behind it, in many cases, not in all cases. but in many cases. So I work through the war part, which is half the book, half of volume three, and now I'm in the Chinese Revolution. And so I'm in the Cold War,

the 45 to 53 period. And we know a lot about that, and it's hard to be fresh about the Cold War. So many great scholars have gone into the previously secret archives and brought out amazing material and written really fine analytical books. But what I discovered about the Cold War stuff is the preoccupation bordering obsession with non-strategic questions like the fate of Poland.

Now, for Poles, the fate of Poland is existential. Don't get me wrong. Just like for Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians and Ukrainians today as we speak on this podcast, I get all that for them. is it core, is it central to the global order that forms after 45? That's a much harder, more difficult question. And so what I've discovered is what I call the four partitions. China, Korea, Japan, and Indochina. And in so many ways, that was so much bigger than the fate of Poland.

Again, not for the pole. I have Polish ancestry, so I understand. what I'm talking about to a certain extent, besides just being a historian. But if you look at the East Asian story, that's where so much of the Cold War still reverberates today, and I would argue is not over. So China could have been partitioned and wasn't. Korea could have been completely taken over by the Soviets, but instead was partitioned, because Truman asked Stalin to stop at the 38th parallel, even though Truman didn't have soldiers on the ground to prevent Stalin from doing so.

Stalin was ready to invade the home islands of Japan and had already given the order. So Japan should have been partitioned and wasn't. And then, of course, Indo-China, what we know is Vietnam today was partisan. So you have these four partitions, two of which happened, Korea and Indochina, both of which led to war. And two partitions that didn't happen. One because the communists won in China, and one because the communists got nowhere near power in Japan. And so that's the really big story in the later part of Stalin's life,

the 45 to 53 period. And I'm working through that now. And I've discovered that it's not as simple as it's presented. Once again, like World War II, I have to go back and dig and dig and dig to verify and to make sure that the things we believe actually happened are actually true. And kind of excavating layers of possibility, paths not taken, decisions made. We know well the episode of General George Marshall.

He's famous for the Marshall Plan in Europe and is considered one of the great statesmen American history. But in China, his mission completely failed. It failed as bad as his mission in Europe succeeded. And so when you give equal or even greater weight, in my view, as would be warranted, to the East Asian story of the Cold War and Stalin's role in it, it could potentially freshen up our understanding of this. And then, of course, it connects to the present day. So volume three is called totalitarian superpower because the Soviet Union was a superior totalitarianism to Nazism, but it was an inferior superpower to the United States,

which is why it was successful in one case and unsuccessful in the other case. But totalitarian superpower has a certain resonance for where we are with China today, not identical, of course, but a certain resonance. And so I'm working my way through this, and I'm bogged down now in the Chinese Revolution and Indochina and the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese occupation. in fresh and astonishing ways, at least for me. Again, there are great books, amazing scholars that we're all reliant on, but I'm trying to get to the source on many of these things.

And so I've got a ways to go. We're still only halfway through. We're still several years away, unfortunately, on Volume 3. But I have the sense of momentum. I was working on it before we got on this call going through some of this stuff and 45 and 46 on the East Asia. Don't get me wrong. Berlin is a big deal. And the division of Germany and the Berlin story and the blockade there and the Ku in Czechoslovakian and the Marshall Plan. I'm not trying to suggest that that's trivial. I'm just trying to suggest that there are things

that are also extraordinarily important that have not been given the same way. As to what I'll do next, I hope I'm going to get my life back. I've been in Joseph Stalin's company. for not quite two decades now, a little more than a decade and a half. And it's been remarkable. I've learned a lot, and I've certainly stretched my mind and come to understand the world in power

much better than I did before, even though there's a ways to go. But it's enough already. Seeing the evil, you know, you probably don't have the... Your world is mostly digital. You don't have the experience of going through documentation with his signature on it, and there's dried blood on the page.

So that's the kind of work I've been immersed, the world I've been immersed in. I understand how his mind works. It's not his blood that's on that page. It's somebody else's blood from their interrogation that he's reading and signing off him. It's had a, it's been a gift to, understand power, that original journey I was launched on, because Stalin is the gold standard of power. If you want to study how power is accumulated, how it's operationalized, and what the consequences are, there's no bigger story than his story. And so from the point of view of power,

it's endlessly fascinating. It's a lifelong learning. It's a gift, as I say, but from the point of view of morality, freedom, the stuff that I cherish and believe in and I'm privileged to be able to experience, it is just devastating. The moral squalor. I mean, there is no limit. The moral squalor is just bottomless. And you live in that world. Not 24-7. I'm sitting here in Stanford University in a plush office, overlooking the campus. Silicon Valley is outside the door. and a $3 million, three-million, three-bedroom houses on sale for $10 million down the street. So this, it's not my life 100%. It's not something that envelops me all the time, but it is something that absorbs me in my life of the mine,

my work experience. And then, of course, I've finished the section on the war, and all of these places that I just wrote about, they're in the news today. So people talk to me about X city Kramatoursk in Ukraine or fill in the blank

whatever place that was obscure to Americans not long ago and is now known to them and all the stuff happened back then in the 40s only it was the Nazi land army against the Soviet land army and so all those place names

and all that history and I just wrote about the war which was really more than war. It was mass murder, World War II on the eastern front. And here I am, and I never thought I would live through war in those places again. Of course, again, I'm not there. I'm not living in Ukraine. My relatives haven't been killed there, just like they weren't in the 1940s in the historical material that I'm immersed in. But you get a feel for this, and it has an effect on you, even if you then can close your laptop

and go off to some fantastic sushi parlor, and you know what I'm talking about. Stephen Kotkin, thank you very much. My pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show.

On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowen, and the show is. at Cow and Convo's. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.