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

The following is a conversation with Stephen Kotkin, his second time on the podcast. Stephen is one of the greatest historians of all time, specializing in 20th and 21st century history of Russia and Eastern Europe. And he has written what is widely considered to be the definitive biography of Stalin in three volumes, two of which have been published. And the third, focused on World War II and the years after, he is in the midst of writing now. This conversation includes a response to my previous podcast episode with Oliver Stone that was focused on Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. Stephen provides a hard-hitting criticism of Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, weighed and contextualized deeply in the complex geopolitics and history of our world, all with an intensity and rigor, but also wit and humor that makes Stephen one of my favorite human beings. Please also allow me to mention something that has been apparent and has weighed heavy on my heart and mind. This conversation with Stephen Kotkin makes it more dangerous for me to travel in Russia. The previous conversation with Oliver Stone makes it more dangerous for me to travel in Ukraine. This makes me sad, but it is the way of the world. I will nevertheless travel to both Ukraine and Russia. I need to once again see with my own eyes the land of my ancestors, where they suffered but flourished, and eventually gave birth to silly old me. I need to hear directly the pain, anger, and hope from both Ukrainians and Russians. I won't give details to my travel plans in terms of location and timing, but the trip is very soon. Whatever happens, I'm truly grateful for every day I'm alive, and I hope to spend each such day adding a bit of love to the world. I love you all. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Stephen Kotkin. You are one of the great historians of our time, specializing in the man, the leader, the historical figure of Stalin. So let me ask a challenging question. If you can, uh, perhaps (sighs) think about the echo of 80 years between Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin. What are the similarities and differences between the man and the historical figure, the historical trajectory of Stalin and Putin?

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

(laughs)

It's been a while.

Yeah.

Good to see you.

Yeah. Good to see you as well. (laughs)

You're looking good.

You as well. (laughs)

I see this podcast stuff is doing you right.

Yeah. (laughs)

So we can't really put very easily Vladimir Putin in the same sentence with Joseph Stalin. Stalin is a singular figure and his category is really small. Hitler, Mao, that's really about it. And even in that category, Stalin is the dominant figure, both by how long he was in power and also by the amount of power, the military-industrial complex he helped build and commanded. So Putin can't be compared to that. However, Putin's in the same building as Stalin. He uses some of the same offices as Stalin used. On some of those television broadcasts that we see of Putin at meetings and Putin inside the Kremlin, Stalin used to sit in those rooms and hold meetings in those rooms. That's the Imperial Senate built by Catherine the Great, an 18th century building inside the Kremlin. It's a domed building and, and you can see it on the panorama, the top of the building at least you can see it on the panorama when you look over the Kremlin wall from many sites, uh, inside Moscow. So if he's not comparable to Stalin, he still works, as I said, in those same buildings, those same offices partly, and so therefore, he's got some of the problems that Stalin had, which was managing Russian power in the world from a position of weakness vis-a-vis the West, but from a, an ambition, a grandiosity, in fact. And so this combination of weakness and grandeur, right, of, of not being as strong as the West, but aspiring to be as great or greater than the West, that's the dilemma of Russian history for the past many centuries. It was the dilemma for the tsars. It was the dilemma for Peter the Great. It was the dilemma for Alexander. Uh, it was the dilemma for Stalin, and it's the dilemma for Putin. Russia is smaller now compared to when Stalin was in that Kremlin. It's got pushed back to borders almost the time of Peter the Great. It's farther from the main European capitals now than any time since that 18th century. And it, and the West has only grown stronger in that period of time. So the dilemma is greater than ever. The irony of being in that position, of sitting in the Kremlin trying to manage Russian power in the world, trying to be a providential power, a country with a special mission in the world, a country which imagines itself to be a whole civilization-...and yet not having the capabilities to meet those aspirations, and falling farther and farther behind the West. The irony of all of that is the attempted solutions put Russia in a worse place every single time. So you try to manage the gap with the West, you try to realize these aspirations, you try to raise your capabilities, and you build a strong state. The quest to build a strong state and use coercive modernization to try somehow, if not to close the gap with the West, at least to manage it. And the result is different versions of personalist rule. So they don't build a strong state, they build a personal dictatorship, they build an autocracy. And moreover, that autocracy undertakes measures which then worsen the very geopolitical dilemma that gave rise to this personalist rule in the first place. And so I call this Russia's perpetual geopolitics. I've been writing about this for many, many years. What's important about this analysis is this is not a story of eternal Russian cultural proclivity to aggression. Right? It's not something that's in the mother's milk, it's not something that can't be changed. Russia doesn't have an innate cultural tendency to aggression. This is a choice. It's a strategic choice to try to match the power of the West, which from Russia's vantage point is actually unmatchable. But it's a choice that's made again and again, and Putin has made this choice just as Stalin made the choice, right? Stalin presided over the World War II victory, and then he lost the peace. After he died in 1953, there was, of course, other rulers who succeeded him. He was still the most important person in the country after he died, because they were trying to manage that system that he built, and more importantly, manage that growing gap with the West. By the time the '90s rolled around, former Soviet troops, now Russian troops, withdrew from all those advanced positions that they had achieved as a result of the World War II victory, and it was Napoleon in reverse. They went on the same roads, but not from Moscow back to Paris, but instead from Warsaw, and from East Berlin, and from Tallinn, and Riga, and, and all the other places of former Warsaw Pact and former Soviet republics in the Baltic region. They went back to Russia in retreat. And so Stalin, in the fullness of time, lost the peace, and Putin, in his own way, inheriting some of this, attempting to reverse it when, as I said, Russia was smaller, farther away, weaker, the West was bigger and stronger and, and had absorbed those former Warsaw Pact, uh, countries and Baltic states, because they voluntarily begged to join the West. The West didn't impose itself on them. It's a voluntary sphere of influence that the West conducts. And so that dilemma is where you can put Putin and Stalin in the same sentence. And the terrible outcome for Russia in the fullness of time also has echoes. But of course, Putin hasn't murdered 18 to 20 million people, and the scale of his abilities to cause grief, uh, with the nuclear weapons aside, is nothing like Stalin's. And so we have to be careful, right? Only Mao put bigger numbers on the board from a tragic point of view than Stalin.