Stephen Kotkin

Thank you for the honor of the invitation.

So you have to put yourself back in the time period to judge the level of repression based upon what norms were, what other regimes did, rather than take the 20th century regimes as the guide and go back.

But we need to widen the aperture a little bit here.

So this is the czarist regime's problem, right?

It needs to be able to compete in the international system.

That means it needs a modern military and modern industry to underwrite that modern military.

So it needs armaments.

It needs steel.

It needs chemicals.

For that, you need workers.

So you want the workers...

only to work in the industry.

You don't want them, for example, to have a labor movement or to go on strike or to have ideas about how politics should be organized.

Similarly with the intellectual side, you need the engineers.

You need the engineers in order to design and build the modern attributes that you need to compete as a global power.

but you don't want those educated people to have their own ideas and values about politics, about whether you'd want an autocratic government like the Russian regime has, or you'd want some other type of government.

So all of these countries,

in the modern period have this dilemma.

Importing modernization, but keeping out the political side, the value side that goes along with that.

So they need to have some way to repress and control