Stephen Kotkin

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1,369 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard Jul 2025

Stephen Kotkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Dwarkesh Podcast · Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history · 10 Jul 2025 podcast

You have this dilemma for the authoritarians.

So you think about Peter the Great.

I need to compete against the great powers.

So I need to have a Navy.

To get a Navy, I need to have the industry that supports a Navy.

I need to have the officers.

I need to have the technical skills.

And so I need to have all of that to be able to compete.

But I have this autocratic regime.

So how do I retain the social structure, the hierarchy, the non-elected

non-legitimate in some ways based upon modern understandings of constitutional order.

How do I retain that while I'm importing these attributes of modern power?

So that's the stuff that persists today for Iran, Russia, China, North Korea.

So they have to get very good at holding at bay

those attributes of modernity that threaten their political regime while importing as much as they can of the attributes.

But it's two sides of the same coin.

The thing that gets you the engineers also gets you the possible political ideas.

And so the czarist regime

begins to repress the very thing it needs to compete in the international system.

It represses the working class, and it represses the engineers and the intellectuals, without which it can't be a great power, without which it can't compete, but with which its political system is threatened.

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