Stephen Kotkin
speaker
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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Appearances
He starts reading forbidden, otherwise censored underground literature and books and learns about the social injustice, not just through firsthand experience, but analytically.
And he never graduates the seminary, which is the highest level of education that was available to somebody in the caucuses because they don't have a university because the czarist regime is afraid to allow a university.
They need the university graduates, but again, they're afraid of the politics of it.
And universities elsewhere, including in the capital, St.
Petersburg, are constantly being shut down through these revolutionary episodes.
So he goes into the underground, and for 20 years of his life, he's got no job, no profession, no source of income.
He's in and out of prison, in and out of Siberian exile, constantly harassed by the police.
If he escapes, they find him, they put him back.
So from the ages of about 17, 18...
to the age of late 30s.
He's a penniless, jobless revolutionary dedicated to fighting the genuine injustices of the Tsarist regime.
What he'll produce is a much more unjust regime than the one he's fighting against.
So this is known as perverse and unintended consequences.
He's legitimately dedicated to revolution as he understands it in his day.
And it's fighting against legitimate injustices.
But the way he does that, the revolutionary methods that he uses, and then the regime that he ends up building, turn out to be worse than the problem that he was addressing.
This is perverse and unintended consequences.
So your question is about whether revolution is a good thing, ultimately, even if...
The injustices are there.
And whether there could have been some solution that was more evolutionary that could get you to a better place.
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