Stephen Kotkin

Now it's 25% more or less favorable globally.

That's Xi Jinping's doing.

How can the elites around him let him do that?

Around Putin, the people are falling out of windows.

Instead of falling out of windows themselves, why don't they push him out the window?

Khamenei in Iran.

He's brought ruin on the country.

Why don't they take him out and try to save themselves and save the country, not just themselves?

In other words, be patriotic as well as self-survival.

And the answer is it rarely happens.

One, you have a collective action problem.

And I think you... Hitler... There are more assassination attempts on Hitler, some of which come very close, than by far on Stalin.

Stalin is the guy who is building and personifying the system.

The people around Stalin can see that he is...

unusually good at dictatorship.

He is just carrying this entire system on his back through thick and thin, killing enemies, liquidating the kulaks, collectivizing agriculture, building a military industrial complex, defeating Hitler in war.

I mean, how much better from the system's logic, not from humanity's logic, not from the point of view of the kind of values that you and I share.

How much better are you going to do than Stalin?

And so there is a way in which their pygmies...

And he's Stalin.