Stephen Kotkin

We turned Hitlerite Germany into our ally with their cooperation.

It's just astonishing.

And then Hirohito, Japan, and the emperor state.

And then Japan's two former colonies, South Korea and Taiwan.

It worked there as well.

Hong Kong was on that trajectory until it was turned back when the lease ended to the communist regime in Beijing.

But the number of countries that have done this is very, very few.

The opposite has happened in most other cases where you've gotten an attempt but a failure to introduce enduring constitutional order into

in a mass society.

How do you bring...

the whole society, what we would call the masses or what used to be called the masses, how do you bring all levels of society into a political system as citizens?

How do you build a polity which is inclusive of people regardless of how much property they have?

And how do you then provide opportunity to them so that they can rise up the ladder, right?

That's the secret of success in the modern world, which a handful of countries have done.

from a non-democratic starting point and which other countries have done from democratizing a liberal constitutional order.

So go back to the czarist regime.

What were the options for the czarist regime?

You have this very heavy absolutist regime.

Autocracy is even a more absolutist version than we had, for example, in the French case.

when the Bourbon dynasty could say the state is me or the state is I, right?