Stephen Kotkin

Where you have this Versailles-like absolutism and aristocracy that forms around the absolutism and is the main beneficiary, and most everybody else is excluded from the political process, and they are going to break through at some point.

So how are you going to manage that breakthrough?

Again, in the French case, it took more than a century to get this right, where the monarch is killed, and the monarch comes back, and they have an emperor, and they have a constitutional order, and they have an elected president who does a self-coup, and one republic falls, and another republic takes its place, and eventually even the Vichy regime...

a Nazi occupation regime that overthrows the Republic, right?

And so it takes de Gaulle in some ways from above to reimpose a Republic, the Fifth Republic later on.

So it's a very difficult process, even when it works, as the French case tells you.

So...

We're not saying that it's simple and easy and that Tsarist Russia could have gone down this path.

A lot of people say, well, if it hadn't been for the war, Tsarist Russia was on an evolutionary path.

It was modernizing economically.

So it might have been a kind of Taiwan story over time where...

The dictatorial regime gave way under economic success and political pressure to a more benign regime, and they institutionalized a rule of law, private property, civil liberties, inclusive polity for everybody.

And the problem with that is that the autocracy refused to do that.

The autocracy wanted no part of any evolutionary process.

So in 1905, when the Tsarist regime is compelled under pressure of tremendous peasant revolt and worker strikes and a defeat in the war against Japan,

When they're compelled to introduce some version of constitutional order, a kind of quasi-parliament, quasi-constitution, the Tsar regrets doing this almost immediately and is trying to push back against his concessions once the lid was put back on because of repression, once Dornavo repressed successfully.

Yeah.

the political movement, the czar wants to undo those concessions and go back to being an autocrat.

An autocrat means a self-power, a power unto itself.

And so this is your challenge.