Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history
episodePreviously titled “Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin Became the Most Powerful Dictator in History” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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My guest today is Stephen Kotkin, who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of two-thirds of his three-volume Stalin biographies. The first one, Stalin Paradoxes of Power, the second one, Stalin Waiting for Hitler. Thank you for coming on my podcast.
Thank you for the honor of the invitation.
Let's begin with the Tsarist regime. So first question, how repressive was the Tsarist regime actually? Because presumably the motivation behind the revolution is to get rid of this autocracy. But you just have these examples of these, Lenin's brother tries to kill the Tsar and he himself is writing these long manifestos about taking down capitalism and overthrowing the government. And him and people like Stalin are just in exile in Siberia, living off government money, robbing banks, small shenanigans. Honestly, it sounds more forgiving than many countries today. So how bad was it really?
So you have to put yourself back in the time period to judge the level of repression based upon what norms were, what other regimes did, rather than take the 20th century regimes as the guide and go back. But we need to widen the aperture a little bit here. So this is the czarist regime's problem, right? It needs to be able to compete in the international system. That means it needs a modern military and modern industry to underwrite that modern military. So it needs armaments. It needs steel. It needs chemicals. For that, you need workers. So you want the workers... only to work in the industry. You don't want them, for example, to have a labor movement or to go on strike or to have ideas about how politics should be organized.
Similarly with the intellectual side, you need the engineers. You need the engineers in order to design and build the modern attributes that you need to compete as a global power. but you don't want those educated people to have their own ideas and values about politics, about whether you'd want an autocratic government like the Russian regime has, or you'd want some other type of government. So all of these countries, in the modern period have this dilemma. Importing modernization, but keeping out the political side, the value side that goes along with that. So they need to have some way to repress and control the working class organization movement stuff, and the university educated intellectuals.
That's a problem we still have today. The Iranian regime now has that problem. The Chinese regime in Beijing has this problem. The Soviet Union had that problem. Contemporary Russia has that problem. How do you bring in modernity, meaning you have tanks, you have airplanes, or you have A.I., But keep out, for example, separation of powers, freedom, property rights, all the things that undermine your dictatorial rule. So the czarist regime was a quintessential example of this fundamental dilemma. So modernization is not a sociological process that kind of just happens. It's a geopolitical process. You modernize because you need to compete in the international system. So if somebody has ships made out of steel, you either have ships made out of steel or they're going to show up at your door like we did to Japan and tell you that they're in charge now.
I thought this was one of the most interesting takes in your first volume, that modernization is not this inevitable process, but is instigated by this ruthless geopolitical competition. Do you think that that still applies in today's world? Because, yes, there are pockets of conflict in the Middle East or in Ukraine, which would motivate the key powers there to want to have modern militaries and modern technologies. But through most of the world, the odds that if France falls behind technologically, if their AI is worse, that Germany is going to take over is just sort of unthinkable. So this dynamic where in order to ward off colonization or other great powers, you need to stay at the cutting edge of technology and also have the up-to-date political processes.
Is that still a drive which moves countries forward?
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