Podcast • November 16, 2014

Stephen Kotkin: Who’s Bigger Than Stalin?

Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin has taken on the most important biography he can imagine: the life, rise and thirty-year reign of Josef Stalin. The first book of a trilogy (out now) goes from Stalin’s birth in ...

Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin has taken on the most important biography he can imagine: the life, rise and thirty-year reign of Josef Stalin. The first book of a trilogy (out now) goes from Stalin’s birth in 1878 to 1928.

And he’ll defend the statement. Stalin was nobody from Georgian who became the longest-serving leader of the century. He’s the man who won (or survived) a world war and forged the nuclear, industrial power called the Soviet Union. And he combined, with terrific force, the features of the totalitarian leader: an impossible dream — of a personal, Communist “paradise on Earth” — and real, unmatched brutality. So, forget Putin — forget everyone. Stalin stands alone in the century. Stalin

The new Russian patriotism is playing its own memory: it does away with Stalin’s Communism in favor of the iron man who whipped the Nazis and changed the map of Europe. Vladimir Putin’s game of equivalences extends to distant history, too: yes, Stalin was bad, he conceded, but no worse than Oliver Cromwell.

So, Kotkin says, as Putin’s Russian Federation revises its textbooks, menaces memory organizations, and stirs up hate and anger, it’s an old playbook they’re using — at a less dire moment and to more muddled effect.

As the conversation ended, Kotkin noted how his subject’s shadow lingers over Putin’s current war. Stalin notoriously starved Ukraine, but he also kindled the idea that they were their own people, with their own nation — another inconvenience inherited from the father of the Russian century.

This Week's Show •

Back in the U.S.S.R.

The Berlin Wall came down twenty five years ago this week — kicking off the collapse of the Soviet Union, ending the Cold War chapter of world history (or so it seemed), and breaking the heart of ...

The Berlin Wall came down twenty five years ago this week — kicking off the collapse of the Soviet Union, ending the Cold War chapter of world history (or so it seemed), and breaking the heart of Vladimir Putin, then an eager young spy working to extend Russian interests in the KGB’s East German bureau.

Two decades and several pivots after, after tanks in Red Square, after the 1991 putsch that gave the world Boris Yeltsin and sent Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost Communism packing, that same Vladimir Putin — after the dirtiest kind of backroom dealing —  has become the indispensable man at the top of Russian government.

In a big policy speech last week, Putin said America has run amok in the world, and that the world needs the Russian bear for bipolar balance. It’s worth reading, either as something serious the New York Times doesn’t want you to know about, or as a declaration of a new Cold War:

Essentially, the unipolar world is simply a means of justifying dictatorship over people and countries. The unipolar world turned out too uncomfortable, heavy and unmanageable a burden even for the self-proclaimed leader. Comments along this line were made here just before and I fully agree with this. This is why we see attempts at this new historic stage to recreate a semblance of a quasi-bipolar world as a convenient model for perpetuating American leadership.

It does not matter who takes the place of the centre of evil in American propaganda, the USSR’s old place as the main adversary. It could be Iran, as a country seeking to acquire nuclear technology, China, as the world’s biggest economy, or Russia, as a nuclear superpower. 

So for nostalgists, Putin has volunteered: he’ll play the podium-thumping, unpredictable Khrushchev staring down the United States.  Masha Gessen has him as “the man without a face”: a wolfish spy in the service of the Russian bear, and a frightening thug of the old Soviet variety — and not to be trusted. So: how do you solve a problem like Vladimir? Or do we need him around?

March 21, 2014

What Would Tolstoy Say About Russia and Ukraine?

What if we could summon the best Russian minds we've ever known - starting with the humanist Tolstoy, the Slavic nationalist Dostoevsky, the gentle Russian in the Crimea Anton Chekhov, and the moderns Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov to fill in the back story of the Russian annexation of Crimea?

TOLSTOY_1910_reading_On_Madness (1)

We’re putting the Crimea story through the filter of Russian poetry, literature and history. I’m calling on two Russian-born authors and scholars, Maxim Shrayer of Boston College, and Svetlana Boym of Harvard. What if we could summon the best Russian minds we’ve ever known – starting with the humanist Tolstoy, the Slavic nationalist Dostoevsky, the gentle Russian in the Crimea Anton Chekhov,  and the moderns Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov to fill in the back story of Russian annexation of Crimea?

 

March 20, 2014

Putin, Ukraine and Reading the Russians

Russian troops are encircling naval bases, Crimea is locked down. We Americans are looking across an ocean, flummoxed in a familiar way by the mind and the mission of the Russian president and people. Why do we keep getting Russia wrong? Putin is only the latest in a series of Russian leaders that have divided American thinkers and policymakers against themselves. Is he a realist, or is he ruled by his emotions? by Cold War nostalgia? by a vision of Eurasian Union? Is he a fascist or a plutocrat, or is he simply reacting to the West’s expansion of NATO? Is he winning — or has he overplayed his hand?
What Would Tolstoy Say About Russia and Ukraine?
Suzanne Massie: Reagan and Russia

Russian troops are encircling naval bases, Crimea is locked down. We Americans are looking across an ocean, flummoxed in a familiar way by the mind and the mission of the Russian president and people.

Suzanne Massie, who persuaded Ronald Reagan that he could hate Communism and love the Russian people in the same career, puts it this way: Why do we keep getting Russia wrong? Putin is only the latest in a series of Russian leaders that have divided American thinkers and policymakers against themselves. Is he a realist, or is he ruled by his emotions? by Cold War nostalgia? by a vision of Eurasian Union? Is he a fascist or a plutocrat, or is he simply reacting to the West’s expansion of NATO? Is he winning — or has he overplayed his hand?

We turn to Massie and other close familiars of Russian culture and history to try and figure out how to read the Russians, now and forever. Thought experiment: given that many of our best insights into Russian character and temperament come to use from their literary geniuses, can we summon some collective judgment on Putin, Ukraine and the Crimea from the contentious, often dissident wisdom of Tolstoy, the humanist; Dostoevsky, the Slavic Nationalist; Chekhov, the gentle star of both Moscow and Yalta; Solzhenitsyn, who argued forcefully that Ukraine must be an eternal part of Russia; and Vladimir Nabokov, who sailed out of Russia for the last time from the Crimea?