hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm chatting with Steven cotkin who's a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute but he was also a professor of history at Princeton University for over 30 years he's one of the best and best
known Scholars of Russian and Soviet history perhaps best known for his multivolume biographies of Stalin Stephen welcome thank you so much for the honor of the invitation Tyler let me start in another Direction what's the state of Russian Buddhism today yeah I wish I knew it's an
excellent question I haven't been to Russia since January 2020 we had the pandemic of course and now the War I can say that there was a lively uh no longer underground of Buddhist presence in Russia it it obviously predates the Soviet period it goes way back the Russian army
was involved in inner Asia conflict over a long time and and had firsthand contact uh with Buddhist peoples uh but what where things are today just in general across the board not just on Buddhism you it's not so simple how much Shamanism do you think
is still around in Siberia uh culturally significantly but how deep the belief system is is a tougher question right you know it's always the the problem between practicing versus raised in the in the tradition so just about everyone in Siberia from a non-european background from
non-european descent will have had some exposure to Shamanism in cultural terms but how many of them will visit Shaman for those big life uh Traditions Life Changes those moments where there's births or deaths or that's a harder thing to pin down I've traveled to
Siberia probably more than a dozen times voluntarily I should say and I encountered quite a bit of it there and of course the Anthropologist did a good job uh Gathering artifacts and retaining the artifacts there are some museums again it's been a while uh
but my last visit there which is probably seven or eight years ago now uh there was still evidence that it was alive can you imagine a future where for some kind of cultural or historic reason Siberia peels off from the more western parts of Russia proper and I don't mean
because of a Chinese Invasion but because of Siberia itself like what's in it for them the current Union not much but there are not very many people there so it's a colossal space and it's far more empty than Canada right so think about Canada which
is roughly not exactly but roughly equivalent in location and Canada itself has not a large population but think about Canada with a far less much less denser population even than it has now with effectively no Toronto no Montreal no Vancouver but only provincial cities and
unpopulated or sparsely populated areas in between connection connectivity governance economy all of those would be Supreme challenges without the current connection or orientation if you will that they have towards European Russia I've been told that in Siberia it
gets colder as you move Eastward and not just as you move northward is that true and if so how is it influenced Siberian history Western Siberia and Eastern Siberia are dramatically different Landscapes floor and FAA weather patterns we think of everything east of
the urals as a coherent unit more or less in fact uh historically there have been three units Western Siberia Eastern Siberia and the Russian then Soviet and now again Russian Far East and they're quite distinct as you just mentioned not just in the weather
patterns um the rivers are really the determining Factor there the rivers are colossal in Siberia and they set the living patterns landscape they've shaped the history quite a bit uh but you you know Lake Bal the largest freshwater lake uh in the world and a tremendously
uh important water source if you're dependent on the Himalayas for your water which is one way to describe Asia that is to say almost every important river in Asia comes from that mountain range as those glaciers are reduced in size or potentially
vanish as the snow cap glacial areas of the Himalayas no longer feed the river systems in the same way the Siberian river systems uh are are all of a sudden supremely important as a strategic resource not just as a basic resource and Lake Bal becomes a way in which you
could imagine that water star populations that are really large on the southern side of the mountains IE China become much more interested in the water sources of Siberia so ironically the resource we think least about know everyone will think about
coal and oil and gas and and gold and you name it you could go right through the whole periodic table for Siberia but it's the water over time that might prove to be among the most and maybe even the most important resource and that could determine the kind of future
that you're poking at uh for the region as a whole so if we can desalinate water at a reasonable cost Siberia becomes much more irrelevant potentially again with technology that's true of just about anything and everything if we could move away from hydrocarbons that changes
geopolitics rather dramatically at least potentially right so similar with Technologies of managing water um desalinization you would know better than I uh but it's it's the scale that we're talking about right we're not talking about something the size of
Israel right the some something the size of Israel is a neighborhood in a Chinese Urban glomeration now Colin thuin in his famous travel book on Siberia he called the place and I quote dull poor unquote agree or disagree I think he's right about the poor
part I wouldn't say it's dull quite the contrary if you've ever seen real Taiga which is Den Forest not Tundra which is not forested but if you've seen Taiga which is thick ancient trees forest and all of the ecosystem of that meaning not just the farest canopies up top which you can barely see
from the ground but the entire ground and everything that's living there and growing there and happening there it's a wonder so from a pure ecological point of view I think dull would be um almost a criminal appalation for Siberia we don't want to put anybody in jail over
what they say uh that we've been practicing that at at universities now for a little while and it hasn't worked but you get my point so just ecologically it's not Dull and then one could go on the people of course and Etc is Siberian butter very
good um yes especially when it's sold under the Danish label as you know so all the Russian Exiles uh feasted on Siberian butter in European Exile before the Revolution uh but of course it came packaged as Danish butter and how did you become so
interested in the OB River Valley a travel uh GK chesterson uh the the writer has this line about history is really travel and you know travel it gives you a wider perspective widens your horizons and teaches you about your your Homeland your home country and all
your experiences prior to that so in some ways uh history and travel overlap at least in Chester's uh formulation and I just went there and having gone there I discovered that you had a a kind of palum sest you had multiple layers that were not visible and not well known
including the Buddhist layer uh there was a um genocide by the Ching troops against the jungar in inner Asia and it affected greatly the origins of the Dalai Lama as an institution a pan a Buddhist institution throughout Asia and all of this stuff is visible in
that River Valley the old in the ear Tish the ear Tish is effectively a tributary of the OB and so if you start from that point of view and you go through the Cent you have the agricultural settlement and transforming uh the the the land in into uh
Farmland you have the Soviet industrialization that kind of toxic civilization that they built right up through plans to reverse the rivers with exploding nuclear devices the kind of scientific lunacy uh that you see often in these uh projects where the Rivers Don't flow the
way you want them to flow and you think that there won't be second and third order consequences to reversing the flow of a river and so it the region turned out to have so much history layered in not all of which was visible to the naked eye but all of which would be
visible if you dug deeply into the source materials and you traveled around a little bit place names for example showed me the the Buddhist the jungar uh prehistory with many of the place names which the or were clearly not Russian words and so if you poked into the atmology you
discovered that history even though there were no visible signs not even cemeteries visible signs of their presence just a few centuries before whatever happened to the science City in Siberia it's academ gorok how's it pronounced yes aadm gorok or we would
call it academic City uh it's still there and it's still really large and important so it still produces science yes it does uh it's had a number of triumphs over the generations it's had some really high-powered uh institutes cybernetics for example a big presence out
there uh it it no longer has the same level of funding that it had in the Soviet period when Bud budget constraints were a little bit different uh but it's still important um the problem for the Siberian academic city is its remoteness from other centers like
manufacturing centers most of the Siberian region around it is old-fashioned metal industry and Mining the kind of stuff that we would call Dirty industry today steel plants dependent on coking coal for example very much uh mid 20th century style industry and so the scientific
achievements could not easily translate into a new productive economy what you might call Precision manufacturing or knowledge economy so they had the science belt but they didn't have it connected very well uh to uh applications in an industrial economy
that was forward-looking so so they fell into a little bit of a rut why were the Soviets so obsessed with cybernetics and AI say in the 1960s is it that they understood where things were going or it just was a big stupid mistake um you can never rule out big
stupid mistakes If we're honest certainly about our own lives and analogizing from them the Soviets were interested in cybernetics because it was about more offic ient ways of us of gathering and using information so the planned economy at core which was a fantasy never a reality
in practice the planned economy was central control over some scarce Commodities resources products so that you could prioritize and you could therefore Supply those privileged factories in your supply chains with the scarce resources to produce predominantly
military industrial products but not exclusively and the rest of the stuff come with May that was Black Market including Black Market Factory to factory so cybernetics was a solution whereby you could make planning work better you could kind of optimize the
information you were getting from uh the localities and then you could optimize the way that you organize things it was a fantasy in a different light and it's the same one that the Chinese Communist party has today which is to say if your authoritarian politics and your productive
economy don't mesh very well turn to technology turn to technological solutions to get beyond the fact that you refuse to do the structural reforms on the institutional side to ensure that the productivity the dynamism continues and so it's this
eternal fantasy that Science and Tech will enable you not to have to give up central control Power Communist Party Monopoly uh from the scientific point of view it was fascinating because that's who they were right they were exceptional world-class mathematicians worldclass
physicists worldclass computer scientists and so for them it was the same thing it would be for scientists anywhere now in the 1980s you went to live in magnitogorsk in the Ural Mountains other than your work and your curiosity as a historian of Soviet Union
what was the best thing about living there just as a citizen of magnitogorsk was there anything you liked for sure it was a harsh en environment pollution wouldn't begin to describe the orange air in the town it they had the it was a one company Town
one industry town they had a gigantic steel integrated steel plant and they had next to no pollution controls because they had installed pollution controls but they didn't use them because it lowered their output and they were paid and got their bonuses based on
quanitative output so the place was harsh as harsh could be but at the same time the people were astonishing there is something that uh for foreigners that's really captivating about all Slavic cultures the Russian one included which is the degree of hospitality and the warmth inside
people's homes so outside there's mismanagement corruption uh unbreathing able air uh undrinkable water no places to shop because the goods have all been stolen but inside people's homes there's everything and anything in a modest way because the size is not comparable to
the kind of middle class life we would imagine uh here or in Europe or in Japan but but inside uh despite the constrain circumstances in terms of the amount of space the warmest and best people you could have imagine and the conversation which was about novels and plays and
poetry and and and Science and the meaning of life and philosophical terms and that was even before you started drinking now the early PL sir magnitogorsk they Incorporated various ideas of utopian Urban Design did any of those come to fruition did you see any
of that when you're actually living there like a rational constructed and built City along some kind of different principles yes and it's still there to this day they built a city according to European modernism and they discovered that it wasn't very
livable so they had these fantastic buildings that looked like your bow house from Germany or your vea from uh Austria which were um not ornamental but still elegant right they were spare on the ornaments but still they had a industrial design Elegance the problem was families didn't
want to live with one bathroom down the hall for everybody they didn't like that deficiency as people in your profession might call it they didn't want to live where their children were raised collectively by somebody else they wanted to live as self-contained nuclear
family units where they had a kitchen and toilet facilities and showers and baths inside their own space rather than sharing that with others so it was this fantastic modernist project that was brought to fruition at scale and the people in it didn't want
to live that way the regime soon enough changed its mind the Central regime and stopped facilitating uh construction architecture by the German imported German Architects or the Soviet um emulation of them and instead turned away from this building of modernist
communal Apartments towards family self-contained Family Apartments which were infinitely more popular and then of course came the stalinist Baro ornamentation uh outside the apartments to differentiate those buildings so you have kind of three phases the spare
modern uh ideologically inflected European this is the way people should live the 20s and 30s then you have the stalinist barog indulgent Family Apartments which are very expensive to build and then you have the Cru Chef um five-story cement blocks very poorly constructed in
prefabricated fashion so those are that's a very basic uh history of the buildings there and but that first piece that you asked about was built and is still there and which of those did you live in neither none of them I lived in the self-contained American Cottage
built for the Us and other foreign Engineers hired on contract to help build and launch and initially it was thought to manage the steel plant remember the steel plant is um not a carbon copy but derived from the Gary Indiana a plant that that was built a
few decades earlier in central United States and so they had a colony which they called the American colony even though there were also Italians and Germans and others there and they had built these self-contained Cottages meaning the kind of house that
you and I would see in an American suburb and that's the pl it was removed from the U U Town a little bit isolated for security purposes and also to keep the Americans isolated from the local population as well as vice versa and those Cottages also survived I don't
know if they're still there but they survived into the the mid to late 90s and I stayed in one of those and I was under of course 247 surveillance now magnetos had been a closed City so what was it that people wanted to talk to you about or hear
about what were their questions everything and anything priority is they wanted to hear about the pope or about the Beatles or about the president or what so the the principle um was just curiosity and so they had been marinated in propaganda not just denied information
we have a wrong view of censorship that it's only suppression it's also promotion of certain kinds of information and certain kinds ways of thinking and so both the denial of the information and the promotion the marination that they went through so
they would ask me the simple questions that would seem silly in some way but fully understandable to me uh were did were workers ever allowed to go on holiday or were just or were recreational Resorts solely for the Bourgeois those kinds of questions because that was the information they
were marinated in uh also they wanted to know uh specific questions s about um people individuals was Ronald Reagan really a a dangerous guy who wanted War Reagan of course was President back then when I was in Magneto course and so it ran the
gamut they also wanted help in finding some children's clothes because there were no children's clothes available they wanted medicines because medicine were in very short supply they wanted me to carry correspondence out and then mail it when I was finally back uh in the US to some
relatives they might have abroad that they wanted to obviate the censorship so their isolation was really profound now some things had penetrated through right if you watch a foreign film for example and you watch a French film and you see how the French live the
apartments that they have the furniture that they have if they walk through a a store some type of store just as part of the moving if you see them on the street and they pass a grocery store and you see the fruit array in on on the street in front of
the store so you'll see oranges you'll see bananas you'll see things the most exotic things imaginable for the people isolated in the eural mountain area in a closed City and they would then ask me is that what shops are really like do people really have apartments with seven
and eight rooms uh is it really possible uh to go on um a trip without asking permission an exit visa for example for them to travel they needed not just the visa to the from the place they were going to but they needed an exit visa to be able
to leave their country so this was all pretty remarkable that I as a young man was plopped down into this remember I could speak the language and so I could Converse without an interpreter I didn't need minders and I was also not afraid so I would just go places I would just
travel around either walk or take mass transit and chat people up when I was taken to um the there was an observation platform outside town where you could see all of magnet gor in front of you and the mayor and various other dignitaries took me to
this they were very proud and and I understood that Pride not civic pride and then I turned around and the other side of the platform showed what looked to me like a prison complex and I said oh that must be the prison and they all all got red-faced
and they said to me oh no we don't have a prison here you know because this is their normal way of of of of denying reality so that they don't get into trouble and a foreigner doesn't get the wrong impression and and I said yeah you're you're right it's only in places like
New York City where we have PR you know where I'm from where we have prisons out here in magnet gors You couldn't possibly have a prison because you don't have any criminals whereas in New York we have as many prisons as as you could imagine and that broke the ice and then
they said well yeah you know it's not just New York actually we do have a prison and that's it and so they be we began to get to know each other get to understand each other whereby uh I didn't make fun of them and they feared me less and less in other
words I appreciated them for who and what they were and they appreciated the fact that I had this curiosity this willingness to learn this open-mindedness about learning who they are what they are when I took them to the cemetery actually the other way around I
should say they took me to the cemetery it uh for a commemoration and we were there for the solemn part of it and then afterwards I asked if we could take a walk and they said why would you want to walk through there it's muddy and I said let's just take a walk so I walked with them
through their Cemetery after the solemn ceremony and I started to narrate the lives of the people whose headstones we were passing because I had been in the archives and I knew the families I knew the history and and they were astonished because they themselves didn't know their own
history certainly not to the degree I knew it and so they began to see my appreci ation my respect for their history that is to say I didn't validate stalinism enslavement of the peasantry gulag all of that is beyond validation it should be condemned and
and was condemned but then you at the same time you have understanding you have empathy right radical empathy whereby you're not trying to validate what they did but you're trying to appreciate how they could do this who did it why they did it and as I walked
them through the cemetery for a long time and there were almost no headstones where I couldn't make some type of comment uh sometimes I knew a lot sometimes I knew just a little piece sometimes I was wrong I guessed because the names were similar
you know you'd walk through a cemetery and you'd see the name Smith for example on our side and you might imagine it was one Smith but it was a different Smith so that happened to me me after that Cemetery walk where I was respectful during the solemn part of their Seminary
uh uh ceremony and then I was um like a teacher that's why I had the fraudi and slip that I took them out to the cemetery when in fact they took me out and and that went a really long way in establishing the kind of trust uh Mutual trust and and gradually over time things
melted and I got more and more access to the documentation in the archives they would only let me read newspapers at first they had full runs of the local newspapers which are rare they were not allowed to be exported so our libraries in the US didn't have local newspapers
from the Soviet Union to any great extent certainly not full runs and even the central libraries the Library of Congress equivalents in the Soviet Union didn't always have full runs of very local newspapers some of which were fly by night and I would sit with the
archists call them over they had been sitting in this archive their whole lives and there were a number of them five or six they were all women because this was considered women's work and no one came to work on their history who would do that and so there I
was the only person uh besides the archists and I would call them over and I would say look at this and I would then explain what I had discovered in their history and some of them were really sharp and knew their history well and had done a lot of research and even
those people I could teach things to and by at by that point they were bringing me stuff sometimes things which weren't necessarily approved to bring me but they would ask me how do you interpret this because they were working on some project and they couldn't figure it out
and maybe I could figure it out for them so by the time I left the city the first time I went back twice I was there in ' 87 1987 and 1989 uh both uh obviously prior to the Soviet Union collapsing in 1991 and they were now recruited to my side so the the the local secret police
the the KGB as it was then called were very concerned that an American agent was recruiting local people but I wasn't trying to recruit them for anything I was just interacting with them on the basis of mutual interest and empathy and so the city
became in some ways conquered by me and and the fear that that produced in those who have the sort of deep suspicion that every American is an agent the CIA is unbelievably capable an octopus everything that happens in the Soviet Union that goes wrong is a result of the
foreign plots and all of this kind of stuff so that's small number of people who had high positions of authority were scared I scared the Jesus out of them but I befriended sobody so many of the other people from all walks of life including from the propaganda apparatus
several of whom were conducting surveillance on me the local newspaper some of them were not some of them were and uh but I didn't care because I had nothing to hide and only to gain from the interactions with the people so it was quite remark to be plopped down in
that isolated town in that time period and it it was forever for me I have some questions about Stalin so if we take some of the great Soviet creators banok shastovich bulgakov eisenstein did Stalin understand they were Geniuses because for all the bad
treatment he didn't quite crush them the way maybe he could have what what was Stalin's attitude toward them Stalin was one of those people for whom High culture was a mark of your advancement civilization what the Germans call buildong and what the Russians call
culturist from culture the German word meaning what we probably would call edification potentially and so Stalin's generation was about people acquiring some familiarity with high culture in all its forms whether Opera painting novels and poetry it was a literacy acquisition
culture where acquisition of literacy meant in the first instance reading and writing of course which Stalin learned from the Orthodox Church schools he attended but also literacy in a broader sense uh who are the great musicians what's the classical Cen in music who
are the great artists who are the great novelists both Russian but also more than Russian pan European not quite Asian Global stuff that didn't have the same resonance the world wasn't globalized in the same way and much of the undeveloped world was under colonial
rule as you know so for Stalin that was an important mark of his rise as an individual and as his self-worth he was predominantly self-educated but not completely so he had just as much education as the vast majority of revolutionaries at his level some completed
University uh most did not complete University he went to a seminary rather than a gymnasium and so therefore University was inaccessible to him uh but trosky put on the Airs of being more educated than Stalin and certainly trosky was uh more Adept at foreign
languages based upon Exile in Europe trosy spoke multiple languages and read multiple languages fluently that wasn't the case for Stalin Stalin had a kind of working uh bizarre or Market level knowledge of Persian Armenian the languages that you would expect someone in the CAU was
who went to the marketplace so so he grew in that mure and acquired that affinity for that culture and then your question is about his judgment could he judge for example that bulgakov was a superior writer or eisenstein was a superior filmmaker and the answer is yes
he made those judgments and not very many adherence to Marxism leninism or to Communism members of the Communist Party Shar sh those tastes with him that those bgea or potentially bgea inclined writers or writers who predated the revolution in origin who might have
criticized communism and certainly didn't adhere to Marxism leninism that they were valued in pure cultural terms so Stalin yes uh of course um he also had his prejudices and his blind spots so some High culture that you and I might appreciate he didn't
appreciate um he loved Czech off the most because the heroes in Czech off were not only uh the main characters also the villains and Stalin would remark that cof's villains were credible they were believable villains they were full-bodied villains in addition to the heroes so
yes um his it's non-trivial because he's the Arbiter of what if anything of high culture is distributed shown allowed and so his tastes were were were critical as the desperate in the system and and so those writers didn't Thrive the way they
would have thrived in an open Society but on the other hand there's something about cultural production under despotic conditions hot house despotic itions that also brings out different sides of these people why did praf have return in 1936 was he just stupid he wasn't making it
in Europe or how do you make sense of that I wouldn't have gone back uh some people who went back were arrested and executed or sent to prison labor and remote waste to return to your original questions about Siberia um but Exile is difficult losing your native language is
difficult for people it's not something uh immigration or Exile the immigrants often go voluntarily meaning they're looking to assimilate they're looking to settle into the new culture they certainly want their children to be completely assimilated in
many cases for exiled it's a little bit different often you didn't leave voluntarily often you were kicked out or you barely escaped you nurtured hopes to go back at some point either the regime would change or it would soften if it didn't
fall moreover if you're a really accomplished player you you're just you have an exceptional talent that talent and the appreciation of that Talent is different at home than it is abroad there's this fantastic scene in Maisto the film um about an actor who remains in sort
of a grandis Nazi Germany not greater Germany under the Nazis and he goes on stage and the Nazis rule there so there as swastikas on the curtains and other indications of the Nazi regime and someone asks him this is Klaus Maria brow the actor who plays the
the part just fantastic film someone says you know how come you didn't you're doing this and how come uh you didn't leave and and he rebukes the question and says you know not everybody can immigrate not everybody can leave for some people the German language and and the theater is
our life and we may or may not like the Nazi regime but why should we give that up and it's it's a moral dilemma obviously that's why the question was posed uh but there's not uh necessarily a single answer or a single black and white answer despite uh the fact that
you can be seen as a collaborator for the kind of stuff he did so prv goes back to do music to do music to appre itive audiences he's supremely talented and everybody there knows that and so does he fully understand how bad the regime is 1936 the regime is about to
descend into the his the frenzy of the mass arrests the so-called great Terror of Stalin 36- 38 so prooff doesn't understand all of that but who did at the time but what he does understand is that it's a musical culture and he is a master
musician what do you think of the hypothesis I think it comes from James Hughes that it was Stalin's visit to Siberia and his time there that gave him a sense of what was wrong with the Soviet Union that you needed to crush the kulacs to be quite oppressive is
that true no it's not true sadly I've been to that same place where Stalin went in barul in 1928 for a while in the museum not on display but in the back room they had the wooden sled that carried him from the rail head to the gigantic Barn where he gave the speech that he was going to
move forward on collectivization it was a decision he had already reached and it was a trip that he took in order to break the party's um affiliation with the kulacs many of party officials in the provinces in the 20s had grown Rich by liaison with the Richer
peasants they had married their daughters to kulok they were typical corrupt officials at the provincial level and Stalin wanted to teach them a lesson that that wouldn't fly anymore and he went out there and delivered a searing speech which of course then was
nationally publicized about how the collectiva full speed forward on collectivization and the koks were an enemy people didn't understand they didn't believe that how could he be doing this right so you have to remember for Marxist leninists uh the base determines the
superstructure so the nature of the economy or what they would call social relations socioeconomic conditions determines the kind of politics you have so if you have a Communist party in power and you have de facto Market relations in the countryside with a
Proto or quasi bis class richer peasants meaning they had more than two cows known as koks either the base would Triumph or the super structure the Communist Party would have to get rid of the base over the long term they were all Marxist leninists in the Communist party and
they all agreed with this even the corrupt ones who were feeding well in the Leon with the koks what they never imagined was that you could do this that you could collectivize agriculture across all of Soviet Eurasia through those multiple multiple time zones where
would you get the wherewithal the capacity to implement that to take people's property away from them so voluntary collectivization as of 1928 when Stalin makes that trip to Siberia it's Western Siberia voluntary collectivization is 1% of arable
land 1% meaning that the people who couldn't Farm themselves individually or as a household as a family they went into collectives voluntarily because they were incapable of managing on their own so for for you to be able to make 99% Collective as opposed to 1%
Collective you needed to take people's property away from them and force them into these Collective Arrangements now the property wasn't duur property it was only defao property but de facto property is still property and so Stalin made that trip in order to announce that
this was now going to happen and the others around him were very skeptical that this was feasible they didn't have a soft spot for the coocks don't get me wrong in in the Central Committee in the central apparatus in Moscow or other party Bastion like Leningrad or Kiev in
Soviet Ukraine or Nova be in Western Siberia but they had the skepticism that this could be done and so Stalin did it that was the thing that shocked them all and when in the process of doing it he caused famine and he was undermining
potentially the party's own rule he just kept going all the way through because he had the courage of his convictions and then when they complained about him he made a mental note of that and he exacted his version of Revenge on them a few years later for their criticisms of
him when he did this so he did this because he believed in true Marxist leninist fashion that this had to be done he felt himself to be a man of Destiny and therefore he could do this and he was looking to find the shock troops to Galvanize the half educated
youth to take violence out on these kulacs and to force the villagers into these Collective arrangements and so what he did and this is what totalitarianism is he galvanized people's agency and those people using their agency destroyed their own agency they made them they dis empowered
themselves by taking up his call do you think georgean blood Feud culture influenced Stalin at all in this yes so there were a lot of Georgians and there's one Stalin you know so people argue that he got into fights on the schoolyard and that the fights were
nasty and therefore he became a certain type of person they argue that his father beat him and therefore he had a certain he became a certain type of person the problem with arguments like that Tyler is that I got into fights in the schoolyard when I was his age people
beat me up because I was a half Catholic half Jew at a Catholic school this was an Englewood New Jersey right and and and people uh and I was small and people knew that they could maybe uh take me on Bully style because I wasn't as big as they
were uh my father also disciplined me with the proverbial belt when I got out of hand and I didn't go on to collectivize agriculture I not responsible for the deaths of 18 to 20 million people so you're not going to be able to explain Stalin as a phenomenon or even as a
personality with those types of tropes so what what explains Stalin at least in my view what I argued and continue to argue in the biography is the experience of getting into power and then exercising power it's building and running the dictatorship it's managing Russian power
in the world that makes Stalin who he is not because there's some kind of DNA there I don't go for cultural DNA like arguments but it's about your geography it's about your capabilities as a great power relative to other great Powers it's about the institutions that you've
inherited not only the ones that you've created and so this mix of Stalin building a dictatorship inside the dictatorship and exercising that power creates the kind of person that we know is St you know how I know that I refused to use sources that were
retrospective if you survived the Stalin collectivization Terror and you wrote A Memoir you looked back on those days in the schoolyard that Georgian Revenge culture and you said oh I remember when he was 11 and you know he put the cat in the
microwave I knew knew right then that we were all going to die right and so that retrospective Memoir approach where you know what happened and then you go back and find the I refused to do that so I only look prospectively at what people said about him in real time and he
resigned six times in the 1920s from the dictatorship from the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party three times we have a written document and three times we have solid testimony that he did it orally from multiple sources who were present
and all six times there might have been more but we have six documented times all six times those people who worked most closely with him refused to allow him to resign because he was carrying the regime on his shoulders he was the only person in that
group capable of doing so he was dedicated like nobody else to the cause and they didn't see the Stalin that we would later see in fact those people in the room with him those six times he murdered almost all of them in less than a decade in some cases and in less than
two decades in other cases and yet they didn't perceive that he was going to murder them because otherwise they would have contrived to get him out let alone uh accepted his multiple resignations so when you look at Stalin in real time you see a transformation in his
personality in symbiosis or in some relationship with building and running that dictatorship at that time period and and so I'm very hesitant of course he has a personality of course he has these experiences as a youth and of course they inform him right he
goes through church school and so he has a lur iCal way of expressing himself meaning uh like the Liturgy he enunciates points and repeats them over and over again it's sometimes it reads just like a catechism his Marxism leninism so you could say that it's
likely that his Orthodox upbringing his church school experiences including at the Seminary influenced him so I don't deny that there's a personality in influences but you're trying to explain one of the three uh bloodiest dictators in the history of our planet right
Hitler Stalin and Ma it's a very small category you can't put anybody else in that category in my view and in in explaining people like that life experiences when they're young or uh or um trips to Siberia or Georgian cult there were a lot of Georgians who grew
up in that time period who are gentle as gentle could be and some of them are communist party members what did you learn from Michelle Fuko about power or indeed anything else yeah I was very lucky I was in Burke I went to Berkeley for a PhD program in 1981 I finished in 1988 and
then my first job was at Princeton University in 1989 and in the middle of it I went for French history and I switched into h Borg history and then finally I switched into Russian Soviet history and I I started learning the Russian alphabet my third year of the
PHD program when I was supposed to take my PhD exams so it was a radical shift and and Fuko I met him because he came to Berkeley in the 80s just like dered da came just like habam Mas came uh Claude Levy stros the Anthropologist came through it was California they were
your Europeans and there was a wow factor for them um Fuko was also uh openly uh gay and San Francisco gay culture was extraordinarily attractive to him it was unfortunately Epoch of the AIDS epidemic so one time I was at lunch with him and he said to me wouldn't it
be amazing if somebody applied my theories to stalinism and I'm sitting there okay I'm 23 years old imagine if you had traveled to Switzerland in the late 19th century and you went up in those engadine mountains and you were at some Cafe in the Mountain Air and there's this guy with a
huge forehead uh and and and hair up in the air sitting there and you went and introduced yourself you said you know hello I'm I'm Tyler and he said hello I'm Fredick n you would say well gez you know I mean this is interesting I should have more
conversations with you so that's the experience I had I had read Fuko and seminar because it was very fashionable to do so obviously especially at Berkeley especially you a culture that tilts One Way politically and I think you'll guess which way that might
be but I didn't understand what he said so I went up to him as a naive with the this book Madness and civilization which we had been forced to read and I I started asking him questions what does this mean what does this mean what is this passage this is
indecipherable and he patiently explained to the that I was what he was trying to say and it s it sounded much more interesting coming from him verbally sitting across just a few feet away than it had on the page and I was lucky to become
the class coordinator for his course at berkling and and so he he gave these lectures about uh the truth the problem of the truth teller in ancient Greece it was very far removed from I had no classical training yes I had Latin in uh high school because I went to Catholic
school and it was a required subject and I started as an ult boy with the Latin Mass uh which quickly changed because of what happened in Vatican 2 but but um no Greek so it was I it was completely Greek to me you forgive me for that wasn't planned that I was going
to sit it just happened spontaneously anyway so I just kept asking him more questions and invited uh him to go to things and so we would have lunches and dinners and I introduced him to this place Little Joe's in um Little Italy part of San Francisco which
unfortunately is no longer there it was quite a landmark back then and and then he would repair after dinner to the bear house the bath houses in San Francisco by himself I was not part of that uh uh I'm neither openly nor closeted gay so so that was a different part of Fuko
that I didn't partake in but others did anyway so I would ask him these things and and he would just explain stuff to me so I would say um what's happening in Poland you know this is the 1980s and he would say things to me likei the idea of
civil society is the opiate of the intellectual class and everybody was completely enamored of the concept of Civil Society in the 80s especially via the Polish case and so I would ask him to elucidate more you know so what does that mean and how does that work and and and he told
me once that class in France came from disease in Paris that it wasn't because of who was a factory worker who wasn't a factory worker but was your neighborhoods in Paris and who died from C and who didn't die from col and a colleague of ours who was another fellow
graduate the Berkeley ended up writing a dissertation using that aside that throwaway line so I began to I was able to ask him these questions about everything and anything and what he showed me this is your question what he showed me was how power works not in
terms of bureaucracy not in terms of the large mechanisms of governance like a secret police but how all of that is enforced and acted through daily life in other words the micro versions of power and so it's connected to the big structures but it's
little people doing this that's why I said totalitarianism is using your agency to destroy your own agency and that means denouncing your neighbors right be being encourag to denounce your your neighbors for um heresies and participating in that culture of denunciation which
loosens all social trust and social bonds and puts you in a situation of dependency on the state so you're a gung-ho activist using your agency and the next thing you know you have no power whatsoever and so those are the kind of things that I could talk to him
about and after he passed away from AIDS in the summer of 1984 it was the AIDS epidemic and horrific uh he passed away and we had a memorial for him I was still a PhD student remember I didn't finish until 88 and there was this guy Michelle deserto who uh wrote a um a tribute to
fukko in French that he was going to deliver at the um at the event was called the laughter of fuk and I had these conversations with derero about his analysis of Fuko the pleasure of analytic work which had been a Hallmark of Fuko and this um laughter of Fuko and
dto taught me a phrase called the little tactics of the habitat which became one of the core ideas of my book my dissertation and then book magnetic Mountain about this micro power stuff so he even though Fuko was gone I was able to extend the beginning of the
conversations with Fuko through dto and I learned how power Works in everyday life and how the language that you use and the the practices like denunciation that you that you enact or partake in helps form those totalitarian structures so it's not just the SEC cuz the secret
police are not there every minute of every day so what's in your head how how are you motivated what type of behavior are you motivated for and so we say oh okay what would Stalin do situation many people approach their lives they've never met Stalin they'll never meet
Stalin but they imagine what Stalin might do and so that gets implanted in their way of thinking it becomes second nature and I learned to discuss and analyze that through fuk call I have to say I did share his analysis that um Western Society was imprisoning that the daily life
practices of free societies were a form of imprisonment in its in its own way uh I never shared that view so it wasn't for me his analysis of the West that I liked it was the analytical toolkit that I adapted from him uh to apply to actual totalitarianism the Soviet case much of
that is a theme in vasel Grossman's life and fate right the paity of people denunciations the logic of decentralized control yes I read Grossman later so remember I I'm an ignor amist like most graduate students uh but but even more so because
I don't know any Russian history I have no Russian history training I'm learning the Russian alphabet and so I don't have that deep and Rich uh feel for the place that I would only developed later on by reading uh life and fate and and and
much else everything that vasile grman wrote so what I had was French history I had the anal School the anal School founded by Mark block and Lucian fev in the 20s it was the journal was called anal and it was as the anal school and brodell fernan brodell became one of the
most famous proponents of the school although a Pierre shonu I prefer much more I like shu's uh Seville in the Atlantic much more than I like brell's Philip in the Mediterranean it's fev was my favorite by far and fev decided unlike block fev decided to
continue to publish during the vichi day and bl went into the resistance and was eventually killed and fev had the whiff of that that shieler that actor in The misto movie that I was talking about but anyway it's this fabulous historical eruption that comes from the French and
what they do is they do total history meaning they take a place they go into the judicial archives which record daily life and they do econom Society culture and politics all rolled into one so that's what I decided to do but in the Soviet case and I became the first case
study of any Soviet Place based upon archival material with this magnetic Mountain project but I did it an all school style splicing in the theories of of micro power and micr politics from Fuko and dto so then I had to learn okay so I
start learning the Russian alphabet as a PhD student at Berkeley instead of taking my exam I had this professor Sergey kasatkin an emigra who was well on in years probably 70s maybe even older I'd never asked him who had immigrated in the Civil War 19920 out through
harbine and then uh became uh an orientalist he wrote a Mongol Mong Mongol dictionary not a Mongol Russian but Mongol Mongol dictionary and the uh new Chinese new Japanese work for British intelligence in World War II and he ends up at the end of life or later days at Berkeley
teaching intensive Russian for beginners so I took Russian two hours a day five days a week with a tiny number of other students in Serge casakin in the classroom so that's that's my level of vasil Gman is very far at that point right I'm trying to figure out how
jirens work you know how the past tense work how you use verbs in Russian which are very diff Russian is much closer to Greek to ancient Greek than it is to English in in its grammar and and some of the behavior of the language so mastering that and then getting on a
plane and going and gorbachov comes into power and I have to do PhD research and and then I finished this and four years later I'm assistant professor of Russian Soviet history at Princeton University so this is like some kind of you know fantasy uh
dystopia um talk about novels right this is just unimag I don't even know if a novelist could have imagined this life and then I have to backfill and I have to start reading the bakov and I have to start reading uh the grma and of course I have to read them in the original Russian now
so I don't read them in translation I don't go through the point where I read them in Translation when I was a a kid and now I'm a professional reading them the first time I ever read them was Russian language just like I read kundra's a book of laughter and
forgetting and after I learned Czech it was part of my Czech language training at Berkeley I studied Czech before Russian because I did hops Borg history so all the backfield I discovered this amazing ancient civilization with all of these layers
and and like music and and graphic arts and literature and poetry and and Theater and that was a bonus I had gone into this only because it was a problem of how power works and the connection between geopolitics institutions daily life ideas and I discovered a world that I
had not appreciated not even anticipated okay sure I wasn't totally ignorant in the way that maybe um I'm I'm portraying it I was predominantly ignorant uh so I'm not exaggerating my ignorance here but it was it was deep I had studied European intellectual history uh
University of Rochester as an undergraduate so I knew the German the French British some Italian stuff I studied German and French languages as an undergraduate so I I was was not a complete unwashed ignoramus but Russia was a world that I
would only discover late later and I it was a stroke of luck what do you like best in Korean art yeah it's funny you should you should ask that question uh when I was a um uh assistant professor at Princeton I got a sabatical and I went to Japan and it had no relation obvious
relationship to my work and I was an assistant professor in 10e track and you can imagine what the senior faculty told me they said are you out of your mind you know you're you're coming up for tenure next and the next year you got to submit your file for tenure the end of
your fifth year and this is your fourth year and you're going to Japan and I went to Japan for um language boot camp I enrolled in a language boot camp that was 18 months for Asians to go to Japanese University so from Mongolia from uh Korea from Hong Kong from everywhere
across Asia it was an amazing mix of people astonishing school and there were two non-asians in the school myself in this class that I was in and the cultural atache at the Austrian Embassy in Tokyo and I'm sitting there with the these Hong Kong people and the teacher
says something and nobody in the class understands a word and then everyone looking puzzled at the teacher and then the teacher goes up to the board and writes a couple of characters and you hear this loud side from all the Hong kongers oh that's what
it means what she's trying to say because they can read they can read the characters they're not identical but they're close enough they've been changed in slightly different ways uh in the different culture that that use them anyway so I got introduced to Asia I had
a a a supervisor at Tokyo University Social Science Institute that um shock Canada was called and so I would go to language boot camp for half the day from sort of early morning till about right after lunch one o'clock or so and then I would go over to an office at Tokyo
University this very privileged amazing uh place where I had this Russian who was also a Korean wada Haruki he was a gem of a scholar and uh uh he was sort of pro- Engagement or Sunshine policy kind of anti-cold War what would you expect a little bit pink on the outside red on
the inside uh but so airod died and such a gentleman and and remember I'm speaking Japanese after a while and so that's really helpful and and he introduced me to this other Professor named hamash who was in the Oriental Institute next door and had
a seminar in Japanese language about the Japan the Chinese tributary system over a millennium so I had this immersion in East Asian stuff as a result of the Curiosity of of wanting to do uh the Japanese language I did rewrite my dissertation I did have a completed man uscript when I came back
from the end of that trip in Japan uh somehow I was voted up for tenure at Princeton and spent 33 years there as you alluded to it but I got this bug that well I had this bug earlier and I was able to live it with this year and I ended up two and a half years in
Japan my dormatory at Tokyo University was at a place called komaba komaba toay was the the Stop and it was at the um Ming card folk art it was at the folk art museum the Japanese folk art and so I fell in love with Japanese furniture and folk art and I discovered the
Koreans had the same thing so uh I met my wife who's Korean South Korean citizen still to this day in kazawa Japan the backside of Japan not the Pacific side at a Japanese language program an advanced program not the beginner one that I had started the the
previous time in Tokyo and she was a PhD student at Colombia writing a dissertation about how Korean Ceramics influenced Japanese ceramics so it was a cultural transfer from Korea to somewhere else which was not typical and the Japanese acquired Korean culture
which is not something that they would admit because for them they were the superior remember the colonial rule there anyway so I began to learn more and more about Korean culture including uh Korean folk art and Korean furniture and so that's the piece the stuff that
my wife taught me which is um the early modern what we would call early modern Ceramics is still has a a place in my heart but it's really the craftsmanship what we put in the folk museums but is the high quality furniture and other accoutrements that maybe one day were in the kitchen and
now are on display play in a museum case and our house has some of these artifacts that we were able to purchase in antique shops uh in in a soul and as well as in Tokyo because you can purchase Korean art and artifacts in Japan because of the colonial period the
Japanese took a lot of stuff back and so I had this fabulous new world that opened up to me just because I had this curiosity I could have learned Chinese and I took a trip in ' 87 to both China and Japan to compare them to decide which East Asian language I was going toh take up
when I had the opportunity and I spent two months in China traveling the whole thing all the way from harbine Trans Siberian railroad carbine all the way down to Hong Kong Shion and the Terracotta Warriors Shanghai and the boond and this is China
87 so it had just begun to open up and foreigners were few and far between and it was a poor country and it was amazing and I got to Japan and it was 80s Japan this modernity that worked all the the stuff about Japan is number one Japan
won the Cold War we're turning Japanese now as as the pop song had it and I was captivated in set so instead of choosing the China piece I chose the Japanese piece but it was a a selection iose it only theoretically cuz I couldn't enact that yet it was only later on when I had
the privilege of being an assistant professor at Princeton with a sabatical year that I decided to to boldly go to Japan and then I said I had that summer in Kazar where I met my wife and and and then I had another year in Hokkaido the northern Island where I was at the uh
Slavic Research Center for for the full year and met a huge number of amazing people and so that all stays with me including the art side and because my wife is a is an accomplished curator we do a lot of travel together where I'll give a lecture about some geopolitical
issue and my wife will have meetings that I'll traes along to with the museum directors and the other curators and so I I have a very U privileged very lucky ability to experience that art world and including Korean art that you asked about last question with two related
Parts first when is your final sty and volume coming out and what will you do next yeah um the um the final sty and volume is taking me longer than I thought uh part of it um was accidental uh I had three separate unrelated cancers that that uh put me in a tunnel
for about 18 months of medical care and they were detected early and I had the finest imaginable doctors so again luck my life and luck are synonymous here they it wasn't one cancer that spread it was three separate cancers that arose
but after I had the first one which was caught early they were looking to see that I didn't have it anymore and the microscopic quality of the surveillance enabled them to discover the incipient other cancer in a very early stage and then that happened again a third time
after the second cancer uh the the uh treatment had been conducted and they were looking to see that it was successful so so that set me back a little bit uh 18 months maybe two years uh it teaches you a lot about life when you go through something like that I
won't go into the details but I'm sure you understand the the bigger reason that it's taking me longer is the difficulty of the subject each one of these three volumes has been harder than the previous one the first one I thought I'm never going
to finish this thing it it's just so hard and I pulled it off and then I said okay I can do this and then I took the second one on and it was signif it was not quite exponentially harder but it was significantly harder and now the third one I'm feeling the same thing
World War II is so much bigger than anything else that's come up in the first two volumes and it took me forever to get to the truth about the war so much of what we think to be true including of course about Stalin's behavior and Soviet Society during the war and various
battles I discovered really didn't have solid evidence behind it in many cases not in all cases but in many cases so I worked through the war part which is half the book half of volume three and now I'm in the Chinese Revolution and so I'm in the Cold War
the 45 to 53 period and we we know a lot about that and it's hard to be fresh about the Cold War so many great Scholars have gone into the previously secret archives and brought out amazing material and written really fine analytical books but what I discovered about the Cold War
stuff is the um preoccupation bordering obsession with non-strategic questions like the fate of Poland now for polls the fate of Poland is existential don't get me wrong just like for lithuanians and lvans and estonians and ukrainians today as we speak on this
cast I get all that for them but is it core is it central to the global order that forms after 45 that's a much harder more difficult question and so what I've discovered is what I call the four partitions um China Korea Japan and Indochina and in so many ways that was
so much bigger than the fate of Poland again not for the polls I'm I have Polish ancestry so I understand what I'm talking about to a certain extent besides just being a storian but if you look at the East Asian story that's where so much of the Cold
War still reverberates today and I would argue is not over so China could have been partitioned and wasn't Korea could have been completely taken over by the Soviets but instead was partitioned because Truman asked Stalin to stop at the 38th parallel even though Truman
didn't have soldiers on the ground to prevent Stalin from doing so Stalin was ready to invade the home islands of Japan and had already given the order so Japan should have been partitioned and wasn't and then of course Indo China what we know is Vietnam today was part
so so you have these four partitions two of which happened Korea and Indochina both of which led to war and two partitions that didn't happen one because the Communists won in China and one because the Communists got nowhere near power in Japan and so that's the
really big story in the later part of Stalin's life the 45 to 53 period and I'm working through that now and I've discovered that it's not as simple as it's present once again like World War II I have to go back and dig and dig and dig to verify and to make sure that the
things we believe actually happened they actually true and kind of Excavating layers of possibility paths not taken decisions made we know well the episode of of General George Marshall he's famous for the Marshall Plan in Europe and is considered one of the great
Statesmen American history but in China he is completely failed uh it failed as bad as his mission in Europe succeeded and so when you give equal or even greater weight in my view as as would be warranted to the East Asian story of the Cold War and Stalin's role
in it uh it could potentially freshen up our understanding of this and then of course it connects to the present day so volume three is called totalitarian super power because the Soviet Union was a superior totalitarianism to Nazism but it was an inferior superpower
to the United States which is why it was successful in one case and unsuccessful in the other case what totalitarian superpower has a certain resonance for where we are with China today not identical of course but a certain resonance and so I'm working
my way through this and I'm bogged down now in the Chinese Revolution and Indochina and the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese Occupation in fresh and astonishing ways at least for me again there are great books amazing Scholars that we're all riant on uh but I'm
trying to get to The Source on many of these things and so I've got a ways to go uh we're still only halfway through we're still several years away unfortunately un volume three but I I I have the sense of momentum I was working on it before we got on this call going
through um some of this stuff in 45 and 46 on the east as don't get me wrong Berlin is a big deal and the division of Germany and the Berlin story and the the blockade there and the KP in Czechoslovakia and the Marshall Plan I'm not trying to suggest that that's
trivial I'm just trying to suggest that there are things that are also extraordinarily important that have not given the same way as to what I'll do next I hope I'm going to get my life back uh I've been in Joseph Stalin's company for not quite two decades now a
decade and a a little more than a decade and a half and um it's it's been remarkable I've learned a lot and I've certainly stretched my mind and come to understand the world in power much better than I did before even though there's a ways to
go but it's enough already seeing the evil you you probably don't have the your world is mostly digital you don't have the experience of of going through documentations with his signature on it and there's dried blood on the page so that's the kind of work I've
been IM the world I've been immersed in I understand how his mind works it's it's not his blood that's on that page it's somebody else's blood from their interrogation that he's reading and signing off on it's how to it it's been a gift to understand power that original journey I
was launched on because Stalin is the gold standard of power if you want to study how power is accumulated how you it's operationalized and what the conse quences are there's no bigger story than his story and and so from the point of view of power it's endlessly fascinating it's
it's a lifelong learning it's a gift as I say but but from the point of view of morality Freedom the stuff that I cherish and believe in and I'm privileged to be able to experience it is just devastating the moral squalor I mean there is no limit
the Mortal squalor is just bottomless and you live in that world not 247 I'm sitting here in Stanford University in a plush office overlooking the campus Silicon Valley is outside the door and and and and a three-bedroom house is a $3 million three-bedroom house is on
sale for 10 million down the street right so this it's not my life uh 100% it's it's not something that envelops me all the time but it is something that absorbs me in my um life of the mind my my work experience and then of course I'm I finished the section on the war
and all of these places that I just wrote about they're in the news today so people talk to me about X City cromor in Ukraine or fill in the blank whatever place that was obscure to Americans not long ago and is now known to them and all this stuff happened back
then in the 40s only it was the Nazi land Army against the Soviet land Army and so all those place names and all that history and I just wrote about the the war which was really more than War it was mass murder World War II on the Eastern front and here I am and I never
thought I would live through war in in those places again of course again I'm not there I'm not living in Ukraine my relatives haven't been killed there just like they weren't in the 1940s in the historical material that that I'm immersed in but
but you get you get an a feel for this and and it it has an effect on you even if you then can close your laptop and go off to some fantastic Sushi PA and you you know what I'm talking about sure Stephen cotkin thank you very much my pleasure thank you thank you for the opportunity