"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 s..."

"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 ..."

"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 proble..."

"Do you think that that still  applies in today's world?  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 milit..."

"while importing as much as they can of the  attributes… It's two sides of the same coin.  The thing that gets you the engineers also  gets you the possible political ideas.  So the tsarist regime begi..."

"It's totally unjust and the claims of  the people protesting are legitimate.  Stalin goes into the underground,  not because he's looking for power.  It's because he's dedicated to fighting  the injus..."

"some solution that was more evolutionary  that could get you to a better place.  The constitutionalists, otherwise known as the  Kadets, we would call them the classical liberals.  They're the private..."

"before the modern era. Why? Because  when you institute constitutional order,   like in England, in the US, to a certain extent  in France which has a more complicated process,   you do it before you'..."

"The opposite has happened in most  other cases where you've gotten an   attempt but a failure to introduce enduring  constitutional order in a mass society.  But there's a paradox here. If you institu..."

"repressed the political movement,  the Tsar wanted to undo those   concessions and go back to being an autocrat. An autocrat, autokrator, means a "self-power,   a power unto itself". So this is  your ..."

"You say that in 1917 a leftist revolution of some  kind was inevitable, but that it didn't have to   be the Bolshevik October Revolution. Why was leftism inevitable in Russia?  You put your finger on ..."

"resolved right through 1917, 1918. So the peasants had their own   revolution in 1917 and 1918, which  was not about the socialist parties.  It's not about the Bolsheviks, it's not about  Lenin, it's ..."

"In central Europe—the southern German  case, the northern Italian case,   the Hungarian case—you don't have the endurance  of the leftists in power. They're all thrown out.   They're thrown out by the..."

"unrest is caused by the mistreatment of peasants  in China and in Russia, you have the mistreatment   of them to an extent unimaginable after the  collectivization in 1928 where literally 100   millio..."

"surveillance and infiltration. You're reading their mail,   which is something that's invented in France. The black cabinets are a French invention that   the tsar's secret police borrow. You're follo..."

"Again, a fantastic question. We get this from  Lev Kopelev, The Education of a True Believer.  He was one of these people. He later then becomes a dissident.  He gets forced into exile in Germany. He'..."

"There's ideology, but there's a very  specific thing to these Marxist regimes.  They might believe in class conflict and  that you need this revolution and so forth.  But there's also this sense that ..."

"of socialism, is absolutely paramount. One way to explain that is that they   were just genuinely afraid of Stalin  and they thought this was antithetical   to their understanding of communism. Anothe..."

"party is dedicated to achieving. You know that there are going to be mistakes   and costs and bad things will happen along the  way, but is imperialist war better than that?  No, the answer is imperia..."

"They don't have to submit to elections. They don't have to have a mandate.  They don't have to legitimate their  rule beyond the ideological building   of a new world, of overcoming injustice. What we..."

"so that… You could never do  this in the private sector.  Nobody could afford you this kind of power in the  private sector and in a decentralized political   system, in a federalized political system..."

"socialism and the building of Marxism-Leninism." So people did believe that Stalin was actually   going against this end goal that they had. At  least Khrushchev believed that. In many cases,   they t..."

"The ones who publicly decry the failures of  the system and its perverse and unintended   consequences, the ones who decry the  dictatorship as opposed to the freedom   that Marx predicted would happe..."

"Human psychology is a complex subject. Figuring out human psychology is a   big challenge, even with everything we  know now, let alone what we knew then.  So it's simultaneously everything and anythi..."

"One of the things they do is  to walk through the fire of   their self-immolation on behalf of the cause. This belief in the new world, in the better world,   in transcending capitalism, in getting  p..."

"Socialism means many different things.  A communist party is building socialism.   Why? Because their view of the world is:  feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism.  First they have to destroy ca..."

"and prosperity, in order to have freedom. We need to manage it better, redistribute.  This civil war on the left,  which arises in real time,   the critics of Lenin's revolution,  the German Social De..."

"You have this deep and  fundamental problem for the left.  The tragedy of the left that it's never able to  overcome, even to this day, where it comes out and   says, "No more anti-capitalism ever, th..."

"You say, "I never said to kill the  people, I said that they should live."  But once you nuke capitalism, you're going to  lose freedom, you're going to lose the ability   to have politics, you're goi..."

"of property, we have to undo collective  farms, we have to undo the dictatorship…   Instead of saying that, they say, "We get  a chance to do it right this time without   the evil Stalin who messed it..."

"that are at fault. China actually did reform the system and they  didn't just discredit the Cultural Revolution.  They said no, much of the planning and  state-owned enterprises was a mistaken idea.  ..."

"But I do have a different question. Wait, that's not exactly the way you   described it. You have a point. You're onto  something, DK. But it needs to be qualified.  What happens in Deng Xiaoping's ca..."

"Therefore, there's something else that  we can go to that's an alternative."  Communism has suppressed all the alternatives. It's either return to tsarism or keep communism.  In the Chinese case, you ..."

"and control and transform the psychology  and behavior of the capital. Of course,   it fails. Instead, the party members  are in cahoots with the millionaires.  They begin to form their own businesses..."

"government wasn't maximally stupid. Fair point, DK. We often exaggerate   the role of policy in all realms because we do  policy ourselves or we talk to policymakers.  We have a bias towards the causa..."

"We have to understand in the communist  sense that incentives matter.  When you create incentives for officials to  increase GDP and to increase job creation,   and that's how they get rewarded, you'r..."

"This is part of the dynamic of us seeing  communism as potentially successful.  We criticize these fools who thought that  the Stalin regime was not going to kill   them, and was not going to produce ..."

"That's a Clinton initiative that happens  right when Bush is going to come to office.  The secret sauce is, you have to manufacture  and export to the American domestic market   because the American m..."

"The other thing they have is overseas Chinese  who know the culture, speak the language,   and are going to do the FDI, again routed through  Hong Kong. So you have Taiwan. Ironically,   the failure t..."

"that American consumers will buy. American consumers are not   forced to buy Chinese products. They're just better, and they're cheaper.  So they buy them because it's a  market and there's competitio..."

"Counterfactuals are really  critical for historical thought.  A lot of historians are pedantic about this. They say we're against counterfactuals,   it's just speculation. But every single one of   th..."

"what the larger context in the world looks like? Here you have a Communist party that seizes power.  As I said, unlike the case of Bavaria, southern  Germany, northern Italy, Hungary, it holds   power..."

"Someone who would then come out the  other side of that as the victor with   this gigantic secret police that was  really small but got really big in   the process of doing the very thing  that people..."

"him let him do that? Around Putin,   the people are falling out of windows. Instead of falling out of the windows themselves,   why don't they push him out the window? Khamenei in Iran, he's brought r..."

"Of course, they know that  they can't do what he does.  If they tried to unseat him, they might  save their lives but they might lose   the revolution, the system and the radiant  future, the overthro..."

"got a point there. What can we do about this?" But you know that Stalin is constantly doing   these provocations, or you suspect he is. You know that he's got people, provocateurs who   are around the..."

"Even so, it is paradoxical because  when Hitler goes to make a speech,   every year Hitler makes a speech in Munich. It's known when he's going to make the speech.   It's announced in the paper. There..."

"They didn't know that Stalin was in the boat. You've written other books about the   collapse of the Soviet Union. There's this last ditch effort   in the Eastern Bloc where there's falling  productiv..."

"What happens in communist political reform,  not economic reform where they allow some   market behavior, but where you liberalize the  system and you open it up politically… You say,   DK, let's have..."

"They're not going to commit suicide  like what happened with Gorbachev.  This means their policy options, their  menu of policy options, is limited.  They can open up the economy, but if it gets too  ..."

"Here's the problem with that argument. First, it didn't work the last time.  That doesn't mean it won't work this  time, but the track record, even though   it's a small number of cases, is not good. ..."

"A lot of people are indifferent but  a majority of the people despise this   regime and want to see it go. They're patriots for Iran,   but they detest the mullah's clerical regime. Neither Russia nor..."

"The challenge for them is that  somebody has to do the repression.  The repressive apparatus is not a machine.  It's not AI. It's not something which is   mechanical. It's people. It's people who grow..."

"that the communist regime can't solve with tech. You say, "Well, the tech could produce power and   prosperity and China could relegitimize its  rule just like it did with economic growth.  The econom..."

"really interesting. In the short run, we're all  dead because there could be a World War III.  But in the long run, we're all  good because our system is better.  So we have to elongate the short run...."