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big whoop dudes an idiot

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- My name is Kai Bird. I'm the Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, as you know. And I want to thank Thad Ziolkowski, our Associate Director, for helping put this together. This is our 10th anniversary, really 10 and a half years now, all funded by Shelby White of the Leon Levy Foundation. So we've now funded 40 fellows, all doing biographies, and about, actually about half of them have finished their books, and the others are still in the works. You know, as you know biography takes, as you'll learn from Professor Kotkin, biography is endless. Our current fellows are Bruce Weber, who is not here tonight, who is working on E.L. Doctorow, Eleanor Randolph, she's back there, working on Michael Bloomberg. Justin Gifford is doing a book on Eldridge Cleaver. He's the one there in the ca-see-uh. Lindsay Whalen is doing a biography of Mary Oliver, and we have Micki Kaufman, who I don't think is here tonight, working on a book on Henry Kissinger. Our next event will be on Wednesday, February 21 with Max Boot for his biography of Edward Lansdale, It's a fascinating book all about the Vietnam War. We are delighted to have this evening Professor Stephen Kotkin of Princeton University to talk about the second volume of his quite magisterial biography of Joseph Stalin. By my count, Professor Kotkin is the author of a dozen books, but this projected three-volume work on Stalin is already being hailed as the definitive life of Stalin for our generation. He has already spent at least 14 years on Stalin, and like any brilliant biographer, he has demythologized his subject and turned him into a real human being. In an interview some years ago, he had this to say, "Evil in some ways becomes more horrifying "when the evil person is humanized. "He, Stalin, made absolutely ruthless, "cold-blooded decisions, "alongside a sincere commitment to social justice. "He was a man who was both utterly charming "and utterly vicious, a shrewd Machiavellian "who was also often blinkered. "He misdiagnosed fascism, for example. "I discovered a Stalin I did not know, "despite teaching the subject for 26 years." And I really think that's, you know, captures the essence of the biographical journey. It's really a special thing. It's a window into understanding history that is essential. Anyway, Professor Kotkin, please tell us more about this man but also your journey as a biographer. (audience applauding) - Move this temporarily if that's okay so I don't bump into it. Is that better? - [Audience Members] Yes. - How do you like that, huh? Once again, thank you for the honor of the invitation and the introduction. This guy was on his deathbed, and there was no hope, this was it. He wanted to get something off his chest, and his wife was beside him in the hospital. And he just, he couldn't say it, couldn't say. Finally, he got it out. He said, "I've got to tell you something." She's looking at him, listening. He says, "I cheated on you." She looks at him, looks at him again and says, "Duh, why do you think I poisoned you?" (audience laughing) And her name is Melania. (audience laughing) That's called preempting the Trump question at the beginning. (audience laughing) Usually the first question is Trump. The second question is the Koch brothers. So I've done one of them at least so far. We'll see if I can handle the other one when it comes. So how do you talk about a book that is 900 pages of text, and it's the second one, (audience laughing) and there's one more to go, another 1,000-page rock I've got to push up the hill somehow, which I'm not really feeling like it's coming yet, but maybe I'll get there. I do this differently each time because I don't really know how you do a 30-minute presentation about something this large. I'll talk a little bit about some of the episodes, maybe some of the process of writing since I've been prompted, and then we'll have questions. So it will be episodic rather than coverage, if that's okay. This is a more attentive and mature audience than I'm used to. (audience laughing) I'm sorry if your children or grandchildren were involved in that comment, if you have any, if any of you have children at Princeton University. I've gotten out of the habit of talking to people who pay attention. (audience laughing) Seriously, okay. So yeah, as Kai alluded to, Stalin was a human being. For example, he really liked saunas, a Russian version known as a banya. He also liked to sleep on top of a hot stove, the kind of stove that peasants have in their huts and that he had in his kitchen at his dacha, in part because of the rheumatism, the difficulty he had. He had pain in his bones, and it was very therapeutic for him to sleep on the stove. He also paced. I've begun to pace myself now. He paced. Everyone was seated in his office, and he was the only one up, and he was pacing, and in part it was because it alleviated the pain. But he couldn't walk that well because of an accident he had in his youth, and he had to swing his hip all the way around when he walked, like this. And so there's no footage anywhere in the Russian archives of Stalin walking because it was prohibited to film him while he walked. There's only a tiny bit of footage from the international conferences, like Yalta or Pot-stam where you can see him moving. It was also prohibited to photograph him in profile. You'll see one photograph of him in profile that was never published because he looked excessively Georgian in his mind from the profile. He loved colored pencils. He used only colored pencils, not pens, blue, red, and green, and no real reason why he chose one color versus another color. And he read documents with the colored pencils. He underlined or he made check marks, or he wrote instructions on the documents in his colored pencils. As you know, he smoked a pipe, and he didn't use pipe tobacco. He used cigarette tobacco. He sometimes smoked the cigarettes as well, but normally he would unroll the cigarette and put it into the pipe, sort of let it flow down. He liked Herzegovina Flor cigarettes, that was the brand he preferred. If some of the tobacco didn't go into the pipe itself, like for example it fell onto the table or onto the floor, he bent over and cleaned it up himself. His desk was quite neat. If there was a runner on the carpet in the hallway, he walked on the runner. And if he saw ahead someone who was off the runner, walking on the parquet, he would shout, "Get on the runner, what are you doing?" He liked bowling, lawn bowling, which in Russian is known as gorodki. He played billiards as well. He did a lot of reading. He collected a humongous library. Not much of it was preserved after his death, only about 570 volumes were preserved, but he had at least 20,000 in his library, and he wrote in his books, and he put little white slips of paper so that he could find quotations. He read, obviously Marx and Lenin. He knew Lenin extremely well, such that, where those white slips for the quotations were, he didn't need to look anymore because he knew much of it by heart. He read also a lot of stuff on ancient Rome and despotism, especially in the later 1930s when he was trying to be a better despot. He was boning up, Augustus, whatever it might be. He read also a lot of medieval and early modern Russian history, Russian imperial history. His favorite author was Chekhov, and he liked Chekhov the best because the villains in Chekhov were realistic. He felt that they were full-bodied, full-rounded villains in Chekhov. This is what he told everybody. He was, as Kai alluded to, very charming, and very nasty at the same time. He had a very perverse sense of humor. So for example, if he hadn't seen you in a long time, and he just saw you again, he would say, "What, you haven't been arrested yet?" Yes, can you imagine working for him? (audience laughing) Yeah, that was his sense of humor. He was very crude. He had crude manners. But when he got the transcripts of his speeches, which of course, he then edited before they were circulated, sometimes they were only circulated in a small setting, sometimes they were published, in millions and millions of copies. When he got the transcripts, he would cross out the crudities to make himself look more statesmanlike. So anyway, I could talk quite a lot about what he was like as a person, and the book attempts in great detail, with anecdote and scene-setting, to bring out the fact that he was a human being. However, he was not only a human being. He was also a communist. As I've said on many occasions, the great secret of the Communist Party archives, you know, we couldn't go in there, they were under lock and key, classified. Finally, they got declassified and gave us access, and what did we discover in the Communist Party archives? They were communists. (audience laughing) That's the big discovery. You see, when they're behind closed doors, and nobody else is watching or looking, but someone's making a transcript, a record of the conversation, they don't say, "Oh, we can relax now. "Enough already with this proletariat, "bourgeoisie imperialism, and all that garbage." In fact, when they're behind closed doors, Stalin as well, and nobody expects any of this to become public, that's all they talk about. The proletariat, the bourgeoisie, imperialism, finance capital. That's how they understood or misunderstood fascism for example. So he was a communist. Stalin was very good at school. His grades were exceptional for the most part as a youth. That's how he progressed. He went to the Tbilisi Seminary in Georgia, which was the highest, along with the Genasium, the highest stage education available in the Caucasus because the tsarist regime wouldn't permit a university there. And he went all the way to the final exams of his fifth and final year. He didn't sit the finals, and so he didn't graduate. And the reason was is because he had joined the revolutionary underground. He'd dedicated himself to fighting for social justice while a youth, and he kept that dedication for more than 20 years in the underground. Arrests, police surveillance, escapes, prison, exile, no money, nothing. He owned nothing. No job, no profession, for 20 years, in and out of exile, in and out of prison. That's a long time to be dedicated to the revolutionary cause. Siberia, Siberian exile, Arctic Circle, frozen tundra. That was his life. He kept that revolutionary dedication after he got into power from the revolution as you know, in October in 1917, the Bolshevik version of the revolution. Already by May, 1922, Stalin was in a position to build a personal dictatorship. You see, Lenin had created this position called General Secretary of the Communist Party in April 1922, and he appointed Stalin General Secretary of the Communist Party. This was Lenin's right hand, the liaison with the secret police, the liaison with the military, control over the party apparatus, control over the ciphers, which meant all the communication with the diplomats abroad as well as with all the provinces and locales internally, it was all in Stalin's hands, as Lenin's right hand, April 1922. In May 1922, Lenin had the first of a series of incapacitating strokes. So six weeks after appointing Stalin his right hand, number two, Lenin was effectively incapacitated. He would have three more major strokes, some minor strokes as well, and die in January 1924. Lenin was a vegetable at the time of his death. So Stalin was in power. There was no succession struggle to succeed Lenin because Stalin was already in power. He had been appointed General Secretary. The struggle was, were they going to be able to remove Stalin or not? And lo and behold, one of the things I discovered, which I discuss in Volume One is that those around Stalin were impressed with his abilities. He worked really hard, he was very skillful. He carried this whole regime on his back. He enacted the role of General Secretary, and he built a personal dictatorship within the dictatorship. And those around him were complicit in this because he was effective. He resigned six times between 1923 and 1928, three times in writing, three times orally. And his resignation was rejected each time. So if you thought he was a psychopath and might kill everybody or kill you or endanger the revolution, and he's offering his resignation, would you have pushed that resignation aside, or would you have schemed to accept it? One of the things the book does is look forward. It uses sources in real time, what those around him, closest to him, thought about him if it was recorded in real time. So what did they say about him in 1925? What did they say in 1926, not retrospectively, after millions died? So this poses the question, where did the Stalin we know come from? If his closest compatriots didn't see it yet, through 1927, 1928, what happened? Where did he come from? So that's one of the prime challenges for writing Volume Two now. And the argument is that it came from the experience of building and running the dictatorship. In other words, it's not a personality that's formed either in childhood or in early youth, which is then unleashed on the world. It is the experience of accumulating power and exercising power, life-and-death power, over several hundred million people that creates the creature we know as Stalin. Meaning the politics creates the personality more than the personality creates the politics. Whatever was in there from youth and childhood, he had a normal childhood for the time, nothing extraordinary in his experiences. But of course, we have quite a lot of testimony retrospectively, of someone survived somehow, knew him in youth, emigrated, managed to escape, and then wrote reminiscences, 10, 20, 30 years later. They would write things like, "We were on the schoolyard, and somebody tripped him, "and he fell, and he got up, and he said, "'I'm going to get you all.'" Well, you know, I said that on the schoolyard also (audience laughing) when they tripped or beat me up. But of course, I didn't build a personal dictatorship and exercise life-and-death power over several hundred million people. Lenin and Stalin together, but mostly Stalin are responsible for 16 to 20 million deaths, not including World War II. And that's mostly famine deaths, but also quite a large number were summarily executed. Okay. So if you open Volume Two, and you'll have to Amazon, you know, when you click on Amazon, they say, "People who bought this also bought whatever," and then you got a weight belt. They got this weight belt like the movers wear. (audience laughing) So if you click on my book, they recommend a weight belt. And so I do also recommend a weight belt. But if you do pick it up and you open it up, you'll see that it begins with the collectivization of agriculture. I'm going to talk a little bit about this episode, collectivization of agriculture, a little bit about foreign policy, and then we'll go to questions. Forgive me there for a little backtracking towards Volume One, but not everyone may be familiar with Volume One, that was my surmise, maybe I'm wrong. As you know, in October of 1917, this small group of people that call themselves the Bolsheviks, in 1918, they would rename themselves the Communist Party. Communism, according to Marx, as you know, is the final stage of history. Feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism, right? So they first have to build socialism before they can get to communism. So it's the Communist Party building socialism. And what is socialism? It kind of had never existed, except in pamphlets and debates at the second international, and there were some socialist parties, including Germany, the biggest one. It's very ironic that Germany will get fascism, and Russia will get socialism, when Russian invented the protocols of the Elders of Zion, and had the big fascist-style pogroms, and the Germans had the biggest social, democratic party. So there's some irony there, which I deal with. But anyway, the socialism part was very difficult to understand, how to imagine this, and there were a lot of debates about what it should look like, a lot of people experimenting, trying to live socialism after 1917. This is the one thing they knew, that whatever socialism was, it couldn't be capitalism, see, because you have to transcend capitalism, right, in this Hegelian fashion, thesis, antithesis, right, and you get the transcendence, aufheben, in the Hegelian terms, and you get to socialism, right? Negate capitalism, overcome capitalism, transcend capitalism, eradicate capitalism, there's various different formulations of it. And what was capitalism? Well, in culture, it was very hard to understand. So for example, was jazz capitalist? Was the novel capitalist? Was the family capitalist? The debates on this were inconclusive, and eventually, they will decide that jazz was compatible with socialism, and the family was compatible with socialism because it predated capitalism, or somehow, it wasn't capitalist. But they had very significant debates about this and at times tried to suppress both the family and jazz for example. You'll see Stalin in the book dealing with culture in a way that is less ideological, more flexible, and in part that's because the proletarian writers were so terrible, and the bourgeois writers were so good, (audience laughing) that he needed the better writers, and that's where this term, "fellow travelers" came in that Trotsky invented. Try to gain the loyalty of the non-proletarians or the non-socialists for the regime. The culture thing was ambiguous and difficult, but when it came to the economy, they were clear. All right, capitalism is markets, socialism is planning. Capitalism is private property, socialism is collective or state property. When it came to politics, they were also pretty clear. Capitalism was bourgeois parliaments, fake parliaments. Socialism was so-called "people's power," all power to the Soviets or to the council is people's power. So this was their understanding. Eradicate markets and private property. Eradicate parliaments and regular bourgeois politics. Transcend this, and get to socialism. This was fine in the cities where the regime was implanted. So for example, you could take over industry, nationalize industry, and have a state-owned, state-managed economy in the cities for the most part. And this is true even in the 1920s, but the countryside was different because the peasants had their own revolution in 1917, 1918. Not the Bolsheviks, but the peasants eliminated the gentry class and seized the land. The peasants didn't control the land de jure, it wasn't their private property, but de facto, it was their property. So this separate peasant revolution elicited a concession from the regime known as the New Economic Policy, which was a quasi-market for the countryside predominantly. However, their goal was not to have capitalism in the countryside and socialism in the cities. It was to have socialism everywhere and to eradicate the capitalism in the countryside. They indulged the peasant de facto ownership and quasi-market relations because that's how the country recuperated from the revolution and civil war destruction, and by 1927, they were at the level of 1913 again. Of course, the rest of the world had advanced well beyond the level they were before 1914, and the Soviet Union came back to that level through this indulgence of the quasi-market, peasant revolution, quasi-private property or de facto private property in the countryside. Now, everybody in the regime, they were communists. They didn't like peasants necessarily, and they didn't like peasant de facto private property. And so there was a debate, but the debate has been mischaracterized. It wasn't a debate over whether to have a socialism or mixed-market economy. That was merely a temporary concession. The debate was how soon, and with what methods, could you eradicate capitalism in the countryside, in order to move to socialism? And the debate was how much coercion was acceptable, and how necessary was it to do this now, or to wait. That's the debate that they had. Voluntary collectivization, voluntary collectivization in 1928 had happened on 1% of the arable land, 1%. And those were the people who couldn't farm, and that's why they got into these collectives which were not very impressive. 1% of the arable land. So voluntary collectivization was interesting as an idea, but as Stalin pointed out to everybody, this is not going to happen voluntarily. He said we have to do this, and the only way to do this is through coercion. It was absolutely correct. That was an historical argument, not a philosophical argument. It was rooted in the facts at the time. And the other guys said, you know, I mean, "First of all, you can't do this, you're not going to be, "how are you going to manage? "There's 120 million peasants in the countryside. "Who's going to force them into collectives? "Where are we going to get that kind of force from? "And secondly, if we do this, not only it won't work, "it'll destabilize our economy "and ruin all the recuperation, "all the gains we've had through the new economic policy." And Stalin said to them, he said, "You don't have the courage of your convictions. "Are we communists? "Do we believe in building socialism? "What are you afraid of? "Are you going to allow the peasants to be capitalists, "to become rich, better-off peasants, "for a new, rural bourgeoisie to form? "Because as a Marxist you know that the base, "the underlying social relations determine the politics. "So our regime can't last "if there are social relations "of capitalism in the countryside." And once again, they said to him, "We know all that, but we just don't think you can do this, "and if you try, we don't think it's going to work. "We think it'll be catastrophic, "destabilizing of the economy, maybe even of the regime." And so that was the debate that they had. And Stalin, his position was such that he was able to impose forced, that is coercive wholesale collectivization across Eurasia, 1/6 of the Earth, not just against peasant resistance, but against the doubters in the Communist Party. This is an unbelievable story of how he was able to do this, which I go into in the book in great detail. Instigating class warfare, using quotas for rich peasants and deportations. Anyway, he got lucky the first year. The first year of this imposition of forced collectivization eradication of capitalism in the countryside, the harvest came through really big. And he said to them, "Look, you predicted doom and gloom. "I went forward with this, and look at the harvest." And he was feeling pretty good about it. That's how Chapter One ends. And then what happened? What happened was drought. Drought, followed by torrential rains. And the harvest the next two years was abysmal, not enough to feed the population. And he had put the country on a knife edge with the destabilization of forced collectivization. He had deported all the best peasant workers, all the better-off peasants, the ones who got the third cow and the fourth cow and the fifth cow from hard working, they were gone now. They were either dead, summarily executed, deported to Siberian wastes, where they perished the first winter there, or if they survived, were now working in a labor camp type construction site. And the administration of the collectives was a mess, and the rules for the collectives was a mess. The whole thing was improvised. Of course, he didn't improvise democracy and rule of law, he improvised eradication of capitalism. So the drought comes, the country's on a knife edge, starvation begins. It begins already in Kazakhstan the year before, and Kazakhstan's going to get the worst of it. In part because it's a nomadic population, and they're trying to force the nomads into these sedentary collectives also. About 1/3 of the ethnic Kazak population is killed, about 1/3, that's just a stunning number. There are corpses all the way, on every trail, heading for China, for example. They're not really roads because they're not paved, but the trails out there to China, just full of corpses as the people try to escape to get some food. There's one photograph of the famine that we have, which is Kazakhstan, which it'll come up in a little bit, and we'll talk about it, when I talk about the photos. Anyway, so the catastrophe happened, and what did Stalin do? The people were starving. There was not enough food for the cities, let alone for the countryside. Murmansk had famine on the Arctic Circle. Georgia had famine, Siberia had famine. It was a Soviet-wide famine. And the cities had more food than the countryside, but the cities didn't have a lot of food. And the workers were starving too. And then of course there was much less grain to export to earn foreign currency to pay for the imported machinery for the five-year plan and the industrialization. So what do you think he did? Concede that he made a mistake and say, "You know what, you guys were right, "this was a big error on my part." Five to seven million people died in the famine 1931 to '33. 50 million to 70 million people starved and survived. It's not just the death numbers. The death numbers are horrific enough. You have a population of 160, 170 million, and 50 to 70 million starve, but survive. Of course, then they're malnourished, their kids are malnourished. There are kids that are not born. Very high infant mortality, but not births that don't happen, so the short-forming population is felt for generations. So now while the catastrophe's going on, Stalin refuses to retreat because he says, you know, "Who is going to forgive me if I fail "to eradicate capitalism and build socialism? "That responsibility is on my shoulders. "This is the country that's had a revolution. "Should we give up? "Keep going." Well, those who had seen this catastrophe unfold, which the regime denied publicly, although it was well-discussed privately, and the internal sources that have now been declassified are very numerous about this, incredibly numerous, and they've survived, all that stuff survived. That is to say the damning sources showing the regime's criminality are there in great abundance, with Stalin's signature on them and everything else. So those people who saw this unfold and were dedicated communists, they began to talk among themselves about the catastrophe, the ruination that Stalin had caused. And some of them were courageous enough to write this down. In fact, a very small group wrote a 200-page treatise criticizing Stalin's horrific dictatorship and what it had brought the country to. Of course, this being Stalin's Soviet Union, somebody in that group tattled, and they found out about them. They were arrested. So this criticism, this whispering criticism in his regime got back to him, and this is part of the key to Stalin the person. Just like the testament in Volume One that Lenin, who was incapable of speech or writing supposedly dictated in December 1922, and January 1923 about removing Stalin. Which precipitates the six resignations, three in writing and three orally, and just got so deep under Stalin's skin, infuriated him, this alleged, "remove Stalin," dictation from Lenin. Just like that piece, now the criticism in collectivization got to him even deeper, and it infuriated and roiled him, and he kept talking about it for the rest of his life. Not the peasants who died, not the millions who starved, not the difficulties he came across in trying to enact this communist social engineering, no, no, no. The criticism that he received for doing it, that he never forgot. And I show in detail with many quotations later on, when he's at a meeting, and he's trying to explain, why Mikhail Tukhachevsky was arrested, and is a treasonous German spy, and in the middle of this rambling dialogue, in a room like this, with the rest of the officers who had not yet been arrested, he all of a sudden blurts out, "Collectivization! "You see, they didn't want collectivization." It got to him, it got to him. So the act of having to forcibly, because there was no other way, eradicate capitalism, the building of socialism through this coercive process, this is what produces Stalin the person we know, the menacing, vengeful, psychopathic, murderous tyrant. Murderous doesn't even begin to describe his regime. And so the argument is that, once again, this experience, being responsible for the world revolution, building socialism, implanting this regime in the countryside, enduring that famine as a story of necessity in his mind to get to progress. Now, those peasants who starved and didn't die, they saved his regime because the harvest, the 1934 harvest came in good. It was a big harvest. And so in 1934, the country had food again, and Stalin had gone through this horrific famine, and now those same people who criticized him were applauding him. For example, at the 17th Party Congress in January 1934, the so-called Congress of the Victors, he was acclaimed for having pulled off this collectivization which they doubted anybody could do, and now they said, "We acknowledge that you did this." It was stunning, but for him, it roiled deeply inside him that they had criticized him about this, even though now they were applauding, and this two-facedness of them he never would let go of, so deep inside his person. Anyway, so the communism story is a really big part of the story. Stalin was an idealist. One of the problems we have with the monsters and the evil people, and the Hitlers and the Maos, and the Stalins, is that we don't allow them to have ideas. We see they're cynical, they're opportunists, they're Machiavellian, they're just after power. In fact, Stalin is an idealist. He's trying to build a better world. He's trying to overcome the injustices of capitalism: imperialist war, mass unemployment, exploitation and alienation, right? In his mind, all of this is necessary on behalf of humanity. He's moved by conviction and ideals and idealism. This doesn't mean he's not opportunistic. It doesn't mean he doesn't have cynical moments. Of course, all idealists combine that with opportunism, but monsters, evil people, are also moved by ideals. We can't just allow idealists to be those people who hold the ideals that we identify with. This story also shows you the costs of eradicating capitalism. You may think that capitalism imposes a lot of costs itself, and even if we agree with that, the costs of eradicating capitalism were far greater, and very, very substantial. And once again, that's not a philosophical question. That's based upon the historical example. And the arguments about how, they didn't do it right, or that Stalin was a mean and evil person, and this explains it, and stuff, I think we have to confront, sometimes, the reality that we see in the history. All right, let's switch now. I think we're okay with time, Kai, I got 7:12. Let's switch now to the foreign policy story. Are we ready for the foreign policy story? I'm not doing the terror here. I'm not doing the terror piece. It's just, we'll run out of time. I'm going to do the Hitler stuff, if that's okay. The great terror piece is in the book. It occupies a very substantial, the whole middle section of the book, several hundred pages. But then again, you can always buy the book and read it (audience laughing) to get the terror part. Forgive me for that. So on the Hitler stuff. There's quite a lot of story about where Hitler's regime comes from, and Stalin's complicity in the rise of Nazism. Stalin is not personally responsible for Nazism in Germany of course, but he does make his contribution, which is detailed in previous books, and also in this one. Stalin has a kind of communist theory of geopolitics, which he develops, already in the 1920s, and it guides him in his grand strategy, and he enacts this, sometimes cleverly, sometimes not so cleverly. He's not a genius. He's very shrewd. He's a shrewd judge of people's character, their psychology, their weaknesses, but he's very blinkered with his primitive theories of imperialism, finance capital, and other things. So it's this crazy combination. But in this text, he wrote, and he called Socialism in One Country, which nobody reads, because we think Trotsky explained it all. One of the problems in Stalin research is you're not actually doing Stalin research. You're doing Trotsky's view of Stalin research. Trotsky has been by far the most influential person in the image that we have of Stalin, and including in something like Socialism in One Country, which in 1925, Trotsky had no criticisms of because he agreed with it. But in 1927, he went bananas, ballistic against it, and that polemical episode is how we have the understanding, false understanding of Socialism in One Country. The reason Trotsky wasn't against Socialism in One Country is because Stalin didn't say he only wanted socialism in one country. He said, "Socialism has happened only in one country. "Do we want to keep it, or do we want to surrender? "And while we keep it, world revolution can also happen, "but in the meantime, if it doesn't happen, "should we surrender, "or should we build socialism in one country?" Trotsky had posed the question earlier, and of course, he answered it in the affirmative. Lenin had posed the question earlier, and he answered in the affirmative as well. Because if the question is keep going or surrender, in the meantime, while the rest of the world revolution hasn't happened, everyone in that regime would've answered the same, "Yes, let's build socialism in one country in the meantime." But Stalin's argument was not just that. He argued that imperialist war could give you revolution. You see, there was this Marxist theory of class struggle, and how you got to revolution, the working class, I'm sure you're familiar with it, we don't need to recapitulate it. But Stalin said there were special conditions that allowed Russia in 1917 to have the socialist revolution, and these special conditions were the imperialist war. See, if the capitalists destroy each other in an imperialist war, and we stay out of it, socialism can happen in those capitalist countries as they ruin each other, and then we can come in at the very end and take advantage. So Soviet geopolitics, Soviet foreign policy, this is already mid-1920s, is try to stop a coalition of imperialist powers against the Soviet Union. Just drive a wedge in there somehow. Keep Germany, France, and Britain, at daggers drawn. It was even more complicated than pre-World War I because now Japan is in the picture. And so if they all gang up, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, the Soviet Union is done for. So Soviet foreign policy is divide the West, drive a wedge into the West, which, as I say now, includes potentially Japan. And if we can get them to fight each other and not fight us, we'll benefit potentially from the socialist revolution. So this was Soviet foreign policy. First with Weimar, they try to get close to the Germans and peel the Germans away from the British and the French. And then even with Hitler, he continues to pursue this, knowing what Hitler's, eventually he figures out what Hitler's regime is, which I'll get to in a second. But nonetheless, the idea is, from his point of view, prevent the imperialist coalition against the Soviet Union. So either deal with Hitler or deal with Britain and France against Hitler. He couldn't get any deal with the United States or Britain against Japan. He was going to have to face Japan by himself, this was pretty clear. All right. These are the fundamentals now, and this is going to unfold in Volume Two, which is full of this foreign policy stuff. I should add one more point here, and that's the Versailles Treaty. The Versailles Treaty is very difficult to rehabilitate. Very few people are going to say a nice thing about the Versailles Treaty. The arguments about the Versailles Treaty are was it was a punitive peace, and it was imposed on the Germans, and it was too punitive, and that's where you, it was complicit therefore in the rise of Hitler and Nazism. The other side of the argument is that the British and the French just shrank from imposing the peace. They lost their will. If they had just had more willpower to defend the peace, then it would've worked fine. So both of these arguments are wrong, and that's because the Versailles peace, in 1919, the treaty that ended World War I, all right, which blamed the Germans exclusively for the war, and which excluded the Soviet Union after its socialist revolution from participating in the peace negotiations, that Versailles Treaty was done at an anomalous time. It's the only time since Bismarck's unification of Germany when both German power and Russian power are flat on their backs. That's never going to happen again. So you're not going to be able to maintain a peace, no matter how much willpower you have, because either German power or Russian power is going to rise again. And in fact, both of them came back as great powers in a single generation, one under Hitler, and one under Stalin. So the Versailles peace was not enforceable, not a matter of willpower, not a problem of punitive nature, a problem of the anomalous, 1919, Germany and Russia flat on their backs. And now they're not flat on their backs anymore. Now the British, they recognize this. Already, in the early 1920s, Lloyd George was trying to renegotiate the Versailles Treaty, the British prime minister. They had this conference in Genoa in 1922 to renegotiate Versailles. The British spent the entire interwar period trying to revise the Versailles Treaty, to bring the Germans in, to stabilize the situation. Even after Hitler began to proactively revise the Versailles Treaty against the rules, the British stayed in the game because they had concluded early that their own peace was anomalous. Part of the problem was the French didn't want to revise the Versailles Treaty because the French, most of the fighting of World War I on the western front had been on French territory. You know, Britain has that channel, if you've seen that incomprehensible film Dunkirk, all right. (audience laughing) The British are on the other side because the soldiers couldn't understand what's happening, the viewers of the film can't understand what's happening. (audience laughing) All right, that's the beauty of the Dunkirk film. They give you the soldier's experience like, "Huh? "Which end is up here, what's going on? "Where's the context?" Watch it win the award, right? Anyway, so the French were right there on the front lines with the Germans, so the idea of allowing the Germans to have a bigger army, and, you know, violate the Versailles restrictions, et cetera, armaments, all this was not very appetizing to the French. So the French and the British didn't see eye to eye on this revision, and then Hitler changed the stakes tremendously. Stalin was also a revisionist. He had not been invited, the Soviets hadn't been invited to Versailles. He was not as proactively revisionist as Hitler, as Eichel. Stalin was going to take advantage of opportunities that Hitler created that Stalin didn't create. Anyway, so with that piece now, we now go to the 1930s, and let's talk about Chamberlain for a second before I do the conclusion here about Stalin and Hitler. Neville Chamberlain, another person that's kind of beyond redemption. I haven't seen anybody at the Leon Levy Center for Biography propose that they're going to write a biography of Neville Chamberlain, (audience laughing) and discover that he was really a statesman. Right, he had that giant beak nose, that ridiculous top hat, the cane, "peace in our time," as he said, when he came back from that infamous Munich agreement in 1938. The guy's a caricature, right? Well, here's what Chamberlain said in 1938, '39. He said, "If I do a deal with Stalin "and fight a war with Hitler," you know, against Hitler, "and we win, how do I get communism out of central Europe?" Yeah. In fact, that's called The Cold War, isn't it? That was the Cold War, which some of us I'm guessing remember. And so that was a difficult proposition. So Chamberlain can be blamed for many things, and the book goes into detail about his oversights and other problems, but he pinpointed the fundamental problem of doing a deal with Stalin, which, I mean, as Stalin's murdering everybody, you want to do a deal with him? All right, so there was many issues involved in potentially doing a deal with Stalin, but the biggest one was if you win, Stalin wins too. And that's something that not very many people, Chamberlain wasn't alone, not very many people thought it was a good idea, but others overlook this question in the criticisms of Chamberlain. All right, so now with the Hitler thing. I mean, there's this great moment in the terror, when Stalin is murdering his officer corps, and Hitler turns to one of his minions, and he says, "This guy Stalin, he's sick in the brain." (laughs) (audience laughing) That's when you know, right, when Hitler is calling you sick in the brain, that's when you know you've really hit it. That's one for all time. Yeah, sick in the brain. Anyway, so on the Hitler-Stalin pact, you know that in August, August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin signed a pact of nonaggression. It wasn't an alliance. Stalin refused an alliance. It was a pact of nonaggression. It had an economic dimension to it, which was very valuable. And it was initialed by Molotov and Ribbentrop, who was the Nazi foreign minister in the Kremlin, and they had a map of Poland. Now, what most people don't know is that, when Hitler came to Stalin in July 1939, Stalin had no deal before that, and he felt very insecure. Hitler decided to invade Poland and destroy Poland. France and Britain publicly declared that they would defend Poland's sovereignty. This meant that there was a possibility of Germany being attacked, war being declared on Germany if they attacked Poland, by Britain and France. And if the Soviets joined Britain and France, Germany would have to fight a two-front war, and it'd be this pan-European war over Poland. So Hitler needed to neutralize Stalin, and so they had this nonaggression pact negotiation, which was a lightening negotiation, and Stalin dictated the terms because Hitler had boxed himself into a corner. The invasion of Poland was just weeks away. Stalin knew this from his intelligence, and he got tremendous concessions from Hitler as a result. The pact was brilliant maneuvering on Stalin's part because Hitler had done so poorly in the setup. Stalin took advantage of Hitler's egregious attempts at diplomacy and statesmanship, okay. So Stalin agrees that Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, can fly into Moscow, and hasn't told anybody this. And as you know, the Nazis and the Communists are pouring filth over each other in the propaganda, in the newspapers, on the TV. I mean, the regimes hate each other. The speeches that Hitler's making at Nuremberg about Judeo Bolshevism, the idea that Ribbentrop is flying to Moscow is incomprehensible to anybody, nobody knows. The night before, at the Dacha, Stalin's in a small gathering of people. Nikita Khrushchev, one of his proteges, little Nikita's there, and Stalin says to Nikita, he says, you know, "Ribbentrop is flying into Moscow tomorrow." And Nikita knows Stalin's perverse sense of humor, so he thinks this is a joke, and he says, "Oh yeah, and maybe he's going to defect." (audience laughing) You know, playing along with the joke. And Stalin says, "Ribbentrop is flying into Moscow tomorrow." Khrushchev's a little puzzled. That's the end of joking. Stalin has told almost nobody. He hasn't told the border guards. Ribbentrop is flying on Hitler's personal plane, known as a Condor. He gets to the Soviet border. The border guards see an unidentified plane, with markings that are not on their logbook crossing the border, crossing Soviet airspace, and they shoot it, they shoot at it. Yep, they shoot at Hitler's plane with Ribbentrop on it at the border. And they miss. (audience laughing) The anti-aircraft misses. The result is Ribbentrop lands safely in Moscow. But let's think about this for a second. They hit him, and Stalin calls Hitler up and says, "I'm so sorry. (audience laughing) "I forgot to tell my border guards. "It was a complete accident. "I invited your foreign minister to Moscow, "and then I shot his, I shot your personal plane down "with him on it, and really I didn't mean to do that." You know, how's Hitler going to take it? He's going to believe him? You think about that for a second. I don't think he's going to believe him. Ribbentrop lands safely, and they do the deal, their lightening deal, and they have this little map of Poland, as you know. Most of Poland's going to Germany. There's a slice of eastern Poland going to the Soviet Union. There's a line down the map, and that line basically goes through Galizia, you know, the city of Lviv, Lvov, Lemberg, that's one city, right? That city, that's right on Stalin's side, and then on the other side is the German side. So the Germans come in September 1, 1939. They bash into Poland. Poland is expecting the French and the British to declare war and help them out. The French and the British hesitate, they declare war, and they do nothing after the declaration of war. Poland is left to fight the Germans by themselves. Stalin, however, doesn't know what's going to happen. Maybe the Poles will bog the Germans down. The Poles have an army, they got an air force. Maybe the French and British will do something. So Stalin's just waiting to see what's going to happen. It turns out the Germans slice through pretty well, very quickly in fact, through most of Poland. The Polish government evacuates Warsaw, heads south to try to save themselves and continue the fight from abroad. And lo and behold, the Wehrmacht, the German army, is on Stalin's side of the line. So Stalin has this piece of paper signed by Ribbentrop in the Kremlin, and then, before he's gone into the negotiation, Stalin has commissioned the translation of Mein Kampf into Russian. They didn't publish it. They just held it privately. And he reads the Mein Kampf, and there's this purple passage that says, "Slavic subhumans, untermenschen," underlined in colored pencil. And the other passage which says, "Drang nach Osten," drive to the east, underlined. Then there's this biography in German that's translated into Russian also for Stalin's dossier in preparation for the negotiations. And it says, you know, "Hitler makes all these agreements, "and he never keeps them, never keeps his word. "He's an inveterate liar," check mark, yeah. And so that's the Hitler that he's now done the deal with, signed by Ribbentrop, on this piece of paper, and the Wehrmacht is on Stalin's side of the line. Now what do you think might be going through his head? There's no guarantee that the Germans are going to stop at that line, that they're even going to stop at the Polish border. Maybe the whole thing's a ruse. Moreover, at the very same time, Stalin's fighting a war, yeah, with Japan. He's fighting a massive border war with Japan in the Far East. So the German army and the Japanese army are in motion at the same time in Stalin's direction. And these are the pact negotiations. This is the pact, the real story of the pact. So Stalin sends a minion in Berlin to German military intelligence to ask about this, you know, how are things going, what's up? (audience laughing) On the table, there's a map of the Polish battlefield, and on the map, there are those little stickpins, where the troop dislocation and tanks and artillery, and it shows on the map that the Germans are on Stalin's side of the line. And that's reported immediately back to Moscow, so Stalin, what do you think he's going to think now? That the Germans, by accident, had the map on the table when Stalin's minion walked in? They couldn't receive him in another room, or they couldn't fold the map up? So Stalin calls in the German military attache in Moscow, and he says, "You know, you're on my side of the line." And he says, "Well, it's easy to explain. "You see, we're killing the Poles, "and the Poles are retreating. "They're running away from us, "and they keep running farther east "to get out of our artillery, and so we have to chase them. "And as soon as we kill all the Poles, we'll be done, "we'll stop, and we'll go back to our side of the line." It's very interesting. So Stalin says, "Well, the Red Army will go in, "and we will take the territory "that's on our side of the line," dismissed. That's it. And the guy says, "But you can't do that. "If you send your army in while our army's moving, "it could be trouble," dismissed. So the Red army goes in on September 17. This is the day after the Japanese have surrendered, and a truce has been signed in the Far East, the day after. Stalin sends the army in. They head into that territory, Galicia, and they fire on the Wehrmacht, and there are casualties on both sides. This is the alliance between Hitler and Stalin. There are casualties because the Soviets are forcibly evicting the Germans. During the middle of this clash, Hitler, who's in Poland, he's in Sopot, if you know Poland, it's a resort town on the Baltic Sea, not that far from Gdansk and Gdynia. It's all now incorporated into one big conglomeration, but anyway, so Hitler's in Poland, adding to the drama, and Hitler, in the middle of this, sends an order which says, "Withdraw the troops," so they're already going backwards. Now they're supposed to withdraw. The Wehrmacht continues to fire even after this order of withdraw. Now Stalin's going to draw the conclusion that the German generals want war with the Soviet Union, and Hitler is the restraining force, which is the exact opposite of reality. Anyway, so this is a great episode. Now, as the Germans withdraw, they get on the other side of that line, and so Lviv, Lemberg, Lvov, that one city, and the Galician oil fields are now back in Stalin's possession. That's right, it just so happens, another coincidence, that the territory that the Germans have taken, which was on Stalin's side of the line, were the oil fields. How do you like that? And what does Stalin sell to Hitler in exchange for the German fighter planes and tanks and designs for naval cruisers, what does he sell? He sells the grain, which is harvested by his enslaved collective farmers, and he sells oil and other raw materials, which the German Wehrmacht had in its own hands, and now they're buying back in exchange for their latest weaponry, which they don't want to part with. So this is the alliance, as it's called in many books, between Hitler and Stalin. It will unfold now over the course of the rest of the book, and the book will end on that night of June 21, 1941, where Stalin is once again pacing in his office, pacing and pacing, "Is Hitler coming? "Is the attack coming?" et cetera. Stalin has the largest army in the world at this point, armed to the teeth. He's got the biggest air force. He's got the most tanks. He's heavily deployed, but he doesn't bring them up to combat readiness for reasons that the book explains. In any case then, of course, in the middle of the morning, the Germans do invade, and that's where Volume Two ends, and now Volume Three, if I ever write it, will begin. Anyway, thank you for your attention. (audience applauding) - Thank you sir, that was fabulous. I thought I knew my history, but, you know, you, it's a drama. We always need to know more, and biography can reveal. So this is the time for all your questions, and we'll open the floor. - [Man] Can you talk a little bit about Hitler's purging of the military from '36 to '39, his preparation for World War II was 75% of the officer corps was killed or put in concentration camps? - Yeah, so Stalin did that, Hitler didn't do that. - [Man] Sorry, I meant Stalin. - I know you did. It's one of the contrasts I draw in the book. I show how Hitler removed some of his top officers, and he didn't, for example, shoot them, he didn't arrest them. He didn't torture them to confess in public that they were spies for Judeo Bolshevism. He told them that they were retired, and he gave them enormous pensions, and they lived in freedom inside Berlin after he cashiered them. So Stalin murdered about 90% of his upper officer corps, and a small percentage of the total officer corps. 33,000 arrests and about 1/3 of those people will be released before 1941. So something like 22,000. The numbers are very difficult to pin down exactly because different documents have different numbers. But anyway, it's a large number. The higher up you go, the larger the number is. So three of the five marshals, right, about 90% of the commanders of divisions, of armies, of corps, right? And moreover, not only does he have them executed or sent to The Gulag labor camp, they're forced to confess, as I said, that they were spies for Nazi Germany, or Britain, or imperial Japan their whole life. So think about this. Now let's imagine that Hitler murders his officer corps, his diplomatic corps, his intelligence, his foreign intelligence, all of the local Nazi potentates, the Gauleiter who rule the provinces, all the state officials at the top, the cultural figures. Let's imagine he murders them, but before he murders them, he has them confess that they're serving Jewish Bolshevism in public confessions, and that they're spies for the Soviet Union. Could he have done that? Could Hitler have done that, gotten away with it? Would the German population have accepted that as potentially true? Would his regime, would Hitler's regime have survived? Moreover, in the middle of this, could Hitler have murdered the Gestapo while they were murdering all the other elites? Because that's what Stalin did. He began to murder his secret police, the so-called NKVD, not after the secret police murdered the other guys, but all during, so the police themselves were being tortured and executed while they were torturing and executing the military, the cultural figures, the party figures, the state officials. This is just an episode that just, it defies reason. So this is why I didn't give it as part of the presentation because it consumes so much time to unravel what this could've been about. The collectivization of agriculture from a Marxist, Leninist point of view was necessary. If you believe in the Marxist Leninism, which means build socialism on the way to communism, eradicating capitalism, then you can't allow capitalism in the countryside. Somehow, you've got to overcome capitalism. Once again, the argument was how much coercion might you need, but for them collectivization was ... In fact, when Khrushchev does the so-called Call to the Personality Speech in 1956, he doesn't repudiate collective farms. Stalin is not accused of the crime of collectivization. That's a fundamental achievement on his ledger, but the terror, the great terror from '36 to '39, that's not necessary for the regime to function. That's something which is more personal, related more to Stalin's personality, rather than inherent. Now there's something about communist regimes that make this possible. Without the communist regime, you couldn't have done this, even if you wanted to. So communism makes this possible, but Stalin is the key ingredient in it happening, and as I said, there's a gratuitous quality, compared to collectivization. But just to finish this, the other piece is, if you have the willpower and the endurance to enforce the collectivization, it produces a certain kind of person. If you do the collectivization, you then become Stalin, and so the idea of the terror, which looks gratuitous from the Marxism Leninism point of view, becomes less gratuitous because it's inbuilt into the dynamic of coercively eradicating capitalism. So this is the argument in the book. What his motivations were, right, that's the much harder question, but I give a lot of evidence by letting him speak. In real time, what was he saying while he was engaged in this activity, okay? - Did you call me? - I didn't call you, but the mic is coming your way. - Can you comment about the role of Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and in Stalin's life, and in the later actions that Stalin took with regard to the Jews in his coterie and his regime? - Yes, I can. (audience laughing) So the short answer, it's a complicated question. Obviously it requires a lot of nuance and qualification, so this will be a slightly simplified answer. The short answer is that The Pale of Settlement, which is the legal provinces of residence for Jews in the tsarist empire, is abolished. And so Jews now have no restrictions, as a result of the revolution in 1917, of where they can reside. Some had gotten exceptions, granted exceptions before 1917, so that for example if they were industrialists or big property owners, they could live in the capital, Saint Petersburg, but for the most part, they were confined to the so-called Pale of Settlement. The Pale of Settlement was where the vast majority of Jews in the Russian empire lived. Russia had no Jews before the partitions of Poland. Catherine the Great was the one who gifted the Jews to Russia through the partitions of Poland, which produced this very substantial Jewish population, which is then confined, legally confined, to The Pale of Settlement. And there are quotas of how many Jews can attend certain schools, restrictions on Jews. These are typical across the European continent. They're repealed at different times in different places. The Russian case is considered one of the worst in terms of anti-Semitism, the so-called pogroms of the tsars period. The pogroms don't happen in Russia, they happen in The Pale of Settlement, which is Ukraine, Romania, right? Titian Uoft Pogrom for example. They happen on those western borderlands that they've bid off from Poland or later, Romania. Anyway, more people might have died in anti-Catholic violence in the Russian empire than in anti-Jewish pogroms. That's not to say the pogroms weren't horrific, they were. But the numbers are known to us from the archives. So now the revolution comes, and it allows them out of The Pale of Settlement. Jews are oppressed. Like other national minorities, they latch on to the leftist, radical ideology in many ways. They have their own party known as The Bund. Many Bundists will leave The Bund and join the Bolsheviks and participate in the revolution on the side of Lenin and Stalin. They're overrepresented in the revolutionary process, compared to the population, but this is true of Latvians, and Latvia's not even in the Soviet Union. Latvia escapes. And this is true of Georgians to a certain extent. So oppressed minorities are now empowered in a way that, this kind of reversal of fortune. There are many Jews inside the Soviet regime. They're extremely prominent in the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, very prominent in there, not only, but prominent. And Stalin has some in his inner circle. Stalin is not especially anti-Semitic. He's got the normal anti-Semitism of the time period. He makes anti-Jewish jokes, off-color anti-Jewish jokes. He makes off-color jokes about many different peoples, including the Jews. There is a Russification, Slavification of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in the late 1930s on purpose, where they diminish the number of Jews very substantially. This happens also in foreign intelligence and domestic internal police. So the very high profile roles of the Jews is reduced, but not only the Jews, but including the Jews. So they're targeted for removal in that '38, '39, 1940 period, replacement by Slavs and Russians to give the regime a kind of Slavic face to the outside world and internally. The post-World War II, the doctor's plot, and all of that kind of stuff, which we know quite well now from the internal documentation. Once again, Stalin is not especially anti-Semitic. In other words, you can't put Stalin and Hitler in the same sentence when it comes to the Jewish stuff. That doesn't mean that Stalin doesn't do things against the Jews, he does. - So Stephen, I have a question for you, I can't resist. In such a massive research project, what was the major obstacle, what did you not find that you were looking for in terms of archival sources or interviews or? Where were you disappointed in your research? - Yeah, well, how long do we have for that? (audience laughing) We could go 'til, when's your next event? - [Man] The 21st. - Yeah, we could go 'til then on the disappointment problem. So, the access to the materials is spectacular. It's a misunderstanding that the archives are closed. Archives are open, and declassification continues. Not all archives are open. The KGB archives are closed, but the KGB archivists published document collections with their materials. And many Russian researchers have been in those archives, and they've produced books based upon, which cite at length, quote at length those documents. So even the closed archives have opened to a certain extent, not everything. So the challenge is the scale of the documentation. It's just too immense to master. People think that the book is long because I'm prolix, and I have to say they're right. At the same time, the book is long because of the immensity of the documentary base that we have now. I'm not the only person working through these documents. Many people are working through them. Mine is a more comprehensive attempt. In other words, they're great books, Stalin and Culture, Stalin and Domestic Terror, Stalin and the Economy, Stalin and Foreign Policy, Stalin and Europe Foreign Policy, Stalin and East Asia Foreign Policy, et cetera. So what I tried to do is the whole shebang in the same book. Culture, economy, domestic politics, international relations, Europe, Asia, everything. It's a kind of, as I like to say, history of the world from Stalin's desk. And so the challenge is mostly it's overwhelming to try to assimilate, to read all this material, and then to make sense of it in a way that doesn't bludgeon the reader to death. Because as you know, in a biography, you know too much, you want to include everything, and the temptation is detrimental to the project because the reader needs to see some of that detail, but if the detail is too excessive, then, of course, the reader can't manage it. So I probably shouldn't say this, but I cut 400 book pages from the book at the end. The first volume lost a little over 300 pages, and the second volume lost about 400 pages. So there are quite a lot of set pieces that I had written that didn't make it into the book, and people say, "Oh, you got to hold on to that," but when was the director's cut of a movie ever better than the cut that was released? (audience laughing) I don't think it was ever better. I think it was just self-indulgent and too long. So that's that. But as far as the disappointments go, you know what it's like with a biography. You get this person, and you get closer and closer, and you can feel the person. You know who this guy is. You can recreate whole days, what he did in the morning, what he did in the afternoon, what he ate that day, right? You begin to get inside this life, you're living this life, but the person keeps eluding you. You get closer, you get more, you get better detail, and the level of understanding gets harder and harder and harder. "Why did he do that? "What was he thinking? "Does that make any sense based upon the guy I know? "Couldn't he have done this instead? "That's what I would've done if I were him "because now I'm thinking of him," all right? And so that sense of proximity and elusiveness at the same time. I think, you know, there's a level of disappointment there after so much work. I really feel this guy, feel this regime, you know. Earlier I wrote a history of the Stalin epoch, from street level, from one industrial town. Street-level, inside view, total history of the town, kind of Arnoult school style, French history style, with the economy, with the politics, with the culture, with the terror, all of this town encapsulate, which, a showcase of the whole Stalin phenomenon, all right? And I mean, I knew everything about that town, and I could walk the cemetery, and I would point out, "Oh, this guy was the chief engineer's assistant, "and this guy was whatever," and I would be there with the relatives, and I would know facts about their relatives that they didn't know, but that I had found in the archives. And then I said, "I'm going to do this "for the whole regime now, not a showcase town, "but for the whole Soviet Eurasia, for the Stalin regime," and I did that, and it's sort of lunacy to embark on that. (audience laughing) And I got in there, and I got this guy, and I feel I nailed him in so many ways, but he keeps eluding my, you know, like that proverbial bar of soap in the shower, it just keeps squirting out of my hand. - You've just described the biographer's dilemma, the lunacy of getting close, but he keeps receding away the closer you get. - [Woman] So you could seriously be shaping the personality. - Yes it is, sadly. I hope not too much though, but you're right. - [Man] Hi Professor, thanks for coming. Like a lot of questions that are being asked, this is a very big question. So how do you situate your contribution to the Stalin historiography, right? It seems to me that in some ways, you're coming back to earlier themes in that body of literature. For instance, I'm thinking of something you said earlier about Stalin being a sincere communist and pursuing sincere communist ideals reminds me of something that Isaac Deutscher wrote in his biography of Stalin, and somewhere he says something like, "Regardless of what we think of Stalin, "we have to give him the dubious credit "of saying he was a sincere believer in his values." So where do you position your work in contrast to other Stalin biographers? - Yeah, so there's obviously a very big literature on Stalin. I own, personally own, let alone what's in off-site storage at a library, right, I personally own many dozens of Stalin biographies, some of which I'm sure you know besides the Deutscher, and some of which are really obscure. But yeah, so of course there's a literature. The main problem with the Stalin literature, despite its many achievements, is this Trotsky "outstanding mediocrity" stuff. All right, Trotsky had one bon mot after another about Stalin. "Gravedigger of the revolution." Oh man, that's just priceless, right? "Outstanding mediocrity," oh, that's too good to be true. All right, that's just so great. I wish I had come up with that. The problem with that is none of that is correct, and it's dragged down the Stalin story. And then the other side will overreact to that, and Stalin will be some kind of statesman. He'll be a realpolitiker, all right. A realpolitiker who murders his officer corps, all right, that's sort of like, not exactly realpolitik. I don't know what realpolitik is maybe, but it's not that. (audience laughing) And so you have to avoid this temptation to diminish him because you dislike him, all right? We see this for example, good books do this. We see this with Putin. You'll see Masha Gessen, right, every imaginable award. She writes a book about Putin, and she puts him down. He's a nothing, he's a nobody. He's only in Dresden in the KGB, low-level post. She quotes people who say he's not very bright, and this and that. And then in the same book, he's responsible for all the evil that happens. So there's this kind of omnipotence on the one hand and mediocrity or diminishment on the other, which makes sense if you're in opposition to that person, that regime, if you're a victim of it, if you're fighting back, right? It's a kind of tactical statement that this is not really a great person, and I blame this person for everything, right? That's been the biggest problem in the Stalin literature, and so we have to get beyond that, but we can't get beyond that by then making him out to be this genius, this all-seeing, "Oh he's not a mediocrity, look how smart he is." You have to maintain the contradictions. You have to avoid the binaries. You have to get into the situation where things which are contradictory can be true at the same time, and we don't have to choose between them. So like I said, charming and vicious, shrewd and blinkered, all right? All of this is what you try to capture, and the way you try to do it is you allow him to speak at length, and you allow him, you put him in situations, and you have others commenting in real time about what he's up to and what he's doing. All of that context. So that's, I think, one thing that potentially could be different. Another thing, as I said, is the book is laced with the foreign policy, and the culture, and the economics, and the politics, all rolled into one. And you get a sense of just how massive his day is, every single day, day in and day out. So he comes to the office, he line edits a novel. He screens films and dictates like the executive producer scenes to cut, dialogues to change. He reads a giant report on ball bearings and picks which kind they should mass produce on the assembly line. Which gun goes on the tank, as opposed to the various choices that are in front of him. He reads about what's happening in the Mongolian puppet state that he's set up, and he's got to give order to the minions there about, you know, how to handle it. And he gets a telegram from an ambassador. He gets a military intelligence report, and his desk, just, hundreds of documents every day, piling onto his desk, on every imaginable subject. So this is what I try to do in the book, without losing the reader, I don't compartmentalize his life, right? I show 'em that he's the editor-in-chief of the culture. He's the head of the military. He's the head of the secret police. He's the head of everything. And moreover, there's no private economy. You see, in this country, we've got Washington responsible more or less for the federal government. Then we've got New York more or less responsible for the economy, financial industry, and then we have Los Angeles, which is separate and responsible for the Hollywood, the culture, right? But in Stalin's regime, it's all there, the Hollywood, the New York, and the Washington is all rolled into one place, and one person. And it's just this little space, this office. All of Volume Two takes place in his office. People gave me grief over Volume One because there are 50 pages, or 30 pages go by, and Stalin's not in there. You know, because I start with the world, and I move the world forward, and he's just a little speck, born on the periphery to a very poor shoemaker and seamstress, the periphery of the Russian empire, so he's nothing, and the world is moving forward, but as the world moves forward, that little speck grows in the book. So World War I, he doesn't participate, but I have a whole chapter on World War I where he's not present, right? But in the second volume, no, you can't do that. The whole thing is very claustrophobic. I had a hard time with the narration. Because I'm in his office, I got to get out there, get some fresh air. (audience laughing) He doesn't travel. He knows the country. He has a feel for worker psychology. He doesn't go to factories. He doesn't get out of the office, except to go to Sochi. He's got this fantastic set of dachas down south in Sochi and Abkhazia, and he goes there for several months of the year, and so that, he gets out of the Kremlin office a little bit there, but then he's in the dacha the whole time. So there aren't these big places where I can talk about the world and the provinces or the republics, the space that's there because I'm dealing with such a massive regime rolled into this one person. Potentially, I think that could differentiate the approach that I tried from the previous ones. Whether you call that once again, a lunacy or ambition, all right? But I try to capture the regime in totality, not from his point of view in a moral sense, all right, but his experience of this. Because the consequences of his wielding of this power are so enormous. If you're interested in power, that's the only subject I've ever written anything about. I write the same book every time. It's about power. If you're interested in power, there's no bigger subject than this one because no regime ever accumulated or exercised more power than this with greater consequences for three decades. And so, somehow to get that, the enormity of the subject and the freshness, the surprise, the unintended consequences, the history as it was experienced and unfolded without knowing the endpoint, which of course they didn't know. - Wow, on that note, I think we have to end. It's already after eight o'clock, but that was a performance (audience applauding) thank you. (laughs)
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Channel: Leon Levy Center for Biography
Views: 57,866
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Length: 91min 45sec (5505 seconds)
Published: Tue Oct 02 2018
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