Stephen Kotkin on Solzhenitsyn 01/14/2019

[Music] welcome to econ talk part of the library of economics and liberty I'm your host Russ Roberts at Stanford University's Hoover Institution our website is econ talk org where you can subscribe comment on this podcast and find links and other information related to today's conversation you'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going back to 2006 our email address is meilahti conte org we'd love to hear from you today is December 10th 2018 and before introducing today's guests I want to encourage listeners to go to econ talk org econ talk dot o-r-g and in the upper left hand corner you'll find a link to our annual survey where you can vote for your favorite episodes of the year tell us about yourself in your listing experience and now for today's guest historian and author Steven Kotkin of Princeton University where he is the John P berkland professor in history international affairs co-director the program in history in the practice of diplomacy and director of the Princeton Institute for international and regional studies is also senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution among many books he's the author of a massive award-winning biography of Joseph Stalin Steven welcome to econ talk Thank You Russ our topic for today is Alexander Solzhenitsyn we're taping this on December 10th that day before Sol Stinson's 100th birthday if he were alive and we did two episodes earlier this year with Kevin McKenna of the University of Vermont on in the first circle today's conversation is based loosely on an essay he wrote for The Times Literary Supplement on a number of recent books by and about soldier Judson I want to begin with his impact as an historian who's written on Stalin among many others I know you've thought and written about the role of individuals in history versus larger forces it's a common issue in thinking about history generally how would you describe solstices impact on history second most important after Stalin himself Solzhenitsyn was able as a single human being to blacken the image of the Soviet you globally even though he was prohibited from publishing most of his works inside the Soviet Union they nonetheless appeared and spread usually underground sometimes through denunciations of him so he had a massive impact at home as well as abroad and this impact was devastating for the Soviet system many people believe the Soviet system had redeeming features for example Hitler Nazism was absolutely beyond redemption the Holocaust and what Hitler did made it seem that if you said anything nice about the Nazi system you were apologizing for in the case of the Soviet Union people imagined that there was a better revolution inside the Stalin regime somehow that 1917 was a pure better form of socialism that had been usurped or degraded by Stalin's rule Solzhenitsyn proved the contrary not only did he prove the contrary but he did it in a way the tens of millions of people were interested to read so that's an incredible accomplishment now on his centenary and when you think about his impact obviously we see it through his work at the reaction that he engendered as you say in the public as well as with the Soviet leadership but it'd be an interesting thought experiment to think about had he not had the courage to do what he did or had his work not survived not gotten outside the camp not been dispersed through various underground networks and then made it its way to the west would do you think Soviet history and world history would have been different if so how yes the debate we had about the Soviet Union it's much muted now it's hard for us to appreciate the Soviet Union has been gone for more than a quarter century however while the Soviet Union still existed the debate about its reform ability its redeemable and why we should have a date on with the Soviet Union and why maybe even the Soviet and American systems were evolving in the same direction in what was called convergence theory those debates were really important debates and confusing Solzhenitsyn entered into those debates with fearing moral authority of having suffered long suffered under that system and he brought the voices of all who suffered under that system to the fore in his work this achievement it was not Perrault by anybody else yes there were many other courageous people yes there were people right there at the Hoover Institution like Robert conquest who wrote magnificent books about the true covering the truth of the Soviet Union however Solzhenitsyn did something more what he did was to show the Soviet Union was evil not just from a political point of view but from a moral point of view and he did it in a way that was persuasive yeah I find it fascinating of course in the 20s in the 1920s there were a lot of apologists who believed or hoped that the Soviet system was creating a new a new man a new human being a new system a better system there are people who lied on its behalf who covered it up who trusted the propaganda that was pumped out by that system and the lies that were told when people visited there you know I can't help but think of Walter to Randy as a shameful piece of that story and a lot of Western intellectuals of course fell prey to that they were eager to believe that something new and better was going on and then there came a time you'll correct me if I'm wrong but there became an awareness somewhere between I would say 1935 and 1955 you'll be more precise that that something was very rotten there that there was an incredibly oppressive regime that it abused its citizens in terrible ways and although a handful of people intellectuals continued to apologize for the system or for Stalin most Westerners turned against the Stalin Stalin's vision why did it take so what's the independent contribution of say Seoul Stinson's first-hand accounts in the Gulag Archipelago that he collected his own story and that of dozens and dozens of other Zack's other political prisoners what was the extra impact of that literary achievement above and beyond what was somewhat well known well-known maybe Russ we have to remember that the French Communist Party was Stalinist during the whole period of Stalin's rule and even after Stalin died and was denounced we also have to remember that many people downplayed the evil nature of the regime that is to say they would acknowledge yes there were famines yes millions of people died but these were not intentional these were mistakes these were not core to the system the gulag where the labor camp otherwise known as the labor camps where millions of people were incarcerated often first so-called political crimes these were not so big the numbers were exaggerated yes there were excesses but nonetheless even Stalinism was not beyond the pale let us also remember that in this confusing debate where some people defended Stalinism once again Russ just about nobody got away with defending the Hitler regime in this confusing debate were some people including prominent people defended Stalinism we also had a large number of people who saw a better revolution inside this soviet regime which may be could be recuperated once Stalin died so Khrushchev secret speech which denounced Stalin for his crimes was actually an attempt to rehabilitate the Soviet system it harkens back to a pure version of the Revolution supposedly associated with Lenin and with Leninism so that Stalin became a cult of the personality in Khrushchev's term a degradation of the revolution and therefore there would be a second wind a socialism with a human face or communist reform many people were newly attracted to the Soviet phenomenon upon Stalin's death in fact there was a split on the left between those who denounced Stalin and those who continued to praise Stalin what both sides shared was a belief in either the Stalin version of the Revolution or an original Lenin version of the revolution as being historically necessary and correct we forget those debates because now of course very few people will defend that history the same way but that's the context in which souls and Eaton arrived and he started out he started out trying to figure how he could capture describe this reality and he wrote a couple of really important novels on the labor camps from first-hand experience and they stood the test of time in fact in 1970 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for these novels and we know them as one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich we know them as in the first circle and of course cancer ward so he won the Nobel by tackling these themes but that wasn't the big impact yet the big impact came from the Gulag Archipelago which would be published not in the soviet union but abroad beginning in the early 1970s 7 1973 after he had won the Nobel and that book was one of the main ways in which many people not just intellectuals but the mass readership the public the kind of people who are core to any country's democratic order those people began to see that the regime was rotten in its roots that there was no better revolution inside the Stalin regime but Stalin's years of the 1920s through 1953 were no better or I'm sorry no worse than Lenin's 1917 coup d'etat in October 1917 and so this achievement of Solzhenitsyn eighteen hundred pages much longer than warned peace longer than Homer's Iliad and Odyssey combined and yet readable a page-turner in many ways yes this incredible achievement which was well documented despite him having zero access to the secret archives of course today people like myself and other scholars we can read those are curves but Solon Eaton had no access to those whatsoever he read published sources Soviet newspapers and other periodicals Soviet books and of course his own life experience and the life experience of two hundred and twenty-six other political prisoners whom he interviewed and whose stories are related in that magnificent three volume Gulag Archipelago the first volume as I said of which appeared in 1973 this is a singular achievement there was nothing else like it and so all those people who are making these fine distinctions between Leninism and Stalinism between the original revolution and the supposed degradation now had to contend with what Solzhenitsyn showed which was that the gulag started years before Stalin and his despotism before Stalin was the sole ruler the system was in place and it was in place from the beginning and it feels you know it's a non specialist in the area it feels like it's even more than just the historical fact that that there was oppression before Stalin it's also that the intellectual corruption and impossibility of the ideals of the Soviet system just shines through over and over again and his work I used to tell us I think I've told listeners before but when ice to teach undergrads on the last class I would recommend a series of books I didn't think they might think of reading that I would recommend encourage them to read and for years over a decade certainly in the 80s and and a lot of the 90s I would recommend that they read The Gulag Archipelago just out of tribute to his courage in writing that book that I felt like morally he deserved from people to read that book I'd also would recommend an apple bombs book The Gulag which is a very nice shorter version of the history and of course there's now a one-volume version of The Gulag Archipelago that as you write in your essay that Solzhenitsyn approved of if I got that right yes so you mentioned some of the of his interactions with the regime in passing I want you to talk about the roller coaster of his relationship with the Soviet leaders you know it begins in some sense with his imprisonment after returning as a veteran from World War two so he said he suffers at Stalin's hands he's then somewhat rehabilitated by Khrushchev then he's on the outs again so he has this incredible up-and-down relationship with Authority and at the same time seems like much of the time the authorities don't know what to do with him and and have unleashed him with effects that they didn't anticipate so I get the feeling and tell me if I'm wrong the crew Schaaf thought he was using social Nets and to advance his own political aspirations in putting down Stalin but eventually he just lost control that you're right Russ Solzhenitsyn was somebody who served in the Soviet Army in World War two he was part of that invasion force that swept into Poland and then Prussia on its way to Berlin in the midst of that he was arrested for some indiscreet comments about Stalin which were normally would be considered harmless but in such a regime as the Stalin regime were considered a political crime and so he was sentenced sent to the gulag although the labor camps by the way we should acknowledge that it was Solzhenitsyn who made that word gulag widespread in multiple languages including English of course he was released eventually and Khrushchev like you said did see him as an instrument in this de-stalinization Khrushchev was denouncing Stalin's crimes and excesses not denouncing for example collectivization of Agriculture where millions of peasants died and warned celinda that survivors were enslaved he was not denouncing the state-owned and state led so-called planned economy he was not denouncing the Communist Party's monopoly on power and the censorship on the public sphere he was denouncing that as Khrushchev was denouncing Stalin's arrests and execution executions of loyal communist cadre and so it was a kind of keep the system but get rid of the excesses and for that the denunciation of the camps that one could see in Solzhenitsyn's novels look like an important instrument that Khrushchev could use so in fact one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich was approved by Khrushchev for publication in the Soviet Union and it's a story about one of the labor camps worse loosely based on Solzhenitsyn's first-hand experience however Solzhenitsyn soon enough as you alluded to ran afoul of the authorities because sauce nation was something that the regime didn't count on first of all he was very determined and resolved his he was resolute unlike a lot of the intellectual class who wanted let's say favors apartments awards a better life recognition a mass audience Solzhenitsyn wasn't against those aspects of a literary life but he was after much more he was after the truth he was writing not because he needed to become famous but because he believed in a different moral universe opposed to the Soviet regime sauce Nielsen was a Russian nationalist and the Soviet regime was supposed to be above nationalism and incorporating a so-called Brotherhood of people's sultan eaton was a conservative not on the left he hated Marxism Leninism and revolution south nation was also a Christian and the Soviet regime of course was officially atheist and attempted to suppress Christianity and destroyed thousands of churches also attacking mosques and synagogues so thoughtful Natan was a came from a different moral universe with a different set of beliefs and he was not as susceptible to the blandishments that many people in the intelligencia will complained about the regime that many people were susceptible to so he was very difficult to handle for the Soviet regime moreover we now have the secret documents KGB documents and Politburo documents about Solzhenitsyn which were published the number of years ago as the Solzhenitsyn files which shows exactly as you suggested that the regime did not handle him you see for example Dimitri was FINA who was laying at Brezhnev's Minister of Defense Brezhnev was the head of the Soviet Union following Khrushchev for 18 years during the from the mid 60s through the early 80s his ministry of defense Dmitriy Ustinov at a polyp your meaning said that if we try to organise a denunciation of Solzhenitsyn in our organization's meaning in all the party cells across the country it might not turn out the way we hope or the way we want in other words they were afraid that Solzhenitsyn and his belief system and his written works could spark not a pro-soviet consolidation but in fact critiques of the Soviet Union from a Russian nationalist and from a Christian conservative point of view and so yeah he was trouble for them trouble in a big way they had a lot of issues don't get me wrong Solzhenitsyn wasn't the only one they had economic issues for us which of course you understand well they had Eastern Europe which was in revolt Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe which was supposed to be a security belt that they acquired in World War two but instead had become a source of vulnerability like in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 the so-called Prague Spring they had multiple vulnerabilities but somebody likes souls who needs them they had no answer for and he was only a single individual and yet they feared him and they didn't know what to do finally they bundled him onto a plane and deported him to the west where he lived the next 20 years of his life the beginning yes beginning in the early 70s and so this life in the West however which is also an important subject we must remember that social needs and in Russian for the audience back home he not only wrote open letters to the Soviet leadership all his novels all his political tracts and interviews and speeches they were directed at his homeland he was trying to affect change at home even when he lived those 20 years in exile in the West you think you'd find it surprising that they didn't kill him obviously Stalin would have killed him if he'd done what he would have become he killed people for far less than that do you find it do we know anything about those internal debates about whether that was talked about or considered the regime changed when Stalin died in 1953 it was still the same regime obviously and it was still the same people in power Joe Stalin was gone but the ability to enact mass violence on their own people had diminished it had diminished in part because of external changes in the world but also because of internal changes yes they could still execute some people yes they could still organize for example accidents fake car accidents to get rid of people but they didn't have the same way with all either ideologically or even their own determination to just wipe people out and so what they began to do instead was a combination of internal exile which had always been practiced but now was practiced more in lieu of executions and what they called prophylaxis which was to try to preempt people like Solzhenitsyn by either intimidating them or seducing them with offers of goodies so that change in tactics by the KGB marks a change in Soviet society from uneducated a third or fourth grade education for the most part on average to completion of high school education completion of college education and pluses we said external changes in the world so there was no longer Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy and Hirohito's regime in Japan and so the ability to just kill people in large numbers because they were dissidents they disagreed with you they criticized you was sort of lost by the regime and so they did Solzhenitsyn what they did to many other people the COSLA dmeir Bukovsky for example Andrei Sakharov for example they tried to banish them internally and cut them off from the public it worked in many cases it didn't work in the case of Kousuke it didn't work in the case of sakarov and obviously it didn't work in the case of Solzhenitsyn but there were exceptions many other people were broken as we would be probably in such circumstances they made their peace with the regime or they simply were trying to survive they had families they had livelihoods not everyone could be Solzhenitsyn Sikora for Bukovsky and so the regime's no policy of internal deportation silencing and/or prophylaxis preemption worked to a very great degree against the dissident movement it just didn't work against somebody like Solzhenitsyn so you get the idea of certainly from reading in the first circle and I would say just just screams out from the man that first of all there's the moral courage that you alluded to earlier but there's also a another advantage he had I think in standing up to the regime's threats and blandishments which was he appears to believe very deeply in the redemptive nature of suffering and I'm curious if in his youth or his upbringing or his personal experiences before he entered the camps other than the fact they nose was a big fan of Dostoevsky and well so I think believed in the redemptive power of suffering I'm curious if we have any hints as to what made him so distinctive so strong so powerful in not being broken there's a determination there which has to be attributed in part to personality this goes back to your earlier question Russ about had there been no Solzhenitsyn maybe things would have turned out the same maybe somebody else would have stepped up and played this role in history as for example history selects people for certain roles and this was a role that needed to be played and if it hadn't been for soldier needs someone else would have been found well I have to say that writing about Stalin I don't believe that Stalin's personality was absolutely crucial it took a person like Stalin to impose this system and stabilize it the way he did at those colossal human costs and I see very few if any people besides Stalin inside that regime as horrible as those other people were as low of you they took on human life as they did I see very other people with that same combination of resolve and skill that Stalin brought to that immense task of building socialism as he called it that is to say imposing that system Solzhenitsyn in the opposite direction is a similar unique personality that combination of moral values beyond corruption as well as resolve and determination no matter how much he suffered Solzhenitsyn discovered a lot of Russian philosophy and Russian authors that is to say that literary figures over the course of time partly it was in Soviet education to begin with for example figures like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were brought back into the curriculum under Stalin partly it was looking as he did for unorthodox figures that were not part of this official Soviet schooling many of them he discovered only when he got out to the West and he could read the emigration in full for example when he worked at the Hoover Institution librarian archives war he worked through other emigrate publications that were sent to him or preserved in different locations besides the Hoover one and so he discovered reinforcements of views that he had developed partly on his own through growing up in that country and just partly because he was looking for a value system beyond the Soviet one even while he was still there and so his education in the broadest sense his upbringing his intellectual trajectory is a really big story and we have some pretty good biographies which try to trace this but even so some mystery remains about the person about this combination is important just in general stubbornness or political resolve as well as moral resolve this is what's special about him Rus and so we have to acknowledge that he's not alone other people shared this including some who are not famous who died in the camps alongside him or who survived the camps boo as invalids or were not great writers and so couldn't transmit their stories the same way that he could we all want to make him seem to be one person among 300 million but nonetheless he speaks for those others who were less eloquent and even those courageous others he stands out against that background in the novel in the first circle which we've talked about here in those episodes I mentioned earlier I think there are four chapters that relate to Stalin and there it's quite lengthy some editors would have cut them they don't add a lot to the plot directly there's sort of a in they could be interpreted I don't think this is correct but they could easily be interpreted as a an indulgence on the part of Sorensen to get it off his chest to satirize and and poke fun at Stalin his portrait Stalin is I would say Stalin is egotistical buffoon as a petty child as an insecure off alter rebe and and I I was also struck watching the movie that came out recently the death of Stalin which I watched with some unease I have to say I didn't find it funny it's supposed to be a comedy sort of a comedy it's the darkest kind of humor that paints Baria and Khrushchev and and the survivors of styling himself as well as sort of comic-book Keystone Cops inept blundering this way and that and what are your thoughts on on first social incidence portrait of Stalin and and on the movie if you have any thoughts on it it's tough what do you do with a guy like Stalin when the evil is so immense scale is just unfathomable and you yourself suffer directly under him Solzhenitsyn's portrait of Stalin is not really successful except as an exercise in kind of psychological revenge he diminished his Stalin as you said he makes Stalin out to be a nothing a nobody and in some ways it was Solzhenitsyn's Oh criticism or joking about Stalin that put him in the gulag in the first place that launched all of what happened including Solzhenitsyn successful blackening of that regime at its roots and so in some ways the end the first circle returns to that 1945 episode however it isn't integral to the novel and it isn't a successful portrait however understandable is psychologically sometimes we forget that evil is also human that Stalin was a human being that Hitler was a human being and that the more we understand them as humans the scarier their evil becomes it doesn't mean we justify them it doesn't mean we validate them we make excuses for them but it does enable us to reach a level of understanding so so Neeson was not interested at all in moral or political or biographical terms of reaching an understanding of Stalin's character he was just interested in countering Soviet propaganda and belittling this figure who had been inflated we he had been if you take Yan OCI's movie the death of Stalin you know she is a great film director and many people find the film entertaining and of course it is very clever and there are moments that I found funny not the whole movie but many moments which were I thought hilarious at the same time and also I'm not afraid to engage in satire when it comes to even something as monstrous as the Stalin regime Brooks did for the Hitler regime Charlie Chaplin did it or Hitler when it's done well it can be very effective however one of the problems with you new Chi is that just like soldier soldier needs portrait of Stalin in in the first circle now once again it can make you feel good but to portray that regime's operatives those around Stalin when he died Baria Molotov Molotov Khrushchev kaganovich to portray them as idiots as venal corrupt politicians like we would find I don't know in in the urban political machine of any major city right graft and bribes and favors to portray them as corrupt and venal in that way and that is not very intelligent is to miss of course how that system could have arisen in the first place and how it could have functioned if everyone was so stupid and if everyone was merely corrupt the Soviet regime never would have happened the people who ran the Soviet regime were not geniuses but they weren't performance they were blinkered ideologically but they were effective administrators in a dictatorial regime in a dictatorial way and so the film for me falls short as a portrait of the reality there I do recognise it once again as an entertainment and it may be harsh to judge it in historical terms rather than as a piece of entertainment however as a piece of entertainment it falls short from me precisely because you can do satire well over regime that big but it's a little one-dimensional ultimately you know gee when he does this about a democratic a Western political system the US system the British system it works much better the stakes are lower because the political system doesn't matter as much and also because they don't have that monstrosity that evil on a mass scale that these officials perpetrated so I wish Solzhenitsyn had done better with his Stalin but I acknowledged that he probably derive some pleasure from being able to ridicule Stalin and print yeah I would make a distinction between the two in the following way between this between social innocence portrait of Stalin and the movie portrait in the death of Stalin movie and I I don't know if this is a accurate or not but in in the movie and well not there will be no spoilers here but the opening scene I found quite quite powerful and creepy it's a concert scene it did capture some of the it tried to be humorous about it but it did capture some of the utter abject fear that people had of being on the wrong side of of Stalin and and it tried to be it didn't work for me aesthetically but it tried to temper the buffoonery with periodic gunshots people being just executed in the in the background of the film which which is an interesting way to try to deal with what we're talking about but the reason I found distance portrait more affecting and more effective is that while he did belittle the man we had the rest of the book and the rest of the book is about the utter horror and human debasement that Stalin was was perpetrating on on his fellow citizens and so I thought that contrast was quite powerful and and it you know I found that quite I think it went along too long but I didn't find that it wasn't just a psychological exercise you know a catharsis in my view but that's um that's neither that's neither here nor there let's let's move but I just want to get that on and get that in tell me why do you think there's a renewal of interest in socialism as you point out historically he's incredibly important but at the same time as you point out the Soviet ian's has been gone for over a quarter of a century the historical lessons it seemed to be no longer relevant I disagree but many would argue that there's no threat of labor camps as you say there wasn't even the threat of mass imprisonment or execution after after the death of Stalin on the surface you could argue so this is just historical curiosity and important figures struggled and shows the courage of one man yet I think it's more than that what are your thoughts you know Solzhenitsyn is going to stay relevant Rus and the reason he's going to stay relevant is because it's not just the system that's God not just the horrors that he described which are now hopefully dead and buried the way Stalin is dead and buried but because he tapped into something larger he tapped into this how to organize our politics when countries have different cultures one of the things we've discovered about globalization and about integrating the world economically is that countries still have their cultures and their identities and that these matter and that people often welcome economic integration but not necessarily at the expense of their own well-being economically or of what they value in cultural terms in identity terms and so Solzhenitsyn was ahead of the curve in speaking to those issues he was arguing many years before the Soviet regime felt that the West could not universalize itself that the institutions which made the west what it is and from which Solzhenitsyn benefited tremendously living in freedom owning private property publishing without censorship he understood those values he appreciated those values but he didn't think every country's history tradition and culture was amenable right I thought that combination that package was amenable to the same institutions country's had national traditions national institutions which had to be taken into account and so the post-soviet for him which as I said he was thinking about well before the Soviet regime collapsed in 1991 was a matter not of westernization per se Heath wanted some measure of local rule local self-rule democracy at the local level but he wanted to marry that with a strong centralized power in Russia because he felt that that was part of the Russian tradition he wanted a spiritual renewal in Russia he wanted a country based on morality not solely or predominantly based on the law he wanted many things which people in the West didn't understand and was one of the reasons behind his difficult reception having been hailed as this great courageous dissident who helped black in the Soviet regime he was then seen as a bizarre 19th century reactionary figure will criticize the West in its values and institutions and didn't understand the West but in fact a kind of liberal condescension the attempt to impose a single worldview or a single political system across the globe which we've seen backfire in our lifetimes that was something Solzhenitsyn worried about and he priests aged and so he became a figure who fit in well with the post 1991 post 1990s in fact mood in Russia and his works are assigned in high school in Russia today by the official federal curriculum in Russia and in addition he can be read in the West the same way that we read Holocaust literature we of course hope that something like that never happens again what happened to the Jews under Nazi rule but yet we still read the Holocaust it still speaks to us because it's about who we are and what we value and the kinds of moral choices in difficult moments under authoritarian or totalitarian regimes Sultan eats and speaks to that in the West even as he speaks to a Russian version of modernity a Russian version of national traditions inside that country - not everybody is going to share Solzhenitsyn's views inside Russia today and we wouldn't expect that nor am i suggesting we accept them all and critically I'm merely suggesting that it's an important part of the conversation and he's a major figure even ten years dead now on his the hundredth anniversary of his birth and he's a major figure for us we don't live in Russia we have different traditions here but he's a major figure for us because we're struggling with this globalization cultural divide cultural identity attempt to understand people who are left out left behind have a different point of view get rid of the condescension towards them why was brexit important what did the trump presidency his election in the electoral college what did it reveal it revealed that a large part of the country was unheard that their voices weren't being heard that's what Trump revealed and that's what brexit revealed and that's to an extent what Solzhenitsyn foretold once again we're not necessarily solving those issues that were revealed the politics may be fake but what I'm suggesting is the sentiments are real and those sentiments are a worthy debate for us to have and Solzhenitsyn fits into that debate here in the US just as he fits in in Russia I encourage listeners to go back to the if you haven't heard at the episode we did with a euro zone II in his book the virtua nationalism which you know is is kind of shocking it you kind of it's easy as a westerner or certainly as an American to think that the trampled march of democracy and capitalism is going to sweep the world and there's some signs that that is a long-term trend but now there's some science that maybe not so much and as you point out so shinsen took a lot of criticism in nineteen in the 80s for again for being a reactionary for being a Christian for being a nationalist in particular which is what we're really talking about this this tension between nationalism and universalism with your call it globalization or universalism and he's also been accused I'm curious do you think he was an anti-semite I've heard that claim no he was not that's a really spare is charge soften even believed that religion was the primary determinant of a civilization why did he think that Russia had a separate identity because of Eastern Orthodox Christianity he wrote a book about the Jews in Russia called 200 years together and it was about how Jews and Russians were different civilizations once again because of religion now we can argue that he's wrong that religion is not the primary determinant of a civilization I'm not suggesting that we accept that argument I'm only suggesting that that was the argument he made and that was the reason he differentiated between Russians and Jews even though they had lived 200 years together because Russians joined Jews joined the Russian Empire after or as a result of the partitions of Poland when Poland was swallowed up at the end of the 18th century that's when Russia the Russian Empire the Tsarist Empire acquired a large Jewish population which it did not have before the late 18th century and so the idea that there's separate civilizations because of religion does not constitute anti-semitism well I agree with you but you know when I and I said we're gonna do a book club and in the first circle some of my readers on Twitter and list knowing I'm Jewish said how could you do this he's an anti-semite in my view is I don't particularly think he is an anti-semite glad to hear you agree but I so could enjoy in the first circle just like I enjoy the brothers karamazov is a magnificent book I don't think Dostoevsky was this was so friendly to Jews but it's not really the I still can learn a lot from him it's not it's okay let's turn toward let's close we talked about Stalin a little bit it's my impression that his reputation on the streets of Moscow and elsewhere in Russia is on the rise that's what we hear in the media is that true is he having something of a comeback reputationally Stalin will always be a major figure with positive as high positive as well as negative views in Russia the reason is pretty simple Rus he won the war Stalin was in power during World War two the greatest war in recorded history against that Hitler regime and he was on the winning side you can argue that they won despite Stalin not because of Stalin you can argue that he contributed nearly to defeat and that if it hadn't been for Stalin maybe they wouldn't have had to fight the war in the first place or certainly they wouldn't have suffered that level of casualties you can make all sorts of arguments and qualifications about Stalin's role in that war but you cannot take away the coincidence the fact that he was in power during the war and so therefore being on the winning side of the greatest war in history will always make Stalin a figure to be at least partially admired in that culture in addition he's seen as someone who stood up to the West who created a nuclear-armed superpower will help divide the world with Churchill Roosevelt and then with other leaders who succeeded Churchill and Roosevelt in the US however the same people who have this partial or even more than partial admiration for Stalin many of them know the crimes he committed the monstrosity of his rule and they still nonetheless have these feelings of admiration for him we shouldn't assume that it's because they're ignorant that they don't know the truth that if we could just tell him how many people perished in the famines that they would back off of their positive views of Stalin Stalin was for better or for worse a very major historical figure perhaps the greatest historical figure in historical terms not in moral terms in that culture and so it's impossible to do away with him in fact after Stalin died in 1953 he was still the most significant personality in that culture and part of Khrushchev's failure upon attempting to succeed Stalin as the ruler of the Soviet Union was that he couldn't he couldn't fill Stalin shoes he couldn't be Stalin now Khrushchev and Stalin were patron and client right they were teacher and disciple and so we shouldn't expect that Khrushchev would be on that same level but that's kind of the point I'm making Stalin was on a very Stalin was on a level different for most politicians for better or for worse now there are many people who detest Stalin alive in Russia today there are many people who cannot stand the name who when they see someone wearing a Stalin shirt they or see Stalin memorabilia it's revolting to them their stomach turns I'm not suggesting that the whole culture there is enamored of Stalin but I'm also not surprised that a significant morality still finds some reasons to admire him through all that bloodshed you're writing a biography of Stalin you've issued you've published the first two volumes is that correct - yes date and they come to 2,000 pages although I'm sure that includes a lot of footnotes and references is there one more volume plan or more than one and what's it like to spend that much time and that many pages with a person you view as a monster yeah I do have one more volume schedule which I'm working on now which covers the period of World War two the called war Stalin's death in the aftermath and I'm hoping that's in the next several years I can bring the that volume to conclusion and therefore the whole series to conclusion I spent now as you say a lot of time with Stalin and it is very troubling you see the evil on the pages on those documents you read with his pencil marks his check marks and pencil his under linings you see the orders to kill this person on that person deport this whole nation yes it's it's hard to describe in words that experience and as you say over a number of years it's cumulative at the same time for us if you're interested in power you're interested in how power works how its accumulated how its exercised and what the consequences of exercising power are a Stalin is really the gold standard he's the gold standard of dictatorship no dictator has amassed more power than Stalin exercised it with greater consequence Mao didn't have a military-industrial complex and of course the Hitler regime went up in flames after only 12 horrible yes but only 12 years while Stalin lasted three decades so if you're interested in power it's endlessly fascinating but of course it is diff on a day-to-day basis to continue to I now I'm inside his head in ways that I wasn't before I started this project I understand him his way of thinking I see why he made decisions he made and I see the consequences of those decisions in the lives of people and it it hurts to see that and it hurts to understand that he didn't have to make those decisions he could have been more magnanimous he didn't have to kill the people he killed his regime would have survived it wasn't under threat and so my job in a way is to convey from the inside from the original documents from a sense of deep empathy not sympathy but deep empathy or understanding as we historians call it empathy of how that regime worked and why it happened the way it did but no we're not writing this biography because we have an exemplary figure we're not teaching Courage Fowler perspicacity magnanimity we're not teaching those values for which biography was originally invented we're teaching the opposite of those things with this biography but those are important lessons too so let's close with how you close your essay on soreness and you mentioned that many people complained about his personality about sergeants of the man he was bitter immature arrogant etc my reaction of that is he was in the camps he's entitled to all the bitterness and all the arrogance you got to cut him some slack and he wasn't just a prisoner who was good at writing it wasn't that lovely that he was able to use the prison experiences to craft some novels and and unique historical documentation in the gulag he was a genius he had an incredible vision he pumped out unimaginable number of words under circumstances that human being should not have to to be in to start with and there unbelievably entertaining like you said here a history of the of the gulag that's a page-turner so I don't really care if he's even vaguely normal I'd expect him to be a troubled and complicated person what do you thoughts on that and sort of that that sort of way of dismissing him it seems to me the essay I wrote for the tls to which you're referring which is published this week my goal in that was first of all to make sure people understood that he was a great writer and that he will endure because he was a great writer not just because he had a political point of view or was a political figure or was caught up in battling the Soviet regime he's a great writer and that's very important to acknowledge second thing is that our heroes were us they're also complex people and the complexities are fine and we shouldn't be afraid of the complexities and as you say they don't diminish the achievements just like I do with our anti heroes with Stalin show the complexity show the multiple dimensions show that he had charm show that people loved him because he was a people person and focused on their lives even as he was ordering the executions of others that complexity is really important and for Solzhenitsyn on the other side a hero not an antihero we also owe him we owe him the respect of showing him in his full complexity and I think his achievement only grows when we do that my guest today has been Stephen Kotkin Stephen thanks for being part of econ talk a great pleasure Russ [Music] this is econ talk part of the library of economics and liberty former econ taco de contort where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings for latest as a day's conversation the sound engineer for econ talk is rich boy yet I'm your host Russ Roberts thanks for listening talk to you on Monday [Music] you

Channel: EconTalk

Views: 117,000

Keywords: Stephen Kotkin, Solzhenitsyn, Princeton University, Stanford University's Hoover Institution, EconTalk, Russ Roberts

Id: i6AZcoko6M8

Length: 60min 20sec (3620 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019