Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin became the most powerful dictator in history

The thing about Stalin's terror is the police are also murdered while they are doing the murdering. You're murdering your intellectuals, your scientists, your cultural figures. You're murdering your loyal party elites and the whole thing doesn't collapse. The people around Stalin can see that he is unusually good at dictatorship.

He is just carrying this entire system on his back through thick and thin, liquidating the kulocks, collectivizing agriculture, building a military-industrial complex, defeating Hitler in war. How much better are you going to do than Stalin? Stalin goes into the underground and for 20 years of his life, he's a penniless, jobless revolutionary dedicated to fighting the genuine injustices of the Zarus regime. what he'll produce is a much more unjust regime than the one he's fighting against.

My guest today is Steven Cochen who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of twothirds of his three volume Stalin biographies. Um the first one Stalin paradoxes of Power, the second one Stalin waiting for Hitler. Thank you for coming on my podcast. Thank you for the honor of the invitation.

Let's begin with the SARS regime. So first question, how repressive was the Sarist regime actually? Because presumably the motivation behind the revolution is to get rid of this autocracy. But you just have these examples of these Lenin's brother tries to kill the Zar and he himself is writing these long manifestos about taking down capitalism and overthrowing the government and him and people like Stalin are just in exile in Siberia living off government money um robbing banks small shenanigans.

Honestly, it sounds more forgiving than uh many countries today. So how how bad was it really? So you have to put yourself back in the time period to judge the level of repression based upon what norms were, what other regimes did rather than take the 20th century regimes as the guide and go back. But we need to widen the aperture a little bit here.

So this is the Zarus regime's problem. It needs to be able to compete in the international system. That means it needs a modern military and modern industry to underwrite that modern military. So it needs armaments, it needs steel, it needs chemicals.

For that you need workers. So you want the workers only to work in the industry. You don't want them for example to ...