Stephen Kotkin: evaluation

Transcript context

…I guess we'd like to think that's what matters. But historically it just seems like when authoritarians crack down really hard, it kind of just works. Right? That's why they have gigantic repressive apparatuses. People talk about a bargain. The Chinese made a bargain or the Russians made a bargain. The people gave up their freedom and the regime provides a higher standard of living. So there's this bargain. There is no bargain. Because if the regime fails to raise the standard of living, the people can't sue them in court. They can't say, "You didn't live up to your end of the bargain. We gave away our freedom, but you didn't deliver on your part of the bargain, so the deal is over. You're out of power now because you didn't live up to your bargain." Instead, they repress. They bring out the batons. They bring out the water cannon. They bring out the disappearances where people are arrested in cause. They're not even indicted, they just disappear them. You have this huge repressive apparatus, and it seems to work, especially when you have this moment where you fail to live up to some of the promises that you made. The challenge for them is that somebody has to do the repression. The repressive apparatus is not a machine. It's not AI. It's not something which is mechanical. It's people. It's people who grow up in neighborhoods, come from villages, and went to schools with other people. This brings us back to the tsarist regime where we started. The tsarist secret police wasn't big enough to keep the lid on, so they had to use the military. The military was a peasant army. They were peasants in uniform. The working class, including women, was striking for bread in the capital and marching in the capital for bread in 1917. The military was told to shoot them. These are elite military units. Shoot these workers. They're peasants, and you think, “Okay, peasants, they'll shoot workers. No love lost.” The workers were peasants yesterday. Some of them were still peasants who went back to the villages where these soldiers were from, during downtime at the factory, during harvest time. They were the same people. The army decided not to shoot. There came a point where the regime called out the repression, and the repressors had agency and didn't repress. That's what happens in these cases. You never know when it's going to happen. It's very hard to predict beforehand. But there comes a moment where the people who are supposed to do the shooting decide not to shoot. The people who are supposed to do the arresting decide not to arrest. The people who are doing the surveillance decide to stop. You have this huge repressive apparatus, and it works until the moment the people in it decide not to do it anymore. That's where the political legitimacy variable is ultimately decisive. Because those people who were killing under communism and collectivizing those villages and dekulakizing and killing the people in their native village that they had grown up with… If they hadn't done that, the regime couldn't have done this. The regime couldn't have collectivized. Stalin wasn't out there shooting people. ople in their native village that they had grown up with… If they hadn't done that, the regime couldn't have done this. The regime couldn't have collectivized. Stalin wasn't out there shooting people. He was signing the decree, which then got communicated through the system to the point of the activist who enacted it or not, as the case might be. When they don't enact, your power evaporates. It's like a bank run. You look at the bank, and you think, "Wow, that's pretty solid. They got these neoclassical columns. It's all made out of stone. Looks really impressive. This bank is really solid." One day, it gets in people's heads that the bank might not have your money. The bank might not be good in reality for your paper holdings. You rush to the bank to try to get your money out before that money is gone or doesn't exist. Everybody gets that idea at the same time, not just one person, and you get a bank run. This really solid institution with these neoclassical stone columns turns out to evaporate, evanescent. You can have a political bank run in the repressive apparatus. They cease thinking that they should kill people like themselves on behalf of a system that they are no longer loyal to, no longer adhering to. That can happen in the forces of order, as we call them, in the repressive apparatus. It can happen inside the elite. Because when the leader gives the order, it's got to go through the whole chain of command. The leader doesn't give the order to the soldier. It goes to the one boss, the subordinate to that boss, the subordinate… Anywhere along the chain of command, there can be disloyalty and revolt. There can be what we call political defection. What motivates, what triggers, political defection? The lack of legitimacy, political illegitimacy. People are not going to die for something that they no longer believe in. So that's a really big problem that the communist regime can't solve with tech. You say, “Well, the tech could produce power and prosperity and China could relegitimize its rule just like it did with economic growth. The economic growth did it for 30-40 years and that's how the regime legitimated itself. The tech will do that for the next 30-40 years.” The answer is, that hasn't happened yet. Maybe it can do that and maybe it can't, but it's never permanent. What's permanent is power rooted in the people. What's permanent is their real citizens. They have real freedoms. They have the right to vote. Now, they can't get what they want. They go to the polls and they see bad candidate, worse candidate, even worse candidate. But they can punish what they don't like. They can exercise that agency. They can be citizens. They can realize their citizenship, just like we do as consumers in the marketplace, consumers of podcasts. That's where you get legitimacy from, where the system enables people, opportunity at home, opportunity for people who otherwise don't have opportunity. That's legitimacy. That's priceless. China doesn't have that. Russia doesn't have that. Stalin had that legitimacy for a time based upon the idea that he was building a new world and overcoming the horrors of capitalism and imperialism and world war.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.