Stephen Kotkin: evaluation

Transcript context

…The final Stalin volume is taking me longer than I thought. Part of it was accidental. I had three separate, unrelated cancers that put me in a tunnel for about 18 months of medical care. They were detected early, and I had the finest imaginable doctors. So again, luck in my life and luck are synonymous here. It wasn’t one cancer that spread; it was three separate cancers that arose. After I had the first one, which was caught early, they were looking to see that I didn’t have it anymore, and the microscopic quality of the surveillance enabled them to discover the incipient other cancer in a very early stage. Then that happened again, a third time after the second cancer. The treatment had been conducted, and they were looking to see that it was successful. So that set me back a little bit, 18 months, maybe two years. It teaches you a lot about life when you go through something like that. I won’t go into the details, but I’m sure you understand. The bigger reason that it’s taken me longer is the difficulty of the subject. Each one of these three volumes has been harder than the previous one. The first one, I thought, “I’m never going to finish this thing. It’s just so hard,” and I pulled it off, and then I said, “Okay, I can do this.” Then I took the second one on, and it was not quite exponentially harder, but it was significantly harder. Now the third one, I’m feeling the same thing. World War II is so much bigger than anything else that’s come up in the first two volumes, and it took me forever to get to the truth about the war. So much of what we think to be true, including, of course, about Stalin’s behavior in Soviet society during the war and various battles, I discovered really didn’t have solid evidence behind it in many cases — not in all cases, but in many cases. I worked through the war part, which is half the book, half of volume 3, and now I’m in the Chinese Revolution. I’m in the Cold War, the ’45 to ’53 period. We know a lot about that, and it’s hard to be fresh about the Cold War. So many great scholars have gone into the previously secret archives and brought out amazing material and written really fine analytical books. But what I discovered about the Cold War stuff is the preoccupation, bordering on obsession, with nonstrategic questions like the fate of Poland. Now, for Poles, the fate of Poland is existential — don’t get me wrong — just like for Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians and Ukrainians today, as we speak on this podcast. I get all that for them, but is it core, is it central to the global order that forms after ’45? That’s a much harder, more difficult question. What I’ve discovered is what I call the four partitions, China, Korea, Japan, and Indochina, and in so many ways, that was so much bigger than the fate of Poland — again, not for the Poles. I have Polish ancestry, so I understand what I’m talking about to a certain extent, besides just being a story. o many ways, that was so much bigger than the fate of Poland — again, not for the Poles. I have Polish ancestry, so I understand what I’m talking about to a certain extent, besides just being a story. But if you look at the East Asian story, that’s where so much of the Cold War still reverberates today and, I would argue, is not over. China could have been partitioned and wasn’t. Korea could have been completely taken over by the Soviets, but instead was partitioned because Truman asked Stalin to stop at the 38th parallel, even though Truman didn’t have soldiers on the ground to prevent Stalin from doing so. Stalin was ready to invade the home islands of Japan and had already given the order, so Japan should have been partitioned and wasn’t. Then, of course, Indochina — what we know as Vietnam today — was partitioned. You have these four partitions, two of which happened — Korea and Indochina — both of which led to war, and two partitions that didn’t happen, one because the Communists won in China, and one because the Communists got nowhere near power in Japan. That’s the really big story in the later part of Stalin’s life, the ’45 to ’53 period. I’m working through that now, and I’ve discovered that it’s not as simple as it’s presented. Once again, like World War II, I have to go back and dig and dig and dig to verify and to make sure that the things we believe actually happened are actually true, and excavate layers of possibility, paths not taken, decisions made. We know well the episode of General George Marshall. He’s famous for the Marshall Plan in Europe and is considered one of the great statesmen in American history, but in China, his mission completely failed. It failed as bad as his mission in Europe succeeded. When you give equal or even greater weight — in my view, as would be warranted — to the East Asian story of the Cold War and Stalin’s role in it, it could potentially freshen up our understanding of this. And then of course, it connects to the present day. Volume 3 is called Totalitarian Superpower because the Soviet Union was a superior totalitarianism to Nazism, but it was an inferior superpower to the United States, which is why it was successful in one case and unsuccessful in the other case. Totalitarian superpower has a certain resonance for where we are with China today, not identical, of course, but a certain resonance. I’m working my way through this, and I’m bogged down now in the Chinese Revolution and Indochina and the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese occupation in fresh and astonishing ways, at least for me. Again, there are great books, amazing scholars that we’re all reliant on, but I’m trying to get to the source on many of these things, and so I’ve got a ways to go. We’re still only halfway through. We’re still several years away, unfortunately, on volume 3, but I have the sense of momentum. I was working on it before we got on this call, going through some of this stuff in ’45 and ’46 on the East. Don’t get me wrong, Berlin is a big deal, and the division of Germany and the Berlin story, and the blockade there, and the coup in Czechoslovakia, and the Marshall Plan. f in ’45 and ’46 on the East. Don’t get me wrong, Berlin is a big deal, and the division of Germany and the Berlin story, and the blockade there, and the coup in Czechoslovakia, and the Marshall Plan. I’m not trying to suggest that that’s trivial. I’m just trying to suggest that there are things that are also extraordinarily important that have not been given the same weight. As to what I’ll do next, I hope I’m going to get my life back. I’ve been in Joseph Stalin’s company for not quite two decades now — a little more than a decade and a half — and it’s been remarkable. I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve certainly stretched my mind and come to understand the world of power much better than I did before, even though there’s a ways to go. But it’s enough already, seeing the evil. Your world is mostly digital. You don’t have the experience of going through documentations with his signature on it, and there’s dried blood on the page. So that’s the world I’ve been immersed in. I understand how his mind works. It’s not his blood that’s on that page. It’s somebody else’s blood from their interrogation that he’s reading and signing off on. It’s been a gift to understand power, that original journey I was launched on, because Stalin is the gold standard of power. If you want to study how power is accumulated, how it’s operationalized, and what the consequences are, there’s no bigger story than his story. From the point of view of power, it’s endlessly fascinating. It’s a lifelong learning. It’s a gift, as I say. But from the point of view of morality, freedom, the stuff that I cherish and believe in and I’m privileged to be able to experience — it is just devastating. There is no limit. The moral squalor is just bottomless, and you live in that world. Not 24/7 — I’m sitting here in Stanford University in a plush office overlooking the campus. Silicon Valley is outside the door, and a $3 million, three-bedroom house is on sale for $10 million down the street. It’s not my life 100 percent. It’s not something that envelops me all the time, but it is something that absorbs me in my life of the mind, my work experience. Then of course, I finished the section on the war, and all of these places that I just wrote about — they’re in the news today. People talk to me about X city — Kramatorsk in Ukraine, or fill in the blank, whatever place that was obscure to Americans not long ago, and is now known to them. All the stuff happened back then in the ’40s, only it was the Nazi land army against the Soviet land army. All those place names and all that history, and I just wrote about the war, which was really more than war. It was mass murder, World War II on the Eastern front. Here I am, and I never thought I would live through war in those places again. Of course, again, I’m not there. I’m not living in Ukraine. My relatives haven’t been killed there, just like they weren’t in the 1940s in the historical material that I’m immersed in. But you get a feel for this, and it has an effect on you, even if you then can close your laptop and go off to some fantastic sushi parlor. You know what I’m talking about.…

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