Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Of course, history, on the one hand, there is a statement, it doesn’t allow for what-ifs. On the other hand, in my opinion, history is full of what-if. That’s what history is about, and certainly the Russian areas, how the Soviet Union would continue, would continue beyond, let’s say, Gorbachev’s tenure. And the argument has been made that the reforms that he introduced, that they were mismanaged and they could be managed differently, or there could be no reforms and there could be continuing stagnation. So that is all possible. What I think would happen one way or another is the Soviet collapse in a different form, on somebody else’s watch at some later period in time. Because we’re dealing with not just processes that we’re happening in the Soviet Union, we’re dealing with global processes. And the 20th century turned out to be the century of the disintegration of the empires. You look at the globe, at the map of the world in 1914, and you compare it to the map at the end of the 20th century in 1991, 1992, and suddenly you realize that there are many candidates for being the most important event, the most important process in the 20th century. But the biggest global thing that happened was redrawing the map of the world and producing dozens, if not hundreds, of new states. That’s the outcome of the different processes of the 20th century. Look, Yugoslavia is falling apart around the same time. Czechoslovakia goes through what can be called a civilized divorce, a very, very rare occurrence in the fall of multinational states. So yeah, the writing was on the wall, whether it would happen under Gorbachev or later, whether it would happen as the result of reforms, or as the result of no reforms. But I think that sooner later that would happen. Yeah, it’s very possible hundreds of years from now, the way the 20th century is written about, as the century defined by the collapse of empires. You call the Soviet Union “the last empire. ” The book is called The Last Empire. So is there something fundamental about the way the world is that means it’s not conducive to the formation of empires? The meaning that I was putting in the term the Soviet Union as the last empire was that the Soviet collapse was the collapse of the last major European empires, traditional empires, that was there in the 18th century, 19th century, and through most of the 20th century. The Austria-Hungary died in the midst of World War I. The Ottoman Empire disintegrated. The Brits were gone and left India. And the successor to the Russian Empire called the Soviet Union was still hanging on there. And then came 1991. And what we see even with today’s Russia, is it’s a very different sort of policies. The Russia or Russian leadership tried to learn a lesson from 1991, so there is no national republics in the Russian Federation that would have more rights than the Russian administrative units. The structure is different, the nationality policies are different, the level of Russification is much higher. So it is in many ways already a post-imperial formation.…

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