YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephen Kotkin

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166
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2022-05-25
most recent
2022-05-25
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Dependence on Russian energy. Voluntarily increasing their dependence on Russia. So here's the conspiracy to bring Russia down. The French, who fantasize about themselves as a diplomatic superpower, are constantly the French leaders are constantly running to the Kremlin to ask what Russia needs, what concessions from the West Russia needs to feel respected again. The British provide all manner of money laundering and reputation laundering services for the whole Russian oligarchy, including the state officials. So all of this is happening, and yet Patrushev imagines this conspiracy to bring Russia down, by the West. And so that's what we've got in the Kremlin again.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So how was that a plot? And then you could go all the way to Obama's ministration, George Bush trying to do business deals and reset the relations, an Obama administration trying to reset the relations and doing nothing after the Georgian War and slapping Putin on the wrist, following the seizure forcibly. And you could go on and you could go on all the way through the Trump administration telling Putin that he's right Trump believes Putin and doesn't believe US intelligence about Russian efforts to interfere in American domestic politics. So despite all the empirics of it, you have Potrushv and likely Putin talking about this multi-decade Western conspiracy to bring Russia down. At the same time as that's happening, the Germans are voluntarily increasing their”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “To back those Republican leaders who were breaking away from Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union, right? So never mind the empirics of it. Never mind that Bill Clinton's administration following George Bush sent boatloads of money, Western taxpayer money to Russia. We don't know exactly how much because it came from different sources. People talk about how there was no Marshall Plan. It was tens of billions of dollars from various sources from the IMF and other sources. And Lexit disappeared. It's gone, just like the German money that went to Gorbachev for unification disappeared even before the Soviet collapse. The money disappeared. But the West sent the money.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Is that he's got this conspiratorial theory that the West has been on a forever campaign to destroy Russia, just like it destroyed the Soviet Union, and that everything the West does is meant to dismember Russia, and that Russia is fighting an existential battle against the West. And so, for example, the CIA and the American government wanted to bring down the Soviet Union. Never mind that the Bush administration, the first Bush, the father, was trying desperately to hold the Soviet Union together because they were afraid of the chaos that might ensue and the nukes that might get loose as a result of the Soviet collapse. And it was until the very last moment where Bush decided his administration.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yes, but Pathrush is a version of Putin's right hand man. And Potrushev has been giving interviews in the press. You probably saw the interview with Nisavisemaya Gazieta not that long ago. He writes also his own blog-like interventions in the public sphere. Using the few channels that are left. And what's interesting about Potr, and this could well reflect similar thinking to Putin's, which is why I'm bringing this up.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “If he does, Lexi's deluding himself We don't know for sure. Very few people talk to him. Very few people have access to him. A handful of Western leaders have met with him for short periods of time. Those inside Russia barely meet with him, his own minions in the regime, barely have facetime with him. We don't know exactly what he thinks. It could be that He has delusions of reconquering Russian influence if not direct control over the territories that broke away. It's not going to happen Let's talk a little bit about this guy Nikolai Pothershiff. Nikolai Potr is probably not well known to your listeners. He's the head of Russia's Security Council. And so you could probably call him the second most important or second most powerful man in Russia. Certainly inside the regime.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Just can't compare. And so we're in a situation where Eurasia, that is to say the ancient civilizations of Eurasia, which would be Russia, Iran, China. Have some version of non democratic, you know, illiberal autocratic regimes. And they're all pushing up against the greater power of the West in some form. Sometimes they coordinate their actions and sometimes they don't. But this is a very longstanding phenomenon lex that predates Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or the latest incarnation of the supreme leader in Iran.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Think the prima facia evidence is that he didn't value human life. Otherwise, I don't think after seeing the amount of lives that were taken in the Soviet experiment, he would have done something similar after that. I think the answer is it's very hard to get inside Mao's head and figure out what he was really thinking, but if you just look at the results that happened, the policies that were undertaken and the consequences of them, you would have to conclude that there was, let's say, no value or little value placed on human life. Unfortunately, that's characteristic not only of communist dictators, right? Of post-communist dictators as well, but the scale of the horrors that they inflict. Horrific as they are.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, Mal killed more people than Stalin because Mal had more people to kill. The most amazing thing about Mao is he watched Stalin do it. He watched Stalin collectivize agriculture and famine result. He watched Stalin impose this communist monopoly, and all of those people sent to prison or given a bullet in the back of the neck. He watched all of that, and then he did it again himself in China.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Countries and Baltic states because they voluntarily begged to join the West. The West didn't impose itself on them. It's a voluntary sphere of influence that the West conducts. And so that dilemma is where you can put Putin and Stalin in the same sentence and the terrible outcome for Russia in the fullness of time also has echoes. But of course Putin hasn't murdered eighteen to twenty million people and the scale of his abilities to cause grief With the nuclear weapons aside, is nothing like Stalin's. And so we have to be careful, right? Only Mao put bigger numbers on the board. From a tragic point of view than Stalin.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “By the time the 90s rolled around, former Soviet troops, now Russian troops, withdrew from all those advanced positions that they had achieved as a result of the World War II victory, and it was Napoleon in reverse. They went on the same roads, but not from Moscow back to Paris, but instead from Warsaw and from East Berlin and from Tallinn and Riga, and all the other places of former Warsaw Pact and former Soviet republics in the Baltic region, they went back to Russia in retreat, and so Stalin in the fullness of time lost the peace. And Putin, in his own way, inheriting some of this, attempting to reverse it when, as I said, Russia was smaller, farther away, weaker, the West was bigger and stronger and had absorbed those former Warsaw Pact.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It's not something that's in the mother's milk. It's not something that can't be changed. Russia doesn't have an innate cultural tendency to aggression. This is a choice. It's a strategic choice to try to match the power of the West, which from Russia's vantage point is actually unmatchable. But it's a choice that's made again and again, and Putin has made this choice just to Stalin made the choice, right? Stalin presided over the World War II victory, and then he lost the peace. After he died in 1953, there was, of course, Other rulers who succeeded him, he was still the most important person in the country after he died because they were trying to manage that system that he built, and more importantly managed that growing gap with the West.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “You try to manage the gap with the West, you try to realize these aspirations, you try to raise your capabilities, and you build a strong state, the quest to build a strong state and use coercive modernization. Try somehow, if not, to close the gap with the West, at least to manage it. And the result is different versions of personalist rule. So they don't build a strong state. They build a personal dictatorship. They build an autocracy. And moreover, that autocracy undertakes measures which then worsened the very geopolitical dilemma that gave rise to this personalist rule in the first place. And so I call this Russia's perpetual geopolitics. I've been writing about this for many, many years. What's important about this analysis is this is not a story of eternal Russian cultural proclivity to aggression.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “compared to when Stalin was in that Kremlin it's got pushed back to borders almost the time of Peter the Great Its father from the main European capitals now than any time since that eighteenth century And the West has only grown stronger in that period of time. So the dilemma is greater than ever. The irony of being in that position, of sitting in the Kremlin, trying to manage Russian power in the world, trying to be a providential power, a country with a special mission in the world, a country which imagines itself to be a whole civilization, and yet not having the capabilities to meet those aspirations, and falling farther and farther behind the West. The irony of all of that is the attempted solutions. Put Russia in a worse place every single time.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “It's a dome building, and you can see it on the panorama, the top of the building, at least you can see it on the panorama when you look over the Kremlin wall from many sites inside Moscow He's not comparable to Stalin, he still works, as I said, in those same buildings, those same offices, partly, and so therefore he's got some of the problems that Stalin had, which was managing Russian power in the world from a position of weakness vis view the West, but from an ambition, a grandiosity, in fact. And so this combination of weakness and grandeur, of not being as strong as the West, but aspiring to be as great or greater than the West. That's the dilemma of Russian history for the past many centuries. It was the dilemma for the Tsars. It was the dilemma for Peter the Great. It was the dilemma for Alexander for Stalin. And it's the dilemma for Putin. Russia is smaller now.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “You're looking good. I see this podcast stuff is doing you right. So we can't really put very easily Vladimir Putin in the same sentence with Joseph Stalin. Stalin is a singular figure, and his category is really small. Hitler, Mao, that's really about it. And even in that category, Stalin is the dominant figure, both by how long he was in power and also by the amount of power, the military industrial complex he helped build and commanded. So Putin can't be compared to that. However, Putin's in the same building as Stalin. He uses some of the same offices as Stalin used. On some of those television broadcasts that we see of Putin at meetings and Putin inside the Kremlin. Stalin used to sit in those rooms and hold meetings in those rooms. That's the Imperial Senate built by Catherine the Great in 18th century building inside the Kremlin.”

    2022-05-25 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source