2025-07-11
2 小时 12 分钟My guest today is Stephen Kotkin,
who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of two-thirds of his three-volume Stalin biographies.
The first one's Stalin Paradoxes of Power.
The second one's Stalin Waiting for Hitler.
Thank you for coming on my podcast.
Thank you for the honor of the invitation.
Let's begin with the Tsarist regime.
So first question, how repressive was the Tsarist 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 Tsar,
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, robbing banks, small shenanigans.
It honestly sounds more forgiving than many countries today.
So 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 czarist regime's problem.
It needs to be able to compete in the international system.