STEPHEN KOTKIN: I think there are a lot of
people out there, but I can’t see anyone.
Which is fortunate.
I get stage fright.
I have to thank Jean Strouse again for the
year at the Cullman Center.
There are many pages of this book that would
not be in there had it not been for the New
York Public Library’s collection, and I
am very grateful.
In fact, we were just on a tour of some of
the holdings upstairs.
Despite working here for thirty years, the
curator upstairs, Thomas Lannon, was showing
me things I hadn’t ever seen before.
The riches here are beyond belief.
I thank Paul Holdengräber, of course.
He told me, he let slip many months ago that
there was a really big event here, Slavoj
Žižek was going to be at the library, and
I said, “Gee, it’s going to sell out.
Can you get me in?”
And Paul kept his word.
I am in.
I was asked to say a few words before we started
the conversation and so I think I’ll do
that.
This guy who was very guilty on his deathbed
with his wife there wanted to tell her that
he had cheated on her.
He—the guilt was so great that he just blurted
it out.
“I don’t know how to tell you this.
But while I told you I was late at work . . .” And
she said, “Duh.
Why do you think I poisoned you?”
You know how many middle-aged men go out for
milk and never come back?
Not enough.
Not enough.
Do we have time for questions?
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Yes.
Is your wife here?
When you told the milk story?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Yes, yes, she is.
Yes she is here.
Or as Joan Rivers liked to say, “You know
a man can do what he wants and have as many
affairs but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty
mistakes, she’s a tramp.
It’s very unfair.
Very unfair.”
Anyway, yes I wrote this book, and I have
to thank Scott Moyers, of Penguin Press, because
I wrote a book that was almost a book and
because of Scott it became an actual book,
and I’m extremely grateful for that.
Ideal editor.
So maybe a couple of words about what I tried
to do and then the questions.
So it’s kind of silly to write yet another
book about Stalin.
Don’t we already know the story?
Don’t we already have as many Stalin books
as we need?
After all, I understand from Tony Marx that
there are limits to the storage under Bryant
Park and some of us should cease and desist.
So there are three ways, I think, that I tried
to do something different and whether I succeeded
or not we’ll find out.
One way was to widen the lens a little bit,
to open up to the full sweep of history, Russian
history and global history.
So this is not a book about Stalin in history,
this is actually a book about history or about
Russian power in the world and then Stalin’s
power in Russia.
So for example there’s a full chapter on
World War I, but Stalin didn’t do anything
in World War I, but without World War I, he
could have never gotten anywhere near the
seat of power.
And so I believe, maybe I’m mistaken, but
I believe that the wider view, the big sweep
of history, enables us to understand him better.
The second thing I did was to put the politics
at the center of the story, so instead of
a weird demonic personality that formed maybe
in childhood or some other way and that then
had an influence on politics, I demonstrate,
I hope, that the politics is what formed Stalin’s
personality and it was the experience of building
a personal dictatorship and exercising power
that made him the kind of person he became.
And therefore there’s a lot of stuff about
him at Party congresses, about him behind
the scenes, about him preparing for speeches,
about the intrigues he’s engaged in and
the ways in which, as I say, this shaped him
as a person.
And I think the third thing that I did, or
at least I tried to do, was to be very comprehensive
and scrupulous in the sources, meaning, take
nothing for granted and go back and read everything
including the avalanche of new materials that
have come out in the last fifteen years.
So there are three or four thousand endnotes
in Volume I to the primary source original
materials, Stalin’s personal archive, KGB
archive, military archive, foreign policy
archive, et cetera.
Many people are working on these materials,
I’m not alone obviously in doing this, but
I tried to synthesize all the new stuff that’s
come out and be very comprehensive, as I said.
So the sort of Russian power in the world
story, the politics at the center of Stalin’s
life creating the person he became, and then
the deep immersion in the primary source materials,
I think those are some of the perhaps the
distinguishing characteristics of the book.
So I could talk further about what I think
is in the book, but I think at this point
maybe my friend Slavoj Žižek might launch
the conversation.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Thanks very much.
First, thanks to all the organizers, Paul
and others.
Second point, I’m really honored to be here
with you because that’s the type of book
I think we who are all fascinated by Stalin
were waiting.
First I would like to begin if I may improvise
a little bit with the feature you mentioned
at the end, how, yes, we should avoid this
I will now use a horrible Marxist term, this
bourgeois liberal way of looking for a private
secret, some vice, whatever, which explains
the political horror.
You adopted the right road.
Even those—that’s for me the tragedy,
and I’m saying this as still a radical leftist—even,
for example, in films, films which appear
to be ruthlessly critical of communism are,
in a way, because of this approach too soft
in some way.
Let me repeat you an old story that I like
to use, I hope all of you saw, it got Oscar
as best foreign movie, you remember some ten
years ago, Leben der Anderen, Life of Others,
the guy’s fanatically, because he comes
from East Prussian nobility, the director,
so he wanted—this is his revenge against
the German Democratic Republic.
But you remember what’s the story, a well-known
East German playwright has a beautiful wife,
some obscure minister wants to have—wants
to have his wife, so he puts all the Stasi
apparatus on him and so on.
But and then you have that the main hero is
a half personally honest Stasi agent.
But wait a minute!
The movie is too soft on the regime.
The point is to be brutal and say that that
in a country like GDR, even if no minister
wants to fuck your wife, you would have been
under total observation and so on and so on.
You know, as if to have this secret police
investigation to be its object, there has
to be some private vice.
And I think this is way too soft.
In the sense you know what Steven Weinberg,
the quantum cosmologist, said, I don’t totally
agree with it, I feel great respect for Christianity,
but there is an element of truth in it when
he wrote somewhere that without religion good
people would be doing good things and bad
people bad things; you need something like
religion to make good people do horrible things.
That’s the true problem.
The true problem is easy to explain when you
have an easy guy, blah blah, for example when
I read and I wonder what you will say in your
next volume.
All those campaigns for collectivization,
late twenties, early thirties, there were
many let’s call them naively honest, sincere
communists who went there and they were trained
to disregard bourgeois compassion.
That’s for me the true ethical tragedy.
When you make a basically good decent guy
do horrible things and for this you need I
said as you said to focus on politics, as
you beautifully said, politics focuses characters.
It’s not this absurd psychoanalytic approach
where let’s look for some personal trauma
to explain it.
The second thing because of which I really
enjoyed your book is I noticed how in the
tradition of Western Marxism, although of
course they are anti-Stalinists, but it always
shocked me to what extent, look at all of
Frankfurt School up to Habermas, any consistent
theory of Stalinism is totally missing.
But why?
This was for me an enigma.
Look, let’s make a mental experiment.
You probably know Jürgen Habermas.
Imagine your only source of information about
post-World War II Germany would have been
the work, the texts written by Habermas.
Reading all his texts, I doubt that you would
ever learn that there were two Germanys.
But you learn a lot of fascism and so on.
You know what’s the basic insight of Frankfurt
School: dialectic of enlightenment, which
means horrors of the twentieth century are
not simply some remainder but are the product
of the immanent antagonisms of modernity.
But here Stalinism is much clearer example
than fascism.
And so why it is missing, so I think Stalinism
still for me remains an enigma.
So now let me go to a part of the book which
I really enjoyed.
I will not ask you about too many details,
because I’m an idiot, you know much more,
so I would only display my stupidity.
There are other ways to do it.
What I really like and here I would like to
challenge you if you could elaborate things
a bit, bit more.
In the conclusion, last pages of the book,
you address this obvious big question: was
the so-called Stalinist system, deeper I hate
this terminology, orthodox Marxist, historical
necessity with Stalin but if not Stalin then
there had been another guy or was it and if
to what extent it was something the Stalinist
system we know that depended on the contingent
fact that Stalin was the one who took over.
Now, on the one hand, I hope you would agree
we cannot put everything on Stalin because
if nothing else there must have been a certain
structure of power so that it was possible
for a guy like Stalin to take over in the
first place but and then I always distrust
this simplistic view shared by some Trotskyists
and others that this is the dream at its purest.
If only Lenin was to survive three, four years
more, made the pact with Trotsky, all totally
different.
Maybe.
But I basically agree with you a lot did depend
on the contingency of Stalin’s personality.
You describe this wonderfully but nonetheless
where would you have set the limit?
I’m asking you what we philosophers call
a counterfactual question, you know, like
was it I think I’m more of a pessimist and
I am the radical leftist here.
I think in a way the whole project Bolshevik
was at the deeper level doomed from the beginning.
I don’t think there was a possibility of
something, maybe it would have been a little
bit better with Lenin at least in the last
years.
He was very resigned, you know, he even said,
forget about constructing socialism, we should
just bring a little bit of Western civilization
to Russia and so on.
So if I can ask you later some other questions
so that I don’t like too much, how would
you be more precise—
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Maybe I could answer this
one.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Yes to this one.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Maybe I could answer this
one.
I don’t know if I can.
But I’m going to try.
We’ll see.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: And Central Committee, which
speaks through me, will tell you if you succeeded
or not.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Yeah, brings back memories
of writing the book.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Yeah.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: So this is a book about ideas.
The revelation of the communist archives,
the secret of the communist archives is that
behind closed doors they spoke the same way
to each other when nobody else was listening
as they spoke in their public propaganda.
They spoke about class warfare, kulaks, rich
peasants, finance capital, bourgeois revolution,
socialist revolution, privately that’s how
they spoke.
It turns out the secret archives have shown
that the communists behind closed doors were
communists.
That’s the big revelation, and that turns
out to matter.
Because if your system is based on the Federalist
papers or your system is based upon Marx and
Lenin, you’re going to get different outcomes.
Not exclusively based upon those things because
many factors are at play here: state-to-state
relations, geopolitics, the international
system.
So Stalin had the idea that small countries
that had used to been part of the Russian
empire were not sovereign, they didn’t decide
their own foreign policy, they were playthings
or instruments for the great powers.
Poland was independent as a result of the
dissolution of the czarist empire.
Finland was independent, Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, but their independence was not
real, because they would be used by the British
or later by the Nazi Germans to invade the
Soviet Union, to overthrow the Soviet system.
So what they called the limitrofa or the near
abroad or the borderlands were independent
countries on the map but not in Stalin’s
mind.
And so therefore he sought to prevent those
countries from becoming playthings in the
hands of the Western powers.
So he tried to do coups in those countries,
overturn those systems, because that was his
way of guaranteeing Soviet security.
This is the 1920s already.
Now, if you noticed, President Putin regarding
Crimea and Ukraine said that Ukraine is not
a real country and the Ukrainian army is the
foreign legion of NATO.
This is the vocabulary out of the 1920s military
intelligence files that were on Stalin’s
desk and that he marked with his blue or red
pencil.
So that’s a big factor, and we can’t explain
the Stalin phenomenon, we can’t explain
Russia today without the geopolitics and then,
of course, there was the fact that they were
communists, which means that they were not
trying to ameliorate the market, ameliorate
capitalism, fix it on the edges, redistribute
a little bit of income from the upper to the
lower.
They were not social democrats who accepted
capitalism, private property, and the markets.
They were communists.
They were there to destroy, eradicate, and
as Hegel said, transcend capitalism.
It was aufheben, transcendence of capitalism.
And they believed this.
It’s clear from the internal documents that
yes, Stalin was concerned about power.
Yes, his personal power was critically important,
but not alone.
He was a true believer, like Lenin and like
the rest of them.
Now, the path wasn’t always straight to
the eradication of capitalism.
They had to make concessions along the way.
But there was no top Bolshevik ever in the
1920s who comes out and says “markets are
good, private property is good, capitalism
should endure in our system.”
They fight about how to eradicate it and when
to eradicate it but not about the principle
of it.
This is very, very important, because we sometimes
confuse the communists with the social democrats,
who in Germany, for example, who came to accept
evolution instead of revolution and came to
accept the market and private property, they
continued to want to ameliorate the conditions
that capitalism caused.
But they accepted eventually what we would
know as the Swedish social democratic model
or the European social democratic model.
This was not Lenin and this was not Stalin.
They were playing for keeps and that mattered.
But the final point, to answer your question.
After you take into account the geopolitics
and after you take into account the communist
ideas which were real for them, you’re still
left with the fact that how did he do this?
How did he manage to enslave a hundred million
peasants, collectivize agriculture?
How did he manage to eradicate markets and
private property?
The others in the regime didn’t think he
could do it and they thought it would be a
catastrophe if he tried.
And it was a catastrophe, they were correct.
The critics of Stalin before he launched collectivization,
which is were Volume I ends, predicted disaster
and their predictions came true.
In fact it was worse than their predictions.
But the thing about Stalin that differentiated
him from the others, what made Stalin different
was that he did it.
He went all the way to the end.
Famine, five to seven million dead from starvation.
Forty million at least starved but survived.
Cannibalism.
The regime itself was destabilized.
His personal dictatorship was destabilized.
He kept going until collectivization was a
hundred percent, until capitalism had been
eradicated in the countryside.
And so this is unusual.
I don’t think there was another person inside
the regime sharing Stalin’s views on foreign
policy, sharing Stalin’s views on communism,
I don’t think somebody else could have done
this.
And so in a way, Stalin was—it’s never
necessary to kill tens of millions of people.
It’s never necessary, that’s a criminal
act, and progress doesn’t come from murder,
especially on the scale that Stalin engaged
in.
But from the communist point of view, there
was no other way to eliminate capitalism,
markets, and private property in the countryside.
You see, because voluntary collectivization,
as of 1928, the year Stalin made his decision,
was 1 percent of the arable land.
It was only the peasants who couldn’t farm
at all who joined the collectives, and they
were sixteen households, seventeen households
on average, 1 percent of the arable land.
There was no voluntary collectivization.
There was only coercive collectivization.
But if you believe that capitalism is imperialist
war, if you believe that capitalism is wage
slavery, if you believe that capitalism is
injustice and alienation and all the things
that they believed in, you try to overcome,
transcend, aufheben of the capitalism.
It turned out that the answer was worse than
the phenomenon that they were critiquing,
Stalinism was worse than the capitalist exploitation,
but nonetheless he was able to pull this off,
and that’s very unusual.
That’s his contribution.
His contribution was the willpower inside
this system to enact this full-scale state-ization,
elimination of markets and private property,
which didn’t happen in very many places,
and nobody thought it was going to happen
here, and Stalin unfortunately saw it through,
so in that sense his contribution is colossal.
He couldn’t have done it without the Communist
Party, he couldn’t have done it without
the ideology, he couldn’t have done it without
the state of siege, so-called capitalist encirclement,
he couldn’t have done it without millions
of young people who wanted to participate
in the building of a new world.
Many factors played into his ability to do
this but I don’t think anybody else in the
regime could have managed to go it all the
way he did.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Can I do a counterquestion?
Now I basically see what you want to say but
I’m a little bit perplexed.
In what sense?
The way you describe it now is just that we
have this background of communist ideology
shared by all, and Stalin was just going to
the end in will and so on.
Okay, so let’s play this counterfactual
game.
Without Stalin or let’s say in ’24 Stalin
has a car accident or whatever.
What do you think would have happened?
Just the same system, maybe a little bit more
moderate, not even that?
Because—sorry, let me finish.
Another thing that I admire in your book when
you describe all those factional struggles,
Trotskyists, I’m sorry if there are some
Trotskyites here to offend you, is the sheer
stupidity of Trotsky.
How, you know, how to call it, the ground
beneath him was Stalin taking over and Trotsky
just arrogantly waiting for the—he really
believed in himself, he thought, “let that
small stupid Georgian bureaucrat do his job,
with one big speech I’m the hero of civil
war.”
So again what would have happened without
Stalin?
I know it’s a stupid question, but it has
a certain weight I think.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: I don’t think it’s a stupid
question at all.
I think it’s exactly the right question.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: So what’s your right answer?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Yes, not to put me on the
spot, but I appreciate that.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: I mean, let’s say Bukharin,
Zinoviev, Kamenev take over in ’25.
Okay, they were on opposite sides, I know.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: So Trotsky is a very talented
individual.
He’s a great speaker and he is extraordinary,
dynamic, charismatic personality.
However this was not a speaking job.
This was a job for different talent, which
was behind-the-scenes intrigue, backstabbing,
coalition-building, gaining others to your
side, reducing your enemies by dividing them,
many talents that he proved not to have in
the struggle with Stalin.
I’ll also say that Stalin was a better Leninist
than Trotsky.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Define Leninism here.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Stalin had flexibility.
Lenin was very extreme in his principles.
He would not compromise his principles except
when he needed to compromise his principles
to realize his principles.
He was the ultimate pragmatist, flexible in
pursuit of the goals that he would never yield
on.
Trotsky lacked that type of pragmatism and
flexibility.
Stalin learned it from Lenin.
He was Lenin’s pupil, not just in self-styling
but actual, in fact.
Moreover, Trotsky constantly tried to make
himself Lenin’s equal or even Lenin’s
better.
And so Lenin was the father of the revolution,
everybody saw Lenin as on a different plane,
but Trotsky would write pamphlets after 1917,
after the seizure of power, recalling how
he had corrected Lenin when they had had arguments.
And Stalin would write pamphlets instead about
how he was Lenin’s pupil, Lenin’s heir,
and would faithfully execute everything that
Lenin had taught him and taught us all, and
this positioning as Lenin’s pupil as opposed
to Lenin’s equal or Lenin’s better and
this ability to retreat, tactically retreat
or go sideways when the frontal path was closed.
Stalin learned as I said this kind of tactics
from Lenin and therefore, in a way, Stalin
was a better Leninist than Trotsky was.
But what would have happened had Stalin died
or had there been no Stalin?
So the regime as it was in the 1920s was a
single-party dictatorship.
Industry was owned by the state and in the
countryside, where the vast majority of people
lived and where the wealth was, the size of
the harvest was the main factor in GDP, was
a private capitalist system more or less.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: After NEP.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Quasi market, so-called New
Economic Policy.
From the early 1920s through the late 1920s.
There was no New Economic Policy in industry,
it was state-owned, so-called commanding heights,
only about 10 percent of GDP that was manufacturing
was artisan, artisanal production.
And there was no political New Economic Policy,
because there was a single-party dictatorship
and censorship, but there was a quasi market
in the countryside, where as I said more than
80 percent of the people lived and where the
wealth was produced.
And so there were actually two revolutions—the
urban, Bolshevik, communist single-party dictatorship
with censorship based upon a vision of an
industrial future, and the peasant revolution,
which was separate, independent, and too strong
for the Bolsheviks, too strong for the communists,
that’s why they conceded the New Economic
Policy.
And all throughout the twenties they were
wringing their hands, all right, banging their
heads against the wall.
What are we going to do about this capitalist-like
peasant revolution in the countryside?
Are we going to confront it or not?
And if we’re going to confront it, how is
that even possible, because we have almost
no communists in the countryside.
The countryside was out of their control.
The red flags, the red banners, the slogans,
they disappeared right after you left the
big cities, they vanished.
And so this problem of the regime’s fate,
the revolution’s fate in the 1920s was clear
to them all.
Now, Stalin built a personal dictatorship
within the dictatorship.
This was an act of unbelievable skill that
the book devotes a great deal of attention
to.
Now, Stalin was no genius, he made many mistakes.
He had no understanding of fascism, for example,
which was a big thing to get wrong.
So we don’t want to make him out to be better
than he was, he was very blinkered.
But when it came to building a communist—building
a personal dictatorship inside the communist
dictatorship, he was very good at that.
And that’s what he did, so he had the authority
to make decisions that others couldn’t participate
in, even, let alone make.
So he was controlling the situation with his
personal dictatorship, but he didn’t have
control over the country, that’s very important.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Through the twenties, throughout
the twenties.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Correct.
Correct.
And so you can imagine without him who’s
talented enough to keep the dictatorship together?
And you look—
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Do you see any potential candidates?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: You look inside the Bolshevik
regime and you don’t see such talented people
at the top.
Now of course some people come out of nowhere,
right?
All of a sudden.
They are, I don’t know, in the senate for
a day or two and then they are president—right?
That happens.
So it could be that somebody else could have
come up from somewhere in the regime that
we underestimate now because they didn’t
have that opportunity.
But if you look at the actual goings-on in
the regime at the time you’d be pessimistic
about a figure with that skill level on the
inside of the regime.
Moreover, the regime couldn’t manage the
quasi market.
It kept ruining its own New Economic Policy
such that the peasants didn’t deliver the
grain anymore.
And so—
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: This is the crisis of when—’28?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: It’s already ’26, ’27,
’28, it wasn’t working anymore.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: And they lost nerves, they
tried violent—
STEPHEN KOTKIN: The communist regime in a
capitalist world, a capitalist-dominated world,
and with a capitalist-like countryside, was
a minoritarian regime and it was in trouble.
And it looks to me like—of course we’ll
never know, but it looks to me like the regime
would have collapsed.
It looks to me like they would have softened
the one-party dictatorship.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: They would have to, they would
be forced.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: They would not have been able
to hold it together and we would have ended
up with either a new crisis that spawned violence
and another kind, maybe a military dictatorship,
a right-wing dictatorship or a different version
of the left, or we would have had themselves
conceding and evolving towards a recognition
that the capitalist-like countryside was here
to stay, and we would have a mixed economy
and therefore we would have a mixed polity
also.
Now the interesting comparison here is contemporary
China, Deng Xiaoping.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: That’s what I was going
to say, could Bukharin have been a Russian
Deng Xiaoping?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Deng Xiaoping conceded the
market in the economy but of course held the
communist monopoly, which is retained to this
day.
And so this lesson of retaining central control
somehow, but giving up the ideology in the
economy is an example that the Chinese have
now taught us.
Whether this was possible in the 1920s conditions
is unclear.
The international situation is a factor here,
the ability to get loans and international
banks or other forms of financing to participate
in the world economy was under threat because
they had repudiated the czarist loans.
The infrastructure was quite poor.
There were many factors here including that
there was no Deng Xiaoping in the 1920s regime,
which is no minor factor.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: You think Bukharin was not
strong enough.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Nikolai Bukharin unfortunately
was not a significant politician and did not
have the skill set necessary to be a leader.
Alexei Rykov, who was the number-two person
in the regime, he had Lenin’s position.
Remember, Lenin was the head of the government,
effectively the prime minister, and Rykov
inherited that position after Lenin died in
January 1924.
He was a very powerful, effective manager
and a smart politician, and Stalin relied
on him to run the economy all throughout the
twenties and Rykov was not removed even though
Bukharin was removed, Stalin still had to
rely on Rykov.
Rykov chaired the Politburo meetings because
the head of the government by tradition from
Lenin chaired the Politburo meetings.
Stalin was the head of the Party but not the
head of the government like Rykov was.
So Rykov was the number-two person in the
regime and he’s the most significant person
after Stalin.
So I looked very closely at Rykov and his
biography, you know, reexamining the original
materials on Rykov.
And he’s an impressive figure but he’s
also a communist.
We have the impression because Rykov opposed
Stalin’s forced collectivization that maybe
he was a little bit pro market, or pro quasi
market.
It turns out that Rykov had no special love
for the peasants and no special love for capitalism,
private property, and the markets.
His argument was that it would be catastrophic
if we tried to overturn it and so we can’t
do that at this time, but at some point we
will have to go after the markets, go after
private property, and get to socialism, socialism
being a stage to communism, right?
Feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism.
Socialism was not the end point, it’s the
intermediate stage.
And so unfortunately Rykov was not a person
like Deng Xiaoping who accepted the permanent
existence of markets and private property.
The guy who came closest, and he’s a semihero
in the book, was named Girsh Brilliant, Diamond,
Girsh Brilliant, and his name is Sokolnikov,
remember nobody has their real names, and
this is the Russian Revolution, right, Stalin’s
name was Dzhugashvili, and Sokolnikov, who
was the finance minister, came the closest
to accepting the market as a permanent institution,
almost on the edge of social democracy, and
in fact Sokolnikov came at a Party congress
and asked Stalin to resign his post as general
secretary.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: When?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: In 1925.
December 1925.
It was a bold, very courageous speech, it
was a speech on principle that no person should
have this much power and that there should
be democracy inside the Party, not democracy
for multiparties, but democracy inside the
Party.
That was a step at least.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: And when did Sokolnikov disappear
in Gulag?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: And Sokolnikov was removed.
Stalin removed him reluctantly—
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Immediately?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: In January 1926 from finance
commissar, but he kept him in the Central
Committee, that’s how important Sokolnikov.
Sokolnikov invented the currency, he’s the
one who made the new economic policy function,
relying on the bankers and economists left
over from the czarist regime but smart enough
to take their advice.
Anyway so there were some figures, Bukharin
wouldn’t have been one of them, but Rykov
and Sokolnikov.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: That’s interesting, yes.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Were the ones that I singled
out towards the end, through the book but
especially toward the end if Stalin had died.
So one could imagine people like that avoiding
collapse by reluctantly, grudgingly coming
around to accepting the market the way Deng
Xiaoping reluctantly grudgingly came around
to accepting the market in the late seventies
and early eighties, but there’s little evidence
that they were prepared to do that in the
twenties.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: And even did they have a strong
enough base, by base I mean not in people,
who cares about that, but in nomenclatura,
bureaucracy?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: If Stalin had died, Rykov
would have been strong enough to take power,
yes, there’s no question, but unfortunately
Stalin didn’t die.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Can I go on?
I have so many provocative questions.
First, one this is where I totally agree with
you, it’s extremely important what you said
at the beginning.
I think that you know you always think they
speak jargon.
No, fuck it, you go in the back, privately,
it’s exactly the same language, it’s totally
wrong this vision they were dirty manipulators,
it’s something—no, it’s the same.
It reminds me of there is another, I forgot
which one sorry, a Spike Lee movie where you
have people you know how in the twenties even
white performers painted their faces black
like Al Jolson and so on, and what happens
there is that you have performers painting
their faces black.
After the end of their performance, they go
to their room and wipe the color off and you
see the same black face.
I like this, this is crucial.
Let me go on.
Nonetheless I have other things to ask you.
Okay, what you said about social democracy
and so on.
I think just a general remark, I’m sorry,
it’s out of order but I cannot resist making
it.
What is social democracy?
How times are changing.
Today in Greece we have Syriza, which is in
European media decried as leftist lunatics,
but if you look closely I know him, he’s
my friend Tsipras, what he demands from Europe,
it’s something that forty, fifty years ago
would not have been even extreme but extremely
moderate social democracy.
In what sad times do we live that what fifty
years, forty ago was an extremely moderate
social democracy, now you have to be radical
left, if you—sad times, but that’s another
point.
Now I go to a little bit defense not really
of Bolshevism, I just want to provoke you
when you said communism, nations, and so on—but
whatever you say about Lenin, that’s my
impression, you can correct me, at one point
he was sincere in his hatred of big Russian
nationalism.
He even had I think Lenin a debate with Rosa
Luxembourg, I simplify the debate but you
can correct me, if I am remembering correctly
it went like this, all these small nations,
precisely the ones you mentioned, from Poland
to Baltic states, they should be given a real
choice, if they want to go their own way,
full independence, they get it.
Now Rosa Luxemburg tried to play a little
bit communist trick, she said, “No, no,
let’s specify it only if the right guys
are in power there, no?”
And Lenin correctly said no, whoever is in
power there, and he did this, Lenin.
Second thing with Ukraine, now I will say
something horrible but from what I know it’s
true, you can correct me again if I’m wrong.
Isn’t it that under czarist regime Ukraine
was not recognized as a nation and so on?
There was no—the golden era of Ukraine,
golden era not for freedom but in the simple
sense of establishing their autonomous, you
know, like culture, lexicons, how you call
them, grammar and so on.
It was the twenties, it was the twenties.
So Stalin’s countercoup against Ukrainians,
it was basically taking away from them not
what they always possessed, even in czarist
regime, but what they gained in the twenties.
So don’t you think that at least at this
point the original Bolsheviks were half sincere,
because as you know better than me, even Lenin,
his first conflict with some guys from Georgia
was precisely how far to go in allowing, don’t
you think that there at least Lenin was serious?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Okay, so—
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Did I say too much?
Hit back.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Lenin was very serious.
He played for keeps, he was for real.
Unfortunately, Lenin was a very large personality.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: What do you mean by this?
Like not Mahatma Gandhi large soul but—
STEPHEN KOTKIN: I don’t think we would have
had October seizure of power, Bolshevik coup
without Lenin and I don’t think we would
have Stalin without Lenin either.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Unfortunately I have to agree
with the second part.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: So, you know, on the nationality
question.
So the revolution happens in Eurasia, it happens
in the former Russian empire.
So this, of course, is a tremendously difficult
proposition.
What to do about this?
You have a revolution based upon a class principle.
The proletariat is the universal class, but
then you have all these nations and the proletariat
speaks all these languages.
So what are you going to do?
It turns out that Lenin didn’t really know
much about these questions.
Lenin was not an expert on nationalities nor
on Russia.
Lenin didn’t travel much.
He never was in Georgia, he didn’t go through
Ukraine.
Lenin knew Zurich very well.
The Dada Café was a few doors down the street
from Lenin’s residence in Zurich.
He knew Finland a tiny bit and of course he
knew—
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: London, a tiny little bit.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: He knew Central Russia a little
where he was born, and he knew Kazan where
he failed to complete his law degree.
But Lenin was not a person of Russian Eurasia
the way Stalin was.
Stalin had significantly deeper knowledge
about Russian Eurasia because he was from
the periphery of the empire.
And he traveled much more widely through the
empire than Lenin ever did.
Stalin was an exile in Russia and Lenin was
an exile in Europe.
And many people hold this against Stalin,
that he didn’t know Europe, that he was
not as smart as Lenin, that he was ignorant,
but actually it turned out to be an advantage
when they were having a revolution in Russian
Eurasia.
It was one of the things I hope the book shows,
that was an advantage for Stalin in the power
struggle.
Now, it’s a very complicated story of how
they got the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
what Lenin’s ideas were, what Stalin’s
ideas were, whether they differed or not on
these questions.
These have been very fraught in the literature
and they certainly wanted to bring a better
Lenin, a more flexible Lenin on this.
You compared him to Rosa Luxemburg and she
was certainly in complete denial of the importance
of nations, in complete denial.
Luxemburgism was the extreme on the left,
and Lenin was much more flexible, willing
to allow, once again, tactical retreats, willing
to allow a certain amount of concession to
nationalism in pursuit of the larger goal,
which of course is world revolution.
Stalin was a little bit more practical than
Lenin and they had a fight.
Stalin wanted to form a single state.
He wanted to fold—what happened was when
the Russian empire collapsed in World War
I, the revolution, and civil war, these new
states or statelets formed.
Ukraine, Belorussia, Finland, Poland, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, they had not existed in
the czarist empire.
They had been only provinces in the czarist
empire.
There was no Ukraine in the czarist empire.
But the circumstances of the dissolution because
of World War I and the revolution produced
these states on the map.
They were not stable, they were fragile, but
they existed.
Stalin’s idea was to fold them all back
into Russia and create a unitary state.
They would have autonomy, as he called it,
in many policies, but they would be part of
Soviet Russia, part of Russia once again.
Lenin initially agreed to this view, and then
Lenin changed his mind and demanded that instead
of folding into Russia they would be joined
in a union of republics, and Russia and Ukraine
and Belorussia and the Caucuses would be equal
members of this union.
And Stalin said, “That’s unfair.
What about the Tatars.
Tatarstan is inside Russia already.
How come they don’t have the same status
as Ukraine, which would become a union republic
equal to Russia in the Union of Soviet Socialist—”
And they fought, but Lenin was Lenin and so
Stalin conceded Lenin’s point, and he formed—Lenin
was sick already—Stalin formed the USSR.
He did it and it was Lenin’s version of
how to deal with revolution in Russian Eurasia.
Well, what happens?
1991 comes along.
The Soviet Union dissolves and it dissolves
into these Leninist constituent republics.
The parts that were folded into Russia are
still in Russia, and so this is one of the
reasons that Stalin is in good standing these
days compared to Lenin, because Lenin was
much more responsible than Stalin for the
possibility that the Soviet Union could be
dissolved into its constituent members because
it was made up of constituent members.
As the final analyst of the KGB, Nikolai Leonov,
has said, the KGB obviously ended formally
in 1991 when the Soviet Union was dissolved.
He said the Soviet Union was like a chocolate
bar, like one of those Hershey bars which
has the creases in it, and you see the little
blocks, and they’re all tied together but
you see where the creases are and you break
it off and you give some to this person—
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Did the KGB analyst use the
example of Hershey bar?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Yes, this was his metaphor.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Hershey bar, not just chocolate?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Actually, just chocolate bar.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Just chocolate!
Too nice to be true.
Sorry.
Sorry.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: You really don’t like to
disappoint, but, you know, facts are very
stubborn.
Sometimes the stories could get better if
you were a novelist at the Cullman Center
as opposed to a historian.
But anyway so these pieces got broken off
and Kazakhstan got a piece of the chocolate
bar and Ukraine got a piece of the chocolate
bar and you ended up with these union republics
being the successor states to the USSR, whereas
Tatarstan, as we said, was still—and many
others like Tatarstan were inside Russia and
remain inside Russia.
So in the end the answer to your question
is, you know, Lenin had tactical flexibility
on the national question but not a difference
in principle and his form and Stalin’s form
were different and Stalin had to concede or
felt he had to concede to Lenin’s form.
If you examine the others, Zinoviev was a
complete nincompoop on this question—
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Complete—
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Complete idiot on this question.
Kominev followed Stalin, but then when Lenin
came out with his view, Kominev and Stalin—So,
you know, Lenin he was for real on communist
revolution and that meant that if you had
to concede something to the ethnic, to the
nationalities, to the ethnicities now because
later you could overcome that some way, you
should do it.
Now let’s remember it was Lenin in 1919,
1920 who forced the invasion of Poland to
try to bring Poland back into the fold, to
try to retake Poland, reconquer Poland with
the Red Army, and Stalin said, you know, “I’m
not sure we can do this, it may not work.”
And it failed and Poland defeated the Red
Army and remained an independent state unfortunately
up to the Hitler/Stalin pact, August 1939,
September 1939 Hitler invaded one side, Stalin
the other.
But until that point Poland had won its independence
and Stalin was the skeptic.
He believed nationalism was for real.
It was Stalin in the 1920s who got up at the
tenth Party Congress in 1921 and said, “Ukraine
is a real nation.”
It was Stalin who said that.
This is one of the chapters in the book.
You know, so history is crazy that way.
It turns out that Lenin’s tactical flexibility
was a little bit too flexible for those who
are ruling Russia today.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Okay, let me provoke you with
another friendly aggressive—Nonetheless,
you know, Poles like to emphasize this yes,
Red Army wanted to crush us in in—but wait
a minute, Poles themselves are not so innocent
here.
Remember that a year before Polish army occupied
practically all of Ukraine.
What were they doing there?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: They were occupying Ukraine,
like you said.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Yeah, that’s what you know.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: You’re right.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: So it’s not just innocent
Poland oh and then you know.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Interwar Poland was a nasty
regime, a very nasty regime, an extremely
nasty regime.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: That’s what I wanted to
bring out of you, yeah.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Polish history portrays—often
portrays Poland solely as a victim.
Poland was victimized but they were also perpetrators,
there’s no question.
I wouldn’t put them on the same plane necessarily
with Stalin in this regard.
But I would not have wanted to live under
the Piłsudski regime in interwar Poland,
absolutely not, that was not a friendly, nice
regime.
You know but in the long sweep of things,
right, you have a problem.
Here you have a book that ends in 1928, the
decision to collectivize agriculture.
And it makes sense.
The guy is not psychopathic in his tendencies
and behavior yet.
They’re arguing about ideas.
He’s exercising a lot of power, et cetera,
but you can feel like you understand this
person.
There’s a human being in there.
And there are all sorts of complicated questions
that would have been complicated for anybody
who was ruling Russia at the time.
The foreign policy would not have been simple
for any kind of regime and the peasant countryside
stuff would have been difficult even if you
accepted the markets because there were many
peculiar aspects to the Russian countryside
even under a market economy.
But then, you see, I get into volume II, which
covers the period 1929 to 1941 and it’s
much harder, you see, because he crashed the
plane.
The plane was flying fine.
There were no mechanical difficulties.
All the people on the plane were loyal and
he drove it into the Alps just like happened
the other day and he smashed it and how do
you explain that?
How do you explain that Stalin who has so
much power already, so much power, he’s
already collectivized agriculture, he’s
eradicated capitalism.
He declares socialism is built in its foundations
in 1936.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: By crashing the plane you
mean great purges, concerning the Party itself.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: And then everybody starts
to be murdered.
All the people who were loyal, his closest
friends and advisers, people who are the heads
of all the factories, the heads of all the
collective farms, his diplomats, his foreign
intelligence officers, his Red Army officer
corps.
A hundred and fifty out of 180 division commanders
are executed as spies for foreign countries.
None of these guys had done anything.
They commanded 12,000, 15,000, 20,000 troops.
They didn’t cross the border with their
troops and betray the country by fleeing.
They didn’t march on the capital to try
to do a coup.
They were loyal and he murdered them.
And he murdered not just a few.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: I know.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: He murdered big numbers.
So we’re talking about the 1920s and it
makes so much sense to me, and then I’m
thinking, you know, he crashed the plane and
where did that come from.
Where did that demonic?
Where did those demons inside him, those snakes
in his head, where did that come from.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Now I will give you a Varoufakis.
You know in what sense.
I agree with you but here you should also
speak to your wonderful principle it’s politics.
Don’t bring me in a too simple way personality
now.
I think this is still in a crazy way that
I don’t understand but my gut feeling is
the horror of the 1930s it’s still a political
process.
It’s not simply then demonic personality
entered and so on.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: So Hitler doesn’t murder
his officer corps.
When Hitler wants to remove the highest level
officers in the Wehrmacht, he retires them,
and he retires them with honors, and he does
it in 1938, the year Stalin is cutting through
like a scythe his officer corps.
And Hitler doesn’t murder his diplomats,
and he doesn’t murder his foreign intelligence
agents, and he doesn’t murder the Gauleiter
or the provincial Nazi officials, and he doesn’t
murder the factory bosses.
There’s the Night of the Long Knives in
1934.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Yeah, but that’s the beginning.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Fewer than a hundred people
are killed in the Night of the Long Knives.
There are execution lists that Stalin signed
that have thousands of names on them, with
his signature, recognized signature on them,
for a single night.
And so this becomes a more difficult proposition.
How you get from the Stalin who is managing
to build a personal dictatorship to the Stalin
who’s going to crash the plane onto the
side of the mountain when it’s fully functional?
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Do you know the book—I like
it, I want now from you as the one who knows
to tell me am I right or not.
Naumov, Getty, The Road to Terror.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Yes of course we know that
book.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Does it have its weaknesses,
or what is your opinion of that book?
Because maybe I’m wrong but for me it’s
the best book that I know of.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: People are trying to explain
the terror as a rational response to conditions
that were there that Stalin was trying to
overcome.
So there was resistance to his directives
on the part of local officials and therefore
they all were killed.
And so I haven’t seen a dictatorship in
which there wasn’t resistance, a circumvention,
ignoring of decrees from the center.
All dictatorships are like that.
But not all dictatorships murder their loyal
elites.
So I’m not sure the Getty/Naumov book really
explains what we’ve got here.
Now, having said that, I do agree with you
that there’s something about having that
kind of power, having life-or-death power
over two hundred million people, because that’s
what Stalin has by the 1930s.
Very few people have ever had power like that
before or since, just a tiny handful, and
that, of course, is going to affect his personality.
But still he’s murdering them and receiving
reports that he’s unhinged the economy.
There are 138 days in 1937 and ’38 where
he gets no foreign intelligence reports.
He’s been getting several every day for
years and they have his pencil marks on them.
A hundred and thirty-eight days blind.
No foreign intelligence.
He had the best foreign intelligence network
the world has ever seen.
And after 138 days he doesn’t stop murdering
them.
This is really perplexing, I gotta tell you.
It’s not easy to figure this out.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: No, I totally agree.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: And where this comes from
and how this is possible.
You know?
This is the problem in the Stalin biographies
and the Stalin literature.
Once you get to this point then you have to
find the answer somewhere before, and so you
begin to look for things he did when he was
younger and blow them up and connect them
to this later behavior.
“Aha, when he put the cat in the microwave,
I knew, I knew right then, that he was going
to murder us all.”
Aha.
And so we have this retrospective finding
of these behaviors which weren’t considered
that crazy, abnormal, demented, or psychopathic
at the time.
And I’m very close in following what people
said not thirty, forty, fifty years later
but at the time.
And so not to go too far with this, but in
analyzing evil, in trying to describe evil,
and in humanizing evil, because evil is much
worse when it’s humanized, then you can
really understand it.
Historians need explanation.
Shakespeare can have Iago and nobody’s there
on the dais, “Jeez, you know, Shakespeare,
how did he get evil, what was it?”
He’s just evil.
Evil is just evil, that’s it.
That’s just how Iago behaves.
And nobody’s asking him questions.
Can you please explain this?
Can you relate this to his relationship with
his mother or, you know, what, did a teacher
humiliate Iago in school?
What was it?
But in history people are expecting explanation
for this type of behavior and if the explanation
is rooted in politics it could be, but I gotta
tell you it didn’t happen in other cases
when dictatorial politics were similar so
I don’t know how much we can exclude the
demonic personality from the explanation.
Although we’ll see, I mean Volume II, I’m
still putting the final touches on this thing.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: You got it how my friend Stephen
did, he began with the book ends perplexed,
his answer was you want the answer to the
mystery of book one, buy volume two, no?
That was the complete story.
That was evil.
I wanted to tell you a much more serious question
now.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: You know, I thought I was
being subtle.
But I wasn’t.
I gotta do better.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: More seriously I liked very
much what you said about comparing Stalinism
and fascism.
And I say this again as a radical leftist.
It always when people just throw them together
into the same category of totalitarianism,
I agree there are good reasons for it, but
the whole functioning of the system was different.
Let’s take the most extreme example of Stalinism,
the purges.
Why this compulsion to have people, victims
accused, publicly admit, confess, you know,
Bukharin and so on, confess their sins?
You cannot imagine the same thing in Nazi
Germany.
It would have been meaningless within the
Nazi universe to organize a big trial against
the Jews where the Jewish leader would confess
to their plot against Germany, it’s not
a part of their universe.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: What would be the comparison
would be Himmler and Heydrich and Goering
confessing to being Soviet spies in public
and then being executed for that.
That would be the equivalent of what happened
in Stalin’s—
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: But again as you said, that
doesn’t happen there.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: It’s unimaginable.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Another thing.
I read in Anne Applebaum’s gulag book, even
in the darkest terror period up to early fifties
when Stalin was still alive, she writes about
this, I hope it’s true, I don’t have any
other means to check it up, once a year on
Stalin’s birthday all the prisoners were
collected and had to sign collectively a telegram—gulag
prisoners to Stalin, wishing him.
You cannot imagine Nazi collecting all the
Jews in Auschwitz to send a telegram to Hitler.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: I’ll give you that.
You’ve got something there.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Now, my explanation is a very
sad one.
That’s the perverted remainder of enlightenment.
In Stalinism you can be the lowest trash,
vermin, shit, but at the same time part of
you participates in universal reason, and
of course it’s all staged, I know that,
but you know the universe of Stalinism is
still a crazy universe of again universal
enlightenment where even the lowest roadside
trash can be forced to participate in this
universal true freedom.
Nazism is a different universe, but now the
last question and then maybe we should admit
the fact which I will never admit within myself
is that we not alone, that there are other
people here.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: That’s big of you.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Do you also agree with me
that and again I’m sympathizing still radical
leftist but that to understand really Stalinism
one has to demystify stop with this especially
in cultural circles it’s popular this idolatry
of the twenties.
Golden era, formalists, futurists, relative
freedom, everything.
It’s not as simple as that.
Especially, you know, some very strange things
were going on, which are in their ideological
potentials maybe in a way even more ominous
than Stalinism.
I’ve written about this in my books.
You know, the so-called I cannot call it otherwise
gnostic Bolshevism.
There was a strong movement, Trotsky even
subscribed to it.
I have quotes where he says, “the next big
task of Soviet power is to construct a new
man,” and he means it quite literally biologically.
A new man who would be much more rational.
Ultimately, there was a very strong school
in the twenties which even said, claimed,
sex is a bourgeois invention, basically.
You know, this kind of—
So what I’m saying is that twenties is a
period to be rediscovered.
We have to stop with this simple idolatry.
Only in this way we can understand, strange
as this may sound, maybe we’ll agree, the
even relative popularity, relative because
of his manipulation, of you know when Stalin
introduced socialist realism.
People were glad finally we will literature
with normal suffering, crying people, enough
of those stupid formalist experiments, and
so on and so on.
So I think would you agree a new look is needed
upon these glorified twenties?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: You know, there was a revolution,
and it was real.
The revolution was widespread, mass participatory.
It was the biggest revolution in world history
to date.
The Chinese revolution would happen later,
obviously.
And the belief, the hopes, the utopia, the
building of a new world, the idea that the
injustice and czarist oppression was severe,
the czarist regime was unjust.
The revolution was because of very good reasons,
and thank God they overthrew the czarist regime.
The revolution was fantastic, and it spawned
a tremendous amount of dynamism and energy
and craziness.
Unfortunately what happens in a revolution
is the brilliant ideas don’t take over.
What takes over are the institutions.
The shards of the old regime become the building
blocks of the new regime.
Protest movements, massing in the streets,
forming communes, chiliastic songs, this doesn’t
get you a parliament, an independent judiciary,
an impartial civil service, a free and open
media space.
These have to be built.
Institutions have to be built, and instead
of building free and open institutions during
the 1920s, they build this dictatorship.
And it’s on purpose; it’s not an accident.
It’s not something circumstances caused.
It was something that Lenin wanted.
And it was something that Lenin and Stalin
and the rest of them were able to implant.
Now, you could argue that they were doing
it because they were trying to create a new
world, they were trying to overcome the injustices
of the old world, and that’s correct, that
was their motivation.
They were not cynics, they were not just out
for personal power.
They were not just killing people for the
sake of killing people in some type of sadistic
orgy.
This was a revolution to bring about a new
world.
The institutions to bring about the new world
were in conflict with the goals.
The methods and the core ideas of the reigning
communists could never bring the freedom and
the abundance and the happiness that the revolution
had been about.
This is a very tragic story.
And the 1920s are very tragic, and Russian
history unfortunately is a tragic story.
Time and again, you know, they try to build
something which is better, and unfortunately
they haven’t made it yet but the attempts
were sincere although misguided in my view.
Now so when you talk about the 1920s the reason
the 1920s look like a great period of pluralism
and relative freedom is because the 1930s
came after that, and if you were alive in
the twenties, you weren’t alive in the thirties,
and so the twenties was a kind of golden era,
so I understand that psychologically.
But your point, your point about the 1920s
being some open, free society that was going
somewhere nice, that’s obviously not true,
you’re absolutely correct that that was
not the case.
You know, on the gulag question, and we could
talk for a long time about this, the forced
labor camps or so-called gulag, it’s very
interesting because not only did they write
the letters to Stalin on his birthday.
Actually, most of them didn’t write the
letters because somebody was there writing
it for them in communist style but they had
a New Year’s Eve masquerade, and they would
have dancers and they would have theater directors
and you know half the Bolshoi troupe was there
in the gulag dancing for the fat-fingered,
thick-necked gulag commandant and his wife
who were in some Arctic Circle but had assembled
the talent, and the photographer who took
pictures of the evening and then sent it,
whether it was the New Year’s Eve masquerade
ball or it was the May Day parade or the revolution
parade, there were gulag photo albums by the
hundreds of these events where the cultural
intelligentsia was in the gulag.
But there were no orchestras.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: The difference from Auschwitz,
where they get orchestra.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: You could go to any Nazi camp
and you could get an orchestra that would
put to shame anything we’ve got here in
New York, but you couldn’t do that in the
gulag because Stalin loved music too much
and he didn’t allow the musicians, especially
the vocalists, to be arrested.
Instead he wanted them to perform for them.
And so these are the kind—I mean, the personality
actually begins to have a stamp on history
that is just so large.
You go to the gulag archive, which is in a
gigantic Corbusier building in Moscow.
You go to the secret floor, the formerly secret
floor, you go to the back wall where they
have the folios and the quartos, because the
stuff is too big to put on a regular shelf,
and it’s gulag photo albums.
You know, “Vorkuta, New Year’s Eve, 1949,
prima ballerina,” et cetera, and that’s
what the camps looked like.
If you’ve got your cultural elite in a labor
camp, the revolution didn’t work out.
Right?
The chiliastic build a new world 1917 revolution,
something has gone amiss, right, if this is
where you’ve ended up.
Maybe some of these people weren’t that
talented, maybe their talent was overrated.
Maybe some of the people who served the regime,
their talent was underrated.
I agree with you on that.
Some of the socialist realist paintings are
well done.
They are.
Some of the orchestral music that’s produced
is better than the music that was produced
in the 1920s or before.
And you could go on.
Some of the architecture is stirring, effective.
You know, so we have to be careful about wonderful
culture, evil culture, the dichotomy that
you’ve got going on.
But the overall trajectory is deeply tragic,
fundamentally tragic.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: And I like the term “tragic”
here in the sense that—sorry here now my
last remainders of communism will come out.
I would like to insist on the term “tragic.”
As you beautifully said, it was whatever you
say, a revolution against czarism a tremendous
explosion of hope and it went terribly wrong.
This is why, this is another difference between
Nazism and Stalinism.
You have many dissidents who claim Stalin
betrayed communism.
I don’t think you have many Nazis who claim
Hitler betrayed authentic Nazism or whatever,
it’s a different logic.
But to conclude before I hope we give over
to them I want to play the last Stalinist
trick on you and what?
You know, one of the stylistic characteristics
of Stalin’s writings—you must know it
better than me is that he likes to ask a question
and then answer it himself.
Like, What are comrades the problems of economy
today?
Comrades, the problems of economy today are—”
So to give you the last chance is there a
question that modeling upon the greatest genius
of humanity, Stalin, you would like to ask
yourself and then answer?
Do you have a question like that?
Are you ready to live up to Comrade Stalin?
Quite seriously.
What this means in more normal terms is do
you think, do you feel that we missed any
crucial point that has to be made?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: You know, the question I’d
like to ask myself is how did I get on this
stage?
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: How to get off the stage?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: How did I get here?
I was a decent, normal kid.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Off the stage.
How to get off the stage?
Very simple, nominate me minister of the interior,
you are in gulag next day.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: I grew up a regular, lower
middle-class, working-class household, and,
you know I should have had that kind of life.
You know, I came home—
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: But you have that kind of
life.
You are a professor writing books.
You have that kind of life, don’t you?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Yeah, you know, I’m not
sure it’s the same kind of life.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: This doubt is part of lower
middle class.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Let’s think about this.
I came home, it was like first or second grade.
And I told my mom that, you know, there was
this play and I had a part.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Which play?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: It was a school play, first
or second grade, who knows what it was?
And I told my mom and she was, “Oh, you’re
going to be in a play at school?”
And she was just melting with emotion about
this and then it dawns on her to ask like
what’s the part I’m going to play?
And I said, “I’m the Jewish husband,”
and she says, “Damn it.
I was hoping you were going to get a speaking
part.”
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: So as a reaction you write
now big fat books to—
STEPHEN KOTKIN: How did I get here?
I fell out of the station wagon on the ride
to school and bonked my head and now somehow
I’m writing three volumes on Stalin, not
to be a psychoanalyst.
Do we go to audience questions at this point?
What’s the protocol?
Is there someone from the leadership?
Paul?
I think.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The leadership is coming
up.
What you will do here is you will come up
and ask a question, which will be about forty
seconds long and which has to be good, so
please come up.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: This is bourgeois liberalism.
In Stalinist times, you know how you did this?
You distribute the questions in advance among
the—
STEPHEN KOTKIN: We’ll hear some of those
too I hope.
Yes, sir.
Q: Mr. Kotkin.
You said you tried to write more about history
and not just focus on Stalin alone.
And so my question is in this vein.
A few days ago I read a credo by Isaiah Berlin
who tried in this credo to explain how he
understands tragedy of twentieth century of
all those totalitarian regimes and I wonder
if you agree with his explanation.
He says that it usually starts as somebody
has an idea of how to bring paradise onto
earth, then they try building it and it always
fails.
The cause is that people’s ideals are mutually
in conflict.
So what do you think about his?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Do you want to try that one,
Isaiah Berlin?
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: It was addressed to you.
Come on, that’s right up your alley, Isaiah
Berlin.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: You know, there is something
about the twentieth century and these regimes
that we hope we don’t see again and that
there is a large number of phenomena that
come together to produce them.
But you know it’s too simple.
You see, you have World War I and World War
I destroys the old order.
Moreover, the generals send millions to their
deaths, knowing that they’re maybe going
to get a couple of inches, move the trench
a little bit farther over.
And this sacrifice of the flower of Europe
for a little bit of movement, one trench over
to the next trench, this is a lesson for Lenin.
Lenin says, “You know, if the old regimes,
if the generals are going to kill people for
no good reason, at least we can sacrifice
people to build a better world than the world
that they have.”
And so you can’t just pin it on bad people,
you can’t just pin it on ideas, even, Lenin.
You have a conjuncture.
You have a conjuncture which is produced by
World War I.
A historical conjuncture.
And this historical conjuncture makes possible
use of violence on a mass scale in everyday
politics and it produces Lenin, it produces
Mussolini, it produces Hitler, and it produces
World War II.
And so you’ve got to talk about the origins
of World War I and what World War I does to
civilization and political systems and then
add in some of the things that Isaiah Berlin
is talking about and then you’re kind of
off to the races.
You know, Lenin was a hard man, a very hard
man, but I’ve gotta tell you, Lenin was
a product of imperial Russia.
Lenin’s hard line, his deep hard line against
freedom was the way he thought you had to
battle the fact that there was no freedom,
no politics, in imperial Russia.
So imperial Russia has a lot to say for producing
a guy like Lenin, just as World War I has
a lot to say for producing these terrible
regimes and these terrible tragedies, you
know, so in that sense, the wider history
or the context is something that’s laid
out in my book and where I try to get to the
larger explanation that you’re asking for.
Q: Are there any good worthwhile or illuminating
fictional depictions of the Soviet system
and if not why are there so few?
STEPHEN KOTKIN: That’s for you for sure.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: I will make a provocation
and I wonder if you would agree.
I always like—you know, I don’t like westerns
from the fifties which get psychological,
you don’t know who is a good—I like westerns
where you know who is good guy, who is bad
guy.
So I will give you two names to provoke you
also, Solzhenitsyn versus Varlam Shalamov.
I almost hate Solzhenitsyn for this verbosity,
deep moralilzing.
If you want to get the raw taste of what gulag
is, read Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales.
It think it’s endlessly superior to this
endless moralizing of Solzhenitsyn and so
on.
Again, do Varlam Shalamov.
If you want to get at the roots, the twenties,
the potentially, to use your terms, demonic
side of the twenties read the one who is and
it’s now more and more recognized among
my Russian friends, the greatest Soviet Russian
author of the twentieth century, Andrei Platonov,
his Foundation Pit and so on, there you have.
He saw before Stalinism he saw where there
is some terrifying nihilistic dimension in
it.
So I would say these are two of my favorite
names in fiction, pure fiction, Andrei Platonov,
especially his great novels but also his short
stories, there are some wonderful movies even
made from them and Varlam Shalamov.
Q: How about Vasily Grossman?
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: I appreciate, I like him deeply
but I’m sorry to tell you this, it will
disappoint you.
For me he’s way too soft humanist.
In his very approach it’s something missing
to grasp what you called the truly demonic
side of Stalinism.
You cannot do it—he was too kind a man.
I want to say this in a way.
This is not a criticism.
You must have like Platonov a certain almost
madness in yourself to get it, although again
I have a great, almost infinite respectful
feeling for Vasily Grossman, but the other
more interesting point would have been.
So here I would agree with you, it’s not
simply black and white image.
Take someone like Sholokhov, yes, the official
Soviet guy, but you know that he nonetheless
in the early thirties he protested to Stalin
against the horrors.
He was almost—so you know you have almost
official big writers who nonetheless had the
minimum of honor so let me end with another
provocation.
Let’s face it, Quietly Flows the Don is
a better novel than Dr. Zhivago.
Dr. Zhivago is for me not such a great novel.
Pasternak is a wonderful, great poet whatever
you want.
You know, one should have the courage to distinguished
even among great dissident figures.
Like this is my personal taste and we will
probably violently disagree, but for me Osip
Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva are infinitely
superior to Anna Akhmatova, who is an endlessly
pretentious bitch.
She has this complex, I am the mother of all
Russia, I speak for all Russia.
Fuck you.
Mandelstam is my hero.
But that’s my opinion.
You’re allowed, temporarily, the two of
us we are in the twenties I’m not yet full
Stalin, I allow you.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: I think we’ll let your judgment
stand.
I think we’ll leave it at that.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Does this mean like Lenin
on nationality, for the time being strategic
retreat?
STEPHEN KOTKIN:Yes.
Q: Hi.
I’m actually Georgian.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Oh my God.
Q: Probably the only Georgian in this space.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Are you also—I met a Georgian
friend who told me I’m a distant relative
unfortunately not of Stalin but of Beria.
You have no connection.
Q: Well, my name is [inaudible].
My great-grandfather was executed in 1937
so my connection to the events, but myself
I am not much on the right from Luxembourg.
My question is you know it was a very historicist
discussion and to kind of bring it to a little
bit of structuralist points.
You elaborated a lot on Stalinism as being
related to the kind of a perverted discourse
and in this way and especially when you expand
on his denial of negation of negation, and
real and void, cut.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: You’re talking to me now.
Q: Yeah, yeah.
History is beautifully written, it’s very
funny to talk about history.
You know to bring it Stalinism is maybe not
dead, right, like they say fascism is not
dead, maybe Stalinism is also not dead so
how do you see with this denial of the real,
denial of the cut and the void, do you see
Stalinism kind of living on in this poststructuralist
vitalist illusion BS that we live in in terms
of left.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: You know there is a great
irony at work in the fact that maybe Fukuyama
has won, liberal democracy, but isn’t it
the irony that those communists who are still
in power but who are not like just lunatics
like North Korea and so on and incidentally
North Koreans don’t even call them now communists.
People didn’t notice it.
A couple of years ago North Korea changed
their constitution, no mention of communism,
just a patriotic military.
But what I want to say those communists who
are still in power, China, Vietnam, and so
on, are more and more appearing as the most
efficient managers of global capitalism, you
know.
Sometimes more efficient than in democracies,
and that’s what really worries me, but that’s
a topic not for today.
Again as I always repeat it, the problem is
that for me global capitalism is approaching
a stage where maybe it less and less needs
democracy.
If it needs it, it’s more and more a kind
of empty, purely ritualized democracy, so
that’s all I can say now not to go into
it.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Paul, can we take one more
question and I can do some of the slides,
I can talk about some of the slides if there’s
interest in talking about the slides or no?
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: Is there any sex in the slides?
No sex.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: You can provide that.
Q: The question will be brief.
Now that Stalin gets extreme popularity in
the period of Soviet and Bolshevik tyranny
and now for example he gathers such a pull
that you personally I think wouldn’t be
able to create without him.
So does it mean that very soon, after the
end of Putin’s tyranny, the soft tyranny,
we’ll get the new wave of reopening twenties
as you call it and the interest to Lenin.
Like maybe Russia with human face.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: I would love to see it but
I doubt it.
But I agree with you that wasn’t there a
mega-opinion poll all academics in Russia
a couple of years ago the greatest personality
of all Russian history and I think Stalin
ended third but not with a great distance
after the first two.
The first was Alexander Nevsky I think but
nowhere in sight was Lenin.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: You look very much like Dmitry
Bykov, the famous Russian writer.
Q: Thank you very much.
I am a great fan of Lenin and I hate Stalin,
that’s normal.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Okay.
Paul could we have the slides and I could
go through them if that would be okay briefly.
Could you go a little bit faster so we can
get to the start?
I don’t know, I won’t do much because
let’s see.
You can comment also because I think we can
see them.
All right that one.
Unretouched photograph, 1927.
The Russo-Japanese war, that’s unfortunately
the Russian navy going down.
That’s the guy who caused the war in some
ways but also got them out of it, Sergei Witte,
the first prime minister of Russia.
That’s the first parliament meeting.
These are all from the glass-plate negatives,
that’s Nicholas II on the throne.
This guy saved the Russian regime in 1906,
the interior minister, Pyotr Durnovo, That’s
Stolypin in the white jacket, directly behind
Nicholas II, he’s the great prime minister,
that’s his dacha, he’s about to be assassinated,
unfortunately.
That’s European royalty.
That’s the queen.
That’s the czarevich, a hemophiliac, they
don’t let him down because if he bumps into
a tree he’ll die of—that’s Stalin’s
father, that’s Stalin’s mother, the other
Georgians in the room.
That’s Stalin’s birth hovel, before Beria
built a gigantic monument over it.
That’s the guy who paid for Stalin’s education,
he owned the tavern and was the head wrestler
in town.
That’s the first photograph of Stalin, center
middle, he’s about ten, twelve years old,
you see the attitude.
That’s Stalin in the seminary, second from
the left on the top, beardless.
That’s the seminary building, neoclassical,
that’s where Stalin studied to be a priest.
That’s the guy who taught Stalin Marxism,
Lado Ketskhoveli, fellow Georgian, he died
young.
That’s Stalin’s only job, the observatory,
he was a weatherman, he went out, took the
weather, and went back in.
That’s Stalin’s prison cell, his first
major prison cell, unfortunately they let
him out.
That’s his first wife, who died of disease
and that’s Stalin in the corner there, that’s
from the Georgian police archive.
This is Stalin from the czarist police archive,
1910.
This is Sarajevo, there’s the archduke,
he’s about to turn and he’s about to be
shot in the head, and this is the guy who’s
about to shoot him, Princip, Gavrilo Princip,
started World War I, helped bring Stalin to
power.
That’s Stalin’s Siberian—Three years
in Siberia during World War I, eight houses,
sixty-seven people on the Arctic Circle, that’s
him in the back with the hat on in Siberia.
This is the Supreme Commander of the Russian
Army who was the right-wing hope in 1917.
That’s Aleksandr Kerensky, he blew it big-time.
That guy we’ve referred to often, he played
for keeps.
You can see that.
That’s Kshesinskaia, the ballerina, this
was Bolshevik headquarters, they evicted her
and ruined the furniture.
That’s the outside of Kshesinskaia’s mansion
across from the Winter Palace, this is where
the revolution came from.
This is the only photograph of the seizure
of power.
That’s Lenin at the podium saying that we’ve
seized power.
That’s Martov, the head of the Mensheviks,
he had left the hall at this time already
unfortunately.
That’s the first Bolshevik government.
There’s Lenin, and there’s Stalin with
his hand on his face against the wall.
Spiridonova, she had the Bolsheviks in July
1918 and let them go she could have murdered
them all.
This is from Stalin’s personal photo album,
that’s his wife Nadya one year before he
married her.
This is Trotsky all in leather, the civil
war hero, the rare photograph that was preserved
of Trotsky.
This is Sokolnikov, the finance minister that
I was referring to in the book.
That’s Lazar Kaganovich.
This is the guy who took over Mongolia, Ungern-Sternberg
and made it the first Soviet satellite.
That’s the civil war, this shows you that
the revolution was for real, those bayonets.
This is the famine 1921 to 1923 in Volgograd,
which is going to be named Stalingrad a few
years later.
Stalin and Lenin, famous picture only never
published because Stalin was looking too much
like Napoleon and so they suppressed that
photo.
This is him in 1923.
That’s Lenin you can see the dementia late
in life that’s his doctor and his nurse.
This is Lenin’s funeral, you can see Stalin
in the hat, January 1924.
This is the death mask, Lenin’s death mask,
it ended up in Stalin’s office, that’s
all you needed to know about the succession
struggle.
This is Stalin’s first book about Lenin,
the famous book on Leninism, you can see the
iconography of the twenties.
That’s Stalin’s office, Old Square #4,
the whole right-hand side, that’s the commissariat
of foreign affairs, which Stalin controlled.
That’s Trotsky’s office.
That’s the commissariat of the military,
the war commissariat of the navy, right here,
the old Alexander Military School.
That’s the original secret police building
before it was refurbished.
That’s Stalin’s inner secretariat, the
people who ran his dictatorship.
It looks like a Berkeley commune.
That’s the military guys and Stalin.
You can see him right here, his left elbow
doesn’t move.
That’s Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the
secret police, he was dying of tuberculosis
for many years, that’s his funeral.
This is Alexei Rykov, the guy I was talking
about, the number two person in the regime.
That’s Menjinsky, one of Stalin’s agents
in the secret police, painted his fingernails
red.
Yagoda, another secret policeman, these are
all Stalin’s minions inside the regime now.
Artuzov the guy who hated Yagoda and Stalin
used their animosity against them.
This is the guy who faked the first major
fake trial.
This is Zinoviev, a caricature, how he’s
playing with the kulak and the NEP man.
This is Kirov, Stalin replaced Zinoviev with
Kirov, his closest friends.
This is the three musketeers, Mikoyan, Stalin,
and Orjonikidze in the Caucuses on holiday
retouched.
This is Stalin’s apartment, seventeenth-century
Boyar residence, the only seventeenth-century
residence in the Kremlin, that’s where his
wife shot herself.
That’s Stalin’s dacha, that’s Stalin’s
son, Vasily, and his son’s friend, Artyom.
That’s Stalin’s wife, second wife Nadya
and that’s little Svetlana.
That’s Yakov, Stalin’s son from his first
wife.
That’s the woman who ran Stalin’s household,
Carolina Till and that’s Svetlana’s nanny,
Bychkova.
That’s Josef Pilsudski on a visit to Romania.
That’s Chiang Kai-shek, he betrayed Stalin
and got the better of him in the 1920s but
Stalin stuck with him.
That’s the Red Army on bicycles, Stalin
had no tanks in 1927.
That’s Stalin, you can see the charisma
standing out in the crowd.
This is the military attachés, all the enemies
of the Soviet Union, they’re lined up on
the May Day Parade.
This is Stalin in Siberia when he goes to
collectivize agriculture.
That’s how he got to the meeting, he got
to the meeting in this.
He’s going to collectivize a hundred million
peasants.
That’s the fabricated Shakhty trial, 1928,
the fabricated, that’s the announcement
of the verdict and the foreign journalists
about how these wreckers destroyed industry
and that’s the kulak, the leather versus
the Bass sandals.
That’s Bukharin, caricature of Stalin.
So anyway, those are the photos.
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I think that just about
wraps it up.
Thank you very much.
STEPHEN KOTKIN: Okay.
Thank you.
