Kotkin, Stephen

historian of Russia and Eastern Europe, biographer of Stalin

Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Stalin, Hitler, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine

Lex Fridman Podcast · May 25, 2022

• Stephen Kotkin
• Putin and Stalin comparison
• Russia's perpetual geopolitics
• Nikolai Patrushev resentment thesis
• NATO expansion rebuttal
• Zelenskyy leadership
• war crimes and international law
• nuclear dual-key system
• China and Xi Jinping strategic wedge
• FSO and Putin succession
• WWII historical parallels

Core ideas

Kotkin argues Putin cannot be equated with Stalin in scale (Stalin's regime killed an estimated 18-20 million people, a toll Kotkin says only Mao's exceeded, since "Mao had more people to kill") but occupies structurally the same historical dilemma: managing Russian power from a position of weakness relative to the West while harboring ambitions of "civilizational" greatness — a mismatch he calls "Russia's perpetual geopolitics." He explicitly frames this as a repeated strategic choice, not an inherent Russian cultural trait toward aggression, rejecting what he calls the popular narrative (common in the Baltic states and Warsaw) of "eternal Russian imperialism." He introduces the Russian term obizhennye ("the resentful," or "losers in the transition") to describe how post-Soviet elites who missed out on 1990s property theft used the 2000s onward to re-expropriate wealth domestically (citing Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Yukos seizure) while pursuing an analogous reversal of Russia's loss of international standing — a psychology of resentment he says Putin's security council chief Nikolai Patrushev has articulated openly and repeatedly in public interviews, framing all Western engagement (investment, energy dependency, banking services, the English language itself) as evidence of a decades-long Western conspiracy to destroy Russia, despite that same elite class actively benefiting from those same Western services.

Kotkin directly rebuts the argument (which he attributes to Oliver Stone and John Mearsheimer, made in Fridman's earlier conversation with Stone) that NATO expansion forced Putin's hand, using an extended analogy to rape ("the woman was wearing a short skirt... the woman was applying for NATO membership") to argue that citing a victim's legal choices as justification for aggression is categorically illegitimate. He cites international agreements signed by the Soviet and Russian governments themselves (the UN Charter, the 1975 Helsinki agreement, the 1990 Charter of Paris, the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act) affirming states' sovereign right to choose alliances, and argues repressive, expansionist Russian state behavior long predates NATO's existence. He states plainly that this argument is empirically false in his assessment, while acknowledging the Cold War was not "a mistake" or manufactured enemy-seeking, citing the 1948 Czechoslovak coup, the Berlin blockade, and the Korean War as genuine unprovoked aggressions the Truman administration was right to resist.

On institutional distinctions, Kotkin argues pre-invasion Ukraine — despite deep corruption and oligarchic dysfunction — remained meaningfully different from Russia because it retained an open public sphere and a functioning (if flawed) parliament, whereas Russia's Duma provides no genuine check on executive power and its judiciary lacks independence; he states plainly that journalist deaths in Ukraine are tragedies while in Russia they reflect "regime policy." He credits Volodymyr Zelenskyy's decision to remain in Kyiv (rising from a 25% approval rating before the war to over 90% after) and Ukraine's demonstrated battlefield and cyberwarfare competence as a genuinely unforeseen development that reshaped Western resolve — crediting Ukrainian resistance, not Western policy foresight, with catalyzing a broader Western reckoning with energy dependency, financial-services complicity, and appeasement patterns Kotkin says had persisted across multiple U.S. administrations (Bush, Obama, Trump).

Discussing possible motives for Putin's continued escalation as of mid-2022, Kotkin lays out a case (explicitly speculative, framed as "you could argue") that from Putin's perspective the war may still look winnable: Russian forces held more Ukrainian territory than before the war, Ukraine's economy had effectively collapsed (needing $5-8 billion/month in external support), and China, India, and other major powers had stayed neutral rather than joining sanctions — while noting significant countervailing pressures, including Russian battlefield losses (Kyiv, most of Kharkiv), technology export controls degrading Russia's arms-manufacturing capacity, and the risk that battlefield disintegration or internal defection (rather than a coup) could ultimately unravel the war effort. He discusses nuclear risk soberly, explaining Russia's "dual key" system for strategic weapons (requiring both presidential and General Staff authorization) as a structural check, while noting tactical/battlefield nuclear weapons may be more unilaterally controlled by Putin — but argues any tactical nuclear use in Ukraine would likely also contaminate Russian territory and staging areas given proximity and prevailing winds, an argument he offers as a reason such use remains a serious but not inevitable risk.

Kotkin draws deliberate, qualified parallels to World War II (invoking place names like Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Izyum that recur from the 1941 Nazi invasion), stating this resonance feels "eerie" to him personally while drafting the WWII-era volume of his Stalin biography, but cautions that the war's scale (army sizes, casualty figures) remains far smaller than WWII while modern precision weapons (drone-directed artillery) and cyberwarfare represent genuinely new dimensions. Asked directly whether Putin is a "war criminal," Kotkin declines to render that as anything but a legal determination requiring evidence and due process in an appropriate court (Ukraine, The Hague, or a future post-regime-change Russian proceeding), distinguishing this from informal social-media judgment.

On China, Kotkin argues Xi Jinping's public backing of Putin (without material military support) cost China a previously effective "wedge" strategy of maintaining separate, less adversarial relations with Europe distinct from U.S.-China tensions — arguing European governments' reaction to the invasion has now pushed European and American China policy closer together, a cost he frames as self-inflicted and significant given China's simultaneous domestic pressures (a property-sector bubble, demographic decline, and Xi's pursuit of an unprecedented third term). He explicitly declines to predict when or how Putin's rule will end, citing the opacity of the FSO (Federal Protective Service, Putin's inner security apparatus) as the critical variable to watch, and offers a similarly hedged assessment of Alexei Navalny's political survival, speculating (without certainty) that Navalny may remain alive because the regime sees him as a potential bargaining chip for future sanctions relief.

He closes by cautioning generally against confident historical prediction — drawing an explicit parallel to how observers in 1922 could not have foreseen the Great Depression or WWII, and noting unrelated future shocks (he cites a hypothetical Israeli strike on Iran, or North Korean escalation, as illustrative possibilities) could upend the current geopolitical picture entirely — and states his own view of a meaningful life as one of modest, local positive impact on others, rather than grand historical transformation.

Excerpts