decks her look at the early life and ascendancy of joseph stalin

with author of sub for the first of the planned 3-volume biography of the soviet leader. this is about an hour. >> please join me in welcoming stephen kotkin. stephen is an international affairs professor. [inaudible] [applause] >> gets a particular pleasure to launch my remaining book tour at the university of pennsylvania bookstore because the university of pennsylvania faculty in this area were instrumental in helping me work out some of the in what i might call the first draft of this manuscript. i'm very grateful to them and would repay my gratitude by

being here tonight and i appreciate the fact that those people helped me those professors are here tonight as well. so somebody said it's very difficult to summarize 739 pages of text in a a book taught that somebody else said when the camera starting rolling the book readers only 628 pages and it read so fast. my strategy would be to talk about a little bit what's in the book and spend most of the time on questions than answers. somebody asked me do we really need another biography of stalin and i said to them well, let's think about this for a second. the most consequential strongest dictatorship that world history has ever known. life and death and power of the single individual over hundreds of millions of people, victory

in the biggest war that has ever been fought, world war ii against the nazis. a nuclear-armed superpower from a country in a single lifetime and i'm thinking yeah that sounds like a pretty big subject and maybe we do need another biography of stalin because my second to this person was named the stalin biography we currently have that is so big, important successful that if there is no room to re-examine the question. and we certainly have had good biographies over the years. my favorite remains the biography from 1935. he was a participant in the event described in the book and he appears in this volume and i thought even though there've been many subsequent ones that there was still room to try to write a biography that was equal to the man and equal to the history that he lived through

and made himself. that was the goal. we will see and it will determine whether it's successful or not. the book proceeds on multiple levels. one, it argues that geopolitics is a principle driver of history, that a state to state relations are really major maybe even the driver of history across the world. for example we have this concept called modernization, how things modernize. you go from a more traditional societies to a more modern society. i make the argument in the book that this process is driven almost entirely by state to state relations. the big and powerful countries acquire new technology, new forms of politics and organization, new forms of mass culture and they force the others to match them to modernize along with them were to get colonized tubes be taken

over by them. if you don't have the steel industry that matches the british steel industry they are going to say -- send both into your harbor in what he going to do about a? say it's unfair? do you either going to match them where they are going to take you over. they're going to put -- so i go through to demonstrate how geopolitics and state to state relations is a driver of history. in fact the very process of modernization that we take as the core aspects of the world we live in today is driven primarily by the states to state relations geopolitics question. russia is a great power in the international system. before stalin is born and then under him it becomes an even greater power. and it's able to do that by modernizing that modernization.

it's not an automatic process. it is a process driven by international competition. the second area of argumentation has to do with dictatorship. we often think of authoritarian regimes as a default for shame. for example if democracy fails to get authoritarianism. i argue at length and demonstrate in the book that all authoritarian regimes including dictatorships have to be built and maintained. they don't arrive automatically once democracy fails. in fact when democracy fails you often get nothing. you get chaos. the authoritarian systems have to be built up in maintained and this is a very difficult challenging process and i show how lenin with his team and then stalin built and sustained a dictatorship in this part of the world. the third argument is about the consequences of ideas.

ideas are extremely important in history and stalin was a true believing marxist from an early age and his ideas, his beliefs were extremely important in just about everything you did. this doesn't mean that ideas determine the way history flows because one of the ideas of marxism and stalin himself propagated was that any means are necessary to reach the end, to reach the goal of building socialism. therefore you can violate even your own ideas in pursuit of your ideas and still be true to your marxist beliefs. nonetheless ideas are extremely consequential and this is also why hope demonstrated in the book. and then finally the fourth level of argumentation has to do with how history works. individuals of course are important and they make choices.

their actions have consequences but only within a larger landscape of big structures and impersonal forces and so the job of the historian is to relate to big impersonal forces. they had geography of where a country is located, the size of their population, your natural resource base, the productivity the type of agriculture you have have, the other countries that surround you your neighbors. i could go on. there are very large structures in history and you have to take the structures into account before you can describe where historical action has an impact or doesn't have an impact. it sounds a lot easier than it is to do in practice, to relate the big impersonal structural forces to the actions of individuals. small and modest individuals as well as big dictators also are

only understood within larger structural courses. so these are the four different levels of argumentation or building blocks of the book in my view. there are others which are not quite on this level that i could go into. so having laid out that many of how i constructed the book let me tell you a little bit more about the content. this is a book that's about russian power in the world and about stalin's power in russia and both of those questions are really important. it does not begin with the details of stalin's early life. it begins with the details a russian power in the world. stalin is going to be enormous the consequential. he's going to affect deeply and in some ways permanently to this day the problems of russian

power in the world and so it's very important to understand the big gigantic world conflict into which he is born. in the 1870s germany is unified. this creates a brand-new big power on european confidence, in germany which we have today. that same decade of the 1870s there something called the asian restoration in japan which is anonymously important for japanese history. it creates a consolidated modernizing nation in japan that can compete in the international system. both of these happen to flank the russian empire. germany is on one side, the european side. japan is on the other side, the asian side and this transforms the world in which a russian power will operate. just so happens that the same decade the 1870s this guy joseph stalin is born in the

periphery of the russian empire. so it's important to set up as i said the world into which he is born in order to understand the role that he is going to play in it. now somebody who is born to a poor family on the periphery of the empire. his mother was a washerwoman and his father was a cobbler shoemaker would never have dreamed about becoming the ruler of the largest state in the world one sixth of the earth's land mass. it was impossible in 1878 when joseph stalin was born to think that this little boy, the only surviving child of the washerwoman and a cobbler could possibly one day aspire to be a ruler let alone a ruler on the level that he exercised power. the only way that could happen is if the whole world was destroyed and all the existing governmental structures were

torn down. it's empire spelled its governments and states were ruined. of course that's what happens in the great war. so without the great war story it's impossible to understand where this guy could come from and how he could get into the position he is in. so it's necessary to go with gurin explained to the reader what happened in the great war and world war i and how the old world destroyed itself baking and opening for an individual like this from the periphery from a poor family and marginal character by any estimation when he's born in 1878 but obviously a world historical figure within about 45 years. so russian power in the world, stalin's power in russia. how did he get power and how did he become the first -- .

if you know stones biography from reading other versions of it there are many really fantastic stories and some of the existing biographies of stalin and i took it upon myself to go and see in the original documentation whether these fantastically interesting stories happened or not. and you will if you are for me with his biography not find some of those great stories in my book because i don't believe they are supported by documentation. they're very dramatic. they are fantastic. if you are a writer and a reader to latch onto that this book very closely follows the documentary record. let me talk a little bit about the documentary record, the source base the documents i examined for this book. the soviet union obviously left behind a lot of paperwork a tremendous amount of paperwork.

their communist party archives. there are soviet state archives. there are separate soviet military archives. there are separate secret police archives. they are separate foreign-policy archives and there are separate archives subcategories of each one of the ones i just name. for example the secret police archives the former kgb, the current fsb access in five different incarnations that i know of. military counterintelligence is in the city in the siberia and unfortunately they would let me in to the military counterintelligence archives. counterintelligence is normally in the military are crisp and the soviet system it's in the secret police. that's where they put counterintelligence but even though the archive itself would let me in i went there in person was denied access, i was still able to access a tremendous

amount of military counterintelligence documentation. how? because some other people have been granted access to those documents. for example dmitri -- who left leptin united states 55 micrograms of original documents much of which our military and police documents. so if you read through those documents that dmitri used for his book you get a lot of access to things like military counterintelligence which otherwise would be blocked from seeing. in addition the military counterintelligence archives is bragging about his history and publishing document corrections. tremendous amounts very large substantial multivolume document collections are published by the archives to try to show that they worked pretty well in the past. so the documents are selected

and you have to be careful in their use but nonetheless there's a gigantic treasure trove of military counterintelligence documentation which is available in american libraries in published form. in addition there are a handful of scholars who are still alive and had access to these archives archives. for example donatich has had access and they have published their own books. 500 pages, 600 pages based upon original documentation which that quote a lot of access to documents it with you follow the russian language publications very thoroughly you can in fact access the documents through them even if they won't give them to you directly. and of course we live in the age of skimming and a very substantial number of documents

were available to me because the researcher had worked in the archives and have been able to scan a copy and was willing to share scanned copies of the documents. so in other words even though access to the secret archives is uneven sometimes blocked, sometimes given only to very few preferential people there are workarounds. there are ways to get your hands on this material. i discovered that my problem was not access to the documentation but volume. i was just overwhelmed by the massive documentation absolutely crushing amount of stuff to read through. which is one of the reasons the endnotes and bibliography are substantial because i worked there great amount of material. they're probably think that i have not seen that i would like to see and if i ever get to see

them i may change my mind about some of the issues but from everything that i was able to see and i have to tell you was very substantial work 11 years of my life i am confident that i have found not only new information but have been able to confirm something that happened in the past and have been able to show that something that we think happened didn't happen. it's very important at least for me personally that this is not a speculative book. this is not a book that puts words in anybody's mouth. this doesn't do with some biographers do very effectively which is called filling in the historical record by imagining how your character probably thought, probably felt, what they probably said, what they probably went through, why they

probably did something. there are many things where i can make that and i believe i have a sense of why something happened. probably i could tell you but i refrain from doing that in the book as thoroughly as they could. in instances where i feel i hope people will point that out for reprints for further additions. so that is the main theme of the book. russian power in the world in stalin's power in russia and that is also some of the work that went into doing the book and the type of documentation. so what's the story? what is the story that one would hear if one sat back on the couch turned the lights out and get remained awake and listen to the audio version of the book? does that sound improbable? [laughter] the story is one of a person who

is not one thing not three-dimensional. he is both really smart and really blatant. he's extremely talented and very awkward. he's both a people person and a loner. most everything you can say about stalin the main thing to say about him was he was a complex contradictory character and moreover he changed over time. one of the things i did most thoroughly was to figure out when he began to exhibit sociopathic behavior. this is a guy who murdered millions of people. where did that come from and when did it begin? it's very hard to explain why somebody becomes a person like that. we had previous explanations. for example his father beat him when he was a child which traumatized him and therefore he

went on as an adult to murder tens of millions of people. i found this an implausible explanation because my father beat me to a pulp when i was a kid and i have yet to accomplish any type of murder on that scale scale. in fact i have never murdered anybody. that's in print. and so i tried to get away from the psychologizing which is unsatisfying to me and instead to try to document those around him and when they begin to perceive that he was either a little bit strange, a lot strange, dangerous or sociopathic. because after all how are people subsequently many decades after his death going to figure him out? we are going to do it through this very close comrades those who lived and worked with him

and see what they had to say about him. this is not an easy task because around stalin there are many lies. there are lies that stalin is told about himself. there lies that the regime told about him in official propaganda. they are allies that his enemies who survived somehow and fled abroad into immigration told about him and then there are fantastic stories about him and what we call the biographies of stalin. and so there is a lot of junk surrounding him so you kind of have to work through it. sort of like a ship that's been in port too long. you get out that scraper and you begin to scrape the barnacles off of the man, stalin, to try to see if you can get back to this process of his evolution as a person. so let me give you one example of something like this. in the spring and summer of

1923, the spring and summer of 1923 stalinist 45 years old. he has been general secretary of the communist party for a little over a year. april 1922. in april 1922 lenon appoints don general secretary. it's well-documented that it was done on purpose, that lenin knew what he was doing and he picked stalin because he thought stalin could do the job and it was a very big job, not a small job. it's well-documented in april 1922. in may 1922 the next month i then had a massive stroke. so within seven weeks of stalin becoming the head of the communist party the most powerful institution in the country his boss, his mentor, his superior has an

incapacitating stroke. so stalin has inherited a dictatorship. by lenin's appointment at him and by len and stroke. so on the one hand it's the action of lenin and on the other hand is the action of lenin's help but here we are a year later spring and summer 1923. and something called subsequently much later called not hault at the time, something called -- know at the time which is called dictation. and a piece of paper tight piece of paper is handed to someone by lenin's widow. she hands him the piece of paper and it says negative things about stalin, about trotsky and he that received the paper from lenin's wife and about three other people. this happens right after the

party conference in stalin has triumphed as they party conference and now comes this piece of paper. but lo and behold a few weeks later a second piece of paper comes out a different piece of paper which is also a jupiter to lenin. there's a problem with this because we have notations from lenin's doctors but there is notifications saying remove stalin. stalin is the general secretary of the party and once again it's given to this guy and he is on vacation down south with other members. and they meet in a cave. they meet in a cave. it's long been known about. what should they do about this

letter? and so they decided to draft a letter to stalin about this letter that allegedly lenin has dictated which says remove stalin. it's a very consequential dictation if it's true because the founder of the revolution is saying remove his principle protégé. so they send a letter to stalin in moscow and stalin is quite surprised. he evidently did not know about the existence of this alleged dictation and he doesn't know what to do. there's an exchange of letters back and forth, a few more and one of the guys who was involved in the inner circle is still in moscow a long stalin -- alongside stalin.

he has a tremendous ambition. he himself wouldn't mind being number one and here's a letter allegedly from lenin saying remove stalin. if he thought stalin was a sociopath if he had thought in the summer of 1923 that stalin's rule could murder tens of millions of people including himself, if he had noticed anything extremely threatening about stalin this was his opportunity to engage in this conspiracy and remove stalin from this powerful position. certainly if i were ambitious and moreover if i were afraid that stalin was sociopathic i would not have hesitated to act upon this alleged dictation by lenin and sought to remove

stalin. let's be honest people have sought to remove their rivals with less than a command from lenin to remove stalin. it kind of goes back to the dash you are exaggerating. in other words the person who is closest to stalin on the day-to-day workspaces for no stalin as well as anybody he left stalin 20 years earlier. he has given stalin eight copy of machiavelli in stalin's from the sky. so he's not exactly naïve but he refuses to engage in a conspiracy to remove stalin and doesn't feel personally threatened and doesn't think the

revolution is under threat by stalin but in fact quite the opposite. what he tells one of stalin's close associates is that stalin is working hard at doing a really big job. so i said to myself this episode is not definitive in the summer of 1923. it doesn't forever decide the question but it's a very interesting episode. evidently stalin's closest comrade did not perceive the sociopathic behavior that we will see later as of summer 1923. so whatever beatings his father gave him, and there are very few sources that corroborate any of these beatings and in fact i have my doubts that his father thrashed him frequently but nonetheless let's suppose he did did. certainly this is a man who is

now in its 45th year in a position of tremendous power and his rivals -- in fact the others that are in a cave on vacation don't actually try to remove stalin. they try to put others next to him in a power-sharing operation. lenin says remove stalin which is the most convenient thing for them that they alleged dictation from lenin could say that he doesn't even act of the phil lenin's wish to remove stalin. they cook up a scheme of sharing power together. that scheme is rebuffed by communist in moscow so nobody on the inside in this moment of tremendous opportunity acts upon the alleged to root remove stalin. not a definitive but a very

important episode and then move a little bit later to 1928. this is a book that goes from 1878 to 1928 1928 as a show was the year that stalin decided to collectivize agriculture. ..

>> bacon wrapped hot dogs on the streets of los angeles , you cannot go >> include the fact that he treated him like a younger brother. and so you begin to see a malevolence, a gratuitous malevolence of making people suffer psychologically certainly by 1928. which as i said it doesn't seem to be visible in the summer of 1923 and this is one of the

participants in the case. so between 1923 in 1928 there evidently is some kind of transformation of behavior. so it could be that the roots of this go back peeper. but it was not seen certainly earlier. there are very few documented episode of people not subsequently or in hindsight, not remembering something 50 years later, but at the time talking about sociopathic behavior on this his part. so here we have, i think a way to state it a little bit or installing we can together understand stalin. there's a lot when we talk about how he became the person he became and a very closely to see

where he is emerging and i think a conclusion or take the question and answer him a let me talk about this on the russian side. there is a lot more to stay about the personality of stalin and the ideas he held and his view of the outside world and how dictators that works and that's one of the reasons that this is 739 pages of text. and i use this to give you a sense of the kind of stuff you might encounter. russian power is not easy to manage. and when they were given their geography, they didn't get the atlantic ocean on one side, the pacific ocean on the other side, mexico to the south, and canada to the north. and instead they got powerful germany on one side, a powerful aggressive japan on the other

side underneath them but redish empire in the islamic world. and russian power because of its geography is enormously challenged, we could go on in this direction, russia is a northern country like canada but it supports the population many times the size of canada's population. agriculture is much more difficult then a more tropical climate. plus, it doesn't have natural borders, so it's constantly expanding while claiming defense. because if it takes a territory and incorporates it it cannot defend that territory until it takes the one next to it one over. and so constantly they feel under siege the need to expand and protect themselves about natural borders and those people they are expanding into it looks like aggression.

but to the russian it looks like they are defensively expanding through protect themselves and this is a dynamic routing and russian history that will also be routed in the regime and we see some of that even today. we are wrestling with this problem. there is a providential special mission that russia is not only a great power but has a special mission in the world we see this play out in a different way under the communist regime. we see tremendous antiwesternism and a level of paranoia attributing and that things have been inside the country to malevolent actions by outsiders. and there are protest movements in the street and somebody from the outside is instigating them, somebody is paying for them. and somebody is trying to undermine our state up from the

outside come of these are legitimate protest movements and grievances against arbitrary rule and corruption and incompetence what is perceived in the russian capital which becomes a second city and it is perceived as a foreign plot. and so we see a lot of this regime today. and we see the desire to be self-sufficient, to pull up the bridges and use the most we also see stalin himself recognizing that it doesn't work because the western powers have the advanced technology and when you are in a competitive modernization and you need the latest guns and artillery and

tanks, the latest avionics, the latest airplanes, when you need to compete against those who have the latest and the best technologies and if you cannot build it all yourself, you are partially dependent upon the outside world and so fortress russia is a temptation but it never works. so we see it with oil technology in addition to military technology especially high level electronics and fortress russia is a temptation that never works. it's a big theme. i could go on and the strong state can be driven to build a strong state culminates in personal rules. time and time again, we are trying to build a strong state and instead of building strong institutions, it is one person.

a network around that person. this is also a paradoxical aspect of the rule of stalin and we see it on a much lesser scale today. and so to summarize, it is impossible to summarize but to summarize this in the world problems and relating the issue of who stalin is and where he comes from, on a very big tableau, one sixth of the earth but actually with global repercussions because the communist movement is a global movement. so as time moves on and as the book moves on stalin's biography becomes like a world history. thank you for your time. [applause] [applause] so perhaps there is a question or two.

[inaudible question] [inaudible question] >> were kind of a country was this place? as an american i cannot perceive how thomas jefferson except that this society that he was in. [inaudible question] [inaudible question] >> russia sounds like a terrible place. and they had a secret police system the whole method of expanding and taking over other people's countries. maybe it is because they are nasty people themselves and

naturally is the japanese were holding off the westerners. and so tell us what was this country like? what qualities to the religion of this country offer people? [inaudible question] >> i think i get your question at this point. it is a good question. i'm not sure that i would use the same language that you do to describe them, but it's easy to see the bad sides of any society and we have some on our own. so independent of the value judgment discussion, let's talk about the kind of society in which we are born. this is one of the things that the book actually does. many biographies of stalin skip

the early years because not much happens. he goes through the age of 40 something and he only really has one job. and he's briefly a weatherman at the observatory, with one of the few legitimate jobs that he does in his whole life before he becomes a victim. so people go over all that history, the protocols, the russian regime, and the czarist ministers, the czarist court wars that they fight against japan, all of that stuff is left out of the biographies because it's not -- he's not inconsequential person. the other strategy that was tried more lately is to invent a very interesting stall and of your leaders. and in other words instead of skipping over this time to make it extremely sexy it turns out that he was able sorry all and all sorts of other things that

he invented, trying to flatter him in the 1930s. so instead of doing either one of those things, ignoring it and jumping through it or inventing a very dramatic version of it, what i do is her through what the russian state was like how russia was ruled what the rulers tried to do before him who had their hands on this wheel before him and how did they succeed or not succeed as the case might be. one of the things that the book does is to talk about how imperial russia was not like the rest of russia. it had created a fiscal state there were a lot of details on how this function and how it was able to become a great power.

and another thing the book does is to show that the underground revolutionary movement that is celebrated was a tremendous failure and that there was a success that culminated in 1917 and 1918. there were protests in some cases, growing protest among factories. but the revolutionary movement and party was the party of lenin and others it was a colossal failure. and so the book also goes through how russia almost created fascism for italy and germany which came as he said from the russian empire, and there was a movement it was very alive and russia. this is another aspect of the book that was illuminated.

it shows how the russian state did not collapse in world war i. it was only the autocratic part of the state that collapsed the russian state function and it was the revolution that destroyed the russian state. the book also shows how the provisional government, the revolution of 1917 was it a tool against the parliament. the book also shows the results of dozens october 1917 was a coup against the soviets. the grassroots soviets. the book shows that there was no state in 1918. a year after lennon claimed and seized power. because the state was in collapse as a result of the revolution. i could go on about many of the things that are in the book, but there is a very substantial analysis based upon primary

documentation and imperial russia of the russian states and the russian opposition of the political party and the prime minister and the russian nationalities and the weight of the empire functioned and then into this chaotic time. are there any other questions? [inaudible question] [inaudible question] [inaudible question]

>> yes, so i mention that the outset that he was a marxist from an early age and that he held these convictions very deeply. this is documented in the book and we have seen him speaking behind the scenes as well as in public. one of the things we discovered when we were first allowed into the secret archives is that they talk the same way in private as they do in public. so that this ideology was not a veneer or a show and it wasn't cynical, but this is how they actually thought and this was a basis for many of their actions. and so in the case of stall and it is very important to acknowledge that he was a true believer as he understood it. so this does not mean that every time he did something that was

part of this it means that that is how he understood the world and that is how he spoke and that is how he explained his actions to others and that is how he thought about them retrospectively. so there's no way to understand the soviet union and there's no way to understand this. the trick is to try to present a nuanced sophisticated version of what the ideology was which was not very simple. [inaudible question] >> thank you for both of those questions. so stall and was in the seminary but did not graduate.

he missed his final exam and did not get his degree.. and we have known the time of stalin and that's because that included many people who went to school with him many of them survived, we also have the records of the seminary to a certain extent. so that picture is not unknown. but the trick is how to understand this. some people have seen the seminary time as formative of his masochistic sociopaths exile. because the seminary was brutal. the seminary was full of snitches and it was tyrannical. and so people think that this was a breeding ground for the stalin regime and to an extent that is possible, but the

problem is that many decent people came out of that same seminary including the same time as stolen, so this is insufficient to really explain it. one of the questions that i tried to figure out was whether he believed in god or not. if having come out of this religious training we know that he was a true believer in god in his early years we know that he wanted to be a priest or a monk in his early years and that he sang in the seminary choir and that he had an impressive voice as a choirmaster and he had this religious feeling but did any of that remain in him for the rest of his life and unfortunately this is an aspect of his personality that is not in the documentation. there are accounts of him talking about going to church

for example and none of these are corroborated. it is possible that some of this was left over and the way people see it is mostly through his style of writing, which they call cataclysmic which has been part of the similarities. so the book treats this as important personalities and goes through very thoroughly painting them as human beings and to get a sense of what they were like and the relationship is a very poor part of the biggest section of the book and i believe that there is well documented significant new information about the important role of the personality formation and the talent and the limitation that is expressed.

are they are a couple more questions? [inaudible question] >> i'm hoping that you can talk about what sources of behavior would set this off among these kind of top inner circles. >> that's a good question. let's think about this. there is speculation that he snaps. his first wife died horrifically of disease and then married again, the second wife committed suicide in late 1932. so this is a moment which is often said to have been the moment when he became sociopathic heard well, now we can see clearly in 1928 that he

is exhibiting this behavior and therefore the suicide of his wife in 1932 is not in this audio and it might have had a big effect on him and i will do without in the second volume solely see in 1927 remember he is 49ers old, he's going to be 50 in 1928 when the first volume ends, or nine years old and if you've known him for 25 or 30 years, some of these people have known him for that long and others have known him for only 20 years or 18 years which is a sufficient amount of time and in 1927 they began to talk among themselves a little bit about

his behavior and they began to worry that it's more than just odd behavior but they seem to come to the conclusion that it is manageable. because he's very talented which they also recognize, he's not a talented democrat or parliamentarian or mother theresa, charity worker but he is a talented ruler of tyrannical regime. which therefore need someone to deal with enemies and they recognize the talent and they seem to come to the conclusion that managing without him would be more difficult than trying to manage these increasingly emerging personality traits that are threatening. because one of the things that i show in the book is that he resigned again and again. i go through in detail about how

his psychology was affected by certain events. one of the expressions is to force his colleagues to reaffirm his authority by resigning. inviting, oily again and again so they have opportunity after opportunity including in december of 1927 just before he goes to siberia on the trip that culminates the book and announces that he is going to collectivize this in december of 1927 before the january 1928 trip to siberia to announce collectivization, he resigned again. there they are in the room not unlike this room and they have started to see this aspect of his personality more clearly.

but instead of getting up and saying that okay, we accept her resignation we have done a great job until now, but we will have someone else be in charge, instead of saying that, the second most powerful person gets up and says that of course not we will never accept the resignation and gets the rest of the room to come and vote to reject the resignation. there is only one vote in favor of the resignation. so they are making a calculation about his abilities and the benefits of his abilities because he has a colossal job and he is able to put that whole regime on his back and i go through in detail about where this came from and how it expressed itself in the kind of tasks that he managed in the manipulations he managed. and they were very impressed by

his ability as a result of which they concluded that they could maybe manage him even though they were able to see a side fm. i think maybe we have more. [inaudible question] >> wouldn't you imagine, you know better than i, having a job such as this working his in a very imperfect and messy system it is a huge country and even the best you can accomplish is not really going to show great

improvement. and so what you know about him as a person, as a possible to imagine this even though they had learned or was good at functioning in a way that the jobs were required to function. it couldn't possibly be enough. my other question is how much did he know about the outside world and what was the level, such as if one could have had him alone in the room and asked him -- how much does he know about the american revolution and how these people came together and tries to create this?

did he know? and did he have an appreciation of differences in government? >> on the issue of the difficulty of the job one of the original points that i made is that dictatorship has to be built and sustained and it isn't allowed automatically. he inherited the basis of a dictatorship and he relentlessly build that leadership up and sustained a and it was enormous and it was very tasking just like you said, and they did experience moments when he felt that he needed a break and could not take it anymore. we have some documentation of him expressing a desire for a holiday or a break from the work. at the same time he was eight political animal. he lived for politics and he lived to be the dictator and the ruler.

and so even later after three delays, he brought his work with them and continued to be a dick tater while on holiday. there is almost no downtime for stalin. ..

to return to an earlier.he is sophisticated at the same time. so talk about fascism has finance capitol. an unsophisticated analysis of fascism because it is filtered through his marxist worldview related to class and class struggle this is not an sophisticated analysis.

he has a sophisticated understanding of how other states use any means necessary but there is a seriousness and a comical quality to the dictatorship. here they are poor country barely able to recover. telling the outside world they are the future of the outside world is going to disappear and desperately needing trade agreements to try to supply them with the things they cannot build themselves. at the same time stalin is engaging and conspiracies to overthrow these foreign regimes that he is desperate to trade with. a polish ethnic high official in the soviet regime and this is how the soviet regime works.

stalin is in control of the communications network, and control of the paperwork the paperwork, the heart of the regime interfacing with the police, the military. i described the physical geography of the regime so that you can understand his power in an entire chapter. the camera high military official and they organize crews in foreign countries. in germany they're leading trading partner, they organize a coup and they hire a few hundred people to conduct this to and send a a tremendous amount of money for them to buy weapons on the black market. he does this again and estonia. there is a version in bulgaria.

here they here they are in this poor, wrecked ruined, catastrophic situation trying to affect the world through these plotted platitudes on the basis of the relationship between stalin and electric. so that reflects what? does that reflect a sophisticated understanding of the capabilities? and so we see him reading phil and marking up texts. then we see him behaving. that that is him in both cases. thank you. [applause] [applause]