question? >> as you studied the characters back then, how do they compare with the casualties today in washington? is there -- [laughter] sounds like this guy is this way? >> i say in the beginning, when con fronted with a tough question, there's one thing you expect washingtonians to do and that duck. >> are you from washington? >> i'm not washington. i think it's just so hard to say. i'm often asked and have been asked recently what robert e. lee say about the way the world is today. and i think it's just impossible question. it's just -- we can't know because so much has happened and it's not fair to stick him from 1870 the last thing he knew, into 2015, and say what do you think about healthcare reform or something like that. he couldn't have even conceived

of where we are as a country, -- one think we can know he would be fascinated by the develops in transportation because he was an engineer to the end, and he did have this great feeling about the country being bound together by these different modes of transportation, whenever he took a train, he would clock and say, it could have been a half a day faster if it had been run more efficiently. so i think he would find that very interesting. but as for a political situation, i'm going to take a pass on the question. it's just too hard to make comparisons. the civil war is such a unique period in our history, and i think we can all agree that we hope that the matter has been forever settled and our country never has to undergo something like that ever again. >> thank you. >> thank you. [applause]

this weekend, saturday morning, start agent 10:00 a.m.

eastern, live on c-span, our nation's governors get together to discuss issues affecting their states. guests include danny meier, ceo of union scare hospitality group, and maria bartromo of fox business news, and sunday morning at 11:00 we continue or live coverage of the national governors associate meeting. featured speakers including homeland security secretary jeh johnson and epa administrator gina mccarthy. on c-span2, saturday, booktv is on the road, experiencing the literary live of greensboro north carolina, part of the 2015 c-span cities tour. and sunday at 9:00 p.m. eastern on "after words," wes moore retraces his career choices from combat veteran to white house fellow, wall street banker to social entrepreneur to find his life's purpose. and on american history tv on c-span3, saturday night justifies after 7:00, the 1963 interview of former nation of

islam minister malcolm x discussing race relations and opposition to racial integration, and sunday at 6:30'm eastern, former cia chief of disguise tells the story of a husband and wife kgb spy team that infiltrated the cia threw the use of sex in the 1970s. find our complete television schedule at c-span2.org and let us know what you think about the programs you're watching. call us at 202, 626-3400. e-mail or send us a tweet. join the c-span conversation. like us on facebook follow us on twitter. >> booktv and primetime continues now with a look at the early life and political ascendancy of joseph stall lynn. we hear from steven kotkin.

it's part of our special showing of programs normally seen on weekends here on c-span2. from philadelphia, this is about an hour. -- [inaudible] -- welcome him now. [applause] >> it's always a particular pleasure to launch my minibook tour here at the university of pennsylvania book store because the university of pennsylvania faculty in this area were instrumental in helping me work out some of the kinks on what i call the first draft of this manuscript. so i'm very grateful to them and repay my gratitude by being here tonight, and i appreciate the

fact that those people who helped me, those professors, are here tonight as well. so it's somebody said it's very difficult to summarize 739 pages of text in a book talk but then somebody else said before the cameras started rolling, that the book reads only like 620 pages, it reads so fast. so my strategy will be to talk a little bit about what is in the book and spend most of the time on questions and 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 power of a single individual over hundreds of millions of people. victory in the biggest war that's ever been fought, world

war ii against the nazis. a nuclear arms super power from a peasant country in a single lifetime. and i'm thinking, yeah well that sounds like a pretty big subject and maybe we do need another biography of stalin because my second point this person was, name the stalin biography we currently have that is so big important and successful, that there's no room to re-examine the question. and we certainly have had good buyographys over the year him favorite remains the biography from 1935 boris suverine. he was a participant in the events and appears in this volume. and i thought that even though there have been many subsequent ones that there was still room. to try to write a biography that would equal the man and equal to the history that he lived through and made himself.

that was the goal. we'll see. the readers will determine whether it's successful or not. the book proceeds on multiple levels. one issue 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 the a more traditional society to a more modern society. i make the argument in the become 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, or to

get colonized, annexed taken over by them. if you don't have a steel industry that matches the british steel industry, they're going to send their boats into your harbor and what are you going do do about it. say it's unfair? you're either going to match them or they're going to take you over. they're going to put their boot on your neck. so i go through to demonstrate how geopolitics, state-to-state relations is a driver of hoyt. in fact the very process of modernizize we take as the core aspect of the world we live in today is driven primarily, in any view, by the state-to-state relations geopolitics question. so russia is a great power in the international system before stalin is born. and then under him it becomes an even greater power and is able to do that by modernizing but that modernization is not an automatic process.

it is a process driven by international competition. okay. the second area of argumentation has to do with dictatorship. we often think of authoritarian regimes as a default regime, for example, if democracy fails, you get authoritarianism. i argue at length and demonstrate in the book that author tearian regimes including dictatorships, have to be built and maintained. they don't arise automatically when democracy fails. in fact when democracy fails you often get nothing. you get chaos. the authoritarian systems have to be built up and maintained, and this is a very difficult challenging process. and i show how first 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 he did. this doesn't mean that ideas determine the way history flows because one of the ideas of marxism, that stalin himself propagated, was that any means are necessary to reach the ends 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, in stalin's view. nonetheless ideas are extremely consequential and this is also, i 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 for the historian is to relate to big impersonal forces. the geography of where your country is located, the size of your population, your natural resource base the productivity of your peasantry, the type of agriculture you have. the other country that surround you, i could go on. very large structures in history, and you have to take those structures into account before you can describe where agency 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 to big impersonal structural forces to the actions of individuals. small and modest individuals as well as big dictators they also

are only understood within larger structural forces. 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. okay. having laid out that sort of menu of how i constructed the book let me tell you a little bit more about the context. this is a book which is about russian power in the world, and about stalin's power in russia, and both questions are really important. it does not begin with the details of stalin's early life. it begins with the details of russian power in the world. stalin is going to be enormously consequential. he is going to affect deeply and in some ways permanently at least to this day the problems of russian power in the world,

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

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

if governments and states were ruined wrecked, and of course that's what happened in the great war. without the great war store, 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 through and explain for the reader what happened in the great war, world war i, and how the old world destroyed itself, making an opening for an individual like this from the periphery from the poor family, a marginal character by any estimation, when he is born in 1878. but obviously a world historical figure within about 45 years. okay. so russian power in the world. stalin's power in russia. how did he get power and how did he become the person he became? now, if you know stalin's

biography from reading other versions of it there are many really fantastic stories. in 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're familiar with his biography, not find some of those great stories in my book. because i don't believe they're supported by sufficient documentation. they're very dramatic they're fantastic, if you're a writer and a reader to latch on to but this book, very closely follows the documentary record. let me talk a little bit about the documentary record the source base the document is examined for this book. the soviet union obviously left behind a lot of paperwork. a tremendous amount of

paperwork. there's communist party archives. there's soviet state archives. there's separate soviet military archives. there's separate secret police archives. there's separate foreign policy archives. and there are separate archives subcategories of each one of the ones i just named. for example, the secret police archives, the former kgb the current fsb exists in five different incarnations i know of. military counterintelligence is in siberia and unfortunately they wouldn't let me into the military counterintelligence archives. counterintelligence is normally in the military archives but in the soviet system is in the secret police. that's where they put counterintelligence. even though the archive itself wouldn't let me in -- i went there and person and 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 dimitri who left in the united states 55 microfilms of original documents, much of which are military and police documents. so if you read through those documents that dimitri used for his book, you get a lot of access to things like military counterintelligence, which otherwise you'd be blocked from seeing. in addition the military counterintelligence archives is bragging about its history, and publishing document collections. tremendous amounts of very large substantial, multivolume document collections are published by the archives, to try to show that they work pretty well in the past. so the documents are selective 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 this archive. for example alexander has had access and they've published emtheir own books. 500 pages, 600 pages, based upon original documentation, in which they quote a lot of these hard to access documents. so if you follow the russian language history publications very thoroughly, you can in fact access the documents through them. even if they won't give them to you directly. then of course we live in the age of scanning. and a very substantial number of documents were available to me because the researcher had

worked in the archives, had scan -- been able to scan a copy and was willing to share scanned copies of the documents with other researchers. 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 work-arounds, ways to get your hands on this material. and i discovered that my problem was not access to the documentation but volume. i was just overwhelmed by the mass of documentation. absolutely crushing amount of stuff to read through. which is one of the reasons the end no.s and bibliography are substantial because i worked through a great amount of material. now, there are probably things 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, it was very substantial work -- 11 years of my life -- i am confident that i have found not only new information but been able to confirm some things that happened in the past and been able to show that some things we think happened didn't happen. so 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 imagine scenes that took place. this doesn't do what some biographies do effectively, which is called filling in the historical record when it's lacking. 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 statement. i believe i have a sense of why something happened. probably i could tell you. but i refrained from doing that in the book as thoroughly as i could, in instances where i failed to do that, i hope people will point that out for reprint or further editions. so that is the main theme of the book russian power in the world, and stalin's power in russia and that is also a sum of the work that intent into doing the book and the type of documentation upon which it's based. so what's the story? what's the story that one would hear? if one sat back on the couch, turned the lights out yet remained awake and listened to the audio version of the book. did that sound improbable? [laughter] >> the story is one of a person

who is not one thing not unidimensional. he is both really smart and really blinkered, both extremely talented and very awkward he is 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 enhe 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. in fact, i've never murdered anybody. except in print. 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 began 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're going to do it through his very close comrades, those who lived and worked with him and kind of 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 told about himself, there are lies they regime told about him in official propaganda. there are lies his enemies who survived somehow and fled abroad into immigration told about him. and then there are the fantastic stories made up about him and what he call the biographies of stalin. so there is a lot of junk surrounding him, and so you kind of have to work through. it's sort of like the ship that has been in port too long and you get out the scraper and begin to scrape the barnacles off 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, spring and summer of 1923, right? the stalin is 45 years old. he has been general secretary of the communist party for a little over a year. april 1922. in april 1922 lenin appoints stalin general secretary of the party. this is well documented that it was done on purpose that lenin knew what he was doing that he picked stalin because he thought stalin would do the job and it was a very big job not a small technical job. extremely well documented this episode in april 1922. well in may 1922 the next month, lenin had a massive stroke. so, within seven weeks of stalin becoming the head of the communist party, the most powerful institution of the country, his boss, his mentor, his superior has an incapacitating stroke. so stalin has inherited a

dictatorship be lenin's appointment of him and by lenin's stroke. so on the one hand it's the action of lenin, on the other hand it's the accident of lenin's health. but here we are year later. spring and summer 1923. and something called -- subsequently called, much later called -- not called at the time -- something called lenin's -- at the time it's just called dictation. and a piece of paper, a type piece of paper i handed to somebody named gregorio be lenin's widow, and she hands him the piece of paper and it says, negative things about stalin about trotsky, about -- who received the paper, from about three other people. this happens right after a party congress and stalin has

triumphed at the party congress, lenin is sick. and out comes this piece of paper. but lo and bee hold few weeks later a second piece of paper comes out. a different piece of paper which is also attributed to lenin, supposed dictation to lenin. there's a problem because we have notation patrols lynnin's doctors about how he couldn't speak. but anyway, theirs dictation attributed to lenin who which says remove stalin. it's called the letter about the secretary because extol -- stalin is general secretary of the party. it's given by lenin's wife to this guy, and he is on vacation down south with other members of the inner regime and they meet in a cave. they meet in a cave, the famous cave meetings. long been known about. what should they do about this

letter? and so they decide 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 head -- the founder of the revolution is saying remove his principle protege. so they send the letter up to stalin in moscow about this and stalin is quite surprised. he evidently did not know about the existence of this alleged dictation. and he kind of doesn't know what to do. and there's an exchange of letters back and forth, a few more, and one of the guys who is involved in the inner circle is still in moscow alongside stalin not on vacation in the cave. and his name is kominev, and he

has also tremendous ambition. he himself wouldn't mind being number one or being co-number one and here's a letter allegedly from lynnin saying remove stalin. if he thought that stalin was a sociopath, if he thought in the summer of 1923 that stalin's rule could murder tens of millions of people, including kominev himself, if he 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 socialow pathic i would not have hesitated to act upon his 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. but minev writes back and says, you're exaggerating. in other words, the person who is close toast stalin on a day-to-day work basis, coominev who knows stalin as well as anybody, he has met stalin 20 years earlier. ...

so i said to myself this is not definitive 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 beatings, and in fact i have my doubts that his father thrashed him frequently but nonetheless let's suppose he did.

this is a man who is now in its 45th year in a position of tremendous power and his rivals and in fact zanoviev and the other in a case on vacation don't actually try to remove stalin. they tried to put others next to him in a power-sharing operation. lenin said remove stalin which is the most convenient thing for them that they could say that zenobia -- zanoviev dismasted fulfill munden swish. they pick up a scheme of sharing power together. that game is rebuffed like kamenev in moscow so nobody on the inside in this tremendous opportunity acts upon the alleged dictation to remove stalin in the summer of 1926. once again not definitive but

very important episode and then i moved later to 1928. this is a book that goes from 1878 to 1928. 1928 as i show was the year that stalin decided to collectivize agriculture. he decided to enslave the peasantry across 16 of the year. it was a bloody horrific episode. it led to famine. five to 7 million people dying and the loss of tens of millions of livestock the wealth of the country could in some ways the soviet union never really recovered from this episode and in some ways it's the central crime of stalin's rule of collectivization. sometimes you watch a movie and there is a murder in the movie but it's offscreen it's off camera. maybe you hear a gunshot, maybe

you don't. maybe there are shadows and maybe there is blood splattering on a window or something like this. this was the effect that i tried for in the book. the actual episode of collectivization is not there but the decision to go forward into a despair. along with that decision in 1928 where the book culminates there is stalin's malevolently torturing psychologically torturing some of his closest associates including those who he is treated like a brother like the younger brother he never had. so you begin to say a malevolence of gratuitous malevolence of making people suffer psychologically certainly by 1928 which as i said doesn't seem to be visible in the summer of 1923 and he's one of the

participants in the cane meeting. so between 1923 in 1928 there evidently is some type of transformation of behavior. now it could be the roots of this go back deeper but it was not seen him certainly earlier. there are very few documented episodes of people subsequently not in hindsight not remembering something 50 years later but at the time talking about sociopathic behavior. so we have i think away to date it a little bit, to date when stalin as it were become stalin. so there's a lot in the book along these lines where we talk about how he became the person he became and very closely

queuing to the documentary record to see where he is emerging. in conclusion before it goes to q&a let me say something about the russian power site. there's obviously much more to say about stalin's personality his willpower, the ideas he held held, his view of the outside world his view about how dictatorship works and one of the reasons the book is 739 pages of tax. i just used this episode to the give you a taste of what you might encounter encounter in the book but let's talk about a russian power in the world. russian power in the world is not easy to manage. you see because 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. instead they got powerful germany on one side, powerful

aggressive japan on the other side and underneath him the british empire and the islamic world. russian power in the world because of its geography is enormous weight challenged. we can go on in this direction. russia is a northern country. many times the size of the population were agriculture is much more difficult obviously been in more tropical climates. russia doesn't have natural borders so it's constantly expanding while claiming defense. because if it takes a territory and incorporates it they can't defend that territory until it takes the one next to it, the one over and so constantly they feel under siege the need to expand to protect themselves of natural borders to those people that are standing into it looks

like aggression but to the russians it looks like they are extensively expanding to protect themselves. this is the dynamic rooted in washing -- russians history and we see that today still wrestling with the problem of expansionism. there's a providential mission that russia is not only a great power but has a special mission in the world. we see this play out one way under the czarist regime and another way under the communist regime. we see a level of paranoia attributing bad things that happen inside the country to mal's malevolent actions by outsiders. their protest movements in the streets. somebody from the outside is instigating them. somebody is paying for them. somebody is trying to undermine our state diversion from the

outside. these are legitimate protest movements against arbitrary rule against corruption and incompetence but perceived in the russian capital which becomes the second city because the soviet capital is perceived as a foreign plot. in stalin's regime we see it. we see the desire to be portrays russia, to be self-sufficient to pull up the bridges and use the mode but fortress russia we see under stalin's regime as stalin himself recognizes does not work. the western powers have the advanced technology and when you're in a competitive modernization game when you need the latest guns, the latest artillery, the latest tanks, the

latest airplanes, when you need to compete against those who have the latest and the best technology if you can't build it all yourself, you are partially dependent on the outside world supplying it for use of fortress russia is a temptation but fortress russia never works. today we see it with oil technology in addition to military technology especially higher-level electronics. the russian regime like to use seek independence of western suppliers that are fortress russia is a temptation that never works. this is the big thing. i could go on. to drive to build a strong state and russia culminates in personal rule. time and time again they try to build a strong state and instead of building strong institutions is one person.

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

>> you said something about russia's situation but what i have trouble with understanding, what kind of a place would -- and as an american i can't conceive how thomas jefferson from a slave society may have viewed the society was then. [inaudible] this russia sounds like a terrible place. the secret police wrote the protocols of zion. they were expanding to kill people in to take over other people's countries. maybe they fear other countries but maybe it's because they are nasty people themselves.

and nearby countries are being colonized to the japanese and say we are going to be a pushover for people. so what kind of the country is this? what quality does the religion of this country offered? what kind attentions are there? i don't have any trouble telling you why this guy was a -- and if you see what's the dramatization? >> i think i get your question at this point. it's a good question. i'm not sure i would use the same normative language you use to describe them. it's easy of course to see the bad sides of any society and we have some on our own so independent of value judgment discussion let's talk about the society which is born. this is one of the things the book actually does. many biographies it's stalin get

the early years because not much happens. he goes through the age of 40 something and he is only really had one job. he is briefly a weatherman at the observatory. it's one of the few legitimate legal jobs he does in his whole life before he becomes a dictator. so people see it very quickly. they go over all that history, protocols of the elders of zion czarist russian regime, the czarist ministers, the czarist court, the war that they fight against japan. all of that stuff was left out of stalin biographies because he is not a consequential person. the other strategy that more lately invents the stalin of the earlier years. in other words instead of skipping over this period they say it turns out he was a low faria, and all sorts of other

things that they invented for stalin trying to flatter him in the 1930s that were left out of the archives. instead of doing one of those things ignoring it or jumping through it or inventing a very dramatic version of it what i do is go through with the russian state was like, how russia was ruled, what the rulers try to do that for stalin, who had their hand on the russian state before him and how did they succeed or not succeed? as the case might be in our aims and managing russian power of the world. one of the things the book does is to talk about how imperial russia had created a very impressive fiscal military state. there is a lot of detail on how this fiscal military state of the czarist function and how was able to become a great power.

another thing the book does is to show that the underground revolutionary movement that is celebrated in most accounts was in fact a tremendous failure and that there was not a successful fourth revolution that culminated in 1917 and 18. there were protests in some cases growing protest among workers in factories and especially from the countryside. the revolutionary movement, the revolutionary party, the party of lenin were colossal failures and the chief of police he mentioned. the book also goes through how russia almost created fascism before italy and germany and the protocols of the elders of zion which came as you said from the russian empire and there was a fascist movement, very very large and russia. it's another aspect of the book

that is illuminated. the book 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 functions right to the war. it was the revolution that destroyed the russian state. the book also shows how the provisional government in the revolution of 1917 was a coup against the parliament a coup against the duma. the book also shows the bolsheviks who of 1917 was a coup not against the provisional government but against the soviets the grassroots soviets. the book shows there was no state in 1918 a year after lenin had claimed he seizes power because the state was in collapse as a result of the revolution. i could go on about many things in the book but there's a very substantial analysis based upon primary documentation imperial

russia, the russian state, of the russian opposition, of the political parties the russian prime ministers, of the russian nationalities, of the way the empire functions through time and into this chaotic period of war or revolution. do we have any other questions? >> one thing you never mentioned was -- fascism. [inaudible] i wonder in 1914 when he was about 40 does he think about jeb durfee or does he only think in terms of warfare?

>> yes so i mentioned at the outset that stalin was a true believing marxist from an early age and that he held these convictions very deeply. this is documented in the book and we see him speaking in marxist category behind the scenes as well as in public. one of the things we discovered when we were first allowed into the secret archives is they talk the same way in private as they did in public. so the marxist ideology was not a veneer it was not a show. they weren't cynical but this is how they actually thought and this was the basis for many of their actions. and stones case it's very important to acknowledge that he was a true believer in the marxist canon as he understood it. this doesn't mean that every single time he did something it

was some marxist belief. it's how we understood the world and that's how he spoke explained his actions and decisions to others and that's how we thought about them retrospectively. there is no way to understand the soviet union after marxist ideology and no way to understand stalin. the truth however -- the trick is to pride in% and they want sophisticated version of what the ideology was and how it worked in practice. yes sir. >> did you uncover anything new? >> thank you for both of those questions.

he was -- went to seminary but didn't graduate. he missed his final exam and never got his degree. we have known pretty much the story of stalin's time in the seminary from the early biographies that's because many other people want to seminary with him, some before, some after, some of the same time in many those people survived. we also have the records of the seminary to a certain extent. so that picture is not unknown. the trick is how to understand the seminary period. some people have seen the seminary period is formative of his masochistic sociopathic side because the seminary was brutal. the seminary was full of snitches. the seminary was tyrannical so people think the culture of the seminary was a breeding ground for the culture of stalin's regime. to an extent that's possible.

the problem is many decent people came out of that same seminary at the same time as stalin so the seminary is insufficient to really explain it. one of the questions i tried to figure out was that stalin believed in god or not. if having come out of this religious training we know 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. we know that he sang in the seminary choir and that he had an impressive voice that impressed the choirmaster and so we know he had this religious feeling but did any of that remain in him through the rest of his life and unfortunately this is an aspect of his personality that is not in the documentation. there are accounts of stalin talking about, of stalin going

to church for example. none of these are corroborated while he is the dictator. it's plausible that some of us was left over. the way people see it it's mostly through his style of writing which has long been known and well understood that there are similarities between seminary's catechism and about the trotsky stuff. the book treats trotsky and lenin as important personalities and goes through thoroughly to paint them as human beings and to get a sense of what they were like and the stalin trotsky relationship is the very core part of the biggest section of part three and i believe there is well-documented significant new information about the important role of trotsky and stalin's personality formation and also the limitations of

trotsky expressed in the book. >> i'm interested the way you are speaking about resources where was recognized the character of stalin. i was wondering if you talk more about what source of behavior but set off those alarms that could top bolshevik inner circle's? >> that's a great questions ... think about this. there is speculation that stalin snapped. he snapped for example when his wife his second wife committed suicide. his first wife died horrifically of disease. he married again. the second wife committed suicide in late 1932. this is a moment which was the moment he became sociopathic. now we can see very clearly

certainly in 1928 and i show in the book in 1927 and he is exhibiting this behavior. so therefore the suicide of his wife in 1932 which is the subject of volume two, it's not in this volume one might've had a big effect on him. i will do it that in the second volume but did not produce the sociopathic stalin. what we see in 1927 not quite in 1926 but what we see in 1927 ramp or she's 491927 is going to be 50 in 1928 when the first volume ends. he's 49 years old and if you have known him for 25 or 30 years and some of you people have known them for that long long and others have known him for only 20 years which is still a sufficient amount of time.

in 1927 they begin to talk among themselves a little bit about his behavior and they begin to worry a little bit that it's more than just odd. but they seem to come to the conclusion that it's manageable. because he's very talented which they also recognized, talented dictator. he's not a talented democrat. he said not a talented parliamentarian. he's not a talented mother teresa charity worker. he's a talented ruler of tyrannical and authoritarian regime which seems to be under siege and therefore needs somebody to deal with the enemies. so they recognized his powers and they seem to come to the conclusion that managing without him would be more difficult than trying to manage the increasingly emerging personality traits that are threatening. one of the things i show in the book is he resigns again and again. i go through in detail about

where, how the psychology was affected by certain events and one of his expressions of his feelings is to force his colleagues to reaffirm his authority by resigning. by writing or late again and again and again. they have opportunity after opportunity including in december 1927 just before he goes to siberia on the trip that culminates the book and announces that he's going to collectivize the peasantry enslave the peasantry. in december 1927 before the january 1928 trip to siberia to announce collective that -- collectivization he resigns again. there they are in a room and they have begun to see this aspect of his personality more clearly. but instead of getting up and

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

abilities. a result of which they concluded that they could maybe manage him even though they were beginning to see a side of him. think maybe we have time for one more. >> during the 20s when you were saying between 22 onward to 26 and 27, wouldn't you imagine, i mean you know better than i having a job such as his job had to be extremely taxing on anyone. i mean working in a very imperfect and messy system. it's a huge country and the best you can accomplish is not going to really show great improvement.

so as much as you know about him as a person is it possible to imagine just the burnout alone, i mean even though he has learned her was good at assumption and the way the job requires him to function he might still have been burned out out. to me could possibly be enough. my other question is how much did he know it about the outside world such as this one could have had him alone in a room and asked him how much did he know about the american revolution have these people came together and try to create --

>> did he know and did he have an appreciation for the differences? >> on the issue of the difficulty of the job wanted the original point i made was dictatorship had to be built and had to be sustained. he did that work. he inherited the basis of the dictatorship in iraq willfully built that dictatorship up and sustained it and it was an enormous task. it was very taxing just like you say. he did experience moments when he felt he would break and couldn't take it anymore and we have some documentation of them expressing that desire for a holiday or a break from work. at the same time he was a deeply political animal. he loved politics. he lived for politics. he lived to be the dictator and he lived to be the ruler. even on a burned out, even when

they went on holiday which was much later than he anticipated he brought his work with him and he continued to be a dictator while on holiday. there's almost no downtime for stalin no downtime. and the pressure gets heavier and heavier and the regime gets narrower and narrower and he gets more and more responsibility as time goes by. this has an effect on him. now let's take the issue of the outside world. he was extremely well read. he wasn't autodidact. he read tremendous amounts when he was young and he never ceased reading. one of the things he read was about the outside world about foreign policy, about theories of rule ge