>> good evening everyone, , and welcome to the new york historical society. i'm dale gregory, vice president for public programs, and is always a thrill to welcome you to our spectacular robert a smith auditorium. the knights program, "stalin: waiting for hitler, 1929-1941" is part of the distinguished speaker series which is the heart of our public programs and we always want to thank mr. swartz for all the support which

has enabled us to invite so many prominent authors. [applause] >> i i would also like to recognize and thank new york historical trustee, chairman emeritus roger herzog, who is responsible for the 2011 renovation of new york historical society building as well as this magnificent robert a smith auditorium during his tenure as chairman. let's give him a big hand, thank you. [applause] i also want to recognize and thank trustees barry barnett, joe pickett, ira and all the wonderful chapmans councilmembers with us with a great work and support as well. a few. [applause] so the program tonight will last an hour, include a question-and-answer session, and the q and who will be conducted

via written questions on cards. you should receive a card and a pencil. if you haven't, the staff are circulating right net and more out and they will be collected later on in the program. there will be a formal book signing in our ny history store on the 77th street side of our building, and copies of the books will be available for sale. we are thrilled to welcome stephen kotkin back to new york historical society. he's a professor holding joint appointments in the history department in the woodrow wilson school at princeton university. he's also a fellow at stanford universities hoover institution. the author of several critically acclaimed books, his latest "stalin: waiting for hitler, 1929-1941", the second of three planned point on the life and times of the soviet dictator. before we begin i'd like to ask

that you please turn off your cell phones, electronic devices, and now please join me in welcoming stephen kotkin. thank you. [applause] >> good evening everyone. there is a little madeleine albright stool her vx at up to speak the podium. that's with the called cold ane state department, the madeleine albright stool, but i'm not going to use the podium if that's okay. i normally walk around the room. in fact, i walk all the way around so that i can check the sales, and j. crew. and i'm speaking -- yes. got to check up out how much te sweatpants costs during the lecture.

it's only $55,000 $55,000 a yeu can't check the sales on j. crew when it's not a lecture or get to check during the i see no one has the laptop open right now. so this seems to be a more engaged audience than i am used to. [laughing] let's see how this is going to go. so there's this guy, and is on his deathbed turkeys that maybe hours to live, if that. and he's very agitated and he's got to get something off his chest. his wife is by the bedside in the hospital, and he's trying, trying, finally, he does it picky says to her, i've got to tell you something. i cheated on you. and the wife looks at him and she says, why do you think i poisoned you? [laughing]

and her name is melania. [laughing] do we have time for questions? [laughing] little did i know, dale, a biography of stall which i began many years ago was going to become a self-help book when it was published. [laughing] but here we are. so this is not the trump lecture. i i also do a trump lecture. maybe i'll be invited back for that, we'll see, i don't know. this is the stall and lecture. so stall and waiting for hitler opens in 1929. the year before, he has announced in a small group he has blurted out that is going to collective eyes agriculture by

force. now, there's something called the peasant commune, not in the entire eurasia but in the russian ports, for example, body in ukraine, not in baltics. the communes collectively redistribute land after a death in the family or a a berth in e family or a calamity so that those who have less land and need more can get a a little bt more, and those were fine can give up a look at atlanta. but after the land is redistributed it work individually. individual household farms. so the commune is not collectively working the land. this is what collectivization of agriculture entails, and the reason he has done this, the reason stalin has decided to do this in 1928, now is going to pose in 1929, is because he's a communist. i know that sounds hard to believe, but the key secret of the communist party archives, the ones that were classified

and hidden and it wouldn't talk about them and would let you see them, the key secret of those archives is that when you get to see the communists behind closed doors, it turns out that they are communists. instead of saying, , oh, you kn, all that nonsense, the working-class, imperialism, the bourgeoisie, , we can relax now. nobody is watching. we can talk about what we really care about. instead, when they are behind closed doors nobody is watching. they don't think anybody is going to find out. all the talk about, working-class, bourgeoisie, if you listen. stalin's argument is as follows. he says while we have socialism in the cities, state owned state managed economy. so-called planned economy, or five-year plan. but in the countryside the peasants have had their own revolution in 1917, 1918.

they evicted the gentry class from the land. that is to say, they get rid of the land owners and they themselves become the de facto land owners, about 25 million peasant households. this is all to the 1920s, and the peasants, some of them are quite hard-working. so one day they have two cows, they were card, you get a third cow, they continue to work, they get a fourth care. they may in fact, hire other villagers to work for them because their farms are successful. well, this is capitalism. this is hired labor, otherwise known as wage slavery, as marx called it. stalin calls this in the jargon of the time culottes farms. slang, it means just pick it means these people kind of holding the others in the fifth. it's a derogatory term. so the regime is dependent on the size of the harvest. they need more grain but as the

peasants are successful, there are threats to the regime because they are quote better off farmers. this is the paradox the regime has, inflated its self in the cities and in the countryside. there's de facto private ownership of the land, a clause i market economy, and there are some peasants, not that many, who are doing well. and, in fact, because they're doing well the people in the cities are eating. but stalin says we can't have two systems. socialism in the city, and capitalism in the countryside. because the marxists believes that the social base, the social relations of production determines the political system over the long haul. so capitalism in the countryside with the vast majority of people live, about 120 million of the 140 or 115 million people, live

in the countryside. capitalism there needs the regime over the long-term is not viable. it will be undone by this new world bourgeoisie that is fully. so stalin argues this and he says, we're going to now collective eyes agriculture. the other people in the regime, they are no friends of pattersons, they don't like markets, they are not happy with capitalism in the countryside, they're committed to eradicating capitalism to get the socialism and then eventually to get to communism. .. so voluntarycollectivization,

you're going to wait a long time for that to happen. however, those people who voluntarily collected lies to their farms are the ones who can't make it . the individual household farms. the only way to do it is by force. active application of force. coercive, wholesale, collective so this is what stalin is going to do now. the other members of the inner-circle and wider part of the regime, the second echelon, this third act on say it's crazy, you can't really do this. where are we going to get all that force from? who's going to do all that and don't you think it would be catastrophic western mark well , we won't increase the harvest. stalin says we need mechanization, right? we need a grana me and fertilizer and consolidation

of farms to get scale, just like is happening in america and they all agree with this. stalin says our tiny household farms is not going to get us that. we need consolidation, big collectivization. they say we can still do that with the model we have. please don't try to impose this by force. they are communists too and stalin says you don't have the courage of your convictions. do you believe in socialism and communism or you don't. either we are going to eradicate capitalism in the countryside or we are going to surrender. you might think, why don't they just allow the successful peasants to continue to grow their farms, acquire more towels and to build a larger scale agriculture through their

hard work once again, the answer is that's capitalism. we can't have that. that's what they did in america . we are a socialist country run by a communist party. of course, stalin is undeterred, tremendous willpower. maneuverability, shrewdness and he outmaneuvered them all . and it forces this mass wholesale coercive collectivization across eurasia affecting 120 million people. it's just breathtaking that he's able to do this, what he does is he insights class warfare in the villages. he pits one group ofpeasants against the other . he imposes quotas for the number of rich peasants who have to be expropriated and shot or deported . so if this were a village, he would say 10 percent of you,

40 of you are better off peasants and have to be deported to the wastes of siberia and the rest of you are going to join the collectives. it turns out that not four of you but 10 of you are better off. that is to say you have three or four orfive cows and the rest of you aren't as well off , but if you say this is a crazy idea, that it had you're now a better off peasants or you are in codes with the better off peasants. so the quotas which have to be met, the peasants get together and they begin to protect themselves by saying no, it's not me, it's you. and they point the fingers at each other. this process, this stirring of hatred and grievances, for example, somebody looks at someone else's wife a few years ago and a peasant remembers that and that grievance becomes the impetus

for now pointing out who's an enemy, who is a henchman or objectively in cahoots with the international bourgeois's. stalin tours up this process. the process of hatred and jealousy and revenge and violence . and it turns out his critics are right. the critics who said it's dangerous if we do this, you're going to destabilize the situation, the harvest is going to be worse, not better. they actually proved to be correct. however, they are correct, well beyond what they even predicted. and as the process launched in 1929, there is a lucky artist the first year in 1930 and then there's a drought followed by torrential rain in 1931. a dislocation, the peasant resistance, the deportations, deporting the people who can

work. they are getting rid of the better off peasants and others getting caught up in the process. as a catastrophic 1931 to 33. about 5 to 7 million people starve to death. and 50 million to 70 million people starve that survive. then it's not just about those who perish, but also those who are malnourished, the children who are malnourished and this is the legacy that last a long time. but the horrendous efforts and the famine last and persists 1932, 1933. there's even a famine in 1934 in some places by 1934, the harvest is better. the surviving peasants plant the grain and the collectives and harvest the grain though they actually saved stalin's regime, the peasants who were enslaved and forced into these collectives across

eurasia. this episode, why is it important? it's important because stalin does does not flinch. he doesn't say you know, you guys were right, i did destabilize the situation. i shouldn't have done that. let's go back . let'sretreat . he continues to press forward all the way through the famine, using some of the famine and dislocation in order to finish the job of collectivization. and by 1934, he has eradicated capitalism in the countryside. and now he's being celebrated even by his critics for having done what nobody thought could be done. which was to impose collective farms across 1/6 of the earth. this social engineering. this episode, what happens sometimes with ideas, and

ideas can be noble or ignoble. the methods can be noble or ignoble in implementing what happens sometimes with ideas, ideas that are noble, we get that. we allow for that and we celebrate that but when somebody is an idealist or has ideas and the ideas are monstrous, or the implementation, the means are monstrous, we tend to talk about opportunism, lust for power and also some other attributes which of course are present, but we tend not to give as much to the ideas when the ideas themselves are anathema. this episode and many other episodes in the book in my view indicates that there is an idealist here, a communist idealist, a communist true

believer, yes he's an opportunist. yes he's bending this way and that way and is flexible the way lenin taught him. yet he's trying to aggrandize and gain even more power over those who already have leadership. but he's doing this because he believes this is necessary for the regime to survive, for socialism to be built and for social justice to be achieved. the elimination of capital. he firmly , deeply believes this in documents are very numerous. about his beliefs or his discussions of his motivations during this and other processes. so we need to take seriously sometimes even when the person is not to our liking, even when the ideas are not to ourliking. just as there's a lot of opportunism with noble ideas . there is course idealism with monstrous ideas as well. anyway, so this opens the

book. stalin presses this collectivization forward. they get nearly 100 percent collectivization. they force the nomads in context on all the hurting. the grazing land into collective farms which they end up losing most of their livestock. the famine in kazakhstan is by far theworst . the costs are astronomical. stalin sees an instrument of the movement of history and this is all justified and necessary but what happens is during the process, he was being criticized. first they doubted him when it started. and then when he destabilize everything, the famine, that broke out, the disease, accompanying the famine, it was horrible. officials began whispering behind his back and sometimes not behind his back .

criticizing what he had done. so this roy told him to no end. it made him so angry that he was doing the hard thing that they said couldn't be done, but needed to be done. they agreed that capitalismin the countryside had to be eliminated, but they were too afraid to try or incapable of trying. and he wasn't afraid. he did it. and they had the severity , to all criticizing. this deeply got under his skin. and we see this anger and resentment over the criticism of collectivization coming back again and again and again to a further episode in the regime including when he murders a large number of his self loyal elites in 1936 and 38 and is also covered in the book. so the argument of the book

is that it's not a personality that's formed in youth and then unleashed on the world. it is the experience of acquiring power, exercising power. life and death power over hundreds of millions of people. that experience is what forms the stalin home rule. in other words, it's a rule. it's theexperience of rule. it's running and building that dictatorship . and collective icing agriculture, imposing that communist system on this vast population. this experience, we all talk about how absolute power corrupts absolutely. that's a famous saying, right? well, power like that, absolute power also forms

personalities. whatever was there, whatever demonic internal roiling sentiments were there before, they were magnified deeply by this experience of rule. i could give many examples of this process at work. now, this is a long book. i've been told.it's 900 pages of text. my wife is kind enough to say that it reads like no more than 700. she said this about volume 1 also. the pages just fly by. so a book that big, it's very difficult to give a 30 or a 40 minute consultation of it but i want to take another episode, a second episode if that's okay besides the collectivization episode to illuminate the kinds of things you would find in the

book. i think i'm okay with time for a change. yes. so the second episode i'd like to talk about is the infamous hitler stalin pact. the hitler stalin pact. this is a book that has culture, domestic politics, the economy, foreign policy all in the same cover to cover between two covers. sometimes with stalin we get the culture in one book, the cultural specialists will take that on. we will get a foreign-policy in a separate book. my trip with stalin is to put everything that he ran, created, experienced, destroyed between the two covers. to bring together what it was like to be stalin, not to separate and compartmentalize. the other thing is the geography.there are whole days of stalin's life that i now know what he did waking up until going to bed.and what path to death that day

and while he put on the document.he's a human being. for example, he likes colored pencils. he likes green, red and blue colored pencils. the documents in the archive are full of his scribblings and scrolling's in these colored pencils. they are produced by the sacco and vanzetti factory. let's call it back. >> he smokes a pipe as you know. >> and he puts tobacco inside the pipe from cigarettes. this floor brand cigarette is his favorite. he unrolled the cigarette. takes the cigarette and dumps the tobacco into the pipe, whose cigarette? if he spills any tobacco on the table or the floor, he scooped it up. because he's a little bit of a neat freak.you know when you go to an overpriced restaurant and they have that

white piece of paper on the table on top of the tablecloth, and then after you are done eating the bread, they come with that letter opener thing and they take the bread crumbs and they take them away. that's what he did with the tobacco. if there was a hallway and a runner down the hallway, he walked on the runner and if somebody else that he saw was not on the runner, he would shout out, get on the carpet. he bowled, he loved a form of bowling. a russian form of bowling called hockey bowling. >> he loved the russian bathhouse. he loved to read. he read all the time, hundreds of pages of books. later on and he's murdering everybody he against a read about roman despotism. he thinks they are desperate in the roman story reading about augustus. so there's a person in their and it's hard to get inside that person.

it's hard to get in there but evil is much more interesting when it's human. so here we have the hitler saga, this infamous thing in august 1939. and one of the wise tales is this amazing number of false stories about stalin that are passed on from generation to generation and then you look to see the documents is asian, whereis this substantiated and often it's not . anyway, one of the wives tales is that he trusted nobody. he was a very suspicious person but somehow he trusted hitler. on the surface, it's kind of absurd. so my working hypothesis was let's assume he didn't trust hitler. potentially, and let's see what comes out. so just before, please remember, the munich pact in 1948 when i chamberlain and

britain and france hand hitler a piece of czechoslovakia with no compensation. there are atleast episodes before . but now we are in august 1969. all during the hitler stalin pact negotiations stalin is at war with japan. that's these station studies so those are usually in different books from the hitler stalin pact which is european. onceagain, the compartmentalization process . so he's at war against a very substantial army, the japanese army on the borderlands of mongolia, there's the japanese have conquered manchuria, created a puppet state. in the earlier part of the 30s so that's happening and

now he's negotiating with hitler. so he reads up. they have a translation of mine, internally produced for the regime. stalin has an eight take care of this,delivers the mein kampf translation so he's underlining with those colored pencils , underlining . some humans. the underlying fact. it says drive to the east. he underlines that. you start to get the impression that he got something out of mein kampf. and he got the point. but that book is about. and then you see that he read other things. he read abiography of hitler . in russian translation. the main argument of which is hitler never keeps any of his agreements. he's a liar. never keeps his agreements so here stalin is negotiating and he says hitler never keeps his agreements. you begin to see that he is trusting of hitler. hitler understood the trust as he told him. so anyway, hitler's the one

who needs todeal because he's decided to attack poland . and britain and france have allowed publicly to defend poland. and so if the soviet union joins britain and france, germany is potentially surrounded and has a two front war to fight . so hitler's concerned to get his eastern flank stabilized with a nonaggression pact. stalin has a lot of leverage in those negotiations. he hasn't told a lot of peoplethat these negotiations are going on because he's suspicious . and the night before the troubles, hitler's foreign minister on behalf of the the table. night before, stalin says to this guy nikita khrushchev was aprotcgc of stalin at

this point , he says he's flying in and stalin had this perverse sense of humor that everyone in the regime is the with. holland won't see somebody for a long time and then will see them and say what, you haven't been arrested yet? that's his sense of humor. how would you like to work in that regime? anyway, so chris jeff, yes, ruben chavez flying to moscow. it's the communists, they hate each other. nothing but pouring filled over each other in their propaganda and chris jeff doesn't know what to say so he takes it as a joke, he's going to join the communist party. stalin says no, ribbon chavez flying to moscow. anyway, to get towards the end, of this story, stalin hasn't told many people, he just told krista the night before.

he hasn't told the border guards so ruben shaw is flying on hitler's personal plane, the condor across from kaliningrad. into soviet territory and the soviet border guards don't know. it's an unadorned identified plane and they begin to shoot the antiaircraft guns. and they miss. they miss ribbon shots plane so he lands safely in moscow. can you imagine stalin telling hitler, have the antiaircraft not miss, what was a misunderstanding. he invited your foreign minister to moscow and we forgot to tell the border guards and they shot him down, i'm so sorry. it won't happen again. you can only imagine how history would have come out had they hit that plane. instead, the plane lands safely.

he is received at the airport with stalin's personal armored packard. and there's a picture of this in the book just like there's a picture of hitler's plane with him on it which comes from his photo album. there's a picture also in the book of stalin's armored packard with a flag on it. rubinchov, which is the private newsreel of the landing that was made for stalin personally. a little snippet. anyway, rubinchov goes to the kremlin and starts negotiate, video is about hitler. most of poland, stalin gets the other side of poland, poland's going to disappear. there's going to be spheres of influence beyond poland. the deal is done, the map is arranged, they agree on where the line goes down in poland. hitler is overjoyed. and nazis invaded poland,

september 1, 1939. a week after ribbentrop has been in moscow. and stalin is supposed to invade poland from the other side he doesn't do anything. he just watches as poland has an army, and air force. maybe they're going to bomb the germans out. it turns out that the polls fight heroically but they don't bond the germans down. the nazis brick blitzkrieg, is not call back yet, slices through. and lo and behold already september 16, 17, 18, the german forces are on stalin's side of the line. >> so think about this. there's a map, they agree. and stalin got what with him?

this piece of paper. that ribbentrop had signed on behalf of hitler. and then german army is moving eastward. stalin's direction. and now they're on the other side of the line that was agreed. so he sends a minion in berlin to meet with the head of german intelligence and what's going on here, the minion gets into the office, there's a giant map on the table and the mac shows the german forces where they are with the little stick pins, on the military map and the mac shows that they are on stalin's side of the line. this is reported back to stalin that they are mapping this . in to the german headquarters. so he calls in the german military attachc. stationed in moscow. says you guys, you're on my side of the line. it's just a misunderstanding. we will fix this. don't worry. he says well, we were killing

the polls. and the polls are running. they're running away so in order to chase them and wipe them out, we have to go farther than we thought we were going to go. and it just so happens that the side of the line where the germans are that was supposed to be stalin's, that's where the oilfields are. the deletion oilfields. around the city of wolf london baird. you know that city? anyway, so just a coincidence, there on the side of the line of the oilfields. and his military attachc, he says if it's a misunderstanding, fine but we're going to take that territory back . and the red army , they go in . forcibly seizing back the oilfields. september 19, 1939. the red army and the where not engage in skirmishes and

there are casualties on both sides. so that's your hitler stalin pact. stalin forcibly takes, remember, there are casualties on both sides this is real engagement. he forcibly takes those oilfields on his side of the map. during the middle, hitler himself is in poland .he's in a coastal resort on the baltic sea. and hitler gives the order in themiddle of it while stalin is forcing the germans back , he gives the order to retreat . he says we shouldn't be there, get out of there and as the germans are retreating, they are angry. they need that oil. they earned it, they took it so they fire at the soviets as they are retreating. stalin draws the conclusion that the german army wants war with the soviet union and hitler is the restraining

force. exactly the opposite. of what the facts were. so this is a gigantic important episode . you're going to say what happens to the oil? of course, stalin is selling , there's a trade for economic dimensions of the pack because stalin is selling the german army green and. in exchange for german military or german weapons, german military industry. so stalin is selling the germans oil that the germans had seized themselves in exchange for state of the art german armaments. so you can only imagine how happy that makes the germans feel. it's the oil that they took, they are now paying for. they had to give it back but they are paying for it. there are episodes like this

that you need to get a fresh look at and you need to put yourself into stalin's mindset area or understanding what the world look like from his point of view. not because we have to validate his point of view, i have very little sympathy for the values that he practices in stalin's regime. i would say eurocentric but in order to understand how this regime operated, what type of person he was rather than assert our assumptions or impose our assumptions on his way of thinking, he's got a japanese moving in his direction, the german army moving in the west and now they are on the other side of that line that he's agreed, he's got a slip of paper and he's been writing checkmarks about hitler never keeps agreements right before they did the pact so you have to say to yourself, it could be that stalin didn't trust him.

anyway, thank you for your attention.maybe we will take some questions now. [applause] okay. here we go. these are your questions. and as you can see i'm taking the top one. you know how dealers are, right? and i'm nothing of the sleeves. no questions that i wrote myself. >> your trusting me? you want to sign a pack? here we go. during the famine and post famine, did the worldwide financial depression affects russia? excellent question. so one of the things about communism was that the timing was good. you see, the capitalism is the reason you have socialism

because capitalism is no good if socialism is going to be better. capitalism is in the great depression, it has mass unemployment, it's got fascist militarism. it imperialism or colonies all over the world so in the 1930s against that background, socialism has full employment. it is has got a stated piece policy rather than an aggression. >> it's got self-determination rather than colonialism or imperialism. so in the 1930s, despite the famine, despite the 5 to 7 million deaths and the 50 million to 70 million carving to survive, like that many people around the world, not just in the soviet union are looking at this and saying this is better for this could work. but what happens after world war ii is the soviet union again assumes that capitalism will have another great

depression. in fact, this is the basis, the core of stalin's grand strategy , that the great depression, boom and bust is inherent in the capitalist system. the problem for stalin is that capitalism forgot to have another great depression after world war ii. instead, it had a middle-class economic boom and my father who work in an embroidery factory bought house. in the post-world war ii economic boom. japan, west germany, just a tremendous story. again, against that background socialism doesn't look as good. and this is the problem for socialism. the problem for socialism is only necessaryif capitalism isn't working , socialism is going to be better. so if capitalism is working at her and better, there's no reason for socialism anymore and that dynamic is the

reverse in the 1930s during the famine and so many people unfortunately excused the famine precisely because they see capitalism is horrific, mass unemployment, fascist aggression, imperialism and socialism have to be better than that even if it's got some growing pains. do you see parallels between stalin and trump work stalin and steve madden? so it took until the second card. let's give the audience credit. we asked a legitimate question for the first question. and here we are now with stalin and trump. yes. so let's say a few things about stalin. 16 to 20 million people died. as a result of stalin. i don't know where you are with trump that i don't think we are there yet.

it's that kind of stuff. stalin was diligent. he worked all day, 16, 18 hour days. showed up at the office all day. convened meetingswith officials . there was an interagency process, there was a policy process . yes, stalin was also the guy we know who was a sociopath. but he built a military industrial superpower. there's no question he presided over that and had quite a lot to do with that. there are few people in stalin's category. hitler, maybe. mao. and who else? i handfulof mother-in-law's . that's really it. i don't think trump is in thatcategory for everything that we could say about trump .

but god willing, in 2024, we will be done with trump. hello new york. right? 1.1, 7 million? hillary clinton won new york by including new york city, 1.5 million votes. she won california by 4.2 million. in other words, trump won the united states of america by 3 million votes excluding california and newyork . that's something to remember also. and if we run up thescore again , the democrat in the next election wins new york not by 1.7 million by 3.7 million, guess what? same score because it's not about new york and california . okay. what do you consider the most common misapprehension's of the spanish war?

we've got history buffs in the audience keeping me on my toes. another very good question. the spanish civil war as you know is this episode 1936 to 1939. there is a spanish republic, and attempted which by generals, one of whom is francisco franco. this little pipsqueak. and he's not the only one, there's this guy general mullah. franco, a couple others. elderly. his son giorgio was in exile in portugal, goes back to spain the putsch but it's such a dandy, and so much luggage that his plane crashes. and he never makes it to the putsch. the reason there's a putsch is because they don't like the republic, they don't like democracy. they don't like the anti-clerical is him what

they're afraid of, leftism which they consider to the bolsheviks or socialist movement. the putsch is not supported by the entire country. there's assistance to the putsch as a result of which spain descended into civil war. colin intervenes in the civil war on behalf of the republic to help it defend itself against franco and franco's helpmate's inside spain and outside spain like mussolini and hitler. this becomes a kind of big moral struggle between fascism and anti-fascism or between franco and his putsch and the left. the left is made up of many, many different groups. anarchists to communists to splinter communist to democratic socialists and there it was called a popular putsch, a popular elect, no enemies to the left.

so the main misapprehension of the spanish civil war, by the way, just a few years ago we finally get the documents on stalin's intervention in the civil war. so we have a new story now that we have before his detailed and one of thelonger chapters . but the main misapprehension is that the popular front in spain, the coalition to oppose the putsch in the civil war against franco, that collective popular front fail, it goes because stalin was evil. and it began to conduct purchase arrests and assassinations on the left, dividing the left as a result of which it was weekend and stalin didn't want a leftist revolution or he wanted only a communist version and it was weekend and therefore franco one. this is a story that is aerobically told in many great memoirs, george orwell has an absolutely brilliant book that makes a version of

this line and orwell himself was a participant as you know and was wounded in the spanish civil war. anyway was there, it was very heavily romanticized. so the facts are the following. the popular front on the left failed on its own terms. because the socialists and the communists in spain hated each other. there was such a goal between the socialists and the communists. the communists didn't want to cooperate with the socialists . because the communists didn't believe the socialists work for real. they thought that they were actually apologists for capitalism, that they were going to keep the markets and private property, not go all the way.the way lenin, stalin and the communists would go. and the socialists expected the communists were not being truthful when they said they were in coalition with the socialists parliamentary regime with private property,

that the communists were working behind the scenes to undermine them so the socialists stressed the communists, the communists distressed the socialists you see this warfare on the left, a civil war inside thespanish civil war on the left . which cripples the ability to fight. even before stalin 's skulduggery is then added to the mix. and in fact it's stalin who's restraining the communists to force them into this coalition on the left and he's the one who's trying to make the popular front work, even as he's assassinating individuals. now, franco wins the war because there is a popular front on the right. which is acceptable. in other words, the right is a bunch of groups also disparate. monarchists. all the way to fascists.

traditionalist catholics, right? big mix on the right and franco is able to marginalize the spanish fascists who are quite small in number and to build this popular front on the right to mystically area and in fact, that's one of the main reasons he wins the civil war. so an wins through political means. he's dexterous politically and the left is condemned by its own civil war. inside itself. training those who accept parliament, private property and markets, one on a welfare state version of socialism. versus those who are more lenin and stalin. >> i could give you many more details but then again, it's in the book. for those people who are thinking that the holidays are coming and the spanish civil war is just the thing you want to give asa gift ,

dad or a grandpa or your children who are ceased reading, after they turned five and discovered your phone, all right. i got another one, this was inserted up to the top line but not by me. so i my conscious is still mostly clear at this point. what does stalin like in his interpersonal relationships with women? was he a harvey weinstein type or not? >> i added that one. >> what was he like with women, that's here. the other part is ripped from the headlines. you get punchy, i don't know about you but i read out to princeton on the thing that we can continually to this day we're calling a train.

but if you've ever been on it, it does not merit that name. it makes all local stops including those docs which are on the schedule. and it just sits there. in the middle of doing nothing with no announcement or if there's an announcement, it's best. that's my life now. yet, it's called new jersey transit. all right, has anybody ever been on that thing? it makes the lirr and metro-north look like the japanese bullet train. so i was on that. on the 630 out of penn station this morning to go out there and check j.crew sales. >> and here i am now, i think it's nighttime. in new york.let's do the women thing. so there's a lot of stuff in the book about stalin's personal relations. he didn't have a harem.

most dictators have a harem. you know mussolini, you know there are mistresses and there are others besides the mistresses . concubines, whatever and it's pretty cool that they do this. sometimes it's extremely coercive. he had a harem and a lot of it was coerced. women were pulled in off the streets by some of various henchmen it looks like, we don't know for sure because of the documents vanished. anyway, stalin has no harem. he doesn't have very many mistresses either. it's hard to identify mistresses. that is to say, in documentation, substantiated. there are rumors and there are some memoirs about how i was stalin's mistress. many years after he's dead. valentina worked at the place

where stalin lived and people think after stalin's wife committed suicide in november 1932, that stalin had a lifelong affair with valentina. you check the documentation, is still began working at the dublin in 1946 so that tells you what that old wives tale is worth. we have a wife who died young , his first wife from disease in baku married in 1907. he seems to have loved her. there's a photograph in my first volume taken from the georgian archives of her funeral. he then remarried. he was also very much older than his second wife not. and she was a teenager.

when he married, his second wife and he loved her. there's no question he loved her but he was not a very good husband. he neglected her the same way he neglected his two children. he had one child from his first wife who was georgian and then he had two children, a spec llama from his second wife nadia. in his own way he loved her. he was very difficult. i know this audience understands what it means to be a difficult husband. as joan rivers once said, how many husbands go down to the corner store for a quart of milk and never come back? not enough. he was that kind of husband.

there weren't very many women in the regime in positions of authority. very few in fact. that's the sort of larger patriarchal culture of russia. >> and stalin loved his daughter that lana much more than just his two boys who doted on her for a while but it was very difficult for the children after the mother died. they were raised by the bodyguards and the other staff personnel. anyhow, so not an exemplary father. not an exemplary husband. but minimal relations with women. because he was a workaholic. and spent almost all his time building this military, socialist military industrial complex. shall we do a couple more? are we okay? one more. all right.

i have more than one in front of me. lenin would have been better with him. lenin had none of collins charm. that's for sure. none of it.was there a realistic prospect of an anglo-french expedition versus the ussr to aid poland or finland? yes. anglo-french expedition? [laughter] this audience has a sense of humor. what do we got here? how did stalin react to anti-semitism in mein kampf? the primary documents offer any insight? that's a good one because he's accused of being an anti-semi but it turns out that stalinhad no special anti-semitism . that we normally associate with. he's got some kind of normal anti-semitism of that time in

that part of the world. let's get a good question and on. oh my god. okay, let's put those aside. okay. we're getting down to the nitty-gritty here dale. here we go, you mention in your book stalin was an avid reader and collector on books. who do you consider to be his longest literary influences out of these writers affect his policies within each. >>. >> it's linen hay. just being pedantic for a second. i am a college professor, after all. >> okay. well, that's one of the

really important things about this. he's a driver, self-government. he does really well in school as ayouth . in fact, he almost he's top of his class. very successful. however, he gives it up for the struggle for social justice because the sars regime is oppressive and he commits his life to social justice. in fact, he spends almost 20 years in the revolutionary underground before 1917 with no job, no money and in exile, imprisonment, estate, police surveillance, back into prison, back into exile but he never gives up area is dedicated to the revolutionary cause. that's part of his idealism story. and he's reading. this whole time and he's got the self betterment

autodidact message. and he likes other people who arelike this. and if you look at his library, his library was dispersed unfortunately. they only get together the books, 500 or so that had his markings in them . 20,000 or so books in his personal library but he didn't have any markings in them. his record collection was also dispersed unfortunately, many of his private photos were lost. but what we do have is the marks in the lending. he constantly read marx and lenin. he put these little white strips of paper inside the book. so that he could find the quotes really handily. so if there was something that lenin said about i don't know, the british or agriculture or whatever, stalin had a white mark but after a while, he knew lenin so closely that he could quote by heart in many of these passages. he also read novels. in fact, he line editednovels .

he would receive a novel or a play or poetry from a writer and he would go through them and make editorial changes, the way for example my editor did at penguin press. and you look at the editing and sometimes the editing was quite good. sometimes it was political and sometimes it was literary and aesthetic and wasn't as important. he screened all the films that he wanted to see and made edits for suggestions or what needed to be done before they were released to the public. he read as i said, as he got one in the 1930s and began to murder his own loyal officials, he read up on despotism. he read quite a lot of russianhistory , imperial russian history, roman history and ancient persian history shows his caucuses influence for example. the ancient persian dynasty,

the medial persian dynasty. he knew quite a lot about them and spent a lot of time with them. he read the classics as we would call them. his favorite, his writer was bogle potentially in terms of the old writers. because gogol portrayed the lens as real people. and stalin like that a lot. not just the heroes but also the villains were believable. >> he read literature in translation. quite a bit. so we think he read about 200 pages a day. most of that was military and intelligence and civilian domestic intelligence files. it's a kind of worldview, suspicious worldview about entities, internal and external blood collected any files and his instructions or

his reactions to the files made them more like what he was looking for and it became kind of echo chamber in a way. but he spent a lot of time with interrogation protocols. he read these, in other words people were tortured to confess and stalin read through hundreds of pages of these. he's a very contradictory person, very clever but at the same time blinkered because he's got these primitive categories of imperialism or bourgeoisie, a broad think about strategy and how the world works, but at the same time murdering people who are loyal to him and not forgetting any slight . all of this is who stalin is and i hope i captured him in the book. thank you . >>.

>> thank you so much. this was a great talk. i hope you will meet him and there are in our ny history bookstore. on the 77 street side of the building. he's happy to sign his book and chat with you a little bit. >> and we hope to see you back again, thank you. thank you all for coming. >>. >> tv has covered many books over the years on russia and its relationship with the united states. including those gary kasparov. masha geffen and more. you watched any of these programs online, visit booktv.org and type russia book in the search bar.

>> here's a look at some of the current best-selling nonfiction books according to the wall street journal. topping the list, fire and you, the walls expose on the white house. next real bernstein offers her advice on how to be less judgmental in the judgment detox. after that it's mark mansfield advice on leading a happier life . followed by your best year ever by michael hyatt and court with dietary advice in the whole theory. a look at some of the best-selling books according to the wall street journal continues with oprah winfrey's insights on the most meaningful conversations, the wisdom of sundays. next on the list another melissa hartwig book followed by walter isaacson's biography of leonardo da vinci. then neil degrasse tyson shares his research on university in astrophysics for people in every wrapping up a look at our books from the wall street journal's nonfiction bestseller list is

electron trump by former trump campaign manager corey lewandowski and deputy manager david moscowitz. many of these authors appeared on tv and you can watch them on our website, booktv.org. here's a look atsome of the best books of the year according to the washington trump . masha guess and reports on the generation of russians that came of age during the printing regime in the national book award winning the future is history. author and journalist matt taibbi explores the death of. >> barack obama three presidential years. washington post reporter kenneth details her experiences covering terrorist groups around the world in the book i was told to come alone and wrapping up our look at the washington post books of 2017 is a , neurobiologist robertson

police thoughts on how the brain affects humanbehavior. >> the next region that is incredibly interesting is called the insular cortex . now, the insular cortex is incredibly boring if you are a lab rat or any other animal in earth because it does something straightforward. you bite into a piece of food and its spoiled and rotten and fetid and rancid and all that and what happens is as a result your insular cortex activates and it triggers all sorts of reflexes. your stomach lurches, you gag, you spit it out, you have a gag reflex. useful. it keeps mammals from eating poisonous foods and you do the same thing with humans. get a human volunteer who is convinced to buy into this food that's rancid and disgusting. we do something fancier. all we have to do is think about eating something disgusting and the insular

cortex activates but then something much more subtle. sit down someone in your brain scanner and have them tell you about the time they did something miserable and rotten to some other human or tell them about some other occurrence of some human doing something miserable and rotten to somebody else and the insularcortex will activate . in every other mammal on earth, its gustatory discussed in us it also does moral disgust and what that tells you is why it is something is sufficiently morally appalling, we feel sick to our stomachs. it leaves abad taste in our mounts. we feel soiled by it. we feel nauseous . because our brain invented this embolic thing of morals and standards some 40, 2000 years ago and didn't invent a new part of the brain. instead there was possibly some sort of big committee meeting and theysaid moral disgust . there's that insular that

does like food discussed, okay. it's in their portfolio now. give me some duck tape and now the insular cortex is going to do moral disgust as well and it has trouble selling the difference. >> some of these authors will be appearing on book tv. watch them on a website, booktv.org . >> ..