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 con

the peasantry. the early weeks of the war. the cities like barcelona and madrid and elsewhere.rather desperately and spontaneously. malicious. very political groups and so forth. fighting desperately without much of in the way of military force. the opposite side had picked up one man's life. and so they keep the fascist forces out of there cities. the people of spain were not much better than the people he had been fighting in north africa. they were pacifying the towns that they took, march the way up the peninsula. that meant basically gathering all the men of military age and machine-gunning them all. a very bloody palms. the same time the militia angry as they were at the church, church, some 6,000 priests who were killed in the 1st weeks of the war by the civilian militias fighting against the fascists. .. all over spain. it shows a executing. there was an expression of the out of range in the way that they have been treated. frankly this arrived. and it just at the time there had been a gathering of people all over europe who are pro- spain who volunteered. it was the de

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 con

and the wealthy had suppressed the peasantry.and in the early weeks of the war when franco's mercenaries were fighting their way toward madrid and they're were some battles going on with the fascists side of the army like barcelona and madrid and elsewhere their had been the formation spontaneously of malicious under various political groups. fighting without much in the way of military force. they literally have so few guns that they were forced to wait until someone on the lines were shot. they were able to keep the fascist forces out of there cities. because we felt that the people of spain were not much better than the savages you been fighting in north africa they were pacifying at the same time at the same time there were some 6000 priests killed in the early weeks of the world by the civilian militias fighting against the fascists. once the government to cold and started to form the professional army the army officers defected to franco side. so the army was headless for a while. once the government started taking control

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 earl

about anna -- but you gave me the impression there was a capacity for social organization among the peasantry there that would have made things very messy and this idea is extremely interesting to me. i'm really eager to hear more about it. but i'm trying to put it together with your -- this other point about cotton being the sort of entry into the world market, or into manufacturing for -- at each point, countries or regions or places that are sort of trying to get in go via that route and so partly i'm also trying to understand whether there's a difference -- whether there's really small scale peasant cotton cultivation that doesn't involve this kind of resistance problem or whether -- i mean it's the plantation system and that did evoke for me forced collectivization. this idea of really organizing something where you just completely tear up whatever form of social organization people already have and just engineer it. >> right. >> can you say something about -- thank you. there's a lot to be said about this and this is basically the second half of the book so i cannot possibly summarize i