Stephen Kotkin on Putin, Stalin, Russia's Perpetual Geopolitics, and the War in Ukraine

Stephen Kotkin, a renowned historian specializing in Russia and Eastern Europe, offers a rigorous analysis of Vladimir Putin's regime by drawing parallels and crucial distinctions with Joseph Stalin. While acknowledging Stalin's singular brutality and scale of power, Kotkin argues that Putin operates within a long-standing Russian geopolitical dilemma: managing aspirations of grandeur and a special mission in the world from a position of relative weakness compared to the West. This historical pattern often leads to attempts at "coercive modernization" and building a "strong state," which paradoxically result in personalist dictatorships that ultimately worsen Russia's international standing and capabilities.\n\nKotkin emphasizes that Russia's aggressive foreign policy is not an inherent cultural trait but a strategic choice. He sharply contrasts Ukraine's flawed but functioning democracy, characterized by an open public sphere and a real parliament, with Russia's corrupt autocracy, which lacks checks on executive power, an independent judiciary, or genuine freedom of speech. He directly challenges the narrative, often associated with figures like Oliver Stone and John Mearsheimer, that NATO expansion or Western actions forced Putin's hand in the invasion of Ukraine, citing numerous international treaties affirming national sovereignty and the West's consistent, often self-detrimental, efforts to integrate Russia into global institutions.\n\nThe analysis delves into the deep psychological underpinnings of the current Russian leadership, particularly the concept of \"abijania\" – a profound resentment among those who felt like \"losers in the transition\" after the Soviet collapse. This resentment fuels both domestic \"restealing\" of wealth and an international drive to reverse perceived losses of power and influence, a project Kotkin views as delusional given Russia's diminished capabilities. He also re-evaluates the Cold War, arguing it was a necessary and creditable response to genuine threats and aggression, not merely a convenient search for an enemy by the West.\n\nUltimately, Kotkin places the Ukraine conflict within a broader context of Eurasian authoritarianism (Russia, Iran, China) pushing against Western power. He highlights that while the Putin regime's greatest victims were initially domestic Russians, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has shifted that, though the long-term suffering and stifling of potential for the Russian people under autocracy remain immense, leading to a significant exodus of its citizens. The core distinction lies in institutional frameworks that protect freedom, rule of law, and civil liberties, which are absent in Russia.

"Putin's in the same building as Stalin he uses some of the same offices as Stalin used and some of those the television broadcasts that we see of Putin at meetings and Putin inside the Kremlin Stalin used to sit in those rooms and hold meetings in those rooms."

"This combination of weakness and grandeur right of of not being as strong as the West but aspiring to be as great or greater than the West that's the dilemma of Russian history for the past many centuries."

"The quest to build a strong state and use coercive modernization to try somehow if not to close the gap with the West at least to manage it and the result is different versions of personalist rule so they don't build a strong state they build a personal dictatorship they build an autocracy."

"This is not a story of eternal Russian cultural proclivity to aggression right it's not something that's in the mother's milk it's not something that can't be changed Russia doesn't have an innate cultural tendency to aggression this is a choice."

"Despite all the empirics of it you have Patrushev and likely Putin talking about this multi-decade Western conspiracy to bring Russia down at the same time as that's happening the Germans are voluntarily increasing their dependence on Russian energy."

"You have a profound psychological a whole generation of people who are on the losing end domestically and reverse that domestically that's what the Putin regime is about."

"The Cold War was not a mistake it was not a misunderstanding we don't have to blame someone for the Cold War we have to give credit for the Cold War the Truman administration deserves credit for standing up to Stalin's regime."

"Ukraine was a flawed democracy before Russia invaded it's utterly corrupt many ways dysfunctional especially the elites were dysfunctional... and yet Ukraine had an open public sphere and it had a parliament that functioned and so despite its flaws it was still a democracy."