Putin inherited Stalin’s rooms, not Stalin’s power

Lex Fridman asks Stephen Kotkin to weigh an eighty-year echo between Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin. Kotkin, in the midst of writing the third volume of his Stalin biography, refuses the easy pairing. Stalin is a singular figure whose peer group is tiny: Hitler, Mao, and not many others. Even inside that group, Kotkin says, Stalin dominates, both by how long he held power and by the military-industrial complex he built and commanded. Putin cannot be compared at that scale.

The catch is architectural. Putin works in the same Kremlin buildings, and on television he appears in rooms where Stalin once sat and held meetings. Those rooms are in the Imperial Senate, the domed eighteenth-century structure Catherine the Great ordered built inside the Kremlin, visible over the wall from many points in Moscow. Sharing the furniture of power is not the same as sharing Stalin’s body count. Kotkin is careful to add that Putin has not murdered eighteen to twenty million people, and that only Mao, with a larger population to kill, put bigger tragic numbers on the board.

What they do share is a structural problem: managing Russian power in the world from a position of weakness vis-à-vis the West, while carrying an ambition Kotkin calls grandiose. Russia now is smaller than in Stalin’s day, pushed back toward borders last seen in Peter the Great’s time, and farther from the main European capitals than at any point since the eighteenth century. The West, in the same interval, has only grown stronger. Weakness bundled with grandeur is, in this telling, the dilemma of Russian history for centuries, faced by the tsars, by Peter, by Alexander, by Stalin, and now by Putin.

Kotkin’s name for the trap is Russia’s perpetual geopolitics. The country imagines itself a providential power, a whole civilization with a special mission, then discovers it lacks the capabilities to match the aspiration and is falling further behind the West. The attempted solutions make the position worse. Coercive modernization is supposed to close or at least manage the gap. What gets built instead is not a strong state but a personal dictatorship, and the autocracy’s next measures worsen the very geopolitical dilemma that produced it.

He leans on that framework because a rival story is popular in the Baltic states, in Warsaw, and among liberal interventionists: that aggression is in the mother’s milk, an unchangeable Russian cultural trait. Kotkin says that story is empirically false. There is no innate cultural tendency to invade neighbors. It is a strategic choice, made again and again, including by Stalin and by Putin. They could choose otherwise: remain Russia, worship in Orthodox cathedrals, and stop chasing an unmatchable contest with the West.

Stalin, in this long view, presided over the World War II victory and then lost the peace. After his death in 1953, successors were still managing the system he built and the widening gap with the West. By the 1990s, former Soviet troops, now Russian, withdrew from the advanced positions that victory had given them. Kotkin calls it Napoleon in reverse: the same roads, not from Moscow back to Paris, but from Warsaw, East Berlin, Tallinn, and Riga back to Russia in retreat. Putin inherited a smaller, farther, weaker Russia, while the West had absorbed former Warsaw Pact countries and Baltic states because they begged to join. That sphere of influence, Kotkin insists, is voluntary, not imposed.

Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council and in Kotkin’s phrase a version of Putin’s right-hand man, has been giving interviews and writing into the remaining public channels. His core claim is conspiratorial: the West has been on a forever campaign to destroy Russia the way it destroyed the Soviet Union, everything the West does is meant to dismember Russia, and Moscow is fighting an existential battle. Kotkin thinks this likely tracks how Putin thinks as well. Almost no one has real access to the president. Western leaders get short meetings; his own minions barely get face time.

The empirics, Kotkin says, wreck the plot. The first Bush administration tried desperately to hold the Soviet Union together, fearing chaos and loose nuclear weapons, and only at the last moment backed republic leaders breaking from Mikhail Gorbachev. Bill Clinton’s administration then sent tens of billions of Western taxpayer dollars through the IMF and other channels. The money disappeared, as German money for unification had disappeared even before the Soviet collapse, but the West did send it. How, he asks, is a cash transfer a conspiracy to bring Russia down?

The pattern continued. Germans voluntarily increased their dependence on Russian energy. French leaders ran to the Kremlin to ask what concessions would make Russia feel respected. The British provided money-laundering and reputation-laundering services for the oligarchy, including state officials looting the state. Obama reset, Trump told Putin he believed him over U.S. intelligence on election interference, and after Georgia and Crimea the response was a slap on the wrist. Stalin had the same mentality: everything that happened in the world was a Western conspiracy against the Soviet Union, and now against Russia. Meanwhile the West was trying to appease, invest, and change Russia, and was itself becoming more corrupt in the process.

Kotkin reaches for a Russian word, *obizhennye*: the resentful, the losers of the transition. When the Soviet Union fell and Russian power shrank, many people did not get to steal the property in the 1990s. They were on the outside, then came back in. The 2000s became a project of restealing, taking money and companies from the first thieves and reversing loser status. Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Yukos is the emblem; firms now held by Putin cronies were taken from whoever stole them first. Putting domestic opponents in jail and seizing property at home is one thing. Reversing the power of the West with a diminished Russia is another, and that is the Patrushev project spoken in public, including Putin’s 2007 Munich speech, the reaction to Ukraine’s 2004 uprising, and the 2003 expropriation of Khodorkovsky.

Fridman asks whether it is also convenient for the West to keep an enemy. Kotkin grants the point, then refuses to treat the Cold War as a misunderstanding or a domestic rallying device. A communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, the Berlin blockade, the North Korean invasion of the South, show trials across Eastern Europe, collectivization: those were not nothing. Credit, he says, belongs to the Truman administration for standing up, creating NATO, and rallying liberal regimes. Nikolai Leonov, the last chief analyst of the Soviet KGB, who died in April 2022, wrote that the West spent resources blackening the Soviet image, and in the next sentence: the Soviets gave them a lot of material to work with.

Freedom, for Kotkin, is not a slogan Hitler also used. It is a bundle of institutions: rule of law, civil liberties, private property, an independent judiciary, a competent civil service, separation of powers, elections, a free public sphere. Ukraine before the invasion was a flawed, corrupt, oligarchic democracy with a functioning parliament and an open public sphere. Russia is a corrupt, oligarchic autocracy whose Duma is not a real parliament and whose judiciary has no independence. Ukraine is not systematically murdering its journalists as regime policy. Before February 2022, Kotkin would have said Russians were the greatest victims of the Putin regime. After documented atrocities, that sentence no longer comes easily, even if, bombing aside, the larger number of victims is still Russian.

Fridman puts Kotkin in contrast with Oliver Stone and John Mearsheimer: the claim that Putin’s hand was forced by NATO expansion and American imperialism. Kotkin answers with a deliberately harsh analogy. After a rape in New York, he says, Stone would stand up and argue that the woman was wearing a short skirt, or applying for NATO membership, and so the perpetrator had no option. Sovereign countries, under treaties Moscow itself signed, get to choose their alliances. He lists the UN Charter, the 1975 Helsinki agreement, the 1990 Charter of Paris, and the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, signed by the Soviet Union or by post-Soviet Russia as its legal successor. All remain in force.

Autocratic regimes invading neighbors in the name of their own security, he adds, predate NATO and predate NATO expansion. Serfdom in the seventeenth century was not imposed because NATO expanded. A long pattern of Kremlin behavior cannot be explained by a defensive alliance that did not yet exist. When you rape someone, it is not because of the skirt. It is because you committed a criminal act. Kotkin is not claiming everything the West has done was honorable or intelligent. Democracies can criticize their own mistakes without going to prison. Responsibility for this invasion, he says, still has to be placed where it lies.

He is countering two popular stories at once. One is eternal Russian imperialism, beloved in the Baltics, Warsaw, and among some Iraq War veterans. The other is Western imperialism, popular on the left and with realist scholars. The mere fact that the West is stronger is not a crime, nor is it a crime that countries beg to join the EU or NATO. NATO is a defensive alliance of largely pacifist members. Ukraine’s desire to join was not going to be granted in our lifetimes; there was no consensus that it was ready. A freely elected government’s foreign-policy choice is not a provocation that compels invasion. That is why people like Kotkin opposed the 2003 Iraq war: it was illegal, and they thought it might backfire.

Why February 24, 2022? When a war goes badly, Kotkin says, launching it looks like lunacy. All aggressive war is based on miscalculation; the usual failure is not the first error but the refusal to recalibrate, the way a GPS reroutes after a missed turn. Hedge-fund traders tell him their favorite trade is the mistake they exited before the carnage. Putin’s calculation started from a simpler fact: he had been getting away with murder, literally. Domestic killings, murders across Europe, Novichok and other banned chemical weapons, the Georgia war and the bites of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the annexation of Crimea, the Donbas insurrection. Sanctions hit little people. Energy dependence grew. The Panama Papers landed and nothing happened to him.

The German slogan *Wandel durch Handel*, change through trade, one of Angela Merkel’s favorites, fed the illusion that commerce would improve autocrats. Kotkin’s unsentimental reading of the Kremlin is that Russian greatness outranks any individual life, especially other people’s lives. The literature that treats the regime as only a kleptocracy is incomplete. In the Grand Kremlin Palace, in St. George’s Hall, looters of the state stand in uniform with medals, eyes moist, not because they are thieves but because they believe in Russia as a special civilization that the West refuses to acknowledge as a first-rank power. They loot the very state they want to make great.

Putin is no fool about the world he lives in. Trade is denominated in dollars and euros; tanks and cruise missiles list Western components and software; Chinese leaders at Asian summits do not speak Chinese to their neighbors. The multipolar world does not exist yet. The goal is to make it exist: another currency, technological self-sufficiency, a Eurasian-centric order. The only path, Kotkin argues, is a West that weakens, divides, and loses resolve. So Russia’s grand strategy is blunt. Do not invest in human capital; talent flees to MIT. Healthcare is terrible, education is in decline, infrastructure is not built, governance is not improved, because when they try, the money is stolen. Skolkovo was supposed to be a Silicon Valley. They cannot build an airport without the money disappearing. The Sochi Olympics officially cost $50 billion and left almost nothing, “like the Second Avenue Subway.” Invest instead in military hardware, cyber, spoilation, and further corruption of the West. If the West is weak, you can muddle through without investing in your people.

What happens if the response is Truman-like: no more laundering, no long-term energy dependence, punishment instead of indulgence? Kotkin says the West switched only because of the courage and ingenuity of Ukrainians fighting a major military power alone, with Western weapons that are legal for self-defense. That resistance surprised him, Putin, the Biden administration, and the European Union. The surprise was not that Ukraine would resist. The Orange Revolution in 2004 and Maidan in 2013-14 had already shown people willing to die for the country. The surprise was how successful they were on the battlefield. That gift let the West rediscover its power and say, for now, the hell with energy dependence, reputation laundering, and trips to Moscow to ask what would make Putin feel respected.

Before the war, Kotkin says, Ukraine was run by a television production company: a producer, a makeup person, a video editor, a few dozen talented people running a country of more than forty million. Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been elected with 73 percent and had fallen to about 25 percent. Then he decided to stay in the capital and risk being killed. Jewish descent, raised speaking Russian, putting his life on the line for Ukraine: Kotkin calls it a very large message. They also turned out to be good at information war. European Parliament, the U.S. Congress, the Israeli parliament: there is no room, on Zoom or in person, that Zelenskyy cannot win over. For the first time, Kotkin says, reality TV was about reality. The Biden administration offered him a ride out, poised for another Afghanistan-style exit. He declined. Approval jumped from the mid-twenties to the nineties. Both numbers, Kotkin says, were deserved.

Fridman feels an inflection. Kotkin shares the feeling and the modesty. After 9/11 the world rallied around the United States; that did not last and was not, in the end, an inflection point. One thing already visible, though, is that the story of Western decline and a risen rest is empirically false. No major multinational institution is led by a South African, a Nigerian, or an Indian. The Chinese would like to run them and have not. The IMF, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve (a domestic body that acts as the most powerful multinational institution), NATO, U.S. bilateral alliances in Asia: which organizations with real leverage on the order are non-Western? The UN is encompassing, but the Security Council vetoes sit with Russia, China, the United States, Britain, and France, not with India, South Africa, or Indonesia, where much of the world’s population lives and grows.

The West, Kotkin reminds Fridman, is not a geographic concept. It is an institutional and values club. Japan is not European and is Western. Russia is European and is not. Europe is a cultural category; the West is rule of law, separation of powers, a free public sphere, a dynamic open-market economy. That club is resented, envied, and admired at once. The late P.J. O’Rourke said every American embassy has two constants: a political protest outside and the longest visa line you have ever seen. Non-Western countries see hypocrisy too: the West invades when it wants and calls others’ invasions illegal; it arrests you for money laundering in the same jurisdictions where you go to launder money. They ask who elected Washington and Brussels to run the world. Kotkin wants the West to use power legally and with restraint, and to bring more of the world inside the institutions rather than dictating after the fact.

Here is the caveat that matters for the war. Those governments do not like Western power and did not all join the condemnation of Russia. They also did not join the aggression. Russia’s civilian aircraft industry is in trouble because of export controls on parts and software. Brazil is a major aircraft manufacturer. It did not rush in to rebuild Putin’s aviation sector. India, China, South Africa, Turkey hedging: look at what they have done in practical terms. They are not supplying the war, Kotkin says, for two reasons. They do not want to be party to it, and they understand Western power well enough not to want the receiving end of a sanctions regime.

Fridman wants the view from Putin’s pillow. Kotkin starts with a joke: two Russian soldiers having a smoke on a tank in Warsaw, one telling the other they lost the information war. On Twitter, Russia has completely lost. In reality they failed to take Kyiv and failed, in phase two, to capture the entire Donbas. Three months is early. A definitive judgment three months after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, or after the 1939-40 Winter War against Finland, would have been wrong. Still, they were driven back from Kharkiv to the Russian border. Those look like losses a Russian regime can explain only by suppressing information. Russian leaders, Kotkin notes, have historically had an easier time with siege and deprivation than with explaining a lost war.

The other column of the ledger is darker. The Russian army has penetrated farther than in February, including Kherson and the just-ended Mariupol siege, with a new presence north of Crimea on the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea littoral, still fighting in Luhansk. Ukraine no longer has an economy: unemployment somewhere between 33 and 50 percent, Azovstal a ruin, farmers not planting because last year’s harvest cannot leave blockaded or destroyed ports. Kyiv needs $5, $7, or $8 billion a month to meet payroll, feed people, and keep the army in the field, indefinitely. Even $5 billion is $60 billion a year. The $40 billion aid bill President Biden had just signed covers, on the economic side, a month and a half or two months.

So if you are Putin, you hold more territory, you have a stranglehold on Ukraine’s economy, much of the world is neutral, Chinese propaganda is running Oliver Stone and Mearsheimer lines, Hungary is dragging its feet on an oil embargo, and Turkey is dragging its feet on Swedish and Finnish NATO applications. Maybe, he tells himself, he can ride it out. Fridman cites Henry Kissinger’s March 5, 2014 *Washington Post* essay: Kissinger had seen four wars begun with enthusiasm, three of which the United States left unilaterally, and the test of policy is how it ends. Kotkin hopes Ukraine’s resistance prevails and supports heavy and offensive weapons for as long as Ukrainians choose to resist. Wars, he adds, only have political ends. A summer combined-arms counteroffensive, if it works, sets the next phase: Putin acknowledges loss, or he announces full mobilization and tries to win with a different plan.

People worry about nuclear or chemical escalation if Russia begins to lose. Kotkin says the possibility has to be taken seriously; it existed before February 2022. Russia’s strategic arsenal can destroy the world many times over, as it has every year since 1991. Strategic weapons, though, sit behind a dual-key system. Putin has one key and must enter launch codes; the order then goes to the chief of the General Staff, who has his own key and codes. Would that officer destroy the world over a battlefield loss in Ukraine? Would young bomber crews and silo crews actually fire? Kotkin does not know. What he knows is that more than one man has to decide.

Tactical, low-yield weapons are murkier. It could well be that Putin alone can order them. There is still no tactical weapon fired at Ukraine that is not also fired at Russia. The Kremlin is about 600 miles from Ukraine; if the wind blows east or northeast, fallout hits the Kremlin, not only Ukrainian soil, and the border staging regions are much closer. Chernobyl’s cloud reached Sweden, which is how the outside world forced a Kremlin admission. The same dynamic already visible with conventional atrocities would likely apply: bomb a hospital, and more heavy weapons flow. Direct NATO engagement on Ukrainian territory is possible and worrisome. For a leader who cannot conquer a Ukraine that barely had heavy weapons before February, taking on NATO would be a bold step.

A despot is a despot only while orders are implemented. Somewhere on the chain, from the General Staff to a platoon, someone may treat a launch order as criminal, remember a Ukrainian grandmother, or decide he does not want to end up in The Hague. The force in the field has already taken horrendous casualties, on the order of a third of the original army, perhaps 50,000 to 60,000 dead and wounded combined, with families left in the dark, as after the sinking of the flagship *Moskva*. Export controls and firms walking away, even beyond McDonald’s, hit oil executives and the parts and software of the military-industrial complex. Domestic substitutes for microelectronics were missing even in Soviet times and are at best a two-year proposition. That pressure, Kotkin says, is already felt in the security and defense ministries.

Fridman asks whether Putin is a war criminal. Kotkin will not assign the label on a podcast. A war crime is a legal determination: evidence, due process, the ability to defend oneself. Putin can be a suspected war criminal, and evidence can be gathered. Then comes the forum: Ukraine as victim, The Hague and the International Criminal Court, or a future Russian court after regime change. Ukraine already has a trial underway of a lower-level tank-group commander who has pleaded guilty. The place names still unsettle a man drafting Stalin’s war chapters: Izyum, Kharkiv, Kyiv. Russia, claiming to “denazify” Ukraine, has invaded the same places the Nazis invaded in 1941.

The Nazis captured Ukraine for a time and were evicted. Behind their lines there was massive partisan resistance the whole time they allegedly controlled the country. Cable-television maps color in “Russian control,” Kotkin says, but the word is misplaced. It is claimed territory, or the farthest troop advance. Behind the lines, Crimea excepted, there are armed insurgencies. In Melitopol a guerrilla war is already trying to hurt the occupiers. Even a stalemate, even a failed Ukrainian counteroffensive and a Russian army that does not disintegrate, would still leave fierce resistance of the kind seen against Nazi occupation. Evicting the Nazis ultimately took the Red Army reinvading at a combined-arms scale far larger than anything discussed today.

The armies now are not in the hundreds of thousands or millions, but the weapons are more precise. Artillery used to be saturation fire; with drones it becomes sniper fire. NATO-supplied guns outrange Russian ones. The dynamic is grim and self-defeating for Moscow: atrocities produce heavier Western weapons, Russians dig in (*kopayut*, they are digging everywhere), and Ukrainians, including teenage gamers now on the cyber battlefield, supply the human capital. Morale, courage, valor: there is no substitute, provided there are enough arms, and if there are not, a grandmother calls in tank coordinates on an iPhone while cafeteria workers stuff Molotov cocktails. Kotkin draws a domestic lesson. The United States has gone to war too often with about 1 percent of the population in an all-volunteer force, which is militarily preferable and politically too easy. Ukrainian society is engaged from hackers to grandmothers.

Could a conversation with Putin work better than bullets? Kissinger, presidents, secretaries of state, even the CIA director in the fall before the invasion, have sat with him. People who have been in the room in the past decade, Kissinger included, say Putin spends the meeting enumerating grievances: the West did this, lied about that, cheated on the other. The volcano of resentment eats the clock. Russia, Kotkin says, wants a closed sphere of influence over its neighbors, exerted by coercion rather than by example, and Western leaders cannot grant special UN-style veto terms for “just another country.” After 9/11 Putin called President Bush, condemned the attack, and offered logistics for Afghanistan. In exchange he asked for a free hand in the former Soviet space. Bush said no. Cooperation blew up over that demand, not over a failure to appreciate a phone call.

China had a smarter plan: accept American hostility, refuse decoupling until “Made in China 2035” delivered self-sufficiency in AI and other critical fields, and keep Europe as the ace, because Europe hates conflict and loves *Wandel durch Handel*. Then Xi Jinping sided with Putin, not with weapons or technology transfer, but with public support and massive pro-Russian propaganda at home. Europeans asked what it meant to refuse to condemn the invasion of a sovereign European country. The wedge between U.S. and European China policy, the pivot of the strategy, is gone. Xi destroyed it, Kotkin says, in return for discounted Russian hydrocarbons China can buy from a diversified set of suppliers. Tibet is Ukraine, Xinjiang is Ukraine, Hong Kong is Ukraine, and that is before Taiwan. Trading with that regime, morally and politically, is getting harder to differentiate from trading with Putin.

Fridman, eyes closed, hears drums of war the way 1922 might have heard the 1930s. Kotkin, who knows 1922 well, would have seen a war behind him, more democracies, dead empires, modernism, women in public life, automobiles, not the Depression, World War II, or the Holocaust. What he knows from studying history is that stuff happens. Economists write “all other factors held constant”; then an Israeli government that will not tolerate an Iranian bomb, or a North Korean leader channeling his grandfather in 1950, upends the table. No evidence of a coup against Putin exists today. He is about sixty-nine, near Russian male life expectancy, with better doctors. Watch the FSO, the *Federalnaya sluzhba okhrany*, the only organization with access to him. He meets the rest of the government on Zoom from offices in Valdai, Sochi, and Novo-Ogaryovo dressed to look the same, after two-week quarantines. If you cannot break that ring, you cannot overturn him. Authoritarian regimes fail at feeding people and at almost every goal. They only have to be good at suppressing political alternatives.

Kotkin has been surprised Navalny is still alive, having feared a staged prison fight with a lead pipe. He guesses the regime knows Navalny is more famous in the West than at home, a card that could be played to lobby sanctions off, even an appointment as prime minister if he would take it, which Kotkin doubts. An alternative is more likely to come from inside Putin’s gang, tired of self-defeating mistakes, blocked by the same FSO cocoon. Asked for the meaning of life, Kotkin will not answer the cosmic question. A purposeful life is not that hard. You are not Gandhi or Roosevelt. You can affect people in a school or a workplace, admit mistakes, remember you cannot predict the future, and take as a rule *save one life, save the world*. The war, he reminds Fridman, is experienced from a Princeton study and a coming Stanford office, in safety, while others have no power, no food, and no certainty about their children. Family buildings in both countries are rubble. Syria, by UN estimates, has seen at least 350,000 dead with Russian participation; Yemen and hungry children in New York get less attention. Geopolitics, in the end, is about human beings and human suffering.