How Historians Work: A History Lab Discussion with Dan Wang and Stephen Kotkin

>> Dan Wang: My name is Dan Wang, I'm sitting here with historian Stephen Kotkin. Steve, today we're going to have a conversation about the practice of history. So you are a historian of power, a historian of communism, a historian of the Soviet Union and modern Russia. You are exceptionally well known for your trilogy of biography of Joseph Stalin.

 

I also want to highlight that you have received rapturous praise for your very first book, the Magnetic Mountain, which I have right here. This is a book that you wrote while being the first American in five decades to live in the Soviet Union's Steel City. I think my favorite article written about you was from the New Yorker in 2017 when Keith Gessen called you a variety of adjectives, my favorite of which were sharp-elbowed and opinionated.

 

Steve, I used to be at the Yale Law School before you brought me out to be a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.- We're here, sitting in your office in Hoover Tower, which is overlooking Stanford. For those watching on video, you'll see that we're sitting amidst shelves stuffed with books, some that are three layers deep, in an office that someone has described as a historian's heaven.

 

Here we're sitting at your desk, and this is the space where you'll finish the third volume of your celebrated Stalin biography. So today we're not going to have so much of a discussion of Russia or Stalin in particular. Rather, we're going to have a conversation about what it is that historians do.

 

So thank you for sitting down with me today.

>> Stephen Kotkin: My pleasure.

>> Dan Wang: I want to start by asking you about the varieties of the historian's experience. So in my conception, historians are people who bury themselves in archives, develop a really severe dust allergy, and try to draw out a story from documents.

 

Now, something that I really appreciate, again from your first book, Magnetic Stalinism as a civilization, was that you went to live in Magnitogorsk, you went to read the local newspapers as well as the archives. You walked through tombstones, you talked to the people. Can you tell us a little bit about how typical is that experience for a historian?

 

How much are you in the archives? What is it that historians mostly do today?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah, those are great questions. Especially in the digital age, we assume that most everything is digitized or most everything worth spending time on is digitized. And my world is only partially digitized. Some of the old documents are available in digitized form, but the vast majority that I used for all the books that I've published up till now were in paper form, sometimes microfilm, which is an ancient technology that has outlived its use in some ways, but nonetheless, a lot of things were microfilmed before they were digitized.

 

And so between the paper and the microfilm, that has been my life for the past many decades. So what I do is I pose a series of questions and then I look for evidence to answer those questions, both to support hunches I might have, but also to contradict hunches I might have.

 

It's very important to search not for confirmatory evidence, but also contradictory evidence, evidence that doesn't fit what you might think to gain the full complexity. If you're lucky, you can also travel to the destination, the locale, the objects of your study. You can't travel to the past itself, obviously, in time travel fashion.

 

That's what you do with the documentation. But you can travel there in person and you can see some of the legacies that are still alive or that have been transformed in interesting ways. You can sometimes talk to some of the people who are alive, depending on how deep in time your subject goes.

 

You can walk around those cemeteries and see those tombstones of people you recognize from the documentation, and you can just feel, not just see, but feel something of the time period and the place that you're interested in. Marc Bloch once paid tribute to Lucien Fevre. They were both French historians of the great Annales School.

 

And Bloch said of Fev, who studied the early modern period, Reformation, Counter Reformation, Renaissance. He said Fevre knew how the flowers smelled in the 16th century. Of course, he didn't know exactly how the flowers smelled in the 16th century, but after a lifetime of study of that epoch, he had come to understand, feel the texture of the life and times there.

 

So that's what we do as historians. We want to answer big questions, big questions about where we are now and where we might be going based on where we've come from.

>> Dan Wang: Fevre knew how the flowers smelled in the 16th century through the 1980s. You went to Magnitogorsk and smelled the coal smoke.

 

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yes.

>> Dan Wang: Quite a different smell. Something that I really try to do in my annual letters from China was to write not so much a formalist explanation of what the top level Communist Party documents revealed from Beijing. I think that is often an easy perspective one can take often from Washington D.C. to take a look at what are the high level central pronouncements, which are no doubt important, but what I really tried to do was also to integrate it with a little bit of what the sparrow sounded like and how the flowers smelled in Shanghai.

 

How typical is it that historians really are going over there to smell the flowers, wherever they may be, and to extract themselves out of the archives and to dwell on stories that are not only found in documentation. Yeah, we can sometimes be tricked because of the bias towards historical records.

 

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Now, you can't write really good history without evidence. And so documentation is absolutely critical. It comes in many different forms. We usually focus on the State Archives, because the State Archives are this convenient repository where a huge number of documents are collected. So that Annales School that I referred to earlier, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, later Fernand Braudel and my favorite, Pierre Chaunu, they would Often go to a French locality, a province, and they would go straight into the judicial archives and they would read all of the ways that ordinary people were caught up in the state machinery, either because they were on the receiving end of someone's ire, or they themselves had initiated a process.

 

And so the state archive could reveal daily life in this place at the time chosen by these people caught up in the state machinery. And that's really, really valuable. And you can write as the annals school people did a total history, the culture, the society, the politics, the economy, sometimes on the basis predominantly of just the judicial archives.

 

And of course, there's other aspects of state machinery as well that they consider. The problem with the state archives is it's about the obsessions, the preoccupations, the fears of the state. If the state is worried about something, it begins to watch it, monitor it deeply, and record everything it can about that phenomenon.

 

But if the state is not worried about something or can't see it, the traces left in the state archives are minimal. Let me give you a couple of examples. I got to Tomsk, Siberia, many decades ago, and I went into the state archive there. It's a 17th century fort in its origin.

 

Tomsk. It became a great university town. And then it fell into backwater status because the Trans Siberian Railroad passed it by. Instead of Tomsk, it went through Novosibirsk. And so Tomsk was off the main line, even though it had a richer and deeper history, and it had the great university.

 

What I discovered in the Tomsk archives was a lot of documentation on Jews. There were maybe enough Jews to congregate in this office in Tomsk, but yet the documentation on them was really, really extensive. And then documentation on heretics, people who didn't follow the Orthodox Church as prescribed, but might have been what were known as Old Believers who didn't take to the reforms that the Church imposed.

 

Anyway, you could see the preoccupations and obsessions of the state. A lot was missing. For example, the corruption of the governor was hard to find in the state archives. You had the corruption of the governor in some references to documents of travelers coming through Tomsk at different periods of time.

 

But the state archive didn't reveal the corruption of the governor unless the governor was brought in front of the judicial authorities, usually for political purge reasons rather than for corruption reasons, and then the corruption was held against them. The Soviet state archive is one of the most extensive archives ever, records so many things you drown in documents.

 

You can barely assimilate the documentation for one place. And one time, let alone for the whole thing. But you're hard pressed to find sufficient documentation on the black market economy because the black market economy was not supposed to exist. It did exist, it was extremely extensive. But recording it was very hard because the goal of the black marketeers was to avoid state scrutiny, often by paying bribes, but just as often by being clever and evasive.

 

So if you were going to write about Soviet history, you might not have sufficient space on the black market economy if you reliance solely on the state archives. So therefore you need all sorts of other sources. You need periodicals. A lot of stuff can be found in periodicals that's left out of the state.

 

The Soviet Union refused to acknowledge the poor harvest and food deprivation, including starvation in 1936. But there were articles in the newspaper about fistfights in queues at the bakeries because there wasn't enough bread to go around. And so you could see indirectly, even though it was prohibited by censors to talk about the shortages, the poor harvest, it nonetheless came out in the periodicals that were supplementary to the state archives that you might read.

 

Then, of course, there's memoirs, as I said, travel accounts, first person views. Of course they are written from the point of view of someone, but so are the state archives. They're written from the point of view of officials. Sometimes the officials are competent and sometimes they're incompetent. Sometimes the documentation is trustworthy and extensive, and sometimes they just made it up so that it would appear they were doing their jobs and they filed it as if they had done all that work when they hadn't done all that work.

 

So the state archives too can be very deceptive. No more, no less deceptive, just in different ways from memoirs. So you try as much as you can to find sources from different genre, different agencies, institutions, people, and you try to juxtapose those different sources to see where the preponderance of evidence is driving.

 

So I would say that there's no perfect way to do history. It's an imperfect. It's an art, not a science. It's an imperfect way to go about things. But the more sources, the better. The more different kinds of sources, the better, the more critical you are of the source material and its generation, its origins, knowing why and how it was produced.

 

And the more you can go there in person and see those orange plumes of smoke coming out of the steel plant, or the smell of burning coal going into people's lungs, sure, it's maybe a significant period of time has elapsed since the time period you're focused on. But there are some of these continuities amid the discontinuities that give you that feel for the life, for the mentality, for the underlying drivers of what's happening there.

 

And so I think most historians would try to do that if they could. Sometimes there are constraints. Regimes don't want their countries to be studied. They don't want their countries to be studied in depth. They don't want certain things to be revealed. They live under censorship regimes for a reason.

 

But sometimes it's people insufficiently driven to get to the truth. In other words, historians can be good, but some historians are just more thorough, more comprehensive, more searching. Get that next one and that next one and that extra one, and check this and check that. It's not dissimilar from journalism.

 

It's not dissimilar from scientists when it's practiced at the most rigorous, highest levels.

>> Dan Wang: How do you make friends with an archivist?

>> Stephen Kotkin: You make friends with an archivist the same way you make friends with anybody. Empathy. One of the great things about history is it teaches you empathy.

 

Empathy in a strategic sense and empathy in a personal sense. I often use this approach with students. I tell them it's not that difficult to read memoirs of Holocaust survivors in the sense that there's a lot of them. Six million people were killed in the Holocaust. Many others suffered near death, experience massive tragedy, and needs to be called a genocide.

 

At the same time, there were survivors, and those survivors often produced memoirs. They're easy to read in the sense that there's a lot of them. They're difficult to read sometimes because of what the people went through. What's not difficult is identifying with the writers of the memoirs. It's very easy to be empathetic to someone solely because of who they are, who their parents were, what their beliefs were, were sent to death camps.

 

The hard part, the really hard part, is to read and understand the camp commandant again, the victims. You can be empathetic to them, but can you show empathy? Can you find empathy for the camp commandant? Not to validate what the camp commandant did, it's murder, but to understand, to appreciate what this person did, to put yourself in that person's shoes and say, how did this person commit genocide?

 

How did this person go home to a spouse and children after work? From the ovens to the home front to the garden, to the pet animals, to the small children romping around in that garden? How did that person think? What did that person think he was doing in those circumstances?

 

How did he explain it, if at all, to others? Showing empathy to the camp commandant again is in no way to validate. Understanding is not validation. But understanding is critical because you have to understand where the evil comes from, how it was perpetrated, who the people were who perpetrated it.

 

Evil is very simple in caricature terms, but when you humanize evil, it becomes much more difficult, much more complex. Like the characters, for example, in Shakespeare, who are the villains? They're rounded characters. They're full characters. Again, it doesn't justify who or what they are, but it does help you understand at a deeper level.

 

So when you're going to sit down with an archivist, that archivist is sitting there all day, every day, year after year after year. What do they think? What do they know about the documentation that they're in charge of? What do they think about visitors who come in to use the materials?

 

What kind of visitors do they have? How many visitors do they have. They're guardians preserving this historical memory. Long hours, low pay, not a lot of appreciation in some cases. What are their lives like? So with an archivist, I would sit down with them and I would show them how I'm reading the particular documentation that they were putting in front of me.

 

And I would say, this is what this tells me and this is how I understand this and come and look at this. And soon enough we became, as it were, collaborators in reading, understanding, talking about the documentation. They appreciated the kind of thoroughness and care I was demonstrating in approaching the documents, the kind of rigor, the demand for more and more documents.

 

And so they had preserved these documents. They had worked all those long hours to catalog them and make sure they were in decent condition in case anybody should come in and ask for them. And I was that person. And not only did I ask for them, but I wanted their collaboration, their assistance in interpreting them.

 

And so you develop a relationship as professionals with the legacy that they are collecting and preserving and that you're trying to understand. And before, I was often the only person on the reader side who would go into the archive, not in all cases, but certainly in Magnetogorsk. There was almost no day where there was another person besides me going to read that history.

 

And I had come from a long way away, and those people were living down the block. By the third, fourth, fifth week, almost the entire archival staff would sometimes gather around my table and engage in questions and discussions about the documentation. They were so happy that someone was studying the history and studying it faithfully and could discuss it with them.

 

All of a sudden, their life work became much more meaningful. It wasn't only for something abstract, like posterity. It was for this real person writing this book that I would then give to them. And I had worked in the archives in Moscow before going to Magnitogorsk, so I knew a lot of things that they didn't have in their archive.

 

Because the Soviet system was highly centralized and many things were decided or sent for final keeping only in the Moscow archive rather than in the local archive. And so I could relate to them materials that I had read about their history that they were not able to see or hadn't seen yet.

 

And then, of course, I had come from the Hoover Institution, where I wasn't affiliated yet with the Hoover Institution, but like many people, I was just another researcher who had worked here in the library and archives. And I had read the anti communist archives of the Hoover Institution, for example, the Boris Nikolayevsky collection.

 

And so I could bring them later, the actual photocopies of documents, but initially, stories about some of the American personnel who had come to Magnitogorsk and helped build the Stalinist showcase city behind the Urals. And they had no access to materials like that. And so they were thrilled to learn about the existence of those materials and eventually to see some of those materials, when later I took other trips, a second trip, and I was able to bring, as I said, photocopies from the Hoover archives.

 

So archivists are our friends. They're indispensable people. And getting to understand them is on us. And getting to appreciate what they do and getting to partner with them, the same thing we do here at the Hoover Institution. But in the case, I'm talking about an encounter between inhabitants of very different systems, very different realms, but trying to understand a similar question, history problem.

 

And so it's very rewarding. To be able to relate to them. Now, what did they think of me? How much did they appreciate this? Were they all of the same mind? No doubt. Some of them saw me as an interloper. Some of them saw me potentially as conducting espionage, reading ancient documents about a steel plant with obsolescent technology, wastefully producing at high cost, low quality steel, that maybe they thought I was involved in some type of espionage or whatever it might be.

 

But the ones that I encountered directly and sat with at that table were deeply engaged with me in the same process of trying to understand their history.

>> Dan Wang: Let me share what I think is the greatest put down of the field of history. This is coming from another historian, probably a distorted quote from Arnold Toynbee, which is that history is just one damn thing after another.

 

What's her response?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Sometimes it is, sadly. So there are two caricatures. One caricature is of the historian knows everything imaginable about one thing and just keeps burrowing deeper and deeper and deeper. And you ask that person to compare, to make generalizations, to come up with larger statements of significance, and they'll say, no, this case is different.

 

It's not like all those other cases. Or no, we can't really generalize based upon this. So they get lost in the details. That's a version of one damn thing after another. It's just all details and they can't add up to anything. And everything is sui generis. That's one caricature.

 

The other caricature is of the political scientist. And the political scientist knows a tiny something about lots and lots of things. So the historian, everything about one case, the political scientist, very little about very many cases. And so the political scientist generalizes from shallow, very superficial understanding of whether it's China or India or South Korea or development or whatever it might be.

 

And they come up with these grand theories which any historian or specialist on one particular case in their multiple cases comes and says that doesn't apply to that case, or that's wrong. And so you have these two stereotypes where it's all generalizations based upon shallow knowledge and no generalizations based upon ridiculously excessive knowledge.

 

So it's clear you don't have to be a genius to understand that a good practicing historian is about deep knowledge about more than one case and coming up with patterns, coming up with patterns of understanding that apply to more than one case. So you want to explain the French Revolution, okay, but does your explanation work for the Russian Revolution?

 

Does it work for the Iranian Revolution? Does it work for revolutions that didn't happen, cases that failed or ceased to unfold the way some contemporaries thought they might. So in developing your analysis, you have to know your French Revolution story really well so that you can pass muster with the experts who deeply, deeply have researched the topic.

 

And then you have to know your other cases, your Russian Revolution, your Chinese Revolution, your Iranian Revolution. And then you can begin to talk intelligently about the patterns of revolution across multiple cases. And then you can debate whether they apply to Nicaragua or whether they apply to fill in the blank, whichever revolution you want to talk about.

 

And maybe they have to be modified when they're in conversation with cases that you didn't consider or that you don't know. So knowing deeply is indispensable, but being able to see patterns is also indispensable. And that is the trade off, the balancing that you have to do. You have to know more than one case, as many cases as is feasible, the way that political scientists try to operate.

 

Multiple cases, multiple ends, as they like to say in the jargon. But you also have to know enough about each of those cases to pass muster to stand up to scrutiny with the experts. So I think one damn thing after another does happen. It doesn't have to happen.

 

It's not endemic, it's not inevitable. And the way to get out of it is to aspire, to try to find patterns, and therefore to have more than one case. Russia Eurasia, enables this because of its geography. Russia Eurasia is world history. It's 11 time zones. Russia is geographically part of Europe, geographically part of the Middle East, geographically part of East Asia.

 

So by taking seriously Russia, Eurasia, by taking the geography seriously, you're inherently a Europeanist, a Middle Eastern specialist, and an East Asian specialist. So that's what studying Russia, Eurasia gave to me. Sure, you can focus on Moscow, you can focus on the regime, you can focus on provinces in the central region.

 

All of that is fine. There's a place for that. And people do that. And some people do that really well. But for me, the challenge, the thrill, was always the whole shebang in all its stretch and ambiguities and contradictions. And therefore, I had to be in East Asian Studies while doing Russia, and I had to be in European studies while doing Russia, and I had to be in Middle Eastern studies while doing Russia.

 

And that's how I organized the PhD program at Princeton. Everybody who came to do a PhD in Russia Eurasia with me at Princeton, where I spent 33 years, had to acquire at least one language and expertise, either in Europe, the Middle East or East Asia, in order to do this.

 

Well at least in order to work with me and others in that program at Princeton. So yeah, one damn thing after another. Sometimes it's well written one damn thing after another and it's a good read. But ultimately people are looking for analysis, explanation, understanding and that comes from depth of knowledge but it also comes from recognition of patterns.

 

 

>> Dan Wang: Recognition of patterns is so important. One of your great lines that I love to repeat is that everything is unprecedented unless you know a little bit of history. Now for many people who do not know a lot of history who do not think necessarily about what are the great trends of our time, rise of China, rise of India, artificial intelligence I think is one of these big things where for everyone everything is always unprecedented.

 

How do you greet the proposition that this time is different? How do we know that this time really is different?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Sometimes, you don't know until it's over. Which is very frustrating for people. Retrospective is pretty easy compared to prospective. Looking forward is really hard. And history does not tell you what the future will be.

 

The future is to be invented, and the future is also plural. There are many futures. But what history tells you is, first of all, that the present cannot just be extended indefinitely in time. Meaning that what we have today is going to change. And it's also going to change in surprising ways.

 

Because that's how it's changed in the past again and again and again. The day after the change, everyone says they predicted it. But two days before the change. People often didn't see it coming. And so history is great that way. It gives you that humility that you think you're right.

 

You think your thoughts are smarter than your predecessors. But then you go look and see that they were smart people. And they got a lot wrong. Maybe they thought that the sun revolved around the Earth. And that was proven to be wrong over time. And so you have to have that humility that what you think is important.

 

That you think you might be superior. Either in your values or your knowledge. It's quite possible that people will look back at you and think, how could they think that? That's so silly. The sun revolving around the Earth. Could they really have thought that? And for hundreds and hundreds of years, yes, they did.

 

So that kind of humility has to be applied. When you're thinking about your analysis of the present. And how things might evolve. What you're looking for are the big drivers of change. What the drivers of change might be, what the big trends are. And how we might be able to affect those drivers of changes.

 

To maybe shift them a little bit In a direction we want to go. History is about the relationship between structure and agency. Agency makes no sense whatsoever. Until you understand the structures, large structures, geography, institutions, which are very, very difficult to change quickly. Commodity prices. There are huge factors that are out of the control of any single individual.

 

No matter how powerful. But agency matters because agency puts those structures into motion. Retards, redirects, sometimes changes those structures. Stalin did that. Changing the socioeconomic structure of Eurasia 11 time. It's remarkable. But first, you have to understand what's there and where it might be going and what's driving it.

 

And then you can begin to place agency on top of that. There are no structures without agencies. But agency is absurd without the structures. So this is life and times that some people call it structure and agency in the jargon. So now when you're looking at things that are precedented or unprecedented, nothing is identical.

 

But again, there are patterns, there are similarities, there are reasons that certain forms can be identified because sometimes people don't know they're not borrowing, they're not emulating. But similar circumstances can give rise to similar forms, whether in governance, in daily life. And so you look to see what happened before in order to understand what might be happening going forward.

 

It's easy to talk about the rise of China. We've all been living through it. But you sort of open up the aperture and you go back in time. And China has been one of the most decisive countries, civilizations for recorded history, with the exception of the period around 1800 to 1980, which is what we call modernity and so looks extremely significant.

 

And China was in a dark tunnel during that time period. Part of it was the predations of the European imperialists. Most of it was the predations by the communist regime and Mao's rule itself. Warlord and other episodes that you know well. So there's this 180 year tunnel which looms very large in discussions of modern history that often begin from the French Revolution, but don't loom as large in the fullness of Chinese history.

 

And so in many ways, China is driving, aspiring, driving to reclaim a place that it had long occupied. Similar story for India and how central India was through most of recorded history. So much of what we think of as Chinese civilization is actually adapted from India. India, more than China, was in some ways the center of what we call retrospectively the Silk Road.

 

And so seeing that deeper history and appreciating that deeper history can allow you to then talk about the current rise of China which has happened. It's been a remarkable story, one of the most, perhaps the most remarkable stories of our lifetimes, what the Chinese people have achieved. But placing it in that longer context can be helpful.

 

No, there are differences, there are ruptures. Not everything is continuous through five millennia like Chinese communist propaganda might indicate. We understand that. We know that it's not the same through five millennia or three millennia or two millennia, whatever frame time period you prefer. We know there are changes and ruptures still, unprecedented is an award you have to give out very sparingly.

 

That goes for populism. The US has one of the richest stories of populism of any country on the planet. Multiple veins of populism. Andrew Jackson's presidency. A biography of Andrew Jackson reads like a biography of current politics today in America. Again with all the differences that must be taken into account as well.

 

Prairie populism, which was part of my training as an undergraduate with Christopher Lasch at the University of Rochester. Another really rich vein of American populism. Pat Buchanan, a more recent a version of American populism. The former speechwriter for Richard Nixon. And what could go on? Does that mean Trump is the same as all of this?

 

No, of course not. Does that mean that things that we're experiencing today are unprecedented? Well, some might be, but the burden on you to show something's unprecedented is to master that previous history and then to demonstrate that it truly is unprecedented despite that. Previous history. So it's a bit of a burden to have to go into the history in order to analyze phenomena today.

 

It definitely is work, it's a responsibility, but I think it's much richer, more rewarding and deeper appreciation for the things that are different, truly different. Genuinely a rupture, genuinely a point of departure because you know the history. I like that you bring up the idea of looking at things retrospectively.

 

And some people write prospectively.

>> Dan Wang: So when I bring up your biography of Stalin, I think in popular parlance it is often compared to another giant biography. Robert Caro writing about Robert Moses in the Power Broker. Now power is right there in his title. Power is something that you think about extensively.

 

I have read the Power Broker and have felt pretty frustrated by some of these techniques of interviews. No matter how extensive narrative, no matter how monumental, to describe something that happened in the past that I think doesn't necessarily read so well today. About Robert Moses, how do you think about how your approach might be different from what is a more journalistic book about power by Robert Carroll?

 

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Anybody who wants to put me in the same sentence with Robert Caro. Like me. Go right ahead, Dan, I'll take that. And I appreciate that deeply. His Master of the Senate about Lyndon Johnson, I would put on the same level as the Power Broker, the Robert Moses biography.

 

He's still finishing the multi volume Lyndon Johnson biography, but Master of the Senate is one of my all time great favorites. And so, yeah, Robert Carroll. So what's the proposition that Carol is putting in front of us or that I'd like to imagine that I'm putting in front of us?

 

It is how power is accumulated, how power is exercised, and what are the consequences of the exercise of power. And those consequences are manifold, of people who have no idea who the person might be that you're writing about. And yet that person has tremendous effects, multi-manifold, multivarious effects on their lives.

 

Coffee growers in South America don't know any of these people wearing red suspenders in London and having a drink after work in a London pub with their red suspenders and their green tweed jackets hanging off the chair. But those red suspended London people, the consequences of their power are felt throughout the entire coffee-growing region of any South American country that grows coffee.

 

So the consequences of power, first the accumulation, which is a story in itself, then the exercise of it, but also it's incumbent upon us to get to the consequences of it. Those consequences can be perverse and unintended. Perverse and unintended consequences is sometimes a synonym for history, at least as I understand it.

 

But so, Caro, that's the proposition. Accumulation, exercise, consequences of power. And for me, it's the same proposition arrived at independently. And many people predate the Robert Moses book and Caro's work and anything that I might have written. This is long standing. You can argue way back. You can take the ancient Chinese classics, you can take the ancient Greek classics, Egypt, Rome.

 

It's a similar proposition, whether they're trying to validate, to justify, rationalize the power, or they're trying to critique the power. Power and institutions. Okay, so how do you go about doing that? How does one dig into, analyze, explain, narrate the accumulation, exercise, and consequences of power? So the way I try to do it, I'll speak solely for myself.

 

But I didn't invent this. I'm just a practitioner of it. I derived it from many people. We could discuss many dead Machiavelli, Tocqueville, some I met in person, Foucault, others I wish I had met in person, Nietzsche. The way I try to do it is I try to compose an analytical narrative.

 

An analytical narrative is all about the detail. But the detail is related to the biggest possible structures and stories and consequences. So you use those details, you dive really deep into the details to reveal the biggest possible picture. And sometimes the smallest detail gives you the widest horizon.

 

And if you can bring the reader along through narrative, you can have the analysis built into the narrative. And the small and the big come together to teach you not just one damn thing after another, but also the why and the how and the with the what consequences.

 

So that method of analytical narrative is hard. It's not easy because you can sometimes overwhelm the reader with details. You know too much. You've spent too much time doing research. The narrative is too long. The reader gets lost in the thickets that you worship because it's work that you did, it's discoveries that you made, it's documents that you read.

 

But you have to always keep in mind the reader, the audience. Everything is about audience, whether you're speaking on a podcast with Dan Wang. Welcome to Hoover. We're thrilled that you came here. Or you're in a lecture hall with students, high school students, master's students, general public, general public that works in professions like journalism.

 

Or read a lot of journalism versus general public that maybe works on a farm or works in a factory, like my father did. So it's always about the audience. What does your audience think already, and what would you like them to think if they're gonna take the time and put in the hard work of engaging with what you're doing.

 

And so when you combine what you know and do with what the audience might need or how they might receive it, that's when you begin this iterative process of developing what I'm calling this it's analytical narrative. It's a show rather than a tell. It's not hitting people over the head.

 

You don't get up on a sandbox in the freedom of the United States, sitting in an office in the Hoover Tower at Stanford University condemning communism as evil. Well, yeah, of course it's evil, but who cares that you think it's evil? Your voice is insignificant because how many millions of people who perished or witnessed it can tell you better.

 

And so forget about the soapbox, but how about showing what evil meant in practice? How about showing where the evil came from? How about showing the little people, the ordinary people who were perpetrators of this evil on their neighbors and on themselves? How about showing what happened as a result of their action?

 

In other words, showing rather than telling. Not soapbox, but immersion, invitation. Bringing people into that world. When you read a great novel, it transports you to that place, that time, that family, those characters, their world. It's another world that you enter. And so this is what you have to do in writing an analytical narrative.

 

You have to invite people into this world that you're going to show how it worked and what that means and what the consequences of it were, and you're going to do that in an inviting way so that you not just invite them in, but you keep them there.

 

They stay with you, and maybe they come back again. And maybe if your book is read not just five years after it's published or 10 years or 20 years, but 50 years after it's published, maybe you've achieved something because people that are born after you may perish are still invited and kept in that world that you've helped them understand.

 

So this analytical narrative approach. I think Carl is extremely good at this analytical narrative, and I'd like to imagine that I'm a practitioner of that and struggling to get better because it's just really important to be able to invite people in, teach them something, and have them be able to appreciate what it is that you spent all that time doing.

 

 

>> Dan Wang: Steve, thank you for the welcome to the Hoover Institution. I'm thrilled to join the Hoover History Lab. You took me out of the Yale Law School, and I think I have found the only people who are more fastidious about footnotes and the lawyers must be the historians like you, right?

 

So it is good to be surrounded by historians. One of the things I really love about the field of history is that I feel that historians are some of the people who still have an ethic in universities of writing for the public, of writing for trade press, rather than only Academic press, in trade press and a bookstore like Barnes and Noble, it is pretty rare to come across a book by a political scientist, by an anthropologist, even by an economist.

 

But there is still this ethic of writing for the public. Now I feel like a lot of academic departments have somewhat retreated into writing for a narrow specialist audience instead of writing much more broadly. But, certainly there is that trend also in history departments. Do you feel that there is going to be this ethic of writing for the popular audience and what does that do to the field of history that so many people, that so many historians really try to do that?

 

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah, I think this is a really important question for all of us. I would put it this way. All audiences matter. Your narrow specialist audience matters, your wider public audience matters, and everything in between. If you can reach them simultaneously, that's a high bar to have jumped over.

 

If you can reach them simultaneously, but only partly, that's still good. Although you need to get better. Writing for a wide audience and writing for a specialist audience can be the same proposition. I hope that specialists appreciate my work and I hope that people who don't work in universities or haven't been there since graduation, I hope that they can also appreciate what I do.

 

I don't differentiate so much. I'm going for this, I'm going for that. I want them all in there and I want people of every political persuasion to be reading my work. You started off with the sharp elbow and opinionated. I think only people on the receiving end who perceive that I am, that my work potentially undermines a certain socialist or leftist utopia might feel that I'm a little bit sharp elbowed.

 

But again, my goal is empathetically to understand who they were and to show what they did and what the consequences were. The demand for history is enormous. It's almost unlimited. When I go into offices, I'll go to D.C. in the Pentagon, I'll go into the intelligence apparatus. I don't work for the government, I don't have a security clearance.

 

I get invited occasionally to meet with them. I'll go to the State Department, I'll go to the White House. And all the questions are about, geez, what happened last time? Or how did we handle this the previous time? Are there any lessons we can pick up from the last time this happened?

 

Or did somebody get this right before and can we copy or adapt what they did? The same happens when I get into the communities, the rooms with business people and investors. All business, all investing is an analysis of the trends, the performance up to the moment that you're talking with them.

 

Everything the Federal Reserve does is to study how prices have worked and how their policy interventions have had the consequences that they've had. Everybody in every walk of life, medicine. The first thing they ask you, Dan, when you're talking to the doctor, is to go through your medical history, sometimes back through your grandparents.

 

Medicine, investment, diplomacy, it's all history. Everybody wants to know the history because they want to apply it to the challenges that they have in front of them, the use of history applied to contemporary policy and other challenges. That's why we founded the Hoover History Lab that you're now.

 

A member of. And so the demand for history is unlimited. You see this in the book sales. History books and history books, sibling biographies, are some of the best selling, I mean, sort of after self help and cookbooks.

>> Dan Wang: Big genre is romantasy now, Steve. So maybe that's something that you can get into too.

 

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: I wish I could write at that level for that size audience. But anyway, my point being is that the demand is there. So it's on us to supply, to deliver, to meet that demand in all ways we can. There are two big seasons in the book trade, Christmas and Father's Day.

 

Everything else is noise but Christmas and Father's Day. So fall books published for Christmas season and spring books published for Father's Day. And history and biography are obviously dominant genre there. Not only, but dominant genre, including history of science and tech and history of innovation and biographies of innovators or scientists or entrepreneurs.

 

So we don't have a problem of trying to find an audience somewhere. The audience is there. Our challenge is meeting that audience where it is. We did that better sometimes in the past. More writers of sort of Cairo style achievement were in history departments in the past potentially than they are today.

 

A lot of your best selling historians don't have an academic affiliation. You could argue that that's not accidental, that there's something that emancipates them or frees them up to write for a larger audience outside the academy. That's a debate that we could have. I think there's something to that, although we don't want to oversimplify.

 

But again, I'm okay with people writing for specialists too. I think that's a worthy audience. I think persuading them or at least engaging with them if you can't persuade them is a really important task of us in the academy. What I don't like is people who dismiss popular history, who dismiss the general public or the wide audience who say you've cheapened history by being successful with the public.

 

I don't like people who say that specialists who write for specialists and are very good are wasting everybody's time. I don't like that either. And I especially don't like condemnation of achieving an audience for the work that you do. Popularization is just another word for having done a good job, that a lot of people are reading what you're writing now.

 

We have choices. There are many different options in books that people can read. Whether you go to the library, as my mother used to take me when I was growing up, the public library had a library card, or you go on the Internet, you scroll on your phone, you go to Amazon, you go to Barnes and Noble, you belong to a book group, virtual or in person.

 

You have unlimited options. And in my view, it's all good. But can I break in to those venues? Can I become an option for those people? Can I offer them something that they can take away, that's valuable with all the other choices and options? In other words, can I participate in the marketplace of ideas?

 

Can I compete in the marketplace of ideas? Can I succeed in the marketplace of ideas? Can I justify taking the attention of people with all of these options? Are they going to feel that they wasted their time, or are they going to feel deeply satisfied and want more?

 

That is incumbent on us, whether we're in the academy, not in the academy, whether we imagine, fantasize that we're going to get this audience or that audience. And the proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. If people are reading your work, even to condemn it, that's a whole lot better than if you're being ignored.

 

If you're on the syllabi of PhD seminars or undergraduate courses, if you're in the conversation on the blogs, in the big blogosphere, if you're in the substack, if people are reading you even to dismiss, condemn, overturn, revise what you're saying, you've achieved something, you're part of the conversation, you're helping people get to a better understanding, even if it's a rejection of what you're trying to say.

 

They are encountering you. The highest achievement is when they have no choice but to take you into account when you're on the PhD syllabus, of those people who despise your work, of those people who are threatened by your work, of those people for whom, if you're right, they're wrong, if you're on their PhD syllabus, if you're inside their substack, if they must, if they must encounter you, if they must take you seriously, you've achieved something.

 

 

>> Dan Wang: The goal of the Hoover History Lab is to use history to inform public policy. That's one of the several things that we do here. And I wonder, how do we think about what is valid historical reasoning? Now, one of these tools that are quite commonly reached for by a certain class of commentators is that that any attempt to be conciliatory smells like the munich Agreement of 1938.

 

Yes, that is just a normal thing that people reach to, to accuse someone of being appeasement. How do we ever weigh any of these analogies and say. And ask whether the metaphor applies to the problem.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yes, Dan, that's a deep one too. So junk history is the biggest problem we face in history.

 

You often hear the complaint that people are ignorant of history. You hear that complaint sometimes from history professors, and you want to take that mirror and hold it up and say, geez, how could it be that people are ignorant of history? Who's trying to teach them and who's failing to teach them history?

 

Who's failing to attract them to history and engagement with history, right? So anybody who complains that people are ignorant of history, they need to look in the mirror and then decide what they're going to do about that. People who are ignorant of history are teachable. You have to do it well.

 

Again you have to attract their attention away from their other options. You have to compete and succeed in the marketplace of ideas. I'm good with that. And I'm okay with ignorance of history because, as I say, they're teachable. A bigger problem we face is junk history. People who think they know something, people who use analogies.

 

People have a superficial understanding of the past, and they're righteous about that understanding and its application. So every time you go into a diplomatic conversation and you're not maximalist in your demands, it's Munich, it's 1938. It's the Munich Pact, it's Chamberlain and Daladier giving away the store to Hitler for nothing, or it's Cold War, or it's fill in the blank, whichever analogy you prefer.

 

And so that's a much bigger problem, at least for me, to face the abuse of history, cutting off conversation by referring to historical examples and getting away. With it, because the people you're talking. To don't know the history either. And so you are so self assured in your use of the analogy, you, you're bluffing your way through.

 

Let's just take the Munich Pact for a second. Just for fun, which I wrote about in Stalin Volume 2, I spent a lot of time revisiting the Munich Pact and what happened and why in Stalin's role. We won't give all the details, but just people can understand. So Chamberlain was the initiator; he was the Prime Minister of Britain.

 

His policy was called appeasement, which was a positive, not a pejorative term in its usage back in that day. And it meant that you would try to find an understanding with the other side, short of maximalism. So there was a deal to be had and the issue was to find where that deal was, to avoid war.

 

Because war is always bad, even when you win. Lives are lost, property, assets are destroyed. Healing takes a long time. So avoid war, do a deal. Appeasement. And it had many motivations in the case of Chamberlain. Preserve the Empire, preserve British standing in the world, globally. Don't get into a war with Germany.

 

It had been very costly, the war just one generation earlier, the First World War. So avoid a repeat of this. And so he goes to Munich, Mussolini. Is there as the dishonest broker presiding. It's in the Fuhrer House, which still stands to this day in Munich. I was there not that long ago.

 

And the Czechoslovaks, whose fate was being decided by Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and the French Prime Minister Daladier didn't invite the Czechoslovaks into the main room. They were in an anteroom, not part of the conversation. Their fate was decided without them, for them. And so it received tremendous condemnation.

 

Part of it in real time and. Most of it retrospectively as having been a really bad deal to give Hitler the Sudetenland, the predominantly German speaking region of Czechoslovakia, for free without compensation after Hitler had stirred up from outside Czechoslovak borders, sabotage and other acts to destabilize the Czechoslovak State.

 

He got the Koda Works, which was the number one Central European defense industrial factory complex. He got it for nothing. There was no compensation paid. Many people became refugees. He promised that that was all he wanted. And then, of course, he then forcibly took the rest of Czechoslovakia the next year.

 

And on it went. And then Poland and World War II. So people look at Chaebol and they. Say, what a fool. What was he thinking? That he could appease Hitler and give Hitler something, make concessions, and that Hitler would swallow that and be satisfied and that would be it.

 

And so, yes, that's how we understand the Munich Pact, which is invoked every time someone wants to make concessions, just like you said. So it's very interesting. You have these letters from Chamberlain to his sisters in real time talking about what he should do. He's sort of confiding in his sisters, the Prime Minister.

 

These are confidential, personal letters, but they've survived. And his critics, the critics of Chamberlain are saying, you just have to do a deal with Stalin. And if you do a deal with Stalin together, you, England, right, the UK and the Soviet Union together can fight against Germany and win.

 

And the Czechoslovaks will fight and maybe the French will join this in, why don't you just do the deal with Stalin? First of all, Stalin was in the process of murdering huge numbers of loyalists. Around a million people were executed or died in torture in 1937 and 38, some of it during the Munich Pact negotiations.

 

It wasn't clear that you could do a deal with Stalin and he would uphold his word. The people who mock Chamberlain for doing a deal with Hitler, as if Hitler would keep his word, are advocating doing a deal with Stalin, as if Stalin had more trustworthiness and credibility than Hitler.

 

So that was one problem. But there was even a deeper problem. Chamberlain wrote to his sister and he said, you know, if I do the deal with Stalin and we go to. War against Germany and we win, how. Do I get the Communists out of Central Europe? We call that the Cold War.

 

That was many decades of people behind the Iron Curtain. That was exactly right. You see, because Churchill did the deal. With Stalin and they won the war against Germany. And then Churchill couldn't get the communists out of Central Europe, could he? They were there long after he perished.

 

Churchill, he did what Chamberlain's critics said Chamberlain should have done, and it worked in defeating Hitler at unbelievable cost, almost unfathomable cost. And then the communists were in occupation of Central Europe and through all sorts of other processes in the fullness of time, that came undone. That's a story for another day.

 

I've written quite a lot about that. But my point being is not to rehabilitate Chamberlain and say that we got him wrong, that he really was a genius and that the critics of him were wrong. No, my point is just that things are complicated and Chamberlain, better than some of his critics understood how fraught the choices were and maybe didn't trust Hitler as much as people think he trusted Hitler.

 

He was desperate for the deal to work because the other deal also had downsides and big problems that he recognized. So it was a choice of two evils and he chose one evil and. It doesn't look good in the fullness. Of time and Churchill chose the other evil and it looks much better in the fullness of time except if you are on the receiving end of that.

 

The consequences of power during all of those decades and Hungary in 56 and the Prague Spring in 68 and etc, and they called it an Iron Curtain for a reason. So again, invoking Munich to criticize any possible diplomatic concessions. Okay, if you want to do that. But then let's talk about the Munich story in its full depth all the way around, not a one sided view of Munich.

 

And then let's see if you want to use that analogy for something that you're criticizing today. Maybe you still do, or maybe you're going to think, you know what, it's more complicated. Maybe the application of the Munich analogy doesn't work. Maybe it does work, or maybe it doesn't work.

 

We see not just commentators, but policymakers making these historical analogies. There's a great book on the Vietnam War of abusing historical analogies. I have it right behind me on the shelf. It's just fabulous. Showing the policymakers applying junk history to justify American involvement in the Vietnam War.

>> Dan Wang: Which book is that?

 

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: This is that book. Analogies at War.

>> Dan Wang: Analogies at War by Yuen Foong Khong.

>> Stephen Kotkin: And you can see the subtitle.

>> Dan Wang: Korea Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam decisions of 1965.

>> Stephen Kotkin: So he exposes the junk history that was extremely consequential for 55,000Americans who perished there.

 

And for untold numbers, probably seven figures of Vietnamese who perished there, as well as South Koreans who fought on the side of Americans and Australians. And we could go on. And so sometimes junk history can be extremely consequential. Now there's an argument about whether the analogies, the junk history is used as motivation or whether it's used as post facto justification rationale.

 

In other words, it maybe didn't motivate them, it was just how they were trying to explain it post facto. And that's an important empirical question. My point only is that junk history is a danger even more than ignorance of history. And good history is just hard to do.

 

And people disagree about it. And that disagreement is fruitful. There's no such thing as one truth, one history. Rifle the past and come up with the consensus and we're all in agreement. But there's preponderance of evidence. There's better history. There's critical use of sources, there's more sources. There's ways in which your history can be better, even if you can never resolve for all time an argument with people because the sources are ambiguous or because disagreements over interpretation are valid.

 

Nonetheless, junk history, Dan, we fight against it hammer and tongs and we lose most of the time.

>> Dan Wang: Junk history is a big problem. Right now in the present moment, we on the Internet are seeing more and more of what the Kids call slop, which is AI generated nonsense that are being read by all sorts of people.

 

How is AI affecting history practice today?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Not enough. Not nearly enough. So we can't be afraid of inventions, of breakthroughs of technology. It can be our friend. It doesn't have to be our enemy. It doesn't have to be predominantly a threat. People say to me, do you allow students to use AI?

 

And I say, well, what makes you think I could prevent them from using it? You think I could prevent them? So of course they're going to use it, and they should use it because it's an important tool that's available to them that wasn't available when I was a student.

 

And so all I ask is that they divulge that they used it, tell me how they used it, and then I'll discuss the material with them orally. Because if they've used it in a way not to engage the material, to avoid hard work, they've cheated, not me as the teacher, they've cheated themselves.

 

They've cheated themselves out of an education at these prices. And so we want to make sure that they're using it in ways that enhance their education, enhance their skill set, enhance their capabilities going forward, not just now. So I'm good with students using AI. I just want them to use it in ways that benefit them in intellectual development and skill set, as I call it.

 

So now you're talking about slop. Back in the day, slop was mimeograph newsletters in five carbon copies sent to post office boxes and pass it on, or it was radio, where someone was ranting and raving on the radio and people were amused even if they couldn't follow the line of thought.

 

To the extent there was a line of thought, slop has always been there. Radio made it a massive form of communication. The carbon copy typewriter with the carbon paper to make the five copies and distribute them was a more difficult distribution mechanism than radio. And radio, of course, is still with us.

 

And now we have the internet. And so you have to ask yourself not why slop is being produced, but why it's being consumed. Who's interested in why? Supply of slop is not interesting to me. Demand for slop. That's a really interesting question. Demand for conspiracy theories, demand for junk history.

 

Demand for we could go on and we could go on and you know better than I do what's coursing through all those amazing electronic devices that we're privileged to have. I want to understand the demand and I want to get myself in to meet that demand, but not with slop.

 

With instead evidence based, verified information and knowledge that's also interesting to read and talk about. In other words, it doesn't have to be dry, it doesn't have to be medicine, it doesn't have to be the opposite of slop. It can read like romance and fantasy, it can read like a novel, it can read like some of the stream of consciousness that you refer to as slope.

 

Where it's hard to make ends meet. You don't know where it begins and where it ends because it doesn't begin and end. It's just roiling. So I'm okay, I need to get in there. I need to reach that audience too. I need somehow to access those people. I need to understand why they are consuming that slop and I need to figure out how to compete with that and get them to consume other things.

 

The answer is never to prohibit. It's never to try to repress, suppress, to censor, because that doesn't work in practice. Even if there are harms from failing to repress certain things, mental health harms teenage girls. One could go on. Even if there are harms, it's very hard to successfully suppress.

 

It's much better to provide the positive, the alternative, but to provide it in ways that are attractive and to provide it where people are. You're not a Venus flytrap where everybody's going to come to you because you're up in some tower at Stanford. You got to go out to where they all are and you got to meet them in the midst of that slop potentially.

 

And it has to turn up somehow on their feed or on the algorithm on the scrolling, and it has to keep them because they can go to other things that are being fed to them. So I understand people are not happy pro holocaust podcasts that gain hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of views.

 

I understand that that stuff is reprehensible. That stuff makes a lot of people upset, even people who are not directly affected by the subject matter that's under discussion. Sometimes it's uncomfortable. Free speech freedom can be very uncomfortable. It can even cause harm to people, sometimes unintentional and sometimes actually intentional.

 

So how do you remain a free and open society and assimilate AI? That's the challenge in front of Les. My generation, we caused enough grief. We failed at enough things. Us baby boomers, we have a lot to answer for. We're not going to fix this. Your generation, the generation behind you, the generation behind that, it's going to be up to you guys to assimilate the slop and other phenomena while remaining a free society.

 

There's nothing more valuable than freedom, and there's nothing more difficult than keeping freedom. There are so many temptations, seductions, to curtail freedom in the name of some injustice or in the name of some emergency or in the name of some harm that's going on. Until you study unfreedom, you don't always appreciate what curtailing freedom Involves.

 

It looks like you're solving one problem, but you're getting perverse and unintended consequences. You never solve the problem you think you're solving, and you introduce a whole lot more problems, you know? Stalin spent his adult life in the underground, the political underground. He got exposed. He was a student of great achievement.

 

Got into the seminary on merit. Teacher's pet, sang in the choir. Spectacular student, really smart. Gonna be a monk priest at the end of the five year course of study at the seminary. Was the highest educational institution in Tbilisi, which was the capital of Georgia, Imperial Russian Georgia, where he was born.

 

In a small town not far away from the capital, he got exposed to subversive literature that was illegal. The censors were trying to suppress it, and they failed. It circulated anyway. Eddy got exposed to injustice at the marketplace, in factory life, up and down the streets of the city of Tbilisi.

 

The injustices were real, they are not invented. Tsarist Russia was an unjust place and many people suffered unjustly. And he witnessed this. And he dedicated his life to fighting injustice. And he gave up the priesthood. He never had a job, except he was a meteorologist at a weather station for a few months when he was a teenager, that was it.

 

Otherwise he was no money, no profession, no prospects, Exile in Siberia, prison, escape from exile or prison, back to exile in prison, surveillance, being monitored by the police, being harassed by the police, how many countless arrests. That was his life for 20 years, from the late seminary period up through the 1917 revolutionary period in Bolshevik coup.

 

A penury, no prospects. And he did that because he was dedicated to fighting injustice. You don't give up everything and anything, have no money, no life prospects, live in Siberian exile, go to prison again and again for power out of cynicism. That's not a life you choose easily.

 

And it's the life he chose. He wasn't the only one. Many young people chose that life. But that was his 20s and his 30s. He then gets into power through complicated circumstances that we're going to skip here, but obviously I've written about. And in fighting injustice and overcoming injustice, he helps create the most unjust system that's ever existed.

 

And injustice in Stalinist Soviet Union is worse than even the incredible injustice in the Romanov dynasty imperial Russia. This is perverse and unintended consequences. That's why I say perverse and unintended consequences is sometimes for me, a synonym of history. So you think you're fighting one thing, and you may actually be creating something worse in the process.

 

However sincere you might be, however dedicated, however much suffering you endure. Because causality is not linear, because intentions are insufficient, because systems behave in complicated and sometimes unpredictable ways, because other people have agency, not just you. And I could go on. So this is the richness of history.

 

And so when you get this slop, now that's more prevalent in terms of being able to access it and see it than it was back in my day because of the electronic brake paper. Breakthroughs. And now because of AI, you have to be careful. Retention of freedom is the most important way that you're going to manage this technological breakthrough.

 

And you need to bend it your generation, you need to bend it into positive use cases, knowing full well that there are going to be negative consequences to it. Additionally, the genie's not going back in the bottle. You're not going to be able to control it. There are going to be negative consequences.

 

Are there going to be positive consequences? And how can we leverage those positive consequences for immense positive effects for your generation and the ones behind you? I think that's a fabulous. Such an enticing proposition. I'd love to be your age again. I'd love that to be what's in front of me right now.

 

My whole life unfold in the pursuit of making that happen. But I want to be careful I don't end up like Stalin. Perverse and unintended consequences and a worse outcome than what I'm fighting against.

>> Dan Wang: Steve, we have to reach the audiences where they are, get into the algorithms.

 

We're not going to break out into a TikTok dance right at this moment.

>> Stephen Kotkin: No.

>> Dan Wang: That's saving that for the next episode where you talk about freedom. The most difficult thing to preserve. I can't agree more. After spending quite a few years living in a modern communist country, what I missed the most was.

 

Was a sense of pluralism.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yes.

>> Dan Wang: And that is, I think, the most important thing in America. That is the most important attribute in America that I crave and that I want to preserve. But we're recording now in middle of May 2025. There has been some economic chaos triggered by tariffs, some curtailment of civil liberties.

 

I'd be remiss if I didn't ask, Hugh, what is the historical moment that you're reaching for beyond Andrew Jackson to think about the second Trump administration Right now.

>> Stephen Kotkin: We have to be careful not to imagine that two thumbs which are hard at work almost 24, 7, are creating long term enduring effects or even short term enduring effects.

 

Many things that are coming from a pair of thumbs are not happening in reality. Many things which people say are happening are not happening. There are approximately 58 Senate confirmed positions so far, more than three months into the new Trump administration. There are 5,500 political appointments and a large number of them require Senate confirmation.

 

And so far we have about 58 at last count when I looked, we don't have a large functioning administration. It looks like a lot is happening because there's just a lot of noise there's a lot of drama, there's a lot of melodrama. There are lives affected. There are a million foreign students in the United States.

 

A million. They're here for a reason. They perceive correctly opportunity here. And they're tremendous. And we're lucky that they come here. Of that million, approximately 1400 had their visas revoked, in some cases even green cards. 1400 people affected. Every one of those is a life. Every one of those is a person.

 

Every one of those is a story and in some cases a tragedy. That's 1400 out of a million. You can do the math of that. 1400. A majority were reinstated. So the thumbs and what's happening don't always fully align. I'm not saying it's inconsequential. I'm not saying that lives aren't affected, they are.

 

I'm just saying we need perspective on what's happening and especially what's not happening. I doubt that Trump will reach the deportation levels achieved under Obama. I seriously doubt he has the competence capabilities, staff follow through to reach Obama level deportations from the United States. We'll see. And also there are worthy debates about the nature of immigration, who should be allowed in, who should not be allowed in, etc.

 

Those debates are not one sided. I'm not taking a side in those debates. I'm just saying that they're worthy debates in a democracy. Immigration policy has been a failure. It's been a multigenerational failure, and it's been a multi sided, bipartisan failure. And I would love to see a solution rather than a failure.

 

But if you want to talk about the current moment, Dan, it's a reckoning, it's a revelation. Trump intentionally and unintentionally is revealing a lot of stuff that was happening that was either under the radar or barely studied or ignored even if people knew about it. He's showing that many things were not working, many processes needed to change, many things that we kept saying, we need to keep this, we need to keep that had already become moribund.

 

And so I perceive the current moment as a colossal opportunity. It's a colossal opportunity to remake where we're going to be and need to be. We need a new equilibrium domestically and internationally. We need a rebalancing in America's role in the world and relationships. We need a rebalancing here at home.

 

We need a revival of our institutions. We need a revival of the story that we tell ourselves and our children and our grandchildren. This is not the way I would have done it had I been asked, how should we rebalance? How should we revitalize? How should we bring about this new equilibrium?

 

But it's on us to seize this moment, to use our agency as citizens, as green card holders, as students on visas, as foreign allies and partners and friends. To seize this moment collectively, to rebalance, remake, get us all to a better place. The beauty of citizenship is that agency where we began the conversation.

 

The structures are in flux. Things are in motion. The future is not determined. President Trump is in his second term and already a lame duck. He cannot rule again, let alone what age he might be. Trumpism without Trump has been a big question mark. All the people who've tried to be Trump at local levels or even a national level, have not succeeded the way Trump has in capturing.

 

Imagination and attention or office. We'll see how enduring some of the phenomenon prove to be. They might be enduring, they might not be enduring, but it's a moment of opportunity. Seize it, shape it, move it in a direction that's positive in ways that you want to see. Things were failing not across the board, but in some cases now they're failing worse in some cases, but they're being revealed more.

 

That's a skill. Trump is one of the masters of social media in ways that's just breathtaking. He's gotten people to believe things are happening that are not happening. He's gotten people to believe all sorts of stuff. Policies are being undertaken even though there are no people in place in many cases.

 

He's great at storytelling in short form in ways that audiences are captivated. He didn't win a majority of the vote. He won by 1.5% more or less of the popular vote, but didn't get 50%. That margin is very small. It was largely a punishment of the Democrats. They deserve that punishment and the voters administered that punishment.

 

And the voters will punish again because voters can't always get what they want, but they can punish what they don't like and what's in front of them. But in the meantime, Dan, how are we going to seize this opportunity? What are we going to create? What are we gonna remake?

 

It's not the 1940s. There hasn't been World War II. There haven't been 55 million killed. We're not reinventing world order under the American aegis like happened in the 40s. A moment that was seized by a small number of people at the top and ultimately by whole societies, US society, European societies, Japanese society, South Korean society, and we could go on.

 

It's remarkable the world that they brought into being, the peace and prosperity comparatively to other epochs. That's a remarkable epoch. Not for everybody. Cold war meant hot war. You can ask the people in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, Congo and many other places. Not everybody shared the peace, not everybody shared the prosperity.

 

But in world historical terms, it was a breakthrough. Immense achievements, some of it technological breakthroughs followed medicine, health, daily life, in addition to communications. They could have not seized that moment. They could have had a revenge oriented approach to their former enemies, like what happened after the First World War.

 

They could have had a non inclusive, moat, fortress style approach to countries that had been either our enemies or been destroyed. Instead it was opportunity at home and opportunity abroad. All of this stuff about liberal international order and rules based order that came much later. Those Slogans never work for me.

 

I understand this is opportunity at home and opportunity abroad. Widely shared wealth. But first you have to produce the wealth and widely shared peace and prosperity globally. That's still in front of us. We know how to do that. We've done it before. We have remarkable institutions that have endured much worse than anything they might be enduring now, depending on your political point of view.

 

And so the capability is there. It's about will, it's about imagination, it's about creativity, and it's about forming coalitions, multiplying our agency, amplifying. It's about tolerance when people disagree. It's about pluralism, it's about community. And it's ultimately about storytelling who we are and who we want to be, what our aspirations are and how we live up to them.

 

I'm extremely optimistic. If we can avoid a Great Power War, and that is the whole game of avoiding Great Power War. If the United States and China do not go to war, remember, 55 million is the low estimate of World War II. That number is already impossible to fathom.

 

And it's a multiple of World War I. What could World War III look like? I don't even want to contemplate that. If we can avoid a Great Power War, which you don't avoid through appeasement, as Churchill said, you only get war. You choose dishonor and you get war.

 

We've been through that episode already. Every other problem is manageable. Every other problem can be addressed. Everything can be tackled. If you can avoid the Great Power War. If you sink into Great Power War or you opt proactively for Great Power War because you think it's a solution, the grief, not just the $115 trillion economy that's at stake, but the grief and the generational grief.

 

Because the consequences of war are multi generation, not just those who fight in it directly. It's horrifying. So I see us as figuring out how to share the planet with China, because they're not going away and we're not going away. The two of us have never been superpowers at the same time.

 

When China went into that tunnel in 1800, approximately and didn't come out till 1880, that was the rise of America. There was no America in the many centuries before 1800, when China was one of, if not the most important country on the planet. We got to share the planet with China.

 

The issue is, what are the terms of sharing that planet? What are the terms of sharing that planet? And how can we achieve, not impose, but achieve favorable terms strength but also diplomacy. People say peace through strength, yes, that is the only formula that works. But it's the peace that's the key.

 

That's the goal. The strength is the means. The peace is the goal, the strength and the diplomacy, negotiating the terms. If the terms are Xinjiang, what's happening in Xinjiang, I don't like those terms. If the terms are what happened to Hong Kong, I don't like those terms. If the terms are domestic repression in China extended abroad, I don't like those terms.

 

Not everything America does is laudable. There's a lot of hypocrisy in American rhetoric and behavior. But I live in a world in which you have to make choices just like Chamberlain had to make choices and Churchill had to make choices. I want to negotiate more favorable terms in sharing the planet because I don't want to go to war.

 

And if I can do that, then I can argue attempt manager. Everything else, whatever the issue might be, whatever the issue, that one side or the other side thinks is the most important. The beauty of democracy is you can peacefully settle your disagreements in a country of 340 million people.

 

We're going to disagree. You and I don't agree, but we can have a peaceful discussion. We don't need violence just because we disagree. America is polarized by definition. In 340 million people, you're going to get far left and far right and everything in between. It would be shocking if you didn't get that.

 

The issue is not polarization, it's demonization. The issue is I disagree with you and you're a threat to the American way of life. That's false. You're not a threat to the American, American way of life. Neither am I a threat to the American way of life if I disagree with you or you disagree with me.

 

So let's recapture that ability to use our democracy the way it was designed, and let's shape that future. Use our agency. Let's figure out those structures. Let's figure out what's driving us, where it's driving us, and let's see if we can tweak a little bit and push it and bring it in alignment with our values or our hopes or aspirations.

 

And let's do that while sharing the planet. But let's make sure we can have leverage, strength in negotiation to determine, to figure out the terms of that shared planet. So that's where we are. That's why we study history. It's not the only thing we study. We want to study science and technology.

 

We want to study everything and anything. The toolkit has to be as big as possible. As long as the institutions, the democracy, the humanity, the compassion, the strategic empathy, the humility, all the stuff that history can give you if done properly. Let's do that.

>> Dan Wang: You're known for being a great mentor at Princeton.

 

In 2010, you won the Graduate Mentoring Award. How do you think about building the next generation?

>> Stephen Kotkin: I was really lucky. At Princeton, I had a very significant PhD program. We had applications from around the world, not just the US and we had unbelievably diverse topics across Eurasia and different methodologies and different personalities.

 

And it was a privilege beyond words to be able to be part of that. And they taught me. However I mentored them, whatever I might have taught them, they taught me an immense amount. And they've all gone on to big stories, to writing big stories, and having that impact and being those people, life of the mind, people that when they were young, they wanted to be.

 

And you look back at that and you think yeah, that's invaluable. Could never put a price on that experience. And I had more than three dozen in my 33 years at Princeton where I was the first Reader Advisor Co advisor. And almost every single one of them has a major academic jobs.

 

Some of them are already full professors. I relinquished that PhD program when I moved here full time three years ago. I had a summer gig for multiple years, an adjunct part time role at Hoover, mostly to carry out my own research here in the rich library and archives and also to lead a workshop on authoritarian regimes and democratic breakdown which Paul Gregory had founded here.

 

And I began to co lead that with Paul. And so moving out here I relinquished that PhD program into which I put so much of my life into and got even more out of and instead I turned my attention more towards policymakers and the business community. I had been interacting with them all during those 33 years at Princeton.

 

But I decided that the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Silicon Valley was a larger and potentially better platform for me individually to have interactions with people in national security, establishment diplomacy, venture capital, investment, broadly job creation. And I thought maybe I can get involved in that way and have an impact in that way.

 

Different from the mentoring of the PhD students, but nonetheless an exciting new prospect which was a principal motivating factor for the move out here. My first time I came here was 1985 to do research in the library and archives when I was a PhD student up the road there at Berkeley.

 

So it's been 40 years I've been coming down here, but the last three years full time senior fellow affiliation but we have undergraduates involved in the Hoover History lab and we treat them like their PhD students. We encourage them to do original research and to publish papers under their own name using history, applying it to contemporary policy challenges.

 

We have quite a number of them now which is really exciting and they're phenomenal if you challenge them and then give them space, boundless what they can achieve. And then we have some assistant professor equivalents. We have recently minted PhDs postdocs. We have research fellows who have the possibility to renew year after year after year.

 

We have visiting fellows, often from industry, sometimes from government. We have senior fellows at my level, Neil Ferguson, Victor Davis Hansen Frank Decatur, Barry Strauss. I hope I'm not leaving anybody out. We have a large number of really exceptional scholars and scholar practitioners H.R. McMaster two doors down from me, where we speak.

 

And so our goal is to form some sense of community and collective enterprise like a lab. And some people have their individual projects. Some people might collaborate with each other inside the lab and do collective projects. Multi-generations are encountering each other, and sometimes the older generation is mentoring the younger people, and sometimes it's the other way around, where the students are teaching and actually mentoring us about what we need to do or to whom we need to speak and how it's just really exciting.

 

It's a kind of movable feast. It's this flexible structure of serendipity and collectivity, but also individual excellence and striving. So the PhD program had that. There's a bit more of a mentor disciple relationship built into it, at least at the beginning, when they first sign on. That's less so as they master a subject that they learn even better than and complete that PhD thesis.

 

Here, we don't have that. We have much highly decentralized, highly opportunity driven, more like a venture capital enterprise. Someone comes with an idea and you say go for it, and you are maybe in charge of putting some resources behind it or putting some staff time behind it or facilitating it in some way.

 

The VC approach to really good ideas and some will succeed beyond dreams and some may not succeed and they have to pivot or adapt. So that's what we got going on here. And if I can play a role in that at least for a few years, then I feel like I've had a second wind or a second act, as we say in America is the land of the second act.

 

Even if you haven't had a first act and I did have a first act and now I'm having a second act and that's really pretty special.

>> Dan Wang: Steve, Anna Karenina had eight acts and so I hope this is your second act. I hope you have many more acts to come.

 

The type of person I most respect are those capable of self reinvention. To have gone to Magnitogorsk, to have decided to do a big biography of Stalin for Penguin Press, and then to depart from a well ensconced position at Princeton. To have yet another act, I think is very admirable.

 

Now we have to leave our viewers, our listeners, with a few book recommendations of history. Obviously you're capable of giving us 500 history book recommendations, but we are going to limit you to give us only five titles and and authors that we should really be thinking about.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you for that prompt, but that's a tough one.

 

That's the toughest assignment you've given. Now throughout the whole discussion. The book that had the greatest influence on me is Borges Labyrinths short stories by the great writer Borges. I have it here on my desk. I have the copy from my college days right here on my desk.

 

I keep it close by because I read and read and reread the Borges Labyrinths and it taught me more about history than any other book I've ever read. I could go on with some fiction. Iliias Canetti's Auto-da-Fe, which is about a Sinologist and his social awkwardness and about the way scholarship is produced and disseminated.

 

It's a magnificent novel. The main character, the Sinologist, is both incredible success and failure at the same time. And it inspired me about academia and how to be an academic and what type of ethics to pursue in the profession. Auto-da-Febby Canetti, Canetti has many great books, but that one I really like a lot.

 

Tocqueville the Old Regime and the French Revolution. One of the greatest history, analytical narratives ever written about how the French revolutionaries smashed everything to create something new, unprecedented. And they discovered that they had recreated a version of the absolutist state with the shards of what they had smashed.

 

The Old Regime and the French Revolution. It's an immortal book. Many others would cite Tocqueville's Democracy in America, which I also venerate without limit. This Old Regime and French Revolution is pinnacle for me when it comes to analyses, analytical narratives, what I would like to aspire to even if I can't achieve.

 

There aren't very many books on Tocqueville's level that you would put in that category. Machiavelli's the Prince is probably one that I would put in the category with Tocqueville. Machiavelli's Prince is often understood superficially, Again with that junk history. Machiavelli was a really interesting, compelling character. So many dimensions.

 

The book is so very rich and surprising and is not one that you can read only once. You read it again and again and you get different things and more things from it. So, okay, so I think I'm at four now.

>> Dan Wang: Four, last one.

>> Stephen Kotkin: I've painted myself into a corner here.

 

I have them coursing through my head. Which books to mention should I mention? Solzhenitsyn Gulag Archipelago? Okay, we won't do that. It's three volumes and too hard for most people. What are we going to do for the fifth and final book? Memoirs of an Antisemite by Fon Rizzori?

 

That's a special taste. It's also one of my favorites, but let's leave that one aside. How about On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt? That may be a less obvious choice. I also keep that. I also keep that close by. We published it at Princeton University Press. I was on the board for many years at Princeton University Press.

 

Harry was in the philosophy department. And it's a very serious discussion. It would seem to be a little bit trivial or tongue in cheek because of the title, but it teaches you a lot about the nature of truth and the truth regime. By that I mean we disagree on what constitutes the truth, but we need to agree on how to get to the truth.

 

The truth regime. We need to agree on how we could get to truth, even if you may have a different version of the truth from my version of it on any particular question. So again, the use of evidence, of proper argumentation, of rigor logic, when speculation is appropriate and when it's not appropriate when you can't know things, when you don't know things and when you make believe that you know things that you don't know when you're riffing or BSing.

 

And so it's a profound meditation. It reads about the amount of time you need to go on the Amtrak from Washington to New York or New York to Boston or the other way, probably a little bit longer than the Caltrain from Palo Alto or Menlo park to San Francisco but not much longer than that ride.

 

But deep, and rich, and abiding, and satisfying in ways that few meditations at that short length are. And so I had only one left for the fifth in Harry Frankfurt.

>> Dan Wang: Stephen, the Amtraks may very well be disrupted by the fires which seem to be quite common on the tracks these days.

 

So if that's not enough time, we have that. Stephen Kotkin, a historian of analytical narrative, thank you.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you so much, Dan. Godspeed to you.