Transcripts For CSPAN2 Stephen Kotkin Stalin 20180128

Has enabled us to invite so many prominent authors. [applause] i i would also like to recognize and thank New York Historical trustee, chairman emeritus roger herzog, who is responsible for the 2011 renovation of New York Historical Society Building as well as this magnificent robert a Smith Auditorium during his tenure as chairman. Lets give him a big hand, thank you. [applause] i also want to recognize and thank Trustees Barry barnett, joe pickett, ira and all the wonderful chapmans councilmembers with us with a great work and support as well. A few. [applause] so the program tonight will last an hour, include a questionandanswer session, and the q and who will be conducted via written questions on cards. You should receive a card and a pencil. If you havent, the staff are circulating right net and more out and they will be collected later on in the program. There will be a formal book signing in our ny history store on the 77th street side of our building, and copies of the books will be available for sale. We are thrilled to welcome Stephen Kotkin back to New York Historical society. Hes a Professor Holding joint appointments in the History Department in the Woodrow Wilson school at princeton university. Hes also a fellow at stanford universities hoover institution. The author of several critically acclaimed books, his latest stalin waiting for hitler, 19291941, the second of three planned point on the life and times of the soviet dictator. Before we begin id like to ask that you please turn off your cell phones, electronic devices, and now please join me in welcoming Stephen Kotkin. Thank you. [applause] good evening everyone. There is a Little Madeleine albright stool her vx at up to speak the podium. Thats with the called cold ane state department, the Madeleine Albright stool, but im not going to use the podium if thats okay. I normally walk around the room. In fact, i walk all the way around so that i can check the sales, and j. Crew. And im speaking yes. Got to check up out how much te sweatpants costs during the lecture. Its only 55,000 55,000 a yeu cant check the sales on j. Crew when its not a lecture or get to check during the i see no one has the laptop open right now. So this seems to be a more engaged audience than i am used to. [laughing] lets see how this is going to go. So theres this guy, and is on his deathbed turkeys that maybe hours to live, if that. And hes very agitated and hes got to get something off his chest. His wife is by the bedside in the hospital, and hes trying, trying, finally, he does it picky says to her, ive got to tell you something. I cheated on you. And the wife looks at him and she says, why do you think i poisoned you . [laughing] and her name is melania. [laughing] do we have time for questions . [laughing] little did i know, dale, a biography of stall which i began many years ago was going to become a selfhelp book when it was published. [laughing] but here we are. So this is not the trump lecture. I i also do a trump lecture. Maybe ill be invited back for that, well see, i dont know. This is the stall and lecture. So stall and waiting for hitler opens in 1929. The year before, he has announced in a small group he has blurted out that is going to collective eyes agriculture by force. Now, theres something called the peasant commune, not in the entire eurasia but in the russian ports, for example, body in ukraine, not in baltics. The communes collectively redistribute land after a death in the family or a a berth in e family or a calamity so that those who have less land and need more can get a a little bt more, and those were fine can give up a look at atlanta. But after the land is redistributed it work individually. Individual household farms. So the commune is not collectively working the land. This is what collectivization of agriculture entails, and the reason he has done this, the reason stalin has decided to do this in 1928, now is going to pose in 1929, is because hes a communist. I know that sounds hard to believe, but the key secret of the communist party archives, the ones that were classified and hidden and it wouldnt talk about them and would let you see them, the key secret of those archives is that when you get to see the communists behind closed doors, it turns out that they are communists. Instead of saying, oh, you kn, all that nonsense, the workingclass, imperialism, the bourgeoisie, we can relax now. Nobody is watching. We can talk about what we really care about. Instead, when they are behind closed doors nobody is watching. They dont think anybody is going to find out. All the talk about, workingclass, bourgeoisie, if you listen. Stalins argument is as follows. He says while we have socialism in the cities, state owned state managed economy. Socalled planned economy, or fiveyear plan. But in the countryside the peasants have had their own revolution in 1917, 1918. They evicted the gentry class from the land. That is to say, they get rid of the land owners and they themselves become the de facto land owners, about 25 million peasant households. This is all to the 1920s, and the peasants, some of them are quite hardworking. So one day they have two cows, they were card, you get a third cow, they continue to work, they get a fourth care. They may in fact, hire other villagers to work for them because their farms are successful. Well, this is capitalism. This is hired labor, otherwise known as wage slavery, as marx called it. Stalin calls this in the jargon of the time culottes farms. Slang, it means just pick it means these people kind of holding the others in the fifth. Its a derogatory term. So the regime is dependent on the size of the harvest. They need more grain but as the peasants are successful, there are threats to the regime because they are quote better off farmers. This is the paradox the regime has, inflated its self in the cities and in the countryside. Theres de facto private ownership of the land, a clause i market economy, and there are some peasants, not that many, who are doing well. And, in fact, because theyre doing well the people in the cities are eating. But stalin says we cant have two systems. Socialism in the city, and capitalism in the countryside. Because the marxists believes that the social base, the social relations of production determines the political system over the long haul. So capitalism in the countryside with the vast majority of people live, about 120 million of the 140 or 115 Million People, live in the countryside. Capitalism there needs the regime over the longterm is not viable. It will be undone by this new world bourgeoisie that is fully. So stalin argues this and he says, were going to now collective eyes agriculture. The other people in the regime, they are no friends of pattersons, they dont like markets, they are not happy with capitalism in the countryside, theyre committed to eradicating capitalism to get the socialism and then eventually to get to communism. So voluntarycollectivization, youre going to wait a long time for that to happen. However, those people who voluntarily collected lies to their farms are the ones who cant make it. The individual household farms. The only way to do it is by force. Active application of force. Coercive, wholesale, collective so this is what stalin is going to do now. The other members of the innercircle and wider part of the regime, the second echelon, this third act on say its crazy, you cant really do this. Where are we going to get all that force from . Whos going to do all that and dont you think it would be catastrophic western mark well , we wont increase the harvest. Stalin says we need mechanization, right . We need a grana me and fertilizer and consolidation of farms to get scale, just like is happening in america and they all agree with this. Stalin says our tiny household farms is not going to get us that. We need consolidation, big collectivization. They say we can still do that with the model we have. Please dont try to impose this by force. They are communists too and stalin says you dont have the courage of your convictions. Do you believe in socialism and communism or you dont. Either we are going to eradicate capitalism in the countryside or we are going to surrender. You might think, why dont they just allow the successful peasants to continue to grow their farms, acquire more towels and to build a larger scale agriculture through their hard work once again, the answer is thats capitalism. We cant have that. Thats what they did in america. We are a socialist country run by a communist party. Of course, stalin is undeterred, tremendous willpower. Maneuverability, shrewdness and he outmaneuvered them all. And it forces this mass wholesale coercive collectivization across eurasia affecting 120 Million People. Its just breathtaking that hes able to do this, what he does is he insights class warfare in the villages. He pits one group ofpeasants against the other. He imposes quotas for the number of rich peasants who have to be expropriated and shot or deported. So if this were a village, he would say 10 percent of you, 40 of you are better off peasants and have to be deported to the wastes of siberia and the rest of you are going to join the collectives. It turns out that not four of you but 10 of you are better off. That is to say you have three or four orfive cows and the rest of you arent as well off , but if you say this is a crazy idea, that it had youre now a better off peasants or you are in codes with the better off peasants. So the quotas which have to be met, the peasants get together and they begin to protect themselves by saying no, its not me, its you. And they point the fingers at each other. This process, this stirring of hatred and grievances, for example, somebody looks at someone elses wife a few years ago and a peasant remembers that and that grievance becomes the impetus for now pointing out whos an enemy, who is a henchman or objectively in cahoots with the international bourgeoiss. Stalin tours up this process. The process of hatred and jealousy and revenge and violence. And it turns out his critics are right. The critics who said its dangerous if we do this, youre going to destabilize the situation, the harvest is going to be worse, not better. They actually proved to be correct. However, they are correct, well beyond what they even predicted. And as the process launched in 1929, there is a lucky artist the first year in 1930 and then theres a drought followed by torrential rain in 1931. A dislocation, the peasant resistance, the deportations, deporting the people who can work. They are getting rid of the better off peasants and others getting caught up in the process. As a catastrophic 1931 to 33. About 5 to 7 Million People starve to death. And 50 million to 70 Million People starve that survive. Then its not just about those who perish, but also those who are malnourished, the children who are malnourished and this is the legacy that last a long time. But the horrendous efforts and the famine last and persists 1932, 1933. Theres even a famine in 1934 in some places by 1934, the harvest is better. The surviving peasants plant the grain and the collectives and harvest the grain though they actually saved stalins regime, the peasants who were enslaved and forced into these collectives across eurasia. This episode, why is it important . Its important because stalin does does not flinch. He doesnt say you know, you guys were right, i did destabilize the situation. I shouldnt have done that. Lets go back. Letsretreat. He continues to press forward all the way through the famine, using some of the famine and dislocation in order to finish the job of collectivization. And by 1934, he has eradicated capitalism in the countryside. And now hes being celebrated even by his critics for having done what nobody thought could be done. Which was to impose collective farms across 1 6 of the earth. This social engineering. This episode, what happens sometimes with ideas, and ideas can be noble or ignoble. The methods can be noble or ignoble in implementing what happens sometimes with ideas, ideas that are noble, we get that. We allow for that and we celebrate that but when somebody is an idealist or has ideas and the ideas are monstrous, or the implementation, the means are monstrous, we tend to talk about opportunism, lust for power and also some other attributes which of course are present, but we tend not to give as much to the ideas when the ideas themselves are anathema. This episode and many other episodes in the book in my view indicates that there is an idealist here, a communist idealist, a communist true believer, yes hes an opportunist. Yes hes bending this way and that way and is flexible the way lenin taught him. Yet hes trying to aggrandize and gain even more power over those who already have leadership. But hes doing this because he believes this is necessary for the regime to survive, for socialism to be built and for social justice to be achieved. The elimination of capital. He firmly , deeply believes this in documents are very numerous. About his beliefs or his discussions of his motivations during this and other processes. So we need to take seriously sometimes even when the person is not to our liking, even when the ideas are not to ourliking. Just as theres a lot of opportunism with noble ideas. There is course idealism with monstrous ideas as well. Anyway, so this opens the book. Stalin presses this collectivization forward. They get nearly 100 percent collectivization. They force the nomads in context on all the hurting. The grazing land into collective farms which they end up losing most of their livestock. The famine in kazakhstan is by far theworst. The costs are astronomical. Stalin sees an instrument of the movement of history and this is all justified and necessary but what happens is during the process, he was being criticized. First they doubted him when it started. And then when he destabilize everything, the famine, that broke out, the disease, accompanying the famine, it was horrible. Officials began whispering behind his back and sometimes not behind his back. Criticizing what he had done. So this roy told him to no end. It made him so angry that he was doing the hard thing that they said couldnt be done, but needed to be done. They agreed that capitalismin the countryside had to be eliminated, but they were too afraid to try or incapable of trying. And he wasnt afraid. He did it. And they had the severity , to all criticizing. This deeply got under his skin. And we see this anger and resentment over the criticism of collectivization coming back again and again and again to a further episode in the regime including when he murders a large number of his self loyal elites in 1936 and 38 and is also covered in the book. So the argument of the book is that its not a personality thats formed in youth and then unleashed on the world. It is the experience of acquiring power, exercising power. Life and death power over hundreds of millions of people. That experience is what forms the stalin home rule. In other words, its a rule. Its theexperience of rule. Its running and building that dictatorship. And collective icing agriculture, imposing that communist system on this vast population. This experience, we all talk about how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Thats a famous saying, right . Well, power like that, absolute power also forms personalities. Whatever was there, whatever demonic internal roiling sentiments were there before, they were magnified deeply by this experience of rule. I could give many examples of this process at work. Now, this is a long book. Ive been told. Its 900 pages of text. My wife is kind enough to say that it reads like no more than 700. She said this about volume 1 also. The pages just fly by. So a book that big, its very difficult to give a 30 or a 40 minute consultation of it but i want to take another episode, a second episode if thats okay besides the collectivization episode to illuminate the kinds of things you would find in the book. I think im okay with time for a change. Yes. So the second episode id like to talk about is the infamous Hitler Stalin pact. The Hitler Stalin pact. This is a book that has culture, domestic politics, the economy, Foreign Policy all in the same cover to cover between two covers. Sometimes with stalin we get the culture in one book, the cultural specialists will take that on. We will get a foreignpolicy in a separate book. My trip with stalin is to put everything that he ran, created, experienced, destroyed between the two covers. To bring together what it was like to be stalin, not to separate and compartmentalize. The other thing is the geography. There are whole days of stalins life that i now know what he did waking up until going to bed. And what path to death that day and while he put on the document. Hes a human being. For example, he likes colored pencils. He likes green, red and blue colored pencils. The documents in the archive are full of his scribblings and scrollings in these colored pencils. They are produced by the sacco and vanzetti factory. Lets call it back. He smokes a pipe as you know. And he puts tobacco inside the pipe from cigarettes. This floor brand cigarette is his favorite. He unrolled the cigarette. Takes the cigarette and dumps the tobacco into the pipe, whose cigarette . If he spills any tobacco on the table or the floor, he scooped it up. Because hes a little bit of a neat freak. You know when you go to an overpriced restaurant and they have that white piece of paper on the table on top of the tablecloth, and then after you are done eating the bread, they come with that letter opener thing and they take the bread crumbs and they take them away. Thats what he did with the tobacco. If there was a hallway and a runner down the hallway, he walked on the runner and if somebody else that he saw was not on the runner, he would shout out, get on the carpet. He bowled, he loved a form of bowling. A russian form of bowling called hockey bowling. He loved the russian bathhouse. He loved to read. He read all the time, hundreds of pages of books. Later on and hes murdering everybody he against a read about roman despotism. He thinks they are desperate in the roman story reading about augustus. So theres a person in their and its hard to get inside that person. Its hard to get in there but evil is much more interesting when its human. So here we have the hitler saga, this infamous thing in august 1939. And one of the wise tales is this amazing number of false stories about stalin that are passed on from generation to generation and then you look to see the documents is asian, whereis this substantiated and often its not. Anyway, one of the wives tales is that he trusted nobody. He was a very suspicious person but somehow he trusted hitler. On the surface, its kind of absurd. So my working hypothesis was lets assume he didnt trust hitler. Potentially, and lets see what comes out. So just before, please remember, the munich pact in 1948 when i chamberlain and britain and france hand hitler a piece of czechoslovakia with no compensation. There are atleast episodes before. But now we are in august 1969. All during the Hitler Stalin pact negotiations stalin is at war with japan. Thats these station studies so those are usually in different books from the Hitler Stalin pact which is european. Onceagain, the compartmentalization process. So hes at war against a very substantial army, the Japanese Army on the borderlands of mongolia, theres the japanese have conquered manchuria, created a puppet state. In the earlier part of the 30s so thats happening and now hes negotiating with hitler. So he reads up. They have a translation of mine, internally produced for the regime. Stalin has an eight take care of this,delivers the mein kampf translation so hes underlining with those colored pencils , underlining. Some humans. The underlying fact. It says drive to the east. He underlines that. You start to get the impression that he got something out of mein kampf. And he got the point. But that book is about. And then you see that he read other things. He read abiography of hitler. In russian translation. The main argument of which is hitler never keeps any of his agreements. Hes a liar. Never keeps his agreements so here stalin is negotiating and he says hitler never keeps his agreements. You begin to see that he is trusting of hitler. Hitler understood the trust as he told him. So anyway, hitlers the one who needs todeal because hes decided to attack poland. And britain and france have allowed publicly to defend poland. And so if the soviet union joins britain and france, germany is potentially surrounded and has a two front war to fight. So hitlers concerned to get his eastern flank stabilized with a nonaggression pact. Stalin has a lot of leverage in those negotiations. He hasnt told a lot of peoplethat these negotiations are going on because hes suspicious. And the night before the troubles, hitlers foreign minister on behalf of the the table. Night before, stalin says to this guy Nikita Khrushchev was aprotcgc of stalin at this point , he says hes flying in and stalin had this perverse sense of humor that everyone in the regime is the with. Holland wont see somebody for a long time and then will see them and say what, you havent been arrested yet . Thats his sense of humor. How would you like to work in that regime . Anyway, so chris jeff, yes, ruben chavez flying to moscow. Its the communists, they hate each other. Nothing but pouring filled over each other in their propaganda and chris jeff doesnt know what to say so he takes it as a joke, hes going to join the communist party. Stalin says no, ribbon chavez flying to moscow. Anyway, to get towards the end, of this story, stalin hasnt told many people, he just told krista the night before. He hasnt told the Border Guards so ruben shaw is flying on hitlers personal plane, the condor across from kaliningrad. Into soviet territory and the soviet Border Guards dont know. Its an unadorned identified plane and they begin to shoot the antiaircraft guns. And they miss. They miss ribbon shots plane so he lands safely in moscow. Can you imagine stalin telling hitler, have the antiaircraft not miss, what was a misunderstanding. He invited your foreign minister to moscow and we forgot to tell the Border Guards and they shot him down, im so sorry. It wont happen again. You can only imagine how history would have come out had they hit that plane. Instead, the plane lands safely. He is received at the airport with stalins personal armored packard. And theres a picture of this in the book just like theres a picture of hitlers plane with him on it which comes from his photo album. Theres a picture also in the book of stalins armored packard with a flag on it. Rubinchov, which is the private newsreel of the landing that was made for stalin personally. A little snippet. Anyway, rubinchov goes to the kremlin and starts negotiate, video is about hitler. Most of poland, stalin gets the other side of poland, polands going to disappear. Theres going to be spheres of influence beyond poland. The deal is done, the map is arranged, they agree on where the line goes down in poland. Hitler is overjoyed. And nazis invaded poland, september 1, 1939. A week after ribbentrop has been in moscow. And stalin is supposed to invade poland from the other side he doesnt do anything. He just watches as poland has an army, and air force. Maybe theyre going to bomb the germans out. It turns out that the polls fight heroically but they dont bond the germans down. The nazis brick blitzkrieg, is not call back yet, slices through. And lo and behold already september 16, 17, 18, the German Forces are on stalins side of the line. So think about this. Theres a map, they agree. And stalin got what with him . This piece of paper. That ribbentrop had signed on behalf of hitler. And then german army is moving eastward. Stalins direction. And now theyre on the other side of the line that was agreed. So he sends a minion in berlin to meet with the head of german intelligence and whats going on here, the minion gets into the office, theres a giant map on the table and the mac shows the German Forces where they are with the little stick pins, on the military map and the mac shows that they are on stalins side of the line. This is reported back to stalin that they are mapping this. In to the german headquarters. So he calls in the German Military attachc. Stationed in moscow. Says you guys, youre on my side of the line. Its just a misunderstanding. We will fix this. Dont worry. He says well, we were killing the polls. And the polls are running. Theyre running away so in order to chase them and wipe them out, we have to go farther than we thought we were going to go. And it just so happens that the side of the line where the germans are that was supposed to be stalins, thats where the oilfields are. The deletion oilfields. Around the city of wolf london baird. You know that city . Anyway, so just a coincidence, there on the side of the line of the oilfields. And his military attachc, he says if its a misunderstanding, fine but were going to take that territory back. And the red army , they go in. Forcibly seizing back the oilfields. September 19, 1939. The red army and the where not engage in skirmishes and there are casualties on both sides. So thats your Hitler Stalin pact. Stalin forcibly takes, remember, there are casualties on both sides this is real engagement. He forcibly takes those oilfields on his side of the map. During the middle, hitler himself is in poland. Hes in a coastal resort on the baltic sea. And hitler gives the order in themiddle of it while stalin is forcing the germans back , he gives the order to retreat. He says we shouldnt be there, get out of there and as the germans are retreating, they are angry. They need that oil. They earned it, they took it so they fire at the soviets as they are retreating. Stalin draws the conclusion that the german army wants war with the soviet union and hitler is the restraining force. Exactly the opposite. Of what the facts were. So this is a gigantic important episode. Youre going to say what happens to the oil . Of course, stalin is selling , theres a trade for economic dimensions of the pack because stalin is selling the german army green and. In exchange for German Military or german weapons, German Military industry. So stalin is selling the germans oil that the germans had seized themselves in exchange for state of the art german armaments. So you can only imagine how happy that makes the germans feel. Its the oil that they took, they are now paying for. They had to give it back but they are paying for it. There are episodes like this that you need to get a fresh look at and you need to put yourself into stalins mindset area or understanding what the world look like from his point of view. Not because we have to validate his point of view, i have very little sympathy for the values that he practices in stalins regime. I would say eurocentric but in order to understand how this regime operated, what type of person he was rather than assert our assumptions or impose our assumptions on his way of thinking, hes got a japanese moving in his direction, the german army moving in the west and now they are on the other side of that line that hes agreed, hes got a slip of paper and hes been writing checkmarks about hitler never keeps agreements right before they did the pact so you have to say to yourself, it could be that stalin didnt trust him. Anyway, thank you for your attention. Maybe we will take some questions now. [applause] okay. Here we go. These are your questions. And as you can see im taking the top one. You know how dealers are, right . And im nothing of the sleeves. No questions that i wrote myself. Your trusting me . You want to sign a pack . Here we go. During the famine and post famine, did the worldwide financial depression affects russia . Excellent question. So one of the things about communism was that the timing was good. You see, the capitalism is the reason you have socialism because capitalism is no good if socialism is going to be better. Capitalism is in the Great Depression, it has mass unemployment, its got fascist militarism. It imperialism or colonies all over the world so in the 1930s against that background, socialism has full employment. It is has got a stated piece policy rather than an aggression. Its got selfdetermination rather than colonialism or imperialism. So in the 1930s, despite the famine, despite the 5 to 7 Million Deaths and the 50 million to 70 million carving to survive, like that many people around the world, not just in the soviet union are looking at this and saying this is better for this could work. But what happens after world war ii is the soviet union again assumes that capitalism will have another Great Depression. In fact, this is the basis, the core of stalins grand strategy , that the Great Depression, boom and bust is inherent in the capitalist system. The problem for stalin is that capitalism forgot to have another Great Depression after world war ii. Instead, it had a middleclass economic boom and my father who work in an Embroidery Factory bought house. In the postworld war ii economic boom. Japan, west germany, just a tremendous story. Again, against that background socialism doesnt look as good. And this is the problem for socialism. The problem for socialism is only necessaryif capitalism isnt working , socialism is going to be better. So if capitalism is working at her and better, theres no reason for socialism anymore and that dynamic is the reverse in the 1930s during the famine and so many people unfortunately excused the famine precisely because they see capitalism is horrific, mass unemployment, fascist aggression, imperialism and socialism have to be better than that even if its got some growing pains. Do you see parallels between stalin and trump work stalin and steve madden . So it took until the second card. Lets give the audience credit. We asked a legitimate question for the first question. And here we are now with stalin and trump. Yes. So lets say a few things about stalin. 16 to 20 Million People died. As a result of stalin. I dont know where you are with trump that i dont think we are there yet. Its that kind of stuff. Stalin was diligent. He worked all day, 16, 18 hour days. Showed up at the office all day. Convened meetingswith officials. There was an interagency process, there was a policy process. Yes, stalin was also the guy we know who was a sociopath. But he built a military industrial superpower. Theres no question he presided over that and had quite a lot to do with that. There are few people in stalins category. Hitler, maybe. Mao. And who else . I handfulof motherinlaws. Thats really it. I dont think trump is in thatcategory for everything that we could say about trump. But god willing, in 2024, we will be done with trump. Hello new york. Right . 1. 1, 7 million . Hillary clinton won new york by including new york city, 1. 5 million votes. She won california by 4. 2 million. In other words, trump won the United States of america by 3 million votes excluding california and newyork. Thats something to remember also. And if we run up thescore again , the democrat in the next election wins new york not by 1. 7 million by 3. 7 million, guess what . Same score because its not about new york and california. Okay. What do you consider the most common misapprehensions of the spanish war . Weve got history buffs in the audience keeping me on my toes. Another very good question. The spanish civil war as you know is this episode 1936 to 1939. There is a spanish republic, and attempted which by generals, one of whom is francisco franco. This little pipsqueak. And hes not the only one, theres this guy general mullah. Franco, a couple others. Elderly. His son giorgio was in exile in portugal, goes back to spain the putsch but its such a dandy, and so much luggage that his plane crashes. And he never makes it to the putsch. The reason theres a putsch is because they dont like the republic, they dont like democracy. They dont like the anticlerical is him what theyre afraid of, leftism which they consider to the bolsheviks or socialist movement. The putsch is not supported by the entire country. Theres assistance to the putsch as a result of which spain descended into civil war. Colin intervenes in the civil war on behalf of the republic to help it defend itself against franco and francos helpmates inside spain and outside spain like mussolini and hitler. This becomes a kind of big moral struggle between fascism and antifascism or between franco and his putsch and the left. The left is made up of many, many different groups. Anarchists to communists to splinter communist to democratic socialists and there it was called a popular putsch, a popular elect, no enemies to the left. So the main misapprehension of the spanish civil war, by the way, just a few years ago we finally get the documents on stalins intervention in the civil war. So we have a new story now that we have before his detailed and one of thelonger chapters. But the main misapprehension is that the popular front in spain, the coalition to oppose the putsch in the civil war against franco, that collective popular front fail, it goes because stalin was evil. And it began to conduct purchase arrests and assassinations on the left, dividing the left as a result of which it was weekend and stalin didnt want a leftist revolution or he wanted only a communist version and it was weekend and therefore franco one. This is a story that is aerobically told in many great memoirs, George Orwell has an absolutely brilliant book that makes a version of this line and orwell himself was a participant as you know and was wounded in the spanish civil war. Anyway was there, it was very heavily romanticized. So the facts are the following. The popular front on the left failed on its own terms. Because the socialists and the communists in spain hated each other. There was such a goal between the socialists and the communists. The communists didnt want to cooperate with the socialists. Because the communists didnt believe the socialists work for real. They thought that they were actually apologists for capitalism, that they were going to keep the markets and private property, not go all the way. The way lenin, stalin and the communists would go. And the socialists expected the communists were not being truthful when they said they were in coalition with the socialists parliamentary regime with private property, that the communists were working behind the scenes to undermine them so the socialists stressed the communists, the communists distressed the socialists you see this warfare on the left, a civil war inside thespanish civil war on the left. Which cripples the ability to fight. Even before stalin s skulduggery is then added to the mix. And in fact its stalin whos restraining the communists to force them into this coalition on the left and hes the one whos trying to make the popular front work, even as hes assassinating individuals. Now, franco wins the war because there is a popular front on the right. Which is acceptable. In other words, the right is a bunch of groups also disparate. Monarchists. All the way to fascists. Traditionalist catholics, right . Big mix on the right and franco is able to marginalize the spanish fascists who are quite small in number and to build this popular front on the right to mystically area and in fact, thats one of the main reasons he wins the civil war. So an wins through political means. Hes dexterous politically and the left is condemned by its own civil war. Inside itself. Training those who accept parliament, private property and markets, one on a welfare state version of socialism. Versus those who are more lenin and stalin. I could give you many more details but then again, its in the book. For those people who are thinking that the holidays are coming and the spanish civil war is just the thing you want to give asa gift , dad or a grandpa or your children who are ceased reading, after they turned five and discovered your phone, all right. I got another one, this was inserted up to the top line but not by me. So i my conscious is still mostly clear at this point. What does stalin like in his interpersonal relationships with women . Was he a Harvey Weinstein type or not . I added that one. What was he like with women, thats here. The other part is ripped from the headlines. You get punchy, i dont know about you but i read out to princeton on the thing that we can continually to this day were calling a train. But if youve ever been on it, it does not merit that name. It makes all local stops including those docs which are on the schedule. And it just sits there. In the middle of doing nothing with no announcement or if theres an announcement, its best. Thats my life now. Yet, its called new jersey transit. All right, has anybody ever been on that thing . It makes the lirr and metronorth look like the japanese bullet train. So i was on that. On the 630 out of penn station this morning to go out there and check j. Crew sales. And here i am now, i think its nighttime. In new york. Lets do the women thing. So theres a lot of stuff in the book about stalins personal relations. He didnt have a harem. Most dictators have a harem. You know mussolini, you know there are mistresses and there are others besides the mistresses. Concubines, whatever and its pretty cool that they do this. Sometimes its extremely coercive. He had a harem and a lot of it was coerced. Women were pulled in off the streets by some of various henchmen it looks like, we dont know for sure because of the documents vanished. Anyway, stalin has no harem. He doesnt have very many mistresses either. Its hard to identify mistresses. That is to say, in documentation, substantiated. There are rumors and there are some memoirs about how i was stalins mistress. Many years after hes dead. Valentina worked at the place where stalin lived and people think after stalins wife committed suicide in november 1932, that stalin had a lifelong affair with valentina. You check the documentation, is still began working at the dublin in 1946 so that tells you what that old wives tale is worth. We have a wife who died young , his first wife from disease in baku married in 1907. He seems to have loved her. Theres a photograph in my first volume taken from the georgian archives of her funeral. He then remarried. He was also very much older than his second wife not. And she was a teenager. When he married, his second wife and he loved her. Theres no question he loved her but he was not a very good husband. He neglected her the same way he neglected his two children. He had one child from his first wife who was georgian and then he had two children, a spec llama from his second wife nadia. In his own way he loved her. He was very difficult. I know this audience understands what it means to be a difficult husband. As joan rivers once said, how many husbands go down to the corner store for a quart of milk and never come back . Not enough. He was that kind of husband. There werent very many women in the regime in positions of authority. Very few in fact. Thats the sort of larger patriarchal culture of russia. And stalin loved his daughter that lana much more than just his two boys who doted on her for a while but it was very difficult for the children after the mother died. They were raised by the bodyguards and the other staff personnel. Anyhow, so not an exemplary father. Not an exemplary husband. But minimal relations with women. Because he was a workaholic. And spent almost all his time building this military, socialist military industrial complex. Shall we do a couple more . Are we okay . One more. All right. I have more than one in front of me. Lenin would have been better with him. Lenin had none of collins charm. Thats for sure. None of it. Was there a realistic prospect of an anglofrench expedition versus the ussr to aid poland or finland . Yes. Anglofrench expedition . [laughter] this audience has a sense of humor. What do we got here . How did stalin react to antisemitism in mein kampf . The primary documents offer any insight . Thats a good one because hes accused of being an antisemi but it turns out that stalinhad no special antisemitism. That we normally associate with. Hes got some kind of normal antisemitism of that time in that part of the world. Lets get a good question and on. Oh my god. Okay, lets put those aside. Okay. Were getting down to the nittygritty here dale. Here we go, you mention in your book stalin was an avid reader and collector on books. Who do you consider to be his longest literary influences out of these writers affect his policies within each. Its linen hay. Just being pedantic for a second. I am a college professor, after all. Okay. Well, thats one of the really important things about this. Hes a driver, selfgovernment. He does really well in school as ayouth. In fact, he almost hes top of his class. Very successful. However, he gives it up for the struggle for social justice because the sars regime is oppressive and he commits his life to social justice. In fact, he spends almost 20 years in the revolutionary underground before 1917 with no job, no money and in exile, imprisonment, estate, police surveillance, back into prison, back into exile but he never gives up area is dedicated to the revolutionary cause. Thats part of his idealism story. And hes reading. This whole time and hes got the self betterment autodidact message. And he likes other people who arelike this. And if you look at his library, his library was dispersed unfortunately. They only get together the books, 500 or so that had his markings in them. 20,000 or so books in his personal library but he didnt have any markings in them. His Record Collection was also dispersed unfortunately, many of his private photos were lost. But what we do have is the marks in the lending. He constantly read marx and lenin. He put these little white strips of paper inside the book. So that he could find the quotes really handily. So if there was something that lenin said about i dont know, the british or agriculture or whatever, stalin had a white mark but after a while, he knew lenin so closely that he could quote by heart in many of these passages. He also read novels. In fact, he line editednovels. He would receive a novel or a play or poetry from a writer and he would go through them and make editorial changes, the way for example my editor did at penguin press. And you look at the editing and sometimes the editing was quite good. Sometimes it was political and sometimes it was literary and aesthetic and wasnt as important. He screened all the films that he wanted to see and made edits for suggestions or what needed to be done before they were released to the public. He read as i said, as he got one in the 1930s and began to murder his own loyal officials, he read up on despotism. He read quite a lot of russianhistory , Imperial Russian history, roman history and ancient persian history shows his caucuses influence for example. The ancient persian dynasty, the medial persian dynasty. He knew quite a lot about them and spent a lot of time with them. He read the classics as we would call them. His favorite, his writer was bogle potentially in terms of the old writers. Because gogol portrayed the lens as real people. And stalin like that a lot. Not just the heroes but also the villains were believable. He read literature in translation. Quite a bit. So we think he read about 200 pages a day. Most of that was military and intelligence and civilian Domestic Intelligence files. Its a kind of worldview, suspicious worldview about entities, internal and external blood collected any files and his instructions or his reactions to the files made them more like what he was looking for and it became kind of echo chamber in a way. But he spent a lot of time with interrogation protocols. He read these, in other words people were tortured to confess and stalin read through hundreds of pages of these. Hes a very contradictory person, very clever but at the same time blinkered because hes got these primitive categories of imperialism or bourgeoisie, a broad think about strategy and how the world works, but at the same time murdering people who are loyal to him and not forgetting any slight. All of this is who stalin is and i hope i captured him in the book. Thank you. Thank you so much. This was a great talk. I hope you will meet him and there are in our ny history bookstore. On the 77 street side of the building. Hes happy to sign his book and chat with you a little bit. And we hope to see you back again, thank you. Thank you all for coming. Tv has covered many books over the years on russia and its relationship with the United States. Including those gary kasparov. Masha geffen and more. You watched any of these programs online, visit booktv. Org and type russia book in the search bar. Heres a look at some of the current bestselling nonfiction books according to the wall street journal. Topping the list, fire and you, the walls expose on the white house. Next real bernstein offers her advice on how to be less judgmental in the judgment detox. After that its Mark Mansfield advice on leading a happier life. Followed by your best year ever by Michael Hyatt and court with dietary advice in the whole theory. A look at some of the bestselling books according to the wall street journal continues with Oprah Winfreys insights on the most meaningful conversations, the wisdom of sundays. Next on the list another Melissa Hartwig book followed by Walter Isaacsons biography of leonardo da vinci. Then Neil Degrasse tyson shares his research on university in astrophysics for people in every wrapping up a look at our books from the wall street journals nonfiction bestseller list is electron trump by former Trump Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and deputy manager david moscowitz. Many of these authors appeared on tv and you can watch them on our website, booktv. Org. Heres a look atsome of the best books of the year according to the washington trump. Masha guess and reports on the generation of russians that came of age during the printing regime in the National Book Award Winning the future is history. Author and journalist matt taibbi explores the death of. Barack obama three president ial years. Washington post reporter kenneth details her experiences covering terrorist groups around the world in the book i was told to come alone and wrapping up our look at the Washington Post books of 2017 is a , neurobiologist Robertson Police thoughts on how the brain affects humanbehavior. The next region that is incredibly interesting is called the insular cortex. Now, the insular cortex is incredibly boring if you are a lab rat or any other animal in earth because it does something straightforward. You bite into a piece of food and its spoiled and rotten and fetid and rancid and all that and what happens is as a result your insular cortex activates and it triggers all sorts of reflexes. Your stomach lurches, you gag, you spit it out, you have a gag reflex. Useful. It keeps mammals from eating poisonous foods and you do the same thing with humans. Get a Human Volunteer who is convinced to buy into this food thats rancid and disgusting. We do something fancier. All we have to do is think about eating something disgusting and the insular cortex activates but then something much more subtle. Sit down someone in your brain scanner and have them tell you about the time they did something miserable and rotten to some other human or tell them about some other occurrence of some human doing something miserable and rotten to somebody else and the insularcortex will activate. In every other mammal on earth, its gustatory discussed in us it also does moral disgust and what that tells you is why it is something is sufficiently morally appalling, we feel sick to our stomachs. It leaves abad taste in our mounts. We feel soiled by it. We feel nauseous. Because our brain invented this embolic thing of morals and standards some 40, 2000 years ago and didnt invent a new part of the brain. Instead there was possibly some sort of Big Committee meeting and theysaid moral disgust. Theres that insular that does like food discussed, okay. Its in their portfolio now. Give me some duck tape and now the insular cortex is going to do moral disgust as well and it has trouble selling the difference. Some of these authors will be appearing on book tv. Watch them on a website, booktv. Org