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hi everybody tom woods here it is episode two six hundred 2624 of the Tom Woods show. And I'm delighted once again to welcome my old professor. I don't mean to say old, but in the old days when I was an undergraduate at Harvard and I took 20th century Russia, I took it with Dr. Vladimir Brofkin, who is our guest today. And his most recent work is

from Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin, Russia in search of its identity, 1913 to 2023. And obviously,

this is a topic of perennial interest where everybody has an interest in the authentic history of Russia, because it's in our

headlines every single day. So Dr. Brofkin, welcome back.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Well, I thought today, now I realize that in covering a topic

like this, we run the risk of being called all kinds of names. But I'll tell you something,

that has never helped me back in the past,

and I'm not about to let it start now.

So the first part of this episode,

I'd like to spend talking about Putin himself.

I'd like to know about who he is and what motivates him,

because the Western view is that he was a communist,

so he's just exchanged one form of authoritarianism for another. He has ambitions to

reconstruct the old Soviet empire. There are a lot of things that we hear in the West. So I'd like to know how true any of that is,

or what you think in your study of the matter, is a more accurate way of describing him.

And in your work you have said, since he's been in power for nearly a quarter century,

that you like to divide that time of his tenure into three separate sections for analytical purposes.

So why don't we start at the beginning, start around the year 2000?

Who is he?

Yes, let me take a slightly different approach to this.

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