This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's impossible to understand the destruction

and slaughter that Vladimir Putin is unleashing in Ukraine, without understanding his most basic conviction,

that the breakup of the Soviet Empire was a catastrophe that Russia has yet to recover from.

No one I know understands this history more intimately than Stephen Kotkin.

Kotkin is a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University,

and he's a research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

He's written two volumes so far on the life of Stalin, with one more to come, as well as books on the Soviet Union in its last years.

We've been hearing from voices both from the past and the present telling us that the reason for what has happened is, as George Kennan said, the great blunder of eastward expansion

of NATO. A modern realist historian like John Mearsheimer tells us that a great deal of the blame for what we're

witnessing now must go to the United States. So I thought we'd begin by your analysis of that

argument. I have only the greatest respect for George Kenan, whom I knew.

John Mearsheimer is a giant of a scholar, but I respectfully disagree.

The problem with their argument is that it assumes that had NATO not expanded,

Russia wouldn't be exactly the same or very likely close to what it is today.

What we have today in Russia is not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern.

Way before NATO existed in the 19th century, Russia looked like this.

It had an autocrat, it had repression, it had militarism, it had suspicion of foreigners in the West.

This is a Russia we know, and it's not a Russia that arrived yesterday or arrived in the 1990s.

It's not a response to actions of the West.

There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.

I would even go farther.

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