Stephen Kotkin: Don’t Blame the West for Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2022

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

It’s impossible to understand the destruction and death that Vladimir Putin is unleashing in Ukraine without understanding his most basic conviction: that the breakup of the Soviet empire was a catastrophe from which Russia has yet to recover. Some experts, including John Mearsheimer, have blamed NATO expansion for the invasion of Ukraine, arguing that it has provoked Vladimir Putin to defend his sphere of influence. Stephen Kotkin, a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University, and a research scholar at the Hoover Institution, respectfully disagrees. Putin’s aggression is “not some kind of deviation from the historical pattern,” he tells David Remnick. Russia in the nineteenth century looked much as it does today, he says. “It had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West.” Kotkin describes how and why the Putin regime has evolved toward despotism, and he speculates that the strategic blunders in invading Ukraine likely resulted from the biases of authoritarian rulers like Putin, and the lack of good information available to them. Kotkin is the author of an authoritative biography of Joseph Stalin, two volumes of which have been published; a third is in the making.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.9	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
0:13.0	It's impossible to understand the destruction and slaughter that Vladimir Putin is unleashing
0:18.2	in Ukraine without understanding his most basic conviction that the breakup of the Soviet
0:23.6	Empire was a catastrophe that Russia has yet to recover from.
0:28.2	No one I know understands this history more intimately than Stephen Kotkin.
0:33.8	Kotkin is a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University, and he's
0:38.0	a research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
0:42.1	He's written two volumes so far on the life of Stalin with one more to come, as well as
0:47.2	books on the Soviet Union in its last years.
0:52.0	We've been hearing from voices both from the past and the present telling us that the
0:56.0	reason for what has happened is, as George Kenan said, the great blunder of Eastward expansion
1:04.8	of NATO.
1:05.8	A modern, realist historian like John Mirschheimer tells us that a great deal of the blame
1:11.2	for what we're witnessing now must go to the United States.
1:16.0	So, I thought we'd begin by your analysis of that argument.
1:23.0	I have only the greatest respect for George Kenan, whom I knew.
1:27.8	John Mirschheimer is a giant of a scholar, but I respectfully disagree.
1:33.1	The problem with their argument is that it assumes that had NATO not expanded, Russia
1:39.5	wouldn't be exactly the same or very likely close to what it is today.
1:45.0	What we have today in Russia is not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern.
1:50.6	Maybe before NATO existed in the 19th century, Russia looked like this.
	...

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