From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker, from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

It's a great privilege and pleasure this week to be joined by Stephen Cockkin, the Berkland Professor of History and International Relations at Princeton and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

Professor Kotkin is one of our foremost eminent historian of Russia and of the Soviet Union.

He's famous for many of his books on Russia, but perhaps most

famously his three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin, the first two volumes of which have already

been published and go right up to the moment of the German invasion of Russia in 1941, and a third

volume which we're all eagerly looking forward to very soon. So Stephen Cockin, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Thank you for the honor of the invitation.

We're going to try and put what's going on right now, obviously in Eastern Europe,

in the context of the broader historical sweep of Russian history

and try and get an understanding of what Vladimir Putin's aims objectives are

and where this may actually end up. And I'm going to start, if I may, with you by quoting right at the beginning of your second volume of the Stalin biography. You have a quote which is from Alexei, the son, the Tsarevich, the son of Nicholas II in 1917 after Nicholas had abdicated for both of them. And the quote is from the young boy, but if there isn't a czar,

who's going to rule Russia? And I wondered if that's actually not only the right historical

context in which to understand Joseph Stalin, well, you put it at the front of that book, but whether

that is the context in which we should understand what Vladimir Putin is. To a certain

extent, Jerry, you're right. We don't want to compare Putin to Stalin. They're not in the same category.

Stalin is in a category with Mao and with Hitler, and it's a very small category. But unfortunately, Putin is replicating many of the historical pathologies that we see in Russia.

And his regime, unfortunately, is also something that we see in Russian history,

which is to say autocracy, highly militarist, very repressive, using lies, and also suspicion of the West, blaming the West, anti-Westernism.

It's a hole that they get into again and again, and he's now in that hole.

If I may ask why, why does Russia seem to have this predilection for autocracy?

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