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The first time I met Stephen Kotkin, I was a young Moscow correspondent covering the Gorbachev-Yeltsin era for the Washington Post. Steve was an energetic young professor of history at Princeton, who was studying what he called “Stalinist civilization.” Unlike some professors in the field, he was not a constant presence on television, unloading opinions on demand; his sources of information ranged beyond the usual, and he preferred to retain a measure of discretion for the sake of his real work. Kotkin certainly knew many dissidents and prominent Communist Party apparatchiks, editors, and security officials, but he also cultivated connections in the nascent world of Russian business and elsewhere. Early in his career, his canvas was the steel city of Magnitogorsk, in the Urals, where so much of Stalin’s war machine was built. In recent years, he has been at work on a three-volume biography of Stalin; he is working now to complete the final installment of that masterly work.
Kotkin is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a scholar of prodigious research and linguistic facility. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine three years ago, we have had a series of conversations for The New Yorker Radio Hour. Our latest discussion came just a few days after Donald Trump and J. D. Vance’s tag-team assault on the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You are hardly a fan of Donald Trump, but your tendency has been to try to look past, or around, his performances, which you’ve compared to professional wrestling. When it comes to Ukraine and American policy, though, what’s behind the performance? What do you think Trump actually wants in Ukraine? Or is that too hard to discern?
Trump is of the opinion that America has been on the wrong side of a lot of deals, not just the Ukrainian deal, and that a rebalancing is necessary. Now, Trump’s style is very off-putting—some would say disgraceful. Trump behaves in ways that diminish American soft power, which is a hugely important dimension of American power. In his mind, the means don’t matter as long as you get to the ends, which is a massive rebalancing of U.S. relationships across the world.
Let’s remember: once upon a time, the left had a view of Russia, which was that Stalin—yes, Stalin—was forging a new world, a new world of abundance and social justice and peace, that…
