![]() ![]() I have only the greatest respect for George Kennan. I thought we’d begin with your analysis of that argument. The great-power realist-school historian John Mearsheimer insists that a great deal of the blame for what we’re witnessing must go to the United States. We’ve been hearing voices both past and present saying that the reason for what has happened is, as George Kennan put it, the strategic blunder of the eastward expansion of NATO. Ever since we met in Moscow, many years ago-Kotkin was doing research on the Stalinist industrial city of Magnitogorsk-I’ve found his guidance on everything from the structure of the Putin regime to its roots in Russian history to be invaluable. Both principled and pragmatic, he is also more plugged in than any reporter or analyst I know. He has myriad sources in various realms of contemporary Russia: government, business, culture. ![]() He is a professor of history at Princeton University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford University. Kotkin has a distinguished reputation in academic circles. Taking advantage of long-forbidden archives in Moscow and beyond, Kotkin has written a biography of Stalin that surpasses those by Isaac Deutscher, Robert Conquest, Robert C. ![]() So far he has published two volumes-“ Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and “ Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941.” A third volume will take the story through the Second World War Stalin’s death, in 1953 and the totalitarian legacy that shaped the remainder of the Soviet experience. His masterwork is a biography of Joseph Stalin. Stephen Kotkin is one of our most profound and prodigious scholars of Russian history. “The shock is that so much has changed, and yet we’re still seeing this pattern that they can’t escape from,” the Russia expert Stephen Kotkin says. ![]()
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