Stephen Kotkin on Stalin, Power, and the Art of Biography

Stephen Kotkin on Stalin, Power, and the Art of Biography

Donate to Conversations with Tyler

Give Crypto

Other Ways to Give

In his landmark multi-volume biography of Stalin, Stephen Kotkin shows how totalitarian power worked not just through terror from above, but through millions of everyday decisions from below. Currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution after 33 years at Princeton, Kotkin brings both deep archival work and personal experience to his understanding of Soviet life, having lived in Magnitogorsk during the 1980s and seen firsthand how power operates in closed societies.

Tyler sat down with Stephen to discuss the state of Russian Buddhism today, how shamanism persists in modern Siberia, whether Siberia might ever break away from Russia, what happened to the science city Akademgorodok, why Soviet obsession with cybernetics wasn't just a mistake, what life was really like in 1980s Magnitogorsk, how modernist urban planning failed there, why Prokofiev returned to the USSR in 1936, what Stalin actually understood about artistic genius, how Stalin's Georgian background influenced him (or not), what Michel Foucault taught him about power, why he risked his tenure case to study Japanese, how his wife's work as a curator opened his eyes to Korean folk art, how he's progressing on the next Stalin volume, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded November 13th, 2024.

Other ways to connect

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(295)

Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer, a Forgotten Sect, and Underrated Artists

Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer, a Forgotten Sect, and Underrated Artists

Andrew Graham-Dixon's new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, rests on the conviction that you cannot understand what's in a painting without knowing what its maker was thinking about. In Vermeer's ...

22 Heinä 0s

Chase Koch on Principles, Music, and Overcoming Entropy

Chase Koch on Principles, Music, and Overcoming Entropy

Chase Koch grew up receiving Sunday philosophy lessons from his father Charles and, by his own account, spent most of them half asleep while his sister supplied the answers. The principles didn't land...

15 Heinä 54min

Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth

Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth

Joel Mokyr co-won the 2025 economics Nobel for exploring the question that traces back to the beginning of economics: how did sustained economic growth suddenly become normal? For nearly all of human ...

8 Heinä 46min

Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World

Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World

Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she's drawn to the 16th century because it sits between the medieval and the modern...

24 Kesä 50min

Dave Baszucki on Roblox, Teen Entrepreneurs, and the Future of Play

Dave Baszucki on Roblox, Teen Entrepreneurs, and the Future of Play

Dave Baszucki is co-founder and CEO of Roblox, the user-generated gaming platform where all the games are built by the community itself. With over 100 million daily active users and projected revenue ...

17 Kesä 53min

Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character

Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian who has made a career out of explaining Germany to the world—and, just as importantly, to Germans themselves. Born in East Germany in 1985 and now based in Br...

10 Kesä 1h 1min

Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization

Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization

Toby Wilkinson is one of the world's leading Egyptologists, whose books have ranged across the full sweep of pharaonic history. His latest, The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to ...

27 Touko 45min

Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: ...

13 Touko 55min

Suosittua kategoriassa Koulutus

rss-murhan-anatomia
psykopodiaa-podcast
voi-hyvin-meditaatiot-2
rss-arkea-ja-aurinkoa-podcast-espanjasta
aamukahvilla
kesken
rss-luonnollinen-synnytys-podcast
rss-koira-haudattuna
rss-narsisti
rss-rahataito-podcast
ihminen-tavattavissa-tommy-hellsten-instituutti
rss-hereilla
rahapuhetta
solu-ja-molekyylibiologian-perusteet
mielipaivakirja
rss-liian-kuuma-peruna
rss-perho-rajoilla
ilona-rauhala
rss-niinku-asia-on
rss-suomen-aa-podcast