Stephen Kotkin

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Stephen Kotkin
Stephen Kotkin speaking at Politics and Prose in March 2015
Stephen Kotkin speaking at Politics and Prose in March 2015
Born (1959-02-17) February 17, 1959 (age 62)
OccupationHistorian, academic, author
NationalityAmerican
EducationB.A. (1981); M.A. (1983); Ph.D. (1988)
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley
University of Rochester
GenreRussian and Soviet politics and history, communism, global history
SubjectAuthoritarianism, geopolitics
Notable worksStalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (2014)
Stalin, Vol. II, Waiting for Hitler, 1928–1941 (2017)
Armageddon Averted: the Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (2001)

Stephen Mark Kotkin (born February 17, 1959)[1] is an American historian, academic and author. He is currently the John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he is also co-director of the program in history and the practice of diplomacy and the director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.[2] He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.[3] He has won a number of awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

Kotkin's most recent book is his second of three planned volumes which discuss the life and times of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, namely Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (2014) and Stalin, Vol. II, Waiting for Hitler, 1928–1941 (2017).

Academic career[]

Kotkin graduated from the University of Rochester in 1981 with a B.A. in English. He studied Russian and Soviet history under Reginald E. Zelnik and Martin Malia at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his M.A. in 1983 and his Ph.D. in 1988, both in history.[4]

Starting in 1986, Kotkin traveled to the Soviet Union and then Russia multiple times for academic research and fellowships. He was a visiting scholar at the Russian Academy of Sciences (1993, 1995, 1998, 1999 and 2012) and its predecessor, the USSR Academy of Sciences (1991). He was also a visiting scholar at University of Tokyo's Institute of Social Science in 1994 and 1997.[5]

Kotkin joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1989 and was the director of the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program for thirteen years (1995–2008) and is currently the co-director of the Certificate Program in History and Diplomacy (2015–present). He is the John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton. He is also a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.[4]

Author[]

Kotkin has written several nonfiction books on history as well as textbooks and is perhaps best known for Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization which exposes the realities of everyday life in the Soviet city of Magnitogorsk during the 1930s.[6] In 2001, he published Armageddon Averted, a short history of the fall of the Soviet Union.

Kotkin is a frequent contributor on Russian and Eurasian affairs and writes book and film reviews for various publications, including The New Republic, The New Yorker, the Financial Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post. He also contributed as a commentator for NPR and the BBC.[5] In 2017, Kotkin wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Communist democide resulted in the deaths of at least 65 million people between 1917 and 2017, stating: "Though communism has killed huge numbers of people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from starvation as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering."[7]

His first volume in a projected trilogy on the life of Stalin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 (976 pp., Penguin Random House, 2014) analyzes his life through 1928, and was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist.[8] It received reviews in newspapers,[9][10] magazines,[11][12] and academic journals,[13][14] The second volume, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (1184 pp., Penguin Random House, 2017) also received several reviews,[15][16] magazines,[17] and academic journals[18][19] upon its release. In these books, among other things, Stephen Kotkin suggested[20] that the Lenin's Testament was authored by Nadezhda Krupskaya. Kotkin pointed out that the purported dictations were not logged in the customary manner by Lenin's secretariat at the time they were supposedly given; that they were typed, with no shorthand or stenographic originals in the archives, and that Lenin did not initial them;[21][22] that by the alleged dates of the dictations, Lenin had lost much of his power of speech following a series of small strokes on December 15-16, 1922, raising questions about his ability to dictate anything as detailed and intelligible as the Testament[23][24] and that the dictation given in December 1922 is suspiciously responsive to debates that took place at the 12th Party Congress in April 1923.[25] However, the Testament has been accepted as genuine by all mainstream historians, including E. H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Dmitri Volkogonov, Vadim Rogovin and Oleg Khlevniuk.[26][27] Kotkin's claims were also rejected by Richard Pipes soon after they were published, who claimed Kotkin contradicted himself by citing documents in which Stalin referred to the Testament as the "known letter of comrade Lenin." Pipes also points to the inclusion of the document in Lenin's Collected Works.[28]

Kotkin is currently writing the third volume, Stalin: Miscalculation and the Mao Eclipse (TBA). He is also working on a multi-century history of Siberia, focusing on the Ob River Valley.[5]

Published works[]

Year Title Collaborator(s) Publisher ISBN
1991 Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era Berkeley: University of California; paperback with afterword in 1993 ISBN 0962262900
1995 Rediscovering Russia in Asia: Siberia and the Russian Far East M. E. Sharpe ISBN 1563245469
1995 Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization Berkeley: University of California ISBN 0520069080
2001 Armageddon Averted: the Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 Oxford and New York: Oxford University; paperback with new preface, 2003; updated edition 2008 ISBN 0192802453
2002 Political Corruption in Transition: A Sceptic's Handbook Co-authored with András Sajó Central European University Press ISBN 9639241466
2003 The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789–1991 Co-authored with Rowman & Littlefield ISBN 0742520625
2005 Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia Co-authored with Charles K. Armstrong, Gilbert Rozman, and M. E. Sharpe
2009 Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of Communist Establishment With a contribution by Jan Gross New York: Modern Library/Random House ISBN 978-0679642763
2010 Manchurian Railways and the Opening of China: An International History Edited with Bruce A. Elleman M. E. Sharpe ISBN 978-0765625144
2014 Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe Co-edited with Mark Beissinger Cambridge University Press ISBN 1107054176
2014 Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928[29] Penguin Press ISBN 1594203792
2017 Stalin: Volume II: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 Penguin Press ISBN 978-1594203800

References[]

  1. ^ "Kotkin, Stephen". Library of Congress. Retrieved 3 February 2015.
  2. ^ "Stephen Kotkin | Department of History". history.princeton.edu. Retrieved 2020-05-14.
  3. ^ "Stephen Kotkin". Hoover Institution. Retrieved 2020-05-14.
  4. ^ Jump up to: a b "The Department of History: Stephen Kotkin". Princeton University. Retrieved 3 February 2015.
  5. ^ Jump up to: a b c Stephen Kotkin. "Stephen Kotkin: Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Princeton University. Retrieved 3 February 2015.
  6. ^ Zimmerman, Andrew (2014). "Foucault in Berkeley and Magnitogorsk: Totalitarianism and the Limits of Liberal Critique". Contemporary European History. 23 (2): 225–236. doi:10.1017/S0960777314000101. ISSN 0960-7773. S2CID 144970424.
  7. ^ Kotkin, Stephen (3 November 2017). "Communism's Bloody Century" The Wall Street Journal. Archived 3 November 2017 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 14 November 2020.
  8. ^ "The Pulitzer Prizes. Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, by Stephen Kotkin". Columbia University. Retrieved August 24, 2020.
  9. ^ Ronald Grigor Suny (December 19, 2014). "Book review: 'Stalin: Volume 1, Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928,' by Stephen Kotkin". The Washington Post.
  10. ^ Serge Schmemann (January 9, 2015). "'Stalin: Paradoxes of Power' by Stephen Kotkin". The New York Times.
  11. ^ Anne Applebaum (November 1, 2014). "Understanding Stalin". The Atlantic.
  12. ^ Keith Gessen (October 20, 2017). "How Stalin Became Stalinist". The New Yorker.
  13. ^ Brandenberger, D. (2016). "Book Review: Stalin, Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 Stephen Kotkin". The American Historical Review. 121 (1): 333–334. doi:10.1093/ahr/121.1.333.
  14. ^ Siegelbaum, L. (2015). "Review: Stalin. Volume 1, Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 by Stephen Kotkin". Slavic Review. 74 (3): 604–606. doi:10.5612/slavicreview.74.3.604. S2CID 164564763.
  15. ^ Ronald Grigor Suny (November 22, 2017). "Terror and killing and more killing under Stalin leading up to World War II". The Washington Post.
  16. ^ (October 19, 2017). "A Portrait of Stalin in All His Murderous Contradictions". The New York Times.
  17. ^ Sheila Fitzpatrick (April 5, 2018). "Just like that: Second-Guessing Stalin". London Review of Books. Vol. 40 no. 7.
  18. ^ Lenoe, M. (2019). "Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941". The American Historical Review. 124 (1): 376–377. doi:10.1093/ahr/rhy475.
  19. ^ Carley, M. J. (2018). "Stalin. Vol. II: Waiting for Hitler 1928–1941". Europe-Asia Studies. 70 (3): 477–479. doi:10.1080/09668136.2018.1455444. S2CID 158248404.
  20. ^ Kotkin 2014, p. 473.
  21. ^ Kotkin 2014, p. 498.
  22. ^ Kotkin 2014, p. 505.
  23. ^ Kotkin 2014, p. 483.
  24. ^ Kotkin 2014, p. 489.
  25. ^ Kotkin 2014, p. 500.
  26. ^ White, Fred (1 June 2015). "A review of Stephen Kotkin's Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928". World Socialist Web Site. Retrieved 29 January 2021.
  27. ^ Gessen, Keith (30 October 2017). "How Stalin Became a Stalinist". The New Yorker. Retrieved 29 January 2021.
  28. ^ Richard Pipes, “The Cleverness of Joseph Stalin,” New York Review of Books, November 20, 2014.
  29. ^ Stephen Kotkin (6 November 2014). Stalin, Volume 1: Paradoxes of Power. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 9780698170100.

External links[]

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