..My grandfather was a Red Army officer. Regiment commander at the age of 30, lieutenant-colonel. Second Ukrainian Front. ..He had survived Battle of Moscow, Stalingrad and died with his regiment in 1944 storming the city of Sebastopol...
What I admire about Kotkin is his rigorously empirical approach to history. And his looking at evidence, and drawing conclusions, in a very logical fashion. At the end, he talks about not having sufficient evidence to draw conclusions on certain issues. But also having ample evidence on certain issues. This makes his lectures and writing so interesting.
@@1940limited Trump this Biden that. Take your nonsense somewhere else, this is not Fox News's comment section. The world is a more complicated place. If you read Stephen Kotkin's book about Stalin and if you weren't such an illiterate you wouldn't be making this type of low IQ trolling comments.
@@bayron45 Another hate-filled, ignorant comment from a Biden lover! You guys are all alike. If you weren't such an ignorant fool you'd keep your insults and stupid replies to yourself. BTW, I'm familiar with Kotkins, have read his works and seen some of his lectures. Nor do I watch Fox News! So go to hell. You're the ignorant one.
@@Sean-xy4hk you are a communist? If admitting to absolute foolishness and ignorance on a public forum is your thing, go ahead and spread the word, otherwise go take a few economic classes and books (preferably of the Austrian school). I bet that you have no idea what you are supporting (and what you are opposing too)!
Steven Kotkin's Stalin's trilogy Part I & II are on audiobook now and it's amazing how detailed the books are. He is a brilliant historian. Can't wait for the next book of the trilogy!
I've done some study of tanks since tanks take territory. One of the stories about the T34 is that their crews, the driver, the commander had to look out of the tank with inferior optics. It is a big deal to not be able to sight your gun or drive with situational awareness when you can't see. The Germans had also put radios in their tanks whereas the Russians had few. So often Russian tanks were half blind and were not coordinated with their infantry or other tanks. Russians did have very good and numerous artillery pieces. Earlier today I watched the CATO lecture. It is more timely & useful far as balance of power questions & Russian Policy imperatives. I want to thank Stephen Kotkin for his work & those who work to present him in these youtube lectures.
the thing that the USSR had plenty of was man [& woman] power and it was their extravigant expenditure of this 'resource'which eventually helped them to their victories.
@@dickyt1318 This was good propaganda. As the war progressed the Soviets became much more conservative of their manpower. Note that their ground attack aircraft were very well armored. They did not take the same tact at all as the Japanese. The Caldron tactics of the Germans that worked so well for them, was imitated by the Soviets. Those tactics worked well for the Soviets.
Fantastic lecture. Having read so many of the authors mentioned by Kotkin, I think I learned more in this 54 minute lecture than in years of reading the top works on the Great Patriotic War.
Read Viktor Suvorov, ex-GRU intelligence officer, for a true history of WW2. He has been sentenced to death in absentia. His most comprehensive work is " The Chief Culprit".
Triumph of the Will... It was Stalin who held the USSR together, when the whole German plan depended on "the whole rotten edifice" crumbling down swiftly. Who could have replaced him? So imho Stalin was the central, indispensable figure in the Soviet victory. Churchill's personal refusal to negotiate with Natzis and his personal ability to draw the USA into the war made him perhaps similarly indispensible. The USSR did fall in the 90's... But that wasn't the threat that Russia faced in 1941. Stalin avoided annihilation and extermination. Russia and most of the other former republics are better off today than they were in 1941. They would have been lebensraum without old Joe.
Very well said. Stalin is the greatest leader in history. The odd thing is he was a hero and “Uncle Joe” for the US and two times man of the year in Times magazine before 1945 and then suddenly the US realized he was in fact a bloody dictator. Quite schizophrenic, don’t you agree?
@@bozo5632 Well, America’s beliefs/ concerns/ demands are less and less relevant. And the truth is out there for anyone with more than 2 brain cells to see.
@@borbo23 It depends how you define 'dictator,' but if Stalin wasn't a dictator then who was? Stalin aside, the USSR was dictatorial. It was also bloody, and not only during the revolution. I would describe the uncontested (and uncontestable) ruler of a bloody dictatorship as a bloody dictator. Hitler was also popular, and chosen through some process, and also a bloody dictator. If Stalin wasn't one, then neither was Hitler. If they don't count, then has there ever been a dictator? The czars and feudal barons before Stalin were bloody dictators too. So the revolution can be justified, and thus the (sometimes bloody) results of the revolution can perhaps be justified, or at least (perhaps) excused. And it's much better now as a result, so maybe you can justify all of it that way. So maybe you can justify Stalin's bloody dictation (joke), but it is what it is. You can argue that it's a damned good thing that Stalin was Stalin. The results of the revolution might have been worse without him. Certainly ww2 might have been worse without him, especially for the Soviets. (Not to mention millions of Soviet Jews.) How Stalin is remembered will be an accident of history, and forever in flux. It will not be an objective, impartial final judgment. Depends on who's writing the history and how they want it to look.
Magnetic Mountain is book authored by Stephen Kotkin. It's about everyday life of citizens living in Magnitogorsk Russia during the 1930s. It is the best book I have read about what life was like under stalinism before The Great Patriotic War.
@@Sputnikoff Well, I mean, how do all the writers who deal with Hitler and Stalin and what happens to everyone else when two disgusting people butt heads using human lives as their weapons. I can only take so much of this stuff before it starts screwing with my head so I don't know how they have the stomach to go back to the well repeatedly. E.g. Simon Sebag-Montefiore said that while he was writing 'The Court of the Red Tsar' he had horrible nightmares about people being tortured and beaten.
@@squamish4244 I suppose that it depends on the individual. Some people are capable of experiencing hell and returning to some semblance of normalcy. It’s definitely not the norm though.
When referring to Stalin and WWII, Prof. Kotkin is truly one of a kind. Next to him is Prof. David Gantz. However, most will agree that Gantz is a terrible author. He just doesn't have it. If brief, DG's work is dry. Reading the labour of Kotkin is a pleasure and it's easy to ride to the end, with pure enjoyment. Kotkin is a skilled author, able to hold interests. I would suggest that most history buffs purchase all of his writings. His thick books on Stalin should have been broken up becuz of the difficulty in carrying and other reasons. Sto Lat do Kotkina (May Kotkin live a 100 yrs.).
The idea of Stalin having a nervous breakdown and blowing the joint for his cabin in the woods is just too amusing to me. If even he can snap, then maybe I'm okay.
@@gg2fan I don't think Stalin gave a shit about anybody unless it involved his own career and in the system he had created, his life as well. So by default he carried the fate of the Slavs on his shoulders because if too many of them died he would lose the war and probably end up murdered or executed.
Everyone faces challenges and everyone falters at least once in their life. So it's not a question of maybe, it's an assurance that you are human and most definitely okay even when you encounter setbacks. That being said, Stalin didn't breakdown upon Nazi invasion. Whatever your opinion of Stalin, and he was no Saint, to suggest that he wasn't a brilliant military leader is just false. Especially if you compare him to Churchill and Roosevelt. During the Civil War, when Russia was invaded by foreign advisories, Lenin always dispatched Stalin to take control of the battlefield when they faced impossible odds or when they were losing ground. It was Stalin's experience during the Civil War that made him the tactician he was during WW2. Russia and it's people, led by Stalin, were the reason the Nazis were defeated. All the Allies played a role in their defeat, but it was Russia that tipped the scales. The world owes Russia and it's people a great debt. Without their bravery and sacrifice, I don't even want to imagine the world we would be facing now.
I haven't ever heard this take on Stalin and the Soviet Union during war time before and I have to admit, this makes more sense than the conventional narrative I usually get from documentaries and lectures
Its because theres a heavy cold-war anti-soviet bias that has been heavily integrated into the study of the subject, oftentimes leaving out much of the nuance and objectivity because it doesn't serve to demonize the USSR.
@@fellowtraveler2251 Communist ideology, and USSR as an embodiment thereof, was widely regarded as an existential threat well before the cold war. Imagine how the only "great power" that didn't suffer at all from the Great Depression looked like to the powers that be (or the masses) in 1930s.
I gotta say this is one of the most objective and well balanced reports I've ever heard on ww2 eastern front and coming from former Soviet Union country I've heard so many of them starting from my school years.
Nikola Avramov literally? I’m genuinely curious, do you have the source to back up this claim? I’d like to hear his arguments for advocating nuclear war.
@@newmillennial4248 50:00 ua-cam.com/video/dqiqUtdFi2I/v-deo.html He's literally advocating for starting of World War 3 'cause "that'll show 'em". The man's insane and should be banned from public platforms because he's literally lobbying for the planet's surface to be scorched in a nuclear exchange. 'cause that would happen if his wish would come true.
McCarthyite lunatic, for one talking about the Soviets the way he is I do not think I would be referring to him that way. McCarthyite would be doing the opposite, and would not be speaking highly of the Soviets.
Stephen is a brilliant historian. His two volumes (so far) on Stalin are immense. They reward close reading. So much writing on the Soviet Union is infected with propaganda and bias, but you truly feel Stephen's implacable search for the truth.
Yeah. It's too bad that when you check his sources, the entire second book seems to be dishonest. Which is a bummer, because the first one was pretty good.
I really loved how he pointed out the skewed misconceptions of the war in favour of *both* Nazi Germany and the Soviets. So often you here either the one narrative or the other. Truly a breeze of fresh air.
@The RightStuff sorry! You're absolutely right. what I mean is that kotkin, even as ideologically motivated as he is, and even as much misleading language as he uses, was over all correct on facts throughout the first book, and if you check his sources against what he says, they generally check out (going back to primary sources). The second book, forever, feels like he lets his research assistants run wild or something. I personally checked 8 claims and by the secondary source, all 8 did not match up to what kotkin claims they do in the book. 3 of those led directly to hearsay that was debunked (one iif which was debunked over a decade before he wrote it), impossible to verify stories that are written as if they are facts. For all of the historical integrity of the first book, it seems to be missing completely in the second. Another historian in this field wrote an entire book debunking kotkin here. Grover furr. The book is called "blood lies"
@The RightStuff No problem! It's just really a shame that this stuff doesn't get more widely circulated. Kotkin's popular, but the debunking of the second book? It's been pushed down and down and down. As for bias... Kotkin? He's a conservative. Ideological bias isn't really a deal-breaker, though. As we saw with his first book. It dispelled many misconceptions and myths about the Soviet Union and Stalin and focused on history for the most part. Knowing a bias is a good thing for understanding language use, but we should never use it the way people in media teach us to use it, to dismiss something that might challenge our preconceptions. We have an entire field (historiography) that wouldn't exist if we did that, you know?
@Kit yeah. So... for source discrepancies, it's a far far far more labor intensive way of getting at the deception. If you check any random grouping of, let's say a dozen of three footnotes against the sources they cite, then check that source against what it cites, etc, down to the "primary source" (and this is something even first year college students are taught to use, primary sources), you will find at least 10, if not 11 or 12 of them have misrepresented something somewhere, sometimes going so far as to outright make things up (the story about the ukrainian/ grave, for example - made up). The misleading language example: use of the word "dictator" to describe Stalin. Just one off the top of my head. It's been a while since I watched this. If you'd like, I'll give it another watch and give a bigger list, but I hope this is good to get you started. There is a good book called "stalin: waiting for the truth" that exposes a LOT LOT LOT more. (There are free pdf versions online and the author has put most primary source evidence on his website for people to verify)
@@TheWersum I watched the entire video, but I didn't hear him say the French and Brits did everything right. In fact, he didn't even refer to Western strategy at all. I really don't get what you're trying to say. Is the question of whether the Soviets committed stupid blunders contingent on whether the Western Allies did likewise?
@Larson Oppenheimer 48:58 ua-cam.com/video/dqiqUtdFi2I/v-deo.html Right here he makes that case. Even though it would literally instantly lead to a nuclear war - he doesn't care, 'cause he's insane. Study or observe McCarthyism and you will notice a particular brand of bloodlust that he is drawing inspiration from and practicing himself.
I love Joe Pessie....Didn't know he had a doctorate in history, best selling author.....It might be the Keystones Talk'n but I learned something today.
@@TheWersum idiot, yes, you!!!! Germans were winning at first. Then the idiots thought that they already won the war & started to enslave & kill civilians. So, the people got pissed & kicked zee German arse. First two years of the war, more than 50% of the local population was pro Hitler. Than everyone learned the truth about zee German superiority. . ......
@@TheWersum ????? Kotkin didn't mention Dunkirk, logical and smart or non of the crap you talked about. Nobody mentioned a piece of nazi propaganda here. What are you even talking about? How does that relate to anything in the comment? Fucking lunatic
This seemingly unlikely historian is absolutely mesmerising! He INHABITS his subject totally, and delivers both the tiniest details and the widest possible overview, without even a moment’s confusion or loss of focus. What is more, he brings his subject completely to life; we are all there with him in the thick of some of the most significant - but often misunderstood - events of a monumentally complicated century. I admire hugely such historians as Niall Ferguson and Victor Davis Hanson, but on C20 Russia and Stalin, this man with a Russian name and a New York accent is peerless - and his powers of narrative are totally unmatched. Thank you Stephen Kotkin, for many, many hours of enlightenment and entertainment.
Thats an obvious bullshit. Crack for western hearer that anticipate something stuff to hear. I'm not a Stalin fan boy totally but I never heard about such stupid 'humor' from any real historians. It must be taken from some fictional novell
the problem of a super centralized war economy versus an improvisation on an epic scale is somewhat simple to solve the party boss were rigidly obeying the instructions handled down to them the local factories managers were practicing flying trapeze of improvisation the reconciliation of both systems was due to basic survival instinct and true dedication
3:04 As a cameraman, I felt that... "so folks are gonna stay in place?" "yeah, sit behind the cam and relax, just make sure the speaker is in focus and press record." "okiedokes..."
Glantz fully acknowledges Stalin's personal nerve, power, brutality, ruthlessness was a major reason for Soviet victory.....why he thinks he's negating Glantz points I dont know. He realizes Stalin's decision prior to Moscow and the stopping of the Germans there was one of the main turning points. It was basically Stalins ability not to give a shit about human life that allowed them to win.
What historians fail to see - it was not just Stalin. Stalin just took the attitude of Russian people of those times. Emperors of Russia failed to see it cause they lived in their aristocratic bubbles. Open a video called "The Romanovs. The History of the Russian Dynasty - Episode 6" and just listen from 35:00 to 35:20. Modern Russian and world mindset is different. Thats why researchers point at Stalin as an explanation.
Did the founding fathers give a shit about the Indians. Did the plantation owners give a shit about the slaves that made them profit. Did the French give a shit about their colonies in Africa and Indochina. Did Churchill give a shit about Chinese, Arab and Indian life.
So, what you're telling me is that the eastern front is the greatest HBO series never made and that we only have the Soviet film 'Come and See' to view that gives us a glimpse of the madness of that period?
What a teacher! Near the end of his talk, after enumerating numerous facts about Stalin and his massive roles, Professor Kotkin cups his hand over his mouth and tells us: “He was Stalin!”
I'm half-way through his second brick of a book;) on this most appalling dictator. But I must confess that I'm eagerly awaiting the third and final masterpiece!
"You are not going to hear about".... then continues to tell you about what you are not going to hear; over and over and over. With only the things you are not going to hear (but end up hearing about anyways) made for a good mini-lecture anyways. ;) Good lecture... information that more need to know and understand. On another note.... I always wait for him to work in something about "the two youts". ;)
The question of whether the Soviet Union won or lost the peace depends greatly on time frame and how it is defined. The USSR ultimately lost control of the central and eastern European states it occupied during and after WWII, but it took 44 years to do it and by then, Stalin was long dead. It seems to me that the post-WWII peace was a draw, which was why the Cold War quickly got underway. Yes, the Soviets quickly established hegemony over much of eastern and central Europe, as well as China and North Korea, with more conquests to follow in the years to come; but it failed to break the western alliance or to make significant inroads into western Europe; except through the medium of client Communist parties which were systematically excluded from government. And the post-Stalin schism in the Communist movement ultimately doomed the Soviet-led Communist bloc, though it took decades before it finally disintegrated in 1989, leaving only a handful of Communist states, each de facto independent of the others. Yet even now, Russia retains northern East Prussia (now the Kaliningrad Oblast), conquered from Germany in 1945, even though it had never before been Russian and was inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans until the conquest (when the locals were expelled) and is physically detached from the rest of the Russian Federation (the nearest approach being over the Baltic Sea to St. Petersburg).
Russia lost all these lands not in 1991 as people think but in 1917/18 when it lost not wwI but being weakened in the war lost its internal structure that brought communists to power. And communists that did not care about the Russian idea immediately created all these non-russian republics with 14 of them having a constitutional right to declare an independence. That was Lenin's architecture that nobody even Stalin questioned in future and this eventually led to the constitutional collapse of Soviet Union, cause republics used their constitutional right to declare an independence. Lenin's hidden idea was - if we are not building communism the former Russian Empire should collapse. And the borders of new states that emerged in 1991 were draw by Lenin in 1922 after the collapse of Russian Empire and communists winning the civil war. Russian Empire failed to unite and enlighten its population around the idea of Russia and as soon as it was weaken disoriented people find themselves under the communist dictatorship. East Prussia mostly remained as a part of modern Russia (another piece of it was given to Poland) only because Stalin put this land under the jurisdiction of Russian Socialist Federate republic (that was a part of Soviet Union with other republics) and not under the jurisdiction of Lithuanian or Belorussian Soviet republic. Had he given it to Lithuanian republic (that was a part of Soviet Union at that time) now it would be a part of independent Lithuania. Only if he had created a separate German (or Prussian) republic their as another republic of Soviet Union todays Russia would have lost it in 1991.
"And the post-Stalin schism in the Communist movement ultimately doomed" I think that there is one much more significant factor in that game. From early '70s, even when taking official statistics at face value, Soviet Union and its vassal states were in clear stagnation, while the West was escaping. As the stagnation seem to hit most developed communist countries first, it seems that simply this communist mode of production started approaching its limits. Possibly all low hanging fruits of industrialisation were realised. Regardless of any geopolitical situation, Soviet long term future started looking bleak, just dilemma of: - staying in denial and allowing this divergence to widen, or - trying some free market reforms.
Stephen has an amazing depth of knowledge when it comes to the Soviet Union and Stalin. Stephen falls short when that knowledge is imposed on culture or future events. A leader's behavior and actions reflect the political culture but do not directly translate to national cultures. The Soviet Union at the time had a communist political culture but was multinational, ruling over multiple ethnicities. Stalin was a Georgian ruling over many peoples, Russians, Azeris, Balts, Turkmen, and more. To say Stalin was representative of Russian culture is misleading, rather a product of early communist and Georgian culture. If giving your successors an international alliance (the Warsaw Pact) that lasts over 40 years is losing the peace of WWII then what qualifies as victory is unclear. Attributing the Warsaw Pact dissolution to Stalin, even though that occurred decades after his death is absurd. It was up to the rulers after Stalin to maintain and expand the international agreements and frameworks that were created in the aftermath of WWII. It was ultimately dismantled by Gorbachev's reforms, past Soviet errors, and the pressures placed on it by the US & NATO.
Agreed. I believe that is where his liberal ideology impedes on his job as a historian - which is to not offer half-baked one dimensional answers to complex issues.
@@crniskadu9881 just what I thought. The deep rooted culture in Russia inhabitants , almost an ideology in itself, of defending Rusija matuška at all costs, is the main reason why SSSR won the WWII, despite the odds, and despite Stalin. Without that ideology there would be no victory, and no Stalin, for that matter.
What was not mentioned about the Soviet tanks is that the war planners studied the limited life expectancy of a Soviet tank and concluded that it would have been a waste of good materials to put quality parts made of quality materials into a tank that was going to have a severely limited life span so they used crappy parts made out of crappy materials on purpose. Not all T-34s were made alike.
Such an excellent lecture. In short: The Eastern Front was a war of attrition, during which the best trained nazi soldiers were lost early thus their performance trailed off, and the soviet army gradually improved (especially with less intervention from Stalin.) Meanwhile Stalin's regime paradoxically did not fall during the chaos, because apparently his reign of fear and murders of his rivals apparently worked.
Hint. If you see a paradox, just check you assumptions. They can be not true. Maybe there were neither chaos nor fear. People could simply like their new Soviet country and their communist government.
This is not a paradox. People commonly overlook the shortcomings of their own government to fight an external enemy, especially when those enemies are Nazis who see them as inherently subhuman.
Kotkin's biographies on Stalin are great but the third volume is going to suffer if he makes the same oversimplifications of military history that he does in this video. For one, David Glantz does not overly extol the Red Army. Much of his work is dedicated to exposing "lost operations:" failed Soviet military operations that were forgotten after the war. Equally does his work cover much of the Red Army's shortcomings. Two, Zhukov and Timoshenko were not "idiots who misunderstood 'Blitzkrieg'(not the actual name the German doctrine.)" They wanted to bring more troops to the borders to absorb the initial German blow and then counter-attack with their own mechanized units. Granted, this was beyond the Red Army's capabilities in 1941, but to say two of the Red Army's top senior officers did not understand modern warfare is a gross oversimplification.
They were not idiots but they were still suffering from their ego's. Both Zhukov and Timoshenko were actually mildly incompetent, which led to big losses on the front. The Soviet system though did have one thing right, even the officers who replaced the purged were strategically competent, so while they took big losses it did not cost them the whole thing. If the Soviet military had been overall strategically incompetent they would have lost the war, given the losses they took.
I feel petty about airing a disagreement when I'm overjoyed listening to so much information, but here it goes... The Soviet tanks have been overrated. The gun and armor were more powerful, and they were more reliable than the later German models, BUT, the ergonomics were terrible. German tankers would usually be able to fire the first shot in a tank duel. That's how they killed so many Soviet tanks.
If the origination of industry was so bad , then how the hell did they produce tanks and aircraft in such numbers, It was the over engineered German weapons and not the Russian simple way of doing things that worked .
This is the first time that I have heard a scholar address the first six months and why the Victorious Wehrmacht won its way to defeat. I don't believe for a minute that Stalin, or anybody else in command had a plan or strategy that would result in German defeat before Moscow. I think that Stalin demanded resistance to the Germans, which, as mr. Kotkin points out, exhausted the German army by sacrifice of millions of Russians. Personally, I think that some form of patriotism was part of the Soviet survival. However, the soviets survived because the Germans violated a basic strategic rule of war: Don't attack an enemy who possesses a huge population, industry and millions of military age men (and women) The Germans were ignorant of their enemy, and they paid a huge price.
Oh Stalin had a plan, his own vision on what to do in order to win. Another question is - how correct his plan and methods were and what was the real impact of his vision. And what could be more correct plan and methods to wage this war. And what were other factors that impact German war machine that were not connected with Stalin's orders - like weather, vast territories of Russia, Russian cultural mindset, allies and other international forces, resources and others. Stalin was more Hitler in waging war than Hitler himself declared he is. Will power. Meaning your willpower to do whatever needs to be done in order to be victorious even if you lost first battles, even if your military command structure is no match to your enemy, even if the enemy is only 100 miles from your capital and all previous battles were lost, even if half of your industrial base with its huge population is captured, even if your Army you built for years is destroyed with all its war machinery and equipment so u have to create a new and better one asap. Willpower to mobilize everyone in the country for the war effort. Anyway a topic needs a huge and impartial research and here I dont see Kotkin or anybody as a person without some ideological agenda to do a decent job.
They didn't have a plan? That evacuation of industry that this clown ( sorry but even this word to easy on him) is caricaturing around 00:31, was an unimaginable enterprise. And he is faking his numbers, more than 2500 big enterprises only, were transferred and started working in a few months. Yes, some even started working without a roof but all of them had infrastructure ( electricity, water, foundations...) ready waiting there. And just to add about that 'numbers' myth, the Reich had 90 million ( with Volksdeutsche) , the Soviet Union had 196 million but they very quickly lost control over the territories populated by 70 million people and these had to work for Germany, willingly or not if they wanted to survive. And you're correct, Hitler and the Nazis didn't have an idea what they were fighting with and that was their first and biggest mistake. They were thinking that the SU would collapse after the first blow, then the second, third... and that was it, it was already over.
@@simplicius11 Amazing you call Kotkin a clown when he knows more on the subject than you ever will. Unlike many others he doesn't write it if documents are not there to prove it.
@@westnash Oh, I really enjoy when a dumb uneducated American is trying to teach me some history. I'll show you the clown when he meets a real historian and trying to start his stand up show with him. You don't have historians dear, you have a stand up comedians as a substitute. I'd suggest you, watch the whole lesson if you want to understand and learn something. ua-cam.com/video/qcllXFYYjak/v-deo.html
Victor Suvorov, former GRU officer, ( and others including R.C Raack, PhD, Albert Weeks, Phd, Mark Solonin, Phd - a Russian historian-, Joachim Hoffman, PhD, and many others) point out the obvious fact that Hitler's attack was pre-emptive and that Stalin was planning a conquest of Europe to the Atlantic coast of France. Stalin's spies and agitation agents were legion in France, and the strength of the Comintern was legendary. Stalin was relying on popular hatred of Germany to clear the way for a Communist victory in France. Stalin had dismantled the Stalin Line, and had fashioned an attack army, and an attack air force with the intention of destroying the Luftwaffe on the ground. Hundreds of thousands of paratroopers were ready to go. He had no interest in defensive war- actually despised it as non-revolutionary- and that is the reason he placed his troops and armor as close to the border as he did. After the treaty with Germany the Stalinist plans were to wait until it was a single front war, which it became when Soviet spies ( such as Harry Dexter White ) in FDR's cabinet manipulated the American leaders into keeping the Navy in the baited trap known as Pearl Harbor. Once it was clear America was committed to Pacific war the offensive Soviet campaign was cleared to go.
Can't get enough of Joe Pesci's smart twin.
Hahaha I knew this guy looked like someone!
@@arturogal4505 Sounds like him most of all.
This is the best UA-cam comment ever. And neither can I.
THAT'S who he looks like - thank you!
Who the fuck is Joe Pesci
Steven "We will not be talking about" Kotkin
Spends half the lecture, "We will not be talking about x,y,z." XD
Kotkin explains history in interesting and relevant ways. Easily digestible. He’s a gift to learning.
..My grandfather was a Red Army officer. Regiment commander at the age of 30, lieutenant-colonel. Second Ukrainian Front. ..He had survived Battle of Moscow, Stalingrad and died with his regiment in 1944 storming the city of Sebastopol...
My Grandfather also fought at Stalingrad, Hungarian second army, was lucky to survive.
My grand-uncle was at Stalingrad, too. Spanish Divisíon Azúl, came home with an Iron Cross ;-)
ქართველი ხარ? ბაბუაჩემიც იბრძოდა ლენინგრადის ბლოკადაში იყო, მერე ბერლინამდე ჩავიდა
Thanks to your grandfather for his service. Lest we Forger
@Joseph Stalin gulag him hard mr stalin!
One of the most interesting teachers I have followed via UA-cam…..Many thanks Professor Kotkin.
What I admire about Kotkin is his rigorously empirical approach to history. And his looking at evidence, and drawing conclusions, in a very logical fashion. At the end, he talks about not having sufficient evidence to draw conclusions on certain issues. But also having ample evidence on certain issues. This makes his lectures and writing so interesting.
This guy's dry wit is amazing!
Watching Stephen Kotkin talk about Stalin was a day of lockdown well spent
Yes, and now you can experience right here at home in DC with Beijing Biden!
@@1940limited Trump this Biden that. Take your nonsense somewhere else, this is not Fox News's comment section. The world is a more complicated place. If you read Stephen Kotkin's book about Stalin and if you weren't such an illiterate you wouldn't be making this type of low IQ trolling comments.
@@bayron45 Another hate-filled, ignorant comment from a Biden lover! You guys are all alike. If you weren't such an ignorant fool you'd keep your insults and stupid replies to yourself. BTW, I'm familiar with Kotkins, have read his works and seen some of his lectures. Nor do I watch Fox News! So go to hell. You're the ignorant one.
@@1940limited Wait, are you saying Biden is a communist? Lmao I wish he was, but as a communist myself, I can assure you he's not 😂
@@Sean-xy4hk you are a communist? If admitting to absolute foolishness and ignorance on a public forum is your thing, go ahead and spread the word, otherwise go take a few economic classes and books (preferably of the Austrian school). I bet that you have no idea what you are supporting (and what you are opposing too)!
stephen kotkin is a fine man and a fine scholar. We need more like him.
I like how we heard about everything we were "not going to hear about"
He has to sell his book
He always does this .
I like Stephen Kotkin's style of lecture.
purely Socratic. he is making you see the light, instead of just giving you the stuff
but he knows where the light is.
Stephen Kotkin is absolutely brilliant author!
@Sam Rocks true
ultra was not yet active
Steven Kotkin's Stalin's trilogy Part I & II are on audiobook now and it's amazing how detailed the books are. He is a brilliant historian. Can't wait for the next book of the trilogy!
Do you know when the release date of Stalin At War???
Vlad Tokarev kotkins tells what we know. “Mostly. But he talks mostly bollox
@@gaygambler for example?
@@thecrow4840 Grover Furr tears Kotkin apart my man.
@@samueldyer4100 in what sense? Elaborate?
I've done some study of tanks since tanks take territory. One of the stories about the T34 is that their crews, the driver, the commander had to look out of the tank with inferior optics. It is a big deal to not be able to sight your gun or drive with situational awareness when you can't see. The Germans had also put radios in their tanks whereas the Russians had few. So often Russian tanks were half blind and were not coordinated with their infantry or other tanks. Russians did have very good and numerous artillery pieces. Earlier today I watched the CATO lecture. It is more timely & useful far as balance of power questions & Russian Policy imperatives. I want to thank Stephen Kotkin for his work & those who work to present him in these youtube lectures.
the thing that the USSR had plenty of was man [& woman] power and it was their extravigant expenditure of this 'resource'which eventually helped them to their victories.
@@dickyt1318 This was good propaganda. As the war progressed the Soviets became much more conservative of their manpower. Note that their ground attack aircraft were very well armored. They did not take the same tact at all as the Japanese. The Caldron tactics of the Germans that worked so well for them, was imitated by the Soviets. Those tactics worked well for the Soviets.
But those tanks were made for Russian's tough climate, terrain, not the Germans and that became and issue.
This guys kills it everytime. Amazing speaker
Fantastic lecture. Having read so many of the authors mentioned by Kotkin, I think I learned more in this 54 minute lecture than in years of reading the top works on the Great Patriotic War.
Read Viktor Suvorov, ex-GRU intelligence officer, for a true history of WW2. He has been sentenced to death in absentia. His most comprehensive work is " The Chief Culprit".
@@leomarkaable1 Суворов иуда
Потрясающе поучительная лекция блестящего историка профессора Коткина.Огромное спасибо!
Triumph of the Will... It was Stalin who held the USSR together, when the whole German plan depended on "the whole rotten edifice" crumbling down swiftly. Who could have replaced him? So imho Stalin was the central, indispensable figure in the Soviet victory.
Churchill's personal refusal to negotiate with Natzis and his personal ability to draw the USA into the war made him perhaps similarly indispensible.
The USSR did fall in the 90's... But that wasn't the threat that Russia faced in 1941. Stalin avoided annihilation and extermination. Russia and most of the other former republics are better off today than they were in 1941. They would have been lebensraum without old Joe.
You got to give him that.
He was a vicious bastard, but he did organise the defeat of Hitler.
Very well said. Stalin is the greatest leader in history. The odd thing is he was a hero and “Uncle Joe” for the US and two times man of the year in Times magazine before 1945 and then suddenly the US realized he was in fact a bloody dictator. Quite schizophrenic, don’t you agree?
@@user-hz5wy5vx1k He was a bloody dictator. That only bothers America when it's not convenient.
@@bozo5632 Well, America’s beliefs/ concerns/ demands are less and less relevant. And the truth is out there for anyone with more than 2 brain cells to see.
@@borbo23 It depends how you define 'dictator,' but if Stalin wasn't a dictator then who was?
Stalin aside, the USSR was dictatorial. It was also bloody, and not only during the revolution. I would describe the uncontested (and uncontestable) ruler of a bloody dictatorship as a bloody dictator.
Hitler was also popular, and chosen through some process, and also a bloody dictator. If Stalin wasn't one, then neither was Hitler. If they don't count, then has there ever been a dictator?
The czars and feudal barons before Stalin were bloody dictators too. So the revolution can be justified, and thus the (sometimes bloody) results of the revolution can perhaps be justified, or at least (perhaps) excused. And it's much better now as a result, so maybe you can justify all of it that way. So maybe you can justify Stalin's bloody dictation (joke), but it is what it is.
You can argue that it's a damned good thing that Stalin was Stalin. The results of the revolution might have been worse without him. Certainly ww2 might have been worse without him, especially for the Soviets. (Not to mention millions of Soviet Jews.)
How Stalin is remembered will be an accident of history, and forever in flux. It will not be an objective, impartial final judgment. Depends on who's writing the history and how they want it to look.
Magnetic Mountain is book authored by Stephen Kotkin. It's about everyday life of citizens living in Magnitogorsk Russia during the 1930s.
It is the best book I have read about what life was like under stalinism before The Great Patriotic War.
Behind The Urals by John Scott is a great book by an American who worked there
I don't know how these authors stay sane writing about all this hideous stuff. Probably know when to take a break and have a beer.
@@squamish4244 John Scott was a socialism fanboy, aka "tankie" by modern lingo. A couple of years in the USSR healed that problem
@@Sputnikoff Well, I mean, how do all the writers who deal with Hitler and Stalin and what happens to everyone else when two disgusting people butt heads using human lives as their weapons. I can only take so much of this stuff before it starts screwing with my head so I don't know how they have the stomach to go back to the well repeatedly. E.g. Simon Sebag-Montefiore said that while he was writing 'The Court of the Red Tsar' he had horrible nightmares about people being tortured and beaten.
@@squamish4244 I suppose that it depends on the individual. Some people are capable of experiencing hell and returning to some semblance of normalcy. It’s definitely not the norm though.
When referring to Stalin and WWII, Prof. Kotkin is truly one of a kind. Next to him is Prof. David Gantz. However, most will agree that Gantz is a terrible author. He just doesn't have it. If brief, DG's work is dry. Reading the labour of Kotkin is a pleasure and it's easy to ride to the end, with pure enjoyment. Kotkin is a skilled author, able to hold interests. I would suggest that most history buffs purchase all of his writings. His thick books on Stalin should have been broken up becuz of the difficulty in carrying and other reasons. Sto Lat do Kotkina (May Kotkin live a 100 yrs.).
An excellent lecture that acknowledged how complicated and contradictory history can be.
Brilliant and utterly fascinating exposition. Thank you, Professor Kotkin!
Thanks for Uploading.
Hell yeah Mr. Kotkin! Thanks for publishing this lecture.
Marvelous lecture! thank you, Professor Kotkin!
This is a preview of Volume 3. As always, great lecture!
Thanks! Much very worthwhile once he gets going!
Could listen to this man all day. Could us some question and answer too
This is absolute gold and should be shown everywhere.
The idea of Stalin having a nervous breakdown and blowing the joint for his cabin in the woods is just too amusing to me. If even he can snap, then maybe I'm okay.
I imagine having the fate of the entire slavic race and Eastern Europe on your shoulders if a pretty understandable reason to snap
@@gg2fan I don't think Stalin gave a shit about anybody unless it involved his own career and in the system he had created, his life as well. So by default he carried the fate of the Slavs on his shoulders because if too many of them died he would lose the war and probably end up murdered or executed.
Nervous breakdown? The Man Of Steel, the revolutionary who was preparing the USSR for the war for 10 years? Don’t let morons brainwash you.
Everyone faces challenges and everyone falters at least once in their life. So it's not a question of maybe, it's an assurance that you are human and most definitely okay even when you encounter setbacks.
That being said, Stalin didn't breakdown upon Nazi invasion. Whatever your opinion of Stalin, and he was no Saint, to suggest that he wasn't a brilliant military leader is just false. Especially if you compare him to Churchill and Roosevelt. During the Civil War, when Russia was invaded by foreign advisories, Lenin always dispatched Stalin to take control of the battlefield when they faced impossible odds or when they were losing ground. It was Stalin's experience during the Civil War that made him the tactician he was during WW2. Russia and it's people, led by Stalin, were the reason the Nazis were defeated. All the Allies played a role in their defeat, but it was Russia that tipped the scales. The world owes Russia and it's people a great debt. Without their bravery and sacrifice, I don't even want to imagine the world we would be facing now.
Remarkable job! Definitely transformed my understanding of Stalinist rule and the events leading up to the war.
Excellent and informative lecture. Thanks for posting it. Kotkin knows his stuff.
I haven't ever heard this take on Stalin and the Soviet Union during war time before and I have to admit, this makes more sense than the conventional narrative I usually get from documentaries and lectures
Its because theres a heavy cold-war anti-soviet bias that has been heavily integrated into the study of the subject, oftentimes leaving out much of the nuance and objectivity because it doesn't serve to demonize the USSR.
@@fellowtraveler2251 Communist ideology, and USSR as an embodiment thereof, was widely regarded as an existential threat well before the cold war. Imagine how the only "great power" that didn't suffer at all from the Great Depression looked like to the powers that be (or the masses) in 1930s.
Stalin destroyed himself in winning the war.
I've often thought that and it's good to see a scholar confirm it.
I gotta say this is one of the most objective and well balanced reports I've ever heard on ww2 eastern front and coming from former Soviet Union country I've heard so many of them starting from my school years.
The man is a McCarthyite lunatic that literally advocates nuclear war.
Nikola Avramov literally? I’m genuinely curious, do you have the source to back up this claim? I’d like to hear his arguments for advocating nuclear war.
@@newmillennial4248
50:00
ua-cam.com/video/dqiqUtdFi2I/v-deo.html
He's literally advocating for starting of World War 3 'cause "that'll show 'em".
The man's insane and should be banned from public platforms because he's literally lobbying for the planet's surface to be scorched in a nuclear exchange. 'cause that would happen if his wish would come true.
McCarthyite lunatic, for one talking about the Soviets the way he is I do not think I would be referring to him that way. McCarthyite would be doing the opposite, and would not be speaking highly of the Soviets.
Having read the excellent first two volumes, I am anxiously awaiting the publication of the final volume.
This lecture was brilliant
Stephen Kotkin “You’re not gonna hear about this, but I’ll talk about it anyway.” 😂
It's called "apophasis".
shut up
@UN KNOWN Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Infatuated with WW2 my Grandfather was in the Battle of the Bulge. Love this. Ty
Always, always eager to listen to Dr. Kotkin.
Great content. Too bad NO one LISTENED to it before they posted it TURN UP THE VOLUME!
You needn't be subject to the volume offered to you, just run the signal to a stereo and you can have it knock you off your chair if you like.
Download it in RealPlayer, then play it back on VLC Player, turn it up as loud as you like on your PC or smartphone or whatever.
@@eamonngaines9887 this is not my problem.
Your computer has a volume control, you stupid bastard. Use it!
Nothing wrong with my volume here. Maybe your hearing aid batteries need replacing?
Stephen is a brilliant historian. His two volumes (so far) on Stalin are immense. They reward close reading. So much writing on the Soviet Union is infected with propaganda and bias, but you truly feel Stephen's implacable search for the truth.
Yeah. It's too bad that when you check his sources, the entire second book seems to be dishonest. Which is a bummer, because the first one was pretty good.
I really loved how he pointed out the skewed misconceptions of the war in favour of *both* Nazi Germany and the Soviets. So often you here either the one narrative or the other. Truly a breeze of fresh air.
@The RightStuff sorry! You're absolutely right. what I mean is that kotkin, even as ideologically motivated as he is, and even as much misleading language as he uses, was over all correct on facts throughout the first book, and if you check his sources against what he says, they generally check out (going back to primary sources).
The second book, forever, feels like he lets his research assistants run wild or something. I personally checked 8 claims and by the secondary source, all 8 did not match up to what kotkin claims they do in the book. 3 of those led directly to hearsay that was debunked (one iif which was debunked over a decade before he wrote it), impossible to verify stories that are written as if they are facts.
For all of the historical integrity of the first book, it seems to be missing completely in the second.
Another historian in this field wrote an entire book debunking kotkin here. Grover furr. The book is called "blood lies"
@The RightStuff No problem! It's just really a shame that this stuff doesn't get more widely circulated. Kotkin's popular, but the debunking of the second book? It's been pushed down and down and down.
As for bias... Kotkin? He's a conservative. Ideological bias isn't really a deal-breaker, though. As we saw with his first book. It dispelled many misconceptions and myths about the Soviet Union and Stalin and focused on history for the most part. Knowing a bias is a good thing for understanding language use, but we should never use it the way people in media teach us to use it, to dismiss something that might challenge our preconceptions.
We have an entire field (historiography) that wouldn't exist if we did that, you know?
@Kit yeah. So... for source discrepancies, it's a far far far more labor intensive way of getting at the deception. If you check any random grouping of, let's say a dozen of three footnotes against the sources they cite, then check that source against what it cites, etc, down to the "primary source" (and this is something even first year college students are taught to use, primary sources), you will find at least 10, if not 11 or 12 of them have misrepresented something somewhere, sometimes going so far as to outright make things up (the story about the ukrainian/ grave, for example - made up).
The misleading language example: use of the word "dictator" to describe Stalin. Just one off the top of my head. It's been a while since I watched this. If you'd like, I'll give it another watch and give a bigger list, but I hope this is good to get you started.
There is a good book called "stalin: waiting for the truth" that exposes a LOT LOT LOT more. (There are free pdf versions online and the author has put most primary source evidence on his website for people to verify)
Love his lectures
Love to listen S. Kotkin!
@@TheWersum I watched the entire video, but I didn't hear him say the French and Brits did everything right. In fact, he didn't even refer to Western strategy at all. I really don't get what you're trying to say. Is the question of whether the Soviets committed stupid blunders contingent on whether the Western Allies did likewise?
He's a McCarthyite warmongering lunatic, but ok.
You like liars?
Listen to Grover Furr
@Larson Oppenheimer
In his speeches he is openly agitating for an escalation of war between two nuclear superpowers.
That's insane in itself.
@Larson Oppenheimer
48:58
ua-cam.com/video/dqiqUtdFi2I/v-deo.html
Right here he makes that case.
Even though it would literally instantly lead to a nuclear war - he doesn't care, 'cause he's insane.
Study or observe McCarthyism and you will notice a particular brand of bloodlust that he is drawing inspiration from and practicing himself.
A great Kotkin performance
Yes yes Love from SWEDEN ❤
this is very interesting! loved the lecture
I agree; Kotchin makes the subject something worth listening to! Most lectures are boring, but not S.Kotchin's!
I love this man. Pity the Q&A section is not here, but nevertheless, to the uploader, thank you.
A brilliant lecture. Greetings from Thuringia/Germany.
I hope prof Kotkin will finish third volume in near future! First two volumes are already great achievments
OMG, I just so happen to have the time to kill & THIS pops up! Yes! An unexpectedly good day! I love this guy's lectures.
I love Joe Pessie....Didn't know he had a doctorate in history, best selling author.....It might be the Keystones Talk'n but I learned something today.
@@TheWersum idiot, yes, you!!!! Germans were winning at first. Then the idiots thought that they already won the war & started to enslave & kill civilians. So, the people got pissed & kicked zee German arse. First two years of the war, more than 50% of the local population was pro Hitler. Than everyone learned the truth about zee German superiority. . ......
@@TheWersum Soviets were outnumbered? Check your data
@@TheWersum ????? Kotkin didn't mention Dunkirk, logical and smart or non of the crap you talked about. Nobody mentioned a piece of nazi propaganda here. What are you even talking about? How does that relate to anything in the comment? Fucking lunatic
@@TheWersum Dude i think you need to account for soviet reserve divisions which overall would still give USSR the numerical advantage in WWII.
Brilliant. Thank you.
BRAVO ❤ LOVE FROM SWEDEN 😍
This seemingly unlikely historian is absolutely mesmerising! He INHABITS his subject totally, and delivers both the tiniest details and the widest possible overview, without even a moment’s confusion or loss of focus.
What is more, he brings his subject completely to life; we are all there with him in the thick of some of the most significant - but often misunderstood - events of a monumentally complicated century.
I admire hugely such historians as Niall Ferguson and Victor Davis Hanson, but on C20 Russia and Stalin, this man with a Russian name and a New York accent is peerless - and his powers of narrative are totally unmatched.
Thank you Stephen Kotkin, for many, many hours of enlightenment and entertainment.
and then Stalin stopped and said to Voroshilov: "funny? funny how? what the fuck do you mean I am funny?"
LOL, very good. He's just trying to amuse us... like a clown.
Absolutely loved this
MISSED THE Q&A SECTION!!!!
Please post it. Thank you.
This guy is awesome, and he knows his stuff too
His opening crack on Stalin's sense of humor actually had me LOL.
Thats an obvious bullshit. Crack for western hearer that anticipate something stuff to hear. I'm not a Stalin fan boy totally but I never heard about such stupid 'humor' from any real historians. It must be taken from some fictional novell
@@JoeDraiser Yes. But it's funny.
Great lecture. Ty
Excellent lecture.
Volume 3 when, Stephen?
Oberstein's always creeping around.
The gulag archipelago aleksandr solzhenitsyn
@@adriandelgado6122 What is your source on this?
It's a good question.
Great lecturer as always! But when is the final book coming out?
Brillliant and masterful!
It was great! Thank you.
Professor Pesci is back!
Barabim-baraboom!
Indeed, a good fella!
Haha, so true.
the problem of a super centralized war economy versus an improvisation on an epic scale is somewhat simple to solve
the party boss were rigidly obeying the instructions handled down to them
the local factories managers were practicing flying trapeze of improvisation
the reconciliation of both systems was due to basic survival instinct and true dedication
3:04 As a cameraman, I felt that... "so folks are gonna stay in place?" "yeah, sit behind the cam and relax, just make sure the speaker is in focus and press record." "okiedokes..."
"should we do a 2 camera setup just in case we need to edit or wanna make the talk a bit more dynamic?" "nah, client said 1 is fine."
Excellent lecture and great demonstration of oratory
His knowledge is amazing
This guy delivers good informative lectures 👏
But he still uses old fake stories in these lectures.
Obviously a man of great depth of knowledge and able to talk on his feet
Love this man and his knowledge. Can't help but think that his voice reminds me of a Bronx mob boss.
He reminds me of a certain actor but I can't put my finger on it
Vinny / Pesci
Hyman Roth from The Godfather! 😂
Glantz fully acknowledges Stalin's personal nerve, power, brutality, ruthlessness was a major reason for Soviet victory.....why he thinks he's negating Glantz points I dont know. He realizes Stalin's decision prior to Moscow and the stopping of the Germans there was one of the main turning points.
It was basically Stalins ability not to give a shit about human life that allowed them to win.
What historians fail to see - it was not just Stalin. Stalin just took the attitude of Russian people of those times. Emperors of Russia failed to see it cause they lived in their aristocratic bubbles.
Open a video called "The Romanovs. The History of the Russian Dynasty - Episode 6" and just listen from 35:00 to 35:20. Modern Russian and world mindset is different. Thats why researchers point at Stalin as an explanation.
Did the founding fathers give a shit about the Indians.
Did the plantation owners give a shit about the slaves that made them profit.
Did the French give a shit about their colonies in Africa and Indochina.
Did Churchill give a shit about Chinese, Arab and Indian life.
So, what you're telling me is that the eastern front is the greatest HBO series never made and that we only have the Soviet film 'Come and See' to view that gives us a glimpse of the madness of that period?
nope, we have starmedia brilliant documentaries
@Alexis Z. ??? Did you saw the movie?
@Alexis Z. what propaganda are you talking about?
Thank you.
What a teacher! Near the end of his talk, after enumerating numerous facts about Stalin and his massive roles, Professor Kotkin cups his hand over his mouth and tells us: “He was Stalin!”
I discovered professor kotkin recently I'm hooked he is a very brilliant historian
What a wonderful introduction.
I'm half-way through his second brick of a book;) on this most appalling dictator. But I must confess that I'm eagerly awaiting the third and final masterpiece!
Kotkin spittin facts.
Great lecture.
"You are not going to hear about".... then continues to tell you about what you are not going to hear; over and over and over. With only the things you are not going to hear (but end up hearing about anyways) made for a good mini-lecture anyways. ;) Good lecture... information that more need to know and understand.
On another note.... I always wait for him to work in something about "the two youts". ;)
The question of whether the Soviet Union won or lost the peace depends greatly on time frame and how it is defined. The USSR ultimately lost control of the central and eastern European states it occupied during and after WWII, but it took 44 years to do it and by then, Stalin was long dead. It seems to me that the post-WWII peace was a draw, which was why the Cold War quickly got underway. Yes, the Soviets quickly established hegemony over much of eastern and central Europe, as well as China and North Korea, with more conquests to follow in the years to come; but it failed to break the western alliance or to make significant inroads into western Europe; except through the medium of client Communist parties which were systematically excluded from government. And the post-Stalin schism in the Communist movement ultimately doomed the Soviet-led Communist bloc, though it took decades before it finally disintegrated in 1989, leaving only a handful of Communist states, each de facto independent of the others. Yet even now, Russia retains northern East Prussia (now the Kaliningrad Oblast), conquered from Germany in 1945, even though it had never before been Russian and was inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans until the conquest (when the locals were expelled) and is physically detached from the rest of the Russian Federation (the nearest approach being over the Baltic Sea to St. Petersburg).
Russia lost all these lands not in 1991 as people think but in 1917/18 when it lost not wwI but being weakened in the war lost its internal structure that brought communists to power. And communists that did not care about the Russian idea immediately created all these non-russian republics with 14 of them having a constitutional right to declare an independence. That was Lenin's architecture that nobody even Stalin questioned in future and this eventually led to the constitutional collapse of Soviet Union, cause republics used their constitutional right to declare an independence. Lenin's hidden idea was - if we are not building communism the former Russian Empire should collapse. And the borders of new states that emerged in 1991 were draw by Lenin in 1922 after the collapse of Russian Empire and communists winning the civil war. Russian Empire failed to unite and enlighten its population around the idea of Russia and as soon as it was weaken disoriented people find themselves under the communist dictatorship.
East Prussia mostly remained as a part of modern Russia (another piece of it was given to Poland) only because Stalin put this land under the jurisdiction of Russian Socialist Federate republic (that was a part of Soviet Union with other republics) and not under the jurisdiction of Lithuanian or Belorussian Soviet republic. Had he given it to Lithuanian republic (that was a part of Soviet Union at that time) now it would be a part of independent Lithuania. Only if he had created a separate German (or Prussian) republic their as another republic of Soviet Union todays Russia would have lost it in 1991.
"And the post-Stalin schism in the Communist movement ultimately doomed"
I think that there is one much more significant factor in that game. From early '70s, even when taking official statistics at face value, Soviet Union and its vassal states were in clear stagnation, while the West was escaping. As the stagnation seem to hit most developed communist countries first, it seems that simply this communist mode of production started approaching its limits. Possibly all low hanging fruits of industrialisation were realised.
Regardless of any geopolitical situation, Soviet long term future started looking bleak, just dilemma of:
- staying in denial and allowing this divergence to widen, or
- trying some free market reforms.
To this day, the rulling elite in Russia is mostly ethnic German. Going back to Katherine the Great.
.........INTERRRESTING?
Stephen has an amazing depth of knowledge when it comes to the Soviet Union and Stalin. Stephen falls short when that knowledge is imposed on culture or future events.
A leader's behavior and actions reflect the political culture but do not directly translate to national cultures. The Soviet Union at the time had a communist political culture but was multinational, ruling over multiple ethnicities. Stalin was a Georgian ruling over many peoples, Russians, Azeris, Balts, Turkmen, and more. To say Stalin was representative of Russian culture is misleading, rather a product of early communist and Georgian culture.
If giving your successors an international alliance (the Warsaw Pact) that lasts over 40 years is losing the peace of WWII then what qualifies as victory is unclear. Attributing the Warsaw Pact dissolution to Stalin, even though that occurred decades after his death is absurd. It was up to the rulers after Stalin to maintain and expand the international agreements and frameworks that were created in the aftermath of WWII. It was ultimately dismantled by Gorbachev's reforms, past Soviet errors, and the pressures placed on it by the US & NATO.
Agreed. I believe that is where his liberal ideology impedes on his job as a historian - which is to not offer half-baked one dimensional answers to complex issues.
@@crniskadu9881 just what I thought. The deep rooted culture in Russia inhabitants , almost an ideology in itself, of defending Rusija matuška at all costs, is the main reason why SSSR won the WWII, despite the odds, and despite Stalin. Without that ideology there would be no victory, and no Stalin, for that matter.
Joe Pesci the historian over here everybody.
We love him
He spends 20 minutes talking about what he wasn’t going to talk about in this lecture.
Welcome aboard.
It's a rhetorical device.
He does it all the time.
the worlds premier Soviet scholar carries around a sackfull of caveats
read the books....3 of then ...big
What was not mentioned about the Soviet tanks is that the war planners studied the limited life expectancy of a Soviet tank and concluded that it would have been a waste of good materials to put quality parts made of quality materials into a tank that was going to have a severely limited life span so they used crappy parts made out of crappy materials on purpose. Not all T-34s were made alike.
This gentleman is a rockstar! ⭐️
What a masterpiece!
Such an excellent lecture. In short: The Eastern Front was a war of attrition, during which the best trained nazi soldiers were lost early thus their performance trailed off, and the soviet army gradually improved (especially with less intervention from Stalin.) Meanwhile Stalin's regime paradoxically did not fall during the chaos, because apparently his reign of fear and murders of his rivals apparently worked.
Hint. If you see a paradox, just check you assumptions. They can be not true. Maybe there were neither chaos nor fear. People could simply like their new Soviet country and their communist government.
This is not a paradox. People commonly overlook the shortcomings of their own government to fight an external enemy, especially when those enemies are Nazis who see them as inherently subhuman.
@@alextsitovich9800 I mean, what could they do about it if they didn’t like it.
@@robreich6881 be sad
Kotkin's biographies on Stalin are great but the third volume is going to suffer if he makes the same oversimplifications of military history that he does in this video. For one, David Glantz does not overly extol the Red Army. Much of his work is dedicated to exposing "lost operations:" failed Soviet military operations that were forgotten after the war. Equally does his work cover much of the Red Army's shortcomings. Two, Zhukov and Timoshenko were not "idiots who misunderstood 'Blitzkrieg'(not the actual name the German doctrine.)" They wanted to bring more troops to the borders to absorb the initial German blow and then counter-attack with their own mechanized units. Granted, this was beyond the Red Army's capabilities in 1941, but to say two of the Red Army's top senior officers did not understand modern warfare is a gross oversimplification.
When it comes to Kotkin's writing style with the two previous volumes on Stalin, using the term _over-simplication_ could be construed as an oxymoron.
Eric.
He did seem rather unfair to T and Z.
Ok they were wrong that one time, but it doesn't make them "idiots".
They were not idiots but they were still suffering from their ego's. Both Zhukov and Timoshenko were actually mildly incompetent, which led to big losses on the front. The Soviet system though did have one thing right, even the officers who replaced the purged were strategically competent, so while they took big losses it did not cost them the whole thing. If the Soviet military had been overall strategically incompetent they would have lost the war, given the losses they took.
LOVE YOU ❤❤❤❤😍😍😍😍
fantastic talk
Very insightful ✊🏾
I hope this means Volume 3 is coming soon since he's giving speeches about WWII
I understand it's expected in October.
and he mentioned it’s taking longer than expected during a recent CATO lecture...
I think during autumn this year
@@ffleischer Indeed, I believe his wording was "years away."
Scott Hanlon thank you, how do you know? They are extraordinary.
I feel petty about airing a disagreement when I'm overjoyed listening to so much information, but here it goes...
The Soviet tanks have been overrated. The gun and armor were more powerful, and they were more reliable than the later German models, BUT, the ergonomics were terrible. German tankers would usually be able to fire the first shot in a tank duel. That's how they killed so many Soviet tanks.
sld1776, not surprising; in weapon design the first thing to go is concern for the user.
Nice lecture
May we please ask for greater volume? Don't always have headset. He's so soft spoken next to my old professors. :-)
Merci!
If the origination of industry was so bad , then how the hell did they produce tanks and aircraft in such numbers, It was the over engineered German weapons and not the Russian
simple way of doing things that worked .
This is the first time that I have heard a scholar address the first six months and why the Victorious Wehrmacht won its way to defeat. I don't believe for a minute that Stalin, or anybody else in command had a plan or strategy that would result in German defeat before Moscow. I think that Stalin demanded resistance to the Germans, which, as mr. Kotkin points out, exhausted the German army by sacrifice of millions of Russians. Personally, I think that some form of patriotism was part of the Soviet survival. However, the soviets survived because the Germans violated a basic strategic rule of war: Don't attack an enemy who possesses a huge population, industry and millions of military age men (and women) The Germans were ignorant of their enemy, and they paid a huge price.
Oh Stalin had a plan, his own vision on what to do in order to win. Another question is - how correct his plan and methods were and what was the real impact of his vision. And what could be more correct plan and methods to wage this war. And what were other factors that impact German war machine that were not connected with Stalin's orders - like weather, vast territories of Russia, Russian cultural mindset, allies and other international forces, resources and others.
Stalin was more Hitler in waging war than Hitler himself declared he is. Will power. Meaning your willpower to do whatever needs to be done in order to be victorious even if you lost first battles, even if your military command structure is no match to your enemy, even if the enemy is only 100 miles from your capital and all previous battles were lost, even if half of your industrial base with its huge population is captured, even if your Army you built for years is destroyed with all its war machinery and equipment so u have to create a new and better one asap. Willpower to mobilize everyone in the country for the war effort. Anyway a topic needs a huge and impartial research and here I dont see Kotkin or anybody as a person without some ideological agenda to do a decent job.
They didn't have a plan?
That evacuation of industry that this clown ( sorry but even this word to easy on him) is caricaturing around 00:31, was an unimaginable enterprise. And he is faking his numbers, more than 2500 big enterprises only, were transferred and started working in a few months. Yes, some even started working without a roof but all of them had infrastructure ( electricity, water, foundations...) ready waiting there.
And just to add about that 'numbers' myth, the Reich had 90 million ( with Volksdeutsche) , the Soviet Union had 196 million but they very quickly lost control over the territories populated by 70 million people and these had to work for Germany, willingly or not if they wanted to survive.
And you're correct, Hitler and the Nazis didn't have an idea what they were fighting with and that was their first and biggest mistake. They were thinking that the SU would collapse after the first blow, then the second, third... and that was it, it was already over.
@@simplicius11 Amazing you call Kotkin a clown when he knows more on the subject than you ever will. Unlike many others he doesn't write it if documents are not there to prove it.
@@westnash Oh, I really enjoy when a dumb uneducated American is trying to teach me some history.
I'll show you the clown when he meets a real historian and trying to start his stand up show with him.
You don't have historians dear, you have a stand up comedians as a substitute. I'd suggest you, watch the whole lesson if you want to understand and learn something.
ua-cam.com/video/qcllXFYYjak/v-deo.html
Victor Suvorov, former GRU officer, ( and others including R.C Raack, PhD, Albert Weeks, Phd, Mark Solonin, Phd - a Russian historian-, Joachim Hoffman, PhD, and many others) point out the obvious fact that Hitler's attack was pre-emptive and that Stalin was planning a conquest of Europe to the Atlantic coast of France. Stalin's spies and agitation agents were legion in France, and the strength of the Comintern was legendary. Stalin was relying on popular hatred of Germany to clear the way for a Communist victory in France. Stalin had dismantled the Stalin Line, and had fashioned an attack army, and an attack air force with the intention of destroying the Luftwaffe on the ground. Hundreds of thousands of paratroopers were ready to go.
He had no interest in defensive war- actually despised it as non-revolutionary- and that is the reason he placed his troops and armor as close to the border as he did. After the treaty with Germany the Stalinist plans were to wait until it was a single front war, which it became when Soviet spies ( such as Harry Dexter White ) in FDR's cabinet manipulated the American leaders into keeping the Navy in the baited trap known as Pearl Harbor. Once it was clear America was committed to Pacific war the offensive Soviet campaign was cleared to go.
This man along with David Glance are my favorite authorities on this topic.
Thank you very much