Transcription
It's a singular honor and privilege for the Center for Policy Research (CPR) to welcome Professor Stephen Kotkin and Professor Pratap Mehta for a conversation on the future of Russia and the world order.
My name is Rahul Verma, and I work at the Center for Policy Research. I am deeply honored to introduce both Professor Kotkin and Professor Mehta, two of the finest minds of our time, especially in global thought and global politics.
Professor Kotkin is one of the foremost historians and authorities on Russian history. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Professor Kotkin is also a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley—my own alma mater—so thank you, sir, for being here. He is a professor emeritus of history and international affairs at Princeton University, where he taught for over three decades. During this time, he has helped us understand authoritarian systems and how authoritarian countries negotiate their place in the world order. He is best known for his two-volume biography of Stalin, with the third volume on making. I encourage those who haven't had a chance to look at these volumes to do so. Thank you, Professor Kotkin, for being here.
Professor Pratap Mehta is the former president and chief executive of the Center for Policy Research. He has taught at many institutions, including Harvard, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Ashoka University, where he was also the vice chancellor. Professor Mehta writes almost weekly for the Indian Express, and we have all learned from his writing. Thank you so much, Pratap, for coming here.
Professor Kotkin and Professor Mehta will be in conversation after Professor Kotkin's lecture. For an institute that continues to face great challenges, having these two individuals engage in conversation is a remarkable way to mark the end of the year 2024.
Let me first invite our current president and chief executive, Shinas, who also happens to be the Ministry of Jal Shakti chair, and who makes waves with his research. I will invite Shinas to make a welcome remark, and then we will have Professor Kotkin speak for 35 to 40 minutes, followed by a conversation between both of them. Thank you.
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Thank you, Rahul, and a very good evening to all of you—Professor Kotkin, Professor Mehta, and friends. On behalf of the Center for Policy Research and the India International Center, it is my privilege to welcome you to this talk today on the future of Russia and the world order by Professor Kotkin.
December is a very busy month, particularly in Delhi. I know for sure there are two talks happening at the same time—one on China and another on Sri Lanka—within a two-kilometer radius. Having you all in this room is a credit to the distinguished speakers we have today.
We are truly honored to host this talk, and I would like to thank Professor Kotkin for agreeing to give this talk today, and also Pratap for having agreed to share this talk at CPR. Rahul mentioned that we have just completed 50 years and have begun our next 50 years. Many of you understand what I mean by that. CPR carries out research in many areas, but if you look at our reputation, or if you want to call it notoriety, it is primarily because of the most visible work we do on foreign policy and security studies.
It is quite natural for us to feel excited about having Professor Kotkin talk about Russia and its politics today. Many of us have known Professor Kotkin's work for the past 30 years, and many more of us have benefited from his insights since the conflict in Ukraine began. I am one of them, and I am grateful for his scholarship. I look forward to his lecture.
I can assure you that while we may not get answers to all the questions we have, we will certainly leave this room much better informed and perhaps better prepared for the surprises that Russia may have in store for the future.
It is just a matter of one hour for us, but we are being enlightened by one of the foremost geopolitical thinkers in the world today. Thank you, Professor Kotkin, for coming.
I don't want to be in the middle of you and what promises to be a very fascinating conversation between Professor Kotkin and Professor Mehta. Just a quick note: as Rahul introduced them, Pratap is a PhD from Princeton and also teaches there, while Professor Kotkin is a professor emeritus from Princeton. So, we have two of the finest minds from Princeton with us today.
Thank you all for joining us today. Pratap, would you like to take over?
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Can I invite Professor Kotkin and Professor Mehta to the dais? Over to you.
I'll get you a walking microphone, so if you want to walk around while we wait for it, I think we kind of anticipated Professor Kotkin either standing or sitting, but I forgot he is a natural teacher and likes to walk around.
I just want to add my personal thanks to Steven Kotkin for doing this. I want to say something particularly for the younger members of this audience: if you want to see what greatness in a historian and the model of scholarship looks like, I advise you to read every one of Professor Kotkin's books.
The book that first made him famous, "The Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization," is truly astonishing. It has the anthropologist's gift of empathy, a strategic thinker's gift of thinking about hard politics, an economist's sense of political economy, and a theorist's sense of what the big questions are. It's a model of how to combine so many disciplinary perspectives coherently.
Apart from being one of the greatest living historians, Professor Kotkin is also one of the finest minds on contemporary strategic affairs. He has almost a parallel career thinking about international relations. For those of you who hear this podcast, his pieces in Foreign Affairs are far ahead of the curve.
Most importantly for this audience, in my years of interaction with American academia, I have not found a better friend for India than Steven Kotkin, who, as a matter of institutional building and scholarship, has done much to further Indian studies and has had India's interests at heart. Like all good friends, he worries about friends and criticizes them as well.
Professor Kotkin is one of India's best friends in academia in the truest sense of that term. We are deeply grateful to have you, Steven. Over to you.
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Would it be okay if I walked around a little bit? I'm vaccinated; I've had four shots. Can you hear me?
When I invited myself to speak here tonight, I was very pleased that the Center for Policy Research graciously accepted my invitation.
My first visit to India was in 1991—a long time ago. I haven't been here often enough, but my impression is that it's been the darkest night here for a really long time because India has grown so much in those 30 years. I read once that India grows at night, so it's been very impressive to see that growth.
Speaking about the future is dangerous; we don't know it very well. In fact, if I knew the future, I would be supporting CPR philanthropically rather than trying to make a speech. Sadly, what history does for the future is important.
There are three dimensions of history that I think are important:
1. **Strategic Empathy**: To understand—not necessarily to validate—but to understand at the deepest possible level.
2. **Perverse and Unintended Consequences**: Where you think you're doing one thing but achieve something different from what you intend.
3. **Getting Outside of the Conjuncture**: Trying to make judgments that are less tied to the current conjuncture or epoch you live in.
This combination of strategic empathy, a feeling for paradox or perverse and unintended consequences, and attempting to be less tied to the current conjuncture enables you to see some of the longer-term trends and possibilities for the future.
As a preface, I can state immediately that no country has done more for India than Russia. Russia showed India the profound moral squalor and murderousness of communism. That is a gift that nobody else could have delivered on the scale that the Soviet Union did.
In 1928, when Joseph Stalin took a trip to Siberia to give a speech about the collectivization of agriculture, only 1% of the arable land in the Soviet Union was collectivized voluntarily. The peasants who couldn't farm had gone into collectives to collectivize agriculture. You needed massive coercive force because people would not give up their property voluntarily.
This episode unfolded with 5 to 7 million people dying of starvation, and 50 million people starved and survived. This is an enduring lesson: if you want to impose some version of anti-capitalism or socialism, you need a level of coercion that has consequences you may not intend.
It was only with the collectivization of agriculture that the Soviet Union's secret police grew to a terrifying scale. Before the peasants were forced into the collectives, it had been a small organization relative to the population.
The second lesson Russia gave you is to show you what it means to be a vassal of China. This is a gift that has been delivered to you more recently, and we are still trying to understand the implications of that. If you underestimate Chinese power and intentions, you don't read the Chinese documentation or see their internal speeches.
The Russians are helping you understand what this could potentially look like—a deep level of dependency that is predominantly one way.
That's why I say Russia has done more for India than any other country in the world.
What might be the future of Russia? When I sent the potential title for this presentation, there was a question mark at the end, which I see didn't make it on the post because the future is yet to be invented, and the future is plural.
We see a pattern in Russia now for at least 300 years. The pattern doesn't mean it's identical in each epoch, nor does it mean Russia doesn't change. It changes quite substantially. Russia is one of the major world civilizations, and it is just awesome to behold their achievements in art, music, dance, architecture, and more.
On the political and geopolitical side, there's a pattern: Russia has aspirations to be a power of the first rank. It wants to be, if not the greatest power in the world, certainly one of the few great powers. This aspiration has been among Russian elites for many centuries.
The challenge is that the capacities and capabilities of Russia don't match these aspirations. It is a power that is not always able, in capability terms, to be a power of the first rank.
There are three peaks of Russian power:
1. **Peter the Great's victory over Charles XII in Sweden**, which implanted Russia on the Baltic Sea.
2. **The defeat of Napoleon**, when Alexander got to Paris and presided over the settlement of Napoleon's defeat in France.
3. **The victory over Hitler in 1945**, when Stalin got to Berlin.
Besides these three peaks, Russia has often experienced difficulties in matching its aspirations.
What happens as a result of this gap between its own capabilities and aspirations? You could also call it a gap between Russian power and the greatest powers in the world. You see them trying to manage this gap with the state as the predominant instrument of power to force modernized Russia in order to catch up.
You can't necessarily catch up, but maybe you can manage it. You often get a growth spurt, and the state forces the country into this modernization, which produces a temporary growth spurt that can be very impressive. Then they hit a wall, and the growth stops.
Instead of getting a strong state, which is the goal of investment in the state as an instrument to force modernization, they get personalistic rule. This conflation of the survival of the country with the survival of that particular regime happens again and again.
This is not identical in every epoch, but there is a remarkable pattern. The current administration in Russia is not the same as the Soviet Union, but there are important differences in aspiration exceeding capabilities, forced modernization with the state, and then personalistic rule.
The irony of this pattern is that it doesn't close the gap with the West. Instead, it widens the gap again and again. Russian power is undermined by this very attempt to make it stronger.
Today, Russia's economy is predominantly a commodity exporter and a military-industrial complex. It has enormous dependencies and is a technology desert at home. It doesn't produce 21st-century technology to the degree you would expect of a country with an economy that size.
Russia's new economy, its private sector, is in exile. You can find it in Tel Aviv, Dubai, and Stanford University. Russia's level of robotization, which is critical for any country with a declining birth rate and a shrinking population, is among the lowest in the world.
The fiscal situation is complex, but it is hemorrhaging human capital—some of its most talented people—whether they leave of their own accord or are forced out. This is a very high cost to pay if you want to be a great power, as Russia does.
As someone who has devoted my life to that remarkable civilization, it is painful to see this conflation between the regime and the survival of this glorious civilization, which is a false conflation.
I could go on, but I see the trajectory that Russia is on, and it is a trajectory that hasn't worked again and again. Yet, it is the trajectory that they persistently pursue.
What we have with Russia are a couple of possibilities:
1. Russia could become like France—a country that had a monarchy, a revolution that was bloody and messy, and then transformed into a stable republic.
2. The other possibilities involve continuing on the path that it's on, playing this geopolitical game the way it's been played for multiple centuries.
Without close ties to Europe, Russia has never prospered. The way back to Europe is now harder than ever. Burning those bridges was more profound than people understand.
The future we see in front of us is one where Russia becomes more dependent on China for technology transfer. The Chinese will give you only what they'll give you; it's not an open relationship.
The increasing dependency of Russia on China ironically creates issues for China to manage. The relationship with China is not a treaty relationship; it's not something of mutual obligation.
Unless we see a remarkable transformation domestically, we will see Russia as dependent on China in a one-way trajectory.
Let me talk a little bit about world order.
If you were alive in 1974 and fell asleep, what would be surprising if you woke up today?
If you were around in 1974, you would have witnessed the self-destruction of U.S. soft power—President Nixon's resignation, the loss of the war in Vietnam, and the Rust Belt's hollowing out.
You would see the recuperation of American soft power and America's economy maintaining its position as more or less one-quarter of global GDP.
Geopolitically, the world has changed much less than we think. If you fell asleep in 1974 and woke up today, the world would look very familiar to you.
What has changed is that everything is interconnected now. The refrigerator in my house can conduct surveillance on my life at home.
Everything is dual-use now. There is no military-industrial complex separate from the civilian economy.
China has become synonymous with economic opportunity. The United States was synonymous with economic opportunity, but today, China is still seen as a manufacturing superpower.
Borders of defeat are another significant change. The Soviet Union's borders were borders of victory, while today we have borders of defeat.
Let me conclude with a few remarks about India.
In America, we often hear about the rise of India. Phrases like "the rise of India" are laughable to me. In historical time, there has been a geopolitical order, but we need a better vocabulary.
I see 6 million Indian diaspora in the United States, and they are in remarkable positions of power and authority.
How are you going to manage American power? What are you going to do with American power?
I find that the answer is not there yet. What are you going to do about Chinese power?
Unless there are persuasive answers to those two questions, I worry that India's role, place, potential, and trajectory will not meet expectations.
Thank you for your attention.
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As we had expected, that was a tour de force. I think this lecture will be discussed in Delhi for a long time and may shape some of the answers we come up with to the questions you posed, sir.
Thank you so much.
Since there are so many interesting people in the audience, rather than have a conversation with Stephen, I think it would be much more interesting to hear from you.
I'll begin the discussion with a couple of small questions to kick things off.
One thing you mentioned, which is very profound, is the idea of defeated borders. Many would argue that this complex also pervades India in a different way.
On the one hand, you have a sense of defeated borders, and on the other hand, you have this extraordinary opportunity in the world.
In the 1980s and 1990s, there was hope that these defeated borders could be managed by creating a world where the stakes in overcoming them became less significant.
What happened in the last 15 to 20 years that this idea of defeated borders has become a pervasive sensibility?
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Thank you for your questions. I apologize for not being succinct enough to allow everyone to ask a question.
Regarding the Russian economy, I wish that were true. You should see the history of my laptop and phone.
As for Russian statistics, I hope you're right, but the Soviet Union's economy was also rather large.
On the question of Syria, I think you should ask our friends in the Russian government and those representing the Russian government about that.
The problem with world order is that it works for many countries but not all. The countries that it doesn't work for often experience horrors that are almost indescribable.
Cold War was a fabulous thing because it means no hot war. When you have great power rivalries, you have four options: hot war, appeasement, capitulation, or cold war.
Cold war is the most stable solution in great power rivalry, but it can lead to proxy wars in other countries.
I worry about the effects on those countries that don't have a voice in the international system.
Thank you for your attention.