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Stalin/Putin: Geopolitics, Power, Ideas

  • When
  • January 15, 2015
    7:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. (EST)
  • Where
  • Open Society Foundations–New York
    224 West 57th Street
    New York, NY 10019
    United States of America
Stalin/Putin: Geopolitics, Power, Ideas (January 15, 2015)

What do we really know about Stalin, how he built his personal dictatorship, and how he exercised power? Is the standard story accurate? What made something like Stalin possible? How did Stalin see the world? More broadly, are there deep patterns in Russian history that seem to recur? Specifically, are there resemblances between the Putin and Stalin regimes? Is Putin in some ways a captive of Stalin’s actions and their consequences? What can Stalin tell us about the current immiserated state of Russian public and political life?

Stephen Kotkin and Bill Keller offer a critical examination of these themes.

Speakers

  • Stephen Kotkin is the acting director of Princeton University’s Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, a John P. Birkelund professor in history and international affairs, and a research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His recent book, Stalin, vol. I: Paradoxes of Power, was published in 2014. The book is the first in a trilogy on the Soviet leader.
  • Bill Keller is the editor in chief of the Marshall Project, a nonprofit journalism start-up focused on the American criminal justice system. Keller was executive editor of the New York Times from 2003 to 2011 and was an op-ed columnist from 2001 to 2003 and again from 2011 to 2014.
  • Leonard Benardo (moderator), is the Open Society Foundations’ regional director for Eurasia.

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