Kotkin was born in New Jersey, the third son of Jay Kotkin, a factory worker of Belarusian-Jewish descent, and Joanne Korolewicz, a cook and art teacher of Polish descent.[5] His father's family emigrated from Vitebsk in the Russian Empire (now Belarus).[6] He grew up in New York City.[7]
Kotkin joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1989. He served as the director of the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program for thirteen years (1995–2008) and as the co-director of the certificate program in History and the Practice of Diplomacy from 2015 to 2022.[8] He is now the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Author
Kotkin has written several nonfiction books about history as well as textbooks. Among scholars of Russia, he is best known for Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization which exposes the realities of everyday life in the Soviet city of Magnitogorsk during the 1930s.[11] In 2001, he published Armageddon Averted, a short history of the fall of the Soviet Union. He is a frequent contributor on Russian and Eurasian affairs and he also writes book and film reviews for various publications, including The New Republic, The New Yorker, the Financial Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post. He also contributed as a commentator for NPR and the BBC.[10] In 2017, Kotkin wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Communist democide resulted in the deaths of at least 65 million people between 1917 and 2017, stating: "Though communism has killed huge numbers of people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from starvation as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering."[12]
His first volume in a projected trilogy on the life of Stalin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (976 pp., Penguin Random House, 2014) analyzes his life through 1928, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.[13] It received reviews in newspapers,[14][15] magazines,[16][17] and academic journals,[18][19] The second volume, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (1184 pp., Penguin Random House, 2017) also received several reviews,[20][21] magazines,[22] and academic journals[23][24] upon its release. In these books, among other things, Stephen Kotkin suggested[25] that Lenin's Testament was authored by Nadezhda Krupskaya. Kotkin pointed out that the purported dictations were not logged in the customary manner by Lenin's secretariat at the time they were supposedly given; that they were typed, with no shorthand originals in the archives, and that Lenin did not affix his initials to them;[26][27] that by the alleged dates of the dictations, Lenin had lost much of his power of speech following a series of small strokes on December 15–16, 1922, raising questions about his ability to dictate anything as detailed and intelligible as the Testament[28][29] and that the dictation given in December 1922 is suspiciously responsive to debates that took place at the 12th Communist Party Congress in April 1923.[30] However, the Testament has been accepted as genuine by many historians, including E. H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Dmitri Volkogonov, Vadim Rogovin and Oleg Khlevniuk.[31][dubious–discuss][32] Kotkin's claims were also rejected by Richard Pipes soon after they were published, who claimed Kotkin contradicted himself by citing documents in which Stalin referred to the Testament as the "known letter of comrade Lenin." Pipes also points to the inclusion of the document in Lenin's Collected Works.[33]
The third and final volume, Stalin: Totalitarian Superpower, 1941-1990, is set to be published in "several years", according to Kotkin in November 2024.[34] He is currently writing a multi-century history of Siberia, focusing on the Ob River Valley.[10]
Published works
Year
Title
Collaborator(s)
Publisher
ISBN
1991
Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era
Berkeley: University of California; paperback with afterword in 1993
Stephen Kotkin supports a centrist view of "normal politics," based on the premise that "problems arise at the extremes, the far left and the far right that don't recognize the legitimacy either of capitalism or of democratic rule of law institutions."[36] Several socialist media outlets have accused Kotkin of ideological bias against the Bolshevik Revolution, pointing out that Kotkin referred to American journalist and socialist John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World, as "former Harvard cheerleader" in his book Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928.[37][38] When speaking about the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine in an interview with Foreign Affairs, Kotkin suggested that a serous threat of regime change in Russia could ultimately motivate Vladimir Putin with to stop the war. Kotkin also described Donald Trump's foreign policy regarding the war in Ukraine as unpredictable, and said he thought it was unlikely that Trump would succeed in becoming an autocrat, given the existing checks and balances in the United States' political system.[39]
↑ Kotkin, Stephen (November 3, 2017). "Communism's Bloody Century". The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on November 3, 2017. Retrieved October 11, 2021.
↑ Brandenberger, D. (2016). "Book Review: Stalin, Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 Stephen Kotkin". The American Historical Review. 121 (1): 333–334. doi:10.1093/ahr/121.1.333.
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