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Stephen Kotkin on Stalin, Power, and the Art of Biography (Ep. 228)

史蒂芬·科特金谈斯大林、权力和传记艺术(第 228 集)
2024-11-13 | 官方页面 YouTube

Thank you to listener Sean Patrick Hughes for sponsoring this transcript.

感谢听众肖恩·帕特里克·休斯赞助这份文字记录。

Want to sponsor a transcript like this one in 2025?

想在 2025 年赞助这样的成绩单吗?

Donate to Conversations with Tyler today.

今天就向与泰勒对话捐款。

TYLER COWEN

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.

大家好,欢迎回到《与泰勒对话》。

Today I’m chatting with Stephen Kotkin, who’s a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, but he was also a professor of history at Princeton University for over 30 years.

今天我和史蒂芬·科特金聊天,他是胡佛研究所的高级研究员,同时也是普林斯顿大学历史学教授 30 多年。

He’s one of the best and best-known scholars of Russian and Soviet history, perhaps best known for his multivolume biographies of Stalin.

他是研究俄罗斯和苏联历史的最优秀、最著名的学者之一,也许最出名的是他的多卷斯大林传记。

Stephen, welcome.

斯蒂芬,欢迎。

STEPHEN KOTKIN

Thank you so much for the honor of the invitation, Tyler.

非常感谢你的邀请,泰勒。

COWEN

Let me start in another direction.

让我从另一个方向开始。

What’s the state of Russian Buddhism today?

当今俄罗斯佛教的状况如何?

KOTKIN

Yes, I wish I knew.

是的,我希望我知道。

It’s an excellent question.

这是一个很好的问题。

I haven’t been to Russia since January 2020.

自 2020 年 1 月以来我就没去过俄罗斯。

We had the pandemic, of course, and now the war.

当然,我们经历了大流行,现在又爆发了战争。

I can say that there was a lively, no longer underground Buddhist presence in Russia.

我可以说,俄罗斯有一个活跃的、不再是地下的佛教存在。

It obviously predates the Soviet period.

它显然早于苏联时期。

It goes way back.

它可以追溯到很久以前。

The Russian army was involved in inner Asia conflict over a long time and had firsthand contact with Buddhist peoples.

俄罗斯军队长期卷入亚洲内部冲突,并与佛教民族有直接接触。

Where things are today — just in general across the board, not just on Buddhism — it’s not so simple.

今天的情况 ——“只是整体而言,不仅仅是佛教”—— 事情并不那么简单。

On Siberia

在西伯利亚

COWEN

How much shamanism do you think is still around in Siberia?

您认为西伯利亚还有多少萨满教?

KOTKIN

Culturally, significantly, but how deep the belief system is is a tougher question.

从文化上来说,意义重大,但信仰体系有多深是一个更棘手的问题。

It’s always the problem between practicing versus raised in the tradition.

这始终是实践与传统中培养之间的问题。

Just about everyone in Siberia from a non-European background, from non-European descent, will have had some exposure to shamanism in cultural terms.

西伯利亚几乎每个非欧洲背景、非欧洲血统的人都会在文化方面接触过萨满教。

But how many of them will visit shamans for those big life traditions, life changes, those moments where there are births or deaths or — that’s a harder thing to pin down.

但他们中有多少人会为了那些重大的生活传统、生活变化、那些出生或死亡的时刻而拜访萨满,或者——这是一件很难确定的事情。

I’ve traveled to Siberia probably more than a dozen times — voluntarily, I should say.

我大概去过西伯利亚十几次了 —— 我应该说是自愿的。

I encountered quite a bit of it there, and of course, the anthropologists did a good job gathering artifacts and retaining the artifacts.

我在那里遇到了很多,当然,人类学家在收集文物和保留文物方面做得很好。

There are some museums.

有一些博物馆。

Again, it’s been a while, but my last visit there, which is probably seven or eight years ago now, there was still evidence that it was alive.

再说一次,已经有一段时间了,但我上次访问那里,可能是七八年前了,仍然有证据表明它还活着。

COWEN

Can you imagine a future where, for some cultural or historic reason, Siberia peels off from the more Western parts of Russia proper?

您能想象未来由于某种文化或历史原因,西伯利亚与俄罗斯本土更西部的地区分离吗?

I don’t mean because of a Chinese invasion, but because of Siberia itself.

我的意思不是因为中国的入侵,而是因为西伯利亚本身。

What’s in it for them, the current union?

现在的工会对他们来说有什么好处?

KOTKIN

Not much, but there are not very many people there.

不多,但那里的人也不是很多。

It’s a colossal space, and it’s far more empty than Canada.

这是一个巨大的空间,而且比加拿大还要空旷得多。

Think about Canada, which is roughly — not exactly, but roughly — equivalent in location.

想想加拿大,它的位置大致 — 不完全是,但大致 — 相当。

Canada itself has not a large population.

加拿大本身人口并不多。

Think about Canada with a far less dense population even than it has now, with effectively no Toronto, no Montreal, no Vancouver, but only provincial cities and unpopulated or sparsely populated areas in between.

想想加拿大,其人口密度远不如现在,实际上没有多伦多,没有蒙特利尔,没有温哥华,只有省会城市和其间人口稀少或人口稀少的地区。

Connection, connectivity, governance, economy — all of those would be supreme challenges without the current connection or orientation, if you will, that they have towards European Russia.

联系、互联互通、治理、经济——如果没有当前与俄罗斯欧洲部分的联系或方向(如果你愿意的话),所有这些都将是巨大的挑战。

COWEN

I’ve been told that in Siberia it gets colder as you move eastward, not just as you move northward.

有人告诉我,在西伯利亚,当你向东移动时,天气会变得更冷,而不仅仅是向北移动。

Is that true?

这是真的吗?

And if so, how has it influenced Siberian history?

如果是这样,它是如何影响西伯利亚历史的?

KOTKIN

Western Siberia and Eastern Siberia are dramatically different landscapes, flora and fauna, weather patterns.

西西伯利亚和东西伯利亚的地貌、动植物、天气模式截然不同。

We think of everything east of the Urals as a coherent unit, more or less.

我们认为乌拉尔山脉以东的一切或多或少都是一个连贯的整体。

In fact, historically, there have been three units: Western Siberia, Eastern Siberia, and the Russian, then Soviet, and now again Russian Far East.

事实上,历史上曾有过三个单位:西西伯利亚、东西伯利亚和俄罗斯,然后是苏联,现在又是俄罗斯远东地区。

They’re quite distinct, as you just mentioned, not just in the weather patterns.

正如您刚才提到的,它们非常不同,不仅仅是天气模式。

The rivers are really the determining factor there.

河流确实是那里的决定因素。

The rivers are colossal in Siberia, and they set the living patterns, the landscape.

西伯利亚的河流浩瀚,它们塑造了生活的模式和景观。

They’ve shaped the history quite a bit.

他们对历史的影响相当大。

You know Lake Baikal?

你知道贝加尔湖吗?

The largest freshwater lake in the world and a tremendously important water source.

世界上最大的淡水湖和极其重要的水源。

If you’re dependent on the Himalayas for your water, which is one way to describe Asia — that is to say, almost every important river in Asia comes from that mountain range.

如果你的水源依赖于喜马拉雅山(这是描述亚洲的一种方式),也就是说,亚洲几乎所有重要的河流都来自该山脉。

As those glaciers are reduced in size or potentially vanish as the snow-cap glacial areas of the Himalayas no longer feed the river systems in the same way, the Siberian river systems are, all of a sudden, supremely important as a strategic resource, not just as a basic resource.

由于喜马拉雅山的积雪冰川地区不再以同样的方式为河流系统提供水源,这些冰川的尺寸减小或可能消失,西伯利亚河流系统突然成为极其重要的战略资源,而不仅仅是基本资源。

Lake Baikal becomes a way in which you could imagine that water-starved populations that are really large on the southern side of the mountains, i.e., China, become much more interested in the water sources of Siberia, ironically, the resource we think least about.

贝加尔湖成为一种方式,你可以想象,山脉南侧(即中国)的大量缺水人口对西伯利亚的水源变得更加感兴趣,讽刺的是,西伯利亚的水源是我们最不考虑的资源。

Everyone will think about coal and oil and gas and gold and you name it.

每个人都会想到煤炭、石油、天然气和黄金,凡是你能想到的。

You could go right through the whole periodic table for Siberia.

你可以直接浏览西伯利亚的整个元素周期表。

But it’s the water, over time, that might prove to be among the most and maybe even the most important resource.

但随着时间的推移,水可能被证明是最重要的资源之一,甚至可能是最重要的资源。

That could determine the kind of future that you’re poking at for the region as a whole.

这可能会决定你所期待的整个地区的未来。

COWEN

If we can desalinate water at a reasonable cost, Siberia becomes much more irrelevant?

如果我们能够以合理的成本淡化海水,西伯利亚就会变得更加无关紧要吗?

KOTKIN

Potentially.

有潜力。

Again, with technology, that’s true of just about anything and everything.

再说一次,对于技术来说,几乎任何事情都是如此。

If we can move away from hydrocarbons, that changes geopolitics rather dramatically, at least potentially.

如果我们能够摆脱碳氢化合物,地缘政治就会发生相当大的变化,至少是潜在的。

It’s similar with technologies of managing water.

这与水管理技术类似。

Desalinization you would know better than I, but it’s the scale that we’re talking about.

你可能比我更了解海水淡化,但我们谈论的是规模。

We’re not talking about something the size of Israel.

我们谈论的不是以色列那么大的地区。

Something the size of Israel is a neighborhood in a Chinese urban agglomeration.

其面积相当于以色列的一个街区,位于中国城市群中。

COWEN

Now, Colin Thubron, in his famous travel book on Siberia, called the place, and I quote, “dull and poor.” Agree or disagree?

现在,科林·图布伦(Colin Thubron)在他著名的西伯利亚旅行书中称这个地方(我引用一下)“沉闷而贫穷”。同意还是不同意?

KOTKIN

I think he’s right about the poor part.

我认为他关于贫穷的部分是正确的。

I wouldn’t say it’s dull.

我不会说这很无聊。

Quite the contrary.

恰恰相反。

If you’ve ever seen real taiga, which is dense forest — not tundra, which is not forested — but if you’ve seen taiga, which is thick ancient trees, forest, and all of the ecosystem of that, meaning not just the forest canopies up top, which you can barely see from the ground, but the entire ground and everything that’s living there and growing there and happening there — it’s a wonder.

如果你见过真正的针叶林,它是茂密的森林 ——不是苔原,没有森林覆盖 ——但是如果你见过针叶林,它是茂密的古树、森林和所有的生态系统,这意味着不仅是顶部的森林树冠,你从地面几乎看不到它,而是整个地面以及生活在那里、在那里生长和在那里发生的一切 ——这是一个奇迹。

From a purely ecological point of view, I think dull would be almost a criminal appellation for Siberia.

从纯粹的生态角度来看,我认为“沉闷”对于西伯利亚来说几乎是一个犯罪的称谓。

We don’t want to put anybody in jail over what they say.

我们不想因为任何人的言论而将他们关进监狱。

We’ve been practicing that at universities now for a little while, and it hasn’t worked.

我们在大学里已经实践了一段时间了,但还没有奏效。

But you get my point.

但你明白我的意思。

Just ecologically, it’s not dull, and then one could go on — the people, of course, et cetera.

就生态而言,这并不乏味,然后人们就可以继续下去——当然,还有人民,等等。

COWEN

Is Siberian butter very good?

西伯利亚黄油很好吗?

KOTKIN

Yes, especially when it’s sold under the Danish label, as you know.

是的,尤其是当它以丹麦标签出售时,如你所知。

All the Russian exiles feasted on Siberian butter in European exile before the revolution, but of course, it came packaged as Danish butter.

革命前,所有俄罗斯流亡者在欧洲流亡者中都享用了西伯利亚黄油,但当然,它是以丹麦黄油的形式包装的。

COWEN

How did you become so interested in the Ob River Valley?

您是如何对鄂毕河流域如此感兴趣的?

KOTKIN

I travel.

我旅行。

G.K.

G.K.

Chesterton, the writer, has this line about history is really travel.

作家切斯特顿有这样一句话:历史就是真正的旅行。

And you know travel — it gives you a wider perspective, widens your horizons and teaches you about your homeland, your home country, and all your experiences prior to that.

你知道旅行 ——它给你一个更广阔的视野,拓宽你的视野,让你了解你的祖国、你的国家,以及你之前的所有经历。

In some ways, history and travel overlap, at least in Chesterton’s formulation.

在某些方面,历史和旅行是重叠的,至少在切斯特顿的表述中是这样。

I just went there.

我刚去过那里。

Having gone there, I discovered that you had a kind of palimpsest.

去了那里之后,我发现你有一种重写本的感觉。

You had multiple layers that were not visible and not well known, including the Buddhist layer.

你有多个不可见且不为人所知的层面,包括佛教层面。

There was a genocide by the Qing troops against the Dzungars in inner Asia.

清军在亚洲内陆地区对准噶尔人进行了种族灭绝。

It affected greatly the origins of the Dalai Lama as an institution, a pan-Buddhist institution throughout Asia.

它极大地影响了达赖喇嘛作为一个机构、一个遍及亚洲的泛佛教机构的起源。

All of this stuff is visible in that river valley, the Ob and the Irtysh.

所有这些东西在鄂毕河和额尔齐斯河谷中都可见。

The Irtysh is effectively a tributary of the Ob.

额尔齐斯河实际上是鄂毕河的支流。

If you start from that point of view, and you go through the set, you have the agricultural settlement and transforming the land into farmland.

如果你从这个角度出发,经历整个场景,你就会看到农业定居点,并将土地转变为农田。

You have the Soviet industrialization, that toxic civilization that they built, right up through plans to reverse the rivers with exploding nuclear devices.

你有苏联的工业化,他们通过核装置爆炸扭转河流的计划建立了有毒的文明。

The scientific lunacy that you see often in these projects where the rivers don’t flow the way you want them to flow, and you think that there won’t be second- and third-order consequences to reversing the flow of a river.

在这些项目中,你经常看到科学上的疯狂,河流不按照你希望的方式流动,你认为逆转河流的流动不会产生二阶和三阶后果。

The region turned out to have so much history layered in, not all of which was visible to the naked eye, but all of which would be visible if you dug deeply into the source materials and you traveled around a little bit.

事实证明,这个地区蕴藏着如此多的历史,并不是所有的历史都是肉眼可见的,但如果你深入挖掘源材料并四处走走,所有这些都将是可见的。

Place names, for example, showed me the Buddhist, the Dzungar prehistory, with many of the place names which the origins were clearly not Russian words.

例如,地名向我展示了佛教、准噶尔史前史,其中许多地名的起源显然不是俄语单词。

If you poked into the etymology, you discovered that history, even though there were no visible signs — not even cemeteries — visible signs of their presence just a few centuries before.

如果你深入研究词源,你就会发现这段历史,尽管在几个世纪前没有明显的迹象——甚至连墓地也没有——有明显的迹象表明它们的存在。

On Akademgorodok, or Academic City

在 Akademgorodok 或学术城

COWEN

Whatever happened to the science city in Siberia?

西伯利亚的科学城到底发生了什么?

It was Akademgorodok.

那是阿卡德姆哥罗多克。

How is it pronounced?

它怎么发音?

KOTKIN

Akademgorodok, or we would call it Academic City.

Akademgorodok,或者我们称之为学术城。

It’s still there, and it’s still really large and important.

它仍然在那里,而且仍然很大而且很重要。

COWEN

It still produces science?

它仍然产生科学吗?

KOTKIN

Yes, it does.

是的,确实如此。

It’s had a number of triumphs over the generations.

几代人以来,它取得了许多胜利。

It’s had some really high-powered institutes.

它有一些非常强大的机构。

Cybernetics, for example, is a big presence out there.

例如,控制论是一个重要的存在。

It no longer has the same level of funding that it had in the Soviet period when budget constraints were a little bit different, but it’s still important.

它不再拥有与苏联时期相同的资金水平,当时的预算限制略有不同,但它仍然很重要。

The problem for the Siberian Academic City is its remoteness from other centers, like manufacturing centers.

西伯利亚学术城的问题在于它远离其他中心,例如制造中心。

Most of the Siberian region around it is old-fashioned metal industry and mining, the kind of stuff that we would call dirty industry today.

它周围的西伯利亚地区大部分地区都是老式的金属工业和采矿业,也就是我们今天所说的肮脏工业。

Steel plants dependent on coking coal, for example; very much mid-20th-century–style industry.

例如,依赖炼焦煤的钢铁厂;非常具有20世纪中叶风格的工业。

And so, the scientific achievements could not easily translate into a new productive economy, what you might call precision manufacturing or knowledge economy.

因此,科学成就无法轻易转化为新的生产经济,即所谓的精密制造或知识经济。

They had the science belt, but they didn’t have it connected very well to applications in an industrial economy that was forward-looking, so they fell into a little bit of a rut.

他们拥有科学带,但他们没有将其与前瞻性工业经济中的应用很好地联系起来,所以他们陷入了一些墨守成规的境地。

COWEN

Why were the Soviets so obsessed with cybernetics and AI, say, in the 1960s?

为什么苏联人在 20 世纪 60 年代如此痴迷于控制论和人工智能?

Is it that they understood where things were going?

他们了解事情的发展方向吗?

Or it just was a big stupid mistake?

或者这只是一个愚蠢的大错误?

KOTKIN

You can never rule out big stupid mistakes if we’re honest, certainly about our own lives and analogizing from them.

如果我们诚实的话,你永远不能排除重大愚蠢的错误,当然是对我们自己的生活并从中进行类比。

The Soviets were interested in cybernetics because it was about more efficient ways of gathering and using information — the planned economy at core, which was a fantasy, never a reality.

苏联人对控制论感兴趣,因为它涉及更有效地收集和使用信息的方式——核心是计划经济,这是一种幻想,从未成为现实。

In practice, the planned economy was central control over some scarce commodities, resources, products so that you could prioritize.

在实践中,计划经济是对一些稀缺商品、资源、产品的集中控制,以便你可以优先考虑。

And you could therefore supply those privileged factories in your supply chains with the scarce resources to produce predominantly military-industrial products, but not exclusively, and the rest of the stuff come what may.

因此,你可以为供应链中的那些享有特权的工厂提供稀缺资源,以生产主要但​​不完全是军工产品,其余的东西无论发生什么。

That was black market, including black market factory of factory.

那是黑市,包括黑市工厂的工厂。

Cybernetics was a solution whereby you could make planning work better.

控制论是一种可以使规划工作更好的解决方案。

You could optimize the information you were getting from the localities, and then you could optimize the way that you organize things.

您可以优化从当地获得的信息,然后可以优化组织事物的方式。

It was a fantasy in a different light, and it’s the same one that the Chinese Communist Party has today, which is to say if your authoritarian politics and your productive economy don’t mesh very well, turn to technology, turn to technological solutions to get beyond the fact that you refuse to do the structural reforms on the institutional side to ensure that the productivity, the dynamism continues.

这是一种不同角度的幻想,与今天的中国共产党的幻想是一样的,也就是说,如果你的威权政治和生产性经济不能很好地契合,那就转向技术,转向技术解决方案,以摆脱你拒绝在制度方面进行结构性改革以确保生产力和活力持续下去的事实。

It’s this eternal fantasy that science and tech will enable you not to have to give up central control, power, Communist Party monopoly.

这是一个永恒的幻想,科学技术将使你不必放弃中央控制、权力和共产党的垄断。

From the scientific point of view, it was fascinating because that’s who they were.

从科学的角度来看,这很有趣,因为他们就是这样的人。

They were exceptional world-class mathematicians, world-class physicists, world-class computer scientists, and so for them, it was the same thing it would be for scientists anywhere.

他们是杰出的世界级数学家、世界级物理学家、世界级计算机科学家,因此对他们来说,这对任何地方的科学家来说都是一样的。

On living in Magnitogorsk

关于马格尼托哥尔斯克的生活

COWEN

Now, in the 1980s, you went to live in Magnitogorsk in the Ural Mountains.

现在,在 20 世纪 80 年代,您搬到乌拉尔山脉的马格尼托哥尔斯克居住。

Other than your work and your curiosity as a historian of Soviet Union, what was the best thing about living there, just as a citizen of Magnitogorsk?

除了您作为苏联历史学家的工作和好奇心之外,作为马格尼托哥尔斯克公民,生活在那里最好的事情是什么?

Was there anything you liked?

有什么你喜欢的吗?

KOTKIN

For sure.

一定。

It was a harsh environment.

那是一个恶劣的环境。

Pollution wouldn’t begin to describe the orange air in the town.

污染不足以形容镇上橙色的空气。

It was a one-company town, one-industry town.

那是一个只有一家公司、一家工业的小镇。

They had a gigantic integrated steel plant, and they had next to no pollution controls because they had installed pollution controls, but they didn’t use them because it lowered their output, and they were paid and got their bonuses based on quantitative output.

他们有一个巨大的综合钢铁厂,他们几乎没有污染控制,因为他们安装了污染控制,但他们没有使用它们,因为这降低了他们的产量,他们的工资和奖金是根据产量定量的。

The place was harsh as harsh could be, but at the same time, the people were astonishing.

这个地方极其严酷,但同时,这里的人们也令人震惊。

There is something that, for foreigners, is really captivating about all Slavic cultures, the Russian one included, which is the degree of hospitality and the warmth inside people’s homes.

对于外国人来说,所有斯拉夫文化(包括俄罗斯文化)真正吸引人的地方就是人们家中的热情好客和温暖。

Outside there’s mismanagement, corruption, unbreathable air, undrinkable water, no places to shop because the goods have all been stolen.

外面管理不善,腐败,空气无法呼吸,水无法饮用,没有地方可以购物,因为货物都被偷了。

But inside people’s homes, there’s everything and anything, in a modest way because the size is not comparable to the kind of middle-class life we would imagine here or in Europe or in Japan.

但在人们的家里,什么都有,但以一种适度的方式,因为其规模与我们想象的这里、欧洲或日本的中产阶级生活无法相比。

Inside, despite the constrained circumstances in terms of the amount of space, the warmest and best people you could imagine, and the conversation, which was about novels and plays and poetry and science and the meaning of life and philosophical terms.

在里面,尽管空间有限,但你能想象到最热情、最好的人,还有关于小说、戏剧、诗歌、科学、生命意义和哲学术语的对话。

That was even before you started drinking.

那是在你开始喝酒之前。

COWEN

Now, the early plans of Magnitogorsk — they incorporated various ideas of utopian urban design.

现在,马格尼托哥尔斯克的早期规划——融入了乌托邦城市设计的各种理念。

Did any of those come to fruition?

其中任何一个已经实现了吗?

Did you see any of that when you were actually living there, like a rationally constructed and built city along some kind of different principles?

当你实际生活在那里时,你有没有看到过这些,就像一个按照某种不同原则合理建造和建造的城市?

KOTKIN

Yes, and it’s still there to this day.

是的,直到今天它仍然存在。

They built a city according to European modernism, and they discovered that it wasn’t very livable.

他们按照欧洲现代主义建造了一座城市,但他们发现它不太适合居住。

They had these fantastic buildings that looked like your Bauhaus from Germany or your Werkstätte from Austria, which were not ornamental but still elegant.

他们有这些奇妙的建筑,看起来就像德国的包豪斯或奥地利的工厂,没有装饰性,但仍然很优雅。

They were spare on the ornaments, but still, they had an industrial-design elegance.

他们在装饰上很简洁,但仍然具有工业设计的优雅。

The problem was, families didn’t want to live with one bathroom down the hall for everybody.

问题是,家庭不想每个人都住在大厅的一间浴室。

They didn’t like that efficiency, as people in your profession might call it.

他们不喜欢这种效率,正如业内人士可能所说的那样。

They didn’t want to live where their children were raised collectively by somebody else.

他们不想生活在别人集体抚养孩子的地方。

They wanted to live as self-contained nuclear family units where they had a kitchen and toilet facilities and showers and baths inside their own space, rather than sharing that with others.

他们希望以独立的核心家庭为单位生活,在自己的空间内拥有厨房、卫生间设施以及淋浴和浴室,而不是与他人共享。

It was this fantastic modernist project that was brought to fruition at scale, and the people in it didn’t want to live that way.

正是这个奇妙的现代主义项目得以大规模实现,而其中的人们并不想那样生活。

The regime, soon enough, changed its mind, the central regime, and stopped facilitating construction architecture by the imported German architects or the Soviet emulation of them and instead turned away from this building of modernist communal apartments towards self-contained family apartments, which were infinitely more popular.

很快,这个政权就改变了主意,即中央政权,不再促进进口德国建筑师或苏联仿效他们的建筑建筑,而是从这种现代主义公共公寓建筑转向更受欢迎的独立家庭公寓。

Then, of course, came the Stalinist Baroque ornamentation outside the apartments to differentiate those buildings.

当然,公寓外还有斯大林主义巴洛克风格的装饰,以区分这些建筑。

You have three phases: the spare, modern, ideologically inflected European — this is the way people should live, the ’20s and ’30s.

分为三个阶段:空闲的、现代的、受意识形态影响的欧洲 ——这就是人们应该生活的方式,20 年代和 30 年代。

Then you have the Stalinist Baroque indulgent family apartments, which are very expensive to build.

然后是斯大林主义巴洛克风格的放纵家庭公寓,其建造成本非常昂贵。

Then you have the Khrushchev five-story cement blocks, very poorly constructed in prefabricated fashion.

然后是赫鲁晓夫式的五层水泥楼,其预制结构的建造质量非常差。

That is a very basic history of the buildings there, but that first piece that you asked about was built and is still there.

这是那里建筑物的非常基本的历史,但是您询问的第一件作品已经建成并且仍然在那里。

COWEN

Which of those did you live in?

您住在其中哪一个?

KOTKIN

None of them.

没有一个。

I lived in the self-contained American cottages built for the US and other foreign engineers hired on contract to help build and launch — and initially, it was thought, to manage — the steel plant.

我住在为美国和其他按合同雇用的外国工程师建造的独立美国小屋中,以帮助建造和启动——人们认为最初是为了管理——钢铁厂。

Remember, the steel plant is not a carbon copy but derived from the Gary, Indiana, plant that was built a few decades earlier in central United States.

请记住,该钢铁厂不是复制品,而是源自几十年前在美国中部建造的印第安纳州加里工厂。

They had a colony, which they called the American colony, even though there were also Italians and Germans and others there.

他们有一个殖民地,他们称之为美国殖民地,尽管那里也有意大利人、德国人和其他人。

They had built these self-contained cottages, meaning the kind of house that you and I would see in an American suburb.

他们建造了这些独立的小屋,这意味着你我会在美国郊区看到的那种房子。

It was removed from the town a little bit, isolated for security purposes, and also to keep the Americans isolated from the local population as well as vice versa.

它被从城镇中移开一点,出于安全目的而被隔离,也是为了使美国人与当地居民隔离,反之亦然。

Those cottages also survived.

那些小屋也幸存下来。

I don’t know if they’re still there, but they survived into the mid to late ’90s.

我不知道他们是否还在那里,但他们一直存活到了 90 年代中后期。

I stayed in one of those, and I was under, of course, 24/7 surveillance.

我住在其中一间,当然,我受到 24/7 的监视。

COWEN

Now, Magnitogorsk had been a closed city.

现在,马格尼托哥尔斯克已经是一座封闭的城市。

What was it that people wanted to talk to you about or hear about?

人们想和你谈论或听到什么?

What were their questions?

他们的问题是什么?

KOTKIN

Everything and anything.

一切一切。

COWEN

But priority, did they want to hear about the pope or about the Beatles or about the president or what?

但优先考虑的是,他们想听听教皇、披头士乐队、总统还是什么?

KOTKIN

The principle was just curiosity.

原则只是好奇心。

They had been marinated in propaganda, not just denied information.

他们受到宣传的影响,而不仅仅是被否认的信息。

We have a wrong view of censorship, that it’s only suppression.

我们对审查制度有一个错误的看法,认为它只是压制。

It’s also promotion of certain kinds of information and certain ways of thinking.

它还促进某些类型的信息和某些思维方式。

Both the denial of the information and the promotion, the marination that they went through.

他们经历了信息的否认和晋升、腌制。

They would ask me the simple questions that would seem silly in some way, but fully understandable to me.

他们会问我一些简单的问题,这些问题在某种程度上看起来很愚蠢,但对我来说完全可以理解。

Were workers ever allowed to go on holiday, or were recreational resorts solely for the bourgeoisie?

工人是否被允许去度假,或者休闲胜地只是资产阶级的专属?

Those kinds of questions, because that was the information they were marinated in.

这类问题,因为那是它们被腌制的信息。

We have a wrong view of censorship, that it’s only suppression.

我们对审查制度有一个错误的看法,认为它只是压制。

It’s also promotion of certain kinds of information and certain ways of thinking.

它还促进某些类型的信息和某些思维方式。

Both the denial of the information and the promotion, the marination that they went through.

他们经历了信息的否认和晋升、腌制。

People would ask me the simple questions that would seem silly in some way, but fully understandable to me.

人们会问我一些简单的问题,这些问题在某种程度上看起来很愚蠢,但对我来说完全可以理解。

Were workers ever allowed to go on holiday, or were recreational resorts solely for the bourgeoisie?

工人是否被允许去度假,或者休闲胜地只是资产阶级的专属?

Those kinds of questions, because that was the information they were marinated in.

这类问题,因为那是它们被腌制的信息。

Also, they wanted to know specific questions about people, individuals.

此外,他们还想了解有关人、个人的具体问题。

Was Ronald Reagan really a dangerous guy who wanted war?

罗纳德·里根真的是一个想要战争的危险人物吗?

Reagan, of course, was president back then when I was in Magnitogorsk.

当然,当时我在马格尼托哥尔斯克时,里根是总统。

It ran the gamut.

它涵盖了所有领域。

They also wanted help in finding some children’s clothes because there were no children’s clothes available.

他们还希望得到帮助来寻找一些儿童衣服,因为没有儿童衣服。

They wanted medicines because medicines were in very short supply.

他们想要药品,因为药品供应非常短缺。

They wanted me to carry correspondence out and then mail it, when I was finally back in the US, to some relatives they might have abroad.

他们希望我将信件带出去,然后当我最终回到美国时,将其邮寄给他们可能在国外的一些亲戚。

They wanted to obviate the censorship.

他们想避免审查制度。

Their isolation was really profound.

他们的孤立确实很严重。

Now, some things had penetrated through.

现在,有些事情已经看透了。

If you watch a foreign film, for example, and you watch a French film, you see how the French live, the apartments that they have, the furniture that they have.

例如,如果你看一部外国电影,然后看一部法国电影,你会看到法国人的生活方式,他们拥有的公寓,他们拥有的家具。

If they walk through a store, some type of store, just as part of the movie — if you see them on the street and they pass a grocery store, you see the fruit arrayed on the street in front of the store.

如果他们走过一家商店,某种类型的商店,就像电影的一部分一样——如果你在街上看到他们,他们经过一家杂货店,你会看到商店前面的街道上排列着水果。

You’ll see oranges, you’ll see bananas, you’ll see things, the most exotic things imaginable for the people isolated in the Ural Mountain area in a closed city.

你会看到橙子,你会看到香蕉,你会看到一些东西,对于那些被隔离在乌拉尔山区封闭城市的人们来说,这是他们能想象到的最奇特的东西。

They would then ask me, is that what shops are really like?

然后他们会问我,商店真的是这样的吗?

Do people really have apartments with seven and eight rooms?

人们真的有七居室和八居室的公寓吗?

Is it really possible to go on a trip without asking permission, an exit visa, for example?

真的可以在没有获得许可(例如出境签证)的情况下旅行吗?

For them to travel, they needed not just a visa from the place they were going to, but they needed an exit visa to be able to leave their country.

为了让他们旅行,他们不仅需要前往目的地的签证,还需要出境签证才能离开自己的国家。

This was all pretty remarkable, that I, as a young man, was plopped down into this.

这一切都非常了不起,作为一个年轻人,我竟然陷入了这样的境地。

Remember, I could speak the language, and so I could converse without an interpreter.

请记住,我会说这种语言,因此我可以在没有翻译的情况下进行交谈。

I didn’t need minders, and I was also not afraid.

我不需要看护者,我也不害怕。

I would just go places.

我只是去一些地方。

I would just travel around, either walk or take mass transit, and chat people up.

我只是到处旅行,要么步行,要么乘坐公共交通工具,和人们聊天。

There was an observation platform outside town where you could see all of Magnitogorsk in front of you.

城外有一个观景台,可以看到马格尼托哥尔斯克的全貌。

The mayor and various other dignitaries took me to this.

市长和其他政要带我去了这里。

They were very proud, and I understood that civic pride.

他们非常自豪,我理解这种公民自豪感。

Then I turned around, and the other side of the platform showed what looked to me like a prison complex.

然后我转过身来,站台的另一边在我看来就像是一座监狱建筑群。

I said, “Oh, that must be the prison.”

我说:“哦,那一定是监狱了。”

They all got red-faced, and they said to me, “Oh, no, we don’t have a prison here,” because this is their normal way of denying reality so that they don’t get into trouble and a foreigner doesn’t get the wrong impression.

他们都涨红了脸,对我说:“哦,不,我们这里没有监狱。”因为这是他们否认现实的正常方式,这样他们就不会惹上麻烦,外国人也不会产生错误的印象。

I said, “Yes, you’re right.

我说:“是的,你说得对。

It’s only in places like New York City, where I’m from, where we have prisons.

只有在像我来自纽约这样的地方,那里才有监狱。

Out here in Magnitogorsk, you couldn’t possibly have a prison because you don’t have any criminals.

在马格尼托哥尔斯克,你不可能有监狱,因为那里没有罪犯。

Whereas in New York, we have as many prisons as you could imagine.”

而在纽约,我们有你能想象到的监狱。”

That broke the ice.

这打破了坚冰。

Then they said, “It’s not just New York.

然后他们说:“这不仅仅是纽约。

Actually, we do have a prison and that’s it.” So, we began to get to know each other, get to understand each other, whereby I didn’t make fun of them, and they feared me less and less.

事实上,我们确实有一所监狱,仅此而已。”于是,我们开始互相了解,互相理解,我不再取笑他们,他们也越来越不害怕我了。

In other words, I appreciated them for who and what they were, and they appreciated the fact that I had this curiosity, this willingness to learn, this open-mindedness about learning who they are, what they are.

换句话说,我欣赏他们的身份和身份,他们也欣赏我的好奇心、学习意愿和了解他们是谁、他们是什么的开放态度。

When I took them to the cemetery — actually, the other way around.

当我带他们去墓地时 ——事实上,恰恰相反。

They took me to the cemetery for a commemoration.

他们带我去墓地悼念。

We were there for the solemn part of it.

我们在那里参加了仪式的庄严部分。

Then afterwards, I asked if we could take a walk.

然后我问我们是否可以去散步。

They said, “Why would you want to walk through there?

他们说:“你为什么要经过那里?

It’s muddy.” I said, “Let’s just take a walk.”

很泥泞。”我说:“我们去散散步吧。”

I walked with them through their cemetery after the solemn ceremony, and I started to narrate the lives of the people whose headstones we were passing because I had been in the archives, and I knew the families, I knew the history.

庄严的仪式结束后,我和他们一起走过他们的墓地,我开始讲述我们经过墓碑的人们的生活,因为我曾经在档案馆里工作过,我了解这些家庭,我了解历史。

They were astonished because they themselves didn’t know their own history, certainly not to the degree I knew it.

他们很惊讶,因为他们自己并不了解自己的历史,当然也不如我了解的程度。

They began to see my appreciation, my respect for their history.

他们开始看到我对他们历史的欣赏和尊重。

That is to say, I didn’t validate Stalinism, enslavement of the peasantry, Gulag.

也就是说,我没有认可斯大林主义、对农民的奴役、古拉格。

All of that is beyond validation.

所有这些都无法验证。

It should be condemned and was condemned.

应该受到谴责,也受到谴责。

But then, at the same time, you have understanding.

但与此同时,你也有了理解。

You have radical empathy whereby you’re not trying to validate what they did, but you’re trying to appreciate how they could do this, who did it, why they did it.

你有强烈的同理心,你不会试图验证他们所做的事情,但你会试图理解他们如何做到这一点、谁做的、为什么这样做。

I walked them through the cemetery for a long time, and there were almost no headstones where I couldn’t make some type of comment.

我带着他们在墓地里走了很长一段时间,几乎没有一个墓碑是我无法发表某种评论的。

Sometimes I knew a lot.

有时我知道很多。

Sometimes I knew just a little piece.

有时我只知道一小部分。

Sometimes I was wrong.

有时我错了。

I guessed because the names were similar.

我猜是因为名字相似。

You’d walk through a cemetery, and you’d see the name Smith, for example, on our side.

例如,你走过墓地,你会在我们这边看到史密斯这个名字。

You might imagine it was one Smith, but it was a different Smith.

你可能会想象这是一个史密斯,但这是另一个史密斯。

That happened to me.

这发生在我身上。

After that cemetery walk, where I was respectful during the solemn part of their ceremony and then I was like a teacher — that’s why I had the Freudian slip, that I took them out to the cemetery when in fact they took me out — that went a really long way in establishing the mutual trust.

在那次墓地散步之后,在他们仪式的庄严部分,我表现得很尊重,然后我就像一位老师——这就是为什么我有弗洛伊德式的失言,我带他们去墓地,而事实上他们把我带出去了——这对建立相互信任起了很大的作用。

Gradually over time, things melted, and I got more and more access to the documentation.

随着时间的推移,事情逐渐融化,我对文档的访问也越来越多。

In the archives, they would only let me read newspapers at first.

在档案馆里,一开始他们只让我看报纸。

They had full runs of the local newspapers, which are rare.

他们有整版的当地报纸,这很罕见。

They were not allowed to be exported, so our libraries in the US didn’t have local newspapers from the Soviet Union to any great extent, certainly not full runs.

它们不允许出口,所以我们美国的图书馆在很大程度上没有苏联的当地报纸,当然也没有满版。

Even the central libraries, the Library of Congress equivalents in the Soviet Union, didn’t always have full runs of very local newspapers, some of which were fly-by-night.

即使是中央图书馆,相当于苏联的国会图书馆,也并不总是有完整的当地报纸,其中一些报纸是不可靠的。

I would sit with the archivists, call them over.

我会和档案管理员坐在一起,把他们叫过来。

They had been sitting in this archive their whole lives, and there were a number of them, five or six.

他们一生都坐在这个档案馆里,而且人数很多,有五六个。

They were all women because this was considered women’s work.

他们都是女性,因为这被认为是女性的工作。

No one came to work on their history.

没有人来研究他们的历史。

Who would do that?

谁会这么做?

So, there I was, the only person besides the archivists.

所以,我就在那里,除了档案管理员之外唯一的人。

I would call them over and I would say, “Look at this.” I would then explain what I had discovered in their history.

我会把他们叫过来,然后说:“看看这个。”然后我会解释我在他们的历史中发现的内容。

Some of them were really sharp and knew their history well and had done a lot of research.

他们中的一些人非常敏锐,非常了解他们的历史并且做了很多研究。

Even those people I could teach things to.

即使是那些我可以教东西的人。

By that point, they were bringing me stuff, sometimes things which weren’t necessarily approved to bring me.

到那时,他们给我带来了一些东西,有时是一些不一定被批准给我带来的东西。

They would ask me, “How do you interpret this?” They were working on some project, and they couldn’t figure it out, and maybe I could figure it out for them.

他们会问我:“你如何解释这一点?”他们正在做一些项目,但他们无法弄清楚,也许我可以帮他们弄清楚。

By the time I left the city the first time — I went back twice.

当我第一次离开这座城市时 —— 我又回去了两次。

I was there in 1987 and 1989, both obviously prior to the Soviet Union collapsing in 1991 — they were now recruited to my side.

1987 年和 1989 年我在那里,显然都早于 1991 年苏联解体——他们现在被招募到我身边。

The local secret police — the KGB, as it was then called — were very concerned that an American agent was recruiting local people, but I wasn’t trying to recruit them for anything.

当地的秘密警察——当时的克格勃——非常担心美国特工正在招募当地人,但我并不是为了任何目的而招募他们。

I was just interacting with them on the basis of mutual interest and empathy.

我只是在共同兴趣和同理心的基础上与他们互动。

The city became, in some ways, conquered by me.

从某种程度上来说,这座城市被我征服了。

The fear that that produced in those who have the deep suspicion that every American is an agent, the CIA is unbelievably capable, an octopus, everything that happens in the Soviet Union that goes wrong is a result of foreign plots, and all of this kind of stuff.

那些深深怀疑每个美国人都是特工的人产生了恐惧,中央情报局的能力令人难以置信,是一只章鱼,苏联发生的一切错误都是外国阴谋的结果,等等。

So, that small number of people who had high positions of authority were scared.

所以,那一小部分身居高位的人都害怕了。

I scared the bejesus out of them.

我把他们吓坏了。

But I befriended so many of the other people from all walks of life, including from the propaganda apparatus — several of whom were conducting surveillance on me — the local newspaper.

但我与来自各行各业的许多其他人成为了朋友,包括来自宣传机构(其中有几个人对我进行监视)和当地报纸的朋友。

Some of them were not; some of them were.

有些人不是;有些人则不然。其中一些是。

I didn’t care because I had nothing to hide and only to gain from the interactions with the people.

我不在乎,因为我没有什么可隐瞒的,只是从与人们的互动中获益。

It was quite remarkable to be plopped down in that isolated town in that time period.

在那个时期,能在那个与世隔绝的小镇上躺下来,是一件很了不起的事。

It was forever for me.

这对我来说是永远的。

On Stalin

论斯大林

COWEN

I have some questions about Stalin.

我有一些关于斯大林的问题。

If we take some of the great Soviet creators — Pasternak, Shostakovich, Bulgakov, Eisenstein — did Stalin understand they were geniuses?

如果我们拿一些伟大的苏联创造者来说——帕斯捷尔纳克、肖斯塔科维奇、布尔加科夫、爱森斯坦——斯大林知道他们是天才吗?

For all the bad treatment, he didn’t quite crush them the way maybe he could have.

尽管受到了种种恶劣的待遇,他并没有像他本可以的那样彻底粉碎他们。

What was Stalin’s attitude toward them?

斯大林对他们的态度如何?

KOTKIN

Stalin was one of those people for whom high culture was a mark of your advancement, civilization, what the Germans called Bildung and what the Russians called kulturnost from Kultur, the German word, meaning what we probably would call edification, potentially.

对斯大林来说,高雅文化是进步、文明的标志,德国人称之为“Bildung”,俄罗斯人称之为“kulturost”,源自德语“Kultur”,意思是我们可能所说的“启迪”。

Stalin’s generation was about people acquiring some familiarity with high culture in all its forms, whether opera, painting, novels, or poetry.

斯大林这一代人对各种形式的高雅文化有所了解,无论是歌剧、绘画、小说还是诗歌。

It was a literacy-acquisition culture, where acquisition of literacy meant in the first instance reading and writing, of course, which Stalin learned from the Orthodox Church schools he attended.

这是一种识字习得文化,当然,识字的习得首先意味着阅读和写作,这是斯大林从他就读的东正教学校学到的。

But also literacy in a broader sense: Who are the great musicians?

但也包括更广泛意义上的识字:谁是伟大的音乐家?

What’s the classical canon in music?

音乐中的古典经典是什么?

Who are the great artists?

谁是伟大的艺术家?

Who are the great novelists?

谁是伟大的小说家?

Both Russian, but also more than Russian — pan-European.

既是俄罗斯的,又不仅仅是俄罗斯的——泛欧洲的。

Not quite Asian, global stuff — that didn’t have the same resonance.

不完全是亚洲的、全球性的东西——没有引起同样的共鸣。

The world wasn’t globalized in the same way, and much of the undeveloped world was under colonial rule, as you know.

世界并没有以同样的方式全球化,正如你所知,许多不发达的世界都处于殖民统治之下。

For Stalin, that was an important mark of his rise as an individual and as his self-worth.

对于斯大林来说,这是他个人和自我价值崛起的重要标志。

He was predominantly self-educated, but not completely so.

他主要是自学成才,但并非完全如此。

He had just as much education as the vast majority of revolutionaries at his level.

他与绝大多数同级别的革命者一样受过同样多的教育。

Some completed university.

有些人完成了大学学业。

Most did not complete university.

大多数人没有完成大学学业。

He went to a seminary rather than a gymnasium, and so, therefore, university was inaccessible to him.

他上的是神学院而不是中学,因此他无法进入大学。

Trotsky put on the airs of being more educated than Stalin.

托洛茨基表现出比斯大林受过更多教育的样子。

Certainly, Trotsky was more adept at foreign languages based upon exile in Europe.

当然,托洛茨基因流亡欧洲而更擅长外语。

Trotsky spoke multiple languages and read multiple languages fluently.

托洛茨基会说多种语言,并能流利地阅读多种语言。

That wasn’t the case for Stalin.

斯大林的情况并非如此。

Stalin had a working bazaar- or market-level knowledge of Persian, Armenian, the languages that you would expect someone in the Caucasus who went to the marketplace.

斯大林拥有波斯语、亚美尼亚语的工作集市或市场水平的知识,这些语言是高加索地区进入集市的人所期望的语言。

He grew in that milieu and acquired that affinity for that culture.

他在那种环境中成长并获得了对那种文化的喜爱。

Then your question is about his judgment.

那么你的问题就是关于他的判断。

Could he judge, for example, that Bulgakov was a superior writer, or Eisenstein was a superior filmmaker?

例如,他能否判断布尔加科夫是一位出色的作家,或者爱森斯坦是一位出色的电影制片人?

The answer is yes, he made those judgements.

答案是肯定的,他做出了这些判断。

Not very many adherents to Marxism-Leninism or to Communism, members of the Communist Party, shared those tastes with him, that those bourgeois or potentially bourgeois-inclined writers or writers who predated the revolution in origin, who might have criticized Communism and certainly didn’t adhere to Marxism-Leninism, that they were valued in pure cultural terms.

没有多少马克思列宁主义或共产主义的追随者,共产党员,与他有同样的品味,那些资产阶级或潜在资产阶级倾向的作家或革命前的作家,他们可能批评共产主义,当然不坚持马克思列宁主义,他们是从纯粹的文化角度来评价的。

Stalin, yes, of course, he also had his prejudices and his blind spots.

斯大林,是的,当然,他也有他的偏见和盲点。

Some high culture that you and I might appreciate, he didn’t appreciate.

有些你我可能欣赏的高雅文化,他却不欣赏。

He loved Chekhov the most because the heroes in Chekhov were not the only main characters — also the villains, and Stalin would remark that Chekhov’s villains were credible.

他最喜欢契诃夫,因为契诃夫笔下的英雄不是唯一的主角,还有反派,斯大林会说契诃夫笔下的反派是可信的。

They were believable villains.

他们是可信的恶棍。

They were full-bodied villains in addition to the heroes.

他们除了英雄之外,也是十足的反派。

Yes, nontrivial because he’s the arbiter of what, if anything, of high culture is distributed, shown, allowed, and so his tastes were critical as the despot in the system.

是的,这很重要,因为他是高雅文化传播、展示、允许的内容(如果有的话)的仲裁者,因此作为体制中的独裁者,他的品味至关重要。

Those writers didn’t thrive the way they would’ve thrived in an open society.

这些作家并没有像他们在开放社会中那样蓬勃发展。

But on the other hand, there’s something about cultural production under despotic conditions, hothouse despotic conditions that also brings out different sides of these people.

但另一方面,专制条件下的文化生产、温室专制条件下的文化生产也暴露了这些人的不同侧面。

COWEN

Why did Prokofiev return in 1936?

普罗科菲耶夫为何在 1936 年回归?

Was he just stupid?

他只是傻吗?

He wasn’t making it in Europe?

他在欧洲没有成功吗?

Or how do you make sense of that?

或者你如何理解这一点?

I wouldn’t have gone back.

我不会回去的。

KOTKIN

Some people who went back were arrested and executed or sent to prison labor in remote waste, to return to your original questions about Siberia, but exile is difficult.

一些回去的人被逮捕并被处决,或者被送往偏远荒地的监狱劳动,回到你最初关于西伯利亚的问题,但流亡是困难的。

Losing your native language is difficult for people.

失去母语对人们来说是很困难的。

Immigration or exile — the immigrants often go voluntarily, meaning they’re looking to assimilate.

移民或流亡——移民通常是自愿离开,这意味着他们寻求同化。

They’re looking to settle into the new culture.

他们正在寻求适应新的文化。

They certainly want their children to be completely assimilated in many cases.

在很多情况下,他们当然希望自己的孩子能够被完全同化。

For exile, it’s a little bit different.

对于流亡者来说,情况有点不同。

Often, you didn’t leave voluntarily.

很多时候,你并不是自愿离开的。

Often you were kicked out or you barely escaped.

你经常被赶出去或者勉强逃脱。

You nurtured hopes to go back at some point.

你怀揣着在某个时候回去的希望。

Either the regime would change, or it would soften if it didn’t fall.

政权要么会改变,要么如果不倒台就会软化。

Moreover, if you are a really accomplished player, you have an exceptional talent, that talent and the appreciation of that talent is different at home than it is abroad.

此外,如果你是一名真正有成就的球员,你就有非凡的天赋,这种天赋以及对这种天赋的欣赏在国内和国外是不同的。

There’s this fantastic scene in Mephisto, the film, about an actor who remains in aggrandized Nazi Germany, greater Germany under the Nazis.

电影《墨菲斯托》中有一个奇妙的场景,讲述了一位演员留在扩张的纳粹德国,纳粹统治下的大德国的故事。

He goes on stage and the Nazis rule there, so there are swastikas on the curtains and other indications of the Nazi regime.

他走上舞台,纳粹统治那里,所以窗帘上有纳粹标志和其他纳粹政权的标志。

Someone asks him — this is Klaus Maria Brandauer, the actor who plays the part, just a fantastic film — someone says, “How come you’re doing this, and how come you didn’t leave?”

有人问他 —— 这是扮演这个角色的演员克劳斯·玛丽亚·布兰道尔(Klaus Maria Brandauer),只是一部精彩的电影 —— 有人说,“你为什么要这样做,你为什么不离开?”

He rebukes the question and says, “Not everybody can emigrate, not everybody can leave.

他反驳了这个问题并说道:“不是每个人都可以移民,也不是每个人都可以离开。

For some people, the German language and the theater is our life.

对于某些人来说,德语和戏剧就是我们的生活。

We may or may not like the Nazi regime, but why should we give that up?” It’s a moral dilemma, obviously.

我们可能喜欢也可能不喜欢纳粹政权,但我们为什么要放弃呢?”显然,这是一个道德困境。

That’s why the question was posed, but there’s not necessarily a single answer or a single black-and-white answer, despite the fact that you can be seen as a collaborator for the kind of stuff he did.

这就是为什么提出这个问题,但不一定有单一的答案或单一的非黑即白的答案,尽管事实上你可以被视为他所做的那种事情的合作者。

Prokofiev goes back to do music, to do music to appreciative audiences.

普罗科菲耶夫回去创作音乐,为欣赏的观众创作音乐。

He’s supremely talented, and everybody there knows that.

他非常有才华,每个人都知道这一点。

Does he fully understand how bad the regime is?

他完全了解这个政权有多糟糕吗?

In 1936 the regime is about to descend into the frenzy of mass arrests, the so-called Great Terror of Stalin, ’36 to ’38.

1936 年,该政权即将陷入大规模逮捕的狂潮,即所谓的斯大林大恐怖(36 年至 38 年)。

Prokofiev doesn’t understand all of that, but who did at the time?

普罗科菲耶夫并不明白这一切,但当时谁明白呢?

What he does understand is that it’s a musical culture, and he is a master musician.

他真正理解的是这是一种音乐文化,而他是一位音乐大师。

COWEN

What do you think of the hypothesis — I think it comes from James Hughes — that it was Stalin’s visit to Siberia and his time there that gave him a sense of what was wrong with the Soviet Union, that you needed to crush the kulaks to be quite oppressive.

你如何看待这个假设——“我认为它来自詹姆斯·休斯”——“正是斯大林对西伯利亚的访问和他在那儿的经历让他意识到苏联出了什么问题,你需要镇压富农才能变得相当具有压迫性。”

Is that true?

这是真的吗?

KOTKIN

No, it’s not true, sadly.

不,可悲的是,这不是真的。

I’ve been to that same place where Stalin went in Barnaul in 1928.

1928 年斯大林在巴尔瑙尔去过的地方我也去过。

For a while, in the museum, not on display but in the back room, they had the wooden sled that carried him from the railhead to the gigantic barn where he gave the speech that he was going to move forward on collectivization.

有一段时间,在博物馆里,不是陈列,而是在后面的房间里,他们有木制雪橇,载着他从铁路终点到巨大的谷仓,在那里他发表了演讲,表示他将继续推进集体化。

It was a decision he had already reached, and it was a trip that he took in order to break the party’s affiliation with the kulaks.

这是他已经做出的决定,也是他为了断绝党与富农的关系而进行的一次旅行。

Many of the party officials in the provinces in the ’20s had grown rich by liaison with the richer peasants.

20世纪20年代,许多省份的党内官员都是通过与富农联系而致富的。

They had married their daughters to kulaks.

他们把女儿嫁给了富农。

They were typical corrupt officials at the provincial level, and Stalin wanted to teach them a lesson that that wouldn’t fly anymore.

他们是典型的省级腐败官员,斯大林想给他们一个教训,让他们知道这样的做法是行不通的。

He went out there and delivered a searing speech, which, of course, then was nationally publicized, about how the collective is at full speed forward on collectivization and the kulaks were an enemy.

他出去发表了一篇激烈的演讲,当然,演讲随后在全国范围内进行了宣传,内容是集体如何全速推进集体化,而富农是敌人。

People didn’t understand.

人们不明白。

They didn’t believe — how could he be doing this?

他们不相信——他怎么会这么做?

You have to remember, for Marxist-Leninists, the base determines the superstructure.

你要记住,对于马克思列宁主义者来说,基础决定上层建筑。

The nature of the economy — or what they would call social relations, socioeconomic conditions — determines the kind of politics you have.

经济的本质——或者他们所说的社会关系、社会经济条件——决定了你所拥有的政治类型。

If you have a Communist Party in power, and you have de facto market relations in the countryside with a proto- or quasi-bourgeois class of richer peasants — meaning they had more than two cows — known as kulaks, either the base would triumph, or the superstructure, the Communist Party, would have to get rid of the base over the long term.

如果共产党掌权,并且在农村与原始或准资产阶级的富农(即他们拥有两头以上的牛)(被称为富农)建立了事实上的市场关系,那么从长远来看,要么是基础阶级取得胜利,要么是上层建筑,即共产党,必须长期摆脱基础阶级。

They were all Marxist-Leninists in the Communist Party, and they all agreed with this, even the corrupt ones who were feeding well in the liaison with the kulaks.

他们都是共产党内的马克思列宁主义者,他们都同意这一点,甚至包括那些在与富农勾结中吃得很好的腐败分子。

What they never imagined was that you could do this, that you could collectivize agriculture across all of Soviet Eurasia through those multiple, multiple time zones.

他们从未想象过你可以做到这一点,你可以通过多个时区将整个苏联欧亚大陆的农业集体化。

Where would you get the wherewithal, the capacity to implement that, to take people’s property away from them?

你从哪里获得资金和能力来实施这一行动,夺走人们的财产?

Voluntary collectivization as of 1928, when Stalin makes that trip to Siberia — it’s Western Siberia — voluntary collectivization is 1 percent of arable land.

自 1928 年斯大林访问西伯利亚(这里是西西伯利亚)起,自愿集体化为耕地的 1%。

One percent, meaning that the people who couldn’t farm themselves, individually or as a household, as a family — they went into collectives voluntarily because they were incapable of managing on their own.

百分之一,就是说那些不能自己耕种的人,无论是个人还是一家人、一家人——他们自愿进入集体,因为他们没有能力自己管理。

For you to be able to make 99 percent collective, as opposed to 1 percent collective, you needed to take people’s property away from them and force them into these collective arrangements.

为了让 99% 的人成为集体的,而不是 1% 的集体的,你需要夺走人们的财产,并强迫他们参与这些集体安排。

Now, the property wasn’t de jure property, it was only de facto property, but de facto property is still property.

现在,该财产不是法律上的财产,它只是事实上的财产,但事实上的财产仍然是财产。

So, Stalin made that trip in order to announce that this was now going to happen.

因此,斯大林此行是为了宣布这件事即将发生。

The others around him were very skeptical that this was feasible.

他周围的其他人都非常怀疑这是否可行。

They didn’t have a soft spot for the kulaks — don’t get me wrong — in the Central Committee, in the central Apparatus in Moscow, or other party bastions, like Leningrad or Kyiv in Soviet Ukraine or Novosibirsk in Western Siberia.

他们对中央委员会、莫斯科中央机构或其他党的堡垒,如苏维埃乌克兰的列宁格勒或基辅或西西伯利亚的新西伯利亚的富农——“别误会我的意思”——没有好感。

But they had skepticism that this could be done.

但他们对这能否做到持怀疑态度。

Stalin did it.

斯大林做到了。

That was the thing that shocked them all.

这才是让他们所有人震惊的事情。

In the process of doing it, he caused famine, and he was undermining, potentially, the party’s own rule.

在这样做的过程中,他引发了饥荒,而且他还潜在地破坏了党自己的统治。

He just kept going all the way through because he had the courage of his convictions.

他一直坚持到底,因为他有勇气坚持自己的信念。

And then, when they complained about him, he made a mental note of that, and he exacted his version of revenge on them a few years later for their criticisms of him when he did this.

然后,当他们抱怨他时,他在心里记下了这一点,几年后,他对他们进行了报复,因为他这样做时他们批评了他。

He did this because he believed, in true Marxist-Leninist fashion, that this had to be done.

他这样做是因为他相信,以真正的马克思列宁主义方式,这是必须要做的。

He felt himself to be a man of destiny, and therefore he could do this.

他觉得自己是一个有命运的人,所以他可以做到这一点。

And he was looking to find the shock troops, to galvanize the half-educated youth to take violence out on these kulaks, and to force the villagers into these collective arrangements.

他正在寻找突击部队,激励那些受过一半教育的年轻人对这些富农采取暴力,并迫使村民接受这些集体安排。

What he did — and this is what totalitarianism is — he galvanized people’s agency, and those people, using their agency, destroyed their own agency.

他所做的——这就是极权主义——他激发了人们的能动性,而这些人利用他们的能动性,摧毁了他们自己的能动性。

They disempowered themselves by taking up his call.

他们通过接听他的电话而剥夺了自己的权力。

COWEN

Do you think Georgian blood feud culture influenced Stalin at all in this?

您认为格鲁吉亚的血仇文化在这方面对斯大林有影响吗?

KOTKIN

Yes.

是的。

So, there were a lot of Georgians and there’s one Stalin.

所以,有很多格鲁吉亚人,只有一个斯大林。

People argue that he got into fights in the schoolyard, and that the fights were nasty, and therefore he became a certain type of person.

人们认为他在校园里打架,而且打架很恶劣,因此他变成了某种类型的人。

They argue that his father beat him, and therefore he became a certain type of person.

他们认为他的父亲打了他,因此他成为了某种类型的人。

The problem with arguments like that, Tyler, is that I got into fights in the schoolyard when I was his age.

泰勒,这样的争论的问题在于,当我像他这个年纪时,我在校园里打过架。

People beat me up because I was a half Catholic, half Jew at a Catholic school.

人们殴打我,因为我是天主教学校的一半天主教徒、一半犹太人。

COWEN

This was in Englewood, New Jersey, right?

这是在新泽西州恩格尔伍德,对吧?

KOTKIN

I was small, and people knew that they could maybe take me on bully-style because I wasn’t as big as they were.

我很小,人们知道他们可能会欺负我,因为我没有他们那么大。

My father also disciplined me with the proverbial belt when I got out of hand.

当我失去控制时,我父亲也用众所周知的腰带来惩罚我。

I didn’t go on to collectivize agriculture.

我没有继续农业集体化。

I’m not responsible for the deaths of 18 to 20 million people.

我对 18 至 2000 万人的死亡不负有责任。

So, you’re not going to be able to explain Stalin as a phenomenon or even as a personality with those types of tropes.

因此,你无法用这些类型的比喻来将斯大林解释为一种现象,甚至是一种人格。

What explains Stalin, at least in my view, what I argued and continue to argue in the biography, is the experience of getting into power and then exercising power.

至少在我看来,我在传记中所争论和继续争论的,解释斯大林的是获得权力然后行使权力的经历。

It’s building and running the dictatorship.

它正在建立和运行独裁政权。

It’s managing Russian power in the world that makes Stalin who he is, not because there’s some kind of DNA there.

正是对俄罗斯在世界上的权力的管理才造就了斯大林,而不是因为那里有某种DNA。

I don’t go for cultural DNA–like arguments.

我不喜欢类似文化 DNA 的争论。

But it’s about your geography.

但这与您的地理位置有关。

It’s about your capabilities as a great power relative to other great powers.

这是关于你作为一个大国相对于其他大国的能力。

It’s about the institutions that you’ve inherited, not only the ones that you’ve created.

这是关于你继承的机构,而不仅仅是你创建的机构。

This mix of Stalin building a dictatorship inside the dictatorship and exercising that power creates the kind of person that we know as Stalin.

斯大林在独裁政权中建立独裁政权并行使这种权力的结合造就了我们所熟知的斯大林。

You know how I know that?

你知道我是怎么知道的吗?

I refuse to use sources that were retrospective.

我拒绝使用回顾性的资料来源。

If you survived the Stalin collectivization terror, and you wrote a memoir, you looked back on those days in the schoolyard, that Georgian revenge culture, and you said, “Oh, I remember when he was 11, and he put the cat in the microwave.

如果你在斯大林集体化恐怖中幸存下来,你写了一本回忆录,你回顾了在校园里的那些日子,格鲁吉亚的复仇文化,你说,“哦,我记得当他11岁的时候,他把猫放进微波炉里。

I knew right then that we were all going to die.” That retrospective-memoir approach, where you know what happened, and then you go back and find the — I refused to do that.

我当时就知道我们都会死。”那种回顾性回忆录的方法,你知道发生了什么,然后你回去发现 - 我拒绝这样做。

So, I only looked prospectively at what people said about him in real time.

所以,我只是前瞻性地实时查看人们对他的评价。

He resigned six times in the 1920s from the dictatorship, from the position of general secretary of the Communist Party.

1920年代,他六次辞去独裁统治,辞去共产党总书记的职务。

Three times we have a written document, and three times we have solid testimony that he did it orally from multiple sources who were present.

我们三次有书面文件,三次有可靠的证词证明他从在场的多个消息来源口头做到了这一点。

I refuse to use sources that were retrospective.

我拒绝使用回顾性的资料来源。

If you survived the Stalin collectivization terror, and you wrote a memoir, you looked back on those days in the schoolyard, that Georgian revenge culture, and you said, “Oh, I remember when he was 11, and he put the cat in the microwave.

如果你在斯大林集体化恐怖中幸存下来,你写了一本回忆录,你回顾了在校园里的那些日子,格鲁吉亚的复仇文化,你说,“哦,我记得当他11岁的时候,他把猫放进微波炉里。

I knew right then that we were all going to die.” That retrospective-memoir approach, where you know what happened, and then you go back and find the — I refused to do that.

我当时就知道我们都会死。”那种回顾性回忆录的方法,你知道发生了什么,然后你回去发现 - 我拒绝这样做。

So, I only looked prospectively at what people said about him in real time.

所以,我只是前瞻性地实时查看人们对他的评价。

All six times — there might have been more, but we have six documented times — all six times, those people who worked most closely with him refused to allow him to resign because he was carrying the regime on his shoulders.

所有六次——“可能还有更多,但我们有六次记录在案”——所有六次,那些与他最密切合作的人都拒绝让他辞职,因为他肩负着政权。

He was the only person in that group capable of doing so.

他是该小组中唯一有能力做到这一点的人。

He was dedicated like nobody else to the cause, and they didn’t see the Stalin that we would later see.

他像其他人一样致力于这项事业,他们没有看到我们后来看到的斯大林。

In fact, those people in the room with him those six times — he murdered almost all of them, in less than a decade in some cases, and in less than two decades in other cases.

事实上,那六次和他一起在房间里的人——他几乎杀掉了所有人,有些案件不到十年,有些案件不到二十年。

Yet, they didn’t perceive that he was going to murder them because otherwise, they would have contrived to get him out, let alone accepted his multiple resignations.

然而,他们并没有意识到他会谋杀他们,因为否则他们会想方设法把他赶出去,更不用说接受他的多次辞职了。

When you look at Stalin in real time, you see a transformation in his personality, in symbiosis, or in some relationship with building and running that dictatorship at that time period.

当你实时观察斯大林时,你会看到他的个性、共生或与当时建立和运行独裁政权的某种关系的转变。

Of course, he has a personality.

当然,他有个性。

Of course, he has these experiences as a youth.

当然,这些经历他年轻时都有过。

Of course, they inform him.

当然,他们会通知他。

He goes through church schools, and so he has a liturgical way of expressing himself, meaning, like the liturgy, he enunciates points and repeats them over and over again.

他在教会学校上过学,所以他有一种礼拜仪式的方式来表达自己,这意味着,就像礼拜仪式一样,他阐明要点并一遍又一遍地重复它们。

Sometimes it reads just like a catechism, his Marxism-Leninism.

有时它读起来就像教义问答,他的马克思列宁主义。

You could say that it’s likely that his Orthodox upbringing, his church school experiences, including at the seminary, influenced him.

你可以说,他的东正教成长经历、他在教会学校的经历,包括在神学院的经历,很可能影响了他。

I don’t deny that there’s a personality and influences, but you’re trying to explain one of the three bloodiest dictators in the history of our planet — Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

我不否认这是有个性和影响的,但你试图解释我们这个星球历史上三个最血腥的独裁者之一——希特勒、斯大林和毛泽东。

It’s a very small category.

这是一个非常小的类别。

You can’t put anybody else in that category, in my view.

在我看来,你不能将其他任何人归入这一类别。

In explaining people like that — life experiences when they’re young, or trips to Siberia, or Georgian cult — there were a lot of Georgians who grew up in that time period who are gentle as gentle could be, and some of them are Communist Party members.

在解释这样的人时——“年轻时的生活经历,或者西伯利亚之旅,或者格鲁吉亚邪教”——那个时期长大的格鲁吉亚人中有很多是温柔的,其中有一些是共产党员。

On learning from Michel Foucault

向米歇尔·福柯学习

COWEN

What did you learn from Michel Foucault about power, or indeed anything else?

关于权力,或者其他方面,你从米歇尔·福柯那里学到了什么?

KOTKIN

I was very lucky.

我很幸运。

I went to Berkeley for a PhD program in 1981.

1981年我去伯克利攻读博士学位。

I finished in 1988, and then my first job was at Princeton University in 1989.

我于 1988 年毕业,然后我的第一份工作是 1989 年在普林斯顿大学。

In the middle of it, I went for French history, and I switched into Habsburg history, and then finally, I switched into Russian Soviet history.

中间,我学习了法国历史,然后又转到了哈布斯堡王朝历史,最后,我又转到了俄罗斯苏联历史。

I started learning the Russian alphabet my third year of the PhD program when I was supposed to take my PhD exams, so it was a radical shift.

我在博士课程的第三年开始学习俄语字母,当时我应该参加博士学位考试,所以这是一个根本性的转变。

Foucault — I met him because he came to Berkeley in the ’80s, just like Derrida came, just like Habermas came, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist, came through.

福柯——我认识他是因为他在八十年代来到了伯克利,就像德里达来了一样,就像哈贝马斯来了一样,人类学家克洛德·列维-斯特劳斯也来了。

It was California.

那是加利福尼亚州。

They were Europeans, and there was a wow factor for them.

他们是欧洲人,这对他们来说有一个令人惊叹的因素。

Foucault was also openly gay, and San Francisco’s gay culture was extraordinarily attractive to him.

福柯也是公开的同性恋者,旧金山的同性恋文化对他来说异常有吸引力。

It was, unfortunately, the epoch of the AIDS epidemic.

不幸的是,那是艾滋病流行的时代。

One time, I was at lunch with him, and he said to me, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if somebody applied my theories to Stalinism?” I’m sitting there, okay, I’m 23 years old.

有一次,我和他一起吃午饭,他对我说:“如果有人把我的理论应用到斯大林主义上,那不是很神奇吗?”我坐在那里,好吧,我23岁了。

Imagine if you had traveled to Switzerland in the late 19th century, and you went up in those Engadin mountains, and you were at some café in the mountain air, and there’s this guy with a huge forehead and hair up in the air sitting there, and you went and introduced yourself.

想象一下,如果你在 19 世纪末去瑞士旅行,你去了恩嘎丁山脉,你在一家山中空气中的咖啡馆里,有一个额头很大、头发高高翘起的家伙坐在那里,你去介绍了自己。

You said, “Hello, I’m Tyler,” and he said, “Hello, I’m Friedrich Nietzsche.” You would say, “Well, geez, this is interesting.

你说,“你好,我是泰勒,”他说,“你好,我是弗里德里希·尼采。”你会说,“好吧,天哪,这很有趣。

I should have more conversations with you.”

我应该和你多聊聊。”

So, that’s the experience I had.

这就是我的经历。

I had read Foucault in seminar because it was very fashionable to do so, obviously, especially at Berkeley, especially in a culture that tilts one way politically, and I think you’ll guess which way that might be.

我在研讨会上读过福柯的著作,因为显然这样做很时尚,尤其是在伯克利,尤其是在一种政治上向一侧倾斜的文化中,我想你会猜到那可能是哪一种方式。

But I didn’t understand what he said, so I went up to him as a naïf with this book, Madness and Civilization, which we had been forced to read, and I started asking him questions.

但我不明白他在说什么,所以我像一个天真的人一样拿着这本书《疯狂与文明》来到他面前,这本书是我们被迫读的,我开始问他问题。

“What does this mean?

“这是什么意思?

What does this mean?

这意味着什么?

What is this passage?

这段话是什么?

This is indecipherable.”

这是无法解读的。”

He patiently explained to the moron that I was what he was trying to say.

他耐心地向白痴解释说我就是他想说的。

It sounded much more interesting coming from him verbally, sitting just a few feet away, than it had on the page.

他坐在几英尺远的地方,用口头说出的内容听起来比纸上的内容有趣得多。

I was lucky to become the class coordinator for his course at Berkeley.

我很幸运成为他在伯克利分校课程的班级协调员。

He gave these lectures about the problem of the truth-teller in Ancient Greece.

他的这些讲座是关于古希腊说真话者的问题。

It was very far removed from .

它离我们很远。

.

。

.

。

I had no classical training.

我没有受过古典训练。

Yes, I had Latin in high school because I went to Catholic school, and it was a required subject.

是的,我在高中时学过拉丁语,因为我上的是天主教学校,这是必修课。

I started as an altar boy with the Latin Mass, which quickly changed because of what happened at Vatican II.

我一开始是拉丁弥撒的祭坛侍童,但由于梵蒂冈二世发生的事情,我的情况很快发生了变化。

But no Greek, so it was completely Greek to me.

但没有希腊语,所以对我来说完全是希腊语。

Forgive me, that wasn’t planned that I was going to say that.

原谅我,我本来没打算这么说。

It just happened spontaneously.

这只是自发发生的。

Anyway, I just kept asking him more questions and invited him to go to things, and so we would have lunches and dinners.

不管怎样,我只是不断地问他更多的问题,并邀请他去做一些事情,这样我们就可以吃午餐和晚餐了。

I introduced him to this place, Little Joe’s in Little Italy, part of San Francisco, which unfortunately is no longer there.

我向他介绍了这个地方,小乔的小意大利,旧金山的一部分,不幸的是它已经不存在了。

It was quite a landmark back then, and then he would repair after dinner to the bathhouses in San Francisco by himself.

这在当时已经是相当具有里程碑意义的事了,吃完晚饭他就一个人去旧金山的澡堂修。

I was not part of that.

我没有参与其中。

I’m neither openly nor closeted gay, so that was a different part of Foucault that I didn’t partake in, but others did.

我既不是公开的同性恋,也不是秘密的同性恋,所以这是福柯的另一部分,我没有参与,但其他人参与了。

Anyway, I would ask him these things, and he would just explain stuff to me.

不管怎样,我会问他这些事情,他只会向我解释。

I would say, “What’s happening in Poland?” This is the 1980s, and he would say things to me like, “The idea of civil society is the opiate of the intellectual class.” Everybody was completely enamored of the concept of civil society in the ’80s, especially via the Polish case, and so I would ask him to elucidate more.

我会说,“波兰发生了什么事?”现在是 20 世纪 80 年代,他会对我说这样的话:“公民社会的理念是知识分子阶层的鸦片。”八十年代每个人都完全迷恋公民社会的概念,特别是通过波兰的案例,所以我想请他解释更多。

“What does that mean, and how does that work?”

“这是什么意思?它是如何运作的?”

He told me once that class in France came from disease in Paris — that it wasn’t because of who was a factory worker, who wasn’t a factory worker, but it was your neighborhoods in Paris and who died from cholera and who didn’t die from cholera.

他曾经告诉我,法国的阶级来自巴黎的疾病——这不是因为谁是工厂工人,谁不是工厂工人,而是因为你在巴黎的社区,谁死于霍乱,谁没有死于霍乱。

A colleague of ours who was another fellow graduate in Berkeley ended up writing a dissertation using that aside, that throwaway line.

我们的一位同事是伯克利的另一位毕业生,他最终用那句话写了一篇论文。

I was able to ask him these questions about everything and anything.

我可以向他询问所有事情的问题。

What he showed me — this is your question — what he showed me was how power works, not in terms of bureaucracy, not in terms of the large mechanisms of governance like a secret police, but how all of that is enforced and acted through daily life.

他向我展示的是——“这是你的问题”——“他向我展示的是权力是如何运作的,不是在官僚机构方面,也不是在像秘密警察这样的大型治理机制方面,而是所有这些都是如何在日常生活中执行和实施的。

In other words, the micro versions of power.

换句话说,就是权力的微型版本。

It’s connected to the big structures, but it’s little people doing this.

它与大型结构相连,但只是小人物在做。

That’s why I said totalitarianism is using your agency to destroy your own agency.

这就是为什么我说极权主义正在利用你的机构来摧毁你自己的机构。

That means denouncing your neighbors, being encouraged to denounce your neighbors for heresies, and participating in that culture of denunciation, which loosens all social trust and social bonds and puts you in a situation of dependency on the state.

这意味着谴责你的邻居,被鼓励谴责你的邻居异端邪说,并参与这种谴责文化,这会放松所有社会信任和社会纽带,并使你处于依赖国家的境地。

You’re a gung-ho activist using your agency, and the next thing you know, you have no power whatsoever.

你是一个积极利用你的机构的积极活动家,但接下来你知道的,你就没有任何权力了。

So, those are the kinds of things that I could talk to him about.

所以,这些都是我可以和他谈论的事情。

After he passed away from AIDS in the summer of 1984 — it was the AIDS epidemic, horrific.

1984年夏天,他因艾滋病去世后——当时艾滋病流行,可怕。

He passed away, and we had a memorial for him.

他去世了,我们为他立了一座纪念碑。

I was still a PhD student, remember.

请记住,我当时还是一名博士生。

I didn’t finish until ’88.

直到88年我才完成。

There was this guy, Michel de Certeau, who wrote a tribute to Foucault in French that he was going to deliver at the event.

米歇尔·德塞托(Michel de Certeau)用法语写了一篇向福柯致敬的文章,并将在活动中发表。

It was called “The Laughter of Foucault.” I had these conversations with de Certeau about his analysis of Foucault and the pleasure of analytic work, which had been a hallmark of Foucault.

它被称为“福柯的笑声”。我与德塞托进行了这些对话,讨论了他对福柯的分析以及分析工作的乐趣,这是福柯的一个标志。

De Certeau taught me a phrase called “the little tactics of the habitat,” which became one of the core ideas of my dissertation and then book, Magnetic Mountain, about this micropower stuff.

德塞托教给我一个短语,叫做“栖息地的小策略”,它成为我的论文和后来的书《磁山》的核心思想之一,关于微功率的东西。

Even though Foucault was gone, I was able to extend the beginning of the conversations with Foucault through de Certeau.

尽管福柯去世了,我仍然能够通过德塞托来延续与福柯对话的开始。

I learned how power works in everyday life, and how the language that you use, and the practices like denunciation that you enact or partake in, help form those totalitarian structures, because the secret police are not there every minute of every day, so what’s in your head?

我了解了权力在日常生活中如何运作,以及你使用的语言以及你制定或参与的谴责等做法如何帮助形成那些极权主义结构,因为秘密警察不是每天每分钟都在,那么你的脑子里在想什么呢?

How are you motivated?

你的动力如何?

What type of behavior are you motivated for?

您的动机是什么类型的行为?

We say, “Okay, what would Stalin do in this situation?” Many people approach their lives — they’ve never met Stalin; they’ll never meet Stalin — but they imagine what Stalin might do.

我们说:“好吧,在这种情况下斯大林会怎么做?”许多人对待自己的生活——“他们从未见过斯大林;”他们永远不会见到斯大林——但他们想象斯大林可能会做什么。

That gets implanted in their way of thinking; it becomes second nature.

这会根植于他们的思维方式中;它成为第二天性。

I learned to discuss and analyze that through Foucault.

我通过福柯学会了讨论和分析这一点。

I have to say, I didn’t share his analysis that Western society was imprisoning, that the daily life practices of free societies were a form of imprisonment in its own way.

我不得不说,我不同意他的分析,即西方社会是监禁,自由社会的日常生活实践本身就是一种监禁。

I never shared that view, so it wasn’t for me his analysis of the West that I liked.

我从来不同意这种观点,所以我不喜欢他对西方的分析。

It was the analytical toolkit that I adapted from him to apply to actual totalitarianism in the Soviet case.

这是我从他那里改编的分析工具包,应用于苏联案例中的实际极权主义。

COWEN

Much of that is a theme in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, right?

其中大部分是瓦西里·格罗斯曼的《生活与命运》中的主题,对吧?

The passivity of people, denunciations, the logic of decentralized control.

人们的被动、谴责、分散控制的逻辑。

KOTKIN

Yes.

是的。

I read Grossman later.

我后来读了格罗斯曼。

Remember, I’m an ignoramus like most graduate students, but even more so because I don’t know any Russian history.

请记住,我像大多数研究生一样无知,但更重要的是因为我对俄罗​​斯历史一无所知。

I have no Russian history training.

我没有受过俄罗斯历史训练。

I’m learning the Russian alphabet.

我正在学习俄语字母。

I don’t have that deep and rich feel for the place that I would only develop later on by reading Life and Fate and much else, everything that Vasily Grossman wrote.

我对这个地方没有那种深刻而丰富的感觉,这种感觉只有在后来阅读《生命与命运》以及瓦西里·格罗斯曼写的所有其他作品时才会产生。

What I had was French history.

我所拥有的是法国历史。

I had the Annales school, the Annales school founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in the ’20s.

我有年鉴学校,年鉴学校由 Marc Bloch 和 Lucien Febvre 在 20 年代创立。

The journal was called Annales, and it was known as the Annales school.

该杂志被称为年鉴,它被称为年鉴学派。

Fernand Braudel became one of the most famous proponents of the school, although Pierre Chaunu I prefer much more.

费尔南·布罗代尔成为该学派最著名的支持者之一,尽管我更喜欢皮埃尔·肖努。

I like Chaunu’s Seville and the Atlantic much more than I like Braudel’s Philip in the Mediterranean.

我喜欢夏努笔下的塞维利亚和大西洋,胜过喜欢布罗代尔笔下的菲利普在地中海。

Febvre was my favorite by far, and unlike Bloch, Febvre decided to continue to publish during the Vichy days.

到目前为止,费弗尔是我最喜欢的,与布洛赫不同,费弗尔决定在维希时期继续出版。

Bloch went into the resistance and was eventually killed.

布洛赫参加了抵抗运动,最终被杀。

Febvre had the whiff of that Schauspieler, that actor in the Mephisto, a movie that I was talking about.

费弗尔身上有肖斯皮勒的气息,他是我正在谈论的电影《墨菲斯托》中的那个演员。

Anyway, it’s this fabulous historical eruption that comes from the French.

不管怎样,这是一场来自法国的神话般的历史爆发。

What they do is, they do total history, meaning they take a place, they go into the judicial archives, which record daily life, and they do economy, society, culture, and politics all rolled into one.

他们所做的是,他们做全历史,这意味着他们占有一个地方,他们进入记录日常生活的司法档案,他们将经济、社会、文化和政治融为一体。

So, that’s what I decided to do, but in the Soviet case.

所以,这就是我决定做的,但针对的是苏联。

I became the first case study of any Soviet place based upon archival material with this Magnetic Mountain project.

我成为第一个基于磁山项目档案材料对苏联地区进行案例研究的人。

But I did it Annales school–style, splicing in the theories of micropower and micro-politics from Foucault and de Certeau.

但我采用了年鉴学派的风格,融合了福柯和德塞托的微观权力和微观政治理论。

I start learning the Russian alphabet as a PhD student at Berkeley instead of taking my exam.

作为伯克利的一名博士生,我开始学习俄语字母,而不是参加考试。

I had this professor, Sergei Kasatkin, an émigré who was well on in years, probably 70s, maybe even older — I never asked him — who had immigrated in the civil war in 1919–20 out through Harbin, and then became an orientalist.

我有一位教授,谢尔盖·卡萨特金(Sergei Kasatkin),他是一名移民,年事已高,可能有 70 多岁,甚至可能更老——“我从来没有问过他”——他在 1919-20 年内战期间从哈尔滨移民过来,然后成为了一名东方学家。

He wrote a Mongol-Mongol dictionary — not a Mongol-Russian but Mongol-Mongol dictionary.

他写了一本蒙古语-蒙古语词典——不是蒙古语-俄语词典,而是蒙古语-蒙古语词典。

Knew Chinese, knew Japanese, worked for British intelligence in World War II.

懂中文,懂日语,二战期间为英国情报部门工作。

He ends up at the end of life, or later days at Berkeley, teaching intensive Russian for beginners.

他在生命的尽头,或者后来在伯克利,为初学者教授俄语强化课程。

I took Russian two hours a day, five days a week with a tiny number of other students in Sergei Kasatkin’s classroom, so that’s my level of understanding.

我每周学习五天、每天两个小时,在谢尔盖·卡萨特金的教室里与少数其他学生一起学习俄语,所以这就是我的理解水平。

Vasily Grossman is very far at that point.

瓦西里·格罗斯曼(Vasily Grossman)在这一点上还很遥远。

I’m trying to figure out how gerunds work, how the past tense works, how you use verbs in Russian, which are very different.

我试图弄清楚动名词是如何工作的,过去时是如何工作的,以及如何在俄语中使用动词,这些都是非常不同的。

Russian is much closer to ancient Greek than it is to English in its grammar and some of the behavior of the language.

俄语在语法和语言的某些行为方面更接近古希腊语,而不是英语。

Mastering that, and then getting on a plane, and Gorbachev comes into power, and I have to do PhD research.

掌握了这一点,然后登上飞机,戈尔巴乔夫上台,我就必须做博士研究。

Then I finished this, and four years later, I’m an assistant professor of Russian Soviet history at Princeton University.

然后我完成了这个,四年后,我成为普林斯顿大学俄罗斯苏联历史助理教授。

This is like some kind of fantasy dystopia.

这就像某种幻想的反乌托邦。

Talk about novels — this is just unimaginable.

谈论小说 ——这简直难以想象。

I don’t even know if a novelist could have imagined this life.

我什至不知道小说家是否可以想象这样的生活。

Then I have to backfill, and I have to start reading the Bulgakov, and I have to start reading the Grossman, and of course, I have to read them in the original Russian now, so I don’t read them in translation.

然后我必须回填,我必须开始阅读布尔加科夫,我必须开始阅读格罗斯曼,当然,我现在必须阅读俄语原文,所以我不阅读翻译版。

I don’t go through the point where I read them in translation when I was a kid, and now I’m a professional at reading them.

我没有经历过小时候读它们的翻译版,现在我是阅读它们的专业人士。

The first time I ever read them was Russian language, just like I read Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting after I learned Czech.

我第一次读的是俄语,就像我学捷克语后读昆德拉的《笑忘书》一样。

It was part of my Czech language training at Berkeley.

这是我在伯克利的捷克语培训的一部分。

I studied Czech before Russian because I did Habsburg history.

我先学捷克语,然后再学俄语,因为我学的是哈布斯堡王朝的历史。

All the backfill.

全部回填。

I discovered this amazing ancient civilization with all of these layers, like music and graphic arts and literature and poetry and theater.

我发现了这个令人惊叹的古代文明,它具有所有这些层次,比如音乐、图形艺术、文学、诗歌和戏剧。

That was a bonus.

这是一个额外的好处。

I had gone into this only because it was a problem of how power works and the connection between geopolitics, institutions, daily life, ideas, and I discovered a world that I had not appreciated, not even anticipated.

我之所以研究这个问题,只是因为这是一个关于权力如何运作以及地缘政治、机构、日常生活、思想之间联系的问题,我发现了一个我从未欣赏过、甚至没有预料到的世界。

Okay, sure, I wasn’t totally ignorant in the way that maybe I’m portraying it.

好吧,当然,我并不是完全无知,也许我所描述的方式。

I was predominantly ignorant, so I’m not exaggerating my ignorance here, but it was deep.

我基本上是无知的,所以我在这里并没有夸大我的无知,但它是很深的。

I had studied European intellectual history at University of Rochester as an undergraduate, so I knew the German, the French, British, some Italian stuff.

我本科时在罗彻斯特大学学习过欧洲思想史,所以我了解德国、法国、英国和一些意大利的东西。

I studied German and French languages as an undergraduate, so I was not a complete unwashed ignoramus, but Russia was a world that I would only discover later, and it was a stroke of luck.

我本科时学过德语和法语,所以我并不是一个完全不学无术的无知者,但俄罗斯是一个我后来才发现的世界,这是一种幸运。

On East Asian art

论东亚艺术

COWEN

What do you like best in Korean art?

您最喜欢韩国艺术中的什么?

KOTKIN

It’s funny you should ask that question.

有趣的是你应该问这个问题。

When I was an assistant professor at Princeton, I got a sabbatical, and I went to Japan.

当我在普林斯顿大学担任助理教授时,我得到了一个休假,然后我去了日本。

It had no obvious relationship to my work, and I was an assistant professor in tenure track.

它与我的工作没有明显的关系,而且我是终身教授的助理教授。

You can imagine what the senior faculty told me.

你可以想象高级教授告诉我的话。

They said, “Are you out of your mind?

他们说:“你疯了吗?

You’re coming up for tenure.

你即将获得终身职位。

End of next year, you’ve got to submit your file for tenure, the end of your fifth year, and this is your fourth year, and you’re going to Japan?”

明年年底,你必须提交你的终身教职档案,第五年结束,今年是你的第四年,你要去日本吗?”

I went to Japan for a language boot camp.

我去日本参加语言训练营。

I enrolled in a language boot camp that was 18 months, for Asians to go to Japanese university, so from Mongolia, from Korea, from Hong Kong, from everywhere across Asia.

我参加了一个为期 18 个月的语言训练营,让亚洲人去日本大学,所​​以来自蒙古、韩国、香港,来自亚洲各地。

It was an amazing mix of people, astonishing school.

这是一个令人惊叹的人群组合,令人惊叹的学校。

There were two non-Asians in the school — myself, in this class that I was in, and the cultural attaché at the Austrian Embassy in Tokyo.

学校里有两个非亚洲人——我所在的班级里的我自己,以及奥地利驻东京大使馆的文化专员。

I’m sitting there with these Hong Kong people, and the teacher says something, and nobody in the class understands a word.

我和这些香港人坐在一起,老师说了一些话,班上没有人听懂一个字。

Everyone’s looking puzzled at the teacher, and then the teacher goes up to the board and writes a couple of characters.

大家都一脸疑惑地看着老师,然后老师走到黑板上写了几个字。

You hear this loud sigh from all the Hong Kongers, “Ohh, that’s what it means, what she’s trying to say,” because they can read.

你会听到所有香港人大声叹息,“哦,这就是这个意思,她想说的,”因为他们看得懂。

They can read the characters.

他们可以阅读这些字符。

They’re not identical, but they’re close enough.

它们并不相同,但足够接近。

They’ve been changed in slightly different ways in the different cultures that use them.

在使用它们的不同文化中,它们的改变方式略有不同。

Anyway, I got introduced to Asia.

不管怎样,我被介绍到了亚洲。

I had a supervisor at Tokyo University Social Science Institute that — Shaken (ISS), is what it was called.

我在东京大学社会科学研究所有一位导师,就是所谓的“摇动”(ISS)。

I would go to language boot camp for half the day, from early morning till about right after lunch, one o’clock or so.

我会去语言训练营呆半天,从清晨到午饭后,一点左右。

Then I would go over to an office at Tokyo University, this very privileged, amazing place where I had this Russianist who was also a Koreanist, Wada Haruki.

然后我会去东京大学的一个办公室,这是一个非常优越、令人惊奇的地方,在那里我有一位俄罗斯学家,也是一位韩国学家,和田春树。

He was a gem of a scholar.

他是一位杰出的学者。

He was pro-engagement or sunshine policy, kind of anti-Cold War, what you would expect.

他支持接触或阳光政策,有点反冷战,正如你所期望的那样。

A little bit pink on the outside, red on the inside, but so erudite and such a gentleman.

外面有点粉红,里面有点红,但是那么博学,那么绅士。

Remember, I’m speaking Japanese after a while, and so that’s really helpful.

请记住,一段时间后我就会说日语,所以这非常有帮助。

He introduced me to this other professor named Hamashta, who was in the Oriental Institute next door and had a seminar in Japanese language about the Chinese tributary system over a millennium.

他向我介绍了另一位名叫 Hamashta 的教授,他在隔壁的东方学院,用日语举办了一场关于中国千年朝贡制度的研讨会。

So, I had this immersion in East Asian stuff as a result of the curiosity of wanting to do the Japanese language.

所以,出于想学日语的好奇心,我对东亚的东西充满了兴趣。

I did rewrite my dissertation.

我确实重写了我的论文。

I did have a completed manuscript when I came back from the end of that trip in Japan.

当我结束日本之行回来时,我确实有了一份完整的手稿。

Somehow, I was voted up for tenure at Princeton and spent 33 years there, as you alluded to.

不知何故,正如你提到的,我被选为普林斯顿大学终身教授,并在那里度过了 33 年。

But I got this bug.

但我遇到了这个错误。

Well, I had this bug earlier, and I was able to live it with this year.

好吧,我早些时候就遇到过这个错误,今年我能够忍受它。

I ended up two and a half years in Japan.

我在日本呆了两年半。

My dormitory at Tokyo University was at a place called Komaba.

我在东京大学的宿舍在一个叫驹场的地方。

Komaba-Tōdaimae was the stop.

驹场东大前站是终点站。

It was at the Folk Art Museum, the Japanese folk art, and so I fell in love with Japanese furniture and folk art, and I discovered that Koreans had the same thing.

就是在民俗美术馆,日本的民间艺术,所以我爱上了日本的家具和民间艺术,我发现韩国人也有同样的东西。

I met my wife, who’s Korean, a South Korean citizen still to this day, in Kanazawa, Japan — the backside of Japan, not the Pacific side — at a Japanese language program, an advanced program, not the beginner one that I had started the previous time in Tokyo.

我在日本金泽(日本的背面,而不是太平洋一侧)遇到了我的妻子,她是韩国人,至今仍是韩国公民,是在一个日语课程中,一个高级课程,而不是我上次在东京开始的初级课程。

She was a PhD student at Columbia, writing a dissertation about how Korean ceramics influence Japanese ceramics.

她是哥伦比亚大学的博士生,正在撰写一篇关于韩国陶瓷如何影响日本陶瓷的论文。

It was a cultural transfer from Korea to somewhere else, which was not typical.

这是从韩国到其他地方的文化转移,这并不典型。

The Japanese acquired Korean culture, which is not something that they would admit because, for them, they were superior.

日本人获得了韩国文化,但他们不会承认这一点,因为对他们来说,他们是优越的。

Remember the colonial rule there.

记住那里的殖民统治。

So, I began to learn more and more about Korean culture, including Korean folk art and Korean furniture.

于是,我开始越来越多地了解韩国文化,包括韩国民间艺术和韩国家具。

That’s the piece, the stuff that my wife taught me, which is what we would call early modern ceramics.

这就是我妻子教我的作品,也就是我们所说的早期现代陶瓷。

It still has a place in my heart.

它仍然在我心中占有一席之地。

It’s really the craftsmanship, what we put in the folk museums, but it’s the high-quality furniture and other accouterments that maybe one day were in the kitchen and now are on display in a museum case.

这实际上是我们放在民间博物馆的手工艺,但它是高品质的家具和其他装备,也许有一天在厨房里,现在在博物馆的柜子里展出。

Our house has some of these artifacts that we were able to purchase in antique shops in Seoul as well as in Tokyo.

我们家有一些这样的文物,我们可以在首尔和东京的古董店购买。

You can purchase Korean art and artifacts in Japan because of the colonial period.

由于殖民时期,您可以在日本购买韩国艺术品和手工艺品。

The Japanese took a lot of stuff back.

日本人拿回了很多东西。

I had this fabulous new world that opened up to me just because I had this curiosity.

我拥有这个美妙的新世界,因为我有这种好奇心,它向我敞开了大门。

I could have learned Chinese, and I took a trip in ’87 to both China and Japan to compare them to decide which East Asian language I was going to take up when I had the opportunity.

我本可以学中文,所以我在 87 年去了中国和日本,对它们进行比较,以决定当我有机会时我要学习哪种东亚语言。

I spent two months in China traveling the whole thing, from Harbin Trans-Siberian Railroad all the way down to Hong Kong, Xi’an and the terracotta warriors and Shanghai and the Bund.

我在中国花了两个月的时间走遍了整个世界,从哈尔滨西伯利亚大铁路一直到香港、西安和兵马俑、上海和外滩。

This is China ’87, so it had just begun to open up, and foreigners were few and far between.

这是87年的中国,刚开始开放,外国人很少。

It was a poor country, and it was amazing.

那是一个贫穷的国家,但这是令人惊奇的。

I got to Japan, and it was ’80s Japan, this modernity that worked, all the stuff about Japan as number one.

我到了日本,那是 80 年代的日本,这种现代性很有效,所有关于日本的东西都是第一。

Japan won the Cold War.

日本赢得了冷战。

We’re turning Japanese now, as the pop song had it, and I was captivated.

正如流行歌曲所唱的那样,我们现在正在变成日语,我被迷住了。

So instead of choosing the China piece, I chose the Japanese piece, but it was a selection.

所以我没有选择中国的作品,而是选择了日本的作品,但这是一个选择。

I chose it only theoretically because I couldn’t enact that yet.

我只是在理论上选择了它,因为我还无法实施它。

It was only later on, when I had the privilege of being an assistant professor at Princeton with a sabbatical year, that I decided to boldly go to Japan.

直到后来,当我有幸在普林斯顿大学担任助理教授并有一年的休假时,我才决定大胆地去日本。

Then, I said I had that summer in Kanazawa where I met my wife.

然后我说我在金泽度过了那个夏天,在那里我遇见了我的妻子。

And then I had another year in Hokkaido, the northern island, where I was at the Slavic Research Center for the full year and met a huge number of amazing people.

然后我又在北部岛屿北海道度过了一年,在那里我在斯拉夫研究中心待了一整年,遇到了很多了不起的人。

And so that all stays with me, including the art side.

所以这一切都留在我身边,包括艺术方面。

Because my wife is an accomplished curator, we do a lot of travel together, where I’ll give a lecture about some geopolitical issue and my wife will have meetings that I’ll traipse along to with the museum directors and the other curators.

因为我的妻子是一位出色的策展人,所以我们经常一起旅行,在那里我会就一些地缘政治问题发表演讲,而我的妻子则会召开会议,我将与博物馆馆长和其他策展人一起参加会议。

I have a very privileged, very lucky ability to experience that art world, including the Korean art that you asked about.

我非常荣幸、非常幸运能够体验那个艺术世界,包括你问到的韩国艺术。

On his final Stalin volume

关于他的《斯大林》最后一卷

COWEN

Last question, with two related parts.

最后一个问题有两个相关部分。

First, when is your final Stalin volume coming out?

首先,你的《斯大林》最后一卷什么时候出版?

And what will you do next?

接下来你会做什么?

KOTKIN

The final Stalin volume is taking me longer than I thought.

斯大林最后一卷花费的时间比我想象的要长。

Part of it was accidental.

其中一部分是偶然的。

I had three separate, unrelated cancers that put me in a tunnel for about 18 months of medical care.

我患有三种不同的、互不相关的癌症,这让我在隧道里接受了大约 18 个月的医疗护理。

They were detected early, and I had the finest imaginable doctors.

他们很早就被发现了,而且我有最好的医生。

So again, luck in my life and luck are synonymous here.

再说一次,我生命中的运气和这里的运气是同义词。

It wasn’t one cancer that spread; it was three separate cancers that arose.

扩散的不是一种癌症;而是一种癌症。这是三种不同的癌症的出现。

After I had the first one, which was caught early, they were looking to see that I didn’t have it anymore, and the microscopic quality of the surveillance enabled them to discover the incipient other cancer in a very early stage.

在我早期发现第一个癌症后,他们希望看到我不再患有这种癌症,而监测的微观质量使他们能够在非常早期的阶段发现其他早期癌症。

Then that happened again, a third time after the second cancer.

然后这种情况又发生了,这是继第二次癌症之后的第三次。

The treatment had been conducted, and they were looking to see that it was successful.

治疗已经进行,他们希望看到治疗成功。

So that set me back a little bit, 18 months, maybe two years.

所以这让我倒退了一点,18 个月,也许两年。

It teaches you a lot about life when you go through something like that.

当你经历类似的事情时,它会教会你很多关于生活的知识。

I won’t go into the details, but I’m sure you understand.

我不会详细说明,但我相信你明白。

The bigger reason that it’s taken me longer is the difficulty of the subject.

我花了更长的时间的更大原因是该主题的难度。

Each one of these three volumes has been harder than the previous one.

这三卷中的每一卷都比前一卷更难。

The first one, I thought, “I’m never going to finish this thing.

第一个,我想,“我永远不会完成这件事。

It’s just so hard,” and I pulled it off, and then I said, “Okay, I can do this.” Then I took the second one on, and it was not quite exponentially harder, but it was significantly harder.

这太难了,”我成功了,然后我说,“好吧,我能做到。”然后我又开始了第二个,虽然难度没有指数级增加,但明显困难了很多。

Now the third one, I’m feeling the same thing.

现在第三次了,我也有同样的感觉。

World War II is so much bigger than anything else that’s come up in the first two volumes, and it took me forever to get to the truth about the war.

第二次世界大战比前两卷中出现的任何其他事情都要严重得多,我花了很长时间才了解战争的真相。

So much of what we think to be true, including, of course, about Stalin’s behavior in Soviet society during the war and various battles, I discovered really didn’t have solid evidence behind it in many cases — not in all cases, but in many cases.

我们认为真实的很多事情,当然包括斯大林在战争和各种战斗期间在苏联社会中的行为,我发现在很多情况下确实没有确凿的证据支持——不是在所有情况下,但在很多情况下。

I worked through the war part, which is half the book, half of volume 3, and now I’m in the Chinese Revolution.

我完成了战争部分,这是本书的一半,第三卷的一半,现在我在中国革命中。

I’m in the Cold War, the ’45 to ’53 period.

我正处于冷战时期,即 45 至 53 年间。

We know a lot about that, and it’s hard to be fresh about the Cold War.

我们对此了解很多,而且很难对冷战感到新鲜。

So many great scholars have gone into the previously secret archives and brought out amazing material and written really fine analytical books.

许多伟大的学者进入了以前的秘密档案,拿出了令人惊叹的材料,写出了非常精彩的分析书籍。

But what I discovered about the Cold War stuff is the preoccupation, bordering on obsession, with nonstrategic questions like the fate of Poland.

但我发现,关于冷战的事情,人们对波兰命运等非战略问题的关注近乎痴迷。

Now, for Poles, the fate of Poland is existential — don’t get me wrong — just like for Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians and Ukrainians today, as we speak on this podcast.

现在,对于波兰人来说,波兰的命运是生死攸关的——“别误会我的意思”——就像我们今天在这个播客上所说的那样,对立陶宛人、拉脱维亚人、爱沙尼亚人和乌克兰人来说。

I get all that for them, but is it core, is it central to the global order that forms after ’45?

我为他们了解了所有这些,但它是核心吗?它是 45 年后形成的全球秩序的核心吗?

That’s a much harder, more difficult question.

这是一个更难、更困难的问题。

What I’ve discovered is what I call the four partitions, China, Korea, Japan, and Indochina, and in so many ways, that was so much bigger than the fate of Poland — again, not for the Poles.

我发现的是我所说的四个瓜分:中国、韩国、日本和印度支那,从很多方面来说,这比波兰的命运要大得多——再说一遍,不是波兰人的命运。

I have Polish ancestry, so I understand what I’m talking about to a certain extent, besides just being a story.

我有波兰血统,所以我在一定程度上理解我在说什么,而不仅仅是一个故事。

But if you look at the East Asian story, that’s where so much of the Cold War still reverberates today and, I would argue, is not over.

但如果你看看东亚的故事,你就会发现,冷战至今仍然在很大程度上产生影响,而且我认为,冷战还没有结束。

China could have been partitioned and wasn’t.

中国本来可以分裂,但没有。

Korea could have been completely taken over by the Soviets, but instead was partitioned because Truman asked Stalin to stop at the 38th parallel, even though Truman didn’t have soldiers on the ground to prevent Stalin from doing so.

朝鲜本来可以完全被苏联占领,但却被分裂了,因为杜鲁门要求斯大林在北纬38度线停下来,尽管杜鲁门没有派士兵在地面阻止斯大林这样做。

Stalin was ready to invade the home islands of Japan and had already given the order, so Japan should have been partitioned and wasn’t.

斯大林准备入侵日本本土,并且已经下达了命令,所以日本应该被瓜分,但没有。

Then, of course, Indochina — what we know as Vietnam today — was partitioned.

当然,然后,印度支那——也就是我们今天所知的越南——被瓜分了。

You have these four partitions, two of which happened — Korea and Indochina — both of which led to war, and two partitions that didn’t happen, one because the Communists won in China, and one because the Communists got nowhere near power in Japan.

有这四次瓜分,其中两次发生了——“朝鲜和印度支那”——两者都导致了战争,还有两次没有发生,一次是因为共产党在中国获胜,一次是因为共产党在日本远没有取得政权。

That’s the really big story in the later part of Stalin’s life, the ’45 to ’53 period.

这是斯大林晚年(45 至 53 年间)真正重要的故事。

I’m working through that now, and I’ve discovered that it’s not as simple as it’s presented.

我现在正在解决这个问题,我发现它并不像所呈现的那么简单。

Once again, like World War II, I have to go back and dig and dig and dig to verify and to make sure that the things we believe actually happened are actually true, and excavate layers of possibility, paths not taken, decisions made.

再次,就像第二次世界大战一样,我必须回去挖掘、挖掘、挖掘,以验证并确保我们认为实际发生的事情确实是真实的,并挖掘层层可能性、未采取的路径、做出的决定。

We know well the episode of General George Marshall.

我们很熟悉乔治·马歇尔将军的故事。

He’s famous for the Marshall Plan in Europe and is considered one of the great statesmen in American history, but in China, his mission completely failed.

他因马歇尔计划而闻名于欧洲,被认为是美国历史上最伟大的政治家之一,但在中国,他的使命彻底失败了。

It failed as bad as his mission in Europe succeeded.

它的失败与他在欧洲的使命的成功一样糟糕。

When you give equal or even greater weight — in my view, as would be warranted — to the East Asian story of the Cold War and Stalin’s role in it, it could potentially freshen up our understanding of this.

当你对东亚的冷战故事和斯大林在其中的角色给予同等甚至更大的重视时(在我看来,这是有道理的),它可能会刷新我们对此的理解。

And then of course, it connects to the present day.

当然,它与今天有关。

Volume 3 is called Totalitarian Superpower because the Soviet Union was a superior totalitarianism to Nazism, but it was an inferior superpower to the United States, which is why it was successful in one case and unsuccessful in the other case.

第三卷之所以叫《极权主义超级大国》,是因为苏联是比纳粹主义优越的极权主义,但它是比美国差的超级大国,这就是为什么它一事成功,一事不成功的原因。

Totalitarian superpower has a certain resonance for where we are with China today, not identical, of course, but a certain resonance.

极权主义超级大国与我们今天的中国有一定的共鸣,当然不是完全相同,但有一定的共鸣。

I’m working my way through this, and I’m bogged down now in the Chinese Revolution and Indochina and the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese occupation in fresh and astonishing ways, at least for me.

我正在努力解决这个问题,现在我以新鲜和令人惊讶的方式陷入了中国革命、印度支那、朝鲜半岛和日本占领的泥潭,至少对我来说是这样。

Again, there are great books, amazing scholars that we’re all reliant on, but I’m trying to get to the source on many of these things, and so I’ve got a ways to go.

再说一次,我们都依赖一些伟大的书籍和杰出的学者,但我正在努力寻找其中许多事情的源头,所以我还有很长的路要走。

We’re still only halfway through.

我们还只完成了一半。

We’re still several years away, unfortunately, on volume 3, but I have the sense of momentum.

不幸的是,我们距离第三卷还有几年的时间,但我有动力。

I was working on it before we got on this call, going through some of this stuff in ’45 and ’46 on the East.

在我们接到这个电话之前,我就在做这件事,在 45 年和 46 年的东部经历了一些这样的事情。

Don’t get me wrong, Berlin is a big deal, and the division of Germany and the Berlin story, and the blockade there, and the coup in Czechoslovakia, and the Marshall Plan.

别误会我的意思,柏林是一件大事,德国的分裂和柏林的故事,那里的封锁,捷克斯洛伐克的政变,还有马歇尔计划。

I’m not trying to suggest that that’s trivial.

我并不是想说这很微不足道。

I’m just trying to suggest that there are things that are also extraordinarily important that have not been given the same weight.

我只是想表明,有些事情也非常重要,但却没有得到同等的重视。

As to what I’ll do next, I hope I’m going to get my life back.

至于我接下来要做什么,我希望我能恢复我的生活。

I’ve been in Joseph Stalin’s company for not quite two decades now — a little more than a decade and a half — and it’s been remarkable.

我在约瑟夫·斯大林的公司工作了不到二十年——“才十五年多一点——”,这已经是了不起的了。

I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve certainly stretched my mind and come to understand the world of power much better than I did before, even though there’s a ways to go.

我学到了很多东西,而且我确实拓展了自己的思维,比以前更好地理解了权力的世界,尽管还有很长的路要走。

But it’s enough already, seeing the evil.

但看到邪恶就已经足够了。

Your world is mostly digital.

你的世界大部分都是数字化的。

You don’t have the experience of going through documentations with his signature on it, and there’s dried blood on the page.

你没有翻阅有他签名的文件的经验,而且页面上有干涸的血迹。

So that’s the world I’ve been immersed in.

这就是我所沉浸的世界。

I understand how his mind works.

我了解他的思维方式。

It’s not his blood that’s on that page.

那一页上的不是他的血。

It’s somebody else’s blood from their interrogation that he’s reading and signing off on.

他正在阅读并签署的是审讯中其他人的血。

It’s been a gift to understand power, that original journey I was launched on, because Stalin is the gold standard of power.

这是理解权力的礼物,这是我最初的旅程,因为斯大林是权力的黄金标准。

If you want to study how power is accumulated, how it’s operationalized, and what the consequences are, there’s no bigger story than his story.

如果你想研究权力如何积累、如何运作以及后果是什么,没有比他的故事更宏大的故事了。

From the point of view of power, it’s endlessly fascinating.

从力量的角度来看,它的魅力无穷。

It’s a lifelong learning.

这是终身学习。

It’s a gift, as I say.

正如我所说,这是一份礼物。

But from the point of view of morality, freedom, the stuff that I cherish and believe in and I’m privileged to be able to experience — it is just devastating.

但从道德、自由、我所珍视和相信的东西以及我很荣幸能够体验到的东西来看——这简直是毁灭性的。

There is no limit.

没有限制。

The moral squalor is just bottomless, and you live in that world.

道德败坏无底线,而你就生活在那个世界里。

Not 24/7 — I’m sitting here in Stanford University in a plush office overlooking the campus.

不是 24/7 —— 我坐在斯坦福大学一间豪华的办公室里,俯瞰着校园。

Silicon Valley is outside the door, and a $3 million, three-bedroom house is on sale for $10 million down the street.

硅谷就在门外,街边一栋价值 300 万美元的三居室房屋正在以 1000 万美元的价格出售。

It’s not my life 100 percent.

这不是我百分百的生活。

It’s not something that envelops me all the time, but it is something that absorbs me in my life of the mind, my work experience.

它并不是一直包围着我的东西,但却是让我全神贯注于我的精神生活和工作经历的东西。

Then of course, I finished the section on the war, and all of these places that I just wrote about — they’re in the news today.

当然,我完成了关于战争的部分,以及我刚刚写的所有这些地方——它们今天都出现在新闻中。

People talk to me about X city — Kramatorsk in Ukraine, or fill in the blank, whatever place that was obscure to Americans not long ago, and is now known to them.

人们跟我谈论X城——乌克兰的克拉马托斯克,或者填空,无论什么地方不久前对美国人来说还很陌生,现在他们已经知道了。

All the stuff happened back then in the ’40s, only it was the Nazi land army against the Soviet land army.

所有的事情都发生在20世纪40年代,只不过是纳粹陆军对抗苏联陆军。

All those place names and all that history, and I just wrote about the war, which was really more than war.

所有这些地名和所有历史,我只是写了关于战争的内容,这实际上不仅仅是战争。

It was mass murder, World War II on the Eastern front.

这是大规模屠杀,是东线的第二次世界大战。

Here I am, and I never thought I would live through war in those places again.

我在这里,我从未想过我会再次在那些地方经历战争。

Of course, again, I’m not there.

当然,我又不在那儿。

I’m not living in Ukraine.

我不住在乌克兰。

My relatives haven’t been killed there, just like they weren’t in the 1940s in the historical material that I’m immersed in.

我的亲戚没有在那里被杀害,就像我沉浸在历史材料中的 1940 年代一样。

But you get a feel for this, and it has an effect on you, even if you then can close your laptop and go off to some fantastic sushi parlor.

但你会感受到这一点,它会对你产生影响,即使你可以关闭你的笔记本电脑并前往一些很棒的寿司店。

You know what I’m talking about.

你知道我在说什么。

COWEN

Sure.

当然。

Stephen Kotkin.

史蒂芬·科特金.

Thank you very much.

非常感谢。

KOTKIN

My pleasure.

我的荣幸。

Thank you for the opportunity.

谢谢你给我这个机会。