Stephen Kotkin

Stephen Mark Kotkin (born February 17, 1959) is an American historian, academic, and author. He is the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

For 33 years, Kotkin taught at Princeton University, where he attained the title of John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs; he took on emeritus status from Princeton University in 2022. He was the director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the co-director of the certificate-granting program in History and the Practice of Diplomacy.

Kotkin's most prominent book project is his three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin: The first two volumes have been published as Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (2014) and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (2017), and the third volume will be published in July 2026.

Kotkin was born in New Jersey, the third son of Jay Kotkin, a factory worker of Belarusian-Jewish descent, and Joanne Korolewicz,^{[citation needed]} a cook and art teacher. His father's family emigrated from Vitebsk in the Russian Empire (now Belarus). He grew up in New York City.

He graduated from the University of Rochester in 1981 with a B.A. degree in English. He studied Russian and Soviet history under Reginald E. Zelnik and Martin Malia at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned an M.A. degree in 1983 and a Ph.D. degree in 1988, both in history. Initially, his PhD studies focused on the House of Habsburg and the History of France, until an encounter with Michel Foucault persuaded him to look at the relationship between knowledge and power with respect to Stalin.

Starting in 1986, Kotkin traveled to the Soviet Union, conducting academic research and receiving academic fellowships. He was a visiting scholar at the USSR Academy of Sciences (1991) and then at its descendant, the Russian Academy of Sciences (1993, 1995, 1998, 1999 and 2012). He was also a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Social Science in 1994 and 1997.

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. He is now the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

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. This early work, based on his PhD thesis, described Stalinsm as "a quintessential Enlightenment utopia, an attempt via the instrumentality of the state, to impose a rational ordering on society, while at the same time overcoming the wrenching class divisions brought about by nineteenth-century industrialization."