Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vaunted “stability” has turned into spoliation. The methods he used to fix the corrupt, dysfunctional post-Soviet state have produced yet another corrupt, dysfunctional state—and unfortunately, there is no end to it in sight. Princeton University Professor Stephen Kotkin discusses his recent article, “The Resistible Rise of Vladimir Putin,” with Foreign Affairs Editor Gideon Rose.

A transcript of the interview is available below:

ROSE: Tell us, Professor Kotkin, who is Vladimir Putin?

KOTKIN: Vladimir Putin is the kind of guy where if you had a whole bunch of 25-year-olds sitting around a table in Burbank and they were trying to figure out what was the ideal villain for a movie, this is for central casting, and they began to throw ideas around the table, how about KGB? KGB? How about a permanent scowl? Permanent scowl. And they went on and they went on, they would produce a figure like Putin.

ROSE: Some people say that he’s just a nonentity. He’s been riding the forces of history and is not really a driving player himself. Do you buy that?

KOTKIN: Yes, this reminds me of what the Trotskyites used to say about Stalin, the outstanding mediocrity of the party. Here’s a guy, Putin, who’s been in power for, what, 15 years now with no end in sight. It’s very hard for a nonentity to last that long at the top of any political system.

ROSE: Where does Ukraine in the current crisis fit into all this?

KOTKIN: The most important thing you could say about Ukraine is that it was wrecked before Putin got his hands on it. Ukrainian elites, pro-Western, pro-Russian, north, south, east, west, they ruined that country well before Putin seized Crimea. It has been a tragic history, a history of unbelievable corruption, shrinkage of GDP.

It was a difficult inheritance, what Ukraine got from the Soviet Union. The post-1991 Ukrainian story is not enviable, but unfortunately wrecked, as I said, by the elites. And Putin gets into the picture and he causes additional damage.

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