Phlegmatic Mountain
I'm just getting round to watching this Kotkin - Zizek thing from a few weeks ago. The man is an embarrassment. Anyone who does the amount of leg work that he (or his interns) has done, and then sagely proclaims to the world that the 'big revelation' of the archives is that - the horror! the horror! - people in the Soviet Union were actually communists is fatuous beyond belief. 'Lenin played for keeps. He was for real. I don’t think there would have been a Bolshevik seizure of power without Lenin. He is a major figure… He was for real on communist revolution.' Please, Professor, translate these pearls of acuity into several thousand pages of popular-academic non-sequitur.
Everything about Kotkin here - the ugliness of his vocabulary ('Bukharin didn't have the right skill set', Christ), the fixation on counterfactuals not just as throwaway 'thought experiments' but as a mode of crucial historical analysis (I guess anything that Penguin will pay this much for seems crucial at the time), the way he luxuriates in his retreat into the most tired, cod-psychological 'explanations' for the 1930s ('Where did those demons inside him, where did those snakes in his head come from?') - everything speaks of a man devoid of the kind of basic human insights/empathies that should be the precondition for this kind of work. And that's without mentioning the grotesque, repetitive metaphor of the GermanWings disaster ('he crashed the plane, he crashed the plane', please shut up), or the self-satisfaction of his wondering out loud (! the mic's still on, Stevie) how crazy it is that a normal lower-middle class guy like him should end up writing books on Stalin. If you find it so hard to compute, feel free to just stop.
http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/rupaul-paul-holdengr%C3%A4ber