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.

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.

[8] 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.

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.

[30] However, the Testament has been accepted as genuine by many historians, including E. H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Dmitri Volkogonov, Vadim Rogovin and Oleg Khlevniuk.

[10] Stephen Kotkin supports a centrist idea of "normal politics", expressing that "problems arise at the extremes, the far left and the far right that don't recognize the legitimacy either of capitalism or of democratic rule of law institutions.

"[36] Several socialist media outlets have accused Kotkin of ideological bias against the Bolshevik Revolution, highlighting that Kotkin referred to American journalist and socialist John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World, as "former Harvard cheerleader" in his book Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928.

[37][38] When speaking about the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine in an interview with Foreign Affairs, Kotkin stated that he advocates for threatening regime change against Vladimir Putin in order to stop the war.