#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler

0:00:08 The following is a conversation with Wehes Ludeviches, a historian specializing in Germany and Eastern Europe.
0:00:13 He has lectured extensively on the rise, the rain, and the fall of communism.
0:00:24 Our discussion goes deep on this, the very heaviest of topics, the communist ideology that has led to over 100 million deaths in the 20th century.
0:00:30 We also discuss Hitler, Nazi ideology, and World War II.
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0:01:19 Speaking of peak performance, I’m trying to figure out in my life
0:01:21 how many times a week to train jiu-jitsu.
0:01:26 There’s a long stretch in my life where jiu-jitsu was a big part of my life.
0:01:28 I would often train twice a day.
0:01:35 And basically, my life was about sort of recovery from that training session.
0:01:39 And during their recovery, I would be doing sort of the deep study
0:01:44 or the deep work of programming for my PhD and then beyond.
0:01:51 And it might sound counterintuitive, but when you’re so passionately pursuing a thing
0:01:54 and it becomes such a big part of your day,
0:01:58 it’s actually much easier to integrate it into your life.
0:02:03 And in fact, your body gets accustomed to that kind of hardness of training.
0:02:07 If you’re doing it correctly in terms of nutrition and in terms of avoiding injury.
0:02:11 In fact, I never got any major injuries, knock on wood,
0:02:15 any sort of breaking of anything doing, you know, I don’t know how many years.
0:02:18 Over 20 years, 25 years.
0:02:23 And I find that now that jiu-jitsu is a much, much smaller part of my life,
0:02:25 it actually does become a different puzzle.
0:02:29 It’s a puzzle of how to avoid injury, how to still have fun,
0:02:35 but also how to keep growing and learning and adapting to the changing environment of grappling.
0:02:37 No geek grappling especially.
0:02:39 So it’s been a fascinating puzzle to try and solve.
0:02:43 Back to AG1, they’ll give you one month supply of fish oil
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0:03:02 I remember speaking of jiu-jitsu, one of the tougher things mentally for me.
0:03:06 For anyone that does jiu-jitsu, that’s one of the wonderful benefits you get from it,
0:03:06 is you get humbled.
0:03:09 And there’s all kinds of ways to get humbled.
0:03:12 But there’s just some training sessions.
0:03:17 And it might not have to do with the skill of the people you’re training with.
0:03:21 It might just be one of those days that you just get smashed.
0:03:30 As they say in the MMA community, when they’re talking about Habib Narmagomedov,
0:03:32 you just feel powerless.
0:03:38 Somebody just crushes you knee on belly or mount or back control and you just
0:03:41 over and over gets submitted or just guard pass, whatever it is.
0:03:43 Just stuff is not working.
0:03:49 And you just feel like there’s nothing in the world that you can do right.
0:03:52 You feel like you’ll never get better.
0:03:55 That it’s just hopeless.
0:03:57 And that feeling, especially in combat sports,
0:04:01 where there’s kind of a masculine competitive energy,
0:04:04 you just feel like this is it.
0:04:06 There’s no light at the end of the tunnel.
0:04:06 This is it.
0:04:09 And that feeling is a beautiful feeling because you just sit in that
0:04:15 and sit with that pain, that disappointment, that emotional turmoil.
0:04:20 And you channel that feeling into growth, into improving,
0:04:24 into strengthening the engine of perseverance.
0:04:27 And all of that is in the mind.
0:04:32 And you should take care of your mind by checking out betterhelp.com/lex
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0:06:26 I think that’s like a meme on the various social media platforms
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0:08:43 And now, dear friends, here’s Vejas Lulevisas.
0:08:50 Let’s start with Karl Marx.
0:08:54 What were the central ideas of Marx that lay the foundation of communism?
0:09:01 I think there were several key ideas that Marx deployed that were destined to have such an impact.
0:09:04 And in some ways, they were actually kind of contradictory.
0:09:12 On the one hand, Marx insisted that history has a purpose, that history is not just random events,
0:09:18 but that rather it’s history, we might say, with a capital H, history moving in a deliberate
0:09:25 direction, history having a goal, a direction that it was predestined to move in.
0:09:32 At the same time, in the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels
0:09:36 also suggested that there was a role for special individuals who might,
0:09:43 even if history was still moving in this predetermined direction, might give it an extra push,
0:09:46 might play a heroic role in that process.
0:09:52 And I think that these two ideas added together, the notion that there is a science of revolution
0:09:59 that suggests that you can move in a deliberate and meaningful, rational way towards the end
0:10:04 of history and the resolution of all conflicts, a total liberation of the human person,
0:10:10 and that moreover, that was inevitable, that that was preprogrammed and destined in the order of
0:10:18 things. When you add to that the notion that there’s also room for heroism and the individual role,
0:10:21 this ended up being tremendously powerful as a combination.
0:10:29 Earlier thinkers who were socialists had already dreamt of or projected futures where
0:10:35 all conflict would be resolved and human life would achieve some sort of perfection. Marx
0:10:40 added these other elements that made it far more powerful than the earlier versions that he
0:10:43 decried as merely utopian socialism.
0:10:47 So there’s a million questions I could ask there. But so on the utopian side,
0:10:54 so there is a utopian component to the way he tried to conceive of his ideas.
0:10:59 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, one has to stress, Marx would have gotten extremely upset
0:11:04 at this point in the conversation, because to call someone a utopian was precisely to argue that
0:11:09 you’re not scientific, you’re not rational, you’re not laying out the iron laws of history,
0:11:14 you’re merely hoping for the best. And that might be laudable, but it was fundamentally unrealistic.
0:11:24 That said, hidden among Marx’s insistence that there are laws and structures as history moves
0:11:32 through class conflict, modes of production towards its ultimate goal of a comprehensive
0:11:38 final revolution that will see all exploitation overthrown and people finally being freed from
0:11:46 necessity in smuggled in among those things are most definitely utopian elements. And there,
0:11:53 they come especially at the end in which Marx sketches the notion of what things will look like
0:12:00 after the revolution has resolved all problems. There, vagueness sets in. It’s clear that it’s
0:12:05 a blessed state that’s being talked about. People no longer exploiting one another,
0:12:12 people no longer subject to necessity or poverty, but instead enjoying all of the
0:12:17 productivity of industrialization that hitherto had been put to private profit,
0:12:24 now collectively owned and deployed. The notion that one will be able to work at one job in the
0:12:30 morning and then engage in leisure activity or yet another fulfilling job in the afternoon,
0:12:38 all of this free of any contradictions, free of necessity, free of the sort of
0:12:43 ordinary irritations that we experience in our ordinary lives. That’s deeply utopian.
0:12:51 The difference was that Marx charted a route towards that outcome that presented itself as
0:12:57 cutting edge science and moreover having the full credibility that science commanded so much,
0:13:04 especially in the 19th and early 20th century. So there is a long journey from capitalism to
0:13:08 communism that includes a lot of problems. He thought once you resolve the problems,
0:13:15 all the complexities of human interactions, the friction, the problems will be gone.
0:13:22 To the extent that they were based on inequalities and on man’s exploitation of man,
0:13:29 the result was supposed to be a resolution of all of this. And inevitably, when you talk about
0:13:35 the history of communism, you have to include the fact that this often tragic and dramatic
0:13:40 history produced a lot of jokes, jokes that were in part reactions sometimes to the ideological
0:13:44 claims made by people like Marx. And one of the famous jokes was that, what’s the difference
0:13:50 between capitalism and communism? And the joke’s answer was capitalism is the exploitation of man
0:13:59 by man, and communism is the exact opposite. Yeah, you actually have an electron humor.
0:14:03 I love it. And you deliver in such a dry, beautiful way. Okay, there’s, again, a million
0:14:10 questions. So you outline a set of contradictions, but it’s interesting to talk about his view.
0:14:19 For example, what was Marx’s view of history? Marx had been a student of Hegel. And Hegel is a
0:14:26 German idealist philosopher, had announced very definitively that history has a purpose. History
0:14:34 is not a collection of random facts. And as an idealist, he proposed that the true movement of
0:14:38 history, the true meaning of history, what made history, history with a capital H,
0:14:43 something that’s transcendent and meaningful, was that it was the working out of an idea
0:14:48 through different civilizations, different stages of historical development. And that idea
0:14:56 was the idea of human freedom. So it was not individuals or great thinkers alone making history
0:15:03 and having an impact. It was the idea itself, striving to come to fruition, striving to come
0:15:11 to an ever more perfect realization. In the case of Hegel, in this very Prussian and German context,
0:15:15 he identified the realization of freedom also with the growth of the state,
0:15:21 because he thought that governments are the ones that are going to be able to deliver on laws and
0:15:31 on the ideal of a state of the rule of law in German Reichstadt. That was a noble dream at the
0:15:36 same time as we recognize from our perspective, state power has been put to all sorts of purposes
0:15:44 besides guaranteeing the rule of law in our own times. What Marx did was to take this characteristic
0:15:51 insistence of Hegel that history is moving in a meaningful and discernible way towards the
0:15:57 realization of an idea and flipped it on its head. Marx insisted that Hegel had so much that was
0:16:04 right in his thinking, but what he had neglected to keep in mind was that, in fact, history is based
0:16:13 on matter. Hence dialectical materialism, dialectical referring to things proceeding by clashes or
0:16:22 conflict towards an ever greater realization of some essential idea. Marx adapts a lot of ideas
0:16:30 of Hegel. You can recognize entire rhetorical maneuvers that are indebted to that earlier
0:16:36 training, but now taken in a very different direction. What remained, though, was the
0:16:42 confidence of being on the right side of history. There are few things that are as intoxicating
0:16:50 as being convinced that your actions not only are right in the abstract, but are also
0:16:58 destined to be successful. Also that you have the rigor of science backing you in your journey
0:17:06 towards the truth. Absolutely. Angles, when he gives the great side eulogy for his beloved friend,
0:17:15 Marx, claims that Marx is essentially the Darwin of history, that he had done for the world of
0:17:24 politics and of human history what Darwin had done with this theory of evolution, understanding
0:17:32 the hidden mechanism, understanding the laws that are at work and that make that whole process
0:17:40 meaningful rather than just one damn thing after another. What about the famous line that
0:17:45 history of all existing societies is the history of class struggles? What about this conception
0:17:51 of history as a history of class struggle? This was the motive force that Karl Marx and Engels saw
0:17:57 driving the historical process forward. It’s important to keep in mind that class conflict
0:18:07 doesn’t just mean revolutions, revolts, peasant uprisings. It’s sort of the totality of frictions
0:18:14 and of clashes, conflicts of interest that appear in any society. Marx was able in this
0:18:21 spirit that he avowed was very scientific to demarcate stages of historical transformation,
0:18:29 primitive communism in the prehistoric period, then moving towards what was called state slavery,
0:18:36 that’s to say the early civilizations deploying human resources and ordering them by all-powerful
0:18:44 monarchs, then private slavery in the ancient period, and then moving to feudalism in the
0:18:50 Middle Ages. Then here’s where Marx is able to deliver a pronouncement about his own times,
0:18:57 seeing that the present day is the penultimate, the next to last stage of this historical development,
0:19:03 because the feudal system of the Middle Ages and the dominance of the aristocracy has been overcome,
0:19:10 has been displaced by the often heroic achievements, astonishing achievements in commerce
0:19:16 and in world building of the middle class, the bourgeoisie, who have taken the world into their
0:19:24 own hands and are engaged in class conflict with the class below them, which is the working class,
0:19:33 or the proletariat. This sort of conflict also, by the way, obtains within classes. The bourgeoisie
0:19:39 are going to be gravediggers, Marx announces, of their own supremacy, because they’re also competing
0:19:47 against one another. Members who don’t survive that competition get pressed down into the subordinate
0:19:53 working class, which grows and grows and grows to the point where at some future moment,
0:20:04 the inevitable explosion will come, and a swift revolution will overturn this penultimate stage
0:20:10 of human history and usher in, instead, the dictatorship of the working class, and then
0:20:16 the abolition of all classes, because with only one class remaining, everyone is finally
0:20:21 unified and without those internal contradictions that had marked class conflict before.
0:20:26 The dictatorship of the working class is an interesting term. What is the role of revolution
0:20:32 in history? This, in particular, for Marx, I think is a really key moment, which is what
0:20:37 makes that such a good question. In his vision, the epic narrative that he’s presenting to us,
0:20:46 revolution is key. It’s not enough to have evolutionary change. It’s not a question of
0:20:53 compromises. It’s not a case of bargaining or balancing interests. Revolution is necessary as
0:20:59 part of the process of a subjugated class coming to awareness of its own historical role. And when
0:21:09 we get to the proletariat, this working class in its entirety, to whom Marx assigns this epic
0:21:14 Promethean role of being the ones who are going to liberate all of humanity, a class
0:21:19 that is universal in its interests and in the role in salvation history that they’ll be playing in
0:21:26 this secular framework, they need revolution and the experience of revolution in order to
0:21:30 come into their own. Because without it, you’ll only have half-hearted compromise and something
0:21:36 less than the consciousness that they then need in order to rule, to administer, and to play the
0:21:44 historical role that they’re fated to have. How did he conceive of a revolution, potentially a
0:21:53 violent revolution, stabilizing itself into something where the working class was able to rule?
0:21:59 That’s where things become a good deal less detailed in his and Engels accounts.
0:22:04 The answer that they proposed, in part, was this is for the future to determine.
0:22:12 So all of the details will be settled later. I think it was allied to this, was a tremendous
0:22:21 confidence in some very 19th century ideas about how society could be administered and what made
0:22:29 for orderly society in a way where if the right infrastructure was in place, you might expect
0:22:37 society to run itself without the need for micromanagement from above. Hence, we arrive at
0:22:44 Marx’s tantalizing promise that there will be a period where it will be necessary to have
0:22:50 centralized control. There might have to be, as he puts it, despotic inroads against property
0:22:57 in order to bring this revolution to pass. But then afterwards, the state, because it represents
0:23:01 everybody, rather than representing particular class interests that are in conflict with other
0:23:07 classes, the state will eventually wither away. So there won’t be need for it. Now, that’s not
0:23:13 to say that that pure stasis arrives, right? Or that the stabilization equals being frozen in time.
0:23:19 It’s not as if that is what things will look like. But instead, the big issues will be settled.
0:23:26 And henceforth, people will be able to enjoy lives of, as he would consider it, in authentic
0:23:32 freedom without necessity, without poverty as a result of this blessed state that’s been arrived at.
0:23:40 Despotic inroads against property. Did he elaborate on the despotic inroads?
0:23:46 Dispossession. Dispossession of the middle classes and of the bourgeoisie. In his model,
0:23:52 humanity is never standing still, right? So he’d probably argue in this dynamic vision of how
0:23:58 history unfolds that there’s always conflict and it’s always moving, propelling history forward
0:24:09 towards its predestined ending. In the way he saw this climax was that, as things did not stay the
0:24:15 same, the condition of the working class was constantly getting worse. And hence, their
0:24:23 revolutionary potential was growing. And at the same time, the expropriators, the bourgeoisie,
0:24:31 were also facing diminishing returns as they competed against one another with more and more
0:24:37 wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and more and more elements of what had been the middle
0:24:45 class detached from the ruling class and being pressed down into the working class. For Marx,
0:24:49 this is really a key part. I mean, it’s a key part of this whole ratchet effect that’s going
0:24:57 to produce this final historical explosion. And in German, the word given to that process was
0:25:04 “fer Elendung,” which is very evocative. Elend means misery. So it’s the growing misery. When
0:25:10 this gets translated into English, the results are never quite as evocative or satisfactory. The
0:25:15 words that get used are “immiserization” or “popperization,” meaning more and more people
0:25:23 are being turned into poppers. But for Marx, that prediction is really key. And even in his own
0:25:29 lifetime, there were already hints that, in fact, if you looked sociologically at the really developed
0:25:35 working classes in places like Great Britain or Germany, that process was not playing out as he
0:25:43 had expected. In fact, although there had been enormous dislocations and tremendous suffering
0:25:49 in the early chaotic sort of wild west stages of capitalism and of industrialization,
0:25:57 there had been reform movements as well. And there had been unions which had sought to carve out
0:26:04 rules and agreements with employers for how the conditions under which workers labored might
0:26:10 be ameliorated. Moreover, the middle class, rather than dwindling and dwindling, seemed to actually
0:26:15 be strengthening and growing in numbers or the appearance of new kinds of people, like white
0:26:21 collar workers or technical experts. So already in Marx’s own lifetime, and then especially in
0:26:28 what follows Marx’s lifetime, this becomes a real problem because it puts a stick into the
0:26:35 spokes of this particular historical prediction. Can you speak to this realm of ideas, which is
0:26:40 fascinating. There’s a battle of big ideas in the 19th century. What are the ideas that were
0:26:49 swimming around here? Yeah. Well, to describe the 19th century as sort of an age of ideologies,
0:26:58 is very apt because Europe is being racked and being put through the ringer of nationalism,
0:27:05 demands for self-expression of peoples who earlier have been in empires or under monarchical rule,
0:27:13 demands to redraw the map. The tremendous transformations of the Industrial Revolution
0:27:18 meant that in the course of about a generation, you would have seen the world around you change
0:27:23 in ways that made it entirely unfamiliar. You’d be able to travel across the landscape at speeds
0:27:30 that have been unthinkable when you were a child. So it’s enormous change and demands for yet more
0:27:39 change. And so it’s a great mix of ideas, ideologies, the old and the new, religious ideas, religious
0:27:48 revivals, as well as demands for secularization. And stepping into all of this are Marx and Engels
0:27:55 together in what has been called, I think with justice, one of the most important and influential
0:28:04 intellectual partnerships of history. They were very different men. They were both German by origin.
0:28:14 Marx had trained as an academic. He had married the daughter of a baron. Because of his radical
0:28:21 ideas, he had foreclosed or found himself cut off from a possible academic career and went
0:28:27 the route of radical journalism. Engels was very different. Engels was the son of an industrialist
0:28:33 and the family owned factories in Germany and in England. So he was most definitely not a member
0:28:40 of the proletariat that he and Marx were celebrating as so significant in their future historical
0:28:47 role. There were also huge differences in character between these men. Marx, when people met him,
0:28:52 they were astonished by his energy and his dynamism. They also saw him as a man who felt
0:29:00 determined to dominate arguments. He wanted to win arguments and was not one to settle for
0:29:09 compromise or a middle road. He was disorderly in his personal habits. We might mention,
0:29:15 among other things, that he impregnated the family made and didn’t accept responsibility
0:29:23 for the child. He was also not inclined to undertake regular employment in order to support
0:29:29 his growing family. That’s where Engels came in. Engels, essentially, from his family fortune
0:29:36 and then from his journalism afterwards, supported both himself and the Marx family
0:29:45 for decades. In a sense, Engels made things happen. In the mysterious way that friendships work,
0:29:51 the very differences between these men made them formidable as a dynamic duo because they balanced
0:29:59 off one another’s idiosyncrasies and turned what might have been faults into potential strengths.
0:30:03 British historian A.J.P. Taylor always has a lovely turn of phrase, even when he’s wrong,
0:30:10 about a historical issue. In this case, he was right. He said that Engels had charm and brilliance.
0:30:17 Marx was a genius. Engels saw himself as definitely the junior partner in this relationship,
0:30:22 but here’s the paradox. Without Engels, pretty clearly, Marx would not have gone on to have
0:30:26 the sort of lasting historical impact in the world of ideas that he had.
0:30:32 Just to throw in the mix, there’s interesting characters swimming around. You have Darwin.
0:30:42 He has a… I mean, it’s difficult to characterize the level of impact he had,
0:30:46 even just in the religious context. It challenges our conception of who we are as humans.
0:30:53 There’s Nietzsche, who’s also, I don’t know, hanging around the area. On the Russian side,
0:31:01 there’s Dostoevsky. It’s interesting to ask, maybe, from your perspective, did these people
0:31:08 interact in the space of ideas to where this is relevant to our discussion, or is this mostly
0:31:14 isolated? I think that it’s part of a great conversation. I think that in their works,
0:31:21 they’re reacting to one another. Dostoevsky’s thought ranges across the condition of modernity,
0:31:25 and he definitely has things to say about industrialization. I think that
0:31:30 they react to one another in these oblique ways, rather than always being at each other’s
0:31:41 throats in direct confrontations. That’s what makes the 19th century so compelling as a story,
0:31:47 just because of the sheer vitality of the arguments that are taking place in ways big and small.
0:31:54 What we should say here, when you mention Karl Marx, maybe the color red comes up for people,
0:32:01 and they think the Soviet Union, maybe China, but they don’t think Germany necessarily. It’s
0:32:10 interesting that Germany is where communism was supposed to happen. That’s right. Can you maybe
0:32:16 speak to that tension? Yeah, absolutely. This is definitely a factor in the entire history that
0:32:26 we’re referencing. Marx and Engels never really shed their identity as Germans, many of their
0:32:32 preconceptions, even those traces of nationalism that they had within themselves, even as they
0:32:40 were condemning nationalism as a fraud against the working class. Clearly, their entire formation
0:32:47 had been affected by their German background. It’s very true, as you point out, that
0:32:53 Germany is intended to be the place where these predictions will play out. They’re also in Britain,
0:33:01 also in France, also eventually in the United States. Germany, by virtue of being its central
0:33:08 location, and then its rapid development later than Britain or France in industrialization,
0:33:20 give it the special role in Marx’s worldview. It’s a lasting irony or a central irony of this
0:33:27 whole story, that when a government establishes itself that claims to be following Marx’s
0:33:32 prescriptions and realizing his vision, it happens in the wreckage of the Russian Empire,
0:33:38 a place that did not match the requirements of being industrialized, developed well on its way
0:33:47 in this historical process. Nobody knew this better than the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his colleagues
0:33:55 had a keen sense that what they were doing, exciting as it was, was a gamble. It was a risk,
0:34:02 because in fact, the revolution to really take hold had to seize power in Germany. That’s why,
0:34:09 immediately after taking power, they’re not sure they’re going to last. Their hope, their
0:34:16 promise of salvation is that a worker’s revolution will erupt in Germany, defeated Germany, in order
0:34:22 to link up with the one that has been launched in this unlikely Russian location. Henceforth,
0:34:31 great things will follow that do cue to Marx’s historical vision. The last thing to mention
0:34:41 about this is that this predominance of Germany in the thinking of Marx had two other reflections.
0:34:52 One was that German socialists and later communists organized in order to fulfill Marx’s vision,
0:35:00 and they produced something that leaves other Westerners in awe in the late 19th century.
0:35:05 That’s the building of a strong German workers movement and a social democratic party.
0:35:12 That social democratic party by 1912 is the largest party in German politics by vote,
0:35:17 and there’s the possibility they might even come to power without meeting radical revolution,
0:35:24 which again also goes against Marx’s original vision of the necessity for a revolution.
0:35:32 Workers around the world or rather radical socialists look with admiration and awe at
0:35:37 what the Germans have achieved, and they see themselves as trying to do what the Germans
0:35:43 have done. The final point is growing up during the Cold War, one thought that, well,
0:35:47 if you want to represent somebody as being a communist, that person has to have a Russian
0:35:53 accent, because Russia, after all, the homeland of this form of government, the Soviet Union,
0:36:01 that must be the point of origin. Before the Bolshevik seized power, in order to really be a
0:36:05 serious radical socialist, you needed to read German, because you needed to read Marx,
0:36:11 and you needed to read Kautsky, and you needed to read Bernstein and other thinkers in this tradition,
0:36:18 and it’s only after the Soviet seizure of power that this all changes. There’s lots of Marx of that
0:36:28 phenomenon, which is why the clash between nationalism and communism in Germany
0:36:31 is such a fascinating aspect of history and all the different trajectories it could take,
0:36:36 and we’ll talk about it. But if we return to the 19th century, you’ve said that
0:36:46 Marx’s chief rival was Russian anarchist Mihail Bakunin, who famously said in 1942,
0:36:53 quote, “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.” So what kind of future did
0:37:00 Bakunin envision? Well, Bakunin, in some things, agreed with Marx, and in many others, disagreed.
0:37:07 He was an anarchist rather than hewing to the sort of scheme of history that Marx was proposing.
0:37:14 So he did see humanity as fighting a struggle for a better way of life. He envisioned, as your
0:37:21 quote suggests, that revolution and sheer confrontation and overthrow of the existing
0:37:25 state of things, not compromise, was going to be the way to get there. But his vision was very
0:37:35 different. Rather than organizing conspiratorial and hierarchical political movement, Bakunin
0:37:43 envisioned that the ties would be far looser, that both the revolutionary movement and the
0:37:47 future state of humanity would grow out of the free association, the anarchist thinking,
0:37:53 the free association of individuals who rejected hierarchical thinking in their relations with
0:37:59 one another, rejected the state as a form of organized violence, and rejected traditional
0:38:07 religious ideas that he saw as buttressing hierarchies. So Bakunin is part of a broader
0:38:12 movement of socialists and anarchists who are demanding change and envisioning really fundamental
0:38:18 transformation. But his particular anarchist vision steers him into conflict with Marx,
0:38:25 and he makes some prophetic remarks about the problems with the system that Marx is proposing.
0:38:32 You should add to this that the very fact that Marx is a German by background and Bakunin is
0:38:36 Russian kind of adds a further nationalist or element of ethnic difference there.
0:38:46 Bakunin warned that a sort of creeping German authoritarianism might insinuate its way into
0:38:52 a movement that hewed too closely to having hierarchies in the struggle to overthrow hierarchies.
0:39:01 His anarchist convictions are not in question here. They led him into conflict with Marx,
0:39:09 and Marx railed against him, denounced him, and eventually had him expelled from the international.
0:39:15 One of the things, though, that also makes Bakunin so significant is Bakunin is the first
0:39:23 in a longer series of approaches between anarchists and communists,
0:39:29 where they try to make common cause. And you have to say that in every case it ends badly for the
0:39:36 anarchists, because the communist vision in particular, especially in its Leninist version,
0:39:44 argued for discipline and a tightly organized professional revolutionary movement. The anarchists
0:39:52 who sought to make common cause with communists, whether it was in the days of the Russian revolution
0:40:00 or the Russian Civil War, or whether it was then in the Spanish Civil War, the anarchists
0:40:08 found themselves targeted by the communists precisely because of their skepticism about
0:40:14 what turned out to be an absolutely key element in the Leninist prescription for a successful
0:40:21 revolution. If we can take that tangent a little bit. So I guess anarchists were less organized.
0:40:26 My definition. Yeah. Why do you think anarchism hasn’t been
0:40:34 rigorously tried in the way that communism was if we just take a complete tangent? I mean,
0:40:44 in one sense, we are living in an anarchy today because the nations are in an anarchic state
0:40:49 with each other. But why do you think there’s not been an anarchist revolution?
0:40:53 Well, I think that probably some anarchists would beg to differ. They would see
0:41:02 communes in Spain during the Spanish Civil War as an example of trying to put anarchist ideas
0:41:10 into place. Bakunin flitted from one area of unrest to another hoping to be in on finally the
0:41:16 founding of the sort of free communes that he had in mind. Another key point in all of this
0:41:22 is that anarchy means something different to different people as a term. So when you point
0:41:27 out quite correctly that we have an anarchic international situation, that’s kind of the
0:41:33 Hobbesian model of the war of all against all, where man is a wolf to man. Generally, except if
0:41:41 you’re talking about nihilists in the Russian revolutionary tradition, anarchists see anarchy
0:41:49 as a blessed state and one where finally people will be freed from the distorting influence of
0:41:57 hierarchies, traditional beliefs, subjugation, inequalities. So for them, anarchy growing out
0:42:04 of the liberation of the human being is seen as a positive good and peaceful. Now, that’s at odds
0:42:10 with the prescription of someone like Bakunin for how to get there. He sees overthrow as being
0:42:19 necessary on the route to that. But as we point out, it’s absolutely key to this entire dynamic
0:42:25 that to be an anarchist means that your efforts are not going to be organized the way a disciplined
0:42:30 and tightly organized revolutionary movement would be. Yeah, it’s an interesting stretch
0:42:36 that a violent revolution will take us to a place of no violence or very little violence.
0:42:46 It’s a leap. It’s a leap. And it points to a phenomenon that would have enraged Marx and
0:42:51 would have been deeply alienating to others in the tradition who followed him, but that
0:42:58 so many scholars have commented on. And that’s that there is a religious element, not a vowed
0:43:06 one, but a kind of hidden religious or secular religious element to Marx’s vision, to the tradition
0:43:14 that follows Marx. And just think of the correspondences. Marx himself as kind of a
0:43:19 positioning himself as a savior figure, whether that’s a Prometheus or a Moses who will lead
0:43:27 people to the promised land. The apocalypse or the end times is this final revolution that will
0:43:35 usher in a blessed final state, a utopia, which is equivalent to a secular version of heaven.
0:43:43 There’s the working class playing the role of humanity in its struggle to be redeemed.
0:43:53 And scholar after scholar has pointed this out. Reinhold Niebuhr back in the 1930s had
0:43:59 an article in the Atlantic magazine that talked about the Soviet Union’s communism as a religion.
0:44:07 Eric Furgelen, a German-American scholar who fled the Nazis and relocated to
0:44:14 Louisiana State University and wrote tomes about the new phenomenon of political religions
0:44:25 in the modern period. And he saw fascism and Nazism and Soviet communism as bearing the stamp
0:44:33 of political religions, meaning ideologies that promised what an earlier age would have
0:44:40 understood in religious terms. Furgelen called this the eschaton and said that these end times,
0:44:46 the eschaton was being promised in the here and now being made imminent. And he warned against
0:44:54 that saying the results are likely to be disastrous. So that’s actually a disagreement with this idea
0:45:02 that people sometimes say that the Soviet Union is an example of an atheistic society.
0:45:08 So when you have atheisms, the primary thing that underpins the society, this is what you get.
0:45:13 So that’s what you’re saying is a kind of rejection of that saying that there’s a
0:45:19 strong religious component to communism. A hidden component, one that’s not officially
0:45:26 recognized. I think that I had a chance to witness this, actually. When I was a child,
0:45:33 my family, I grew up in Chicago to a Lithuanian-American family. And my father, who was a
0:45:39 mathematician, got a very rare invitation to travel to Soviet Lithuania, to the University
0:45:46 of Vilnius, to meet with colleagues. And at this point, journeys of more than a few days or a week
0:45:54 were very rare to the Soviet Union for Americans. And the result was that I had unforgettable
0:46:00 experiences visiting the Soviet Union in Brezhnev’s day. And among the things I saw there was a
0:46:07 museum of atheism that had been established in a church that had been ripped apart from inside
0:46:18 and was meant to kind of embody the official stance of atheism. And I remember being baffled
0:46:23 by the museum on the inside because you would expect exhibits, you would expect something
0:46:28 dramatic, something that will be compelling. And instead, there was some folk art from the
0:46:35 countryside showing bygone beliefs. There were some lithographs or engravings of the Spanish
0:46:42 Inquisition and its horrors. And that was pretty much it. But as a child, I remember being
0:46:51 reproved in that museum for not wearing my windbreaker, but instead carrying it on my arm,
0:46:55 which was a very disrespectful thing to do in an official museum of atheism.
0:47:02 When I was able to visit the Soviet Union later for a language course in the summer of 1989,
0:47:09 one of the obligatory tours that we took was to file reverently past the body of Lenin
0:47:16 outside the Kremlin in the Mausoleum at Red Square. And communist mummies like those of Lenin,
0:47:23 earlier Stalin had been there as well, communist mummies like Mao or Ho Chi Minh,
0:47:33 really, I think, speak to a blending of earlier religious sensibility, reverence for relics of
0:47:40 great figures, almost saintly figures, so that even what got proclaimed as atheism turned out
0:47:44 to be a very demanding faith as well. And I think that’s a contradiction that other scholars have
0:47:50 pointed out as well. Yeah, it’s a very complicated sort of discussion. When you remove religion as
0:47:58 a big component of a society, whether something like a framing of political ideologies in religious
0:48:04 ways is the natural consequence of that. We hear nature abhorring a vacuum, and I think that
0:48:10 there are places in human character that long for transcendental explanations, right? That it’s
0:48:17 not all meaningless. In fact, there’s a larger purpose. And I think it’s not a coincidence
0:48:23 that such a significant part of resistance to communist regimes has in part come from,
0:48:31 on the one hand, religious believers, and on the other hand, from disillusioned true believers
0:48:38 in communism who find themselves undergoing an internal experience of just a revulsion,
0:48:43 finding that their ideals have not been followed through on.
0:48:49 So this topic is one of several topics that you eloquently describe as contradictions within
0:48:58 the ideas of Marx. So religious, there is a kind of religious adherence versus also the rejection
0:49:04 of religious dogma that he stood for. We’ve talked about some of the others, the tension between
0:49:10 nationalism that emerged when it was implemented versus what communism is supposed to be, which
0:49:17 is global, so globalism. Then there’s the thing that we started talking with is individualism.
0:49:22 So history is supposed to be defined by the large collection of humans,
0:49:28 but there does seem to be these singular figures, including Marx himself, that are like really
0:49:38 important. Geography of global versus restricted to certain countries. And tradition, you’re supposed
0:49:44 to break with the past and communism, but then Marxism became one of the strongest traditions
0:49:50 in history. That’s right. I think that that last one is especially significant because it’s
0:49:54 deeply paradoxical. I mean, trying to outline these contradictions, by the way, is like subjecting
0:49:59 Marx to the sort of analysis that Marx subjected other people to, which is to point out internal
0:50:05 contradictions, things that are likely to become pressure points or cracks that might open up in
0:50:14 what’s supposed to be a completely set, and durable, and effective framework. The one about
0:50:22 tradition, Marx points out that the need for revolution is in order to break with the traditions
0:50:30 that have hemmed people in, this earlier ways of thinking, earlier social structures, and to
0:50:36 constantly renovate. And what happens instead is a tradition of radical rupture emerges.
0:50:44 And that’s really tough because imagine the last stages of the Soviet Union, where
0:50:52 keen observers can tell that there are problems that are building in society. There are discontents
0:50:58 and demands that are going to clash, especially when someone like Gorbachev is proposing reforms,
0:51:05 and things are suddenly thrown open for discussion. The very notion that you have the
0:51:14 celebration of revolutionaries and the Bolshevik legacy at a time when the state wants to enforce
0:51:21 stability, and an order that’s been received from the prior generation, think of Brezhnev’s time,
0:51:28 for instance. All of that is a specially volatile mix, and unlikely to work out very
0:51:36 durably in the long run. I would love to talk about the works of Marx, the Communist Manifesto
0:51:42 and Das Kapital. What can we say that’s interesting about the manifestation of his ideas on paper?
0:51:48 Well, the first thing to note, obviously, is that those two works are very different. Das Kapital
0:51:54 is an enormous multi-volume work that Marx worked at and only got the first volume out
0:52:00 because Engels begged him to stop revising. Please just finally get it into press. And then the rest,
0:52:08 Engels had to actually reconstruct out of notes after Marx passed away. It’s a huge work. By contrast,
0:52:16 the Communist Manifesto is a brief pamphlet that ended up affecting the lives of many millions
0:52:26 worldwide in spite of its comparative brevity. The Communist Manifesto, moreover, is also
0:52:33 something of the nature of having a delayed fuse, you could say, because when it first appears amid
0:52:41 the revolutions of 1848 that sweep across Europe, the work is contrary to what people often believe.
0:52:48 That pamphlet did not cause the revolutions of 1848, many of which had national or liberal demands.
0:52:56 The voice of Marx and Engels was barely to be heard over the din of other far more prominent
0:53:03 actors. It is, however, in the aftermath that this work takes on tremendous significance
0:53:10 and becomes popularly read and popularly distributed. It’s especially the episode,
0:53:17 the bloody episode of the Paris Commune in 1871, which comes to be identified with Marx,
0:53:23 even though it was not purely inspired by Marx alone, nor were all of the Communards devoted
0:53:29 Marxists. It’s the identification of this famous or infamous episode in urban upheaval
0:53:37 that really leads to worldwide notoriety for Marx and attention to those works.
0:53:45 They’re very different in form. Das Kapital is intended to be the origin of species of its realm,
0:53:52 of economic thought, and represents years and years of work of Marx laboring in the British
0:53:59 Museum Library, working through statistics, working on little bits and pieces of a larger
0:54:06 answer to big historical questions that he believes that he’s arrived at. Its tone is
0:54:11 different from that of the Communist Manifesto, which is a call to arms. It announces with great
0:54:18 confidence what the scheme of history will be, but rather than urging that the answer might
0:54:23 be passivity and just waiting for history to play out in its preordained way, it’s also
0:54:31 a clarion call to make the revolution happen and is intended to be a pragmatic, practical
0:54:39 statement of how this is to play out. It starts in part with those ringing words about a ghost
0:54:44 or a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism, which wasn’t true at the time,
0:54:50 but decades later most definitely is the case. Is there something we could say about the difference
0:54:58 between Marxian economics and Marxist political ideology? The political side of things and the
0:55:08 economics side of things. I think that Marx would probably have responded that in fact those things
0:55:20 are indivisible. The analysis as purely theoretical certainly can be performed on any economic
0:55:27 reality that you care to mention, but the imperatives that grow out of that economic analysis
0:55:37 are political. Marx and Engels emphasize the unity of theory and practice. It’s not enough to
0:55:44 dispassionally analyze. It’s a call to action as well, because if you’ve delivered the answer to
0:55:53 how history evolves and changes, it obligates you. It demands certain action. You sometimes hear
0:56:00 from undergraduates that they’ve heard from their high school history teachers that Marxism was just
0:56:08 a theoretical construct that was the idle production of a philosopher who was not connected to the
0:56:14 world and was never meant to be tried in practice. Marx would have been furious to hear this, and
0:56:21 it’s almost heroically wrong as a historical statement, because Marx insisted that all previous
0:56:29 philosophers have theorized about reality. What now is really necessary is to change it.
0:56:39 You could say that in the abstract, a Marxist economist can certainly use Marx’s theoretical
0:56:46 framework to compare to a given economic reality, but Marx would have seen that as incomplete and
0:56:54 as deeply unsatisfactory. There’s a footnote to all of this, which is that even though Marxist
0:56:59 dialectical materialism grounds itself in these economic realities, and the political prescription
0:57:07 is supposed to flow from the economic realities and be inevitably growing out of them,
0:57:15 in the real history of communist regimes, you’ve actually seen periods where the economics becomes
0:57:22 detached from the politics. I’m thinking in particular of the new economic period,
0:57:28 early in the history of the Soviet Union, when Lenin realizes that the economy is so far gone
0:57:33 that you need to reintroduce or allow in a limited way some elements of private enterprise
0:57:40 just to start getting Russia back on course in order to have the accumulation of surplus that
0:57:47 will be necessary to build the project at all. There are many Bolsheviks who see the new economic
0:57:54 program as a new economic policy, as a terrible compromise and a betrayal of their ideas, but
0:58:01 it’s seen as necessary for a short while, and then Stalin will wreck it entirely. Consider, for that
0:58:09 matter, China today, where you have a dominant political class, the Communist Party of China,
0:58:16 which is allowing economic development and private enterprise as long as it retains
0:58:25 political control. Some of these elements already represent divergences from what Marx would have
0:58:33 expected, and this points to a really key problem or question for all of the history of communism.
0:58:38 It has to do with it being a tradition in spite of itself, and that could be expressed in the
0:58:44 following way. An original set of ideas is going to evolve. It’s going to change because circumstances
0:58:51 change. What elaborations of any doctrine, whether it’s communism or a religious doctrine or any
0:59:01 political ideology, what elaborations are natural stages in the evolution of any living set of ideas
0:59:10 or when you reach the point where some shift or some adaptation is so radically different
0:59:16 that it actually breaks with the tradition. That’s an insoluble problem. You probably have
0:59:23 to take it on a case-by-case basis. It speaks to issues like the question that gets raised today.
0:59:31 Is China, in a meaningful sense, a communist country anymore, and there’s a diversity of
0:59:37 opinion on this score? If you’re looking at the history of communism and you look at North Korea,
0:59:44 which now is on its third installment of a dynastic leader from the same family who rules
0:59:52 like a god-king over a regime that calls itself communist, is that still a form of communism?
1:00:01 Is it an evolution of? Is it a complete reversal of? I tend to want to take an anthropological
1:00:07 perspective in the history of communism and to take very seriously those people who avow
1:00:13 that they are communists, and this is the project that they have underway. Then, after hearing that
1:00:19 avowal, I think as a historian, you have to say, “Well, let’s look at the details. Let’s see what
1:00:23 changes have been made, what continuities might still exist, whether there’s a larger pattern
1:00:28 to be discerned here.” It’s a very, very complicated history that we’re talking about.
1:00:33 Let’s step back to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century,
1:00:41 and let’s steelman the case for communism. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the people there,
1:00:45 not in this way we could look back at what happened in the 20th century.
1:00:53 Why was this such a compelling notion for millions of people? Can we make the case for it?
1:00:58 Well, clearly, it was a compelling case for millions of people, and part of this story has
1:01:06 to do with, overall, has to do with the faith, conviction, stories of people sacrificing themselves,
1:01:12 as well as their countrymen in a cause that they believed was not just legitimate, but
1:01:18 demanded their total obedience. I think that throughout the early part of the 20th century,
1:01:26 late 19th century, early part of the 20th century, so much of the compelling case for
1:01:32 communism came from the confidence that people in the West more generally placed in science,
1:01:41 the notion that science is answering problems. Science is giving us solutions to how the world
1:01:48 around us works, how the world around us can be improved. Some varieties of that, and I watched
1:01:54 the quotation marks, science were crazy, like phrenology, so-called scientific racism that tried
1:02:01 to divide humanity up into discrete blocks and to manipulate them in ways that were allegedly
1:02:08 scientific or rational. So there were horrors that followed from those invocations of science,
1:02:16 but its prestige was enormous, and that in part had to do with the lessening grip of religious
1:02:24 ideas on intellectual elites, more generally processes of secularization, not total secularization,
1:02:32 but processes of secularization in Western industrial societies, and the sense that here’s
1:02:43 a doctrine that will allow escape from wars brought on by capitalist competition, poverty
1:02:52 and economic cycles and depressions brought on by capitalist competition, the inequalities of
1:03:00 societies that remain hierarchical and class-based, and this claim to being cutting-edge science,
1:03:10 I think allows people like Lenin to derive immense confidence in the prescription that
1:03:16 they have for the future, and that paradoxically the confidence that you have in broad strokes,
1:03:22 the right set of answers for how to get to the future also allows you to take huge liberties
1:03:30 with the tactics and the strategies that you follow as long as your ultimate goal remains
1:03:38 the one sketched by this master plan. So ultimately, some of the predictions of someone
1:03:46 like Lenin, that once society has reached that stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat,
1:03:53 the notion that governments will essentially be able to run themselves, and that the model he had
1:04:00 in mind, oddly enough, was Swiss post offices. Being in Swiss exile must have impressed him so
1:04:07 much with the orderliness and the sheer discipline and rationality of a Swiss post office, and he
1:04:13 thought, why can’t you organize governments like this where you don’t need political leaders,
1:04:20 you don’t need grand visions, you have procedures, you have bureaucracy, which does its job in a way
1:04:28 that’s not alienating, but simply produces the greatest good. When you think of the experiences
1:04:35 with bureaucracy in the 20th century, one’s hair stands on end to have the comparative naivete
1:04:41 on display with a prediction like that, but it derives from that confidence that it’s all going
1:04:50 to be okay because we understand, we have the key, we have the plan to how to arrive at this final
1:04:58 configuration of humanity. Yeah, the certainty of science in quotes and the goal of utopia
1:05:04 gets you in trouble, but also just on the human level from a working class person
1:05:11 perspective. From the industrial revolution, you see the growing inequality, wealth inequality,
1:05:17 and there is a kind of, you see people getting wealthy and combined with the fact that life
1:05:23 is difficult, life in general, life is suffering for many, for most, for all, if you listen to
1:05:33 some philosophers, and there is kind of a powerful idea in that the man is exploiting me, and that’s
1:05:39 a populist message that a lot of people resonate with because to a degree is true in every system,
1:05:47 and so before you kind of know how these economic and political ideas manifest themselves,
1:05:55 it is really powerful to say here beyond the horizon, there’s a world where the rich man will
1:06:02 not exploit my hard work anymore, and I think that’s a really powerful idea. It is. I mean,
1:06:06 at the same time though, it kind of points to a further problem, that’s the identity of the
1:06:14 revolutionaries. It turned out that many of these revolutionary movements, and then the founding
1:06:21 elites of communist countries in the aftermath of the Soviet seizure of power, turn out to be
1:06:25 something quite different from people who have spent their lives in factories experiencing the
1:06:30 industrial revolution firsthand. I mean, there’s a special role here for intellectuals,
1:06:38 and when Marx and Engels write into the communist manifesto, the notion that
1:06:44 certain exceptional individuals can rise above their class origins in a way other people can’t,
1:06:53 and transcend their earlier role, their materially determined role in order to gain
1:06:57 a perspective on the historical process as a whole and ally themselves with the working class
1:07:03 and its struggle for communism, this sort of special role that they carved out for themselves
1:07:09 is enormously appealing for intellectuals, because any celebration of intellectuals as world movers
1:07:20 is going to appeal to intellectuals. That gap, that frequent reality of not being in touch with
1:07:29 the very classes that the communists are aiming to represent, is a very frequent theme in this
1:07:39 story. It also speaks to a crucial part of this story, which is the breaking apart or the civil
1:07:46 war, the war of brother against brother, the fraternal struggle that splits socialism and splits
1:07:55 followers of Marx, and that’s in the aftermath of the First World War in particular, or during this
1:08:03 traumatic experience, the way in which Lenin encourages the foundation of radical parties that
1:08:07 will break with social democracy of the sort that had been elaborated, especially in places like
1:08:14 Germany, scorning their moderation and instead announcing a new dispensation, which was the
1:08:20 Leninist conception of a disciplined, hardcore, professional revolutionaries who will act in
1:08:28 ways that a mere trade union movement couldn’t. What this speaks to is a fundamental tension
1:08:38 in radical movements, because left to their own devices, Lenin announces, workers tend to focus
1:08:46 on their reality, their families, their workplace, want better working conditions, unionize and then
1:08:54 aim to negotiate with employers or to agitate for reforms on the part of the state to improve
1:09:00 their living conditions. Then they’re happy for the advances that they have won. For Lenin,
1:09:05 that’s not enough, because that’s a half measure. That’s the sort of thing that leads you into an
1:09:11 accommodation with the system rather than the overthrow of the system. There’s a constant
1:09:15 tension in this regard that plays itself out over the long haul.
1:09:25 Let’s go to Lenin and the Russian Revolution. How did communism come to power in the Soviet Union?
1:09:31 It came to power as a result of stepping into a power vacuum. The power vacuum was created by
1:09:38 the First World War. It’s the effect that it had as a total war, unprecedented pressure placed on
1:09:47 a regime that in many ways was a traditional, almost feudal monarchy, only experiencing the
1:09:54 beginnings of the modernization that the rest of Europe had undergone. For this reason, communism
1:10:01 comes to power in a place that Marx probably wouldn’t have expected in the wreckage of the
1:10:09 Russian Empire. Lenin is absolutely vital to this equation, because he’s the one who presses
1:10:19 the process forward. Ironically, given the claim of communist leaders to having the key to history,
1:10:26 just a few months previous in exile in Switzerland, Lenin had been despairing and had been convinced
1:10:34 that he may not even live to see the advent of that day. Then when revolution does break out in
1:10:45 the Russian Empire in February of 1917, Lenin is absolutely frantic to get back. When he does get
1:10:51 back as a result of a deal that is negotiated with the German high command, a step that they later
1:10:58 live very much to regret, he is able to get back and to go into action and to press for nothing
1:11:07 less than the seizure of power that brings his Bolshevik faction, the radical wing of the socialist
1:11:14 movement to power and then to build the Soviet Union. Even he was surprised how effective and
1:11:21 how fast the revolution happened. He was, although I think that he would have agreed that what was
1:11:29 necessary was a cataclysm on the scale of the First World War to make this happen. The First
1:11:37 World War shatters so many of the certainties of the 19th century that we talked about as a
1:11:44 dynamic period with argument between ideologies. It scrambles all sorts of earlier debates.
1:11:52 It renegotiates the status of the individual versus an all-powerful state and the claims of the
1:12:00 state because to win or even just to survive in World War I, you need to centralize, centralize,
1:12:07 and to put everything onto authoritarian wartime footing in country after country.
1:12:16 Lenin earlier had already articulated the possibility that this might happen by talking about how
1:12:25 the entire globe already was connected. There’s a chain of capitalist development
1:12:32 that is connecting different countries so that the weakest link in the chain, if it breaks,
1:12:42 if it pops open, it might actually inaugurate much bigger processes and start a chain reaction.
1:12:49 That’s what he intended to do and has the chance to do in the course of 1917. Incidentally,
1:12:59 just to get a sense of the sheer chaos and the human, on an individual human level, what the
1:13:07 absence of established authority meant, there’s few works of literature that are as powerful
1:13:15 as Buddy’s Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago for giving the whole sweep of contending forces in a power
1:13:22 vacuum. It’s an amazing testimony to that time and place. You said that Bolsheviks saw violence
1:13:28 and terror as necessary. Can you just speak to this aspect of there? Because they took power
1:13:34 and so this was a part of the way they saw the world. Right, and it had antecedents.
1:13:43 Even though Lenin and his colleagues are competing amongst each other for the title of
1:13:49 “Most Faithful Disciple of Marx” and most true to the received
1:13:57 theory in practice, there’s other influences, earlier influences, that operate in the Russian
1:14:04 context that were not operative, let’s say, in the German context. Here you have to step back
1:14:12 and think about the nature of Tsarism, which had maintained still into the 20th century the notion
1:14:19 of divine right to rule, that God had ordained the Tsarist system and its hierarchies, and that
1:14:27 to question these was sinful and politically not advisable. The restrictive nature of Russian
1:14:34 society at this point dominated by the Tsarist establishment. Its harshness, its reactionary
1:14:39 nature meant that people who in another context, in another country, might have been reformers,
1:14:44 could instead very easily be provoked into becoming revolutionaries.
1:14:54 Lenin is a perfect example of this because his older brother was executed as a result of being
1:15:02 in a radical revolutionary movement who was arrested and executed for association with
1:15:12 terrorism. Earlier generations of Russian radicals had founded populist groups that would aim to
1:15:20 engage in terrorism and resistance against the Tsarist regime. This included people who call
1:15:26 themselves nihilists. These nihilists were materialists who saw themselves ushering in
1:15:35 a new age by absolute rejection of earlier religious traditions and aiming for material
1:15:44 answers to the challenges of the day. Among them was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who wrote what’s been
1:15:49 called the worst book ever written. It was, in fact, one of Lenin’s favorite books in Russian,
1:15:56 its Stodielat, in English it gets translated, “What is to be done?” It’s a utopian novel about
1:16:03 revolutionaries and how revolutionaries should act with one another in open ways, new ways,
1:16:10 nontraditional ways in order to help usher in the coming revolution. Lenin loved the work
1:16:17 and said it had the great merit of showing you how to be a revolutionary. There’s the Marxist
1:16:25 influence and then there’s Russian populist, nihilist influence, which is also a very live
1:16:33 current in Lenin’s thinking. When you add these things together, you get an explosive mix because
1:16:42 Lenin as a result and part of this family trauma of his brother becomes an absolutely reconcilable
1:16:48 enemy of the Tsarist regime and sets about turning himself into what you might call a
1:16:55 guided missile for revolution. He turns himself into a machine to produce revolutionary change.
1:17:03 I mean that with little hyperbole. Lenin at one point shared with friends that he loved listening
1:17:09 to music, but he tried not to listen to beautiful music like Beethoven because it made him feel
1:17:17 gentle. What the revolution demanded was realism, hardness, absolute, steely resolve.
1:17:25 Lenin worries even to follow revolutionaries by the intensity of his single-minded focus to
1:17:31 revolution. He spends his days thinking about the revolution. He probably dreamt about the
1:17:41 revolution. 24/7, it’s an existence where he’s paired off other human elements quite deliberately
1:17:46 in order to turn himself into an effective instigator of revolution. When the opportunity
1:17:55 comes in 1917, he’s primed and ready for that role. It’s interesting that nihilism,
1:18:00 Russian nihilism had an impact on Lenin. Traditionally, nihilist philosophy rejects
1:18:06 all sorts of traditional morality. There’s a kind of cynical dark view and where’s delight?
1:18:13 The light is science. The light is science and materialism. Oh boy. The nihilists, some of them
1:18:18 did a very bad job of hiding their political beliefs because they were famous for wearing
1:18:25 blue-tinted spectacles, the sunglasses of the late 19th century, as a way of shielding their eyes
1:18:34 from light, but also having a dispassionate and realistic view of reality outside. Nihilists,
1:18:40 as the name would suggest, do reject all prior certainties, but they make an exception for science
1:18:46 and see that as the possibility for founding an entirely new mode of existence.
1:18:53 For most people, I think nihilism is introduced in the brilliant philosophical work. I don’t know
1:18:59 if you’re familiar with it by the name of the big Lebowski. Nihilists appear there. I think
1:19:05 they summarize the nihilist tradition quite well, but it is indeed fascinating. Also, it is
1:19:11 fascinating that Lenin, and I’m sure this influenced Stalin as well, that hardness was the
1:19:19 necessary human characteristics to take the revolution to its end. That’s right. So prior
1:19:28 generations of nihilists or populists had resembled Lenin’s single-mindedness by arguing that
1:19:36 one needed total devotion for this. To play this role in society, it was not enough to be
1:19:41 somewhat committed. Total commitment was necessary. The other theme that’s at work here, obviously,
1:19:48 is if we consider Lenin affected by Marxist ideas and the homegrown Russian revolutionary
1:19:59 tradition that predates the arrival of Marxist socialism in Russia, it’s the theme of
1:20:07 needing to adapt to local conditions. So Marxism or communism in Vietnam or in Cuba
1:20:15 or in Cambodia or in Russia will be very different in its local adaptations and local themes and
1:20:23 resonance than it was in Germany where Marx would have expected all this to unfold.
1:20:31 So let’s talk about Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, this little interplay that eventually led to
1:20:36 Stalin accumulating, grabbing, and taking a hold of power. What was that process like?
1:20:47 So Lenin’s supreme confidence leads the party through some really difficult steps. That involves
1:20:53 things like signing the humiliating treaty with the Germans, the Treaty of Bresletovsk,
1:20:59 where critics of the Bolsheviks said that no one who loved their country would have agreed to
1:21:06 a so draconian, so harsh a settlement that saw the peeling off of large territories that had
1:21:11 belonged to the Russian Empire. Lenin is willing to undertake this because of the larger prize.
1:21:16 He even says that he’s not going to bother to read the treaty because shortly that treaty is
1:21:20 going to be a dead letter. His expectation is, revolution’s going to break out everywhere,
1:21:26 especially after we’ve raised the standard, first of all, in the wreckage of the Russian Empire.
1:21:31 And we should probably say that that treaty, to some small degree, maybe you can elaborate
1:21:40 now or later, lays the groundwork for World War II because resentment is a thing that with time
1:21:48 can lead to just extreme levels of destruction. Right. For German sensibilities, for German
1:21:57 nationalists, that treaty meant that Germany had essentially won World War I. Only a turn of events
1:22:04 that many of them couldn’t even follow or conceive of, the arrival of American troops, the tipping
1:22:12 of the balance in the West led to that reversal. And one of the many scholars and contemporaries
1:22:16 pointed out that Germany between the wars was full of people who were convinced that Germany
1:22:22 had actually not lost the war. However, that victory of theirs was defined. So most definitely,
1:22:27 that groundwork is late. And incidentally, this is something we can talk about later,
1:22:32 World War I and World War II have a lot of linkages like that. And as time goes by,
1:22:39 I think historians are going to focus on those linkages even more. But Lenin also in his leadership
1:22:48 against the odds leads the Bolsheviks to power in the Russian Civil War, where most betting people
1:22:54 would have given them very slight odds of even surviving given how many enemies they faced off
1:23:03 against. Lenin’s insistence upon discipline and upon good organization allowed the Bolsheviks to
1:23:13 emerge as the winners. And yet, a great disappointment follows. Lenin, as we said, had expected that
1:23:17 revolution will break out soon everywhere. And all it’ll be necessary for the Bolsheviks to do,
1:23:24 having given the lead, is to link up with others. And so he considered that what would be established
1:23:33 would be a red bridge between a communist Russia and once Germany inevitably plunged ahead into
1:23:38 its revolutionary transformation, a communist Germany. That doesn’t end up happening. On the
1:23:45 contrary, what happens in Germany is a out and out shooting war between different kinds of socialists.
1:23:50 When Germany establishes a democracy that later goes by the name of the Weimar Republic,
1:23:56 the government is a government of social democrats, moderate social democrats,
1:24:01 who are fearful of what they see as Russian conditions of disorder and who are not necessarily
1:24:08 in sympathy with the Leninist vision of tightly organized authoritarian rule.
1:24:15 So, communists who revolt in Germany are brutally suppressed by mercenaries,
1:24:24 hardened front fighters, and nationalist radicals hired by the German socialist government. And
1:24:32 the result is a wound that just won’t heal in the German socialist movement as a result of this
1:24:39 fratricide. It frustrates Lenin’s ambitions, so too does the fact that Poland, rather than
1:24:46 going Bolshevik, resists attempts by the Bolsheviks to move forward and to connect up with Germany.
1:24:54 The Poles yet again play a tremendously important historical role in changing the expected course
1:25:02 of historical events. It’s in the aftermath of these unexpected turns that Lenin and his
1:25:08 colleagues realize that they’re in this for the long haul. It’s necessary to wait longer. They
1:25:16 don’t lose hope in, or confidence, you might say, in the eventual coming of international
1:25:22 workers’ revolution, but it’s been deferred. It’s been put off. And so the question then arises,
1:25:28 what do you build within a state that’s established called the Union of Soviet Socialist
1:25:35 Republics or the Soviet Union? Lenin, as a result of an assassination attempt, is
1:25:44 deeply affected in his health and would have loved to continue for years longer to steer
1:25:52 the regime. But he’s sidelined because of his declining health, and there emerges a contest,
1:26:03 a contest between a very charismatic leader, Leo Trotsky, on the one hand, who is an amazing orator,
1:26:11 who is an intellectual, who has traveled widely in the world, who has seen much of the world,
1:26:20 and who is a brilliant writer, a far-ranging intellect, and is seen as extremely radical
1:26:27 because of his demand for permanent revolution, the acceleration of revolutionary processes
1:26:32 to drive history forward, to strike while the iron is hot, and on the other hand,
1:26:38 is an extremely unlikely contender for power. And that’s a man who’s probably the antithesis of
1:26:45 charisma, if you were to meet him in person, a guy with a squeaky, somewhat high-pitched voice,
1:26:54 not well-suited to revolutionary oratory, his face pockmarked with the scars of youthful illness,
1:27:02 and who, moreover, doesn’t speak a fine, sophisticated Russian, but speaks a Russian,
1:27:07 heavily inflected with a Georgian accent from that part of the Russian Empire from which he came,
1:27:15 and that was Stalin. And I know that you already have a marvelous interview with Stephen Kotkin,
1:27:23 the brilliant biographer of Stalin, who has so many insights on that subject.
1:27:31 The one thing that even after reading about Stalin, that never ceases to surprise me,
1:27:38 even in retrospect, is that Stalin gains a reputation not as a fiery radical,
1:27:45 but as a moderate, a man who’s a conciliator, someone who’s calm when others are excited,
1:27:53 someone who is able, because of his organizational skills, to resolve merely theoretical disputes
1:28:00 with practical solutions. Now, to fully take this aboard, we have to unknow what we know
1:28:07 from our vantage point about Stalin’s leadership, Stalin’s brutality in eliminating his opposition,
1:28:14 the cult of personality that, against all odds, got built up around Stalin so successfully,
1:28:23 and the absolute dominant role that led him later to be described as Genghis Khan with a telephone.
1:28:30 A brutal dictator with ancient barbarism, allied to the use of modern technology.
1:28:38 While Trotsky is delivering stirring speeches and theorizing, Stalin works behind the scenes to
1:28:46 control personnel decisions in the Bolshevik movement and in the state. And it’s a cliche,
1:28:54 because it’s true that personnel is policy. Trotsky is increasingly sidelined and then demonized,
1:29:01 and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union, and later murdered in Mexico City. For Stalin,
1:29:06 eliminating his enemies turned out to be the solution that he was most comfortable with.
1:29:13 So, from that perspective, there’s a lot of fascinating things here. So, one is that you
1:29:23 can have a wolf, a brutal dictator in moderate clothing. So, just because somebody presents
1:29:28 this moderate, doesn’t mean they can’t be one of the most destructive, not the most
1:29:35 destructive humans in history. The other aspect is, using propaganda, you can construct an image
1:29:43 of a person, even though they’re uncharismatic, not attractive, their voice is no good, all of those
1:29:50 aspects, you can still have a, like, they’re still to this day, a very large number of people that
1:29:57 see him as a religious type of god-like figure. So, the power of propaganda there.
1:30:02 Today, we would call that curating the image. Curating the image, but to the extent to which
1:30:09 you can do that effectively is quite incredible. So, in that way, also, Stalin is a study of the
1:30:16 power of propaganda. Can we just talk about the ways that the power vacuum is filled by Stalin,
1:30:23 how that manifests itself? Perhaps one angle we can take is, how was the secret police used?
1:30:29 How did power manifest itself under Stalin? Well, before getting to the secret police,
1:30:36 I would just want to add the other crucial element, which is Lenin’s patronage. Stalin doesn’t brawl
1:30:44 his way into the Bolshevik party and dominate. He’s co-opted and promoted to positions of
1:30:51 importance by Lenin, who sees him as a somewhat rough around the edges, not very sophisticated,
1:30:59 much less cosmopolitan than other Bolsheviks, but dependable, reliable, and committed revolutionary.
1:31:04 So, I think that one of the things that’s emerged, especially after archives opened up
1:31:08 with the fall of the Soviet Union, and we were able to read more and more the communications of
1:31:17 Lenin, is that it’s not the case that we’re talking here about a unconnected series of careers.
1:31:22 Rather, there are connections to be made. It’s true that towards the end of his life,
1:31:29 Lenin came to be worried by complaints about Stalin’s rudeness towards fellow Bolsheviks,
1:31:35 and in his testament, he warned against Stalin’s testimonies. Lenin fundamentally saw himself
1:31:42 as irreplaceable, and so that doesn’t really help in a succession struggle. Stalin
1:31:49 is able to rely on a secret police apparatus that have been built up under Lenin already.
1:31:58 It’s very early in the foundation of the Soviet state that the Chekha, or the Extraordinary
1:32:07 Commission, is established as a secret police to terrify the enemies, beat down the opponents of
1:32:15 the regime, and to keep an eye on society more generally. The person who’s chosen for that task
1:32:23 also is an anomaly among Bolsheviks. That is a man of Polish aristocratic background,
1:32:30 Felix Zerzhinsky, who comes to be known by the nickname Iron Felix. Here’s a man about whom
1:32:38 a cult of personality also is created. Zerzhinsky is celebrated in the Soviet period as the model of
1:32:47 someone who’s harsh but fair, an executioner but with a heart of gold, somebody who loves children,
1:32:55 somebody who has a tender heart but forces himself to be steely-willed against the opponents
1:33:03 of the ideological project of the Bolsheviks. Zerzhinsky is succeeded by figures who will
1:33:10 be absolutely instrumental to Stalin’s exercise of power, and they’re not immune either. Stalin,
1:33:18 in his purges, takes care also to purge the secret police as a way of finding others upon
1:33:27 whom to deflect blame for earlier atrocities and to produce a situation where even committed
1:33:33 Bolsheviks are uncertain of what’s going to happen next and feel their own position to be
1:33:39 precarious. Incidentally, there are other influences that probably are brought to bear here as well.
1:33:44 It gets said about Stalin that he used to spend a lot of time flipping through Machiavelli’s The
1:33:54 Prince. It seems that Stalin’s personal copy of The Prince, nobody knows where that is if it still
1:34:03 exists, but historians have found annotations in works by Lenin that Stalin, who is a voracious
1:34:10 reader as it turns out, made in the back of one of the books, which sounds almost like a commentary
1:34:17 on Machiavelli’s almost but not quite suggestion that the ends justify the means. Stalin’s own
1:34:28 writing says that if someone is strong, active, and intelligent, even if they do things that other
1:34:35 people condemn, they’re still a good person. Stalin’s self-conception of himself is someone
1:34:42 who along these lines, and in line with Lenin’s emphasis on practical results and discipline,
1:34:51 somebody who gets things done, that’s the crucial ethical standard. Ultimately, in criticisms,
1:34:58 by later dissidents of Bolshevik morality, this question of what is the ethical standard,
1:35:07 what is the ethical law, will bring this question into focus. This goes back to Marx as well,
1:35:14 incidentally. The notion that any ethical system, any notion of right or wrong is purely a product
1:35:20 of class identity, because every class produces its distinctive ideas, its distinctive religion,
1:35:27 its distinctive art forms, its distinctive styles means that with no one transcendent
1:35:33 or absolute morality, it’s all up for grabs. Then it’s a question of power and the exercise of power
1:35:40 with no limits untrammeled by any laws whatsoever. Dictatorship in its purest form,
1:35:44 something that Lenin had avowed, and then Stalin comes to practice even more fully.
1:35:51 Not that it’s possible to look deep into a person’s heart, but if you look at Trotsky,
1:35:57 you could say that he probably believed deeply in Marxism and communism, probably the same with
1:36:03 Lenin. What do you think Stalin believed? Was he a believer? Was he a pragmatist that used
1:36:10 communism as a way to gain power and ideology as part of propaganda, or did he in his own
1:36:15 private moments deeply believe in this utopia? That’s an excellent question, and you’re quite
1:36:21 right. We cannot peer into the inmost recesses of somebody’s being and know for sure. My intuition,
1:36:30 though, is that this may be a false alternative, a false dichotomy. It’s natural enough to see
1:36:36 somebody who does monstrous things to say, “Well, ideology is being used as a cover for it,” but
1:36:42 I think that my suspicion is that these were actually perfectly compatible in his historical
1:36:49 role. The notion that there’s an ideology, it gives you a master plan for how history is going
1:36:58 to develop, and your own power, the increase of that power to unprecedented proportions,
1:37:05 your ability to torment even your own faithful followers in order just to see them squirm,
1:37:15 which Stalin was famous for, to keep people unsettled. To me, it seems that for some people,
1:37:19 those might not actually be opposed, but might even be mutually reinforcing,
1:37:25 which is a very scary thought. It’s terrifying, but it’s really important to understand.
1:37:35 If we look at once Stalin takes power at some of the policies, so the collectivization of
1:37:45 agriculture, why do you think that failed so catastrophically, especially in the 1930s with
1:37:53 Ukraine and Politomor? I think the short answer is that the Bolsheviks in particular,
1:37:57 but also communists more generally, have had a very conflicted relationship with agriculture.
1:38:10 Agriculture as a very vital, obviously, but also very traditional and old form of human activity
1:38:17 has about it all of the smell of tradition and other problematic factors as well.
1:38:26 In a place like Russia or the Russian Empire, peasants throughout history for centuries had
1:38:35 wanted one thing, and that was to be left alone to farm their own land. That’s their utopia,
1:38:42 and that for someone like Marx, who had a vision of historical development and transcendence and
1:38:48 progress as being absolutely key, does not mesh at all with that vision. For that reason,
1:38:56 when Marx comes up with this tableau, this tremendous display of historical transformation
1:39:02 taking place over centuries and headed towards the final utopia, the role of farmers there
1:39:14 is negligible. Peasants get called conservative and dull as sacks of potatoes in Marx’s historical
1:39:21 vision because they’re limited in their horizon. They farm their land, their plot, and don’t have
1:39:26 greater revolutionary goals beyond working the land and having it free and clear.
1:39:33 By contrast, industrialization, that’s progress. Images that today would be deeply disturbing
1:39:40 to an environmentalist’s sensibility. Smoke steps, belching smoke, the byproducts of industry,
1:39:48 a landscape transformed by the factory model, that’s what Marx and then later the Bolsheviks
1:39:56 have in mind. Similarly, the goal, even as articulated in Marx’s writings, is to put agriculture
1:40:03 and farming on a factory model so that you won’t need to deal with this traditional
1:40:09 role of the independent farmer or the peasant. Instead, you’ll have people who benefit from
1:40:17 progress, benefit from rationalization by working factory farms. In approaching the question of
1:40:25 collectivization, we have to keep in mind that for Stalin and his comrades who are bound and
1:40:30 determined to drag Russia, kicking and screaming into the modern age and not to allow it be beaten
1:40:37 because of its backwardness, as Stalin puts it, traditional forms of agriculture are not what
1:40:45 they have in mind. In their rank of desired outcomes, industrialization, especially massive,
1:40:54 heavy industry, is the sine qua non. That’s their envisioned future. Agriculture rates below.
1:41:01 In that case, the crucial significance of collectivization is to get a handle on the food
1:41:06 situation in order to make it predictable and not to find oneself in another crisis,
1:41:11 like during the Civil War, when the cities are starving, industry is robbed of labor,
1:41:19 and the factories are at a standstill. This is really the core approach to collectivization,
1:41:26 to put the productive capacities of the farmers in a regimented way, in a state-controlled way,
1:41:36 under the control of the state. This produces vast human suffering because, for the farmers,
1:41:42 their plot of land that they thought they had gained as a result of the revolution
1:41:49 is now taken away. They no longer have the same incentives they had before to be successful
1:41:54 farmers. In fact, if you’re a successful farmer and maybe have a cow as opposed to your neighbors
1:42:02 who have no cow, you’re defamed and denounced as a kulak, a tight-fisted exploiter, even though
1:42:08 you might be helping to develop agriculture in the region that you’re from. The result is
1:42:18 human tragedy on a vast scale. Allied to that, incidentally, is Stalin’s sense that
1:42:28 this is a chance to also target people who are opposed to the Bolshevik regime for other reasons,
1:42:34 whether it’s because of their Ukrainian identity, whether it’s because of a desire for a different
1:42:42 nationalist project. For Stalin, there are many motives that roll into collectivization.
1:42:48 The final thing to be said is you’re quite right that collectivization proves to be a failure
1:42:55 because the Soviet Union never finally gets a grasp on the problems of agricultural production.
1:43:04 By the end of the Soviet Union, they’re importing grain from the west in spite of having some of
1:43:10 tremendously rich farmland to be found worldwide. The reason for that had to do in part, I think,
1:43:17 with the incentives that had been taken away. Prosperous individual farmers have a motive
1:43:26 for working their land and maximizing production. By contrast, if you are an employee of a factory
1:43:33 style agricultural enterprise, the incentives run in very different directions. The joke that
1:43:40 was common for decades in the Soviet Union and other communist countries with similar systems was,
1:43:48 we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. Even labor, which is rhetorically respected and
1:43:57 valorized in practice, is rewarded with very slim rewards and, the last point, immobility. The
1:44:03 collectivization reduces the mobility of the peasants who are not allowed because of internal
1:44:09 passports to move to the cities unless they have permission. They’re locked in place. You’ve got
1:44:15 to say, at the time and afterwards, that looked a lot like feudalism or neo-feudalism in terms of
1:44:23 the restrictions on workers in the countryside. It is a terrifying, horrific, and fascinating study
1:44:35 of how the ideal, when meeting reality, fails. The idea here is to make agriculture more efficient,
1:44:42 to be more productive, so the industrialized model. The implementation through collectivization
1:44:49 had all the elements that you’ve mentioned that contended with human nature, first with the
1:44:57 Kulaks. The successful farmers were punished. Then the incentive is not just not to be a successful
1:45:05 farmer, but to hide. Added to that, there’s a growing quota that everybody’s supposed to deliver on,
1:45:11 that nobody can deliver on. Now, because you can’t deliver on that quota, you’re basically exporting
1:45:18 all your food and you can’t even feed yourself. Then you suffer more and more and more and there’s
1:45:24 a vicious downward spiral of you can’t possibly produce that. Now, there’s another human incentive
1:45:33 where you’re going to lie. Everybody lies on the data. Even Stalin himself probably, as evil or
1:45:38 incompetent as he may be, was not even getting good data about what’s even happening. Even
1:45:44 if he wanted to stop the vicious downward cycle, which he certainly didn’t, but he wouldn’t be
1:45:54 even able to. There’s all these dark consequences of what on paper seems like a good ideal. It’s
1:46:01 a fascinating study of things on paper. That’s right. When implemented, it can go really, really
1:46:08 bad. That’s right. The outcome here is a horrific man-made famine, not a natural disaster, not
1:46:14 bad harvest, but a man-made famine as a result of then the compulsion that gets used by the Soviet
1:46:21 state to extract those resources, cordoning off the area, not allowing starving people to escape.
1:46:29 You put very well some of the implications of this case study in how things look in the
1:46:38 abstract versus in practice. Those phenomena were going to haunt the rest of the experience
1:46:45 of the Soviet Union. The whole notion that up and down the chain of command, everybody is falsifying
1:46:54 or tinkering with or purifying the statistics or their reports in order not to look bad and
1:47:01 not to have vengeance visited upon them reaches the point where nobody, in spite of the pretense
1:47:08 of comprehensive knowledge. There’s a state planning agency that creates five-year plans
1:47:15 for the economy as a whole and which is supposed to have accurate statistics. All of this is founded
1:47:24 upon a foundation of sand. That’s inadvertent. That’s not an intended side effect. What you
1:47:32 described in terms of the internal dynamics of fostering conflict in a rural society was
1:47:39 absolutely not inadvertent. That was deliberate. The doctrine was you bring civil war. Now, had
1:47:44 there been social tensions before? Of course there had. Had there been envies? Had there been
1:47:52 differentiations in wealth or status? Of course there had been, but a deliberate plan to bring
1:47:59 class conflict and bring civil war and then heighten it in the countryside does damage,
1:48:06 and not least of that, is this phenomenon of a negative selection. Those who have most enterprise,
1:48:12 those who are most entrepreneurial, those who have most self-discipline, those who are best
1:48:21 organized will be winnowed again and again and again, sending the message that mediocrity is
1:48:30 comparatively much safer than talent. This pattern, incidentally, gets transposed and in
1:48:38 tremendously harrowing ways also to the entire group of Russian intelligentsia and intellectuals
1:48:49 of other peoples who are in the Soviet Union. They discover similarly that to be independent,
1:48:59 to have a voice which is not compliant carries with it tremendous penalties in especially in
1:49:06 Stalin’s reigns of terror. Again, a difficult question about a psychology of one human being,
1:49:16 but to what degree do you think Stalin was deliberately punishing the farmers and the
1:49:26 Ukrainian farmers? To what degree was he looking the other way and allowing the large-scale incompetence,
1:49:31 the horrific incompetence of the collectivization of agriculture to happen?
1:49:37 I think it was both things. There were not only sins of omission, but also sins of commission.
1:49:46 I don’t think for Stalin it was personal. These are people who are very remote from him. He never
1:49:53 coming into contact with the people who are suffering in this way. Attributed to him is the
1:50:00 quote that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. I think he in action
1:50:07 certainly acted in a way that would vindicate that. The process of collectivization was not
1:50:14 just a bureaucratic snafu following a bureaucratic snafu. There was the mobilization of communist
1:50:22 youth, of military, of party activists to go into the regions and to search for hidden food,
1:50:35 to extract the food where it could be found. We have testimony to this in the case of people
1:50:43 who later became dissidents like Lev Kopolev who wrote in his memoirs about how he was among those
1:50:49 who were sent in to enact these policies. He saw families with the last food being taken away even
1:50:56 as signs of starvation were visible already in the present. Yet he did not go mad. He didn’t kill
1:51:02 himself. He didn’t fall into despair because he believed. He had been taught and believed at least
1:51:09 then that this was justified. This was a larger historical process and a greater good would result
1:51:14 even from these enormities. I think that this was quite deliberate.
1:51:27 Following this, as you’ve mentioned, there was the process of the great terror or the intellectuals
1:51:33 where the Communist Party officials, the military officers, the bureaucrats, everybody,
1:51:40 750,000 people were executed and over a million people were sent to the gulag.
1:51:48 What can you say by way of wisdom from this process of the great terror that Stalin implemented
1:52:00 from 36 to 38? Well, the terror had a variety of victims. There were people who were true believers
1:52:06 and who were Bolsheviks who were especially targeted by Stalin because he aimed to revenge
1:52:11 himself for all the condescension that he’d experienced in that movement before and also to
1:52:19 eliminate rivals or potential rival power centers and members of their families. Then there were
1:52:27 people who simply got caught up in a process whereby the repressive organs in the provinces were
1:52:33 sent quotas. You have to achieve your quota and maybe even better yet overachieve your quota,
1:52:39 overperform. That would be the key to success and rising in the bureaucracies and the age of the
1:52:49 terror. What’s so horrifying is the way in which a whole society stood paralyzed in this process
1:52:57 and how neighbors would be taken away in the middle of the night and people would be wary
1:53:09 of talking about it. Resistance, at least in these urban centers, was entirely paralyzed by fear when,
1:53:16 if one had somehow find a way to mobilize, somehow a way to resist the process, the results
1:53:20 might have been different. There’s an astonishing book. There are so many great books
1:53:28 that have come out quite recently even on these topics. Orlando Figes has an amazing book called
1:53:38 “The Whispers” that traces several families’ history in the Stalin period. It’s a testimony to
1:53:44 how a whole society and some of its most intelligent people got winnowed again and again
1:53:51 and again in that process of negative selection that we talked about, the lasting dislocation
1:53:57 and scars that this left, and the way in which how people were not able to talk about these things
1:54:05 in public because that would put you next on the list suspected of having less than total
1:54:11 devotion to the state. I think one of the things that also is so terrifying about the entire process
1:54:20 is even total devotion wasn’t enough. The process took on a life of its own, and I think that it
1:54:27 might even have surprised Stalin in some ways, not enough to short-circuit the process, but the
1:54:36 notion where people were invited to denounce neighbors, coworkers, maybe even family members,
1:54:44 meant that ever larger groups of people would be brought into the orbit of the secret police,
1:54:50 tortured in order to produce confessions. Those confessions then would lead to more lists of
1:54:57 suspects of people who had to be investigated and either executed or sent to the gulags.
1:55:11 The uncertainty that this produced was enormous. Even loyalty was not enough to save people. The
1:55:18 stories, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is full of stories of dedicated communists
1:55:24 who find themselves in the gulag and are sure that some mistake has been made. And if only
1:55:30 Comrade Stalin would hear about the terrible thing that has happened to them, surely it would be
1:55:36 corrected. And nothing like this, when everyone else, by contrast, accused of terrible crimes,
1:55:43 there must be some truth behind that. Talk about ways of disaggregating a society,
1:55:53 ways of breaking down bonds of trust. This left lasting traces on an entire society that endured
1:56:01 to this very day. Yeah, again, a fascinating study of human nature. There essentially was
1:56:11 an emergent quota of confessions of treason. So even though the whole society was terrified
1:56:19 and were through terror or loyal, there still needed to be a lot of confessions of people
1:56:25 being disloyal. So you’re just making shit up now. At a mass scale, stuff is being made up.
1:56:30 And it’s also the machine or the secret police starts eating itself, because you want to be
1:56:43 confessing on your boss, on this weird, dark, dynamic system where human nature is just worst.
1:56:51 Absolutely. Absolutely. Why, if we look at this deep discussion we had about Marxism,
1:57:01 to what degree can we understand from that lens, why the implementation of communism in the Soviet
1:57:08 Union failed in such a dark way, both in the economic system with agriculture and industrialization,
1:57:16 and on the human way with just violation of every possible human right and the torture and the
1:57:22 suffering and gulags and all of this. Well, I think some of it comes back to the ethical
1:57:29 grounding that we mentioned earlier, the notion that ethics are entirely situational,
1:57:35 and that any ethical system is an outgrowth of a particular class reality, a particular material
1:57:45 reality, and that leaves the door wide open. So I think that that aspect was present from
1:57:56 the very beginning. I think that the expectations of Marx that the revolution would take hold and
1:58:04 be successful in a developed country played a role here as well. Russia, which compared to the
1:58:10 rest of Europe, was less developed even before the First World War, is in a dire state after
1:58:16 all of the ravage and the millions of deaths that continue even after the war has ended in the West.
1:58:27 That leaves precious little in the way of structural restraints or a functioning society
1:58:35 that would say, “Let’s not do things this way.” I think that in retrospect, that special role
1:58:42 carved out for special individuals who can move this process forward and accelerate historical
1:58:50 development allowed for people to step into those roles and appoint themselves
1:58:56 executors of this ideological vision. So I think those things play a role as well.
1:59:01 Now, it’s hard to do counterfactual history, but to what degree is this basically that
1:59:06 the Communist ideals create a power vacuum and a dictator type figure steps in,
1:59:11 and then it’s a role of the dice of what that dictator is like? So can you imagine a world where
1:59:19 the dictator was Trotsky? Would we see very similar type of things or is the hardness and the brutality
1:59:26 of somebody like Stalin manifested itself in being able to look the other way as some of these
1:59:33 dark things were happening more so than somebody like Trotsky who would presumably be
1:59:37 see the realizations of these policies and be shocked?
1:59:42 Well, counterfactuals are hard, like you said, and one very quickly gets off into
1:59:48 really deep waters in speculation. There were contemporaries and there have been scholars
1:59:55 since who suggest that Trotsky, by all indications, might have been even more radical than Stalin in
2:00:04 the tempo that he wanted to achieve. Think of the slogan of permanent revolution.
2:00:14 Trotsky also, who dabbled in so many things in his intellectual life, also spoke in almost
2:00:18 utopian terms that are just astonishing to read, in utopian terms about the construction of the
2:00:25 new man and the new woman, and that out of the raw material of humanity, once you really get
2:00:30 going and once you’ve established a system that matches your hopes for the future,
2:00:36 it’ll be possible to reconfigure people and talk about ambition to create essentially the
2:00:43 next stage in human evolution, a new species growing out of humanity. Those don’t sound like
2:00:49 very modest or limited approaches, and I guess we just really won’t know.
2:00:55 Do some of the destructive characteristics of communism have to go hand in hand? The central
2:01:02 planning that we talked about, the censorship with the secret police, the concentration of power
2:01:11 in one dictatorial figure, and again with the secret police, the violent oppression.
2:01:17 One should add to those factors that have a kind of interrelated logic of their own.
2:01:24 The sheer fact that communism comes to power in most of these instances as a result of war,
2:01:29 as a result of the destruction of what came before and a power vacuum. Think of
2:01:40 the Russian revolutions in the wake of the fall of Tsarism. Think of the expansion of Stalin’s
2:01:45 puppet regimes into Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II and the Red Army moving into
2:01:52 Occupy areas in Eastern Europe, although they announced that they’re coming as liberators.
2:02:01 Consider the foundation of communist China on the heels of World War II and yet more
2:02:12 Chinese civil war. Consider cases like Korea, Vietnam. It’s likely that this already
2:02:19 is a key element in setting things up for further crisis because upon seizure of power,
2:02:25 if your expectation is, well, it ought to be relatively easy to get the system rolling and
2:02:32 put it on a basis that’s, after all, we have the roadmap to the future, there will follow
2:02:38 frustrations and impediments and resistance. There’s a ratchet effect then there because it’ll
2:02:45 produce more repression, producing even more problems that follow. What drives the whole
2:02:51 thing forward though, especially in its Leninist version, but already visible with Marx and Engels,
2:02:58 is the insistence on confidence. If you have the key to the future, all of these things are possible
2:03:09 and necessary. This leads to an ethos, I think, that’s very hard for historians to quantify or
2:03:17 to study in a methodical way, but it’s the insistence that you hear with Lenin and then,
2:03:27 especially with Stalin, that to be a Bolshevik means to be hard, to be realistic, to be consequential,
2:03:34 meaning you don’t shy away from doing what needs to be done, even if your primordial,
2:03:39 ethical remainders from whatever earlier experience you have rebelled against it.
2:03:46 Under Stalin, there’s a constant slogan of the Bolshevik tempo. The Bolsheviks, there’s no
2:03:53 fortresses that they can’t storm. They can do everything. In a way, this is the assertion that
2:04:00 it’s will over everything. History can be moved forward and accelerated and probably your own
2:04:07 actions justified as a result, no matter what they were, if you are sufficiently hard and determined
2:04:12 and have the confidence to follow through. Then that obviously raises the ultimate question,
2:04:16 what happens when that confidence ebbs or erodes or when it’s lost?
2:04:27 If we go to the 1920s to the home of Karl Marx, fascism as implemented by the Nazi party in Germany
2:04:38 was called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. What were the similarities and differences
2:04:44 of fascism, socialism, how it was conceived of in fascism and communism? Maybe you can
2:04:50 speak to the broader battle of ideas that was happening at the time and battle of political
2:04:55 control that was happening at the time. Well, I mean, there’s a whole bunch of terms that are
2:05:04 in play here. When we speak of fascism, fascism in its original sense is a radical movement
2:05:11 founded in Italy, which though it had been allegedly on the winning side of World War I,
2:05:17 is disappointed with the lack of rise in national prestige and territory that
2:05:25 commences after the end of the war. Bizarrely enough, it’s a socialist by the name of Benito
2:05:34 Mussolini who crafts an ideological message of glorification of the state, the people at large
2:05:44 united in a militaristic way on the march, ready to attack, ready to expand. A complete overthrow
2:05:52 of liberal ideas of the rights of the individual or of representative democracy and instead
2:06:01 vesting power in one leader, in his case the Duce Mussolini, in order to replicate in peacetime
2:06:06 the ideal of total military mobilization in wartime.
2:06:17 Although the Nazis in Germany are inspired and borrow heavily from fascist ideology,
2:06:23 there also are different emphases that they include and that includes
2:06:31 their virulent racism from the outset, which in addition to a glorification of the state,
2:06:38 glorification of the leader and preparation for national greatness, race is absolutely core.
2:06:46 It’s that racial radicalism that the Nazis espouse as a central idea along with
2:06:53 antisemitism, the demonizing in particular of the Jews and this insane racialist cosmology that
2:07:03 the Nazis avow. It is the assertion that the Nazis will uniquely bring to pass unity in the people,
2:07:12 unity in the society that leads them to give themselves this odd name of national socialist.
2:07:20 Some leaders like Goebbels among the Nazis accent the socialist part to begin with,
2:07:28 others put the accent firmly on the nationalist part. In part, the term they chose for their
2:07:35 movement was meant to be confusing. It was meant to take slogans or words from different parts of
2:07:41 the political spectrum to fuse them into something unfamiliar and new and claim that they’d overcome
2:07:48 all earlier political divisions. The Nazis claimed that they were a movement, not a party,
2:07:56 even though their party was called a party. What did Nazism and Bolshevism and communism
2:08:01 share or how were they opposed to one another? What we need to start with, but making clear,
2:08:08 they were ideological arch enemies. In both worldviews, the opposite side represented the
2:08:14 ultimate expression of the evil that needed to be exercised from history in order for their
2:08:22 desired utopia to be brought about. This leads to strange and perverted beliefs about reality.
2:08:30 From the perspective of the Nazis, the Nazis claimed that because they saw the Jews as a
2:08:38 demonic element in human history, the Bolsheviks didn’t really believe all of this economic,
2:08:45 dialectical materialism. They were in fact a racial conspiracy it was alleged. The Nazis used
2:08:55 the term of Judeo-Bolshevism to argue that communism is essentially a conspiracy steered by the Jews,
2:09:03 which was complete nonsense. For their part, the communists and from the perspective of the Soviet
2:09:12 Union, the Nazis were in essence a super capitalist conspiracy. If the cosmological
2:09:18 enemy are the capitalists and the owners, the exploiters, then all of the rigamarole about
2:09:29 race and nationalism are distractions. They’re meant to fool the poor saps who enlist in that
2:09:38 movement. It’s essentially steered by capitalist owners who is claimed are reduced to this
2:09:45 desperate expedient of coming up with this thuggish party that represents the last gasp of
2:09:51 capitalism. Bizarrely enough, from the communist perspective, the rise of the Nazis can be
2:09:58 interpreted as a good sign because it means that capitalism is almost done because this is the last
2:10:11 undisguised naked face of capitalism nearing its end. The other beyond this ideological
2:10:21 total opposition in terms of their hoped for futures, the reality is that there were
2:10:25 aspects that were shared on either side, and that included the conviction that
2:10:36 they could agree that the age of democracy was done, and that the 19th century had had its day
2:10:44 with experiments with representative democracy, the claims of human rights, classical liberal
2:10:51 ideas, and all of this had been revealed as bankrupt. It had gotten you what? It got you first
2:11:00 the First World War as a total conflict leaving tens of millions dead, and then economically the
2:11:09 Great Depression showing that the end was not far away. This produced, at one and the same time,
2:11:18 both ideological opposition and instances of vastly cynical cooperation. In terms of the
2:11:26 Weimar Republic, it’s obvious with the benefit of hindsight that German democracy had ceased to
2:11:32 function even before Hitler comes to power. But in the process of making democracy unworkable
2:11:45 in Germany, the extremes, the Nazi stormtrooper army with their brown shirts and the communist
2:11:55 street fighters had cooperated in heightening an atmosphere of civil war that left people
2:12:02 searching for desperate expedience in the last days of the Weimar Republic.
2:12:12 The most compelling case of their cooperation was the signing of the Nazi Soviet Pact
2:12:21 on August 23, 1939, which enables Hitler to start World War II. A non-aggression pact
2:12:30 in official terms, it contains secret clauses whereby the Nazis and the Soviets meeting in Moscow
2:12:37 under Stalin’s wary eye had agreed on territorial division of Eastern Europe and making common
2:12:46 cause as each claiming to be the winner of the future. In spite of their oppositions,
2:12:53 these were regimes that were able, very cynically, to work together to dire effect.
2:13:02 In the course of the 1950s, in particular, there arose political scientists who also crafted
2:13:09 an explanation for ways in which these regimes, although they were opposed to one another,
2:13:19 actually bore morphological resemblances. They operated in ways that, in spite of ideological
2:13:25 differences, bore similarities. Such political scientists, Hannah Arendt, chief among them,
2:13:33 crafted a model called totalitarianism, borrowing a term that the fascists had liked about themselves,
2:13:42 to define regimes like the Nazis, like Stalin’s Soviet Union, for a new kind of dictatorship
2:13:52 that was not a backwards caste revival of ancient barbarism, but was something new,
2:13:58 a new form of dictatorship that laid total claims on hearts and minds that didn’t want
2:14:05 just passive obedience, but wanted fanatical loyalty, that combined fear with compulsion
2:14:12 in order to generate belief in a system, or at the very least atomize the masses
2:14:18 to the point where they would go along with the plans of the regime. This model
2:14:27 has often met with very strong criticism on the grounds that no regime in human history has yet
2:14:35 achieved total control of the population under its grip. That’s true, but that’s not what Hannah
2:14:42 Arendt was saying. Hannah Arendt was saying there will always be inefficiencies, there will be
2:14:51 resistance, there will be divergences. What was new was not the alleged achievement of total control,
2:14:58 it was the ambition, the articulation of the ambition that it might be possible to exercise
2:15:04 such fundamental and thoroughgoing control of entire populations. The final frightening thought
2:15:12 that Arendt kept for her was, “What if this is not a model that comes to us from benighted
2:15:19 uncivilized ages? What if this is what the future is going to look like?” That’s a horrifying intuition.
2:15:26 So let me ask you about Daryl Cooper, who is a historian and did a podcast with Tucker Carlson,
2:15:33 and he made some claims there and elsewhere about World War II. There are two claims that I would
2:15:39 love to get your perspective on. First, he stated that Churchill was “the chief villain
2:15:44 of the Second World War.” I think Daryl argues that Churchill forced Hitler to expand the war
2:15:52 beyond Poland into a global war. Second, the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slav, Gypsies in death camps
2:16:01 was an accident, a byproduct of global war, and in fact the most humane extermination of prisoners
2:16:07 of war possible, given the alternative, was death by starvation. So I was wondering if you
2:16:13 can respond to each of those claims. Well, I think that this is a bunch of absurdity,
2:16:19 and it would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious in its implications.
2:16:28 To address the points in turn, Churchill was not the chief villain of the Second World War.
2:16:36 The notion that Churchill allegedly forced Hitler to escalate and expand a conflict that could have
2:16:47 been limited to Poland is that assertion is based on a complete neglect of what Nazi ideology was.
2:16:59 The Nazi worldview and racism was not an ideology that was limited in its application.
2:17:07 It looked toward world domination. In the years since the Nazis had come to power,
2:17:13 they sponsored programs of education called geopolitics, which urged Germans to think in
2:17:23 continents to see themselves as one of the superpowers that would battle for the future of
2:17:28 the world. Now, in retrospect, we of course can see that Germany was not in a position to
2:17:38 legitimate a claim like that, but the Nazis’ aims were anything but limited. In particular,
2:17:48 this argument has been tried out in different ways before. In previous decades, there had been
2:18:00 attempts by historians who were actually well-read and well-published to argue that World War II
2:18:12 had been in part a contingent event that had been brought about by accidents or miscalculations,
2:18:21 and such explanations argued that if you put Hitler’s ideology aside, you actually could
2:18:28 interpret him as a pretty traditional German politician in the stripe of Bismarck. Now,
2:18:33 when I say it like that, I think you can spot the problem immediately. When you put the ideology
2:18:42 aside to try to analyze Hitler’s acts or alleged motives, in the absence of the ideology that he
2:18:49 himself subscribed to and described in hateful detail in Mein Kampf and other manifestos and
2:18:58 speeches is an enterprise that’s doomed to failure justifiably. The notion that the mass murder of
2:19:07 Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Gypsies was an event that simply happened as a result of unforeseen
2:19:15 events and that it was understood as somehow being humane is also runs contrary to the
2:19:24 historical fact. When Poland was invaded, the Nazis unleashed a killing wave in their so-called
2:19:31 Operation Tannenbeg, which sent in specially trained and ideologically pre-prepared killers
2:19:37 who were given the name of the units of the Einsatzgruppen in order to wipe out the Polish
2:19:48 leadership and also to kill Jews. This predates any of the Operation Barbarossa and the Nazis’
2:19:57 invasion of the Soviet Union. The Nazis, moreover, in many different expressions of their ideology,
2:20:02 had made clear that their plans, you can read this in Mein Kampf for Eastern Europe, were
2:20:11 subjugation and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale. I consider both of these claims absolutely
2:20:17 untenable given the facts and documents. Do you think it was always the case that
2:20:21 Nazi Germany was going to invade the Soviet Union? I think, as you can read in Mein Kampf,
2:20:31 this is what’s necessary in order to bring that racial utopia to pass. While the timetable might
2:20:38 be flexible, while obviously geopolitical constellations would play a role in determining
2:20:45 when such a thing might be possible, it was most definitely on his list. I would want to add that
2:20:53 in my own scholarship, I’ve worked to explore some of these themes a little bit further.
2:20:59 My second book, which is entitled The German Myth of the East, which appeared with Oxford
2:21:08 University Press, examines centuries in the German encounter with Eastern Europe and how
2:21:13 Germans have thought about Eastern Europe, whether in positive ways or in negative ways.
2:21:23 One thing that emerges from this investigation is that even before the Nazis come to power in
2:21:30 Germany, there are certainly negative and dehumanizing stereotypes about Eastern Europeans,
2:21:36 some of them activated by the experiences of German occupation in some of these regions
2:21:42 during the First World War. The Nazis take the very most destructive and most negative
2:21:48 of all those stereotypes and make them the dominant ones, making no secret of their
2:21:54 expected future of domination and annihilation in the East.
2:22:03 The idea of Lebensraum, is it possible to implement that idea without Ukraine?
2:22:14 Hitler has Ukraine in his horizon as one of the chief prizes and the Nazis then craft extensive
2:22:21 plans, a master plan that they work on in draft after draft after draft, even as the
2:22:25 balance of the war is turning against them on the Eastern Front. This master plan is called
2:22:33 the General Plan Ost, meaning the general plan for the East. It foresees things like mega-highways
2:22:41 on which the Germanic master race will travel to vacation in Crimea or how their settlements will
2:22:48 be scientifically distributed in the wide open spaces of Ukraine for agriculture that will feed
2:22:56 an expanded and purified Germanic master race. This was not peripheral to the Nazi ambitions,
2:23:04 but central. As I best understand, there is extensive and definitive evidence
2:23:13 that the Nazis always wanted to invade the Soviet Union, and there is always a racial component,
2:23:21 and not just about the Jews. They wanted to enslave and exterminate the Jews, yes,
2:23:32 but the Slavic people, the Slavs. And if he was successful at conquering the Soviet Union,
2:23:39 I think the things that would be done to the Slavic people would make the Holocaust seem
2:23:48 insignificant. In my understanding, in terms of the numbers and the brutality and the viciousness
2:23:59 in which he characterized the Slavic people. In their worldview, the Jews were especially demonized,
2:24:08 and so the project of the domination of Eastern Europe involves this horrific program of mechanized,
2:24:16 systematized, bureaucratically organized, and horrifyingly efficient mass murder of the Jewish
2:24:25 populations. What the Nazis expected for the Slavs had a longer timeline. Himmler expected,
2:24:31 the head of the SS, the SS has given a special mission to be part of the transformation
2:24:38 of these regions ethnically. Himmler, in his role of envisioning this German future in Eastern
2:24:47 Europe, gives such a chilling phrase. He says that while certain Slavs will fall victim immediately,
2:24:55 some proportion of Slavs will not be shipped out or deported or annihilated, but instead,
2:25:03 they will remain as Slavs for our culture. In that one phrase, Himmler managed to defile and
2:25:11 deface everything that the word culture had meant to generations of the best German thinkers and
2:25:19 artists in the centuries before the Nazis. The notion of Slavs for our culture was part of his
2:25:28 longer-term expectation, and then there’s finally a fact that speaks volumes about what the Nazis
2:25:37 planned for the East. Hitler and Himmler envisioned permanent war on the Eastern Front. Not a peace
2:25:44 treaty, not a settlement, not a border, but a constant moving of the border every generation,
2:25:50 hundreds of miles east in order to keep winning more and more living space,
2:25:59 and with analogy to other frontiers, to always give more fighting experience and more training
2:26:05 and aggression to generation after generation of German soldiers. In terms of nightmarish
2:26:14 visions, this one’s right up there. And always repopulating the land conquered with the German,
2:26:21 the Aryan race, in terms of race, repopulating with race, and enslaving the Slavic people and
2:26:26 exterminating them, because there’s so many of them, it takes a long time to exterminate.
2:26:37 Even in the case of the Germans themselves, the hidden message behind even Nazi propaganda about
2:26:47 unity and about German national identity was the Nazis envisioned relentless purges of the
2:26:54 German genetic stock as well. So among their victims are people with disabilities, people who
2:27:01 are defined as not racially pure enough for the future, even though they are clearly Germans by
2:27:11 identity, the full scale and the comprehensive ambitions of the Nazis are as breathtaking as
2:27:19 they are horrifying. One of the other things I saw Darrell tweet was that what ended up happening
2:27:24 in the Second World War was the worst possible thing that could have happened. And I just also
2:27:32 wanted to comment on that, which I can imagine a very large number of possible scenarios that
2:27:38 could have happened that are much, much worse, including the successful conquering of the Soviet
2:27:45 Union, as we said, the kind of things that would be done, and the total war ever ongoing
2:27:53 for generations, which would result in hundreds of millions of deaths and torture and enslavement.
2:27:58 And not to mention the other possible trajectory of the nuclear bomb.
2:28:03 That’s right. That’s right. I would think that the Nazis with atomic weapons with no
2:28:10 compunctions about deploying them would rank up there as even worse than the horrors that we saw.
2:28:14 Now, let me steal man a point that was also made as part of this,
2:28:24 that the oversimplified narrative of sort of, to put it crudely, Hitler bad Churchill good
2:28:32 has been used and abused by neocons and warmongers and the military industrial complex in a year
2:28:40 since to basically say this particular leader is just like Hitler, or maybe Hitler of the 1930s,
2:28:47 and we must invade now before he becomes the Hitler of the 1940s. And that has been applied
2:28:53 in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, and God forbid that can be also applied in the war with
2:29:02 China in the 21st century. So yes, warmongers do sure love to use Hitler and apply that template
2:29:12 to wage war. And we should be wary of that and be careful of that, both the over application of
2:29:18 this historical template onto the modern world and of warmongers in general.
2:29:24 Yeah. And I think that nobody should like oversimplified narratives. We need subtle and accurate
2:29:30 narratives. And also, I just would like to say that probably, as we’ve been talking about Stalin
2:29:38 and Hitler, are singular figures. And just as we’ve been talking about the implementation of
2:29:45 these totalitarian regimes, they’re singular in human history, that we never saw anything like it.
2:29:50 And I hope from everything it looks like, we will never see anything like it again.
2:29:56 I mean, they’re certainly striking and unique historical characters in the record.
2:30:01 One of the things that’s so disturbing about Hannah Arendt’s model of totalitarianism is
2:30:10 the leader can be changed. The system itself demands that there be a leader who allegedly is
2:30:16 all-powerful and all-knowing and prophetic and the like. But
2:30:26 whether particular figures are interchangeable in that role is a key question.
2:30:32 Let me go back to the 1920s and sort of ask another counterfactual question.
2:30:39 Given the battle between the Marxists and the Communists and the National Socialists,
2:30:47 was it possible and what would that world look like if the Communists indeed won in Germany as
2:30:54 Karl Marx envisioned? And it made total sense given the industrialized expanse that Germany
2:30:59 represented. Was that possible and what would it look like if it happened?
2:31:05 I would think that the reality was probably very remote, but that was certainly their ambition.
2:31:15 German Communists get quoted as saying after Hitler, it’s our turn. Their sentiment was that
2:31:26 the arrival of Nazism on the scene was a sign of how decrepit and incompetent and doomed capitalism
2:31:36 was. In hindsight, that’s almost impossible to believe because what happens is the Nazis with
2:31:44 their characteristic brutal ruthlessness simply decapitate the party and arrest the activists
2:31:51 who were supposed to be waiting to take over. So that’s forestalled. A further hypothetical
2:31:56 that gets raised a lot is couldn’t the social Democrats and the Communists have worked together
2:32:05 to keep Hitler out of power? That’s where the prior history comes into play. The very fact that
2:32:17 the German Revolution in 1919 sees socialists killing socialists produces a dynamic that’s
2:32:26 so negative that it’s nearly impossible to settle on cooperation. Added to the fact that
2:32:34 the Communists see the social Democrats as rivals for the loyalty of the working class.
2:32:40 In terms of just statistical likelihood, a lot of experts at the time felt
2:32:52 surely the German army is going to step in. The most likely outcome would have been a German
2:33:02 general shutting down the democracy and producing a military dictatorship. It says a lot about how
2:33:10 dreadful and bloody the record of the Nazis was that some people in retrospect would have felt
2:33:16 that that military dictatorship would have been preferable if it had obviated the need for the
2:33:22 ordeal under the Nazis. What do you think Marx would say about the 20th century?
2:33:32 Let’s take it before we get to Mao and China just looking at the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
2:33:47 That’s a really good question. I think that Marx was flexible in his expectations about
2:33:58 tactics and strategies even as he was sure that he had actually cracked a big intellectual problem
2:34:04 of what the future is going to look like. How it would play out, he was a man who had to deal
2:34:10 with a lot of disappointments because in revolutionary uprising after revolutionary uprising,
2:34:17 whether it was in the revolutions of 1848 across Europe, whether it was in Poland,
2:34:25 whether it was in the Paris Commune, this is it. This is the outbreak of the real thing,
2:34:30 and then it doesn’t end up happening. I think that he’d probably have tried to be
2:34:37 patient about the turn of events. We mentioned at the outset that Marx felt it was unlikely that
2:34:45 a worker’s revolution would break out in the Russian Empire because for that you needed lots
2:34:51 of industrial workers and they didn’t have a lot of industry. There’s a footnote to add there,
2:34:57 and it proves his flexibility. A Russian socialist wrote to Marx asking,
2:35:05 “Might it not be possible for Russia to escape some stages of capitalist development?”
2:35:12 I mean, do you have to rigidly follow that scheme? Marx’s answer was convoluted,
2:35:20 but it wasn’t a no. That suggests that Marx was willing to entertain all sorts of
2:35:27 possible scenarios. I think he would certainly have been very surprised at the course of events
2:35:32 as it unfolded because it didn’t match his expectations at the outset.
2:35:40 Not to put this on him, but would he be okay with the price of haremor
2:35:50 for the utopian destination of communism, meaning is it okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet?
2:35:56 Well, we don’t know what Marx would say if he would pose that question deliberately,
2:36:05 but we do know in the case of a Marxist historian, Eric Habsbaum, who was a prolific and celebrated
2:36:12 British historian of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was put this question in the 90s after the
2:36:23 collapse of the Soviet Union. He stated forthrightly that because the Soviet Union failed, such sacrifices
2:36:34 were inordinate. But if the experiment had succeeded and a glorious future had been open for
2:36:42 mankind as a result of the Soviet Union’s success, that would lead to a different reply.
2:36:52 And that is one person’s perspective. So that takes us to the other side of the world.
2:37:01 The side that’s often in the West not considered very much when we talk about human history.
2:37:10 Chinese dynasties, empires are fascinating, complex, and there’s just a history that’s not
2:37:16 as deeply explored as it should be. And the same applies to the 20th century.
2:37:23 So Chinese radicals founded the Chinese Communist Party CCP in July 1921.
2:37:30 Among them, as you talk about, was Mao. What was the story of Mao’s rise to power?
2:37:39 So Mao takes a page from the book of Lenin by
2:37:48 adapting or seeking to adapt Marx’s ideology to a context that would have surprised Marx
2:37:58 significantly. And that is not only to set the revolution in an as yet not industrialized country,
2:38:04 but moreover to make the peasants, rather than being conservative sacks of potatoes,
2:38:09 to make them into the prime movers of the success of this political venture.
2:38:22 That’s a case of the phenomenon that we talked about earlier. When is an adaptation of an ideology
2:38:32 or a change to an ideology of valid adjustment that you’ve made or adaptation? And when is it
2:38:36 already so different that it’s something entirely distinct?
2:38:45 Maoism was very clearly intended to answer this question for the Chinese context
2:38:53 and by implication other non-western parts of the world. This was in part Mao’s way, whose
2:38:59 ambition was great, to put himself at the head of a successful international movement
2:39:08 and to be the successor to Stalin, whose role he both admired and resented from having to be
2:39:16 the junior partner. To take an example of a masterwork in a major milestone in the history
2:39:26 of communism, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kowalowski, who was at first a committed communist
2:39:31 and then later became disillusioned and wrote a three-volume study of Marxist thought called
2:39:40 “Currence of Marxism.” In that book, when he reaches Maoism, Kowalowski essentially throws up
2:39:46 his hands and says, “It’s hard even to know what to do with this,” because putting the peasantry
2:39:54 in the vanguard role is something that is already at variance with the original design,
2:40:01 but Marx says this is an improved version. This is an adapted and truer version of Marxism
2:40:10 for the Chinese context. In case after case, in Mao’s rise to power, we see a really complicated
2:40:18 relationship with Stalin. He works hard to gain Stalin’s support because the common turn, the
2:40:24 international organization headquartered in Moscow working to encourage and help revolutionaries
2:40:31 worldwide is skeptical about the Chinese Communist to begin with and believes that China still has
2:40:38 a long way to go before it’s reached the stage where it’s ripe for communist revolution. In a way,
2:40:46 that’s more orthodox Marxism than what Mao is championing. Mao chafes under Stalin’s
2:40:56 acknowledged leadership of international communism as a movement. In 1950, when Mao
2:41:03 goes to visit Stalin in Moscow in order to sign a treaty of cooperation, he’s left waiting for
2:41:10 days and days and days in a snub that is meant to show him that you’re just not as important as
2:41:19 you might think you are. And then when Stalin dies in 1953, Mao feels the moment is ready for him to
2:41:28 step into the leadership position surpassing the Soviet Union. So many of Mao’s actions like the
2:41:35 Great Leap Forward and the agricultural disasters that follow from that are literally attempts to
2:41:41 outdo Stalin, to outperform Stalin, to show that what Stalin was not able to do,
2:41:51 the Chinese Communist regime will be able to bring off. And the toll for that hubris is vast.
2:41:55 Yeah, in the darkest of ways, he did outdo Stalin.
2:41:57 That’s right. In the statistics.
2:42:04 The Great Leap Forward ended up killing approximately 40 million people from starvation or murder.
2:42:07 Can you describe the Great Leap Forward?
2:42:13 So it was modeled on the crash industrialization that Stalin had wanted to undertake in the Soviet
2:42:19 Union and to outdo it. The notion of the Great Leap Forward was that it would be possible for the
2:42:25 peasant masses out of their conviction in the rightness of the Chinese Communist cause to
2:42:32 industrialize China overnight. That involved things like creating small smelting furnaces in
2:42:42 individual farm communes. It involved folding together farming territories into vast communes
2:42:49 of very large size that were just because of their sheer gigantism supposed to be by definition
2:42:59 more efficient than small scale farming. It ended up producing environmental disasters and campaigns
2:43:10 to eliminate birds or insects were supposed to demonstrate mastery over nature by sheer acts
2:43:20 of will. These included things like adopting Soviet agricultural techniques that were pioneered by
2:43:28 a crackpot biologist by the name of Trofim Lysenko that produced more agricultural disaster.
2:43:35 That involved things like plowing to depths that were not practical for the seeds to germinate and
2:43:43 grow, but were supposed to produce super plants that would produce bumper harvests and outpace
2:43:50 the capitalist countries and the Soviet Union. So the context for all of this is a race to get
2:43:59 first to the achievement of full-scale communism. One of the themes that I think it’s so valuable
2:44:06 to pursue and to take seriously in the history of communism is what concrete promises were made.
2:44:18 In the case of China, Mao made promises and projections for the future that were
2:44:25 worrying even to some of his own assistants. He exclaimed that perhaps by 1961,
2:44:31 perhaps by 1973, China would be the winner in this competition, and it would have achieved
2:44:37 full communism. So that which Marx had sketched as the endpoint of humanity would be achieved first
2:44:45 by the Chinese. Later, his own comrades, when he passed from the scene, felt the need to temper
2:44:50 that a little bit and promised that they would achieve full communism by the year 2000.
2:45:00 Such promises are helpful to a regime to create enthusiasm and to hold out to people the prospect
2:45:06 of real successes just around the corner. But what happens when the date arrives and you haven’t
2:45:13 actually achieved that goal? That’s one ticking time bomb that played a role in the increasing
2:45:18 erosion of confidence in the Soviet Union, and the case of China must have been something similar.
2:45:24 So there’s a lot of other elements that are similar to the Soviet Union.
2:45:29 Maybe you could speak to the 100 Flowers campaign.
2:45:39 The 100 Flowers campaign is a chance for Mao, who has felt that he has lost prestige and lost
2:45:45 standing in the party because of the disasters of the Great Leap Forward, to regain some of that
2:45:53 momentum. And the whole 100 Flowers campaign, officially titled the rectification campaign,
2:46:01 to set things right, is still shrouded in mystery. Historians disagree about how to interpret what
2:46:10 Mao was actually up to. The most cynical variant is that Mao encouraged Chinese thinkers and
2:46:20 intellectuals to share ideas and to engage in constructive criticism, to propose alternatives,
2:46:26 and to let a full discussion happen. And then, after some of them had ventured that,
2:46:31 to come in and purge them, to punish them ruthlessly for having done what he had invited
2:46:40 them to do. That is the most cynical variant. Some historians argue that Mao himself was not
2:46:48 prepared for the ideas that he himself had invited into the public square, and that he grew anxious
2:46:54 and worried and angry at this without having thought this through in a cynical way to begin with.
2:47:00 The end result is the same. The end result is, once again, negative selection. The decimation
2:47:05 of those who are most venturesome, those who are most talented and intelligent,
2:47:12 are punished relentlessly for that. And just a general culture of censorship and fear,
2:47:16 and all the same stuff they saw in the Soviet Union. That’s right. I mean, think of the impact
2:47:22 on officials who are loyal servants of the regime and just want to get along. The message goes out
2:47:28 loud and clear. Don’t be venturesome. Do not propose reforms. Stick with the tried and true,
2:47:32 and that’ll be the safe route, even if it ends in ultimately stagnation.
2:47:38 So, as the same question I asked about the Soviet Union, why do you think there was so much failure
2:47:45 of policies that Mao implemented in China during his rule?
2:47:51 Mao himself had a view of human beings as being, as he put it, beautiful blank pieces of paper upon
2:48:01 which one can write new characters. And that is clearly at variance with what you and I know
2:48:04 about the complex nature of human beings as we actually encounter them in the world.
2:48:12 I think that in the process of hatching schemes that were one size fits all for a country as big
2:48:23 and as varied in its communities as China, inevitably such an imposition of one model
2:48:32 was going to lead to serious malfunctions. And so much of what other episodes in Chinese history
2:48:38 had showed, the entrepreneurial capacity, the productive capacity economically of the Chinese
2:48:44 people was suppressed by being fitted into these rigid schemes. What we’ve seen since,
2:48:52 after Mao passes from the scene and with reforms of Deng Xiaoping, one sees just how much of those
2:48:57 energies had been forcibly suppressed for so long, and now we’re allowed to re-emerge.
2:49:10 Mao died in 1976. You wrote that the CCP in ’81, looking back through the lens of historical
2:49:19 analysis, said that he was 70% correct, exactly 70% correct. Yeah, not 69, not 71.
2:49:24 Not 71. The scientific precision, I mean, we should say that again and again.
2:49:37 The co-opting of the authority of science by the Union, by Mao, by Nazi Germany, Nazi science,
2:49:47 is terrifying and should serve as a reminder that science is the thing that is one of the most
2:49:54 beautiful creations of humanity, but is also a thing that could be used by politicians and
2:50:02 dictators to do horrific things. Its essence is questing, not certainty, constant questing.
2:50:12 Exactly. Humility, intellectual humility. So how did China evolve after Mao’s death to today?
2:50:24 Well, I think that there is, without denouncing Mao, without repudiating Mao’s 70% correctness,
2:50:32 the regime actually undertook a new venture, and that venture was to open up economically,
2:50:45 to gain access to world markets, and to play a global role, always with the proviso that the
2:50:53 party retained political supremacy. It’s been pointed out that while Khrushchev tries in the
2:50:59 Soviet Union in 1956, especially with a secret speech in which he denounces Stalin’s crimes,
2:51:08 he tries to go back to the founder’s intentions of Lenin. Nothing like that, it’s argued, is possible
2:51:16 in the Chinese case, because Mao was not the equivalent of Stalin for Communist China. Mao was
2:51:22 the equivalent of Lenin. Mao was the founder, so there’s no repudiating of him. They are stuck
2:51:28 with that formula of 70%, and acknowledging that there were some problems, but by and large arguing
2:51:35 that it was the correct stance of the party and its leader that was paramount. And the results of
2:51:44 this wager are where we are today. China has been transformed out of all recognition in terms of
2:51:52 not all of the living standards of the country, but many places. Its economic growth
2:52:02 has been dramatic, and the new dispensation is such that people ask, is this a communist country
2:52:06 anymore? And that’s probably a question that haunts China’s current leadership as well.
2:52:16 With Chairman Xi, we’ve seen a return to earlier patterns. Xi insisting that Mao’s achievement
2:52:24 has to be held as equal to that of the reform period. Sometimes, imitations or nostalgia
2:52:30 for the Mao period, or even the sufferings of the Cultural Revolution, are part of this volatile
2:52:42 mix. But all of this is outward appearance. Statistics can also be misleading. And I think that
2:52:47 very much in question is China’s further revolution in our own times.
2:52:52 In the West, China is often demonized.
2:53:01 And we’ve talked extensively today about the atrocities that result from
2:53:08 atrocities both internal and external that result from the communist nations.
2:53:24 But what can we say by way of hope to resist the demonization? How can we avoid cold or hot war
2:53:30 with China, we being the West or the United States, in the 21st century?
2:53:38 Well, you mentioned in the context of the claims of science, humility as a crucial attribute.
2:53:47 I think that humility, sobriety, realism are tremendously valuable in trying to understand
2:53:56 another society, another form of government. And so I think one needs to be very self-aware that
2:54:03 projection onto others of what we think they’re about is no substitute for actual study
2:54:10 of the sources that a society like that produces. It’s declarations of what matters most to them.
2:54:18 The leadership’s own pronouncements about what the future holds. I think that matters a lot more
2:54:28 than pious hopes or versions of being convinced that inevitably, everyone will come to resemble us
2:54:35 in a better future. You mentioned this earlier, but just to take a small detour. What are we supposed
2:54:42 to think about North Korea and their declaration that they’re supposedly a communist nation?
2:54:51 What can we say about the economic, the political system of North Korea? Or is it just like a
2:54:58 hopelessly simple answer of this is a complete disaster of a totalitarian state?
2:55:05 So I think the answer that a historian can give is a historical answer, that we have to inquire
2:55:11 into what has to happen in order to arrive at the past we are today. We have a regime that’s
2:55:20 claiming to be communist or has an even better version of Marx’s original ideas in the form of
2:55:30 a Korean adaptation called Yuche. How does that mesh with the reality that we’re talking about a
2:55:36 dynastic government and a monarchy in all but name, but a communist monarchy, if that’s what
2:55:49 it is? I think that examining as much as we can learn about a closed society that goes about its
2:55:56 every day in ways that are inscrutable to us is very, very challenging. But the only answer,
2:56:01 when an example like this escapes your analytic categories, probably there’s a problem with
2:56:07 your analytical categories rather than the example being the problem in all its messiness.
2:56:12 Yes, so there’s a component here in the release of China as well to bring like somebody like John
2:56:18 Mirsheimer into the picture. There’s a military component here too. And that is ultimately how
2:56:24 these nations interact, especially totalitarian nations interact with the rest of the world.
2:56:33 So nations interact economically, culturally, and militarily. And the concern with countries
2:56:42 like North Korea is the way for them to be present on the world stage in a game of geopolitics
2:56:49 is by flexing their military might and they invest a huge amount of their GDP
2:56:58 into the military. So I guess the question there to discuss in terms of analysis is
2:57:07 how do we deal with this kind of system that claims to be a communist system and what lessons
2:57:14 can we take from history and apply it to that? Or should we simply just ignore and look the
2:57:18 other way as we’ve been kind of hoping it doesn’t get out of hand?
2:57:29 Yeah, I mean, there’s realists see states following their own interests and prioritizing
2:57:35 their own security. And there’s probably not much that could be done to change that. But
2:57:42 conflict arising as a result of misunderstanding or mixed messages or
2:57:50 misinterpretation, those are things that policymakers probably do have some control over.
2:57:58 I think that there’s internal processes that’ll work their way out even as opaque a place as
2:58:08 North Korea. It’s also the reality just as we saw with the divided Germanies that it’s a precarious
2:58:15 kind of twinned existence when you have countries that are across the border from one another that
2:58:22 are derived from what used to be a single unit that now are kind of a real life social science
2:58:27 experiment in what kind of regime you get with one kind of system, what sort of regime you get
2:58:33 with another kind of system. And that’s a very unstable setup as it turns out.
2:58:44 Now, let us jump continents. And in the 20th century, look to North America. So you also
2:58:51 have lectured about communism in America, the different communist movements in America. It was
2:59:00 also founded in 1919 and evolved throughout through a couple of red scares. So what was the
2:59:05 evolution of the Communist Party in just in general, communist in America?
2:59:09 It’s fascinating to observe this story because one
2:59:19 longstanding commonplace had been that socialism has less purchase or radical socialism in the
2:59:25 United States than in European countries. So to the extent that that was true,
2:59:32 it was an uphill battle for the communists to get established in the United States. But
2:59:40 it makes it all the more interesting to follow the development of the movement. And
2:59:48 there were two challenges in particular that played a role in shaping the American communist
2:59:57 experience. One was the fact that to begin with, the party was often identified with immigrants.
3:00:07 The communities that had come over across the Atlantic from Europe often had strong socialist
3:00:13 contingents. And when this break happens within the socialist movement between radical socialists
3:00:22 and more moderate socialists, there were fiery individuals who saw the opportunity to
3:00:28 help shape the American communist movement. But the result was that for many American workers,
3:00:34 they saw the sheer ethnic variety and difference of this movement as something that was unfamiliar.
3:00:42 It would only be with the rise to the leadership of the Communist Party of Earl Browder,
3:00:50 a American-born political leader with vast ambitions for creating an American
3:00:58 communist movement that that image would start to be modified. Earl Browder had a meteoric rise
3:01:07 and then fall over the promise he made that went by the slogan, “Communism is 20th century
3:01:16 Americanism.” The notion was that communism could find roots in American political discourse and
3:01:24 experience where Earl Browder fell afoul of other communists was in his expectations during World
3:01:31 War II that it might be possible for the Soviet Union and the United States to make their current
3:01:38 cooperation permanent and to come to some sort of accommodation that would moderate their rivalry.
3:01:44 As it turns out with the dawning already of Cold War tensions that would later flower more fully,
3:01:50 that was unacceptable and the movement divested itself of Earl Browder.
3:01:59 Another point that shaped American perceptions of the communist movement in the United States
3:02:09 involved issues of espionage. During the 1930s and the 1940s, American communists,
3:02:16 not all of them obviously, but select members of the movement, were called upon by Soviet
3:02:22 intelligence to play a historical role by gathering information, winning sympathies.
3:02:28 One of the most amazing books of the 20th century is the book written by Whitaker Chambers
3:02:35 who had served as a Soviet spy, first a committed communist then a Soviet spy,
3:02:43 and then later a renegade from those allegiances. His book is entitled “Witness” published in 1952
3:02:48 and it’s one of the most compelling books you could ever read because it’s so full
3:02:55 of both the unique character of the author in all of his idiosyncrasies
3:03:04 and a sense of huge issues being at stake, ones upon which the future of humanity turns.
3:03:14 So, talk about the ethical element being of importance there. Through the apparatus of the
3:03:23 state, the Soviets managed to infiltrate spies into America’s military as well as government
3:03:36 institutions. One great irony is that when Senator McCarthy in the ’50s made vast claims about
3:03:43 communist infiltration of the government apparatus, claims that he was unable to substantiate
3:03:54 with details, that reality had actually been closer to the reality of the 1930s and the 1940s
3:04:01 than his own time. But the association of American communists with the foreign power of the Soviet
3:04:11 Union and ultimately an adherence to its interests did a lot to undermine any kind of hearing
3:04:19 for American communists. An example, of course, was the notorious Nazi Soviet pact in 1939.
3:04:26 The American communist movement found itself forced to turn on a dime in its propaganda.
3:04:33 Before the Nazi Soviet pact of August 1939, they had denounced Nazi Germany as the greatest
3:04:41 threat to world peace. Just after the signing of the pact, they had to proclaim that this was a great
3:04:52 win for peace and for human harmony and to completely change their earlier relationship
3:04:58 of being mortal enemies with Nazi Germany. There were many American communists who couldn’t stomach
3:05:04 this and who, in disillusionment, simply quit their party memberships or drifted away.
3:05:11 But it’s a fascinating story of the ups and downs of a political movement with radical
3:05:21 ambitions in American political history. Yeah, the Cold War and the extensive levels of espionage
3:05:29 sort of created, combined with Hollywood, created basically firmly solidified communism
3:05:36 as the enemy of the American ideal. That was sort of embodied. And not even the economic
3:05:44 policies of the political policies of communism, but like the word. And the color red, the hammer
3:05:50 and sickle, you know, Rocky Four, one of my favorite movies. Well, that’s canonical, right?
3:05:59 Yeah. I mean, it is a bit of a meme, but meme becomes reality and then enters politics.
3:06:09 And is used by politicians to do all kinds of name calling. You have spoken eloquently about
3:06:15 modern Russia and modern Ukraine and modern Eastern Europe.
3:06:23 So how did Russia evolve after Stalin and after the collapse of the Soviet Union?
3:06:31 Well, I think the short answer is without a full historical reckoning that would have been healthy
3:06:38 about the recent past. In ways that’s not very surprising because given the economic misery of
3:06:46 dislocations and the cumulative damage of all of those previous decades of this experiment,
3:06:52 it left precious little patience or leisure or surplus for introspection.
3:07:07 But after an initial period of great interest in understanding the full measure of what Russia
3:07:15 and other parts of the Soviet Union had undergone in this first initial explosion of journalism
3:07:21 and of reporting and investigations, historical investigations with new sources,
3:07:32 after an initial period marked by such interest, people instead retreated into the here and now
3:07:44 and the today. And the result is that there’s been less than would be healthy of a taking stock,
3:07:53 a reckoning, even an assigning of responsibility for those things that were experienced in the past.
3:08:01 No Nuremberg trial took place in order to hold responsible those who had repressed others
3:08:10 in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In other ex-communist countries, there
3:08:16 was also precious little in the way of legal proceedings that would have established responsibility.
3:08:22 And keep in mind, the Nuremberg trials had as one of their goals, a very important one, as it turns
3:08:31 out, not even individual verdicts for individual people found guilty, but to collect and publicize
3:08:37 information, to create knowledge and transparency about what the reality had been in the past.
3:08:43 In the case of the former Soviet Union, in the case of Russia today,
3:08:54 instead of a clear-eyed recognition of the vast nature of what it all cost, Putin, upon replacing
3:09:03 Yeltsin, was in a position to instead traffic in the most varied, eclectic, and often mutually
3:09:13 contradictory historical memories or packages of memories. So on the one hand, in Putin’s Russia,
3:09:24 the Tsars are rehabilitated as heroes of Russian statehood. Putin sees Lenin in a negative light
3:09:30 because Lenin, by producing federalism as a model for the Soviet Union, laid a time bomb
3:09:37 at the base of that state that eventually smashed it into many constituent parts as
3:09:43 nations regained their independence. While Stalin, it’s acknowledged,
3:09:50 exacted a dreadful toll, but also was effective as a representative of Russian statehood.
3:10:02 This produced where we are today. It’s a commonplace that echoed by many that Russia,
3:10:11 without Ukraine, is a nation state or could be a nation state. Russia, with Ukraine, has to be an
3:10:20 empire. And Putin, who is not really seeking a revival of Stalin’s rule, but still is nostalgic
3:10:28 about earlier forms of greatness and of the strength of Russian statehood to the exclusion
3:10:37 of other values, has undertaken a course of aggression that has produced results quite different
3:10:44 from what he likely expected. And I think that timing is crucial here. It’s fascinating to try
3:10:56 to imagine. What if this attempt to redigest Ukraine into an expanded Russian imperial territory
3:11:03 had taken place earlier? I think that the arrival on the scene of a new generation of Ukrainians
3:11:12 has produced a very different dynamic and a disinclination for any kind of nostalgia for
3:11:20 the past packaged however it might be and however nostalgic it might be made to appear.
3:11:31 And there, I think that Putin’s expectations in the invasion of 2022 were entirely overturned.
3:11:40 His expectation was that Ukraine would be divided on this score and that some significant portion
3:11:45 of Ukrainians would welcome the advance of Russian forces. And instead,
3:11:53 there has been the most amazing and surprising heroic resistance that continues to this day.
3:12:00 And it’s interesting to consider timing and also individual leaders. Zelensky,
3:12:08 you can imagine all kinds of other figures that would have folded much easier. And Zelensky,
3:12:18 I think, surprised a lot of the world by somehow this comedian somehow becoming essentially an
3:12:30 effective war president. So that put that in the bin of singular figures that define history.
3:12:34 That surprises, yeah. How do you hope the war in Ukraine ends?
3:12:39 I’m very pessimistic on this score, actually, and for the reasons we just talked about,
3:12:51 about how these things escape human management or even rationality. I think that war takes on a
3:13:03 life of its own as accumulated suffering actually eliminates possible compromises or settlements
3:13:15 that one might talk about in the abstract. I think that it’s one thing for people far away to propose
3:13:25 trades of territory or complicated guarantees or
3:13:33 arrangements that sound very good in the abstract and that will just be refused by people who have
3:13:38 actually experienced what the war has been like in person and what it has meant to them
3:13:43 and their families and everyone they know in terms of lives destroyed.
3:13:53 I think that peacemaking is going to face a very daunting task here given all that’s accumulated.
3:14:02 And I think in particular, just from the last days of the launching of missile attacks against
3:14:08 indiscriminate or civilian targets, that’s not easy to turn the corner on.
3:14:14 So let me ask a political question. I recently talked to Donald Trump and he said,
3:14:20 if he’s elected, before he is sworn into office, he will have a peace deal.
3:14:27 What would a peace deal like that look like? And is it even possible, do you think?
3:14:33 So we should mention that Russia has captured four regions of Ukraine now. Donetsk, Luhansk,
3:14:40 Zaporizhia and Herzog. Also, Ukraine captured a part of the Kursk region within Russia.
3:14:46 So just like you mentioned, territories on the table, NATO, European Union is on the table.
3:14:54 Also, funding and military help from the United States directly to Ukraine is on the table.
3:15:01 Do you think it’s possible to have a fair deal that from people, like you said, far away,
3:15:10 where both people walk away, Zelensky and Putin, unhappy but equally unhappy and peace is negotiated?
3:15:16 Equally unhappy is a very hard balance to strike, probably.
3:15:23 I think my concern is about the part of the equation that involves people just being desperately
3:15:30 unhappy, laying the foundations for more trouble to come. I couldn’t imagine what that looks like,
3:15:37 but once again, these are things that escape human control in the details.
3:15:44 So laying the foundation for worse things to come. So it’s possible you have a ceasefire
3:15:54 that lays the foundation for a worse warrant and suffering in a year, in five years and 10 years.
3:16:01 Well, in a way, we may already be there because ratifying the use of force to change borders
3:16:09 in Europe was a taboo since 1945, and now look where we are. If that is validated,
3:16:16 then it sets up incentives for more of the same.
3:16:25 If you look at the 20th century, we’ve been talking about with horrendous global wars that
3:16:33 happened then, and you look at now, and it feels like just living in the moment with the war in
3:16:41 Ukraine breaking the contract of you’re not supposed to do territorial conquest anymore
3:16:53 in the 21st century, that then the just intensity of hatred and military tension in the Middle East
3:17:04 with Israel, Iran, Palestine just building, and then China calmly, but with a big stick
3:17:10 talking about Taiwan. Do you think a big conflict may be on the way?
3:17:16 Do you think it’s possible that another global war happens in the 21st century?
3:17:26 I hope not, but I think so many predictions reach their expiration dates and get invalidated.
3:17:32 Obviously, we’re confronting a dire situation in the present.
3:17:40 So as a historian, let me ask you for advice. What advice would you give on interviewing
3:17:47 world leaders, whether it’s people who are no longer here, some of the people we’ve been talking
3:17:52 about, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or people that are still here, Putin, Zelensky, Trump,
3:18:01 Kamala Harris, Netanyahu, Xi Jinping? As a historian, what is it possible to have an
3:18:06 interesting conversation? Maybe as a thought experiment, what kind of conversation would
3:18:10 you like to have with Hitler in the 1930s or Stalin in the 1920s?
3:18:16 Well, first of all, the answer is very clear. I would never presume to advise you about
3:18:23 interviewing world leaders and prominent people because the roster that you’ve accumulated is
3:18:33 just astonishing. But I know what I might aim for. And that is, I think in historical analysis,
3:18:39 in trying to understand the role of a particular leader, the more one understands about their
3:18:46 prior background and formative influences, the better a fix I think one gets on the question of
3:18:52 what are their expectations? What is the, in German, there’s a beautiful word for this.
3:18:57 The Germans managed to mash together several words into one even better word. And in German,
3:19:07 it’s Erwartungshorizont, the horizon of expectation. So in the case of figures like Churchill or
3:19:17 Hitler, their experience of World War I shaped their actions in World War II. Their values
3:19:22 were shaped in their childhood. Is there a way of engaging with
3:19:32 someone you’re interviewing, even obliquely, that gives a view in on their sense of
3:19:39 what the future might hold? And I mean that, obviously, such people are expert at being guarded
3:19:47 and not being pinned down. But the categories in which they’re thinking, a sense of what their
3:19:53 own ethical grounding might be or their ethical code that gives hints to their behavior, it gets
3:19:58 said, and again, it’s a cliche because it’s true that one of the best measures of a person,
3:20:04 especially a leader, is how they treat people from whom they don’t expect anything.
3:20:13 Are they condescending? Are they, on the contrary, fundamentally interested in another person,
3:20:20 even if that person can’t help them or be used in some way? Speaking of prominent world leaders to
3:20:28 interview, there’s Napoleon. Napoleon psychologically must have been a quite amazing person to make a bid
3:20:34 for mastery of Europe and then already thinking about the mastery of the world. But contemporaries
3:20:42 who met Napoleon said that it was very disturbing to talk with him because meeting with him one on
3:20:48 one revealed that he could talk to you but look like he was looking right through you,
3:20:56 as if you were not fully real. You were more in the nature of a character on a chessboard.
3:21:02 And for that reason, some of them called Napoleon the master of the sightless stare.
3:21:07 So if you’re talking with a world leader and he or she has a sightless stare, that’s probably a bad
3:21:17 sign. But there might be other inadvertent clues or hints about the moral compass or the future
3:21:21 expectations of a leader that emerge in one of your wonderful conversations.
3:21:27 Yeah, you put a brilliantly in several ways. But the moral compass, getting sneaking up
3:21:34 to the full nuance and complexity of the moral compass, and one of the ways of doing that is
3:21:42 looking at the various horizons in time about their vision of the future. I imagine it’s possible to
3:21:49 get Hitler to talk about the future of the Third Reich and to see in ways like what he actually
3:21:58 envisions that as and similar with Stalin. But of course, funny enough, I believe those leaders
3:22:04 would be easier to talk to because there’s nothing to be afraid of in terms of political competition.
3:22:14 Modern leaders are a little bit more guarded because they have opposition often to contend
3:22:23 with and constituencies. You did a lot of amazing courses, including for the great courses.
3:22:31 On the topic of communism, you just finished the Third. So you did a series of lectures on the rise
3:22:42 of communism, then communism and power, and then decline and fall. So when I was sort of listening
3:22:50 to these lectures, I can’t possibly imagine the amount of work that went into it. Can you just
3:22:57 speak why these, what was that journey like of taking everything you know, your expertise on
3:23:05 Eastern Europe, but just bringing your lens, your wisdom, your focus onto this topic and what it
3:23:12 takes to actually bring it to life? Well, journey is probably just the right word because it’s this
3:23:19 week that the third of that trilogy, decline of communism, is being released. And it felt like
3:23:27 something that I very much wanted to do because the history that’s narrated there is one
3:23:37 that is so compelling and often so tragic that it needs to be shared. The vast amount of material
3:23:41 that one can include is probably dwarfed by the amount that actually ends up on the cutting
3:23:47 room floor. One could probably do an entire lecture course on every single one of those
3:23:55 lecture topics that got broached. But one of the great satisfactions of putting together a course
3:24:03 like this is also being able to give further suggestions for study to the listeners and,
3:24:10 in some cases, to introduce them to neglected classics or books that make you want to grab
3:24:16 somebody by the lapels and say, “You’ve got to read this.” There’s probably a few things that are
3:24:25 as exciting as a really keen and targeted reading recommendation. In addition, I’ve also done other
3:24:33 courses on the history of World War I, on the diplomatic history of Europe from 1500 to the
3:24:39 present, a course on the history of Eastern Europe, and also a course on dictatorships
3:24:46 called Utopia and Terror, and then also a course on explorers and a course on turning points in
3:24:53 modern history. And every single one of those is so rewarding because you learn so much in the
3:24:59 process, and it’s really fantastic. And I should highly recommend that people sign up to the…
3:25:03 First of all, this is the great courses where you can buy the courses individually,
3:25:08 but I recommend people sign up for great courses plus, which are things like a monthly membership
3:25:16 where you get access to all these courses, and they’re just incredible. And I recommend people
3:25:21 watch all of yours. Since you mentioned books, this is an impossible question, and I apologize
3:25:27 ahead of time, but is there books you can recommend just in your own life that you’ve enjoyed,
3:25:37 whether really small or some obvious recommendations that you recommend people read?
3:25:41 It is a bit like asking, “What’s your favorite band?” I think that’s the thing.
3:25:47 That’s right. Well, would a book that got turned into a movie be acceptable as well?
3:25:56 Yes. So in that case, all of us reflect on our own childhoods and that magical moment of
3:26:03 reading a book or seeing a movie that really got you launched on some particular set of
3:26:08 things that you’re going to find fascinating for the rest of your life. And there’s a direct
3:26:14 line to the topics we were talking about today from myself in the Chicagoland area as a kid,
3:26:21 seeing the film of Dr. Zhivago, and then later reading the novel on which it was based by
3:26:28 Pasta Nak. And even though the film had to be filmed on location in Spain, pretending to be
3:26:38 Revolutionary Russia, it was magical for the sheer sweep and tragedy and human resilience
3:26:46 that it showed. The very way in which a work of literature or of cinematography could capture
3:26:55 so much, still, I’m still amazed by that. And then there’s also in the spirit of recommending
3:27:04 neglected classics, my favorite author. My favorite author is now a late Canadian author
3:27:12 by the name of Robertson Davies, who wrote novel after novel
3:27:20 in a mode that probably would get called magical realism, but is so much more.
3:27:28 Robertson Davies was heavily influenced by Carl Jung and Jungian philosophy,
3:27:38 but in literary form, he managed to create stories that blend the mythical, the mystical,
3:27:46 and the brutally real to paint a picture of Canada as he knew it, Europe as he knew it,
3:27:53 and the world as he knew it. And he’s most famous probably for the Depthford trilogy,
3:27:59 three novels in a series that are linked, and they’re just masterful. If only there were
3:28:06 more books like that. The Depthford trilogy, fifth business, the Manticore, World of Wonders,
3:28:12 and you got a really nice beard. Yes, it was an amazing beard, very 19th century.
3:28:23 Okay, beautiful. What advice would you give to young people today that have just listened
3:28:28 to us talk about the 20th century and the terrifying prospects of ideals implemented
3:28:35 into reality? And by the way, many of the revolutions are carried out by young people.
3:28:42 And so, the good and the bad and the ugly is thanks to the young people. So,
3:28:45 the young people listening today, what advice would you give them?
3:28:47 Well, it comes down to one word, and that one word is read.
3:28:56 I’m, as a college teacher, I’m concerned about what I’m seeing unfolding before us, which is
3:29:03 classes, not my classes, but classes in which students are asked to read very little,
3:29:10 or maybe in some cases not at all, or snippets that they are provided digitally.
3:29:18 Those have their place and can be valuable, but the task of sitting down with a book
3:29:23 and absorbing its message, not agreeing with it necessarily, but taking in the implications,
3:29:35 learning how to think within the categories and the values of the author is going to be irreplaceable.
3:29:46 And my anxiety is that with college bookstores now moving entirely to the paperless format,
3:29:54 it changes how people interact with texts. And if the result is not a renaissance and a resurgence
3:29:59 of reading, but less reading, that will be dreadful, because the experience of thinking your way into
3:30:08 other people’s minds that sustained reading offers is so crucial to human empathy,
3:30:16 a broadening of your own sensibilities of what’s possible, what’s in the full range of being human,
3:30:22 and then what’s best? What are the best models for what has been thought and felt and how people
3:30:32 have acted? Otherwise, we fall prey to manipulators and the ability of artificial intelligence to
3:30:37 give us versions of realities that never existed and never will and the like.
3:30:44 That’s a really interesting idea. So let me give a shout out to Perplexity that I’m using here to
3:30:50 summarize and take quick notes and get little snippets and stuff, which is extremely useful,
3:30:57 but books are not just about information transfer. Just as you said, it’s a journey
3:31:03 together with a set of ideas and it’s a conversation and getting a summary of the book
3:31:09 is the cliche thing is it’s really getting to the destination without the journey.
3:31:14 And the journey is the thing that’s important, thinking through stuff. And I’ve actually learned,
3:31:19 you know, I’ve been surprised, I’ve learned, I’ve trained my brain to be able to get the same thing
3:31:24 from audio books also. It’s a little bit more difficult because you don’t control the pacing.
3:31:29 Sometimes pausing is nice, but you could still get it from audio books. So it’s an audio version
3:31:34 of books. And that allows you to also go on a journey together and sometimes more convenient
3:31:39 because you could take it to more places with you. But there is a magical thing. And I also
3:31:45 trying to train myself mostly to use Kindle, the digital version of books. But there is,
3:31:51 unfortunately, still a magical thing about being there with the page.
3:31:56 Well, audio books are definitely not to be scorned because as people pointed out,
3:32:04 the original traditions of literature were oral, right? So that’s actually the 1.0 version, right?
3:32:09 And combining these things is probably the key. I think one of the things I find so
3:32:18 wonderful about the best lectures that I’ve heard is it’s a chance to hear someone thinking out loud,
3:32:27 not laying down the law, but taking you through a series of logical moves, imaginative leaps,
3:32:35 alternative suggestions. And that’s much more than data transfer.
3:32:43 The use case of AI as a companion, as you read, is really exciting to me. I’ve been using it
3:32:50 recently to basically, as you read, you can have a conversation with a system that has access to a
3:32:56 lot of things about a particular paragraph. And I’ve been really surprised how my brain,
3:33:02 when given some extra ideas, other recommendations of books, but also just like a summary of other
3:33:08 ideas from elsewhere in the universe that relates to this paragraph, it sparks your imagination
3:33:15 and thought, and you see the actual richness in the thing you’re reading. Now, nobody’s,
3:33:21 to my knowledge, has implemented a really intuitive interaction between AI and the text,
3:33:29 unfortunately, partially because the books are protected under DRM. And so there’s like a wall
3:33:33 where you can’t access, the AI can’t access the thing. So if you want to play with that kind
3:33:39 of thing, you have to, you know, break the law a little bit, which is not a nice thing, not a good
3:33:48 thing. But just like with music, Napster came up, people started illegally sharing music.
3:33:54 And the answer to that was Spotify, which made the sharing of music revolutionized everything
3:33:58 and made the sharing of music much easier. So there are some technological things that can
3:34:06 enrich the experience of reading, but the actual painful long process of reading is really useful,
3:34:12 just like boredom is useful. That’s right. It’s also called just sitting there underrated virtue.
3:34:21 Yeah. Yeah. And of course, you have to see the the smartphone as an enemy, I would say, as of
3:34:26 that special time you have to think, because social media companies are maximized to get your
3:34:32 engagement. They want to grab your attention. And they grab that attention by making you as
3:34:36 brain dead as possible and getting you to look at more and more and more things. So it’s nice and
3:34:42 fun. It’s great. I recommend it highly. It’s good for dopamine rush, but see it as a counter,
3:34:50 is a counter force to the process of sitting with an idea for a prolonged period of time,
3:35:00 taking a journey through an expert, eloquently conveying that idea and growing by having a
3:35:05 conversation with that idea and a book is really, really powerful. So I agree with you
3:35:13 totally. What gives you hope about the future of humanity? We’ve talked about the dark past.
3:35:22 What gives you hope for the light at the end of the tunnel? So we talked indeed about a lot of
3:35:30 latent, really damaging and negative energies that are part of human nature, but I find hope in
3:35:38 another aspect of human nature. And that is the sheer variety of human reactions to situations.
3:35:49 The very fact that history is full of so many stories of amazing endurance, amazing resilience,
3:35:59 the will to build up even after the horrors have passed, this to me is an inexhaustible
3:36:06 source of optimism. And there are some people who condemn cultural appropriation and say that
3:36:14 borrowing from one culture to another is to be condemned. Well, the problem is a synonym for
3:36:23 cultural appropriation is world history, trade, transfer of ideas, influences, valuing that,
3:36:29 which is unlike your own culture, is also a form of appropriation, quite literally. And so
3:36:38 those, that multitude of human reactions and the fact that our experience is so unlimited
3:36:42 as history testifies gives me great hope for the future. Yeah, and the willingness of humans
3:36:50 to explore all of that with curiosity, even when the empires fall and the dreams are broken,
3:36:53 we rise again. That’s right. Unceasingly.
3:36:59 Thank you so much for your incredible work, your incredible lectures, your books, and thank you
3:37:05 for talking today. Thank you for this such a fun chat. Thanks for listening to this conversation
3:37:10 with Vejas Ludeviches. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
3:37:16 And now let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx. History repeats itself,
3:37:29 first as a tragedy, second as a farce. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
3:37:42 [Music]