Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler | Lex Fridman Podcast #444
- And the outcome here is
a horrific, manmade famine, not a natural disaster, not bad harvest, but a manmade famine, as a result of then the compulsion that gets used by the Soviet state to extract those resources, cordoning off the area, not allowing starving people to escape. You put very well, some of the implications
of this case study in how things look in the
abstract versus in practice. And those phenomena were going to haunt the rest of the experience
of the Soviet Union. The whole notion that up and
down the chain of command, everybody is falsifying or tinkering with or
prettifying the statistics or their reports in order not to look bad and not to, you know, have
vengeance visited upon them, reaches the point where nobody, in spite of the pretense of
comprehensive knowledge, right? There's a state planning agency that creates five-year plans
for the economy as a whole, and which is supposed to
have accurate statistics. All of this is founded
upon a foundation of sand. A deliberate plan to bring class conflict and bring civil war and then
heighten it in the countryside does damage and not least of that, is this phenomenon of
a negative selection. Those who have most enterprise, those who are most entrepreneurial, those who have most self-discipline, those who are the best organized, will be winnowed again
and again and again, sending the message that mediocrity is comparatively much safer than talent. Hitler and Himmler
envisioned permanent war on the eastern front. Not a peace treaty, not a
settlement, not a border, but a constant moving of the border, every generation, hundreds of miles east, in order to keep winning
more and more living space, and with analogy to other frontiers, to always give more fighting experience and more training and aggression to generation after
generation of German soldiers. In terms of nightmarish visions,
this one's right up there. - The following is a conversation
with Vejas Liulevicius, a historian specializing in
Germany and eastern Europe. He has lectured extensively
on the rise, the reign, and the fall of communism. 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. We also discuss Hitler, Nazi
ideology and World War II. This is the Lex Fridman podcast, to support it, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
here's Vejas Liulevicius. Let's start with Karl Marx. What were the central ideas of Marx that lay the foundation of communism? - I think there were several
key ideas that Marx deployed, that were destined to have such an impact, and in some ways, they were
actually kind of contradictory. On the one hand, Marx insisted
that history has a purpose. That history is not just random events, but that rather it's
history, we might say, with a capital H. History moving in a deliberate direction, history having a goal, a direction that it was
predestined to move in. At the same time, in
the communist manifesto, Karl Marx and his
colleague Friedrich Engels, also suggested that there was a role for special individuals, who might, even if history was still moving in this predetermined direction, might give it an extra push, might play a heroic role in that process. And I think that these
two ideas added together, the notion that there is
a science of revolution that suggests that you
can move in a deliberate and meaningful, rational way
towards the end of history and the resolution of all conflicts, a total liberation of the human person. And that, moreover, that was inevitable, that that was pre-programmed and destined in the order of things. When you add to that, the notion that there's
also room for heroism and the individual role, this ended up being tremendously
powerful as a combination. Earlier, thinkers, who were socialists, had already dreamt of or projected futures where all conflict would be resolved and human life would achieve
some sort of perfection. Marx added these other elements that made it far more powerful
than the earlier versions that he decried as
merely utopian socialism. - So there's a million questions
that I could ask there, but so on the utopian side, so
there is a utopian component to the way he tried to
conceive of his ideas. - Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, one has to stress, Marx would've gotten extremely upset at this point in the conversation, because to call someone a utopian was precisely to argue
that you're not scientific, you're not rational, you are not laying out
the iron laws of history. You're merely hoping for the best. And that might be laudable, but it was fundamentally unrealistic. That said, hidden among Marx's insistence that there are laws and structures as history moves through class conflict, modes of production,
towards its ultimate goal of a comprehensive final revolution that will see all exploitation overthrown and people finally being
freed from necessity, smuggled in among those things are most definitely utopian elements. And there, they come
especially at the end, in which Marx sketches the notion of what things will look like after the revolution has
resolved all problems. There, vagueness sets in. It's clear that it's a blessed state that's being talked about. People no longer exploiting one another, people no longer subject
to necessity or poverty, but instead, enjoying all of the productivity
of industrialization that hitherto had been
put to private profit, now collectively owned and deployed. The notion that one will
be able to work at one job in the morning, and then engage in leisure activity or yet another fulfilling
job in the afternoon. All of this, free of any contradictions, free of necessity, free of the
sort of ordinary irritations that we experience in our ordinary lives, that's deeply utopian. The difference was that
Marx charted a route towards that outcome that was... That presented itself
as cutting edge science and moreover, having the full credibility that science commanded so much, especially in the 19th
and early 20th century. - So there is a long journey
from capitalism to communism that includes a lot of problems. He thought once you resolve the problems, all the complexities of human
interactions, the friction, the problems will be gone - To the extent that they
were based on inequalities and on man's exploitation of man, the result was supposed to be
a resolution of all of this. And inevitably, when you talk about the
history of communism, you have to include the
fact that this often tragic and dramatic history
produced a lot of jokes. Jokes that were in part
reactions sometimes to the ideological claims
made by people like Marx. And one of the famous jokes was that, what's the difference between
capitalism and communism? And the joke's answer was, capitalism is the
exploitation of man by man, and communism is the exact opposite. (Lex laughs) - Yeah, you actually
have a lecture on humor. I love it. And you deliver in such
a dry, beautiful way. Okay, there's again, a million questions. So you outline a set of contradictions, but it's interesting
to talk about his view. For example, what was
Marx's view of history? - Marx had been a student of Hegel, and Hegel is a German
idealist philosopher, had announced very definitively
that history has a purpose. History is not a
collection of random facts. And as an idealist, he proposed that the
true movement of history, the true meaning of history, what made history,
history with a capital H, something that's
transcendent and meaningful, was that it was the working out of an idea through different civilizations, different stages of
historical development, and that idea was the
idea of human freedom. So it was not individuals
or great thinkers alone making history and having an impact, it was the idea itself,
striving to come to fruition, striving to come to an
evermore perfect realization. In the case of Hegel, in this very Prussian and German context, he identified the realization of freedom also with the growth of the state. Because he thought that governments are the ones that are going
to be able to deliver on laws and on the ideal of a
state of the rule of law, in German, the (speaking in German), that was a noble dream, at the same time, as we
recognize from our perspective, state power has been put
to all sorts of purposes besides guaranteeing the
rule of law in our own times. What Marx did, was to take this characteristic
insistence of Hegel that history is moving in a meaningful and discernible way towards
the realization of an idea, and flipped it on its head. Marx insisted that Hegel
had so much that was right in his thinking, but what he had neglected to
keep in mind was that in fact, history is based on matter. So hence, dialectical materialism, dialectical referring to
things proceeding by clashes or conflict towards an
ever greater realization of some essential idea. And so Marx adapts a
lot of ideas of Hegel. You can recognize entire
rhetorical maneuvers that are indebted to
that earlier training, but now taken in a very
different direction. What remained though was the confidence of being on the right side of history. And there are few things
that are as intoxicating as being convinced that your
actions not only are right in the abstract, but are also
destined to be successful. - And also that you have the
rigor of science backing you in your journey towards the truth. - Absolutely, so Engels, when he gives the grave side eulogy for his beloved friend, Marx, claims that Marx is essentially
the Darwin of history, the Darwin of history. That he had done for the world of politics and of human history, what Darwin had done with
this theory of evolution, understanding the hidden mechanism, understanding the laws that are at work, and that make that
whole process meaningful rather than just one
damn thing after another. - What about the sort of famous line that, "History of all existing societies is the history of class struggles." So what about this conception of history as a history of class struggle? - Well, so this was the
mode of force that Karl Marx and Engels saw driving the
historical process forward. And it's important to keep in mind that class conflict doesn't
just mean revolutions, revolts, peasant uprisings. It's sort of the totality of frictions, and of clashes, conflicts of interest that
appear in any society. And so Marx was able... And this spirit that he
avowed was very scientific, to demarcate stages of
historical transformation. Primitive communism in
the prehistoric period, then moving towards what
was called state slavery. That's to say, the early civilizations deploying human resources and ordering them by
all powerful monarchs. Then private slavery
in the ancient period, and then moving to feudalism
in the Middle Ages. And then here's where Marx is able to deliver a pronouncement
about his own times, seeing that the present
day is the penultimate, the next to last stage of
this historical development. Because the feudal
system of the Middle Ages and the dominance of the
aristocracy has been overcome, has been displaced by the
often heroic achievements, astonishing achievements in commerce and in world building of the
middle class, the bourgeoisie, who have taken the world
into their own hands and are engaged in class conflict with the class below them, which is the working
class or the proletariat. And so this sort of conflict, also by the way, obtains within classes, so the bourgeoisie are
going to be grave diggers, Marx announces, of their own supremacy, because they're also
competing against one another. And members who don't
survive that competition get pressed down into the
subordinate working class, which grows and grows and grows to the point where, at some future moment, the inevitable explosion will come, and a swift revolution will overturn this penultimate stage of human history and usher in instead the
dictatorship of the working class, and then the abolition of all classes, because with only one class remaining, everyone is finally unified, and without those internal contradictions that had marked class conflict before. - The dictatorship of the working class is an interesting term. So what is the role of
revolution in history? - So this in particular for Marx, I think is a really key moment, which is what makes that
such a good question. In his vision, the epic narrative that he's presenting to us, revolution is key. It's not enough to have
evolutionary change, it's not a question of compromises, it's not a case of bargaining
or balancing interests, revolution is necessary
as part of the process of a subjugated class coming to awareness of
its own historical role. And when we get to the proletariat, this working class in its entirety, to whom Marx assigns
this epic Promethean role of being the ones who are going
to liberate all of humanity, a class that is universal in its interests and in the sort of role
in salvation history, that they'll be playing
in this secular framework, they need revolution and
the experience of revolution in order to come into their own. Because without it, you'll only
have half-hearted compromise and something less than the consciousness that they then need in
order to rule, to administer and to play the historical role
that they're fated to have. - How did he conceive of a revolution, potentially a violent
revolution, stabilizing itself into something where the
working class was able to rule. - That's where things become
a good deal less detailed in his and Engels' accounts. The answer that they proposed in part was, this is for the future to determine. So all of the details
will be settled later. I think there was, allied to this, was a tremendous confidence in some very 19th century ideas about how society could be administered and what made for orderly society, in a way where, if the right
infrastructure was in place, you might expect society
to kind of run itself without the need for
micromanagement from above. And hence we arrive at
Marx's tantalizing promise that there will be a period where it'll be necessary
to have centralized control and there might have to be, as he puts it, despotic inroads against property in order to bring this revolution to pass. But then afterwards, the state, because it represents everybody, rather than representing
particular class interests that are in conflict with other classes, the state will eventually wither away, so there won't be need for it. Now, that's not to say that
pure stasis arrives, right? Or that the stabilization
equals being frozen in time. It's not as if that is
what things will look like, but instead, the big
issues will be settled, and henceforth, people will
be able to enjoy lives of, as he would consider it, in authentic freedom, without
necessity, without poverty, as a result of this blessed
state that's been arrived at. - Despotic inroads against property. Did he elaborate on the despotic inroads? - Dispossession. Dispossession of the middle
classes and of the bourgeoisie. In his model, humanity is
never standing still, right? So he'd probably argue in this dynamic vision
of how history unfolds, that there's always conflict and it's always propelling history forward towards its predestine ending. In that, the way he saw this climax was that, as things did not stay the same, the condition of the working class was constantly getting worse, and hence their revolutionary
potential was growing, and at the same time, the
expropriators, the bourgeoisie, were also facing diminishing returns, as they competed against one another, with more and more wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and more and more elements of what had been the middle class detached from the ruling class and being pressed down
into the working class, for Marx, this is really a key part. I mean, it's a key part of
this whole ratchet effect that's going to produce this
final historical explosion. And in German, the word given to that
process was Verelendung, which is very evocative. Elend means misery, so
it's the growing misery. When this gets translated into English, the results are never quite
as evocative or satisfactory. The words that get used are immiserization or pauperization, meaning more and more people
are being turned into paupers. But for Marx, that
prediction is really key. And even in his own lifetime, there were already hints that in fact, if you looked sociologically at the really developed working classes in places like Great Britain or Germany, that process was not playing
out as he had expected. In fact, although there have
been enormous dislocations and tremendous suffering in the early, chaotic
sort of wild west stages of capitalism and of industrialization, there had been reform movements as well. And there had been unions which had sought to carve out rules and agreements with employers for how the conditions
under which workers labored might be ameliorated. Moreover, the middle class, rather than dwindling and dwindling, seemed to actually be strengthening and growing in numbers with the appearance of
new kinds of people, like white collar workers
or technical experts. So already in Marx's own lifetime, and then especially in what
follows Marx's lifetime, this becomes a real problem because it puts a stick into the spokes of this particular historical prediction. - Can you speak to this realm of ideas, which is fascinating, this battle of big ideas
in the 19th century. What are the ideas that
were swimming around here? - Yeah, yeah. Well, to describe the 19th century as sort of an age of
ideologies is very apt, because Europe is being racked and being put through the
wringer of nationalism, demands for self-expression of peoples who earlier have been in empires or under monarchical rule, demands to redraw the map. The tremendous transformations of the industrial revolution meant that in the course of about a generation, you would've seen the
world around you change in ways that made it entirely unfamiliar. You'd be able to travel
across the landscape at speeds that would've been unthinkable when you were a child. So it's enormous change and
demands for yet more change, and so it's a great mix
of ideas, ideologies, the old and the new, religious
ideas, religious revivals, as well as demands for secularization and stepping into all of
this are Marx and Engels, together, in what has been called, I think with justice,
one of the most important and influential intellectual
partnerships of history. They were very different men. They were both German by origin. Marx had trained as an academic. He had married the daughter of a baron. Because of his radical ideas, he had foreclosed or just found himself cut off from a possible academic career and went the route of radical journalism. Engels was very different. Engels was the son of an industrialist and the family owned factories
in Germany and in England. So he was most definitely not
a member of the proletariat that he and Marx were celebrating as so significant in their
future historical role. There were also huge differences in character between these men. Marx, when people met him, they were astonished by his
energy and his dynamism. They also saw him as a
man who felt determined to dominate arguments. He wanted to win arguments and was not one to settle for compromise or a middle road. He was disorderly in his personal habits, we might mention, among other things, that he impregnated the family maid, and didn't accept
responsibility for the child. He was also not inclined to undertake regular employment in order to support his growing family. That's where Engels came in. Engels essentially,
from his family fortune, and then from his journalism afterwards, supported both himself and
the Marx family for decades. And so in a sense, Engels
made things happen, in the mysterious way
that friendships work, the very differences between these men made them formidable as a dynamic duo, because they balanced off
one another's idiosyncrasies and turned what might have been faults into potential strengths. British historian, A.J.P. Taylor, always has a lovely turn of phrase, even when he's wrong
about a historical issue. In this case, he was right. He said that, "Engels
had charm and brilliance, Marx was the genius." And Engels saw himself as
definitely the junior partner in this relationship, but here's the paradox, without Engels, pretty clearly, Marx would not have gone on to have the sort of
lasting historical impact in the world of ideas that he had. - Just to throw in the mix. There's interesting
characters swimming around. So you have Darwin, he has a... I mean it's difficult to characterize the level of impact he had, even just in the religious context, it challenges our conception
of who we are as humans. There's Nietzsche, who's
also, I don't know, hanging around the area. On the Russian side, there's Dostoevsky. So it is interesting to ask
maybe from your perspective, did these people interact
in the space of ideas to where this is relevant
to our discussion, or is this mostly isolated? - I think that it's a part of
a great conversation, right? I think that in their works, they're reacting to one another. I mean, Dostoevsky's thought ranges across the condition of modernity, and he definitely has things to say about industrialization. I think that they react to one another in these oblique ways, rather than always being
at each other's throats in direct confrontations. And that's what makes the
19th century so compelling as a story, just because
of the sheer vitality of the arguments that are taking place in ways big and small. - Well, we should say here, you know, when you mention Karl Marx, maybe the color red comes up for people and they think the Soviet
Union, maybe China, but they don't think Germany necessarily. It's interesting that, I mean, Germany is where communism
was supposed to happen. - That's right.
- And so can can you maybe speak to that tension? - Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is definitely a factor in the entire history
that we're referencing. Marx and Engels never really
shed their identity as Germans. Many of their preconceptions, even those traces of nationalism that they had within themselves, even as they were condemning nationalism as a fraud against the working class. Clearly, their entire formation had been affected by
their German background. And it's very true, as you point out, that Germany is intended to be the place where these predictions will play out. Also in Britain, also in France, also eventually in the United States, but it's a... You know, it's Germany by
virtue of it's central location, and then it's rapid development, later than Britain or
France in industrialization, give it the special role
in Marx's worldview. And so it's a lasting irony or a central irony of this whole story that when a government establishes itself that claims to be following
Marxist prescriptions and realizing his vision, it happens in the wreckage
of the Russian Empire. A place that did not
match the requirements of being industrialized, developed, well on its way in this
historical process. And nobody knew this
better than the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his colleagues had a keen sense that what they were
doing, exciting as it was, was a gamble, it was a risk. Because in fact, the revolution, to really take hold, had
to seize power in Germany. And that's why immediately
after taking power, they're not sure they're going to last. Their hope, their promise of salvation is that a worker's revolution
will erupt in Germany, defeated Germany, in order to link up with the
one that has been launched in this unlikely Russian location, and henceforth, you know,
great things will follow that do hew to Marx's historical vision. The last thing to mention about this is that this predominance of Germany in the thinking of Marx
had two other reflections. One was that German socialists,
and later, communists, organized in order to
fulfill Marx's vision, and they produce something
that leaves other westerners in awe in the late 19th century. And that's the building of a
strong German workers movement and a social democratic party. That social democratic party by 1912 is the largest party in
German politics by vote, and there's the possibility
they might even come to power without needing radical revolution, which again, also goes
against Marx's original vision of the necessity for a revolution. Workers around the world, or
rather radical socialists, look with admiration and awe at what the Germans have achieved, and they see themselves as trying to do what the Germans have done. The final point is, growing
up during the Cold War, one thought that, "Well, if
you want to represent somebody as being a communist, that person has to have a Russian accent." Because Russia after all, the homeland of this form of
government, the Soviet Union, that must be the point of origin. Before the Bolsheviks seize power, in order to really be a
serious radical socialist, you needed to read German, because you needed to read Marx and you needed to read Kautsky, and you needed to read Bernstein and other thinkers in this tradition, and it's only after the
Soviet seizure of power that this all changes, so there's lots of marks
of that phenomenon. - Which is why the clash
between nationalism and communism in Germany is such a fascinating aspect of history and all the different
trajectories it could take, and we'll talk about it, but if we return to the 19th century, you've said that Marx's chief rival was Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, who famously said in 1942, quote, "The passion for destruction
is also a creative passion." So what kind of future
did Bakunin envision? - Well, Bakunin in some
things agreed with Marx and in many others disagreed. He was an anarchist, rather than hewing to the
sort of scheme of history that Marx was proposing. So he did see humanity
as fighting a struggle for a better way of life. He envisioned, as your quote suggests, that revolution and a sheer confrontation and overthrow of the
existing state of things, not compromise, was going
to be the way to get there but his vision was very different. Rather than organizing conspiratorial and hierarchical political movement, Bakunin envisioned that the
ties would be far looser. That both the revolutionary movement and the future state of humanity would grow out of the free association, the anarchist thinking, the
free association of individuals who rejected hierarchical thinking in their relations with one another, rejected the state as a
form of organized violence, and rejected traditional religious ideas, that he saw as buttressing hierarchies. So Bakunin is part of a
broader movement of socialists and anarchists who are demanding change and envisioning really
fundamental transformation, but his particular anarchist vision steers him into conflict with Marx, and he makes some prophetic remarks about the problems with the
system that Marx is proposing. We should add to this, that the very fact that Marx is a German by background and Bakunin is Russian kind
of adds a further nationalist or element of ethnic difference there. Bakunin warned that a sort of creeping
German authoritarianism might insinuate its way into a movement that hewed too closely
to having hierarchies in the struggle to overthrow hierarchies. And, you know, his anarchist convictions are not in question here, they led him into conflict with Marx and Marx railed against
him, denounced him, and eventually had him expelled
from the international. One of the things though that also makes Bakunin so significant is, Bakunin is the first in a
longer series of approaches between anarchists and communists, where they try to make common cause, and you have to say that in every case, it ends badly for the anarchists. Because the communist
vision in particular, especially in its Leninist
version, argued for discipline and a tightly organized
professional revolutionary movement. The anarchists who sought
to make common cause with communists, whether it was in the days
of the Russian Revolution or the Russian Civil War, or whether it was then
in the Spanish Civil War, the anarchists found themselves targeted by the communists precisely because of their skepticism about what turned out to be
an absolutely key element in the Leninist prescription
for a successful revolution. - If you can take that
tangent a little bit. So I guess anarchists were less organized? - Yes, by definition. (laughs) - Yeah. Why do you think anarchism hasn't been rigorously tried
in the way the communism was? If we just take a
complete sort of tangent, I mean, in one sense we are
living in an anarchy today because the nations are
in an anarchic state with each other. But why do you think, sort of, there's not been an anarchist revolution? - Well, I think that
probably some anarchists would beg to differ, right? They would see communes in Spain during the Spanish Civil War as an example of trying to put
anarchist ideas into place. Bakunin, you know, flitted
from one area of unrest to another, hoping to be in on finally the founding of
the sort of free communes that he had in mind. You know, another key point in all of this is that anarchy means something different to different people as a term. And so when you point out
quite correctly that, you know, we have an anarchic
international situation, that's kind of the Hobbesian model of the war of all against all, where man is a wolf to man. Generally, except if you're
talking about nihilists in the Russian revolutionary tradition, anarchists see anarchy as a blessed state, and one where, finally, people will be freed from
the distorting influence of hierarchies, traditional beliefs, subjugation, inequalities. So for them, anarchy, growing out of the
liberation of the human being is seen as a positive good and peaceful. Now that's at odds with the prescription of someone like Bakunin
for how to get there. He sees overthrow as being
necessary on the route to that, but you know, as we point
out, it's absolutely key to this entire dynamic
that to be an anarchist means that your efforts
are not gonna be organized the way a disciplined and tightly organized
revolutionary movement would be. - Yeah, it's an interesting stretch that a violent revolution will take us to a place of no violence
or very little violence. So it's a leap. - It's a leap and it kind of... It points to a phenomenon
that would've enraged Marx and would've been deeply
alienating to others in the tradition who followed him, but that so many scholars
have commented on. And that's that there is a
religious element, you know, not a avowed one, but a
kind of hidden religious or secular religious
element to Marxist vision, to the tradition that follows Marx, and, you know, just think of
the correspondences, right? Marx himself as kind
of positioning himself as a savior figure,
whether that's a Prometheus or a Moses, who will lead
people to the promised land. The apocalypse or the end
times is this final revolution that will usher in a blessed
final state, a utopia, which is equivalent to a
secular version of heaven. There's the working class, playing the role of humanity
in its struggle to be redeemed. And scholar after scholar
has pointed this out. Reinhold Niebuhr, back in the 1930s, had an article in The Atlantic magazine that talked about the
Soviet Union's communism as a religion. Eric Voegelin, a German-American scholar who fled the Nazis and relocated to
Louisiana State University and wrote tomes about the new phenomenon of political religions
in the modern period. And he saw fascism and Nazism and Soviet communism as bearing the stamp of political religions, meaning ideologies that promised what an earlier age would've
understood in religious terms. Voegelin called this the
(speaking in foreign language), and said that these end times, the (speaking in foreign language), was being promised in the here
and now, being made imminent. And he warned against that, saying, the results are
likely to be disastrous. - So that's actually a
disagreement with this idea that, you know, people sometimes
say that the Soviet Union is an example of an atheistic society. So when you have atheism
as the primary thing that underpins the society,
this is what you get. So that's what you're saying is a kind of rejection of that, saying that there's a
strong religious component to communism.
- A hidden component, one that's not officially recognized. I mean, I think that, you know, I had a chance to witness this
actually when I was a child. My family, I grew up in Chicago to a Lithuanian-American family. And my father, who was a mathematician, got a very rare invitation to
travel to Soviet Lithuania, to the University of Vilnius,
to meet with colleagues. And at this point, journeys
of more than a few days or a week were very rare
to the Soviet Union, for Americans. And the result was that I had unforgettable experiences visiting the Soviet Union in Brezhnev's day. And among the things I saw,
there was a museum of atheism that had been established in a church that had been ripped apart from inside and was meant to kind of embody the official stance of atheism, and I remember being baffled
by the museum on the inside, because you would expect exhibits, you would expect something dramatic, something that will be compelling. And instead, there was some
folk art from the countryside showing bygone beliefs. There were some lithographs or engravings of the Spanish
Inquisition and its horrors, and that was pretty much it. But as a child, I remember being reproved in that museum for not
wearing my windbreaker, but instead carrying it on my arm, which was a very disrespectful thing to do in an official museum of atheism. When I was able to visit
the Soviet Union later for a language course
in the summer of 1989, one of the obligatory tours that we took was to file reverently
past the body of Lenin outside the Kremlin in the
mausoleum at Red Square. And communist mummies, like those of Lenin, earlier,
Stalin had been there as well. Communist mummies like Mao or Ho Chi Minh, really, I think, speak to a blending of earlier religious sensibility, reverence for relics of great figures, almost saintly figures. So that even what got
proclaimed as atheism turned out to be a very
demanding faith as well, and I think that's a contradiction that other scholars have
pointed out as well. - Yeah, that's a very
complicated sort of discussion. When you remove religion as
a big component of a society, whether something like a
framing of political ideologies in religious ways is the
natural consequence of that. - We hear nature abhorring a vacuum, and I think that there are
places in human character that long for transcendental
explanations, right? That it's not all meaningless. In fact, there's a larger purpose, and I think it's not a coincidence that such a significant part of resistance to communist regimes
has, in part, come from, on the one hand, religious believers, and on the other hand, from disillusioned, true believers in communism, who find themselves undergoing
an internal experience of just revulsion, finding that their ideals have
not been followed through on. - So this topic is one of several topics that you eloquently describe as contradictions within
the ideas of Marx. So religious, there is a
kind of religious adherence versus also the rejection
of religious dogma that he stood for. We've talked about some of the others, the tension between nationalism that emerged when it was implemented, versus what communism is
supposed to be, which is global, so globalism. Then there's the thing that
we started talking with is individualism. So, you know, history is
supposed to be defined by the large collection of humans, but there does seem to be
these singular figures, including Marx himself, that
are like really important. Geography of global versus
restricted to certain countries, and, you know, tradition, sort of, you're supposed to break with the past- - Yeah.
- In communism, but then Marxism became one of those strongest traditions- - That's right.
- In history. - That's right, that's right. I think that last one is
especially significant because it's deeply paradoxical. I mean, trying to outline
these contradictions by the way is like subjecting Marx to the sort of analysis that
Marx subjected other people to, which is to point out
internal contradictions, things that are likely
to become pressure points or cracks that might open up in what's supposed to be a completely set and durable and effective framework. The one about tradition, you know, Marx points out that
the need for revolution is in order to break with the traditions that have hemmed people in. These earlier ways of thinking,
earlier social structures and to constantly renovate. And what happens instead is, a tradition of radical rupture emerges. And that's really tough, because imagine the last
stages of the Soviet Union where keen observers can tell that there are problems that
are building in society. There are discontents and demands that are going to clash, especially when someone like
Gorbachev is proposing reforms and things are suddenly
thrown open for discussion. The very notion that
you have the celebration of revolutionaries and
the Bolshevik legacy at a time when the state
wants to enforce stability and an order that's been received
from the prior generation. Think of Brezhnev's time, for instance. All of that is an especially volatile mix and unlikely to work out
very durably in the long run. - I would love to sort of
talk about the works of Marx, "The Communist Manifesto"
and the "Das Kapital." What can we say that's interesting about the manifestation
of his ideas on paper? - Well, the first thing to note obviously, is that those two works
are very different. "Das Kapital" is an
enormous multi-volume work that Marx worked at and only
got the first volume out because Engels begged
him to stop revising. "Please just finally get it into press." And then the rest, Engels
had to actually reconstruct out of notes after Marx passed away. It's a huge work. By contrast, "The Communist Manifesto" is a brief pamphlet that
ended up affecting the lives of many millions worldwide, in spite of its comparative brevity. "The Communist Manifesto" moreover, is also something of the nature of having a delayed fuse, you could say. Because when it first appears amid the revolutions of 1848
that sweep across Europe, the work is contrary to
what people often believe. That pamphlet did not cause
the revolutions of 1848, many of which had national
or liberal demands. The voice of Marx and Engels
was barely to be heard over the din of other,
far more prominent actors. It is however in the aftermath, that this work takes on
tremendous significance and becomes popularly read
and popularly distributed. It's especially the episode, the bloody episode of the
Paris Commune in 1871, which comes to be identified with Marx, even though it was not purely
inspired by Marx alone, nor were all of the
Communards devoted Marxists. It's the identification of this famous or infamous episode in urban upheaval that really leads to
worldwide notoriety for Marx and attention to those works. And they're very different in form. "Das Kapital" is intended to
be the "Origin of Species" of its realm of economic thought and represents years and
years of work of Marx laboring in the British Museum Library, working through statistics,
working on little bits and pieces of a larger answer
to big historical questions that he believes that he's arrived at. Its tone is different from that of "The Communist Manifesto," which is a call to arms. It announces with great confidence what the scheme of history will be, but rather than urging that
the answer might be passivity and just waiting for history to play out in its preordained way, it's also a clarion call to
make the revolution happen, and is intended to be a pragmatic, practical statement of
how this is to play out and, you know, starts in part with those ringing words about a ghost or a specter haunting Europe,
the specter of communism, which wasn't true at the time, but decades later, most
definitely is the case. - Is there something we could
say about the difference between Marxian economics and Marxist political ideology? So the political side of things and the economics side of things?
- Yeah. So I think that Marx would
probably have responded that in fact, those
things are indivisible. The analysis as sort of the
purely theoretical is... Certainly can be performed
on any economic reality that you care to mention, but the imperatives that grow
out of that economic analysis are political. Marx and Engels emphasized the unity of theory and practice. So it's not enough to
dispassionately analyze, it's a call to action as well. Because if you've delivered the answer to how history evolves and
changes, it obligates you, right? It demands certain action. You sometimes hear from undergraduates that they've heard from their
high school history teachers that Marxism was just
a theoretical construct and the idle production of a philosopher who was not connected to the world and was never meant to
be tried in practice. Marx would've been furious to hear this, and it's almost heroically
wrong as a historical statement, because Marx insisted that
all previous philosophers have theorized about reality. What now is really
necessary is to change it. So you could say that in the abstract, a Marxist economist can certainly use Marx's theoretical framework to compare to a given economic reality, but Marx would've seen that as incomplete and as deeply unsatisfactory. There's kind of a footnote to all of this, which is that even though
Marxist dialectical materialism grounds itself in these economic realities and the political prescription is supposed to flow from
the economic realities and be inevitably growing out of them, in the real history of communist regimes, you've actually seen periods where the economics becomes
detached from the politics. And I'm thinking in particular of the new economic period early in the history of the Soviet Union, when Lenin realizes that
the economy is so far gone, that you need to reintroduce
or allow in a limited way, some elements of private enterprise just to start getting
Russia back on course in order to have the
accumulation of surplus that will be necessary to
build the project at all. And there are many Bolsheviks who see the new economic program as a... New economic policy as
a terrible compromise and a betrayal of their ideas, but it's seen as necessary
for a short while and then Stalin will wreck it entirely. Or consider for that matter, China today, where you have a dominant political class, the Communist Party of China, which is allowing economic development and private enterprise as long as it retains political control. So some of these elements
already represent divergences from what
Marx would've expected. And this points to a really key problem or question for all of
the history of communism. It has to do with it being a
tradition, in spite of itself. And that could be expressed
in the following way. An original set of ideas
is going to evolve, it's going to change,
because circumstances change. What elaborations of any doctrine, whether it's communism
or a religious doctrine or any political ideology, what elaborations are natural stages in the evolution of any
living set of ideas, or when do you reach the
point where some shift or some adaptation is
so radically different that it actually breaks
with the tradition. And that's an insoluble problem. You probably have to take
it on a case by case basis. It speaks to issues like the question that gets raised today. Like is China, in a meaningful sense, a communist country anymore? And there's a diversity
of opinion on this score. Or you know, if you're looking
at the history of communism and you look at North Korea, which now is on its third installment of a dynastic leader from the same family who rules like a God king over a regime that calls itself communist, is that still a form of communism? Is it an evolution of? Is it a complete reversal of? I tend to want to take an
anthropological perspective in the history of communism, and to take very seriously those people who avow
that they are communists, and this is the project
that they have underway. And then, after hearing that avowal, I think as a historian you have to say, "Well, let's look at the details. Let's see what changes have been made, what continuities might still exist, whether there's a larger
pattern to be discerned here." So it's a very, very complicated history that we're talking about. - Let's step back to the
end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and let's steelman the case for communism. Let's put ourselves in the
shoes of the people there. Not in this way where we can
look back at what happened in the 20th century. Why was this such a compelling notion? - Yeah.
- For millions of people. - Can we make the case for it? - Well, clearly it was a compelling case for millions of people, and part of this story has to do with... Overall, has to do with
the faith, conviction, stories of people sacrificing themselves as well as their countrymen in a cause that they believed
was not just legitimate, but demanded their total obedience. I think that throughout the
early part of the 20th century, the late 19th century, early
part of the 20th century, so much of the compelling
case for communism came from the confidence that people, in the west more generally,
placed in science. The notion that science
is answering problems, science is giving us solutions to how the world around us works, how the world around us can be improved. Some varieties of that and like watch the
quotation marks, "science," we're crazy, right? Like phrenology, so-called
scientific racism that tried to divide humanity
up into discrete blocks and to manipulate them in ways that were allegedly
scientific or rational. So there were horrors that followed from those invocations of science, but its prestige was enormous. And that in part had to
do with the lessening grip of religious ideas on intellectual elites. More generally, processes
of secularization, not total secularization, but
processes of secularization in western industrial societies. And the sense that, here's a doctrine that will allow escape from wars brought on by
capitalist competition, poverty and economic cycles and depressions brought on
by capitalist competition, the inequalities of societies
that remain hierarchical and class-based. And this claim to being
cutting edge science, I think allows people like Lenin to derive immense confidence in the prescription that
they have for the future. And that paradoxically, the confidence that you
have in broad strokes, the right set of answers for
how to get to the future, also allows you to take huge
liberties with the tactics and the strategies that you follow, as long as your ultimate goal remains the one sketched
by this master plan. So, you know, ultimately
some of the predictions of someone like Lenin, that once society has reached that stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the notion that governments
will essentially be able to run themselves. And that the model he had
in mind, oddly enough, was Swiss post offices. Being in Swiss exile must
have impressed him so much with the orderliness
and the sheer discipline and rationality of a Swiss post office. And he thought, why can't you
organize governments like this where you don't need political leaders, you don't need grand
visions, you have procedures, you have bureaucracy, which does its job in a way that's not alienating, but simply produces the greatest good. You know, when you
think of the experiences with the bureaucracy in the 20th century, one's hair stands on
end to have, you know, the comparative naivete on display with a prediction like that, but it derives from that confidence that it's all gonna be okay, because we understand, we
have the key, we have the plan to how to arrive at this final
configuration of humanity. - Yeah, the certainty
of "science," in quotes, and the goal of utopia
gets you in trouble. But also, just on the human level from a working class person perspective. From the industrial revolution, you see the growing
inequality, wealth inequality, and there is a kind of... You see people getting wealthy and combined with the fact
that life is difficult, life in general, life is suffering for many, for most, for all, if you listen
to some philosophers. And there is kind of a powerful idea in that the man is exploiting me. And that's a populist message that a lot of people resonate with, because to a degree it's
true, in every system. And so before you kind of
know how these economic and political ideas manifest themselves, it is really powerful to say, "Here, beyond the horizon, there's a world where the rich man will not exploit my hard work anymore." And I think that's a really powerful idea. - It is. I mean, at the same time though, it kind of points to, you
know, a further problem, that's the identity of
the revolutionaries. It turned out that many of
these revolutionary movements and then the founding elites
of communist countries in the aftermath of the
Soviet seizure of power turn out to be something quite different from people who have spent
their lives in factories experiencing the industrial
revolution firsthand. I mean there's a special
role here for intellectuals. And when Marx and Engels write into "The Communist Manifesto," the notion that certain
exceptional individuals can rise above their class origins in a way other people can't and transcend their earlier role, their materially determined role in order to gain a perspective on the historical process as a whole, and ally themselves with the working class and its struggle for communism, this sort of special role that they carved out for themselves is enormously appealing for intellectuals. 'Cause any celebration of
intellectuals as world movers is gonna appeal to intellectuals. That gap, that frequent
reality of not being in touch with the very classes that the communists are aiming to represent is a very frequent theme in this story. It also speaks to a
crucial part of this story, which is the breaking
apart or the civil war, the war of brother against brother, the fraternal struggle
that splits socialism and splits followers of Marx. And that's in the aftermath
of the First World War in particular or during
this traumatic experience, the way in which Lenin
encourages the foundation of radical parties that will
break with social democracy of the sort that had been elaborated, especially in places like
Germany, scorning their moderation and instead announcing a new dispensation, which was the Leninist conception of a disciplined, hardcore,
professional revolutionaries who will act in ways that a mere trade union movement couldn't. And what this speaks to is, you know, a fundamental tension
in radical movements. Because left to their own
devices, Lenin announces, workers tend to focus on
their reality, their families, their workplace, want better
working conditions, unionize, and then aim to negotiate with employers or agitate for reforms
on the part of the state to improve their living conditions, and then they're happy for the
advances that they have won. And for Lenin, that's not enough, because that's a half measure. That's the sort of thing that leads you into an accommodation with the system rather than the overthrow of the system. So there's a real... There's a constant tension in this regard that plays itself out over the long haul. - So let's go to Lenin and
the Russian Revolution. How did communism come to
power in the Soviet Union? - It came to power as a result of stepping into a power vacuum. And the power vacuum was
created by the First World War, and it's... The effect that it had as a total war, unprecedented pressure placed on a regime that in many ways, was a traditional, almost futile monarchy, only
experiencing the beginnings of the modernization that the
rest of Europe had undergone. And for this reason,
communism comes to power in a place that Marx probably
wouldn't have expected, in the wreckage of the Russian empire. Lenin is absolutely
vital to this equation, because he's the one who
presses the process forward. Ironically, given the
claim of communist leaders to having the key to history, just a few months previous,
in exile in Switzerland, Lenin had been despairing and had been convinced
that he may not even live to see the advent of that day. But then when revolution does break out in the Russian Empire in February of 1917, Lenin is absolutely frantic to get back. And when he does get back, as a result of a deal that is negotiated with the German high command, a step that they'll later
live very much to regret, he's able to get back
and to go into action and to press for nothing less
than the seizure of power that brings his Bolshevik faction, the radical wing of the
socialist movement to power, and then to build the Soviet Union. - So even he was surprised, how effective and how fast
the revolution happened. - He was, although I think
that he would've agreed that what was necessary was a cataclysm on the scale of the First
World War to make this happen. The First World War shatters so many of the certainties
of the 19th century that we talked about as a dynamic period with argument between ideologies, it scrambles all sorts of earlier debates. It renegotiates the
status of the individual versus an all powerful state and the claims of the state. Because to win, or even just to survive in World War I, you need to centralize,
centralize, centralize and to put everything onto a
authoritarian wartime footing in country after country. So Lenin earlier had already
articulated the possibility that this might happen, by talking about how the entire
globe already was connected, and there's a chain of
capitalist development that is connecting different countries, so that the weakest link in the chain, if it breaks, if it pops open, it might actually inaugurate
much bigger processes and start a chain reaction. And that's what he intended to do and has the chance to do
in the course of 1917. Incidentally, just to get
a sense of the sheer chaos and the human, on an
individual human level, what the absence of
established authority meant, there's few works of literature that are as powerful as Boris
Pasternak's, "Doctor Zhivago" for giving just the whole
sweep of contending forces in a power vacuum. It's an amazing testimony
to that time and place. - So you said that Bolsheviks saw violence and terror as necessary. So can you just speak to
this aspect of their... Because they took power
and so this was a part of the way they saw the world. - Right, and it had antecedents. Even though Lenin and his colleagues are competing amongst each other for the title of most
faithful disciple of Marx and most true to the received theory, in practice, there's other influences, earlier influences that
operate in the Russian context that were not operative, let's
say in the German context. And here you have to step back and think about the nature of Czarism, which had maintained still,
into the 20th century, the notion of a divine right to rule, that God had ordained the Czarist system and its hierarchies. And that to question these was sinful and politically not advisable. And the restrictive nature of
Russian society at this point dominated by the Czarist establishment. Its harshness, its reactionary nature meant that people who in another context, in another country, might
have been reformers, could instead very easily be provoked into becoming revolutionaries. And Lenin is a perfect example of this, because his older brother was executed as a result of being in a
radical revolutionary movement that was... Who was arrested and executed for association with terrorism. And earlier generations
of Russian radicals had founded populist groups that would aim to engage in terrorism and resistance against the Czarist regime. And this included people who
called themselves nihilists. And these nihilists were materialists who saw themselves ushering in a new age by absolute rejection of
earlier religious traditions and aiming for material answers to the challenges of the day. Among them was Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who wrote, what's been called,
the worst book ever written. It was in fact one of
Lenin's favorite books, in Russian it's (speaking in Russian). In English it gets translated
"What is to Be Done?" And it's a utopian novel
about revolutionaries and how revolutionaries should act with one another in open ways, new ways, non-traditional ways, in order to help usher
in the coming revolution. Lenin loved the work and said it had the great merit of showing you how to be a revolutionary. So there's the Marxist influence, and then there's Russian
populist, nihilist influence, which is also a very live
current in Lenin's thinking. And when you add these things together, you get an explosive mix, because Lenin, as a result and part of this family
trauma of his brother, becomes a absolutely irreconcilable enemy of the czarist regime, and sets about turning himself into what you might call a
guided missile for revolution. He turns himself into a machine to produce revolutionary change. And I mean that with little hyperbole. Lenin at one point shared with friends that he loved listening to music, but he tried not to listen to
beautiful music like Beethoven because it made him feel gentle. What the revolution demanded was realism, hardness, absolute steely resolve. So Lenin worries even
fellow revolutionaries by the intensity of his
single-minded focus to revolution. He spends his days thinking
about the revolution. He probably dreamt about the revolution. And so 24/7, it's an existence
where he's paired off other human elements quite deliberately in order to turn himself into an effective
instigator of revolution. So when the opportunity comes in 1917, he's primed and ready for that role. - It's interesting that nihilism, Russian nihilism had an impact on Lenin. I mean traditionally, nihilist philosophy rejects all sorts of traditional morality. There's a kind of cynical dark
view, and where's the light? - The light is science.
- Oh. - The light is science and materialism. - Oh boy.
- The nihilists, some of them did a very bad job of hiding their political beliefs because they would wear... They were famous for wearing
blue tinted spectacles, kind of the sunglasses
of the late 19th century, as a way of shielding
their eyes from light, but also having a dispassionate and realistic view of reality outside. So nihilists, as the name would suggest, do reject all prior certainties, but they make an exception for science and see that as the possibility for founding an entirely
new mode of existence. - For most people. I think nihilism is introduced in the brilliant philosophical work. I don't know if you're familiar with it, by the name of "The Big Lebowski." - All right.
- Nihilists appear there, and I think they summarized the nihilist tradition quite well. But it is indeed fascinating. And also it is fascinating that Lenin, and I'm sure this
influenced Stalin as well, that hardness-
- Yeah. - Was a necessary human characteristic to take the revolution to its end. - That's right, that's right. So prior generations of
nihilists or populists had resembled Lenin's
single-mindedness by being, you know, by arguing that one needed
total devotion for this. This was... To play this role in society, it was not enough to
be somewhat committed. Total commitment was necessary. And the other theme that's
at work here obviously is, if we consider Lenin
affected by Marxist ideas and the homegrown Russian
revolutionary tradition that predates the arrival of
Marxist socialism in Russia, it's the theme of needing to
adapt to local conditions. So Marxism or communism in Vietnam, or in Cuba, or in Cambodia, or in Russia, will be very different
in its local adaptations and local themes and resonances, than it was in Germany, where Marx would've
expected all this to unfold. - So let's talk about
Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. This little interplay that eventually led to Stalin
accumulating, grabbing, and taking a hold of power. What was that process like? - So Lenin's supreme confidence leads the party through
some really difficult steps, that involves things like
signing the humiliating treaty with the Germans, the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, where critics of the Bolshevik said that no one who loved their country would've agreed to a so
draconian, so harsh a settlement, that saw the peeling
off of large territories that had belonged to the Russian empire. Lenin is willing to undertake this because of the larger prize. He even says that he's not
gonna bother to read the treaty, because shortly that treaty
is gonna be a dead letter. His expectation is, revolution's
gonna break out everywhere, especially after we've
raised the standard, first of all in the wreckage
of the Russian Empire. - And we should probably
say that that treaty to some small degree,
maybe you can elaborate now or later, lays the
groundwork for World War II, because there is... Resentment is a thing that with time can lead to just extreme
levels of destruction, - Right. For German sensibilities,
for German nationalists, that treaty meant that Germany had essentially won World War I, and only a turn of events that many of them couldn't even follow or conceive of, the
arrival of American troops, the tipping of the balance in the west, led to that reversal. And one of the many scholars and contemporaries
pointed out that Germany between the wars was full of people who were convinced that Germany had actually not lost the war. - Yeah.
- However that victory of theirs was defined. So most definitely,
that groundwork is laid. And incidentally, this is
something we can talk about later. World War I and World War II have a lot of linkages like that. And as time goes by, I think historians are gonna focus on those linkages even more. But Lenin, also in his
leadership, against the odds, leads the Bolsheviks to power
in the Russian Civil War where most betting people
would've given them very slight odds of even surviving, given how many enemies
they faced off against. Lenin's insistence upon discipline and upon good organization allowed the Bolsheviks
to emerge as the winners. And yet, a great disappointment follows. Lenin, as we said, had expected that revolution will
break out soon everywhere and all it'll be necessary
for the Bolsheviks to do, having given the lead, is
to link up with others. And so he considered that what would be established
would be a red bridge between a communist Russia, and once Germany inevitably plunged ahead into its revolutionary
transformation, a communist Germany. That doesn't end up happening. On the contrary, what happens in Germany is a out and out shooting war between different kinds of socialists. When Germany establishes a democracy that later goes by the name
of the Weimar Republic, the government is a government
of social democrats, moderate social democrats, who are fearful of what they see as Russian
conditions of disorder, and who are not necessarily in sympathy with the Leninist vision
of tightly organized authoritarian rule. So communists who revolt in Germany are brutally suppressed by mercenaries, hardened front fighters
and nationalist radicals hired by the German socialist government. And the result is a wound that just won't heal in the
German socialist movement as a result of this fratricide. It frustrates Lenin's ambitions. So too does the fact that Poland, rather than going Bolshevik, resists attempts by the
Bolsheviks to move forward and to connect up with Germany. The Poles, yet again, play a tremendously
important historical role in changing the expected
course of historical events. It's in the aftermath of
these unexpected turns that Lenin and his colleagues realize that they're in this for the long haul. It's necessary to wait longer. They don't lose hope in... Or confidence you might say, in the eventual coming of
international workers revolution, but it's been deferred, it's been put off. And so the question then arises, what do you build within a
state that's established, called the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics or the Soviet Union. Lenin, as a result of an
assassination attempt, is deeply affected in his health and would've loved to
continue for years longer to steer the regime, but he's sidelined because
of his declining health. And there emerges a contest, a contest between a
very charismatic leader, Leon Trotsky, on the one hand, who is an amazing orator,
who is an intellectual, who has traveled widely in the world, who has seen much of the world, and who is a brilliant writer, a far ranging intellect, and
is seen as extremely radical because of his demand
for permanent revolution, the acceleration of
revolutionary processes to drive history forward, to
strike while the iron's hot. And on the other hand, is an extremely unlikely
contender for power. And that's a man who's probably
the antithesis of charisma if you were to meet him in person, a guy with a squeaky,
somewhat high pitched voice, not well suited to revolutionary oratory. His face pockmarked with the
scars of youthful illness, and who moreover, doesn't speak a fine, sophisticated Russian, but speaks a Russian heavily inflected with a Georgian accent from that part of the Russian
empire from which he came, and that was Stalin. And I know that you already
have a marvelous interview with Stephen Kotkin, the brilliant biographer of Stalin, who has so many insights on that subject. The one thing that even
after reading about Stalin that never ceases to surprise
me, even in retrospect, is that Stalin gains a reputation
not as a fiery radical, but as a moderate. A man who's a conciliator, someone who's calm when
others are excited, someone who is able, because
of his organizational skills, to resolve merely theoretical disputes with practical solutions. Now to fully take this aboard, we have to unknow what we
know from our vantage point about Stalin's leadership,
Stalin's brutality in eliminating his opposition,
the cult of personality, that against all odds,
got built up around Stalin so successfully. And the absolute dominant role that led him later to be
described as Genghis Khan with a telephone. A brutal dictator with ancient barbarism allied to the use of modern technology. While Trotsky is delivering
stirring speeches and theorizing, Stalin works behind the scenes to control personnel decisions in the Bolshevik movement
and in the state. And you know, it's a cliche 'cause it's true that personnel is policy. Trotsky is increasingly
sidelined and then demonized and eventually expelled
from the Soviet Union and later murdered in Mexico City. For Stalin, eliminating his enemies turned out to be the solution that he was most comfortable with. - So from that perspective, there's a lot of fascinating things here. So one is that you can have a wolf, a brutal dictator in moderate clothing. So just because somebody
presents as moderate- - That's right.
- Doesn't mean they can't be one of the most destructive, if not the most destructive
humans in history. The other aspect is, using propaganda you can
construct an image of a person, even though they're
uncharismatic, not attractive, their voice is no good,
all of those aspects, you can still have a, like... There's still to this day, a
very large number of people that see him as a religious- - Yeah.
- Type of God-like figure. - Yeah.
- So the power of propaganda there. - Today, we would call that
curating the image, right? - Curating the image, but the extent to which you can do that
effectively is quite incredible. So in that way also, Stalin is a study of
the power of propaganda. Can we just talk about the
ways that the power vacuum is filled by Stalin, how that manifests itself. Perhaps one angle we can take is, how was the secret police used? How did power manifest
itself under Stalin? - Well, before getting
to the secret police, I would just want to add
the other crucial element, which is Lenin's patronage. Stalin doesn't, you know, brawl his way into the Bolshevik party and dominate. He's co-opted and promoted
to positions of importance by Lenin, who sees him as a somewhat
rough around the edges, not very sophisticated, much less cosmopolitan
than other Bolsheviks, but dependable, reliable,
and committed revolutionary. So I think that one of
the things that's emerged, especially after archives opened up with the fall of the Soviet Union, and we were able to read more and more of the communications of Lenin, is that, it's not the case
that we're talking here about a unconnected series of careers. Rather there are connections to be made. It's true that towards
the end of his life, Lenin came to be worried by complaints about Stalin's rudeness
towards fellow Bolsheviks. And in his testament, he warned against Stalin's testimonies, Lenin fundamentally saw
himself as irreplaceable. And so that doesn't really help in a succession struggle, right? Stalin is able to rely on
a secret police apparatus that had been built up
under Lenin already. And it's very early in the foundation of the Soviet state that the Cheka or the
Extraordinary Commission is established as a secret police to terrify the enemies, beat down the opponents of the regime, and to keep an eye on
society more generally. The person who's chosen for that task also is a anomaly among Bolsheviks. That is a man of Polish
aristocratic background, Feliks Dzierzynski, who comes to be known by
the nickname "Iron Felix." Here's a man about whom
a cult of personality also is created. Dzierzynski is celebrated
in the Soviet period as the model of someone
who is harsh but fair. An executioner, but with a heart of gold. Somebody who loves children, somebody who has a tender heart, but forces himself to be steely willed against the opponents of the ideological
project of the Bolsheviks. Dzierzynski is succeeded by figures who will be absolutely instrumental to Stalin's exercise of power. And they're not immune either. Stalin, in his purges, takes care also to purge the secret police as a way of finding others upon whom to deflect blame for earlier atrocities
and to produce a situation where even committed Bolsheviks are uncertain of what's
going to happen next, and feel their own
position to be precarious. I mean, incidentally,
there are other influences that probably are brought
to bear here as well. It gets said about Stalin that he used to spend a lot of time flipping through
Machiavelli's "The Prince." And it seems that Stalin's
personal copy of "The Prince," nobody knows where that
is, if it still exists. But historians have found annotations in works by Lenin, that Stalin,
who is a voracious reader, as it turns out, made in the
back of one of the books, which sounds almost like a commentary on Machiavelli's almost,
but not quite suggestion that the ends justify the means. Stalin's own writing says that if someone is strong,
active, and intelligent, even if they do things
that other people condemn, they're still a good person. And so Stalin's
self-conception of himself is, someone who along these lines, and in line with Lenin's
emphasis on practical results and discipline, somebody
who gets things done, that's the crucial ethical standard. And ultimately, in criticisms
by later dissidents of Bolshevik morality, this question of, what
is the ethical standard? What is the ethical law? Will bring this question into focus. Because by the... And this goes back to Marx
as well, incidentally. The notion that any ethical system, any notion of right or wrong, is purely a product of class identity. Because every class produces
its distinctive ideas, its distinctive religion,
its distinctive art forms, its distinctive styles, means that with no one transcendent or absolute morality,
it's all up for grabs. And then it's a question of power and the exercise of power with no limits, untrammeled by any laws whatsoever. Dictatorship in its purest form, something that Lenin had avowed, and then Stalin comes to
practice even more fully. - Not that it's possible to
look deep into a person's heart, but you know, if you look at Trotsky, you could say that he probably
believed deeply in Marxism and communism, probably
the same with Lenin. What do you think Stalin believed? Was he a believer? Was he a pragmatist that used communism as a way to gain power, and the ideology as part of propaganda? Or did he in his own private moments deeply believe in this utopia? - That's an excellent question,
and you're quite right. I mean, we cannot peer
into the inmost recesses of somebody's being and know for sure. My intuition though is that... Is that this may be a false
alternative, a false dichotomy. It's natural enough to see somebody who does monstrous things
to say, "Well, this ideology is being used as a cover for it." But I think that my suspicion is that these were actually
perfectly compatible in his historical role. The notion that there's an ideology. It gives you a master plan for how history is going to
develop and your own power, the increase of that power
to unprecedented proportions, your ability to torment even
your own faithful followers in order just to see them squirm, which Stalin was famous for,
to keep people unsettled. To me it seems that for some people those might not actually be opposed, but might even be mutually reinforcing, which is a very scary thought. - It's terrifying, but it's really important to understand. If we look at, once Stalin takes power, at some of the policies, so the collectivization of agriculture, why do you think that
failed so catastrophically, especially in the 1930s
with Ukraine and Holodomor? - I think the short answer is that the Bolsheviks in particular, but also communists more generally, have had a very conflicted
relationship with agriculture. Agriculture is a very... I mean, vital, obviously,
but also very traditional, an old form of human activity. Has about it all of the smell of tradition and other problematic factors as well. In a place like Russia
or the Russian Empire, peasants throughout
history, for centuries, had wanted one thing, and that was to be left
alone to farm their own land. You know, that's their utopia. And that, for someone like Marx, who had a vision of historical
development and transcendence and progress as being absolutely key, does not mesh at all with that vision. For that reason, when Marx
comes up with this tableau, this tremendous display of
historical transformation taking place over centuries and headed towards the final utopia, the role of farmers there is negligible. Peasants get called conservative and dull as sacks of potatoes
in Marx's historical vision because they're limited in their horizon. They farm their land, their plot, and don't have greater revolutionary goals beyond working the land and
having it free and clear. By contrast, industrialization,
that's progress. I mean images that today
would be deeply disturbing to an environmentalist's sensibility, smoke stacks belching smoke,
the byproducts of industry, a landscape transformed
by the factory model, that's what Marx, and then later the
Bolsheviks, have in mind. Similarly, the goal, even as
articulated in Marx's writings, is to put agriculture and farming on a factory model, so that you won't need to deal
with this traditional role of the independent farmer or the peasant. Instead, you'll have people
who benefit from progress, benefit from rationalization
by working factory farms. So in approaching the
question of collectivization, we have to keep in mind that
for Stalin and his comrades who are bound and
determined to drag Russia, kicking and screaming,
into the modern age, and not to allow it to be beaten because of its backwardness,
as Stalin puts it, traditional forms of agriculture are not what they have in mind. And in their rank of desired
outcomes, industrialization, especially massive heavy industry is the sine qua non, that's
their envisioned future. Agriculture rates below. So in that case, the crucial significance
of collectivization is to get a handle on the food situation in order to make it predictable and not to find oneself in another crisis, like during the Civil War,
when the cities are starving, industry is robbed of labor and the factories are at a standstill. So this is really the core approach to collectivization, to put
the productive capacities of the farmers in a regimented way, in a state controlled way, under the control of the state. This produces vast human suffering because for the farmers,
their plot of land that they thought they had gained as a result of the
revolution, is now taken away. They no longer have the same incentives they had before to be successful farmers. In fact, if you're a successful farmer and maybe have a cow, as opposed to your
neighbors who have no cow, you're defamed and denounced as a kulak, a tight-fisted exploiter, even though you might be helping to develop agriculture in
the region that you're from. So the result is human
tragedy on a vast scale. And allied to that, incidentally, is Stalin's sense that this is a chance to also target people who are opposed to the Bolshevik
regime for other reasons. Whether it's because of
their Ukrainian identity, whether it's because of a desire for a different nationalist project. So for Stalin, there are many motives that roll into collectivization. And the final thing to be
said is, you are quite right that collectivization
proves to be a failure, because the Soviet Union
never finally gets a grasp on the problems of
agricultural production. By the end of the Soviet Union, they're importing grain from the west in spite of having some of
tremendously rich farmland to be found worldwide. And the reason for that,
had to do in part, I think, with the incentives that
had been taken away. Prosperous individual farmers have a motive for working their land and maximizing production. By contrast, if you are an employee of a factory style
agricultural enterprise, the incentives run in
very different directions. And the joke that was common
for decades in the Soviet Union and other communist countries
with similar systems was, we pretend to work and
they pretend to pay us. So even labor, which is
rhetorically respected and valorized, in practice, is rewarded
with very slim rewards, and the last point, immobility. The collectivization reduces
the mobility of the peasants who are not allowed, because of internal passports, to move to the cities,
unless they have permission, they're locked in place. And you gotta say, at
the time and afterwards, that looked a lot like
feudalism or a neo feudalism, in terms of the restrictions
on workers in the countryside. - It is a terrifying, horrific and fascinating study of how the ideal, when meeting reality, fails. So the idea here is to make
agriculture more efficient, so be more productive. So the industrialized model, but the implementation
through collectivization had all the elements
that you've mentioned, that contended with human nature. So first with the kulaks, so the successful farmers were punished, and so then the incentive is, not just not to be a successful farmer, but to like hide. Added to that there's a growing quota that everybody's supposed to deliver on, that nobody can deliver on. And so now, because you
can't deliver on that quota, you're basically exporting all your food and you can't even feed yourself. And then you suffer more and more and more and there's a vicious
downward spiral of like, you can't possibly produce that. Now there's... And another human incentive, where you're gonna lie,
everybody lies on the data. - That's right.
- And so even Stalin himself, probably, as evil or
incompetent as he may be, he was not even getting good data about what's even happening. - That's right.
- Even if he wanted to stop the vicious downward cycle, which he certainly didn't, but
he wouldn't be even able to. So there's all these
like dark consequences of what on paper seems like a good ideal. And it's a fascinating study
of like things on paper- - Yes, that's right. - When implemented, can
go really, really bad. - That's right, and the outcome here is a,
a horrific manmade famine, not a natural disaster, not bad harvest, but a manmade famine, as a result of then the compulsion that gets used by the Soviet state to extract those resources,
cordoning off the area, not allowing starving people to escape. You put very well, some
of the implications of this case study in how things look in the
abstract versus in practice. And those phenomena were going to haunt the rest of the experience
of the Soviet Union. The whole notion that up and
down the chain of command, everybody is falsifying or tinkering with or
prettifying the statistics or their reports, in order not to look bad and not to, you know, have
vengeance visited upon them, reaches the point where nobody, in spite of the pretense of
comprehensive knowledge, right? There's a state planning agency that creates five-year plans
for the economy as a whole, and which is supposed to
have accurate statistics. All of this is founded
upon a foundation of sand. That's inadvertent. That's not an intended side effect. But what you described, in
terms of the internal dynamics of fostering conflict in a rural society was absolutely not inadvertent. That was deliberate. The doctrine was, you bring civil war. Now had there been social tensions before? Of course there had. Had there been envies, had
there been differentiations in wealth or status. Of course there had been, but a deliberate plan
to bring class conflict and bring civil war and then heighten it in the countryside does damage, and not least of that is this phenomenon of a negative selection. Those who have most enterprise, those who are most entrepreneurial, those who have most self-discipline, those who are best organized, will be winnowed again
and again and again, sending the message that mediocrity is comparatively much safer than talent. And this pattern incidentally, gets transposed, and in
tremendously harrowing ways also, to the entire group of
Russian intelligentsia and intellectuals of other peoples who are in the Soviet Union. They discover similarly,
that to be independent, to have a voice which is not compliant, carries with it tremendous penalties, especially in Stalin's reigns of terror. - Again, a difficult question about a psychology of one human being, but to what degree do you think Stalin was deliberately punishing the farmers and the Ukrainian farmers? And to what degree was
he looking the other way and allowing the large scale incompetence, the horrific incompetence of the collectivization
of agriculture to happen? - Well, I mean I think it
was both things, right? I mean, there were not
only sins of omission, but also sins of commission. Incidentally, one should add, I don't think for Stalin it was personal. These are people who are
very remote from him. Never coming into contact with the people who are suffering in this way. Attributed to him is the quote that, "One death is a tragedy, a
million deaths is a statistic." I think he, in action, certainly acted in a way
that would vindicate that. But the process of collectivization was not just a bureaucratic snafu following on bureaucratic snafu. There was the mobilization
of communist youth, of military, of party activists, to go into the regions and to search for hidden food, to extract the food
where it could be found. And this... We have testimony to this
in the case of people who later became dissidents,
like Lev Kopelev, who wrote in his memoirs about how he was among
those who were sent in to enact these policies. And he saw families with the
last food being taken away even as signs of starvation were visible already in the present. And yet he did not go mad. He didn't kill himself. He didn't fall into despair,
because he believed. Because he had been taught and believed at least then,
that this was justified. This was a larger historical process and a greater good would result
even from these enormities. So I think that this was quite deliberate - Following this, as you've mentioned, there was the process of the Great Terror. Or the intellectuals, where the communist party officials, the military officers, the
bureaucrats, everybody, 750,000 people were executed, and over a million people
were sent to the gulag. What can you say by way of
wisdom from this process of the Great Terror that Stalin
implemented from 36 to 38? - Well, the Terror had
a variety of victims. There were people who were true believers and who were Bolsheviks, who were especially targeted by Stalin because he aimed to revenge himself for all the sort of condescension
that he'd experienced in that movement before. And also to eliminate rivals or potential rival power centers and members of their families. And then there were people
who simply got caught up in a process whereby the repressive organs in the provinces were sent quotas. You have to achieve your quota and maybe even better yet,
overachieve your quota, overperform. That would be the key to success and rising in the bureaucracies
in the Age of the Terror. What's so horrifying is the
way in which a whole society stood paralyzed in this process. And how neighbors would be taken away in the middle of the night and people would be wary
of talking about it. Resistance, at least
in these urban centers, was entirely paralyzed by fear, when, if one had somehow
found a way to mobilize, somehow a way to resist the process, the results might have been different. There's an astonishing book. I mean there's so many great books that have come out quite
recently, even on these topics. Orlando Figes has a amazing
book called "The Whisperers," that traces several families'
history in the Stalin period. And it's a testimony
to how a whole society and some of its most
intelligent people got winnowed again and again and again in that process of negative selection that we talked about, the lasting dislocation
and scars that this left, and the way in which how people were not able to talk about
these things in public, because that would put
you next on the list suspected of having less than
total devotion to the state. I think one of the things that also is so terrifying
about the entire process is, even total devotion wasn't enough. The process took on a life of its own. And I think that it might
even have surprised Stalin in some ways, not enough to short circuit the process. But the notion where people were invited to denounce neighbors, co-workers, maybe even family members, meant that ever larger groups of people would be brought into the orbit of the secret police, tortured in order to produce confessions. Those confessions then would
lead to more lists of suspects of people who had to be investigated and either executed or sent to the gulags. The uncertainty that this produced, it was enormous. Even loyalty was not
enough to save people. The stories, Solzhenitsyn's
"Gulag Archipelago" is full of stories of dedicated communists who find themselves in the gulag and are sure that some
mistake has been made, and if only Comrade Stalin would hear about this terrible thing
that has happened to them, surely it would be corrected and nothing like this would... Everyone else, by contrast,
accused of terrible crimes, there must be some truth behind that. So, you know, talk about ways
of disaggregating a society, ways of breaking down bonds of trust. This left lasting traces
on an entire society that endured to this very day. - Yeah, there again, a
fascinating study of human nature that there essentially
was an emergent quota of confessions of treason. So like, even though the
whole society was terrified and were through terror, loyal, there still needed to
be a lot of confessions of people being disloyal.
- Right, right. - So you just making shit up now. Like at a mass scale,
stuff is being made up, and it's also, the machine of the secret
police starts eating itself because you want to be confessing
on your boss, on your... And this is this weird,
dark, dynamic system where human nature is just at its worst. - Absolutely. Absolutely. - Why, if we look at this deep discussion we had about Marxism, to what degree can we
understand from that lens why the implementation of communism in the Soviet Union
failed in such a dark way, both in the economic
system with agriculture and industrialization, and on the human way with just violation of every possible human right, and the torture and the
suffering and gulags and all of this. - Well, I think some of it comes back to the ethical grounding
that we mentioned earlier, the notion that ethics
are entirely situational, and that any ethical
system is an outgrowth of a particular class reality, a particular material reality, and that leaves the door wide open. So I think that that aspect was present from the very beginning. I think that the expectations of Marx, that the revolution would take hold and be successful in a developed country, played a role here as well. Russia, which compared
to the rest of Europe, was less developed even before the First World War is in a dire state after all of the ravage and the millions of deaths that continue even after the war has ended in the west, that leaves precious little in the way of structural restraints or a functioning society that would say, "Let's not do things this way." I think that in retrospect, that special role carved
out for special individuals who can move this process forward and accelerate historical development allowed for people to
step into those roles and appoint themselves executors
of this ideological vision. So I think those things
play a role as well. - Now, it's hard to do
counterfactual history, but to what degree is this basically that the communist ideals
create a power vacuum and a dictator type figure steps in, and then it's a roll of the dice of what that dictator is like. So can you imagine a world
where the dictator was Trotsky. Would we see very similar type of things? Or is the hardness and the brutality of somebody like Stalin, manifested itself in being
able to look the other way as some of these dark
things were happening, more so than somebody like Trotsky who would presumably see the realizations of these policies and be shocked? - Well, counterfactuals
are hard, like you said, and one very quickly gets off into really deep waters in speculation. There were contemporaries and there have been scholars since, who suggest that Trotsky, by all indications, might
have been even more radical than Stalin in the tempo
that he wanted to achieve. - Oh boy.
- Think of the slogan of permanent revolution. Trotsky also, who
dabbled in so many things in his intellectual life, also spoke in almost utopian terms that are just astonishing to read, in utopian terms about the construction of the new man and the new woman. And that out of the raw
material of humanity, once you really get going, and once you've established a system that matches your hopes for the future, it'll be possible to reconfigure people and like talk about ambition, to create essentially the
next stage in human evolution, a new species growing out of humanity. Those don't sound like very
modest or limited approaches, and I guess we just really won't know. - Do some of the
destructive characteristics of communism have to go hand in hand? So the central planning
that we talked about, the censorship of the secret police, the concentration of power
in one dictatorial figure, and the... Well, let's say with, again,
with the secret police, the violent oppression. - One should add to those factors that have a kind of
interrelated logic of their own. The sheer fact that
communism comes to power in most of these instances
as a result of war. As a result of the destruction
of what came before and a power vacuum. So think of the Russian revolutions in the wake of the fall of Czarism. Think of the expansion of
Stalin's puppet regimes into eastern Europe in the wake of World War II, and the Red Army moving into occupy areas in eastern Europe, although they announced that
they're coming as liberators. Consider the foundation of communist China on the heels of World War II, and yet more Chinese civil War. Consider cases like Korea, Vietnam. It's likely that this
already is a key element in setting things up for further crisis, because upon seizure of power, if your expectation is, "Well, it ought to be relatively easy to get this system rolling and
put it on a basis that's... After all, we have the
roadmap to the future." There will follow
frustrations and impediments and resistance, and there's
a ratchet effect then there because it'll produce more repression, producing even more problems that follow. What drives the whole
thing forward though, especially in its Leninist version, but already visible with Marx and Engels, is the insistence on confidence. If you have the key to the future, all of these things are
possible and necessary. This leads to an ethos, I think, that's very hard for historians to quantify or to study
in a methodical way, but it's the insistence
that you hear with Lenin and then especially with Stalin, that to be a Bolshevik means to be hard, to be realistic, to be consequential, meaning you don't shy away from
doing what needs to be done, even if your primordial ethical remainders from whatever earlier experience you have, rebel against it. Under Stalin, there's a constant slogan of the Bolshevik tempo. The Bolsheviks, there's no
fortresses that they can't storm. They can do everything. And in a way, this is the assertion that it's will over everything. History can be moved
forward and accelerated and probably your own actions
justified as a result, no matter what they were, if you are sufficiently
hard and determined and have the confidence to follow through. And then that obviously
raises the ultimate question, what happens when that
confidence ebbs or erodes or when it's lost? - If we go to the 1920s,
to the home of Karl Marx, fascism as implemented by
the Nazi party in Germany was called the National
Socialist German Workers Party. So what were the similarities and differences of fascism, socialism, how it was conceived of
in fascism and communism? And maybe you can speak to
the broader battle of ideas that was happening at the time, and battle of political control that was happening at the time. - Well, I mean there's
a whole bunch of terms that are in play here, right? And when we speak of fascism,
fascism in its original sense is a radical movement founded in Italy, which though it had been
allegedly on the winning side of World War I, is disappointed
with the lack of rise in national prestige and territory that commences after the end of the war. So bizarrely enough, it's a socialist by the
name of Benito Mussolini, who crafts an ideological message of glorification of the state, the people at large united
in a militaristic way on the march, ready to
attack, ready to expand. A complete overthrow of liberal ideas of the rights of the individual or of representative democracy. And instead, vesting power
in one leader, in his case, the Duce, Mussolini, in order to replicate in peace time, the ideal of total military
mobilization in wartime. Although the Nazis in Germany are inspired and borrow heavily from fascist ideology, there also are different
emphases that they include, and that includes their
virulent racism from the outset, which, in addition to a
glorification of the state, glorification of the leader and preparation for national greatness, race is absolutely core. And it's that racial radicalism that the Nazis espouse as a central idea along with antisemitism, the demonizing in particular of the Jews, and this insane racialist cosmology that the Nazis avow. It is the assertion that the
Nazis will uniquely bring to pass unity in the people,
unity in the society, that leads them to give
themselves this odd name of national socialist. Some leaders like
Goebbels, among the Nazis, accent the socialist part to begin with, others put the accent firmly
on the nationalist part. In part, the term they
chose for their movement was meant to be confusing. It was meant to take slogans or words from different parts
of the political spectrum to fuse them into something
unfamiliar and new, and claim that they'd overcome all earlier political divisions. That the Nazis claimed
that they were a movement, not a party, even though their party
was called a party. So what did Nazism and
Bolshevism and communism share, or how were they opposed to one another? What we need to start with, by making clear, they were
ideological archenemies. In both worldviews, the opposite side represented
the ultimate expression of the evil that needed to
be exorcized from history in order for their desired
utopia to be brought about. And this leads to strange and perverted beliefs about reality. From the perspective of the Nazis, the Nazis claimed that
because they saw the Jews as a demonic element in human history, the Bolsheviks weren't
even really, you know, didn't really believe
all of this economic, dialectical materialism, they were in fact a racial
conspiracy, it was alleged. And so the Nazis used the
term of Judeo-Bolshevism to argue that communism is essentially a conspiracy
steered by the Jews, which was complete nonsense. For their part, the communists, and from the perspective
of the Soviet Union, the Nazis were in essence a
super capitalist conspiracy. If the cosmological enemy
are the capitalists, and the owners, the exploiters, then all of the rigmarole about race and nationalism are distractions. They're meant to fool the poor SAPs who enlist in that movement. It's essentially steered
by capitalist owners, who, it is claimed, are reduced to this desperate expedient of coming up with this thuggish party that represents the
last gasp of capitalism. So bizarrely enough, from
the communist perspective, the rise of the Nazis could
be interpreted as a good sign, because it means that
capitalism is almost done, because this is the last
undisguised, naked face of capitalism nearing its end. So the other... Beyond this ideological total opposition in terms of their hoped for futures, the reality is that there were aspects that were shared on either side, and that included the conviction that they could agree that
the age of democracy was done, and that the 19th century had
had its day with experiments with representative democracy, the claims of human rights,
classical liberal ideas, and all of this had been
revealed as bankrupt. It had gotten you what? It got you first, the First World War, as a total conflict, leaving
tens of millions dead, and then economically,
the Great Depression, showing that the end was not far away. This produced, at one and the same time, both ideological opposition and instances of vastly
cynical cooperation. In terms of the Weimar Republic, it's obvious with the benefit of hindsight that German democracy
had ceased to function even before Hitler comes to power. But in the process of
making democracy unworkable in Germany, the extremes, the Nazi storm trooper army, with their brown shirts and
the communist street fighters had cooperated in heightening
an atmosphere of civil war that left people searching
for desperate expedience in the last days of the Weimar Republic. The most compelling case
of their cooperation was the signing of the Nazi Soviet Pact, on August 23rd, 1939, which enables Hitler
to start World War II. A non-aggression pact in official terms, it contains secret
clauses whereby the Nazis and the Soviets meeting in
Moscow under Stalin's wary eye, had agreed on territorial
division of eastern Europe and making common cause as each claiming to be
the winner of the future. So in spite of their oppositions, these were regimes that
were able, very cynically, to work together to dire effect. In the course of the 1950s in particular, there arose political scientists who also crafted an explanation for ways in which these regimes, although they were opposed to one another, actually bore morphological resemblances. They operated in ways that, in spite of ideological
differences, bore similarities. And such political scientists, Hannah Arendt chief among them, crafted a model called totalitarianism, borrowing a term that the fascists had liked about themselves, to define regimes like the Nazis, like Stalin's Soviet Union, for a new kind of dictatorship, that was not a backwards cast
revival of ancient barbarism, but with something new, a
new form of dictatorship that laid total claims
on hearts and minds. That didn't want just passive obedience, but wanted fanatical loyalty. That combined fear with compulsion in order to generate belief in a system, or at the very least, atomize the masses to the point where they would go along with the plans of the regime. This model has often met
with very strong criticism on the grounds that no regime in human history has yet
achieved total control of the population under its grip. That's true, but that's not
what Hannah Arendt was saying. Hannah Arendt was saying, there will always be inefficiencies, there will be resistance, there will be divergences. What was new was not
the alleged achievement of total control, it was the ambition. The articulation of the ambition that it might be possible
to exercise such fundamental and thoroughgoing control
of entire populations. And the final frightening thought that Arendt kept before her was, what if this is not a model that comes to us from
benighted uncivilized ages? What if this is what the
future is going to look like? That's a horrifying intuition. - So let me ask you about Darryl Cooper, who is a historian and podcaster, did a podcast with Tucker Carlson. And he made some claims there and elsewhere about World War II. There are two claims that I would love to
get your perspective on. First he stated that Churchill was quote, "The chief villain of
the Second World War." I think Darryl argues that
Churchill forced Hitler to expand the war beyond
Poland into a global war. Second, the mass murder of
Jews, Poles, Slavs, gypsies and death camps was an accident, a byproduct of global war. And in fact, the most humane extermination of prisoners of war possible, given the alternative
was death by starvation. So I was wondering if you can respond to each of those claims. - Well, I think that this
is a bunch of absurdity and it would be laughable
if it wasn't so serious in its implications. To address the points in turn, Churchill was not the chief villain of the Second World War. The notion that Churchill
allegedly forced Hitler to escalate and expand a conflict that could have been
limited to Poland is... That assertion is based
on a complete neglect of what Nazi ideology was. The Nazi worldview and
racism was not a ideology that was limited in its application. It looked toward world domination. In the, the years since the
Nazis had come to power, they sponsored programs of
education called geopolitics, which urged Germans to
think in continents. Think in continents. To see themselves as
one of the superpowers that would battle for
the future of the world. And now, in retrospect,
we of course can see that Germany was not in a position to legitimate a claim like that, but the Nazis aims were
anything but limited. In particular, this sort of
argument has been tried out in different ways before. In previous decades, there had
been attempts by historians who were actually well-read
and well-published to argue that World War
II had been in part, a contingent event that
had been brought about by accidents or miscalculations. And such explanations argued that if you put Hitler's ideology aside, you actually could interpret him as a pretty traditional German politician in the stripe of Bismarck. Now, when I say it like that, I think you can spot
the problem immediately. When you put the ideology aside. To try to analyze Hitler's
acts or alleged motives in the absence of the ideology
that he himself subscribed to and described in hateful
detail in "Mein Kampf" and other manifestos and speeches, is an enterprise that's doomed
to failure, justifiably. The notion that the mass
murder of Jews, Poles, Slavs and gypsies was an event
that simply happened as a result of unforeseen events, and that it was understood
as somehow being humane also runs contrary to the historical fact. When Poland was invaded, the Nazis unleashed a killing wave in their so-called Operation Tannenberg, which sent in specially trained and ideologically pre-prepared killers, who were given the name of the
units of the Einsatzgruppen in order to wipe out the Polish leadership and also to kill Jews. This predates any of
the Operation Barbarossa and the Nazis' invasion
of the Soviet Union. The Nazis moreover, in many different
expressions of their ideology had made clear that their plans, you can read this in "Mein
Kampf," for eastern Europe, were subjugation and ethnic
cleansing on a vast scale. So I consider both of these
claims absolutely untenable given the facts and documents. - So do you think it was always the case that Nazi Germany was going
to invade the Soviet Union? - I think as you can read in "Mein Kampf," this is what's necessary in order to bring that
racial utopia to pass. And so while the timetable
might be flexible, while obviously,
geopolitical constellations would play a role in determining when such a thing might be possible, it was most definitely on his list. And I would wanna add that
in my own scholarship, I've worked to explore
some of these themes a little bit further. My second book, which is entitled "The German Myth of the East," which appeared with
Oxford University Press, examines centuries in the German encounter with eastern Europe and how Germans have thought
about eastern Europe, whether in positive ways
or in negative ways. And one thing that emerges
from this investigation is that even before the Nazis
come to power in Germany, there are certainly negative and dehumanizing stereotypes
about eastern Europeans. Some of them activated by the experiences of German occupation in
some of these regions during the First World War. But the Nazis take the
very most destructive and most negative of all those stereotypes and make them the dominant ones, making no secret of their
expected future of domination and annihilation in the east. - The idea of lebensraum, is it possible to implement
that idea without Ukraine? - Hitler has Ukraine in his horizon as one of the chief prizes, and the Nazis then craft extensive plans, a master plan that they work on in draft after draft after draft, even as the balance of the
war is turning against them on the eastern front. This master plan is called
the meaning Generalplan Ost, the general plan for the east. And it foresees things like mega highways on which the German master
race will travel to vacation in Crimea, or how their settlements will be scientifically distributed in the wide open spaces
of Ukraine for agriculture that will feed an expanded and purified Germanic master race. So this was not peripheral
to the Nazi ambitions, but central. - As I best understand, there is extensive and definitive evidence that the Nazis always wanted
to invade the Soviet Union, and there was always a racial component and not just about the Jews. They wanted to enslave and
exterminate the Jews, yes, but the Slavic people, the Slavs. And if he was successful at
conquering the Soviet Union, I think the things that would
be done to the Slavic people would make the Holocaust
seem insignificant, in my understanding, in terms of the numbers and the brutality and the viciousness in which he characterized
the Slavic people. - In their worldview, the Jews
were especially demonized. And so the project of the
domination of eastern Europe involves this horrific program
of mechanized, systematized, bureaucratically organized and horrifyingly efficient mass murder of the Jewish populations. What the Nazis expected for the
Slavs had a longer timeline. Himmler expected, the head of the SS, the SS is given a special mission, to be part of the transformation of these regions ethnically. And Himmler in his role of
envisioning this German future in eastern Europe gives
such a chilling phrase. He says that while certain Slavs will fall victim immediately, some proportion of Slavs will
not be shipped out or deported or annihilated, but instead they'll remain
as slaves for our culture. And in that one phrase, Himmler managed to defile and deface everything that
the word culture had meant to generations of the best German thinkers and artists in the
centuries before the Nazis. The notion of slaves for our culture was part of his longer term expectation. And then there's finally a fact that speaks volumes about
what the Nazis planned for the east. Hitler and Himmler
envisioned permanent war on the eastern front. Not a peace treaty, not a
settlement, not a border, but a constant moving of the
border, every generation, hundreds of miles east, in order to keep winning
more and more living space, and with analogy to other frontiers, to always give more fighting experience and more training and aggression to generation after
generation of German soldiers. In terms of nightmarish visions, this one's right up there. - And always repopulating
the land conquered with the German, the Aryan race. So in terms of race,
repopulating with race and enslaving the Slavic
people and exterminating them. Because there's so many of them, it takes a long time to exterminate. - And even in the case of
the Germans themselves, the hidden message behind even
Nazi propaganda about unity and about German national identity was, the Nazis envisioned relentless purges of the German genetic stock as well. So among their victims are
people with disabilities, people who are defined as
not racially pure enough for the future, even though they are
clearly Germans by identity. The full scale and the
comprehensive ambitions of the Nazis are as breathtaking
as they are horrifying. - One of the other
things I saw Darryl tweet was that what ended up happening
in the Second World War was the worst possible thing
that could have happened. And I just also wanted to comment on that, which I can imagine a very large number of possible scenarios
that could have happened that are much, much worse, including the successful
conquering of the Soviet Union. As we said, the kind of
things that would be done, and the total war, ever
ongoing for generations, which would result in, you know, hundreds of millions of deaths
and torture and enslavement, and not to mention the
other possible trajectory of the nuclear bomb.
- That's right, that's right. I would think that the
Nazis with atomic weapons with no compunctions about deploying them would rank up there as even worse than the horrors that we saw. - Now let me steelman a point that was also made as part of this, that the oversimplified
narrative of sort of... To put it crudely,
Hitler bad Churchill good has been used and abused
by neocons and war mongers and the military industrial
complex in the years since to basically say, "This particular leader is just like Hitler," or maybe, "Hitler in the 1930s, and we must invade now before he becomes the
Hitler of the 1940s." And that has been applied
in the Middle East, in eastern Europe, and god forbid that can be also applied in the war with China in the 21st century. So yes, war mongers do
sure love to use Hitler and apply that template to wage war, and we should be wary of that and be careful of that, both the overt application
of this historical template onto the modern world and
of warmongers in general. - Yeah, and I think
that nobody should like oversimplified narratives. We need subtle and accurate narratives. - And also, I just would
like to say that probably, as we've been talking
about Stalin and Hitler, are singular figures. And just as we've been talking about, the implementation of
these totalitarian regimes, they're singular in human history, that we never saw anything like it, and I hope, from everything it looks like, we'll never see anything like it again. - I mean, there's certainly striking and unique historical
characters in the record. One of the things that's so disturbing about Hannah Arendt's model
of totalitarianism is, the leader can be changed. The system itself demands
that there be a leader who allegedly is all powerful and all knowing and
prophetic and the like. But whether particular
figures are interchangeable in that role is a key question. - Let me go back to the 1920s, instead of ask another
counterfactual question. Given the battle between the
Marxists and the communists and National Socialists, was it possible and what
would that world look like, if the communists indeed won in Germany, as Karl Marx envisioned, and it made total sense given
the industrialized expanse that Germany represented. Was that possible? And what would it look
like if it happened? - I would think that the reality
was probably very remote, but that was certainly their ambition. German communists get quoted as saying, "After Hitler, it's our turn." Their sentiment was that the
arrival of Nazism on the scene was a sign of how decrepit and incompetent and doomed capitalism was. In hindsight, that's almost
impossible to believe. Because what happens is, the Nazis with their
characteristic brutal ruthlessness, simply decapitate the party and arrest the activists who were supposed to be waiting to take over. So that's forestalled. A further hypothetical
that gets raised a lot is, couldn't the social democrats and the communists have worked together to keep Hitler out of power? That's where the prior
history comes into play. The very fact that the
German revolution in 1919 sees socialists killing socialists produces a dynamic that's so negative, that it's nearly impossible
to settle on cooperation. Added to the fact that the communists see the social democrats as rivals for the loyalty of the working class. In terms of just statistical likelihood, a lot of experts at the time felt, surely the German army
is going to step in, and the most likely outcome
would've been a German general shutting down the democracy and producing a military dictatorship. It says a lot about how dreadful and bloody the record of the Nazis was, that some people in retrospect would've felt that that
military dictatorship would've been preferable, if it had obviated the need for the ordeal under the Nazis. - What do you think Marx would
say about the 20th century? (Vejas chuckles) Let's take it before we
get to Mao and China. Just looking at the Soviet
Union and Nazi Germany. - That's a really good question. I think that Marx was
flexible in his expectations about tactics and strategies, even as he was sure that
he had actually cracked a big intellectual problem of what the future's going to look like. So how it would play out, he was a man who had to deal
with a lot of disappointments, because in revolutionary uprising, after revolutionary uprising, whether it was in the revolutions
of 1848 across Europe, whether it was in Poland, whether it was in the Paris commune, "This is it." "This is the outbreak of the real thing." and then it doesn't end up happening. So I think that he'd probably have tried to be patient about the turn of events. We mentioned at the outset
that Marx felt it was unlikely that a worker's revolution would break out in the Russian empire, because for that you needed
lots of industrial workers, and they didn't have a lot of industry. There's a footnote to add there, and it proves his flexibility. A Russian socialist wrote to Marx asking, "Might it not be possible for Russia to escape some stages of
capitalist development? I mean, do you have to
rigidly follow that scheme?" And Marx's answer was
convoluted, but it wasn't a no. And that suggests that Marx was willing to entertain all sorts
of possible scenarios. I think he would certainly
have been very surprised at the course of events as it unfolded, because it didn't match his
expectations at the outset. - Not to put this on him, but would he be okay with
the price of Holodomor for the utopian destination of communism? Meaning, is it okay to crack
a few eggs to make an omelet? - Well, we don't know what Marx would say if he were posed that
question deliberately, but we do know in the case
of a Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, who was a prolific and celebrated British
historian of the 19th and 20th centuries, and
he was put this question in the nineties after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, and he stated forthrightly that because the Soviet Union failed, such sacrifices were inordinate. But if the experiment had succeeded and a glorious future had
been opened for mankind as a result of the Soviet Union's success, that would lead to a different reply. And that is one person's perspective. - So that takes us to the
other side of the world, the side that's often in the
west, not considered very much when we talk about human history. Chinese dynasties, empires
are fascinating, complex, and there's just a history
that's not as deeply explored as it should be, and the same applies to the 20th century. So Chinese radicals founded
the Chinese Communist Party, CCP in July, 1921. Among them, as you talk about, was Mao, what was the story of Mao's rise to power? - So Mao takes a page
from the book of Lenin by adapting or seeking
to adapt Marx's ideology to a context that would've
surprised Marx significantly. And that is not only to set the revolution in an as yet not industrialized country, but moreover, to make the peasants, rather than being conservative
sacks of potatoes, to make them into the prime movers of the success of this political venture. That's a case of the phenomenon that we talked about earlier. When is an adaptation of an ideology or a change to an ideology, a valid adjustment that
you've made or adaptation? And when is it already so different that it's something entirely distinct? Maoism was very clearly intended to answer this question
for the Chinese context, and by implication, other
non-Western parts of the world. This was in part, Mao's way,
whose ambition was great to put himself at the head of a successful
international movement and to be the successor to Stalin, whose role he both admired and resented from having
to be the junior partner. To take an example of a masterwork and a major milestone in
the history of communism, the Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski, who was at first a committed communist and then later became disillusioned and wrote a three volume
study of Marxist thought called "Currents of Marxism." In that book, when he reaches Maoism, Kolakowski essentially throws up his hands and says like, "It's
hard to even know what to do with this." Because putting the peasantry
in the vanguard role is something that is already at variance with the original design, but Marx says this is an improved version, this is an adapted and truer version of Marxism
for the Chinese context. In case after case in Mao's rise to power, we see a really complicated
relationship with Stalin. He works hard to gain Stalin's support because the Comintern, the international organization
headquartered in Moscow working to encourage and help
revolutionaries worldwide is skeptical about the Chinese
communists to begin with, and believes that China
still has a long way to go before it's reached the stage where it's ripe for communist revolution. And in a way that's more orthodox Marxism than what Mao is championing. Mao chafes under Stalin's
acknowledged leadership of international communism as a movement. And in 1950, when Mao goes
to visit Stalin in Moscow, in order to sign a a
treaty of cooperation, he's left waiting for
days and days and days in a snub that is meant to show him that you're just not as important as you might think you are. And then when Stalin dies in 1953, Mao feels the moment is ready for him to step into the leadership position, surpassing the Soviet Union. So many of Mao's actions
like the Great Leap Forward and the agricultural disasters
that follow from that, are literally attempts to outdo Stalin, to outperform Stalin, to show that what Stalin
was not able to do, the Chinese communist regime
will be able to bring off. And the the toll for that hubris is vast. - Yeah, in the darkest of
ways, he did outdo Stalin. - That's right, in the statistics. - The Great Leap Forward ended up killing approximately
40 million people from starvation or murder. Can you describe the Great Leap Forward? - So it was modeled on the
crash industrialization that Stalin had wanted to
undertake in the Soviet Union and to outdo it. The notion of the Great Leap Forward was that it would be possible
for the peasant masses out of their conviction in the rightness of the
Chinese communist cause to industrialize China overnight. That involved things like
creating small smelting furnaces in individual farm communes. It involved folding
together farming territories into vast communes of very large size that were, just because
of their sheer gigantism, supposed to be by
definition, more efficient, than small scale farming. It ended up producing
environmental disasters, and campaigns to
eliminate birds or insects were supposed to demonstrate
mastery over nature by sheer acts of will. These included things like adopting Soviet agricultural techniques that were pioneered by
a crackpot biologist by the name of Trofim Lysenko, that produced more agricultural disaster, that involved things
like plowing to depths that were not practical for the
seeds to germinate and grow, but were supposed to produce super plants that would produce bumper harvests and outpace the capitalist
countries and the Soviet Union. So the context for all of this is, a race to get first to the achievement of
full scale communism. One of the themes that I think
it's so valuable to pursue and to take seriously in
the history of communism is, what concrete promises were made. In the case of China, Mao made promises and projections for the future that were worrying even to
some of his own assistants. He exclaimed that perhaps by 1961, perhaps by 1973, China would be the winner
in this competition, and it would've achieved full communism, so that which Marx had sketched as the end point of humanity, would be achieved first by the Chinese. Later, his own comrades, when he passed from the scene, felt the need to temper that a little bit and promised that they
would achieve full communism by the year 2000. Such promises are helpful to
a regime to create enthusiasm and to hold out to people, the prospect of real successes
just around the corner, but what happens when the date arrives and you haven't actually
achieved that goal. That's one ticking time bomb that played a role in
the increasing erosion of confidence in the Soviet Union, and the case of China must
have been something similar. - So there's a lot of other elements that are similar to the Soviet Union. Maybe you could speak to the
Hundred Flowers Campaign. - The Hundred Flowers Campaign is a chance for Mao who has felt that he has lost prestige and lost standing in the party, because of the disasters
of the Great Leap Forward, to regain some of that momentum. And the whole Hundred Flowers Campaign, officially titled The
Rectification Campaign, to set things right, is
still shrouded in mystery. Historians disagree about how to interpret what Mao was actually up to. The most cynical variant is that Mao encouraged Chinese thinkers and intellectuals to share ideas, and to engage in constructive criticism, to propose alternatives, and to let a full discussion happen. And then, after some of
them had ventured that, to come in and purge them, to punish them ruthlessly for having done what he
had invited them to do. That is the most cynical variant. Some historians argue that Mao himself was not prepared for the ideas that he himself had invited
into the public square, and that he grew anxious and worried and angry at this, without having thought this through in a cynical way to begin with. The end result is the same. The end result is, once
again, negative selection. The decimation of those
who are most venturesome, those who are most
talented and intelligent, are punished relentlessly for that. - And just a general culture
of censorship and fear and all the same stuff we
saw in the Soviet Union. - That's right. I mean, think of the impact on officials, who are loyal servants of the regime and just want to get along. The message goes out loud and clear. Don't be venturesome,
do not propose reforms, stick with the tried and true, and that'll be the safe route even if it ends in,
ultimately, stagnation. - So as the same question I
asked about the Soviet Union, why do you think there was
so much failure of policies that Mao implemented in
China during his rule? - Mao himself had a view
of human beings as being, as he put it, beautiful
blank pieces of paper upon which one can write new characters. And that is clearly at variance with what you and I know
about the complex nature of human beings as we actually encounter
them in the world. I think that in the
process of hatching schemes that were one size fits all, for a country as big and as varied in its communities as China, inevitably, such an
imposition of one model was going to lead to serious malfunctions. And so much of the, you know, what other episodes in
Chinese history had showed, the entrepreneurial capacity, the productive capacity, economically, of the Chinese people, was suppressed by being fitted
into these rigid schemes. What we've seen since after
Mao passes from the scene and with the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, one sees just how much of those energies had been forcibly suppressed for so long, and now were allowed to reemerge. - Mao died in 1976. He wrote that the CCP in 81, looking back through the
lens of historical analysis, said that he was 70% correct. Seven zero, exactly 70% correct. - Yeah. Not 69, not 71.
- Not 71. The scientific precision, I mean, we should say that again and again. The co-opting of the authority of science by the Soviet Union, by
Mao, by Nazi Germany, Nazi science, is terrifying and should serve as a
reminder that science is the thing that is one of
the most beautiful creations of humanity, but is also a thing that
could be used by politicians and dictators to do horrific things, and- - Its essence is questing, not certainty. - Yeah.
- Constant questing. - Exactly. Humility, intellectual humility. So how did China evolve
after Mao's death to today? - Well, I think that there is, without denouncing Mao, without repudiating Mao's 70% correctness, the regime actually
undertook a new venture, and that venture was to
open up economically, to gain access to world markets and to play a global role, always with a proviso that the party retained
political supremacy. It's been pointed out
that while Khrushchev tries in the Soviet Union, in 1956 especially, with a secret speech in which he denounces Stalin's crimes, he tries to go back to the
founder's intentions of Lenin. Nothing like that, it's argued, is possible in the Chinese case. Because Mao was not the
equivalent of Stalin for communist China. Mao was the equivalent of
Lenin, Mao was the founder. So there's no repudiating of him, they're stuck with that formula of 70%, and acknowledging that
there were some problems, but by and large arguing that
it was the correct stance of the party and its
leader that was paramount. And the results of this
wager are, you know, where we are today. China has been transformed
out of all recognition in terms of not all of the
living standards of the country, but many places. Its economic growth has been dramatic, and the new dispensation is
such that people will ask, is this a communist country anymore? And that's probably a question that haunts China's
current leadership as well. With Chairman Xi, we've seen
a return to earlier patterns. Xi insisting that Mao's achievement has to be held as equal to
that of the reform period. Sometimes imitations or
nostalgia for the Mao period or even the sufferings of
the cultural revolution are part of this volatile mix. But all of this is outward appearance. Statistics can also be misleading. And I think that very much in question is China's further
evolution in our own times, - In the west, China is often demonized. And we've talked extensively
today about the atrocities that results from... Atrocities both internal and external, that result from communist nations. But what can we say by way of hope to resist the demonization? How can we avoid cold
or hot war with China. We being the west or the United
States, in the 21st century? - Well, you mentioned in
the context of the claims of science, humility
as a crucial attribute. I think that humility, sobriety, realism are tremendously valuable in trying to understand another society, another form of government, and so I think one needs
to be very self-aware that projection onto others
of what we think they're about is no substitute for
actual study of the sources that a society like that produces. it's declarations of what
matters most to them, the leadership's own pronouncements about what the future holds. I think that matters a
lot more than pious hopes or versions of being
convinced that inevitably, everyone will come to resemble
us in a better future. - You mentioned this earlier, but just to take a small detour, what are we supposed to
think about North Korea and their declaration that they're supposedly communist nation? What can we say about the economic, the political system of North Korea? Or is it just like a
hopelessly simple answer of, this is a complete disaster
of a totalitarian state. - So I think the answer
that a historian can give is a historical answer, right? That we have to inquire into how... You know, what has to happen
in order to arrive at the past we are today. Where you have a regime that's
claiming to be communist or has a even better version
of Marx's original ideas in the form of a Korean
adaptation called Juche. How does that mesh with the reality that we're talking about
a dynastic government and a monarchy in all but name, but a communist monarchy. If that's what it is. I think that examining
as much as we can learn about a closed society that is... Goes about its every day in ways that are inscrutable to us, is very, very challenging, but the only answer, when an example like this
escapes your analytic categories, probably there's a problem
with your analytic categories rather than the example being the problem, in all its messiness. - Yeah, so there's a component here and it relates to China as well, to bring like somebody
like John Mearsheimer into the picture. There's a military component here too, and that is ultimately how
these nations interact, especially totalitarian nations, interact with the rest of the world. So, nations interact economically, culturally, and militarily, and the concern with
countries like North Korea is the way for them to be
present on the world stage in the game of geopolitics is by flexing their military might, and they invest a huge amount of their GDP into the military.
- Yeah. - So I guess the question there to discuss in terms of analysis is, how do we deal with this kind of system that claims to be a communist system, and what lessons can we take from history and apply to that? Or should we simply just ignore and look the other way as we've been kind of hoping
it doesn't get out of hand. - Yeah, I mean, there's... Realists see states
following their own interests and prioritizing their own security, and there's probably not
much that could be done to change that, but conflict arising as a
result of misunderstanding or mixed messages or misinterpretation, those are things that policymakers probably do have some control over. I think that there's internal processes that'll work their way out in... Even as opaque a place as North Korea. It's also the reality, just as we saw with the divided Germanys, that it's a precarious
kind of twinned existence when you have countries that are across the
border from one another, that are derived from what
used to be a single unit, that now are kind of a real
life social science experiment, in what kind of regime do you
get with one kind of system? What sort of regime do you get
with another kind of system? And that's a very unstable
setup as it turns out. - Now let us jump continents, and in the 20th century,
look to North America. So you also have lectured
about communism in America, the different communist
movements in America. It was also founded in 1919 and evolved throughout,
through a couple of red scares. So what was the evolution
of the Communist Party and just in general,
communists in America? - Well, it's fascinating
to observe this story because one longstanding commonplace had been that socialism has less purchase, or radical socialism in the United States than in European countries. So to the extent that that was true, it was an uphill battle for the communists to get established in the United States, but it makes it all the more interesting to follow the development of the movement. And there were two
challenges in particular that played a role in shaping the American
communist experience. One was the fact that to begin with, the party was often
identified with immigrants. The communities that had
come over across the Atlantic from Europe often had strong
socialist contingents, and when this break happens
within the socialist movement between radical socialists
and more moderate socialists, there were fiery individuals who saw the opportunity to help shape the American
communist movement. But the result was that
for many American workers, they saw the sheer ethnic variety and difference of this movement as something that was unfamiliar. It would only be with the
rise to the leadership of the Communist Party of Earl Browder, a American born political leader with vast ambitions for creating an American
communist movement that that image would
start to be modified. Earl Browder had a meteoric
rise and then fall, over the promise he made
that went by the slogan, "Communism is 20th century Americanism." The notion was that
communism could find roots in American political discourse and experience, where Earl Browder fell
afoul of other communists was in his expectations
during World War II, that it might be possible
for the Soviet Union and the United States to make their current
cooperation permanent, and to come to some sort of accommodation that would moderate their rivalry. As it turns out, with the dawning already of Cold War tensions that
would later flower more fully, that was unacceptable, and the movement divested
itself of Earl Browder. Another point that shaped
American perceptions of the communist movement
in the United States involved issues of espionage. During the 1930s and the 1940s, American communists, not
all of them obviously, but select members of the movement, were called upon by Soviet intelligence to play a historical role
by gathering information, winning sympathies. One of the most amazing
books of the 20th century is the book written by Whittaker Chambers, who had served as a Soviet spy. First a committed communist,
then a Soviet spy, and then later a renegade
from those allegiances. His book is entitled,
"Witness," it published in 1952, and it's one of the most compelling books you could ever read, because it's so full of
both the unique character of the author in all of his idiosyncrasies and a sense of huge issues being at stake, ones upon which the
future of humanity turns. So talk about the ethical element
being of importance there. Through the apparatus of the state, the Soviets managed to infiltrate spies into America's military as well
as government institutions. One great irony is that
when Senator McCarthy, in the fifties, made vast claims about
communist infiltration of government apparatus, claims that he was unable to
substantiate with details, that reality had actually been closer to the reality of the 1930s and
the 1940s than his own time. But the Association of American Communists with the foreign power of the Soviet Union and ultimately, an
adherence to its interests, did a lot to undermine any kind of hearing for American communists. An example, of course, was the notorious Nazi
Soviet Pact in 1939. The American communist
movement found itself forced to turn on a dime in its propaganda. Before the Nazi Soviet
Pact of August, 1939, they had denounced Nazi Germany as the greatest threat to world peace. Just after the signing of the pact, they had to proclaim that
this was a great win for peace and for human harmony, and to completely change
their earlier relationship of being mortal enemies with Nazi Germany. There were many American communists who couldn't stomach this, and who in disillusionment, simply quit their party
memberships or drifted away. But it's a fascinating story of the ups and downs of a political movement with radical ambitions in
American political history. - Yeah, the Cold War and the extensive levels of espionage sort of created, combined
with Hollywood, created... Basically firmly solidified communism as the enemy of the American ideal. It was sort of embodied. And not even the economic policies or the political policies of communism, but like the word and the color red, with a hammer and sickle,
you know, "Rocky IV," one of my favorite movies.
- Well, that's canonical, right?
- Yeah. And I mean, it is a bit of a meme, but meme becomes reality
and then enters politics and is used by politicians to
do all kinds of name calling. You have spoken eloquently
about modern Russia and modern Ukraine and
modern eastern Europe. So how did Russia evolve after Stalin and after the collapse
of the Soviet Union? - Well, I think the short answer is, without a full historical reckoning that would've been healthy,
about the recent past, in ways that's not very surprising, because given the economic
misery of dislocations and the cumulative damage of all of those previous
decades of this experiment, it left precious little patience or leisure or surplus for introspection. But after an initial
period of great interest in understanding the full
measure of what Russia and other parts of the
Soviet Union had undergone in this first initial
explosion of journalism and of reporting and investigations, historical investigations
with new sources. After an initial period
marked by such interest, people instead retreated
into the here and now and the today. And the result is that there's been less than would be healthy of a
taking stock, a reckoning, even an assigning of responsibility for those things that were
experienced in the past. No Nuremberg trial took place in order to hold responsible those who had repressed others in the aftermath of the
collapse of the Soviet Union. In other ex-communist countries, there was also precious little in the way of legal proceedings that would've established responsibility. And keep in mind, the Nuremberg trials had as one of their goals, a very important one as it turns out, not even individual verdicts for individual people found guilty, but to collect and publicize information. To create knowledge and transparency about what the reality
had been in the past. In the case of the former Soviet Union, in the case of Russia today, instead of a clear-eyed recognition of the vast nature of what it all cost, Putin, upon replacing Yeltsin, was in a position to instead traffic in the most varied, eclectic and often mutually contradictory
historical memories or packages of memories. So on the one hand, in Putin's Russia, the Czars are rehabilitated as
heroes of Russian statehood. Putin sees Lenin in a negative light because Lenin, by producing federalism as a
model for the Soviet Union, laid a time bomb at the base of that state that eventually smashed it
into many constituent parts as nations regained their independence. While Stalin, it's acknowledged,
exacted a dreadful toll, but also was effective as a representative of Russian statehood. This produced where we are today. It's a commonplace, echoed by many, that Russia without
Ukraine is a nation state or could be a nation state. Russia with Ukraine has to be an empire. And Putin, who's not
really seeking a revival of Stalin's rule, but still is nostalgic about
earlier forms of greatness and of the strength of Russian statehood, to the exclusion of other values, has undertaken a course of aggression that has produced results quite different from what he likely expected. And I think that timing is crucial here. It's fascinating to try to imagine what if this attempt to re-digest Ukraine into an expanded Russian
imperial territory had taken place earlier. I think that the arrival on the scene of a new generation of Ukrainians has produced a very different dynamic, and a disinclination for
any kind of nostalgia for the past, packaged
however it might be, and however nostalgic it
might be made to appear. And there, I think that
Putin's expectations in the invasion of 2022
were entirely overturned. His expectation was that
Ukraine would be divided on this score, and that some significant
portion of Ukrainians would welcome the advance
of Russian forces. And instead there has
been the most amazing and surprising heroic resistance
that continues to this day. - And it's interesting
to consider the timing and also individual leaders. Zelenskyy, you can imagine
all kinds of other figures that would've folded much easier. And Zelenskyy, I think,
surprised a lot of the world by somehow, you know, this comedian, somehow becoming-
- Somehow. - Essentially, an effective war president. So, you know, put that in
the bin of singular figures that define history. - That surprises, yeah. - How do you hope the war in Ukraine ends? - I'm very pessimistic
on this score actually, and for the reasons we just talked about, about how these things
escape human management or even rationality. I think that war takes
on a life of its own as accumulated suffering, actually eliminates possible compromises or settlements that one might
talk about in the abstract. I think that it's one
thing for people far away to propose trades of territory or complicated guarantees, or arrangements that sound
very good in the abstract, and that will just be refused by people who have actually experienced what the war has been like in person, and what it has meant to
them and their families, and everyone they know in
terms of lives destroyed. I think that peacemaking is going to face a very
daunting task here, given all that's accumulated. And I think in particular, you know, just from the last days of the
launching of missile attacks against indiscriminate
or civilian targets, that's not easy to turn the corner on. - So lemme ask a political question. I recently talked to Donald Trump and he said if he's elected, before he is sworn into office,
he'll have a peace deal. What would a peace deal
like that look like? And is it even possible, do you think? So we should mention
that Russia has captured four regions of Ukraine
now, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Also Ukraine captured a part
of Kursk region within Russia. So just like you mentioned,
territories on the table, you know, NATO, European
Union is on the table, also funding and military
help from the United States directly to Ukraine is on the table. Do you think it's possible
to have a fair deal that from people, like you said, far away, where both people walk away,
Zelenskyy and Putin, unhappy, but equally unhappy,
and peace is negotiated - Equally unhappy is a very
hard balance to strike probably. I think my concern is about
the part of the equation that involves people just
being desperately unhappy, laying the foundations
for more trouble to come. I couldn't imagine what that looks like, but once again, these are
things that escape human control in the details. - So laying the foundation
for worse things to come. So it's possible you have a ceasefire that lays the foundation for a worse war and suffering in a year,
in five years, in 10 years. - Well, in a way we may already be there, because ratifying the use of force to change borders in Europe
was a taboo since 1945, and now look where we are. If that is validated, then it sets up incentives
for more of the same. - If you look at the 20th century, what we've been talking about, with horrendous global
wars that happened then, and you look at now, and it feels like just
living in the moment, with the war in Ukraine, breaking the contract of, you're not supposed to do
territorial conquest anymore in the 21st century. That then the just intensity of hatred and military tension in the Middle East, with the Israel, Iran,
Palestine just building, and then China calmly,
but with a big stick, talking about Taiwan. Do you think a big
conflict may be on the way? Do you think it's possible that another global war
happens in the 21st century? - I hope not, but I think so many predictions
reach their expiration dates and get invalidated. Obviously, we're
confronting a dire situation in the present. - So as a historian, let
me ask you for advice, what advice would you give on
interviewing world leaders? Whether it's people
who are no longer here, some of the people we've
been talking about, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or people that are still
here, Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Kamala Harris, Netanyahu, Xi Jinping. As a historian, like what... Is it possible to have an
interesting conversation, maybe as a thought experiment? What kind of conversation
would you like to have with Hitler in the 1930s
or Stalin in the 1920s? - Well, first of all, I mean,
the answer's very clear. I would never presume to advise you about interviewing world
leaders and prominent people because the roster that you've accumulated is just astonishing, so. But I know what I might aim for, and that is, I think,
in historical analysis, in trying to understand the role of a particular leader, the more one understands
about their prior background and formative influences,
the better a fix, I think, one gets on the question of, what are their expectations? What is the... In German, there's a
beautiful word for this. Germans managed to mash
together several words into one even better word, and in German it's, (speaking in German), the horizon of expectation. So in the case of figures
like Churchill or Hitler, their experience of World War I shaped their actions in World War II. Their values were shaped
in their childhood. Is there a way of engaging with
someone you're interviewing even obliquely, that gives a view in on their sense of what
the future might hold? And I mean that obviously, such people are expert at being guarded and not being pinned down, but the categories in
which they're thinking, a sense of what their own
ethical grounding might be, or their ethical code, that
gives hints to their behavior. It gets said, and again, it's a cliche 'cause it's true, that one of the best measures of a person, especially a leader, is
how they treat people from whom they don't expect anything. Are they condescending? Are they, on the contrary, fundamentally interested
in another person, even if that person can't help
them or be used in some way? You know, speaking of prominent
world leaders to interview, there's Napoleon. Napoleon psychologically must have been a quite amazing person to make
a bid for mastery of Europe and then already thinking
about the mastery of the world. But contemporaries who met Napoleon said that it was very
disturbing to talk with him, because meeting with him one-on-one revealed that he could talk to you, but look like he was
looking right through you, as if you were not fully real. You were more in the nature of
a character on a chessboard. And for that reason, some
of them called Napoleon, the master of the sightless stare. So if you're talking with a world leader and he or she has a sightless stare, that's probably a bad sign. But there might be other inadvertent clues or hints about the moral compass or the future expectations of a leader that emerged in one of your
wonderful conversations. - Yeah, you put it
brilliantly in several ways, but the moral compass, getting... Sneaking up to the full nuance and complexity of the moral compass. And one of the ways of doing that is looking at the various horizons in time about their vision of the future. I imagine it's possible to get Hitler to talk about the future
of the Third Reich and to see in ways like, what he actually envisions that as. And similar with Stalin. But of course, funny enough, I believe those leaders
would be easier to talk to, because there's nothing to be afraid of in terms of political competition. Modern leaders are a
little bit more guarded because they have to... They have opposition
often to contend with. - And constituencies.
- And constituencies. You did a lot of amazing courses, including for the Great Courses. On the topic of communism,
you just finished the third, so you did a series of lectures
on the rise of communism then Communism in power.
- Yes. - And then decline and fall.
- Decline of communism. Decline of communism. - So when I was sort of
listening to these lectures, I can't possibly imagine
the amount of work that went into it. Can you just speak wisely? What was that journey like of taking everything you know, your expertise on eastern Europe, but just bringing your lens, your wisdom, your focus onto this topic, and what it takes to
actually bring it to life? - Well, journey is probably
just the right word because it's this week that the third of that
trilogy, decline of communism, is being released. And it felt like something
that I very much wanted to do because the history that's narrated there is one that is so compelling and often so tragic, that
it needs to be shared. The vast amount of material that one can include
is probably dwarfed by the amount that actually ends
up on the cutting room floor. One could probably do
an entire lecture course on every single one of
those lecture topics that got broached. But one of the great satisfactions of putting together a course like this is also being able to give
further suggestions for study to the listeners, and in some cases, to introduce them to neglected classics or books that make you want
to grab somebody by the lapels and say, "You've got to read this." There's probably few
things that are as exciting as a really keen and targeted
reading recommendation. In addition, I've also done other courses on the history of World War I, on the diplomatic history
of Europe from 1500 to the present, a course on the history of eastern Europe, and also a course on dictatorships called, Utopia and Terror, and then also a course on explorers, and a course on turning
points in modern history. And every single one of
those is so rewarding because you learn so much in the process, and it's really fantastic. - And I should highly recommend
that people sign up to the, first of all, this is the Great Courses, where you can buy the
courses individually, but I recommend people sign
up for Great Courses Plus, which I think is like
a monthly membership, where you get access to all these courses and they're just incredible. And I recommend people watch all of yours. Since you mentioned books,
this is an impossible question and I apologize ahead of time, but is there books you can recommend, just in your own life,
that you've enjoyed, whether really small, or some obvious recommendations that you recommend people read? It is a bit like asking
what's your favorite band, that kind of thing.
- That's right, that's right. Well, would a book that got turned into a movie be acceptable as well? - Yes. (laughs)
- So in that case, you know, all of us reflect
on our own childhoods and that that magical
moment of reading a book or seeing a movie that
really got you launched on some particular set of things that you're gonna find fascinating for the rest of your life, and there's a direct line to the topics we were talking about today, from myself in the
Chicagoland area, as a kid, seeing the film of "Doctor Zhivago," and then later reading the novel on which it was based, by Pasternak. And even though the film
had to be filmed on location in Spain, pretending to be revolutionary Russia, it was magical for the
sheer sweep and tragedy and human resilience that it showed, the very way in which a work of literature or a cinematography could capture so much. Still, I'm still amazed by that. And then there's also, in the spirit of recommending
neglected classics, my favorite author. My favorite author is now
a late Canadian author by the name of Robertson Davies, who wrote novel after novel in a mode that probably would
get called magical realism but is so much more. Robertson Davies was heavily
influenced by Carl Jung and Jung in philosophy,
but in literary form, he managed to create stories that blend the mythical, the mystical, and the brutally real, to paint a picture of
Canada as he knew it, Europe as he knew it, and the world as he knew it. And he's most famous probably
for "The Deptford Trilogy," three novels in a series that are linked, and they're just masterful. If only there were more books like that. - "The Deptford Trilogy,"
"Fifth Business," "The Manticore," "World of Wonders," and he got a really nice beard. - Yes, it was an amazing beard. (Lex laughs) Very 19th century. - Okay, beautiful. What advice would you
give to young people today that have just listened to us
talk about the 20th century and the terrifying prospects of ideals implemented into reality? And by the way, many of the revolutions are carried out by young
people, and so, you know, the good and the bad and the ugly is thanks to the young people. So the young people listening today, what advice would you give them? - Well, it comes down to one word, and that one word is read. I'm... As a college teacher, I'm concerned about what
I'm seeing unfolding before us, which is
classes, not my classes, but classes in which students
are asked to read very little or maybe in some cases, not at all, or snippets that they
are provided digitally. Those have their place
and can be valuable, but the task of sitting down with a book and absorbing its message, not
agreeing with it necessarily, but taking in the implications, learning how to think
within the categories and the values of the author is going to be irreplaceable. And my anxiety is that
with college bookstores now moving entirely to
the paperless format, it changes how people interact with texts. And if the result is not a renascence and a resurgence of reading, but less reading, that will be dreadful, because the experience
of thinking your way into other people's minds that sustained reading offers is so crucial to human empathy. A broadening of your own
sensibilities of, you know, what's possible, what's in
the full range of being human, and then what's best, what are the best models
for what has been thought and felt and how people have acted. Otherwise, we fall prey to manipulators and the ability of artificial intelligence to give us versions of
realities that never existed and never will and the like. - It's a really interesting idea. So let me give a shout out to
Perplexity that I'm using here to sort of summarize and take quick notes, and get little snippets of
stuff, which is extremely useful. But it's not... Books are not just about
information transfer, it's, just as you said, it's like a journey together
with a set of ideas, and that's a conversation, and getting a summary of the book as the cliche thing is, it's really getting to the
destination without the journey. And the journey is the
thing that's important, thinking through stuff. And I've actually learned,
you know, I've been surprised, I've learned, I've trained my brain to be able to get the same
thing from audiobooks also. It's a little bit more difficult because you don't control the pacing. Sometimes pausing is nice, but you could still get it from audiobook. So it's an audio version of books and that allows you to also
go on a journey together and is sometimes more convenient. 'cause you could take it
to more places with you. - That's right.
- But there is a magical thing, and I also am trying to train myself mostly to use Kindle, the digital version of books, but there is unfortunately,
still a magical thing about being there with the page. - Well, audio books are
definitely not to be scorned because as people have pointed out, the original traditions of
literature were oral, right? So that's actually the 1.0 version, right? And combining these things
is probably the key. I think one of the things
I find so wonderful about the best lectures
that I've heard is, it's a chance to hear
someone thinking out loud, not laying down the law, but taking you through a
series of logical moves, imaginative leaps,
alternative suggestions, and that's much more
than than data transfer. - The use case of AI as
a companion as you read is really exciting to me. I've been using it recently
to basically, as you read, you can have a conversation with a system that has access to a lot of things about a particular paragraph and to... I've been really surprised how my brain, when given some extra ideas, other recommendations of books, but also just like a
summary of other ideas from elsewhere in the universe that relates to this paragraph is like, it sparks your imagination and thought and you see the actual richness in the thing you're reading. - Right.
- Now nobody, to my knowledge, has implemented a really
intuitive interaction between AI and the text, unfortunately, partially because the books
are protected under DRM and so there's like a wall where you can't access... The AI can't access the thing. So if you want to play
with that kind of thing, you have to, you know,
break the wall a little bit, which is not a nice
thing, not a good thing. But just like with music, Napster came up, people started
illegally sharing music, and the answer to that was Spotify, which made the sharing of music... Revolutionized everything and made the sharing of music much easier. So there is some technological things that can enrich the experience of reading, but the actual painful,
(Vejas laughs) long process of reading is really useful. Just like boredom is useful. - That's right.
- It's also called just sitting-
- That's an underrated virtue. - Yeah, yeah. And of course, you have to see
the smartphone as an enemy, I would say, of that special
time you have to think, because social media companies are maximized to get your engagement. They wanna grab your attention, and they grab that attention by making you as brain dead as possible and getting you to look at
more and more and more things. So it's nice and fun and it's great, recommend it highly, it's
good for dopamine rush, but see it as a counterforce to the process of sitting with an idea for a prolonged period of time. Taking a journey through an expert eloquently conveying that idea and growing by having a conversation with that idea in a book
is really, really powerful. So I agree with you totally. What gives you hope about
the future of humanity? We've talked about the dark past. What gives you hope for the
light at the end of the tunnel? - So we talked indeed
about a lot of latent, really damaging and negative energies that are part of human nature. But I find hope in another
aspect of human nature, and that is the sheer
variety of human reactions to situations. The very fact that history is full of so many stories
of amazing endurance, amazing resilience, the will to build up, even after the horrors have passed. This to me is an inexhaustible
source of optimism. And you know, there are some people who condemn cultural appropriation, and say that borrowing
from one culture to another is to be condemned. Well, the problem is, a synonym for cultural
appropriation is world history, trade, transfer of ideas, influences. Valuing that which is
unlike your own culture is also a form of
appropriation, quite literally. And so those... That multitude of human reactions and the fact that our experience is so unlimited as history testifies, gives me great hope for the future. - Yeah, and the willingness of humans to explore all of that with curiosity. Even when the empires fall and the dreams are broken, we rise again. - That's right, unceasingly.
(Lex laughs) - Vejas, thank you so much
for your incredible work, your incredible lectures, your books, and thank
you for talking today. - Thank you for this. Such a fun chat. - Thanks for listening
to this conversation with Vejas Liulevicius. To support this podcast, please check out our
sponsors in the description. And now let me, leave you with
some words from Karl Marx. "History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce." Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.