the outcome here is a horrific man-made famine. Not a natural disaster, not bad harvest, but a
man-made 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 have vengeance
visited upon them, reaches the point where nobody, in spite of the pretense of comprehensive knowledge,
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 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 Ludevicius, a historian specializing in Germany and Eastern Europe.
He has lectured extensively on the rise, the rain, 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 Friedman Podcast. To support it,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Vejas Ludevicius.
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 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 have 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're 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 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 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.
Yeah, you actually have a lecture on humor. I love it. And you deliver in such a dry, beautiful way.
Okay. 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, as 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 ever more 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 Reichsstaat. 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. Hence, dialectical materialism. Dialectical referring to things proceeding by clashes or
conflict towards an ever greater realization of some essential idea. 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 gradeside eulogy for his beloved friend Marx,
claims that Marx is essentially the Darwin of history. He had done for the world of politics and of
human history what Darwin had done with his 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, in 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 worldbuilding 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 gravediggers, 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 last, 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 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 Engel's 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 that 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 will 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
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, inauthentic 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. 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 moving,
propelling history forward towards its predestined ending. In 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
ver-elendung, 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 emiserization 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 had 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 of 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. 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 have 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 had 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 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 made 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. 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 AJP 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 a genius. 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.
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's 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
in ways big and small. What we should say here, when you mentioned Karl Marx, maybe the color red
comes up for people, and they think the Soviet Union may be 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 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 Germany, by virtue of its central location and then its rapid development later than Britain or
France in industrialization, give it this 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 Marx's 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 workers' 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, 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 organize 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 seized 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 Mihail 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 abhusing 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 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. You 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 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.
Yeah, that's my definition.
Yeah. Why do you think anarchism hasn't been
rigorously tried in the way that 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
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 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 as a positive good and peaceful. Now, that's at odds
with the 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 going to 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 have enraged Marx and would have 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 not a avowed one, but a kind of hidden religious or secular religious element to Marx's
vision, to the tradition that follows Marx. And, you know, just think of the correspondences, right? Marx
himself as kind of a 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. Erich 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 have understood
in religious terms. Fergun called this the eschaton and said that these end times, the eschaton 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 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.
And 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, it'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 and 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 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 and communism,
but then Marxism became one of the strongest traditions in history.
That's right. That's right. I think that 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. There's 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 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
properly distributed. It's especially 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
of how this is to play out. And 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 you could say about the difference between Marxian economics
and Marxist political ideology? So the political side of things and the economics side of things.
So I think that Marx would probably have responded that, in fact, those things are
indivisible. The analysis, as sort of purely theoretical, 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 emphasize 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 that was the idle production of a philosopher who was not connected to the world
and was never meant to be tried in practice. Marx would have 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 Marxist theoretical framework to compare to a given
economic reality, but Marx would have 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. 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 have 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 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. Is China, in a
meaningful sense, a communist country anymore? And there's a diversity of opinion on this score.
Or 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 ruled 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 steel man 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 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, 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 I watched the quotation marks, science were 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
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 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. When you think of the experiences with the
bureaucracy in the 20th century, one's hair stands on end to have the comparative naivete
on display with a prediction like that. But it derives from that confidence that it's all going to 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 is 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,
and 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,
because any celebration of intellectuals as world movers is going to 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 to 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 feudal 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 is 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 in 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 have 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 an authoritarian
wartime footing in country after country. Lenin earlier had already articulated the possibility
that this might happen by talking about how the entire globe already was connected. 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
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 Dr. Zhivago for giving 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 Tsarism, which had maintained still into the 20th century the notion of a divine
right to rule, that God had ordained the Tsarist 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 Tsarist 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 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 Tsarist 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 Nikolai Czarnashevsky, 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
shtodielat. 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,
nontraditional 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 Tsarist 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 to 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. 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 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. Nihilists appear there, and I think they summarize 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 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 arguing that one needed total devotion for this. If 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 resonance than it was in Germany where Marx would have 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 Bolsheviks said that no one who loved their country would have agreed to a so
draconian, so harsh 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 going to bother to read the treaty because shortly that treaty is going to be a dead letter.
His expectation is revolution is going to 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 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,
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 going to 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 have 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 have 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, Leo 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 is 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 because 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
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 type of god-like figure. So, the power of propaganda there.
Trotsky- Today, we would call that curating the image, right?
Trotsky- Curating the image, but to 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 an 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. 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 an anomaly among Bolsheviks. That is
a man of Polish aristocratic background, Felix Zerzynski, who comes to be known by the nickname Iron Felix.
Here's a man about whom a cult of personality also is created. Zerzynski is celebrated in the Soviet
period as the model of someone who's 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. Zerzynski 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 wrought 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 was 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 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 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 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 Polydemore?
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, as a very vital, obviously,
but also very traditional and 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. 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. Images that today would be deeply disturbing to an environmentalist's
sensibility—smokestaps, 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.
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 be beaten because of its backwardness, as Stalin puts it, traditional forms of agriculture are
not what they have in mind. In their rank of desired outcomes, industrialization, especially massive,
heavy industry, is the sine qua non. That's their envisioned future. Agriculture rates below. 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. 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're 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've got to
say, at the time and afterwards, that looked a lot like feudalism or 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,
to 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
another human incentive where you're gonna lie, everybody lies on the data.
That's right.
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, 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, when implemented, can go really, really bad.
That's right. And the outcome here is a horrific manmade famine, not a natural disaster, not bad
harvests, 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 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
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 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. He's 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 we have testimony to this in the case of people who
later became dissidents, like Lev Kopolev, 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 1936 to 1938? 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 are so
many great books that have come out quite recently even on these topics. Orlando Fygus has an 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-circus 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
was enormous. Even loyalty was not enough to save people. 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 the terrible thing that has happened to them, surely
it would be corrected. And nothing like this would have everyone else, by contrast, accused of terrible
crimes. There must be some truth behind that. So 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. Again, a fascinating study of human nature. There essentially was an emergent quota
of confessions of treason. So 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. So you're just making
shit up now. Like at a mass scale, stuff is being made up. And it's also the machine or the secret
police starts eating itself because you want to be confessing on your boss, on your, and it is just this
weird, dark, dynamic system where human nature is just as it is 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
the just violation of every possible human right, and the torture, and the suffering, and the 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 the 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. 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 I 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 with the secret police, the concentration of power
in one dictatorial figure, and let's say, 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 Tsarism. 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,
one 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 peacetime 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 in this insane racialist
cosmology, 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. 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 arch enemies. In both worldviews,
the opposite side represented the ultimate expression of the evil that needed to be exercised from
history in order for their desired utopia to be brought about. 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 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, 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 stormtrooper 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 23, 1939, which enables Hitler to start World War II.
A non-aggression pact, in official terms, it contained 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. 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-caste revival of ancient barbarism, but was 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 Daryl 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 Daryl argues that Churchill forced Hitler to expand the war beyond
Poland into a global war. Second, the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slav gypsies in death camps was an
accident, a byproduct of a global war, and in fact, the most humane extermination of prisoners of war
were 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, that assertion is based on a complete
neglect of what Nazi ideology was. The Nazi worldview and racism was not an ideology that was
limited in its application. It looked toward world domination. In 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. 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 Nazi's 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 want to 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. 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 General Plan Ost, meaning the
General Plan for the East. And it foresees things like mega highways on which the Germanic 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 is 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 has 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 will 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 Slavs 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 Daryl 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 hundreds of millions of deaths and torture and enslavement. 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, to put it crudely, Hitler bad, Churchill good,
has been used and abused by neocons and warmongers 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,
warmongers 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 over-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 will never see anything like it again.
I mean, they're 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 and sort of ask another counterfactual question. Given the battle
between the Marxists and the Communists and the 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
these 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 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 have 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 have felt that
that military dictatorship would have 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?
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
is 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 workers' 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 kind of eluded, 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 Haudenberg 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 would pose 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 90s 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 open 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?
Mao takes a page from the book of Lenin by adapting or seeking to adapt Marx's ideology to a context that would
have 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 in a major milestone in the history of communism,
the Polish philosopher Leszek Kowakowski, 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, Kowakowski 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. 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 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 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
that were supposed to demonstrate mastery over nature by sheer acts of will.
These included things like adopting Soviet agricultural
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 is 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 assistance.
He exclaimed that perhaps by 1961,
perhaps by 1973,
China would be the winner in this competition and it would have achieved full communism.
So that which Marx had sketched as the endpoint 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 success is 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 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 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 are allowed to reemerge. Mao died in 1976. You wrote that the CCP
in 81, looking back through the lens of historical analysis, said that he was 70% correct.
70, 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 can be used by politicians and dictators
to do horrific things.
And its essence is questing, not certainty, 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 the 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 are 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
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 revolution in our own times.
In the West, China is often demonized.
And we've talked extensively today about the atrocities that result from
atrocities both internal and external that result from communist nations.
But what can we say by way of hope
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 a 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 what has to happen in order to arrive at the past we are
today. We have a regime that's claiming to be communist or has an even better version of Marx's
original ideas in the form of a Korean adaptation called Yuche.
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 goes about its everyday 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 analytical categories rather than the example being
the problem in all its messiness.
Yeah, so there's a component here in the release of 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. 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 it 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 you get with one kind of system, what sort of regime you get with another kind of system. And
that's a very, 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,
an 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 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 Whitaker 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,
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
of the United States 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 50s made vast claims about communist infiltration of the 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
Nazi-Soviet 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, sort of embodied. And not even the economic policies of
the political policies of communism, but like the word. And the color red, the hammer and sickle,
you know, Rocky IV, one of my favorite movies. Well, that's canonical, right?
Yeah. Yeah. 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 have 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 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 a signing 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 have 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 Tsars 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 that 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. Putin, who is 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 timing and
also individual leaders. Zelensky, you can imagine all kinds of other figures that would have folded much
easier. And Zelensky, I think, surprised a lot of the world by somehow, you know, this comedian
somehow becoming essentially an effective war president. So, you know, put that in the bin of
singular figures that define history, right? And 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 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, um, that's not easy to turn the corner on. So let me ask a political question. I recently
talked to Donald Trump and he said if he is elected, uh, before he is sworn into office, he will 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, uh, Russia has captured four regions of Ukraine now, Donetsk, Luhansk, the Parisian,
and Kherson. Also Ukraine captured a part of Korsk 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, Zelensky and Putin
unhappy, but equally unhappy and peace and peace is negotiated?
Equally unhappy is a very hard balance to strike. Probably. Um, I think my concern is about
the part of the equation that involves people just being desperately unhappy, uh, and laying the
foundations for more trouble to come. I, I couldn't imagine what that looks like, but that's, uh, once
again, these are things that escape, uh, escape, uh, human control in, 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, uh, suffering in a year, in five years, in 10 years.
Well, in, 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. Uh, if that is validated, uh, then, um,
it sets up incentives for, for more of the same. If you look at the 20th centuries, 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, the contract of,
you're not supposed to do territorial conquest anymore in the, in the 21st century, that then the
just intensity of hatred and, and military tension in the Middle East with, uh, 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, uh, 21st century?
I hope not, but I think, um, so many predictions, uh, reach their expiration dates and, uh, and get
invalidated. Um, obviously it's a, it, we were 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, who are no longer here? Some of the people we've been talking about,
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or people that are still here, Putin, Zelensky, Trump, Kamala Harris, Netanyahu,
Xi Jinping. Uh, as a historian, like what, is it possible to have an interesting conversation?
Maybe as a thought experiment, what, what, 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 is very clear.
I would never presume to advise you about, uh, interviewing world leaders, uh, and prominent
people because the, the roster that you've accumulated is just astonishing. So, but I, I know what,
what, what I might aim for. And that is, I think, um, 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. The Germans managed to
mash together several words into, into one even better word. And in German, it's Erwartungshorizont,
the horizon of expectation. So, um, in the case of figures like Churchill or Hitler, their experience
of World War I shaped their actions in World War II. Uh, 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, uh, uh, a sense of what
their, 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 because 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.
Uh, 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? Um, you know, speaking of,
of prominent world leaders to interview, uh, 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 emerge in one of your wonderful conversations.
Yeah. You, you put it brilliantly in several ways, but the moral compass getting, sneaking up to the,
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, 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.
Um, modern leaders are a little bit more guarded because they have to, they, they have, uh,
opposition often to, uh, contend with.
And constituencies.
You did a lot of, uh, amazing courses, including for the great courses, uh, on the topic of communism,
you just finished the third. So you did a series of lectures on the rise of communism,
then communism and power, and then, uh, 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 as, what was that, um, journey like
of taking everything you know, your expertise on Eastern Europe,
but just bringing, uh, 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, um, it's this week
that the third of that trilogy decline of communism is being released. And it, it felt like something that
I very much wanted to do because, um, the history that's narrated there, uh, is one that is
so compelling and often so tragic that it needs to be shared. Um, the, 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. Um, there's probably a few things that are as exciting as a, a really keen
and targeted reading recommendation. In addition, I've, I've also done other courses on the history
of world war one, 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 there's, you learn so much in the process and it's really fantastic.
And I should highly recommend that people sign up to the, uh, 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
things like a monthly membership, uh, where you get access to all these courses and they're just
incredible. And, uh, I recommend people watch all of yours. Uh, 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, uh, whether really small or some obvious recommendations
that, uh, you recommend people read? It is a bit like asking what's your favorite band, uh,
kind of thing. That's right. That's right. Well, uh, would a book that got turned into a movie be,
uh, acceptable as well? Yes. So, uh, in that case, you know, all of us reflect on our own childhoods and the,
and the, that, that, um, that magical moment of, uh, reading a book or seeing a movie that,
that really got you launched on some particular set of things that you're going to 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 Dr. Zhivago and then later reading
the novel on which it was based by Postonok. 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, the very way in which a work of literature or a cinematography
could capture so much. Um, still, I'm, I'm still amazed by that. Uh, and then there's also in the
spirit of recommending neglected classics, uh, my favorite author, my favorite author is a, uh, now, uh,
a late Canadian author by the name of Robertson Davies, who wrote, um, 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 Jungian 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, um, he's most famous
probably for the Depthford trilogy, three novels in a series that are linked and they're just masterful.
Uh, if only there were more books like that. The Depthford trilogy, fifth business, the Manticore,
world of wonders. And he got a really nice beard. Yes. It was an amazing beard. Very 19th century.
Okay. Beautiful. Um, what advice would you give to young people today that have just listened to us
talk about the 20th century and, uh, terrifying prospects of ideals implemented into reality?
And by the way, many of the revolutions are carried out, uh, 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. Uh, 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 absorb 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, uh, with college
bookstores now moving entirely to, uh, the paperless format, um, it changes how people interact with
texts. And if the result is not a Renaissance 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,
uh, we fall prey to manipulators, uh, and the ability of, of artificial intelligence to give us
versions of realities that never existed and never will and the like.
That's a really, uh, interesting idea. So, uh, let me give a shout out to perplexity that I'm using
here to, uh, 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, uh, just as you said,
it's like a journey together with a set of ideas and it's a conversation and, uh, getting a summary of
the book is 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 audio books 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 audio books. So it's an audio version of, of books. And that allows
you to also go on a journey together and sometimes more convenient because you could take it to more
places with you. That's right. But there is a magical thing. And I also 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, um, the original traditions of literature were oral, right? So
that's actually the, the, the, the 1.0 version, right? Uh, and combining these things is probably the
key. I think one of the things I find so, 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. Um, and, uh, uh, that that's much more
than, than data, data transfer. The use case of AI as a companion, as you read is, is really exciting to
me. I've been using it recently to, 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, um, 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's, it sparks your imagination and thought you, and you see the actual richness in the thing you're
reading. Now, nobody's, uh, to my knowledge has implemented a really intuitive, um, interaction
between AI and the text, unfortunately, partially because, um, 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, um, break the law a little bit, which is not a nice
thing, not a good thing, but just like with music, Napster came up, uh, people started illegally,
illegally sharing music. And, uh, the answer to that was Spotify, which made the sharing of music, revolutionized
everything and made the sharing of music much easier. So there are some technological things that
can enrich the experience of reading, but the actual painful long process of reading is really useful.
Just like, uh, boredom is useful. That's right. It's also called just sitting there. Underrated virtue.
Yeah. Yeah. And of course you have to see the, the smartphone as a enemy, I would say, as of
that special time you have to think because social media companies are maximized to get your engagement.
They want to 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. It's great.
I recommend it highly. It's good for dopamine rush, but see it as a counter, uh, it's a counter force
to the process of sitting with an idea for a prolonged period of time, taking a journey through
an expert, uh, eloquently conveying that idea and growing, uh, by having a conversation with that
idea and a book is really, really powerful. So I agree with you, um, uh, totally. What gives you hope
about the future of humanity? We've talked about the dark past, uh, what gives you, uh, hope for the
light at the end of the tunnel? So we, we, 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, um, history is full
of so many stories of amazing endurance, amazing resilience, uh, 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, uh, is to be condemned. Well, the problem is a synonym for
cultural appropriation is world history, trade transfer of ideas, influences, uh, valuing that which is
unlike your own culture, uh, is also a form of appropriation quite literally. And so, um,
those, that, that multitude of human reactions and the fact that, uh, 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,
even when the empires fall and the dreams are broken, we rise again.
That's right. Unceasingly.
Vejas, thank you so much for your incredible work, your incredible lectures, your books,
and, uh, thank you for talking today.
Thank you for this. Such a fun chat.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Vejas Lodeviches. 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.
I hope to see you next time.
Thank you.