Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler | Lex Fridman Podcast #444

and 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 staring starving people to uh to escape um you put very well some of the the implications of this case study in in how things look in the abstract versus in practice um and those phenomena were going to haunt the rest of the experience of the Soviet Union um the whole notion that up and

down the chain of command everybody is falsifying or tinkering with or prying the statistics or their reports in order not to look bad and and not to you know have Vengeance visited upon them um reaches the point where nobody in spite of the pretense of comprehensive knowledge right there's a a 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 uh is founded upon uh a foundation of sand a deliberate plan to bring class conflict and bring Civil War and then

heighten it in the countryside um 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 uh sending the message that mediocrity is comparatively much safer than Talent Hitler and himler 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 in aggression to generation after generation of German soldiers in terms of nightmarish Visions this one's right up there the following is conversation with vas ludus 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 Alex Freedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's veas L vicious let's start with KL 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 um on the one hand uh Marx insisted that history has a purpose that history is not just random events uh but that rather it's history we might

say with a capital H history moving in a deliberate direction history having a goal uh a a a a direction that it was predestined to move in um at the same time in the Communist Manifesto uh Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engles also suggested that there was a role for special individuals who might uh even 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 uh and meaningful rational way towards the end of history and the resolution of all conflicts uh a total liberation of the human person uh and that moreover that was inevitable that that was pre-programmed and destined in the in the order of things when you add to that the notion that there's also room for heroism and the individual role uh this ended up being tremendously powerful as a combination um earlier thinkers uh 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 uh 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 markx would have gotten extremely upset at this point in the conversation because because to call someone a utopian was precisely to argue that you're not

scientific you're not rational you are not laying out the iron laws of History you're merely hoping for the best and that might be laudable but it was fundamentally unrealistic uh that said hidden among Marx's insistence that there are laws and and structures uh as history moves through uh class conflict modes of production uh towards its ultimate goal of a comprehensive final Revolution that will see all exploitation overthrown and people finally being freed from necessity um in in smuggled in among those things are most definitely utopian elements and there they come especially at the end in

which Marx U sketches the notion of what things will look like after the revolution has resolved all problems uh there vagueness sets in uh it's clear that it's a blessed State that's being talked about um people no longer exploiting one another people no longer subject to necessity or poverty but instead enjoying all of the productivity of industrialization that hither to had been put to private profit now uh 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 another yet another

fulfilling job in the afternoon um all of these all of this free of any contradictions free of necessity free of the sort of ordinary irritations that we experienc in our ordinary lives that's deeply utopian the difference was that Marx charted a route towards that outcome that was uh that presented itself as cuttingedge science and moreover having the the the 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 on 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 uh um man's exploitation of man uh the result was supposed to be a uh a resolution of all of this uh 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 you actually have electron humor I love it and you deliver in such a dry beautiful way uh 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 uh what was Marx's view of History uh Marx had been a student of Hegel uh and Hegel as a German idealist philosopher had uh announced very definitively that history has

a purpose history is not a collection of random facts uh and as an idealist he proposed that the true movement of History the true meaning of History what made history history with 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 uh in the case of of 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 a state of the rule of law in German uh that was a a a noble dream um at the same time as as we recognize from our perspective uh state power has been put to all sorts of purposes besides guaranteeing the rule of

law uh in our own times what Marx did was to take this this characteristic insistence of Hegel that that history is moving in a meaningful and discernable 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 is is based on matter so hence d itical materialism the dialectical referring to things proceeding by clashes or conflict towards an Ever greater realization of some essential idea and so

Marx adapts a lot of ideas of of Hegel you can recognize entire rhetorical Maneuvers that are uh indebted to that that earlier training but now taken in a in a very uh different direction what 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 uh the rigor of science backing you in your journey towards the truth absolutely I so

uh angles when when he gives the grade side eulogy for his beloved friend Marx um claims that Marx is essentially the Darwin of History the Darwin of History he that he had done for the world of politics and of uh um human history what Darwin had done with his theory EV of evolution understanding the hidden mechanism understanding the laws that are at work and that uh 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 motive force that KL Marx and angles saw driving the historical process forward and it's it's important to keep in mind that class conflict doesn't just mean revolutions revolts peasant uprisings uh it it's it's sort of the the totality of friction and of clashes conflicts of interest that appear in any society and so Marx was able in this spirit that he uh avowed was very scientific to demarcate stages of historical transformation primitive communism in the prehistoric period Then

moving towards what was called State slavery uh that's to say the early civilizations deploying uh human resources and ordering them uh by all powerful monarchs uh then private slavery in the ancient period and then moving to feudalism in the Middle Ages and then here's where 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 uh has been displaced by the often

heroic achievements astonishing achievements in Commerce and in World building of the middle class the bisi uh who have uh taken the world into their own hands and are engaged in uh class conflict with the the the class below them which is the working class or the proletariat and so this sort of this sort of conflict uh um uh also by the way obtains within classes so the Bourgeois are going to be gravediggers Marx announces of their own Supremacy because they're also competing against one another and um members who don't survive that competition get pressed down

into the subordinate working class uh which grows and grows and grows to the point where uh at some future moment the inevitable explosion will come uh and uh a a swift Revolution Will overturn this last this penultimate stage uh 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 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 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 this uh uh uh working class uh in its entirety to

whom marks assign this uh this epic Promethean role of being the ones who are going to liberate all of humanity a class that is universal in its interests and in the sort of role in Salvation history that they'll be playing in this in this secular framework uh 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 faded to have how

did he conceive of a revolution potentially a violent revolution stabilizing itself into something where the the working class was able to rule that's where things become a good deal less detailed in his and anglo's accounts the answer that they proposed in part was this is this is for the future to determine so all of the details will be settled later um uh I think there was a lied to this was a a tremendous confidence in um some very 19th century ideas about how Society could be administered uh and what made for orderly Society um in

a way where uh if the right infrastructure was in place uh you might expect Society to kind of run itself without the need for uh micromanagement from above and hence we arrive at at Marx's tantalizing promise that at there will be a period where it's it'll be necessary to have centralized control and there might have to be as he puts it despotic inroads against property in order to bring this revolution to pass but then afterwards the state because it represents everybody rather than representing particular class interests that are in conflict with other classes the state

will eventually wither away so there won't be need for it now that's not to say that 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 in authentic freedom without necessity without poverty uh as a result of this uh blessed State that's been arrived at despotic inroads against property did he elaborate on the despotic inroads dispossession dispossession of the uh

of the middle classes and of the bis 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 there there's always conflict and it's always moving propelling history forward towards its predestined ending um in the the way he saw this climax uh 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 the at the same time the expropriators the Bourgeois 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 the working class uh for for Marks 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 in German the word given to that process was F which is very evocative aland means misery so it's the growing misery when this gets translated into English uh

the results are never quite as evocative or satisfactory the words that get used are emeris or popularization meaning more and more people are being turned into poppers but for Marx that prediction is really key and even in his own lifetime there were already hints that in fact if you look sociologically at the really developed working classes in places like Great Britain or Germany that process was not playing out as he had expected uh in fact uh although there have been enormous dislocations and tremendous suffering in the early chaotic sort of wild west stages of of

capitalism and of industrialization there had been reform movements as well and there had been unions which had sought uh to carve out uh rules and uh and agreements with employers for how uh the conditions under which workers labored might be ameliorated moreover the middle class rather than dwindling and dwindling seem to actually be strengthening and growing in numbers the appearance of new kinds of people like white collar workers or technical experts so um already in Marx's own Lifetime and then especially in what follows Marx's lifetime uh this becomes a real problem because it it uh

it puts a a stick into the spokes of this particular historical prediction can you speak to this realm of ideas which is fascinating this battle of big ideas in the 19th century what are the ideas that were swimming around here yeah yeah well um the to describe the 19th century as sort of an age of ideologies is very apt because um Europe is being racked and and and uh um and being put through the ringer of nationalism uh demands for uh self-expression of peoples who earlier have been in Empires or under monarchical rule demand to

redraw the map um the tremendous transformations of the Industrial Revolution meant that in 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 have been Unthinkable when you were a child so it's it's enormous change and and demands for yet more change and so it's a great mix of ideas ideologies the old the new religious ideas religious revivals as well as demands for secularization um and stepping into all of this are marks

and angles together uh in what has been called I think with Justice one of the most important and influential intellectual Partnerships uh uh of History uh they were very different men uh they were both German by origin um uh Marx had uh trained as an academic he had married the daughter of a baron uh because of his radical ideas uh he had foreclosed or found himself cut off from a possible academic career and went the route of radical journalism angles was very different angles 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 uh he and Marx uh were celebrating uh as 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 uh and uh was not one to uh to to settle for compromise or a Middle Road um he was uh disorderly in in his

personal habits uh we might mention among other things that he impregnated the family made uh and didn't uh didn't accept responsibility for the child um he was also uh not inclined to uh undertake regular employment in order to support his growing family that's where angles came in angles essentially from his family fortune uh and then from his journalism afterwards supported both himself and the Marx family uh for decades and so in a sense um angles made things happen uh in in the 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 fals uh into potential potential strengths British historian ajp Taylor always has a lovely turn of phrase even when he's wrong about a historical issue uh in this case he was right he said that um angles had charm and Brilliance Marx was a genius and angles saw himself as the definitely the junior partner in this relationship but here's the Paradox without angles uh pretty clearly markx would not have gone on to have the sort of lasting historical impact

in the world of ideas that he had just a throwing in the mix there's interesting characters swimming around uh so you have Darwin he has a I mean it's difficult to to to uh to characterize the the level of impact he had even just in the religious context they challenges our conception of who we are as humans uh there's n who's also I don't know hanging around the area on the Russian side there's DKI so it's interesting to ask maybe uh from your perspective did these people interact in in a space of ideas to where

this is relevant to our discuss disc or is this mostly uh isolated I I think that it's part of a great conversation right I think that in their Works um they're reacting to one another I mean Doo's uh thought ranges across the condition of modernity uh 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 being at each other's throats uh uh in in direct confrontations um and that's what makes the 19th century uh so um so compelling as a story

just because of the sheer Vitality of the arguments uh that are 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 uh they think the Soviet Union maybe China but they don't think Germany necessarily it's interesting that I mean Germany is where communism was supposed to happen that's right and so can you uh maybe speak to that tension yeah yeah absolutely I mean this is uh this is definitely a factor in the entire history that uh that

we're referencing um Marx and Engles never really shed their identity as Germans um many of their preconceptions uh even those traces of nationalism that they had within themselves even as they were condemning nationalism as a as a fraud against the working class um uh their clearly their entire formation had been affected by their their German background uh and it's very true as you point out that Germany is intended to be the place where these predictions will play out also in Britain also in France also eventually in the United States but it's a uh you know

it's it's Germany by virtue of be its central location and then its rapid development uh um later than Britain or France in industrialization um give it this special role in in Marx's worldview and so um it 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 was did not match the requirements of being IND industrialized developed well on its way in this historical process um and

nobody knew this better than the Bolsheviks Lenin and his colleagues um 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 seese power in Germany and that's why in immediately after taking power uh they're not sure they're going to last their their hope their their 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

uh and henceforth uh uh uh you know great things will follow that do Hue to Marx's historical uh uh Vision the last thing to mention about this is that uh this uh predominance of Germany in the thinking uh of of uh Marx had two other Reflections one was that uh German socialists and later Communists organized in order to fulfill Marx's vision and they produced something that leaves other uh westerners in awe uh 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 19112 uh is the largest party in German politics by vote and there's the possibility they might even come to power without needing radical revolution uh which again also goes against Marx's uh original vision of their the necessity for a revolution um workers around the world uh or rather um 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 um 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 uh the homeland of this form of government the Soviet Union uh uh that must be the the point of origin before the Bolshevik seize power in order to really be a serious radical socialist you needed to read German because you needed to read Marx and you needed to read kowsky and you needed to read Bernstein and other thinkers in this tradition and uh it's only after the Soviet seizure of power that uh that this all changes so there's lots of

marks of that phenomenon which is why the clash between nationalism and communism in uh 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 uh Marxist Chief rival was Russian Anarchist uh Mel bakunin uh who famously said in 1942 quote the passion for Destruction is also a creative passion so what kind of future did bakunin uh Envision well bakunin in some things agreed with Marx and in many others disagreed uh he was an anarchist

rather than uh hueing to uh the sort of scheme of history that 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 uh 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 conspir uh conspiratorial uh uh and hierarchical political movement bakun and envision that the ties would be far looser that both the Revolutionary movement and the 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 far uh the very fact that Marx uh is a German by background and bakunin is Russian kind of adds a further nationalist or or element of ethnic difference there bakunin uh 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 uh you know his Anarchist convictions were are not um uh not in question here they let him into conflict with Marx and and Marx railed against him denounced him uh and eventually had him

expelled uh from the the international one of the things though that also makes bakuna so significant is bakunin is the first in a longer series of um 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 uh um the the Communist Vision in particular especially in leninist version uh argued for discipline and a tightly organized professional revolutionary movement The anarchists Who sought to make common cause with uh uh Communists whether it was in the days of the Russian

Revolution or the Russian Civil War uh or whether it was uh then in the Spanish Civil War the anarchist found themselves um uh targeted by uh the Communists precisely because because uh 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 uh so I guess anarchists were less organized yeah that's my definition yeah why do you think anarchism hasn't been uh rigorously tried in the way the communism was if could just take a complete sort of

tangent I mean in one sense we are living in an anarchy today because the 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 I I think that probably some Anarchist would beg to differ right they would see uh um communes in Spain uh uh during the Spanish Civil War as an example of trying to put Anarchist ideas into into place bakunin um 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 uh 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 Hoban model of the war of all against all where man is a wolf to man generally except if you're talking about uh NE ists in uh in in the Russian revolutionary tradition uh anarchists see Anarchy as a blessed State and one where finally people

will be freed from the distorting influence of hierarchies traditional beliefs uh um subjugation inequalities so for them Anarchy uh growing out of the liberation of the human being is seen as as a positive good and and peaceful now that's at odds with the the prescription of someone like bakun for how to get there uh he sees overthrow as being uh necessary uh on on the route to that but you know as we point out um uh it's uh 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 it's a it's a leap it's it's a leap um and it it kind of it points to a phenomenon that um would have enraged Marx and uh 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 uh you know not not a a

vowed one but a kind of hidden religious or secular religious uh element to Marx's Vision to to the tradition that follows Marx um 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 uh apocalypse or the end times is this final Revolution that will usher in a blessed final State a Utopia which is uh equivalent to a secular version of Heaven uh there's the the working class playing the role

of uh Humanity in its struggle to be redeemed um and and Scholar after scholar has has pointed this out um uh Reinhold neore back in the 1930s had an article in the Atlantic magazine that talked about the Soviet Union's communism as a religion Eric fuggin a German American Scholar uh who fled the Nazis and and relocated to Louisiana State University uh and and and wrote Toms about the new phenomenon of political religions in the modern period and he saw um Fascism and Nazism and uh the so and and Soviet communism uh as uh as bearing

the stamp of of political religions meaning ideologies that promised what an earlier age would have understood in religious terms um fergin called this the escaton and said that uh these end times the escaton was being promised in the here and now being made imminent uh and he warned against that saying the results are likely to be disastrous so that's actually uh a disagreement with this idea that uh you know people sometimes say that uh the Soviet Union is an example of an atheistic Society so when you have atheism is the primary thing that underpins the

society this is what you get so that's what you're saying is a kind of uh rejection of that saying that there's a strong religious component uh to Communism a hidden component one that's not officially recognized I mean I I think that um you know I had a chance to witness this actually uh when I was a child my family uh I grew up in Chicago to a Lithuanian American family and uh my father who was a mathematician got a very rare invitation to travel to Soviet Lithuania to the University of vus to meet with colleagues

and um at this point journeys of more than a few days or a week were very rare to the Soviet Union for for Americans uh and uh the result was that um I had Unforgettable experiences visiting uh the Soviet Union in bv's day and among the things I saw there was a museum of atheism that had been established in a church that had been uh uh um ripped apart from inside and was meant to uh meant to kind of embody the official stance of atheism and um I remember being baffled by the museum on the

inside because you would expect exhibits you would ex expect something dramatic something that will be compelling and instead there were uh there was some folk art uh 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 uh but as a child I remember being um 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 um when I was able to visit the

Soviet Union later uh 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 uh communist mummies like Mau or hoi Min um really I think uh speak to a blending of earlier religious sensibility reverence for relics of great figures almost saintly figures uh so that even what got proclaimed as atheism uh turned out to be a very demanding

Faith as well and I think that's a contradiction that uh that other Scholars have pointed out as well yeah it's a very complicated sort of discussion when you remove religion as a as a big component of a society whether something like a framing of political ideologies in religious ways is the natural consequence of that we hear nature abhorring a vacuum and I think that there are there are pces in human character that long for transcendental explanations right that it's not all meaningless uh it's uh in fact there's a a larger purpose and I think it's

not a coincidence that such a significant part of resistance to uh communist regimes has in part come from on the one hand religious Believers uh and on the other hand uh from uh disillusioned True Believers in communism who uh find themselves uh undergoing a uh an internal experience of just of revulsion uh finding that their ideals uh are have not been followed through on so this topic is one of several topics that you eloquently describe as contradictions within the ideas of uh Marx so religious there is a kind of religious adherence versus uh also the

rejection of religious Dogma that he stood for uh we've talked about some of the others the the tension between nationalism that emerged when it was implemented versus what communism is supposed to be which is global so globalism um then there's the uh 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 um geography of global versus restricted to certain countries and uh you know tradition sort of

you're supposed to break with the past yeah the communism but then Marxism became one of the strongest traditions in history that's right that's right I think that the that last one is is especially significant because it's it's deeply paradoxical I mean trying to outline these contradictions by the way is like subjecting Marx to a the sort of analysis that Marx subjected other people to which is to point out internal contradictions things that are likely to to become pressure points or cracks that might open up what's supposed to be uh a completely um uh set and

durable and effective uh framework um the one about tradition uh you know Marx points out that the need for revolution is in order to break with the Traditions that have hemmed people in this earlier earlier ways of thinking earlier social structures uh and uh and and to constantly renovate and what happens instead is um a tradition of rad IAL rupture emerges and that's really tough because imagine um uh the last stages of the Soviet Union where um Keen observers can tell that there are problems that are building in society there are discontents and demands that

are are going to clash especially when someone like gorbachov is proposing reforms and things are suddenly thrown open for discussion um the very notion that you have the celebration of revolutionaries uh and the Bolshevik uh Legacy at a time when the state wants to enforce stability and uh an order that's been received from the prior generation think of bv's time for instance um all of that is a especially volatile mix and uh uh unlikely to work out very durably in the long run I would love to sort of uh talk about the works uh of

marks The Communist Manifesto in Das Capital what can we say that's interesting about the manifestation of his ideas on paper well the first thing to note obviously is that uh those two works are very different DUS Capital uh is an enormous multivolume work that that Marx worked at and only got the first volume out because angles begged him to stop revising please just finally get it into press and then the rest angles had to uh actually reconstruct out of notes after uh Mark's passed away uh it's a huge work by contrast the Communist Manifesto uh

is uh a brief pamphlet that ended up affecting the lives of many millions worldwide uh in spite of its its comparative brevity um The Communist Manifesto moreover is also something of the nature of having a delayed fuse you could say because uh when it first appears amid the revolutions of 1848 that sweep across Europe uh the work is contrary to what people often believe the the that pamphlet did not cause the Revolutions of 1848 many of which had National or liberal demands uh the voice of Marx and angles was barely to be heard over the

den 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 uh the episode The 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 in urban upheaval that really leads to uh um worldwide notoriety for Marx and attention uh to those works and they're very

different in form uh Das capital is intended to be the Origin of Species of its uh realm of economic thought and and represents years and years of work of of Marx laboring in the British Museum library uh working through statistics working on little bits and pieces of a larger uh answer to Big historical questions that he believes that he's 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 paity and just waiting for history to play out in its pre-ordained way it's also uh a Clarion call to make the revolution happen uh and uh in is intended to be a a a pragmatic practical statement of of how this is to to play out and you know starts in part with those ringing words about a a ghost or a spectre haunting Europe the Spectre of Communism which wasn't true at the time but decades later most definitely is the case is there something we could say about the difference between marxian economics and Marxist

political ideology so the political side of things and the economics side of things so I I think that Marx would probably have responded that uh in fact those things are indivisible uh it the analysis uh as sort of the purely theoretical uh is uh certainly can be performed on any economic reality that you care to mention but the imperatives that grow out of that imper that e economic analysis are political um Marx and and Engles um emphasize the unity of the and practice so it's it's not enough to dispassionately analyze uh it's a call to

action as well because if you've delivered the answer to how history evolves and and changes uh it obligates you right it uh it uh it demands certain action um you sometimes hear from undergraduates that they've heard from their High School history teachers that that Marxism was just a theoretical construct that was an the idol production of a philosopher who was um not connected to the world and was never meant to be tried in practice Marx would have been Furious to hear this uh and it's almost heroically wrong uh 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 um you could you could say that in the abstract a Marxist Economist can certainly use Marxist theoretical framework uh uh to compare to a given economic reality uh 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 uh and and and be

inevitably uh 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 um the new economic period uh early in the history of the Soviet Union when Lenin realizes that the economy is so far gone that you need to reintroduce or allow in a limited way some elements of private Enterprise just to start getting Russia back on course in order to have the accumulation of surplus that will be necessary to build the project at all and that's there

are many Bolsheviks who see the new economic program as a New Economic Policy as a terrible compromise and and a betrayal of of their ideas but it's it's seen as necessary for a short while and then Stalin uh will will wreck it entirely or consider for that matter uh China today where you you have a a dominant political class the Communist Party of China uh which is allowing Economic Development uh and private Enterprise as long as it retains political control um so some of these elements already represent divergences from what Marx would have expected and

this is 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 like is China in a meaningful sense a communist country anymore um and there's a there's a diversity of opinion on this score or you know if you're looking at the history of communism and you look at North Korea which now is on its third installment of a dynastic leader from the same family who rules like a god king over a regime

that calls itself communist is that still a form of Communism is it an evolution of is it a complete reversal of I tend to want to take an anthropological perspective in the history of Communism and to take very serious iously those people who avow that they are communists and this is the project that they have underway and then after hearing that AOW uh 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 um so it's a very very complicated history that we're talking about let's step back to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century and let's Steelman the case for communism let's put ourselves in the shoes of the people there not in this way we can we can look back at what happened in the 20th century why was this such a compelling notion for millions of people uh can we make the case for it well clearly it was a compelling case for millions of people and and part of this

story has to do with uh overall has to do with the faith conviction stories of uh of people sacrificing themselves as well as their countrymen uh in a cause that they believed was uh not just legitimate but uh demanded their total obedience I think that throughout the early part of the 20th century uh 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 um some varieties of that and like watch the quotation mark science were crazy right like phenology so-called scientific racism that tried to divide Humanity up into uh discret blocks uh and to manipulate them in ways that were allegedly scientific or rational so there were Horrors that followed from uh those invocations of science but its Prestige was enormous and that in part had to do with uh the uh lessening grip of religious ideas on intellectual Elites more generally processes of secularization not total

secularization but but processes of secularization in in Western industrial societies um and the sense that here's a doctrine that will allow allow escape from Wars brought on by capitalist competition poverty and economic cycles and depressions brought on by capitalist competition uh the inequalities uh of societies that remain hierarchical and class-based uh and this claim to being cuttingedge 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 this master plan so um you know ultimately some of the predictions of someone like lennin that that once Society has reached that stage of the dictatorship of the 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 the greatest good uh you know when you think of the experiences with bureaucracy in the 20th century once hair stands on end to have you know the the the comparative naive uh on display with a prediction like that but it deres 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 uh at this this uh this final uh 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 um 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 a powerful idea in that the man is exploiting me and that's a populist message that a lot of people resonate with because to a degree it's true in every system and so before you kind of know how these economic and political uh 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 uh you know a further problem and that's the identity of the revolutionaries um it it turned out that uh many of these revolutionary movements uh and then the founding Elites of communist countries uh in the aftermath of the the Soviet seizure of power um turn out to be something quite different from people who have spent their lives in factories experiencing the Industrial Revolution firsthand I there's a special role here for intellectuals uh and um when when Marx and angles right 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 their materially determined role in order to gain a perspective on the historical process as a whole and Ally themselves with a 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 uh that that um Gap that um that frequent reality of not being in touch with uh the very

classes that the uh Communists are aiming to represent uh is is a a very frequent theme in uh in this story uh it also um 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 uh uh aftermath of the the first world war in particular uh or or during the this traumatic experience the way in which uh 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 uh scorning their moderation and instead announcing a new dispensation which was the leninist conception of a disciplined hardcore of professional revolutionaries who will act in ways that uh that a mere Trade union movement couldn't and what this speaks to is you know a fundamental tension in uh in radical movements because uh left to their own devices lennin uh 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 uh in in in this regard that plays itself out over the Long Haul so let's go to uh Lenin and the Russian Revolution how did uh 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 the effect that it had as a total war unprecedented pressure placed on a regime that in many ways uh was a a traditional almost feudal monarchy uh only experiencing the beginnings of the modernization that uh the rest of Europe had undergone the uh and for this reason communism comes to power in a place that Marx probably wouldn't have expected in the wreckage wreckage of the Russian Empire uh Lenin is

absolutely vital to this equation because uh he's the one who presses the process forward uh ironically um given the claim of communist leaders to having the key to history uh just a few months previous in Exile in Switzerland Lenin had been despairing and been convinced that uh that that he's not may not even live to see the Advent of that day but then when Revolution does break out in uh the Russian Empire uh 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 they'll later live very much to regret uh he is able to get back and to go into action and to press for nothing less than the seizure of power uh that brings uh the his Bolshevik faction the radical uh wing of the Socialist movement uh 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 uh would have agreed that what was necessary was

a cataclysm on the scale of the first world war to make this happen um the first world war shatters so many of the certainties of the 19th century that we talked about as a as a dynamic period with argument between ideologies it it's 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 uh and to uh put everything onto a authoritarian wartime footing in country

after country uh so Lenin uh earlier had already articulated the possibility that this might happen by talking about how the entire Globe already was connected uh and there's a 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 uh it might actually uh inaugurate much bigger processes uh and uh start a chain reaction and that's what he intended to do and has the chance to do uh in the course of 1917 um incidentally just to get a a sense of the

sheer chaos and the um the human on an individual human level what the absence of uh established Authority meant uh there's there's few works of literature that are as powerful as bis pak's Dr zivago for giving the the whole sweep of contending forces uh in a power vacuum uh it's an amazing testimony to that time and place so you said uh that Bolshevik saw violence and Terror as necessary so can can you just speak to this aspect of their because they took power and and so this this was a part of the way they saw

the world right and it had antecedence um even though Lenin and his colleagues are competing amongst each other for the title of most faithful disciple of Marx and and most true to the received uh theory in in practice there's other influences earlier influences that operate in the Russian context uh that were not operative let's say on the German context and here you have to step back and think about the nature of tsarism which had maintained still uh into the 20th century the notion of a divine right to rule that God had ordained uh the Tara

system and uh its hierarchies and that the question these was was sinful and politically not advisable and the restrictive nature of Russian Society at this point dominated by The tarist 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 uh and Lenin is a perfect example of this because his uh older brother uh was executed as a result of being in a uh radical revolutionary movement uh that was who was arrested and executed for uh association with

terrorism um and earlier generations of Russian radicals had uh founded populist groups that would aim to engage in terrorism and resistance against the tarist regime um and this included uh people who call themselves nalists and these nalists were materialists who saw themselves um ushering in uh a new age by absolute rejection of earlier religious traditions uh and aiming for material answers to uh the the challenges of the day uh among them uh was Nikolai chfi who wrote uh what's been called the worst book ever written it was in fact one of Lennon's favorite books it

in Russian it's stel in English it gets translated what is to be done and it's a utopian novel about uh revolutionaries and how revolutionaries should act with one another in open ways new ways non-traditional ways in order to help usher in the 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 neolist influence which uh um is also a very live current in in Lenin's thinking and when you add these things together you get

a an explosive mix because Lenin as a result and part of this family trauma of his brother becomes a absolutely reconcilable enemy of the tarist 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 I mean that with little hyperbole lenon at one point shared with friends that he loved listen 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 um worries even fellow revolutionaries by the intensity of his single-minded Focus to Revolution he spends his days thinking about the revolution he probably dreamt about the revolution uh and so 24 47 it's an existence where he's paired off other um human elements quite deliberately in order to turn himself into an effective uh instigator of Revolution so when the opportunity comes in 1917 he's primed and and ready uh for that role it's interesting that nihilism Russian nihilism had an impact on Lenin I mean traditionally niist philosophy rejects all sorts of traditional morality there's

the kind of cynical dark View and where's the light the light is science the light is science and materialism oh boy um the nihilists um some of them did a very bad job of hiding their political beliefs because they would wear they were famous for wearing blue tinted spectacles kind of the sunglasses of the late 19th century as a way of uh shielding their eyes from light but also having a dispassionate and realistic view of reality uh outside so um 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 a uh uh an entirely new mode of existence uh for most people I think nihilism is introduced in the brilliant philosophical work I don't know if you're familiar with it uh by the name of uh the big Labowski nlist appear there and I think they summarize the nlist tradition quite well but it is indeed fascinating and also it is fascinating that lennin and I'm sure this influenced Stalin as well that hardness yeah was a necessary uh human characteristics to take the revolution to its uh to

its end that's right that's right so prior generations of nihilists or populists um had resembled Lenin's single-mindedness by being you know by by arguing that uh one needed total devotion for this this was 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 uh if we consider Lenin affected by Marxist ideas and the Homegrown Russian revolutionary tradition that predates uh uh uh the arrival of marxist socialism in in 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 ex 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 uh leads the the party through some really difficult steps that involves things like signing the humiliating treaty with the Germans

the Treaty of breslov where critics of the Bolshevik said that no one who loved their their country would have would have agreed to a so Draconian so harsh a settlement that saw the peeling off of large territories that had belonged to the Russian Empire Lenin is willing to undertake this because the larger prize um 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's going to break out everywhere especially after we've raised the standard first of all in

the wreckage of the the Russian Empire and we should probably say that that treaty to some small degree maybe you can elaborate now or later l the the groundwork for World War II because there is resentment is a thing that with time can lead to just extreme levels of Destruction right it in for 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 the arrival of American American troops The Tipping of the

balance in the west led to that reversal and uh um 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 that groundwork is laid and incidentally um this is something we can talk about later uh World War I and World War II have a lot of linkages like that and and uh as time goes by I think his are going to focus on those linkages uh even

more but Lenin uh 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 uh good organization uh allowed the bull to emerge uh 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 uh uh Russia and once Germany inevitably plunged aad head into its revolutionary transformation a communist Germany that doesn't end up happening on the contrary what happens in Germany is a out andout shooting war between different kinds of socialists when Germany establishes a democracy that later goes by the name of the vimar Republic the government uh 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 uh uh authoritarian rule so Communists who Revolt in uh Germany are brutally suppressed by mercenaries uh hardened front Fighters and uh and uh 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 frat side it frustrates Lenin's Ambitions so too does the fact that Poland rather than going Bolshevik uh resists attempts by the Bolsheviks to move forward and to connect up with Germany uh the polls uh yet

again uh play a tremendously important historical role in changing the expected course uh 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 has it's been deferred it's been put off and so the question then arises what do you build within uh a state that's established called the Union of Soviet Socialist republics or the the Soviet Union

um Lenin as a result of an assassination attempt uh is deeply affected in his health and um would have loved to continue for years longer to steer the regime uh but he's sidelined because of his declining health and there emerges a contest a contest between a very charismatic um leader uh uh leot Trotsky um on the one hand who is an amazing orator who is an intellectual who has traveled widely in the world who has seen uh uh much of the world and who is a a brilliant writer uh a far-ranging intellect uh and is

seen is extremely radical because of his demand for permanent revolution the acceleration of revolutionary processes to drive history forward to to strike while the iron is hot and on the other hand is an extreme unlikely Contender for power and that's a man who's probably the antithesis of Charisma if you were to meet him in person uh a guy with a uh a squeaky somewhat high-pitched voice not well suited to revolutionary oratory uh uh his face pockmarked with uh the scars of uh youthful illness uh and who moreover doesn't speak uh a fine sophisticated Russian but

speaks a uh Russian heavily inflected with a Georgian accent uh from that part of the Russian Empire from which he came and that was Stalin and um I know that you already have a marvelous uh interview with uh Steven cotkin uh the brilliant biographer uh of Stalin uh uh who um has so many insights U on that subject the one thing that's that even after reading about Stalin um 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 to fully take this aboard we have to unknow what we know from our vantage point about Stalin's leadership Stalin's brutality and eliminating uh his opposition um The Cult of Personality that Against All Odds got built up around Stalin so so successfully um and the the absolute dominant role that led him later to be described as genghiskhan with a telephone uh um a a a brutal dictator uh of a with

ancient barbarism all lied to the use of modern technology while trosky is delivering stirring speeches and theorizing Stalin Works behind the scenes to uh 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 um trosky is increasingly sidelined uh and then demonized and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union and later murdered uh in in Mexico City um for Stalin uh 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 a wolf a uh brutal dictator in moderate clothing so just just because somebody presents as moderate doesn't mean they can't be one of the most destructive not the most destructive humans in history the other aspect is 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 uh there's still to this day a very large number of people that see him as a religious yeah

type of uh Godlike figure so the power of propaganda there today we would call that curating the image right curating the image but to the extent to which you can do that effectively uh is is quite incredible so in that way also Stalin is a study of the power of propaganda uh can we just talk about the ways that the the the power vacuum is filled by Stalin how that manifest itself perhaps one angle we can take is how was the secret police used how how did power manifest itself under Stalin well um 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 and and and dominate uh he's co-opted and promoted to positions of importance by Lenin who sees him as uh a somewhat Rough Around the Edges not very sophisticated uh much less Cosmopolitan than other Bolsheviks but but Dependable reliable and committed revolutionary so um 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 the communications of Lenin is that uh it's there's it's not the case that we're talking here about um a unconnected series of careers rather there are uh connections to be made it's true that towards the end of his life Lenin uh came to be worried by uh complaints about Stalin's rudeness towards fellow Bolsheviks uh and in his Testament he warned against uh Stalin's testimonies lendon fundamentally saw himself as Irreplaceable and so that doesn't really help in a succession struggle right um Stalin uh is able to rely on a secret police

apparatus that have been built up under Lenin already and um it's uh very early in the foundation of the Soviet state that uh the ca or the extraordinary commission uh is established as a secret police to uh terrify the enemies beat down the opponents of the regime and to uh keep an eye on society more generally uh the person who's chosen for that task also is a anomaly among Bolsheviks uh that is a man of Polish aristocratic background Felix zinski who comes to be known by the nickname iron Felix uh here's a man about whom

a cult of personality also is created um zinski is celebrated in the Soviet period as the model of someone who's harsh but fair a 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 uh the ideological project of the Bolsheviks um zinski 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 uh earlier uh atrocities and uh to produce a situation where even committed Bolsheviks are uncertain of what's going to happen next uh and feel their own position to be precarious I mean incidentally there are other influences that probably are brought to be hair as well it gets said about Stalin that he used to spend a lot of time flipping through makaveli's the prince and um it seems that Stalin's personal copy of the prince um nobody knows where that is if if if it still exists but um the historians have

found annotations in works by Lenin that Stalin who is a voracious reader as it turns out um made in in the back of one of the books which sounds almost like a commentary on makaveli'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 stop 's self-conception of himself is someone who along these lines and in line with Lennon's emphasis on on practical results and discipline somebody who

gets things done that's the crucial ethical standard and and in ultimately uh in in criticisms by later dissidence of Bolshevik morality this question of what is the ethical standard what is the ethical law uh 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 it's distinc of religion it's distinc of art forms it's distinc of uh Styles um 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 uh dictatorship in its purest form something that Lenin had avowed and then Stalin comes to practice more uh even more fully not that it's possible to look deep into a person's heart but you know if you look at trosky you could say that he probably believed deeply in Marxism and communism probably the same with lennin what do you think Stalin believed was he a Believer was 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 and know for sure my intuition though is that um is that this may be a false alternative uh a false dichotomy uh it's natural enough to to see somebody who does monstr things to say well this is being you ideology is being used as a cover for

it but I think that um my suspicion is that these were actually perfectly compatible in his historical role the notion that that there's an ideology it gives you a a a master plan for how history is going to develop and your own power the the increase of that power to unprecedented uh uh proportions your ability to torment even your own faithful follow followers uh in order just to see them squirm which Stalin was famous for uh uh to keep people unsettled I I 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 it's terrifying but it's really important to understand if we look at once Stalin takes power at uh some of the policies so the collectivization of Agriculture why do you think that failed so uh catastrophically uh especially in the 1930s with uh Ukraine and Poore I think the the short answer is that um the Bolsheviks in particular but also Communists more generally have had of very conflicted relationship with agriculture agriculture um as a very I mean vital obviously but also very traditional an

old form of human activity um has about it all of the the smell of tradition and other problematic factors as well um in a place like uh Russia or the Russian Empire um peasants throughout history for centuries had wanted one thing and that was to be left alone to farm their own land uh um the you know that's their Utopia and that for someone like Marx who had a vision of historical development and Transcendence and progress as being absolutely key uh does not mesh at all with that vision for that reason when Marx comes up

with this this Tableau this um tremendous display of historical transformation taking place over centuries and headed towards the final Utopia the role of farmers there is is negligible peasants get called um conservative and dull as sacks of potatoes in uh Marx's uh 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 um by contrast industrialization that's progress I mean images that today would be deeply disturbing to an environmentalist sensibility Smoke Stacks belching smoke the byproducts of

Industry a landscape transformed by uh the factory model that's what marks and then later the Bolsheviks have in mind um similarly the goal uh 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 um so in approaching the question of collectivization we have to keep in mind that for uh Stalin and his comrades who are bound and determin

to drag Russia Kicking and Screaming into the Modern Age and not to allow it be beaten because of its backward as Stalin puts it traditional forms of Agriculture are not what they have in mind and in their rank of desired outcomes industrialization especially massive heavy industry uh is the sinequanon that's their envisioned future uh agriculture rates below so in that case The crucial significance of collectivization is to get a handle on the food situation in order to make it predictable and not to find oneself in another crisis like during the Civil War when the cities

are starving industry is robbed of Labor and the factories are at a s at a standstill so this is really the the the core approach to collectivization to put the productive capacities of the farmers uh in a regimented way in a state controlled way under the control of of the state this produc produces vast human suffering because the 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 kulok a tightfisted 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 uh a lied to that uh incidentally is uh Stalin sense that um this is a chance to also Target people who are opposed to the bulvik regime for other reasons whether it's because of their Ukrainian identity uh whether it's because of a desire

to to for a different nationalist project uh so for Stalin there are many motives that roll into collectivization and the final thing to be said is you are quite right that collectivization proves to be a failure because the Soviet Union never finally gets a grasp on the pro problems of agricultural production by the end of the Soviet Union uh they're importing grain from the West uh in uh um in spite of having some of tremendously Rich Farmland uh to be found worldwide and the reason for that had to do in part I think with the

incentives that had been taken away um 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 uh the incentives run in very different directions and the the joke that was common um 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 um rhetorically respected and uh valorized uh in practice is rewarded with very slim rewards and the last point immobility the collectivization

reduces the mobility of the who are not allowed because of internal passports to move to the cities unless they have permission they're locked in place I got to say at the time and afterwards that looked a lot like feudalism or Neo feudalism in terms of the restrictions on uh on workers in the countryside it is a terrifying horrific and fascinating study of how the ideal when meeting reality fails so the the IDE idea here is to make agriculture more efficient so be more productive so the industrialized model but the implementation through collectivization had all the

elements that you've mentioned that uh contended with human nature so first with the coolock 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 uh 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 going to lie everybody lies on the data that's right and so even uh Stalin himself probably uh as evil or incompetent as he may be was not even getting good data about what's even happening even if he wanted to stop the vicious D cycle which he certainly didn't but he wouldn't be even able to so there's all these like dark consequences of uh of what on paper seems like a good ideal and it's it's a fascinating study of like things on paper that's right when implemented can

go really really bad that's right and and and 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 staring starving people to uh to escape um you put very well some of the the implications of this case study and in how things look in the abstract versus in practice um and those phenomena were going to haunt the rest of the experience of the Soviet

Union um the whole notion that up and down the chain of command everybody is falsifying or tinkering with or prying the statistics or their reports in order not to look bad and and not to you know have Vengeance visited upon them um reaches the point where nobody in spite of the pre sense of comprehensive knowledge right there's a a a state planning agency that creates 5-year plans for the economy as a whole and which is supposed to have accurate statistics all of this uh is founded upon uh a foundation of sand that's inadvertent that's not

an intended side effect but what you described as in terms of the internal dynamics of fostering conflict in a rural societ 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 uh in 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 um 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 uh sending the message that mediocrity is comparatively much safer than talent and this pattern incidentally gets transposed and in tremendously harrowing ways also to an the entire group of uh Russian intelligencia and intellectuals of other peoples who are in the Soviet Union um they discover similarly that to be independent to have a voice which is not compliant uh carries with it uh tremendous penalties um um in

in uh especially in Stalin's Reigns of Terror again a difficult question about a psychology uh of one human being but to what degree do you think Stalin was deliberately punishing the farmers and the Ukrainian farmers and to a degree was he looking the other way and allowing the the large scale incompetence the horrific incompetence of the collectivization of agriculture well I I think it was both things right I mean there were not only sins of omission but also sins of commission um incidentally one should add I don't think for Stalin it was personal um these

are people who are very remote from him he never never coming into contact with the people who are suffering in this way um attributed to him uh is the quote that uh one death is a tragedy a million deaths is a statistic um I think he in action certainly acted in a way that would vindicate that um but the process of collectivization was not just uh 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

uh uh extract the uh uh the food where it could be found and um this we have testimony to this in the case of uh people who later became dissidents like Lev copv 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 a greater good would result even from these enormities so I think that uh um this was quite deliberate following this as you've mentioned uh there was the process of uh the great Terror where the intellectuals where the Communist Party officials the Military Officers the bureaucrats everybody uh 750,000 people were executed and over a million people were sent to the gulag what can you say by way of wisdom from this process of the great Terror that Stalin implemented from 36 to

38 well the the terror had uh a variety of victims um there were people who were True Believers and who were both bulvik who were especially targeted by Stalin because uh he aimed to Revenge himself for all the sort of condescension that he'd experience in that movement before uh and also to eliminate rivals or potential rival uh Power centers uh and members of their families and then there were people who um 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 uh uh the bureaucracies in the age of the terror what's so horrifying is the way in which a whole society uh stood paralyzed uh in this this process uh and how uh neighbors would be taken away in the middle of the night and people would be wary of talking about it um resistance uh uh at least in in these Urban centers uh was entirely Paralyzed by fear when uh if one had somehow find a way to mobilize somehow a

way to to to to resist the process the results might have been different there's there's an astonishing book I mean there are so many great books that have come out quite recently even on these topics Orlando figus has a amazing book called The Whisperers that traces several families history in the Stalin period and it's a testimony to how a whole society and some of its most intelligent people got winnowed again and again and again in that process of negative selection that we talked about the lasting dislocation and scars that this left and the way in

which how people were not able to talk about these things in public because that would put you next on the list uh suspected of uh of 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 um the process took on a life of its own and I think that uh it might even have surprised Stalin in some ways um not enough to to to to short circus the process but the notion where um people were invited

to denounce neighbors co-workers maybe even family members um 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 uh were had to be investigated uh and uh um either executed or sent to the ggs um the uncertain certainty that this produced it was enormous um even loyalty was not enough to save people the stories soja nen's Gulag archipelago is full of stories of dedicated Communists uh who find themselves in the

GG and are sure that some mistake has been made and uh if only comrad Stalin would hear about this terrible thing that has happened to them um surely uh it would be corrected and uh um nothing like this would everyone else by contrast accused of terrible crimes must there there must be some truth behind that so uh you know talk about ways of of disaggregating a society ways of breaking down bonds of trust um this left lasting traces on uh an entire society that that endureed to this very day yeah there're again a fascinating study

of human nature that they're essentially was an emergent quota of confessions of treason so like even though the whole society was terrified and were through Terror loyal there's still needed to be a lot of confessions of people being disloyal so you're just making up now like at a mass scale stuff is being made up and it's also the machine of the secret police starts eating itself because you want to be confessing on your boss on your and is this weird dark uh dynamic system where human nature just as it is it's worst absolutely absolutely why

if we look at this deep discussion we had about Marxism uh 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 on 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 Googs and all of all of this well I think some of it comes back to the ethical grounding that we mentioned earlier um the notion that uh ethics are entirely situational and that

any ethical system is an outgrowth of a particular class reality a particular material reality uh and that leaves the door wide open um so I think that that that aspect was uh present from the very beginning uh I think that the um expectations of Marx uh that the revolution would take hold and be successful in a developed country played a role here as well um 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 um continue even after the war has ended in the west um that leaves precious little in the way of uh structural restraints or um a functioning society that would say let's not do things this way um I think that in retrospect that special role carved out for special individuals who can move this process forward and accelerate historical development um allowed for people to step into those those roles and and appoint themselves executors of this ideological uh Vision um so I think those things play a role as well now it's hard to do contrafactual history

but to what degree is this basically that the Communist ideals create a power vacuum and a dictator type figure steps in and then it's a roll of the dice of what that dictator is like so can you imagine a world where the dictator uh was trosky would we see very similar type of things or is the hardness and the brutality of somebody like Stalin manifested itself in um being able to look the other way as some of these dark things were happening more so than somebody like trosky who would presumably be um see the realizations

of these policies and be shocked well counterfactuals are hard like you said and uh and one very quickly gets off into really deep Waters in in speculation there were contemporaries and there have been Scholars since who suggest that trosky by all indications might have been even more radical than Stalin in the tempo that he wanted to achieve think of think of the the uh the um the slogan of permanent revolution trosky also um who dabbled in in so many uh things in his 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 uh A system that matches your hopes for the future it'll be possible to reconfigure people and I like talk about ambition to create essentially the next stage in human evolution a new species growing out of humanity um those don't sound like very modest or limited approaches um and uh I guess we just really won't know do some of the destructive characteristics of Communism

have to go hand inand so the central planning that we talked about the censorship with the secret police uh the concentration of power in one one dictatorial figure and uh well let's say with again with the secret police the the the violent oppression what one should add to to those factors that have a kind of interrelated logic of their own the 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

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 uh in in Eastern Europe um uh although they announc that they're coming as liberators uh consider uh the foundation of communist China on the heels of World War II and yet more Chinese Civil War uh consider uh 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'll it ought to be relatively easy to get this system rolling and put it on a basis that's uh after all we have the road map to the Future there will follow frustrations and impediments and resistance and there's a ratchet effect then there because it'll produce uh more repression uh producing even more problems that follow um what drives the whole thing forward though especially in its leninist version but already visible with with marks and angles 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 an ethos I think that um 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 um the 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 you're 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 es or erodes or when it's lost if we go to the 1920s to the home of KL Marx fascism as implemented by the Nazi party in Germany

was called The National Socialist German Workers Party uh so what were the similarities and differences of uh 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 right uh that was happening at the time well I mean there's a a whole bunch of terms that are in play here right um and when we speak of fascism uh fascism in its original sense um is a radical movement founded in Italy which though it had

been allegedly on The Winning Side uh of World War I is disappointed with the lack of rise in National Prestige and territory that that that leads that that commences after the end of the war so bizarrely enough it's a socialist by the name of bito musolini Who crafts an ideological message of glorification of the State uh 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 musolini uh in order to rep licate in peace time the ideal of total military mobilization in Wartime um although the Nazis in in Germany are inspired and borrow heavily from fascist ideology there also are different emphases that they include and that includes uh their virulent racism from the outset which um in addition to a glorification of the state glorification of the leader and preparation for National greatness uh race is absolutely core and it's that racial radicalism that the Nazis espouse as a central idea along with anti-Semitism the demonizing in particular

of the Jews and this this insane racialist cosmology that the Nazis uh AOW it is the assertion that the Nazis will 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 Gobles among the Nazis uh accent the Socialist part to begin with others put the accent firmly on the Nationalist part in part the the term they chose for their movement was meant to be confusing it was meant to take slogans or words from different parts of the political

Spectrum to fuse them into something unfamiliar and new and claim that they'd overcome all earlier political divisions that they 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 we need to start with by making clear they were ideological Archen 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 uh

and and this leads to um strange and perverted beliefs about reality uh from the perspective of the Nazis the Nazis claimed that uh because they saw the Jews as a demonic element in human history the Bolsheviks weren't even really you know didn't really believe all of this economic dialectical materialism they were in fact a racial conspiracy it was alleged and so the Nazis use the term of judeo bolshevism to argue that uh communism is essentially a uh conspiracy uh steered by the Jews which was complete nonsense uh for their part the Comm Communists uh and

and from the perspective of the Soviet Union the Nazis um were in essence a super capitalist conspiracy if the if the cosmological enemy are the capitalists and the owners the exploiters then all of the rigar about race and nationalism are distractions they're meant to fool the the uh poor saps who enlist in that movement it's essentially steered by capitalist owners who it is claimed are um 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

can be interpreted as a good sign because it means that capitalism is almost done because this is the last undisguised uh naked face of capitalism nearing its end so the other uh uh Beyond this um ideological uh 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 uh uh the the claims of Human Rights uh

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 uh conflict leaving uh tens of millions dead and then economically the Great Depression showing that that the the end was not was not far away um this produced at one and the same time both ideological opposition and instances of vastly cynical cooperation um in terms of the viar Republic um it's obvious with a 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 uh the extremes the Nazi uh uh Stormtrooper army with their brown shirts and the Communist Street Fighters had cooperated in uh um heightening an atmosphere of civil war that uh uh left people searching for desperate expedience uh uh in the last day of uh of the viar Republic um the most compelling case of their cooperation uh was the signing of the Nazi Soviet pact on August 23rd 1939 which enables Hitler to start World War II a non-aggression pact in official terms it contains secret Clauses

whereby the Nazis and the Soviets meeting in Moscow under Stalin's wary eye had agreed on territorial division of Eastern Europe and making common cause uh as uh each claiming to be the winner of the future um so in spite of their oppositions uh these were regimes that uh were able very cynically uh to work together to dire effect uh in the course of the 1950s in particular uh there arose political scientists who also crafted uh an explanation for ways in which these regimes although they were opposed to one another actually um bore morphological resemblances they

operated in ways that in spite of ideological differences bore similarities uh and such political scientists Hannah rent uh Chief among them um crafted a model called totalitarian Ian ISM borrowing a term that the fascists had liked about themselves to Define regimes like the Nazis like Stalin Soviet Union uh for a new kind of dictatorship that was not a backwards cast um Revival of ancient barbarism but with something new a new form of dictatorship that laid total claims on hearts and Minds that didn't want just passive obedience but wanted fanatical loyalty that combined fear with compulsion

uh 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 um this this um model um has often met with very strong criticism uh on the grounds that no regime in human history has yet achieved total control of the population under its uh grip that's true but that's not what Hannah rent was saying Hannah rent was saying there will always be inefficiencies there will be resistance there will be uh 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 thoroughgoing control of entire populations and the final frightening thought that arent kept before her was what if this is not a model that comes to us from bited un civilized 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 uh historian and podcaster did a podcast with tuer Carlson and he made some claims there and else

where 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 uh Poland into a global war second the mass murder of Jews po slav gypsies in death camps was an accident a uh byproduct of a global war and in fact the most most Humane extermination of prisoners of War possible given the alternative was death by starvation so I was wondering if you

can respond to each of those claims well I I think that this is uh a bunch of absurdity uh and it would be laughable if it wasn't so serious in uh in its implications um I to address the the points in turn um 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 uh is that assertion is is based on a complete neglect of what Nazi ideology was uh the Nazi worldview and racism was not

a ideology that was limited in its application it looked toward world domination uh the in the the years since the Nazis had come to power they sponsored programs of Education called geopolitics which urged Germans to think in continents think Inc continents to uh see themselves as one of the superpowers that would battle for the future of the world uh and now in in retrospect we of course can see that Germany was not in a position to to uh legitimate a claim like that but the Nazis aims were anything but limited in particular uh this sort

of argument has been tried out in in different ways before in previous decades there had been attempts by historians who were actually uh 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 uh and uh 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 bismar now when I say it like that I think you can spot the problem immediately when you put the ideology aside

to uh 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 mine and other manifestos and speeches is uh an Enterprise that's doomed to failure uh justifiably the notion that the mass murder of Jews PS claves and gypsies was an event that um simply happened as a result of unforeseen events and that it was understood as somehow being Humane uh is also runs contrary to the historical fact when Poland was invaded uh the Nazis Unleashed a killing wave in their

so-called operation tanan bag which sent in specially trained and ideolog I Ally pre-prepared Killers who were given the name of the units of the einat grin in order to wipe out the Polish leadership uh and also uh to kill Jews uh this predates any uh um of the operation Barbarosa and the Nazis invasion of the Soviet Union uh the Nazis moreover in their in many different expressions of their ideology had made clear that their plans you can read this in mine comp for Eastern Europe were subjugation and uh ethnic uh cleansing uh on a vast

scale so I consider um 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 mind com this is what's necessary in order to uh bring that racial Utopia to pass um and so so uh while the timetable might be flexible while obviously uh 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

uh that in in my own scholarship I've worked to um explore some of these themes a little bit further uh my second book uh which is entitled uh the German myth of the East which appeared with Oxford University press um examines centuries in the German encounter with Eastern Europe and how Germans have thought about Eastern Europe whether in positive ways or in negative ways and one thing that emerges from this investigation is that uh 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 uh uh uh expected future of domination and Annihilation uh in the East the idea of laan's real is it Poss possible to uh Implement that idea without Ukraine Hitler has Ukraine in his Horizon uh as one of the chief prizes uh and uh the Nazis then craft extensive plans uh 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 genal 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 they'll their settlements will be scientifically distributed in the wide open spaces of Ukraine for for agriculture that will feed an expanded uh and purified Germanic Master race so uh this was not peripheral to the Nazi Ambitions But Central

as I best understand and there is extensive and definitive evidence that the Nazis always wanted to invade the Soviet Union and there was always a racial component and not just about the Jews they wanted to enslave and exterminate the Jews yes but the Slavic people the Slavs and uh if he was success uccessful at uh 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 in their in their worldview the Jews were um especially demonized and so the project of the domination of Eastern Europe involves this horrific program of mechanized systematized uh bureaucratically organized and and horrifyingly efficient mass murder of the Jewish populations what the Nazis expected for the slaves had a longer timeline himler expected the head of the SS SS has given special special mission to be part of the transformation of these regions ethnically and himler in his role of envisioning this German future in Eastern Europe uh gives such a chilling phrase he says that while

certain slaves will uh fall victim immediately um some proportion of Slavs uh will not be shipped out or deported or annihilated but instead they will remain as slaves for our culture and in that one phrase himler managed to defile and deface everything that the word culture had meant to generations of the best German thinkers and artists in the centuries before the Nazis the notion of slaves for our culture uh was part of his longer term expectation and then there's finally a a a a fact that is speaks volumes about what the Nazis planned for the

East Hitler and himler 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 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 German themselves um the um the hidden message behind even Nazi propaganda about unity and about uh uh 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 uh people who are defined as not racially pure enough for the future even though they are clearly Germans by identity um this uh full the full scale and the

the the comprehensive Ambitions of the Nazis are as breathtaking as they are horrifying one of the other things I saw uh 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 in 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 the total war ever ongoing

for Generations which would result in you know hundreds of millions of deaths and torture and enslavement and uh not to mention the other possible trajectory of the nuclear 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 Steel Man a point that was also made as part of this uh that The oversimplified Narrative of uh sort of to put it crudely Hitler bad Churchill good has been used and abused by neocons

and and uh warmongers and the military industrial complex in the year since to basically say this this particular leader is just like Hitler or maybe Hitler of 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 and God forbid that can be also applied in the uh in the war with China in the um 21st century so yes warmongers do sure love to use Hitler and apply that template to wage war uh 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 uh 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 uh just as we've been talking about the implementation of these totalitarian regimes they are 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 there certainly striking and unique historical characters in The Record one of the things that's so disturbing about Hannah Ren's model of totalitarianism is um the leader can be changed the system itself demands that there be a leader who allegedly is uh is all powerful and all- knowing and prophetic and the like but um whether particular figures are interchangeable in that role um is uh is a key question let me go back to the 19 19 20s and sort of asked another counterfactual question given the battle between the marxists and

the Communist and uh National Socialist was it possible and what would that world look like if the Communists indeed won in Germany as uh Carl Marx envisioned and it made total sense given the the industrialized expanse that Germany represented uh was that possible and what would it look like if it happened I would think that the the reality was probably very remote but that was certainly their ambition uh German Communists get quoted as saying after Hitler it's our turn um 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 of power uh that's where the prior history comes into play the very fact that the German Revolution in 1919 sees socialists killing socialists produces a dynamic that's so negative that it's nearly

impossible to settle on on cooperation added to the fact that um the communist see the social Democrats as as as Rivals for the Loyalty uh of the working class in terms of just statistical likelihood a lot of experts at the time felt surely the German Army is going to step in and uh the most likely outcome would have been a German general shutting down uh the democracy and producing a military dictatorship it says a lot about how Dreadful and bloody the record of the Nazis was that um 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 Ma and China just looking at the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that's a really good question um 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 uh in in Revolutionary Uprising after revolutionary Uprising whether it was in uh the Revolutions of 1848 in across Europe whether it was in Poland whether it was in uh uh the Paris commune um he this is it this this is the outbreak of the real thing and then it it doesn't end up happening so I think that he'd probably have tried to be patient uh about the turn of events uh we mentioned at the outset that 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 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 um Marx's answer was convoluted but it wasn't a no and that suggests that Marx was willing to entertain all sorts of possible scenarios uh I think he would certainly have

been very surprised at uh uh at the course of events as it unfolded because it didn't match uh his expectations at the outset not to put this on him but would he be okay with the price of holl Moore for the the utopian destination of uh communism meaning is it okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet well um we don't know what Marx would say if he would POS that question deliberately but we do know in the case of a Marxist historian Eric Hobs bom who was um a prolific and celebrated British

historian of the 19th and 20th centuries and and he was he was put this question in the 90s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and he stated forthrightly that um because the Soviet Union failed such sacrifices uh were um 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 uh that is uh one person's perspective so that takes us to the other side of the world uh the side that's often in the west

not considered very much when we talk about human history uh Chinese dynasties Empires are fascinating complex and there's there's just a history that's not as deeply explored as it should be and the same applies to the 20th century so um Chinese radicals founded the Chinese Communist Party CCP in July 1921 among them as you uh talk about was Ma what was the story of Ma's rise to power so Mao takes a page from the book of Lenin by adapting or seeking to adapt Marx's ideology to a context that would 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 um when do you when is an adaptation of an ideology or a change to an ideology a valid um adjustment that you've made or adaptation and when is it already so different that it's something entirely distinct um 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 maway whose ambition was great to put himself at the head of a success International movement uh and to be the successor to Stalin whose role he both admired and resented uh from having to be the junior partner to take an example of a Masterwork in major milestone in the history of Communism the Polish philosopher Lea kovski who was at first a committed communist and then later became disillusion and wrote a three volume study of marxist thought called currents of

Marxism in that book when he reaches maoism kovski essentially throws up his hands and says like it's it's hard to even even know what to do with this because putting the peasantry in the Vanguard role is 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 um in case after case in in in Ma's rise to power we see a really complicated relationship with Stalin he works hard to gain Stalin's support because the common

turn the international organization headquartered in Moscow working to encourage and help revolutionaries worldwide is skeptical about the Chinese Communist to begin with and believes that China still has a long way to go before it's reached the stage where it's ripe for Communist Revolution and in a way that's more Orthodox Marxism uh than what Mao is championing um Mao chafes under Stalin's acknowledged leadership uh of international communism as a movement and in 1950 when Mao goes to visit Stalin in Moscow in order to sign a a treaty of cooperation he's left waiting for days and days

and days in in a snub that is meant to show him that you're you're just not as important as you might think you are and then when Stalin dies in 1953 um Mao feels the moment is ready for him to step into the leadership position surpassing the Soviet Union so many of Ma'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 uh

the the toll uh 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 described a great Le forward so it was modeled on the crash industrialization that Stalin had wanted to undertake in the Soviet Union and 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 uh 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 smallscale farming um it ended up uh uh producing environmental disaster and campaigns to eliminate uh birds or insects uh were supposed to demonstrate Mastery over Nature by sheer acts of will these included things like um adopting Soviet agricultural um techniques that were uh pioneered by a crackpot biologist by the name of trofim lenko uh

that that produced more agricultural disas fter that involved things like plowing to depths that were not practical for the seeds to germinate and grow but we're supposed to produce super plants that would uh uh produce bumper harvests and outpace the capitalist countries and the Soviet Union so the context for all of this is a race to get first to the achievement of full-scale Communism one of the themes that I think it's so valuable to pursue and to take seriously in the history of Communism is what concrete promises were made in the case of um the

of China ma made promises and projections for the future that were worrying even to some of his own assistant he exclaimed that perhaps by 1961 perhaps by 1973 three China would be the winner in this competition and it would have achieved full communism so that which Marx had sketched as the Endo of humanity would be achieved first by the Chinese uh later his own um 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 um such promises are

helpful to a regime to create enthusiasm and to hold out to people the prospect of real successes just around the corner but what happens when the date arrives and you haven't actually achieved that goal that's one ticking time bomb that played a role in the increasing erosion of confidence in the Soviet Union and the case of china must have been something similar so there's a lot of other elements that are similar to um the Soviet Union maybe you could speak to the 100 Flowers Campaign the 100 Flowers Campaign is uh a chance for Mao who

has felt that he has uh 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 100 Flowers Campaign uh officially titled the rectification campaign uh to set things right is still shrouded in mystery historians disagree about how to interpret what Ma was actually up to the most cynical variant is that Mao encouraged Chinese thinkers and uh intellectuals to share ideas and to engage in constructive criticism to propose Alternatives and to let a full discussion happen and then after some of

them had ventured that to come 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 um 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 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 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 um clearly at variance with what you and I know about the complex nature of human beings as we actually encounter them in the world uh I think that in the process of hatching schemes that were one siiz fits-all for a country as big and as varied in its uh um uh in its

communities as China uh inevitably uh such an imposition of one model was going to lead to uh U serious malfunctions and so much of the you know what what other episodes in Chinese history had showed the the entrepreneurial capacity the productive capacity economically of the Chinese people was suppressed by being fitted into these rigid schemes uh what we've seen since uh after M passes from the scene and with the reforms of dong sha ping uh one sees just how much of those energies had been forcibly suppressed for so long and now we allowed to reemerge

Mao died in uh 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 the scientific Precision I mean we should we should say that again and again um The Coop in of the authority of Science by um the Soviet Union by Mao by Nazi Germany Nazi science is um is is terrifying and should serve as a reminder that science is the thing that is one of the most beautiful creations of humanity but

uh is also a thing that could be used by politicians and dictators to do horrific things and its Essence is questing not certainty constant questing exactly uh humility uh intellectual humility so how did China evolve after Ma's death to today well I think that there is um without denouncing Mao without repudiating Ma's 70% correctness um the regime actually undertook a new Venture and that Venture was to open up economically to uh gain access to world markets and to play a global role always with a Proviso that the party retained political Supremacy uh it's been pointed

out that while kusov tries in the Soviet Union in 1956 especially with a secret spe in which he denounces Stalin's crimes um he tries to go back to the founders 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 Mau was the equivalent of Lenin Mau 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 that it was the the the correct

stance of the party and its leader uh that was Paramount and the results of this wager are you know where we are today um China has been transformed out of all recognition in terms of not all of the living standards of the country but but many places uh it's economic growth uh has been dramatic and the new dis pensation 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 uh with chairman XI we've seen a return to earlier patterns uh she insisting

that Mao's achievement has to be held as as equal to that of the reform period um sometimes imitations uh or Nostalgia for the M period or even the offerings of the cultural revolution are part of this volatile mix um but all of this is uh is outward appearance uh statistics can also be misleading and um 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 uh atrocities both internal and external that result from

communist Nations um but what can we say by way of Hope to resist the demonization how can we avoid cold or hot war with China we being the West or the United States in the 21st century well you you mentioned in the context of uh of the claims of science uh humility as a crucial attribute I think that um 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 project onto others of what we think they about is no

substitute for actual study of the sources that a society like that produces it's it's Declarations of what matters most to them uh the leadership's own pronouncements about what the future holds um I think that matters a lot more than Pious hopes or or versions of uh um being convinced that inevitably uh 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 what can we say uh 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 the answer that a historian can give is a historical answer right that we have to inquire into how what has to happen in order to arrive at the past we are today where we have a regime that's claiming to be communist uh or uh a has a even better version of Marx's original ideas in the form of a Korean adaptation called uch um how does that

mesh with the reality that we're talking about a dynastic government and a monarchy in in all but name but a communist monarchy if that's if that's what it is I think that um examining as much as we can learn about a closed society that is um goes about its everyday in in ways that are inscrutable to us is very very challenging but the only answer when an example like this escapes your analytic categories uh probably there's a problem with your analytical C categories rather than the example being the problem in all its messiness yeah so

there's a component here in the release to China as well to bring like uh somebody like John me shimer into the picture there's a military component here too and 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 uh 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 discuss in terms of analysis is uh how do we deal with this kind of system that claims to be a uh 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 ways we've been kind of doing hoping it doesn't get it doesn't get out of hand yeah I mean there's um realists see States following their own interests and um prioritizing their own security and uh there's probably not much that could be done to change that but

conflict arising as a result of misunderstanding or mixed messages or uh um uh misinterpretation uh those are things that that that policy makers probably do have some control over I think that um there's internal processes that'll work their way out in in the even as opaque a place as North Korea there's it's also the reality just as we saw with the divided germanies that um it's a precarious kind of uh twinned existence when you have countries that are across the border from one another that are derived from what used to be a single unit that

now are kind of a real life social science experiment in what kind of regime do you get with one kind of system what sort of regime do you get with another kind of system and that's a very a very unstable setup as it turns out now let us jump continents and uh 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 uh evolved throughout through a couple of red scares so what was the evolution of the

Communist party and just in general communist in America well it's it's fascinating to observe this story because one long-standing commonplace had been that socialism uh has less purchase uh uh or radical socialism in the United States than in European countries uh so in in to the extent that that was true uh it was an uphill battle for the Communists to get established in the United States but um it makes it all the more interesting to follow the development uh of the movement and there were two challenges in particular that uh played a role in shaping

the American Communist experience one was the fact that to begin with the party was often identified with immigrants uh 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 um there were fiery individuals who uh 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 um it would only be with

a rise to the leadership of the Communist Party of Earl Browder a American Born political leader uh with vast Ambitions for creating an American communist movement that that image would start to be modified uh 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 a foul of other Communists was in his expectations during World War II that it might be possible for the Soviet Union

and the United States to make their current cooperation permanent and to come to some sort of accommodation that would uh moderate their rivalry uh as it turns out with the dawning already of Cold War tensions uh that would later flower more fully uh that was unacceptable and the movement divested itself of of Earl Browder another point that shaped American perception of the communist movement in the United States uh involved issues of Espionage um during the 1930s and the 1940s uh American Communists not all of them obviously but um select members of the movement were called

upon by Soviet intelligence to play a historical role by uh gathering information winning sympathies uh one of the most amazing books of the 20th century is is the book written by Whitaker Chambers who had served as a Soviet spy first a committed communist then an then a Soviet spy and then later a renegade from those allegiances uh his book is entitled witness in 195 published in 1952 and it's 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 and a sense of huge issues being at stake ones upon which the future of humanity turns so talk about the ethical element being of importance there um through the uh uh apparatus of of the State uh the Soviets managed to infiltrate spies into America's uh military as well as uh government institutions great irony is that when Senator McCarthy uh in the 50s made vast claims about communist infiltration of the government apparatus claims that he was unable to substantiate uh with details um 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 uh ultimately an adherence to its interests did a lot to uh undermine any kind of hearing for uh American Communists an example of course was the notorious Nazi Soviet pact in 1939 the American communist movement found itself forced to turn on a dime in its propaganda before the Nazi Soviet pact of August 1939 they had denounced Nazi Germany as the greatest threat to World Peace just after the signing of the pact they had to uh

Proclaim that this was a great win for peace and for human Harmony and to uh um completely change uh their earlier relationship of being mortal enemies with Nazi Germany uh there were many American Communists who couldn't stomach this and who in disillusionment um simply quit their party memberships or drifted away um but it's a fascinating story uh of the ups and downs uh of a political movement with radical Ambitions in American political history yeah the 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 polit political policies of Communism but like the word and and the color red with a hammer and sickle you know Rocky four one of my favorite movies well that's canonical right yeah yeah I mean it is a bit of a meme but meme becomes real ERS uh 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 uh 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 uh it left precious little patience or Leisure or Surplus for introspection but after an initial period of great interest in understanding the full measure of what Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union had undergone in this first

initial explosion of Journalism and of reporting and investigations historical investigations with new sources uh after an initial period marked by such interest uh people instead um retreated into the here and now and the today and the result is that um there's been less than would be healthy of a taking stock a reckoning uh even an ass signing of responsibility for those things that were experienced in the past no nberg trial took place in order to hold responsible those who had repressed others in uh 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 nberg trials had as one of their goals a very important one as it turns out not even individual verdicts for IND 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 cleare eyed recognition of the vast nature of what it all cost Putin uh upon

replacing yelon uh 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 um the tars are rehabilitated as Heroes of Russian statehood uh 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 Uh u exacted a dreadful toll but also was effective

as a representative of Russian statehood um this produced where we are today uh it's a it's a common place that echoed by by many that Russia without Ukraine is a nation state or could be a nation state Russia with Ukraine has to be an Empire and Putin who 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 redigested 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 uh of 2022 were entirely overturned his expectation was that that Ukraine would be divided on this score and that

some significant portion of ukrainians would welcome uh the advance of Russian forces uh and instead uh there has been the most amazing uh and surprising heroic resistance uh that continues to this day and it's interesting to consider timing and also individual leaders zalinski you can imagine all kinds of other figures that would have uh folded much easier and zinsky I think surprised a lot of the World by somehow you know this comedian somehow be becoming a uh essentially uh an effective War President so you know that that put that in the in the in the

bin of uh singular figures that Define history right 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 uh about how these things Escape human management or even rationality um 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 um 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 uh I think that peacemaking is going to face a very daunting task here given all that's accumulated um and I think in particular you know just from the last days of 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 even possible do you think so we should mention that uh Russia has captured four regions of Ukraine now Dan Lans zapan hon also Ukraine captured the part of ksk region in within Russia so just like you mentioned territory is 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 zinski and Putin unhappy but equally unhappy and peace and peace is negotiated equally unhappy is a 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 human control in in the details so laying the foundation for worse things to come so it's possibly you have a ceasefire that lays the foundation for a worse war and uh suffering in a year in 5 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 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 centuy 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 the Israel Iran on 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 we we're confronting a dire situation in the present so as a historian let me ask you for advice what advice would you give on interviewing world leaders whether it's people who who are no longer here some of the people we've been talking about Hitler Stalin ma or people that are still here Putin zalinsky Trump KLA Harris that

Yahoo siing ping 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 know 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 a beautiful word for this Germans managed to ma Mash together several words into into one even better word and in German it's 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 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 oneon-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 stair 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 uh 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 act 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 contend with constituencies and constituencies you did a lot of uh amazing courses including for the gray courses U 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 yes and then uh Decline and falline 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 he just speak widely 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 put 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 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 I on the Diplomatic history of Europe from 1500 to the present a course on the history of Eastern Europe and also a course on dictatorships called Utopia and Terror and then also a course on explorers and a course on turning points in modern history and every single one of those is so rewarding because

there's you learn so much in the process and it's really fantastic and I should highly recommend the people sign up to the uh first of all there's the Great Courses where you can buy the courses individually but I recommend people sign up for GR courses plus which I think is 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 recommend people read it is a bit like asking what's your favorite band uh kind thing that's right well uh would a book that got turned into a movie be uh acceptable as well yes so uh in in that case you know all of us reflect on our own childhoods and the and the that that that magical moment of a 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 Chicago land area as a kid seeing the film of Dr zivago and then later reading the novel on which it was based by pastan 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 of 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 Yung and yungan 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 depford trilogy three novels in in a series that are linked and they're just masterful uh if only there were more books like that the Deford 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 the 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 um 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 and never will

and and the like it's a really uh interesting idea so let me give a shout out to perplexity that I'm using here for to uh to sort of summarize and take quick notes and get little Snippets of stuff which is extremely useful but it's not books are not just about information transfer it's uh just as you said it's 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 actually learned you know I've been surprised I've learned I've trained my brain to be able to get the same thing from audiobooks also it's a little bit more difficult because you don't control the pacing sometimes pausing is nice but you could still get it from audiobooks 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 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 pointed out um the original traditions of literature were oral right so that's actually the the the F the the 1.0 version right uh and combining these things is probably the key I 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 is it Sparks your imagination and thought you and you see the actual richness in the thing you're reading right 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 Revolution 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 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 recommend it highly it's good for dopamine rush but see it as a counter uh as a counter Force to the the process of sitting with an idea for a prolonged period

of time taking a journey through an expert eloquently conveying that idea and growing 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 uh 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 V 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 vus lud vicious to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from KL Marx history repeats itself first as a tragedy second as a farce thank you for listening I hope to see you next time