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

The following is conversation with Vejas Liulevicius, a historian specializing in Germany and Eastern Europe. He has lectured extensively on the rise, the reign, and the fall of communism. Our discussion goes deep on this, the very heaviest of topics, the communist ideology that has led to over 100 million deaths in the 20th century. We also discuss Hitler, Nazi ideology, and World War II. Now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's

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Lex to get 350 bucks off the pod for ultra. This is Lex Reemun podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's vejas Lulee Vicious. Let's start with Karl Marx. What were the central ideas of Marx that lay the foundation of communism? I think there were several key ideas that Marx deployed that were destined to have such

an impact. And in some ways, there were actually kind of contradictory. On the one hand, Marx insisted that history has a purpose, that history is not just random events, but that rather it's history, we might say, with a capital H, history moving in a deliberate direction,

history having a goal, a direction that it was predestined to move in. At the same time, in the communist manifesto Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels also suggested that there was a role for special individuals who might, even if history was still moving in this predetermined direction, might give it an extra push, might play a heroic role in that process.

And I think that these two ideas added together, the notion that there is a science of revolution that suggests that you can move in a deliberate and meaningful rational way towards the end of history and the resolution of all conflicts, a total liberation of the human person, and that moreover, that was inevitable, that that was pre-programmed and destined in the order of things. When you add to that, the notion that there's also room for heroism and the individual

role, this ended up being tremendously powerful as a combination. Earlier thinkers who were socialists had already dreamt of or projected futures where all conflict would be resolved and human life would achieve some sort of perfection. Marx added these other elements that made it far more powerful than the earlier versions that he decried as merely utopian socialism. So there's a million questions that 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, what has to stress, Marx would have gotten extremely upset at this point in the conversation, because to call someone a utopian was precisely to argue that you're not scientific, you're not rational, you're not laying out the iron laws of history, you're merely hoping for the best, and that might

be laudable, but it was fundamentally unrealistic. That said, hidden among Marx's insistence that there are laws and structures as history moves through class conflict, modes of production, towards its ultimate goal of a comprehensive final revolution that will see all exploitation overthrown, and people finally being freed from necessity in smuggled in among those things

are most definitely utopian elements. And they come especially at the end in which Marx sketches the notion of what things will look like after the revolution has resolved all problems. Their vagueness sets in. It's clear that it's a blessed state that's being talked about. People no longer exploiting one another. People no longer subject to necessity or poverty, but instead enjoying all of the productivity of industrialization that Hither too had been put

to private profit now collectively owned and deployed. The notion that one will be able to work at one job in the morning and then engage in leisure activity or another yet another fulfilling job in the afternoon. All of these free of any contradictions, free of necessity, free of the sort of ordinary

irritations that we experience in ordinary lives. That's deeply utopian. The difference was that Marx charted a route towards that outcome that was presented itself as cutting edge science and more over having the full credibility that science commanded so much, especially in the 19th and early 20th century. So there is a long journey from capitalism to communism that includes a lot of problems. He thought once you resolve the problems, all the complexities of human interactions,

the friction, the problems will be gone. To the extent that they were based on inequalities and on man's exploitation of man, the result was supposed to be a resolution of all of this. And inevitably, when you talk about the history of communism, you have to include the fact that this often tragic and dramatic history produced a lot of jokes. Jokes that were in part reactions

sometimes to the ideological claims made by people like Marx. And one of the famous jokes was that what's the difference between capitalism and communism and the joke's answer was capitalism is the exploitation of man by man and communism is the exact opposite. Yeah, you actually have a lecture on humor. I love it. And you deliver in such a drive beautiful way. Okay, there's again, a million questions. So you outline a set of contradictions,

but it's interesting to talk about his view. For example, what was Marx's view of history? Marx had been a student of Hegel. And Hegel as a German idealist philosopher had announced very definitively that history has a purpose. History is not a collection of random facts.

And as an idealist, he proposed that the true movement of history, the true meaning of history, what made history history with a capital H, something that's transcendent and meaningful, was that it was the working out of an idea through different civilizations, different stages of historical development. And that idea was the idea of human freedom. So it was not individuals or great thinkers alone making history and having an impact. It was the idea itself striving to

come to fruition, striving to come to an ever more perfect realization. In the case of Hegel, in this very Prussian and German context, he identified the realization of freedom also with the growth of the state, because he thought that governments are the ones that are going to be able to deliver on laws and on the ideal of a state of the rule of law in German the Reichstatt.

That was a noble dream at the same time as we recognize from our perspective, state power has been put to all sorts of purposes besides guaranteeing the rule of law in our own times. What Marx did was to take this characteristic insistence of Hegel that history is moving in a meaningful and discernible way towards the realization of an idea and flipped it on its head. Marx insisted that Hegel had so much that was right in his thinking, but what he had neglected

to keep in mind was that in fact, history is based on matter. So hence dialectical materialism, dialectical referring to things proceeding by clashes or conflict towards an ever greater realization of some essential idea. So Marx adapts a lot of ideas of Hegel. You can recognize entire rhetorical maneuvers that are indebted to that earlier training, but now taken in a very different direction. What remained though was the confidence of being on the right side of

history. And there are a few things that are as intoxicating as being convinced that your actions not only are right in the abstract, but are also destined to be successful. And also that you have the rigor of science backing you in your journey towards the truth. Absolutely. So angles when he gives the grade side eulogy for his beloved friend, Marx, claims that Marx is essentially the Darwin of history, the Darwin of history, that he had done

for the world of politics and of human history. What Darwin had done with this theory of evolution, understanding the hidden mechanism, understanding the laws that are at work and that make that whole process meaningful rather than just one damn thing after another. What about the sort of famous line that history of all existing societies is the history of class struggles. So what about this conception of history as a history of class struggle? Well, so this was the mode of force

that Karl Marx and Engels saw driving the historical process forward. And it's important to keep in mind that class conflict doesn't just mean revolutions, revolts, peasant uprisings. It's sort of the totality of frictions and of clashes, conflicts of interest that appear in any society. And so Marx was able in this spirit that he devout was very scientific to demarcate

stages of historical transformation. Primitive communism in the prehistoric period, then moving towards what was called state slavery, that's to say the early civilizations deploying human resources and ordering them by all powerful monarchs, then private slavery in the ancient period,

and then moving to feudalism in the middle ages. And then here's where Marx is able to deliver a pronouncement about his own times, seeing that the present day is the penultimate, the next to last stage of this historical development, because the feudal system of the middle ages and the dominance

of the aristocracy has been overcome, has been displaced by the often heroic achievements, astonishing achievements in commerce and in world building of the middle class, the bourgeoisie, who have taken the world into their own hands and are engaged in class conflict with the class below them, which is the working class or the proletariat. And so this sort of conflict, also by the way obtains within classes. So the bourgeoisie are going to be grave diggers, Marx announces of their

own supremacy, because they're also competing against one another. And members who don't survive that competition get pressed down into the subordinate working class, which grows and grows and grows to the point where at some future moment, the inevitable explosion will come. And a swift revolution will overturn this last, this penultimate stage of human history and usher in instead the

dictatorship of the working class. And then the abolition of all classes, because with only one class remaining, everyone is finally unified and without those internal contradictions that had marked class conflict before. The dictatorship of the working class is an interesting term. So what is the role of revolution in history? So this in particular from Marx, I think is a really key moment, which is

what makes that such a good question. In his vision, the epic narrative that he's presenting to us, revolution is key. It's not enough to have evolutionary change. It's not a question of compromises. It's not a case of bargaining or balancing interests. Revolution is necessary as part of the

process of a subjugated class coming to awareness of its own historical role. And when we get to the proletariat, this working class in its entirety, to whom Marx assigns this epic prometian role of being the ones who are going to liberate all of humanity, a class that is universal in its interests and in the sort of role in salvation history that they'll be playing in this secular framework, they need revolution and the experience of revolution in order to come

into their own. Because without it, you'll only have half-hearted compromise and something less than the consciousness that they then need in order to rule, to administer and to play the historical role that they're fated to have. How did he conceive of a revolution, potentially a violent revolution, stabilizing itself into something where the working class was able to rule? That's where things become a good deal less detailed in his and Engels accounts. The answer that they proposed in part

was this is for the future to determine. So all of the details will be settled later. I think it was allied to this was a tremendous confidence in some very 19th century ideas about how society could be administered and what made for orderly society in a way where if the right infrastructure was in place, you might expect society to kind of run itself without the need for micromanagement from above. Hence, we arrive at Marx's tantalizing promise that

there will be a period where it will be necessary to have centralized control. And there might have to be as he puts it, despotic inroads against property in order to bring this revolution to pass. But then afterwards, the state, because it represents everybody, rather than representing particular class interests that are in conflict with other classes, the state will eventually wither away. So there won't be need for it. Now, that's not to say that that pure stasis arrives,

right? Or that the stabilization equals being frozen in time. It's not as if that is what things will look like. But instead, the big issues will be settled. And henceforth, people will be able to enjoy lives of, as he would consider it, an authentic freedom without necessity, without poverty, as a result of this blessed state that's been arrived at. The spotic inroads against property. Did he elaborate on the despotic inroads? Dispossession. Dispossession of the of the middle classes

and of the bourgeoisie. In his model, humanity is never standing still, right? So he'd probably argue in this dynamic vision of how history unfolds that there's always conflict. And it's always moving, propelling history forward towards its predestined ending. In the way he saw this climax, was that as things did not stay the same, the condition of the working class was constantly getting

worse and hence their revolutionary potential was growing. And at the same time, the expropriators, the bourgeoisie were also facing diminishing returns as they competed against one another, with more and more wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and more and more elements of what had been the middle class detached from the ruling class and being pressed down into the working class. For Marx, this is really a key part of this whole ratchet effect that's going to produce

this final historical explosion. And in German, the word given to that process was Fet Aylendum, which is very evocative. Aylend means misery. So it's the growing misery. When this gets translated into English, the results are never quite as evocative or satisfactory. The words that get used are emisorization or popperization, 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 looked sociologically at the really developed working classes in places like Great Britain or Germany, that process was not playing out as he had expected. In fact, although there have been enormous dislocations and tremendous suffering in the early chaotic sort of Wild West stages of capitalism and of industrialization, there had been reform movements

as well. And there had been unions which had sought to carve out rules and agreements with employers for how the conditions under which workers' labor might be ameliorated. Moreover, the middle class, rather than dwindling and dwindling, seemed to actually be strengthening and growing in numbers. Are they appearance of new kinds of people like white collar workers or

technical experts? So already in Marx's own lifetime, and then especially in what follows Marx's lifetime, this becomes a real problem because it puts a stick into the spokes of this particular historical prediction. Can you speak to this realm of ideas, which is fascinating, this battle of big ideas in the 19th century? What are the ideas that were swimming around here?

Describe the 19th century as sort of an age of ideologies is very apt because Europe is being racked and being put through the ringer of nationalism, demands for self-expression of people who

earlier have been in empires or under monarchical rule, demands to redraw the map. The tremendous transformations of the industrial revolution meant that in the course of about a generation, you would have seen the world around you change in ways that made it entirely unfamiliar, you'd be able to travel across the landscape at speeds that had been unthinkable when you were

a child. So it's enormous change and demands for yet more change. And so it's a great mix of ideas, ideologies, the old and the new religious ideas, religious revivals, as well as demands for secularization. And stepping into all of this are Marx and Engels together in what has been called, I think with Justice, one of the most important and influential intellectual partnerships of history. They were very different men. They were both German by origin. Marx had trained as an academic. He had

married the daughter of a baron. Because of his radical ideas, he had foreclosed or found himself cut off from a possible academic career and went the route of radical journalism. Engels was very different. Engels was the son of an industrialist and the family owned factories in Germany and in England. So he was most definitely not a member of the proletariat that he and Marx were celebrating as so significant in their future historical role. There were also huge differences in character

between these men. Marx, when people met him, they were astonished by his energy and his dynamism. They also saw him as a man who felt determined to dominate arguments. He wanted to win arguments and was not one to settle for compromise or a middle road. He was disorderly in his personal habits. We might mention among other things that he impregnated the family made and didn't accept responsibility for the child. He was also not inclined to undertake regular employment in order to

support his growing family. That's where Engels came in. Engels essentially from his family fortune and then from his journalism afterwards supported both himself and the Marx family for decades. In a sense, Engels made things happen. In the mysterious way that friendships work, the very differences between these men made them formidable as a dynamic duo because they balanced off one

and others idiosyncrasies and turned what might have been faults into potential strengths. British historian AJ P. Taylor always has a lovely turn of phrase even when he's wrong about a historical issue. In this case, he was right. He said that Engels had charm and brilliance. Marx was a genius and Engels saw himself as the, definitely the junior partner in this relationship. But here's the paradox. Without Engels, pretty clearly Marx would have not gone on to have the sort of lasting

historical impact in the world of ideas that he had. Just a throwing the mix. There's interesting characters swimming around. So you have Darwin. He has a, I mean, it's difficult to characterize the level of impact he had, even just in the religious context. The challenges are a conception of who we are as humans. There's Nietzsche, who's also, I don't know, hanging around the area.

On the russian side, there's Dostoevsky. So it's interesting to ask maybe from your perspective, did these people interact in the space of ideas to where this is relevant to our discussion or is this mostly isolated? I think that it's a part of a great conversation. I think that in their works, they're reacting to one another. I mean, Dostoevsky's thought ranges across the

condition of modernity. And he definitely has things to say about industrialization. I think that they react to one another in these oblique ways rather than always being at each other's throats in direct confrontations. And that's what makes the 19th century so compelling as a story, just because of the sheer vitality of the arguments that are taking place in ways big and small. Well, we should say here, when you mention Karl Marx, maybe the color red comes up for people,

and they think the Soviet Union may be China, but they don't think Germany necessarily. It's interesting that I mean, Germany is where communism was supposed to happen. That's right. And so, can you maybe speak to that? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is definitely a factor in the

entire history that we're referencing. Marx and Engels never really shed their identity as Germans, many of their preconceptions, even those traces of nationalism that they had within themselves, even as they were condemning nationalism as a fraud against the working class. They're clearly their entire formation had been affected by their German background. And it's very true, as you point out, that Germany is intended to be the place where these

predictions will play out. They're also in Britain, also in France, also eventually in the United States. But it's a, you know, it's Germany by virtue of be its central location and then its rapid development later than Britain or France in industrialization. Give it the special role in Marx's

worldview. And so it's a lasting irony or a central irony of this whole story that when a government establishes itself that claims to be following Marx's prescriptions and realizing his vision, it happens in the wreckage of the Russian Empire, a place that did not match the requirements of being industrialized, developed well on its way in this historical process. And nobody knew this better than the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his colleagues had a keen sense that

what they were doing, exciting as it was, was a gamble. It was a risk because, in fact, the revolution to really take hold had to seize power in Germany. And that's why, in immediately after taking power, they're not sure they're going to last. They're hope. Their promise of salvation is that a workers revolution will erupt in Germany, defeated Germany, in order to link up with the one that has been launched in this unlikely Russian location. And henceforth,

great things will follow that do cue to Marx's historical vision. The last thing to mention about this is that this predominance of Germany and the thinking of Marx had two other reflections. One was that German socialists and later communists organized in order to fulfill Marx's vision, and they produced something that leaves other Westerners in awe in the late 19th century. And that's the building of a strong German workers movement and a social democratic party.

That social democratic party by 1912 is the largest party in German politics by vote. And there's the possibility they might even come to power without needing radical revolution, which again also goes against Marx's original vision of the necessity for a revolution. Workers around the world, or rather radical socialists, look with admiration and awe at what

the Germans have achieved. And they see themselves as trying to do what the Germans have done. The final point is growing up during the Cold War, one thought that, well, if you want to represent somebody as being a communist, that person has to have a Russian accent because Russia, after all, the homeland of this form of government, the Soviet Union, that must be the point of origin.

Before the Bolshevik sees 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 Kowtsky and you needed to read Bernstein and other thinkers in this tradition. And it's only after the Soviet seizure of power that this all changes. So there's lots of Marx of that phenomenon, which is why the clash between nationalism and communism in Germany, such a fascinating aspect of history and all the different

trajectories it could take. And we'll talk about it. But if we return to the 19th century, you've said that Marx's chief rival was Russian anarchist, Miehl Bakunin, who famously said in 1942, quote, the passion for destruction is also a creative passion. So what kind of future did Bakunin envision? Well, Bakunin in some things agreed with Marx and in many others disagreed. He was an anarchist rather than a huing to the sort of scheme of history that Marx was proposing. So he

did see humanity as fighting a struggle for a better way of life. He envisioned, as your quote suggests, that revolution and sheer confrontation and overthrow the existing state of things, not compromise was going to be the way to get there. But his vision was very different. Rather than organizing conspiratorial and hierarchical political movement, Bakunin envisioned that the ties would be far looser, that both the revolutionary movement and the future state of humanity would

grow out of the free association, the anarchist thinking, the free association of individuals who rejected hierarchical thinking in their relations with one another, rejected the state as a form of organized violence and rejected traditional religious ideas that he saw as buttressing hierarchies. So Bakunin is part of a broader movement of socialist and anarchists who were demanding change and envisioning really fundamental transformation. But his particular anarchist vision steers him into

conflict with Marx. And he makes some prophetic remarks about the problems with the system that Marx is proposing. You should add to this that the very fact that Marx is a German by background and Bakunin is Russian, kind of adds a further nationalist or an element of ethnic difference there. Bakunin warned that a sort of creeping German authoritarianism might insinuate its way into a movement that hew too closely to having hierarchies in the struggle to overthrow hierarchies. And

his anarchist convictions are not in question here. They led him into conflict with Marx and Marx railed against him, denounced him, and eventually had him expelled from the international. One of the things though that also makes Bakunin so significant is, Bakunin is the first in a longer series of approaches between anarchists and communists where they try to make common cause. And you have to say that in every case it ends badly for the anarchists.

Because the communist vision in particular, especially in its Leninist version, argued for discipline and a tightly organized professional revolutionary movement.

The anarchists who sought to make common cause with communists, whether it was in the days of the Russian Revolution or the Russian Civil War or whether it was then in the Spanish Civil War, their anarchists found themselves targeted by the communists precisely because of their skepticism about what turned out to be an absolutely key element in the Leninist prescription for a successful revolution. If we can take that tangent a little bit. So I guess anarchists were less organized.

Yes, my definition. Yeah. Why do you think anarchism hasn't been rigorously tried in the way the communism was if we just take a complete sort of tangent? I mean, in one sense, we are living in an anarchy today because then the nations are in an anarchic state with each other. But why do you think there's not been an anarchist revolution? Well, I think that probably some anarchists would beg to differ. They would see communes in Spain during the Spanish Civil War as an example of

trying to put anarchist ideas into place. Bakunin 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. Another key point in all of this is that anarchy means something different to different people as a term. And so when you point out quite correctly that we have an anarchic international situation, that's kind of the Hobbesian model of the war of all against all, where man is a wolf to man.

Generally, except if you're talking about nihilists in the Russian Revolutionary Tuderson, anarchists see anarchy as a blessed state. And one where finally people will be freed from the distorting influence of hierarchies, traditional beliefs, subjugation, inequalities. So for them, anarchy growing out of the liberation of the human being is seen as a positive good and peaceful. Now, that's at odds with the prescription of someone like Bakunin for how to get there.

He sees overthrow as being necessary on the route to that. But as we point out, it's absolutely key to this entire dynamic that to be an anarchist means that your efforts are not going to be organized the way a disciplined and tightly organized revolutionary movement would be. Yeah, it's an interesting stretch that a violent revolution will take us to a place of no violence,

or very little violence. It's a leap. It's a leap. And it kind of points to a phenomenon that would have enraged Marx and would have been deeply alienating to others in the tradition who followed him. But that so many scholars have commented on. And that's that there is a religious element, you know, not a vowed one, but a kind of hidden religious or secular religious element to Marx's vision to the tradition that follows Marx. And, you know, just think of the correspondence,

right? Marx himself as kind of a positioning himself as a savior figure, whether that's a Prometheus or a Moses who will lead people to the Promised Land. The apocalypse of the end times is this final revolution that will usher in a blessed final state, a utopia, which is equivalent to a secular version of heaven. There's the the working class playing the role of humanity in its struggle to be redeemed. And scholar after scholar has pointed this out.

Reinhold Niebauer back in the 1930s had an article in the Atlantic magazine that talked about the Soviet Union's communism as a religion, Eric Fugelin, a German-American scholar who fled the Nazis and relocated to Louisiana State University and and and wrote tomes about the new phenomenon of political religions in the modern period. And he saw fascism and Nazism and the so and and Soviet communism as as bearing the stamp of of political religions, meaning ideologies

that promised what an earlier age would have understood in religious terms. Fugelin called this the Eskitan and said that these end times the Eskitan was being promised in the here and now being made imminent. And he warned against that saying the results are likely to be disastrous. So that's actually a disagreement with this idea that you know people sometimes say that the Soviet Union is an example of an atheistic society. So when you have atheism is the primary

thing that underpins the society, this is what you get. So that's what you're saying is a kind of rejection of that saying that there's a strong religious component to a communism. A hidden component, one that's not officially recognized. I mean, I think that you know, I had a chance to witness this actually. When I was a child, my family, I grew up in Chicago to a Lithuanian-American family. And my father who was a mathematician got a very rare invitation to

travel to Soviet Lithuania to the University of Venice to meet with colleagues. And at this point, journeys of more than a few days or a week were very rare to the Soviet Union for Americans. And the result was that I had unforgettable experiences visiting the Soviet Union in Brezhnev's day. And among the things I saw there was a museum of atheism that had been established in a church that had been ripped apart from inside and was meant to

to kind of embody the official stance of atheism. And I remember being baffled by the museum on the inside because you would expect exhibits. You would expect something dramatic, something that will be compelling. And instead, there were there was some folk art from the countryside showing bygone beliefs. There were some lithographs or engravings of the Spanish Inquisition and its horrors.

And that was pretty much it. But as a child, I remember being reproved in that museum for not wearing my windbreaker, but instead carrying it on my arm, which was a very disrespectful thing to do in an official museum of atheism. When I was able to visit the Soviet Union later for a language course in the summer of 1989, one of the obligatory tours that we took was to file reverently past the body of Lenin

outside the Kremlin in the Mausoleum at Red Square. And communist mummies, like those of Lenin, earlier Stalin had been there as well, communist mummies like Mao or Ho Chi Minh. Really, I think, speak to a blending of earlier religious sensibility, reverence for relics of great figures, almost saintly figures, so that even what got proclaimed as atheism turned out to be a very demanding faith as well. And I think that's a contradiction that other scholars have pointed out as well.

Yeah, that's a very complicated sort of discussion. When you remove religion as a big component of a society, whether something like a framing of political ideologies in religious ways is the natural consequence of that. We hear nature of hauring of vacuum. And I think that there are places in human character that long for transcendental explanations, right? That it's not all meaningless.

It's, in fact, there's a larger purpose. And I think it's not a coincidence that such a significant part of resistance to communist regimes has in part come from on the one hand religious believers and on the other hand, from disillusioned true believers in communism who find themselves undergoing an internal experience of just a revolution, finding that their ideals have not been followed through on. So this topic is one of several topics that you eloquently describe as

contradictions within the ideas of Marx. So religious, there is a kind of religious adherence versus also the rejection of religious dogma that he stood for. We've talked about some of the others, the tension between nationalism that emerged when it was implemented versus what communism is supposed to be, which is global. So globalism. Then there's the thing that we started talking with this individualism. So history is supposed to be defined by the large collection of humans.

But there does seem to be the singular figures including Marx himself that are like really important. Geography of global versus restricted to certain countries and tradition. You're supposed to break with the past in communism. But then Marxism became one of the strongest traditions in history. That's right. I think that last one is especially significant because it's deeply paradoxical.

I mean, trying to outline these contradictions by the way is like subjecting Marx to the sort of analysis that Marx subjected other people to, which is to point out internal contradictions, things that are likely to become pressure points or cracks that might open up in what's supposed to be a completely set and durable and effective framework. The one about tradition, Marx points out that the need for revolution is in order to break with the traditions that

have hemmed people in. There's earlier ways of thinking, earlier social structures, and to constantly renovate. What happens instead is a tradition of radical rupture emerges. That's really tough because imagine the last stages of the Soviet Union where keen observers can tell that there are problems that are building in society. There are discontents and demands that are going to clash, especially when someone like Gorbachev is proposing reforms.

And things are suddenly thrown open for discussion. The very notion that you have the celebration of revolutionaries and the Bolshevik legacy at a time when the state wants to enforce stability and an order that's been received from the prior generation. Think of Brezhnev's time, for instance. All of that is a specially volatile mix and unlikely to work out very durable in the long run. I would love to talk about the works of Marx, the Communist manifesto and Das Kapital.

What can we say that's interesting about the manifestation of his ideas on paper? Well, the first thing to note obviously is that those two works are very different. Das Kapital is an enormous multi-volume work that Marx worked at and only got the first volume out because Engels begged him to stop revising. Please just finally get it into press. And then the rest,

Engels had to actually reconstruct out of notes after Marx passed away. It's a huge work. By contrast, the Communist manifesto is a brief pamphlet that ended up affecting the lives of many millions worldwide, in spite of its comparative brevity. The Communist manifesto, moreover, is also something of the nature of having a delayed fuse, you could say. Because when it first appears amid the revolutions of 1848 that sweep across Europe, the work is contrary to what people

often believe. That pamphlet did not cause the revolutions of 1848, many of which had national or liberal demands. The voice of Marx and Engels was barely to be heard over the din of other far more prominent actors. It is, however, in the aftermath that this work takes on tremendous significance and becomes popularly read and popularly distributed. It's especially the episode, the bloody episode of the Paris commune in 1871, which comes to be identified with Marx.

Even though it was not purely inspired by Marx alone nor were all of the communards devoted Marxists, it's the identification of this famous or infamous episode in urban upheaval that really leads to worldwide notoriety for Marx and attention to those works. And they're very different in form.

Thus Kapital is intended to be the origin of species of its realm, of economic thought, and represents years and years of work of Marx, laboring in the British Museum Library, working through statistics, working on little bits and pieces of a larger answer to big historical questions that he believes that he's arrived at. Its tone is different from that of the Communist

Manifesto, which is a call to arms. It announces with great confidence what the scheme of history will be, but rather than urging that the answer might be passivity and just waiting for history to play out in its preordained way, it's also a clarion call to make the revolution happen. And is intended to

be a pragmatic, practical statement of how this is to play out. And starts, in part, with those ringing words about a ghost or a specter haunting Europe, the specter of communism, which wasn't true at the time, but decades later, most definitely is the case. Is there something we could say about the difference between Marxian economics and Marxist political ideology? So the political side of things

and the economics side of things. So I think that Marx would probably have responded that, in fact, those things are indivisible. The analysis as sort of purely theoretical is certainly can be performed on any economic reality that you care to mention, but the imperatives that grow out of that, that economic analysis are political. Marx and Engels emphasize the unity of theory and practice. So it's not enough to dispassionally analyze. It's a call to action as well. Because

if you've delivered the answer to how history evolves and changes, it obligates you, right? It demands certain action. You sometimes hear from undergraduates that they've heard from their high school history teachers that Marxism was just a theoretical construct that was, and the idle production of a philosopher who was not connected to the world and was never meant to be tried in practice. Marx would have been furious to hear this, and it's almost heroically wrong as a historical

statement. Because Marx insisted that all previous philosophers have theorized about reality, what now is really necessary is to change it. So you could say that in the abstract, a Marxist economist can certainly use Marx's theoretical framework to compare to a given economic reality,

but Marx would have seen that as incomplete and as deeply unsatisfactory. There's kind of a footnote to all of this, which is that even though Marxist dialectical materialism grounds itself in these economic realities, and the political prescription is supposed to flow from the economic realities and be inevitably growing out of them. In the real history of communist regimes, you've actually seen periods where the economics becomes detached from the politics.

And I'm thinking in particular of the new economic period early in the history of the Soviet Union, when Lenin realizes that the economy is so far gone that you need to reintroduce or allow in a limited way some elements of private enterprise just to start getting Russia back on course in order to have the accumulation of surplus that will be necessary to build the project at all.

And that's there are many Bolsheviks who see the new economic program as a new economic policy as a terrible compromise and a betrayal of their ideas, but it's seen as necessary for a short while and then Stalin will will record entirely or consider for that matter China today where you have a a dominant political class, the Communist Party of China, which is allowing economic development and private enterprise as long as it retains political control. So some of these elements already

represent divergences from what Marx would have expected. And this points to a really key problem or a question for all of the history of communism. It has to do with it being a tradition in spite of itself. And that could be expressed in the following way. An original set of ideas is going to evolve.

It's going to change because circumstances change. What elaborations of any doctrine, whether it's communism or a religious doctrine or any political ideology, what elaborations are natural stages in the evolution of any living set of ideas or when you reach the point where some shift or some adaptation is so radically different that it actually breaks with the tradition. And that's an insoluble problem. You probably have to take it on a case-by-case basis.

It speaks to issues like the question that gets raised today. Is China in a meaningful sense a communist country anymore? And there's a diversity of opinion on this score. Or if you're looking at the history of communism and you look at North Korea, which now is on its third installment of a dynastic leader from the same family who rules like a god king over a regime that calls itself communist, is that still a form of communism? Is it an evolution of? Is it a complete

reversal of? I tend to want to take an anthropological perspective in the history of communism. And to take very seriously those people who avow that they are communist. And this is the project that they have underway. And then, after hearing that avowal, I think as a historian, you have to say, well, let's look at the details. Let's see what changes have been made, what continuities might still exist, whether there's a larger pattern to be discerned here. So it's a very, very complicated

history that we're talking about. Let's step back to the end of the 19th century in the beginning of the 20th century. And let's steal man the case for communism. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the people there, not in this way we could look back at what happened in the 20th century. Why was this such a compelling notion for millions of people? Can we make the case for it?

Well, clearly it was a compelling case for millions of people. And part of this story has to do with overall has to do with the faith, conviction, stories of people sacrificing themselves as well as their countrymen in a cause that they believed was not just legitimate, but demanded their total obedience. I think that throughout the early part of the 20th century, the late 19th century, early part of the 20th century, so much of the compelling case for communism came from the confidence that

people in the Westmore generally placed in science. The notion that science is answering problems. Science is giving us solutions to how the world around us works, how the world around us can be improved. Some varieties of that, and I watch the quotation marks, science were crazy, right? Like, phrenology, so-called scientific racism that tried to divide humanity up into

discrete blocks and to manipulate them in ways that were allegedly scientific or rational. So there were horrors that followed from those invocations of science, but its prestige was enormous. And that in part had to do with the lessening grip of religious ideas on intellectual elites. More generally, processes of secularization, not total secularization, but processes of secularization

in Western industrial societies. And the sense that here's a doctrine that will allow escape from wars brought on by capitalist competition, poverty, and economic cycles, and depressions brought on by capitalist competition, the inequalities of societies that remain hierarchical and class-based, and this claim to being cutting edge science, I think allows people like Lenin

to derive immense confidence in the prescription that they have for the future. And that paradoxically, the confidence that you have in broad strokes, the right set of answers for how to get to the future also allows you to take huge liberties with the tactics and the strategies that you follow as long

as your ultimate goal remains the one sketched by this master plan. So, you know, ultimately, some of the predictions of someone like Lenin that once society has reached that stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the notion that governments will essentially be able to run themselves. And the model he had in mind, oddly enough, was Swiss post offices. Being in Swiss exile must have impressed him so much with the orderliness and the sheer discipline and rationality

of a Swiss post office. And he thought, why can't you organize governments like this, where you don't need political leaders, you don't need grand visions, you have procedures, you have bureaucracy, which does its job in a way that's not alienating, but simply produces the greatest good.

You know, when you think of the experiences with bureaucracy in the 20th century, once hair stands on end to have, you know, the comparative naivete on display with a prediction like that, but it derives from that confidence that it's all going to be okay because we understand, we have the key, we have the plan to how to arrive at this this this final configuration of humanity.

Yeah, the certainty of science, in quotes, and the goal of utopia gets you in trouble. But also, just on the human level, from a working class person perspective, from the industrial revolution, you see the growing inequality, wealth inequality. And there is a kind of, you see people getting wealthy, and combined with the fact that life is difficult, life in general, life is suffering for many, for most, for all, if you listen to some philosophers. And there is kind of a powerful idea in that

the man is exploiting me. And that's a populous message that a lot of people resonate with because to a degree is true in every system. And so before you kind of know how these economic and political ideas manifest themselves, it is really powerful to say, here beyond the horizon, there's a world where the rich man will not exploit my hard work anymore. And I think that's a really powerful idea. It is. I mean, at the same time, though, it kind of points to, you know, a further problem. That's

the identity of the revolutionaries. It turned out that many of these revolutionary movements, and then the founding elites of communist countries in the aftermath of the Soviet seizure of power, turn out to be something quite different from people who have spent their lives in factories, experiencing the industrial revolution firsthand. I mean, there's a special role here for intellectuals. And when Marx and Engels write into the Communist Manifesto, the notion that certain

exceptional individuals can rise above their class origins in a way other people can't. And transcend their earlier role, their materially determined role in order to gain a perspective on the historical process as a whole and ally themselves with the working class and its struggle for communism. This sort of special role that they carved out for themselves is enormously appealing for intellectuals because any celebration of intellectuals as world movers is going to appeal to

intellectuals. That gap, that frequent reality of not being in touch with the very classes that the communists are aiming to represent is a very frequent theme in this story. It also speaks to a crucial part of this story, which is the breaking apart or the civil war, the war of brother against brother, the fraternal struggle that splits socialism and splits

followers of Marx. And that's in the aftermath of the first world war in particular, or during this traumatic experience, the way in which Lenin encourages the foundation of radical parties that will break with social democracy of the sort that had been elaborated, especially in places like Germany, scorning their moderation and instead announcing a new dispensation, which was the Leninist conception of a disciplined, hardcore, professional revolutionaries

who will act in ways that a mere trade union movement couldn't. And what this speaks to is, you know, a fundamental tension in radical movements because left to their own devices, Lenin announces, workers tend to focus on their reality, their families, their workplace, want better working conditions, unionize and then aim to negotiate with employers or to agitate for reforms on the part of the state to improve their living conditions. And then they're

happy for the advances that they have won. And for Lenin, that's not enough because that's a half measure. That's the sort of thing that leads you into an accommodation with the system rather than the overthrow of the system. So there's a real, there's a concentration in this regard that plays itself out over the long haul. So let's go to Lenin and the Russian Revolution. How did communism come to power in the Soviet Union? It came to power as a result of stepping into a power vacuum.

And the power vacuum was created by the First World War and it's the effect that it had as a total war, unprecedented pressure placed on a regime that in many ways was a traditional, almost feudal monarchy only experiencing the beginnings of the modernization that the rest of Europe had undergone. And for this reason communism comes to power in a place that Marx probably wouldn't have expected in the wreckage of the Russian Empire. Lenin is absolutely vital to this equation because he's

the one who presses the process forward. Ironically, given the claim of communist leaders to having the key to history just a few months previous in exile in Switzerland, Lenin had been despairing and had been convinced that he's not may not even live to see the advent of that day. But then when revolution does break out in the Russian Empire in February of 1917, Lenin is absolutely frantic to get back. And when he does get back as a result of a deal that is negotiated with the German

high command, a step that they are they'll later live very much to regret. He is able to get back and to go into action and to press for nothing less than the seizure of power that brings his Bolshevik faction, the radical wing of the socialist movement to power in and then to build the Soviet Union. So even he was surprised how effective and how fast the revolution happened. He was, although I think that he would have would have agreed that what was necessary was a

cataclysm on the scale of the First World War to make this happen. The First World War shatters so many of the certainties of the 19th century that we talked about as a dynamic period with argument between ideologies, it scrambles all sorts of earlier debates. It renegotiates the status of the individual versus an all powerful state and the claims of the state because to win or even just to survive in World War I, you need to centralize centralized centralized and to put everything

onto a authoritarian wartime footing in country after country. So Lenin earlier had already articulated the possibility that this might happen by talking about how the entire globe already was connected and there's a chain of capitalist development that is connecting different countries so that the weakest link in the chain, if it breaks, if it pops open, it might actually inaugurate much bigger processes and start a chain reaction. And that's what he intended to do

and has the chance to do in the course of 1917. Incidentally, just to get a sense of the sheer chaos and the human on an individual human level, what the absence of established authority meant, there's a few works of literature that are as powerful as Budes Pustanox, Dr. Javago, for giving just the whole sweep of contending forces in a power vacuum. It's an amazing testimony to that time and place. So you said that Bolshevik saw violence and terror as necessary.

So can you just speak to this aspect of there? Because they took power and so this was a part of the way they saw the world. Right. And it had antecedents, even though Lenin and his colleagues are competing amongst each other for the title of most faithful disciple of Marx and most true to the received theory in practice, there's other influences, earlier influences that operate

in the Russian context that were not operative, let's say, in the German context. And here you have to step back and think about the nature of Tsarism, which had maintained still into the 20th century, the notion of divine right to rule that God had ordained the Tsarist system and its hierarchies,

and that to question these was sinful and politically not advisable. And the restrictive nature of Russian society at this point dominated by the Tsarist establishment, its harshness, its reactionary nature meant that people who in another context in another country might have been reformers could instead very easily be provoked into becoming revolutionaries. And Lenin is a perfect example of this because his older brother was executed as a result of being in a radical revolutionary movement

that was who was arrested and executed for association with terrorism. And earlier generations of Russian radicals had founded populist groups that would aim to engage in terrorism in resistance against the Tsarist regime. And this included people who called themselves

nealists. And these nealists were materialists who saw themselves ushering in a new age by absolute rejection of earlier religious traditions and aiming for material answers to the challenges of the day among them was Nikolai Chennishevsky who wrote what's been called the worst book ever written. It was in fact one of Lenin's favorite books in Russian it's Stodiela in English against

Trans-Edit what is to be done. And it's a utopian novel about revolutionaries and how revolutionaries should act with one another in open ways, new ways, non-traditional ways in order to help usher in the coming revolution. Lenin loved the work and said it had the great merit of showing you how to be a revolutionary. So there's the Marxist influence and then there's Russian populist

nealist influence which is also a very live current in Lenin's thinking. And when you add these things together you get an explosive mix because Lenin as a result and part of this family trauma of his brother becomes a absolutely reconcilable enemy of the Tsarist regime and sets about turning himself into what you might call a guided missile for revolution. He turns himself into a

machine to produce revolutionary change. And I mean that with little hyperbole Lenin at one point shared with friends that he loved listening to music but he tried not to listen to beautiful music like Beethoven because it made him feel gentle. What the revolution demanded was realism, hardness, absolute steely resolve. So Lenin worries even fellow revolutionaries by the intensity of his single mind to focus to revolution. He spends his days thinking about the revolution.

He probably dreamt about the revolution. And so 24 seven is an existence where he's paired off other human elements quite deliberately in order to turn himself into an effective instigator of revolution. So when the opportunity comes in 1917 he's primed and ready for that role. It's interesting that nihilism, Russian nihilism had an impact on Lenin. I mean traditionally nihilist philosophy rejects all sorts of traditional morality. There's the kind of

cynical dark view and where's the light? The lightest science, the lightest science and materialism. Oh boy. The nihilists, some of them did a very bad job of hiding their political beliefs because they would wear, they were famous for wearing blue tinted spectacles kind of the sunglasses of the late 19th century as a way of shielding their eyes from light, but also having a dispassionate

and realistic view of reality outside. So nihilists as the name would suggest do reject all prior certainties, but they make an exception for science and see that as the possibility for founding an entirely new mode of existence. For most people, I think nihilism is introduced in the brilliant philosophical work. I don't know if you're familiar with it by the name of the Big Lebowski.

nihilists appear there and I think they summarize the nihilist tradition quite well, but it is indeed fascinating and also it is fascinating that Lenin and I'm sure this influence Stalin as well, that hardness was a necessary human characteristics to take the revolution to its to its end. That's right. That's right. So prior generations of nihilists or populists had resemble Lenin's single-mindedness by arguing that 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 if we consider Lenin affected by Marxist ideas and the homegrown Russian revolutionary tradition that predates the arrival of Marxist socialism in Russia, it's the theme of needing to adapt to local conditions.

So Marxism or communism in Vietnam or in Cuba or in Cambodia or in Russia will be very different in its local adaptations and local themes and resonance than it was in Germany where Marx would have expected all this done for. So let's talk about Lenin Trotsky installing this little interplay that eventually led to Stalin accumulating, grabbing and taking a hold of power. What was that process like? So Lenin's supreme confidence leads the party through some really difficult steps.

That involves things like signing the humiliating treaty with the Germans, the Treaty of Brezlatovsk, where critics of the Bolsheviks said that no one who loved their country 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. 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, revolutions going to break out everywhere, especially after we've raised the standard, first of all, in the wreckage of the Russian Empire. And we should probably say that that treaty to some small degree, maybe you can elaborate now or later, lays the groundwork for World War II because there is resentment is a thing that with time can lead to extreme levels

of destruction. Right. For German sensibilities, for German nationalists, that treaty meant that Germany had essentially one World War I. And only a turn of events that many of them couldn't even follow or conceive of the arrival of American troops, the tipping of the balance in the West, led to that reversal. And one of the many scholars and contemporaries pointed out that Germany between the wars was full of people who were convinced that Germany had actually not lost the war.

However, that victory of theirs was defined. So most definitely, that groundwork is laid. And incidentally, this is something we can talk about later. World War I and World War II have a lot of linkages like that. And as time goes by, I think historians are going to focus on those linkages even more. But Lenin also, in his leadership, against the odds leads the Bolsheviks to power in the Russian Civil War, where most betting people would have given them very slight odds of

even surviving, given how many enemies they faced off against. Lenin's insistence upon discipline and upon good organization allowed the Bolsheviks to emerge as the winners. And yet, a great disappointment follows. Lenin, as we said, had expected that revolution will break out soon everywhere. And all it will be necessary for the Bolsheviks to do, having given the lead,

is to link up with others. And so he considered that what would be established would be a red bridge between a communist Russia and one's Germany inevitably plunged ahead into its revolutionary transformation, a communist Germany. That doesn't end up happening. On the contrary, what happens

in Germany is a out and out shooting war between different kinds of socialists. When Germany establishes a democracy that later goes by the name of the Weimar Republic, the government is a government of social democrats, moderate social democrats, who are fearful of what they see as Russian conditions of disorder. And who are not necessarily in sympathy with the Leninist

vision of tightly organized authoritarian rule. So, communists who revolt in Germany are brutally suppressed by mercenaries, hardened front fighters and nationalist radicals, hired by the German socialist government. And the result is a wound that just won't heal in the German socialist movement as a result of this fratricide. It frustrates Lenin's ambitions. So too, does the fact that Poland, rather than going Bolshevik, resists attempts by the Bolsheviks to move

forward and to connect up with Germany. The polls yet again play a tremendously important historical role in changing the expected course of historical events. It's in the aftermath of these unexpected turns that Lenin and his colleagues realize that they're in this for the long haul. It's necessary to wait longer. They don't lose hope in or confidence, you might say, in the eventual coming of international workers revolution, but it has been deferred. It's been put off.

And so the question then arises, what do you build within a state that's established called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the Soviet Union? Lenin, as a result of an assassination attempt, is deeply affected in his health and would have loved to continue for years longer to

steer the regime. But he's sideline because of his declining health and there emerges a contest, a contest between a very charismatic leader, Liotrotsky, on the one hand, who is an amazing orator, who is an intellectual, who has traveled widely in the world, who has seen much of the world, and who is a brilliant writer, a far-ranging intellect, and is seen as extremely radical because of his demand for permanent revolution, the acceleration of revolutionary processes to drive

history forward, to strike while the iron is hot. And on the other hand, is an extremely unlikely contender for power. And that's a man who's probably the antithesis of charisma, if you were to meet him in person, a guy with a squeaky, somewhat high-pitched voice, not well suited to revolutionary oratory. His face pockmarked with the scars of youthful illness, and whom, or over, doesn't speak a fine sophisticated Russian, but speaks a Russian heavily inflected with a Georgian accent,

from that part of the Russian Empire, from which he came, and that was Stalin. And I know that you already have a marvelous interview with Stephen Kotkin, the brilliant biographer of Stalin,

who has so many insights on that subject. The one thing that's, that even after reading about Stalin, that never ceases to surprise me, even in retrospect, is that Stalin gains a reputation not as a fiery radical, but as a moderate, a man who's a conciliator, someone who's calm when others are excited, someone who is able, because of his organizational skills, to resolve merely

theoretical disputes with practical solutions. Now, to fully take this aboard, we have to unknow what we know from our vantage point about Stalin's leadership, Stalin's brutality and eliminating his opposition. The cult of personality that against all odds got built up around Stalin, so, so successfully. And the absolute dominant role that led him later to be described as Genghis Khan with a telephone, a brutal dictator of a, with ancient barbarism, allied to the use of modern

technology. While Trotsky is delivering stirring speeches and theorizing, Stalin works behind the scenes to control personnel decisions in the Bolshevik movement and in the state. And, you know, it's a cliche because it's true that personnel is policy. Trotsky is increasingly sidelined and then demonized and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union and later murdered in Mexico City. For Stalin, eliminating his enemies turned out to be the solution that he was most comfortable with.

So, from that perspective, there's a lot of fascinating things here. So, one is that you can have a wolf, a brutal dictator in moderate clothing. So, just because somebody presents this moderate, doesn't mean they can't be one of the most destructive, not the most destructive humans in history. The other aspect is using propaganda, you can construct an image of a person, even though they're uncharismatic, not attractive, their voice is no good. All of those aspects,

you can still have a root, like, they're still to this day. A very large number of people that see him as a religious type of godlike figure. So, the power of propaganda there. Today, we would call that curating the image. Curating the image, but the extent to which you can do that effectively is quite incredible. So, in that way, also Stalin is a study of the power of propaganda. Can we just talk about the ways that the power vacuum is filled by Stalin, how that manifests

itself? Perhaps one angle it can take is how was the secret police used? How did power manifest itself under Stalin? Well, before getting to the secret police, I would just want to add the other crucial element, which is Lenin's patronage. Stalin doesn't, you know, brawl his way into the Bolshevik party and dominate. He's co-opted and promoted to positions of importance by Lenin, who sees him as a somewhat rough around the edges, not very sophisticated, much less cosmopolitan

than other Bolsheviks, but dependable, reliable and committed revolutionary. So, I think that one of the things that's emerged, especially after archives opened up with the fall of the Soviet Union, and we were able to read more and more the communications of Lenin, is that it's not the case that we're talking here about a unconnected series of careers. Rather, there are connections to be made.

It's true that towards the end of his life, Lenin came to be worried by complaints about Stalin's rudeness towards fellow Bolsheviks, and in his testament, he warned against Stalin's testimonies, Lenin fundamentally saw himself as irreplaceable, and so that doesn't really help in a succession

struggle, right? Stalin is able to rely on a secret police apparatus that have been built up under Lenin already, and it's very early in the foundation of the Soviet state that the Chekha, or the extraordinary commission, is established as a secret police to terrify the enemies, beat down the opponents of the regime, and to keep an eye on society more generally.

The person who's chosen for that task also is an anomaly among Bolsheviks. That is a man of Polish aristocratic background, Felix Zerszynski, who comes to be known by the nickname Iron Felix. Here's a man about whom a cult of personality also has created. Zerszynski is celebrated in the Soviet period as the model of someone who's harsh but fair, an executioner but with a heart of

gold. Somebody who loves children, somebody who has a tender heart but forces himself to be steely-willed against the opponents of the ideological project of the Bolsheviks. Zerszynski is succeeded by figures who will be absolutely instrumental to Stalin's exercise

of power, and they're not immune either. Stalin in his purges takes care also to purge the secret police as a way of finding others upon whom to deflect blame for earlier atrocities, and to produce a situation where even committed Bolsheviks are uncertain of what's going to happen next and feel their own position to be precarious. I mean, incidentally, there are other influences that probably are brought to bear here as well. It gets said about Stalin that he used to spend a

lot of time flipping through Makiyeveli's The Prince. And it seems that Stalin's personal copy of the Prince, nobody knows where that is if it still exists, but historians have found annotations in works by Lenin that Stalin, who is a voracious reader, as it turns out, made in the back of one of the books, which sounds almost like a commentary on Makiyeveli's almost but not quite

suggestion that the ends justify the means. Stalin's own writing says that if someone is strong, active, and intelligent, even if they do things that other people condemn, they're still a good person. And so Stalin's self-conception of himself is someone who along these lines, and in line with Lenin's emphasis on practical results and discipline,

somebody who gets things done, that's the crucial ethical standard. And ultimately, in criticisms by later dissidents of Bolshevik morality, this question of what is the ethical

standard? What is the ethical law? We'll bring this question into focus because, and this goes back to Marx as well, incidentally, the notion that any ethical system, any notion of right or wrong, is purely a product of class identity because every class produces its distinctive ideas, its distinctive religion, its distinctive art forms, its distinctive styles,

means that with no one transcendent or absolute morality, it's all up for grabs. And then it's a question of power, and the exercise of power with no limits untrammeled by any laws whatsoever. A dictatorship in its purest form, something that Lenin had devoured, and then Stalin comes to practice even more fully. Not that it's possible to look deep into a person's heart, but you know, if you look at Trotsky, you could say that he probably believed deeply in Marxism and

Communism, probably the same with Lenin. What do you think Stalin believed? Was he a believer? Was he a pragmatist that used Communism as a way to gain power, and the ideology as part of propaganda, or did he in his own private moments deeply believe in the Cetopia? That's an excellent question, and you're quite right. I mean, we cannot peer into the inmost recesses of somebody's being and know for sure. My intuition, though, is that this may be a false alternative,

a false dichotomy. It's natural enough to see somebody who does monstrous things to say, well, this is being ideologies being used as a cover for it. But I think that my suspicion is that these were actually perfectly compatible in his historical role. The notion that there's an ideology, it gives you a master plan for how history is going to develop and your own power,

the increase of that power to unprecedented proportions. Your ability to torment even your own faithful followers in order just to see them squirm, which Stalin was famous for, to keep people unsettled. To me, it seems that for some people, those might not actually be opposed, but might even be mutually reinforcing, which is a very scary thought.

It's terrifying, but it's really important to understand. If we look at one's Stalin takes power at some of the policies, so the collectivization of agriculture, what do you think that failed so catastrophically, especially in the 1930s with Ukraine and Polytomor? I think the short answer is that the Bolsheviks in particular, but also communists more generally

have had a very conflicted relationship with agriculture. Agriculture as a very vital, obviously, but also very traditional and old form of human activity has about it all of the smell of tradition and other problematic factors as well. In a place like Russia, or the Russian Empire, peasants throughout history for centuries had wanted one thing, and that was to be left alone

to farm their own land. That's their utopia, and that for someone like Marx, who had a vision of historical development and transcendence and progress as being absolutely key, does not mesh at all with that vision. For that reason, when Marx comes up with this tablo, this tremendous display of historical transformation taking place over centuries and headed towards the final utopia, the role of farmers there is negligible. Peasants get called conservative and dull as sacks of

potatoes in Marx's historical vision because they're limited in their horizon. They farm their land, their plot, and don't have greater revolutionary goals beyond working the land and having it free and clear. By contrast, industrialization, that's progress. Images that today would be deeply disturbing to an environmentalist's sensibility. Smokestab, belching smoke, the byproducts of industry, a landscape transformed by the factory model. That's what Marx and then later the Bolsheviks

have in mind. Similarly, the goal, even as articulated in Marx's writings, is to put agriculture and farming on a factory model so that you won't need to deal with this traditional role of the independent farmer or the peasant. Instead, you'll have people who benefit from progress, benefit

from rationalization by working factory farms. In approaching the question of collectivization, we have to keep in mind that for Stalin and his comrades who are bound and determined to drag Russia kicking and screaming into the modern age and not to allow it be beaten because of its backwardness as Stalin puts it, traditional forms of agriculture are not what they have in mind. And in their rank of desired outcomes, industrialization, especially massive, heavy industry,

is the cyniquanon. That's their envisioned future. Agriculture rates below. So in that case, the crucial significance of collectivization is to get a handle on the food situation in order to make it predictable and not to find oneself in another crisis, like during the Civil War, when the cities are starving, industry is robbed of labor, and the factories are at a standstill.

So this is really the core approach to collectivization, to put the productive capacities of the farmers in a regimented way, in a state controlled way, under the control of the state. This produces vast human suffering because for the farmers, their plot of land that they thought they had gained as a result of the revolution is now taken away. They no longer have the same

incentives they had before to be successful farmers. In fact, if you're a successful farmer and maybe have a cow as opposed to your neighbors who have no cow, you're defamed and denounced as a kool-ahk, a tight-fisted exploiter, even though you might be helping to develop agriculture in the region

that you're from. So the result is human tragedy on a vast scale and allied to that, incidentally, is Stalin's sense that this is a chance to also target people who are opposed to the Bolshevik regime for other reasons, whether it's because of their Ukrainian identity, whether it's because of a desire for a different nationalist project. So for Stalin, there are many

motives that roll in to collectivization. And the final thing to be said is you're quite right that collectivization proves to be a failure because the Soviet Union never finally gets a grasp on the problems of agricultural production. By the end of the Soviet Union, they're importing grain from the West in spite of having some of tremendously rich farmland to be found worldwide. And the reason for that had to do, in part, I think, with the incentives that had been taken away.

Prosperous individual farmers have a motive for working their land and maximizing production. By contrast, if you are an employee of a factory-style agricultural enterprise, the incentives run in very different directions. And the joke that was common for decades in the Soviet Union and other communist countries with similar systems was we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. So even labor, which is rhetorically respected and valorized, in practice,

is rewarded with very slim rewards and the last point immobility. The collectivization reduces the mobility of the peasants who are not allowed because of internal passports to move to the cities unless they have permission. They're locked in place. And you got to say, at the time, and afterwards, that looked a lot like feudalism or a neo-futalism in terms of the restrictions on workers in the countryside. It is a terrifying, horrific and fascinating study of how the idea

when meeting reality fails. So the idea here is to make agriculture more efficient, so be more productive, so the industrialized model. But the implementation through collectivization had all the elements that you've mentioned that contend with human nature. So first with the cool ox, the successful farmers were punished. And so then the incentive is not just not to be a successful farmer, but to hide added to that, there's a growing quota that everybody's supposed to

deliver on, that nobody can deliver on. And so now, because you can't deliver on that quota, you're basically exporting all your food and you can't even feed yourself. And then you suffer more and more and more. And there's a vicious downward spiral of like you can't possibly produce that. Now there's another human incentive where you're going to lie, everybody lies on the data. And so even Stalin himself, probably as evil or incompetent as he may be, it was not even

getting good data about what's even happening. Even if he wanted to stop the vicious cycle, which he certainly didn't, but he wouldn't be even able to. So there's all these like dark consequences of what on paper seems like a good ideal. And it's a fascinating study of like things on paper.

That's right. When implemented, you can go really, really bad. That's right. 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 starving people to escape. You put very well some of the implications of this case study in how things look in the abstract versus in practice.

And those phenomena were going to haunt the rest of the experience of the Soviet Union. The whole notion that up and down the chain of command, everybody is falsifying or tinkering with

or purifying the statistics or their reports. In order not to look bad and not to have vengeance visited upon them, reaches the point where nobody, in spite of the pretence of comprehensive knowledge, right, there's a state planning agency that creates five-year plans for the economy as a whole, and which is supposed to have accurate statistics, all of this is founded upon a foundation of sand. That's inadvertent. That's not an intended side effect, but what you described in terms of the

internal dynamics of fostering conflict in a rural society was absolutely not inadvertent. That was deliberate. The doctrine was, you bring civil war. Now, had there been social tensions before, of course, there had. Had there been envies, had there been differentiations in wealth or status, of course, there had been, but a deliberate plan to bring class conflict and bring civil war and then heighten it in the countryside, does damage, and not least of that, is this phenomenon of

a negative selection. Those who have most enterprise, those who are most entrepreneurial, those who have most self-discipline, those who are best organized, will be win-owed again and again and again, sending the message that mediocrity is comparatively much safer than talent. And this pattern, incidentally, gets transposed in tremendously harrowing ways also to the entire group of Russian

intelligentsia and intellectuals of other people who are in the Soviet Union. They discover similarly that to be independent, to have a voice which is not compliant, carries with it tremendous penalties, especially in Stalin's reigns of terror.

Again, a difficult question about a psychology of one human being, but to what degree do you think Stalin was deliberately punishing the farmers and the Ukrainian farmers and to what degree we'll see looking the other way and allowing the large-scale incompetence, the horrific incompetence of the collectivization of agriculture to happen? Well, I think it was both things, right? I mean, there were not only sins of omission, but also sins of commission. Incidentally, one should add,

I don't think for Stalin, it was personal. These are people who are very remote from him. You never coming into contact with the people who are suffering in this way. A tribute to him is the quote that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. I think he inaction certainly acted in a way that would vindicate that. But the process of collectivization was not just a bureaucratic

snafu following on bureaucratic snafu. There was the mobilization of communist youth, of military, of party activists, to go into the regions and to search for hidden food, to extract the food where it could be found. We have testimony to this in the case of people who later became dissidents, like Lev Kopolev, who wrote in his memoirs about how he was among those who were sent in to enact these policies. And he saw families with the last food being taken away

even as signs of starvation were visible already in the present. And yet he did not go mad, he didn't kill himself, he didn't fall into despair because he believed, because he had been taught and believed at least then that this was justified. This was a larger historical process and a greater good would result even from these enormities. So I think that this was quite deliberate.

Following this, as you've mentioned, there was the process of the great terror, or the intellectuals where the communist party officials, the military officers, the bureaucrats, everybody. 750,000 people were executed, and over a million people were sent to the gulag. What can you say by way of wisdom from this process of the great terror that Stalin

implemented from 36 to 38? Well, the terror had a variety of victims. There were people who were true believers and who were Bolsheviks who were especially targeted by Stalin because he aimed to revenge himself for all the sort of condescension that he'd experienced in that movement before and also to eliminate rivals or potential rival power centers and members of their families. And then there were people who simply got caught up in a process whereby the

repressive organs in the provinces were sent quotas. You have to achieve your quota and maybe even better yet overachieve your quota, overperform. That would be the key to success and rising in the bureaucracies and the age of the terror. What's so horrifying is the way in which a whole society stood paralyzed in this process and how neighbors would be taken away in the middle of the night

and people would be wary of talking about it. Resistance, at least in these urban centers, was entirely paralyzed by fear when if one had somehow found a way to mobilize, somehow a way to resist the process, the results might have been different. There's an astonishing book. I mean, there are so many great books that have come out quite recently even on these topics. Orlando Fiegas has an amazing book called The Whisperers that traces several families history in the Stalin

period. And it's a testimony to how a whole society and some of its most intelligent people got winnowed again and again and again in that process of negative selection that we talked about. The lasting dislocation and scars that this left and the way in which show people we're not able to talk about these things in public because that would put you next on the list,

a suspected of having less than total devotion to the state. I think one of the things that also is so terrifying about the entire process is even total devotion wasn't enough.

The process took on a life of its own and I think that it might even have surprised Stalin in some ways, not enough to short-circus the process, but the notion where people were invited to denounce neighbors, co-workers, maybe even family members, meant that ever larger groups of people would be brought into the orbit of the secret police tortured in order to produce confessions. Those confessions then would lead to more lists of suspects of people who had to be investigated

and either executed or sent to the gulags. The uncertainty that this produced was enormous. Even loyalty was not enough to save people. The stories, Solje Nitsyn's gulag archipelago is full of stories of dedicated communists who find themselves in the gulag and are sure that some mistake has been made. If only Comrade Stalin would hear about the terrible thing that has happened to them, surely it would be corrected. Everyone else, by contrast,

accused of terrible crimes, must be some truth behind that. Talk about ways of disaggregating a society, ways of breaking down bonds of trust. This left lasting traces on an entire society that endured to this very day. Yeah, again, a fascinating study of human nature. There essentially wasn't an emergent quota of confessions of treason. Even though the whole society was terrified and we're through terror, loyal,

there's still needed to be a lot of confessions of people being disloyal. You're just making shit up now. At a mass scale, stuff is being made up. It's also the machine of the secret police starts eating itself because you want to be confessing on your boss on your, and it is this weird, dark dynamic system or human nature just as it is, it's worst. Absolutely.

Why, if we look at this deep discussion we had about Marxism, to what degree can we understand from that lens why the implementation of communism and the Soviet Union failed in such a dark way. Both an economic system with agriculture and industrialization and on the human way with just violation of every possible human right and the torture and the suffering and gulags and all of this. Well, I think some of it comes back to the ethical grounding

that we mentioned earlier. The notion that ethics are entirely situational and that any ethical system is an outgrowth of a particular class reality, a particular material reality, and that leaves the door wide open. So I think that that aspect was present from the very beginning. I think that the expectations of Marx that the revolution would take hold and be successful

in a developed country played a role here as well. Russia, which compared to the rest of Europe, was less developed even before the First World War is in a dire state after all of the ravage and the millions of deaths that continue even after the war has ended in the West. That leaves precious little in the way of structural restraints or a functioning society that would

say, let's not do things this way. I think that in retrospect that special role carved out for special individuals who can move this process forward and accelerate historical development allowed for people to step into those those roles and appoint themselves executors of this

ideological vision. So I think those things play a role as well. Now it's hard to do controversial history, but to what degree is this basically that the Communist ideals create a power of acumen, a dictator type figure steps in, and then it's a role of the dice of what that dictator is like.

So can you imagine a world where the dictator was Trotsky? Would we see very similar type of things or is the hardness and the brutality of somebody like Stalin manifested itself in being able to look the other way as some of these dark things were happening more so than somebody like Trotsky who would presumably be see the realizations of these policies and be shocked. Well, counterfactuals are hard, like you said, and one very quickly gets off into really deep waters

in speculation. There were contemporaries and there have been scholars since who suggest that Trotsky by all indications might have been even more radical than Stalin in the tempo that he wanted to achieve. I think of the slogan of permanent revolution. Trotsky also who dabbled in so many things in his intellectual life also spoke in almost utopian terms that are just astonishing to

read. And you told me in terms about the construction of the new man and the new woman, and that out of the raw material of humanity, once you really get going and once you've established a system that matches your hopes for the future, it'll be possible to reconfigure people. And I like to talk about ambition to create essentially the next stage in human evolution, a new species growing out of humanity. Those don't sound like very modest or limited approaches. And I guess

we just really won't know. Do some of the destructive characteristics of communism have to go hand in hand? So the central planning that we talked about, the censorship of the secret police, the concentration of power in one dictatorial figure, and let's say, again, with the secret police, the violent oppression. What should add to those factors that have a kind of interrelated logic of their own, the sheer fact that communism comes to power in most of these instances as a result

of war, as a result of the destruction of what came before and a power vacuum. So think of the Russian revolutions in the wake of the fall of Tsarism. Think of the expansion of Stalin's puppet regimes into Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II and the Red Army moving into Occupy areas in Eastern Europe, although they announced that they're coming as liberators. Consider the foundation

of communist China on the heels of World War II and yet more Chinese civil war. Consider cases like Korea, Vietnam, it's likely that this already is a key element in setting things up for further crisis because upon seizure of power, if your expectation is, well, it'll, it ought to be relatively easy to get this system rolling and put it on a basis that's, after all, we have the roadmap to the future,

there will follow frustrations and impediments and resistance. And there's a ratchet effect then there because it'll produce more repression, producing even more problems that follow. So what drives the whole thing forward though, especially in its Leninist version, but already visible with, with Marx and Engels is the insistence on confidence. If you have the key to the future,

all of these things are possible and necessary. This leads to an ethos, I think that, 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,

whatever earlier experience you have, rebel against it. 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 your own actions justified as a result, no matter what they

were, if you are sufficiently hard and determined and have the confidence to follow through. And then that obviously raises the ultimate question, what happens when that confidence ebbs or roads or when it's lost? If we go to the 1920s to the home of Karl Marx, fascism as implemented by the Nazi party in Germany was called the National Socialist German Workers Party. So what were the similarities

and differences of fascism? Socialism, how was conceived of in fascism and communism? And maybe you can speak to the broader battle of ideas that was happening at the time and battle of political control that was happening at the time. Well, I mean, there's a whole bunch of terms that are

in play here, right? And when we speak of fascism, fascism in its original sense is a radical movement founded in Italy, which though it had been allegedly on the winning side of World War One is disappointed with the lack of rise in national prestige and territory that that leads, that commences after the end of the war. So bizarrely enough, it's a socialist by the name of Benito

Mussolini who crafts an ideological message of glorification of the state. The people at large united in a militaristic way on the march ready to attack, ready to expand a complete overthrow of liberal ideas of the rights of the individual or of representative democracy. And instead, vesting power in one leader, in his case, the Duce Mussolini, in order to replicate in peacetime the ideal of total military mobilization in wartime.

Although the Nazis in Germany are inspired and borrow heavily from fascist ideology, there also are different emphases that they include. And that includes their virulent racism from the outset, which in addition to a glorification of the state, glorification of the leader, and preparation for national greatness, race is absolutely core. And it's that racial radicalism that the Nazis espouse as a central idea, along with antisemitism, the demonizing in particular

of the Jews and this insane racialist cosmology that the Nazis, uh, uh, allow. It is the assertion that the Nazis will uniquely bring to pass unity in the people, unity in the society, that leads them to give themselves this odd name of national socialist. Some leaders like Goebbels among the Nazis, uh, accent the socialist part to begin with, others put the accent firmly on the nationalist part. In part, the term they chose for their movement was meant to be confusing.

It was meant to take slogans or words from different parts of the political spectrum to fuse them into something unfamiliar and new and claim that they'd overcome all earlier political divisions. That the Nazis claimed that they were a movement, not a party, even though their party was called a party. So what did Nazism and Bolshevism and Communism share, or how were they opposed to one another? What we need to start with, but making clear, they were ideological arch-enemies.

In both worldviews, the opposite side represented the ultimate expression of the evil that needed to be exercised from history in order for their desired utopia to be brought about. And this leads to, um, strange and perverted beliefs about reality. 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 used the term of Judeo-Bolshevism to argue that, uh, Communism is essentially a conspiracy steered by the Jews, which was complete nonsense. For their part, the Communists and, and from the perspective of the Soviet Union, the Nazis were in essence a super-capitalist conspiracy. If the, if the cosmological enemy are the capitalist and the owners, the exploiters,

then all of the rigour roll about race and nationalism are distractions. They're meant to fool the, the poor saps who enlisted that movement. It's essentially steered by capitalist owners who 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, naked face of capitalism, nearing its end. So the other, 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, 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 tens of millions dead. And then economically, the Great Depression showing that the end was not, was not far away.

Um, this produced at one in the same time both ideological opposition and instances of vastly cynical cooperation. Um, in terms of the Weimar 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, left people searching for desperate

expedience, uh, in the last days of, of the Weimar 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. And not aggression packed 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 are rose 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, uh, chief among them, um, crafted a model called totalitarianism, borrowing a term that the fascists had liked about themselves to define regimes, like the Nazis, like Stalin's Soviet Union, uh, for a new kind of dictatorship that was not a

uh, 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 and thoroughgoing control of entire populations. And the final frightening thought that a rent kept before her was, what if this is not a model that comes to us from benign it on 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 Darryl Cooper, who is a, uh, historian and podcaster, did a podcast with Tucker Carlson, and he made some claims there and elsewhere about World War Two. There are two claims that I would love to get your perspective on. First, he stated that Churchill was quote, the chief villain of the Second World War. I think Darryl argues that Churchill forced Hitler to expand the war beyond, uh, Poland into a global war. Second, the mass murder of Jews,

Poles, Slav gypsies, and death camps was an accident, a, uh, byproduct of, uh, global war. And in fact, the most humane extermination of prisoners of war possible given the alternative was death by starvation. So I was wondering if you can respond to each of those claims. Well, I think that this is, 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 in continents to, uh, see themselves as one of the super powers 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, 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, uh, 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 Bismarck. 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 Mein Kampf and other manifestos and speeches,

is, uh, an enterprise that's doomed to failure, uh, justifiably. The notion that the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slavs 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 Tannenberg, which sent in specially trained and ideologically pre-prepared killers who were given the name of the units of the Einzatsgruppen in order to wipe out the Polish leadership and also, uh, to kill Jews. Uh, this predates any, uh, um, of the Operation Barbarossa

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 Mein Kampf, for Eastern Europe, were subjugation and, uh, ethnic, uh, cleansing, uh, on a vast scale. So I consider, um, both of these claims absolutely unturnable, given the facts and documents. So do you think it was always the case that, uh, Nazi Germany was going to invade the Soviet Union?

I think, as you can read in Mein Kampf, this is what's necessary in order to, uh, bring that racial utopia to pass. Um, and so, uh, while the timetable might be flexible, while, obviously, geopolitical constellations would play a role in determining when such a thing might be possible, it was most definitely on his list. And I would want to add that in, 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, uh, 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, expected future of domination and annihilation in the East. The idea of Laban's realm is it 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 Generaal 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, there is extensive and definitive evidence that the Nazis always wanted to invade the Soviet Union. And there is always a racial component and not just about the Jews. They wanted to enslave and exterminate the Jews, yes, but the Slavic people, the Slavs. And, uh, if he was successful at conquering the Soviet Union, I think the things that would be done to the Slavic people

would make the Holocaust seem insignificant. In my understanding, in terms of the numbers, and the brutality and the viciousness in which he characterized the Slavic people. In, 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, bureaucratically organized, and, and horrifyingly efficient mass murder of the Jewish populations.

What the Nazis expected for the Slavs had a longer timeline. Himmler expected the head of the SS, the SS has given special, a special mission to be part of the transformation of these regions ethnically. And himmler, in his role of envisioning this German future in Eastern Europe, gives such a chilling phrase. He says that while certain Slavs will fall victim immediately, some proportion of Slavs will not be shipped out or deported or annihilated, but instead they

will remain as slaves for our culture. And in that one phrase, himmler managed to defile and deface everything that the word culture had meant to generations of the best German thinkers and artists in the centuries before the Nazis. The notion of slaves for our culture was part of his longer term expectation. And then there's finally a fact that speaks volumes about what the Nazis planned for the East. Hitler and himmler envisioned permanent war on the Eastern front.

Not a peace treaty, not a settlement, not a border, but a constant moving of the border, every generation hundreds of miles east in order to keep winning more and more living space. And with analogy to other frontiers to always give more fighting experience and more training in 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 area

and race. So in terms of race, repopulating with race and enslaving the Slavic people and exterminating them because there's so many of them, it takes a long time to exterminate. And even in the case of the Germans themselves, the hidden message behind even Nazi propaganda about unity and about about German national identity was the Nazis envisioned relentless purges of the German genetic

stock as well. So among their victims are people with disabilities, people who are defined as not racially pure enough for the future, even though they are clearly Germans by identity. This full scale and the comprehensive ambitions of the Nazis are as breathtaking as they are horrifying. One of the other things I saw Darrell Tweet was that what ended up happening in the

second world war was the worst possible thing that could have happened. And I just also wanted to comment on that, which I can imagine a very large number of possible scenarios that could have happened that are much, much worse, including the successful conquering of the Soviet Union as we said, the kind of things that would be done. And the total war ever ongoing for generations, which would result in hundreds of millions of deaths and torture and enslavement. And

then not to mention the other possible trajectory of nuclear. 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 steal a point that was also made as part of this.

That the oversimplified narrative of sort of to put it crudely, Hitler bad Churchill good has been used and abused by Neocons and warmongers and the military industrial complex in a year since to basically say this particular leader is just like Hitler or maybe Hitler in the 1930s and we must invade now before he becomes the Hitler of the 1940s. And that has been applied in the Middle East in Eastern Europe and God forbid that can be also applied in the war with China

in the 21st century. So yes, warmongers do share love to use Hitler and apply that template to wage war and we should be wary of that and be careful of that. Both the overapplication of this historical template onto the modern world and of warmongers in general. Yeah, and I think that nobody should like oversimplified narratives. We need subtle and accurate narratives. And also I just would like to say that probably as we've been talking about Stalin and Hitler

are singular figures. And just as we've been talking about the implementation of these totalitarian regimes, they're singular in human history that we never saw anything like it. And I hope from everything it looks like we will never see anything like it again. I mean, they're certainly striking and unique historical characters in the record. One of the things that's so disturbing about Hannah Ren's model of totalitarianism is

the leader can be changed. The system itself demands that there be a leader who allegedly is is all powerful and all-knowing and prophetic and the like. But whether particular figures are interchangeable in that role is a key question. Let me go back to the 1920s and sort of ask another counterfactual question.

Given the battle between Marxists and the communists and national socialist, was it possible and what would that world look like if the communists indeed won in Germany as Karl Marx envisioned and it made total sense given the industrialized expanse that Germany represented? Was that possible and what would it look like if it happened? I would think that the reality was probably very remote but that was certainly their ambition.

German communists get quoted as saying after Hitler it's our turn. Their sentiment was that the arrival of Nazism on the scene was a sign of how decrepit and incompetent and doomed capitalism was. In hindsight that's almost impossible to believe because what happens is the Nazis with their characteristic brutal ruthlessness simply decapitate the party and arrest the activists who were

supposed to be waiting to take over. So that's forced all. A further hypothetical that gets raised a lot is couldn't the social democrats and the communists have worked together to keep Hitler out of power. That's where the prior history comes into play. The very fact that the German revolution in 1919 sees socialists killing socialists produces a dynamic that's so negative that it's nearly impossible to settle on cooperation. Added to the fact that the communists see the social democrats

as rivals for the loyalty of the working class. In terms of just statistical likelihood a lot of experts at the time felt surely the German army is going to step in and the most likely outcome would have been a German general shutting down the democracy and producing a military dictatorship. It says a lot about how dreadful and bloody the record of the Nazis was that some people in retrospect would have felt that that military dictatorship would have been preferable if it had

obviated the need for the ordeal under the Nazis. What do you think Marx would say about the 20th century? Let's take it before we get to Mao and China just looking at the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. That's a really good question. I think that Marx was flexible in his expectations about tactics and strategies even as he was sure that he had actually cracked a big intellectual

problem of what the future is going to look like. He was a man who had to deal with a lot of disappointments because in revolutionary uprising after revolutionary uprising whether it was in the revolutions of 1848 across Europe whether it was in Poland whether it was in the Paris commune. This is it. This is the outbreak of the real thing and then it doesn't end up happening. So I think that he'd probably have tried to be patient about the turn of events.

We mentioned at the outset that Marx felt it was unlikely that a worker's revolution would break out in the Russian Empire because for that you needed lots of industrial workers and they didn't have a lot of industry. There's a footnote to add there and it proves this flexibility. A Russian socialist wrote to Marx asking might it not be possible for Russia to escape some

stages of capitalist development? I mean do you have to rigidly follow that scheme? And Marx's answer was kind of alluded but it wasn't to know and that suggests that Marx was willing to entertain all sorts of possible scenarios. I think he would certainly have been very surprised at the course of events as it unfolded because it didn't match his expectations at the outset. Not to put this on him but would he be okay with the price of hall of more?

For the utopian destination of communism meaning is it okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet? Well we don't know what Marx would say if he would pose that question deliberately but we do know in the case of Marxist historian Eric Hobbesbaum who was a prolific and celebrated British historian of the 19th and 20th centuries and he was put this question in the 90s

after the collapse of the Soviet Union and he stated forth rightly that because the Soviet Union failed such sacrifices were inordinate but if the experiment had succeeded and a glorious future had been open for mankind as a result of the Soviet Union's success that would lead to a different reply and that is one person's perspective. So that takes us to the other side of the world. The side that's often in the west

not considered very much when we talk about human history. Chinese dynasties, empires are fascinating, complex and there's just a history that's not as deeply explored as it should be and the same applies to the 20th century. So Chinese radicals founded the Chinese Communist Party CCP in July 1921. Among them as you talk about was Mao. What was the story of Mao's rise to power?

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 and as yet not industrialized country but moreover to make the peasants rather than being conservative sacks of potatoes to make them into the prime movers of the success of this political

venture. That's a case of the phenomenon that we talked about earlier. When do you when is an adaptation of an ideology or a change to an ideology of valid adjustment that you've made or adaptation and when is it already so different that it's something entirely distinct? Maoism was very clearly intended to answer this question for the Chinese context and by implication other non-western parts

of the world. This was in part Mao's way whose ambition was great to put himself at the head of a successful international movement and to be the successor to Stalin whose role he both admired and resented from having to be the junior partner. To take an example of a masterwork in a major milestone in the history of communism the Polish philosopher Lesia Kowakowski who was at first a committed communist and then later became disillusioned and wrote a three volume study of Marxist

thought called Currence of Marxism. In that book when he reaches Maoism Kowakowski essentially throws up his hands and says it's hard to even know what to do with this because putting the peasantry in the Vanguard role is something that is already at variance with the original design but Marx says this is an improved version. This is an adapted and true version of Marxism for the Chinese context. In case after case in Mao's rise to power we see a really complicated

relationship with Stalin. He works hard to gain Stalin's support because the common turn the international organization had quoted 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.

In a way that's more orthodox Marxism than what Mao is championing. Mao chafes under Stalin's acknowledged leadership of international communism as a movement and in 1950 when Mao goes to visit Stalin in Moscow in order to sign a treaty of cooperation he's left waiting for days and days and days in a snub that is meant to show him that you're just not as important as you might think you are. And then when Stalin dies in 1953 Mao feels the moment is ready for him

to step into the leadership position surpassing the Soviet Union. So many of Mao's actions like the Great Leap Forward and the agricultural disasters that follow from that are literally attempts to outdo Stalin to outperform Stalin to show that what Stalin was not able to do the Chinese communist regime will be able to bring off and the toll for that hubris is vast. Yeah in the darkest of ways he did outdo Stalin. That's right in the statistics.

The Great Leap Forward ended up killing approximately 40 million people from starvation or murder. Can you describe the Great Leap Forward? So it was modeled on the crash industrialization that Stalin had wanted to undertake in the Soviet Union and to outdo it. The notion of the Great Leap Forward was that it would be possible for the peasant masses out of their conviction in the rightness of the Chinese communist cause to industrialize China overnight. That involved things like creating

small smelting furnaces in individual farm communes. It involved folding together farming territories into vast communes of very large size that were just because of their sheer gigantism supposed to be by definition more efficient than small scale farming. It ended up producing environmental disasters and campaigns to eliminate birds or insects were supposed to demonstrate mastery over

nature by sheer acts of will. These included things like adopting Soviet agricultural techniques that were pioneered by a crackpot biologist by the name of Truffim Lysenko that produced more agricultural disaster. That involved things like plowing to depths that were not practical for the seeds to germinate and grow but were supposed to produce superplants that would produce bumper harvests and outpace the capitalist countries and the Soviet Union.

So the context for all of this is a race to get first to the achievement of full scale communism. One of the themes that I think it's so valuable to pursue and to take seriously in the history of communism is what concrete promises were made. In the case of China, Mao made promises and projections for the future that were worrying even to some of his own assistance. He exclaimed that perhaps by 1961 perhaps by 1973 China would be the winner in this competition and it would have

achieved full communism. So that which Marx had sketched as the end point of humanity would be achieved first by the Chinese. Later his own comrades when he passed from the scene felt the need to temper that a little bit and promised that they would achieve full communism by the year 2000. Such promises are helpful to a regime to create enthusiasm and to hold out to people the prospect of real successes just around the corner. But what happens when the date arrives and you haven't

actually achieved that goal? That's one ticking time bomb that played a role in the increasing erosion of confidence in the Soviet Union and the case of China must have been something similar. So there's a lot of other elements that are similar to the Soviet Union. Maybe you could speak to the 100 Flowers campaign. The 100 Flowers campaign is a chance for Mao who has felt that he has lost prestige and lost standing in the party because of the disasters of the great

leap forward to regain some of that momentum. And the whole 100 Flowers campaign officially titled the rectification campaign to set things right is still shrouded in mystery. Historians disagree about how to interpret what Mao was actually up to. The most cynical variant is that Mao encouraged Chinese thinkers and intellectuals to share ideas and to engage in constructive criticism

to propose alternatives and to let a full discussion happen. And then after some of them had ventured that to come in and purge them to punish them ruthlessly for having done what he had invited them to do. That is the most cynical variant. Some historians argue that Mao himself was not prepared for the ideas that he himself had invited into the public square and that he grew anxious and worried and angry at this without having thought this through in a cynical way to begin

with. The end result is the same. The end result is once again negative selection. The decimation of those who are most venture some 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 is on the Soviet Union. That's right. I mean think of the impact on officials who are loyal servants of the regime and

just want to get along. The message goes out loud and clear. Don't be venture some. Do not propose reforms. Stick with the tried and true and that'll be the safe route even if it ends in ultimately stagnation. So as the same question I asked about the Soviet Union, why do you think there are so much failure of policies that Mao implemented in China during his rule? Mao himself had a view of human beings as being as he put it beautiful blank pieces of paper upon which one can write new

characters. And that is clearly at variance with what you and I know about the complex nature of human beings as we actually encounter them in the world. I think that in the process of hatching schemes that were one size fits all for a country as big and as varied in its in its communities as China inevitably such an imposition of one model was going to lead to serious malfunctions.

And so much of the what what other episodes in Chinese history had showed the entrepreneurial capacity, the productive capacity economically of the Chinese people was suppressed by being fitted into these rigid schemes. What we've seen since after Mao passed us from the scene and with the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, one sees just how much of those energies had been forcibly

suppressed for so long and now we're allowed to re-emerge. Mao died in 1976. You wrote that the CCP in 81 looking back through the lens of historical analysis said that he was 70% correct.

70 exactly 70% correct. Not 69 not 71. That's the only one. The scientific precision I mean we should we should say that again and again the co-opting of the authority of science by so the union by Mao by Nazi Germany, Nazi science 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 is also a thing that could be used by politicians and dictators to do horrific things. It's essence is questing not certainty.

Yes, it's questing. Exactly. Humility. Intellectual humility. So how did China evolve after Mao's death to today? Well, I think that there is without denouncing Mao, without repudiating Mao's 70% correctness, the regime actually undertook a new venture and that venture was to open up economically to gain access to world markets and to play a global role always with a proviso that the party retained

political supremacy. It's been pointed out that while Khrushchev tries in the Soviet Union, in 1956 especially with a secret speech in which he denounces Stalin's crimes, he tries to go back to the founders intentions of Lenin. Nothing like that, it's argued, it's possible in the Chinese case because Mao was not the equivalent of Stalin for communist China, Mao was the equivalent of Lenin. Mao was the founder so there's no repudiating of him. They are stuck

with that formula of 70%. And acknowledging that there were some problems, but by and large arguing that it was the correct stance of the party and its leader that was paramount. And the results of this wager are where we are today. China has been transformed out of all recognition in terms of not all of the living standards of the country, but many places. Its economic growth has been dramatic and the new dispensation is such that people ask, is this a communist country anymore?

And that's probably a question that haunts China's current leadership as well. With Chairman Xi, we've seen a return to earlier patterns. Xi insisting that Mao's achievement has to be held as equal to that of the reform period. Sometimes imitations or nostalgia for the Mao period or even the sufferings of the cultural revolution are part of this volatile mix.

But all of this is outward appearance. Statistics can also be misleading. And I think that very much in question is China's further revolution in our own times. In the West, China is often demonized. And we've talked extensively today about the atrocities that result from atrocities both internal and external that result from communist nations. But what can we say by way of hope to resist the demonization?

How can we avoid cold or hot war with China, we being the West or the United States in the 21st century? Well, you mentioned in the context of the claims of science, humility as a crucial attribute. I think that humility, sobriety, realism are tremendously valuable in trying to understand another society, another form of government. And so I think what needs to be very self-aware that projection onto others of what we think they're about is no substitute for actual study

of the sources that a society like that produces. It's declarations of what matters most to them. The leadership's own pronouncements about what the future holds. I think that matters a lot more than pious hopes or versions of being convinced that inevitably everyone will come to resemble us in a better future. You mentioned this earlier, but just to take a small detour. What are we supposed to think about North Korea and their declaration that they're supposedly

a communist nation? What can we say about the economic, the political system of North Korea? Or is it just like a hopelessly simple answer? This is a complete disaster of a totalitarian state? So I think the answer that a historian can give is a historical answer, right? That we have to inquire into what has to happen in order to arrive at the past we are today. We have a regime that's claiming to be communist or a, has an even better version of Marx's

original ideas in the form of a Korean adaptation called UCHE. How does that mesh with the reality that we're talking about a dynastic government, and a monarchy in all but name, but a communist monarchy, if that's what it is? I think that examining as much as we can learn about a closed society that is, goes about its everyday in ways that are inscrutable to us is very, very challenging,

but the only answer. When an example like this escapes your analytic categories, probably there's a problem with your analytical categories rather than the example being the problem in all its messiness. So there's a component here in the release of China as well to bring like somebody like John Mirsheimer into the picture. There's a military component here too, and that is ultimately how these nations interact, especially totalitarian nations interact

with the rest of the world. So nations interact economically, culturally and militarily. And the concern with countries like North Korea is the way for them to be present on the world stage in a game of geopolitics is by flexing their military might and they invest a huge amount of their GDP into the military. So I guess the question there to discuss in terms of analysis is how do we deal with this kind of system that claims to be a communist system and what lessons

can we take from history and apply it to that? Or should we simply just ignore and look the other ways we've been kind of hoping it doesn't get out of hand? Yeah, I mean there's realists see states following their own interests and prioritizing their own security and there's probably not much that could be done to change that, but conflict arising as a result of misunderstanding or mixed messages or misinterpretation. Those are things that policymakers

probably do have some control over. I think that there's internal processes that will work their way out in even as opaque a place as North Korea. It's also the reality just as we saw with the divided Germany's that it's a precarious kind of twin existence when you have countries that are across the border from one another that are derived from what used to be a single unit that now are kind of a real life social science experiment in what kind of regime do you get with one kind

of system? What sort of regime do you get with another kind of system? And that's a very unstable setup as it turns out. Now let us jump continents and in the 20th century look to North America. So you also have lectured about communism in America, the different communist movements in America. It was also founded in 1919 and evolved throughout through a couple of red scares. So what was the evolution of the communist party in just in general communist in America?

It's fascinating to observe this story because one long standing commonplace had been that socialism has less purchase or radical socialism in the United States than in European countries. So in to the extent that that was true, it was an uphill battle for the communists to get established in the United States. But it makes it all the more interesting to follow the development of the movement. And there were two challenges in particular that played a role in shaping the

American communist experience. One was the fact that to begin with the party was often identified with immigrants. The communities that had come over across the Atlantic from Europe often had strong socialist contingents. And when this break happens within the socialist movement between radical socialists and more moderate socialists, there were fiery individuals who saw the opportunity to

help shape the American communist movement. But the result was that for many American workers, they saw the sheer ethnic variety and difference of this movement as something that was unfamiliar. It would only be with the rise to the leadership of the Communist Party of Earl Browder, a American born political leader with vast ambitions for creating an American communist movement

that that image would start to be modified. Earl Browder had a meteoric rise and then fall over the promise he made that went by the slogan, communism is 20th century Americanism.

The notion was that communism could find roots in American political discourse and experience where Earl Browder fell 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 moderate their rivalry.

As it turns out with the dawning already of Cold War tensions that would later flower more fully, that was unacceptable and the movement divested itself of Earl Browder. Another point that shaped American perceptions of the communist movement in the United States involved issues of espionage. During the 1930s and the 1940s, American communists, not all of them, obviously, but select members of the movement were called upon by Soviet intelligence to play a

historical role by gathering information, winning sympathies. One of the most amazing books of the 20th century is the book written by Whitaker Chambers who had served as a Soviet spy, first a committed communist then a Soviet spy, and then later a renegade from those allegiances. His book isn't titled Witness in 1952 and it's one of the most compelling books you could ever read because it's so full of both the unique character of the author in all of his idiosyncrasies and a sense

of huge issues being at stake, one's upon which the future of humanity turns. So talk about the ethical element being of importance there. Through the apparatus of the state, the Soviets manage to infiltrate spies into America's military as well as government institutions. One great irony is that when Senator McCarthy in the 50s made vast claims about communist infiltration of the government apparatus, claims that he was unable to substantiate with details, that reality had

actually been closer to the reality of the 1930s and the 1940s than his own time. But the association of American communists with the foreign power of the Soviet Union and ultimately and adherence to its interests did a lot to undermine any kind of hearing for American communists. An example, of course, was the notorious Nazi Soviet pact in 1939. The American communist

movement found itself forced to turn on a dime in its propaganda. Before the Nazi Soviet pact of August 1939, they had denounced Nazi Germany as the greatest threat to world peace. Just after the signing of the pact, they had to proclaim that this was a great win for peace and for human harmony and to completely change their earlier relationship of being mortal enemies with Nazi Germany. There were many American communists who couldn't stomach this and who

in disillusionment simply quit their party memberships or drifted away. But it's a fascinating story of the ups and downs of a political movement with radical ambitions in American political history. Yeah, the Cold War and the extensive levels of espionage sort of created combined with Hollywood, created basically firmly solidified communism as the enemy of the American ideal.

I was sort of embodied and not even the economic policies of political policies of communism, but like the word and the color of red, the hammer and sickle, you know, Rocky IV, one of my favorite movies. Well, that's canonical, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is a bit of a meme, but meme becomes reality and there's an entourage politics and is used by politicians to do all kinds of name calling. You have spoken eloquently about modern Russia and modern Ukraine and modern

Eastern Europe. So how did Russia evolve after Stalin and after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Well, I think the short answer is without a full historical reckoning that would have been healthy about the recent past, in ways that's not very surprising because given the economic misery of dislocations and the cumulative damage of all of those previous decades of this experiment,

it left precious little patience or leisure or surplus for introspection. But after an initial period of great interest in understanding the full measure of what Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union had undergone in this first initial explosion of journalism and of reporting and investigations, historical investigations with new sources. After an initial period marked by

such interest, people instead retreated into the here and now and the today. And the result is that there's been less than would be healthy of a taking stock or reckoning, even in a signing of responsibility for those things that were experienced in the past. No Nuremberg trial took place in order to hold responsible those who had repressed others in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In other ex-communist countries, there was also precious little in the way of legal

proceedings that would have established responsibility. And keep in mind, the Nuremberg trials had as one of their goals, a very important one as it turns out, not even individual verdicts for individual people found guilty, but to collect and publicize information, to create knowledge and transparency

about what the reality had been in the past. In the case of the former Soviet Union, in the case of Russia today, instead of a clear eyed recognition of the vast nature of what it all cost, Putin, upon replacing Yeltsin, was in a position to instead traffic in the most varied eclectic and often mutually contradictory historical memories or packages of memories. So on the one hand in Putin's

Russia, the Tsars are rehabilitated as heroes of Russian statehood. Putin sees Lenin in a negative light because Lenin, by producing federalism as a model for the Soviet Union, laid a time bomb at the base of that state that eventually smashed it into many constituent parts as nations regained their independence, while Stalin, it's acknowledged, exacted a dreadful toll, but also

was effective as a representative of Russian statehood. This produced where we are today, it's a commonplace that echoed by many that Russia without Ukraine is a nation state or could be a nation state. Russia with Ukraine has to be an empire. 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 re-digest Ukraine into an expanded Russian imperial territory had taken place earlier? I think that the arrival on the scene of a new generation of Ukrainians has produced a very different dynamic and a disinclination for any kind of nostalgia for the past packaged, however it might be,

and however nostalgic it might be made to appear. And there, I think that Putin's expectations in the invasion of 2022 were entirely overturned. His expectation was that Ukraine would be divided on the score and that some significant portion of Ukrainians would welcome the advance of Russian forces. And instead, there has been the most amazing and surprising heroic resistance that continues to this day. And it's interesting to consider timing and also individual leaders.

Zelensky, you can imagine all kinds of other figures that would have folded much easier. And Zelensky, I think, surprised a lot of the world by somehow this comedian, somehow becoming an essentially an effective war president. So, you know, that put that in the bin of singular figures that define history. That surprises, yeah. How do you hope the war in Ukraine ends?

I'm very pessimistic on this score, actually. And for the reasons we just talked about how these things escape human management or even rationality, I think that war takes on a life of its own as accumulated suffering actually eliminates possible compromises or settlements that

one might talk about in the abstract. I think that it's one thing for people far away to propose trades of territory or complicated guarantees or arrangements that sound very good in the abstract and that will just be refused by people who have actually experienced what the war has been like in person and what it has meant to them and their families and everyone they know in terms of lives destroyed. I think that peacemaking is going to face a very daunting task here given

all that's accumulated. And I think in particular, you know, just from the last days of the launching of missile attacks against indiscriminate or civilian targets, that's not easy to turn the corner on. So let me ask a political question. I recently talked to Donald Trump and he said, if he's elected, before he is sworn into office, he will have a peace deal. What would a peace deal like that look like and is it even possible, do you think? So we should mention that Russia has

captured four regions of Ukraine now, the Niasco-Hansk, the Parisian, Herzog. Also, Ukraine captured a part of the course of the region within Russia. So just like you mentioned, territories on the table, you know, NATO, European Union is on the table, also funding and military help from the United States directly to Ukraine is on the table. Do you think it's possible to have a fair deal that from people like you said far away, where both people walk away, Zelensky and Putin unhappy,

but equally unhappy and peace and peace is negotiated? Equally unhappy is a very hard balance to strike probably. I think my concern is about the part of the equation that involves people just being desperately unhappy and laying the foundations for more trouble to come. I couldn't imagine what that looks like, but that's once again, these are things that escape human control in the details.

So laying the foundation for worse things to come, so it's possible we have a ceasefire that lays the foundation for a worse warrant and suffering in a year, in five years and ten years. Well, in a way, we may already be there because ratifying the use of force to change borders in Europe was a taboo since 1945 and now look where we are. If that is validated, then

it sets up incentives for more of the same. If you look at the 20th century, we've been talking about with horrendous global wars that happen then and you look at now, and it feels like just living in the moment with the war in Ukraine, breaking the contract of

you're not supposed to do territorial conquest anymore in the 21st century, that then the just intensity of hatred and military tension in the Middle East with the Israel, Iran, Palestine, just building and then China, calmly, but with a big stick talking about Taiwan. Do you think a big conflict may be on the way? Do you think it's possible that another global war happens in the 21st century? I hope not, but I think so many predictions

reach their expiration dates and get invalidated. Obviously, we're confronting a dire situation in the present. As a historian, let me ask you for advice. What advice would you give on interviewing world leaders, whether it's people who are no longer here, some of the people who have been talking about Hitler's Stalin, Mao, or people who are still here, Putin's Zalansky Trump, Kamal Harris, Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, as a historian, what is it possible to have an interesting conversation?

Maybe as a thought experiment, what kind of conversation would you like to have with Hitler in the 1930s or Stalin in the 1920s? Well, first of all, the answer is very clear. I would never presume to advise you about interviewing world leaders and prominent people because the roster that you've

accumulated is just astonishing. But I know what I might aim for. That is, I think in historical analysis, in trying to understand the role of a particular leader, the more one understands about their prior background and formative influences, the better a fix, I think, when it gets on the question of what are their expectations? What is the, in German, there's a beautiful word for this. German's managed to mash together several words into one even better word.

And in German, it's Evato-Horizant, the horizon of expectation. So in the case of figures like Churchill or Hitler, their experience of World War One shaped their actions in World War Two, their values were shaped in their childhood. Is there a way of engaging with someone you're interviewing even obliquely that gives a view in on their sense of what the future might hold? And I mean that obviously such people are expert at being guarded and not being pinned down,

but the categories in which they're thinking. A sense of what their own ethical grounding might be, or their ethical code that gives hints to their behavior. It gets said, and again, it's a cliche, 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. 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?

Speaking of prominent world leaders to interview, there's Napoleon. Napoleon psychologically must have been a quite amazing person to make a bid for mastery of Europe and then already thinking about the mastery of the world. But contemporaries who met Napoleon said that it was very disturbing to talk with him, because meeting with him one-on-one revealed that he could talk to you, but look like he was looking right through you, as if you were not fully real. You were more in the

nature of a character on a chessboard. For that reason, some of them called Napoleon the master of the sightless stare. If you're talking with a world leader and he or she has a sightless stare, that's probably a bad sign. But there might be other inadvertent clues or hints about the moral compass, or the future expectations of a leader that emerged in one of your wonderful conversations. Yeah, you put it brilliantly in several ways, but the moral compass getting sneaking up

to the full nuance and complexity of the moral compass. One of the ways of doing that is looking at the various horizons in time about their vision of the future. I imagine it's possible to get Hitler to talk about the future of the Third Reich and to see in ways like what he actually envisioned that as, and similar with Stalin. But of course, funny enough, I believe those leaders would be easier to talk to, because there's nothing to be afraid of in terms of political competition.

Modern leaders are a little bit more guarded because they have to, they have opposition often to contend with constituencies. And constituencies. You did a lot of amazing courses, including for the great courses. On the topic of communism, you just finished the third. So you did a series of lectures on the rise of communism, then communism and power, and then decline and fall. Right up communism, decline and decline. 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. What was that journey like of taking everything you know, your expertise on Eastern Europe, but just bringing your lens, your wisdom, your focus onto this topic and what it takes to actually bring it to life? Well, journey is probably just the right word because it's this week that the third of that

trilogy, decline of communism is being released. And it felt like something that I very much wanted to do because the history that's narrated there is one that is so compelling and often so tragic that it needs to be shared. The vast amount of material that one can include is probably dwarfed by the amount that actually ends up on the cutting room floor. One could probably do an entire

lecture course on every single one of those lecture topics that got broached. But one of the great satisfaction of putting together a course like this is also being able to give further suggestions for study to the listeners. And in some cases to introduce them to neglected classics or books that make you want to grab somebody by the little pals and say you've got to read this. There's probably

few things that are as exciting as a really keen and targeted reading recommendation. In addition, I've also done other courses on the history of World War One, on the diplomatic history of Europe from 1500 to the present, a course on the history of Eastern Europe, and also a course on dictatorships called Utopia and Terror, and then also a course on explorers and a course on turning points in modern history. And every single one of those is so rewarding because you learn

so much in the process. And it's really fantastic. And I should highly recommend that people sign up to the, for sure, all this is the great courses where you can buy the courses individually, but I recommend people sign up for great courses plus, which I think is like a monthly membership where you get access to all these courses and they're just incredible. And I recommend people

watch all of yours. Since you mentioned books, this is an impossible question and I apologize ahead of time, but is there books you can recommend just in your own life that you've enjoyed, whether really small or some obvious recommendations that you recommend people read. It is a bit like asking what's your favorite band. That's right. Well, would a book that got turned into a movie

be acceptable as well? Yes. So in that case, you know, all of us reflect on our own childhoods and that magical moment of reading a book or seeing a movie that really got you launched on some particular set of things that you're 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. Shavago. And then later reading the novel on which it was

based by Pasta knock. And even though the film had to be filmed on location in Spain pretending to be revolutionary Russia, it was magical for the sheer sweep and tragedy and human resilience that it showed. The very way in which a work of literature or a cinematography could capture so much. Still, I'm still amazed by that. And then there's also in the spirit of recommending neglected classics

my favorite author. My favorite author is a now a late Canadian author by the name of Robertson Davies who wrote novel after novel in a mode that probably would get called magical realism, but is so much more. Robertson Davies was heavily influenced by Carl Jung and Jung in philosophy. But in literary form, he managed to create stories that blend the mythical, the mystical, and the brutally real to paint a picture of Canada as he knew it, Europe as he knew it,

and the world as he knew it. And he's most famous probably for the depth for trilogy, three novels in a series that are linked, and they're just masterful. If only there were more books like that. The depth for trilogy, fifth business, the Manticore, World of Wonders, and you got a really nice beard. Yes, it was an amazing beard. Very 19th century. Okay, beautiful. What advice would you give to young people today that have just listened to us talk about the 20th century and the

terrifying prospects of ideals implemented into reality? And by the way, many of the revolutions are carried out by young people. And so, you know, the good and the bad and the ugly is thanks to the young people. So the young people listening today, what advice would you give them? Well, it comes

down to one word, and that one word is read. I'm, as a college teacher, I'm concerned about what I'm seeing unfolding before us, which is classes, not my classes, but classes in which students are asked to read very little, or maybe in some cases, not at all, or snippets that they are

provided digitally, those have their place and can be valuable. But the task of sitting down with a book and absorbing its message, not agreeing with it necessarily, but taking in the implications, learning how to think within the categories and the values of the author is going to be irreplaceable. And my anxiety is that with college bookstores now moving entirely to the paperless format, it changes how people interact with texts. And if the result is not a

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, abroadening of your own sensibilities of what's possible, what's in the full range of being human, and then what's best? What are the best models for what has been thought

and felt and how people have acted? Otherwise, we fall prey to manipulators and the ability of artificial intelligence to give us versions of realities that never existed and never will and the like. It's a really interesting idea. So let me give a shout out to Perplexity that I'm using here to sort of summarize and take quick notes and get little snippets of stuff, which is extremely

useful. But it's not books are not just about information, transfer. It's just as you said, it's a journey together with a set of ideas and that's a conversation and getting a summary of the book is the cliché thing is it's really getting to the destination without the journey. And the journey is the thing that's important, thinking through stuff. And I've actually learned, you know, I've been surprised, I've learned, I've trained my brain to

be able to get the same thing from audio books also. It's a little bit more difficult because you don't control the pacing. Sometimes pausing is nice, but you could still get it from audio books, so it's an audio version of 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. But there is a magical thing, and I also try 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 point it out, the original traditions of literature were oral, right? So that's actually the one point

o version, right? And combining these things is probably the key. I think one of the things I find so so wonderful about the best lectures that I've heard is it's a chance to hear someone thinking out loud, not laying down the law, but taking you through a series of logical moves, imaginative leaps, alternative suggestions, and that that's much more than than data transfer.

The use case of AI as a companion as you read is really exciting to me. I've been using it recently to basically as you read, you can have a conversation with a system that has access to a lot of things about a particular paragraph. And to I've been really surprised how my brain when given some extra ideas, other recommendations of books, but also just like a summary of other ideas from elsewhere in the universe that relates to this paragraph is it sparks your imagination and thought and you

see the actual richness in the thing you're reading. Now, nobody's to my knowledge is implemented a really intuitive interaction between AI and the text. Unfortunately, partially because the books are protected under DRM. And so there's like a wall where you can't access the thing. So if you want to play with that kind of thing, you have to break the law a little bit, which is not a nice thing, not a good thing, but just like with music, Napster came up. People started

illegally sharing music. And the answer to that was Spotify, which made the sharing of music, Revolutionized everything and made the sharing of music much easier. So there are some technological things that can enrich the experience of reading, but the actual painful, long process of reading is really useful, just like boredom is useful. That's right. It's also called just sitting there.

Underrated virtue. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, you have to see the smartphone as an 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 US brain debt as possible and getting you to look at more and more and more things. So it's nice and fun.

It's great. Recommended highly. It's good for dopamine rush, but see it as a counter is a counter force to the process of sitting with an idea for a prolonged period of time, taking a journey through an expert eloquently, conveying that idea and growing by having a conversation with that idea and a book is really, really powerful. So I agree with you totally. What gives you hope about the future of humanity? We've talked about the dark past.

What gives you hope for the light at the end of the tunnel? So we talked indeed about a lot of latent, really damaging and negative energies that are part of human nature, but I find hope in another aspect of human nature. And that is the sheer variety of human reactions to situations. The very fact that history is full of so many stories of amazing endurance, amazing resilience, the will to build up even after the horrors have passed. This to me is an inexhaustible source of

optimism. And there are some people who condemn cultural appropriation and say that borrowing from one culture to another is to be condemned. The problem is a synonym for cultural appropriation is world history, trade, transfer of ideas, influences, valuing that, which is unlike your own culture, is also a form of appropriation, quite literally. And so those that multitude of human reactions and the fact that our experience is so unlimited as history testifies gives me great

hope for the future. Yeah, and the willingness of humans to explore all that with curiosity, even when the empires fall and the dreams are broken, we rise again. That's right, unceasingly. Vegas, thank you so much for your incredible work, your incredible lectures, your books, and thank you for talking today. Thank you for this such a fun chat. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Veyha Slodivicious. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors

in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx. History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a force. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.