Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler

00:00:00.000 | And the outcome here is a horrific man-made famine,

00:00:03.940 | not a natural disaster, not bad harvest,

00:00:06.140 | but a man-made famine as a result of then the compulsion

00:00:09.720 | that gets used by the Soviet state

00:00:11.400 | to extract those resources,

00:00:13.220 | corning off the area, not allowing starving people to escape.

00:00:17.900 | You put very well some of the implications

00:00:21.740 | of this case study in how things look

00:00:25.500 | in the abstract versus in practice.

00:00:29.220 | And those phenomena were going to haunt

00:00:33.420 | the rest of the experience of the Soviet Union.

00:00:35.960 | The whole notion that up and down the chain of command,

00:00:40.280 | everybody is falsifying or tinkering with

00:00:43.980 | or prettifying the statistics or their reports

00:00:48.860 | in order not to look bad and not to have vengeance

00:00:52.420 | visited upon them, reaches the point where nobody,

00:00:57.080 | in spite of the pretense of comprehensive knowledge,

00:01:00.220 | there's a state planning agency that creates five-year plans

00:01:05.220 | for the economy as a whole,

00:01:07.400 | and which is supposed to have accurate statistics,

00:01:09.820 | all of this is founded upon a foundation of sand.

00:01:14.820 | A deliberate plan to bring class conflict

00:01:18.300 | and bring civil war and then heighten it

00:01:20.700 | in the countryside does damage.

00:01:24.080 | And not least of that is this phenomenon

00:01:27.220 | of a negative selection.

00:01:29.080 | Those who have most enterprise,

00:01:31.980 | those who are most entrepreneurial,

00:01:33.900 | those who have most self-discipline,

00:01:36.740 | those who are best organized,

00:01:38.980 | will be winnowed again and again and again,

00:01:43.980 | sending the message that mediocrity

00:01:46.540 | is comparatively much safer than talent.

00:01:49.740 | Hitler and Himmler envisioned permanent war

00:01:54.400 | on the Eastern Front, not a peace treaty,

00:01:57.800 | not a settlement, not a border,

00:02:00.280 | but a constant moving of the border

00:02:02.960 | every generation, hundreds of miles east,

00:02:06.720 | in order to keep winning more and more living space.

00:02:11.000 | And with analogy to other frontiers,

00:02:14.620 | to always give more fighting experience

00:02:17.600 | and more training in aggression

00:02:19.620 | to generation after generation of German soldiers.

00:02:23.780 | In terms of nightmarish visions,

00:02:25.740 | this one's right up there.

00:02:27.180 | - The following is a conversation with Weihas Ludwig Wischus,

00:02:33.320 | a historian specializing in Germany and Eastern Europe.

00:02:37.500 | He has lectured extensively on the rise,

00:02:40.380 | the reign, and the fall of communism.

00:02:42.740 | Our discussion goes deep on this,

00:02:45.120 | the very heaviest of topics,

00:02:47.100 | the communist ideology that has led

00:02:49.660 | to over 100 million deaths in the 20th century.

00:02:54.100 | We also discuss Hitler, Nazi ideology, and World War II.

00:02:58.800 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:03:01.960 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:03:03.900 | in the description.

00:03:05.340 | And now, dear friends, here's Weihas Ludwig Wischus.

00:03:09.740 | Let's start with Karl Marx.

00:03:12.600 | What were the central ideas of Marx

00:03:15.380 | that lay the foundation of communism?

00:03:17.580 | - I think there were several key ideas that Marx deployed

00:03:21.260 | that were destined to have such an impact.

00:03:23.380 | And in some ways, they were actually kind of contradictory.

00:03:27.940 | On the one hand, Marx insisted that history has a purpose,

00:03:32.500 | that history is not just random events,

00:03:35.060 | but that rather it's history, we might say,

00:03:37.220 | with a capital H, history moving in a deliberate direction,

00:03:41.180 | history having a goal,

00:03:43.520 | a direction that it was predestined to move in.

00:03:47.940 | At the same time, in "The Communist Manifesto,"

00:03:50.980 | Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels

00:03:53.940 | also suggested that there was a role

00:03:56.020 | for special individuals who might,

00:03:59.460 | even if history was still moving

00:04:00.860 | in this predetermined direction,

00:04:02.660 | might give it an extra push,

00:04:05.100 | might play a heroic role in that process.

00:04:08.100 | And I think that these two ideas added together,

00:04:11.140 | the notion that there is a science of revolution

00:04:14.740 | that suggests that you can move in a deliberate

00:04:17.420 | and meaningful, rational way towards the end of history

00:04:21.820 | and the resolution of all conflicts,

00:04:24.140 | a total liberation of the human person,

00:04:27.380 | and that moreover, that was inevitable,

00:04:29.460 | that that was pre-programmed and destined

00:04:31.660 | in the order of things.

00:04:33.380 | When you add to that the notion

00:04:35.180 | that there's also room for heroism and the individual role,

00:04:40.100 | this ended up being tremendously powerful as a combination.

00:04:43.940 | Earlier thinkers who were socialists

00:04:47.340 | had already dreamt of or projected futures

00:04:50.420 | where all conflict would be resolved

00:04:53.140 | and human life would achieve some sort of perfection.

00:04:56.620 | Marx added these other elements

00:04:59.100 | that made it far more powerful than the earlier versions

00:05:01.860 | that he decried as merely utopian socialism.

00:05:05.660 | - So there's a million questions I could ask there,

00:05:07.540 | but so on the utopian side,

00:05:09.140 | so there is a utopian component

00:05:12.140 | to the way he tried to conceive of his ideas.

00:05:16.900 | - Yeah, absolutely.

00:05:17.740 | I mean, first of all, one has to stress,

00:05:19.300 | Marx would have gotten extremely upset

00:05:21.020 | at this point in the conversation

00:05:22.980 | because to call someone a utopian

00:05:24.980 | was precisely to argue that you're not scientific,

00:05:27.540 | you're not rational,

00:05:28.540 | you are not laying out the iron laws of history,

00:05:31.140 | you're merely hoping for the best,

00:05:33.140 | and that might be laudable,

00:05:34.420 | but it was fundamentally unrealistic.

00:05:37.020 | That said, hidden among Marx's insistence

00:05:41.300 | that there are laws and structures

00:05:45.420 | as history moves through class conflict,

00:05:48.860 | modes of production towards its ultimate goal

00:05:52.820 | of a comprehensive final revolution

00:05:55.700 | that will see all exploitation overthrown

00:05:58.700 | and people finally being freed from necessity,

00:06:01.660 | smuggled in among those things

00:06:05.060 | are most definitely utopian elements.

00:06:07.500 | And there, they come especially at the end

00:06:09.700 | in which Marx sketches the notion

00:06:13.700 | of what things will look like

00:06:15.820 | after the revolution has resolved all problems.

00:06:18.980 | There, vagueness sets in.

00:06:21.220 | It's clear that it's a blessed state

00:06:23.180 | that's being talked about,

00:06:25.100 | people no longer exploiting one another,

00:06:27.500 | people no longer subject to necessity or poverty,

00:06:31.700 | but instead enjoying all of the productivity

00:06:35.300 | of industrialization that hitherto

00:06:37.460 | had been put to private profit,

00:06:39.220 | now collectively owned and deployed.

00:06:42.460 | The notion that one will be able to work

00:06:45.220 | at one job in the morning

00:06:46.860 | and then engage in leisure activity

00:06:49.380 | or yet another fulfilling job in the afternoon,

00:06:52.500 | all of this free of any contradictions,

00:06:56.780 | free of necessity,

00:06:58.500 | free of the sort of ordinary irritations

00:07:01.900 | that we experience in our ordinary lives,

00:07:03.460 | that's deeply utopian.

00:07:05.180 | The difference was that Marx charted a route

00:07:07.780 | towards that outcome that presented itself

00:07:12.300 | as cutting edge science

00:07:14.620 | and moreover having the full credibility

00:07:17.660 | that science commanded so much,

00:07:19.140 | especially in the 19th and early 20th century.

00:07:22.500 | - So there is a long journey from capitalism to communism

00:07:26.900 | that includes a lot of problems.

00:07:28.460 | He thought once you resolve the problems,

00:07:31.660 | all the complexities of human interactions,

00:07:34.740 | the friction, the problems will be gone.

00:07:37.660 | - To the extent that they were based on inequalities

00:07:40.060 | and on man's exploitation of man,

00:07:44.580 | the result was supposed to be a resolution of all of this.

00:07:49.580 | And inevitably, when you talk about the history of communism,

00:07:52.340 | you have to include the fact

00:07:54.180 | that this often tragic and dramatic history

00:07:57.340 | produced a lot of jokes.

00:07:59.140 | Jokes that were in part reactions

00:08:00.700 | sometimes to the ideological claims

00:08:02.540 | made by people like Marx.

00:08:03.700 | And one of the famous jokes was that,

00:08:05.820 | what's the difference between capitalism and communism?

00:08:08.980 | And the joke's answer was,

00:08:10.300 | capitalism is the exploitation of man by man

00:08:13.220 | and communism is the exact opposite.

00:08:16.340 | (laughing)

00:08:17.860 | - Yeah, you actually have a lecture on humor.

00:08:20.780 | Yeah, I love it.

00:08:21.620 | And you deliver in such a dry, beautiful way.

00:08:24.100 | Okay, there's again, a million questions.

00:08:26.060 | So you outline a set of contradictions,

00:08:29.180 | but it's interesting to talk about his view.

00:08:32.300 | For example, what was Marx's view of history?

00:08:35.940 | - Marx had been a student of Hegel.

00:08:40.180 | And Hegel is a German idealist philosopher,

00:08:43.020 | had announced very definitively that history has a purpose.

00:08:48.020 | History is not a collection of random facts.

00:08:51.500 | And as an idealist, he proposed that

00:08:54.180 | the true movement of history, the true meaning of history,

00:08:57.940 | what made history, history with a capital H,

00:09:00.540 | something that's transcendent and meaningful,

00:09:02.900 | was that it was the working out of an idea

00:09:05.500 | through different civilizations,

00:09:07.380 | different stages of historical development.

00:09:09.300 | And that idea was the idea of human freedom.

00:09:12.380 | So it was not individuals or great thinkers alone

00:09:17.380 | making history and having an impact.

00:09:19.940 | It was the idea itself, striving to come to fruition,

00:09:24.580 | striving to come to an evermore perfect realization.

00:09:28.620 | In the case of Hegel,

00:09:30.780 | in this very Prussian and German context,

00:09:33.740 | he identified the realization of freedom

00:09:36.260 | also with the growth of the state,

00:09:38.340 | because he thought that governments

00:09:40.060 | are the ones that are going to be able to deliver on laws

00:09:43.260 | and on the ideal of a state of the rule of law,

00:09:47.620 | in German, the Rechtsstaat.

00:09:50.220 | That was a noble dream.

00:09:53.220 | At the same time, as we recognize from our perspective,

00:09:56.380 | state power has been put to all sorts of purposes

00:09:58.660 | besides guaranteeing the rule of law in our own times.

00:10:01.980 | What Marx did was to take this characteristic insistence

00:10:06.980 | of Hegel that history is moving in a meaningful

00:10:10.860 | and discernible way towards the realization of an idea

00:10:14.620 | and flipped it on its head.

00:10:16.540 | Marx insisted that Hegel had so much

00:10:19.260 | that was right in his thinking,

00:10:20.660 | but what he had neglected to keep in mind

00:10:23.460 | was that in fact, history is based on matter.

00:10:27.380 | So hence dialectical materialism,

00:10:30.940 | dialectical referring to things proceeding by clashes

00:10:34.820 | or conflict towards an ever greater realization

00:10:39.420 | of some essential idea.

00:10:42.220 | And so Marx adapts a lot of ideas of Hegel.

00:10:45.460 | You can recognize entire rhetorical maneuvers

00:10:49.660 | that are indebted to that earlier training,

00:10:52.860 | but now taken in a very different direction.

00:10:56.220 | What remained though was the confidence

00:10:58.900 | of being on the right side of history.

00:11:01.460 | And there are few things that are as intoxicating

00:11:04.560 | as being convinced that your actions

00:11:07.420 | not only are right in the abstract,

00:11:10.460 | but are also destined to be successful.

00:11:14.180 | - And also that you have the rigor of science

00:11:18.140 | backing you in your journey towards the truth.

00:11:21.220 | - Absolutely.

00:11:22.180 | So Engels, when he gives the great side eulogy

00:11:26.420 | for his beloved friend Marx,

00:11:29.140 | claims that Marx is essentially the Darwin of history,

00:11:34.220 | the Darwin of history.

00:11:35.060 | That he had done for the world of politics

00:11:38.220 | and of human history,

00:11:41.840 | what Darwin had done with his theory of evolution,

00:11:45.260 | understanding the hidden mechanism,

00:11:48.060 | understanding the laws that are at work

00:11:51.260 | and that make that whole process meaningful

00:11:55.020 | rather than just one damn thing after another.

00:11:57.720 | - What about the sort of famous line

00:12:02.020 | that history of all existing societies

00:12:03.980 | is the history of class struggles?

00:12:05.900 | So what about this conception of history

00:12:07.900 | as a history of class struggle?

00:12:10.100 | - Well, so this was the motive force

00:12:11.620 | that Karl Marx and Engels saw

00:12:13.780 | driving the historical process forward.

00:12:15.820 | And it's important to keep in mind

00:12:18.320 | that class conflict doesn't just mean

00:12:21.120 | revolutions, revolts, peasant uprisings.

00:12:25.460 | It's sort of the totality of frictions

00:12:29.500 | and of clashes, conflicts of interest

00:12:32.920 | that appear in any society.

00:12:34.660 | And so Marx was able in this spirit

00:12:37.080 | that he avowed was very scientific

00:12:39.840 | to demarcate stages of historical transformation.

00:12:44.420 | Primitive communism in the prehistoric period,

00:12:47.800 | then moving towards what was called state slavery.

00:12:51.680 | That's to say the early civilizations

00:12:53.840 | deploying human resources

00:12:56.220 | and ordering them by all powerful monarchs.

00:12:59.760 | Then private slavery in the ancient period

00:13:03.180 | and then moving to feudalism in the middle ages.

00:13:06.920 | And then here's where Marx is able to deliver

00:13:10.260 | a pronouncement about his own times,

00:13:12.420 | seeing that the present day is the penultimate,

00:13:16.000 | the next to last stage of this historical development.

00:13:19.640 | Because the feudal system of the middle ages

00:13:22.140 | and the dominance of the aristocracy has been overcome,

00:13:25.920 | has been displaced by the often heroic achievements,

00:13:29.840 | astonishing achievements in commerce

00:13:32.300 | and in world building of the middle class,

00:13:34.640 | the bourgeoisie, who have taken the world

00:13:38.340 | into their own hands and are engaged in class conflict

00:13:43.180 | with the class below them,

00:13:45.220 | which is the working class or the proletariat.

00:13:48.060 | And so this sort of conflict also, by the way,

00:13:52.680 | obtains within classes.

00:13:54.140 | So the bourgeoisie are going to be gravediggers,

00:13:57.460 | Marx announces, of their own supremacy

00:14:00.380 | because they're also competing against one another.

00:14:02.920 | And members who don't survive that competition

00:14:06.780 | get pressed down into the subordinate working class,

00:14:10.860 | which grows and grows and grows to the point where

00:14:14.300 | at some future moment, the inevitable explosion will come

00:14:19.300 | and a swift revolution will overturn this last,

00:14:24.620 | this penultimate stage of human history

00:14:27.860 | and usher in instead the dictatorship of the working class.

00:14:31.740 | And then the abolition of all classes

00:14:34.240 | because with only one class remaining,

00:14:36.400 | everyone is finally unified

00:14:39.040 | and without those internal contradictions

00:14:41.160 | that had marked class conflict before.

00:14:43.640 | - The dictatorship of the working class

00:14:45.320 | is an interesting term.

00:14:46.920 | So what is the role of revolution in history?

00:14:50.680 | - So this in particular for Marx,

00:14:52.680 | I think is a really key moment,

00:14:53.840 | which is what makes that such a good question.

00:14:56.200 | In his vision, the epic narrative

00:14:58.040 | that he's presenting to us,

00:15:00.400 | revolution is key.

00:15:04.260 | It's not enough to have evolutionary change.

00:15:07.160 | It's not a question of compromises.

00:15:09.340 | It's not a case of bargaining or balancing interests.

00:15:13.980 | Revolution is necessary as part of the process

00:15:17.100 | of a subjugated class coming to awareness

00:15:20.220 | of its own historical role.

00:15:21.420 | And when we get to the proletariat,

00:15:23.020 | this working class in its entirety

00:15:27.660 | to whom Marx assigns this epic Promethean role

00:15:32.580 | of being the ones who are going to liberate all of humanity,

00:15:35.360 | a class that is universal in its interests

00:15:38.360 | and in the sort of role in salvation history

00:15:40.920 | that they'll be playing in this secular framework,

00:15:44.340 | they need revolution and the experience of revolution

00:15:48.040 | in order to come into their own.

00:15:49.680 | Because without it, you'll only have half-hearted compromise

00:15:52.240 | and something less than the consciousness

00:15:54.760 | that they then need in order to rule, to administer,

00:15:57.920 | and to play the historical role that they're fated to have.

00:16:00.860 | - How did he conceive of a revolution,

00:16:04.260 | potentially a violent revolution,

00:16:08.380 | stabilizing itself into something

00:16:11.860 | where the working class was able to rule?

00:16:15.940 | - That's where things become a good deal less detailed

00:16:19.200 | in his and Engel's accounts.

00:16:22.000 | The answer that they proposed in part was,

00:16:24.520 | this is for the future to determine.

00:16:26.740 | So all of the details will be settled later.

00:16:29.680 | I think that was allied to this

00:16:33.260 | was a tremendous confidence in some very 19th century ideas

00:16:38.260 | about how society could be administered

00:16:42.540 | and what made for orderly society

00:16:45.020 | in a way where if the right infrastructure was in place,

00:16:51.160 | you might expect society to kind of run itself

00:16:53.620 | without the need for micromanagement from above.

00:16:56.820 | And hence, we arrive at Marx's tantalizing promise

00:17:01.100 | that there will be a period

00:17:03.400 | where it'll be necessary to have centralized control.

00:17:07.780 | And there might have to be, as he puts it,

00:17:09.340 | despotic inroads against property

00:17:11.900 | in order to bring this revolution to pass.

00:17:14.580 | But then afterwards, the state,

00:17:17.920 | because it represents everybody,

00:17:19.660 | rather than representing particular class interests

00:17:22.700 | that are in conflict with other classes,

00:17:24.580 | the state will eventually wither away.

00:17:26.700 | So there won't be need for it.

00:17:28.480 | Now, that's not to say that pure stasis arrives, right?

00:17:32.120 | Or that the stabilization equals being frozen in time.

00:17:35.460 | It's not as if that is what things will look like.

00:17:38.380 | But instead, the big issues will be settled.

00:17:41.780 | And henceforth, people will be able to enjoy lives of,

00:17:46.060 | as he would consider it, in authentic freedom

00:17:48.460 | without necessity, without poverty,

00:17:51.180 | as a result of this blessed state that's been arrived at.

00:17:54.860 | - Despotic inroads against property.

00:17:58.180 | Did he elaborate on the despotic inroads?

00:18:02.580 | - Dispossession.

00:18:03.460 | Dispossession of the middle classes and of the bourgeoisie.

00:18:07.220 | In his model, humanity is never standing still, right?

00:18:11.860 | So you'd probably argue in this dynamic vision

00:18:14.340 | of how history unfolds that there's always conflict

00:18:17.700 | and it's always moving, propelling history forward

00:18:20.540 | towards its predestined ending.

00:18:22.480 | In the way he saw this climax,

00:18:27.100 | was that as things did not stay the same,

00:18:32.420 | the condition of the working class

00:18:34.340 | was constantly getting worse,

00:18:36.860 | and hence their revolutionary potential was growing.

00:18:40.260 | And at the same time, the expropriators, the bourgeoisie,

00:18:45.100 | were also facing diminishing returns

00:18:49.460 | as they competed against one another

00:18:52.260 | with more and more wealth

00:18:53.760 | concentrated in fewer and fewer hands

00:18:56.260 | and more and more elements

00:18:58.020 | of what had been the middle class

00:19:00.060 | detached from the ruling class

00:19:01.980 | and being pressed down into the working class.

00:19:06.100 | For Marx, this is really a key part.

00:19:09.580 | I mean, it's a key part of this whole ratchet effect

00:19:11.540 | that's going to produce this final historical explosion.

00:19:14.580 | And in German, the word given to that process

00:19:19.020 | was verelendung, which is very evocative.

00:19:22.700 | Elend means misery, so it's the growing misery.

00:19:26.100 | When this gets translated into English,

00:19:29.200 | the results are never quite as evocative or satisfactory.

00:19:31.860 | The words that get used are immiserization or pauperization,

00:19:36.140 | meaning more and more people are being turned into paupers.

00:19:39.300 | But for Marx, that prediction is really key.

00:19:44.020 | And even in his own lifetime,

00:19:46.500 | there were already hints that, in fact,

00:19:49.240 | if you looked sociologically

00:19:50.700 | at the really developed working classes

00:19:52.540 | in places like Great Britain or Germany,

00:19:55.580 | that process was not playing out as he had expected.

00:19:59.460 | In fact, although there have been enormous dislocations

00:20:03.500 | and tremendous suffering in the early chaotic,

00:20:06.940 | sort of Wild West stages of capitalism

00:20:10.380 | and of industrialization,

00:20:12.380 | there had been reform movements as well.

00:20:15.080 | And there had been unions which had sought

00:20:17.660 | to carve out rules and agreements with employers

00:20:22.340 | for how the conditions

00:20:25.060 | under which workers labored might be ameliorated.

00:20:28.180 | Moreover, the middle class,

00:20:30.380 | rather than dwindling and dwindling,

00:20:31.900 | seemed to actually be strengthening and growing in numbers

00:20:34.520 | or the appearance of new kinds of people

00:20:36.260 | like white-collar workers or technical experts.

00:20:39.580 | So already in Marx's own lifetime,

00:20:41.940 | and then especially in what follows Marx's lifetime,

00:20:45.580 | this becomes a real problem

00:20:46.940 | because it puts a stick into the spokes

00:20:50.660 | of this particular historical prediction.

00:20:53.420 | - Can you speak to this realm of ideas,

00:20:56.700 | which is fascinating,

00:20:57.540 | this battle of big ideas in the 19th century?

00:21:00.860 | What are the ideas that were swimming around here?

00:21:03.340 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:21:04.700 | Well, to describe the 19th century

00:21:09.580 | as sort of an age of ideologies is very apt

00:21:12.260 | because Europe is being racked

00:21:15.700 | and being put through the ringer of nationalism,

00:21:20.700 | demands for self-expression of peoples

00:21:24.580 | who earlier have been in empires or under monarchical rule,

00:21:28.280 | demands to redraw the map.

00:21:30.280 | The tremendous transformations of the Industrial Revolution

00:21:35.320 | meant that in the course of about a generation,

00:21:38.580 | you would have seen the world around you change

00:21:40.860 | in ways that made it entirely unfamiliar.

00:21:42.940 | You'd be able to travel across the landscape

00:21:44.920 | at speeds that had been unthinkable when you were a child.

00:21:47.920 | So it's enormous change and demands for yet more change.

00:21:52.920 | And so it's a great mix of ideas, ideologies,

00:21:57.860 | the old and the new, religious ideas, religious revivals,

00:22:02.460 | as well as demands for secularization.

00:22:05.780 | And stepping into all of this are Marx and Engels together

00:22:10.780 | in what has been called, I think with justice,

00:22:14.180 | one of the most important and influential

00:22:17.780 | intellectual partnerships of history.

00:22:22.060 | They were very different men.

00:22:23.760 | They were both German by origin.

00:22:26.800 | Marx had trained as an academic.

00:22:31.460 | He had married the daughter of a baron.

00:22:34.420 | Because of his radical ideas, he had foreclosed

00:22:39.060 | or just found himself cut off

00:22:41.260 | from a possible academic career

00:22:42.780 | and went the route of radical journalism.

00:22:45.420 | Engels was very different.

00:22:46.860 | Engels was the son of an industrialist

00:22:49.460 | and the family owned factories in Germany and in England.

00:22:53.300 | So he was most definitely not a member of the proletariat

00:22:56.580 | that he and Marx were celebrating

00:22:59.860 | as so significant in their future historical role.

00:23:03.460 | There were also huge differences

00:23:05.220 | in character between these men.

00:23:07.260 | Marx, when people met him,

00:23:09.540 | they were astonished by his energy and his dynamism.

00:23:12.820 | They also saw him as a man who felt determined

00:23:15.620 | to dominate arguments.

00:23:16.940 | He wanted to win arguments and was not one

00:23:20.540 | to settle for compromise or a middle road.

00:23:24.320 | He was disorderly in his personal habits.

00:23:30.180 | We might mention, among other things,

00:23:31.920 | that he impregnated the family he made

00:23:34.820 | and didn't accept responsibility for the child.

00:23:38.140 | He was also not inclined to undertake regular employment

00:23:43.980 | in order to support his growing family.

00:23:46.980 | That's where Engels came in.

00:23:48.500 | Engels, essentially, from his family fortune

00:23:51.820 | and then from his journalism afterwards,

00:23:54.620 | supported both himself and the Marx family for decades.

00:23:59.180 | And so in a sense, Engels made things happen.

00:24:02.980 | In the mysterious way that friendships work,

00:24:07.520 | the very differences between these men

00:24:09.320 | made them formidable as a dynamic duo

00:24:12.320 | because they balanced off one another's idiosyncrasies

00:24:16.360 | and turned what might've been faults

00:24:18.680 | into potential strengths.

00:24:21.280 | British historian A.J.P. Taylor

00:24:22.880 | always has a lovely turn of phrase,

00:24:24.560 | even when he's wrong about a historical issue.

00:24:27.400 | In this case, he was right.

00:24:28.520 | He said that Engels had charm and brilliance.

00:24:32.620 | Marx was a genius.

00:24:34.380 | And Engels saw himself as definitely the junior partner

00:24:37.980 | in this relationship.

00:24:39.160 | But here's the paradox.

00:24:40.720 | Without Engels, pretty clearly,

00:24:42.820 | Marx would not have gone on to have

00:24:44.680 | the sort of lasting historical impact

00:24:46.920 | in the world of ideas that he had.

00:24:48.780 | - Just to throw in the mix,

00:24:50.840 | there's interesting characters swimming around.

00:24:53.560 | So you have Darwin.

00:24:55.880 | He has a, I mean, it's difficult to characterize

00:25:00.120 | the level of impact he had,

00:25:04.400 | even just in the religious context.

00:25:06.040 | It challenges our conception of who we are as humans.

00:25:09.020 | There's Nietzsche, who's also, I don't know,

00:25:13.080 | hanging around the area.

00:25:14.840 | On the Russian side, there's Dostoevsky.

00:25:16.840 | So it's interesting to ask maybe from your perspective,

00:25:22.520 | did these people interact in the space of ideas

00:25:26.400 | to where this is relevant to our discussion,

00:25:29.080 | or is this mostly isolated?

00:25:32.200 | - I think that it's a part of a great conversation, right?

00:25:35.040 | I think that in their works,

00:25:36.940 | they're reacting to one another.

00:25:38.520 | I mean, Dostoevsky's thought

00:25:40.920 | ranges across the condition of modernity.

00:25:44.080 | And he definitely has things to say about industrialization.

00:25:47.140 | I think that they react to one another in these oblique ways,

00:25:50.660 | rather than always being at each other's throats

00:25:53.880 | in direct confrontations.

00:25:56.500 | And that's what makes the 19th century

00:25:59.920 | so compelling as a story,

00:26:03.520 | just because of the sheer vitality of the arguments

00:26:06.520 | that are taking place in ways big and small.

00:26:09.960 | - Well, we should say here,

00:26:11.840 | when you mentioned Karl Marx,

00:26:13.980 | maybe the color red comes up for people,

00:26:16.400 | and they think the Soviet Union, maybe China,

00:26:20.320 | but they don't think Germany, necessarily.

00:26:23.280 | It's interesting that, I mean,

00:26:26.000 | Germany is where communism was supposed to happen.

00:26:28.760 | - That's right.

00:26:29.800 | - And so can you maybe speak to that tension?

00:26:33.360 | - Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:26:34.660 | I mean, this is definitely a factor

00:26:37.060 | in the entire history that we're referencing.

00:26:40.560 | Marx and Engels never really shed their identity as Germans.

00:26:46.920 | Many of their preconceptions,

00:26:49.920 | even those traces of nationalism

00:26:51.920 | that they had within themselves,

00:26:53.680 | even as they were condemning nationalism

00:26:55.520 | as a fraud against the working class,

00:26:57.980 | clearly their entire formation had been affected

00:27:02.820 | by their German background.

00:27:04.640 | And it's very true, as you point out,

00:27:08.720 | that Germany is intended to be the place

00:27:12.200 | where these predictions will play out,

00:27:14.040 | also in Britain, also in France,

00:27:16.480 | also eventually in the United States.

00:27:19.040 | But it's Germany, by virtue of being its central location,

00:27:24.040 | and then its rapid development later than Britain

00:27:28.480 | or France in industrialization,

00:27:31.240 | give it this special role in Marx's worldview.

00:27:34.880 | And so it's a lasting irony,

00:27:39.880 | or a central irony of this whole story,

00:27:43.040 | that when a government establishes itself

00:27:46.800 | that claims to be following Marx's prescriptions

00:27:50.040 | and realizing his vision,

00:27:52.000 | it happens in the wreckage of the Russian empire,

00:27:54.800 | a place that did not match the requirements

00:27:57.600 | of being industrialized, developed,

00:27:59.760 | well on its way in this historical process.

00:28:02.480 | And nobody knew this better than the Bolsheviks.

00:28:07.600 | Lenin and his colleagues had a keen sense

00:28:11.960 | that what they were doing, exciting as it was,

00:28:15.880 | was a gamble, it was a risk,

00:28:17.680 | because in fact, the revolution to really take hold

00:28:21.240 | had to seize power in Germany.

00:28:23.720 | And that's why immediately after taking power,

00:28:27.160 | they're not sure they're going to last.

00:28:28.920 | Their hope, their promise of salvation

00:28:32.600 | is that a workers' revolution will erupt in Germany,

00:28:36.720 | defeated Germany, in order to link up

00:28:39.240 | with the one that has been launched

00:28:41.160 | in this unlikely Russian location,

00:28:43.560 | and henceforth, great things will follow

00:28:47.920 | that do hew to Marx's historical vision.

00:28:52.520 | The last thing to mention about this

00:28:54.080 | is that this predominance of Germany

00:28:58.760 | in the thinking of Marx had two other reflections.

00:29:03.760 | One was that German socialists and later communists

00:29:10.600 | organize in order to fulfill Marx's vision,

00:29:14.000 | and they produce something that leaves other Westerners

00:29:18.560 | in awe in the late 19th century,

00:29:22.040 | and that's the building of a strong German workers' movement

00:29:25.720 | and a social democratic party.

00:29:28.360 | That social democratic party, by 1912,

00:29:31.480 | is the largest party in German politics by vote,

00:29:34.640 | and there's the possibility they might even come to power

00:29:37.520 | without needing radical revolution,

00:29:40.320 | which, again, also goes against Marx's original vision

00:29:44.360 | of the necessity for a revolution.

00:29:46.480 | Workers around the world, or rather radical socialists,

00:29:52.520 | look with admiration and awe

00:29:54.760 | at what the Germans have achieved,

00:29:56.720 | and they see themselves as trying to do

00:29:58.400 | what the Germans have done.

00:29:59.360 | The final point is, growing up during the Cold War,

00:30:04.040 | one thought that, well, if you want to represent somebody

00:30:06.800 | as being a communist,

00:30:07.960 | that person has to have a Russian accent,

00:30:09.920 | because Russia, after all,

00:30:12.240 | the homeland of this form of government, the Soviet Union,

00:30:15.560 | that must be the point of origin.

00:30:19.040 | Before the Bolsheviks seized power,

00:30:21.640 | in order to really be a serious radical socialist,

00:30:24.720 | you needed to read German,

00:30:26.200 | because you needed to read Marx,

00:30:27.760 | and you needed to read Kautsky,

00:30:29.280 | and you needed to read Bernstein

00:30:31.160 | and other thinkers in this tradition,

00:30:33.440 | and it's only after the Soviet seizure of power

00:30:37.520 | that this all changes.

00:30:39.080 | So there's lots of marks of that phenomenon.

00:30:42.400 | - Which is why the clash between nationalism and communism

00:30:47.280 | in Germany is such a fascinating aspect of history

00:30:51.960 | and all the different trajectories it could take,

00:30:53.760 | and we'll talk about it.

00:30:55.320 | But if we return to the 19th century,

00:30:57.920 | you've said that Marx's chief rival

00:31:01.480 | was Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin,

00:31:06.920 | who famously said in 1942,

00:31:09.520 | quote, "The passion for destruction

00:31:11.160 | "is also a creative passion."

00:31:13.480 | So what kind of future did Bakunin envision?

00:31:17.440 | - Well, Bakunin, in some things, agreed with Marx,

00:31:20.280 | and in many others, disagreed.

00:31:22.280 | He was an anarchist,

00:31:23.400 | rather than abhewing to the sort of scheme of history

00:31:27.800 | that Marx was proposing.

00:31:29.480 | So he did see humanity as fighting a struggle

00:31:32.640 | for a better way of life.

00:31:34.680 | He envisioned, as your quote suggests,

00:31:37.160 | that revolution and sheer confrontation

00:31:41.520 | and overthrow of the existing state of things,

00:31:43.680 | not compromise, was going to be the way to get there.

00:31:46.560 | But his vision was very different.

00:31:48.520 | Rather than organizing conspiratorial

00:31:53.520 | and hierarchical political movement,

00:31:57.080 | Bakunin envisioned that the ties would be far looser,

00:32:02.080 | that both the revolutionary movement

00:32:04.160 | and the future state of humanity

00:32:06.520 | would grow out of the free association,

00:32:08.720 | the anarchist thinking,

00:32:09.800 | the free association of individuals

00:32:12.440 | who rejected hierarchical thinking

00:32:14.600 | in their relations with one another,

00:32:16.600 | rejected the state as a form of organized violence,

00:32:20.200 | and rejected traditional religious ideas

00:32:22.800 | that he saw as buttressing hierarchies.

00:32:26.040 | So Bakunin is part of a broader movement

00:32:29.920 | of socialists and anarchists who were demanding change

00:32:32.960 | and envisioning really fundamental transformation,

00:32:35.920 | but his particular anarchist vision

00:32:37.920 | steers him into conflict with Marx.

00:32:40.320 | And he makes some prophetic remarks

00:32:42.520 | about the problems with the system that Marx is proposing.

00:32:47.520 | You should add to this,

00:32:48.880 | that the very fact that Marx is a German by background

00:32:53.520 | and Bakunin is Russian kind of adds a further nationalist

00:32:56.280 | or element of ethnic difference there.

00:32:58.800 | Bakunin warned that a sort of creeping

00:33:03.160 | German authoritarianism might insinuate its way

00:33:07.920 | into a movement that hewed too closely to having hierarchies

00:33:12.480 | in the struggle to overthrow hierarchies.

00:33:15.240 | And his anarchist convictions are not in question here.

00:33:20.240 | They led him into conflict with Marx

00:33:23.200 | and Marx railed against him, denounced him,

00:33:27.160 | and eventually had him expelled from the international.

00:33:31.880 | One of the things though,

00:33:33.120 | that also makes Bakunin so significant is,

00:33:36.160 | Bakunin is the first in a longer series of approaches

00:33:41.160 | between anarchists and communists,

00:33:45.360 | where they try to make common cause.

00:33:48.000 | And you have to say that in every case,

00:33:50.040 | it ends badly for the anarchists,

00:33:52.440 | because the communist vision in particular,

00:33:57.020 | especially in its Leninist version,

00:33:59.120 | argued for discipline

00:34:01.480 | and a tightly organized professional revolutionary movement.

00:34:05.520 | The anarchists who sought to make common cause

00:34:08.480 | with communists,

00:34:11.080 | whether it was in the days of the Russian revolution

00:34:14.800 | or the Russian civil war,

00:34:16.720 | or whether it was then in the Spanish civil war,

00:34:21.200 | the anarchists found themselves targeted

00:34:24.640 | by the communists precisely because of their skepticism

00:34:29.640 | about what turned out to be an absolutely key element

00:34:33.700 | in the Leninist prescription for a successful revolution.

00:34:36.940 | - If we can take that tangent a little bit.

00:34:39.100 | So I guess anarchists were less organized.

00:34:43.540 | - Yeah, that's my definition.

00:34:44.620 | - Yeah.

00:34:45.460 | Why do you think anarchism hasn't been rigorously tried

00:34:49.380 | in the way that communism was?

00:34:54.100 | If we just take a complete sort of tangent,

00:34:56.500 | I mean, in one sense, we are living in anarchy today

00:35:01.500 | because the nations are in an anarchic state

00:35:06.540 | with each other.

00:35:07.860 | But why do you think sort of there's not been

00:35:09.900 | an anarchist revolution?

00:35:11.660 | - Well, I think that probably some anarchists

00:35:14.020 | would beg to differ, right?

00:35:15.020 | They would see communes in Spain

00:35:19.500 | during the Spanish civil war as an example

00:35:22.460 | of trying to put anarchist ideas into place.

00:35:25.140 | Bakunin flitted from one area of unrest to another,

00:35:29.340 | hoping to be in on finally the founding

00:35:32.740 | of the sort of free communes that he had in mind.

00:35:35.500 | Another key point in all of this

00:35:38.300 | is that anarchy means something different

00:35:40.420 | to different people as a term.

00:35:42.580 | And so when you point out quite correctly

00:35:44.980 | that we have an anarchic international situation,

00:35:48.140 | that's kind of the Hobbesian model

00:35:50.580 | of the war of all against all, where man is a wolf to man.

00:35:54.300 | Generally, except if you're talking about nihilists

00:35:58.300 | in the Russian revolutionary tradition,

00:36:01.820 | anarchists see anarchy as a blessed state

00:36:05.140 | and one where finally people will be freed

00:36:08.900 | from the distorting influence of hierarchies,

00:36:12.100 | traditional beliefs, subjugation, inequalities.

00:36:16.300 | So for them, anarchy, growing out of the liberation

00:36:20.540 | of the human being is seen as a positive good and peaceful.

00:36:24.740 | Now that's at odds with the prescription

00:36:27.700 | of someone like Bakunin for how to get there.

00:36:30.140 | He sees overthrow as being necessary on the route to that.

00:36:35.140 | But as we point out, it's absolutely key

00:36:40.740 | to this entire dynamic that to be an anarchist

00:36:43.060 | means that your efforts are not gonna be organized

00:36:45.700 | the way a disciplined

00:36:47.220 | and tightly organized revolutionary movement would be.

00:36:50.540 | - Yeah, it's an interesting stretch

00:36:52.700 | that a violent revolution will take us to a place

00:36:56.340 | of no violence or very little violence.

00:36:59.420 | So it's a leap.

00:37:00.900 | - It's a leap.

00:37:02.380 | And it kind of, it points to a phenomenon

00:37:05.180 | that would have enraged Marx

00:37:08.180 | and would have been deeply alienating

00:37:10.480 | to others in the tradition who followed him,

00:37:12.860 | but that so many scholars have commented on.

00:37:16.340 | And that's that there is a religious element,

00:37:19.180 | not a avowed one, but a kind of hidden religious

00:37:23.140 | or secular religious element to Marx's vision,

00:37:27.440 | to the tradition that follows Marx.

00:37:30.500 | And just think of the correspondences, right?

00:37:34.420 | Marx himself as kind of a,

00:37:36.540 | positioning himself as a savior figure,

00:37:38.960 | whether that's a Prometheus or a Moses

00:37:40.960 | who will lead people to the promised land.

00:37:43.260 | The apocalypse or the end times is this final revolution

00:37:48.260 | that will usher in a blessed final state, a utopia,

00:37:52.900 | which is equivalent to a secular version of heaven.

00:37:57.900 | There's the working class playing the role of humanity

00:38:02.900 | in its struggle to be redeemed.

00:38:06.160 | And scholar after scholar has pointed this out.

00:38:12.300 | Reinhold Niebuhr back in the 1930s

00:38:14.860 | had an article in "The Atlantic" magazine

00:38:17.100 | that talked about the Soviet Union's communism

00:38:20.380 | as a religion.

00:38:22.060 | Erich Voegelin, a German-American scholar

00:38:25.420 | who fled the Nazis and relocated

00:38:28.700 | to Louisiana State University and wrote tomes

00:38:33.140 | about the new phenomenon of political religions

00:38:36.660 | in the modern period.

00:38:37.740 | And he saw fascism and Nazism

00:38:41.300 | and Soviet communism as bearing the stamp

00:38:46.300 | of political religions,

00:38:49.700 | meaning ideologies that promised what an earlier age

00:38:54.700 | would have understood in religious terms.

00:38:57.860 | Voegelin called this the eschaton

00:38:59.380 | and said that these end times,

00:39:02.260 | the eschaton was being promised in the here and now,

00:39:05.460 | being made imminent.

00:39:06.980 | And he warned against that,

00:39:08.380 | saying the results are likely to be disastrous.

00:39:11.780 | - So that's actually a disagreement with this idea

00:39:15.900 | that people sometimes say that the Soviet Union

00:39:20.900 | is an example of an atheistic society.

00:39:24.900 | So when you have atheism as the primary thing

00:39:27.780 | that underpins the society, this is what you get.

00:39:30.620 | So that's what you're saying is a kind of rejection

00:39:33.740 | of that, saying that there's a strong religious component

00:39:37.760 | to communism.

00:39:39.020 | - A hidden component, one that's not officially recognized.

00:39:42.500 | I mean, I think that, you know,

00:39:44.820 | I had a chance to witness this actually.

00:39:47.220 | When I was a child, my family,

00:39:50.620 | I grew up in Chicago to a Lithuanian American family.

00:39:53.620 | And my father, who was a mathematician,

00:39:56.580 | got a very rare invitation to travel to Soviet Lithuania,

00:40:00.420 | to the University of Vilnius to meet with colleagues.

00:40:03.580 | And at this point, journeys of more than a few days

00:40:07.880 | or a week were very rare to the Soviet Union for Americans.

00:40:12.600 | And the result was that I had unforgettable experiences

00:40:17.100 | visiting the Soviet Union in Brezhnev's day.

00:40:20.720 | And among the things I saw there was a museum of atheism

00:40:24.380 | that had been established in a church

00:40:26.040 | that had been ripped apart from inside

00:40:29.520 | and was meant to kind of embody

00:40:34.520 | the official stance of atheism.

00:40:36.860 | And I remember being baffled by the museum on the inside

00:40:41.700 | because you would expect exhibits.

00:40:43.860 | You would expect something dramatic,

00:40:45.820 | something that will be compelling.

00:40:47.500 | And instead, there was some folk art from the countryside

00:40:51.660 | showing bygone beliefs.

00:40:53.660 | There were some lithographs or engravings

00:40:57.180 | of the Spanish Inquisition and its horrors.

00:41:00.500 | And that was pretty much it.

00:41:02.560 | But as a child, I remember being reproved in that museum

00:41:07.560 | for not wearing my windbreaker,

00:41:10.860 | but instead carrying it on my arm,

00:41:13.020 | which was a very disrespectful thing to do

00:41:15.300 | in an official museum of atheism.

00:41:17.520 | When I was able to visit the Soviet Union later

00:41:21.620 | for a language course in the summer of 1989,

00:41:24.820 | one of the obligatory tours that we took

00:41:26.980 | was to file reverently past the body of Lenin

00:41:31.380 | outside the Kremlin in a mausoleum at Red Square.

00:41:34.660 | And communist mummies like those of Lenin,

00:41:38.980 | earlier Stalin had been there as well,

00:41:42.140 | communist mummies like Mao or Ho Chi Minh,

00:41:45.600 | really, I think, speak to a blending

00:41:50.140 | of earlier religious sensibility,

00:41:53.340 | reverence for relics of great figures,

00:41:56.180 | almost saintly figures,

00:41:57.640 | so that even what got proclaimed as atheism

00:42:01.700 | turned out to be a very demanding faith as well.

00:42:03.940 | And I think that's a contradiction

00:42:05.300 | that other scholars have pointed out as well.

00:42:08.040 | - Yeah, it's a very complicated sort of discussion

00:42:10.620 | when you remove religion as a big component of a society,

00:42:15.540 | whether something like a framing of political ideologies

00:42:19.740 | in religious ways is the natural consequence of that.

00:42:23.500 | - We hear nature abhorring a vacuum,

00:42:25.260 | and I think that there are places in human character

00:42:29.140 | that long for transcendental explanations, right?

00:42:31.900 | That it's not all meaningless.

00:42:33.580 | In fact, there's a larger purpose.

00:42:37.180 | And I think it's not a coincidence

00:42:39.600 | that such a significant part of resistance

00:42:41.980 | to communist regimes has in part come from,

00:42:46.500 | on the one hand, religious believers,

00:42:49.220 | and on the other hand,

00:42:50.380 | from disillusioned true believers in communism

00:42:54.500 | who find themselves undergoing an internal experience

00:42:59.500 | of just a revulsion,

00:43:01.220 | finding that their ideals have not been followed through on.

00:43:05.660 | - So this topic is one of several topics

00:43:08.140 | that you eloquently describe as contradictions

00:43:11.000 | within the ideas of Marx.

00:43:13.500 | So religious, there is a kind of religious adherence

00:43:17.700 | versus also the rejection of religious dogma

00:43:21.740 | that he stood for.

00:43:23.340 | We've talked about some of the others,

00:43:25.140 | the tension between nationalism that emerged

00:43:28.860 | when it was implemented

00:43:29.800 | versus what communism is supposed to be, which is global,

00:43:33.220 | so globalism.

00:43:34.280 | Then there's the thing that we started talking with

00:43:38.620 | is individualism.

00:43:40.380 | So history is supposed to be defined

00:43:42.580 | by the large collection of humans,

00:43:45.140 | but there does seem to be these singular figures,

00:43:47.820 | including Marx himself, that are really important.

00:43:52.560 | Geography of global versus restricted to certain countries

00:43:56.400 | and tradition,

00:43:58.600 | you're supposed to break with the past and communism,

00:44:02.640 | but then Marxism became one of the strongest traditions

00:44:06.680 | in history.

00:44:07.600 | - That's right, that's right.

00:44:08.480 | I think that that last one is especially significant

00:44:11.240 | because it's deeply paradoxical.

00:44:13.400 | I mean, trying to outline these contradictions, by the way,

00:44:15.720 | is like subjecting Marx to the sort of analysis

00:44:18.440 | that Marx subjected other people to,

00:44:19.960 | which is to point out internal contradictions,

00:44:22.080 | things that are likely to become pressure points

00:44:25.320 | or cracks that might open up in what's supposed to be

00:44:28.640 | a completely set and durable and effective framework.

00:44:33.640 | The one about tradition,

00:44:37.600 | Marx points out that the need for revolution

00:44:42.440 | is in order to break with the traditions

00:44:44.560 | that have hemmed people in,

00:44:45.680 | this earlier ways of thinking, earlier social structures,

00:44:51.600 | and to constantly renovate.

00:44:53.120 | And what happens instead is

00:44:55.080 | a tradition of radical rupture emerges.

00:44:59.540 | And that's really tough because imagine

00:45:02.280 | the last stages of the Soviet Union,

00:45:05.720 | where keen observers can tell

00:45:10.720 | that there are problems that are building in society.

00:45:13.600 | There are discontents and demands that are going to clash,

00:45:17.480 | especially when someone like Gorbachev

00:45:19.560 | is proposing reforms and things are suddenly thrown open

00:45:22.480 | for discussion.

00:45:23.500 | The very notion that you have the celebration

00:45:28.280 | of revolutionaries and the Bolshevik legacy

00:45:33.240 | at a time when the state wants to enforce stability

00:45:38.240 | and an order that's been received from the prior generation.

00:45:42.680 | Think of Brezhnev's time, for instance.

00:45:45.240 | All of that is especially volatile mix

00:45:48.000 | and unlikely to work out very durably in the long run.

00:45:52.240 | - I would love to sort of talk about the works of Marx,

00:45:57.240 | the "Communist Manifesto" and "Das Kapital."

00:46:00.540 | What can we say that's interesting

00:46:01.720 | about the manifestation of his ideas on paper?

00:46:05.560 | - Well, the first thing to note, obviously,

00:46:07.200 | is that those two works are very different.

00:46:09.600 | "Das Kapital" is an enormous multi-volume work

00:46:12.920 | that Marx worked at and only got the first volume out

00:46:16.880 | because Engels begged him to stop revising.

00:46:19.280 | Please just finally get it into press.

00:46:21.400 | And then the rest, Engels had to actually reconstruct

00:46:24.440 | out of notes after Marx passed away.

00:46:28.840 | It's a huge work.

00:46:29.720 | By contrast, the "Communist Manifesto" is a brief pamphlet

00:46:34.720 | that ended up affecting the lives

00:46:37.800 | of many millions worldwide,

00:46:40.000 | in spite of its comparative brevity.

00:46:43.640 | The "Communist Manifesto," moreover,

00:46:47.080 | is also something of the nature

00:46:49.760 | of having a delayed fuse, you could say,

00:46:52.480 | because when it first appears amid the revolutions of 1848

00:46:57.480 | that sweep across Europe,

00:47:00.720 | the work is contrary to what people often believe.

00:47:04.640 | That pamphlet did not cause the revolutions of 1848,

00:47:07.880 | many of which had national or liberal demands.

00:47:11.480 | The voice of Marx and Engels was barely to be heard

00:47:15.000 | over the din of other far more prominent actors.

00:47:19.280 | It is, however, in the aftermath

00:47:21.920 | that this work takes on tremendous significance

00:47:25.040 | and becomes popularly read and popularly distributed.

00:47:28.360 | It's especially the bloody episode

00:47:33.360 | of the Paris Commune in 1871,

00:47:36.500 | which comes to be identified with Marx,

00:47:39.120 | even though it was not purely inspired by Marx alone,

00:47:42.420 | nor were all of the communards devoted Marxists.

00:47:45.960 | It's the identification of this famous

00:47:48.400 | or infamous episode in urban upheaval

00:47:51.520 | that really leads to worldwide notoriety for Marx

00:47:56.520 | and attention to those works.

00:47:59.080 | And they're very different in form.

00:48:01.840 | Das Kapital is intended to be the origin of species

00:48:05.480 | of its realm of economic thought.

00:48:08.600 | And represents years and years of work of Marx

00:48:12.640 | laboring in the British Museum Library,

00:48:16.400 | working through statistics,

00:48:17.920 | working on little bits and pieces of a larger answer

00:48:22.400 | to big historical questions

00:48:23.960 | that he believes that he's arrived at.

00:48:27.000 | Its tone is different from that of the Communist Manifesto,

00:48:30.440 | which is a call to arms.

00:48:32.480 | It announces with great confidence

00:48:34.680 | what the scheme of history will be,

00:48:37.160 | but rather than urging that the answer might be passivity

00:48:41.560 | and just waiting for history to play out

00:48:43.320 | in its preordained way,

00:48:44.600 | it's also a clarion call to make the revolution happen

00:48:49.600 | and is intended to be a pragmatic, practical statement

00:48:54.400 | of how this is to play out.

00:48:57.200 | And it starts in part with those ringing words

00:49:00.160 | about a ghost or a specter haunting Europe,

00:49:03.600 | the specter of communism, which wasn't true at the time,

00:49:07.080 | but decades later, most definitely is the case.

00:49:10.680 | - Is there something you could say

00:49:11.520 | about the difference between Marxian economics

00:49:14.520 | and Marxist political ideology?

00:49:16.120 | So the political side of things

00:49:19.680 | and the economics side of things.

00:49:24.000 | - So I think that Marx would probably have responded

00:49:28.240 | that in fact, those things are indivisible.

00:49:33.280 | The analysis as sort of purely theoretical

00:49:37.880 | certainly can be performed on any economic reality

00:49:43.000 | that you care to mention,

00:49:44.520 | but the imperatives that grow out of that economic analysis

00:49:49.520 | are political.

00:49:50.840 | Marx and Engels emphasize the unity of theory and practice.

00:49:56.720 | So it's not enough to dispassionately analyze,

00:50:01.640 | it's a call to action as well,

00:50:03.480 | because if you've delivered the answer

00:50:05.800 | to how history evolves and changes, it obligates you, right?

00:50:10.320 | It demands certain action.

00:50:13.720 | You sometimes hear from undergraduates

00:50:16.760 | that they've heard from their high school history teachers

00:50:20.440 | that Marxism was just a theoretical construct

00:50:24.720 | that was in the idle production of a philosopher

00:50:28.200 | who was not connected to the world

00:50:30.400 | and was never meant to be tried in practice.

00:50:33.240 | Marx would have been furious to hear this,

00:50:35.840 | and it's almost heroically wrong as a historical statement,

00:50:39.880 | because Marx insisted that all previous philosophers

00:50:44.280 | have theorized about reality.

00:50:47.760 | What now is really necessary is to change it.

00:50:51.800 | So you could say that in the abstract,

00:50:56.840 | a Marxist economist can certainly use

00:50:59.920 | Marx's theoretical framework

00:51:01.800 | to compare to a given economic reality,

00:51:06.280 | but Marx would have seen that as incomplete

00:51:08.560 | and as deeply unsatisfactory.

00:51:10.960 | There's kind of a footnote to all of this,

00:51:12.760 | which is that even though Marxist dialectical materialism

00:51:17.760 | grounds itself in these economic realities

00:51:20.400 | and the political prescription is supposed to flow

00:51:22.880 | from the economic realities

00:51:24.440 | and be inevitably growing out of them,

00:51:29.440 | in the real history of communist regimes,

00:51:34.800 | you've actually seen periods where the economics

00:51:37.080 | becomes detached from the politics.

00:51:39.640 | And I'm thinking in particular of the new economic period

00:51:44.640 | early in the history of the Soviet Union,

00:51:46.720 | when Lenin realizes that the economy is so far gone

00:51:50.560 | that you need to reintroduce or allow in a limited way

00:51:53.880 | some elements of private enterprise

00:51:56.360 | just to start getting Russia back on course

00:51:59.400 | in order to have the accumulation of surplus

00:52:02.760 | that will be necessary to build the project at all.

00:52:05.960 | And there are many Bolsheviks

00:52:08.000 | who see the new economic policy as a terrible compromise

00:52:13.000 | and a betrayal of their ideas,

00:52:16.360 | but it's seen as necessary for a short while

00:52:19.320 | and then Stalin will wreck it entirely.

00:52:22.720 | Or consider for that matter, China today,

00:52:26.320 | where you have a dominant political class,

00:52:29.520 | the Communist Party of China,

00:52:32.000 | which is allowing economic development

00:52:35.320 | and private enterprise

00:52:37.280 | as long as it retains political control.

00:52:40.480 | So some of these elements already represent divergences

00:52:45.480 | from what Marx would have expected.

00:52:48.240 | And this points to a really key problem or question

00:52:52.680 | for all of the history of communism.

00:52:55.240 | It has to do with it being a tradition in spite of itself.

00:52:58.880 | And that could be expressed in the following way.

00:53:01.520 | An original set of ideas is going to evolve.

00:53:04.520 | It's going to change because circumstances change.

00:53:07.720 | What elaborations of any doctrine,

00:53:11.000 | whether it's communism or a religious doctrine

00:53:13.360 | or any political ideology,

00:53:15.120 | what elaborations are natural stages in the evolution

00:53:20.120 | of any living set of ideas?

00:53:24.080 | Or when you reach the point where some shift

00:53:29.080 | or some adaptation is so radically different

00:53:32.320 | that it actually breaks with the tradition.

00:53:34.920 | And that's an insoluble problem.

00:53:37.760 | You probably have to take it on a case by case basis.

00:53:40.560 | It speaks to issues like the question

00:53:43.480 | that gets raised today.

00:53:44.960 | Is China in a meaningful sense a communist country anymore?

00:53:49.840 | And there's a diversity of opinion on this score.

00:53:54.640 | Or if you're looking at the history of communism

00:53:57.360 | and you look at North Korea,

00:54:00.360 | which now is on its third installment

00:54:03.080 | of a dynastic leader from the same family

00:54:05.920 | who ruled like a god king over a regime

00:54:09.420 | that calls itself communist.

00:54:11.860 | Is that still a form of communism?

00:54:14.680 | Is it an evolution of?

00:54:16.440 | Is it a complete reversal of?

00:54:19.100 | I tend to want to take an anthropological perspective

00:54:23.880 | in the history of communism

00:54:25.200 | and to take very seriously those people who avow

00:54:29.860 | that they are communists.

00:54:31.280 | And this is the project that they have underway.

00:54:33.520 | And then after hearing that avowal,

00:54:36.440 | I think as a historian, you have to say,

00:54:38.360 | well, let's look at the details.

00:54:40.040 | Let's see what changes have been made,

00:54:42.020 | what continuities might still exist,

00:54:44.020 | whether there's a larger pattern to be discerned here.

00:54:46.740 | So it's a very, very complicated history

00:54:49.820 | that we're talking about.

00:54:51.500 | - Let's step back to the end of the 19th century

00:54:54.100 | and the beginning of the 20th century.

00:54:56.300 | And let's steel man the case for communism.

00:55:00.500 | Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the people there.

00:55:03.960 | Not in this way we can look back

00:55:06.400 | at what happened in the 20th century.

00:55:09.420 | Why was this such a compelling notion

00:55:11.800 | for millions of people?

00:55:13.780 | Can we make the case for it?

00:55:16.040 | - Well, clearly it was a compelling case

00:55:17.640 | for millions of people.

00:55:18.600 | And part of this story has to do with,

00:55:21.200 | overall has to do with the faith,

00:55:23.700 | conviction, stories of people sacrificing themselves

00:55:28.480 | as well as their countrymen

00:55:30.600 | in a cause that they believed was not just legitimate,

00:55:34.300 | but demanded their total obedience.

00:55:37.520 | I think that throughout the early part of the 20th century,

00:55:41.400 | the late 19th century, early part of the 20th century,

00:55:44.600 | so much of the compelling case for communism

00:55:48.720 | came from the confidence that people in the West

00:55:53.040 | more generally placed in science.

00:55:55.640 | The notion that science is answering problems.

00:56:00.500 | Science is giving us solutions

00:56:02.720 | to how the world around us works,

00:56:04.860 | how the world around us can be improved.

00:56:07.680 | Some varieties of that,

00:56:09.640 | and I watch the quotation marks,

00:56:10.800 | science were crazy, right?

00:56:12.840 | Like phrenology, so-called scientific racism

00:56:16.240 | that tried to divide humanity up into discrete blocks

00:56:21.000 | and to manipulate them in ways

00:56:22.740 | that were allegedly scientific or rational.

00:56:24.980 | So there were horrors that followed

00:56:26.920 | from those invocations of science,

00:56:29.920 | but its prestige was enormous.

00:56:32.480 | And that in part had to do with the lessening grip

00:56:37.480 | of religious ideas on intellectual elites.

00:56:41.760 | More generally, processes of secularization,

00:56:44.660 | not total secularization,

00:56:46.080 | but processes of secularization

00:56:48.600 | in Western industrial societies.

00:56:51.200 | And the sense that here's a doctrine

00:56:55.560 | that will allow escape from wars,

00:57:02.320 | brought on by capitalist competition,

00:57:04.720 | poverty and economic cycles and depressions

00:57:08.360 | brought on by a capitalist competition,

00:57:11.640 | the inequalities of societies

00:57:14.600 | that remain hierarchical and class-based.

00:57:18.000 | And this claim to being cutting edge science,

00:57:23.000 | I think allows people like Lenin

00:57:27.000 | to derive immense confidence

00:57:31.160 | in the prescription that they have for the future.

00:57:33.640 | And that paradoxically, the confidence

00:57:36.120 | that you have in broad strokes,

00:57:38.160 | the right set of answers for how to get to the future,

00:57:41.680 | also allows you to take huge liberties

00:57:45.020 | with the tactics and the strategies that you follow

00:57:49.160 | as long as your ultimate goal

00:57:51.280 | remains the one sketched by this master plan.

00:57:56.200 | So ultimately, some of the predictions

00:57:59.640 | of someone like Lenin,

00:58:00.800 | that once society has reached that stage

00:58:05.800 | of the dictatorship of the proletariat,

00:58:08.120 | the notion that governments

00:58:12.000 | will essentially be able to run themselves.

00:58:14.720 | And the model he had in mind, oddly enough,

00:58:16.800 | was Swiss post offices.

00:58:19.200 | Being in Swiss exile must have impressed him so much

00:58:22.920 | with the orderliness and the sheer discipline

00:58:26.420 | and rationality of a Swiss post office.

00:58:28.920 | And he thought, why can't you organize governments like this

00:58:33.000 | where you don't need political leaders,

00:58:35.080 | you don't need grand visions, you have procedures,

00:58:38.920 | you have bureaucracy, which does its job

00:58:42.560 | in a way that's not alienating,

00:58:44.240 | but simply produces the greatest good.

00:58:46.960 | When you think of the experiences

00:58:50.600 | with the bureaucracy in the 20th century,

00:58:53.080 | one's hair stands on end.

00:58:54.560 | To have the comparative naivete on display

00:58:59.280 | with a prediction like that,

00:59:00.880 | but it derives from that confidence

00:59:02.680 | that it's all gonna be okay because we understand,

00:59:06.360 | we have the key, we have the plan

00:59:08.720 | to how to arrive at this final configuration of humanity.

00:59:13.720 | - Yeah, the certainty of science, in quotes,

00:59:18.120 | and the goal of utopia gets you in trouble.

00:59:21.760 | But also just on the human level

00:59:23.640 | from a working class person perspective.

00:59:28.280 | From the Industrial Revolution,

00:59:30.480 | you see the growing inequality, wealth inequality.

00:59:33.680 | And there is a kind of, you see people getting wealthy

00:59:36.400 | and combined with the fact that life is difficult,

00:59:40.320 | life in general, life is suffering for many,

00:59:43.240 | for most, for all, if you listen to some philosophers.

00:59:46.320 | And there is kind of a powerful idea

00:59:50.840 | in that the man is exploiting me.

00:59:53.720 | And that's a populous message

00:59:56.560 | that a lot of people resonate with

00:59:58.240 | because to a degree it's true in every system.

01:00:01.800 | And so before you kind of know

01:00:05.240 | how these economic and political ideas manifest themselves,

01:00:09.240 | it is really powerful to say here beyond the horizon,

01:00:13.000 | there's a world where the rich man

01:00:17.040 | will not exploit my hard work anymore.

01:00:20.440 | And I think that's a really powerful idea.

01:00:22.880 | - It is.

01:00:23.720 | I mean, at the same time though,

01:00:24.800 | it kind of points to a further problem

01:00:27.520 | and that's the identity of the revolutionaries.

01:00:30.560 | It turned out that many of these revolutionary movements

01:00:35.040 | and then the founding elites of communist countries

01:00:38.320 | in the aftermath of the Soviet seizure of power

01:00:41.760 | turned out to be something quite different

01:00:44.320 | from people who have spent their lives in factories

01:00:46.720 | experiencing the Industrial Revolution firsthand.

01:00:50.320 | I mean, there's a special role here for intellectuals.

01:00:53.760 | And when Marx and Engels

01:00:56.480 | write into "The Communist Manifesto,"

01:00:58.800 | the notion that certain exceptional individuals

01:01:02.520 | can rise above their class origins

01:01:04.640 | in a way other people can't

01:01:06.640 | and transcend their earlier role,

01:01:11.400 | their materially determined role

01:01:13.640 | in order to gain a perspective

01:01:15.760 | on the historical process as a whole

01:01:17.600 | and ally themselves with a working class

01:01:19.760 | in its struggle for communism,

01:01:22.480 | this sort of special role

01:01:24.160 | that they carved out for themselves

01:01:26.240 | is enormously appealing for intellectuals

01:01:28.520 | 'cause any celebration of intellectuals as world movers

01:01:31.080 | is gonna appeal to intellectuals.

01:01:33.520 | That gap, that frequent reality

01:01:38.520 | of not being in touch with the very classes

01:01:43.760 | that the communists are aiming to represent

01:01:47.480 | is a very frequent theme in this story.

01:01:52.160 | It also speaks to a crucial part of this story,

01:01:58.000 | which is the breaking apart or the civil war,

01:02:02.320 | the war of brother against brother,

01:02:04.520 | the fraternal struggle that splits socialism

01:02:08.040 | and splits followers of Marx.

01:02:10.400 | And that's in the aftermath of the First World War

01:02:14.840 | in particular, or during this traumatic experience,

01:02:19.280 | the way in which Lenin encourages the foundation

01:02:22.960 | of radical parties that will break with social democracy

01:02:27.040 | of the sort that had been elaborated,

01:02:28.480 | especially in places like Germany,

01:02:31.160 | scorning their moderation

01:02:32.720 | and instead announcing a new dispensation,

01:02:35.960 | which was the Leninist conception

01:02:38.040 | of a disciplined, hardcore professional revolutionaries

01:02:41.800 | who will act in ways

01:02:43.400 | that a mere trade union movement couldn't.

01:02:47.120 | And what this speaks to is a fundamental tension

01:02:50.080 | in radical movements

01:02:52.640 | because left to their own devices, Lenin announces,

01:02:57.640 | workers tend to focus on their reality,

01:03:02.560 | their families, their workplace,

01:03:05.240 | want better working conditions, unionize,

01:03:08.320 | and then aim to negotiate with employers

01:03:12.280 | or to agitate for reforms on the part of the state

01:03:16.320 | to improve their living conditions.

01:03:17.800 | And then they're happy for the advances that they have won.

01:03:22.280 | And for Lenin, that's not enough

01:03:24.040 | because that's a half measure.

01:03:25.520 | That's the sort of thing that leads you

01:03:27.120 | into an accommodation with the system

01:03:29.520 | rather than the overthrow of the system.

01:03:31.760 | So there's a real,

01:03:32.960 | there's a constant tension in this regard

01:03:35.960 | that plays itself out over the long haul.

01:03:38.480 | - So let's go to Lenin and the Russian revolution.

01:03:42.120 | How did communism come to power in the Soviet Union?

01:03:48.120 | - It came to power as a result of stepping

01:03:49.960 | into a power vacuum.

01:03:51.640 | And the power vacuum was created by the first world war.

01:03:54.600 | And it's the effect that it had as a total war,

01:03:58.840 | unprecedented pressure placed on a regime

01:04:02.160 | that in many ways was a traditional almost feudal monarchy,

01:04:07.160 | only experiencing the beginnings of the modernization

01:04:11.520 | that the rest of Europe had undergone.

01:04:13.840 | And for this reason, communism comes to power

01:04:18.000 | in a place that Marx probably wouldn't have expected

01:04:21.160 | in the wreckage of the Russian empire.

01:04:25.720 | Lenin is absolutely vital to this equation

01:04:28.720 | because he's the one who presses the process forward.

01:04:32.760 | Ironically, given the claim of communist leaders

01:04:37.760 | to having the key to history,

01:04:41.880 | just a few months previous in exile in Switzerland,

01:04:45.440 | Lenin had been despairing and had been convinced

01:04:48.040 | that he may not even live to see the advent of that day.

01:04:53.040 | But then when revolution does break out

01:04:56.000 | in the Russian empire in February of 1917,

01:05:01.000 | Lenin is absolutely frantic to get back.

01:05:06.600 | And when he does get back as a result of a deal

01:05:09.120 | that is negotiated with the German high command,

01:05:12.000 | a step that they'll later live very much to regret,

01:05:15.560 | he is able to get back and to go into action

01:05:18.440 | and to press for nothing less than the seizure of power

01:05:22.640 | that brings his Bolshevik faction,

01:05:25.720 | the radical wing of the socialist movement,

01:05:30.080 | to power and then to build the Soviet Union.

01:05:33.760 | - So even he was surprised how effective

01:05:35.880 | and how fast the revolution happened.

01:05:39.120 | - He was, although I think that he would have agreed

01:05:42.640 | that what was necessary was a cataclysm

01:05:45.960 | on the scale of the First World War to make this happen.

01:05:50.160 | The First World War shatters so many

01:05:55.160 | of the certainties of the 19th century

01:05:57.840 | that we talked about as a dynamic period

01:06:00.920 | with argument between ideologies.

01:06:02.680 | It scrambles all sorts of earlier debates.

01:06:06.680 | It renegotiates the status of the individual

01:06:11.680 | versus an all-powerful state and the claims of the state

01:06:15.200 | because to win or even just to survive in World War I,

01:06:19.680 | you need to centralize, centralize, centralize,

01:06:23.840 | and to put everything onto a authoritarian wartime footing

01:06:28.080 | in country after country.

01:06:30.240 | So Lenin earlier had already articulated

01:06:33.920 | the possibility that this might happen

01:06:35.760 | by talking about how the entire globe already was connected

01:06:40.760 | and there's a chain of capitalist development

01:06:47.800 | that is connecting different countries

01:06:50.560 | so that the weakest link in the chain,

01:06:53.320 | if it breaks, if it pops open,

01:06:56.560 | it might actually inaugurate much bigger processes

01:07:01.560 | and start a chain reaction.

01:07:04.080 | And that's what he intended to do

01:07:05.880 | and has the chance to do in the course of 1917.

01:07:10.680 | Incidentally, just to get a sense of the sheer chaos

01:07:15.480 | and the human, on an individual human level,

01:07:20.480 | what the absence of established authority meant,

01:07:25.560 | there's few works of literature that are as powerful

01:07:29.040 | as Boris Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago"

01:07:32.320 | for giving the whole sweep of contending forces

01:07:36.440 | in a power vacuum.

01:07:38.160 | It's an amazing testimony to that time and place.

01:07:41.240 | - So you said that Bolsheviks saw violence

01:07:44.000 | and terror as necessary.

01:07:46.120 | So can you just speak to this aspect of there?

01:07:49.840 | Because they took power.

01:07:51.420 | And so this was a part of the way they saw the world.

01:07:55.020 | - Right, and it had antecedents.

01:07:57.120 | Even though Lenin and his colleagues

01:08:02.040 | are competing amongst each other

01:08:03.960 | for the title of most faithful disciple of Marx

01:08:07.440 | and most true to the received theory in practice,

01:08:12.880 | there's other influences, earlier influences

01:08:15.880 | that operate in the Russian context

01:08:18.600 | that were not operative, let's say, on the German context.

01:08:23.000 | And here you have to step back

01:08:24.680 | and think about the nature of Tsarism,

01:08:27.240 | which had maintained still into the 20th century

01:08:31.680 | the notion of a divine right to rule,

01:08:33.880 | that God had ordained the Tsarist system

01:08:36.840 | and its hierarchies,

01:08:38.920 | and that to question these was sinful

01:08:41.480 | and politically not advisable.

01:08:43.840 | And the restrictive nature of Russian society at this point

01:08:48.520 | dominated by the Tsarist establishment.

01:08:51.680 | Its harshness, its reactionary nature

01:08:54.760 | meant that people who in another context,

01:08:57.240 | in another country, might have been reformers

01:09:00.320 | could instead very easily be provoked

01:09:02.320 | into becoming revolutionaries.

01:09:05.000 | And Lenin is a perfect example of this

01:09:07.520 | because his older brother was executed

01:09:12.520 | as a result of being in a radical revolutionary movement

01:09:17.680 | that was, who was arrested and executed

01:09:20.840 | for association with terrorism.

01:09:23.440 | And earlier generations of Russian radicals

01:09:27.640 | had founded populist groups

01:09:31.240 | that would aim to engage in terrorism

01:09:33.560 | and resistance against the Tsarist regime.

01:09:36.160 | And this included people who call themselves nihilists.

01:09:42.000 | And these nihilists were materialists

01:09:45.200 | who saw themselves ushering in a new age

01:09:49.680 | by absolute rejection of earlier religious traditions

01:09:54.360 | and aiming for material answers

01:09:56.960 | to the challenges of the day.

01:10:00.120 | Among them was Nikolai Chernyshevsky,

01:10:03.320 | who wrote what's been called the worst book ever written.

01:10:07.200 | It was, in fact, one of Lenin's favorite books.

01:10:09.720 | In Russian, it's "Что делать?"

01:10:11.800 | In English, it gets translated, "What is to be done?"

01:10:14.720 | And it's a utopian novel about revolutionaries

01:10:18.520 | and how revolutionaries should act with one another

01:10:21.600 | in open ways, new ways, nontraditional ways

01:10:26.000 | in order to help usher in the coming revolution.

01:10:29.920 | Lenin loved the work and said it had the great merit

01:10:33.800 | of showing you how to be a revolutionary.

01:10:36.480 | So there's the Marxist influence,

01:10:38.600 | and then there's Russian populist nihilist influence,

01:10:43.040 | which is also a very live current in Lenin's thinking.

01:10:48.040 | And when you add these things together,

01:10:50.560 | you get an explosive mix.

01:10:54.160 | Because Lenin, as a result and part of this family trauma

01:10:57.680 | of his brother, becomes a absolutely irreconcilable enemy

01:11:02.680 | of the tsarist regime and sets about turning himself

01:11:08.320 | into what you might call a guided missile for revolution.

01:11:11.560 | He turns himself into a machine

01:11:14.120 | to produce revolutionary change.

01:11:16.960 | And I mean that with little hyperbole.

01:11:20.120 | Lenin at one point shared with friends

01:11:22.600 | that he loved listening to music,

01:11:25.680 | but he tried not to listen to beautiful music like Beethoven

01:11:29.040 | because it made him feel gentle.

01:11:31.200 | What the revolution demanded was realism,

01:11:35.760 | hardness, absolute steely resolve.

01:11:39.440 | So Lenin worries even fellow revolutionaries

01:11:43.760 | by the intensity of his single-minded focus to revolution.

01:11:47.480 | He spends his days thinking about the revolution.

01:11:50.760 | He probably dreamt about the revolution.

01:11:53.320 | And so 24/7, it's an existence where he's paired off

01:11:58.320 | other human elements quite deliberately

01:12:02.320 | in order to turn himself

01:12:03.600 | into an effective instigator of revolution.

01:12:07.040 | So when the opportunity comes in 1917,

01:12:09.720 | he's primed and ready for that role.

01:12:13.720 | - It's interesting that nihilism,

01:12:16.480 | Russian nihilism had an impact on Lenin.

01:12:19.120 | I mean, traditionally nihilist philosophy

01:12:21.560 | rejects all sorts of traditional morality.

01:12:24.280 | There's a kind of cynical, dark view and where's the light?

01:12:28.840 | - The light is science.

01:12:30.120 | The light is science and materialism.

01:12:32.000 | - Oh boy.

01:12:33.000 | - The nihilists, some of them did a very bad job

01:12:36.080 | of hiding their political beliefs

01:12:37.760 | because they were famous for wearing blue-tinted spectacles,

01:12:42.360 | kind of the sunglasses of the late 19th century,

01:12:45.280 | as a way of shielding their eyes from light,

01:12:48.320 | but also having a dispassionate

01:12:50.960 | and realistic view of reality outside.

01:12:54.360 | So nihilists, as the name would suggest,

01:12:57.720 | do reject all prior certainties,

01:13:00.440 | but they make an exception for science

01:13:02.280 | and see that as the possibility for founding

01:13:05.160 | an entirely new mode of existence.

01:13:09.360 | - For most people, I think nihilism is introduced

01:13:12.880 | in the brilliant philosophical work,

01:13:14.760 | I don't know if you're familiar with it,

01:13:16.320 | by the name of The Big Lebowski.

01:13:19.320 | Nihilists appear there.

01:13:21.080 | And I think they summarize the nihilist tradition quite well.

01:13:24.120 | But it is indeed fascinating.

01:13:26.400 | And also it is fascinating that Lenin,

01:13:29.200 | and I'm sure this influenced Stalin as well,

01:13:31.600 | that hardness was a necessary human characteristics

01:13:36.600 | to take the revolution to its end.

01:13:40.160 | - That's right, that's right.

01:13:41.040 | So prior generations of nihilists or populists

01:13:45.680 | had resembled Lenin's single-mindedness

01:13:48.360 | by arguing that one needed total devotion for this.

01:13:53.360 | This was, if to play this role in society,

01:13:56.720 | it was not enough to be somewhat committed.

01:13:59.960 | Total commitment was necessary.

01:14:01.320 | And the other theme that's at work here obviously is,

01:14:04.680 | if we consider Lenin affected by Marxist ideas

01:14:08.160 | and the homegrown Russian revolutionary tradition

01:14:11.200 | that predates the arrival of Marxist socialism in Russia,

01:14:16.200 | it's the theme of needing to adapt to local conditions.

01:14:23.560 | So Marxism or communism in Vietnam or in Cuba

01:14:28.560 | or in Cambodia or in Russia will be very different

01:14:34.360 | in its local adaptations and local themes and resonance

01:14:38.680 | than it was in Germany where Marx

01:14:43.160 | would have expected all of this to unfold.

01:14:45.560 | - So let's talk about Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin,

01:14:50.560 | this little interplay that eventually led to Stalin

01:14:54.360 | accumulating, grabbing, and taking a hold of power.

01:14:57.680 | What was that process like?

01:14:59.140 | - So Lenin's supreme confidence leads the party

01:15:05.160 | through some really difficult steps.

01:15:08.680 | That involves things like signing the humiliating treaty

01:15:12.920 | with the Germans, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk,

01:15:15.880 | where critics of the Bolsheviks said that no one

01:15:18.440 | who loved their country would have agreed

01:15:21.080 | to a so draconian, so harsh a settlement

01:15:25.040 | that saw the peeling off of large territories

01:15:27.760 | that had belonged to the Russian empire.

01:15:29.840 | Lenin is willing to undertake this

01:15:31.740 | because of the larger prize.

01:15:33.920 | He even says that he's not gonna bother to read the treaty

01:15:36.760 | because shortly that treaty's gonna be a dead letter.

01:15:39.240 | His expectation is revolution's gonna break out everywhere,

01:15:42.880 | especially after we've raised the standard,

01:15:45.440 | first of all, in the wreckage of the Russian empire.

01:15:48.520 | - And we should probably say that that treaty,

01:15:50.360 | to some small degree, maybe you can elaborate now or later,

01:15:54.720 | lays the groundwork for World War II

01:15:57.960 | because there is, resentment is a thing

01:16:01.600 | that with time can lead

01:16:04.080 | to just extreme levels of destruction.

01:16:06.680 | - Right, for German sensibilities, for German nationalists,

01:16:11.680 | that treaty meant that Germany

01:16:13.280 | had essentially won World War I.

01:16:15.640 | And only a turn of events that many of them

01:16:20.480 | couldn't even follow or conceive of,

01:16:23.480 | the arrival of American troops,

01:16:25.600 | the tipping of the balance in the West led to that reversal.

01:16:29.080 | And one of the many scholars and contemporaries

01:16:33.960 | pointed out that Germany between the wars

01:16:36.760 | was full of people who were convinced

01:16:38.240 | that Germany had actually not lost the war.

01:16:40.840 | However, that victory of theirs was defined.

01:16:43.560 | So most definitely that groundwork is laid.

01:16:46.040 | And incidentally,

01:16:47.640 | this is something we can talk about later,

01:16:49.880 | World War I and World War II

01:16:51.280 | have a lot of linkages like that.

01:16:52.880 | And as time goes by,

01:16:54.480 | I think historians are gonna focus

01:16:55.720 | on those linkages even more.

01:16:58.160 | But Lenin also in his leadership against the odds

01:17:03.080 | leads the Bolsheviks to power in the Russian Civil War

01:17:07.560 | where most betting people would have given them

01:17:11.280 | very slight odds of even surviving

01:17:14.000 | given how many enemies they faced off against.

01:17:17.200 | Lenin's insistence upon discipline

01:17:20.160 | and upon good organization

01:17:23.880 | allowed the Bolsheviks to emerge as the winners.

01:17:28.240 | And yet a great disappointment follows.

01:17:32.000 | Lenin, as we said,

01:17:33.720 | had expected that revolution will break out soon everywhere

01:17:37.000 | and all that'll be necessary for the Bolsheviks to do

01:17:39.520 | having given the lead is to link up with others.

01:17:42.840 | And so he considered that what would be established

01:17:46.320 | would be a red bridge between a communist Russia

01:17:51.320 | and once Germany inevitably plunged ahead

01:17:55.080 | into its revolutionary transformation, a communist Germany.

01:17:58.720 | That doesn't end up happening.

01:18:00.360 | On the contrary, what happens in Germany

01:18:02.360 | is a out-and-out shooting war

01:18:05.280 | between different kinds of socialists.

01:18:08.120 | When Germany establishes a democracy

01:18:10.520 | that later goes by the name of the Weimar Republic,

01:18:13.560 | the government is a government of social Democrats,

01:18:16.880 | moderate social Democrats who are fearful

01:18:19.600 | of what they see as Russian conditions of disorder

01:18:22.680 | and who are not necessarily in sympathy

01:18:24.600 | with the Leninist vision

01:18:25.840 | of tightly organized authoritarian rule.

01:18:30.160 | So communists who revolt in Germany

01:18:34.240 | are brutally suppressed by mercenaries,

01:18:38.720 | hardened front fighters and nationalist radicals

01:18:43.720 | hired by the German socialist government.

01:18:46.600 | And the result is a wound that just won't heal

01:18:50.280 | in the German socialist movement

01:18:53.280 | as a result of this fratricide.

01:18:55.840 | It frustrates Lenin's ambitions.

01:18:57.880 | So too does the fact that Poland,

01:19:00.560 | rather than going Bolshevik, resists attempts

01:19:04.800 | by the Bolsheviks to move forward

01:19:06.880 | and to connect up with Germany.

01:19:08.440 | The Poles, yet again,

01:19:11.560 | play a tremendously important historical role

01:19:14.000 | in changing the expected course of historical events.

01:19:18.800 | It's in the aftermath of these unexpected turns

01:19:22.880 | that Lenin and his colleagues realize

01:19:26.240 | that they're in this for the long haul.

01:19:28.680 | It's necessary to wait longer.

01:19:30.120 | They don't lose hope in, or confidence, you might say,

01:19:34.160 | in the eventual coming

01:19:36.400 | of international workers' revolution,

01:19:39.400 | but it's been deferred, it's been put off.

01:19:42.520 | And so the question then arises,

01:19:44.160 | what do you build within a state that's established

01:19:48.160 | called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

01:19:50.600 | or the Soviet Union?

01:19:53.160 | Lenin, as a result of an assassination attempt,

01:19:57.000 | is deeply affected in his health

01:20:01.680 | and would have loved to continue for years longer

01:20:05.480 | to steer the regime,

01:20:07.600 | but he's sidelined because of his declining health.

01:20:12.520 | And there emerges a contest,

01:20:14.080 | a contest between a very charismatic leader,

01:20:20.320 | Leotrotsky, on the one hand, who is an amazing orator,

01:20:25.320 | who is an intellectual who has traveled widely in the world,

01:20:30.040 | who has seen much of the world,

01:20:33.880 | and who is a brilliant writer, a far-ranging intellect,

01:20:38.880 | and is seen as extremely radical

01:20:42.080 | because of his demand for permanent revolution,

01:20:45.680 | the acceleration of revolutionary processes

01:20:49.120 | to drive history forward,

01:20:50.760 | to strike while the iron is hot,

01:20:53.160 | and on the other hand,

01:20:54.160 | is an extremely unlikely contender for power.

01:20:57.600 | And that's a man who's probably the antithesis of charisma,

01:21:01.160 | if you were to meet him in person,

01:21:03.280 | a guy with a squeaky, somewhat high-pitched voice,

01:21:07.280 | not well-suited to revolutionary oratory,

01:21:10.240 | his face pockmarked with the scars of youthful illness,

01:21:17.640 | and who, moreover, doesn't speak

01:21:19.840 | a fine, sophisticated Russian,

01:21:22.280 | but speaks a Russian heavily inflected

01:21:25.480 | with a Georgian accent from that part of the Russian empire

01:21:29.160 | from which he came, and that was Stalin.

01:21:31.160 | And I know that you already have

01:21:33.160 | a marvelous interview with Stephen Kotkin,

01:21:37.960 | the brilliant biographer of Stalin,

01:21:41.560 | who has so many insights on that subject.

01:21:46.380 | The one thing that, even after reading about Stalin,

01:21:50.840 | that never ceases to surprise me, even in retrospect,

01:21:54.720 | is that Stalin gains a reputation,

01:21:58.680 | not as a fiery radical, but as a moderate,

01:22:02.760 | a man who's a conciliator,

01:22:04.800 | someone who's calm when others are excited,

01:22:07.880 | someone who is able, because of his organizational skills,

01:22:11.840 | to resolve merely theoretical disputes

01:22:15.120 | with practical solutions.

01:22:17.340 | Now, to fully take this aboard,

01:22:20.280 | we have to unknow what we know from our vantage point

01:22:23.940 | about Stalin's leadership, Stalin's brutality

01:22:27.260 | in eliminating his opposition,

01:22:30.480 | the cult of personality that, against all odds,

01:22:33.180 | got built up around Stalin so successfully,

01:22:36.700 | and the absolute dominant role

01:22:41.380 | that led him later to be described

01:22:43.380 | as Genghis Khan with a telephone,

01:22:45.320 | a brutal dictator with ancient barbarism

01:22:50.800 | allied to the use of modern technology.

01:22:53.400 | While Trotsky is delivering stirring speeches

01:22:56.600 | and theorizing, Stalin works behind the scenes

01:23:00.240 | to control personnel decisions

01:23:03.960 | in the Bolshevik movement and in the state.

01:23:07.280 | And it's a cliche 'cause it's true

01:23:09.440 | that personnel is policy.

01:23:12.000 | Trotsky is increasingly sidelined and then demonized

01:23:16.420 | and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union

01:23:18.700 | and later murdered in Mexico City.

01:23:22.780 | For Stalin, eliminating his enemies turned out

01:23:26.540 | to be the solution that he was most comfortable with.

01:23:29.340 | - So from that perspective,

01:23:31.260 | there's a lot of fascinating things here.

01:23:33.460 | So one is that you can have a wolf,

01:23:38.260 | a brutal dictator in moderate clothing.

01:23:41.960 | So just because somebody presents as moderate

01:23:45.920 | doesn't mean they can't be one of the most destructive,

01:23:50.200 | if not the most destructive humans in history.

01:23:53.560 | The other aspect is using propaganda,

01:23:56.180 | you can construct an image of a person,

01:23:58.220 | even though they're uncharismatic, not attractive,

01:24:02.100 | their voice is no good, all of those aspects,

01:24:05.620 | you can still have a, like they're still, to this day,

01:24:10.520 | a very large number of people that see him

01:24:12.460 | as a religious type of a godlike figure.

01:24:17.060 | So the power of propaganda there.

01:24:19.260 | - Today, we would call that curating the image, right?

01:24:21.300 | - Curating the image, but to the extent

01:24:23.660 | to which you can do that effectively is quite incredible.

01:24:28.340 | So in that way, also, Stalin is a study

01:24:30.900 | of the power of propaganda.

01:24:32.580 | Can we just talk about the ways

01:24:35.660 | that the power vacuum is filled by Stalin,

01:24:38.740 | how that manifests itself?

01:24:41.480 | Perhaps one angle we can take

01:24:43.320 | is how is the secret police used?

01:24:45.540 | How did power manifest itself under Stalin?

01:24:49.120 | - Well, before getting to the secret police,

01:24:51.920 | I would just wanna add the other crucial element,

01:24:54.220 | which is Lenin's patronage.

01:24:56.400 | Stalin doesn't brawl his way

01:24:58.720 | into the Bolshevik party and dominate.

01:25:02.760 | He's co-opted and promoted to positions of importance

01:25:06.680 | by Lenin, who sees him as a somewhat rough-around-the-edges,

01:25:11.680 | not very sophisticated,

01:25:14.240 | much less cosmopolitan than other Bolsheviks,

01:25:17.320 | but dependable, reliable, and committed revolutionary.

01:25:21.660 | So I think that one of the things that's emerged,

01:25:24.760 | especially after archives opened up

01:25:26.800 | with the fall of the Soviet Union

01:25:28.360 | and we were able to read more and more

01:25:29.960 | of the communications of Lenin,

01:25:31.520 | is that it's not the case that we're talking here

01:25:35.320 | about a unconnected series of careers.

01:25:39.360 | Rather, there are connections to be made.

01:25:42.240 | It's true that towards the end of his life,

01:25:44.000 | Lenin came to be worried by complaints

01:25:47.800 | about Stalin's rudeness towards fellow Bolsheviks.

01:25:51.920 | And in his testament,

01:25:53.160 | he warned against Stalin's testimonies.

01:25:56.040 | Lenin fundamentally saw himself as irreplaceable.

01:25:58.680 | And so that doesn't really help

01:26:00.400 | in a succession struggle, right?

01:26:03.500 | Stalin is able to rely on a secret police apparatus

01:26:08.500 | that had been built up under Lenin already.

01:26:11.540 | And it's very early in the foundation of the Soviet state

01:26:16.540 | that the Cheka, or the Extraordinary Commission,

01:26:21.900 | is established as a secret police

01:26:24.540 | to terrify the enemies,

01:26:28.420 | beat down the opponents of the regime,

01:26:30.660 | and to keep an eye on society more generally.

01:26:34.940 | The person who's chosen for that task

01:26:37.300 | also is a anomaly among Bolsheviks.

01:26:40.740 | That is a man of Polish aristocratic background,

01:26:45.420 | Felix Dzerzhinsky,

01:26:47.060 | who comes to be known by the nickname Iron Felix.

01:26:50.740 | Here's a man about whom a cult of personality

01:26:53.420 | also is created.

01:26:55.100 | Dzerzhinsky is celebrated in the Soviet period

01:26:59.140 | as the model of someone who's harsh but fair,

01:27:03.580 | an executioner but with a heart of gold,

01:27:07.420 | somebody who loves children,

01:27:09.260 | somebody who has a tender heart but forces himself

01:27:13.220 | to be steely-willed against the opponents

01:27:17.820 | of the ideological project of the Bolsheviks.

01:27:21.340 | Dzerzhinsky is succeeded by figures

01:27:25.040 | who will be absolutely instrumental

01:27:27.800 | to Stalin's exercise of power,

01:27:30.480 | and they're not immune either.

01:27:31.880 | Stalin, in his purges, takes care also

01:27:35.280 | to purge the secret police

01:27:37.200 | as a way of finding others upon whom to deflect blame

01:27:41.520 | for earlier atrocities

01:27:44.560 | and to produce a situation

01:27:47.520 | where even committed Bolsheviks are uncertain

01:27:50.880 | of what's going to happen next

01:27:53.120 | and feel their own position to be precarious.

01:27:56.000 | I mean, incidentally, there are other influences

01:27:58.800 | that probably are wrought to bear here as well.

01:28:01.060 | It gets said about Stalin

01:28:02.640 | that he used to spend a lot of time

01:28:05.000 | flipping through Machiavelli's "The Prince,"

01:28:08.000 | and it seems that Stalin's personal copy of "The Prince,"

01:28:13.000 | nobody knows where that is, if it still exists,

01:28:17.360 | but historians have found annotations

01:28:21.520 | in works by Lenin that Stalin,

01:28:24.520 | who was a voracious reader, as it turns out,

01:28:26.760 | made in the back of one of the books,

01:28:30.160 | which sounds almost like a commentary

01:28:32.120 | on Machiavelli's almost-but-not-quite suggestion

01:28:35.960 | that the ends justify the means.

01:28:38.200 | Stalin's own writing says that if someone is strong,

01:28:43.200 | active, and intelligent,

01:28:48.120 | even if they do things that other people condemn,

01:28:51.560 | they're still a good person.

01:28:53.440 | And so Stalin's self-conception of himself

01:28:56.340 | is someone who, along these lines,

01:28:58.560 | and in line with Lenin's emphasis

01:29:01.040 | on practical results and discipline,

01:29:04.120 | somebody who gets things done,

01:29:05.920 | that's the crucial ethical standard.

01:29:09.400 | And ultimately, in criticisms

01:29:13.480 | by later dissidents of Bolshevik morality,

01:29:16.960 | this question of what is the ethical standard,

01:29:19.960 | what is the ethical law,

01:29:22.400 | will bring this question into focus,

01:29:24.400 | because by the,

01:29:27.200 | and this goes back to Marx as well, incidentally,

01:29:30.040 | the notion that any ethical system,

01:29:32.640 | any notion of right or wrong,

01:29:34.840 | is purely a product of class identity,

01:29:37.160 | because every class produces its distinctive ideas,

01:29:40.680 | its distinctive religion, its distinctive art forms,

01:29:43.600 | its distinctive styles,

01:29:45.560 | means that with no one transcendent or absolute morality,

01:29:51.240 | it's all up for grabs.

01:29:52.720 | And then it's a question of power,

01:29:54.400 | and the exercise of power with no limits,

01:29:57.240 | untrammeled by any laws whatsoever.

01:29:59.880 | Dictatorship in its purest form,

01:30:02.200 | something that Lenin had avowed,

01:30:03.720 | and then Stalin comes to practice even more fully.

01:30:07.060 | - Not that it's possible to look deep

01:30:09.820 | into a person's heart, but if you look at Trotsky,

01:30:13.400 | you could say that he probably believed deeply

01:30:16.400 | in Marxism and communism.

01:30:18.440 | Probably the same with Lenin.

01:30:20.280 | What do you think Stalin believed?

01:30:22.040 | Was he a believer?

01:30:24.000 | Was he a pragmatist that used communism

01:30:26.640 | as a way to gain power,

01:30:28.280 | and ideology as part of propaganda,

01:30:30.880 | or did he, in his own private moments,

01:30:32.840 | deeply believe in this utopia?

01:30:34.560 | - That's an excellent question, and you're quite right.

01:30:37.720 | I mean, we cannot peer into the inmost recesses

01:30:40.080 | of somebody's being and know for sure.

01:30:42.680 | My intuition, though, is that this may be

01:30:47.440 | a false alternative, a false dichotomy.

01:30:51.080 | It's natural enough to see somebody

01:30:53.000 | who does monstrous things to say,

01:30:54.720 | well, ideology is being used as a cover for it,

01:30:58.160 | but I think that my suspicion is that these

01:31:00.760 | were actually perfectly compatible in his historical role.

01:31:05.200 | The notion that there's an ideology,

01:31:08.080 | it gives you a master plan for how history

01:31:11.400 | is going to develop, and your own power,

01:31:14.840 | the increase of that power to unprecedented proportions,

01:31:19.840 | your ability to torment even your own faithful followers

01:31:25.160 | in order just to see them squirm,

01:31:27.080 | which Stalin was famous for, to keep people unsettled.

01:31:32.080 | To me, it seems that for some people,

01:31:37.320 | those might not actually be opposed,

01:31:39.320 | might even be mutually reinforcing,

01:31:42.040 | which is a very scary thought.

01:31:44.160 | - It's terrifying, but it's really important to understand.

01:31:47.480 | If we look at, once Stalin takes power,

01:31:52.320 | at some of the policies,

01:31:54.840 | so the collectivization of agriculture,

01:31:57.940 | why do you think that failed so catastrophically,

01:32:04.840 | especially in the 1930s with Ukraine and Polydomor?

01:32:09.720 | - I think the short answer is that the Bolsheviks

01:32:14.160 | in particular, but also communists more generally,

01:32:17.200 | have had a very conflicted relationship with agriculture.

01:32:20.440 | Agriculture, as a very vital, obviously,

01:32:25.440 | but also very traditional and old form of human activity,

01:32:33.160 | has about it all of the smell of tradition

01:32:36.640 | and other problematic factors as well.

01:32:39.260 | In a place like Russia, or the Russian Empire,

01:32:44.700 | peasants throughout history for centuries

01:32:48.480 | had wanted one thing, and that was to be left alone

01:32:51.600 | to farm their own land.

01:32:53.080 | That's their utopia.

01:32:57.720 | And that, for someone like Marx,

01:32:59.960 | who had a vision of historical development

01:33:02.960 | and transcendence and progress as being absolutely key,

01:33:07.880 | does not mesh at all with that vision.

01:33:09.720 | For that reason, when Marx comes up with this tableau,

01:33:14.240 | this tremendous display of historical transformation

01:33:18.720 | taking place over centuries

01:33:19.960 | and headed towards the final utopia,

01:33:22.340 | the role of farmers there is negligible.

01:33:26.360 | Peasants get called conservative

01:33:30.400 | and dull as sacks of potatoes in Marx's historical vision

01:33:35.400 | because they're limited in their horizon.

01:33:39.660 | They farm their land, their plot,

01:33:41.900 | and don't have greater revolutionary goals

01:33:45.080 | beyond working the land and having it free and clear.

01:33:48.640 | By contrast, industrialization, that's progress.

01:33:53.560 | I mean, images that today would be deeply disturbing

01:33:55.680 | to an environmentalist's sensibility.

01:33:58.080 | Smokestacks, belching smoke, the byproducts of industry,

01:34:02.280 | a landscape transformed by the factory model,

01:34:06.780 | that's what Marx, and then later the Bolsheviks,

01:34:09.960 | have in mind.

01:34:10.980 | Similarly, the goal, even as articulated

01:34:15.240 | in Marx's writings, is to put agriculture and farming

01:34:20.240 | on a factory model so that you won't need to deal

01:34:24.360 | with this traditional role of the independent farmer

01:34:27.320 | or the peasant.

01:34:28.320 | Instead, you'll have people who benefit from progress,

01:34:32.120 | benefit from rationalization by working factory farms.

01:34:35.840 | So in approaching the question of collectivization,

01:34:40.880 | we have to keep in mind that for Stalin and his comrades

01:34:45.760 | who are bound and determined to drag Russia kicking

01:34:49.280 | and screaming into the modern age

01:34:51.280 | and not to allow it be beaten because of its backwardness,

01:34:54.300 | as Stalin puts it, traditional forms of agriculture

01:34:58.120 | are not what they have in mind.

01:35:00.720 | And in their rank of desired outcomes,

01:35:04.880 | industrialization, especially massive heavy industry,

01:35:09.640 | is the sine qua non.

01:35:11.000 | That's their envisioned future.

01:35:14.220 | Agriculture rates below.

01:35:16.920 | So in that case, the crucial significance

01:35:20.280 | of collectivization is to get a handle

01:35:22.720 | on the food situation in order to make it predictable

01:35:25.880 | and not to find oneself in another crisis

01:35:28.380 | like during the Civil War when the cities are starving,

01:35:31.380 | industry is robbed of labor,

01:35:33.160 | and the factories are at a standstill.

01:35:36.640 | So this is really the core approach to collectivization,

01:35:41.160 | to put the productive capacities of the farmers

01:35:45.760 | in a regimented way, in a state-controlled way,

01:35:48.640 | under the control of the state.

01:35:51.920 | This produces vast human suffering

01:35:56.640 | because for the farmers, their plot of land

01:36:01.160 | that they thought they had gained

01:36:02.400 | as a result of the revolution is now taken away.

01:36:06.640 | They no longer have the same incentives they had before

01:36:10.120 | to be successful farmers.

01:36:12.160 | In fact, if you're a successful farmer

01:36:14.500 | and maybe have a cow as opposed to your neighbors

01:36:16.840 | who have no cow, you're defamed and denounced

01:36:20.520 | as a kulak, a tight-fisted exploiter,

01:36:23.760 | even though you might be helping to develop agriculture

01:36:27.680 | in the region that you're from.

01:36:29.520 | So the result is human tragedy on a vast scale.

01:36:34.520 | And allied to that, incidentally, is Stalin's sense

01:36:40.000 | that this is a chance to also target people

01:36:45.120 | who are opposed to the Bolshevik regime for other reasons,

01:36:49.960 | whether it's because of their Ukrainian identity,

01:36:53.320 | whether it's because of a desire

01:36:55.840 | for a different nationalist project.

01:36:58.420 | So for Stalin, there are many motives

01:37:01.200 | that roll into collectivization.

01:37:04.720 | And the final thing to be said is you're quite right

01:37:07.440 | that collectivization proves to be a failure

01:37:10.600 | because the Soviet Union never finally gets a grasp

01:37:14.160 | on the problems of agricultural production.

01:37:17.200 | By the end of the Soviet Union,

01:37:19.640 | they're importing grain from the West

01:37:22.160 | in spite of having some of tremendously rich farmland

01:37:28.440 | to be found worldwide.

01:37:29.640 | And the reason for that had to do in part, I think,

01:37:32.820 | with the incentives that had been taken away.

01:37:35.960 | Prosperous individual farmers have a motive

01:37:39.600 | for working their land and maximizing production.

01:37:44.160 | By contrast, if you are an employee

01:37:47.360 | of a factory-style agricultural enterprise,

01:37:52.320 | the incentives run in very different directions.

01:37:54.720 | And the joke that was common for decades

01:37:57.600 | in the Soviet Union and other communist countries

01:38:00.440 | with similar systems was we pretend to work

01:38:03.480 | and they pretend to pay us.

01:38:05.080 | So even labor, which is rhetorically respected

01:38:10.080 | and valorized in practice is rewarded

01:38:14.880 | with very slim rewards.

01:38:16.320 | And the last point, immobility.

01:38:19.260 | The collectivization reduces the mobility of the peasants

01:38:23.840 | who are not allowed because of internal passports

01:38:26.720 | to move to the cities unless they have permission.

01:38:29.160 | They're locked in place.

01:38:30.960 | And you gotta say at the time and afterwards,

01:38:33.200 | that looked a lot like feudalism or neo-feudalism

01:38:36.760 | in terms of the restrictions on workers in the countryside.

01:38:41.760 | - It is a terrifying, horrific, and fascinating study

01:38:46.640 | of how the ideal, when meeting reality, fails.

01:38:51.340 | So the idea here is to make agriculture more efficient,

01:38:57.340 | to be more productive, so the industrialized model.

01:39:02.360 | But the implementation through collectivization

01:39:05.920 | had all the elements that you've mentioned

01:39:08.380 | that contended with human nature.

01:39:10.800 | So first with the kulaks,

01:39:12.000 | so the successful farmers were punished.

01:39:15.160 | And so then the incentive is not just not to be

01:39:18.840 | a successful farmer, but to hide.

01:39:22.200 | Added to that, there's a growing quota

01:39:25.720 | that everybody's supposed to deliver on

01:39:27.780 | that nobody can deliver on.

01:39:29.520 | And so now, because you can't deliver on that quota,

01:39:32.240 | you're basically exporting all your food,

01:39:34.580 | and you can't even feed yourself.

01:39:37.760 | And then you suffer more and more and more,

01:39:39.720 | and there's a vicious downward spiral

01:39:41.720 | of you can't possibly produce that.

01:39:43.960 | Now there's another human incentive

01:39:46.300 | where you're gonna lie, everybody lies on the data.

01:39:49.960 | And so even Stalin himself, probably,

01:39:54.320 | as evil or incompetent as he may be,

01:39:57.480 | was not even getting good data about what's even happening.

01:40:00.360 | Even if he wanted to stop the vicious downward cycle,

01:40:03.120 | which he certainly didn't,

01:40:05.040 | but he wouldn't be even able to.

01:40:07.420 | So there's all these dark consequences

01:40:11.160 | of what on paper seems like a good ideal.

01:40:15.400 | And it's a fascinating study of things on paper.

01:40:20.400 | - That's right.

01:40:21.280 | - When implemented, it can go really, really bad.

01:40:23.920 | - That's right.

01:40:24.760 | And the outcome here is a horrific man-made famine,

01:40:29.240 | not a natural disaster, not bad harvest,

01:40:31.440 | but a man-made famine as a result of then the compulsion

01:40:35.040 | that gets used by the Soviet state

01:40:36.720 | to extract those resources.

01:40:38.520 | Corning off the area,

01:40:39.840 | not allowing starving people to escape.

01:40:43.200 | You put very well some of the implications

01:40:47.040 | of this case study in how things look

01:40:50.800 | in the abstract versus in practice.

01:40:53.020 | And those phenomena were going to haunt

01:40:58.720 | the rest of the experience of the Soviet Union.

01:41:01.240 | The whole notion that up and down the chain of command,

01:41:05.560 | everybody is falsifying or tinkering with

01:41:09.280 | or prettifying the statistics or their reports

01:41:14.120 | in order not to look bad

01:41:15.680 | and not to have vengeance visited upon them,

01:41:18.920 | reaches the point where nobody,

01:41:22.360 | in spite of the pretense of comprehensive knowledge,

01:41:25.480 | there's a state planning agency

01:41:28.280 | that creates five-year plans for the economy as a whole,

01:41:32.640 | and which is supposed to have accurate statistics,

01:41:35.080 | all of this is founded upon a foundation of sand.

01:41:40.080 | That's inadvertent.

01:41:42.440 | That's not an intended side effect.

01:41:46.120 | But what you described in terms of the internal dynamics

01:41:50.000 | of fostering conflict in a rural society

01:41:54.200 | was absolutely not inadvertent.

01:41:56.320 | That was deliberate.

01:41:57.880 | The doctrine was you bring civil war.

01:42:00.760 | Now, had there been social tensions before?

01:42:03.520 | Of course there had.

01:42:04.640 | Had there been envies?

01:42:05.880 | Had there been differentiations in wealth or status?

01:42:10.000 | Of course there had been.

01:42:11.700 | But a deliberate plan to bring class conflict

01:42:15.200 | and bring civil war and then heighten it

01:42:17.600 | in the countryside does damage.

01:42:20.960 | And not least of that is this phenomenon

01:42:24.100 | of a negative selection.

01:42:25.960 | Those who have most enterprise,

01:42:28.840 | those who are most entrepreneurial,

01:42:30.800 | those who have most self-discipline,

01:42:33.620 | those who are best organized,

01:42:35.840 | will be winnowed again and again and again,

01:42:40.840 | sending the message that mediocrity

01:42:43.420 | is comparatively much safer than talent.

01:42:46.920 | And this pattern, incidentally, gets transposed,

01:42:51.280 | and in tremendously harrowing ways also,

01:42:54.560 | to the entire group of Russian intelligentsia

01:42:59.080 | and intellectuals of other peoples

01:43:02.100 | who are in the Soviet Union.

01:43:04.600 | They discover, similarly,

01:43:07.200 | that to be independent,

01:43:10.960 | to have a voice which is not compliant,

01:43:15.120 | carries with it tremendous penalties,

01:43:18.140 | especially in Stalin's reigns of terror.

01:43:23.280 | Again, a difficult question about a psychology

01:43:26.620 | of one human being.

01:43:28.560 | But to what degree do you think Stalin

01:43:30.760 | was deliberately punishing the farmers

01:43:36.840 | and the Ukrainian farmers?

01:43:40.160 | And to what degree was he looking the other way

01:43:42.640 | and allowing the large-scale incompetence,

01:43:48.680 | the horrific incompetence of the collectivization

01:43:52.320 | of agriculture to happen?

01:43:53.760 | - Well, I mean, I think it was both things, right?

01:43:55.520 | I mean, there were not only sins of omission,

01:43:58.440 | but also sins of commission.

01:44:00.100 | Incidentally, one should add,

01:44:02.760 | I don't think for Stalin it was personal.

01:44:05.200 | These are people who are very remote from him,

01:44:07.800 | never coming into contact with the people

01:44:10.680 | who are suffering in this way.

01:44:12.180 | Attributed to him is the quote

01:44:15.640 | that one death is a tragedy,

01:44:17.820 | a million deaths is a statistic.

01:44:21.200 | I think he, in action, certainly acted

01:44:23.680 | in a way that would vindicate that.

01:44:25.580 | But the process of collectivization

01:44:28.560 | was not just a bureaucratic snafu

01:44:31.640 | following a bureaucratic snafu.

01:44:33.720 | There was the mobilization of communist youth,

01:44:37.840 | of military, of party activists to go into the regions

01:44:42.840 | and to search for hidden food,

01:44:45.240 | to extract the food where it could be found,

01:44:50.840 | and we have testimony to this

01:44:55.840 | in the case of people who later became dissidents,

01:44:59.120 | like Lev Kopolev, who wrote in his memoirs

01:45:02.100 | about how he was among those

01:45:05.160 | who were sent in to enact these policies,

01:45:07.560 | and he saw families with the last food being taken away,

01:45:10.960 | even as signs of starvation were visible

01:45:14.200 | already in the present.

01:45:15.640 | And yet he did not go mad, he didn't kill himself,

01:45:18.960 | he didn't fall into despair because he believed,

01:45:21.840 | because he had been taught and believed, at least then,

01:45:25.540 | that this was justified,

01:45:26.900 | this was a larger historical process,

01:45:29.180 | and a greater good would result even from these enormities.

01:45:33.440 | So I think that this was quite deliberate.

01:45:37.040 | - Following this, as you've mentioned,

01:45:42.820 | there was the process of the Great Terror,

01:45:47.860 | where the intellectuals,

01:45:49.240 | where the Communist Party officials,

01:45:51.520 | the military officers, the bureaucrats, everybody,

01:45:56.100 | 750,000 people were executed,

01:46:00.620 | and over a million people were sent to the Gulag.

01:46:03.080 | What can you say, by way of wisdom,

01:46:06.600 | from this process of the Great Terror

01:46:09.580 | that Stalin implemented from '36 to '38?

01:46:15.000 | - Well, the terror had a variety of victims.

01:46:18.660 | There were people who were true believers

01:46:22.340 | and who were Bolsheviks,

01:46:23.580 | who were especially targeted by Stalin

01:46:25.700 | because he aimed to revenge himself

01:46:28.740 | for all the sort of condescension

01:46:30.300 | that he'd experienced in that movement before,

01:46:33.220 | and also to eliminate rivals,

01:46:35.180 | or potential rival power centers,

01:46:38.660 | and members of their families.

01:46:40.820 | And then there were people who simply got caught up

01:46:44.300 | in a process whereby the repressive organs

01:46:48.440 | in the provinces were sent quotas.

01:46:50.720 | You have to achieve your quota,

01:46:52.440 | and maybe even better yet, overachieve your quota,

01:46:55.000 | overperform.

01:46:56.400 | That would be the key to success

01:46:57.960 | in rising in the bureaucracies in the Age of the Terror.

01:47:02.960 | What's so horrifying is the way in which a whole society

01:47:07.320 | stood paralyzed in this process,

01:47:12.240 | and how neighbors would be taken away

01:47:15.660 | in the middle of the night,

01:47:17.340 | and people would be wary of talking about it.

01:47:21.420 | Resistance, at least in these urban centers,

01:47:26.420 | was entirely paralyzed by fear

01:47:30.740 | when if one had somehow find a way to mobilize,

01:47:34.520 | somehow a way to resist the process,

01:47:37.820 | the results might've been different.

01:47:39.940 | There's an astonishing book.

01:47:41.420 | I mean, there are so many great books

01:47:43.340 | that have come out quite recently, even on these topics.

01:47:46.180 | Orlando Fieges has a amazing book called "The Whisperers"

01:47:51.180 | that traces several families' history in the Stalin period.

01:47:56.460 | And it's a testimony to how a whole society,

01:48:02.020 | and some of its most intelligent people,

01:48:04.680 | got winnowed again, and again, and again

01:48:07.840 | in that process of negative selection that we talked about,

01:48:11.440 | the lasting dislocation and scars that this left,

01:48:15.600 | and the way in which how people were not able

01:48:18.820 | to talk about these things in public,

01:48:20.540 | because that would put you next on the list,

01:48:23.560 | suspected of having less than total devotion to the state.

01:48:28.560 | I think one of the things that also is so terrifying

01:48:32.200 | about the entire process is even total devotion

01:48:34.960 | wasn't enough.

01:48:37.160 | The process took on a life of its own.

01:48:40.240 | And I think that it might even have surprised Stalin

01:48:43.640 | in some ways, not enough to short-circus the process,

01:48:48.640 | but the notion where people were invited

01:48:52.520 | to denounce neighbors, coworkers,

01:48:56.900 | maybe even family members,

01:48:58.760 | meant that ever larger groups of people

01:49:03.360 | would be brought into the orbit of the secret police,

01:49:06.320 | tortured in order to produce confessions.

01:49:08.960 | Those confessions then would lead to more lists of suspects,

01:49:12.640 | of people who had to be investigated,

01:49:16.160 | and either executed or sent to the gulags.

01:49:19.760 | The uncertainty that this produced was enormous.

01:49:25.760 | Even loyalty was not enough to save people.

01:49:33.200 | The stories, Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago"

01:49:36.160 | is full of stories of dedicated communists

01:49:40.920 | who find themselves in the gulag

01:49:42.600 | and are sure that some mistake has been made.

01:49:45.040 | And if only Comrade Stalin would hear

01:49:47.800 | about this terrible thing that has happened to them,

01:49:50.760 | surely it would be corrected.

01:49:52.880 | And nothing like this would have everyone else,

01:49:56.080 | by contrast, accused of terrible crimes,

01:49:59.480 | there must be some truth behind that.

01:50:01.680 | So talk about ways of disaggregating a society,

01:50:05.640 | ways of breaking down bonds of trust.

01:50:08.240 | This left lasting traces on an entire society

01:50:14.200 | that endure to this very day.

01:50:16.160 | - Yeah, again, a fascinating study of human nature,

01:50:21.360 | that there essentially was an emergent quota

01:50:25.480 | of confessions of treason.

01:50:29.400 | So like, even though the whole society was terrified

01:50:33.720 | and were through terror loyal,

01:50:35.820 | there still needed to be a lot of confessions

01:50:40.600 | of people being disloyal.

01:50:42.200 | So you're just making shit up now.

01:50:44.080 | Like at a mass scale, stuff is being made up.

01:50:47.760 | And it's also the machine of the secret police

01:50:50.420 | starts eating itself because you want to be confessing

01:50:53.440 | on your boss, on your, and it is just this weird,

01:50:57.680 | dark, dynamic system where human nature

01:51:03.520 | just is at its worst.

01:51:06.000 | - Absolutely, absolutely.

01:51:07.700 | - Why, if we look at this deep discussion

01:51:12.480 | we had about Marxism,

01:51:13.860 | to what degree can we understand from that lens

01:51:19.600 | why the implementation of communism in the Soviet Union

01:51:24.120 | failed in such a dark way?

01:51:26.800 | Both in the economic system with agriculture

01:51:29.000 | and industrialization, and on the human way

01:51:32.920 | with just violation of every possible human right

01:51:37.360 | and the torture and the suffering

01:51:38.680 | and gulags and all of this?

01:51:42.120 | - Well, I think some of it comes back

01:51:43.840 | to the ethical grounding that we mentioned earlier.

01:51:47.280 | The notion that ethics are entirely situational

01:51:51.780 | and that any ethical system is an outgrowth

01:51:54.060 | of a particular class reality,

01:51:56.640 | a particular material reality.

01:52:00.460 | And that leaves the door wide open.

01:52:04.140 | So I think that that aspect was present

01:52:07.220 | from the very beginning.

01:52:09.060 | I think that the expectations of Marx

01:52:14.060 | that the revolution would take hold and be successful

01:52:19.320 | in a developed country played a role here as well.

01:52:22.260 | Russia, which compared to the rest of Europe

01:52:26.660 | was less developed even before the First World War,

01:52:30.280 | is in a dire state after all of the ravage

01:52:33.300 | and the millions of deaths that continue

01:52:36.280 | even after the war has ended in the West.

01:52:38.520 | That leaves precious little in the way

01:52:42.860 | of structural restraints or a functioning society

01:52:47.860 | that would say, let's not do things this way.

01:52:52.320 | I think that in retrospect,

01:52:55.900 | that special role carved out for special individuals

01:52:59.020 | who can move this process forward

01:53:03.300 | and accelerate historical development

01:53:05.540 | allowed for people to step into those roles

01:53:10.220 | and appoint themselves executors of this ideological vision.

01:53:15.220 | So I think those things play a role as well.

01:53:18.980 | - Now it's hard to do counterfactual history,

01:53:20.980 | but to what degree is this basically

01:53:23.020 | that the communist ideals create a power vacuum

01:53:25.780 | and a dictator type figure steps in

01:53:28.220 | and then it's a roll of the dice

01:53:29.620 | of what that dictator is like?

01:53:30.940 | So can you imagine a world where the dictator was Trotsky?

01:53:35.940 | Would we see very similar type of things?

01:53:39.900 | Or is the hardness and the brutality

01:53:41.740 | of somebody like Stalin manifested itself

01:53:44.780 | in being able to look the other way

01:53:47.700 | as some of these dark things were happening

01:53:50.340 | more so than somebody like Trotsky

01:53:53.140 | who would presumably see the realizations

01:53:57.840 | of these policies and be shocked?

01:54:00.020 | - Well, counterfactuals are hard, like you said.

01:54:02.060 | And one very quickly gets off

01:54:04.220 | into really deep waters in speculation.

01:54:07.900 | There were contemporaries,

01:54:09.140 | and there have been scholars since,

01:54:10.900 | who suggest that Trotsky, by all indications,

01:54:15.020 | might've been even more radical than Stalin

01:54:17.180 | in the tempo that he wanted to achieve.

01:54:20.020 | Think of the slogan of permanent revolution.

01:54:27.420 | Trotsky also, who dabbled in so many things

01:54:32.200 | in his intellectual life,

01:54:34.400 | also spoke in almost utopian terms

01:54:37.140 | that are just astonishing to read,

01:54:38.580 | in utopian terms about the construction

01:54:40.720 | of the new man and the new woman.

01:54:42.700 | And that out of the raw material of humanity,

01:54:46.280 | once you really get going,

01:54:47.640 | and once you've established a system

01:54:50.360 | that matches your hopes for the future,

01:54:52.480 | it'll be possible to reconfigure people.

01:54:54.840 | And I talk about ambition,

01:54:57.100 | to create essentially the next stage in human evolution,

01:55:00.740 | a new species growing out of humanity.

01:55:04.020 | Those don't sound like very modest or limited approaches.

01:55:08.740 | And I guess we just really won't know.

01:55:11.340 | - Do some of the destructive characteristics

01:55:14.140 | of communism have to go hand in hand?

01:55:16.580 | So the central planning that we talked about,

01:55:19.120 | the censorship of the secret police,

01:55:23.260 | the concentration of power in one dictatorial figure,

01:55:27.200 | and, well, let's say, again, with the secret police,

01:55:31.040 | the violent oppression.

01:55:33.460 | - One should add to those factors

01:55:36.680 | that have a kind of interrelated logic of their own,

01:55:39.880 | the sheer fact that communism comes to power

01:55:43.480 | in most of these instances as a result of war,

01:55:46.680 | as a result of the destruction of what came before

01:55:49.440 | and a power vacuum.

01:55:50.520 | So think of the Russian revolutions

01:55:54.520 | in the wake of the fall of Tsarism.

01:55:58.040 | Think of the expansion of Stalin's puppet regimes

01:56:03.040 | into Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II

01:56:06.240 | and the Red Army moving into occupy areas in Eastern Europe,

01:56:11.080 | although they announced that they're coming as liberators.

01:56:15.460 | Consider the foundation of communist China

01:56:19.840 | on the heels of World War II

01:56:22.480 | and yet more Chinese civil war.

01:56:25.480 | Consider cases like Korea, Vietnam.

01:56:30.480 | It's likely that this already is a key element

01:56:35.960 | in setting things up for further crisis

01:56:38.780 | because upon seizure of power, if your expectation is,

01:56:43.780 | well, it ought to be relatively easy

01:56:45.860 | to get this system rolling and put it on a basis

01:56:48.840 | that's, after all, we have the roadmap to the future,

01:56:53.140 | there will follow frustrations

01:56:55.040 | and impediments and resistance.

01:56:57.780 | And there's a ratchet effect then there

01:56:59.820 | because it'll produce more repression,

01:57:03.700 | producing even more problems that follow.

01:57:06.520 | What drives the whole thing forward though,

01:57:08.600 | especially in its Leninist version,

01:57:11.320 | but already visible with Marx and Engels

01:57:13.440 | is the insistence on confidence.

01:57:16.340 | If you have the key to the future,

01:57:18.420 | all of these things are possible and necessary.

01:57:21.660 | This leads to an ethos, I think,

01:57:23.960 | that's very hard for historians to quantify

01:57:28.960 | or to study in a methodical way,

01:57:34.620 | but it's the insistence that you hear with Lenin

01:57:38.860 | and then especially with Stalin

01:57:41.100 | that to be a Bolshevik means to be hard,

01:57:45.460 | to be realistic, to be consequential,

01:57:49.380 | meaning you don't shy away from doing what needs to be done,

01:57:52.940 | even if your primordial ethical remainders

01:57:57.940 | from whatever earlier experience you have

01:58:00.620 | rebel against it.

01:58:01.840 | Under Stalin, there's a constant slogan

01:58:05.340 | of the Bolshevik tempo.

01:58:06.740 | The Bolsheviks, there's no fortresses that they can't storm.

01:58:10.220 | They can do everything.

01:58:12.060 | And in a way, this is the assertion

01:58:14.900 | that it's will over everything.

01:58:17.140 | History can be moved forward and accelerated

01:58:21.220 | and probably your own actions justified as a result,

01:58:24.180 | no matter what they were,

01:58:25.900 | if you are sufficiently hard and determined

01:58:29.100 | and have the confidence to follow through.

01:58:30.700 | And then that obviously raises the ultimate question,

01:58:33.880 | what happens when that confidence ebbs or erodes

01:58:36.900 | or when it's lost?

01:58:38.260 | - If we go to the 1920s, to the home of Karl Marx,

01:58:45.100 | fascism as implemented by the Nazi party in Germany

01:58:49.740 | was called the National Socialist German Workers Party.

01:58:54.740 | So what were the similarities and differences of fascism,

01:59:01.740 | socialism, how it was conceived of in fascism and communism?

01:59:06.260 | And maybe you could speak to the broader battle of ideas

01:59:08.860 | that was happening at the time

01:59:10.740 | and battle of political control

01:59:12.860 | that was happening at the time.

01:59:15.140 | - Well, I mean, there's a whole bunch of terms

01:59:17.260 | that are in play here, right?

01:59:19.380 | And when we speak of fascism,

01:59:21.740 | fascism in its original sense is a radical movement

01:59:26.740 | founded in Italy, which though it had been allegedly

01:59:30.180 | on the winning side of World War I,

01:59:33.220 | is disappointed with the lack of rise

01:59:37.220 | in national prestige and territory

01:59:39.180 | that leads, that commences after the end of the war.

01:59:43.900 | So bizarrely enough, it's a socialist

01:59:46.620 | by the name of Benito Mussolini

01:59:48.620 | who crafts an ideological message

01:59:51.700 | of glorification of the state,

01:59:53.960 | the people at large united in a militaristic way

01:59:59.420 | on the march, ready to attack, ready to expand,

02:00:03.540 | a complete overthrow of liberal ideas

02:00:08.540 | of the rights of the individual

02:00:10.980 | or of representative democracy,

02:00:13.460 | and instead vesting power in one leader,

02:00:17.120 | in his case, the Duce Mussolini,

02:00:19.660 | in order to replicate in peacetime

02:00:24.080 | the ideal of total military mobilization in wartime.

02:00:31.860 | Although the Nazis in Germany are inspired

02:00:36.740 | and borrow heavily from fascist ideology,

02:00:39.660 | there also are different emphases that they include,

02:00:44.100 | and that includes their virulent racism from the outset,

02:00:49.100 | which in addition to a glorification of the state,

02:00:53.300 | glorification of the leader,

02:00:54.820 | and preparation for national greatness,

02:00:58.720 | race is absolutely core.

02:01:00.820 | And it's that racial radicalism

02:01:05.140 | that the Nazis espouse as a central idea,

02:01:07.860 | along with antisemitism, the demonizing in particular

02:01:11.260 | of the Jews and this insane racialist cosmology

02:01:14.900 | that the Nazis avow.

02:01:17.940 | It is the assertion that the Nazis

02:01:21.900 | will uniquely bring to pass unity in the people,

02:01:25.880 | unity in the society that leads them

02:01:29.260 | to give themselves this odd name of national socialist.

02:01:34.260 | Some leaders like Goebbels among the Nazis

02:01:40.380 | accent the socialist part to begin with,

02:01:43.460 | others put the accent firmly on the nationalist part.

02:01:47.660 | In part, the term they chose for their movement

02:01:50.260 | was meant to be confusing.

02:01:51.660 | It was meant to take slogans or words

02:01:56.400 | from different parts of the political spectrum

02:01:58.620 | to fuse them into something unfamiliar and new

02:02:01.480 | and claim that they'd overcome

02:02:03.740 | all earlier political divisions,

02:02:05.320 | that the Nazis claimed that they were a movement,

02:02:09.500 | not a party, even though their party was called a party.

02:02:13.440 | So what did Nazism and Bolshevism and communism share

02:02:18.440 | or how were they opposed to one another?

02:02:21.240 | What we need to start with, but making clear,

02:02:23.680 | they were ideological arch enemies.

02:02:26.000 | In both worldviews, the opposite side represented

02:02:29.920 | the ultimate expression of the evil

02:02:33.040 | that needed to be exercised from history

02:02:35.080 | in order for their desired utopia to be brought about.

02:02:38.600 | And this leads to strange

02:02:41.920 | and perverted beliefs about reality.

02:02:45.040 | From the perspective of the Nazis,

02:02:46.700 | the Nazis claimed that because they saw the Jews

02:02:51.700 | as a demonic element in human history,

02:02:55.000 | the Bolsheviks didn't really believe

02:02:59.080 | all of this economic dialectical materialism.

02:03:02.840 | They were in fact a racial conspiracy, it was alleged.

02:03:06.200 | And so the Nazis used the term of Judeo-Bolshevism

02:03:09.280 | to argue that communism is essentially a conspiracy

02:03:14.280 | steered by the Jews, which was complete nonsense.

02:03:20.400 | For their part, the communists,

02:03:23.280 | and from the perspective of the Soviet Union,

02:03:26.240 | the Nazis were in essence a super capitalist conspiracy.

02:03:31.240 | If the cosmological enemy are the capitalists

02:03:35.760 | and the owners, the exploiters,

02:03:37.800 | then all of the rigmarole about race

02:03:41.640 | and nationalism are distractions.

02:03:44.940 | They're meant to fool the poor saps

02:03:49.600 | who enlist in that movement.

02:03:51.520 | It's essentially steered by capitalist owners

02:03:55.400 | who is claimed are reduced to this desperate expedient

02:04:00.400 | of coming up with this thuggish party

02:04:05.000 | that represents the last gasp of capitalism.

02:04:08.700 | So bizarrely enough, from the communist perspective,

02:04:11.600 | the rise of the Nazis can be interpreted as a good sign

02:04:15.960 | because it means that capitalism is almost done

02:04:18.560 | because this is the last undisguised naked face

02:04:23.240 | of capitalism nearing its end.

02:04:25.520 | So the other, beyond this ideological total opposition

02:04:31.760 | in terms of their hoped for futures,

02:04:38.840 | the reality is that there were aspects

02:04:44.040 | that were shared on either side.

02:04:45.920 | And that included the conviction that they could agree

02:04:50.920 | that the age of democracy was done

02:04:53.600 | and that the 19th century had had its day

02:04:57.920 | with experiments with representative democracy,

02:05:01.160 | the claims of human rights, classical liberal ideas,

02:05:07.240 | and all of this had been revealed as bankrupt.

02:05:10.240 | It had gotten you what?

02:05:11.680 | It got you first the first world war

02:05:14.960 | as a total conflict leaving tens of millions dead.

02:05:19.960 | And then economically, the great depression

02:05:23.360 | showing that the end was not far away.

02:05:26.960 | This produced at one in the same time,

02:05:31.640 | both ideological opposition and instances

02:05:35.840 | of vastly cynical cooperation.

02:05:39.960 | In terms of the Weimar Republic,

02:05:41.960 | it's obvious with the benefit of hindsight

02:05:45.840 | that German democracy had ceased to function

02:05:48.800 | even before Hitler comes to power.

02:05:51.120 | But in the process of making democracy unworkable

02:05:54.160 | in Germany, the extremes,

02:05:59.160 | the Nazi stormtrooper army with their brown shirts

02:06:05.400 | and the communist street fighters had cooperated

02:06:10.320 | in heightening an atmosphere of civil war

02:06:15.320 | that left people searching for desperate expedience

02:06:19.560 | in the last days of the Weimar Republic.

02:06:24.300 | The most compelling case of their cooperation

02:06:30.900 | was the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact on August 23rd, 1939,

02:06:35.900 | which enables Hitler to start World War II.

02:06:42.160 | A non-aggression pact in official terms,

02:06:45.680 | it contains secret clauses whereby the Nazis

02:06:50.000 | and the Soviets meeting in Moscow under Stalin's wary eye

02:06:54.440 | had agreed on territorial division of Eastern Europe

02:06:58.580 | and making common cause as each claiming

02:07:02.800 | to be the winner of the future.

02:07:05.320 | So in spite of their oppositions,

02:07:09.480 | these were regimes that were able very cynically

02:07:13.400 | to work together to dire effect.

02:07:15.360 | In the course of the 1950s in particular,

02:07:19.960 | there arose political scientists

02:07:22.100 | who also crafted an explanation for ways

02:07:27.960 | in which these regimes,

02:07:29.160 | although they were opposed to one another,

02:07:32.200 | actually bore morphological resemblances.

02:07:37.200 | They operated in ways that in spite

02:07:40.360 | of ideological differences bore similarities.

02:07:43.220 | And such political scientists, Hannah Arendt,

02:07:45.920 | chief among them, crafted a model called totalitarianism,

02:07:52.080 | borrowing a term that the fascists

02:07:54.020 | had liked about themselves to define regimes

02:07:57.840 | like the Nazis, like Stalin's Soviet Union

02:08:01.720 | for a new kind of dictatorship

02:08:05.000 | that was not a backwards cast revival

02:08:10.000 | of ancient barbarism, but was something new,

02:08:14.040 | a new form of dictatorship that laid total claims

02:08:18.020 | on hearts and minds that didn't want just passive obedience

02:08:22.120 | but wanted fanatical loyalty,

02:08:24.240 | that combined fear with compulsion

02:08:28.200 | in order to generate belief in a system

02:08:31.720 | or at the very least atomize the masses

02:08:34.880 | to the point where they would go along

02:08:36.400 | with the plans of the regime.

02:08:38.640 | This model has often met with very strong criticism

02:08:43.640 | on the grounds that no regime in human history

02:08:49.080 | has yet achieved total control of the population

02:08:52.480 | under its grip.

02:08:55.680 | That's true, but that's not what Hannah Arendt was saying.

02:08:58.520 | Hannah Arendt was saying there will always be

02:09:02.160 | inefficiencies, there will be resistance,

02:09:05.460 | there will be divergences.

02:09:09.240 | What was new was not the alleged achievement

02:09:12.480 | of total control, it was the ambition.

02:09:15.280 | The articulation of the ambition

02:09:16.840 | that it might be possible to exercise

02:09:20.080 | such fundamental and thoroughgoing control

02:09:22.640 | of entire populations.

02:09:23.960 | And the final frightening thought

02:09:25.960 | that Arendt kept before her was,

02:09:29.600 | what if this is not a model that comes to us

02:09:33.880 | from benighted uncivilized ages?

02:09:36.200 | What if this is what the future is going to look like?

02:09:39.000 | That's a horrifying intuition.

02:09:41.000 | - So let me ask you about Darrell Cooper,

02:09:43.680 | who is a historian and podcaster,

02:09:46.440 | did a podcast with Tucker Carlson,

02:09:48.360 | and he made some claims there

02:09:50.800 | and elsewhere about World War II.

02:09:53.160 | There are two claims that I would love

02:09:55.440 | to get your perspective on.

02:09:57.040 | First, he stated that Churchill was, quote,

02:09:59.560 | "The chief villain of the Second World War."

02:10:02.840 | I think Darrell argues that Churchill forced Hitler

02:10:05.520 | to expand the war beyond Poland into a global war.

02:10:08.880 | Second, the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slavs, Gypsies

02:10:13.880 | in death camps was an accident, a byproduct of a global war.

02:10:18.880 | And in fact, the most humane extermination

02:10:22.880 | of prisoners of war possible, given the alternative,

02:10:25.960 | was death by starvation.

02:10:28.120 | So I was wondering if you can respond

02:10:29.760 | to each of those claims.

02:10:31.280 | - Well, I think that this is a bunch of absurdity,

02:10:36.120 | and it would be laughable if it wasn't so serious

02:10:39.840 | in its implications.

02:10:42.400 | I, to address the points in turn,

02:10:45.120 | Churchill was not the chief villain of the Second World War.

02:10:50.080 | The notion that Churchill allegedly forced Hitler

02:10:54.720 | to escalate and expand a conflict

02:10:56.760 | that could have been limited to Poland

02:10:58.760 | is, that assertion is based on a complete neglect

02:11:03.760 | of what Nazi ideology was.

02:11:08.040 | The Nazi worldview and racism was not a ideology

02:11:13.040 | that was limited in its application.

02:11:19.360 | It looked toward world domination.

02:11:22.560 | In the years since the Nazis had come to power,

02:11:28.120 | they sponsored programs of education called geopolitics,

02:11:31.920 | which urged Germans to think in continents,

02:11:35.400 | think in continents to see themselves

02:11:40.400 | as one of the superpowers that would battle

02:11:44.520 | for the future of the world.

02:11:46.680 | And now in retrospect, we of course can see

02:11:49.200 | that Germany was not in a position

02:11:50.720 | to legitimate a claim like that,

02:11:54.600 | but the Nazis' aims were anything but limited.

02:11:58.600 | In particular, this sort of argument

02:12:04.120 | has been tried out in different ways before.

02:12:07.600 | In previous decades, there had been attempts

02:12:10.520 | by historians who were actually well-read

02:12:15.280 | and well-published to argue that World War II

02:12:20.280 | had been in part a contingent event

02:12:29.760 | that had been brought about by accidents or miscalculations.

02:12:34.760 | And such explanations argued

02:12:38.480 | that if you put Hitler's ideology aside,

02:12:42.920 | you actually could interpret him

02:12:44.240 | as a pretty traditional German politician

02:12:47.920 | in the stripe of Bismarck.

02:12:49.760 | Now, when I say it like that,

02:12:51.240 | I think you can spot the problem immediately.

02:12:53.400 | When you put the ideology aside,

02:12:57.360 | to try to analyze Hitler's acts or alleged motives

02:13:02.080 | in the absence of the ideology

02:13:03.880 | that he himself subscribed to

02:13:05.760 | and described in hateful detail in "Mein Kampf"

02:13:09.320 | and other manifestos and speeches

02:13:12.040 | is an enterprise that's doomed to failure justifiably.

02:13:17.040 | The notion that the mass murder

02:13:20.160 | of Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Gypsies

02:13:22.360 | was an event that simply happened

02:13:27.360 | as a result of unforeseen events

02:13:31.440 | and that it was understood as somehow being humane

02:13:35.040 | also runs contrary to the historical fact.

02:13:39.320 | When Poland was invaded,

02:13:42.360 | the Nazis unleashed a killing wave

02:13:44.760 | in their so-called Operation Tannenberg,

02:13:48.120 | which sent in specially trained

02:13:50.360 | and ideologically pre-prepared killers

02:13:54.120 | who were given the name of the units of the Einsatzgruppen

02:13:57.640 | in order to wipe out the Polish leadership

02:14:00.360 | and also to kill Jews.

02:14:03.920 | This predates any of the Operation Barbarossa

02:14:08.920 | and the Nazis' invasion of the Soviet Union.

02:14:13.360 | The Nazis, moreover, in many different expressions

02:14:18.200 | of their ideology, had made clear that their plans,

02:14:21.840 | you can read this in "Mein Kampf" for Eastern Europe,

02:14:24.200 | were subjugation and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale.

02:14:29.200 | So I consider both of these claims absolutely untenable,

02:14:34.640 | given the facts and documents.

02:14:36.800 | - So do you think it was always the case

02:14:38.480 | that Nazi Germany was going to invade the Soviet Union?

02:14:41.800 | - I think, as you can read in "Mein Kampf,"

02:14:43.760 | this is what's necessary in order to bring

02:14:47.120 | that racial utopia to pass.

02:14:49.440 | And so while the timetable might be flexible,

02:14:54.320 | while obviously geopolitical constellations

02:14:58.600 | would play a role in determining

02:15:00.360 | when such a thing might be possible,

02:15:02.480 | it was most definitely on his list.

02:15:05.560 | And I would want to add that in my own scholarship,

02:15:10.080 | I've worked to explore some of these themes

02:15:14.320 | a little bit further.

02:15:15.920 | My second book, which is entitled

02:15:19.040 | "The German Myth of the East,"

02:15:20.520 | which appeared with Oxford University Press,

02:15:22.960 | examines centuries in the German encounter

02:15:28.720 | with Eastern Europe and how Germans have thought

02:15:31.760 | about Eastern Europe, whether in positive ways

02:15:34.480 | or in negative ways.

02:15:36.480 | And one thing that emerges from this investigation

02:15:40.600 | is that even before the Nazis come to power in Germany,

02:15:45.760 | there are certainly negative and dehumanizing stereotypes

02:15:50.760 | about Eastern Europeans, some of them activated

02:15:54.040 | by the experiences of German occupation

02:15:57.000 | in some of these regions during the First World War.

02:16:00.120 | But the Nazis take the very most destructive

02:16:03.720 | and most negative of all those stereotypes

02:16:06.000 | and make them the dominant ones,

02:16:08.200 | making no secret of their expected future

02:16:13.040 | of domination and annihilation in the East.

02:16:16.480 | - The idea of Lebensraum,

02:16:19.200 | is it possible to implement that idea without Ukraine?

02:16:25.360 | - Hitler has Ukraine in his horizon

02:16:30.640 | as one of the chief prizes.

02:16:32.760 | And the Nazis then craft extensive plans,

02:16:37.120 | a master plan that they work on

02:16:39.720 | in draft after draft after draft,

02:16:41.880 | even as the balance of the war is turning against them

02:16:44.840 | on the Eastern front.

02:16:45.800 | This master plan is called the Generalplan Ost,

02:16:49.360 | meaning the general plan for the East.

02:16:52.120 | And it foresees things like mega highways

02:16:55.720 | on which the Germanic master race will travel

02:16:59.080 | to vacation in Crimea, or how their settlements

02:17:03.160 | will be scientifically distributed

02:17:05.800 | in the wide open spaces of Ukraine for agriculture

02:17:09.600 | that will feed an expanded

02:17:12.000 | and purified Germanic master race.

02:17:14.360 | So this was not peripheral to the Nazi ambitions,

02:17:18.160 | but central.

02:17:19.880 | - As I best understand,

02:17:21.520 | there is extensive and definitive evidence

02:17:27.120 | that the Nazis always wanted to invade the Soviet Union.

02:17:32.120 | And there was always a racial component

02:17:35.280 | and not just about the Jews.

02:17:37.880 | They wanted to enslave and exterminate the Jews, yes,

02:17:42.880 | but the Slavic people, the Slavs.

02:17:48.760 | And if he was successful at conquering the Soviet Union,

02:17:53.760 | I think the things that would be done to the Slavic people

02:17:58.400 | would make the Holocaust seem insignificant.

02:18:01.900 | In my understanding, in terms of the numbers

02:18:06.320 | and the brutality and the viciousness

02:18:10.280 | in which he characterized the Slavic people.

02:18:13.080 | - In their worldview, the Jews were especially demonized.

02:18:18.080 | And so the project of the domination of Eastern Europe

02:18:25.400 | involves this horrific program of mechanized, systematized,

02:18:32.800 | bureaucratically organized and horrifyingly efficient

02:18:37.160 | mass murder of the Jewish populations.

02:18:40.560 | What the Nazis expected for the Slavs

02:18:43.800 | had a longer timeline.

02:18:45.920 | Himmler expected the head of the SS,

02:18:49.040 | the SS is given a special mission

02:18:51.680 | to be part of the transformation

02:18:53.080 | of these regions ethnically.

02:18:55.240 | And Himmler in his role of envisioning this German future

02:18:59.520 | in Eastern Europe gives such a chilling phrase.

02:19:03.200 | He says that while certain Slavs

02:19:06.960 | will fall victim immediately,

02:19:10.480 | some proportion of Slavs will not be shipped out

02:19:14.560 | or deported or annihilated,

02:19:16.480 | but instead they will remain as slaves for our culture.

02:19:20.160 | And in that one phrase, Himmler managed to defile

02:19:25.160 | and deface everything that the word culture

02:19:28.800 | had meant to generations of the best German thinkers

02:19:33.120 | and artists in the centuries before the Nazis.

02:19:36.240 | The notion of slaves for our culture

02:19:39.960 | was part of his longer-term expectation.

02:19:43.040 | And then there's finally a fact that speaks volumes

02:19:48.040 | about what the Nazis planned for the East.

02:19:51.360 | Hitler and Himmler envisioned permanent war

02:19:57.080 | on the Eastern front, not a peace treaty,

02:20:00.520 | not a settlement, not a border,

02:20:03.000 | but a constant moving of the border every generation,

02:20:07.280 | hundreds of miles East in order to keep winning

02:20:10.800 | more and more living space.

02:20:13.680 | And with analogy to other frontiers,

02:20:17.320 | to always give more fighting experience

02:20:20.280 | and more training and aggression

02:20:22.320 | to generation after generation of German soldiers.

02:20:26.480 | In terms of nightmarish visions, this one's right up there.

02:20:30.280 | - And always repopulating the land conquered

02:20:35.160 | with the German, the Aryan race.

02:20:37.720 | So in terms of race, repopulating with race

02:20:41.480 | and enslaving the Slavic people and exterminating them,

02:20:44.940 | because there's so many of them,

02:20:46.240 | it takes a long time to exterminate.

02:20:48.520 | - And even in the case of the Germans themselves,

02:20:55.280 | the hidden message behind even Nazi propaganda

02:20:59.080 | about unity and about German national identity

02:21:04.080 | was the Nazis envisioned relentless purges

02:21:08.880 | of the German genetic stock as well.

02:21:11.200 | So among their victims are people with disabilities,

02:21:15.720 | people who are defined as not racially pure enough

02:21:19.020 | for the future, even though they are

02:21:21.720 | clearly Germans by identity.

02:21:24.960 | The full scale and the comprehensive ambitions

02:21:29.960 | of the Nazis are as breathtaking as they are horrifying.

02:21:35.040 | - One of the other things I saw, Daryl tweet,

02:21:38.920 | was that what ended up happening in the Second World War

02:21:42.960 | was the worst possible thing that could have happened.

02:21:45.640 | And I just also wanted to comment on that,

02:21:48.040 | which I can imagine a very large number

02:21:52.400 | of possible scenarios that could have happened

02:21:54.680 | that are much, much worse,

02:21:56.720 | including the successful conquering of the Soviet Union,

02:22:00.640 | as we said, the kind of things that would be done,

02:22:03.320 | and the total war ever ongoing for generations,

02:22:08.320 | which would result in hundreds of millions of deaths

02:22:13.800 | and torture and enslavement,

02:22:15.480 | and not to mention the other possible trajectory

02:22:19.240 | of nuclear bomb. - That's right, that's right.

02:22:22.200 | I would think that the Nazis with atomic weapons

02:22:24.640 | with no compunctions about deploying them

02:22:27.280 | would rank up there as even worse

02:22:29.960 | than the horrors that we saw.

02:22:32.720 | - Now, let me steel man a point

02:22:34.600 | that was also made as part of this,

02:22:36.360 | that the oversimplified narrative of sort of,

02:22:43.080 | to put it crudely, Hitler bad, Churchill good

02:22:46.440 | has been used and abused by neocons and warmongers

02:22:52.000 | and the military-industrial complex in the years since

02:22:55.360 | to basically say this particular leader

02:22:58.920 | is just like Hitler, or maybe Hitler in the 1930s,

02:23:02.760 | and we must invade now

02:23:04.880 | before he becomes the Hitler of the 1940s.

02:23:08.360 | And that has been applied in the Middle East,

02:23:10.480 | in Eastern Europe, and God forbid,

02:23:12.560 | that can be also applied in the war with China

02:23:16.080 | in the 21st century.

02:23:18.600 | So yes, warmongers do sure love to use Hitler

02:23:23.000 | and apply that template to wage war.

02:23:26.560 | And we should be wary of that and be careful of that,

02:23:30.960 | both the over-application of this historical template

02:23:36.400 | onto the modern world and of warmongers in general.

02:23:40.560 | - Yeah, and I think that nobody should like

02:23:42.280 | oversimplified narratives.

02:23:43.840 | We need subtle and accurate narratives.

02:23:47.160 | And also, I just would like to say that probably,

02:23:50.720 | as we've been talking about,

02:23:51.960 | Stalin and Hitler are singular figures.

02:23:54.960 | And just as we've been talking about the implementation

02:23:59.960 | of these totalitarian regimes,

02:24:02.880 | they're singular in human history,

02:24:05.200 | that we never saw anything like it.

02:24:08.280 | And I hope, from everything it looks like,

02:24:11.120 | we will never see anything like it again.

02:24:13.440 | - I mean, they're certainly striking

02:24:15.120 | and unique historical characters in the record.

02:24:19.120 | One of the things that's so disturbing

02:24:20.920 | about Hannah Arendt's model of totalitarianism

02:24:23.560 | is the leader can be changed.

02:24:28.240 | The system itself demands that there be a leader

02:24:31.120 | who allegedly is all-powerful and all-knowing

02:24:36.120 | and prophetic and the like.

02:24:38.440 | But whether particular figures are interchangeable

02:24:44.800 | in that role is a key question.

02:24:48.280 | - Let me go back to the 1920s

02:24:51.600 | and sort of ask another counterfactual question.

02:24:54.540 | Given the battle between the Marxists and the communists

02:24:59.240 | and national socialists,

02:25:01.800 | was it possible and what would that world look like

02:25:06.480 | if the communists indeed won in Germany,

02:25:08.720 | as Karl Marx envisioned?

02:25:11.400 | And it made total sense given the industrialized expanse

02:25:16.280 | that Germany represented.

02:25:18.200 | Was that possible?

02:25:19.360 | And what would it look like if it happened?

02:25:22.300 | - I would think that the reality was probably very remote,

02:25:26.120 | but that was certainly their ambition.

02:25:28.600 | German communists get quoted as saying,

02:25:31.720 | "After Hitler, it's our turn."

02:25:34.320 | Their sentiment was that the arrival of Nazism on the scene

02:25:41.100 | was a sign of how decrepit and incompetent

02:25:46.100 | and doomed capitalism was.

02:25:49.280 | In hindsight, that's almost impossible to believe

02:25:55.640 | because what happens is the Nazis

02:25:58.360 | with their characteristic brutal ruthlessness

02:26:01.120 | simply decapitate the party and arrest the activists

02:26:06.000 | who were supposed to be waiting to take over.

02:26:08.680 | So that's forestalled.

02:26:10.960 | A further hypothetical that gets raised a lot

02:26:14.400 | is couldn't the social Democrats and the communists

02:26:17.960 | have worked together to keep Hitler out of power?

02:26:21.240 | That's where the prior history comes into play.

02:26:26.480 | The very fact that the German revolution in 1919

02:26:31.480 | sees socialists killing socialists produces a dynamic

02:26:39.280 | that's so negative that it's nearly impossible

02:26:44.280 | to settle on cooperation.

02:26:47.280 | Added to the fact that the communists

02:26:50.240 | see the social Democrats as rivals

02:26:53.280 | for the loyalty of the working class.

02:26:56.740 | In terms of just statistical likelihood,

02:27:00.800 | a lot of experts at the time felt

02:27:03.560 | surely the German army is going to step in.

02:27:06.660 | And the most likely outcome would have been

02:27:11.660 | a German general shutting down the democracy

02:27:17.880 | and producing a military dictatorship.

02:27:23.140 | It says a lot about how dreadful and bloody

02:27:26.500 | the record of the Nazis was

02:27:28.740 | that some people in retrospect would have felt

02:27:32.000 | that that military dictatorship would have been preferable

02:27:35.120 | if it had obviated the need for the ordeal under the Nazis.

02:27:40.120 | - What do you think Marx would say about the 20th century?

02:27:44.980 | Let's take it before we get to Mao and China,

02:27:50.780 | just looking at the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

02:27:54.260 | - That's a really good question.

02:28:00.340 | I think that Marx was flexible in his expectations

02:28:05.340 | about tactics and strategies,

02:28:11.840 | even as he was sure that he had actually cracked

02:28:17.920 | a big intellectual problem

02:28:20.300 | of what the future is going to look like.

02:28:23.180 | So how it would play out,

02:28:25.700 | he was a man who had to deal with a lot of disappointments

02:28:28.040 | because in revolutionary uprising

02:28:30.800 | after revolutionary uprising,

02:28:32.200 | whether it was in the revolutions of 1848 across Europe,

02:28:37.200 | whether it was in Poland,

02:28:39.240 | whether it was in the Paris commune,

02:28:43.280 | this is it, this is the outbreak of the real thing.

02:28:47.660 | And then it doesn't end up happening.

02:28:50.380 | So I think that he'd probably have tried to be patient

02:28:53.100 | about the turn of events.

02:28:55.620 | - We mentioned at the outset that Marx felt it was unlikely

02:28:59.460 | that a workers' revolution would break out

02:29:03.260 | in the Russian empire,

02:29:05.820 | because for that you needed lots of industrial workers

02:29:09.020 | and they didn't have a lot of industry.

02:29:11.280 | There's a footnote to add there,

02:29:13.240 | and it proves his flexibility.

02:29:15.580 | A Russian socialist wrote to Marx asking,

02:29:19.940 | might it not be possible for Russia

02:29:23.700 | to escape some stages of capitalist development?

02:29:27.780 | I mean, do you have to rigidly follow that scheme?

02:29:30.860 | And Marx's answer was convoluted, but it wasn't a no.

02:29:35.860 | And that suggests that Marx was willing to entertain

02:29:41.220 | all sorts of possible scenarios.

02:29:44.920 | I think he would certainly have been very surprised

02:29:47.520 | at the course of events as it unfolded,

02:29:50.680 | because it didn't match his expectations at the outset.

02:29:54.940 | - Not to put this on him,

02:29:57.480 | but would he be okay with the price of Holodomor

02:30:02.220 | for the utopian destination of communism?

02:30:08.440 | Meaning, is it okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet?

02:30:12.880 | - Well, we don't know what Marx would say

02:30:16.560 | if he were posed that question deliberately,

02:30:18.600 | but we do know in the case of a Marxist historian,

02:30:21.760 | Eric Hobsbawm, who was a prolific and celebrated

02:30:26.760 | British historian of the 19th and 20th centuries.

02:30:30.600 | And he was put this question in the '90s

02:30:33.680 | after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

02:30:36.300 | And he stated forthrightly that

02:30:39.180 | because the Soviet Union failed,

02:30:43.880 | such sacrifices were inordinate.

02:30:48.280 | But if the experiment had succeeded

02:30:54.040 | and a glorious future had been open for mankind

02:30:57.200 | as a result of the Soviet Union's success,

02:30:59.640 | that would lead to a different reply.

02:31:04.160 | And that is one person's perspective.

02:31:12.640 | So that takes us to the other side of the world.

02:31:15.040 | The side that's often in the West,

02:31:19.760 | not considered very much when we talk about human history.

02:31:23.960 | Chinese dynasties, empires are fascinating, complex,

02:31:28.960 | and there's just a history that's not

02:31:33.240 | as deeply explored as it should be.

02:31:35.860 | And the same applies to the 20th century.

02:31:38.560 | So Chinese radicals founded

02:31:41.640 | the Chinese Communist Party, CCP, in July, 1921.

02:31:45.820 | Among them, as you talk about, was Mao.

02:31:51.000 | What was the story of Mao's rise to power?

02:31:53.580 | - So Mao takes a page from the Book of Lenin

02:31:58.580 | by adapting or seeking to adapt Marx's ideology

02:32:08.200 | to a context that would have surprised Marx significantly.

02:32:11.600 | And that is not only to set the revolution

02:32:16.600 | in an as-yet-not-industrialized country,

02:32:21.100 | but moreover, to make the peasants,

02:32:23.640 | rather than being conservative sacks of potatoes,

02:32:26.240 | to make them into the prime movers

02:32:28.800 | of the success of this political venture.

02:32:33.760 | That's a case of the phenomenon

02:32:37.380 | that we talked about earlier.

02:32:38.880 | When is an adaptation of an ideology

02:32:44.180 | or a change to an ideology

02:32:47.080 | a valid adjustment that you've made or adaptation?

02:32:52.080 | And when is it already so different

02:32:56.320 | that it's something entirely distinct?

02:33:00.700 | Maoism was very clearly intended to answer this question

02:33:05.700 | for the Chinese context and, by implication,

02:33:10.100 | other non-Western parts of the world.

02:33:12.860 | This was, in part, Mao's way, whose ambition was great,

02:33:16.720 | to put himself at the head

02:33:18.660 | of a successful international movement

02:33:21.500 | and to be the successor to Stalin,

02:33:25.100 | whose role he both admired and resented

02:33:29.580 | from having to be the junior partner.

02:33:32.260 | To take an example of a masterwork

02:33:34.780 | in a major milestone in the history of communism,

02:33:39.780 | the Polish philosopher Leszek Kowalkowski,

02:33:44.060 | who was at first a committed communist

02:33:48.380 | and then later became disillusioned

02:33:50.060 | and wrote a three-volume study of Marxist thought

02:33:53.620 | called "Currents of Marxism,"

02:33:56.260 | in that book, when he reaches Maoism,

02:34:00.620 | Kowalkowski essentially throws up his hands

02:34:03.000 | and says it's hard to even know what to do with this

02:34:05.980 | because putting the peasantry in the vanguard role

02:34:10.980 | is something that is already at variance

02:34:15.020 | with the original design,

02:34:17.020 | but Marx says this is an improved version,

02:34:19.580 | this is an adapted and truer version of Marxism

02:34:23.100 | for the Chinese context.

02:34:26.120 | In case after case in Mao's rise to power,

02:34:31.120 | we see a really complicated relationship with Stalin.

02:34:35.040 | He works hard to gain Stalin's support

02:34:38.120 | because the Comintern,

02:34:39.960 | the international organization headquartered in Moscow,

02:34:44.040 | working to encourage and help revolutionaries worldwide

02:34:48.120 | is skeptical about the Chinese communists to begin with

02:34:51.560 | and believes that China still has a long way to go

02:34:55.280 | before it's reached the stage

02:34:56.820 | where it's ripe for communist revolution.

02:34:59.560 | And in a way, that's more orthodox Marxism

02:35:02.260 | than what Mao is championing.

02:35:04.120 | Mao chafes under Stalin's acknowledged leadership

02:35:10.600 | of international communism as a movement.

02:35:14.320 | And in 1950, when Mao goes to visit Stalin in Moscow

02:35:20.760 | in order to sign a treaty of cooperation,

02:35:23.640 | he's left waiting for days and days and days

02:35:26.880 | in a snub that is meant to show him

02:35:30.160 | that you're just not as important

02:35:32.080 | as you might think you are.

02:35:33.560 | And then when Stalin dies in 1953,

02:35:37.000 | Mao feels the moment is ready for him

02:35:41.600 | to step into the leadership position

02:35:44.760 | surpassing the Soviet Union.

02:35:47.200 | So many of Mao's actions like the Great Leap Forward

02:35:51.720 | and the agricultural disasters that follow from that

02:35:55.380 | are literally attempts to outdo Stalin,

02:35:59.240 | to outperform Stalin,

02:36:00.920 | to show that what Stalin was not able to do,

02:36:04.280 | the Chinese communist regime will be able to bring off.

02:36:08.600 | And the toll for that hubris is vast.

02:36:14.360 | - Yeah, in the darkest of ways, he did outdo Stalin.

02:36:17.480 | - That's right, in the statistics.

02:36:19.840 | - The Great Leap Forward ended up killing

02:36:22.320 | approximately 40 million people from starvation or murder.

02:36:26.200 | Can you describe the Great Leap Forward?

02:36:29.960 | - So it was modeled on the crash industrialization

02:36:32.980 | that Stalin had wanted to undertake in the Soviet Union

02:36:35.600 | and to outdo it.

02:36:37.580 | The notion of the Great Leap Forward

02:36:39.060 | was that it would be possible for the peasant masses

02:36:42.400 | out of their conviction in the rightness

02:36:44.960 | of the Chinese communist cause

02:36:46.800 | to industrialize China overnight.

02:36:50.000 | That involved things like creating small smelting furnaces

02:36:54.520 | in individual farm communes.

02:36:57.680 | It involved folding together farming territories

02:37:02.680 | into vast communes of very large size

02:37:06.480 | that were just because of their sheer gigantism

02:37:09.640 | supposed to be by definition more efficient

02:37:12.240 | than small-scale farming.

02:37:13.780 | It ended up producing environmental disasters

02:37:20.040 | and campaigns to eliminate birds or insects

02:37:25.040 | were supposed to demonstrate mastery over nature

02:37:30.300 | by sheer acts of will.

02:37:32.840 | These included things like

02:37:34.840 | adopting Soviet agricultural techniques

02:37:39.840 | that were pioneered by a crackpot biologist

02:37:44.080 | by the name of Trofim Lysenko

02:37:46.080 | that produced more agricultural disaster.

02:37:49.960 | That involved things like plowing to depths

02:37:53.760 | that were not practical for the seeds to germinate and grow

02:37:58.040 | but were supposed to produce super plants

02:38:00.600 | that would produce bumper harvests

02:38:04.120 | and outpace the capitalist countries and the Soviet Union.

02:38:07.860 | So the context for all of this is a race to get first

02:38:12.860 | to the achievement of full-scale communism.

02:38:18.720 | One of the themes that I think it's so valuable to pursue

02:38:22.680 | and to take seriously in the history of communism

02:38:25.160 | is what concrete promises were made.

02:38:28.680 | In the case of China,

02:38:33.880 | Mao made promises and projections for the future

02:38:38.880 | that were worrying even to some of his own assistants.

02:38:43.180 | He exclaimed that perhaps by 1961,

02:38:47.940 | perhaps by 1973,

02:38:50.260 | China would be the winner in this competition

02:38:52.580 | and it would have achieved full communism.

02:38:54.780 | So that which Marx had sketched as the endpoint of humanity

02:38:58.500 | would be achieved first by the Chinese.

02:39:01.580 | Later, his own comrades, when he passed from the scene,

02:39:06.460 | felt the need to temper that a little bit

02:39:08.740 | and promised that they would achieve full communism

02:39:11.200 | by the year 2000.

02:39:12.700 | Such promises are helpful to a regime to create enthusiasm

02:39:19.520 | and to hold out to people the prospect of real successes

02:39:23.780 | just around the corner.

02:39:25.380 | But what happens when the date arrives

02:39:27.860 | and you haven't actually achieved that goal?

02:39:30.620 | That's one ticking time bomb that played a role

02:39:33.660 | in the increasing erosion of confidence in the Soviet Union.

02:39:38.300 | And the case of China must have been something similar.

02:39:41.700 | - So there's a lot of other elements

02:39:43.020 | that are similar to the Soviet Union.

02:39:46.820 | Maybe you could speak to the Hundred Flowers Campaign.

02:39:51.700 | - The Hundred Flowers Campaign is a chance for Mao

02:39:55.620 | who has felt that he has lost prestige

02:40:00.620 | and lost standing in the party

02:40:02.600 | because of the disasters of the Great Leap Forward

02:40:05.700 | to regain some of that momentum.

02:40:08.820 | And the whole Hundred Flowers Campaign,

02:40:12.180 | officially titled the Rectification Campaign

02:40:15.700 | to set things right, is still shrouded in mystery.

02:40:20.100 | Historians disagree about how to interpret

02:40:23.220 | what Mao was actually up to.

02:40:25.660 | The most cynical variant is that Mao encouraged

02:40:30.140 | Chinese thinkers and intellectuals to share ideas

02:40:35.140 | and to engage in constructive criticism,

02:40:39.820 | to propose alternatives,

02:40:42.140 | and to let a full discussion happen.

02:40:45.420 | And then, after some of them had ventured that,

02:40:48.940 | to come in and purge them,

02:40:50.820 | to punish them ruthlessly for having done

02:40:52.820 | what he had invited them to do.

02:40:54.960 | That is the most cynical variant.

02:40:58.140 | Some historians argue that Mao himself

02:41:01.820 | was not prepared for the ideas

02:41:05.260 | that he himself had invited into the public square,

02:41:08.620 | and that he grew anxious and worried and angry at this

02:41:12.980 | without having thought this through

02:41:14.700 | in a cynical way to begin with.

02:41:16.400 | The end result is the same.

02:41:18.020 | The end result is, once again, negative selection,

02:41:21.740 | the decimation of those who are most venturesome,

02:41:24.780 | those who are most talented and intelligent,

02:41:27.220 | are punished relentlessly for that.

02:41:29.200 | - And just a general culture of censorship and fear,

02:41:35.380 | and all the same stuff we saw in the Soviet Union.

02:41:37.460 | - That's right.

02:41:38.300 | I mean, think of the impact on officials

02:41:40.620 | who are loyal servants of the regime

02:41:42.340 | and just wanna get along.

02:41:43.780 | The message goes out loud and clear.

02:41:45.820 | Don't be venturesome.

02:41:47.300 | Do not propose reforms.

02:41:48.980 | Stick with the tried and true,

02:41:50.260 | and that'll be the safe route,

02:41:51.540 | even if it ends in, ultimately, stagnation.

02:41:54.740 | - So as the same question I asked about the Soviet Union,

02:41:58.620 | why do you think there was so much failure

02:42:01.380 | of policies that Mao implemented in China during his rule?

02:42:06.380 | - Mao himself had a view of human beings

02:42:10.420 | as being, as he put it, beautiful blank pieces of paper

02:42:13.500 | upon which one can write new characters.

02:42:16.420 | And that is clearly at variance

02:42:21.420 | with what you and I know about the complex nature

02:42:24.540 | of human beings as we actually encounter them in the world.

02:42:27.500 | I think that in the process of hatching schemes

02:42:31.380 | that were one-size-fits-all for a country as big

02:42:35.220 | and as varied in its communities as China,

02:42:40.220 | inevitably, such an imposition of one model

02:42:44.860 | was going to lead to serious malfunctions.

02:42:49.700 | And so much of what other episodes

02:42:53.580 | in Chinese history had showed,

02:42:54.860 | the entrepreneurial capacity,

02:42:57.300 | the productive capacity, economically,

02:42:59.660 | of the Chinese people was suppressed

02:43:02.060 | by being fitted into these rigid schemes.

02:43:05.180 | What we've seen since, after Mao passes from the scene

02:43:09.500 | and with the reforms of Deng Xiaoping,

02:43:12.420 | one sees just how much of those energies

02:43:15.760 | had been forcibly suppressed for so long

02:43:18.140 | and now were allowed to reemerge.

02:43:20.020 | - Mao died in 1976.

02:43:25.100 | You wrote that the CCP in '81,

02:43:29.100 | looking back through the lens of historical analysis,

02:43:32.620 | said that he was 70% correct.

02:43:35.140 | Seven, zero, exactly 70% correct.

02:43:38.780 | - Yeah, not 69, not 71.

02:43:41.020 | The scientific precision, I mean,

02:43:44.000 | we should say that again and again.

02:43:46.860 | The co-opting of the authority of science

02:43:52.020 | by the Soviet Union, by Mao,

02:43:56.480 | by Nazi Germany, Nazi science,

02:43:59.800 | is terrifying and should serve as a reminder

02:44:06.100 | that science is the thing

02:44:08.460 | that is one of the most beautiful creations of humanity,

02:44:12.620 | but is also a thing that could be used

02:44:15.880 | by politicians and dictators to do horrific things.

02:44:19.740 | - Its essence is questing, not certainty.

02:44:23.180 | - Yeah. - Constant questing.

02:44:24.180 | - Exactly.

02:44:25.620 | Humility, intellectual humility.

02:44:29.620 | So how did China evolve after Mao's death to today?

02:44:36.180 | - Well, I think that there is, without denouncing Mao,

02:44:40.940 | without repudiating Mao's 70% correctness,

02:44:46.920 | the regime actually undertook a new venture,

02:44:52.100 | and that venture was to open up economically,

02:44:55.020 | to gain access to world markets,

02:44:59.240 | and to play a global role,

02:45:05.300 | always with the proviso

02:45:06.660 | that the party retained political supremacy.

02:45:10.660 | It's been pointed out that while Khrushchev

02:45:14.380 | tries in the Soviet Union in 1956,

02:45:17.420 | especially with a secret speech

02:45:19.260 | in which he denounces Stalin's crimes,

02:45:21.580 | he tries to go back to the founders' intentions of Lenin.

02:45:26.660 | Nothing like that, it's argued,

02:45:30.060 | is possible in the Chinese case,

02:45:32.480 | because Mao was not the equivalent of Stalin

02:45:35.860 | for communist China, Mao was the equivalent of Lenin.

02:45:40.020 | Mao was the founder, so there's no repudiating of him.

02:45:43.540 | They are stuck with that formula of 70%,

02:45:45.740 | and acknowledging that there were some problems,

02:45:48.500 | but by and large arguing that it was the correct stance

02:45:52.700 | of the party and its leader that was paramount.

02:45:56.020 | And the results of this wager are where we are today.

02:46:02.420 | China has been transformed out of all recognition

02:46:05.880 | in terms of not all of the living standards of the country,

02:46:10.380 | but many places.

02:46:11.840 | Its economic growth has been dramatic,

02:46:17.240 | and the new dispensation is such that people ask,

02:46:22.160 | is this a communist country anymore?

02:46:25.320 | And that's probably a question

02:46:26.640 | that haunts China's current leadership as well.

02:46:30.120 | With Chairman Xi, we've seen a return to earlier patterns.

02:46:35.120 | Xi insisting that Mao's achievement has to be held as equal

02:46:40.980 | to that of the reform period.

02:46:43.340 | Sometimes, imitations or nostalgia for the Mao period,

02:46:47.940 | or even the sufferings of the Cultural Revolution,

02:46:51.020 | are part of this volatile mix.

02:46:53.240 | But all of this is outward appearance.

02:46:59.420 | Statistics can also be misleading.

02:47:02.660 | And I think that very much in question

02:47:06.940 | is China's further revolution in our own times.

02:47:09.940 | - In the West, China is often demonized.

02:47:15.120 | And we've talked extensively today

02:47:20.860 | about the atrocities that result from,

02:47:23.260 | atrocities both internal and external

02:47:28.040 | that result from the communist nations.

02:47:31.120 | But what can we say by way of hope

02:47:37.980 | to resist the demonization?

02:47:42.140 | How can we avoid cold or hot war with China,

02:47:47.740 | we being the West or the United States in the 21st century?

02:47:53.980 | - Well, you mentioned in the context

02:47:55.680 | of the claims of science, humility as a crucial attribute.

02:48:00.680 | I think that humility, sobriety, realism

02:48:06.220 | are tremendously valuable in trying to understand

02:48:09.800 | another society, another form of government.

02:48:13.600 | And so I think one needs to be very self-aware

02:48:17.920 | that projection onto others of what we think they're about

02:48:22.700 | is no substitute for actual study

02:48:26.220 | of the sources that a society like that produces.

02:48:29.380 | It's declarations of what matters most to them.

02:48:33.060 | The leadership's own pronouncements

02:48:35.180 | about what the future holds.

02:48:37.160 | I think that matters a lot more than pious hopes

02:48:41.500 | or versions of being convinced that inevitably

02:48:46.500 | everyone will come to resemble us in a better future.

02:48:52.260 | - You mentioned this earlier,

02:48:54.020 | but just to take a small detour,

02:48:56.540 | what are we supposed to think about North Korea

02:48:59.820 | and their declaration that they're supposedly

02:49:03.380 | a communist nation?

02:49:05.040 | What can we say about the economic,

02:49:10.300 | the political system of North Korea?

02:49:12.700 | Or is it just like a hopelessly simple answer

02:49:16.380 | of this is a complete disaster of a totalitarian state?

02:49:21.740 | - So I think the answer that a historian can give

02:49:25.060 | is a historical answer, right?

02:49:26.620 | That we have to inquire into what has to happen

02:49:29.780 | in order to arrive at the past we are today.

02:49:32.780 | We have a regime that's claiming to be communist

02:49:36.100 | or has an even better version of Marx's original ideas

02:49:41.100 | in the form of a Korean adaptation called "Yuche."

02:49:48.140 | How does that mesh with the reality

02:49:51.780 | that we're talking about a dynastic government

02:49:53.780 | and a monarchy in all but name,

02:49:55.780 | but a communist monarchy if that's what it is.

02:49:59.380 | I think that examining as much as we can learn

02:50:04.380 | about a closed society that goes about its every day

02:50:11.060 | in ways that are inscrutable to us

02:50:14.520 | is very, very challenging.

02:50:16.300 | But the only answer,

02:50:18.100 | when an example like this escapes your analytic categories,

02:50:21.640 | probably there's a problem with your analytical categories

02:50:24.940 | rather than the example being the problem

02:50:27.660 | in all its messiness.

02:50:29.060 | - Yeah, so there's a component here

02:50:30.380 | in the release of China as well

02:50:32.860 | to bring somebody like John Mearsheimer into the picture.

02:50:36.420 | There's a military component here too.

02:50:38.320 | And that is ultimately how these nations interact,

02:50:43.380 | especially totalitarian nations interact

02:50:45.500 | with the rest of the world.

02:50:46.700 | So nations interact economically, culturally,

02:50:51.700 | and militarily.

02:50:53.300 | And the concern with countries like North Korea

02:50:57.140 | is the way for them to be present on the world stage

02:51:01.340 | in the game of geopolitics

02:51:05.300 | is by flexing their military might.

02:51:08.540 | And they invest a huge amount of their GDP

02:51:12.380 | into the military.

02:51:14.580 | So I guess the question there to discuss

02:51:19.060 | in terms of analysis is

02:51:20.980 | how do we deal with this kind of system

02:51:25.700 | that claims to be a communist system?

02:51:28.840 | And what lessons can we take from history

02:51:31.580 | and apply it to that?

02:51:34.060 | Or should we simply just ignore and look the other way

02:51:36.500 | as we've been kind of hoping it doesn't get out of hand?

02:51:41.980 | - Yeah, I mean, there's realists see states

02:51:46.980 | following their own interests

02:51:49.740 | and prioritizing their own security.

02:51:53.260 | And there's probably not much that could be done

02:51:55.700 | to change that, but conflict arising

02:51:59.700 | as a result of misunderstanding or mixed messages

02:52:03.620 | or misinterpretation.

02:52:08.180 | Those are things that policy makers

02:52:10.660 | probably do have some control over.

02:52:13.140 | I think that there's internal processes

02:52:16.100 | that'll work their way out

02:52:17.380 | even as opaque a place as North Korea.

02:52:21.540 | It's also the reality just as we saw

02:52:24.860 | with the divided Germanys that

02:52:26.700 | it's a precarious kind of a twinned existence

02:52:32.980 | when you have countries that are across the border

02:52:36.060 | from one another that are derived from

02:52:38.380 | what used to be a single unit that now are

02:52:42.580 | kind of a real life social science experiment

02:52:45.500 | in what kind of regime do you get with one kind of system?

02:52:48.900 | What sort of regime do you get with another kind of system?

02:52:51.020 | And that's a very unstable setup as it turns out.

02:52:55.980 | - Now let us jump continents

02:52:59.140 | and in the 20th century look to North America.

02:53:05.580 | So you also have lectured about communism in America,

02:53:10.580 | the different communist movements in America.

02:53:12.860 | It was also founded in 1919

02:53:16.420 | and evolved throughout through a couple of red scares.

02:53:21.420 | So what was the evolution of the Communist Party

02:53:24.860 | and just in general communists in America?

02:53:27.100 | - Well, it's fascinating to observe this story

02:53:31.100 | because one longstanding commonplace

02:53:34.060 | had been that socialism has less purchase

02:53:38.540 | or radical socialism in the United States

02:53:42.300 | than in European countries.

02:53:44.580 | So to the extent that that was true,

02:53:47.820 | it was an uphill battle for the communists

02:53:51.500 | to get established in the United States,

02:53:53.860 | but it makes it all the more interesting

02:53:57.540 | to follow the development of the movement.

02:54:01.740 | And there were two challenges in particular

02:54:06.740 | that played a role in shaping

02:54:09.780 | the American communist experience.

02:54:12.620 | One was the fact that to begin with,

02:54:14.740 | the party was often identified with immigrants.

02:54:19.580 | The communities that had come over across the Atlantic

02:54:26.060 | from Europe often had strong socialist contingents.

02:54:29.780 | And when this break happens within the socialist movement

02:54:33.420 | between radical socialists and more moderate socialists,

02:54:37.100 | there were fiery individuals who saw the opportunity

02:54:43.380 | to help shape the American communist movement.

02:54:46.620 | But the result was that for many American workers,

02:54:50.820 | they saw the sheer ethnic variety and difference

02:54:54.940 | of this movement as something that was unfamiliar.

02:54:58.900 | It would only be with the rise to the leadership

02:55:02.340 | of the Communist Party of Earl Browder,

02:55:04.660 | a American-born political leader with vast ambitions

02:55:09.660 | for creating an American communist movement

02:55:13.300 | that that image would start to be modified.

02:55:17.020 | Earl Browder had a meteoric rise and then fall

02:55:21.780 | over the promise he made that went by the slogan,

02:55:27.100 | "Communism is 20th century Americanism."

02:55:30.380 | The notion was that communism could find roots

02:55:35.740 | in American political discourse and experience

02:55:39.460 | where Earl Browder fell afoul of other communists

02:55:44.460 | was in his expectations during World War II

02:55:47.820 | that it might be possible for the Soviet Union

02:55:50.500 | and the United States to make

02:55:52.380 | their current cooperation permanent

02:55:55.380 | and to come to some sort of accommodation

02:55:57.620 | that would moderate their rivalry.

02:56:01.260 | As it turns out, with the dawning already

02:56:03.380 | of Cold War tensions that would later flower more fully,

02:56:07.320 | that was unacceptable and the movement divested itself

02:56:11.500 | of Earl Browder.

02:56:13.700 | Another point that shaped American perceptions

02:56:18.580 | of the communist movement in the United States

02:56:22.320 | involved issues of espionage.

02:56:25.320 | During the 1930s and the 1940s, American communists,

02:56:30.320 | not all of them obviously,

02:56:33.440 | but select members of the movement were called upon

02:56:37.620 | by Soviet intelligence to play a historical role

02:56:40.560 | by gathering information, winning sympathies.

02:56:44.260 | One of the most amazing books of the 20th century

02:56:48.080 | is the book written by Whitaker Chambers

02:56:51.280 | who had served as a Soviet spy,

02:56:53.760 | first a committed communist, then a Soviet spy,

02:56:57.040 | and then later a renegade from those allegiances.

02:57:01.160 | His book is entitled "Witness" published in 1952,

02:57:05.760 | and it's one of the most compelling books

02:57:08.180 | you could ever read because it's so full

02:57:11.080 | of both the unique character of the author

02:57:15.320 | in all of his idiosyncrasies

02:57:18.040 | and a sense of huge issues being at stake,

02:57:22.920 | ones upon which the future of humanity turns.

02:57:26.000 | So talk about the ethical element

02:57:27.800 | being of importance there.

02:57:29.240 | Through the apparatus of the state,

02:57:36.120 | the Soviets managed to infiltrate spies

02:57:40.120 | into America's military

02:57:43.200 | as well as government institutions.

02:57:48.000 | One great irony is that when Senator McCarthy

02:57:53.000 | in the '50s made vast claims

02:57:57.620 | about communist infiltration of the government apparatus,

02:58:02.620 | claims that he was unable to substantiate with details,

02:58:07.840 | that reality had actually been closer

02:58:13.280 | to the reality of the 1930s and the 1940s

02:58:16.800 | than his own time.

02:58:18.520 | But the association of American communists

02:58:21.680 | with the foreign power of the Soviet Union

02:58:24.760 | and ultimately an adherence to its interests

02:58:29.620 | did a lot to undermine any kind of hearing

02:58:33.920 | for American communists.

02:58:36.120 | An example, of course,

02:58:37.200 | was the notorious Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939.

02:58:41.760 | The American communist movement found itself forced

02:58:45.800 | to turn on a dime in its propaganda.

02:58:48.640 | Before the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939,

02:58:52.880 | they had denounced Nazi Germany

02:58:54.640 | as the greatest threat to world peace.

02:58:57.740 | Just after the signing of the pact,

02:58:59.920 | they had to proclaim that this was a great win for peace

02:59:04.680 | and for human harmony

02:59:06.640 | and to completely change

02:59:11.080 | their earlier relationship of being mortal enemies

02:59:15.560 | with Nazi Germany.

02:59:17.520 | There were many American communists

02:59:19.120 | who couldn't stomach this

02:59:20.520 | and who in disillusionment

02:59:22.840 | simply quit their party memberships or drifted away.

02:59:26.180 | But it's a fascinating story of the ups and downs

02:59:31.240 | of a political movement with radical ambitions

02:59:34.560 | in American political history.

02:59:37.240 | - Yeah, the Cold War and the extensive levels of espionage

02:59:42.240 | sort of created, combined with Hollywood,

02:59:46.960 | created a basically firmly solidified communism

02:59:51.680 | as the enemy of the American ideal.

02:59:54.180 | It was sort of embodied.

02:59:57.320 | And not even the economic policies

02:59:59.040 | of the political policies of communism,

03:00:02.280 | but like the word and the color red

03:00:06.380 | with a hammer and sickle.

03:00:08.040 | You know, "Rocky IV," one of my favorite movies.

03:00:10.840 | - Well, that's canonical, right?

03:00:12.160 | - Yeah, I mean, it is a bit of a meme,

03:00:15.720 | but meme becomes reality

03:00:18.480 | and then enters politics

03:00:21.240 | and is used by politicians to do all kinds of name calling.

03:00:25.440 | You have spoken eloquently about modern Russia

03:00:33.820 | and modern Ukraine and modern Eastern Europe.

03:00:37.300 | So how did Russia evolve after Stalin

03:00:43.400 | and after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

03:00:45.740 | - Well, I think the short answer is

03:00:50.120 | without a full historical reckoning

03:00:52.800 | that would have been healthy about the recent past,

03:00:57.040 | in ways that's not very surprising

03:00:58.800 | because given the economic misery of dislocations

03:01:02.640 | and the cumulative damage

03:01:04.840 | of all of those previous decades of this experiment,

03:01:08.940 | it left precious little patience

03:01:11.080 | or leisure or surplus for introspection.

03:01:15.080 | But after an initial period of great interest

03:01:21.080 | in understanding the full measure

03:01:28.000 | of what Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union

03:01:32.640 | had undergone in this first initial explosion

03:01:36.600 | of journalism and of reporting and investigations,

03:01:41.600 | historical investigations with new sources,

03:01:43.880 | after an initial period marked by such interest,

03:01:48.840 | people instead retreated into the here and now and the today.

03:01:56.160 | And the result is that

03:01:58.000 | there's been less than would be healthy

03:02:04.240 | of a taking stock, a reckoning,

03:02:07.900 | even an assigning of responsibility

03:02:12.520 | for those things that were experienced in the past.

03:02:16.180 | No Nuremberg trial took place

03:02:20.120 | in order to hold responsible those who had repressed others

03:02:24.400 | in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

03:02:28.440 | In other ex-communist countries,

03:02:31.960 | there was also precious little in the way

03:02:34.280 | of legal proceedings

03:02:36.240 | that would have established responsibility.

03:02:38.240 | Keep in mind, the Nuremberg trials

03:02:41.500 | had as one of their goals,

03:02:42.960 | a very important one as it turns out,

03:02:45.220 | not even individual verdicts

03:02:47.560 | for individual people found guilty,

03:02:50.940 | but to collect and publicize information,

03:02:55.220 | to create knowledge and transparency

03:02:57.300 | about what the reality had been in the past.

03:02:59.660 | In the case of the former Soviet Union,

03:03:03.940 | in the case of Russia today,

03:03:06.260 | instead of a clear-eyed recognition

03:03:10.420 | of the vast nature of what it all cost,

03:03:14.060 | Putin, upon replacing Yeltsin,

03:03:17.940 | was in a position to instead traffic

03:03:21.300 | in the most varied, eclectic,

03:03:24.660 | and often mutually contradictory historical memories

03:03:28.900 | or packages of memories.

03:03:31.460 | So on the one hand in Putin's Russia,

03:03:35.540 | the Tsars are rehabilitated as heroes of Russian statehood.

03:03:41.500 | Putin sees Lenin in a negative light

03:03:46.300 | because Lenin, by producing federalism

03:03:49.660 | as a model for the Soviet Union,

03:03:51.340 | laid a time bomb at the base of that state

03:03:55.140 | that eventually smashed it into many constituent parts

03:03:59.180 | as nations regained their independence,

03:04:03.120 | while Stalin, it's acknowledged,

03:04:05.820 | exacted a dreadful toll,

03:04:08.980 | but also was effective

03:04:10.540 | as a representative of Russian statehood.

03:04:14.860 | This produced where we are today.

03:04:18.060 | It's a commonplace that echoed by many

03:04:22.860 | that Russia, without Ukraine,

03:04:27.020 | is a nation-state or could be a nation-state.

03:04:30.300 | Russia, with Ukraine, has to be an empire.

03:04:34.500 | And Putin, who is not really seeking

03:04:37.500 | a revival of Stalin's rule,

03:04:40.140 | but still is nostalgic about earlier forms

03:04:44.420 | of greatness and of the strength of Russian statehood

03:04:49.420 | to the exclusion of other values,

03:04:52.380 | has undertaken a course of aggression

03:04:56.400 | that has produced results quite different

03:04:59.460 | from what he likely expected.

03:05:01.660 | And I think that timing is crucial here.

03:05:04.820 | It's fascinating to try to imagine

03:05:07.340 | what if this attempt to re-digest Ukraine

03:05:13.860 | into an expanded Russian imperial territory

03:05:18.180 | had taken place earlier.

03:05:19.760 | I think that the arrival on the scene

03:05:22.460 | of a new generation of Ukrainians

03:05:26.020 | has produced a very different dynamic

03:05:30.220 | and a disinclination for any kind of nostalgia

03:05:34.060 | for the past, packaged however it might be,

03:05:38.900 | and however nostalgic it might be made to appear.

03:05:43.340 | And there, I think that Putin's expectations

03:05:48.000 | in the invasion of 2022 were entirely overturned.

03:05:53.000 | His expectation was that Ukraine would be divided

03:05:57.740 | on this score and that some significant portion

03:06:02.020 | of Ukrainians would welcome the advance of Russian forces.

03:06:06.260 | And instead, there has been the most amazing

03:06:10.660 | and surprising heroic resistance

03:06:14.020 | that continues to this day.

03:06:15.900 | - And it's interesting to consider timing

03:06:18.700 | and also individual leaders.

03:06:21.500 | Zelensky, you can imagine all kinds of other figures

03:06:25.020 | that would've folded much easier.

03:06:28.860 | And Zelensky, I think, surprised a lot of the world

03:06:32.420 | by somehow, you know, this comedian,

03:06:34.540 | somehow becoming a, essentially,

03:06:40.100 | an effective war president.

03:06:41.860 | So, you know, put that in the bin

03:06:47.540 | of singular figures that define history.

03:06:52.260 | - That surprises, yeah, yeah.

03:06:54.380 | - How do you hope the war in Ukraine ends?

03:06:56.940 | - I'm very pessimistic on this score, actually,

03:06:59.700 | and for the reasons we just talked about,

03:07:02.220 | about how these things escape human management

03:07:07.900 | or even rationality.

03:07:09.580 | I think that war takes on a life of its own

03:07:14.820 | as accumulated suffering actually eliminates

03:07:20.820 | possible compromises or settlements

03:07:25.540 | that one might talk about in the abstract.

03:07:28.380 | I think that it's one thing for people far away

03:07:36.540 | to propose trades of territory

03:07:40.540 | or complicated guarantees

03:07:45.540 | or arrangements that sound very good in the abstract

03:07:51.620 | and that will just be refused by people

03:07:55.340 | who have actually experienced

03:07:56.900 | what the war has been like in person

03:07:59.420 | and what it has meant to them and their families

03:08:02.860 | and everyone they know in terms of lives destroyed.

03:08:05.940 | I think that peacemaking is going to face

03:08:11.500 | a very daunting task here given all that's accumulated.

03:08:15.740 | And I think in particular, you know,

03:08:19.300 | just from the last days of the launching

03:08:21.740 | of missile attacks against indiscriminate

03:08:25.460 | or civilian targets, that's not easy to turn the corner on.

03:08:31.180 | - So let me ask a political question.

03:08:32.820 | I recently talked to Donald Trump and he said,

03:08:35.980 | if he is elected, before he is sworn into office,

03:08:40.460 | he will have a peace deal.

03:08:43.180 | What would a peace deal like that look like?

03:08:46.540 | And is it even possible, do you think?

03:08:49.300 | So we should mention that Russia has captured

03:08:52.660 | four regions of Ukraine, now Donetsk, Luhansk,

03:08:55.820 | Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

03:08:57.180 | Also Ukraine captured a part of Kursk region

03:09:00.820 | and within Russia.

03:09:02.060 | So just like you mentioned, territory is on the table.

03:09:05.100 | You know, NATO, European Union is on the table.

03:09:08.720 | Also funding and military help from the United States

03:09:14.740 | directly to Ukraine is on the table.

03:09:16.640 | Do you think it's possible to have a fair deal

03:09:20.460 | that from people like you said, far away,

03:09:23.900 | where both people walk away, Zelensky and Putin,

03:09:27.300 | unhappy but equally unhappy and peace is negotiated?

03:09:32.300 | - Equally unhappy is a very hard balance to strike,

03:09:37.380 | probably.

03:09:38.220 | I think my concern is about the part of the equation

03:09:43.740 | that involves people just being desperately unhappy,

03:09:46.460 | laying the foundations for more trouble to come.

03:09:50.380 | I couldn't imagine what that looks like,

03:09:52.820 | but that's, once again, these are things

03:09:54.740 | that escape human control in the details.

03:09:59.740 | - So laying the foundation for worse things to come.

03:10:03.080 | So it's possible you have a ceasefire

03:10:06.920 | that lays the foundation for a worse war

03:10:11.680 | and suffering in a year, in five years, in 10 years.

03:10:16.680 | - Well, in a way, we may already be there

03:10:19.820 | because ratifying the use of force to change borders

03:10:23.720 | in Europe was a taboo since 1945, and now look where we are.

03:10:28.720 | If that is validated,

03:10:32.300 | then it sets up incentives for more of the same.

03:10:37.300 | - If you look at the 20th century,

03:10:41.020 | it's what we've been talking about,

03:10:43.420 | with horrendous global wars that happened then,

03:10:48.420 | and you look at now,

03:10:51.260 | and it feels like, just living in the moment,

03:10:54.480 | with the war in Ukraine breaking the contract

03:10:59.480 | of you're not supposed to do territorial conquest anymore

03:11:03.660 | in the 21st century,

03:11:05.520 | that then the just intensity of hatred

03:11:10.520 | and military tension in the Middle East

03:11:15.700 | with Israel, Iran, Palestine,

03:11:19.600 | just building, and then China, calmly,

03:11:24.600 | but with a big stick, talking about Taiwan.

03:11:29.680 | Do you think a big conflict may be on the way?

03:11:32.320 | Do you think it's possible that another global war happens

03:11:36.840 | in the 21st century?

03:11:38.740 | - I hope not, but I think so many predictions

03:11:45.160 | reach their expiration dates and get invalidated.

03:11:50.060 | Obviously we're confronting a dire situation in the present.

03:11:55.060 | - So as a historian, let me ask you for advice.

03:11:59.980 | What advice would you give on interviewing world leaders,

03:12:04.180 | whether it's people who are no longer here,

03:12:08.500 | some of the people we've been talking about,

03:12:10.060 | Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or people that are still here,

03:12:13.540 | Putin, Zelensky, Trump, Kamala Harris, Netanyahu,

03:12:18.220 | Xi Jinping, as a historian,

03:12:22.500 | is it possible to have an interesting conversation?

03:12:24.780 | Maybe as a thought experiment,

03:12:26.100 | what kind of conversation would you like to have

03:12:29.060 | with Hitler in the 1930s or Stalin in the 1920s?

03:12:33.180 | - Well, first of all, I mean, the answer's very clear.

03:12:35.140 | I would never presume to advise you

03:12:37.740 | about interviewing world leaders and prominent people

03:12:42.060 | because the roster that you've accumulated

03:12:45.180 | is just astonishing.

03:12:46.700 | But I know what I might aim for.

03:12:49.780 | And that is, I think in historical analysis,

03:12:54.780 | in trying to understand the role of a particular leader,

03:12:59.260 | the more one understands about their prior background

03:13:02.500 | and formative influences, the better a fix

03:13:06.460 | I think one gets on the question

03:13:08.300 | of what are their expectations?

03:13:10.780 | What is the, in German, there's a beautiful word for this.

03:13:14.580 | The Germans managed to mash together several words

03:13:16.940 | into one even better word.

03:13:18.780 | And in German, it's erwartungshorizont,

03:13:21.500 | the horizon of expectation.

03:13:24.340 | So in the case of figures like Churchill or Hitler,

03:13:29.340 | their experience of World War I

03:13:32.180 | shaped their actions in World War II.

03:13:35.660 | Their values were shaped in their childhood.

03:13:42.220 | Is there a way of engaging with someone you're interviewing,

03:13:47.220 | even obliquely, that gives a view in on their sense

03:13:53.820 | of what the future might hold?

03:13:57.220 | And I mean that, obviously, such people are expert

03:14:00.420 | at being guarded and not being pinned down,

03:14:03.900 | but the categories in which they're thinking,

03:14:06.300 | a sense of what their own ethical grounding might be

03:14:11.180 | or their ethical code that gives hints to their behavior.

03:14:14.580 | It gets said, and again, it's a cliche 'cause it's true,

03:14:17.660 | that one of the best measures of a person,

03:14:20.260 | especially a leader, is how they treat people

03:14:24.300 | from whom they don't expect anything.

03:14:26.340 | Are they condescending?

03:14:29.380 | Are they, on the contrary, fundamentally interested

03:14:33.780 | in another person, even if that person can't help them

03:14:37.300 | or be used in some way?

03:14:40.220 | Speaking of prominent world leaders to interview,

03:14:43.700 | there's Napoleon.

03:14:45.460 | Napoleon, psychologically, must have been

03:14:48.100 | a quite amazing person to make a bid for mastery of Europe

03:14:52.420 | and then already thinking about the mastery of the world.

03:14:55.500 | But contemporaries who met Napoleon

03:14:58.820 | said that it was very disturbing to talk with him

03:15:01.700 | because meeting with him one-on-one

03:15:05.540 | revealed that he could talk to you

03:15:08.560 | but look like he was looking right through you,

03:15:11.660 | as if you were not fully real.

03:15:13.820 | You were more in the nature of a character on a chessboard.

03:15:18.820 | And for that reason, some of them called Napoleon

03:15:22.140 | the master of the sightless stare.

03:15:24.560 | So if you're talking with a world leader

03:15:26.660 | and he or she has a sightless stare,

03:15:28.380 | that's probably a bad sign.

03:15:30.340 | But there might be other inadvertent clues or hints

03:15:34.340 | about the moral compass or the future expectations

03:15:39.340 | of a leader that emerge

03:15:41.960 | in one of your wonderful conversations.

03:15:44.280 | - Yeah, you put it brilliantly in several ways,

03:15:46.860 | but the moral compass, sneaking up to the full nuance

03:15:51.860 | and complexity of the moral compass.

03:15:54.000 | And one of the ways of doing that

03:15:56.400 | is looking at the various horizons in time

03:15:59.920 | about their vision of the future.

03:16:02.160 | I imagine it's possible to get Hitler

03:16:05.580 | to talk about the future of the Third Reich

03:16:07.700 | and to see in ways like what he actually envisions that as

03:16:13.380 | and similar with Stalin.

03:16:14.840 | But of course, funny enough,

03:16:19.220 | I believe those leaders would be easier to talk to

03:16:22.300 | because there's nothing to be afraid of

03:16:24.420 | in terms of political competition.

03:16:26.320 | Modern leaders are a little bit more guarded

03:16:30.500 | because they have to,

03:16:32.300 | they have opposition often to contend with.

03:16:37.280 | - And constituencies.

03:16:38.120 | - And constituencies.

03:16:39.980 | You did a lot of amazing courses,

03:16:43.700 | including four, the great courses.

03:16:46.340 | On the topic of communism, you just finished the third.

03:16:50.300 | So you did a series of lectures on the rise of communism,

03:16:54.840 | then communism and power,

03:16:57.580 | and then decline and fall.

03:17:00.380 | - Right of communism, decline of communism.

03:17:01.860 | - So when I was sort of listening to these lectures,

03:17:06.180 | I can't possibly imagine the amount of work

03:17:08.500 | that went into it.

03:17:11.620 | Can you just speak wisely as what was that journey like

03:17:16.620 | of taking everything you know,

03:17:18.340 | your expertise on Eastern Europe,

03:17:20.900 | but just bringing your lens, your wisdom,

03:17:25.220 | your focus onto this topic

03:17:27.160 | and what it takes to actually bring it to life?

03:17:29.900 | - Well, journey is probably just the right word

03:17:32.100 | because it's this week that the third of that trilogy,

03:17:36.940 | decline of communism is being released.

03:17:39.600 | And it felt like something that I very much wanted to do

03:17:43.340 | because the history that's narrated there

03:17:48.340 | is one that is so compelling and often so tragic

03:17:52.980 | that it needs to be shared.

03:17:55.120 | The vast amount of material that one can include

03:18:00.620 | is probably dwarfed by the amount

03:18:02.460 | that actually ends up on the cutting room floor.

03:18:05.020 | One could probably do an entire lecture course

03:18:07.720 | on every single one of those lecture topics

03:18:10.740 | that got broached.

03:18:12.380 | But one of the great satisfactions

03:18:15.440 | of putting together a course like this

03:18:18.700 | is also being able to give further suggestions for study

03:18:22.420 | to the listeners.

03:18:24.420 | And in some cases, to introduce them to neglected classics

03:18:29.420 | or books that make you want to grab somebody by the lapels

03:18:33.580 | and say, "You've got to read this."

03:18:36.420 | There's probably few things that are as exciting

03:18:39.340 | as a really keen and targeted reading recommendation.

03:18:44.340 | In addition, I've also done other courses

03:18:47.620 | on the history of World War I,

03:18:50.880 | on the diplomatic history of Europe from 1500 to the present,

03:18:55.880 | a course on the history of Eastern Europe,

03:18:58.980 | and also a course on dictatorships

03:19:02.120 | called "Utopia and Terror,"

03:19:03.740 | and then also a course on explorers

03:19:06.420 | and a course on turning points in modern history.

03:19:09.700 | And every single one of those is so rewarding

03:19:13.460 | because you learn so much in the process,

03:19:16.260 | and it's really fantastic.

03:19:17.740 | - And I should highly recommend

03:19:19.740 | that people sign up to the...

03:19:22.220 | First of all, this is the great courses

03:19:23.520 | where you can buy the courses individually,

03:19:25.060 | but I recommend people sign up for Great Courses Plus,

03:19:28.460 | which I think is like a monthly membership

03:19:30.500 | where you get access to all these courses,

03:19:34.580 | and they're just incredible.

03:19:35.800 | And I recommend people watch all of yours.

03:19:39.240 | Since you mentioned books, this is an impossible question,

03:19:43.020 | and I apologize ahead of time,

03:19:44.340 | but is there books you can recommend

03:19:46.620 | just in your own life that you've enjoyed,

03:19:49.400 | whether really small or some obvious recommendations

03:19:55.580 | that you recommend people read?

03:19:59.820 | It is a bit like asking, "What's your favorite band?"

03:20:03.180 | That kind of thing. - That's right, that's right.

03:20:04.100 | Well, would a book that got turned into a movie

03:20:07.060 | be acceptable as well?

03:20:09.300 | - Yes. (laughs)

03:20:10.140 | - So in that case, all of us reflect on our own childhoods,

03:20:14.980 | and that magical moment of reading a book

03:20:19.980 | or seeing a movie that really got you launched

03:20:23.740 | on some particular set of things

03:20:25.940 | that you're gonna find fascinating

03:20:27.320 | for the rest of your life.

03:20:28.500 | And there's a direct line to the topics

03:20:30.920 | we were talking about today

03:20:32.620 | from myself in the Chicagoland area as a kid

03:20:36.660 | seeing the film of "Dr. Zhivago,"

03:20:39.860 | and then later reading the novel

03:20:42.500 | on which it was based by Postanak.

03:20:44.660 | And even though the film had to be filmed

03:20:47.900 | on location in Spain,

03:20:49.420 | pretending to be revolutionary Russia,

03:20:52.100 | it was magical for the sheer sweep

03:20:56.660 | and tragedy and human resilience that it showed.

03:21:01.660 | The very way in which a work of literature

03:21:05.900 | or of cinematography could capture so much,

03:21:09.360 | still, I'm still amazed by that.

03:21:14.420 | And then there's also,

03:21:15.860 | in the spirit of recommending neglected classics,

03:21:19.920 | my favorite author.

03:21:21.700 | My favorite author is now a late Canadian author

03:21:26.500 | by the name of Robertson Davies,

03:21:29.220 | who wrote novel after novel

03:21:34.220 | in a mode that probably would get called magical realism,

03:21:41.460 | but is so much more.

03:21:43.380 | Robertson Davies was heavily influenced

03:21:47.100 | by Carl Jung and Jungian philosophy,

03:21:51.620 | but in literary form,

03:21:54.360 | he managed to create stories

03:21:56.420 | that blend the mythical, the mystical,

03:22:00.560 | and the brutally real

03:22:03.300 | to paint a picture of Canada as he knew it,

03:22:07.380 | Europe as he knew it,

03:22:08.900 | and the world as he knew it.

03:22:10.580 | And he's most famous probably for "The Depthford Trilogy,"

03:22:15.180 | three novels in a series that are linked,

03:22:18.940 | and they're just masterful,

03:22:20.700 | if only there were more books like that.

03:22:22.340 | - "The Depthford Trilogy," "Fifth Business,"

03:22:25.660 | "The Emanticore," "World of Wonders,"

03:22:29.260 | and you got a really nice beard.

03:22:30.980 | - Yes, it was an amazing beard.

03:22:32.460 | Very 19th century.

03:22:35.700 | - Okay, beautiful.

03:22:38.540 | What advice would you give to young people today

03:22:43.540 | that have just listened to us talk about the 20th century

03:22:47.180 | and the terrifying prospects of ideals

03:22:49.960 | implemented into reality?

03:22:51.700 | And by the way, many of the revolutions

03:22:53.700 | are carried out by young people.

03:22:58.700 | And so the good and the bad and the ugly

03:23:02.480 | is thanks to the young people.

03:23:04.220 | So the young people listening today,

03:23:05.540 | what advice would you give them?

03:23:07.140 | - Well, it comes down to one word,

03:23:08.440 | and that one word is "read."

03:23:10.120 | As a college teacher,

03:23:13.620 | I'm concerned about what I'm seeing unfolding before us,

03:23:17.560 | which is classes, not my classes,

03:23:20.700 | but classes in which students are asked to read very little,

03:23:25.700 | or maybe in some cases, not at all,

03:23:29.500 | or snippets that they are provided digitally.

03:23:33.200 | Those have their place and can be valuable,

03:23:37.880 | but the task of sitting down with a book

03:23:40.780 | and absorbing its message,

03:23:42.320 | not agreeing with it necessarily,

03:23:43.940 | but taking in the implications,

03:23:46.420 | learning how to think within the categories

03:23:49.940 | and the values of the author

03:23:54.420 | is going to be irreplaceable.

03:23:58.220 | And my anxiety is that with college bookstores

03:24:03.840 | now moving entirely to the paperless format,

03:24:08.840 | it changes how people interact with texts.

03:24:12.620 | And if the result is not a renaissance

03:24:15.300 | and a resurgence of reading, but less reading,

03:24:18.500 | that will be dreadful

03:24:19.660 | because the experience of thinking your way

03:24:21.540 | into other people's minds that sustained reading offers

03:24:26.540 | is so crucial to human empathy,

03:24:31.700 | a broadening of your own sensibilities of what's possible,

03:24:35.600 | what's in the full range of being human,

03:24:38.720 | and then what's best.

03:24:40.320 | What are the best models for what has been thought

03:24:42.760 | and felt and how people have acted?

03:24:46.080 | Otherwise, we fall prey to manipulators

03:24:50.040 | and the ability of artificial intelligence

03:24:53.760 | to give us versions of realities that never existed

03:24:57.440 | and never will and the like.

03:25:00.240 | - It's a really interesting idea.

03:25:02.440 | So let me give a shout out to Perplexity

03:25:04.700 | that I'm using here to sort of summarize

03:25:08.340 | and take quick notes and get little snippets of stuff,

03:25:10.680 | which is extremely useful.

03:25:12.380 | But books are not just about information transfer.

03:25:16.380 | It's just as you said,

03:25:18.740 | it's a journey together with a set of ideas

03:25:20.940 | and it's a conversation.

03:25:22.100 | And getting a summary of the book,

03:25:25.660 | as the cliche thing is,

03:25:28.580 | it's really getting to the destination without the journey.

03:25:31.380 | And the journey is the thing that's important,

03:25:33.900 | thinking through stuff.

03:25:35.020 | And I've actually learned, I've been surprised.

03:25:38.480 | I've learned, I've trained my brain

03:25:40.080 | to be able to get the same thing from audiobooks also.

03:25:42.900 | It's a little bit more difficult

03:25:44.420 | because you don't control the pacing.

03:25:46.300 | Sometimes pausing is nice,

03:25:48.020 | but you can still get it from audiobooks,

03:25:49.660 | so it's an audio version of books.

03:25:53.300 | And that allows you to also go on a journey together

03:25:55.680 | and sometimes more convenient

03:25:56.940 | 'cause you can take it to more places with you.

03:25:58.420 | - That's right.

03:25:59.260 | - But there is a magical thing,

03:26:00.980 | and I also trying to train myself mostly to use Kindle,

03:26:04.720 | the digital version of books.

03:26:07.220 | But there is unfortunately still a magical thing

03:26:11.780 | about being there with the page.

03:26:13.980 | - Well, audiobooks are definitely not to be scorned

03:26:16.320 | because as people have pointed out,

03:26:18.300 | the original traditions of literature were oral, right?

03:26:22.660 | So that's actually the 1.0 version, right?

03:26:27.320 | And combining these things is probably the key.

03:26:29.940 | I think one of the things I find so wonderful

03:26:34.060 | about the best lectures that I've heard

03:26:36.740 | is it's a chance to hear someone thinking out loud,

03:26:40.580 | not laying down the law,

03:26:41.860 | but taking you through a series of logical moves,

03:26:46.860 | imaginative leaps, alternative suggestions,

03:26:52.460 | and that's much more than data transfer.

03:26:57.460 | - The use case of AI as a companion as you read

03:27:01.580 | is really exciting to me.

03:27:05.100 | I've been using it recently to basically, as you read,

03:27:09.740 | you can have a conversation with a system

03:27:11.700 | that has access to a lot of things

03:27:13.700 | about a particular paragraph.

03:27:15.620 | And I've been really surprised how my brain,

03:27:18.500 | when given some extra ideas,

03:27:20.380 | other recommendations of books,

03:27:23.100 | but also just like a summary of other ideas

03:27:25.040 | from elsewhere in the universe

03:27:26.280 | that relates to this paragraph,

03:27:28.180 | it sparks your imagination and thought

03:27:31.500 | and you see the actual richness in the thing you're reading.

03:27:35.740 | Now, nobody's, to my knowledge,

03:27:37.780 | has implemented a really intuitive interaction

03:27:41.580 | between AI and the text.

03:27:43.060 | Unfortunately, partially because the books are protected

03:27:48.340 | under DRM, and so there's like a wall

03:27:51.380 | where you can't access, the AI can't access the thing.

03:27:54.100 | So if you want to play with that kind of thing,

03:27:56.140 | you have to break the law a little bit,

03:27:59.500 | which is not a nice thing, not a good thing.

03:28:01.260 | But just like with music, Napster came up.

03:28:06.260 | People started illegally sharing music.

03:28:11.660 | And the answer to that was Spotify,

03:28:14.500 | which made the sharing of music, revolutionized everything

03:28:16.700 | and made the sharing of music much easier.

03:28:18.620 | So there are some technological things

03:28:20.180 | that can enrich the experience of reading,

03:28:22.700 | but the actual painful, long process of reading

03:28:27.140 | is really useful, just like boredom is useful.

03:28:31.820 | - That's right.

03:28:32.660 | - It's also called just sitting there--

03:28:33.500 | - Underrated virtue.

03:28:34.620 | - Yeah, yeah, and of course,

03:28:36.700 | you have to see the smartphone as a enemy, I would say,

03:28:40.980 | as of that special time you have to think

03:28:44.860 | because social media companies are maximized

03:28:48.420 | to get your engagement, they wanna grab your attention.

03:28:51.220 | And they grab that attention by making you

03:28:54.300 | as brain dead as possible and getting you

03:28:56.060 | to look at more and more and more things.

03:28:57.840 | So it's nice and fun, it's great,

03:28:59.780 | recommend it highly, it's good for dopamine rush.

03:29:02.700 | But see it as a counter force to the process

03:29:07.700 | of sitting with an idea for a prolonged period of time,

03:29:12.940 | taking a journey through an expert,

03:29:16.300 | eloquently conveying that idea and growing

03:29:20.100 | by having a conversation with that idea

03:29:25.140 | in a book is really, really powerful.

03:29:26.700 | So I agree with you totally.

03:29:29.900 | What gives you hope about the future of humanity?

03:29:33.580 | We've talked about the dark past.

03:29:36.100 | What gives you hope for the light at the end of the tunnel?

03:29:41.580 | So we talked indeed about a lot of latent,

03:29:45.980 | really damaging and negative energies

03:29:48.540 | that are part of human nature.

03:29:49.900 | But I find hope in another aspect of human nature,

03:29:53.540 | and that is the sheer variety

03:29:57.020 | of human reactions to situations.

03:30:01.660 | The very fact that history is full of so many stories

03:30:07.220 | of amazing endurance, amazing resilience,

03:30:11.860 | the will to build up even after the horrors have passed.

03:30:17.860 | This to me is an inexhaustible source of optimism.

03:30:22.940 | And there are some people

03:30:24.620 | who condemn cultural appropriation

03:30:27.900 | and say that borrowing from one culture to another

03:30:31.460 | is to be condemned.

03:30:33.060 | Well, the problem is a synonym

03:30:35.540 | for cultural appropriation is world history.

03:30:38.900 | Trade, transfer of ideas, influences,

03:30:43.900 | valuing that which is unlike your own culture

03:30:47.500 | is also a form of appropriation, quite literally.

03:30:50.980 | And so that multitude of human reactions

03:30:55.980 | and the fact that our experience is so unlimited

03:31:00.100 | as history testifies, gives me great hope for the future.

03:31:03.380 | - Yeah, and the willingness of humans

03:31:05.740 | to explore all of that with curiosity,

03:31:08.180 | even when the empires fall and the dreams are broken,

03:31:12.700 | we rise again.

03:31:13.660 | - That's right, unceasingly.

03:31:15.140 | (Lex laughs)

03:31:15.980 | - Vejas, thank you so much for your incredible work,

03:31:18.740 | your incredible lectures, your books,

03:31:20.700 | and thank you for talking today.

03:31:22.540 | - Thank you for this, such a fun chat.

03:31:24.440 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

03:31:27.100 | with Vejas Ludovicius.

03:31:28.900 | To support this podcast,

03:31:30.060 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:31:33.060 | And now let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx.

03:31:36.900 | History repeats itself, first as a tragedy,

03:31:41.820 | second as a farce.

03:31:43.840 | Thank you for listening.

03:31:46.300 | I hope to see you next time.

03:31:48.320 | (upbeat music)

03:31:50.900 | (upbeat music continues)

03:31:54.320 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

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

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