Lex Fridman Podcast
#444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler
Fri, 20 Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius is a historian specializing in Germany and Eastern Europe, who has lectured extensively on Marxism and the rise, the reign, and the fall of Communism. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep444-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/vejas-liulevicius-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Vejas's Courses: https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/vejas-gabriel-liulevicius Vejas's Books: https://amzn.to/4e3R1rz Vejas's Audible: https://adbl.co/4esRrHt SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex Notion: Note-taking and team collaboration. Go to https://notion.com/lex LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex Eight Sleep: Temp-controlled smart mattress. Go to https://eightsleep.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (08:48) - Marxism (36:33) - Anarchism (51:30) - The Communist Manifesto (1:00:29) - Communism in the Soviet Union (1:20:23) - Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin (1:30:11) - Stalin (1:37:26) - Holodomor (1:51:16) - The Great Terror (2:04:17) - Totalitarianism (2:15:19) - Response to Darryl Cooper (2:30:27) - Nazis vs Communists in Germany (2:36:50) - Mao (2:41:57) - Great Leap Forward (2:48:58) - China after Mao (2:54:30) - North Korea (2:58:34) - Communism in US (3:06:04) - Russia after Soviet Union (3:17:35) - Advice for Lex (3:25:17) - Book recommendations (3:28:16) - Advice for young people (3:35:08) - Hope PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips
The following is a conversation with Wejas Lulevicius, a historian specializing in Germany and Eastern Europe. He has lectured extensively on the rise, the reign, and the fall of communism. Our discussion goes deep on this, the very heaviest of topics, the communist ideology that has led to over 100 million deaths in the 20th century. We also discuss Hitler, Nazi ideology, and World War II.
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This episode is brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Speaking of peak performance, I'm trying to figure out in my life how many times a week to train jiu-jitsu. There's a long stretch in my life where jiu-jitsu was a big part of my life and I would often train twice a day.
And basically my life was about sort of recovery from that training session. And during the recovery, I would be doing sort of the deep study or the deep work of programming for my PhD and then beyond. And it might sound counterintuitive, but when you're so... passionately pursuing a thing and it becomes such a big part of your day, it's actually much easier to integrate it into your life.
And in fact, your body gets accustomed to that kind of hardness of training, if you're doing it correctly in terms of nutrition and in terms of avoiding injury. In fact, I never got any major injuries, knock on wood, any sort of breaking of anything doing, you know, I don't know how many years, over 20 years, 25 years.
And I find that now that jiu-jitsu is a much, much smaller part of my life, it actually does become a different puzzle. It's a puzzle of how to avoid injury, how to still have fun, but also how to keep growing and learning and adapting to the changing environment of grappling, no-geek grappling especially. So it's been a fascinating puzzle to try and solve.
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I remember, speaking of jiu-jitsu, one of the tougher things mentally for me, for anyone that does jiu-jitsu, that's one of the wonderful benefits you get from it is you get humbled. And there's all kinds of ways to get humbled. But there's just some training sessions. And it might not have to do with the skill of the people you're training with.
It might just be one of those days that you just get smeshed. as they say in the MMA community when they're talking about Khabib Nurmagomedov. You just feel powerless. you know, somebody just crushes you knee on belly or mount or back control and you just over and over get submitted or just guard pass, whatever it is, just stuff is not working.
And you just feel like there's nothing in the world that you can do right. You feel like you'll never get better, that it's just hopeless. And that feeling, especially in combat sports, where there's kind of a a masculine competitive energy, you just feel like this is it. There's no light at the end of the tunnel, this is it.
And that feeling's a beautiful feeling, because you just sit in that and sit with that pain, that disappointment, that emotional turmoil, and you channel that feeling into growth, into improving, into strengthening the engine of perseverance. And all of that is in the mind. And you should take care of your mind by checking out betterhelp.com slash Lex and save in your first month.
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Anyway, go explore the nature of your own consciousness at asleep.com slash Lex and use code Lex to get 350 bucks off the pod for Ultra. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Vejas Lulevicius. Let's start with Karl Marx. What were the central ideas of Marx that lay the foundation of communism?
I think there were several key ideas that Marx deployed that were destined to have such an impact. And in some ways, they were actually kind of contradictory. On the one hand, Marx insisted that history has a purpose, that history is not just random events, but that rather it's history, we might say, with a capital H. History moving in a deliberate direction.
History having a goal, a direction that it was predestined to move in. At the same time, in the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels also suggested that there was a role for special individuals who might, even if history was still moving in this predetermined direction, might... given an extra push, might play a heroic role in that process.
And I think that these two ideas added together, the notion that there is a science of revolution that suggests that you can move in a deliberate and meaningful, rational way towards the end of history and the resolution of all conflicts. a total liberation of the human person, and that moreover, that was inevitable, that that was pre-programmed and destined in the order of things.
When you add to that the notion that there's also room for heroism and the individual role, this ended up being tremendously powerful as a combination. Earlier thinkers who were socialists had already dreamt of or projected futures where all conflict would be resolved and human life would achieve some sort of perfection.
Marx added these other elements that made it far more powerful than the earlier versions that he decried as merely utopian socialism.
So there's a million questions I could ask there, but so on the utopian side. So there is a utopian component to the way he tried to conceive of his ideas.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, one has to stress Marx would have gotten extremely upset at this point in the conversation because to call someone a utopian was precisely to argue that you're not scientific, you're not rational, you're not laying out the iron laws of history, you're merely hoping for the best. And that might be laudable, but it was fundamentally unrealistic.
That said, hidden among Marx's insistence that there are laws and structures as history moves through class conflict modes of production towards its ultimate goal of a comprehensive final revolution that will see all exploitation overthrown and people finally being freed from necessity in in. smuggled in among those things are most definitely utopian elements.
And they come especially at the end in which Marx sketches the notion of what things will look like after the revolution has resolved all problems. There, vagueness sets in. it's clear that it's a blessed state that's being talked about.
People no longer exploiting one another, people no longer subject to necessity or poverty, but instead enjoying all of the productivity of industrialization that hitherto had been put to private profit, now collectively owned and deployed. The notion that one will be able to work At one job in the morning and then engage in leisure activity or yet another fulfilling job in the afternoon.
All of this free of any contradictions, free of necessity, free of the sort of ordinary irritations that we experience in our ordinary lives. That's deeply utopian. The difference was that Marx charted a route towards that outcome that presented itself as cutting-edge science and, moreover, having the full credibility that science commanded so much, especially in the 19th and early 20th century.
So there is a long journey from capitalism to communism that includes a lot of problems. He thought once you resolve the problems, all the complexities of human interactions, the friction, the problems will be gone.
to the extent that they were based on inequalities and on man's exploitation of man, the result was supposed to be a resolution of all of this. And inevitably, when you talk about the history of communism, you have to include the fact that this often tragic and dramatic history produced a lot of jokes, jokes that were in part reactions sometimes to the ideological claims made by people like Marx.
And one of the famous jokes was that What's the difference between capitalism and communism? And the joke's answer was capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and communism is the exact opposite.
Yeah, you actually have an electron humor. I love it. And you deliver in such a dry, beautiful way. Okay, there's, again, a million questions. So you outline a set of contradictions, but it's interesting to talk about his view. For example, what was Marx's view of history?
Marx had been a student of Hegel. And Hegel, as a German idealist philosopher, had announced very definitively that history has a purpose. History is not a collection of random facts. And as an idealist, he proposed that
The true movement of history, the true meaning of history, what made history, history with a capital H, something that's transcendent and meaningful, was that it was the working out of an idea through different civilizations, different stages of historical development. And that idea was the idea of human freedom.
So it was not individuals or great thinkers alone making history and having an impact. It was the idea itself striving to come to fruition, striving to come to an ever more perfect realization.
In the case of Hegel, in this very Prussian and German context, he identified the realization of freedom also with the growth of the state, because he thought that governments are the ones that are going to be able to deliver on laws and on the ideal of a state of the rule of law, in German, the Rechtsstaat.
That was a noble dream at the same time as we recognize from our perspective, state power has been put to all sorts of purposes besides guaranteeing the rule of law in our own times. What Marx did was to take this characteristic insistence of Hegel that history is moving in a meaningful and discernible way towards the realization of an idea and flipped it on its head.
Marx insisted that Hegel had so much that was right in his thinking, but what he had neglected to keep in mind was that, in fact, history is based on matter. So hence dialectical materialism, dialectical referring to things proceeding by clashes or conflict towards an ever greater realization of some essential idea. And so Marx adapts a lot of ideas of Hegel.
You can recognize entire rhetorical maneuvers that are indebted to that earlier training, but now taken in a very different direction. What remained, though, was the confidence of being on the right side of history. And there are few things that are as intoxicating as being convinced that your actions not only are right in the abstract, but are also destined to be successful.
And also that you have the rigor of science backing you in your journey towards the truth.
Absolutely. So Engels, when he gives the grade-side eulogy for his beloved friend Marx, he
claims that Marx is essentially the Darwin of history, the Darwin of history, that he had done for the world of politics and of human history what Darwin had done with his theory of evolution, understanding the hidden mechanism, understanding the laws that are at work and that make that whole process meaningful rather than just one damn thing after another.
What about the sort of famous line that history of all existing societies is the history of class struggles? So what about this conception of history as a history of class struggle?
Well, so this was the motive force that Karl Marx and Engels saw driving the historical process forward. And it's important to keep in mind that class conflict doesn't just mean revolutions, revolts, peasant uprisings. It's sort of the totality of frictions and of clashes, conflicts of interest that appear in any society. And so Marx was able, in this spirit that he avowed was very scientific—
to demarcate stages of historical transformation. Primitive communism in the prehistoric period, then moving towards what was called state slavery. That's to say the early civilizations deploying human resources and ordering them by all powerful monarchs. Then private slavery in the ancient period.
and then moving to feudalism in the Middle Ages, and then here's where Marx is able to deliver a pronouncement about his own times, seeing that the present day is the penultimate, the next to last stage of this historical development.
Because the feudal system of the Middle Ages and the dominance of the aristocracy has been overcome, has been displaced by the often heroic achievements, astonishing achievements in commerce and in world building of the middle class, the bourgeoisie.
who have taken the world into their own hands and are engaged in class conflict with the class below them, which is the working class or the proletariat. And so this sort of conflict... also, by the way, obtains within classes. So the bourgeoisie are going to be gravediggers, Marx announces, of their own supremacy because they're also competing against one another.
And members who don't survive that competition get pressed down into the subordinate working class, which grows and grows and grows to the point where at some future moment, we're
the inevitable explosion will come and a swift revolution will overturn this penultimate stage of human history and usher in instead the dictatorship of the working class and then the abolition of all classes because with only one class remaining, everyone is finally unified and without those internal contradictions that had marked class conflict before.
The dictatorship of the working class is an interesting term. So what is the role of revolution in history?
So this in particular for Marx, I think, is a really key moment, which is what makes that such a good question. In his vision, the epic narrative that he's presenting to us, revolution... is key. It's not enough to have evolutionary change. It's not a question of compromises. It's not a case of bargaining or balancing interests.
Revolution is necessary as part of the process of a subjugated class coming to awareness of its own historical role. And when we get to the proletariat, this
working class in its entirety, to whom Marx assigns this epic Promethean role of being the ones who are going to liberate all of humanity, a class that is universal in its interests and in the sort of role in salvation history that they'll be playing in this secular framework, they need revolution and the experience of revolution in order to come into their own.
Because without it, you'll only have half-hearted compromise and something less than the consciousness that they then need in order to rule, to administer, and to play the historical role that they're fated to have.
How did he conceive of a revolution, potentially a violent revolution, Stabilizing itself into something where the working class was able to rule.
That's where things become a good deal less detailed in his and Engel's accounts. The answer that they proposed in part was, this is for the future to determine. So all of the details will be settled later. I think what was allied to this was a tremendous confidence in... some very 19th century ideas about how society could be administered and what made for orderly society.
in a way where if the right infrastructure was in place, you might expect society to kind of run itself without the need for micromanagement from above. And hence, we arrive at Marx's tantalizing promise that there will be a period where it'll be necessary to have centralized control.
And there might have to be, as he puts it, despotic inroads against property in order to bring this revolution to pass. But then afterwards, the state, because it represents everybody, rather than representing particular class interests that are in conflict with other classes, the state will eventually wither away. So there won't be need for it.
Now, that's not to say that pure stasis arrives, right? Or that the stabilization equals being frozen in time. It's not as if That is what things will look like. But instead, the big issues will be settled. And henceforth, people will be able to enjoy lives of, as he would consider it, inauthentic freedom without necessity, without poverty, as a result of this blessed state that's been arrived at.
The Spotic inroads against property. Did he elaborate on the despotic inroads?
Dispossession. Dispossession of the middle classes and of the bourgeoisie. In his model, humanity is never standing still, right? So he'd probably argue in this dynamic vision of how history unfolds that there's always conflict and it's always moving, propelling history forward towards its predestined ending. In the way he saw this climax was that
As things did not stay the same, the condition of the working class was constantly getting worse, and hence their revolutionary potential was growing.
And at the same time, the expropriators, the bourgeoisie, were also facing diminishing returns as they competed against one another with more and more wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and more and more elements of what had been the middle class detached from the ruling class and being pressed down into the working class. For Marx, this is really a key part.
I mean, it's a key part of this whole ratchet effect that's going to produce this final historical explosion. And in German, the word given to that process was «Ferehlendung». which is very evocative. Elend means misery. So it's the growing misery. When this gets translated into English, the results are never quite as evocative or satisfactory.
The words that get used are immiserization or pauperization, meaning more and more people are being turned into paupers. But for Marx, that prediction is really key. And even in his own lifetime, there were already hints that, in fact, if you looked sociologically at the really developed working classes in places like Great Britain or Germany, that process was not playing out as he had expected.
In fact, although there have been enormous dislocations and tremendous suffering in the early chaotic sort of Wild West stages of capitalism and of industrialization, there had been reform movements as well. And there had been unions which had sought to carve out rules and agreements with employers for how the conditions under which workers labored might be ameliorated.
Moreover, the middle class, rather than dwindling and dwindling, seem to actually be strengthening and growing in numbers of the appearance of new kinds of people like white-collar workers or technical experts.
Yeah.
Can you speak to this realm of ideas, which is fascinating, this battle of big ideas in the 19th century? What are the ideas that were swimming around here? Yeah, yeah.
Well, the... To describe the 19th century as sort of an age of ideologies is very apt because Europe is being racked and being put through the ringer of nationalism, demands for self-expression of peoples who earlier have been in empires or under monarchical rule, demands to redraw the map.
And the tremendous transformations of the Industrial Revolution meant that in the course of about a generation, you would have seen the world around you change in ways that made it entirely unfamiliar. You'd be able to travel across the landscape at speeds that had been unthinkable when you were a child. So it's enormous change and demands for yet more change.
And so it's a great mix of ideas, ideologies, the old and the new, religious ideas, religious revivals, as well as demands for secularization. And stepping into all of this are Marx and Engels together in what has been called, I think with justice, one of the most important and influential intellectual partnerships of history. They were very different men. They were both German by origin.
Marx had trained as an academic. He had married the daughter of a baron. Because of his radical ideas, he had foreclosed or found himself cut off from a possible academic career and went the route of radical journalism. Engels was very different. Engels was the son of an industrialist, and the family owned factories in Germany and in England.
So he was most definitely not a member of the proletariat that he and Marx were celebrating as so significant in their future historical role. There were also huge differences in character between these men. Marx, when people met him, they were astonished by his energy and his dynamism. They also saw him as a man who felt determined to dominate arguments.
He wanted to win arguments and was not one to settle for compromise or a middle road. He was disorderly in his personal habits. We might mention, among other things, that he impregnated the family he made and didn't accept responsibility for the child. He was also not inclined to undertake regular employment in order to support his growing family. That's where Engels came in.
Engels, essentially from his family fortune and then from his journalism afterwards, supported both himself and the Marx family for decades. And so in a sense, Engels made things happen.
In the mysterious way that friendships work, the very differences between these men made them formidable as a dynamic duo because they balanced off one another's idiosyncrasies and turned what might have been faults into potential strengths. British historian A.J.P. Taylor always has a lovely turn of phrase, even when he's wrong about a historical issue. In this case, he was right.
He said that Engels had charm and brilliance. Marx was a genius. And Engels saw himself as definitely the junior partner in this relationship. But here's the paradox. Without Engels, pretty clearly, Marx would not have gone on to have the sort of lasting historical impact in the world of ideas that he had.
Just to throw in the mix, there's interesting characters swimming around. So you have Darwin. He has a... I mean, it's difficult to... To characterize the level of impact you had, even just in the religious context, it challenges our conception of who we are as humans. There's Nietzsche, who's also, I don't know, hanging around the area. On the Russian side, there's Dostoevsky.
So it's interesting to ask maybe from your perspective, did these people interact in the space of ideas? to where this is relevant to our discussion, or is this mostly isolated?
I think that it's a part of a great conversation, right? I think that in their works, they're reacting to one another. I mean, Dostoevsky's thought ranges across the condition of modernity, and he definitely has things to say about industrialization. I think that... They react to one another in these oblique ways rather than always being at each other's throats in direct confrontations.
And that's what makes the 19th century so compelling as a story just because of the sheer vitality of the arguments that are taking place in ways big and small. Right.
What we should say here, when you mentioned Karl Marx, maybe the color red comes up for people and they think the Soviet Union, maybe China, but they don't think Germany necessarily. It's interesting that... I mean, Germany is where communism was supposed to happen. That's right. And so can you maybe speak to that tension?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is definitely a factor in the entire history that we're referencing. Marx and Engels never really shed their identity as Germans.
Many of their preconceptions, even those traces of nationalism that they had within themselves, even as they were condemning nationalism as a fraud against the working class, clearly their entire formation had been affected by their German background. And it's very true, as you point out, that Germany is intended to be the place where these predictions will play out.
Also in Britain, also in France, also eventually in the United States. But it's Germany by virtue of its central location and then its rapid development later than Britain or France in industrialization give it this special role in Marx's worldview.
And so it's a lasting irony or a central irony of this whole story that when a government establishes itself that claims to be following Marxist prescriptions and realizing his vision, it happens in the wreckage of the Russian Empire, a place that did not match the requirements of being industrialized, developed well on its way in this historical process.
And nobody knew this better than the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his colleagues had a keen sense that what they were doing, exciting as it was, was a gamble. It was a risk because, in fact, the revolution to really take hold had to seize power in Germany. And that's why immediately after taking power, they're not sure they're going to last. Their hope, their promise of salvation is that
a workers' revolution will erupt in Germany, defeated Germany, in order to link up with the one that has been launched in this unlikely Russian location. And henceforth, great things will follow that do hew to Marx's historical vision. The last thing to mention about this is that this... predominance of Germany in the thinking of Marx had two other reflections.
One was that German socialists and later communists organize in order to fulfill Marx's vision, and they produce something that leaves other Westerners in awe of in the late 19th century. And that's the building of a strong German workers' movement and a social democratic party. That social democratic party by 1912 is the largest party in German politics by vote.
And there's the possibility they might even come to power without needing radical revolution, which again, also goes against Marx's original vision of the necessity for a revolution. workers around the world, or rather radical socialists, look with admiration and awe at what the Germans have achieved, and they see themselves as trying to do what the Germans have done.
The final point is, growing up during the Cold War, one thought that, well, if you want to represent somebody as being a communist, that person has to have a Russian accent, because Russia, after all, The homeland of this form of government, the Soviet Union, that must be the point of origin.
Before the Bolsheviks seized power, in order to really be a serious radical socialist, you needed to read German because you needed to read Marx and you needed to read Kautsky and you needed to read Bernstein and other thinkers in this tradition. And it's only after the Soviet seizure of power that this all changes. So there's lots of marks of that.
phenomenon which is why the clash between nationalism and communism in uh germany is such a fascinating aspect of history and all the different trajectories it could take and we'll talk about it but if we return to the 19th century you've said that um
Marxist chief rival was Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who famously said in 1942, quote, the passion for destruction is also a creative passion. So what kind of future did Bakunin envision?
Well, Bakunin, in some things, agreed with Marx and in many others disagreed. He was an anarchist rather than hewing to the sort of scheme of history that Marx was proposing. So he did see humanity as fighting a struggle for a better way of life. He envisioned, as your quote suggests, that revolution and revolution sheer confrontation and overthrow the existing state of things.
Not compromise was going to be the way to get there, but his vision was very different. Rather than organizing conspiratorial and hierarchical political movement, Bakunin envisioned that the ties would be far looser.
that both the revolutionary movement and the future state of humanity would grow out of the free association, the anarchist thinking, the free association of individuals who rejected hierarchical thinking in their relations with one another, rejected the state as a form of organized violence, and rejected traditional religious ideas that he saw as buttressing hierarchies.
So Bakunin is part of a broader movement of socialists and anarchists who are demanding change and envisioning really fundamental transformation. But his particular anarchist vision steers him into conflict with Marx. And he makes some prophetic remarks about – the problems with the system that Marx is proposing.
You should add to this that the very fact that Marx is a German by background and Bakunin is Russian kind of adds a further nationalist or element of ethnic difference there. Bakunin warned that a sort of creeping German authoritarianism might insinuate its way into a movement that hewed too closely to having hierarchies in the struggle to overthrow hierarchies.
And his anarchist convictions are not in question here. They led him into conflict with Marx, and Marx railed against him, denounced him, and eventually had him expelled from the international arena. One of the things, though, that also makes Bakunin so significant is Bakunin is the first in a longer series of approaches between anarchists and communists where they try to make common cause.
And you have to say that in every case it ends badly for the anarchists because they The communist vision in particular, especially in its Leninist version, argued for discipline and a tightly organized professional revolutionary movement.
The anarchists who sought to make common cause with communists, whether it was in the days of the Russian Revolution or the Russian Civil War, or whether it was then in the Spanish Civil War, The anarchists found themselves targeted by the communists precisely because of their skepticism about what turned out to be an absolutely key element in the Leninist prescription for a successful revolution.
If we can take that tangent a little bit. So I guess anarchists were less organized.
That's my definition. Yeah.
Why do you think anarchism hasn't been... rigorously tried in the way that communism was, if we just take a complete sort of tangent. I mean, in one sense, we are living in anarchy today because the nations are in an anarchic state with each other. But why do you think sort of there's not been an anarchist revolution?
Well, I think that probably some anarchists would beg to differ, right? They would see communes in Spain during the Spanish Civil War as an example of trying to put anarchist ideas into place. Bakunin flitted from one area of unrest to another, hoping to be in on finally the founding of the sort of free communes that he had in mind.
You know, another key point in all of this is that anarchy means something different to different people as a term. And so when you point out quite correctly that we have an anarchic international situation, that's kind of the Hobbesian model of the war of all against all, where man is a wolf to man.
Generally, except if you're talking about nihilists in the Russian revolutionary tradition, anarchists see anarchy as a blessed state. and one where finally people will be freed from the distorting influence of hierarchies, traditional beliefs, subjugation, inequalities. So for them, anarchy, growing out of the liberation of the human being, is seen as a positive good and peaceful.
Now, that's at odds with the prescription of someone like Bakunin for how to get there. He sees overthrow as being necessary on the route to that. But as we point out, it's absolutely key to this entire dynamic that to be an anarchist means that your efforts are not going to be organized the way a disciplined and tightly organized revolutionary movement would be.
Yeah, it's an interesting stretch that a violent revolution will take us to a place of no violence or very little violence. It's a leap.
It's a leap. And it points to a phenomenon that... would have enraged Marx and would have been deeply alienating to others in the tradition who followed him, but that so many scholars have commented on. And that's that there is a religious element, not a vowed one, but a kind of hidden religious or secular religious element to Marx's vision, to the tradition that follows Marx.
And, you know, just think of the correspondences, right? Marx himself as kind of positioning himself as a savior figure, whether that's a Prometheus or a Moses who will lead people to the promised land. The apocalypse or the end times is this final revolution that will usher in a blessed final state, a utopia, which is equivalent to a secular version of heaven.
There's the working class playing the role of humanity in its struggle to be redeemed. And scholar after scholar has pointed this out. Reinhold Niebuhr back in the 1930s had an article in The Atlantic magazine that talked about the Soviet Union's communism as a religion. Erich Voegelin, a German-American scholar who fled the Nazis and relocated to Louisiana State University and wrote tomes about
the new phenomenon of political religions in the modern period. And he saw fascism and Nazism and Soviet communism as bearing the stamp of political religions, meaning ideologies that promised what an earlier age would have understood in religious terms. Ferdinand called this the eschaton and said that These end times, the eschaton was being promised in the here and now, being made imminent.
And he warned against that, saying the results are likely to be disastrous.
So that's actually a disagreement with this idea that, you know, people sometimes say that The Soviet Union is an example of an atheistic society. So when you have atheism as the primary thing that underpins the society, this is what you get. So that's what you're saying is a kind of rejection of that, saying that there's a strong religious component to communism?
A hidden component, one that's not officially recognized. I mean, I think that, you know, I had a chance to witness this, actually. When I was a child, my family, I grew up in Chicago to a Lithuanian-American family, and my father, who was a mathematician, got a very rare invitation to travel to Soviet Lithuania, to the University of Vilnius, to meet with colleagues. And at this point,
Journeys of more than a few days or a week were very rare to the Soviet Union for Americans. And the result was that I had unforgettable experiences visiting the Soviet Union in Brezhnev's day. And among the things I saw there was a museum of atheism. that had been established in a church that had been ripped apart from inside and was meant to kind of embody the official stance of atheism.
And I remember being baffled by the museum on the inside because you would expect exhibits. You would expect something dramatic, something that will be compelling. And instead, there was some folk art from the countryside showing bygone beliefs There were some lithographs or engravings of the Spanish Inquisition and its horrors, and that was pretty much it.
But as a child, I remember being reproved in that museum for not wearing my windbreaker, but instead carrying it on my arm, which was a very disrespectful thing to do in an official museum of atheism.
When I was able to visit the Soviet Union later for a language course in the summer of 1989, one of the obligatory tours that we took was to file reverently past the body of Lenin outside the Kremlin in a mausoleum at Red Square.
And communist mummies like those of Lenin, earlier Stalin had been there as well, communist mummies like Mao or Ho Chi Minh really, I think, speak to a blending of earlier religious sensibility. reverence for relics of great figures, almost saintly figures, so that even what got proclaimed as atheism turned out to be a very demanding faith as well.
And I think that's a contradiction that other scholars have pointed out as well.
Yeah, it's a very complicated sort of discussion when you remove religion as a big component of a society, whether something like a framing of political ideologies in religious ways is the natural consequence of that.
We hear nature abhorring a vacuum, and I think that there are places in human character that long for transcendental explanations, right? That it's not all meaningless. In fact, there's a larger purpose. And I think it's not a coincidence that such a significant part of resistance to communist regimes has in part come from, on the one hand, religious believers, and on the other hand, from
disillusioned true believers in communism who find themselves undergoing an internal experience of just a revulsion, finding that their ideals have not been followed through on.
So this topic is one of several topics that you eloquently describe as contradictions within the ideas of Marx. So religious, there is a kind of religious adherence versus also the rejection of religious dogma that he stood for. We've talked about some of the others, the tension between nationalism that emerged when it was implemented versus
what communism is supposed to be, which is global, so globalism. Then there's the thing that we started talking with is individualism. So, you know, history is supposed to be defined by the large collection of humans, but there does seem to be these singular figures, including Marx himself, that are like really important. geography of global versus restricted to certain countries and tradition.
You're supposed to break with the past and the communism, but then Marxism became one of the strongest traditions in history.
That's right. I think that that last one is especially significant because it's deeply paradoxical.
I mean, trying to outline these contradictions, by the way, is like subjecting Marx to the sort of analysis that Marx subjected other people to, which is to point out internal contradictions, things that are likely to become pressure points or cracks that might open up in what's supposed to be a completely – set and durable and effective, uh, framework. Um, the one about tradition, uh,
you know, Marx points out that the need for revolution is in order to break with the traditions that have hemmed people in this earlier, earlier ways of thinking earlier social structures, uh, and, uh, and, and to constantly renovate. And what happens instead is, um, a tradition of radical rupture emerges.
And that's really tough because imagine, um, uh, the last stages of the Soviet union where, um, keen observers can tell that there are problems that are building in society. There are discontents and demands that are going to clash, especially when someone like Gorbachev is proposing reforms and things are suddenly thrown open for discussion.
The very notion that you have the celebration of revolutionaries and the Bolshevik legacy at a time when the state wants to enforce stability, and an order that's been received from the prior generation. Think of Brezhnev's time, for instance. All of that is an especially volatile mix and unlikely to work out very durably in the long run.
I would love to sort of talk about the works of Marx, the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. What can we say that's interesting about the manifestation of his ideas on paper?
Well, the first thing to note, obviously, is that those two works are very different. Das Kapital is an enormous multi-volume work that Marx worked at and only got the first volume out because Engels begged him to stop revising. Please just finally get it into press. And then the rest, Engels had to actually reconstruct out of notes after Marx passed away. It's a huge work.
By contrast, the Communist Manifesto is a brief pamphlet that ended up affecting the lives of many millions worldwide in spite of its comparative brevity. The Communist Manifesto, moreover, is also something of the nature of having a delayed fuse, you could say. Because when it first appears amid the revolutions of 1848 that sweep across Europe, the work is contrary to what people often believe.
That pamphlet did not cause the revolutions of 1848, many of which had national or liberal demands. The voice of Marx and Engels was barely to be heard over the din of other far more prominent actors. It is, however, in the aftermath that this work takes on tremendous significance and becomes popularly read and popularly distributed. It's especially the...
the episode, the bloody episode of the Paris Commune in 1871, which comes to be identified with Marx, even though it was not purely inspired by Marx alone, nor were all of the Communards devoted Marxists. It's the identification of this famous or infamous episode in urban upheaval that really leads to worldwide notoriety for Marx and attention to those works. And they're very different in form.
Das Kapital is intended to be the origin of species of its realm of economic thought and represents years and years of work of Marx laboring in the British Museum Library, Working through statistics, working on little bits and pieces of a larger answer to big historical questions that he believes that he's arrived at.
Its tone is different from that of the Communist Manifesto, which is a call to arms. It announces with great confidence what the scheme of history will be. But rather than urging that the answer might be passivity and just waiting for history to play out in its preordained way, it's also a clarion call to make the revolution happen and is intended to be a pragmatic, practical statement of
of how this is to play out. And, you know, starts in part with those ringing words about a ghost or a specter haunting Europe, the specter of communism, which wasn't true at the time, but decades later, most definitely is the case.
Is there something you could say about the difference between Marxian economics and Marxist political ideology? So the political side of things and the economics side of things. Yeah.
So I think that Marx would probably have responded that, in fact, those things are indivisible. The analysis as sort of purely theoretical certainly can be performed on any economic reality that you care to mention, but the imperatives that grow out of that economic analysis are political. Marx and Engels emphasize the unity of theory and practice. So it's not enough to dispassionately analyze.
It's a call to action as well, because if you've delivered the answer to how history evolves and changes, it obligates you, right? It demands certain action.
You sometimes hear from undergraduates that they've heard from their high school history teachers that Marxism was just a theoretical construct and the idle production of a philosopher who was not connected to the world and was never meant to be tried in practice.
Marx would have been furious to hear this, and it's almost heroically wrong as a historical statement, because Marx insisted that all previous philosophers have theorized about reality. What now is really necessary is to change it.
So you could say that in the abstract, a Marxist economist can certainly use Marx's theoretical framework to compare to a given economic reality, but Marx would have seen that as incomplete and as deeply unsatisfactory. And there's kind of a footnote to all of this, which is that even though
Marxist dialectical materialism grounds itself in these economic realities, and the political prescription is supposed to flow from the economic realities and be inevitably growing out of them. in the real history of communist regimes, you've actually seen periods where the economics becomes detached from the politics.
And I'm thinking in particular of the new economic period, early in the history of the Soviet Union, when Lenin realizes that The economy is so far gone that you need to reintroduce or allow in a limited way some elements of private enterprise just to start getting Russia back on course in order to have the accumulation of surplus that will be necessary to build the project at all.
There are many Bolsheviks who see the new economic policy as a terrible compromise and a betrayal of their ideas, but it's seen as necessary for a short while, and then Stalin will wreck it entirely, or consider, for that matter, China today.
where you have a dominant political class, the Communist Party of China, which is allowing economic development and private enterprise as long as it retains political control. Some of these elements already represent divergences from what Marx would have expected. And this points to a really key problem or question for all of the history of communism.
It has to do with it being a tradition in spite of itself. And that could be expressed in the following way. An original set of ideas is going to evolve. It's going to change because circumstances change. What elaborations of any doctrine, whether it's communism or a religious doctrine or any political ideology, what elaborations are natural stages in the evolution of any living set of ideas?
Or when do you reach the point where some shift or some adaptation is so radically different that it actually breaks with the tradition? And that's an insoluble problem. You probably have to take it on a case-by-case basis. It speaks to issues like the question that gets raised today. Is China, in a meaningful sense, a communist country anymore? And there's a diversity of opinion on this score.
Or if you're looking at the history of communism and you look at North Korea – which now is on its third installment of a dynastic leader from the same family who rules like a god-king over a regime that calls itself communist, is that still a form of communism? Is it an evolution of? Is it a complete reversal of?
I tend to want to take an anthropological perspective in the history of communism and to take very seriously Those people who avow that they are communists and this is the project that they have underway. And then after hearing that avowal, I think as a historian, you have to say, well, let's look at the details.
Let's see what changes have been made, what continuities might still exist, whether there's a larger pattern to be discerned here. So it's a very, very complicated history that we're talking about.
Let's step back to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and let's steel man the case for communism. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the people there, not in this way we can look back at what happened in the 20th century. Why was this such a compelling notion for millions of people? Can we make the case for it?
Well, clearly it was a compelling case for millions of people. And part of this story has to do with, overall has to do with the faith, conviction, stories of people sacrificing themselves as well as their countrymen in a cause that they believed was not just legitimate, but demanded their total obedience.
I think that throughout the early part of the 20th century, late 19th century, early part of the 20th century, So much of the compelling case for communism came from the confidence that people in the West more generally placed in science. The notion that science is answering problems. Science is giving us solutions to how the world around us works, how the world around us can be improved.
some varieties of that, and watch the quotation marks, science, were crazy, right? Like phrenology, so-called scientific racism that tried to divide humanity up into discrete blocks and to manipulate them in ways that were allegedly scientific or rational. So there were horrors that followed from Those invocations of science, but its prestige was enormous.
And that in part had to do with the lessening grip of religious ideas on intellectual elites. more generally, processes of secularization, not total secularization, but processes of secularization in Western industrial societies.
And the sense that here's a doctrine that will allow escape from wars brought on by capitalist competition, poverty and economic cycles and depressions brought on by capitalist competition, the inequalities of societies that remain hierarchical and class-based. And this claim to being cutting-edge science, I think, allows people like Lenin to derive immense confidence in
in the prescription that they have for the future. And that paradoxically, the confidence that you have in broad strokes, the right set of answers for how to get to the future also allows you to take huge liberties with the tactics and the strategies that you follow as long as your ultimate goal remains the one sketched by this master plan.
So ultimately, some of the predictions of someone like Lenin, that once society has reached that stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the notion that Governments will essentially be able to run themselves. And the model he had in mind, oddly enough, was Swiss post offices.
Being in Swiss exile must have impressed him so much with the orderliness and the sheer discipline and rationality of a Swiss post office. And he thought... Why can't you organize governments like this where you don't need political leaders? You don't need grand visions. You have procedures.
You have bureaucracy, which does its job in a way that's not alienating, but simply produces the greatest good. You know, it... When you think of the experiences with the bureaucracy in the 20th century, one's hair stands on end to have the comparative naivete on display with a prediction like that.
But it derives from that confidence that it's all going to be okay because we understand, we have the key, we have the plan to how to arrive at this final configuration of humanity. Yeah.
Yeah, the certainty of science, in quotes, and the goal of utopia gets you in trouble. But also, just on the human level, from a working class person perspective, from the Industrial Revolution, you see the growing inequality, wealth inequality.
And there is a kind of, you see people getting wealthy, and combined with the fact that life is difficult, life in general, life is suffering for many, for most, for all, if you listen to some philosophers. And there is kind of a... a powerful idea in that the man is exploiting me. And that's a populist message that a lot of people resonate with because to a degree it's true in every system.
And so before you kind of know how these economic and political ideas manifest themselves, it is really powerful to say, here beyond the horizon, there's a world where the rich man will not exploit my hard work anymore. And I think that's a really powerful idea.
It is. I mean, at the same time, though, it kind of points to a further problem, and that's the identity of the revolutionaries.
It turned out that many of these revolutionary movements and then the founding elites of communist countries in the aftermath of the Soviet seizure of power turn out to be something quite different from people who have spent their lives in factories experiencing the Industrial Revolution firsthand. I mean, there's a special role here for intellectuals.
And when Marx and Engels write into the Communist Manifesto the notion that certain exceptional individuals can rise above their class origins in a way other people can't and transcend their class,
earlier role, their materially determined role, in order to gain a perspective on the historical process as a whole and ally themselves with the working class and its struggle for communism, this sort of special role that they carved out for themselves is enormously appealing for intellectuals, because any celebration of intellectuals as world movers is going to appeal to intellectuals. That gap
That frequent reality of not being in touch with the very classes that the communists are aiming to represent is a very frequent theme in this story. It also speaks to a crucial part of this story, which is the breaking apart or the civil war, the war of brother against brother, the fraternal struggle that splits socialism and splits followers of Marx.
And that's in the aftermath of the First World War in particular, or during this traumatic experience, the way in which Lenin encourages the foundation of radical parties that will break with social democracy of the sort that had been elaborated, especially in places like Germany,
scorning their moderation and instead announcing a new dispensation, which was the Leninist conception of a disciplined, hardcore, professional revolutionaries who will act in ways that a mere trade union movement couldn't. And what this speaks to is, you know, a fundamental tension in radical movements, because the
Left to their own devices, Lenin announces, workers tend to focus on their reality, their families, their workplace, want better working conditions, unionize, and then aim to negotiate with employers or to agitate for reforms on the part of the state to improve their living conditions. And then they're happy for the advances that they have won.
And for Lenin, that's not enough because that's a half measure. That's the sort of thing that leads you into an accommodation with the system rather than the overthrow of the system. So there's a real, there's a constant tension in this regard that plays itself out over the long haul.
So let's go to Lenin and the Russian Revolution. How did communism come to power in the Soviet Union?
It came to power as a result of stepping into a power vacuum. And the power vacuum was created by the First World War and the effect that it had as a total war, unprecedented pressure placed on a regime that in many ways was a traditional, almost feudal monarchy, only experiencing the beginnings of the modernization that the rest of Europe had undergone.
And for this reason, communism comes to power in a place that Marx probably wouldn't have expected in the wreckage of the Russian empire. Lenin is absolutely vital to this equation because he's the one who presses the process forward. Ironically, given the claim of communist leaders to having the
key to history, just a few months previous in exile in Switzerland, Lenin had been despairing and had been convinced that he may not even live to see the advent of that day. But then when revolution does break out in the Russian Empire, in February of 1917, Lenin is absolutely frantic to get back.
And when he does get back as a result of a deal that is negotiated with the German high command, a step that they'll later live very much to regret, He is able to get back and to go into action and to press for nothing less than the seizure of power that brings his Bolshevik faction, the radical wing of the socialist movement, to power and then to build the Soviet Union.
So even he was surprised how effective and how fast the revolution happened.
He was, although I think that he would have agreed that what was necessary was a cataclysm on the scale of the First World War to make this happen. The First World War shatters so many of the certainties of the 19th century that we talked about as a dynamic period with argument between ideologies, it scrambles all sorts of earlier debates.
It renegotiates the status of the individual versus an all-powerful state and the claims of the state because to win or even just to survive in World War I. You need to centralize, centralize, centralize, and to put everything onto an authoritarian wartime footing in country after country.
So Lenin earlier had already articulated the possibility that this might happen by talking about how the entire globe already was connected. and there's a chain of capitalist development that is connecting different countries so that the weakest link in the chain, if it breaks, if it pops open, it might actually inaugurate much bigger processes and start a chain reaction.
And that's what he intended to do and has the chance to do in the course of 1917. Incidentally, just to get a sense of the sheer chaos and the... human, on an individual human level, what the absence of established authority meant. There's few works of literature that are as powerful as Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago for giving the whole sweep of contending forces in a power vacuum.
It's an amazing testimony to that time and place.
So you said that Bolsheviks saw violence and terror as necessary. So can you just speak to this aspect of their, because they took power, and so this was a part of the way they saw the world.
Right, and it had antecedents. Even though Lenin and his colleagues are competing amongst each other for the title of most faithful disciple of Marx and most true to the received theory in practice, there's other influences, earlier influences that operate in the Russian context that were not operative, let's say, in the German context.
And here you have to step back and think about the nature of czarism. which had maintained still into the 20th century the notion of a divine right to rule, that God had ordained the Tsarist system and its hierarchies, and that to question these was sinful and politically not advisable. And the restrictive nature of Russian society at this point dominated by the Tsarist establishment.
its harshness, its reactionary nature meant that people who in another context, in another country, might have been reformers could instead very easily be provoked into becoming revolutionaries. And Lenin is a perfect example of this because his older brother was executed as a result of being in a radical revolutionary movement who was arrested and executed for association with terrorism.
And earlier generations of Russian radicals had founded populist groups that would aim to engage in terrorism and resistance against the Tsarist regime. And this included people who called themselves nihilists.
And these nihilists were materialists who saw themselves ushering in a new age by absolute rejection of earlier religious traditions and aiming for material answers to the challenges of the day. Among them was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who wrote a what's been called the worst book ever written. It was, in fact, one of Lenin's favorite books. In Russian, it's Shtodielat.
In English, it gets translated, What is to be done? And it's a utopian novel about revolutionaries and how revolutionaries should act with one another in open ways, new ways, non-traditional ways, in order to help usher in the coming revolution. Lenin loved the work. and said it had the great merit of showing you how to be a revolutionary.
So there's the Marxist influence, and then there's Russian populist nihilist influence, which is also a very live current in Lenin's thinking. And when you add these things together, you get an explosive mix, because Lenin, as a result and part of this family trauma of his brother, becomes a
absolutely irreconcilable enemy of the Tsarist regime and sets about turning himself into what you might call a guided missile for revolution. He turns himself into a machine to produce revolutionary change. And I mean that with little hyperbole.
Lenin at one point shared with friends that he loved listening to music, but he tried not to listen to beautiful music like Beethoven because it made him feel gentle. What the revolution demanded was realism, hardness, absolute steely resolve. So Lenin worries even fellow revolutionaries by the intensity of his single-minded focus to revolution. He spends his days thinking about the revolution.
He probably dreamt about the revolution. And so 24-7, it's an existence where he's paired off other human elements quite deliberately in order to turn himself into an effective instigator of revolution. So when the opportunity comes in 1917, he's primed and ready for that role.
It's interesting that nihilism, Russian nihilism, had an impact on Lenin. I mean, traditionally nihilist philosophy rejects all sorts of traditional morality. There's a kind of cynical, dark view, and where's the light?
The light is science. The light is science and materialism.
Oh, boy.
The nihilists, some of them did a very bad job of hiding their political beliefs because they were famous for wearing blue-tinted spectacles, kind of the sunglasses of the late 19th century, as a way of shielding their eyes from light, but also having a and realistic view of reality outside.
So nihilists, as the name would suggest, do reject all prior certainties, but they make an exception for science and see that as the possibility for founding an entirely new mode of existence.
For most people, I think nihilism is introduced in the brilliant philosophical work, I don't know if you're familiar with it, by the name of The Big Lebowski. Oh. nihilists appear there. And I think they summarize the nihilist tradition quite well. But it is indeed fascinating, and also it is fascinating that Lenin, and I'm sure this influenced Stalin as well, that hardness was a necessary element
human characteristics to take the revolution to its end.
That's right. That's right. So prior generations of nihilists or populists had resembled Lenin's single-mindedness by arguing that one needed total devotion for this. If to play this role in society, it was not enough to be somewhat committed. Total commitment was necessary. And the other theme that's at work here, obviously, is
If we consider Lenin affected by Marxist ideas and the homegrown Russian revolutionary tradition that predates the arrival of Marxist socialism in Russia— It's the theme of needing to adapt to local conditions.
So Marxism or communism in Vietnam or in Cuba or in Cambodia or in Russia will be very different in its local adaptations and local themes and resonance than it was in Germany, where Marx would have expected all this to unfold.
So let's talk about Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, this little interplay that eventually led to Stalin accumulating, grabbing, and taking a hold of power. What was that process like?
So Lenin's supreme confidence leads the party through some really difficult steps. That involves things like signing the humiliating treaty with the Germans, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
where critics of the Bolsheviks said that no one who loved their country would have agreed to a so draconian, so harsh a settlement that saw the peeling off of large territories that had belonged to the Russian Empire. Lenin is willing to undertake this because of the larger prize.
He even says that he's not going to bother to read the treaty because shortly that treaty is going to be a dead letter. His expectation is revolution is going to break out everywhere. especially after we've raised the standard, first of all, in the wreckage of the Russian Empire.
And we should probably say that that treaty, to some small degree, maybe you can elaborate now or later, lays the groundwork for World War II. Because resentment is a thing that with time can lead to just extreme levels of destruction.
Right. For German sensibilities, for German nationalists, that treaty meant that Germany had essentially won World War I. And only... a turn of events that many of them couldn't even follow or conceive of. The arrival of American troops, the tipping of the balance in the West led to that reversal.
And one of the many scholars and contemporaries pointed out that Germany between the wars was full of people who were convinced that Germany had actually not lost the war, however that victory of theirs was defined. So most definitely that groundwork is laid. And incidentally, This is something we can talk about later. World War I and World War II have a lot of linkages like that.
And as time goes by, I think historians are going to focus on those linkages even more. But Lenin also, in his leadership, against the odds, leads the Bolsheviks to power in the Russian Civil War, where most betting people would have given them very slight odds of even surviving, given how many enemies they faced off against.
Lenin's insistence upon discipline and upon good organization allowed the Bolsheviks to emerge as the winners. And yet— a great disappointment follows. Lenin, as we said, had expected that revolution will break out soon everywhere and all it'll be necessary for the Bolsheviks to do, having given the lead, is to link up with others.
And so he considered that what would be established would be a red bridge between a communist Russia and once Germany inevitably plunged ahead into its revolutionary transformation, a communist Germany. That doesn't end up happening. On the contrary, what happens in Germany is a out-and-out shooting war between different kinds of socialists.
When Germany establishes a democracy that later goes by the name of the Weimar Republic, the government is a government of social democrats, moderate social democrats, who are fearful of what they see as Russian conditions of disorder and who are not necessarily in sympathy with the Leninist vision of tightly organized authoritarian rule.
So communists who revolt in Germany are brutally suppressed by mercenaries, hardened front fighters and nationalist radicals hired by the German socialist government. And the result is a wound that just won't heal in the German socialist movement as a result of this fratricide. It frustrates Lenin's ambitions.
So too does the fact that Poland, rather than going Bolshevik, resists attempts by the Bolsheviks to move forward and to connect up with Germany. The Poles, yet again, play a tremendously important historical role in changing the expected course of historical events. It's in the aftermath of these unexpected turns that Lenin and his colleagues realize that they're in this for the long haul.
It's necessary to wait longer. They don't lose hope or confidence, you might say, in the eventual coming of international workers' revolution, but it's been deferred. It's been put off. And so the question then arises, what do you build within a state that's established called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the Soviet Union?
Lenin, as a result of an assassination attempt, is deeply affected in his health and would have loved to continue for years longer to steer the regime, but he's sidelined because of his declining health, and there emerges a contest, a contest between a very charismatic leader, Leo Trotsky,
On the one hand, who is an amazing orator, who is an intellectual, who has traveled widely in the world, who has seen much of the world, and who is a brilliant writer, a far-ranging intellect, and is seen as extremely radical because of his demand for permanent revolution, the acceleration of revolutionary processes to drive history forward, to strike while the iron is hot.
And on the other hand, is an extremely unlikely contender for power. And that's a man who's probably the antithesis of charisma, if you were to meet him in person.
a guy with a squeaky, somewhat high-pitched voice, not well-suited to revolutionary oratory, his face pockmarked with the scars of youthful illness, and who, moreover, doesn't speak a fine, sophisticated Russian, but speaks a Russian heavily inflected with a Georgian accent from that part of the Russian Empire from which he came, and that was Stalin.
And I know that you already have a marvelous interview with Stephen Kotkin, the brilliant biographer of Stalin, who has so many insights on that subject. The one thing that even after reading about Stalin that never ceases to surprise me, even in retrospect, is that Stalin gains a reputation not as a fiery radical, but as a moderate.
a man who's a conciliator, someone who's calm when others are excited, someone who is able, because of his organizational skills, to resolve merely theoretical disputes with practical solutions. Now, to fully take this aboard, we have to unknow what we know from our vantage point about Stalin's leadership, Stalin's brutality in eliminating his opposition, and
The cult of personality that, against all odds, got built up around Stalin so successfully. And the absolute dominant role that led him later to be described as Genghis Khan with a telephone. A brutal dictator with ancient barbarism allied to the use of modern technology.
While Trotsky is delivering stirring speeches and theorizing, Stalin works behind the scenes to control personnel decisions in the Bolshevik movement and in the state. And it's a cliche because it's true that personnel is policy. Trotsky is increasingly sidelined and then demonized and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union and later murdered in Mexico City.
For Stalin, eliminating his enemies turned out to be the solution that he was most comfortable with.
So from that perspective, there's a lot of fascinating things here. So one is that you can have a wolf, a brutal dictator in moderate clothing. So just because somebody presents as moderate doesn't mean they can't be one of the most destructive, not the most destructive humans in history. The other aspect is using propaganda, you can construct an image of a person