Pod Insights Lex Fridman Podcast #444 – Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler About this episode 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.
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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
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Transcript 28,567 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lex Fridman? The following is a conversation with Wejas Ludevichus, 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. And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got AG1 for health, BetterHelp for your mind, Notion for team collaboration, Element for electrolytes,
0:44 Lex Fridman? and Aidsleep for naps. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. 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.
1:27 Lex Fridman? 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.
2:07 Lex Fridman? In fact, I never got any major injuries, knock on wood, any sort of breaking of anything during, you know, I don't know how many years, over 20 years, 25 years. And I find that now that jujitsu 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. Back to AG1, they'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P, help.
2:52 Lex Fridman? They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. I remember, speaking of jujitsu, one of the tougher things mentally for me, for anyone that does jujitsu, 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 smashed, as they say in the MMA community when they're talking about Habib Nurmagomedov. You just feel powerless. You know, somebody just crushes you, knee on belly or mount or back control,
3:37 Lex Fridman? 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 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 is 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,
4:21 Lex Fridman? into strengthening the engine of perseverance. So and all of that is in the mind. And you should take care of your mind by checking out betterhelp.com/lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex.
4:37 Lex Fridman? This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool.
4:42 Lex Fridman? It's probably my favorite integration of AI into the writing process. I haven't used it that much for the team collaboration aspect, but for the note taking aspect, but I've heard really great things about the team collaboration thing. I've been preparing extensively to interview the Cursor team. Cursor is an editor and IDE for programming that is a fork of VS Code. It makes sort of AI assistant coding, a foundation based on which they're kind of building the feature. So it makes AI the primary citizen. And I've seen that Notion does the same kind of thing. They're really, really focused on empowering AI to help you,
5:27 Lex Fridman? not just for a single document, but across entire projects and wikis and all that kind of stuff. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase notion.com/lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar delicious electrolyte mix. Whenever you see me drinking, sometimes I'll have something that looks like a Powerade bottle with a clear liquid. The clear liquid is cold water with one packet of watermelon salt, Element. It's a thing I drink before a run, after a run, before and after a heart training session, and just as throughout the day. It's a delicious way to consume
6:09 Lex Fridman? water. I continually am surprised how much of sort of physical and psychological problems can be solved with getting the right amount of electrolytes. I think that's like a meme on the various social media platforms of like a girlfriend complaining about something being wrong. And the suggestion is, well, have you tried drinking a glass of water? That the implication is that she's simply thirsty, but she doesn't want the boyfriend to give a solution to the problem. In fact, she wants to just be heard. That's the meme.
6:47 Lex Fridman? But to sort of dig for the wisdom within the meme, really, you could solve so many problems by drinking water and getting enough electrolytes. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drinkelement.com/lex. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and its pod for Ultra. Technology is being integrated in every part of our lives. The refrigerator is next, friends. There is some features I would love to have in a refrigerator, some intelligence. And in fact, I can anticipate that Eight Sleep is probably working on some additional AI. They're already using a bunch of cool machine
7:31 Lex Fridman? learning. How do you take the signal that comes from your body, given a set of sensors, and understand various metrics, various characteristics about how you're sleeping? They're already doing that. And so you have an app and you can analyze all the different ways that you're sleeping. Of course, for me, the thing I enjoy most is that it's a cool surface with a warm blanket and you can just disappear into the world of dreams and dragons and weird creatures that you may have seen on a hypothetical ayahuasca journey in the jungle.
8:08 Lex Fridman? How amazing is the human mind that it can generate those worlds? Anyway, go explore the nature of your own consciousness at asleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get 350 bucks off the Pod for Ultra. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Vehas Lillivicious.
8:48 Lex Fridman? Let's start with Karl Marx. What were the central ideas of Marx that lay the foundation of communism?
8:55 Speaker 01 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
9:39 Speaker 01 direction, might give it an extra push, might play a heroic role in that process. And I think that these two ideas added together, the notion that there is a science of revolution that suggests that you can move in a deliberate and meaningful, rational way towards the end of history and the resolution of all conflicts, a total liberation of the human person, and that moreover, that was inevitable, that that was preprogrammed 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.
10:22 Speaker 01 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.
10:43 Lex Fridman? 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.
10:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first of all, one has to stress Marx would have gotten extremely upset at this point in the conversation because because to call someone a utopian was precisely to argue that you're not scientific, you're not rational, you are not laying out the iron laws of history, you're merely hoping for the best. And that might be laudable, but it was fundamentally unrealistic. 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
11:36 Speaker 01 overthrown and people finally being freed from necessity in smuggled in among those things are most definitely utopian elements. And there 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
12:19 Speaker 01 and deployed. The notion that one will be able to work at one job in the morning and then engage in leisure activity. Yet another fulfilling job in the afternoon. All of these, 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 was, that presented itself as cutting edge science. And moreover, having the, the, the full credibility that science commanded so much, especially in the 19th and early 20th century.
13:00 Lex Fridman? 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.
13:15 Speaker 01 To the extent that they were based on inequalities and on man's exploitation of man, the result was supposed to be a, 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.
13:56 Lex Fridman? Yeah, you actually have a lecture on 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?
14:15 Speaker 01 Marx had been a student of Hegel. And Hegel is 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.
14:58 Speaker 01 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 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.
15:40 Speaker 01 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.
16:23 Speaker 01 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.
16:52 Lex Fridman? And also that you have the rigor of science backing you in your journey towards the truth.
16:59 Speaker 01 Absolutely. So Engels, when he gives the graveside eulogy for his beloved friend Marx, claims that Marx is essentially 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.
17:35 Lex Fridman? 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?
17:47 Speaker 01 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
18:28 Speaker 01 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.
19:14 Speaker 01 Who have taken the world into their own hands and are engaged in class conflict with the the the class below them, which is the working class or the proletariat. And so this sort of this sort of conflict 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,
19:54 Speaker 01 the inevitable explosion will come and a swift revolution will overturn this last, this penultimate stage of human history and usher in instead the dictatorship of the working class and then the abolition of all classes, because with only one class remaining, everyone is finally unified and without those internal contradictions that had marked class conflict before.
20:21 Lex Fridman? The dictatorship of the working class is an interesting term. So what is the role of revolution in history?
20:28 Speaker 01 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 this working class in its entirety, to whom Marx assigns this this epic Promethean role of being the ones who are going to liberate
21:12 Speaker 01 all of humanity, a class that is universal in its interests and in the sort of role in salvation history that they'll be playing in this in this secular framework. 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.
21:38 Lex Fridman? How did he conceive of a revolution?
21:43 Lex Fridman? Potentially a violent revolution stabilizing itself into something where the the working class was able to rule.
21:54 Speaker 01 That's where things become a good deal less detailed in his and Engels' accounts. The answer that they proposed in part was this is this is for the future to determine. So all of the details will be settled later.
22:09 Speaker 01 I think there 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.
22:25 Speaker 01 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 at at Marx's tantalizing promise that there will be a period where it's it'll be necessary to have centralized control. And there might have to be, as he puts it, despotic inroads against property in order to bring this revolution to pass. But then afterwards, the state, because it represents everybody, rather than representing particular class interests that are in conflict with other classes, the state will eventually wither away. So there won't be need for it. Now, that's not to say that that pure stasis arrives, right?
23:10 Speaker 01 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.
23:33 Lex Fridman? Despotic inroads against property. Did he elaborate on the despotic inroads?
23:40 Speaker 01 Dispossession, dispossession of the of the middle classes and of the bourgeoisie. In his model, humanity is never standing still, right? So he'd probably argue in this dynamic vision of how history unfolds that there's there there's always conflict and it's always moving, propelling history forward towards its predestined ending. In the the way he saw this climax was that
24:08 Speaker 01 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.
24:52 Speaker 01 And in German, the word given to that process was "veräelandung," which is very evocative. Äland 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 "paparization," meaning more and more people are being turned into "poppers." But for Marx, that prediction is really key. And even in his own lifetime, there were already hints that, in fact, if you look sociologically at the really developed working classes in places like Great Britain or Germany, that process was not playing out as he had expected.
25:37 Speaker 01 In fact, although there had been enormous dislocations and tremendous suffering in the early chaotic sort of Wild West stages of capitalism and of industrialization, there had been reform movements as well. And there had been unions, which had sought to carve out rules and agreements with employers for how the conditions under which workers labored might be ameliorated. Moreover, the middle class, rather than dwindling and dwindling, seemed to actually be strengthening and growing in numbers, or the appearance of new kinds of people, like white-collar workers or technical experts.
26:17 Speaker 01 So already in Marx's own lifetime, and then especially in what follows Marx's lifetime, this becomes a real problem because it puts a stick into the spokes of this particular historical prediction.
26:31 Lex Fridman? 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?
26:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. Well, to describe the 19th century as sort of an age of ideologies is very apt because Europe is being racked and being put through the wringer of nationalism, demands for self-expression of peoples who earlier have been in empires or under monarchical rule, demands to redraw the map. The tremendous transformations of the Industrial Revolution meant that in the course of about a generation, you would have seen the world around you change in ways that made it entirely unfamiliar, be able to travel across the landscape at speeds that had been unthinkable when you were a child.
27:26 Speaker 01 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.
28:09 Speaker 01 He had married the daughter of a baron. Because of his radical ideas, he had foreclosed or disfound 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.
28:51 Speaker 01 They also saw him as a man who felt determined to dominate arguments. He wanted to win arguments and was not one to settle for compromise or a middle road. He was disorderly in his personal habits. We might mention, among other things, that he impregnated the family made and didn't accept responsibility for the child. He was also not inclined to undertake regular employment in order to support his growing family. That's where Engels came in. Engels essentially, from his family fortune and then from his journalism afterwards, supported
29:33 Speaker 01 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 the, definitely the junior partner in this relationship. But here's the paradox.
30:18 Speaker 01 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.
30:26 Lex Fridman? 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.
30:39 Lex Fridman? To characterize the level of impact it 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?
31:09 Speaker 01 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.
31:47 Lex Fridman? What we should say here, when you mention 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.
32:06 Speaker 01 That's right.
32:07 Lex Fridman? And so can you maybe speak to that tension?
32:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is definitely a factor in the entire history that we're referencing. Marx and Engels never really shed their identity as Germans. Many of their preconceptions, even those traces of nationalism that they had within themselves, even as they were condemning nationalism as a fraud against the working class, they're clearly, their entire formation had been affected by their German background. And it's very true, as you point out, that Germany is intended to be the place where these predictions will play out.
32:51 Speaker 01 They're also in Britain, also in France, also eventually in the United States. But it's a, you know, it's, it's Germany by virtue of be its central location. And then its rapid development later than Britain or France in industrialization. Give it this special role in, in Marx's worldview. And so it, it's a lasting irony or a central irony of this whole story. That when a government establishes itself that claims to be following Marx's prescriptions and realizing his vision, it happens in the wreckage of the Russian Empire.
33:32 Speaker 01 A place that was, did not match the requirements of being industrialized, developed well on its way in this historical process. And nobody knew this better than the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his colleagues had a keen sense that what they were doing, exciting as it was, was a gamble. It was a risk because in fact, the revolution to really take hold had to seize power in Germany. And that's why in immediately after taking power, they're not sure they're going to last. Their, their hope, their, their, their promise of salvation is that a workers' revolution
34:13 Speaker 01 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, you know, great things will follow that do hue to Marx's historical vision. The last thing to mention about this is that this predominance of Germany in the thinking of, 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.
34:58 Speaker 01 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
35:43 Speaker 01 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 seize power, in order to really be a serious radical socialist, you needed to read German, because you needed to read Marx, and you needed to read 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.
36:20 Lex Fridman? Which is why the clash between nationalism and communism in Germany is such a fascinating aspect of history and all the different trajectories it could take. And we'll talk about it. But if we return to the 19th century, you've said that Marx's chief rival was Russian anarchist Mihail Bakunin, who famously said in 1942, quote, "The passion for destruction is also a creative passion." So what kind of future did Bakunin envision?
36:55 Speaker 01 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 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
37:36 Speaker 01 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.
38:18 Speaker 01 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, you know, his anarchist convictions are not in question here.
38:59 Speaker 01 They led him into conflict with Marx and Marx railed against him, denounced him, and eventually had him expelled from the international.
39:09 Speaker 01 One of the things, though, that also makes Bakunin so significant is Bakunin is the first in a longer series of approaches between anarchists and communists where they try to make common cause. And you have to say that in every case, it ends badly for the anarchists. Because the communist vision in particular, especially in its Leninist version, argued for discipline and a tightly organized professional revolutionary movement. The anarchists who sought to make common cause with communists, whether it was in
39:51 Speaker 01 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.
40:14 Lex Fridman? If you can take that tangent a little bit. So I guess anarchists were less organized.
40:21 Speaker 01 That's my definition.
40:22 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Why do you think anarchism hasn't been rigorously tried in the way that communism was? If we just take a complete sort of tangent. I mean, in one sense, we are living in an anarchy today because then the nations are in an anarchic state with each other. But why do you think sort of there's not been an anarchist revolution?
40:49 Speaker 01 Well, I think that probably some anarchists would beg to differ, right? They would see communes in Spain during the Spanish Civil War as an example of trying to put anarchist ideas into into place. Bakunin You know, flitted from one area of unrest to another, hoping to be in on finally the founding of the sort of free communes that he had in mind. You know, another key point in all of this is that anarchy means something different to different people as a term. And so when you point out quite correctly that, you know, we have an anarchic international situation, that's kind of the Hobbesian model of the war of all against all, where man is a wolf to man.
41:32 Speaker 01 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.
42:14 Speaker 01 But, you know, as we point out, it's absolutely key to this entire dynamic that to be an anarchist means that your efforts are not going to be organized the way a disciplined and tightly organized revolutionary movement would be.
42:28 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it's an interesting stretch that a violent revolution will take us to a place of no violence or very little violence. So it's a leap.
42:39 Speaker 01 It's a leap. And it kind of, it points to a phenomenon that would have enraged Marx and would have been deeply alienating to others in the tradition who followed him, but that so many scholars have commented on. And that's that there is a religious element, you know, not a avowed one, but a kind of hidden religious or secular religious element to Marx's vision, to the tradition that follows Marx. And, you know, just think of the correspondences, right? Marx himself as kind of a positioning himself as a savior figure, whether that's a Prometheus or a Moses who will lead people to the promised land. The apocalypse or the end times is
43:25 Speaker 01 This final revolution that will usher in a blessed final state, a utopia, which is equivalent to a secular version of heaven. There's the the working class playing the role of humanity in its struggle to be redeemed. And scholar after scholar has pointed this out. Reinhold Niebuhr, back in the 1930s, had an article in The Atlantic magazine that talked about the Soviet Union's communism as a religion. Eric Fügelin, a German-American scholar who fled the Nazis and relocated to Louisiana
44:07 Speaker 01 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. Fügelin 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.
44:49 Lex Fridman? 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.
45:17 Speaker 01 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.
45:58 Speaker 01 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 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 were, there was some folk art from the countryside showing bygone beliefs. There were some lithographs or engravings of the Spanish Inquisition and its horrors. And that was pretty much it.
46:40 Speaker 01 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,
47:24 Speaker 01 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, that other scholars have pointed out as well.
47:46 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it's a very complicated sort of discussion. When you remove religion as a, as a big component of a society. Whether something like a framing of political ideologies in religious ways is the natural consequence of that.
48:01 Speaker 01 We hear nature abhorring a vacuum, and I think that there are, there are places in human character that long for transcendental explanations, right, that it's not all meaningless. It's, in fact, there's a larger purpose, and I think it's not a coincidence that such a significant part of resistance to communist regimes has in part come from, on the one hand, religious believers, and on the other hand, from disillusioned true believers in communism, who find themselves undergoing a, an internal experience of just a revulsion, finding that their ideals are, have not been followed through on.
48:43 Lex Fridman? 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, 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
49:26 Lex Fridman? Marx himself, that are like really important. Geography of global versus restricted to certain countries, and, you know, tradition, sort of, you're supposed to break with the past and communism, but then Marxism became one of the strongest traditions in history.
49:45 Speaker 01 That's right. That's right. I think that that last one is especially significant because it's, it's deeply paradoxical. I mean, trying to outline these contradictions, by the way, is like subjecting Marx to a, the sort of analysis that Marx subjected other people to, which is to point out internal contradictions, things that are likely to, to become pressure points or cracks that might open up in what's supposed to be a completely.
50:09 Speaker 01 Set and durable and effective framework. The one about tradition. You know, Marx points out that the need for revolution is in order to break with the traditions that have hemmed people in this earlier, earlier ways of thinking, earlier social structures and, and to constantly renovate. And what happens instead is a tradition of radical rupture emerges. And that's really tough because imagine the last stages of the Soviet Union where keen observers can tell that there are problems that are building in society.
50:51 Speaker 01 There are discontents and demands that are, 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 especially volatile mix and unlikely to work out very durably in the long run.
51:30 Lex Fridman? 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?
51:43 Speaker 01 Well, the first thing to note, obviously, is that those two works are very different. Das Kapital is an enormous multi-volume work that, 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
52:28 Speaker 01 fuse, you could say. Because when it first appears amid the revolutions of 1848 that sweep across Europe.
52:38 Speaker 01 The work is, contrary to what people often believe, that pamphlet did not cause the revolutions of 1848, many of which had national or liberal demands. The voice of Marx and Engels was barely to be heard over the din of other far more prominent actors. It is, however, in the aftermath that this work takes on tremendous significance and becomes popularly read and popularly distributed. It's especially the episode, the bloody episode of the Paris Commune in 1871, which comes to be identified with Marx, even though it was not purely inspired by Marx alone, nor were all of the Communards devoted Marxists.
53:24 Speaker 01 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,
54:08 Speaker 01 which is a call to arms. It announces with great confidence what the scheme of history will be, but rather than urging that the answer might be passivity and just waiting for history to play out in its preordained way, it's also a clarion call to make the revolution happen and is intended to be a pragmatic, practical statement of how this is to play out. And it 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.
54:48 Lex Fridman? Is there something we say about the difference between Marxian economics and Marxist political ideology? So the political side of things and the economics side of things?
55:02 Speaker 01 So I think that Marx would probably have responded that, in fact, those things are indivisible. The analysis as sort of purely theoretical is, certainly can be performed on any economic reality that you care to mention, but the imperatives that grow out of that 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
55:42 Speaker 01 delivered the answer to how history evolves and changes, it obligates you, right? It demands certain action. You sometimes hear from undergraduates that they've heard from their high school history teachers that Marxism was just a theoretical construct that was the idle production of a philosopher who was not connected to the world and was never meant to be tried in practice. Marx would have been furious to hear this, and it's almost heroically wrong as a historical statement, because Marx insisted that all
56:20 Speaker 01 previous philosophers have theorized about reality. What now is really necessary is to change it. So you could say that in the abstract, a Marxist economist can certainly use Marx's theoretical framework to compare to a given economic reality, but Marx would have seen that as incomplete and as deeply unsatisfactory. There's kind of a footnote to all of this, which is that even though Marxist dialectical materialism grounds itself in these economic realities, and the political prescription is supposed to flow from the economic realities and be inevitably growing out of them.
57:09 Speaker 01 In the real history of communist regimes, you've actually seen periods where the economics becomes detached from the politics. And I'm thinking in particular of the new economic period, early in the history of the Soviet Union, when Lenin realizes that the economy is so far gone that you need to reintroduce or allow in a limited way some elements of private enterprise just to start getting Russia back on course in order to have the accumulation of surplus that will be necessary to build the project at all. And that's, there are many Bolsheviks who see the new economic program as a new economic policy as a terrible compromise and a betrayal of their ideas.
57:54 Speaker 01 But it's seen as necessary for a short while and then Stalin will wreck it entirely. Or consider, for that matter, China today, where you have a dominant political class, the Communist Party of China, which is allowing economic development and private enterprise as long as it retains political control. So some of these elements already represent divergences from what Marx would have expected. And this is, this points to a really key problem or question for all of the history of communism. It has to do with it being a tradition in spite of itself. And that could be expressed in the following way.
58:39 Speaker 01 An original set of ideas is going to evolve. It's going to change because circumstances change. What elaborations of any doctrine, whether it's communism or a religious doctrine or any political ideology, what elaborations are natural stages in the evolution of any living set of ideas? Or when you reach the point where some shift or some adaptation is so radically different that it actually breaks with the tradition. And that's an insoluble problem. You probably have to take it on a case by case basis. It speaks to issues like the question that gets raised today.
59:23 Speaker 01 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
1:00:03 Speaker 01 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.
1:00:29 Lex Fridman? Let's step back to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. And let's steel man the case for communism. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the people there. Not in this way where we can look back at what happened in the 20th century. Why was this such a compelling notion for millions of people? Can we make the case for it?
1:00:54 Speaker 01 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.
1:01:38 Speaker 01 Science is giving us solutions to how the world around us works, how the world around us can be improved. Some varieties of that, and I watch the quotation marks, "science," were crazy, right? Like phrenology, so-called scientific racism, that tried to divide humanity up into discreet 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,
1:02:20 Speaker 01 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.
1:02:56 Speaker 01 And this claim to being cutting-edge science, I think, allows people like Lenin to derive immense confidence in the prescription that they have for the future. And that, paradoxically, the confidence that you have, in broad strokes, the right set of answers for how to get to the future, also allows you to take huge liberties with the tactics and the strategies that you follow, as long as your ultimate goal remains the one sketched by this master plan.
1:03:34 Speaker 01 So ultimately, some of the predictions of someone like Lenin, that once society has reached that stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat...
1:03:47 Speaker 01 The notion that governments will essentially be able to run themselves. And the model he had in mind, oddly enough, was Swiss post offices. Being in Swiss exile must have impressed him so much with the orderliness and the sheer discipline and rationality of a Swiss post office. And he thought, why can't you organize governments like this? Where you don't need political leaders, you don't need grand visions, you have procedures, you have bureaucracy, which does its job in a way that's not alienating, but simply produces the greatest good. You know, when you think of the experiences with bureaucracy in the 20th century, one's
1:04:31 Speaker 01 hair stands on end to have, you know, the comparative naivete on display with a prediction like that. But it derives from that confidence that it's all going to be okay because we understand, we have the key, we have the plan to how to arrive at this final configuration of humanity.
1:04:53 Lex Fridman? Yeah, the certainty of science in quotes and the goal of utopia gets you in trouble. But also, just on the human level, from a working class person perspective, from the industrial revolution, you see the growing inequality, wealth inequality. And there is a kind of, you see people getting wealthy and combined with the fact that life is difficult, life in general, life is suffering for many, for most, for all, if you listen to some philosophers. And there is kind of a powerful idea in that the man is exploiting me. And that's a populist message that a lot of people resonate with because to a degree
1:05:37 Lex Fridman? is true in every system. And so before you kind of know how these economic and political ideas manifest themselves, it is really powerful to say, here, beyond the horizon, there's a world. Where the rich man will not exploit my hard work anymore. And I think that's a really powerful idea.
1:06:01 Speaker 01 It is. I mean, at the same time, though, it kind of points to, you know, a further problem. And that's the identity of the revolutionaries. It turned out that many of these revolutionary movements and then the founding elites of communist countries in the aftermath of the Soviet seizure of power turned 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
1:06:46 Speaker 01 their earlier role, their materially determined role, in order to gain a perspective on the historical process as a whole and ally themselves with the working class and its struggle for communism. This sort of special role that they carved out for themselves is enormously appealing for intellectuals because any celebration of intellectuals as world movers is going to appeal to intellectuals. That gap, that frequent reality of not being in touch with the very classes that the communists are aiming to represent is a very frequent theme in this story.
1:07:31 Speaker 01 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,
1:08:14 Speaker 01 which was the Leninist conception of a disciplined hardcore professional revolutionaries who will act in ways that that a mere trade union movement couldn't. And what this speaks to is, you know, a fundamental tension in in radical movements. Because left to their own devices, Lenin announces, workers tend to focus on their reality, their families, their workplace, want better working conditions, unionize, and then aim to negotiate with employers or to agitate for reforms on the part of the state to improve their living conditions.
1:08:55 Speaker 01 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 in this regard that plays itself out over the long haul.
1:09:16 Lex Fridman? So let's go to Lenin and the Russian Revolution. How did communism come to power in the Soviet Union?
1:09:26 Speaker 01 It came to power as a result of stepping into a power vacuum. And the power vacuum was created by the First World War. And it's the effect that it had as a total war, unprecedented pressure placed on a regime that in many ways was a traditional, almost feudal monarchy, only experiencing the beginnings of the modernization that the rest of Europe had undergone. And for this reason, communism comes to power in a place that Marx probably wouldn't have expected, in the wreckage wreckage of the Russian Empire.
1:10:03 Speaker 01 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 that that he's not may not even live to see the advent of that day. But then when revolution does break out in the Russian Empire in February of 1917, Lenin is absolutely frantic to get back.
1:10:44 Speaker 01 And when he does get back, as a result of a deal that is negotiated with the German High Command, a step that they are they'll later live very much to regret, he is able to get back and to go into action and to press for nothing less than the seizure of power that brings the his Bolshevik faction, the radical wing of the socialist movement to power in and then to build the Soviet Union.
1:11:11 Lex Fridman? So even he was surprised how effective and how fast the revolution happened.
1:11:16 Speaker 01 He was, although I think that he would have would have agreed that what was necessary was a cataclysm on the scale of the First World War to make this happen. The First World War shatters so many of the certainties of the 19th century that we talked about as a 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 One, you need to
1:11:58 Speaker 01 centralize, centralize, centralize and to put everything onto a authoritarian wartime footing in country after country. So Lenin earlier had already articulated the possibility that this might happen by talking about how.
1:12:18 Speaker 01 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
1:12:57 Speaker 01 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 just the whole sweep of contending forces in a power vacuum. It's an amazing testimony to that time and place.
1:13:18 Lex Fridman? 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?
1:13:32 Speaker 01 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, on the German context. And here you have to step back and think about the nature of Tsarism, which had maintained still into the 20th century, the notion of a divine right to rule, that God had ordained
1:14:16 Speaker 01 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
1:14:54 Speaker 01 in a radical revolutionary movement that was, who was arrested and executed for association with terrorism. And earlier generations of Russian radicals had founded populist groups that would aim to engage in terrorism and resistance against the Tsarist regime.
1:15:17 Speaker 01 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 what's been called the worst book ever written. It was, in fact, one of Lenin's favorite books. In Russian, it's "Stodielat." 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
1:16:01 Speaker 01 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...
1:16:40 Speaker 01 Absolutely reconcilable enemy of the Tsarist regime and sets about turning himself into what you might call a guided missile for revolution. He turns himself into a machine to produce revolutionary change. And I mean that with little hyperbole. Lenin, at one point, shared with friends that he loved listening to music, but he tried not to listen to beautiful music like Beethoven because it made him feel gentle. What the revolution demanded was realism, hardness, absolute steely resolve. So Lenin worries even fellow revolutionaries by the intensity of his single-minded focus
1:17:25 Speaker 01 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 pared 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.
1:17:52 Lex Fridman? 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?
1:18:06 Speaker 01 The light is science. The light is science and materialism.
1:18:09 Lex Fridman? Oh, boy.
1:18:10 Speaker 01 The nihilists, some of them did a very bad job of hiding their political beliefs because they would wear, they were famous for wearing blue tinted spectacles, kind of the sunglasses of the late 19th century, as a way of shielding their eyes from light, but also having a dispassionate and realistic view of reality outside. So nihilists, as the name would suggest, do reject all prior certainties, but they make an exception for science and see that as the possibility for founding an entirely new mode of existence.
1:18:46 Lex Fridman? For most people, I think nihilism is introduced in the brilliant philosophical work, I don't know if you're familiar with it, by the name of The Big Lebowski. Nihilists appear there. And I think they summarize the nihilist tradition quite well. But it is indeed fascinating. And also, it is fascinating that Lenin, and I'm sure this influenced Stalin as well, that hardness was a necessary human characteristics to take the revolution to its, to its end.
1:19:18 Speaker 01 That's right. That's right. So prior generations of nihilists or populists had resembled Lenin's single-mindedness by being, you know, by arguing that one needed total devotion for this. This was if to play this role in society, it was not enough to be somewhat committed. Total commitment was necessary. And the other theme that's at work here, obviously, is if we consider Lenin affected by Marxist ideas and the homegrown Russian revolutionary tradition that predates the arrival of Marxist socialism in Russia.
1:19:57 Speaker 01 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 of this to unfold.
1:20:23 Lex Fridman? 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?
1:20:38 Speaker 01 So Lenin's supreme confidence leads the, the party through some really difficult steps. That involves things like signing the humiliating treaty with the Germans, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
1:20:53 Speaker 01 Where critics of the Bolsheviks said that no one who loved their their country would have would have agreed to a so draconian, so harsh, a settlement that saw the peeling off of large territories that had belonged to the Russian Empire. Lenin is willing to undertake this because it's 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.
1:21:26 Lex Fridman? And we should probably say that that treaty, to some small degree, maybe you can elaborate now or later, lays the groundwork for World War II. Because there is resentment is a thing that with time can lead to just extreme levels of destruction.
1:21:44 Speaker 01 Right. In for for German sensibilities, for German nationalists, that treaty meant that Germany had essentially won World War I. And only a turn of events that many of them couldn't even follow or conceive of, the 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
1:22:29 Speaker 01 II have a lot of linkages like that. And 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.
1:23:10 Speaker 01 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,
1:23:51 Speaker 01 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.
1:24:36 Speaker 01 So too does the fact that Poland, rather than going Bolshevik, resists attempts by the Bolsheviks to move forward and to connect up with Germany. The Poles, yet again, play a tremendously important historical role in changing the expected course of historical events. It's in the aftermath of these unexpected turns that Lenin and his colleagues realize that they're in this for the long haul. It's necessary to wait longer. They don't lose hope in, or confidence, you might say, in the eventual coming of international workers' revolution, but it's been deferred. It's been put off.
1:25:20 Speaker 01 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...
1:25:37 Speaker 01 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, Leotrotzky. 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
1:26:16 Speaker 01 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
1:26:57 Speaker 01 a fine, sophisticated Russian, but speaks a Russian heavily inflected with a Georgian accent from that part of the Russian Empire from which he came, and that was Stalin. And I know that you already have a marvelous interview with Stephen Kotkin, the brilliant biographer of Stalin, who has so many insights on that subject. The one thing that's, that even after reading about Stalin, that...
1:27:30 Speaker 01 Never ceases to surprise me, even in retrospect, is that Stalin gains a reputation, not as a fiery radical, but as a moderate, a man who's a conciliator, someone who's calm when others are excited, someone who is able, because of his organizational skills, to resolve merely theoretical disputes with practical solutions. Now, to fully take this aboard, we have to unknow what we know from our vantage point about Stalin's leadership, Stalin's brutality in eliminating his opposition, the cult of
1:28:09 Speaker 01 personality that against all odds got built up around Stalin so successfully, and the absolute dominant role that led him later to be described as Genghis Khan with a telephone, a brutal dictator with ancient barbarism allied to the use of modern technology. While Trotsky is delivering stirring speeches and theorizing, Stalin works behind the scenes to control personnel decisions in the Bolshevik movement and in the state. And, you know, it's a cliche because it's true that personnel is policy.
1:28:50 Speaker 01 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.
1:29:07 Lex Fridman? 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. Even though they're uncharismatic, not attractive, their voice is no good. All of those aspects, you can still have a like, uh, there's still to this day, a very large number of people that see him as a religious
1:29:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:29:52 Lex Fridman? type of godlike figure. So the power of propaganda there.
1:29:57 Speaker 01 Today, we would call that curating the image, right?
1:29:59 Lex Fridman? Curating the image, but to the extent to which you can do that effectively is quite incredible. So in that way also Stalin is a study of the power of propaganda.
1:30:12 Lex Fridman? Can we just talk about the ways that the the power vacuum is filled by Stalin? How that manifests itself? Perhaps one angle we can take is how was the secret police used? How did power manifest itself under Stalin?
1:30:27 Speaker 01 Well, um, before getting to the secret police, I would just want to add the other crucial element, which is Lenin's patronage. Stalin doesn't, you know, brawl his way into the Bolshevik party and dominate. He's co-opted and promoted to positions of importance by Lenin, who sees him as a somewhat rough around the edges, not very sophisticated, much less cosmopolitan than other Bolsheviks, but but dependable, reliable and committed revolutionary. So I think that one of the things that's emerged, especially after archives opened up with the fall of the Soviet Union, and we were able to read more and more of the
1:31:08 Speaker 01 communications of Lenin, is that it's there's it's not the case that we're talking here about a unconnected series of careers. Rather, there are connections to be made. It's true that towards the end of his life, Lenin came to be worried by complaints about Stalin's rudeness towards fellow Bolsheviks. And in his testament, he warned against Stalin's testimonies. Lenin fundamentally saw himself as irreplaceable. And so that doesn't really help in a succession struggle, right?
1:31:41 Speaker 01 Stalin is able to rely on a secret police apparatus that had been built up under Lenin already. And it's very early in the foundation of the Soviet state that the Cheka or the Extraordinary Commission is established as a secret police to
1:32:05 Speaker 01 Terrify the enemies, beat down the opponents of the regime, and to keep an eye on society more generally. The person who's chosen for that task also is an anomaly among Bolsheviks. That is a man of Polish aristocratic background, Felix Zerzinski, who comes to be known by the nickname Iron Felix. Here's a man about whom a cult of personality also is created. Zerzinski is celebrated in the Soviet period as the model of someone who's harsh but fair, an executioner but with a heart of gold, somebody who loves children,
1:32:47 Speaker 01 somebody who has a tender heart but forces himself to be steely-willed against the opponents of the ideological project of the Bolsheviks. Zerzinski is succeeded by figures who will be absolutely instrumental to Stalin's exercise of power. And they're not immune either. Stalin, in his purges, takes care also to purge the secret police as a way of finding others upon whom to deflect blame for earlier atrocities and to produce a situation where even committed Bolsheviks are uncertain of what's going to happen next
1:33:30 Speaker 01 and feel their own position to be precarious. I mean, incidentally, there are other influences that probably are wrought to bear here as well. It gets said about Stalin that he used to spend a lot of time flipping through Machiavelli's The Prince. And it seems that Stalin's personal copy of The Prince, nobody knows where that is, if it still exists. But historians have found annotations in works by Lenin that Stalin, who was a voracious reader, as it turns out, made in the back of one of the books, which sounds almost like a commentary on Machiavelli's almost-but-not-quite suggestion
1:34:14 Speaker 01 that the ends justify the means. Stalin's own writing says that if someone is strong, active, and intelligent...
1:34:26 Speaker 01 Even if they do things that other people condemn, they're still a good person. And so Stalin's self-conception of himself is someone who along these lines and in line with Lenin's emphasis on practical results and discipline, somebody who gets things done, that's the crucial ethical standard. And in ultimately, in criticisms by later dissidents of Bolshevik morality, this question of what is the ethical standard, what is the ethical law, will bring this question into focus because by the, and this goes back to Marx as well, incidentally, the notion
1:35:08 Speaker 01 that any ethical system, any notion of right or wrong, is purely a product of class identity, because every class produces its distinctive ideas, its distinctive religion, its distinctive art forms, its distinctive styles, means that with no one transcendent or absolute morality, it's all up for grabs. And then it's a question of power and the exercise of power with no limits, untrammelled by any laws whatsoever, dictatorship in its purest form, something that Lenin had avowed, and then Stalin comes to practice even more fully.
1:35:44 Lex Fridman? Not that it's possible to look deep into a person's heart, but if you look at Trotsky, you could say that he probably believed deeply in Marxism and communism, probably the same with Lenin. What do you think Stalin believed? Was he a believer? Was he a pragmatist that used communism as a way to gain power and ideology as part of propaganda? Or did he in his own private moments deeply believe in the Cetopia?
1:36:12 Speaker 01 That's an excellent question, and you're quite right. I mean, we cannot peer into the inmost recesses of somebody's being and know for sure. My intuition, though, is that
1:36:24 Speaker 01 Is that this may be a false alternative, a false dichotomy. It's natural enough to see somebody who does monstrous things to say, well, this is being ideology is being used as a cover for it. But I think that my suspicion is that these were actually perfectly compatible in his historical role. The notion that that there's an ideology, it gives you a master plan for how history is going to develop and your own power, the increase of that power to unprecedented proportions. Your ability to torment even your own faithful followers in order just to see them squirm,
1:37:05 Speaker 01 which Stalin was famous for, to keep people unsettled. To me, it seems that for some people, those might not actually be opposed, but might even be mutually reinforcing, which is a very scary thought.
1:37:21 Lex Fridman? It's terrifying, but it's really important to understand. If we look at when Stalin takes power, at some of the policies, so the collectivization of agriculture, why do you think that failed so catastrophically, especially in the 1930s with Ukraine and Holodomor?
1:37:47 Speaker 01 I think the short answer is that the Bolsheviks in particular, but also communists more generally, have had a very conflicted relationship with agriculture. Agriculture as a very, I mean, vital, obviously, but also very traditional and old form of human activity, has about it all of the smell of tradition and other problematic factors as well. In a place like Russia or the Russian Empire, peasants throughout history, for centuries, had wanted one thing, and that was to be left alone to farm their own land.
1:38:31 Speaker 01 Um, the, you know, that's their utopia. And that for someone like Marx, who had a vision of historical development and transcendence and progress as being absolutely key, uh, does not mesh at all with that vision. For that reason, when Marx comes up with this, this tableau, this tremendous display of historical transformation taking place over centuries and headed towards the final utopia, the role of farmers there is, is negligible. Peasants get called, um, conservative and dull as sacks of potatoes in Marx's historical
1:39:14 Speaker 01 vision because they're limited in their horizon. They farm their land, their plot, and don't have greater revolutionary goals beyond working the land and having it free and clear. Um, by contrast, industrialization, that's progress. I mean, images that today would be deeply disturbing to an environmentalist's sensibility. Smokestacks, belching smoke, the byproducts of industry, a landscape transformed by, uh, the factory model, that's what Marx and then later the Bolsheviks have in mind. Similarly, the goal, uh, even as articulated in Marx's writings, is to put agriculture
1:39:57 Speaker 01 and farming on a factory model so that you won't need to deal with this traditional role of the independent farmer or the peasant. Instead, you'll have people who benefit from progress, benefit from rationalization by working factory farms. Um, so in approaching the question of collectivization, we have to keep in mind that for Stalin and his comrades, who are bound and determined to drag Russia kicking and screaming into the modern age and not to allow it be beaten because of its backwardness, as Stalin puts it. Traditional forms of agriculture are not what they have in mind.
1:40:38 Speaker 01 And in their rank of desired outcomes, industrialization, especially massive, heavy industry, is the sine qua non. That's their envisioned future. Agriculture rates below. So in that case, the crucial significance of collectivization is to get a handle on the food situation in order to make it predictable and not to find oneself in another crisis like during the civil war, when the cities are starving, industry is robbed of labor, and the factories are at a standstill. So this is really the core approach to collectivization, to put the productive capacities of the
1:41:22 Speaker 01 farmers in a regimented way, in a state-controlled way, under the control of the state. This produces vast human suffering because for the farmers, their plot of land that they thought they had gained as a result of the revolution is now taken away. They no longer have the same incentives they had before to be successful farmers. In fact, if you're a successful farmer and maybe have a cow as opposed to your neighbors who have no cow, you're defamed and denounced as a kulak, a tight-fisted exploiter, even though you might be helping to develop agriculture in the region that you're from.
1:42:07 Speaker 01 So the result is human tragedy on a vast scale. And allied to that, incidentally, is Stalin's sense that this is a chance to also target people who are opposed to the Bolshevik regime for other reasons, whether it's because of their Ukrainian identity, whether it's because of a desire for a different nationalist project. So for Stalin, there are many motives that roll into collectivization. And the final thing to be said is you are quite right that collectivization proves to be
1:42:47 Speaker 01 a failure because the Soviet Union never finally gets a grasp on the problems of agricultural production. By the end of the Soviet Union, they're importing grain from the West in spite of having some of tremendously rich farmland to be found worldwide. And the reason for that had to do in part, I think, with the incentives that had been taken away. Prosperous individual farmers have a motive for working their land and maximizing production. By contrast, if you are an employee of a factory-style agricultural enterprise, the incentives run in very different directions.
1:43:32 Speaker 01 And the joke that was common for decades in the Soviet Union and other communist countries with similar systems was, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. So even labor, which is rhetorically respected and valorized, in practice is rewarded with very slim rewards. And, the last point, immobility. The collectivization reduces the mobility of the peasants who are not allowed, because of internal passports, to move to the cities unless they have permission. They're locked in place. And I've got to say, at the time and afterwards, that looked a lot like feudalism or neo-feudalism
1:44:14 Speaker 01 in terms of the restrictions on workers in the countryside.
1:44:19 Lex Fridman? It is a terrifying, horrific, and fascinating study of how the ideal when meeting reality fails. So the idea here is to make agriculture more efficient, to be more productive, so the industrialized model. But the implementation through collectivization...
1:44:44 Lex Fridman? Had all the elements that you've mentioned that contended with human nature. So first with the kulaks, so the successful farmers were punished. And so then the incentive is not just not to be a successful farmer, but to like hide. Added to that, there's a growing quota that everybody's supposed to deliver on, that nobody can deliver on. And so now, because you can't deliver on that quota, you're basically exporting all your food. And you can't even feed yourself. And then you suffer more and more and more, and there's a vicious downward spiral of like, you can't possibly produce that. Now there's another human incentive where you're gonna lie. Everybody lies on the data.
1:45:27 Speaker 01 That's right.
1:45:28 Lex Fridman? And so even Stalin himself, probably as evil or incompetent as he may be, was not even getting good data about what's even happening. Even if he wanted to stop the vicious downward cycle, which he certainly didn't, but he wouldn't be even able to. So there's all these like dark consequences of what on paper seems like a good ideal. And it's a fascinating study of like, things on paper.
1:45:58 Speaker 01 That's right.
1:45:59 Lex Fridman? When implemented, can go really, really bad.
1:46:02 Speaker 01 That's right. And the outcome here is a horrific man-made famine. Not a natural disaster, not bad harvest, but a man-made famine as a result of then the compulsion that gets used by the Soviet state to extract those resources, cordoning off the area, not allowing starving people to escape. You put very well some of the implications of this case study in how things look in the abstract versus in practice. And those phenomena were going to haunt the rest of the experience of the Soviet Union.
1:46:40 Speaker 01 The whole notion that up and down the chain of command, everybody is falsifying or tinkering with or prettifying the statistics or their reports in order not to look bad and not to have vengeance visited upon them, reaches the point where nobody, in spite of the pretense of comprehensive knowledge, right? There's a state planning agency that creates five-year plans for the economy as a whole and which is supposed to have accurate statistics. All of this is founded upon a foundation of sand. That's inadvertent. That's not an intended side effect.
1:47:24 Speaker 01 But what you described as in terms of the internal dynamics of fostering conflict in a rural society was absolutely not inadvertent. That was deliberate. The doctrine was you bring civil war. Now, had there been social tensions before? Of course, there had. Had there been envies? Had there been differentiations in wealth or status? Of course, there had been. But a deliberate plan to bring class conflict and bring civil war and then heighten it in the countryside does damage. And not least of that is this phenomenon of a negative selection. Those who have most enterprise, those who are most entrepreneurial,
1:48:08 Speaker 01 those who have most self-discipline, those who are best organized, will be winnowed again and again and again, sending the message that mediocrity is comparatively much safer than talent. And this pattern, incidentally, gets transposed and in tremendously harrowing ways also to the entire group of Russian intelligentsia and intellectuals of other peoples who are in the Soviet Union. They discover similarly that to be independent, to have a voice which is not compliant,
1:48:53 Speaker 01 carries with it tremendous penalties, especially in Stalin's reigns of terror.
1:49:01 Lex Fridman? Again, a difficult question about a psychology of one human being. But to what degree do you think Stalin?
1:49:10 Lex Fridman? Was deliberately punishing the farmers and the Ukrainian farmers? And to what degree was he looking the other way? And allowing the large scale incompetence, the horrific incompetence of the collectivization of agriculture to happen?
1:49:31 Speaker 01 Well, I think it was both things, right? I mean, there were not only sins of omission, but also sins of commission. Incidentally, one should add, I don't think for Stalin, it was personal. These are people who are very remote from him. He never, never coming into contact with the people who are suffering in this way. Attributed to him is the quote that one death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic. I think he in action certainly acted in a way that would vindicate that. But the process of collectivization was not just a bureaucratic snafu following on bureaucratic snafu. There was the mobilization of communist youth,
1:50:15 Speaker 01 of military, of party activists to go into the regions and to search for hidden food, to extract the food where it could be found. And
1:50:32 Speaker 01 this, we have testimony to this in the case of people who later became dissidents like Lev Kopolev, who wrote in his memoirs about how he was among those who were sent in to enact these policies. And he saw families with the last food being taken away, even as signs of starvation were visible already in the present. And yet he did not go mad. He didn't kill himself. He didn't fall into despair because he believed, because he had been taught and believed at least then that this was justified. This was a larger historical process and a greater good would result even from these enormities. So I think that this was quite deliberate.
1:51:17 Lex Fridman? Following this, as you've mentioned, there was the process of the Great Terror. Where the intellectuals, where the Communist Party officials, the military officers, the bureaucrats, everybody. 750,000 people were executed and over a million people were sent to the Gulag. What can you say by way of wisdom from this process of the Great Terror that Stalin implemented from 36 to 38?
1:51:53 Speaker 01 Well, the terror had a variety of victims. There were people who were true believers and who were Bolsheviks, who were especially targeted by Stalin because he aimed to revenge himself for all the sort of condescension that he'd experienced in that movement before, and also to eliminate rivals or potential rival power centers and members of their families. And then there were people who simply got caught up in a process whereby the repressive organs in the provinces were sent quotas. You have to achieve your quota, and maybe even better yet, overachieve your quota, overperform.
1:52:34 Speaker 01 That would be the key to success and rising in the bureaucracies in the Age of the Terror. What's so horrifying is the way in which a whole society stood paralyzed in this process and how neighbors would be taken away in the middle of the night and people would be wary of talking about it. Resistance, at least in these urban centers, was entirely paralyzed by fear when, if one had somehow find a way to mobilize, somehow a way to resist the process, the results might have been different. There's an astonishing book.
1:53:19 Speaker 01 I mean, there are so many great books that have come out quite recently even on these topics. Orlando Figgas has an amazing book called The Whisperers that traces several families' history in the Stalin period.
1:53:35 Speaker 01 And it's a testimony to how a whole society and some of its most intelligent people got winnowed again and again and again in that process of negative selection that we talked about. The lasting dislocation and scars that this left and the way in which how people were not able to talk about these things in public because that would put you next on the list, suspected of of of having less than total devotion to the state. I think one of the things that also is so terrifying about the entire process is even total devotion wasn't enough.
1:54:15 Speaker 01 The process took on a life of its own, and I think that it might even have surprised Stalin in some ways, not enough to to to to short circus the the process, but the notion where people were invited to denounce neighbors, coworkers, maybe even family members, meant that ever larger groups of people would be brought into the orbit of the secret police, tortured in order to produce confessions. Those confessions then would lead to more lists of suspects of people who were had to be investigated and either executed or sent to the gulags.
1:54:59 Speaker 01 The uncertainty that this produced was enormous. Even loyalty was not enough to save people. The stories, Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is full of stories of dedicated communists who find themselves in the Gulag and are sure that some mistake has been made. And if only comrade Stalin would hear about this terrible thing that has happened to them, surely it would be corrected. And nothing like this would have everyone else, by contrast, accused of terrible crimes must there, there must be some truth behind that.
1:55:39 Speaker 01 So, you know, talk about ways of of disaggregating a society, ways of breaking down bonds of trust. This left lasting traces on an entire society that that endured to this very day.
1:55:54 Lex Fridman? Yeah, there again, a fascinating study of human nature that there essentially was an emergent quota.
1:56:04 Lex Fridman? Of confessions of treason. So like, even though the whole society was terrified and were through terror loyal, there's still needed to be a lot of confessions of people being disloyal.
1:56:20 Speaker 01 Right.
1:56:20 Lex Fridman? So you're just making shit up now, like at a mass scale, stuff is being made up. And it's also the machine of the secret police starts eating itself because you want to be confessing on your boss, on your, it is this weird, dark, dynamic system where human nature is just as it is its worst.
1:56:44 Speaker 01 Absolutely, absolutely.
1:56:47 Lex Fridman? Why, if we look at this deep discussion we had about Marxism, to what degree can we understand from that lens, why the implementation of communism in the Soviet Union failed in such a dark way? Both in the economic system with agriculture and industrialization and on the human way with the just violation of every possible human right and the torture and the suffering and gulags and all of, all of this?
1:57:20 Speaker 01 Well, I think some of it comes back to the ethical grounding that we mentioned earlier, the notion that ethics are entirely situational and that any ethical system is an outgrowth of a particular class reality, a particular material reality. And that leaves the door wide open. So I think that, that that aspect was present from the very beginning. I think that the expectations of Marx, that the revolution would take hold and be successful in a developed country played a role here as well.
1:58:02 Speaker 01 Russia, which compared to the rest of Europe was less developed even before the First World War, is in a dire state after all of the ravage and the millions of deaths that continue even after the war has ended in the West. That leaves precious little in the way of structural restraints or a functioning society that would say, let's not do things this way. I think that, in retrospect, that special role carved out for special individuals who can move this process forward and accelerate historical development allowed for people
1:58:46 Speaker 01 to step into those roles and appoint themselves executors of this ideological vision. So I think those things play a role as well.
1:58:56 Lex Fridman? Now, it's hard to do counterfactual history, but to what degree is this basically that the communist ideals create a power vacuum, a dictator-type figure steps in, and then it's a roll of the dice of what that dictator is like? So can you imagine a world where the dictator was Trotsky? Would we see very similar type of things? Or is the hardness and the brutality of somebody like Stalin manifested itself in being able to look the other way as some of these dark things were happening more so than somebody like Trotsky who would presumably be, see the realizations of these policies and be shocked?
1:59:38 Speaker 01 Well, counterfactuals are hard, like you said, and one very quickly gets off into really deep waters in speculation. There were contemporaries, and there have been scholars since, who suggest that Trotsky, by all indications, might have been even more radical than Stalin in the tempo that he wanted to achieve. I think of the slogan of permanent revolution.
2:00:05 Speaker 01 Trotsky also, who dabbled in so many things in his intellectual life, also spoke in almost utopian terms that are just astonishing to read. In utopian terms about the construction of the new man and the new woman. And that out of the raw material of humanity, once you really get going and once you've established a system that matches your hopes for the future, it'll be possible to reconfigure people. And I talk about ambition to create essentially the next stage in human evolution, a new species growing out of humanity. Those don't sound like very modest or limited approaches. And I guess we just really won't know.
2:00:50 Lex Fridman? Do some of the destructive characteristics of communism have to go hand in hand? So the central planning that we talked about, the censorship with the secret police, the concentration of power in one dictatorial figure. And well, let's say, again, with the secret police, the violent oppression.
2:01:12 Speaker 01 One should add to those factors that have a kind of interrelated logic of their own. The sheer fact that communism comes to power in most of these instances as a result of war, as a result of the destruction of what came before and a power vacuum. So think of the Russian revolutions in the wake of the fall of Tsarism. Think of the expansion of Stalin's puppet regimes into Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II and the Red Army moving in to occupy areas in Eastern Europe, although they announced that they're coming as liberators. Consider the foundation of Communist China
2:01:57 Speaker 01 on the heels of World War II and yet more Chinese Civil War. Consider cases like Korea, Vietnam.
2:02:09 Speaker 01 It's likely that this already is a key element in setting things up for further crisis because upon seizure of power, if your expectation is, well, it'll, it ought to be relatively easy to get the system rolling and put it on a basis that's, after all, we have the roadmap to the future, there will follow frustrations and impediments and resistance. And there's a ratchet effect then there because it'll produce more repression, producing even more problems that follow. What drives the whole thing forward, though, especially in its Leninist version, but already visible with Marx and Engels, is the insistence
2:02:52 Speaker 01 on confidence. If you have the key to the future, all of these things are possible and necessary. This leads to an ethos. I think that that's very hard for historians to quantify or to study in a methodical way. But it's the insistence that you hear with Lenin and then especially with Stalin, that to be a Bolshevik means to be hard, to be realistic, to be consequential, meaning you don't shy away from doing what needs to be
2:03:30 Speaker 01 done, even if your primordial ethical remainders from whatever earlier experience you have rebel against it. The, under Stalin, there's a constant slogan of the Bolshevik tempo. The Bolsheviks, there's no fortresses that they can't storm. They can do everything. And in a way, this is the assertion that it's will over everything. History can be moved forward and accelerated and probably your own actions justified as a result, no matter what they were, if you are sufficiently hard and determined and have the confidence to follow through. And then that obviously raises the ultimate question, what happens
2:04:12 Speaker 01 when that confidence ebbs or erodes or when it's lost?
2:04:17 Lex Fridman? If we go to the 1920s, to the home of Karl Marx.
2:04:24 Lex Fridman? Fascism as implemented by the Nazi Party in Germany was called the National Socialist German Workers' Party. So what were the similarities and differences of fascism? Socialism, how it was conceived of in fascism and communism? And maybe you could speak to the broader battle of ideas that was happening at the time and battle of political control that was happening at the time.
2:04:53 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, there's a whole bunch of terms that are in play here, right? And when we speak of fascism, fascism in its original sense is a radical movement founded in Italy, which, though it had been allegedly on the winning side of World War I, is disappointed with the lack of rise in national prestige and territory that that that leads, that commences after the end of the war. So bizarrely enough, it's a socialist by the name of Benito Mussolini, who crafts an ideological message of glorification of the state, the people at large united in
2:05:35 Speaker 01 a militaristic way on the march, ready to attack, ready to expand, a complete overthrow of liberal ideas of the rights of the individual or of representative democracy, and instead vesting power in one leader, in his case, the duchy, Mussolini, in order to replicate in peacetime the ideal of total military mobilization in wartime. Although the Nazis in Germany are inspired and borrow heavily from fascist ideology,
2:06:17 Speaker 01 there also are different emphases that they include, and that includes their virulent racism from the outset. Which in addition to a glorification of the state, glorification of the leader, and preparation for national greatness, race is absolutely core. And it's that racial radicalism that the Nazis espouse as a central idea, along with antisemitism, the demonizing in particular of the Jews in this insane racialist cosmology that the Nazis avow.
2:06:56 Speaker 01 It is the assertion that the Nazis will uniquely bring to pass unity in the people, unity in the society, that leads them to give themselves this odd name of national socialist. Some leaders like Goebbels among the Nazis accent the socialist part to begin with. Others put the accent firmly on the nationalist part. In part, the term they chose for their movement was meant to be confusing. It was meant to take slogans or words from different parts of the political spectrum
2:07:36 Speaker 01 to fuse them into something unfamiliar and new and claim that they'd overcome all earlier political divisions. That they, the Nazis, claimed that they were a movement, not a party, even though their party was called a party. So what did Nazism and Bolshevism and Communism share? Or how were they opposed to one another? What we need to start with, but making clear, they were ideological archenemies. In both worldviews, the opposite side represented the ultimate expression of the evil that needed to be exercised from history in order for their desired utopia to be brought about.
2:08:16 Speaker 01 And this leads to strange and perverted beliefs about reality. From the perspective of the Nazis, the Nazis claimed that because they saw...
2:08:29 Speaker 01 The Jews as a demonic element in human history, the Bolsheviks weren't even really, you know, didn't really believe all of this economic dialectical materialism. They were in fact a racial conspiracy, it was alleged. And so the Nazis used the term of Judeo-Bolshevism to argue that communism is essentially a conspiracy steered by the Jews, which was complete nonsense. For their part, the communists, and from the perspective of the Soviet Union, the Nazis were in essence, a super capitalist conspiracy.
2:09:10 Speaker 01 If the cosmological enemy are the capitalists and the owners, the exploiters, then all of the rigmarole about race and nationalism are distractions. They're meant to fool the poor saps who enlist in that movement. It's essentially steered by capitalist owners who it is claimed are reduced to this desperate expedient of coming up with this thuggish party that represents the last gasp of capitalism. So bizarrely enough, from the communist perspective, the rise of the Nazis can be interpreted as a good sign
2:09:54 Speaker 01 because it means that capitalism is almost done. Because this is the last undisguised naked face of capitalism nearing its end. So the other, beyond this ideological total opposition in terms of their hoped for futures, the reality is that there were aspects that were shared on either side. And that included the conviction that
2:10:28 Speaker 01 They could agree that the age of democracy was done. And that the 19th century had had its day with experiments with representative democracy, the claims of human rights, classical liberal ideas, and all of this had been revealed as bankrupt. It had gotten you what? It got you first the First World War as a total conflict, conflict, leaving tens of millions dead. And then economically, the Great Depression, showing that the end was not, was not far away. This produced, at one and the same time, both ideological opposition and instances
2:11:13 Speaker 01 of vastly cynical cooperation. In terms of the Weimar Republic, it's obvious, with the benefit of hindsight, that German democracy had ceased to function even before Hitler comes to power. But in the process of making democracy unworkable in Germany, the extremes, the Nazi stormtrooper army with their brown shirts and the communist street fighters had cooperated in heightening
2:11:51 Speaker 01 an atmosphere of civil war that left people searching for desperate expedients in the last days of the Weimar Republic. The most compelling case of their cooperation was the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact on August 23, 1939, which enables Hitler to start World War II. A non-aggression pact, in official terms, it contains secret clauses whereby the Nazis and the Soviets, meeting in Moscow under Stalin's wary eye, had agreed on territorial
2:12:34 Speaker 01 division of Eastern Europe and making common cause as each claiming to be the winner of the future. So in spite of their oppositions, these were regimes that were able, very cynically, to work together to dire effect. In the course of the 1950s, in particular, there arose political scientists who also crafted an explanation for ways in which these regimes, although they were opposed to one another, actually bore morphological resemblances. They operated in ways that, in spite of ideological differences,
2:13:19 Speaker 01 bore similarities. And such political scientists, Hannah Arendt, chief among them, crafted a model called totalitarianism, borrowing a term that the fascists had liked about themselves, to define regimes like the Nazis, like Stalin's Soviet Union, for a new kind of dictatorship that was not a backwards caste revival of ancient barbarism, but was something new, a new form of dictatorship that laid total claims on hearts and minds that didn't want just passive obedience, but wanted fanatical loyalty,
2:14:02 Speaker 01 that combined fear with compulsion in order to generate belief in a system, or at the very least, atomize the masses to the point where they would go along with the plans of the regime. This model has often met with very strong criticism on the grounds that no regime in human history has yet achieved total control of the population under its grip. That's true, but that's not what Hannah Arendt was saying. Hannah Arendt was saying there will always be inefficiencies, there will be resistance, there will be divergences.
2:14:47 Speaker 01 What was new was not the alleged achievement of total control. It was the ambition. The articulation, the ambition that it might be possible to exercise such fundamental and thoroughgoing control of entire populations. And the final frightening thought that Arendt kept before her was, what if this is not a model that comes to us from benighted, uncivilized ages? What if this is what the future is going to look like? That's a horrifying intuition.
2:15:19 Lex Fridman? So let me ask you about Darryl Cooper, who is a historian and podcaster, did a podcast with Tucker Carlson. And he made some claims there and elsewhere about World War II. There are two claims that I would love to get your perspective on. First, he stated that Churchill was, quote, "the chief villain of the Second World War." I think Daryl argues that Churchill forced Hitler to expand the war beyond Poland into a global war. Second, the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slavs, Gypsies in death camps was an accident, a byproduct of a global war. And in fact, the most humane extermination of prisoners of war possible, given the alternative,
2:16:04 Lex Fridman? was death by starvation. So I was wondering if you can respond to each of those claims?
2:16:09 Speaker 01 Well, I think that this is a bunch of absurdity, and it would be laughable if it wasn't so serious in its implications. To address the points in turn, Churchill was not the chief villain of the Second World War. The notion that Churchill allegedly forced Hitler to escalate and expand a conflict that could have been limited to Poland is, that assertion is based on a complete neglect of what Nazi ideology was.
2:16:48 Speaker 01 The Nazi worldview and racism was not a ideology that was limited in its application. It looked toward world domination.
2:17:03 Speaker 01 The, in the, the years since the Nazis had come to power, they sponsored programs of education called geopolitics, which urged Germans to think incontinence, think incontinence, to see themselves as one of the superpowers that would battle for the future of the world. And now, in retrospect, we of course can see that Germany was not in a position to, to legitimize a claim like that, but the Nazis' aims were anything but limited. In particular, this sort of argument has been tried out in, in different ways before.
2:17:45 Speaker 01 In previous decades, there had been attempts by historians who were actually well-read and well-published to argue that World War II had been, in part, a contingent event that had been brought about by accidents or miscalculations, and such explanations argued that if you put Hitler's ideology aside, you actually could interpret him as a pretty traditional German politician in the Stripe of Bismarck.
2:18:27 Speaker 01 Now, when I say it like that, I think you can spot the problem immediately. When you put the ideology aside, to, to try to analyze Hitler's acts or alleged motives, in the absence of the ideology that he himself subscribed to and described in hateful detail in Mein Kampf and other manifestos and speeches, is an enterprise that's doomed to failure, justifiably. The notion that the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Gypsies was an event that, um... Simply happened as a result of unforeseen
2:19:08 Speaker 01 events and that it was understood as somehow being humane is also runs contrary to the historical fact. When Poland was invaded, the Nazis unleashed a killing wave in their so-called Operation Tonnenberg, which sent in specially trained and ideologically pre-prepared killers, who were given the name of the units of the Einsatzgruppen, in order to wipe out the Polish leadership and also to kill Jews. This predates any of the Operation Barbarossa and the Nazis invasion of the Soviet Union.
2:19:51 Speaker 01 The Nazis, moreover, in their, in many different expressions of their ideology, had made clear that their plans, you can read this in Mein Kampf, for Eastern Europe were subjugation and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale. So I consider both of these claims absolutely untenable, given the facts and documents.
2:20:14 Lex Fridman? So do you think it was always the case that Nazi Germany was going to invade the Soviet Union?
2:20:19 Speaker 01 I think, as you can read in Mein Kampf, this is what's necessary in order to bring that racial utopia to pass. And so while the timetable might be flexible, while obviously geopolitical constellations would play a role in determining when such a thing might be possible, it was most definitely on his list. And I would want to add that in, in my own scholarship, I've worked to explore some of these themes a little bit further. My second book, which is entitled The German Myth of the East, which appeared with Oxford University Press.
2:21:02 Speaker 01 examines centuries in the German encounter with Eastern Europe and how Germans have thought about Eastern Europe, whether in positive ways or in negative ways. And one thing that emerges from this investigation is that even before the Nazis come to power in Germany, there are certainly negative and dehumanizing stereotypes about Eastern Europeans. Some of them activated by the experiences of German occupation in some of these regions during the First World War. But the Nazis take the very most destructive and most negative of all those stereotypes
2:21:44 Speaker 01 and make them the dominant ones, making no secret of their expected future of domination and annihilation in the East.
2:21:55 Lex Fridman? The idea of Lebensraum. Is it possible to implement that idea without Ukraine?
2:22:04 Speaker 01 Hitler has Ukraine in his horizon as one of the chief prizes. And the Nazis then craft extensive plans, a master plan that they work on in draft after draft after draft, even as the balance of the war is turning against them on the eastern front. This master plan is called the General Plan Ost, meaning the general plan for the East. And it foresees things like mega highways on which the Germanic master race will travel to vacation in Crimea, or how their settlements will be scientifically distributed in the
2:22:44 Speaker 01 wide open spaces of Ukraine for agriculture that will feed an expanded and purified Germanic master race. So this was not peripheral to the Nazi ambitions, but central.
2:22:58 Lex Fridman? As I best understand. There is extensive and definitive evidence that the Nazis always wanted to invade the Soviet Union. And there is always a racial component, and not just about the Jews. They wanted to enslave and exterminate the Jews, yes, but the Slavic people, the Slavs. And if he was successful at conquering the Soviet Union, I think the things that would be done to the Slavic people would make the Holocaust seem insignificant.
2:23:40 Lex Fridman? In my understanding, in terms of the numbers and the brutality and the viciousness in which he characterized the Slavic people.
2:23:51 Speaker 01 In their worldview, the Jews were especially demonized. And so the project of the domination of Eastern Europe involves this horrific program of mechanized, systematized, bureaucratically organized, and horrifyingly efficient mass murder of the Jewish populations. What the Nazis expected for the Slavs had a longer timeline. Himmler expected, the head of the SS, the SS is given a special mission to be part of the transformation of these regions ethnically. And Himmler, in his role of envisioning
2:24:36 Speaker 01 this German future in Eastern Europe, gives such a chilling phrase. He says that while certain Slavs will fall victim immediately, some proportion of Slavs will not be shipped out or deported or annihilated, but instead they will remain as slaves for our culture. And in that one phrase, Himmler managed to defile and deface everything that the word "culture" had meant to generations of the best German thinkers and artists in the centuries before the Nazis. The notion of slaves for our culture was part of his longer term expectation.
2:25:21 Speaker 01 And then there's finally a fact that speaks volumes about what the Nazis planned for the East. Hitler and Himmler envisioned permanent war on the eastern front. Not a peace treaty, not a settlement, not a border, but a constant moving of the border every generation, hundreds of miles east, in order to keep winning more and more living space. And with analogy to other frontiers, to always give more fighting experience and more training in aggression to generation after generation of German soldiers.
2:26:04 Speaker 01 In terms of nightmarish visions, this one's right up there.
2:26:08 Lex Fridman? And always repopulating the land conquered with the German, the Aryan race. So in terms of race, repopulating with race and enslaving the Slavic people and exterminating them, because there's so many of them, it takes a long time to exterminate.
2:26:26 Speaker 01 And even in the case of the Germans themselves, the hidden message behind even Nazi propaganda about unity and about German national identity was the Nazis envisioned relentless purges of the German genetic stock as well. So among their victims are people with disabilities, people who are defined as not racially pure enough for the future, even though they are clearly Germans by identity. This full, the full scale and the comprehensive ambitions of the Nazis are as breathtaking
2:27:11 Speaker 01 as they are horrifying.
2:27:12 Lex Fridman? One of the other things I saw, Daryl tweet, was that what ended up happening in the Second World War was the worst possible thing that could have happened. And I just also wanted to comment on that.
2:27:27 Lex Fridman? Which I can imagine a very large number of possible scenarios that could have happened that are much, much worse, including the successful conquering of the Soviet Union, as we said, the kind of things that would be done, and the total war ever ongoing for generations, which would result in, you know, hundreds of millions of deaths and torture and enslavement, and not to mention the other possible trajectory of the nuclear
2:27:58 Speaker 01 That's right, that's right. I would think that the Nazis with atomic weapons with no compunctions about deploying them would rank up there as even worse than the horrors that we saw.
2:28:10 Lex Fridman? Now, let me steel man a point that was also made as part of this, that the oversimplified narrative of sort of, to put it crudely, Hitler bad, Churchill good, has been used and abused by neocons and warmongers and the military industrial complex in the years since to basically say, this, this particular leader is just like Hitler, or maybe Hitler of the 1930s, and we must invade now before he becomes the Hitler of the 1940s. And that has been applied in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, and, and God forbid, that
2:28:51 Lex Fridman? can be also applied in the, in the war with China in the 21st century. So yes, warmongers do sure love to use Hitler and apply that template to wage war. And we should be wary of that and be careful of that, both the over application of this historical template onto the modern world and of warmongers in general.
2:29:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I think that nobody should like oversimplified narratives. We need subtle and accurate narratives.
2:29:25 Lex Fridman? And also, I just would like to say that probably, as we've been talking about, Stalin and Hitler are singular figures and
2:29:35 Lex Fridman? Just as we've been talking about the implementation of these totalitarian regimes, they're singular in human history, that we never saw anything like it. And I hope, from everything it looks like, we will never see anything like it again.
2:29:51 Speaker 01 I mean, they're certainly striking and unique historical characters in the record. One of the things that's so disturbing about Hannah Arendt's model of totalitarianism is the leader can be changed. The system itself demands that there be a leader who allegedly is is all powerful and all-knowing and prophetic and the like. But whether particular figures are interchangeable in that role is a key question.
2:30:27 Lex Fridman? Let me go back to the 1920s and sort of ask another counterfactual question. Given the battle between the Marxists and the communists and National Socialists, was it possible? And what would that world look like if the communists indeed won in Germany as Karl Marx envisioned? And it made total sense, given the industrialized expanse that Germany represented. Was that possible? And what would it look like if it happened?
2:31:00 Speaker 01 I would think that the the reality was probably very remote, but that was certainly their ambition. German communists get quoted as saying, after Hitler, it's our turn. Their sentiment was that the arrival of Nazism on the scene was a sign of how decrepit and incompetent and doomed capitalism was.
2:31:28 Speaker 01 In hindsight, that's almost impossible to believe. Because what happens is the Nazis with their characteristic brutal ruthlessness simply decapitate the party and arrest the activists who were supposed to be waiting to take over. So that's forestalled. A further hypothetical that gets raised a lot is couldn't the social democrats and the communists have worked together to keep Hitler out of power? That's where the prior history comes into play.
2:32:04 Speaker 01 The very fact that the German revolution in 1919 sees socialists killing socialists produces a dynamic that's so negative that it's nearly impossible to settle on cooperation. Added to the fact that the communists see the social democrats as rivals for the loyalty of the working class. In terms of just statistical likelihood, a lot of experts at the time felt surely the German army is going to step in.
2:32:44 Speaker 01 And the most likely outcome would have been a German general shutting down the democracy and producing a military dictatorship. It says a lot about how dreadful and bloody the record of the Nazis was that some people in retrospect would have felt that that military dictatorship would have been preferable if it had obviated the need for the ordeal under the Nazis.
2:33:18 Lex Fridman? What do you think Marx would say about the 20th century? Let's take it before we get to Mao and China, just looking at the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
2:33:36 Speaker 01 That's a really good question. I think that Marx was flexible in his expectations about tactics and strategies, even as he was sure that he had actually cracked a big intellectual problem of what the future is going to look like. So how it would play out. He was a man who had to deal with a lot of disappointments because in revolutionary uprising after revolutionary uprising, whether it was in the revolutions of 1848 in across Europe,
2:34:16 Speaker 01 whether it was in Poland, whether it was in the Paris Commune, he said, this is it. This is the outbreak of the real thing. And then it doesn't end up happening. So I think that he'd probably have tried to be patient about the turn of events. We mentioned at the outset that Marx felt it was unlikely that a workers' revolution would break out in the Russian Empire because for that you needed lots of industrial workers and they didn't have a lot of industry. There's a footnote to add there, and it proves his flexibility. A Russian socialist wrote to Marx asking, might it not be possible for
2:35:00 Speaker 01 Russia to escape some stages of capitalist development? I mean, do you have to rigidly follow that scheme? And Marx's answer was convoluted, but it wasn't a no. And that suggests that Marx was willing to entertain all sorts of possible scenarios. I think he would certainly have been very surprised at the course of events as it unfolded because it didn't match his expectations at the outset.
2:35:34 Lex Fridman? Not to put this on him, but would he be okay with the price of Hall and Moore? For the utopian destination of communism, meaning is it okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet?
2:35:51 Speaker 01 Well, we don't know what Marx would say if he would pose that question deliberately, but we do know in the case of a Marxist historian Eric Hobbsbaum, who was a prolific and celebrated British historian of the 19th and 20th centuries. And he was put this question in the 90s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And he stated forthrightly that
2:36:19 Speaker 01 because the Soviet Union failed, such sacrifices were inordinate.
2:36:29 Speaker 01 But if the experiment had succeeded and a glorious future had been opened for mankind as a result of the Soviet Union's success,
2:36:40 Speaker 01 that would lead to a different reply. And that is one person's perspective.
2:36:50 Lex Fridman? So that takes us to the other side of the world.
2:36:55 Lex Fridman? The side that's often in the West not considered very much when we talk about human history. Chinese dynasties, empires are fascinating, complex. And there's just a history that's not as deeply explored as it should be. And the same applies to the 20th century. So Chinese radicals founded the Chinese Communist Party, CCP, in July 1921. Among them, as you talk about, was Mao. What was the story of Mao's rise to power?
2:37:31 Speaker 01 So Mao takes a page from the Book of Lenin by
2:37:41 Speaker 01 Adapting, or seeking to adapt Marx's ideology to a context that would have surprised Marx significantly. And that is not only to set the revolution in an as-yet-not-industrialized country, but moreover, to make the peasants, rather than being conservative sacks of potatoes, to make them into the prime movers of the success of this political venture. That's a case of the phenomenon that we talked about earlier.
2:38:18 Speaker 01 When is an adaptation of an ideology, or a change to an ideology, a valid adjustment that you've made, or adaptation? And when is it already so different that it's something entirely distinct?
2:38:38 Speaker 01 Maoism was very clearly intended to answer this question for the Chinese context, and by implication, other non-Western parts of the world. This was, in part, Mao's way, whose ambition was great, to put himself at the head of a successful international movement, and to be the successor to Stalin, whose role he both admired and resented from having to be the junior partner. To take an example of a masterwork in a major milestone in the history of communism, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kowalski,
2:39:22 Speaker 01 who was at first a committed communist, and then later became disillusioned, and wrote a three-volume study of Marxist thought called Currents of Marxism. In that book... When he reaches Maoism, Koikovsky essentially throws up his hands and says like, "It's hard to even know what to do with this." Because putting the peasantry in the vanguard role is something that is already at variance with the original design. But Marx says this is an improved version. This is an adapted and truer version of Marxism for the Chinese context.
2:40:04 Speaker 01 In case after case, in Mao's rise to power, we see a really complicated relationship with Stalin. He works hard to gain Stalin's support because the Communist Turn, the international organization headquartered in Moscow, working to encourage and help revolutionaries worldwide, is skeptical about the Chinese communists to begin with and believes that China still has a long way to go before it's reached the stage where it's ripe for communist revolution. And in a way, that's more orthodox Marxism than what Mao is championing.
2:40:44 Speaker 01 Mao chafes under Stalin's acknowledged leadership of international communism as a movement. And in 1950, when Mao goes to visit Stalin in Moscow in order to sign a treaty of cooperation, he's left waiting for days and days and days in a snub that is meant to show him that you're just not as important as you might think you are. And then when Stalin dies in 1953, Mao feels the moment is ready for him to step into the leadership position, surpassing the Soviet Union.
2:41:25 Speaker 01 So many of Mao's actions, like the Great Leap Forward and the agricultural disasters that follow from that, are literally attempts to outdo Stalin, to outperform Stalin, to show that what Stalin was not able to do, the Chinese communist regime will be able to bring off. And the toll for that hubris is vast.
2:41:51 Lex Fridman? Yeah, in the darkest of ways, he did outdo Stalin.
2:41:55 Speaker 01 That's right, in the statistics.
2:41:57 Lex Fridman? The Great Leap Forward ended up killing approximately 40 million people from starvation or murder. Can you describe the Great Leap Forward?
2:42:08 Speaker 01 So it was modeled on the crash industrialization that Stalin had wanted to undertake in the Soviet Union and to outdo it. The notion of the Great Leap Forward was that it would be possible for the peasant masses, out of their conviction in the rightness of the Chinese Communist cause, to industrialize China overnight. That involved things like creating small smelting furnaces in individual farm communes. It involved folding together farming territories into vast communes of very large size that were, just because of their sheer gigantism, supposed to be by definition more efficient than small-scale farming.
2:42:53 Speaker 01 It ended up producing environmental disasters and campaigns to eliminate birds or insects were supposed to demonstrate mastery over nature by sheer acts of will. These included things like adopting Soviet agricultural techniques that were pioneered by a crackpot biologist by the name of Trofim Lysenko that produced more agricultural disaster. That involved things like plowing to depths that were not practical for the seeds to
2:43:34 Speaker 01 germinate and grow, but were supposed to produce superplants that would produce bumper harvests and outpace the capitalist countries and the Soviet Union. So the context for all of this is a race to get first to the achievement of full-scale communism. One of the themes that I think it's so valuable to pursue and to take seriously in the history of communism is what concrete promises were made. In the case of China, Mao made promises and projections for the future that were worrying
2:44:19 Speaker 01 even to some of his own assistants. He exclaimed that perhaps by 1961, perhaps by 1973, China would be the winner in this competition, and it would have achieved full communism. So that which Marx had sketched as the endpoint of humanity would be achieved first by the Chinese. Later, his own comrades, when he passed from the scene, felt the need to temper that a little bit and promised that they would achieve full communism by the year 2000. Such promises are helpful to a regime to create enthusiasm and to hold out to people the prospect of real success is just around the corner.
2:45:03 Speaker 01 But what happens when the date arrives and you haven't actually achieved that goal? That's one ticking time bomb that played a role in the increasing erosion of confidence in the Soviet Union, and the case of China must have been something similar.
2:45:18 Lex Fridman? So there's a lot of other elements that are similar to the Soviet Union. Maybe you could speak to the Hundred Flowers Campaign?
2:45:29 Speaker 01 The Hundred Flowers Campaign is a chance for Mao, who has felt that he has lost prestige and lost standing in the party because of the disasters of the Great Leap Forward, to regain some of that momentum. And the whole Hundred Flowers Campaign, officially titled the Rectification Campaign to set things right, is still shrouded in mystery. Historians disagree about how to interpret what Mao was actually up to. The most cynical variant is that Mao encouraged Chinese thinkers and intellectuals
2:46:12 Speaker 01 to share ideas and to engage in constructive criticism, to propose alternatives and to let a full discussion happen. And then, after some of them had ventured that, to come in and purge them, to punish them ruthlessly for having done what he had invited them to do. That is the most cynical variant. Some historians argue that Mao himself was not prepared for the ideas that he himself had invited into the public square, and that he grew anxious and worried and angry at this without having thought this through
2:46:52 Speaker 01 in a cynical way to begin with. The end result is the same. The end result is, once again, negative selection. The decimation of those who are most venturesome, those who are most talented and intelligent are punished relentlessly for that.
2:47:09 Lex Fridman? And just a general culture of censorship and fear and all the same stuff we saw in the Soviet Union.
2:47:15 Speaker 01 That's right. I mean, think of the impact on officials who are loyal servants of the regime and just want to get along. The message goes out loud and clear. Don't be venturesome. Do not propose reforms. Stick with the tried and true, and that'll be the safe route, even if it ends in ultimately stagnation.
2:47:32 Lex Fridman? So, as the same question I asked about the Soviet Union, why do you think there was so much failure of of policies that Mao implemented in China during his rule?
2:47:46 Speaker 01 Mao himself had a view of human beings as being, as he put it, beautiful blank pieces of paper upon which one can write new characters. And that is...
2:47:59 Speaker 01 Clearly, it variants with what you and I know about the complex nature of human beings as we actually encounter them in the world. I think that in the process of hatching schemes that were one size fits all for a country as big and as varied in its communities as China, inevitably, such an imposition of one model was going to lead to serious malfunctions. And so much of the, you know, what other episodes in Chinese history had showed, the entrepreneurial capacity, the productive capacity economically of the Chinese people was suppressed by being fitted into these rigid schemes.
2:48:43 Speaker 01 What we've seen since, after Mao passes from the scene and with the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, one sees just how much of those energies had been forcibly suppressed for so long, and now we're allowed to reemerge.
2:48:57 Lex Fridman? Mao died in 1976. You wrote that the CCP in 81, looking back through the lens of historical analysis, said that he was 70% correct, 7-0, exactly 70% correct.
2:49:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, not 69, not 71.
2:49:19 Lex Fridman? Not 71. The scientific precision, I mean, we should say that again and again. The co-opting of the authority of science by the Soviet Union, by Mao, by Nazi Germany, Nazi science is terrifying and should serve as a reminder that science is the thing that is one of the most beautiful creations of humanity, but is also a thing that could be used by politicians and dictators to do horrific things.
2:49:57 Speaker 01 It's absence is questing, not certainty, constant questing.
2:50:02 Lex Fridman? Exactly. Humility, intellectual humility. So how did China evolve after Mao's death to today?
2:50:14 Speaker 01 Well, I think that there is, without denouncing Mao, without repudiating Mao's 70% correctness, the regime actually undertook a new venture. And that venture was to open up economically, to gain access to world markets, and to play a global role, always with the proviso that the party retained political supremacy. It's been pointed out that while Khrushchev tries, in the Soviet Union, in 1956 especially,
2:50:56 Speaker 01 with a secret speech in which he denounces Stalin's crimes, he tries to go back to the founders' intentions of Lenin. Nothing like that, it's argued, is possible in the Chinese case. Because Mao was not the equivalent of Stalin for Communist China. Mao was the equivalent of Lenin. Mao was the founder, so there's no repudiating of him. They are stuck with that formula of 70%. And acknowledging that there were some problems, but by and large arguing that it was the correct stance of the party and its leader that was paramount. And the results of this wager are, you know, where we are today.
2:51:40 Speaker 01 China has been transformed out of all recognition in terms of not all of the living standards of the country, but many places. Its economic growth has been dramatic. And the new dispensation is such that people ask, is this a communist country anymore? And that's probably a question that haunts China's current leadership as well. With Chairman Xi, we've seen a return to earlier patterns. Xi insisting that Mao's achievement has to be held as equal to that of the reform period. Sometimes imitations or nostalgia for the Mao period,
2:52:26 Speaker 01 or even the sufferings of the Cultural Revolution, are part of this volatile mix. But all of this is outward appearance. Statistics can also be misleading. And I think that very much in question is China's further revolution in our own times.
2:52:49 Lex Fridman? In the West, China is often demonized.
2:52:55 Lex Fridman? And we've talked extensively today about the atrocities that results from
2:53:04 Lex Fridman? atrocities, both internal and external, that result from communist nations.
2:53:11 Lex Fridman? But what can we say by way of hope
2:53:18 Lex Fridman? to resist the demonization? How can we avoid cold or hot war with China, we being the West or the United States in the 21st century?
2:53:32 Speaker 01 Well, you mentioned in the context of the claims of science, humility as a crucial attribute. I think that humility, sobriety, realism are tremendously valuable in trying to understand another society, another form of government. And so I think one needs to be very self-aware that projection onto others of what we think they're about is no substitute for actual study of the sources that a society like that produces. It's declarations of what matters most to them, the leadership's own pronouncements about what the future holds.
2:54:16 Speaker 01 I think that matters a lot more than pious hopes or versions of
2:54:23 Speaker 01 being convinced that inevitably everyone will come to resemble us in a better future.
2:54:30 Lex Fridman? You mentioned this earlier, but just to take a small detour. What are we supposed to think about North Korea and their declaration that they're supposedly a communist nation?
2:54:44 Lex Fridman? What can we say about the economic, the political system of North Korea? Or is it just like a hopelessly simple answer of this is a complete disaster of a totalitarian state?
2:54:59 Speaker 01 So I think the answer that a historian can give is a historical answer, right? That we have to inquire into how, what has to happen in order to arrive at the past we are today? We have a regime that's claiming to be communist or has an even better version of Marx's original ideas in the form of a Korean adaptation called Uche. How does that mesh with the reality that we're talking about a dynastic government and a monarchy in all but name, but a communist monarchy, if that's what it is?
2:55:37 Speaker 01 I think that examining, as much as we can learn about a closed society that is, goes about its every day in ways that are inscrutable to us, is very, very challenging. But the only answer, when an example like this escapes your analytic categories, probably there's a problem with your analytical categories rather than the example being the problem in all its messiness.
2:56:06 Lex Fridman? Yeah, so there's a component here in the release to China as well, to bring like somebody like John Mearsheimer into the picture. There's a military component here too. And that is ultimately how these nations interact, especially totalitarian nations interact with the rest of the world. So nations interact economically, culturally, and militarily. And the concern with countries like North Korea is the way for them to be present on the world stage in a game of geopolitics is by flexing their military might.
2:56:46 Lex Fridman? And they invest a huge amount of their GDP into the military. So I guess the question there to discuss in terms of analysis is
2:57:01 Lex Fridman? How do we deal with this kind of system that claims to be a communist system? And what lessons can we take from history and apply it to that? Or should we simply just ignore and look the other way as we've been kind of hoping it doesn't get, it doesn't get out of hand?
2:57:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, there's
2:57:23 Speaker 01 realists see states following their own interests and prioritizing their own security. And there's probably not much that can be done to change that. But conflict arising as a result of misunderstanding or mixed messages or
2:57:44 Speaker 01 misinterpretation, those are things that policymakers probably do have some control over. I think that there's internal processes that'll work their way out in even as opaque a place as North Korea. There's, it's also the reality, just as we saw with the divided Germanies, that
2:58:07 Speaker 01 it's a precarious kind of twinned existence when you have countries that are across the border from one another, that are derived from what used to be a single unit that now are kind of a real life social science experiment in what kind of regime do you get with one kind of system? What sort of regime do you get with another kind of system? And that's a very, a very unstable setup, as it turns out.
2:58:35 Lex Fridman? Now let us jump continents. And in the 20th century, look to North America. So you also have lectured about communism in America, the different communist movements in America. It was also founded in 1919 and evolved throughout through a couple of Red Scares. So what was the evolution of the Communist Party and just in general, communists in America?
2:59:06 Speaker 01 Well, it's fascinating to observe this story because one longstanding commonplace had been that socialism has less purchase, or radical socialism, in the United States than in European countries. So, to the extent that that was true, it was an uphill battle for the communists to get established in the United States. But it makes it all the more interesting to follow the development of the movement. And there were two challenges in particular that played a role in shaping the American communist experience. One was
2:59:51 Speaker 01 the fact that, to begin with, the party was often identified with immigrants. The communities that had come over across the Atlantic from Europe often had strong socialist contingents. And when this break happens within the socialist movement between radical socialists and more moderate socialists, there were fiery individuals who saw the opportunity to help shape the American communist movement. But the result was that, for many American workers, they
3:00:29 Speaker 01 saw the sheer ethnic variety and difference of this movement as something that was unfamiliar. It would only be with the rise to the leadership of the Communist Party of Earl Browder, a American-born political leader with vast ambitions for creating an American communist movement, that that image would start to be modified. Earl Browder had a meteoric rise and then fall over the promise he made that went by the slogan "Communism is 20th Century Americanism."
3:01:09 Speaker 01 The notion was that communism could find roots in American political discourse and experience, where Earl Browder fell afoul of other communists was in his expectations during World War II, that it might be possible for the Soviet Union and the United States to make their current cooperation permanent, and to come to some sort of accommodation that would moderate their rivalry. As it turns out, with the dawning already of Cold War tensions that would later flower more fully, that was unacceptable, and the movement
3:01:48 Speaker 01 divested itself of Earl Browder. Another point that shaped American perceptions of the communist movement in the United States involved issues of espionage. During the 1930s and the 1940s, American communists, not all of them, obviously, but select members of the movement, were called upon by Soviet intelligence to play a historical role by gathering information, winning sympathies. One of the most amazing books of the 20th century is the book written by Whittaker Chambers, who had served as a Soviet spy,
3:02:31 Speaker 01 first a committed communist, then a Soviet spy, and then later a renegade from those allegiances. His book is entitled Witness, published in 1952, and it's one of the most compelling books you could ever read, because it's so full of both the unique character of the author in all of his idiosyncrasies, and a sense of huge issues being at stake, ones upon which the future of humanity turns. So, talk about the ethical element being
3:03:06 Speaker 01 of importance there. Through the apparatus of the state, the Soviets managed to infiltrate spies into America's military, as well as government institutions.
3:03:26 Speaker 01 One great irony is that when Senator McCarthy in the 50s made vast claims about communist infiltration of the government apparatus, claims that he was unable to substantiate with details, that reality had actually been closer to the reality of the 1930s and the 1940s than his own time. But the association of American communists with the foreign power of the Soviet Union, and ultimately, an adherence to its interests,
3:04:07 Speaker 01 did a lot to undermine any kind of hearing for American communists. An example, of course, was the notorious Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939. The American communist movement found itself forced to turn on a dime in its propaganda. Before the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, they had denounced Nazi Germany as the greatest threat to world peace. Just after the signing of the pact, they had to proclaim that this was a great win for peace and for human harmony,
3:04:44 Speaker 01 and to completely change their earlier relationship of being mortal enemies with Nazi Germany. There were many American communists who couldn't stomach this, and who, in disillusionment, simply quit their party memberships or drifted away. But it's a fascinating story of the ups and downs of a political movement with radical ambitions in American political history.
3:05:15 Lex Fridman? Yeah, the Cold War and the extensive levels of espionage sort of created, combined with Hollywood, created, basically firmly solidified communism as the enemy of the American ideal. Sort of embodied. And not even the economic policies of the political policies of communism, but like the word.
3:05:42 Lex Fridman? And the color red with a hammer and sickle, you know, Rocky IV, one of my favorite movies.
3:05:48 Speaker 01 Well, that's canonical, right?
3:05:50 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I mean, it is a bit of a meme, but meme becomes reality and there's and then enters politics and is used by politicians to do all kinds of name calling. You have spoken eloquently about modern Russia and modern Ukraine and modern Eastern Europe. So how did Russia evolve after Stalin and after the collapse of the Soviet Union?
3:06:24 Speaker 01 Well, I think the short answer is without a full historical reckoning that would have been healthy about the recent past. In ways, that's not very surprising because given the economic misery of dislocations and the cumulative damage of all of those previous decades of this experiment, it left precious little patience or leisure or surplus for introspection. But after an initial period of great interest in understanding the full measure of what Russia and other parts
3:07:09 Speaker 01 of the Soviet Union had undergone in this first initial explosion of journalism and of reporting and investigations, historical investigations with news sources. After an initial period marked by such interest, people instead retreated into the here and now and the today. And the result is that.
3:07:39 Speaker 01 There's been less than would be healthy of a taking stock, a reckoning, even a signing of responsibility for those things that were experienced in the past. No Nuremberg trial took place in order to hold responsible those who had repressed others in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In other ex-communist countries, there was also precious little in the way of legal proceedings that would have established responsibility. And keep in mind, the Nuremberg trials had as one of their goals, a very important
3:08:21 Speaker 01 one, as it turns out, not even individual verdicts for individual people found guilty, but to collect and publicize information, to create knowledge and transparency about what the reality had been in the past. In the case of the former Soviet Union, in the case of Russia today, instead of a clear-eyed recognition of the vast nature of what it all cost, Putin, upon replacing Yeltsin, was in a position to instead traffic in the most varied, eclectic, and often mutually
3:09:03 Speaker 01 contradictory historical memories or packages of memories. So, on the one hand, in Putin's Russia, the Tsars are rehabilitated as heroes of Russian statehood. Putin sees Lenin in a negative light because Lenin, by producing federalism as a model for the Soviet Union, laid a time bomb at the base of that state that eventually smashed it into many constituent parts as nations regained their independence, while Stalin,
3:09:42 Speaker 01 it's acknowledged, exacted a dreadful toll, but also was effective as a representative of Russian statehood.
3:09:53 Speaker 01 This produced where we are today. It's a, it's a commonplace that echoed by, by many that Russia without Ukraine is a nation state or could be a nation state. Russia with Ukraine has to be an empire. And Putin, who is not really seeking a revival of Stalin's rule, but still is nostalgic about earlier forms of greatness and of the strength of Russian statehood to the exclusion of other values, has undertaken a course of aggression that has produced results quite
3:10:37 Speaker 01 different from what he likely expected. And I think that timing is crucial here. It's fascinating to try to imagine, what if this attempt to redigest Ukraine into an expanded Russian imperial territory had taken place earlier? I think that the arrival on the scene of a new generation of Ukrainians has produced a very different dynamic and a disinclination for any kind of nostalgia for the past, packaged however it might be and however nostalgic it might be made to appear.
3:11:21 Speaker 01 And there, I think that Putin's expectations in the invasion of 2022 were entirely overturned. His expectation was that, that Ukraine would be divided on this score and that some significant portion of Ukrainians would welcome the advance of Russian forces. And instead, there has been the most amazing and surprising heroic resistance that continues to this day.
3:11:53 Lex Fridman? And it's interesting to consider timing and also individual leaders. Zelensky, you can imagine all kinds of other figures that would have folded much easier. And Zelensky, I think, surprised a lot of the world by somehow, you know, this comedian. Somehow
3:12:14 Speaker 01 Somehow.
3:12:14 Lex Fridman? Becoming a essentially an effective war president. So, you know, that that put that in the in the in the bin of singular figures that define history.
3:12:30 Speaker 01 And surprises, yeah.
3:12:32 Lex Fridman? How do you hope the war in Ukraine ends?
3:12:35 Speaker 01 I'm very pessimistic on this score, actually, and for the reasons we just talked about about how these things escape human management or even rationality.
3:12:49 Speaker 01 I think that war takes on a life of its own
3:12:54 Speaker 01 as accumulated suffering actually eliminates possible compromises or settlements that one might talk about in the abstract. I think that
3:13:11 Speaker 01 it's one thing for people far away to propose trades of territory or
3:13:21 Speaker 01 complicated guarantees or
3:13:28 Speaker 01 arrangements that sound very good in the abstract and that will just be refused by people who have actually experienced what the war has been like in person and what it has meant to them and their families and everyone they know in terms of lives destroyed.
3:13:45 Speaker 01 I think that peacemaking is going to face a very daunting task here, given all that's accumulated.
3:13:55 Speaker 01 And I think in particular, you know, just from the last days of of the launching of missile attacks against indiscriminate or civilian targets. That's not easy to turn the corner on.
3:14:09 Lex Fridman? So let me ask a political question. I recently talked to Donald Trump and he said, if he is elected, before he is sworn into office, he will have a peace deal. What would a peace deal like that look like? And is it even possible, do you think? So we should mention that Russia has captured four regions of Ukraine now, Donetsk, Luhansk, the Parisian, Kherson. Also, Ukraine captured a part of the Kursk region within Russia. So just like you mentioned, territory is on the table. You know, NATO, European Union is on the table. Also, funding and military help from the United States directly to Ukraine is on the
3:14:54 Lex Fridman? table. Do you think it's possible to have a fair deal that, from people, like you said, far away, where both people walk away, Zelensky and Putin unhappy, but equally unhappy, and peace, and peace is negotiated?
3:15:12 Speaker 01 Equally unhappy is a very hard balance to strike, probably. I think my concern is about the part of the equation that involves people just being desperately unhappy, laying the foundations for more trouble to come. I couldn't imagine what that looks like, but that's, once again, these are things that escape, escape human control in the details.
3:15:38 Lex Fridman? So laying the foundation for worse things to come. So it's possible you have a ceasefire that lays the foundation for a worse war and suffering in a year, in five years, in 10 years?
3:15:55 Speaker 01 Well, in a way, we may already be there, because ratifying the use of force to change borders in Europe was a taboo since 1945. And now, look where we are. If that is validated, then it sets up incentives for more of the same.
3:16:17 Lex Fridman? If you look at the 20th centuries, what we've been talking about, with horrendous global wars that happened then, and you look at now.
3:16:29 Lex Fridman? And it feels like just living in the moment with the war in Ukraine, breaking the contract of you're not supposed to do territorial conquest anymore in the 21st century. That then the just intensity of hatred and military tension in the Middle East with Israel, Iran, Palestine, just building. And then China calmly, but with a big stick, talking about Taiwan. Do you think a big conflict may be on the way?
3:17:11 Lex Fridman? Do you think it's possible that another global war happens in the 21st century?
3:17:18 Speaker 01 I hope not, but I think so many predictions reach their expiration dates and get invalidated. Obviously, we're confronting a dire situation in the present.
3:17:35 Lex Fridman? So as a historian, let me ask you for advice. What advice would you give on interviewing world leaders? Whether it's people who are no longer here, some of the people we've been talking about, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or people that are still here? Putin, Zelensky, Trump, Kamala Harris, Netanyahu, Xi Jinping. As a historian, like, is it possible to have an interesting conversation? Maybe as a thought experiment, what kind of conversation would you like to have with Hitler in the 1930s or Stalin in the 1920s?
3:18:11 Speaker 01 Well, first of all, I mean, the answer is very clear. I would never presume to advise you about interviewing world leaders and prominent people because the roster that you've accumulated is just astonishing. So, but I know what I might aim for. And that is, I think.
3:18:31 Speaker 01 In historical analysis, in trying to understand the role of a particular leader, the more one understands about their prior background and formative influences, the better affixed I think one gets on the question of what are their expectations? What is the, in German, there's a beautiful word for this. The Germans managed to mash together several words into one even better word. And in German, it's Erwartungshorizont, the horizon of expectation. So in the case of figures like Churchill or Hitler, their experience of World War I shaped their actions in World War II.
3:19:14 Speaker 01 Their values were shaped in their childhood. Is there a way of engaging with someone you're interviewing, even obliquely, that gives a view in on their sense of what the future might hold? And I mean that, obviously, such people are expert at being guarded and not being pinned down, but the categories in which they're thinking, a sense of what their, what their own ethical grounding might be, or their ethical code, that gives hints to their behavior. It gets said, and again, it's a cliche because it's true, that one of the best measures
3:19:57 Speaker 01 of a person, especially a leader, is how they treat people from whom they don't expect anything. Are they condescending? Are they, on the contrary, fundamentally interested in another person, even if that person can't help them or be used in some way? You know, speaking of prominent world leaders to interview, there's Napoleon. Napoleon psychologically must have been a quite amazing person to make a bid for mastery of Europe and then already thinking about the mastery of the world. But contemporaries who met Napoleon said that it was very disturbing to talk with him
3:20:39 Speaker 01 because meeting with him one-on-one revealed that he could talk to you but looked like he was looking right through you. As if you were not fully real. You were more in the nature of a character on a chessboard. And for that reason, some of them called Napoleon the master of the sightless stare. So if you're talking with a world leader and he or she has a sightless stare, that's probably a bad sign. But there might be other inadvertent clues or hints about the moral compass or the future expectations of a leader that emerge in one of your wonderful conversations.
3:21:22 Lex Fridman? Yeah, you put it brilliantly in several ways, but the moral compass getting sneaking up to the full nuance and complexity of the moral compass. And one of the ways of doing that is looking at the various horizons in time about their vision of the future. I imagine it's possible to get Hitler to talk about the future of the Third Reich and to see in ways like what he actually envisions that as, and similar with Stalin. But of course, funny enough, I believe those leaders would be easier to talk to because they have nothing to be afraid of in terms of political competition.
3:22:05 Lex Fridman? Modern leaders are a little bit more guarded because they have to, they have opposition often to contend with.
3:22:15 Speaker 01 Constituencies.
3:22:16 Lex Fridman? And constituencies. You did a lot of amazing courses, including four, the great courses. On the topic of communism, you just finished the Third. So you did a series of lectures on the rise of communism, then communism and power.
3:22:35 Speaker 01 Yes.
3:22:35 Lex Fridman? And then decline and fall.
3:22:38 Speaker 01 Rise of communism, decline of communism.
3:22:39 Lex Fridman? So when I was sort of listening to these lectures, I can't possibly imagine the amount of work.
3:22:48 Lex Fridman? That went into it. Can you just speak wisely? What was that journey like of taking everything you know, your expertise on Eastern Europe, but just bringing your lens, your wisdom, your focus onto this topic and what it takes to actually bring it to life?
3:23:08 Speaker 01 Well, journey is probably just the right word because it's this week that the third of that trilogy, Decline of Communism, is being released. And it felt like something that I very much wanted to do because the history that's narrated there is one that is so compelling and often so tragic that it needs to be shared. The vast amount of material that one can include is probably dwarfed by the amount that actually ends up on the cutting room floor. One could probably do an entire lecture course on every single
3:23:46 Speaker 01 one of those lecture topics that got broached. But one of the great satisfactions of putting together a course like this is also being able to give further suggestions for study to the listeners and in some cases to introduce them to neglected classics or books that make you want to grab somebody by the lapels and say, you've got to read this. There's probably few things that are as exciting as a really keen and targeted reading recommendation. In addition, I've also done other courses on the history of World War I, on the diplomatic
3:24:30 Speaker 01 history of Europe from 1500 to the present, a course on the history of Eastern Europe, and also a course on dictatorships called Utopia and Terror, and then also a course on explorers and a course on turning points in modern history. And every single one of those is so rewarding because you learn so much in the process and it's really fantastic.
3:24:55 Lex Fridman? And I should highly recommend that people sign up to the, first of all, this is the great courses where you can buy the courses individually, but I recommend people sign up for great courses plus, things like a monthly membership.
3:25:10 Lex Fridman? Where you get access to all these courses and they're just incredible. And I recommend people watch all of yours. Since you mentioned books, this is an impossible question and I apologize ahead of time. But is there books you can recommend just in your own life that you've enjoyed? Whether really small or some obvious recommendations that you recommend people read? It is a bit like asking, what's your favorite band?
3:25:41 Speaker 01 That's right. That's right. Well, would a book that got turned into a movie be acceptable as well?
3:25:47 Lex Fridman? Yes.
3:25:47 Speaker 01 So in that case, you know, all of us reflect on our own childhoods and that magical moment of reading a book or seeing a movie that that really got you launched on some particular set of things that you're going to find fascinating for the rest of your life. And there's a direct line to the topics we were talking about today from myself in the Chicagoland area as a kid, seeing the film of Dr. Zhivago. And then later, reading the novel on which it was based by Pasternak. And even though the film had to be filmed on location in Spain, pretending to be revolutionary
3:26:29 Speaker 01 Russia, it was magical for the sheer sweep and tragedy and human resilience that it showed. The very way in which a work of literature or cinematography could capture so much. Still, I'm still amazed by that. And then there's also, in the spirit of recommending neglected classics, my favorite author. My favorite author is a now a late Canadian author by the name of Robertson Davies, who wrote novel after novel.
3:27:14 Speaker 01 In a mode that probably would get called magical realism, but is so much more. Robertson Davies was heavily influenced by Carl Jung and Jungian philosophy. But in literary form, he managed to create stories that blend the mythical, the mystical, and the brutally real to paint a picture of Canada as he knew it, Europe as he knew it, and the world as he knew it. And he's most famous probably for the Deptford trilogy, three novels in a series that are
3:27:55 Speaker 01 linked, and they're just masterful, if only there were more books like that.
3:28:00 Lex Fridman? The Deptford trilogy, Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders, and you got a really nice beard.
3:28:09 Speaker 01 Yes, it was an amazing beard. Very 19th century.
3:28:13 Lex Fridman? Okay, beautiful. What advice would you give to young people today that have just listened to us talk about the 20th century and the terrifying prospects of ideals implemented into reality? And by the way, many of the revolutions are carried out by young people. And so, you know, the good and the bad and the ugly is thanks to the young people. So, the young people listening today, what advice would you give them?
3:28:45 Speaker 01 Well, it comes down to one word, and that one word is read. I'm, as a college teacher, I'm concerned about what I'm seeing unfolding before us, which is classes, not my classes, but classes in which students are asked to read very little. Or maybe in some cases, not at all, or snippets that they are provided digitally. Those have their place and can be valuable. But the task of sitting down with a book and absorbing its message, not agreeing with it necessarily, but taking in the implications, learning how to think within the categories and the
3:29:29 Speaker 01 values of the author is going to be irreplaceable. And my anxiety is that with with college bookstores now moving entirely to the paperless format, it changes how people interact with texts. And if the result is not a renaissance and a resurgence of reading, but less reading, that will be dreadful because the experience of thinking your way into other people's minds that sustained reading offers is so crucial to human empathy, a broadening of your own
3:30:11 Speaker 01 sensibilities of, you know, what's possible, what's in the full range of being human, and then what's best? What are the best models for what has been thought and felt and how people have acted? Otherwise, we fall prey to manipulators and the ability of of artificial intelligence to give us versions of realities that never existed and never will and the like.
3:30:38 Lex Fridman? It's a really interesting idea. So let me give a shout out to perplexity that I'm using here to sort of summarize and take quick notes and get little snippets of stuff, which is extremely useful. But it's not, books are not just about information transfer. It's just as you said, it's a journey together with a set of ideas and it's a conversation. And getting a summary of the book.
3:31:05 Lex Fridman? Is the cliche thing is it's really getting to the destination without the journey. And the the journey is the thing that's important, thinking through stuff. And I've actually learned, you know, I've been surprised. I've learned, I've trained my brain to be able to get the same thing from audiobooks also. It's a little bit more difficult because you don't control the pacing. Sometimes pausing is nice, but you could still get it from audiobooks. So it's an audio version of of books. And that allows you to also go on a journey together and sometimes more convenient because you could take it to more places with you.
3:31:36 Speaker 01 Right.
3:31:37 Lex Fridman? But there is a magical thing, and I also trying to train myself mostly to use Kindle, the digital version of books. But there is unfortunately still a magical thing about being there with the page.
3:31:52 Speaker 01 Well, audiobooks are definitely not to be scorned because as people have pointed out, the original traditions of literature were oral, right? So that's actually the the the 1.0 version, right? And combining these things is probably the key. I think one of the things I find so so wonderful about the best lectures that I've heard is it's a chance to hear someone thinking out loud, not laying down the law, but taking you through a series of logical moves, imaginative leaps, alternative suggestions, and that that's much more than than data transfer.
3:32:35 Lex Fridman? The use case of AI as a companion as you read is is really exciting to me. I've been using it recently to to basically, as you read, you can have a conversation with a system that has access to a lot of things about a particular paragraph. And I've been really surprised how my brain, when given some extra ideas. Other recommendations of books, but also just like a summary of other ideas from elsewhere in the universe that relates to this paragraph is like it sparks your imagination and thought and you see the actual richness in the thing you're reading. Now, nobody's, to my knowledge, has implemented a really intuitive
3:33:19 Lex Fridman? interaction between AI and the text, unfortunately, partially because the books are protected under DRM. And so there's like a wall where you can't access, the AI can't access the thing. So if you want to play with that kind of thing, you have to, you know, break the law a little bit, which is not a nice thing, not a good thing, but
3:33:42 Lex Fridman? just like with music, Napster came up. People started illegally, illegally sharing music. And the answer to that was Spotify, which made the sharing of music revolutionize everything and made the sharing of music much easier. So there are some technological things that can enrich the experience of reading, but the actual painful, long process of reading is really useful, just like boredom is useful. That's right. It's also called just sitting there. Underrated virtue. Yeah, yeah. And of course, you have to see the smartphone as a enemy, I would say, as of that special time you have to think, because social media companies are maximized to get your engagement.
3:34:27 Lex Fridman? They want to grab your attention and they grab that attention by making you as brain dead as possible and getting you to look at more and more and more things. So it's nice and fun and it's great. Recommend it highly. It's good for dopamine rush, but see it as a counter,
3:34:44 Lex Fridman? as a counter force to the process of sitting with an idea for a prolonged period of time, taking a journey through an expert eloquently conveying that idea and growing by having a conversation with that idea and a book is really, really powerful. So I agree with you totally. What gives you hope? About the future of humanity. We've talked about the dark past. What gives you a hope for the light at the end of the tunnel?
3:35:19 Speaker 01 So we talked indeed about a lot of latent, really damaging and negative energies that are part of human nature. But I find hope in another aspect of human nature, and that is the sheer variety of human reactions to situations. The very fact that history is full of so many stories of amazing endurance, amazing resilience, the will to build up even after the horrors have passed. This, to me, is an inexhaustible source of optimism.
3:36:01 Speaker 01 And, you know, there are some people who condemn cultural appropriation and say that borrowing from one culture to another is to be condemned. Well, the problem is, a synonym for cultural appropriation is world history. Trade, transfer of ideas, influences, valuing that which is unlike your own culture is also a form of appropriation, quite literally. And so those, that multitude of human reactions and the fact that our experience is so unlimited, as history testifies, gives me great hope for the future.
3:36:41 Lex Fridman? Yeah, and the willingness of humans to explore all of that with curiosity, even when, even when the empires fall and the dreams are broken, we rise again.
3:36:51 Speaker 01 That's right, unceasingly.
3:36:54 Lex Fridman? Vélez, thank you so much for your incredible work, your incredible lectures, your books, and thank you for talking today.
3:37:00 Speaker 01 Thank you for this, such a fun chat.
3:37:03 Lex Fridman? Thanks for listening to this conversation with Vélez Lórez Vicious. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx. History repeats itself. First, as a tragedy. Second, as a farce.
3:37:23 Lex Fridman? Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
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