Totalitarianism

And the outcome here is a horrific man-made famine, not a natural disaster, not bad harvests, but a man-made famine as a result of then the compulsion that gets used by the Soviet state to extract those resources, cordoning off the area, not allowing starving people to escape. You put very well some of the implications of this case study in how things look in the abstract versus in practice, and those phenomena were going to haunt the rest of the experience of the Soviet Union. The whole notion that up and down the chain of command, everybody is falsifying or tinkering with or purifying the statistics or their reports in order not to look bad and not to have vengeance visited upon them reaches the point where nobody, in spite of the pretense of comprehensive knowledge, 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.

Let's start with Karl Marx. What were the central ideas of Marx that lay the foundation of communism? I think there were several key ideas that Marx deployed that were destined to have such an impact, and in some ways they were actually kind of contradictory. On the one hand, Marx insisted that history has a purpose. That history is not just random events, but that rather it's history, we might say, with a capital H, history moving in a deliberate direction, history having a goal, a direction that it was predestined to move in.

Marx's chief rival was Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who famously said in 1942, "The passion for destruction is also a creative passion." So what kind of future did Bakunin envision? Well, Bakunin in some things agreed with Marx, and in many others, disagreed. He was an anarchist rather than hewing to the sort of scheme of history that Marx was proposing. So he did see humanity as fighting a struggle for a better way of life. He envisioned, as your quote suggests, that revolution and sheer confrontation and overthrow the existing state of things, not compromise, was going to be the way to get there, but his vision was very different. Rather than organizing conspiratorial and hierarchical political movement, Bakunin envisioned that the ties would be far looser, that both the revolutionary movement and the future state of humanity would grow out of the free association, the anarchist thinking, the free association of individuals who rejected hierarchical thinking in their relations with one another, rejected the state as a form of organized violence, and rejected traditional religious ideas that he saw as buttressing hierarchies.

I would love to talk about the works of Marx, the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. What can we say that's interesting about the manifestation of his ideas on paper? Well, the first thing to note obviously is that those two works are very different. Das Kapital is an enormous multi-volume work that Marx worked at and only got the first volume out because Engels begged him to stop revising. "Please, just finally get it into press," and then the rest, Engels had to actually reconstruct out of notes after Marx passed away. It's a huge work. By contrast, the Communist Manifesto is a brief pamphlet that ended up affecting the lives of many millions worldwide, in spite of its comparative brevity.

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 could look back at what happened in the 20th century. Why was this such a compelling notion for millions of people? Can we make the case for it? Well, clearly it was a compelling case for millions of people, and part of this story overall has to do with the faith, conviction, stories of people sacrificing themselves as well as their countrymen in a cause that they believed was not just legitimate, but demanded their total obedience. I think that throughout the early part of the 20th century, the late 19th century, early part of the 20th century, so much of the compelling case for communism came from the confidence that people in the West more generally placed in science, the notion that science is answering problems. Science is giving us solutions to how the world around us works, how the world around us can be improved. Some varieties of that, and watch the quotation marks, "science" were crazy, 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.

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? Lenin's supreme confidence leads the party through some really difficult steps that involves things like signing the humiliating treaty with the Germans, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Where critics of the Bolsheviks said that no one who loved their country would've agreed to a so Draconian, so harsh a settlement that saw the peeling off of large territories that had belonged to the Russian Empire. Lenin is willing to undertake this because the larger prize. He even says that he's not going to bother to read the treaty because shortly that treaty is going to be a dead letter. His expectation is revolution's going to break out everywhere, especially after we've raised the standard, first of all, in the wreckage of the Russian Empire.

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. Can we just talk about the ways that 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? Well, before getting to the secret police, I would just want to add the other crucial element, which is Lenin's patronage. Stalin doesn't brawl his way into the Bolshevik party and dominate. He's co-opted and promoted to positions of importance by Lenin who sees him as a somewhat rough around the edges, not very sophisticated, much less cosmopolitan than other Bolsheviks. But dependable, reliable, and committed revolutionary. One of the things that's emerged, especially after archives opened up with the fall of the Soviet Union and we were able to read more and more the communications of Lenin, is that it's not the case that we're talking here about an 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.

It's terrifying, but it's really important to understand. If we look at when Stalin takes power at some of the policies. The collectivization of agriculture. Why do you think that failed so catastrophically, especially in the 1930s with Ukraine and Poland and more? I think the short answer is that the Bolsheviks in particular, but also communists more generally have had a very conflicted relationship with agriculture. Agriculture, as a very vital, obviously, but also very traditional and old form of human activity has about it all of the smell of tradition and other problematic factors as well. In a place like Russia or the Russian Empire peasants, throughout history, for centuries, had wanted one thing, and that was to be left alone to farm their own land. That's their utopia. And that, for someone like Marx who had a vision of historical development and transcendence-

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? 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, over perform. That would be the key to success and rising in the bureaucracies in the age of the terror.

So let me ask you about Darrell 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 "The chief villain of the Second World War." I think Darrell 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 by product of global war. And in fact, the most humane extermination of prisoners of war possible, given the alternative, was death by starvation. So I was wondering if you can respond to each of those claims. Well, I think that this is 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, that assertion is based on a complete neglect of what Nazi ideology was. The Nazi worldview and racism was not a ideology that was limited in its application, it looked toward world domination. In 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. Now in retrospect, we of course can see that Germany was not in a position to legitimate a claim like that but the Nazis aims were anything but limited.

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? I would think that the reality was probably very remote, but that was certainly their ambition. German Communists get quoted as saying, "After Hitler, it's our turn." Their sentiment was that the arrival of Nazism on the scene was a sign of how decrepit and incompetent and doomed capitalism was. In hindsight, that's almost impossible to believe because what happens is, the Nazis with their characteristic brutal ruthlessness, simply decapitate the party and arrest the activists who are 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?

So that takes us to the other side of the world. The side that's often in the West, not considered very much when we talk about human history, Chinese dynasties, empires, are fascinating, complex, and there's just a history that's not as deeply explored as it should be. And the same applies to the 20th century. So Chinese radicals founded the Chinese Communist Party, CCP, in July 1921. Among them, as you talk about, was Mao. What was the story of Mao's rise to power? So Mao takes a page from the book of Lenin by adapting or seeking to adapt Marx's ideology to a context that would have surprised Marx significantly. And that is, not only to set the revolution in, 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. 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? 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 and a major milestone in the history of Communism, the Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski, 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, Kołakowski essentially throws up his hands and says, "It's hardly you'd 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.

The Great Leap Forward ended up killing approximately 40 million people from starvation or murder. Can you describe the Great Leap Forward? It was modeled on the crash industrialization that Stalin had wanted to undertake in the Soviet Union and to outdo it. The notion of the Great Leap Forward was that it would be possible for the peasant masses out of their conviction in the rightness of the Chinese Communist cause to industrialize China overnight. That involved things like creating small smelting furnaces in individual farm communes. It involved folding together farming territories into vast communes of very large size that were, just because of their sheer gigantism, supposed to be by definition more efficient than small-scale farming. It ended up producing environmental disasters and campaigns to eliminate birds or insects.

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. Seven zero, exactly, 70% correct. Yeah. Not 69, not 71.

You mentioned this earlier, but just to take a small detour, what are we supposed to think about North Korea and their declaration they're supposedly a communist nation? What can we say about the economic, the political system of North Korea? Or is it just a hopelessly simple answer, "This is a complete disaster of a totalitarian state?" I think the answer that our historian can give is a historical answer that we have to inquire into what has to happen in order to arrive at the past we are today. Where you 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 Juche. How does that mesh with the reality that we're talking about a dynastic government and a monarchy in all but name, but a communist monarchy if that's what it is? I think that examining as much as we can learn about a closed society that 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.

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 communist in America? 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 the fact that, to begin with, the party was often identified with immigrants. The communities that had come over across the Atlantic from Europe often had strong socialist contingents. And when this break happens within the socialist movement between radical socialists and more moderate socialists, there were fiery individuals who saw the opportunity to help shape the American Communist movement. But the result was that, for many American workers, they saw the sheer ethnic variety and difference of this movement as something that was unfamiliar.

Yeah. I mean, it is a bit of a meme, but meme becomes reality 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. How did Russia evolve after Stalin and after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Well, I think the short answer is without a full historical reckoning that would've been healthy about the recent past in ways that's not very surprising because given the economic misery of dislocations and the cumulative damage of all of those previous decades of this experiment, it left precious little patience or leisure or surplus for introspection. But after an initial period of great interest in understanding the full measure of what Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union had undergone in this first initial explosion of journalism and of reporting and investigations, historical investigations with new sources, after an initial period marked by such interest, people instead retreated into the here and now and the today. And the result is that there's been less than would be healthy of a taking stock, a reckoning. Even in assigning 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.

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, 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? First of all, I mean the answer's very clear. I would never presume to advise you about interviewing world leaders and prominent people because the roster that you've accumulated is just astonishing. But I know what I might aim for and that is, I think, in historical analysis, in trying to understand the role of a particular leader, the more one understands about their prior background and formative influences, the better a fix, I think, one gets on the question of what are their expectations? In German, there's a beautiful word for this. 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. 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?

I should highly recommend that people sign up. 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, which I think is like a monthly membership where you get access to all these courses and they're just incredible. 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 kind of thing. That's right. Would a book that got turned into a movie be acceptable as well?

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? By the way, many of the revolutions are carried out by young people, and so 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? It comes down to one word, and that one word is read. As a college teacher, I'm concerned about what I'm seeing unfolding before us, not my classes, but classes in which students are asked to read very little or maybe in some cases not at all, or snippets that they are provided digitally. Those have their place and can be valuable, but the task of sitting down with a book and absorbing its message, not agreeing with it necessarily, but taking in the implications, learning how to think within the categories and the values of the author is going to be irreplaceable, and my anxiety is that with college bookstores now moving entirely to the paperless format, it changes how people interact with texts.

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. There are some people who condemn cultural appropriation and say that borrowing from one culture to another is to be condemned or 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 that multitude of human reactions and the fact that our experiences so unlimited as history testifies, gives me great hope for the future. The willingness of humans to explore all of that with curiosity. Even when the empires fall and the dreams are broken, we rise again.