My guest today is Stephen Kotkin, who is a senior  fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of  

two-thirds of his three-volume Stalin biographies. The first one, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power. 

The second one, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler. Thank you for coming on my podcast. 

Thank you for the honor of the invitation. Let's begin with the tsarist regime. 

First question, how repressive  was the tsarist regime actually? 

Presumably the motivation behind the revolution is  to get rid of this autocracy. But you have these  

examples. Lenin's brother tried to kill the tsar. Lenin himself is writing these long manifestos  

about taking down capitalism  and overthrowing the government. 

He and people like Stalin are in exile  in Siberia, living off government money,  

robbing banks, and small shenanigans. Honestly, it sounds more forgiving than  

many countries today. How bad was it really? You have to put yourself back in the time  

period to judge the level of repression based  upon what norms were, what other regimes did,  

rather than take the 20th-century  regimes as the guide and go back. 

We need to widen the aperture a little bit here. This is the tsarist regime's problem. 

It needs to be able to compete  in the international system. 

That means it needs a modern military and modern  industry to underwrite that modern military. 

So it needs armaments, it needs steel, it needs  chemicals. For that, you need workers. So you  

want the workers only to work in the industry. You don't want them, for example, to have a  

labor movement or to go on strike, or to have  ideas about how politics should be organized. 

Similarly, with the intellectual  side, you need the engineers. 

You need the engineers in order to  design and build the modern attributes  

that you need to compete as a global power. But you don't want those educated people to  

have their own ideas and values about politics,  about whether you'd want an autocratic government  

like the Russian regime has, or whether  you'd want some other type of government. 

So all of these countries in the  modern period have this dilemma:  

importing modernization but  keeping out the political side,  

the value side that goes along with that. They need to have some way to repress and  

control the working-class organization, movement  stuff, and the university-educated intellectuals. 

That's a problem we still have today. The Iranian regime now has that problem. 

The Chinese regime in Beijing has this problem. The Soviet Union had that problem. Contemporary  

Russia has that problem. How do you bring  in modernity—meaning you have tanks,  

you have airplanes, or you have AI—but keep  out, for example, separation of powers,  

freedom, property rights, all the things  that undermine your dictatorial rule. 

The tsarist regime was a quintessential  example of this fundamental dilemma. 

Modernization is not a sociological process that  kind of just happens. It's a geopolitical process.  

You modernize because you need to  compete in the international system. 

If somebody has ships made out of steel, either  you also have ships made out of steel or they're  

going to show up at your door, like we did to  Japan, and tell you that they're in charge now. 

This was one of the most interesting takes in  your first volume, that modernization is not  

this inevitable process but is instigated  by ruthless geopolitical competition. 

Do you think that that still  applies in today's world? 

Yes, there are pockets of conflict  in the Middle East or in Ukraine,  

which would motivate the key powers there to want  to have modern militaries and modern technologies. 

But through most of the world… For example, the odds that if France falls behind  

technologically if their AI is worse, Germany is  going to take over, is just sort of unthinkable. 

This dynamic where in order to ward  off colonization or other great powers,  

you need to stay at the cutting edge of technology  and also have up-to-date political processes. 

Is that still a drive that  moves countries forward? 

If you have an autocratic regime, it  is existential for you every day. You  

want to compete. France can compete or fail to  compete, and its political system is not at risk. 

No one's going to say the regime is illegitimate  because someone else beat them in AI. 

Students are going to protest in the streets. 

That's not going to mean that  the regime is going to fall. 

There may be a change of  government, but the system remains. 

You have this dilemma for the  authoritarians. Think about Peter  

the Great. I need to compete against the  great powers, so I need to have a navy. 

To get a navy, I need to have the  industry that supports a navy. 

I need to have the officers. I need to have the technical skills. 

So I need to have all of that to be able to  compete, but I have this autocratic regime. 

How do I retain the social  structure, the hierarchy? 

It’s non-elected, non-legitimate  in some ways based upon modern  

understandings of constitutional order. How do I retain that while I'm importing  

these attributes of modern power? That's the stuff that persists today  

for Iran, Russia, China, North Korea. They have to get very good at holding  

at bay those attributes of modernity  that threaten their political regime  

while importing as much as they can of the  attributes… It's two sides of the same coin. 

The thing that gets you the engineers also  gets you the possible political ideas. 

So the tsarist regime begins to  repress the very thing it needs  

to compete in the international system. It represses the working class and it  

represses the engineers and the intellectuals,  without which it can't be a great power,  

without which it can't compete, but with  which its political system is threatened. 

So the amount of repression  is an important question. 

We would call this a vegetarian regime compared to  the carnivores, like Stalin's regime or Hitler's  

regime, in terms of the degree of repression. But the dynamic of being compelled to exercise  

repression against the very  people you need like oxygen,  

that's the dynamic that we see in tsarist Russia  and that we still see today in a certain form. 

Is one of the key lessons from your volumes  that you should be tripping over yourself  

in order to embrace a lesser of two evils? Does that apply to all the examples you give? 

This is maybe a general question about how  much you can actually learn from history. 

For every seeming lesson, there's an equal  and opposite lesson that you can also learn. 

During the tsarist regime, in retrospect, we can  say that the liberals and the constitutionalists  

should have cooperated with Stolypin or Witte. Even though it was an autocratic regime,  

they were actually doing these  real reforms and there was growth. 

They should have continued that process. Or when the government fell in February 1917,  

the Provisional Government factions should  have united to oppose the Bolsheviks. 

But then there's all these other examples. In Germany, the conservative Weimar government  

allies with Hitler in order to fend off what  they think is the greater evil, the communists. 

Given the events up to that point, it's a  reasonable concern to have, given what the  

Bolsheviks have done in Russia. Where should we end up on this? 

Should you embrace a lesser of two evils  whenever you get the chance, or no? 

The Tsarist regime is undertaking this  repression of people who have legitimate claims. 

That repression is quite severe  by the standards of the day. 

It's not going to be everybody murdered or  everybody deported to the wastes of Siberia,  

which we're going to see in  the 20th century when we have  

a different level of communications  and transport, different technology,  

when we have a different level of ideological  commitment. Still, it's highly repressive.  

It's totally unjust and the claims of  the people protesting are legitimate. 

Stalin goes into the underground,  not because he's looking for power. 

It's because he's dedicated to fighting  the injustices of the tsarist regime. 

A lot of young people like him do the same.  He's in the seminary. He's highly successful,  

unbelievably successful. He's great at  school. That's been true for many years now,  

since he was in elementary school. He sang in the choir, got good  

grades, and did his homework. He's on track to be successful  

in society. He gives it all up. He  starts reading forbidden, otherwise  

censored underground literature and books. He learns about social injustice, not just  

through firsthand experience, but analytically. He never graduated from the seminary,  

which is the highest level of education that  was available to somebody in the Caucasus. 

They don't have a university, because the  Tsarist regime is afraid to allow a university. 

They need the university graduates, but  again, they're afraid of the politics of it. 

Universities elsewhere,  including in the capital, St. 

Petersburg, are constantly being shut  down through these revolutionary episodes. 

He goes into the underground and for  20 years of his life he's got no job,  

no profession, no source of income. He's in and out of prison, in and out of  

Siberian exile, constantly harassed by the police. If he escapes, they find him, they put him back. 

From the ages of about 17-18 to  his late 30s, he's a penniless,  

jobless revolutionary, dedicated to fighting  the genuine injustices of the Tsarist regime. 

What he'll produce is a much more unjust  regime than the one he's fighting against. 

This is known as perverse  and unintended consequences. 

He's legitimately dedicated to revolution  as he understands it in his day,  

and it's fighting against legitimate injustices. 

But the way he does that—the revolutionary  methods that he uses and then the regime that  

he ends up building—turns out to be worse  than the problem that he was addressing. 

This is a perverse and unintended consequence. Your question is about whether revolution is a  

good thing ultimately, even if the injustices  are there, and whether there could have been  

some solution that was more evolutionary  that could get you to a better place. 

The constitutionalists, otherwise known as the  Kadets, we would call them the classical liberals. 

They're the private property,  constitutional order, anti-autocracy  

people fighting the tsarist regime. They're going to be the protagonists  

of the February Revolution in 1917. It looks like they could possibly be  

the solution because they're against  arbitrary, autocratic, unjust rule. 

They're in favor of constitutional order. That's not how they behave once they're in  

power. But let's leave that aside. Here's  your problem. This was foreseen by the  

Interior Minister who put down the 1905  Rebellion Revolution, Pyotr Durnovo, who  

understands the liberals, the constitutionalists. They’re the classical liberals who want private  

property and constitutional order and probably, if  they had their druthers, a constitutional monarchy  

like you have in the UK and Britain at the time. But Durnovo says to them, "You guys are fools,  

because if you take down the Tsar,  you won't get a constitutional order. 

You'll get chaos and anarchy and you'll  get a massive social revolution by the  

peasants predominantly, but also by  the nationalities and the workers. 

You will bring on the opposite  of a constitutional order. 

So instead of fighting against the Tsar,  you should throw in your lot with the  

Tsar against the Stalins and the social  movement that came from the investment in  

modernization." Durnovo is proved right. He's  proved right not just in Russia, by the way. 

In many places in the world at the time, between  like 1905 and 1925 or so, 1926 in the case of  

Portugal, you have constitutional revolutionary  attempts to introduce constitutional order:  

Mexico, Iran, China, Russia, Portugal.  They all fail. The constitutionalists  

take power for a brief period of time and  then they're swept out by a more leftist,  

more social-oriented revolutionary process. So the constitutional epoch of the early  

20th century turns out to be a bust. It had to have happened beforehand,  

before the modern era. Why? Because  when you institute constitutional order,  

like in England, in the US, to a certain extent  in France which has a more complicated process,  

you do it before you're in the mass age. You do it before the working class and the  

peasantry are politically organized. You're able to introduce rule of law,  

constitutionalism based on a private property  model where not that many people get to vote. 

The franchise is restricted, the vast majority of  people can't vote, only property holders can vote. 

Only men can vote, not women. You have this restricted franchise,  

which is like a breathing space for you to  introduce and get used to a liberal constitutional  

order that you can then democratize over time. Over time non-property holding males get to vote. 

Over time, women get to vote. Over  time, slaves become citizens. They  

become people and fully-fledged citizens. They also get to vote and to own property legally. 

You have this order that has  all of these birth defects. 

It's very restrictive in the franchise. Some people are slaves,  

not even considered people. Yet over time you can get that  

right because the category of citizenship and  the constitutional order are already embedded. 

When you have the constitutional revolution  in the mass age—when you have the peasants  

and the workers and those for national  self determination participating in the  

constitutional revolution—constitutional order  and rule of law isn't enough for a lot of them. 

It worked in Taiwan and South Korea. There was an era of industrialization under,  

not a dictator, but an authoritarian government. Then they were able to transition to  

rule of law democracy. There are these exceptions  

which have turned out to be false normative,  or guiding, stars for us in every case. 

It happened in West Germany and Japan under  American occupation, enormously successful. 

We turned Hitlerite Germany into our ally with  their cooperation. It's just astonishing. And  

with Hirohito's Japan, the emperor stayed. Then with Japan's two former colonies,  

South Korea and Taiwan, it worked there as well. Hong Kong was on that trajectory until it was  

turned back when the lease ended  to the communist regime in Beijing. 

But the number of countries that  have done this is very, very few. 

The opposite has happened in most  other cases where you've gotten an  

attempt but a failure to introduce enduring  constitutional order in a mass society. 

But there's a paradox here. If you institute this  sort of revolution, or changing of the guard,  

during the mass age, then you're going to get  this sort of leftist revolution which is very  

antithetical to future prosperity and rule of law. On the other hand, if you don't change the regime,  

you will fail to… It's been  pointed out that Chiang Kai-shek,  

when he did have control over China, should  have done some amount of land reform. 

You talk about how Stolypin, after the  1905 attempted revolution, attempted  

to put in this sort of agricultural reforms. But their success was mixed because the existing  

aristocracy obviously didn't favor it. So there  is this paradox. If you don't change the regime,  

the existing stakeholders will not want the kinds  of reforms which would make it possible to have a  

lower class that's bought into the system. How do you bring the whole society,  

what we would call the masses or what used to be  called the masses… How do you bring all levels  

of society into a political system as citizens? How do you build a polity which is inclusive of  

people regardless of how much property they have? How do you then provide opportunity to them so  

that they can rise up the ladder? That's the secret of success in  

the modern world, which a handful of countries  have done from a non-democratic starting point. 

Other countries have done it by  democratizing a liberal constitutional order. 

Go back to the tsarist regime. What were the options for the tsarist regime? 

You have this very heavy absolutist regime. Autocracy is even a more absolutist  

version of what we had, for example in the  French case, when the Bourbon dynasty could say,  

"the state is me" or "the state is I". You have this Versailles-like absolutism,  

and aristocracy that forms around the  absolutism that is the main beneficiary. 

Most everybody else is excluded  from the political process and  

they are going to break through at some point. So how are you going to manage that breakthrough. 

Again, in the French case it took  more than a century to get this right. 

The monarch is killed and the monarch comes  back and they have an emperor and they have  

a constitutional order and they have an elected  president who does a self-coup and one republic  

falls and another republic takes its place. Eventually even the Vichy regime, the Nazi  

occupation regime, overthrows the republic. So it takes de Gaulle in some ways from above to  

reimpose a republic, the fifth Republic, later on. So it's a very difficult process, even when it  

works, as the French case tells you. So we're not saying that it's simple  

and easy and that Tsarist Russia  could have gone down this path. 

A lot of people say, if it hadn't been for the  war, Tsarist Russia was on an evolutionary path. 

It was modernizing economically, so it might  have been a kind of Taiwan story over time,  

where the dictatorial regime gave way,  under economic success and political  

pressure, to a more benign regime. They institutionalized rule of law,  

private property, civil liberties,  and an inclusive polity for everybody. 

The problem with that is that  the autocracy refused to do that. 

The autocracy had wanted no part  of any evolutionary process. 

So in 1905, when the tsarist regime is  compelled—under pressure of tremendous  

peasant revolt and worker strikes and  a defeat in the war against Japan—to  

introduce some version of constitutional order,  a kind of quasi-parliament, quasi-constitution,  

the Tsar regrets doing this almost immediately and  is trying to push back against his concessions. 

Once the lid was put back on because of  repression, once Durnovo successfully  

repressed the political movement,  the Tsar wanted to undo those  

concessions and go back to being an autocrat. An autocrat, autokrator, means a "self-power,  

a power unto itself". So this is  your challenge. How do you undo  

the autocracy and get to an evolutionary mode  when the autocracy itself is committed to not  

allowing any political participation whatsoever? So you have the leftist version of overthrow,  

where you end up with a radicalization in the  leftist direction, and you have a rightist version  

of overthrow, where you end up with, "Oh, we're  not going to have Leninism here. Let's prevent  

Leninism. Let's go with the radical right." The traditional right invites, as happened in  

the German case and earlier in the Italian  case, invites the radical right to power,  

thinking they can control the radical right,  the fascism, the Nazism. The traditional  

right is wrong. The radical right, once it's  invited to power, institutionalizes itself. 

You get a leftist version of this and a  rightist version of this. They're kind of  

codependent. Each uses the threat of the other to  further consolidate their dictatorship. This is  

the 20th-century version. The irony here is that  you got the radical right, the fascist solution in  

the German case, and you got the radical left,  the socialist solution in the tsarist case. 

The tsarist regime had a massive radical right. They had the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,  

that infamous anti-Semitic tract, which then  makes its way to Germany but originates in  

the tsarist empire. The antisemitism is there.  The right-wing movement is there, implanted in  

villages, the Union of the Russian People. Russia has the fascism before Germany. 

Germany has the largest socialist party in  its parliament, in the sense that it's not  

a majority, but it's a plurality. The Social Democrats in Germany  

are enormously successful at the ballot box. The right-wing movement with the antisemitism  

is enormously successful in  the streets in Tsarist Russia. 

If you were alive before 1917, 1933, you would  predict that socialism would be victorious and  

triumph in Germany, and the fascism would triumph  in the Russian Empire. But it's the opposite. So  

that's just a fascinating, amazing paradox that  I tried to deal with in the first two volumes. 

You say that in 1917 a leftist revolution of some  kind was inevitable, but that it didn't have to  

be the Bolshevik October Revolution. Why was leftism inevitable in Russia? 

You put your finger on a big part of it when you  talked about Chiang Kai-shek and land reform. 

You have this peasant land hunger. The peasants are often without their own holdings. 

They work on someone else's property, or  their holdings are so small that if there's  

a little bit of bad weather let alone a massive  drought, they're on the verge of starvation. 

Subsistence level agriculture  is not politically stable. 

You want a class of people, a kind of yeoman  capitalists, property owners who can expand  

their farms and can succeed and hire labor. Some of those hired hands can then get their own  

land and become a version of these yeoman farmers,  sort of Thomas Jefferson-style or Stolypin,  

the great attempted reform of Stolypin after the  1905 revolution, which ended in his assassination. 

You need to deal with the peasant land hunger so  that it becomes a stabilizing political force. 

You have the peasants get the land and  then they have a piece of the status  

quo and want to retain the system, versus  the peasants not having the land and they  

want to overthrow the system to get the land. In the Russian case there is the end of serfdom  

in the 1860s, again as a result of the defeat  in the Crimean War, where there is a reform. 

They free the serfs, emancipation of the serfs. But the serfs don't get the land to the degree  

that could have happened, because  the landowners are the political  

support of the tsarist autocracy. To take the land away from the land  

magnates and give it to the peasants is to go  through this risky path where you're losing  

one political support, the landowners, before  you've fully gotten the new political support. 

You're gonna go through this valley of  hell potentially where all bets are off  

and you're not sure if it's going to work. So the peasants don't really get the land  

as they could have in the 1860s. It became a problem that's not  

resolved right through 1917, 1918. So the peasants had their own  

revolution in 1917 and 1918, which  was not about the socialist parties. 

It's not about the Bolsheviks, it's not about  Lenin, it's about the peasants seizing the land. 

But that creates an intense radicalism that  becomes the platform for the socialists in the  

cities to gain and hold power in the system. You don't have that in the German case. 

In the German case, you have  strikes and seizures of power  

in a few places, like Bavaria for example. You have a Bavarian Soviet Socialist Republic,  

but they're easily put down by the forces of order  or the army and guess who's in the army? It’s the  

peasants. You don't have a peasant army ready to  put down the revolt in the Russian case, because  

the peasant army is the one seizing the land. It's the one doing the radical revolution. 

So you lack the forces of order to destroy  the leftist movement in the Russian case,  

because it is the leftist movement in the  Russian case which should be the forces of order. 

In the German case—and to a certain extent the  Italian case which happened simultaneously,  

and there's also a Hungarian case here—you  have leftist revolts in the cities, seizures  

of power like the Paris Commune of 1870-71, which  happened in Paris and not in the rest of France. 

You need a peasant army that  has a stake in the existing  

order to undo the city leftist revolution. You have this in the other European cases. 

One case you don't have  this is in the Russian case. 

Then you're going to get to the Chinese case  later, which is going to be a variant of what  

happened in the Russian case, where you have  a gigantic land hungry peasantry that's going  

to become radical for a time. Again, there are going to be  

perverse and unintended consequences. The peasants are ready to destroy the  

existing order, not to bring communists to  power, but to seize the land themselves. 

In the 1920s, the peasants were  de facto, not de jure, landowners. 

They don't own the property  in law, they own it in fact. 

But then Stalin's going to reverse the  peasant revolution violently and re-enserf  

or enslave the peasants across all the  11 time zones, this gigantic Eurasia. 

The peasant revolution is going  to be annihilated in blood. 

So the peasants have, through their  radicalism of seizing the land,  

helped bring Lenin and his Bolsheviks to  power in the cities which is going to be the  

death of the peasants owning the land and lead  instead to the re-enserfment of the peasants. 

Something similar is gonna  happen in the Chinese case. 

Again there's this irony of history:  perverse and unintended consequences. 

Stalin is fighting against tsarist  injustice only to impose worse injustice  

and worse bloodshed and worse repression. The peasants are fighting on behalf of obtaining  

the land, only to then be expropriated and forced  into these collectives and losing the very land,  

the land that they took in the seizures that  brought these leftists to power in the case. 

In central Europe—the southern German  case, the northern Italian case,  

the Hungarian case—you don't have the endurance  of the leftists in power. They're all thrown out.  

They're thrown out by the forces of order. They're thrown out by the right. 

So the traditionalism of the peasants—where  they believe in God, they believe in law and  

order—is overriding because they already  have a lot of the land in comparison to  

their Russian or Chinese counterparts. They can be part of the forces of order. 

So you can get fascism in Central Europe. You can get the right wing dictatorships  

in Central Europe, the forces  of order destroying the left. 

Whereas you get the leftist dictatorships  in the giant peasant societies where you  

don't quite have the distribution of land. Now the peasants are complaining about land  

distribution in Italy and Germany,  don't get me wrong, but relative  

to Russia and China they're doing well. So then you think about the Mexican case,  

the Iranian case, the Portuguese case, all  of which are peasant societies as well.  

There's how you integrate farmers. The whole  world order rests on the backs of farmers. 

How much farmers till means how  rich or poor your country is. 

Whether you have a surplus, as we  call it, that the farmers can sell  

on the market after they consume what they  need for their family's purposes or not,  

tells you how much wealth you have to then  build an army, build modern industry, et cetera. 

The world order rests on these hardworking,  predominant in the population, peasantries. 

In some ways, the political system doesn't  derive in deterministic fashion from them. 

Politics still matters and politics is  never reducible to social relations. 

But failure to master, or mastery of the social  relations of, the peasant land question is  

fundamental in some of the political outcomes. The politicians have to be good at managing the  

peasantry's integration into that society, where  you're trying to get an order in the mass age. 

You're beyond just the court society  at Versailles, the tsarist court in St. 

Petersburg, or the men at the  Constitutional Convention in the US. 

You're beyond that in the mass age. You have to be able to incorporate the  

masses somehow in a polity. It's really hard  to do. So this dynamic of failure to master,  

or mastery over it, tells you a lot  about the direction you're going to go. 

This answers one of the other  questions I had for you. 

Why did we see these communist  revolutions in peasant countries? 

It’s the opposite of the Marxist  prediction that you would first  

need capitalism and industrialization before  you would see the turn towards socialism. 

I guess the answer is that the private  property which is engendered by  

capitalism and industrialization actually helps  the peasants more, or helps them somewhat and  

buys them into the system. This raises another  question. If it's the case that all of this  

unrest is caused by the mistreatment of peasants  in China and in Russia, you have the mistreatment  

of them to an extent unimaginable after the  collectivization in 1928 where literally 100  

million peasants were enslaved. Of course, there's some lack  

of cooperation with the regime. They kill half the livestock and so forth. 

But it doesn't break the regime, even  though it's way more repressive and  

destructive than anything the tsar did. So if the peasants are the backbone of the  

regime's stability, why doesn't collectivization  in China and Russia break the regime? 

Terrific question again. You have a multi-pronged  answer. Let’s do it this way. On the one hand,  

you have a much bigger repressive apparatus,  a much, much bigger repressive apparatus. 

The tsarist regime has a very  small secret police, really small. 

The secret police for the tsarist regime is  mostly following a handful of intellectuals. 

You had a few thousand university students  in tsarist Russia in the mid-19th century,  

about 5,000 or so when this term  intelligentsia got invented. 

You're going to have a few  thousand more over time. 

But you're in the thousands, not the millions. Even there though, Lenin, Trotsky,  

and Stalin go off and they're sent into exile. They're not only living off government money,  

but while in exile and they're writing for Pravda. They're writing, "here's my manifesto  

on the fall of capitalism." Even the intellectuals are not really repressed. 

The sense of repression is more about  following what they do rather than  

arresting them on a pretext and putting  a bullet in the back of their neck. 

You have this tsarist secret  police, the "Okhranka". 

That's the pejorative nickname  for them, the "Okhranka". 

They're tasked with following these  revolutionaries and infiltrating their  

groups and maybe sabotaging them from within. Something similar happens in the labor movement. 

Zubatovshina is the Russian term where you  plant the leader of the workers' movement in  

order to make sure that it's controlled by the  secret police rather than has a spontaneous or  

autonomous version that could get out of hand. So you have a small police that's dedicated to  

surveillance and infiltration. You're reading their mail,  

which is something that's invented in France. The black cabinets are a French invention that  

the tsar's secret police borrow. You're following them and a lot  

of them get deported to Siberian  exile, like happened to Stalin. 

Some get forced into European  exile, like happened to Lenin. 

Lenin for 15 of the 17 years between 1900  and 1917 was in European exile. He's not  

even in Russia. In fact, the Paris branch  of the tsarist secret police, the Okhranka,  

which conducted the surveillance and infiltration  in Europe - we have their entire archive right  

here at the Hoover Institution. It was supposed to be destroyed. 

The order went to destroy it  in Paris after the revolution. 

Instead the guy put it on a boat and secretly  had it shipped here to the United States. 

Now we have the Tsarist Russian  archive, secret police for the foreign  

revolutionaries in foreign exile. So you have surveillance and  

infiltration on a lower level. The main force of repression in  

Tsarist Russia is the army, not the secret police. You don't have a gigantic armed secret police. 

The secret police are kind of intellectuals. They're reading Lenin's tracts and they're  

writing summaries, like AI would do  now, about what they contain and how  

to combat it and why the idea is wrong. They're sort of like pseudo-intellectuals,  

or in some cases intellectuals with degrees. They're not the thugs, the torturers and the  

thugs that we would associate with secret police. That's built under Stalin in order to enact the  

re-enserfment, the enslavement of the  hundred million peasants. It's that act.  

It's a kind of chicken and egg thing. How do you enslave the peasants  

without the gigantic secret police? But then when you enslave the peasants,  

the result is you have this gigantic secret  police now that can do everything and anything. 

It's a process where the chicken and egg are  happening simultaneously and they're building  

the secret police capacity, while enslaving  the peasants, that they didn't have before. 

How do we explain this surplus of  sadism during this period in Russia? 

Stalin recruits the twenty-five-thousanders  who go out to the countryside and steal  

from basically starving people. They can visibly see, I'm sure,  

that they're stealing from a family  that's going to starve without this grain. 

You have tens of thousands, maybe  hundreds of thousands, of interrogators  

and torturers in the gulag system. They must know it's a cynical thing  

where they're making the person  confess to a thing that they haven't  

done and they're employing torture to do it. It wasn't just Stalin doing all these things. 

There were hundreds of thousands, maybe  millions of people if you include informants,  

who are implicated in this whole ghoulish regime. Is this just a latent thing that is true in any  

society and Stalin was able to exploit it, or with  some circumstance created this level of sadism? 

Again, a fantastic question. We get this from  Lev Kopelev, The Education of a True Believer. 

He was one of these people. He later then becomes a dissident. 

He gets forced into exile in Germany. He's  a Germanist by profession. He writes this  

fantastic memoir, a couple of memoirs. One of them is called The Education  

of a True Believer, which covers how he was  the one who did this, including in his native  

village. Here's your answer. On the one hand,  there's ideology and the importance of ideology. 

We may think that no one really believes the  ideology. The ideology is too ridiculous. It's  

too disproven by facts in life. We're too smart and they  

couldn't have been as stupid. They had to be smart like us and  

not believe these crazy fairy tales about it. In  fact, it's wrong. They do believe the ideology  

and they're young. They're young people. A story  of the evil of capitalism… You have World War I,  

millions of people die. For what? Why are those  millions of people being killed? The flower  

of European youth. Then many colonial armies  get drawn in because of European imperialism. 

Young people, the future of those countries, go  to their senseless deaths. What's that about? It's  

about imperialism, it's about capitalism. So that's evil and we must overcome that. 

So there's a way in which life experience, as well  as the fervor of youth, leads to, "let's build a  

new world today rather than wait for tomorrow. Let's be impatient, let's eradicate capitalism,  

let's bring about socialism. Let's bring about socialism,  

meaning we end war and imperialism. Achieve abundance for everybody,  

so that it's not just the haves and the  have nots, but everybody's got something. 

In the process, let's make my  little life world historical." 

So here I am, just a little activist with a  red star on my cap and my life means nothing. 

Except I'm a participant in building  a new world, in a world historical  

process that's going to end exploitation,  that's going to end haves and have nots. 

I get it if you're a middle bureaucrat  in the Communist Party, sure. 

Do you think that explains the motivation  of an interrogator in a Gulag, that this  

is part of the goal of communism? There's a big story here, which is  

about how we're building a new world. There are people against that because  

they're the bourgeoisie, or they're the  fools who are doing the bourgeoisie's  

business on behalf of the bourgeoisie.  They're duped into false consciousness. 

But in many of these cases, they know  that they're the ones orchestrating this  

show trial, this cynical game. They know that they just picked  

up a random person in the dead of night. They know that there are enemies out there. 

They know that this process has people who  are against it. That's a given. Who are the  

people who are against it? They're  masking their true feelings. They're  

hiding behind professions of loyalty. When in fact, when the hour of crisis  

comes and there's a war, they will be the  saboteurs behind the lines, the fifth column. 

It might be that some of them are innocent  that you're arresting, but some of them  

are clearly going to be guilty as well. To get the guilty, you have to somehow  

manage to deal with victimizing people who are  likely innocent and you may know are innocent. 

But you also know to your bone marrow  that some people out there are enemies. 

It's hard to identify and find them. So you're overcompensating a little bit to  

make sure that you get every last enemy. Again, it's a crazy idea to us. 

It makes no sense to us, but a lot of  things make no sense that people believe in. 

There's this young kid who's really  adept at social media who just looks  

like he won the primary for Democratic  candidate for mayor in New York City. 

One of the things he wants to do  is freeze rents, rent control,  

because he wants more affordable housing. He's a complete idiot in terms of facts,  

because the way to get more affordable  housing is to build more housing. 

If supply massively increases and it  exceeds demand, the price has to go down. 

It's proven again and again and again. What rent control does, or freezing of rent,  

it inhibits the building of new housing. Because who's going to build new housing  

when you can't make money off of it? So rent control is what produces the  

lack of affordable housing in the first place. He sees what's the problem as the solution now.  

Now, is he a fool? No, he's a really bright guy.  He's very well-educated. He's read everything and  

anything. He's been to university. He's  talked to a lot of really smart people. 

You'd say, "how could he be so  foolish to believe an idea that's  

obviously falsified by empirical reality?" But again, it's an ideological belief. 

He wants to allow people who can't afford  Manhattan to live there. That's a good idea.  

Life should be more affordable. There should  be more places like Queens, where you can  

come in as immigrants or you can come in as  lower class, front end of the social ladder,  

like my family did for example. My father worked in a factory. 

You should be able to get some  housing for your family, work hard,  

and rise up. I agree with that 100%. But he's got  an ideological approach to how to achieve that,  

which to me is completely foolish. If I were as smart as him… how could  

he possibly hold that idea in his head?  But ideology is pervasive. It's pervasive,  

flying in the face of empirical reality. We  could give many examples. I'm not picking on  

this guy in New York. It's just a recent example.  I don't know him. I've never met him. Whatever.  

Maybe there's a more complicated story there. I'm just saying that we have to take ideology  

seriously because it's deep and it can be  enduring even in the face of empirical reality. 

There's ideology, but there's a very  specific thing to these Marxist regimes. 

They might believe in class conflict and  that you need this revolution and so forth. 

But there's also this sense that  you cannot contradict the party,  

you cannot contradict the vanguard. Even in 1924, when Trotsky is getting  

condemned by the party, or whatever that was,  he gets up to give a speech to the Party Plenum,  

and he says, "Look, for all of my thoughts, let  there be no mistake that the party is always right  

and party discipline is always important." So there's not only the sense where Mamdani  

would say, "Oh, I want these specific policies  implemented" but there's also the sense that  

loyalty to the party, and eventually to Stalin  even when it seems to contradict my understanding  

of socialism, is absolutely paramount. One way to explain that is that they  

were just genuinely afraid of Stalin  and they thought this was antithetical  

to their understanding of communism. Another is that part of the ideology is  

this theocratic understanding that the party's  always right, even if it seems like a single  

individual is manipulating it to their ends. Why is Marxism-Leninism especially so attractive  

to young people and to intellectuals? Why?  We have this history, which is a bloody mess. 

Millions of people die, and they die  because of the enactment of this ideology. 

How could people continue to adhere to an ideology  like that during the murderous time period,  

and even more after the murderous time period  when we can look at it dispassionately? Here's  

part of the answer. Young people  are attracted to impatient, quick,  

total transformation of the world, eradication  of war, eradication of social injustice. 

There's a simplicity to the ideology.  It's a total package. It gets rid of  

everything bad if you just follow the precepts. Sure, things happen that shouldn't have happened. 

There are some surprises, there are some  downsides. But are you pro-capitalism? Are you  

pro-imperialist war? Are you pro-landowners having  all the land and the have-nots having nothing? 

There's this constant threat where  if you contravene the ideology,  

you're in bed with the very evils that  the ideology is trying to overcome. 

You become an accomplice in the persistence of  the things that you're dedicated to overthrowing. 

It's not just that you're loyal to the party. You're loyal to the outcome that the  

party is dedicated to achieving. You know that there are going to be mistakes  

and costs and bad things will happen along the  way, but is imperialist war better than that? 

No, the answer is imperialist  war has got to be worse. 

The other reason, which is even deeper than that,  is that Marxism-Leninism empowers the intellectual  

class and the lumpen-intellectual class. In a market system, you get to do what you want. 

You want to open up a family business, you  want to take a loan and give it a try? You  

can do that. Nobody can stop you. It might be that  it's hard to get the loan in some neighborhoods. 

It might be that the loan interest rate is… You've  got to work much harder than you thought, etc. 

But you get to make the decisions. You get to decide what to do, when to do it. 

You can work for somebody else,  you can put out your own shingle. 

In these kinds of systems,  it's the intellectuals and the  

lumpen-intellectuals who make those decisions. They use the state as an instrument to overcome  

the injustices of the existing society.  Again, the injustices are real. But that  

empowers them to be in charge. The beauty of Marxism-Leninism,  

and why what we used to call the Third World  loves this, is that they get to be in power. 

It empowers them across the board. They get to make the decisions on the economy. 

They don't have to submit to elections. They don't have to have a mandate. 

They don't have to legitimate their  rule beyond the ideological building  

of a new world, of overcoming injustice. What we see again and again is young  

people being impatient for evil to end, but  also empowering themselves to be in charge.  

They love the state. They love the state as an  instrument for social justice, social engineering. 

They love to empower themselves as the  decision-makers because, after all,  

they're the intellectuals. They've studied  the theory. They know better than others.  

Workers and peasants and the downtrodden, the  lower classes, sometimes have false consciousness. 

They don't understand why, for example, we  have an imperialist war. They get sucked  

in. Bread and circuses fool them. They  have this false consciousness. But I know  

better, and I can be in charge. I can get us to a better place. 

Even along the way, bad  things are going to happen. 

Some people who are innocent  are going to die or be arrested. 

But this is the march of history. This march of history is to peace and justice. 

Who is going to stand in the way of that? Especially when it empowers you personally  

so that… You could never do  this in the private sector. 

Nobody could afford you this kind of power in the  private sector and in a decentralized political  

system, in a federalized political system  where nobody accumulates that much power. 

Social engineering is always  coercive, always coercive. 

The issue is how much of the coercion is  necessary that we accept in the tradeoff to right  

some of the things that are obviously wrong. All the anti-Marxism, I totally agree with. 

But still, just purely analyzing the system  there's still something to be explained. There  

are many ideologies. You have this line that  you can't explain Stalin by saying that he was  

beaten as a kid or he's a Georgian or whatever,  because many other people are Georgians or beaten  

as a kid and they turn out not this way. There's many different kinds of ideologies,  

and very few of them end up as  amenable to dictatorship as Marxism. 

Another thing that's really confusing here is  that all of these Old Bolsheviks who abet the  

system and whom eventually Stalin purges, whatever  you might say about them, they're not weak men. 

They were willing to face down the Tsar. They were able to organize  

the revolution against the Tsar. They're willing to live in exile,  

to potentially get shot… I guess not  shot by the Okhrana, but whatever. 

They're willing to go through  hardships for their beliefs. 

At the same time, you might think they might just  go along with Stalin's doings because this serves  

what they think is the end goal of communism. But we know that after Stalin died, Khrushchev,  

who was one of the key people in the regime,  gave a Secret Speech where he said that,  

"No, Stalin was going against it. He was destroying the building of  

socialism and the building of Marxism-Leninism." So people did believe that Stalin was actually  

going against this end goal that they had. At  least Khrushchev believed that. In many cases,  

they themselves are being implicated  and they know they're innocent. 

In many of these cases, there's this period in  between when they're a dead man walking—because  

Stalin has started putting the feelers out that  this person is a Trotskyite or something—but  

they're still in their positions of power. They're still the editor of Pravda or in  

charge of the military or something. It's mysterious why these people  

who were able to… They're not cowards, they were  able to organize a revolution against the Tsar. 

But they are not using this period that’s  like a chicken with its head cut off in order  

to organize some sort of defense of themselves. Maybe the next time they have the Party Plenum,  

instead of just confessing or giving the  obligatory speech where you're castigating  

yourself, you just say, "No, I think  Stalin's leading the revolution wrong. 

I'm going to die either way,  but I might as well say this." 

The same thing happened in China. Liu Shaoqi, when he's a dead man  

walking as the premier under Mao during the  Cultural Revolution, he doesn't use that  

opportunity to go up… It’s very strange. There are very few,  

but there are some people like that. They're arrested and executed, all of them. 

Very few of those kinds of  people are going to survive. 

The ones who publicly decry the failures of  the system and its perverse and unintended  

consequences, the ones who decry the  dictatorship as opposed to the freedom  

that Marx predicted would happen, there are some  people like that. They're extremely courageous.  

They're known to us. I'm not the only one,  but I feature some of them in my book. 

But again, you're creating a new world. It's going to be messy because it's  

about class struggle. And class struggle means  

there are going to be winners and losers. The  bourgeoisie have to go. They're inherently  

evil. They're an evil class. They have to  not just be retired to a farm somewhere. 

They have to be eradicated, liquidated as a class. They're going to resist and therefore there  

are going to be enemies everywhere. You're not going to know who they are. 

So are you on the side of the enemies? But what about the cases where  

they're implicating themselves? They know they're not an enemy. 

Again, the party is a larger cause than they  are. You're building a new world. Your life can  

contribute to that or not, and it's insignificant. What fraction of confessions by high-level party  

members do you think were not  coerced out of a sense of fear  

of their own lives or their family's lives? I guess they knew they were going to be executed. 

So it would have to be for their family's  life or to avoid torture vs. a very sort of  

Ozymandian, "I will sacrifice myself for the…" We're in the realm of psychology here, DK. 

Human psychology is a complex subject. Figuring out human psychology is a  

big challenge, even with everything we  know now, let alone what we knew then. 

So it's simultaneously everything and anything. We have to get rid of the binaries. 

They didn't believe, they were cynical, and they  sacrificed themselves because they were cowards. 

Or because they knew that, they were  forced to make that sacrifice to preserve  

some of their family members or whatever. There are elements of belief and elements of,  

let's say, suspension of disbelief, and  elements of cynicism and knowledge and  

understanding simultaneously in almost everybody.  They coexist. We think of them as contradictory,  

but humans can hold contradictory thoughts  simultaneously without too much trouble.  

We could give many examples. You've had  people like that on your show, for example. 

So the psychology is not  as surprising in some ways. 

What's surprising is that  this whole thing succeeds. 

It doesn't collapse of its own internal  contradictions. It doesn't undermine itself.  

If you're murdering a high percentage of your  upper officer corps… If you're murdering your  

intellectuals, your scientists, your  cultural figures… If you're murdering  

your loyal party elites centrally and in the  provinces… And if you're murdering the police  

who are carrying out all of these murders… The thing about Stalin's terror is the police  

are also murdered during the terror  while they are doing the murdering. 

You're doing all of that and the  whole thing doesn't collapse. 

To me, that's more interesting in some ways than  the complexity of human psychology that holds  

these contradictory thoughts and fails to go for  self-preservation in some cases or fails to say,  

"I'm going to die anyway, I might as well go down  fighting," or whatever the metaphor might be. 

The fact that the system is able to undergo  this level of self-disruption and come out  

the other side, that's pretty astonishing. Hitler does not murder his upper officer corps. 

He doesn't like them, he retires  them, and they get a pension. 

He doesn't murder the Gauleiters or the  Nazi party officials. He doesn't murder  

the intellectuals. Some go to prison,  some go into exile if they're lucky. 

Some definitely are executed, often  for acts that they've committed. 

Sometimes it’s just because they  had an enemy in the system who  

wanted to enact revenge against them. But for the most part, Hitler is attacking  

what we would call his real enemies, that is  to say, people who are opposed to his regime,  

either in thought or in action or both. Stalin is attacking those people,  

but he's also attacking loyalists. He's taking down, in really big numbers,  

system loyalists, people who  would walk through fire for him. 

One of the things they do is  to walk through the fire of  

their self-immolation on behalf of the cause. This belief in the new world, in the better world,  

in transcending capitalism, in getting  peace as well as abundance on the planet,  

in building paradise on earth, needs to  be understood as absolutely fundamental  

to everything that we're talking about. We often talk about Nazi racial ideology. 

How could they believe that stuff? That stuff is obviously ridiculous, you say. 

Goebbels, who helped enact the  regime's ideology about a master race,  

had several deformities, right? Clubbed foot, walked in a brace. 

Yet, he's helping preside over the murder  of people because they are disabled. 

They're singled out solely for their disabilities  to be sent to the gas chambers or to be sent to  

imprisonment. And he's one of them. So we  say, "Could he really have believed this? 

I mean, wasn't he a cynic enacting this? How could he not understand that these are  

real people? Because he's one of them."  The answer is, "Yes, he was a Nazi." 

These people were communists and he was a Nazi. And there were a lot of them, and they had  

doubts. They suffered bouts of doubt. A lot  of events contradicted the official ideology. 

Innocent people, innocent family members,  themselves innocent, went to the gallows,  

got the bullet in the back of the neck. So you say, God, the belief. 

They couldn't have believed this stuff. And yet  they did. The main thing that we know from the  

archives that were formerly secret, that we get  into when they're declassified, is that the Nazis  

were Nazis and the communists were communists. So here we have this problem with socialism.  

Socialism means many different things.  A communist party is building socialism.  

Why? Because their view of the world is:  feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism. 

First they have to destroy capitalism to  get to socialism, and then socialism can  

eventually get you to communism. So the communist party must first  

build socialism. How do you build socialism?  It doesn't exist. So how do we know what it  

looks like? How do you get there? They don't  know. The only thing they know is that it's  

not capitalism. So let's destroy capitalism.  That will be the step to get us to socialism. 

Capitalism has markets, we'll have planning. Capitalism has private property, we'll have  

state property or collective property. Capitalism has bourgeois parliaments where  

they vote and they claim it's democracy, but  it's only for the property-holding bourgeoisie. 

So we will have a dictatorship of the  proletariat. Everything. Capitalism has  

wage slavery. That is the story. And real slavery. 

Exactly. Everything is to eradicate  capitalism to get you to socialism. 

It turns out that doesn't deliver  freedom, it doesn't deliver prosperity,  

and it doesn't deliver peace. It delivers  massive state-ization. Because once you  

eliminate private property and individual choice,  the state is now responsible for everything. 

It delivers ration tickets and the Gulag. You get a bunch of socialists that break  

from this. They say Lenin is wrong.  Eradicating private property, markets,  

civil liberties, and parliament is a mistake. We have to accept private property, markets,  

capitalism, and parliaments because  that's the only way to get to freedom. 

Otherwise, you get to the Leninist dictatorship,  total state-ization, Gulag, and ration tickets. 

These people are denounced as revisionists,  like Eduard Bernstein in Germany, for example. 

The Swedish Social Democrats, they say, "We  accept capitalism, markets, and private property. 

We want to redistribute the income because  it's tough for some people to make their  

way in the system. The system produces  inequality. Let's make it more equal with  

social engineering redistribution. But we keep capitalism, we keep  

markets and private property, and we keep  democracy, voting, rule of law, et cetera. 

We'll evolve towards full  socialism and eventually communism,  

but we will not do it the Leninist way." There's this huge break in the socialist movement  

between those who are real revolutionaries  and want to overthrow, eradicate capitalism  

to get to the just and prosperous and peaceful  future, and those who want to use the existing  

system and evolve, embrace, and accept it. The left has a civil war, a civil war  

on the left which is still going on. It’s between those who say capitalism  

is evil and must go vs. capitalism has a lot of  problems, but we need it in order to have peace  

and prosperity, in order to have freedom. We need to manage it better, redistribute. 

This civil war on the left,  which arises in real time,  

the critics of Lenin's revolution,  the German Social Democratic Party,  

people like Bernstein and the rest of them,  they are critics in real time of this. 

Yet, some of the critics who are what we would  call the social democrats of Europe… Lenin was  

also a member of the Social Democratic Party  of Russia, but the communist thing makes this  

divide between those who are serious about  destruction of capitalism and those who are,  

"revisionists", this denunciatory term. What happens is that some of the people  

who are in the revisionist camp begin to  flirt with the "capitalism is evil" analysis. 

They begin to truck with the communists that  they've broken from and are in civil war with. 

You get left-wing social democrats who are  closer to Lenin than they are to right-wing  

social democrats like Bernstein and the rest  who are pro-capitalism but pro-redistribution. 

This is confusing to people because  not everybody is a communist. 

Some people, like in Sweden, accept  private property and markets. 

But some of the people in Sweden seem to  go back on that promise of accepting it,  

and argue that if we don't get rid of capitalism  we're still going to end up with an evil system. 

This civil war on the left never gets resolved,  it's ongoing, and the right uses this confusion  

to paint everybody as anti-capitalism. The left gives them ammunition by talking  

about the evils of capitalism, even when they've  come along to accept private property and markets. 

You have this deep and  fundamental problem for the left. 

The tragedy of the left that it's never able to  overcome, even to this day, where it comes out and  

says, "No more anti-capitalism ever, that is over. That leads to death, bloodshed, Gulag,  

ration tickets, war that actually is worse than  the original problem it diagnosed." Think about  

Marx. Marx says that you get rid of private  property, markets, capitalism, and you're going  

to get freedom, you're going to get abundance. You  don't get that. People say, "Marx wanted freedom,  

he didn't want Stalin's dictatorship. It's not Marx who's the problem,  

it's Stalin who deformed Marx." We see this argument all the time. 

Stalin is a deformity, whereas Marx was  about freedom. Think about a nuclear bomb.  

You're going to do a nuclear bomb. You're going to nuke a population,  

but you don't want to kill any people. Your goal is to nuke them, but nobody  

dies. That's what you say. You're going to get  rid of capitalism, you're going to nuke them,  

but instead everybody's going to live. You give that order to your generals. 

You say, "Nuke them, but  everybody lives, nobody dies." 

They nuke them, and everybody  dies instead of everybody living. 

You say, "I never said to kill the  people, I said that they should live." 

But once you nuke capitalism, you're going to  lose freedom, you're going to lose the ability  

to have politics, you're going to end up  with some version of a Leninist system. 

The ideology is going to  drive that to the doubters. 

You're going to get a second wind  where you get Khrushchev, as you said. 

He comes into power, he denounces Stalin's crimes. He doesn't praise capitalism, private property,  

and markets. He doesn't undo collective farms.  He doesn't undo state ownership of property. 

He doesn't undo the planning  system. He just undoes Stalin's  

personality. He's trying to subtract… The  de-Stalinization is to take away Stalin. 

It's not to take away any of the  other attributes of the system. 

It's a second wind that it was Stalin who was  the problem, not the system that was the problem. 

So here we have the experience of going  through the horrors, then having those  

horrors publicly denounced within the party. The Secret Speech is not published in Soviet  

newspapers, but it's discussed  at party meetings in all locales. 

Within the Party, there's  a public dimension to this. 

All party members become familiar with  Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. 

They experience the horrors  in many cases firsthand. 

They enacted the horrors in many cases themselves. They then see this denounced as horror,  

and they get facts that they didn't know. They get a big picture view back onto this. 

Instead of saying, this system is evil, we made  a big mistake, we have to undo state ownership  

of property, we have to undo collective  farms, we have to undo the dictatorship…  

Instead of saying that, they say, "We get  a chance to do it right this time without  

the evil Stalin who messed it all up." The Khrushchev thing, the revelation of  

the horrors, the denunciation of the horrors,  ironically gives you the second wind of belief  

in the system that's going to last right  through Gorbachev, who's a Khrushchev-era baby. 

We have this with Xi Jinping. If you know the story of his father  

and of his own upbringing, they suffer massively  through Mao's regime and the Cultural Revolution.  

They're purged, they're humiliated. Yet,  instead of saying, "This system is horrible,  

if I ever get power, I'm going to undo this  system, which was so unjust to me and my family." 

Instead of that, "They say,  let's make this better. 

Let's not have the bad things that happened  under Mao, but let's keep all the good things,  

supposedly good things that happened,  including the Communist Party monopoly." 

That to us looks like the problem, and it wreaked  havoc in their lives, in their family's life,  

but to them, that's the solution. This is a paradoxical element of  

communism where its failures don't become  discrediting for so many of the people. 

They instead become a kind of second wind  once you acknowledge and denounce them. 

It's never the system at  fault, it's Stalin at fault. 

It's never the system at fault, it's Mao's  mistakes or excesses as they're called,  

that are at fault.

China actually did reform the system and they  didn't just discredit the Cultural Revolution. 

They said no, much of the planning and  state-owned enterprises was a mistaken idea. 

But I do have a different question. Wait, that's not exactly the way you  

described it. You have a point. You're onto  something, DK. But it needs to be qualified. 

What happens in Deng Xiaoping's case  is that the communists have unwittingly  

destroyed the planning system. They have sent down to the village  

people who do economic planning. They've sent them to manual labor. 

They have smashed them in the face  because they wear glasses, in many cases,  

and therefore they're putatively intellectuals. They've undermined their ability to continue  

the economic system as they had it. But if that's the reason why they  

weren't able to do planning, shouldn't  Stalin's purges and then World War II have  

also had the same effect on the Soviet Union? Not the political system. Deng Xiaoping never  

takes down the political system or the ideology. So you still have today the communist monopoly.  

Communism can fail at everything. It can  starve the people, it can kill the people. 

It only has to do one thing to survive:  suppress political alternatives. 

So during that peasant resistance to Stalin in  the collectivization episode that you referenced  

earlier, there's no political alternative. There's no other place for them to go and say,  

"We don't like the injustices of the tsarist  regime and we don't like what communism is doing. 

Therefore, there's something else that  we can go to that's an alternative." 

Communism has suppressed all the alternatives. It's either return to tsarism or keep communism. 

In the Chinese case, you  have something quite similar. 

They allow economic liberalization,  in part because they have no choice,  

but they don't allow political liberalization. They're able to "reform" by enabling the  

people to generate wealth, jobs,  prosperity through market behavior. 

It's mostly the peasant class in China. That then leads to family-owned businesses,  

which then leads to larger businesses. Society, not the Party,  

creates the miracle in China. The party tightens its grip because  

the ideology of the party is that when the  socioeconomic base has a lot of market in it,  

it's a threat to the party's rule. The party has to be even more vigilant  

against the capitalists in the society. It turns out that you get to Jiang Zemin,  

who is Deng Xiaoping's handpicked successor. Jiang Zemin sees that the private sector is  

becoming dominant in the country and that the  party's monopoly on power is under threat. 

Jiang Zemin decides he's gonna do  something called the Three Represents. 

He's gonna bring the millionaire  capitalists into the party. 

He's gonna make them party members. Instead of the party being against capitalists,  

the capitalists are gonna join the party, and this  is gonna somehow increase the party's leverage  

and control and transform the psychology  and behavior of the capital. Of course,  

it fails. Instead, the party members  are in cahoots with the millionaires. 

They begin to form their own businesses  by expropriating other people's property. 

The party begins to go dissolute in  an anti-Marxist fashion in terms of  

private property, wealth accumulation. So Xi Jinping comes along, predictably. 

He looks at Jiang Zemin's solution,  co-opt the millionaires into the  

party, and sees that it failed. Not only did it fail to transform  

the behavior of the private sector people,  it infected the behavior of the party people. 

Instead of bringing the capitalists  into the party, he's going to  

force the party back into capitalism. He's going to push the party into the private  

sector more strongly than it was before. Board  directors, party officials. CEO, party official.  

Private sector people who don't cooperate? Destroy them, make examples of them,  

including in the tech sector, so that people  get the message that the party is the boss here. 

You have a kind of natural progression  where you open up the system economically  

in order to drive jobs, prosperity,  wealth, because you've destroyed. 

People say the Communist Party brought  700-800 million people out of poverty. 

No, the Communist Party put  those people into poverty. 

Why are a billion plus people in poverty? Because  of the party's rule. It's the people themselves,  

they lift themselves out of poverty. The Communists have to reassert their control,  

their Leninist monopoly on power, because the  very thing that has rescued them—the diligence,  

entrepreneurialism, ingenuity of the  amazing Chinese people and of that  

society—is now a threat to Communist rule. I agree with the mechanism by which the  

growth happened, but I don't think it's the case  that it was their inability to have true Marxist  

communism which led to liberalization. If you look at the creation of these  

special economic zones, the imperative at  a national level that you must have growth,  

and then Deng's Southern tour… Jiang Zemin, he  tries after Tiananmen to clamp down on opening up. 

Deng says, "No, we must open up. If you don't, we’ll remove you." 

All of that is a sort of positive. Maybe positive is the wrong word, but… 

Policy driven, that’s true. It's a special effort you have to  

make towards economic liberalization. It didn't just happen by default. 

People really had to push for it. The alternative story, which it seems  

you're saying, is "No, it was just that they  physically could not enforce communism anymore." 

That's how it started, DK.  Let's go look at the facts. 

Why do you have a Special Economic Zone? 

Why can't every zone have market relations? Agreed, but then the creation of that  

zone had to be a proactive action. You’re doing this grudgingly. This  

is a grudging allowance of certain behavior.  You look at the decrees. You can trade onions,  

but you can't trade potatoes. Okay, you can trade potatoes,  

but you can trade only on Tuesdays and  Thursdays, not Monday, Wednesday and Friday. 

You can only have three employees per corporation. 

Right, so the decrees are all  grudging with very few exceptions. 

The society is forcing more  and more concessions onto  

the ideologues in the Marxist-Leninist system. At the beginning, it's launched by the party's  

grudging acceptance that the society is gonna  rebuild and not starve, through its own hard work. 

They've been through a couple of  famines here, really big famines. 

They don't have the state capacity to reimpose  the system immediately in the economic sphere,  

so they grudgingly make concessions,  very few but some, in the market sphere. 

Gradually, that expands over time as more and more  people push against the system's restrictions. 

It's a policy-driven story  in part, but not as the lead. 

It's a policy-driven story as the  following of the entrepreneurialism  

and the hard work of the society. But that pushback is coming from within. 

This is your thesis in Uncivil Society, right? Yes. 

It is coming from within the system. Because they could have… In 1976,  

they're like North Korea, literally. North  Korea still exists. There's no reason… 

North Korea doesn't have the Cultural Revolution  where it annihilates its state capacity in a  

Maoist frenzy in order for Mao to, in his mind,  undo his rivals, unbalance and destabilize them. 

But they have famines. Yes, they do. But they still  

have the mechanisms of economic control  and they have a massive black market. 

You’ve got to remember that communism  doesn't have legal markets for the most part. 

It has restricted legal markets, again grudgingly. Household plots… But for the most part, it has a  

lot of illegal market activity,  including in the state sector. 

The state sector gets an order to produce  certain numbers of large quantitative output  

for the military-industrial sector, but it  only gets allocated 25% of its ball bearings. 

It has to assign its supply department  on the black market to go out and find  

the other ball bearings that it's  not assigned from central planning. 

You get a massive black market in the system, not  just at the level of little people in the village,  

but at the top level of the military-industrial  complex to make the system work. 

So when market behavior is grudgingly accepted,  what that does is it brings market behavior out  

of the shadows into a legal or quasi-legal realm. You're not inventing market behavior from scratch. 

You're surfacing it in some ways. So party officials and industrial  

officials have market behavior in their firms to  grease the system and to meet their output quotas. 

I agree with your general point that  how any nation gets wealthy is not  

by the government but because of the thrift and  entrepreneurialism and hard work of individuals. 

But that's also true in  Western capitalist countries. 

In those countries, we also  have a lot of stupid policies… 

Yes, as we sit here and speak. When we say America is a capitalist  

country, what we could say is the  government or all the bureaucrats,  

they'll try to put in all these regulations. It's only grudgingly that they will accede to…  

We could point to a bunch of stupid policies  in America that are equivalent to where they  

try to outlaw the potatoes and the onions,  but they could only outlaw the potatoes. 

So any "capitalist society", is just a case where  the government had to cede some amount of control. 

We give credit to capitalist countries  in the West for saying, at least the  

government wasn't maximally stupid. Fair point, DK. We often exaggerate  

the role of policy in all realms because we do  policy ourselves or we talk to policymakers. 

We have a bias towards the causality of policy. America has been 25% of the  

global economy since 1880. We've had no income tax, we've had income tax. 

We've had high income tax,  we've had low income tax. 

We've had tariffs, we've had fewer tariffs. We've had all sorts of regulations,  

we've had deregulation. For 150 years, more or less, we've been around  

25% of global GDP, 5% of the population, through  every imaginable variety of policy regimes. 

That doesn't mean that policy is inconsequential. It matters for a lot of players in the system. 

It matters for those who get the  policy turned in their direction,  

the subsidies or the tax breaks, or the taxes  on their competitors or whatever it might be. 

There's a lot of gaming of  the system and it does matter. 

But in the larger picture of things, you can't  create the wealth of the United States over  

those 150 years, that global economic dominance,  and you can't strangle it, in the policy realm. 

You can affect it, but you can  neither create nor strangle it. 

We have to understand in the communist  sense that incentives matter. 

When you create incentives for officials to  increase GDP and to increase job creation,  

and that's how they get rewarded, you're  going to get a lot of that behavior. 

The Party will do that, not immediately. Remember, immediately they're  

kind of flat on their back. They've had this Gang of Four. 

Deng Xiaoping has come back  from having been purged. 

They're on the verge of another potential famine. Per capita GDP under Mao is $200 during the  

Cultural Revolution. $200 is the annual  per capita GDP of a billion people,  

or slightly under. You think, "that's insane".  That's where all the people are in poverty when  

I was saying the regime put them in poverty. They're a little bit flat on their back,  

which creates an opening. It creates this grudging dynamic  

of "we're going to hold power and we're going to  allow economic entrepreneurialism to take place,  

but we're gonna control it. We’re going to control it  

with special economic zones…" In any country in the world today  

where there's a lot of poverty, the reason  the poverty exists is also because of policy. 

To the extent that poverty has been  removed, it is because of some combination  

of human capital and policy got less stupid. If we're going to complain about a country like  

Bangladesh being poor—and there are  many poor countries in the world…  

Maybe we're going in circles here. A different question I wanna ask is… 

No, you have a point. We're not disagreeing. I’m  just trying to say that we give too much credit to  

the Communist Party for what's happened in China  and not enough blame for what's happened in China. 

This is part of the dynamic of us seeing  communism as potentially successful. 

We criticize these fools who thought that  the Stalin regime was not going to kill  

them, and was not going to produce famine. Yet we have this narrative that the Communist  

Party produced an economic miracle in China. I’m sorry, the Communist Party took  

advantage of the economic miracle in China. It played a part in it, expropriated the hard  

work of many people, and stole the businesses. A lot of those local officials just stole the  

land and stole the businesses from  people who'd created a success. 

This is the thing that the Party  did that's really important. 

Deng Xiaoping first went to Japan in early  '79, before he came to the US and met  

Carter and put on the cowboy hat, that gigantic  ten-gallon hat that was bigger than he was. 

He was like five gallons, the hat was like ten  gallons. He goes to Japan. You're looking at  

Japan, DK, and it lost the war. It was literally incinerated in  

the American use of atomic weapons. It was destroyed, it lost the war,  

and it's rising to be the second-largest  economy in the world. What happened? How  

was that possible? How could Japan rise from  the ashes, literally, when China won the war? 

It was on the winning side and  it has a $200 per capita GDP. 

Deng Xiaoping looks this over, and  he says the answer is that Japan is  

partners with America, not with the Soviet Union. Deng Xiaoping is going to divorce the Soviet Union  

economically, and he's going to marry the US. Deng gets most-favored-nation status in 1980,  

thanks to Jimmy Carter. The communist regime in  

Beijing gets most-favored-nation status, which  has to be renewed every year and is renewed  

every single year until 2000-2001,  when they're admitted to the WTO. 

That's a Clinton initiative that happens  right when Bush is going to come to office. 

The secret sauce is, you have to manufacture  and export to the American domestic market  

because the American middle class is insatiable. They will buy anything as long as the quality is  

high and the price is low. Japan did this. Japan's  two former colonies, Taiwan and South Korea,  

followed in Japan's footsteps. China's going to do this too. 

We're going to use this Japanese  model and the American middle class,  

and their insatiable overconsumption, is  going to create the Chinese middle class. 

So this is what the party does, this geopolitical  reorientation from a Soviet economic model to a  

Japan-style export-led partnership with  the US domestic market and middle class. 

They have a couple of tricks that are really  important. They have Hong Kong. Hong Kong is  

a British-controlled, rule of law, international  financial order that allocates capital based upon  

risk and return, not Communist Party dictates. Gorbachev's Soviet Union,  

they have nothing like Hong Kong. The only reason China has Hong Kong is  

because after World War II—when Truman announced  that Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists were  

going to accept the Japanese surrender in  Hong Kong—the British sent their boats in and  

took Hong Kong back themselves, so that when Mao  defeated Chiang Kai-shek he didn't have Hong Kong. 

The British had Hong Kong, and they created  this international financial system that  

Mao's successors would be able to use. Had the British not done this, there would  

be no Hong Kong and there would be no Chinese  miracle in the Deng Xiaoping and after period. 

The other thing they have is overseas Chinese  who know the culture, speak the language,  

and are going to do the FDI, again routed through  Hong Kong. So you have Taiwan. Ironically,  

the failure to win the civil war 100%… We  think of the Korean peninsula as divided. 

We think of this partition of the Korean  peninsula, but China is also partitioned. 

There's also Taiwan, still  partitioned to this day. 

Taiwan is the FDI that's going to come  in, through Hong Kong, routed through  

into the special economic zones on a risk-reward,  capitalist market basis, not a communist basis. 

Furthermore, they have the Japanese  war guilt because the Japanese  

committed those atrocities in China. So the Japanese are going to make up for  

what they did by helping rebuild China. Again, the FDI and the tech transfer,  

like it's coming from Taiwan. So Taiwan and Japan, this partitioned China,  

and this war guilt, through the British Hong Kong  is going to go into the special economic zones,  

manufacture things like the Japanese, and then  export them to the American domestic consumers. 

It's going to be t-shirts at the beginning  and then they're going to, like the Japanese,  

and then they're going to climb the value chain  until it's got the highest value-added products. 

Then supply chains are going to change as a  result, and nothing is made in one place anymore,  

and the world gets very complicated. The point being is that Deng Xiaoping did  

that. That was intentional. That's the credit  that the party deserves and the party never  

gets because it's a story not of the party's  rule alone, but of British Hong Kong, Taiwan,  

Japan, United States domestic market, etc. So how do you get rich in the modern world?  

You sell to America. Those countries that  are partners with America and that are able  

to compete. The Chinese deserve credit. They can  manufacture higher-quality, lower-cost products  

that American consumers will buy. American consumers are not  

forced to buy Chinese products. They're just better, and they're cheaper. 

So they buy them because it's a  market and there's competition. 

Bangladesh can do this in textiles, you referenced  Bangladesh, which is how I got launched on  

this reverie that I hope is now ending. My point being is that the East Asian miracle  

is Japan selling to the American domestic  market, followed by South Korea and Taiwan  

doing the same trick, and then followed by Deng  Xiaoping's Communist China, the same exact trick,  

filtered through British Hong Kong. The problem with the Chinese one  

is that they're not allies, former  enemies who are allies like Japan. 

They are former allies who are now  enemies who have done this magic sauce. 

Now we're in the pickle that  we're in as a result of this. 

But the formula… This is where the communists  deserve the credit that they never get, whereas  

they get credit for things that they didn't do. Suppose Stalin had lost the succession battle  

in 1924 and somebody else is in power, but he's  still on the Central Committee or the Politburo. 

It's 1930 and suppose the other person is also  ruthless and is one by one getting rid of every  

single person in the inner circle. What would a Stalin-type figure  

have done if he found himself on the  periphery of somebody else's regime? 

Counterfactuals are really  critical for historical thought. 

A lot of historians are pedantic about this. They say we're against counterfactuals,  

it's just speculation. But every single one of  

them is a practitioner. Why? If you say that  Stalin caused collectivization, that means  

without Stalin there's no collectivization. If you say Hitler caused World War II,  

you're doing the counterfactual. You're saying no Hitler, no World War II. 

Just to put a finer point on my question,  I mean it not just in the sense of whether  

collectivization would have happened, but more in  the sense of, how would he personally have avoided  

the fate of Bukharin and Kamenev and Zinoviev? Potentially, he’s thinking, "I'm going to get  

purged someday, I don't want to  be the toady to somebody else." 

How would he personally have navigated  the sort of power struggle at being what  

Zinoviev was to Stalin or Bukharin was to Stalin? This is a question about how do you become Stalin? 

Could there have been another  Stalin besides Stalin? 

A lot of people will argue that you have  this formative period when you're growing up,  

your parents, your schooling, the influences of  your peers, and you become a certain personality. 

Part of it is genetic, and then a lot of it is the  environment, and you have this then personality. 

So you have to understand how the  person formed, whether it's Picasso  

as a painter or Stalin as a dictator. Then if you understand their personality,  

you'll understand what they do in power. The problem with that analysis is that Stalin  

is not Stalin when he first gets into power. It's the experience of being in  

power that makes Stalin, Stalin. It's the building of the dictatorship  

within the dictatorship, and it's the enacting  of that kind of power that makes Stalin who he  

is. It's sitting in that chair. It's being  in the Kremlin, running a Leninist regime,  

and being responsible for Russian power in the  world against Nazi Germany, the UK, the US. 

People say about Xi Jinping now, "You know,  Xi Jinping has made a lot of mistakes. 

If he had just kept to Deng Xiaoping's  policies, China would be much better off. 

We'd still be in a kind of  détente or partnership with China. 

Instead, we're at loggerheads  and there's potential war." 

The problem with that analysis is,  "What would Xi Jinping have done if  

he were the number one guy under  Deng Xiaoping instead of Deng?" 

Maybe he would have done Deng's  policies just like Deng did. 

More importantly, what would Deng do if  he were alive today instead of Xi Jinping? 

Would he do what Deng did in the 80s and 90s,  or would he do what Xi Jinping is doing today? 

In other words, how much is the  personality and how much is the system? 

How much is formation before you  get into the position of power,  

and how much is the circumstances and  responding to those circumstances and  

the exigencies of the moment and the way the  system operates and the place the system is and  

what the larger context in the world looks like? Here you have a Communist party that seizes power. 

As I said, unlike the case of Bavaria, southern  Germany, northern Italy, Hungary, it holds  

power. It doesn't just seize power. The Paris  Commune, 1870-71, they seized power in Paris. 

Then they were destroyed, put  up against the wall and shot. 

They seize and they hold power. But they're in this peasant country,  

and the peasant has the land  de facto and they're Marxists. 

They believe that the base, the  socioeconomic base, the class relations,  

determine the superstructure or the politics. In Marxism, the base, the socioeconomic base,  

gives you the superstructure. Politics depends on it, it's  

an outcome of what the base is. So you have a de facto capitalist base. 

I don't mean whether they would  have done collectivization. 

I mean how would he personally…  Because he wants power. 

I get that. He makes this decision.  All of them want to get rid of  

capitalist relations in the countryside. Every single one of them wants to do that. 

They're all communists,  they're all Marxist Leninists. 

But they don't think it can be done. They think if you try it, you'll fail.  

He goes and tries it. He creates even more  destabilization than they had predicted. 

But he just powers through and  gets there to the end and succeeds. 

Most of them are grateful that he's pulled this  off because they thought it couldn't be done. 

Your question is, "who else could  have become Stalin in that position?" 

Who else among the Marxist-Leninists could have  been the guy who says, "Whether we can do this  

or not, we have to do this because we can't  have a socioeconomic base that's capitalist  

and have the communist regime survive." They were all ready to say that,  

but they weren't all ready to do that. Moreover, after he did it, they had criticized  

him during the process while he was doing it. He was the only one in his mind who  

was Marxist-Leninist enough to get it  done, and they were all carping at him. 

This is where you begin to see the paranoia,  suspicion being magnified, where he then,  

in a few years after collectivization is more  or less finished, he's going to go after them. 

So you needed a person who could  have felt in their head that  

this was not only necessary, but doable. Someone who would undertake those risks,  

power through no matter how much famine and  resistance and upheaval and criticism there was. 

Someone who would then come out the  other side of that as the victor with  

this gigantic secret police that was  really small but got really big in  

the process of doing the very thing  that people said you couldn't do. 

Then having all of that and not destroying any  rivals and going from dictatorship to despotism… 

So you would need a person who was  capable of being Stalin in that group,  

not from outside that group but inside that group. Then that person would either not use that power  

to destroy everybody else—not yearn for despotism  but be satisfied with dictatorship where others  

exercised power and their domains—and yet  still be able to hold on to the system. 

Was there such a person in the circle? If the answer is no, could that person  

have emerged in the process of doing it? I guess my question is slightly different. 

Even if such a person did not exist,  suppose Stalin already exists,  

he did all the stuff, and it's 1934. It seems like Stalin's starting  

to go a little Great Terror-y soon. Another copy of Stalin is in the Politburo. 

Just out of a sense of self-preservation,  they're like, "In a couple of years,  

I don't want to be writing my own  confession and ending up in the Gulag." 

Is Stalin, being the power player that he  was and knowing how to align factions against  

each other to his own advantage in the very  end, if somebody like him was in the Politburo,  

what would they have done? Or were they already there  

and there was nothing they could do by this point? This is a question for every single dictatorship. 

Why didn't somebody just kill Stalin? He was gonna kill them, kill them all. 

Why didn't they just kill him and save themselves? During the 1920s, Stalin resigned six times,  

three times in writing and three  times orally, between 1923 and 1928. 

Every time those guys around him beg him to stay. Not only do they fail to try to push him out,  

but when he himself volunteers  to go out, they beg him to stay. 

Then he kills all of them within 10 years. Every one of them,  

just with a few exceptions, is dead. Jeez, so what were those guys thinking? 

It's clear that Stalin was not Stalin yet. If they knew in the 20s that in the 30s he  

was gonna murder them all, maybe they  would have acted the way you said. 

He becomes Stalin in this process. He's not  Stalin yet. That's a really important argument  

that I make in the book. Today you look at Putin.  Putin is ruining Russia. Why doesn't somebody just  

assassinate him? Xi Jinping, he's hurting China.  He's making China enemies everywhere around the  

world when China was, until recently, popular.  China was 75% favorable globally. Now it's 25%,  

more or less, favorable globally. That's Xi  Jinping's doing. How can the elites around  

him let him do that? Around Putin,  

the people are falling out of windows. Instead of falling out of the windows themselves,  

why don't they push him out the window? Khamenei in Iran, he's brought ruin  

on the country. Why don't they take  

him out and try to save themselves and  save the country, not just themselves? 

In other words, they can be patriotic  as well as securing self-survival. 

The answer is it rarely happens. One, you have a collective action problem. 

Sorry, why doesn't this prevent… People  are trying to kill the Tsar constantly. 

They're killing Russian  ministers in the tsarist regime. 

There are more assassination attempts on  Hitler, some of which come very close,  

than by far on Stalin. Also, Mussollini, but never  

against Stalin. Why is that? Stalin is the guy who is  

building and personifying the system. The people around Stalin can see that  

he is unusually good at dictatorship. He is just carrying this entire system  

on his back through thick and thin, killing  enemies, liquidating the kulaks, collectivizing  

agriculture, building a military-industrial  complex, defeating Hitler in war. 

I mean, how much better from the system's logic,  not from humanity's logic, not from the point of  

view of the kind of values that you and I share,  how much better are you going to do than Stalin? 

So there is a way in which  they're pygmies and he's Stalin. 

Of course, they know that  they can't do what he does. 

If they tried to unseat him, they might  save their lives but they might lose  

the revolution, the system and the radiant  future, the overthrow of capitalism,  

the abundance, peace, paradise on earth. That's a big move to lose if you believe  

in that, if your life is about  that and you're dedicated to that. 

But in addition, you have a collective  action problem that's really important. 

Let's suppose that I'm in a  Stalinist regime with you. 

You're a functionary and I'm a functionary. Stalin's collectivizing agriculture, which  

means he's destroying productivity,  and we're going to be poor. 

All the way through the Brezhnev period, we're  gonna be importing wheat even though we have this  

gigantic agricultural belt, wheat belt. Some people knew in real time  

that this was self-harm. I come to you and I say,  

"This Stalin guy, he's wrecking everything. We got to take him down." You agree with  

me. But you know what? You don't know. Maybe  I've been sent by Stalin to test your loyalty. 

Maybe I'm provoking you to reveal your disloyalty.  Maybe I'm not being sincere. You agree with me,  

but instead of saying yes, let's do it,  immediately you run to Stalin and you say  

that this Kotkin guy is talking behind your  back about how we need to take you down. 

It’s self-preservation, you're going to  preserve yourself because you don't trust. 

There's a lack of trust  inside these dictatorships. 

If you knew that Stalin hadn't sent me for sure  100%, you would say, "You know, you're right. You  

got a point there. What can we do about this?" But you know that Stalin is constantly doing  

these provocations, or you suspect he is. You know that he's got people, provocateurs who  

are around the system doing things like this. The secret police are listening  

in on your phone conversations. The driver of your car works for Stalin,  

doesn't work for you, and is reporting  any overheard conversations in the car. 

And the maid in your apartment  is also working for the secret  

police and reporting up the chain of command. So the system that you're in enmeshes you in this  

distrust, in this surveillance and distrust. So what looks like, "Geez, let's just take  

him down and save our own life,  let alone save the country." 

Yes, it's logical, but that's not  the kind of life that they led. 

We would think that based upon the kind  of lives and the system that we live in. 

But there's a bunch of revolutionaries who try  to kill the Tsar and sometimes succeed. They're  

just random people. They're not people in  the regime, they're just random people. 

Yes. Why doesn't a kulak, one of the  

hundred million enslaved people, go out and… The Tsar has less security than Stalin does. 

Didn't you say that in 1928 he had like one  bodyguard when he would go to his dacha? 

The bodyguard stuff increases over time, but  the regime is walled off from the people. 

Stalin doesn't go out in public. He's not one of these populist types in public  

who's bathing in the adulation of the crowd. He's in the office, he's at the dacha, he's at  

the party meeting, he's at the party congress. He's not putting himself at risk. 

Even so, it is paradoxical because  when Hitler goes to make a speech,  

every year Hitler makes a speech in Munich. It's known when he's going to make the speech.  

It's announced in the paper. There are a  couple of assassination attempts on Hitler,  

one of which takes place in the hall where  he's going to do, where someone plants a  

bomb. It's a working-class guy. He plants a  bomb there and the bomb goes off, it blows up. 

Hitler left the hall more quickly than  anticipated, based on the schedule that people  

thought he would be there longer. It was quicker.  He was out and the bomb exploded and he survived. 

There are military officials who tried  to kill Hitler, famously, in 1944. 

They plant a bomb under the  table which also goes off. 

It almost gets him but doesn't get  him, during a military briefing. 

There are attempts on Hitler's life both from  the society and from inside the regime. Stalin  

doesn't have this. In fact, the people  inside the regime are killing themselves. 

When they see that Stalin is leading them down a  blind alley of murder and ration tickets in Gulag. 

They kill themselves rather than kill Stalin. Again, there's something special about the  

mentality of these communists. There's also something about  

Stalin's success as well as the threat  that he represents to these individuals. 

Still, it is mysterious because there  were opportunities and people didn't  

take up the opportunities. Very few… There was no  

serious assassination attempt on Stalin. The very few times when they accused somebody  

of doing an assassination… There were shots fired  at a boat when Stalin was on holiday in the south. 

It was not because Stalin was in the boat. It was because the boat was not in the system  

as marked as allowed to use that waterway. They were just performing their duties as  

border guards shooting at the boat. It got dressed up as an assassination  

attempt and people were arrested and  executed and it was publicized as such. 

They didn't know that Stalin was in the boat. You've written other books about the  

collapse of the Soviet Union. There's this last ditch effort  

in the Eastern Bloc where there's falling  productivity, to borrow more money, invest  

more into finding this last ditch technological  miracle that can cure all their problems. 

How similar is that, in your opinion,  to what's happening in China? 

The dissimilarity is that while Eastern Europe was  struggling to export and they had a trade deficit,  

China, many people argue, is exporting too much. Do you see any similarity between where Eastern  

Europe was in 1989 versus where China is today? Or are you not as concerned about China right now? 

It's a very difficult question to answer very  briefly, but it's a really important question. 

There are tremendous differences,  of course, civilizational  

differences let alone system differences. We wouldn't want to elide those differences. 

What's similar is the  Marxist-Leninist monopoly on power. 

People ask me, is China a Marxist-Leninist regime? I usually say it's a Leninist  

regime because that's undisputable. Do they believe in Marxism or not? People disagree  

on this. How many true believers are there? Is Xi Jinping a true believer? 

That's a difficult argument to win because  the evidence is contradictory and because  

we don't know the inside of the system. It's still in power, it hasn't fallen. 

But it's clearly a Leninist system. A Leninist system can't be half-pregnant.  

You can't be half-communist. You either  have a communist monopoly or you don't. 

What happens in communist political reform,  not economic reform where they allow some  

market behavior, but where you liberalize the  system and you open it up politically… You say,  

DK, let's have debate inside the party. Let's allow pluralism inside the party's rule,  

meaning we're going to keep the party but we're  going to allow different tendencies in the party. 

The problem with that is some  wiseacre raises their hand and  

says, "I don't want the party. I want another  party. I don't want the Communist Party. 

I want a Social Democratic party, or I want a  right-wing party, or I want a centrist party." 

And you say, "No, no, no,  that's not the rules here. 

The rule is only debate within the party's  monopoly, not that you can have another party." 

What happens is there's no way for them  to open debate and then to put a lid on  

the debate. It becomes a Pandora's box. You  can't be half-communist, half-monopoly. You  

either have the monopoly or you don't. Every time they liberalize politically,  

the system liquidates itself. Hungary in '56, Czechoslovakia  

in '68, and Gorbachev. Had Gorbachev not happened,  

China might have done its own Gorbachev. Had they not seen Gorbachev accidentally  

liquidate the party, they might have done  political reform, opened up the party,  

and watched the thing unravel. Or they would have had a crackdown  

and put the lid back on much bigger  than the Tiananmen episode in June 1989. 

They're not going to do political reform because  they know from studying the Gorbachev case,  

which everybody studies in party school where  all the cadres have to go to be trained. 

They're not going to open up the system  politically because that's suicide. 

They're not going to commit suicide  like what happened with Gorbachev. 

This means their policy options, their  menu of policy options, is limited. 

They can open up the economy, but if it gets too  open and too liberalized, too many people with  

independent sources of power and wealth, too  many Jack Ma’s, they lose control potentially. 

They can open up the system economically, but  then they have to somehow reimpose controls. 

But if they reimpose too many controls, the GDP  goes down and they don't have the job creation. 

You have this constant back and forth of  how much economic liberalization you can  

have before it becomes a threat, or how  little economic liberalization you can  

have before it becomes a threat to your  ability to create jobs and wealth. That's  

the dilemma they're in. The Soviets in the  '70s and '80s were looking at the system. 

They didn't want to change  the system Gorbachev-style. 

They didn't want to liberalize it politically. They were willing to introduce some market  

economic liberalization, some market incentives. They tried that in '65, it actually didn't work. 

Then the Prague Spring happened in '68  and scared the bejesus out of them. 

Reform looked like the end of the system. They tried a little bit of economic  

liberalization. It didn't work. They didn't want  to open up the system politically. So what's left?  

Technological fantasies. Maybe technology can  perfect planning. All the pathologies of the  

planned economy, all the inefficiencies of the  planned economy can be overcome with computers. 

Maybe if we invest heavily in tech, we  don't have to make the hard choices of  

deep and fundamental structural change which  would end our party's monopoly. We can keep  

the party. We can keep the party's monopoly. We can even keep the state-owned economy, but we  

can just tweak it with the tech and supercharge it  or even turbocharge it and make it work that way. 

Computers, tech, will save us from the hard  choices of deep structural reform which will  

threaten our power. We know how that worked. It  didn't work. Now you're looking at China today. 

You have a Communist Party monopoly. You can't  be half-pregnant. You can't open up politically.  

How are you going to reintroduce dynamism? How are you going to get the GDP growth? 

How are you going to get job creation? How are you going to get societal buy-in? 

If you go too far in that direction,  that could threaten the regime. 

If you don't go far enough… So we got tech. The tech can make our  

dictatorship function better. Not just our economy, our productivity, our job  

creation, managing through the demographic crisis,  not just the economic and social benefits from  

tech that tech could deliver…Tech could maybe make  our communist dictatorship immune from challenges  

because surveillance is all-encompassing, because  of our ability to spot things before they happen. 

So you can see where they would be so seduced,  so tempted to believe that tech is the solution. 

Here's the problem with that argument. First, it didn't work the last time. 

That doesn't mean it won't work this  time, but the track record, even though  

it's a small number of cases, is not good. But the other problem is political legitimacy.  

You can't get political legitimacy. You might  have thought that, "Oh, geez, if the GDP grows,  

that'll give us legitimacy." Then the GDP stops growing and  

you no longer have the economic benefits  to claim that that's why you're in power. 

But do you need it? Stalin didn't have strong  growth in the '20s and '30s, and it seems like  

you just double down on repression. If you double down on the NKVD…  

The Tsar actually had 2% growth up until 1917. They're dead, and their system is gone. 

It's fundamentally a deficit  of political legitimacy. 

We talk about Iran today and how Russia and China  didn't even help them with any military support or  

economic support while they're under tremendous  strain from Israel rolling back Iranian power. 

So they kind of got betrayed  by their strategic partners. 

The strategic partnership among the authoritarian  regimes is a fake. That's true. It is a fake.  

They're out for themselves. They're opportunistic,  and they will help the others to the extent that  

they feel it's helping for themselves. The day that they feel it's not helping  

themselves, forget it. There's a deeper problem  there. What the Iranian regime needs is political  

legitimacy. That's what it doesn't have.  It's not just a failure economically. 

It's not just a failure in  security. In its foreign  

policy terms. It's hated by its own people. It's got maybe 20% support in the population. 

A lot of people are indifferent but  a majority of the people despise this  

regime and want to see it go. They're patriots for Iran,  

but they detest the mullah's clerical regime. Neither Russia nor China can give political  

legitimacy to Iran. They can give dual-use  technology. They can give them missiles.  

They can give them anti-missile defense. They can never give them political legitimacy. 

That's the vulnerability, which is  why Iran is on the precipice now. 

Because the regime is illegitimate  and the regime knows that it's  

illegitimate in the eyes of the people. I guess we'd like to think that's what matters. 

But historically it just seems like when  authoritarians crack down really hard,  

it kind of just works. Right? That's why they have gigantic  

repressive apparatuses. People talk  about a bargain. The Chinese made a  

bargain or the Russians made a bargain. The people gave up their freedom and the  

regime provides a higher standard of living.  So there's this bargain. There is no bargain.  

Because if the regime fails to raise the standard  of living, the people can't sue them in court. 

They can't say, "You didn't live  up to your end of the bargain. 

We gave away our freedom, but you didn't deliver  on your part of the bargain, so the deal is over. 

You're out of power now because you  didn't live up to your bargain." Instead,  

they repress. They bring out the  batons. They bring out the water cannon. 

They bring out the disappearances  where people are arrested in cause. 

They're not even indicted,  they just disappear them. 

You have this huge repressive apparatus,  and it seems to work, especially when you  

have this moment where you fail to live  up to some of the promises that you made. 

The challenge for them is that  somebody has to do the repression. 

The repressive apparatus is not a machine.  It's not AI. It's not something which is  

mechanical. It's people. It's people who grow up  in neighborhoods, come from villages, and went to  

schools with other people. This brings us back to  

the tsarist regime where we started. The tsarist secret police wasn't big enough to  

keep the lid on, so they had to use the military. The military was a peasant army. They were  

peasants in uniform. The working class, including  women, was striking for bread in the capital and  

marching in the capital for bread in 1917. The military was told to shoot them. These  

are elite military units. Shoot these workers.  They're peasants, and you think, "Okay, peasants,  

they'll shoot workers. No love lost." The workers  were peasants yesterday. Some of them were still  

peasants who went back to the villages where  these soldiers were from, during downtime at  

the factory, during harvest time. They were  the same people. The army decided not to shoot. 

There came a point where the regime  called out the repression, and the  

repressors had agency and didn't repress. That's what happens in these cases. 

You never know when it's going to happen. It's very hard to predict beforehand. 

But there comes a moment where the people who are  supposed to do the shooting decide not to shoot. 

The people who are supposed to do  the arresting decide not to arrest. 

The people who are doing the  surveillance decide to stop. 

You have this huge repressive  apparatus, and it works until the moment  

the people in it decide not to do it anymore. That's where the political legitimacy  

variable is ultimately decisive. Because those people who were killing  

under communism and collectivizing those villages  and dekulakizing and killing the people in their  

native village that they had grown up with… If  they hadn't done that, the regime couldn't have  

done this. The regime couldn't have collectivized.  Stalin wasn't out there shooting people. 

He was signing the decree, which  then got communicated through the  

system to the point of the activist who  enacted it or not, as the case might be. 

When they don't enact, your power evaporates.  It's like a bank run. You look at the bank,  

and you think, "Wow, that's pretty solid. They  got these neoclassical columns. It's all made  

out of stone. Looks really impressive.  This bank is really solid." One day,  

it gets in people's heads that the  bank might not have your money. 

The bank might not be good in  reality for your paper holdings. 

You rush to the bank to try to get your money  out before that money is gone or doesn't exist. 

Everybody gets that idea at the same time,  not just one person, and you get a bank run. 

This really solid institution with these  neoclassical stone columns turns out to  

evaporate, evanescent. You can have a political  

bank run in the repressive apparatus. They cease thinking that they should kill people  

like themselves on behalf of a system that they  are no longer loyal to, no longer adhering to. 

That can happen in the forces of order, as  we call them, in the repressive apparatus. 

It can happen inside the elite. Because when the leader gives the order,  

it's got to go through the whole chain of command. The leader doesn't give the order to the soldier. 

It goes to the one boss, the subordinate to that  boss, the subordinate… Anywhere along the chain  

of command, there can be disloyalty and revolt. There can be what we call political defection. 

What motivates, what  triggers, political defection? 

The lack of legitimacy, political illegitimacy. People are not going to die for something  

that they no longer believe in. So that's a really big problem  

that the communist regime can't solve with tech. You say, "Well, the tech could produce power and  

prosperity and China could relegitimize its  rule just like it did with economic growth. 

The economic growth did it for 30-40 years  and that's how the regime legitimated itself. 

The tech will do that for the next 30-40 years." The answer is, that hasn't happened yet. 

Maybe it can do that and maybe it  can't, but it's never permanent. 

What's permanent is power rooted in the people. What's permanent is their real citizens. They have  

real freedoms. They have the right to vote. Now, they can't get what they want. 

They go to the polls and they see bad candidate,  worse candidate, even worse candidate. 

But they can punish what they don't  like. They can exercise that agency.  

They can be citizens. They can realize their  citizenship, just like we do as consumers in  

the marketplace, consumers of podcasts. That's where you get legitimacy from,  

where the system enables people, opportunity at  home, opportunity for people who otherwise don't  

have opportunity. That's legitimacy. That's  priceless. China doesn't have that. Russia  

doesn't have that. Stalin had that legitimacy for  a time based upon the idea that he was building  

a new world and overcoming the horrors of  capitalism and imperialism and world war. 

Khrushchev gave a second wind to that, even  as he was revealing more of the horrors. 

Then that just ran out, and they  unwittingly destroyed the system  

trying to give it a third wind under Gorbachev. So they have no way forward. They're stuck.  

They can't do structural reform and maintain  their power, but without structural reform,  

without a legitimate system, they also  can't maintain their power forever. It's  

really interesting. In the short run, we're all  dead because there could be a World War III. 

But in the long run, we're all  good because our system is better. 

So we have to elongate the short run. No world war between the US and China. 

Get to the long run, get to the competition,  get to the cold war instead of hot war,  

where we're not having a hot war. That's the beauty of cold war. It's not hot  

war. You can compete, you can have tensions, you  can have rivalries, but you don't have hot war. 

So in the short run, potentially, we're  all dead, because a world war with great  

powers… It was 55 million in World  War II, the low estimate of deaths. 

That was a multiple of World War I, and World  War III would be a multiple of World War II. 

If we can avoid that, in the long run, we're good. It's the opposite of what Keynes said  

about how in the long run, we're all dead. It's in the short run that we're potentially dead. 

But I like the long run. So the tech and China thing  

might work, and it might not work, but  it's not permanent even if it does work. 

All right, great note to close on. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. 

It was a real pleasure to talk to you. My pleasure. I apologize for not being  

succinct in my answers, but if you've  read some of my books, not all of them,  

some of them go on at length. A few of them are short, though. 

I have to master the answers to questions  on podcasts in order to be able to get  

through your whole magnificent list. Maybe next time we'll do better. 

The long drawdown is why  I want you on the podcast. 

A lot of these issues are complicated,  so I appreciate you doing it.