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- [00:00]
Derek
My guest today is Stephen Kotkin, who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of 2/3 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.
- [00:15]
Stephen Kotkin
Thank you for the honor of the invitation.
- [00:17]
Derek
Let's begin with the tsarist regime. So first question, how repressive was the tsarist regime actually? Because presumably the motivation behind the revolution is, is to get rid of this autocracy. But you just have these examples of these. Lenin's brother tries to kill the Tsar and he himself is writing these long manifestos about taking down capitalism and overthrowing the government. And him and people like Stalin are just in exile in Siberia, living off government money, robbing banks, small shenanigans. Honestly, it sounds more forgiving than many countries today. So how bad was it really?
- [00:50]
Stephen Kotkin
So you have to put yourself back in the time period to judge the level of repression and based upon what norms were, what other regimes did, rather than take the 20th century regimes as the guide and go back. But we need to widen the aperture a little bit here. So this is the czarist 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 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. So 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. So the czarist regime was a quintessential example of this fundamental dilemma. So 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. So if somebody has ships made out of steel, you either 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.
- [03:45]
Derek
I thought this was one of the most interesting takes in your first volume, that modernization is not this inevitable process, but is instigated by this ruthless geopolitical competition. Do you think that that still applies in today's world? Because 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, the odds that if France falls behind technologically, if their AI is worse, that Germany is going to take over is just sort of unthinkable. So 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 the up to date political processes, is that still a drive which moves countries forward?
- [04:31]
Stephen Kotkin
If you have an autocratic regime, it is existential for you every day. So 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. So you 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. And so I need to have all of that to be able to compete. But I have this autocratic regime. So how do I retain the social structure, the hierarchy, the 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? So that's the stuff that persists today for Iran, Russia, China, North Korea. So 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. But it's two sides of the same coin. The thing that gets you the engineers, also gets you the possible political ideas. And so the czarist 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, I was.
- [07:03]
Derek
Thinking, 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. And whether that applies through all the examples you give. And this is maybe a general question about how much can you actually learn from history, because for every seeming lesson, there's an equal and opposite lesson that you can also learn. So during the czarist regime, in retrospect, we can say that the liberals and the constitutionalists should have cooperated with Stoipian or white. And even though it was an autocratic regime, they were actually doing these real reforms and there was growth and they should have continued that process. Or when the government falls In February in 1917, the provisional government faction should have united to oppose the Bolsheviks. But then there's all these other examples. In Germany, the conservative Weimar government is allies with Hitler in order to fend off what they think is the greater evil, which is the communists. And given the events up to that point, it's a reasonable concern to have, given what the Bolsheviks have done in Russia. So where should we end up on this? Should you embrace the lesser of two evils whenever you get the chance, or no?
- [08:03]
Stephen Kotkin
So the tsarist regime is undertaking this repression of people who have legitimate claims. And that repression is quite severe by the standards of the day. Okay, 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. But still it's highly repressive, it's totally unjust, and the claims of the people protesting are legitimate. And so 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. And a lot of young people like him do the same. And so 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, sang in the choir, good grades, did his homework. So he's on track to be successful in society. He gives it all up. He starts reading forbidden, otherwise censored underground literature and books, and learns about the social issues, injustice, not just through firsthand experience, but analytically. And he never graduates the seminary, which is the highest level of education that was available to somebody in the caucuses, because they don't have a university, because the czar's regime is afraid to allow a university. They need the university graduates, but again, they're afraid of the politics of it. And universities elsewhere, including in the capital, St. Petersburg, are constantly being shut down through these revolutionary episodes. So 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. So from the ages of about 17, 18 to the age of 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. So this is known as perverse and unintended consequences. He's legitimately dedicated to revolution as he understands it in his date, 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 turn out to be worse than the problem that he was addressing. This is perverse and unattended consul. So 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. So the constitutionalists, otherwise known as the cadets, we would call them the classical liberals, they're the private property, constitutional order, anti autocracy people fighting the czarist regime. They're going to be the protagonists of the February Revolution in 1917. And it looks like they could possibly be the solution because they're against arbitrary, autocratic, unjust rule, and they're in favor of constitutional order. That's not how they behave once they're in power. But let's leave that aside. But here's your problem. And this was foreseen by the Interior minister who puts down the 1905 Rebellion Revolution, Pyotr Dornovo, who understands that, that the liberals, the constitutionalists, classical liberals, the ones who want private property and constitutional order, probably, if they had their druthers, a constitutional monarchy like you have in the UK and Britain at the time. But Dornavo 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. And you will bring on the opposite of a constitutional order. So instead of fighting against the Czar, you should throw in your lot with the Czar against the Stalins and the social movement that came from the investment in modernization. All right. And so Dornavo 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, attempts to introduce constitutional order, Mexico, Iran, China, Russia, Portugal, and 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. And so the constitutional epoch of the early 20th century turns out to be a bust. It had to have happened beforehand, so 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. So 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, or only men can vote, not women. And so 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. So 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, and they also get to vote and to own property legally. So you have this order that has all of these birth defects. It's very restrictive in the franchise Some people are slaves, not even people. And yet over time you can get that right, because the category citizenship and the constitutional order are already embedded. When you have the constitutional revolution in the mass age, and when you have the peasants and the workers and those for national self determination participating in the constitutional revolution, constitutional order, rule of law isn't enough for a lot of them.
- [15:38]
Derek
It worked in Taiwan and South Korea. There was an era of industrialization under not a dictator but an authoritarian government. And then they were able to transition to rule of law, democracy.
- [15:49]
Stephen Kotkin
There are these exceptions which have turned out to be a false normative or guiding stars for us in every case. So 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 then Hirohito, Japan and the Emperor State, and then 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.
- [16:49]
Derek
But there is a paradox here where if you institute this sort of revolution or changing of the guard during the mass age, then you are going to get this sort of leftist revolution which is very antithetical to future prosperity and ruler law. But on the other hand, if you don't have a changing of the regime, you will fail to be able to. So it's been pointed out that Chiang Kai Shek, when he did have control over China, should have done some amount of land reform. And you talk about how stoypen after the 1905 attempted to put in this sort of agricultural reforms, but their success was mixed because the existing aristocracy obviously didn't favor. So there is this paradox of 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.
- [17:35]
Stephen Kotkin
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? And 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 and which other countries have done from democratizing a liberal constitutional order. So 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 than we had, for example, in the French case, when the Bourbon dynasty could say the state is me or the state is I. Right? Where you have this Versailles like absolutism and aristocracy that forms around the absolutism and as the main beneficiary. And 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, where 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, and eventually even the Vichy regime, Nazi occupation regime, that overthrows the republic. Right. And 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, well, 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. And they institutionalized a rule of law, private property, civil liberties, and inclusive polity for everybody. And the problem with that is that the autocracy refused to do that. The autocracy 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, when they're compelled to introduce some version of constitutional order, a kind of quasi parliament, quasi constitution, the Czar 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 Dornavo repressed successfully the political movement, the Tsar wants to undo those concessions and go back to being an autocrat. An autocrat after krater, means a self power, a power unto itself. And 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. And 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 in a kind of, oh, we're not going to have Leninism here, let's prevent Leninism, let's go with the radical right. So 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. So you get a leftist version of this and a rightist version of this, and then they're kind of co dependent where each uses the threat of the other to further consolidate their dictatorship. So 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 czarist case, the tsarist regime had a massive radical right. They had the Protocols of the Elders of Zionism, that infamous tract, anti Semitic tract, which then makes its way to Germany, but originates in the tsarist empire. So 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 and the right wing movement with the antisemitism is enormously successful and in the streets in czarist Russia. So if you were alive before 1917, 1933, you would predict that the socialism would be victorious, would triumph in Germany, and the fascism would triumph in the Russian empire. But it's the opposite. And so that's just a fascinating, amazing paradox that I tried to deal with.
- [23:45]
Derek
Is you say that in 1917 a leftist revolution of some kind was inevitable, but that it didn't have to be the October Bolshevik Revolution. So why was leftism inevitable in Russia?
- [23:55]
Stephen Kotkin
At the point 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. And so 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. So subsistence Level agriculture is not politically stable. So you want a class of people, kind of yeoman capitalists, property owners who can expand their farms and can succeed and hire labor. And 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 ends in his assassination. So you need to deal with the peasant land hunger so that it becomes a stabilizing political force because the peasants get the land and then they have a piece of the status quo and they want to retain the system versus the peasants don't have the land and. And they want to overthrow the system to get the land. So 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. So 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. So you're gonna go through this valley of hell potentially where all bets are off and you're not sure if it's gonna work. So the peasants don't really get the land as they could have in the 1860s and it becomes a problem that's not resolved right through 1917. 18. So the peasants have their own revolution in 1917, 18, which is 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. So 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 Republics. But they're easily put down by the forces of order or the army. And guess who's in the army? The peasants. So 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. And in the German case, and to a certain extent the Italian case, which happened simultaneously. And there's also a Hungarian case here where you have leftist revolts in the cities, seizures of power, like the Paris Commune of 1870, 71, which happens in Paris, not in the rest of France. And you need a peasant army that has a stake in the existing order to undo the city leftist revolution. And so you have this in the other European cases. In one case, you don't have this 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. So in the 1920s, the peasants are 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 reinsurf or enslave the peasants across all the 11 time zones, this gigantic Eurasia. And the peasant revolution is going to be annihilated in blood. And so the peasants have, through their radicalism of seizing the land, have helped bring Lenin and his Bolsheviks to power in the cities, which is going to be the death of the peasants, owning of the land and instead the reinsurfment of the peasants. And something similar is going to happen in the Chinese case. So 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. And 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 of. So 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. And 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. And so they can be part of the forces of order. And 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. So there's how you integrate farmers. The whole world order rests on the back of farmers. How much farmer's 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. So the world order rests on these hardworking, predominant in the population, peasantries. And 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. So 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 where just the court society at Versailles, the Czarist court in St. Petersburg, or the men at the Constitutional Convention in the US or the people who are the. You're beyond that in the mass age and you have to be able to incorporate the masses somehow in a polity. And it's really hard to do. And so this dynamic of failure to master or mastery over it, it tells you a lot about the direction you're going to go.
- [32:20]
Derek
This answers one of the other questions I had for you, which is why did we see these communist resolutions in peasant countries, which is the opposite of Marxist prediction that you would first need capitalism and industrialization before you would see the turn towards socialism. And I guess the answer is that the private property which is engendered by capitalism, industrialization actually helps the peasants more or helps them somewhat and buys them into the system. But this raises another question, which is if it's the case that all of this unrest is caused by the mistreatment of peasants in China, in Russia, you have the mistreatment of them to an extent unimaginable after the collectivization in 1928, where there are literally 100 million peasants are enslaved. And of course there's some lack of cooperation with the regime to kill half the livestock and. 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?
- [33:25]
Stephen Kotkin
Yeah, terrific questions again. So you have a multi prog dancer. Let's do it this way. On the one hand, you have a much bigger repressive apparatus. Much, much bigger repressive apparatus. So the czarist regime has a very small secret police. Really small. The secret police for the tsarist regime is mostly following the handful of intellectuals. You have a few thousand university students in tsarist Russia in the mid 19th century, when 5,000 or so when this term intelligentsia gets invented, and you're going to have a few thousand more over time, but you're in the thousands, not.
- [34:09]
Derek
The millions of, sorry, even there though, like Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, they go off, they're sent into exile, but they're not only living off government money, but while in exile they're writing for Pravda. They're writing, you know, here's my manifesto on the fall of capitalism. So even the intellectuals are not really.
- [34:25]
Stephen Kotkin
Depressed repression and is more about following what they do rather than arresting them on a pretext and putting a bullet in the back of their neck. So you have this tsara secret police, the Akhranka, that's the pejorative nickname for them, the acranka. They're tasked with following these revolutionaries and infiltrating their groups and maybe sabotaging them from within. Something similar happens in the labor movement where you have this 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 by the way, is something that's invented in France. The black cabinets are a French invention that the czar's secret police borrow. And so 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, is in European exile. He's not even in Russia and in fact, the Paris branch of the czarist secret police, the Okranka, the Paris branch, which conducted the surveillance and infiltration in Europe, we have that 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, and instead the guy put it on a boat and. And secretly had it shipped, adhered to the United States. And so now we have the czarist Russian archive, secret police for the foreign revolution, the 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 reinservement, the enslavement of the 100 million peasants. It's that act, it's a kind of chicken and egg thing where 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. So 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.
- [37:37]
Derek
Can I ask about that? How do we explain this surplus of sadism during this period in Russia where the 25,000ers who Stalin recruits to go out to the countryside and steal from basically starving people, and they can visibly see, I'm sure, that, you know, 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 Gulok system who they must know. It's a cynical thing where they're making them 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 heinous things. There were hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, including, if you include informants, probably millions of people who are implicated in this whole ghoulish regime. So is this just a latent thing that is true in any society and Stalin was able to exploit it, or was some circumstance created this level of.
- [38:29]
Stephen Kotkin
Again, fantastic question. So we get this from Lev Kopolev, 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. And he writes this fantastic memoir, a couple of memoirs, but one of them is called Education or True Believer, which covers how he was the one who. Who did this, including in his native village. So here's your answer. On the one hand, there's ideology and the importance of ideology, right? We may think that no one really believes the ideology, that 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. In fact, it's wrong. They do believe the ideology. And they're young. They're young people. And so a story of the evil of capitalism. You have World War I, millions of people die, like, for what? Why are those millions of people being killed? The flower of European youth. And then many colonial armies get drawn in because of European imperialism. Young people, the future of those countries go to their senseless debts. What's that about? It's about imperialism, it's about capitalism. And so that's evil and we must overcome that. And so there's a way in which life experience, as well as the fervor of youth. 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 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. And 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 if 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.
- [40:50]
Derek
Do you think that those genuine. I get if you're a middle bureaucrat in the Communist Party, sure. Do you think that explains the motivation of an interrogator and a gulag? That they're like, oh, this is part of the end goal of communism?
- [41:05]
Stephen Kotkin
There's a big story here, which is about how we're building a new world. And 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. Right? They're duped into false consciousness.
- [41:23]
Derek
But in many of these cases, they know that they're the ones orchestrating this sort of show trial, the cynical game, where they know that they just picked up a random person in the dead of night.
- [41:31]
Stephen Kotkin
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? You see, 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. And so it might be that some of them are innocent that you're arresting, but some of them are clearly gonna be guilty as well. And so to get the guilty, you have to somehow manage to deal with your 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. So there's this young kid who's really adept at social media who just looks like he won the primary for a Democratic candidate for mayor in New York City. And one of the things he wants to do is freeze rents, rent control, because he wants more affordable housing. So he's a complete idiot in terms of facts, because the way to get more lower rent, 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. And what rent control does, or freezing of rent, it inhibits the building of new housing. Because who's gonna 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. So 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. And 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. And that's a good idea. Life should be more affordable. There should be more places like Queens, where. 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, and 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. And if I were as smart as him, I. How could he possibly hold that idea in his head? But so 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.
- [45:19]
Derek
There's ideology, but there's a very specific thing to these Marxist regimes where they might believe in class conflict and you need this revolution and so forth. But there's also this sense of you cannot contradict the party, you cannot contradict the vanguard. So even in 1924, when Trotsky is getting condemned by the party or whatever that was, and 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 I think Mamdani would say, oh, I want these specific policies implemented, but the sense that also loyalty to the party and eventually to Stalin, even when it seems to contradict my understanding of socialism, is absolutely paramount. And 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 or another. Is that like part of the ideology is this theocratic understanding of the party's always right, even if it seems like a single individual is manipulating it to their ends.
- [46:28]
Stephen Kotkin
Why is Marxism, 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 again. Young people are attracted to impatient, quick, total transformation of the world, eradication of war, eradication of social injustice. And there's a simplicity to the ideology. It's kind of a total package. It gets rid of everything bad, just if you follow the precepts. And so 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? So 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. So you become an accomplice in the persistence of the things that you're dedicated to overthrowing. So it's not just that you're loyal to the party, you're loyal to the outcome that the party is dedicated to achieving. And you know that there are going to be mistakes and costs and bad things happen along the way. But hey, is imperialist war better than that? No, the answer is imperialist war has got to be worse. And so I got to. But the other reason, which is even deeper than that, is because Marxism Leninism empowers the intellectual class and the lumpen intellectual class. You see, 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. Now, it might be that it's hard to get the loan in some neighborhoods. It might be that the loan interest rate, you 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. You can work for somebody else, you can put out your own shingle. In these kind 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. So the beauty of Marxism Leninism and why what we used to call the Third World loves this is because they get to be in power. It empowers them across the board. They get to make the decisions on the economy, and 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. So 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, they sometimes have false consciousness. They don't understand why, for example, we have imperialist war. They get sucked in bread and circuses fools them. They have this false consciousness. But I know better and I can be in charge and I can get us to a better place. Even along the way, bad things are gonna happen. Some people who are innocent are gonna die or be arrested. But this is the march of history. This march of history is to peace and justice. And who is gonna 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 trade off to right some of the things that are obviously wrong.
- [51:37]
Derek
All the anti Marxism I totally agree with, but I still think from a purely just like analyzing the system. There's many ideologies and you know, you have this line that you often have that look, 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 for sure, and very few of them end up as amenable to dictatorship as Marxism. And you also have another thing that's really confusing here is that all of these old Bolsheviks who abet the system and who eventually stall in purges, whatever you might say about them, they're not weak men, right? They were. They were willing to face down the tsar, they were able to organize the revolution against the Tsar, and they're willing to live in exile, to potentially get shot by the Orang, I guess not shot by the Oranga, but you know, whatever. They're willing to go through hardships for their beliefs. So you might think well, okay, 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 is one of the key people in the regime, gives a secret speech where he says that, no, Stalin was going again. He was destroying the building of socialism and the building of Marxism, Leninism. So people did believe that Stalin is actually going against this end goal that they have. At least Khrushchev believed that. And there's also, in many cases, they themselves are being implicated and they know they're innocent. And in many of these cases, there's this period in between when they're a dead man walking because Stalin has started putting, you know, the Met feelers out that this person is a Trotskyite or something. But they're still in their positions of power. They're still the head editor of Pravda or in charge of the military or something. And it's mysterious why these people who. They're not cowards, they were able to organize a revolution against the Tsar, are not using this period of 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 same thing happens in China. Li Shai Kuo, when he's a dead man walking. The premiere under Mao during the Cultural Revolution, he doesn't use that opportunity to go up to the.
- [53:58]
Stephen Kotkin
There are very few, but there are some people like that, and they're arrested and executed, all of them. Very few of those kind 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. Right. There are some people like that. They're extremely courageous. They're known to us. I'm not the only one, but I featured some of them in my book. But again, you're creating a new world, and it's going to be messy because it's about class struggle. And class struggle means there are going to be winners and losers, and 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. And so they're going to resist and therefore they're going to be enemies everywhere. And again, you're not going to know who they are. So are you on the side of the enemies?
- [55:08]
Derek
But what about the cases where they're implicating themselves? They know they're not an enemy.
- [55:12]
Stephen Kotkin
Right, but again, the party is larger cause than they are. You're building a new world. Your life can contribute to that or not, and it's insignificant ultimately.
- [55:23]
Derek
What fraction of confessions by high level party members do you think were not coarse out of a sense of fear of their own lives or their family's lives? Well, I guess they knew they were gonna execute it. So it would have to be for their family's life or to avoid torture versus in order. It was a very sort of Oandian, like I will sacrifice myself for the.
- [55:44]
Stephen Kotkin
We're in the level of psychology here, dk.
- [55:46]
Derek
Yeah.
- [55:47]
Stephen Kotkin
And it's, it's. 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, it's simultaneously everything and anything. We have to get rid of the binaries where, you know, 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.
- [56:49]
Derek
Right.
- [56:50]
Stephen Kotkin
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. And so the fact that the system is able to undergo this level of self disruption and come out the other side, that's pretty astonishing. So 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, and some definitely are executed often for acts that they've committed, sometimes 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. And one of the things they do is to walk through the fire of their self immolation on behalf of the cause. And 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, right? Goebbels, who helped enact the regime's ideology about a master race, had several deformities, clubbed foot, walked in a brace, and 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. And so we say, could he really have believed this? I mean, wasn't he a cynic, enacting this? Because how could he not understand that these are real people? Because he's one of them. And the answer is, well, 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. And so you say, God, this 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, right? A Communist party is building socialism. Why? Because their view of the world is feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism. So 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, is not capitalism. So let's destroy capitalism. That will be the step to get us to socialism. So 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 its democracy, but it's only for the property holding bourgeoisie. So we will have a dictatorship of the proletariat, Right? Everything. Capitalism has wage slavery, Right?
- [62:23]
Derek
That is real slavery.
- [62:26]
Stephen Kotkin
Exactly. But everything is eradicate capitalism to get you to socialism. It turns out that that doesn't deliver freedom, it doesn't deliver prosperity and it doesn't deliver peace. It delivers massive stateization because once you eliminate private property, an individual choice, the state is now responsible for everything and it delivers ration tickets and the Gulag. So you get a bunch of socialists that break from this. They say, you know what? Lenin is wrong. Eradicating private property, markets, civil liberties in parliament is a mistake. We have to accept that private property, markets, capitalism and parliaments, because that's the only way to get to freedom. Otherwise you get to the Leninist dictatorship, total statization, 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 and 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. And we'll evolve towards full socialism and eventually communism, but we will not do it the Leninist way. And so 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. So the left has a civil war, a civil war on the left, which is still going on between those who say capitalism is evil and must go versus capitalism has a lot of problems, but we need it in order to have peace and prosperity, in order to have freedom. And we just need to manage it better. Redistribute. And so 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. And 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 quote revision, this denunciatory term. What happens is some of the people who are in the revisionist camp begin to flirt with the capitalism is evil analysis. And so they begin to truck with the communists that they've broken from and are in civil war with. So you get left wing social democrats who are closer to Lenin than they are to right wing social democrats like Bernstein and the rest of the who are pro capitalism but pro redistribution. And so 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 arguing that if we don't get rid of capitalism, we're still going to end up with an evil system. And so this civil war on the left never gets resolved, it's ongoing. And the right uses this confusion to paint everybody as anti capitalism. And the left gives them ammunition by talking about the evils of capitalism, even when they've come along to accept private property and markets. And so you have this really 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 solution, than the original problem it diagnosed. Think about Marx. Marx says, you get rid of private property, markets, capitalism, you're going to get freedom, you're going to get abundance. You don't get that. And then people say, oh, you know, but Marx wanted freedom, he didn't want Stalin's dictatorship. So 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. So think about A nuclear bomb. You're going to do a nuclear bomb. You're gonna nuke a population, but you don't wanna kill any people. Your goal is to nuke them, but nobody dies. That's what you say. You're gonna get rid of capitalism, you're gonna nuke them, but instead everybody's gonna live. And you give that order to your generals. You say, nuke them, but everybody lives, nobody dies. So they nuke them and everybody dies instead of everybody living. And you say, you know, I never said to kill the people, I said that they should live. But once you nuke capitalism, you're gonna lose freedom, you're gonna lose the ability to have politics. You're gonna end up with some version of a Leninist system. And the ideology is gonna drive that to the doubters. And then you're gonna get a second wind where you get Khrushchev, like 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 destalinization is take away Stalin. It's not take away any of the other attributes of the system. And so 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. So within the party, there's a public dimension to this. All party members become familiar with Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. So 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. And instead of saying, oh, my God, 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, oh, we get a chance to do it right this time without the evil Stalin who messed it all up. And so the Khrushchev thing, the revelation of the horrors, the denunciation of the horrors, ironically gives you the second wind 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. And yet instead of saying, this system is horrible, if I ever get power, I'm gonna 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, because 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. And so this is 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. So 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.
- [71:48]
Derek
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- [73:14]
Stephen Kotkin
That's not exactly the way you described. You have a point. You're onto something, dk. But it needs to be qualified. So what happens in Deng Xiaoping's case is the communists have accidentally, that is unwittingly, not accidentally, 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. And so they've undermined their ability to continue the economic system as they had it.
- [73:57]
Derek
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?
- [74:06]
Stephen Kotkin
Not the political system. Deng Xiaoping never takes down the political system or the ideology. And 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 suppress political alternatives. So during that resistance, 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 czarist 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. So it's either return to tsarism or keep communism. And so 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. And so they're able to, quote, reform by enabling the people to generate wealth, jobs, prosperity through market behavior. And it's mostly the peasant class in China, which then leads to family owned businesses, which then leads to larger businesses. And so society, not the party, creates the miracle in China. And the party tightens its grip. Because the ideology of the party is when the socioeconomic base has a lot of market in it, it's a threat to the Party's rule. So the party has to be even more vigilant against the capitalists in the society. And it turns out that you get to Jiang Zemin, who is Deng Xiaoping's handpicked successor, and Jiang Zemin sees that the private sector is becoming dominant in the country and that the party's monopoly on power is under threat. And 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. So 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 and they begin to form their own businesses by expropriating other people's property. And 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, 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. So he's going to, instead of bringing the capitalists into the party, he's going to force the Party back into the capitalism. So 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. So 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. And so 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.
- [78:35]
Derek
I mean, 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 or which led to liberalization. I mean if you look at the creation of these special economic zones, the imperative at the national level that you must have growth. And then Deng's Southern Tuan. So Jiang Zemin, he tries after the Tiananmen to clamp down on opening up. And Deng says no, we must open up. If you don't, you'll remove you. All of that is a sort of positive. Maybe positive is the wrong word, but.
- [79:20]
Stephen Kotkin
Policy driven, yeah, that's for sure.
- [79:23]
Derek
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. Because the alternative story, which seems you're saying is no, it was just that they physically could not enforce communism anymore.
- [79:37]
Stephen Kotkin
That's how it started, dk. So let's go look at the facts. Why do you have a Special Economic Zone? Why can't every zone have market relationships?
- [79:47]
Derek
The creation of that to be a proactive action.
- [79:50]
Stephen Kotkin
This grudgingly, this is a grudging allowance of certain behavior. So 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.
- [80:07]
Derek
You can only have three employees at the right corporation. Yeah.
- [80:10]
Stephen Kotkin
So the decrees are all grudging, with very few exceptions. And the society is forcing more and more concessions onto the ideologues in the Marxist Leninist system. So at the beginning, it's launched by the party's grudging acceptance that the society is going to rebuild and not starve through its own hard work. So they've been through a couple of famines here. I mean 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. And so it's a policy driven, a 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 system.
- [81:15]
Derek
But that pushback must come from. Is coming from within. This is your thesis in uncivil society, right? That it is coming from within the system. Because they could have, I mean, north in 1976. They're like North Korea, literally. And North Korea still exists. Right. There's no reason North Korea doesn't have.
- [81:30]
Stephen Kotkin
The Cultural Revolution where it annihilates and its state capacity in a Maoist frenzy. In order for Mao to, in his mind, undo his rivals, unbalance and destabilize them. Yes, they do. But they still have the mechanisms of economic control and they have a massive black market. You gotta remember that the 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. So 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. So it has to assign its supply department on the black market to go out and find the other ball bearings. That it's not a sign from central planning. So 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. So you're not inventing market behavior from scratch, you're surfacing it in some ways. And so party officials and industrial officials, they have market behavior in their firms to grease the system and to meet their output quotes.
- [83:16]
Derek
I agree with their general point that how any nation gets wealthy is not by the government, but because of the thrift in 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.
- [83:32]
Stephen Kotkin
And as we sit here and speak.
- [83:33]
Derek
When we say America is a capitalist country, what we say is like the government or all the bureaucrats, they'll try to put in all these regulations and it's only grudgingly that they will accede to. We could point to a bunch of stupid policies in America where they try to outlaw the potatoes and the onions, but they could only outlaw the potatoes equivalents things. So any capitalist society, quote unquote, is just a case where the government had to accede some amount of control. And we give credit to capitalist countries in the west for saying, like at least the government wasn't maximally stupid.
- [84:08]
Stephen Kotkin
Fair point, DK Fair point. We often exaggerate the role of policy in all realms because we are do policy ourselves or we talk to policymakers. We have a bias towards the causality of policy. So America is 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, which is 5% of the population, through every imaginable variety of policy regime. 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. The taxes on their competitors or whatever it might be. There are 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't either create or strangle it. And so we have to understand in the communist sense that incentives matter. We know that. And so when you create incentives for officials to increase GDP and to increase job creation, and that's how they get rewarded, you're gonna get a lot of that behavior. And the Party will do that. Not immediately. Remember, immediately they're kind of flat on their back, and they've had this gang of Four, and Deng Xiaoping has come back from having been purged, and they're on the verge of another potential famine. And 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. And you think that's insane. That's where all the people are in poverty. When I was saying the regime put them in poverty, and so they're a little bit flat on their back, which creates an opening, and it creates this grudging dynamic of we're going to hold power, and we're going to allow the economic entrepreneurialism to take place, but we're going to control it. We're going to control it with special economic zones.
- [86:47]
Derek
In any country in the world today where there's a lot of poverty, the reason the poverty exists is also because of policy. And the extent the. The extent that poverty has been removed, it is because some combination of human capital and policy got less stupid. So if we're going to complain about a country like there's many poor countries in the world, like Bangladesh being poor, the country which just does it less, maybe we're going in circles here. A different question I want to ask is.
- [87:14]
Stephen Kotkin
No, you have a point. We're not disagreeing.
- [87:17]
Derek
Right.
- [87:18]
Stephen Kotkin
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. And this is part of the dynamic of us seeing communism as potentially successful. So we criticize these fools who thought that the Stalin regime was not gonna kill them, was not gonna produce famine, and yet we have this narrative that the Communist Party produced an economic miracle in China, which. I'm sorry, the Communist Party took advantage of the economic miracle in China played a part in the expropriated. The hard work of many people stole the businesses. A lot of those local officials just stole the land and stole the businesses from people who 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. Put on the cowboy hat, that gigantic 10 gallon hat that was bigger than he was. He was like 5 gallons. The hat was like 10 gallons. He goes to Japan and you're looking at Japan dk and it lost the war. It was actually 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's $200 per capita GDP. And Deng Xiaoping looks this over and he says, you know what the answer is? Japan is partners with America, not with the Soviet Union. And so Deng Xiaoping is going to divorce the Soviet Union economically and he's going to marry the U.S. and so Deng gets Most Favored Nation status in 1980, thanks to Jimmy Carter. 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. And so 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 gonna do this too. We're gonna use this Japanese model and the American middle class and their insatiable over consumption is gonna 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, 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 they have 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. So 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 partition to this day. And Taiwan is the FDI that's gonna come in through Hong Kong, routed through into the special economic zones on a risk reward, capitalist market basis, not a communist basis. And furthermore, they have the Japanese war guilt cuz the Japanese committed those atrocities in China. So the Japanese are gonna 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 guilty, the 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. And it's going to be T shirts and at the beginning and then they're gonna like the Japanese and then they're gonna climb the value chain until it's the highest value added products. And then supply chains are gonna change as a result and nothing is made in one place anymore. And the world gets very complicated. But 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 that not of the party's rule alone, but of British Hong Kong, globalization, Taiwan, Japan, United States domestic market. And 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. And so they buy them because it's a market and there's Competition. So some countries in 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, which 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. And now we're in the pickle that we're in as a result of this. But the formula is, this is where the Communists deserve the credit that they never get, whereas they get credit for things that they didn't do.
- [95:12]
Derek
Yeah. Suppose Stalin had lost succession battle in 1924, and somebody else is in power, but he's still on the Central Committee or the politburo, and it's 1930. And suppose the other person is also in this way, 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?
- [95:39]
Stephen Kotkin
So counterfactuals are really critical for historical thought. A lot of historians are pedantic about this and they say we're against counterfactual. 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.
- [96:12]
Derek
And just to put a finer point on my question, I mean, 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 Genoviev in terms of potentially, I'm gonna 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 Genoviev was to Stalin or Bukharin was Stalin.
- [96:39]
Stephen Kotkin
This is a question about how do you become Stalin? Could there have been another Stalin besides Stalin?
- [96:45]
Derek
Yeah.
- [96:46]
Stephen Kotkin
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. And so you have to understand how the person formed, whether it's Picasso as a painter or Stalin as a dictator. And then if you understand their personality, you'll understand what they do in power. The problem with that analysis is 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, the dictatorship within the dictatorship, and it's the enacting 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 So people say about Xi Jinping, now, 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 be still in a kind of detente or partnership with China, and 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. So here you have Communist Party seizes power, and 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 and then they were destroyed, put up against the wall and shot. So 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. So they believe that the base, the socioeconomic base, the class relations, determine the superstructure or the politics. Right. Marxism, the base, the socioeconomic base gives you the superstructure politics gives you. Depends on. It's an outcome of what the base is. So you have a de facto capitalist base.
- [99:57]
Derek
Yeah, and I don't mean, like whether they would have done collectivization. I mean, like, how would he personally, because he wants to be in power.
- [100:03]
Stephen Kotkin
I get that. So he makes this decision. All of them want to get rid of capitalist relations in the countryside. Every single one of them want 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. So 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. And most of them are grateful that he's pulled this off because they thought it couldn't be done. So 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 the communist regime will survive? They were all ready to say that, but they weren't all ready to do that. Moreover, after he does 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. So 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, undertake those risks, power through, no matter how much famine and resistance and upheaval and criticism there was, and 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, and then having all of that and not destroying any rivals and going from dictatorship to despotism. Right? So you would need a person who was capable of being Stalin in that group, not from outside that group, but inside that group, and then would either not use that power to destroy everybody else, not yearn for despotism, but be satisfied with dictatorship where others exercise power in their domains, and yet still able to hold on to the system. So was there such a person in the circle? And if the answer is no, could that person have emerged in the process of doing it?
- [102:53]
Derek
I guess my question is slightly different, which is that even if such a person did not exist, and suppose Stalin already exists, he did all the stuff, and it's 1934 and it seems like Stalin's starting to go a little gray terror y soon and another copy of Stalin is in the Politburo. And 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 sort of 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?
- [103:39]
Stephen Kotkin
This is a question for every single dictatorship. Why didn't somebody just kill Stalin? He was going to kill them, kill them all. Why didn't they just kill him and save themselves? So during the 20s, Stalin resigns six times, three times in writing and three times orally between 23 and 28. And every time those guys around him beg him to stay. So not only do they fail to try to push him out, but when he himself volunteers to go out, they beg him to stay. And then he kills all of them within 10 years. Every one of them just with a few exceptions, is dead. And so, geez, 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. So he becomes Stalin in this process. He's not Stalin yet. That's a really important argument that I make in the book. But 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 windows themselves, why don't they push him out the window? Khamenei in Iran, right? 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, be patriotic as well as self survival. And the answer is it rarely happens. One, you have a collective action problem.
- [105:34]
Derek
But sorry, why doesn't this prevent. The tsar is like people are trying to kill the Tsar constantly. They're killing Russian ministers in the czarist regime and I think in the Hitler.
- [105:44]
Stephen Kotkin
There are more assassination attempts on Hitler, some of which come very close than.
- [105:49]
Derek
By Stalin, but never against Stalin. Why is that?
- [105:53]
Stephen Kotkin
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 with 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? And so there is a way in which their pygmies, and he's Stalin, so of course they know that they can't do what he does. And if they try to unseat him, they might save their lives, but they might lose 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. So let's suppose that I'm in a Stalin regime with you. You're a functionary and I'm a functionary. And Stalin's collectivizing agriculture, which means he's destroying the productivity and we're gonna 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. Yeah. And 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. So instead 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. Because you're gonna preserve self preservation, you're gonna preserve yourself cause 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, and you know that he's got people provocateur who are around the system doing things like this. And the secret police are listening in on your phone conversations. And 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 them down and save our own life, let alone save the the country. Looks like, yes, it's logical, but that's not the kind of lives that they led. We would think that based upon the kind of lives in the system that we live in.
- [109:37]
Derek
But there's a bunch of revolutionaries who try to kill the Tsar and sometimes succeed. And they're just like random people. They're not like people in the regime, they're just random people.
- [109:46]
Stephen Kotkin
Yes.
- [109:46]
Derek
Why doesn't the kulak, one of the 100 million enslaved people, the Tsar has.
- [109:51]
Stephen Kotkin
Less security than Stalin does.
- [109:53]
Derek
But didn't you say in the conduct that in 1928 he had like one bodyguard when he would go to his dacha?
- [109:58]
Stephen Kotkin
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. And so he's not putting himself at risk. But even so, it is paradoxical because when Hitler goes to make a speech, every year Hitler makes a speech in Munich and it's known when he's gonna make the speech. It's announced in the paper. And there are a couple of assassination attempts on Hitler, one of which takes place in the hall where he's gonna do where someone plants a bomb. It's a working class guy plants a bomb there and the bomb goes off. It blows up. But 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 so the bomb exploded and he survived. There are military officials who try to kill Hitler, famously in 1944, they plant a bomb under the table, which also goes off and almost gets him, but doesn't get him during a military briefing. And so there are Attempts on Hitler's life, both from the society and from inside the regime. And 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. So again, there's something special about the mentality of these communists. And 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. The very few, I mean, there's no serious assassination attempt on Stalin. The very few times when they accused somebody of doing an assassination, for example, 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. And so they were just performing their duties as border guards. That's funny, shooting at the boat in it. It got dressed up as an assassination attempt and people were arrested and executed and it was publicized as such, but they didn't know that Stalin was in the boat.
- [112:44]
Derek
Yeah. So you have, you've written other books about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
- [112:49]
Stephen Kotkin
Yeah.
- [112:50]
Derek
And there's this last ditch effort in the Eastern bloc where there's following 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? Because the dissimilarity is that while Eastern Europe is 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 is it. You're not as concerned about China right now.
- [113:25]
Stephen Kotkin
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. And we wouldn't want to ally those differences. What's similar is the Marxist Leninist monopoly on power. People ask me, is China a Marxist Leninist regime? And I usually say it's a Leninist regime because that's undisputable. Do they believe in the 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. Well, it's still in power. It hasn't fallen, but it's clearly a Leninist system. And a Leninist system can't be half pregnant. You can't be half communist. You either have a communist monopoly or you don't. So 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. So you say dk, okay, 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 Communist Party, I want to 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. So 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. So 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. Yeah, or they would have had a crack down and put the lid back on much bigger than the Chan on men episode in June 1989. So they're not going to do political reform because they know from studying the Gorbachev case, which everybody studies in party school, which is where all the cadre have to go to be trained. They're not going to open up the system politically because that's suicide. And they're not going to commit suicide like what happened with Gorbachev. So 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 mas, they lose control potentially. So they can open up the system economically, but then they got to somehow reimpose controls. But if they reimpose too much controls, they the GDP goes down and they don't have the job creation. So 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. So that's the dilemma they're in. The Soviets in the 70s and 80s were looking at the system and 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. And anyway, then the Prague spring happened in 68 and scared the bejesus out of them. Reform looked like the end of the system. So 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?
- [117:45]
Derek
Yes.
- [117:47]
Stephen Kotkin
Maybe technology can perfect planning. So 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 do 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, so you can't open up politically. So how are you going to reintroduce the dynamism? How you going to get the GDP growth? How you're going to get the job creation? How are you going to get the societal buy in? Because if you go too far in that direction, that could threaten the regime. And if you don't go far. So tech, 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, but tech could maybe even make our communist dictatorship immune from challenges because of the surveillance is all encompassing because of our ability to spot things before they happen. And so you can see where they would be so seduced, so tempted 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 the legitimacy, then the GDP stops growing and you no longer have the economic benefits to claim that that's why you're in power.
- [120:24]
Derek
But do you need it? Like Stalin didn't have strong growth in the 20s and 30s and it seems like you just doubled down on repression. Like if you double down on the NKVD, the Tsar actually 2% growth up till 1917. Huh. They're dead, they're in cemetery, that's the point, right?
- [120:39]
Stephen Kotkin
The growth is dead, they're dead and the system is gone. So it's, it's fundamentally a deficit of political legitimacy. So when 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, and 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. And the day that they feel it's not helping themselves, forget it. Right, but there's a deeper problem there. What 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. It's in its foreign policy terms, it's hated by its own people. It's got maybe 20% support in the population and a lot of people are indifferent. But a majority of the people despise this regime, wanna 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. And 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.
- [122:24]
Derek
I guess we'd like to think that that's the main thing that matters, but historically it just seems like when authoritarians crack down really hard, it kind of just works. Right?
- [122:33]
Stephen Kotkin
And that's why they have gigantic repressive apparatuses. Because 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, oh, you know, 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's 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 and they're not even arrested in cause, they're not even indicted, they just disappear. And so 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 there is 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 grew up in neighborhoods, come from villages, went to the 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. And the working class, including women, were striking for bread in the capital and marching in the capital for bread in 1917. And the military was told to shoot them. And these are elite military units. Shoot these workers and they're peasants. And you think, okay, peasants, they'll shoot workers, right? No love lost. The workers were peasants yesterday, and 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. And 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. And so 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. They decide not to arrest the people who are doing the surveillance. They decide to stop. So you have this huge repressive apparatus and it works until the Moment the people in it decide not to do it anymore. And so that's where the political legitimacy variable is ultimately decisive. Because those people who are killing under communism and collectivizing those villages and de kulakizing 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 transported through the system, 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 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. And then 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. And so you rush the bank to try to get your money out before that money is gone or doesn't exist. And everybody gets that idea at the same time, not just one person. And you get a bank run. And so this really solid institution with these neoclassical stone columns turns out to be evaporates, 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. And anywhere along the chain of command, there can be disloyalty and revolt. There can be what we call political defection. And so 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. And so that's a really big problem that the communist regime can't solve with tech. And you say, well, the tech could produce power and prosperity and China could re legitimize its rule just like it did with the economic growth. And so the economic growth did it for 30, 40 years. And that's how the regime legitimated itself. And then the tech will do that for the next 30, 40 years. The answer is that hasn't happened yet. So 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 they're 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. And so 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. And Khrushchev gave a second wind to that even as he was revealing more of the horrors, and then that just ran out, and they unwittingly destroyed the system, trying to give it a third wind under Gorbachev. And 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. So 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 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. And 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, 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. And so the tech in China thing might work, and it might not work, but it's not permanent even if it does work.
- [131:29]
Derek
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.
- [131:34]
Stephen Kotkin
My pleasure. I apologize for not being succinct in my answers, but if you read some of my books, not all of them, so some of them go on at length. A few of them are short though, and 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.
- [131:55]
Derek
Yes, the long run or the long drawdown is why I want you on the podcast. Right? A lot of these issues are complicated, so I appreciate you doing it. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, the most helpful thing you can do is just share it with other people who you think might enjoy it. Send it to your friends, your group, chats, Twitter, wherever else. Just let the word go forth. Other than that, super helpful. If you can subscribe on YouTube and leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, check out the sponsors in the description below. If you want to sponsor a future episode, go to dwarkash.com advertise. Thank you for tuning in. See you on the next one.