Explaining the Soviet Union

Summary

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History 102 with WhatifAltHist: Explaining the Soviet Union

Hosts: Rudyard Lynch & Austin Padgett
Date: December 23, 2025
Podcast Network: Turpentine

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Overview

In this episode, hosts Rudyard Lynch (WhatifAltHist) and Austin Padgett embark on a sweeping, deeply analytical journey through the rise, existence, and collapse of the Soviet Union. They explore how the Soviet experiment was both a peculiar outlier in world history and, paradoxically, a logical culmination of trends within Russian—and broader 20th-century—modernity. The episode connects the Soviet story with patterns from ancient political philosophy, Russian autocracy, the trauma of serfdom, and the psychological underpinnings of totalitarianism, offering rich insights for understanding the fate of civilizations.

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Main Discussion Themes

1. The ‘Strangeness’ and Context of the Soviet Union

• The Soviet Union is described as a “rebellion against nature” and received as both an anomaly and a logical product of its age [01:07].
  • Rudyard: “Most historic eras tried to work with nature, but the Soviet Union was a direct rejection of what was seen as historic common sense ... an attempt to create a new civilization operating under completely different principles.”
  • Cites Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times” for the framing that the 20th century saw societal structures break down and their replacements, like Soviet Communism, fail on their own terms.

2. Russian Autocracy’s Deep Roots and Transition

• The Soviet system was an outgrowth of older patterns, not merely a rupture [03:18, 21:40].
  • Rudyard: “One of the elements of the Soviet Union that is very much there that no one studies is how it was the continuation of trends already seen under the czars.”
  • Under the Tsars: rigidly autocratic, with nobility’s role tied to state service, not land or geography.
  • End of serfdom had unforeseen social consequences, as “being free is a cultural trait that we don’t teach anymore” [21:40].

3. Political Philosophy: Cycles, Democracy, and Elites

• Ancient frameworks (from Aristotle, Polybius) are invoked to interpret Russia’s (and America’s) trajectories [05:13–13:39].
  • Rudyard: “The reason they supported monarchy was ... the king has a natural incentive to maintain his society because it’s his.”
  • Democracies and welfare: classical pessimism about a democracy’s lifecycle, with the ‘Oedipal welfare state’ as a natural endpoint [09:27].
  • The American experiment is compared to the European and Russian experiences, highlighting differences in property, self-reliance, and susceptibility to equality-induced conformity.

4. Chaos, Intellectuals, and Revolutionary Culture

• The pre-Soviet Russian landscape was fraught with revolutionary intellectual circles, nihilism, and state repression [29:22–32:53].
  • Revolutionary concepts spread in a society “warped by authority."
  • The role of the intelligentsia: “It wasn’t working class people, it was the sons of the lower tier of nobility and the educated classes. Trust fund academics.” [41:12]
  • The revolutionary underground became culturally meme-ified.

5. World War I, Lenin’s Ascendancy, and the Civil War

• Lenin’s personal impact: the German aid to Lenin seen as naive (“They didn’t seem to realize that Lenin was one of the great men of the 20th century...changed the course of history the most.”) [32:53].
• The Bolshevik takeover was enabled by popular war exhaustion and power vacuums rather than mass ideological support [48:34].
  • The Whites’ failure: lack of decisive leadership; anti-Semitic and regional factionalism [51:12–55:04].

6. The Soviet System: Oppression, Famine, and Control

• Post-revolution, rapid build-up of a totalitarian state: secret police mushroomed from 160 to 15,000+; mass killings [21:40, 55:52, 56:36].
• The Holodomor: deliberate starvation as a policy, especially against Ukrainians (“At least 5 million people died in the Holodomor,” [115:07]).

7. Economic Myths and Realities

• Debunks the idea that communism industrialized Russia—it piggybacked on Tsarist momentum and resulted in massive human cost [44:09, 45:03].
  • Rudyard: “Every single thing the Marxists say about this is wrong...under the czars, economic and industrial growth was exponential. And under the Marxists, it was arithmetic.”
  • Stalinist ‘growth’ came at horrific cost—famines, forced collectivization, and “second serfdom.”

8. Totalitarian Psychology and Social Acidification

• The Soviet system “is acid on the organic society in a way that is uniquely terrible” [111:17].
• Life inside: omnipresent surveillance, lack of autonomy, artificiality (‘hyperreality’) [97:11–104:33].
  • Forced informant networks, inability for private or authentic life, manipulation of science for ideology (Lysenkoism).
  • Social trauma persists, with demographic echoes into present Russian society.

9. Legacy—Collapse and Aftermath

• The system’s final years were marked by stagnation, disbelief, and collapse “from above, not below” [150:34, 150:50].
  • Gorbachev’s reforms intended to create a liberal democracy but led to the dissolution of social fabric.
  • Oligarchic capitalism replaces Communism, echoing Russia’s recurring inability to foster a broad-based, self-organized, and resilient society [156:25].
  • The trauma cycle: the need to “teach [future generations] to be free again” [113:04]. Gen Z and Alpha face risk of “forgetting how to function as human beings and as adults.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Soviet exceptionalism:
  • “Across the historic record, the Soviet Union is deeply strange, but within the context of the 20th century, it makes sense. It’s just the logical extension of insanity.” – Rudyard [02:46]
• On political cycles:
  • “If you ask the Founding Fathers ... when [American democracy] would ultimately have its issues ... they would have said 250 years. And next year will be exactly 250 years after the American Revolution, which is pretty creepy.” – Rudyard [06:25]
• On economic myths:
  • “If communism never arose in Russia, Russia would easily be a first world country. It would be wealthy ... an extra hundred million people without the Communists.” – Rudyard [45:06]
  • “Communism was called the second serfdom. And it was worse than the original serfdom because the old lord allowed you to keep more of your produce.” [106:58]
• On totalitarianism:
  • “You ask, do people believe these things, the utterly ridiculous lies? The answer was yes, because they had to … when you’re not allowed to talk through your reality, it starts to consume everything around you.” – Rudyard [99:16]
• On the Holodomor and Ukrainian genocide:
  • “The singular thing Stalin did that killed the most people was killing off the kulaks...And this killed off all of the most productive farmers and created a massive famine event...” – Rudyard [115:09–116:50]
• On cultural and psychological aftermath:
  • “To get Russia to transition from a communist society to a wealthy, developed, free, fair society, you would require a greatest historic figure. And the entire social structure of communism was to stop a figure like that from ever arising.” – Rudyard [157:44]

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Key Timestamps

• [01:07] — Framing the ‘unnaturalness’ of the Soviet project.
• [03:18] — Soviet Union as a continuation of Tsarist patterns.
• [09:27–13:39] — Ancient political cycles and the limitations of democracy.
• [21:40] — Aristocracies, elitism, and meritocracy—how Russia and Europe managed societal leadership.
• [29:22–32:53] — Revolutionary culture and underground networks pre-1917.
• [44:09–45:06] — Myths of Soviet industrialization; quantitative comparison with the Tsarist period.
• [48:34–56:08] — Bolshevik seizure of power; dynamics of the civil war.
• [97:11–104:33] — Long digression on Soviet command economy inefficiencies; black market fixers, artificial society; Lysenkoism.
• [111:17] — The acid effect of communism on society and generational repercussions.
• [115:07–116:50] — Stalin’s genocides, Holodomor, psychological and cultural destruction.
• [150:34–154:54] — The collapse described as “hyperreality” and a loss of belief; what replaced communism in the ‘90s.
• [157:44] — The impossibility of growing great leaders in a system designed to destroy them.

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Further Insights and Thematic Threads

• Analogies to the Modern West:
  • Acute warnings draw parallels between Soviet conditions and contemporary Western societies: fragility, psychological manipulation, and “wokeness” as potential heirs to totalitarian errors [79:37, 111:17].
• Interplay of Masculine/Feminine Social Dynamics:
  • Gendered metaphors abound, with communism likened to the “toxic castrating mother,” contrasted with the more externally-directed violence of fascism [80:46].
• Revival of Old Political Pathologies:
  • The episode ties in degenerative cycles observed across various civilizations, emphasizing the tragic repetition of history and the destruction of social capital.

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Summary Table: Soviet Union Key Inflection Points

| Event / Policy | Consequence | Speaker Insights | Timestamp | |----------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------|---------------| | End of Serfdom | Dislocation, lack of preparation for freedom | Cultural traits needed to be free | [21:40] | | Bolshevik Revolution | Totalitarian state, small radical minority rules | Lenin’s cult of will | [48:34] | | Collectivization / Kulak Purges | Famine, societal collapse, trauma echoing to the present | Stalin’s calculated brutality | [115:09] | | WWII & German Invasion | Enormous human toll, “Pyrrhic victory” | Comparison to earlier Russian wars | [130:03] | | Collapse (Gorbachev, 1991) | Managed from above, social unraveling, rise of oligarchs | Lasting psychological impact | [150:50] |

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Conclusion

This episode provides a wide-ranging, provocative, and deeply informed analysis of the Soviet Union—seeing it as both a product of Russian history and a symptom of modernity’s excesses. The hosts’ style is both irreverent and erudite, mixing classical references, dark humor, and serious political anthropology. They highlight the enduring lessons and shadow that the Soviet experiment casts not only on modern Russia, but on the world’s approach to freedom, governance, and the cycles of history.

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Next Episode: Medieval Islam

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For listeners seeking a tour de force on the Soviet experiment—layered, comparative, and always questioning—this episode is essential.

Transcript

[Rudyard Lynch]

Tis the season to cozy up with all your favorite holiday movies and shows. You coming where to? The North Pole, of course. Like a very Jonas Christmas movie and Home Alone on Disney.

[Austin Padgett]

Did I burn down the joy?

[Rudyard Lynch]

I don't think so. Then snuggle up with the Polar Express at National Lampoon's Christmas vacation. With Hulu on Disney, I think we're.

[Austin Padgett]

All in for a very big Christmas treat this season.

[Rudyard Lynch]

There's something for everyone with Hulu on Disney Bundle subscription required terms apply. Visit disneyplus.com hulu for details. Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist, Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in. Hi everybody. Hi boys and girls. Are you having a good day?

[Austin Padgett]

We're back and ready to creep you out and give you history.

[Rudyard Lynch]

This will be the second scariest thing in this video after Stalin, one of.

[Austin Padgett]

The spookiest periods of history known to man.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Today's video is going to be on the Soviet Union, which is a strange historic time period. It's one that sort of rebelled against nature. Most historic eras tried to work with nature, but the Soviet Union was a direct rejection of what was seen as historic common sense, where certain societies have the laws of nature or these underlying principles that you just assume the world works in a particular way. And communism in the Soviet Union was the attempt to do that and then create a new civilization, because that's really what the Soviets were attempting, that was operating under completely different principles. And I think it's valuable to study the Soviet Union as an example of a very strange confluence of variables, where a hyper conservative autocratic society did something that was in the direct opposition of what you would expect. But within the context of the 20th century, it makes total sense. Where I was recently read Modern Times by Paul Johnson, which is really a brilliant book and it really reframed how I saw the 20th century because the book is set from World War I until the end of the Cold War. And the thesis of the book was that modernity was an era in which the older social structures broke down and it's all of these failed replacements. So across the historic record, the Soviet Union is deeply strange, but within the context of the 20th century, it makes sense. It's just the logical extension of insanity.

[Austin Padgett]

So how did that catch back up? Where a unique circumstance and maybe the Soviet or Russian history ended up matching up with Communism in a way that was predictable, with the trends of Modernity.

[Rudyard Lynch]

One of the elements of the Soviet Union that is very much there that no one studies is how it was the continuation of trends already seen under the czars. And we took a few week break. I was tired, so I took a week off. Then I drove across the Great Plains. Then I had some other affairs come up. But I'm glad that we took the break because I read several different books on this topic in the time between. And. And on the next video, that's going to be medieval Islam. That reformulated my understanding of them. And one of the things that I gained a greater comprehension of was the earlier trends under the czars that had ultimately led up to the Soviet Union. And one of Alexis de Tocqueville's buddies and de Tocqueville, he's one of my favorite authors. He was a French thinker in the early 19th century who was known for going to America and running up the culture. And I think de Tocqueville also went to Russia, but one of his friends who also went to America with de Tocqueville, wrote his own anthropological report on Russia at the same time that de Tocqueville was basing his study of America on. Because these French thinkers, who were both descendants of the aristocracy that had died in the French Revolution, they thought, let's check out Russia to see what would happen if the French autocracy had lasted and gone way, way worse. And then let's see America to see the exact opposite. Because thinkers Even in the 1840s were saying that the two great powers of the next century would be Russia and America.

[Austin Padgett]

And so the French recognized that they ended up kind of somewhere in between and look to Russia and America as the contrast. And so this was in the 1800s where they saw Russia going in a communist, socialist direction.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. I read a book called, I think it's the 12 decisive battles in History. And it was written by Edward Shepard Crecy, who was a British military historian in the 1850s. And it's interesting that he predicts the great powers of the. Of the 20th century would be Russia, America, Britain and France. Sorry, Russia, America, Britain, France. And he thought Germany would never unify. He thought France would continue to dominate the European continent. He thought that Britain would populate Africa and control the east forever. And he. He predicted in the 1850s that America would have 100 million people. And his idea was that the Russians and the French would fight each other over Central Europe. And he was really shocked that Germany was able to unify and became the dominant European thread. But these French authors who went to Russia and America, they went to America firstly doubtful, because they had seen the failures of the French Revolution. But what both authors came to, the conclusion was, was that democracy would work in America because American society was fundamentally different from French society. But what they also said is that the natural endpoint of this would be, and at the time of the American Revolution, they thought America would last about 250 years. Because I have an author back there called Titler, who was a Scottish thinker from the Napoleonic era and he wrote this universal history of the world that I'm about to read. And he clarified the 250 year imperial cycle. And that was another idea that went back to Aristotle and Polybius, that there are these established sort of cycles of regimes. And so if you ask the founding fathers that if American democracy survived the first few hurdles, when it would ultimately have its issues, then they would have said 250 years. And next year will be exactly 250 years after the American Revolution, which is pretty creepy, but.

[Austin Padgett]

But a little bit after the Mayan calendar ended. So that one was off.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Stings TAKE time CRIES so their assessment of Russia and what they said about it was Russia was a society that had been fundamentally warped by authority. Where they said in America it was a society that, due to property rights and rule of law, where the society rewarded initiative and hard work. And both of them wrote a lot about the American characters ability to naturally self organize. They said that was the defining character of the Americans. And they also predicted the end failing of America would be the creation of an Oedipal welfare state that would gradually weaken the public. Because they said what would happen in a society like America is the incentive would be to psychologically manipulate the public. So they said you end up with a sort of welfare state that would keep the public weak and psychologically manipulated. And they said equality also breeds conformity. And they were looking back to earlier republics like the Greeks and the Romans, who had similar trends. And so these were people who were significantly more intelligent than we were. And they saw a lot of the end points of where we are today in ways that we can't, you think.

[Austin Padgett]

They heard conversations among elite circles about plans to manipulate the public and got a lot of their ideas from what the actual elite was talking about themselves. Kind of like if you looked at what they were saying in the 90s about controlling the food supply or something, ended up being something they managed to pull off or what would seem a conspiracy at some point in 1850, a welfare state would seem like a crazy idea or a conspiracy like it's a pretty crazy prediction from an 1850s perspective. But I bet the elites were talking about it more than the regular people.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Welfare was completely off the table in the early 19th century in every country in the Western world. In most of the Western world, they had relentlessly classist laws. And the reason that they thought welfare would develop was they had a fairly good track record of what happened to earlier democracies. And Aristotle had written about this, where Aristotle and Polybius said that democracies end when the public votes to move capital from one group to another. And that had happened with the Greeks and the Romans, who had also developed welfare states where at the start of their republics, both of those peoples were just vehemently against welfare. But they saw this as a natural incentive structure that would occur over the course of centuries. And they were self aware that governments and regimes needed to have reboots. Thomas Jefferson thought that we should have revolutions and killing off the ruling classes every generation. But he was widely seen as the most deranged founding father at the time. And that's part of the reason why they put so many sort of weird symbols in the US currency or in our state symbols, because they were trying to say these were the ideas we put in the system when we founded it. So if you have to reboot it, look at these symbols to figure out the mental trajectories we were on.

[Austin Padgett]

So ironically, the symbols that are used to point to a lot of Illuminati conspiracies were actually warnings about tyranny of that very sort, rather than kind of Easter eggs. Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So when they say six semper tyrannis or E pluribus unum or at the I in the triangle, those all have distinct meanings. And the founding fathers were very aware that the natural incentive structure was towards tyranny and bloat.

[Austin Padgett]

And it's funny with the French Revolution because you said that the problem with democracy, and they were aware that the Greeks and the Romans were against welfare at first, but the French Revolution, they went to redistributing wealth immediately. So I guess that's why it was so fast. But they also got kind of stuck and, I don't know, stasis, middle ground, welfare system. Anyways, which is kind of interesting.

[Rudyard Lynch]

What De Tocqueville said about that is that France was an accumulation of a lot of distinct subtypes of person who had their own specific interests, whether the nobility, the peasants, the Church, the Breton, the Savoyards and de Tocqueville said that it would be very difficult to make a functioning democracy off the American model in France because these distinct types of people would just support whatever their self interest was. As you can see a lot of these issues as distinct types of French people fighting over authority. And he said that in America the average person was self reliant and flexible and responsible enough that he thought it would work because coalitions can open and close without getting stuck in these intractable, almost ethnic differences.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting, because the. The regions of France had their. Did he distinguish between the different types of enlightenment in France and America or mostly attribute it to the different people?

[Rudyard Lynch]

He said that equality was a bigger push in France than America. But he was ultimately concerned that equality.

[Austin Padgett]

Would grow more in America where regardless of constitution.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, because he said equality would cause social atomization and the breakdown of society and religion in the long term. Where all of these thinkers had comprehensions that you can't expect a regime to last forever. And so they're looking at the sort of trends over the course of centuries that would erode said society. And they knew one of them would occur and they're trying to guess which one would.

[Austin Padgett]

Ironically, you would be thinking about that more in the beginning because you just experienced this happening. So it's not that weird to think that it'll change again someday versus when you're in the middle or even the end. You might think it's going to last forever.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. Another element to that is they were coming from a completely different political philosophy that we've since made to taboo. And the core assumption of their political philosophy was whatever social standard you set for the society, you will not see progress beyond it. And what I mean by that is the reason they supported monarchy was the king is the highest status guy. And so the king has no incentive to undercut anyone above him because he's naturally above everyone else. Where the king has a natural incentive to maintain his society because it's his and he has no threat. Not to what they said would happen if you have democracy or multiple cadres of leadership. Because they were going off Aristotle. And Aristotle divides it into democracy, oligarchy and monarchy is that people do not want to pick others who are superior to them because that's a threat. And so they said that democracies will vote in mediocre candidates because the public would be genuinely scared of someone like Alexander the Great or Frederick the Great because they're too risky. And they were operating out of ideas of social responsibility and incentive structures. And that sort of political philosophy became highly taboo after World War I, where if you even mention these ideas in academia, your life is over. Do you have any points on this before I jump to Russia?

[Austin Padgett]

Just I guess defining the aristocracy is kind of interesting. We talked about that a bit because we talk about it goes from landed nobility or king to what fills the role of aristocracy today, and I think we've settled on it. Was the university system pumped out basically the leadership class? And Even today in D.C. there's a huge bias around Ivy League degrees to where people who are in the system think that that's kind of what they have to do to be accepted. And they're still a bias that's fading because the Ivy League system's imploding. And it'll be interesting to see what becomes the new system for like vetting elites or maintaining an aristocratic network. But it seems like we're in a transition process with that too.

[Rudyard Lynch]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

The original meaning of aristocracy is a Greek term for rule by the best. And this was of course made by the aristocrats to say that we as the nobility are the best, we should govern. And it's always stuck in this terminology of do you use the aristocracy to signify a distinct social and legal designation? Where in nations like England you have a very small group of nobility who have the title of being nobility, and then you have a huge gentry who are functionally the same as nobility in their lifestyle or power, but they don't have the title. Meanwhile, in nations like Japan or Hungary or France not France, but Hungary, Japan, Poland is they've bloated the title of the nobility to anyone who can own land. And so it differs by society. But then if you want to use aristocracy for the ruling class of a society, you would say that the Ivy leagues are that for America. But you're always stuck with this aristocracy of are you talking about a specific sort of landed nobility that has the title or are you talking about a general ruling class? And that depends on the thinker you're dealing with, right?

[Austin Padgett]

And you can See how the, the French, like de Tocqueville is aware of the problems of democracy. Because the French in the Revolution, they got rid of their aristocracy completely. It was a total inversion. But at the same time, like you said, the landed nobility will claim that they have their position because they're better, but they just aren't. It's just not meritocratic because you see that over and over again with service in the military or merchants, like just. You're never as capable as a noble relative to a competitive environment.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So yeah, in competitive environments, merit beats out the nobility. The issue is that merit based structures tend to degenerate on a generational basis. So the social incentive structure you're doing with establishing a nobility is I want to make a multi generational institution that establishes incentives for excellence, managing the commons, personal nobility and aesthetic taste in those different things. And several countries in Western Europe really nailed this. The British did, the French did, where they would gradually bring people into the nobility from the meritocratic other classes. That's the Romans were good at it. If you have a functioning society, it's because you're integrating meritocratic people from the lower classes into the upper classes. And then in a society like Germany, it ossified into a highly distinct caste system where a nobleman's wife would never talk to a wealthy merchant's wife because they were different social classes. Wealthy merchants did not get places in the military, where in Germany it ossified into a caste system in a way it didn't in the rest of Europe. And Russia was a really interesting example where it's simultaneously a combination of a modern total state and with a feudal society where the nobility in Russia was distinct from others, where unlike the rest of Europe, where the nobility were from a specific town and they were from a specific line, in Russia, being a nobleman was a government appointed job that was dependent on you serving for the government. And so if you chose not to work for the government, they would immediately renege your title of nobility. And they'd also move the nobility around the country so they had no attachment to regional areas. And Russian nobility would write letters to the Tsar referring to themselves as your humble slave. And Russia was the most despotic and autocratic society in the world at the time, although they had gone through a process of reforms. And when de Tocqueville's friend, his name starts with the C, I can't believe I forget it was when he was going to Russia, he said that this establishment of nobility and titles and hierarchy for everything, it creates incentives towards lying and deceit and authoritarianism, because your status is determined by having the right blood or pleasing the right people. And so Russia took on this very court, very backstabbing dynamic, where the Russians would hire significant amounts of foreigners who to provide all of the serious roles, because it was widely known that you would be able to get your Russians to work if you basically put a gun up against them. But the second that you could no longer enforce hierarchy directly, you would not be able to get them to do the job or to have quality control or that stuff. So they would rely on Germans or French or British to make the factories or run the bureaucracies or. Or be the military commanders. And the start of the trajectory that led up to the Soviet Union all put it with the Stolypin reforms and the end of serfdom, where Russia lost the Crimean War, which was deeply humiliating in the 1850s, where Russia tried to take out the Turkish empire through invading through the Balkans. But the British and the French, who were going through the early phases of the Industrial Revolution, which the Russians weren't, they were able to use their technology to push the Russians onto the defensive and attack Crimea and southern Ukraine. And the Russians were so inefficient and broken that they weren't capable of defeating the British and the French on their own turf. They could barely supply their own men. And so after the war, the Russian elite went through this process of transformation and panicking about, how do we deal with this? And so one of the things was to get rid of serfdom, which 80% of Russians lived in serfdom, which was a state comparable to black American slavery, where Russian serfs could be worked all hours of the day, they could be sold to different landlords, they were there for life, they could never leave their lord's land, They a master could beat or rape his serfs. It was really a brutal system and the Russians did a good job of adapting. Where Russia very much could have had a revolution in the mid 19th century, that was part of the whole era of the time with 1848, and the Russian elite didn't, which delayed their revolution until World War I, which in some ways was more dangerous, because if they had a revolution in the mid 19th century, it would have been Cossacks, it would have been classical liberals, Russian nationalists. But when you drop your revolution in World War I, that's the peak of popularity for Communism. And the reforms set up all of these distinct trajectories that eventually caused the rise of serfdom, where one of the things that French writer said is the Russians had become so used to servitude and they had no mechanism to train them to be free, because being free is a skill that's transmitted culturally and it stems from being responsible for your own outcomes, having to manage your own life, having an identity distinct from the group. The religion has to further it, the society has to further it in a society like America. And this is the thing I find really worrying about Gen Z is being free is a cultural trait that we don't teach anymore. And so in Russia, you had all of these serfs who were no longer attached to their lord. And this was a messier process than a lot of people think. A lot of the serfs got poorer, and there was a situation where some serfs would buy out the land and then others were stuck in debt for decades. But I ultimately think the end of serfdom was a good decision. Instead, French writer said that what comes after the death of the czars is. Is something even more authoritarian and cruel than the czars were, which was totally true, where the czars had a secret police of 160 guys. And the second the Communists took power, the secret police had 15,000 people. And then they radically expanded it from there. And the communists killed more people in the first year of power than the czars did for the previous century. And I have an interesting side story here where I was reading Fire on the Minds of Men by Billington, which is a history of the origins of the left. And it talks about the revolutionary movement in czarist Russia. And it's really fascinating because you could make a video game or a movie about it where you had these underground cells that were operating across Russia. And the Poles actually introduced revolutionary sentiment into Russia after the Russians conque Poland. Because there was a time in the early 19th century when the Russian Empire had more literate Polish speakers than Russian speakers. And Poland was one of the most loyal supporters of the Napoleonic Empire. And so the Russians built out this network, the Russian rebels built out this network across a variety of cities. And the political boss of St. Petersburg, he actually kept operations going for decades. And I think about him because this guy in St. Petersburg, who faced all of these depredations from the czars, who had constant secret police trying to get him, this one guy was instrumental to the later formation of the Soviet Union because he kept the whole operation going for decades. And if you remove singular figures like that, you would not get the Soviet Union. And it's really fascinating because it was this Cat and mouse game, where all of these revolutionary associations, they were always worried that they were getting infiltrated by the secret police. So they would have these contacts across Russia where they'll say, operations in Kiev. They just got knocked up by the secret police. Everyone there committed suicide rather than sharing all of their coordinates. And revolutionary culture was a sort of part of Russian society, and it fed into the intellectual culture that ultimately caused the Russian Revolution, where it was a sort of social archetype of the revolutionary. And authors like Chekhov and Dostoevsky and these people, they were part of this broader culture, and it became almost a sort of meme more than it was actually a political opinion at certain times. And the tsarist regime was genuinely oppressive, where it had practically no freedom of speech. It was really terrible to the Jews, and the Jews were overrepresented in said revolutionary associations. It practiced serfdom. You'll hear stories of serf glancing at a noble woman and making eye contact with her, and then she sends him off to Siberia for punishment. So it was just utter, sort of depraved whims.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And ironically, it was also Germany pushing a lot of it. There's a weird alliance between, like, the German establishment, who had an interest from a foreign policy perspective, and then the rebels, they kind of. And the networks they harbored to help communism evolve in the Soviet Union or in Russia to undermine Russia. And people kind of sometimes latch on to these things as if they're the kind of reason for the events happening, but as what they're actually doing is they're tapping into an existing vein. If they want to throw off the power in Russia, that's either pogromming the Jews or a threat to Germany, then what you do is. I forgot my. Oh, yeah. You tap into the existing cultural trends for revolution. So, like in the US you tap into the things that the foreign governments are funding are things that they're trends that. Potential trends that exist within our culture already. That's why everything that Russia might want to fund on the Internet, I was talking about 10, 15 years ago, maybe before they even looked into it, to know that those were going to be the political trends to elevate.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. Lenin was based out of Switzerland for years before he was sent back to Russia by the Germans, where he was so politically controversial that he couldn't stay in Russia. And he was an intellectual, and there was a lot of resentment that he went back to Russia, that this intellectual guy who had been abroad just seized control of the Russian Communist Party and drove out from power all of these hard bitten political bosses who had been doing sort of ground support in Russia for a while and the Germans did not know what they were doing. They did not see it as a political decision. They saw it as a power decision where they were at war with Russia. And they thought that Lenin would be this gadfly that would hurt the Russians. They didn't seem to realize that Lenin was one of the great men of the 20th century. He is one of the singular figures in the 20th century who changed the course of history the most. Because when you're looking at the Russian Revolution, which we'll get to in a little bit, the only reason that worked was due to Lenin, due to his cult of personality, due to his iron will, due to the intellectual terms he developed and all those different things. And the Kaiser really did not like the Communists. Germany, in fact, a year later or a year or two later had their own civil war between communist militias and right wing militias. And then the right wing militias just killed the communist ones. It was called the Spartacist revolts. But when you're looking at the decades that lead up to the Russian Revolution, people didn't think that Russia would fall until a lot of the way through World War I, where it was as widely assumed that Russia was this great power that would totally dominate. And the Germans were terrified of the Russians. And part of the reason they started World War I was, was they assessed that 1916 was the last year they.

[Austin Padgett]

Could beat Russia because Thucydides trap for them.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's one of the most pure examples of a Thucydides trap where the Russians started the war because they thought the Germans started the war with the Russians because they thought the Russians were industrializing so fast that they needed to, while the British and the French made the same calculation about the Russians. And so that was. Sorry, British and the French made the same calculation with the Germans. And so it was this layered industrialization Thucydides trap. And there's been a lot of propaganda on this topic where Tsarist Russia has been painted as this evil, tyrannical society. But it did better than the Soviet Union on almost every conceivable metric. It did have secret police, but it had significantly more freedom of thought and freedom of speech than the Soviet Union did. Where a lot of the Soviet Union's sort of intellectual prelude was in Russian nihilistic philosophy. Where for decades before the rise of the Soviet Union, Russia was going through this nihilistic philosophic trajectory where they took in all of these European ideas, but they didn't have the concept of the individual or liberalism to metabolize them. So there were a variety of factions between people who ultimately became the Soviets, who thought that mankind could just rewrite reality and mankind was capable of becoming a God. That was a popular thread in Russian philosophy, the idea that nothing matters and. And that life is absurdist. That was really popular.

[Austin Padgett]

Those are ironically very related, those two.

[Rudyard Lynch]

They are, yeah. Yeah, they are.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. If nothing matters, then you can do anything.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. Another interesting element is that if you were to guess that Russia had a civil war and a regime shift, you would not think the Communists would win. You would think the Slavic nationalists would, because that was the biggest current before World War I. And Slavic nationalism had a lot of sort of elements to it, one of which was Eurasianism. The idea that the Russian identity had to be based upon this new Eurasian identity that pulled from the Mongols or Central Asia or the steppe, that Russia had this own distinct mystical civilization that made it distinct from Western civilization. And the Slavs were a unique race with unique abilities that had to separate itself from the West. That was a significantly bigger current among Russian intellect, maybe among a lot of Russian intellectuals and the Russian leadership class than Communism was. It's just that World War I fried.

[Austin Padgett]

Their circuits and it took out the whole nationalist thing and there was no alternative.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, but in any given timeline, you would have probably guessed that if the czars fell, that they would be replaced by something like fascists.

[Austin Padgett]

The. The lack of liberalism and concept of individualism. I was going to say you could tie that back to the Mongols taking out the Swedish kingdoms. Yeah. Which then ties in perfectly to what you said about the Slavic baseline, which was what determined the structure outside of the Swedish monarchy.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah, that's a very good point. And there was this profound detachment between reality and Russian intellectuals. And it's a society in many ways very similar to France before its revolution, where they had a government that intervened in the economy in a radical sense. They had a lot of economic growth before then. And it was a society where the intellectuals were not integrated with the leadership, where the leadership were sort of reactionary theocrats who couldn't keep up with the current society. So the intellectuals wandered off in their own direction, picked up all of these very silly ideas, and then they caused the Russian Revolution, which in a lot of ways is very parallel to the French Revolution.

[Austin Padgett]

You mentioned growth before the revolution. Yes, yeah, go ahead.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's a complicated story because on one side, Russia was a great growing titan that looked terrifying on the outside, but on the other Russia had all of these intractable issues under the surface that blew it out. So as an example, Russia had staggering economic growth for the decades leading up to World War I. It was one of the most rapidly industrializing countries on earth. But there were a few issues. The first is that this came at the expense of increasing income inequality. Where Russia was the most chronically unequal country in Europe at the start of World War I, where they were actually riding the sort of secular cycle wave that slammed into the rest of Europe with the French Revolution. But it was delayed over a century for the Russians due to the colonization of Ukraine and Siberia.

[Austin Padgett]

Right, yeah. That enabled them to escape their Malthusian trap pressure.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Another thing is that the Russian nobility, they. The end of serfdom created a lot of issues, one of which is that it destroyed an entire class of nobility who could no longer support themselves when their serfs demanded wages. What these people did was move to the cities, become over educated. And the Russian economy did not produce enough education focused jobs for these people. So they had this huge academic elite overproduction. And this very demographic became the big supporters of the communists. It wasn't working class people, it was the sons of the lower tier of nobility and the educated classes. Who turns to communism partly as a way to get rid of their guilt for being the children of the landowners, but also because they wanted a system that rewarded their education, trust fund academics.

[Austin Padgett]

Where I've ever heard that before.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. And they became a really sort of cancerous demographic in Russia and they were present across all of Eastern Europe. They were the people who were involved in the black hand that started World War I. The people in the anarchist associations where Russia had a huge terrorism issue with the anarchists. And the back of this economic growth was driven mostly off foreign capital where Russia had huge amounts of investments from Britain, France, Germany, even America, where huge Russian industrial facilities were built by Americans and even into the Soviet Union. American private corporations were supporting the early Soviet growth where Wall street firms helped fund the Russian revolution. And American, I think even ones like maybe not Ford, but of that scale, they were helping building plants in Russia because we forget this, but no one at the time understood how bad the Soviets or Mao or Hitler were. So these people had lots of admirers in the Western world that genuinely sent them hell.

[Austin Padgett]

That's funny because I just heard Fuentes talking about how the US doesn't need any foreign expertise or even people to train people, no immigrants as we re industrialize because the Soviet Union industrialized without any foreigners and having Worked in Asia. I know what it's like where there's always foreigners, where you're setting up an industry, where you don't have the domestic expertise in which it is our situation now where we're not the cutting edge of a few different ones. But yeah, there were Western foreigners all over the Soviet Union helping set that up. And it's important you mentioned the growth before the Soviet Union because they take credit for pretty much all the downstream trends of industrialization. It's kind of used as a proof that communism works because look how much better it was in the czars. Look at this industrialization. But they were building off of that cultural capital and also intersecting with these more advanced technologies that they could copy and paste. So it reminds me of being in Thailand, where I know their monarch has nothing to do with why they have skyscrapers in Bangkok. He's just like a classic line of monarchies that monarchs that got hit by the timeline of industrialization. But in Thailand and these villages, like the king brought them the technology, it came with, like the seal of the king. There was a. There were visits, there were narratives, there were pictures. And so they think that he's just an amazing king because he, like, look how much he changed their lives. But he. He's. He was not a unique figure at all. He didn't even really run the government.

[Rudyard Lynch]

He wasn't that involved unilaterally. Every single thing the Marxists say about this is wrong. They say that Russia before the communists was starving. It wasn't. Russia was Europe's greatest breadbasket. It massively exported food. The starving came with the Communists. The czars were doing radically faster economic growth than the Communists were. And we ran statistical models on this where under the czars, economic and industrial growth was exponential. And under the Marxists, it was arithmetic. And so under the czars, you had an incentive structure to build these industrial plants and make technological innovations. And there wasn't that incentive under the Marxists. So they would just shove more inputs in. But there was no incentive for exponential growth.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Inputs, including people. Yes.

[Rudyard Lynch]

If communism never arose in Russia, Russia would easily be a first world country. It would be wealthy. It would have. The former Soviet Union would probably have an extra hundred million people without the Communists.

[Austin Padgett]

You mean if the Mongols never invaded?

[Rudyard Lynch]

No, if Kerensky. I know that you're making a point.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

But if Kerensky had won in the Russian Civil War, because it was that close. Where after World War I started, the Russians fought against the Germans, and that was the Bloodiest front of the war. No one remembers the Eastern Front in World War I, but it's significantly, in some ways, at least, more brutal than the Western Front. I forget if the Eastern and the Western Front killed more people, but they both killed a lot. And you gradually saw the weakness of the Russian state, and you saw presages of that with the Russo Japanese War, where Russia had a Little Revolution in 1904 due to the failures of the Russo Japanese War, where the Russian military was just staggeringly inefficient in both wars. And it really tested a lot of faith or respect in the tsarist system because they would keep on sending men into battle who had no training and no guns, or not supplying their troops, or having BS regulations where the enemy spies had better comprehensions of the structure of the forts they were in than the Russian officers who were in those forts. And so the Russian people started to lose faith in the czars. And part of the way through World War I, it's not really that Russia lost the war. It's that they got so much pressure. They fell apart as a society. They could not supply their militaries. They could not feed the people they needed to. And that was the real tipping point where Russia had two different revolutions. One the October and the February Revolution, where there was a gradual realization that the czars could not keep Russia going through this war. And so the first one was a sort of palace coup where classical liberals installed themselves in power. And Kerensky was the first classical. It's complicated. They had five different. They had many different regimes, rolling revolutions. It's not a clean process. But Kerensky got power. And Kerensky's goal was to establish Russia as a classical liberal democracy, much like America. And Russia was that very briefly. And when they had universal suffrage, the average Russian who was a peasant voted in moderate socialist governance based around land reform. And the Bolsheviks who later took power. They were something that. Less than 2% of Russia's population, they were truly tiny. And communism was banned in Russia under the czars, although funnily enough, they didn't ban the Communist Manifesto because the Russian censors assessed it was too boring to be dangerous.

[Austin Padgett]

That's hilarious. I mean, to be fair, that's what I would do if I read gender studies academic paper, but seemed to have worked on some. A few. Quite a few people.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And Kerensky. Kerensky was definitely the better player. He wasn't a completely nice guy. He would do stuff like just steal food from the peasants, maintain power Fairly brutally. But compared to the Marxists, he was a chocolate cake. And he refused to end the war with Germany, which was the big thing that pissed off the Russian public where they were tired of the war, millions of people had died. But to give up the war would mean surrendering a majority of the industrial base of Russia as well as a huge amount of territory between Poland and the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus. And Russia was in this sort of indeterminate place where it didn't know what it was going to do while it was still fighting the war with the Germans. And the Germans made these huge territorial gains when Russian society fell apart. And this is when the Germans chose to drop Lenin in Petrograd, which was the renamed version of St. Petersburg, because St. Petersburg was a German name. They were at war with the Germans. And you can see how much czarist society had broken down, that Lenin was operating as a revolutionary in the capital of Tsarist Russia. And they couldn't really taper him down where he and his crew were throwing out pamphlets, they were openly recruiting. They had operations running across the entire country and they were waiting for the moment to strike. The sort of thing they discovered was that the average Russian military serviceman was not willing to shoot on rebels because they were so disaffected from the entire system that the military was no longer loyal to the government. And Lenin is one of the, as I said before, very few historic figures who actively carved history himself. And he's very much a Robespierre figure, where both of them were rigid, hyper intelligent ideologues. Where Lenin was predominantly an intellectual, although he also was a great leader and he was known for writing essays about just the economic implications of Marxism and that stuff. And he had a personal grasp with the Russians. I think he's part Siberian Finno Ugrian ancestry. I forget if he's part Jewish.

[Austin Padgett]

I think his family was, but he wasn't religious.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah. And his brother, I believe, was thrown in jail by the czars unfairly, which radicalized him for the rest of his life. And his dad was a schoolteacher and he seized control of the Bolsheviks. And the Bolshevik is a term for majority. Because there was a single snapshot where the Bolsheviks had a majority of the Socialist Congress and they themselves the majority. And then the other party which normally had way more people, the Mensheviks, they were called the minority. And in a collectivist, consensus based culture like Russia saying you're the majority really matters. And Lenin seized control of these different organizations. And he was absolutely brutal. There's been this attempt to rehabilitate Trotsky and Lenin. But both of them were ostensibly monsters who saw human life with total contempt. And the reason Lenin won was he maintained hyper ideological rigidity and hierarchical structure. Where the Bolsheviks, they were a tiny group of leftists who shot dissenters, maintained their internal structure and they would self police each other. And so they had a higher degree of in group cooperation and loyalty than any other faction in Russia at the time. So they seized power at a moment when Russia was in disarray. And so they launched another revolution that seized control of Petrograd and took out Kerensky's government. And the Russian Civil War is kind of a clusterfuck where part of the reason Lenin was able to take power is that he made peace with the Germans. And that's what the average Russian wanted. Because the average Russian was a peasant who wanted bread and land and peace with the Germans. And Lenin offered all of those things. He offered, I'm going to take care of your material needs. We're going to end the war with the Germans. And so he gave all of the areas of the Brest Litovsk Treaty, including Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, the Baltics to Germany. And for several years at the end of World War I, Germany treated them as de facto colonies where they were moving in German settlers and taking over the region and establishing governments while the whites. It was a civil war between the anti communist whites and then the Reds or the Soviets they were. The whites could have won, but they had a crisis of leadership. They had three sort of distinct polarities. With Admiral Kolchak up by the Arctic Sea you had Admiral Kolchak. By the Arctic Sea you had another admiral by the Black Sea who was known as being rabidly anti Semitic. Where both the Communists later on and the whites were anti Semitic, where he'd go on pogroms across Ukraine, he got a lot of the old Cossacks who were a free nomad people on his side. And the Ukrainians were also anti Communist where part of Stalin's plan to genocide the Ukraine stemmed from him knowing in the Russian Revolution that Ukraine had all of these anti Marxist anarchist groups and peasant groups that rebelled against them. Even though Ukraine was also one of the top two spots. The Communists pulled leadership from the two geographic regions in the Russian Empire that the most communist leadership were from were either Petrograd or from Ukraine.

[Austin Padgett]

Why Ukraine?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Ukrainians are. They're sort of like the south in America where they have their own distinct identity. And if the confederacy won the civil war, it would Be genuinely arguable if they're their own nation and ethnic group, the north and south would both say that they were. And Ukraine's similar where it's part of the. It was part of the Russian empire, but it's also got its own thing. And when you have your own thing and your own identity, you can often be able to tap into much larger systems that don't. It's partly why there's so many Canadian musicians and cultural figures in America, because the Canadians have enough of an identity to help each other out and become a laboratory to be a springboard for America.

[Austin Padgett]

Right, so it's like the Ukrainian network of activists.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And this gets back to the Bolsheviks because like you mentioned, the Bolsheviks were an organic development. They took Trotsky took over, or Lenin took over an organization that from. What do you call them? The hard bosses on the ground.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Kind of set this up. And pretty much all of them were Russians. The Jews were a very tiny minority. And then Jews were like 10 out of the top 100 and then four out of the top seven, partly because they represented those organizational hubs. So it's probably the Jews in Germany is probably similar to the Russians in Ukraine in terms of elevating their position as organizers.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I think at their peak, the Jews were like a third of the. Of the Marxists. But that was a brief peek around the revolution. And then once the revolution went out, they started purging the Jews from the Communist Party. So Stalin nearly genocided the Jews at the end of his reign, and they were actively kicking them out. And so the Jews joined the Marxists because tsarist Russia was one of the regimes in history the most genuinely oppressive to the Jews. And one of the things Paul Johnson said is that a lot of the left wing radicalism in Europe or America is us sort of paying a karmic debt for tsarist Russia, because he says all of these activists who were Ashkenazi Jews who came out of tsarist Russia in the early to mid 20th century in. In the Western world, and those who are new to my content, you know, I've had a lengthy whole spiel about how the Jews are a faction of leftism, but they're not the predominant one. Where it's like the rise of early Christianity where they. It's the creation of a cultural movement that a vote eventually cannibalized the Jews. But tsarist Russia was also oppressive to a variety of groups. They hated the Poles more than they hated Muslims, actually, which is funny, where tsarist Russia actually encouraged pagans in Central Asia to convert to Islam. And in some ways the Marxists were worse to the Muslims and the Asian minorities than the czars were because the czars were looking more so for reconciliation and owning the land. And the Marxists just saw the native peoples with contempt. They forced the hunter gatherers to move into the communes. They committed some of the worst genocides of anyone against the Kazakhs and the steppe peoples of Central Asia because they saw their life with contempt. While the czars had more respect for minorities. Where one of the weird details of Czarist Russia is for a lot of their minorities, they were one of the nicer European colonial empires. Tsarist Russia was the most brutal in most ways. You can find sort of distinct exceptions.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. But that's probably because they were used to managing a multi ethnic kind of empire. Right. It's also ironic that when an actual communist meets an actual nomadic person, that they're not as impressed as the Rousseauian imagination. Like what happened when they actually met them. They killed them. While talking about the piece of mythical piece of the noble savage.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's actually really funny. I went through a sort of obsession of mapping all the languages on Earth. And when I was going through Siberia and looking at the distinct languages, there's this huge native die off of these languages with the Soviet Union in this process. So it's whichever. Whichever Siberian peoples made it through this filter were the ones that passed on the culture. But the filter is there. Mongolia is similar, which the Soviet Union conquered Mongolia as their only real puppet state between World War I and World War II. And they drove out the Count von Sternberg, who was a German Estonian warlord who declared himself king of Mongolia with his group of buddies and managed it his own personal fief. And I've heard conflicting stories about communist Mongolia, where apparently they killed some vast amount of the population initially and they got bored and gave up. And then it became one of the most lackadaisical communist states, I heard.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, they. They had an issue with their planning because they didn't have property rights. So they. And they introduced a new type of animal for grazing. And so because they didn't have property rights, they raced for the grass and they ate all the young grass. This is what happened in the Great Depression too, because fencing wasn't allowed in the Midwest. And so it created a really big ecological disaster in Mongolia. And so that's definitely impeded their like agricultural development and general development.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I've heard that too. Also that they were trying to collectivize the cattle and the Mongols as a proud warrior. People just killed the cattle first, which caused mass famine. The Mongols were really hard to break, where they killed a lot of them in the beginning, and then it just got so brutal that they sort of gave up. And it's kind of funny that the premiere of Mongolia, he was the only guy in Stalin's network who would talk back to Stalin, and Stalin let him do it. Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

It's like they get away with it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. I don't know for what reason. Maybe Mongolia was utterly powerless. Maybe Stalin admired Arab balls.

[Austin Padgett]

They're like the libertarian of the international scene.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

Where they can have their opinion and everybody's like, okay, you're allowed to dissent, but nobody else is.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Where Stalin would make demands of the communist premier of Mongolia and he'd just say no.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Kind of like the Amish too.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Like they don't have to listen to the fda.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And then later on, they loosened up a lot on a lot of the communist stuff, more than other communist countries. Which is partly why Mongolia could adjust from being a communist to a free country more easily than most Iron Curtain block nations.

[Austin Padgett]

Which one went from a communist to free easily?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Mongolia.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because they never got that deep into it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Mongolia has a constitution exactly identical to the American.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, fascinating.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Mongolians love America.

[Austin Padgett]

I would love to go there.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Me too.

[Austin Padgett]

Do Mongolian wrestling. They do that. And, like, they like to have foreigners do it, I think. And then horse riding, all that great stuff.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I'm going to insert this tangent here, but I don't follow Ishowspeed. But I saw he went to Mongolia in ishowspeed. He's a YouTuber.

[Austin Padgett]

Right.

[Rudyard Lynch]

If a white person greenlit that show, they would say it's deeply racist in its blackface. But because he does it, it's seen as empowering. It's like Leslie Jones on snl. If a white person greenlit Leslie Jones as a character, it would be seen as a deeply inflammatory, racist stereotype.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, because Leslie does do a bit of, like a black person parody.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

And, yeah. Kind of a way that you would do if you were mocking. Doing a mocking representation. And Speed has that. That's funny. I thought at first it would be about how he treated the locals or something. By being boisterous.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Or not respectful. But no, it was about how he made himself look. That was.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And Russian civil war is not a particularly sexy conflict. There aren't big set piece battles, decisive turning points. It's mostly that Lenin was really good at sort of holding his iron rod where he could maintain the leadership. And the whites around him were divided. Most of the major other Western regimes, they did not send enough support for the Russian Civil War where America, Russia, Britain, France, Japan. We sent some fleets out by Vladivostok in the Pacific and then up by Archangel in Russia's Arctic Sea coast. But that wasn't enough to sort of turn the tide of the conflict. But at the same time, World War I just happened. And how were you supposed to militarily project force into Russia by water? I don't know how. You march an army from Archangel to Moscow and hold the terrain and you see weird stuff like the Czech army, where a bunch of Czechs who were fighting for the Russians against the Austrian Empire, which had their homeland, they got stuck in Siberia and they militarily occupied Siberia on the transcontinental railroad. And at the end of the war, they took the railroad out to Vladivostok on the Pacific, got picked up by a British fleet, and then fled to safety in Western Europe, which is a chad move.

[Austin Padgett]

Wow. They resisted all the way to Siberia and then escaped. That's the best. I love a great siege story where the guy actually escapes or people actually get to escape when they. When it's inevitable. It's like the best of both worlds where you get to fight to the end and survive.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. That was like all the video games I played as a kid.

[Austin Padgett]

And.

[Rudyard Lynch]

There was this weird split second moment where all of the Russian elite at the time of the revolution, or the Communists, the new communist formed elite, they were all utterly insane religious fanatics where they assumed that this was the start of a global revolutionary process where Marxism would have revolutions rippling across the entire world. And Lenin assumed that Germany was on the verge of a revolution. Revolutions would even take over America. That was a common sentiment where American Americans would worry about a communist revolution in 1919, which caused the biggest Red scare in American history. More so than even McCarthy. We just forgot the 1919 Red Scare. And this was a huge turning point where the American elite became more egalitarian and less unequal because they worried about a Marxist revolution.

[Austin Padgett]

But domino theory had a basis in something earlier.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It did. And in this brief split second at the end of World War I, when the Russians finally, or the Communists finally unified Russia, and Poland was the people on the Western front of the Communists who had invaded Russia earlier because Poland had just gotten independence due to the Treaty of Versailles from the German Empire and a little bit of Austria. And so the Poles used this to immediately try to reconquer Poland, Lithuania or their huge empire that used to stretch into the east. And the Russians were able to defeat the Poles and push them out to Warsaw, where under their, I believe Pilsudski, under Pilchudski, who I can't forget if Pilskutsi was the 17th century guy or the 20th century guy, they had a cavalry officer, military dictator who held against the Russians at the Battle of Warsaw. And this was widely seen as a historically decisive battle. And I'm not so certain anymore where I think the Russians could have taken Poland. I don't think the Russians would have kept going west and launched a series of communist revolts across Europe because they just assumed that Germany would have a communist revolt. Because in Marxist eschatology, the capitalist nations rebel before the agrarian ones. And because Germany was a more industrialized economy by definition. If Russia rebelled, Germany was on the verge of rebelling. The right wing militias crushed the left wing Spartacist revolt, so that German Marxist revolt never happened. And the Russians did get turned back from Poland. Poland stayed being an independent country, as did the Baltics, while the Russians held onto Ukraine and Belarus. And they were able to crush these independent liberation movements where part of the Russian Revolution was Central Asia and Ukraine and the Caucasus nations having these revolutionary wars, where these independent ethnic groups formed their own distinct countries. And these were crushed into the Russian Empire, where in all reality the Soviet Union was an extension of the Russian Empire, where they often even pushed the centralization further, where it was this sleight of hand that there were all of these independent Soviet Socialist Republics, Ukraine, Soviet Socialist Republic, Kazakh Socialist Republic, and these technically had self governance, but they were actually totally directed by Moscow. And so the Russian Empire put on this mask of diversity and internationalism, while in reality they were pushing the centralizing trends even more so than before.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting. This really reminds me of those situations where you have a prediction or you get a glimpse into the future and. And then because you saw it, you made it happen by you inadvertently made it come about. Because in America they were worried about communism, right? So they started the kind of neoliberalism which led directly to socialism because of the stacking interventions. And then they were afraid of domino theory and the spread of international communism. So they created this like international empire which became the structure for a global communist cartel. Like we were way better at advancing international communism than Russia because the way domino theories ironically does work with free markets, free markets do create a domino effect because it creates a hermetic pressure towards competition. But communism actually does not lead to a domino theory because it fails like in Vietnam. So to, to have international communism, you don't get there through domino theory. You get there through international rules that keep people in the same basket to prevent domino theory from undermining it. And so by, by our two attempts to stop communism, we kind of were more successful at bringing it about than the Soviets. And it's interesting with Lenin to Stalin and kind of Germany with the communists to the national Socialists, because it was almost like the national socialist moment in Russia was Stalin's regime change or takeover of the system from the more Lenin system, where in Germany it was the Nazis winning an election against the Marxists. But they're kind of like the parallels between the communists and Nazis in Germany kind of match up with Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union in terms of kind of how they ran their government.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, there was a tipping point where Russia was about to crystallize into a bunch of certain ways. And one of the things that's really annoying about leftist movements over history is that they tend to be very ideologically muddy until they get hit under pressure and they immediately default onto the most totalitarian option possible. And leftists have been far or the entire society was far too kind to the Soviet union in the 20th century where people say that Lenin meant well, which was not true. He killed millions of people. He had mass murders and confiscations that were way worse than anything the czars ever did. And he was the person who established the totalitarian machinery that Stalin created. He was the guy who built all of that. And people also like to imagine that Trotsky was some nice guy, but he was on the exact same page. The big difference in Stalin and Trotsky wasn't about any of the murders or that stuff. It was that Trotsky was an internationalist and Stalin was a nationalist. Lenin had a series of health issues, he died pretty fast and he was turned into a religious figure being kept in a mausoleum in the middle of Red Square. And of course not of course, but they moved the capital from St. Petersburg to Moscow as a sign that the Soviet Union was no longer the foreign focused country, that the czars were pulling European influences. It was a rebellion by the Slavic interior Russian peoples who became resentful at the czars bringing in capitalism in Western ways. So that was the symbolic of going from a coastal to an interior capital.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Because you could associate capitalism with foreign anti national forces, values, interests.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I'm going to get a glass of water. I'll be right back.

[Austin Padgett]

I will do the same.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Stalin was Lenin's bureaucracy, paper guy, where Lenin was an intellectual and he was quite hard working and disciplined, but he wasn't the type of guy who liked to manage the boring stuff or the back end. And that was what Stalin loved to do. Stalin was a thug from Georgia where he alongside Mao were literal criminals, where they'd rob banks and just steal money before they became revolutionaries. And a big element in the communists or the Nazis was they would literally recruit criminals into their ranks for the leadership, because criminals had the type of ruthlessness and immorality that they actively tried to cultivate. It's not that these genocidal regimes just happened. They were the end points of the people involved. And in every communist revolution, the first people to seize power are the Lenin's. They're ideological fanatics and intellectuals. And then the Stalin's ultimately win. Where Stalin's move was, he would just say, Lenin, give me as much work as you need, I'll have me and my people handle it. So he was behind Lenin making sure things got done. And he built up a reputation as being a real man, the kind of guy who could manage things and handle difficult situations. And he built up a lot of respect among the Russians that there was a resentment against Lenin being this guy who was out in Europe for years. And when Lenin died, it was the death of their religious figures. They didn't have a method. And the communists are terrible at systems thinking. It's funny that they pretend to love systems and they can't do any systems thinking in actual application, so they don't have methods to choose new leaders. And so that was why with the death of both Lenin and Stalin, there was this huge kerfuffle of people killing each other and conspiracies because there wasn't a system. And Trotsky got pushed out and he fled to Mexico, living with the Frida Kahlo and her husband in Mexico City. And he was ultimately assassinated. And a lot of the global left had a sort of love for Trotskyism, thinking that if he won things would have been better. But no, he was basically exactly the same. It's just Trotsky's ideal was that communism and the Soviet Union had to be this global evangelical project. And his faction was significantly more Jewish. And Stalin's was that we need to solidify power over the Soviet Union and then resume normal trade relations and diplomatic relations with other countries because we cannot sustainably push revolution around the world while still having a functioning country that exists with other countries. That was seen as a betrayal to a Lot of the global left, but the global left kept on making excuses for all of these people and.

[Austin Padgett]

Trotsky didn't live long enough to become the villain, essentially.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly, yeah. If you've gotten this far into the movie with dispossessing property and killing people and killing off parish priests, you're not a nice guy. Sorry, I just had a thought where people would hate on the whites for going too far in the Russian civil war, but it was actively immoral that the whites didn't push harder because do you see the point I'm making? There's sort of morality where we let something like Stalin take over. We see it as bad to push back, but you're, you're sort of, your softness is allowing something worse to come in.

[Austin Padgett]

It's the same thing with Trump where they criminalized him and tried to put him in jail for non crimes. And so now it's a debate like, oh, do we punish people for actual crimes or do we try and hold ourselves to a different standard? And that doesn't really work because they don't care about hypocrisy and they've already left, already made these decisions. You know, I mean, they'll pack the court next time they get in and we're, we're worried about the filibuster. So yeah, it's, it's like, you're right, it's this paradox of morality because the morality is not important. But I don't know, maybe it's a com. Compartmentalization.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's really that they're apologizing for what Nietzsche calls resentment or envy and toxic femininity, where it was this global conspiracy to defend equality and Marxist like ideas. Because by this point the Western ruling classes were already, if not Marxist, they were liberals who were several steps removed from being sympathetic to Marxists. And this is something that becomes very obvious in the Holodomor where you had Western thinkers that went to Russia, but it was these sort of set stage plays where if you visited Russia, they bring the nicest villages, you talk to the local people who were basically paid actors. And so the Russians made it very easy to pretend that the Soviet Union was a good country in this mutual game of not knowing. And so at the time, the Western press wrote glowing reviews of Stalin and it was widely said that Russia would be a new great civilization and that the Soviets won the. There was a line that goes, I, I've, I've seen to the, I've seen the future and it's real of what a Western journalist who Went to Russia.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Future.

[Austin Padgett]

And if you just like China today, Hasan pike are going to China.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's the exact same thing. And it's really disgusting how common a thread that was during the Cold War of, during the Vietnam War. Going to Vietnam saying it's a good country or going to China saying Mao was a great leader who killed 40 million people. And these are not good regimes. These are in a lot of ways the worst regimes in history. Mao killed 40 million people, Stalin killed 20 million, Hitler killed 12 million. And when you look back on them, you come to realize that it's also violence in a highly acidic, highly destructive, targeted way where every single fascist regime became a democracy within a generation. Because fascism for all of its flaws, directs its violence outside the in group. So it's not actively self cannibalizing. What communism effectively is is the toxic castrating mother trying to kill her own society.

[Austin Padgett]

Where the problem is those are the kind of democracies that a lot of these fascist experiments have gone back to. They might have like brief periods, but it's, they bounce back to the, you know, the female toxicity, so to speak.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And it's two sides of the same coin. One of the things Carl Jung would say is that the Iron Curtain, which split Europe in half, was symbolic for the collective unconscious of the European peoples that had been split in half. And Carl Jung would say both sides of the Iron Curtain are actually fairly similar, at least in some ways. I'm not going to get too carried away on that train. But they both radically split apart human nature. And Carl Jung would talk about how people in the modern world don't notice obvious things. They have really terrible intuition and wisdom and judgment because they're so psychically split. And so when you're looking at the Cold War, you're seeing two varieties of toxic feminine state overreach that manifest in different ways. The Western branch was around psychological manipulation where it was still an agnostic socialist feminine society, but it was all based around using the social institutions to psychologically manipulate people to consent to the, the system. In the Soviet Union it was force.

[Austin Padgett]

Right, so brave new world versus 1984.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, that's true.

[Austin Padgett]

And in real time.

[Rudyard Lynch]

No, I'm just, I'm thinking if there's any other threads on the support from the west in that time period that's useful. The Soviet Union had a significant amount of Western supporters. They had spies in the highest ranks of the British intelligence. A lot of people in Roosevelt administration were Marxist spies.

[Austin Padgett]

They were big in Holly, like his vp.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Or they changed him out for Truman.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And it was something the western elites were not ready for. And they kept on giving concessions to the Marxists, thinking the Marxists were like them. And this is a mistake liberals keep on making. Liberals think that Marxists have the same values as them. They're just a little misled. And the reality is that the Marxists do genuinely believe the things they say. They want to destroy global civilization, they want to kill the rich, they want to totally remake and destroy all society in place for the human soul. And so you'll look at the British government before World War II or after World War II or FDR and a lot of these administrations and they were just profoundly naive and gullible. And people had no idea how bad the Marxists were until the end of the Cold War where only the most radical far right in Western politics was even approximately close to how brutal the communists were.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. I guess the liberals didn't understand taxation is theft. So they could identify with the goal of equality through redistribution, I guess because it's kind of like the natural conclusion maybe of their idea. So they can see it as an extreme but related connected phenomenon which is kind of, kind of true. I mean the, the, I guess the neoliberals or the liberals are kind of like Schrodinger Gur's cat, where they can flip either way to the end goal being communism or free markets.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Three cultural issues with modernity. One is mouse utopia, the second is the autistic masculine. And the third is the hysterical devouring feminine. And they all play off against each other. Make a very dangerous situation where if you try to fix one, it recircuits to another one. The autistic masculine refuses to see things that would be obvious for all of history through arbitrary mental categories. This enables the hysterical feminine, which doesn't have social stabilizers and just keeps. And once you remove social stabilizers for the feminine, it sort of becomes a black hole that keeps on consuming to see when will it hit a barrier? That's a very Jungian concept.

[Austin Padgett]

And mouse, when will it meet Batman?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. And the third thing is mouse utopia, which is just as the society got wealthier, it started gradually, started to degenerate. So these three things are mixed. And if we removed one of these three, it would be a radically better situation.

[Austin Padgett]

That's why I'm worried about a trauma cycle like you mentioned earlier with the serfdom in Russia really informing people's views. Obviously there's the exodus dynamic with being stuck as a slave and having to wander through the desert. It's not as simple as getting rid of the tyranny. But you can also relate it to, like, people who grew up in the Great Depression and they recycled tin foil their whole lives, or they were washing, like, their plastic utensils. And then people who grew up during COVID a lot of them will probably be washing their hands eight times a day for the rest of their life. And then like the. The Nazis in Germany, right, were resulting in all this damage. And then all these men from Russia just like raping these women. So you get this crazy feminist backlash of resentment. And if, I don't know if we're on the beginning of a cycle that's like increasing to implosion, I don't know how long it can go. But I just, I don't want a positive feedback loop to accelerate there or trap us. And I kind of relate that directly to Hobbs vs Rousseau. Right? That's this, the trauma cycle. The masculine feminine maps on to Hobbs, Rousseau, maybe Locke maps on to mouse utopia, which we have to figure out. There's other factors there too, obviously, with welfare dependency being a big factor for mouse utopia. But I just thought that was an interesting parallel between masculine feminine and Hobbes and Rousseau. Like everything we're talking about is kind of overlapping.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The question you posit is profoundly valuable. However, it's nearly 3pm and we're still stuck in 1921.

[Austin Padgett]

That's true. We're having too much fun after our break. I have a whole thing too about the right brain, left brain transition.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I have a rant about this too. I'm going to keep it on topic on this, but this podcast is not going to be three hours. So Stalin unifies power. And there was this weird transition period where Lenin had allowed some private agriculture and private business to form in the aftermath of the Russian Civil war just to stop mass starvation. Because Eastern Europe was facing horrifying mass starvation at the time. And surprisingly, this very small amount of privatization. Privacy. Privatization caused a radical increase in the amount of food in Russia and the stabilization of the economy.

[Austin Padgett]

This is under Stalin.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, Lenin. Stalin got it. Which Stalin solved by destroying this private initiative which plunged the people back into famine. Okay, so Stalin tried to put Russia in the period between the early twenties and the war with the Germans in 1940, 1941, through economic development. And the Soviets did economically develop Russia, but it was at a staggering cost where they. They destroyed the private agriculture, which plunged people into famine. And if the communists had not seized power, I think Russia would have developed economically Faster and stronger. And I used to think that the Soviets sped up economic growth because they would do these huge five year plans. But because they were in these constant inefficiency and burnout cycles, I don't think the five year plans add up against the lessened compounded pressure of increases in efficiency and a more efficient interconnected economic system. And all those different things where you saw a series of issues, for example, that they would requisition food from farmers. The farmers weren't paid for growing food, so they wouldn't grow the food. Then the food would go to cities. And there was this huge move in the 20s to ship food from the countrysides to the factories because in Marxist theory factories were more important than, than than farmers due to. You needed to evolve the economy to reach a Marxist social structure, to have the, the proletariat.

[Austin Padgett]

So the Soviet like level two is higher than level one so we don't need stairs.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it was a lot of thinking like that.

[Austin Padgett]

And.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So you saw a wide scale population migration from the countryside to the cities due to this. But they weren't able to build in the cities fast enough. So you saw these horrifying Brazil style tenements such as 20 people living in the same room or people not having warm buildings in the Russian winter where it was really a nightmare. And quality of life did not really improve from the czars to the communists. In fact it radically decreased for the first over a decade and it only recovered after a very long time. And if the czars had maintained power, the average Russian would be vastly wealthier.

[Austin Padgett]

It's crazy. People don't know that. Most people don't know that even on both sides.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, they plunged the Russians into significantly higher degrades degrees of average poverty. And a horrible thing as well is that the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc had higher inequality than the west did during the Cold War because the Soviets established their own system where their new nobility would live in the palaces of the old Russian nobility. They would have highly expensive meals. And in Russian society at the through to the communist social structure they had all of these types of inequality similar to the social credit system that you didn't see in a purely market based economy. The only way to get opera tickets or a specific type of meat was to have political connections. And so inequality across the society was vastly higher than in the West. And even on a purely economic level, the difference between a CEO and an employee in America in 1960, 1960 was significantly less than between a comparable Russian commissar and a worker. So the Soviets established their own system of hierarchy and inequality. That was pretty bad.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. I mean, sometimes people can underestimate how unequal socialist societies can be, and then you lose the connection a little bit when making comparison to a developing country because the scale's all off. But you can just look at America. We have more socialism by far than ever and way more inequality. That's actually not unconnected, which is kind of an interesting thing.

[Rudyard Lynch]

To have socialism in order to have socialism create inequality. In order to have a society that is socialist enough that it can genuinely radically affect inequality, you have to kill the society.

[Austin Padgett]

Right.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Which is what the Europeans did. Where Europe is one of the very few places where with having a socialist country, there is an impact on the inequality, where in China, it's technically socialist. More unequal than America in actual statistics. America has a lot of socialist policies. We are more unequal than we've ever been. Even the Gilded Age. And inequality is really a function of labor supply and skill level. If you go for any variable besides those two, you're going to fail because it just is a function of skill. Slash, efficiency and labor.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, you're talking about the meat that goes into the sausage. Like, what are your building blocks? Everything's harder. You're just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. Or you have a blanket that's too short and you can decide to put it on your chest or your feet. Like, I'm in the business of building blankets. That's what I'm interested in. Like, how do you make blankets longer?

[Rudyard Lynch]

I think it's fairly easy to make blankets longer, but I guess.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, yeah, why didn't we think of that, actually?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Whoa, man.

[Austin Padgett]

People got taller.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. So you saw several different spikes of this. And this was partly a loyalty thing for Stalin. And at the time, the Soviet Union was the only major communist nation. So they were trying to figure this out themselves. And they saw themselves as a historic turning point where the Soviets were totally obsessed with records because they wanted every single detail for this new glorious experiment in human history to be recorded perfectly so that future generations could look to it to figure out what had happened. And this was ultimately used against them because when the Soviet Union fell, those very same records proved that the Communists killed significantly more people than we thought.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, wow. Right. And, like, people didn't know how bad it was. One of the first accounts I saw was Germans who discovered a tank factory. And they described the conditions, like you said, beyond 20 people in a room, like some dystopia where they're hanging out freezing or in this, like. It basically looks like where a rat would live or something. It's just steel and metal and everything's hard and there's like, no good food. And. And when you have these totalitarian systems, we understand the statistical surplus in the deaths. Right. Where they're just, like, making these huge utilitarian calculations. But what we don't see is the statistical surplus that doesn't quite die, but is just in these insane perpetuating conditions. Because they're basically treated equivalently, like a statistic of someone who'd be. Who would be dead. But they're just, like, stuck in these avenues that get no attention, where these dynamics just fester to absurd degrees.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's very clever you said that. Because that's one of the elements you keep finding in totalitarian regimes that don't exist in other ones, that totalitarian regimes have this issue of people's entire lives are consumed by these forgotten, boring schemes from decades earlier that got thrown out. And.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, there's no corrective mechanism. It's like if you were next to a reef or whatever and you're trying to get back on and the waves are just like, pushing you right and left and however much you swim doesn't matter.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Which is the theme of an Ayn Rand book about, like, what it was like to be under the Soviet Union. The destruction of your will through that dynamic. But you basically, like, that's why I say statistic, because you're becoming subject to a force of human nature equivalent to the ocean.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. And the Soviet Union is completely awash with that. If you look at the primary sources, where every single Soviet factory had an unofficial role that was a fixer, and he wouldn't be on any records. But because the Soviet command economy was so inefficient, where they had thousands of guys in a single room in Moscow trying to plant out all the mechanisms for the economy, which of course, did not work. And when you add all of those things together, you have these huge disjoints where a shoe factory, for example, might not have leather. It might not have the iron necessary, but because their superior demands that they produce it now to fill the quota, they have to figure it out somehow. So they have the fixer, who has the role of just having enough stuff on the black market to make sure that you can figure out how to get things done. And that type of person is unnecessary in a capitalist economy.

[Austin Padgett]

The fixer archetype is a very interesting person as it relates to navigating Bureaucracies. It's like it increases the value of the network effect in the same way as it increases the value of the nepotism effect.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Where people will accuse, you know, rich people being nepotistic to their kids, or all rich people came from other rich people, etc. Which isn't true. But in a socialist bureaucracy it is true that nepotism is just about the only thing you have to differentiate yourself absent strong meritocratic systems. And that's why you kind of aristocratic.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It is the Soviet Union creates all of the conditions of the worst aristocracies and the worst absolutist regimes from the pre modern world, but way more nepotism, corruption, oppression, whatever. And the reason, part of the reason that the Petrograd and the Ukraine cliques were so big in the Communist Party was that they looked out for each other's interest in these nepotistic games.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Like the Ukraine thing. Right. It's the, the organization network effect.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And so when you're looking at the Soviet Union's industrialization, you're seeing a haphazard political project of trying to build these enormous compounds in these enormous projects like the five Year Plan. And these worked sometimes. And the Soviets loved gargantuan constructions, huge factories, farms that are 30,000 acres. And they were obsessed with doing agricultural scale. But the human beings were crushed inside these things. Where when you look at the Soviet brutalist architecture, it's very clear that this is an anti life, anti human force. And in demographic histories of this region of the world that I've read, the unpleasantness of Soviet hospitals was a large factor in why the Soviet birth rate collapsed so quickly. Where Russia at the start of World War I had six to seven children per women by 1970, Russia was below replacement level. Russia was one of the first nations in the world to go below replacement birth rate 30 years before America. Even though America was a much richer country, which you would expect it to be the opposite because the Russian family system and the Russian society was so dehumanizing. And they would do a lot of weird projects where as an example, they made a system and they take this out after a few years where there was no standard weekend, your weekend was assigned per person. And this ended up destroying friend groups and families because there was no time to meet up and they got rid of it because it was too inefficient or something. People forget about communist societies is there's no place for you to have private life. You have to send your kids to the state run school when they Leave the school, they have to go to the youth program. And you have to at least socially sign up for a few of these extra programs. And it's all about monitoring the person's entire life. And there's a book called Dictators by Richard Overy which goes through what life in a totalitarian regime is like. In every single facet of someone's life is dictated on maintaining the lie. That's the media they consume, the social interactions they have. Every floor in Soviet apartments would have, or every Soviet apartment building would have a designated person whose role was to inform on the commissars about what people were talking about in Mao. You would have to write down what your private conversations were that you had with your friends and family. And it was just this air of fear and mistrust. And the Soviet Union didn't let you have labor unions even though, even though they said they were for the workers. And you were given practically no autonomy in your life. And that's a huge element of totalitarian regimes that people don't understand. You ask do people believe these things, the utterly ridiculous lies? The answer was yes, because they had to. And they weren't allowed to breathe mentally. They were completely surrounded. And when you're in a situation like that, it just drives you crazy. Crazy where your entire reality is made to reflect that. And the human mind can only think through possibility. And so when you're not allowed to talk through your reality, it starts to consume everything around you. And I read this interesting book called New Leviathans by John Gray and it's about comparing modern wokeness to the Soviet Union. And it has a lot of interesting anthropological details which where one of which is that the Soviet Union and a lot of anthropological metrics is really, really weird because it has all of these artificial states of nature where because the government intervenes in everything, you don't have normal family organization, you don't have the passing on of traditions, you don't have organic development and growth. Where the communists were very good at the psychology and manipulation and they'd break up every organic social thing where you couldn't have social meetings of more than 10 people because that would become a threat to the regime.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, that reminds me of Lenin in the beginning, right? Because the way he was successful is he was able to organize without ever getting caught and the military was not willing to shoot under crowds. So when Lenin set up their system, and I'm sure this logic extended through, they probably very much focused on making sure that organizations people couldn't do exactly what he did. Yeah. Right. Organizations you couldn't organize. And the military was unlocked on unlock with their crowd control.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And the communists would do lots of things where they get you to agree to the exact opposite of the truth in order that you can't say the truth because you have to first acknowledge that it's the opposite of what they said. And it's a tactic that used in America.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Prime example being the biologist, what's his name, Lynn Coism, where he basically, he just said that you could breed whatever you want. He had a theory that plants were more adaptable than they are, so you could make summer wheat into winter wheat within a few years. Obviously, none of his agricultural projects came to fruition, but nobody was able to call out, you know, contradict, quote, unquote, the science, even though it was. It was an even more absurd version of the science team than what we experienced in Covid.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, he was. Stalin made it so that the only biology people. You could only follow Lysenko biology, which was Lamarckian, that you do certain traits and then biology rewards you for the certain behaviors. The reason for that was to admit heredity or Darwinism would destroy the blank slate. And the Soviets said that men and women were the exact same race, sex, hierarchy did not exist, so they couldn't admit Darwinism or heredity.

[Austin Padgett]

They basically said you could trans your corn into being a winter corn or winter wheat.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, no, they thought that.

[Austin Padgett]

And Stalin was social constructivism. How you talk to the plant. Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And Stalin is trying to train an army of ape men.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, wow.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Side projects. Yeah. Create human, animal, ape men and.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, if it works.

[Rudyard Lynch]

They did. They did a lot of stuff. And part of the reason that the Soviets had a good space program, but then not a lot else is that it's hard to be politically biased in physics in a way. Biology or history or those fields were. The Soviets were very good at intelligence and psychology and information warfare. Their psychological warfare against the west was one of their most useful things. It's strange that that survived so much longer than the actual Soviet Union, where they had huge networks of informants in the west, people in positions of power in academia, culture, business, whatever. And the techniques that the Soviet experts like Yuri Besmanov would use, they just became the dominant ruling ideology of the West. And I don't want to get too much on that rant. I just find it deeply impressive.

[Austin Padgett]

It tells you a lot about their system because you can tell how their system operates by what they're good at, because they need some skill or efficacy Right, good point.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

So it's like a reverse engineer. What do you. What's your cultural export? That's like the foundation of your manipulation? Yeah, that's how they ran it, which is, I guess, impressive. But I wanted to comment on scale for efficiency, which is really interesting because I think people obsessed with scale for efficiency when you can't innovate. Because in a lot of cases, pretty much every case, you can imagine a situation in which you're scaling a model and to increase its efficiency or competitiveness, but there's a lot of cases within that where an innovation will change that entire equation. So if you're just like chasing scale because you have no innovate, it's kind of reflective of a lack of innovation mentality, I think. Yes. An obsession with scale. I think you see that today in the US too.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's true. The Soviets were obsessed with steel as an example, and they built it a huge industrial base in the 30s through 40s. The issue though is that Soviet manufacturing was not competitive. So Even by the 60s and 70s, their factories were not at all competitive against the west. And they were not adaptive. They were hyper inefficient. The quality of goods was terrible because communism gives bad incentive structures. And it was widely said among Russians when they were allowed to grumble, communism was called the second serfdom. And it was worse than the original serfdom because the old lord allowed you to keep more of your produce, more of your stuff. Well, communism is de facto slavery to the state. And it's insane that that is not more of a talking point in society when we deal with communists that they demand total slavery of everyone and they forced people to live in the same barracks. You were not allowed to split off and form your own family in a lot of cases, although it was worse for the Maoists and total alienation of the individual for the system.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. So you can relate feudalism to capitalism through property rights, but capitalism is better than feudalism.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

What socialism relates to is serfdom.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

But socialism is even worse than serfdom. So, like the evolution of serfdom is worse. The evolution of is at least we're getting better. Yeah. Which is kind of hilarious. And the artificial state of nature reminds me of pattern matching. Because the thing you said about Sunday. Right. Or the weekend, where they tried to make the weekend kind of flexible, in a real situation, there's a free situation, there's an advantage to a weekend because you can create a shared times. Right?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

But within that, that's going to be like a 90%. So because there's going to be an asymmetrical advantage for a certain percent of people to use that time for something else. Call it like 90% versus 10%. So in the Soviet Union, if you wanted to centrally plan in a way that reflected reality, if you wanted to guess as close as possible, you would have to take a percent of people and give them a separate day for a weekend. But getting that exactly right would be impossible and also would be you'd be choosing the wrong person and at the wrong time. So it's. But it's interesting that they kind of tried to create an artificial pattern matching because that's the nature of the real reality.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I had a really interesting conversation with Grok about this lately and Grok gave a great answer. And I said, what are the psychological traits that allow the rise of the sort of insane toxic feminine that we saw with communism? And it's actually a fairly complex confluence of variables that includes you have to have very high emotional awareness and intelligence for those things. Combine that with a highly disjointed personality which is capable of fully believing the things you say, while also cynically in another part of your mind believing something else that allows you to basically manipulate the ideology. It's one of the weird things Marxists do that you can tell they simultaneously believe this, but they also don't.

[Austin Padgett]

That's why it's so slippery. Pinned down.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. They also do that at the same time. And it requires highly good systemic thinking combined with utter irrationality. Because Marxists are highly good at thinking inside their system. But it's all emotional rationalizations and it's the only type of mind. This type of mind can only exist in modernity.

[Austin Padgett]

Maybe it's why Fuentes audience is actually so tolerant of him pivoting to be more moderate because they understand the power game where someone who might get like too into it doesn't know how to roll with the joke.

[Rudyard Lynch]

My rage is too great to talk about Fuentes now. You'll blow out a circuit in my mind.

[Austin Padgett]

Don't worry. We already had the previous context, so we don't have to elaborate on it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So one of the things I find really interesting about John Gray's analysis is he's talking about these artificial states of nature where for any given behavior in the Soviet Union, you cannot separate it from the oppressive totalizing state. And it's similar to today, where every element of life in the west today cannot be separated from wokeness and the ruling regime because it permeates the economy. It Permeates the family and dating the religion, the society. Where once you hit totalitarianism you don't have the society. And these decisions are being made for power based reasons. And all of this was the complete breaking the will of the Russian people. And it succeeded. Which is why Russians have a. The average male mortality in Russia is the same as New Guinea. It's the year 54. New guinea is one of the most desperately poor nations on earth. Many of the tribes are still stone age. And in Russia it's because their men drink themselves to death because they have nothing to live for. And when you look at these communist societies, they score the worst anthropologically in nearly every metric because communism is acid on the organic society in a way that is uniquely terrible. There is no other regime in history that is as acidic to social structures.

[Austin Padgett]

It's not only acidic, it's like turning, it's only burning you away. It's turning the population from like people into ghouls or like slaves. And if we reach a critical mass of slaves then absent like really insanely good elite organization which you're already going to need anyways, we're going to be screwed for a long time. Like you, you can't reach a critical mass of slaves without going through an exodus period.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And then you need, you need to have social institutions to teach them to be free again, which we're, we're going to have to do that in the west where.

[Austin Padgett]

Because we have to do real fast because it's accelerating dramatically like every 10 years based on the last three generations.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Gen Z is screwed. I'm seeing the Gen Alpha kids and it's getting worse because Gen Z is going to need to be taught how to function as human beings and as adults because a lot of them can't. And you need them to sort of function as individual members of society and collectives so that they can have kids and make businesses to support the elderly. It's, it's, it's, we're living, we're like.

[Austin Padgett]

10, 15 years from reaching critical mass. Yeah. Because Gen Z, you could maybe afford to like lose all of Gen Z and then it would be still under. But if you lose all of Gen Z, you're going to lose part of Alpha. Like we need to save it like as many Gen Z as we can from the lost generation that already kind of hit millennials because yeah, those two, that's another 10% then another 10% and I think we're there.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The 1930s and 40s were such an insane clusterfuck in Russia, it's hard to even narrate. They had all of these economic pushes and it was all dictated by Stalin's whims. And a lot of this logic was motivated by. They produced too many elite aspirants in the early phases of the Communist revolution. So Stalin was just killing them off for anyone that could be threats to him. And this was a horrible period. Stalin killed 20 million people. There are certain years of people born in Russia where very few people survived because they had to face the Russian Civil War, Stalin and World War II. So this was an utter devastation of Russia, and it's really horrible. We haven't sort of thought about this as a society or what its implications have been been, because we lost Eastern Europe as a once incredibly vibrant place of the world.

[Austin Padgett]

And.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So you saw mass genocides of a variety of ethnic groups. And this was mixed with the collectivization of agriculture, where the singular thing Stalin did that killed the most people was killing off the kulaks. And this was concentrated in Ukraine and the Chernobyzim, or the black soil growth grasslands of the Russian steppe. And the kulaks were people who are often of serf ancestry, where they became middle class, where they often had a few extra cows or tile, but they could have provided local leadership. And Stalin would kill off the kulaks and he would use resentment inside these towns to destroy the society. And this killed off all of the most productive farmers and created a massive famine event because there was just. No one was growing food because you killed off all the best farmers and you confiscated their food. And there was no reason to grow food because it would just get taken to the cities which you assessed were more important. And at least 5 million people died in the holodomor. It was concentrated among the Ukrainians, more so than other ethnicities, although Stalin did genocide many others. And you have lots of heartbreaking stories where. Hello, Shadowlands. Sorry, not that one. Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder goes through a lot of the logic Stalin was doing and stuff. Like, there was a village where everyone was starving to death and the Soviets sent in a marching band because they wanted the villagers to have culture even though they were dying. And that's a very communist move.

[Austin Padgett]

It's so dystopian. Oh, it is like a fever dream. A fever dream situation. You're starving, you're already hallucinating from that. Probably this band is just walking through your town. Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And then you had Western journalists going through, seeing the three Disney towns that were well fed. And there's a story of A young Khrushchev seeing a movie set in the Kuban, which is the region he was from, where he was an ethnic Ukrainian from the area down by the Caucasus. And he would see that in the movie, the people in his hometown were super well fed, and they were fat and happy. And he said, no, everyone in my hometown's starving. This is all a lie. And this was a tipping point in Khrushchev's life. Cynical at the Stalinist system. And it's really a wonder people at Khrushchev survived, because Stalin would just kill off all of the people who could be even somewhat of a threat. And he committed genocide against the Cossacks, against the Kazakhs. He moved the Kazakhs thousands of miles out. He moves the Chechens thousands of miles out from their homeland in Ossetia. He genocided the Volga German people, or the Germans who had lived in Russia since the 18th century century. He genocided the Poles, killed off Catholics, killed off the priests, the wealthy, of course, the nobility. And so in Soviet Russia, they were killing off all of the distinct subgroups that could have provided any social leadership or betterment to replace with the total state. And you'll see weird things where, you know the meme that goes, where is the Israel that rest? Like, you'll be with your mother and then you'll have a restaurant. You say, oh, I want to go to that rest restaurants. We have blank at home.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So the Russians made their own version of that in the Far east for Israel, where they had a separate Jewish SSR out by Vladivostok in Korea that they would migrate their Jews out to, because Stalin went through a huge anti Semitic phase where he nearly killed all the Jews. And some people think that the reason he died was that his Jewish doctor poisoned him because he realized he was next. We don't have proof for that yet. And they also moved Koreans thousands of miles to Kazakhstan. So it was like the worst empires of the ancient near east, like the Assyrians were the Babylonians, who would migrate entire peoples thousands of miles to break their will. And their goal was to create the most compliant, soulless, broken person ever. And Stalin makes staggeringly terrible decisions. For example, after the war with Poland and before the German invasion with Barbarossa, he killed off 80% of the Russian top officer corps. And this was disastrous with the coming war with the Germans, because you can't replace military talent like that. It has to be cultivated over time. And so they went into the war with the Germans with losing three men for every casualty. The Germans Took because they had killed off all of their pre established leadership and training because they were a potential threat to Stalin. And also, Stalin killed off all of the doctors in Russia before his death. So the doctor he had was one of the very, very few left.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, I was gonna say that's. I wonder if that's why he ended up with that specific doctor. It's also kind of funny that that guy didn't get sent away. And you wondered, how did Khrushchev. Khrushchev escape Stalin's gaze after kind of being sympathetic to raising a lot of red flags through his views? And I. I don't know if this is accurate at all. Maybe you can verify from a book, but in the Death of Stalin, the Khrushchev character was very proactive around pleasing Stalin according to kind of the customs or heuristics that Stalin used to test loyalty or decide whether he liked someone. So he was like, doing notes with his wife about what did Stalin say? To remember this, to remember that. To make sure that he wasn't raising a red flag around a heuristic. And it reminded me of another show, Sharp, where one of the really bad British soldiers got away with a lot of bad behavior because he was ridiculously compliant with his salutes and like the base things that officers would use as heuristics to tell who was a reliable man, like always yelling the loudest and standing the tallest. And they're like, okay, well, that guy's good, so we don't have to pay attention to him. So if you hack a heuristic, you can kind of. Those are just examples of hacking heuristics. So maybe that's partly how Khrushchev did it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's definitely what Khrushchev did. He was a teddy bear. He was hyper compliant, and he would constantly agree with everything Stalin said, and that's how he survived. But he was capable of maintaining enough of his self that once he got power after Stalin's death, he could revert back to his original views.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And you can do this in a negative and positive way, which is interesting, because your self can be better or worse than the heuristic.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, good point. Stalin's attack dog was Beria, who was a brutal thug. And he ran the nkpd, which was the Russian secret police. It was a truly terrible organization. Killed millions of people, and Beria raped thousands of women. That was one of his hobbies because he would take a woman in and say, hey, I'll let your husband live if you sleep with me. She sleep with him. Oh, I'll kill him anyway.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, well, we'll blame the Mongols for that tradition, too.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Maybe we'll. Maybe I'll let him live, maybe not. And Stalin had a sort of mutual understanding with Barria. They just knew they were both monsters, and they were okay with that sort of arrangement. And surviving in Stalin's inner orbit for a long time was like playing Russian roulette. A name that works. Oh, yeah, And I read Solzhenitsyn's book on the Gulag Archipelago, and it was very well written and it really conveyed the horror of the entire situation. And I couldn't get past 200 pages because it was just too terrible. And if you know me, you know that I will handle a lot of horror and gore. But it was just the same lesson that got hammered home again and again, that communism will insidiously use any type of horror and control to a degree that you cannot understand because you'll read out the Gulags, but you don't read about the psychological torture and the psychological warfare they do, or how they'd have systems where they break into your home at the night and take you out. You can't ask which of your neighbors just got detained. And they would hold food in front of people for days and not let them eat it. You'd hear horror stories of them leaving men out in the ice and then covering them in the negative 40 degrees weather with water to make ice sculptures. The mind just blots out how horrible a lot of this stuff is. Shooting entire lines of men working people every hour till they break and die or not, feeding them, creating systems among the camp prisoners where they turn on each other. You don't know who to trust. And my mind sort of rejects a lot of this stuff since it's so horrifying. But once you start reading about the Soviet Union, Communism, you realize how deep and how horrible this goes where it's so insidious. And no matter how bad you think the Marxists were, every time you read Gulag Archipelago or a book like that, you'll find it's even worse.

[Austin Padgett]

This reminds me of something someone said recently where they were warning, like, just FYI, there is no rock bottom. You can actually go lower just. Just as a warning. Don't get too comfortable where you think rock bottom is. Have you read the White Pill by Michael Malice?

[Rudyard Lynch]

No, I haven't.

[Austin Padgett]

It's his recent book, and it's basically, it's an exercise of endurance around the horrors of the Soviet Union because he gets into all those examples and it's just like a never ending list to the point where you're like broken down. So it gets you to kind of feel it versus like 1984. Maybe you understand the, the systems of totalitarianism, but this one is just like blasting your, your brain with it. And like, it's hard to describe because you can describe people getting shot in lines or working until their, you know, hands, fingernails fall off or all these things are kind of like relatable, simple endurance things. But the real crazy stuff was like psychological and chaotic and like diabolical. Like, the real diabolical stuff is complex to a degree that's hard to relate unless you just sit down and absorb it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I can relate to it. I would rather not.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, yeah. I listened to it as an audiobook on a road trip. If I wasn't in a car, I would have never made it through. Yeah, it's just brutal.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Sometimes life is too real. So I'm not actually going to narrate World War II. It's its own anime arc. And Stalin actually trusted Hitler, which I find horrifying because Stalin didn't trust anyone and he thought Hitler would keep his word. Although Hitler's entire platform was the conquest of the Soviet Union and the destruction.

[Austin Padgett]

Of it was like Barry probably the only person Stalin could relate to. So he's like, maybe, yeah, I thought we were pros.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. And Hitler's entire platform was the conquest and destruction of Russia. And they split up Poland, which was a huge moment in the international left because the international left tended to take orders directly from Moscow and be stooges of Moscow. But when the Nazis and the Soviets divided up Poland and the Soviets took the Baltics, and it made a lot of Western leftists realize that, wait, Stalin doesn't actually have our interests because he worked with the Nazis and were anti fascists. And so the Western left split off from the Eastern left over that. What do you find funny?

[Austin Padgett]

Just. Just that they saw the Soviets as more similar to them than the Nazis and Soviets to each other. Like the naivety around that, which is. It parallels perfectly with the last 15 years where Nazi is seen as something totally horrible and antithetical. Where Communism is like, okay, well, that's a nice thought, you know, because they relate. It's all about the Schrodinger's liberal relating to an end point. So like, the Nazis that they hated so much were actually really bad for the same reasons the Soviets were bad and reasons why the Soviets were even worse. So it's just interesting how similar it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Is to today, I am simultaneously torn between the narrative about how bad the communists are and the reality I have learned. And it's one of those things where once you sort of leave the modernist paradigm and you can see human nature as something that has a soul and an innate value and higher character, the communists switch from being sort of nice utopians to being utterly insane, power hungry, demonic maniacs. And when you make that jump, you can't really go back. And so when you look back on the 20th century, you see what was the most horrifying abuse of power in history, in an entire world that went to a lot of effort to enable it. And you said there was a centralized lie of the 20th century that this was acceptable, that the Western elites covered up and then the, the Soviets and the Maoists perpetuated.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, this is why I'm so cautious about cynical narrative and word games. Yeah, and politics. Because a web of lies always makes things more complicated because it's much easier to learn than to unlearn. And then it also collapses eventually. So it's like just, it's more painful, I guess, to tear off the band aid earlier, but just like you have to say the whole thing earlier, you can't mess around the edges of, of these narrative manipulations because it's not going to get you to the end result that you want. You're just going to become stuck in the web.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. And communism operates off anti truths and anti information. Anti information is something, a piece of information. You hear that, when you hear it, you actively know less. And the world today is filled with.

[Austin Padgett]

Anti information and justified under serving a cynical purpose.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, World War II was a horrible war for the Soviets. It was the singular most important event in Soviet history by a vast margin. And it's hard to overstate, it killed 30 million Russians. Just that would make it, I think, the third bloodiest war ever in history just for the Russian casualties. Where the Nazis. If you put the border between German occupied Poland and Russia on the American east coast, they would have made it out to Kansas. So they put a huge region, including a majority of Russia's industrial base and a big part of the colonization of Siberia, which was held back by the Soviets. It was occurring faster under the czars. And if the czars had stayed in power, Liberia could have formed a distinct Asiatic Russian polarity from European Russia, but they did not. And they moved a lot of their industrial base out to the Urals because they were worried that the Germans would take European Russia and the Germans, they could wipe out Russian Field armies much larger than them, because the Russian military doctrine was sloppy, where they'd have armies that they'd march into the middle of rivers because their orders would tell them to march a certain distance. If they didn't follow the orders exactly right, they'd die. So they'd march into the river and die, which was better than staying on the other side of the river and getting shot. And the Russians would use human wave tactics against the Germans, which is why at the start of the war, the Germans could kill three Russians for every casualty they took. And the Germans would surround entire Russian armies in the field of a million men, because the Russians couldn't maneuver very easily.

[Austin Padgett]

It's like the Zulus.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I can see why the Germans had their theories of racial superiority, even though Germans and Russians are genetically very close, because the Slavs were operating at such a level of incompetence for what their potential should have been, right? And the Russians were ultimately able to pull things back together under rigid command and hierarchy. And they've maintained the same military doctrine through the Ukraine war, which has been occurring over the last few years. And Zhukov was the general who turned the tide. And the Soviets were able to push back the Germans at Moscow, at Volgograd or Stalingrad then, and at Leningrad, which was the new name for St. Petersburg. And those were all brutal battles. Moscow, they turned because their spy in Japan said that they were going to be said that the Japanese weren't going to invade the Russian east so they could move their Asian divisions to protect Moscow from the German takeover. Stalingrad worked because they built up a force on the other side of the Volga that hit the German formation in the flank, wiping it out. And they took back the Caucasus to surround the army there. And Leningrad was a horrifying siege that lasted years, being by far the most brutal siege in world history. And the John Gray book I read talks about how the famine in Leningrad was utterly dystopian and terrible, and they could only get food in through the winter when they could drive over Lake Ladoga's ice.

[Austin Padgett]

Wow. Interesting to have food only in the winter. Such a weird reversal.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And they do stuff like eat rats or cannibalism or all these things. But one of the points John Gray makes, if this was as much an artificial famine as it was one from German occupation, because even at the highest ranks in the Leningrad court, in the Leningrad Soviet commissars, they were still eating well. And there were all of these issues of supply or inefficiency in the Soviet system, where the reason that the Leningrad siege was as bad as it was, had as much to do with the Soviet agricultural system which was still completely dependent on the Americans, where the Soviet industrial military and their food supplies were both dependent on the Americans backing them. So they were not self sufficient. So the Leningrad famine was as much engineered as it was the Germans starving the city.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Just because of the fragility of the system. Even if it's only producing 50% less food versus another system, it's also fragile so it can break to zero more easily.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. And the final part of the Eastern war is not really a fun war. It's just the Russians grinding the the Germans west from the AA line, the Astrakhan Archangel line that the Germans wanted to take out to Berlin. And once you get past Kursk, the Germans were not able to launch a meaningful offensive. But it was the bloodiest war ever in history with the Eastern Front killing 40 million people. I believe 80% of the casualties in the European theater of the war, easily a majority of all of the World War II. And it sapped the life force of all of Eastern Europe to a remarkable degree. Eastern Europe had so much potential before World War I that was wasted by these two very cruel totalitarian regimes which just ground the humanity between them. Where Poland lost a quarter of its people, the Jews were genocided. The Germans who were the most prosperous and advanced people in Eastern Europe, who were often quite loyal to the Russian government, they were either genocided or pushed west. And so the Soviets were able to win a Pyrrhic victory against the Germans through wearing them down with more people and more land, as well as their allies, the Americans and the British. But Russia lost something vital in the same process. But the communists had to make peace with the church and the state during World War II in a way they hadn't beforehand. So a lot of Russian Orthodoxy or Russian nationalism comes from the World War II period because that's when they let little glimmers of the religion back in.

[Austin Padgett]

Oh, interesting. Which there probably would have been a pressure to do based on how bad conditions are get. Because. Because that's when people turn also more to God. So they, they might have faced their own revolution if they didn't create a little bit of an outlet for that. And it's interesting that, I mean basically what they were doing with throwing the bodies into the war in World War II is that was basically like their last gift from the Tsarist momentum, that population boom that was able to avoid the Malthusians trap by going east. And there was like an extended population from that going into World War II. And they just took those bodies and thanks, thanks for the Victorian era and threw them in the grist mill. And now they have population issues. But it's interesting that, because it's amazing how the Russians defend themselves. And I thought it was weird in the beginning when you were talking about World War I and described the Russians as having like, given up due to attrition. But I, I feel like that's their strong suit is they never give up through attrition. It was these very specific circumstances of instability and timing with the communism in Russia that kind of nullified their usual strategy in World War I, which I don't know if it ends in any other way than attrition. I don't know if you can actually like, beat the Russians without just killing them all in that way. And if you look at the Ukraine conflict today, I don't see them being that internally destabilized to a degree where a war might end because Russia gives up because the only. The counter, external power. So like the, the counter factions in Russia that are similar to Ukraine, they would be the ones who liked like Europe more and like, like neoliberal Europe. And that European culture is not vibrant right now. So nothing's, you're not going to get a strong counterculture to. They're not going to get any traction. The, the pro EU people and Russia aren't going to get any, any traction for a counter revolution. So I don't think they'll be internally destabilized. And so they'll be able to grind it out if they want to.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I used to think that Russia would. I used to think they'd fall into civil war due to Ukraine. I don't think that anymore. You're right. You can't defeat Russia purely through attrition. The only times Russia has been defeated by a foreign invader when it's been disunited. That's the Mongols in World War I. And so for the czars, they hit a cross section of secular cycle, not having a strong enough industrial base to support that war and incompetence in the military. And for Stalin, they couldn't have had an internal coup because they had done a lot of work to build out their industrial base so they could beat the Germans in the next war. And also they had crushed their own internal dissent so much that they couldn't maintain that. And they conquered a huge area stretching out further than a lot of people expected. With Yugoslavia was the only communist state in Eastern Europe that wasn't under their heel because Tito pushed back. They took Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Czechia, Eastern East Germany and they made the Iron Curtain that Churchill talks about from Trieste to Lubeck. And that was a distinct world where they did not have much interaction with the rest of the world. They were all socialist economies and they gave these independent societies enough freedom to kick around and not enough to make decisions. They were controlled by Moscow. They would kill the centers in places like Hungary or Czechia. They would periodically have phases where they were allowed to show some independence and then the Russian tanks would come in and crush the them. And East Germany was the worst because they were trying to recover from the Nazis and the communists were worse at political correctness, which is actually a Soviet term. That's one of the things that. Who's the Jewish London podcaster Kissen? Oh yeah, yeah. Konstantin Kissin talks about political correctness in the Soviet Union, which was a term they had. They would have diversity quotas for certain ethnicities or for certain social classes. And they really pushed against the anti Nazi stuff to create guilt among the Germans for their earlier war. And that's part of the reason why East Germany is the most right wing area of Germany because they. They've seen political correctness before because they were inoculated using the same technologies by the Soviets earlier.

[Austin Padgett]

Not only that, but it's the same theme of political correctness, specifically the same topics.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, it's really disappointing once you know what Marxist tactics look like, that you see them everywhere in the west and people are completely naive to it. It's the exact same issues, the exact same types of psychological manipulation, the same strategies written in the same systems.

[Austin Padgett]

It's almost how the whole society thinks now. Like. And that's partly why people can't see it. Because they're in the water.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. Sorry, this has been my entire life.

[Austin Padgett]

And even people who you think are like, understand it because they're with you against this other group and then it turns out they behave exactly the same way. And not even like with libertarians. You know, it's like, oh well, maybe libertarians are more rational, but not everybody's rational. It's like actually turns out being in the top 10 percentile of rationality doesn't separate you from the human condition. Unfortunately, you're still the same. The base layer is more important than the small differences.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. After World War II, you enter the Cold War, which is its own video. I won't get into it. I need to read John Lewis Gaddis book before I get into the Cold War, but they were stuck in competition with the West. And the history of the Soviet Union is quite boring from this point on. They had an economic boom through. Through the post World War II period. It was much more muted than the west, but they saw a growth of an industrial middle class, people moving out of abject poverty, although the average Russian still was poor. And they had their own baby boom after World War II, which was shorter and smaller than the West's. So you saw the same trends as the post war west, just muted. They got some stuff like rock and roll or jeans, but they were contraband and they were underground. And it was a very controlled society in almost every way possible. And they missed out on a lot of potential. And we were worried that they would replace us because their propaganda was good enough. And there were several points in the Cold War where they appeared like they might be able to. Sputnik is an example. People used physics was one of the very few things where they were competitive. And we would also believe their propaganda unironically, even though a lot of it wasn't true. And we undercounted ourselves. But there was a genuine fear during the early Cold War that Communism would keep its growth trajectory. Because keep in mind, From World War I to World War II, communism went from just Russia to an ideology that spread from the Elbe river out by Berlin to North Korea and down through Vietnam and then countless Latin American, African decolonial countries.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, the colonial wave.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, it was first the Eurasian wave and then the colonial wave and the Marxist parties that were popular across the First World as well. So the First, Second and the Third World all had significant Marxist influence. And so by the time of Reagan, it was seen that the Communists were winning because they had put that they had a lot of influence everywhere in. And they're winning the propaganda intellectual war. Well, in reality, Communism was growing weaker. And so America was operating out of this sort of defensive scarcity mindset for a lot of the Cold War, even though our fundamentals were significantly stronger than Communism. And so that's why you see wars like Vietnam or Korea, because we thought Communism was this irrepressible force that would keep growing. Well, in reality, it was attached to several particular historic moments. Either the burst in growth that came with the chaos after World War II or the rise of thugs in the third world who needed an ideology to rationalize them taking stuff.

[Austin Padgett]

It was really like the size of the Soviet Empire or Communist sphere was directly reflective of the success of the west in their colonial expansion. Yeah, because it was like if we capture all the colonies, turn all these country blue slowly at a time, then you have this big mass of blue and then it flashes blue, red, blue, red and turns red. Right. Because all the countries that were former colonies had the anti colonial sentiment and then associated with the oppositional force to that which was the Russian Soviets. And on top of that it's more compatible with a lot of these third world and tribal cultures because it's like a basic appeal to collective morality.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's a very good point. And the Cold War, the Americans ultimately won it because the Soviet Union was declining. And when America hit an exponential growth in the 80s, partly due to the Reagan revolution, partly due to technology, the Soviets couldn't keep up with the growth where they were sort of at each other's throats with stuff like the moon landing or competing over the third world. There's a great board game, one of the best ever on this topic called Twilight Struggle and it's about fighting over different areas of the world between Soviet and American influence. The Soviets had a huge nuclear arsenal and through all of it the Soviets were trying to compete against the Americans. And they kept on coming short. And you'll hear stories of Gorbachev coming to America and seeing how wealthy an average American family was and just not believing it. Or the Soviets showing Dallas, a TV show, wealthy Texans in Czechoslovakia, one of their client states, to show how bad capitalism was. And the Czechs were just shocked at how wealthy the poor Americans were. And so you'll see these cultural disconnects that come from centrally managed societies. And the Soviet Union kept stagnating and declining and it kept going for decades because they were selling off their oil. The Soviet Union's oil supply was one of the very few things that kept them going because their manufacturings were not competitive. They were reliant on grain from America for a lot of the Cold War. And they were basically a military power where the card they could play if shit hit the fan was they had a huge military and a huge production.

[Austin Padgett]

Kind of like a Middle Eastern blueprint.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's a fairly common anthropological point that Russia in most anthropology stats is closer to a Middle Eastern country than a Western one.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting. Yeah, well that oriental despotism is all the same. Yeah. Once you get too far out, everything.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Is cool when you're part of a team. Stalin died. There was a kerfuffle about power, trying to figure out who would come next. Beria died in that. There's an entertaining movie called the Death of Stalin. And Khrushchev took power. And Khrushchev tried to go through all of these policies to lessen Stalin. He wasn't the cuddly figure a lot of Westerners would like to paint him as, but he was significantly better than him. Loosened up on the complete thought control, on the complete murdering and that stuff. And there was nothing afterwards in the Soviet Union that was equivalently brutal to Stalin. They front loaded the vast majority of their murders. And Khrushchev rolled through the quiet sort of nice period, the post war growth. But by the time we get to the 70s and the 80s, the Soviet Union was sort of just running off fumes. And it's funny that Western analysts assumed that the Soviet would last into the 21st century. My mom actually thought the Soviet Union would fall three years before it did. And she was widely seen as crazy for saying that.

[Austin Padgett]

That's good because everyone always talks about in the context of it being impossible to predict. But I'm sure there were some people who were kind of onto the trends.

[Rudyard Lynch]

My mom was looking at their military spending versus their economic growth. She said that they had basically sustained military spending longer than economic growth growth to a degree that they could not sustain.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Which is connected to the whole Afghanistan conflict and the death of empires. Yeah. Oh, the Soviet with Sputnik thing. Right. Where it looked like they were kind of maybe ahead with Sputnik in the 60s, but then by the 70s we pretty clearly had an advantage in technology, space and physics. And do you think that's a coincidence that the 70s is also when I think Marc Andreessen said the US government stopped doing research into physics. Or at least GATE kept research into physics.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Because once they beat the Soviets, then there wasn't as much of a pressure and they were like, wait, we're in the same. They probably were used to this competition. Right. It's like an arms race where this physics knowledge is powerful and so they're just focused on beating the Soviets. But when there's no threat, they want to keep that from their population. And. But if they have to compete with the Soviets, then they have to open up development and physics.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's an incredibly good point. You're on fire today.

[Austin Padgett]

Two weeks of attic.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. That was like three weeks. But oh, well, the. I normally I'm not very good at imperial declines. There's not that much to say. I'll talk for over an hour about the instigating war, but I don't know what to tell you. At the 60s and the 70s and the 80s in the Soviet Union, they were kind of just stuck on a track and things gradually got worse. And that went against Marxist propaganda because it was supposed to go through all these in the beginning to hit the exponential growth curve. But then their huge deeply brutal inputs they shoved in under Stalin decayed over time rather than growing. And there was this over a decade period when no one in the Soviet Union believed the things that their elite said. And Adam Curtis, who I believe best documentary filmmaker now calls it hyperreality or it's the sort of sense that the public facing image is not the lived reality we have. And these things are miles apart and it's the code switching you do between these. And we have that in our society. And it's probably the biggest marker of totalitarianism you could choose to look for. And so the Soviet Union had that for over a decade. And it's interesting that in the west we thought they would last. But inside the Soviet Union when it fell, everyone thought, oh my God, how is this happening? And after it fell, people thought, how did it last this so long? Because it kept going for longer than the bluff should have gone. And you'll hear stories about people reading classical literature, listening to rock as signs of revolution in the Soviet Union towards the end, because people did not respect the system. And the Soviet Union fell from above and not from below. Where Gorbachev, when he dismantled it, his goal was to turn the Soviet Union into a liberal democracy. He created universal suffrage, freedom of speech, all of these things because he visited Western Europe and he said, I don't believe in communism anymore. We can just let go and try to become West European country. And that failed because the Soviet Union held together under the shared brutality. And the general public did not believe, the public didn't believe communism. Once the leadership class let go of the joke, it all fell apart. And within a few years of Gorbachev not enforcing the military authority, the dream was sort of gone. And that's very stark in Ceausesco's Romania, which was one of the worst client states where it was the North Korea of Eastern Europe. And that's a whole different story where the dictator walked up in front of a crowd and he was going to re establish authority. And the crowd, there was a moment of flicker where they just turned and said no. And the crowd started booing him. And that's when the power fell. In Romania or in the Baltics, you had these color flag revolutions where people would go along and make these band aids, make these rings around the borders of these countries, where the Russian tanks would have to shoot the dissenters to enter into the former Baltic territories, and they just refused to do it. And it was between 1989 and 1991, between the first stage of liberalization. The Berlin Wall goes down. In places like Poland that had the Solidarity movement. They'd been fighting the Soviets for a while. Solidarity finally got power. You saw this rippling effect until the joke was just gone. And for most Soviets, it felt like the world ended because their social structure was completely dependent on communism. Their quality of life went down because it was artificially inflated. Their societies broke apart, and the state had trained them to be docile slaves so they couldn't adapt. And that's why Russia is such a mess, because their social structure broke down. The Soviet government managerial system that managed your entire life went down. And in its place was replacement by these corrupt oligarchs who were criminal interests, often from the secret police. Where Putin. He was the head of the Soviet secret police. That was his old job, which is. That's very Arab vizier. It's very Arab vizier coded as before. Next video.

[Austin Padgett]

Parallel with Bush, too.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I won't ask questions about. Oh, yeah, he was. Wait, what?

[Austin Padgett]

Bush was head of the CIA. And then they both rose to leadership not too long against each other. And they were competing in the intel worlds around similar times.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I think half of me knew that and half of me didn't.

[Austin Padgett]

Slightly off the timeline.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. No, it's. It's the same thread. The Soviet Union fell, and it fell as a sort of historic moment of we don't believe in the era of, quote, ideology anymore. It was Francis Fukuyama's idea of the end of history. And the 1990s are almost like a historic opium high. People were just not thinking clearly. And you can see that in. It was mostly a good thing. You saw the end of apartheid, the end of horrible tyrannical regimes across the third world, the liberalization of China and India lifting billions of people out of poverty, where the Reagan revolution in America created this huge economic and technological revolution that created a ripple effect that created the largest global economic revolution ever that spanned across the whole world. And the Soviet Union's fall was part of that process, and it really couldn't compete. But the Soviets had blown out all of their cultural circuits so much that they couldn't really survive or maintain once they had let go of the government system that had cannibalized the society.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And it's also classic leftism to say that we're post ideology so that they can advance a subjectivism that allows them to push their ideology unchallenged. And yeah, you break the trust for so long that if you get some institutional shift where maybe someone wants to do something good, that's at the point where you don't have any of the trust to put it together. And I don't know if anything could come out good could have come out of the Soviet transition. It seems like passing off the state assets to the oligarchy was pretty kind of predictable plan for them, which prevents them from reforming too much. Because if you do a free, if you increase freedom, you're going to undermine the oligarchy. And the oligarchy is the method of organizing power. So it's kind of. They're stuck in this Iraq and a hard place between the anti globalist forces who would put their oligarchy under pressure by creating growth, and then the globalist forces who they don't want to be dependent on or in the same organization as, even though they want the benefits of the lack of pressure from the lack of competitive pressure.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Those are two very good points. It's interesting that you look back on it and you just find that it was the sort of thing that required a great man at that particular moment of history, and the Soviets would have just destroyed that man in his development. To get Russia to transition from a communist society to a wealthy, developed, free, fair society, you would require a greatest historic figure. And the entire social structure of communism was to stop a figure like that from ever arising.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, so they were already killed before, so it wasn't like you could have even gotten lucky. And then. Oh, it was really interesting you said that not saying that the economy was not growing was against communist propaganda. Because that just seems hilarious to like a hilarious version of torture for communists to not be able to say that communism doesn't allow growth. But that was kind of the last point in history where they said that. That's where the degrowth is good actually narrative emerged because at first it's like it's not happening. It is happening, but it's a good thing. Right. Like the Soviets are technologically better than the West. They're industrializing. They have Sputnik. Okay, that myth breaks down. Well, actually degrowth is a good thing because we're killing the environment and we're doing blah, blah, blah, blah, even though the Soviets killed the environment. It's just. But that, that is the historical origin of the shift to that degrowth narrative is the failure of the Soviet Union.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The issue is that you're correct and it's horrible. So this video was too long. I don't want to replicate this. I don't know why we spent nearly three hours on a 70 year time period. I don't know where the time went. I guess time flies when you're having fun. Unlike the Soviet Union.

[Austin Padgett]

It's because I had plenty to say about the Soviets and we're just back from a long.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah, things happen.

[Austin Padgett]

I think people will like this one though.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Hopefully. Okay, I will catch you next week.

[Austin Padgett]

For Medieval Islam and then I gotta give an announcement real quick. During our sabbatical or a week before, I started my own YouTube channel where I delve into political topics more fully. So if there's another break in history 102 or if you're waiting for the episode to come out, check out my channel @ Austin Padgett is the channel name and the at is Ludwig Nevermesis. It's on YouTube. I'm also going to upload it to Rumble. Maybe I'll put the link in the description of this video. If not, you can find it through my X link which is also in the description. And we also have a merch store there if you want to get anything for Christmas. The regular stuff that people might want to wear like hats, shirts, whatever I priced, I basically gave us a teeny margin. And then I threw some other items on like bookmarks or whatever where it's like a hundred dollar two hundred fifty, five hundred just supporters tier. So if you want something with the logo just to wear, you get it for what it costs to make basically if you want to give us something by exclusive bookmark, if someone buys one then I'll take it off in a couple of months so you can be the only person to have it. And then we also have a bitcoin donate address in our page link. No one's used that yet though, so if you like the show, do.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That. Okay, sounds.

[Austin Padgett]

Good. Okay, perfect. I'll send it to you. All right.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Peace. Bye bye. History102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ 102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for.