Stalinism Triumphant: Famine, Terror, And Hitler's Shadow, 1929-1941

it's a great pleasure to welcome you to the Hoover Institution this morning and welcome a Hoover Fellow and princeton professor steven Kotkin to join us to talk about his new book stalin waiting for hitler 1929 to 1941 which as you know is volume 2 of a projected three volume trilogy I guess that's redundant a trilogy on Stalin's life and times probably for this crowd in particular don't need to talk as much about Volume one or the reception of volume one but clearly volume one came out in what year was a 2000 2014 okay so three years ago and what I was actually interested in is reading a number of the reviews of volume two is some of them and I think in particular I'm thinking of The New Yorker review where actually reviews of one and two so people are treating this as it should be treated which is as a an integrated series and thinking about the lessons from volume one as they engage with with volumes it's really a pleasure to have Steve come here as you know as I mentioned is a Hoover fellow as well as a professor of long standing at Princeton but if you have not you know seen volume one if you haven't read it in volume two I mean this is truly a landmark achievement and eagerly awaiting now volume volume three and will be the definitive word on Stalin and his times Steve I wanted to start off by reading you a few quotes I won't tell you who they're from first but will but would like to get your thoughts this is the first quote you may recognize it communist Russia has been from the beginning to an unusual extent a reflection of the mind and psyche of one man his biography and its history are uniquely fused a fundamental source of his strength and personal magnetism was the identification of his person with the cause in him the two became indistinguishable that's actually Richard pipes writing about Lenin in his book the Russian Revolution but reading two volumes here it certainly struck me that the same case could be made if not stronger for Stalin and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that was it Lenin that really was the the lodestar and guider of the revolution or was it Stalin and in particular as you stress so much his interpretation of Lenin thank you first of all for the invitation to be here it's my pleasure thanks everyone for coming you know Lenin was a singular figure also there's no question pipes is correct about that Lenin brought this group to power it's hard to imagine them getting into power without Lenin he took full advantage of circumstances that played his way the circumstances are critical but nonetheless he took advantage of them however Lenin was in power for just a full year just four years essentially he already became sick in 1921 insomnia migraines not fully dysfunctional but blackouts in 21 in 1922 he had his first of several major strokes and he died as you know in January 1924 so in the sweep of things bringing the group to power was a colossal achievement but that's really it Stalin however is in power for three decades and so the fusion of the personality with the system and vice-versa maybe can be attributed to Lenin but I do think it applies more to Stalin let's remember Lenin picks Stalin Lenin created the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party which had not existed a new position in April 1922 and this was essentially the guy who could run things Lenin was the supreme leader but he needed a deputy who had the ability to carry the load of the administration and he picks tala created this position general secretary of the party Lenin was head of the government the next month in May 1922 Lenin had a stroke the first of four major strokes and so here he creates a gigantic position administratively covering everything liaison to the secret police liaison to the military liaison to the state the diplomacy and intelligence of book and then he goes and has a stroke and leaves the scene essentially the next month this afforded Stalin the opportunity to create a personal dictatorship within the Bolshevik dictatorship that Lenin had created Stalin seized that opportunity created that dictatorship and now we're off to the races with him so you read I don't know if you use these words exactly but essentially you write that that Stalin was Lenin's greatest pupil he's his most faithful pupil and you you refer as as you talk about and I think trying to change at least some of the the general impression of Stalin the intelligence that he had is voracious reading he worked harder than everyone else but he also knew Lenin better than everyone else and you you at different points refer to him being able to you know go pick and choose exactly what he needed from Lenin's writings in order to make to make his case did he really believed in Lenin or was it that Lenin was a useful tool for him as he was continuing to consolidate power and get rid of the rivals yeah so there's no question he is a disciple of Lenin we have had a long-standing debate which has been extremely enervating about whether Stalin usurped power or was Lenin's rightful heir this debate is completely beside the point in some ways because Lenin usurped power to begin with so there's no issue of legitimacy it was a seizure of power it was a coup that Lenin led and so the idea that whoever succeeds him is legitimate or illegitimate it is already out of the question because the power itself is illegitimate from the beginning however the question of what was Stalin's relationship to Lenin is a big and important one leaving aside the silliness over the usurpation argument when the Bolsheviks had already usurped the power this is a book about power it's a book about how power is accumulated how its exercised and the consequences of exercising that kind of power the argument of the book is that Stalin's experience of acquiring and exercising that kind of power life-and-death power over hundreds of millions of people but that experience created the person we know with Stalin this is not a story of a formed personality his father beat him his teachers humiliated him he had some physical deformities and then he went out and murdered everybody right that's not the story here the story here is that he believed in communism he built a communist system and that experience made him the person he is now very specifically about Lenin this is the thing about power right power can be Noble or ignoble you can use noble means or ignoble means we tend to attribute idealism only when the end goals and the means are noble ones and then we tend to talk about cynicism and opportunism when the means are ignoble and the ends are ignoble that's a mistake because Stalin like Lenin is an idealist he's driven by ideals I don't identify with those ideals I don't think there's any ambiguity in the book about what those ideals produce the horror the terror the famines right but nonetheless because the ideas have horrible consequences does it mean the ideas were not there in the first place they were what Stalin line from Lenin was two things the intense determination the willpower right the desire to implement at whatever cost those fundamental ideas of communism but the other thing he learned from Lenin was the tactical flexibility because Leninism is about destruction of markets and private property eradication of capitalism in order to get to a supposedly better place socialism and eventually communism these supposin stages of history but any means are ok in fact you're duty-bound to use any means necessary to get there so you can zig and zag you can do the opposite of what you're saying you can have 100% tactical flexibility violating your own ideals in the process of implementing them this is what Stalin learned from Lenin both the determination on the ideals side and the extreme tactical flexibility to implement them and so in that sense Stalin was a deeply faithful pupil of Lenin and others recognized this quality in Stalin he went to school with Lenin he in in a political sense not school in the sense of elementary school high school all right he observed Lenin closely worked with Lenin watched Lenin do what Lenin did and Stalin then became in that sense this faithful disciple this implementer of Leninism the only other challenger of that potential level of course was Trotsky and yet you you point out that Trotsky saw himself as competing with Lenin and Stalin never took that yes physician why did why was Noah like a common yevon zanovia then why was no one else able to to do what Stalin did was it simply a character issue or as you said they recognized he was the hardest worker and so they stepped back but why was he the one who was able to be the faithful pupil and not people who were much at least initially much better known and more prominent than him yeah once again it's a combination of personality as you're alluding to absolutely correctly but also institutions Stalin is the General Secretary of the Communist Party already in April 1922 before Lenin dies in January 1924 so Stalin is in power the argument about a succession struggle to succeed Lenin is mistaken you can't struggle when the guy already has succeeded Lenin by having been appointed by Lenin to that position so you can either remove him or he's the successor Trotsky was not in power Kamen Evans and OVF were not in power Trotsky had two problems one he was incompetent and two he was detested he just about everybody who got to know Trotsky disliked him intensely and moreover he was not very capable at administration so Stalin I know this is going to sound a little bit off the wall Stalin was charming he had the ability to charm people and to win their loyalty over to him in part because they see that he can carry this thing on his back that he can do the administrative work that he can work 16 and 18 hour days and handle military matters and police matters and ideology and foreign policy and so there's respect and admiration for his capabilities now once again their capabilities within a dictatorship right if you wanted Stalin for example to run I don't know a charity I'm not sure those skills would have come in as handy as they were in running a dictatorship all right I'm mad with mass bloodshed so he's good at dictatorship better than the others but the key factor is that he's there think about Stalin's office right who has the codes the cipher codes for sending out and receiving information Stalin does there in his office because he's general secretary of the party so when you have to give out instructions to all the localities across Eurasia about what to do they're issued by Stalin's office so they have a meeting they make it some decisions they have debates everybody else goes back to their office Stalin goes back to his office often the meetings are in his office itself right and so he has the levers of power under his control after the Lennon got incapacitated Stalin could have said you know this is unfair I mean after all I control the secret police I control the military I control the state I control the diplomacy that's not right you know I should give some of this up how about Trotsky you have their Shenzhen oviya Stalin was not that kind of person instead he enacted this personal dictatorship from the moment he was able to we have correspondents already in spring 1920 to this position the ink is barely dry on the decree creating general secretary and Stalin is corresponding with secret police officials they're writing to him and he's writing to them about stuff that they should do and there's no discussion by the others in about these issues and if Stalin doesn't inform the others at a meeting they don't know what the regime is doing so that's quote the succession struggle the struggle is Stalin's creation and it's an awesome creation in a political sense not in a moral sense Stalin's creation of a personal dictatorship within the dictatorship that's Volume one and then Stalin's conversion of the dictatorship into a despotism that's volume to the portrait you you draw of Stalin is is deeply unsettling not because he's a mass murderer which we all knew and not because he controlled the fate of one-sixth of the world and and Beyond eventually but in a sense and I got this more strongly myself I don't know how other people felt from Volume one almost a sympathy it felt like on your part to him I don't mean sympathy in that you supported what he did but a did you respect Stalin yeah that's a really hard question you read execution lists people in big numbers executed for fake crimes for imagined crimes you read interrogation protocols that have still to this day dried blood on them from the people because they were beaten during the interrogation tortured and the blood spilled out onto the document that recorded the interrogation right you read that kind of stuff and it's very hard to respect a person I don't really know if respect is the proper word at the same time you get to know what this guy achieved now let's remember what the costs were let's remember what the methods were nonetheless he built a military-industrial complex for example in the 1930s that's a story I tell in volume two and he was not fully responsible you can't attribute the whole thing to him but nonetheless he was crucial in that he had an office it was about this size the room that were in right now it was you know the Kremlin is a triangle it's a triangular fortress inside the triangular fortress there's a triangle building called the Imperial Senate built in the 18th century on the Catherine great so triangle inside the triangle and then the end of the triangle the corner is Stalin's office on the second floor which is known as the little corner where the building comes to that point and from that office and almost the entire volume to takes place in that office gigantic world events armies moving nations being deported it takes place in that office and the Sochi dacha inside that office he worked really long hours and he had a big felt table which sat about 20 22 people and he convened meetings at that table what type of artillery what type of gun on the tank what type of motors for the bombers and that work was constant and he engaged in a level of micromanagement that's breathtaking so there's an awesome quality to Stalin once again respect isn't quite the work you know this is an evil person even though you humanize him in fact the evil comes out even bigger when you see that there was a human being in there that's one of the things I try to do with the book but his diligence his ability to manage multiple issues he wasn't a genius he made many mistakes he has a primitive mind when it comes to bourgeoisie proletariat imperialism it's a primitive way of thinking but he also was a strategist understood moves in advance understood the motives of some of his rivals or some foreign leaders right so he is a leader and in fact he is a significant world leader the entire time and you cannot call him as Trotsky did a mediocrity right this is the problem with analyses of evil people and we have this with masha gessen x' book on putin as well first she mocks and ridicules him really not a big guy in the cage be really not very impressive yes it was second rate and then she attributes blame to him for everything bad that happens so somehow they're mediocre and then somehow at the same time they can do all these unbelievable evil things across right one-sixth of the earth so there's a contradiction there they're either not capable of doing all of that or they are capable of doing all of that which is it and the answer is he was capable unfortunately right yeah you know when I said respect I I knew I didn't want to use the word admire but you know especially in volume one there is yes this dogged quality you bring out yes and overcoming so much and I was trying to figure what is the right descriptor and I didn't come up with one but I think the most unsettling thing to me and I wonder your own sense of it was the intelligence yeah it was one thing to think of a brute killer he's just the most most ruthless and maybe the luckiest but and you said he's not genius but he's a smart person his various things are more scary in the way wow did you he's got a blinkered a worldview but he's extremely smart he's got deep emotional intelligence he sizes people up their capabilities their vulnerabilities he understands strategy in a broad sense all right we look at the primitive Marxism Leninism and we think you know we read those texts and we think this is can't be a smart guy so the challenge is to combine the ideological way of thinking the ideological blinkers with all of the other stuff at the same time right and that's where you can see this kind of intelligence now this doesn't mean he made many mistakes mistakes all over the place and he refused to admit almost all his mistakes he denied errors that he made he blamed and scapegoated others for them right so he was not a nice guy I hope we're conveying that but at the same time he a level above just about anybody else around him and one of the things the pygmies continually concluded around him was that without him they couldn't manage even common Evans and Oviatt in the 20s thought this that you know we don't like what he's doing all the time we're a little bit concerned maybe afraid of him but look at what this guy can do it's very important we it's easy to mock and ridicule right Hitler the mustache was so silly the forelock that falls over the head the gesturing you look back on and you think could this guy have mesmerized the German nation well there's clearly something in there for a guy who comes to power stays in power and move the country through multiple Wars remember the Germans fought World War two all the way to the end to the end meaning they didn't capitulate along the way when things started going bad so you need to be able to explain this phenomenon of both hatred and mass popularity of a polarizing figure like Stalin which is partly attributable to his capabilities so in that sense maybe respect wasn't fully off-base it's just I would use the word awesome to describe it it takes about about a thousand pages from volume 1 into volume 2 before the Stalin that we think of usually emerges again volume 1 this building element yeah and overcoming obstacles the the the testament which you put a lot of them this this sort of albatross hanging around isn't yeah and yet over and over he he offers to resign I think you come for at least six points and yeah I'm but finally we get to the style of it that we think of after after about a thousand pages do you see what was there to you a sort of break point that the the the suicide of Nadezhda is it something that begins that flipping the the murder of Kirov that begins that flipping from a Stalin that honestly I was revolting against the almost what I felt was an almost sympathetic portrayal of this man building this state and his power into okay now it's Stalin now the real Stalin has emerged was is there a man for you where it changes so we need to be close to the evidence we need to substantiate our claims about people and about their actions and about what they what others thought of them one of the problems with somebody like Stalin is retrospective judgment 3040 years after events somebody survives gets out into the immigration and says you know we were on the schoolyard and I tripped them and he turned around and he said I'm gonna get you all and he's 12 years old well you know I was on the schoolyard and I said that sometimes when I was twelve years old right but that's the kind of thing one reads backwards in time and then brings that forward as quote a key moment in stall so I refused to do that I refused to pick these incidents that are retrospectively remembered at a context you know put the cat in the microwave and then I knew he was going to kill hundreds of millions of people across Eurasia right that kind of thing I know what some of those accounts could be accurate but I'm not using them instead I'm looking in real time forward what they're saying and thinking about him do they think he's a monster do they think he's a sociopath are they physically afraid of him are they it do they feel they're in danger in real time 1925 1926 1927 because he's resigning six times as you eluded to three times in writing and three times orally and if they felt they were in physical danger and this a guy that was gonna put them all in the microwave if they felt that why didn't they accept his resignation or why didn't they shoot him or whatever it might be right and the answer is they must not have thought that he was this sociopath monster in those years when he was offering his resignation so then the question becomes like you said Michael when does Stalin become Stalin and how and we have once again these personal moments his wife commits suicide right in the fall late fall 1932 his best friend Kirov is assassinated right in December 1934 and these are supposed quote turning points the argument to repeat is that it's the experience of accumulating and exercising power that produces the person Stalin whom we know so it's building and running this dictatorship that's why there's so much detail about inside what we would call inside baseball right inside the regime about his machinations because already now in 1929 we're volume 2 opens you can begin to see the Stalin we recognize the vengefulness the never forgetting a slight this is in part a result of Lenin's so-called testament there after Lenin becomes an invalid and cannot really speak cannot write there's a document that comes forward calling for Stalin's removal in Lenin's name allegedly dictated by Lenin you know on his sickbed we don't have the original document we have other documents of Lenin dictating which are taken down in shorthand by the secretaries and then transcribe from the shorthand onto a typescript we don't have that in this particular case it could be that Lenin dictated remove Stalin it could also be that groups dial Anton's wife quote interpolated Lenin's thoughts and brought the document forward the burden of proof is on those who want to say the testament is real to show that document or to explain why we don't have it in conveniently right once again I acknowledge that he could have done that dictation whether Lenin actually said that or didn't say that this becomes a political reality the testament so-called comes forward and it says remove stalin and so he's now living under this Lenin's successor Lenin's disciple Lenin's people the Lenin of his day but letting supposedly calling for his removal and it Royals him completely and he's telling them okay fine I'll resign and you can see the anger and like the kind of self-pity that begins to emerge with this but you don't see the vengefulness against the others quite yet that you begin to see when he launches the collectivization of Agriculture or the enslavement of the peasantry a hundred and twenty million people across Eurasia nineteen twenty nine thirty leads to the catastrophic famine as you know 1931 to 33 the second famine of the regime already this process of launching collectivization which is the core crime of this criminal regime there are many crimes of this criminal regime this collectivization is really the core crime of it and they don't recover from this act and this is where volume two begins that process royals him even more than the testament and magnifies internally whatever it is that was they're the demonic personality the sociopath and we begin to see that behavior in documentation in real time in 1929 so I don't know maybe the Stalin that we know was that Stalin already in 1927 but it's not documented those who worked most closely with him didn't perceive him to be that way they only began to perceive that in this turning point 28 to 29 so it's really the Testament with Lenin episode and then the collectivization episode and now you're getting to see this Stalin later on in the terror the so-called great terror the words important characterization of Robert conquest as you know also a Hoover fellow for many years out at Stanford and early and correct on most of the big issues Robert conquest right a conquest called the episode 1936 38 the murders of the Soviet elite by its own regime he calls it the great terror and during that episode Stalin is speaking about collectivization endlessly which is behind him already he's achieved that it's done but he can't let go that he was criticized for doing it it just eats him alive not the fact that millions of people starved from the policy of collectivization he's not talking about that he's not having any pangs of conscious that we know in documents about that but he's angry at the criticism when he did what was historically necessary collectivizing that is to say eradicate capitalism markets and private property in the countryside so you've mentioned that the court crime is is collectivization and the book starts there obviously in 1929 and it's been controversial of course because some of the the claims you make about not claims you mean your your conclusion not the claims you make your conclusion that it was not ethnically against the Ukrainians there's other revisionism that I assume has roiled some of the academic community I don't know the degree to which the Kirov murderer was still in an open case so to speak but you come down close close case no clearly on the side of Stalin did not plan the murder of his best friend but I would like even though collectivization was the crime I would like to talk a little bit more about the terror probably because for most of us that's you know really what in you know it's it's it's a terrible awful fascination with how this how this could have happened I'd like to talk about it if possible in two ways the first is to do maybe the impossible which you try to do in heroically labor at and I think and essentially succeed which is to explain it and you write for those of you you have your books I think page for 3839 a number of factors made such a terror possible the Communist Party underwent periodic purges to root out those deemed unworthy and these long-standing practices were ramped up to certain arrest and likely execution the terror also depended on isolation it enabled Stalin to play the role of teacher to a populous new generation of functionaries it wasn't once ludicrous and logical do you feel after all you've done that you've explained to yourself adequately how the terror could have not just begun but continue to unfold you you paint this picture of these webs are these these ripples spreading out across society how could it have happened yeah you know it is a difficult problem let's imagine for a second Hitler who is generally speaking not considered let's say an unbloody ruler right let's imagine that Hitler decides to murder 90 percent of his upper officer corps accuse them of false crimes have them tortured to test five that they committed those false crimes that they were working the whole time for Judeo Bolshevism as they were building up the Nazi regime and let's imagine that the population in Germany accepts that 90% of the upper officer corps in Germany were working the whole time for Judea Bolshevism and then they get shot he shoots his owner let's imagine he does that also to all the gal lighter and the provincial nazi party machines that is he gets them to testify that they were working for Judea Bolshevism but all the time that they were Nazis and let's imagine he does that for his diplomatic corps and his intelligence operations and he does it for his cultural figures and in then he does it to the Gestapo he murders the gestapo because they're agents of Soviet influence they're Soviet agents wearing Gestapo uniforms and malva he destroys the Gestapo while the Gestapo is destroying everybody else not after but during while they're killing the army officers and while they're killing the party and state officials he's killing the police official let's imagine Hitler does all of that and the populace in Germany accepts that they were all these traitors can can we actually imagine that and and this is Hitler after all there's no way to imagine it for Hitler it's impossible to think first of all with the hit could Hitler have actually enacted that who would have done all of that on his behalf if he gave those orders and how could his regime have survived such as self destabilization so that's what Stalin does so that's the problem we've got to explain right good luck with that right that's that's a very tall order to explain and that's why the explanations have not been very satisfactory and so where do you begin to untangle this the easiest thing to do is the guy was crazy right he was a paranoid lunatic and that's what explains it in fact Hitler didn't murder his officer course he retired them when he didn't like them he retired them and gave them a gigantic pension and let them live in Berlin not fearing that they would plot against him after he sacked them Hitler in the middle of Stalin's Great Terror says this guy Stalin is sick in the head yeah I swear it's just the lines are so good you think I invented them but what do we have now for a possible explanation right if we did the entire explanation right here it would take a little bit too much time after all there are about 300 plus pages on the terror in the book so we're not gonna do the full 300 page download right now but we'll do a little bit of what I think is at stake here the way I approach this was what did Stalin say he was doing what did he tell others was going on I started that with that as the point of departure in other words let him speak in his own words about what he's doing and lo and behold he's telling a lot of stuff that seems to be going on that is a partial explanation at least of his motivations that's not to mean he's not lying right he's then the mendacity is off the charts you can't even use the word mendacity for what this guy's about right but he's speaking out of both sides of his mouth there's lying going on but there's also that kind of blurted out in the middle of a tense moment what he's got going on once again it's not the paranoia because there are a lot of paranoid people and 830,000 are not executed in two years right paranoia can't explain that level of executions it's just impossible so what we have is part of it is despotism when you're a dictator you kind of feel somehow it's not enough and you want to be a despot a dictator is there are others with power around you you are clearly the top person sometimes called first among equals but maybe not equals but nonetheless they are more than just mere minions they run thief's they have opinions they engage in conversation policy discussion with you you're the recognized dictator but there's this all these other people around you so a despotism is enslaving crushing psychologically spiritually politically crushing those around you who serve you right they become slaves not just the peasants on collective farms or the victims in the gulag the labor camps but the the regime personnel themselves so that's part of the motivation Stalin is reading during the terror Russian translations or Russian historical works on ancient despotism he's reading about Augustus he's reading about ancient Persian monarchy he's trying to figure out how to be a despot he's studying up that's part of it another part of it is the obsession with Trotsky this obsession is so deep and inexplicable this obsession with Trotsky it's almost as if Stalin cannot let go of Trotsky and so that maniacal fixation on Trotsky figures into a lot of the action during the terror then there's the piece about the criticism of collectivization mm-hm I did historical necessity and they had the gall to complain right he knew his whole life he holds on to that then there's this other piece which was a little bit surprising but others before me have latched on to it which is he's a pedagogue he's got a theory of wool part of the theory of rule is that if you hold people in fear you get more out of them okay so you ratchet up the enemies from without the enemies from within the under siege the siege mentality and you get better performance so that's part of his theory of rule but the other piece of that is more people like himself in positions of power people from modest circumstances up from the soil partly educated strivers wanting to self you know better themselves replace the elite wholesale with this other type of person who's cleaner less baggage closer to the real people right there's a kind of pseudo populism to his terror so he's this pedagogue who's looking for pupils that resemble himself and in fact he writes rewrites completely almost from beginning to end this infamous short course history of the Communist Party for these people that he's promoting to take the place of those he's murdered because he wants to marinate them in the Marxism Leninism because he thinks they'll be better functionaries better officials on behalf of the cause if like him they become more expert at the ideology having come up from the soil and been these closer to the people types and so believe it or not he's constantly talking about this during the terror and like every author he's disappointed yes he says they they don't get it they can't they don't get the book there's this fabulous meaning I mean one of them maybe I should go into this episode a little bit you know the Munich pact in 1938 the miss Munich pact when the Western powers handed Hitler a big chunk of Czechoslovakia with no compensation right doll a DA of France Neville Chamberlain of Britain Hitler Mussolini as the dishonest broker and then the chicle Slovak in another room not even part of the conversation in the Fuhrer house in Munich right what's Stalin doing during the Munich pact he wasn't invited it's this colossal important event what's he doing the whole time of the Munich pact he's not in his office not answering telegrams not participating in the normal flow of state business because he is at a multi-day conference with propagandists on the short course history of the Communist Party this is fall 1938 he spent the whole summer as I said rewriting this book and he's presenting it to them they are the survivors the people promoted to replace those murdered and now he's got this gift for them he wants to marinate them in this Marxism Leninism and he starts the conversation you know who read the book everybody claims that read the book and then the next question of the teacher is ok what did you make of the book if you've been in a classroom you know that's the moment when the room goes silent right they're all talking before the class starts everyone is very animated you can't believe how passionate and excited they are the teacher opens the class asks what did you make of the reading and psych complete silence like in a monastery like that's what happens to him and then he starts calling on people you know so-and-so George would you make a chapter 12 and George is like well to be honest I found it very difficult he gets really teed off about that just like you said and then he goes back and has another giant meet with even more people about this book and another one in a he's just trying this pedagogy to create these true Marxist Leninist next generation of functionaries right kind of like what we're doing in our liberal universities to staff Washington although sometimes the voters have different ideas about who should get in there don't get me wrong I love Washington I bring my children here we we drive down K Street so that they can see their government yeah every time I bring him here so I wanna I want to get to questions I know people have a lot of questions but I wanna I want to read you one last quote which I think helps you know get into the mindset we've been talking about maybe not on the short course but in general quote they had high positions and great power in the party but they were hugely corrupt and plotted to usurp the party's leadership and seize state power the leader saved the party saved the country he saved socialism that is not from the Soviet Union it's not from the 1930s that was last week in China it was a senior official talking at the Party Congress about a group of high-level cadres who had been arrested and charged with plotting a coup the language is almost exactly the same yeah it's Machiavelli one on one invent a conspiracy kill off your rivals and then claim credit for having save the people from a conspiracy mounted by your external enemies and your internal enemies right if this were a school of dictatorship you know we have NDI we have all these places where you learn how to do democracy we don't have that many where you learned how to do dictatorship you know beyond my class at Princeton University for example I see some victims of that class in the audience here so if you wanted to teach people how to do it that would be one of them techniques of course you would teach them and Stalin was borrowing from that repertoire but he was a master at that repertoire and the communists have developed it into an art they it's not a communist monopoly we have to admit right there are non communist or authoritarian regimes that are decent at this game also what communism brings to bear is it's got a theory of history which is internally about class warfare meaning enemies so enemies are inherent in the movement of history for communists so there can never be a period without enemies as far as communism is concerned that's extremely convenient if you want to run a regime that's non transparent doesn't have checks and balances etc right there's so much more we could talk about I want to ask you about the arts and you spend a lot of time talking about his engagement with the artists with Maxim Gorky with Shostakovich and others more on the police state I mean look there's 900 plate pages in the book there's a lot but it reads like only 700 it's exactly the pages fly by and if you put the don't be intimidated but I do have some time for questions Steve's gonna have to run off to the State Department to do a talk in about 15-20 minutes or so so we'll open it up please do ask a question so we can get as many in and be as concise as possible if you can please let us know who you are we'll start here like that we have a mic so please wait for the mic mic Danny just wanted to check their numbers are all over the map number of people that either directly or indirectly killed what's your best estimate number one and number two why has a world by and large turned a blind eye to that and particularly the people in Russia failing to learn anything from their history yes I had an essay in the Wall Street Journal about the victim numbers once again facts matter right the guy's evil but he didn't kill cue off that doesn't make him a better person but we need to stick with the evidence right so the evidence on communism death toll is estimate because they didn't keep track this many people died of starvation today or that right then we we all have fully accurate records the way you would have with death certificates and all the same but we've got demographers who can see what the size of the population was at a given point what the birth rate was what the size of the population was when they took another census and how come there's a certain number missing and then you can understand how many people likely died from these episode these horrific episodes so you've got 65 million globally from communism people say a hundred million because they want a bigger number as if a hundred million is worse than 65 million in terms of evil once you get to 65 million you're evil you don't need any more from that why not stick with the evidence right so it's 65 million globally the Lenin Stalin piece of that is approximately 18 million 1618 is the highest number you could possibly reach that doesn't include World War two deaths so once again that's a pretty big number most of those deaths are from famine and disease related to famine right the disease that sometimes people are weakened by malnutrition they're more susceptible to disease the number of people executed is much lower than that right it's it's a little over a million meaning intentionally murdered executions a little over a million under Lenin and Stalin most of it obviously under Stalin so the vast majority of deaths are from the crazy communist social engineering like collectivization which produces five to seven million deaths from famine for example in 1931 233 mouths famines are much bigger his numbers are bigger his number of executions is not quite the same as Stalin's so whether you call this intentional death or unintentional death can be debated Stalin did not intend milt for millions of people to die in the famine but then again he collectivized agriculture right so you can see both sides of that argument in other words if you intended to collectivize agriculture and we know what's going to happen as a result of that right that's a pretty monstrous policy but there's no documentation of him intending to kill peasants or intending to kill Ukrainians or anybody else as a result of during collectivization we have massive documentation of him intending to kill people for many episodes of the Soviet regime but we don't have the documentation not a single document showing intention ality but okay if it hadn't been for collectivization they wouldn't have had those kind of deaths so I think those are big numbers don't you yeah so the way things work in history is it's good to be on the winning side of the war if you want a reputation in history to be preserved or endure in some fashion it's better to win the war than to lose the war if Hitler had won World War two it would be very interesting what type of reputation he would have historically he lost that war and he is irredeemable evil like the Holocaust Hitler's regime it's very hard to say anything positive because you're apologizing for him you know Hitler build highways you'll say things like that and people will shudder right because of how evil this regime is Stalin happens to be on the winning side of the war you can say they won the war despite him I'm not taking a position on that right here but nonetheless he was in power when they won the war and that's forever so they prefer to see that side of him they've reduced the communism peace they've made him not a communist but a Russian patriot they've reduced them gratuitous mayhem like the murder of the officer corps in these things and they focused instead on the great power trajectory and so the Stalin they have is one who took a peasant country and made a nuclear-armed superpower won the war and was sitting you know at Yalta and Potsdam as the arbiter of world affairs that Stalin will remain no matter how much you talk about his crimes and inside Russia they do know about his crimes there's no question many families recall what happened in their own family their grandparents their great-grandparents this is handed down but the Stalin that they have is the statesmen stone which is an aspect of Stalin right it's not completely false it just leaves out all the stuff that you know and something we didn't have time to talk about is the enormous amount I mean that the volume is subtitle waiting for Hitler the enormous amount of attention you paid International Affairs I mean it's just it's it's rife in the discussions it's not just Germany it's China extensive discussion of China of Chiang kai-shek and and Mao Zedong and so there's there's all of that in there as well but I do want to get to other questions because we could just keep talking rich thanks mr. rich Cramer Foreign Policy Research Institute thank you very much dr. Kokan a catalyst question and it's about this shift from a dictatorship to being a despot and I'm curious as to you know and forgive me if I missed it in your remarks but what what in your estimate drove that I mean because essentially it strikes me that overall in your discussions about there was an idealism that sellin adhere to and as a dictator it seemed to me that he was being able to fulfill his ambitions for the Soviet people and beyond so this this interest in actually fascinating reading about despotism to the extent that he recognizes that this is the next stage in order to achieve the grand ideas that he has for the Soviet Union and beyond is striking to me was there an efficiency there or was there actually something as psychosis that led him into this interest towards despotism as a means a role thank you okay rich so just about every dictator aspires to despotism not all but just about everyone they're usually incapable of realizing a despotism there are institutional constraints the military is powerful the secret police is powerful the church is powerful whatever the Pope is powerful right there could be all sorts of institutional constraints there's a private economy so private business is powerful right and the aspiration remains only that an inability to enact or realize this aspiration so Stalin has the aspiration and he has the wherewithal to try to pull it off both in times of ability to crush the other institutions that have power right and the ability to manipulate the isolation the ideology the enemies all of that kind of stuff so he's got the wherewithal in addition to the aspiration why does he do it when this particular time period that he does it there's an evolution in authoritarian regimes his has one as well where they continually accumulate more power all right this is something that you see unfold and yet at the same time they don't think it's enough because there are whispers there are people who are potentially disloyal and you get this attempt to wipe out all dissent or all disloyalty or all perceived disloyalty once again most regimes can't enact this the Communists have this conspiratorial ideology in practice right they've got the isolation of the population from the outside world except filtered through the communist propaganda they've got tremendous censorship so they've got quite a number of tools and Stalin's in control of those tools so as the regime evolves he becomes able to act on this aspiration for despotism and he succeeds in part because he's very good if he had been less adept many dictators are not that good they try to do this kind of stuff and it backfires they destabilize their regime they get overthrown in a palace coup or whatever it might be right so he's a depth at this this is unfortunately that he's at this level of skill right it's this is not a happy story I'm telling for those people who are on the victimized end of all of this so you could imagine that if he didn't feel this aspiration as deeply if he didn't have the skill set and communism didn't lend itself to this that the terror was unnecessary collectivization was core to the regime they couldn't have socialism in the city and capitalism in the countryside because as Marxist Leninist s-- the economic relations the base determines the political regime so having capitalist economic relations in the countryside was long-term impossible for the regime to survive so collectivization is not a gratuitous act that's why he's angry at the criticism but the terror is Stalin it's inherently possible in communism but it's not necessary for the regime to survive to have this terror so he wants it and he does it and it's him now you're getting a type here right it's a coincidence right Stalin Mao Pol Pot the the Kim dynasty in North Korea you're starting to say that you know is this odd a certain personality type keeps coming to the floor and ruling for long periods inside these regimes so that's about the fact that the regime type calls forward individuals like this or individuals like this are the ones who rise to the fore within those types of regimes and Stalin was on an individual like this par excellence time for a few more questions yes sir here and then we'll go to the young lady Mike Masonic where do you come down in in this argument or whatever you want to call it between whether Stalin used the time between the rib etre Ribbentrop molotov pact and the invasion or did his paranoid personality just make it lucky that the Soviet Union wasn't destroyed by the Nazis yeah so the Hitler Stalin pack you know sometimes called the molotov-ribbentrop pact as you alluded to I prefer to call it the Hitler Stalin pact of August 1939 the predates the June 1941 invasion June 22nd 1941 which is where my volume two ends it ends that night June 21st June 22nd night and morning in Stalin's office I've recreated that episode that evening the tension in his office the entire day actually is entire day is how the book ends but the chapter before that ending is about the intelligence and whether he knew the war was coming and how could he not know and the all the controversies that you alluded to the short answer is no spoiling of the chapter here for this audience I will not reveal what it is that I say and you only have to read the first 750 pages to get to that point to satisfy your curiosity on that excellent question so that was a Dodge on my part I think to be honest to be fully honest I've got an answer I hope the answer is substantiated with the evidence but come on you've got a reading is that fair this is the South Stalin dealt with the people who didn't get the short course you gotta read actually there would be further dealings with the people and so Mike you're safe though yeah there's not gonna be that here we're going to the young lady and then Ted and that'll probably wrap up our time names Annie Himes so my question has to do with the weaponization of history and modern Russia so what is your take on the way that the Kremlin is now oversimplifying and using history as a way to manipulate the people and then what role should historians play out historians that are outside of Russia and volumes like this in addressing what's happening within Russia so let's give the Putin regime a little credit here for once I'm not very favorably disposed to that regime but they think history is important and they think it's important to have a certain kind of civics lesson drilled into their students I gotta say it would be okay if we had that idea in this country maybe we wouldn't want to have an orthodoxy a single view that we would drill into everybody's head in our civics classes but how about let's have civics classes at all let's teach history and geography and American political system and the Constitution we have 60 something history professors at Princeton University you think that's a healthy number I think that's a pretty big crop of people how many do we have teaching the US Constitution at Princeton University's history Department out of those 60 something zero is the answer we got nobody teaching a class on the US Constitution and you got to say to yourself can we afford to have one at a 60 something I think we can right now obviously it begins before the University we're not fully responsible for the lack of emphasis in the culture history and civics and institutions and you can mock this right when I was going to school we had a textbook you had an American flag on the cover waving in the wind and the textbook was called the march of freedom and you look at that and say you know what about the oppression what about the slaves what about this and that and sure that critique has quite a lot of substance but you know what there was a march of for him there were those institutions and let's get back to teaching that kind of stuff and so ironically Putin is giving us a lesson not in how we should do it but that we should do it in the first place he recognizes that civics are important in his you know authoritarian way of implanting or attempting it'll fail attempting to implant an orthodoxy let's take up that challenge ourselves and but let's do it in a way that is about American values and the value of alternative opinions and pluralism and dissent and and the big diverse nation that we are so you know I you probably going to be shocked here but I'm pro history you'll get the last question a drummer from the Heritage Foundation that was such an inspiring note to end on that I feel almost guilty by asking a question at this point but I'll ask it anyhow you mentioned earlier the sources of resistance to potential despots church business military and you can point to all of those in fascist Italy and even Nazi Germany yeah as I'm sure you were alluding to was it easier for Stalin to achieve what he achieved because Russia the Soviet Union was less richly endowed with social capital social institutions forces that could potentially resist the move first dictatorship and the despotism and is that also sort of a simple you can compare the Soviet Union under Stalin to for North Korea perhaps Mao's China are these places easier to turn into despotisms because of the kind of place they are oh yeah you're absolutely right of course you're absolutely and we could give manifests detail about how that operates right if the state controls on all employment if the state controls life chances and you want a dissent you lose your livelihood if the state controls all education and you don't like the way things are going on your kids might not go to school if the state controls not just passports but exit visas to allow you even to leave the country and one could go on and one could go on right so when you have that level of state ownership state management of course you reduce the countervailing institutions and tendencies so the question is how did they get that level of state imposition and the answer is that it took incredible violence it was not something that would have been possible without mass bloodshed people talk about how you know capitalism is no good capitalism is a problem we got to get to socialism well ok you're into social justice you want to bring about more social justice in the world here's your challenge history has demonstrated not theoretically but empirically that every time we try to get the socialism by eliminating markets and private property millions of people died millions of people die so it took that level of mass violence secondly the more developed the society the more difficult it is to enact that level of mass violence and to destroy those countervailing institutions you have a world war that's trouble that's very destabilizing there's a lot of destruction a world war is almost like a social revolution discrediting of institutions destruction of property destruction of classes infrastructure so you got to be careful with stuff like that I mean the fascism the Nazism the communism is the world war one world war two epoch so you want to go toe to toe in a big global war again with the great powers you're risking right the kind of stuff that you were talking about in fact that's Stalin's theory of geopolitics maybe we can end on this note Stalin's theory of geopolitics is slightly different from Lenin and he writes this in socialism in one country which has nothing to do with what we think it has to do with because it has been filtered through Trotsky Trotsky's false characterization of Stalin's argument of socialism in one country is what we think Stalin said but you go back and read the thing itself and then the idea carries through it's in my Volume one but it carries through all the stuff he wrote as you'll see in the 1930s in volume 2 and it's a theory that war is conducive to revolution and socialism provided it's not against the Soviet Union so the geopolitics was allow the imperialists as he called them to go out each other avoid that war stay on the outside of that but come in at the end take advantage of it and the imperialist self-destruction will enable this revolution and socialism to take place socialized socialism in one country he meant that socialism had happened only in one country so far so we should build it in that one country now rather than capitulate even though it hasn't happened in the other countries that we said but if what if we're right and imperialism leads to war if so facto if capitalism cannot exist outside of self-destructive war let's egg that on but be careful to stay out and then let's take advantage of that so yeah once you destroy a lot of your society institutions you're in trouble potentially that the coercion the coercive mechanisms could implant this type of statism well I think at the end of every event we say we could talk for hours but in this case I really mean it we've barely scratched the surface there is so much to talk about Steve want to thank you for your time and please join me in thanking [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 63,839

Keywords: Stalin, Russia, Hitler, socialist, Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, Great Terror, collectivization

Id: Ev1LFjpPjmo

Length: 73min 28sec (4408 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 12 2017