Stephen Kotkin on Dwarkesh Patel: Why Stalin Needed Terror

1. 0:00 – 24:38

   Was the tsarist regime the lesser of 2 evils?

   1. SKStephen Kotkin0:00

      The thing about Stalin's terror is, the police are also murdered while they are doing the murdering. You're murdering your intellectuals, your scientists, your cultural figures. You're murdering your loyal party elites, and the whole thing doesn't collapse. The people around Stalin can see that he is unusually good at dictatorship. He is just carrying this entire system on his back, through thick and thin, liquidating the kulaks, collectivizing agriculture, building a military-industrial complex, defeating Hitler in war. How much better are you gonna do than Stalin? Stalin goes into the underground, and for 20 years of his life, he's a penniless, jobless revolutionary dedicated to fighting the genuine injustices of the czar's regime. What he'll produce is a much more unjust regime than the one he's fighting against.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel0:53

      My guest today is Stephen Kotkin, who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of two-thirds of his three-volume Stalin biographies, um, the first one, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, the second one, Stalin Waiting for Hitler. Thank you for coming on my podcast.

   3. SKStephen Kotkin1:08

      Thank you for the honor of the invitation.

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:10

      Let's begin with the czar's regime. So first question: how repressive was the czar's regime actually? Because presumably, the motivation behind the revolution is to get rid of this autocracy, but y- you just have these examples of these... Lenin's brother tries to kill the czar, and he himself is writing these long manifestos about taking down capitalism and overthrowing the government, and him and people like Stalin are just in exile in Siberia living off government money, um, robbing banks, small shenanigans. I- it honestly sounds more forgiving than, uh, many countries today, so how, how bad was it really?

   5. SKStephen Kotkin1:43

      So you have to put yourself back in the time period to judge the level of repression based upon what norms were, what other regimes did, rather than take the 20th century regimes as the guide...

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel1:57

      Yeah.

   7. SKStephen Kotkin1:58

      ... and go back, but we need to widen the aperture a little bit here. So this is the czar's regime's problem. It needs to be able to compete in the international system. That means it needs a modern military and modern industry to underwrite that modern military.

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel2:18

      Mm-hmm.

   9. SKStephen Kotkin2:18

      So it needs armaments. It needs steel. It needs chemicals. For that, you need workers. So you want the workers only to work in the industry. You don't want them, for example, to have a labor movement or to go on strike or to have ideas about how politics should be organized. Similarly, with the intellectual side, you need the engineers. You need the engineers in order to design and build the modern attributes that you need to compete as a global power, but you don't want those educated people to have their own ideas and values about politics, about whether you'd want an autocratic government like the Russian regime has or you'd want some other type of government. So all of these countries in the modern period have this dilemma, importing modernization but keeping out the political side, the value side that goes along with that.

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel3:24

       Mm-hmm.

   11. SKStephen Kotkin3:24

       So they need to have some way to repress and control the working class organization movement stuff and the university-educated intellectuals. That's a problem we still have today. The Iranian regime now has that problem. The Chinese regime in Beijing has this problem. The Soviet Union had that problem. Contemporary Russia has that problem. How do you bring in modernity, meaning you have tanks, you have airplanes, or you have AI, but keep out, for example, separation of powers, freedom...

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel4:03

       Mm-hmm.

   13. SKStephen Kotkin4:03

       ... property rights, all the things that undermine your dictatorial rule? So the czar's regime was a quintessential example of this fundamental dilemma. So modernization is not a sociological process that kind of just happens. It's a geopolitical process.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel4:21

       Hmm.

   15. SKStephen Kotkin4:22

       You modernize because you need to compete in the international system. So if somebody has ships made out of steel, you either have ships made out of steel, or they're going to show up at your door like we did to Japan...

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel4:36

       Mm-hmm.

   17. SKStephen Kotkin4:36

       ... and tell you that they're in charge now.

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel4:38

       I, I thought this was one of the most interesting takes in your, uh, uh, first volume, that modernization is this, is not this inevitable process, but is instigated by this, uh, ruthless geopolitical competition. Do you think that that still applies in today's world? Because yes, there are pockets of conflict in the Middle East or in Ukraine which would motivate the key powers there to want to have modern militaries and modern technologies, but through most of the world, the odds that if France falls behind technologically, if their AI is worse, that Germany is going to take over is just sort of unthinkable. So this, this dynamic where in order to ward off colonization or other great powers, you need to stay at the cutting edge of technology and also have the up-to-date political processes, is that still a drive which moves countries forward?

   19. SKStephen Kotkin5:25

       If you have an autocratic regime, it is existential for you every day, so you want to compete. France can compete or fail to compete, and its political system is not at risk. No one's gonna say the regime is illegitimate because someone else beat them in AI. Students are gonna protest in the streets. That's not gonna mean that the regime is gonna fall. There may be a change of government, but the system remains. You have this dilemma for the authoritarians. So you... Think about Peter the Great.I need to compete against the great powers, so I need to have a navy. To get a navy, I need to have the industry that supports a navy, I need to have the officers, I need to have the technical skills. And so I need to have all of that to be able to compete, but I have this autocratic regime. So how do I retain the social structure, the hierarchy, the non-elected, non-legitimate in some ways, based upon modern understandings of constitutional order? How do I retain that while I'm importing these attributes of modern power? So that's the stuff that persists today for Iran-

   20. DPDwarkesh Patel6:43

       Right.

   21. SKStephen Kotkin6:43

       ... Russia, China, North Korea. So they have to give very good at holding at bay those attributes of modernity that threaten their political regime, while importing as much as they can of the attributes, but it's two sides of the same coin. The thing that gets you the engineers also gets you the possible political ideas. And so the Czarist regime begins to repress the very thing it needs to compete in the international system. It represses the working class, and it represses the engineers and the intellectuals, without which it can't be a great power, without which it can't compete, but with which its political system is threatened. So, so the amount of repression is an important question. We would call this a vegetarian regime, compared to the carnivores like Stalin's regime or Hitler's regime, in terms of the degree of repression. But the dynamic of being compelled to exercise repression against the very people you need like oxygen-

   22. DPDwarkesh Patel7:50

       Yeah.

   23. SKStephen Kotkin7:50

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

   24. DPDwarkesh Patel7:55

       Mm-hmm. I was thinking, w- is one of the key lessons from your volumes that you should be tripping over yourself in order to embrace the lesser of two evils? And whether that applies through all the examples you give. And this is maybe a general question about how much can you actually learn from history? Because for every seeming lesson, there's an equal and opposite lesson that you can also learn. So during the Czarist regime, in retrospect, we can say that the liberals and the constitutionalists should have cooperated with Stolypin or White, and even though it was an autocratic regime, they were actually doing these real reforms and, uh, there was growth, and they should have continued that process. Or when the government falls in February, that in 17, 1917, they shou- the provisional government faction should have united to oppose the Bolsheviks. But then there's all these other examples. In Germany, the conservative Weimar Government is allies with Hitler in order to fend off what they think is a greater evil, which is the communists. And given the events up to that point, it's a reasonable concern to have, uh, given what the Bolsheviks had done in Russia. So where, where should we end up on this? Should you embrace the lesser of two evils whenever you get the chance or no?

   25. SKStephen Kotkin8:56

       So the Czarist regime is undertaking this repression of people who have legitimate claims, and that repression is quite severe by the standards of the day. Okay, it's not going to be everybody murdered or everybody deported to the wastes-

   26. DPDwarkesh Patel9:13

       Right.

   27. SKStephen Kotkin9:13

       ... of Siberia, which we're going to see in the 20th century when we have a different level of, uh, communications and transport, different technology, when we have a different level of ideological commitment. But still, it's highly repressive, it's totally unjust, and the claims of the people protesting are legitimate.

   28. DPDwarkesh Patel9:34

       Yeah.

   29. SKStephen Kotkin9:35

       And so Stalin goes into the underground, not because he's looking for power. It's because he's dedicated to fighting the injustices of the Czarist regime, and a lot of young people like him do the same. And so he, he's in the seminary.

   30. DPDwarkesh Patel9:51

       Mm-hmm.
2. 24:38 – 38:31

   The peasants brought Lenin to power, then he enslaved them

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel24:38

      answer to that?

   2. SKStephen Kotkin24:38

      ... in the first two volumes.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel24:38

      Because you say that in 1917, a leftist revolution of sh- some kind was inevitable, but that it didn't have to be the October Bolshevik Revolution. So why, why was leftism inevitable in Russia at that point?

   4. SKStephen Kotkin24:49

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

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel24:53

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SKStephen Kotkin24:54

      You have this peasant land hunger. And so the peasants are often without their own holdings. They work on someone else's property, or their holdings are so small that if there's a little bit of bad weather-

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel25:08

      Yeah.

   8. SKStephen Kotkin25:08

      ... let alone a massive drought, they're, they're on the verge of starvation. So subsistence level agriculture is not politically stable, so you want a, a class of people, kind of yeomen capitalists, property owners who can expand their farms and can succeed and hire labor, and some of those hired hands can then get their own land and become a version of these yeomen farmers, sort of Thomas Jefferson style-

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel25:36

      Yeah.

   10. SKStephen Kotkin25:37

       ... or Stolypin, the great attempted reform of Stolypin after the 1905 revolution, which ends in his assassination. So you need to deal with the peasant land hunger so that it becomes a stabilizing political force because the peasants get the land and then they have a piece of the status quo and they want to retain the system, versus the peasants don't have the land and they want to overthrow the system to get the land. So in the Russian case, there is a, the end of serfdom in the 1860s, again, as a result of the, the defeat in the Crimean War. Where there is a reform, they free the serfs, emancipation of the serfs. But the serfs don't get the land to the degree that could have happened because the landowners are the political support of the czarist autocracy. So to take the land away from the land magnates and give it to the peasants is to go through this risky path where you're losing one political support, the landowners, before you've fully gotten the new political support. So you're going to go through this valley of hell, potentially, where all bets are off and you're not sure if it's going to work. So the peasants don't really get the land as they could have in the 1860s, and it becomes a problem that's not resolved right through 1917, '18. So the peasants have their own revolution in 1917, '18, which is not about the socialist parties, it's not about the Bolsheviks, it's not about Lenin, it's about the peasants seizing the land. But that creates an intense radicalism that becomes the platform for the socialists in the cities to gain and hold power in the system. So you don't have that in the German case. In the German case, you have strikes and seizures of power in a few places, like Bavaria, for example. You have a Bavarian Soviet Socialist Republics. But they're easily put down by the forces of order or the army, and guess who's in the army? The peasants. So you don't have a peasant army ready to put down the revolt in the Russian case because the peasant army is the one seizing the land. It's the one doing the radical revolution. So you lack the forces of order to destroy the leftist movement in the Russian case, because it is the leftist movement in the Russian case-

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel28:12

       Mm-hmm.

   12. SKStephen Kotkin28:12

       ... what should be the forces of order. And in the German case, and to a certain extent the Italian case which happened simultaneously, and there's also a Hungarian case here, we have leftist revolts in the cities, seizures of power, like the Paris Commune of 1870-'71, which happens in Paris, not in the rest of France, and you need a peasant army that has a stake in the existing order to undo the city leftist revolution. And so you have this in the other European cases. In one case, you don't have this, in the Russian case. Then you're going to get to the Chinese case later, which is going to be a variant of what happened in the Russian case-

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel28:54

       Right.

   14. SKStephen Kotkin28:54

       ... where you have a gigantic, land-hungry peasantry that's going to become radical for a time. Again, there are going to be perverse and unintended consequences. The peasants are ready to destroy the existing order, not to bring communists to power, but to seize the land themselves. So in the 1920s, the peasants are de facto, not de jure landowners. They don't own the property in law-

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel29:20

       Yeah.

   16. SKStephen Kotkin29:20

       ... they own it in fact. But then Stalin's going to reverse the peasant revolution violently and re-enserf or enslave the peasants across all the 11 time zones, this gigantic Eurasia, and the peasant revolution is going to be annihilated in blood. And so the peasants have, through their radicalism of seizing the land, have helped bring Lenin and his Bolsheviks to power in the cities, which is gonna be the death of the peasants owning of the land, and instead, the re-enserfment of the peasants. And something similar is going to happen in the Chinese case. So again, there's this irony of history, perverse and unintended-

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel30:01

       Yes.

   18. SKStephen Kotkin30:01

       ... consequences...... Stalin is fighting against czarist injustice, only to impose worse injustice-

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel30:07

       Yeah.

   20. SKStephen Kotkin30:07

       ... and worse bloodshed and worse repression. And the peasants are fighting on behalf of obtaining the land, only to then be expropriated and forced into these collectives and losing the very land th- the land that they took in the seizures that brought these leftists to power in the case. So in Central Europe, the southern German case, the northern Italian case, the Hungarian case, you don't have the endurance of the leftists in power. They're all thrown out. They're thrown out by the forces of order, they're thrown out by the right, and so the traditionalism of the peasants where they believe in God, they believe in law and order, is, is overriding because they already have a lot of the land in comparison to their Russian or Chinese counterparts. And so they can be part of the forces of order, and so you can get fascism in Central Europe, you can get the right-wing dictatorships in Central Europe, the forces of order destroying the left, whereas you get the leftist dictatorships in the giant peasant societies where you don't quite have the distribution of land. Now, the peasants are complaining about land distribution in Italy and Germany, don't get me wrong, but relative to Russia and China, they're doing well. So then you think about the Mexican case, the Iranian case, the Portuguese case, all of which are peasant societies as well. So there's how you integrate farmers, the whole world order rests on the back of farmers. How much farmers till means how rich or poor your country-

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel31:43

       Yeah.

   22. SKStephen Kotkin31:44

       ... is. Whether you have a surplus, as we call it, that the farmers can sell on the market after they consume what they need for their families purposes or not, tells you how much wealth you have to then build an army, build modern industry, et cetera.

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel32:00

       Mm.

   24. SKStephen Kotkin32:00

       So the world order rests on these hardworking, predominant in the population peasantries, and in some ways, the political system doesn't derive in deterministic fashion from them. Politics still matters, and politics is never reducible to social relations. But failure to master or mastery of the social relations of the peasant land question is fundamental in some of the political outcomes. So the politicians have to be good at managing the peasantry's integration into that society where you're trying to get an order in the mass age, you're beyond where just th- the court society at Versailles, the czarist court in St. Petersburg, right? Or the, the men at the Constitutional Convention in the US, or the...

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel32:55

       Right.

   26. SKStephen Kotkin32:56

       ... the, the people who are the dec- you're beyond that in the mass age, and you have to be able to incorporate the masses somehow in a polity, and it's really hard to do. And so this dynamic of failure to master or mastery over it, it tells you a lot about the direction you're gonna go.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel33:13

       This answers one of the other questions I had for you, which is why did we see these communist resolutions in peasant countries, which is the opposite of Marx's prediction that you would first need capitalism and industrialization before you would see the turn towards socialism? And I guess the answer is that the private property which is engendered by, uh, capitalism and industrialization actually helps the peasants more or helps them somewhat and b- buys them into the system. But this raises another question, which is if it's the case that all of this unrest is caused by the mistreatment of peasants in China, in Russia, you have the mistreatment of them to an extent unimaginable after the collectivization in 1928 where there are literally 100 million peasants who are enslaved, and of course, there's some lack of cooperation with the regime to kill half the livestock and-

   28. SKStephen Kotkin34:00

       Yes.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel34:00

       ... uh, and so forth, but it doesn't break the regime even though it's way more repressive and, uh, and destructive than any o-

   30. SKStephen Kotkin34:10

       Yes.
3. 38:31 – 1:03:19

   Why did so many go along with enforced famine and the Great Terror?

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel38:31

      that? How do we explain this surplus of sadism, uh, during this period in Russia, where the 25,000 who Stalin recruits to go out to the countryside and steal from basically starving people, uh, and they can visibly see, I'm sure, that, you know, they're stealing from a family that's gonna starve without this grain. You have tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of interrogators and torturers in this gulag system. They must know it's a cynical thing where they're making them confess to a thing that they haven't done and they're employing torture to do it. It wasn't just Stalin doing all these heinous things.

   2. SKStephen Kotkin39:03

      That's right.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel39:03

      There were hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, I mean, in- including, if you include infor- informants, probably millions of people who are implicated in this whole ghoulish regime. So is this just a latent thing that is true in any society and Stalin was able to exploit it? Or was some circumstance, uh, created this level of, um-

   4. SKStephen Kotkin39:21

      Yeah. Again, fantastic question. So we get this from Lev Kopelev, Education of a True Believer. He was one of these people. He later then becomes a dissident. He gets forced into exile in Germany. He's a Germanist as, by profession. And he writes this fantastic memoir. It's a couple of memoirs, but one of them is called Education of a True Believer, which covers how he was the one who did this, including in his native village. So here's your answer. On the one hand, there's ideology and the importance of ideology, right? We may think that no one really believes the ideology, that the ideology is too ridiculous. It's too disproven by facts and life. We're just too smart and they couldn't have been as stupid. They had to be smart like us and not believe these crazy fairy tales about the... In fact, it's wrong. They do believe the ideology, and they're young. They're young people. And so a story of the evil of capitalism. You have World War I. Millions of people die. Like, for what? Why are those millions of people being killed? The flower of European youth, and then many colonial armies get drawn in because of European imperialism. Young people, the future of those countries go to their senseless deaths. What's that about? It's about imperialism, it's about capitalism, and so that's evil and we must overcome that. And so there's a way in which life experience, as well as the, the fervor of youth, let's build a new world today rather than wait for tomorrow. Let's be impatient. Let's eradicate capitalism. Let's bring about socialism. Let's bring about socialism meaning end war and imperialism. Achieve abundance for everybody so that it's not just the haves and the have-nots, but everybody's got something. And in the process, let's make my little life world historical. So here I am, just a little activist with a red star on my cap, and my life means nothing except if I'm a participant in building a new world, in a world historical process that's gonna end exploitation, that's gonna end haves and have-nots.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel41:43

      But do you think that those genu- I get if you're a middle bureaucrat in, uh, in the Communist Party, sure. Do you think that explains the motivation of an interrogator in a gulag? Like, that they're like, "Oh, this is part of-"

   6. SKStephen Kotkin41:57

      There's a-

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel41:57

      "... the end goal of communism."

   8. SKStephen Kotkin41:58

      There's a big story here, which is about how we're building a new world and there are people against that because they're the bourgeoisie, or they're the fools who are doing the bourgeoisie's business on behalf of the bourgeoisie, right? They're duped.... into false consciousness.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel42:16

      But they— in many of these cases, they know that it's— they're the ones orchestrating this sort of show trial, this cynical game where they know that they just picked up a random person in the dead of night.

   10. SKStephen Kotkin42:24

       They know that there are enemies out there. They know that this process has people who are against it. That's a given. Who are the people who are against it? You see, they're masking their true feelings. They're hiding behind professions of loyalty when, in fact, when the hour of crisis comes, and there's a war, they will be the saboteurs behind the lines.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel42:48

       But why-

   12. SKStephen Kotkin42:48

       The fifth column. And so it might be that some of them are innocent that you're arresting, but some of them are clearly gonna be guilty as well. And so to get the guilty, you have to somehow manage to deal with your victimizing people who are likely innocent and you may know are innocent, but you also know to your bone marrow that some people out there are enemies. It's hard to identify and find them, so you're overcompensating a little bit to make sure that you get every last enemy. Again, it's a crazy idea to us.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel43:27

       So-

   14. SKStephen Kotkin43:27

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

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel43:32

       Right.

   16. SKStephen Kotkin43:33

       So there's this young kid who's really adept at social media, who just, uh, looks like he won the primary for Democratic candidate-

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel43:42

       Yeah.

   18. SKStephen Kotkin43:42

       ... for mayor in New York City. And one of the things he wants to do is freeze rents, rent control-

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel43:48

       Yeah.

   20. SKStephen Kotkin43:49

       ... because he wants more affordable housing. So he's a complete idiot in-

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel43:55

       (laughs)

   22. SKStephen Kotkin43:55

       ... in terms of facts-

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel43:56

       Right.

   24. SKStephen Kotkin43:57

       ... because the way to get more lower rent, affordable housing is to build more housing.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel44:02

       Right.

   26. SKStephen Kotkin44:03

       If supply massively increases, and it exceeds demand, the price has to go down. It's proven again and again and again. And what rent control does, or freezing of rent, it inhibits the building of new housing because who's gonna build new housing when you can't make money off of it? So, rent control is what produces the lack of affordable housing in the first place. So he sees this, the— what's the problem as the solution now. Now, is he a fool? No, he's a really bright guy. He's very well-educated. He's, he's read everything and anything. He's been to university. He's talked to a lot of really smart people. And you'd say, "How could he be so foolish to believe an idea that's obviously falsified by empirical reality?" But again, it's an ideological belief. He wants to allow people who can't afford Manhattan to live there, and that's a good idea. Life should be more affordable. There should be more places like Queens where you can come in as immigrants or you can come in as lower class, front end of the, of the social ladder, like my family did, for example. My father worked in a factory. And you should be able to get some housing for your family, work hard, and rise up. I agree with that 100%. But he's got an ideological approach to how to achieve that, which, to me, is completely foolish. And if I were as smart as him, h- h- how could he possibly hold that idea in his head? But so, ideology is pervasive. It's pervasive, flying in the face of empirical reality. We could give many examples. I'm not picking on this guy in New York. It's just a-

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel45:54

       Yeah.

   28. SKStephen Kotkin45:54

       ... recent example. Uh, I don't know him. I've never met him. Whatever, maybe there's a, a more complicated story there. I'm just saying that we have to take ideology seriously because it's deep and it can be enduring even in the face of empirical reality.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel46:12

       Um, there's ideology, but there's a very specific thing to these Marxist regimes where they might believe in class conflict and you need this revolution and so forth, but there's also this sense of y- you, you cannot contradict the party. You cannot contradict the vanguard. So even in 1924 when Trotsky is getting condemned by the party or, uh, what- whatever that was, and he, he's, um, he gets up to give a speech to the party plenum, right, and he says, "Look, uh, for all of my thoughts, let me n- l- l- let there be no mistake that, uh, the party is always right and party discipline is always important." So, it- there's not- not only in the sense where I think, uh, Mamdani would say, "Oh, I want these specific policies implemented," but the sense that also loyalty to the party and eventually to Stalin, even when it seems to contradict my understanding of socialism, is absolutely paramount. And e- one, one way to explain that is that they were just genuinely afraid of Stalin, and they thought this was antithetical to their understanding of communism, or another is that, like, part of the ideology is this theoretic understanding of the party is always right, even if it seems like a single individual is manipulating it to their ends.

   30. SKStephen Kotkin47:21

       Why is Marxism, Marxism-Leninism especially, so attractive to young people and to intellectuals? Why? We have this history, which is a bloody mess. Millions of people die, and they die because of the enactment of this ideology. How could people continue to adhere to an ideology like that during the murderous time period and, even more, after the murderous time period when we can look at it dispassionately? Here's part of the answer. Again, young people are attracted to impatient, quick, total transformation of the world, eradication of war, eradication of social injustice, and there's a simplicity to the ideal. It's kind of a total package.
4. 1:03:19 – 1:13:54

   Today's leftist civil war

   1. SKStephen Kotkin1:03:19

      Exactly. But everything is, eradicate capitalism to get you to socialism. It turns out that that doesn't deliver freedom, it doesn't deliver prosperity, and it doesn't deliver peace. Mm-hmm. It delivers massive statization because once you eliminate private property and individual choice, the state is now responsible for everything, and it delivers ration tickets and the Gulag. So you get a bunch of socialists that break from this. They say, "You know what? Lenin is wrong. Eradicating private property, markets, civil liberties, and parliament is a mistake. We have to accept private property, markets, capitalism, and parliaments because that's the only way to get to freedom. Otherwise, you get to the Leninist dictatorship, total statization, Gulag, and ration tickets." These people are denounced as revisionists, like Eduard Bernstein in Germany, for example, the Swedish Social Democrats. They say, "We accept capitalism, markets, and private property. We want to redistribute the income because it's tough for some people to make their way in the system, the system produces inequality, and let's make it more equal with social engineering, redistribution, but we keep capitalism, we keep markets and private property, and we keep democracy, voting, rule of law, et cetera, and we'll evolve towards full socialism and eventually communism, but we will not do it the Leninist way." And so there's this huge break in the socialist movement between those who are real revolutionaries and want to overthrow, eradicate capitalism to get to the just and prosperous and peaceful future, and those who want to use the existing system and evolve- Mm-hmm. ... embrace and accept it. So the left has a civil war, a civil war on the left, which is still going on, between those who say, "Capitalism is evil and must go" versus "Capitalism has a lot of problems, but we need it in order to have peace and prosperity, in order to have freedom, and we just need to manage it better, redistribute." And so this civil war on the left, which arises in real time, the critics of Lenin's revolution, the German Social Democratic Party, people like Bernstein and the rest of them, they are critics in real time of this. And, and yet some of the critics who are what we would call the Social Democrats of Europe, Lenin was also a member of the Social Democratic Party of Russia, but the communist thing makes this divide- Yep. ... between those who are serious about destruction of capitalism and those who are, quote, "revisionists." Yep. It's denunciatory term. What happens is some of the people who are in the revisionist camp begin to flirt with the capitalism is evil analysis. And so they begin to truck with the communists that they've broken from and are in civil war with. So you get left-wing Social Democrats-... who are closer to Lenin than they are to right-wing social democrats like Bernstein and the rest, who are pro-capitalism but pro-redistribution. Mm-hmm. And so this is confusing to people, because not everybody is a communist. Some people, like in Sweden, accept private property and markets, but some of the people in Sweden seem to go back on that promise of accepting it and arguing that if we don't get rid of capitalism, we're s- we're still gonna end up with an evil system. And so this civil war on the left never gets resolved, it's ongoing, and the right uses this confusion to paint everybody as anti-capitalism. And the left gives them ammunition by talking about the evils of capitalism, even when they've come along to accept private property and markets. And so you have this really deep and fundamental problem for the left, the tragedy of the left, that it's never able to overcome, even to this day, where it comes out and says, "No more anti-capitalism, ever. That is over. That leads to death, bloodshed, gulag, ration tickets, war. That actually is worse than the solut- than the pro- original problem it diagnosed." Think about Marx. Marx says, "You get rid of private property, markets, capitalism, you're gonna get freedom, you're gonna get abundance." You don't get that. And then people say, "Oh, you know, but Marx wanted freedom. He didn't want Stalin's dictatorship. So it's not Marx who's the problem, it's Stalin who deformed Marx." We see this argument all the time. Stalin is a deformity, whereas Marx was about freedom. So think about a nuclear bomb. You're gonna do a nuclear bomb. You're gonna nuke a population, but you don't wanna kill any people. Your goal is to nuke them, but nobody dies. That's what you say. You're gonna get rid of capitalism, you're gonna nuke them, but instead, everybody's gonna live. Yeah. And you give that order to your generals. You say, "Nuke them, but everybody lives, nobody dies." So they nuke them and everybody dies, instead of everybody living. Yeah. And you say, "You know, I never said to kill the people." (laughs) "I said that they should live." But once you nuke capitalism, you're gonna lose freedom, you're gonna lose the ability to have politics, you're gonna end up with some version of a Leninist system, and the ideology is gonna drive that to the doubters, and then you're gonna get a second wind where you get Khrushchev, like you said. He comes into power. He denounces Stalin's crimes. He doesn't praise capitalism, private property, and markets. He doesn't undo collective farms. He doesn't undo state ownership of property. He doesn't undo the planning system. He just undoes Stalin's personality. Yeah. He's trying to subtract... The de-Stalinization is take away Stalin. It's not take away any of the other attributes of the system. And so it's a second wind that it was Stalin who was the problem, not the system that was the problem. So here we have the experience of going through the horrors, then having those horrors publicly denounced, uh, uh, within the party. The Secret Speech is not published in Soviet newspapers, but it's discussed at party meetings in all locales. So within the party, there's a public dimension to this. Right. All party members become familiar with Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. So they experience the horrors, in many cases, firsthand. They enacted the horrors, in many cases, themselves. Right. They then see this denounced as horror, and they get facts that they didn't know. They get a big-picture view back onto this. And instead of saying, "Oh, my God, this system is evil. We made a big mistake. We have to undo state ownership of property. We have to undo collective farms. We have to under- do the dictatorship," instead of saying that, they say, "Oh, we get a chance to do it right this time, without the evil Stalin who messed it all up." And so the Khrushchev thing, the revelation of the horrors, the denunciation of the horrors, ironically gives you the second wind belief in the system that's gonna last right through Gorbachev, who's a Khrushchev era baby. We have this with Xi Jinping. If you know the story of his father and of his own upbringing, they suffer massively- Right. ... through Mao's regime and the Cultural Revolution. They're purged, they're humiliated, and yet instead of saying, "This system is horrible. If I ever get power, I'm gonna undo this system which was so unjust to me and my family," instead of that, they say, "Let's make this better. Let's not have the bad things that happened under Mao, but let's keep all the good things," supposedly good things that happened," including the Communist Party monopoly, because that to us looks like the problem." And it wreaked havoc in their lives, in their family's life, but to them, that's the solution. And so there's this paradoxical element of communism where its failures don't become discrediting for so many of the people. Right. They instead become a kind of second wind once you acknowledge and denounce them. So it's never the system at fault, it's Stalin at fault. It's never the system at fault, it's Mao's mistakes or excesses, as they're called, that are at fault.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:12:41

      Lighthouse is the fastest immigration solution for people building technology. When I worked with them to help me secure a visa for one of my employees, the difference was clear throughout the whole process, starting even with the initial intake form. While most immigration firms require you to schedule a meeting and pay hundreds of dollars just to start discussing your visa options, Lighthouse only needs a LinkedIn profile or a resume to evaluate your eligibility for a ton of different employment visas, like the EB-1A or the O-1A.You take 60 seconds to fill out some basic information, and they'll put together a document for you, for free, which is fully comprehensive. They'll list out all the potential paths available to you and how strong of a candidate you are for each one. Also, if you decide to move forward, Lighthouse can take things all the way to the finish line. Building out your story, preparing your application for you, and moving things forward faster than you would have thought possible. If you've ever even considered working in the United States, I really encourage you to reach out. You're probably more eligible for a visa than you realize. Go to lighthousehq.com/getstarted to find out. All right, back to Stephen.

5. 1:13:54 – 1:36:06

   Doesn’t CCP deserve credit for China's growth?

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel1:13:54

      I guess in China's case, they actually did reform the system and didn't just, uh, it- it- they didn't, uh, just discredit the Cultural Revolution. They said, "No, the whole- the- the- much of the planning and, uh, state-owned enterprises was a mistaken idea." I- but I do have a different question.

   2. SKStephen Kotkin1:14:07

      Wait. That's not exactly the- the- the way you described. You have a point. You're onto something, DK.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel1:14:14

      Yeah.

   4. SKStephen Kotkin1:14:14

      But they- it needs to be qualified. So what happens in Deng Xiaoping's case is the communists have accidentally, that is unwittingly, not accidentally, unwittingly destroyed the planning system.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel1:14:28

      Yep.

   6. SKStephen Kotkin1:14:30

      They have sent down to the village people who do economic planning, they've sent them to manual labor. They have smashed them in the face because they wear glasses in many cases, and therefore, they're putatively intellectuals. And so they've undermined their ability to continue the economic system as they had it.

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel1:14:50

      But if that's the reason why they weren't able to do planning, shouldn't Stalin's purges and then World War II have also had the same effect on the Soviet Union?

   8. SKStephen Kotkin1:14:59

      Not the political system. Deng Xiaoping never takes down the political system or the ideology. And so you still have today the communist monopoly. Communism can fail at everything. It can starve the people. It can, um, uh, kill the people. It only has to do one thing to survive. Suppress political alternatives. So during that resistance, peasant resistance to Stalin and the collectivization episode that you referenced earlier, there's no political alternative. There's no other place for them to go and say, "We don't like the injustices of the czar's regime, and we don't like what communism is doing, therefore there's something else that we can go to that's an alternative." Communism has suppressed all the alternatives. So it's either return to czarism or keep communism.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel1:15:54

      Right.

   10. SKStephen Kotkin1:15:54

       And so- and so in the Chinese case, you have something quite similar. They allow economic liberalization, in part because they have no choice. But they don't allow political liberalization.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel1:16:06

       Right.

   12. SKStephen Kotkin1:16:06

       And so they're- they're able to, quote, "reform" by enabling the people to generate wealth, jobs, prosperity through market behavior, and it's mostly the peasant class in China, which then leads to family-owned businesses, which then leads to larger businesses. And so society, not the party, creates the miracle in China. And the party tightens its grip because the ideology of the party is when the socioeconomic base has a lot of market in it, it's a threat to the party's rule. So the party has to be even more vigilant against the capitalists in the society. And it turns out that you get to Jiang Zemin, who is, uh, Deng Xiaoping's handpicked successor-

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel1:16:54

       Yeah.

   14. SKStephen Kotkin1:16:54

       ... and Jiang Zemin sees that the private sector is becoming dominant in the country, and that the party's monopoly on power is under threat. And Jiang Zemin decides he's going to do something called the Three Represents. He's gonna bring the millionaire capitalists into the party. He's gonna make them party members.

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel1:17:15

       Yep.

   16. SKStephen Kotkin1:17:15

       So instead of the party being against capitalists, the capitalists are gonna join the party and this is gonna somehow increase the party's leverage and control and transform the psychology and behavior of the capi- Of course, it fails. Instead, the party members are in cahoots with the millionaires and they begin to form their own businesses by expropriating other people's property, and the party begins to go dissolute in a anti-Marxist fashion in terms of private property, wealth accumulation. So Xi Jinping comes along, predictably. He looks at Jiang Zemin's solution, co-opt the millionaires into the party, sees that it failed. Not only did it fail to transform the behavior of the private sector people, it infected the behavior of the party people. So he's gonna, instead of bringing the capitalists into the party, he's gonna force the party back into the capitalism. So he's gonna push the party into the private sector more strongly than it was before. Board directors, party officials. CEO, party official.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:26

       Mm-hmm.

   18. SKStephen Kotkin1:18:27

       Private sector people who don't cooperate, destroy them, make examples of them, including in the tech sector-

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:33

       Right.

   20. SKStephen Kotkin1:18:34

       ... so that people get the message that the party is the boss here. So you have a kind of natural progression where you open up the system economically in order to drive jobs, prosperity, wealth because you've destroyed... People say the Communist Party brought 700, 800 million people out of poverty. No. The Communist Party put those people into poverty.

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:58

       Mm-hmm.

   22. SKStephen Kotkin1:18:59

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

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel1:19:08

       Right.

   24. SKStephen Kotkin1:19:08

       And so the communists have to reassert their control, their Leninist monopoly on power, because the very thing that has rescued them...... the diligence, entrepreneurialism, ingenuity of the amazing Chinese people and of that society is now a threat to communist rule.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel1:19:28

       The, I mean, uh, I agree with, uh, the, the mechanism by which the growth happened, but I, I don't think it's the ca-

   26. SKStephen Kotkin1:19:36

       Go ahead.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel1:19:36

       I don't think it's a case that it was their inability to have true Marxist communism, which, uh, uh, which led to liberalization. I mean, if you look at the, um, the creation of the special economic zones, the imperative at a national level that you must have growth, uh, and then Deng's, uh, southern tour. And so is Jiang Zemin, he tries after the Tiananmen to clamp down on these proto-... uh, clamp down on opening up, and then Deng says, "No, we must open up. If you don't, we'll remove you." All of that is a, is a sort of positive, uh, may- maybe positive's the wrong word, but, um-

   28. SKStephen Kotkin1:20:13

       Policy-driven.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:14

       Yeah. I- i- it's a s-

   30. SKStephen Kotkin1:20:15

       That's for sure.

Episode duration: 2:13:34