Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler | Lex Fridman Podcast #444

He claimed history moves inevitably toward a classless utopia, yet still leaves room for ‘special individuals’ to accelerate revolution—giving intellectuals and revolutionaries both a sense of righteousness and destiny.

By presenting revolution as scientifically necessary rather than morally debatable, later leaders like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao could justify radical violence and social engineering as rational, inevitable steps toward history’s end.

From collectivization to the Great Terror and Mao’s campaigns, those who were most capable, entrepreneurial, or intellectually independent were often targeted, while lying up the chain became rational self‑defense, hollowing out state capacity.

Both sought to ‘modernize’ agriculture via coercive collectivization and pseudo‑scientific schemes; instead they destroyed incentives, provoked mass falsification of data, and caused famines that killed tens of millions.

Though ideologically opposed—class vs. race—they shared features Arendt called totalitarian: single‑party rule, leader cults, pervasive terror, propaganda, and ambitions to reshape humanity and history without moral limits.

Hitler’s drive for Lebensraum, enslavement and eventual decimation of Slavs, and extermination of Jews was not an accident of war but a core program elaborated in Mein Kampf and detailed schemes like Generalplan Ost.

Post‑Soviet Russia never had a ‘Nuremberg’ for communism; instead, Putin fuses Tsarist, Soviet, and nationalist narratives into a flexible, often contradictory story that supports renewed imperial aggression, exemplified in Ukraine.