Norman Naimark: Genocide, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Absolute Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #248

The following is a conversation with Norman Naimark, a historian at Stanford specializing in genocide, war and empire. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, here's my conversation with Norman Naimark. Did Stalin believe that communism is good, not just for him, but for the people of the Soviet Union and the people of the world?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, Stalin believed that, uh, you know, socialism was the be all and end all of, uh, you know, human existence. He was a true Leninist and in Lenin's tradition, this was, uh, you know, what he believed. I mean, that- that set of beliefs didn't, uh, exclude other kinds of things he believed or thought or did. But, uh, no, the kind- w- what had- the way he defined socialism, the way he thought about socialism, no, he absolutely thought it was in the interest of the Soviet Union and of the world. And in fact, that the world was one day going to go socialist. In other words, I think he believed in the- in eventually in the international revolution.

So given, uh, the genocide in the 1930s that you describe, was Stalin evil, delusional or incompetent?

Uh, evil, delusional or incompetent? Well, you know, evil is one of those words, you know, which has a lot of, uh, kind of religious and moral, uh, connotations. And in that sense, yes, I think he was an evil man. I mean, he, you know, eliminated people absolutely unnecessarily. He, um, tortured people, had people tortured. Uh, he was completely indifferent, uh, to, uh, the suffering of others. He couldn't have cared a whit, you know, that millions, uh, uh, were suffering. And so yes, I- I consider him a- an evil man. I mean, y- you know, historians don't like to-

Use the word evil?

... use the word evil. It's a, you know, it's a word for moral philosophers, but I think it certainly fits, uh, who he is. I think he, uh, was delusional. And there is a wonderful historian, uh, at Princeton, a political scientist actually, named Robert Tucker who said he suffered from a paranoid delusional system. And I will always remember that of- of Tucker's, uh, writing because, uh, what Tucker meant is that he was not just paranoid, meaning, you know, I'm paranoid, I'm worried you're out to get me, right?

Mm-hmm.

But that he constructed a whole, uh, plots of people, uh, whole systems of people who were out to get him. So in other words, his delusions were that there were all of these groups of people out there, um, who were out to, uh, diminish his power and remove him fr- and remove him, uh, from his position and undermine the Soviet Union in his view. So yes, I think he did suffer from, uh, from, uh, delusions. And this had a huge effect because whole groups then, uh, were destroyed, uh, by his, uh, by his activities which he would construct, uh, based on, uh, on these delusions. He was not incompetent. He was an extremely competent man. I mean, I think most of the research that's gone on especially since the, uh, Stalin archive, uh, was opened at the beginning of this century. And I think almost every historian who goes in that archive comes away from it with the feeling of a man who was enormously hardworking, intelligent, uh, you know, with an acute sense of politics, a really excellent sense of, um, you know, political, uh, rhetoric. A fantastic editor, you know, in a kind of agitational sense. I mean, he's a real agitator, right? And, um, of a, um, you know, a really hard worker. I mean, somebody who works from morning 'til night. Uh, a micromanager in some ways. So his competence, I think, was really extreme. Now there were times when that fell down. You know, times in the '30s, times in the '20s, times during the war where he made mistakes. It's not as if he didn't make any mistakes, but I think, you know, you- you look at his stuff, you know, you look at his archives, you look what he did, I mean, this is an enormously competent man who- who in many, many different a- areas of enterprise because he, you know, he had this notion that he should know everything and did know everything. I remember one, uh, archive, dyala it's called, you know, a kind of folder that I looked at where he actually went through the wines that were produced in his native Georgia and- and- and wrote down how much they should make of each of these wines, you know, how m- how many, you know, barrels they should- they should produce of these wines, which grapes were better than the other grapes. Sort of correcting-