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

And the outcome here is a horrific man-made famine, not a natural disaster, not bad harvest, but a man-made famine as a result of then the compulsion that gets used by the Soviet state to extract those resources, cordoning off the area, not allowing starring- starving people to, uh, to escape. Um, you put very well some of the- the implications of this case study in- in how things look in the abstract versus in practice. Um, and those phenomena were going to haunt the rest of the experience of the Soviet Union. Um, the whole notion that up and down the chain of command, everybody is falsifying or tinkering with or prettifying the statistics or their reports in order not to look bad and- and not to, you know, have vengeance visited upon them, um, reaches the point where nobody, in spite of the pretense of comprehensive knowledge, right? There's a- a state planning agency that creates five-year plans for the economy as a whole and which is supposed to have accurate statistics. All of this, uh, is founded upon, uh, a foundation of sand. A deliberate plan to bring class conflict and bring civil war and then heighten it in the countryside, um, does damage, and not least of that is this phenomenon of a negative selection. Those who have most enterprise, those who are most entrepreneurial, those who have most self-discipline, those who are best organized will be winnowed again and again and again, uh, sending the message that mediocrity is comparatively much safer than talent. Hitler and Himmler envisioned permanent war on the Eastern front. Not a peace treaty, not a settlement, not a border, but a constant moving of the border every generation hundreds of miles east in order to keep winning more and more living space. And with analogy to other frontiers, to always give more fighting experience and more training and aggression to generation after generation of German soldiers. In terms of nightmarish visions, this one's right up there.

The following is a conversation with Vejas Liudevicius, a historian specializing in Germany and Eastern Europe. He has lectured extensively on the rise, the reign, and the fall of communism. Our discussion goes deep on this, the very heaviest of topics, the communist ideology that has led to over 100 million deaths in the 20th century. We'll also discuss Hitler, Nazi ideology, and World War II. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Vejas Liudevicius. Let's start with Karl Marx. What were the central ideas of Marx that lay the foundation of communism?

I think there were several key ideas that Marx deployed that were destined to have such an impact. And in some ways, they were actually kind of contradictory. Um, on the one hand, uh, Marx insisted that history has a purpose, that history is not just random events, uh, but that rather it's history, we might say, with a capital H. History moving in a deliberate direction, history having a goal, uh, a- a- a direction that it was predestined to move in. Um, at the same time, in The Communist Manifesto, uh, Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels also suggested that there was a role for special individuals who might, uh, even if history was still moving in this predetermined direction, might give it an extra push, might play a heroic role in that process. And I think that these two ideas added together, the notion that there is a science of revolution that suggests that you can move in a deliberate and, uh, and meaningful, rational way towards the end of history and the resolution of all conflicts, uh, a total liberation of the human person, uh, and that moreover, that was inevitable, that that was pre-programmed and destined in the- in the order of things. When you add to that the notion that there's also room for heroism and the individual role, uh, this ended up being tremendously powerful as a combination. Um, earlier thinkers, uh, who were socialists had already dreamt of or projected futures where all conflict would be resolved and human life would achieve some sort of perfection. Marx added these other elements, uh, that made it far more powerful than the earlier versions that he decried as merely utopian socialism.