Stephen Kotkin — How Stalin Became the Most Powerful Dictator in History

The Stephen Kotkin episode. Kotkin is arguably the world’s foremost expert on Joseph Stalin and has written a massive 2-volume biography of Stalin (with a 3rd volume in the works).

No other individual had more of a profound impact on the 20th century than Stalin. He held the power of life and death over every single person across 11 time zones, and he killed tens of millions of people, utterly consumed by an ideology aimed at building paradise on Earth.

And he was one half of the biggest and most consequential military confrontation in history (even if Hitler didn’t prove to be his match).

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) – Was the tsarist regime the lesser of 2 evils?

(00:23:45) – The peasants brought Lenin to power, then he enslaved them

(00:37:38) – Why did so many go along with enforced famine and the Great Terror?

(01:02:26) – Today’s leftist civil war

(01:13:01) – Doesn’t CCP deserve credit for China's growth?

(01:35:13) – Why didn't somebody just kill Stalin?

(01:52:45) – Overcoming the pathologies of communism with tech: USSR vs China

Transcript

00:00:00 – Was the tsarist regime the lesser of 2 evils?

Dwarkesh Patel 00:00:00

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. The first one, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power. The second one, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler. Thank you for coming on my podcast.

Stephen Kotkin 00:00:14

Thank you for the honor of the invitation.

Dwarkesh Patel 00:00:16

Let's begin with the tsarist regime. First question, how repressive was the tsarist regime actually? Presumably the motivation behind the revolution is to get rid of this autocracy. But you have these examples. Lenin's brother tried to kill the tsar. Lenin himself is writing these long manifestos about taking down capitalism and overthrowing the government. He and people like Stalin are in exile in Siberia, living off government money, robbing banks, and small shenanigans. Honestly, it sounds more forgiving than many countries today. How bad was it really?

Stephen Kotkin 00:00:50

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 and go back. We need to widen the aperture a little bit here.

This is the tsarist 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. 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 whether 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. 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, property rights, all the things that undermine your dictatorial rule. The tsarist regime was a quintessential example of this fundamental dilemma.

Modernization is not a sociological process that kind of just happens. It's a geopolitical process. You modernize because you need to compete in the international system. If somebody has ships made out of steel, either you also have ships made out of steel or they're going to show up at your door, like we did to Japan, and tell you that they're in charge now.

Dwarkesh Patel 00:03:45

This was one of the most interesting takes in your first volume, that modernization is not this inevitable process but is instigated by ruthless geopolitical competition. Do you think that that still applies in today's world? 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…

For example, the odds that if France falls behind technologically if their AI is worse, Germany is going to take over, is just sort of unthinkable. 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 up-to-date political processes. Is that still a drive that moves countries forward?

Stephen Kotkin 00:04:31

If you have an autocratic regime, it is existential for you every day. You want to compete. France can compete or fail to compete, and its political system is not at risk. No one's going to say the regime is illegitimate because someone else beat them in AI. Students are going to protest in the streets. That's not going to mean that the regime is going to fall. There may be a change of government, but the system remains.

You have this dilemma for the authoritarians. 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. So I need to have all of that to be able to compete, but I have this autocratic regime. How do I retain the social structure, the hierarchy? It’s 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?

That's the stuff that persists today for Iran, Russia, China, North Korea. They have to get 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… It's two sides of the same coin. The thing that gets you the engineers also gets you the possible political ideas.

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

Dwarkesh Patel 00:07:03

Is one of the key lessons from your volumes that you should be tripping over yourself in order to embrace a lesser of two evils? Does that apply to all the examples you give? This is maybe a general question about how much you can actually learn from history. For every seeming lesson, there's an equal and opposite lesson that you can also learn.

During the tsarist regime, in retrospect, we can say that the liberals and the constitutionalists should have cooperated with Stolypin or Witte. Even though it was an autocratic regime, they were actually doing these real reforms and there was growth. They should have continued that process. Or when the government fell in February 1917, the Provisional Government factions should have united to oppose the Bolsheviks.

But then there's all these other examples. In Germany, the conservative Weimar government allies with Hitler in order to fend off what they think is the greater evil, the communists. Given the events up to that point, it's a reasonable concern to have, given what the Bolsheviks have done in Russia. Where should we end up on this? Should you embrace a lesser of two evils whenever you get the chance, or no?

Stephen Kotkin 00:08:03

The Tsarist regime is undertaking this repression of people who have legitimate claims. That repression is quite severe by the standards of the day. It's not going to be everybody murdered or everybody deported to the wastes of Siberia, which we're going to see in the 20th century when we have a different level of communications and transport, different technology, when we have a different level of ideological commitment. Still, it's highly repressive. It's totally unjust and the claims of the people protesting are legitimate.

Stalin goes into the underground, not because he's looking for power. It's because he's dedicated to fighting the injustices of the tsarist regime. A lot of young people like him do the same. He's in the seminary. He's highly successful, unbelievably successful. He's great at school. That's been true for many years now, since he was in elementary school. He sang in the choir, got good grades, and did his homework. He's on track to be successful in society.

He gives it all up. He starts reading forbidden, otherwise censored underground literature and books. He learns about social injustice, not just through firsthand experience, but analytically. He never graduated from the seminary, which is the highest level of education that was available to somebody in the Caucasus. They don't have a university, because the Tsarist regime is afraid to allow a university. They need the university graduates, but again, they're afraid of the politics of it. Universities elsewhere, including in the capital, St. Petersburg, are constantly being shut down through these revolutionary episodes.

He goes into the underground and for 20 years of his life he's got no job, no profession, no source of income. He's in and out of prison, in and out of Siberian exile, constantly harassed by the police. If he escapes, they find him, they put him back. From the ages of about 17-18 to his late 30s, he's a penniless, jobless revolutionary, dedicated to fighting the genuine injustices of the Tsarist regime.

What he'll produce is a much more unjust regime than the one he's fighting against. This is known as perverse and unintended consequences. He's legitimately dedicated to revolution as he understands it in his day, and it's fighting against legitimate injustices. But the way he does that—the revolutionary methods that he uses and then the regime that he ends up building—turns out to be worse than the problem that he was addressing. This is a perverse and unintended consequence.

Your question is about whether revolution is a good thing ultimately, even if the injustices are there, and whether there could have been some solution that was more evolutionary that could get you to a better place. The constitutionalists, otherwise known as the Kadets, we would call them the classical liberals. They're the private property, constitutional order, anti-autocracy people fighting the tsarist regime. They're going to be the protagonists of the February Revolution in 1917. It looks like they could possibly be the solution because they're against arbitrary, autocratic, unjust rule. They're in favor of constitutional order. That's not how they behave once they're in power. But let's leave that aside.

Here's your problem. This was foreseen by the Interior Minister who put down the 1905 Rebellion Revolution, Pyotr Durnovo, who understands the liberals, the constitutionalists. They’re the classical liberals who want private property and constitutional order and probably, if they had their druthers, a constitutional monarchy like you have in the UK and Britain at the time. But Durnovo says to them, “You guys are fools, because if you take down the Tsar, you won't get a constitutional order. You'll get chaos and anarchy and you'll get a massive social revolution by the peasants predominantly, but also by the nationalities and the workers. You will bring on the opposite of a constitutional order. So instead of fighting against the Tsar, you should throw in your lot with the Tsar against the Stalins and the social movement that came from the investment in modernization.”

Durnovo is proved right. He's proved right not just in Russia, by the way. In many places in the world at the time, between like 1905 and 1925 or so, 1926 in the case of Portugal, you have constitutional revolutionary attempts to introduce constitutional order: Mexico, Iran, China, Russia, Portugal. They all fail. The constitutionalists take power for a brief period of time and then they're swept out by a more leftist, more social-oriented revolutionary process. So the constitutional epoch of the early 20th century turns out to be a bust.

It had to have happened beforehand, before the modern era. Why? Because when you institute constitutional order, like in England, in the US, to a certain extent in France which has a more complicated process, you do it before you're in the mass age. You do it before the working class and the peasantry are politically organized. You're able to introduce rule of law, constitutionalism based on a private property model where not that many people get to vote. The franchise is restricted, the vast majority of people can't vote, only property holders can vote. Only men can vote, not women. You have this restricted franchise, which is like a breathing space for you to introduce and get used to a liberal constitutional order that you can then democratize over time. Over time non-property holding males get to vote. Over time, women get to vote. Over time, slaves become citizens. They become people and fully-fledged citizens. They also get to vote and to own property legally.

You have this order that has all of these birth defects. It's very restrictive in the franchise. Some people are slaves, not even considered people. Yet over time you can get that right because the category of citizenship and the constitutional order are already embedded. When you have the constitutional revolution in the mass age—when you have the peasants and the workers and those for national self determination participating in the constitutional revolution—constitutional order and rule of law isn't enough for a lot of them.

Dwarkesh Patel 00:15:38

It worked in Taiwan and South Korea. There was an era of industrialization under, not a dictator, but an authoritarian government. Then they were able to transition to rule of law democracy.

Stephen Kotkin 00:15:48

There are these exceptions which have turned out to be false normative, or guiding, stars for us in every case. It happened in West Germany and Japan under American occupation, enormously successful. We turned Hitlerite Germany into our ally with their cooperation. It's just astonishing. And with Hirohito's Japan, the emperor stayed. Then with Japan's two former colonies, South Korea and Taiwan, it worked there as well. Hong Kong was on that trajectory until it was turned back when the lease ended to the communist regime in Beijing. But the number of countries that have done this is very, very few. The opposite has happened in most other cases where you've gotten an attempt but a failure to introduce enduring constitutional order in a mass society.

Dwarkesh Patel 00:16:48

But there's a paradox here. If you institute this sort of revolution, or changing of the guard, during the mass age, then you're going to get this sort of leftist revolution which is very antithetical to future prosperity and rule of law. On the other hand, if you don't change the regime, you will fail to… It's been pointed out that Chiang Kai-shek, when he did have control over China, should have done some amount of land reform.

You talk about how Stolypin, after the 1905 attempted revolution, attempted to put in this sort of agricultural reforms. But their success was mixed because the existing aristocracy obviously didn't favor it. So there is this paradox. If you don't change the regime, the existing stakeholders will not want the kinds of reforms which would make it possible to have a lower class that's bought into the system.

Stephen Kotkin 00:17:35

How do you bring the whole society, what we would call the masses or what used to be called the masses… How do you bring all levels of society into a political system as citizens? How do you build a polity which is inclusive of people regardless of how much property they have? How do you then provide opportunity to them so that they can rise up the ladder? That's the secret of success in the modern world, which a handful of countries have done from a non-democratic starting point. Other countries have done it by democratizing a liberal constitutional order.

Go back to the tsarist regime. What were the options for the tsarist regime? You have this very heavy absolutist regime. Autocracy is even a more absolutist version of what we had, for example in the French case, when the Bourbon dynasty could say, “the state is me” or “the state is I”. You have this Versailles-like absolutism, and aristocracy that forms around the absolutism that is the main beneficiary. Most everybody else is excluded from the political process and they are going to break through at some point. So how are you going to manage that breakthrough.

Again, in the French case it took more than a century to get this right. The monarch is killed and the monarch comes back and they have an emperor and they have a constitutional order and they have an elected president who does a self-coup and one republic falls and another republic takes its place. Eventually even the Vichy regime, the Nazi occupation regime, overthrows the republic. So it takes de Gaulle in some ways from above to reimpose a republic, the fifth Republic, later on. So it's a very difficult process, even when it works, as the French case tells you.

So we're not saying that it's simple and easy and that Tsarist Russia could have gone down this path. A lot of people say, if it hadn't been for the war, Tsarist Russia was on an evolutionary path. It was modernizing economically, so it might have been a kind of Taiwan story over time, where the dictatorial regime gave way, under economic success and political pressure, to a more benign regime. They institutionalized rule of law, private property, civil liberties, and an inclusive polity for everybody.

The problem with that is that the autocracy refused to do that. The autocracy had wanted no part of any evolutionary process. So in 1905, when the tsarist regime is compelled—under pressure of tremendous peasant revolt and worker strikes and a defeat in the war against Japan—to introduce some version of constitutional order, a kind of quasi-parliament, quasi-constitution, the Tsar regrets doing this almost immediately and is trying to push back against his concessions.

Once the lid was put back on because of repression, once Durnovo successfully repressed the political movement, the Tsar wanted to undo those concessions and go back to being an autocrat. An autocrat, autokrator, means a “self-power, a power unto itself”. So this is your challenge. How do you undo the autocracy and get to an evolutionary mode when the autocracy itself is committed to not allowing any political participation whatsoever?

So you have the leftist version of overthrow, where you end up with a radicalization in the leftist direction, and you have a rightist version of overthrow, where you end up with, “Oh, we're not going to have Leninism here. Let's prevent Leninism. Let's go with the radical right.” The traditional right invites, as happened in the German case and earlier in the Italian case, invites the radical right to power, thinking they can control the radical right, the fascism, the Nazism.

The traditional right is wrong. The radical right, once it's invited to power, institutionalizes itself. You get a leftist version of this and a rightist version of this. They're kind of codependent. Each uses the threat of the other to further consolidate their dictatorship.

This is the 20th-century version. The irony here is that you got the radical right, the fascist solution in the German case, and you got the radical left, the socialist solution in the tsarist case. The tsarist regime had a massive radical right. They had the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that infamous anti-Semitic tract, which then makes its way to Germany but originates in the tsarist empire. The antisemitism is there. The right-wing movement is there, implanted in villages, the Union of the Russian People.

Russia has the fascism before Germany. Germany has the largest socialist party in its parliament, in the sense that it's not a majority, but it's a plurality. The Social Democrats in Germany are enormously successful at the ballot box. The right-wing movement with the antisemitism is enormously successful in the streets in Tsarist Russia. If you were alive before 1917, 1933, you would predict that socialism would be victorious and triumph in Germany, and the fascism would triumph in the Russian Empire. But it's the opposite. So that's just a fascinating, amazing paradox that I tried to deal with in the first two volumes.

00:23:45 – The peasants brought Lenin to power, then he enslaved them

Dwarkesh Patel 00:23:45

You say that in 1917 a leftist revolution of some kind was inevitable, but that it didn't have to be the Bolshevik October Revolution. Why was leftism inevitable in Russia?

Stephen Kotkin 00:23:55

You put your finger on a big part of it when you talked about Chiang Kai-shek and land reform. You have this peasant land hunger. 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 let alone a massive drought, they're on the verge of starvation. Subsistence level agriculture is not politically stable.

You want a class of people, a kind of yeoman capitalists, property owners who can expand their farms and can succeed and hire labor. Some of those hired hands can then get their own land and become a version of these yeoman farmers, sort of Thomas Jefferson-style or Stolypin, the great attempted reform of Stolypin after the 1905 revolution, which ended in his assassination.

You need to deal with the peasant land hunger so that it becomes a stabilizing political force. You have the peasants get the land and then they have a piece of the status quo and want to retain the system, versus the peasants not having the land and they want to overthrow the system to get the land.

In the Russian case there is the end of serfdom in the 1860s, again as a result of 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 tsarist autocracy. 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. You're gonna 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. It became a problem that's not resolved right through 1917, 1918. So the peasants had their own revolution in 1917 and 1918, which was 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.

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 Republic, but they're easily put down by the forces of order or the army and guess who's in the army? It’s the peasants. 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 which should be the forces of order.

In the German case—and to a certain extent the Italian case which happened simultaneously, and there's also a Hungarian case here—you have leftist revolts in the cities, seizures of power like the Paris Commune of 1870-71, which happened in Paris and not in the rest of France. You need a peasant army that has a stake in the existing order to undo the city leftist revolution. You have this in the other European cases.

One case you don't have this is 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, 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. In the 1920s, the peasants were de facto, not de jure, landowners. They don't own the property in law, 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. The peasant revolution is going to be annihilated in blood. So the peasants have, through their radicalism of seizing the land, helped bring Lenin and his Bolsheviks to power in the cities which is going to be the death of the peasants owning the land and lead instead to the re-enserfment of the peasants. Something similar is gonna happen in the Chinese case.

Again there's this irony of history: perverse and unintended consequences. Stalin is fighting against tsarist injustice only to impose worse injustice and worse bloodshed and worse repression. 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, the land that they took in the seizures that brought these leftists to power in the case.

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. So the traditionalism of the peasants—where they believe in God, they believe in law and order—is overriding because they already have a lot of the land in comparison to their Russian or Chinese counterparts. They can be part of the forces of order.

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.

There's how you integrate farmers. The whole world order rests on the backs of farmers. How much farmers till means how rich or poor your country 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 family's purposes or not, tells you how much wealth you have to then build an army, build modern industry, et cetera.

The world order rests on these hardworking, predominant in the population, peasantries. 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.

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 just the court society at Versailles, the tsarist court in St. Petersburg, or the men at the Constitutional Convention in the US. You're beyond that in the mass age. You have to be able to incorporate the masses somehow in a polity. It's really hard to do. So this dynamic of failure to master, or mastery over it, tells you a lot about the direction you're going to go.

Dwarkesh Patel 00:32:19

This answers one of the other questions I had for you. Why did we see these communist revolutions in peasant countries? It’s the opposite of the Marxist prediction that you would first need capitalism and industrialization before you would see the turn towards socialism. I guess the answer is that the private property which is engendered by capitalism and industrialization actually helps the peasants more, or helps them somewhat and buys them into the system.

This raises another question. If it's the case that all of this unrest is caused by the mistreatment of peasants in China and in Russia, you have the mistreatment of them to an extent unimaginable after the collectivization in 1928 where literally 100 million peasants were enslaved. Of course, there's some lack of cooperation with the regime. They kill half the livestock and so forth. But it doesn't break the regime, even though it's way more repressive and destructive than anything the tsar did. So if the peasants are the backbone of the regime's stability, why doesn't collectivization in China and Russia break the regime?

Stephen Kotkin 00:33:24

Terrific question again. You have a multi-pronged answer. Let’s do it this way.

On the one hand, you have a much bigger repressive apparatus, a much, much bigger repressive apparatus. The tsarist regime has a very small secret police, really small. The secret police for the tsarist regime is mostly following a handful of intellectuals. You had a few thousand university students in tsarist Russia in the mid-19th century, about 5,000 or so when this term intelligentsia got invented. You're going to have a few thousand more over time. But you're in the thousands, not the millions.

Dwarkesh Patel 00:34:09

Even there though, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin go off and they're sent into exile. They're not only living off government money, but while in exile and they're writing for Pravda. They're writing, “here's my manifesto on the fall of capitalism.” Even the intellectuals are not really repressed.

Stephen Kotkin 00:34:25

The sense of repression is more about following what they do rather than arresting them on a pretext and putting a bullet in the back of their neck. You have this tsarist secret police, the “Okhranka”. That's the pejorative nickname for them, the “Okhranka”. They're tasked with following these revolutionaries and infiltrating their groups and maybe sabotaging them from within. Something similar happens in the labor movement. Zubatovshina is the Russian term where you plant the leader of the workers' movement in order to make sure that it's controlled by the secret police rather than has a spontaneous or autonomous version that could get out of hand.

So you have a small police that's dedicated to surveillance and infiltration. You're reading their mail, which is something that's invented in France. The black cabinets are a French invention that the tsar's secret police borrow. You're following them and a lot of them get deported to Siberian exile, like happened to Stalin. Some get forced into European exile, like happened to Lenin. Lenin for 15 of the 17 years between 1900 and 1917 was in European exile. He's not even in Russia.

In fact, the Paris branch of the tsarist secret police, the Okhranka, which conducted the surveillance and infiltration in Europe - we have their entire archive right here at the Hoover Institution. It was supposed to be destroyed. The order went to destroy it in Paris after the revolution. Instead the guy put it on a boat and secretly had it shipped here to the United States. Now we have the Tsarist Russian archive, secret police for the foreign revolutionaries in foreign exile.

So you have surveillance and infiltration on a lower level. The main force of repression in Tsarist Russia is the army, not the secret police. You don't have a gigantic armed secret police. The secret police are kind of intellectuals. They're reading Lenin's tracts and they're writing summaries, like AI would do now, about what they contain and how to combat it and why the idea is wrong. They're sort of like pseudo-intellectuals, or in some cases intellectuals with degrees. They're not the thugs, the torturers and the thugs that we would associate with secret police.

That's built under Stalin in order to enact the re-enserfment, the enslavement of the hundred million peasants. It's that act. It's a kind of chicken and egg thing. How do you enslave the peasants without the gigantic secret police? But then when you enslave the peasants, the result is you have this gigantic secret police now that can do everything and anything. It's a process where the chicken and egg are happening simultaneously and they're building the secret police capacity, while enslaving the peasants, that they didn't have before.

00:37:38 – Why did so many go along with enforced famine and the Great Terror?

Dwarkesh Patel 00:37:38

How do we explain this surplus of sadism during this period in Russia? Stalin recruits the twenty-five-thousanders who go out to the countryside and steal from basically starving people. They can visibly see, I'm sure, that they're stealing from a family that's going to starve without this grain. You have tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of interrogators and torturers in the gulag system. They must know it's a cynical thing where they're making the person 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 things. There were hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people if you include informants, who are implicated in this whole ghoulish regime. Is this just a latent thing that is true in any society and Stalin was able to exploit it, or with some circumstance created this level of sadism?

Stephen Kotkin 00:38:29

Again, a fantastic question. We get this from Lev Kopelev, The 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 by profession. He writes this fantastic memoir, a couple of memoirs. One of them is called The Education of a True Believer, which covers how he was the one who did this, including in his native village.

Here's your answer. On the one hand, there's ideology and the importance of ideology. We may think that no one really believes the ideology. The ideology is too ridiculous. It's too disproven by facts in life. We're 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 it. In fact, it's wrong. They do believe the ideology and they're young. They're young people.

A story of the evil of capitalism… You have World War I, millions of people die. For what? Why are those millions of people being killed? The flower of European youth. 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. So that's evil and we must overcome that.

So there's a way in which life experience, as well as the fervor of youth, leads to, “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 we 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. 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 I'm a participant in building a new world, in a world historical process that's going to end exploitation, that's going to end haves and have nots.

Dwarkesh Patel 00:40:50

I get it if you're a middle bureaucrat in the Communist Party, sure. Do you think that explains the motivation of an interrogator in a Gulag, that this is part of the goal of communism?

Stephen Kotkin 00:41:04

There's a big story here, which is about how we're building a new world. 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. They're duped into false consciousness.

Dwarkesh Patel 00:41:22

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

Stephen Kotkin 00:41:30

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? 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, the fifth column.

It might be that some of them are innocent that you're arresting, but some of them are clearly going to be guilty as well. To get the guilty, you have to somehow manage to deal with 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. It makes no sense to us, but a lot of things make no sense that people believe in.

There's this young kid who's really adept at social media who just looks like he won the primary for Democratic candidate for mayor in New York City. One of the things he wants to do is freeze rents, rent control, because he wants more affordable housing. He's a complete idiot in terms of facts, because the way to get more affordable housing is to build more housing.

If supply massively increases and it exceeds demand, the price has to go down. It's proven again and again and again. What rent control does, or freezing of rent, it inhibits the building of new housing. Because who's going to 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. He sees 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 read everything and anything. He's been to university. He's talked to a lot of really smart people. 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. 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 social ladder, like my family did for example. My father worked in a factory. 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. If I were as smart as him… how could he possibly hold that idea in his head? But 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 recent example. I don't know him. I've never met him. Whatever. Maybe there's 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 00:45:18

There's ideology, but there's a very specific thing to these Marxist regimes. They might believe in class conflict and that you need this revolution and so forth. But there's also this sense that you cannot contradict the party, you cannot contradict the vanguard. Even in 1924, when Trotsky is getting condemned by the party, or whatever that was, he gets up to give a speech to the Party Plenum, and he says, “Look, for all of my thoughts, let there be no mistake that the party is always right and party discipline is always important.”

So there's not only the sense where Mamdani would say, “Oh, I want these specific policies implemented” but there's also the sense that loyalty to the party, and eventually to Stalin even when it seems to contradict my understanding of socialism, is absolutely paramount. 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. Another is that part of the ideology is this theocratic understanding that the party's always right, even if it seems like a single individual is manipulating it to their ends.

Stephen Kotkin 00:46:28

Why is 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. Young people are attracted to impatient, quick, total transformation of the world, eradication of war, eradication of social injustice. There's a simplicity to the ideology. It's a total package. It gets rid of everything bad if you just follow the precepts. Sure, things happen that shouldn't have happened. There are some surprises, there are some downsides. But are you pro-capitalism? Are you pro-imperialist war? Are you pro-landowners having all the land and the have-nots having nothing? There's this constant threat where if you contravene the ideology, you're in bed with the very evils that the ideology is trying to overcome.

You become an accomplice in the persistence of the things that you're dedicated to overthrowing. It's not just that you're loyal to the party. You're loyal to the outcome that the party is dedicated to achieving. You know that there are going to be mistakes and costs and bad things will happen along the way, but is imperialist war better than that? No, the answer is imperialist war has got to be worse.

The other reason, which is even deeper than that, is that Marxism-Leninism empowers the intellectual class and the lumpen-intellectual class. In a market system, you get to do what you want. You want to open up a family business, you want to take a loan and give it a try? You can do that. Nobody can stop you. It might be that it's hard to get the loan in some neighborhoods. It might be that the loan interest rate is… You've got to work much harder than you thought, etc. But you get to make the decisions. You get to decide what to do, when to do it. You can work for somebody else, you can put out your own shingle.

In these kinds of systems, it's the intellectuals and the lumpen-intellectuals who make those decisions. They use the state as an instrument to overcome the injustices of the existing society. Again, the injustices are real. But that empowers them to be in charge. The beauty of Marxism-Leninism, and why what we used to call the Third World loves this, is that they get to be in power. It empowers them across the board. They get to make the decisions on the economy. They don't have to submit to elections. They don't have to have a mandate. They don't have to legitimate their rule beyond the ideological building of a new world, of overcoming injustice.

What we see again and again is young people being impatient for evil to end, but also empowering themselves to be in charge. They love the state. They love the state as an instrument for social justice, social engineering. They love to empower themselves as the decision-makers because, after all, they're the intellectuals. They've studied the theory. They know better than others. Workers and peasants and the downtrodden, the lower classes, sometimes have false consciousness. They don't understand why, for example, we have an imperialist war. They get sucked in. Bread and circuses fool them. They have this false consciousness. But I know better, and I can be in charge. I can get us to a better place.

Even along the way, bad things are going to happen. Some people who are innocent are going to die or be arrested. But this is the march of history. This march of history is to peace and justice. Who is going to stand in the way of that? Especially when it empowers you personally so that… You could never do this in the private sector. Nobody could afford you this kind of power in the private sector and in a decentralized political system, in a federalized political system where nobody accumulates that much power. Social engineering is always coercive, always coercive. The issue is how much of the coercion is necessary that we accept in the tradeoff to right some of the things that are obviously wrong.

Dwarkesh Patel 00:51:36

All the anti-Marxism, I totally agree with. But still, just purely analyzing the system there's still something to be explained. There are many ideologies. You have this line that you can't explain Stalin by saying that he was beaten as a kid or he's a Georgian or whatever, because many other people are Georgians or beaten as a kid and they turn out not this way. There's many different kinds of ideologies, and very few of them end up as amenable to dictatorship as Marxism.

Another thing that's really confusing here is that all of these Old Bolsheviks who abet the system and whom eventually Stalin purges, whatever you might say about them, they're not weak men. They were willing to face down the Tsar. They were able to organize the revolution against the Tsar. They're willing to live in exile, to potentially get shot… I guess not shot by the Okhrana, but whatever. They're willing to go through hardships for their beliefs.

At the same time, you might think they might just go along with Stalin's doings because this serves what they think is the end goal of communism. But we know that after Stalin died, Khrushchev, who was one of the key people in the regime, gave a Secret Speech where he said that, “No, Stalin was going against it. He was destroying the building of socialism and the building of Marxism-Leninism.” So people did believe that Stalin was actually going against this end goal that they had. At least Khrushchev believed that. In many cases, they themselves are being implicated and they know they're innocent.

In many of these cases, there's this period in between when they're a dead man walking—because Stalin has started putting the feelers out that this person is a Trotskyite or something—but they're still in their positions of power. They're still the editor of Pravda or in charge of the military or something.

It's mysterious why these people who were able to… They're not cowards, they were able to organize a revolution against the Tsar. But they are not using this period that’s like a chicken with its head cut off in order to organize some sort of defense of themselves. Maybe the next time they have the Party Plenum, instead of just confessing or giving the obligatory speech where you're castigating yourself, you just say, “No, I think Stalin's leading the revolution wrong. I'm going to die either way, but I might as well say this.”

The same thing happened in China. Liu Shaoqi, when he's a dead man walking as the premier under Mao during the Cultural Revolution, he doesn't use that opportunity to go up… It’s very strange.

Stephen Kotkin 00:53:57

There are very few, but there are some people like that. They're arrested and executed, all of them. Very few of those kinds of people are going to survive. The ones who publicly decry the failures of the system and its perverse and unintended consequences, the ones who decry the dictatorship as opposed to the freedom that Marx predicted would happen, there are some people like that. They're extremely courageous. They're known to us. I'm not the only one, but I feature some of them in my book.

But again, you're creating a new world. It's going to be messy because it's about class struggle. And class struggle means there are going to be winners and losers. The bourgeoisie have to go. They're inherently evil. They're an evil class. They have to not just be retired to a farm somewhere. They have to be eradicated, liquidated as a class. They're going to resist and therefore there are going to be enemies everywhere. You're not going to know who they are. So are you on the side of the enemies?

Dwarkesh Patel 00:55:08

But what about the cases where they're implicating themselves? They know they're not an enemy.

Stephen Kotkin 00:55:12

Again, the party is a larger cause than they are. You're building a new world. Your life can contribute to that or not, and it's insignificant.

Dwarkesh Patel 00:55:23

What fraction of confessions by high-level party members do you think were not coerced out of a sense of fear of their own lives or their family's lives? I guess they knew they were going to be executed. So it would have to be for their family's life or to avoid torture vs. a very sort of Ozymandian, "I will sacrifice myself for the…"

Stephen Kotkin 00:55:44

We're in the realm of psychology here, DK. Human psychology is a complex subject. Figuring out human psychology is a big challenge, even with everything we know now, let alone what we knew then. So it's simultaneously everything and anything. We have to get rid of the binaries. They didn't believe, they were cynical, and they sacrificed themselves because they were cowards. Or because they knew that, they were forced to make that sacrifice to preserve some of their family members or whatever.

There are elements of belief and elements of, let's say, suspension of disbelief, and elements of cynicism and knowledge and understanding simultaneously in almost everybody. They coexist. We think of them as contradictory, but humans can hold contradictory thoughts simultaneously without too much trouble. We could give many examples. You've had people like that on your show, for example.

So the psychology is not as surprising in some ways. What's surprising is that this whole thing succeeds. It doesn't collapse of its own internal contradictions. It doesn't undermine itself. If you're murdering a high percentage of your upper officer corps… If you're murdering your intellectuals, your scientists, your cultural figures… If you're murdering your loyal party elites centrally and in the provinces… And if you're murdering the police who are carrying out all of these murders…

The thing about Stalin's terror is the police are also murdered during the terror while they are doing the murdering. You're doing all of that and the whole thing doesn't collapse. To me, that's more interesting in some ways than the complexity of human psychology that holds these contradictory thoughts and fails to go for self-preservation in some cases or fails to say, "I'm going to die anyway, I might as well go down fighting," or whatever the metaphor might be.

The fact that the system is able to undergo this level of self-disruption and come out the other side, that's pretty astonishing. Hitler does not murder his upper officer corps. He doesn't like them, he retires them, and they get a pension. He doesn't murder the Gauleiters or the Nazi party officials. He doesn't murder the intellectuals. Some go to prison, some go into exile if they're lucky. Some definitely are executed, often for acts that they've committed. Sometimes it’s just because they had an enemy in the system who wanted to enact revenge against them.

But for the most part, Hitler is attacking what we would call his real enemies, that is to say, people who are opposed to his regime, either in thought or in action or both. Stalin is attacking those people, but he's also attacking loyalists. He's taking down, in really big numbers, system loyalists, people who would walk through fire for him. One of the things they do is to walk through the fire of their self-immolation on behalf of the cause. This belief in the new world, in the better world, in transcending capitalism, in getting peace as well as abundance on the planet, in building paradise on earth, needs to be understood as absolutely fundamental to everything that we're talking about.

We often talk about Nazi racial ideology. How could they believe that stuff? That stuff is obviously ridiculous, you say. Goebbels, who helped enact the regime's ideology about a master race, had several deformities, right? Clubbed foot, walked in a brace. Yet, he's helping preside over the murder of people because they are disabled. They're singled out solely for their disabilities to be sent to the gas chambers or to be sent to imprisonment. And he's one of them. So we say, "Could he really have believed this? I mean, wasn't he a cynic enacting this? How could he not understand that these are real people? Because he's one of them."

The answer is, “Yes, he was a Nazi.” These people were communists and he was a Nazi. And there were a lot of them, and they had doubts. They suffered bouts of doubt. A lot of events contradicted the official ideology. Innocent people, innocent family members, themselves innocent, went to the gallows, got the bullet in the back of the neck. So you say, God, the belief. They couldn't have believed this stuff. And yet they did. The main thing that we know from the archives that were formerly secret, that we get into when they're declassified, is that the Nazis were Nazis and the communists were communists.

So here we have this problem with socialism. Socialism means many different things. A communist party is building socialism. Why? Because their view of the world is: feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism. First they have to destroy capitalism to get to socialism, and then socialism can eventually get you to communism. So the communist party must first build socialism. How do you build socialism? It doesn't exist. So how do we know what it looks like? How do you get there? They don't know. The only thing they know is that it's not capitalism.

So let's destroy capitalism. That will be the step to get us to socialism. Capitalism has markets, we'll have planning. Capitalism has private property, we'll have state property or collective property. Capitalism has bourgeois parliaments where they vote and they claim it's democracy, but it's only for the property-holding bourgeoisie. So we will have a dictatorship of the proletariat. Everything. Capitalism has wage slavery. That is the story.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:02:23

And real slavery.

01:02:26 – Today's leftist civil war

Stephen Kotkin 01:02:26

Exactly. Everything is to eradicate capitalism to get you to socialism. It turns out that doesn't deliver freedom, it doesn't deliver prosperity, and it doesn't deliver peace. It delivers massive state-ization. Because once you eliminate private property and individual choice, the state is now responsible for everything. It delivers ration tickets and the Gulag.

You get a bunch of socialists that break from this. They say 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 state-ization, 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. 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. We'll evolve towards full socialism and eventually communism, but we will not do it the Leninist way.”

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, embrace, and accept it. The left has a civil war, a civil war on the left which is still going on. It’s between those who say capitalism is evil and must go vs. capitalism has a lot of problems, but we need it in order to have peace and prosperity, in order to have freedom. We need to manage it better, redistribute.

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. 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 between those who are serious about destruction of capitalism and those who are, “revisionists”, this denunciatory term.

What happens is that some of the people who are in the revisionist camp begin to flirt with the “capitalism is evil” analysis. They begin to truck with the communists that they've broken from and are in civil war with. 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. 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 argue that if we don't get rid of capitalism we're still going to end up with an evil system. This civil war on the left never gets resolved, it's ongoing, and the right uses this confusion to paint everybody as anti-capitalism. The left gives them ammunition by talking about the evils of capitalism, even when they've come along to accept private property and markets.

You have this 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 original problem it diagnosed.”

Think about Marx. Marx says that you get rid of private property, markets, capitalism, and you're going to get freedom, you're going to get abundance. You don't get that. People say, “Marx wanted freedom, he didn't want Stalin's dictatorship. 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.

Think about a nuclear bomb. You're going to do a nuclear bomb. You're going to nuke a population, but you don't want to kill any people. Your goal is to nuke them, but nobody dies. That's what you say. You're going to get rid of capitalism, you're going to nuke them, but instead everybody's going to live. You give that order to your generals. You say, “Nuke them, but everybody lives, nobody dies.” They nuke them, and everybody dies instead of everybody living. You say, “I never said to kill the people, I said that they should live.”

But once you nuke capitalism, you're going to lose freedom, you're going to lose the ability to have politics, you're going to end up with some version of a Leninist system. The ideology is going to drive that to the doubters. You're going to get a second wind where you get Khrushchev, as 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. He's trying to subtract… The de-Stalinization is to take away Stalin. It's not to take away any of the other attributes of the system. 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 within the party. The Secret Speech is not published in Soviet newspapers, but it's discussed at party meetings in all locales. Within the Party, there's a public dimension to this. All party members become familiar with Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. They experience the horrors in many cases firsthand. They enacted the horrors in many cases themselves. 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.

Instead of saying, 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 undo the dictatorship… Instead of saying that, they say, “We get a chance to do it right this time without the evil Stalin who messed it all up.” The Khrushchev thing, the revelation of the horrors, the denunciation of the horrors, ironically gives you the second wind of belief in the system that's going to 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 through Mao's regime and the Cultural Revolution. They're purged, they're humiliated. Yet, instead of saying, “This system is horrible, if I ever get power, I'm going to 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.”

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. This is a paradoxical element of communism where its failures don't become discrediting for so many of the people. They instead become a kind of second wind once you acknowledge and denounce them. 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.

01:13:01 – Doesn’t CCP deserve credit for China's growth?

Dwarkesh Patel 01:13:01

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

Stephen Kotkin 01:13:14

Wait, that's not exactly the way you described it. You have a point. You're onto something, DK. But it needs to be qualified. What happens in Deng Xiaoping's case is that the communists have unwittingly destroyed the planning system. 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. They've undermined their ability to continue the economic system as they had it.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:13:57

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?

Stephen Kotkin 01:14:06

Not the political system. Deng Xiaoping never takes down the political system or the ideology. So you still have today the communist monopoly. Communism can fail at everything. It can starve the people, it can kill the people. It only has to do one thing to survive: suppress political alternatives.

So during that peasant resistance to Stalin in 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 tsarist 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. It's either return to tsarism or keep communism.

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. They're able to “reform” by enabling the people to generate wealth, jobs, prosperity through market behavior. It's mostly the peasant class in China. That then leads to family-owned businesses, which then leads to larger businesses. Society, not the Party, creates the miracle in China. The party tightens its grip because the ideology of the party is that when the socioeconomic base has a lot of market in it, it's a threat to the party's rule. The party has to be even more vigilant against the capitalists in the society.

It turns out that you get to Jiang Zemin, who is Deng Xiaoping's handpicked successor. Jiang Zemin sees that the private sector is becoming dominant in the country and that the party's monopoly on power is under threat. Jiang Zemin decides he's gonna do something called the Three Represents. He's gonna bring the millionaire capitalists into the party. He's gonna make them party members.

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 capital. Of course, it fails. Instead, the party members are in cahoots with the millionaires. They begin to form their own businesses by expropriating other people's property. The party begins to go dissolute in an 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, and 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. Instead of bringing the capitalists into the party, he's going to force the party back into capitalism. He's going to push the party into the private sector more strongly than it was before. Board directors, party officials. CEO, party official. Private sector people who don't cooperate? Destroy them, make examples of them, including in the tech sector, so that people get the message that the party is the boss here.

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. 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.

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.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:18:35

I agree with the mechanism by which the growth happened, but I don't think it's the case that it was their inability to have true Marxist communism which led to liberalization. If you look at the creation of these special economic zones, the imperative at a national level that you must have growth, and then Deng's Southern tour… Jiang Zemin, he tries after Tiananmen to clamp down on opening up. Deng says, "No, we must open up. If you don't, we’ll remove you." All of that is a sort of positive. Maybe positive is the wrong word, but…

Stephen Kotkin 01:19:20

Policy driven, that’s true.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:19:23

It's a special effort you have to make towards economic liberalization. It didn't just happen by default. People really had to push for it. The alternative story, which it seems you're saying, is “No, it was just that they physically could not enforce communism anymore.”

Stephen Kotkin 01:19:36

That's how it started, DK. Let's go look at the facts. Why do you have a Special Economic Zone? Why can't every zone have market relations?

Dwarkesh Patel 01:19:47

Agreed, but then the creation of that zone had to be a proactive action.

Stephen Kotkin 01:19:49

You’re doing this grudgingly. This is a grudging allowance of certain behavior. You look at the decrees. You can trade onions, but you can't trade potatoes. Okay, you can trade potatoes, but you can trade only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, not Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:20:07

You can only have three employees per corporation.

Stephen Kotkin 01:20:10

Right, so the decrees are all grudging with very few exceptions. The society is forcing more and more concessions onto the ideologues in the Marxist-Leninist system. At the beginning, it's launched by the party's grudging acceptance that the society is gonna rebuild and not starve, through its own hard work. They've been through a couple of famines here, really big famines.

They don't have the state capacity to reimpose the system immediately in the economic sphere, so they grudgingly make concessions, very few but some, in the market sphere. Gradually, that expands over time as more and more people push against the system's restrictions. It's a policy-driven story in part, but not as the lead. It's a policy-driven story as the following of the entrepreneurialism and the hard work of the society.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:21:15

But that pushback is coming from within. This is your thesis in Uncivil Society, right?

Stephen Kotkin 01:21:19

Yes.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:21:20

It is coming from within the system. Because they could have… In 1976, they're like North Korea, literally. North Korea still exists. There's no reason…

Stephen Kotkin 01:21:29

North Korea doesn't have the Cultural Revolution where it annihilates its state capacity in a Maoist frenzy in order for Mao to, in his mind, undo his rivals, unbalance and destabilize them.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:21:44

But they have famines.

Stephen Kotkin 01:21:47

Yes, they do. But they still have the mechanisms of economic control and they have a massive black market. You’ve got to remember that communism doesn't have legal markets for the most part. It has restricted legal markets, again grudgingly. Household plots… But for the most part, it has a lot of illegal market activity, including in the state sector. The state sector gets an order to produce certain numbers of large quantitative output for the military-industrial sector, but it only gets allocated 25% of its ball bearings. It has to assign its supply department on the black market to go out and find the other ball bearings that it's not assigned from central planning.

You get a massive black market in the system, not just at the level of little people in the village, but at the top level of the military-industrial complex to make the system work. So when market behavior is grudgingly accepted, what that does is it brings market behavior out of the shadows into a legal or quasi-legal realm. You're not inventing market behavior from scratch. You're surfacing it in some ways. So party officials and industrial officials have market behavior in their firms to grease the system and to meet their output quotas.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:23:16

I agree with your general point that how any nation gets wealthy is not by the government but because of the thrift and entrepreneurialism and hard work of individuals. But that's also true in Western capitalist countries. In those countries, we also have a lot of stupid policies…

Stephen Kotkin 01:23:32

Yes, as we sit here and speak.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:23:33

When we say America is a capitalist country, what we could say is the government or all the bureaucrats, they'll try to put in all these regulations. It's only grudgingly that they will accede to… We could point to a bunch of stupid policies in America that are equivalent to where they try to outlaw the potatoes and the onions, but they could only outlaw the potatoes. So any “capitalist society”, is just a case where the government had to cede some amount of control. We give credit to capitalist countries in the West for saying, at least the government wasn't maximally stupid.

Stephen Kotkin 01:24:07

Fair point, DK. We often exaggerate the role of policy in all realms because we do policy ourselves or we talk to policymakers. We have a bias towards the causality of policy.

America has been 25% of the global economy since 1880. We've had no income tax, we've had income tax. We've had high income tax, we've had low income tax. We've had tariffs, we've had fewer tariffs. We've had all sorts of regulations, we've had deregulation. For 150 years, more or less, we've been around 25% of global GDP, 5% of the population, through every imaginable variety of policy regimes.

That doesn't mean that policy is inconsequential. It matters for a lot of players in the system. It matters for those who get the policy turned in their direction, the subsidies or the tax breaks, or the taxes on their competitors or whatever it might be. There's a lot of gaming of the system and it does matter. But in the larger picture of things, you can't create the wealth of the United States over those 150 years, that global economic dominance, and you can't strangle it, in the policy realm. You can affect it, but you can neither create nor strangle it.

We have to understand in the communist sense that incentives matter. When you create incentives for officials to increase GDP and to increase job creation, and that's how they get rewarded, you're going to get a lot of that behavior. The Party will do that, not immediately.

Remember, immediately they're kind of flat on their back. They've had this Gang of Four. Deng Xiaoping has come back from having been purged. They're on the verge of another potential famine. Per capita GDP under Mao is $200 during the Cultural Revolution. $200 is the annual per capita GDP of a billion people, or slightly under. You think, “that's insane”. That's where all the people are in poverty when I was saying the regime put them in poverty.

They're a little bit flat on their back, which creates an opening. It creates this grudging dynamic of “we're going to hold power and we're going to allow economic entrepreneurialism to take place, but we're gonna control it. We’re going to control it with special economic zones…”

Dwarkesh Patel 01:26:44

In any country in the world today where there's a lot of poverty, the reason the poverty exists is also because of policy. To the extent that poverty has been removed, it is because of some combination of human capital and policy got less stupid. If we're going to complain about a country like Bangladesh being poor—and there are many poor countries in the world… Maybe we're going in circles here. A different question I wanna ask is…

Stephen Kotkin 01:27:14

No, you have a point. We're not disagreeing. I’m just trying to say that we give too much credit to the Communist Party for what's happened in China and not enough blame for what's happened in China. This is part of the dynamic of us seeing communism as potentially successful.

We criticize these fools who thought that the Stalin regime was not going to kill them, and was not going to produce famine. Yet we have this narrative that the Communist Party produced an economic miracle in China. I’m sorry, the Communist Party took advantage of the economic miracle in China. It played a part in it, expropriated the hard work of many people, and stole the businesses. A lot of those local officials just stole the land and stole the businesses from people who'd created a success.

This is the thing that the Party did that's really important. Deng Xiaoping first went to Japan in early '79, before he came to the US and met Carter and put on the cowboy hat, that gigantic ten-gallon hat that was bigger than he was. He was like five gallons, the hat was like ten gallons.

He goes to Japan. You're looking at Japan, DK, and it lost the war. It was literally incinerated in the American use of atomic weapons. It was destroyed, it lost the war, and it's rising to be the second-largest economy in the world. What happened? How was that possible? How could Japan rise from the ashes, literally, when China won the war? It was on the winning side and it has a $200 per capita GDP.

Deng Xiaoping looks this over, and he says the answer is that Japan is partners with America, not with the Soviet Union. Deng Xiaoping is going to divorce the Soviet Union economically, and he's going to marry the US. Deng gets most-favored-nation status in 1980, thanks to Jimmy Carter. The communist regime in Beijing gets most-favored-nation status, which has to be renewed every year and is renewed every single year until 2000-2001, when they're admitted to the WTO. That's a Clinton initiative that happens right when Bush is going to come to office.

The secret sauce is, you have to manufacture and export to the American domestic market because the American middle class is insatiable. They will buy anything as long as the quality is high and the price is low. Japan did this. Japan's two former colonies, Taiwan and South Korea, followed in Japan's footsteps. China's going to do this too. We're going to use this Japanese model and the American middle class, and their insatiable overconsumption, is going to create the Chinese middle class. So this is what the party does, this geopolitical reorientation from a Soviet economic model to a Japan-style export-led partnership with the US domestic market and middle class.

They have a couple of tricks that are really important. They have Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a British-controlled, rule of law, international financial order that allocates capital based upon risk and return, not Communist Party dictates. Gorbachev's Soviet Union, they have nothing like Hong Kong. The only reason China has Hong Kong is because after World War II—when Truman announced that Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists were going to accept the Japanese surrender in Hong Kong—the British sent their boats in and took Hong Kong back themselves, so that when Mao defeated Chiang Kai-shek he didn't have Hong Kong. The British had Hong Kong, and they created this international financial system that Mao's successors would be able to use. Had the British not done this, there would be no Hong Kong and there would be no Chinese miracle in the Deng Xiaoping and after period.

The other thing they have is overseas Chinese who know the culture, speak the language, and are going to do the FDI, again routed through Hong Kong. So you have Taiwan. Ironically, the failure to win the civil war 100%… We think of the Korean peninsula as divided. We think of this partition of the Korean peninsula, but China is also partitioned. There's also Taiwan, still partitioned to this day. Taiwan is the FDI that's going to come in, through Hong Kong, routed through into the special economic zones on a risk-reward, capitalist market basis, not a communist basis.

Furthermore, they have the Japanese war guilt because the Japanese committed those atrocities in China. So the Japanese are going to make up for what they did by helping rebuild China. Again, the FDI and the tech transfer, like it's coming from Taiwan. So Taiwan and Japan, this partitioned China, and this war guilt, through the British Hong Kong is going to go into the special economic zones, manufacture things like the Japanese, and then export them to the American domestic consumers. It's going to be t-shirts at the beginning and then they're going to, like the Japanese, and then they're going to climb the value chain until it's got the highest value-added products. Then supply chains are going to change as a result, and nothing is made in one place anymore, and the world gets very complicated.

The point being is that Deng Xiaoping did that. That was intentional. That's the credit that the party deserves and the party never gets because it's a story not of the party's rule alone, but of British Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, United States domestic market, etc. So how do you get rich in the modern world? You sell to America. Those countries that are partners with America and that are able to compete.

The Chinese deserve credit. They can manufacture higher-quality, lower-cost products that American consumers will buy. American consumers are not forced to buy Chinese products. They're just better, and they're cheaper. So they buy them because it's a market and there's competition. Bangladesh can do this in textiles, you referenced Bangladesh, which is how I got launched on this reverie that I hope is now ending.

My point being is that the East Asian miracle is Japan selling to the American domestic market, followed by South Korea and Taiwan doing the same trick, and then followed by Deng Xiaoping's Communist China, the same exact trick, filtered through British Hong Kong. The problem with the Chinese one is that they're not allies, former enemies who are allies like Japan. They are former allies who are now enemies who have done this magic sauce. Now we're in the pickle that we're in as a result of this. But the formula… This is where the communists deserve the credit that they never get, whereas they get credit for things that they didn't do.

01:35:13 – Why didn't somebody just kill Stalin?

Dwarkesh Patel 01:35:12

Suppose Stalin had lost the succession battle in 1924 and somebody else is in power, but he's still on the Central Committee or the Politburo. It's 1930 and suppose the other person is also ruthless and is one by one getting rid of every single person in the inner circle. What would a Stalin-type figure have done if he found himself on the periphery of somebody else's regime?

Stephen Kotkin 01:35:39

Counterfactuals are really critical for historical thought. A lot of historians are pedantic about this. They say we're against counterfactuals, it's just speculation. But every single one of them is a practitioner. Why? If you say that Stalin caused collectivization, that means without Stalin there's no collectivization. If you say Hitler caused World War II, you're doing the counterfactual. You're saying no Hitler, no World War II.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:36:12

Just to put a finer point on my question, I mean it not just in the sense of whether collectivization would have happened, but more in the sense of, how would he personally have avoided the fate of Bukharin and Kamenev and Zinoviev? Potentially, he’s thinking, “I'm going to get purged someday, I don't want to be the toady to somebody else.” How would he personally have navigated the sort of power struggle at being what Zinoviev was to Stalin or Bukharin was to Stalin?

Stephen Kotkin 01:36:39

This is a question about how do you become Stalin? Could there have been another Stalin besides Stalin? A lot of people will argue that you have this formative period when you're growing up, your parents, your schooling, the influences of your peers, and you become a certain personality. Part of it is genetic, and then a lot of it is the environment, and you have this then personality. So you have to understand how the person formed, whether it's Picasso as a painter or Stalin as a dictator. Then if you understand their personality, you'll understand what they do in power.

The problem with that analysis is that Stalin is not Stalin when he first gets into power. It's the experience of being in power that makes Stalin, Stalin. It's the building of the dictatorship within the dictatorship, and it's the enacting of that kind of power that makes Stalin who he is. It's sitting in that chair. It's being in the Kremlin, running a Leninist regime, and being responsible for Russian power in the world against Nazi Germany, the UK, the US.

People say about Xi Jinping now, “You know, Xi Jinping has made a lot of mistakes. If he had just kept to Deng Xiaoping's policies, China would be much better off. We'd still be in a kind of détente or partnership with China. Instead, we're at loggerheads and there's potential war.” The problem with that analysis is, “What would Xi Jinping have done if he were the number one guy under Deng Xiaoping instead of Deng?” Maybe he would have done Deng's policies just like Deng did. More importantly, what would Deng do if he were alive today instead of Xi Jinping? Would he do what Deng did in the 80s and 90s, or would he do what Xi Jinping is doing today?

In other words, how much is the personality and how much is the system? How much is formation before you get into the position of power, and how much is the circumstances and responding to those circumstances and the exigencies of the moment and the way the system operates and the place the system is and what the larger context in the world looks like?

Here you have a Communist party that seizes power. As I said, unlike the case of Bavaria, southern Germany, northern Italy, Hungary, it holds power. It doesn't just seize power. The Paris Commune, 1870-71, they seized power in Paris. Then they were destroyed, put up against the wall and shot. They seize and they hold power.

But they're in this peasant country, and the peasant has the land de facto and they're Marxists. They believe that the base, the socioeconomic base, the class relations, determine the superstructure or the politics. In Marxism, the base, the socioeconomic base, gives you the superstructure. Politics depends on it, it's an outcome of what the base is. So you have a de facto capitalist base.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:39:57

I don't mean whether they would have done collectivization. I mean how would he personally… Because he wants power.

Stephen Kotkin 01:40:02

I get that. He makes this decision. All of them want to get rid of capitalist relations in the countryside. Every single one of them wants to do that. They're all communists, they're all Marxist Leninists. But they don't think it can be done. They think if you try it, you'll fail. He goes and tries it. He creates even more destabilization than they had predicted. But he just powers through and gets there to the end and succeeds. Most of them are grateful that he's pulled this off because they thought it couldn't be done.

Your question is, “who else could have become Stalin in that position?” Who else among the Marxist-Leninists could have been the guy who says, “Whether we can do this or not, we have to do this because we can't have a socioeconomic base that's capitalist and have the communist regime survive.” They were all ready to say that, but they weren't all ready to do that. Moreover, after he did it, they had criticized him during the process while he was doing it.

He was the only one in his mind who was Marxist-Leninist enough to get it done, and they were all carping at him. This is where you begin to see the paranoia, suspicion being magnified, where he then, in a few years after collectivization is more or less finished, he's going to go after them. So you needed a person who could have felt in their head that this was not only necessary, but doable. Someone who would undertake those risks, power through no matter how much famine and resistance and upheaval and criticism there was. Someone who would then come out the other side of that as the victor with this gigantic secret police that was really small but got really big in the process of doing the very thing that people said you couldn't do. Then having all of that and not destroying any rivals and going from dictatorship to despotism…

So you would need a person who was capable of being Stalin in that group, not from outside that group but inside that group. Then that person would either not use that power to destroy everybody else—not yearn for despotism but be satisfied with dictatorship where others exercised power and their domains—and yet still be able to hold on to the system. Was there such a person in the circle? If the answer is no, could that person have emerged in the process of doing it?

Dwarkesh Patel 01:42:53

I guess my question is slightly different. Even if such a person did not exist, suppose Stalin already exists, he did all the stuff, and it's 1934. It seems like Stalin's starting to go a little Great Terror-y soon. Another copy of Stalin is in the Politburo. Just out of a sense of self-preservation, they're like, “In a couple of years, I don't want to be writing my own confession and ending up in the Gulag.”

Is Stalin, being the power player that he was and knowing how to align factions against each other to his own advantage in the very end, if somebody like him was in the Politburo, what would they have done? Or were they already there and there was nothing they could do by this point?

Stephen Kotkin 01:43:39

This is a question for every single dictatorship. Why didn't somebody just kill Stalin? He was gonna kill them, kill them all. Why didn't they just kill him and save themselves?

During the 1920s, Stalin resigned six times, three times in writing and three times orally, between 1923 and 1928. Every time those guys around him beg him to stay. Not only do they fail to try to push him out, but when he himself volunteers to go out, they beg him to stay. Then he kills all of them within 10 years. Every one of them, just with a few exceptions, is dead.

Jeez, so what were those guys thinking? It's clear that Stalin was not Stalin yet. If they knew in the 20s that in the 30s he was gonna murder them all, maybe they would have acted the way you said. He becomes Stalin in this process. He's not Stalin yet. That's a really important argument that I make in the book.

Today you look at Putin. Putin is ruining Russia. Why doesn't somebody just assassinate him? Xi Jinping, he's hurting China. He's making China enemies everywhere around the world when China was, until recently, popular. China was 75% favorable globally. Now it's 25%, more or less, favorable globally. That's Xi Jinping's doing. How can the elites around him let him do that?

Around Putin, the people are falling out of windows. Instead of falling out of the windows themselves, why don't they push him out the window? Khamenei in Iran, he's brought ruin on the country. Why don't they take him out and try to save themselves and save the country, not just themselves? In other words, they can be patriotic as well as securing self-survival. The answer is it rarely happens. One, you have a collective action problem.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:45:34

Sorry, why doesn't this prevent… People are trying to kill the Tsar constantly. They're killing Russian ministers in the tsarist regime.

Stephen Kotkin 01:45:44

There are more assassination attempts on Hitler, some of which come very close, than by far on Stalin.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:45:49

Also, Mussollini, but never against Stalin. Why is that?

Stephen Kotkin 01:45:52

Stalin is the guy who is building and personifying the system. 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, killing enemies, liquidating the kulaks, collectivizing agriculture, building a military-industrial complex, defeating Hitler in war. I mean, how much better from the system's logic, not from humanity's logic, not from the point of view of the kind of values that you and I share, how much better are you going to do than Stalin?

So there is a way in which they're pygmies and he's Stalin. Of course, they know that they can't do what he does. If they tried to unseat him, they might save their lives but they might lose the revolution, the system and the radiant future, the overthrow of capitalism, the abundance, peace, paradise on earth. That's a big move to lose if you believe in that, if your life is about that and you're dedicated to that. But in addition, you have a collective action problem that's really important.

Let's suppose that I'm in a Stalinist regime with you. You're a functionary and I'm a functionary. Stalin's collectivizing agriculture, which means he's destroying productivity, and we're going to be poor. All the way through the Brezhnev period, we're gonna be importing wheat even though we have this gigantic agricultural belt, wheat belt. Some people knew in real time that this was self-harm. I come to you and I say, “This Stalin guy, he's wrecking everything. We got to take him down.” You agree with me. But you know what? You don't know. Maybe I've been sent by Stalin to test your loyalty. Maybe I'm provoking you to reveal your disloyalty. Maybe I'm not being sincere.

You agree with me, but instead of saying yes, let's do it, immediately you run to Stalin and you say that this Kotkin guy is talking behind your back about how we need to take you down. It’s self-preservation, you're going to preserve yourself because you don't trust. There's a lack of trust inside these dictatorships. If you knew that Stalin hadn't sent me for sure 100%, you would say, “You know, you're right. You got a point there. What can we do about this?”

But you know that Stalin is constantly doing these provocations, or you suspect he is. You know that he's got people, provocateurs who are around the system doing things like this. The secret police are listening in on your phone conversations. The driver of your car works for Stalin, doesn't work for you, and is reporting any overheard conversations in the car. And the maid in your apartment is also working for the secret police and reporting up the chain of command.

So the system that you're in enmeshes you in this distrust, in this surveillance and distrust. So what looks like, “Geez, let's just take him down and save our own life, let alone save the country.” Yes, it's logical, but that's not the kind of life that they led. We would think that based upon the kind of lives and the system that we live in.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:49:37

But there's a bunch of revolutionaries who try to kill the Tsar and sometimes succeed. They're just random people. They're not people in the regime, they're just random people.

Stephen Kotkin 01:49:45

Yes.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:49:46

Why doesn't a kulak, one of the hundred million enslaved people, go out and…

Stephen Kotkin 01:49:51

The Tsar has less security than Stalin does.

Dwarkesh Patel 01:49:53

Didn't you say that in 1928 he had like one bodyguard when he would go to his dacha?

Stephen Kotkin 01:49:58

The bodyguard stuff increases over time, but the regime is walled off from the people. Stalin doesn't go out in public. He's not one of these populist types in public who's bathing in the adulation of the crowd. He's in the office, he's at the dacha, he's at the party meeting, he's at the party congress. He's not putting himself at risk.

Even so, it is paradoxical because when Hitler goes to make a speech, every year Hitler makes a speech in Munich. It's known when he's going to make the speech. It's announced in the paper. There are a couple of assassination attempts on Hitler, one of which takes place in the hall where he's going to do, where someone plants a bomb. It's a working-class guy. He plants a bomb there and the bomb goes off, it blows up. Hitler left the hall more quickly than anticipated, based on the schedule that people thought he would be there longer. It was quicker. He was out and the bomb exploded and he survived.

There are military officials who tried to kill Hitler, famously, in 1944. They plant a bomb under the table which also goes off. It almost gets him but doesn't get him, during a military briefing. There are attempts on Hitler's life both from the society and from inside the regime.

Stalin doesn't have this. In fact, the people inside the regime are killing themselves. When they see that Stalin is leading them down a blind alley of murder and ration tickets in Gulag. They kill themselves rather than kill Stalin. Again, there's something special about the mentality of these communists. There's also something about Stalin's success as well as the threat that he represents to these individuals. Still, it is mysterious because there were opportunities and people didn't take up the opportunities.

Very few… There was no serious assassination attempt on Stalin. The very few times when they accused somebody of doing an assassination… There were shots fired at a boat when Stalin was on holiday in the south. It was not because Stalin was in the boat. It was because the boat was not in the system as marked as allowed to use that waterway. They were just performing their duties as border guards shooting at the boat. It got dressed up as an assassination attempt and people were arrested and executed and it was publicized as such. They didn't know that Stalin was in the boat.

01:52:45 – Overcoming the pathologies of communism with tech: USSR vs China

Dwarkesh Patel 01:52:46

You've written other books about the collapse of the Soviet Union. There's this last ditch effort in the Eastern Bloc where there's falling productivity, to borrow more money, invest more into finding this last ditch technological miracle that can cure all their problems.

How similar is that, in your opinion, to what's happening in China? The dissimilarity is that while Eastern Europe was struggling to export and they had a trade deficit, China, many people argue, is exporting too much. Do you see any similarity between where Eastern Europe was in 1989 versus where China is today? Or are you not as concerned about China right now?

Stephen Kotkin 01:53:25

It's a very difficult question to answer very briefly, but it's a really important question. There are tremendous differences, of course, civilizational differences let alone system differences. We wouldn't want to elide those differences.

What's similar is the Marxist-Leninist monopoly on power. People ask me, is China a Marxist-Leninist regime? I usually say it's a Leninist regime because that's undisputable. Do they believe in Marxism or not? People disagree on this. How many true believers are there? Is Xi Jinping a true believer? That's a difficult argument to win because the evidence is contradictory and because we don't know the inside of the system. It's still in power, it hasn't fallen. But it's clearly a Leninist system.

A Leninist system can't be half-pregnant. You can't be half-communist. You either have a communist monopoly or you don't. What happens in communist political reform, not economic reform where they allow some market behavior, but where you liberalize the system and you open it up politically… You say, DK, let's have debate inside the party. Let's allow pluralism inside the party's rule, meaning we're going to keep the party but we're going to allow different tendencies in the party. The problem with that is some wiseacre raises their hand and says, “I don't want the party. I want another party. I don't want the Communist Party. I want a Social Democratic party, or I want a right-wing party, or I want a centrist party.” And you say, “No, no, no, that's not the rules here. The rule is only debate within the party's monopoly, not that you can have another party.”

What happens is there's no way for them to open debate and then to put a lid on the debate. It becomes a Pandora's box. You can't be half-communist, half-monopoly. You either have the monopoly or you don't. Every time they liberalize politically, the system liquidates itself. Hungary in '56, Czechoslovakia in '68, and Gorbachev. Had Gorbachev not happened, China might have done its own Gorbachev. Had they not seen Gorbachev accidentally liquidate the party, they might have done political reform, opened up the party, and watched the thing unravel. Or they would have had a crackdown and put the lid back on much bigger than the Tiananmen episode in June 1989.

They're not going to do political reform because they know from studying the Gorbachev case, which everybody studies in party school where all the cadres have to go to be trained. They're not going to open up the system politically because that's suicide. They're not going to commit suicide like what happened with Gorbachev. This means their policy options, their menu of policy options, is limited. They can open up the economy, but if it gets too open and too liberalized, too many people with independent sources of power and wealth, too many Jack Ma’s, they lose control potentially.

They can open up the system economically, but then they have to somehow reimpose controls. But if they reimpose too many controls, the GDP goes down and they don't have the job creation. You have this constant back and forth of how much economic liberalization you can have before it becomes a threat, or how little economic liberalization you can have before it becomes a threat to your ability to create jobs and wealth.

That's the dilemma they're in. The Soviets in the '70s and '80s were looking at the system. They didn't want to change the system Gorbachev-style. They didn't want to liberalize it politically. They were willing to introduce some market economic liberalization, some market incentives. They tried that in '65, it actually didn't work. Then the Prague Spring happened in '68 and scared the bejesus out of them. Reform looked like the end of the system. They tried a little bit of economic liberalization. It didn't work. They didn't want to open up the system politically. So what's left? Technological fantasies.

Maybe technology can perfect planning. All the pathologies of the planned economy, all the inefficiencies of the planned economy can be overcome with computers. Maybe if we invest heavily in tech, we don't have to make the hard choices of deep and fundamental structural change which would end our party's monopoly. We can keep the party. We can keep the party's monopoly. We can even keep the state-owned economy, but we can just tweak it with the tech and supercharge it or even turbocharge it and make it work that way. Computers, tech, will save us from the hard choices of deep structural reform which will threaten our power.

We know how that worked. It didn't work. Now you're looking at China today. You have a Communist Party monopoly. You can't be half-pregnant. You can't open up politically. How are you going to reintroduce dynamism? How are you going to get the GDP growth? How are you going to get job creation? How are you going to get societal buy-in? If you go too far in that direction, that could threaten the regime. If you don't go far enough… So we got tech.

The tech can make our dictatorship function better. Not just our economy, our productivity, our job creation, managing through the demographic crisis, not just the economic and social benefits from tech that tech could deliver…Tech could maybe make our communist dictatorship immune from challenges because surveillance is all-encompassing, because of our ability to spot things before they happen. So you can see where they would be so seduced, so tempted to believe that tech is the solution.

Here's the problem with that argument. First, it didn't work the last time. That doesn't mean it won't work this time, but the track record, even though it's a small number of cases, is not good. But the other problem is political legitimacy. You can't get political legitimacy. You might have thought that, "Oh, geez, if the GDP grows, that'll give us legitimacy." Then the GDP stops growing and you no longer have the economic benefits to claim that that's why you're in power.

Dwarkesh Patel 02:00:23

But do you need it? Stalin didn't have strong growth in the '20s and '30s, and it seems like you just double down on repression. If you double down on the NKVD… The Tsar actually had 2% growth up until 1917.

Stephen Kotkin 02:00:39

They're dead, and their system is gone. It's fundamentally a deficit of political legitimacy.

We talk about Iran today and how Russia and China didn't even help them with any military support or economic support while they're under tremendous strain from Israel rolling back Iranian power. So they kind of got betrayed by their strategic partners. The strategic partnership among the authoritarian regimes is a fake. That's true. It is a fake. They're out for themselves. They're opportunistic, and they will help the others to the extent that they feel it's helping for themselves. The day that they feel it's not helping themselves, forget it.

There's a deeper problem there. What the Iranian regime needs is political legitimacy. That's what it doesn't have. It's not just a failure economically. It's not just a failure in security. In its foreign policy terms. It's hated by its own people. It's got maybe 20% support in the population. A lot of people are indifferent but a majority of the people despise this regime and want to see it go. They're patriots for Iran, but they detest the mullah's clerical regime.

Neither Russia nor China can give political legitimacy to Iran. They can give dual-use technology. They can give them missiles. They can give them anti-missile defense. They can never give them political legitimacy. That's the vulnerability, which is why Iran is on the precipice now. Because the regime is illegitimate and the regime knows that it's illegitimate in the eyes of the people.

Dwarkesh Patel 02:02:24

I guess we'd like to think that's what matters. But historically it just seems like when authoritarians crack down really hard, it kind of just works. Right?

Stephen Kotkin 02:02:33

That's why they have gigantic repressive apparatuses. People talk about a bargain. The Chinese made a bargain or the Russians made a bargain. The people gave up their freedom and the regime provides a higher standard of living. So there's this bargain. There is no bargain. Because if the regime fails to raise the standard of living, the people can't sue them in court. They can't say, "You didn't live up to your end of the bargain. We gave away our freedom, but you didn't deliver on your part of the bargain, so the deal is over. You're out of power now because you didn't live up to your bargain."

Instead, they repress. They bring out the batons. They bring out the water cannon. They bring out the disappearances where people are arrested in cause. They're not even indicted, they just disappear them. You have this huge repressive apparatus, and it seems to work, especially when you have this moment where you fail to live up to some of the promises that you made. The challenge for them is that somebody has to do the repression. The repressive apparatus is not a machine. It's not AI. It's not something which is mechanical. It's people. It's people who grow up in neighborhoods, come from villages, and went to schools with other people.

This brings us back to the tsarist regime where we started. The tsarist secret police wasn't big enough to keep the lid on, so they had to use the military. The military was a peasant army. They were peasants in uniform. The working class, including women, was striking for bread in the capital and marching in the capital for bread in 1917. The military was told to shoot them. These are elite military units. Shoot these workers. They're peasants, and you think, “Okay, peasants, they'll shoot workers. No love lost.” The workers were peasants yesterday. Some of them were still peasants who went back to the villages where these soldiers were from, during downtime at the factory, during harvest time. They were the same people. The army decided not to shoot.

There came a point where the regime called out the repression, and the repressors had agency and didn't repress. That's what happens in these cases. You never know when it's going to happen. It's very hard to predict beforehand. But there comes a moment where the people who are supposed to do the shooting decide not to shoot. The people who are supposed to do the arresting decide not to arrest. The people who are doing the surveillance decide to stop. You have this huge repressive apparatus, and it works until the moment the people in it decide not to do it anymore.

That's where the political legitimacy variable is ultimately decisive. Because those people who were killing under communism and collectivizing those villages and dekulakizing and killing the people in their native village that they had grown up with… If they hadn't done that, the regime couldn't have done this. The regime couldn't have collectivized. Stalin wasn't out there shooting people. He was signing the decree, which then got communicated through the system to the point of the activist who enacted it or not, as the case might be.

When they don't enact, your power evaporates. It's like a bank run. You look at the bank, and you think, "Wow, that's pretty solid. They got these neoclassical columns. It's all made out of stone. Looks really impressive. This bank is really solid." One day, it gets in people's heads that the bank might not have your money. The bank might not be good in reality for your paper holdings. You rush to the bank to try to get your money out before that money is gone or doesn't exist. Everybody gets that idea at the same time, not just one person, and you get a bank run. This really solid institution with these neoclassical stone columns turns out to evaporate, evanescent.

You can have a political bank run in the repressive apparatus. They cease thinking that they should kill people like themselves on behalf of a system that they are no longer loyal to, no longer adhering to. That can happen in the forces of order, as we call them, in the repressive apparatus. It can happen inside the elite. Because when the leader gives the order, it's got to go through the whole chain of command. The leader doesn't give the order to the soldier. It goes to the one boss, the subordinate to that boss, the subordinate… Anywhere along the chain of command, there can be disloyalty and revolt. There can be what we call political defection.

What motivates, what triggers, political defection? The lack of legitimacy, political illegitimacy. People are not going to die for something that they no longer believe in.

So that's a really big problem that the communist regime can't solve with tech. You say, “Well, the tech could produce power and prosperity and China could relegitimize its rule just like it did with economic growth. The economic growth did it for 30-40 years and that's how the regime legitimated itself. The tech will do that for the next 30-40 years.” The answer is, that hasn't happened yet. Maybe it can do that and maybe it can't, but it's never permanent.

What's permanent is power rooted in the people. What's permanent is their real citizens. They have real freedoms. They have the right to vote. Now, they can't get what they want. They go to the polls and they see bad candidate, worse candidate, even worse candidate. But they can punish what they don't like. They can exercise that agency. They can be citizens. They can realize their citizenship, just like we do as consumers in the marketplace, consumers of podcasts. That's where you get legitimacy from, where the system enables people, opportunity at home, opportunity for people who otherwise don't have opportunity. That's legitimacy. That's priceless. China doesn't have that. Russia doesn't have that.

Stalin had that legitimacy for a time based upon the idea that he was building a new world and overcoming the horrors of capitalism and imperialism and world war. Khrushchev gave a second wind to that, even as he was revealing more of the horrors. Then that just ran out, and they unwittingly destroyed the system trying to give it a third wind under Gorbachev.

So they have no way forward. They're stuck. They can't do structural reform and maintain their power, but without structural reform, without a legitimate system, they also can't maintain their power forever. It's really interesting. In the short run, we're all dead because there could be a World War III. But in the long run, we're all good because our system is better. So we have to elongate the short run. No world war between the US and China. Get to the long run, get to the competition, get to the cold war instead of hot war, where we're not having a hot war.

That's the beauty of cold war. It's not hot war. You can compete, you can have tensions, you can have rivalries, but you don't have hot war. So in the short run, potentially, we're all dead, because a world war with great powers… It was 55 million in World War II, the low estimate of deaths. That was a multiple of World War I, and World War III would be a multiple of World War II. If we can avoid that, in the long run, we're good.

It's the opposite of what Keynes said about how in the long run, we're all dead. It's in the short run that we're potentially dead. But I like the long run. So the tech and China thing might work, and it might not work, but it's not permanent even if it does work.

Dwarkesh Patel 02:11:28

All right, great note to close on. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It was a real pleasure to talk to you.

Stephen Kotkin 02:11:34

My pleasure. I apologize for not being succinct in my answers, but if you've read some of my books, not all of them, some of them go on at length. A few of them are short, though. I have to master the answers to questions on podcasts in order to be able to get through your whole magnificent list. Maybe next time we'll do better.

Dwarkesh Patel 02:11:55

The long drawdown is why I want you on the podcast. A lot of these issues are complicated, so I appreciate you doing it.