It Was Not a Slippery Slope. It Was a Leap.

Lex Fridman opens with Stanford historian Norman Naimark, a specialist in genocide, war, and empire, and goes straight at Stalin. Did the man actually believe communism was good for the Soviet people and the world? Naimark does not hesitate. Absolutely. Stalin was a true Leninist: socialism was the be-all and end-all of human existence, the world would one day go socialist, and international revolution would eventually come. That creed, Naimark adds, did not exclude the other things Stalin believed, thought, or did.

The Holodomor of 1932–33 sits at the center of the conversation. Collectivization had already produced an all-union famine. Then, uniquely in Ukraine, the regime went further: a second expropriation that stripped peasants of everything, laws that made stealing grain — including by children — punishable by death, a ban on leaving the villages, a refusal of Polish and Vatican relief, and a public denial that famine existed at all. Naimark has seen photographs of Ukrainian peasants who made it as far as the sidewalks of Kharkiv and Kyiv and died there. His late colleague Robert Conquest called the countryside a vast Belsen: bodies lying everywhere, people dying of hunger.

Naimark studies this in a flat voice that Fridman keeps pressing toward moral language. Famine existed across the Soviet Union; sealing people in place, shooting anyone looking for food in the fields, and pretending the disaster was not happening were Ukrainian specifics. Cannibalism, including parents eating their own children, is in the record. Stalin knew. There is not a sign of remorse, pity, or any human emotion Naimark thinks a normal person would have.

Fridman offers the trilemma: given the 1930s, was Stalin evil, delusional, or incompetent? Naimark takes all three words seriously and assigns them different weights. Historians dislike *evil* — it is a word for moral philosophers — but he thinks it fits. Stalin eliminated people unnecessarily, tortured them, had them tortured, and was completely indifferent to millions suffering. On delusion he quotes Princeton's Robert Tucker: a paranoid delusional system. Ordinary paranoia is worry that you are out to get me. Stalin constructed whole plots of people, whole systems of people out to diminish his power and undermine the Soviet Union. Those constructed groups were then destroyed.

Incompetence, Naimark says, does not apply. Since the Stalin archive opened at the beginning of this century, almost every historian who goes in comes out with the same impression: enormously hardworking, intelligent, with an acute sense of politics, a fantastic agitational editor, a micromanager who worked from morning till night. Naimark once looked at a folder in which Stalin went through the wines of his native Georgia, writing down how many barrels of each should be produced and which grapes were better, correcting the figures subordinates had put down. Competence that ranged very wide, or that he thought ranged very wide — Naimark says both are true.

The wine memo and the starvation orders sat in the same filing system. Fridman asks whether absolute power corrupted him or revealed him, and whether the genocide of the early 1930s was always inevitable in the man. Naimark will not say it was inherent. Without the position, the man could not have murdered groups of people. New research has also softened the old battered-child story: it was the mother, occasionally, not a uniquely brutal father, and he was not an unusual young Georgian kid or student. What grew murderous was the man inside a system with no checks, plus an NKVD and a circle he learned to manipulate with humor, sarcasm, and verbal undermining — skill that is on one hand admirable and on the other the architecture of terror.

Fridman wants to know how easy the slope is: does one murder, committed because you are paranoid about a rival, open a door that changes the murderer? He folds in Solzhenitsyn's line that the line between good and evil runs through every human being. Naimark hears several questions at once. Stalin was not Lenin's most likely successor; the 1920s were full of political contingencies. Trotsky mistrusted him and thought him a mindless bureaucrat. If you had known him in 1925, Naimark does not think anybody — much less Stalin himself — would have said this was a future mass murderer. Power came through bureaucratic and political maneuvering that worked.

The slope, if that is even the right picture, does not begin until the 1930s: complete control of the Politburo, the Five-Year Plan, collectivization, and a reversal of earlier nationality policy that had given cultures room to develop. Then 1932–33 stacks the Ukrainian famine, the murder of Kirov, and the suicide of Stalin's wife. People around him start to see that a dangerous situation is emerging. Civil War research shows dictatorial and murderous traits were already there, but Naimark does not treat them as a necessary stage for the terror of the 1930s, when most people feared for their lives and their families and torture became ordinary.

The Lenin–Stalin continuity debate, he notes, has been going on since he was an undergraduate. He leans against the claim that Stalin was the natural next step, without making an absolute argument that Marxism-Leninism had nothing to do with it. It had a lot to do with it. Stalin takes it one major step further. That is why Naimark dislikes the slippery-slope metaphor: it means slow and easy. It was a leap. Historians talk about the Stalin revolution of 1928–29, in which he creates, in some senses, a whole new system.

Collectivization, Naimark says, was a catastrophe. So-called kulaks were not really rich: anyone with a tin roof and a cow could qualify, and people with nothing could qualify if they opposed the program. Millions were tagged. Ukraine was heavily agricultural, and Ukrainian peasants resisted more fiercely than Russian ones — burning houses, killing animals, being shot on the spot or sent into exile. The countryside was a conflagration, and famine followed. It was worse in Ukraine in part because resistance was worse.

Then came the measures not used in the rest of the union. Teams of policemen, urban thugs, party people, and some poor peasants went into villages and seized grain and animals. In December 1932 and early 1933 Stalin was convinced the Ukrainian peasantry needed to be shown who was boss — hiding grain, resisting expropriators, acting like traitors, ready, he told Kaganovich, to pull out and join Poland. The second expropriation took everything. New laws allowed shooting anyone looking for food. Peasants could not leave for the city, for Belarus, or for Russia. Relief was refused. Famine was denied.

Motive, as so often in history, is a little of both. The rational side is a long Soviet antipathy to Ukrainian nationalism: Stalin writes that if these guys win, we lose Ukraine, a determination to break the back of national identity as a separatist force. The emotional side is annoyance — peasants who will not conform to how he thinks they should act, a breadbasket that will not turn over grain to sell abroad and feed city workers. When things fail, typically, he blames groups, not individuals, and eventually purges the Ukrainian party. Fridman asks about joy in teaching them a lesson. Naimark doubts Stalin understood joy. It was more a cold necessity to get those SOBs. They deserved it. He said several times: this is their own fault.

Numbers are permanently contested. Ukrainians, Naimark says, now claim 11.5 million died in the Holodomor; most scholars assume something in the neighborhood of four to 4.5 million. He is working with a museum in Kyiv still being built and talks with historians about it constantly. For Mao's Great Leap Forward of 1958–62, people dispute 14, 15, 17, 20 million; some go to 30, 40, even 50 million. Fridman shifts the frame: death is only one consequence of suffering. Months and years with nothing to eat never go into the spreadsheet. Naimark agrees completely. Long-term mental and physical health, the ability to work, brains injured in people who survive — Ukrainians are studying the multigenerational effect, and he is sure something similar sits on the Chinese peasantry, mostly unrecorded.

The Great Leap, in Naimark's telling, was mostly Mao's doing, powered in part by rivalry with the Soviet Union. Mao was a good Stalinist in the sense that he thought Stalin was the right kind of communist leader; he disliked Khrushchev's reforms and Khrushchev's pretension that shifting power from state to party meant rushing into communism. Mao's answer was people's communes: enormous conglomerations of collective farms, communal eating, children raised in separate homes, pots and pans melted for backyard steel. A true megalomaniac project, like some of Stalin's. People had no choice. Agriculture was wrecked. There was bad weather and flooding, but it was a man-made famine.

Mao said at one point, who cares if millions die? It just does not matter; we have millions more left. He would periodically say things like this, showing, like Stalin, total indifference to large numbers of people dying. Cannibalism and terrible wastage followed. People in the party edged toward telling him to back off; he would not, and objectors were beaten. Eventually the catastrophe was so large he had to stop. Naimark notes that later political campaigns, including against a bureaucracy that had resisted him on the Leap, compounded the wound. The countryside was horrific, and people who kept track eventually wrote the books.

Fridman asks where to put North Korea: the 1990s Arduous March, mass starvation that many say continues. Naimark steps back to the 1990s tribunals for Bosnia and Rwanda and the later International Criminal Court, which lists genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Torture, unnecessary famine, forced incarceration, and mass rape sit under crimes against humanity. That is where he places North Korea: not genocide, which is an attack on a group as a group. Some jurists treat genocide as the crime of crimes; the ICC treats the three as more or less co-equal. He does not want to split hairs. He finds it morally unseemly. Darfur is his example: the Bush administration called it genocide, the UN said crimes against humanity, and the argument confused things. People were being killed. Everybody knew.

What role, Fridman asks, does a person with food and shelter have when thinking about North Korea, Syria, or Uyghurs in China? Naimark's first answer is the same as his job: teach, learn, get the message out, because the more people who understand, the more likely a government will try to do something. He writes books; Fridman does shows and tweets. On action, both men sit with unintended consequences. The doctrine that followed Kosovo in 1999 is responsibility to protect, adopted unanimously by the UN in 2005, Chinese and Russians included: sovereignty is earned by protecting your people. If you do not, the international community has an obligation, with a hierarchy from persuasion through sanctions to military force as last resort — and only if intervention will not create more damage than it relieves.

Syria, in that framework, was judged beyond useful military intervention. Xinjiang is the same kind of hell-would-break-loose calculation. Myanmar's junta and Ethiopia in Tigray sit on the list where push short of war is still imaginable. Naimark thinks there was more willingness in the 1990s and at the turn of the century, then an America-first withdrawal, and that Biden's problem is rebuilding consensus. He is, here, more optimistic than Fridman: the international community might still muster fortitude short of war. Fridman also worries that financial self-interest now silences criticism of China more smoothly than old-fashioned fear. Naimark agrees the analysis is correct, and that it is not only corporations — the American government feels compelled not to challenge Beijing on human rights.

Why genocide happens is usually political, Naimark says; Hitler's murder of the Jews is bound up with German political and wartime history from the 1930s. Why ordinary people pull triggers is social psychology. Ordering genocide is not enough. Someone at the mezzo level of a bureaucracy, and someone at the everyday level, has to cooperate — force people into a gas chamber, or, in Kyiv in September 1941 at Babi Yar, push them toward the ravine where the machine gunners wait. Within all of us, he says, is the capability of participating in mass murder.

The fact that still shocks him from Holocaust research: you could pull out. If they ordered a police battalion to shoot Jews, you did not have to do it. They never killed anybody for refusing, never even punished people for saying no. So people did it voluntarily. They may not have wanted to. They were given booze to numb the pain of murder, because the organizers knew there is pain. They still did not pull out. Groups decide a great deal: who you talk to, who your friends are, who heads the group. Naimark sees it in the Stanford academy, in a labor union, in a church group in Tennessee. People are unwilling, frequently, to say this is wrong. In authoritarian or totalitarian societies there is also backup in the distance — the NKVD, the Gestapo — even when nobody is forcing your hand that minute.

Fridman notes that the higher you go, the more power you have to change the direction of the Titanic, and nobody seems to. Naimark says it does happen. In the Armenian genocide, Turkish governors said they would not kill Armenians; they were removed, and replacements were easy to find. German generals questioned the killing of Jews in Poland or Belarus and were pushed aside, or they ended up doing it, and they usually did. Who will stand up is not predictable. Studies of Poles who rescued Jews are messy: sometimes the fiercest antisemite protected someone because people should not be killed; sometimes the expected humanist did not. Fridman, rereading Viktor Frankl, quotes the line that knowing a man was a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing — human kindness can be found in all groups. He worries he would not have been a good German. Naimark says that is exactly the task of his genocide class: to get students to see that this is not about weird people far away in time and place.

On the victim side, Naimark's view is bleak. He comes away from genocide research with a very pessimistic take on human nature — including among victims. Ukrainians ate their children because they had no choice. Victims robbed one another and built hierarchies. At Majdanek in 1942, a group of Slovak Jews stuck together, many of them merchants who knew one another, and then ran the camp: the important jobs, including beating other Jews and other nationalities. A Polish memoirist hated them for treating Poles like trash and asked, bitterly, whether *they* were the inferior ones. There is another side: heroic Polish women put on a nightly program called Radio Majdanek in the women's camp, singing to raise spirits. People shared food. Primo Levi, Naimark's favorite camp writer, had pals he helped, and still described an inhuman environment no one escaped. Levi became a writer in Italy after the war and later killed himself, likely bound up with what he had seen. Black-and-white photographs of "the camp" are a false image; camps differed, people differed, and almost everyone was caught in the web.

Fridman offers his hope: in almost every human heart a flame of compassion, kindness, and love that longs to connect and, en masse, overpowers everything else. Resistance to genocide feels to him like a quieter, stronger force that we are simply worse at narrating than we are at narrating atrocity. Naimark does not deny the flame. He thinks it is too easily doused, too easily goes out in a lot of people. He is a pessimist coming out of this work. Steven Pinker's long decline of homicide, rape, and — except for the mid-twentieth-century blip — genocide eventually convinced him, methodology problems and all. Then the counter: we are modern people. We should have eliminated this a long time ago. Myanmar, Xinjiang, Tigray — electric cars and planes to Beijing, and the difference in genocide across three hundred years is not all that great.

A Berkeley friend once told him, in a seminar, to remember original sin. Naimark is not Catholic and does not think in that frame, but he takes the point: we carry a potentially nasty mean streak that can do real harm. Fridman says we carry the capacity to love too. Yes, Naimark says. That is part of the deal. Fridman argues that optimism is a prerequisite for engineering a better future, that Wikipedia and a spreading internet make a Hitler harder, that knowing the Holocaust happened is itself a preventer. Naimark hopes he is right. The evidence, he says, is different — Mexico massacres, ISIS and the Yazidis, Syria as a mass grave. Good things happen too: Turks helping Syrians, Germans absorbing a million people. He does not think we are on a path to eliminating the really bad things. He thinks otherwise it is an article of faith, and that faith is better than the opposite, but it is still faith.

Fridman tries the technology door: not just electric cars and rockets but Wikipedia, the internet still reaching only about half the world, rising education especially among women, crypto as a structural constraint on authoritarian money. Naimark is polite and blunt. He has to say Fridman is naive about technology. He does not spend much time on it and does not much like it, so arguing may be unfair, but he has examples: the atomic bomb, and Facebook. He once heard Eric Schmidt describe a future without translating, reading, driving, or doing this and that, and thought: what kind of life is that?

His position is that technology should be governed by political, social, and moral need. It does not solve problems by itself. People and political systems do. At some level tools are neutral and make work easier — he likes email and word processing — but in human relations and international conflict, technology creates as many problems as it solves, or more. Climate change is the exhibit: we enjoy heat and oil-burning cars, we are all consumers, we all benefit, and the same technical civilization has given us a huge danger it is not now resolving. His prediction is that we will wait for a horrible catastrophe. Greta Thunberg's blah-blah-blah at Glasgow, as he remembers it, is the point: we do not have the wisdom, realism, or sense of purpose unless we are hit upside the head. Nuclear weapons are the exception; Khrushchev's big hydrogen bomb scared people into arms control.

Fridman answers that mutually assured destruction is also why there has been no World War III, and that pressure already sparks innovation — SpaceX, Tesla, education software — which might improve life more than the disaster degrades it. Naimark will not pretend to know the shape of the coming blow: resource wars, hunger, migration, or some other catastrophe nobody listed. Fifty or sixty years on, someone will say they always knew it would be X. History, he insists, cannot predict. Fridman calls himself a naive optimist and Naimark, fondly, a naive cynic about tech; Naimark declines the framing. The job is not optimism or pessimism. It is to be a realist, cobbled from knowledge, wisdom, and good intuition — something both of them, he says, are after.

The major definitional document, Naimark says, is the December 1948 UN Convention: the intentional destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such — the group as a group. Behind it is an aesthetic of human diversity that he traces to Romanticism after the French Revolution, especially Herder: Estonians, a Native American tribe, South African peoples, the Rohingya. Intent is the first-degree-murder analogue; manslaughter can end the same way without the plan. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish jurist who reached the United States during the war, coined the word in 1943 and published it in 1944: *geno* for people, *-cide* for killing.

The problems with the definition are several. Why only those four groups? In 1948 the drafters were thinking of Jews, Poles, Russians, sometimes Yugoslavs — Nazi victims. Social and political groups were kept out, the Soviets primary among those who did not want kulaks or peasants or political enemies covered. Indonesia in 1965–66 killed roughly 600,000 communists; Naimark's view is that it is genocide even though Indonesians were killing Indonesians. Cambodia is recognized in part because some Vietnamese, Cham Muslims, and other minorities were killed alongside Cambodians. He wants the definition expanded, the way a constitution written in the eighteenth century has to live in the twenty-first. Nations themselves, he adds, are modern: no Germans or Italians as such in the seventeenth century, until Herder collected languages and folklore and people began to say we too are a nation. Late-nineteenth-century social Darwinism and racial antisemitism then made it impossible to be both German and Jewish. Hitler, in *Mein Kampf*, took the package. Nationalism as shared language and belonging is not the villain; the weaponized form is, especially when two groups live in the same place.

Fridman sees a playbook: blame, narrative, othering, hatred, slaughter. Naimark thinks the observation has merit. Hannah Arendt had already written the totalitarian playbook in *The Origins of Totalitarianism*, and Stalin more or less follows it. Depth varies. Castro was a terrible dictator and not a mass murderer. Ho Chi Minh was responsible for much death and was not, in Naimark's view, a mass murderer of Stalin's type. Lenin, others will disagree, did not kill the way Stalin killed. Khrushchev stopped that killing and still ran a gulag. Ideology makes genocide too easy — history split into a correct side and a wrong side that must be destroyed — but it does not always lead there. Cuba is not pretty and had no genocide. North Vietnam neither. North Korea is awful and, as far as we know, not genocidal, though who knows what annexing the South would bring. Berkeley's Martin Malia argued ideology was central to Soviet killing; Naimark is not fully persuaded. Mass human-rights abuse and mass killing are different systems. History, asked to predict the next one from a snapshot of Saddam's Iraq or 1980s Yugoslavia, basically never can. Columnists love to say they saw it coming. January 6th could have gone many ways. Hitler looked like a clown until he did not; even German Jews, incrementally squeezed in the 1930s, mostly did not leave, because seeing the extent of the danger is almost impossible.

Fridman wants love in the story: suffering, he suggests, can force out the best of people, and that best is love. Naimark refuses the frame without hedging. He does not think suffering is good for love. Better not to suffer. Study the camps and you will see they are not a place of love. Love does occur, but it is a place of rape, torture, killing, and inhuman behavior — not only between perpetrator and victim, but among the sufferers. In the gulag, criminals beat politicals, politicals beat those below, everyone was beaten from above. He will not romanticize want as a source of beauty. Relative sufficiency — food, a roof, the ability to care for a family — is a better climate for loving relationships. Poor households do worse on crime, on beating wives, on abusing children; that is not an accident, and it is not a claim that poor people are bad. A country should try to reduce scarcity. He has many criticisms of China and still insists it pulled the country out of horrible poverty, millions who had been living at the edge of subsistence, a state in which love and sympathy are hard to grow.

He will not forget love. Wartime friendship can be extremely intense. He will not make the trade. He lived in the Soviet Union more than once — first in 1969–70, then around 1975, mostly Leningrad, some Moscow, the years of détente and of long lines for food, of Jews trying to leave, of a dissident whose studio was burned with him inside, widely assumed to be the KGB, never proved. On the street, people were mean to one another and never smiled. Once you were inside an apartment and trusted, the friendship was incredibly intense and beautiful. That is a life with food and a roof, not the bottom of a famine. A friend's book about love in postwar German camps for Jewish survivors — not the concentration camps, the aftermath, with British control and a hope of Palestine — moved him: couples forming once there was again room to be human. There is a threshold beyond which people cannot bear it, and below which love grows back. He will not treat the suffering itself as something to seek.

The dearest Soviet memory is friends. In a dorm that also housed Siberian students he met Sasha from Omsk. They talked history outside, because both knew the room was listened to. Sasha was a naive Marxist-Leninist who insisted Naimark must have a bourgeois ideology; Naimark said he was just trying to get the story accurate. Letters later stopped when Sasha became a local official. He moved toward the democrats, served in the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years, and was finished when Putin came in. He had wanted the democratic path. A memoir recently published in Russia, Naimark says, is very good; he once translated the title into English. As a foreign scholar he knew he was followed and reported on, part of an exchange that sent American historians into archives and Soviet scientists to Rochester and MIT. His Russian is fine for reading and living, uneven in speech, weak in writing. Fridman, who wants to sit as a fly on the wall of those conversations, talks about how much translations of Dostoevsky lose; Naimark agrees that translation is hard and that beauty still comes through.

Asked to put on an optimistic hat after a career in the darkest files, Naimark points to persistence. Despite two world wars, a nuclear standoff, climate and migration trouble, the civilization is still here, still inventing, still trying to solve problems, still loving and hating. He has children and grandchildren and thinks they will be fine. He is not a Cassandra. The other source is the students. They are incredibly good: dreamers and problem-solvers with humanitarian values who want to do the right thing, a very large proportion of them. Some will later go to shark law firms instead of human-rights work. At this age they are smart, energetic, hardworking, focused — not only at Stanford, nationwide. He does not buy the cartoon of a reflexive, silly left. They are very good young people.

Advice for a life you can respect: do work that serves the public interest, not only your own. Working in your own interest is not bad if it is useful to family and others. Find who you want to be and pursue it. The NGO world is growing; Human Rights Watch and that kind of work is admirable. Fridman adds the sentence that sounds like the episode's landing. Even outside human rights, live with integrity. Most of us will face quiet decisions that may never be written about. You can take the harder road, the one the best version of that person would take. The small resistances of early Nazi Germany were that. The best way to avoid genocide at scale is for people to live that way in their own moments. He believes people know the right thing. Naimark does not contradict him. He cites Václav Havel on living in truth, and says living with integrity is super important.

He also refuses to speak for History. Some nineteenth-century historians thought they did; he tells students this is Norman talking, not History talking. One of his views is that want is a real tragedy: it hurts people and makes turmoil. He feels for people in Syria and in Tigray who cannot eat. That does not mean they do not love, or love their children. It does make it harder. Fridman still will not grant "harder" as the last word; he thinks we count deaths and fail to count the times people fall deeply in love. The conversation does not unify. A historian walking out of archives says the flame is too easy to extinguish. An engineer building things says you have to believe it can be guarded. Fridman thanks him in Russian. In the outro he leaves a line attributed to Stalin: one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. The crack it names — person into number into category into "their own fault" — is where the killing starts.