A Man-Made Famine, Packaged as the Science of History

Lex Fridman introduces Vejas Liulevicius as a historian of Germany and Eastern Europe who has lectured for years on the rise, reign, and fall of communism — an ideology Fridman notes led to more than 100 million deaths in the twentieth century. The conversation opens on Karl Marx. Liulevicius says Marx's most potent ideas were, in a way, contradictory. On one hand, history is not random: it is History with a capital H, moving in a predestined direction toward a goal. On the other, the Communist Manifesto still leaves room for special individuals who can give that process an extra push and play a heroic role.

Add those together and you get what he calls a tremendously powerful combination: a science of revolution that promises a rational path to the end of history, total liberation, and the resolution of all conflict — and the further claim that this outcome is inevitable. Earlier socialists had already dreamed of perfected futures. Marx added the iron-law packaging and the heroic opening, and that is what made his version stronger than the "utopian socialism" he denounced. Call him a utopian to his face, Liulevicius notes, and he would have been furious: the word meant you were not scientific, only hoping for the best.

Utopia still sneaks in at the end. After the final revolution, Marx's sketch of the blessed state is vague: no exploitation, no poverty, industrialization's productivity finally owned in common, work at one job in the morning and another fulfilling task in the afternoon, free of ordinary irritations. The route toward that picture presented itself as cutting-edge science, with all the prestige science commanded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Engels, at Marx's graveside, called him the Darwin of history: the man who had found the hidden mechanism of politics the way Darwin had found the mechanism of life. Few things, Liulevicius adds, are as intoxicating as being convinced you are not only right but destined to succeed.

The engine Marx and Engels named was class struggle: not only revolts, but the whole friction of clashing interests in any society. History moves through stages — primitive communism, state slavery, private slavery, feudalism — until the present, the penultimate stage, in which the bourgeoisie has displaced the aristocracy and now fights the proletariat below. The bourgeoisie, Marx announced, would be the gravediggers of their own supremacy: losers of that internal competition get pressed down into a working class that grows until a swift revolution ushers in the dictatorship of the working class, then the abolition of classes altogether.

Revolution, in this epic, is not optional. Compromises and bargaining will not do. The proletariat has a Promethean, almost salvific role, and it needs the experience of revolution to come into consciousness of that role. How a violent revolution then stabilizes into working-class rule is much less detailed. Marx and Engels leave a lot to the future, plus a very nineteenth-century confidence that the right infrastructure might let society run itself. There would be a period of centralized control and "despotic inroads against property," then the state, representing everybody rather than a class, would wither away. The prediction that workers would grow ever more miserable — Verelendung — was already looking shaky in Marx's lifetime, as unions, reforms, and a swelling white-collar middle class put a stick in the spokes.

Marx and Engels never really shed their German identities, and Germany — late to industrialize, central, fast-developing — was where the script was supposed to play out, along with Britain, France, and eventually the United States. The lasting irony of the whole story is that the first government claiming to follow Marxist prescriptions rose in the wreckage of the Russian Empire, a place that did not match the requirements. Nobody knew that better than the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his colleagues treated the seizure of power as a gamble whose only salvation was a workers' revolution in defeated Germany, a red bridge between the two. German social democrats, by 1912 the largest party by vote, had already built a workers' movement that other radicals watched with awe — and that looked capable of coming to power without the revolution Marx had required.

Marx's chief rival in the nineteenth century, Liulevicius says, was the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who wrote that the passion for destruction is also a creative passion. They agreed that the existing order had to be overthrown, not compromised with. They split on organization. Marx wanted a disciplined, hierarchical revolutionary party. Bakunin wanted looser free association, a rejection of the state as organized violence, and a rejection of traditional religion as a prop for hierarchy. He warned that a creeping German authoritarianism might insinuate itself into a movement that used hierarchy to overthrow hierarchy. Marx had him expelled from the International.

Bakunin is also the first in a longer series of attempted alliances between anarchists and communists, and in every case it ends badly for the anarchists. In the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and the Spanish Civil War, communists targeted them precisely because of their skepticism about what Leninism treated as essential: a tightly organized professional revolutionary movement. Anarchism, by definition, does not organize that way. Fridman asks why there has been no anarchist revolution on communism's scale. Liulevicius notes that anarchists would point to Spanish communes, that anarchy means different things to different people, and that for most anarchists anarchy is a blessed peaceful state — even if Bakunin's route there still ran through violent overthrow.

That leap — violence now, little violence later — points to what would have enraged Marx: a hidden religious structure. Scholars from Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930s Atlantic to Eric Voegelin in exile described Soviet communism, fascism, and Nazism as political religions, promising in the here and now what an earlier age understood as the end times. Marx positions himself as Prometheus or Moses; the final revolution is apocalypse; the blessed state is a secular heaven; the working class is humanity waiting to be redeemed. Liulevicius saw a Soviet museum of atheism, set in a gutted church, that scolded him as a child for carrying his windbreaker over his arm. In 1989 he filed past Lenin's body on Red Square. Communist mummies — Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh — look like relics. Official atheism turned out to be a very demanding faith.

Das Kapital is a vast multi-volume work Marx kept revising until Engels begged him to stop; Engels had to reconstruct later volumes from notes. The Communist Manifesto is a brief pamphlet with a delayed fuse. It did not cause the revolutions of 1848. It caught fire after the Paris Commune of 1871, an upheaval identified with Marx even though the Communards were not all Marxists. Kapital aspires to be the Origin of Species of economic thought. The Manifesto is a call to arms, opening with a specter haunting Europe that was not yet true and, decades later, was. Marx insisted theory and practice were a unity: previous philosophers had only interpreted the world, and the point was to change it.

In real communist regimes, economics sometimes detached from politics. Lenin, facing a ruined economy, allowed limited private enterprise in the New Economic Policy — a betrayal to many Bolsheviks, later wrecked by Stalin. China today lets private enterprise run so long as the party keeps political control. Liulevicius prefers an anthropological test: take seriously people who avow they are communists, then look at the details, the continuities, and the breaks. That is how he would approach whether China is still communist, or whether North Korea's dynastic God-king is an evolution or a reversal.

Steelmanning the appeal, he says much of the case in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from the West's confidence in science, just as religious grip on intellectual elites was loosening. Here was a doctrine that promised escape from capitalist wars, depressions, and class hierarchy, with the prestige of the laboratory behind it. That confidence let Lenin take huge tactical liberties so long as the destination stayed fixed. His model for a government that would eventually run itself was, of all things, the Swiss post office: orderly, disciplined, rational, no need for leaders or grand visions. After the twentieth century's experience of bureaucracy, Liulevicius says, one's hair stands on end at the naivete. From the factory floor the populist core was simpler and just as powerful: beyond the horizon, the rich man will not exploit my work anymore.

Communism came to power in a vacuum the First World War opened under a traditional monarchy only beginning to modernize. Months before, Lenin in Swiss exile had despaired of living to see the day. When revolution broke out in February 1917 he was frantic to return; the German high command, in a deal it would regret, helped him do it. He pressed for nothing less than seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, the radical wing. World War I, he had already argued, connected the globe in a chain of capitalist development: break the weakest link and a chain reaction might start. Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, Liulevicius says, still gives the human feel of that missing authority.

Russian soil added currents that German Marxism did not. Tsarism still claimed a divine right to rule; people who might have been reformers elsewhere were easily provoked into becoming revolutionaries. Lenin's older brother was executed for association with radical terrorism. Nihilists and populists, including Nikolay Chernyshevsky — author of What Is to Be Done?, which has been called the worst book ever written and was one of Lenin's favorites — taught that a revolutionary must reject old certainties, with an exception for science and materialism. Lenin loved the novel because it showed you how to be a revolutionary. Marx plus the homegrown Russian tradition made an explosive mix.

He set about turning himself into what Liulevicius calls a guided missile for revolution. He told friends he loved music but tried not to listen to Beethoven, because beautiful music made him feel gentle, and the revolution demanded hardness and steely resolve. Fellow revolutionaries worried at the intensity of the focus: days, probably dreams, spent on revolution, other human elements paired off. That hardness, plus the insistence on a disciplined professional party, is why Lenin broke with moderate social democrats. Left to themselves, he argued, workers will unionize, win better conditions, and be satisfied. For him that was a half measure: the point was not to accommodate the system but to overthrow it.

Lenin's confidence carried the Bolsheviks through the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which peeled off large territories of the old empire. He said he would not bother to read it, because revolution elsewhere would soon make it a dead letter. German nationalists, Liulevicius notes, took the treaty as proof Germany had essentially won the war until American troops reversed it — one of many links between the two world wars. The German revolution Lenin needed never came. Instead, moderate social democrats in the Weimar government, fearing Russian chaos, used front fighters and nationalist radicals to crush communist revolts, leaving a wound in German socialism that would not heal. Poland blocked the Red Army's attempt to connect with Germany. Only then did Lenin and his colleagues realize they were in it for the long haul.

An assassination attempt wrecked Lenin's health. The succession contest pitted Leon Trotsky — dazzling orator, widely traveled intellectual, apostle of permanent revolution — against a man who was almost the antithesis of charisma. Stalin had a high, squeaky voice, a pockmarked face, and Russian heavily inflected with a Georgian accent. His reputation, Liulevicius stresses, was not as a fiery radical but as a moderate: calm when others were excited, a conciliator who used organizational skill to settle theoretical fights with practical fixes. While Trotsky gave stirring speeches, Stalin controlled personnel. Personnel is policy. Trotsky was sidelined, demonized, expelled, and later murdered in Mexico City.

To see how that looked at the time, you have to unknow the later cult, the purges, and the later nickname "Genghis Khan with a telephone." Stalin did not brawl his way in; Lenin promoted him as rough, not cosmopolitan, but dependable. Late in life Lenin worried about Stalin's rudeness and warned in his testament, but he also saw himself as irreplaceable, which is no help in a succession. The Cheka, already built under Lenin and first headed by Feliks Dzerzhinsky — "Iron Felix," harsh but fair, an executioner with a heart of gold in the official cult — became Stalin's instrument. Liulevicius's intuition about whether Stalin "believed" is that ideology and the inflation of his own power were not opposites. A master plan for history, plus the ability to torment even faithful followers just to watch them squirm, could be mutually reinforcing. That, he says, is a very scary thought.

Bolsheviks had a conflicted relationship with agriculture. Russian peasants had wanted one thing for centuries: to be left alone to farm their own land. That was their utopia, and it did not mesh with Marx's picture of progress. He called peasants conservative and dull as sacks of potatoes, limited in horizon. Smokestacks and factory landscapes were what counted as the future; farming itself was supposed to be put on a factory model. Collectivization's core job, for Stalin, was to get a handle on food so the cities would not starve and the factories stop as they had in the Civil War. Dragging Russia into modernity meant traditional farms were not on the list of desired outcomes. Heavy industry was.

The land peasants thought they had gained in the revolution was taken back. A farmer with a cow could be denounced as a kulak, a tight-fisted exploiter, even if he was helping local agriculture. Quotas that nobody could meet produced lying up and down the chain. A state planning agency wrote five-year plans on a foundation of sand. The outcome, Liulevicius says in the line that opens the episode, was a horrific man-made famine, not a natural disaster, not a bad harvest: compulsion to extract the grain, the area cordoned off, starving people not allowed to escape. Some of this was inadvertent. Deliberately bringing class conflict and civil war into the countryside was not. The most enterprising, entrepreneurial, self-disciplined, and organized people were winnowed again and again, sending the message that mediocrity is safer than talent.

He does not think it was personal for Stalin; these were remote people, and the attributed line "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" fits how he acted. It was also not a string of bureaucratic snafus. Communist youth, the military, and party activists were sent to search for hidden food. Lev Kopelev, later a dissident, wrote that he was among those who took a family's last food while signs of starvation were already visible, and he did not go mad, because he believed it was a larger historical process that would yield a greater good. The Soviet Union never did get a grip on agricultural production; by the end it was importing grain despite some of the world's richest farmland. The joke for decades was: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. Internal passports locked peasants in place, a neo-feudalism in all but name.

From 1936 to 1938, Fridman notes, about 750,000 people were executed and more than a million sent to the Gulag. Liulevicius describes a machine that reproduced itself. Provincial repressive organs got quotas; overperforming was the way to rise. Neighbors were taken in the night and people learned not to talk. Denunciations of co-workers, even family, fed torture, which produced confessions, which produced new lists. Orlando Figes's The Whisperers traces families through that winnowing. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is full of dedicated communists sure a mistake has been made, sure Comrade Stalin would correct it if he knew — and equally sure that the others in the camp must have some guilt. Even total devotion was not enough. The process took on a life of its own and broke the bonds of trust in a society, traces of which, Liulevicius says, endure to this day.

Why did Marxist implementation fail so darkly? He points back to ethics as a mere product of class, which leaves the door wide open; to the revolution arriving in a ravaged, less-developed Russia with few structural restraints; and to the special role carved out for exceptional individuals who could appoint themselves executors of the vision. Counterfactuals are deep water. Contemporaries and some scholars suggest Trotsky, with his slogan of permanent revolution and his utopian talk of constructing a new man and woman — the next stage of human evolution from the raw material of humanity — might have been even more radical in tempo than Stalin. Communism, Liulevicius adds, usually came to power through war and a vacuum: 1917, the Red Army in Eastern Europe, China after world and civil war, Korea, Vietnam. Frustration after seizure then ratchets into more repression.

What drives the Leninist version forward is confidence. If you have the key to the future, hardness becomes an ethic: do not shy from what needs doing even when older moral remainders rebel. Under Stalin the slogan was Bolshevik tempo — no fortress they cannot storm, will over everything. The ultimate question, Liulevicius says, is what happens when that confidence ebbs.

Fascism in its original sense is Italian: Mussolini, a former socialist, glorified the state, militarized the people, overthrew liberal rights and representative democracy, and vested power in one leader in order to copy wartime mobilization in peacetime. The Nazis borrowed heavily but added something core of their own: virulent racism and antisemitism, a racial cosmology. They named themselves the National Socialist German Workers' Party in part to confuse — slogans lifted from different parts of the spectrum, fused into something that claimed to overcome all earlier divisions. Goebbels leaned on the socialist half; others put the accent firmly on the nation.

They were ideological archenemies. Each needed the other exorcized from history for its utopia to arrive. Nazis claimed Bolshevik economics were a cover for a racial conspiracy and coined "Judeo-Bolshevism" — complete nonsense, Liulevicius says. Soviets claimed Nazi race talk was a distraction steered by capitalist owners, the last gasp of a dying system, which meant the rise of the Nazis could even be read as a good sign. What they shared was the conviction that the age of democracy was done: the nineteenth century's experiments had delivered the First World War and the Great Depression. In Weimar, brownshirts and communist street fighters cooperated in heightening civil war. The most compelling case of cooperation was the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939, a public non-aggression treaty with secret clauses dividing Eastern Europe, which enabled Hitler to start World War II.

In the 1950s, political scientists, Hannah Arendt chief among them, described a new kind of dictatorship they called totalitarianism. It was not a revival of ancient barbarism. It laid total claims on hearts and minds, wanted fanatical loyalty rather than passive obedience, and combined fear with compulsion to generate belief or at least to atomize the masses. Critics say no regime has ever achieved total control. That is true, Liulevicius says, and not what Arendt meant. What was new was the ambition — the articulation that such control might be possible. Her frightening last thought: what if this is not a leftover of uncivilized ages? What if this is what the future looks like?

Fridman asks Liulevicius to answer two claims from historian and podcaster Darryl Cooper: that Churchill was "the chief villain of the Second World War," having forced Hitler to expand a Polish war into a global one; and that the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Roma was an accident of global war, even a humane alternative to death by starvation. Liulevicius's word is absurdity, laughable if it were not so serious. The first claim neglects Nazi ideology. The worldview was not limited; it looked toward world domination. After taking power the Nazis taught geopolitics that urged Germans to "think in continents" as a superpower battling for the future of the world. Earlier historians tried to read Hitler as a Bismarckian traditionalist if you put the ideology aside. The problem, he says, is visible as soon as you say it: Hitler wrote the ideology in hateful detail in Mein Kampf.

The killing was not a byproduct of Barbarossa. When Poland was invaded, Operation Tannenberg sent Einsatzgruppen — specially trained, ideologically prepared killers — to wipe out the Polish leadership and to kill Jews, long before the invasion of the Soviet Union. Mein Kampf already described subjugation and ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe on a vast scale. Ukraine was one of the chief prizes. The Generalplan Ost, drafted and redrafted even as the eastern front turned against Germany, imagined autobahns for a German master race vacationing in Crimea and scientifically distributed agricultural settlements in Ukraine to feed an expanded, purified Germanic race. This was central, not peripheral.

Himmler expected some Slavs to die immediately and some remainder to stay as "slaves for our culture" — a phrase Liulevicius says defiled what generations of German thinkers had meant by culture. Hitler and Himmler envisioned permanent war in the east: no peace treaty, no border, the line moving hundreds of miles east every generation to win more living space and to train aggression into German soldiers yet unborn. The Nazis also planned relentless purges of the German genetic stock, including people with disabilities and Germans judged not racially pure enough. Cooper's further claim that World War II was the worst possible outcome fails the same test. Liulevicius can imagine worse: a conquered Soviet Union and generations of that eastern war, or Nazis with atomic weapons and no compunction about using them. Oversimplified "Hitler bad, Churchill good" templates have been abused by later war-makers, Fridman notes; Liulevicius agrees nobody should like oversimplified narratives. The need is for subtle and accurate ones.

Marx would have been still more surprised by China. Mao adapted Lenin by setting the revolution in a not-yet-industrialized country and making peasants — those "sacks of potatoes" — the prime movers. When the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, in his three-volume Currents of Marxism, reaches Maoism, Liulevicius says he essentially throws up his hands: putting the peasantry in the vanguard is already at variance with the original design. Mao needed Stalin's support because the Comintern was skeptical that China was ripe, a more orthodox Marxist judgment. In 1950, visiting Moscow to sign a treaty, Mao was left waiting for days in a snub. When Stalin died in 1953, Mao felt the moment had come to surpass the Soviet Union.

The Great Leap Forward was crash industrialization meant to outdo Stalin: backyard furnaces in farm communes, vast merged communes assumed to be more efficient by sheer size, campaigns to kill birds and insects as acts of will over nature, and Lysenkoist techniques such as plowing so deep seeds could not germinate, sold as the path to super plants. Fridman says it killed approximately 40 million people by starvation or murder; Liulevicius agrees that in the statistics Mao outdid Stalin. Mao even projected that China might reach full communism by 1961 or 1973; after he died, colleagues pushed the date to 2000. Such dates manufacture enthusiasm. When they arrive unmet, they become a ticking bomb of eroded trust, as in the Soviet Union.

The Hundred Flowers Campaign, after the Leap had damaged Mao's standing, is still disputed. The cynical reading is that he invited criticism and then purged those who spoke. Another is that he was unprepared for what he heard and grew angry. The result is the same: negative selection of the most talented, and a loud message to officials not to be venturesome. Mao saw human beings as blank paper on which one can write new characters, a view Liulevicius says is at variance with people as we actually meet them. One-size-fits-all schemes in a country as varied as China suppressed a long-demonstrated entrepreneurial energy that Deng Xiaoping later let back out. In 1981 the party judged Mao 70 percent correct — not 69, not 71. Khrushchev could denounce Stalin and return to Lenin; China cannot repudiate Mao, because Mao is the founder. So the formula stays, the economy opens, and the party keeps political supremacy. Under Xi, Mao's achievement is held equal to the reform period. Whether this is still a communist country, Liulevicius says, is a question that probably haunts China's own leadership. Humility and actual study of what that leadership declares beat projection that everyone will eventually resemble us.

North Korea calls itself communist and offers Juche as a Korean improvement on Marx, while ruling as a dynasty, a monarchy in all but name. When an example escapes your categories, Liulevicius says, the problem is probably the categories. American communism, founded in 1919, faced an uphill climb in a country where radical socialism had less purchase than in Europe. Early on the party looked like an immigrant movement; Earl Browder, American-born, tried to change that with the slogan "Communism is 20th century Americanism," then fell when he hoped wartime Soviet-American cooperation could be made permanent. Whittaker Chambers's Witness (1952), the memoir of a communist who became a Soviet spy and then a renegade, is one of the century's most compelling books. The Nazi-Soviet Pact forced American communists to reverse overnight from calling Nazi Germany the greatest threat to peace to calling the pact a win for harmony; many quit. Cold War espionage and Hollywood then fixed communism, the color red, and the hammer and sickle as the enemy of the American ideal.

After the Soviet collapse there was a burst of journalism and archival investigation, then a retreat into the here and now. Economic misery left little surplus for introspection. There was no Nuremberg: Liulevicius stresses that those trials mattered as much for collecting and publicizing information as for individual verdicts. Putin, replacing Yeltsin, could instead traffic in contradictory packages of memory. The tsars return as heroes of statehood. Lenin is a negative figure because his federalism, in Putin's view, laid a time bomb that smashed the state into independent nations. Stalin exacted a dreadful toll but was effective as a representative of Russian statehood. A commonplace Liulevicius echoes: Russia without Ukraine can be a nation-state; Russia with Ukraine has to be an empire. Putin's 2022 expectation that Ukraine would split and some significant share of Ukrainians would welcome Russian forces was overturned by a new generation and by resistance Fridman ties also to Volodymyr Zelenskyy as one of those singular figures who surprise history. Liulevicius is pessimistic about peace. War takes on a life of its own; accumulated suffering eliminates paper compromises. Ratifying the use of force to change borders in Europe, a taboo since 1945, sets up incentives for more of the same.

Asked for advice on interviewing leaders, he offers a German word: Erwartungshorizont, the horizon of expectation. Churchill's and Hitler's First World War shaped their Second. A bad sign, drawn from Napoleon's contemporaries, is the sightless stare — talking to you while looking through you as a piece on a chessboard. Measure a leader by how he treats people from whom he expects nothing. For the young who have just heard how ideals met reality, the advice is one word: read. College classes that assign snippets or nothing, and bookstores gone paperless, worry him because the long task of sitting with a book, thinking inside an author's categories without having to agree, is how empathy is built and how you become harder for manipulators and synthetic realities to play. What gives him hope is another fact of human nature: the sheer variety of reactions, the record of endurance and rebuilding after horror, and the old habit — some people call it cultural appropriation; he calls it world history — of valuing what is unlike your own culture. Empires fall and dreams break. People rise again, unceasingly.