Vejas Liulevicius on Communism, Fascism, and the Machinery of Totalitarianism

Historian Vejas Liulevicius traces the twentieth century’s three great totalising ideologies — Marxist communism, Maoism, and Nazism — from their intellectual roots through the machinery each built to hold power: collectivisation and the Holodomor, the Great Terror, the Great Leap Forward, and the Holocaust. Along the way he supplies the analytic model, Hannah Arendt’s totalitarianism, for what these regimes shared despite treating each other as mortal enemies, and directly rebuts a contemporary revisionist claim that the Second World War’s mass murder was accidental.

Key ideas

1. Marx fused historical inevitability with room for individual heroism. The Communist Manifesto’s power came from combining two claims in tension: history moves toward a predestined, classless resolution through class conflict (dialectical materialism), yet exceptional individuals — Marx among them — can accelerate that process. Together they produced a doctrine confident enough to justify almost any tactic and adaptable enough to travel from the industrialised Germany Marx expected to agrarian Russia and peasant China, contexts he never anticipated.
2. A hidden religious structure runs beneath professedly atheist ideology. Scholars from Reinhold Niebuhr to Eric Voegelin have read Soviet communism as a political religion — a secular eschaton promised in the here and now, with Marx as a saviour figure, the proletariat as a chosen class, and the embalmed bodies of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao functioning as relics for veneration.
3. Stalin’s terror rested on an inherited ethics, not personal sadism alone. Stalin’s own writing endorsed a class-relative morality in which anyone strong and effective counts as good regardless of method — a direct descendant of Marx’s own claim that ethics are a mere by-product of class position. The Great Terror (1936–38, roughly 750,000 executed) became self-sustaining once provincial quotas for confessions and denunciations took on a life independent of any actual security threat.
4. Totalitarianism names an ambition, not an achievement. Hannah Arendt’s model, which groups Nazism and Stalinism as a genuinely new form of dictatorship, survives the standard objection that no regime ever achieved total control — that was never the claim. What was new was the aspiration to command belief itself, not merely obedience.
5. The same catastrophic mechanism recurs across ideologically opposed regimes — while Nazi genocide specifically was planned, not accidental. Stalin’s collectivisation and Holodomor, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and Hitler’s Generalplan Ost each show the same ‘negative selection’, in which a totalising master plan punishes the population it claims to serve. Liulevicius directly rebuts commentator Darryl Cooper’s claim that Churchill was ‘the chief villain’ of the Second World War and that mass murder was an accidental by-product of war, citing Mein Kampf, Generalplan Ost, and the pre-Barbarossa Einsatzgruppen campaign, Operation Tannenberg.

Content

Marx, Hegel, and the machinery of historical inevitability

Liulevicius opens with Marx’s debt to and inversion of Hegel. Hegel, a German idealist, held that history has a purpose: the working-out of an idea — human freedom — through successive civilisations. Marx kept the structure but replaced the engine: not an idea unfolding, but dialectical materialism, matter and class conflict driving history through determinate stages (primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism) toward a final, classless resolution. Engels’s graveside eulogy called Marx ‘the Darwin of history’ — someone who had found the hidden mechanism behind what would otherwise look like ‘one damn thing after another’.

The combination that made this doctrine so powerful, Liulevicius argues, was Marx’s insistence that history is simultaneously predetermined and open to acceleration by exceptional individuals. Revolution, for Marx, was not optional or gradual: only the shock of revolution brings a subjugated class to full consciousness of its historical role. What followed revolution was left deliberately vague — a temporary ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, ‘despotic inroads against property’, after which the state would ‘wither away’. Marx expected this to happen first in industrialised Germany; the actual first communist seizure of power came in the wreckage of the Russian Empire, a mismatch every subsequent communist regime inherited and had to explain away.

Bakunin, anarchism, and the hidden religion of Marxism

Marx’s ‘chief rival’, the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, shared the demand for revolutionary overthrow but rejected Marx’s disciplined, hierarchical party for looser, voluntary association. Every subsequent attempt at communist–anarchist cooperation — the Russian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War — ended the same way: Leninist discipline treated anarchist looseness as a threat and purged it.

Liulevicius also surfaces a structural paradox Marx himself would have rejected: communism’s resemblance to religion. Reinhold Niebuhr and the German-American scholar Eric Voegelin both read Soviet communism as a ‘political religion’ — Voegelin’s term was the eschaton, the end times, made ‘imminent’ in the here and now. Liulevicius’s own childhood visit to a Soviet ‘museum of atheism’ — built inside a gutted church, and containing almost nothing beyond some anti-Inquisition lithographs — left him struck by how thin official atheism actually was next to the reverence given to Lenin’s, Stalin’s, and Mao’s embalmed bodies, which function, he argues, as genuine relics.

Lenin, the Bolshevik seizure of power, and the making of Stalin

Communism’s actual seizure of power exploited the vacuum left by the First World War’s collapse of the Tsarist regime. Lenin, radicalised in part by his brother’s execution for revolutionary terrorism, drew on both Marxism and homegrown Russian nihilist traditions (Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done, which Lenin called formative) that prized total, hardened commitment over half-measures — a temperament Lenin consciously cultivated, reportedly avoiding music that ‘made him feel gentle’.

Stalin’s rise against the far more charismatic Trotsky is, in Liulevicius’s telling, one of the most counter-intuitive turns in the whole story: Stalin gained a reputation not as a radical but as a moderate conciliator, while working behind the scenes to control personnel appointments across the party and the Cheka, the secret police founded under Lenin. ‘Personnel is policy’ — Trotsky, the orator and intellectual, was outmanoeuvred by a man who controlled who got which job, then exiled and eventually assassinated.

Collectivisation and the Holodomor

Stalin’s collectivisation aimed to convert Soviet agriculture to a factory model, guaranteeing predictable food supply for industrialisation. Liulevicius identifies its core failure mode: it destroyed the incentives of the most capable farmers, who were denounced as kulaks — exploitative rich peasants — for owning as little as an extra cow, and dispossessed or deported. He names the pattern negative selection: a system that repeatedly punishes the most enterprising, self-disciplined people, teaching an entire society that mediocrity is safer than talent — a dynamic he traces forward into the Soviet intelligentsia’s later experience under Stalin’s terror.

The 1932–33 Ukrainian famine that resulted killed millions. Liulevicius is careful about the mechanism: much of the catastrophe was ‘not an intended side effect’ — falsified statistics up and down the chain of command left even the state’s own planning apparatus ‘founded upon a foundation of sand’ — but the extraction of grain past subsistence, and the cordoning of famine areas to prevent starving people escaping, were deliberate policy. Asked whether Stalin personally targeted Ukrainian farmers or merely allowed catastrophic incompetence to run its course, Liulevicius answers ‘both’ — sins of omission and of commission together, executed by mobilised party activists who, per the testimony of dissident Lev Kopelev, believed a larger historical justice was being served even as they watched families starve.

The Great Terror

The Great Terror (1936–38) executed roughly 750,000 people and sent over a million to the Gulag. Its distinguishing horror, on Liulevicius’s account, is that it became self-sustaining independent of any actual security logic: provincial secret-police units were assigned arrest-and-confession quotas, which they met and over-fulfilled to advance their own careers, generating an emergent supply of manufactured ‘treason’ confessions that in turn justified further arrests. Even total loyalty offered no protection — Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago documents devoted communists imprisoned and still certain that ‘comrade Stalin’ would correct the ‘mistake’ once he heard of it. Liulevicius reads this as a society disaggregated at every level of trust, a wound that, in his assessment, persists in Russia to this day.

Asked whether Stalin was a true believer or a cynical opportunist using ideology as cover, Liulevicius resists the dichotomy: ‘these were actually perfectly compatible’ — conviction and the pleasures of unconstrained power may have reinforced rather than opposed each other, ‘which is a very scary thought’. Stalin’s own writing endorsed an explicitly class-relative ethics — strength and effectiveness make a person good regardless of method — a direct descendant, Liulevicius notes, of Marx’s own claim that all morality is merely a product of class position.

Totalitarianism as an analytic model

In the 1950s, political scientists — Hannah Arendt chief among them — built a comparative model, totalitarianism, to explain why Nazism and Stalinism, ideological enemies, nonetheless resembled each other structurally. The model’s most common criticism — that no regime in history has achieved total control — misreads what Arendt claimed. Her point was about ambition, not achievement: a new kind of dictatorship that demanded not passive obedience but fanatical belief, and combined fear with compulsion to atomise populations into compliance. Arendt’s more unsettling suggestion, as Liulevicius frames it, is that totalitarianism might not be a throwback to ‘ancient barbarism’ confined to the twentieth century, but a template the future could repeat under the right conditions — and that the specific leader in that template is, structurally, replaceable.

Nazism, communism, and the debate over the Second World War

Fascism, Liulevicius notes, originates with Mussolini in Italy — state glorification and militarised nationalism, with no inherent racial doctrine. Nazism borrowed heavily from fascism but added, from the outset, a ‘virulent racism’ and antisemitism absolutely central to its worldview; the two ideologies declared each other the ultimate historical evil — Nazi propaganda alleged a fictitious Judeo-Bolshevism (communism as a secret Jewish conspiracy, ‘complete nonsense’), while Soviet propaganda dismissed Nazism as capitalism’s last, most naked gasp. Despite this, both movements agreed liberal democracy was finished, cooperated cynically to destabilise Weimar Germany (Nazi Stormtroopers and Communist street-fighters both undermining the same republic), and reached the starkest expression of that cynicism in the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, whose secret protocols divided Eastern Europe between them.

This section includes Liulevicius’s direct rebuttal of commentator Darryl Cooper, who had claimed on a podcast that Churchill was ‘the chief villain’ of the war and that the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Roma in the camps was an accidental by-product of total war — even, Cooper suggested, a comparatively humane alternative to mass starvation. Liulevicius calls this ‘a bunch of absurdity’: the Churchill-as-villain claim requires bracketing out Nazi ideology entirely, which Nazi ‘geopolitics’ education explicitly aimed at world domination, not a limited claim on Poland. The accident claim fails against Operation Tannenberg — the pre-planned Einsatzgruppen killing campaign launched with the September 1939 invasion of Poland, well before Barbarossa — and against Generalplan Ost, the Nazis’ evolving master plan for the East: mega-highways for a ‘Germanic master race’, agricultural colonisation of Ukraine, and, in Himmler’s own chilling phrase, a surviving Slavic remnant kept as ‘slaves for our culture’. Hitler and Himmler additionally envisioned permanent war on the Eastern Front — no peace treaty, ever, just a border pushed hundreds of miles east every generation to keep training new soldiers in aggression.

Mao’s China: an adapted ideology and its catastrophes

Mao adapted Leninism to a non-industrialised, peasant China, making the peasantry — ‘conservative sacks of potatoes’ in Marx’s own dismissive phrase — the revolution’s prime movers instead of the industrial proletariat. The Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, a former committed communist, found this adaptation so far from Marx’s original design that he ‘essentially throws up his hands’ when trying to classify it. Mao’s complicated rivalry with Stalin — resentful of playing junior partner, left waiting for days on a 1950 state visit to Moscow, determined to surpass Stalin’s achievements once Stalin died in 1953 — drove policy directly: ‘so many of Mao’s actions like the Great Leap Forward… are literally attempts to outdo Stalin.’

The Great Leap Forward (1958–62) tried to industrialise the countryside overnight through backyard smelting furnaces, gigantist rural communes, and Lysenkoist pseudoscience (deep ploughing meant to produce impossible ‘super plants’). It produced an estimated 40 million deaths from starvation and violence. The Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956) — an invitation for intellectuals to criticise the party, followed by a purge of those who did — shows the same negative selection Liulevicius traces in the Soviet case: the message to officials and thinkers alike was ‘don’t be venturesome… stick with the tried and true’, even if that guarantees stagnation. The Chinese Communist Party’s own 1981 verdict rated Mao ‘70% correct’ — a precision Liulevicius reads as a regime still needing ideological legitimacy even while admitting catastrophe. Because Mao, unlike Stalin, was the founder of Chinese communism (the equivalent of Lenin, not Stalin), no Khrushchev-style denunciation has ever been possible in China.

Aftermaths: North Korea, American communism, and post-Soviet Russia

North Korea’s dynastic Juche communism — a hereditary ‘god king’ system claiming Marxist descent — is, for Liulevicius, a case where ‘the only answer, when an example… escapes your analytic categories, [is that] probably there’s a problem with your analytical categories’. American communism, meanwhile, was genuinely entangled with 1930s–40s Soviet espionage (documented independently of Senator McCarthy’s later, evidence-free 1950s claims, which Liulevicius notes targeted the wrong decade), and collapsed further credibility when American communists were forced to flip overnight from denouncing to praising Nazi Germany after the 1939 pact.

Post-Soviet Russia, unlike Germany after Nuremberg, never held a formal reckoning for Soviet-era repression — no trials, no systematic public accounting. Liulevicius argues this absence let Putin construct a contradictory patchwork of historical memory: rehabilitating the Tsars, blaming Lenin’s federalism for the Soviet collapse, while still crediting Stalin’s state-building. He connects this directly to the war in Ukraine, judging Putin’s 2022 expectation of a divided, welcoming Ukrainian population ‘entirely overturned’ by unexpected resistance, and closes pessimistically about the war’s prospects for settlement — territory, security guarantees, and accumulated suffering, in his view, now compound each other rather than pointing toward compromise. This closing material is Liulevicius’s own political judgement rather than historical analysis.

Related

• Vejas Liulevicius — speaker
• Lex Fridman — host
• Totalitarianism — the Arendt model this episode uses to compare Nazism and Stalinism
• Joseph Stalin — subject of the Holodomor, Great Terror, and cult-of-personality material
• Mao Zedong — subject of the Great Leap Forward and Hundred Flowers material
• Stephen Kotkin on Stalin, Power, and the Art of Biography — companion Stalin material from a different angle (power-as-mechanism versus ideology-as-mechanism)
• James Holland on World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and the Biggest Battles — companion Nazi Germany and propaganda material
• Yuval Noah Harari on Shared Fictions, Intelligence, and Power — a structurally different account of Hitler’s rise, via shared fiction rather than ideology