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

Notes on Vejas Liulevicius in conversation with Lex Fridman — Lex Fridman Podcast (https://lexfridman.com/vejas-liulevicius), 20 September 2024.

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? A comparative history of the three great totalising ideologies of the twentieth century — Marxism-derived Soviet communism, Maoist communism, and Nazism/fascism — told by a historian of Germany and Eastern Europe. Liulevicius traces each from its intellectual roots (Hegel and Marx, Bakunin’s anarchism, Nazi racial doctrine) through seizure of power to the mechanics of rule: collectivisation and the Holodomor, the Great Terror, the Great Leap Forward, the Holocaust and Generalplan Ost. The organising question is not merely ‘what happened’ but why ideology, once married to state power, produces the same catastrophic patterns — negative selection, terror as self-reinforcing system, a promised utopia that recedes the harder the state pursues it — across regimes that saw each other as mortal enemies.

Q2 — How is it argued? By tracing lineage and adaptation: Marx inherits and inverts Hegel; Lenin adapts Marx to an unindustrialised Russia; Mao adapts Lenin to a peasant China; each adaptation is tested against Marx’s own predictions and found to diverge, raising the historian’s recurring question of when a doctrine’s evolution remains the same tradition and when it has broken from it. Liulevicius uses named case studies as evidence (the 1932–33 famine, the 1936–38 terror, the 1958–62 Great Leap Forward, the 1956 Hundred Flowers Campaign) and directly engages a live public controversy — commentator Darryl Cooper’s claim that Churchill was ‘the chief villain’ of the Second World War and that the death camps were an accidental by-product of war — rebutting it with primary evidence (Mein Kampf, Generalplan Ost, Operation Tannenberg) to show the argument depends on bracketing out the ideology the actors themselves declared.

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? Strong on the Nazi case: the claim that genocide was planned, not accidental, is well evidenced (Mein Kampf, Generalplan Ost, the Einsatzgruppen’s Operation Tannenberg preceding Barbarossa) and matches the settled historiographical consensus. Strong on institutional mechanics — collectivisation’s incentive collapse, the Great Terror’s self-devouring quota system, the Great Leap Forward’s Lysenkoist agronomy — each independently well documented elsewhere (Figes, Solzhenitsyn, standard PRC economic history). Weaker, and explicitly hedged by Liulevicius himself, is the psychological claim about Stalin’s inner belief (‘my intuition, though…’) [?] — a considered guess, not a documented fact. The closing material on the war in Ukraine and US–China policy is Liulevicius’s own political judgement rather than historical analysis and should be read as such [?political].

Q4 — What of it? Fills a genuine gap: the wiki holds rich material on Stalin (via Stephen Kotkin on Stalin, Power, and the Art of Biography) and on Hitler/Nazi Germany (via James Holland on World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and the Biggest Battles and others), but nothing that puts communism and fascism side by side as ideologies, or gives Hannah Arendt’s totalitarianism model its own page. This source supplies both: a first home for Totalitarianism, and the wiki’s first substantial treatment of Mao and the Great Leap Forward, alongside new cross-links strengthening the existing Stalin material.

Glossary

Totalitarianism — Hannah Arendt’s term for a form of dictatorship that claims not merely obedience but total, fanatical loyalty, seeking to reshape private belief as well as public conduct. The claim is about ambition, not achievement — no regime in history has hit 100% control, and that was never Arendt’s argument. [§ Totalitarianism]

Dialectical materialism — Marx’s inversion of Hegel: history still moves toward a predestined goal through conflict, but the engine is material and economic (class conflict), not the unfolding of an idea. [§ Marxism]

Cult of personality — the deliberate cultivation of a leader’s image as infallible or god-like, built through propaganda and enforced reverence rather than organic charisma; Liulevicius’s example is Stalin, an uncharismatic figure in person who became a quasi-religious icon. [§ Stalin]

Collectivisation — the forced consolidation of individually farmed land into state- or collective-run farms, intended to put agriculture on an industrial model; in the Soviet case it destroyed the incentives of successful farmers and produced chronic food shortages for the rest of the USSR’s existence. [§ Holodomor]

Negative selection — Liulevicius’s recurring term for a system that systematically punishes the most capable, entrepreneurial, or independent-minded people (kulaks under Stalin, venturesome intellectuals under Mao), teaching a population that mediocrity is safer than talent. [§ Holodomor]

Kulak — the Soviet propaganda label for a supposedly exploitative rich peasant, applied in practice to any farmer more successful than his neighbours (owning so much as an extra cow); the label justified dispossession and deportation during collectivisation. [§ Holodomor]

The Great Terror — Stalin’s 1936–38 purge, which executed roughly 750,000 people and sent over a million to the Gulag; its distinguishing horror, on Liulevicius’s account, is that it required an emergent quota of confessions, so a terrorised population invented denunciations that then justified more terror. [§ The Great Terror]

Great Leap Forward — Mao’s 1958–62 programme to industrialise China’s countryside overnight through backyard smelting and giant communes, modelled on (and intended to outdo) Stalin’s crash industrialisation; it produced an estimated 40 million deaths from starvation and violence. [§ Mao’s China]

Hundred Flowers Campaign — Mao’s 1956 invitation to Chinese intellectuals to voice open criticism of the party, followed by a purge of those who did; historians dispute whether Mao planned the reversal from the outset or lost his nerve once criticism arrived. [§ Mao’s China]

Generalplan Ost — the Nazi regime’s evolving master plan for the conquered East: mass expulsion and extermination of Slavic populations, German colonial settlement, and — in Himmler’s own phrase — a remaining Slavic population kept as ‘slaves for our culture’. [§ Nazism, communism, and the debate over the Second World War]

Judeo-Bolshevism — the Nazi conspiracy theory that Soviet communism was in reality a Jewish plot rather than a genuine (if mistaken) economic ideology; Liulevicius calls it ‘complete nonsense’, noting the mirror-image Soviet claim that Nazism was a capitalist plot. [§ Nazism, communism, and the debate over the Second World War]

Erwartungshorizont (‘horizon of expectation’) — Liulevicius’s borrowed German term for the formative experiences and assumptions that shape a leader’s sense of what the future holds; he offers it as the analytic question worth pursuing when interviewing or assessing any powerful figure. [§ Aftermaths]

Key claims by section

Marxism [§ Marxism]

Marx took Hegel’s claim that history has a purpose and inverted its engine from idea to matter: dialectical materialism, history moving through class conflict toward a final, classless resolution.
The doctrine’s power came from combining two claims that are in tension: history is predetermined (a ‘science of revolution’), yet exceptional individuals can accelerate it. Both together proved unusually potent and durable as a call to action.
Marx expected the revolution in industrialised Germany, not agrarian Russia — a mismatch every subsequent communist regime had to explain away.

Anarchism [§ Anarchism]

Bakunin, Marx’s chief rival, agreed revolution was necessary but rejected Marx’s disciplined, hierarchical party in favour of loose, voluntary association — a difference of organisation, not of aims.
Every historical attempt at communist–anarchist cooperation (the Russian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War) ended with communists purging anarchists, because Leninist discipline treated anarchist looseness as an existential threat to the revolution’s success.

The Communist Manifesto and hidden religion [§ The Communist Manifesto]

The Communist Manifesto (1848) had little influence at first; its fame dates from the 1871 Paris Commune. Das Kapital is the multi-volume ‘scientific’ companion piece Marx never finished.
Multiple scholars (Niebuhr, Voegelin) read communism as a ‘political religion’: a secular eschaton (Voegelin’s term) promised in the here and now, complete with a saviour figure (Marx-as-Darwin-of-history), a chosen class (the proletariat), and reverence for relics — Lenin’s, Stalin’s, and Mao’s embalmed bodies function as a form of secular sainthood. [?]

Communism in the Soviet Union and Lenin’s rise [§ Communism in the Soviet Union]

Communism came to power in the wreckage of the Russian Empire, not the industrialised Germany Marx expected — a gamble the Bolsheviks knew was a gamble, staked on a hoped-for German revolution that never arrived.
Lenin drew on both Marxism and homegrown Russian nihilist/populist traditions (Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done) that prized total, hardened commitment over half-measures — a temperament Lenin consciously cultivated in himself.

Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin [§ Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin]

Stalin won the succession contest not through oratory (Trotsky’s strength) but through control of personnel and the secret police apparatus (the Cheka, founded under Lenin) — ‘personnel is policy’.
Stalin gained a reputation as a moderate conciliator during the power struggle, a reading Liulevicius flags as one of history’s most surprising reversals given what followed.

Stalin [§ Stalin]

Stalin’s own writing endorsed a class-relative ethics — anyone strong, active, and intelligent counts as good regardless of what they do — which removes any transcendent check on power.
Liulevicius resists the true-believer-versus-cynic dichotomy often applied to Stalin: ideological conviction and the pleasures of unconstrained power may have been mutually reinforcing rather than opposed. [?]

Holodomor [§ Holodomor]

Collectivisation aimed to convert agriculture to a factory model and guarantee food supply for industrialisation; it instead destroyed farmers’ incentives and produced chronic Soviet grain shortages until the USSR’s end.
The resulting 1932–33 Ukrainian famine was compounded, not merely caused, by deliberate policy: grain quotas were enforced past the point of subsistence, and starving regions were cordoned to prevent escape. Liulevicius treats this as substantially deliberate, not merely negligent. [?]

The Great Terror [§ The Great Terror]

The Terror (1936–38) executed roughly 750,000 people and sent over a million to the Gulag; its mechanism required province-level arrest quotas that officials met and exceeded to advance their own careers.
Even total loyalty offered no protection — Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago documents devoted communists imprisoned and still certain a ‘mistake’ would be corrected — which Liulevicius reads as evidence the process had become self-sustaining, detached from any rational security logic.

Totalitarianism [§ Totalitarianism]

Hannah Arendt’s totalitarianism model groups Nazism and Stalinism as a genuinely new form of dictatorship, distinguished not by achieving total control (no regime has) but by the ambition to exercise it — over belief, not merely behaviour.
Arendt’s disturbing further claim, per Liulevicius: this is not a throwback to ‘ancient barbarism’ but potentially a template the future could repeat, given the right conditions.

Response to Darryl Cooper [§ Response to Darryl Cooper]

Liulevicius rebuts the claim that Churchill was ‘the chief villain’ of the war: it requires bracketing out Nazi ideology entirely, which is documented as aiming at world domination (Nazi ‘geopolitics’ education) rather than a limited claim on Poland.
He rebuts the claim that the Holocaust was an accidental by-product of war using Operation Tannenberg — the pre-planned Einsatzgruppen killing campaign that began with the September 1939 invasion of Poland, before Barbarossa — and Generalplan Ost’s explicit long-term plans for the Slavic population, including Himmler’s ‘slaves for our culture’.

Nazism, communism, and the debate over the Second World War [§ Nazis vs Communists in Germany]

Nazism and communism were declared ideological enemies (Nazi ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ versus Soviet ‘Nazism as last-gasp capitalism’) yet cooperated cynically when convenient — most starkly in the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact’s secret territorial division of Eastern Europe.
Both movements agreed that liberal representative democracy was finished; their street-fighting cooperation in destabilising Weimar Germany (Nazi Stormtroopers and Communist militants both undermining the same republic) helped make Hitler’s rise possible.

Mao’s China: an adapted ideology and its catastrophes [§ Mao]

Mao adapted Leninism to a non-industrialised, peasant China by making the peasantry — ‘conservative sacks of potatoes’ in Marx’s own framework — the revolution’s prime movers, a change some Marxist historians (Kolakowski) regard as no longer recognisably Marxist.
The Great Leap Forward (1958–62) copied and tried to outdo Stalin’s industrialisation, killing an estimated 40 million through Lysenkoist pseudoscience, backyard smelting, and gigantist communes; the Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956) similarly ended in the same ‘negative selection’ Liulevicius traces in the Soviet case — the most capable and outspoken punished, teaching everyone else that caution is safer than initiative.
The party’s own 1981 verdict rated Mao ‘70% correct’ — precise phrasing Liulevicius reads as characteristic of the regime’s continued need for ideological legitimacy even after acknowledging catastrophe.

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

North Korea’s dynastic ‘Juche’ communism, American communism’s entanglement with real 1930s–40s Soviet espionage (documented independently of McCarthy’s later, evidence-free claims), and post-Soviet Russia’s failure to hold any Nuremberg-style reckoning for Soviet-era repression are each treated as unresolved legacies of the ideology’s twentieth-century run.
Liulevicius argues Russia’s absence of a formal reckoning, unlike Germany’s Nuremberg process, left Putin free to construct a contradictory patchwork of historical memory — rehabilitating the Tsars, criticising Lenin for enabling Soviet break-up, praising Stalin’s state-building — that has fed directly into the war in Ukraine. This closing material shades into Liulevicius’s own political judgement rather than historical fact. [?political]