Speaker

Vejas Liulevicius

Vejas Liulevicius

Historian of Germany and Eastern Europe; Lindsay Young Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Liulevicius has produced a widely heard trilogy of Great Courses lecture series on the rise, reign, and decline of communism, alongside courses on the First World War, the history of Eastern Europe, and dictatorship more broadly.

Born to a Lithuanian-American family in Chicago, Liulevicius visited the Soviet Union as a child during the Brezhnev era and again as a language student in 1989, experiences he draws on directly when discussing everyday life under communist rule. His scholarship centres on Germany’s historical relationship with Eastern Europe — his second book, The German Myth of the East, traces German attitudes toward the region across centuries, including the dehumanising stereotypes the Nazis later radicalised into policy.

Core positions

Liulevicius treats communism, Nazism, and fascism as ideologies whose implementation cannot be understood apart from the ideas that drove them — a direct rebuttal of readings that bracket ideology out and treat twentieth-century mass violence as the product of circumstance, individual pathology, or accident alone. He is willing to name a regime’s own self-understanding as a legitimate historical source (taking communist states’ avowed communism seriously as an object of study) while still holding their conduct to independent scrutiny. He is notably resistant to reducing dictators to simple categories — true believer versus cynic, genius versus fool — arguing instead that ideological conviction and the exercise of unconstrained power are often mutually reinforcing rather than opposed.

In the wiki