Rev Left Radio - The Soviet Union: The Russian Revolution and Joseph Stalin

Episode Date: October 16, 2017

 Gregory Afinogenov received his PhD in History from Harvard University, and is now an assistant professor in Imperial Russian History at Georgetown University.  Greg sits down with Brett to discuss the October Revolution and the Soviet Union. Topics Include: Joseph Stalin, The Bolsheviks, The failures and fallacies of western liberal propaganda, the Cold War, the Space Race, George Orwell, Trotsky v. Stalin, Holodomor, The successes of the Soviet Union, what leftists of all stripes can learn from the Russian Rev, and much more!  Follow Greg on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/athenogenes Outro music: The Harvest by No Thanks off the album "The Trial". No Thanks is a local Omaha band and good friends of the show! David, the sound guy for Rev Left Radio, actually recorded the album in the same studio out of which we do the show! Check them out here: https://no-thanks.bandcamp.com Please support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio  and follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio  Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Theme song by The String-Bo String Duo which you can find here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/album/smash-the-state-distribute-bread  

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I am your host and comrade, Brett O'Shea. And today I have on Greg O'Fenniginov. Did I say that right? That's right. All right. He's on to talk about the Soviet Union and Stalin and a bunch of other related topics. I'm really excited for this conversation. This month is the 100-year anniversary.

of the October Revolution. So I thought it would be fitting to have an episode about that revolution and what happened after it. Greg, would you like to introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background before we get into the questions? Absolutely. So I'm a professor of Imperial Russian history at Georgetown in D.C. And so my work actually focuses on the 18th century, and it's not particularly devoted to class struggle or anything like that. But recently, you know all imperial russian historians are trained in soviet history and because of the activity on the left and around the anniversary have also become interested in sort of what my field has been saying about this and what other people in the broader left political world have been saying

about it and so i think what strikes me is that there's so little contact between these two worlds and i'm hoping that that i can help bridge them somehow yeah absolutely um so before we begin before we get into the questions, I always ask my guests this question, just to kind of let my listeners orient themselves to the guest. But how would you describe yourself politically? How do you identify politically? So politically identify as a Democratic socialist. I'm a member of DSA in D.C. and I've been doing some work with them. But in general, as an academic, you know, I'm constantly surrounded by people who either claim to be leftists or use leftist language, but really just talk a lot. And there's just a lot of talk. It's, it's, it's

It's in academia and in the broader world where there's just a little connection between the ideology you're going to follow and your effect on the real world. So I've kind of become a little bit a theoretical in the sense that I'm much more interested to see how people organize themselves and how to give people a sense that they can actually act as a community out there in the world. And in fact, so the episode that you had with Zoe Simuzzi last week is a really good example to me. how much the Marxist or non-Marxist left can learn from other organizing techniques like black anarchism. And, you know, the fact that Black Lives Matter has been so much more successful at radicalizing people than any Marxist organization over the past few years should really teach the left a lot. So I'm deliberately not committing myself to any particular tendency in leftism. Yeah, that's awesome that you listen to that episode with Zoe, you know. this podcast really tries to be pan leftist in that we try to do that exact sort of thing,

not recoil into our own tendencies, but to learn about other tendencies and to kind of cross-pollinate ideas because I truly believe that, especially in this day and age, we have to draw from all forms of leftist thought. We can't just recoil into one tendency and go full steam ahead. So that's awesome. I think we're on the same page with that. So let's just go ahead and dive into the questions.

I know there's a lot to cover, so no need to wait any longer. Just to start off, could you briefly summarize the October Revolution, maybe mention some key players, and tell us your thoughts on what leftists can learn from that revolution today? Absolutely. And so I want to make two points before I talk about the revolution itself that I think are often missed by people and missed in introductions to it. The first, and this sort of follows from what I was saying before, is that Russian people, And I mean, people in the Russian Empire, many of whom were not Russian, were incredibly militant and incredibly politicized in the run-up to the revolution. And in fact, there was an earlier revolution in the Russian Empire in 1905 where, you know, there were general strikes that was a massively popular uprising, including both the intelligentsia and the workers. But by 1917, workers, I mean, they only made up about 5% of the population, maybe a little bit less. But they were incredibly militant. So something like over the course of a, of a given year in a particular province, the entire workforce might go on strike over the course

of the year, or several times a year. And so what a lot of socialist parties in the Russian Empire did was basically fight over who could offer this militant group of people the most appealing political strategy, which I think explains a lot of Bolshevik policies, really, because they weren't trying to kind of create a revolutionary class from the ground up. They were trying to mobilize a class that was very well aware of. its power and potential. And of course, peasants were also incredibly militant politicized, but of course, but they weren't as concentrated in central areas, so they were harder to politically

organize. And the other point that I wanted to bring up is that the war, World War I that Russia had been participating in since the very beginning, of course, was an incredibly powerful force in shaping their revolution. And this sounds like an obvious point. But when you think about the fact that Russian casualties in World War I were over 3 million soldiers alone from all causes. And what that means is that in 1917, every month more Russian soldiers were dying on the front than the entirety of American casualties in Vietnam, of American deaths in combat in Vietnam. So the party that was most closely devoted to ending the war, most desperately obsessed with that question was the Bolsheviks. There were other leftist parties,

and many of them articulated positions that were just as radical as the Bolshevik positions. But as a political organization, the organization that was associated with ending the war was the Bolsheviks. And there's even notebooks and drawings surviving from children in Petrograd in 1917, and they would kind of draw events that were happening that they encountered in the city. And whenever they drew a Bolshevik, the Bolshevik would be carrying a flag that said, an end to the war. So essentially what happened is, the Russian monarchy, by the end of 1916, it was incredibly delegitimized.

The population, because of the war, the war was going so badly that the population basically assumed that the imperial, that the Romanov dynasty was written with German infiltrators and that they were sabotaging the country from within. And eventually the war went so badly that in February 1917, there was a march of women this is very important that this is a march of women for food and and more broader political demands as well but essentially it led to the to the parliament the duma calling for the tsar to abdicate and the tsar did so because he basically he was incompetent and he and nicholas the second he had seen basically that he could no longer maintain the country and not be i mean he thought

that he could still get away with his life in the end but but that turned out not to be the case. So then for the rest of 1917, up from February to October, the country was ruled by this provisional government, which whose exact shape kept shifting. There was a parliament, sometimes it was headed by a constitutional liberal party, sometimes it was headed by a socialist named Kerensky. And on the other side, there was the Soviets. And the Soviets are, Soviet is just the Russian word for council. And these were essentially just councils of workers that were kind of elected democratically and directly and in the form of deputies

that would sort of come to represent their interests from all over the empire. And there were also Soviets for soldiers. There were also Soviets for sailors. So this was sort of the organ of proletarian democracy in Russia at the time. So the entire course of 1917 was this tug of war between proletarian democracy and sort of bourgeois democracy

as represented by the various quasi-parliamentary bodies that inhabited the space of the parliament. And then eventually, I mean, the exact details are very complicated, as you'll see from, for example, China Mievel's new book, which is quite good, called October. But eventually, by the end of October, 1917, the Bolsheviks, Lenin, especially, saw their opportunity to launch an armed uprising and to break the deadlock that had emerged between these two bodies,

the Soviet and the provisional government. And essentially everything from then on is the story of the Bolsheviks attempting to hold on to and consolidate their power in a socialist state. So, of course, it's very hard. And as Cheneas Mayneville points out, as anyone can see, it's often very hard to square the legacy of 1917 with the things that happen in the Soviet Union later. and obviously your opinions can differ incredibly on how much of it was worth it, how bad certain things were, but by and large, I think we can agree that the Soviet Unioners that existed at the end of the 1930s was not what most people had envisioned at the end of the 19th century as being a socialist state, highly repressive, highly undemocratic, with a highly consolidated, quasi-Bourgeois bureaucratic elite that enjoy a lot of privileges.

But I think the basic problem of 1917, and I think the most important thing for the left, is that the Bolshevik choices often seem right. So, for example, when the Bolshevik's first decisions was to dissolve the constituent assembly, which was a body that had been elected to write the new constitution for Russia and sort of to serve as the new government. And it's very, I mean, many people say that, well, this was like the moment where everything went bad, but, and the Bolsheviks were kind of the second group in that, in that election. So the Socialist Revolutionaries and other left-wing party had more votes. But after the Bolsheviks dissolved this assembly, it actually didn't have a lot of credibility.

So the Soviets, which were the bodies through which the Bolsheviks governed, actually were the groups that people were interested in defending, as opposed to the Constitution Assembly, which was kind of accreted by this artificial impulse to graft a parliamentary democracy onto a country that had never really experienced it. And a lot of other choices, I mean, especially the Treaty of Bras deftops, which ended Russia's participation in World War I, but at the cost of just enormous territorial losses, the rest of the left in Russia hated the Bolsheviks for it and the left wing of the socialist revolutionaries with whom the Bolsheviks were in coalition they broke from it and eventually declared a campaign of essentially a campaign of terrorism and this is not like a Bolshevik propaganda this is what they explicitly said that we need terrorism to stop to restart the war but if you think about the fact that that 60,000 people were dying every month it does seem like the right decision

so then somehow we arrive in the 1930s and everything is bad Yeah, and I think it's extremely important for leftists in the 21st century when we look back on the decisions that were made. You can agree or disagree with certain things, but you have to wrestle with the actual options on the table that the Bolsheviks had to choose between. It's easy to go back and say, I would like full democracy and I would like full freedoms and a nice bill of rights and all of that. but in the context of two world wars and all the things that you had to deal with, it wasn't so cut and dry. And so I hope that we can help add some nuance to a lot of listeners' ideas about the revolution and what came afterwards.

I think that's important. And we're going to get into a lot of, this whole episode is going to be a lot of that. But before we do dive into those nuances, one question I wanted to ask up top, in your opinion, since you are a historian, what do Western liberal historians most often get wrong about Soviet history? What are some of the tropes and assumptions that paint Western liberal views on that history? Yeah. So for a long time, the most influential historians, I mean, you could barely even describe them

as liberal. I mean, they were often outright conservatives. And some of them, you know, were white emigrates from the Soviet Union, which, who had a deep nostalgia for the imperial system. But essentially, there used to be this, these two models. But one in which the Soviet Union was so totalitarian that it sort of brainwashed its whole population and that they were all a bunch of zombies, basically, who had been indoctrinated in the language of Marxist Leninism and had no independent ability to act as individuals. And then there was another paradigm which kind of tried to figure each individual citizen of the Soviet Union as a potential resistor. And so it talked a lot about dissidents and how much time the Soviets spent suppressing dissent.

And for a long time, these two kind of historical factions really defined the scope of the field about the Soviet Union, because people assumed that there was no way that the Soviet Union could have real legitimacy or that its citizens could be really authentic human beings because they clearly self-evidently lived in this cartoonishly awful system. But academic historiography since then has become a lot better, I think. it has also become a lot, I mean, I would say that it's become a lot friendlier to interpretations of the Soviet Union that see redeemable value in it. And in part, this is because of the underlying dynamics of how history as a profession works. You know, I see a lot of stuff on Twitter, like, you know, Western settler academia, you know, they're all in the pay of the CIA, blah, blah, law. But actually, if right now you took a paper that basically said, oh, the Soviet Union was 1984, like, you know, it suppressed all these nationalities, et cetera, and you took that into an

academic conference on the Soviet Union, you'd be laughed out of the room. Not just because the people there might have laughing politics, which most of them don't necessarily, but just that people have heard that stuff before in the field since then has marched on. And it's marched on in this direction of becoming more nuanced and understanding. how people understood their lives within socialism and how many things socialism did that don't fit into this paradigm of 1984. On the other hand, popular history, you know, popular audiences seem to have this just unlimited appetite for stories about gulags and oppression and terror. And to some extent, these stories are justified, but to some extent, popular history

narratives are often very sensational. And they often use this mixture of legitimate archival and published sources with sources that are much more dubious. And in that sense, I think the skepticism of people on the left towards these kind of narratives is very well justified because in the minds of a lot of readers who are not historians, that's what represents the state of the field. You know, these books by people like Ann Applebaum or Tim Snyder who kind of like represent all of Soviet history as this giant tragedy. Exactly, yeah.

And I think that's an important distinction to make. When you're talking about the actual academic historians, discussions of the Soviet Union, most regular people in the population don't actually have access to that nuance and to those discussions. What we do get is what you said is the popular history. What we get is the media narrative. What we get is how it's framed in popular culture. And so when I think a lot of people like Marxist-Leninists who like to defend the Soviet Union, when they talk about Western propaganda, not many of them are necessarily talking about,

academia at the highest level specifically, but most of them are talking about the overall popular narratives that most Americans are given about the Soviet Union, which still a lot of that stuff is rooted in Cold War propaganda, which leads nicely into the next question, which you might have touched on a little bit in your last one, but what are some of the biggest and most persistent lies about Russia and the Soviet Union that were propagated in the U.S. during the Cold War that many people still hold on to today? absolutely and i mean i think as i did mention uh 1984 this whole kind of idea of soviet history as you know everyone is dressed in gray everyone thinks the same there's this

like complete control of by the party state over people's minds and and uh over all information um it's it's just laughable how completely inaccurate that is and even at the height of Stalinism. Some of the, you know, some of the most influential literature in historiography. So, for example, a book by Sheila Fitzpatrick called Everyday Stalinism. It's a nice, it's a very accessible read, and it's

a very good kind of inquiry into like what it was like for ordinary people that just live their lives under Stalinism. But one of the thing we know for sure is that it was not late 1984 in the sense that, so for example, under, in the Cold War era, the Soviets could not actually jam Western radio stations like Radio Liberty and Radio

for Europe. And so people all over the Soviet Union, or at least in the Western parts, would be able to tune into those stations. And it didn't necessarily make them into anti-Soviet freedom fighters. And, you know, more recently you had this New York Times op-ed or Washington Post op-ed where, you know, it was argued that the Soviet Union was this horrible, Slavic, racist place, which was trying to suppress every nationality. When actually the Soviet Union has probably one of the better records of any country that's ever existed in terms of actually taking seriously the aspirations to nationhood or to a national culture of of indigenous people or of people who have not been traditionally, have not had statehood or imperial states.

And then of course, more generally, I think there's this tendency to erase the distinctions between different periods in Soviet history. because so I'm from Russia and my parents grew up were born in the 60s and they grew up in the late Soviet era and to them the world of Stalin and the world of the Gullahs was just as distant

and unfamiliar as almost as it is to us today the Soviet Union was a much more normal country incidentally it in the post-Stalin era it imprisoned way fewer people than the U.S. does today so the idea that it was just one giant gulag that lasted for 70 years and then imploded is completely false.

And you mentioned 1984 and also obviously we'd add in Animal Farm which many middle school and high school students in America are taught. Orwell incidentally was more of an anarchist, more of an anti-authoritarian socialist actually fought fascist in Spain.

But do you think a lot of this propaganda, a lot of the lies that you mentioned, are stemmed or they stem from Orwell's rather shoddy or simplistic ideas and framing of the Soviet Union? Do you blame Orwell at all for any of this? I mean, Orwell was pretty opportunistic in terms of sort of cashing in his socialist credentials for a positive reception among a public that was looking for condemnation of the Soviet Union.

I don't think I blame Orwell because there was so much appetite in the Cold War era for books that drew exactly this moral. And, you know, there are other books, Arthur Kessler, for example, was a classic one. So people were just looking for a fable to tell that would justify not only their own hatred and fear of the Soviets, but also the nuclear standoff that was taking place and sort of justified the fact that their own government, just like the Soviet government, was planning to annihilate, you know, every human being in the Soviet Union. Yeah, that's an interesting thing. and people still debate Orwell today. He's seen as a divisive figure on the left, so I just thought that was interesting to throw in there.

But one of the most amazing things about the Soviet Union, in my opinion, was the raid at which it was able to industrialize and even become like the primary competition for the U.S. and the space race, beating them out in several battles of the overall space war, if you want to go ahead and call it that. But what are your thoughts on this accomplishment specifically, and why are such accomplishments so rarely highlighted in the West? Yeah. So I think for me this is one of the central paradoxes of the Soviet Union. And I would identify here kind of two different stages at which the Soviet Union was industrializing very successfully. And the first era was under Stalin. So the key to that industrialization was a mixture of 50% genuine and massive social mobilization, which in part was very conscious, you know, people did rally to build socialism. And on the other hand,

hand, a huge amount of coercion repression. So, um, the institution of, of laws that would, uh, that would punish you with, often with imprisonment in the gulad if you, uh, were late for work too many times or if you took something from, uh, from your, your work or some store or something, um, these penalties were incredibly repressive. Um, and in fact, the inmates of the gulad itself, uh, were primarily seen in most in many periods as a as a workforce and so uh in terms of heavy minerals something like 100% of all the gold and diamonds and platinum that was mine in the Soviet Union came from gulags and iron uh about 40% something like that 20% of the construction was done by by inmates so essentially slave labor basically um and these are often the most

dangerous places to work, the most dangerous construction projects. And so, and I think I would take a kind of a productive or an eco-socialist frame in reference to this particular issue. I think because what defines Stalinism to me is this ideology of conquest over nature of the production of tonnage of raw materials or tonnage of steel and coal that was in many ways severed from concrete human goals. I mean, of course, there is a siege, there is a sort of a siege mentality, but the way that the Soviet Union approached nature, which was just to basically to turn it into a giant factory, was, I think, stimulated a lot of the problems that Stalinism genuinely faced. So a classic example, I think, is the collectivization and

the famines that resulted from it. I mean, I could go into this a little bit later, but that was in many ways the result of needing to extract as much grain as possible from peasants in order to fuel industrialization. And in cases where this introduced some kind of conflict with socialist values, often productivism went out over other considerations. So the Soviets sold a lot of that grain abroad in order to purchase factories and farm equipment from Western countries, Western capital. those countries. So I think that's the basic problem of industrialization under Stalin. And I learned it was incredibly effective, but on the other hand, it came with this ideology of the conquest of nature, which steamrolled human beings and ways of life just as easily as it steamrolled forests or lakes. And then later, I think a lot of the reconstruction after Stalin

was really recovery after the war. And countries that are recovering from a conflict like this often grow very quickly because a lot of the stuff isn't really destroyed. You can put it back together. You can use the stuff that the Soviets expropriated from the Nazis, the factory, the machinery to rebuild your own capacity. And I think the Soviets did that very successful. In terms of the space race, I think what that shows is the degree to which the Soviets were devoted to science and devoted to engineering.

You know, the Soviet Union in the post-World War II era employed more scientists or people in scientific technical professions than any society on the face of the planet as far as I know and possibly more than even than the United States is today. And so, you know, people think about Lysenko, the distortions of Soviet science, and it's true that there were systematic distortions introduced into Soviet science by political considerations

just like there were in the West. But by and large, nowhere was a better place to do science than in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. and the victory in the space race, which was also actually in part a result of the Soviet pursuit of an ICBM that would be able to strike the U.S., so that kind of shows the importance of the Cold War, but in part it's also about the scientific legacy. Yeah, and I think that that is one aspect of the Soviet Union that doesn't get enough airing is the sort of culture of, and it was here in the West as well, maybe to a lesser extent, but the culture of science and of science fiction and the importance, you know, it was an avowedly atheist nation, and it really had a respect for science and there was a blossoming of science fiction in the Soviet Union, which you write about it. We don't have enough time to talk about it in this episode, but I encourage listeners to go read some of that stuff because I find, as a fan of science fiction, I find that stuff fascinating. But moving on a little bit, kind of based jumping off your last answer, all too often there is a false dichotomy propped up about Stalin and the Soviet Union. On the Western propaganda

side, it's always depicted as a dictatorial dystopia. And on the non-Trottskyist Marxist-Leninist left, there can be very high levels of apologism, some even going so far as to reject the idea that Stalin was anything but an absolute hero of the working class. What are your thoughts on this sort of dichotomy and how should leftists of any and all tendencies understand the Stalin era of the Soviet Union and Stalin in particular? So first of all, I mean, I think the genuinely Stalinist left is thankfully a minority, although people, I think because people have had an education in Soviet history that's often been carried out by people who don't know much about it or don't care about it, and therefore are happy to present what are

effectively Cold War curricatures as truth. I think people have come with this sense that it's all a bunch of lies, and so Stalin must have been a good guy. I think that's a really unhelpful approach. I don't think that the historical facts about Stalin should make you necessarily revise your position on whether you're a Marxist-Leninist, but a lot of people seem to have that conclusion that in order to be a real Marxist-Leninist, you have to defend everything that Stalin ever did. And in the service of this, they have this kind of, you know, they carry on these snippets of books or books by people like Grover Fer, who's completely not academic. You know, his basic assumption is that everyone who ever confessed to anything in a Stalinist trial or

interrogation was telling the truth about themselves, which is completely not borne out by the I love it is. But I think the important thing is to know that Stalinism came with a lot of things that were structurally inherent in the kind of policies that the Soviet Union had embarked on, in part as a result of Stalin's leadership. So kind of to get back to the to this peasant thing that I was talking about earlier, one of the most important early episodes in the history of the Soviet Union is the so-called scissors crisis. And basically what that meant was that, peasants were no longer willing to sell their grain in order to buy industrial products because the industrial products were too expensive or there wasn't enough of them or they were

too poor and quality and as a result of the fact that that peasants wouldn't buy that stuff they wouldn't they also weren't going to weren't selling their grain which meant that industrial enterprises couldn't make the money that they needed to to expand and so and this was in the early 1920s and so the answer to that in the net era was basically to relax all kinds of restrictions and to kind of implement a form of partial, allow a certain degree of capitalism. But in reality, that scissors-skirts is, I think, set forth the basic model for the Stalinist industrialization policy. So Stalin repressed the peasants because he needed them to be able to give up grain by force because they weren't willing to do it voluntarily.

And collectivization, you know, people, there's often this claim that collectivization saved the Civil Union from famine. But, of course, there were famines under collectivization. You can say that maybe they were less severe, although I don't think there's a whole lot of evidence for that. But famines only really stopped in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, once massive amounts of fertilizer and new agricultural technology were used, just as happened all over the world in the Green Revolution.

So we often associate the horrors of the collectivization famine and other famines in the Soviet Union with Stalin's leadership. And in part, it might have been more severe because Stalin had a more on compromising line, but really, this is how a Soviet industrialization needed to take place by forcible extraction of grain from peasants. And to a certain extent, there was no avoiding a huge number of casualties as a result. So, but I think one of the ways in which historians are currently trying to understand the Stalin era is by thinking about different ways in which there are parallels to it. You know, of course, there's been for a long time this argument that

Soviets were just like the Nazis or Stalin was just like Hillary. And this is not that kind of thing. So one of the interesting directions that's just being pursued in some recent scholarship on the Gulag is how the British Empire ran forced labor camps in India and in other places in Africa to nominally for famine relief, but really the people in them were assigned minimal rations and forced to do incredibly hard labor. And there are very, very clear parallels between the British system. and the Gulag system. And there might even be a case for some direct influence. So Stalinism was not unique, and many of the problems that it had were shared with other societies. And I think one of the ways we can condemn Salon is some of the most brutal repressions

seem to have absolutely no structural or economic logic to them whatsoever. So, for example, the criminalization of homosexuality in the early 1930s led to a lot of a lot of victims and a lot of imprisonments that essentially had no justification to them whatsoever. And the argument was that they were counter-revolutionary, but of course there's no real evidence

that gay people were engaged in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. I mean, it's completely absurd. So you have to, in order to understand Stalin, you have to be willing to accept the fact that he did a lot of things that a modern leftist would find just completely anathema. And I think the repressions against individual nationalities, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, for example, were particularly brutal and a particularly clear betrayal, I think, of the socialist

legacy and socialist beliefs. And, of course, in the last years of his rule, there was signs that an anti-Semitic persecution might also begin. And you can trace through the documents that people really did believe that the Jews were about to be cracked out on the Soviet Union. And, you know, it's possible to say, oh, this is all just Nazi propaganda, but the documents are there in the archives. And it's not necessarily, you don't have to be a cold warrior in order to condemn these aspects of Stalinism. Right. But in general, I think we should try to move away from a personalistic obsession with Stalin and move towards an understanding of what was it about the civic union that made these things possible. And one of these things is its obsession with mastering nature and with producing the same. tonnage of industrial stuff with the aid of all this forced labor.

And it's thorough and enormous reliance on forced labor over the course of the Stalin period. Yeah, I think that's extremely nuanced, and I think that's extremely fair, and I largely agree with that analysis. I don't like when the versions of Stalin and his role are simplified in either direction. I think that nuance is important. But one of the big questions that naturally arises out of this and that people have debated ever since is how different would things have been, in your opinion, if, let's say, Lenin lived another 20 years, or if Trotsky would have taken over instead of Stalin?

So I think, in many ways, I think that Trotsky thing is a pretty, is a comforting myth that Trotsky's have told themselves over the past century. I think the evidence is that Trotsky was capable of just as much brutality and just as much repression as Stalin was. And as far as I can tell, Stalin's plan or Trotsky's plan for the peasantry was basically a form of forced requisitioning just as just as brutal as collectivization, but perhaps with even less of a contribution to the welfare of the peasants. So collectivization, you know, not only involved putting peasants into communes, but also involved mechanization of agriculture and the implementation of the centralized motor tractor stations, which was, in fact, a positive contribution. for Trotsky didn't take present concerns seriously at all so

I think it would have been a form of war communism and Lenin too I mean I think Lenin would have been much less excessively brutal I think that there are many episodes of repression understalling that are still inexplicable by historians

you know people have tried to understand what it was that drove him to do that but I haven't seen any explanation that I personally find compelling for you know these mass ethnicity deportations campaigns or the massive purge of the army. I mean, I've seen just so stories that kind of tell a pat narrative about what drove Stalin to do that, but I don't know that any of them tell the whole truth.

And I think under Lenin, these kinds of things would probably have been less prominent. But nevertheless, I think the strategy that the Soviets embarked on was involved a lot of repression and a lot of force. And the way that the Soviets suppressed proletarian democracy in the Soviets over the course of the Civil War, which they saw as a kind of measure of desperation in the face of encirclement, but nonetheless, it did result in a suppression of democracy. I think it would have necessitated a lot of force no matter what. So I think the Soviet Union would have been much less brutal, but it still would not have

satisfied, I think, many people and many people who care about, you know, not subjecting your society to massive level of repression. I think a different question, and I think this is something that people take, this is not something that most people think about, but we in the United States live in a society that's literally built on the bones of millions of slaves and indigenous people. And leftists, of course, will say that it wasn't worth it. Nothing could be worth that. But nonetheless, it's clear that for most people, especially people who are not leftists,

it kind of, in a sense, is worth it, because none of them are. You know, certainly nobody that you meet on the street considers packing up and going back to Europe. So I don't, in theory, exclude the possibility that it could have been worth it in the end, that if the Soviets had, in fact, built functioning socialist society, that in the end, in a few hundred years, it could have all been forgotten. But the fact is that the Soviets didn't. In fact, Soviet society imploded. So in the end, the fact that it was all such a waste is, I think,

I think probably the longest legacy of the Soviet Virginia. Yeah, and I do agree with you. I'm sure you agree with me on this. I do think there is a huge level of hypocrisy when it comes to U.S. liberals, U.S. patriots, you know, U.S. mythologizers, criticizing the Soviet Union as this horrific, you know, dictatorship built on violence and death. And it's sort of a whitewashing of,

of U.S. history, which I've said many times in the podcast, in which you just said, which I totally agree with, that U.S. capitalism, and insofar as it's been exported globally, global capitalism, was firmly rooted in the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, and to some extent dropping of nukes on Japan, which catapulted the U.S. to imperial superpower status and allowed it to continue imperialism and the exportation of capitalism. So wherever you fall on some of these questions, it's important to, to note the hypocrisy in defenders of U.S. capitalism pointing at the Soviet Union and refusing to point that finger back at the U.S.

But, yeah, I think we agree on that. So a big criticism of the Soviet Union and one that, you know, it's an issue that I struggle with as well thinking through, is the question of economic planning. So what are your thoughts on economic planning in the USSR, like what were its pros and cons and what can its failures teach us about how to organize a socialist economy in the future? So it's interesting. I think people have a, there are basically two very distinct strands in the history of Soviet planning. And the first strand really begins with the Stalin era, like a lot of other things. It's the first five-year plan, you know, the idea that we're

going to beat all these production targets that we're going to fulfill the five-year plan in four years. And it's not really useful to think of that form of planning as sort of shaping the economy in the way that we might think it is. What it was is really kind of a to-do list. It's something that motivates you and something that kind of guides how you carry on your activities, but it doesn't actually have any control over how you behave. And so, for example, you can take the phenomenon of shock workers to Hanavites, people who just wildly overfulfell. filled the plan in a particular area. I mean, of course, most of these stories were fabricated.

But if you think about that concept, if you are really thinking of your economy as a system that's rationally planned, the idea of somebody over-fulfilling a plan in one area shouldn't fill you with pride and joy. It should fill you with anxiety because it means that somewhere else there's too much of an input or too little of an input. So it's, Stalin's planning is more about a kind of an ideology or a propaganda device than it was really an actual act of planning. But more interesting, I think, is something that emerged in the Khushov era for the first time.

Now, one of the most interesting things I think about Soviet history is that after, is that in this period, in the 1950s and in 1960s, cybernatics became an incredibly popular field of study in the Soviet Union. And so cybernetic principles were written into the Communist Party program. I've written a little bit about this in an academic journal. But essentially, Siberianics became a new form of Marxist ideology or integrated into Marxist ideology. And so there was really genuine attempts to plan out what it would look like to use computers to manage the Soviet economy. And what happened, there's a book, a recent book by Ben Peters, which just recently won an award, which kind of showed why it was, why the Soviet Union not even didn't just fail to automate its economy. it failed to even create a comprehensive internet-type network. And it was because by that point,

the Soviet economy had become so siloed in different ministries and different power structures that they were unable to cooperate between them. And I think in many ways it was a lost opportunity. But if we do look to the history of social spending, I think it's to those kinds of beginnings, to the work of mathematicians and computer scientists to try to create rational models for an economy.

that we should turn and not to the five-year plans of this dollar era. Yeah, so that's a really interesting concept. The notion that, I mean, since computers have evolved so much, do you think that it's possible in the future that, like I think you kind of touched on that, but like that we could utilize this technology to help us organize, organize an economy that doesn't depend on the free market to set prices and distribute goods and whatnot?

I think, so this is obviously goes. somewhat beyond my expertise. I think one potential difficulty is that a lot of this depends on what initial assumptions you built in at every stage of the planning process. And there was a really interesting discussion about this on the blog, Cricket Timber, where somebody was kind of from a sympathetic point of view to algorithmic computer-based planning was kind of showing that actually this gets you into a lot of very hard-to-solve difficulties. But on the other hand, I think it's important to remember that our economy is already being planned by computers, except it's being planned by these stock treating algorithms that are designed to funnel as much

money as possible into the pockets of the 0.001%. So in that sense, we're no longer choosing between the free market and social planning. We're choosing between two different kinds of computers and asking who do these computers really serve. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, it's interesting to think about. So let's go ahead and talk about Stalin and the famines, because This is a big thing that people talk about, and it's a popular trope in some Leninist circles to mock the idea that Stalin was at all responsible for, say, you know, Holodomor. What are your thoughts on that and what were its causes and how much blame do you put at the feet of Stalin for the famine?

Yeah, I think, so I would say that Ukrainian nationalists have really done the feel an incredible disservice in the way that they frame this question and in some of the arguments that they've introduced for it. because it's really clouded the debate in a profound way. One thing that cannot be denied is that there was, in fact, a famine. And, you know, I've seen so much kind of Marxist-Lennist energy online devoted to debunking this or that account of how horrible things were. But you can see internal NKVD reports from agents on the ground just saying how much cannibalism there is, just how deep the suffering of people is. So this is, the famine that specifically is talked about here is, of course,

in Ukraine that lasted from 31 to 33, with its height being at the end of 32. And it wasn't, the thing is that this famine, unlike what the Ukrainian nationalists tend to say, this famine was not just a Ukrainian famine, and it wasn't something that was deliberately created or targeted at Ukrainians. And Haldemore, in fact, that word implies, it's a kind of, it's a transitive verb. It implies that somebody is starving somebody else. And so the famine also was landed in an incredibly significant way in Kazakhstan, where it killed proportionally to the population far more people than the Ukrainian one did. So a lot of this was really just a severe famine. It was a harvest failure, and these were periodic in the Soviet Union, and previously

there had been a good harvest, so things had gotten kind of relaxed, and the Soviet state continued to demand a huge amount of grain requisitions. And by the time that people realized, That's just how horrible the famine was. I think the grain requisitions had become so high that people literally had no more food to eat. And the assumption was that Ukrainians and others were hiding in a way. So the historical consensus is that essentially Stalin did not cause the famine. Stalin did not intend the famine to start Ukrainians, but Stalin's policies did contribute to making what was a severe famine into a catastrophic one. And these policies, for example, included restrictions on movement and restrictions on who relief grain would go to.

So there was some small amount of relief grain released to various Ukrainian collective farms. And the way it was distributed was essentially that people who, the more people worked, the more they received in grain, which meant that a huge number of people who are unable to work or didn't produce as much for whatever reason were left out. And in part, this was all in the service of the kind of mastery of nature productivist ideology that Stalin pursued, because the idea was to use, I think he kind of used the famine in order to, in order to ensure that the collective farms were subjected to this logic of you must produce more and more. And you can really see that play out in Kazakhstan. Now, Kazakhstan was a republic with a huge population of nomads, where the population. was basically pastoralists who migrated from place to place. And the Soviets basically considered nomadism to be inherently, inherently regressive or inherently assigned that population was ready for modernity.

And there's not a – I wouldn't say that this is some kind of anti-Kazakh persecution by Russians because many of the people who contributed to the Kazakh famine were in fact Kazakhs themselves. But what it entailed was essentially forcibly making an entire population of people who had not been sedentary farmers into an agricultural sedentary population, which led to a million dead, which was an incredibly high percentage of the population of the territory at the time, and huge waves of just of flight across the border and other things. And there, again, so you can see that ideology at work where the most important thing is to make sure that people are pinned down or that they can produce as much food as possible for the. industrial process to continue and kind of sweep away previous forms of life and and to make sure that that nomads don't get a chance to to regress to pre-modern to their pre-modern state or whatever. So I think it's important to avoid the distortions introduced by by Ukrainian nationalist framing, which in many ways, and I think the Marshallsena has the right on this said that in many

ways it borrows tropes and documents and stories from Nazi propaganda, but it is impossible important to recognize the contribution of Stalinist policies to that famine. And the fact that the command structure of the Soviet Union was such that pleas from people on the ground, including members of the secret police and members of the Communist Party, did not have any effect on Stalin or had only a very belated effect on Stalin in his actions and his responses to the famine. So insofar as Stalin's policies, intensified an already existing famine, would you say that those were like sort of the unconscious byproducts of policies already in place, or were those policies put in place

purposefully by Stalin to increase the famine? I don't think Stalin wanted to kill as many people as possible. I think Stalin would have rather had fewer people die. But I think Stalin was indifferent to the cost of the famine if it meant sort of breaking down what he might have seen as the sort of resists. individualistic farming impulses of Ukrainian peasants who because of the extraordinary productivity of Ukrainian land tended to be more individually wealthy and therefore more resistant to collectivization. I think in that sense the terror of the famine in some sense

was a positive but I think I don't think that Stalin had a conscious desire to create millions of victims no. Interesting. Yeah, thank you for that. That's really informative for me as well. it's really hard to find good information on that topic, and it's always highly ideologically painted no matter where you go to find that information. So I appreciate that sort of nuance. So we're about 10 minutes away from 60 minutes. So let's just go through the last couple questions fairly quickly. In your opinion, what were some of the best accomplishments of the Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent Soviet Union, and what can the left broadly learn from these successes?

So I think looking back in the history of the Soviet Union, it's remarkable what it managed to accomplish in terms of literacy. You know, over the course of just a few years, a quarter of a population that had been overwhelmingly illiterate became literate and, you know, within 10 or 15, almost all of all Soviet citizens became literate. That's an incredible achievement that I think is almost unparalleled in human history. And the same goes for housing and health care in later years. So, you know, we have the stereotype of, oh, these horribly decrepit Stalinist or Soviet apartment blocks.

And, in fact, most Soviet housing policy that, you know, was good, took place in the post-war era. But these gray Stalinist apartment blocks actually represent an incredible achievement in terms of providing a population that had hitherto mostly been living in wooden huts or barracks with modern apartments. And, you know, my family in Moscow still lives in those apartments today. It's not something that they are ashamed of. It's something that the Soviet state created for that. And I think also it's dedication to science. I think it's holding forth the possibility, at least of having a society that cares about scientific achievement to the exclusion of, you know, developing algorithms that are more and more efficient at manipulating our emotions into buying consumer products. I think that's an incredibly noble accomplishment.

And I think the Soviet Union did allow the space for a lot of people to pursue. do that. And I also think internationalism, I really think that the Soviet Union, if you compare the levels of anti-Semitism, for example, as expressed in public in the Soviet Union versus today or, you know, racism, I think the Soviet Union did very much try to teach its people to be to be less racist, less anti-Semitic, more accepting of the possibility of solidarity between Russians and on people in very distant countries. And today I think much of that legacy has been squandered deliberately. Yeah, absolutely.

I think it's kind of fallen quite a bit, and there's a lot of right-wing reaction in Russia currently, unfortunately. But after saying the best accomplishments, I only think it's fair, what are some of the worst aspects of the Soviet Union, especially during the time of Stalin? And then how much of that, in your opinion, was the fault of Stalin's ability as a leader, and how much of it was the result of variables that nobody could have controlled anyway?

Yeah, I think, I mean, of course, Stalin's society was in many ways, was in many ways unique. I think the period that defines Soviet life for me, because it's the period under which technically the majority of the Soviet Union lived, was essentially the Khrushchev and Brezhnevaras, and also into the 1980s, Bergen of successors. And I think that the, no, of course, Stalin and, you know, Stalin is the moment. I've already talked about a lot of repression and stuff, but the really, the things that continue to hang on were things like restrictions on international travel and profound restrictions on the kinds of things you could publish in the press and the kinds of arguments you could make in an academic scholarship.

And, of course, the lack of any meaningful participation in government except through kind of letters of complaint or something like that or accusations. And I think that those legacies I don't think that they were necessary. I don't think that the Soviet Union would have fallen apart if it had more freedom of the press, for example. And I don't think that the Soviet Union would have fallen apart

if more people, rather than just party members, would have been able to travel abroad. But because the Soviet State was so obsessed with preventing its people from defecting, I think that revealed a fundamental weakness in its conception of its place in the world, that it had to pen people in, otherwise they would all run away. I think it was possible to build a Soviet Union in which people didn't defect.

And I ultimately think that these were the considerations that led, or these were the circumstances that led the system to sort of rot from the inside out and that deprived of ultimately of a lot of its legitimacy. Because the inability, even though there were all these restrictions, in fact, the Soviets were unable to control a lot of the circulation information, and they were unable to prevent people from understanding that, or from thinking of foreign countries as something, especially capitalist countries is something to which they should aspire.

So that deprive the system of a lot of its legitimacy, and then in the 90s and 2000s, I think a lot of people realized that things in the Soviet Union might not have been as bad as they had thought, and that, in fact, Western capitalism wasn't necessarily the utopia that some of them had thought it was. And to be fair, many people in the 80s did believe that what they were going to build was a,

a social democracy, a freer society that retained much of the good sides of the Soviet Union. And that they were unable to do that is, I think, also a measure of the degree to which the Soviet economy had become committed to oil and to other, essentially, ways of staving off economic collapse when the defective economic planning of the post-war years ceased to function. Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of, I've recently seen. a lot of polls, like legitimate polls coming out that show that the older population in Russia has above 50% approval of a lot of the Soviet Union era stuff compared to what they're going through now. A lot of them do have a certain nostalgia for it and a certain respect and admiration for what was achieved during those times. So I think that bears out your claim that a lot of the promises of capitalism have not been met and the state that we see now is is kind of a sad

a sad version of what it could have been if things had been different so so last question it's just a since we started with the october revolution we should touch on this before we end briefly why did the soviet union ultimately fall and break apart and how should we think about the end of the soviet union as leftists in the 21st century um yeah absolutely um so i think the Soviet Union fell because of three main reasons. The first reason is that essentially by the 1970s, the people in the Communist Party and in the state and in other leading positions had lost confidence in the ability, in their ability to not only build a meaningful communist society, but also to continue to compete with the United States. And what essentially they found was that, of course, there was an oil spike in the second half of the 1970s. And so they could use the natural resources that the Soviet Union had and use them to pay for enough consumer goods to keep their population pretty much happy.

The population was not going to be mobilized. You know, there was a lot of work absenteeism. And, you know, they were never going to be incredibly rich. But it was fairly well and equally distributed. And then the problem is in the 1980s that oil price fell and that suddenly this life preserver was taken away. then the second reason is actually the desire of some elites within the Communist Party and especially elites who had risen up through the ranks

in the Hushchev era in this era of Thaw post-Stalin reformism who thought, especially Gorbachev, who thought that they could reform the Soviet Union and make it work. And because the reform project was pushed through the party apparatus, this is something that you can see in Stephen Kotkin's book Armageddon diverted, which I think is the best guide to the fall of the Soviet Union.

Essentially, there was no mechanism in place within the Soviet state to stop the reform process from engulfing the entire economy. And so essentially undermined the structure of the state from within. And then finally, I think there was the eruption of a lot of nationalist pressure and a lot of sectarian pressure on peripheries. war, you know, ethnic conflict in, in the Caucasus being one classic example, and pressure from Ukrainians and pressure from Latvians and Lithuanians and Estonians for separation. And the rise of these nationalist groups, which hitherto the Soviets had been pretty good at suppressing,

was just too much. And the apparatus of the Soviets had set up on the assumption that the centrality of the central government could not be challenged was suddenly undermined. And then, of course, Yeltsin led the nationalist reaction in Russia itself. And the possibility that Russia could secede from the Soviet Union was just something that nobody had ever planned for. But in effect, that's kind of what happened. And Gorbachev was left in a heading a vanguard party without a state to be the vanguard of. And ultimately, the role of nationalism in the breakup process is one reason that you have so many kind of small conflicts continuing on to the stay because the Soviet Union designed a lot of

these states in such a way that they could only function within a centralized Soviet-dominated federation. But, you know, in places like Chechnya, which was part of the Russian Federation, despite a long legacy of ethnic conflict, that wasn't necessarily something that the Chechians agreed with. And so this led to all kinds of fragmentation. And so, this led to all kinds of fragmentation. desire to to settle old scores and ultimately i think that broke down the soviet legacy the of internationalism uh pretty significantly okay and and then just um just i i put it in the last part of that question but just broadly even over like the whole scope of this interview what do you think are one or two things that leftists can learn about this entire

you know the rise and fall of the soviet union yeah uh i think it would be an enormous mistake, I think, to envision the Soviet Union as something that leftists have to continue to argue about for decades into the future. I think leftists need to learn to move forward and to understand that the Soviet Union is not coming back, that the things that made the Soviet Union function, these modernistic, productivist ideologies, these obsessions of taming nature, are not going to recur in a world which is so preoccupied, for example, with climate change. And so I think the important thing is to learn, is to derive lessons about certain organizational things, how important it is to have a militant population that is responsive

to ideological appeals. I think the experience in the Soviet Union, I don't think that it shows that the Marxist-Leninist centralized party model is bad or that the, that the DSA sort of multi-tenancy model is bad. I think what it shows is that, um, There are lots of ways in which your ideological training cannot prepare you for the role of governing a state, and that there's lots of ways in which it can escape from you. And that the slogans that you adopt at the beginning of a struggle, I think especially the revolution shows us this, that the slogans that you adopt in the beginning of a struggle don't shape the position in which you find yourself when that struggle actually begins.

So the socialist revolutionaries, for example, before the revolution, were one of the most radical groups in all of Russia. You know, they had committed hundreds of terrorist attacks against officials of the imperial regime. And suddenly, by the time the revolution, the October revolution happened, suddenly they were the right wing almost, not quite. They were sort of the center right. But what that tells us, I think, is that it doesn't matter what you describe yourself as. What matters is how you behave at moments of decision. Yeah, perfectly said, and I think that sums up the ethos of this show. and my general feeling about these things.

So that was perfectly said. This whole interview has been extremely fascinating. It's been extremely informative. I know I've learned a lot. So thank you so much for coming on. It's really been a pleasure and an honor to have you on. Before we leave you, though, can you point listeners in the direction of your work

and maybe throw out a couple suggestions for anyone who wants to learn more about anything we've discussed today? Yeah. So my non-academic work and my political articles tend to be, I write them for the journal N plus 1. And you can find it under my author page. I've written a lot of stuff from them, especially about Russia, that I think will be of some interest.

In terms of literature on the revolution, I think the best introduction is actually the work of Steve Smith, or Stephen A. Smith, who is a British historian of the revolution. And he actually has a very excellent book in the very short introduction series, which is, you know, you might think it's like kind of, kind of childish because these are these slim little books but actually it's one of the best and most fair-minded and most grounded in the historiography accounts of the revolutionary process that I've ever read anywhere and it's you can read it in three hours so that's the book I recommend a very short introduction to the Russian Revolution awesome well thank you so much Greg for coming on I really appreciate it it's been an absolute blast to talk to you and yeah just thank you so much for coming on thank you so much great I love talking about

all right you have a good one Thank you. Wake up showing, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, boy, and shine, oh, come on. Hust to go Whiting and shining The Humber Oh