School of War - Ep 182: Sean McMeekin on Communism

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

Sean McMeekin, Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College and author of To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, joins the show to talk about Communist approaches to foreign policy and war. ▪️ Times      •      01:35 Introduction     •      02:39 Communism and war     •     11:02 Giving history a shove        •      16:41 Lenin’s vision       •     20:55 A united front         •      25:54 Infiltration       •      28:45 Stalin at the helm       •     34:51 Ups and downs        •      41:10 Driving a wedge      •      43:37 “We resemble them more than they resemble us…” Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

It seems uncontroversial to say that America is engaged in some kind of competition with the People's Republic of China, a state that is controlled by something that calls itself the Chinese Communist Party. Well, what if we took the communist part of that name seriously and asked ourselves, what does a communist approach to foreign policy or to war look like, allowing for regional and historical variations, of course? Our guest today, Sean McMeekin is going to help us do just that. Let's get into it. For three for war, the Iraqi invasion of Iraqisbury. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinity. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the way situation in France. We'll fight on the beaches.

We shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram. substack and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. MacLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, Sean McMeekin, who is the Francis

Florinoi professor of European history and culture at Bard College. He is the author of numerous books and articles most recently to overthrow the world the rise and fall and rise of communism. Sean, thank you so much for coming back. Thanks for having. And I'll tell you, you are a contributor to the success of this project. Your first episode, which was on your fascinating and provocative book, Stalin's War, was episode four of the show. And I'm sure that both people who listened to that episode got a lot from it.

But now they've multiplied a few times. And as most people who are listening now, we'll have missed it. You should go back. And we'll probably align Stalin's conduct of the Second World War a bit as we talk today, just because we covered it in depth then and your book covers it. But the new one is a broader take. You divide your book up into theory and practice, and you make this really interesting observation

as you're surveying Marx's career in the 19th century and how he emerges amongst this ferment of 19th century socialism and different ideas from Rousseau and Hegel and others, that he and I guess Lenin is the one who really kicks us into high gear and operationalize it. He sees the opportunities. for global communism in war. I thought that was a really interesting point,

and I wanted to ask you to explain that. Yeah, in some ways, that's Lenin's own innovation, but it's obviously drawing very heavily on Marx's own experience, and even Marx's writing and Marx's response to the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune. I mean, before I even get there, though, we have to give some credit to some of these earlier thinkers, Etienne Morley, I talk about in the book,

who was writing about the same time as Rousseau, but went much further than Rousseau in his critique. of social inequality, really positing the idea of this kind of all-powerful state, maybe on a small scale, at least in Morley's version, but which would control all resources and distribute them and have this kind of universal rationing and a suppression of private property. And then you had the example of Gracchus Babbooth in the French Revolution. And this is the so-called conspiracy of the equals. Now, the reason this was significant both to Marx and that it kind of became part of the canon for people like Lenin, was that Babouf was also a much more forthright and I think almost

honest about what was required. That is to forcibly eradicate social inequality, it absolutely required political violence. So that's kind of almost like the first prerequisite. And, you know, Marx picks up on this and, you know, he says, like, you all say that, you know, this is going to require coercion. And we say, yeah, well, absolutely, it's going to require the most extreme methods of coercion. Then in the case of the Frank oppression war, in the Paris commune and the violent suppression of the commune in 1871. A lot of people thought Marx might have distanced himself from it, in part because the commune wasn't really orthodox communism in practice.

They hadn't necessarily done all of the elements of the program that manifest to the Communist Party laid out in the manifesto by Marx and Engels. A lot of people in Europe were kind of blaming Marx because he had this organization called the first working as an international association for being behind the commune. It wasn't really true. He could have distanced himself, but instead, even as, in fact, exactly precisely as the commune was going down in this kind of terrific, horrific blaze of violence with, you know, all these kind of archbishops and bourgeois notables being taken hostage and executed. And then on the other side with the army pouring in, you know, mowing down communards, including women and children. Marx didn't just kind of endorse this and embraced it. But, you know, he said, this is absolutely. essential and we're just, for a year's like the bourgeois, he's showing their true colors and we're showing you cannot achieve the revolution without this kind of cleansing revolutionary violence. And yes, it will involve women and children. And that's, that's fine because that just proves the kind

of bona fides and the commitment of the communist. Lenin's contribution, I think, which was significant, was he was also almost intramentalizing the process by which this had happened in France, that is in the course of a war with Prussia, which France had decisively lost and kind of been humiliated and that toppled the government and also obviously deprived it of any prestige, which meant it was weaker, which meant the revolutionaries had a chance to strike and to topple the government to kind of seize power. And Lenin actually formulated this into this doctrine of revolutionary defeatism, as he called it during the First World War, using almost like the scare quotes of you want your own side to lose your own country to lose the war. But he went further

in the military program of the proletarian revolution in 1916, not one of his better known work, but I think in some ways one of the most significant, Lenin was prophesing that, look, you know, it'll be like the weakest link in the chain, which he thought would probably be Russia and the capitalist chain, the chain of kind of the bourgeois capitalist world of imperialism, as he called it. Russia would topple, Russia would fall. And here's where we get back to this idea almost akin to Islam about the abode of war and the abode of peace. But then you'd have one communist country, you know, the imperialist, would turn into a civil war in Russia, but then Russia in turn would be communist and would be in a state of war with the rest of the world. And so you'd get this whole series of war. He's writing this at a time when much of the civilized world, those who weren't actually out doing the kind of the fighting and the killing and the dying are really kind of extremely concerned about the horrific violence engulfing Europe, particularly on the Western Front. And he isn't shying away from it. He's saying, no, no, no, what we need is more of it. We need this horrific imperialist war to turn into a civil war. And he doesn't shying away from it. He's saying, no, no, no, no, what we need is more of it. We need this horrific imperialist war to turn into a civil war.

which will then turn into a kind of series of wars between the communist countries and the non-communist countries. So eventually you'll get this kind of baptism by fire on a global level of just this whole series of wars engulfing the earth. You know, there absolutely were many socialists who were either pacifists or at the very least opposed violence, who didn't want to embrace violent methods. One can say, however, that none of them had the record that either Marx or particularly Lenin did as far as actually tried to achieve their objectives. Lenin basically said, yes, it's going to require violence and ultimately loss of violence. And yes, women and children will be thrown into the front lines.

And basically everyone will have to become a soldier in the class war. Yeah. And the way in which there seems to be tension between that and then the profession of the commitment to justice, right, which is really how left totalitarianism leads in which in some ways makes it so appealing, especially to young people, is it's this heroic vision. of overcoming the awfulness of society as it is in turning that over into a better world. Well, that's right. And I think the violence is a part of the attraction. I mean, just to give an idea of the sequence of even the phenomenon of what was called fellow traveling.

So this is Trotsky's phrase originally, the Papuchiki, those who might not necessarily join the party, but who kind of admired the Soviet Union and communism, was not in the 1920s that the fellow travelers and even really people. joining the party had their heading. The 20s were the period when they had to retrench after the civil war. After war communism, Lenin kind of dialed things back. He allowed basically to have this utter economic collapse when you try to plan the whole economy and eradicate private property. So they had to let farmers bring their goods to market again. They had to allow small scale retail manufacture. This was what was called the new economic policy. It was also viewed as a betrayal

by many, if not most, communists. And so the 20s, even though it was a little bit more humane in a of ways, the political repression, at least in some cases, eased up. I mean, it kind of came back in a big way in the late 20s, and there were periodic crackdowns. But overall, it was a much kind of softer period of repression than the high Stalinism of the 30s. But it was under the high Stalinism of the 30s. That's when communism prestige really began to peak global and people joined the party en masse. They were fellow traveling en masse, joining committees, all this kind of leagues against fascism, all these kind of communist front organizations. That was the heyday. It was as Stalin was communizing the country, as you have the whole of the more, as we now call it in Ukraine,

the terror famine under collectivization, five-year plans, trials of industrial records, millions of nipmen and recalcitrant peasants in places like Kazakhstan and Ukraine, you know, being thrown into these forced labor camps, mass executions, horrific political violence. That was when communism was kind of most popular and most prestigious. So, you know, it's true. Maybe people didn't understand the full story and maybe they had the kind of rosyade view of what was happening in this opening. But it was this image of the kind of aggressive dynamic building of utopia, the breaking of the eggs to build the omel. That's when communism was its most popular and most influential.

I want to come back to this period of the 20s and 30s in a second. But can we just let's stick with the Russian Revolution just for a second. You've written the whole book on this and obviously cover it in the current book. Can you just tell us a bit about 1970? but with the following lens in mind, which is obviously Marx's theory of the case is that all of this is on some level inevitable. This is the unfolding of a kind of Hegelian logic, the seizure of the means of production by the proletariat and the defeat of the ruling classes, et cetera.

But of course, here in the real world, there's a way in which what happens was actually highly contingent on a number of factors, Lenin's strategy, not a small factor among them. some rather irresponsible German state craft, it seems, in retrospect. Tell us about, tell us how contingent the Russian revolution actually was. I guess that's my question. Yeah, well, it certainly was contingent on a lot of factors, not least the support of the German imperial government for Lenin and has returned to Russia. You know, we should give Lenin at least some credit just as far as his innovations in doctrine.

Again, there's some Marxists who might say, oh, well, Lenin was kind of a heretic even in the Marxist tradition because, you know, he would say, for example, as they did in Stold Yelit, or what is to be done, this is long before the war back in 192, that, look, it's not quite happening in the way that a lot of Marxists said it would. You know, this kind of inevitable buildup of the tensions and the proletarians would get more and more numerous and eventually the integment of private property would sound. Lenin was not alone in trying to kind of adapt to changing circumstances. Somebody like Rosa Luxembourg also had certain ideas. She believed a little more in the potential of the workers to kind of figure it out on their own, whereas Lenin thought you needed to give history a

shove a little bit. It's sometimes called vanguardism or this kind of these party elites who may not necessarily themselves being workers, kind of giving history a shove. What both of them saw, though, you know, which probably was a little different than what Marx had seen in his own time, was that the imperialist rivalries between the great powers might function almost in the same way as Marx had seen this kind of inevitable proletarianization and the kind of the kind of the kind of the collection of more and more of the ownership of capital and fewer and fewer hands. It was a little more and fewer and fewer of these imperialist powers had conquered more and more of the globe and created greater kind of inequality and tensions over markets and that this would produce the cataclysm,

the kind of a civil war inside the capitalist world. And then the communist could really exploit that and sort of like march over the corpse of capitalism to the inevitable tribes. And so in theory, Lennon had already worked some of this out. He always needed some help. And And, you know, he would have just been some obscure Bolshevik. This is the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the so-called majority faction in exile. He would have been a fairly obscure figure, had not first, obviously, the First World War happened, and then led to this chaos and carnage and destruction and particularly led to, you know, all kinds of political tensions in Russia, other countries too, but particularly Russia. And then the Germans after the February Revolution in Russia, when the Tsar in the end was. forced to abdicate, really kind of by his own advisors and generals, very contingent in the Bolsheviks

and Lenin had almost nothing to do with that. But then Lenin figured out how to take advantage of it. The Germans ended back to Russia. And while a lot of the other people on the left in Russia, people like Kerenzky from the Socialist Revolutionary Party, they had more of a base among the peasants. And they were a little more patriotic and pro-war. And then you also had the Minchaviks who weren't quite as extreme as the Bolsheviks. And they're all kind of tying themselves in knots over the war question like, well, we don't really like the war. We don't want to be an imperialist war, but we also don't want to be conquered and we don't want to look like we're traders. And Lenin, again, kind of for good and for ill, was just much more brutally honest about this, you know, saying,

no, it's an unjust war, down with the war. Even though he had literally been kind of financed and logistically supported by the Germans. As some people were accusing him of being a traitor, he just embraced it. He said, no, we just, we end the war. And then once he finally did come to power. He did end the war. And to the extent there was any political message at all that resonated, and they didn't win a majority. You know, they did win, though, in the end, something like 24% of the vote in the November 1917 elections, which is not bad for what had recently been a fringe party. It was the anti-war message. It was a little bit like a bait and switch, though, because, of course, the ultimate goal was class war, cataclysm, and communism. And a lot of Russians

didn't really understand that. I think they thought, oh, well, at least Lenin wants to end the war. you know, they didn't realize he wanted to end one war and start another war in a whole series of war. So there was a kind of a bait and switch there. But it really kind of almost like a brilliant opportunism. And yes, it was definitely contingent on a lot of circumstances, the German help. Also, Kedrenzky's incompetence and not seeing it coming and allowing the Bolsheviks to arm themselves. There are all kinds of specific events in 1917 that were very contingent. But we do have to give some credit to Lenin just for the kind of consistency and ruthlessness of his vision.

And his willingness even to risk being labeled a traitor by ending the war almost immediately and, you know, basically almost begging the Germans for an armistice. A lot of people did call him a traitor, but, you know, in the end, it worked and he won. Well, his loyalty wasn't to Russia, was it? He was not a Russia. It wasn't the Germany either. I mean, it's not like he was acting as a German agent. His loyalty was to the revolution to communism.

Well, another, before we come back to this, this period, as you put it so well, you know, peak oppression and inhumanity at home sort of mirror maximal Soviet soft. power abroad with Stalin pre-war. But just sticking with Lenin for a minute and these sort of last few years of Lenin's life, but the first few years of the Soviet Union's life, just talk about, talk about the role of ideology and how Lenin prioritizes global revolution amidst an extremely chaotic period. I mean, we covered this a little bit in the last few minutes, but just, I mean, you

have the Russian Civil War, which is one of these things. It's kind of like the Chinese Civil War, which, you know, but for specialists, I think there's virtually no knowledge of these things in the United States. There's sort of these vast bloodlettings between armies in the heart of Eurasia, where the party that America preferred at the time loses. And there's just not a lot of knowledge of these things in America. So you've got the Russian Civil War. You've got wars to sort of secure the periphery of things. You do have post-World War I uprisings in Germany and Hungary, communist uprisings. You have the founding of the common turn. Put this all together for us. How does Lenin see the world in these first few years

of the Soviet. Well, right, as you said, he's not really loyal to Russia. In fact, well until probably like 1923 or so, although by then, Lenned had a series of strokes. And so he wasn't really kind of fully in charge of things anymore in the party or in Russia. A lot of the Bolsheviks, a lot of the communists in Russia still thought that there would be these kind of copycat or at the very least assisted revolutions in places like Germany and Hungary.

Germany was, for a lot of them, still kind of the center of things, not least because because so many of them had either spent time there, Marx himself having been German and kind of almost like the language of the movement of Marxism had been German. A lot of the prestige was German. And there were all these attempted uprisings after the war in Germany that almost followed Lenin's own logic of revolutionary defeatism because the Germans, even though they had been on an opposite from the Russians, the Russians lost, but then the Germans lost the year after in 1918. And there was very nearly, I mean, there was a pretty serious revolution in Germany where briefly, Spartacus kind of raised the red flag over Berlin, and they had these versions of the

Russian Soviets that is these councils of workers and soldiers that eventually gathered in Berlin, but unlike in Russia, they basically voted not to take power and they wanted to have proper so-called bourgeois elections. But Lenin absolutely viewed these as priorities. I mean, even as they're fighting the Russian Civil War, and you think they would have had much greater priorities closer to home. They are sending agents abroad, you know, often with, you know, things. like jewels and diamonds stitched into their jackets and secret kind of pamphlets and paraphernalia to try to foment and support revolutions across Europe. You know, they have their creating these new communist parties loyal to Moscow in most of

the rich industrialized countries of the world. You know, they're kind of intervening in Italian politics in the end, rather ineffectually. And they, it's not that they brought Mussolini to power, but certainly by kind of trashing and smearing the socialists who were opposing the Zalini, they probably didn't help. There was even some hope, believe it or not, for a revolution in Britain. There was some labor unrest in Britain afterwards. Lenin is absolutely just viewing Russia as kind of this almost like, you know, piece of the chessboard where he's envisioning this kind of global revolution.

Now, things did change a little bit in the early Stalin years. It wasn't really Stalin years, but after Lenin's death in the 20s, when the kind of post-war revolutionary wave in Europe had mostly Peter Vass. out and it looked like, well, maybe we should just concentrate on building communism at home or communism in one country, as Nikolai Bukharin and a few others who supported the new economic policy put it. But yeah, up until about 1923, at least, they're absolutely viewing the chaos in Russia is just almost like prelude to what they hoped would be a global revolution sweeping over the world. Now, they had to back down a little bit after most of those revolutions were

either suppressed as in Hungary, Belakun 100 days or Munich. A couple of of times briefly in Berlin. They're also supporting communism in China. And they're actually backing both the formal Communist Party in China, which Mao belongs to. But they're also backing the Kuomintang for a while, at least until 1927 under Chiang Kai Shack. So they're definitely thinking globally. I mean, that's, I think, the simplest answer to your question. Well, let me, let me fasten on to the very last thing that you said there, because I think it opens an interesting door for us, or a couple of interesting doors. So communist policy with regard to China, just what you just said, There's a communist party of China that's founded and a function of the common turns policy.

And there are sort of rules by which these parties are meant to adhere. They're the, what the 21 conditions. But at the same time, there's the, there's a nationalist movement, an anti-imperialist movement in China, the KMT. And these are the CCP and the KMT, of course, are the two parties who listeners will know will ultimately fight the Chinese civil war. And, you know, KMT takes off to Taiwan. And all of all of these problems are still alive and with us today. and have gone through numerous fascinating iterations and revolutions of their own over time.

What is the logic behind the United Front and sort of loosening, loosening the strict requirements of policy where you're not purely going to support communist parties pursuing communist aims, but actually work with kind of anyone who's an enemy of your enemy. Let's talk us through that. Right. Well, I mean, you see it in China. You would also see it in places like Spain and eventually even to some extent it would emerge

in Eastern Europe, you know, the idea that. you could support someone who was a client, you know, who would help to, again, as you call them, you know, the enemy of my enemies in this case is sort of like the capitalist world. So the elements in, let's say, the KMT that were similar to those in the CCP in China were that, you know, they opposed Western influence and domination. In practice, of course, they had to accept a lot of eventually, particularly after the communist, well, it was more China-Kashik who broke with the communists in 1927. Eventually, they have to kind of cultivate relations with the capitalist world

that is the KMT, the Chinese, we later called them nationalists, but originally they were really almost as much socialists and kind of anti-imperialists or anti-foreign as they were nationalist. There was always that element of that going back to Sun Yotson and really just kind of almost dominating Chinese politics. And it's understandable where it came from them. The humiliation of China in the 19th century, particularly in the opium wars with Britain, the kind of suppression of the boxers and the boxer rebellion, in China under the kind of jackboat of this European imperialist repression and order. And so there was definitely an element in China where the communists were not the only ones who were singing these kind of similar notes. And I think it also helped in the end to inform and to some extent

inspire and kind of define the dynamic of the CCP, you know, once they kind of blended together those elements with the more orthodox Marxist elements. So that, you know, you would see this in the early years, particularly after Mao Csies is powered 49. the Korean War years, also again in the 60s, there was a very strong xenophobic, hesperaphobic, anti-Western element in Chinese communism. But as far as the Soviet perspective, again, there it was supporting clients

who might, in the end, be useful in toppling and destroying and undermining the capitalist world. So for a while, China, Kajek was seen as very promising. Again, even though he was not formally a communist. And in fact, he was even invited to this anti-imperialist Congress in Brussels in 1927, although it turned out. He was just as he was actually about to kind of turn against the communist. He was a little bit too busy to come. But the idea was to use him in the same way that, let's say,

the fellow travelers were used or later on you could have these formerly non-communist governments, places like Spain during the Spanish Civil War, the so-called Republican government was not formally headed by a communist, but because it was opposing the reactionary forces of Franco, supported by in that case, Hitler and Mussolini. It was useful, you know, at times to have someone who was not formally a communist. And that could be true in other cases, too, if let's say during the Second World War is a great example of, let's say Britain and the United States are extremely friendly to the Soviet Union and giving them a lot of aid in the case of Len Lease aid, then you might want to tone down the Communist Party denunciation of those governments temporarily. You know,

so there could be these kind of tactical moves. But in China, it was a little bit like backing different horses and after 27, it was clear, Chiang Kai Shack had broken with the communists, and so all the support then went to Mao and the CCP. Although, as you talked about the United Front, which you mentioned, you know, in the 30s, and this is the Chinese version of the popular front, or at least briefly, they tried to have a truce between Mao and in China Kai Shik after the various encirclement campaigns and after the so-called Long March. And Mao was, I think, much, much keener at the time than Shai Shack. In the end, Shai Chai-Shek almost had to be kind of kidnapped and sort of threatened into going along with it. This turned out to be a little bit like waving the red flag

before Japan, and Japan ended up invading China. And it worked out very well from Stalin's purposes, because in the end, with China's forces, did all the fighting against Japan and Mao, just sort of by this time in the hinterland. There's even a secret agreement between Mao and Japan brokered by Stalin and the Soviets. You know, there are the idea is just, look, you foment chaos. You know, whether it's the civil war inside China or a Japanese invasion, all of these. things are salutary because in the end they're going to destroy the existing kind of peace, equilibrium capitalist order. And it's only in these circumstances of either global war, world war, civil war, the communists ever have a chance really of sniffing power.

And we've had Jackie Diel on the show to talk about this. And I'm an enormous fan of a paper she wrote about in her view how the United Front sort of way of thinking, if you like, is in the strategic DNA of the Chinese Communist Party. in this period, I guess it's the 30s, maybe it's the 20s and the 30s, the two different episodes, where the instructions from Moscow to the CCP are to not only cooperate with the KMT, but to co-op the KMT, to infiltrate the KMT, and sort of to seize control through insinuation of, or infiltration maybe, of existing anti-Western movements, that that remains central to the Chinese way of thinking about strategy.

I've always thought that was fascinating. Yeah, and I mean, there are examples in Europe, certainly during the Spanish Civil War, the Popular Front period. But, you know, there are also counter examples that period between 1928 and 34, really almost until 35. This was a so-called kind of class against class where the communists were supposed to denounce socialists and Germany and elsewhere as social fascists and really have nothing to do with them and, you know, view them as even worse than the fascists or the Nazis. Again, it depended on circumstances. In the end, I think that policy turned out to be counterproductive. It didn't actually work out well. them, but it took them a while to change it. But you're right. In the case of China, I think that was particularly effective. It was a very effective strategy. It's not that the communists were always kind of all seeing and they didn't always have the right moves and the right strategy, but at times, I think when they did, particularly this kind of the move towards infiltration and then using other movements as kind of a cover for the spread of communist policy. You can see this even in Eastern Europe after the Second World War, where for a couple of years it looked like

Shekelsovakia might escape the more extreme repression and control of Stalinism because there were these figures like Mazarek and Benesh, you know, were not communists, only it turned out that they were carrying out communist policies. And so that actually worked out perfectly well for the Soviet Union. You know, if so long as the policies were both aligned with Soviet needs and also communist in a sense of things like nationalization of property, confiscation of property, those kinds of things, which they were actually doing in Czechoslovak, even under the so-called. pluralistic government until 1948, then that was in some ways even better because you could advance both your policy aims and your foreign policy aims while under this kind of fig leaf

of a non-communist government. They didn't always have to be headed by communists. So we've walked up to this point a few times. So let's just push on through to the Second World War and the Cold War. Say what you will about the Second World War. I'm glad we fought it. I'm glad the fascists were defeated. It's a good thing for humanity. But the communists also, end up big winners. The United States, the Soviet Union are at, are the big winners of World War II, even though the Soviet Union has a near-death experience amidst it. There's Stalin sitting there in 45, 46. You can even take it up to 49 when the communists take over China. So now you have global communism as a real winner of the 1940s by 1949. A bit like you spoke to Lenin in the early 20s.

Speak to Stalin in his prioritization and his worldview at this point of really, substantial global influence. To what extent does Stalin keep alive hopes of global revolution and ideological expansionism? To what extent is he call it what you want, you know, or a Russian nationalist or, you know, primarily a kind of actor on behalf of the Russian state in his own more narrow interests? And how does all this start to start to play out as the Cold War begins? Well, I think because you could at least see some elements of this in, in the Soviet during the war, the rehabilitation of the church, the embrace of slightly more traditional patriotic themes in war propaganda. There has been this view, which you sometimes hear, that

Stalin, in fact, had kind of turned into this Russian nationalist monkeh. And of course, this is the way a lot of people in Russia today would like to view Stalin. They may not necessarily want to go back to collectivization and five-year plans and kind of hard communism, but they liked the fact that Stalin was a conqueror who kind of both conquered new territory, but also advanced what he might call a kind of a Russian, although then it was Soviet national interest. I do think this is a little bit misleading. There's obviously a certain grain of truth in it, and that he also just became more practiced at geopolitics. He was obviously very good at it. I mean, in his negotiations at Tehran and Yalta, which I talked about a lot of Stalin's war, he just wins kind of across the board. And a lot of

this is just his kind of skill and talent. He obviously has really good intelligence. He's also a very a stubborn and effective negotiator. That doesn't mean, though, that he ever abandoned the ideology. In fact, you might think again with, oh, well, now we have these Soviet armies occupying and conquering much of Eastern Europe. And, you know, as you point out, things are starting to go the communist way in Asia as well, although it takes a couple more years to roll up Shanghai's forces. Soviets have already expanded into Manchuria and Coral Islands.

You know, they've made some moves there. Well, okay, you've got the swaggering conquer aspect of Stalin. But he's still paranoid. He still thinks that the communist world is under siege. And after all, I mean, the Soviet losses during the war were horrendous. You know, the figures are people seem to have settled on some figure around 25 or 30 million war losses, were dead actually, including civilians. It's always a little bit murky as to how much we're counting soldiers, how much we're

counting civilians. There are some estimates that when it's highest 46 million, which I think is probably unrealistic. But the losses were tremendous. The loss is in obviously infrastructure, you know, things. were destroyed either an initial invasion or the Soviet counteroffensive or were burned down on the retreat. The Soviets were able to bring back a lot of movable property from Germany and other occupied countries of Europe, which did kind of help the seat Soviet industry and technology after the war, along with, of course, the American landlief. But that said, a lot of the country

was still kind of a ruin in 1945, 1946, you know. And so there's also this element of, you can say, well, Stalin's the great victor in a lot of ways he is, geopolitically, in terms of territory. But from his perspective, of course, the Soviets are still kind of like this beleaguered. It's larger now, but it's still kind of a communist island in this capitalist sea and surrounded by enemies. So there's still this element of kind of this paranoia. And so like a lot of the work on Stalin's later years, the doctors, there are a lot of works on the doctor's plot. There was even that humorous, but in some ways, interesting movie, The Death of Stalin that came out a few years ago. You know, this view that at the very end, and we still don't know the full

story precisely what transpired with Baria. But it's kind of amazing that after Stalin's death, Baria, his secret police chief, you know, at least for a little while, tried to wind down some of the paranoia and even tried to kind of soften Soviet control and gave the signal that maybe they actually weren't going to insist on communist policies and all their satellites, that maybe they wanted to have a kind of rep Rushman with the West. And then he was killed for this, of course, you know, by the Politburo and Zhukov and the others, he was seen as kind of dangerous. selling out Soviet interests. But there definitely was a kind of a danger of war. You know, we forget how tense the early 50s were, you know, with the atomic race, the Soviet H-bomb, obviously the Korean

war, China going almost to this kind of full apocalyptic war footing against the United States and the Soviets, you know, really being quite paranoid at the time about the Americans. You know, there's definitely still this element of paranoid encirclement. I don't think he gave up that is on, you know, the vision of, yes, expansion, but also kind of feeling like they were surrounded by hostile enemies. You know, I think that was definitely a sense you got. And the other thing is the repression actually in some ways stepped back up, of course, in the Soviet Union after the war. There are all these new categories. You could be an admirer of American democracy. That was one of my favorites, you know, that this is one of the categories of class enemy. You know, so there

was this paranoia, not least because actually the Soviets had gotten more engaged with the simply in order to defeat Nazi Germany. And a lot of Soviet soldiers had been abroad. And a lot of other Soviet government officials had been abroad and had met foreigners and had exposed to foreign influence. So it was kind of also this paranoia of the returning soldiers, the so-called the pawns of Yalta, many of whom were sent into internal exile or arrested. You know, so there's definitely not a sense of an easing of tension between the communist and the capitalist world. You know, quite the opposite. with obviously some of the famous early Cold War episodes such as Wakate in Berlin, the Berlin airlift, eventually, you know, the Marshall Plan is over to response to it.

You know, it was a very tense period, you know, that maybe like those of us who lived through the later Cold War, sometimes we have almost this nostalgia for almost just kind of how simple and binary the world was. But of course, those who were living through it at the time, particularly in the more tense stages of the Cold War, it really was quite terrifying. And so Post-Dolan then, under Khrushchev, to what extent is the sort of cocktail you just described altered. And this has been a theme in the show. I've had a number of people come on and and talk about, you know, various, various episodes in Cold War history. We've had Sergey Renschenko on,

and I'm going to, I'm going to summarize his, his overview as it's really complicated. You have to be in the archives and looking at the specifics. And I respect that. Vad Max Hastings on to talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis in the course of that conversation. He just flatly declared that there's no such thing as Soviet plans for world domination, just in general, that that wasn't, that wasn't a thing that was a function of American Cold War paranoia. You know, how does how, how does the Soviet policy evolve or change after Stalin? Well, so initially into Barry, again, there's almost this complete winding down of everything of the repression of terror and then, you know, even to some extent of the Soviet kind of suppression

and control of its satellites, but this is, of course, rejected. Barry is arrested and rather brutally, brutally executed. So Khrushchev, although there were certainly. elements of, well, we might call Thaw under Khrushchev in the cultural realm. I mean, things like allowing, you know, certain people, a little bit of a windy down of the gulag continued. And there was the allowance of books such as day in the life of the Denisovic, Solzhenits, and, you know, certain kind of surprisingly dissident works would appear. But in the foreign policy realm, it was kind of back to confrontation. And, of course, you know, one can have exceptions

to this, right? Before the Gary Power's spy plane was shut down, there was supposed to be a which might have led to some easing of tensions. Apparently they even built a golf course for Eisenhower outside Moscow. But then, of course, he never went. So one doesn't know. Maybe there might have been a lessening of tensions. If the dynamic between Kennedy and Khrushchev might have been a little bit different, particularly at their Vienna summit, you know, possible Khrushchev might not have tried the brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis. No, my own reading of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I don't know exactly what it was that Max Hastings said. You know, it was certainly true that the Soviet move there was, I think, more about trying to attain, if not parity, than at the very

least, to respond to what really was at the time a kind of American nuclear superiority. Kennedy had talked about a missile gap. He actually kind of had it backwards, as I think eventually he learned once he was in the White House, that the real strategic dynamic of the Cold War, at least until the Dayton years, was that the Soviets had massive conventional superiority in Europe. And yet the Americans had the nuclear umbrella, at least a superiority in striking power capacity with ICBMs. And they also had, of course, the short-range Jupiter missiles in Turkey, which ended up being bartered for the Soviet missiles in Cuba. But some of the recent archival revelations have shown that, in fact, the Soviets even tried to hide warheads in Cuba even after the missiles were

removed. You know, that is that it was hardly this like total surrender across the board. And then, of course, we know there was this no invasion pledge after the U.S. had been kind of mucking around. in places like the Bay of Pigs. And so Khrushchev could have claimed this as a little bit of a face-saving negotiation, that is, that the Americans, they got rid of the Jupiter missiles, and also they agreed to the no-in-invasion pledge. I think things were genuinely tense. There was nothing fake or sort of gussied up about the Cuban missile crisis. It was extremely tense and extremely significant at the time. And I think, you know, we should be grateful to some extent to both Kennedy and Khrushchev for backing down from the brink at the end. As far as

is that idea about the Soviet world domination. I mean, if you move into the Brezhnev years, sure, there's a certain kind of almost sclerosis that sets in, you know, where the Soviets are a little bit less maybe dynamic and ambitious and they're a little more devoted to just holding on to their winnings. I mean, the so-called Brezhnev doctrine is not that the Soviets are going to go out and conquer every country in the world, but rather that to hold on to the countries that already have. This is the one that famously is later kind of toppled in a news conference when Garasimov tells, I think it was good morning today. It was one of those American television programs.

I forget which one when he said, now we have the Sinatra Doctrine. Those countries are free to go my way. You know, there was still some teeth in Soviet totalitarianism, as we saw in places like Prague. Obviously, well, Budapest, 56 was even more violent, Prague and 68. You know, some of the regimes were quite ferocious, although, oddly enough, some of the more repressive ones like Mao's and China

or like Choshescus and Romania were actually somewhat aloof from the Soviets. But we have, I talk a lot about the war in Afghanistan, in part because of the way it kind of helps to finally topple the Soviets. But it shows they certainly were willing to fight and at times to expand the map, to expand the boundaries of communism if they saw opportunities. But yeah, I think it was a little more about making these kind of incremental advances here and there. In fact, even the extremes of the great leap forward and the great proletarian cultural revolution in China, the Soviets even, I think just, partly because of the aging of the leadership and maybe just becoming increasingly more comfortable with their relatively secure position in the world were probably a little bit less manic and kind of dynamic and ambitious than Mao was in that era. Whereas I absolutely think that if Mao wasn't better

in global domination, it was the very least bent on making up for whatever the Soviets were kind of lacking in Ailan and revolutionary enthusiasm. But yeah, realistically, obviously China did not have the military force or the satellites to really expand and even really to replace the Soviet. So a lot of that was just rhetoric. I mean, even the famous, we will bury you quote from Khrushchev when he's talking about things like meat and milk production and eventually industrial production. The Soviets were hoping to surpass the United States in many categories, whereas the Chinese under Mao were saying, no, we may not catch the U.S., but we want to surpass Britain. And so, you know, even there, there were some limits to the ambition. Yeah, the repeat.

repeated suggestion today in 2025 that American policy should aim at pulling a, quote, reverse Kissinger to separate the Russians from the Chinese because it was so straightforward and easily done under Nixon. You know, why couldn't we explore the same thing today? I'm always it pains to explain in those circumstances. And I'm not a professional historian of the period, but I know enough to explain that the Sino-Soviet split somewhat precedes Nixon and Kissinger's efforts to drive a wedge through it. And one of the really interesting, yeah, indeed. And one of the really interesting aspects of the split that you just kind of point to in terms of Mao's sort of, you know, relative extremism in the day is kind of Mao's discussed at the post-Stalin trajectory of the

Soviet Union, the way in which Khrushchev rejects Stalin and Stalinism's importance to Mao and Mao's governing ideology, which further complicates the split, or at least, I should say, further complicates how we should understand what actually happened when Kissinger and then Nixon went to China and how complicated it actually was. Right. This so-called secret speech, even though it was almost immediately transmitted to party members and then leaked and eventually the New York Times picked it up and so on. This is February, 1956. Khrushchev really did disown almost not the entire legacy of Stalin, but a large part of it. I mean, this is kind of a very shocking moment in the history of communism. And a lot of Western admirers of Stalin and the Soviet Union didn't really know what to do

afterwards. In fact, this even kind of affected, you might say, intellectual history and that a lot of historians have pointed out that Tiemannismo or the whole idea of the third world didn't really emerge until after. Khrushchev had disillusioned so many Western admirers of communism that they had to have a new cause to embrace. And the new cause turned out to me, some of it was because of the Bandung conference the previous year, but it was kind of this, oh, well, look, The third world could be untainted by either capitalism and imperialism or communism. So we'll be kind of, you know, free to develop in its own way. But yeah, as far as Mao, absolutely, this is a betrayal.

A betrayal and the Soviets have kind of shown that they are no longer really true communists. They even stop sharing nuclear information with China in 1959. And the scientists at the times, even at 69 and 70, there were even kind of brief military engagements on the border. So you're right about that. I think you're right, there was almost a decade plus, almost 12, 13 years or so of a kind of emerging sign of Soviet split, but preceded the Nixon move to split China off from Russia. No, that doesn't mean it's not a potentially useful idea.

That does mean, though, that you're right. I mean, there might need to be, you know, Russian-Chinese relations might have to be substantially colder than they currently are for it really to be a realistic prospect. We can obviously U.S. Russian relations right now have been kind of in the deep freeze almost for the better part of a decade, particularly the last three years. And so, yeah, difficult as it might be. The idea isn't necessarily, I think, without some merit. But I think you're right. It's important to look at both the backstory and also the kind of the geopolitical limitations. I want to be respectful of your time. We've covered a ton of ground here. Some episodes will cover the events of a few hours or a couple of days. Here we've been covering a whole century plus. One last question. From what you, you've learned in your career as a student of revolutionary communism, when you look at Xi Jinping in 2025, what do you want to point out to the rest of us? Well, it's a great question. I mean, certainly Chinese communism now does not bear a particularly close resemblance in a lot of ways to what you might have seen under Mao in 50s,

Mao in the late 50s, early 60s, greatly forward or even the great proletarian cultural revolution. And I don't think there's this world beating, world conquering sense, you know, even at home, I think a lot of the revolutionary dynamism in Ailan has a long since given way to a more almost kind of just rationalistic planning aspect. I mean, the way I talk about it in the book is some of the old elements about, let's say communism requires ownership of the means of production, state ownership of the means of production. You know, the party still indirectly controls a lot of the Chinese economy, but obviously there's a rather large private black market sector.

even if the party gets to kind of pick winners and losers. So I don't think the kind of the threat, let's say, to either Western values or a way of life is quite the same as you might have seen from the years of kind of high Stalinism or high Maoism, even as far as just people being fellow travelers or kind of trying to embrace those ideas. But some of it I still think, and I guess this is what I was trying to get out in my epilogue, certain elements of communist practice, which have in some ways actually, you might even say, been streamlined or improve, that is to say, the repression, the censorship, the state control of information, the social credit system.

You know, you saw much blunter extreme versions of this, let's say in the Soviet Union, where, of course, you couldn't advance anywhere if you didn't join the party, and they had a whole kind of a youth network, the pioneers and the comsimal, and here's how you got ahead and you had to go to the meetings, you had to vote a certain way, and you had to have the approved thoughts. It's much subtler than that now. But I do think that the regime that he embraces, and in some ways I think he's done so more than some of his predecessors, you know, that it does have this ambitious ethos of social control, which again may not be an overt model in the same way that, let's say a lot of people

either join the party or joined front committees in the 1930s. It's not like there are a lot of people around the world saying, oh, I want to do things like the CCP. Rather, I think it's a little subtler and it's more insidious. I think that the influence has spread, you know, in some ways through China's market power and places like Europe and the United States in some ways more obviously through the Confucius institutes. But I think more just that it's a little bit of this thing where I remember back in the 90s when I was in Model UN among other things. There were all these debates about U.S. policy vis-to-vis China and the idea of opening up China. And back then the argument was that we should trade with China. We should kind of can open up to China. Some of it went

all the way back to Nixon. Some of it was newer. Eventually some of it was kind of cemented with China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001, because that way will make them more like us. That is to say, you know, it's true. They crushed the rebels, the student protesters at Tiananmen Square. Maybe rebels is the right word. I apologize if anyone was offended by that. Protesters will call them. They obviously crushed them, suppressed them. They obviously did not introduce any kind of genuine democracy or accountability to the public. However, if we trade with them, they'll be a little bit more like us. and eventually they'll develop liberal political institutions. That doesn't seem to have happened.

If anything, the opposite seems to have happened. I mean, if anything, I think we've come to resemble them more than they resemble us. It is to say, you know, our own public life is, I think, and increasingly kind of taken over by social controls. And, you know, the early euphoria about the Internet, maybe we should have been suspicious because the Internet was originally Arpinet, a project of basically the Pentagon of the Defense Department. Maybe we shouldn't have been surprised that in the end,

these tools of social or political liberation could also be turned against us by governments, large corporations, et cetera. I mean, it's something to worry about. I think, you know, we just have to we just have to stay vigilant and, you know, make sure that our own traditions, I think, are upheld. Well, Sean, we'll bring you back some time to talk about the global designs of universal liberalism. Right. We're next subject. Sean McMeekin, author of To Overthrow the World, the Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. This was really great. Thank you so much for coming back, Sean. Yep, thanks for having me on again, Aaron. It was a lot of fun.

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