Ep 182: Sean McMeekin on Communism

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

Aaron MacLean:

Hi, I am Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show today, Sean McMeekin, who is the Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College. He's 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.

Sean McMeekin:

Thanks for having me.

Aaron MacLean:

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 will have missed it, you should go back, and we'll probably elide 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.

Sean McMeekin:

Sure.

Aaron MacLean:

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 this into high gear and operationalizes 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.

Sean McMeekin:

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 Babeuf 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 Babeuf was also 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 Marx picks up on this, and he says, "You all say that 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 Franco-Prussian War, and the Paris Commune, and the violent suppression of the Commune in 1871, a lot of people thought Marx might've 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 manifesto of the Communist Party laid out in the manifesto by Marx and Engels.

A lot of people in Europe were kind of blaming Marx, because they had this organization called the First Working Men's 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 all these kind of archbishops, and bourgeois notables being taken hostage and executed, and then on the other side, with the army pouring in, mowing down communards, including women and children, Marx didn't just kind of endorse this and embraced it, but he said, "This is absolutely essential, and we're just... [inaudible 00:03:49] like the bourgeois 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 fine, because that just proves the kind of bona fides and the commitment of the communists."

Lenin's contribution, I think, which was significant, was he was also almost intermentalizing 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 prophesying that, "Look, 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 abode of war and the abode of peace, but then you'd have one communist country. The imperialist war 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 was writing this at a time when much of the civilized world, those who weren't actually out doing the kind of 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, 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."

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 trying 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."

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. And the way in which there seems to be tension between that, and then the profession of the commitment to justice, which is really how left totalitarianism leads, and 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, and turning that over into a better world.

Sean McMeekin:

Well, that's right, and I think the violence is a part of the attraction. I mean, just to give you 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 you'd 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 lot 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 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 globally. People joined the party en masse. They were fellow traveling en masse, joining committees, all this kind of leagues against fascism, all these communist front organizations. That was the heyday. It was as Stalin was communizing the country, as you had the Holodomor, as we now call it in Ukraine, the terror famine under collectivization, five-year plans, trials of industrial records, millions of Nepmen, and recalcitrant peasants in places like Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, 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, it's true, maybe people didn't understand the full story, and maybe they had the kind of rosy eyed view of what was happening in the Soviet Union, but it was this image of the kind of aggressive dynamic building of utopia, the breaking of the eggs to build the omelet, that's when communism was its most popular, and most influential.

Aaron MacLean:

I want to come back to this period of the '20s and '30s in a second, but let's stick with the Russian Revolution just for a second, because you've written a whole book on this, and obviously cover it in the current book. Can you just tell us a bit about 1917, 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 statecraft, it seems, in retrospect. Tell us about how contingent the Russian Revolution actually was. I guess that's my question.

Sean McMeekin:

Yeah, well, it certainly was contingent on a lot of factors, not least the support of the German imperial government for Lenin, and his return to Russia. 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 the heretic even in the Marxist tradition," because he would say for example, as he did in Chto delat

? or, What is to be Done? This is long before the war back in 1902, that look, it's not quite happening the way that a lot of Marxists said it would. This kind of inevitable buildup of the tensions, and the proletarians would get more and more numerous, and eventually the integument of private property would sound... Lenin was not alone in trying to kind of adapt to changing circumstances.

Somebody like Rosa Luxemburg 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, that 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, 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 collection of more and more of the ownership of capital in fewer and fewer hands. It was a little more like 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 communists could really exploit that, and sort of march over the corpse of capitalism to the inevitable tribes.

And so, in theory, Lenin had already worked some of this out. He obviously needed some help, and he would've just been some obscure Bolshevik. This is the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, the so-called majority faction in exile. He would've 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 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, and Bolsheviks and Lenin had almost nothing to do with that. But then Lenin figured out how to take advantage of it. The Germans sent it back to Russia, and while a lot of the other people on the left in Russia, and people like Kerensky 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 Mensheviks, 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 it to be an imperialist war, but we also don't want to be conquered, and we don't want to look like we're traitors." And Lenin, again, kind of for good, and for ill, was just much more brutally honest about this, 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 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, 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." They didn't realize he wanted to end one war, and start another war, and a whole series of wars. 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 Kerensky's incompetence in 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 basically almost begging the Germans for an armistice. A lot of people did call him a traitor, but in the end it worked, and he won.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, his loyalty wasn't to Russia, was it? He was not a traitor [inaudible 00:14:16].

Sean McMeekin:

It wasn't to Germany either. I mean, it's not like he was acting as a German agent. His loyalty was to the revolution to communism.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, before we come back to this period, where as you put it so well, 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 last few years of Lenin's life, but the first few years of the Soviet Union's life, just 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 you have the Russian Civil War, which is one of these things. It's kind of like the Chinese Civil War, but for specialists. I think there's virtually no knowledge of these things in the United States. There's these vast blood lettings between armies and 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, in 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 Union?

Sean McMeekin:

Well right, as you said, he's not really loyal to Russia, in fact, well until probably like 1923 or so, although by then Lenin had 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 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 so many of them had either spent time there, or 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 upside 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 for 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've had much greater priorities closer to home, they are sending agents abroad, often with 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. They have, they're creating these new communist parties, loyal to Moscow in most of the rich industrialized countries of the world. They're kind of intervening in Italian politics, in the end, rather ineffectually. It's not that they brought Mussolini to power, but certainly by kind of trashing, and smearing the socialists who were opposing Mussolini, 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 after the war. So, Lenin is absolutely just viewing Russia as kind of this almost like 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 petered 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 as 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, Béla Kun, the 100 Days, or in Munich, a couple 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-shek. So, they're definitely thinking globally. I mean, that's, I think, the simplest answer to your question.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, let me fasten onto 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 is a function of the cominterns policy, and there are rules by which these parties are meant to adhere, with the 21 conditions, but at the same time, there's a nationalist movement, an anti-imperialist movement in China. The KMT, and the CCP and the KMT of course, are the two parties who listeners will know will ultimately fight the Chinese Civil War, and KMT takes off to Taiwan, and 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 loosening the strict requirements of policy, where you're not purely going to support communist parties pursuing communist aims, but actually work with anyone who's an enemy of your enemies? Let's talk us through that.

Sean McMeekin:

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. The idea that you could support someone who was a client, who would help to, again, as you call them, the enemy of my enemies in this case, is sort of like the capitalist world, so that the elements in, let's say the KMT that were similar to those in the CCP in China, were that they opposed Western influence and domination. In practice, of course, they had to accept a lot of/// eventually, particularly after the communists... Well, it was more Chiang Kai-shek 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 call them nationalists, but originally they really almost as much socialists, and kind of anti-imperialists or anti-foreigner as they were nationalists.

There was always that element of that, going back to Sun Yat-sen, and really just kind of almost dominating Chinese politics, and it's understandable where it came from, 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, China under the kind of jackboot 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, once they kind of blended together those elements with the more orthodox Marxist elements, so that you would see this in the early years, particularly after Mao seizes power in '49, and the Korean War years, also again in the '60s, there was a very strong xenophobic, 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 of the capitalist world. So for a while, Chiang Kai-shek was seen as very promising. Again, even though he was not formally a communist, and in fact, he was even invited to the Santee Imperialist Congress in Brussels in 1927, although it turned out it was just as he was actually about to kind of turn against the communists in China.

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 formally 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 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 lend-lease aid, then you might want to tone down the Communist Party denunciation of those governments temporarily. 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-shek 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, in the '30s, and this is the Chinese version of the popular front, where at least briefly, they tried to have a truce between Mao and Chiang Kai-shek after the various Encirclement campaigns, and after the so-called Long March, and Mao was, I think much, much keener at the time than Chiang Kai-shek, in the end, Chiang Kai-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, it was Chinese forces doing all the fighting against Japan, and Mao just sort of bide his time in the hinterland, and there was even a secret agreement between Mao and Japan brokered by Stalin and the Soviets. There, the idea is just, look, you foment chaos, whether it's the Civil War inside China, or a Japanese invasion, all 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, or civil war that communists ever have a chance really of sniffing power.

Aaron MacLean:

And we've had Jackie Deal 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-opt the KMT, to infiltrate the KMT, and to seize control through insinuation, 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,

Sean McMeekin:

Yeah, and I mean there are examples in Europe, certainly during the Spanish Civil War, the popular front period, but 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 in Germany and elsewhere as social fascists, and really have nothing to do with them, and 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 for 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 could see this even in Eastern Europe after the Second World War, where for a couple of years, it looked like Czechoslovakia might escape the more extreme repression, and control of Stalinism, because there were these figures like Masaryk, and Benes, 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, so long as the policies were both aligned with Soviet needs, and also communist in the sense of things like nationalization of property, confiscation of property, those kinds of things, which they were actually doing in Czechoslovakia, 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.

Aaron MacLean:

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 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, and 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, a Russian nationalist, or primarily a kind of actor on behalf of the Russian state, and his own more narrow interests, and how does all of this start to play out as the Cold War begins?

Sean McMeekin:

Well, I think because you could at least see some elements of this in the Soviet Union 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 see here, that Stalin in fact had kind of turned into this Russian nationalist [inaudible 00:27:53], 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 you 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 in that he also just became more practiced at geopolitics, and he was obviously very good at it. I mean, in his negotiations at Tehran, and Yalta, which I talked about a lot in 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 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 as you point out, things are starting to go the communist way in Asia as well, though it takes a couple more years to roll up Chiang Kai-shek's forces. Soviets have already expanded into Manchuria, and Kuril Islands. They've made some moves there.

Well, okay, you've got the swaggering conqueror 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. The figures are... People seem to have settled on some figure around 25 or 30 million war losses, war 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 went as high as 46 million, which I think is probably unrealistic, but the losses were tremendous, the losses in obviously infrastructure, things that were destroyed either in the 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 to seed Soviet industry and technology after the war, along with of course, the American lend-lease aid. But that said, a lot of the country was still kind of a ruin in 1945, 1946.

And so, there's also this element of, again, you could 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 this paranoia, and so, like a lot of the work on Stalin's later years, of the doctors... Put 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.

This view that at the very end, and we still don't know the full story of precisely what transpired with Beria, but it's kind of amazing that after Stalin's death, Beria and his secret police chief, 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 this signal that maybe they actually weren't going to insist on communist policies in all their satellites, that maybe they wanted to have a kind of rapprochement with the West. I mean, he was killed for this, of course, 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. We forget how tense the early '50s were, 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 really being quite paranoid at the time about the Americans. There's definitely still this element of paranoid encirclement. I don't think he gave up, that is, on the vision of yes, expansion, but also kind of feeling like they were surrounded by hostile enemies. 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. This is one of the categories of class enemy. So, there was this paranoia, not at least because actually, the Soviets had gotten more engaged with the West 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 been exposed to foreign influence. So, there was kind of also this paranoia about the returning soldiers, the so-called the pawns of Yalta, many of whom were sent into internal exile or arrested.

So, there's definitely not a sense of an easing of tension between the communist and the capitalist world. Quite the opposite, with obviously some of the famous early Cold War episodes such as the Blockade of Berlin, and Berlin Airlift, eventually the Marshall Plan, the Soviet response to it. It was a very tense period, that maybe... 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.

Aaron MacLean:

And so post-Stalin, then, under Khrushchev, to what extent is the cocktail you just described altered? And this has been a theme in the show. I've had a number of people come on and talk about various episodes in Cold War history. We've had Sergey Radchenko on, and I'm going to summarize his overview as, it's really complicated. You have to be in the archives and looking at the specifics, and I respect that. We've had 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 a thing, that was a function of American Cold War paranoia. How does the Soviet policy evolve, or change after Stalin?

Sean McMeekin:

Well, so initially under Beria, again, there's almost this complete winding down of everything, of the repression of terror, and then even to some extent of the Soviet suppression, and control of its satellites. But this is, of course, rejected. Beria is arrested, and rather brutally executed. So, Khrushchev, although there were certainly elements of what we might call thaw under Khrushchev in the cultural realm, I mean things like allowing certain people... A little bit of a winding down of the gulag continued, and there was allowance of books such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn, certain kind of surprisingly dissident works would appear, but in the foreign policy realm, it was kind of back to confrontation, and course one can have exceptions to this. Right?

Before that Gary Powers' spy plane was shot down, there was supposed to be a summit, which might've 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've been a lessening of tensions if the dynamic between Kennedy and Khrushchev might've been a little bit different, particularly at their Vienna Summit. It's 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, it was certainly true that the Soviet move there was, I think, more about trying to attain, if not parody, 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 detente 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 of Jupiter missiles in Turkey, which ended up being bartered for the Soviet missiles in Cuba.

But no, 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. That is that it was hardly this total surrender across the board, and then of course, we know there was this no invasion pledge after the US 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 got rid of the Jupiter missiles, and also they agreed to the no 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 we should be grateful to some extent, to both Kennedy and Khrushchev for backing down from the brink at the end.

As far as that idea about the Soviet world domination, I mean, if you move into Brezhnev years, sure, there's a certain kind of almost sclerosis that sets in, where the Soviets are a little bit less maybe dynamic, and ambitious, and they're a little more devoted to just holding onto 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 they'll hold onto the countries that they already have. This is the one that famously is later kind of toppled in a news conference, when Gerasimov 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."

There was still some teeth in Soviet totalitarianism, as we saw in places like Prague. Obviously, Budapest in '56 was even more violent, Prague in '68. Some of the regimes were quite ferocious, although, oddly enough, some of the more repressive ones, like Mao's in China, or Ceaușescu's in 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 bent on global domination, he was the very least bent on making up for whatever the Soviets were kind of lacking in elan, and revolutionary enthusiasm. But yeah, realistically, obviously, China did not have the military force, or the satellites to really expand, and [inaudible 00:38:24] really replace the Soviets. A lot of that, that was just rhetoric. I mean, even the famous, "We will bury you," quote from Khrushchev when he is 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 US, but we want to surpass Britain." And so, even there, there were some limits to the ambition.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. The repeated suggestion today, in 2025, that American policy should aim at pulling a "reverse Kissinger," to separate the Russians from the Chinese, because it was so straightforward and easily done under Nixon, why couldn't we explore the same thing today? I'm always at 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-

Sean McMeekin:

That's a good point.

Aaron MacLean:

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 relative extremism in the day, is kind of Mao's disgust 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.

Sean McMeekin:

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 19... 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, in that a lot of historians have pointed out that Tiers-mondisme, 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 be... Some of it was because the Bandung Conference the previous year, but it was kind this, "Oh, well, look, the Third World could be untainted by either capitalism, and imperialism, or communism, so will be kind of 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 stopped sharing nuclear information with China in 1959, in the Sino-Soviet split times, even in '69 and '70, there were even kind of brief military engagements on the border. So, you're right about that. I mean, I think you're right. There was almost a decade plus, almost 12, 13 years or so, of a kind of emerging Sino-Soviet split, preceded the Nixon move to split China off from Russia.

Now, that doesn't mean it's not a potentially useful idea. That does mean though, that you're right. I mean, Russian-Chinese relations might have to be substantially colder than they currently are for it really to be a realistic process. We can obviously... US-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 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.

Aaron MacLean:

I want to be respectful of your time. We've covered a ton of ground here. Some episodes we'll cover the events of a few hours or a couple days. Here we've been covering a whole century plus. One last question. From what 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?

Sean McMeekin:

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've seen under Mao in the '50s, Mao in the late '50s, early '60s, Great Leap Forward, or even the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. I don't think there's this world-beating, world-conquering sense. Even at home, I think a lot of the revolutionary dynamism and elan has 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. The party still indirectly controls a lot of the Chinese economy, but obviously there's a rather large private and 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've seen from the years 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 at in my epilogue, certain elements of communist practice, which have in some ways actually, you might even say have been streamlined or improved, that is to say, the repression, the censorship, the state control of information, the social credit system.

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 Komsomol, 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 some more than some of his predecessors, 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 join 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, in some ways through China's market power, in 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 US policy vis-a-vis China, and the idea of opening up China, and back then the argument was that we should trade with China. We should 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, no, it's true. They crushed the rebels, the student protesters at Tiananmen Square, maybe rebels isn't the right word, apologize if anyone was offended by that, protesters, we'll 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. That is to say, our own public life is, I think, increasingly kind of taken over by social controls, and the early euphoria about the internet. Maybe we should have been suspicious, because the internet was originally ARPANET, a project of basically the Pentagon, and 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 think it's something to worry about. I think we just have to stay vigilant, and make sure that our own traditions, I think, are upheld.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, Sean, we'll bring you back some time to talk about the global designs of universal liberalism.

Sean McMeekin:

Right.

Aaron MacLean:

That’ll be our 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.

Sean McMeekin:

Yep. Thanks for having me on again, Aaron, it was a lot of fun.

Aaron MacLean:

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