Stephen Kotkin

How do you undo the autocracy and get to an evolutionary mode when the autocracy itself is committed to

not allowing any political participation whatsoever.

And so you have the leftist version of overthrow, where you end up with a radicalization in the leftist direction.

And you have a rightist version of overthrow, where you end up in a kind of, oh, we're not going to have Leninism here.

Let's prevent Leninism.

Let's go with the radical right.

So the traditional right invites, as happened in the German case,

and earlier in the Italian case, invites the radical right to power, thinking they can control the radical right, the fascism, the Nazism.

The traditional right is wrong.

The radical right, once it's invited to power, institutionalizes itself.

So you get a leftist version of this and a rightist version of this, and then they're kind of...

codependent, where each uses the threat of the other to further consolidate their dictatorship.

So this is the 20th century version.

The irony here is that you got the radical right, the fascist solution in the German case, and you got the radical left, the socialist solution in the czarist case.

The czarist regime had a massive radical right.

They had the protocols of the elders of Zionism, that infamous tract, anti-Semitic tract, which then makes its way to Germany but originates in the czarist empire.

So the anti-Semitism is there.

The right-wing movement is there, implanted in villages, the union of the Russian people.

Russia has the fascism before Germany.

Germany has the largest socialist party in its parliament.