Stephen Kotkin

In the sense that it's not a majority, but it's a plurality.

The Social Democrats in Germany are enormously successful at the ballot box.

And the right-wing movement with the anti-Semitism is enormously successful in the streets in Tsarist Russia.

So if you were alive before 1917, 1933, you would predict...

That the socialism would be victorious, would triumph in Germany, and the fascism would triumph in the Russian Empire.

But it's the opposite.

And so that's just a fascinating, amazing paradox that I tried to deal with in the first two volumes.

You put your finger on a big part of it when you talked about Chiang Kai-shek and land reform.

You have this peasant land hunger.

And so the peasants...

are often without their own holdings.

They work on someone else's property or their holdings are so small that if there's a little bit of bad weather, let alone a massive drought, they're on the verge of starvation.

So subsistence level agriculture is not politically stable.

So you want a class of people, kind of yeoman capitalists, property owners who can expand their farms and can succeed

And higher labor and some of those hired hands can then get their own land and become a version of these yeoman farmers, sort of Thomas Jefferson style.

Or Stalipan, the great attempted reform of Stalipan after the 1905 revolution, which ends in his assassination.

So you need to deal with the peasant land hunger so that it becomes a stabilizing political force because the peasants get the land and then they have a piece of the status quo and they want to retain the system versus the peasants don't have the land and they want to overthrow the system to get the land.

So in the Russian case, there is the end of serfdom in the 1860s, again, as a result of the defeat in the Crimean War, where there is a reform.

They free the serfs, emancipation of the serfs.

But the serfs don't get the land to the degree that could have happened because the landowners are the political support of the Tsarist autocracy.