Stephen Kotkin

And so you have this in the other European cases.

In one case, you don't have this in the Russian case.

Then you're going to get to the Chinese case later, which is going to be a variant of what happened in the Russian case, where you have a gigantic land-hungry peasantry that's going to become radical for a time.

Again, there are going to be perverse and unintended consequences.

The peasants are ready to destroy the existing order, not to bring communists to power, but to seize the land themselves.

So in the 1920s, the peasants are de facto, not de jure landowners.

They don't own the property in law.

They own it in fact.

But then Stalin's going to reverse the peasant revolution violently and

and reinsert or enslave the peasants across all the 11 time zones, this gigantic Eurasia, and the peasant revolution is gonna be annihilated in blood.

And so the peasants have, through their radicalism of seizing the land,

have helped bring Lenin and his Bolsheviks to power in the cities, which is going to be the death of the peasants, owning of the land, and instead the reinsertment of the peasants.

And something similar is going to happen in the Chinese case.

So again, there's this irony of history, perverse and unintended consequences.

Stalin is fighting against czarist injustice only to impose worse injustice and worse bloodshed and worse repression.

And the peasants are fighting on behalf of obtaining the land only to then be expropriated and forced into these collectives and losing the very land, the land that they took in the seizures that brought these leftists to power in the case.

So in Central Europe, the Southern German case, the Northern Italian case, the Hungarian case,

you don't have the endurance of the leftists in power.

They're all thrown out.

They're thrown out by the forces of order.