Stephen Kotkin

It's that act.

It's a kind of chicken and egg thing where how do you enslave the peasants without the gigantic secret police?

But then when you enslave the peasants, the result is you have this gigantic secret police now that can do everything and anything.

So it's a process where the chicken and egg are happening simultaneously and they're building the secret police capacity while enslaving the peasants that they didn't have before.

created this level of again fantastic question so we get this from Lev Kopelev education of a true believer he was one of these people he later then becomes a dissident he gets forced into exile in Germany he's a Germanist by profession

And he writes this fantastic memoir, a couple of memoirs, but one of them is called Education of a True Believer, which covers how he was the one who did this, including in his native village.

So here's your answer.

On the one hand, there's ideology and the importance of ideology, right?

We may think that no one really believes the ideology, that the ideology is too ridiculous.

It's too disproven by facts in life.

We're too smart, and they couldn't have been as stupid.

They had to be smart like us and not believe these crazy fairy tales about them.

In fact, it's wrong.

They do believe the ideology, and they're young.

They're young people.

And so a story of the evil of capitalism.

You have World War I. Millions of people die.

Like for what?

Why are those millions of people being killed?

The flower of European youth and then many colonial armies get drawn in because of European imperialism.