Stephen Kotkin

They're singled out solely for their disabilities to be sent to the gas chambers or to be sent to imprisonment.

And he's one of them.

And so we say, you know, could he really have believed this?

I mean, wasn't he a cynic enacting this?

Because how could he not understand that these are real people because he's one of them?

And the answer is, well, yes, he was a Nazi.

These people were communists.

And he was a Nazi.

And there were a lot of them.

And they had doubts.

They suffered bouts of doubt.

A lot of events contradicted the official ideology.

Innocent people, innocent family members, themselves innocent, went to the gallows, got the bullet in the back of the neck.

And so you say, God, this...

They couldn't have believed this stuff, and yet they did.

The main thing that we know from the archives that were formerly secret that we get into when they're declassified is that the Nazis were Nazis and the communists were communists.

So here we have this problem with socialism.

Socialism means many different things, right?

A communist party is building socialism.

Why?