Stephen Kotkin
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Nobody dies.
So they nuke them, and everybody dies instead of everybody living.
And you say, you know, I never said to kill the people.
I said that they should live.
But once you nuke capitalism, you're going to lose freedom.
You're going to lose the ability to have politics.
You're going to end up with some version of a Leninist system.
And the ideology is going to drive that to the doubters.
And then you're going to get a second wind where you get Khrushchev, like you said.
He comes into power.
He denounces Stalin's crimes.
He doesn't praise capitalism, private property, and markets.
He doesn't undo collective farms.
He doesn't undo state ownership of property.
He doesn't undo the planning system.
He just undoes Stalin's personality.
He's trying to subtract.
The de-Stalinization is take away Stalin.
It's not take away any of the other attributes of the system.
And so it's a second wind that it was Stalin who was the problem, not the system that was the problem.