Stephen Kotkin

When they see that Stalin is leading them down a blind alley of murder and ration tickets and gulag, they kill themselves rather than kill Stalin.

So again, there's something special about the mentality of these communists.

And there's also something about Stalin's success as well as the threat that he represents to these individuals.

Still, it is mysterious because there were opportunities and people didn't take up the opportunities.

The very few... I mean, there's no serious assassination attempt on Stalin.

The very few times...

When they accuse somebody of doing an assassination, for example, there were shots fired at a boat when Stalin was on holiday in the South.

It was not because Stalin was in the boat.

It was because the boat was not in the system as marked, as allowed to use that waterway.

And so they were just performing their duties as border guards.

Shooting at the boat in it.

It got dressed up as an assassination attempt and people were arrested and executed and it was publicized as such, but they didn't know that Stalin was in the boat.

Yeah.

It's a very difficult question to answer very briefly, but it's a really important question.

There are tremendous differences, of course, civilizational differences, let alone system differences.

And we wouldn't want to ally those differences.

What's similar is the Marxist-Leninist monopoly on power.

People ask me, is China a Marxist-Leninist regime?

And I usually say it's a Leninist regime because that's undisputable.

Do they believe in the Marxism or not?