Stephen Kotkin

They're not even indicted.

They just disappear.

And so you have this huge repressive apparatus, and it seems to work, especially when you have this moment where you fail to live up to some of the promises that you made.

The challenge for them there is somebody has to do the repression.

The repressive apparatus is not a machine.

It's not AI.

It's not something which is mechanical.

It's people.

It's people who grew up in neighborhoods, come from villages, went to the schools with other people.

This brings us back to the Tsarist regime where we started.

The Tsarist secret police wasn't big enough to keep the lid on.

So they had to use the military.

The military was a peasant army.

They were peasants in uniform.

And the working class, including women, were striking for bread in the capital and marching in the capital for bread in 1917.

And the military was told to shoot them.

And these are elite military units.

shoot these workers, and they're peasants.

And you think, okay, peasants, they'll shoot workers, right?

No love lost.