Stephen Kotkin

The workers were peasants yesterday.

And some of them were still peasants who went back to the villages where the soldiers were from during downtime at the factory, during harvest time.

They were the same people.

And the army decided not to shoot.

There came a point where the regime called out the repression and the repressors had agency and didn't repress.

And so that's what happens in these cases.

You never know when it's going to happen.

It's very hard to predict beforehand.

But there comes a moment where the people who are supposed to do the shooting decide not to shoot.

The people who are supposed to do the arresting, they decide not to arrest.

The people who are doing the surveillance, they decide to stop.

So you have this huge repressive apparatus.

And it works until the moment the people in it decide not to do it anymore.

And so that's where the political legitimacy variable is ultimately decisive.

Because those people who are killing under communism and collectivizing those villages and de-kulakizing and killing the people in their native village that they had grown up with, if they hadn't done that, the regime couldn't have done this.

The regime couldn't have collectivized it.

Stalin wasn't out there shooting people.

He was signing the decree, which then got transported through the system, communicated through the system to the point of the activists who enacted it or not, as the case might be.

When they don't enact,

Your power evaporates like a bank run.