Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
While Trotsky is delivering stirring speeches and theorizing, Stalin works behind the scenes to control personnel decisions in the Bolshevik movement and in the state. And it's a cliche because it's true that personnel is policy. Trotsky is increasingly sidelined and then demonized and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union and later murdered in Mexico City.
For Stalin, eliminating his enemies turned out to be the solution that he was most comfortable with.
Today we would call that curating the image, right?
Well, before getting to the secret police, I would just want to add the other crucial element, which is Lenin's patronage. Stalin doesn't brawl his way into the Bolshevik party and dominate. He's co-opted and promoted to positions of importance by Lenin, who sees him as a somewhat rough-around-the-edges person.
not very sophisticated, much less cosmopolitan than other Bolsheviks, but dependable, reliable, and committed revolutionary. So I think that one of the things that's emerged, especially after archives opened up with the fall of the Soviet Union and we were able to read more and more of the communications of Lenin, is that it's not the case that we're talking here about an unconnected
series of careers. Rather, there are connections to be made. It's true that towards the end of his life, Lenin came to be worried by complaints about Stalin's rudeness towards fellow Bolsheviks. And in his testament, he warned against Stalin's testimonies. Lenin fundamentally saw himself as irreplaceable. And so that doesn't really help in a succession struggle, right?
Stalin is able to rely on a secret police apparatus that had been built up under Lenin already. And it's very early in the foundation of the Soviet state that the Cheka, or the Extraordinary Commission, is established as a secret police to... terrify the enemies, beat down the opponents of the regime, and to keep an eye on society more generally.
The person who's chosen for that task also is an anomaly among Bolsheviks. That is a man of Polish aristocratic background, Felix Zerzhinsky, who comes to be known by the nickname Iron Felix. Here's a man about whom a cult of personality also is created.
Zerzhinsky is celebrated in the Soviet period as the model of someone who's harsh but fair, an executioner but with a heart of gold, somebody who loves children, somebody who has a tender heart but forces himself. to be steely-willed against the opponents of the ideological project of the Bolsheviks.
Zerzhinsky is succeeded by figures who will be absolutely instrumental to Stalin's exercise of power. And they're not immune either. Stalin, in his purges, takes care also to purge the secret police as a way of finding others upon whom to deflect blame for earlier atrocities and to produce a situation where even committed Bolsheviks are uncertain of what's going to happen next.
and feel their own position to be precarious. I mean, incidentally, there are other influences that probably are wrought to bear here as well. It gets said about Stalin that he used to spend a lot of time flipping through Machiavelli's The Prince. And it seems that Stalin's personal copy of The Prince, nobody knows where that is, if it still exists. But
historians have found annotations in works by Lenin that Stalin, who was a voracious reader, as it turns out, made in the back of one of the books, which sounds almost like a commentary on Machiavelli's almost-but-not-quite suggestion that the ends justify the means. Stalin's own writing says that if someone is strong, active, and intelligent—
even if they do things that other people condemn, they're still a good person. And so Stalin's self-conception of himself is someone who along these lines, and in line with Lenin's emphasis on practical results and discipline, somebody who gets things done, that's the crucial ethical standard. And ultimately, in criticisms by later dissidents of Bolshevik morality,
This question of what is the ethical standard, what is the ethical law, will bring this question into focus because by the—and this goes back to Marx as well, incidentally—the notion that any ethical system, any notion of right or wrong, is purely a product of class identity because every class produces its distinctive ideas, its distinctive religion, its distinctive art forms, its distinctive styles.
means that with no one transcendent or absolute morality, it's all up for grabs. And then it's a question of power and the exercise of power with no limits, untrammeled by any laws whatsoever, dictatorship in its purest form, something that Lenin had avowed, and then Stalin comes to practice even more fully.
That's an excellent question, and you're quite right. I mean, we cannot peer into the inmost recesses of somebody's being and know for sure. My intuition, though, is that this may be a false alternative, a false dichotomy. It's natural enough to see somebody who does monstrous things to say, well, ideology is being used as a cover for it.
But I think that my suspicion is that these were actually perfectly compatible in his historical role. The notion that there's an ideology, it gives you a master plan for how history is going to develop.
And your own power, the increase of that power to unprecedented proportions, your ability to torment even your own faithful followers in order just to see them squirm, which Stalin was famous for, to keep people unsettled. To me, it seems that for some people, those might not actually be opposed, but might even be mutually reinforcing. which is a very scary thought.
I think the short answer is that the Bolsheviks in particular, but also communists more generally, have had a very conflicted relationship with agriculture. Agriculture, as a very vital, obviously, but also very traditional and old form of human activity, has about it all of the smell of tradition and other problematic factors as well. In a place like Russia or the Russian Empire,
And peasants throughout history for centuries had wanted one thing, and that was to be left alone to farm their own land. That's their utopia. And that for someone like Marx, who had a vision of historical development and transcendence and progress as being absolutely key, does not mesh at all with that vision.
Showing 181–200 of 414 · page 10 of 21
← Previous
Next →