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.
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So Marxism or communism in Vietnam or in Cuba or in Cambodia or in Russia will be very different in its local adaptations and local themes and resonance than it was in Germany, where Marx would have expected all this to unfold.
So Lenin's supreme confidence leads the party through some really difficult steps. That involves things like signing the humiliating treaty with the Germans, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
where critics of the Bolsheviks said that no one who loved their country would have agreed to a so draconian, so harsh a settlement that saw the peeling off of large territories that had belonged to the Russian Empire. Lenin is willing to undertake this because of the larger prize.
He even says that he's not going to bother to read the treaty because shortly that treaty is going to be a dead letter. His expectation is revolution is going to break out everywhere. especially after we've raised the standard, first of all, in the wreckage of the Russian Empire.
Right. For German sensibilities, for German nationalists, that treaty meant that Germany had essentially won World War I. And only... a turn of events that many of them couldn't even follow or conceive of. The arrival of American troops, the tipping of the balance in the West led to that reversal.
And one of the many scholars and contemporaries pointed out that Germany between the wars was full of people who were convinced that Germany had actually not lost the war, however that victory of theirs was defined. So most definitely that groundwork is laid. And incidentally, This is something we can talk about later. World War I and World War II have a lot of linkages like that.
And as time goes by, I think historians are going to focus on those linkages even more. But Lenin also, in his leadership, against the odds, leads the Bolsheviks to power in the Russian Civil War, where most betting people would have given them very slight odds of even surviving, given how many enemies they faced off against.
Lenin's insistence upon discipline and upon good organization allowed the Bolsheviks to emerge as the winners. And yet— a great disappointment follows. Lenin, as we said, had expected that revolution will break out soon everywhere and all it'll be necessary for the Bolsheviks to do, having given the lead, is to link up with others.
And so he considered that what would be established would be a red bridge between a communist Russia and once Germany inevitably plunged ahead into its revolutionary transformation, a communist Germany. That doesn't end up happening. On the contrary, what happens in Germany is a out-and-out shooting war between different kinds of socialists.
When Germany establishes a democracy that later goes by the name of the Weimar Republic, the government is a government of social democrats, moderate social democrats, who are fearful of what they see as Russian conditions of disorder and who are not necessarily in sympathy with the Leninist vision of tightly organized authoritarian rule.
So communists who revolt in Germany are brutally suppressed by mercenaries, hardened front fighters and nationalist radicals hired by the German socialist government. And the result is a wound that just won't heal in the German socialist movement as a result of this fratricide. It frustrates Lenin's ambitions.
So too does the fact that Poland, rather than going Bolshevik, resists attempts by the Bolsheviks to move forward and to connect up with Germany. The Poles, yet again, play a tremendously important historical role in changing the expected course of historical events. It's in the aftermath of these unexpected turns that Lenin and his colleagues realize that they're in this for the long haul.
It's necessary to wait longer. They don't lose hope or confidence, you might say, in the eventual coming of international workers' revolution, but it's been deferred. It's been put off. And so the question then arises, what do you build within a state that's established called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or the Soviet Union?
Lenin, as a result of an assassination attempt, is deeply affected in his health and would have loved to continue for years longer to steer the regime, but he's sidelined because of his declining health, and there emerges a contest, a contest between a very charismatic leader, Leo Trotsky,
On the one hand, who is an amazing orator, who is an intellectual, who has traveled widely in the world, who has seen much of the world, and who is a brilliant writer, a far-ranging intellect, and is seen as extremely radical because of his demand for permanent revolution, the acceleration of revolutionary processes to drive history forward, to strike while the iron is hot.
And on the other hand, is an extremely unlikely contender for power. And that's a man who's probably the antithesis of charisma, if you were to meet him in person.
a guy with a squeaky, somewhat high-pitched voice, not well-suited to revolutionary oratory, his face pockmarked with the scars of youthful illness, and who, moreover, doesn't speak a fine, sophisticated Russian, but speaks a Russian heavily inflected with a Georgian accent from that part of the Russian Empire from which he came, and that was Stalin.
And I know that you already have a marvelous interview with Stephen Kotkin, the brilliant biographer of Stalin, who has so many insights on that subject. The one thing that even after reading about Stalin that never ceases to surprise me, even in retrospect, is that Stalin gains a reputation not as a fiery radical, but as a moderate.
a man who's a conciliator, someone who's calm when others are excited, someone who is able, because of his organizational skills, to resolve merely theoretical disputes with practical solutions. Now, to fully take this aboard, we have to unknow what we know from our vantage point about Stalin's leadership, Stalin's brutality in eliminating his opposition, and
The cult of personality that, against all odds, got built up around Stalin so successfully. And the absolute dominant role that led him later to be described as Genghis Khan with a telephone. A brutal dictator with ancient barbarism allied to the use of modern technology.
Showing 161–180 of 414 · page 9 of 21
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