Vejas Liulevicius: Communism, Marxism, Nazism, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler

High-Level Overview

Lex Fridman talks with historian Vejas Liulevicius, a specialist in Germany and Eastern Europe whose lecture series trace the rise, reign and fall of communism, about what he calls the very heaviest of topics: an ideology linked to over 100 million deaths in the 20th century. They begin with Karl Marx's ideas and their hidden contradictions, move through the Bolshevik seizure of power, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, collectivization and the Holodomor, the Great Terror, the rivalry and occasional cooperation between Nazis and communists, Hannah Arendt's model of totalitarianism, Mao's China, North Korea and communism in America, and end with post-Soviet Russia, the war in Ukraine, advice for interviewing world leaders, book recommendations and a case for reading.

The tone is scholarly, sober and occasionally wry; Liulevicius delivers dark Soviet jokes with dry precision and draws on childhood visits to Soviet Lithuania. Fridman acts as an eager student who repeatedly asks for steelmen, counterfactuals and lessons about human nature. The conversation moves chronologically through history while constantly returning to a few big themes: the danger of certainty, the seductive prestige of science, and how ideals behave when they meet reality.

The Discussion Explores:

• Marx's core ideas: history with a purpose, class struggle, revolution, and utopian promises dressed as science
• The contradictions inside Marxism and why it functioned like a hidden political religion
• Marx and Engels, the anarchist rival Bakunin, and why Germany, not Russia, was supposed to lead the revolution
• How Lenin seized power in the vacuum of World War I, and how Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky
• Collectivization, the man-made famine in Ukraine, the Great Terror and the logic of negative selection
• Nazism versus communism, the Nazi-Soviet pact, Arendt's totalitarianism, and a rebuttal to Darryl Cooper's claims about World War II
• Mao's rise, the Great Leap Forward, the Hundred Flowers campaign, China after Mao and North Korea
• Communism in America, Russia's failure to reckon with its past, the Ukraine war, and advice on reading and hope

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Marx's Big Ideas and Their Utopian Core

Liulevicius identifies two powerful, somewhat contradictory ideas at the heart of Marx's thought. First, history has a purpose and moves in a predetermined direction toward an end in which all conflict is resolved and humanity is liberated. Second, special individuals can play a heroic role in pushing history along. Together, the idea of a science of revolution and a role for heroes made Marx far more compelling than the earlier socialists he dismissed as utopian. Marx learned from Hegel that history is the working out of an idea, human freedom, but flipped it into dialectical materialism, grounding history in material conditions and conflict. At Marx's graveside, Engels called him essentially "the Darwin of history." Liulevicius notes that few things are as intoxicating as believing your actions are both right and destined to succeed.

Marx described history as a sequence of class struggles from primitive communism through slavery and feudalism to the bourgeois present, which he saw as the penultimate stage. Competition would push more of the middle class down into the proletariat, whose growing misery would lead to revolution, a dictatorship of the working class, and eventually a classless society in which the state withers away. Revolution was essential, not optional, because only through it would the working class gain the consciousness to rule. The end state, where one could work at one job in the morning and pursue leisure in the afternoon free of necessity, was vague and deeply utopian. Liulevicius shares a Soviet-era joke that captures the gap: "capitalism is the exploitation of man by man and communism is the exact opposite." He also notes that even in Marx's lifetime, reforms, unions and a growing middle class of white-collar and technical workers undercut the prediction of ever-deepening misery.

Contradictions, Rivals and a Secular Religion

Marx and Engels formed one of history's most influential intellectual partnerships. Marx was an energetic, domineering genius who wanted to win every argument, disorganized in his personal life, and reluctant to hold regular work; Engels, the son of an industrialist, supported the Marx family for decades. Their great rival was the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who declared that "the passion for destruction is also a creative passion" and envisioned free association instead of hierarchy. Bakunin warned that authoritarianism could creep into a movement that used hierarchy to overthrow hierarchy, and Marx had him expelled from the International. Liulevicius observes that every alliance between anarchists and communists, from the Russian Civil War to the Spanish Civil War, ended badly for the anarchists.

Fridman and Liulevicius catalog Marxism's contradictions: global in theory but national in practice, about impersonal forces yet reliant on singular figures, a break with tradition that became one of history's strongest traditions, and officially atheistic yet religious in structure. Scholars such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Eric Voegelin described communism, fascism and Nazism as political religions promising the end times in the here and now. Liulevicius recalls visiting a Soviet museum of atheism housed in a gutted church as a child and being scolded for carrying his windbreaker disrespectfully, and filing past Lenin's mummified body in 1989, which he sees as a blend of religious reverence for relics with official atheism. He adds that resistance to communist regimes has often come from religious believers and from disillusioned true believers.

From the Manifesto to the Russian Revolution

The Communist Manifesto was a brief call to arms with a delayed fuse; contrary to popular belief it did not cause the revolutions of 1848 and only gained worldwide notoriety after the Paris Commune of 1871. Das Kapital, a vast work Engels had to beg Marx to publish, was meant to be the Origin of Species of economics. Liulevicius stresses that Marx insisted on the unity of theory and practice, so the idea that Marxism was never meant to be tried is historically wrong. Germany, with its central location, rapid industrialization and powerful Social Democratic Party (the largest party by vote by 1912), was supposed to be where the revolution came, and serious radicals had to read German. The central irony is that the first government claiming Marx came to power in the wreckage of the Russian Empire, which did not meet his requirements.

To steelman communism's appeal, Liulevicius points to the enormous prestige of science, declining religious certainty among elites, and the promise of escape from war, depression and class hierarchy, along with, as Fridman adds, the resonant message that the rich were exploiting ordinary workers. Yet the movement was often led by intellectuals rather than workers, and Lenin split socialism by scorning reformist workers' movements in favor of a disciplined vanguard of professional revolutionaries. Lenin, who returned to Russia in 1917 through a deal with the German high command, stepped into the power vacuum created by World War I. His hardness had Russian roots too: his brother was executed for revolutionary terrorism, he loved Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?, and he avoided beautiful music like Beethoven because it made him feel gentle. Liulevicius recommends Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago for capturing the chaos of the period.

Lenin, Trotsky and the Rise of Stalin

Lenin accepted the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, confident it would soon be a dead letter, and Liulevicius notes it helped convince many Germans they had not really lost World War I, one of many links between the two world wars. When the expected German revolution failed, crushed partly by the moderate socialist government using nationalist mercenaries, and Poland halted the Red Army, the Bolsheviks realized they were in for the long haul. After an assassination attempt weakened Lenin, the brilliant, cosmopolitan orator Leon Trotsky, champion of permanent revolution, lost out to a far less likely contender: Stalin, with his pockmarked face, high voice and Georgian-accented Russian.

What surprises Liulevicius most is that Stalin was seen as a moderate and a calm conciliator who solved theoretical disputes with practical organization, a reminder that a brutal dictator can come in moderate clothing. Stalin controlled personnel, because "personnel is policy," and used the secret police apparatus Lenin had already built under Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka, before purging the secret police itself. Stalin was later described as "Genghis Khan with a telephone." Asked whether Stalin believed in communism or just used it, Liulevicius suggests that may be a false dichotomy: ideology and the lust for power may have been mutually reinforcing, which he calls a very scary thought. Because Marx treated all morality as a product of class interest, there was no transcendent ethical limit left, only power.

Collectivization, Famine and Terror

Communists had a conflicted relationship with agriculture. Marx dismissed peasants as dull as sacks of potatoes, and the Bolsheviks prized heavy industry above all, so collectivization aimed to put farming under state control on a factory model. Successful farmers were denounced as kulaks, incentives vanished, quotas grew impossible, and statistics were falsified up and down the chain until planners stood on a foundation of sand. The result was a man-made famine in Ukraine, with areas cordoned off to keep starving people in. Liulevicius says it was both sins of omission and commission, noting the quote attributed to Stalin that "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," and citing Lev Kopelev's memoir of seizing food from starving families while believing it served history. Collectivization never fixed Soviet agriculture; the USSR ended up importing grain, and workers joked "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." Internal passports tied peasants to the land in what looked like neo-feudalism.

The Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, in which Fridman notes some 750,000 people were executed and over a million sent to the Gulag, targeted old Bolsheviks, rivals and their families, and then ordinary people swept up by quotas that officials sought to overfulfill. Denunciations produced confessions under torture, which produced more names; even total loyalty was no protection. Liulevicius recommends Orlando Figes's The Whisperers and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, full of devoted communists sure their arrest was a mistake Stalin would fix. He highlights negative selection, in which the most enterprising, talented and independent people are repeatedly weeded out, teaching everyone that mediocrity is safer than talent, and he argues that communism's typical birth amid war and collapse, plus its absolute confidence, created a ratchet of repression.

Nazism, Communism and Totalitarianism

Liulevicius distinguishes Mussolini's fascism, a glorification of the state and leader modeled on wartime mobilization, from Nazism, which added racism and antisemitism at its core. The name National Socialist was deliberately confusing, fusing slogans from across the spectrum. Nazis and communists were ideological arch-enemies: the Nazis spun the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, while communists saw Nazism as capitalism's last gasp. Yet both agreed that democracy and liberalism were finished, their street fighters jointly destabilized the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, with its secret clauses dividing Eastern Europe, enabled Hitler to start the war. German communists even said, after Hitler, it's our turn. Because socialists had killed socialists in 1919, social democrats and communists could not unite against Hitler.

Hannah Arendt's model of totalitarianism described a new kind of dictatorship that demanded not just obedience but fanatical belief. Critics note no regime ever achieved total control, but Liulevicius says Arendt's point was the ambition: "It was the ambition." Her most frightening thought was that this might be what the future looks like, and that the leader in such a system may be interchangeable.

Rebutting Darryl Cooper on World War II

Fridman asks about claims by podcaster Darryl Cooper that Churchill was the chief villain of World War II, pushing Hitler to expand the war beyond Poland, and that the killing of Jews, Poles, Slavs and Roma in camps was essentially a byproduct of war. Liulevicius calls it "a bunch of absurdity," serious in its implications. Nazi ideology looked toward world domination, and analyzing Hitler without his ideology, as described in Mein Kampf, is doomed. Mass killing began with the invasion of Poland through Operation Tannenberg and the Einsatzgruppen, before the invasion of the Soviet Union. Drawing on his book The German Myth of the East, he explains that the Nazis took the most dehumanizing stereotypes about Eastern Europe and made them dominant.

He describes the Generalplan Ost, with its highways to Crimea and German settlements across Ukraine, Himmler's chilling phrase that some Slavs would remain as "slaves for our culture," and Hitler and Himmler's vision of a permanent war that moved the border east every generation, alongside purges of Germans deemed unfit, including people with disabilities. Fridman adds that a Nazi victory over the Soviet Union or Nazi atomic weapons would have been far worse than what happened, while steelmanning a legitimate concern: the oversimplified Hitler template has been abused by warmongers to justify new wars, and both men agree that nuance, not oversimplification, is needed.

Mao, China and North Korea

Mao adapted Marxism by making peasants, not industrial workers, the revolution's prime movers, a shift so large that the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, in his study Main Currents of Marxism, struggled to classify it. Mao both admired and resented Stalin, who kept him waiting for days in Moscow in 1950, and after Stalin's death he sought to outdo him. The Great Leap Forward, which Fridman notes killed roughly 40 million people, featured backyard furnaces, gigantic communes, campaigns against birds and insects, and the pseudoscience of Trofim Lysenko, such as deep plowing to create superplants. Mao promised full communism by 1961 or 1973, and later leaders pushed it to 2000, creating a ticking time bomb of broken promises. The Hundred Flowers campaign invited criticism and then punished it, whether by design or panic, producing more negative selection. Mao saw people as "beautiful blank pieces of paper" to write on, which ignored human complexity.

After Mao's death in 1976, the party judged him "70% correct" and, under Deng Xiaoping, opened the economy while keeping political control. Because Mao was the equivalent of Lenin rather than Stalin, he could not be repudiated the way Khrushchev denounced Stalin. Under Xi Jinping, Liulevicius sees a partial return to earlier patterns. He urges humility and close study of what a society says about itself rather than projecting Western hopes onto China. On North Korea, a self-described communist state run by a third-generation dynasty under its Juche ideology, he says a case that escapes our categories probably means the categories are the problem, and notes the instability of divided nations like the two Koreas and the former two Germanies. Fridman emphasizes how easily science's authority is co-opted, and Liulevicius adds that science's essence is "questing, not certainty."

Communism in America and Russia After the USSR

The American Communist Party struggled because it was associated with immigrant communities and later with Soviet espionage. Earl Browder's slogan that communism is 20th-century Americanism rose and fell when he hoped wartime US-Soviet cooperation might last. Liulevicius calls Whittaker Chambers's 1952 memoir Witness one of the most compelling books one could read, and notes the irony that Soviet infiltration was more real in the 1930s and 1940s than in Senator McCarthy's time. The Nazi-Soviet pact forced American communists to reverse their anti-Nazi propaganda overnight, driving many to quit.

Post-Soviet Russia, he argues, never had a full reckoning: no Nuremberg-style trials documented responsibility. Putin assembles contradictory memories, rehabilitating the tsars, blaming Lenin's federalism for breaking up the state, and crediting Stalin with strong statehood. Liulevicius repeats the observation that Russia without Ukraine can be a nation-state, but with Ukraine it has to be an empire. Putin expected Ukrainians to be divided in 2022 and instead met heroic resistance, helped by a new generation and by Zelensky's unexpected wartime leadership. He is pessimistic about peace: accumulated suffering eliminates compromises that look reasonable from afar, and validating the use of force to change European borders, taboo since 1945, sets dangerous incentives.

Advice, Books and Hope

Asked how to interview world leaders, Liulevicius suggests probing their horizon of expectation, the German idea of what someone expects the future to hold, shaped by formative experiences, and watching how they treat people who can do nothing for them. Contemporaries called Napoleon the "master of the sightless stare" because he looked through people as if they were chess pieces, a bad sign in any leader. He mentions his Great Courses lectures, including a newly released third installment on the decline of communism, and recommends Doctor Zhivago, which launched his fascination as a child in the Chicago area, and the Deptford Trilogy by Canadian novelist Robertson Davies.

For young people, "it comes down to one word and that one word is read." He worries about classes that assign little or no reading, because sustained reading builds empathy and protects against manipulators and AI-generated false realities. Fridman agrees that summaries skip the journey, discusses audiobooks and using AI as a reading companion, and calls the smartphone an enemy of sitting with an idea. Liulevicius finds hope in the sheer variety of human responses and the resilience people show after horrors, adding that "a synonym for cultural appropriation is world history." Fridman closes with Marx himself: "History repeats itself. First, as a tragedy. Second, as a farce."

Conclusion

Vejas Liulevicius offers a sweeping, humane tour of the 20th century's great ideological catastrophes, arguing that communism's horrors were not accidents of bad leaders alone but flowed from its combination of utopian certainty, the borrowed prestige of science, a morality reduced to class interest, and seizures of power amid war and collapse. From Marx's study to Stalin's famine and terror, from Hitler's plans for the East to Mao's Great Leap Forward, the recurring lessons are the danger of total confidence, the destructive logic of negative selection, and the way ideals change when they meet human nature. His antidotes are humility, careful study of what regimes actually say and do, and deep reading, and he ends on hope in human resilience. It is a dense, long listen that rewards anyone wanting to understand how ideas reshaped the modern world.

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