Norman Naimark is a historian at Stanford, specializing in the history of genocide. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Norman's Website: https://history.stanford.edu/people/norman-naimark
Stalin's Genocides (book): https://amzn.to/3oO0Hzb
Stalin and the Fate of Europe (book): https://amzn.to/3pLbWrk
Books & resources mentioned:
The Origins of Totalitarianism (book): https://amzn.to/3oNDSvA
Man's Search for Meaning (book): https://amzn.to/3pMzs7d
Radio Majdanek (Research Paper): https://bit.ly/3GxPEAb

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:20 - Stalin and absolute power
14:17 - Dictators and genocide
38:43 - What is genocide
48:50 - Human nature and suffering
1:18:35 - Mao's Great Leap Forward
1:25:49 - North Korea
1:29:42 - Our role in fighting against atrocities 
1:38:38 - China
1:42:47 - Hopes for the future and technology
1:57:40 - Advice for young people
2:00:27 - Love and tragedy

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The following is a conversation with Norman Namark, a historian at Stanford specializing in genocide, war, and empire.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, here's my conversation with Norman Namark.

Did Stalin believe that communism is good, not just for him, but for the people of the Soviet Union and the people of the world?

I mean, Stalin believed that socialism was the be all and end all of, you know, human existence.

He was a true Leninist and in Lenin's tradition, this was, you know, what he believed.

I mean, that set of beliefs didn't exclude other kinds of things he believed or thought or did, but no, the way he defined socialism, the way he thought about socialism, he absolutely thought it was in the interest of the Soviet Union and of the world.

And in fact, that the world was 1 day going to go socialist.

In other words, I think he believed in, eventually in the international revolution.

So given the genocide in the 1930s that you described, was Stalin evil, delusional, or incompetent?

Well, you know, evil is 1 of those words, you know, which has a lot of kind of religious and moral connotations.

And in that sense, yes, I think he was an evil man.

I mean, he, you know, eliminated people absolutely unnecessarily.

He was completely indifferent to the suffering of others.

He couldn't have cared a whit, you know, that millions were suffering.

I mean, you know, historians don't like to- Use the word evil.

It's, you know, It's a word for moral philosophers, but I think it certainly fits who he is.

And There is a wonderful historian at Princeton, a political scientist actually, named Robert Tucker, who said he suffered from a paranoid delusional system.

And I always remember that of Tucker's writing because what Tucker meant is that he was not just paranoid, meaning, you know, I'm paranoid, I'm worried you're out to get me, right?

But that he constructed a whole plots of people, a whole systems of people who were out to get him.

So in other words, his delusions were that there were all of these groups of people out there who were out to diminish his power and remove him from his position and undermine the Soviet Union in his view.

So yes, I think he did suffer from delusions.

And this had a huge effect because whole groups then were destroyed by his activities, which he would construct based on these delusions.

I mean, I think most of the research that's gone on, especially since the Stalin Archive was opened at the beginning of the century.

And I think almost every historian who goes in that archive comes away from it with the feeling of a man who is enormously hardworking, intelligent, you know, with an acute sense of politics, a really excellent sense of political rhetoric, a fantastic editor, in a kind of agitational sense.

I mean, somebody who works from morning till night, a micromanager in some ways so his competence I think was really extreme.

Now there were times when that fell down, you know, times in the 30s, times in the 20s, times during the war where he made mistakes.

It's not as if he didn't make any mistakes, but I think, you know, you look at his stuff, you look at his archives, you look what he did.

I mean, this is an enormously competent man who in many, many different areas of enterprise because he had this notion that he should know everything and did know everything.

I remember 1 archive, Diyalad's called, you know, a kind of folder that I looked at where he actually went through the wines that were produced in his native Georgia and wrote down how much they should make of each of these wines, how many barrels they should produce of these wines, which grapes were better than the other grapes, sort of correcting, in other words, what people were putting down there.

So he was, his competence ranged very wide, or at least he thought his competence ranged very wide.

I mean, both things I think are the case.

If we look at this paranoid delusional system, Stalin was in power for 30 years.

He is, many argue, 1 of the most powerful men in history.

Did in his case, absolute power corrupt him or did it reveal the true nature of the man?

And maybe just in your sense, as we kind of build around this genocide of the early 1930s, this paranoid delusional system, did it get built up over time?

It's kind of a question of did the genocide, Was that always inevitable essentially in this man or did power create that?

And I don't think you can say that it was always kind of inherent in the man.

I mean, the man without his position and without his power, you know, wouldn't have been able to accomplish what he eventually did in the way of murdering people, you know, and murdering groups of people, which is what genocide is.

So, you know, I don't, I can't, it wasn't sort of in him.

I mean, there were, and again, you know, the new research has shown that you know, he had his childhood was You know not a particularly Nasty when I and people used to say, you know The father beat Beat him up and it turns out actually it wasn't the father was a mother once in a while But but basically, you know, he was not an unusual young georgian kid or student even And you know, it was it was the the growth of the Soviet system and him within the Soviet system.

I mean, his own development within the Soviet system, I think that led, you know, to the kind of mass killing that occurred in the 1930s.

You know, he essentially achieved complete power by the early 1930s.

And then as he rolled with it, as you would say, you know, or people would say, you know, it increasingly became murderous.

And there was no, you know, there were no checks and balances obviously on that murderous system.

And not only that, you know, people supported it in the NKVD and elsewhere.

I mean, he was a superb political manipulator of those people around him.

And we've got new transcripts, for example, of police bureau meetings in the early 1930s.

And you read those things and you read, you know, he uses humor and he uses sarcasm, especially he uses verbal ways to undermine people, you know, to control their behavior and what they do.

And he's a really, he's a real, I guess manipulator is the right word.

And he does it with a kind of skill that on the 1 hand is admirable and on the other hand, of course, is terrible because it ends up creating the system of terror that he creates.

I mean, I guess just to linger on it, I just wonder how much of it is a slippery slope.

In the early 20s, 1920s, did he think he was going to be murdering even a single person, but thousands and millions.

I just wonder, maybe the murder of a single human being, just to get them, because you're paranoid about them potentially threatening your power.

And once you open the door, you become a different human being.

A deeper question here is the Solzhenitsyn, the line between good and evil runs in every man, are all of us, once we commit 1 murder in this situation, does that open a door for all of us?

And I guess even the further, deeper questions, how easy it is for human nature to go on this slippery slope that ends in genocide?

There are a lot of questions in those questions.

And the slippery slope question, I would answer, I suppose, by saying, Stalin wasn't the most likely successor of Lenin.

There were a lot of political contingencies that emerged in the 1920s that Made it possible for stalin to seize power.

I don't think of him as a, you know, if you would just know him in

I don't think anybody would say, much less himself, that this was a future mass murderer.

I mean, Trotsky mistrusted him and thought he was, you know, a mindless bureaucrat.

You know, others were less mistrustful of him, but you know, he managed to gain power in the way he did through this bureaucratic and political maneuvering that was very successful.

You know, the slippery slope, as it were, doesn't really begin until the 1930s, in my view.

In other words, once he gains complete power and control of the Politburo, once the programs that he institutes, the five-year plan and collectivization, go through, once he reverses himself and is able to reverse himself or reverse the Soviet path, you know, to give various nationalities their, you know, their ability to develop their own cultures and sort of internal politics.

Once he reverses all that, you know, you have the Ukrainian famine in 32, 33, you have the murder of Kirov, who is 1 of the leading Figures, you know in the political system.

You have all these things come together in

That then you know Make it more likely in other words, that bad things are gonna happen.

And people start seeing that too around him.

They start seeing that it's not a slippery slope.

It's a dangerous situation which is emerging and some people really understand that.

So I really do see a differentiation then between the 20s.

I mean It's true that Stalin during the civil war, there's a lot of good research on that, shows that he already had some of these characteristics of being, as it were, murderous and being dictatorial and pushing people around and that sort of thing.

But I don't really see that as kind of the necessary stage for the next thing that came, which was the 30s, which was really terror of the worst sort, where everybody's afraid for their lives and most people are afraid for their lives and their families' lives and where torture and that sort of thing becomes a common part, you know, of what people had to face.

They'll argue this kind of Lenin-Stalin continuity debate.

You know, that's been going on since I was an undergraduate right that that that argument, you know Was Stalin the natural sort of next step from Lenin or was he something completely different?

Many people will argue, you know, because of Marxism-Leninism, because of the ideology that, you know, it was the natural, it was a kind of natural next step.

I mean, I won't make an absolute argument that what Stalin became had nothing to do with Lenin and nothing to do with Marxism.

And again, that's why I don't like the slippery slope metaphor because that means it's kind of slow and easy.

And we call, I mean, historians talk about the Stalin revolution, you know, in 28 and

you know, that he in some senses creates a whole new system, you know, through the five-year plan, collectivization and seizing political power the way he does.

Can you describe what happened in Holodomor, the Soviet terror famine in Ukraine in the 32 and 33?

It's a long story, you know, but Let me try to be as succinct as I can be.

I mean the whole of the more the the terror famine of

comes out of in part an all-union famine that root that is the result of Collectivization, you know collectivization was a catastrophe You know the more or less of the so-called kulaks the more or less richer farmers.

Anybody with a tin roof and a cow was considered a kulak, you know, and other people who had nothing were also considered kulaks if they opposed Collectivization so these kulaks we're talking millions of them, right and Ukraine It's worth recalling and I'm sure you know, this was a you know, heavily agricultural area and Ukrainian peasants were in the countryside and resisted collectivization more than even the Russian peasants resisted collectivization, suffered during this collectivization program.

And they, you know, burned sometimes their own houses, they killed their own animals, they were shot, you know, sometimes on the spot.

Tens of thousands and others were sent into exile So there was a conflagration in the countryside And the result of that conflagration in ukraine was terrible famine And again, there was famine all over the Soviet Union, but it was especially bad in Ukraine in part because Ukrainian peasants resisted.

Now in 32, 33, a couple of things happen.

I mean, I've argued this in my writing and you know, I've also worked on this.

I continue to work on it, by the way, with a museum in Kiev that's going to be about the Holodomor.

They're building the museum now, and it's going to be a very impressive set of exhibits and talk with historians all the time about it.

So what happens in 32-33 a couple of things.

First of all, the Stalin develops an even stronger, I say even stronger because they already had an antipathy for the Ukrainians and even stronger antipathy for the Ukrainians in general First of all, they resist collectivization Second of all, he's not getting all the grain he wants out of them and which he needs and so he sends in then people to expropriate the grain and take the grain away from the peasants.

These teams of people you know some policemen, some urban thugs, some party people, some poor peasants you know take part too, go into the villages and forcibly seize grain and And animals from the Ukrainian peasantry.

I mean, let's remember again this is all over the Soviet Union in 32, especially Then, you know in December of

Stalin is convinced the Ukrainian peasantry needs to be shown who's boss, that they're not turning over their grain, that they're resisting the expropriators, that they're hiding the grain, which they do sometimes, right?

That they're basically not loyal to the Soviet Union, that they're acting like traitors, that they're ready, and he says this, you know, to, I think it's Kaganovich he says it to, you know, they're ready to kind of pull out of the Soviet Union and join Poland.

I mean, he thinks Poland is, you know, out to get the you out to get Ukraine.

And so he's going to then essentially break the back of these peasantry.

And the way he breaks their back is by going through another expropriation Program, which is not done in the rest of the soviet union.

So he's taking away everything they have everything they have Their new laws introduced where they will actually punish people including kids With Death if they steal any grain, you know if they take anything from the you know from the fields so, you know, you can shoot anybody You know who is looking for food and then he introduces Measures in ukraine which are not introduced into the rest of the Soviet Union.

For example, the Ukrainian peasantry are not allowed to leave their villages anymore.

They can't go to the city to try to find some things.

I mean, we've got pictures of, you know, Ukrainian peasants dying on the sidewalks in Kharkiv and in Kiev and in places like that who've managed to get out of the village and get to the cities, but now they can't leave.

They can't leave Ukraine to go to Belarus or Belarus today or to Russia, you know, to get any food.

There's no, he won't allow any relief to Ukraine.

A number of people offer relief, including the Poles, but also the Vatican offers relief.

He won't admit that there's a famine in Ukraine.

And instead what happens is that Ukraine turns into the Ukrainian countryside, turns into what my now past colleague who died Several years ago, Robert Conquest called a vast belson.

And by that, the image is of bodies just lying everywhere, people dead and dying of hunger, which is, by the way, I mean, as you know, I've spent a lot of time studying genocide.

I don't think there's anything worse than dying of hunger from what I have read.

I mean, you see terrible ways that people die, right?

But dying of hunger is just such a horrible, horrible thing.

And so, for example, we know there were many cases of cannibalism in the countryside because there wasn't anything to eat.

People were eating their own kids, right?

And again, we started with this question a little bit earlier, he doesn't, he, there's not a sign of remorse, not a sign of pity, right?

Not a sign of any kind of human emotion that normal people would have.

What about the opposite of joy for teaching them a lesson?

You know, I think he felt it was necessary to get those SOBs Right that they deserved it.

This is their own fault And as their own fault, you know, they get what they deserve Basically,

Was there a long-term strategy, or was this strategy based on emotion and anger and?

No, well, I think actually the right answer is a little of both.

I mean, usually the right answer in history is something like that.

It wasn't just, I mean, first of all, you know, the Soviets Had it in for Ukraine and Ukrainian nationalism, which they really didn't like and by the way Russians still don't like it, right?

So they had it in for Ukrainian nationalism.

As I said, you know, Stalin, Stalin writes, you know, we'll lose Ukraine, you know, if these guys win, you know, so there's a kind of long term determination, as I said, you know, to kind of break the back of Ukrainian national identity and Ukrainian nationalism as any kind of separatist force whatsoever.

And so there's that rational calculation.

At the same time, I think Stalin is annoyed and peeved and angry on 1 level with the Ukrainians for resisting collectivization and for being difficult and for not, you know, not conforming You know to hit the way he thinks Peasants should act in this situation.

So you have both things he's also very angry at the Ukrainian party and eventually purges it for not being able to control Ukraine and not be able to control the situation.

You know, Ukraine is in theory the breadbasket, right, of Europe.

Well, how come the breadbasket isn't turning over to me all this grain so I can sell it abroad and you know, build new factories and support the workers in the cities.

So there's a kind of annoyance, you know, when things fail, and this is absolutely typical of Stalin, when things fail, he blames it on other people and usually groups of people, right?

So a little bit of both, I think is the right answer.

This blame, it feels like there's a playbook that dictators follow.

I just wonder if it comes naturally or just kind of evolves.

It's blaming others and then telling these narratives and then creating the other and then somehow that leads to hatred and genocide.

It feels like there's too many commonalities for it not to be a naturally emergent strategy that works for dictatorships?

I mean, that's a good, it's a very good point.

In other words, I think you're right, that there's certain kinds of strategies by dictators that are common to them.

A lot of them do killing, not all of them of that sort that Stalin did.

I've written about Mao and Pol Pot and Hitler and there is a sort of, as you say, a kind of playbook for political dictatorship, also for, you know, a kind of communist totalitarian way of functioning, you know, and that way of Functioning was described already by hannah rent early on when she wrote the origins of totalitarianism and and and she more or less writes the playbook And stalin does follow it the real question and It seems to me is to what extent you know, and and how deep does this go?

And how often does it go in that direction?

I mean, you can argue, for example, I mean, Fidel Castro was not a nice man, right?

But he did not engage in mass murder Ho Chi Minh was a dictator a communist dictator who grew up, you know in the communist movement went to Moscow You know spent time in Moscow in the 30s and went to find found the the vietnamese communist party You know, he was a horrible dictator.

I'm sure he was responsible for a lot of death and destruction, but he wasn't a mass murderer.

And so you get those, you know, I mean, I would even argue, others will disagree, that Lenin wasn't a mass murderer.

You know, that he didn't kill the same way, you know, that Stalin killed.

They're communist dictators too, after all.

Khrushchev, well, was a communist dictator, but he stopped this killing.

And, you know, he's still responsible for a gulag and people sent off into a gulag and imprisonment and torture and that sort of thing.

So there are some, you know, like Stalin, like Mao, like Pol Pot, you know, who commit these horrible, horrible atrocities, extensively engaging in my view, in genocide, and there's some who don't.

Well, the difference is partly in personality, partly in historical circumstance, you know, partly in, you know, who is it that controls the reins of power?

How much do you connect the ideas of communism or Marxism or socialism to Hollydom or to Stalin's rule?

So how naturally is he kind of alluded to, does it lead to genocide?

That's also, I mean, in some ways, I've just addressed that question by saying it doesn't always lead to genocide.

You know, in the case again, you know, Cuba is not pretty, but it didn't have, there was no genocide in Cuba.

Even North Korea, as awful as it is, is a terrible dictatorship, right?

And people's rights are totally destroyed, right?

They have no freedom whatsoever, you know, is not as far as we know, genocidal.

Who knows whether it could be Or whether if they took over south korea, you know mass murder wouldn't take place and that kind of thing But my point is is that the ideology Doesn't necessarily dictate Genocide in other words.

I think that that makes genocide sometimes too easily possible Given You know the way it thinks through history as being you're on the right side of history and some people are on the wrong side of history and you have to destroy those people who are on the wrong side of history.

I mean, there is something in, you know, Marxism, Leninism, which, which, you know, has that kind of language and that kind of thinking.

But I don't think it's necessarily that way.

There's a wonderful historian at Berkeley named Martin Melia who has written on, you know, wrote a number of books on this subject and he was very, very, he was very, he was convinced that the, you know, that the ideology itself, you know, played a crucial role in the murderousness of the Soviet regime.

When I say not completely convinced, I think you could argue it different ways,

I mean, there's something about the ideology of communism that allows you to decrease the value of human life, almost like this philosophy, if it's okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.

So maybe that, if you can reason like that, then it's easier to take the leap of, for the good of the country, for the good of the people, for the good of the world, it's okay to kill a few people.

And then that's where I wonder about the slippery slope.

Yeah, no, no, again, I don't think it's a slippery slope.

In other words, I think it's dangerous, but I don't consider, I don't like Marxism, Leninism any better than the next guy.

And I've lived in plenty of those systems to know how they can beat people down and how they can, you know, destroy human aspirations and human interaction between people, but they're not necessarily murderous systems.

They are systems that contain people's autonomy, that force people into work and labor and lifestyles that they don't want to live.

I spent a lot of time with East Germans and Poles who lived in, and even in the Soviet Union, in the post-Stalin period where people lived lives they didn't want to live, you know, and didn't have the freedom to choose.

And that was terrifying in and of itself.

And they, you know, ascribe to Marxism-Leninism.

So I suppose it's important to draw the line between mass murder and genocide and mass murder versus just mass violation of human rights.

And the leap to mass murder, you're saying may be easier in some ideologies than others, but it's not clear that somehow 1 ideology definitely leads to mass murder and not.

I wonder how many factors, what factors, how much of it is a single charismatic leader?

How much of it is the conflagration of multiple historical events?

How much of it is just dumb, the opposite of luck.

Do you have a sense where if you look at a moment in history predict, looking at the factors, whether something bad's going to happen here.

When you look at Iraq, when Saddam Hussein first took power, well, you could, or you can, you know, go even farther back in history, would you be able to predict?

So you said, you already kind of answered that with Stalin saying there's no way you could have predicted that in the early 20s, is that always the case?

It's pretty much always the case in other words.

I mean history is a wonderful You know discipline and way of looking at life and the world in retrospect, meaning it happened.

And it's too easy to say sometimes it happened because it had to happen that way.

And you know, things, so I very much am of the school that emphasizes, you know, contingency and choice and difference and different paths and not necessarily a path that has to be followed.

I mean, you can think, well, something's gonna happen.

And usually the way it works, let me just give you 1 example.

I mean, I'm thinking about an example right now, which was the war in Yugoslavia, you know, which came in the 1990s and eventually ventuated in genocide in Bosnia.

And I remember very clearly, you know, the 1970s and 1980s in Yugoslavia and people would say, you know, there's trouble here and, you know, something could go wrong.

But no 1 in their wildest imagination thought that there would be outright war between them all.

Then the outright war happened, genocide happened, and afterwards people would say, I saw it coming.

So you get a lot of that, especially with pundits and journalists and that.

I saw it coming, I knew it was happening.

Well, I mean, what happens in the human mind and it happens in your mind too is, you go through a lot of alternatives.

I mean, think about January 6th in this country and all the different alternatives which people had in their mind or before January 6th, you know, after the lost election.

You know, things could have gone in lots of different ways and there were all kinds of people choosing different ways it could have gone, but nobody really knew how it was going to turn out.

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Norman Naimark: Genocide, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Absolute Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #248