Civilization #59: The Man of Steel

I want to make the argument that Joseph Stalin is probably the greatest man who ever lived. There are three reasons for this.

First, Joseph Stalin was a poor high school dropout from Georgia, which is on the fringes of the Russian Empire, and he led an extreme, fringe, and despised political party called the Bolsheviks into absolute power in Russia.

Second, among the Bolsheviks, Stalin was the least impressive. Everyone else was an intellectual with many books, speeches, and achievements on his resume. But Stalin defeated them all and became the ultimate ruler of Soviet Russia.

Third, during World War II, the Soviet Union was up against Germany. Stalin took a poor, divided, isolated nation, defeated Germany, and turned it into a global hegemon.

These are the three main reasons why I consider Stalin to be certainly the greatest man of the 20th century, and you can quite possibly make the argument that he was the greatest man who ever lived.

To reframe this, the Bolsheviks should not have triumphed. If you just looked at what was going on in early 20th-century Russia, you would not have predicted that the Soviets would have won. Stalin should not have become the Soviet leader, and the Soviets should not have won World War II. All three of these things happened because Stalin willed this reality into being. He is what Friedrich Nietzsche would call the Übermensch: someone who steps outside of history and warps it to his will. That is Joseph Stalin.

The Contradictions of Imperial Russia

Russia is very much a nation with a split personality. It is both Asian and European, both Christian and pagan, both enlightened and reactionary. Because of these contradictions, it has led to many rebellions and revolutions throughout Russian history. One of the most famous was in 1825, when a group of military officers called the Decembrists tried to overthrow the Tsar and install a military dictatorship. Ever since this event, revolutionary discussion became a sort of national pastime in Russia. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were sympathetic to revolutions.

The period from 1853 to 1856 was a pivotal moment in Russian history because that's when Russia lost the Crimean War to the Ottoman Empire, which was backed by the French and the British. This marked a limit to the expansion of Russia. One way that Russia resolved its internal contradictions and conflicts was by expanding eastwards, allowing the nobles to accumulate more land and more serfs, which mollified many of them. But after Russia lost the Crimean War, it understood that it was backward and agricultural compared with Europe.

So, Alexander II, who was Tsar of Russia at this time, embarked on a series of radical liberal reforms. The most major was in 1861 when he emancipated the serfs—slaves who were tied down to the land. By liberating them, he hoped to further industrialize Russia and create a more vibrant market economy, which is what you need to be a modern nation-state. But as you can imagine, this created a lot of pushback from the nobles who lost a lot of wealth and property because of these reforms.

A fun fact about Alexander II was that he was very good friends with Abraham Lincoln. In fact, Alexander II was a huge admirer of the American Republic. So much so that when the American Civil War started in 1861, Tsar Alexander II was worried that the French and the British would intervene on behalf of the Confederacy. The reason is that, first of all, the American Confederacy provided a lot of cotton to the British and the French for their textile industry. As well, the French and the British saw America as a growing threat, so by supporting the Confederacy, they believed they could divide and weaken America.

In response, the Tsar publicly stated that if the French and the British ever declared an alliance with the Confederacy, then Russia would intervene on behalf of the Union. To show that he was serious, he sent warships to New York and San Francisco to show that Russia would defend America. This is forgotten, but it's a really fun fact about Russian history that Alexander II was a huge admirer of Abraham Lincoln. They wrote letters to each other, and he did much to save the American Union in a time of its crisis.

His liberal reforms stopped in 1881 when he was assassinated. He was assassinated on the day that he returned from a meeting where he was going to promote a constitutional monarchy in Russia. He was assassinated by a terrorist group called the People's Will.

There's a very good reason why the People's Will assassinated Alexander II. At this time in Russian history, many revolutionaries believed that to liberate Russia, you needed to liberate the mindset of the peasants. The problem was the peasants loved the Tsar. The intellectuals felt that the idea of the Tsar enslaved the peasants from seeking enlightenment and freedom. Therefore, to send a signal to liberate the peasantry, you needed to kill the Tsar in an act of violence. And that's what happened in 1881.

The People's Will was a very small group of people; there were at most 2,000 members. They were founded in 1879, right before they assassinated Alexander II, and after the assassination, all the major members were quickly arrested by the secret police and executed. They confessed to their crimes, which is why we know so much about them.

But this creates a problem. If the secret police were so effective in capturing all the assassins right after the assassination, why weren't they effective in stopping the assassination? That's a curious question. If you think about it some more, you have other problems. For example, the People's Will was a terrorist organization, but where did they get their funding? This is always a problem when you are an underground organization. Another problem is that if these are religious fanatics who truly believe their mission is to liberate the peasantry, they're probably very opinionated and very hard to organize into a hierarchy. These are two major problems that the People's Will and other terrorist organizations throughout Russian history would face, including the Bolsheviks.

The Secret Police and the Cultivation of Extremism

To answer both questions, let's do a thought experiment. Let's just say you're the secret police, and you're tasked with monitoring and capturing these terrorists. Is it to your benefit to capture them, or is it to your benefit to assist them? This sounds like a silly question, but let's think about it deeply.

Why wouldn't you want to support political extremists? There are some very good reasons. It's risky, it's violent, it's unethical, and it doesn't really help anyone. But if you're the secret police and you ask yourself what the benefits of helping them are, it turns out there are quite a lot.

• Defame the opposition: By helping extremists, you defame the entire political opposition. You make all the people who oppose the Tsar look bad because they look fanatical and violent.
• Foment internal dissent: You can foment internal dissent among political opponents. The classic example is the Marxist group at this time, the Mensheviks. They were intellectuals who believed heavily in Marx. The Bolsheviks were led by Lenin and were an extreme group. The main conflict was that the Mensheviks believed that for the revolution to happen, you had to follow the Marxist prescription: you go from an autocracy to a bourgeois democracy because that is what's going to help Russia industrialize. Once industrialization happens, capitalism will automatically make the proletariat class-conscious, and when they're class-conscious, they will unite and overthrow the bourgeois democracy to create the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is the classical Marx theory of evolution towards a communist society. Lenin believed we don't need this. The Menshevik worldview was that they had to be patient and wait for Russia to industrialize. At that time, industrial workers in Russia were about 3% of the population, while the peasantry was 80%. Lenin's argument was that instead of waiting for the proletariat to become 80% of the population, we can create a vanguard party and lead the peasants into a communist paradise. The Mensheviks said that when you do that, all you're doing is creating a peasant revolution, which will lead to a dictatorship of the peasantry. You'll be no different from the Tsar. Eventually, Lenin and the Bolsheviks would split apart from the Mensheviks, and it would be to the benefit of the secret police to support the Bolsheviks.
• Justify state control: By supporting political extremism, you also induce political violence to justify more state control.
• Collect intelligence: You collect intelligence by implanting spies within these extremist groups.
• Score political points: You can also arrest extremists to score political points within the bureaucracy. The secret police is getting paid a lot of money; how do they justify their salaries? They arrest extremists that they support.
• Assassinate political enemies: You can use these extremists to assassinate political enemies. You can make the argument that within the secret police, there was a faction of nobles who were outraged at the reforms of Alexander II, especially the thought of creating a constitutional monarchy which would limit the powers of the aristocracy. Therefore, they had the People's Will kill Alexander II.
• False flag operations: You can have extremists, on behalf of your enemy, create terrorist events within the country which will justify a war against that enemy.
• It's fun and exciting: The people in the secret police are all psychopaths, and they enjoy this process.

You can make the argument that one of the main functions of the secret police is to create problems for society so that they can justify their power. This sounds pretty extreme, but let's look at some evidence that this was the case in Russia in the late 19th century.

This is Vladimir Lenin, a revolutionary who had to escape to Europe to avoid being captured by the secret police. He was a fanatic. Let's read from Wikipedia about his time in London:

Lenin's factionalism began to alienate increasing numbers of Bolsheviks, including his former close supporters... The Okhrana, the Russian imperial secret police, exploited his factional attitude by sending a spy, Roman Malinovsky, to act as a vocal supporter of Lenin within the party. Various Bolsheviks expressed their suspicions about Malinovsky to Lenin, although it is unclear if the latter was aware of the spy's duplicity; it is possible that he used Malinovsky to feed false information to the Okhrana.

The secret police was an active supporter of Vladimir Lenin. Wikipedia tells us that they sent a spy to support Lenin, but we can also guess that the secret police were also sending money to Lenin, which is very important because then Lenin could support his faction within the larger socialist movement. In fact, they probably had more money than the other groups. The secret police was incubating the Bolsheviks.

Have you ever asked yourself where Islamic extremism comes from? During the Islamic Golden Age, it was a period of openness and tolerance. So what changed? After World War II, the Americans and the British started to sponsor Islamic extremism. This is pretty well known historically. There are three main reasons why.

1. At this time, the Soviet Union and America were fighting a Cold War. There were no Islamic minorities within America, but there were lots and lots of Islamic minorities within the Soviet Union—maybe a third of the population. They hated the communists because the communists were atheists, and they wanted to celebrate their religion. By sponsoring Islamic extremism, you are destabilizing the Soviet Union.
2. The Middle East was growing in importance because of its oil resources. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, nationalism, terrorism, and socialism were the major ideologies of these nations, and these were all threats to American and British commercial interests within the Middle East. All these ideologies were saying we shouldn't give our oil for free to America and Britain; we should protect our resources. By supporting Islamic extremism, you're undermining these ideologies, which is exactly what happened in Iran.
3. The Americans and the British heavily supported the Saudi regime, which was extremely unpopular. A long time ago, the Saudis made a pact with Wahhabism, which is a fanatical ideology within Islam. By supporting Islamic extremism, you support Wahhabism, which supports the Saudi regime.

The secret police throughout history have been supporting local extremists in order to achieve short-term political objectives.

The Fall of the Tsar and the Rise of Lenin

After the death of Alexander II, his son Alexander III came into power, and he was a reactionary. But he died fairly young, which left his son, Nicholas II, to take the throne. Nicholas II was very young and inexperienced. He was a nice guy who loved his family, but he was not really equipped to lead Russia in a time of tremendous political and social tumult.

In 1904, the Russians lost a war against the Japanese. At this time, not only did they lose the war, but there was a famine going on throughout Russia. This was a time of tremendous discontent and revolution, which led to something called Bloody Sunday in 1905, where worker protesters were killed by soldiers.

Also at this time, the royal family started to ally themselves with a priest named Grigori Rasputin. He styled himself as a mystic. The royal family had exactly one heir to the throne, his name was Alexei, the young son. The problem with Alexei was he had something called hemophilia, which meant that if he bled, he could die. Rasputin was very good at calming down Alexei, so Rasputin became a member of the royal family, essentially. But the Russian people hated Rasputin because there were rumors that he was a sex maniac and was organizing all these satanic rituals. There was also a very popular rumor that Rasputin was sleeping with Alexandra, the Tsarina. Eventually, the nobles would organize and assassinate Rasputin, but not before this entire affair did tremendous damage to the reputation and prestige of the royal family.

World War I broke out, and even though Rasputin pleaded with the Tsar not to intervene, the Tsar did declare war against Germany. Now Russia was up against Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. This war was devastating for Russia.

In 1917, there was a huge, spontaneous protest against the Tsar. At this point, his generals told him he should abdicate, which is what he did. The parliament, called the Duma, became the provisional government, and they declared a republic. But they were still at war with Germany. So what Germany did was it organized for Lenin to be smuggled back into Russia so that he could foment discontent, rebellion, and revolution. Lenin was not just a useful idiot to the Russian secret police; he was also a useful idiot to the Germans who wanted to knock Russia out of the war.

When Lenin returned to Russia, he tried to organize a rebellion against the provisional government because the provisional government still wanted to stay in the war, and Lenin wanted to take Russia out of the war. Lenin called for three things: land, peace, and bread. This was very popular among the people. Eventually, the provisional government tried to arrest Lenin, and he escaped. But then the military tried to overthrow the government, and now the provisional government under Kerensky required Lenin to help out and defend the republic against the military.

Lenin was not a politician; he was a theoretician. And he was fanatical. Let's read a passage from his book State and Revolution, which he wrote in the summer of 1917, to understand his thinking:

The petty-bourgeois democrats, those sham socialists who replaced the class struggle by dreams of class harmony, even pictured the socialist transformation in a dreamy fashion—not as the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting class, but as the peaceful submission of the minority to the majority which has become aware of its aims.

Lenin had absolute, violent, vitriolic contempt for all of his enemies. In October 1917, Lenin ordered a coup d'état against the provisional government, and this would eventually lead to the Russian Civil War. At this time, the Bolsheviks were controlling only some small cities, primarily Petrograd. But their enemies, called the Whites—former remnants of the Russian Empire, the aristocrats, the military—controlled most of Russia, and it seemed like they were making a huge advance against the Bolsheviks.

But three things would conspire to ensure the Bolsheviks won.

1. The Whites didn't actually have a policy for reform. They wanted things to stay the way they were, but peasants were hungry, landless, and wanted peace. So they lost the support of the peasants.
2. The Bolsheviks enacted a reign of terror. They had a secret police called the Cheka, which went around and killed all enemies of the revolution. They were fanatically installing fear and terror among the Russian people.
3. The last and most important reason was Leon Trotsky. Trotsky organized the Red Army, and he was an incredible orator as well as an organizer. He was absolutely ruthless. He organized something called blocking divisions. The idea was when you go into battle, you're supposed to run ahead. If you change your mind and run back, someone in the back—a blocker—will shoot you to death. It was brutal, but it worked very effectively. Also, Trotsky reorganized the Red Army into a meritocracy. He didn't care about your political affiliation or whether or not you supported the Bolsheviks. If you were capable, you would be promoted within the Red Army. He turned the Red Army into a very effective fighting force, and this was what allowed the Bolsheviks to eventually triumph.

The Poet, The Prophet, and The Messiah

In many ways, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution are very similar.

In both, you have a poet. Rousseau said freedom is the general will; Marx said freedom is classlessness. Then you have a prophet who leads everyone into the promised land through his pure faith and fanaticism. In the French Revolution, you had Robespierre, who said reason will set us free. In the Russian Revolution, you have Lenin, who said violence will set us free.

And the last thing is the messiah figure who comes and conquers the world to ensure the revolution succeeds. In the French Revolution, you have Napoleon, who said, "I'm the expanding empire." His theory to ensure the revolution would survive was to expand outwards and conquer Europe, which is what he did. But then you have Stalin, who is "the continuous revolution." The way that he maintained the stability and vitality of the revolution was by constantly purging his enemies, very much along the lines of the Cultural Revolution in China.

Let's look at the similarities between Lenin and Robespierre. Both were from the lower nobility. They were both poets in many ways, and their families faced downward mobility. Lenin's father was an educator and a member of the low nobility, but he died when Lenin was young. Then Lenin's brother, whom Lenin really admired, was arrested while he was at university for plotting against the empire and was executed. Both were idealists who sought to create justice in a world of injustice.

The similarities between Napoleon and Stalin are also really interesting. They were both from marginalized minorities—Napoleon was Corsican, Stalin was Georgian—and they felt persecution and inadequacy. So they became obsessed with obtaining power to escape their insecurities. The similarities between these characters are very enlightening.

The Spy Who Became a Messiah

Stalin's father owned a small shoe factory when Stalin was born, but then the father lost the factory and became an abusive alcoholic. Stalin was born poor. He had a very loving Christian mother and did well in school, but in high school, he came in contact with Marxism and then dropped out. The fact that Stalin was a young man who suffered racial discrimination, downward mobility, and had an alcoholic father made him the perfect recruit for three types of organizations: criminal networks, revolutionaries, and the secret police. He was part of all three networks and was a nexus of these three networks within Georgia.

Here is some background about Stalin from Wikipedia. I want to point out certain sentences. He goes to Batumi, and there, "his militant rhetoric proved divisive among the city's Marxists, some of whom suspected he was an agent provocateur." He was a spy. His mission was to promote violence and disorganization within the locality so the secret police could swoop in and arrest everyone. This makes a lot more sense than a poor man discovering Marxism and then being totally committed to the cause. It makes more sense that he was recruited as a spy by the secret police in order to sow discontent and violence among the Marxists.

Let's continue. Stalin began working at the Rothschild oil refinery, where he co-organized two worker strikes. After the strikes, the leaders were arrested. The moment he organized the strikes, all these leaders were arrested. He co-organized a mass demonstration which led to the storming of the prison. Stalin was arrested in April 1902 and sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia, arriving in November 1903. After one failed attempt, Stalin escaped from his exile in January 1904.

Throughout this time, he was getting arrested by the secret police, but for some reason, he escaped after only a month. The benefit of being arrested by the secret police is that he now has credentials. You can only be a revolutionary if you've been sent to Siberia by the secret police. This is all very suspicious.

In 1905, government troops massacred protesters. Stalin was in Baku in February when ethnic riots broke out between Armenians and Azeris, and he formed Bolshevik battle squads, which he used to keep the city's warring ethnic factions apart. Of all the Bolsheviks—because at this point in history, Lenin and Trotsky were basically writing books—Stalin was the one who was out there organizing people, committing violence, and creating organizations. In fact, he was the one funding the Bolsheviks. He assembled his gang, a criminal network, which attacked the Black Hundreds and raised money through racketeering, counterfeiting, robberies, and kidnapping the children of wealthy figures for ransom. He was the main financier of the Bolshevik party. Without him, there would be no Bolsheviks. I would make the argument that he was doing this on behalf of the secret police. Because why would you do this? If you're stealing money, why not keep it for yourself, spread it to your friends, and bribe the police? Why are you taking all this money and giving it to Lenin?

Ultimately, Stalin would triumph. Why? Because Lenin and Trotsky, his two main competitors, were egomaniacs who wanted to be proven right. They were intellectuals and theorists. Stalin just wanted power for himself.

Stalin's Path to Absolute Power

Vladimir Lenin was the one pushing for the revolution; he was the theorist. As the Soviets developed power, by the 1920s, he was starting to have strokes. He had always been in bad health, but now he was in really bad health, so he had to figure out who would succeed him. Ultimately, he decided the best person to succeed him was Leon Trotsky because Trotsky was a hero of the revolution. He, like Lenin, believed in an international movement of communism. They both believed that if communism was to survive in the Soviet Union, it had to spread to Europe. They both believed very strongly that with one push, because of World War I, all of Europe would fall to communism.

Stalin disagreed with them. Stalin believed in maintaining communism within the boundaries of the Soviet Union and being a nationalist. Ultimately, it was Stalin who would triumph over Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin and create his cult of personality in the Soviet Union.

Most people assume that Stalin and Lenin were best friends because, really, without Stalin, there would be no Lenin. But you can also make the argument that without Lenin, there would be no Stalin. They were codependent on each other, so it's always assumed they were best friends. But before his death, Lenin wrote a secret memo to the party leaders.

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution... Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General.

What Lenin was saying is that if you let Stalin continue to amass power, he will become a dictator. Lenin was the head of the Bolsheviks, but he was not a dictator; there was committee rule. At this point, you would think that Lenin, as the leader, would make it his mission to ensure Stalin was removed from the General Secretary position and removed as a possible contender for power. But then something happened: Lenin had a stroke, convulsions, and he died.

We will never know what really happened, but if you talk to medical practitioners who've looked at this case, they say these convulsions are more indicative of poisoning than they are of a stroke. There are certain people—and this is not a mainstream view—who believe that Stalin poisoned Lenin because Lenin was about to remove Stalin from his position of power.

At this time in history, there were three individuals in the way of Stalin amassing complete power. We talked about Lenin, but then there was a man named Yakov Sverdlov. He was Lenin's right-hand man. In fact, he was the General Secretary of the Bolsheviks before Stalin. He was extremely competent, and then at a very young age, only in his 30s, he died of an illness. That's really convenient for Stalin because now Stalin could become head of the organization department of the Bolshevik party and install all his cronies into positions of power.

But guess what? In 1926, the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky—the head of the secret police—died as well under mysterious circumstances. He had a heart attack, and he was also really young. Remember, the secret police is where the center of power in government is. After he died, Stalin was now able to implant his cronies, his loyal subordinates, into the secret police. All of this was really convenient for Stalin. Even though we have no evidence that he, in fact, poisoned all three, it's just really convenient for him. Either he was the luckiest man ever in the world, or he basically killed everyone in order to amass power.

He continued this from 1936 to 1938 in something called the Great Purge, which was the continuous revolution. At this point, Stalin would kill at least one million party members. He destroyed the old guard by having the secret police purge the army and the bureaucracy, and then secret units within the secret police purged those guys, and then new units purged those secret units, and so on. There were show trials where the Bolshevik leaders, the old guard, confessed to being traitors to the regime and secret capitalists.

Let's look at the purges of the Red Army. This is from Wikipedia:

The purges of the Red Army and Military Maritime Fleet removed:

• 3 of 5 marshals
• 13 of 15 army commanders
• 8 of 9 admirals
• 50 of 57 army corps commanders
• 154 out of 186 division commanders

He completely wiped out the entire leadership of the Soviet military. This fact is what sort of convinced the Germans to invade in 1941 because they thought Stalin had killed off all the experienced officers, so they wouldn't know what to do. But you can make the argument, and a lot of people have, that this was ultimately beneficial to the war effort in World War II. Why? Because you've removed all the dead weight. You removed the conservative generals who were not experienced with innovative warfare. By doing this, Stalin made the Soviet military more innovative, more open, and more flexible.

Let's do a thought experiment. Let's say there are a hundred of you students, and you're shipped off to a desert island and forced to survive by yourself. Maybe in the beginning, you would struggle and fight, but eventually, over a couple of weeks, you would learn to get along and survive. Now, let's imagine 20 teachers go with you guys. I'm pretty sure you're worse off because those 20 teachers would be more intent on maintaining a hierarchy than actually solving a problem. You can make the argument that by purging the army in the late 30s, Stalin made the Red Army more innovative and better prepared for the German invasion in 1941.

During the show trials, basically all the leading Bolsheviks, anyone who could have possibly challenged Stalin, were arrested, and they confessed to being criminals, traitors, and spies. All of them were, of course, innocent. These were loyal Bolsheviks who sacrificed their entire lives and their families to ensure the revolution would succeed. So why did they confess?

Arthur Koestler wrote a book called Darkness at Noon, which is one of the best books ever written. In it, he profiles an old Bolshevik leader and tries to go into the mind of this person as he is about to be executed. He's remembering his life, where for the revolution, he killed everyone, sacrificed everyone, betrayed everyone—he is guilty as sin. But the moment that he's about to be executed, he confesses to everything. The argument here is if you spend your entire life doing bad things, you're not going to admit this was all for nothing. He's going to do everything possible to save the revolution. If that meant killing himself in order to save the revolution, he would do so. Think of the original sin of the revolution: all this violence committed against civilians. Now this Bolshevik, he is like Jesus who is sacrificed; he will cleanse the people of their sins and allow for the revolution to continue. What was brilliant about this is Stalin put these people on trial and he knew that ultimately they would confess, and this would cement his power.

How Stalin Won It All

Let's summarize how Stalin won it all. There are five reasons.

1. From an early age, he won the charge of powerful patrons—criminal mafia bosses, secret police heads, revolutionaries—and he was actually loyal to them until it was no longer expedient. What's amazing about Stalin is he made everyone believe that he was loyal to them personally and absolutely.
2. He was always able to identify capable subordinates and promote them selflessly.
3. He understood silence can be more powerful than great speechmaking. Do not become too wedded to ideas and positions, and let others despise you. Lenin and Leon Trotsky were tremendous orators. They were brilliant. The problem, though, is that by making these speeches, it increased their hubris, their ego, and it made them more wedded to ideas. Stalin refused to give speeches, so you could never understand how he thought about things. That was his secret weapon. Also, no one took him seriously. Everyone thought Stalin was an intellectual lightweight because, at this point, the Bolsheviks thought that whoever had the best theories were the most righteous leaders, and Stalin didn't have any ideas of his own.
4. Strategic retreats are most effective in times of internal conflict. Disappearing and hiding offends no one and offers no risk. The secret police always arrested Stalin at a time of tremendous conflict within the socialist movement. During the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, Stalin wasn't there; he was arrested. That's really convenient for Stalin.
5. Let your enemies destroy themselves. Accept who they are and help them become their worst selves. Trotsky lost out because he was a tremendous egomaniac. He pissed everyone off, and Stalin encouraged that. He would do this with Hitler as well, and that's how he won World War II.

There's no way we can understand how Stalin was able to defeat the Bolshevik leadership without a very simple formulation: Lenin and Trotsky were all priests, but Stalin was a spy.

Priests have faith and conviction; you're trying to bring God to the world. A spy has multiple personalities. Stalin could be a different person to two different people. In fact, no one really thought Stalin was a serious threat, and no one really took him seriously. Priests have analytical intelligence; that's why they're able to write books and give great speeches. A spy has emotional intelligence; a spy is able to make you trust him. Priests are concerned with the pursuit of truth in God; spies only want power. If you think about it this way, the Bolsheviks didn't really have a chance against Stalin.

World War II: The Ultimate Gambit

There's tremendous debate as to what happened in World War II. It was a cataclysmic struggle between the Soviet Union and the Germans. Tens of millions of people died in this war; it was a tragedy. So there's always going to be debate as to what happened and why the Germans lost.

My interpretation is this: The Germans had a certain doctrine of war, a certain belief system, going into the war, and they executed this belief system perfectly in the blitzkrieg. But when their doctrine of war failed, they couldn't adapt. The German doctrine of war is called blitzkrieg, and the idea is you very quickly cut off the head, and the body collapses. You basically go in and destroy the command and control center of the military. That's what happened throughout Europe in the late 30s. That's what happened to France. In only a few weeks, Germany was able to cut off the command center of the French military and cause it to collapse.

But the problem with the Soviet Union is that it's huge, and there's really no command and control center. So even though the Germans were destroying the Soviets, they were wandering around Russia pointlessly for many months. They really didn't have a plan because the plan was always to destroy the head of the snake. But if you can't find the head, you're going to run around aimlessly.

The Soviets were really good at fighting a war of attrition, something called a scorched-earth policy, which is how they defeated Charles XII of Sweden as well as Napoleon of France before. And that's how they also defeated the Germans. The Germans are known for their organizational supremacy, but they're not known for their battle flexibility. The Soviets, even though they were losing many battles in the beginning of the war, eventually adapted themselves to German warfare and were able to overwhelm the Germans. A lot of this flexibility had to do with the fact that they lost a lot of their major leadership in the purges. Another way of saying this is the difference between the Germans and the Russians is Hitler did not purge his military; Stalin did purge his military, and that's why the Soviets were much more innovative than the Germans in the war.

Also, the Germans were fighting for something called Lebensraum, which means "living space" in German. It's basically the idea that if we are to survive as a German people, as a German nation, we need more resources, we need more land, and so we need Ukraine, especially for the oil. But the Soviets were fighting for their motherland, Mother Russia. So they were much more motivated to fight than the Germans.

Looking at this map, you'll see two things. First, the Germans were really spread out throughout the front. That allows for encirclement; it allows for the Soviets to attack them from different angles. Second, you will also notice that the Germans didn't get that far in this war. They at most got to the outskirts of Moscow but not beyond. And the Soviet Union, if you just look at a map, is huge.

This was one of the deadliest wars in human history. The Germans sent in almost 4 million personnel and they overwhelmed the Soviets in the beginning, but it was not enough. Four million men was not enough to conquer the Soviet Union. You needed 40 million, and the Germans didn't have that.

The World in 1935

This is a big deal because let's go back to the year 1935. If we were to discuss what would happen 10 years from then, we could probably guess that the Soviet Union would collapse. Why? Because Stalin was purging all the major leadership of the Soviet Union, creating a lot of discontent and civil conflict. If you look at a map of the world in 1935, most of the world was capitalist. Japan, which controlled the East, was capitalist. Then you had the Germans, the Nazis, rising. You had the English, and you had the Americans. All four of these nations were under threat from communism. There were communist subversives in all these countries, and they were considered a major threat. In the 1930s, there was a real threat that in America there would be a communist rebellion. In Germany, there was a failed communist revolution. In France, in England, the communists were everywhere. So these four nations—Japan, the Americans, the English, the Germans—all saw communism as a major threat to them. We could imagine that they would unite against the Soviet Union at some point to destroy communism once and for all.

Second, at this point in history, race science and eugenics were very popular. The Americans, the British, and the Germans all saw themselves as one people: the Nordic people, the Aryan race. In fact, Hitler was a tremendous admirer of the English people. He saw the English as brave, brilliant, as the master race. So you can make the argument that the Nordic people would eventually unite together to destroy the Slavs, which was a major threat to them in Europe.

The third major reason is that as Germany was industrializing, the Americans were helping Hitler industrialize. This is from ChatGPT:

American industrialists invested heavily in Nazi Germany, particularly before and during World War II. Major companies like General Motors, ITT, Eastman Kodak, Standard Oil, and others had substantial assets and investments in German subsidiaries.

These major American companies of the time were helping Hitler to industrialize his war machine. Given all this, you could imagine that America would eventually come to support Germany in a conflict with the Soviet Union. At this point in history, it was unlikely the Soviet Union would survive.

Operation Barbarossa: The Greatest Mystery

Then in 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. This is one of the greatest mysteries among historians. The mystery is this: Hitler had organized 4 million soldiers, a multinational force, to invade the Soviet Union. Spies—the Americans, the British—told Stalin, "Listen, Hitler's going to invade you." Stalin refused to believe them. He said, "First of all, I have a non-aggression pact with Hitler. We're friends. He's not going to invade me. Number two, Hitler is being blockaded by the British. We, the Soviet Union, are providing all these resources—oil, food—to the Germans. Why would they invade us? It's suicidal. And third of all, Germany doesn't have the resources to invade us."

Stalin refused to believe that the Germans would invade. He believed it was a British plot to undermine the friendship between Germany and the Soviet Union. Also, there were some German soldiers who were sympathizers to communism. They would run away and go to the Soviets and tell them, "Listen, I have all these secret plans of this invasion called Operation Barbarossa. They're going to come. The Germans are coming. Be ready." And what did the Soviets do? They shot them to death for being spies.

So, the Germans invaded, and the Soviets weren't prepared. But not only that, Stalin seemed to be purposefully sabotaging the Soviet war effort. As the Germans were advancing, the Soviets should have pushed back. But Stalin ordered the army to stay where they were, so they got encircled by the Germans. At this point, the Germans had more prisoners of war than they could possibly imagine—millions and millions of Soviets captured in the first months of the war. It was a complete disaster for the Soviet Union.

Everyone thought Stalin had gone out of his mind. First of all, why wasn't he ready for Hitler's invasion? He refused to believe that Hitler would invade. Second of all, why didn't he give his generals authority to run the war in the way that it should have been run? Why did Stalin interfere and destroy the Soviet army in the first few months? These are the two major mysteries of Operation Barbarossa.

I'm going to make you this argument: Stalin purposefully did both things. Stalin purposely let Hitler invade, and Stalin purposely let millions of soldiers be captured by the Nazis.

Because the Nazis were destroying the Soviet Union, the Americans came in on behalf of the Soviet Union. Remember, at this point in history, the Americans thought they were going to go to war against the Soviet Union. The Americans wanted to ally with Germany. But because the Germans were about to destroy the Soviet Union, the Americans couldn't let this happen. If Germany destroyed the Soviet Union, German science, technology, and organization would have access to Soviet manpower, oil, and food. Germany would be invincible. So the Americans stepped in.

Let's look at the American contribution to the war. In total, US deliveries to the USSR via Lend-Lease amounted to $11 billion, equivalent to $250 billion today.

• Over 400,000 jeeps and trucks
• 12,000 armored vehicles
• 7,000 tanks
• 14,000 aircraft
• 1.75 million tons of food

The Americans basically industrialized the Soviet Union, giving them unlimited resources and unlimited technology because they were afraid of a German conquest. From Wikipedia, roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR. When the Americans entered the war, they used a total of 22 million tons. The American army used the same amount of supplies that they gave to the Soviets. That's incredible to think about.

There were millions of soldiers captured by the Germans, and it's a travesty what happened to them because most of them would starve to death. They starved to death not because the Nazis were barbarians, but because the Nazis had a doctrine of war where they would go in, and after three months, the country would collapse. That didn't happen. Now they were stuck with these millions of soldiers. Now they were in trouble because they couldn't actually deal with all these soldiers, and they didn't have enough food and supplies to continue the war. These prisoners of war were a huge problem for the Nazi war machine. And because a lot of these soldiers were dying in prisoner camps, it motivated the Russians to fight to the bitter end.

The Soviet Union lost anywhere between 26 to 27 million people. It is one of the greatest tragedies to befall a nation in human history. That is true, but let's look at something called game theory counterfactual. I'm going to show you different possibilities, different outcomes.

Everyone knew the Soviet Union and Germany were going to go to war at some point. It was entirely obvious to everyone. There were four possibilities:

1. The Soviet Union invades Germany and threatens Berlin. What happens here? I guarantee you the Americans come in on behalf of Germany. The Americans send their military to defend Germany because they cannot afford for Europe to turn communist. In this situation, Stalin loses the war. The Soviet Union is destroyed.
2. The Soviet Union invades Germany and is stopped at the border. Guess what? The Americans still come in because they cannot afford for Germany to lose this war against the Soviet Union. The Americans still come in; Stalin loses.
3. Germany invades the Soviet Union and is stopped at the border. In this scenario, the Americans are laughing their heads off. "Fine, fight it out. We don't care." The Americans are probably going to sell supplies to both the Germans and the Soviet Union to destroy both, and eventually, they'll come in to destroy both Germany and the Soviet Union.
4. Germany invades the Soviet Union and threatens Moscow. This is the only situation in which the Soviet Union wins.

In all three other situations, the Soviet Union loses. There's only one situation in which the Soviet Union wins. There are 10,000 different scenarios, and there's only one scenario in which Stalin wins the war. And he found it, and he implemented it. But it required the sacrifice of 27 million Soviet people, soldiers, and civilians. Only in this situation does the Soviet Union win World War II. In every other situation, Stalin loses the war because the Americans will come in on behalf of Germany.

This war was fundamental, and it changed the course of history. Without this war, without Stalin winning, there would be no Mao Zedong, there would be no communist China, there would be no new China, there would be no today's China. You have to understand this: communism was not inevitable. It did not have to happen. In fact, you can make the argument that in the 1940s, it was going to get destroyed by the capitalists. It was only the start of World War II that allowed China to turn communist. Stalin changed the course of human history. None of these things should have happened. Stalin made them happen.

Questions and Answers

How did the Americans feel about communism and fascism?

In the 1930s, the American elite were heavy Nazi sympathizers. There was an American named Charles Lindbergh, and he founded something called the America First party. He was very popular, and there's a very good chance that he would have won the elections in America. American isolationism was the dominant political trend, and it was only when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that the Americans entered World War II. If the Japanese hadn't attacked Pearl Harbor, it would have been almost impossible to convince the American people to enter the war. The American elite were either neutral—"we don't care, we're isolationists"—or pro-Nazi. Communism and anarchism were real threats to the American political system in the 1930s, especially with the Great Depression.

Why did the British hate the Germans so much?

Hitler made numerous peace overtures to the British, especially Winston Churchill. The Germans had tremendous respect for the British; it's basically the same people. So why was Churchill so intent on destroying Germany?

There are different historical arguments. One argument is Churchill just hated Hitler personally; he had a visceral dislike of him. Number two is the Germans embarrassed the British in the war because the British sent this expeditionary force against the Germans, and the Germans wiped them out. The British were forced to retreat at Dunkirk.

For me, the best reason is just geopolitical. This is something called the Mackinder thesis, which was developed after World War I. The idea is this: Britain is a naval power, and as long as it's able to dominate the seas, it controls the world because, at this time in history, most people are trading through the sea.

But there's a problem. Let's just say that a power arises within the Heartland—it could be Germany, or it could be Russia. If they're able to unite or conquer each other, then they unite the entire Eurasian continent, in which case all they do is build railways, and then Britain ceases to exist as an empire. The great threat is a great power emerging within Eurasia to unite the entire Heartland. The British believed this, but the Americans believed this as well because the Americans would eventually inherit the British Empire. At this point in history, Germany was conquering all of Europe and was about to conquer Russia. So Britain's geopolitical interest was to ensure that Germany would be hindered.

The history books teach that World War II was a great conflict between Britain and Germany for democracy and human freedom. That's nonsense. World War II was fought primarily between Germany and Russia. Three-quarters of German forces were directed at Russia. Most casualties were happening between Germany and Russia. What Britain was doing that was vital was blockading Germany. As Germany was running out of food and fuel, it had no choice but to invade the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, in order to access the resources of Russia. During World War II, Hitler wanted peace. Britain wanted to ensure Germany could not expand to the east and create the Heartland. That's what was driving British interest at this time.

What was Stalin's strategy vis-à-vis the Americans?

What Stalin was able to do that was different from everyone else is that he was able to see the world as it is. If you're Churchill or Hitler, you're thinking in terms of Europe; they're all Eurocentric. Stalin was able to see the Americans. He knew the Americans would eventually come into the war. He was able to see Japan. The reason why is that at this time, communism was an international movement, so he had spies everywhere. He basically had the best intelligence in the world, so he was able to figure out exactly how these pieces were going to move about.

For him, it was like, "Okay, I go conquer Germany, but then the Americans come in and destroy us." The main problem was the Americans because, at this point, America had the greatest industrial capacity in the world. Whichever side the Americans supported would win the war. So Stalin had to figure out a way to neutralize the Americans. And the best way to neutralize the Americans is to be friends. Because America is a democracy, if Roosevelt is saying, "Uncle Joe is our friend," and he has all these photos in the press of Stalin and Roosevelt shaking hands and having these conferences, then the Americans cannot go around and backstab the Soviet Union.

After World War II ended, after the Germans were defeated handily by the Allies, there were many Americans, especially General Patton, who recognized that they had made a mistake. The real enemy was not the Germans; the real enemy was the Russians. This would eventually give us the Cold War. It was after World War II that the Americans realized they were duped. They should not have come into this war on behalf of the Soviet Union. They should have stayed neutral or supported Germany to maintain the balance of power.

Stalin just tricked everyone. That's why I say he's the Übermensch. It should not have happened this way. If you just think logically about what each player in the game should have done, then the Soviet Union should have collapsed. Stalin was able to trick Hitler; he convinced Hitler to invade him. He tricked Roosevelt; Roosevelt became his supporter. He even tricked Churchill. Using game theory analysis, you have to conclude that Stalin was the only one who saw the world globally and was able to manipulate people to his benefit.

What did Stalin promise the Soviet people to get them to fight to the bitter end?

He didn't have to promise them anything. He was God. He could do what he did because he was God. Any other leader who pulled this crap would have been arrested and executed for incompetence. Only Stalin, who because of the Great Purge consolidated power only in his hands, had authority that was unquestionable. He had spies spying on spies, and he had other spies spying on those spies. He created this divide-and-conquer system within the Soviet Union which made his power absolute. You can make the argument that he was the most powerful person ever in human history because no one could question his authority. So he could afford to do this. He could afford to make mistakes and look like a buffoon because no one could challenge him.

Ultimately, the Soviet people rallied around him because they didn't want to be conquered by the Germans. They wanted to save their nation, and Stalin knew this. There's a very famous quotation attributed to Stalin. It's not true; he actually didn't say this, but he could have said this: "One million people die in a gulag, that's a statistic. One man gets run over by a tractor, that's a national tragedy." He understood intimately how people think. He understood the psychology of both individuals and of nations, and as such, he was able to manipulate people and control people to his will.

One thing he did promise people during the time of war was a return to Russian patriotism. With Soviet ideology, there wasn't really a space for the old Russian identity; it was a new Soviet identity that was being created. That meant you closed all the churches and got rid of traditional culture. During the war, the churches opened up again, and it was able to create a certain amount of unity amongst the population that was otherwise divided.

His major contribution to communist theory was the idea of nationalism. What made him different from Trotsky and Lenin was he was only concerned about the Soviet Union. He wanted to maintain the integrity of the Soviet Union, whereas Trotsky and Lenin were concerned about international communism. They saw the Soviet Union as the little brother in the movement. Germany would be the big brother because Germany had the most proletariat and was the most urbanized, and maybe the French as well. Lenin and Trotsky were fundamentally internationalists, whereas Stalin understood people don't want that crap. People want to feel part of a community, part of a place. And so he heavily promoted nationalism, which galvanized the people into making tremendous sacrifices during World War II. People die not for ideas; people die for each other, and that's what Stalin understood fundamentally. Mother Russia was his promise to the people.