Liulevicius, Vejas
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Liulevicius identifies two seemingly contradictory ideas that gave Marxism its unique power: history has a predetermined, scientific direction (dialectical materialism, inherited and inverted from Hegel's idealist "history as the working-out of freedom") toward a final classless utopia, yet special individuals can still play a heroic accelerating role within that predestined process. This combination of scientific certainty and room for heroic agency proved intoxicating, especially against the 19th century's immense prestige of science (Engels eulogized Marx as "the Darwin of history"). Liulevicius stresses the deeply utopian, quasi-religious character hidden beneath Marx's insistence on rigor — the promised final state (working in the morning, leisure in the afternoon, no exploitation) resembles a secularized heaven, with Marx as a Moses/Prometheus figure, the proletariat as a redemptive collective humanity, and revolution as apocalypse — a parallel scholars like Reinhold Niebuhr and Eric Voegelin (who coined "political religion") drew explicitly. He recounts childhood memories visiting Soviet Lithuania, including an oddly reverent "museum of atheism" and filing past Lenin's embalmed body, as lived evidence that professed atheism concealed genuine religious sensibility.
He walks through Marx's stagist theory of history (primitive communism, state slavery, private slavery, feudalism, capitalism as the "penultimate" stage, ending in proletarian dictatorship and the state's eventual "withering away"), and highlights the doctrine of Verelendung (immiseration) — Marx's prediction that workers' conditions would inexorably worsen while wealth concentrated — as already empirically strained within Marx's own lifetime by the rise of unions, reforms, and a growing middle class. He details Marx and Engels's radically different, complementary temperaments (Marx the domineering genius who neglected his family; Engels the industrialist's son who financially supported Marx for decades) and stresses the deep irony that Marx expected revolution in industrialized Germany, not the comparatively backward Russian Empire where it actually took hold — a gamble the Bolsheviks themselves recognized, expecting German revolution to rescue their isolated experiment.
On the road to power, Liulevicius traces Lenin's radicalization to his brother's execution for revolutionary terrorism, and to Russian populist "nihilist" traditions (via Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?) that fused with Marxism into a demand for total, disciplined, unsentimental commitment — Lenin reportedly avoided listening to Beethoven because it made him "feel gentle." He frames the Bolshevik seizure of power as filling a vacuum created by WWI's destruction of the Tsarist order, and stresses that Lenin's Brest-Litovsk treaty and expectation of imminent German revolution were disappointed when German Communists were crushed by a wary Social Democratic government — a "wound that just won't heal" in the socialist movement, and a precedent for German nationalist resentment that later fed Nazism. On Stalin's rise, he emphasizes the counterintuitive fact that Stalin was seen by contemporaries not as a radical firebrand like the charismatic Trotsky but as a dull, moderate conciliator — aided by Lenin's patronage, control of personnel and the secret police (founded as the Cheka under "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky), and a Machiavellian personal ethic (Stalin annotated his own copies of Lenin's works approvingly) holding that ends justify means since, per Marxist class-relativism, there is no transcendent morality, only power.
Discussing collectivization and the Holodomor, Liulevicius explains that Marxist ideology had little use for peasants (dismissed by Marx as "conservative... dull as sacks of potatoes") since the future belonged to industrialization; collectivization aimed to seize predictable control over the food supply for cities and industry, and Stalin used it simultaneously to attack Ukrainian and other nationalist identities. The result was catastrophic negative selection: the most capable, disciplined farmers were denounced as "kulaks" and eliminated, incentives collapsed, and a cascading culture of falsified statistics at every level of the state (immortalized in the joke "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us") meant that even Stalin's own five-year plans rested on fabricated data — a systemic self-deception distinct from, but compounding, the deliberate use of famine and cordoned starvation as a weapon (documented by dissidents like Lev Kopelev, who took part in grain requisitions while starving families watched, sustained by genuine belief in the larger cause).
On the Great Terror (1936–38, ~750,000 executed, over a million to the Gulag), he describes purges targeting both genuine rivals and people swept up by regional NKVD quotas that officials competed to overfulfill, producing a self-perpetuating machine where forced confessions generated further denunciation lists, atomizing Soviet society and destroying interpersonal trust for generations (drawing on Orlando Figes's The Whisperers and Solzhenitsyn's account of loyal Communists in the Gulag still certain "Comrade Stalin" would fix their case if only he knew). Asked whether Stalin personally believed in Marxist utopia or merely used it cynically, Liulevicius suggests this is likely a false dichotomy — genuine ideological conviction and the pursuit of total, unaccountable power may have been mutually reinforcing rather than opposed.
Turning to totalitarian theory, he lays out Hannah Arendt's model: Nazism and Stalinism, despite being ideological arch-enemies (each considering the other a conspiracy — "Judeo-Bolshevism" versus "capitalism's last gasp"), shared a demand for total, fanatical loyalty rather than mere obedience, and cynically cooperated when convenient (the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact). Arendt's key insight, per Liulevicius, was not that either regime achieved total control but that they articulated the ambition of total control as newly conceivable — a genuinely modern, not merely archaic-barbaric, phenomenon, and one she worried might be a template for the future rather than an aberration of the past.
Responding directly to claims made by podcaster Darryl Cooper on Tucker Carlson's show — that Churchill was "the chief villain" of WWII for forcing Hitler to expand the war, and that the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Roma was an unplanned byproduct of war (with starvation framed as the "humane" alternative) — Liulevicius calls both claims untenable given the documentary record: Nazi ideology from Mein Kampf onward explicitly aimed at world domination and eastward racial conquest regardless of Churchill's actions, and mass killing operations (Operation Tannenberg's Einsatzgruppen executions in Poland) predate the invasion of the Soviet Union, contradicting any "unforeseen accident" framing. He details the Generalplan Ost, the Nazi blueprint for settling Ukraine and Eastern Europe with a "purified" Germanic population while enslaving or annihilating Slavic populations (Himmler's chilling phrase: Slavs kept alive would remain "slaves for our culture"), and Hitler/Himmler's vision of permanent eastward war rather than a stable border, expanding "living space" generation after generation — a plan whose full realization, Liulevicius and Lex agree, would likely have produced a death toll and human catastrophe dwarfing the actual history of WWII, including plans for genetic "purges" targeting disabled Germans themselves.
On Mao, Liulevicius describes Maoism as an adaptation of Marxism so drastic (making peasants, not industrial workers, the revolutionary vanguard) that scholars like Leszek Kołakowski struggled to classify it as orthodox Marxism at all, and frames much of Mao's action — especially the Great Leap Forward — as a deliberate, hubristic attempt to surpass and outdo Stalin (whom Mao resented for treating him as a junior partner) after Stalin's death opened a leadership vacuum in world communism. The Great Leap Forward (~40 million dead) combined backyard steel furnaces, giant unworkable communes, pseudo-scientific Lysenkoist farming techniques, and explicit target dates (1961, then 1973, then 2000) for achieving "full communism" before capitalism — promises whose repeated failure to materialize eroded regime confidence much as unmet Soviet promises had. The subsequent Hundred Flowers Campaign, whether a deliberate trap or a policy that spiraled beyond Mao's own expectations, produced the same "negative selection" dynamic seen in the USSR: the most talented and outspoken were punished, teaching everyone else that caution and stagnation were safer than initiative. Liulevicius notes the surreal precision of the CCP's 1981 verdict that Mao was "70% correct" (not 69, not 71), and traces China's post-Mao trajectory — Deng-era economic opening while retaining Party political supremacy, an "un-repudiate-able" founder status (Mao occupies the symbolic role Lenin, not Stalin, held for the USSR, making a full Khrushchev-style repudiation structurally impossible) — and Xi's partial return to Maoist symbolism as evidence that China's own ideological trajectory remains genuinely unsettled.
On the U.S. and Russia's post-communist trajectories, he traces the American Communist Party's struggles with its immigrant identity (until Earl Browder's "Communism is 20th Century Americanism" campaign, undone by his WWII-era hopes for permanent U.S.-Soviet cooperation) and its real but exaggerated espionage history (Whitaker Chambers's Witness), noting the irony that McCarthy's unsubstantiated 1950s claims of infiltration were actually closer to the truth of the 1930s–40s than of his own era. On Russia, he argues the absence of any Nuremberg-style reckoning or "historical accounting" after 1991 — unlike Germany's postwar process, whose value lay less in verdicts than in establishing public documented knowledge — left space for Putin to construct an eclectic, contradictory memory politics (rehabilitating the Tsars, denouncing Lenin for enabling Soviet collapse via federalism, honoring Stalin's "effectiveness" while acknowledging his toll), producing the operating axiom that "Russia without Ukraine can be a nation-state; Russia with Ukraine must be an empire." He expresses pessimism about a negotiated Ukraine peace given how accumulated suffering forecloses compromises that look reasonable only from a distance, and worries that any settlement validating post-1945 European border changes by force sets a dangerous incentive precedent — while declining to predict whether a broader 21st-century global conflict is likely, given how often confident predictions "reach their expiration dates."
Asked for advice on interviewing world leaders, Liulevicius recommends probing a leader's Erwartungshorizont ("horizon of expectation") — their formative experiences and vision of the future — and watching how they treat people from whom they expect nothing, citing Napoleon's disconcerting "sightless stare" (treating interlocutors as chess pieces) as a warning sign. He closes urging young people toward sustained reading over fragmented digital summaries as essential to empathy and resisting manipulation (including by AI-generated content), and locates his hope for humanity's future not in optimism about human nature per se but in the sheer variety and resilience of human responses to catastrophe throughout history — civilizations and individuals repeatedly rebuilding after ruin.
Excerpts
On the hidden religious structure beneath professed Marxist atheism, illustrated by a childhood visit to Soviet Lithuania:
“There is a religious element. Not an avowed one, but a kind of hidden religious or secular religious element... Marx himself positioning himself as a savior figure, whether that's a Prometheus or a Moses who will lead people to the promised land. The apocalypse or the end times is this final revolution that will usher in a blessed final state, a utopia, which is equivalent to a secular version of heaven.”
On why Stalin's rise surprised contemporaries who expected the charismatic Trotsky to prevail:
“The one thing that... never ceases to surprise me, even in retrospect, is that Stalin gains a reputation not as a fiery radical, but as a moderate. A man who's a conciliator... While Trotsky is delivering stirring speeches and theorizing, Stalin works behind the scenes to control personnel decisions... It's a cliché because it's true, that personnel is policy.”
On rebutting the claim that Nazi mass murder was an unplanned accident of war:
“This sort of argument... to try to analyze Hitler's acts or alleged motives, in the absence of the ideology that he himself subscribed to and described in hateful detail in Mein Kampf... is an enterprise that's doomed to failure... Operation Tannenberg... predates any of the Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi's invasion of the Soviet Union.”