The Charlie Kirk Show - The Real History of Communism ft. Sean McMeekin

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 Charlie Kirk here, live from the Bitcoin.com studio.

00:00:04.000 Today, I have an amazing interview for you with my friend, Professor Sean McMeekin.

00:00:09.000 We have a very in-depth discussion on Joseph Stalin, FDR, and how American liberals nearly gave the country away to communists.

00:00:16.000 It's super insightful.

00:00:18.000 I think you're going to love this conversation.

00:00:19.000 Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com, and become a member today, members.charliekirk.com.

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00:00:33.000 That is tpusa.com.

00:00:35.000 So check it out today, tpusa.com.

00:00:38.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:38.000 Here we go.

00:00:40.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:41.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:43.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:47.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:50.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:51.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:52.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:01:00.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

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00:01:38.000 Okay, everybody.

00:01:39.000 Very special guest here, and we're going to talk history, communism, the rise, the fall, and then the rise again with Professor Sean McMeekin.

00:01:50.000 Dr. McMeekin, I should say.

00:01:52.000 Sean is absolutely fine.

00:01:53.000 Sean is fine.

00:01:54.000 These books are incredible accomplishments.

00:01:57.000 You've got to write longer books.

00:02:00.000 Well, yeah.

00:02:01.000 I think that one's a little longer than the other one you write.

00:02:03.000 This is incredible.

00:02:05.000 I mean, this is...

00:02:09.000 I don't know if I have the time.

00:02:11.000 But, I mean, look at the amount.

00:02:12.000 The bibliography here alone is like 100 pages long.

00:02:15.000 It's pretty long.

00:02:16.000 Believe it or not, I actually cut about 40,000 words from the original draft of that book, and it still ended up more than 800 pages long.

00:02:22.000 Well, congratulations.

00:02:23.000 I want to talk about this book in particular and the theme, which I love, to overthrow the world, the rise and fall and rise of communism.

00:02:33.000 What is this book about?

00:02:34.000 Well, so after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a period of, you can almost call it triumphalism.

00:02:41.000 The most famous phrase was probably Francis Fukuyama was talking about the end of history.

00:02:45.000 We had this image of Yeltsin bellowing on the tank.

00:02:47.000 It looked like communism was dead, buried, finished.

00:02:50.000 There was even talk about this kind of Nuremberg trial for communism that everyone was maybe hoping for, wishing would happen in the same way that the Nuremberg trials helped put Nazism to rest and ruin and destroy its reputation forever. 0.70

00:03:02.000 That didn't quite happen, though.

00:03:03.000 I mean, I discovered when I looked into it, although I lived through it at the time, I remember hearing about how the Communist Party was vaguely on trial in Russia, but the details were a little murky.

00:03:11.000 I learned later what had actually happened in 1992 was that the Communist Party had sued Boris Yeltsin because he had outlawed the Communist Party.

00:03:21.000 And his position, effectively, was it wasn't just a party.

00:03:23.000 It was kind of this criminal organization conspiracy fusing together with state structures to produce this totalitarian oppression.

00:03:30.000 And they did talk about some of this at the trial, but in the end, here's the thing.

00:03:33.000 The Communist Party won.

00:03:35.000 And they were re-legalized, and very soon they were actually the largest political party again in the Russian Federation, and they very nearly defeated Yeltsin in the 96 elections.

00:03:44.000 We also had China, of course.

00:03:45.000 That was the discordant part about the story from the outset.

00:03:48.000 If history had supposedly ended with this Western triumph, why did we have Tiananmen Square in 1989 in China?

00:03:56.000 May, June 1989, this incredibly dark story, this massacre in the streets of Beijing.

00:04:02.000 And then, of course, the CCP endures in China to this day and has given the world many treats over the past few decades, most recently with COVID lockdowns.

00:04:12.000 So, first of all, congratulations on your work.

00:04:16.000 I know dangerously little about this, but we'll try our best.

00:04:20.000 Compared to you, I know more than the guy in the street.

00:04:24.000 Is it one of the reasons—that's such a great point, I've never thought of it—that there was this clear, like, we must put the philosophy of fascism on trial in Nuremberg to put it to rest.

00:04:33.000 Is one of the reasons that never happened because the intelligentsia of the West actually agreed with a lot of communistic— I think there's something to that.

00:04:45.000 The pretense of communism, of course, was always that they were going to create this better world.

00:04:50.000 It was a sort of universal ideal, an ideal that, of course, has led to a lot of death and destruction, but an ideal many people believed in.

00:04:58.000 They thought inequality is wrong.

00:05:00.000 They thought it's not fair that the rich have too much and the poor have too little and that some people don't have enough to eat.

00:05:06.000 And this idea, a vague version of this idea will always, I think, appeal, particularly to younger people who believe in whatever the phrase is, social justice or education.

00:05:16.000 I mean, we know that these words are loaded, but there's always some kind of sympathy, I think, that people have for this idea.

00:05:21.000 Whereas Nazism is a little bit harder to defend because it was a little more specific to one nation, to one race, and it seemed to be chauvinistic and aggressive and was associated with military aggression.

00:05:35.000 It was not something that had a lot of admirers, really.

00:05:38.000 Across Europe, there were fascists, of course, but meaning once...

00:05:47.000 Nazism pretty much just died.

00:05:49.000 It's not like there were—I mean, people are always saying there are Nazis under your bed and so on, but in fact, Nazism has been basically dead and disappeared since 1945.

00:05:57.000 Communism, unfortunately, I think in some form or other will always be with us, just because the idea continues to appeal.

00:06:02.000 Let's define our terms, because I think that is one of the struggles.

00:06:06.000 What is communism?

00:06:08.000 Where does it come from, and has it actually ever been— Well, it's a great question.

00:06:14.000 There are certain almost dictionary definitions you could start with.

00:06:18.000 You could trot out the Manifest of the Communist Party, authored by Marx and Engels back in 1848, where there's actually a program.

00:06:23.000 They talk about things like the abolition of private property and exchange and credit, the centralization of industry, of banking.

00:06:30.000 They called it credit.

00:06:32.000 That was the word they used.

00:06:33.000 Industrial armies for agriculture.

00:06:36.000 The centralization of the means of transport and communication, which basically means the government.

00:06:40.000 Government controls the media.

00:06:42.000 It controls everything.

00:06:43.000 Today it might be even broader than that.

00:06:45.000 It might be the internet or it might be airplane travel.

00:06:48.000 And that day it probably would be the main roads, the main railroads, the main avenues of communication.

00:06:53.000 That is, government control of a large part of the economy and the destruction or eradication of private property.

00:06:59.000 In practice, most communist regimes try to do this to one extent or another.

00:07:03.000 They actually would go out and they would, for example, nationalize the banks, which effectively meant nationalizing people's bank accounts.

00:07:09.000 off in their private savings.

00:07:11.000 I mean, in Russia, they actually had An agency devoted to safe cracking so they could crack into people's private bank accounts.

00:07:17.000 They would try to nationalize agriculture.

00:07:19.000 They would create these collective farms or state-controlled farms.

00:07:23.000 In practice, none of these regimes ever quite succeeded.

00:07:26.000 The Soviets and the Chinese probably came closest, or maybe in an even more, I think, draconian and dark way, the Khmer Rouge and Cambodian, completely eradicating the private sector. 0.97

00:07:37.000 But the fact is, it's impossible to do that.

00:07:39.000 everyone would basically starve.

00:07:40.000 And so you've always had some variety of...

00:07:58.000 By 1921, you had a mass famine.

00:07:59.000 You had an industrial collapse, manufacturing collapse.

00:08:02.000 The economy just basically didn't work.

00:08:04.000 And so for a while in Russia, amazingly, in the 20s, they actually tried to bring back They allowed people to buy and sell again, because without that everyone would have, again, they would have starved. 0.73

00:08:18.000 The enduring take that I get on campuses is, well, communism hasn't been tried.

00:08:25.000 As a historian, how do you then respond to that?

00:08:28.000 It's sort of...

00:08:31.000 It has been tried.

00:08:32.000 It absolutely has been tried.

00:08:33.000 It just has never been achieved.

00:08:35.000 And so I suppose that's the kind of tricky part, right?

00:08:37.000 It's never been realized.

00:08:39.000 It's never been realized because it can't be realized.

00:08:40.000 These regimes always fail.

00:08:42.000 They always fail.

00:08:43.000 They always fail in...

00:08:47.000 You get a collapse, particularly in things like agricultural yields, productivity.

00:08:52.000 You get shortages.

00:08:53.000 You get famines.

00:08:54.000 Eventually you get even jokes about how hungry people are.

00:08:58.000 Most of the jokes that came out of Cuba in the communist era, for example, had to do with food.

00:09:04.000 Essentially, it would be something to the nature of A school chef would be asked, like, what are some problems that the communist regime still tries to face?

00:09:16.000 And he would list a couple, and he would say, like, what do you think is the biggest problem?

00:09:20.000 And he would say something like breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

00:09:23.000 Basically just feeding people.

00:09:25.000 That would be the biggest problem.

00:09:26.000 And then you would get, if they tried to nationalize the means of production, that is to say manufacturing, industry, you would get...

00:09:38.000 The other problem is you cannot plan an economy.

00:09:40.000 It's simply impossible.

00:09:41.000 You try to plan every single thing that people are going to need over a period of months or years, you get things wrong.

00:09:48.000 There's simply no way of predicting how many cars people will buy, how many industrial inputs a certain industry will need.

00:09:57.000 The only things that worked a little bit, and this is maybe a slight exception to the rule, particularly in the Soviet era, Are things that they would produce for export.

00:10:05.000 And that's because, let's say, you talk about the AK-47, for example, famous Soviet export or, you know, MiG airplanes, weapons, basically.

00:10:12.000 Because they traded those in the international market, they had to work.

00:10:15.000 The market functioned to some extent.

00:10:17.000 But at home, if there's no market to function, the goods don't have to be any good.

00:10:20.000 Most of them are shoddy, or as Gorbachev would say, you know, supposedly we could send satellites into outer space and we have intercontinental ballistic missiles, but our refrigerators don't work.

00:10:32.000 And that was kind of the classic problem.

00:10:34.000 What is it about human nature that doesn't mix with communism?

00:10:39.000 Well, I guess it's partly that people's needs are various.

00:10:43.000 And the other thing is that people want, and this is just pretty basic, if you're going to consume something, if you're going to buy a product or use it.

00:10:51.000 You want that product to work.

00:10:52.000 And the way a market economy basically works is that if your product is no good, people stop buying it.

00:10:58.000 So you have to either improve the product or you go out of business.

00:11:00.000 And the problem under a planned communist economy is basically that there was no incentive to either work harder, there was no real incentive to get higher wages because wages were supposed to be centrally controlled.

00:11:13.000 In practice, they would give higher wages to skilled engineers and such, but products And so you'd get shortages and you'd get shoddy products.

00:11:24.000 But I think people's nature, the reason eventually would rub up against human nature in a maybe more profound way is that most people, maybe some people do, but most people don't like being hectored and surveilled and controlled and told what to do.

00:11:37.000 At least enough people don't that fortunately...

00:11:46.000 Is communism inherently totalitarian?

00:11:49.000 Not inherently in all cases, but it does tend in that direction.

00:11:52.000 Where hasn't it ever been totalitarian?

00:11:54.000 That's a good question.

00:11:55.000 I suppose the countries where communism was adopted with perhaps the least conviction when it was imposed at the point of a gun, in Eastern Europe, for example.

00:12:04.000 In Poland, a good example of this, because communism was so unpopular in Poland from the earliest days, because it was kind of seen as this almost alien imposition by the conquering Soviet armies, by the Russians, who Poles generally had various reasons to resent and hate going back decades, if not centuries.

00:12:20.000 They didn't actually go as far as they did in other countries.

00:12:24.000 So agriculture, for example, private agriculture was to some extent reluctantly tolerated.

00:12:28.000 They did not go quite as far in Poland as they might have done in other countries like Bulgaria, for example, where the communist regime had a little bit more legitimacy and popularity.

00:12:38.000 It's a matter of degree.

00:12:39.000 But they all tended in the same general direction.

00:12:41.000 You'd have secret police, you'd have surveillance, you'd have state constitutionally.

00:12:55.000 They even would give assignments to all their satellite countries, what you're supposed to produce, what sports you're supposed to specialize in.

00:13:01.000 It all had to be planned from above.

00:13:04.000 So everything had to be planned and controlled.

00:13:05.000 And the problem is most people would balk at that sort of thing.

00:13:09.000 It's just against human nature to constantly be surveilled and told what to do.

00:13:14.000 I have a question on that in a second.

00:13:15.000 Why do the regimes end up so incredibly violent?

00:13:21.000 Well, there have been a lot of sympathizers who always say that there's nothing inherently violent in socialism or communism.

00:13:27.000 And my main response to that is you have to read the source texts.

00:13:30.000 You have to actually go back and see what Marx was saying, see what some of Marx's own Somebody like Gracchus Babouf, who launched the so-called Conspiracy of the Equals in the French Revolution, which inspired Marx, was quite open about the fact that you would have to put class enemies and counter-revolutionaries to death.

00:13:47.000 Marx was quite open about this.

00:13:49.000 He talked about, for example, from his political career, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, there was this brief period in Paris called the Commune, which maybe wasn't a perfectly communist regime.

00:14:00.000 It didn't last long.

00:14:01.000 It didn't last long, and it went down in this horrendous blaze of violence when you had...

00:14:15.000 A number of women and children were killed in the battle.

00:14:17.000 And a lot of people told Marx, you should distance yourself from this.

00:14:21.000 He didn't.

00:14:21.000 He went the other way.

00:14:22.000 He embraced it.

00:14:23.000 He justified it.

00:14:24.000 This is then cited by Lenin.

00:14:26.000 During the First World War, a lot of other people were really recoiling from the horrendous violence in the trenches.

00:14:31.000 Lenin wanted more of it.

00:14:32.000 He wrote this thing called the Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution.

00:14:35.000 And he said, no, Marx taught us this, that arson is a legitimate tool of war, taking hostages, all of these are legitimate things.

00:14:43.000 Class war, we need to kill people. 1.00

00:14:44.000 The violence is an inherent part of...

00:14:47.000 In fact, civil war, this was his phrase, you have to turn the imperialist war into a civil war.

00:14:53.000 And then once you've achieved communism in one country, that country will be effectively opposed to all of the other non-communist countries.

00:15:00.000 So it will be in a state of war with them. 0.91

00:15:02.000 So you get a kind of wave of civil wars and interstate wars engulfing the earth.

00:15:08.000 And he was not saying this is what I hope won't happen.

00:15:11.000 He was saying this is what has to happen.

00:15:13.000 This is what must happen.

00:15:15.000 There maybe have been a lot of sympathizers who shy away from the violence, but I honestly think if you look at the evidence, Is it rooted in resentment?

00:15:38.000 There's definitely an element to this.

00:15:40.000 Communists in nearly every country where they succeeded in grappling with the regime and then eventually seizing power By necessity, they have to put the arms in the hands of a lot of angry young people, usually young men, sometimes women as well.

00:15:56.000 And while some of them were intellectuals, the party leaders were usually intellectuals, a lot of the foot soldiers.

00:16:02.000 Sometimes they would literally just empty the prisons.

00:16:04.000 They did this after the Russian Revolution.

00:16:06.000 Sometimes they would recruit former soldiers who were already alienated or disaffected or already had kind of acquired a taste for violence.

00:16:14.000 The real muscle in, for example, the Bolshevik Revolution, red October of 1917, actually came from either deserters from the army or people in the Russian Navy or in the Russian army.

00:16:25.000 The so-called Red Guards were mostly actually, some of them came from factories, most of them actually came from the army.

00:16:32.000 They might be disaffected.

00:16:38.000 They might be unemployed.

00:16:39.000 They might be veterans.

00:16:40.000 They might be deserters.

00:16:42.000 They might be criminals being let out of prison.

00:16:44.000 But yes, they're not generally the haves.

00:16:47.000 Here's an interesting question.

00:16:48.000 What is it about Russia when communism was popping up?

00:16:52.000 I believe there was a failed communist revolution in like 1908 or something, right?

00:16:56.000 So, 1905 was the first revolution, which succeeded in some ways.

00:17:00.000 It fizzled out, though, right?

00:17:01.000 It fizzled out, right.

00:17:02.000 What is it about what was happening in Russia at the time that made the...

00:17:10.000 Revolution successful.

00:17:12.000 Mostly it was the First World War.

00:17:14.000 And this is where Lenin develops a theory which actually helps to explain how and why communists would later succeed.

00:17:22.000 Part of it was that in most countries there are kind of defenses against this sort of thing.

00:17:26.000 You know, you get your violent activists, but eventually the police might crack down.

00:17:33.000 In Russia, it was the disruption of the war, the fact that millions of men were mobilized into the armies.

00:17:38.000 There was obviously some war weariness, but mostly it was that Lenin actually propagandized the armies.

00:17:43.000 A lot of other socialists and communists were a little more naive about this.

00:17:47.000 They thought you could convince people eventually through education or the ballot box to reason or something like that.

00:17:54.000 They also thought the war was a bad thing, a lot of them, not all of them.

00:17:57.000 And so they thought you should, for example, maybe tell people to resist the draft.

00:18:00.000 Lenin said, no, you don't resist the draft.

00:18:02.000 You infiltrate the armies.

00:18:04.000 You turn them red.

00:18:05.000 Was he the first infiltration philosopher in communist thought?

00:18:09.000 Alinsky was very big into this.

00:18:10.000 Yes.

00:18:11.000 Well, I mean, he was the first to really systematize it, but it was always there in a latent sense.

00:18:15.000 The anthem of international socialism, Eugène Pontier's Internationale, the main theme is actually about a mutiny.

00:18:22.000 So it's about an army mutiny.

00:18:23.000 And this is basically what happens in Russia in 1917.

00:18:25.000 It's like a gigantic mutiny in the Russian armies that Lenin and the communists push along for their own purposes.

00:18:31.000 Wasn't it a relatively small group of people?

00:18:33.000 And if I'm not mistaken, the czar actually...

00:18:39.000 Like, the rebellion could have been thwarted.

00:18:41.000 Well, the February Revolution, which is separate from the October one, is one where the Tsar probably could have intervened, and he nearly did.

00:18:48.000 He actually did issue orders for loyal frontline troops to go to Petrograd and suppress the revolution.

00:18:54.000 He was talked out of it by his generals, who were getting bad advice from these liberal politicians.

00:18:58.000 Yeah, but they had the advantage.

00:18:59.000 They did, and the Bolsheviks at that time were still relatively weak.

00:19:02.000 Lenin's in Switzerland.

00:19:03.000 He's not even in rush at the time.

00:19:04.000 Is he still in jail or is he?

00:19:07.000 Unfortunately enough, he spent a lot of 1917 with warrants for his arrest plastered all over Russia because he participated in a couple of failed putches before the final one that succeeded.

00:19:16.000 But you're absolutely right.

00:19:17.000 They were a minority party.

00:19:19.000 In the only real elections Russia had in 1917, they had made inroads.

00:19:24.000 I mean, we have to give them some credit just politically.

00:19:38.000 The party was much smaller than that, the hardcore of the party.

00:19:40.000 That was part of his philosophy.

00:19:42.000 It was called vanguardism.

00:19:43.000 You had to have this hardcore, this elite of professional revolutionaries.

00:19:46.000 So you didn't need to convince everyone.

00:19:48.000 You didn't need to mobilize everyone.

00:19:49.000 What you had to do was have this kind of hardcore of vanguard elites who were, they were more like full time.

00:19:59.000 You know, you then needed the muscle, though.

00:20:05.000 You needed the foot soldiers.

00:20:06.000 And Lenin approached politics, he was actually reading Clausewitz.

00:20:08.000 It was very much about force.

00:20:10.000 Basically, you had to have superior force.

00:20:12.000 They would literally count up, like, how many men do we have under arms and how many men do our enemies have under arms?

00:20:17.000 You know, there's this very almost reductionist element to communist philosophy when it comes to politics and violence.

00:20:22.000 Like Stalin would later famously say, asked about the pope and his possible influence.

00:20:27.000 Well, how many divisions does the Vatican have?

00:20:29.000 They're very, very crude and reductionist in this way that they actually did literally see it as you have to overwhelm your enemies by force.

00:20:37.000 It's not really about persuasion.

00:20:39.000 Yeah, power politics is at the core of communism.

00:20:42.000 them.

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00:22:01.000 When Russia fell victim to this communist revolution, Yes, absolutely.

00:22:11.000 How did that work?

00:22:12.000 that's always something I don't understand.

00:22:13.000 How did a Christian nation embrace Yes. 0.94

00:22:19.000 There are different ways of looking at it.

00:22:21.000 Some historians, and they don't usually tend to be Russians, have proposed that there was something in the Russian Orthodox Church that had always been a bit friendlier to state power than either the Catholic strain or the Protestant strains of Christianity.

00:22:35.000 And to just run to the czarist regime, the state played a huge and powerful role.

00:22:40.000 Peter the Great, for example, actually abolished the Patriarchate.

00:22:43.000 It came back.

00:22:44.000 Oddly enough, after the Russian Revolution only to then come under the thumb, really, of the communists and the KGB.

00:22:50.000 There are a lot of Russians who find this offensive.

00:22:52.000 A lot of Russians who say, no, look, our real tradition is the Christian one.

00:22:56.000 Marxism, communism was this kind of alien, atheistic import.

00:22:59.000 And it's true. 0.56

00:23:00.000 The communists would go into churches and they would have these ceremonies where they would expose old bones and say, look, these are relics.

00:23:07.000 These aren't real.

00:23:08.000 They would erect museums of atheism.

00:23:10.000 So it was the world's first atheist regime. 0.62

00:23:13.000 Yeah, that's what I'm trying to understand.

00:23:14.000 I've never heard anyone explain it as well as you did.

00:23:18.000 In order for a revolution to be successful, allegedly you have to win over the polity.

00:23:22.000 Right.

00:23:23.000 Was that what happened in Russia, or was it a small vanguard that kind of took the whole nation hostage? 0.79

00:23:27.000 They did win over enough people so that the regime could endure.

00:23:30.000 A plurality or a majority?

00:23:31.000 Well, as far as an electoral majority, it's hard to say they did because we just don't have the evidence.

00:23:36.000 But obviously a lot of their enemies and opponents were either killed off or fled Russian immigration, the emigres. 0.98

00:23:41.000 And they were able to propagandize, particularly the younger generation.

00:23:45.000 So they would have these things like the pioneers and the komsomol to indoctrinate people into the faith.

00:23:50.000 And they did ape or even mimic some elements of the old Russian Christian tradition, the icons, for example, that Russians would traditionally have over their mantelpiece.

00:24:00.000 Instead, you would have, of course, images of the new sacred figures, Lenin, later Stalin, so that there was a way in which they...

00:24:21.000 The czars mishandled the agrarian to industrial transition, and this opened up the communists with an opportunity to strike. 0.66

00:24:31.000 Well, land reform was the great question of late czarist politics in Russia.

00:24:36.000 It was an extremely difficult question.

00:24:38.000 Serfdom endured. 1.00

00:24:39.000 Right up to the 1860s, Russians liked to remind Americans serfdom was abolished one year before the Emancipation Proclamation of the United States, which is true, but they didn't really sort the problems out right away, although one could say, of course, it took a while for us to sort out our own problems here.

00:24:54.000 They couldn't quite figure out, for example, did the serfs have to Did we want to turn them into these kind of entrepreneurial peasant capitalists? 0.57

00:25:10.000 The one great figure who tried to solve this problem, Piotr Stalipin, and this is in the first decade of the 1900s, he did actually put forward some far-reaching reforms.

00:25:21.000 Not quite the same thing as maybe the Homestead Act in the U.S., but it was kind of a similar idea.

00:25:25.000 You would give peasants credit. 0.99

00:25:27.000 They had a peasant's land bank.

00:25:28.000 They were trying to allow them to set out for some of the virgin lands of western Siberia to basically create these kind of almost pioneering type homesteads.

00:25:37.000 Unfortunately, Stalipin had warned that for this program to work and for Russia to modernize and enter the modern age, she needed peace.

00:25:49.000 And that's why the First World War was so critical.

00:25:52.000 He said this in, I think, 1909, give us 20 years of peace and you won't recognize the country, that we'll be able to not solve all problems, but resolve some of the tensions.

00:26:02.000 The peasants would then become a little bit more of a bulwark of conservatism, as they were viewed in some countries.

00:26:07.000 In Russia, they weren't.

00:26:08.000 Oddly enough, in Russia, there was kind of a strain of almost this agrarian radicalism that would sometimes...

00:26:13.000 DFL.

00:26:14.000 Yeah, a little bit like this with, they have this thing called a commune where they would divide land up according to...

00:26:25.000 Stalipan wanted to turn the peasants into stolid kind of middle class citizens. 0.68

00:26:31.000 Subjects still probably because you had monsters.

00:26:35.000 The First World War, which broke out in 1914, and Stalipin, unfortunately, was also assassinated in 1911.

00:26:41.000 So that kind of cut off a lot of these possible paths that might have led to really a more humane and I think also a more prosperous Russia.

00:26:49.000 It's just an amazing thing.

00:26:51.000 I mean, you've written about it, how a great power like Russia, this was communists' biggest get-to-date. 0.80

00:26:57.000 Is that fair to say?

00:26:59.000 That this was the biggest accomplishment of the ideology.

00:27:02.000 Well, sure.

00:27:03.000 And one could go further.

00:27:04.000 I mean, to kind of bring this story up to Stalin and say that the greatest boast that any communist regime has ever had is that Stalin allegedly industrialized the country and then, of course, defeated Nazi Germany in the war.

00:27:15.000 How do you respond to that?

00:27:17.000 Well, this is the thing.

00:27:18.000 There are some elements of the story.

00:27:19.000 there's just enough truth in it that you can see why people have made this argument ever since and why the Russian government to this day still views the victory in what they call the Great Patriotic War as kind of the

00:27:30.000 the glue the the the origin story to some extent of the core mythology of the core mythology of their existence right a number of problems of this first of all russia was rapidly industrializing before the first world war with growth rates approaching 10 and so not unlike china in recent years even if there might be some holes in the economy we haven't been told of there are all these headlines about the stupendous growth rates that was the russian story before 1914 uh the germans for

00:27:57.000 We were the first to modernize Russia.

00:28:15.000 It's just not true.

00:28:16.000 In fact, the Russian economy, of course, When Stalin did go back in this kind of mass mobilization drive, the arms build up, the five-year plans launched or backdated to 1928.

00:28:45.000 They relied a lot on imported machinery, expertise, engineers.

00:28:49.000 A couple of great examples of this.

00:28:50.000 The collective farm or state farm of Kalkoz, almost like the emblematic institution of Soviet communism in the early 1930s, was actually based on And it appealed to Stalin mostly because it was basically the world's largest farm, 95,000 acres or something.

00:29:11.000 A lot of the factories were not only designed, but often they were direct copies of those in the United States.

00:29:18.000 It was the Arthur McKee Corporation that designed Magnitogorsk, like the world's largest steel town.

00:29:24.000 A lot of the patents were bought.

00:29:26.000 Even the famous T-34 tank was actually based on a U.S. patent design, the Christie suspension engine.

00:29:32.000 And then, of course, if you bring the story through the 30s, there's a lot of imported technology from Europe, from Germany.

00:29:37.000 The Molotov-Rippentrop Pact, the Soviets were buying up all kinds of blueprints and designs from the Germans. 0.58

00:29:43.000 Actually, they weren't buying.

00:29:44.000 They were sort of just acquiring them by trading raw materials.

00:29:46.000 And then the Lendley story, which is one of the big themes I talk about in Stalin's war.

00:30:02.000 Sometimes they would use spies, so they infiltrated the U.S. aviation industry.

00:30:06.000 They had a team of almost 30 spies working in American universities.

00:30:10.000 And then I ended up kind of either stealing or adapting or reverse engineering a lot of American designs.

00:30:24.000 After the U.S. entered, well, even before the U.S. entered the war in 1941, after Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June 41, They didn't have to spy anymore because the Roosevelt administration just gave them everything.

00:30:36.000 They literally would just let Soviet engineers tour around American factories taking notes, taking photographs.

00:30:42.000 Oftentimes they would just ask for things.

00:30:44.000 It's an amazing aspect of the story.

00:30:46.000 They were actually given the same requisition forms used by the U.S. Army, and in fact they were often put at the front of the line.

00:30:53.000 The Arcadia Declaration, this is right after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt sort of bullied Churchill into agreeing with this.

00:30:59.000 Churchill liked the focus on Europe.

00:31:01.000 But the secondary part, that is Germany first, the secondary part was that the number one priority of the U.S. Roosevelt declared in the wake of Pearl Harbor was assistance to Russia's offensive by all available means, meaning our number one priority was not defeating Japan, was not even fighting Germany ourselves, it was supplying the Russian armies.

00:31:20.000 Creating the Cold War, basically.

00:31:21.000 Basically, yes, arming our future opponents in the Cold War.

00:31:24.000 I have a side note question that I actually wouldn't be able to answer if someone asked me.

00:31:28.000 Why did Hitler turn on Stalin?

00:31:29.000 That's a great question, and I'm glad you asked.

00:31:32.000 I think that the most interesting archival revelation in Stalin's war, although I did a lot of work in the Russian archives, in the Soviet archives.

00:31:41.000 No, my favorite sort of archival find, believe it or not, was in the Bulgarian archives.

00:31:46.000 And this is when I discovered...

00:31:48.000 You went to Sofia and you were in the...

00:31:52.000 So Hitler unloaded in one of his famous sort of rants or tirades on the Bulgarian minister to Berlin, a guy called Parvin.

00:32:01.000 I'm going to butcher his last name.

00:32:02.000 But anyway, so the Bulgarian minister to Berlin, one of these tirades.

00:32:06.000 The reason he was angry was because Molotov, the same one who had signed the Molotov-Rippentrop Pact, where Hitler and Stalin had, of course, carved up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.

00:32:16.000 They had agreed jointly to invade and carve up Poland together. 0.92

00:32:19.000 The Soviets were given these spheres of influence.

00:32:22.000 They had to actually split the difference on Lithuania.

00:32:24.000 Lithuania was first supposed to be in the German sphere.

00:32:27.000 Then it was given to Stalin. 0.74

00:32:28.000 Stalin had... 0.58

00:32:34.000 And what year was this?

00:32:34.000 Romania.

00:32:35.000 So this is between 1939 and 1941.

00:32:38.000 And when Hitler makes his decision to break with Stalin and invade the Soviet Union, Molotov had come to Berlin to basically negotiate a sort of update to the Molotov-Ribb-Drop Act. 0.57

00:32:48.000 This is in November of 1940.

00:32:51.000 A couple of months before this, Germany, Italy, and Japan, what we usually call the Axis, they had signed before the war something they called an Anti-Commontern Pact.

00:33:01.000 That is, it was against the Communist International, against the Soviet Union.

00:33:04.000 That was back in 1936 and 1937.

00:33:06.000 They updated it now, a sort of cosmetic update.

00:33:08.000 They called it the Tripartite Pact.

00:33:10.000 So it wasn't against the Soviets.

00:33:12.000 It was against the Anglo-Saxon powers, meaning Britain and the United States.

00:33:16.000 Interesting because the U.S. was supposedly still neutral, although Roosevelt is doing everything he can to make sure that the U.S. is actually very firmly on the side of Britain.

00:33:35.000 They were, after all, already cooperating and carving up Eastern Europe together.

00:33:40.000 Stalin, however, drove a really hard bargain, which is kind of remarkable when you consider that the Germans had really done almost all the work. 0.95

00:33:46.000 They did all the work in destroying Poland's armies. 0.99

00:33:48.000 The Soviets marched it a couple weeks later.

00:33:50.000 Czechoslovakia.

00:33:51.000 The Soviets, they just get to march in. 0.91

00:33:54.000 Basically, they would even do it in this cynical way where right after the fall of Paris, so this is in June of 1940, when the world is focusing on Paris, and you might remember the Casablanca, all the dramatic scenes of the German troops entering Paris.

00:34:07.000 The world's focused on that.

00:34:09.000 Stalin decides that that's the time to send his ultimata to Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Romania, and the Soviets invade those countries, only no one really noticed, because everyone's focused on France.

00:34:19.000 And they're doing this in this kind of cheap slapdash way.

00:34:22.000 Again, the Germans are fighting genuine, serious military opponents.

00:34:26.000 The Soviets, they could barely even, and they didn't quite subdue Finland when they tried to. 0.94

00:34:30.000 So Stalin is kind of like this jumped-up Mussolini, this jackal-like figure, but he decides that he wants to kind of bully and boss Hitler around. 0.81

00:34:38.000 He says, I will join your pact, but only if you meet about five conditions.

00:34:43.000 He wanted the Germans to basically withdraw all their troops and personnel from Finland.

00:34:49.000 They only had a few people on the ground there.

00:34:51.000 That was because they needed nickel to build their panzers, their tanks.

00:34:54.000 They also wanted the Germans to withdraw from Romania.

00:34:57.000 The Germans were in Romania.

00:34:59.000 because they desperately needed the oil there.

00:35:01.000 They're getting almost half of their oil supplies from Romania.

00:35:04.000 And here's where it gets really interesting.

00:35:06.000 Stalin also demanded a right to invade Bulgaria and station troops at the Turkish Straits that is on the Bosporus.

00:35:15.000 Now, his reasoning here is that Britain, although he was not at war with Britain, which was also interesting, because Britain had declared war on Nazi Germany, but not the Soviet Union, he still saw Britain as hostile, and he thought that maybe they could threaten him through the Straits, into the Black Sea, or the underbelly through Ukraine.

00:35:32.000 So these are his reasons.

00:35:34.000 But from Hitler's perspective, this is just mad. 0.88

00:35:36.000 Oh, he also wanted half of Sakhalin Island.

00:35:38.000 He wanted the Germans to put pressure on Japan.

00:35:42.000 So, Hitler thinks this is just crazy.

00:35:44.000 You know, here is this kind of junior partner who's acting like he's the boss.

00:35:48.000 He unloads in this Bulgarian. 1.00

00:35:50.000 And, you know, he says, now I know what Stalin's really about.

00:35:53.000 You know, some of it had to do with material interests.

00:35:55.000 The Soviets, whenever they moved into a country, the economy would collapse. 1.00

00:35:58.000 And as Hitler pointed out, I can't have them in the Balkans because I need all these things from the Balkans. 0.98

00:36:03.000 They needed things like chrome, you know, which you needed to treat steel.

00:36:07.000 They needed manganese.

00:36:09.000 Yeah, so they needed all these alloys.

00:36:10.000 They need all this stuff.

00:36:11.000 They're getting from Turkey and from the Balkans.

00:36:13.000 we cannot have them in the Balkans. 0.98

00:36:14.000 And so he decides on...

00:36:19.000 Is it more like a kind of a vengeance strike?

00:36:22.000 but he decides he's going to hit Stalin.

00:36:24.000 And so what is it about Oh, yeah.

00:36:32.000 Well, so Sweden invaded Russia on a number of occasions.

00:36:35.000 And the Poles in, like, the 1800s.

00:36:36.000 The Poles were occupying Moscow, right, before the Romanov dynasty began.

00:36:40.000 The French, and now, of course, the Nazis. 0.83

00:36:43.000 I mean, that's four examples.

00:36:45.000 Is there like a little built of Russian paranoia that they're going to constantly be invaded and kind of sure extract it? 0.99

00:36:52.000 I mean, there's something about Russia where they just they just see.

00:36:58.000 Yeah, it depends on your perspective.

00:36:59.000 A lot of Russia's neighbors have, of course, always seen Russia as a bully who invades her neighbors, and the Russians think they are a country that's frequently been invaded across the vast European plain, whether it's Napoleon or Hitler, of course, as you pointed out, Sweden.

00:37:12.000 And the Swedes make it as far as Poltava, this great battle in the early 18th century where they're actually basically conquering large parts of Ukraine.

00:37:20.000 Of all countries, Sweden.

00:37:21.000 Of old countries, Sweden, right.

00:37:23.000 Although now they wanted to start doing it again.

00:37:25.000 It's part of the reason they joined NATO.

00:37:27.000 I was in Sweden about six years ago.

00:37:28.000 You would not believe the way they were chomping at the bit to finally get back at Russia by joining NATO.

00:37:33.000 But so in 1941, here's where the story goes.

00:37:36.000 Hitler does make this decision, and we know he issued some of these directives as early as December 1940, about six months before the invasion.

00:37:44.000 They get delayed a little bit when they get kind of sucked into the Balkans and Yugoslavia, which is a story we can maybe talk about a little later.

00:37:50.000 But the thing is, everyone assumes that...

00:37:53.000 The Russians were kind of taken by surprise.

00:37:56.000 There's this story where Stalin collapses in this kind of drunken stupor.

00:38:00.000 How could I be betrayed?

00:38:01.000 There's like a Robert Duvall movie.

00:38:03.000 know they're all these kind of legends about the story.

00:38:06.000 The thing that is so bonkers about this narrative is that the Russians had spent of course And it's not just that they're preparing for a defensive war.

00:38:19.000 In fact, quite the opposite.

00:38:21.000 They're not building fortifications.

00:38:23.000 They're not erecting lines of barbed wire.

00:38:25.000 They're not making sure that they can destroy all the bridges.

00:38:29.000 No, they're actually building roads.

00:38:31.000 They're building railroads.

00:38:32.000 They're building tank parks.

00:38:33.000 They're building air bases.

00:38:36.000 199 air bases are being built basically right on the border of the Reich.

00:38:41.000 And this is not in Russia proper.

00:38:43.000 These are on the territories the Russians have conquered since 1939.

00:38:46.000 So it's actually on foreign soil.

00:38:48.000 Within a couple minutes flying distance of the Reich.

00:38:52.000 A lot of people know the story about how when the Germans invade, they knock out more than a thousand Russian warplanes on the ground in the early hours.

00:38:58.000 And oil fields, too.

00:38:59.000 Right, and the office, but what were they doing there in the border districts?

00:39:02.000 They were there because Stalin was preparing Was he preparing for an offensive war?

00:39:09.000 The way they talked about it in their war gaming was more like they thought the Germans would sort of telegraph this giant punch and then they would have a counter-strike.

00:39:18.000 Were they ever ideologically aligned?

00:39:22.000 I mean, do we have any evidence that Hitler and Stalin would have long-ranging conversations in the Alps talking about how...

00:39:34.000 Well, that's a great question, in part because the biggest what-if is, what if Hitler had actually met Stalin?

00:39:39.000 Oh, they never did?

00:39:41.000 I see that shows my...

00:39:43.000 Right, but no, no.

00:39:43.000 Everyone thought it would happen, but part of the reason why...

00:39:51.000 The only exception is he left the Soviet Union to Tehran, and that was because Tehran, this is for the conference in 1943, Because Tehran was under military.

00:40:00.000 This is actually a huge problem for Roosevelt, who's like this invalid, who keeps trying to get Stalin to come to places like Alaska, or maybe England, or somewhere in the Mediterranean, and Stalin keeps luring him. 0.54

00:40:09.000 Or Georgia, where he's from.

00:40:10.000 Or Georgia, anywhere.

00:40:11.000 But Stalin will not leave the Soviet Union.

00:40:14.000 That's amazing.

00:40:14.000 And so it's the same thing.

00:40:15.000 Had Stalin gone to Berlin in November 1940, I actually think they could have worked out a deal. 0.93

00:40:21.000 Because they had such, again, in some ways opposed, but also kind of very charismatic personalities.

00:40:25.000 That's what I'm saying.

00:40:26.000 Yeah.

00:40:26.000 Molotov is this dour, cold fish.

00:40:28.000 You know, he had almost like negative charm and he and Hitler just couldn't stand each other. 0.96

00:40:34.000 Where Stalin, for all that we've seen him, was a very monstrous, mass murdering figure, Absolutely.

00:40:45.000 I mean, for good reason.

00:40:46.000 I mean, he had made so many enemies with the purges of the 30s, just with so many people whose blood were on his hands.

00:40:52.000 Tukachevsky.

00:40:53.000 Yeah, Tukachevsky and, of course, thousands of other top-ranking officers, party members, etc.

00:40:58.000 There were a lot of people who made this.

00:40:59.000 We're out dancing all over the place.

00:41:01.000 But it's fun.

00:41:02.000 Why did Stalin do that?

00:41:04.000 What was his internal justification for purging some of his best, most loyal performing generals?

00:41:10.000 Was it like no one's off limits?

00:41:13.000 He wanted everyone to be even more paranoid than he is?

00:41:16.000 Well, so there are a lot of different theories about this.

00:41:18.000 One of the more interesting ones actually has to do with, again, although they never met, they're kind of...

00:41:24.000 So you had in Germany the famous Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, and it was only six months later that the so-called Kirov affair breaks in Russia, which is sort of the proximate cause.

00:41:35.000 So this is when this party boss called Sergei Kirov.

00:41:38.000 And again, one of the theories about it is that Kirov supposedly won this sort of like inner party poll and Stalin thought he might be more popular and maybe he was a rival.

00:41:47.000 So Stalin had him killed the historian who looked most closely into the evidence.

00:41:51.000 Believe me, he wrote an 800 page book just about this.

00:42:01.000 And kind of learning from Hitler, who in the Night of the Long Knives had a lot of the most enthusiastic Nazis, like Ernst Röhm, the founder of the Sturmabteilung, or kind of the essay of the Stormtroopers, you know, he had them killed. 0.79

00:42:11.000 He literally arrested Röhm, like, personally.

00:42:14.000 Pull him out of bed with his own hands.

00:42:17.000 So he was basically having some of the most fanatical Nazi loyalists whacked.

00:42:22.000 And so Stalin might have gotten the idea that...

00:42:28.000 Was he genuinely paranoid that there were always plots against him?

00:42:31.000 I think to some extent he was.

00:42:32.000 Like if you look at the evidence presented against people in the show trials or the pretext used for these kind of purges and the mass murdering of party members, a lot of it was also xenophobic.

00:42:44.000 That's the part a lot of people maybe don't know.

00:42:46.000 There was a lot of paranoia about espionage.

00:42:48.000 So a lot of Polish ethnics or German ethnics, even a lot of Koreans were either deported or executed in the 30s.

00:42:56.000 So it's a blend of things.

00:42:57.000 Some of it's xenophobia.

00:42:58.000 Some of it's paranoia.

00:42:59.000 Some of it is maybe, again, maybe he's got the idea from Hitler.

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00:44:03.000 Shouldn't you be looking into doing that too?

00:44:09.000 And this is a great part of your book, which I haven't read, but I just love the thesis, because we do have, what do you call it, a Germano-centric view of the world?

00:44:16.000 Germano-centric, I call it.

00:44:18.000 Right.

00:44:18.000 It's very...

00:44:19.000 You know, we look at it from the West.

00:44:23.000 But there really is no understanding of the other powers.

00:44:26.000 Let's just first talk briefly about Stalin.

00:44:29.000 Because everyone could tell you about Hitler, right? 0.89

00:44:31.000 He was a disaffected artist, and he was in jail, and he wrote Mein Kampf.

00:44:36.000 I think an average, well-educated Westerner can tell you a rough kind of biography of Hitler.

00:44:42.000 But they can't do the same for Stalin.

00:44:44.000 So he went to seminary.

00:44:47.000 He then was what caught up in this communist revolution as like a lieutenant under Lenin.

00:44:52.000 What did he believe?

00:44:53.000 Was he an actual communist or was he just a power-hungry guy?

00:44:56.000 Well, right.

00:44:56.000 A lot of people have tried to make the argument at the end he was just about power, that he was kind of this, eventually turned into a nationalist or something.

00:45:03.000 But, I mean, no, he actually came up through the party.

00:45:05.000 He was very much a fanatical, believing communist.

00:45:08.000 You know, he was well-rounded in the sense that he was pretty well-read.

00:45:12.000 He wrote poetry.

00:45:14.000 He obviously had some charm and some charisma, but he also had a brutality that was evident from the very first days.

00:45:19.000 Some of this came from the kind of almost bandit culture of the Caucasus with vendettas.

00:45:24.000 And you'd read these stories about, you know, kind of like bandits and rebels, you know, kind of basically meting out vengeance to their enemies.

00:45:32.000 So that was obviously part of his milieu and his worldview.

00:45:34.000 He was personally involved in this famous bank heist in Tbilisi or Tiflis in Georgia in 1907.

00:45:42.000 This is one of the ways in which the Bolsheviks, the communists would raise funds was, of course, by taking other people's money. 0.84

00:45:46.000 Taking other people's money, which then once they were in power, that's literally what they did.

00:45:49.000 They still do that.

00:45:50.000 Yeah, they still do that.

00:45:50.000 So that was one of the ways in which they would raise funds.

00:45:52.000 They would just rob banks.

00:45:53.000 In this case, it was like it was sort of like an.

00:45:57.000 Unfortunately, a lot of the bills were marked.

00:45:59.000 Not able to really use them all.

00:46:01.000 But Lenin was very impressed by this.

00:46:03.000 I mean, one way in which I have to say Stalin, again, not that I find him sympathetic, but He was not usually involved in sort of street demonstrations, street violence.

00:46:15.000 He would often shy away from any risky situation.

00:46:18.000 You know, after the July days of 1917, when they tried to arrest him, he adopted a disguise.

00:46:23.000 You know, he fled into the Finnish countryside.

00:46:25.000 Stalin was arrested many, many, many times, sent to Siberia.

00:46:28.000 He spent the war actually in Siberia, in the underground, whereas Lenin was often, you know, he's in Switzerland, you know, kind of living it up in Zurich, of all places.

00:46:39.000 I think he always had, again, a little bit more.

00:46:43.000 Trotsky tried to caricature him as this kind of comrade card index because he controlled the personnel files and he was a bureaucrat.

00:46:51.000 That wasn't really the case.

00:46:53.000 He did that too, but he also had charisma.

00:46:55.000 He had strength.

00:46:57.000 And he had ruthlessness.

00:46:59.000 I mean, again, one of the other theories about why he became quite so violent in the 1930s is that, well, there's this line he said, Now, after the death of his wife, he lost his last warm feeling for other human beings.

00:47:11.000 And what's curious about this is that you might think he would say this after his wife, Nadia, committed suicide in 1932.

00:47:19.000 In fact, he said it after his first wife died in 1907.

00:47:22.000 But when his second wife committed suicide after this night when he had kind of berated her in public, so maybe he felt vaguely guilty about it.

00:47:31.000 But he responded to this very kind of Stalin-esque way by making sure he had lists of anyone who was there that night, you know, who knew anything about it, which might be compromising and eventually had a lot of them executed.

00:47:41.000 So he was he was obviously ruthless in the way that he would deal with his enemies.

00:47:46.000 Now, he had a certain, you might call it almost like a flexibility in foreign policy, as you might say from the Molotov-Rippentrop Pact.

00:47:54.000 He could be opportunistic.

00:47:56.000 But I think, and this is one of my big arguments in the book, he did have a kind of central animating motivation or principle in foreign policy, which was effectively to exacerbate wars and conflict in the capitalist world because that is what would lead communists to triumph.

00:48:10.000 I mean, that's very Hegelian in some ways, right?

00:48:13.000 Create the tension and dialectical continue.

00:48:16.000 But isn't that at odds with what so many communists will say, that America is this colonialist, internationalist project?

00:48:23.000 Communism seems to be far more internationalistically expansionist than...

00:48:35.000 An example of this, so in the book and also in this op-ed that I wrote in the Wall Street Journal on the 80th anniversary of the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, this is what they signed in April 1941, which is perverse in a lot of ways.

00:48:48.000 One of the things people never understood about Hitler's strategy or his complete lack of strategy in the war is that Japan had been hostile to the Soviet Union really for most of its existence.

00:48:58.000 and said they'd actually intervened in the Russian Civil War alongside Britain, France, and the U.S. They had fought against the Soviets in the Far East in 1938, 1939, and they were, of course, allied to Nazi Germany.

00:49:09.000 And so why did Hitler not even bother telling them about his plans to invade Russia? 0.82

00:49:13.000 He didn't trust them, and so he didn't tell them.

00:49:15.000 Then the foreign minister of Japan...

00:49:22.000 Now, what I pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, and I talk about this in the book, is that Stalin's goal in signing a neutrality pact with Japan is very clearly to try to pressure or hint or suggest that it might be better if the Japanese attacked British and U.S. positions in the Pacific instead of the Soviet Union, which is, of course, precisely what then happened.

00:49:41.000 Part of this was because also Stalin gave it a bit of a shove.

00:49:43.000 He had agents in Washington, including Harry Dexter White, second in command of the Treasury Department.

00:49:51.000 Well, some of them were on the payroll.

00:49:54.000 Some of them, like Harry Dexter White, were more like just sort of volunteers who sympathized with communism or with the Soviet Union.

00:50:00.000 Yes, he was actually heavily involved, among other things, in even the creation of things like the World Bank and Bretton Woods in 1944.

00:50:09.000 I guess McCarthy was right.

00:50:10.000 But you say he wrote up what?

00:50:12.000 So he wrote up the so-called whole note.

00:50:14.000 So this is basically the last sort of diplomatic communication with Japan right before Pearl Harbor.

00:50:19.000 So basically it's sort of this ultimatum.

00:50:21.000 You must withdraw all of your troops from China and from Indochina, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, etc., or else.

00:50:28.000 Just basically like you have to withdraw them all because by then the U.S. had effectively had a de facto embargo on things like oil, all these things Japan desperately needed.

00:50:36.000 The Japanese were trying to negotiate some type of a compromise.

00:50:40.000 They had a couple of different proposals which were rejected by the Roosevelt administration.

00:50:43.000 We know that the whole.

00:50:47.000 It was actually based on a draft handed to him by his Soviet handler, a man called Detali Pavlov, earlier in 1941.

00:50:57.000 So the reason I got in trouble with the Russian government was I pointed this out, that the whole point of the neutrality pact was to try to basically encourage the Japanese to attack the U.S. and Britain, and the Russian foreign ministry—there's actually a tweet on the 4th of July a couple of years ago.

00:51:11.000 They denounced me by name, and they said that the Soviet Union was a peace-loving empire, which, of course, had no imperialistic or warlike intentions of any kind.

00:51:21.000 Right, right, sure.

00:51:22.000 But so that was the goal.

00:51:26.000 More talk in the book of Europe, just in part because that's kind of where a lot of the really dramatic and also devastating military action and so many of the casualties of the deaths are happening.

00:51:35.000 In a lot of ways, Stalin's foreign policy was actually more effective in Asia, because you think about this, it's almost incredible the way it worked out for him.

00:51:42.000 So, signs of neutrality back with Japan. 0.61

00:51:44.000 Japan attacks the United States and British positions across the Pacific.

00:51:49.000 Then for the next four years, the U.S. wages an extremely expensive, bloody, so-called island-hopping campaign against Japan.

00:51:55.000 They could have gone in through China instead.

00:51:57.000 That's another question which has to do with Soviet influence operations.

00:52:01.000 And then at the very end of the war, Stalin's position, which he laid out at both Tehran and Yalta, it was so cynical, it was unbelievable.

00:52:09.000 He literally said, you know, I will not enter the war against Japan.

00:52:12.000 Roosevelt asked him dozens of times, can you help us against Japan? 0.78

00:52:15.000 It's not just that Stalin didn't help.

00:52:18.000 U.S. pilots who would stage bombing raids on Japan, who had to land on Soviet soil, were arrested and interned in Soviet labor camps during the war, including the pilots of the famous Doolittle Raid of April 1942, who were actually sensationalized in a Hollywood blockbuster film, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo.

00:52:39.000 They left this part out of the movie.

00:52:40.000 They were arrested and sent to Soviet labor camps.

00:52:43.000 It's such a great point.

00:52:44.000 I have to interrupt you.

00:52:46.000 I guess it's just I've never heard it.

00:52:48.000 Russia didn't help us at all in the Pacific theater.

00:52:50.000 Right.

00:52:51.000 They're constantly bellyaching about the lack of a second front, which I guess Sicily and Italy didn't count.

00:52:56.000 Their excuse, I guess, their excuse was that we had our hands full because Hitler's near Moscow.

00:53:01.000 Right.

00:53:02.000 That the war is in Europe, and three months after the war in Europe ends, and not a moment sooner, we will enter the war in Japan at a price, and that price is negotiated in Tehran, which basically included the Soviet sphere of influence in Manchuria, North China, Korea, Sakhalin, the Kura Islands, and so on.

00:53:18.000 So I don't want to let something slip.

00:53:20.000 I've never heard anyone say this either.

00:53:22.000 We could have based our operation out of China.

00:53:26.000 Right.

00:53:27.000 Why didn't we?

00:53:28.000 There are a number of reasons that we didn't.

00:53:30.000 I mean, it would have been difficult because the Japanese had made these moves down into Indonesia and Burma. 0.98

00:53:35.000 But there was a lot of talk all through 1943.

00:53:38.000 There was a guy called Chenow in the U.S. Army Air Forces, and he thought that we should basically focus more on China.

00:53:44.000 We had to open up the Burma Road for supply.

00:53:46.000 He also thought we could do a lot with air power alone.

00:53:48.000 But to get serious war supplies to China, we would have had to go in through the Bay of Bengal, this whole operation they called Buccaneer.

00:53:55.000 The problem was that...

00:54:04.000 By communist agents in Washington and in Chongqing, his kind of capital during the war.

00:54:10.000 Specifically, there were three guys in the Treasury Department.

00:54:12.000 One I already mentioned, Harry Dexter White.

00:54:14.000 There's a guy called Frank Koh.

00:54:16.000 Another guy called Solomon Adler.

00:54:18.000 It's amazing.

00:54:18.000 It's incredible.

00:54:19.000 So Solomon Adler was literally in charge of the money pipeline of our aid that was supposed to go to China.

00:54:24.000 He convinced Roosevelt to cut off the money because he said Chiang Kai-shek and his wife are really corrupt and they're going to waste it.

00:54:31.000 And then Stilwell, the commander of U.S. Swartz is there, who's supposed to be this, like, real tough-talking, you know, salty guy.

00:54:38.000 They call him Vinegar Joe.

00:54:40.000 Mostly because he kept insulting Chiang Kai-shek.

00:54:43.000 You know, he would call him Little Bastard.

00:54:45.000 He would call him Peanut.

00:54:46.000 And he would constantly talk about how he wasn't really fighting Japan.

00:54:49.000 It was the communists who were fighting Japan.

00:54:51.000 He thought that because that's what the communists told him.

00:54:54.000 It was a lie in every possible sense.

00:54:56.000 What you're saying is that in the Great War that is the modern crucifixion of modernity, it's the most important event that we talk about in reference, good and evil is centered around how we view World War II.

00:55:09.000 Right.

00:55:10.000 And bad is not Hitler.

00:55:12.000 That's basically what, if you set...

00:55:16.000 You're saying in that war so much of the political decisions were influenced by communist sleeper cell agents in our government?

00:55:27.000 Both the agents in our government and also people who weren't necessarily answering to Soviet handlers but who were extremely powerful.

00:55:35.000 Harry Hopkins, for example, who's literally sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom for most of the war, he's almost like Roosevelt's right-hand man, and he's running the Lend-Lease operation where we're basically ramping up the vast hydraulic machinery of the entire U.S. economy.

00:55:48.000 We retool, for example, the pork industry so that we could supply the Soviets with the famous spam, the Tusanka.

00:55:54.000 But not just that.

00:55:55.000 We were sending them millions of tiny little packets of dehydrated borscht because that's what they like to eat.

00:56:00.000 We were feeding the Red Army.

00:56:01.000 We were giving them their boots.

00:56:03.000 We were giving them their clothes.

00:56:04.000 We were giving them their fuel.

00:56:05.000 We were giving them the rubber for their tires.

00:56:07.000 We were sending them trucks and Jeeps and Harley Davidson motorcycles, some of which were actually re-gifted to Stalin's Polish stooges so they could go around and hunt Polish patriots with them. 0.78

00:56:18.000 Do you think F...

00:56:24.000 Was he actually quietly sympathetic to the Soviet Union?

00:56:27.000 Oh, he was absolutely sympathetic, and he wasn't that quiet about it.

00:56:30.000 Philosophically?

00:56:31.000 Philosophically, again, he was not communist, but I think he thought that the Soviets were kind of on the side of progress, and he thought that European imperialism was on the way out.

00:56:41.000 So he consistently favored Stalin over Churchill, to an extreme degree.

00:56:45.000 Just to make sure we're all keeping score at home.

00:56:47.000 Who killed more of their own people, Stalin or Hitler? 0.60

00:56:49.000 Oh, Stalin, undoubtedly.

00:56:50.000 By how much more?

00:56:53.000 If you count up all the deaths throughout Stalin's reign, you'd probably have to get up close to, again, just kind of spitballing a figure, somewhere around 30 or 35 million.

00:57:05.000 It certainly outstrips the Holocaust. 0.93

00:57:07.000 And as far as Hitler killing his own people, a lot of them were German.

00:57:11.000 Jews, obviously, were killed.

00:57:12.000 A lot of the people killed by the Nazis were not German.

00:57:15.000 So if you're talking about his own people, it gets a little bit dicey.

00:57:19.000 So, I'm just asking for a reason.

00:57:21.000 Stalin killed maybe 3 to 4x what Hitler did of whatever population that they were overseeing.

00:57:28.000 I mean, almost certainly, you could say, if you're talking about the consequences of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, where the Soviets allegedly lose 27 million people, you could maybe put that in Hitler's tally, I guess, even if a lot of them were actually killed by the Soviets.

00:57:41.000 Under that, wasn't Stalin equally the villain then of World War II?

00:57:45.000 Well, I guess that's the difficult question because the war ends up becoming so aligned with Stalin's interests on almost every front.

00:57:52.000 This is one of the big themes of the book, that he's kind of the key victor.

00:57:56.000 It's not that the U.S. doesn't gain anything from the war.

00:57:59.000 Basically, the U.S. pushes the British Empire into receivership and starts picking it apart, a little bit like going down like a scarecrow or a vulture or something.

00:58:11.000 But Stalin gains territory.

00:58:13.000 He actually gains an empire.

00:58:24.000 The armies that would eventually conquer Asia and then link up with Mao and supply Mao with a lot of his weapons, that is the Soviet Far Eastern armies, were mostly supplied with weapons, largesse, war materiel, foodstuffs, boots, etc., by the United States, the U.S. taxpayer.

00:58:41.000 Just to give you an example of the volume we're talking about, about 8.25 million tons of war materiel was shipped to Vladivostok by the United States during the war.

00:58:53.000 through Japanese territorial waters when we were at war with Japan.

00:58:57.000 That's on the eastern.

00:58:57.000 Yeah.

00:58:58.000 It's amazing.

00:58:59.000 Japan let it through because the Japanese thought, oh, this is great.

00:59:02.000 The U.S. is sending all their weapons to Stalin where they're not fighting us as well as they might. 0.68

00:59:07.000 And so they kind of just let it through.

00:59:08.000 And so then Stalin waits until after the U.S. has done all the work against Japan until Japan has, because the U.S. chose not to supply China, Japan had started removing more and more soldiers back to the home island. 0.61

00:59:20.000 So Manchuria, which is where Japan originally was, is almost stripped of troops by the time Stalin says, OK, now we move.

00:59:26.000 So Stalin then makes his move in Asia with U.S. weapons and supplies basically into territories vacated by the Japanese because of the U.S. war against Japan.

00:59:35.000 So how should then, based on your book, Stalin's War, and this is fascinating.

00:59:42.000 I could talk to you for hours.

00:59:43.000 How should we revise the view of FDR?

00:59:45.000 He is viewed as, from historians, one of the greatest presidents ever.

00:59:48.000 But based on your view, does...

01:00:05.000 I think that's largely true.

01:00:07.000 I have to give Roosevelt credit that when he wanted to, he could actually play a kind of ruthless rail politic.

01:00:13.000 And this is a real contrast, his approach to Britain versus his approach to Russia.

01:00:18.000 The Lend-Lease Act, although applied to Britain, the British actually had to pay us for it.

01:00:23.000 In the Basis for Destroyers Deal of 1940, for example, we basically picked off the carcass of the British Empire in the Western Hemisphere.

01:00:31.000 Britain didn't finish paying off her World War II debts to the United States.

01:00:34.000 So when he wanted to put the squeeze on in the interests of the United States, he could.

01:00:40.000 For whatever reason, he either had this sympathy, this soft spot, this blind spot for Stalin, which I think in the end did have very deleterious consequences.

01:00:49.000 So the Lendley story, I'm willing to give Roosevelt the benefit of the doubt, let's say, in the first year or two after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

01:00:57.000 I might disagree, but there's a rational argument to be made that the U.S. had a national interest in ensuring that the Soviet Union wouldn't collapse.

01:01:04.000 Maybe Hitler would have been a greater threat had he had the resources of Russia at his disposal. 0.98

01:01:09.000 Yes.

01:01:13.000 which might have ended with a kind of sunset clause after the first year, the first or the second protocol in June 42 or June 43. So after Stalingrad, that's in the winter of 42, 43, or after Kursk in the summer of They're clearly not going to lose.

01:01:29.000 We could have slowed it down.

01:01:30.000 We could have said, look, okay, we're happy to help you survive.

01:01:34.000 Now you're on your own because we don't want to send you 400,000 trucks so that you can invade Europe. 0.53

01:01:38.000 Once the barbarians are not at your gate, we're going to calm things down a little bit. 0.99

01:01:41.000 Instead, I don't know if you remember the movie Spaceballs, but you remember instead of, I think instead of hyperspeed, they had ludicrous speed.

01:01:48.000 Instead, after 43, when it was no longer really needed, there wasn't much of an argument for it, we ramped it up to ludicrous speed.

01:01:55.000 In the most generous interpretation of FDR's own view, what did he think a post-war Europe would look like?

01:02:03.000 Well, this is an interesting question.

01:02:05.000 I think in some ways Harry Hopkins is right-hand man.

01:02:08.000 He argued this a bit more explicitly than Roosevelt.

01:02:11.000 I mean, Roosevelt definitely wanted the Soviets to be a partner.

01:02:13.000 And Hopkins was a communist adjacent guy?

01:02:16.000 Hopkins was absolutely full-throated sympathizer, not a party member.

01:02:21.000 Sure.

01:02:21.000 But he was saying that basically because the Soviets would be all-powerful, it was a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, we're making them all-powerful with our Lend-Lease aid.

01:02:29.000 Because of that, we should do everything we can to please them and befriend them.

01:02:34.000 That was Hopkins'position.

01:02:36.000 Roosevelt, again, is not quite as extreme, but I think he sees the Soviets as a partner in creating this new world order based on the United Nations with European empires all kind of being pushed to the curb. 0.77

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01:03:51.000 Here's another question that I'm curious about.

01:03:54.000 Behind you is a picture of Churchill.

01:03:55.000 I like Churchill a lot.

01:03:58.000 Was Churchill worried or aware that FDR and his inner circle was quietly sympathetic to Stalin?

01:04:07.000 Did Churchill express any concern about this and what a post-war Europe would look like?

01:04:12.000 He did, although one of the things that I do in the book— No one's perfect.

01:04:21.000 As early as 1939, because Churchill was so focused on Hitler and Nazi Germany and the German threat, he had a good relation with the Soviet ambassador, and he was beginning to signal, even before he became prime minister at the beginning of the war, he's first lord of the admiralty, before the war, he's out of the government entirely.

01:04:36.000 But he was kind of suggesting that Britain might look favorably on Soviet moves in the Baltic region or in Finland because he thought they'd be a good counterweight to Hitler.

01:04:45.000 He had talked about the idea of a grand alliance as early as 1938.

01:04:48.000 So he thought that in the end, the best way to defeat Nazi Germany would be by getting the U.S. and the Soviet Union into the war.

01:04:55.000 That was a large part of what he was thinking in the famous period of the kind of the finest hour when he's giving these famous speeches.

01:05:01.000 He's thinking, look, we need to hold out long enough so that the U.S. and the Soviets will eventually bail us out.

01:05:06.000 One of the ironies is that although he was much flippant.

01:05:11.000 Again, it's not that he was in any way sympathetic to communism, but he was friendlier to Russia.

01:05:14.000 He had the sense of almost like Russia's sort of brotherhood in arms from the First World War.

01:05:19.000 There's this great power.

01:05:20.000 The great power that we're going to need them.

01:05:22.000 And so he writes Stalin all these letters saying, don't you know Hitler's going to turn on you, etc., etc.

01:05:27.000 He was right.

01:05:27.000 Yeah, he was right.

01:05:28.000 Stalin never responded to his letters because Stalin was very loyal to Hitler until after Hitler, of course, broke with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union.

01:05:36.000 Go ahead.

01:05:37.000 So Churchill, he did put up some fight on things like whether the Soviets should be able to have control of the Baltic countries.

01:05:44.000 You know, the Soviet position in Poland.

01:05:46.000 Up to a point, Poland's borders.

01:05:48.000 By the end of the war, you know, he is almost willing to go to war with the Soviets over Poland.

01:05:52.000 He actually proposes this.

01:05:54.000 He calls this Operation Unthinkable.

01:05:55.000 Actually, that's not what he called it.

01:05:57.000 That's what his generals called it.

01:05:58.000 They called it Operation Unthinkable.

01:05:59.000 He was actually proposing a war to sort of eject the Soviets from Poland by 1945.

01:06:04.000 I think he had some regret about his own role at Tehran and Yalta, but of course, mostly it was because Roosevelt just would not put up any fight at all over Poland.

01:06:16.000 Was Churchill infiltrated as well?

01:06:18.000 The British government was definitely infiltrated.

01:06:20.000 There was a lot of Soviet influence operations in the British government as well.

01:06:23.000 The famous so-called Cambridge Five, actually about nine spies at Cambridge.

01:06:27.000 They'd infiltrated the BBC, MI6, MI4.

01:06:31.000 Cambridge.

01:06:31.000 Yeah, Cambridge.

01:06:32.000 They had a lot of influence in Cairo.

01:06:34.000 And this actually did play a role.

01:06:36.000 And I think the one area in the book where I come down probably hardest on Churchill is that I think he misread the situation in Yugoslavia.

01:06:43.000 So in 1943, based on...

01:06:52.000 They're hosting a royal Yugoslav government in exile in London.

01:06:55.000 Its legatee inside the country is a general called Mikhailovich, and his forces are called the Chetniks.

01:07:01.000 They're sort of mostly Serbs, but sort of like Yugoslav royalists who are allies of Britain.

01:07:08.000 And Churchill cuts off Mikhailovich and throws all his support behind Joseph or Yosef Broz.

01:07:16.000 Tito, basically the communist, not realizing that Tito is actually answering to Stalin.

01:07:23.000 And for the next almost a year and a half, it's actually Britain that gets most of the arms and supplies to Tito because the Soviets have no ability to actually supply him.

01:07:32.000 But the whole time, and this is something...

01:07:40.000 We know that Tito was not only responding and talking with Stalin and Molotov, but he was literally even reporting on Churchill's envoy, Fitzroy McLean.

01:07:48.000 He was fully loyal.

01:07:49.000 I mean, at one point, Churchill gets really shocked.

01:07:51.000 He doesn't know where Tito is, and he can't figure out where he went.

01:07:55.000 And, of course, where did he go?

01:07:55.000 He went to Moscow.

01:07:57.000 So he got played, you know, at times.

01:08:01.000 there was almost this romantic idea that, look, Tito's this kind of guerrilla fighter, and he's supposedly killing more Germans than Mihailovic.

01:08:08.000 He thinks this because that's what...

01:08:19.000 In fact, the Chetniks were not perfect, but they were definitely doing more damage to German forces. 1.00

01:08:23.000 I know this because I've seen the German files too.

01:08:26.000 So saying a new history of World War II, if you had to summarize what is that history then?

01:08:32.000 We've been going around it.

01:08:34.000 If you had to say...

01:08:35.000 If you were in charge of how this was taught to children and to kids, how would you present that?

01:08:40.000 It's difficult because when you're talking about kids, I obviously don't want to disabuse them of...

01:08:50.000 But I do think we need to reckon with the consequences of the Second World War.

01:08:55.000 First of all, for our own country, the erosion of our own basically domestic liberties, the way in which we ramped up the security state, created these organizations like the OSS, the future CIA, the Lend-Lease Administration.

01:09:08.000 Congress effectively forfeits a lot of its supervisory role over U.S. foreign policy.

01:09:14.000 You know, too much power is probably invested in the executive branch.

01:09:17.000 There are a lot of consequences for the U.S., but also for the world.

01:09:19.000 You know, that is to say, if it's a war of liberation, you know, tell that to the Poles. 0.63

01:09:23.000 It's an amazing fact that Poland has still not received reparations from either Germany or the Soviet Union after being, of course, invaded and largely obliterated and turned into a smoking ruin by them in the Second World War.

01:09:36.000 As recently as a couple of years ago, Poland levied a new reparations claim against Germany for about $1.3 trillion.

01:09:43.000 And it was rejected, as always, because the claim is that Poland forfeited her right to reparations in 1953.

01:09:51.000 That is to say, when she was an occupied Soviet communist satellite state.

01:10:03.000 American soldiers, American pilots, the Seabees in the Pacific War.

01:10:08.000 Heroic feats of endurance, engineering prowess, bravery.

01:10:12.000 We should not underemphasize that.

01:10:16.000 That's obviously a part of the story.

01:10:18.000 But we do want to ask what they were fighting for and what the result of that war was.

01:10:23.000 Because the real problem I see with the good war kind of story, narrative myth, is that people are always trotting out Munich and appeasement.

01:10:32.000 And this is the story which people use to justify almost any U.S. What's wrong with it at its core?

01:10:38.000 Well, what's wrong with it is that the U.S., first of all, Doesn't always know what it's doing.

01:10:44.000 Does not always produce the desired results.

01:10:47.000 In fact, oftentimes the results are counterproductive.

01:10:50.000 We've talked a lot about the Second World War, the U.S. intervention in the First World War.

01:10:54.000 I obviously am not going to go into all of the details of the story.

01:10:57.000 I know very little about what we're doing.

01:10:58.000 But so the interesting fact is that the U.S. supposedly goes to war because of violations of kind of freedom of navigation and freedom of the seas with German U-boat attacks, and there's some vague notion that Wilson gloms onto the way he justifies to combat it.

01:11:11.000 is that it's a war for democracy.

01:11:13.000 Or as the phrase is sometimes, A war to make the world safe for democracy.

01:11:19.000 What U.S. intervention does instead in the First World War is by defeating the Germans who were then occupying Russia, it makes the world safe for communism.

01:11:27.000 Because the Germans had sort of midwife. 1.00

01:11:29.000 They sent Lenin to Russia.

01:11:30.000 They're occupying Russia. 0.89

01:11:31.000 Basically, it allows the communist regime to survive.

01:11:34.000 And so if we midwife communism into existence with our intervention in the First World War, the Second World War, we liberated Western Europe.

01:11:41.000 I think that's fair to say.

01:11:43.000 We liberated some of the countries of Southeast Asia, although it didn't always go well in places like Vietnam.

01:11:51.000 But most of northern Asia, eventually all of China, and of course the vast bulk of Eastern Europe, ended up under totalitarian communist rule.

01:12:00.000 So if that was the result of the war, then I do think we have to ask whether the war aims, again, maybe...

01:12:17.000 The brokering of the war.

01:12:18.000 The brokering of the war, the negotiations, the decisions made, the allocation of resources, and above all, the diplomacy that, you know, effectively, we ended up handing over so much of Eurasian to Stalin. 0.82

01:12:30.000 So, yeah, so then Yalta, that was the first time all three of those guys met.

01:12:35.000 No, they met at Tehran.

01:12:37.000 FDR went to Tehran.

01:12:39.000 Amazingly.

01:12:40.000 That's quite a jaunt.

01:12:41.000 They had to negotiate to the last minute.

01:12:43.000 Roosevelt finally said, I can't go.

01:12:45.000 It's just too far.

01:12:46.000 It's so far that I won't even be able to get back to sign bills from Congress in time.

01:12:50.000 That was back when you didn't have Air Force One.

01:12:52.000 I mean, you had a plane.

01:12:53.000 Right.

01:12:54.000 It's a very dangerous trip.

01:12:56.000 The trip to Yalta was even more dangerous because by then Roosevelt's blood pressure was so elevated that the planes could not go above, I believe, 6,000 feet.

01:13:04.000 because of the lower oxygen levels.

01:13:05.000 So they basically had to deal with the risk of kind of flak and German anti-aircraft fire, basically because, you know, his health, he would not have survived the flight otherwise.

01:13:13.000 And they didn't have the depressurization technology that we have.

01:13:16.000 Apparently not.

01:13:17.000 Or pressurization, yeah.

01:13:17.000 It was extremely risky.

01:13:19.000 You know, he did make it.

01:13:20.000 That's something.

01:13:20.000 But no, Tehran, this is the thing everyone talks about Yalta.

01:13:22.000 And Yalta's kind of where, finally, it's sort of There were some agreements there that were new.

01:13:31.000 The one regarding the Soviet prisoners of war, it's really kind of shocking, where basically Churchill and Roosevelt agree, and the U.S. later called this Operation Keelhaul.

01:13:40.000 This is basically referring to this hideous naval punishment where you'd be kind of like dragged behind a ship.

01:13:45.000 This is how they describe the repatriation of Soviet prisoners of war who did not want to go home because they were viewed by Stalin's government as traitors.

01:13:53.000 So Yalta.

01:13:54.000 Just the conference.

01:13:56.000 Right.

01:13:57.000 Why is it that Stalin got to keep every country he invaded?

01:14:01.000 Well, a lot of this, the thing that, again, people focus on Yalta, and this is one way in which they can justify it.

01:14:06.000 And they could say, well, look, by the time of Yalta, the Soviet armies had already moved into places like not all of Poland, but like they had actually moved into Warsaw.

01:14:14.000 You know, they'd started moving into places like Hungary and Romania, and they were actually occupying Bulgaria. 0.51

01:14:19.000 So you could say, well, it's almost like a done deal.

01:14:21.000 It's sort of a de facto thing they're just recognizing.

01:14:24.000 The problem is that Roosevelt actually agreed to nearly all of these spheres of influence at Tehran in November, 1943, when the Soviets were still struggling to cross the Dnieper region

01:14:46.000 His famous last stand, the Mediterranean strategy, where he wants to have more time for the 500,000 odd troops that the Allies by then have in Italy, the British, the Americans, Canadians, some French, to maybe do something in the Mediterranean, maybe an amphibious landing somewhere in the Adriatic, maybe bring Turkey into the war.

01:15:04.000 Somehow try to kind of push into the Balkans, the underbelly of Europe, maybe even get there before... 0.96

01:15:13.000 Roosevelt briefly entertained the idea and then someone apparently passed him a note under the table.

01:15:18.000 And it was almost certainly Hopkins telling him to cool it.

01:15:21.000 And so he dropped the idea.

01:15:23.000 He insisted on the earliest possible date for D-Day.

01:15:26.000 And it wasn't just the earliest possible date for D-Day or Overlord.

01:15:28.000 It was specifically that they couldn't do anything in the Mediterranean.

01:15:31.000 They had to send all the landing craft to England.

01:15:33.000 They couldn't do any real offensive operations in the Mediterranean.

01:15:37.000 So that's the last time they really could have influenced the kind of future course of Eastern Europe.

01:15:41.000 Not only did they agree not to do this when Roosevelt sided with Stalin against Churchill, it wasn't even subtle.

01:15:47.000 He just sided with Stalin against Churchill.

01:15:49.000 In addition to this...

01:15:59.000 And what's amazing about this is Stalin actually, sorry, Roosevelt actually revealed to Stalin even before his own advisers or the U.S. public that he was going to run for election in 1944.

01:16:09.000 And the reason he did this was because he said, look, you can have the Baltic countries and you could probably have Poland too, but just be quiet about it until after next year's elections.

01:16:18.000 That's literally what he told him.

01:16:20.000 He even let the Soviets basically carve up what had been kind of the eastern part of Poland that the Soviets had been assigned in 1939 and then to push Poland's borders westward into Germany.

01:16:32.000 What was amazing about this was at one point one of the British delegation actually said, are you actually proposing you want us to sign off on the Molotov-Rippentrop borders?

01:16:43.000 And what was great was I think Molotov's line was, you can call them what you like.

01:16:47.000 We consider them natural and just.

01:16:50.000 Yeah, they did.

01:16:51.000 They signed off on basically the Molotov-Rip and Trump borders.

01:16:55.000 So Roosevelt had already really agreed to all this, and Tehran, again, at a point in the Soviet armies, were nowhere near Poland yet.

01:17:01.000 They still hadn't even really pushed into Belarusia.

01:17:04.000 They were still in central Ukraine.

01:17:07.000 And so that's, to me, the really shocking thing.

01:17:09.000 Again, by Yalta, you could sort of make the argument, well, there's not a lot they could do other than maybe threaten to withhold, lend-lease aid, and all the rest of it.

01:17:18.000 Yalta is where some of the famous lines were uttered, though.

01:17:21.000 I think one of them was...

01:17:38.000 no, no.

01:17:38.000 And I think at one point it was Roosevelt who said that the election should be as clean as Caesar's wife, and Stalin replied, Caesar's wife was no virgin.

01:17:50.000 Although she was the head of the Vistigil Virgins, apparently. 1.00

01:17:53.000 That's so funny.

01:17:54.000 Not exactly chaste.

01:17:56.000 So he got his way.

01:17:57.000 So in closing, let's kind of connect all the ties together.

01:18:00.000 Let's connect all this together.

01:18:02.000 It says the rise and fall and rise of communism.

01:18:05.000 And we're here in the West in America right now.

01:18:08.000 Do you think communism is going to make a third or fourth attempt here in the We certainly have a lot of CCP-influenced operations.

01:18:24.000 They've all been well-documented, widely discussed, everything from universities, of course, to, well, Washington.

01:18:31.000 Halls of Congress and so on.

01:18:33.000 The lockdowns in the COVID period were, I think, clearly imported from communist China.

01:18:38.000 So certain policies have come over.

01:18:40.000 So it might be a kind of, I think, more subtle or insidious type of development.

01:18:47.000 I don't think it'll be quite as obvious as it was when, let's say, you know, the period of the Comintern or the Cold War, the Soviets would send out these advisors and they had these parties that answered to them that were funded by Moscow.

01:18:57.000 The CCP doesn't operate in quite the same way.

01:19:00.000 I think it's a little subtler in the way that it spreads its influence.

01:19:03.000 Not always, but a little bit subtler.

01:19:05.000 So I think what we really have to watch out for are both those type of influence operations, but also, frankly, what we're doing to ourselves.

01:19:14.000 The censorship, the surveillance, a lot of which, of course, they have tools at their disposal now.

01:19:20.000 I mean, the Soviets could only have dreamed of having something like social media and Twitter and Facebook where the government could have potential backdoors into our private communications.

01:19:31.000 They had to spend money to go out and bug places and send hundreds of thousands of spies and agents out to kind of keep track of people's thoughts.

01:19:38.000 Now many of us just volunteer it for free.

01:19:41.000 So I think the real thing we have to worry about is, again, maybe some new variety or new blend of statist surveillance and control of the population.

01:19:58.000 Various periods, great proletarian cultural revolution, these kind of offensives which are partly directed from above but partly maybe burble up from below.

01:20:07.000 We really have to, I think, be careful just about defending our own liberties.

01:20:11.000 This is a final question.

01:20:13.000 What would you say is the greatest misunderstanding about World War II that if you had your way to correct, the world would be a better place?

01:20:18.000 I think the biggest misunderstanding is probably this idea of the liberation of Europe.

01:20:24.000 And maybe, again, some of it is selective that more of us have probably been to France or we have some connection to Italy, and so we kind of know this part of the story.

01:20:32.000 The story is much darker in Eastern Europe.

01:20:35.000 It's much darker in Asia. 0.98

01:20:37.000 In some ways, the war never really ended in Asia.

01:20:40.000 In Eastern Europe, maybe it ended with the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

01:20:43.000 I mean, in some form, as it's still going on, that, for example, as some of my Polish friends or people who've read my book have reminded me of something I probably vaguely knew but hadn't really thought about until they told me, there are no statues of Churchill in Poland.

01:21:11.000 I was in Poland a couple of years ago on the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, so this would have been, I guess, the 75th anniversary.

01:21:21.000 So this would be 2019.

01:21:23.000 And the scene was just absolutely unreal.

01:21:26.000 I mean, with sirens going off and smoke in the air and almost everyone in the country participating in this kind of ritual about, you know, which was really kind of this doomed uprising that just led to nothing but kind of horrors for the population.

01:21:38.000 but it's still sacred there.

01:21:40.000 The cause is sacred, but it's not...

01:21:45.000 I mean, it's a story of a war that the Poles fought bravely and on principle but lost virtually everything and were betrayed and abandoned by the West.

01:21:55.000 So I think we have to remember that side of the story.

01:21:58.000 Stalin's War to Overthrow the World. 0.84

01:22:00.000 Sean McMeekin, this was wonderful.

01:22:01.000 Any closing thoughts?

01:22:03.000 Not really, Charles.

01:22:04.000 It's just a great pleasure to be on.

01:22:05.000 Thank you.

01:22:06.000 I'm so grateful you had me on the show.

01:22:07.000 This was a great conversation.

01:22:09.000 Again, check out, you have nine books now?

01:22:12.000 Yep, I'm working on my tenth.

01:22:13.000 What is the tenth?

01:22:14.000 The tenth is a more general history of the 20th century.

01:22:17.000 There are these versions you might call the short 20th century.

01:22:20.000 They go from about 1914 to 89. Wrap it up a bit with a bow of the fall of communism.

01:22:25.000 and as you can see I don't think the story's over but I'm going to frame it a bit differently I'm going to go all the way back to 1900 and then forward to 2025 so the idea is less a story about either just ideology or just the world wars and communism but rather a story about Europe the west more broadly including the United States but particularly Europe it's placed in the world in 1900 and then Europe today so it's basically a decline and fall story phenomenal he bumps along the way Sean McMeekin thank

01:22:54.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

01:23:02.000 Email us, as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - June 13, 2025

The Real History of Communism ft. Sean McMeekin

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