Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today: Class 10: Oligarchy, Neo fascism and Liberation

Okay. Greetings everybody. Good morning. Welcome. You've made it through to the end, if it's still you who's here and not somebody else. Very glad to be with you. Very glad to have come this far. What we're going to do today is reprise some of the themes of the class at the beginning, and then we will try to pick up history again where we left off in the 1980s, 1990s. We'll move on to a reflection on the difference between memory and history, and then we will close with some thoughts about the present world, the third decade of the 21st century.

So to begin, I had some fun last time with the Canadians forcing me to change the title of the class from Hitler, Stalin, and Us to Hitler, Stalin, and the Present. And I want to take the opportunity to explain why the class is called, or should be called, Hitler, Stalin, and Us. The reason has to do with the theme of this lecture and of the last lecture, and really of this class, which is the meaning of history. So history, by its nature, is not just a set of impersonal processes or mechanisms that we observe. History, by its nature, is a humanity, which means that we can understand it in part because we are human. A machine can't really produce history. A machine also really can't understand history, because history depends on the empathetic understanding of other human beings.

So if, to take a famous example from the political theorist Isaiah Berlin, we as readers of texts can understand exactly why — at least I hope so, raise your hand and tell me if I'm wrong — why, this is Isaiah Berlin's example, the plays of Shakespeare didn't take place in the court of Genghis Khan. We know, we have an intuition that one thing doesn't fit together with another thing. Whereas if you gave that as an AI prompt — don't do it now because it will hurt my feelings — but if you gave it as an AI prompt, you know, set the plays of Shakespeare in the court of Genghis Khan, that could be done, right? It could be done, but what enables it is precisely the lack of human understanding about what is essentially different between one time and place and another time and place. So history is a humanity in the sense of understanding.

History is therefore riskier, because history involves claims of intuition coming from where you are, as opposed to the claim that one is separated entirely from the way one understands the world. But history is risky in another way as well. And this was a theme in a way of the last lecture, that once you understand history as not being just a set of objective or deterministic processes, once you see that you understand it partly by virtue of being inside it, you're also forced to take responsibility for history. So history isn't just something that you understand. History is also something that touches you and that you touch. And that can be a very uncomfortable thought. It's perhaps nicer to think of history as a series of dusty documents or a pile of books that you didn't want to read anyway, or a larger set of things that happened that were somehow separate from you. But if you understand history, as I think one must, as an all-embracing panorama, and you're standing in a place in that panorama, and you're looking around and understanding it, but you also recognize, aha, other people are looking at me as I look at them, and where I stand and how I stand, that what I do also affects the overall panorama.

I'm using the word panorama not just because it's fun to say over and over again, right? Like say it five times fast, it'll make your day better. But also because it sounds like a Canadian department store chain, doesn't it? Like Panorama. It isn't one, but doesn't it sound like one? No, it doesn't. Yeah. Okay. Like I'm just trying to gauge how much I'm understanding this country. All right. So, but I choose the word not by accident because it's the word that Paul Wilson chooses to use when he translates Powell, the overall panorama, everything that we see. But you realize that everything that you see excludes you, but that other people are seeing you. And whatever you're doing, including doing nothing, or including pretending that you're not part of history, or including pretending that you're invisible, including pretending that you don't matter, all of those things actually do matter. That there's no way out of history.

And so that's why the class was called Hitler, Stalin, and Us. Not because Us was a pun on the United States, but because we are all involved in history. And insofar as a class on Hitler, Stalin, and Us makes sense, it's not just because we understand what gave rise to a Nazi regime or a Soviet regime. It's also because we recognize that humans were involved in that. And we recognize that the way we understand these past events, or other major past events, may affect how, or in what respect, or for what reasons we get involved. Okay.

So the second, as I begin to reprise this class, I'm going to recall for you the very first reading which you did. I say hopefully that you did. I'm using the past tense. If you haven't done it, I will say you will have done the reading for the first week, which you will have done before the final exam, no doubt. The very first reading that you were assigned when we were thinking about what is history was "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlers" by Tadeusz Borowski, the Polish writer. And Borowski took a very strong view on history, which is where I want to begin. And his view on history was that it was simply the chronicles of the victors. That history was a kind of trap because power was overwhelming and all of the records that we have are simply a result of who won.

So Borowski, who himself had a beautiful humanistic education and who as a very young man worked very hard to educate himself, took the view nevertheless that everything he knew about the Roman world, which he found very interesting, that everything he knew about the Roman world was essentially false because it was a result of the Romans having crushed others. And all of their thought, though it might seem attractive, was in some sense an excuse for power. It was a result of power and it was an excuse of power. Now, this is a critique of history which is certainly worth taking on board. It is definitely the case that power speaks with a different voice than powerlessness. Right? It's definitely the case that empires are not just empires of resource extraction or political domination, but empires are also always empires of knowledge in the sense that they impose their own ways of seeing the world, but also in the sense that they destroy other people's ways of seeing the world and destroy other knowledge that we might have had.

So this is a very powerful critique of history and I'm not dismissing it. I'm taking it on board at the beginning, as I hope you took it on board at the beginning of this class, as we ask to what extent history can actually help us to understand power or help us to find a place within power, right? Because if Borowski was right, like if that prevailing view that he articulates were correct, it really wouldn't matter what we do because some larger force is ultimately going to overwhelm us. It doesn't matter what I teach in this class or what you read or whatever kind of dissent you might find because eventually we'll all be overwhelmed.

But, you know, to begin the critique of Borowski, the fact that we could read his stories about Auschwitz suggests that maybe he wasn't entirely correct, right? The fact, and again, I'm just going to go on the blind, hopeful, you know, Pollyannaish assumption that you have read the text, but the fact that you have read the text suggests that he wasn't perhaps entirely correct. He was postulating a world in which Germany won the Second World War, in which concentration camps spread out forever, in which everybody's labor and mind would be exploited and abused. That world wasn't quite created. We do have his text, and with his text about the difficulty of history, we can move on to thinking, I think, about the possibility of history.

That brings us to what was the next main theme in the class, which is empire. So I hope it was useful to you that we went over 500 years of empire. I hope that you got some factual knowledge out of that. There are certainly big themes from that history which are worth knowing in and of themselves. But one of the reasons why we were interested in the history of European empire in the 500 years or so between, let's say, 1450 and 1950, one of the reasons why we were interested in European empire was that we were thinking also about knowledge. We were thinking about what we can know and what we can't know about empire. Why it's necessary to know things about empire that, so to speak, empire doesn't know itself. Why it's important for us to be able to see, for example, empire as a general concept, which empires themselves don't necessarily do.

Like the American empire of 2026 is a very, is like a superior example of this. If you listen to the pronouncements of the leaders of the United States, there seems to be no consciousness whatsoever that they are functioning within history or that other people have had rises and falls or that there have been other military campaigns and so on and so forth, right? But that's just an extreme example of a general rule. Each empire tends to think that it is specific and that it won't fall prey to the general rules of empire, like, for example, overextension, that people who oppose it will imitate its methods and so on, right? So in making empire itself a theme, we were learning about specific empires, I hope, but we were also trying to know things about empires that empires don't necessarily know about themselves.

Another reason why it was important to have a brief, brief review of those 500 years of empire was to set us up to understand the Nazi and the Soviet experiments in the 20th century. So again, it's quite tempting, and you'll find I think that most books do this, it's quite tempting to treat the Soviet and the Nazi experiments as being something which is exclusively of the 20th century, that can be contained within the 20th century. But I don't think that's the case. I don't think we can understand either the Nazis or the Soviets without understanding that they were emerging from a world of empire and that in different ways both Hitler and Stalin, not only they, but both Hitler and Stalin, were reacting to that world of empire.

That it was, for example, that when Lenin, and we went through this argument, that when Lenin made the claim that you could make a revolution in Russia, which was a backward country, he was depending upon the assumption that we are living in a world of empire and it's all interconnected. Or when Hitler made the case from a very different set of ideas that Germany should become an empire, he was leaning on the idea that all great European powers should become an empire and that Germany had been denied one for essentially unfair reasons. There's also something which brings the two systems together, which is important from the history of empire, and that is the theory and practice of statelessness.

The state, as I hope you've noticed, has been an important category inside this class. The state often gets ignored or downplayed because it can seem a bit boring. But the state and the theory of statelessness, the practice of statelessness are essential to empire. We went over this before. I'm sure you'll remember it. But in general, the way empires function is that they treat other political units as not being justified, not being legitimate, not being subjects of law. Right? So when European powers, to take the classic example, were racing to control Africa in the third quarter of the 19th century, in the early 20th century, they recognized each other as being states, but they didn't recognize any of the units that they encountered as being states. They didn't recognize any of the African states as being states.

Likewise, when European imperial powers and especially their successors spread from east to west across what we now call the North American continent, it was the same story. They did encounter political entities, but they did not recognize them as political entities. They did not treat them as political entities. According to the doctrine of discovery, the moment that Europeans saw something, everybody else's political units, political experience ceased to exist. All that mattered were the Europeans and what the Europeans saw. Now, I mention this not just because it's a theory, but also because it's a practice. If I don't recognize that you have a state, when I destroy your state, I haven't done anything.

So if not just in Africa, but now imagine Poland in 1939, because this is the connection. If the Nazis and the Soviets agree that Poland in 1939 is not a state, well, when they invade it and destroy it, they haven't actually done anything because it was just a vague container of sort of undefined peoples in the first place. And one thing which was rather special about the Nazis and the Soviets and the way they made war was that denying that other European states were in fact states. And of course the colonial observation about this, which was made by me, it was made by Hannah Arendt and others, is that yes, true, the Germans didn't recognize other states as states and thereby they were continuing this larger imperial practice which had been going on for hundreds of years.

So we note statelessness as being an important general theme. If you read the text of Bloodlands carefully, as it was assigned to you, those couple chapters in the beginning of the class, you'll see this theme emerge. I wrote Bloodlands essentially as a narrative account, but the theme, one of the underlying causal themes, is the destruction of states.

Another thing we observe from empire, before I move on, is the historical centrality of Ukraine. So, as you'll remember, we had an entire lecture which was devoted to the history of Ukraine, to the historical centrality of Ukraine. And in this argument, there are essentially two parts. The first is that before the 19th and 20th centuries, Ukraine was for thousands of years an incredibly interesting and often pioneering human experience. The second part of the argument, though, is that when imperial practice, European imperial practice, turned away from the rest of the world and began to focus on Europe itself, the crucial colonial territory was precisely Ukraine. Precisely Ukraine.

That from their side, the Leninists, the Stalinists needed to control Ukraine to become a functional and powerful Soviet state. From the point of view of Berlin, Ukraine had to be seized from the Soviets so that Germany could become an autarky. Autarky is a very important fascist term, by the way. It just means, it's an old-fashioned Greek word, it just means self-sufficiency. The fascists talk a lot about autarky, right? And just by the way, when they talked about autarky, some of the fascists, Carl Schmitt in particular, said this is the, the Americans have their Monroe Doctrine. They control, you know, one hemisphere. So we should have our own Monroe Doctrine. We get to control Eurasia. That's what autarky means. You're dividing the world up into zones of influence and you are economically self-contained because you control part of the world. The Japanese had much the same idea with their notion of an East Asian co-prosperity sphere.

Okay. But the point is that for both the Soviets and the Germans, Ukraine was a crucial territory. And this, by the way, is an example of how Borowski is right, or how at least one has to be very careful when one is reconstructing history, because certainly it's the case that if you read histories of Europe or histories of the Second World War or histories of the Holocaust, Ukraine is not in fact going to be a central concept generally, right? Even though I think it's fair to say you can't understand any of those things without Ukraine. And that is the triumph of power in Borowski's sense, that the very things that might be central to historical understanding tend to get blacked out, but maybe not blacked out completely.

Just incidentally, Borowski himself, although he was Polish, was born in what is now Ukraine and was a survivor of the Holodomor, and both of his parents were sentenced to the Soviet Gulag. So, but that's just so you know, but his larger point seems very applicable to Ukraine. Just the simple note that Ukraine was at the center of an imperial competition between these two totalitarian powers, that seems obvious, but it also seems it's generally obviously overlooked.

Okay, so this brings us to the fascist view of history. As we start to try to close this introductory part of the lecture, what is the fascist view of history? And this is important. I want to make sure you understand it, but also I want you to have it in mind when you consider the present. So, when you're wandering around — okay, not wandering around, when you're purposefully moving from place to place in your well-ordered lives in 2026 and you're thinking about what's going on around you, one of the concepts that you might consider applying to what's going on around you is fascism. And I'm not insisting on this, right? And you know, certainly not in Ontario, which is lovely and above reproach, but thank you for the smiles. It shows me you're awake. When you smile, I know you're awake, and I appreciate that. Because I know you can sleep with your eyes open. I mean, at least when I was your age, I could.

Okay. So what is the fascist view of history? And I put this out there not just because it's important and interesting, but also because it's something you can use to test the reality around you. In the fascist view of history, essentially all that ever happens is conflict between the strong and the weak. But there's always a particularity about it. The particular past of my group is significant. So when Mussolini pioneers fascism in Italy, the Roman Empire suddenly becomes very important, but important in a certain way. Important as a repository of power, important as a glorious past to which we must return. Not important as a source of thought or self-critique or anything like that.

Over the weekend, I was reading Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor in the late 2nd century AD. And among other things, he fought the Sarmatians, who, as you of course will remember, were an Iranian-speaking people who were in Ukraine. But while Marcus Aurelius was fighting the Sarmatians and also some German-speaking tribes — I shouldn't say tribes, right? Because they had political units too. But while Marcus Aurelius was fighting German-speaking people and Iranian-speaking people in central and eastern Europe, he sat in his tent and he wrote essentially a philosophy book which we now call the Meditations, which is full of self-critique and it's full of an attempt to understand a worldview. In other words, it's completely different. In fact, he doesn't even mention the war that he's fighting.

And so what I'm trying to say is that when fascists go back to whatever they go back to, they don't go back to the history of thought. They just go back to the history of power. Right? So in any nostalgic moment that a fascist might go back to, they're not going to go back to the interesting parts where humans ask about the meaning of life. They're simply going to go back to the domination.

Okay. Now the very specific element of Nazism and its view of history was transforming everything into biology. Seeing the entire past as simply a play of nature. So as with fascism generally, it was also about the strong and the weak. But the strong and the weak were defined very much in biological terms. A human race was like a species. Some races were stronger than others. Therefore it was the law of nature. To use a favorite phrase of Hitler's, it was the law of nature that one race would starve out and control another race. That one race would take land from another race. This is just the way things went and this was the way things should go. There was no difference between what happened and what should happen. What should happen is always what happened because everything is just a play of power.

However, so when things didn't turn out right, when the more powerful race didn't win, that's because something which was non-natural appeared on the scene. And so much more than Mussolini, Hitler was focused on what he understood to be the role of the Jews. In Hitler's idea, if the strong didn't defeat the weak, it was because of Jewish mind control, basically.

As humans, we are no different. Hitler has a long list of animals that he compares us to, which is kind of curious, but as unfair to the animals, I just want to say in general, but from Hitler's point of view, we are no different than other animals. And when we think we are different from other animals, we're making a mistake. So when we think that we are capable of reason or we're capable of empathy, we're making a mistake. We're not. We're just like other animals. All we really need is a habitat and all we really want to do is drive others out from that habitat. If we think anything else, and you'll remember all of this, it's because of Jewish mind control.

So if we believe in working-class solidarity, Jewish mind control. If we believe in constitutions or laws, Jewish mind control. And if we believe in the kind of history in which we reflect rather than a kind of nostalgia for power, also Jewish mind control. So anything which elicits identification with others as human beings and anything which allows us to think about ourselves is Jewish mind control. And this problem is so pernicious and thoroughgoing, according to Hitler, there's only one way to solve it, and that is to physically remove the Jews. You'll remember all of this.

Okay. But this is important as part of the Nazi view of history. And again, I say this not to force anything on you, but these are the ideas that are in chapter two of Mein Kampf. And if as you move about the world, you hear ideas that are similar to these, you know, you can make your own judgments about what their relationship to the past might be.

A more important or an equally important element, though, of Hitler's thought in addition to the biology and this special anti-Semitism is the way that he considers the earth. So when I say that he thinks of everything as biology, and with the exception of the Jews who are telling us to be different kinds of creatures than we really are, we can overlook the issue of how he thinks biology or zoology or ecology actually works. And this is actually quite important to fascism, although it's often overlooked. When Hitler sees us in our relationship to the world, it's a relationship of consumption. We go into ecological niches, we control them, we establish agriculture, we do whatever we do, but the earth is there to serve us. The earth is there to be exploited. That's how he sees ecology.

So I got into a — when I published another book which was called Black Earth, which was specifically about the Holocaust, and I used this term ecology a lot. And then when the book was translated into German, the German journalists were annoyed with me because for them they thought, you know, Ökologie was just an entirely positive term. Like ecology means that you're a nice middle-class person and you, you know, you recycle, and ecology is 100% — yes, and you should recycle, it's great, but I'm not against it. But what I was trying to say in the book is that there are different understandings of how ecology works, right? So in German, if you say ökologisch, that means today it's entirely positive. It just means that, you know, you're the kind of person who cares about the environment. But you can have different views of ecology.

And Hitler had a view of ecology which was entirely about consumption. It was entirely about the earth being a sort of backdrop or a reservoir of resources which humans then conquer and consume. And that generally goes under the radar when we critique fascism for what I hope are fairly obvious reasons, because that particular behavior is not one that many people are accustomed to criticizing, but it's essential to the way that Hitler saw the world, that the world was there for us to dominate but also there for us to consume.

And then if we consider the setup of the Second World War, and again this was in Bloodlands, if we consider the reasons why Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, we see all of the themes that I've talked about. It's about reestablishing an empire. It's about destroying the Jews. It's about creating a zone of autarky or self-sufficiency over a broad space. But it's also very specifically about controlling and consuming resources. In particular, the fertile soil of Ukraine, but also the oil of the Caucasus. So, among other things, Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was an oil war. It was a war for the control of oil.

Again, just something worth thinking about, that there may, like, that when we consider the long history of empire and the specific totalitarian codification of the history of empire in the 20th century, there is an essential question which involves the control of specific kinds of resources. And that particular element of the history of empire or the history of totalitarianism may, it's not just that it may still cast a shadow, that particular elements may still be walking among us, which would of course suggest that if one is trying to think against empire or think against totalitarianism, part of the thinking that would be necessary would be precisely about ecology. How you think about the relationship between humans and the world generally.

Okay. So, and it would also have to do, I mean very specifically, not to bring the point to an over-refined degree, but it would also very specifically have to do with the question of humans and energy. Where do we find sources of energy? What do we do in order to control energy? Right. So it may be that there's a deep connection between the hydrocarbon revolution of the 19th century and the things that have followed that. And it may, it's just worth thinking about that if there's going to be fundamental political change, it would have to involve shifting away from hydrocarbons towards something else. So maybe the connection between hydrocarbons and fascism had already occurred to you. But I'm just trying to suggest that in the historical record, there's also a thread there which is worth perhaps being pulled.

Okay. So let me then just remind you or say a word about how the Marxists, the Leninists and the Stalinists thought about history. I mean, keeping in mind our general theme here is Hitler, Stalin, and us, what do we know, what do we learn about history, and how does what we learn about history affect our own sense of agency or our own sense of power and responsibility in the world. One of the things to know about history is how other people think about history. Because how other people think about history creates certain grooves. It creates certain grooves in the road. Like if you imagine a dirt path that — okay, you can do this, right? You can imagine a dirt path and there are wagons and the wagon wheels are cutting a rut in the road, right? You can do that, right? You're from, I don't know, does anybody still have horses and wagons in this country? No. Ontario. Yes. Does it still exist? Okay, great.

So if you imagine like other people's views of history are like ruts in the road and it's easy to get your wheels in them and then once your wheels are in them and you're just following them, you may not realize that you're in a kind of politics of time. It may just seem completely natural to you, right? And that's why it's worth trying to be explicit about a fascist view of time or about a communist view of time or about our own contemporary views of time, which I'm going to get to by the end.

So what was special about the Marxist view of time was the notion that, yes, there is progress. That's a very tempting idea. Yes, there is progress, but progress comes by way of conflict. So we are moving forward to some end, but there's conflict along the way. And so conflict isn't necessarily a bad thing. Revolution isn't necessarily a bad thing. Even mass killing isn't necessarily a bad thing so long as it is on the right side of history, so long as the conflict is by the right class, the working class against everyone else.

Now this is subject to two pretty obvious critiques. The first is, who is the working class? And the fact that I'm saying that I exercise power on behalf of the working class may or may not mean that this is true. And this is of course a fairly accurate critique of the Soviet Union's history. But the second critique, which is a bit more subtle, is that if you think that history is going in only one direction, like if you have one idea of the good and there's no other idea of the good, then logically any sacrifice is justified if it leads you to that one good thing.

So a view of history in which there's necessary conflict, but the necessary conflict is leading you towards some kind of human utopia at the end of it. It's very attractive for reasons we've talked about, but it also justifies pushing aside and marginalizing anybody else who might have a different idea of what the good thing is. If I know, like, if I'm sure what the good thing is. So this is the critique we talked about at the end of last lecture, or one of Kołakowski's critiques of Marxism, that it was an essentially religious or eschatological view of history, that there was one ending of it and the one ending therefore justified sacrifices along the way.

And then we've also followed a bit how Lenin and then Stalin simplified a Marxist view of history to the point where under Stalin it becomes a bit of an absurdity and progress becomes what I think, or progress becomes what the Politburo decides. And you know, if you're momentarily against me, then you're a deviationist and you're also a deviationist.

Okay. So this brings us to where I wanted, this brings us up to where we left off and where I want to start moving now into the late 20th century and then into the 21st. Because these ideas, okay, I mean I hope you enjoyed the first part of the lecture because these ideas of the past, the fascist and the communist ones, they may be subject to all kinds of pretty fundamental critique, but they are, let's face it, interesting. At least I hope you find them so. I mean, just humor me.

Whereas what's characteristic of the last part of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st is that there's still a politics of time, but it's incredibly boring and uninteresting, which doesn't mean that it's not real and powerful. And in a funny way it may actually be seductive by not being interesting, because Marxism, for example, was very explicit about what it stood for. And because it was very explicit, it was thereby easier to critique. You could latch on to some part of it. You could find some text. You could write your own counter-text, whatever. Whereas the current views of history are much more amorphous and harder to get your hands around. They don't, they pretend that they're not what they are.

Okay, let me try to explain that. But I'm going to explain this historically. Now, we're now going to move into the part of history where we actually are, which is the late 20th century, and we're going to pick up again with the late period of Soviet domination, that is the 1970s and the 1980s.

So, when we talked last time about dissident thought, we went over some of the signposts of the second half of Soviet rule or Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. And I'm just going to mention these again. Dates that you're going to remember forever because you're young and you still remember stuff. Or you can, it's possible for you to remember stuff, right? Like if you're young and you don't stare at the screen the whole time, you can remember stuff. If, no, it's true. Like that's it. That's the human possibility. There's no other, if you're old, it doesn't matter whether you stare at screens or not, right? Like all bets are off anyway. Okay. That was really unfair.

I'm sorry. Like, you know, the people have remembered to come every Tuesday morning much more reliably than the actual students have, right? So, you know, okay, maybe what I said was unjustified. Um, so, okay. Where was I? Oh, yeah. So, yeah. So, no, seriously, where was I? Oh, yeah. Okay.

So the, so in the 70s and 80s, oh, the turning point. So 1953, Stalin dies. It shouldn't be so important that Stalin dies, right? Because the system is in principle based upon an understanding of history and so on and so forth, but it is incredibly important that Stalin dies. He'd been in control of the system for a quarter century and his death was a crisis, led to a crisis of interpretation. It led to crises in Eastern Europe as people after 1953 tried to experiment with new ways of doing communism or new ways of thinking about communism. 1956, another turning point, the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

And unrest in Poland. 1968, another turning point: the Soviet plus allied — so the Warsaw Pact — invasion of Czechoslovakia, which puts an end to the Prague Spring. 1980, 1981, as we talked about last time, Solidarity — the very large, almost all-embracing labor movement in Poland — for about 16 months. Those are the turning points.

I now want to look at this more from the point of view of Moscow and the Soviet Union. As we talked about last time, this is a period of economic stagnation. Stagnation was a key term, by the way, which Russians and others applied to the Soviet Union at the time. Stagnation in the economic sense, for reasons we discussed, that the Soviet model of economic development can essentially get you one generation of fast growth, but you can't repeat it.

So you can collectivize the peasants and take their land once, but you can't do it again because you've already taken the land. You can take the peasants and you can move them into mines and factories once, but you can't do it again. You can build factories that imitate the capitalist system once, but once you've got them, you know, then you've got them. And you don't know that.

And interestingly, Marxism doesn't tell you what the next step is, because from the point of view of Marx and Engels in the late 19th century, there was nothing more impressive than enormous factories. It was just a matter of who controls the factories, right? Even from the point of view of the Soviets in the 1920s, there was nothing more impressive than Ford Motor Company. It just didn't get more impressive than that. It was just a matter of who owned Ford Motor Company. If the workers owned Ford Motor Company, then everything was going to be all right.

And so Marxism doesn't actually give you anything to imagine beyond the big factories. But by the time the Soviet Union has built the big factories — and they were very big factories, by the way — the Soviet Union had the problem, it later turned out to be a big problem, of industrial concentration, or what in capitalist terms are called monopoly, when a very small number, often one factory, produces everything for the entire Soviet Union. Okay.

So the point is that the Soviet economic model had essentially played itself out, and it was no longer producing what the capitalists were fond of calling economic growth. And so therefore there was a question of how you continue. And as we talked about last time, what the Soviets did was they performed a strategy of essentially reform substitution. Reform was difficult for various reasons. And so what they did was export grain and export increasingly hydrocarbons in exchange for Western technologies that they could use to plug holes and used to keep the system going over the course of the 1970s.

Now then, I'm going to make a Marxist argument about the Soviet Union. So there is a consequence of that economic change, and the consequence of that economic change is that the Soviets themselves lose track of the future, right? So the Soviets always had a — until late in the game they had a model of the future. Khrushchev goes to the United Nations and bangs his shoe on the table famously and says, 'We will bury you.' But what he means is economically, he means that the Soviet economy has a future which is brighter than that of the United States.

The whole notion of Leninism is that we're going to catch up to the West and then we're going to surpass it. Right? So we see two stages of the future. The first stage is imitation: we're going to catch up to the capitalists. And the second stage is we're going to surpass them, because we're not just going to build this stuff, but we're going to have different forms of ownership of it. And that means that we're going to be more successful and also more just.

By the 1970s under Brezhnev, they'd essentially given up on that. There was a notion of when communism was going to arrive, which is in retrospect a little bit funny. But they were like — they were dating it. They were saying like, 'It's just 20 years down the — oh no, it's just 20 years down the road. Oh, it's still just 20 years down the road, and now it's still 20 years down the road.' And it's a bit like — well, I was going to make a Silicon Valley comparison, but like — because it is — no, it's seriously, it's — I mean, opening it, just think about this.

Technology from California is going to solve all of our problems, right? And it's going to like in 20 years everything's going to be okay. None of us are going to be working. We all have guaranteed fixed income. Just give another 20 years. It's all going to be — no, it's okay, it's still 20 years into the future, but eventually technology — So anyway, and then you hit a moment, and this happened in Silicon Valley as it did with Brezhnev. You hit a moment where you stop making the promises.

So in Silicon Valley, they've stopped making the promises, right? They no longer are saying, you know, in 20 years everything's going to be great and you're all going to be free. They're now saying, 'We're going to colonize your brains and use them for our profits of about five people,' right? They've sort of switched over to that. Okay. So that's a familiar story to you.

So on that model, we can follow the Soviet trajectory. So in the 1970s, 1980s, Brezhnev is no longer saying there's a bright future. He's saying, 'What we have, this is it. This is as good as it gets.' Right? There's a Jack Nicholson movie, I think, which is under that title, 'As Good as It Gets.' And there's a funny scene, like he's an old cranky guy and he's in a dentist office and he's like — he's got like a robe on. He's waiting for his appointment to see the dentist. I think it's a dentist, maybe it's a doctor. And he looks around at the other patients and like they're in robes and they're all so grumpy and everybody's sick, and he says, 'Yeah, this is as good as it gets.'

Okay, so that's what's meant, right? Like this sort of recognition: all right, the Soviet Union has delivered everything it could deliver, and now it's your job, citizens of the Soviet Union, to understand that this is really existing socialism. That was the term. So they stopped predicting when communism was going to come. They just let that go, and they said this is as good as it's going to get.

And so what you have then is an interesting view of time, which is that time has stopped. There is no longer a future. Your life in a tiny apartment in a high-rise in a city — this is great. The world never had anything better to offer. We never promised anything better. This is all we ever promised. You've got a metro, you know, your kids go to school. This is it. There's nothing more than this.

But with that immediately — and this is the interesting part about the politics of time — as soon as you say that time has stopped and there's no future, the past comes rushing in, because you then have to justify where you are not in terms of where you're going, but in terms of where you've come from. And under Brezhnev you had the cultivation of the myth of the Great Fatherland War.

So if you know anything about contemporary Russia or about the late Soviet Union, you might think they were always obsessed with the Second World War. And that's not true. This idea that the meaning of the Soviet Union is that they won the Second World War — that is essentially a creation of Brezhnev in the 1970s and 1980s. It's believed like gospel now by Putin and the people around him who run Russia. But it's a late memory construct.

And that memory construct is necessary because the future has been lost. So to say that the Soviet Union is justified because it beat fascism in 1945 is a very different kind of claim than to say the Soviet Union is justified because we're going to bring you communism and a perfect life. And it leads to a very different political mindset and probably to very different kinds of policies.

Okay. So I mention all of this because — and I've tried to make it as interesting as I can. I mean, it was incredibly boring at the time for everyone involved, but it's significant because that particular politics of time then arrives — I'm just marking this — it then arrives later in the West. Okay, I'll spend more time on this, but the Soviets, so to speak, got there first.

What Brezhnev was saying was essentially what Margaret Thatcher was going to say a few years later on: there is no alternative. The way things are is the only way that things can be. We thought history was moving, but actually history's come to an end. You know, it turns out that history ends in the dentist's office. Like, this is it. You know, your teeth are going to be cleaned. We can offer you that. That's pretty much it. We hope you're happy, right?

We realize the early chapters of this story might have been more promising, but you know, oral hygiene also important, very important. Okay, so I'm setting that out because it helps a bit to understand the dissident in the last section, but it also helps us to start thinking about what it reminds us of — an important element about what history in fact might be, or how we might think about history.

It helps you to understand the dissident of the 70s and 80s because they started to think about history in a quite different way. What they were saying was: history can't end. There are always alternatives. History can't end because history involves what I'm doing. It involves what you're doing. It involves how I think about the notion that history is over. Right? People tell me there are no alternatives. They give me television shows. They make it difficult for people to think outside the bounds of conformism. But I can still think about all that, and I can still take small actions to change it.

And so their notion of history goes small. And this is important to understand them. The idea that there's one path of history — that is a big idea, right? Marx's idea is a big idea. And the Marxists and the former Marxists as well throughout the 20th century, they tended to write history with a big H, and for a reason, because they didn't just mean history in the sense of what's happening, they meant history as a freight train. They meant history as something which is going along one path and it was going to take you with it whether you wanted it or not. That's a big idea.

The notion that history is over — it's super boring, but it's also a big idea. Okay, it may not have the attraction or the charm of history as being one track, but the idea that there is no history at all, that there are no alternatives — that's also a big idea in the sense that it crowds everything else out. It takes up all the space.

And so if you're a dissident and you start to say things like, well, what I do is also history. Everything we do is history. Everything matters. Everything is part of history. It matters whether or not this obscure rock and roll band that nobody has heard of can play their concerts or not. It matters whether or not young people who have different ideas about things get to express them in their own way. It matters whether or not people were sent to the Gulag or not.

And therefore I'm going to devote my life and take risks to recording the names of the people who were sent to the Gulag and what their sentences were. Right? So these are small ideas. These are small notions of what history is. But they're definitely notions of what history is, and they arise in this particular environment in which the notion that history was one thing has become the notion that history is over.

Okay. So it turned out, of course — and again this is a lesson, right — the Soviets in the 70s and 80s were in the mode that history was over, that nothing new could ever happen. And in fairness, from the point of view of the United States — and this is now already things that I was living through — almost nobody looked at the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s and said, this thing is about to fall apart. A few people did, but not very many.

The thing — this stagnation business, this no alternatives business — that was generally accepted on both sides of the Cold War. No one really had a notion that the Soviet Union could come apart, or could come apart quickly. This is worth noting just as a historical point, because in today's politics of memory, 30 years plus onward, what very often people tend to ascribe, you know, to the Americans some kind of master plan, like, you know, we somehow managed to bring the Soviet Union to an end. This is what the Russian politics of memory now says, like we somehow managed to make it happen.

And I can assure you that that wasn't the case. Official America was scared by the end of the Soviet Union and really didn't want it to happen, and pumped tons of money into Moscow to try to prevent it from happening. That was not our policy, to end the Soviet Union. But that's a small point. The larger point is that history does continue, and it can take you by surprise, and the end of the Soviet Union was for many people — or for pretty much everybody, including the central participants, including the people who brought it about — a surprise.

What were the causes? Number one, we've already talked about, was the economic exhaustion of the system. And as I mentioned last time, the relevant comparison to the successful West European welfare states. So part of the experience in the 1970s and 1980s of Soviet satellite states was that people were allowed to go work in West Germany — it was then West Germany, of course — or France. And so the relevant comparison was not to America, right? This is important.

It's not like lots of Soviet citizens flew to America and like were free to fly to America and said, 'Oh, this is the land of the free.' That didn't happen. But they did have experience with Scandinavia. They did have experience with France, Belgium, and so on. That was the relevant comparison. So Soviet economic decline and comparison with the West European welfare states. Number one.

The second cause was the contradictions — if you'll forgive the Marxist term — the contradictions within the Leninist state. So Gorbachev comes to — a relatively young man — Gorbachev comes to power in 1983, and he's a much younger man. I mean, he's in his 50s, but that was super young by the standards of the time. He comes to power because everyone in the older generation comes to power and dies. So Brezhnev dies, and Andropov dies, Chernenko dies. They all die very quickly.

And oh, and why — and so this is just a point about the Soviet Union. Why are they allowed to die? Why were they not killed off earlier? Okay. No, this is — so this is how the Soviet Union changes, right? Because one of — I'm not advocating terror, but one of the things that terror does as a form of politics is that it allows upward mobility.

And so so long as there was terror in the Soviet Union — this is now happening in China, by the way — but so long as there was terror in the Soviet Union, that meant that younger people had a chance to move up the ranks. But after Stalin dies, the deal that Khrushchev made with the cadres, with the members of the party, was: there will no longer be blood purges among us. Which means that once Brezhnev secures power in the mid-60s, he's just going to be there until he dies.

And the people around him are generally the same people who are around him. And so when Brezhnev dies, you're not looking at a middle-aged or a youthful pool. You're looking at people who are Brezhnev's generation. So there's a relevant point about the Soviet Union to be made here.

So Gorbachev comes to power, and what Gorbachev tries to do is solve the economic problem of the Soviet Union by way of changing the Leninist state. So Gorbachev looks at the Soviet economic system and says, 'Okay, this is ossified. Too many big factories. We're stuck. Nothing's in motion. How can we change this? Well, we can change it by way of some form of economic reform.' He thinks economic reform in the Soviet system is possible. He's probably wrong, but he never gets there to find out, because in order to get there, you have to have political reform.

Okay, how do you have political reform inside the Soviet Union? You have to break the party. And so Gorbachev decides that what he wants to do is move from being general secretary — so being on top of the Communist Party — to being the president of the Soviet Union. So the whole Leninist idea of the state, as we've talked about, is based on the notion that the party is real and the state is not. The party is real and the state is not. The state is there to serve the party.

Gorbachev wanted to reverse that. He wanted to disempower the party. He wanted to create a meaningful Soviet state. He wanted to be president of that state. He wanted to have elections. He wanted to win those elections. He wanted to have freedom of speech. He wanted freedom of speech to be about how his program was wonderful, he was wonderful, he should be president of the Soviet Union. Okay, that was Glasnost and Perestroika.

Those things didn't work out for him. It was hard to break the Leninist state. The party resisted. In order to break the Leninist state, you had to reconsider how it was constructed. Okay? And if you think back a few lectures, you'll remember that the Soviet Union was constructed as a nominal federation. It had lots of national parts like Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and so on. But this was not so meaningful, because what really mattered was the party, the central party, the party that was based in Moscow.

Once you try to shift from the party to the state, you're confronted with the fact that the Soviet Union is a federation, has all these different parts, and you have to then figure out what the relationship is among these parts now that there's going to be a state. And it's at that particular practical problem in the summer of 1991 that the Soviet Union broke up.

Gorbachev, in order to get to economic reform, wanted political reform. In order to get to political reform, he had to try to define the Soviet state. He had to do all these things at the same time. It's unsurprising that he failed. So in 1991, where he failed was on something called a union treaty, where he was going to essentially create a new element of a Soviet constitution by defining the relationship between all of the republics. It was that union treaty which led to the attempted push against him in the early morning of August 19th, 1991.

And from then on out you have the process of the collapse of the Soviet Union precisely into those constituent parts. By the way, this is the fact that the Soviet Union could come apart into its constituent elements depends upon how the Soviet Union was created. These federal units the entire time were not very meaningful, but they existed. They were lines on maps. They were separate institutions, which meant that when the Soviet Union fell apart, there was, so to speak, a program, a design for how the Soviet Union could fall apart.

And insofar as this is a class about the centrality of Ukraine, I'm just going to remind you why that was. The reason why the Soviet Union had to be established as a nominal federation with units as opposed to one unified revolutionary state was the existence of Ukrainian national sentiment at the time of the revolution. So at the beginning of the Soviet Union, Ukrainians did something which then led to the way eventually the Soviet Union fell apart. Okay.

So when the Soviet Union falls apart, where does that leave the rest of us? How does that change the way that people think about history in the rest of the world? China, of course, is a special case. This isn't a class about China, but I'm just going to mention the Chinese reaction to the end of the Soviet Union. The Chinese reaction to the end of the Soviet Union was: let's do economic reform, but let's not do political reform.

And let's do economic reform essentially becomes let's do certain kinds of capitalism with a Leninist state. And this proves something very important, which is relevant for the West, but it took a long time for people in the West to figure it out, which is that you can have Leninism and capitalism at the same time, or you can have authoritarianism and capitalism at the same time, right? So the lesson that many people in the West drew from the end of the Soviet Union was a lesson which suited their prior beliefs.

And this is a very important point, by the way. Surprising historical things happen. Are we prepared when surprising historical things happen to change our mind, or does everything that happens, no matter what it is, simply confirm what we believed anyway already? Right? So history is an experimental science. If you're an actual historian, you go into the archives and you're surprised all the time and you change your mind all the time.

If you're a historically minded person and something big and important happens, it might cause you to change your mind, right? Just maybe, possibly, right? Or if you learn something you didn't know about the past, it might cause you to change your mind. And this is one of the ways that history is useful, because it prepares you for big events and it prepares you to adapt to them.

Now, I say this because this is not the way that the dominant political thinking in at least the English-speaking part of the West responded to 1989, the end of communism, 1991, the end of the Soviet Union. The dominant response had to do with the fact that Thatcher had been in power in Britain, Reagan had been in power in the United States, and that we were already in a mode of our own kind of economic determinism.

Margaret Thatcher famously said there are no alternatives. What she meant was there are no alternatives to capitalism. And Ronald Reagan — over the course of the 1980s the United States had pursued a fairly consistent anti-state policy, which we talked about previously. The logic of which was that state intervention only helps minorities to cheat, and therefore it's undesirable, and the welfare state is connected to communism.

And I'm going to pause on that because there's a very specific American way of thinking about totalitarianism which comes into play with a vengeance in the 1990s. And that American way of thinking is that the only way you can lose your freedom is by way of the economic intervention of the government. Like everything else is okay, but the government shouldn't intervene.

And so this explanation applies more or less to the Soviet Union. But the Americans did, and still do when they bother to remember, also apply it to Nazi Germany. The argument goes that the problem with Nazi Germany was that Hitler created the welfare state, and the welfare state somehow led — I don't — I can't actually give you the — I know, I know, I know, but that was — but this is the argument.

The argument is that the Hitler and the Stalin thing are essentially the same, and that they both are a result of too much state intervention in the economy. I can't defend that very well because it just doesn't — it's historically so wrong. It's upsettingly wrong. But you need to know that as a matter of fact that's how a lot of people interpreted totalitarianism.

So a lot of American thinkers said that essentially what the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had in common was the state intervened. And again, like opening our minds a moment to the present, this way of thinking continues, right? So Elon Musk, for example, says that the problem with national socialism is not the national part, it's the socialist part. And he's not alone. Many people in the United States make that kind of argument, that national socialism was essentially just like the Soviet Union, the only thing wrong was that everybody intervened in the economy, therefore we have to make the state small.

Okay, but I have to give you the setting because it helps to explain the strange way that the end of the Soviet Union was interpreted in the US. In a funny way, we reprised the end of the Soviet Union, because when communism came to an end, the dominant way that we thought about it was to say that history was over. History was over. History was over because there were no alternatives.

They'd all played themselves out. Fascism had played itself out in 1945. Leninism played itself out in 1991. And so what's left? What's left is what we have. Whatever that is. And there are no alternatives to this, which is an incredibly comforting thought, right? It's an incredibly attractive thought. The idea that the way that you happen to do things in a certain moment is the way that history had determined that all human beings were supposed to live forever.

That's a great thought. It's very comforting, and it's — but it has certain disadvantages which I want to dwell on. One of these disadvantages is that it means that if history is over and things happen, you have a license not to notice them.

One of the things that happened right after the end of the Soviet Union, more or less at the same time actually, is the beginning of wars in Yugoslavia. But the way that we categorized — especially the Americans, but also Europeans to a large extent — the way that we categorized the wars in Yugoslavia was very interesting. We said the problem in Yugoslavia is that there's too much history. These people remember the past too much, and that's why they don't like each other. And if they could just let it all go, then everything would be fine.

Right now, this is not a class on the history of the wars in Yugoslavia. Maybe I'll teach — I have a class that covers that. Maybe I'll teach it sometime. But why there was war in Yugoslavia is — it's not just much more complicated than that. It's a different story. But the point here is that the analysis is very revealing. In the early 90s, the notion was that the Yugoslavs are — they're atavistic because they care about the past.

And what that implies is if you don't care about the past, everything is a-okay, right? You just let history alone. And notice what that implies, right? So if Yugoslavia has a problem because Croatians and Serbs remember the past, well, it would be pretty good then if African Americans would also just forget the past, right? I mean, that just causes conflict. When there were like indigenous peoples in North America, they should just forget the past, because the past just causes trouble, right? Just causes trouble.

So that everyone should just kind of forget the past is very convenient. Okay. But my point was, when things happen and you say that history is over, you're not able to understand why they happen, and you'll tend to blame history, right? You'll tend to blame history.

The second shortcoming of this way of thinking about things is that it tends to push you towards — and this is incredibly ironic. I mean, I realize irony is dead, but I keep trying to revive it at least in some kind of zombie form — that what this leads to is a certain kind of economic determinism, right? Okay, that's ironic because the Soviet Union was based on economic determinism.

But when you say history is over and there are no alternatives, what you're basically saying is that there's capitalism, and capitalism is just like — it's just nature. It's just there. Like there's just the way things are, and capitalism just brings democracy and freedom to what it does. It's terrific. And I mean, putting it — putting the — that was — I was — that didn't — I wasn't me, that wasn't me. I was like giving voice to the — so the notion is that capitalism automatically brings — like the economy automatically brings certain political and cultural results. That's economic determinism.

And so the history's over view was that capitalism is just here and it's going to continue to bring not just an economic but also a political and cultural bounty, and that's just the way things are always going to be. Now, within that view, it's very easy to then say the only possible problems in life are that the government gets in the way of capitalism.

When you're within this view, then you say, okay, well, history's over, but there's a little bit of house cleaning still to be done. We could get the government out of this, we could get the government out of that, we could get the government out of the other thing, right? And so you're just sort of following history's wishes by doing this kind of housekeeping at the end of history, right? History is over. Like history — imagine history is over and history has left you with this beautiful house, but there are a few specks of dust in the window, and like your job is to go there and just clean those things off, right?

So you just need to get rid of that health care system. You just need to get rid of environmental protection. Just get rid of a few more things, and then everything will be perfect. Then history will really be over. And so the idea that history is over with this economic determinism does lead to some policy prescriptions which were followed in a lot of places, including the US, or especially the US.

But the third problem, and maybe the most essential, at least for the purposes of the class, and the most essential when we consider last week and the dissident and the way they thought about history: if history is over, then nobody bears historical responsibility. Nobody. You don't bear any — if things are just the way they are, they have to be the way they are. Therefore it doesn't matter how you live.

Now that again is a comfortable way of thinking about things. It has its attractions. You know, just do what you want. Doesn't matter. But it's a wildly anti-democratic way of thinking about politics, because in order for there to be democracy, people have to want to rule. People have to want to take responsibility.

And if I raise you up from the cradle with the idea that nothing you do matters because history is over, it's then pretty unlikely — or it's less likely, let's say — that you will draw the conclusion that your own actions matter and therefore there should be democracy. So the idea that — in other words, the idea that democracy was inevitable was horrible for democracy.

Because democracy itself depends on the notion that people are contending with history the entire time. Not that history is over, or that history gives you everything you want automatically, but that you're contending with history the entire time. That you, as the people, are contending with things. You're contending with factors. You're contending with oppressors. You're contending with structures. And so if I say, oh, history is over, democracy is just given to you — what I'm doing is I'm undermining democracy.

And of course all these things — like these factors — and one of course can debate whether there are other factors, but just historically speaking, this whole moment of the end of history didn't last very long. This interregnum, this moment, lasted, you know, maybe until 2001 and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or maybe as late as 2010. But the moment of the consolidation of democracies — it lasted for about half as long at most as the period of communist rule in Eastern Europe. Just to keep things in perspective.

So as the end of history didn't last for very long, and the notion of the end of history brought about consequences. Okay. So this brings me to what I want to talk about next, which is the politics of memory. So as in the Soviet Union, so in the United States, when you decide that history is over and that we are in a kind of eternal present, immediately what happens is that there's a shift back to nostalgia.

And in the US, this also took the form of nostalgia for the Second World War. There's the idea of the greatest generation, the idea that the Americans won the Second World War, the idea that we fought the Second World War in order to stop the Holocaust. All of this — I mean, all of this is very questionable factually.

But my point though is that this burst of nostalgia for the Second World War is not something which directly followed from 1945, any more than it was in the USSR. It's something which was a result of the conditions of the 1980s and especially the 1990s.

Now when I say this is a politics of memory, I want to pause because there's a difference that I want to insist on now between a politics of memory and history as we're trying to do it. Right? History as we're trying to do it involves knowing that you're often wrong. History as we're trying to do it involves hypotheses, investigating, learning new things. It involves ever-shrinking uncertainty, but it never involves certainty. It involves unpredictability. The things that you don't know will surprise you.

The politics of memory has one thing in common with history, which is that it's about the past. But in every other respect, it's different. In the politics of memory, you know — or the teacher knows and the teacher's going to tell you, or the minister of education knows and they're going to tell you. The politics of memory is always about you. It's not about empathizing with other people. It's about you, how you were right, how you were innocent, how other people might have been wrong, but...

But you were right. And the politics of memory, unlike history, has no future. Okay? So, history is about the past. But the more history you understand, the more lines you see heading towards the future. The politics of memory insists on pushing you over and over again back towards the past. It doesn't suggest any way that you, by your actions or through your understanding, could change the future. So when the Americans move to a certain politics of memory in the 1990s, which involves the Second World War and the Holocaust, it's a way of overlooking certain things. So when we remember the Second World War, we are forgetting, for example, that we too were an empire.

So our great moment of righteousness is the Japanese attack on Hawaii, on Pearl Harbor. But I mean, Hawaii was our colony. It wasn't even part of the integral United States at the time. It was a colony where we had a military base. The Japanese also wanted colonies with military bases. It excludes the fact that we fought the Second World War with a segregated army. We went to war against fascism with a racially segregated army.

And the bit about the Holocaust is, and this is a sensitive point in the US now, probably always will be. There was an exhibition about this, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which took years and years to construct and then had to be taken down. But the United States was a very typically anti-Semitic country in the 1930s, and saving the Jews had nothing to do with why Americans went to war in the Second World War. There were some efforts to help Jews carried out by the Roosevelt administration, but they had to actually be codenamed and kept secret because otherwise they would have been incredibly unpopular. The notion that this was a Jewish war and therefore it shouldn't be fought at all was quite a powerful idea in both Britain and the US at the time.

So the politics of memory about the Second World War overlooks certain important things. One of the things they overlook, also in fairness, is the Soviet Union. So the American nostalgia about the Second World War overlooks completely the fact that it was the Soviet Union that took 80% of the casualties in Europe, and that the Soviet Union was fighting for a long time in Europe when we were not. And what everybody's nostalgia overlooks is the importance of economics.

Nobody, whether it's the Soviets or the Americans, ever remembers that the main reason why the Allies won the Second World War was the American economy, and very specifically American economic aid to the Soviet Union. Nobody likes to remember that because the politics of memory is all a morality play. We're right, you're wrong. We were innocent, you were guilty, we did the right thing. It's not about things like economics and policy. Okay. So where does this take us? One place this took us was into the Iraq War. The Iraq War of 2003.

It really does matter if you misunderstand history. And it really does matter if your politics of memory pushes out the elements in history that are essential for how you confront contemporary problems. And the Iraq War of 2003 is a good example of that. If you follow the logic of this class in the lecture and the readings, the category of the state will have been important to you. You will have read Hannah Arendt's essay from 1943, I think, 'We the Refugees', which is about the essentially protective character of the relationship between a person and a state. To be sure, it's imperfect, right? But there's a reason why when people move to Canada they start spending a ton of time doing paperwork to get their work permit or their permanent residence or their citizenship. There's a reason why people aren't indifferent to that.

There's a reason why you don't come to a country and say, 'Oh, what the hell? I'm not going to deal with this bureaucracy. It doesn't matter.' Right? Nobody does that. I mean, correct, maybe you, I don't know. But in general, nobody, okay, if you're born into citizenship, you might not think about these things, but in general, people are very concerned about their connection to the state and their right to be concerned. Going back to the history of the Holocaust, you'll remember from the lecture, I hope, that the major rescuers in the Holocaust were people who could give papers. It's not exciting, right? Like it's not as exciting as other things which happened and which are true of people taking personal risks to hide others in their attics or their basement. That happened. But it's not as exciting to say I'm a diplomat and I've got a stamp and I'm going to hand out hundreds of pieces of paper. But that's how more people got rescued than any other way, because people with state power chose to share the state power.

Right? And in the history of the Holocaust as well, where Jews died in large numbers is where the state was defined as having been destroyed. Poland and the Western Soviet Union. Now, that is a generic lesson about the Holocaust. It's not about how Jews are good and other people are bad, which by the way is ridiculous. It's a generic lesson about the Holocaust. It's a generic fact that if you deny people a state, you're putting them in a condition of vulnerability. So, I mean, if you're doing the Israeli politics of memory, you're not going to focus on how important the state was to the Holocaust because that would raise questions about your own policies towards Palestinians, right? Okay.

But going back to the Americans, when the Bush administration was considering how to react — it wasn't even a reaction, but how to react to the 9/11 terrorist attacks — one of the notions, for various reasons which don't have to detain us, was that we would invade an unrelated country, which was Iraq. The way that our historical misunderstanding comes into this has to do with the state. Our notion, and you can look back at the debates about this, they're fascinating. Our notion of what would happen in Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was like Hitler, who's a bad person, the reason why you have terrible policies is because there are very bad people with authoritarian power, and if you remove them and then you destroy their state, everything will be okay, right? Because the state is always the problem.

Now that is a way of thinking about Iraq which is consistent with the American politics of memory. It's consistent with how we understood totalitarianism. It's consistent with how we understood the Holocaust. It's just not consistent with historical reality. And so when we invaded Iraq, which was a bad idea for all kinds of reasons I don't have time to go into, but when we invaded Iraq, our premise, our serious political premise was all you have to do is clear away the bad stuff and then the good stuff will automatically pop up out of the ground because that's the way that history works. All you really need is — it's a kind of right-wing anarchism for all you right-wing anarchists out there. All you need to do is clear away the state and then immediately capitalism will bloom and from capitalism democracy and so on.

And this was a — I mean, political scientists held this view. I remember having what seemed to be very sober discussions with political scientists at the time, and the notion was that like human nature is what it is. Institutions are the problem. You clear them away and then immediately we'll all form like nice social contracts. We'll have capitalism. Everything will be A-OK. So, that's not what happened in Iraq. Obviously, the Americans were drawn into wars which lasted for a couple of decades and are arguably still continuing. But what I'm trying to say is that this was, among many other things, this was very much a memory war.

There's a second point relating to the Europeans which I want to mention as well. And this is also a kind of summary of an earlier lecture. But just to make the point in this context, it matters a lot how the members of the European Union consider the history of the Soviet Union, the history of Nazi Germany, and the broader history of empire. It's not just the Americans who shift from history to memory. The Europeans do it too, just in a different mode. And this is important because if you're a European — you can all jump up and tell me I'm wrong in a moment — but if you're a European, the default mode of talking about the politics of memory is to say, 'Haha, the Americans have an incredibly stupid politics of memory.' Which, okay, but the implication of that is that we Europeans are very wise because we remember history and so on. And that's where it all goes wrong. Because that's not correct.

What Europeans have in the European Union is a different politics of memory. And that different politics of memory says in 1945 — note again, the Second World War. It's like the universal retrospect across so much of the world. In 1945, we Europeans learned a lesson. We learned that war was bad. And ever since then, we have preferred peace. And this is why we're better than the Americans, because the Americans didn't learn the lesson of 1945, whereas we did, and thanks to our knowledge that peace was better than war, we were able to cooperate economically and create our nice integration system. Okay. So, as you'll remember from a previous lecture, that's not how it happened at all.

Europeans most definitely did not learn in 1945 that peace was good and war was bad. Europeans kept fighting imperial wars until they lost them. 1945 is Germany losing the imperial war. The Dutch lost their imperial war in Indonesia. 1948, the French lost their imperial wars in Southeast Asia and in Northwest Africa. The Belgians lost their imperial wars. The Portuguese, the Spanish, they all lost imperial wars. No Europeans said, 'Ah, we will no longer fight colonial wars because we've learned the lesson of 1945.' That simply never happened. That is a retrospect of the politics of memory from much later on. What actually happened was that Europeans were no longer able to maintain their empires. As we talked about a couple of lectures ago, they found a substitute, which was cooperating with one another, which worked out very well for them. And now they have a mystification of that story, which is that they like peace.

Okay. But that mystification matters. It has practical consequences. If you misunderstand history and you prefer your own version of how you were innocent — in this case, the innocence is against the Americans, right? We are innocent because we like peace. Look at the Americans. They go fight those stupid wars. The only difference is the Americans are worse at recognizing they've lost wars, right? I mean, consider where we are right now. Like it's literally — I mean, people are going to watch this on video and comment on it, but it's literally impossible for the US media to say we have lost the war in Iran. Like it's just like it's unsayable, right? It's just unsayable in American English that we've lost a war. We still have trouble saying we lost in Vietnam, and that was a long time ago. That was 50 years ago.

But I'm just like right now as I watch the US press covering this war, like the notion that we might have actually lost it in the first five minutes, like that's unthinkable, right? It's simply unthinkable. So the Americans have — you know, the Americans are better at fighting wars than the Europeans. That's true. But they're also better at not admitting that they've lost wars. So anyway, so the Europeans do have a point, but the point is not the point they think they have.

And so what I'm trying to say is that when the Europeans mystify their history, when they fall into their own politics of memory — we're always innocent, we love peace, right? — they're doing a number of things too. One of the things they're doing is that they are blocking out the whole 500 years of imperial history that we tried to begin the class with. Because if Europeans are just these nice people and they've always been in Europe and they like peace, well, it's hard to fit the whole story of 500 years of world history in, then it goes missing, as it has to, right? As it has to. And that's significant, you know, in and of itself.

But also if you drop the category of empire and you drop the experience of losing wars, then it becomes very hard as a European to understand the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because the Russian invasion of Ukraine is an imperial war. And so what do you do with that? You can say, if you've forgotten about empire, you don't know how to evaluate it. And maybe even more importantly, if you've forgotten that the way that you stopped being an empire was that you lost an imperial war, it may not occur to you that it would be good if Russia lost this imperial war. So the politics of memory that the Europeans have chosen for themselves affects then how Europeans react to a war which is happening in their backyard.

And then finally, and just very briefly, the 1945 point of nostalgia, or the end of the Second World War, is a point of nostalgia. It affects others as well across Europe. It affects East Europeans. I already mentioned that it affects Israelis. It has a powerful way of helping you to decide that you were the victim. And we don't have time in this lecture to go into all the details, but all across Europe — this not just Eastern Europe, Western Europe too — this notion that you were somehow the victim in the Second World War, even if you're German, this idea can have some resonance that you were the victim in the Second World War, creates a point of gravitational force. It creates the center around which you can orbit your politics of memory, your sense that you in fact were innocent.

Okay. So I now need to move on to the last part of this lecture, which is Russia and the present politics of oligarchy and fascism. But I hope before we get there, before I start talking about Russia, that you'll recognize that the things that happen in Russia in the 2000s, 2010s, 2020s, they're very often just sharpened forms of developments that happen elsewhere. And if I talk for much of the remainder of this lecture about Russia, it's partly to emphasize that larger point. I am definitely not trying to say that there is something specific about Russia of which the rest of us are exceptions. On the contrary, what I want to do in the case of Russia is to develop the points that I've already made.

Okay. So, one point that I hope I've already made is that the notion of the end of history does not favor the working class. The notion of the end of history does not favor people who are disadvantaged, because if history is over and you know this is as good as it gets, it's as good as it gets for you too, right? So the notion that history is over does not suggest that the position of the less well-off is going to change anytime soon. Whether that is because you are disabled, or for reasons of gender, reasons of race, whatever sort of disadvantage you're facing. If history is over, I'm afraid this is what we got for you. You know, this is it. This is what we got for you. We've got stairs and not ramps in front of our businesses. But, you know, history is over. There's not a lot we can do about that, right? Because I got the memo that history was over.

You know, it's far more likely that an African-American man is in prison than in university, but history is over. So those long sentences are going to have to be served, right? So I'm giving you specific examples which may seem striking, but they're in some sense deeply true. If history is over and whatever problems there are are going to be automatically addressed by capitalism are not addressed at all, then that's it. Okay? And if history is over and there's nothing the government can do, as we've already talked about, that leads to the government becoming weaker.

Okay. So how does government become stronger? Government becomes stronger when there are specific tasks and when there is some kind of consensus or institutional alignment which allows government to address a task. If history is over, it's going to be hard to think of tasks that the government should be addressing. And so government is going to seem ever more archaic and bureaucratic because it is going to be right. There are no more tasks to be addressed. So if history ends before Americans have healthcare, all right, history is over. You know, there's not really anything we can do about that. And so the urgency, like the things which actually make government seem useful and appealing, they start to fade away. And government itself does become more bureaucratic, more ossified and less and less attractive.

But who benefits from this? As government becomes weaker, as new forms of wealth and power emerge, the government can't challenge those new forms of wealth and power. It maybe can't even recognize them because history is over, right? There's nothing new under the sun. And so when, for example, in the United States wealth between 1980 and the present becomes collected in fewer and fewer and fewer hands, we don't have a language for that. That's just normal. And that change is connected, I'm trying to say, to the politics of time, because if you say that history is over, the economy does all the work and it kind of does it on its own. It just sort of thumps along like a perpetual motion machine. Capitalism just kind of thumps along. It does the work.

Then let's say, you know, wealth inequality gets worse. Well, that's the price of progress or whatever. Then it gets even worse. That's also the price of progress. Then it gets even worse. That's also the price of progress. And there's no point where you have any argument against wealth inequality. You don't have any argument against wealth inequality because you just say, 'Well, it's a side effect, right?' And this is an important argument, too.

Let's say all of you have $10. Okay, don't make — I mean, I can't actually make this true, but like let's say all of you have $10. And then let's say I have $20. Okay, you could probably deal with that, right? Let's say that you'll have $10 and I have $20 billion.

Now I could say your situation hasn't changed, right? Because you all still have $10, so nothing's changed. But something obviously has changed because if I have 20 billion dollars, then I can change the entire situation around us, right? If I have $20 billion — sometimes it's awkward that things are videoed. All right? But I'm going to do it anyway. So, if I have $20 billion, I can make a series of strategic donations to the University of Toronto and shape how the entire thing is operated and change your lives, right? And if I have $20 billion, maybe I won't do that in a way which is very helpful for you, right? So, okay, you see the point.

The argument is that wealth inequality doesn't matter because you guys still have the same amount of money. But obviously if a few people have extreme amounts of money, that does change politics. It also changes conversations. So, if I have $20 billion and you all have $10, it's going to be very easy for me to control the conversation. Not that I would, because like I'm a nice person, right? But if I had $20 billion — okay, I hereby promise that if I have $20 billion, I will share it with students who took my class. Okay, I want that on the record.

Okay, that was the most ridiculous populist thing I've ever done. But I will aim higher. I will aim higher. But the point is that if inequality — the logic is always a little, it doesn't matter because I haven't hurt you, right? I haven't hurt you. But in fact I have, because with my wealth I can change the overall conversation. And this is a generic point, and it's a point which has been understood since at least the fifth century BC. There's a long tradition of political thought which points this out, which the end of history chooses to ignore.

And so I'm just mentioning this because I'm trying to suggest a specific point which we see in Russia very early on. Russia moves very quickly after 1991 into a world of oligarchy. The word oligarchy, which is a familiar word, right? Like you grew up with the word oligarchy. That word didn't you? Yes. No. Maybe. Okay. That word came back. That word had not been important until Russia in the 1990s. And then that old Greek word, which means the rule of the few, came back in the very specific meaning of the rule of the wealthy few with respect to specifically Russians and other post-Soviet people.

And the reason why it was possible in Russia had to do with a flaw in the Leninist system, which I already mentioned, which was the extreme centralization. So if you have all of the profitable things in a few sites, it's not that hard for a few people to take them over and to become very wealthy. And some of those sites, not surprisingly, had to do with raw materials, and others had to do eventually with television. So Russia very quickly reaches a point of extreme wealth inequality. The word oligarchy comes back.

The person who manages to get control of the situation, who manages to get the state in control of the situation, is Vladimir Putin. And what Putin does is that he essentially becomes the capo di tutti capi. He becomes the boss of the bosses. He becomes the main oligarch. He uses state power, which the oligarchs don't have, to coerce them to get behind him. He becomes incredibly personally wealthy himself. Everyone always says that Musk is the wealthiest person in the world. Probably, but if he's not, it's Putin. The difference is that Putin doesn't talk about how wealthy he is, but he does just casually give like a billion dollars to his friends. That's making me look bad now. But he just casually gives a billion dollars to his friends. Like he has a friend who plays cello, but the friend didn't make a billion dollars playing cello. He made a billion dollars because Putin just gave him a billion dollars.

So we get to the state in the political economy of Russia very quickly where there's radical wealth inequality, and that is one — it's not like I want to make it interesting. Marx did a good job of making it interesting. Wealth inequality should be interesting. It shouldn't fade into the background because it changes everything else. It establishes its own norms of conversation. It makes some things sayable and other things unsayable.

So in Russia under Putin, wealth inequality is combined with a radical form of nostalgia. Why is that? These things go together. If there's incredible wealth inequality, there's no social mobility. If there's no social mobility, the future is a very dangerous idea because you don't have one. If you don't have a future individually, in politics I have to get rid of the future in general. What do I have to offer you instead? I have the past to offer you. The past as I understand it. And for Putin, and he gets this from Brezhnev, he just makes it sharper. For Putin, that's the history of the Second World War. Everything Russia does is innocent and good because we were invaded in 1941 and we resisted fascism.

That means that whatever we do now, we're always the victims. We're always innocent. So there's a historical objection to this, but then there's also the logical objection. The historical objection, of course, is that in 1941, up until the moment when Germany invaded on June 22nd, the Soviet Union was Nazi Germany's ally. So the idea that the Soviet Union was somehow innocent in all of this, even if you put aside the terror and the Gulag and everything — without the Soviet Union, it's very hard to see how Germany starts the Second World War in 1939. So that's the innocence part.

But the logical part is probably more important. Whenever people make an argument from the politics of memory, it is good to be able to explain factually why it doesn't hold up. But it's probably more important to be able to say that the deep problem with this is that one person is deciding how history works. So if Putin says Russia is innocent because we were invaded in 1941, that's not a historical claim, that's a power claim. If Putin says Ukraine and Russia are one country because of something that happened in 862, okay, one can spend a lot of time — and I hope you can do it too at the end of this class — one can spend a lot of time answering that historically, but it's such an extreme example that it invites us instead to make the logical point, which is that if I can say that Canada and America are one country because of something that happened in 862, right? That is a power claim.

It's a power claim. It's not a historical claim. It's a power claim. And the fact that I am — I'm not making it, by the way, just to be clear. But the fact that anyone who attempts to make that kind of argument is asserting a certain kind of power. They're saying I, not you, draw a line to the past. I choose what the object of nostalgia is. I choose what the implications of it are. And I have the power to sweep all the facts away. Right? So the facts suddenly don't matter.

And that brings us to the second thing which is interesting about Russia in the 2000s. So wealth inequality again extreme in Russia, but as I hope I've already hinted, a serious problem in the US too and elsewhere. The second interesting thing about the 21st century is revealed when Russia invades Ukraine in 2014. And it might even be revealed by that statement I just made. Russia invades Ukraine in 2014. Because you're probably thinking, well, wait a minute. Didn't Russia invade Ukraine in 2022? Yeah, they did. But they also invaded in 2014.

But when they invaded in 2014, they covered it with an incredibly effective social media campaign. It was so effective that people all around the world, including in Canada, Britain, the United States in early 2014, were arguing about things like are there too many nationalists in Ukraine or are there too many gays in Ukraine? It depends on who you were. If you were on the left, you were concerned about how many nationalists there were in Ukraine. If you were on the right, you were concerned about how many gays there were in Ukraine. And that tells you how social media works, right? Because the Russians had figured something out, which is that it's all targeted. So, you can disable the left by telling them the Ukrainians are Nazis, and you can disable the right by telling them Ukrainians are gay, and nobody notices that you're saying that they're gay Nazis because there's no single social media conversation. It's all already polarized. The Russians understood that and they very effectively muddied the waters.

They used social media aggressively in this way in 2014. They did it again in 2016, supporting Brexit in the UK and supporting the Trump candidacy in the United States. In both cases, quite possibly being the factor that pushed the political outcome over the line, in which case that would be social media being historically incredibly consequential. Now, again, the point here is not that this is specific to Russia, right? The point is that already in 2014, if we were paying attention, we were getting a taste of the second big factor in the 21st century after wealth inequality, which is the new form of digital media.

So you might say, well, this recalls the 1920s. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was also a lot of inequality. And in the 1920s, 1930s, there was a new medium which was radio, which the fascists and the Nazis used. And that is true. That analogy is fine as far as it goes. But I would point out that the wealth inequality that we have now is actually more severe. And this technology that we have, the internet, is perhaps a bit different from radio.

So it's interesting how like every new medium causes chaos when we have it. So the book — right, like I spend this entire class saying, students, please read books, right? And that's incredibly boring of me. But like when the printing press was invented, it caused 150 years of religious war in Europe, right? It wasn't such a calming technology back then. So every new technology that comes along wreaks havoc, and then only in retrospect does it seem to be so civilizing. The same is true with radio, right? Now if you get up in the morning, you listen to the BBC or whatever, and it's very calming, you think, I'm a very civilized person. But in the early 20th century, radio was considered rousing, and understandably so.

But this medium is a bit different because this medium has a couple of capacities that others don't have. One is to make personal appeals, right? By way of algorithmic specializations to individuals and thereby pull them out of politics and into their own worlds. And another one, which is not true of radio, which often gets overlooked, is that this digital technology is incredibly consumptive of resources. It's incredibly consumptive of resources. To choose digital technology is to choose a certain version of ecology. It's to choose the version of ecology in which this is not — I don't know if it's happening in Canada. I don't think it is quite so much. But in the US, like where I'm from in rural Ohio, all over the United States, we have this plague of data centers which are coming to take all — you don't even know what this is. That's good. Coming to use all the water and use all the electricity and create lots of noise pollution and basically ruin everybody's lives.

And this is a big factor in the current politics of the United States because it's one of the things which is leading a lot of Trump voters to be upset. But that's a minor aside. The larger point is that unlike radio, unlike the book, if you choose digital technology, you're also choosing to destroy the environment because it uses so much energy, right? We don't think about this, right? When you do a search in the middle of class, you don't think, okay, I just boiled a kettle of water, right? When you use AI to do a search, you're boiling 10 kettles of water. You would think about boiling 10 kettles of water, but you don't think about doing an AI search.

So, in this way, there's the risk — and I'm going to close here because it's the risk we're facing now. There's the risk that in allowing so much power in the hands of the wealthy few — Trump, right? Not that Trump has a lot of money, but Trump pretended to have a lot of money and thereby was appealing to people who thought the deck was stacked against them. Understandably, in a world of wealth inequality where so much of the money is made on natural resources, you risk falling into a situation where you're trapped in oil and gas in order to keep the digital technology going. But the digital technology is precisely what's keeping you locked in the present and preventing you from seeing other political possibilities.

Okay. So maybe the history of the 20th century in this last 500 years helps you to see these and other elements of your contemporary reality. I hope that it's done so. Not so much because I want you to draw specific conclusions that I might draw, but because I want to awaken you to the possibility that history can help you to see things that you might not otherwise see. Hitler and Stalin are just two examples. One could have done this class with many other examples and perhaps come to similar awakenings or to different awakenings.

But the point is not that you draw exactly the same conclusions. The point is that the more history you know, the more history you have to think with, the better you can think about the history of your own moment and perhaps the more engaged you can be with it. Which is why the class was called Hitler, Stalin, and Us. Not because we're the same as Hitler and Stalin, but because Hitler and Stalin or other important historical events can help us to think about how we are contributing or not to present catastrophe, or how we might contribute or not to routes away from present catastrophe. So I will leave you with that.

Leaving you with that though is not to say that you don't have to know what happened in the past. It's not just about like, I'm in general inspired by history and now I'll be more. No, no, no. You are specifically inspired by specific things that you learned about history, right? It's not enough to say — it's not a slogan. It's not enough to say, oh yes, like I understand history is important and now I see the future. No, that's not how it works. We've learned specific things about the past and that might open us to specific things about the present and the future, which is all by way of saying you do have to study for the final, right? It's going to be very much like the midterm. I'm sure you'll all do very well and I've enjoyed having you here. Thanks very much.