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00:00In this last lecture, we examine the intellectual and human legacy of communism and its challenges
00:24for the future in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern
00:30Europe, and the Soviet Union's implosion. Is the story now complete? Communism presented itself as
00:37dynamic and assertive for roughly 140 years since it was launched by Marx and Engels. How resilient
00:45or capable of return is communism today? What is a long view for thinking about communism?
00:52Today, communism remains officially the ruling ideological system in China, North Korea,
01:00Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba. Yet we have seen the tremendous adaptations and evolutions that
01:07communism has undergone, as it was taken up as a shortcut to perfected modernity. So further
01:14changes and transformations may be expected to continue. The problem, as we've seen throughout
01:21these lectures, is what constitutes an elaboration and what constitutes a break. We have argued that
01:29communism is best understood as a failed attempt to construct a new and distinct civilization.
01:36Especially throughout the 20th century, communism represented a global challenge to all existing
01:42societies that decisively shaped our modern world. So without understanding communism, one cannot
01:49understand the 20th century's trajectory, nor where we are now. Its decline came about because of its
01:56internal contradictions in what was supposed to be a unity of theory and practice.
02:04In seeking definitive conclusions, the perspective of the graveside seems to offer finality. So what happens
02:12when we visit a series of historic gravesides? First, let us walk to the tomb of Karl Marx, permanently in his
02:20exile in London since his death in 1883. His grave is in Highgate Cemetery in North London, where his wife and
02:28other family members are also buried. Atop a marble pedestal is a massive bronze bust of Marx with a full beard and
02:38determined expression. And below it are the ringing final words of the communist manifesto,
02:44workers of all lands unite. For over a century, Marx's grave has been a site of pilgrimage for admirers of the
02:53fierce advocate of the abolition of private property, who prophesied the nearing end of capitalism.
03:00In a profound irony, by 2015, visitors to the site had to pay an admission fee of about six dollars.
03:07The historic cemetery, which had been private when Marx was buried there, is now maintained by a trust,
03:13which needs to charge for the upkeep of the location. In a compounded irony, at about the same time,
03:21a copyright dispute erupted over ownership of the 50-volume English translation of Marx and Engels' works.
03:29A small publisher, which at one point had been the official publisher for the British Communist Party,
03:35forced the Marxist Internet Archive to take down its files of those materials from its website,
03:43where earlier they'd been freely available. This move was decried as uncomradely, but it showed the
03:50durability of assertions of ownership. The very cash nexus, which Marx denounced, struck again.
03:57If we travel to Moscow, we can shuffle through the line to visit Lenin's mausoleum on Red Square,
04:05in front of the Kremlin fortress. The red marble of the ziggurat-like structure echoes the red brick
04:12of the Kremlin wall behind it. Lenin's mummified body has been on display here almost continuously since
04:19his death in 1924, except for the emergency interval of World War II, when it was spirited away to Siberia
04:27and hidden until it was again restored. The visit is free of charge. Lenin's body, periodically refreshed
04:35by embalming experts, continues to lie here, under a glass sarcophagus, in spite of calls after 1991 to
04:43finally have him removed and buried underground. Instead, over the decades, his body has been
04:51improved, or re-sculpted, as the experts put it, with added artificial materials to keep him looking
04:58lifelike. The display of Lenin as a relic continues a century after his death.
05:06If we project ourselves to the other side of the world, to Beijing, China, we can also visit the
05:12Chairman Mao Memorial Hall. The huge hall was completed by 1977, a year after Mao's death in 1976.
05:24In tribute to the example of Lenin's body as a relic, Mao's mummy lies here as well, draped in the
05:32state's red flag with yellow stars. In 2019, Chairman Xi and other CCP leaders ceremonially
05:40trooped to visit Mao and bow three times as they mark the 70th anniversary of CCP rule in China,
05:49already outpacing the Soviet Union's 69 years of official existence. Afterwards, Xi was quoted as
05:57saying, a promising nation must have heroes. Yet Mao, memorialized here, is associated with the deaths of
06:06over 40 million in the famine of the Great Leap Forward and the terror of the Cultural Revolution.
06:12He remains a bodily presence amid a China that has changed so much as to be nearly unrecognizable,
06:20at least on the surface. Finally, we can survey an entirely different scene. The remains of the
06:26hundreds and hundreds of Gulag camps in frozen Siberian wastelands. The barracks, watchtowers,
06:35barbed wire fences, and cemeteries are not preserved, and nature has begun to reclaim these sites as the
06:42structures start to sink into the ground. The oblivion of social amnesia takes hold. Graves of prisoners
06:50are churned up in thaws along the Kolima Highway from Magadan, nicknamed the Road of Bones, and throughout
06:57what Solzhenitsyn named the Gulag Archipelago. At Vorkuta alone, local historians estimate
07:04that the bodies of 200,000 prisoners are buried in the permafrost. In far-off Moscow, a Gulag museum
07:12was opened in 2015. Yet the Lubyanka headquarters of the Cheka and the KGB are not a historical exhibit,
07:20but instead house the security organs of the present state. In 2014, Putin decreed the building of a
07:27national monument in downtown Moscow called the Wall of Grief for the victims of Stalin. Unveiled in 2017,
07:35it is a wall showing faceless victims. Yet dissidents and critics in Russia saw it as an attempt to
07:42whitewash present-day repression by the state. The Memorial Organization had promoted the idea of a vast
07:50memorial complex with a museum, archive, and library. But Putin shut Memorial down. Amid day-to-day worries
07:59and twisting of memories, many reflect the sentiment which David Satter used as a title for his eloquent
08:06and striking book about Russian society's perilous forgetting. It was a long time ago, and it never
08:13happened anyway. Another oblivion threatens elsewhere in the world, when generations do not remember the
08:20significance of Gulag camps like Magadan, Rokuta, Norilsk, Kolima, Chelyabinsk, Karaganda. Overall, then,
08:30we see that a graveside perspective does not offer finality, but more questions or ironies.
08:36Communism and power also found itself beset with ironies and unexpected contradictions. Marx had
08:46insisted that earlier philosophers had only interpreted the world when the real point was to
08:53change it. Marx's philosophy aspired to unify theory and practice. Yet both theory and practice provoked
09:02some of those jokes that accompany the history of communism as we have charted it. These jokes,
09:08moreover, are of a very special kind. They have a tragic charge. They seek to overcome through laughter
09:16and the recognition of official absurdity. When I tell these jokes to undergraduates today,
09:22I always need to point out that they were much funnier under conditions of repression,
09:27heightened by the risk and complicity of telling or listening to a joke. If these jokes start becoming
09:35funnier again, of course, that would be a danger sign. At the level of theory, we have repeatedly
09:42highlighted the promises, often highly specific promises, of when the radiant future would arrive,
09:49with full communism finally achieved. The ideology was driven to these promises as part of its claim to
09:56have deciphered and instrumentalized the iron laws of historical development and the science of
10:03revolutionary progress. Jokes appeared to puncture these pretensions. Among them was this joke told
10:11around the time of Khrushchev, which was actually later a favorite of Gorbachev's. In a lecture hall,
10:18a party speaker is telling his audience that the first rays of the dawning of the age of communism are
10:25already visible on the horizon. An elderly peasant in the back raises his hand and asks,
10:33Comrade lecturer, what is a horizon? The lecturer patiently explains that the horizon is a distant line
10:42where earth and sky converge, and that the closer you get to it, the more it recedes into infinity.
10:49The peasant then says, Thank you, comrade, now everything is clear. In another variation on
10:57promises of the future, one citizen tells another, Have you heard? In 20 years we'll be living under
11:04communism. And the other replies, That's all very well for us old folks, but what will become of the
11:10children? A different joke actually imagined that the future had arrived. It's 100 years from now.
11:18Communism was reached a long time ago. And a child asks his grandmother what a line used to be.
11:26The grandmother explains, Before communism, people would stand in a row, one after another,
11:32and wait for hours. And then, finally, they would be given butter or sausage. And the child asks,
11:39What are butter and sausage? Theory maintained that for such glorious ends as the radiant tomorrow,
11:47any means were justified in practice. On the level of practice, jokes aplenty daringly confronted the
11:55mechanics of repression by the state. The knock on the door in the middle of the night, the arrest,
12:01life in the camps. Among all these, there's a model of joke which to me seems an archetype.
12:08It shows up in all sorts of variations. But the classic one dated back to the terror under Stalin.
12:16And it featured a starring role by Karl Radek, an early Bolshevik who moved between Polish,
12:23Russian, and German revolutionary circles. Radek was famed for his compulsive joking,
12:29his zest for chaos, and his comrades called him half-professor and half-bandit.
12:34Radek had been a friend of Lenin's, mixed with Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Stalin. And back in 1917,
12:42he boarded that famous SEAL train from Switzerland, taking Lenin back to Russia. And he would go on to
12:49encourage Bolshevik-style revolts in Central Europe, becoming a member of the Executive Committee of the
12:55Comintern, which aimed to export revolution worldwide. In spite of his active role, or because of it,
13:03Radek fell afoul of Stalin as Stalin consolidated his rule. Even recanting his views in front of Stalin
13:11did not save him for long. Stalin had probably heard the rumors that Radek himself was the inventor of
13:18most, maybe all, of the political jokes circulating about Stalin. So in 1937, Radek was put on show trial
13:26in Moscow, sentenced to 10 years hard labor, and then died in a labor camp in 1939. The archetypal joke
13:35which circulated was this, three men are sitting in a prison cell. One says he's in prison because he
13:42opposed Radek. The second says he's in prison because he supported Radek. And then the third man confesses,
13:49he is Radek. This joke actually speaks volumes. The men in the cell were all active communists,
13:57but the revolution eats its own, as indeed happened in the real case of Karl Radek.
14:03As they fall victim to changing orthodoxies, their fate makes clear that in this system,
14:09there are no permanent eternal truths, only twists and turns of the party line.
14:14The joke is also archetypal in showing the range of reactions that led the men to their place of
14:22confinement, support, opposition, or simply one's identity. In the spirit of support, the fall of
14:30communism by 1991 prompted some to declare that their views were unchanged and consistent. The British
14:39historian Eric Hobsbaw, a best-selling author of historical works, who passed away in 2012, was a
14:45lifelong Marxist and active in the British communist movement. He gave a television interview in 1994
14:53in which he stood by his loyalties. His interviewer, the Canadian writer Michael Ignatieff, asked him,
15:01In 1934, millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that,
15:07would it have made a difference to you at the time, to your commitment to being a communist?
15:13Hobsbaw replied, probably not. Asked why, Hobsbaw responded, quote,
15:20because in a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely
15:26universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing.
15:33The sacrifices were enormous. They were excessive by almost any standard, and excessively great.
15:41But I'm looking back at it now, and I'm saying that because it turns out that the Soviet Union was
15:47not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I'm not sure, end quote. Surprised,
15:54Ignatieff was moved to ask further. What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow
16:01actually been created? The loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?
16:07Hobsbaw replied, yes.
16:12So there is the bold and forthright verdict that the ends do justify the means, at least according to
16:17Hobsbaw. In the category of opposition is the very different case of Yang Jishen and his huge book.
16:25Yang Jishen was a Chinese journalist with the government's Xinhua news agency, and he edited a
16:33secret newswire for party elites, so he had insider status. Using his access as a reporter, he worked
16:42for 20 years in secret on the side, gathering materials from throughout China in regional archives to
16:49produce an epic study of the famine that followed Mao's great leap forward, which resulted in some
16:5640 million deaths from 1958 to 1961. Yang had become disenchanted with the CCP after the 1989 protests were
17:06crushed. As Yang put it, the blood of young students washed clean all the lies that were in my head.
17:12Yang gave his enormous two-volume study the title Tombstone. This had a specific significance for the
17:21author. His own beloved father had died in the famine in 1959, and this work was meant as a belated
17:29tribute and a payment of a debt, motivated by Yang's keen regret at not rushing to his dying father sooner.
17:36What emerged was an attempt at a redemptive act of memory. In minute detail, from region to region,
17:44town to village, Yang laid out what he had uncovered about the fates of ordinary Chinese,
17:51and the astonishing way in which people afterwards assumed that their own region was hardest hit or
17:58exceptional during these events, never fully bringing into focus that this was a vaster national
18:04catastrophe. Just as Yang had at first thought his father's death an isolated tragedy, until the
18:11overall picture emerged. The political system, which Yang labeled totalitarian, made the famine logically
18:18inevitable. The book was published in 2008 in Hong Kong, but met with official silence in the rest of
18:26China. In the category of self-reflection, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago is a kindred spirit in many
18:36ways to Yang's tombstone. Both express the impossibly heavy sense of obligation to give testimony to those who
18:46who cannot speak for themselves. Solzhenitsyn starts his work with the declaration that the multi-volume
18:53book is, quote, our common collective monument to all those who were tortured and murdered, end quote.
19:01In the course of his unsparing narrative, Solzhenitsyn shows what humans are capable of doing to each
19:07other in the grip of ideology. He concludes that the cautionary tale is not just about a monstrous
19:14other, but for all of us. And he begins with himself, recalling how in the egotism of youth,
19:22he had been brought up and educated as a communist until his confinement in the gulag.
19:28There, he tells, quote, it was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back,
19:35which nearly broke beneath this load, this essential experience, how a human being becomes evil and how
19:43good. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first
19:50stirrings of good. Gradually, it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not
19:58through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every
20:05human heart and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.
20:14And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.
20:20And even in the best of all hearts, there remains an unuprooted small corner of evil, end quote.
20:27This is a part of the permanent human condition.
20:32What remains urgent is the question of how to adequately remember the communist past.
20:37The scale is vast. The volume entitled The Black Book of Communism, originally published in 1999 in
20:45France by Stéphane Courtois, Mark Kramer at Alia, counted a number approaching 100 million lives lost
20:53under communist regimes worldwide, including the Holodomor famine in Ukraine, Stalin's repressions,
21:01Mao's record, to the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia. As the book unleashed debate and prompted
21:08questions of precise numbers, the question reasserted itself, how could one even comprehend a reality so
21:14large, however difficult to quantify exactly? In Washington, D.C., the Victims of Communism Memorial
21:22Foundation was authorized by the U.S. Congress in 1993. It maintains a museum at its location two
21:29blocks from the White House, which in its several galleries and compact space effectively communicates
21:35the scale of the history to be related. It also maintains online resources for education and a
21:42so-called witness project of individual testimonials from around the globe. Also online,
21:48the Gulag.cz project, founded in 2009 and based in Prague in the Czech Republic, uses new information
21:56technology to convey both Czech experience under communism and Soviet state terror and a Gulag online
22:03museum. In Russia, the work of the Memorial Organization was ended when the state shut it down in 2022. A multitude of
22:13adventures around the world seek to keep memory alive in particular sites. In Prague in 2009, some refugees from
22:21East Germany, who 20 years previous had smilingly stepped onto those freedom trains to take them to West Germany,
22:29were part of a joyful commemorative reenactment of that event. Today, one can visit the Stasi prison in the Berlin
22:37neighborhood of Hohenschönhausen. When I was on a tour years ago, led by a former prisoner as a tour guide,
22:44it was unforgettable. In Vilnius, Lithuania, one can visit the former secret police headquarters in Lukashku
22:52Square. The same in Budapest, Hungary. In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Security Prison 21, used by the Khmer Rouge,
23:01is now a museum dedicated to the killing wave they unleashed, and many other historical sites deserve
23:07notice and visits. This brings us to the question of the future prospects for communism. Is the story
23:14complete? How resilient or capable of return is communism today? This question is immensely complicated
23:22and elicits different views. Some observers have argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union
23:28has relieved communists of the burden of defending that flawed exemplar. Now they are said to be truly
23:35liberated to champion their doctrine in all its purity and theoretical perfection. A rejoinder might be
23:42that, in fact, results do matter. And even with the Soviet Union gone and Lenin's project concluded,
23:49the historical facts are what they are and must be confronted. Leszek Kowakovsky, author of the
23:56magisterial three-volume study, Main Currents of Marxism, written in the 1960s and 1970s, in 2004 observed
24:06that, quote, philosophical doctrines never die out entirely, end quote, and that, quote, dreams about
24:14the perfect society belong to the enduring stock of our civilization, end quote. Another startling,
24:22unexpected observation came from a man who played a significant role in the undermining of communism,
24:28Pope John Paul II. In 2005, the same year he died, he published a book entitled Memory and Identity,
24:36subtitled Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium. In the form of an interview or dialogue, he reflected on
24:44the earlier history he'd participated in, leading up to Poland regaining its freedom and Soviet collapse.
24:51A decade and a half later, he stated, quote, We know that communism fell in the end because of
24:58the system's socioeconomic weakness, not because it has been truly rejected as an ideology or a
25:05philosophy, end quote. From his perspective, the process is not concluded. My own sense is that this
25:13question of the future of communism has multiple layers. First, communism as a doctrine or program
25:20launched by Marx and Engels was very deeply embedded in 19th-century ideas. Optimism in the potential of
25:29industry, scientific certainty, and social control. Such vast confidence in a science of revolution seems less
25:38powerful today. Once in power from 1917, in Lenin's Soviet state, the program became an established set
25:47of practices, constituting an experiment that dominated the history of the 20th century with
25:54worldwide ramifications. The experiment lasted for 74 years, in the form of the Soviet Union, and continues
26:02to be avowed at least officially in those states that today call themselves Marxist. But there's another
26:09deeper dimension as well. Below all this, deeper than doctrine, are the psychological wellsprings that give
26:17communism its appeal. Even more than theory and practice, most of all there is a motivating spirit
26:23behind those. It formed the basis for an attempted new civilization. This deepest conviction is the
26:31message that human existence ultimately is only about force. No independent truth or ethics exist, only the
26:38correlation of forces in constant struggle. Everything is defined in terms of power. All relations are about power.
26:47Power is the sole criterion. As articulated by Marx and Engels, every successive economic
26:54system produces its own moral standards that reflect the material interests built into that system.
27:03Ethics, then, is merely part of the superstructure built atop concrete economic realities. As the mode of
27:11production changes, ethics change. All moralities are merely class moralities, reflecting the balance of
27:18forces in the ongoing class struggle. All history is the history of class conflict. Without independent
27:27truth or ethics. With force and effectiveness as the sole criteria, other disastrous conclusions easily
27:34follow. People, then, can be used as means, not regarded as ends in themselves. The promise of a radiant
27:42tomorrow is said to be justification enough. Further still, some who experience freedom as a
27:50torment of unwanted responsibility actually rejoice at the promise of comprehensive coordination,
27:58administering, and control of society and themselves. Finally, this can lead some people actively to identify
28:05themselves even with an overwhelming power that oppresses so as to feel strong even if enslaved.
28:12This instinct to identify with oppressive power also taps into the darkest parts of human nature,
28:19seeking license for sanctioned approved violence against others. These motivations are very durable
28:26and have not vanished. They tend to reappear in new guises, but with the same spirit. To my mind,
28:34the remedy involves refuting Stalin. Stalin is supposed to have said, in a masterpiece of cruelty and cynicism,
28:41quote, one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic, end quote. Memory, as well as our
28:49attention in the present day, needs to turn back to the individuals who make up that million or millions,
28:56as challenging as that is. The best memorialization and caution is to remember, to refuse amnesia. I think
29:06the best monument is to learn about the historical record and then make your own informed
29:11judgments.
29:41A
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