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A growing threat to democracies appears in the force of dictatorships. Dictators like Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Augusto Pinochet, Mobutu Sese Seko and Fidel Castro found their way to power through similar methods. “Making A Dictator” examines the brutal methods and common practices implemented by each dictatorship, along with the ways in which they corrupted the countries they claimed to improve.
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00:00Once dictators obtain absolute power, they have the ability to do whatever they want.
00:17Now, the focus they once had on taking power is directed at keeping power.
00:22And they'll use anything at their disposal to push forward their agenda, be it personal wealth or genocide.
00:39Life under a dictatorship teaches its citizens no one is safe.
00:52The life cycle of a dictatorship is like that of any creature.
01:06It is born.
01:09It stays alive as long as it can.
01:15And at some point, it dies.
01:18But often, after a dictator takes power, their priorities change.
01:25And their tactics intensify.
01:30From his stronghold in the wild Sierra Maestria Mountains, Cuba's Fidel Castro emerged triumphant.
01:35First and foremost, they need to build on their alliances.
01:40It's a daunting task.
01:42To maintain their grip on power, they need the support of those who won't question their position.
01:49Because, in most cases, they believe, no matter how misguidedly, that they are the country's savior.
01:56It is perhaps the greatest mass rally ever staged in the Western Hemisphere.
02:00A telling demonstration of Castro's sway over the Cuban masses.
02:07Dictatorship is not really a job description.
02:10And that's not something that you have a normal ambition to, like becoming a lawyer or an accountant.
02:14And it usually requires someone who thinks that he's indispensable.
02:18Dictators tend to be high on narcissism.
02:22They also tend to have a sense of infallibility and a sense of destiny.
02:34Because they believe they are indispensable, the normal rules don't apply to them.
02:42They are doing what's necessary to bring order and safety to their nation.
02:46Many Americans saw the bearded revolutionist as Cuba's long-awaited emancipation.
02:51But despite being absolute ruler, they have to navigate the internal political structure,
02:58forging alliances with those they can use.
03:02Cuba's Castro and Khrushchev had a well-publicized meeting.
03:06And eliminating threats from those who might oppose them.
03:10There is no formula to analyze how a society is going to react against power.
03:18And it changes from time to time, from society to society, from political moment to political moment.
03:26They may also need to cut deals with foreign powers.
03:29But not until they've put their own house in order.
03:32Like Augusto Pinochet in Chile.
03:34At least in the beginning, they have to have some support.
03:41Whether it's from their political party, from a mass movement,
03:44from other lobbies or interest groups or some combination of that.
03:47They need that.
03:49They particularly need it from institutions that are deeply ingrained in the culture.
03:55Like the Catholic Church in 1970s Latin America.
03:58To maintain power in Chile after deposing the Allende government in 1973,
04:04Augusto Pinochet needs the church to support his regime.
04:08Or at least not oppose it.
04:12But which church exactly?
04:13You do not have one church as an institution working in Latin America.
04:19You have the option for the poor, which is basically the left wing of the church,
04:24working with the neighborhoods and the barriers.
04:26And then you have the high ranks of the church.
04:30Church officials had strongly opposed Allende's communist policies
04:34and choose not to get in the way of Pinochet's campaign to destroy communism in Chile.
04:41Most of the churches in Latin America, particularly in South America,
04:45were working with the dictatorships, directly involved with the juntas.
04:48Pinochet succeeds in making important allies of powerful figures in the Chilean church.
05:01For Adolf Hitler in the years leading up to and following the 1933 elections,
05:07there are two main groups he needs to back him.
05:10Hitler tried to forge alliances with the military, with the business community.
05:20But he had to overcome some opposition.
05:26To persuade the wealthy industrialists to support his agenda,
05:30Hitler promises to outlaw labor unions and rid Germany of communists,
05:35many of whom are Jews.
05:37The military is even easier to convince.
05:43The German armed forces had been slashed after World War I,
05:48and their humiliation continues to rankle both commanders and the rank and file.
05:54Hitler grows their numbers, rearms them,
05:58and fills their heads with dreams of victory
06:00and the recapture of Germany's former territory.
06:03Once Hitler came to power, he saw the military as an important ally.
06:11Because the military was upset by one of the Nazi party's paramilitary organizations,
06:19the stormtroopers.
06:23At the time, the Nazi stormtroopers outnumbered Germany's army 30 to 1.
06:29But the German army was restricted by the Versailles Treaty to just 100,000.
06:37So Hitler eases tension with the German military in 1934
06:42by purging Nazi leadership,
06:44claiming they were attempting to overthrow the government.
06:47What Hitler does, though, is he has the army swear loyalty to him personally,
06:56not to the Constitution, but to him personally.
07:00Potential dictators tend to surround themselves with those who benefit the most from their continued power.
07:07Those that were in disenfranchised or even humiliating positions before the tyrants rise to power
07:17and now owe their allegiance and their continued well-being to the regime's continued success.
07:25Over the course of time, he was able to fill in positions with people that he trusted.
07:34They might not have been friends,
07:36but they were political leaders that were obedient to him
07:40that would carry out what he wanted to do.
07:47Internal alliances are key to a dictator's continued success.
07:51While Hitler has to cede his government with loyalists,
07:55some dictators come to power with a ready-made support system.
08:00By 1927, Joseph Stalin has become undisputed leader of the Soviet Communist Party,
08:07a title he takes after the death of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.
08:13Stalin's constituency within the party was bureaucratic.
08:17Stalin had behind him most of the members of the administration of the party.
08:22Stalin was a fantastic tactician.
08:26Unlike Hitler, who takes power in Germany through elections,
08:30Stalin is uninterested in the support of the masses.
08:34The communists had triumphed not so much by winning the hearts and minds of the people,
08:38but through violent revolution.
08:40He wasn't a terrific populist.
08:45His main constituency was the party itself.
08:47So after a revolution,
08:50Stalin was able to consolidate personal power at the head of a specific kind of party.
08:54A party that gave him all the backing he needed,
08:58military, financial, and organizational.
09:01But for a colony like the Belgian Congo,
09:06that has just recently gained its independence,
09:09this kind of infrastructure has to be built from the ground up.
09:13The dictator has to create his allies.
09:16This is one of Mobutu Sese Seko's first orders of business in 1965.
09:22It was not a nation.
09:23This was colonies of various people, various ethnic groups,
09:27that had been forced to live together.
09:29Mobutu had to build a nation.
09:35He invested a lot in building a military that is multi-ethnic.
09:40He invested a lot in building a leadership in civil service
09:44that brought leaders from various parts of the country.
09:48A dictator doesn't become a dictator by himself.
09:50Mobutu didn't become a dictator by himself.
09:52He talked about the man,
09:53but the man is not leading or managing whatever system he's managing by himself.
09:58He needs to build an entire network of supporters,
10:02of associates, of partners within his own country.
10:08There are many ways for a dictator to lock in people's support.
10:12But which one does a dictator rely on most?
10:15Loyalty here can be philosophical.
10:28It can be based on ethnicity.
10:30But loyalty can also be bought.
10:32And that typically means buying people off so they can deliver on certain things.
10:36It means carrying favor and giving all the key positions to people that you rely on.
10:42I am pleased to have been able to meet again with President Mobutu,
10:47who's been a faithful friend of the United States for some 20 years.
10:52It isn't long before Mobutu's regime is notorious for its widespread patronage and corruption.
10:58It's the carrot and his carrot and stick plan for staying in power.
11:03For Mobutu, it works brilliantly.
11:06But while the carrot can cultivate loyalty,
11:10dictators find the big stick is what really delivers.
11:13Every dictator has to forge partnerships that help him consolidate control and advance his agenda.
11:25But there's an even more critical task.
11:28In most populations, there are negative feelings, negative sentiments, negative experiences.
11:38In a democracy, these are handled in one way.
11:45But in a dictatorship, they're handled in a very different way.
11:51The details of how tyrants suppress dissent may vary.
11:55But historically, a few tactics are nearly universal.
11:59Murder, the most direct way to get rid of individuals who pose a threat.
12:04Imprisonment and torture, taking potential foes out of the equation without killing them.
12:11Fear, creating an atmosphere of terror that prevents people from opposing or even seeming to oppose the dictator.
12:18And strict control of information, so no one really knows what the dictator is doing.
12:23But he always knows what you are doing.
12:26Perfect information minimizes conflict.
12:29So they employ these tactics to keep possible usurpers at bay.
12:35The first of which is murder.
12:37To review a great parade of Russian might, comes Stalin.
12:41Dictatorships always leave a long trail of corpses in their wake.
12:47From mass murder to genocide.
12:49Stalin watches with satisfaction the display of Russia's strength on land and in the air.
12:54Joseph Stalin was responsible for the deaths of roughly 10 million.
13:01Mao Zedong, in just four years, oversaw the killing of at least 45 million people.
13:08Hitler's Holocaust claimed the lives of almost 20 million people, including 6 million Jews.
13:15But dictators commission murder on a smaller scale as well.
13:22To rid themselves of threats, real, potential or imagined.
13:28In 1934, Hitler makes his first large-scale move to eliminate a potential threat.
13:45Ernst Rahm, the head of the Nazi stormtroopers, or brown shirts, is the brutal muscle behind Hitler's rise to power.
13:53With over 3 million men in its ranks, the stormtroopers are 30 times larger than the German army.
14:02Rahm and Hitler have different visions of Germany's future.
14:05And soon the Fuhrer is persuaded that Rahm is planning a coup to oust him.
14:10Violence and terror were key parts of Nazi policy.
14:20Almost from the beginning, this is a party that grew up in violence.
14:24And once they come into power, they use terror both as a tool to suppress political opposition and to carry out their racial policies.
14:36On the night of June 30th, 1934, Hitler sets in motion the Night of the Long Knives and takes Rahm out of play.
14:53Rahm and as many as 200 people are thought to have been shot to death in the purge.
14:59The stormtroopers are now rudderless.
15:02And suddenly Hitler has a lot less to worry about.
15:06He's removed a potential threat.
15:09Appeased the military, who resented Rahm and the stormtroopers.
15:12And rid himself of someone committed to the promises the Nazis made to win the 1933 elections.
15:19With dictators, there's an early period where you've made promises and you have to keep them.
15:25Then there's a later period where you make promises and you get to execute the people who remember them.
15:31But purges aren't always deliberate and strategic.
15:34Dictators tend to be paranoid to see conspiracies everywhere.
15:39If you were a dictator, you're very concerned about assassination, because usually in the way you rose to power, there might have been a certain amount of violence, contemplation, or actually execution of assassinations.
15:54You must think, well, there are other people who might like to come to power in that same way, which is going to involve the end of me.
15:59Some dictators become paranoid toward the end of their rule.
16:06Others seem to be that way from the start.
16:08On July 16th, 1979, Saddam Hussein assumes the presidency of Iraq.
16:17Six days later, he summons 400 top Ba'ath Party officials to an auditorium and announces...
16:23He has uncovered a Syrian-backed plot to overthrow the Iraqi government.
16:30The plot is a complete fabrication, but 22 people are dragged out one by one to be executed.
16:38Saddam Hussein makes sure the event is captured on videotape to spread fear and to further control the public.
16:52Saddam Hussein was not sophisticated in the ways in which he created fear.
16:59Saddam Hussein was not sophisticated in the way he was murdered.
17:29They were ordered to shoot them and are then tortured and imprisoned.
17:33The reason? Saddam sees them as political rivals.
17:41Dictators tend to crave power and want centralized authority in their own hands.
17:53But even when compared to the worst murderers in history, Saddam Hussein stands out for his brutality.
17:59Saddam is one of the rare dictators who is no qualm-killing family.
18:19Most dictators cannot do that, but Saddam did.
18:21Throughout his long career, Saddam routinely imprisons, tortures, and executes anyone he determines is disloyal, a potential rival, or a spy.
18:36The victims number in the thousands.
18:39Saddam's on-fall campaign from 1986 to 1989 resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 Kurds.
18:47Most people here were killed outright.
18:52There was no time even to seek shelter from the cyanide gas.
18:58More than 5,000 Kurdish civilians are killed by a poison gas attack in Halabja in 1988.
19:05Saddam is also responsible for the massacre of as many as 100,000 civilians and rebels during uprisings in 1991.
19:17Like Saddam, who purged the government of rivals and potential threats just weeks after becoming president,
19:32Pinochet doesn't waste any time eliminating political dissent in Chile.
19:37His main target, supporters of the left-wing popular unity party of deposed president Allende.
19:44Less than three weeks after the September 11, 1973 coup, he sends out an army death squad that will come to be known as the Caravan of Death.
20:02At least 75 people already in custody are tortured and killed, their bodies disposed of in mass graves or in the sea.
20:11When they had the full power, they incarcerated people without the right process.
20:17They disappeared people and they killed people.
20:22That was the way that the Juntas Militares in Latin America were acting.
20:28You can see the same during the Nazi times, during Stalin.
20:32Also like Saddam, the Pinochet regime relies on torture done out of the public eye.
20:40The Chilean secret police set up interrogation and torture centers where prisoners are subjected to electric shocks to their genitals,
20:53waterboarding, beatings and sexual abuse.
20:57More than 25,000 people are tortured and more than 1,000 disappear, never to be heard from again and presumed dead.
21:06It was the first time that the whole power of the states, ministries, the executive power, the Congress were suppressed.
21:20And used to slaughter the civil population, disappearing people, torturing people, creating concentration camps in Argentina.
21:30But what kind of impact does torture and murder have in a dictatorship?
21:38The answer? Huge.
21:49Torture is famously unreliable as an interrogation technique.
21:53So why do it?
21:55The answer is to instill fear in the population, like Hitler did in Germany.
22:03Once in power, the dictator works to increase fear and create a sense of collective helplessness in the population.
22:13Ultimately, the dictator creates fear to such an extent that no one is willing or able to rebel against the regime.
22:26In the beginning, people just disappear.
22:28And only when they come back do they tell their families what's happened.
22:32People hear about the early camps.
22:34So they become these zones into which people disappear, sometimes permanently.
22:38And so there's that air of mystery which adds to the fear.
22:43And that's part of the structure.
22:44You go away, you might come back, you might not come back.
22:46But if you do come back, you come back changed.
22:49In Pinochet's regime, thousands of people are disappeared.
22:54They vanish and friends and family don't know if they are dead or alive.
22:59The result is a frightened and passive populace.
23:02The most important kind of fear is the fear that people have of standing out.
23:08So what you need is for people not to do anything.
23:11You just need for them to go along.
23:13That's the main kind of fear you need.
23:16The fear that leads to conformism.
23:18Dictators use fear of beatings, torture, imprisonment, and death to keep people quiet.
23:26Citizens begin to fear their every move is watched, their every word heard.
23:30No one can ever really be with anyone else because there's always that ever-present third, which is the police.
23:39That's a denunciation state.
23:41And you can see what aspiring authoritarians or dictators will do will be they will create offices where people are supposed to denounce.
23:48And they'll describe it as your civic duty.
23:50You should feel good about yourself for doing this.
23:52In a dictatorship, you're constantly censoring yourself and you're constantly doubting other people because you wonder whether they will report you if you say anything.
24:06And, of course, the regime has spies so that you come to believe your neighbor, your shopkeeper, everybody is a potential spy.
24:20Dictatorships play on people's concern for their loved ones.
24:23They don't just target you.
24:29They will target your friends and your family, your mother, your brother.
24:37So they all pressure you to not speak out.
24:42Hitler knew that in the 1933 election, 23 million people had not voted for the Nazis.
24:48This was a sizable number of people he had to keep an eye on.
24:53Enter the Gestapo and the SS, Hitler's secret police, who stop at nothing to strike out dissent at every level.
25:00My mother helped a Jewish lady to escape from Germany.
25:07And then she writes a postcard and she tells my mother that she is out of Germany, that her plan worked.
25:18And then she writes a postcard and the PS, and the PS said, if it hadn't been for you, I wouldn't be here.
25:34And censorship of male to and from foreign country was 100%.
25:42Only those who get behind the scenes know that it is out of Germany.
25:45And the Gestapo came the same day, arrested us.
25:53And then they decided to send us to a concentration camp.
26:00In Hitler's Germany, religious leaders, anti-Nazi student groups, even people who made jokes about Hitler, are arrested.
26:13There is no due process.
26:15Shortly after taking power in Congo, renamed Zaire by its new leader, Mobutu Seiseiseko, justice comes in the form of public executions for four former government officials.
26:31Mobutu, Mobutu decided that he wanted to assert his power.
26:34So what he did was arrest four people he had accused of plotting a coup.
26:40Most people did not think he was going to hang them.
26:43But Mobutu didn't budge, he hung them publicly.
26:46This was a brutal act for a president to do with his own people.
26:50Actually, there was no base really to accuse them of any plot.
26:54There was no plot.
26:55It was important for him, as he saw it, that this is the way I'm going to send a message to the people, to whosoever may be out there, thinking they can challenge me.
27:04So that hanging scared the Congolese, it subjected people to fear, and it became the base of Mobutu's leadership moving forward.
27:15It didn't stop there.
27:17Mobutu created a vast system of secret police and informers, which reported only to him, on student resistance.
27:25Labor unions, and anyone he saw as a threat.
27:34The motive is predictable.
27:36Control the population through fear and intimidation.
27:43Violence and the threat of violence aren't enough to control a people forever.
27:47Because in a dictatorship, information is power.
27:55Dictators always take steps to control the flow of information.
27:59The first step is to destroy the free press, either by eliminating journalists or dictating what they can say and print.
28:07Within a year of being sworn in as prime minister of Cuba, Fidel Castro starts cracking down on dissent, in much the same way as the dictator he overthrew, Fulgencio Batista.
28:20In a wide-sweeping takeover of all means of production, he even asks children to report on parents who disagree with his plan.
28:31Eventually, newspapers, radio, and TV stations are closed down.
28:36Castro now has a television program called The Television World Asks.
28:40The questions are carefully screened.
28:42By 1965, he's merged Cuba's two leading newspapers into one that is controlled by the state.
28:49Dictators come up with media which spread the lies and the propaganda and the confusion which keep people from thinking,
28:58you know, the real political issue in my country is that a few people have all this stuff.
29:04As Cuba enters the fifth year of Fidel Castro's rule...
29:08The press becomes a propaganda arm of the state.
29:11Journalists who criticize the regime are arrested and imprisoned.
29:15...by an American cameraman.
29:17He was allowed to photograph only what authorities felt would reflect honor on Cuba.
29:22Cubans hear only what the state wants them to hear.
29:26The mission of propaganda is to have people believing that what you are doing is the right thing to do.
29:31Castro's propaganda ministry had used television, the newspapers, and radio for weeks in advance
29:38to whip up enthusiasm for this mammoth demonstration.
29:41The main thing that they do is you try to make people who speak truth feel lonely.
29:49You generate costs for them by bullying them, by rallying your people against them.
29:55So literally rallying.
29:56They are all there with Castro to denounce the United States.
30:00And you point to people, you point to journalists, and you say boo them or throw them out, right?
30:07So you try to create costs for people whose job it is to seek the truth,
30:12or who just have the inclination or the courage to seek the truth.
30:14Nuestro pueblo se reúnen gigantesca y entusiasta multitud.
30:20Every dictatorship, every autocracy, and every authoritarian government creates its own reality,
30:31its own world, its own fake news.
30:35If you do not fight this fictional war that they create with truth,
30:42people will not have any chance to recover their rights.
30:48In 2003, Castro cracks down hard on dissidents,
30:52imprisoning 75 people in dehumanizing conditions, 29 of them journalists.
30:59He claims they're agents of the U.S. government.
31:02The citizens in dictatorships are faced every day with countless bombardments of messages,
31:14propaganda, telling them that the regime is just and fair and valid.
31:20In the privacy of their homes, they can be frank and talk about the regime as they really feel.
31:27But in public, and with most people, they have to pretend that they support the regime.
31:36But the most efficient propaganda machine was arguably the one Hitler used in Germany.
31:46The radio, every time we move it, victory, victory.
31:52Das Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.
31:55Dr. Goebbels belies...
31:57They had a guy with the name of Josef Goebbels,
32:00and he was the Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment,
32:05and he used it to the fullest.
32:10One of the first things that Hitler does in the first 100 days as chancellor
32:14is he creates a state propaganda apparatus.
32:18Every day, the propaganda ministry gives out instructions to the press.
32:25It says, this is what's going to be reported, this is how it's going to be reported.
32:32People that violate those rules can be sent to a concentration camp,
32:39can lose their job,
32:40and they regulate who can work in those professions.
32:52Dictatorships keep a stranglehold on the population
32:55by executing and imprisoning the opposition,
32:59creating an atmosphere of constant fear
33:01and controlling what people can know and what they can say.
33:04But even the most brutally efficient regime
33:11has to manage the world outside its national borders.
33:14In Chile, the Pinochet dictatorship depended on the backing of other Latin American despots
33:23and the willingness of the U.S. and other nations to look the other way.
33:28The 1970s in South America are a time of pervasive right-wing dictatorship.
33:34A military junta in Brazil.
33:40A military general turned dictator in Bolivia.
33:43A militaristic autocrat in Paraguay.
33:47Another military junta in Uruguay.
33:51A military dictator in Argentina.
33:55And of course, Pinochet in Chile.
33:58All intensely anti-communist, pro-big business,
34:06repressive, and supported by the U.S.
34:09for economic and ideological reasons.
34:13The U.S. had provided training for the South American military
34:17and their death squads as part of its Cold War strategy.
34:22Much of it is directed to Argentina.
34:24You had this big operation called Operacion Condor,
34:29which was a coordination between all these different armies
34:34and repressive structures from different places in Latin America.
34:41In order to kidnap, in order to exchange information,
34:46to exchange prisoners.
34:47Operation Condor is in full swing by 1975.
34:56And before it's through,
34:57an estimated 60,000 people will have been killed,
35:0130,000 disappeared,
35:03and 400,000 imprisoned and tortured.
35:05Across South America,
35:13it's a mutual support system of terror.
35:17The leaders are Pinochet in Chile
35:20and Videla in Argentina.
35:23They sanction the infamous death flights,
35:25where victims are thrown to their deaths from aircraft.
35:29But their agents kill in more conventional ways as well.
35:32April the 10th, 1975,
35:39my father, Dr. Mario Gershanic,
35:41a young Argentinian pediatrician,
35:44was murdered by a gang that attacked my family's house.
35:49Fifteen men, around 20 and 25 years old,
35:54heavily armed with war weapons,
35:58axes and cars provided by the Argentinian state.
36:01attacked our house.
36:04They were wanting to kidnap my father
36:07because he was, at that time,
36:11directing an important and a sensitive part of a public hospital.
36:19He resisted.
36:23He defended himself.
36:24He defended our family.
36:27My mother and myself.
36:29I was an 11-month baby.
36:33He told them,
36:34I know that if I leave this house,
36:36you're going to kill me.
36:37You're going to murder me.
36:44So they murdered him with 80 bullets
36:47in front of us.
36:53Dictators claim they will help fix an ailing system.
36:57In 1959, Castro took power with a host of good intentions.
37:02He says he wants to reform government and society
37:05for the good of the Cuban people.
37:07The revolutionary invasion advances on all fronts.
37:11For the first time in history,
37:13medical care comes to Zapata.
37:15When it comes to education and health care,
37:18he in large part succeeds.
37:21All inhabitants of the region are inoculated
37:23against tetanus, tuberculosis and malaria.
37:26The infant mortality rate falls from 37 to 4 per 1,000 births.
37:31Like health care,
37:33education in Cuba becomes universal and free
37:36as a result of Castro's reforms.
37:40His government also breaks up massive land holdings
37:43to distribute smaller tracts to peasants.
37:46But historically,
37:47these moves benefit a country's government,
37:50not necessarily its people.
37:52Castro is slowly turning into that which he once fought,
37:56a dictator.
37:57Dictators maintain, solidify, and extend their power
38:04through strategic alliances
38:05and repression of dissent.
38:10Murder, imprisonment, and torture,
38:14a culture of fear,
38:16constant surveillance and control of information.
38:19Freedom for purifying the prisoners!
38:22Freedom for purifying the prisoners!
38:24Freedom for purifying!
38:27All are typical of dictatorships,
38:31though not every tyrant uses them all,
38:33or uses them to the same degree.
38:36But there is one 20th century figure
38:39whose bloody regime excels
38:40in every one of these strategies.
38:44For almost 30 years,
38:46Joseph Stalin presides
38:48over a Soviet communist dictatorship
38:50whose victims will number
38:51in the tens of millions.
38:54His first major attacks as dictator
38:56are directed at the peasants.
38:59They are the more affluent peasants,
39:01known as kulaks.
39:05Stalin believes the Soviet Union's survival
39:07depends on rapid industrialization,
39:10not agriculture.
39:12What Stalin does is he takes a political revolution,
39:15which has already taken place in 1917,
39:17and says now it's time for the economic revolution.
39:21The economic revolution means that the peasantry,
39:23numerically the most important,
39:25is going to be eliminated.
39:26They're going to lose their property.
39:28Those who remain on the land
39:29are going to work effectively as state employees
39:31on collective farms.
39:33He orders the arrest of hundreds of thousands of landowners,
39:37whom he accuses of hoarding grain.
39:41Farmers are forced to work on group farms
39:43and give large chunks of their grain to the state
39:46in what's known as collectivization.
39:50Morale plummets.
39:51Resistance grows.
39:54Armed uprisings gather momentum.
39:56The promised explosion of agricultural productivity
40:00never materializes.
40:03Stalin orders all food supplies cut off
40:06from those who oppose collectivization.
40:09What happens is that the very hunger and starvation,
40:12which is created by collectivizing agriculture,
40:15is blamed on domestic enemies,
40:18and it becomes an argument for terror.
40:20It becomes an argument for mass murder.
40:22As many as 5 million peasants
40:25are sent to forced labor camps.
40:28It is believed that roughly 12 million people
40:30die from starvation and disease
40:32as a result of Stalin's collectivization policies.
40:37And Stalin is just getting started.
40:40It's the beginning of the Great Terror.
40:43A series of trials in Moscow
40:45result in the executions of several high-level officials,
40:49many on the basis of confessions
40:51extracted through torture.
40:52Their families are arrested and executed as well.
40:57Then, Stalin goes after the military
41:00and the intellectuals.
41:02For Stalin, you can't think by that point in life,
41:05okay, now it's all over, now everything is calm.
41:07You've made yourself into the kind of person
41:09who thinks that there's perpetual conflict for power.
41:12And so whether it's there or whether it's not,
41:13you're going to feel like it is.
41:15Stalin's paranoia and narcissism combine in a purge
41:21that can't be explained solely by ideology.
41:24Part of the explanation may be in Stalin's psychology.
41:29The dictator distrusts everyone
41:31and gives out power minimally to other people.
41:37So what you get is a concentration of absolute power
41:42in the hands of the dictator
41:43who ends up making every decision that is important.
41:49And of course, because the dictator is making every decision,
41:53this leads to catastrophic events.
41:58In 1938 and 1939 alone,
42:05over a million people are thought to have been executed
42:07in the Great Terror.
42:10Even more were sent to internment camps or tortured.
42:15A culture of fear is the inevitable result.
42:19Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, could be anywhere.
42:24And so could their informers.
42:26Children turned in parents.
42:29Workers turned in their colleagues.
42:31You enforce conformity by creating the general fear
42:35that the neighbor or the teacher or the student
42:38or the son or the father is going to denounce.
42:42That you have to police everything that you say
42:44because everything that you say,
42:46you're not just saying it to the person you're saying it to,
42:48you're also saying it to the police
42:49because you think this person could denounce me at any time.
42:53Those whom Stalin doesn't execute
42:55or send to the gulag are silenced by terror.
43:05As powerful as dictators become,
43:08there are almost always oppositional forces
43:12willing to fight for freedom.
43:13In some cases, the dictator is pushed aside
43:20by historical events, by disasters that are just too great.
43:26And sometimes the actions of one enemy
43:29open the door to taking down others.
43:34States like these and their terrorist allies
43:37constitute an axis of evil.
43:40Emboldened by power,
43:46dictators often find their reach
43:48exceeds their grasp.
43:51To do that, there's no right behind guys.
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