How did the communists take power in Russia? How did Franklin Roosevelt prop up the Soviet economy and set the stage for the Cold War? Are communists motivated by a desire for equality, or by darker desires for revenge? Historian Sean McMeekin joins Charlie for a wide-ranging conversation on World War 2, Soviet Russia, Joseph Stalin, and the facts that every American should know about the real history of the 20th century. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Charlie Kirk here, live from the Bitcoin.com studio.
Today, I have an amazing interview for you with my friend, Professor Sean McMeekin.
We have a very in-depth discussion on Joseph Stalin, FDR, and how American liberals nearly gave the country away to communists.
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I think you're going to love this conversation.
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Okay, everybody.
Very special guest here, and we're going to talk history, communism, the rise, the fall, and then the rise again with Professor Sean McMeekin.
Dr. McMeekin, I should say.
Sean is absolutely fine.
Sean is fine.
These books are incredible accomplishments.
You've got to write longer books.
Well, yeah.
I think that one's a little longer than the other one you write.
This is incredible.
I mean, this is...
I don't know if I have the time.
But, I mean, look at the amount.
The bibliography here alone is like 100 pages long.
It's pretty long.
Believe it or not, I actually cut about 40,000 words from the original draft of that book, and it still ended up more than 800 pages long.
Well, congratulations.
I want to talk about this book in particular and the theme, which I love, to overthrow the world, the rise and fall and rise of communism.
What is this book about?
Well, so after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a period of, you can almost call it triumphalism.
The most famous phrase was probably Francis Fukuyama was talking about the end of history.
We had this image of Yeltsin bellowing on the tank.
It looked like communism was dead, buried, finished.
There was even talk about this kind of Nuremberg trial for communism that everyone was maybe hoping for, wishing would happen in the same way that the Nuremberg trials helped put Nazism to rest and ruin and destroy its reputation forever.
That didn't quite happen, though.
I mean, I discovered when I looked into it, although I lived through it at the time, I remember hearing about how the Communist Party was vaguely on trial in Russia, but the details were a little murky.
I learned later what had actually happened in 1992 was that the Communist Party had sued Boris Yeltsin because he had outlawed the Communist Party.
And his position, effectively, was it wasn't just a party.
It was kind of this criminal organization conspiracy fusing together with state structures to produce this totalitarian oppression.
And they did talk about some of this at the trial, but in the end, here's the thing.
The Communist Party won.
And they were re-legalized, and very soon they were actually the largest political party again in the Russian Federation, and they very nearly defeated Yeltsin in the 96 elections.
We also had China, of course.
That was the discordant part about the story from the outset.
If history had supposedly ended with this Western triumph, why did we have Tiananmen Square in 1989 in China?
May, June 1989, this incredibly dark story, this massacre in the streets of Beijing.
And then, of course, the CCP endures in China to this day and has given the world many treats over the past few decades, most recently with COVID lockdowns.
So, first of all, congratulations on your work.
I know dangerously little about this, but we'll try our best.
Compared to you, I know more than the guy in the street.
Is it one of the reasons—that's such a great point, I've never thought of it—that there was this clear, like, we must put the philosophy of fascism on trial in Nuremberg to put it to rest.
Is one of the reasons that never happened because the intelligentsia of the West actually agreed with a lot of communistic— I think there's something to that.
The pretense of communism, of course, was always that they were going to create this better world.
It was a sort of universal ideal, an ideal that, of course, has led to a lot of death and destruction, but an ideal many people believed in.
They thought inequality is wrong.
They thought it's not fair that the rich have too much and the poor have too little and that some people don't have enough to eat.
And this idea, a vague version of this idea will always, I think, appeal, particularly to younger people who believe in whatever the phrase is, social justice or education.
I mean, we know that these words are loaded, but there's always some kind of sympathy, I think, that people have for this idea.
Whereas Nazism is a little bit harder to defend because it was a little more specific to one nation, to one race, and it seemed to be chauvinistic and aggressive and was associated with military aggression.
It was not something that had a lot of admirers, really.
Across Europe, there were fascists, of course, but meaning once...
Nazism pretty much just died.
It's not like there were—I mean, people are always saying there are Nazis under your bed and so on, but in fact, Nazism has been basically dead and disappeared since 1945.
Communism, unfortunately, I think in some form or other will always be with us, just because the idea continues to appeal.
Let's define our terms, because I think that is one of the struggles.
What is communism?
Where does it come from, and has it actually ever been— Well, it's a great question.
There are certain almost dictionary definitions you could start with.
You could trot out the Manifest of the Communist Party, authored by Marx and Engels back in 1848, where there's actually a program.
They talk about things like the abolition of private property and exchange and credit, the centralization of industry, of banking.
They called it credit.
That was the word they used.
Industrial armies for agriculture.
The centralization of the means of transport and communication, which basically means the government.
Government controls the media.
It controls everything.
Today it might be even broader than that.
It might be the internet or it might be airplane travel.
And that day it probably would be the main roads, the main railroads, the main avenues of communication.
That is, government control of a large part of the economy and the destruction or eradication of private property.
In practice, most communist regimes try to do this to one extent or another.
They actually would go out and they would, for example, nationalize the banks, which effectively meant nationalizing people's bank accounts.
off in their private savings.
I mean, in Russia, they actually had An agency devoted to safe cracking so they could crack into people's private bank accounts.
They would try to nationalize agriculture.
They would create these collective farms or state-controlled farms.
In practice, none of these regimes ever quite succeeded.
The Soviets and the Chinese probably came closest, or maybe in an even more, I think, draconian and dark way, the Khmer Rouge and Cambodian, completely eradicating the private sector.
But the fact is, it's impossible to do that.
everyone would basically starve.
And so you've always had some variety of...
By 1921, you had a mass famine.
You had an industrial collapse, manufacturing collapse.
The economy just basically didn't work.
And so for a while in Russia, amazingly, in the 20s, they actually tried to bring back They allowed people to buy and sell again, because without that everyone would have, again, they would have starved.
The enduring take that I get on campuses is, well, communism hasn't been tried.
As a historian, how do you then respond to that?
It's sort of...
It has been tried.
It absolutely has been tried.
It just has never been achieved.
And so I suppose that's the kind of tricky part, right?
It's never been realized.
It's never been realized because it can't be realized.
These regimes always fail.
They always fail.
They always fail in...
You get a collapse, particularly in things like agricultural yields, productivity.
You get shortages.
You get famines.
Eventually you get even jokes about how hungry people are.
Most of the jokes that came out of Cuba in the communist era, for example, had to do with food.
Essentially, it would be something to the nature of A school chef would be asked, like, what are some problems that the communist regime still tries to face?
And he would list a couple, and he would say, like, what do you think is the biggest problem?
And he would say something like breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Basically just feeding people.
That would be the biggest problem.
And then you would get, if they tried to nationalize the means of production, that is to say manufacturing, industry, you would get...
The other problem is you cannot plan an economy.
It's simply impossible.
You try to plan every single thing that people are going to need over a period of months or years, you get things wrong.
There's simply no way of predicting how many cars people will buy, how many industrial inputs a certain industry will need.
The only things that worked a little bit, and this is maybe a slight exception to the rule, particularly in the Soviet era, Are things that they would produce for export.
And that's because, let's say, you talk about the AK-47, for example, famous Soviet export or, you know, MiG airplanes, weapons, basically.
Because they traded those in the international market, they had to work.
The market functioned to some extent.
But at home, if there's no market to function, the goods don't have to be any good.
Most of them are shoddy, or as Gorbachev would say, you know, supposedly we could send satellites into outer space and we have intercontinental ballistic missiles, but our refrigerators don't work.
And that was kind of the classic problem.
What is it about human nature that doesn't mix with communism?
Well, I guess it's partly that people's needs are various.
And the other thing is that people want, and this is just pretty basic, if you're going to consume something, if you're going to buy a product or use it.
You want that product to work.
And the way a market economy basically works is that if your product is no good, people stop buying it.
So you have to either improve the product or you go out of business.
And the problem under a planned communist economy is basically that there was no incentive to either work harder, there was no real incentive to get higher wages because wages were supposed to be centrally controlled.
In practice, they would give higher wages to skilled engineers and such, but products And so you'd get shortages and you'd get shoddy products.
But I think people's nature, the reason eventually would rub up against human nature in a maybe more profound way is that most people, maybe some people do, but most people don't like being hectored and surveilled and controlled and told what to do.
At least enough people don't that fortunately...
Is communism inherently totalitarian?
Not inherently in all cases, but it does tend in that direction.
Where hasn't it ever been totalitarian?
That's a good question.
I suppose the countries where communism was adopted with perhaps the least conviction when it was imposed at the point of a gun, in Eastern Europe, for example.
In Poland, a good example of this, because communism was so unpopular in Poland from the earliest days, because it was kind of seen as this almost alien imposition by the conquering Soviet armies, by the Russians, who Poles generally had various reasons to resent and hate going back decades, if not centuries.
They didn't actually go as far as they did in other countries.
So agriculture, for example, private agriculture was to some extent reluctantly tolerated.
They did not go quite as far in Poland as they might have done in other countries like Bulgaria, for example, where the communist regime had a little bit more legitimacy and popularity.
It's a matter of degree.
But they all tended in the same general direction.
You'd have secret police, you'd have surveillance, you'd have state constitutionally.
They even would give assignments to all their satellite countries, what you're supposed to produce, what sports you're supposed to specialize in.
It all had to be planned from above.
So everything had to be planned and controlled.
And the problem is most people would balk at that sort of thing.
It's just against human nature to constantly be surveilled and told what to do.
I have a question on that in a second.
Why do the regimes end up so incredibly violent?
Well, there have been a lot of sympathizers who always say that there's nothing inherently violent in socialism or communism.
And my main response to that is you have to read the source texts.
You have to actually go back and see what Marx was saying, see what some of Marx's own Somebody like Gracchus Babouf, who launched the so-called Conspiracy of the Equals in the French Revolution, which inspired Marx, was quite open about the fact that you would have to put class enemies and counter-revolutionaries to death.
Marx was quite open about this.
He talked about, for example, from his political career, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, there was this brief period in Paris called the Commune, which maybe wasn't a perfectly communist regime.
It didn't last long.
It didn't last long, and it went down in this horrendous blaze of violence when you had...
A number of women and children were killed in the battle.
And a lot of people told Marx, you should distance yourself from this.
He didn't.
He went the other way.
He embraced it.
He justified it.
This is then cited by Lenin.
During the First World War, a lot of other people were really recoiling from the horrendous violence in the trenches.
Lenin wanted more of it.
He wrote this thing called the Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution.
And he said, no, Marx taught us this, that arson is a legitimate tool of war, taking hostages, all of these are legitimate things.
Class war, we need to kill people.
The violence is an inherent part of...
In fact, civil war, this was his phrase, you have to turn the imperialist war into a civil war.
And then once you've achieved communism in one country, that country will be effectively opposed to all of the other non-communist countries.
So it will be in a state of war with them.
So you get a kind of wave of civil wars and interstate wars engulfing the earth.
And he was not saying this is what I hope won't happen.
He was saying this is what has to happen.
This is what must happen.
There maybe have been a lot of sympathizers who shy away from the violence, but I honestly think if you look at the evidence, Is it rooted in resentment?
There's definitely an element to this.
Communists in nearly every country where they succeeded in grappling with the regime and then eventually seizing power By necessity, they have to put the arms in the hands of a lot of angry young people, usually young men, sometimes women as well.
And while some of them were intellectuals, the party leaders were usually intellectuals, a lot of the foot soldiers.
Sometimes they would literally just empty the prisons.
They did this after the Russian Revolution.
Sometimes they would recruit former soldiers who were already alienated or disaffected or already had kind of acquired a taste for violence.
The real muscle in, for example, the Bolshevik Revolution, red October of 1917, actually came from either deserters from the army or people in the Russian Navy or in the Russian army.
The so-called Red Guards were mostly actually, some of them came from factories, most of them actually came from the army.
They might be disaffected.
They might be unemployed.
They might be veterans.
They might be deserters.
They might be criminals being let out of prison.
But yes, they're not generally the haves.
Here's an interesting question.
What is it about Russia when communism was popping up?
I believe there was a failed communist revolution in like 1908 or something, right?
So, 1905 was the first revolution, which succeeded in some ways.
It fizzled out, though, right?
It fizzled out, right.
What is it about what was happening in Russia at the time that made the...
Revolution successful.
Mostly it was the First World War.
And this is where Lenin develops a theory which actually helps to explain how and why communists would later succeed.
Part of it was that in most countries there are kind of defenses against this sort of thing.
You know, you get your violent activists, but eventually the police might crack down.
In Russia, it was the disruption of the war, the fact that millions of men were mobilized into the armies.
There was obviously some war weariness, but mostly it was that Lenin actually propagandized the armies.
A lot of other socialists and communists were a little more naive about this.
They thought you could convince people eventually through education or the ballot box to reason or something like that.
They also thought the war was a bad thing, a lot of them, not all of them.
And so they thought you should, for example, maybe tell people to resist the draft.
Lenin said, no, you don't resist the draft.
You infiltrate the armies.
You turn them red.
Was he the first infiltration philosopher in communist thought?
Alinsky was very big into this.
Yes.
Well, I mean, he was the first to really systematize it, but it was always there in a latent sense.
The anthem of international socialism, Eugène Pontier's Internationale, the main theme is actually about a mutiny.
So it's about an army mutiny.
And this is basically what happens in Russia in 1917.
It's like a gigantic mutiny in the Russian armies that Lenin and the communists push along for their own purposes.
Wasn't it a relatively small group of people?
And if I'm not mistaken, the czar actually...
Like, the rebellion could have been thwarted.
Well, the February Revolution, which is separate from the October one, is one where the Tsar probably could have intervened, and he nearly did.
He actually did issue orders for loyal frontline troops to go to Petrograd and suppress the revolution.
He was talked out of it by his generals, who were getting bad advice from these liberal politicians.
Yeah, but they had the advantage.
They did, and the Bolsheviks at that time were still relatively weak.
Lenin's in Switzerland.
He's not even in rush at the time.
Is he still in jail or is he?
Unfortunately enough, he spent a lot of 1917 with warrants for his arrest plastered all over Russia because he participated in a couple of failed putches before the final one that succeeded.
But you're absolutely right.
They were a minority party.
In the only real elections Russia had in 1917, they had made inroads.
I mean, we have to give them some credit just politically.
The party was much smaller than that, the hardcore of the party.
That was part of his philosophy.
It was called vanguardism.
You had to have this hardcore, this elite of professional revolutionaries.
So you didn't need to convince everyone.
You didn't need to mobilize everyone.
What you had to do was have this kind of hardcore of vanguard elites who were, they were more like full time.
You know, you then needed the muscle, though.
You needed the foot soldiers.
And Lenin approached politics, he was actually reading Clausewitz.
It was very much about force.
Basically, you had to have superior force.
They would literally count up, like, how many men do we have under arms and how many men do our enemies have under arms?
You know, there's this very almost reductionist element to communist philosophy when it comes to politics and violence.
Like Stalin would later famously say, asked about the pope and his possible influence.
Well, how many divisions does the Vatican have?
They're very, very crude and reductionist in this way that they actually did literally see it as you have to overwhelm your enemies by force.
It's not really about persuasion.
Yeah, power politics is at the core of communism.
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When Russia fell victim to this communist revolution, Yes, absolutely.
How did that work?
that's always something I don't understand.
How did a Christian nation embrace Yes.
There are different ways of looking at it.
Some historians, and they don't usually tend to be Russians, have proposed that there was something in the Russian Orthodox Church that had always been a bit friendlier to state power than either the Catholic strain or the Protestant strains of Christianity.
And to just run to the czarist regime, the state played a huge and powerful role.
Peter the Great, for example, actually abolished the Patriarchate.
It came back.
Oddly enough, after the Russian Revolution only to then come under the thumb, really, of the communists and the KGB.
There are a lot of Russians who find this offensive.
A lot of Russians who say, no, look, our real tradition is the Christian one.
Marxism, communism was this kind of alien, atheistic import.
And it's true.
The communists would go into churches and they would have these ceremonies where they would expose old bones and say, look, these are relics.
These aren't real.
They would erect museums of atheism.
So it was the world's first atheist regime.
Yeah, that's what I'm trying to understand.
I've never heard anyone explain it as well as you did.
In order for a revolution to be successful, allegedly you have to win over the polity.
Right.
Was that what happened in Russia, or was it a small vanguard that kind of took the whole nation hostage?
They did win over enough people so that the regime could endure.
A plurality or a majority?
Well, as far as an electoral majority, it's hard to say they did because we just don't have the evidence.
But obviously a lot of their enemies and opponents were either killed off or fled Russian immigration, the emigres.
And they were able to propagandize, particularly the younger generation.
So they would have these things like the pioneers and the komsomol to indoctrinate people into the faith.
And they did ape or even mimic some elements of the old Russian Christian tradition, the icons, for example, that Russians would traditionally have over their mantelpiece.
Instead, you would have, of course, images of the new sacred figures, Lenin, later Stalin, so that there was a way in which they...
The czars mishandled the agrarian to industrial transition, and this opened up the communists with an opportunity to strike.
Well, land reform was the great question of late czarist politics in Russia.
It was an extremely difficult question.
Serfdom endured.
Right up to the 1860s, Russians liked to remind Americans serfdom was abolished one year before the Emancipation Proclamation of the United States, which is true, but they didn't really sort the problems out right away, although one could say, of course, it took a while for us to sort out our own problems here.
They couldn't quite figure out, for example, did the serfs have to Did we want to turn them into these kind of entrepreneurial peasant capitalists?
The one great figure who tried to solve this problem, Piotr Stalipin, and this is in the first decade of the 1900s, he did actually put forward some far-reaching reforms.
Not quite the same thing as maybe the Homestead Act in the U.S., but it was kind of a similar idea.
You would give peasants credit.
They had a peasant's land bank.
They were trying to allow them to set out for some of the virgin lands of western Siberia to basically create these kind of almost pioneering type homesteads.
Unfortunately, Stalipin had warned that for this program to work and for Russia to modernize and enter the modern age, she needed peace.
And that's why the First World War was so critical.
He said this in, I think, 1909, give us 20 years of peace and you won't recognize the country, that we'll be able to not solve all problems, but resolve some of the tensions.
The peasants would then become a little bit more of a bulwark of conservatism, as they were viewed in some countries.
In Russia, they weren't.
Oddly enough, in Russia, there was kind of a strain of almost this agrarian radicalism that would sometimes...
DFL.
Yeah, a little bit like this with, they have this thing called a commune where they would divide land up according to...
Stalipan wanted to turn the peasants into stolid kind of middle class citizens.
Subjects still probably because you had monsters.
The First World War, which broke out in 1914, and Stalipin, unfortunately, was also assassinated in 1911.
So that kind of cut off a lot of these possible paths that might have led to really a more humane and I think also a more prosperous Russia.
It's just an amazing thing.
I mean, you've written about it, how a great power like Russia, this was communists' biggest get-to-date.
Is that fair to say?
That this was the biggest accomplishment of the ideology.
Well, sure.
And one could go further.
I mean, to kind of bring this story up to Stalin and say that the greatest boast that any communist regime has ever had is that Stalin allegedly industrialized the country and then, of course, defeated Nazi Germany in the war.
How do you respond to that?
Well, this is the thing.
There are some elements of the story.
there's just enough truth in it that you can see why people have made this argument ever since and why the Russian government to this day still views the victory in what they call the Great Patriotic War as kind of the
the glue the the the origin story to some extent of the core mythology of the core mythology of their existence right a number of problems of this first of all russia was rapidly industrializing before the first world war with growth rates approaching 10 and so not unlike china in recent years even if there might be some holes in the economy we haven't been told of there are all these headlines about the stupendous growth rates that was the russian story before 1914 uh the germans for
We were the first to modernize Russia.
It's just not true.
In fact, the Russian economy, of course, When Stalin did go back in this kind of mass mobilization drive, the arms build up, the five-year plans launched or backdated to 1928.
They relied a lot on imported machinery, expertise, engineers.
A couple of great examples of this.
The collective farm or state farm of Kalkoz, almost like the emblematic institution of Soviet communism in the early 1930s, was actually based on And it appealed to Stalin mostly because it was basically the world's largest farm, 95,000 acres or something.
A lot of the factories were not only designed, but often they were direct copies of those in the United States.
It was the Arthur McKee Corporation that designed Magnitogorsk, like the world's largest steel town.
A lot of the patents were bought.
Even the famous T-34 tank was actually based on a U.S. patent design, the Christie suspension engine.
And then, of course, if you bring the story through the 30s, there's a lot of imported technology from Europe, from Germany.
The Molotov-Rippentrop Pact, the Soviets were buying up all kinds of blueprints and designs from the Germans.
Actually, they weren't buying.
They were sort of just acquiring them by trading raw materials.
And then the Lendley story, which is one of the big themes I talk about in Stalin's war.
Sometimes they would use spies, so they infiltrated the U.S. aviation industry.
They had a team of almost 30 spies working in American universities.
And then I ended up kind of either stealing or adapting or reverse engineering a lot of American designs.
After the U.S. entered, well, even before the U.S. entered the war in 1941, after Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June 41, They didn't have to spy anymore because the Roosevelt administration just gave them everything.
They literally would just let Soviet engineers tour around American factories taking notes, taking photographs.
Oftentimes they would just ask for things.
It's an amazing aspect of the story.
They were actually given the same requisition forms used by the U.S. Army, and in fact they were often put at the front of the line.
The Arcadia Declaration, this is right after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt sort of bullied Churchill into agreeing with this.
Churchill liked the focus on Europe.
But the secondary part, that is Germany first, the secondary part was that the number one priority of the U.S. Roosevelt declared in the wake of Pearl Harbor was assistance to Russia's offensive by all available means, meaning our number one priority was not defeating Japan, was not even fighting Germany ourselves, it was supplying the Russian armies.
Creating the Cold War, basically.
Basically, yes, arming our future opponents in the Cold War.
I have a side note question that I actually wouldn't be able to answer if someone asked me.
Why did Hitler turn on Stalin?
That's a great question, and I'm glad you asked.
I think that the most interesting archival revelation in Stalin's war, although I did a lot of work in the Russian archives, in the Soviet archives.
No, my favorite sort of archival find, believe it or not, was in the Bulgarian archives.
And this is when I discovered...
You went to Sofia and you were in the...
So Hitler unloaded in one of his famous sort of rants or tirades on the Bulgarian minister to Berlin, a guy called Parvin.
I'm going to butcher his last name.
But anyway, so the Bulgarian minister to Berlin, one of these tirades.
The reason he was angry was because Molotov, the same one who had signed the Molotov-Rippentrop Pact, where Hitler and Stalin had, of course, carved up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence.
They had agreed jointly to invade and carve up Poland together.
The Soviets were given these spheres of influence.
They had to actually split the difference on Lithuania.
Lithuania was first supposed to be in the German sphere.
Then it was given to Stalin.
Stalin had...
And what year was this?
Romania.
So this is between 1939 and 1941.
And when Hitler makes his decision to break with Stalin and invade the Soviet Union, Molotov had come to Berlin to basically negotiate a sort of update to the Molotov-Ribb-Drop Act.
This is in November of 1940.
A couple of months before this, Germany, Italy, and Japan, what we usually call the Axis, they had signed before the war something they called an Anti-Commontern Pact.
That is, it was against the Communist International, against the Soviet Union.
That was back in 1936 and 1937.
They updated it now, a sort of cosmetic update.
They called it the Tripartite Pact.
So it wasn't against the Soviets.
It was against the Anglo-Saxon powers, meaning Britain and the United States.
Interesting because the U.S. was supposedly still neutral, although Roosevelt is doing everything he can to make sure that the U.S. is actually very firmly on the side of Britain.
They were, after all, already cooperating and carving up Eastern Europe together.
Stalin, however, drove a really hard bargain, which is kind of remarkable when you consider that the Germans had really done almost all the work.
They did all the work in destroying Poland's armies.
The Soviets marched it a couple weeks later.
Czechoslovakia.
The Soviets, they just get to march in.
Basically, they would even do it in this cynical way where right after the fall of Paris, so this is in June of 1940, when the world is focusing on Paris, and you might remember the Casablanca, all the dramatic scenes of the German troops entering Paris.
The world's focused on that.
Stalin decides that that's the time to send his ultimata to Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Romania, and the Soviets invade those countries, only no one really noticed, because everyone's focused on France.
And they're doing this in this kind of cheap slapdash way.
Again, the Germans are fighting genuine, serious military opponents.
The Soviets, they could barely even, and they didn't quite subdue Finland when they tried to.
So Stalin is kind of like this jumped-up Mussolini, this jackal-like figure, but he decides that he wants to kind of bully and boss Hitler around.
He says, I will join your pact, but only if you meet about five conditions.
He wanted the Germans to basically withdraw all their troops and personnel from Finland.
They only had a few people on the ground there.
That was because they needed nickel to build their panzers, their tanks.
They also wanted the Germans to withdraw from Romania.
The Germans were in Romania.
because they desperately needed the oil there.
They're getting almost half of their oil supplies from Romania.
And here's where it gets really interesting.
Stalin also demanded a right to invade Bulgaria and station troops at the Turkish Straits that is on the Bosporus.
Now, his reasoning here is that Britain, although he was not at war with Britain, which was also interesting, because Britain had declared war on Nazi Germany, but not the Soviet Union, he still saw Britain as hostile, and he thought that maybe they could threaten him through the Straits, into the Black Sea, or the underbelly through Ukraine.
So these are his reasons.
But from Hitler's perspective, this is just mad.
Oh, he also wanted half of Sakhalin Island.
He wanted the Germans to put pressure on Japan.
So, Hitler thinks this is just crazy.
You know, here is this kind of junior partner who's acting like he's the boss.
He unloads in this Bulgarian.
And, you know, he says, now I know what Stalin's really about.
You know, some of it had to do with material interests.
The Soviets, whenever they moved into a country, the economy would collapse.
And as Hitler pointed out, I can't have them in the Balkans because I need all these things from the Balkans.
They needed things like chrome, you know, which you needed to treat steel.
They needed manganese.
Yeah, so they needed all these alloys.
They need all this stuff.
They're getting from Turkey and from the Balkans.
we cannot have them in the Balkans.
And so he decides on...
Is it more like a kind of a vengeance strike?
but he decides he's going to hit Stalin.
And so what is it about Oh, yeah.
Well, so Sweden invaded Russia on a number of occasions.
And the Poles in, like, the 1800s.
The Poles were occupying Moscow, right, before the Romanov dynasty began.
The French, and now, of course, the Nazis.
I mean, that's four examples.
Is there like a little built of Russian paranoia that they're going to constantly be invaded and kind of sure extract it?
I mean, there's something about Russia where they just they just see.
Yeah, it depends on your perspective.
A lot of Russia's neighbors have, of course, always seen Russia as a bully who invades her neighbors, and the Russians think they are a country that's frequently been invaded across the vast European plain, whether it's Napoleon or Hitler, of course, as you pointed out, Sweden.
And the Swedes make it as far as Poltava, this great battle in the early 18th century where they're actually basically conquering large parts of Ukraine.
Of all countries, Sweden.
Of old countries, Sweden, right.
Although now they wanted to start doing it again.
It's part of the reason they joined NATO.
I was in Sweden about six years ago.
You would not believe the way they were chomping at the bit to finally get back at Russia by joining NATO.
But so in 1941, here's where the story goes.
Hitler does make this decision, and we know he issued some of these directives as early as December 1940, about six months before the invasion.
They get delayed a little bit when they get kind of sucked into the Balkans and Yugoslavia, which is a story we can maybe talk about a little later.
But the thing is, everyone assumes that...
The Russians were kind of taken by surprise.
There's this story where Stalin collapses in this kind of drunken stupor.
How could I be betrayed?
There's like a Robert Duvall movie.
know they're all these kind of legends about the story.
The thing that is so bonkers about this narrative is that the Russians had spent of course And it's not just that they're preparing for a defensive war.
In fact, quite the opposite.
They're not building fortifications.
They're not erecting lines of barbed wire.
They're not making sure that they can destroy all the bridges.
No, they're actually building roads.
They're building railroads.
They're building tank parks.
They're building air bases.
199 air bases are being built basically right on the border of the Reich.
And this is not in Russia proper.
These are on the territories the Russians have conquered since 1939.
So it's actually on foreign soil.
Within a couple minutes flying distance of the Reich.
A lot of people know the story about how when the Germans invade, they knock out more than a thousand Russian warplanes on the ground in the early hours.
And oil fields, too.
Right, and the office, but what were they doing there in the border districts?
They were there because Stalin was preparing Was he preparing for an offensive war?
The way they talked about it in their war gaming was more like they thought the Germans would sort of telegraph this giant punch and then they would have a counter-strike.
Were they ever ideologically aligned?
I mean, do we have any evidence that Hitler and Stalin would have long-ranging conversations in the Alps talking about how...
Well, that's a great question, in part because the biggest what-if is, what if Hitler had actually met Stalin?
Oh, they never did?
I see that shows my...
Right, but no, no.
Everyone thought it would happen, but part of the reason why...
The only exception is he left the Soviet Union to Tehran, and that was because Tehran, this is for the conference in 1943, Because Tehran was under military.
This is actually a huge problem for Roosevelt, who's like this invalid, who keeps trying to get Stalin to come to places like Alaska, or maybe England, or somewhere in the Mediterranean, and Stalin keeps luring him.
Or Georgia, where he's from.
Or Georgia, anywhere.
But Stalin will not leave the Soviet Union.
That's amazing.
And so it's the same thing.
Had Stalin gone to Berlin in November 1940, I actually think they could have worked out a deal.
Because they had such, again, in some ways opposed, but also kind of very charismatic personalities.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah.
Molotov is this dour, cold fish.
You know, he had almost like negative charm and he and Hitler just couldn't stand each other.
Where Stalin, for all that we've seen him, was a very monstrous, mass murdering figure, Absolutely.
I mean, for good reason.
I mean, he had made so many enemies with the purges of the 30s, just with so many people whose blood were on his hands.
Tukachevsky.
Yeah, Tukachevsky and, of course, thousands of other top-ranking officers, party members, etc.
There were a lot of people who made this.
We're out dancing all over the place.
But it's fun.
Why did Stalin do that?
What was his internal justification for purging some of his best, most loyal performing generals?
Was it like no one's off limits?
He wanted everyone to be even more paranoid than he is?
Well, so there are a lot of different theories about this.
One of the more interesting ones actually has to do with, again, although they never met, they're kind of...
So you had in Germany the famous Night of the Long Knives in June 1934, and it was only six months later that the so-called Kirov affair breaks in Russia, which is sort of the proximate cause.
So this is when this party boss called Sergei Kirov.
And again, one of the theories about it is that Kirov supposedly won this sort of like inner party poll and Stalin thought he might be more popular and maybe he was a rival.
So Stalin had him killed the historian who looked most closely into the evidence.
Believe me, he wrote an 800 page book just about this.
And kind of learning from Hitler, who in the Night of the Long Knives had a lot of the most enthusiastic Nazis, like Ernst Röhm, the founder of the Sturmabteilung, or kind of the essay of the Stormtroopers, you know, he had them killed.
He literally arrested Röhm, like, personally.
Pull him out of bed with his own hands.
So he was basically having some of the most fanatical Nazi loyalists whacked.
And so Stalin might have gotten the idea that...
Was he genuinely paranoid that there were always plots against him?
I think to some extent he was.
Like if you look at the evidence presented against people in the show trials or the pretext used for these kind of purges and the mass murdering of party members, a lot of it was also xenophobic.
That's the part a lot of people maybe don't know.
There was a lot of paranoia about espionage.
So a lot of Polish ethnics or German ethnics, even a lot of Koreans were either deported or executed in the 30s.
So it's a blend of things.
Some of it's xenophobia.
Some of it's paranoia.
Some of it is maybe, again, maybe he's got the idea from Hitler.
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And this is a great part of your book, which I haven't read, but I just love the thesis, because we do have, what do you call it, a Germano-centric view of the world?
Germano-centric, I call it.
Right.
It's very...
You know, we look at it from the West.
But there really is no understanding of the other powers.
Let's just first talk briefly about Stalin.
Because everyone could tell you about Hitler, right?
He was a disaffected artist, and he was in jail, and he wrote Mein Kampf.
I think an average, well-educated Westerner can tell you a rough kind of biography of Hitler.
But they can't do the same for Stalin.
So he went to seminary.
He then was what caught up in this communist revolution as like a lieutenant under Lenin.
What did he believe?
Was he an actual communist or was he just a power-hungry guy?
Well, right.
A lot of people have tried to make the argument at the end he was just about power, that he was kind of this, eventually turned into a nationalist or something.
But, I mean, no, he actually came up through the party.
He was very much a fanatical, believing communist.
You know, he was well-rounded in the sense that he was pretty well-read.
He wrote poetry.
He obviously had some charm and some charisma, but he also had a brutality that was evident from the very first days.
Some of this came from the kind of almost bandit culture of the Caucasus with vendettas.
And you'd read these stories about, you know, kind of like bandits and rebels, you know, kind of basically meting out vengeance to their enemies.
So that was obviously part of his milieu and his worldview.
He was personally involved in this famous bank heist in Tbilisi or Tiflis in Georgia in 1907.
This is one of the ways in which the Bolsheviks, the communists would raise funds was, of course, by taking other people's money.
Taking other people's money, which then once they were in power, that's literally what they did.
They still do that.
Yeah, they still do that.
So that was one of the ways in which they would raise funds.
They would just rob banks.
In this case, it was like it was sort of like an.
Unfortunately, a lot of the bills were marked.
Not able to really use them all.
But Lenin was very impressed by this.
I mean, one way in which I have to say Stalin, again, not that I find him sympathetic, but He was not usually involved in sort of street demonstrations, street violence.
He would often shy away from any risky situation.
You know, after the July days of 1917, when they tried to arrest him, he adopted a disguise.
You know, he fled into the Finnish countryside.
Stalin was arrested many, many, many times, sent to Siberia.
He spent the war actually in Siberia, in the underground, whereas Lenin was often, you know, he's in Switzerland, you know, kind of living it up in Zurich, of all places.
I think he always had, again, a little bit more.
Trotsky tried to caricature him as this kind of comrade card index because he controlled the personnel files and he was a bureaucrat.
That wasn't really the case.
He did that too, but he also had charisma.
He had strength.
And he had ruthlessness.
I mean, again, one of the other theories about why he became quite so violent in the 1930s is that, well, there's this line he said, Now, after the death of his wife, he lost his last warm feeling for other human beings.
And what's curious about this is that you might think he would say this after his wife, Nadia, committed suicide in 1932.
In fact, he said it after his first wife died in 1907.
But when his second wife committed suicide after this night when he had kind of berated her in public, so maybe he felt vaguely guilty about it.
But he responded to this very kind of Stalin-esque way by making sure he had lists of anyone who was there that night, you know, who knew anything about it, which might be compromising and eventually had a lot of them executed.
So he was he was obviously ruthless in the way that he would deal with his enemies.
Now, he had a certain, you might call it almost like a flexibility in foreign policy, as you might say from the Molotov-Rippentrop Pact.
He could be opportunistic.
But I think, and this is one of my big arguments in the book, he did have a kind of central animating motivation or principle in foreign policy, which was effectively to exacerbate wars and conflict in the capitalist world because that is what would lead communists to triumph.
I mean, that's very Hegelian in some ways, right?
Create the tension and dialectical continue.
But isn't that at odds with what so many communists will say, that America is this colonialist, internationalist project?
Communism seems to be far more internationalistically expansionist than...
An example of this, so in the book and also in this op-ed that I wrote in the Wall Street Journal on the 80th anniversary of the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, this is what they signed in April 1941, which is perverse in a lot of ways.
One of the things people never understood about Hitler's strategy or his complete lack of strategy in the war is that Japan had been hostile to the Soviet Union really for most of its existence.
and said they'd actually intervened in the Russian Civil War alongside Britain, France, and the U.S. They had fought against the Soviets in the Far East in 1938, 1939, and they were, of course, allied to Nazi Germany.
And so why did Hitler not even bother telling them about his plans to invade Russia?
He didn't trust them, and so he didn't tell them.
Then the foreign minister of Japan...
Now, what I pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, and I talk about this in the book, is that Stalin's goal in signing a neutrality pact with Japan is very clearly to try to pressure or hint or suggest that it might be better if the Japanese attacked British and U.S. positions in the Pacific instead of the Soviet Union, which is, of course, precisely what then happened.
Part of this was because also Stalin gave it a bit of a shove.
He had agents in Washington, including Harry Dexter White, second in command of the Treasury Department.
Well, some of them were on the payroll.
Some of them, like Harry Dexter White, were more like just sort of volunteers who sympathized with communism or with the Soviet Union.
Yes, he was actually heavily involved, among other things, in even the creation of things like the World Bank and Bretton Woods in 1944.
I guess McCarthy was right.
But you say he wrote up what?
So he wrote up the so-called whole note.
So this is basically the last sort of diplomatic communication with Japan right before Pearl Harbor.
So basically it's sort of this ultimatum.
You must withdraw all of your troops from China and from Indochina, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, etc., or else.
Just basically like you have to withdraw them all because by then the U.S. had effectively had a de facto embargo on things like oil, all these things Japan desperately needed.
The Japanese were trying to negotiate some type of a compromise.
They had a couple of different proposals which were rejected by the Roosevelt administration.
We know that the whole.
It was actually based on a draft handed to him by his Soviet handler, a man called Detali Pavlov, earlier in 1941.
So the reason I got in trouble with the Russian government was I pointed this out, that the whole point of the neutrality pact was to try to basically encourage the Japanese to attack the U.S. and Britain, and the Russian foreign ministry—there's actually a tweet on the 4th of July a couple of years ago.
They denounced me by name, and they said that the Soviet Union was a peace-loving empire, which, of course, had no imperialistic or warlike intentions of any kind.
Right, right, sure.
But so that was the goal.
More talk in the book of Europe, just in part because that's kind of where a lot of the really dramatic and also devastating military action and so many of the casualties of the deaths are happening.
In a lot of ways, Stalin's foreign policy was actually more effective in Asia, because you think about this, it's almost incredible the way it worked out for him.
So, signs of neutrality back with Japan.
Japan attacks the United States and British positions across the Pacific.
Then for the next four years, the U.S. wages an extremely expensive, bloody, so-called island-hopping campaign against Japan.
They could have gone in through China instead.
That's another question which has to do with Soviet influence operations.
And then at the very end of the war, Stalin's position, which he laid out at both Tehran and Yalta, it was so cynical, it was unbelievable.
He literally said, you know, I will not enter the war against Japan.
Roosevelt asked him dozens of times, can you help us against Japan?
It's not just that Stalin didn't help.
U.S. pilots who would stage bombing raids on Japan, who had to land on Soviet soil, were arrested and interned in Soviet labor camps during the war, including the pilots of the famous Doolittle Raid of April 1942, who were actually sensationalized in a Hollywood blockbuster film, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo.
They left this part out of the movie.
They were arrested and sent to Soviet labor camps.
It's such a great point.
I have to interrupt you.
I guess it's just I've never heard it.
Russia didn't help us at all in the Pacific theater.
Right.
They're constantly bellyaching about the lack of a second front, which I guess Sicily and Italy didn't count.
Their excuse, I guess, their excuse was that we had our hands full because Hitler's near Moscow.
Right.
That the war is in Europe, and three months after the war in Europe ends, and not a moment sooner, we will enter the war in Japan at a price, and that price is negotiated in Tehran, which basically included the Soviet sphere of influence in Manchuria, North China, Korea, Sakhalin, the Kura Islands, and so on.
So I don't want to let something slip.
I've never heard anyone say this either.
We could have based our operation out of China.
Right.
Why didn't we?
There are a number of reasons that we didn't.
I mean, it would have been difficult because the Japanese had made these moves down into Indonesia and Burma.
But there was a lot of talk all through 1943.
There was a guy called Chenow in the U.S. Army Air Forces, and he thought that we should basically focus more on China.
We had to open up the Burma Road for supply.
He also thought we could do a lot with air power alone.
But to get serious war supplies to China, we would have had to go in through the Bay of Bengal, this whole operation they called Buccaneer.
The problem was that...
By communist agents in Washington and in Chongqing, his kind of capital during the war.
Specifically, there were three guys in the Treasury Department.
One I already mentioned, Harry Dexter White.
There's a guy called Frank Koh.
Another guy called Solomon Adler.
It's amazing.
It's incredible.
So Solomon Adler was literally in charge of the money pipeline of our aid that was supposed to go to China.
He convinced Roosevelt to cut off the money because he said Chiang Kai-shek and his wife are really corrupt and they're going to waste it.
And then Stilwell, the commander of U.S. Swartz is there, who's supposed to be this, like, real tough-talking, you know, salty guy.
They call him Vinegar Joe.
Mostly because he kept insulting Chiang Kai-shek.
You know, he would call him Little Bastard.
He would call him Peanut.
And he would constantly talk about how he wasn't really fighting Japan.
It was the communists who were fighting Japan.
He thought that because that's what the communists told him.
It was a lie in every possible sense.
What you're saying is that in the Great War that is the modern crucifixion of modernity, it's the most important event that we talk about in reference, good and evil is centered around how we view World War II.
Right.
And bad is not Hitler.
That's basically what, if you set...
You're saying in that war so much of the political decisions were influenced by communist sleeper cell agents in our government?
Both the agents in our government and also people who weren't necessarily answering to Soviet handlers but who were extremely powerful.
Harry Hopkins, for example, who's literally sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom for most of the war, he's almost like Roosevelt's right-hand man, and he's running the Lend-Lease operation where we're basically ramping up the vast hydraulic machinery of the entire U.S. economy.
We retool, for example, the pork industry so that we could supply the Soviets with the famous spam, the Tusanka.
But not just that.
We were sending them millions of tiny little packets of dehydrated borscht because that's what they like to eat.
We were feeding the Red Army.
We were giving them their boots.
We were giving them their clothes.
We were giving them their fuel.
We were giving them the rubber for their tires.
We were sending them trucks and Jeeps and Harley Davidson motorcycles, some of which were actually re-gifted to Stalin's Polish stooges so they could go around and hunt Polish patriots with them.
Do you think F...
Was he actually quietly sympathetic to the Soviet Union?
Oh, he was absolutely sympathetic, and he wasn't that quiet about it.
Philosophically?
Philosophically, again, he was not communist, but I think he thought that the Soviets were kind of on the side of progress, and he thought that European imperialism was on the way out.
So he consistently favored Stalin over Churchill, to an extreme degree.
Just to make sure we're all keeping score at home.
Who killed more of their own people, Stalin or Hitler?
Oh, Stalin, undoubtedly.
By how much more?
If you count up all the deaths throughout Stalin's reign, you'd probably have to get up close to, again, just kind of spitballing a figure, somewhere around 30 or 35 million.
It certainly outstrips the Holocaust.
And as far as Hitler killing his own people, a lot of them were German.
Jews, obviously, were killed.
A lot of the people killed by the Nazis were not German.
So if you're talking about his own people, it gets a little bit dicey.
So, I'm just asking for a reason.
Stalin killed maybe 3 to 4x what Hitler did of whatever population that they were overseeing.
I mean, almost certainly, you could say, if you're talking about the consequences of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, where the Soviets allegedly lose 27 million people, you could maybe put that in Hitler's tally, I guess, even if a lot of them were actually killed by the Soviets.
Under that, wasn't Stalin equally the villain then of World War II?
Well, I guess that's the difficult question because the war ends up becoming so aligned with Stalin's interests on almost every front.
This is one of the big themes of the book, that he's kind of the key victor.
It's not that the U.S. doesn't gain anything from the war.
Basically, the U.S. pushes the British Empire into receivership and starts picking it apart, a little bit like going down like a scarecrow or a vulture or something.
But Stalin gains territory.
He actually gains an empire.
The armies that would eventually conquer Asia and then link up with Mao and supply Mao with a lot of his weapons, that is the Soviet Far Eastern armies, were mostly supplied with weapons, largesse, war materiel, foodstuffs, boots, etc., by the United States, the U.S. taxpayer.
Just to give you an example of the volume we're talking about, about 8.25 million tons of war materiel was shipped to Vladivostok by the United States during the war.
through Japanese territorial waters when we were at war with Japan.
That's on the eastern.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
Japan let it through because the Japanese thought, oh, this is great.
The U.S. is sending all their weapons to Stalin where they're not fighting us as well as they might.
And so they kind of just let it through.
And so then Stalin waits until after the U.S. has done all the work against Japan until Japan has, because the U.S. chose not to supply China, Japan had started removing more and more soldiers back to the home island.
So Manchuria, which is where Japan originally was, is almost stripped of troops by the time Stalin says, OK, now we move.
So Stalin then makes his move in Asia with U.S. weapons and supplies basically into territories vacated by the Japanese because of the U.S. war against Japan.
So how should then, based on your book, Stalin's War, and this is fascinating.
I could talk to you for hours.
How should we revise the view of FDR?
He is viewed as, from historians, one of the greatest presidents ever.
But based on your view, does...
I think that's largely true.
I have to give Roosevelt credit that when he wanted to, he could actually play a kind of ruthless rail politic.
And this is a real contrast, his approach to Britain versus his approach to Russia.
The Lend-Lease Act, although applied to Britain, the British actually had to pay us for it.
In the Basis for Destroyers Deal of 1940, for example, we basically picked off the carcass of the British Empire in the Western Hemisphere.
Britain didn't finish paying off her World War II debts to the United States.
So when he wanted to put the squeeze on in the interests of the United States, he could.
For whatever reason, he either had this sympathy, this soft spot, this blind spot for Stalin, which I think in the end did have very deleterious consequences.
So the Lendley story, I'm willing to give Roosevelt the benefit of the doubt, let's say, in the first year or two after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
I might disagree, but there's a rational argument to be made that the U.S. had a national interest in ensuring that the Soviet Union wouldn't collapse.
Maybe Hitler would have been a greater threat had he had the resources of Russia at his disposal.
Yes.
which might have ended with a kind of sunset clause after the first year, the first or the second protocol in June 42 or June 43. So after Stalingrad, that's in the winter of 42, 43, or after Kursk in the summer of They're clearly not going to lose.
We could have slowed it down.
We could have said, look, okay, we're happy to help you survive.
Now you're on your own because we don't want to send you 400,000 trucks so that you can invade Europe.
Once the barbarians are not at your gate, we're going to calm things down a little bit.
Instead, I don't know if you remember the movie Spaceballs, but you remember instead of, I think instead of hyperspeed, they had ludicrous speed.
Instead, after 43, when it was no longer really needed, there wasn't much of an argument for it, we ramped it up to ludicrous speed.
In the most generous interpretation of FDR's own view, what did he think a post-war Europe would look like?
Well, this is an interesting question.
I think in some ways Harry Hopkins is right-hand man.
He argued this a bit more explicitly than Roosevelt.
I mean, Roosevelt definitely wanted the Soviets to be a partner.
And Hopkins was a communist adjacent guy?
Hopkins was absolutely full-throated sympathizer, not a party member.
Sure.
But he was saying that basically because the Soviets would be all-powerful, it was a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, we're making them all-powerful with our Lend-Lease aid.
Because of that, we should do everything we can to please them and befriend them.
That was Hopkins'position.
Roosevelt, again, is not quite as extreme, but I think he sees the Soviets as a partner in creating this new world order based on the United Nations with European empires all kind of being pushed to the curb.
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Here's another question that I'm curious about.
Behind you is a picture of Churchill.
I like Churchill a lot.
Was Churchill worried or aware that FDR and his inner circle was quietly sympathetic to Stalin?
Did Churchill express any concern about this and what a post-war Europe would look like?
He did, although one of the things that I do in the book— No one's perfect.
As early as 1939, because Churchill was so focused on Hitler and Nazi Germany and the German threat, he had a good relation with the Soviet ambassador, and he was beginning to signal, even before he became prime minister at the beginning of the war, he's first lord of the admiralty, before the war, he's out of the government entirely.
But he was kind of suggesting that Britain might look favorably on Soviet moves in the Baltic region or in Finland because he thought they'd be a good counterweight to Hitler.
He had talked about the idea of a grand alliance as early as 1938.
So he thought that in the end, the best way to defeat Nazi Germany would be by getting the U.S. and the Soviet Union into the war.
That was a large part of what he was thinking in the famous period of the kind of the finest hour when he's giving these famous speeches.
He's thinking, look, we need to hold out long enough so that the U.S. and the Soviets will eventually bail us out.
One of the ironies is that although he was much flippant.
Again, it's not that he was in any way sympathetic to communism, but he was friendlier to Russia.
He had the sense of almost like Russia's sort of brotherhood in arms from the First World War.
There's this great power.
The great power that we're going to need them.
And so he writes Stalin all these letters saying, don't you know Hitler's going to turn on you, etc., etc.
He was right.
Yeah, he was right.
Stalin never responded to his letters because Stalin was very loyal to Hitler until after Hitler, of course, broke with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union.
Go ahead.
So Churchill, he did put up some fight on things like whether the Soviets should be able to have control of the Baltic countries.
You know, the Soviet position in Poland.
Up to a point, Poland's borders.
By the end of the war, you know, he is almost willing to go to war with the Soviets over Poland.
He actually proposes this.
He calls this Operation Unthinkable.
Actually, that's not what he called it.
That's what his generals called it.
They called it Operation Unthinkable.
He was actually proposing a war to sort of eject the Soviets from Poland by 1945.
I think he had some regret about his own role at Tehran and Yalta, but of course, mostly it was because Roosevelt just would not put up any fight at all over Poland.
Was Churchill infiltrated as well?
The British government was definitely infiltrated.
There was a lot of Soviet influence operations in the British government as well.
The famous so-called Cambridge Five, actually about nine spies at Cambridge.
They'd infiltrated the BBC, MI6, MI4.
Cambridge.
Yeah, Cambridge.
They had a lot of influence in Cairo.
And this actually did play a role.
And I think the one area in the book where I come down probably hardest on Churchill is that I think he misread the situation in Yugoslavia.
So in 1943, based on...
They're hosting a royal Yugoslav government in exile in London.
Its legatee inside the country is a general called Mikhailovich, and his forces are called the Chetniks.
They're sort of mostly Serbs, but sort of like Yugoslav royalists who are allies of Britain.
And Churchill cuts off Mikhailovich and throws all his support behind Joseph or Yosef Broz.
Tito, basically the communist, not realizing that Tito is actually answering to Stalin.
And for the next almost a year and a half, it's actually Britain that gets most of the arms and supplies to Tito because the Soviets have no ability to actually supply him.
But the whole time, and this is something...
We know that Tito was not only responding and talking with Stalin and Molotov, but he was literally even reporting on Churchill's envoy, Fitzroy McLean.
He was fully loyal.
I mean, at one point, Churchill gets really shocked.
He doesn't know where Tito is, and he can't figure out where he went.
And, of course, where did he go?
He went to Moscow.
So he got played, you know, at times.
there was almost this romantic idea that, look, Tito's this kind of guerrilla fighter, and he's supposedly killing more Germans than Mihailovic.
He thinks this because that's what...
In fact, the Chetniks were not perfect, but they were definitely doing more damage to German forces.
I know this because I've seen the German files too.
So saying a new history of World War II, if you had to summarize what is that history then?
We've been going around it.
If you had to say...
If you were in charge of how this was taught to children and to kids, how would you present that?
It's difficult because when you're talking about kids, I obviously don't want to disabuse them of...
But I do think we need to reckon with the consequences of the Second World War.
First of all, for our own country, the erosion of our own basically domestic liberties, the way in which we ramped up the security state, created these organizations like the OSS, the future CIA, the Lend-Lease Administration.
Congress effectively forfeits a lot of its supervisory role over U.S. foreign policy.
You know, too much power is probably invested in the executive branch.
There are a lot of consequences for the U.S., but also for the world.
You know, that is to say, if it's a war of liberation, you know, tell that to the Poles.
It's an amazing fact that Poland has still not received reparations from either Germany or the Soviet Union after being, of course, invaded and largely obliterated and turned into a smoking ruin by them in the Second World War.
As recently as a couple of years ago, Poland levied a new reparations claim against Germany for about $1.3 trillion.
And it was rejected, as always, because the claim is that Poland forfeited her right to reparations in 1953.
That is to say, when she was an occupied Soviet communist satellite state.
American soldiers, American pilots, the Seabees in the Pacific War.
Heroic feats of endurance, engineering prowess, bravery.
We should not underemphasize that.
That's obviously a part of the story.
But we do want to ask what they were fighting for and what the result of that war was.
Because the real problem I see with the good war kind of story, narrative myth, is that people are always trotting out Munich and appeasement.
And this is the story which people use to justify almost any U.S. What's wrong with it at its core?
Well, what's wrong with it is that the U.S., first of all, Doesn't always know what it's doing.
Does not always produce the desired results.
In fact, oftentimes the results are counterproductive.
We've talked a lot about the Second World War, the U.S. intervention in the First World War.
I obviously am not going to go into all of the details of the story.
I know very little about what we're doing.
But so the interesting fact is that the U.S. supposedly goes to war because of violations of kind of freedom of navigation and freedom of the seas with German U-boat attacks, and there's some vague notion that Wilson gloms onto the way he justifies to combat it.
is that it's a war for democracy.
Or as the phrase is sometimes, A war to make the world safe for democracy.
What U.S. intervention does instead in the First World War is by defeating the Germans who were then occupying Russia, it makes the world safe for communism.
Because the Germans had sort of midwife.
They sent Lenin to Russia.
They're occupying Russia.
Basically, it allows the communist regime to survive.
And so if we midwife communism into existence with our intervention in the First World War, the Second World War, we liberated Western Europe.
I think that's fair to say.
We liberated some of the countries of Southeast Asia, although it didn't always go well in places like Vietnam.
But most of northern Asia, eventually all of China, and of course the vast bulk of Eastern Europe, ended up under totalitarian communist rule.
So if that was the result of the war, then I do think we have to ask whether the war aims, again, maybe...
The brokering of the war.
The brokering of the war, the negotiations, the decisions made, the allocation of resources, and above all, the diplomacy that, you know, effectively, we ended up handing over so much of Eurasian to Stalin.
So, yeah, so then Yalta, that was the first time all three of those guys met.
No, they met at Tehran.
FDR went to Tehran.
Amazingly.
That's quite a jaunt.
They had to negotiate to the last minute.
Roosevelt finally said, I can't go.
It's just too far.
It's so far that I won't even be able to get back to sign bills from Congress in time.
That was back when you didn't have Air Force One.
I mean, you had a plane.
Right.
It's a very dangerous trip.
The trip to Yalta was even more dangerous because by then Roosevelt's blood pressure was so elevated that the planes could not go above, I believe, 6,000 feet.
because of the lower oxygen levels.
So they basically had to deal with the risk of kind of flak and German anti-aircraft fire, basically because, you know, his health, he would not have survived the flight otherwise.
And they didn't have the depressurization technology that we have.
Apparently not.
Or pressurization, yeah.
It was extremely risky.
You know, he did make it.
That's something.
But no, Tehran, this is the thing everyone talks about Yalta.
And Yalta's kind of where, finally, it's sort of There were some agreements there that were new.
The one regarding the Soviet prisoners of war, it's really kind of shocking, where basically Churchill and Roosevelt agree, and the U.S. later called this Operation Keelhaul.
This is basically referring to this hideous naval punishment where you'd be kind of like dragged behind a ship.
This is how they describe the repatriation of Soviet prisoners of war who did not want to go home because they were viewed by Stalin's government as traitors.
So Yalta.
Just the conference.
Right.
Why is it that Stalin got to keep every country he invaded?
Well, a lot of this, the thing that, again, people focus on Yalta, and this is one way in which they can justify it.
And they could say, well, look, by the time of Yalta, the Soviet armies had already moved into places like not all of Poland, but like they had actually moved into Warsaw.
You know, they'd started moving into places like Hungary and Romania, and they were actually occupying Bulgaria.
So you could say, well, it's almost like a done deal.
It's sort of a de facto thing they're just recognizing.
The problem is that Roosevelt actually agreed to nearly all of these spheres of influence at Tehran in November, 1943, when the Soviets were still struggling to cross the Dnieper region
His famous last stand, the Mediterranean strategy, where he wants to have more time for the 500,000 odd troops that the Allies by then have in Italy, the British, the Americans, Canadians, some French, to maybe do something in the Mediterranean, maybe an amphibious landing somewhere in the Adriatic, maybe bring Turkey into the war.
Somehow try to kind of push into the Balkans, the underbelly of Europe, maybe even get there before...
Roosevelt briefly entertained the idea and then someone apparently passed him a note under the table.
And it was almost certainly Hopkins telling him to cool it.
And so he dropped the idea.
He insisted on the earliest possible date for D-Day.
And it wasn't just the earliest possible date for D-Day or Overlord.
It was specifically that they couldn't do anything in the Mediterranean.
They had to send all the landing craft to England.
They couldn't do any real offensive operations in the Mediterranean.
So that's the last time they really could have influenced the kind of future course of Eastern Europe.
Not only did they agree not to do this when Roosevelt sided with Stalin against Churchill, it wasn't even subtle.
He just sided with Stalin against Churchill.
In addition to this...
And what's amazing about this is Stalin actually, sorry, Roosevelt actually revealed to Stalin even before his own advisers or the U.S. public that he was going to run for election in 1944.
And the reason he did this was because he said, look, you can have the Baltic countries and you could probably have Poland too, but just be quiet about it until after next year's elections.
That's literally what he told him.
He even let the Soviets basically carve up what had been kind of the eastern part of Poland that the Soviets had been assigned in 1939 and then to push Poland's borders westward into Germany.
What was amazing about this was at one point one of the British delegation actually said, are you actually proposing you want us to sign off on the Molotov-Rippentrop borders?
And what was great was I think Molotov's line was, you can call them what you like.
We consider them natural and just.
Yeah, they did.
They signed off on basically the Molotov-Rip and Trump borders.
So Roosevelt had already really agreed to all this, and Tehran, again, at a point in the Soviet armies, were nowhere near Poland yet.
They still hadn't even really pushed into Belarusia.
They were still in central Ukraine.
And so that's, to me, the really shocking thing.
Again, by Yalta, you could sort of make the argument, well, there's not a lot they could do other than maybe threaten to withhold, lend-lease aid, and all the rest of it.
Yalta is where some of the famous lines were uttered, though.
I think one of them was...
no, no.
And I think at one point it was Roosevelt who said that the election should be as clean as Caesar's wife, and Stalin replied, Caesar's wife was no virgin.
Although she was the head of the Vistigil Virgins, apparently.
That's so funny.
Not exactly chaste.
So he got his way.
So in closing, let's kind of connect all the ties together.
Let's connect all this together.
It says the rise and fall and rise of communism.
And we're here in the West in America right now.
Do you think communism is going to make a third or fourth attempt here in the We certainly have a lot of CCP-influenced operations.
They've all been well-documented, widely discussed, everything from universities, of course, to, well, Washington.
Halls of Congress and so on.
The lockdowns in the COVID period were, I think, clearly imported from communist China.
So certain policies have come over.
So it might be a kind of, I think, more subtle or insidious type of development.
I don't think it'll be quite as obvious as it was when, let's say, you know, the period of the Comintern or the Cold War, the Soviets would send out these advisors and they had these parties that answered to them that were funded by Moscow.
The CCP doesn't operate in quite the same way.
I think it's a little subtler in the way that it spreads its influence.
Not always, but a little bit subtler.
So I think what we really have to watch out for are both those type of influence operations, but also, frankly, what we're doing to ourselves.
The censorship, the surveillance, a lot of which, of course, they have tools at their disposal now.
I mean, the Soviets could only have dreamed of having something like social media and Twitter and Facebook where the government could have potential backdoors into our private communications.
They had to spend money to go out and bug places and send hundreds of thousands of spies and agents out to kind of keep track of people's thoughts.
Now many of us just volunteer it for free.
So I think the real thing we have to worry about is, again, maybe some new variety or new blend of statist surveillance and control of the population.
Various periods, great proletarian cultural revolution, these kind of offensives which are partly directed from above but partly maybe burble up from below.
We really have to, I think, be careful just about defending our own liberties.
This is a final question.
What would you say is the greatest misunderstanding about World War II that if you had your way to correct, the world would be a better place?
I think the biggest misunderstanding is probably this idea of the liberation of Europe.
And maybe, again, some of it is selective that more of us have probably been to France or we have some connection to Italy, and so we kind of know this part of the story.
The story is much darker in Eastern Europe.
It's much darker in Asia.
In some ways, the war never really ended in Asia.
In Eastern Europe, maybe it ended with the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.
I mean, in some form, as it's still going on, that, for example, as some of my Polish friends or people who've read my book have reminded me of something I probably vaguely knew but hadn't really thought about until they told me, there are no statues of Churchill in Poland.
I was in Poland a couple of years ago on the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, so this would have been, I guess, the 75th anniversary.
So this would be 2019.
And the scene was just absolutely unreal.
I mean, with sirens going off and smoke in the air and almost everyone in the country participating in this kind of ritual about, you know, which was really kind of this doomed uprising that just led to nothing but kind of horrors for the population.
but it's still sacred there.
The cause is sacred, but it's not...
I mean, it's a story of a war that the Poles fought bravely and on principle but lost virtually everything and were betrayed and abandoned by the West.
So I think we have to remember that side of the story.
Stalin's War to Overthrow the World.
Sean McMeekin, this was wonderful.
Any closing thoughts?
Not really, Charles.
It's just a great pleasure to be on.
Thank you.
I'm so grateful you had me on the show.
This was a great conversation.
Again, check out, you have nine books now?
Yep, I'm working on my tenth.
What is the tenth?
The tenth is a more general history of the 20th century.
There are these versions you might call the short 20th century.
They go from about 1914 to 89. Wrap it up a bit with a bow of the fall of communism.
and as you can see I don't think the story's over but I'm going to frame it a bit differently I'm going to go all the way back to 1900 and then forward to 2025 so the idea is less a story about either just ideology or just the world wars and communism but rather a story about Europe the west more broadly including the United States but particularly Europe it's placed in the world in 1900 and then Europe today so it's basically a decline and fall story phenomenal he bumps along the way Sean McMeekin thank
