大家好 歡迎來到不明白波克 我是主持人遠立節目開始前 跟大家說個事 第二季不明白傑江與9月6日在華山頓舉辦現下及線上票都已經開始報名一個好消息是 我們將給不明白波克的付費 訂閱用戶與捐贈人贊送一張免費的線上票詳請請到波克討論區或我們的社交媒體賬號查看並登記報名本次賺票也適用於9月1日前加入付費訂閱的聽眾感謝大家一直以來的陪伴我們希望能得到你們的長期支持把這個節目長久的辦下去目前先下票還剩於一些名額歡迎大家來華盛頓一起過節今天的節目很特別是英文帶中文字幕嘉賓是著名歷史學家胡佛研究所高級研究員Steven Cautkin 考特金教授他是兩卷本斯大領鑽的作者正在撰寫第三句他對斯大林的研究員Steven Kotkin 考特金教授他是兩卷本斯大林鑽的作者正在鑽寫第三句

他對斯大林的研究重塑了我們對共產集權運作邏輯的理解

他的研究超越了蘇聯 延伸到全球卑權主義

並越來越多的轉向當代中國

在這期節目裡 我們談到了他為什麼說斯大林而不是毛澤東是獨裁者的最高點範為什麼希特勒多次遭遇暗殺而斯大林卻沒有如何從斯大林三十年代的大清洗來理解習近平目前正在進行的清洗對於列寧主義集權政權最大的威脅是什麼為什麼斯大林、毛澤東和習近平都不願意指定接班人以及很多很多有意思的討論這次迫力用英文錄製節目時常也遠超過去的任何一期因為我相信科特金教授的研究對於理解當下的中國至關重要在YouTube上我們為聽眾朋友們準備了精心製作的中文字幕最後再說一句我建議聽眾朋友們對比無國官教授前兩期錄製的習近平失去權力了以及即將在不明白解善我和蔡霞老師的對話為何習近平與中共必有一道但不是惡鬥這是一個混亂令人不安的歷史時刻有太多的不明白還好我們有這麼多優秀的學者在這裡傳到解惑Steven, Welcome to不明白Thank you for the honor of the invitationYou described Stalin as the gold standard for dictators. Some Chinese, I'm sure, will question why not Mao? Mao people died and Mao's rule and he built a more pervasive code of personality, some, you know, many would argue. What makes Stalin's dictatorship more consequential? Yes, it's a very good question. It depends how you measure. Certainly if you measure in terms of sheer victims, Mao exceeds anyone. Stalin, including with Lenin, is responsible for maybe 18 to 20 million deaths, directly through executions and indirectly through famine resulting from his policies and disease. Mao is responsible for at least double the number of deaths of Stalin. Again, it depends. The sources are difficult here because no one measured the number of deaths and communist China, of course, they're only estimates, but certainly the lowest figure one would give for Mao is 40 million double Stalin and probably a lot higher. So if you measured solely in terms of the number of victims, not just those who died, but those subjected to his rule, Mao would come on top. You know, often the communists talk about in China how they raised 700 million people out of poverty. Well, of course, the Chinese communist regime put them into poverty in the first place. Per capita GDP during Mao cultural revolution was $200 equivalent at the exchange rate per year, $200 per person per year. So you had more than a billion people living in the poverty. So and they raised themselves out of poverty by the way it wasn't the Chinese regime that did that. So if you look in terms of the deaths and in terms of the impact on even the people who survived, very consequential Mao's dictatorship. But there are a couple of important caveats or qualifications here. First, Mao came to power because of Stalin. The Chinese often complained that Stalin did not support their revolution from the beginning or enough, insufficient they charged him with support of communist regime. That Stalin doubted the Chinese Communist Party's chances to win in the Civil War. All of that is true. Stalin did doubt their chances, and Stalin did waver in his support. But in the end, without Stalin, there is no way the Chinese Communist could have come to power. There is no way Mao could have come to power without the decisive support, especially military support and weapons that Stalin did provide the Chinese Communist Party in the end. So in some ways Mao is derivative of Stalin, so that's one qualification. A second qualification is in terms of the military industrial complex. China under Mao did not have a military industrial complex. Sure, it had a large army, sure, it had some weapons systems, but Stalin built one of the most formidable military industrial complexes ever. Colossal and strong. In fact, that's how they were part of the victors in World War II over the Nazi land army. And in some ways China's military industrial complex as small as it was was again derived from the Soviet Union, from Soviet aid, both finance but also technology, experts. So in terms of just the sheer power of the state, Stalin's state was much stronger. And then the final qualification I would introduce is that Stalin was a micro-manager. Stalin managed policy day-to-day across all areas from culture, including novels and films and what was prohibited and what was allowed

editing drafts of Soviet novels before they were published, editing some of the films before they were released, all the way through production and industrial production, personnel, ideology, and so many ways Stalin managed the whole society and he did it for a really long time. Mao was not the micro-manager that Stalin was. So if you look at how Mao and his regime were in part derivative of Stalin, if you look at the size of the military industrial complex in the might of the state, and you look at the day-to-day management of the dictatorship, Stalin in my mind is still the gold standard, even though Mao had more victims overall. Some observers argue that Xi Jinping entered the office with a clear ambition to return

China to a more moist authoritarian system, others say a more gradual process. Xi became significantly more authoritarian by the end of his first term. There are comparable trajectory in Stalin's rise. More broadly, what do historical patents tell us about how modern autocrates consolidate power over time? Yeah, very good difficult question. The Stalin regime is accessible to us because the regime fell and we have the documentation. Xi Jinping's regime and his personal wishes and intentions are still hidden from us. One of the arguments that I make in my Stalin biography is that it was the system that helped create Stalin, not just the other way around. In other words, we see Stalin as a person not fully formed, not the Stalin that we know from later. When he takes, when he first takes power, it's the experience of building the personal dictatorship inside the Leninist regime and then exercising that kind of power after he accumulates it and the consequences of it that makes style in the person he is So that's not to say he lacks a personality. Of course he has a personality They used to joke under cruise chef when he gave the cult of the personality speech in 1956 They used to say to him Nikita. Yes, there was a cult of the personality, but there was also a personality. You know, and why? That the fruit of the earth maybe wasn't on that same level. So, I had a personality, but I would say he was formed as much by the experience of being a dictator and eventually a despot, of building that power up and of exercising that power and seeing and experiencing the consequences. And so when Xi Jinping comes to power as the top leader of China in 2012, he may have certain proclivities, certain ideas, certain wishes. It's hard to say because he concealed his intentions. His greatest talent, to the extent that he has any talent, I wouldn't exaggerate his talent, but his greatest talent was in concealing his intentions or his ideas from those who helped elevate him and then revealing them only later. But it's likely, again, we don't have the internal documentation and we have to be careful about the limits of our knowledge. But it's likely that the experience of being China's top leader has exerted tremendous influence on him. It's really difficult to manage that system. That system is gigantic. It's colossal in terms of the number of interest groups it has. It's really big stretching from domestic policy to foreign policy and encompassing the entire globe. That experience would have a big impact on anybody who was thrust into that. Plus you have the trajectory of the regime that you must take into account. Xi Jinping comes to power 2012 after a long trajectory of the country doing really well economically and building up its power domestically and externally. And so you could speculate of what Xi Jinping might have done had he come to power in 1979. Maybe he would have looked in 1979 more like Dong Xiaoping. Maybe the epoch shaped Dong Xiaoping as much as Dong Xiaoping the epoch. We have Donkshalping had come to power in 2012, instead of 1979, he would look more like Xi Jinping than he would look like the Donkshalping that we know from 1979. I don't want to discount the personality. And it's clear that Xi Jinping has certain beliefs and certain life experiences and from what we know, including from Joseph Teryjian's new biography of Xi Jinping's father, which is a miracle of academic scholarship and impeccable research. It's clear that there are very formative experiences on Xi Jinping as he's growing up and adhes serving in provincial capacities and other capacities on the way to the top leadership position. But it's also clear that the influence of both the position and the time period should also be taken into account when understanding Xi Jinping. So if you think about it this way, the Communist Party wants to preserve its monopoly at all costs. That's the number one goal. They want China to be great. They want China to be powerful. They want China to return to what they regard as its rightful place, as the dominant power in East Asia and beyond. But all that depends in their mind on the party retaining its position as the sole decider of all policies inside that big country. And so everything is subordinated to the continuation of the party's role. Once you allow liberalization in the economy, as Dungshel Ping did, in order to revive the economic prospects of the country, in order to get out of the poverty that mouse policies in the communist regime had placed the country in. Once you do that, you then risk the party's monopoly on power. And so you have to figure out how to balance the new private sector activity, the new independent sources of wealth and power that come from the private sector with the party's political monopoly. Dungshelping, as you know, never relaxed the party's political monopoly. There was no liberalization in the political sphere to the degree that there was in the economic sphere. And then don't successor, Zhang Zemin, has to confront this contradiction of relying on the private sector to revive the country, but worried about the private sector's threat to Communist Party monopoly. And John Zemin comes up with the three represents, you know this well. And so his idea is to allow the Communist Party membership for the capitalists to let the capitalists into the party. If the capitalists, the private sector people come into the party, maybe that will influence their behavior and help fourify the Communist Monopoly. So bringing the private sector into the party, of course this doesn't work. They do allow the private sector people to come into the party, but it doesn't reduce the threat to Communist Party Monopoly. It doesn't reduce the corruption, it doesn't reduce the power of the private sector. So Xi Jinping comes along after this. And he's not going to do the three represents, bring the capitalists into the Communist Party. He's going to do the opposite. He's going to force the Communist Party back into the private sector at all levels. Meaning Communist Party bosses are going to be the CEOs of the companies. They're going to run the boards. And so the private sector will no longer be a threat to the Communist Party's political monopoly because the party will go into the private sector rather than the private sector coming into the party. So I think just about any communist leader in China would have tried something similar as Xi Jinping has tried after the failure of Jiang Zemin's three represents. And so again, we understand that Xi Jinping has a personality. He has preferences, his relationship to Mao, his relationship to the Maoist era. All that is very important. But there's a dynamic and a trajectory at play here of protecting Communist Party rule at all costs, while needing to rely on the private sector for economic growth and job creation. And that gives you a certain kind of policy. First the one tried by Zhang and now the one tried by Xi Jinping. And you can see that it's logical that someone in his position coming to power in 2012 would address this problem and would address it in this particular way. So I don't want to diminish his personality, but I do want to talk about the larger structural dynamics. So as long as the Communist Party is in power, there would not be political reform because when Xi Jinping came to power so many Chinese

intellectuals and officials like, oh, he's going to be a reformer, his father was a reformer, he's going to reform the party politically. So his father was a reformer and a don't shall ping in a different epoch. Let's remember. I don't know what his father would have been like today, maybe more like the sun. So of course, the wishful thinking about what Xi Jinping would do, tremendous wishful thinking about reform. And let's remember it was all throughout the communist structures, this wishful thinking. It wasn't just far in observers. Many people in the Central Party School were

predicting that Xi Jinping would be a reformer. They wrote reformed blueprints for him for Xi Jinping in the period 2008, 2009, 2012. And of course, there naivete looks silly in retrospect. But there was a sense in which the regime had been successful with economic opening, so why not political opening even if it came later than the economic opening. The problem with these arguments or this wishful thinking was that you cannot be half communist, just like you cannot be half pregnant.

You either have the political monopoly

of the Communist Party

or the regime begins to unravel.

We know every case of attempted political liberalization,

not economic but political liberalization

under a communist rule,

ended up liquidating the system unintentionally. How did that happen? Well, you announced that there's going to be liberalization of the party's rule, that there will be debate inside the party's monopoly. And what happens is people say, Oh, debate is free now. We can talk freely. Some of them decide they don't want the Communist Party. They want other political parties. They want more like a Western system or the kind that you have in India, which is to say a constitutional order and a democracy. The kind you have in Taiwan, for example. And the Communist Party objects and says, no, that's not what we mean by political liberalization. We mean debate inside the Communist Party monopoly. So we retain the Party's rule, but we just allow liberalization of the Party's rule. Again, you cannot have half pregnant, have communism. What happens is the liberalization begins to be anti-communist and to unravel the communist monopoly as people demand other political parties and they demand that the freedoms granted for inside the party be used outside the party as well. And each time we see this Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Gorbachev in the 1980s, each time we see this attempted liberalization in the political sphere, the Communist Party's monopoly unravels, and there's no political reform equilibrium. There's no place where you begin to liberalize politically, and then you can stop and stabilize. Instead, once you open political liberalization, you begin to see this unraveling dynamic like a political bank run. And so then you either get a crackdown, which is what happened in Hungary in 56 when the Soviet Center tanks or Czechoslovakia in 68 again when the Soviet Center tanks. In the Gorbachev case the crackdown came very late and it failed and the communist regime unraveled. Once you've seen what's happened in the Soviet Union and you are a leader of the Chinese Communist Party, you will not permit political reform, political liberalization of Communist party rule because you know from the Soviet case it is self-destruction, auto-liquidation. And so all of them when they go to the party school and this has been true for a long time now, they learn two things. One, the idea, actually the myth that the East is rising and the West is declining, they hear this again and again and again. The decadence of the West, the decline of the West, the desperation of the West. And the other thing that they hear is Gorbachev. And how there will be no Gorbachev in China. There will be no attempted political liberalization, opening of the political system. China will not destroy Communist Party rule. Now, had Gorbachev not happened, China might have had a Gorbachev. It might have had some political leader who had illusions that you could could liberalize the communist system and keep it in power That there was a mysterious reform equilibrium where you began to open the system and it stabilized and it worked But now that they've seen the Gorbachev they will never do this so when Xi Jinping comes to power in 2012 and people are predicting he's going to be a political reformer, they don't understand the history of communism, of Leninist regimes, the structure of Leninist regimes, and therefore they don't understand that Xi Jinping is limited in the choices he can make. He's not going to open the system politically because that means he would be the man to destroy the system like Gorbachev. That opportunity, that pathway, is closed to China. They can open economically, as long as they retain tight political control over the economic sphere, the way she ging ping isintroducing, as we said, the party into the private sector. But opening up politically was not an option for him because of what happened under Gorbachev, and they study this again and again. The cadre all studied this at the party school, and of she Jingping took over the party school when he headed the secretary yet in the years before he became the primary leader and so he was the one that helped introduce this transformation from the party school advocating political opening to the party school studying how political opening is communist suicide and we will never do this in China. It's the machine of the party, not the Xi, just Xi alone, right? It's the, you're right, it's the structure of a Leninist regime. Now you can argue that not everybody believes in Marxism and China,

whether Xi Jinping believes in Marxism or not is hard for us to judge and we can have different opinions. Many people who are members of the Communist Party might not believe in Marxism. And so when you call it a Marxist Leninist regime, you invite debate about how Marxist is it really?

So I don't call it a Marxist-Leninist regime. I call it a Leninist regime because it has a Leninist structure, this inability to do political reform and survive. That's the nature of a Leninist regime. So China has a Leninist regime, whether it's Marxist or not Marxist again to be debated, but you cannot debate whether it has a Leninist regime or not. And Xi Jinping didn't create that Leninist regime. He's a product of it, and he's now a great defender of that regime and his lifelong mission is to ensure the survival of that regime and ensuring the survival is to forbid political reform in any meaningful sense. So it's about the structure of a leninist regime, not only his personal wishes or personality. Right, yeah. Starting executed hundreds of military commanders in the 1941 Red Army purge, and Xi Jinping is not executing his officers, but he has systematically removed top generals and military leaders. Do you see a name meaningful parallels between these two campaigns? And what do they reveal about how authoritarian leaders maintain control over the armed forces? Yeah, those are really difficult questions and important questions. It's the force ministries that are critical to the survival of the regime ultimately, because if the people become disillusioned, if they oppose the regime through acts of courage or other ways, the force that's left is the army and the security police. And so the army and the security police loyalty is critical to the survival of the regime. That's true of all authoritarian regimes, not just communist regimes. What's very interesting about Stalin is he murdered his military officers and his KGB generals, his KGB officers, while they were murdering others. So they were arresting people and putting them up on false charges, torturing them, forcing them to confess to imagine crimes. But some of those very torturers, some of those very people who are oppressing the others and sending them to execution themselves were arrested and executed, not afterwards, but during. This is one of the most amazing things of communism, that it kills its own loyalists. It destroys its own loyalists, people who don't waver in their loyalty are nonetheless targeted by the regime in its paranoia and its paroxysms. So, you know, Xi Jinping in the military is a deep fundamental question. We have many experts on this question. Let me approach it this way. Suppose you are an official in the communist system. And suppose you have provincial appointment. They send you to the province and you become the number two or the number one in the province. While serving there, you develop a bunch of relationships with people who are dependent on you, your subordinates. And then you get assigned to another province and the same thing happens. And you build up a team of loyalists who owe their lives and positions to you. By the time you get to Beijing, if you've served in two or three provinces, you have 10 or 15 loyalists for one province, 10 or 15 loyalists for another. So you get to Beijing. You have under 50 people who are your people. They are beholden to you and they wouldn't have their positions without you and they've worked under you for a long time and so you know their loyalty. Then you get to Beijing. And Beijing is this monster of interest groups and bureaucracy and the military and the secret police. You cannot rule this system with 50 loyalists that you've brought from the provinces. There is just no way to manage the scale of this with only 50 loyalists or even 100 loyalists that you've brought from the provinces. So you begin to discover how difficult, how challenging it is to oversee the security police, to oversee the military, to oversee this economic bureaucracy, to oversee the ideology, to oversee the foreign policy, the ambassadors, the spy networks. It's just enormous how big this system is and how many people are in it. So how are you going to manage? How is an individual going to accumulate the kind of power not on paper where he's proclaimed the paramount leader at the party congress or in other ritualistic settings? How do you have effective power, real power, so that when you're not in the room, when you're not present, when you're not at the meeting, you can rely on them to

implement your will and not sabotage, betray you, make alliances with others, falsely report what you're doing in order to gain a medal when you're doing the opposite. How can you do that as the paramount leader when the system is so big and you don't have enough loyalists?

And so you begin to try to find new loyalists. You begin to try to appoint people, two positions of authority, especially in the military, in the secret police, who are trusted by you and who owe their appointment to you and won't betray you or won't

collude with others behind your back. And then you appoint them and you discover that you know what? They're not all loyal only to me. Some of them are having conversations with others. Some of them are stealing money and not telling me about it. Some of them are promoting their own subordinates to positions of power without me knowing about it. Sometimes they're own children. And so you begin to see that the people you thought were your own loyalists, have their own interests, have their own networks, have their own patronage, have their their own families? Have their own wealth? And so what are you supposed to do? Who can you trust? Who's really your person? Remember, it's the secret police and the military that could potentially remove you. Those are the groups that you have the most to worry about. You're very reliant on them for your own personal security. We think of Xi Jinping as all powerful, but remember, somebody has to cook his food. Somebody has to taste his food. Somebody drives his cars, flies his airplanes, cleans his rooms, where he's present, helps him with his communications network. There's a gigantic apparatus that services the Supreme Leader at any given time. And all of those people are points of vulnerability. What about his food? Someone can come into the apartments where he's living or the offices where he works and look like they're cleaning but instead smearing poison across the desk or across the chair or across the computer screen. Someone can put something in his food. Someone can spray something with an aerosol in the air. Someone can collude to drive the car into an accident. Someone can plant a bomb. And you can use your imagination for all the possibilities. So you're living in a system where many, many people have access to you as a person. Many, many ministries or bodies, agencies have huge amount of power because of guns and access to cyber and other tools. And so you're trying to command all of this. You're trying to preside over it so that it remains loyal to you. And you again, you discover that some of these people have their own businesses on the side, have their own patronage networks and loyalties. So you can maybe create animosities and factions. You can maybe say, okay, this one in the military, how about if I put another person in the military and they fight with each other? And so each of them will snitch. They will tattle on each other to me. And I'll find out what they're up to because their rivals, their enemies, they hate each other. And so you begin to try to exacerbate the rivalries, the competition, the animosities within the system, the different interest groups. So you sum you reward and others you punish, and then those you rewarded, you punish a little bit, and you reward the ones you were punishing. This is a really difficult time consuming 24-7 task that you as the Supreme Leader cannot do. Your time is just limited on a day-to-day basis. You can't stretch across the whole system. So, again, you're going to be reliant on people. And three people, people, seven people cannot do this. Fifty people can't do this. A hundred people can't do this. This is many thousands and thousands and thousands of people in positions of power. Who could either be loyal or could pose a threat. Now, it's not easy for them to collude with each other, but it's something that you are concerned about and have to watch. So in the military, he appoints certain people. He discovers that they are his appointees, they're his loyalists, but they're doing some other things. And so he removes them. As you've seen now, we've had three people from the Central Military Commission, the highest body in the military, be removed and they were ostensibly Xi Jinping's people. So this tells you about the difficulties of managing a system this big. And so your power depends not solely on what's written on paper, but your credibility and authority with the cadre. So this is why Don't Shalping had much more power than Xi Jinping has. Because Don't Shalping commanded loyalty even when he was not in the room and not only out of fear, but out of belief and out of respect and out of admiration, and even if Dung didn't have every single formal position, he still had more power. People looked up to him as a man of the original revolution, as a man who rescued China from Mao's cultural revolution, as a man dedicated and committed to the survival of the party, not just his own rule. And so Xi Jinping aspires to that kind of power, but we're seeing his difficulties in managing the scale of the system. And although on paper, he has that kind of power in practice, I'm doubtful that he has the kind of power that don't shall ping exercise. We will see, of course, we will see it's very difficult to predict. It's very opaque. There are tremendous limits to what we know and can know. The system is not easy to interpret even from the inside, let alone from the outside. The insiders themselves have trouble understanding how the system is working, whose oil and who's not and what to do. So for outsiders, it's doubly difficult. My point is not that Xi Jinping is in trouble, that he is going to be overthrown, that his rule is under tremendous threat. I have no idea about any of that. And I don't think very many people do. That's speculation, and I don't engage in speculation. My point is about the difficulties of managing such a big system for anybody, no matter how talented, no matter how shrewd, and the system is bigger now than it was under Dung, and Xi Jinping is challenged to manage that system to get policies implemented. When they announce policies and they don't get implemented, they announce them again and they announce them again.

And that's because you cannot control this system no matter how much power you have on paper.

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