Savage Continent

When you think of the most deadly people in history the names that pop into your mind are typically your power hungry sociopaths... you know... Hitler, Stalin, Mao... Pol Pot.  If you turn back the clock or know your history you might toss up names like Gengis Kahn, Tamerlane, Julius Caesar or Ashurbanipal II. You might also consider Leopold II , Charles V, or Ivan The Terrible. Whatever you come up with, its typically a head of state or at least someone who with military power. You don't think of a poor softspoken peasant with little education that has some interesting ideas about plants. Nonetheless... one man... Trofim Lycenko may have been responsible for more deaths than at least half the people on your top ten list... and chances are you probably haven't heard of him. If you have, then you might not know the whole story. This is a cautionary tale of what happens when politics and science become one and the same.  Millions of people died directly because of his false ideas. But it's deeper than that. What happens when the idea of "truth" itself is called into question? What happens when a state adopts a view of reality that is contrary to reason itself?  What happens when contradicting an "official" narrative guarantees losing your job, your freedom or even your life?  Could you stand up to that or would you just look the other way? In the Gospel of John, Pilate famously asks: "What is Truth?" To live in the Soviet Union was to ask yourself that question on a daily basis.  The vast majority of people quietly went along with it. Why?  After spending nearly a decade in Stalin's Gulag and another twenty years as a "free"  Soviet citizen,  Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote:

"The permanent lie becomes the only safe form of existence, in the same way as betrayal. Every wag of the tongue can be overheard by someone, every facial expression observed by someone. Therefore every word, if it does not have to be a direct lie, is nonetheless obliged not to contradict the general, common lie."

You’ve heard the phrase “follow the science” or “science is real” over the past several years. Having “science” on one’s side seems to make a viewpoint authoritative if not infallible. The Soviet Union believed this wholeheartedly. Not only that but they believed their whole system of government itself was BASED on science. This was the “Scientific Socialism” of Marx and Engels put into practice on a grand scale. Science or the idea of it permeated every aspect of Soviet life to an extent that we in the West have never known. Socialism was supposed to be hypermodern. It would sweep away all  the social and cultural baggage that had accumulated over the millenia and usher in an era of pure reason and progress. This would be accomplished through the power of science. Through science the Soviets sought to reprogram the individualistic human mind and make it communist to the very core. From the very beginning Lenin was fascinated with the work of Ivan Pavlov. He believed that this physiologist who so expertly conditioned dogs to respond to the stimuli of his choosing held the key to shaping the collective psyche of the entire Russian people. They would be fashioned into obedient Communists through the power of science. A decade later the world got its first glimpse of what these Soviet scientists were up to. During Stalin’s show trials high ranking defendants admitted to fantastic crimes that they had no way of actually committing. Moreover, they pledged absolute fealty to a system and a man they knew would soon destroy them. Had the Soviets discovered a new method of dark persuasion unknown to the west? Even the Nazis were unnerved by the idea. Soon an obsession with Pavlovian “brainwashing” would overwhelm the free world. It was discussed in universities, newspapers, films and even on the floor of the United States Congress. Meanwhile, within the Soviet Union, the scientific optimism and ambition of the 1920’s would give way to repression and fear. Any scientist that dared to question the state approved Pavlovian doctrine would find himself out of a job, in prison camp or worse. The Soviets came to believe the human mind was simply a series of reflexes that could be manipulated to the will of the state. There was no room for any other opinion. In the 1950’s a sinister new figure would come to dominate the field of Soviet Psychology: Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevsky. Under his rule, the state devised a new diagnosis for individuals who dared to question the absolute superiority of the Soviet system: “Sluggish Schizophrenia.” Now, if you spoke out against the regime you could find yourself locked in a mental asylum indefinitely with no right of appeal and no correspondence with the outside world. These “patients” were often heavily drugged and made to undergo tortures that many compared with what Jewish prisoners experienced at the hands of Nazi doctors decades earlier. How did a science that promised such a bright and limitless future devolve into a dystopian tool of oppression? Maybe that’s just what happens when politics and science become one and the same under a system that demands absolute conformity.     

Stalin's plan to Collectivize the Soviet Union was finally in full swing. Peasants everywhere were being forced to abandon their antiquated bucolic lifestyles and become modern proletarians on large agroindustrial farms. Marx’s dream of “labor armies” in the countryside was finally coming true.  "The worker's paradise is upon us comrades!!" Well... not so fast. The pushback against this plan was widespread and determined... so much so that even Stalin had to publicly admit it simply wouldn't be possible to forcibly coerce 100 million people to voluntarily become cogs in the colossal wheel of Soviet socialism. It was time for plan B. ``What if we made it impossible for people NOT to join the collective farms? What if we taxed anyone that didn't give in so hard they would be begging for mercy?" As it turned out, plan B did work... sort of... but then a new problem arose. These farms were simply not producing enough food to go around. Socialism wasn't working. Uh oh… So did he back off? Try a different plan? You know that's not how Stalin rolls. It was full speed ahead. “Damn the torpedoes.”  Millions of people might starve but it was all for a good cause right? The Soviet Union had to meet those export targets. They needed a lot of hard cash to build those shiny new factories and there was no other way to get it but by selling grain on the world market. If that meant people at home had to go hungry then so be it. “They should have worked harder,” he would say. Of course, the epicenter of this very predictable disaster would be Ukraine. Stalin had an almost pathological distrust for non Russian nationalities that refused to wholeheartedly submit to Soviet power. And of all the nationalities that had resisted his rule so far, none had been more troublesome than the Ukrainians. What he did there in the years 1932-3 has been declared a genocide by 16 countries (inluding the United States). The man who invented the word "genocide" even declared it a genocide. At the famine’s height, a territory the size of France, consisting of 30 million people would be hermetically sealed off from the outside world and its inhabitants left to die a slow, lingering death. Inside the death zone, to even grab a handful of grain from a field could get one executed or sent to the Gulag for a decade long sentence (which was just as good). Many would go insane. Others would become criminals. Some would even resort to cannibalism. No one who survived these years would ever be the same again.  Stalin once said "It is ideas that matter, not the individual." Well how about 4 to 5 million individuals?  How many eggs do you need to break to make this omelet? Seems like a lot of eggs to me. It would later be called "The Holodomor '' or "death by starvation," and increasingly, historians see it as a deliberate act of a totalitarian regime to break the will of an entire nation. If you want to know why the Ukrainian people of today would be willing to fight with such tenacity to defy the will of a dictator in Moscow, then look no further. After listening to this then you'll get it. Or don’t listen to it. Putin wouldn’t want you to anyways. You know… “fascist” propaganda and all.

Stalin had big plans for revolutionizing  the Soviet Union and nowhere where those plans bigger than Ukraine.  90% percent of the population in the republic were small time farmers who worked the same plots of land their ancestors always had. He wanted to dispossess all of them and force everyone into large industrial plantations where they would become employees of the state. Convinced that that the "fascist" Western democracies were itching to invade, he wanted to take the agrarian Soviet Union and turn it into an industrial superpower capable defeating the "capitalist encirclement" in just 5 years. However, to do that he needed money... lots of money and the Soviet Union would have to export grain... lots and lots of grain to get it.  But what if his own people didn't have enough to eat? In that case the industrialized "proletarian" regions would be fed and the backward agricultural ones would have to do without. He reasoned that to create this new bulwark of Socialism the peasants would have to be "sacrificed." Lenin had said that peasants "need to do a little starving" now and then and this would be no exception. The "Worker's Paradise" had no use for these vestiges of the feudal past and if some of these were lost it wouldn't be the worst thing in the  world. But he also saw Ukraine as a hotbed of "counterrevolutionaries," "kulaks," "wreckers," "Petliurists," and about a dozen other hidden "class enemies." They were all threats to Soviet power and had connections to "fascist" Western democracies. These were people that needed to be taught a lesson they wouldn't soon forget. What followed would be one of the darkest man made catastrophes on Earth but it would happen systematically, in deliberate stages. Stalin would later confess to Churchill that he had to "destroy 10 million." It would be known as the "Holodomor" or "death by hunger." It doomed the population of Ukraine to a slow, lingering death. Ultimately, 13% of the population perished in less than two years. Nonetheless, a sympathetic  New York Times reporter from the time would say "you have to break  a few eggs to make an omelet."  Do the ends always justify the means? Today, the United States, along with 18 other countries officially recognize it as a genocide. Unsurprisingly, Putin's Russia is not one of them. They do not teach it in schools and still deny it ever occurred. If you want to know why every day people would be willing to fight to the death in the streets of Kiev to repel a Russian invader, look no further.

They say nature abhors a vacuum. By the late 1920's everything remotely traditional in Russian culture had been all but atomized. Churches had been dynamited, clergy were either dead, imprisoned or so marginalized that they were no longer relevant. A whole way of life had abruptly ended. But what now? The Soviets were not afraid to tell you how to act in public or even what to think in private. Under the draconian Article 58 of the legal code even your private feelings could make you a criminal. But was this justified? Was it moral? Of course it was. It was "science." Lenin had taken the writings of Marx and Engels and turned them into an all encompassing regimen for how society was to function all the way down to the thoughts of the smallest child. It was called "scientific socialism" and to even doubt this doctrine as infallible truth could make one into a dangerous heretic worthy of denunciation, arrest, imprisonment or death. But attempts to impliment socialism during Revolution and Civil War had proven to be noting short of a national self immolation for the Russian people. By 1920 the regime was teetering on the abyss. Cannibalism was widespread. Reluctantly, Lenin decided to allow elements of capitalism to exist in order to save the state from complete implosion.... and it worked. The Soviet Union was saved and everyone lived happily ever after..... Lol... not quite. Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin would impliment a plan to end this deal with the devil of capitalism an impose socialism by force from above. Millions of peasants would die but the worker's paradise would be just around the  corner. Was it the right thing to do? Of course it was. It was "science." You believe in "science" don't you?    

Marxists had always assumed the that Communism... when it finally arrived would be a perfect existence without religion. In the words of John Lennon :"Imagine there's no heaven... no hell below us, above us only sky." This had been a concept tossed around by European intellectuals since the Enlightenment yet few had dared to act upon it. The Russian Revolution gave the World a chance to see what it would be like to make that dream a reality. Lenin believed that religion (especially Russian Orthodoxy) was a cancer on society that needed to be ruthlessly extirpated or the Revolution would never have a chance to take root. The Bolsheviks would waste no time making the arch enemies of the proletariat pay for centuries of having fed the ignorant people "spiritual booze." The Revolutionary terror would sweep away millions of ordinary citizens of the former Russian Empire in a torrent of bloodshed but would turn its fiercest wrath on the Church. Atrocities the likes of which the modern world had never seen sprang up like wild fires across an empire of 150 million people. Who would dare resist? Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow... a man with less than a year serving in a position that hadn't even existed for 300 years in an organization that probably hadn't been politically relevant since the Middle Ages, decided to answer the call.  Seems like quite a mismatch. But wait whats this? This guy isn't afraid to drop some bombs. Even Lenin will find himself scared to touch him. How will it all end? Check out our latest episode to find out! 

Marx was fond of the phrase “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” Creating the shining future of communism meant destruction of the corrupt system of bourgeois capitalism. Like Marx, Friedrich Nietzche thought the western world’s moral system was hopelessly flawed, only he believed  it was tainted by the “slave morality” of Christianity. Unlike Marx though, he thought a new race of supermen would be needed to cure the World of the plague of nihilism that would descend upon humanity  when the decrepit  Christian value systems were finally declared dead. But there was another view.  A Russian writer named Fyodor Dostoyevsky warned what might happen if either of these utopian dreams were attempted. He predicted police states, reigns of terror and 100 million corpses... and he did it all in a devilishly dark comedy. Not bad for a guy writing in 1872. What happens when you tear down a system? Will it result in a beautiful dream or a dystopian nightmare? 

To some he was a genius that gave hope to millions. To others he was charlatan that nearly led mankind to its destruction. Everyone agreed that he was a rebel that offered a savage indictment on the harsh realities of modern industrial society; a prophet of doom to  the powers that be.  His work still inspires aspiration and dread to this day. It is still relevant. In a century it will remain relevant. Who was he? What did he really believe? What vision did he offer? You may think you know him but chances are you only know half the story.  It's Karl Marx... this time on Savage Continent.

Khrushchev finally makes what he believes will be his master stroke on the island of Cuba. If he can only get those medium range missiles operational in time all his bluff and bluster for the past 7 years will have paid off. But just when success seems within his grasp, disaster strikes.  Kennedy finds out... and not only does he find out but he threatens actual nuclear war.. ON NATIONAL TELEVISION. Meanwhile on Cuba, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara have resolved to to throw their tropical island home onto the nuclear funeral pyre and launch a first strike on America (with nuclear missiles that Uncle Sam has no idea are already locked and loaded). Which city will go up in a mushroom cloud? New York? Washington? Beneath the waves a Soviet Submarine captain and his first mate believe the world has already gone over the edge and order the firing of a "nuclear torpedo." How close can you get to the edge without falling?? Then,  what were the plans for everyday people should the unthinkable happen? What would your government do for you? You probably don't want to know.  Finally... the Soviets will build an actual doomsday machine. Yes, an actual automated system to finish human life on earth should their regime go down.  Pretty nuts eh? Sometimes reality is better than fiction.

We all know Khrushchev has been fibbing big time but in 1961 it was big news. For eight years the world believed that the USSR had an arsenal so big that could demolish mankind in a matter of minutes. But what? What’s this? He’s been bluffing?! What would you do in his shoes? I know, let’s build a bomb so big that the mushroom cloud reaches 40 miles into the stratosphere and were it to be detonated in New York, windows in Montreal would be shattered and then… provoke a war in Berlin. Next… attempt to sneak 162 nuclear missiles just 90 miles away from the U.S. in Cuba. What could go wrong? Finally, let’s take a look under the hood of the U.S war plan SIOP 62. What did it actually call for? How was dropping over 600,000 Hiroshima bombs in an afternoon even possible? Can this brand new President John F. Kennedy cope with the cagey Khrushchev?  Who will win? How close will the world come to unthinkable disaster?