This lecture by historian Vejas Liulevicius takes a sweeping look at the great totalitarian movements of the twentieth century: communism, Marxism, Nazism, and the regimes led by Stalin, Mao and Hitler. Rather than treating each in isolation, Liulevicius places them side by side, asking what they shared and where they differed. All of them, he suggests, promised a radical remaking of society, relied on ideology and terror, and left millions dead, yet they also emerged from different traditions, appealed to different peoples, and fought each other as fiercely as they fought their other enemies.
The lecture is valuable because it refuses simple answers. It explores Marx’s ideas and how they were turned into Soviet communism under Lenin and Stalin, how Mao adapted them in China, and how Nazism borrowed from and opposed Marxism at the same time. Viewers are invited to consider how ideas travel, how they are distorted in power, and why the twentieth century’s most destructive movements all claimed to be building a better future.
For anyone trying to understand that century, this is a clear and wide-ranging introduction. It helps explain why the names Stalin, Mao and Hitler still provoke such strong feeling, and why the debates about communism, Nazism and Marxism remain urgent today.