Terror, Propaganda and the Birth of the “New Man”: Experiences from Cuba, North Korea, and the Soviet Union
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Good morning and welcome to the Cato Institute. My name is Marian Tupy. I'm a senior policy analyst at Cato and also an editor of humanprogress.org. A few months ago, Andrei Larionov, Ian Vasquez, and I decided to put together a number of panels commemorating or perhaps I should say commiserating 100 years since the Bolshevik coup d'etat in Russia and the great social catastrophe

that the rise of communism unleashed upon the world. Mark Kramer of Harvard University estimates that upwards of 80 million people have needlessly died between November 1917 and the mid-1990s in Korea thanks to communism, though other estimates put that figure as high as 160 million. That's a killing rate of between 150 and 300 people each hour for 78 years.

And, of course, the people's misery continues in North Korea and Cuba. Communism was, and for some people still is, a very powerful idea. And it is not surprising that its influence continues to today.

On Thursday, we will have Vito Tanzi and Amity Shlaes discussing the influence of communism on the size and scope of the state. And in late November, we will be hosting Fleming Rose and Christina Hoff Summers, who will talk about communist influence on political correctness, speech codes, intersectionality, and other insanities taking place in American and European intellectual life.

But today we will look at the communist attempts to transform human nature itself. The new man was to be free of selfishness and base instincts. He would be austere, disciplined, hardworking, and willing to sacrifice himself for common good. But, as Steven Pinker of Harvard showed, man is not a blank slate.

And so the incompatibility of communist ideas and human nature necessitated a massive expansion of propaganda to brainwash those who could be brainwashed, and terror to eliminate those who were deemed irredeemable. To help us understand what happened and how much of that legacy remains with us today, I'm delighted to welcome our three speakers. Our first speaker is Andrei Nikolaevich Lankov.

He's a Russian scholar of Asia and a specialist in Korean studies and a director of Korea Risk Group. Lankov was born in 1963 in Leningrad in the Soviet Union, what is now St. Petersburg, Russia.

He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Leningrad State University in 86 and 89. He also attended the Pyongyang Kim Il-sung University in 1985. Following his graduate studies, he taught Korean history and language at his alma mater, and in 1992, he went to South Korea.

He currently teaches at Kookmin University in South Korea, where he's been since 2004. He runs a North Korea-themed live journal blog in Russian, where he documents aspects of life in North and South Korea. He's an author of a number of books, including 2003, From Stalin to Kim Il-sung,

a formation of North Korea between 1945 and 1960. In 2004, he wrote Crisis in North Korea, the Failure of De-Stalinization in 1956.

He's written North of the DMZ, Essays on Daily Life in North Korea. In 2008, he wrote The Dawn of Modern Korea. And in 2013, The Real North Korea, Life and Politics in the Failed Socialist Utopia. With that, please help me welcome Andrei Lankov. So thank you for inviting me to talk here.

I have just 20 minutes to talk about what was probably one of the most interesting, if highly brutal, social experiments in the history of the 20th century. Because it's always when one is talking about North Korea under Kim Il-sung, who was the supreme ruler of the country from essentially 1946 to 1994,

It's possible to say that Kim Il-sung was more Stalinist than Joseph Stalin himself. He created a society in the 60s which lasted for roughly three decades and was in many regards an embodiment of Joseph Stalin's dreams. But maybe in some cases even the Russian Stalinists would consider it to be a nightmare.

However, I'm not going to talk so much about this society, but also about its eventual disintegration and partial collapse over the last 25 years. Because this high surveillance society has a major shortcoming. It's not viable in the long run. It's probably not even sustainable. What's actually happened?

In 1956, there was an unsuccessful attempt at de-Stalinization of North Korea. A group of officials who were secretly encouraged by Nikita Khrushchev's leadership in Moscow tried to remove Kim Il-sung from power. They failed. And Kim Il-sung, which by that time already had very tense relations with the Soviet Union,

broke away from the Soviet and Chinese control, and began to build his dream society.

Let's admit that he had a great deal of support within the North Korean society. It's not something which is fashionable to say, and it's something I have no time to talk about at any length, but it looks like that initially many people who became victims of Kim Il-sung's social experiments did not oppose it, but pretty much supported it.

Because it's probably resonated with their own ideas how a perfect society should be organized. But what was the result as it developed in the 1960s? It was a society of the total control. Government wanted to know everything about everybody. Let's start from maybe economy because society was completely demonetized.

Unlike other communist leaders who saw rationing and distribution as a necessary evil, as something which has to be done for a short period of time, Kim Il-sung and people around them said everything should be distributed. We should get rid of monetary economy as soon as possible.

Ideally, government decided from 1957, it became illegal to sell and buy grain. And in North Korea, which back then as now was a very poor country, grain was the major source of calories.

Everything was rationed. Depending on your type of job and your age, you were given between 100 grams for infants and 900 grams of grain. For more privileged people it was rice, for the less privileged people it was corn or wheat flour. So by the 1970s trade almost disappeared.

What was important? Control over the domestic movement. Everybody had, of course, household registration.

And in order to leave your county or city of residence, you had to first apply to the second department of the local city council, which was essentially staffed by the police. You had to collect, say you had an uncle living, say, 100 kilometers away, and you want to go to his house. First, you had to write explanation why you are going to

see your uncle. You would go to your supervisor and then you would go to your head of the people's group of which more later. You got the formal approval, then you would go to the second department of the city council and you would have your travel permit issued. Being outside your county or city of residence without a travel permit was a crime.

Because pretty much all or many communist countries try to control domestic movement. Nobody has done it with such kind of level of strictness. And what is interesting, people's groups.

Actually, it was started by the Japanese in the last days, last years of the colonial rule. Well, all Koreans were essentially divided into the groups. Usually, it was, say, if you have a village, you have a block, maybe a few dozen houses, a few thousand households. They were made into the people's group, neighborhood mutual watch group.

And this group known as Inminban, people's groups, they had, we can use present tense because on paper it still exists, they have official. In Pyongyang and other major cities, she is paid. I say she because it's always female. So she is, it's an unpaid job in the countryside. It's paid job in large cities.

Her job is to control everything which is going in your group. Among other things, if you had an overnight visitor, somebody who is staying overnight in your home,

Before 10 p.m., you must go to your people's group head, and she would register, she would check your visitor's ID, and she would register that he or she is staying in your home. An interesting part of the system, worse than steel, is sukpa kamyol, that is household checks.

What is it? It's random police checks, which are not only legal but obligatory, depending on where you live. In Pyongyang, it would happen every second month. In the borderland area, probably even slightly more frequently. In the remote countryside, even under Kim Il-sung, maybe once or twice a year. Practically not anymore. I'll reach more later. So police comes after midnight. You have knock on the door. It's "suk pak kom jol," household check.

A group of a couple of police officers and your head of the people's group, and if there are people from the military, somebody from the military police, they are coming and checking to make sure that everybody who is sleeping on premises, who is sleeping in your house, has a proper registration and have done all this registration. Then they have a quick look through books. And when the video began to spread in North Korea in the early days,

2000s, they began to check also DVDs and DVD players to make sure that you are not watching everything dangerous. Then they would check your radio set. Why? Because from 1967 it became punishable with three to five years of imprisonment to be in possession of tunable radio sets. You have radio sets. If it's sold legally, domestically, it doesn't have tuning device. It just have buttons.

One button, marching band of the Korean People's Army. Another button, lecture about greatness of their supreme leader, like that. The problem is that North Korea, surprisingly, long story wide, I can't explain that we have just 12 minutes left, had a remarkably loose hard currency control.

It was quite legal to have card currency, unlike, say, Soviet Union. It was quite legal to buy stuff in hard currency shops, including radios. But once you... if you buy a radio, or if you bring radio from overseas, you have 48 hours to deliver it to a police workshop, where for a fee, of course, you have to pay. They will repair it, making sure it will be unable... it will not be used to listen to the politically dangerous broadcast.

Problem is that Korea is a poor country, but it's a remarkably well-educated country for such a poor place. They had pretty much zero illiteracy rate and college attendance rates of close to 15%. It's clearly an achievement of the Kim family regime. It's not only all bad things. There are good things, too.

And when you have so many smart people, many of them know what to do with radio. So what is done? Actually, radios are sealed. And when you have Sukhpak Kamyol, household check, police is checking whether your radio is sealed to make sure that you did not open it and you did not basically repair the tuning mechanism.

So, all this type of controls and on top of that obligatory participation in the organizational life for which I have no time and weekly, usually in some cases more frequently, some less, mutual criticism session and a lot of other things. But again, control of information. Yes, finally what I also should mention. Their major worry from the 1960s was spread of information about the outside world.

Kim Il-sung was first worried about the influence of the Soviet revisionist ideas, because the Soviet Union under Brezhnev for him was a libertine, permissive, immoral, excessively free, ultra-democratic state. He didn't want Brezhnev's Russia to undermine his control over power. In the 1970s, when South Korea began to grow really fast,

Historically, North Korea was an industrial stronghold. South Korea was an agricultural backwater. Tables were turned, began to be turned in the 1960s. Around 1970 or a bit earlier, South Korea had significantly higher living standards. So the policy was to make sure that North Koreans will remain unaware about South Korean economic success.

So this policy, information control, one of the things which was quite interesting and sounds very Aurelian was a ban on access to old North Korean newspapers. You need security clearance, technically still, in North Korea to watch, to read newspapers published more than five or seven, I'm not sure about exact kind of moving wall, years ago.

All newspapers are classified. I mean official North Korean newspapers. And it's also you need security clearance to read any kind of non-technical reference material. But when I'm saying so, in many cases, I have to basically apply past tense. Because what happened? This system was remarkably expensive and unviable.

And when in the early 1990s, North Korean government lost access to the foreign subsidies, largely the Soviet subsidies, the system began to fall apart. Because all this enforces they wanted to be paid and well fed. They wanted their 700 grams of pure rice and a slice of pork every second Sunday, which was very rich life by the then North Korean standards. And government had nothing to give them.

So what's happened? It was a time of massive economic dislocation. When the old state-planned economy began to fall apart and eventually collapsed. North Korea is often described as a communist state, socialist state. No, if you look at the economy, it's largely an increasingly private economy. And when things began to change, the government discovered that it could not pay the enforcers.

And the enforcers began to basically look at the other side. For example, on paper, you still need the permit to go to another county. But 25 to 50 percent of the GDP is now produced by the private economy.

80% of the income of the average household is private. Usually, males go to the government offices where they are not really paid. It's now they're beginning to get paid because North Korean economy began to recover under Kim Jong-un. There is an economic recovery quite significant now. Until recently, they were not paid.

But wives went to the market, they did some kind of trade, and they were earning money. Such a model was operational. And if you are a Korean woman, ajumma, those who are Koreans, they know it. Yes, I see you do. If you are a Korean ajumma, North Korean middle-aged woman, a tough, really entrepreneurial, smart, you want to just sell fish.

You know, you live near the coast, you buy fish, you go to other places to sell fish. What do you do? Of course you go there. There are private buses, private bus companies, private truck companies. You make a deal, you put your, you know, you pack your fish. Problem is, it will be rotten, it will be spoiled if you wait for the permit. So what do you do? You pay bribe.

And police officers are quite happy to accept the bribe, not least because the new government line from the late 1990s, mid-1990s, when they tried occasionally to enforce the regulations and they discovered they had no money to pay for it. And the enforcers were not going to work for the love of their leader. They asked for their bowl of pure rice and a slice of pork every second Sunday.

And the leader could not give them. But people whom they were supposed to control, the new rich entrepreneurial people who were willing to pay bribes, they were willing to give them enough money to buy a bowl of pure rice and a slice of pork every Sunday. And the choice was simple. I remember how I was interviewed, a North Korean girl who was moving counterfeited Chinese cigarettes

Oh no, not country, smuggled. She was doing the smuggled stuff, can't read another story. Smuggled Chinese cigarettes from the Chinese border. She lived in Pyongyang. She went to the border town where she bought Chinese cigarettes from smugglers and then they moved it back to Pyongyang and sold it with huge profit.

Back then, I'm talking the beginning of the famine, it was around 1996, 1997, every Korean train, every North Korean train, which either departed from Pyongyang or had Pyongyang as its destination, had to have a police patrol on board. Not all trains, but this particular always had a police patrol, so policemen were supposed to go across this train and check whether everything is fine. So they made a deal, she was paying policemen some money,

which was roughly twice his official salary, monthly salary. And policemen, of course, did not ask questions and they never necessarily even helped her to move heavy bags of smuggled Chinese tobacco.

It was very normal behavior. Same situation as, say, these household checks. Yes, they can discover that you are in possession of a tunable radio, but they are not going to put you in prison if you are willing to pay a few hundred dollars. So, actually, the growth of the new private economy dramatically undermined these old regulations. Undermined, but did not destroy it.

Because North Korean leaders, especially under the leadership of Kim Jong-un, who is, I would say, very smart, very cynical, quite brutal, and very efficient gentleman. He, a very pro-market, by the way, pro-capitalist, very pro-capitalist, very pro-market. He now becomes very selective with enforcing the new regulations. On paper, all the regulations I have described still exist.

They did not lift any ban which was introduced by Kim Il-sung in the 1950s and 1960s. But there is an explicit or implicit policy that some of the old bans are enforced and some are not enforced.

And the choice is quite clear, because Kim Jong-un's government wants to basically have an economic growth, which has begun, economy is growing. They want this economic growth to continue, but he doesn't want to be overthrown, so he controls what is vital. So what's happening? Control over domestic movement is essentially non-existent.

It's still advisable to pay a small bribe to a local official to get a travel permit, but government doesn't care much about it. It's just a small nice additional source of income for the local officials. But Kim Jong-un's government in the last few years dramatically increased control over the border with China, which used to be absolutely porous. You could go to China and back easily. Not anymore.

And he was also trying to crack down on the spread of the DVD with the South Korean production, which is quite clear why. In order to remain stable, to keep stability, the North Korean government should ensure that the average North Korean would remain ignorant about economic prosperity enjoyed by the South Koreans. Because the gap, per capita income gap between South and North Korea

is the world's largest gap between two countries with shared land border. To put things in comparison, gap between East and West Germany was between 1 to 2 and 1 to 3. Gap between North Korea and South Korea in per capita income is between 1 to 14 and 1 to 30.

And Kim Jong-un is quite correct when he believes that his people should know as little as possible about life outside the borders, and they should keep a distance from the politics. At the same time, he is very selective in enforcing these regulations. And for us, it's a very interesting lesson. A surveillance state might look terrifying, but it's terribly expensive.

remarkably inefficient and probably not sustainable in the long run, even though the period when it can be sustained might be long enough for millions of people to die. Thank you very much. Thank you. That was absolutely fascinating. Our second speaker is Yuri Perez-Vazquez, who was born in Camagüey,

Cuba. Mr. Vazquez was a youth leader in Cuba working for peaceful transition to democracy and promoting free market economy and rule of law principles amongst Cuban youth and university students until he left for the United States as a political refugee. Mr. Perez currently works at Freedom House where he continues to support fellow

freedom fighters in Latin America. His uncle, Amado Perez, was a political prisoner in Cuba and his father, Eliseo Perez, has been a dissident since the 90s. Please help me welcome Yuri Perez.

Thank you, Marian. It's a real honor to be back here. I was an intern in 2012 with Ian Vasquez back there, and I'm really happy to be back. The second scene, just a clarification, although I'm the Freedom House Cuba expert, I'm speaking today for myself as a victim of a communist regime in Cuba, not for Freedom House.

So basically I'm going to share some of the experiences that I lived back in Cuba, how the communist regime enforced this terror, the propaganda. And I would encourage you to buy White Peace. It's a book that I left my contribution to the book outside for you guys to read, but definitely you should go on Amazon and

buy the book because it has many other contributors, excellent work and it's a really good read. So basically, I'm going to again speak about the communist regime in Cuba, how the Castro regime has been able to stay in power. Basically, it's established in terror, fear with confiscations, massive incarcerations, killings and the use of watch organizations to spy on every other citizen.

Back there, when Castro took power, he needed to justify the staying power. And listening to my colleague talking about the Korean regime is very similar. Basically, Castro's regime blamed the United States for all the problems in Cuba and justified the failure of the systems and keep the attention overseas. Then the Castro regime...

took over the whole society. They understand when you want, as a communist, to establish this new society and the new man, you have to destroy the previous, the traditional society. And how they did that? Well, first they start establishing this global...

They call it revolutionary, international revolutionaries, where they try to establish similar regimes all over Latin America and Africa. And then the hostility to the United States, the anti-American activism worldwide has been one of the pillars of the Castro regime foreign policy, and it serves him to justify the repression inside Cuba. But nevertheless, through...

problem, the true war, is against the Cuban citizens. So one of the things that is very common in Cuba is repressive techniques. Let's say if you are against the regime, all your neighbors, your co-workers, well, you get fired from your work or from the university, and then

through society, through fear, they keep you in check. And then the worst case scenarios, as I mentioned before, massive incarcerations, human rights violations, day-to-day situation. So-- give me a second.

So the other thing that the regime does is it's not only at the beginning to destroy the traditional man and to create the new man. Again, they have to kill a lot of people. But once this horror, the terror is established, then over several years later, you don't need to kill that many people. But still you need to target different sectors of society to keep

people afraid, very afraid. So since the big killings in the 60s and the 70s, now from the 70s, 80s, 90s and today, what the regime does is to target different sectors of society. So the rest of the society is still in fear.

So for example, they would target the wealthy at the beginning. So if you were considered rich, then all your property would be confiscated. Most of those people will have to go to exile to United States, to Latin America. Then farmers. After that, religious organizations, LGBT, entrepreneurs, even prostitutes. So it's a method to keep society in fear.

And then citizens live in this state of fear, even sometimes terror. And the other part of keeping this regime going is to keep everybody poor. So what do they do to keep everybody poor? It's very similar to the experience that—and that's like in a positive side, Cuba is better than North Korea, but in the Western midfield it's the worst situation.

they will outlaw every economic activity. So if the government is not authorizing an economic activity, that's illegal, and then all the Cuban population is poor. So as a consequence of five decades of communism, every small economic activity

is strongly taxed or otherwise persecuted by the government. And that leaves the citizen with little choice. So if you're a regular Cuban, you have to break the legal system in order to survive. And then buying very basic items like milk, beef. Just to give you an example, if you kill a cow in Cuba, you can go to prison for 20 years.

And if you buy that meat that the--

the cow killer did, you can go to prison for five years, 10 years. So that gives you an idea of how repressive on the economic activities, not only with the political dissidents, with people who are exercising free speech, but just basic day-to-day activities. You are trying to provide for your families, and that's the way it works. So you have to go to the black market for sure.

Then this allowed the secret police to target people easily because, well, all this repressive spying system is based on the fact that people need to satisfy these basic needs. And then once you get caught buying anything in the black market...

it's easier to prosecute or to send to prison than if it's a political case. So let's say, if you are a dissident, you are going to be most likely sent to prison for buying anything or producing something than for your free speech. And then the whole society feel criminalized. And that affects every-- the average Cuban

the lack of any economic opportunity. Then the other thing that I wanted to talk about is Che Guevara, because Che Guevara was like the poster new man.

So since you are born in Cuba and then you go to elementary school, you have to every day swear that you are going to be like Che Guevara. That idea that you are willing to kill for the regime, that human rights don't matter, you are taught that since early age.

So I still remember going to elementary school, that you have to Che Guevara's pictures everywhere, and then you have to worship Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. In conclusion, I just would like to add the communist...

change from the old society, as they call it, to the new society, this utopical dream that they have, is the total destruction of the humans, you know, the individuals as they are individuals. And you have to become part of this collective

masses as they call it, working to establish this utopic society. Then the other thing that is very important with this regime is the media.

In Cuba, there is no independent TV or radio station or newspapers. All that is exchanged independently from the government is illegal. And then there are very courageous individuals producing this information, exchanging information. But to give you an idea, let's say in the '90s, up to 2008,

to have a DVD player was illegal in Cuba, to have a computer was illegal in Cuba. Now you have, it's legal to have a computer, but it's really difficult to connect to internet. So that allows the regime to have a total, almost total monopoly of the exchange of information because one of the latest reforms that people, you know, like the media here in the United States

was focused on was the fact that now Cubans can go to a public place, a Wi-Fi hub spot, and then they can connect. And that's a great achievement. It's really a good development. But what people don't understand is that for you to get that service, you have to go with your ID

to a government company and then you buy let's say two hours of internet one hour of internet and the traffic that you do during that time is uh linked to your id so if you are exchanging information that the regime can consider so bad so bad against the regime you are going they are going to find you very easily because you bought it with your identification

Then the other thing that I wanted to talk about is how this machine, this terror and propaganda machine, has been spread all over Latin America. And you have the example of Venezuela, Nicaragua, with Venezuela being the case, most serious case right now. If you see what has been happening in Venezuela in the last few years, it's just a copy and paste from the Cuban regime.

The Chavez regime started by taking the TV stations, the newspapers, and now they are being able very successfully to impoverish all Venezuelans. So that's the way that these regimes work. They first destroy the old values, what they call the traditional society, to create this new man. And this new man is just a slave for the regime to work

to protect the revolution and to kill if necessary to keep this regime in place. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Our last speaker today is Andrei Ilarionov, who is a serial, serial, a senior fellow.

a senior fellow here at the Cato Institute Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. And as such, he's a colleague of mine and Ian's. From 2000 to December of 2005, he was the chief economic advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Ilarionov served as the president's personal representative in the G8. He's one of Russia's most forceful and articulate advocates of open society and democratic capitalism and has been a longtime friend of the Cato Institute.

From 1983 to 1994, Ilarionov served as Chief Economic Advisor to the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, Viktor Chernomyrdin. He resigned in February '94 to protest against the government's economic policy. In July '94, Ilarionov founded the Institute of Economic Analysis and became its director.

He has co-authored several economic programs for Russian governments and has written three books and more than 300 articles on Russian economic and social policies. He has received his PhD from St. Petersburg University in 1987. Please help me welcome Andrei Larionov. Andrei Larionov: Okay. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Following my colleagues, Andrei and Yuri, I suppose to talk about the system of terror propaganda and subversion in Russia. And I'm going to do it, but also I would talk a little bit more not only about Russia, since Russia or Soviet Union were the first country that applied massively these policies within its borders.

but also exported these policies outside this first country. Today, when such terms like terror and terrorism became a center of public interest and public attention,

in many countries, in many Western countries, including here in the United States, we probably need to look into the country where these policies became official ones, the part of official policy. It may probably be one of the most important, maybe the most important instrument of both domestic and foreign policies.

There are several slides here, and I'll try--I'll start with the ideology of terror. This ideology and this terrorist practice started not in 1917 with October Revolution.

that we are talking now about 100 years ago. But with ideological approach from Karl Marx, there is only one way to shorten bloody sufferings or bursts of new society, revolutionary terrorism, the direct quotation for him. Vladimir Lenin just said

supported his mentor saying before revolution, before revolution in Russia, no revolution government cannot avoid executions towards landlords and capitalists. Yakov Sverdlov, who was the head of CECA, Russia's president, if it can be translated into normal language,

in 1918 said that we need to apply mass terror. Grigory Zinoviev, the head of Komintern, International Communist Movement, quotation from him, we must inspire with communist ideas and lead 90 million out of 100 million of population of Soviet Russia. We cannot speak to remaining 10 million. They need to be liquidated.

So that is why when there was a discussion in the communist literature about the liquidation of class structure, of particular class, or Kulaks as a class, and many other quotations that definitely you've heard. So it was not only the figure of speech

It was literally, they meant literally liquidations of people, of members of those social classes, social strata, social groups. And here we need to look into some kind of very basic but most important element of communist sociology. How did they understand, and some of them still do understand, the society, the societies that they have inherited or they conquered

as a result of their rise to power. The societies that they have conquered consisted essentially of three groups of people. The first one, useful human materials, deserved to form political and social pillars in new society.

And therefore, they must be empowered, armed, and reached with money, food carts, apartments, cars, duchess, sanatoriums, trips abroad, and so on. The highest echelon of this group became known as Privilege Nomenklatura. The second group of people is called enemies of the people. This term became extremely popular in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. They deserve to be annihilated, preferably by immediate shooting.

in the best case to be exploited to death in the penal colonies, and the Gulag, the most infamous example of that.

And others, neither enemies nor pillars, they deserve to be trained, educated, and re-educated according to communist ideas and rules. The main instrument of this process of applying terror, individual mass terror, and so on, was a secret political police that had different names. I put here several of those names.

And that gave us some maybe not direct or maybe indirect understanding how attentively the government, the communist, looked into this instrument, how they look out to increase from their point of view efficiency of the terror that has been used by the secret police.

how many reorganizations, polishing, restructuring they undertook just to make it more efficient.

We don't know the number of these NKVD, Vecheka, OGPU, KGB officials. We know the number that has been released by the last head of KGB in 1991. According to his data, in 1991, the number of KGB employees in the former Soviet Union was close to half a million people.

There are several methods of terror that they applied. Definitely there were some of the basic ones, deportation of people, confiscation of property, arrests, hostage-taking. Mr. Lenin very much liked hostage-taking of hundreds or thousands of people who could be executed if some of communists would be suffering due to any reason.

Confirming to the camp torture, execution, and the extrajudicial killing by decision also called Troika and Dvojka. Troika means only three people could decide without any court procedures, without any legal proceeding, only three people. A party secretary for a particular region, the head of Ankevede of that particular region, and the prosecutor of that region, who all of them would be communists.

So these three people and sometimes even Dvojkas, even without party secretary, the head of NKVD and prosecutor would decide the fate of thousands and tens of thousands of people in that particular region.

So let's look into this particular group, enemies of the people. Those classes, social strata, social groups, they're considered to be not compatible with a classless communist society and deserve to be liquidated. We can look into the actual statistics and actual data. People who have been killed not because they demonstrated their...

or desire to resist only due to their belongingness to a particular social class, education, and some position in society, regardless whether they were involved in any activity against communist authorities or not. So members of the Romanov family, just the imperial family,

All aristocrats and nobles, members of the government of the Russian Empire, regardless, old, young, they some kind of resign from this position, doesn't matter.

Governors and general governors of the districts or regions of Russian Empire, from Russian Empire. Members of the Senate and State Duma of the Parliament in Russia. Generals, admirals, officers of the Imperial Army and Fleet. Police and Jordanian officers. Members of all non-communist parties, regardless, even the so-called close to communists, even leftists, even some of them socialists.

Parties, even Mensheviks, who were members of the same party as communists, they deserve to be annihilated.

Public figures, figures in society, leaders, journalists, professors, teachers, religious leaders, bishop, priests, monks, academics and scientists, persons of culture, art, cinema, business people. That was the beginning of the first wave of terror, which became known as Red Terror, coincided mostly with the Civil War and after that.

The next wave, the big wave of terror, certainly it was, terror was always without any pause for mass terror, was for 35 years from 1917 until 1953, until the Stalin's death. But just one of the most known wave of this terror, so-called Great Terror in 1937-38,

who were enemies of the people of that time. Remaining members of non-communist parties, remaining officers of imperial army and police, remaining officials of imperial government, remaining religious leaders and priests, professors and teachers, academics and scientists, kulaks of the Velsa peasants, more than half a million have been killed, and several millions of them have been deported to Siberia and northern regions.

Officials, now it's a new wave and there is already new officials, officials of the Soviet government, some of them of communists, have been sent to Golak and liquidated as well. Already Soviet generals, officers from army, secret police, military intelligence.

Soviet officials who refused to come back to the USSR from abroad. So the special teams have been sent to Europe. Mostly it was in Europe and they have been killed in different countries.

The so-called CSER, it's a Russian abbreviation, which means members of families of traitors of motherland. So even those not, the terror would not stop on, let's say, head of the family or the male members, they go to the wives or kids, regardless whether they were considered to be part of any ideological group

resistance and so on, no, by the fact that it belongs to a particular family.

Enemies of the people in the same continuation of this list. In the late 1930s, terror moved to ethnic groups within the USSR. Germans, Poles, Romanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Thanes, Bulgarians, Greeks, Iranians, Afghans, Koreans, Balkars, Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens,

English, Crimean, Tatar, Stuk, Mesketeans, Yakuts, Kazakhs, and Harbin, ethnic Russians who lived in Harbin.

Members of Communist Party, members of foreign Communist parties, international volunteers during civil war in Spain, 1936-1939. So special groups of NKVD have been sent to Spain and during special civil war they have killed several thousands of international volunteers who were fighting on the part of the Republic of Spain. Participant of Uyghur uprising, so when the Soviet troops moved to

Uyghur region. Now it's a part of China, so they have performed repressions and terror over there. Monks in Mongolia and Tuvar are before Tuvar became part of the Soviet Union and Mongolia was an independent country. So just several numbers for just to give you an understanding of the size of the scope of terror.

Victims of red terror and civil war, the first killed in the battle, about 2.5 million. All these estimates, as you understand, red terror during civil war, which is separate from the people killed in the battle, 2 million. Died due to starvation and epidemics, 6 million. Total people killed and died, 10.5 million, together with emigrated, the total losses, more than 15 million people.

The extent of Stalin terror for these more than three decades, the political repressions during Great Terror and before that it's close to one million people. People died in Gulag system of camp, 1.6 million.

People starved to death because the sedation was used as a very effective political instrument against those regions where communists saw real or potential resistance. In Volga regions, 5 million. In Ukraine, 4.6 million. In Kazakhstan, about 2 million. In the post-Second World War, you were to sign 1946-47, 1.5 million altogether.

killed, died, stabbed to death, about 16 million people. So the total human losses due to terror, starvation, political repressions, about 34 million people, which would account up to 22% of the USSR population of 1922.

Number of arrested and convicted people to political reasons, five and a half million. And there were different estimates of total human losses due to all possible reasons. It might be close to 100 million people.

But the terror that the practices and methodics, the technology of terror that has been applied first of all on the territory of Soviet Russia and Soviet Union, after then have been exported to new conquered territories.

Just before the Second World War and right during the war and right after the Second World War, it has been applied in eastern Poland, which is known as a western Belarusian, western Ukraine, in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia, Bukovina. Who were targets of those terror attacks?

Members of government and parliament, government officials, general officers of army and police, members of non-communist parties, religious leaders and priests, professors and teachers, academics and scientists, public figures, persons of culture, cinema, business people.

If you look how terror has been used in new wave of conquered countries and occupied by Soviet troops during the Second World War and those countries where communism has been established later, there's Eastern and Central Europe as well as China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba.

Same list of categories. Government officials, generals and officers, members of non-communist parties, religious leaders, professors and teachers, academics, scientists, public figures, leaders in culture, art, cinema, business people.

Probably for American audience is better known the massacre in Hue in southern Vietnam, Hue the former old capital of King Vietnam. During the so-called Tet Offensive in 1968, Viet Cong troops have conquered Hue and kept for only 26 days.

When American troops have liberated Hue once again, they found that more than 4,000 people have been killed.

And when they looked into the who those people who have been killed during this very short period of time, we would find almost the same categories of the enemies of the peoples. Soldiers of Army of the Republic of Vietnam, all non-communist political party members, civil servants, religious leaders, school cheaters, those American civilians who were staying there, and other foreigners.

One of the most striking my personal experience when I went to liberated area of Georgia after short occupation by Russian forces. This is a great district of proper, Georgia in October year 2008 I found to my

A great shock that the families of several categories have become victims of terror from this very short period of occupation, less than two months. Families of government officials, families of officers of army police of Georgia, priests, and especially striking school teachers in that particular region.

So that demonstrates the very persistent, systematic approach to apply terror in any particular territory that is being controlled militarily. This is a very clear design to change social structure of all these territories.

So here the list of some terrorist acts. In most of those cases, there is a substantial basis to believe that the authorities and FSB, which is inherited from KGB, is involved in some of those actions in Russia over the last period of time.

So the results of this terror, propaganda, and also interventionism, Russian society became deeply wounded, weak, disintegrated, lacking basic mutual trust between its members, suspicious, filled with secret police agents, fearful, unable to resist against rising authoritarianism, and very easy to be manipulated.

Here I would finish with two slides from the lecture of Yuri Bizmenov, who gave that lecture in 1983 in Los Angeles. He was a very high official in the Soviet KGB. He defected to the United States, and he gave a number of lectures, and he has written on the theory and practice of subjugation and subversion

activities against foreign nations. He talked, first of all, here in the United States about the policies and the activities directed at the United States and at other countries. There are four stages of subversion activity against those new targets, not those countries that already conquered, but future targets. The first one is demoralization of society that might take up to 20 years.

Second, destabilization of society up to five years. After that, crisis that should be organized and managed up to six months. Possible options for further actions, either civil war or foreign intervention if it's a relatively small country nearby. And final stage is the so-called normalization, including liquidation of the key actors and executions during the first three stages.

And the main targets during these subversion activities are power structures in those countries, public life, education, religious organizations, and trade unions. Unfortunately, what we're talking today about this, about all those instruments, it's not only history. We would like to look at this as a historical experience that we could look from these kind of perspectives.

long-term perspective. Unfortunately, many of these activities are still essence of today. Thanks. Thank you very much, Andrei. We'll open to Q&A. Please wait until the mic gets to you.

And then after I call on you, please form your question in a form of a question so that we can get as many questions in as possible. And tell us who you are and who you work for. So are there any questions? Gentleman in the middle. Hello. Yes, I'm Peter Ward. I'm a student of Seoul National University. Mr. Perez, I'm very curious as to how Cubans survived the collapse of the Soviet Union. I'm not sure if...

I'm not sure how I should express what I'm trying to say here, but I study North Korea. I study North Korean markets. I study the collapse of socialism in North Korea. And as you may know, there was a massive famine in North Korea that killed upwards of 500,000 people, at least some say as many as 2 million. My understanding is that Cubans didn't have a famine. I'm curious as to how the Cuban people survived the withdrawal of Soviet subsidies, the withdrawal of Soviet oil, et cetera.

Hello. Yes. Well, actually, it was not as bad as North Korea famines, but there was a lot of hunger and desperation in the 90s. Then the way that the regime was able to move on was with free market reforms. They allowed people to start small business, do very small stuff, nothing like private projects.

private property and stuff like that. But then they also engage Canadians, Europeans, Japanese,

to get investment. And through that foreign investment and small businesses inside Cuba, they were able to get to the point that at the end of the 90s, Hugo Chavez won in Venezuela, and then they were able to substitute this small free market operation for subsidies again and went back to the same thing with the Soviet Union, now with Venezuela and oil. Sir? Yeah, Pat Spann, just to represent myself.

I'm a little curious. I've seen some discussion that the Soviet Union collapsed after 70-some years of supposedly grooming the new man. He never showed up after several generations. I wonder, can we expect to see the same type of effect over time in long haul in Cuba and North Korea? Yeah.

Well, at least talking, I'm not sure about Cuba. With North Korea, it's quite clear, no traces of a new North Korean man. I would like to emphasize, however, that in terms of their identity and cultural values, North Koreans are different increasingly from South Koreans. Contrary to the traditional nationalist perception,

officially supported in both countries, they increasingly see themselves as members of a different Choson nation, not Hanguk nation of South Korea. Having said that, however, I don't see any traces of this ideal new man appearing there. And if anything, North Koreans are probably even more individualistic, in many regards at least, and more pragmatic

significantly so then sales carried.

Well, just to add, in Cuba, if you saw when President Obama visited the country a couple of years ago, like most of the youth, they will be wearing American flags and stuff like that. So it has been the opposite. People in Cuba are very pro-American. You will find Che Guevara sympathizers here in the United States, people wearing the Che Guevara t-shirt, but not in Cuba unless you're forced to do that.

I would probably add that from the experience of the former Soviet Union, Russia, some other post-communist countries, it looks like that this system for seven decades plus was not able to destroy

ability to build businesses, desire for profit, ability to create rather efficient business companies, as we can see. So that was expected but did not happen. What actually has happened and what we can see, it is a, if not total, but close to total destruction of normal social fabric.

How people interact with each other, the trust among people, ability for collective actions, either it would be in social life or political life, that part of society has been destroyed pretty effectively. Milton Grenfell, American Citizen.

One thing that struck me in these reports was that there seemed to be sort of this entanglement of laws and regulations that were put in place so that, as you said, everyone felt they were breaking a law.

It seems like in the U.S. today there's more and more of this kind of enskeying of laws that we're subjected to. No one even knows what they all are. And then you take a college campus where there are all sorts of different classes of people. They get different sort of treatments now. And they have their own kind of law system of what's right and what's wrong in terms of speech. So what I'm asking, is there kind of a proto-Marxist thing brewing in the U.S. today from you people's perspective? Anybody wants to take that one?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I wouldn't say that they are communist, but at the end of the day, we are talking about social control. And if you want to have more control over the individuals,

That's the way you go. Usually I say it as a joke, but it's true to a certain extent. And I find in American universities, there are more comments than in Cuba, because in Cuba, people have to belong to a communist party. And the good thing here is that you have this free exchange of ideas, but sometimes you see the same repression, like, oh, if you say something that is considered non-politically correct, you are going to suffer the consequences.

I would also like to remind you that on November 28th, and the invite will go out very soon, we are going to have a panel devoted just to that subject, the Marxist and communist origins of political correctness and speech codes and so forth. So I hope that you can join us for that. My name is Terence Byrne. I'm unaffiliated. Question about the former Soviet Union. There is a theory that this...

The communist state was held together, supported by the threat of terror and by propaganda. And that when Gorbachev came in and he lessened or even removed the threat of terror, and with glasnost, he began to let in more truth, the Soviet state crumbled. Is this a plausible explanation, particularly to, I ask Mr. Ilarionov?

This is a very popular explanation. At least part of the truth does exist in this explanation. But certainly the reason for dissolution of the Soviet Union

numerous. This is one of them. The crucial fact for dissolution of the Soviet Union, this is definitely the first element, is a liberalization, the internal liberalization of the regime, political liberalization, that led to inability of the existence of mature adult

nations within the territory of the former empire. All these 14 countries, former republics, were absolutely ready for independent existence as we have seen over the last 26 years. But it was one more particular reason that I would mention here that became known only over the last couple of years since telephone conversations between Yeltsin and

and George Bush and Leonid Kravchuk have been published. It became unknown from the first persons that the final blow to the Soviet Union in any form

have been produced by the fact that in new so-called federation or confederation, Russia would find itself in minority with Muslim republics of Central Asia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan. And it was a unilateral decision of Russia

Yeltsin not to be in such a position where just by number of votes Muslim republics would overwhelm will of the Russian leadership and that was the final blow to the all possible attempts to save either Soviet Union or something what would be remaining from the Soviet Union. Yes. Yes, you.

Steven, sure. Any thoughts about China so far seems to be an economic exception in terms of having built a better economic life for its people since the death of Mao. Will China continue to be the exception or will its communist past eventually catch up and destroy the nation? I think I have nothing to do with China.

Yes, so difficult to say. Our neighbors, well, I don't know. I hoped, I used to hope, that China will go basically the same way as developmental dictatorships of East Asia. Because it's quite easy and pleasant to overlook that South Korea, for example, was by no means a democracy until the late 1980s.

And even though the South Korean generals killed far, far less people than their North Korean counterparts, and even though many of these people were at least guilty of something, while in North Korea most people killed were guilty of nothing,

But it still was a pretty brutal regime, and by the Norman standard, it was seen as a very brutal dictatorship. And the same was applicable to Taiwan until roughly the same time, until the late 1980s. And both governments have undergone a kind of gradual transition to democracy.

So, well, personally, I used to believe it, and I still believe it, but I'm getting a bit skeptical when I see the case of Singapore, where I see economic growth, a remarkably efficient market economy,

but combined with authoritarian regime which shows no signs of crumbling. So let's wait and see. And of course, the recent changes in China under Xi Jinping are not encouraging, to put it mildly, because probably it will see whether he is going to follow the tradition of rotation, whether he is going to replace his successor in the next

few months, but I will not be surprised if he is going to break the tradition and remain in charge for years and many years to come. And as somebody who is going to China, I can assure you that over the last year or two, it has become much more difficult to deal with the Chinese colleagues because they are much more mindful of what they say in public and not even in public.

And a lot of things I used to do with impunity on the border, talking to the North Koreans, much more difficult because North Koreans are more tense and Chinese are more tense. So, well, we'll see. We used to be optimistic, a bit less so now. I would probably add, I don't know what exactly you had in mind when you were saying about the exception. Exception to what?

If I understand the kind of very popular debate about the compatibility of high economic growth with authoritarian regime, political regime, whether China is the exception to this rule, because we, at least some people say that there is not possible to have persistent high economic growth

growth rates for a long period of time if the country is still under politically authoritarian regime. So it looks like at the moment China is still not an exception to this rule. If we would reformulate the rule

We would not say that it is impossible to have a high growth rate at all. It is possible, and we have seen that many authoritarian governments were able to produce high growth rates. That will be true not only for China, but I already mentioned South Korea or Taiwan or some other places, and non-politically free regimes. If we remulate this rule, and we would say whether it is possible for China

non-politically free political regime to reach high growth rates at the level of economic development higher than particular level, let's say 30 or 40 percent of the level of the United States, let's say GDP per capita. So far, we have not seen any case of growth

authoritarian, really authoritarian regime that would reach for any particular period of time, persistent period, long period of time, persistent high growth rates. And

And China did not reach that particular level. And from this point of view, Singapore would not fall into this rule as well, because according to the criteria of Freedom House, Singapore is not fully non-free political regime. It's half free, as well as Hong Kong. So these two countries, some kind of city states, they have not fully...

let's say, hot authoritarian regimes, like a semi-authoritarian or semi-free regime. So that is why if we would reformulate this rule, it looks like there is no exception from this rule. Also, we would put aside seven highly oil-rich countries, like Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Brunei, that reach a very high level of GDP per capita due mostly to oil rents, not so much by efforts of business people over there.

Thank you very much. I'm Bob Gersoni. My question is about North Korea. Some of the questioners and yourselves made reference to the tremendous famine in North Korea in the late 1990s. The international community sent two million tons of food aid to North Korea.

What happened to the food aid? And I've heard some people speculate that had they not sent this assistance at the time, that the government would have been in a far weaker position. Can you comment on that? Well, it's true, and it's a very difficult moral question. I believe I know the answer, but I will not force this answer. The question is, without this aid, the food aid,

the North Korean government was far more likely to collapse in the late 1990s. Because it's very often stated that the aid was eaten by the soldiers and policemen and common people got nothing. It's not true. Common people got a lot, but only after the politically valuable part of population has been fed. So when they got food, they used food to feed military,

members of the, it is a large group, it's one million people, but they have one of the proportionately, they have by far the world's largest military, police, and their family members. Then they pay, they fed officials, and they fed to an extent population of Pyongyang and some major cities because riot in a major city would be politically dangerous. What was left was used to feed children,

and what was in the common people across the, through schools, everything. And what was left of that was given to the common people. Not much was left. So without it, probably they, this order soldiers, officials, children, communists,

or soldiers, officials, dangerous urban people, children, governors, well, probably we would have many more dead governors, many more dead children, many more dead low-level officials, and maybe we would have a revolution.

So current estimates is between 450,000 and 800,000 people starved to death between '96 and '99. Maybe we would have really two or three million people dead and a revolution, civil war, a lot of more people during the transition and a unified career right now. Is it a good idea? Personally, I would say it's not.

But I quite understand logic of many people who say it would be a good idea. It's a choice, well, is it better to provoke economic crisis, to create a bloodbath which will eventually produce some paradise? Frankly, it's an old communist dream, but it doesn't necessarily work well. But sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Personally, I would never make such a decision, but fortunately, nobody is going to ever ask me to make such a decision. All right. Warren Coates.

Warren Coats retired from the International Monetary Fund. If we look at modern day Putin, Russia, and his application of propaganda, it appears he's been highly successful in winning quite broad spread and high level of support domestically in Russia. And we're learning more and more about how he's deploying propaganda in Europe and the United States to

keep us confused and maintain us as his enemy, which he seems to need to bolster his position in Russia. If you go back 20 years or so, it wasn't all at all like that. I.e., Putin was a part of what became the G8. He was embraced.

felt to be a prestigious member of the Western world, which is what he seemed very much to want. What went wrong? This is a long list to explain what went wrong, but essentially this is a change of nature of the political regime. In the 90s under Yeltsin, with all problems and with all mistakes that Yeltsin personally has committed and other people, so it was

some kind of semi-democratic society that was developing, not without mistakes, in the right direction, even under the conditions of the severe economic crisis.

Since '99, I would use such a phrase, corporation of officers of secret police came to power, to full power. Since '99 until today, for 18 years, it's a period longer than Brezhnev was the head of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. This group of people are at the top of the political regime in the country.

And the approach that they're using, he or they are using towards the society, is very similar to what we have seen as communists used in the previous seven decades. The same three main groups in society. One of the so-called useful people, some kind of pillars of the regime, they should be supported, armed, given different perks, money, and so on.

The enemies of the society, enemies of the political regime, they should be eliminated. Instead of mass terror, they're using selective terror. Boris Nemtsov, Anna Politkovska, Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Yushchenkov, and many others, just some of those names I have put here into this list, they have been killed and murdered with very clear reasons.

desire to produce fear on the rest of society. And there are many part of the society which maybe according to sociology would say 85, 83, 86%. They kind of that others, they might be educated, re-educated, trained, and the propaganda is used for them. So the two most efficient machines of the current political regimes are two,

One is machine of terror against those people who are courageous enough to stand up against the political regime. And second, propaganda machine for the rest. Well, that's all the time we have for. Please join us for lunch on the second floor in the George M. Yeager Conference Center, which is up the spiral staircase. Restrooms are on the second floor as well. Thank you very much for coming. See you next time.