TRUMP AND PUTIN: A LOVE STORY

A mural in Vilnius, Lithuania. Trump sees strength and cynicism in Putin. Putin sees in Trump a grand opportunity. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEKSANDR LUKJANOV / ALAMY

By David Remnick, AUGUST 3, 2016 (The New Yorker)

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Donald J. Trump are locked in a humid political embrace, which seems, at first glance, unlikely. Putin grew up in postwar Leningrad. In the dismal courtyard of his building on Baskov Lane, a hangout for local thugs and drunks, he and his childhood friends pursued their favorite pastime: chasing rats with sticks. His father, a wounded veteran, beat him with a belt. Putin’s way up, his dream, was to volunteer for the K.G.B. Donald Trump encountered few rats on his lawn in Jamaica Estates. Soft, surly, and academically uninterested, Donald was disruptive in class—so much so that his father, a real-estate tycoon of the outer boroughs, shipped him off to military school when he was thirteen. He did not set out to serve his country; he set out to multiply his father’s fortune. “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” Trump has said. “The temperament is not that different.”

Decades later, Trump has praised Putin as a forceful leader, a “better leader” than Barack Obama; Putin hardly conceals his hope that Trump will win election to the White House. What would be more advantageous for Putin than to see the United States elect an incompetent leader who just so happens to be content to leave the Russian regime to its own devices, particularly in Europe? Even as non-Democrats have variously described their own nominee as a “con,” a “bully,” and a “borderline” 9/11 conspiracy theorist, Putin has acted as a surrogate from afar, dropping clear hints at his preference, slyly declaring Trump “bright” and “talented without doubt.”

The Times has reported that hackers who broke into the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail trove—a cyber version of the Watergate burglary—were likely agents of the Russian Federation. We shall see if that suspicion holds up. But what’s undisputed is that the gathering of kompromat—compromising material—is a familiar tactic in Putin’s arsenal. For years, the Russian intelligence services have filmed political enemies in stages of sexual and/or narcotic indulgence, and have distributed the grainy images online. Last April, state TV broadcast a black-and-white film of Mikhail Kasyanov, Putin’s former Prime Minister but now a potential opposition leader, exchanging carnal favors and playing “Name That Tune” with his political assistant, Natalya.

Even if the Russian government is not responsible for the hack on the D.N.C., Putin’s affinity for Trump is clear. Some part of it may be a matter of kindred temperament. Just as Trump talks ominously about Mexican “rapists” and tens of thousands of “illegal immigrants … roaming free” in the land, Putin won early popularity by vowing to dispense with terrorists from the Caucasus: “We will ice them in their shithouses.” Trump is, after all, a kind of parody of Putin: the bluster, the palaces. As the historian Timothy Snyder puts it, “Putin is the real-world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television.”

The fellow-feeling between the two is complex, but it is not hard to see who gets the better of whom. Trump sees strength and cynicism in Putin and hopes to emulate him. Putin sees in Trump a grand opportunity. He sees in Trump weakness and ignorance, a confused mind. He has every hope of exploiting him.

Putin’s view of the world­­—of the future of Russia and its increasingly dangerous confrontation with the West—is rooted in the fall of the Soviet Union. His behavior and his resentments, to say nothing of his shrewd foray into our current electoral follies, are based entirely on that event.

Twenty-five summers ago, Communist ideology and the Soviet Union itself teetered on the brink of nonexistence. On the morning of July 23, 1991, two newspaper articles appeared that, each in its own way, signalled the end.

A liberal paper called Nezavisimaya Gazeta (The Independent Newspaper) published a leak of a new draft platform for the Communist Party. The draft rejected Marxist-Leninist ideology in favor of European-style social democracy, and it “unconditionally” condemned the “crimes” of the Stalin regime, which “broke and maimed the lives of millions of people, whole nations.” The draft had the endorsement of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was still the Party’s General Secretary, but of no more than a third of the Central Committee.

That same morning, Sovyetskaya Rossiya (Soviet Russia), the most prominent daily outlet for orthodox Communists and hardcore Russian nationalists, published a front-page call to arms called “Slovo k Narodu” (“A Word to the People”). The appeal, signed by leading figures in the military, the security apparatus, and the right-wing intelligentsia, accused Gorbachev and more radical reformers of leading the Soviet Union to ruin. Only if the “healthy forces” of state power united and acted swiftly could “humiliation” and “fratricidal war” be averted.

“An enormous, unforeseen calamity has taken place,” it read. “The Motherland, our country, a great power, given to us by nature, with its glorious ancestors, is perishing, breaking apart, falling into darkness. And this collapse is taking place with our silent acquiescence and tolerance. Brothers, we are late in waking to this, late in observing the misery when our home is already aflame in every corner. We must extinguish this blaze not with water but with our tears and blood.”

The florid apocalyptic language was distinctly that of one of the signatories, Aleksander Prokhanov, the editor of a reactionary newspaper called Dyen’ (The Day). Prokhanov, a third-rate novelist, was closely connected with the Army and the intelligence services. He was widely known around Moscow as “the Nightingale of the General Staff.” For many months, Prokhanov’s paper had given vent to the anger of important figures in the Soviet hierarchy. At a certain point, these men no longer cared that they were speaking in defiance of Gorbachev. They saw a world coming to an end, and with it their positions, their privileges. In order to preserve at least the rudiments of the old order, they were prepared to defy Gorbachev and anyone else they judged to be betraying them.In one interview, published in 1991, Oleg Baklanov, Gorbachev’s assistant in charge of the military-industrial complex, told Prokhanov, “The bones of the defense industry are breaking.” The Soviet Union was weak, and losing its capacities as a superpower. Prokhanov replied that perhaps, in order to avoid the collapse of Soviet power, “one should spit upon the legal technicalities and impose a dictatorship.”

These hints that the conservative forces in the Soviet leadership were emboldened and planning some sort of putsch against Gorbachev did not come as a shock to the first Bush Administration. As early as July, 1989, Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s Foreign Minister, had told Secretary of State James Baker, “In time there could be danger of civil war and dictatorship.” The C.I.A. did not think a putsch was necessarily imminent, but with every month there were broad indications—then more booming ones. In December, 1990, Shevardnadze resigned his post, declaring publicly, “A dictatorship is coming.”

And in June, 1991, just weeks before the publication of “A Word to the People,” Gavriil Popov, a liberal and the mayor of Moscow, went to Spaso House, the residence of American Ambassador Jack Matlock, and told him that a coup was being planned. Matlock sent an emergency “flash cable” to Baker, who, in turn, told Bush; the Americans also informed both Gorbachev and the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin. Gorbachev, who had grown accustomed to a more or less permanent state of crisis and embattlement, somehow did not take the warning seriously. This was a mistake.

On August 18, 1991, while vacationing at his seaside villa in Ukraine, Gorbachev received unexpected visitors from the leadership in Moscow. They informed him that he was being “temporarily” stripped of his authority, until “everything returned to normal.” Gorbachev’s communications were cut off, and he and his family were put under virtual house arrest.

The next morning, state television broadcast a loop of Tchaikovsky’s ballet “Swan Lake.” Tanks rolled into the center of the capital. The people of the Soviet Union were informed that Gorbachev had “stepped down” and yielded power to the ominously named State Committee for the State of Emergency because of “problems related to his health.” Everyone understood the meaning: the coup had begun.

The beginning of the coup, Moscow, August 19, 1991. PHOTOGRAPH BY GUEORGUI PINKHASSOV / MAGNUM

Putin, for his part, experienced the events of the Soviet decline and fall from afar. When the Berlin Wall was crumbling, in 1989, he was a mid-level intelligence officer in Dresden, and as protesters arrived at the gates of his offices he helped shovel countless secret documents into a roaring furnace. “The work we did was no longer necessary,” he told an interviewer, years later. “What was the point of writing, recruiting, and procuring information? Nobody at Moscow Center was reading our reports.” Fearing that the building would be overrun, Lieutenant Colonel Putin called Moscow for orders. But, he said, “Moscow was silent.”

“I had the feeling then that the country was no more, that it had disappeared,” Putin recalled. “It had become clear that the Soviet Union was sick. It was a deadly, incurable disease called paralysis—a paralysis of power.”

By August, 1991, Putin was back in Leningrad, working for Anatoly Sobchak, the city’s liberal mayor, as a K.G.B.-affiliated aide. The coup lasted only three days. The plotters failed to follow the standard putsch handbook. A coup, Lenin instructed, must “first seize the telegraph,” the means of communication. They didn’t. There were renegade reports all over the media, rallying the resistance. The coup’s leaders were comically disorganized, often drunk, and, above all, unwilling to shed the blood necessary to overcome popular resistance. Just as Gorbachev refused to open fire in the capitals of Eastern and Central Europe to retain the “near Empire,” the coup plotters lacked the cruelty of their Stalin-era heroes. They could not bear to unleash the tanks on their countrymen or even arrest Yeltsin, who bravely rallied the forces of opposition.

Demonstrators defy the curfew in Moscow in the days after the coup, in August, 1991. PHOTOGRAPH BY GUEORGUI PINKHASSOV / MAGNUM

Putin reacted to the coup with ambivalence. Having sided with Sobchak through the ordeal, helping to insure his security, he was at a loss when the drama ended. Where would he go? The August events, he said, “tore my life apart. . . . There were no prospects, and in general it was clear what would happen with the intelligence service.” Putin claims that he resigned from the intelligence services after the coup, though he is fond of saying, with evident conviction, “There is no such thing as a former K.G.B. man.”

By Christmas, 1991, the Soviet Union itself was a memory. Gorbachev, who struggled to form even a loosely confederated union out of the fifteen Soviet republics, blamed Yeltsin and the leaders of Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus for plotting illegally to dissolve the bloc. But the truth was that, by that time, the union itself was a mass of internal uprisings for independence—first in the smallest republics, the Baltic states, and then in the Slavic heart of the union, Ukraine and Russia.

Putin was less ambivalent about the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2005, he called it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the past century.” Although it was Yeltsin who brought Putin to Moscow, Putin has expressed barely concealed contempt for the nineteen-nineties, the Yeltsin era, as a period of unrelieved chaos, theft, and humiliation.

There are many worthwhile books on the post-Soviet period and Putin’s ascent. David Hoffman meticulously describes the rise of the new rich in the nineties in “The Oligarchs,” and Steven Lee Myers’s “The New Tsar” is the most solid book we have on Putin. Mikhail Zygar’s “All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin” is an entertaining look at Kremlin politics in the “Game Change” mode. “Opposing Forces,” a book-length dialogue between two dissidents—one Polish, Adam Michnik; the other Russian, Alexei Navalny—is a good supplement to the best of the recent surveys: Ben Judah’s “Fragile Empire,” Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s “Kremlin Rising,” and Arkady Ostrovsky’s “The Invention of Russia.”

But the nonfiction volume that has done the most to deepen the emotional understanding of Russia during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history “Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets.” Alexievich is sixty-eight and lives in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year. She is hardly pro-Putin. Like many in the urban intelligentsia, she supported the anti-Kremlin street demonstrations that took place between 2011 and 2013. She views Putin as a dangerous autocrat who chokes dissent. “I have no love for the Russia of Beria, Stalin, and Putin,” she has said.

But Alexievich is interesting less for her analysis of Putin’s political stratagems than for her profound presentation of Russian voices­­: the psychological disorientation after decades of Soviet rule and Communist ideology; the widespread outrage toward the business élite who grabbed up state enterprises at cut-rate prices; the sense of loss and humiliation after realizing that a once great power was now diseased and fallen.

Putin’s hold over public opinion unquestionably depends on his ruthless stifling of dissent and the media. But he also appeals to something that is harder to quantify, something deep in the psychology of a people just twenty-five years distant from the fall of the Soviet imperium. Putin gains tremendous plaudits by refusing to take moral or political direction from the West. He has taken to lecturing the West for its sins and hypocrisies—in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Libya, and elsewhere—its “moral bankruptcy,” its godlessness. Bravado became his way of appealing to his own people. His military actions in Crimea and Syria are meant not only to display a geopolitical toughness but also to rouse a Russian people who were humbled and insulted by the weakness that followed the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras. Many Russians are, despite the censorship of televised news, quite well informed, and they know that Putin is hardly their Lincoln. And yet he speaks to the grievances and indignities of many millions of Russians; he speaks to the restoration of Russian self-respect. This appeal is hard, given Putin’s brutality and his cynical disdain for individual rights and democratic aspirations, to understand from a distance. People in the West, Alexievich told the Times recently, “do not understand that there is a collective Putin, consisting of some millions of people who do not want to be humiliated by the West. There is a little piece of Putin in everyone.”

It is safe to say that, on a strictly intellectual level, Donald Trump understands little of this. In recent weeks, he has made it plain that he is ignorant of the basics of contemporary Russian and geostrategic reality. He has declared nato“obsolete” and has suggested that he might do away with Article 5, which promises that an attack on one member state is an attack on all. He makes the threat not because he is interested in reassessing anything as complex as global-security strategy but, rather, because not every member state is forking over its dues.

Trump is muddled in the essentials. He has admitted that he doesn’t read much. It shows. On Sunday, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Trump said that in his Administration Putin would never send forces into Ukraine. When Stephanopoulos reminded Trump that “they’re already there,” the candidate forged ahead like a school kid bullshitting his way through an oral exam that he had not bothered to prepare for.

“O.K., well, he’s there in a certain way,” Trump said. “But I’m not there. You have Obama there. And, frankly, that whole part of the world is a mess under Obama, with all the strength that you’re talking about and all of the power of nato and all of this.”

When, on “Morning Joe,” he described Putin as “a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” Joe Scarborough pushed back, saying that Putin “kills journalists that don’t agree with him.” This seemed not to faze Trump. “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe,” he replied. “You know, there’s a lot of stuff going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on and a lot of stupidity.”

Some analysts have said that Trump’s affection for Putin is based mainly on his own, and his circle’s, economic interests. Paul Manafort, his campaign manager, profited immensely as an adviser to Viktor Yanukovich, the pro-Russian (and now deposed) leader of Ukraine. (Manafort has also worked as a lobbyist for other dictators, including Mobutu Sese Seko, of Zaire, and Ferdinand Marcos, of the Philippines.) Carter Page, one of Trump’s foreign-policy advisers, has longstanding ties to Gazprom, a pillar of Russia’s energy industry. Donald Trump, Jr., has made it plain that the family has pursued opportunities in Russia for decades. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” he said, in a speech in 2008 to a real-estate conference, according to the Washington Post. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” The public would have a more detailed sense of this if Trump were ever to release his tax returns.

One of the countless lies that Trump has told over the years is that he ispersonally acquainted with Putin. In 2013, while he was promoting the Miss Universe contest in Moscow, he told MSNBC that he had a “relationship” with Putin. In 2014, at a National Press Club lunch in Washington, Trump remarked that he had spoken “indirectly and directly” with Putin, “who could not have been nicer.” In fact, as Trump has now had to admit, the two never met.

No matter. Trump is just pleased that Putin has returned his compliments. “It is always a great honor,” he has said, “to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

In Moscow, officials around Putin have echoed the idea that Trump’s election would be welcome and would bring about better, less stressful, relations with the United States. Alexei Pushkov, the chairman of the international-affairs committee in the State Duma, has said that, because Trump has stated that the people of Crimea prefer to live under Russian rule, then “Trump has shown himself to be far more democratic” than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Alexander Dugin is a nationalist intellectual whose pronouncements often represent the darker id of the Russian policy élite. Recently, he wrote of his disdain for Obama (“the black Muslim Democrat”) and Clinton (“quite annoying”) and his amused admiration for the Republican nominee. Trump, Dugin writes, is “crude America without the gloss of the globalist élite. He is sometimes disgusting and violent, but he is what he is. He is true America. . . . Vote for Trump and see what will happen.”

Putin may get high marks for leadership from Trump, but he knows that his own country is in a state of crisis: low global energy prices, Western sanctions, an economy that seems incapable of healthy growth. And, in his view, what is bad for the United States is good for Russia.

Putin’s first years in office were relatively charmed. Even as he denounced the colossal property grab of the nineties, Russia began, in the early aughts, to see the benefits of those changes. The G.D.P. climbed steadily. As energy prices soared, so, too, did the over-all economy, and not only for the super-wealthy. Even as Putin enriched his circle of intelligence officers and friends from St. Petersburg, creating a kleptocracy widely known as Kremlin, Inc., he was also able to erase budget deficits, build a surplus, pay salaries and pensions for working people, and help engender a new urban middle class.

Putin was not nearly as anti-Western then as he is now. He notably called George W. Bush quickly to offer support after 9/11, and even talked about future Russian membership in nato. “Russia is part of the European culture,” he said in 2000. “And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. So it is hard for me to visualize nato as an enemy.”

After NATO absorbed seven new countries in the region, in 2004, and after witnessing the rebellions in his midst, from Kiev to Tbilisi, Putin adopted a more resentful attitude toward the West. He felt that the hand he had extended to Washington had been rejected, disdained. He reminded the public that the Clinton Administration had taken advantage of Yeltsin, bombing Kosovo and Belgrade. He was furious that the coalition attack on Libya did not merely stop a potential slaughter in Benghazi but ended up toppling Muammar Qaddafi and creating even more disorder in the region. He admonished the West for treating Russia as a “vassal” rather than as a powerful global actor.

Putin had come to believe that the West was behaving heedlessly abroad; it was also fomenting internal dissent. And this is Putin’s singular anxiety. He fears a chaotic uprising, an Arab Spring or an Orange Revolution on Red Square, outside the Kremlin walls. In 2011, he accused Hillary Clinton of giving “the signal” that started a wave of anti-Kremlin demonstrations in downtown Moscow. He resented the presence in Moscow of the American Ambassador,Michael McFaul, whom the Kremlin had suspected of trying to push a pro-democracy agenda in Russia since his days as a grad student.

In 2012, Putin returned to the Presidency determined never again to trust the West or the urban middle classes that had protested against him. He used means as aggressive as cyberattacks (in the Baltic states) and old-fashioned invasion (in Ukraine) to subdue independent nations that he considered within his sphere of influence. Putin has also aligned himself with reactionary forces across Europe. His government has loaned money to Marine Le Pen’s nativist party, in France, and has lent support to similarly right-wing forces elsewhere in Europe, like Golden Dawn, in Greece, and Jobbik, in Hungary.

When Putin looks at the Presidential race in the United States, he sees Hillary Clinton, who is hardly likely to dissolve American commitments to nato. Then he sees Donald Trump, who refuses to accept that Putin kills opponents (“I haven’t seen that”) and who called the Russian leader’s diatribe against American exceptionalism in the Times, three years ago, “a masterpiece.”

In “Putin’s Puppet,” in Slate, Franklin Foer suggests, with the benefit of original reporting, that one reason for Trump’s attitude has to do with his business ambitions. Perhaps. He is also right when he dismisses the cartoonish notion that, somehow, Trump is a “Manchurian candidate.” But it is also quite clear that Putin has an interest in Trump’s success.

“Putin wants the United States to be taken up with its own problems, and forget about things like Ukraine and Crimea,” Sergei Parkhomenko, an activist and broadcaster for Echo of Moscow, told me. “It seems to him that, if the United States elects Trump, all of America will be taken up for at least a year trying to ‘digest’ him.

“But there is a second reason,” Parkhomenko continued. “Putin is convinced that absolutely everything in this world is done for money. He is a religious fanatic, and money is his god. With money, it is possible to solve any problem, buy any interlocutor. He bought the Olympic Games, he bought the World Cup. It will be easy to deal with Trump. He won’t need to use words in negotiations, only figures. When they don’t agree, it will only be necessary to find the right price.”

Vladimir Putin is a cunning and cynical reader of his adversaries. He notices that Trump does not know the difference between the Quds Force and the Kurds, or what the “nuclear triad” is; that his analysis of Brexit was based in part on what might be good for his golf courses in Britain; that his knowledge of world affairs is roughly that of someone who subscribes to a daily newspaper but doesn’t always have time to get to it. Overwhelmed with his own problems at home, Putin sees the ready benefit in having the United States led by an unlettered narcissist who believes that geostrategic questions are as easy to resolve as a real-estate closing. Putin knows a chump when he sees one.

Remembering the biggest mass murder in the history of the world

Chinese peasants suffering from the effects of the Great Leap Forward.

By Ilya Somin August 3

Who was the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world? Most people probably assume that the answer is Adolf Hitler, architect of the Holocaust. Others might guess Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who may indeed have managed to kill even more innocent people than Hitler did, many of them as part of a terror famine that likely took more lives than the Holocaust. But both Hitler and Stalin were outdone by Mao Zedong. From 1958 to 1962, his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people – easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded.

Historian Frank Dikötter, author of the important book Mao’s Great Famine recently published an article in History Today, summarizing what happened:

Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors by herding villagers across the country into giant people’s communes. In pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised. People had their work, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them. In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the party’s every dictate. As incentives to work were removed, coercion and violence were used instead to compel famished farmers to perform labour on poorly planned irrigation projects while fields were neglected.

A catastrophe of gargantuan proportions ensued. Extrapolating from published population statistics, historians have speculated that tens of millions of people died of starvation. But the true dimensions of what happened are only now coming to light thanks to the meticulous reports the party itself compiled during the famine….

What comes out of this massive and detailed dossier is a tale of horror in which Mao emerges as one of the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for the deaths of at least 45 million people between 1958 and 1962. It is not merely the extent of the catastrophe that dwarfs earlier estimates, but also the manner in which many people died: between two and three million victims were tortured to death or summarily killed, often for the slightest infraction. When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive. The father died of grief a few days later. The case of Wang Ziyou was reported to the central leadership: one of his ears was chopped off, his legs were tied with iron wire, a ten kilogram stone was dropped on his back and then he was branded with a sizzling tool – punishment for digging up a potato.

The basic facts of the Great Leap Forward have long been known to scholars. Dikötter’s work is noteworthy for demonstrating that the number of victims may have been even greater than previously thought, and that the mass murder was more clearly intentional on Mao’s part, and included large numbers of victims who were executed or tortured, as opposed to “merely” starved to death. Even the previously standard estimates of 30 million or more, would still make this the greatest mass murder in history.

While the horrors of the Great Leap Forward are well known to experts on communism and Chinese history, they are rarely remembered by ordinary people outside China, and has had only a modest cultural impact. When Westerners think of the great evils of world history, they rarely think of this one. In contrast to the numerous books, movies, museums, and and remembrance days dedicated to the Holocaust, we make little effort to recall the Great Leap Forward, or to make sure that society has learned its lessons. When we vow “never again,” we don’t often recall that it should apply to this type of atrocity, as well as those motivated by racism or anti-semitism.

The fact that Mao’s atrocities resulted in many more deaths than those of Hitler does not necessarily mean he was the more evil of the two. The greater death toll is partly the result of the fact that Mao ruled over a much larger population for a much longer time. I lost several relatives in the Holocaust myself, and have no wish to diminish its significance. But the vast scale of Chinese communist atrocities puts them in the same general ballpark. At the very least, they deserve far more recognition than they currently receive.

[The truth about life under Cuban communism]

I. Why We so Rarely Look Back on the Great Leap Forward

What accounts for this neglect? One possible answer is that the most of the victims were Chinese peasants – people who are culturally and socially distant from the Western intellectuals and media figures who have the greatest influence over our historical consciousness and popular culture. As a general rule, it is easier to empathize with victims who seem similar to ourselves.

But an even bigger factor in our relative neglect of the Great Leap Forward is that it is part of the general tendency to downplay crimes committed by communist regimes, as opposed to right-wing authoritarians. Unlike in the days of Mao, today very few western intellectuals actually sympathize with communism. But many are reluctant to fully accept what a great evil it was, fearful – perhaps – that other left-wing causes might be tainted by association.

In China, the regime has in recent years admitted that Mao made “mistakes” and allowed some degree of open discussion about this history. But the government is unwilling to admit that the mass murder was intentional and continues to occasionally suppress and persecute dissidents who point out the truth.

This reluctance is an obvious result of the fact that the Communist Party still rules China. Although they have repudiated many of Mao’s specific policies, the regime still derives much of its legitimacy from his legacy. I experienced China’s official ambivalence on this subject first-hand, when I gave a talk about the issue while teaching a course as a visiting professor at a Chinese university in 2014.

II. Why it Matters.

For both Chinese and westerners, failure to acknowledge the true nature of the Great Leap Forward carries serious costs. Some survivors of the Great Leap Forward are still alive today. They deserve far greater recognition of the horrible injustice they suffered. They also deserve compensation for their losses, and the infliction of appropriate punishment on the remaining perpetrators.

In addition, our continuing historical blind spot about the crimes of Mao and other communist rulers, leads us to underestimate the horrors of such policies, and makes it more likely that they might be revived in the future. The horrendous history of China, the USSR, and their imitators, should have permanently discredited socialism as completely as fascism was discredited by the Nazis. But it has not – so far – fully done so.

Just recently, the socialist government of Venezuela imposed forced labor on much of its population. Yet most of the media coverage of this injustice fails to note the connection to socialism, or that the policy has parallels in the history of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other similar regimes. One analysis even claims that the real problem is not so much “socialism qua socialism,” but rather Venezuela’s “particular brand of socialism, which fuses bad economic ideas with a distinctive brand of strongman bullying,” and is prone to authoritarianism and “mismanagement.” The author simply ignores the fact that “strongman bullying” and “mismanagement” are typical of socialist states around the world. The Scandinavian nations – sometimes cited as examples of successful socialism- are not actually socialist at all, because they do not feature government ownership of the means of production, and in many ways have freer markets than most other western nations.

[We ignore Venezuela’s imminent implosion at our peril]

Venezuela’s tragic situation would not surprise anyone familiar with the history of the Great Leap Forward. We would do well to finally give history’s largest episode of mass murder the attention it deserves.

The election is in 100 days. Here’s what we know.

Presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. (Dsk/AFP/Getty Images)

By Chris Cillizza July 31 at 5:48 PM - The Washington Post

The two party conventions are over. The first general election debate is in 56 days. The general election is 99 days away. Now seems like a good time to look at what we know about the clash between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Here are five things I think I know.

1. There is no Trump 2.0.

I’ve been saying this for a while now. There is no pivot. There is no new and improved version. There is just Donald Trump — take him or leave him. Ask yourself this: What successful 70-year-old man — in the immediate aftermath of one of the greatest victories of his life — decides to do things totally differently? The answer is no 70-year-old man, particularly one with the level of supreme confidence displayed by Trump.

“There is no other Donald Trump,” Clinton said in her acceptance speech last week in Philadelphia. “This is it.” That’s right. For Republicans desperately hoping that Trump stops attacking members of his own party or takes a break from Twitter, it’s just not going to happen. Trump is going to be Trump; Republicans have to decide whether that’s who they want to vote for.

July 30, 2016The campaign buses as they pass through Johnstown, Pa., on the second day of the tour. Melina Mara/The Washington Post

2. Hillary Clinton is going to play it safe.

Clinton’s defining trait as a politician is her cautiousness. She doesn’t leap before she looks. Ever. Her selection of Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) as her vice presidential running mate — and reporting that suggests Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack finished second in the veepstakes — makes clear that Clinton isn’t going to take any major risks in the coming days of the campaign.

What that caution reflects is a belief — never stated publicly — among Clinton and her senior aides that if she does the basic blocking and tackling in swing states, makes no major mistakes and just keeps letting Trump talk, she wins. Based on the electoral map and Trump’s demographic problems with Hispanic voters, that looks like a smart strategy today.

3. Trump has a very narrow electoral path.

If Trump loses this fall, many Republicans will heap blame on him and the campaign he is running. Some of that blame will be fair. Much of it won’t be, for this reason: No Republican presidential nominee starts off with a 50-50 shot of beating their Democratic opponent because of the GOP’s huge disadvantages in the electoral map.

Consider this: Eighteen states, plus the District of Columbia, have voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in each of the six elections between 1992 and 2012. They yield 242 electoral votes. There are 13 states that have voted for the Republican nominee in every presidential election since 1992. They yield 102 electoral votes. So, if Clinton wins the 18 states in the “Blue Wall” and wins Florida (and its 29 electoral votes), the election is over. She is president.

4. Clinton and Trump may be the only people each other can beat.

We are dealing with two very unpopular nominees — the two least popular major-party picks in modern presidential politics. These are two deeply flawed candidates with problems that almost certainly can’t be fixed.

For Trump, the issue is that people simply struggle to see him as someone who could actually be president. His short temper, tendency to overstate and seeming unwillingness to back away from his more divisive rhetoric make Trump less than ideal as a major-party nominee.

Meanwhile, Clinton labors under deep doubt about her honesty and trustworthiness — concerns that were only exacerbated by her mishandling of the email controversy regarding her electronic correspondence at the State Department. Clinton has rhetorically bowed to the idea that she has work to do to convince people — “I get it that some people just don’t know what to make of me,” she said in her acceptance speech at the convention — but it’s unclear whether anything she could say or do would change minds.

The simple fact is that Trump is the only Republican Clinton can beat and Clinton is the only Democrat Trump can beat.

5. The next three months are going to be incredibly nasty.

When you have two candidates who are as disliked as these two, the path to victory isn’t to make yourself more likable — it’s to make the other person even less well liked. Money spent on ads trying to make either Clinton or Trump more appealing to the electorate is almost certainly a waste.

What that means is that you are going to hear a lot more about “Crooked Hillary” from Trump and a lot more about Trump’s controversial comments about women, Hispanics and, well, almost everyone else from Clinton.

Brace yourself: It’s going to be the nastiest 99 days you have ever seen in a political campaign.

Chris Cillizza writes “The Fix,” a politics blog for the Washington Post. He also covers the White House. Follow @thefix

Michelle Obama's Speech for the Ages

The First Lady took to the stage at the Democratic National Convention, and united a divided hall.

The Atlantic

Most convention speeches are forgotten almost before they’re finished. But tonight in Philadelphia, Michelle Obama delivered a speech that will be replayed, quoted, and anthologized for years. It was as pure a piece of political oratory as this campaign has offered, and instantly entered the pantheon of great convention speeches.

Obama stepped out onto a stage in front of a divided party, including delegates who had booed almost every mention of the presumptive nominee. And she delivered a speech that united the hall, bringing it to its feet.

She did it, moreover, her own way—forming a striking contrast with the night’s other speakers. She did it without shouting at the crowd. Without overtly slamming Republicans. Without turning explicitly negative. Her speech was laden with sharp barbs, but she delivered them calmly, sometimes wryly, biting her lower lip, hitting her cadence. It was a masterful performance.

She offered an upbeat vision of how far America had come, and—like her husband 12 years before—put herself forward as living evidence of what American ideals might accomplish. “That is the story of this country,” she said.

The story that has brought me to this stage tonight. The story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all our sons and daughters now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.

When Obama first said that she wakes up every morning in a house built by slaves in a commencement address a month ago, right-wing commentators were quick to attack her as unpatriotic. Instead of backing away from the sentiment, though, she expanded on it. She explained it. She offered it as evidence of American possibility.

And then a First Lady often attacked for lacking patriotism, a woman accused of not loving her country, turned the table on her critics:

So look. So, don't let anyone ever tell you that this country isn't great—that somehow we need to make it great again—because this right now is the greatest country on earth. And as my daughters prepare to set out into the world, I want a leader who is worthy of that truth.

It was an attempt to frame the terms of the 2016 election. Nearly two-thirds of Hispanics, more than four in five African Americans, believe that America’s best days lie ahead. Michelle Obama didn’t shy away from the worst of what her country has done, but she insisted that it is improving, that it is already great, and that it can be greater still.

Few politicians have lost by betting on the optimism of the American people.

Michelle Obama delivers a passionate defense of Hillary Clinton

By Krissah Thompson and Ed O'Keefe

Michelle Obama publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton for the first time during a primetime address in Philadelphia, giving her full support to her husband’s former secretary of state.

The first lady, who is one of the most popular political figures in the Democratic Party, said “in this election — I’m with her.”

“When she didn’t win the election eight years ago, she didn’t get angry or disillusioned,” Obama said.

“Hillary did not pack up and go home because as a true public servant Hillary knows that this is so much bigger than her own desires and disappointments. She proudly stepped up again to serve as secretary of state … She could have decided that she was tired of being picked apart for how she looks or how she talks or even how she laughs… Hillary Clinton has never quit on anything in her life.”

Obama did not mention Donald Trump by name, but she had a pointed critique of the Republican nominee.

[Transcript: Read Michelle Obama’s full speech from the 2016 DNC]

“When you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military in your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can’t have a thin skin or a tendency to lash out. You need to be steady and measured and well informed," Obama said.

Obama marveled that it has been eight years since she stood before a similar crowd asking that Democrats to nominate her husband to be president. But she lamented that political discourse has become so harsh. Regardless, she urged Democrats to remain focused on keeping the White House.

“When they go low, we go high,” she said, repeating a mantra she heard as a child.

She delivered a passionate defense of Hillary Clinton — touting her “lifelong devotion to our nation’s children -- not just her own daughter – who she has raised to perfection, but every child who needs a champion.”

[The Take: Democrats’ gathering goes off its feel-good script]

Speakers who came to the main stage earlier in the program, were booed at the mention of Clinton’s name and greeted with loud shouts of “Bernie!” Obama, however, received warmer treatment. Members of the crowd stood and hoisted “Michelle” signs. Delegates, volunteers and reporters filled the Wells Fargo Arena during her address, sitting in the aisles in some sections.

“When I think about the kind of president I want for my girls and for all children, that’s who I want,” Obama added. “I want someone with the proven strength to persevere. Someone who knows this job and takes it seriously. Someone who understands that the issues that a president tackles are not black or white and cannot be boiled down to 140 characters.”

Turning personal and emotional toward the end, Obama marveled at the journey of her family in the last eight years.

“I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I’ve watched my daughters, two beautiful intelligent black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters and all of our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States,” she said.

“Don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great,” she added. “That somehow we need to make it great again. Because this right now is the greatest country on earth.”

She said her daughters and the nation’s children need a president “who understands the issues a president faces are not black and white.”

[Cue the media speculation about a Michelle Obama presidential run]

Earlier Monday, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon told reporters that they are eager to have Obama hit the campaign trail “as her schedule permits.”

Her remarks are an important moment in the final year of her husband’s presidency. While she has not been personally close to the Clintons in the years since their bruising 2008 campaign, her husband’s legacy now rests on the success of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Krissah Thompson began writing for The Washington Post in 2001. She has been a business reporter, covered presidential campaigns and written about civil rights and race. More recently, she has covered the first lady's office, politics and culture. Follow @Krissah30

Ed O’Keefe is covering the 2016 presidential campaign. He's covered presidential and congressional politics, Congress and federal agencies and spent a brief time covering the Iraq war. Follow @edatpost

Michelle Obama may be the only person on Earth that Donald Trump won’t attack. But why?

First lady Michelle Obama addressed the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia July 25. Here are some highlights from that speech. (Video: Deirdra O'Regan/The Washington Post; Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By Aaron Blake

Last week, we found out that Donald Trump's wife, Melania Trump, is apparently a fan of Michelle Obama's. In explaining her inadvertent plagiarizing of the first lady's 2008 convention speech, Melania Trump's speechwriter said, "A person she has always liked is Michelle Obama."

Is it possible that Melania Trump's husband agrees with her?

As I noted last week, it's not that unusual for prospective or actual first ladies to say nice things about one another. There is something of a kinship, it seems, and they don't often get involved in the political sniping.

[The ugly truth about the White House and its history of slavery]

But here's the thing: Obama has now delivered two speeches that were very tough on Donald Trump — albeit without mentioning him by name in either. There was one in an early June commencement speechand now on Monday night at the Democratic National Convention. Trump's response to each one has been silence.

Update: Trump has now broken his silence -- to praise Obama. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Trump says of the speech that clearly targeted him in all but name: "I thought her delivery was excellent. I thought she did a very good job. I liked her speech."

And indeed, despite Obama's status as a first lady many conservative Republicans love to hate, Trump doesn't appear to have ever really gone after her for anything, really.

That's surprising from a guy who is nothing if not fond of doing things to stir up the GOP base. This is also a guy, mind you, who doesn't take incoming political fire without responding in kind. "I'm a counter-puncher," he has said repeatedly during this campaign. It's his explanation for many of his feuds.

It's also not as though he's opposed to engaging in political fights with women. Rosie O'Donnell, Megyn Kelly, Carly Fiorina, Elizabeth Warren — the list goes on and on. And we all know how Trump feels about Obama's husband.

And yet, even as he tweetstormed during the big speeches of the convention Monday night — especially during speeches by Warren, Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders — not a word about the first lady, even as she made a very forceful case against him in no uncertain terms.

[Full transcript and video: Michelle Obama's emotional Monday night speech at the DNC]

"I want someone with the proven strength to persevere," she said. "Someone who knows this job and takes it seriously. Someone who understands that the issues a president faces are not black and white and cannot be boiled down to 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military in your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can't have a thin skin or a tendency to lash out. You need to be steady, and measured, and well-informed."

It didn't escape notice:

"Donald Trump ranted about all the DNC speakers on Twitter — except one," Business Insider said.

"There’s One Person Donald Trump Did Not Try to Mess With Last Night: Michelle Obama," Slate said.

Some indeed painted it as Trump not wanting to pick a fight with a powerful and eloquent first lady who gave a fantastic speech.

But Trump's feuds are never quite so calculated. If he doesn't worry about "counter-punching" with Pope Francis — the pope! — why would he shy away from doing the same with Obama? This is not a guy who knows how to just let something go or can be prevailed upon to avoid an unhelpful political feud.

There is something about the first lady, it seems, that's different for Trump. And looking back, it's not clear that he has ever really targeted her in a forceful way.

In fact, four years ago at this very juncture in the presidential process, Trump actually praised her Democratic National Convention speech.

The year 2012 was not back when Trump was a Democrat, mind you. This was after he spent years questioning whether Obama's husband was born in the United States and was a legitimate president. His other tweets during that year's Democratic convention weren't nearly so kind.

And yet, praise for Michelle Obama.

Earlier that year, Trump did take a little dig at the first lady.

But that appears to be about the worst thing he's said about her. Other tweets mentioning her include asking what people thought of her haircut.

And he complimented her and her husband on their 20th anniversary in 2012.

Trump has always been a fan of stirring up controversy and appealing to the GOP base's antipathy toward everything Obama — except, apparently, for Michelle Obama. Not yet, anyway.

Here are six times Republican presidential contender Donald Trump has insulted women, from Rosie O'Donnell to Ted Cruz's wife, Heidi. (Sarah Parnass and Nicki DeMarco/The Washington Post)

Michelle Obama: 'When they go low, we go high'

First lady Michelle Obama waves to the crowd before delivering remarks on the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the Wells Fargo Center, July 25, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

By Sunlen Serfaty and Eric Bradner, CNN
Updated 5:53 PM ET, Tue July 26, 2016

Philadelphia (CNN) Michelle Obama cast the presidential race as one between a positive role model for children -- in Hillary Clinton -- and a damaging one -- in Donald Trump -- in the marquee speech on the Democratic National Convention's opening night.

The first lady never mentioned Trump by name, but leveraging her popularity, she made a rare, if not unprecedented, foray into partisan politics to knock the Republican nominee.

Obama condemned "the hateful language that we hear from public figures on TV," saying that "our motto is, when they go low, we go high."

And in a shot at Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan, Obama discussed raising her children in a White House that was built by slaves.

Memorable lines from the DNC's opening night

"Don't let anyone tell you that this country isn't great. This right now is the greatest country on earth," the first lady said.

Obama electrified the crowd at the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia, taking the stage just after 10 p.m. ET and -- in a departure from the political attacks on display all day -- making the case that, because of her character and temperament, Clinton is the role model she'd like her daughters to see in the Oval Office.

Even Trump, who Obama was implicitly criticizing, praised her remarks.

"I thought her delivery was excellent," Trump told The Hollywood Reporter. "I thought she did a very good job. I liked her speech."

It was a remarkable embrace of the prime-time stage for Obama, who was reluctant about the spotlight that came when her husband, then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, launched his presidential campaign against Clinton in 2007.

"To understand the journey she's taken as a reluctant conscript on the public scene, to come here and command that stage the way she did tonight was extraordinary -- and I think did for Hillary Clinton what no one else has done to this point," said David Axelrod, a top Obama strategist on the 2008 campaign and now a CNN political commentator.

Symone Sanders, former national press secretary for the Bernie Sanders campaign, praised Obama's speech for its historical significance.

"The Obamas were the first African-American First Family that we had and they did not eradicate racism in this country. We do not live in this post-racial society, where race doesn't matter, where the struggle is not there for people of color in this country," she told CNN's Chris Cuomo Tuesday on "New Day."

"And I think Michelle Obama went up on that stage and embodied everything that is great about America," Sanders added. "She gave us hope but she also told us we still have work to do."

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who spoke before Obama, praised her speech for its "spirit."

"She spoke from the heart. You felt her energy. You felt her spirit," he said Tuesday on "New Day."

"I think that what people expected was a speech but what they really got was a sharing, a convening of spirit. And when she talked about her kids, that really affected me."

Dems open convention without Wasserman Schultz

The first lady began discussing watching her daughters grow up in the White House -- saying she remembers watching them go off to school for the first time.

"At that moment, I realized that our time in the White House would form the foundation for who they would become, and how we managed this experience could truly make or break them," she said.

She added: "This election -- every election -- is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of our lives. And I am here tonight because in this election, there is only one person who I trust with that responsibility -- only one person who I believe is truly qualified to be President of the United States. And that is our friend, Hillary Clinton."

Obama told the electrified audience that "we are always stronger together," saying she wants a president "who will teach our children that everyone in this country matters."

"I am here tonight because I know that that is the kind of president that Hillary Clinton will be, and that's why in this election, I'm with her," Obama said.

Michelle Obama hits back against 'hateful' rhetoric

In a nod to Clinton's historic status as the first female presumptive nominee of a major U.S. political party, she said: "Because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters, and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States."

She called Clinton "a leader who will be guided every day by the love and hope and impossibly big dreams that we all have for our children."

Temperament and experience is something Michelle Obama has been referencing a lot these days -- dipping her toe into 2016 politics by taking veiled shots at Donald Trump in speeches over the past few months.

"Right now, when we're hearing so much disturbing and hateful rhetoric, it is so important to remember that our diversity has been -- and will always be -- our greatest source of strength and pride here in the United States," Mrs. Obama said at a Nowruz celebration at the White House in April.

"Here in America, we don't give in to our fears. We don't build up walls to keep people out," she said during a commencement address at City College of New York this June.

Members of the media stand during the event

Powerful surrogate

Michelle Obama is seen as having a unique and essential role to play for Clinton, key to keeping the Obama coalition of women, African Americans, Hispanics and young people engaged.

The first lady could turn into a powerful surrogate to boost the presumptive Democratic nominee, with her high favorability ratings.

"I think Hillary Clinton is a phenomenal woman," the first lady said when asked about her at a White House event in April, "and I've gotten to know her, and I think she's made some pretty major contributions over the course of her life."

However, she took the stage to make the case for a woman she hasn't always supported.

During the bruising 2008 Democratic primary fight, Michelle Obama often took veiled swipes at her husband's opponent.

"They said there was an inevitable candidate, that there was someone who was going to make this race virtually impossible. And I thought, wow, it's over already?" Obama said in an interview with CBS in the fall of 2007, in the throes of the Democratic primary.

"So, our view is that if you can't run your own house, you certainly can't run the White House," Michelle Obama said from the campaign trail in the early state of Iowa in August of 2007.

But theirs was a relationship that grew once the campaign came to a close.

Shortly after Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign and endorsed then-Sen. Barack Obama, Michelle praised Clinton for the way she came around to supporting her husband.

"From the minute after this was done, right, she has always been just cordial and open. I've called her. I've talked to her. She's given me advice about the kids," Obama told Larry King in October of 2008, "We've talked at length about this kind of stuff, how you feel, how you react. She has been amazing. She is a real pro and a woman with character."

The convention stage is a platform that Obama is familiar with by now, delivering high-profile speeches in both the 2008 and 2012 conventions for her husband, speeches that drew heavily on the Obama family's personal story.

"Every step of the way since that clear day, February, 19 months ago, when, with little more than our faith in each other and a hunger for change, we joined my husband, Barack Obama, on the improbable journey that has led us to this moment," Mrs. Obama said in Denver at the DNC in 2008. "But each of us comes here also by way of our own improbable journey."

She hit similar themes, weaving in their personal narrative, four years later.

"Barack knows the American Dream because he's lived it and he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are, or where we're from, or what we look like, or who we love," she said in 2012 in Charlotte.

CNN's Eugene Scott contributed to this story.