WEBVTT NOTE The Rise and Fall of Soviet Communism 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.000 Well, I think it's really, I'm very excited to be a part of this celebration of truth of Austrian School of Economics. 2 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:16.000 Just two days before the birthday of Ludwig von Mises and the 15th anniversary of the Institute, 3 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:25.000 it really shows who won and for me, interestingly enough, after my studies in the University of Marxist-Leninism, 4 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:38.000 and Socialism, to get this wonderful license plate called L.V. Mises, and you can see Dr. Gordon is approvingly inspecting this license plate. 5 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:45.000 Well, Austrian School is definitely the most anti-socialist school of economic thought. 6 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:53.000 It completely demolished the intellectual foundations of socialism, starting with Carl Menger, actually, 7 00:00:53.000 --> 00:00:58.520 publication of his book in 1870 he made and I believe that that's really so he 8 00:00:58.520 --> 00:01:02.920 made Karl Marx completely speechless Marx never wrote anything in economic 9 00:01:02.920 --> 00:01:11.000 theory after 1870 then Boehm-Bawerk he completely smashed the objective 10 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:17.000 theory of value at the end of the 19th century and von Mises and Hayek and 11 00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:22.600 Murray Rothbard continued this work of dismantling the pretense of socialism as 12 00:01:22.600 --> 00:01:26.240 as being a scientific teaching. 13 00:01:26.240 --> 00:01:30.200 Well, all the predictions of Austrian School of Economics 14 00:01:30.200 --> 00:01:31.720 came absolutely true. 15 00:01:31.720 --> 00:01:33.960 And the whole history of the 20th century 16 00:01:33.960 --> 00:01:37.320 was the history of human suffering 17 00:01:37.320 --> 00:01:41.480 when the people were trying, as Ludwig von Mises said, 18 00:01:41.480 --> 00:01:46.480 to revolt against economics, to revolt against economics theory. 19 00:01:46.480 --> 00:01:50.560 20th century is what two and a half years left only. 20 00:01:50.560 --> 00:01:55.560 In the 20th century it probably will be considered by the humankind, by the future historians, 21 00:01:55.560 --> 00:02:03.560 as one of the most bloodthirsty, one of the most criminal centuries in the history of humankind. 22 00:02:03.560 --> 00:02:10.560 Over 170 million people were slaughtered during this century by their own governments. 23 00:02:10.560 --> 00:02:13.560 Not in the war, but in a peacetime situation. 24 00:02:13.560 --> 00:02:34.560 The governments were trying to impose all kinds of social utopias, all kinds of socialist social utopias, no matter of what color, whether it was Soviet communism or German Nazism, the whole idea is the same, the idea of the same socialist idea. 25 00:02:34.560 --> 00:02:43.560 I was listening to Dr. Gordon's description of Edward Bernstein, of that German social democrat. 26 00:02:43.560 --> 00:02:48.560 And I recollected kind of personal encounter with Bernstein. 27 00:02:48.560 --> 00:02:55.560 I came from Kazan, I was born in, it's Republic of Tatarstan, one of parts of Russian Empire. 28 00:02:55.560 --> 00:03:03.560 And in 1938, Joseph Stalin declared a campaign of purges against something he called Bernsteinian sleaze. 29 00:03:03.560 --> 00:03:16.560 and Sleaze. And by Bernstein and Sleaze, he meant some kind of, he described this half-baked socialism based on immoral principles. 30 00:03:16.560 --> 00:03:31.560 And in Kazan, which is predominantly Muslim part of this former Soviet Union, 700 peasants were physically slaughtered because they were considered to be this Bernstein and Sleaze. 31 00:03:31.560 --> 00:03:47.560 I think this logic was very well described today in the morning by Dr. Levin who, the socialist logic was that Muslims are the same as Jewish and peasants are the same as Bernsteinian intellectuals. 32 00:03:47.560 --> 00:03:58.560 But when I was thinking about that, I realized that most governments today, I think, both here and in Western Europe, can be, from Stalin's perspective, called Bernsteinian sleaze. 33 00:03:58.560 --> 00:04:06.560 in the sense that it's again the same combination of half-baked socialism and I would say being very far from morality. 34 00:04:06.560 --> 00:04:16.560 And today's socialism, I think in the United States, except academia when it is alive and thriving and open and proud, 35 00:04:16.560 --> 00:04:23.560 but outside of academia, I think socialism takes forms of different social movements, of different social movements. 36 00:04:23.560 --> 00:04:34.260 And those social movements, what's common of all of them with socialism, as Murray Rothbard put it, 37 00:04:34.260 --> 00:04:38.560 that private property is eliminated, individualism goes by the board, 38 00:04:38.560 --> 00:04:43.060 individuality is flattened, all property is owned and controlled communally, 39 00:04:43.060 --> 00:04:50.060 and the individual units of the new collective organism are in some way equal to one another. 40 00:04:50.060 --> 00:05:04.560 And it kind of also occurred to me that these new social movements are the most, I would say, lively today form of socialism we experience today. 41 00:05:04.560 --> 00:05:10.560 What's common between them is again the hatred of private property. 42 00:05:10.560 --> 00:05:28.560 Well, the rise of communism, say, in Russia, was due mostly to the attacks on private property which were conducted even before the bloody revolution of 1917. 43 00:05:28.560 --> 00:05:36.560 In Russia, the cost of socialist experience was over 60 million people. Over 60 million people were slaughtered in the dreadful Gulag. 44 00:05:36.560 --> 00:05:46.560 The attacks were again on everything the people would cherish. On private property, which was considered to be a crime, it was attacks on family. 45 00:05:46.560 --> 00:05:59.560 In 1920s, the Soviet government openly unleashed a campaign against family by suggesting so-called communal families, meaning that all children should be socialized, 46 00:05:59.560 --> 00:06:14.560 Socialized, that people should not see each other on a permanent basis and all children should believe that all adults are their parents and all parents, all adults should consider all children to be of their own. 47 00:06:14.560 --> 00:06:27.560 And I remember I was in San Francisco about a year ago and attended a meeting with Hillary Clinton. She was promoting her book, It Takes a Village. 48 00:06:27.560 --> 00:06:36.560 Yes, and one person in the audience asked her whether, and she said, well, the government, the community, the business leaders, they're all responsible for children. 49 00:06:36.560 --> 00:06:43.560 And one person in the audience said, what about family, what about the parents? She said, oh, parents as well, parents as well. 50 00:06:43.560 --> 00:06:47.560 She kind of permitted parents also to be included in this process. 51 00:06:47.560 --> 00:07:04.560 In the Soviet Union, I think this campaign against families resulted in the sanctification and glorification of 11-years-old Pavlik Morozov who reported to KGB about his father who was storing grain, who was hoarding grain. 52 00:07:04.560 --> 00:07:11.560 and his father was immediately murdered by the KGB squad in the backyard of his own house 53 00:07:11.560 --> 00:07:19.560 and this young boy, he was axed by his grandfather who was also then shot by the KGB squad 54 00:07:19.560 --> 00:07:29.560 so it's a very tragic, I would say, very dramatic story of completely confused morals, completely confused young boy 55 00:07:29.560 --> 00:07:46.560 But then they named all, practically every second high school was named after Pavlik Morozov as well as a lot of streets, a lot of community centers were named after him and he was considered to be the most good example for all young people. 56 00:07:46.560 --> 00:07:59.560 It also brings me to thoughts, I think, best described by Murray Rothbard that communism was not a system of scientific thinking at all. 57 00:07:59.560 --> 00:08:08.560 It was a religion. It was a religion. And in his brilliant essay, Karl Marx as a religious discatologist, 58 00:08:08.560 --> 00:08:17.840 Murray Rothbard is writing that the bottom line about Marx is that he was a communist. 59 00:08:17.840 --> 00:08:22.160 In the same way as the return of the messiah in Christian theology 60 00:08:22.160 --> 00:08:25.320 will put an end to history and establish new heaven and new earth, 61 00:08:25.320 --> 00:08:31.840 so the establishment of communism according to Marx would put an end to human history. 62 00:08:31.840 --> 00:08:35.840 And this end they really tried to put in a very hard way. 63 00:08:35.840 --> 00:08:44.240 There were streams of blood going from Russia to Kampuche, from China to Yugoslavia. 64 00:08:44.240 --> 00:08:50.540 The number of people slaughtered, the number of intellectuals gone, was overwhelming. 65 00:08:50.540 --> 00:08:58.240 The whole idea of communism was to impose the new men, the formation of the new person 66 00:08:58.240 --> 00:09:03.440 who would obey his intellectuals leaders, who would be completely and complete compliance, 67 00:09:03.440 --> 00:09:09.440 He was kind of an ideal person who would not ask anything for the labors of his work. 68 00:09:09.440 --> 00:09:19.440 He would not. He would be in full compliance with what these intellectuals as striving for power would do of him. 69 00:09:19.440 --> 00:09:27.440 Grigory Malenkov, who was close associate to Stalin and later became a general secretary of the Communist Party, 70 00:09:27.440 --> 00:09:33.440 He called it that this permitted costs of introducing this eternal happiness on people. 71 00:09:33.440 --> 00:09:39.960 So those people who would not comply with this idea of eternal happiness should go. 72 00:09:39.960 --> 00:09:47.080 So the socialism in, say, in Soviet Union, in China, in all other communist countries, 73 00:09:47.080 --> 00:09:51.160 and there were 33 of them, can you imagine, there were 33 countries in the world with 74 00:09:51.160 --> 00:10:03.160 So the population of 1.4 billion people were professing communism until practically five years ago. 75 00:10:03.160 --> 00:10:12.160 And most of these countries, those at least which were not suffering from this Bernsteinian sleaze, 76 00:10:12.160 --> 00:10:18.160 which was kind of a mild diversion of communism, most of them were in the process of this holy war 77 00:10:18.160 --> 00:10:25.640 War against any kind of rethinking, and this holy war resulted both in skimming the milk 78 00:10:25.640 --> 00:10:32.080 and throwing the cream away all the time, skimming intellectuals, skimming the best 79 00:10:32.080 --> 00:10:38.840 people, and because of that today in Russian philosophy, a lot of Russian philosophers 80 00:10:38.840 --> 00:10:45.920 and sociologists are talking even about the complete thinning of the genetic fund of Russian 81 00:10:45.920 --> 00:10:53.920 people, because for the last 70 years, the best, the entrepreneurial, the free, they 82 00:10:53.920 --> 00:11:00.400 were all being consistently removed, murdered, could not reproduce themselves at all. 83 00:11:00.400 --> 00:11:07.560 And only people who would be conformed, people who would try to actually to drown their desires, 84 00:11:07.560 --> 00:11:15.600 their qualities in heavy drinking and alcoholism, it's not a coincidence that Russia consumption 85 00:11:15.600 --> 00:11:19.020 Drinking of alcohol in Russia is four times, even today, four times higher than in the 86 00:11:19.020 --> 00:11:23.120 United States, four times higher than in the United States, so, and the United States is 87 00:11:23.120 --> 00:11:29.800 also becoming more and more drinking, drinking country, I think maybe, maybe someone would 88 00:11:29.800 --> 00:11:37.220 even do a correlation analysis, will put econometricians to good use, maybe they can, they can see how 89 00:11:37.220 --> 00:11:42.640 the amount of socialism correlates with, with, with drinking. 90 00:11:42.640 --> 00:11:51.480 And Ludwig von Mises, in 1918, his essay, Economic Calculation of the Socialist Commonwealth, 91 00:11:51.480 --> 00:11:56.480 it proved complete impracticability of socialism. 92 00:11:56.480 --> 00:12:02.400 So socialism, today I'm teaching at the University of San Diego, unfortunately it's not a state 93 00:12:02.400 --> 00:12:07.760 university, it's a catholic school, but the University of San Diego and I'm all the time 94 00:12:07.760 --> 00:12:10.840 discussing the issues of so-called comparative economic systems, 95 00:12:10.840 --> 00:12:14.960 comparative economic, it's taught in most American universities. 96 00:12:14.960 --> 00:12:17.360 But there are no comparative economic systems. 97 00:12:17.360 --> 00:12:22.360 Von Mises proved that socialism is not an economic system. 98 00:12:22.360 --> 00:12:24.480 It's not an economic, it's a non-economic system. 99 00:12:24.480 --> 00:12:26.280 It's a revolt against economics. 100 00:12:26.280 --> 00:12:30.880 It's a simple system of management based on coercion, based on violence. 101 00:12:30.880 --> 00:12:36.240 It's run, more or less, the command system is more or less run the same way, 102 00:12:36.240 --> 00:13:06.240 The same way as, say, army or whatever, the people are ordered to work, that's why, and that's why it collapsed so suddenly and unpredictably for our CIA and other intelligence establishments in Washington, D.C. who never read von Mises, they could predict it very accurately, but the prediction would be based on a simple assumption that when they would start shooting people, then they are gone, and that's exactly it. 103 00:13:06.240 --> 00:13:13.240 And that's exactly what happened. When they, kind of as Soviets would say, ran out of bullets, then it collapsed. It imploded as a courthouse. 104 00:13:13.240 --> 00:13:21.240 And that's, I think, that's what Mr. Gorbachev should be credited for, that in his ignorance, he removed violence out of the system based on violence. 105 00:13:21.240 --> 00:13:32.240 And the glue, the only glue which kept that nations together, the only glue which actually would be forcing people to go to work and do something there, it was gone. 106 00:13:32.240 --> 00:13:39.040 and since 1989 all the socialism is gone and these countries are in free fall. 107 00:13:39.040 --> 00:13:46.880 Another prediction of von Mises and especially I would say of Murray Rothbard was that how they should desocialize. 108 00:13:46.880 --> 00:13:51.680 How it's, I wouldn't say it's easy to go that way, but they did it. 109 00:13:51.680 --> 00:13:55.080 They did all the way, they murdered all these people. 110 00:13:55.080 --> 00:13:59.720 But right now the issue is how to return back from this insanity 111 00:13:59.720 --> 00:14:04.160 and how to return back with keeping all the skeletons on the cardboard. 112 00:14:04.160 --> 00:14:09.880 Because can you imagine if 60 million people out of 200 million population of Soviet Union 113 00:14:09.880 --> 00:14:14.400 were physically slaughtered, how many executioners should be around? 114 00:14:14.400 --> 00:14:18.000 Can you imagine how many people were involved in these murders? 115 00:14:18.000 --> 00:14:21.360 How many people believed in this? 116 00:14:21.360 --> 00:14:28.200 And today, this, I would say, the burden of the past is so overwhelming that I think that 117 00:14:28.200 --> 00:14:34.160 But for some countries it's just very difficult even to overcome the shock, overcome the shock 118 00:14:34.160 --> 00:14:40.200 to find out that all the modern history was the history of lies and crimes and nothing 119 00:14:40.200 --> 00:14:41.560 else. 120 00:14:41.560 --> 00:14:48.920 And for people, especially of older age, it's a very bitter pill to swallow. 121 00:14:48.920 --> 00:14:53.880 And that's why we see all the time that communists are bouncing back, because communists are 122 00:14:53.880 --> 00:14:56.120 providing people with some comfort. 123 00:14:56.120 --> 00:15:01.840 No, it was not all crimes and lies, that we see the same mentality. 124 00:15:01.840 --> 00:15:08.640 For example, President Yeltsin yesterday endorsed this decree prohibiting other denominations 125 00:15:08.640 --> 00:15:17.600 rather than four so-called mainstream denominations, Russian Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist, 126 00:15:17.600 --> 00:15:25.120 which I consider to be right now, government religions in Russia today, which is kind of 127 00:15:25.120 --> 00:15:38.120 The pendulum's flying in another direction, but prohibiting a lot of denominations to do it, again, that's the same thing that they still cannot admit that freedom is better than slavery. 128 00:15:38.120 --> 00:15:51.120 Moreover, right now, it's again the newspeak, quite a lot, and private property also formally endorsed in, say, Russia, in Ukraine. It's completely fake. 129 00:15:51.120 --> 00:16:07.120 If you read New York Times, Los Angeles Times, you would see that right now the major problem of Russia from the perspective of New York Times and Washington Post is the problem that greedy capitalism has completely dislodged all the social structures in Russia. 130 00:16:07.120 --> 00:16:14.120 That people are starving because of this greed, of this capitalist, of this absence of compassion and things like that. 131 00:16:14.120 --> 00:16:44.120 and things like that. But what kind of capitalism we can talk about that even today, and nobody would mention that, even today in Russia, all land belongs to the state. I mean, the land is nationalized. I mean, this is one thing. I mean, how you can, what kind of property relations you can talk about if anything you do is on a state-owned land and the state can ask you to move anytime. That's one thing. Another thing that they adopted 270,000 different regulations following our example that 132 00:16:44.120 --> 00:17:14.120 The same we see here in less kind of obvious form, but von Mises in 1929, he wrote a critique of interventionism, showing that interventionist governments are just an extension of socialism, it's just a little bit less of it, but it's not a matter of qualitative difference, it's a matter of quality, it's a matter of quality, it's a matter of quality, it's a matter of quality, it's a matter of quality, it's a matter of quality. 133 00:17:14.120 --> 00:17:19.120 It's a quantitative difference. It's a matter of how much of regulations you have. 134 00:17:19.120 --> 00:17:26.120 And the more we are regulating economy, the more is so-called artificial need to regulate more and more. 135 00:17:26.120 --> 00:17:30.120 Because the more problems you introduce with government regulations of the economy, 136 00:17:30.120 --> 00:17:34.120 the more government you need to attend these problems. 137 00:17:34.120 --> 00:17:39.120 And so this is really like a drunk who never can get real drunk. 138 00:17:39.120 --> 00:17:54.120 So it's, and that will, that the logic of it as von Mises showed, it will bring us exactly to the same kind of things that the people in Eastern Europe and Asia experienced for the last, from 50 to 70 years. 139 00:17:54.120 --> 00:18:01.120 The logic of collective action is to have as much government as you can. 140 00:18:01.120 --> 00:18:08.520 And because of that I think that this awful experiment, which that people staged on themselves, 141 00:18:08.520 --> 00:18:11.640 that we should learn something from that, we should learn something from that. 142 00:18:11.640 --> 00:18:18.560 From that the fate of this 170 million people, 170 million people who are physically slaughtered 143 00:18:18.560 --> 00:18:21.560 to make this experiment happen. 144 00:18:21.560 --> 00:18:26.920 I'm on a sabbatical leave from my college and they found a replacement for me and the 145 00:18:26.920 --> 00:18:28.920 The chair of my department called me and he said, 146 00:18:28.920 --> 00:18:34.920 the person who is replacing you put a big picture of Stalin in your office. 147 00:18:34.920 --> 00:18:36.920 Big picture of Stalin in your office. 148 00:18:36.920 --> 00:18:38.920 So, wherever you defect, 149 00:18:38.920 --> 00:18:41.920 you would have a picture of Stalin hanging in your office, 150 00:18:41.920 --> 00:18:43.920 no matter what. 151 00:18:43.920 --> 00:18:49.920 And that's why I think that the Institute is doing a great, great work 152 00:18:49.920 --> 00:18:53.920 in providing an intellectual alternative, intellectual counter-evolution 153 00:18:53.920 --> 00:19:00.920 to the ideas of statism, the ideas of coercion, the ideas of state-endorsed violence against people. 154 00:19:00.920 --> 00:19:07.920 And I am so proud to be kind of, I would say, an ambassador of Institute at my college, 155 00:19:07.920 --> 00:19:12.920 11 students of which attended already Ludwig von Mises University. 156 00:19:12.920 --> 00:19:18.920 Right now I'm trying to work on University of San Diego students, and hopefully we'll see many of them attending this, 157 00:19:18.920 --> 00:19:48.920 this, I would say, festival of intellectual freedom and freethinking in, moreover, when I came to the United States, I really thought that it's the land of the free and the home of the brave, and then, and then I see that there are not so many brave left, yes, and not so many free left, yes, and I never would think about myself that I would be an object of such ferocious attacks, right now I'm being named 158 00:20:18.920 --> 00:20:26.920 This is an intellectual tradition of immense strength, and the strength of this tradition is that we tell the truth. 159 00:20:26.920 --> 00:20:31.920 I was very close to Austrian economist. He kind of deviated all his life. 160 00:20:31.920 --> 00:20:37.920 He would go into, or become kind of conservative Keynesian and bounce back. His name was Gottfried Habler. 161 00:20:37.920 --> 00:20:44.920 Gottfried died three years ago in Washington, D.C., but I was quite close to him when I was in Washington, 162 00:20:44.920 --> 00:21:14.920 in Washington, and he was, at that time, 95 years old, and I kind of asked him, what's the reason that the Austrian economist, the longevity is so, life expectancy is so high, he said, he looked at me, he was very frail at that time, he looked at me and he said, because we'll never lie, that's what he said, we'll never lie, and so, and I think that's the strength of the school, that I think it's kind of almighty because it's true, and it's just a matter of time, 163 00:21:14.920 --> 00:21:20.920 that people are trying everything else, and they've tried practically everything else, and it didn't work. 164 00:21:20.920 --> 00:21:24.920 And because of that, I think the future is for Austrian School. 165 00:21:24.920 --> 00:21:33.920 And I would think that what we observe today is just such a manifestation of success and strength of us. 166 00:21:33.920 --> 00:21:40.920 And for me especially, being kind of only neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate on campus, 167 00:21:40.920 --> 00:21:50.320 To be part of this great intellectual celebration, it's so needed to know that you are not alone, 168 00:21:50.320 --> 00:21:54.920 that you are not thinking, that you are not so different from all these people, 169 00:21:54.920 --> 00:22:01.920 and happily you are different from that people, and that really provides me with a lot of strength. 170 00:22:01.920 --> 00:22:10.920 Well, and also I would say that Austrian economics, besides showing intellectual futility of socialism, 171 00:22:10.920 --> 00:22:18.920 it also provides us with a lot of, I would say, real-day prescriptions, real-day recommendations 172 00:22:18.920 --> 00:22:21.920 what to do with the economy if the economy is in a bad shape. 173 00:22:21.920 --> 00:22:29.920 And again, Murray Rothbard, he developed a very logical system of desocialization, 174 00:22:29.920 --> 00:22:32.120 How these countries should desocialize? 175 00:22:32.120 --> 00:22:38.080 And the whole idea of this system is that private property, based on very fast, on a 176 00:22:38.080 --> 00:22:43.920 fell swoop kind of reform approach, that's what would pay. 177 00:22:43.920 --> 00:22:48.960 And those countries which followed his advice, and some countries did, like Czech Republic 178 00:22:48.960 --> 00:22:52.280 or Estonia, they are doing much better. 179 00:22:52.280 --> 00:22:56.920 And yesterday I was reading the World Bank report, and even the central planners from 180 00:22:56.920 --> 00:23:04.040 on the World Bank, they were forced to admit that only those countries which went far enough 181 00:23:04.040 --> 00:23:09.400 and fast enough did make it, and those countries which didn't, for example, like Russia, Ukraine, 182 00:23:09.400 --> 00:23:15.600 Belarus, which still have the government property on land, which do not respect private property 183 00:23:15.600 --> 00:23:22.720 at all, these countries are doing much worse than they would be doing otherwise. 184 00:23:22.720 --> 00:23:28.520 And also another thing is that today we see the revival of Austrian tradition say in Russia. 185 00:23:28.520 --> 00:23:33.180 Right now in Russia there are three free market institutions openly proclaiming their allegiance 186 00:23:33.180 --> 00:23:35.640 to Austrian School of Economics. 187 00:23:35.640 --> 00:23:42.540 The socialism, liberalism, bureaucracy, planned chaos, these books were all translated into 188 00:23:42.540 --> 00:23:44.220 Russian language. 189 00:23:44.220 --> 00:23:50.280 For socialism they have a second printing, first printing was 15,000 right now it's 25,000. 190 00:23:50.280 --> 00:24:10.280 The second printing of Socialism by von Mises, the book which Hayek testified that opened his mind, opened to Austrian economics, that he was a socialist himself before reading von Mises' Socialism. 191 00:24:10.280 --> 00:24:18.280 Just two months ago they started something called Catallactics Institute in Lithuania. 192 00:24:18.280 --> 00:24:25.080 There are free market institutions in all Baltic states, in Czech Republic, five or six of them already. 193 00:24:25.080 --> 00:24:30.360 So we can see that this intellectual tradition is reviving there. 194 00:24:30.360 --> 00:24:35.000 Austrian School of Economics was all the time the most hated school back in the Soviet Union, 195 00:24:35.000 --> 00:24:37.400 and rightly from the communist perspective. 196 00:24:37.400 --> 00:24:44.120 So Nikolai Bukharin, who was the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, 197 00:24:44.120 --> 00:24:47.480 was a student of Boehm-Bawerk in 1912 in Vienna. 198 00:24:47.480 --> 00:24:53.160 And upon his return back, he said, this is the enemy, this is the enemy, the enemy. 199 00:24:53.160 --> 00:24:59.560 And all other intellectual traditions, he said, they're not strong enough, they're not sincere enough, 200 00:24:59.560 --> 00:25:03.240 and they're not close enough to Austrian school. 201 00:25:03.240 --> 00:25:08.840 And so Austrian School of Economics was considered to be, von Mises was considered to be like the most reactionary, 202 00:25:08.840 --> 00:25:14.800 which, hearing from whom we heard it, I think was the best compliment 203 00:25:14.800 --> 00:25:17.800 that Soviet Communists could make to von Mises. 204 00:25:17.800 --> 00:25:23.800 And so, on this note, I think I would like to congratulate all of you, 205 00:25:23.800 --> 00:25:29.800 because I think it's the event which we're all very happy to be part of. 206 00:25:29.800 --> 00:25:31.800 Thanks.