Stalin - classic or dud

How could e. Germany have been the world's sixth largest economy (no less an "objective" authority than the CIA) if they weren't doing something right. Not to mention basic human rights and equitable distribution of resources--completely absent in the Cheney-Rove regime we're labouring in now.

Still, you'll obviously believe whatever you're fed by CNN no matter what the facts say.

ooo neat! i'm learning new words to-day!

Can I have some of what you're smokin', dude?

Well, we can't freely admit it, can we? Our self-expression has been totally crushed!

"It was a disgusting time. Even in terms of music, we were so insular. We didn't really know western music at all. In 1956 I went to Brussels to perform and I came back with suitcases filled with scores of music by Ravel and Debussy - and I suddenly became a focal point for musicians in Moscow who wanted to study these rare documents. What a terrible indictment of our country. It was an embarrassment to be Russian. In 1955, the Boston Symphony Orchestra came and in one concert they performed the Soviet anthem. Before I heard them, I thought our orchestras played it well, but the Americans played it much more beautifully. The problem was our instruments were no good. It was a national shame. But throughout that time visiting western orchestras always gave us music lessons in performing music beautifully."

http://www.lexia.com.ar/rippers/NKVD_Mandelstam.jpg

Interesting point, which I disagree with. Happy times = bad art and vice versa, I think.

1. Answer my first question about why an entire nation would abandon a working system in exchange for chaos, uncertainty and extensive poverty in adjustment

2. Point to the works of art which the Soviet era is famous for that AREN'T Socialist Realism posters or the national anthem. Alternatively, explain why Ashkenazy, Tabachnik, et al. are so unworthy and foolish.

3. Explain how individualism is served better by Stalin's methods. Seriously.

http://www.liberafolio.org/bildoj/deklarodemilitastato.jpg

ok, who saw him first ?

http://www.weltchronik.de/ws/bio/c/ceausescu/cn01918a-CeausescuNicolae-19180126b-19891225d.jpg

I have not thought much of Hobsbawm since this post from mark s:

hobsbawm is and always has been a dismal cultural hypocrite - key sentence: " Whenever Hobsbawm enters a politically sensitive zone, he retreats into hooded, wooden language, redolent of Party-speak."

EH even wrote about jazz, which he loved, under a pseudonym, so as not to fall into disrepute w.the party (jazz of course being a music where "message" and "medium" can't be cut adrift from one another, as per the standard-issue brainless idealism of the line enrique quotes)

-- mark s (mar...), November 3rd, 2003.

The article Mark linked to is regrettably no longer available for free, but is worth reading if you're not familiar with it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/br/thumb/b/b9/Honecker.jpg/180px-Honecker.jpg

http://www.dhm.de/lemo/objekte/pict/KontinuitaetUndWandel_photoWalterUlbricht/index.jpg

seriously, i'm more awed than appalled. it's like frozen caveman or something.

However, if not, then it is just a simple matter of bethune not having learned that, if one point of view is obviously wrong, it does not make the opposite side obviously right. The propaganda wars of the twentieth century were like Duelling Banjos - both sides were playing the same damn lying banjo.

http://www.soviethistory.org/images/Chrome/photobar1936.jpg

Can we stop scaring bethune away with taunting? I'm interested in what he/she has to say.

http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefmedia/sharemed/targets/images/pho/t059/T059123A.jpg

Cathy, I heart you, but I said that it wasn't available for free in my post!

"Stalin, who presided over the ensuing iron age of the USSR, was an autocrat of exceptional, some might say unique, ferocity, ruthlessness and lack of scruple. Few men have manipulated terror on a more massive scale. There is no doubt that under some other leader of the Bolshevik party the sufferings of the peoples of the USSR would have been less, the number of victims smaller. Nevertheless, any policy of rapid modernisation in the USSR, under the circumstances of the time, was bound to be ruthless and, because imposed against the bulk of the people and imposing serious sacrifices on them, to some extent coercive."

Apparently, he was only 5'3".

Ah, but I have. ;-) His stuff always ends up on reserve over here, so I've dipped in from time to time.

I have to say that piece you're quoting doesn't do much to change my image of him.

actually in ref. to TOMBOT's earlier question, soviet film probably represents the single most lasting and awesome artistic achievement by the USSR. of course, the vast majority of the good stuff was mercilessly cut by censors or flat-out banned (and was usually implictly critical of the regime and especially socialist realism anyway), but there's a lotta good shit to be found.

otm

It's telling that German soldiers would walks 200+ miles to be captured by the Americans.

I think German policy in the occupied Soviet Union might have a lot to do with that.

The early Soviet era (pre-Socialist Realism) - revolutionary era blending into Lenin with stragglers into Stalinism was ripe with art. Rodchenko and Malevich and El Lissitzky, Constructivism/Suprematism, etc. Eisenstein and early Soviet film, of course.

Also, The Man With The Camera and I Am Cuba for later achievements. And Tarkovsky.

Also at issue is our insularity - westerners in general know relatively little about the painting or the photography or the writing of the later Soviet era, and film knowledge is largely confined to those who broke into the Euro art film market (Tarkovsky), but not much about popular film making.

You can also treat the failures with more than a 'well, shucks, it was bound to hurt anyway' diffidence.

dovzhenko's "earth"

kuleshov

meyerhold

all totally brilliant

ts: the great depression vs collectivization/"liquidation" as a "kulak"/mass famine

Not to mention that maybe if there hadn't been all those military purges then just maybe the Nazis wouldn't have been so successful as they were initially. And how much further death was the result?

That isn't how I understand Hobswbawm's attitude at all. But, oh well.

Anybody seen "Night Watch"?

Katyn Forest Massacre

These "objective" observers obviously have a vested interest in painting as dark a picture as possible of most of the SU's most successful and transformative policies and programs.

The Artificial Famine/Genocide in Ukraine 1932-33

Having quasi-left wing versions of Holocaust deniers is a major bummer.

I really like The Age of Revolution. I love Hobsbawm's throwaway details, and his painting-with-broad-strokes style. Not for everyone though, I'm sure.

I don't think these people are exactly Bush admin lackeys:

http://iraqbodycount.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=cffe318d74f5e5222e778f6f0517a744&submit3=Enter+Site

And I'm pretty sure they're including people killed by insurgents.

Eek. No. He was. Really.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/itn/article/0,2763,184815,00.html

Some will say that Living Marxism won the "public relations battle", whatever that is. Others will cling to the puerile melodrama that ITN's victory in the high court yesterday was that of Goliath over some plucky little David who only wanted to challenge the media establishment.

But history - the history of genocide in particular - is thankfully built not upon public relations or melodrama but upon truth; if necessary, truth established by law. And history will record this: that ITN reported the truth when, in August 1992, it revealed the gulag of horrific concentration camps run by the Serbs for their Muslim and Croatian quarry in Bosnia.

http://zope06.v.servelocity.net/hjs/sections/greater_europe/document.2005-11-21.8955930068

In 2003, the left-wing Swedish magazine Ordfront published an interview with Johnstone, which repeated her revisionist, genocide-denying views of the Bosnian war. This provoked massive outrage on the part of members of Ordfront’s editorial board and readers, leading to resignation of the editor and a public apology by the magazine for the pain it had caused to Bosnian genocide survivors.

Kronstadt.

I wonder do Gulag deniers and Holocaust deniers ever get together to recreate the Hitler-Stalin pact?

Nonetheless, you're talking about the total number of people killed as a result of an ill-considered and perhaps immoral military excursion, and even including the people killed by the insurgency the number is dwarved by what Stalin did.

Oswald Mosely? He was pretty shoddy.

http://www.joneslanglasalle.com/en-GB/

You'd have to compare death tolls as a percentage of the population. The 19th Century didn't do too bad: US Civil War; genocides of Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, Maoris; famine in Ireland; deaths brought about by industrialisation in various countries: disease, malnutrition, workplace accidents. Just off the top of my head that. Human beings have always been a lot better at killing each other than they are at looking after each other.

extrapolation...tomorrow

bringing about the workers' revolution by cratering the value of their houses!

Dude did have some good soundbites.
He also gave us a lot of stats to think about.

(didn't stop him from trying, unfortunately) :-(

'tmoftewc' was by the anti-stalinist e.p. thompson, you fucking poindexter.

-- Cathy (cathyleec...), January 30th, 2006.

... el hobsbo meantime very much IS a stalinist; he remained in the party after 1956. qed.

no wai; the whole thing is that there wasn't much to stalin -- no hitler, he. the russian revolution -- never a runaway success -- went bureaucratic and stalin was the helmsman. it's not down to his personality though.

I have often heard this comment attributed to Stalin, but always detached from any context or publication... does anyone have a reliable source for it?

http://images.art.com/images/products/regular/10126000/10126167.jpg

Indeed. He even signed for a billionaire Russian capitalist.

He remained in the party, to much criticism, because he continued to believe in its ideals. That doesn't make him a Stalinist. Is every member of the Labour Party a Blairite?

There's a nice interesting Guardian article about Hobsbawm here, which explains his position quite well:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/artsandhumanities/story/0,12241,791760,00.html

well, yes they are, in the sense i'm using (see other post about the meaning of 'stalinist'). if you remained in the party you tacitly supported the party's attempts to stifle debate (eg in the 'reasoner' which ep thompson co-edited) -- which makes you a stalinist. or a supporter of the SU, whatever.

I suspect that for all his intellectual window-dressing the real reasons why he stayed in the party are sociological and psychological - the difficulty of leaving something in which you have invested a lot of emotional capital.

The whole Militant debacle springs to mind. Which said, Derek Hatton deserves to be thrown out of anything and everything (including - but not limited to - shops, public parks, windows).

O RLY?

http://www.beheard.com/beheard/images/items/1842120069.jpg
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/users/vfolkenflik/VRF%20Sources/george-orwell.jpg

Why are we so hung up on Hobsbawm? This thread is meant to be about Stalin, FATHER OF THE WORKERS!

http://www.thebricktestament.com/judges/index.html

Ignatieff: “In 1934, millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a Communist?”

Hobsbawm: “This is the sort of academic question to which an answer is simply not possible. . . . If I were to give you a retrospective answer which is not the answer of a historian, I would have said, ‘probably not.’”

Ignatieff: “Why?”

Hobsbawm: “Because in a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing. Now the point is, looking back as an historian, I would say that the sacrifices made by the Russian people were probably only marginally worthwhile. The sacrifices were enormous; they were excessive by almost any standard and excessively great. But I’m looking back at it now, and I’m saying that because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I’m not sure.”

Ignatieff: “What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?”

Hobsbawm: “Yes.”

Okay, yes, enough Hobswbawm.

Fuck that pock-faced, moustachioed little dictator. The shit he pulled in Poland is unforgiveable.

-- Cathy (cathyleec...), January 31st, 2006.

no, not enough. this is hard to unpack, but first off about half of those dead died in the USSR itself, which under stalin purged its own officer corps AND THEN SIGNED A PACT WITH HITLER, so the two things -- stalinism and the numbers of dead -- are not unconnected.

also there is a diff between the enforced famine in the ukraine and the liberation of france, or is that just too insane for you?

As it is, I'm just left saying: Bethune, you're an idiot. Others have already said it, but seriously.

Have you read ANYTHING about the history of computing in the USSR? Or are you just too smart to believe anything you read? What's your yardstick for determining the integrity of a source of information?

Also NB cheney-rove thus far have not lined up men, women and children, tied them together two by two, and then shot every other one in the face so that the falling corpses cause the spared to be forced into a trench, which is then filled in while half its occupants are still breathing. Not to defend lying or warfare but hey at least they ain't breaking new barriers in inhumanity to man in an attempt to save ammunition.

It is hard to unpack, yes. And a little hard for me to relate to personally, because I don't believe in the ideals of communism so bringing about a communist utopia wouldn't be worth even one pointless death to me. However, in the context of WW2, if you see the aim of the alliance purely as defeating Nazism, that is a cause most people would consider worth fighting for, at any cost. But is people's evident repulsion at Hobswbawm's comments because you don't believe any cause is worth such a high death toll, or just that the success of communism wasn't?

It is perhaps not a very helpful way of thinking about things. If asked, was the defeat of Nazism worth the bombing of Hiroshima, Dresden, Nagasaki, Berlin etc, I'm not really sure what I'd say. I'd probably say "ask me a different question".

Among other charming crimes committed by Stalin: The wholesale expulsion of the Ossetians. The imperialist invasion of Finland.

Now the devil was a-readin' in the good book one day,
How the Lord created Adam to walk the righteous way.
It made the devil jealous,
He turned green up to his horns,
And he swore by things unholy,
That he'd make one of his own.

So he packed his two suitcases full of grief and misery,
And he caught the midnight special going down to Germany.
Then he mixed his lies and hatred with fire and brimstone,
The the devil sat upon it,
That's how Adolf was born.

Now Adolf got the notion that he was the master race.
And he swore to bring new honor and put mankind in its place.
So he set his plans in motion and was winning ev'rewhere,
'Til he p and got the notion
for to kick that Russian Bear. (chorus)

Yes, he kicked that noble Russian, but it wasn't very long,
Before Adolf got suspicious that he had done something wrong.
'Cause that Bear grabbed the Fuehrer and gave him an awful fight,
Seventeen months he scrapped the Fuehrer,
Tooth and claw, day and night.

Then that Bear smacked the Fuehrer with a mighty armored paw,
And Adolf broke all recods running backwards to Kharkov.
then Goebbels sent a message to the people ev'rywhere,
That if they couldn't help the Fuehrer,
God don't help that Russian Bear.
(chorus)

Then this Bear called on his buddy the noble fighting Yank,
and they sent the Fuehrer running with his ships and planes and tanks.
Now the Fuehrer's having nightmares 'cause Der Fuehrer knows darned well,
That the devil's done wrote "Welcome" on his residence in [Hell].
(chorus)

i don't think the two things are comparable, but the 50m deaths hobsbawm counted -- well, how many of these were people killed by the germans? it's kind of material, because if, say, 750,000 british and americans died to prevent further nazi carnage, i don't see how that's the same thing as stalin deliberately killing millions of people during peacetime.

it's not about abstract idealist stuff like 'the success of communism' by the time you get to, well, lenin, it's about concretely assuming the reigns of power of an enormous empire. leave marxist utopianism (which i'm open to!) at the finaldn station left luggage.

Considering the behavior of the Western democracies, I can't really blame Stalin for the pact. he needed time. All the available intelligence pointed to war starting much later than '39, The Wermacht didn't want to go to war before '43.

uhhh, ok, except that the pact involved carving up poland over which britain and france had said they'd go to war.

re being a communist in 1934 -- i probably would have been but read thee some borkenau (a contemporary commentator) or indeed trotsky or mandel on why the stalinist international fkn HELPED BRING ABOUT facsism in germany.

Anybody ever read about the hilarious ideological somersaults the PCF did between '39 and '43? 'Premature anti-fascism' is one of my alltime favorite bits of cant.

I've got to take issue with that. It colours our reading of Hobsbawm, but no more than A.J.P. Taylor's long association with Beaverbrook or Niall Ferguson's long association with being an utter cock colours our reading of their work. A lot of Hobsbawm's work is hugely technically accomplished, and his analyses are open to be challenged like anybody else's. There aren't any neutral historians, are there?

I'm not defending Hobsbawm's views anymore. It seems a bit pointless seeing as I don't share them.

funny, i'd never thought bethune could be a girl. what an awful sexist i am. subconsciously thinking someone discussing politics that way could only be a man... tsk tsk tsk.

This is genuinely interesting. We will subscribe to breaking eggs to make an omelette provided it's defeating Nazism, but when it comes to making a brighter future, we wont. I will frankly admit to a great deal of pessimism with regard to both the perfectability of human nature and humanity's capacity to rationally order the minutiae of the economy. The 'invisible hand' doesn't exist in a vaccuum or an ideal state. It's modified by culture and law and custome, etc... That may sound like a fudge equivalent to Trotskyites and Stalinists splitting hairs over Marxist ideology, but I think that a modern Marx would still recognize the incredible power of Capitalism and be likely to predict that the advent of communism may take more time than the hopeful 19th century expected.

yes france and britain did sell out czechoslovakia (though i suppose at one remove -- there was no equiv of the katyn massacre).

White, yes, I was making the leap of defeating the axis powers = defeating Nazism/Fascism. You can substitute any other massacres committed by the Allies in Europe, there are plenty to choose from, unfortunately.

can you not see a difference between massacres in the course of a war against the nazis and stalin's massacres and forced famines?

xpost re the breaking of eggs -- exactly.

I had to stop myself from using the eggs/omelette analogy earlier on because I thought it was a bit crass but, yes, it's difficult for a few eggs not to get broken - especially when making such an enormous and unwieldy omelette!

Is it like the difference between a forced and an unforced error?

otmfm. i find it astonishing that someone as bright as hobsbawm is so naive as to think the workers' paradise was right around the corner, give or take 20 million dead.

!!! suddenly feel terribly old...

x-post

(only by a few months, AleXTC!)

It's called "having faith" and "believing in something"

Just explaining, not condoning. Faith does not require intelligence.

But even if Communism is/was a tragic mistake or unreachable Utopia, it was based on a desire to improve the quality of human existence. What does W believe in other than more money for those who've got plenty already? Some faiths are intrinsically more virtuous than others.

as has been pointed out, in any case, "rove/cheney" (haha), for all their manifest faults, misdeeds and killings, have yet to kill tens of millions of people in the name of anything at all. and with any luck, no one will be interviewed fifty years from now and claim that it was worth killing however many muslims because a democratic utopia might have been realized.

And you'd be OTM. It reminds me of when Republicans ask "Isn't it worth it to torture some prisoners in order to gain valuable information and save lives?" Wrong question -- not enough evidence that torture actually has anything to do with preventing terrorism and saving lives.

Interestingly, the current interim administration in Russia**hardly what I'd
call orthodox, but okay, whatever**announced today that they'd developed an
advanced missile system unmatched in the world. It's all over the internet.
This demonstrates what I've been trying to point out, that with access to
inexpensive computers, as well as more robust mainframe platforms, real
progress is not only possible, but inevitable. Even you lot will recognize
the coincidental timing**just as cheney-rove has positioned himself in iraq,
Russia feels the need for a superior missile DEFENSE system. Not at all
surprising. The oil thing is such a red herring. Cheney-Rove doesn't care
about Iraqi oil. When they want oil, watch out Alberta. This iraq
interlude is just an attempt to attack the core of the former SU from what
they perceive as a vulnerable spot. Sorry. Busted.

Not that anyone has noticed this other than the interim administration in
Russia. Europe especially is full of chattering hyenas, not dissimilar to
this board-no it's Thompson, no it's hobsbawm, no it's the WSP, English
branch or American branch? Like it makes a difference.

Whatever.

Uh, do you actually know who "cheney-rove" *is*?

followed by a couple of paragraphs of insanity.

You a bad troll and we can have this conversation on our own, thanx.

-- The Man in the Iron-On Mask (noodle_vagu...), January 31st, 2006.

maybe communism in the abstract was about improving things for everyone, but i'm not sure russian communism was, in 1934.

but yeah in the uk i can see how it would look much more promising than the milk-and-water trade unionism of the parliamentary left.

Great rhetoric but demonstrably untrue.

that's good, too

I think W probably believes that his foreign policy will spread democracy and make America safer, that abortion is morally wrong, etc.

I firmly believe that W believes that "democracy" and "freedom" as experienced in the US are, at the very least, the pinnacle of human accomplishment to date. I wouldn't want to vouch for his whole administration, nor would I necessarily deny that he is open to "helping out his friends" along the way.

It's this conflating of religion (faith) and the particularities of American politics, culture, and economics that are what make him so dangerous.

brit deal with hitler was bad -- ie 'ok take the sudetenland and we won't respond' -- but not quite on a par with the russian deal with hitler -- ie 'take half of poland, we'll take the other half, and together we'll kill everyone'.

The maneuverings of cheney-rove during the past couple of weeks-the "hunting" incident, and now the Dubai flare-up - are merely smokescreens to take focus away from the role of the current post-soviet regime's attempts to play honest broker in the mid-east.

Almost no coverage has been granted to russia's efforts to organize a nascent labour movement in Syria and Iran. After their success in Saudi, worker representatives in Syria asked the russian movement for assistance organizing. This is the last thing cheney-rove wants publicisised. A peaceful workers' uprising would stunt cheney-rove's juggernaut in the region.

Not that it will get out, given cheney-roves stranglehold on US and European media outlets--witness the cartoon fracus.

The current regime in russia isn't strictly orthodox, but early signs are that the direction is appropriate. Look for a reconstitution of a shadow "supreme soviet" to serve as an advisory panel. You heard it here first.

Well, there's a novel interpretation.

http://www.etext.org/Politics/Staljin/Staljin/articles/lies/lies.html

And here's Johann Hari's article on The Stalin Society, followed by Harpal Brar's predictably scathing response:

http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=155

Some day, some day, some day, dominion
Come a time
Some day, some day, some day, dominion
Some say prayers
Some say prayers
I say mine

In the light of the fact
On the lone and level
Sand stretch far away
In the heat of the action
In the settled dust
Hold hold and say
In the meeting of mined
Down in the streets of shame
In the betting of names on gold to rust
In the land of the blind
Be...king, king, king, king

Some day, some day, some day, dominion
Come a time
Some day, some day, some day, dominion
Some say prayers
Some say prayers
I say mine

Some day, some day, some day, dominion
Some say prayers
Some say prayers
I say mine

In the heat of the night
In the heat of the day
When I close my eyes
When I look your way
When I meet the fear that lies inside
When I hear you say
In the heat of the moment
Say, say, say

Some day, some day, some day, dominion
Some say prayers
Some say prayers
I say mine
I say mine
I say mine

We serve an old moan in a dry season
A lighthouse keeper in the desert sun
Dreamers of sleepers and white treason
We dream of rain and the history of the gun
There’s a lighthouse in the middle of prussia
A white house in a red square
I’m living in films for the sake of russia
A kino runner for the ddr
And the fifty-two daughters of the revolution
Turn the gold to chrome
Gift...nothing to lose
Stuck inside of memphis with the mobile home, sing:

Mother russia
Mother russia
Mother russia rain down down down
Mother russia
Mother russia
Mother russia rain down

The prosecution rest their case nearly two years ago and whole trial has been riddled with breaks for Slobo's health. It hardly seems their fault that the case wasn't over yet.

Another thing mostpeople don't realize is that cheney-rove actually pays people to post sympathetic comments on boards like this. Usually through third parties, of course. Impossible to say for sure, but look at TOMBOT's posts carefully.

As opposed to legal poisoning?

They ditched it after Spitting Image ran a series of spoofs, first with Uncle Joe himself saying, in comedy voice, "Did you know I killed more people than Hitler?" and following it up with the likes of Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and so on wittering on about underpants and genocide.

i love it!

Hardware is only one of the keys to successful implementation--software remains embargoed by cheney-rove. It's harder to reverse engineer. But this is beside to point. As clearly explained above China has abandoned orthodoxy. As a result, the people suffer.

I'd like to hear more about your struggle. Plz. be specific.

Maybe I shouldn't have said "turn ON your TV" but rather switch the channel from american idol or put down the PS2 controller.

he listens to lots of gang of four and rage against the machine records?!?

http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&q=solow+computer+paradox&meta=

http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/computers/clones/russian.htm

Hobsbawm: “Yes.”

somehow i'd missed this first time around. that is a truly disgusting quote. what a fucking moron.

!!!

i get the sense that stalinism was a much bigger problem in the uk than in the states (where i gather trotsky was big dog in the '30s). as a result it's still less about telling the historical truth than present-day politics.

so simon ballbag montefauntleroy's take is *bound* to be (this is my reading) more an attack on the left *in general* than anything else.

Yup. That's his real name.

For example, newly uncovered high-level political documents from 1931 to 1934 finally destroy the argument, canvassed even quite recently, that there were no disputes in the post-1930 Politburo — that Stalin ruled unopposed. This is crucial to both historical and biographical insight: it confirms that Stalin's fight to retain power was not only a struggle against the people but also, and concomitantly, a struggle against any signs of independence, or even wavering, within his own apparat.

We've been waiting for you. Welcome aboard!

if our "friend" bethune is still here, he'd obviously abhor the thing.

bethune, a poster for the ages!

Another thing mostpeople don't realize is that cheney-rove actually pays people to post sympathetic comments on boards like this. Usually through third parties, of course. Impossible to say for sure, but look at TOMBOT's posts carefully.
-- bethune, Monday, January 30, 2006

I think it is outrageous to suggest that highminded public figures like Dick Cheney or Karl Rove would stoop to paying people to post favourable comments on message boards.

like a couple of bumps in the road and suddenly Stalin is a "bad guy"

lol whatever happened to Bethune?!?

iirc he became a part of putin's inner circle, rose in power and then disappeared mysteriously

show trial, plexiglass cage, the usual

http://memoryfull.ru/purge/repressions.html

wow

a close friend is a Stalin apologist now :(

:>(

wait I mean

>:(

how does that even work

always loved this one re: Yezhov

http://firstlightforum.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/nikolai-yezhov-nkvd.jpg

mookie mystified by shakey's nose-becomes-hat move

xp @ mookie my stepfather was one too. the line they tend to take is that the longer broader view of building communism is one that requires great sacrifice and long-term vision, and that humanism is bullshit, it's a whole huge self-deluding schema that's very hard to penetrate from the outside - like any rigid ideology you sort of have to make a leap of buying into some shit you don't naturally buy into & then you're golden

wow

yeah it's easy really. combine that with "the US propaganda machine is extremely effective" (which is true!) & assorted failures of liberalism and you can wash away lots of death and blood. this is a really close friend and I only have a handful of close friends so it fucking blows but he's been over the bend about other shit before, we just avoid the subject. four years ago he was as over the moon for Obama as anybody you know.

'great sacrifice' in the context of the soviet union always make my heart skip.

good thing we don't have kulaks here

I know someone, i can't really call him my friend, but he is in the group of friends I hang up with. he is a huge communist and (apparently) talented philosopher, total fan of both Mao and Stalin. I just don't get it.

we keep our kulaks in other countries. it's more civilized that way

er wait delete that post misreading things argh

i've talked to stalin apologists before, in my experience they tend to cite mysterious 'recently revealed kremlin documents' that prove that stalin didn't really kill anyone except bad guys.

difficult listening hour to thread

All that twaddle about world revolution and the repulsiveness of humanism aside, the attraction to Stalin is a sycophant's to power.

the Stalin apologists I've known have done the appalling interior work to be OK with outright murder as one of the eggs you gotta break en route to the omelette. Alfred OTM though - "Stalinists" from free market economies are essentially glassy-eyed idol-seekers.

he is a fascinating guy, no doubt -- i'd read another book on stalin before i'd read another book on hitler, no question.

Better taste in literature than Adolf too.

Stalin def more interesting/inscrutable. something common and obvious about Hitler's pathologies.

never got around to reading Montefiore's "Young Stalin", I should get that out of the library.

once again, we note the continuing absence of Bethune from ILX ... and speculate as to the reasons therefor.

we should just have all his posts mysteriously erased, AS IF HE NEVER EXISTED

a most fitting fate, i agree.

you can tell comrade yezhov i believe in god after all. because from stalin, i deserve nothing but gratitude for my faithful service. but from god, i deserve the most severe punishment, for having violated his commandments thousands of times. so. look at me, and judge for yourself: is there a god? or not?

you think that kamenev may not confess?

i don't know. he doesn't yield to persuasion.

you don't know? comrade mironov, how much does our state weigh?

...

with all the factories? the machines? the armies? with all the armaments and the navy? think it over and tell me.

nobody can know that, iosif vissarionovich. it is in the realm of astronomical figures.

well. and can one man withstand the pressure of that astronomical weight?

no.

now then. do not tell me any more that kamenev, or this prisoner, or that prisoner, does not yield to persuasion.

anyway yeah, single most successful gangster in human history, surprisingly inscrutable, hard to tell whether he really thought (as his apologists do) that his brand of horrifying brute force was What Russia Needed; but then it's hard to tell what caesar was thinking too. not as different from lenin and trotsky as sentimental acolytes of the latter like to think; not as similar as right-leaning historians like to insist; had trotsky and not stalin inherited the state there certainly would have been terror and famine but the latter would probably not have been as bad and the former would certainly not have had the insane unprecedented quality of being designed specifically to allow the gen-sec to crawl inside the paralyzed minds of everyone in the country. a Very Bad Man, no doubt, and no kind of medicine for history no matter how much you believe in the dictatorship of the proletariat, but endlessly fascinating.

is that Koestler...?

xp

it's supposedly a real transcription, from the (of course suspect but what isn't) memoirs of this guy.

I've posted it before but it never gets old. Especially for the caption in Robert Conquest's "The Great Terror."

http://thevieweast.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/vikkibird3.jpg

"The next day, Stalin had her father shot."

DLH what do you think the best books on the russian revolution/soviet history in general are?

Hitchens got...intemperate over his bro Martin Amis' Koba the Dread but it's an effective intro.

i thought figes' revolution book was outstanding, although later events have suggested dude has some issues

i read a bunch of books on the subject --including the figes one and, oddly, the amis one -- in college but most of the details have grown fuzzy. figes is the one who was caught trolling other soviet historians on amazon, right?

for hard(ish)core social history i am a sheila fitzpatrick person but she is a little Controversial, or at least was; but as near as i can tell this is mostly just because she doesn't remind you of how evil stalin was with sufficient frequency. she has a little book called the russian revolution that despite the title goes all the way to 1932 and covers a combination of political maneuvering and socioeconomic conditions; she focuses on the latter in the stalin years in everyday stalinism which is also terrific. BUT for juicy horrifying tragic epic stalin details you want, yes, still the great terror, which focuses mostly on 36-38; the two montefiore books (young stalin and, waitforit, the court of the red tsar); and (backtracking a little, or rather a lot) bertrand wolfe's rad (geddit) triple-biography three who made a revolution, which covers stalin/trotsky/lenin's early years up to i think only the v beginning of 1917. robert service has written biographies of the Big Three but i do not trust robert service really -- i read his big fat gloss on Modern Russia (1917-putin) and it wasn't bad, it was a gloss, but his biographies, even of stalin, seem a little too infused w the old intellectual resentments of the 60s rightists. (or, you know, the not-leftists.) who were, of course, correct! about the Great Soviet Experiment, i mean. or at least about stalin. (robert conquest, who ran w this crowd himself, suggested for the subtitle of the second edition of the great terror, issued after glasnost/the fall gave us new confirmation of basically everything in the once-controversial original edition, "I Told You So You Fucking Fools", and this is totally fair.) but that doesn't mean service is the best person to write these peoples' biographies.

(and especially trotsky's biography. i like trotsky a lot -- like, a lot -- that doesn't mean i don't think he was a murderous ideologue like the rest of them or that i would like him running my country but... it's complicated. actually i cannot recommend enough his three-volume history of the revolution, which is a totally totally fascinating and brilliant and sometimes actually really funny play-by-play of 1917, to be read in combination w portland favorite son john reed's ten days that shook the world, which i have never actually finished but which trotsky quotes a lot. which must have felt cool.)

also you cannot beat solzhenitsyn and don't listen to anyone who tells you different; he was a grouch and eventually a crank but archipelago (which i have not read in full) gets tears on practically every page i've read without ever much trying for them. his detailed description of Article 34 (i think it is 34), the soviet law under which most of the terror arrests/executions were performed, practically obsoletes catch-22.

i haven't read the figes book actually! i like its title.

i cannot recommend enough his three-volume history of the revolution, which is a totally totally fascinating and brilliant and sometimes actually really funny play-by-play of 1917, to be read in combination w portland favorite son john reed's ten days that shook the world, which i have never actually finished but which trotsky quotes a lot. which must have felt cool.

^^ this.

oh and one more stalin anecdote, which i think i got from montefiore: stalin goes for a photo-op visit with his aging georgian mother, who's understandably a little confused about what all the complex and deceptive politburo maneuvering actually means, and asks him, son, what exactly is it that you do? and stalin says, well, you remember the tsar? i am sort of like that.

the Conquest book and Young Stalin are the only ones I've read -- the former is dry, almost acerbic, and uninterested in Stalin's peculiarities, the latter gets his sociopathic traits plus gets his unaccountable tastes.

the amis book isn't bad but it's a little DID YOU GUYS KNOW ABOUT THIS? I HAD NO IDEA ABOUT ANY OF THIS! WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME ABOUT THIS? and for some reason most of the second half is about what a dick christopher hitchens is. also it has that famous part where martin amis compares the cries of his hungry baby in the night to the screams from the lubyanka, which is the definition of :/.

sure but Amis' book isn't written for Sovietphiles.

yeah the conquest book isn't much about stalin at all; it's about the mechanics of the terror. you know what reminds me of it actually? "the part about the crimes" in 2666. it just goes on and on and numbingly on and you start having really bad dreams.

you guys can also watch Geoffrey Rush as Trotsky mount Salma Hayek's Frida Kahlo in Frida.

DLH: thanks for that! i think it's time to dive into some of these (some of 'em for the second time -- i actually read 'everyday stalinism' for a class but remember nothing about it).

the amis book is classic for the phone conversation he recounts where the hitch insists (as he never did in print, oddly) that lenin was, all joking aside, a really great man.

richard abraham's book on kerensky is really excellent, tho probably not a good first book for anyone to read given the bewildering nature of the provisional government period. kerensky was always the figure who fascinated me most from this whole era -- at once brave and noble and kind of useless as a leader. he's kind of like napoleon if napoleon had suddenly gotten the jitters about actually hurting anyone. i'd still be more inclined to defend him than trotsky. great article about him here: http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=38883

the thing about the provisional government is, they didn't end the war. that's both why it's hard to embrace them and why they were successfully overthrown. they should have ended the war. i've never read a dedicated kerensky book and i should (and i should try of course not to be too influenced by how scathing trotsky is about him) -- i will seek out the abraham book, thanks! -- but he has always seemed to me like an intelligent and goodhearted person who could not stand up to the right and to the money. (part, no doubt, out of fear of the alternative, of lenin, but.) basically any revolution stands or falls on the army's decision, and much of the army went w the bolsheviks because they were sick of dying in the trenches for no reason and the provisional govt gave them no relief. kerensky also (although i am fuzzy, now, on the details of this; i wish i could actually fuckin REMEMBER what i read) was not much help at all during the lead-up to kornilov's attempted rightist coup.

did you ever read Victor Serge's bio of Trotsky? I've got it out from the library but have not started it.

i haven't; i've read book 1 of the deutscher trilogy (THE PROPHET etc), which has a reputation for being a hagiography but didn't seem that hagiographic to me, or maybe the problem is i'm inside the cult. honestly, don't listen to me about trotsky.

Camus can be a self-contradictory, misguided curmudgeon but the gist of his explanation of Stalinism as nihilism in The Rebel is cock on imo

more so than a reactionary cunt like Martin A. because you believe Camus is still a leftist at heart

ooh also, jumping way ahead, william taubman's khrushchev bio is as fun as you'd think a khrushchev bio would be. in one scene he gets drunk w hubert humphrey and says WHERE ARE YOU FROM? and hubert humphrey says oh i'm from minneapolis, it's in the state of minnesota, and khrushchev stands up and looks at the map on his wall and draws a big circle around minneapolis in marker and says

I WILL ORDER THEM TO SPARE IT WHEN THE ROCKETS FLY!

humphrey says "i'm sorry i can't reciprocate."

iirc kerensky's defense was that the allies had kind of blackmailed him into staying in the war and he -- foolishly -- thought that a fast victory (the US having just joined the war) would be useful for shoring up the legitimacy of his gov't. then he convinced himself he could somehow inspire the soldiers to fight harder by going to the front dressed up like napoleon (hand tucked in shirt and all) and making speeches -- which, oddly, was exactly what tsar nick had done.

i have a total uncritical teenager's crush on camus which i will never relinquish, haven't read that book though.

what's scary about khrushchev is that he totally seems like the level-headed one whenever you read about the cuban missile crisis.

xp

i think he deserves the crush but he's better as a critic of the failures of left politics than as an advocate for a way forward

ha see now nicky i feel very sorry for. (because i didn't have to live in his country, of course.) that's the problem w monarchy i guess: there are any number of quiet little jobs he would have been perfectly happy in and competent at. and instead.

khrushchev <3s HSTNGS

re nicky, there's a totally overwhelming-for-me part in trotsky's diaries, where he talks about returning to st petersburg after time on the front of the civil war, and being brought up to speed on what he's missed, and he asks if any decision has been made re: the tsar, and the guy he's talking to says yes, he was shot, and trotsky's like oh! okay, well, that was probably necessary. what was done with the family; were they sent to england? and the guy says, they were shot too. and trotsky says, what, all of them?

and there's this little moment where it's menacingly apparent that trotsky's devotion to the revolution is being tested, that trotsky is now required to express remorseless satisfaction at the annihilation of the royal family, kids and all -- and even at the time of writing, 18 years later, after he's been declared an enemy of the state and is in exile in switzerland or wherever he happens to be for this particular entry, he still feels compelled to demonstrate devotion, since he follows it with a paragraph or so of rather dry "this is why it was the only thing to do and it just goes to show you what a genius lenin was and how he always knew what was necessary" stuff. and i'm sure he genuinely believed that. but there's still that flash -- what, all of them? -- where for a second he's horrified, before he stuffs it back inside like a good revolutionary. and he doesn't draw any explicit connection himself and doesn't deviate at all from soviet orthodoxy on the question but i don't think it is irrelevant that this particular anecdote is recorded in a diary largely given over to sad/furious denunciations of stalin.

khrushchev (i am told) decided early on that there was no way a nuclear war would happen, that it would clearly be the end of civilization and human beings weren't crazy enough to do it, and that therefore he could rattle as many rockets as he wanted and it wouldn't matter. which is... an interesting way to look at it. especially when so many human beings on both sides seem to have been plenty crazy enough.

that does seem ill-informed

proved right so far

yeah exactly i dunno!

Dr Strangelove didn't get a release in 60s USSR i guess

but i mean he really committed himself to that particular game of chicken. we could all probably have done without it. xp

i feel like his realpolitik, if true, didn't get how other politicians in the US and at home were prepared to go to the mat in the name of ideology?

the famous story -- and here we overlap w alfred and other american history people -- w the two v divergent telegrams that khrushchev sends to kennedy in quick succession at the height of the missile crisis, one all blustering and soviet and we-will-bury-you and the other all lachrymose and what-have-we-done and WE HAVE BOTH SEEN WAR. WE KNOW THAT WAR DOES NOT STOP UNTIL IT HAS ROLLED THROUGH CITIES AND VILLAGES AND DESTROYED ALL IN ITS PATH, is i feel prob p revealing of khrushchev's attitude towards this? as in, it was not consistent. which is an improvement of course on the consistency of a lemay. i should reread the relevant chapters tho. in this and many other books.

(kennedy/mcnamera's much and probably justly praised stroke of diplomatic ingenuity being to go, how about we just ignore that first one.)

xp...
I'd expect Trotsky to be well aware of the mess that followed the last Russian dynastic change and would pretty readily accept the wisdom of publically announcing the elimination of all Romanov heirs. It was the only way to ensure no False Dmitris could arise to rally the Whites.

^that preceded the last Russian dynastic change...

I mean, the founder of the Romanov dynasty "ordered the 3-year-old son of the False Dymitri II to be hanged, and had Dimitri's wife Maryna strangled". A thorough housecleaning was not unprecedented.

of course. (although dmitri, the real dmitri, was almost certainly killed, and it didn't stop the imposters. one of whom i actually used to have this totally awesome conspiracy theory about that i have forgotten all the details of, but it involved him being brought up to believe he actually was dmitri by a consortium of restorationists etc etc etc., and was p convincing if i do say so myself). hence, yeah, i think he thought it was the right thing to do. maybe it was! but his kneejerk is what it is.

one of the false dmitrys was a stooge for the Poles, who (hard though it may be for us to believe nowadays) once were a serious threat to Moscow. of course, the Russians avenged Polish perfidy many times over ... but that's another story.

Which one was supposedly stuffed into a cannon and fired back in the direction of Poland?

well here's something I'd never heard of before, Russia's Bitch Wars

Prisons were hellish. The suka wars were only part of it - aside from the vor-on-vor fighting, both sets of criminals were effectively free to exploit the regular citizens who were dumped in there. It served Stalin's purposes to make jail as terrifying as possible.

The vor culture is still pretty strong. Quite a few made it into government after the fall of communism or became super-rich businessmen. The archives of jail tattoos that were published a couple of years ago are interesting.

yeah I have Volume II of those. it's a deeply disturbing book.

Really like to read more by Sheila Fitzpatrick too -- her articles in the LRB are really good and this is a review by her of Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary, which I must track.

Would never get within a mile of Montefiore, its a British thing. He is the enemy. Get bad vibes from Conquest too, so even though I love 2666 I couldn't read him.

re: gulags. I would read Shamalov's Kolyma Tales over anything by Solzhenitsyn, and Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs of that time are truly affecting too.

And of course Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev. We can't ignore the 'fiction', this one has a portrait of Stalin (as "The Chief").

Fitzroy Maclean's Eastern Approaches, while mostly a memoir of his adventures, has a fantastic account of his observations of the Trial of the Twenty-One.

why is Montefiore the enemy exactly? is he a tory or something?

oh I see he's buddies with Prince Charles and Cameron. eh whatever.

"country house" partisan

lol @ wiki:

Miramax Films and Ruby Films have bought the rights and are currently developing a movie of Young Stalin.[8]

West End music next, I'm sure.

musical I mean.

gonna wash that menshevik right outta my hair

many of the good writers on stalin are righter than me, unsurprisingly; the western left (w exceptions of course, including camus and the godhead orwell) honestly did not acquit itself terribly well on this front. but the conquest book grinds no axes (outside of the reissue's forward) and is not wrong. mandelstam memoirs are v good tho yeah.

i basically want to write the stalin movie; no shame. (the robert duvall one was nothing special, altho shout-out to the bizarrely cast michael caine in the otherwise p fun lithgow/hoskins/caine Big Three movie when lions roared.)

foreword i mean. also referring there obv to a different big three than the last one i referred to itt.

we watched this in high school -- pretty good, or at least i thought so then:

http://www.impawards.com/1991/posters/inner_circle.jpg

I thought Lithgow did a fine goon show imitation and Hoskins slightly less impressive.

Wait, what's wrong with Conquest -- his rightwards tilt or something?

Not saying the Western Left have done a good job on Stalin at all, but Montefiore comes across like an idiot whenever he's appeared on Television. Can't stomach him.

Ok, i shd give Robert Conquest a go. Perhaps hasty in lumping him w/Montefiore.

Watched Eisenstein's October at the weekend which reminded me I never finished T's History.... The two vols were really great, need to get back on that.

The Ukranian famine -- another Stalin job -- was also written about in Forever Flowing by Vasily Grossman. Also has a portrait of a man coming back from a long sentence served in a gulag. xp

Montefiore comes across like an idiot whenever he's appeared on Television. Can't stomach him.

I'm only reading his books, could care less how authors come across on TV

I have this vague memory that the documentary Seeing Red addressed the American Communist Party's problematic attraction to Stalin, but it's been a long time since I saw it. Very interesting film and recommended as a side note.

Stalin owned

He had his faults, but who doesn't? Overall a cool bro

the American Communist Party's problematic attraction to Stalin

actual pathology imo

Robert Conquest is a failtarded western 'sovietologist' and shit from hacky western anti-communists like him is what makes it hard to actually figure out what happened. Read this, peace http://rationalrevolution.net/special/library/famine.htm

i only just thought to recheck this thread so ugh here are some MORE PARAGRAPHS

i don't know that the idea that the ukrainian famine was a deliberate genocide is all that uncritically accepted. i mean i've heard it a lot sure. i think the weird bolshevik relationship w the peasantry (combination of the mystical idealization of The Commune held over from 19c populism + furious disappointment and resentment at their perceived petty covetous superstitious backwardness -- it's almost a spurned relationship) went a long way towards stalin/the party's willingness to pursue policies that killed so many in the name of organizing the countryside and "liquidating" the "kulaks". but yeah, i dunno that stalin had some particular antipathy towards ukrainians; and i'd have to read more about the ukraine in particular to have any real idea of how legitimate is the notion that the famine was calculated to crush local nationalist movements. whatever the motives tho, forced collectivization was executed ruthlessly and destructively and killed way more people than would have died without it even though it wasn't raining much. i tend to think lenin would have been a little more adaptable/pragmatic/successful on this front, but then, that's what all the sentimentalists say.

anyway, the conquest book i recommended (the most famous conquest book) is about 1935-38, not about the famine, and glasnost produced nothing to discredit it. internal battles amongst the western left aside, the line i always think of re: stalin-scholarship (much quoted in solzhenitsyn obits) is brodsky's, talking to (waitforit) susan sontag, sometime in the 70s, and laughing together like good leftists over some ranting condemnation that's just issued from solzhenitsyn's vermont compound. yes, brodsky acknowledges, solzhenitsyn's a crank, a religious reactionary (and a few decades later a putin man), "but everything he says about the soviet union is true. all those numbers. it's all true." i mean, one would like it not to be. but.

More PARAGRAPHS:
A thing about Serge, Shamalov, maybe even Grossman for a time and from what I can see (and other writers who fictionalised these massacres like Platonov) was that they all believed in it. Disgusted as they were by the direction their country was taking you sense a critical -- half despairing yet also half engaged stance but its hard to substantiate without more reading. The discussions of Grossman centre on his role as a "Tolstoy of the Soviet Union" but I think there is more to him. So wrt Montefiore and their ilk their work is marketed as good, honest history to dig out the archives and to properly document the crimes to the fullest and get the numbers to the nearest decimal point...underneath it all though what you have is a "never try anything but the market and neo-liberalism because look at what can happen". Not a message I'm prepared to listen to given what governments in Europe are doing to the poor via the destruction of the welfare state. It may sound insensitive but a lot of this seems like body count history whereas I'm in need of a wider, open discussion of the positives and negatives of the Soviet Union, a fuller account something that was tried and failed, but what can be learned. Even if the Western left lied and wouldn't acknowledge the crimes then I'm not sure I could stomach a right-winger writing about this given what is happening now.

This article details a book on the Chinese famine.

imo the anti-communist hack to avoid is richard pipes, not robert conquest.

Denying the 'holodomor' is a crime in Ukraine, and the idea that it was deliberate genocide is accepted by quite a few national governments but historians are still pretty split. It is difficult to unpick - Ukrainian nationalism probably played a part in both the resistance to the five year plan and Stalin's willingness to crush it so ruthlessly but it is one factor among many.

is anyone going to read Anne Applebaum's new book on the Iron Curtain? I wish a relative had bought it for me on my birthday.

underneath it all though what you have is a "never try anything but the market and neo-liberalism because look at what can happen".

oh this is definitely a thing (idk if it is so much in the montefiore stalin bios, which if anything made me like the guy [stalin not montefiore]) and the conventional wisdom that Communism Failed and Communism Doesn't Work is ahistoric propaganda (not necessarily the same thing as being wrong). and yes, the best sources are probably the heartbroken. (this is why orwell is Best Of The West.) but it's not body count history; it's remembrance, and there's absolutely no way you can get a clear picture of the soviet union without having a clear picture of the terror. in a way they never got out from under the terror. (when glasnost happened the terror's memory proved itself still perfectly capable of helping to tear apart the country fifty years on.) and it isn't just a question of numbers -- i'm not very interested in the WAS IT 10 MILLION OR 20 MILLION OR 7 MILLION OR ZERO OR debate -- but of what it was like to live in russia 1937 and why it was like that; it's also about the v hardcore political maneuvering of stalin, which is interesting/valuable for the same reasons as, idk, plutarch. in america you can't really bring the subject up without immediately being asked to take a side on The Viability Of Socialism, as if socialism's so weak a doctrine one guy in one country killing people in its name can tear it to shreds forever, but i think that when the modern left hedges and ducks and plays the propaganda card on this subject they only make themselves more vulnerable to the gross deadening alternative-killing false pragmatism of neoliberalism: see, look, those stupid idealists still can't even face the numbers. (our own numbers are of course kept carefully indirect.)

cosign on pipes.

I think I have an Applebaum press copy hanging about somewhere but I've never been that convinced by her. According to reviews she let's her personal politics interfere with her scholarship less this time around though.

She was an ed at the Spectator! One more to avoid.

I want a clear picture of the Terror, and remembrance is vital, but I wouldn't expect Applebaum and Montefiore to repress their politics, and that would surely affect their reading of what was or wasn't happening so..

I read about half of Gulag and thought it spectacular.

Because she's written for a Tory magazine we're supposed to mistrust her over the neo-Trotskyites, neocons, neophytes, and neo-neos who've written bout Koba the Undead?

Not just the spectator. This is actually a partic type you tend to come across in cultural and political debate far too often for my liking -- they've done the rounds at the Economist, Telegraph too and their presence and contributions are not something I would trust or entertain in any way whatsoever, to say the least.

Not a single word.

I still recommend you read Gulag. check this out: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/11/12/121112crbo_books_menand

Fwiw, her books aren't as bad as her journalism.

She is definitely a hard line conservative, cold warrior type (also married to Radek Sikorski) and that does filter through in her books but not quite as much as you would expect. She is a decent researcher too.

i'm reading bloodlands which talks a lot about stalin and includes this ukrainian children's song:

Father Stalin, look at this
Collective farming is just bliss
The hut’s in ruins, the barn’s all sagged
All the horses broken nags
And on the hut a hammer and sickle
And in the hut death and famine
No cows left, no pigs at all
Just your picture on the wall
Daddy and mommy are in the kolkhoz
The poor child cries as alone he goes
There’s no bread and there’s no fat
The party’s ended all of that
Seek not the gentle nor the mild
A father’s eaten his own child
The party man he beats and stamps
And sends us to Siberian camps

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/21/could-stalin-have-been-stopped

As Costigliola sees it, Roosevelt hoped that, at least during the early postwar years, Great Britain, the US, and the Soviet Union would act together as the policemen of world peace. He never subscribed to the Churchillian and Stalinist notion of dividing the world into areas of great power interest; yet, somewhat illogically, he accepted the fact that wherever American, British, or Soviet armies went during the war, their respective power would prevail. But this would only be temporary, Roosevelt argued. Once the Soviets convinced themselves of the West’s readiness to play a fair game, a peaceful world would become a genuine possibility, and the Soviet Union—or so Costigliola speculates—might well abandon its idée fixe regarding the need for tightly controlled buffer states along its borders.

This matches my own conclusions about Roosevelt's policy -- a kind word to describe his improvisatory thinking -- after finishing the new bio of Harry Hopkins. Post-war speculation will continue producing literature because other than def wanting to extirpate British imperialism from the globe, FDR, well, could not envisage life after WWII. He and Hopkins were so obsessed with winning the war that a life after the war wasn't so much unknown as impossible -- and it was.

i wanna read this bad
http://www.amazon.com/Moscow-1937-Karl-Schl-ouml/dp/0745650767/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368158107&sr=8-1&keywords=moscow+1937

ooh!

coincidentally I just got my copy of the Court of the Red Tsar back the other day

http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/02/20/280131736/sochi-was-once-a-vacation-spot-fit-for-a-dictator

Viktoria leads the way into the billiard room, where the dictator used a special, lead-weighted cue because a damaged arm made it hard for him to feel the weight of a regular stick. Visitors are welcome to try a shot or two using that cue.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/04/h-g-wells-it-seems-me-i-am-more-left-you-mr-stalin

Recently I have been reading Gulag by Anne Applebaum, the scale and evil of his terror campaign is beyond belief.

from a 1943 article by wendell willkie:

Once I was telling him of the Soviet schools and libraries I had seen -- how good they seemed to me. And I added: "But if you continue to educate the Russian people, Mr. Stalin, the first thing you know you'll educate yourself out of a job."

He threw his head back and laughed and laughed. Nothinig 1 said to him, or heard anyone else say to him, through two long evenings, seemed to amuse him as much.

lol

also oh man thanks mordy!

wells interview a deluge of otm from the old bastard honestly, even if all his answers are textbook

In speaking of the impossibility of realising the principles of planned economy while preserving the economic basis of capitalism, I do not in the least desire to belittle the outstanding personal qualities of Roosevelt, his initiative, courage and determination. Undoubtedly Roosevelt stands out as one of the strongest figures among all the captains of the contemporary capitalist world.

But if the circumstances are unfavourable, the most talented captain cannot reach the goal you refer to. Theoretically, of course, the possibility of marching gradually, step by step, under the conditions of capitalism, towards the goal which you call Socialism in the Anglo-Saxon meaning of the word, is not precluded. But what will this “Socialism” be? At best, bridling to some extent the most unbridled of individual representatives of capitalist profit, some increase in the application of the principle of regulation in national economy. That is all very well. But as soon as Roosevelt, or any other captain in the contemporary bourgeois world, proceeds to undertake something serious against the foundation of capitalism, he will inevitably suffer utter defeat.

That is why, objectively, there will be no reorganisation of society.

Nor will there be planned economy. What is planned economy? What are some of its attributes? Planned economy tries to abolish unemployment. Let us suppose it is possible, while preserving the capitalist system, to reduce unemployment to a certain minimum. But surely, no capitalist would ever agree to the complete abolition of unemployment, to the abolition of the reserve army of unemployed, the purpose of which is to bring pressure on the labour market, to ensure a supply of cheap labour. You will never compel a capitalist to incur loss to himself and agree to a lower rate of profit for the sake of satisfying the needs of the people.

meanwhile hg wells is saying this kind of thing

I object to this simplified classification of mankind into poor and rich. Of course there is a category of people which strive only for profit. But are not these people regarded as nuisances in the West just as much as here? ... There are capitalists who only think about profit, about getting rich; but there are also those who are prepared to make sacrifices. Take old Morgan, for example. He only thought about profit; he was a parasite on society, simply, he merely accumulated wealth. But take Rockefeller. He is a brilliant organiser; he has set an example of how to organise the delivery of oil that is worthy of emulation.

the new statesman chooses the above juncture to insert this picture:

http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/images/2014%2B15wells2.jpg

Of course there is a category of people which strive only for profit. But are not these people regarded as nuisances in the West just as much as here?

no

lol wow @ stalin's grim kicker tho:

Wells: Unfortunately, I have various engagements to fulfil and I can stay in the USSR only for a week. I came to see you and I am very satisfied by our talk. But I intend to discuss with such Soviet writers as I can meet the possibility of their affiliating to the PEN Club. The organisation is still weak, but it has branches in many countries, and what is more important, the speeches of its members are widely reported in the press. It insists upon this, free expression of opinion – even of opposition opinion. I hope to discuss this point with Gorki. I do not know if you are prepared yet for that much freedom...

Stalin: We Bolsheviks call it “self-criticism”. It is widely used in the USSR.

(iirc samokritika is what it was called when you signed the paper saying you'd been a british spy since 1920)

lol mookieproof

But surely, no capitalist would ever agree to the complete abolition of unemployment, to the abolition of the reserve army of unemployed, the purpose of which is to bring pressure on the labour market, to ensure a supply of cheap labour.

gee, i've been shouting this at dishonest tv pols for years

I've just remembered that my Mum, who was 6 when WWII started, told me that whenever Stalin was shown in newsreels in the cinema all the children used to cheer him - they might have cheered Churchill and FDR too (they undoubtedly cheered Hitler in Germany at the time) but I get the impression he was a particular favourite of children.

he looked so jolly

alfred to thread

Good old uncle joe.

http://www.laprogressive.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/stalin-450.jpg

New bio published -- was hoping for early reviews!

reviews are good, but mystified that the author is dismissive/disbelieving of lenin's post-stroke disavowal of joe

assume most people have heard of this little sage, but i hadn't until a year or so ago so http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1907_Tiflis_bank_robbery

Reading Joseph Persico's book on FDR and espionage published in the early '00s there's a good bit about Roosevelt suppressing and actively transferring agents who approached him with anti-Bolshevik material in 1944-1945, so intent was he on keeping Stalin as an ally and keeping him close before Yalta.

assume most people have heard of this little sage, but i hadn't until a year or so ago so http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1907_Tiflis_bank_robbery

lots of good caper stuff in young stalin: stalin climbs out of window dressed as woman, etc

the tiflis bank robbery was insane. was sort of dismayed to learn about the complicity of lenin, even though i didn't think i had illusions about him, but yeah

in terms of one's lieutenants, trotsky can write a mean pamphlet, and even lead an army, but yr still gonna need some money

i still don't understand where trotsky learned about leading armies.

btw this is the bio I mentioned: http://www.amazon.com/Stalin-Volume-Paradoxes-Power-1878-1928/dp/1594203792/ref=pd_cp_b_0

Interesting. I extrapolated a name from that email address, and googled it + jll, and got a former CEO of a major airline.
― truck-patch pixel farmer (my crop froze in the field) (Rock Hardy), Monday, January 30, 2006 7:23 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Dude, are you G0rd0n B3thun3, former CEO of C0ntin3ntal A!rl!nes? If so, why are you loitering around here, pestering the working classes?
― truck-patch pixel farmer (my crop froze in the field) (Rock Hardy), Wednesday, February 1, 2006 4:06 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B_XZFaeUcAAhUv7.jpg

good to know

wish bethune would come back and give us his opinions on Putin

Young Stalin was pretty hot as far as future genocidal autocrats go.

the hair!

was bethune really the former ceo of continental airlines?

Veep creator Armando Iannucci is making a comedy about Stalin

yesssssss

Is this the point where he brings back Chris Langham to play Beria ?:p

lol