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.
― bethune, Monday, 30 January 2006 16:20 (eighteen years ago) link
ooo neat! i'm learning new words to-day!
― kingfish kuribo's shoe (kingfish 2.0), Monday, 30 January 2006 16:21 (eighteen years ago) link
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 30 January 2006 16:22 (eighteen years ago) link
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 30 January 2006 16:23 (eighteen years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Monday, 30 January 2006 16:24 (eighteen years ago) link
― Huk-L (Huk-L), Monday, 30 January 2006 16:25 (eighteen years ago) link
― The Man in the Iron-On Mask (noodle vague), Monday, 30 January 2006 16:29 (eighteen years ago) link
Can I have some of what you're smokin', dude?
― M. White (Miguelito), Monday, 30 January 2006 16:30 (eighteen years ago) link
― M. White (Miguelito), Monday, 30 January 2006 16:31 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish kuribo's shoe (kingfish 2.0), Monday, 30 January 2006 16:33 (eighteen years ago) link
― bethune, Monday, 30 January 2006 17:00 (eighteen years ago) link
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:01 (eighteen years ago) link
― AleXTC (AleXTC), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:03 (eighteen years ago) link
― beanz (beanz), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:06 (eighteen years ago) link
Well, we can't freely admit it, can we? Our self-expression has been totally crushed!
― Nemo (JND), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:07 (eighteen years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Monday, 30 January 2006 17:10 (eighteen years ago) link
― bethune, Monday, 30 January 2006 17:13 (eighteen years ago) link
"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."
― TOMBOT, Monday, 30 January 2006 17:17 (eighteen years ago) link
http://www.lexia.com.ar/rippers/NKVD_Mandelstam.jpg
― DV (dirtyvicar), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:18 (eighteen years ago) link
― Sam (chirombo), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:19 (eighteen years ago) link
Interesting point, which I disagree with. Happy times = bad art and vice versa, I think.
― beanz (beanz), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:19 (eighteen years ago) link
― beanz (beanz), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:21 (eighteen years ago) link
― bethune, Monday, 30 January 2006 17:21 (eighteen years ago) link
― Cathy (Cathy), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:21 (eighteen years ago) link
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:25 (eighteen years ago) link
― beanz (beanz), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:26 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― TOMBOT, Monday, 30 January 2006 17:28 (eighteen years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Monday, 30 January 2006 17:30 (eighteen years ago) link
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:31 (eighteen years ago) link
http://www.liberafolio.org/bildoj/deklarodemilitastato.jpg
― Eisbär (llamasfur), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:32 (eighteen years ago) link
― beanz (beanz), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:33 (eighteen years ago) link
ok, who saw him first ?
― AleXTC (AleXTC), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:33 (eighteen years ago) link
http://www.weltchronik.de/ws/bio/c/ceausescu/cn01918a-CeausescuNicolae-19180126b-19891225d.jpg
― Eisbär (llamasfur), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:34 (eighteen years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Monday, 30 January 2006 17:36 (eighteen years ago) link
― DV (dirtyvicar), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:43 (eighteen years ago) link
― bethune, Monday, 30 January 2006 17:44 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 30 January 2006 17:52 (eighteen years ago) link
― bethune, Monday, 30 January 2006 17:58 (eighteen years ago) link
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
― Eisbär (llamasfur), Monday, 30 January 2006 18:02 (eighteen years ago) link
seriously, i'm more awed than appalled. it's like frozen caveman or something.
― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Monday, 30 January 2006 18:08 (eighteen years ago) link
― jocelyn (Jocelyn), Monday, 30 January 2006 18:23 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Aimless (Aimless), Monday, 30 January 2006 18:42 (eighteen years ago) link
― trappist monkey, Monday, 30 January 2006 18:49 (eighteen years ago) link
― trappist monkey, Monday, 30 January 2006 18:55 (eighteen years ago) link
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 30 January 2006 18:56 (eighteen years ago) link
http://www.soviethistory.org/images/Chrome/photobar1936.jpg
― Eisbär (llamasfur), Monday, 30 January 2006 19:00 (eighteen years ago) link
Can we stop scaring bethune away with taunting? I'm interested in what he/she has to say.
― Cathy (Cathy), Monday, 30 January 2006 19:00 (eighteen years ago) link
http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefmedia/sharemed/targets/images/pho/t059/T059123A.jpg
― Eisbär (llamasfur), Monday, 30 January 2006 19:01 (eighteen years ago) link
― Eisbär (llamasfur), Monday, 30 January 2006 19:07 (eighteen years ago) link
Yeah, I like youtubing his bookshop appearances. Great accent as well.
― calzino, Friday, 22 December 2017 23:38 (six years ago) link
Yagoda had never risen higher than nonvoting candidate of the Central Committee, and had never been much of a public face for the regime, absent from prominent public photographs (an exception was the White Sea-Baltic Canal book, which, however, was withdrawn). But his corpse was said to have been displayed on the grounds of his legendary dacha, located outside Moscow on the Kaluga highway, the site of a prerevolutionary estate that he had occupied in 1927. The complex had become part of the Kommunarka state farm and had served as a well stocked country club for Yagoda's use, but then it became a killing field. Kommunarka shared that function with nearby Butovo, also just outside Moscow, a former stud farm that the NKVD had seized from its owner. Mass burials of of ashes also took place at the former Donskoi Monastery (1591), whose crematorium (completed in October 1927) was the first in Russia or the Soviet Union. Tukhachevsky's ashes had been dumped here in a mass grave. Initially, victims' ashes were buried in a common graves using a shovel, but soon the NKVD bought in an excavator and a bulldozer. At Kommunarka, up to 14,000 executions would take place, primarily of political, military, scientific, and cultural figures, whose bones were sometimes seen in the jaws of prowling dogs.
― calzino, Saturday, 30 December 2017 01:17 (six years ago) link
I got the second volume as a Xmas present! 300 pages in. He's discovering the power of ci-ne-mah.
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 30 December 2017 01:23 (six years ago) link
"no I didn't say a movie about destitution and far-mine, I said those collective farms are looking good, Soso"
― calzino, Saturday, 30 December 2017 01:35 (six years ago) link
So it turns out Beria was a true OG counterrevolutionary - working for Musavat counterintelligence during the British occupation of Baku. Stalin knew this and had Kaminsky shot for talking about it at the '37 central committee plenum. It must been a real pisser to get 10 years in a gulag or shot on trumped charges of being an internal state enemy, when it was widely known, but dangerous to mention that Beria was effectively a British spy during the revolution.
― calzino, Wednesday, 3 January 2018 19:06 (six years ago) link
I just read that bit in Kotkin.
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 3 January 2018 19:14 (six years ago) link
It was a bit of revelation for me, never read it in any other books - if my memory serves me right. Only that dreadful fucker could get away with having a past like that revealed during the deadly super-heated phase of The Great Terror.
― calzino, Wednesday, 3 January 2018 19:25 (six years ago) link
The assassination of Slutsky is classic Soviet-fic: Frinovsky keeps him distracted in his office while an agent quietly enters with a chlorophene rag, swiftly incapacitates him whilst a 2nd agent enters and injects the poison into his arm, before he knows what has hit him he has tragically died of a heart attack. And then Stalin undoes it all by posthumously declaring him an enemy of the people anyway.
In some ways Krushchev the "sycophant and boot-licker" who'd left mountains of corpses in Ukraine on his way up, is almost more hate-able than Beria, not that B has any redeeming features other than being a much sharper + deadlier operator than K.
― calzino, Friday, 5 January 2018 17:47 (six years ago) link
Catkin notes how Khrushchev was disgusted by Mein Kampf after Stalin forced his inner circle to read it for clues into Hitler – he was repulsed by Hitler's immorality and bloodthirstiness.
― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 5 January 2018 17:55 (six years ago) link
It always struck me as odd that Hitler so publicly declared his intentions of conquest + colonisation the east in MK, it's like the UK government when they talk to the UK press about the EU like they aren't reading this y'know! I bet Khrushchev's "disgust" was a complete bit of ham acting.
― calzino, Friday, 5 January 2018 18:20 (six years ago) link
It was also odd that Stalin had this naive belief in the integrity of the Molotov/Ribbentrop, despite being an un-trusting despot to the core. and all the rest!
― calzino, Friday, 5 January 2018 18:35 (six years ago) link
In the Russian commuter town of Balakhna (near Nizhny Novgorod), a banner has been placed on a building with Josef Stalin styled as the "The Terminator". He's wearing sunglasses & there are two messages: “I'll be back” & “75 years since the Great (WW2) Victory (over Germany)." pic.twitter.com/A9wW2zbsnK— Bryan MacDonald (@27khv) December 22, 2019
― calzino, Monday, 23 December 2019 22:56 (four years ago) link
it should be funny but it is mostly scary?
― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Tuesday, 24 December 2019 03:40 (four years ago) link
or maybe shouldnt be funny at all
and turned away from him, in splendidindifference to neva's blind force,unshakeable, as if suspendedon high, there sat with arm extendedthe great bronze idol, memed by dorks
― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, 24 December 2019 03:45 (four years ago) link
It's funny to me because it is hamfisted propaganda done by idiots, but i doubt anyone over is there is scared by it tbf.
― calzino, Tuesday, 24 December 2019 03:47 (four years ago) link
"Oh no zombie terminator Stalin gonna purge all the moderates from the FSB and whip Putin into shape" is not quite a credible fear amongst those in the Russian Federation these days:p
― calzino, Tuesday, 24 December 2019 03:57 (four years ago) link
advertising hoarding in '35 Moscow : Coming Soon : The Great Terror!
― calzino, Tuesday, 24 December 2019 04:16 (four years ago) link
Classic.
pic.twitter.com/ySTzNU5wPV— duckazz ☭ (@duck_azz) July 2, 2020
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 3 July 2020 22:20 (four years ago) link
this dude sucks
― methinks dababy doth bop shit too much (m bison), Friday, 3 July 2020 22:25 (four years ago) link
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EFXvrhDXoAAaOxx?format=jpg
― If you choose too long a name, your new display name will be truncated in (Left), Friday, 3 July 2020 22:54 (four years ago) link
Stalin as Christian icon pic.twitter.com/KWbR9Ryu1X— Anton Jäger (@AntonJaegermm) July 31, 2020
― Fizzles, Monday, 3 August 2020 10:35 (four years ago) link
As retold in the dizzying, brilliant Khrustalyov, My Car!
― À la recherche du scamps perdu (Noodle Vague), Monday, 3 August 2020 10:37 (four years ago) link
how anyone can rave about that horrible, noisy, tryhard gagfest by Ianucci and disregard Khrustalyov, My Car! is just beyond me.
― calzino, Monday, 3 August 2020 10:52 (four years ago) link
Much darker jokes, difficult to follow, no rape scene in the Ianucci iirc
― À la recherche du scamps perdu (Noodle Vague), Monday, 3 August 2020 10:53 (four years ago) link
no farting corpse scene either!
stalin did have about 100000 priests shot during the great terror and was probably responsible for umpteen ancient orthodox churches getting bulldozed into dust, but he makes a fine religious icon.
― calzino, Monday, 3 August 2020 10:56 (four years ago) link
Liquidate Me Father
― À la recherche du scamps perdu (Noodle Vague), Monday, 3 August 2020 10:58 (four years ago) link
he was having lots of Jews arrested and murdered towards the end, it's a bit of fortune he eat it when he did because his anti-jewish actions would have definitely escalated.
― calzino, Monday, 3 August 2020 10:58 (four years ago) link
just atheist things
― À la recherche du scamps perdu (Noodle Vague), Monday, 3 August 2020 11:02 (four years ago) link
I've seen Remember Holodomor stencilled on walls all across Lisbon and along the coast. Ukrainians second largest immigrant group
― cherry blossom, Monday, 3 August 2020 11:43 (four years ago) link
Some dick I heard in passing on the radio yesterday was just thinking thoughts about whether Ukraine regretted getting rid of its nukes
― À la recherche du scamps perdu (Noodle Vague), Monday, 3 August 2020 12:00 (four years ago) link
In an unrelated note here is a 10 mins interview with Nadeszha Mandelstam, who wrote a couple of great memoirs of her husband (who was in the end sent to prison and died there) and that time.
https://t.co/uCun5aOjYCNadezhda Mandelstam talking about Osip Mandelstam.(english)— flowerville_ii (@flowerville_II) July 27, 2020
― xyzzzz__, Monday, 3 August 2020 12:41 (four years ago) link
"im so horny for josef stalin!" "oh no!" you say, clutching your pearls. "he's a pisces"— wint but AI (@dril_gpt2) December 4, 2020
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 5 December 2020 12:53 (three years ago) link
kids these days irl
― Left, Saturday, 5 December 2020 14:42 (three years ago) link
My son drew this five years ago. Other artists have failed to capture Stalin’s cheeky grin. pic.twitter.com/FziNNJVtnQ— Jon Dennis (@JonDennis) November 21, 2021
― mookieproof, Sunday, 21 November 2021 20:55 (two years ago) link
Stalin knew how to read books pic.twitter.com/CMQgz2gIHH— Daniel Zamora Vargas (@DanielZamoraV) February 19, 2022
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 19 February 2022 11:10 (two years ago) link
"rubbish" "scumbag" "piss off"
^^^
me reading the Graun
― calzino, Saturday, 19 February 2022 11:16 (two years ago) link
It's 2024 and I can't find any information on kotkin vol 3
― H.P, Sunday, 4 August 2024 23:30 (one month ago) link
Miscalculation and the Mao Eclipse is a title I really dig
― vodkaitamin effrtvescent (calzino), Sunday, 4 August 2024 23:33 (one month ago) link
Not a dud title in the 3 volumes
― H.P, Tuesday, 6 August 2024 04:40 (one month ago) link
gotta call caro first
― mookieproof, Tuesday, 6 August 2024 04:56 (one month ago) link
Taking sides: Lyndon Johnson vs. Joseph Stalin
― H.P, Tuesday, 6 August 2024 05:09 (one month ago) link
My informers tell me Stalin: Totalitarian Superpower, 1941-1990 is maybe coming in 2025.
― omar little, Tuesday, 6 August 2024 05:11 (one month ago) link
for the audiobook: 07/15/2025 release date?https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/stalin-volume-iii
― StanM, Tuesday, 6 August 2024 05:28 (one month ago) link
the unrelenting insanity of the closing chapters of Waiting For Hitler from '37 onwards are a sweet spot for me. He's liquidating anyone with the most tenuous links to the Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Center + pals and all their creatures or creatures of their creatures and the officer core who might have once said hello to Trotsky during the civil war, there are so many layers of dubious connection it becomes dizzying and sort of blackly comic. While turning on the NKVD themselves, the people, who while signing off on or organising thousands of executions a day of internal enemies, were also guilty of letting confected conspirators exist within their ranks.
― vodkaitamin effrtvescent (calzino), Monday, 19 August 2024 22:59 (one month ago) link
Stalin = dud
The Stalin = classic
― pink-haired Marxist (sleeve), Monday, 19 August 2024 23:02 (one month ago) link