Stalin - classic or dud

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.