Stalin - classic or dud

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.