Stalin - classic or dud

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