Stalin - classic or dud

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

The two organs of state control, SMERSH and NKVD, executed 158,000 soldiers for desertion during the war and jailed 135,056 Red Army officers, mostly after the war, because they had become too independent. A further 1.5 million Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans were sent to gulags or Siberian work camps simply because they had been tainted by contact with the West.

I'd never heard that it was because they had become 'tainted by the west' before. Order 270 effectively made being captured as a POW tantamount to desertion so anyone failing to fight to the death could potentially be jailed as collaborators when they had been released. 1.5m seems a high estimate given that there were only about 2.4m who didn't die in the camps and a fair whack of them were redrafted when they had been liberated, iirc, but there was a definite attempt to demonise a lot of POWs.

There was an account of a miraculous escape from some stalag by a group of some very resolute Red Army captives who managed to break out, gather weapons & steal a German plane and fly it back home, a true Great Escape scenario and as soon as they landed on Russian soil they were arrested and sent to the Kolyma gulag, which was effectively a starvation death sentence during wartime. Stalin regarded captured soldiers as "traitorous cowards" and if they weren't starved to death or shot by the Nazis, they often didn't face much better endings post "liberation".

red army blues

Among the best-publicized examples of the NKVD's bravery behind enemy lines were the heroic deeds of its detachment in the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Odessa during the 907-day occupation by German and Romanian forces. The detachment based itself in the catacombs there, a maze of underground tunnels used to excavate sandstone for the construction of the elegant nineteenth-century buildings which still line many of Odessa's streets and boulevards. With over a thousand kilometers of unmapped tunnels as well as numerous entrances and exits, the catacombs made an almost ideal base for partisan warfare....

The multi-volume Odessa file ... [begins] by recording the despatch of [Captain Vladimir Aleksandrovich] Molodtsov's detachment of six NKVD officers to Odessa shortly before it fell to the Germans in October 1941, with orders to establish an underground residency which would organize reconnaissance, sabotage and special operations behind the German lines. In Odessa they were joined by thirteen members of the local NKVD Special Department, commanded by Lieutenant V.A. Kuznetsov. According to the official version of events, the two groups held a Party/Komsomol meeting on the evening of October 15 immediately before going down into the catacombs to set up their base. What actually took place, according to the KGB file, was a raucous dinner party and heavy drinking which ended in a fight between the Moscow and Odessa NKVD detachments. The next day the two groups entered the catacombs still at daggers drawn, with Molodtsov and Kuznetsov each claiming overall command. Over the next nine months Muscovites and Odessans combined operations against the Germans and Romanians with internecine warfare among themselves....

Molodtsov... was captured by the enemy in July 1942 but refused to beg for his life, courageously telling his captors, "We are in our own country and will not ask the enemy for mercy." After Molodtsov's execution, Kuznetsov disarmed his detachment and put them under guard inside the catacombs. All but one, N.F. Abramov, were executed on Kuznetsov's orders on charges of plotting against him. As conditions in the catacombs deteriorated, the Odessans then proceeded to fall out among themselves... with their kerosene almost exhausted, the detachment was forced to live in semidarkness. On August 28 Kuznetsov shot one of his men, Molochny, for the theft of a piece of bread. On September 27 two others, Polschikov and Kovalchuk, were executed for stealing food and "lack of sexual discipline." Fearing that he might be shot next, Abramov killed Kuznetsov a month later....

By this time, following several other deaths at the hands of the enemy, only three NKVD officers remained alive in the catacombs: Abramov, Glushchenko and Litvinov. Abramov and Glushchenko together killed Litvinov... Gluschenko wrote in his diary that Abramov wanted to surrender: "We are beaten. There is no victory to wait for. He told me not to be frightened of committing treason or being shot as he has friends in German intelligence." On February 18, 1943, apparently suffering from hallucinations, Glushchenko wrote, "[Abramov] was bending over, attending to his papers. I took my pistol from my belt and shot him in the back of the head." Over the next few months Glushchenko spent much of his time ... in his wife's Odessa flat. After the liberation of Odessa by the Red Army in April 1945 Glushchenko returned with members of the Ukrainian NKVD to collect equipment and compromising papers from the catacombs, but was fatally wounded when a grenade he picked up exploded in his hands....

In 1963 the KGB was disconcerted to discover that Abramov had not been killed by Glushchenko after all, but had escaped and was living in France. Abramov's supposed widow, Nina Abramova, who had been working in the KGB First Chief Directorate, was quietly transferred to another job.

Been reading that Robert Service Stalin biog. One bit I really enjoyed was the anecdote about him walking outside the Kremlin during a snowstorm and a tramp is begging for money and Josef is unrecognisable due to his winter wear. He obliges and gives the tramp a generous rouble note, then in response the tramp starts waving his fists and accusing him of being a "bourgeoisie bastard eh?" and then Stalin in pre-Terror form is laughing and saying "you see what happens when you give these bastards too much?".

Mikoyan's alternate account to Pravda's story of Stalin braving the frontline (40 miles from the actual hostilities according to him) in '43 to give essential orders and strategies to his Generals.

Allegedly Stalin, as he talked with his commanders, felt an urgent call of nature. Mikoyan speculated that it might have been mortal fear rather than the normal effects of digestion. Stalin anyway needed to go somewhere fast. He asked about the bushes by the roadside, but the generals - whose troops had not long before liberated the zone from German occupation - could not guarantee that landmines had not been left behind. 'At that point,' Mikoyan recorded with memorable precision, 'the Supreme Commander in sight of everyone dropped his trousers and did a shit on the asphalt. This completed his "reconnoitring of the front" and then he went back to Moscow.'

i was denounced for plugging those montefiore books so i'm denouncing all of you for not denouncing xelab for reading robert service

? I like Court of the Red Tsar a LOT. (haven't read young Stalin). xelab not really worth acknowledging ime.

(altho that Stalin-takes-a-shit-on-the-German-front anecdote is classic, I must admit)

?

just wanted to type denounce a bunch really

i like court of the red tsar a lot too. young stalin is comparatively carefree+swashbuckling, as mookieproof's recent revive implies

You guys need to read Kotkin's bio.

That Kotkin bio does look good. I hate spending over a tenner on an ebook file, but couldn't find the fucker on the torrentz made an honourable exception in this case.:p

Did Orlando Figes get denounced on here? I can recall something - all the same I thought his People's Tragedy book was brilliant.

never forget l1bg3n.0rg

btw I'm reading Susan Butler's new Roosevelt and Stalin, to my eyes the most thorough accounting of the degree to which FDR and Stalin did reach amicable comity b/w 1942-1945. For the sake of his agreement to serve as one of the United Nations' Great Powers, FDR got him to agree to allow religious expression, firm commitments about joining the war, and other smaller concessions. Stalin also never forgot the United States' recognizing the Soviet Union and -- crucially -- sending it Lend-Lease supplies. As a testament to Stalin's regard for FDR, he admitted to liking one of the president's awful martinis.

ya'll otm about montefiore, his use of sources is laughable, just wants to tell a good yarn. historical journalism of the worst kind.

gonna get to kotkin this summer, very high hopes.

Spiridon Putin, grandfather of Vladmir Putin was a chef for Lenin when he retreated in to the Gorki (nothing to do with the writer) Estate due to ailing health, where Stalin was his most calculatingly knavish frequent visitor.

I can't wait for Vol 2 of Kotkin's book with it's account of collectivisation, great terror, famine and war to follow. Vol 1 has been so deeply comprehensive, the best Stalin book I have read so far. It is horrible having to wait for it.

wasn't it good?

How long till vol2 ? yes it was brilliant! A masterpiece! One of them books that you never want to end.

Koba would agree!

I can't wait to see Kotkin's take on the notes found on Stalin's desk, like the mercy plea from Bukharin and the unveiled death threat from Tito.

i read robert service's stalin book last year. but i might have to read this one too. thanks for posting about it!

I was watching a Kotkin Q+A on youtube and he was giving some effusive praise for Issac Deutscher's three volume Trotsky biography (which was earlier this year published in one enormous volume) and on further reading it seems to be an essential book, some say it is one of the greatest 20th century biographies.

I read one and a half volumes. It was fine.

tony blairs favourite book istr

If I am not enjoying it after a few hundred pages I can use that as a convenient excuse to bail out!