Stalin - classic or dud

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!

Apart from the Robert Conquest one, is there another Great Terror account worth reading? Just asking like!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9voDV_ZsB8

Anyone read the Kotkin bio? It impressed me.

i have it and intend to start soon

Vol 2 with his insights on collectivization/the great purge etc should be good stuff when it comes out.

so i started reading last night. so far i'm only up to his early radicalization outside of the seminary. i love the way kotkin interperses the geopolitical history and russia's colonial history alongside the history of stalin's family and early life. it helps me put into perspective exactly how Georgia came under Czarist authority, and a lot of this early colonial history I didn't really know very well (like the use of the church to acculturate and disarm Georgian nationalism).

at some pt i got to the part where he was accepted into the seminary and then i was rapt bc his experience there was like a mirror image of mine in yeshiva. my yeshivas also appointed particular rabbis to be watchers and i also had the experience of my room constantly being searched for contraband. i also smuggled tons of literature into the school that was forbidden and they were always taking my books away. i even got in trouble for coming back to school from leave late like he did and just like he didn't finish his final year bc he had become too radicalized for the program (and there's a sense that they didn't want him back and he didn't want to come back) practically the same thing happened with my brother (who never finished high school and did an early college acceptance instead and until today has a BA but no high school degree). i wonder if this is just a coincidence/commonality of religious boarding schools or something more - bc american yeshiva systems are based on pale of settlement yeshiva systems. the pale didn't include Georgia, but i had no idea that the first RSDLP congress was held in Minsk (and was funded by the Bund no less)! i would not be shocked at all to learn that these various pedagogies have real associations (not through the RSDLP, just that indicated to me that there was serious crossover going on throughout the kindgom).

really the book is fantastic and i'm only just up to the political philosophy material and stalin's early start as an organizer / labor activist.

also, the book really drives home to me how vindicated by history the reformers were - and why ultimately reform is the only political system that stands any chance of improving human conditions while avoiding autocratic genocide and/or famine.

anyway, the book is long as hell. i read for like 2 hours last night and only got 4% in according to my kindle. so i have quite a bit more to go but if anyone is interested i'll try to pseudo-liveblog my thoughts as i work my way through it. very readable. (the author is super corny though - i watched a few of his lectures/videos on youtube last night and he keeps making the most bizarre jokes about cheating on his wife and wives poisoning their cheating husbands and i can't tell if his marriage is actually in trouble or he just thinks he's being funny.)

Sheila Fitzpatrick's On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics is another good one, you get this sense that despite successfully creating a dictatorship within a dictatorship he still had to work hard on his "team" to get his way and often had to delegate and compromise, even at the height of The Great Terror, which at it's peak could have turned on him she alleges.

Kotkin's stage banter is awful, but he is an insightful writer and meticulous researcher, at least that is my take. I loved Paradoxes of Power, it didn't even feel like a long book to me and I'm a proley numpt!

fitzpatrick excellent in general imo: her social history everyday stalinism a remedy to the lurid top-down soap opera you sometimes discover yourself overenjoying in this field; her slim primer on 1917-1934 hugely but formidably compressed. will get to the kotkin eventually probs. you guys otm about the stage banter, that is utterly weird.

i love the way kotkin interperses the geopolitical history and russia's colonial history alongside the history of stalin's family and early life.

^^ this. And he's an aphorist! Few historians can write decent ones.

kotkin says early on that the right-wing was too fractured and one-dimensional to adequately challenge the leftist revolution in the wake of the tsar's crisis of sovereignty. does he talk more about this? i wonder why this was -- is it that the institute of the tsar already represented the legitimate right-wing (and in fact were able to hold back the revolution at least a few years bc of right-wing suppression + crackdowns) such that with its collapse the right in general lost its validity? does it have something to do w/ the fact that the tsarist line became heavily intermarried w/ german royalty and really at some level european royalty formed its own class distinct from any of their particular empires such that any kind of potential nationalist russian movement was preemptively defused?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hundreds

in general i think this -- is it that the institute of the tsar already represented the legitimate right-wing -- is right; "orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality" had been the tsarist slogan for so long by that point that they had to call to mind defeat by the japanese, cartoonishly incompetent/callous incidents like khodynka, and of course world war i, on top of the obvious and more controversial oppressions. even after nicky fell, the rightist/reformist elements in the provisional government remained committed to the war.

also i think once tsarism was pulled, like a tooth, there was all of a sudden much less conservative feeling in the villages and peasant army than the aristocratic/administrative class had come to expect. a lot of peasants had maintained a mystical faith in the tsar but hated their local priests and were eager to kill their landlords.

(that hardly made them bolsheviks, it turned out, but it made them revolutionaries for a moment.)

so kotkin seems pretty sure that lenin's testament was a forgery.

finished this last night. i like in the coda that kotkin drops all pretenses of objectivity and is just like "stalin was a fucking maniac and probably no one would've been as bad as him [even tho contradictions of NEP + communism would've still existed]