Stalin - classic or dud

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

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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]

this is obv not the right thread for this question but for some reason i feel like ppl who read this thread might know the answer (and i couldn't find a better thread to post it to):
who is good to read about left-wing german politics at the end of the weimer republic?

i found this and it's really good:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-ghost-of-social-fascism/#10

er that link goes to the middle of the article but the entire thing is worthwhile imo

There is a good account of the post Weimar years in Volker Ullrich's Hitler biography Mordy. It is a decent enough book but is too reliant on Goebbel's dairies and not a patch on Kotkin's.

have you read Richard Evans' Third Reich Trilogy? I'm on the third volume now, on the war, but volumes 1 in particular, on the rise of the Third Reich, goes into quite some detail on the politics of Weimar. it's not fully satisfying but it's enough of a start to see what more specialized interest you want to pursue next.

i haven't. i found a few things last night to read and then stayed up way too late reading them --

The German Left and the Weimar Republic - A Selection of Documents (Historical Materialism Book Series Volume 75)
Eric Weitz - Creating German Communism, 1890-1990
Catherine Epstein - The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century
Robert Heynen - Degeneration and Revolution: Radical Cultural Politics and the Body in Weimer Germany

plus the afore-linked Commentary article which is really quite good and gets to exactly what i really wanted to read the most about, aka the relationship between various left, liberal and moderate groups in the wake of the rise of national socialism

i've been pulling quotes too - was thinking i'd maybe start an ilafl social fascism thread w/ them later today. i'll link from here if i do.

pumped!

social fascism

stalin does turn out to be super relevant since a lot of the harder line messaging coming out of KPD + Thälmann in particular came straight from stalin and the transition in german communist rhetoric can be mapped directly onto the post-lenin power struggle happening next door. (tho the draper piece predates the social fascism concept to before stalin so it's really more of a flowering than sui generis

what I want to understand right now is the German revolution of 1918, from which the "stab in the back" narrative emerges. I'd like to read something in particular about this.

just reached Operation Barbarossa in the Evans book. it's terrible reading about Soviet soldiers fleeing the front, hoping they'll be treated better by Hitler than Stalin, and then finding out how wrong they were. & about how Stalin had soldiers who (sanely) fled the front in the early days of Barbarossa classed as traitors.

the second and third chapters of this are probably worth reading

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/hindenburg-9780199570324?cc=us&lang=en&

interesting paragraph from the epstein book re jews + KPD:

The Eislers were of Jewish origin, but the family was completely assimi- lated and never practiced Judaism. Interestingly, besides Ruth Fischer, a number of the KPD’s early leaders were also of Jewish descent— Luxemburg, Levi, and Maslow. By the mid-1920s, however, relatively few individuals of Jewish origin remained in the leading bodies of the party; by the end of the Republic, there were virtually none. According to one historian, the KPD was well aware of omnipresent anti-Semitism in Weimar Germany and, for tactical reasons, tried to keep Jews out of prominent party positions. The party did not engage in propaganda campaigns against anti-Semitic feeling and, to strengthen its popularity, occasionally even deployed anti-Semitic rhetoric. But the KPD was not an anti-Semitic party. Rather, it had little reason to focus on Jewish is- sues. German Jewry was overwhelmingly bourgeois, and the party had little chance of attracting Jewish voters, much less Jewish party members. The exact percentage of KPD members with Jewish backgrounds is un- available, but it is estimated that in 1927 0.7 percent of party members, or roughly one thousand individuals, were of Jewish descent.24 At the same time, those like the Eisler siblings who did join the KPD had usually distanced themselves from their Jewish origins and thus had little inter- est in Jewish matters. They were, in their own minds, German commu- nists—neither German Jews nor Jewish communists. Like all KPD mem- bers, they saw themselves as struggling for universal emancipation; they believed that the communist revolution would resolve all social and other problems (including, if they considered the issue at all, the “Jewish Question”). In postwar East Germany, approximately seventy longtime communists with Jewish backgrounds achieved some renown.25

like so many other german communism developments this seem symmetrical to stalin cleaning house on the jews. from the kotkin:

In December 17, the expulsions of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and others from the party, which had been voted back at the previous plenum, were confirmed.301 Two days later, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others, twenty-three people in total, signed a degrading petition to the congress—which they were not even allowed into the hall to present in person—renouncing their “wrong and anti-Leninist views.” Stalin again refused to reinstate them.302 Orjonikidize engaged in negotiations over the disposition of the highest-profile Trotskyites who sought to continue working in some capacity, but Stalin soon scattered them into internal exile.303 Whereas in the politburo back in mid-1924, Great Russians accounted for 46 percent, with a third having been Jews and the remaining three a Pole, Latvian, and Georgian, now the politburo became two-thirds Russian (and would retain a Russian majority thereafter).304 The talk around the congress was that “Moses had taken the Jews out of Egypt, and Stalin took them out of the Central Committee.”305

Citing the words a Swiss newspaper had attributed to British General Sir Frederick Maurice, Hindenburg thus lent his mythical authority to the ‘stab-in-the-back’ allegation. His endorsement popularized the narrative immediately; conservative commentators proclaimed a ‘victory of the truth’ within 24 hours.13 Hindenburg had not invented the narrative, but broadened its dissemination considerably. His statement was printed in all the major daily papers the day after his testimony and debated endlessly in the opinion columns. He was therefore midwife to an idea German society had been pregnant with since the revolution—an idea that burdened the young republic with accusations of treachery, thereby intensifying political polarization and shifting the political climate decisively to the right.

Hindenburg’s endorsement put the democratic camp in a near-impossible position. Republican commentators faced the complicated task of defying a narrative granted the Field Marshal’s official approval, whilst avoiding personal and direct criticism of a man whose mythical adulation had lent legitimacy to their cause until a few months previously. Even if Theodor Wolff had recognized the danger of the ‘infallibility theory’ about Hinden- burg, which strengthened the allegations of democratic treason, he insisted in the same article: ‘Tannenberg remains Tannenberg. [Hindenburg] . . . is one of those historical figures to whom the people’s feelings [Volksgefuhl] will always flow.’14

the jewish character of the "stab-in-the-black," as well as the accusation of jewish bolshevikism being responsible for the stalin catastrophe, are shockingly still alive online. i keep running into them on seemingly unrelated reddit threads. you'd think both would be ancient history at this pt; which i guess just goes to show that nazis have memories like elephants.

thanks nakhchivan I'll read that!

it's younger than the protocols of the elders of zion which is still doing a roaring trade

also don't read reddit

good advice. is protocols still popular in europe? thought it mostly got a second life in the islamic world.