Stalin - classic or dud

ugh, in the mid-90s i knew a whole gang of the pseudo-marxists in the RCP, which then became the libertarian take-churn machine spiked

(tho to be fair i don't know if they stayed with it all the way down the road)

(lol a french woman i know who had an affair w/one of them said he had the tiniest penis she had ever encountered)

One problem with relentless propaganda, as we all can verify from personal observation of politics, is that every action and every decision is spun as equally excellent in its effect and profoundly moral in its constitution. Or, from the opposition pov, all are equally horrifying and morally bankrupt. They all get put through the same mill. In a landscape so flattened and robbed of distinctive features, it is very easy to get lost.

― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, August 24, 2017 6:02 PM (forty-seven seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM. It's "the single greatest decision, the best action, tremendously good" vs "Fake news. Sad!"

the first woman i ever loved is one of the most prominent trots in scotland (not tommy sheridan)

i know you know this stuff when you haven't got yr adolescent edgelord hat on, trotsky wrote about it in books you lent me

OK, sure - certain other accounts (like that twitter thread) do pass me by, and that's a minefield (as er my revival clearly demonstrates), but I like to balance out from the way this stuff is written about by most ppl in the UK where the agenda behind it is to maintain the status quo in UK politics (Applebaum, Sebag Montefiore, people like that).

(not tommy sheridan)

ron howard voice: it was t

Love the ron howard voice meme

Stalin idk. He had a tough job and at least it's conclusively proved that leftist politics are nonsense, in the long run that was possibly worth it at thirty million dead or w/e?

Gonna say "too soon to call"

So what's new, everyone? Is Stalin cool now? Would he have won in a heads-up race against Trump? Just trying to stay on top of things here.

Stalin: one of history's great monsters, but is he the greatest?

Nope. Well established fact that Jimmy Carter is history's greatest monster.

Discovery channel virtual mockup dictator tourney of death

I won't hear a word against Robespierre though, what that poor boy had to put up with!

That's it Tom, ppl won't look at things in context.

Billy Wright was the greatest leader we never had

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/9e/Davidlowrendezvous.png/330px-Davidlowrendezvous.png
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/fe/2b/0c/fe2b0ce590a910f5a8fa90ed869220c2--political-cartoons-honeymoons.jpg
Interesting (or maybe not!), contrast in depictions of Stalin. From Low's Alexender II type imposing strongman, that probably was probably more a symptom of UK Empire insecurity than Berryman's portrayal of him as the bonnie bridesmaid.

kotkin pt. 2 is out; only 1184 pages in hardcover

£15 for an e-book gtf! I might be forced to steal this I'm afraid.

thx for the tip - just ordered my copy. i'm really excited.

This is good on Akhmatova and Stalin, and Sappho, and the act of preservation.

thx for the heads up!

"Waiting for Hitler" is a great title

I just started Kotkin's vol 2 book earlier. I'm guessing he will later posit that he murdered both Gorky + Kirov.

The description of Yezhov as the type of street urchin who would pour kerosene on a cat's tail and light it up for amusement had me chuckling. What a completely grotesque character, "the little blackberry" doesn't quite do him justice!

"Yezhov not only drank," recalled Zinaida Glikina, a friend of Yezhov's wife, Yevgeniya. "In addition, he deteriorated and lost the visage of not only a Communist but of a human being."

he was under a lot of stress tbf

aye, being top NKVD dog was pretty stressful, and your chances of ever quietly retiring weren't too hot.

one of the many perplexing things about tankies how do they explain away the prominence of absolutely skin-crawlingingly awful people at the nexus of soviet power during his reign? I mean Beria almost makes Yezhov look like a nice wee guy

I stuck Kotkin's bio in my Amazon list, hoping one of my friends will take the hint :(

presumably the same way they justify everything else: instructions for making omelets xp

insistence that good ends justify using evil means. this line is taken by people of every political persuasion. it's an equal opportunity rationalization.

Yes, a lot of UK Conservative commentators/voters/arseholes use that rationale to justify the escalating austerity related deaths of disabled people since 2010.

Kotkin on The Great Terror:

"Public receptiveness to the charges, in turn, was facilitated by the widely shared tenet that building socialism constituted an adversarial crusade against myriad "enemies" at home and abroad, and by the circumstance that the system was not supposed to have a new elite, but did. The new elite's apartments, cars, servants, concubines, and imported luxuries were often visible, while workers and farmers lived in hovels and went hungry. This did not mean that every ordinary Soviet inhabitant was eager for the blood of bigwigs, but few tears were shed."

well specifically on it's targeting of major public figures.

Kotkin spoke at the bookstore I work at part time and he was fucking hilarious. He slayed quite honestly.

Such a treat after Jonathan israel, who kept absent mindedly waving the microphone away from his face, rendering much of his talk inaudible.

Yeah, I like youtubing his bookshop appearances. Great accent as well.

Yagoda had never risen higher than nonvoting candidate of the Central Committee, and had never been much of a public face for the regime, absent from prominent public photographs (an exception was the White Sea-Baltic Canal book, which, however, was withdrawn). But his corpse was said to have been displayed on the grounds of his legendary dacha, located outside Moscow on the Kaluga highway, the site of a prerevolutionary estate that he had occupied in 1927. The complex had become part of the Kommunarka state farm and had served as a well stocked country club for Yagoda's use, but then it became a killing field. Kommunarka shared that function with nearby Butovo, also just outside Moscow, a former stud farm that the NKVD had seized from its owner. Mass burials of of ashes also took place at the former Donskoi Monastery (1591), whose crematorium (completed in October 1927) was the first in Russia or the Soviet Union.

Tukhachevsky's ashes had been dumped here in a mass grave. Initially, victims' ashes were buried in a common graves using a shovel, but soon the NKVD bought in an excavator and a bulldozer. At Kommunarka, up to 14,000 executions would take place, primarily of political, military, scientific, and cultural figures, whose bones were sometimes seen in the jaws of prowling dogs.

I got the second volume as a Xmas present! 300 pages in. He's discovering the power of ci-ne-mah.

"no I didn't say a movie about destitution and far-mine, I said those collective farms are looking good, Soso"

So it turns out Beria was a true OG counterrevolutionary - working for Musavat counterintelligence during the British occupation of Baku. Stalin knew this and had Kaminsky shot for talking about it at the '37 central committee plenum. It must been a real pisser to get 10 years in a gulag or shot on trumped charges of being an internal state enemy, when it was widely known, but dangerous to mention that Beria was effectively a British spy during the revolution.

I just read that bit in Kotkin.

It was a bit of revelation for me, never read it in any other books - if my memory serves me right. Only that dreadful fucker could get away with having a past like that revealed during the deadly super-heated phase of The Great Terror.

The assassination of Slutsky is classic Soviet-fic: Frinovsky keeps him distracted in his office while an agent quietly enters with a chlorophene rag, swiftly incapacitates him whilst a 2nd agent enters and injects the poison into his arm, before he knows what has hit him he has tragically died of a heart attack. And then Stalin undoes it all by posthumously declaring him an enemy of the people anyway.

In some ways Krushchev the "sycophant and boot-licker" who'd left mountains of corpses in Ukraine on his way up, is almost more hate-able than Beria, not that B has any redeeming features other than being a much sharper + deadlier operator than K.

Catkin notes how Khrushchev was disgusted by Mein Kampf after Stalin forced his inner circle to read it for clues into Hitler – he was repulsed by Hitler's immorality and bloodthirstiness.

It always struck me as odd that Hitler so publicly declared his intentions of conquest + colonisation the east in MK, it's like the UK government when they talk to the UK press about the EU like they aren't reading this y'know! I bet Khrushchev's "disgust" was a complete bit of ham acting.

It was also odd that Stalin had this naive belief in the integrity of the Molotov/Ribbentrop, despite being an un-trusting despot to the core. and all the rest!

In the Russian commuter town of Balakhna (near Nizhny Novgorod), a banner has been placed on a building with Josef Stalin styled as the "The Terminator". He's wearing sunglasses & there are two messages: “I'll be back” & “75 years since the Great (WW2) Victory (over Germany)." pic.twitter.com/A9wW2zbsnK

— Bryan MacDonald (@27khv) December 22, 2019

it should be funny but it is mostly scary?

or maybe shouldnt be funny at all

and turned away from him, in splendid
indifference to neva's blind force,
unshakeable, as if suspended
on high, there sat with arm extended
the great bronze idol, memed by dorks

It's funny to me because it is hamfisted propaganda done by idiots, but i doubt anyone over is there is scared by it tbf.

"Oh no zombie terminator Stalin gonna purge all the moderates from the FSB and whip Putin into shape" is not quite a credible fear amongst those in the Russian Federation these days:p