Stalin - classic or dud

It's telling that German soldiers would walks 200+ miles to be captured by the Americans.

I think German policy in the occupied Soviet Union might have a lot to do with that.

The early Soviet era (pre-Socialist Realism) - revolutionary era blending into Lenin with stragglers into Stalinism was ripe with art. Rodchenko and Malevich and El Lissitzky, Constructivism/Suprematism, etc. Eisenstein and early Soviet film, of course.

Also, The Man With The Camera and I Am Cuba for later achievements. And Tarkovsky.

Also at issue is our insularity - westerners in general know relatively little about the painting or the photography or the writing of the later Soviet era, and film knowledge is largely confined to those who broke into the Euro art film market (Tarkovsky), but not much about popular film making.

You can also treat the failures with more than a 'well, shucks, it was bound to hurt anyway' diffidence.

dovzhenko's "earth"

kuleshov

meyerhold

all totally brilliant

ts: the great depression vs collectivization/"liquidation" as a "kulak"/mass famine

Not to mention that maybe if there hadn't been all those military purges then just maybe the Nazis wouldn't have been so successful as they were initially. And how much further death was the result?

That isn't how I understand Hobswbawm's attitude at all. But, oh well.

Anybody seen "Night Watch"?

Katyn Forest Massacre

These "objective" observers obviously have a vested interest in painting as dark a picture as possible of most of the SU's most successful and transformative policies and programs.

The Artificial Famine/Genocide in Ukraine 1932-33

Having quasi-left wing versions of Holocaust deniers is a major bummer.

I really like The Age of Revolution. I love Hobsbawm's throwaway details, and his painting-with-broad-strokes style. Not for everyone though, I'm sure.

I don't think these people are exactly Bush admin lackeys:

http://iraqbodycount.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=cffe318d74f5e5222e778f6f0517a744&submit3=Enter+Site

And I'm pretty sure they're including people killed by insurgents.

Eek. No. He was. Really.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/itn/article/0,2763,184815,00.html

Some will say that Living Marxism won the "public relations battle", whatever that is. Others will cling to the puerile melodrama that ITN's victory in the high court yesterday was that of Goliath over some plucky little David who only wanted to challenge the media establishment.

But history - the history of genocide in particular - is thankfully built not upon public relations or melodrama but upon truth; if necessary, truth established by law. And history will record this: that ITN reported the truth when, in August 1992, it revealed the gulag of horrific concentration camps run by the Serbs for their Muslim and Croatian quarry in Bosnia.

http://zope06.v.servelocity.net/hjs/sections/greater_europe/document.2005-11-21.8955930068

In 2003, the left-wing Swedish magazine Ordfront published an interview with Johnstone, which repeated her revisionist, genocide-denying views of the Bosnian war. This provoked massive outrage on the part of members of Ordfront’s editorial board and readers, leading to resignation of the editor and a public apology by the magazine for the pain it had caused to Bosnian genocide survivors.

Kronstadt.

I wonder do Gulag deniers and Holocaust deniers ever get together to recreate the Hitler-Stalin pact?

Nonetheless, you're talking about the total number of people killed as a result of an ill-considered and perhaps immoral military excursion, and even including the people killed by the insurgency the number is dwarved by what Stalin did.

Oswald Mosely? He was pretty shoddy.

http://www.joneslanglasalle.com/en-GB/

You'd have to compare death tolls as a percentage of the population. The 19th Century didn't do too bad: US Civil War; genocides of Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, Maoris; famine in Ireland; deaths brought about by industrialisation in various countries: disease, malnutrition, workplace accidents. Just off the top of my head that. Human beings have always been a lot better at killing each other than they are at looking after each other.

extrapolation...tomorrow