Stalin - classic or dud

Can I have some of what you're smokin', dude?

Well, we can't freely admit it, can we? Our self-expression has been totally crushed!

"It was a disgusting time. Even in terms of music, we were so insular. We didn't really know western music at all. In 1956 I went to Brussels to perform and I came back with suitcases filled with scores of music by Ravel and Debussy - and I suddenly became a focal point for musicians in Moscow who wanted to study these rare documents. What a terrible indictment of our country. It was an embarrassment to be Russian. In 1955, the Boston Symphony Orchestra came and in one concert they performed the Soviet anthem. Before I heard them, I thought our orchestras played it well, but the Americans played it much more beautifully. The problem was our instruments were no good. It was a national shame. But throughout that time visiting western orchestras always gave us music lessons in performing music beautifully."

http://www.lexia.com.ar/rippers/NKVD_Mandelstam.jpg

Interesting point, which I disagree with. Happy times = bad art and vice versa, I think.

1. Answer my first question about why an entire nation would abandon a working system in exchange for chaos, uncertainty and extensive poverty in adjustment

2. Point to the works of art which the Soviet era is famous for that AREN'T Socialist Realism posters or the national anthem. Alternatively, explain why Ashkenazy, Tabachnik, et al. are so unworthy and foolish.

3. Explain how individualism is served better by Stalin's methods. Seriously.

http://www.liberafolio.org/bildoj/deklarodemilitastato.jpg

ok, who saw him first ?

http://www.weltchronik.de/ws/bio/c/ceausescu/cn01918a-CeausescuNicolae-19180126b-19891225d.jpg

I have not thought much of Hobsbawm since this post from mark s:

hobsbawm is and always has been a dismal cultural hypocrite - key sentence: " Whenever Hobsbawm enters a politically sensitive zone, he retreats into hooded, wooden language, redolent of Party-speak."

EH even wrote about jazz, which he loved, under a pseudonym, so as not to fall into disrepute w.the party (jazz of course being a music where "message" and "medium" can't be cut adrift from one another, as per the standard-issue brainless idealism of the line enrique quotes)

-- mark s (mar...), November 3rd, 2003.

The article Mark linked to is regrettably no longer available for free, but is worth reading if you're not familiar with it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/br/thumb/b/b9/Honecker.jpg/180px-Honecker.jpg

http://www.dhm.de/lemo/objekte/pict/KontinuitaetUndWandel_photoWalterUlbricht/index.jpg

seriously, i'm more awed than appalled. it's like frozen caveman or something.

However, if not, then it is just a simple matter of bethune not having learned that, if one point of view is obviously wrong, it does not make the opposite side obviously right. The propaganda wars of the twentieth century were like Duelling Banjos - both sides were playing the same damn lying banjo.

http://www.soviethistory.org/images/Chrome/photobar1936.jpg

Can we stop scaring bethune away with taunting? I'm interested in what he/she has to say.

http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefmedia/sharemed/targets/images/pho/t059/T059123A.jpg

Cathy, I heart you, but I said that it wasn't available for free in my post!

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

advertising hoarding in '35 Moscow : Coming Soon : The Great Terror!

Classic.

pic.twitter.com/ySTzNU5wPV

— duckazz ☭ (@duck_azz) July 2, 2020

this dude sucks

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EFXvrhDXoAAaOxx?format=jpg

Stalin as Christian icon pic.twitter.com/KWbR9Ryu1X

— Anton Jäger (@AntonJaegermm) July 31, 2020

As retold in the dizzying, brilliant Khrustalyov, My Car!

how anyone can rave about that horrible, noisy, tryhard gagfest by Ianucci and disregard Khrustalyov, My Car! is just beyond me.

Much darker jokes, difficult to follow, no rape scene in the Ianucci iirc

no farting corpse scene either!

stalin did have about 100000 priests shot during the great terror and was probably responsible for umpteen ancient orthodox churches getting bulldozed into dust, but he makes a fine religious icon.

Liquidate Me Father

he was having lots of Jews arrested and murdered towards the end, it's a bit of fortune he eat it when he did because his anti-jewish actions would have definitely escalated.

just atheist things

I've seen Remember Holodomor stencilled on walls all across Lisbon and along the coast. Ukrainians second largest immigrant group

Some dick I heard in passing on the radio yesterday was just thinking thoughts about whether Ukraine regretted getting rid of its nukes

In an unrelated note here is a 10 mins interview with Nadeszha Mandelstam, who wrote a couple of great memoirs of her husband (who was in the end sent to prison and died there) and that time.

https://t.co/uCun5aOjYC

Nadezhda Mandelstam talking about Osip Mandelstam.
(english)

— flowerville_ii (@flowerville_II) July 27, 2020

"im so horny for josef stalin!" "oh no!" you say, clutching your pearls. "he's a pisces"

— wint but AI (@dril_gpt2) December 4, 2020

kids these days irl

My son drew this five years ago. Other artists have failed to capture Stalin’s cheeky grin. pic.twitter.com/FziNNJVtnQ

— Jon Dennis (@JonDennis) November 21, 2021

Stalin knew how to read books pic.twitter.com/CMQgz2gIHH

— Daniel Zamora Vargas (@DanielZamoraV) February 19, 2022

"rubbish" "scumbag" "piss off"

^^^

me reading the Graun