The Poignant Gulag Art by Stalin’s Doomed Meteorologist | Hacker News Reader

The Poignant Gulag Art by Stalin’s Doomed Meteorologist

atlasobscura.com

69 pointsIntronExon40 comments

Sad and touching story. His illustrations remind me of the Soviet children's books[0] I grew up with as a kid.

0 http://linkdot.link/sooviytt-prcurnnlu-childrens-books.html

this is a great article. It's shocking how many people have never heard of Holodomor [0]. Or the extent of Stalin's brutality long before the second world war began.

0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

Note Holodomor was actually a subset of a general attack on peasants in all of Soviet Union -

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_famine_of_1932%E2%8...

Between 15% and 42% of the entire Kazakh population died in this same fell swoop. Essentially, grain silos that the (Ukranian, Russian, Kazakh, [insert peasant population and Republic]) peasants had reserved to feed themselves during a year that had poor crop yields had been previously taken by force to feed people in cities. When the very harsh winter of '32-33 came, that meant death of starvation for all these peasants, of all these nationalities. The breadbaskets of USSR (Ukraine and Kazakhstan) had a particularly high concentration of peasants, and therefore, particularly high death rate.

I think part of this lies with the fact that Stalin and especially Communism had a lot of highly placed admirers in the West. One of those was Walter Duranty, who even won a Pulitzer Prize for for his work as the Moscow Bureau Chief for the New York Times. He worked to deny and discredit those who tried to tell the world about the atrocities of Stalin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty https://www.nytco.com/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pu...

It continues today in the social sciences:

"Overall, Marxism is a tiny minority faith. Just 3% of professors accept the label. The share rises to 5% in the humanities. The shocker, though, is that as recently as 2006, about 18% of social scientists self-identified as Marxists"

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1...

It's important to note that in the 2006 study that Caplan cites, which reported that 18% of social scientists identified as Marxists, the other options offered were all about political affiliation rather than economic views (although there is certainly significant overlap between these categories). The prevalence of self-identified Marxists in social sciences, particuarly sociology, may reflect the important role Marx's commentaries on the social outcomes of 19th century capitalism has had in areas like history, sociology, and cultural studies, rather than a commitment to communist economic structures. There are plenty of Marxist scholars who use Marx's methods of analyzing social phenomena without subscribing to his statements about the inevitable triumph of socialism. Marx is generally recognized as a better diagnostician than a prescriptionist, and for fields involved in critical analysis of social-political-economic phenomena it is not surprising to see people who identify (politically) with his work and world view.

From the linked SlateStarCodex piece :

> Conservatives always complain that liberals “deny human nature”

> But here I have to give conservatives their due. As far as I can tell, Marx literally, so strongly as to be unstrawmannable, believed there was no such thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable.

So, it is possible Marx's economic prescription came out of his social diagnosis

Marxism and Stalinism are different things.

I can imagine some conflation happening in the 1930s, but at least today, there's a stark differentiation between Stalinism and Marxism. 18% of social scientists do not identify as Stalinists.

For anyone interested about the attitude of various Soviet-sympathetic people in the West during the 20th century, I'd recommend reading Scott Alexander's book review of "Chronicles of Wasted Time" [0]. I admit I haven't read the book itself but the review seems to do a good job summing things up.

Basically it's the autobiography of Malcolm Muggeridge, who grew up in a socialist background, becomes a journalist and goes over to Stalin's USSR to report on the amazing new progress being made, only to realize just how false all the reports are -- and what's more, how unwilling his target audience would be to hear it:

[quotes from the review]

>although it is clear to him that the Soviet economy is struggling, every dispatch they are given to send home declares that things are better than ever, that the Workers’ Paradise is even more paradisiacal than previously believed, that the evidence is in and Stalinism is the winner. It doesn’t matter what he makes of this, because anything he writes which deviates from the script is rejected by the censors, who ban him from sending it home. He is reduced to sending secret messages at the bottoms of people’s suitcases, only to find to his horror that even when they successfully reach the Guardian offices back in Britain, his bosses have no interest in publishing them because they offend the prejudices of its progressive readership.

[...]

>His final break with the rest of the enlightened progressive world comes when he decides to do something that perhaps no other journalist in the entire Soviet Union had dared – to go off the reservation, so to speak, leave Moscow undercover, and see if he can actually get into the regions where rumors say some kind of famine might be happening. The plan goes without a hitch, he passes himself off as a generic middle-class Soviet, and he ends up in Ukraine right in the middle of Stalin’s Great Famine. He describes the scene – famished skeletons begging for crumbs, secret police herding entire towns into railway cars never to be seen again. At great risk to himself, he smuggles notes about the genocide out of the country, only to be met – once again – with total lack of interest. Guardian readers don’t look at the newspapers to hear bad things about the Soviet Union! Guardian readers want to hear about how the Glorious Future is already on its way! He is quickly sidelined in favor of the true stars of Soviet journalism, people like Walter Duranty, the New York Times‘s Russia correspondent, who wrote story after story about how prosperous and happy and well-fed the Soviets were under Stalin, and who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his troubles.

[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-...

Yes. URSS has been very effective in the long-term manipulation of opinions and history. I am french. IMHO, May 1968 events were the consequences of this manipulated opinions. The "anti-capitalist" ideology was very present in governments between 1981 and 2007 (maybe 2017). The "anti-religious" ideology is still present.

Everyone should should read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago too.

I am not sure how readable Solzhenytsin is in English, but his Russian is atrocious (he was also obviously not a nice person).

For sheer horror of life in worker's paradise, I think Varlam Shalamov's [0] Kolyma stories are much better written.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varlam_Shalamov

Yeah, no-one in the west liked him much either. Perhaps it takes an angry unpleasant person to tell the truth?

Thanks for the link; I'll look it up.

You don't necessarily have to be a self-promoting a*hole either, though.

You're welcome. Haven't really checked if translations of Shalamov into English are any good, but originals are. Not something you would read for pleasure though.

Lots of people haven't heard of the Holodomor but even the most vague and generic perceptions of Stalin's brutality are not based on the second world war.

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