A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books
drb.ie
drb.ie
Because of the new archives you can really get an insight into the day to day operation of an empire that combined the power and function of New York, Washington, LA, Detroit and SF into one centrally run from an office. Its a a baffling process where Stalin moves between editing movies, deciding how many tanks to build and what kind, who would lead what part of the local bureaucracy and how to respond to an inquiry from a major foreign state and those meeting might be on the same day.
I highly recommend Kotkin two volumes on Stalin!
Being interested in WW1-WW2 timeframe what always struck me is the difference between Hitler and Stalin based on their basic outlook.
Hitler world-view was basically pessimistic, all races were in a global struggle for dominance, and its either win now or lose everything for ever. Low chance of success, no matter, its not or never. Germans were simply not close to the largest ethnic group.
Stalin on the other hand was fundamentally a Communist. Being in the end successful was not really a question, the global revolution was coming and they would win. Its really only a question of how long it would take. History would inevitably push in their direction.
Stalin foreign policy (not unlike Chamberlains) was to pull Germany to his side, because his fundamental Geo-strategic believe was that the global communist revolution would happen when the Capitalist were fighting in war against each other. But this time, the 'right reactionaries' would find the Red Army supporting the revolutionary.
German attack on France/Britain was everything Stalin had dreamed about for 2 decades. Decades of work leading him to the promised land, the Great Capitalistic War. And his plan very well might have worked, it was a decent strategy. Germans invaded with tanks using Soviet fuel and many other materials. But, French Army and Nation were not as they were in WW1 and they collapsed like a house of cards within weeks. Germany had landed into total continental power and most nations of Eastern Europe preferred them to the Soviets.
Stalin plan turned from mopping up weak regimes into being opposed by major very aggressive continental power. The Blowback of this strategy was gigantic, with 50+ million Soviets dying until it was over.
I despise Stalin and all the Bolsheviks, but Russian history is endlessly fascinating.
but maybe I'm just squinting my 'eyes' too hard
I don't think you are squinting too hard, there is a common view in geopolitics as Russia being a peer (super)power and future tie breaker between the US and China. Or at least there was until two weeks ago.
One explanation for recent events is China letting Putin stick his head out and by literally sitting back and doing nothing they'll essentially get to own Russia now. Which fits their style of doing things historically.
That would be Taoism, but overall, I do not see modern china as a non interfering power. Also, it is not settled yet, how all of this will play out.
He can't climb down from the military debacle without getting overthrown. Similarly, the politicians in countries that so publicly imposed sanctions on him won't be able to backpedal either.
Short of a coup d'etat, a new iron curtain, a fire sale on Russian raw materials and companies. Ultimately, economic subjection to China and atrocities in Ukraine.
You name it: this is a very possible outcome. Putin is only the tsar, as long he is succesful. The russian oligarchy is likely not happy about the state of things.
And it would be hard to unwind things, but without Putin new diplomatic solutions might be possible.
The protests now are a fraction of what they were last year for Navalny. In retrospect that was probably his dry run. Weeks into this the majority of the Russian population either supports this "special operation" or is too scared to say anything. Same difference, this is the new normal for them just like the good old days.
Hm, in my perspection he consolidated his power with the oligarchy.
And a popular uprising I do not see coming in the near future, but once all those disillusioned soldiers come home and share their stories of the real war, while they discover how screwed up everything has become at home - then things might change.
The big question is, what are the other powers to be thinking, the armed forces and the intelligence community? And what's gonna happen of one of those groups decides that Putin is more of a hindrance than a benefit? Or even a risk to their interests?
Ok, by my definition, they are part of the oligarchy ... so we probably only disagree on definitions.
The other interesting thing about studying Stalin is that very few people liked him enough to hide his dirty laundry after he died. There are very few secrets about him and all the little awful details of his life are freely available to his biographers.
I think that comes naturally, if everyone important around him, had to fear for their life for years. One wrong look, or just one bad mood of the great leader - and someone gone again. They never knew what to expect, when being summoned, praise or prison - and that was intentional. Absolute power. Reign of terror. And always in paranoid fear, of a plot against the great leader.
I think there was a great relief in the inner circles, with his death.
There is a historical character Abakumov [1], and in one of his reflections, (from my memory) he rues the fact that he was inducted into the inner circle of Stalin. One moment of displeasure, and he could be gone. And there is no way out of the inner circle other than perhaps, death.
A truly frightening, strangling, situation.
In any Gulag you would find amazing musicians, dancers and so on. But not singer, Stalin liked them to much. The cultural landscape of a country altered by the simple preference of one men.
We don't have everything, people like Ygoda seem to have gone threw the document and removed things that would negatively reflect on him.
This is not true. It took super little searching to find Vadim Kozin and Lidia Ruslanova. And it is not like I would be an expert. The reason I searched was that this anecdote makes zero sense in the context of how Russia under Stalin or Stalin himself operated. Liking something too much would not prevent either from crushing that something hard.
http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1929-2/proletarian-writers/prol...
The political persecution he was under was not that unusual for times. It strikes me more like "I heard many stories kinda like that" then super unusual.
What I found very interesting about Stalin is that he knew what people to choose. For example he got rid of Budyonny [1] pretty fast after the disaster in Kyiv, even though Budyonny had been one of his protégées and had helped him (Stalin) get rid of Tukhachevsky in the Great Purge.
Not only that, but pretty soon Budyonny's place was taken by Rokossovsky [2], who in early 1940 was still actually in the Gulag but by late 1941 had successfully defended Moscow against the Germans, was there when von Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad and was in this famous photo [3] walking triumphantly near the Brandenburg gate in July 1945.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semyon_Budyonny
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Rokossovsky
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Rokossovsky#/media/...
Sort of. Prior to 1933 was the Third Period where the Comintern was antagonistic in Germany even to socialists ("social fascists"). From 1934 to the end of 1938 the USSR was looking for a self-defense pact with France, or the UK, neither country of which was interested (Blum in France was not for complex reasons). In 1939 the USSR and Germany signed a peace treaty, which Germany would break within two years, but it gave the Soviet Union enough time to prepare for invasion. Also Germany having a western front helped the Soviet Union.
Stalin was initially unsupportive of Lenin's plan for a socialist government in Russia in 1917. Then again, neither were most Bolsheviks. Lenin did not have global goals with himself at the center, and Stalin's goals were even more modest. Of course they made the most of whatever foreign good will they had.
There certainty were rough patches in the relationship and the didn't like each other, but strategically from 1922 on Russia was mostly supportive of Germany.
And of course Stalin hated the SPD and he thought they were more dangerous then the Rightists. But that doesn't mean that the core relationship was always that Germany had to be support as long as they were aggressive towards the other 'capitalist powers'.
> France, or the UK, neither country of which was interested
They were interested. But the cost of such an agreement was basically to give Stalin power over pretty much all of Eastern and Southern Europe.
And such an agreement would only have been a tool in Stalin attempt to create war between France and Germany that he could stay out off.
The French were very suspicious of Soviet intentions (far more so then they used to be of Imperial Russia) and that is why the French never came even close to such an agreement.
> In 1939 the USSR and Germany signed a peace treaty, which Germany would break within two years, but it gave the Soviet Union enough time to prepare for invasion. Also Germany having a western front helped the Soviet Union.
Yeah sure it helped that Germany spent resources fighting Britain. But not getting invaded by 1.5 million Germans at all would have helped far more.
The reality is, Germany can't invaded Soviet Union without Soviet Union or Britain support. They likely couldn't even have invaded France without Soviet Support. So had Stalin adopted a different strategy, Germany would have never seriously invaded the Soviet Union.
> Lenin did not have global goals with himself at the center
Sure. Until the moment he has the option to be.
> Stalin's goals were even more modest
No they weren't. Both of their goals was global revolution and Soviet Leadership of global communism.
I came to appreciate the interwar period as being at least as interesting as the two world wars, it is highly complex, wrought with conflict and so formative when it comes to WW2 and even the Cold War. This period is also tremendously under covered, maybe not in the East but absolutely in common German history lessons. But not diving deep into that period, so much context of WW2 is lost.
The USSR were also pretty close to signing a treaty with Romania (from where I'm from) in around 1936 if I'm not mistaken, had that happened they would have probably not taken Bessarabia (present-day Republic of Moldova), Northern Bukovina and the county of Herza from us in June 1940. Our Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, Titulescu, was very against it so unfortunately that didn't happen.
It also didn't help that the Soviets were, for all intents and purposes, a Bolshevik State and were seen by everyone else as a Bolshevik State first and foremost. For all the attacks drawn against the author I think Ernst Nolte's book The European Civil War [1] best describes that mindset, this part of Europe was really divided into Bolshevism vs anti-Bolshevism back at the time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Nolte#Der_europ%C3%A4isc...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/af83a4c8-966... (amp link hopefully avoids paywall) and https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/stalin-hitler-and-cromwell-a... for a Stalin/Cromwell comparison.
In particular, Cromwell is accused of genocide against Catholics, so stating "Cromwell may have thought his was a divine task, but he did not arbitrarily decide that innocent people were suddenly enemies of the people, to be eliminated either on account of their religion, race, or supposed class interest." seems at best ill-informed, at worst outright propaganda. I mean he's fighting for power against royalists, how is that not class interests?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwellian_conquest_of_Irelan...
I'm eagerly awaiting the take on this for the Trump years. Can you imagine having actor comedians play Spicer, Scaramucci, a constantly exasperated Gen. Mattis, etc, etc?
• Vasily Stalin was not a hopeless drunk until after the death of his father.
• The Stalin children were not expelled from the country after the execution of Beria.
• Molotov was described as a hardass, not the laughing grandfather figure we see in the movie. It was Molotov who demanded the release of his wife.
• The person Svetlana Stalin asked to be released [cannot find at the moment] did not die, and was in fact was released later.
In general, many of the characters are changed to make Khrushchev look like a more natural successor than any of the other figures.
Molotov certainly was a hardass - hence the cocktail. But he was also very loyal to Stalin, hence his comedic (and tragic) use in the film.
The Molotov cocktail was named ironically after Molotov by Finns.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov_cocktail
The name "Molotov cocktail" was coined by the Finns during the Winter War, called Molotovin koktaili in Finnish. The name was a pejorative reference to Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who was one of the architects of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed in late August 1939.
The name's origin came from the propaganda Molotov produced during the Winter War, mainly his declaration on Soviet state radio that bombing missions over Finland were actually airborne humanitarian food deliveries for their starving neighbours. As a result, the Finns sarcastically dubbed the Soviet cluster bombs "Molotov bread baskets" in reference to Molotov's propaganda broadcasts.[3] When the hand-held bottle firebomb was developed to attack and destroy Soviet tanks, the Finns called it the "Molotov cocktail", as "a drink to go with his food parcels".
Excellent movie.
Sadly, I don't find the comparison particularly reassuring. Hilter, another 'moon-calf', with his 'first available dozen debt-encumbered lieutenants', did far more damage than Stalin ever did, and far more damage still than Bismark, who would be the 'big' Napoleon to Hitler's 'little'.
The amount of horror a head of state can spawn has little or no relation to their individual talents or lack thereof. I think Stalin is a bit of an outlier, in that he took a fairly sane if shaky revolutionary party, and turned it into a cannibalistic monster state, essentially through his own hard work and talent.
Lenin started the Checka. Trotsky's complaint was that Collectivization didn't go far enough. We can go on and on. This party was rotten from the beginning.
That is totally different then believing in a global race war.
Its not at all like Napoleon and Napoleon III. They hoped for the same thing, but were just differently capable.
> did far more damage than Stalin ever did
That's debatable.
> fairly sane if shaky revolutionary party
That is a delusional take on the Bolsheviks. Their state was fundamentally evil from the beginning. The literal first act of the Bolshviks was to do a coup against NOT THE DUMA but rather the Soviet. They first purged the other Socialist parties.
And then engaged in some of the worst economic policies in the history of humanity that lead to a mass starvation unbelievable proportions and only report that if they didn't change their policies they would soon be ruling a graveyard finally changed their minds about that.
It was Lenin who created the General Secretary. It was Lenin who gave the General Secretary an absurd amount of Power.
The constant claim by Communist that if not for Stalin the Bolsheviks would have produced some great government is so much historical revisionism.
Trosky with his amazing writing and speaking was the darling of the Western Left but he proclaimed proudly that he was pro-Finish Winter War and that killed his movement to a significant degree. The secrete is that all those guys were more the same then they were different.
I don't really want to argue in detail about the character of the Bolsheviks. I agree they were extremely ruthless, and that they created a lot of the norms and institutions that Stalin later used.
Taking a bit of a step back, however, I think most of this stuff is pretty normal for the winning party in a civil war, especially a revolutionary party. It was an extremely chaotic situation, and if they were not the kind of bloody-minded, ruthless people they were, it's really unlikely they would have been successful.
If you take the Finnish civil war, for instance, there was systematic use of terrorism by both sides, and in the aftermath, the victorious whites essentially went on a political purge, imprisoned socialists en masse, etc. The 'whites' in Korea killed hundreds of thousands of 'communists' and 'suspected communist sympathizers' during the Korean war. The liberals in the French Revolution (Robespierre, etc) killed enormous numbers of people. Civil wars are like that. Revolutions are like that. As 'winners' of this kind of thing go, the Bolsheviks are really pretty mild.
Ultimately, I think the Tsar's Russia was a deeply sick system that had to go, one way or another, and if the Bolsheviks had not had Stalin, the period of violence would have turned into a normal state with a fairly normal post-revolutionary democratic deficit, that would have been resolved in a way compatible with the (actually very lofty) goals of the revolution.
Note that it already went away by the time the Bolshevik's staged their 'Revolution'. Also, there's an argument (ironically mirroring yours) that had Russia avoided WW1, the Tsar's system would end up evolving towards a constitutional monarchy, but without the piles of corpses.
Sure. But that's also very normal in revolutions, to have a multiple-stage affair with different conceptions of what the revolution is for emerging throughout the duration. Karensky has often been portrayed as a sort of mini-Napoleon figure, so it's hard to see his overthrow as a pure 'palace coup'.
To be honest, I feel like the history here is very murky, full of misleading names and conflicting accounts, and the best you can do is to try and get a grasp of the characters of the people involved. With the old Bolsheviks, most of whom Stalin had killed, you tend to get the feeling of ruthless, dedicated, but ultimately idealistic people. Pretending that they were always just an evil clique is basically anarchonism: you're taking the fate of the USSR, and putting it on to the people who formed its early days.
Idealistic is not an antonym to evil. Ruthless and idealistic is a very good way to justify evil to oneself.
I do agree evil clique is not the right way to consider the start of the revolution. The USSR was poisoned from the start by the Bolshevik contempt to democracy and anything that was standing in the way of their ideals. They had to experiment on their society no matter how many people died.
Eventually after a long paroxysm of violence it morphed to a clique, which was actually less evil than what preceded it despite being less idealistic.
I also think that it's normal to have a democratic deficit during an extremely chaotic situation, and a lot of the people 'standing in the way of their ideals' were also trying to kill the Bolsheviks. German armies were literally rolling through Russia at the time. All of these guys were raised on the history of the french revolution and the paris commune, both events in which the far left had an almost complete mortality rate.
It's also the case that leftists simply have a different definition of democracy to liberals. They would call what we call democracy an oligarchy, an 'bourgeois democracy', etc. So, obviously, they wouldn't have any patience for its trappings. I don't think you can simply call them anti-democratic on the simple grounds that their idea of democracy differs from yours.
>It's also the case that leftists simply have a different definition of democracy to liberals.
Their 'definition' of democracy is not a democracy. e.g. the various People's Democratic Republic of X, like say North Korea.
I think people are way too black-and-white about these things. Democracy is supposed to be a mapping of the people's will to the people's living conditions. It's very obvious that some states are way better at this than others. The amount of control the US voter has over the specific policy regime they live under is almost nonexistent. That's quite normal in western democracies.
To put it in context, an Athenian democrat would call every one of our modern democracies an oligarchy, and we in turn would call their democracy an apartheid state.
I don't think you're right about the Soviets, but my observation is that a large part of western misunderstandings of the Bolsheviks come from failing to understand them on their terms. In my eyes, a state based on soviet sovereignty, even with a strong executive in emergency situations, would be a very democratic state. That's what the Bolsheviks said they wanted to deliver, and I don't see why we shouldn't believe them.
Well, there are a lot of things one can say about these countries, but we're talking about the Soviets here. The Western flaws don't excuse the 'idealistic' Soviets.
>In my eyes, a state based on soviet sovereignty, even with a strong executive in emergency situations, would be a very democratic state.
A pity the Communists never ever tried to implement soviet sovereignty.
>That's what the Bolsheviks said they wanted to deliver, and I don't see why we shouldn't believe them.
Their very consistent actual record?
Do you usually just straight up buy propaganda served to you by dictators?
> I also think that it's normal to have a democratic deficit during an extremely chaotic situation, and a lot of the people 'standing in the way of their ideals' were also trying to kill the Bolsheviks.
Yes, but many were not in the way of 'all power to the soviets' but the Bolsheviks killed them anyway.
> German armies were literally rolling through Russia at the time.
German are the ones that helped put the Bolsheviks into power. This is well known fact. And not just transport, but also money and political protection.
> It's also the case that leftists simply have a different definition of democracy to liberals.
Yes, the Bolsheviks definition of democracy of 'democracy' was 'what the people want' and the way to figure that out was to consult their own opinions.
So whatever Stalin/Lenin or later Mao wanted was by definition 'democratic'.
Everybody else calls that sort of thing a dictatorship, but I guess if you are far enough left you can transform language to use all the popular words to fit whatever you want to do.
> I don't think you can simply call them anti-democratic on the simple grounds that their idea of democracy differs from yours.
Yes actual that's exactly what you should do. Because we can not allow a group of extremist to simply change definitions of words that actually had a meaning for 1000s of years.
Do you also accept the Nazi opinion that they were Socialist? Do you just accept anything violent groups say in their propaganda?
At the end of the day, call it whatever you want, all this arguments about semantics is pointless. The simple fact is, they wanted power and control. And they killed literally everybody who opposed them. Its that simple and its fundamentally evil.
Bismarck kind of saw that coming, to me it seems he did what he could to prevent it. That Bismarck was also a true Prussian conservative, and that wars still broke out during his time doesn't prove any of the above wrong.
> a true Prussian conservative
That's the issue. Bismark wasn't a true conservative. Conservatives of his time and place were anti-nationalist. Bismark merged nationalism, authoritarianism, and cultural chauvinism to produce a kind of new form of conservatism, that later turned out to be spectacularly dangerous. I don't particularly have anything against Bismark himself (he seems pragmatic and capable) but his legacy was extremely unfortunate.
That's what I'm saying. Bismark was (the? a? the most successful?) creator of modern-day nationalism. He proved that you could use nationalism to enhance state power, by transforming it from a movement of oppressed peoples for self-determination, to an homogenizing ideology.
Disclaimer: Kotkin is absolutely NOT a fan of Stalin, just trying to be thorough and impartial.
You can look at the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and argue about the real cause, and the Great Purge and crimes like the Katyn massacre had their own evil logic, but consider the Polish Operation of the NKVD -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD. They randomly selected Soviet men with Polish-sounding names, arrested them, and executed 80% of them.
The only thing that separated Stalin from Hitler was that Stalin sent 20% of the men to the gulag and didn't murder their families.
1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/joseph-stalin-national-hero-or-c...
He would have never been even remotely close to any position of relevance and nobody would know his name.
Maybe it was Schopenhauer's notion of the noumenal will being the prime mover that gave Hitler the notion that anything could be achieved if only it was willed strongly enough, hence the title of the infamous Nazi propaganda movie, Triumph Of The Will. Hitler was found to have developed a system of annotating passages with a system of colored pencils. Presumably there was a lot of angry red.
Given that, it is one of history's great disappointments that Martin Heidegger never met his hero. One could imagine Der Fueherer's face twitching in increasing rage as Heidegger effused about the great leader's seminal position in the hierarchy of being-in-the-world, leading in short order to a defenestration.
Ironic.
I just can't help but share this meme from 4chan about Nietzche here.
The end result is that most people have no idea what Nietzsche thought and believed, but he gets held up as an example of something he spent his life fighting.
His chapter on Nietzsche was also just disastrous, while reading this, I had wondered whether he even knew who Nietzsche was.
So it's not just one time thing.
I remember reading that chapter - though I wish I had forgotten it. It made me look at Russell in a negative way.
Lenin create the General Secretary position as a position of huge amount of power, 2nd only to himself as Council of People's Commissars of the Russian SFSR. And Lenin gave this position to Stalin explicitly.
The authorship of Lenin "Testimony" (only called that later by Trosky supporters) has been put into question to a significant degree by recent scholarship. I suspect Lenin would be spinning in his grave when people suggest he would have wanted Trosky to be his successor.
Lenin is the reason Stalin reached the positions of power he did. Trotsky had little to do with it.
Recent scholarship meaning Kotkin. His is still a minority viewpoint, but he makes a solid case for it here (interesting throughout):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ9KCG0KO4U
More broadly speaking, his historical project is dispelling the notion that Stalin was some amoral psychopath who deviated from Lenin and the original Party and betrayed the organic development of the revolution (the viewpoint of most Trotskyists), so he's coming from a particular angle.
But what he goes against is the typical historical narrative driven by exiled Soviets and sympothatic Western professors who wanted to believe in the 'Revolution Betayed' narrative.
And I dont remember the texts in detail but it doesnt directly call for Troskey to be his successer anyway.
https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/index_video....
https://medium.com/fan-fare/hbo-max-is-failing-the-classic-t...
> Uploaded BY ahmad essawi
You gotta wonder what Ahmad is thinking about all this. Or if he was interviewed.