Kotkin’s Stalin bio, volumes 1 & 2

Post #421,240 by rcareaga 11/11/17 3:55:33 PM 11/14/17 9:34:16 PM Reply	Kotkin’s Stalin bio, volumes 1 & 2 I’ve just completed the second installment of a projected trilogy, having ordered this and the previous book each in advance of publication (three years ago for the first episode). I have not been disappointed. The author does not like his subject—who could, tens of millions of suffering Soviets apart?—but he respects him. I grew up (here speaking of the period of my own young manhood) with what was essentially Trotsky’s portrait of the coarse, brutish bureaucratic schemer, possessed of a low animal cunning by means of which he’d outmaneuvered his brilliant rival. In fact, Stalin was an extraordinarily intelligent character, although his intellect was constrained within the narrow channels of Marxist-Leninist ideology, with a prodigious memory (for slights, of course, as many an Old Bolshevik learned to his cost, but also for vast volumes of technical details), a sophisticated grasp of culture (in his youth he was regarded as among the more promising Georgian poets) that compared favorably to those of the other WWII leaders, and which made him especially dangerous to the artists under Soviet rule, and a command of administrative minutiae and the energy to commit sustained attention to these, in contrast to the relative fecklessness of his opposite number in Germany during the same period. Volume I takes the story to 1929, and its principal is actually offstage for most of its pages, as an exhaustive inventory of the particulars of the senescence and administrative decrepitude of czarist Russia is set forth, setting the stage for the revolution, for Lenin’s coup and Stalin’s subsequent rise. Kotkin maintains, interestingly, that Lenin’s supposed “testament,” with its recommendation that Stalin be supplanted as General Secretary, was essentially a fabrication. Volume II, finished here about twenty minutes ago, takes the story to the eve of the German invasion in 1941, covering along the way the horrific periods of collectivization and of the “Terror.” The concluding section, on the sinister waltz undertaken between the USSR and the Third Reich between 1939 and 1941, is particularly compelling. Highly recommended to any student of this milieu. Quite readable, considering the density of the material presented. I presume that I’ll have to wait until 2020 for the concluding volume. I’ll be drumming my fingers until then. collectively, Edited by rcareaga Nov. 14, 2017, 09:34:16 PM EST Expand All History
Post #421,247 by boxley 11/12/17 10:40:04 AM 11/12/17 10:40:04 AM Reply	do you have a link to a point of sale? "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
Post #421,258 by rcareaga 11/12/17 11:09:54 PM 11/12/17 11:09:54 PM Reply	Denial is not a river in Brazil, if you catch my meaning.
Post #421,251 by a6l6e6x 11/12/17 1:30:14 PM 11/12/17 1:30:14 PM Reply	The man was evil personified. I'm just finishing Winston Churchill's WW-II series. In 1944 as the Soviets were pushing the Germans West in Poland, Stalin's guy were encouraging the people of Warsaw to start an uprising against the Germans. After all, they could hear the distant artillery bombardment of the approaching Soviets. But, after the uprising started, the Soviets stopped dead in their tracks. Furthermore, they did not send any supplies and prohibited the other Allies from using any Soviet controlled ground to be used for supplying the Poles. It was a long flight from Allied controlled Italy. So the Poles had very minor help as the German's turned on them with a fury. The whole idea was to get the Germans to wipe out the nationalist Poles so that when the Soviets arrived in Warsaw, the Polish Communists could take over. Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #421,256 by drook 11/12/17 5:16:46 PM 11/12/17 5:16:46 PM Reply	The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy, nothing more -- Drew
Post #421,263 by a6l6e6x 11/13/17 9:20:19 AM 11/13/17 9:20:19 AM Reply	But not what Radio Moscow was saying at the time. Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #421,264 by drook 11/13/17 9:24:54 AM 11/13/17 9:24:54 AM Reply	Fake news! -- Drew
Post #421,259 by rcareaga 11/12/17 11:15:37 PM 11/12/17 11:15:37 PM Reply	Pole-axed Andrzej Wajda’s 1957 film Kanal tells the story very vividly: September 1944—the citizens of Warsaw are eight weeks into their valiant, if somewhat foolhardy, uprising against the Third Reich. If the resistance fighters can only hold out until the Soviet force massed just outside the city come to their rescue...but wait! The Red Army chooses this time to sort its sock drawers, do some laundry, catch up on back episodes of The Sopranskis, freeing the Hun to put paid to the Poles in job lots. What rotten luck! The film follows a dead-ender band of partisans as they dodge the Krauts, retreating finally to the insalubrious environment of the Warsaw sewers, which make Orson Welles’ desperate flight at the end of The Third Man look like a stroll through a semiconductor “clean room.” cordially,
Post #421,266 by mmoffitt 11/13/17 12:34:20 PM 11/13/17 12:34:20 PM Reply	Some of the reverence Stalin still enjoys, while I disagree whole-heartedly, I understand. I've heard some Russians say that Stalin inherited a nation with wooden plows and left in its place a nuclear power. There's no arguing that he did drag the Soviet Union into the twentieth century. But the cost was, quite obviously, far too great. bcnu, Mikem It's mourning in America again.
Post #421,270 by rcareaga 11/13/17 6:25:18 PM 11/13/17 6:27:46 PM Reply	Stalinist cost-benefit I once saw a visual rendering that put it this way: imagine a graph depicting human suffering in the west during the industrial revolution, with the horizontal axis representing a century-and-a-half of time, and the vertical the degree of suffering, rendered as a rising and then as a descending curve. A second graph depicts the industrialization of the USSR under Stalin, with the horizontal axis much shorter—twenty-five years—and the vertical axis much higher, since even capital’s direst Gilded Age counteroffensives did not involve shooting fifteen hundred people a day. The point being made (with what validity I am not prepared to speculate) was that the areas enclosed by the two curves were roughly equivalent. Stalin seems to me, on the basis of Kotkin’s account, to have been the indispensable man when it came to Stalinism: an able, energetic, superhumanly determined character absolutely and sincerely a believer in Marxist-Leninist theory, who willed into being the USSR as a major industrial power. We may question whether absent its transformation in that harrowing crucible (if you will pardon the blending of an agricultural and an industrial metaphor, which seems not inapropos here in this context), a Soviet Union capable of turning back the German onslaught would have emerged from a kinder, gentler alternative Bolshevik leadership. If, as I believe, the answer is “probably not,” it may be argued that, given the character of Hitler’s regime and of what it might have achieved with a defeated, supine Russia as its granary, the cost, while steep, was not “too high.” I admit that if one happened to have starved to death during collectivization, this does not make for a particularly persuasive case. I hope I do not appear to be defending the dreadful man, but for better or for worse, we have all of us been born into the world he had a major part in creating. Kotkin limns a character impossible to admire, but who compels our appalled respect. And I speak here as a US citizen of Truman Administration vintage, and accordingly marinated in Cold War mythos (North American edition). I can imagine how the despot’s accomplishments resonate today in the minds of Russian nationals of my age, who remember when their country made its enemies tremble. cordially, Edited by rcareaga Nov. 13, 2017, 06:27:46 PM EST Expand All History
Post #421,276 by a6l6e6x 11/13/17 11:27:09 PM 11/13/17 11:27:09 PM Reply	He had his breakdown. Stalin’s Breakdown During his thirty-year rule of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin succeeded in stifling all opposition. There was never a serious threat to his leadership. But there was one occasion, at the end of June 1941, when Stalin suffered what may have been a mental breakdown. When, after three days, his colleagues came for him, he fully expected to be arrested. But they hadn’t come to arrest him, they’d come to plead with him, begging him to return and take control. Stalin had survived and was to remain in power until his death twelve years later. But what had brought about Stalin’s temporary collapse, and why did his Politburo colleagues fail to bring to an end his murderous rule? “We were witness to his moment of weakness,” recalled Beria later, “and for that he’ll never forgive us.” Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #421,277 by rcareaga 11/14/17 12:30:20 AM 11/14/17 12:30:20 AM Reply	I know that story And his Politburo colleagues did not come to arrest him because they had all either been psychologically broken by him, or owed their careers to him, and all recognized that he was the only man who could hold together the state he had created in his cruel image, and deploy it against the existential Nazi threat. cordially,
Post #421,289 by Ashton 11/14/17 7:35:52 PM 11/14/17 7:39:22 PM Reply	"le mot juste" precísamente [Ed: blongs under Rand's nonpareil phrase/bad moi.] (phrases too..) One wag asserts, Flaubert spent his life agonizing over "le mot juste." Now Madame Bovary is available in 20 different crappy English translations, so now it doesn't really make a damn bit of difference. (but I digress and disagree, anyway.) Edited by Ashton Nov. 14, 2017, 07:39:22 PM EST Expand All History
Post #421,281 by mmoffitt 11/14/17 8:18:53 AM 11/14/17 8:18:53 AM Reply	A brilliant description: "appalled respect." Exactly my sense of the man. bcnu, Mikem It's mourning in America again.
Post #421,272 by rcareaga 11/13/17 7:03:08 PM 11/13/17 7:03:08 PM Reply	a prophecy I repeat that I hold no brief for the old monster, but this speech (possibly his last public appearance) from 1952 has a few lines that rather describe our situation stateside in 2017. The relevant portions occur between 8:15 and 9:12. cordially,

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