A lot of that rings pretty true. Stephen Kotkin's own biography that I have been reading his some of the same points.
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.
Often times there's a lot of controversy about if a leader is really in charge, or if they are merely a figurehead for some group of masterminds behind the scenes. The thing I like about studying Russia under Stalin is that Stalin was the one actually in charge. More than any other leader of the 19th or 20th century, he held the whole thing together almost singlehandedly. He had to because he got rid of people so regularly that there was no one else who had been there long enough to even know how to run things.
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.
> Stalin foreign policy (not unlike Chamberlains) was to pull Germany to his side
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 is also a good review in the Financial Times which emphasises Stalin being well read. My favourite was 'On a book about the English Civil War, he made a mark comparing the Puritan chaplains of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army with the political commissars of the Soviet Red Army.' This is apparently a popular comparison and Putin is a Cromwell fan too.
It would seem just not celebrating any of them is the easy option. It's only when you need to justify Cromwell's statue outside Parliament, that your opposition to a Stalin statue becomes tricky.
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?
IMHO the best view of Stalin and Stalinism, and certainly the funniest if your taste is for black humor is the film "The Death Of Stalin" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Stalin often available on streaming services. A new version with s/Stalin/Putin/ would be good, and perhaps given oligarchs etc. even funnier.
Simply not true. It is an exaggerated Western stereotypical view of it. Stephen Kotkins book offer a much more informed view of him and his inner circle.
If you liked that, watch The Thick of It, also by Iannucci, a dark comedy (tv series) about modern British government. Both funny and ugly.. the character Malcolm Tucker still strikes fear into my heart.
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?
Not sure about how much historically accurate the movie is (my guess is not very much) but is one of the best comedies out there, specially if you like history. I also read the original comic book source material.
I'm reminded a bit of Marx's Eighteenth Bruminaire of Louis Bonaparte, where the line 'once as grand tragedy, and the second time as rotten farce' was coined, because just like Napoleon III to Napoleon I, compared to Stalin, Putin is a dwarf.
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.
Bismark is a far more reasoned and careful strategist with incredibly different goals compared to Hitler. He wanted short wars for limited strategic gains and Prussia to be dominate within the German Empire.
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.
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.
Somebody (George Kennan? Gordon Craig?) quotes Bismarck as telling the German generals that it would be mad to fight a war with Russia: You would find no one to surrender to you, and the farther east you got, the worse off you would be.)
Stephen Kotkin (briefly referenced in the article) is a history professor at Princeton University and known as the leading Stalin scholar. He's written amazing books and has long interviews on the subject on youtube. One thing that stood out from his talks/books is that he proposes that Stalin was no a psychopathic killer (unlike many other biographers/scholars) but a person who genuinely and deeply believed in communism and was willing to sacrifice anything and everything for it. He also describes Stalin as a super hard-working and pretty smart person.
Disclaimer: Kotkin is absolutely NOT a fan of Stalin, just trying to be thorough and impartial.
"Sacrifice" is a very dishonest way of referring to the mass murder Stalin routinely ordered.
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.
While searching about Stalin on Google I came across an interesting article (1) that provides some more perspective on his life (particularly his early years). He did seem mostly sound of mind especially in his earlier years (and the script was quite similar to any revolutionary), but somewhere it turned violent. Though in his later years - he believed his son surrendered to the Germans (!?) rather than getting captured - he clearly was delusional or had some elements of grandiosity. I wonder how things would have tuned out if he was a pacifist. (I should add that I'm not well aware of the details of European/Soviet history beyond very basics and I'm comparing "revolutionaries" to freedom fighters in colonized countries which likely isn't a great comparison.)
"In an interview I conducted with Vyacheslav Nikonov, he spoke to me of his grandfather Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, as a kindly old man who loved him as a grandson who at one time saved him from drowning. When the archives were opened Nikonov saw his granddad in a different light, spending almost a full day with Stalin signing thousands of death warrants."
FWIW, V. Nikonov is a big fan of both his granddad Molotov and Stalin, and is one of Putin's party (United Russia) figureheads. So I'm not sure how well "different light" describes it.
Hitler was also a voracious reader with a private library of some 2000 books. Surprisingly, Schopenhauer appears to have been Hitler's favorite reading rather than those books of Nietzsche which proclaim the right of the amoral Superman to impose his will on all, or the repulsive racist theories of Alfred Rosenberg and Houston Stuart Chamberlain which surface in Mein Kamph.
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.
I wonder if those books were just for show, or for merely confirming/justifying his pre-existing beliefs. Hitler apparently loved to hold after-dinner "discussions"(mostly soliloquies), and by all reports his viewpoints on the topics that he himself was obsessed with were extremely banal and unsophisticated.
I remember reading somewhere (Speer's autobiography?) that Hitler had a photographic memory for books. He could recall whole sections of books and knew on what pages of a book these pages were.
everbody seem to fascinated by Stalin, but only mention Trotsky in passing. It should have been Trotsky at the center stage as secretrait, even Lenin wanted him but alas the man died. I dont think there would have been Stalin if it was not for Lenin and Trotsky. Zinoview and Kaminev were .......
This is wrong. Lenin never wanted Trotsky, in fact he used Stalin deliberately to block Trotsky. And he empowered many of Trotsky enemies. Trotsky was a late comer to the Bolsheviks and because of his popularity in the civil war he was a danger to Lenin.
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.
You can download 121 episodes of Tom and Jerry from the CIA's public release of Osama Bin Laden's Abbottabad compound computer files. As far as I can tell, it is the most complete collection available online for free or though paid services. The runner up is HBO max with a paltry 77 episodes.
[+] [-] panick21_|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] narrator|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bsedlm|4 years ago|reply
but maybe I'm just squinting my 'eyes' too hard
[+] [-] VictorPath|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jsmith99|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] potbelly83|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zabzonk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] publicola1990|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pizza|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrepd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] er4hn|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] silveira|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmoriarty|4 years ago|reply
Excellent movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnt_by_the_Sun
[+] [-] pasabagi|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] panick21_|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yyyk|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cafard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] george0812|4 years ago|reply
Disclaimer: Kotkin is absolutely NOT a fan of Stalin, just trying to be thorough and impartial.
[+] [-] Duwensatzaj|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] user_7832|4 years ago|reply
1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/joseph-stalin-national-hero-or-c...
[+] [-] panick21_|4 years ago|reply
He would have never been even remotely close to any position of relevance and nobody would know his name.
[+] [-] fuy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zuider|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] FredPret|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xhevahir|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackallis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panick21_|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gumby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] loo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ortusdux|4 years ago|reply
https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/index_video....
https://medium.com/fan-fare/hbo-max-is-failing-the-classic-t...
[+] [-] maybelsyrup|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themodelplumber|4 years ago|reply
> Uploaded BY ahmad essawi
You gotta wonder what Ahmad is thinking about all this. Or if he was interviewed.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sydthrowaway|4 years ago|reply