Stephen Kotkin, Stalin

This is volume two of Kotkin's magisterial biography.

At Amazon, Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941.

Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin

From Professor Michael Curtis, at the New English Review:

Are the Tsars out tonight? High in the sky the Tsars climb. For policy makers in Washington it is useful to compare two individuals who have risen in the Russian sky. On May  7, 2018 the 65 year old Vladimir V. Putin was sworn in as President of Russia for another six year term, his fourth term of office, having been elected with 77% of the vote.  He was not crowned Tsar in a relatively low key ceremomy that was attended by about 6,000 including sundry personalities, Gerhard Schroeder, former German Chancellor and critic of sanctions against Russia, Steven Seagal, Hollywood black belt in aikido and citizen of Russia since November 2016, and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill who gave Putin an 18th century icon. After the inauguration ceremony the secular Putin attended a prayer service at the Cathedral of the Annunciation.

 Vladimir Putin has been in power, as president or as prime minister since the last day of 1999. According to polls conducted by the independent Moscow Levanda Center in 2017, his popularity remains high, partly because there is no obvious alternative, no candidate from political parties, or social organizations, or trade unions, who can be regarded as a possible alternative.

Yet, Putin is not the most renowned or revered Russian. A poll in June 2017 on which Russian was the national symbol and biggest hero revealed that Joseph Stalin was the "most outstanding person in history." Stalin got 38% approval, while Putin tied with writer Alexander Pushkin at 34%. Stalin, probably seen as the hero of World War II rather than a cruel ruler, was even much more favorably regarded than Lenin, Bolshevik founder of the Soviet Union.

For the U.S. and indeed the rest of the democratic world a vital question is raised. Can Putin be seen as the heir of Stalin and the continuator of his policies? First, how to define Stalinism? Was it a perversion of the Bolshevism launched by Lenin, or was it the Revolution betrayed, or was it the embodiment of historic Russian nationalism using palatable language?

The showing recently of the black comedy film The Death of Stalin is a reminder of the crimes, the power struggles, counter plots, cult of personality, rewriting of history, the shifting truths in the Soviet Union. Central to most of that regime is the story of Stalin's reign of terror, a "total river of blood" in Leon Trotsky's words, during which more than 1.6 million party officials, military officers, intelligence agents, were murdered on fake charges of treason. In one year 1937-38, more than 700,000 were executed and millions of others were exiled or imprisoned.

It is arguable whether Stalin's brutality towards Ukraine 1932-3 can be called Holodomor, the deliberate attempt at genocide, the death of  millions, some estimates go as high as seven million, of Ukrainians on ethnic grounds, and the elimination of the Ukraininan independence movement, or whether the catastophe was an act of nature, a  genuine result of crop failure. Either way, it was a state engineered mass murder of the peasantry. It was part of Stalin's emphasis on the collectivization of agriculture. Every action of Stalin, other than the maintenance of his own power, was subordinated to "socialism in one country" and thus to a near permanent state of emergency. For Stalin, the Soviet Union was encircled by external enemies, and therefore a massive security organization was vital.

But Stalin's paranoia embodied internal enemies for which the main instruments were the political police and the Gulag system of forced labor camps...

More.

Bicentennial of Birth of Karl Marx, the Man Whose Ideas Killed Untold Millions

From Paul Kengor, at WSJ, "Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face":

Opinion: Marx’s apologists should be red in the face, writes @DrPaulKengor https://t.co/diNstXSF9T

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) May 5, 2018

May 5 marks the bicentennial of Karl Marx, who set the stage with his philosophy for the greatest ideological massacres in history. Or did he?

He did, but deniers still remain. “Only a fool could hold Marx responsible for the Gulag,” writes Francis Wheen in “Karl Marx: A Life” (1999). Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung, Mr. Wheen insists, created “bastard creeds,” “wrenched out of context” from Marx’s writings.

Marx has been accused of ambiguity in his writings. That critique is often justified, but not always. In “The Communist Manifesto,” he and Friedrich Engels were quite clear that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.”

“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property,” they wrote. “But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population.” And this: “In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.”

Marx and Engels acknowledged that their views stood undeniably contrary to the “social and political order of things.” Communism seeks to “abolish the present state of things” and represents “the most radical rupture in traditional relations.”

Toward that end, the manifesto offers a 10-point program, including “abolition of property in land,” “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax,” “abolition of all right of inheritance,” “centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly,” “centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state” and the “gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.”

In a preface to their 10 points, Marx and Engels acknowledged their coercive nature: “Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads.” In the close of the Manifesto, Marx said, “The Communists . . . openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”

They were right about that. Human beings would not give up fundamental liberties without resistance. Seizing property would require a terrible fight, including the use of guns and gulags. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and a long line of revolutionaries and dictators candidly admitted that force and violence would be necessary...

More.

Victims of Communism Day

At Reason:

Today is May Day. "Over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their [authority]. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes' millions of victims."https://t.co/kfMLXupao7

— reason (@reason) May 1, 2018

While communism is most closely associated with Russia, where the first communist regime was established, it had equally horrendous effects in other nations around the world. The highest death toll for a communist regime was not in Russia, but in China. Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward was likely the biggest episode of mass murder in the entire history of the world. In terms of comprehensive state control over society and suppression of civil liberties, Soviet communism fell short of the even more thoroughgoing totalitarianism of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge and North Korea.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

This book is great.

Solzhenitsyn is an often hilarious novelist, all the more interesting given the gravity of the subject matter.

At Amazon, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle. (Linked is the translation by Harry Willets.)

New History of the Ukrainian Famine

This is Sophie Pinkham's review of Anne Applebaum's Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine. It's really good, dang!

(Pinkham's the author of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine.)

At the Nation, "The Candle of Memory":

In 1928, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union had a food problem. Because of policies that gave farmers little incentive to sell their grain, the state could no longer feed the urban population. Stalin became convinced that counterrevolutionary “kulaks”—a mostly imaginary class of fat-cat capitalist peasants—were hoarding grain. He ordered requisitions that angered the peasants and discouraged production, leading to further grain shortages, which in turn were followed by even more requisitions. Stalin had quickly made his own suspicions come true: Peasants began to hoard and hide grain—in protest and as a means of survival.

In response to this crisis, the Communist Party’s Central Committee decided to collectivize agriculture in 1929. Collective farms were to function like state-owned agricultural factories, with peasant farmers transmogrified into workers. The fantasy was that scientific innovations would vastly improve productivity, providing bountiful food for the cities, with plenty left over to export in exchange for the hard currency needed for rapid industrialization.

Though some high-ranking members of the party (notably Nikolai Bukharin) opposed forced collectivization, Stalin chose to employ the most coercive and violent methods available to him. He began by having millions of “kulaks” deported to distant collective farms, depriving them of the ties to community that would aid them in a rebellion. Many peasants chose to destroy their crops and slaughter their livestock rather than turn them over to the state; some of the more religious ones came to believe that the Soviet Antichrist was ringing in the end of the world. Others, more accurately, saw collectivization as a form of “second serfdom.” Peasants lynched and murdered Soviet officials and volunteers in charge of collectivization.

The result of Stalin’s policies was a man-made famine of terrifying scale. By the spring of 1932, peasants in the grain-growing districts of Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, the Volga region, and western Siberia were starving. Applebaum draws on oral testimonies and memoirs that offer a vivid look into the transformations wrought by famine. One Ukrainian survivor described his brother as “alive but completely swollen, his body shining as if it were made of glass.” An activist from Russia remembered Ukrainian children looking “all alike: their heads like heavy kernels, their necks skinny as a stork’s…the skin itself like yellow gauze stretched over their skeletons.” Some parents abandoned or even killed their children, unable to bear watching them starve to death. There were instances of cannibalism, usually necrophagia. Though this horror was the result of Soviet policy, the police arrested those who succumbed to it. Applebaum quotes a Polish woman who wrote in her gulag memoir about being transferred to a prison island populated by “Ukrainian cannibals”:

They described how their children died of hunger, and how they themselves, very close to starvation, cooked the corpses of their own children and ate them. This happened when they were in a state of shock caused by hunger. Later, when they came to understand what had happened, they lost their minds.

People died in the streets, and no one had the strength to bury them. Peasants were forbidden to enter the cities in search of food, and the areas most affected, including Ukraine, were closed off. Policemen and party activists searched village households and confiscated any remaining animals or food they saw, even crusts of bread. Harsh penalties—execution or 10 years’ hard labor—were imposed for any kind of theft. By the end of 1932, less than six months after the new law had been passed, 4,500 people had been executed for violating it, and more than 100,000 had received 10-year sentences.

Party members, ordinary people, and cultural figures like the author Mikhail Sholokhov wrote to Stalin, describing the horrendous situation and imploring him to help. Moscow party boss Martemyan Ryutin released an opposition platform denouncing the Soviet leader and aggressively criticizing coercive collectivization and the anti-kulak terror; he and his family were soon arrested and executed. Members of the Ukrainian Communist Party pleaded with Stalin to lower the quotas and provide food aid; some quit in protest. Many paid for these protests with their lives, and others committed suicide.

In May of 1933, the Soviet authorities finally approved substantial food aid, sent in workers to help bring in the harvest, stopped the arrests of peasants (in part because the prisons and camps were overflowing), and ended the policy of food confiscation. Grain quotas were reduced. But the damage done was almost unimaginable: Between 1931 and 1934, at least 5 million people starved to death across the Soviet Union...

RTWT.

Stephen Kotkin, Stalin

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941.

Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin

At Amazon, Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator.

Think Twice

About communism.

From Laura M. Nicolae, at the Harvard Crimson, "100 Years. 100 Million Lives. Think Twice":

"My father left behind his parents, friends, and neighbors in the hope of finding freedom. I know his story because it is my heritage; you now know his story because I have a voice. One hundred million other people were silenced." https://t.co/qgSm47yOMZ @lauramnic pic.twitter.com/AhAhPEvgQf

— Victims of Communism (@VoCommunism) November 21, 2017

In 1988, my twenty-six-year-old father jumped off a train in the middle of Hungary with nothing but the clothes on his back. For the next two years, he fled an oppressive Romanian Communist regime that would kill him if they ever laid hands on him again.

My father ran from a government that beat, tortured, and brainwashed its citizens. His childhood friend disappeared after scrawling an insult about the dictator on the school bathroom wall. His neighbors starved to death from food rations designed to combat “obesity.” As the population dwindled, women were sent to the hospital every month to make sure they were getting pregnant.

My father’s escape journey eventually led him to the United States. He moved to the Midwest and married a Romanian woman who had left for America the minute the regime collapsed. Today, my parents are doctors in quiet, suburban Kansas. Both of their daughters go to Harvard. They are the lucky ones.

Roughly 100 million people died at the hands of the ideology my parents escaped. They cannot tell their story. We owe it to them to recognize that this ideology is not a fad, and their deaths are not a joke.

Last month marked 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution, though college culture would give you precisely the opposite impression. Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence. Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative.

Walk around campus, and you’re likely to spot Ché Guevara on a few shirts and button pins. A sophomore jokes that he’s declared a secondary in “communist ideology and implementation.” The new Leftist Club on campus seeks “a modern perspective” on Marx and Lenin to “alleviate the stigma around the concept of Leftism.” An author laments in these pages that it’s too difficult to meet communists here. For many students, casually endorsing communism is a cool, edgy way to gripe about the world.

After spending four years on a campus saturated with Marxist memes and jokes about communist revolutions, my classmates will graduate with the impression that communism represents a light-hearted critique of the status quo, rather than an empirically violent philosophy that destroyed millions of lives.

Statistics show that young Americans are indeed oblivious to communism’s harrowing past. According to a YouGov poll, only half of millennials believe that communism was a problem, and about a third believe that President George W. Bush killed more people than Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who killed 20 million. If you ask millennials how many people communism killed, 75 percent will undershoot.

Perhaps before joking about communist revolutions, we should remember that Stalin’s secret police tortured “traitors” in secret prisons by sticking needles under their fingernails or beating them until their bones were broken. Lenin seized food from the poor, causing a famine in the Soviet Union that induced desperate mothers to eat their own children and peasants to dig up corpses for food. In every country that communism was tried, it resulted in massacres, starvation, and terror.

Communism cannot be separated from oppression; in fact, it depends upon it. In the communist society, the collective is supreme. Personal autonomy is nonexistent. Human beings are simply cogs in a machine tasked with producing utopia; they have no value of their own.

Many in my generation have blurred the reality of communism with the illusion of utopia. I never had that luxury...

Keep reading.

Catherine Merridale, Lenin on the Train

At Amazon, Catherine Merridale, Lenin on the Train.

Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government

This looks fascinating.

At Amazon, Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution.

Reckoning with Communism

Turns out there's an amazing conference coming up in a couple of week, in D.C., "Victims of Communism Centennial Commemoration." (Hat Tip: National Review, below.)

EVENT 11/7-9: Victims of Communism Centennial Commemoration via Victims of Communism @VoCommunism #communismkills https://t.co/041v1cg0qV pic.twitter.com/ahrVrpeHz9

— Selfish Citizenship (@SelfishCitizen) October 25, 2017

Reckoning with Communism https://t.co/61xpgWgdnt via @JohnOSullivanNR pic.twitter.com/KORLDS8nRv

— National Review (@NRO) October 25, 2017

Stephen Kotkin, Stalin

This is one I'm really excited about. It's out on Halloween.

At Amazon, Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941.

Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time

At Amazon, Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets.

Because It's Never Been Tried!

Following-up from the other day, "Venezuela's Useful Idiots Have Gone Silent."

From Frank Fleming, seen at Instapundit:

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands

At Amazon, Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

Mary Habeck, Storm of Steel

At Amazon, Mary Habeck, Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919–1939.

Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station

Following-up from last night, "The New York Times Shills for Communism — Again."

At Amazon, Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History.

The New York Times Shills for Communism — Again

Can't get enough Walter Duranty over there, lol.

And they never tire of rehabilitating the failed theories of Marxism.

See Bhaskar Sunkara (Editor of the Jacobin), at the Old Gray Lady, "Socialism’s Future May Be Its Past":

Why, 100 years on, the road to socialism runs back through Finland Station in Russia. By @sunraysunray https://t.co/QH0N0Zp6k6

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) June 26, 2017

Stripped down to its essence, and returned to its roots, socialism is an ideology of radical democracy. In an era when liberties are under attack, it seeks to empower civil society to allow participation in the decisions that affect our lives. A huge state bureaucracy, of course, can be just as alienating and undemocratic as corporate boardrooms, so we need to think hard about the new forms that social ownership could take.

Some broad outlines should already be clear: Worker-owned cooperatives, still competing in a regulated market; government services coordinated with the aid of citizen planning; and the provision of the basics necessary to live a good life (education, housing and health care) guaranteed as social rights. In other words, a world where people have the freedom to reach their potentials, whatever the circumstances of their birth.

We can get to this Finland Station only with the support of a majority; that’s one reason that socialists are such energetic advocates of democracy and pluralism. But we can’t ignore socialism’s loss of innocence over the past century. We may reject the version of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as crazed demons and choose to see them as well-intentioned people trying to build a better world out of a crisis, but we must work out how to avoid their failures...

Try as they might, it's still the old Communism, but with fluffed-up dressing.

These are terrible people. Resist them to the last.

"Workers' democracy" will be dismantled as soon as the "majority" vote in the party elites. It's the same old, same old.

David M. Glantz, Barbarossa Derailed

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, David M. Glantz, Barbarossa Derailed. Volume 1: The German Advance, The Encirclement Battle, and the First and Second Soviet Counteroffensives, 10 July - 24 August 1941.