A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books
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Re: A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books
#2A 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.
Re: A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books
#3I'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.
Re: A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books
#4A 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…
wow, I can't help but imagine a similar scenario but replacing Germany with Russia and Russia with China
but maybe I'm just squinting my 'eyes' too hard
Re: A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books
#5A 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…
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.
Re: A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books
#6You 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.
https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/index_video....
https://medium.com/fan-fare/hbo-max-is-failing-the-classic-t...
Re: A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books
#7Hitler 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.
Re: A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books
#8Hitler 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 n…
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.
Re: A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books
#9Hitler 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 n…
Nietzsche was staunchly against nationalism, socialism, and Prussian militarism. Pretty much the anti-Hitler.
Re: A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books
#10A 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…
> 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.