Tag Archives: Russian History

Why Stalin Hated Trotsky

01 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in History, Political Philosophy

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Three Famous Russians

“One wonders whether Stalin’s hatred of Trotsky, one of the most passionate in history (with three floors of the Lubyanka [KGB headquarters] devoted to his destruction), was to some extent ‘racial.’ It is, anyway, all of a piece. Anti-Semitism is an announcement of inferiority and a protest against a level playing field – a protest against talent. And this is true, too, of the most hysterical, demonizing, millenarian versions of the cult, according to which a tiny minority, the Jews, planned to achieve world domination. Now how would they manage that, without inordinate gifts? It is said that anti-Semitism differs from other prejudices because it is also a ‘philosophy.’ It is also a religion – the religion of the inadequate. When tracing the fateful synergy between Russia and Germany, we may recall that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the ‘warrant for genocide’ as it is called in Norman Cohn’s book of that name, was a fiction composed by the Tsarist secret police. […]

The proximate cause of [Stalin’s] final delirium was evidently the emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 and the arrival, later that year, of the new ambassador, Golda Meir, who attracted a crowd of 50,000 Jews outside the Moscow synagogue. This was a shocking display of ‘spontaneity’; it also confronted Stalin with an active minority who owed an allegiance other than to ‘the Soviet power’. He is supposed to have said: ‘I can’t swallow them, I can’t spit them out.’ In the end, it seems, he decided to do both. The Jews who survived the gauntlet were meant to end up in Birobidzhan on the Chinese border and in other parts of Siberia where, according to Solzhenitsyn, ‘barracks had already been prepared for them’… Solzhenitsyn believes that the pogrom was to be launched at the beginning of March by the hanging of the ‘doctor-murderers’ in Red Square. But then, too, at the beginning of March something else happened: Stalin died.

It is perhaps controversial to suggest that Iosif Stalin in his last years was capable of further spiritual decline. But one is struck by the loss, the utter evaporation, of his historical self-consciousness, suggesting some sort of erasure in a reasonably important part of Stalin’s brain. ‘Anti-Semitism is counterrevolution,’ Lenin once claimed. Anti-Semitism was the creed of the Whites, of the Tsarists… against whom the young Stalin might have stood in line on the streets of Russia’s cities. Anti-Semitism was for the rabble and the Right. In turning to it, the world’s premier statesman, as he then was, also squandered the vast moral capital that the USSR had accumulated during the war: Hitler’s conqueror, incredibly, became Hitler’s protégé.”

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Pulled from Martin Amis’s engrossing short history of Stalin and the origins of the Soviet Union Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.

Among the most renowned Anglo-American historians of the Soviet Union is 98-year-old Hoover Institute fellow Robert Conquest, a familial friend of Amis and the first Western scholar to describe Stalin’s terror-famine as a purposeful, premeditated genocide. The book in which he makes that claim, The Harvest of Sorrow, opens with the following:

We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.

That single sentence is 3,040 lives. His book runs over 400 pages.

Pictured: Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky at the Eighth Bolshevik Conference in March, 1919.

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The Fitting Final Days of Joseph Stalin

23 Monday Mar 2015

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Stalin

“‘I’m finished,’ Stalin had recently been heard to say to himself: ‘I trust no one, not even myself.’ Svetlana says of this period that a visit to her father would physically wipe her out for several days; and Svetlana was in no fear of her life.

On 1 March Stalin stirred at midday, as usual. In the pantry the light came on: MAKE TEA. The servants waited in vain for the plodding instruction, BRING TEA IN. Not until 11 P.M. did the duty officers summon the nerve to investigate. [Stalin] was lying in soiled pyjamas on the dining-room floor near a bottle of mineral water and a copy of Pravda. His beseeching eyes were full of terror. When he tried to speak he could only produce ‘a buzzing sound’ – the giant flea, the bedbug, reduced to an insect hum. No doubt he had had time to ponder an uncomfortable fact: all the Kremlin doctors were being tortured in jail, and his personal physician of many years, Vinogradov, was, moreover (at the insistence of Stalin himself), ‘in irons’. […]

Stalin’s right side was paralysed; his left side twitched at random. Over the next five days, as the doctors trembled over their work, Vasily Dzhugashvili would sometimes stagger in and shout, ‘They’ve killed my father, the bastards!’ At 9:50 P.M. on 5 March Stalin began sweating heavily. His blue face turned bluer. Svetlana watched and waited. This is her valediction:

For the last twelve hours the lack of oxygen became acute. His face and lips blackened… The death agony was terrible. He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed like the very last moment, he opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry, and full of fear of death… [Then] he suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something up above and bringing down a curse on all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace.

What was he doing? He was groping for his power.

Stalin was dead – but he wasn’t yet done. He had always loved grinding people together, pestling them together, leaving them without air and space, without recourse; he had always loved hemming and cooping them, penning them, pinning them: the Lubyanka reception ‘kennel’, with three prisoners for every yard of floor space; Ivanovo, with 323 men in a cell intended for twenty, or Strakhovich, with twenty-eight men in a cell intended for solitary confinement; or thirty-six in a single train compartment, or a black maria packed so tight that the urkas can’t even pickpocket, or the zeks trussed in pairs and stacked like logs in the back of the truck – en route to execution… On the day of Stalin’s funeral vast multitudes, ecstatic with false grief and false love, flowed through Moscow in dangerous densities. When, in a tightening crowd, your movements are no longer your own and you have to fight to breathe, a simple and sorrowful realization asserts itself through your panic: that if death comes, it will be brought here by life, too much life, a superabundance of life. And what were they all doing there anyway – mourning him? On that day well over a hundred people died of asphyxiation in the streets of Moscow. So Stalin, embalmed in his coffin, went on doing what he was really good at: crushing Russians.”

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Pulled from Martin Amis’s engrossing short history of Stalin and the origins of the Soviet Union Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.

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Stalin funeral

Bernard-Henri Lévy: The Russia I Respect, the Russia I Despise

01 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by in Current Events, Debate, Political Philosophy, Politics

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BHL

“Unlike you, I have absolutely no desire to be Russian or to return to Russia.

I used to love a certain idea of Russia.

I loved and defended this idea of Russian culture, which in the 1970s and ‘80s conjured up a whole hodgepodge, Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, the Slavophiles and Europhiles, the disciples of Pushkin and those of Dostoyevsky, the dissidents on the right and the left and those who, in the words of the mathematician Leonid Plyushch, belonged to neither of these camps but to the concentration camp and the gulag…

Then there’s what Russia has become, what appeared when the breakdown of communism, its debacle — what a mountaineer like your father would call its ‘thaw’ — revealed to the world: the Russia of Putin, of the war in Chechnya, the Russia that assassinated Anna Politkovskaja on the stairway in her building and that the same Anna Politkovskaja described in her wonderful book A Russian Diary, just before she was assassinated. It’s the Russia of the racist packs who, right in the center of Moscow, track down ‘non ethnic’ Russians… the Russia that has the nerve to explain to the world that it has its own “democracy,” a special, local democracy that is quite unrelated to Western canons and rights.

It’s the country of such specialties as its party, the Nashi, meaning ‘our own,’ which, to call a spade a spade, is a Stalin-Hitler combo, the Russia that, incidentally, is giving new life to the anti-Semitic European pamphlets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries… This Russia, which, apart from this kind of idiocy, believes in nothing at all… This Russia, which, the last time I went there, struck me as having had its culture erased and its brain washed, this Russia, whose most discouraging side, according to Anna Politkovskaja, to mention her yet again, was its amorphousness and passivity, the way it accepts, for example, that it hardly has any employment legislation left and that its workers are treated like dogs… In this Russia, no less than under communism, people are ready to betray their parents to steal a broom, a bowl, a badly screwed tap or bits of scrap iron from deserted buildings abandoned by oligarchs on the run or in prison.

Not only does this Russia inspire no desire in me, it fills me with horror. I’d go so far as to say that it frightens me because I see in it a possible destiny for the late-capitalist societies. Once upon a time, during your postwar ‘glory days,’ the middle class was terrorized by being told that Brezhnev’s communism was not an archaism restricted to distant societies but rather a picture of our future. We were wrong: it was not communism but post communism, Putinism, that may be the testing ground for our future.”

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BHL on a tear in his book-form debate with French novelist Michel Houellebecq, Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take On Each Other and the World.

Regardless of whether you speak French, I recommend keeping up to speed on Lévy’s work wherever it’s translated. The man has more style and swagger and moral intelligence than several whole societies I can think of.

More from epitomizers of cool:

Below: BHL in Libya (2011), Egypt (2011), Ukraine (2014).

BHL en LibyeBHL place Tahrir

BHL Ukraine

The Nightmarish Child

02 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by in History

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Vladimir Lenin

“Lenin suffered his first stroke in May 1922. In September he wrote the ferocious letter to Gorky.* In the intervening July he was drawing up his many lists of intellectuals for arrest and deportation or internal exile. A month earlier Lenin’s doctors had asked him to multiply 12 by 7. Three hours later he solved the problem by addition: 12 + 12 = 24, 24 + 12 = 36. . . . The ex-believer Dmitri Volkogonov comments in his Lenin: A New Biography:

He had covered a twenty-one-page notepad with childish scrawls… The future of an entire generation of the flower of the Russian intelligentsia was being decided by a man who could barely cope with an arithmetical problem for a seven-year-old.

There were further strokes. Later, Lenin’s wife Krupskaya taught him to repeat (and it only worked under direct prompting) the words ‘peasant,’ ‘worker,’ ‘people,’ and ‘revolution’ . . . Adam Ulam has described the nihilism of the Russian revolutionary tradition as ‘at once childish and nightmarish.’ The dying Lenin — and, frequently, the living Lenin, too — was childish and nightmarish. In his last ten months he was reduced to monosyllables. But at least they were political monosyllables: vot-vot (here-here) and sezd-sezd (congress-congress)…

In March 1887 Lenin’s older brother Alexander was arrested for conspiring to murder his namesake, Tsar Alexander III; a plea for clemency would have reduced his sentence to hard labor, but Alexander was possessed of the courage of youth and, two months later, was duly hanged. He was twenty-one. Vladimir Ilyich was seventeen. And their father died the previous year. Clearly the consequences of these events are entitled to be boundless. My sense of it is that Lenin’s moral faculties stopped developing thereafter. Hence his foulmouthed tantrums, his studied amorality, his flirtatious nihilism, his positively giggly response to violence: his nightmarish childishness.”

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Excerpted from Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis.

I highly recommend you pick up your own copy of this dark but illuminating book. On a sunnier (or at least funnier) note, there’s some light verse that’s unavoidable here, penned as it was by Robert Conquest, the renowned historian of the Soviet Union and family friend of Amis:

There once was a bastard called Lenin
Who did one or two million men in.
That’s a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in.

To take you back into the shade: in introducing his compendious study of the 1929 Soviet terror-famine, The Harvest of Sorrow, Conquest offers the reader the following proem:

“We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.”

That single sentence stands for 3,040 lives. His book runs 417 pages.

*“The intellectual strength of workers and peasants grows in the struggle to overturn the bourgeoisie and their acolytes, those second-rate intellectuals and lackeys of capitalism, who think they are the brains of the nation. They are not the brains of the nation. They’re its shit.”

More on Russia:

  • Anne Applebaum describes Putin’s eerie connection to the ancien régime
  • A. N. Wilson lays out just how much the Soviets sacrificed to beat the Nazis
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s incisive Nobel speech about the nature of man

Vladimir Lenin

A Chekist on the Global Chessboard

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in Current Events, Interview, Politics

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Vladimir Putin

Brian Lamb: Correct me if I’m wrong, but did you say [Putin] was a ‘Cheka’?

Anne Applebaum: Putin was a member of the secret police, which was later called the KGB. And the old name — the Leninist era name — for the KGB is the Cheka. And Putin has described himself as a ‘Chekist,’ which is an old fashioned word for secret policeman.

Brian Lamb: What does that mean to you?

Anne Applebaum: The first time I heard him say it, it filled me with horror. It’s like somebody saying, “I was a Brownshirt.” It has very, very unpleasant connotations.

Brian Lamb: Why do you think he says it?

Anne Applebaum: He says it because it gives him an aura of invincibility. ‘We were the people behind the scenes who were running the old Soviet Union.’ The term still commands a certain amount of respect in Russia. A poll was done recently which showed that some 60 or 70 percent of Russians still think Lenin was a great man who contributed to their country. So he’s echoing a respect for the Russian Revolution.

Brian Lamb: I read a story in The New York Times about Saddam Hussein which read just like [accounts of the Soviet Gulag] —  the enemies lists that they had, the kind of people they put away, the torturing that went on. How much of this is still going on around the world?

Anne Applebaum: I would say a great deal. The Stalinist regime — and later the Krushchevite and Brezhnevite regimes in the Soviet Union — actually spread their techniques, and they taught people around the world how to run police states. I have no doubt that, through the East Germans, Saddam Hussein’s police state was probably set up with Russian or Soviet advice.

It is not an accident that so many of these systems share so much in common; there was a set of techniques, they were deliberately spread. The Soviet camp was exported to China; the Chinese exported it to North Korea. The North Korean Gulag that exists today sounds, from what little we know about it, very much like Stalin’s Gulag.

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From Anne Applebaum’s 2003 interview with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, discussing her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gulag: A History.

I sometimes think it all boils down to names. We had Roosevelt (Dutch for “rose garden”) then Truman (Old English: “honest man”); Chamberlain (“servant of a bed chamber”) then Churchill (“church’s hill”) and Attlee (“from the meadow”).

They had Stalin (“man of steel”) and his henchmen: Kamenev (“man of stone”), Molotov (“hammer”), Lenin (“from the River Lena”) — and Trotsky (The name on one of young Lev Bronstein’s fake passports, which wound up catching on).

Putin, though he mysteriously lacks a single antecedent family member who shares his surname, lays claim to a strangely appropriate etymology: “on his way”, “on his path”.

In the next few weeks, I’ll post more on this topic as well as excerpts from Applebaum’s book, which as far as I can tell is now considered the preeminent history of the Soviet prison and slave labor system (a Google search for “gulag book” displays it first, above Solzhenitsyn’s Archipelago). Gulag concludes with a clear-eyed rumination on the post-Soviet psyche, especially as it is expressed by today’s Russians and enacted in the 20th century atavisms of their largely popular Chekist-in-Chief. Writing in her epilogue a decade ago, Applebaum observed,

[T]en years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, the country that has inherited the Soviet Union’s diplomatic and foreign policies, its embassies, its debts, and its seat at the United Nations, continues to act as if it has not inherited the Soviet Union’s history. Russia does not have a national museum dedicated to the history of repression. Nor does Russia have a national place of mourning, a monument which officially recognizes the suffering of victims and their families…

Many Russians experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union as a profound blow to their personal pride. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now feel—but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad. It is too painful, like speaking ill of the dead.

Unlike most attempts at mass psychoanalysis, these considerations are hardly trivial, especially as we attempt to internalize what is happening in Ukraine and perhaps anticipate the Chekist’s next move.

On a brighter note: I recommend not only Applebaum’s substantial book, but also her columns, which are printed in The Washington Post. Along with Danielle Crittenden (wife of conservative political commentator David Frum), she has also published a cook book on Polish comfort food — and though I can’t speak to its merits, I can say that when juxtaposed with her work on the famines of Stalinism makes her probably the most versatile author I’ve cited on this blog. (Below: Applebaum and Crittenden; below that, Applebaum with her sons and husband, Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.)

Anne Applebaum and Danielle Crittenden Anne Applebaum and Family