Reasonable Stalin

HG Wells' interview with Joseph Stalin, lately rescusitated by the New Statesman is a delight in many ways, not all of them predictable.  We have Wells' callow, self-admiring pomposity, like a giant gaseous Lieutenant Fuzz--no surprise there, but it's an amusing nostalgia trip.  What is perhaps surprising--startling to me--is Stalin.  He sounds reasonable. Not just reasonable but as well-informed as you might have been entitled to expect from any contemporaneous leader.  Also with a sense of history remarkable in a former bank robber and seminary dropout.

Read that again:  I didn't say he was reasonable; only that he seemed so, to a reader informed 80 plus years and so much savage bloodshed.  I really don't know quite what to make of all this.  One's first thought is that must be some sort of boy-Stalin: a bit bluff and perhaps unwilling to suffer fools (or at least one fool) gladly--perhaps the kind of guy who could mousetrap those who underrated him, not yet a paranoid monster and madman.
  
But this can't be right: we know now that Stalin was already well into the great terror-famine that Robert Conquest so damningly documented in Harvest of Sorrow. --and which Walter Duranty worked so hard to conceal from the readers of the New York Times.  So we know that Stalin already possessed the barbarity necessary to execute a program of mass murder but also the duplicity necessary to put a benign face on it.

Stolypin??

If there is any surprise in finding Josef Stalin on a list of most popular Russians, I suppose it is finding that he is only third from the top (link). We've been hearing for years about how Russian truck drivers carry Stalin dashboard medallions, and how impoverished pensioners moan that "if only Stalin were alive ..." Sure, he was a brutal dictators but so many of his opponents are, well, dead. And not just because it was all so many years ago.

Stalin also defeated the German invaders--a characteristic he shares with the number one choice Alexander Nevsky, whom regular readers of Underbelly will remember for his place in the Second Pskovian Chronicle, recording events of the 13th Century (Alexander had an even bigger problem with the Golden Horde, whom he fended off more with fancy footwork than with fire and sword). But number two is--Pyotr Stolypin? Having had the good fortune to be actually awake in Russian history class that day, I remember him as an interesting guy--the conservative counter-Lenin, who wanted to stem the tide of revolution by creating a class of industrious farmers. He probably does deserve a place in any respectable narrative of the Russian state--but second most popular? How is it that Russians know so much about him? Has there been a series on the Russian version of Mawsterpiece Theatre, or some such? Stolypin? [For a fuller and less flippant answer, see Abraham Ascher, P.A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (2001)].

Aside from the "popularity" problem I'd say that putting both Stalin and Stolypin on the same list is no more remarkable than bracketing these two on the "Most Admired American Woman" list. Hat Tip: Wichita Bureau. Thanks, John.

Update: Moscow Times offers a bit of context (link).

History Has its Demands: Stalin Statues Division

My friend Neizvestnie remembers an important day during his youth in Kazakhstan:

I knew the statues of Stalin had been taken away. One day I was out berry picking and I came upon a field--there they all were, 200 of them, lying in a field. All the noses had been broken off, I suppose so no one could use them again. There is a highway over the field now, but I know where they are buried.

Birthday Greetings

Happy Birthday, Uncle Joe. Warm down there?

[Old style; new style is December 18.]

More Overy on Hitler, Stalin

After a break (link), I’ve gone back and finished Richard Overy’s absorbing The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004). Overy certainly has an eye for the telling detail:

• The October Revolution and the attendant Civil War left the Red Army almost devoid of resources—so devoide that “on May Days in the 1920s Red Army men paraded through Red Square on bicycles.” (446)
  

• On their drive to Moscow in 1941, the Nazis moved so fast that “they entered the city of Orel with the streetcars still running.” (493)

• By 1927, the Soviets had recognized 172 ethnic minorities, and 192 distinct languages. The goal of linguistic modernization drove the campaign to extend Latin script to Arab linguages—sometimes faster than the growth of cultural comprehension. “One Kyrgyz instructor, having successfully instilled the letters of the alphabet into her class by rote, sent off to Moscow for another set.” (554)

• Prisoners packed off in boxcars en route to the Gulag found they could escape by chopping through the floor and dropping onto the railroad tracks below, “but after a time the guards fitted an improvised steel scythe beneath the last freight car to cut escapees in half as they lay on the tracks.” (563)

• Guards at Auschwitz carried “a notorious whip nicknamed ‘Interpreter’ because it could speak to the multinational workshop in any language.” (622-3)

I should add that Overy’s book is far more than mere anecdote. It is a rich, dense, detailed comparative study, resisting easy summary—unless to say that “resists easy summary” is itself a kind of summary. I’ll forgive my self for pillaging the cherries out of this cake, but the whole product deserves far more respectful and extensive attention than it is going to get here. It does remind me to go back and take a second look at one of Overy’s earlier efforts, Why the Allies Won, which I skimmed with interest but perhaps insufficient care a few years back—and which, happily, I seem not to have given away.

Life Imitates Mel Brooks

Life imitates Mel Brooks: more cullings from Richard Overy, The Dictators (2004)

• “So anxious were [planners] to match [Stalin’s] vision … that the huge Moskva Hotel, built with the same over-high classical portico found on the designs for Berlin, was constructed with two wings of completely different styles because Stalin had mistakenly approved as a single design tweo separate submissions placed on a table in front of him.” (223)

• Stalin’s “favorite film was said to be the 1938 production of V olga! Volga! a musical comedy that ends with the triumphant completion of the Moscow-Volga canal by regiments of prisoner-labourers …” (238)

• There were 34 assassination attempts against Hitler, none against Stalin (though plenty of people wanted to). “Lenin was the victim of two attempts on his life. Many years later, a man was caught in the Lenin mausoleum trying to shoot the embalmed corpse.” (326)

• Those émigré Russians who try to be Nazis? Evidently the mustache was part of the rigging: “each [was] comically adorned with Hitler’s familiar toothbrush mustache and a uniform like that of a railway guard…” (336)

• Builders of a superblock at Magnitogorsk, the “new industrial city” forgot to include a sewer system (228). [I seem to recall reading about the same problem with a new barracks built by the Austrian Empire in the 1890s…]

Overy on State Terror

Is the United States a fascist dictatorship? Of course not. But it may be small consolation; think of those bumper stickers that say “George Bush—Not as Bad as Saddam.” But reading Richard Overy’s The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004) is enough to give you the chills, particularly his chapter on “States of Terror”—the development and maintenance of terror mechanisms in each of his two subject states.

For starters, Overy makes the point that for the insiders, it wasn’t really terror at all:

For much of the life of both dictatorships the public war against terror won widespread approval and even co-operation from the two populations. Though fear might now seem the most rational of responses to what were, by any standards, fearful regimes, that fear was projected onto the victims of discrimination and state reporession. ‘Terrorists’ were excluded and persecuted not only by the organs of state security, but by a population made anxious thorugh orchestrated programs of public vilification.

—Richard Overy, The Dictators 177 (2004)

Overy goes on to show how neither Hitler’s Germany nor Stalin’s Russia began as a fully-developed police state. In an unsettling parallel, he shows how each dictator advanced down the road state terrorism by deploying a vivid, dramatic, but in the end entirely fortuitous disruption—in Germany, the Reichstag Fire of 1933, in Russia, the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934. In each case, the emerging dictator used a dramatic challenge as a hook on which to climb towards absolute power, unanswerable and outside the law.

More generally, Overy shows how state terror grows by the frog-in-a-pot approach—slowly turning up the heat so the subject doesn’t quite realize what has happened to it until it is all over and done.

Overy also shows how, particularly in German, the forces of state terror ultimately become a law unto themselves, and how (if it is any consolation) the terror forces to some extent come to devour their own. For what it is worth, he also shows how conventional estimates of deaths from internal terror (but excluded the holocaust) are perhaps exaggerated—the number more likely in thousands or tens of thousands than millions or tens of millions. Small consolation: it’s still not a road down which any citizen or polity would willingly want to go.