There is a general consensus that Stalin was a sadistic tyrant. But the ghost of his predecessor remains “handshakeworthy” on the left hand side of the political spectrum. The SWPLy bobos of Seattle, who would not have been long for the Communist world, erected a statue to him in the city center. The New York Times “celebrated” the centenary of the Russian Revolution with odes to the Bolsheviks’ progressivism on the environment, sex, and race (not that Terell J. Starr with his strange ideas of how the USSR “centered the Russian slav” would appreciate it).
Westerners, at least, have a good excuse for subscribing to the self-serving Trotskyite belief that Stalin “betrayed” Lenin’s revolution – after all, the bacillus that Germany unleashed upon Russia during its moment of weakness and disarray did more than anyone else to derail De Tocqueville’s prophesy and ensure that the 20th century would be an exclusively American one.
And yet, as of the centenary of Red October, 56% of Russians – up from 40% in 2006 – maintained a positive view of the grandfather of this dismal experiment. To this day, Lenin’s pyramid-like tomb occupies the center of Moscow, the heart of Russia, as if he was a Pharaoh of old – though perhaps that is ironically appropriate, in light of his zealous drive to drag Russia into the Communist future instead depositing it in a world with the ethical norms of the 3rd millennium BC.
There is thus no better and no more urgent time to consign the “Communist fable of a Lenin supposedly gentler than Stalin” (as Stephen Kotkin put it) to its well-deserved place in the dustbin of history.
Who was Lenin?
The brother of a terrorist. In the totalitarian state that he built, which operated by blood guilt, this would have been as good as a death sentence. Fortunately for Lenin, he lived in the Russian Empire, not the USSR.
Lenin’s “administrative exile” to Siberia – a rite of passage for Russian revolutionaries – might as well have been a holiday. He brought along his mother, wife, and even hired a maid to keep house (how bourgeois). He whiled away his time in Siberia fishing, hunting, and corresponding with other revolutionaries. Needless to say, consequent Siberian vacations would not be near as fun for the 3,777,380 people convicted under the Soviet “counter-revolutionary” articles implemented under Lenin and his successors from 1921-53.
A student who never finished university, a lawyer who never plied his trade. After Siberia, he would spend most of the next seventeen years in European exile, writing articles for low-circulation journals that alternated between rehashing Marx and Engels, engaging in disputes with fellow Marxists who were famous in narrow circles, and penning bromides against “reactionary” Russia from the comfort of London and Geneva, much like latter day liberal Bolsheviks such as Garry Karparov and Ilya Ponomarev today.
Supported and inspired terrorist attacks on Russian police and state bureaucrats. Around 4,500 Tsarist officials were murdered just in 1905-1907. Bolshevik propaganda about “Bloody Nikolashka” aside, only around 6,321 people were executed for all offenses (including purely criminal ones, like murder) in the Russian Empire from 1825-1917. The Red Terror that Lenin would unleash in response to the assassination of just one Bolshevik functionary would claim two orders of magnitude more lives.
Zealotry aside, Lenin wouldn’t be Lenin without a side dish in treason.
Supported Japan in the Russo-Japanese at the 3rd Congress of the RSDRP.
From an article in January 1905:
The proletariat is hostile to the bourgeoisie and all aspects of the bourgeois order, but his hostility does not absolve him from the duty of differentiating between historically progressive and reactionary representatives of the bourgeoisie. It is entirely understandable that the more consistent and decisive representatives of international revolutionary Social Democracy, Jules Guesde in France and Hyndman in England, expressed without reservation their sympathies towards Japan, for its role in destroying Russian autocracy.
On the outbreak of World War I, Lenin happened to be in Krakow, where he was arrested by the Austro-Hungarian authorities as an “enemy alien.” Fortunately, an Austrian socialist leader was there to vouch for him, assuring them that he was no spy, but a “bitter enemy” of Russia and a proponent of Ukrainian separatism. He was dispatched to Switzerland in early September, where he would continue scribbling away.
Letter to Shlyapnikov, 1914:
For us Russians, from the point of view of the laboring masses and the working class of Russia, there can be absolutely no doubt that the lesser evil would be the defeat of Tsarism in this war. For Tsarism is 100 times worse than Kaiserism.
Article in “Social Democrat,” March 1915:
The only correct proletarian slogan is to transform the present imperialist war into a civil war. This transformation flows from all the objective conditions of the current military disaster, and only by systematically propagandising and agitating in that direction can the workers’ parties fulfil the obligations they undertook at Basle. That is the only kind of tactics that will be truly revolutionary working-class tactics, corresponding to the conditions of the new historical epoch.
Article in “Social Democrat”, November 1916:
Whatever the outcome of this war, it is those who say that the only possible socialist way out of it is through a civil war of the proletariat for socialism, who will be proven right. It is those Russian Social Democrats, who said that the defeat of Tsarism and its complete military destruction is the lesser evil.
Letter to Suvarin, December 1916:
Our party has rejected Tolstoy’s teachings, and pacifism, by proclaiming that socialists must work to turn the current war into a civil war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.
But he was growing despondent: In January 1917, he told a socialist gathering that “we old-timers may not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution.”
Fortunately for Lenin, he got a big break with the February Revolution, the elite led coup against the Tsarist regime. Soon after, the Germans arranged for him, along with other Bolshevik activists, to be transported to Russia in a “sealed train” (actually sealed in propaganda only; in practice, there were plenty of stop-overs). It is worth noting that the guy who arranged this, the German Communist Fritz Platten, also tried to enlist Socialist Revolutionary exiles for the purpose of destabilizing Russian. To their credit, none of them accepted, not wishing to be associated with Lenin’s overt treason.
Once he was in Russia, Lenin began to implement his program of “revolutionary defeatism.” First proposed at the Zimmerwald Peace Conference in 1915, publication of the doctrine was squashed by the German Foreign Office, on the fear that its contents would let the Okhrana justify mass arrests of Russian socialists. This didn’t sway Lenin from repeating it in his April Theses, whose slogan “down with the war” and call for the abolition of the Russian Army was so radical than even the Bolsheviks’ newspaper, Pravda, initially refused to print it.
All this was sustained in large part thanks to German money. In 1917, a grand total of around 50 million gold marks were transferred to Lenin’s party in Petrograd (this translates to an amzing $1 billion in today’s currency). This helped fund the Bolshevik printing presses, and there are numerous accounts of money being handed out for protests against the Provisional Government throughout 1917 (all standard features of modern color revolutions). This was all done with the firm knowledge that the Bolsheviks served the interests of Germany. Parvus, aka Israel Gelfand, said in a meeting with the German ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1915, “The interests of the German Imperial Government are identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries.” The second key intermediary, Alexander Kesküla, was a one-time socialist who had become a hardcore Estonian nationalist; his motivations for working with Germany were, in his words, simple: “Hatred of Russia.”
To Lenin belongs the dubious honor of carrying out the world’s first color revolution, and its color was red.
Source: @welections
Russian Constituent Assembly election, 1917: Brown = Social Revolutionaries; Red = Bolsheviks; Green = Regional SR’s; Yellow = Local parties.
Rejected the results of the last democratic election in Russian history until 1990 because he didn’t like that the Bolsheviks only won 24.5% of the vote.
Any direct or indirect attempt to consider the Constituent Assembly from a formally legalistic point of view, from within the framework of bourgeois democracy, without taking into account the class struggle or civil war, is treason against the proletariat and a defection to the worldview of the bourgeoisie. It is the duty of revolutionary Social Democracy to warn everybody against this error, which a considerable number of Bolshevik leaders are prone to, apparently unable to properly assess the October Revolution and the tasks before the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Even Rosa Luxemburg, criticizing Lenin for his ultra-liberal attitudes towards small nationalisms, pointed out the irony:
One is immediately struck with the obstinacy and rigid consistency with which Lenin and his comrades struck to this slogan, a slogan which is in sharp contradiction to their otherwise outspoken centralism in politics as well as to the attitude they have assumed towards other democratic principles. While they showed a quite cool contempt for the Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, freedom of press and assemblage, in short, for the whole apparatus of the basic democratic liberties of the people which, taken all together, constituted the “right of self-determination” inside Russia, they treated the right of self-determination of peoples as a jewel of democratic policy for the sake of which all practical considerations of real criticism had to be stilled. While they did not permit themselves to be imposed upon in the slightest by the plebiscite for the Constituent Assembly in Russia, a plebiscite on the basis of the most democratic suffrage in the world, carried out in the full freedom of a popular republic, and while they simply declared this plebiscite null and void on the basis of a very sober evaluation of its results, still they championed the “popular vote” of the foreign nationalities of Russia on the question of which land they wanted to belong to, as the true palladium of all freedom and democracy, the unadulterated quintessence of the will of the peoples and as the court of last resort in questions of the political fate of nations.
In other words, a German Communist revolutionary, in practice, cared more for Russia’s territorial integrity and the democratic viewpoints of the Russian people than the man whose statues still dot the expanses of the Russian Federation.
In effect capitulated to Germany at Brest-Litovsk, ceded massive territories without military need, and betrayed Russia’s war allies.
What could have been: Map of the “Future Europe” (not like Wilhelm II would have liked it!)
As Winston Churchill wrote in his book The World Crisis (1916-1918):
Surely to no nation has Fate been more malignant than to Russia. Her ship went down in sight of port. She had actually weathered the storm when all was cast away. Every sacrifice had been made; the toil was achieved. Despair and Treachery usurped command at the very moment when the task was done.
Talk of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
In December 1917, set up the Cheka. At the outset, they were predominantly staffed by non-Russians – mostly Latvians – headed by the Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Anecdote about Dzerzhinsky: Before the war, he managed to get beaten up by Polish factory workers, whom he had tried to agitate against the Tsar. There must be some kind of achievement trophy for that level of fail.
But the Cheka was another matter, and no laughing matter.
In August 1918, the Cheka’s Petrograd head Moisei Uritsky was assassinated. The killer, incidentally, was one of history’s forgotten heroes, Leonid Kannegisser, who explained his motives thus:
I am a Jew. I killed a Jewish vampire, who drank Russian blood. I wanted to show the Russian people that to Uritsky wasn’t a Jew to us. He was a renegade. I killed him in the hopes of redeeming the good name of Russian Jews.
One successful assassination and one attempted assasination against Lenin was enough to kickstart the Red Terror.
The famous August 11, 1918 cable to the Communists in Penza:
Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because ‘the last decisive battle’ with the kulaks is now under way everywhere. An example must be demonstrated.
- Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers.
- Publish their names.
- Seize all their grain from them.
- Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.
Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: “they are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks”.
Telegraph receipt and implementation.
Yours, Lenin.
Find some truly hard people
Whereas previously, mass shootings had numbered in the dozens at most, they would now climb into the thousands, once Sovnarkom authorized mass terror on September 5th. The repressions would now directly affect even other leftist groups. Local Soviets were to arrest all Social Revolutionaries, take hostages from the families of Tsarist officers, and summarily execute anyone suspected of involvement in White Guard activities.
Though statistics are much harder to come by than in the better documented Stalinist period, it is plausible that around one million Russians were killed in the Red Terror – two orders of magnitude more than what the Russian Empire was responsible in the preceeding century, and entirely comparable to the victims of Stalinism.
With zero economic education outside regurgitating Marx and Engels, Lenin implemented war communism.
Within a year, an Empire with one of the world’s highest economic growth rates became a desert, where those who could, fled, and those who could not, died of hunger and typhus. Even amidst the instability of two revolutions, industrial production had remained at 80% during 1917 relative to 1913 figures; it plummeted to around 10% by 1920, as the Bolsheviks confiscated everything from banks and factories to ordinary people’s windmills, workshops, apartments, and private savings. You have a complaint? Justice system now consists of black-leather jacketed thugs that operate on hostage taking and mass shootings. Good luck suing them.
Despite not performing a single day’s worth of “productive” work in his life, Lenin loved to call all sorts of people parasites. For instance, those well-known exploiters, peasants.
From a speech in November 1919:
Peasants do not all understand that free trade in bread is a state crime. “I made bread, this is my product, and I have the right to trade with them,” the peasant argues, out of antiquated habit. But we say that this is a state crime. Free trade in grain means enrichment thanks to this bread – this is a return to old capitalism, we will not allow this, we will fight this at any price.
The death toll of war communism: 5-10 million deaths, a number that is once again entirely comparable to the Stalinist famines of the early 1930s (5-7 million) and 1946-47 (1 million), and again, an order of magnitude worse than the worst famine of the Russian Empire in 1891-92 (500,000 victims).
The ruthless grain requisitions (prodrazvyorstka) provoked the Tambov uprising, which the Bolsheviks crushed with the use of poison gas and concentration camps. Upwards of 200,000 deaths.
Finally, it would be amiss to speak of Lenin’s legacy without mentioning his attitude towards Russia and Russians in the widest sense of the word.
Although formally Russian, Lenin was in reality the métis par excellence: Around 1/4 German-Swedish, 1/4 Jewish, 1/4 Russian, and 1/4 token ethnic minority (Kalmyk).
Come to think of it – remarkably representative of 20th century Communism.
In that respect, it is perhaps of little surprise that the state he founded was based on a rather pecular mixture of socialist and nationalist principles.
From On the Question of the Nationalities, 1922:
Therefore internationalism on the part of the oppressing or so-called “great” nation (although it is great only in violence, great only as a gendarme is) must consist not only in observing formal equality of nations but also in such inequality as would be compensation by the oppressing nation, the big nation, for that inequality which actually takes shape in life. …
In these circumstances it is very natural that the “freedom to leave the union,” with which we justify ourselves, will prove to be just a piece of paper incapable of protecting people of other nationalities from the incursion of that the true Russian, the Great Russian, the chauvinist, in essence, the scoundrel and despoiler which the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There can be no doubt that the insignificant percentage of Soviet and Sovietized workers will drown in this sea of chauvinistic, Great Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.
The result: An Affirmative Action Empire, as Terry Martin styled it:
A third and final premise asserted that non-Russian nationalism was primarily a response to Tsarist oppression and was motivated by a historically justifiable distrust (nedoverie) of the Great Russians. This argument was pressed most forcefully by Lenin, who already in 1914 had attacked Rosa Luxemburg’s denial of the right of self-determination as “objectively aiding the Black Hundred Great Russians… Absorbed by the fight with nationalism in Poland, Rosa Luxemburg forgot about the nationalism of the Great Russians, though it is exactly this nationalism that is the most dangerous of all.” The nationalism of the oppressed, Lenin maintained, had a “democratic content” that must be supported, whereas the nationalism of the oppressor had no redeeming value. He ended with the slogan “Fight against all nationalisms and, first of all, against Great Russian nationalism.”
What polemicists against the Stalinist USSR’s destruction of national intellentsias in the Ukraine or the Baltics leave out is that the Bolsheviks started out with Russia’s.
Just one example: There was a Kiev Club of Russian Nationalists operating from 1908, a tea club of conservative intellectuals who promoted the theory of the triune Russian nation, which saw Malorossiyans (Ukrainians) as one branch of the Russian people. It is conceivable that in a surviving Russian Empire or Republic, these intellectuals would have helped foster the growth of a Malorossiyan identity subsumed to an overarching Russian one, as in Bavaria with respect to Germany, or even subsumed them entirely, as with the Occitans with respect to France. A fascinating what if. But this was not to be. The Bolsheviks got a list of their members on capturing Kiev in January 1919, and all 68 of their members were rounded up and shot.
The 1920s were to be a period of aggressive Ukranization, which Stalin cemented with the Holodomor.
Needless to say, Bolshevik reprisals against the Russian intelligentsia were not aimed exclusively at its overtly nationalist elements.
At the very top, there was, of course, the execution of the Romanov family (the French revolutionaries, at least, had the decency to spare Louis XVI’s children, and the last Chinese Emperor lived out his twilight days as an ordinary citizen of Maoist China).
The cream of Russia’s intellectual elites left the country. There would be no Sikorsky Airlines, no Zworykin TVs, no Dobzhansky Institutes. Just the “philosopher’s ship” carried away names like Sergey Bulgakov, Nikolay Berdyaev, and Ivan Ilyin.
A large percentage of those who stayed out of patriotic considerations would be killed by Stalin in the late 1930s, or forced to work as cognitive slaves in sharashkas.
Those who left, a “White emigration” numbering 2-3 millions, would instead enrich other countries.
In the early 1970s, Russian-Americans had the highest median family income, highest % of college graduates (26% vs. 12% US average), highest percentage of white-collar workers relative to all other European ethnic groups in the United States.
There was an aggressive campaign against Orthodox priests, who were conflated with nationalists.
Lenin in a March 1922 letter to the Politburo:
I come to the conclusion that we must precisely now smash the Black Hundreds clergy most decisively and ruthlessly and put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades.
Lenin had an exceedingly poor opinion of the great classics of the Russian Silver Age. His learned thoughts on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky:
On this topic, Lenin’s judgments were made confidentaly, said directly and sharply, without equivocation. Lev Tolstoy: On the one hand: “A mirror of the Russian revolution,” a “spirited man” who “unmasked everyone and everything,” but on the other hand, he was also a “worn-out, hysterical slave to power,” preaching non-resistance to evil. Fedor Dostoevsky: “Vomit-inducing moralization,” “penitent hysteria” (on Crime and Punishment), an “odorous work” (on The Brothers Karamazov and Demons), “clearly reactionary filth… I read it and threw it at the wall” (on Demons).
Even the Cyrillic alphabet was an expression of Great Russian privilege. As Lenin told Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet Minister of Education: “I am under no doubt that there will come a time when the Russian alphabet is Latinized… when we gather enough energy for this, all of this will be trivially easy.” This moment seemed to arrive in 1929, when a commission on the matter officially proclaimed that “the imminent transition of Russian to a single international alphabet is inevitable.”
Their arguments are too “powerful” not to cite in full:
The Russian civil alphabet is a relic of the class structure of the 18th-19th century of the Russian feudal landowerners and bourgeoisie – the structures of autocratic oppression, missionary propaganda, Great Russian chauvinism, coercive Russification, and the expansion of Russian Tsarism abroad… To this day it ties the Russian-reading population with the national-bourgeois traditions of Russian pre-revolutionary culture.
In the hands of the Soviet proletariat, a unified Latin alphabet will serve as a means of propagating the cultural revolution in the Soviet East on the basis of the socialist reconstruction of the national economy. This is why it will constitute the alphabet of the proletarian revolution in the Soviet East and a weapon of class war here, on the front of the cultural revolution. See the words of Lenin: “Latinization is the great revolution of the East).
Transition to the Latin alphabet will free the laboring masses of the Russian people from the influence of bourgeois-nationalist and religious pre-revolutionary texts. Of course, artistically and scientifically valuable literature from that period should be republished in the new alphabet.
It was none other than Stalin, who had been criticized as a Great Russian chauvinist by Lenin – and I suppose he was, at least by Lenin’s standards, if not by any other one – who put an abrupt stop to this project: “Tell [them] to stop work on the Latinization of the Russian alphabet.”
Incidentally, at this point you might be getting an inkling of the real reason why Western intellectuals like Lenin a lot more than Stalin.
It is also worth emphasizing that Lenin’s famous Testament on Stalin’s unfitness for office, contrary to its presentation as a premonition of Stalin’s capacity for tyranny – hardly a matter of concern to either man – actually arose as a result of a dispute between the two men on the nationalities policy.
Once again citing Affirmative Action Empire:
His anger climaxed during the notorious Georgian affair of 1922, when he denounced Dzerzhinskii, Stalin, and Ordzhonikidze as Great Russian chauvinists (russified natives, he maintained, were often the worst chauvinists). Such Bolshevik chauvinism inspired Lenin to coin the term rusotiapstvo (mindless Russian chauvinism), which then entered the Bolshevik lexicon and became an invaluable weapon in the rhetorical arsenals of the national republics. …
Lenin’s extreme formulation of this principle led to one of his two differences of opinion with Stalin over nationalities policy in late 1922. Stalin had supported the greatest-danger principle before 1922-1923, reiterated his support in 1923, and from April 1923 to December 1932 supervised a nationalities policy based on that principle. Nevertheless, Stalin was uncomfortable with the insistence that all local nationalism could be explained as a response to great-power chauvinism. Based on his experience in Georgia, Stalin insisted that Georgian nationalism was also characterized by great-power exploitation of their Ossetine and Abkhaz minorities. Stalin therefore always paired his attacks on Great Russian chauvinism with a complementary attack on the lesser danger of local nationalism. … Despite these differences in emphasis, Stalin consistently supported the greatest-danger principle.
Ultimately, it was Lenin’s nationality policy that more than anything else doomed his creation.
Once the socialist system – what Lenin and Co. saw as revealed truth – ran into terminal epistemic and economic failure, the Soviet carapace fell away, revealing the petty nationalisms they had nurtured all that while, and, married to the unleashed appetites of the nomenklatura, the resultant centrifugal forces blew the whole artificial contraption apart. And (Great) Russian (chauvinists), the only ethnicity without a place of their own in the Soviet communal apartment (in Yuri Slezkine’s metaphor), had no good incentives to try to keep it together.
As Vladimir Putin himself remarked in 2016:
It is right to steer the stream of thought, only we need this thought to lead to the right results, unlike in the case of Vladimir Ilyich. Because, eventually, this thought led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, that’s what it led to. There were many such thoughts: autonomation, and so on. They planted an atomic bomb underneath the building called Russia, later it blew up. Nor did we need the global revolution either. There was this thought there, too
This brings me to the final point I wish to make about Lenin: The state he built as a failure.
By extension, Lenin was not just a sadist, a Russophobe, and a tyrant.
He was also a failure.
The slogan “Land, Bread, Peace” turned into a lie as soon as it was implemented. In the end, Russia got two much bloodier wars, the Civil War and World War II, for the price of one – the one that it had as good as won by 1917, with Austria-Hungary and Turkey as good as knocked out the war. Nor was there much bread. The Civil War resulted in a famine ten times worse than than anything seen in the ancien regime, and the populations of Petrograd and Moscow declined by around 70% and 50%, respectively, as civilization went into literal reverse. And what had been an increasingly prosperous peasantry thanks to Stolypin’s reforms and the construction of a mass schooling system in the last two decades of the Empire was soon deprived of both its lands and rights under collectivization; Soviet peasants only gained the right to a passport in 1974.
The world that Lenin and his successors built was a world based on lies; lies with aggressive, impudent, and often deadly pretensions to truth, as lampooned from Koestler to Kundera.
This was a world where the fictive dictatorship of the proletariat was almost immediately replaced by an all too real dictatorship of the nomenklatura based on renewed class privileges, judicial “telephone law,” no division of powers, and but a lame parody of an electoral process.
There would be no world revolution. Apart from military conquest in Eastern Europe, and China setting off down its own demented Maoist experiment, the only other Communist takeovers would only happen in irrelevant parts of the Third World, which would quickly fall apart though not before consuming dollops of Soviet foreign aid, which it generously parcelled out even as it gained the dubious distinction of being the first industrialized country to see a sustained rise in infant mortality during peacetime. The last surviving relicts of that world, Cuba and North Korea, stand as testaments to total failure.
Even a robot realizes this.
A world that by the 1970s was a vast expanse of unproductive rustbelts, unable to compete with the capitalist world and kept afloat by an oil windfall that would peter out by the late 1980s.
A world whose own citizens abandoned it for the promise of a pair of jeans, and whose own masters ended up selling it for real estate in Monaco and Miami.
This is the world that Lenin built and which collapsed during the 1990s.
“The intelligentsia is not the brains of the nation, but its shit.” It’s as if he was talking about himself.
Overall, brilliant and comprehensive article about a truly loathsome man. I can’t think of anyone else who, through his own efforts and will, has forced so much destruction onto the world.
Magnificent polemic. Should be compulsorily published in the Guardian and all the other nests of SJW Lenin apologists around the US sphere.
Sounds good. But I’m sure he must’ve had some shortcomings and failures too; are you going to address them in the next post?
Two quibbles. The Lenin statue in Seattle is not in the “city center.” It is in the Fremont neighborhood, which is known for “alternative lifestyles” (the whole city is really alternative by normal standards, but Fremont is really extra fruitcake).
Also, the war being as good as won in 1917 for the Russians is hyperbole, particularly without the benefit of hindsight. Although the Brusilov Offensive was operationally very successful, it bled the Austro-Hungarians and the Russians, not the Germans, and the overall strategic situation for Russia looked pretty grim. Sure, if Russia could have held out another year or so – in retrospect – it might have won, but that might have also led to other contingencies (e.g. Germans going defensive on the Western Front and re-concentrating on the East) with unpredictable results.
But, theses are minor quibbles. The overall essay was quite readable and convincing.
Very good piece.
The NEP was unforgiveable revisionism?
If Lenin had been run over and killed shortly before November 7 1917, Russia still would have faced imminent disintegration, hyperinflation, famine, defeat and civil war. Not taking that fact on board is a serious weakness of this spirited piece.
The events of 1917 have very little in common with a colour revolution. An elemental social cataclysm is not at all like a political soap opera in which a farcical imitation of the masses makes an occasional appearance.
Very good, although I hate to find myself agreeing with 5371 that Russia was disintegrating. The Left SR’s would have done for Kerensky if there had been no Trotsky. Would they have been better rulers? Who knows? Would they have fought to take Ukraine?
I was reading on some blogs the happenings and times of the Soviet Union. Why did the Soviet Union seem to constantly have such food insecurity, especially outside of Moscow? It didn’t seem like such a large population to support.
A note about them – with the onset of World War I many of them held a lot of assets abroad but for patriotic reasons liquidated them and brought their money home to Russia. This, of course, meant that when the Revolution occurred and everything in Russia was stolen from them they were left largely penniless.
Quibble:
Doubtful. Ukrainian parties won the 1917 election in Ukraine, and during the Civil War there were no ethnic Ukrainian (or Little Russian, as they would have called themselves) military leaders or units from Russian Ukraine who supported a Russian cause – the various bands were all Ukrainian nationalist, anarchists and few pro-communists. Russian nationalism was an idea with no local popular support among ethnic Ukrainians/Little Russians in what is now Ukraine, in the Russian Empire. This idea was viable a couple generations earlier, the 1850s.
Ironically there was pro-Russian military unit from Ukraine, made up of Transcarpatian Russophile POWs, led by a Galician Russophile. They fought for Kolchak in Siberia.
The point is that the civil war was particularly bloody because it was impossible for anybody to compromise with the Bolsheviks, and so the stakes were ultrahigh. On the other hand, I’m not sure how unavoidable the civil war was. For example Stalin and a number of Bolsheviks (maybe Molotov, too? I’m not sure) wanted to vote for war in 1914 (because Stalin considered it kinda unpatriotic to start a revolution during a major war with Germany), and then again in 1917 (when the first revolution had already won) Stalin was slow to understand Lenin’s radicalism in that respect (because Stalin clearly understood that by fomenting revolution at home, they’re essentially doing the bidding of an enemy government). So I’m not sure there would’ve been a civil war without Lenin, because even the rest of the Bolsheviks had to be prodded into the revolution and then the Red Terror by Lenin.
Regarding the famine, I think you don’t quite appreciate the unprecedented dimensions (in modern Russian history) of the Bolshevik famines, nor the anthropogenic nature of those famines. For example in 1921 the Sovnarkom noticed that wherever there was a huge famine, the peasants stopped their rebellion, so they deliberately sent requisitioning brigades to the villages to take away all grain in order to make the peasants starve (and thus to stop them from fighting a guerrilla war).
There’s very little (and irregular) precipitation, so agriculture in Russia is a little bit tricky. Not very tricky, to be sure: both Czarist Russia and the modern Russian Federation managed to figure it out, but not the USSR.
The same wonders happened in China: under Maoism, they couldn’t figure out how to feed the population (it was greater, but with enough labor input, rice fields usually yield more), and then in the 1980s they suddenly figured it out.
I mean, communism as an economic system is shit, especially with agriculture, for a number of reasons.
Yes. It’s like doing 8 repetitions of a weight, and saying that after 6 reps you’re basically done. No, the last two are the most difficult.
I also don’t quite like to think about how Russia or Europe would’ve looked like after Russia and her Western allies having won the Great War. I think Russia was already large enough (in fact, too large) by 1914, it didn’t need much territorial expansion (to the contrary, it probably needed to shed areas like Poland). I don’t quite think that Germany should’ve been smaller than it was in 1922 (and the maps clearly show the annexation of areas with essentially 100% German or pro-German populations like East Prussia or the Saarland and the Palatinate). Hungary’s borders were planned to be better than they actually got, but I’m not sure I could be rooting for those either.
Maoism included such an epic campaign of retardation of a scale that is difficult to quantify, and even entailed the active destruction of well-known realities of farming for the “new scientific measures.”
The famous Trofim Lysenko. Lysenkoism was bad for everyone, to put it lightly. The rural/city divide made things even worse and eventually to the millions perishing in famines.
Great joy.
Russians are to be blamed for this. Peter the Great started the process of destroying the russian tradition, he wanted to create Western Europe in the East, he centralized power by eliminating Sobór Ziemski, he even made boyars cut their beards because otherwise they wouldn’t be allowed to come to the Kremlin, he made the Orthodox Church subordinate to secular power, like in Protestant nations, and soon in France. Traditional russian monks protested against him and thought that he himself is a protestant. For a brief period of time during Peter 3rd’s rule, the russian army even wore prussian uniforms and orthodox priests wore protestant robes
XVIII century Russia already marked the beginning of the revolutionary process in Russia. Russians conformed to occidentalist and anti-russian attitudes of the russian elite, they lost faith in russian tradition too and became indifferent to what happens with the country, became indifferent to Orthodox faith which became a puppet in the hands of the monarch
Once the Tsarate was destroyed in the war by the Germans, nobody had any vision for future Russia in this whole vaccuum, people were apathetic and indifferent. And the bolsheviks stepped in, as the only convinced and passionate people
Some people just don’t like omelets; heck, they probably don’t even like eggs.
It’s ironic that although Karlin is astute enough to suggest that it’s time to put the myth of a nobler, gentler Lenin into the ‘dustbin of history’ he still manages to play the equally outdated and mythical idea of a ‘triune Russian nation’ with a melancholic and unrealistic tune, that will not be revived with his incessant and inept marketing scheme lackluster here and elsewhere. Anatoly, give it up already:
I found that map rather creepy for exactly those reasons and googled it…apparently it’s merely a propaganda piece, not some serious official document for post-war planning:
http://expositions.nlr.ru/eng/ex_map/worldwar1/agit.php
Am in agreement with you about the larger point.
All the combatant countries faced mounting inflation problems as the war dragged on. I don’t recall the exact figures, but as I recall Russia’s were less severe than Germany’s, even as of November 1917. Maybe someone can dig up more details.
There’s a book on agricultural production that reconstructed historical harvest statistics since 1896: http://statehistory.ru/books/Rastyannikov-V-G—Deryugina-I-V-_Urozhaynost-khlebov-v-Rossii/
http://statehistory.ru/books/Rastyannikov-V-G—Deryugina-I-V-_Urozhaynost-khlebov-v-Rossii/1366288694_c9db.jpg
yield of cereals in 1795-2007, c / g
Table for Russia here: http://statehistory.ru/books/Rastyannikov-V-G—Deryugina-I-V-_Urozhaynost-khlebov-v-Rossii/6
For Russia and other countries: http://statehistory.ru/books/Rastyannikov-V-G—Deryugina-I-V-_Urozhaynost-khlebov-v-Rossii/2
Average of 7.2 c/g in 1916 and 6.4 c/g in 1917, which was bad relative to the traditional baseline bumper harvest of 1913, but not awfully so.
The harvest averaged around 5.9 c/g during the crisis period of 1905-7, but there was no famine during that time.
The main problem, of course, was not so much the below average harvest but the partial breakdown of the railway system, which badly affected prices in the cities. But again, comparison is key. Russia did not face a blockade, and its soldiers even in 1917 were better fed than their German equivalents.
As reiner Tor points out, it was indeed manmade in the Soviet case.
Possibly, but there was absolutely no certainty about any of that.
Is it me – or does homeboy look a lot like Charles Manson in that photo?
Yes, exactly.
Besides, the patriotic press of all the major combatant countries made fantasy post-victory maps.
I mean, Russia’s is preferably to France’s (for Germany):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/FR-WW1-1915-French-plans.png
They could probably have been fobbed off with concessions on autonomy so long as the Russian Republic existed. (This was within the spectrum of acceptable of acceptable outcomes for the Ukrainian Social Revolutionaries, though AFAIK their preferred option in 1917 was eventual independence).
After this, I imagine that two other factors would come into play:
(1) 1917-18 was a centrifugal extreme in Russian politics; all sorts of natural as well as not so natural polities popped up (Green Ukraine would be a good example).
This does occur during times of crises. For instance, Bavarian separatism was strong during the early 1920s. It tends to fade away once said crises have been resolved.
(2) People naturally like the strong horse as our good friend OBL pointed out. Had Russia ended up on the winning side in WW1, its prestige would have grown.
This is actually the converse of (1).
Okay, fair enough, that might be somewhat overestimating Russia’s chances.
But I would still say they were way above 50% (relative to Germany).
Russia was in a strong position as of February 1917: Soldiers well supplied with food and now munitions too, preparations in place for an amphibious assault on Turkey and the final knockout blow against AH. The Tsarist regime was at any rate confident of victory at that point, unlike in 1915. The Budyonovka (now synonymous with the Red Army) was originally designed for the Berlin victory parade. Talk of counting your chickens before they’re hatched…
The chaos around the February Revolution hurt it a great deal, but order to the armies had been restored just prior to the Kornilov affair. Most importantly, the US had by then entered the war, a critical development (though ofc more evident in hindsight).
wonderful and powerful article
maybe translate it into Russian to spread in Runet?
I’m one of those plebs who basically got all my Russian history from Western textbooks when I was young so I’m quite ignorant about Russia. I’m just wondering, if Russia was in a relatively good position, how did the uprising even succeed in the first place? Surely it would have been easy to put down? Or is this just a case of Tocqueville’s observation where governments collapse when everything is getting better?
Maybe muhammad (disgrace be upon him).
Good point. So a Lenin is a once in a thousand years or so type of monster.
what’s the place of October 1917 in the general European context? I mean it wasn’t just the Russian Empire that fell following WW1.
Joos agree (albeit for different reasons)
nope, the spirit of progress was genuine. An apathetic nation doesn’t produce a Mayakovsky, say. It doesn’t consume tons and tons of pop-sci literature.
narodniks, zapadniks, pochvenniks, Russians had more by way of genuine politics than the West does today where everything is just different flavors of liberal POZ.
the sad truth is it doesn’t take that much to turn a place into a Hobbesian jungle if one makes it one’s purpose. Arabs and/or Muzzies are about as culturally confident as it gets and yet what’s the death toll in Iraq so far?
I am not as negative about the triune idea as you are. It is not an evil idea, as was Bolshevism. Also, as a myth, it isn’t terribly unrealistic and was once popular among Ukrainians themselves. Indeed, the very people who standardized the Ukrainian language, such as Kulish, were adherents of this idea while they were doing their work, referring to it as the Little Russian language. Their vision was that there would be one Rus under the Tsar, but with a Little Russia and Great Russia, each with its own languages, schools, customs, etc. The analogy would not be to Bavaria within Germany (Bavarians learn standard German after all) but perhaps more like with the different Chinese peoples. The local Russian governors supported these Little Russians, but Saint Petersburg bureaucrats opposed them. The latter won, the project was repressed, Little Russian banned, and Little Russians were to be assimilated into Great Russians. The backlash was inevitable, assimilation didn’t happen, and the former Little Russians, now Ukrainians, pushed towards full independence.
Had the different faction won with respect to Russian government policy towards Ukraine, history could have turned out very differently.
By 1917 it was already too late. We are even further from that now. But I wouldn’t compare this idea to Bolshevism.
As has every other historic movement of importance in Ukraine since 1917. Time to move on and deal with reality Anatoly, not delude yourself somehow that Ukraine will end up being a part of a greater Russia, including your laconic cry of an acceptable ‘autonomy’. 🙁
Who’s comparing the triune idea with bolshevism? I was only pointing out, by way of analogy, that the triune idea’s time has come and gone, as I see you’ve permitted yourself to do. At least since Hrushevsky’s time, whose ideas and scholarship have soundly been lauded by historians around the world, this idea has undergone serious challenge, if not outright discreditation. I think that you’d agree that to cling to this outdated idea today, is to show little respect for Ukraine’s standing and right to pursue and independent political course of its own.
Generally agree. However unlike in the case of Bavaria, the Ukrainians already had a different, standardized language, schoolbooks, etc. as well as a national mythology contradictory to ultimate union, and this was a central concern of theirs (IIRC thousands of schools were already being set up prior to the Bolsheviks seizing power).
So at best, from the perspective of unity, it would have been a Catalonia situation, rather than a Bavaria one. However, in Ukraine the Ukrainian parties had something like 70% support rather than 52% for such parties in Catalonia; with such an easy margin it would be likely that demands would be made for increasing autonomy until full independence were achieved. The only way this would be stopped would be if Russia, being on the winning side, enjoyed the support of the entire world in demanding unity (and so, Catalonia again).
I know this was about Lenin mostly however this guy, Andrei Fursov, believes the USSR was a great achievement under Stalin. He does believe that Lenin did not care for Russia. Here is a video link in which he describes the possibility of the USSR surpassing the US if it wasn’t for the Nomenklatura: https://youtu.be/cXfkEUe-axo
Would like to know what you think.
No, there was certainly no knockout blow against the Dual Monarchy imminent. Even big breakthroughs were extraordinarily hard to exploit at that stage, as the fate of the 1916 offensive showed. Since then, the Austro-Hungarian armies had been thoroughly stiffened with German units and even NCOs.
The collapse of a whole social fabric doesn’t happen often in history, let alone over an area and involving a population like Russia’s. But happen it did in 1917, and it’s important not to attribute a process of this magnitude to any individual, let alone one who wasn’t even in power.
NEP? Nah. To me NEP is a clear example of his pragmatism, his tactical genius (which is what this is all about). 100% goal-oriented, pragmatic, non-ideological. Very much a western (modern western CEO-like) quality.
Here’s what China Mieville writes in his recent book:
Finally, a sane comment.
Peter I and the demented system he built are the real criminals. The bolsheviks were also demented, but they were a bumbling, painful step towards fixing what Peter I broke.
Bravo, Anatoly Karlin!
“Moral is to material as three is to one.”
Yes, Russia may have been in a better material condition for war than Germany as of early 1917 (though that, too, one can debate). But what was the state of its state? What was the state of its social cohesion, its morale?
I mentioned this before, but even in a war dubbed materialschlacht, the outcome of war is not always dependent on “correlations of forces” as the Soviets were fond of framing. That is to say, war is not a video game, in which the side with more food and munitions always wins. There are critical social factors that are difficult (perhaps impossible) to quantify (especially until AFTER the fact) and yet play decisive roles in the outcomes of wars.
Indeed, if Russia had been so healthy and strong, would the “bacillus” that the German unleashed have been so devastating?
Agree. My Russian history is thin, but I’ve read off and on that mass killings under Lenin began very quickly after a few failed experiments at worker-run factories. Likewise, my understanding is that only Western salon intellectuals and tenured university professors still buy into the “good Lenin/bad Stalin” boogie-woogie for the usual self-serving reasons, not the least of which is how to judge Hitler’s excesses by comparison.
“If Lenin (or Hitler, or Pol Pot, or Mao) is your solution, what in hell was your problem again?” I recall that quip from years ago, and it seems to fit here. Still, many of our Western politicians seem to have not learned that solutions devised to fit an abstract, ideological agenda are likely to be freighted by unreality and “puritanical utopianism”.
It needed the incompetence of the government and person of Nicholas II, with a competent ruler Tsarism would’ve easily survived. (Probably it wouldn’t have started the war in the first place.) Unfortunately in a monarchy with a strong monarch, a lot depends on the person of that monarch. So that was the flaw of the system.
See my answer to 5371, the Tsar himself was incompetent.
once again proves americans (Twinkie) know little about essential history, the german and austro-hungarians eastern front did not end with the russian capitulation but it needed 6 months agains the second smaller nation, the kingdom of Romania which took them 6 months of concentrated effort to take out (after austrian failure, the germans accomplished it with bulgarian help too), it is reasonable that it would have taken years for Germans and austro-hungarians to take out Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Romania if they could
No. Zemsky Sobor ceased to operate before Peter. After Peter (18th century) gathered a meeting of elected representatives of the estates (but the name of the Zemsky Sobor was not used)
Similar measures were undertaken in Japan and Turkey (two other examples of successful modernization). So, probably, these measures made sense.
The Church before of Peter was subordinated to the state. And it’s good
Why not the 16th century? Or 13 century? Or 11th century?
The German and Austro-Hungarians needed 6 month to take out the second, smaller adversary on the Eastern Front, the Kingdom of Romania, it is likely if the Russian Empire had not capitulated they would have needed far more than 6 months to win against the russian empire and the kingdom of romania or perhaps they would not have wan the eastern front at all, so karlin is right, you know little history, maybe enough for a US or Western Leninist
Are you suggesting they put forth maximum effort to remove this minor adversary?
I would blame those who had overthrown Nicholas and were themselves in power or passed for being so, myself. The western allies also had a lot to do with the February revolution. But in the end, all or almost all were guilty.
correct would be to know that it took more than one and a half years to defeat the small kingdon of romania on the eastern front (see wikipedia for example) so german empire and austro-hungarian empire were not that strong and would have lost or taken a lot more time to defeat the russian empire and romanian kingdom even if they had that time and resources, if the russian empire had not collapsed . the russian empire had about 20 times the population of the romanian kingdom and a lot more space of defense . yes, resources were diverted from the western front and the austrians were not capable initially to win therefore germans needed to send resources. You overestimate the central powers for certain, the central powers had also setbacks and defeats on their way to Bucharest. After the russian capitulation some of their soldiers even changed sides . If you read the views of the german marechal hindeburg you will see that was true, they felt vulnerable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania_during_World_War_I
No, I think the Lysenkoist experiments only lasted a few years during the Great Leap Forward. But China had to resort to importing food and/or underfeeding its people basically throughout Maoism, so much so that in the 1970s when the “reforms” started, it was basically just that since the people’s communes were unable to feed their members, some of them allowed the peasants to toil small parcels themselves in exchange for some grain or rice requisitioning. The peasants miraculously managed to fulfill their requisitioning quotas and even accumulate a surplus for themselves already in the first year, so the experiment spread to other provinces. The central leadership (then already under Deng Xiaoping) discovered it a couple years later (by that time it was already spreading like wildfire in the provinces), and first decided to shut it down, but then a few months later realized that here’s an opportunity to increase agricultural production, and pragmatically enough reversed course and spread the experiment to the whole country.
I think communism’s main problem with agriculture is basically that during the agricultural season it requires a lot of dedicated work on behalf of the peasants, and it’s very difficult to centrally control or supervise. This means that when the land is collectivized, peasants lose their incentives, and no amount of coercion or promises can stop them from cheating and not working hard enough. The result will be a chronically low harvest year in and year out.
Once you re-privatize the land, the incentives return, and the harvest magically increases – due to the very hard and dedicated work of the peasants. In the USSR it was complicated by the fact that by the 1990s kolkhozniks were two generations removed from working for themselves, and not only got used to being lazy, but never even had childhood memories of how to toil the land for themselves. So it took a couple decades for Russian agriculture to regain productivity.
The Tsar was not guilty by my standards, just incompetent. The revolutionaries and all who encouraged the revolution were guilty. It still remains a fact that had the Tsar been competent, he could easily have prevented the situation from getting out of control.
I would say the Tsar himself was a tragic figure, because he probably knew well how incompetent and unfit to be Tsar he was, but out of a sense of duty he decided to sacrifice his life by devoting himself to public duty and working as hard as possible (and making stupid decisions all along). He paid with his and his family’s life for it.
Wow, you made a comment that I completely agree with. And this contradicts the idea that the Revolution and Russia’s destruction were inevitable events, rather than the work of a strong-willed, farsighted, charismatic, malignant genius.
I saved a comment by a commentator, “Bardon Kaldian”, on another forum:
Thanks for the suggestion. I don’t think there’s much point, for two reasons.
There is no shortage of other good “take downs” of Lenin in Russian (just the extended Sputnik i Pogrom ecosystem and the genby blog come to mind), which brings us to the key problem: It’s not there is an absence of such criticisms, but of a sizable audience for them.
Russian liberals have succeeded in setting the terms of the debate and adoration of Lenin, Communism, the USSR, and especially Stalin is now for all intents and purposes a tribal identifier for the “patriotic” camp. In the same way that, say, denial of climate change and other retarded positions has become a tribal identifier for conservatives in the United States. This is very bad, very sad, and it’s not obvious how to get out of here.
The Germans never captured all of Belgian territory.
Are you suggesting they were too weak to take all of Belgium?
The Germans had over 13 million men on the Western Front. Germans and Austrian combined used 750,000 troops in Romania. The Romanians had about 60% more casualties than their opponents.
It is obviously impossible figures
I would say that the Tsar was not a complete incompetent – Russia did improve in many ways under his rule, thanks in part to people he had brought in, such as Stolypin. But he made the huge mistake of getting Russia into the war, and wasn’t competent enough to steer it successfully through this. Nevertheless, without Lenin’s genius it is likely that Russia would have made it to 1918.
Sarcasm on: Please stop operating with facts and historic knowledge. Also, stop using this horrible thing called causality. You are not hip, cool and most likely color-blind to understand all those graphs;-) Most likely you have low IQ, as most well-versed and erudite historians do.
Sorry – that was total military strength, per wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Front_(World_War_I)
At any rate, the point that Romania was not a central concern and this, rather than the fact that the central powers were to weak to handle it, explains why it took so long for Romania to be defeated.
Hi,
What about demographics? Pre-WW1 Youth Bulge?
As far as I understood Russia was growing/modernizing, but as usual many Young Men (TM) are not quite content with their place in the New Era(TM). Was Russia growing fast enough?
Without the Youth Bulge where did the different Civil War-faction would get their cannon-fodder from?
Looking back in the last 40 years only China/India/South-East-Asia seemed to be able to bring population-growth under control FAST and fired up an agressive economic boom, which makes the overwhelming majority of Young Men (TM) satisfied.
Arabs/African/Central-American nations failed to do so. Now they have to deal with Jihadists, Rebel-Groups and MS-13 & Co. Foreign Meddling (TM) would only be the cherry-topping.
Is Lenin the early 20th Century Russian-variant of the contemporary Jihadist Moroccan hate-preacher in Mollenbeek, Belgium, who lives off Social Welfare and runs a Youtube-blog?
Cheers
Anatoly, you have a way of asserting very surprising and counter-intuitive claims without much comment or support. An earlier example I’m familiar with was when you claimed that the opening of the Soviet archives revealed that anti-communist polemicists like Conquest systematically overestimated the number of victims of Stalin, whereas I had always thought they had the opposite effect, i.e. confirming that Stalin was indeed a mass-murderer of millions, rather than the petty dictator of leftist imagination who was responsible for at most a few thousand deaths.
Now you’re saying that the Holodomor was an instrument of Ukrainization, rather than the “normie” understanding of it as a deliberate genocide of Ukrainians. You might be right but you can’t just say that without adding explanation (and a Russian-only link doesn’t count!).
of course they had much less than 13 millions on the western front, actually the entire force in ww2 that invaded USSR was 2-3 times the 750k figure you suggest of being used against the kingdom of romania and the adversary USSR had an army and reserves of manpower 30-50 time greater than the Romanian kingdom had in ww1, so the figure is significant, so they use much greater manpower in proportion to the adversary number and space against romanian kingdom compared to the invasion of USSR later. Of course that would have been far less than needed if the russian empire had not collapsed. 750k was a forece that could have changed the odds of any battle on western front. adjusted to adversary size 750k was a much greater force than that used to invade USSR in ww2, obviously you are too pro central powers but even so , even if this is due to weakness, karlin is right that the russian empire was near victory
entire force in ww2 that invaded USSR – about 5 millions
Don’t think I said or even implied that, the idea was that Ukrainization helped cement the Ukrainian nation as something discrete from the Russian one, while the Holodomor helped estrange it from Russia.
OK, your clarification makes sense, but your original wording was misleading. You said that Stalin cemented Ukrainization through the Holodomor, which sounds like the Holodomor was part of the same policy of Ukrainization.
We won’t have a corect understanding of the revoultion as long as we repeat the mantra of the Tsar involving Russia inWW1.
The war was imposed on Russia (and actually that was the hidden reason of the War, with the ultimate goal of provoking the revolution and the dismemberment of Russia).
Russia was not loosing the war in 1917.
Lenin and his gang did exactly what his sponsors demanded from them: taking Russia out of the war, dismembering the Empire, opening it to the economic exploitation of the “imperialists”
That was the reason of the NEP.
One cannot avoid the idea that the Holodomor had an intimate relation with the project of a Jewish autonomous republic in Crimea and Ukraine.
Who is a traitor? The russian generals forced the Czar to abdicate to please Woodrow Wilson and receive American money. Kerensky was a british agent, according to his own memories.
Lenin’s followers at least fought for their own interests, not those of the English and French governments.
https://futuristrendcast.wordpress.com/2015/07/12/was-1917-russian-revolution-an-early-maidan-russian-analyst-nikolay-starikov-on-armenia-maidan-and-greece/
…. Well the USSR did give us the greatest national anthem of all time.
A real work of art of the 20th century.
Lenin’s genius was exploiting the stupidity of great powers.
And great powers were really stupid in WWI. All of them.
WWI also made Mussolini.
“Home of the free” go the lyrics. Funny how everyone, even communists, claim something that science sees as determined by the interaction of evolved algorithms. Surely they can’t actually believe in free will !
The only stupid great power was Germany and its stupidity was in not attacking Russia in 1905.
The development of pre WW1 Russia was due to French loans to build railroads, which were primarily for military purposes. (ie so Russia could fight Germany).In the run up to WW1 Alsatian Raymond Poincare (cousin of the superbrain physicist) got the Czar to commit to a war against Germany. Although Germany had missed its chance (in 1905) it was just too strong to be easily beaten. The French Revolution* happens largely because of Austrian victories and the 1905 Revolution happened because of Japanese victory . Once Russia went to war, the 1918 revolution was quite predictable. but if they hadn’t went to war alongside France, Russia would have been alone and faced with a victorious Germany too powerful to be beaten.
(*Apart from The Czarina and Marie Antoinette both being accused of being a foreign spy, there are many other parallels. For example, the affair of the necklace and Rasputin.).
What you mean is Lenin was fighting for German interests. The Germans had paid him after all to do what he did. And it nearly worked. The Germans nearly won WWI as a result.
Lenin was a traitor. But a dimwit like you fails to grasp this.
Not a patch on the old Russian Imperial Anthem, or even the Finnish Anthem (I’m sure Rusty Mannerheim will back me up on this ! )
Priss Factor, you really are taking the Piss Factor !
I don’t remember “home of the free” in there. Free republics, free fatherland, but no “home of the free”, so nothing to worry about. Communist ideology is certainly more deterministic that liberalism; socioeconomic formations change like geologic periods, the base determines the superstructure.
As for free will, believing in it doesn’t make any difference. Those destined to believe in free will have no choice but to believe in it.
It’s down to Tocqueville, though I would modify that proposition – governments collapse when the proles are given scraps of bread (aka some slight growth and betterment, as happened under Nicholas, but not radical change), after which they hunger for more. Enter the Bolsheviks, who promised utopia and much more. The keyword is “relatively”, at any rate.
None of what you say disproves the fact that NEP was revisionism.
And temporary, at that.
A lot of Calvinism there for a commie.
Though I agree that the base determines a lot, structural change usually needs a trigger, the “vanguard” in your parlance. And said vanguard can, with enough manipulation, move the base enough. It’s a feedback loop, to be sure, but societal movement does not necessarily begin with base-to-vanguard-to-power to create the structure, as the base does not always find a trigger to set off the revolution – heck, the powerful might be smart enough to change things over time, as has happened in the West. Plus, every revolution has always needed some disgruntled financier that needs help with ulterior motives, whether at home or abroad.
The greatest stupidity of Germany was that it attacked Russia at all. And that against the advice of her greatest statesmen (Bismarck). Bismarck warned the hotheads of the General Staff that a victory in a war against Russia is impossible due to the vastness of the Russian space, of her huge population and of her ‘Greek-Orthodox relgion’ which would always unite the Russians. He recommended to adopt a defensive stance and let the internal contradictions of the Russian society to play their role. In other words to incite a revolution in Russia.
Bismarck was prophetic. What won the war against ‘fascist invasion’ was the appeal of Stalin to the Orthodox feelings of the Russians, to the acknowledgement that all the ‘war against God’ of the Lenin-Trotsky gang had failed.
Anyone think there’d be good value in having a German with the right credibility do a Karlinesque takedown of Adolf Hitler?
You may want to read the conversation more carefully before barging into it. It wasn’t about NEP.
I see what you mean; the thing is, the Kaiser and the Heer were bigger Francophobes than Russophobes. Then again, all-out war on Russia is hard to win (ask Napoleon), but a status-quo settlement was never out of reach. Brest-Litovsk proved that.
WWI should have never been anything more than Franco-Prussian War II, as these countries were the only willing ones to go to total war. On the East, a short Austro-Hungarian-Russian War without any other parties involved would have led to a better border settlement over the eternally troubled Eastern European peoples (I don’t include the Ottomans, they were collapsing harder than the Tsar’s empire) than the idiotic Wilsonian plan of supporting a myriad little republics ready to be fought over in a future war. (A plan enabled by the earlier idiotic French idea of cordon sanitaire, just as idiotic as the Maginot Line).
It was the stupid alliances and geopolitical ambitions of everyone (including the victors), that dragged everyone into an unnecessary mess, and created a much deadlier second part as well.
Agreed, though it is based on very non-Soviet older musical motifs. Orthodox choral music is usually amazing.
For this reason, even Putin rehabilitated the music, albeit with changed lyrics of course.
Karlinesque takedown of Adolf Hitler
Is that really needed?
What is the size of the academic and intellectual ideological forbearance of Hitler as opposed to Lenin?
There must be tens of thousands of Lenin groupies for every Hitler one.
That seems rather pointless given that only the most deranged Neonazis would defend Hitler.
Even if you don’t care about the criminal character of his enterprise and what it meant for Jews, Slavs etc., the war he started had ruinous consequences for Germany itself and ended in utter defeat. That’s very different from Lenin and Stalin who at least in a superficial sense were very successful.
I would not say Russia was near-victory, but definitely could have pursued better terms if it had waited a few more months. Just look at what the other Entente members got awarded in Versailles.
Then again, as others have mentioned, the Tsar was not popular nor too good at keeping the people on his side, and people wanted to speed up change in a forceful way. The Bolsheviks took advantage.
Just like Brexit was more about principle and ideals for the future than responding to actual present conditions.
Autonomism is usually stopped by material progress and propaganda tying said progress to the whole of the nation as opposed of only to the region.
I think it would have been not like Catalonia, but more like the Spanish Crown before the Bourbons, or the British Isles before the Acts of Union, Ukraine and others being independent kingdoms united in the Tsar’s crown. That may have worked in the long-run – or at least, would have allowed for less violence. All water under the bridge, anyway.
I do agree with Mr. Karlin in that Lenin was sneaky – he criticized Tsarist Russian irredentism, only for it to be replaced with the Internationalist Soviet kind that him and Trotsky spoused. Stalin may have brutishly Russified the hell out of the other republics, but he was right in that without such control the other republics would have fallen prey to their own little elites – as happened after the wall fell.
I agree with you, though Hupa does have a point – the post-Peter Occidental Russian state was not popular nor culturally close to the Russian people, ergo when it failed it lacked for defenders (the Whites being mostly anti-Bolsheviks and faithful Orthodox more than commited Tsarists). There is a reason why the Tsar’s office was not rehabilitated by Yeltsin, yet Spain did bring their king back.
Then again, as others have said, Nicholas was very incompetent. Sometimes we focus too much on the systems and ideologies, when in reality the actions and failures of some individuals have the strongest consequences. For all the glories of the Roman Republic, we would have never known them if it was not for Caesar’s personal desire for military conquest, and those who followed in his footsteps.
It was about Lenin’s shortcomings and failures, of which NEP was one of the few exceptions.
You may have a point; do have to look at the data to back that up, but would not be surprised if there was a Youth Bulge.
At any rate, culture also matters. The Asian regions you mention have a longer history of cultures emphasizing discipline and learning, as well as a stronger sense of identity (they tend to be countries bigger in population and not short of historical tragedies and rebirths). Therefore, in those countries it was possible to implement those changes with less blood and more progress.
Geography also has something to do with it, but always related with demography.
GR, I was thinking, roughly, of a takedown written for Hitler’s detractors, those who’ve made of him a “psychopathic god”, and, I think, in the process, have made of themselves as way too virtuous.
What about an interpretation of Hitler as an overreaching fuck-up? I don’t want to relitigate WWII, but there certainly must be some published thinking by German nationalist or conservative types that the demands on Poland may have been met peacefully with time to allow the Czech crisis to heal, steady diplomatic pressure, and economic incentives.
Likewise, there must be some thinking, again by German nationalist or conservative types, that Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies ought to be regarded as, very roughly, anti-German, because they alienated talented Jews with strong attachments to Germany and had those same Jews working for team America.
Seems to me there’s way too much credit given to Hitler and the Nazis for the 1933-1939 economic uplift in Germany, at a time when there were a whole lot of folks in the ministries who were republicans, monarchists, plain old conservatives, probably a German liberal or two, adherents of that Rhenish Catholic party, and so on.
I admit to not being a 100% sure of what I’m getting, but I hope I helped a little.
Well fine, I meant that since Peter the idea that such thing as Sobor Ziemski could gather again, was unthinkable, because Russia became so drastically centralized
You’re right about Turkey, Ataturk is a kind of Peter the Great but for the Turks. If you think that the state should make laws regarding beards of people, then you’re hyperactive
Subordination of the Church to the state makes no sense, because the Church can conduct its mission only as a separate entity. Oh and in XVIII Russia they also abolished the secret of confession in the Church
And XVIII century is important in Russia because it was revolutionary and as I wrote, it showed the extent to which the russian elites disliked russian tradition, it marked the beginning of the process of the abandonment of russian and christian tradition by the Russians en masse, this is why they were so sloppy in fighting Bolsheviks
Well yes, but most of those points are pretty obvious, I’d think. Unless one’s a hardcore revisionist (“Hitler didn’t want war, the Poles made him do it”) or thinks aggressive wars to create a Germanic racial empire are justified, there’s really no way to defend Hitler, and hardly anybody does today.
It’s obviously different with Lenin, both because his vision for humanity apparently has much more appeal to many than Hitler’s narrow Germanic racism and because the system whose foundations he laid lasted 70 years and wasn’t as clearly a spectacular failure as Hitler’s 1000-year Reich.
I do not wish in any way to slight the anguish of the loss of human life in WWII, but Germany has bounced back remarkable well, hasn’t it?
Millions of Turks and North Africans can’t all be wrong.
GR, you’re in Germany, right? In the States, it’s a commonplace to conflate Hitler, Nazis, Prussian-style conservatism, and God knows what-all into an undifferentiated mess of “bad German”. My points are not obvious at all to Americans whose WWII began December 1941.
Granted, Lenin probably enjoys a quiet respectability of sorts among Western intellectuals for the reasons you mention. Yet, anti-Germanism does also enjoy quiet respectability. See Paul Gottfried, for example. Perhaps an essay title, “Hitler: Opportunist, Credit-Grabber, Traitor”, may sort of suggest the tone of what I’m getting at. For my assertion that the economic successes of the peacetime Reich have been improperly credited to Hitler and the Nazis, you’d need actual evidence, of course.
What I think I’m getting at is cutting Hitler down to size. Thanks for your comment.
Compared to what it was before 1914 (or even in some ways in the 1920s) it’s a bad joke (though I suppose you can say that for other European countries as well).
“Sounds good. But I’m sure he must’ve had some shortcomings and failures too; are you going to address them in the next post?”
LoL. This was astute.
I also do not fail to notice that many here at UNZ , including Anatolii, are doing basically what Lenin was doing albeit without much effect outside of this blog.
I would also find it peculiarly strange to call a failure the man who founded Soviet Union which achieved superpowerdom, became world premier economic power, sent man to space achieved status Russia under Tsars simply was not able to achieve and created first state in the history that actually was working in the interests of all people, not just elites.
Basically is about kicking dead lion. Some find this article brilliant. I find it nauseatic.
Posting photo of a very sick man at the end of his life is pretty low in my opinion.
I’m not sure there still are any positive assessments of Nazi economic policy in the 1930s, isn’t the general consensus that it would have been unsustainable for much longer and only made sense as a preparatory phase for the war Hitler had planned all along? Granted, I don’t know much about economics, and haven’t gotten around to reading that book by Tooze (“Wages of destruction”) which supposedly is quite good about those issues.
Yes, there is a tendency to consider imperial Germany as just a proto-Nazi empire, which despite its undoubted and quite severe flaws (militarism, atrocities in the colonies and Belgium) is unjustified imo. Similar imo to the myth that Bolshevist tyranny was just a continuation of Tsarist autocracy.
Thank you for this post, AK. It should be required reading in high school history classes.
You have done your bit to give the light of justice to the victims of “St. Lenin”.
Agree, I’d like a balanced piece on Hitler, not just as military leader either. Particularly the pre-1939 economic policy, including in credit availability from international sources. Whether he was covertly egged on to invade as Saddam in Kuwait. A concise explanation of his jewish policy particularly in relation to other enemies of state. Differences and similarities with Spain and Italy that allowed for fascism to rise. There’s room for understanding. It’s like he’s untouchable to sensible people. Or uninteresting. He should be neither.
You are basing your thinking on the near endless propaganda assault by the jews for the last 70 years, Germany of all places has had such a severe anti Hitler narrative that it makes the personality cults of North Korea look mundane. If you can accept the fact that jews are detrimental to not just whites, but ultimately to almost everyone else then you will also see that Hitler was not the worst leader.
You will find that the places that the jews have least managed to penetrate with their narratives (India, Mongolia, South East Asia) have some people dressing up as SS officers or other such Reich fashion. You might dismiss this as merely uninformed cosplay, but the way I see it, it does show that people that have not been droned into their minds since birth about how Hitler is the devil don’t see it your way.
I don’t see how that’s relevant, people there probably just like the aesthetic or have some vague admiration for “strong” leaders (especially one whose forces fought against the British empire and contributed to its end).
Anyway, I disagree with your argument, but I don’t think we should derail this fine thread any further. It’s about Lenin, not Hitler.
I don’t know nearly the amount of Russian or WWI history as most of the commenters one here, but I am glad to have learned from both this good article and the comments. I had known there were millions killed in the Russian civil war caused by Lenin, but not about how many were ordered killed by him during this time.
This doesn’t let Stalin off the hook, and Mao built up an even bigger toll, depending on whether you count pure stupidity (the early 1960’s famine caused by him directly) as just as bad as orders of execution. To me, dead is dead, and the fact that one man with great power is responsible for one’s death without any decision-making on one’s own part involved makes all those deaths equally horrible.
There are articles on the very site right now that espouse Communism and “Central Planning”. The stupidity goes on down through the centuries unabated, but it will reach a local maximum in this country as the SHTF – coming soon – Peak Stupidity.
Thanks for the history lesson, Mr. Karlin
Excellent post, Anatoly! 🙂
Indeed, I completely agree that Vladimir Lenin was a total piece of shit who deserves to burn in Hell! 🙁 In fact, it would have been much better had the Russian Provisional Government jailed or even shot and killed him and his Bolshevik friends (for promoting defeatism and, in July 1917, for attempting to seize power). Of course, the Russian Provisional Government should have also avoided launching any offensives until after large numbers of U.S. troops were already in France.
Frankly, one of the very few positive things about Lenin is his nominal support for national self-determination. Of course, even then, it would have certainly been much better for the whole edifice to come crashing down in the late 1910s or even early 1920s than to have various people–including the Great Russians, of course–suffer under the hands of the Bolsheviks for seven decades! 🙁 Ultimately, I wonder if it would have been better for Germany to win World War I and then overthrow the Bolsheviks right afterwards. Indeed, this would have spared us some of the 20th century’s worst horrors.
Also, I do think that, with the exception of Poland and perhaps Finland, a surviving Russian Republic (not Russian Empire) would have been able to hold together reasonably well up to the present-day. After all, even the Bolsheviks managed to create a type of Sovok identity among the Soviet population (as evidenced by the results of the March 1991 referendum in most of the Soviet Union). Indeed, in a surviving Russian Republic, there would have been various ethnic groups who would have had their own languages, cultures, and often autonomy but who might have also very well embraced a Russian national identity (rossiyane–not russkiye). Also, the much greater prosperity of a surviving Russian Republic–in comparison to the Soviet Union, of course–would have probably kept ethnic separatist sentiments inside of Russia relatively low and small.
Indeed, Russia had an excellent future in late 1917 before the Bolsheviks seized power there. After all, the excesses of Tsarist Russia–such as the anti-Semitic Pale of Settlement and the lack of genuine democracy and basic liberties–were abolished and, with the U.S. already in World War I, the Entente stood an excellent chance of winning this war. Plus, even with the lower-IQ Central Asians (whom there weren’t that any of back then), the IQ potential of Russia was certainly very high–indeed, probably slightly lower than Italy’s, Spain’s, or Portugal’s full potential. In turn, this fact combined with Russia’s large amounts of natural resources meant that a surviving Russian Republic would have almost certainly become a developed, extremely prosperous country by the end of the 20th century. Plus, Russia’s large Ashkenazi Jewish population–assuming that a large part of them wouldn’t have emigrated in this scenario–would have certainly helped a surviving Russian Republic with scientific research, technological development, innovation, et cetera.
Also, there’s one more thing that I want to mention. In a scenario where Lenin and the Bolsheviks fail to seize power in Russia, I expect the Bolsheviks’ multikult successors (who will be a part of Russia’s liberal scene in this scenario) to push for large-scale non-White immigration to Russia in this scenario. Indeed, if “open borders” Russian liberals and various ethnic minorities (especially Muslim ones) in a surviving Russian Republic would have eventually teamed up, you could certainly see Russia have an enormous Muslim minority today. After all, in addition to the growing Muslim population in Azerbaijan and especially Central Asia, there would be an extremely huge Muslim “migration reservoir” in Afghanistan, Iran, and South Asia in this scenario. Thus, had the Russian Republic survived, I could certainly see Russian nationalists and alt-righters being legitimately scared of a looming Islamization of Russia!
Ultimately, though, a Russia with an extremely huge Muslim population–indeed, possibly above 35-40% in the long(er)-run depending on just how much Muslim immigration from countries to the south it will get–is still an extremely small price to pay for preventing the Lenin and Bolsheviks from coming to power in Russia!
Are there any documents to prove this? As I said before, if any documents that showed German money transfers to Lenin or Bolsheviks existed in Berlin archives, a subsequent German government (e.g. Hitler) would certainly use them for propaganda. But they didn’t. Occam’s razor tells us that no such documents exist.
Both Reds and Whites used chemical weapons against each other on several occasions. Additionally, the Romanian Army used poison gas to suppress a Communist uprising in Bessarabia in 1919.
Some say that Lenin’s Kalmyk origin was invented out of whole cloth by Marietta Shaginyan.
Great majority of these “Russian-Americans” were Jews who had fled that shining paradise of pre-revolutionary Russia.
: The fact that 70% of Ukrainians voted for Ukrainian parties doesn’t necessarily mean that 70% of Ukrainians wanted to secede from Russia, though. Similarly, just because a Muslim in British India voted for the Muslim League (and thus for the creation of Pakistan) does not necessarily mean that he would have personally been willing to move to Pakistan.
To my knowledge, Ukrainian nationalists only began demanding independence after the Bolshevik revolution occurred. Before that, they would have probably been content with sufficient autonomy and land reform. Thus, I certainly don’t see why exactly a South Tyrol-style solution would have been unacceptable for the Ukrainians in this scenario. Indeed, even in our TL, an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians (over 70%, if I recall correctly) voted to preserve the Soviet Union in some form in March 1991! They could have voted No in this referendum just like the overwhelming majority of people in Galicia did, but they instead voted in favor of keeping the Union in some form!
Given that a surviving Russian Republic would have almost certainly been much more economically successful than Bolshevik Russia was, and given the fact that, in spite of 70 years of Soviet oppression and stagnation, over 70% of Ukrainians still wanted a Union of some form in 1991, I certainly think that most Ukrainian nationalists would have been satisfied with sufficient autonomy plus land reform in this scenario. Of course, the big wild card that I could see in regards to this is if large numbers of Central Asians and other Muslims began moving en masse to Ukraine. In such a case–and especially if these Muslims will bring backwards attitudes and whatnot with them to Ukraine–I could certainly see Ukrainian separatism getting a shot in the arm. Of course, in such a scenario, Russia will probably be more resistant than ever at letting Ukraine secede considering that letting Ukraine secede might very well accelerate the Islamization of Russia in this scenario! (Indeed, please remember that, in additional to Central Asia, there are hundreds of millions of Muslims in South Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran! If even a small fraction of them move to Russia, they will certainly significantly change Russia’s demographics.)
: “and during the Civil War there were no ethnic Ukrainian (or Little Russian, as they would have called themselves) military leaders or units from Russian Ukraine who supported a Russian cause”
Actually, if we want to get technical about this, Pavlo Skoropadsky was a military man who supported the unity of a future non-Bolshevik Russia and Ukraine in a federation. Indeed, he announced this position shortly after Germany’s defeat in World War I.
The article is total garbage. The quotes maybe genuine but then maybe not.
Car did loose respect totally. Japanese destroyed Russian eastern fleet.
There were two peasant uprising before Lenin. They were defeated and thousands of peasants executed.
Russian army was defeated continuously. Four million casualties. Kerensky deposed Car, but he continued failing policies of the Car. All complete regiments were deserting. Leaving the front and going home with weapons. Lenin and other communists went to welcome them and convinced them to join the revolution when the time comes. Lenin or no Lenin country was ripe for revolution.
And Lenin delivered.
“Yes, there is a tendency to consider imperial Germany as just a proto-Nazi empire, which despite its undoubted and quite severe flaws (militarism, atrocities in the colonies and Belgium) is unjustified imo. Similar imo to the myth that Bolshevist tyranny was just a continuation of Tsarist autocracy.”
Yep, GR, I think that’s what I’m sort of stumbling toward. For many American observers, including in my opinion educated people who really ought to know better, there’s an “essentialist” Russia in which Tsarism and Bolshevism go undifferentiated, and, likewise, an “essentialist” Germany in which Kaiser and Fuehrer go undifferentiated. That just bugs the living daylights out of me, and one reason is that it gives American policies of all sorts way too much unearned virtue.
A Karlinesque hit piece directed against Herr Hitler and published in the States? It would be necessarily tendentious, one-sided, but I think it would also be productive if written by a German with some conservative or nationalist credibility, and supported by sufficient evidence.
Thanks for your comments.
Based on
Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, ‘Lenin’, 1998, 2001, New York
Solschenizyn, ‘Lenin in Zürich, Die entscheidende Jahre zur Vorbereitung der Oktoberrevolution’, 1975, 1980, Hamburg
I must disagree.
The tzarist regime was horrible, forgot in which book the son of a GB diplomat, stationed in St Petersburg, visited his father each summer, the family had not moved there, and found the Russian aristocracy repugnant.
Lenin lived in poverty in Zurich.
So, being a terrorist in the tzarist regime, understandable.
That communism failed, socially and economically, yes.
Socially, one group of aristocrats was replaced by another, even more brutal.
Economically, a centrally governed economy is unable to produce those consumer goods the consumer want, just the profit motive accomplishes this, as even China now knows.
he was a bit of a ghoul, though.
and it’s unkown what Russia would be like and would have achieved w/o Communism (certainly not space, as that was a function of the space race between the two systems, but still)
tl;dr: she would probably not be “great”, as in first-human-in-space kind of “great”, but she would be “okay.”
Agree completely! It was stupid to leave exusting Germany. It should be divided between France and a new Slavic-ruled central European federation, instead if leaving small German republic which wet to war without having chance to win.
The fact that after all those years there’s still so much hatred, and the hatred is so intense, is a testimony to the historical significance of the events in question.
What’s interesting, it also goes a long way to explain the extent of political repressions in the USSR during the period. I always felt that the scale of repressions was grotesquely unreasonable, but reading comments here it seems that they might’ve been mostly justified. 100 years passed – and yet the hatred is palpable. Amazing…
Not just in Zürich, but several other cities, too. He didn’t work, but due to money sent to him by his sisters (he was a landed nobleman, and his land was enough to provide a comfortable living for someone who didn’t work), he had a comfortable living by the standards of the time (including a maid), for example an apartment with a couple of clean rooms, the ability to hang around idly in cafes, or traveling extensively around Europe. In general his living standards were probably better than like 95% (or perhaps 98 or 99%) of the Russian population, it was better than most non-Russian Europeans had at the time. Maybe his living standards were lower than most university educated people at the time, but then again, Lenin refused to do any even remotely productive work, and made little effort to make money other than the money sent to him by his sisters.
Maybe in Zürich his living standards were lower than elsewhere, but don’t forget that for the vast majority of Europe’s population at the time, the most horrible war in several generations was just going on, and so basically everybody was living in poverty. I think even the Swiss were living temporarily worse, because imports (particularly of important commodities like coal or foodstuffs) were getting more expensive (although they could export to the rest of Europe at good prices, so that after the end of the war they were better off as all other countries became indebted to them).
It’s funny to see that some of our resident holocaust-deniers also peddle in communism-relativization. (Though at least you acknowledge that the communists were definitely more brutal than the Czarist regime.)
I’m sure Russia would’ve gone on developing military technologies regardless of space race and communism or not, so for example just like France or the UK or China, it would’ve built nukes and ICBMs and would’ve had a space program, if for no other reason, then out of prestige. To be honest, it’s so difficult to imagine the alternate timeline (too many questions, like would Hitler have come to power in Germany in such a case? would he have been able to conquer most of Europe in a few years time? would cultural Marxism have become influential by the mid-20th century and the quasi official religion by the early 21st century?), that this is getting meaningless. The only meaningful comparisons with the real timeline is perhaps through 1939, and only in terms of internal development.
Shame on you Karlin! you piss on the graves of founding fathers of modern Russia. No wonder people like you don’t have any influence in Russia
Just one little comment on the ‘civil war’ (more like foreign invasion). From wikipedia:
Major General William S. Graves, who commanded American occupation forces in Siberia, testified that:
You can find general Graves’ book here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/graves/1931/siberian-adventure/
Just one little comment on the ‘civil war’ (more like foreign invasion). From wikipedia:
Major General William S. Graves, who commanded American occupation forces in Siberia, testified that:
You can find general Graves’ book here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/graves/1931/siberian-adventure/
The Central European federation is probably unworkable, even the smaller entities like the USSR (of the similar Eastern Slavic nations) or Czechoslovakia (of the industrialized Czechs and rural Slovaks, both of whom speak basically mutually understandable dialects) fell apart, not to mention Yugoslavia.
I think that after Poland won much of the land ruled and settled by Germans for nearly a millennia, it’d be magnanimous to acknowledge that in the 1920s the Polish-German border was mostly fair (with a few legitimate grievances on both sides), or that dividing a large and culturally developed nation between neighbors like some African colonies would only lead to further bloodshed. Maybe less than WW2, but WW2 needed a lot of highly unfortunate contingent circumstances (like Hitler’s personality etc.), so it’s something like “would you murder baby Hitler?”
Well, that’s Yeltsin.
Is it not anti-Japanese propaganda, though?
In general it’s well established that whites also got radicalized as time went on, and committed stupid atrocities, but were dwarfed by the Red Terror, if only because the Reds controlled a larger population throughout the civil war and were victorious in the end, and so had more chances of mass murdering people. They committed the occasional mass murder well into the 1940s, while the previous Czarist regime (of whose former partisans the whites drew most of their support) never committed anything on that scale, so it’s not unreasonable to think that the escalation of violence was more driven by the Reds than by the Whites.
“tl;dr: she would probably not be “great”, as in first-human-in-space kind of “great”, but she would be “okay.””
Probabilities are that without Lenin, Russia would have been OK aka dead. It was disintegrating already before Lenin came to power and there was no one to stop Russia being torn to pieces. Nevertheless, there still would have been job for Anatolii writing about Russia we lost.
those principles of the future Britain will be made by the future inhabitants of uk, projected to be from indian subcontinent as a majority and commonwealth not by the English, brexit changes nothing. realities are stronger than ideals, ideals are often delusional . you mean that the pursue of the ideals of communism was worth the human loss and the genocidal destruction of russian society from which it never recovered and may never recover
“The fact that after all those years there’s still so much hatred, and the hatred is so intense, is a testimony to the historical significance of the events in question. ”
Those who want to make away with loot from Soviet people need to completely discredit every single aspect of Soviet life and obviously founding fathers of the soviet Union Lenin and Stalin. They use outright lies like German money, taken out of contest and artificially glued together quotes form Lenin and Stalin, outright lying about who deposed Tsar and so forth so on . They obviously understand that few would go and read the whole history and all of 55 Lenin’s issues to confront them.
Here Anatolii brings again German money label which was proven long time ago to be lie and fraud.
Meanwhile it is very reasonable that Abramovich pays Anatolii and same minded people to write similar opuses to brainwash population, cause divide and thus allowing him to keep his yacht and soccer club with other nice things. We obviously do not have a proof but it is even more reasonable by the outcome than Lenin taking German money and then doing everything opposite to what his supposed paymasters paid for. Anatolii on the other hand is doing everything that he would have been supposed to do were he paid by said Abramovich. All in all, Great October Socialist revolution first time showed that led by talented devoted people who have interests exploited in their heart it is possible to take power away form bloodsuckers and it is possible to build state that takes care of all people not just few. For that Lenin and Stalin are hated.
“What’s interesting, it also goes a long way to explain the extent of political repressions in the USSR during the period. I always felt that the scale of repressions was grotesquely unreasonable, but reading comments here it seems that they might’ve been mostly justified. 100 years passed – and yet the hatred is palpable. Amazing…”
Exactly. You can imagine to what length enemies would go 80 years ago. I was not sitting and making research in opened archives. The picture is still not clear to me. I understand that Stalin was not all powerful as it has been promoted by liberals and there was intense fight within party different
sections. Anyway, at the time it was already obvious what outcomes of wrong choices would have been. Soviet Russia death as in 30’s Hitler was already in power and his intentions were obvious for all to see. Imagine strong Communist core in CPSU in 80’s realizing where Gorbachev was taking the country and taking drastic measures. Look how many people were surrounding Gorbachev and Yeltsin and who after the fact were people enemies as we see it. Imagine they would take decisive measures and prevailed. I suspect there would have been trials and many people would be condemned to long terms in jails and death. It would have been reasonable and it would have saved millions upon millions lives that were lost including completely destroyed demography and industry and torn apart country.
I disagree here. Maybe with the older generations it is, but russian zyklon b gen core is not tainted by the red bullshit to such extent. If anything, they are cynical beyond belief, and red myth doesn’t take much to dismantle anyway.
” but russian zyklon b gen core is not tainted by the red bullshit to such extent. If anything, they are cynical beyond belief, ”
That should be expected considering amount of liberal and other BS thrown at them since their birth.
But you cannot expect great things from them either. You cannot even expect from them enough babies to keep Russian population at least stable to allow time for better generations to come forward. I do not feel uplifted by cynics who believe in nothing but this $$$.
I’ve read the book and I don’t think so. Why would it be anti-Japanese propaganda, anyway? They were allies in Siberia.
Well, that’s the official anti-communist narrative. One can accept it as “well established”, or be skeptical, or reject it altogether.
Reading Graves’ memoirs (that I linked above) would certainly affect one’s attitude towards the anti-communist civil war narrative; after all he was there, he was well-informed, he definitely wasn’t a commie symp, and he says that in that particular area the White Terror was responsible for at least 100 times more murders/atrocities than the Red Terror. Read the quote again.
I feel your pain. I’ve been hard at work for decades trying to make sense of all this, and all I know is some American history, I have figured out that the Brits and bankers were masters at stirring up problems and setting their competitors against one another, and that American “knowledge” about Germany is about the exact opposite as one can get, but I know next to nothing about Russian or Chinese history.
It’s interesting that Churchill wrote mourning a Russia that went down when the Brits were, in fact, a significant part of its sinking. But then I suppose he would rather have preferred to have Russia and Germany keeping each other occupied.
I found the article informative and worth studying, but I feel handicapped by not knowing anything more than “tourist level” Russian, and I have a few quibbles.
While meant as criticisms, they are weak. I especially had to smile at “writing articles for low-circulation journals.” It’s pretty obvious that the level of circulation should mean nothing regarding quality; after all, UR itself is probably very low “circulation” and it free, yet it’s better than anything with a wide circulation that people actually pay for.
I’ve long had a question about this, but have yet to have the time to research an more specific answer.
Does anyone know precisely who or what were the precise sources of the money?
Not my area at all, but my understanding is that Great Russians promoted the tripartite Russia idea, while the two “little brothers” of the meme had little enthusiasm for it, for fairly obvious reasons.
Given enough time, a common Russian identity could have probably grown up. Examples include not only those of France and Germany.
In Spain all regional nationalism but the Catalans and Basques became generic Spaniards, though we shouldn’t forget the Portuguese, who took their resistance to becoming Spanish to the next level.
Italy similarly had/have significant problems with regional nationalisms, though they are seldom remembered outside Italy.
With the exception of the Irish, at least until recently, the Brits seemed to get it right. Welsh and Scots didn’t become English, retaining their national identity but within the greater umbrella of Britishness.
OTOH, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia illustrate the two ends of the spectrum for dealing with intransigent nationalisms.
I do not disagree, but would you care to elaborate beyond what you already said? Your comment makes sense to me, but I’m curious about the details. What sources would you recommend for fleshing out your claims?
Yeltsin is modern Grishka Otrepiev that succeeded. By their deeds you will know them. Alexander Zinoviev put it well calling what’s left of Russia horned rabbit. New Russia is being lucky to preserve at least part of soviet foundation that still keeps this ramp afloat and secure. The only hope for Russia to rise again lies in preserving and further developing that foundation.
`
It seems to me that enough crap has been spread about the man already. It’s way past due for Americans to unlearn the propaganda in fact, and it doesn’t take a Nazi sympathizer to understand it.
While I do appreciate there is a certain irony about a proud NEET such as myself making fun of Lenin for spending most of his life writing articles for marginal journals financed by wealthy sponsors, the difference is that I don’t rant about fat cat peasant and bourgeois parasites.
Was inevitable in the 20th century, and would have otherwise lasted from approximately 1920-2050+ (maybe China and India would have displaced it and the US by then), instead of 1945-1991.
LOL.
As reiner Tor said, no reason to think it wouldn’t have happened otherwise. And maybe sooner: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/paper-review-iq-of-peoples/#comment-1903539
Yes, in retrospect, that’s probably right.
.
No Poland, sure, but that’s feature, not bug. There was no significant separatism in Finland.
Yes, I posited as much in this post from a few weeks back: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/progressive-russian-empire/
Of course it would be partially offset by a much larger Slavic population.
This topic interests me. Where can I find that side of the story? Thanks.
I bet around 2100 the descendants of these people will be condemning critics of Yeltsin for hating their own country.
I do agree with that, but still, as it stands, there are plenty of people Red Myth dismantling without my input.
Latest Kholmogorov: https://vz.ru/columns/2017/11/8/894324.html
Life on Venus is of great interest to me as well. I want life to be on Venus. It is other matter if there is life there at all.
Who am I not getting paid by?
But thanks, adding this to my “powerful takes” folder.
Replacement level question is, well, questionable. With the low process standards of two recent pop count attempts current russian government itself can’t claim that precise numbers are known.
What a sad irony it would be if the centasians brought in with the low pop(and old “them subhumans will do jerbs russians won’t” bullshit) as sole justification were completely unneeded in reality, setting Russia up for another series of interethnic conflicts. Hell, they are unneeded even in their own homelands!
I love me some holmie after supper, thanks.
Translating it here seems to be pretty redundant after your own piece got published, though.
js, okay, I’ll back off. Let me close by saying we’ve got folks today who for psychological and political reasons want Hitler limned larger than life and always on center stage under the hot lights. That seems to me just plain wrong and distracts us from solving today’s problems. “Good war”, “axis of evil”, and so on. How long are we going to allow this guy to cloud our thinking? That’s why my suggestion. Thanks for your comment.
Great piece,
See: http://fosterspeak.blogspot.com/2011/12/wheres-my-omelet-or-lenin-versus-kant.html
Add one more piece to that puzzle, a Swedish banker named Olof Aschberg helped to finance the bolshevicks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olof_Aschberg I think there’s more than meet the eyes.
You must know better than me. Did you ever ask Lenin personally if he was paid and he responded or you can only beat upon long dead people by repeating lies that were proven lies long time ago like German money and some unknown mecenats ? Basically I wonder what you people have to offer Russian people ? So far I see nothing but paleocrap hunting.
I would compare it to voting for the Catalan Parties, the Scottish National Party, or the Parti Quebecois. I suppose not every voter for these parties wants independence, but most do. If the party were to barely get 50% support, perhaps under 50% of the population would actually want independence; but with 70% support, it would be easily over 50% favoring independence.
Correct. It was incremental. In June 1917 Ukraine declared broad autonomy (including for its own separate military); the Provisional Government objected to some aspects of this (particularly the military), negotiations ensured and a modified Autonomy was declared in July 1917. Ukraine was to have its own parliament, its own Ukrainian-language schools, land reforms, etc. Full independence was declared after the Bolshevik invasion in January 1918.
This is a a semi-myth often used by pro-Russians.
There was no independence option on the all-Republic referendum. This question was asked on the oblast level in the Galicia provinces (where 88% voted for).
The entire USSR had this question:
“”Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedom of an individual of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?”
71% were for.
Ukrainian SSR had this additional question:
“”Do you agree that Ukraine should be part of a Union of Soviet Sovereign States on the basis on the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine?”
81% were for.
This declaration meant Ukraine would have run its own affairs, including having its own army. De facto independent.
Their initial demands were for local autonomy, schools, and military units. So it would have been a little like Austria-Hungary, Ukraine being Hungary to Russia’s Austria. In such a scenario eventual independence would have been likely.
A brief tactical move, because without German support Ukraine needed an ally during the Bolshevik invasion and he would have taken autonomy within Russia (with hios own army, laws and schools) over a Soviet takeover. This was not his position prior to the German withdrawal, and not his position in exile. But this position had no popular support, and neither he nor his followers actually fought for such as union with Russia.
Do you feel the same way about hatred towards the Nazis, so many years later, by Slavs and Jews?
Anatoli, your reanimator like attempt to reanimated that cadaver of long dead Tsarist Russia, put a lot of maep and lipstick on that long dead pig are laughable. It died of the deceased that while originally was curable eventually turned incurable due to neglect and bad life style choices. New Soviet Russia achieved in reality what older Russia could not have achieved even in your optimistic extrapolations. The proof is on the pudding so to speak.
Evening, Priss.
I see that you are posting on TOO, different u-name, but instantly recognisable.
Not that I am disliking your posts. Sometimes informative, entertaining, if a little repetitive.
Interesting that you are to choose a Slavonic u-name there.
Also interestingly, Rehmat has stopped posting here many months ago, but is quite the regular on TOO now.
From my reading, and I have read much from Mussolini and other fascists, original texts in translation, the formative years were his ‘missing years’ in Switzerland, where he would have been associating with mainly Jewish exiled Zionists and RSDLP peopke. That, not WWI, was the time that was to forming his later ideas.
As for the Bolshevik coup d’etat, even i am surprised by the extent of Japanese govt. support for the 1905 uprising, I knew from propaganda among Russian POWs that was going much further. That propaganda was made to order from Noo Yawk Jews.
However, before, too. Japanese Imperial Govt was having many interventions in Russia.
Point is, the German sealed train containing Lenin, and many mainly Jewish Bolsheviks, was inspired by the tactics of Japan 13 years earlier, even if at the time, Japan was ally of Britain, not Germany.
Our old govt’s activities, except the existence of a fake Commmunist Party in 1920s, are secret to us.
Nice that you are using a photo of incapacitated and drooling Lenin. Hating to seeing anyone in that state, but thinking he may have been deserving it.
Small point: Fritz Platten was Swiss, not German. It would be nice to think that Putin, or moe importantly, the gangsters behind him, had learned the lesson. There’s no sign of that, though.
In 1917, a grand total of around 50 million gold marks were transferred to Lenin’s party in Petrograd (this translates to an amzing $1 billion in today’s currency).
OK Lenin was not a nice man (though far from a Stalin or Mao).
But you left one thing out. At the very end, when it became apparent that orthodox communism was a failure, Lenin realized this. He instituted the “New Economic Policy” (NEP) that was the sort of pragmatic state-regulated capitalism that has lately been so successful in China. The economy progressed, until by some metrics it became better than under the Tsars. Then Stalin came along…
Stalin did not ‘betray’ communism. Lenin did! Stalin ‘saved’ that bloody fiasco.
So I repeat: at the end Lenin got it. He understood that orthodox communism was destined to fail, and he acted on that. Does this forgive his other many sins? No. But surely worthy of mention.
Winston Churchill once said of Russia that its greatest catastrophe was that Lenin was born, and the second greatest is that he died when he did.
Makes that Facebag/Tweeter/etc. “Russian Meddling in the US Elections” look like a piker’s game.
What seriously pissed the Never Trumpers off was the fact that hundreds of millions of production and ad-buy dollars didn’t run through their grubby paws: They would have been wholly on board if Trump had actually been buying their wares.
A lion? More like a jackal. And a liar. And a hypocrite. And a sociopath. Just out for power like all dictators. This article just described millions of people who had no control over Lenin’s demons, being murdered, destroyed economically, labeled parasites while doing all the work that provided anything good, like food, clothing, shelter and education. Communism was responsible for mega-deaths. Lenin looks haunted and insane in that photo; because he was, morally. Sickness alone doesn’t give that expression.
It boils down to this: Lenin caused more horror and bloodshed than would have happened if he’d just got out of Dodge and let it alone. Russia was “progressing” just fine without him. He is one of those many people the world would have been better off without.
Looks a little like school shooter Adam Lanza:
http://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/130328102411-adam-lanza-mug-story-top.jpg
A diagnostic sign:
Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in her “Memoirs”, published in Moscow in 1932, described how Lenin once rowed a boat out to a little island in the Yenisei River where many rabbits had migrated during the winter. He clubbed so many rabbits to death with the butt of his rifle that the boat sank under the weight of all the dead bodies.
Economists’ talk of things “not being sustainable” is always guesswork, and almost always completely wrong.
My understanding is that the new government was excessively centralized, and the communist leaders knew nothing about agriculture. They were constantly railing against the kulaks for hoarding grain. With the agricultural techniques of the day about 10 percent of the harvest had to be held back for next year´s seed. They confiscated seed grain, and this led to poor harvests the following years. Plus the chaos and lack of motivation caused by the sudden collectivization of agriculture. Plus the desire to finance industrialization by exporting grain.
In fairness, Russia’s status from 1772-1855 particularly was very, very high.
Bukharin understood this but sadly no one listened.
Do you know any books that give this topic worthy treatment?
I am interested in the failed westernization of P I; my Russian Orthodox friend states it just as you have.
Amen to that.
I’d put it this way. how long are we going to allow really old, tired propaganda to cloud our thinking?
I would’ve guessed that by now everyone should be on board with the fact that most of what we hear is utter garbage. A lot of what we’ve been trained to believe is the exact opposite of the truth, a fact that you seem to appreciate.
Thanks for your comments, and I thank the author of this piece as well.
Now, about the specific sources of Lenin’s gold…
Everything good that happened, it would’ve happened anyway.
Everything bad that happened, it would’ve been avoided.
Not exactly the kind of intellectual reasoning one would expect from extremely high-IQ individuals. More like a declaration of faith.
May you end up in such “fixing” times someday. Experience all the fixing, you know, for the betterment of the backwards social order where not everybody is in gulag all time errytime.
Anatoly,
A brilliant piece.
Your main point, I think, is that Lenin was an irrational bullshitter. Indeed, the whole theory of Leninism is based on vacuous abstraction, which allowed Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks to rationalize doing whatever they thought they needed to do to gain and keep power. And since there was allegedly a dialectic at play, he and his chums could, at least in their own minds, contradict themselves the next day in either theory, policy, or execution … without the onus of contradiction. In short, they could do as they pleased without any justification at all. The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) has baskets of comorbid psychological disorders set aside for these kinds of people.
First, German money and, later, Jewish money from Wall Street kept Lenin in power. His success had nothing to do with his theories or his policies. It was brute power … the willingness to put hundreds of thousands of people in front of firing squads or, when given the opportunity, save the cost of bullets and starve them to death. In short, Lenin succeeded because he “out brutalized” the opposition, doing evil things that they dare not imagine.
Perhaps we should go the root cause of Lenin’s vacuous abstractions and put the concept of the dialectic on the table for destructive criticism. Marx, Lenin, Stalin (and the mobs of Cultural Marxists currently contaminating Western Civilization) all believed it is okay to believe inconsistent things. It’s the dialectic, you know, which makes it okay to assert that what is true today is false tomorrow.
Perhaps a route to sanity in today’s troubled world is to reappreciate the import of the Law of Noncontradiction to better identify the world that does exist from all possible worlds that could exist. So Cultural Marxists, please, no more hiding behind an appeal to dialectics and other flights of vacuous abstraction. Simple assertions about what is true and what is false will better determine what is real and unreal as well as what is good and evil in this world.
It’s the first step in our de-Stalinization.
I just have the books to go on, a picture of poverty, as with most Russian exiles.
None of them were able to find decent work.
William Somerset Maugham’s novel A Christmas Holiday is about a British aristocrat who meets in a Paris dancing a Russian princess, earning her living as a topless dancer.
That Lenin lived better than a Russian peasant is probably true.
We Dutch did not live in poverty in WWI, not even my grandmother, whose husband was conscripted into the army for four years.
How the business was continued, my grandfather was a baker, my father never could tell me.
Great reading! One minor typo I spotted: “beaten up Polish factory workers, whom he had tried to agitate against the ” needs the word ‘by’ between up & Polish.
I’m currently reading Montefiore’s Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar. I’m struck by the notion of who else could have beaten the Third Reich? Would a USSR under Trotsky or Kirov have won?
“Really a foreign invasion” – unless it refers to Poland’s, that was a real invasion – is one of the weakest and silliest pro-Bolshevik takes on the civil war. Funny sort of invasion which involves so little fighting on the part of the invaders.
It depends on when. In the 1840s-1860s this idea was popular among Ukrainians/Little Russians who considered themselves a sort of Rus nationalists. The ideas were generally that there was ne Rus people with two coequal branches, Little And Great Russians, each with their own languages and local history. Poles and Jews were seen as enemies of the Rus people, who must be removed from Rus territory and their lands divided among Rus peasants; the Tsar was the savior. As such, Russian nationalism may have been more popular in Ukraine than in Russia itself.
The Russian government was initially divided in its approach towards this movement. Conservatives didn’t care about Rus nationalism and wanted to preserve the traditional rights of landowners against peasants, nevermind if Polish Catholic landowners oppressed Rus Orthodox peasants. After the Polish uprisings things changed. The local Russian officials supported Little Russians against the Poles, but the central authorities worried that eventually the Little Russians might end up like Poles, and so they pursued a policy of rigid centralization and assimilation, repressing the Little Russian movement and trying to turn Little Russians into Great Russians. This produced a backlash – the Little Russians now turned into Ukrainians and wanted to leave Russia. Maybe the centralizers were right all along, but it might very well have been a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Ukraine joined Russia much later than Catalonia joined Castille.
The linguistic differences between Ukrainian and Russian are greater than between Italian dialects. They are similar to the differences between Spanish and Italian.
Yeah, people hate it when they get put on lists to be later shot in the head and pushed into a ditch. Others hate being sent to work to death in freezing-ass cold Siberia. Some other people hate it when they haven’t eaten for a week solid because their dear leader had some kind of stupid plan to make steel on the farms and it was up to him what everyone does with his time. People even hate the young bloggers that don’t know squat about Communism and other evils. This explains why even over the centuries, it seems like humans don’t learn very much about how to avoid past horrible mistakes.
You, Sergey here, James Petrak, Godfrey Roberts, and others are hated for this same reason. The hell with all of you Commies.
My favorite period is that of 18 th century.
If he were mere jackal you and the like would not assemble here in great numbers to houl over his dead body. There would have been no meat. Like nobody care about dead jackal Yeltsin. There is no meat on the bone so to speak. I also wonder, if you ever suffer two strokes of the same severity God forbids, would you ask your doctor taking pictures to compare. The whole comments line of yours and many others truly belong to jackals.
Nah. Poland was part of the Russian Empire, so it can be interpreted as an internal police action, squashing a rebellion.
Uhm, I dunno. A dozen of foreign countries invaded and occupied substantial territories. French troops occupied Odessa, for example. Japan and others, most of Siberia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War
Let’s face the fact, the Europeans including their offshoots is where is now, still filthy rich (although always complaining), because of those hundreds of millions of people all over the world who were robbed and murdered, those who become victims of their very madness of colonialism and orientalism, of the crusades and the slave and Opium trades. Cathedrals and palaces, museums and theatres, train stations – all had been constructed on horrid foundations of bones and blood, and amalgamated by tears. There were so many centuries of plunder that the acts of looting the world for the sole benefit of the few, turned into inseparable part of the ‘Western existence and culture’, something that gets almost never addressed, let alone criticized.
Without the Europeans particular their offshoot the American humanity will not have gone through two world wars, one on the edge of Armageddon, and on the verge of another Armageddon.
Though the violence led by Lenin in Bolsheviks Revolution was horrible and a crimes against humanity, but it is no worse than the crimes against humanity committed by Maximilien Robespierre in French Revolution, Oliver Cromwell in the English Civil War and Abraham Lincoln in American Civil War.
If one could look at the events objectively, all of the above violence were a self rejuvenating effort to get rid of a cancer that was crippling the society, while comparing to the violence led by the Western imperialists including the USA and Japan against rest of the world during their imperial expansions, the crimes against humanity and peace and war crimes they committed only can be classified as criminal of the greedies, all were destructive and nothing good came out of it. One even can say the Bolsheviks Revolution is self healing event within Russia while the Western imperialist expansion, colonization and invasion are murders and has forced so much destruction onto the world.
This article is a drop in the bucket the West’s continuous effort to rewrite other people’s history for the others, so that they can white wash and gloss over the war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace they have been committing since Columbus time.
Cut out the sanctimony, will ya? Times of great upheaval and great transformations are accompanied by violence. That’s just the law of nature.
https://besboshnik.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/the-two-faces-of-russia-essay-by-oswald-spengler/ this for instance. The other literature I read in polish (because I am polish…), I doubt it’s translated to english
Hugo Boss was a really good designer.
Speaking of Aschberg, I wonder if McFadden was talking about him here.:
Maybe German_reader can also be that German_writer?
This article is a drop in the bucket the West’s continuous effort to rewrite other people’s history for the others, so that they can white wash and gloss over the war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace they have been committing since Columbus time.
Do you feel similarly about people howling about Hitler after all these years? Also a lion?
It may be the first step in our evolution from nonage as well, but it could take a while. The ancients were on to the oracular bullshitters such as those at Dodona and the fume inhalers at Delphi millennia ago, but we, the masses, have yet to get a grip on the concept.
around 6,321 people were executed for all offenses (including purely criminal ones, like murder) in the Russian Empire from 1825-1917
This number seems to me to be too high. What do we know about components of this number?
China has been self sufficient in food since its existence. Chinese agriculture technology has been superior to the West except in the last couple hundreds due to Western imperialism and colonialism destructive interference. Without stealing Chinese agriculture technology the West will not have industrial revolution and they would still live in the backward medieval serfdom era.
Yeah, I’ve heard y’all’s expression before about needing to crack eggs to make an omelet … all that stuff… you’d better hope you and yours aren’t the ones to get scrambled next time, or scrambled, smothered and covered, more like (heh, “Waffle House does Communism”). All your talk and writing won’t mean a hill of beans when another Pol Pot or Mao gets going.
One can’t argue with a Commie too long before the violence starts. Be aware that this time around, you are dealing with a population that is heavily armed and most are well-regulated.*
Yeah, it was all that Western interference, that’s the ticket. We’ve had our own problems with the Russians spending THOUSANDS of dollars interfering in the entire presidential election process via pintrest and facebook. I feel for you, bro, I mean, Joe.
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Literally, THOUSANDS!
Hey, I actually agree with you somewhat here. I’m no fan of Mr. Lincoln. However, although ignoring the US Constitution by starting the war to begin with and waiving habeas corpus, etc. in the North, this guy didn’t make up lists of people to purge. Once war starts, all bets are off.
Your heroes are the kind of guys who make lists of people to be shot in mass, and bulldozed into big ditches. Well, everyone has got to have a role model, I guess. It’s better than just drifting through life … I think …
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BTW, something like the US Constitution, or the English Magna Carta of centuries back, could not have even been thought of, much less implemented in almost all other societies. Maybe the Chinese could have copied one from us, but the people are too corrupt for it to ever actually work.
I mean the Polish invasion of the Ukraine in 1920.
I am curious if you ever read a book called “The Man who Loved China”?
It is a book about a prolific English author who was pretty much a Commie after he started an affair with s Chinese visiting student to England. This guy spent lots of time there and wrote 17 volumes about how the Chinese invented this, that, and the other (yeah, the airplane too!). Well, I wish I could remember the author of the 17 volumes’ name (the guy written about in “The Man who Loved China”), but he apparently always wondered how the country was such a damn shithole (not his exact words, as I recall) with all those smart people discovering stuff way before the West.
Could the economic systems down through the millenia have had anything to do with it? Man, wouldn’t you put any thought into that? This guy didn’t – he went to his death bed wondering, “hey, how come we Westerners made all the guns? Hmmm?”
So, Europe is far away for you, it all seems the same?
French Revolution (Lenin admired Robespierre) – about 400,000 victims IIRC.
Not much, compared to Lenin.
Would you also consider leprosy to be a self-healing event, if the victim is someone you don’t like?
Ouch!
It was corruption that crammed the constitution down our throats. It was a huge link in the chain around our necks. (But not for the bankers and their buds.)
Nock and the anti-federalists were correct.
This stuff does seem to repeat itself in century-or-so long intervals. Have you read “The Fourth Turning”? It’s partially bullshit and the authors are statists, but the concept is very interesting. Strauss and Howe, the authors, applied their concept of cyclical history only to the English/American world, but who knows? People just refuse to learn, as is is evidence right here on unz this very hour.
Joseph Needham is his name; he came up with various theories as to why Song China didn’t industrialize. I’ll check out this book on him, thanks.
It is interesting that the Chinese tended not to keep their inventions. Someone might build an air conditioning system of fans powered by waterwheels for a rich patron, but it just gets treated as a eccentricity rather than becoming an idea to build from. The economic system definitely had something to do with it.
A similar case could have been made for late Rome, which also had machinery but capital investment in machinery appears to have been noncompetitive against human labor.
I’m not saying it was for sure a guide to a better system than that under the Confederation, but had some of the various states been invaded by a foreign power, the Constitution would have been sorely missed. The point was mostly to have a common defense.
Yes, the central banking stuff is part of the reason for the ruin now, but it was more the last 5 to 10 decades (depending on which parts you think are more important) of this document being ignored and figuratively shredded that made America what it is today. Come to think of it, the central banking stuff IS unconstitutional, at least something like the Federal Reserve.
Joseph Needham. His ideology regardless, his books are comprehensive and very highly regarded by the relevant experts.
The 50 million gold mark figure comes from German Social Democratic politician (((Eduard Bernstein))) who had a lot of reasons to want to make the Second Reich look bad and never gave any source.
Stalin > Lenin. Always.
Lenin destroyed an empire. Stalin created one.
Yeah, the book is good – I wouldn’t be able to read the 17 volumes that Joseph Needham wrote, even if I could find them. Oh … just found it on the shelf – Simon Winchester is the author of “The Man who Loved China”.
Dang, man, I am now able to post in real time, at least right here. This is bad … very bad… for me, as I’m not gonna get stuff done, and for the idiot Commies on here who are going to have to get educated even though that pains the shit out of them. They may eventually have to get to class… wymyn’s studies has a lot of tough, very rigorous requirements.
Very good job regurgitating English Composition 101 at generic State U. talking points. Your blue haired TA would be proud.
Thanks, Mr. Karlin… just got the info from Daniel Chieh first. Great post here.
around 6,321 people were executed
For comparison England and Wales statistics
1800-1827 2,340
1828-1836 408
1837-1868 350
1868-1899 454
Scottland
1800-1868 273
1868-1899 17
Population of UK 1827-27 millions 1901- 38 millions
Population of Russia? Is it 3 or 4 times larger than UK in 19c?
c. 2.5 times more executions per capita in UK than in Russia in 19c.
I still suspect that the number 6,321 given by Karlin is way too large. Perhaps this is a number of death sentences given but not actual executions?
For comparison the US
1800-1824 602
1825-1849 894
1850-1874 1,364
1875-1899 2,521
And for that the Russian people fiercely fought against Charles XII under Peter , and against Napoleon, after Peter?
About the culture in General strange statement – what is called the “Russian culture”, 99% of the post-Petrine phenomenon. But then it’s not Russian culture? Russian do not like Pushkin and Briullov? And for this rebelled in 1917?
Yes, the economic system AND rule of law (maybe they can’t be separated) is the point. Why would you work hard on any cool new idea if you would not make money out of it and maybe even not get any recognition (with it being stolen legally by your “betters”)?
I wouldn’t just say that the Chinese couldn’t KEEP their inventions, but also they had no follow-through to make the inventions workable. Things have to be engineered at some point – made to work optimally, reliably, and cheap enough to make money on. I doubt there was much of that in any of the Chinese systems back through the past.
It’s different now there, and this is something that the Commies on here get exactly backwards. China has only come this far in these last 35 years or so because the free-market for small business was left alone to a big degree since Mr. Deng started that.
Sorry, for both of you guys, I wrote kind of quickly first and hadn’t comprehended all. (I had first thought you meant Winchester.) Yeah, I don’t doubt that Needham did his research, and that’s really what the Winchester book is about, along with the rest of Needham’s life story. However, as erudite as the man was, why he couldn’t see past his research to the big world around him and figure out why all of these myriad Chinese inventions/discoveries didn’t go far is beyond me. It’s partly because of his ideology that he could not see, or did not want to. I notice this all the time, like say, today, under this post.
Can you direct me to a source for that? What do you think of Rep McFadden’s claim?:
I guess the author of the article has no credible source to offer. Too bad.
This entire opus is such a collection of lies, half-truths, distortions, opinions based on exactly nothing, it’s astonishing, in a way. The complexities of the epoch and the situation are reduced to a simple thesis: Lenin was stupid, cruel, and a failure. How he ever managed to hold on to the power and win the Civil War agains impossible odds is anybody’s guess.
He introduced “war communism” – the fact that there was a war going on at the time does not deserve mentioning. Or that it was the very same Lenin who introduced the new economic policy (NEP) after the war ended. “Red terror” – there was also “White terror”, hardly any more pleasant – have you ever heard of that? If we are in the business of “would’ve-could’ve-should’ve”, why not consider the possibility (just as an example of that kind of thinking) that if our European friends had not taken such a kin and active interest in the Russians affairs, perhaps, the Civil War would not’ve been so long, cruel and devastating to the country, with all the inevitable consequences?
Lenin founded a country that became the most powerful Russian state that ever existed. The Russians still live a country that Lenin designed, for better or for worse. If this is failure, I wonder what success looks like?
Is this info credible?
Lenin, while crossing German territory, had with him on board of his train some ten million dollars in gold, thanks to German chief banker Max Warburg, whose brother Paul strangely enough, in 1913, was the chief architect of the Federal Reserve System, the central bank of the United States.
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Sealed_Train
This statement is just wrong. A meeting of elected representatives from the estates was expected to raise in 1730, and later (under the Empress Elizaveta) elected representatives from cities and the nobility participated in the drafting of laws. Then Catherine II convened a meeting of elected representatives from estates.
Peter himself introduced a number of elected posts (for example if previously, the city was ruled by a tsars appointed officials, Peter created the elective municipal government)
It’s not me, so people thought in the 17th and 18th centuries. In particular, the decrees on dress and hairstyles have published Peter’s father, Alexei Mikhailovich.
Much later the same thought the Meiji reformers in Japan, and the Turkish sultans reformers (later Ataturk). I don’t think they were fools
“The schism is, perhaps, the most tragic part of the legacy inherited by Peter, and for the split in any case he is not responsible. The situation extremely aggravated in the reign of Sophia. In the lent 1685г. were taken 12 notorious articles against the believers. The death penalty, whip, in the very best link —here is the meaning of this unheard of cruelty of the decree. Moreover, the decree has received meticulous and rigorous execution: according to reliable estimates, up to Easter in Moscow was burned about a hundred people. And immediately, the country erupted into a religious conflict….the attitude to the old believers is softened immediately after Sverre& tion of Sophia**. The government is a compromise policy that refuses “pravdivaya” Raskolnikov. The number of self-immolations sharply. Some of the fugitives returned from abroad. Blooms Vigo-Lakinskoe settlement (old believers ). When 1702г. the Peter on the road from Arkhangelsk is in Vigo, there was prepared to flee, and to “fiery death”, but Peter promised the old believers sort of confessional autonomy—and kept his word.”
А.М.Панченко Начало Петровсой реформы: идейная подоплека
The Church was forced, instead of Auto-da-fé to build schools and to train missionaries. It was right
That had no consequences Only indignation of historians “intelligents” in the 20th century
????
In for this in the 18th century (by Peter decrees) were taken under the protection of the monuments medieval age, began the study of mediaeval Chronicles, was published the first written national history, etc.?
the end of the middle ages and the transition to a Modern Age – a universal process
By affirmative action, one can only assume that you mean enslaving a quarter or more of the population and depriving them of opportunities given to the other 75 once it was divied up among the class structures.
I agree that is some serious affirmative action. A tad more severe, than red lining, pigeon holing, freezing, separate but unequal, etc, FDR’ new deal for whites, segregated military, (if one could get in based on the standards being raised) . . . among the occasional lynching to drive the point home.
I agree in some ways, our country does in act harbor some similar policies favoring some and denying others and then blaming the denied. That sounds very much like communist thinking revolutionary thinking. Doling out goodies for those who played along as loyal and good comrades.
Your a brave man to make that observation.
“I have figured out that the Brits and bankers were masters at stirring up problems and setting their competitors against one another.”
I’ve just finished reading Nikolai Starikov’s two books that have been translated into English; “Who Set Hitler Against Stalin”, and “Rouble Nationalization”. His main thesis is that most of the troubles of the 20th century, including the troubles of Germany and Russia and the World Wars, was precisely from the Brits and the Bankers deliberately trying to do exactly what you said, especially to stir up Germany and Russia against each other to insure British Hegemony over both potential competitors. He indulges in a lot of speculation and conjecture, but his claims seem to make a lot of sense to explain a lot of things that otherwise don’t make sense.
Starikov’s take on Lenin and Stalin is that they acted as stooges for the Brits in order to get power, and were bad when they were too obedient to their British masters in weakening Russia, but did good when they would rebel against British control to strengthen Russia after coming to power. Trotsky was, according to Starikov, evil all the way, as he was too loyal to his British handlers, and Stalin was right to get rid of him.
Never let it be said that you aren’t an asshole!
Chinese invented republic and democracy thousands years ago, but some unscrupulous guys out maneuver the decent ones and got into authoritarian afterwards. But even that the ruler must rule in according to the mandate from the heaven which is taking care of the well-being of the ruled, otherwise anybody can overthrow the ruler with moral authority from the heaven too.
US Constitution or the English Magna Carta are copycat of Chinese republic and democracy invented thousands years ago with modifications as human beings accumulate wisdom with time. Besides neither the English Magna Carta nor US Constitution were aimed at the masses, they were drafted to protect the interests of the selected few, the oligarchies, they were contracts of power sharing among the oligarchies. There is a clear distinction between taking care of the masses and taking care of the selected few in terms of substance in democracy and human rights in case you don’t know.
When CCP won the civil war there was feeling of reborn among the Chinese, they felt finally they had kicked the Chinese compradors out and freed from the Western and Japanese imperialist yokes to rebuild their nation from rubble caused by the hundred years of inhumane unequal treaty destruction and exploitation. But the imperial parasites did not want to lose the host, China, their overt and covert destabilizing operations against the new regime provoked the new vulnerable regime to react violently against anyone suspected not welcoming the new regime. Perhaps without the Western Imperialists’ interference, there won’t be something bad for the West to portray China as a role model of Orientalism perpetually.
Regarding role model, nobody can beat the Anglo in hypocrisy, double think and brutality.
Nikolai Starikov offers his answers in his books and articles, mostly in Russian (which I don’t read) but two of his books are available in English translation; “Who set Hitler Against Stalin” and “Rouble Nationalization”. As a lot of what he says appears to be his own conjecture; I’m not sure how reliable his thesis is, but it does seem to make sense.
Also, you can look for some of Starikov’s articles in English at orientalreview.org.
BS.
Correction! Trotsky was loyal to his Jewish-German-American handlers. Lenin too.
He was personally very successful. Few people in history have forced their vision upon the world, and have been so destructive. He was just a failure for Russia and civilization.
As someone else mentioned, Mohammand and what he did to much of the world was an analogue.
Reactive and on a smaller scale of brutality. This argument is like equating Soviet army rapes to what the Germans had been doing durng the war.
It was clearly heading in that direction anyway. But the monster that Lenin created was self-destructive and fell apart after only a few decades.
USA. A country that doesn’t fall apart on its own after 70 years. Hell, pretty much any other industrialized nation.
I am exausted of “details” and “facts” and all of the events, names, surrounding this bombastic theme, so my arrived at final extraction thus being : Who is vulnerable, attracted to the communist idea, in light of it’s repeated murderous failures : none other than ignorant, stupid or crazy individuals, basta.
The lunatic credo of each new generation of reds: ” They, the Russians, the Cubans, the eastern Europeans, were the wrong ones, and we are the right ones and we will get it right this time” : this mindset is revealing of psychosis beyond redemption.
I have spent time visiting several east block countries long before the fall of the wall, and I will never forget the morgue-like atmosphere of the cities and the dead eyes of the hopeless natives.
In Germany the insane gift which never stops giving, there is in every town or city of size a “Karl Marx Strasse” , and natives, when confronted with this phenomena, will always come up with the amazing deranged explanation therefore of : “He was a great philospher”, regardless of the rivers of blood resulting from his “philosophy”
Authenticjazzman “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army Vet, and pro Jazz artist.
The XVIIIth Century was important in Russia because it made Russia of today.
I see you’re very stubborn and you try to disprove what I claim by pointing to some minor traits that existed in Russia (and in any country in the world – which doesn’t make all countries the same), even though I’m clearly talking about proportions, I don’t care whether you had a collective body, because, hell, even North Korea has collective bodies
The thing is that Peter changed totally the idea and tasks compared to Zemsky Sobor. France during absolutism also had local governments, but that doesn’t change the fact that the king liquidated the General Estates
Maybe Peter had some good grounds for subordinating the Church, but first off, then it shows the Orthodox Church in a bad light and secondly, doesn’t change the fact that what followed was that the Church became fake
People of the Middle Ages could say that people abandoning paganism and choosing christianity instead, was also a universal process. I don’t think this argument should be decisive
And it destroyed continuity of tradition in Russia, which created good grounds for revolutionism and bolshevism
Shall we take the West’s words as given truth? Providing the amount of fake news the West is fabricating it is hard to know which bloodletting is more barbaric, France Revolution, English Civil War, American Civil War or Russian Revolution.
Leprosy is a disease like a cancer or like compradores and oligarchs to a nation, if the patient takes action to get ride of the disease, won’t you say it is self-healing? The same logic applies to getting ride of compradores or oligarchs in a revolution is self-healing.
Any preceding century was important in Russia because it made Russia of today.
The West under the American leadership were imposing full spectrum sanctions and embargo against China before 1980, where would China import food from? The American and their lackeys were as helpful to China as before 1941, they were financing and supplying war materials and technology to the beastly Japanese to wage barbaric wars to cripple China.
If you do not understand farming or anything about other nation, please stop trolling a distorted imagine about others from a mindset brain washed by the ‘god-fearing’ morally defunct evil ‘inquisitors’ in the Washington and London from cradle to grave and reinforced by excessive flag saluting. The self righteous attitude permeated in your comment make you a perfect gear in the USSR central planning machinery, creating mayhem based on half baked truth or bigotry imagination.
Stalin just put the Humpty Dumpty toghether again.
“He was just a failure for Russia and civilization.”
You seem to have everything covered. So, if founding state which would become powerful enough to beat the whole of Europe combined forces basically tet a tet and providing population with top notch education, healthcare, 8 hours working day, guaranteed employment and subsequent retirement, basically free shelter and many other things. You seem to have peculiar sense of humor.
Note that he and Stalin managed to do so starting from extremely low point and without any help from outside. you also must be very wealthy person to ignore significance of what Lenin did for working people not just in Russia / USSR but world wide.
Boyar Duma (whose members were appointed by tsar) is not the Zemsky Sobor. Peter did not destroy the Zemsky Sobor (this is the Zemsky Sobor ceased to function for 40 years, until the reign of Peter). It’s not a small detail – it makes your argument meaningless.
The Church itself has made their teaching a fake. This would not have happened if priests carried out the decrees of Peter (and other emperors) on the need to educate ordinary people and to spend the Church’s wealth to charity.
In Europe no doubt. Here without variants
The IRA for example. Rather more successful than the Bavarians.
It’s a foundational meme of Eurasianists that the Russian Empire was some kind of “Germanic yoke” and the October Revolution was the liberation of the “real” Asiatic Russia and ultimate triumph of Muscovy over St Petersburg.
“Lenin was stupid, cruel, and a failure. How he ever managed to hold on to the power and win the Civil War agains impossible odds is anybody’s guess. ”
It is like piece of cr^^^p wrapped in enigma and spiced with mystery. I wonder how long did it take to produce this outstanding piece of thought?
Well, he didn’t. Please stop regurgitating Bolshie propaganda.
60% higher population than Germany, almost lost to it, after losing 20+ million killed.
Good education. Still not the best though.
Only industrialized country with a rising infant mortality rate. Low life expectancy.
Translation: can show up to work drunk and not get fired. Can go on zapoy for a week and the job will still be waiting for you.
If you like a generous safety net in exchange for lower standard of living by wealthy people, western Europe did it much better.
Soviet middle class living like poor African-Americans in public housing projects. But – for free!
If not for the mass deaths, Soviet Union would have been funny.
Excellent work, Gospodin Karlin!! “Spacebo!”
How about self-decapitation?
I don’t mean that Bolsheviks represented real Russia, I only meant that when XVIII century Russia dissolved its tradition, then Bolsheviks had it easier to introduce their own vision. Although obviously Bolsheviks represented a trait of russian, radical, savage, romantic, maximalist thinking
You’re running out of arguments, so you cling to lacks in my arguments, because I’m trying not to create walls of text. Duma was a part of Zemsky Sobor, which was even bigger than Duma alone and it even further supports my argument as to how revolutionary and destructive Peter the Great and his reforms were to russian tradition and its “natural constitution”
Maybe the Church made itself its teachings fake, maybe Peter was right at some time, but that doesn’t change the fact that the idea of the Church makes sense only when it’s a separate, autonomous body, not when its under such control by the state authority, because then it becomes simply another government official, so there’s no need for another state official if we have the original one already
Prophetic essay, thanks!
Sure, they did, and it was those damn unscrupulous guys again, yeah… they would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling mandarins.
Yes, we’re the ones that copied everything, like the turbojet engines … copied from China… the internet … copied from China… latex paint … copied from China… toilets you can sit on … copied from … wait a minute! What?
Yes, the right to bear arms was made for the oligarchs – why I still have my guns is a wonder… hell, maybe I’ve been an oligarch and never knew it. Damn, I’d have picked up a lot more women at the bars if they knew I was an oligarch. Yeah, I guess I have seen a lot of oligarchs in small claims court too, now that you mention it. Hmmm… I am learning so much from you, Joe Wrong.
You people were reborn, ehh? How come nobody has ANY religious beliefs in modern-day China? Are you perhaps “born-again atheists” Does one have to get dunked in any water for that, cause you know that Chinese people mostly can’t swim and the water tastes like ass. Maybe it’s faked like the fake money burned on Tomb-Sweeping Day. Hey, listen, Chinamen (AND women), if you’re trying to get this money to your dead ancestors, they are going to have no use for that monopoly money – I’d suggest greenbacks until the dollar dies, then 100-Yuan notes, you cheap-asses.
I did hear about the whole country getting rebuilt during the Mao era from rubble. The problem, as with a lot of Cheap China-made Crap (see also here, here, and here.), you don’t build stuff with rubble. You’ve got to start with decent materials and use decent tools. You should know all this, Mr. Wrong, as remember, we copied all these ideas from the Middle Kingdom way back during the Poontang Dynasty.
The big reason you’re able to even write this on a computer not made out of wood and beads, is that Bill Clinton wanted to get laid and collect a few bucks, so he sold out American manufacturing might. (Can’t blame it all on him though, lots of Globalist elites were involved.)
Your Commie lies might get you through graduate school, but this is unz, baby. You’re gonna need to grow up, Joe. Write me back in a decade, after you have had some time to reflect on your Commie stupidity. I will expect you under a new pseudonym, Joe White.
“60% higher population than Germany, almost lost to it, after losing 20+ million killed.”
All of Europe was was working for Germany. Germany occupied territory with 80 million Soviet population making it unavailable to Soviet military effort until 1943-1944. It means that USSR was actually fighting and winning war with mere 110 million also managing to out manufacture the whole of Europe.
You seem to have answer on any question. But those are not good answers.
“Soviet middle class living like poor African-Americans in public housing projects. But – for free!”
Such idiotic comment only American can make. Ever experienced half a country ruined to the ground with people living in dugouts? No. Then obviously you have no clue that firstly people had to be provided with basic shelter, whole cities rebuilt. Then it was about comfort and apartments were getting better with time. You also do not appreciate being free of debt because most probably you are up to your nostrils in it. Are you aware of statistics how many Americans are on antidepressants? I knew of no such thing back in Soviet days. Apartments built in 70-80’s were increasingly of larger size and improved quality. I also wonder how much space people need? Being free of mortgage beats your 4000 sq feet any day.
Do you know what mortgage means? “Death pledge”.
“Translation: can show up to work drunk and not get fired. Can go on zapoy for a week and the job will still be waiting for you.”
This happens everywhere but you miss the point completely because it is who you are.
The point is, good, educated man or woman , could graduate without any debt, get guaranteed employment at occupation they studied and subsequently get shelter also free. Moreover, if one was talented there was no limits to growth. Worker could become director of the factory and even minister.
If you enjoy being constantly in debt that’s your problem.
Americans are hopeless individualists but that until US$ status allow you to live beyond your means.
When this is over you will get what I mean.
One more thing – if Peter’s changes were so great, then why was there a Church Council in 1917-1918?
Maybe perhaps the Orthodox Church didn’t really like what Peter introduced and wanted to overthrow those changes?
communism would never work as it goes directly against human nature : selfishness. No idea how long it will take for humans to rise above it, if ever.
it completely gets rid of the carrot that dangles in front of people, that compels them to work harder, smarter, for personal gain. a system like capitalism creates the illusion of a carrot, but it still works better than communism, as alot of people will buy the illusion.
capitalism didn’t win over it, communism defeated it self. it works as an idea, but will never work in practice. not with current and past HDI, and extremely limited “beyond kin altruism”.
It was dead for all practical purposes by late 1920s. Some kind of mix between social state and state capitalism, and capitalism may emerge eventually.
Yes and no. In the end (or beginning, depends of POV) even Jesus Christ died for humanity’s sins. So, the idea is not novel and it will stick around (granted we survive as species) for a while too. But your point is correct. Time will tell.
So, country with 60% of Soviet population, was also busy occupying all of Europe, was also fighting on another front, and still USSR almost lost.
Rather pathetic performance; tragic from the perspective of the tens of millions of lives needlessly lost.
Exactly.
But it is true. You can’t even deny it – instead you have to make excuses, about the war.
Are you aware of how many Soviets were self-medicating with alcohol?
You think binge drinking is better than taking antidepressants?
No, you just had an African life expectancy due to chronic alcohol.
So housing projects were improving a little?
Poor African-Americans living on housing projects are free of mortgage. You would celebrate that.
It means living in a house all along while you pay it off, rather than living in a small place for 20-30 years while accumulating capital to get a house.
Obviously you can live in an apartment instead, and not have a mortgage.
LOL.
Good, educated man in an industrialized country not under Communism get get a good job and afford to live much better than one under Communism – the latter would live like a poor, uneducated Western man for free.
Like Andrew Carnegie? How inspiring!
: I think that the rest of your points here are spot-on. Thus, I will only respond to your comment about the March 1991 referendum:
It is true that there was no independence question on the ballot in the rest of Ukraine in March 1991. However, you don’t raise the obvious question of why there was no such question on the ballot in the rest of Ukraine. Indeed, based on what I can tell, the reason that there was no such question on the ballot in the rest of Ukraine is that there simply wasn’t enough support for Ukrainian independence in the rest of Ukraine during this time.
Also, please keep in mind that, as far as I know, Galicians had the choice of voting Yes to both of these questions. Indeed, the fact that Galicians overwhelmingly didn’t do this suggests that they viewed the question about the preservation of the Soviet Union as being a vote on whether or not the Soviet Union should continue to exist–in other words, a vote on whether or not Ukraine should try reaching some kind of accommodation with Moscow.
In addition to this, it is worth noting that, in spite of the much greater Ukrainian nationalism in Volhynia, Volhynians voted Yes in the referendum preserving the Soviet Union (a referendum in which you say a Yes vote would have resulted in a de facto independent Ukraine) at a much lower rate than people in both Crimea and the Donbass did. Indeed, why would the nationalistic Volhynians have been much less in favor of Ukrainian independence than the much less nationalistic Crimea and Donbass were?
Also, based on your logic here, there was a massive shift in Crimea against Ukrainian independence between March 1991 and December 1991. After all, while 87% of Crimeans voted Yes in March 1991, only ~55% (if one includes Sevastopol) voted Yes in December 1991. However, I have never heard anyone interpret these results in such a way. Indeed, why exactly would Crimeans have suddenly become much more hostile to an idea (Ukrainian independence) that they had overwhelmingly supported just nine months earlier? Heck, if anything, there should have been more support for Ukrainian independence in Crimea in December 1991 than in March 1991 considering that the failed August 1991 coup attempt occurred in between these two elections.
Finally, you mention the reference to the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine in the March 1991 Ukrainian referendum. However, please keep in mind that it is possible that Ukrainian voters viewed this declaration as a means of getting large concessions from Moscow. In other words, Ukrainian voters might have believed that this declaration was merely a blueprint for what they want and that future negotiations with Moscow might result in some of this stuff being changed or gotten rid of. In turn, what this suggests is that a vote of Yes in the March 1991 Ukrainian referendum might not have been as much a vote in favor of Ukrainian independence as a vote in favor of Ukrainian autonomy within some kind of surviving Soviet Union. Indeed, as I wrote above, if there was genuine support for full independence throughout Ukraine in March 1991, then the independence question in the March 1991 Ukrainian referendum certainly wouldn’t have been limited to Galicia but rather would have been put on the ballot throughout all of Ukraine. The fact that this question was limited to Galicia appears to indicate that full Ukrainian independence–as opposed to Ukrainian autonomy while reaching some sort of accommodation with Moscow–wasn’t supported by a majority of the Ukrainian population outside of Galicia.
Thus, my point here appears to still stand. In other words, in spite of Kravchuk’s effective changing of the wording of this referendum, I certainly don’t think that the results of this referendum would have been much different in March 1991 if this question had been “Do you support Mikhail Gorbachev’s New Union Treaty?”
: In regards to Finland, I have previously heard that Russian Tsar Nicholas II pissed off a lot of Finns with his forced Russification program there between 1899 and 1905. While this program ended in 1905, the anger towards his government among Finns appears to have remained.
Also, in regards to having Germany win World War I, please keep in mind that this would still mean giving up Russian claims to Poland, the Baltic countries, Ukraine, and possibly Belarus and the Caucasus as well. Plus, if Germany would have wanted to get really ambitious, it could have tried turning all of Russia (or at least all of European Russia) into a German satellite state. In turn, this could have resulted in Russia becoming Germany’s Afghanistan experience and thus in a revolution still eventually occurring in Germany (followed by a German withdrawal from Russia, of course).
Ultimately, though, even if a victorious Germany would have tried to puppetize Russia and been extremely brutal in its attempts to suppress any Russian uprisings against German rule, it would have still probably been better for both Germany and Russia in comparison to what these countries endured in our TL.
Also, in regards to Ukraine, I certainly think that a Ukrainian identity would have survived in a surviving Russian Republic. However, I honestly wonder if AP is being too bullish in regards to this. After all, if the March 1991 Ukrainian referendum meant what he says it meant, then it makes absolutely no sense for the Yes side to fare so poorly in Galicia, Volhynia, and Kiev and for the Yes side to fare so well in Crimea and the Donbass (especially considering that, in the case of Crimea, only about 55% of Crimean voters voted in favor of Ukrainian independence in December 1991). Indeed, if a Yes vote in the March 1991 Ukrainian referendum genuinely represented de facto Ukrainian independence (as AP says it did), then the Yes vote in Galicia, Volhynia, and Kiev should have been extremely overwhelming while the Yes vote in Crimea should have been much smaller.
In turn, this is why I think that Ukraine would have had a good chance of remaining a part of (a Greater) Russia in a scenario where the Russian Republic survives.
Also, for what it’s worth, what strikes me is just how incompetent the Russian Provisional Government actually was. Indeed, the Bolsheviks try to overthrow you in July 1917 and what’s your response to them? To release them and to arm them, of course!
Surely the Russian Provisional Government could have tried stopping General Kornilov without the help of the Bolsheviks, no? Plus, even if Kornilov was actually serious about trying to launch a military coup, surely the Russian Provisional Government could have figured out that a Kornilov-led Russia is better than a Russia which is led by Bolshevik thugs and madmen, no?
You know, the more I read, the more I’m beginning to think that the key leaders of the time were set up by certain banking “elite” and then they were pit against one another, so I’d add Hitler to the list. They remind me of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, to name two prominent ones of recent vintage.
Getting back to Brit manipulation of others, their craftiness was on full display, for instance, in the Agadir Crisis and the way they played their cards in East Africa They were sharp. Evil but hard to beat in gamesmanship.
Thanks a lot!
Sir, I think you may be replying to the wrong person.
Anyway, as for Lenin being a success, no doubt it was due to the backing he likely had from powerful bankers. It appears to me that national “leaders” get nowhere unless vetted by the big money boys. Once they’ve outlived their usefulness, they get tossed under the bus in one way or another.
One sees this in the case of the Shrub, Bill Clinton, and O-bomb-a, who were nobodies until some money bag fool thought they’d be useful.
“Some kind of mix between social state and state capitalism, and capitalism may emerge eventually. ”
Et tu, Brute 🙂 Seems human nature got you too. Did you mean capitalism or some sort of hybrid? Capitalism seems to be here for a long time and things are not going that well for quite some time.
Looks like human nature should be taken into context of the further development but the sort of system that is prevalent in the world is leading directly to our extinction.
There’s no question that the Provisional Government was very incompetent and blindsided by its own revolutionary zeal.
The Kornilov affair itself was caused by a stupid misunderstanding.
They were obsessed by a reactionary revanche and underestimated the strength and the malevolence of the Bolsheviks and especially of Lenin to the end.
Not to be a dick about it or nuthin.. but the reason communism won’t work is something a kid can understand even in his kindergarten/grade-school years, albeit without any of the terminology to explain. This is before all of the brainwashing. You’ve got your dump truck, and you’re told it’s nice to share. Well, you’re told it’s nice and you have to share.
That’s the problem – this other kid has already trashed-out his trucks by leaving them outside and treating them roughly. Now, he’s playing with your stuff via coercion from a higher power (the teacher). Didn’t that piss you off two ways?: 1) It’s my stuff that I took care of, but I’m not getting to play with it and 2) This other kid is treating my stuff like crap now (‘specially nowadays with the cheap China-made crap) and it won’t last long like this. The thoughts in your head are like “Hey, this is cough, Bullshit, cough, cough!”
It’s the same thing at the level of employment and industry in a Communist system. It’s all about being forced to share, and nobody likes that, nobody except the teacher, say a Chairman Mao or Lenin/Stalin.
Communism is fundamentally against built-in human nature, yet every damn century or so, idiots trot this stuff out like it’s the best thing since sliced bread. It makes you wonder if any of these Commies get out of the coffee shops and their mother’s basements long enough to get the stupidity out of their puny gelled-up brains.
“So, country with 60% of Soviet population, was also busy occupying all of Europe, was also fighting on another front, and still USSR almost lost.”
Almost. You ever heard of outcomes? Obviously not. What was outcome? Soviet troops in Berlin.
You cannot be almost pregnant.
Regarding educated Western men and women. You are at UNZ review and posting nonsense when USA middle class is almost dead and who are those people ? Well educated middle class. I wonder what percentage of them are on anti depressants.
It’s difficult to know what exactly what was going on in Russia from January 1916 to the revolution due to the incessant propaganda about its problems and dis function. If the Germans and other capitalist countries had not poured all the money into the communist revolution and Lenin and his paid mobs there probably would have been a coup.
The Czar would have abdicated under severe pressure. One of his many male relatives would have taken the throne. There would have been a propaganda blast about the new and better Czar. A lot of food and welfare would have been distributed to the people. The clergy critters would have been bribed to preach about the new and better Czar and the bright future. The newspapers and magazines would have treated the new czar as our media treated the demi God Obama.
I had to chuckle at your comment since I feel the same but it goes the same in my opinion for any form of coercion. It’s also critical to note that so called “capitalists” use any tool at their disposal to gain power, and that includes using the rhetoric, people and systems of whatever revolution comes long that they can twist to their benefit. Once the revolutionists have done their job, they’re tossed away like a used tissue paper.
We see it today with the various “colored revolutions” none of which would have occurred without some money bag puppet master pulling the strings.
In the early 20th century the Reds were all the rage; it was cool and fashionable. Lots of suckers went along with the program including many Red millionaires.
Almost. You ever heard of outcomes? Obviously not. What was outcome? Soviet troops in Berlin.
Outcome is over 20 million dead and large area of land occupied for a few years, by a country 60% your population and very little of your natural resources, that was only using 80% of its military against you, while occupying most of Europe.
Do you really believe this nonsense?
Lenin and his followers fought for their sponsors and pay master, the German government.
Soviet troops in Berlin = outcome.
Yes, imprisoned German scientists and treasonous Jewish-spy technology transfers, but, let’s face it, even Houthis could build nuclear weapons under those circumstances.
Now that’s a good day’s humor.
What was I saying about imprisoned German scientists? Well, threatening to kill their entire families did pay some dividends.
Oh, right, so when the first Tsar took power in … oh, Ivan the Great in 1460s, or, more officially, Ivan the Terrible in 1547. Now, let’s look at Russia’s size and prosperity in 1470 vs. 1547 vs. 1917? Surely you must credit the Tsars with some progress, no?
LOL, yeah, sure they were. Everyone was “equal”. Except the pigs. They were more equal than the others. And got to kill them by the millions if they disagreed. Particularly if you disagreed enough to kill one of the pigs. Tell me, in Russia, was the punishment the same for killing a Bolshevik official and a kulak or priest? Or maybe they weren’t “equal”?
You wouldn’t be complaining of a bad picture of Hitler, who, through and through, was a far better man than Lenin. Of course, Lenin’s is an almost impossible depth to sink deeper from.
Wikepedia????? Really, I thought you were an intelligent person. Wikepedia, like academia the media and the American government is very left wing. It is only useful for dates timelines and names.
Only leftists and the incredibly naive believe anything in wikepedia. Therefore you are a naive leftist.
While I agree with the point that Lenin was probably just as ruthless as Stalin, you try to make out that he was lazy. This seems very unlikely. If Lenin was lazy and complacent, that doesn’t say much for his White Russian opponents.
Mao Cheng Ji’s a commie propagandist. Don’t even bother refuting him.
Russian troops in Berlin in 1919 after 2.5-3 million war deaths, or Soviet troops in Berlin in 1945 after 9 million military deaths and 18 million civilian ones – “two tragic, but nonetheless distinguishable, post-war outcomes.”
And AP is of course fundamentally right. The survival of the USSR in 1941 and especially 1942 was an exceedingly close run thing.
He probably had the backing of Americans and Brits as well.
So Lenin was likely a Traitor, Parasite, Failure and a fraud, but he was also no doubt a rich guys’ tool. I doubt he would have accomplished anything without the backing of Red millionaires in the US and Britain primarily.
A pox on all of them.
Where do they come from? Are they for real?
Getting it on the ballot was the result of hard work by activists who were only strong enough to get it on the ballot in those regions. Yes, this sentiment was so strong in Galicia that this was done, but that doesn’t mean the populations in other reasons weren’t also pro-independence, even though they were more passive about it.
Galicians had a choice – independence – so they went for that instead. Places that didn’t have the choice went for sovereignty as declared by the Ukrainian SSR, which meant Ukraine having its own army, laws, etc. – essentially reducing the USSR to an EU-like arrangement.
Do you have a link for the sovereignty referendum by oblast?
Sovereignty meant the USSR becomes much like the EU. Independence meant total independence. It could be that Crimeans supported the former much more than the latter.
You are correct in that a subset of the pro-sovereignty people probably didn’t want full independence. But since full independence wasn’t an option outside Galicia, we don’t know what that size that subset would be.
But my main point was that this vote should in no way be used to assume large % of people wanted to actually preserve the USSR. Full independence wasn’t an option, and the people actually preferred version closest to it – one in which Ukraine had its own army, laws, etc. To simply say this vote meant most wanted to keep the USSR is false.
27 million of your own citizens dead at the hands of a much smaller nation using only 80% of its forces = outcome.
“He [Lenin] clubbed so many rabbits to death with the butt of his rifle that the boat sank under the weight of all the dead bodies.”
I’m not surprised. Only a psychopath can perpetrate so deliberately, so much death and mayhem, and then get worshiped by people who never knew him because he — did what exactly? Millions of people would have lived had Lenin never been, and also countless rabbits, murdered not for meat or fur, but because Lenin just wanted to. Shelley’s poetic observation on these monstrous egos:
I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
We’re only “howling” over his one corpse. He howled over millions. There’s difference.
And anyway, he started it.
Karlin’s writing about Russia are complete and utter rubbish. This article is no exception.
Interesting that you’re Polish, good to have another point of view in this sometimes very Russified site. And good question. Cesaropapism can’t be good, but Russia did have good monastic religious life. I think it had to do with the Russian Church’s position to the revolutionary government’s ascension to power and repression, and whether to leave Russia, but I’d appreciate some of the Orthodox commenters’ input.
I think a computer wrote this latest comment by the program that calls itself Joe Wong.
Just what does China have to do with the article about Lenin anyway?
Joe Wong program’s only function is to evoke antipathy towards Chinese. Who wrote it and who is running it?
It is not Lenin’s fault that Russia/USSR fell apart. Empires are by nature programmed to fall apart. It would have happened regardless who ruled it: Tsar/Lenin/Stalin/Trotsky or any other ruler Mr. Karlin care to choose.
But, yea, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were murderous. At the same time people were smitten by Marxism, they really believed they can offer humanity paradise on earth and in short order. Why did millions believe Lenin? It is not his fault. Who ordered them to worship him?
Interesting thing noted in this article is that the Chinese have not been as blood thirsty as much as the Bolsheviks. But, what accounts for the difference? By the way the health care in Cuba is good; Russia and even some sections of America would love to have it.
Among some other things, you’re quite wrong about Skoropadsky. Such erroneous commentary typically goes unopposed, due to a prevailing ignorance on the subject, that sees the svidomite, Pilsudskiite and sovok views getting the upper hand.
For your edification (Over the years, what has been posted at JRL isn’t always the best material.):
http://www.eurasiareview.com/22052011-pavlo-skoropadsky-and-the-course-of-russian-ukrainian-relations-analysis/
The not so pro-Russian academic Mark von Hagen has noted that Skoropadsky favored Russo-Ukrainian togetherness, even when he was dependent on German support. Some of the contrary (to that view) comments attributed to him in exile are suspect, along the lines of the claim of WW II era pro-Bandera Jews.
In point of fact, the Galician Ukrainians en masse came under the command of the Russian Whites after Petliura agreed to sell out all of Galicia to Poland in exchange for Polish aid. Petliura did this because he lacked support, with many in Ukraine supporting some kind of togetherness with Russia.
True, but what else is there?
This is a very strange point of view. Lenin was a follower of the German ultranationalist Friedrich Engels
“The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples ( Slavs). And that, too, is a progress.”
Engels, “the Magyar Struggle” [Kampf Der Magyarische] 13.01.1849
It’s true that during the life and death struggle of WW2, Russia and Germany needed ruthless centralization and a total commitment to war production – and Stalin was better at this than Hitler. The Russians more effectively used their resources for war production than the Germans.
But, looking at the post WW2 Soviet planned economy, what works in the emergency of wartime is very dysfunctional in peacetime. Outside of a national emergency, private ownership and free markets work better, and the proof was that Russians aspired to a Western lifestyle, not vice-versa, and the Berlin Wall was there to keep East Germans in, rather than to keep West Germans out.
It’s also true that there’s nostalgia for Soviet Russia, but it’s not framed in its historic period, it’s rather a comparison between now and then, focusing on the loss of community of a more predictable egalitarian society that could get fine results in culture and education. Current Russian plutocratic capitalism is just as ugly as the US version.
End of time will tell, when the Christ comes to judge the living and the dead.
Alden:
Institute of Advanced Studies physicist Freeman Dyson on Wikipedia: “Everybody distrusts it and everybody uses it”.
From my POV Western capitalism (until recently) was controlled selfishness, rather like a football game with rules and a good referee, obviously more successful than the Communist game of dictating every player move.
The current mess probably comes from Special Interests taking over the capitalist game and changing the rules to suit themselves (and fixing referee decisions).
I had a good laugh while reading your rant. Ever heard of Kurchatov, Korolev, ok even Sakharov ? No. It basically leaves those poor suffering German engineers out of the picture. Meanwhile Von Braun the most prominent German engineer and the father of Nazi rocket program , all his blueprints and materials went directly to USA. Which makes US rocket project not exactly US made.
Russian troops in Berlin in 1919. It is alternative reality, right? By 1917 Russian troops already wanted to do nothing about that war and were voting with their legs and you are talking 1919.
You are very peculiar type of nationalist patriot. You seem to always side with failures which you then transfer into your parallel universe where it miraculously turns into success. Give a rest. Russian people never wanted to do anything with that war. Real history showed that very well and by 1917 Russian army and society were in state that would be generously described as near death and you are talking about 1919.
Outcome = Soviet troops in Berlin and lost war by Germany.
Germany took over the whole of Europe before attacking USSR. Resources and industries of the whole Europe were deployed. While Nazis had the luxury to deploy almost all of their men against USSR, Soviet Union had to both send men to fight and make sure there is enough left to work at the factories.
Another point counter your grotesque logic is that 18 million out of all Soviet losses were Soviet civilians. This constituted war crimes. Considering that Soviet army won and occupied Germany what do you think was possible to do about German population in light of crimes Germans committed in the Soviet Union. Right. End the whole German nation as such. It is another question why Soviet Union did not do it, because of the human nature of the state and the people. But outcome was allowing this.
According to your logic then, Punic War II outcome would be that Hannibal defeated Romans 5-6 times, roamed across Italy destroying everything for 15 years and Romans lost up to 15% of their population. No, outcome in both cases was VICTORY.
Give me a break. You do not give a damn about dead Russians, Koreans, Vietnamese and so forth. Both World wars were started by your capitalistic countries.. Losses in vicinity of 100 000 million real not invented. After World wars your peace loving capitalists have been roaming the earth and killing people directly and indirectly in tens of millions. But obviously you do not care. Let’s houl over imaginary victims of that damn communism.
First of all, selfishness (what you probably mean here is ‘greed’) is only one part of human nature, along with empathy, generosity, and so on.
And second, all kinds of ‘human nature’ elements have been overcome by civilization. A vast majority of humans don’t rob, rape, or kill each other these days. Saying that something “goes directly against human nature” is not saying much. Where it’s human nature vs social conditioning, social conditioning wins when applied efficiently and persistently.
Well, sure, or any other German who finds value in the idea. It doesn’t take much intellectual mojo to state that Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies were a betrayal of early 19th century Prussian liberalization, or that Hitler’s diplomacy spit on Bismarckian prudence in the conduct of foreign affairs. C’mon, you want to build a goddamned freeway to Koenigsberg, so you unleash a war to get it? Any writer would need to prep himself, find supporting evidence that’s at least plausible, but, as with Anatoly’s Lenin piece here, I think the result would be productive of good debate.
@Anatoly:
I would like to ask you if you can recommend any English-language books on 19th-century Russia.
Doesn’t matter if it’s general or social, economic or cultural history. Just needs to be accurate. Monographs on narrower subjects like terrorism or foreign policy also count.
I need to diversify a bit away from leninism/stalinism 🙂
Your argument (Peter destroyed the Zemsky Sobor) is meaningless because Peter did not destroy the Zemsky Sobor.
If the answer to your argument “generally” – without a radical modernization of medieval Russia, Russia would simply disappear from the face of the earth. Of course in this case there would be no revolution in 1917 (as there would be no Russia)
Protestant countries (where the Church was completely subordinated to the state) had more success than the Catholics.
But in any case the Church in Russia is subordinated to the state since the 15th century.
And the Islamists hate Ataturk and wanted to overthrow those changes. Further evidence that religious zeal deprives people of reason
One doesn’t have to go to Jesus or any kind of extreme idealism to aim at some variety of Communism. Star Trek is communistic in both words and practice, and right-wing America loves it. Human Nature: Ten thousand years ago human nature disallowed city-states, apparently. Then, two thousand years ago city states became banal and passe, suddenly states stretching over vast expanses became viable. After the fall of Rome Europe was a backwater, and then Voltaire learned and wrote about China, inspiring the Enlightenment and the Napoleonic Code.
I’d compare solving the social problems with making a good dish: it’s not strictly about logic and quantitative measurements, though they are essential, tiny amounts of ingredients of different quality can make huge differences: one has to keep eyes open for the actual facts, explore with an open mind, and yet keep thinking systematically.
Zeno’s Paradox shouldn’t be a mortal threat to taking steps.
Ukraine joined Russia much later than Catalonia joined Castille.
Depends, of course, on the two dates you assign.
One logical date for the end of Catalan autonomy is the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714. The Catalans were on the losing side in this international/civil war and their considerable autonomy was stripped away as Spain began its centralization.
So when did Ukraine “join” Russia? I don’t think it’s reasonable to say it was “much later.” It was also definitely a gradual process, so a hard date is pretty tough to determine.
The Church in Russia was always subordinate to the State, though also having great influence over the State. The Russian Church was descended from the Eastern Roman Church, in which the Emperor always had power over the Church.
Caesaropapism, it’s called.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesaropapism
It is strange, but it was a real sentiment amongst the NatsBols, who coalesced around that period (ironically most would be shot in the late 1930s – Stalin didn’t appreciate them nearly as much as they did him).
Engels was indeed very anti-Slavic (thanks BTW for posting the link at /r/russia). Its sick and absurd we still have a town named after him.
Agree. The question of elites calcification, stratification and rotation should be addressed. Soviet fish indeed became rotten from its head. Check and balances.
Martin Malia – Russia under Western Eyes (not limited to 19th century but ofc constitutes a huge chunk of the book)
This is pretty fun: Tolz, Vera – 2005 – Orientalism, Nationalism, and Ethnic Diversity in Late Imperial Russia. On the late Imperial roots of Eurasianism.
Not before February. Uptick following the February Revolution. Then quieted down again after Kerensky got serious about derooting Bolshevik saboteurs from the Army. Then went to hell again in the wake of the Kornilov Affair, but only became terminal after October.
Getting outright defeated by Germany in WW1 would have been far preferable to a 70 year Red plague.
I mean, even the ultimate borders would have ended up similar to what we have today, LOL.
All kinds of shit are against “human nature,” but we have come of with some pretty good work-arounds over the centuries, mostly through trial and error. None were assured to work perfectly, yet a small number of people hatched the ideas and convinced others to go along.
I am happy to know that you and your kind has no chance of snowflake in Hell to have any serious position in Russia discourse. And you dare to call Lenin traitor. Were it not for Lenin there would have been no russia to talk about. Even Denikin and count Mikhail aknowledged that Lenin and Bolshevikks acted as patriots and collectors of russian lands. You can however continue to roam alternative reality.
There are some rules and customs for the good that are against natural human nature, like marriage, for instance. I’ll grant you that. Communism attempts to create an economic system which assumes things that are completely wrong about human nature regarding, well economics (of the family unit, the natural greed inherent in every man to help him take care of his family the best, etc.)
Nobody, no matter how many books they read in grad school about Marx, likes to work his ass off while the guy slacking of next to him gets the same pay.
You wrote about trial and error. Communism was tried multiple times to the detriment of billions of people. There were errors. They can’t be corrected via more Communism. As, a commenter above brought up, (to paraphrase) it’s not “we just did it wrong in Russia, they had the wrong guy running it in China, Cuba was pretty good except for the 99% poor people… well, we can get it right next time – let’s start LongMarch 7.0 in America – 7th time’s a charm, they say”. It is a terrible, unnatural, sick way of life, and if people can’t learn that from almost a billion humans’ experience, than they are just hopeless.
It is a way of ruining all the good in people by making their and their children’s lives miserable with no hope and no way out. International-Globalist Communism would be about the end of any free world, as who is outside to escape to / look to as a beacon / even help to end the misery. We’re gonna need a bigger SETI Antenna!
I, for one, enjoyed Mr. Karlin’s article here on Mr. Lenin, and it has made me start looking out for other articles by him to read (both to learn from him and many of the commenters).
You, Mr. Krieger, from your commenting here, have displayed such ignorance and just flat-out USSR-Commie-sack-hanging, that I will avoid anything of yours for the rest of your life. 7 DECADES of brutal Communism in your own (or formerly-own) nation, and you haven’t learned a DAMN thing! What’s the latest lie here, spouting garbage about how the Bolsheviks gave the Russians land? I guess you have to be the right kind of Bolshevik to have a collection of land, huh?
If I were Russian, I would call you a traitor. I am American, so I say “you have to go back!”. I don’t know if the Russian people would want you back though.
You suck to no end, Comrade!
Anatoly,
I would guessing there are far too comments to expect a repJy here, but am thinking the question is interesting, though slightly off-topic.
Djugashvili, Stalin, in his days of banditry to support the party, was part of a duo with noms de guerre Koma and Koba. IIRC, Uncle Joe was Koma. Who was Koba, and what was his fate?
… or is this truly lost information?
Sincere question, have read much of the history, but for reasons, that question is always interesting me, not least because, never myself a robber, I can still understand Stalin’s deep disdain for the opportunist and worse person, Lev Bronstein, who had never done anything with courage, opportunisitically switching sides in RSDLP in summer of 1917.
Thank you! Sometimes an ‘outsider’ will have a more balanced outlook. I like AP’s comments, but have stopped reading the interminable spats. Some chains read like kids in the schoolyard arguing about whose father has the biggest car, albeit disguised with percentages and maps. I’m sure Russia is superior in all ways to all countries, but why do they try so hard to convince? Putin certainly does not talk that way.
It is Kamo.
Well Mr. Ahmed, safe your breath. Anybody who is hanging on Anatolii words about Soviet period of Russian history is ultimately ignorant and extremely biased as the only things Anatolii peddles here on the topic is lies, alternative reality and outright biased hatred of all things Soviet. Good luck learning Soviet history from him.
Alright, if I was confusing vowel order, thank you for the correction, but my question is easy to understand, you are not answering it, who was the other (Koba or Kabo, think it correct it was Koba) and what was his fate?
Europe ceased being a backwater long before Voltaire.
This probably helps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamo_(Bolshevik)
Thanks for the interesting question.
You are very much right (http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-rise-of-west-asking-right-questions.html). I noticed the error but as it was a side topic I decided not to spend more words on it.
Some months ago, I forwarded information to the generally excellent journalist Greg Hunter: I countered his claim that Russian Communism killed fifty million. In response, he told me to stop trolling.
The American view of Communism is apparently of a certain fixed social system whose direct implementation in Russia, China etc. led to 100 of million dead. It is a view indistinguishable from an idée fixe, a dogma.
That, in turn, suggests the worrying extent to which today’s USA has become culturally an Asiatic country, like Pakistan. I hear from Pakistani expats that it’s a place of anxious people desperately clinging to pseudo-facts about demonic outsiders and finding emotional relief through agreement over those pseudo-facts.
Ukraine was Russia before becoming “Ukraina”, the ‘margin’ parts of Poland. It did not “join” Russia, it just RE-joined it after a long separation.
I already know some history, Mr. Krieger. It’s the details that are interesting. The overall hatred for Communism and Socialists that I have will not change whomever’s article I read. My blood pressure just goes up when I read lies and people encouraging another century of misery for some country, maybe Amerika.
Correct.
Half of Ukraine was autonomous to the point of having its own military and foreign policy until the loss at Poltava in 1709 – after that, autonomy was gradually curtailed (with ups and downs) until 1781:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossack_Hetmanate
When the modern era of nationalism began, Ukrainians had grandparents who had still remembered this.
Another ~30% of Ukraine (the area west of the Dnipro River and east of Galicia) joined Russia in 1793, having been fully a part of Poland until then.
And then of course Galicia had never been ruled by Moscow until a brief period of time in 1915, and again in 1939.
Hybrid, or mixed economy–whatever the more appropriate definition is. E.g. State has no business in retail of consumer good (food security is another matter when staple foods are concerned), in many services, from restaurants to tourism, to whatever–you name it. That all has to be private. State has to be present in strategic fields of resources, science, R&D and hi end machine-building and has to (which is being done to a degree already) support private efforts in hi tech, from processors to CNC machinery to whatever else smart tech-oriented people may offer. Just an example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KB_SAT_SR-10
This aircraft which was literally designed and assembled in some hangar privately has officially won the tender for Russian Air Force initial cadet training and will begin series production soon. This bird is a result of enthusiasm and private initiative:
http://kb-sat.ru/projects/cp10.shtml
And, of course, state is there to provide good social safety net–from health to education. No private ownership of strategic resources and manufacturing–it seems that this lesson has finally been learned in Russia.
Which would normally be considered inevitable – Hitler was on a suicide mission. The Bolsheviks just made sure that it took 27 million dead Soviets to achieve this objective. Nice outcome.
So Germans had to occupy most of an entire continent and still the Bolsheviks allowed them to kill 27 million Soviets. Rather pathetic, no?
You forgot that the Soviets were also getting help from other areas.
In 1943 the Axis had 3.9 million troops on the eastern front and the Soviets 6.7 million.
War crimes made possible because incompetent Soviet military allowed little Germany to take a huge amount of territory and failed to get it back for several years.
It means Hannibal’s opponents were really incompetent and nothing to brag about. There’s a reason why people remember Hannibal and not Publius Cornelius Scipio, Tiberius Sempronius Longus, Gaius Terentius Varro, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, or even Scipio Africanus who ultimately defeated him.
One of the more interesting things about the history of this whole area is how various groups latch onto boundaries or ethnic groupings at a particular time and announce that is the basis for all further discussion.
In actual fact there are no natural boundaries in the area and “national” boundaries (a term that didn’t have all that much meaning until quite recently) have fluctuated back and forth.
Yet somehow Crimea, which had never, ever been part of Ukraine until transferred to it as an internal political ploy by USSR, must never have its boundaries reconsidered.
I have no dog in this fight, I’m just amazed that people think boundaries that have been all over the place for centuries should suddenly be set in stone.
Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus the Cunctator.
100 trillion dead. That’s a lot of people.
Rus was not Russia, just as Frankia (Charlemagne’s Empire) was not France.
Ukrainians as an ethnos did not exist in a recognizable form until the 15th century (just as the English, prior to the Norman invasion, were some kind of Germano-Celts, their language and culture very different from what we see now), with the mixture of Rus peoples and Poles. Russians developed earlier, probably in the 13th century.
Interestingly, the Rus people in what is now Ukraine and Belarus referred to themselves as Rus people but to what we call Russians as Muscovites, rather than Rus people, until IIRC the 17th century. Conversely, “Muscovites” referred to themselves as Rus people but to the former groups as “Lithuanians” during this time. Each side didn’t consider the other as Rus. The widespread nature of the idea of a united people is fairly new.
this is actually pretty good. it is like that. a communist govt micro manages too much.
imo, I don’t think western capitalism was ever controlled selfishness. other wise we would not have the boom and bust cycle we have now. it like growing crops for a harvest. wait for it to grow for 15-20 years and cut it down(buying up everything that is about to go bankrupt for a huuuuge profit during the bust cycle like 2008) the bubble is engineered from the git go to pop. it is pure, unadulterated selfishness.
it is 100% planned, macro wise. it is like blowing air into a bloon, it is going to pop at certain limits, and if you know the limit, you can prepare to make a killing.
greed is just a part of selfishness imo. empathy and generosity only trumps selfishness in a few humans. not enough to make any difference currently.
and has civilization overcome those other elements yet? let alone selfishness? hell, we built the entire western civilization base on it.
let me put it this way, if we don’t make rules against robbing, rapping, killing, will civilization still exist? yet, selfishness helps the western style civilization thrive. of course at the expense of others on the planet, but that is the nature of selfishness.
communism was something people thought up to combat it, and it died horribly.
Your upset is understandable, your outrage is typical to the Eurocentralists when their fabricated world history which put themselves on pedestal undeservedly by claiming credit where credit is not due get exposed.
But your bitching is unwarranted, I merely told you the other part of the history you don’t know, I did not do anything like the West by smearing others in order to glorify themselves.
Anyhow you may cling on the old days of Eurocentralist world history, but it is fake and provincial in the real world history. As the global economy grows, the real world history will prevail over the fabricated Eurocentralist world history which will be reduced to as peripheral and an eccentric fantasy imaged by a minoriy in the past.
Your upset is understandable, your outrage is typical to the Eurocentralists when their fabricated world history which put themselves on pedestal undeservedly by claiming credit where credit is not due get exposed.
But your bitching is unwarranted, I merely told you the other part of the history you don’t know, I did not do anything like the West by smearing others in order to glorify themselves.
Anyhow you may cling on the old days of Eurocentralist world history, but it is fake and provincial in the real world history. As the global economy grows, the real world history will prevail over the fabricated Eurocentralist world history which will be reduced to as peripheral and an eccentric fantasy imaged by a minority in the past.
I agree that “communism” has been tried enough times that most should have an understanding that it will not work, but who knows? The utopian ideas associated with universal brotherhood have a powerful appeal for many people. Just look at the thousands of iterations of Christianity, yet millions still bang their heads against it.
The concept of “family” is quite flexible.
Thank you Ivan, although I am hating to get information from the Wikipedia.
So Stalin was Koba.
Explaining my incorrect order of vowels in Koma, and who the other was. Was posting from dimly remembered reading.
Again, thank you.
” By the way health care in Cuba is good”
Bullshit : Doctors training in Cuba amounts to, at best, an boy-scout scout level of expertise.
Chavez went there for treatment and returned to Venezuela in a coffin.
You, like all of the arm-chair socialists/reds, are prone to romanticizing and praising communist “Errungenschaften” where no praise is due.
Look I was behind the iron curtain, having visited several east-block countries long before the fall of the Berlin wall, and some day I will write book revealing my horrid observations in those shit-hole “workers and Farmers” paradises.
Authenticjazzman “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro jazz musician. ( next gig: this evening)
PS this reply was intended for different post.
Very flattering to your readers to refer without more to “de Tocqueville”s prophesy” but I did felt compelled to check. Googling “de Tocqueville on Russia” of course got me there straight away, but I could have done without being flattered 🙂
Joe,
You have made a double-post of the same post. I am also doing it a few times. If not timed out, recommending to remove the one with no real reply (this one).
Can’t you make Cimmunism and all other let’s-be-all-rqually-miserable prescriptions work by imbuing all with faith in an after life?
robbing, rapping, killing are not uncommon because ‘we made rules’. It’s because of the social pressure, social norms, presented initially as ‘commandments’ from god, religious taboos. Again, conditioning of the mind can override basic instincts; I don’t think it’s controversial.
I don’t like ‘selfishness’. You could say that giving away one’s all possessions demonstrates his ‘selfishness’ because it makes him feel good. I think ‘greed’, desire to possess, is what you mean here.
Greed certainly has a place in the current socioeconomic system. Perhaps not as central as people tend to believe (status, recognition may play a bigger role), but it sure does. But that’s exactly why you can’t argue that it’s been proven unstoppable – because it’s being socially cultivated, so no wonder it’s strong.
Except for the monks/nuns. Google tells me there might be a couple millions of them (including buddhist) in the world. That’s something.
fyi, you could cut the entire comment when you could edit it. save it and it will be gone and you can reply and paste to the person intended.
I am 100% sure if there are no laws and punishment for robbing, raping, and killing there would be more of them. a hell of alot more of them. there is nothing you can write that will convince me otherwise.
I am not saying those people don’t exist, I am saying there aren’t enough of them. a few million monks and nuns out of 7-8 billion people? and those few don’t interact much with the rest of the 7-8 billion. when that number reaches 3.5 billion, you will have something.
that is why greed is just a part of it, I don’t think I claimed it was the whole of it did I? look at bill gates, by giving away 5% of his networth, his name will live on forever unless his foundation dies. the only person that fits your example is george lucas. he actually gave away his entire fortune. Who’s to say if he is like the monks and nuns or exactly like what you described? we can’t assume one way or the other, or maybe even both.
power, status and recognition comes with money. this feeds into my argument pretty well.
Playing on words would not advance our knowledge. ‘Rus’ was not (later) Russia, but Russia was nevertheless ‘Rus’. What is the meaning of “All Russias”? Of the notion of ‘triedetni russki narod’?
Why the ‘Ukrainians’, before inventing their separate ‘identity’, called themselves (and were called as such by all neighbouring peoples), Ruski, Rusyni, Rutsensi, Malorosy?
Actually why do they shun the ‘Moskali’ as mixed with Finns and Mongols, when they pride themselves of being Sarmatians, Khazars, Tartars?
There are few of them now, because there are no social taboos on possessive attitudes. On the contrary, both consumerism and accumulation of material possessions are actively encouraged. As the Russian joke from the 90s goes: ‘how did you become a foreign-currency prostitute? Oh, I just got lucky.’
To prove your thesis you would need a control group of newborn children, brought up and conditioned, and living their lives in an appropriate (‘communist’, in this case) environment, isolated from the outside world and from any carriers of undesirable (possessive, in this case) attitudes.
There was, actually, a documentary about North Korean child gymnasts some years ago. It seemed boring and I didn’t watch it, but it might have something relevant.
First of all, my bold, as I hope you don’t mean me personally, because I want nothing to do with it. I don’t think the most well-meaning Communist in the world (there are lots, but that doesn’t stop people from being killed and miserable!) could do this. Communism and all totalitarian societies need people to see THE STATE as God. They can’t have people serving 2 masters.
Look at the the Russians and the Chinese(especially the latter). There ain’t much religion left after the Commies beat it out of them.
“…the USSR did give us the greatest national anthem of all time…”
Heh.
The birth of that “battleship of a song” (as Stalin dubbed it), Alexandrov’s anthem, is described, hilariously, in D. D. Shostakovich’s memoirs.:
http://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/07/archives/improvising-under-stalins-baton.html
Possibly the single funniest story in a book full of funny stories
“…The atmosphere was appropriate to a sacred rite, and it seemed that a miracle was about to occur —for instance, Stalin would give birth. The expectation of a miracle was on every toady’s face…”
P.S. – the “greatest national anthem of all time,” words & music, is, of course, Parry’s setting of Blake, Jerusalem.
Unfortunately.
Koba was Stalin.
Karlin seems to hang out in Russia almost exclusively with marginalized nationalists, spouting here their old and disproven propaganda about the Russian revolution. I wonder who is paying for his “work” there. Now, about Lenin and bolsheviks: the Civl War in Russia was obviously started by the party that lost the power – antibolsheviks with massive aid from Western powers. At one point during the war, foreign invaders controlled about 20% of Russia. Those are the cold facts. Russians are well aware of these facts, and they are also aware of the atrocities committed by Polish, Finnish, Czech, English, Japanese etc. troops during that war. So yeah, there is little sympathy for Karlin’s agenda there. Leave Russia’s problems to Russians.
The sparkling enthusiasm for every divisive subject, eh? Any US equivalent would definitely be accused of being a Putin troll corrupting wholesome Americans.
But then, it’s all in English here. Can’t do much damage, I suppose.
500 years of Anglo Dutch capitalism has made the most of world’s poor healthier, longer lived, better educated and richer. Some expense! And slavery is illegal everywhere thanks to the British Empire.
Lenin didnt give a crap about Russians or anyone else.
He just wanted his revolution.
His policies left several million dead in a short time.
Stalin did kill more, but was in power way longer,
and part of that count includes invading forces from Nazi Germany.
His aims were more to make USSR stronger, compared to spreading revolution.
(Im not fan of either).
To this day Western socialists often prefer Lenin/Trotsky. Why? Because they were more left wing
and also funded by Western capitalists and socialists.
Glad you had a laugh. I do believe my rant was orders of magnitude better than yours, since I am not a mindless worshiper of the mass murderer of millions of his own people. That kind of despicable and unspeakable depravity belongs almost exclusively to you and your buddy Lenin/Stalin-worshiping sociopaths.
By the way, do you own anything that has the value of a cow? What, you have a computer??? Because that makes you a blood-sucking parasite who deserves a quick death, according to your idol Lenin. If only Lenin were around to bring you his brand of “justice” that you so pathetically adore ….
Now, on to your new nonsense.
Of course. Ever hear of the “atomic spies”? Just because Kurchatov ran and worked on the program does not mean he did not steal the 100,000s of man-hours of labor the US had put into the Manhattan Project (and also Germany but that was more generically in the field of nuclear physics – these German scientists were forced to help Soviets with the English documents they had their Commie spies steal).
Bullocks, the Soviet rocket designs were discarded as dysfunctional and they used the German design. You think there was only one copy? LOL. Granted the US also used that design, in fact the entire world’s rocket systems are based on the German designs. Did I mention Hitler was a far greater man than Lenin? He actually even fought in a war, Lenin was just a cowardly and idiotic mass murdering sociopath who lived in 1,000 times the luxury of the kulaks he ruthlessly murdered.
Kerensky could have done better than Lenin. German gold made the difference. All those print workers.
Pardon my not noting who I was specifically replying to (AP) in my initial set of comments here.
I’ll add that Dominic Lieven is among some others who note the obvious about a separatist Ukrainian nation not being so fully developed (in terms of popular support) at the time of the Russian Civil War.
On some other point raised here by AP, Muscovy was definitely part of Rus. The Rus entities had a policy of simultaneously identifying with their area and the greater entity. Relatedly, someone saying they’re a New Yorker doesn’t contradict their US roots.
Needham was Mrs Thatcher’s favourite author. She had an order for each edition as it came out.
China had poor protection for merchant property rights. Inventors were seldom awarded monopolies such as patents.
i must admit i once held a favourable view of Lenin. not so favourable now, perhaps.
once read a book called “Mutual Aid” by Russian anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin
(it’s actually a very good text-book re:wikipedia:”it is an argument against the competition-centred theories of so-called social Darwinism, as well as the romantic depictions of cooperation presented by writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued it was motivated by universal love rather than self-interest. Mutual Aid is considered a fundamental text in anarchist communism, presenting a scientific basis for communism alternative to the historical materialism of the Marxists. Many biologists also consider it an important catalyst in the scientific study of cooperation.”
however, i was more interested in reading the foreword (1920) to the book (originally written 1902) in which Peter Kropotkin took issue with Lenin and his practice of hostage-taking ( as a form of “protection” against the Tsarist police who were after him at the time (early 1900s”)
“Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.
Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? … If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages.
I hope you will not answer me that Power is for political men a professional duty, and that any attack against that power must be considered as a threat against which one must guard oneself at any price. This opinion is no longer held even by kings… Are you so blinded, so much a prisoner of your own authoritarian ideas, that you do not realise that being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods … What future lies in store for Communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way every honest feeling?
Letter to Vladimir Lenin (21 December 1920); as quoted in Peter Kropotkin : From Prince to Rebel (1990) by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, p. 426
Variant translation: Whoever holds dear the future of communism cannot embark upon such measures. It is possible that no one has explained what a hostage really is? A hostage is imprisoned not as punishment for some crime. He is held in order to blackmail the enemy with his death.”
my attitude then was : what’s a few hostages mean when you’re about to start a Revolution
(cf Danton:how can you make an omelette, without breaking a few eggs)
The life expectancy is 79.7 years, higher than the US and second-highest in Latin America. Not bad for a dirt poor country, certainly higher than capitalist Haiti (63.1 years).
So Chavez had a massive cancer. He had a surgery in Cuba to remove it. One month later he had a surgery in Venezuela. He then spent 12 months on chemotherapy before he died.
And this is blamed on Cuba, how? Do you know that people die in every country on Earth from cancer? WTF is you agenda to make such a patently false and utterly stupid point?
Needham was focused n the history of technology rather than politics and economics. But Chinese stagnation is simple. There were no secure private property rights for merchants.
Kerensky was a much more likely British “agent” than Trotsky. With the head of government in sympathy with you, why finance his opponents. Trotsky had good personal expenses from New York. Lenin had funding for a Coloured revolution.
This thread includes a blend of svidomite and sovok views that severely distort history.
I very much doubt that Denikin ever considered Lenin as a patriot. Lenin recdeived much foreign backing from Germany and some Western leftists. Moreover, Lenin made a then secret pact with Pilsudski to not support the Whites. Lenin was willing to cede Rus land to Pilsudski.
The matter of an Allied intervention in Russia to support the Whites is grossly exaggerated BS. Keep in mind the German support for Lenin. As WW I was still being fought, there was concern about Central Powers activity in the former Russian Empire. When that war ended, some of the major powers had concern about their foreign nationals and biz interests in land that was contested by warring factions. The degree of fighting that their forces did during the Russian Civil War was quite minimal, as was the support given to the Whites:
Related:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/08042016-fuzzy-history-how-poland-saved-the-world-from-russia-analysis/
http://www.eurasiareview.com/23032017-reexamining-russias-past-analysis/
I don’t see much contradiction. After the German sponsors left, Skoropadsky turned to an alliance with Russian Whites (who also enjoyed the support of the Entente), all the while insisting on Ukrainian-language policies, military and other trappings of an independent state. After the war ended and the Whites couldn’t offer him anything anymore, he went back to being a Ukrainian nationalist.
You know, there was a Hetmanite monarchist movement within the Ukrainian diaspora.
Skoropadsky also worked with hardcore Russophobe Dmytro Dontsov, the ideologue who inspired Banderism. Dontsov was Skoropadsky’s press secretary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmytro_Dontsov
The alliance with Russian Whites was probably not a bad idea, given that the Bolsheviks were far more evil and fighting everyone all at once had little chance of success. The problem is that this idea had no widespread support among the Ukrainian masses. Moreover, I’m not sure how much the Whites themselves would have approved of Skoropadsky’s terms.
Imperial mythology for the purpose of uniting these lands.
For similar reasons there are Romanians in the Balkans, Romansch in Switzerland and Romans in Italy. I suspect if one of these groups tried to take over and assimilate the others there might have been some name changes.
Solzhenitsyn told us the origin of such evil men. this is what we get when men forget God. judging by how many have forgotten now, the future looks gloomy. shame on lenin; but shame on all of us who forget our God Who fashioned and sustained us from our mothers’ wombs, giving us life, strength and intellect. He gave everything to us when we are not worthy to get anything, but then we quickly turn around and deny or forget Him. shame on all of us.
And what’s the pejorative slur for your kind? Y’know, just make it fair, so that we can communicate on equal footing.
Not ‘allied’, foreign. Including Czechs, Polaks, Japanese, etc. All together they probably had a couple of hundred thousand of troops in Russia. Holding/securing large territories in the rears liberates the equal amount of combat troops to participate in fighting. Material support wasn’t insignificant either. Surely exaggerating isn’t a greater sin than understating?
Dontsov had a position in Skoro’s government. That alone didn’t make him a close ally of Skoropadsky. Compare Nikki Haley’s comments on Russia to that of Trump. Skoros’s government had that dynamic as well.
FYI, the Whites developed a policy of a single unitary Russian language, in conjunction with agreeing to use of Ukrainian on a regional level.
BTW, when the Germans left, Skoro was overthrown at a time when the Whites didn’t have a good base established in Ukraine. Skoro’s time in exile didn’t exclude good ties with anti-Communist Russian patriots.
As previously noted, the not so pro-Russian academic Mark von Hagen has noted that Skoro favored Russo-Ukrainian togetherness even when he depended on the Germans.
What great battles did these foreign forces engage in against the Bolshes?
What was the actual degree of material support given to the Whites?
You’re apparently unaware of Lloyd George’s argument against arming the Whites.
http://www.eurasiareview.com/23032017-reexamining-russias-past-analysis/
Excerpt –
In his memoirs, Alexander Kerensky quotes British Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s basis for Britain’s non-support to the Russian Civil War era Whites. Kerensky references this excerpt from Lloyd George’s September 17, 1919 House of Commons speech:
“Denikin and Kolchak are fighting for two main objects. The first is the destruction of Bolshevism and the restoration of good government in Russia. Upon that, they could get complete unanimity among all the forces, but the second is that they are fighting for a reunited Russia. Well, it is not for me to say whether that this is a policy which suits the British Empire. There was a very great statesman…Lord Beaconsfield, who regarded a great, gigantic, colossal, growing Russia rolling onwards towards Persia and the borders of Afghanistan and India as the greatest menace the British Empire could be confronted with.”
Churchill unsuccessfully argued to the contrary. Specifically, that the Bolshes would be an even greater threat.
What’s with “great battles”? Was something unclear or incorrect in my comment you’re replying to: “holding/securing large territories in the rears liberates the equal amount of combat troops to participate in fighting“?
Significant, as per common knowledge. When you’re challenging common knowledge – nothing’s wrong with it, of course, but nevertheless: the burden of proof is on you.
Indeed, I was unaware. As well, I’m unaware of a million other random irrelevant quotations of millions of others. And what of it?
Some filibustering on your part.
The foreign forces there weren’t supporting the Whites so much as protecting their nationals and biz interests, while keeping tags on the other powers.
You duck the fact that the foreign forces in question played a very small role (virtually none) in the actual Russian Civil War fighting. Once again noting the then secret Pilsudskiite-Red agreement, which saw the Bolshes not support the Whites, while agreeing to give Rus land to the Poles.
In terms of the military historical aspect, not much is known of that war. Instead, sovoks posting photos of foreign forces in the former Russian Empire. Wow! Quite convincing.
It’s a “mythology” to pretend that modern day Russia, Ukraine and Belarus don’t share a common past with Rus, with the Moscow based Russia being a legit heir to the Kiev based Rus.
Prior to the Mongol subjugation, it was becoming pretty clear that Moscow was gaining in stature. It emerged from the Mongol subjugation as the freest (from foreign domination) and most powerful of Rus land.
Ivan the Terrible was a Rurik prince, with Michael Romanov having Rurik ties.
I’m glad to see the popular Russian President Putin speak negatively/accurately about Lenin, while giving the Whites respect.
The two headed eagle and tri-color are actively back in Russia, with the Rusisan Empire having lasted considerably longer than the Soviet Union.
About Vera Tolz I find this on Amazon:
“Out of the ferment of revolution and war, a group of scholars in St. Petersburg articulated fresh ideas about the relationship between power and knowledge, and about Europe and Asia as mere political and cultural constructs. Their ideas anticipated the work of Edward Said and post-colonial scholarship by half a century. The similarities between the two groups were, in fact, genealogical. Said was indebted, via Arab intellectuals of the 1960s who studied in the Soviet Union, to the revisionist ideas of Russian Orientologists of the fin de siecle.”
I won’t comment on that other than that you promised fun. I hope that Tolz is good at telling jokes in reverse, because the payoff is out in the open now, I guess.
Putin quite frankly despite his obvious contribution and intelligence is not even on same page as Lenin and even Stalin. While facing his own challenges he has still got foundation left to him by critisized by you Soviet union. Imagine him having to start and deal what Lenin and Stalin had to.
It would have been ridiculous for Ruusia to have red banner ad red banner represented certain things values and challenge. It also represented eventually status of the Soviet Russia which modern Russia does not have anymore. Meanwhile color of the victory is Red and not of Georgievskoi stripe. Under tricolor Russia lost both war with Japan and WWI. Not exactly inspiring. This whole return is a sign of strategic defeat. While USA clearly did not defeat ussr defeat was self inflicted and the loss of the status is quite obvious. By the virtue of winning WW2 Soviet Russia should have been ruling Europe for centuries. Instead it has to defend herself along her own borders within former Soviet Russia space. I have no idea why you feel proud of this and continue smearing Soviet history when Russia truly attained greatness.even now Russia still have whatever left of previous standing due to Soviet legacy.
This is a popular misconception in the West but is factually incorrect. The white terror was no more reactive than the red terror was reactive to, say, an attempt on Lenin’s life. As to the scope and brutality, Bolsheviks had nothing on the noblemen of the White Army. Kolchak, the ruler of Siberia, for example, was notorious for his cruelty towards the locals. And he wasn’t the only one. This, by the way, was one of the reasons why Bolsheviks ultimately prevailed in the Civil War.
There is nothing monstrous about the Soviet Union – nothing more than about any “industrialized nation”. In spite of the difficult periods, the Soviet Union was, and still is, a powerful project that unleashed enormous creative forces not just in Russia but all over the world. To reduce it to such primitive descriptions as “evil”, “destructive”, monstrous” is – trying to be polite – silly.
One American writer (don’t remember who) once remarked: “Why are we rejoicing that the only attempt to build a society based on the best human qualities failed, whereas our society built on the most primitive basal human traits such as greed and cruelty to other is thriving?” This is BTW is the definition of your “success”. Sad.
Of course they do. And Cuba, the Philippines, and Peru have a common past with Spain. And Romania, France, etc, have a common past with Rome. Sweden, Denmark and Norway have common pasts. So?
You mean the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal. Moscow itself was nothing much until the end of the 13th century.
The last principality to conquer Kiev prior to the Mongol invasion was the Galician one.
Depends on what one means by “foreign domination.” A Rus prince once gained the Polish throne, after all.
Descent. So do thousands of other people.
The Emperor of Brazil belonged to the Portuguese royal family. So – one people?
Surely far more convincing than a trivial quote from some British politician’s speech, don’t you think?
All I got from you so far is that you:
– have an opinion, and
– are openly contemptuous of those who don’t share it.
It’s all fine, but on these internets that’s the most common case. Not very interesting.
What can I say? Okay: your opinion is noted.
So slaughrering 10,000s in response ot assassination attempt on Lenin is comparable to slaughtering 10,000s in response to the slaughtering of 10,000s. Go it.
Maybe by your logic Nazi atrocities were also reactive to anti-Nazi resistence?
A don’t recall the millions of starved-to-death Americans, Frenchmen, Italians, etc.
Hey, did I see you in the guardian a couple of year ago? Did they ban you eventually?
{ Under tricolor Russia lost both war with Japan and WWI. Not exactly inspiring. This whole return is a sign of strategic defeat. While USA clearly did not defeat ussr defeat was self inflicted and the loss of the status is quite obvious.}
Because of (Communist) Gorbachev’s stupidity and gullibility Putin has to deal with NATO on Russia’s borders, which West/Globalists promised Gorby would never happen?
{By the virtue of winning WW2 Soviet Russia should have been ruling Europe for centuries}
Well, Soviet Union did dominate Eastern Europe (Warsaw Pact) for 70 years, and people in those countries didn’t seem to be too happy. I mean, German people were trying to escape from East Germany to West Germany, and East Germans had to build a wall to keep their people in: doesn’t speak too well of a form of government that has to force people to live under its rule.
Now, as I have said in other threads, one side benefit of being under Soviet rule is that only those European countries that were kept away from Globalist infestation – e.g. Hungary, Poland,….. – are the ones resisting suicidal edicts from Brussels to open the floodgates and allow unlimited Islamist invasion, like they are doing in West Europe today.
So it’s not Soviet “all good” and Russia “all bad”: it’s a mixed bag (….from what I can see as a non-Russian not living in Russia). Soviets accomplished a lot. A superb education system, for example. But their mismanagement of the economy and inability to adapt and change until too late, left USSR structurally vulnerable.
Given its inherent structural issues, SU probably could not last, quote, ‘centuries’.
But the winding down could have been accomplished in an orderly fashion.
Tens of millions of Soviet citizens lost everything when SU broke up so suddenly: jobs, security, accumulated pensions under the Soviet system/ruble,….. People who worked all their lives and contributed when they were working are destitute old people today with no pension and no jobs (in all 15 former SSRs).
And Gorbachev is still running around and giving advice left and right, instead of being in jail.
Im happy that Putin made that statement
about the crimes of Soviets and millions of victims
From my observations Putin seems anti Lenin
and fairly in the middle on Stalin (someone can correct me here).
You are probably familiar with the conspiracy theory that millions of Americans starved to death in the 1930s because the population then only increased by 7%, instead of by 15% as in the 1920s and the 1940s.
One finds it not infrequently brought up on the communist parts of Runet.
That is correct.
It is not an answer to a specific comment but rather is aimed at comments made by some in which they refer to the Ukraine as having such or other tendencies in the 19th and early 20th century.
Before it is even possible to address them first one has to ask: what exactly do they mean by the Ukraine? It could be the geographic area of one of the following: the historic borderland of the Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ukrainian National Republic, West Ukrainian People’s Republic, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (before the war, after the war, before or after Khrushchev gave it Crimea?), the current independent state of Ukraine, Malorossiya, Galicia, Cossack Hetmanate, Ruthenia, Volhynia all of the above, some of the above, some of the above plus something else – keep in mind that while all these overleap to some extend (sometimes to a considerable extend) they are not one and the same.
That Is not all.
Parts of what could be with justification considered “the Ukraine” where not even in the same countries (states). Thus when one says there were certain tendencies, views or opinions in 19th century Ukraine it should be kept in mind that it could mean popular talking points in Lviv’s cafes or matters that dominated village talk in the Poltava Governorate. Either could be justifiably considered Ukrainian opinions.
It is also really baffling to read that there was no Ukrainian part to the Russian civil war. All the Bolshevik Ukrainians do not count? What about all the white forces in southern Russia – oh I get it southern RUSSIA and thus can’t be considered Ukraine. Good to know because it cuts a large chunk out of what could be considered the Ukraine.
Moving on, the “let’s stay in the USSR” vote in Ukraine does not really count because it was one heavily qualified with additional conditions. The same thing could be said about many other votes because most are heavily contextualized, dependent on a lot of ‘small print stuff’ etc.
Many more points to be maid but sorry – this should suffice to make my points while I have to get back top work.
Excellent points. I am afraid that it took centuries for currest state of affairs and human capitalistic behavioral norms to get established and entrenched. Soviet was the first time that attempt was made to build society as you said based upon best humanity traits. Obviously there was a lot premature optimism and rush. There was also other issues especially at the very top which were caused by basal human qualities and allowed personalities of the lowest possible denomination to get and stay theŕe like Krushev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The question of how and why is complex and includes also such things as lack of understanding of basic human needs and wants at the very top level. Basically too much to write in current format. Discussion like this would require lots of space and time. But yes. USA basically was built and prospered by calling to what is the worst in humanity basal instincts which is obvious now, while Ussr was making attempt to improve human condition via virtues. The path of din is always easier than the path of virtue.
Thank you.
I was posting a quick and good dumping on Lev Bronstein, but vanishing, sure by my own error, a shame, it was a little entertaining and very damning.
Maybe trying the replication tomorrow.
As I stated, defeat was self inflicted. If such moron or an agent was capable to destroy great country unaposed with the rest of elites and population not only doing nothing to remove him but actually engaging in smearing of own country and history and later in tearing own country apart… make your conclusion. Self smearing still continues. Soviet union did not have structural issues which would cause collapse. The case of kings destroying own country via sheer stupidity is widespread in history. China was in far worse position then ussr and nothing happened. Elites are important factor.
Yeah, I saw it too.
While the practice of counting/comparing ‘victims’ – while deliberately ignoring (or misconstruing) historical context – is, of course, utterly idiotic, it is indeed interesting that the western narrative refuses to acknowledge a single starvation death during the great depression and the dust bowl. They admit ‘malnutrition’, but that’s it. It feels like straight common sense rather than ‘conspiracy theory’ to assume that the great depression/dust bowl narrative has been just as thoroughly constructed and politicized as one of the stalinist atrocities… No?
Elena Krupnikova in her book about Golodomor also touched American depression and population losses from it. Basically the West likes to hide own skeletons while concentrating on others. Naive aboriginals are of great help to them.
Cuba, Philippines… don’t border Spain and were never key to it along the lines of the Novgorod to Kiev to Moscow ties. The Rome point goes way further back in history, when things were considerably more different. The Roman Empire encompassed numerous different peoples with noticeably different languages and ethnic makeups.
On your other points:
What was California at the time of the American Revolution and for that matter American Civil War?
Poland doesn’t see itself as part of the Rus legacy for obvious reasons. Poland is a classic example of the occupier becoming occupied.
The Ivan the Terrible and Michael Romanov references to the Rurik dynastic line show a clear relationship with the Rus entity prior to the Mongol subjugation period.
Putin has spoken negatively of Lenin, while being comparatively mixed on Stalin. The latter was an extreme brute – something that Putin hasn’t contradicted.
IMO, Stalin’s foreign policy took into consideration Russia’s legit interests – more so than Lenin.
I suspect that a good number of White Russians view the Soviet-Finnish War and Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as necessary acts to better secure Russia.
If you read more into the subject, you’d know that Lloyd George’s mindset to not support the Whites prevailed over Churchill’s preference on the basis of the quote in question. This was previously noted at this thread.
You must be kidding about the photos said to show foreign forces in Russia (in non-fighting instances). Show me photos and detailed accounts of noticeable Western fighting against the Bolshes in support of the Whites.
If anything, the then secret Polish-Red agreement is somewhat akin to what some accuse the Red Army of doing during the Warsaw Uprising, or for that matter the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. There’s your foreign collusion during the Russian Civil War, along with the German and assorted Western left support for the Bolshes.
” Life expectancy is 79.7 years, not bad for a dirt poor country”
Look if you choose to believe any or all of the absurd communist propaganda pertaining to health care, coming out of Cuba, be my guest, period.
Aside from this I am aware of the “real” facts and truth surrounding the issues of health care in the communist world, as I was married, in west Germany, from the late seventies to the mid eighties, to a German MD, a surgeon, and at least two of her east-German trained MD co-workers constituted a huge problem for the hospital as they revealed themselves as completely incompetent and clueless, and were subjected to daily on-the-job remedial training, and not were detailed to the operating room for more than trivial issues.
The west German gov at one point came to the conclusion that the training of medical doctors, of medical personal in the DDR was far below western standards, and they were faced with the dilema of what to do, as the recognition of east-German medical degrees was an element of the detante’ , the “Ost-Politik” initiated by Willy Brandt, and they were most certainly not going to reverse any of the aspects of this concept.
As regarding Chavez : This is but one example of the tremendously “superior” communist medical expertise, and I would wager that one could, with sufficient research uncover thousands of such cases.
Authenticjazzman “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army Vet, and pro Jazz musician.
The Whites also showed signs of improving their ability to govern. Wrangel in particular has been credited for such. Hence, their victory arguably might very well have led to a more humane and prosperous Russia. To a degree, a number of Russians in the post-Soviet era don’t consider this thought to be so off the mark.
We have such short memories.
Germans are still alive who shot and killed other Germans for simply trying to leave the country.
hahahaha. hey you, you have been exploited for the last 499 years, but look, you are free now. thank us! now we will just exploited you in a different way 🙂 thank us again!
You are wasting you breath and time arguing with AP’s. You might have noticed that all their arguments are of the ‘what about’ type, the diversionary tactic of changing the subject of discussion. From Ukraine we jump to Brazil and take the example of Brazil as the norm for Ukraine (a sheer fallacy by any logical rules – Aristotle called it ‘ignoratio elenchi’). BTW, ‘Brazilians’ and Portugese were the same people and that’s why a member of the Portugese royal family could become the Emperor of Brazil.
They say that we are in Winter, covering the approximate period of 2005- 2025. As in nature, each season has its possibilities and they identify Crisis (Winter) as a time for societal survival, demanding a genuine gathering together in unselfish common action.
Each generation supposedly defines itself in opposition to its parents with “Boomer” children looking for societal order and stability rather than the counter -cultural revolution that was forced onto them. It may be true that Millennials are tiring of the old Hippies.
https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Turning-American-Prophecy-Rendezvous/dp/0767900464/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510438535&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Fourth+Turning
No analogy is 100% precise because no two situations are exactly identical.
That said, some analogies are more accurate than others. The WaPo, NYT, JRL Affirmative Action, Russophobe Tyrell Starr, said the Russians treat the Ukrainians like the Blacks have been treated by Whites in the US. A better analogy likens the Russo-Ukrainian relationship to the Scots and English. Of course, that analogy isn’t exactly precise.
There’s value in answering some of the commentary that has been put out here and other venues. A number of folks are either suspect, but not knowing of the other perspective, or get duped by continuously one-sided commentary, without knowing there’s a valid other side.
Gorbachev was trying to keep the SU together. Yeltsin was the architect of Russian independence.
Well, don’t leave us hanging. What did the West Germans do about that dilemma?
Yeltsin was about upping his stature, along with his having found like minded folks seeking to do the same in their respective domain.
well if you are so negative about everything , communist,atleast his revolution has endured for 3 generations larger than many kingdoms
” Well don’t leave us hanging. What did the West Germans do about that dilema”
Nothing, as the wall came down and the majority of east German medicos moved to the western portion of Germany, and were absorbed by the huge German medical field, with all of their flaws intact.
I can vividly recall that one of my wife’s medico colleagues was consumed with a rabid hatred for Americans and all thing American, even though he had grown up in east Germany and had no contact with Americans whatsoever, of course this being the result of the incessant anti-American propaganda
imposed upon the east German populous.
Authenticjazzman “Mensa” qualified since 1973, Airborne trained US Army Vet, and pro jazz msuician.
In addition the conditions in hospitals eastern vs. western hospital were like earth and heaven. Comfortable beds, much better food, even ventilation in the west was better.
The end result was that anybody having a choice would obviously pick a western hospital over an eastern one but that had very little to do with the competence of eastern vs. western doctors.
The above does not of course exclude that there were in fact some very competent western doctors who had individual experiences with their incompetent professional counterparts from the east.
But what really makes me smell a fake is the idea that an East German doctor was infected with anti-American propaganda. That is either a gigantic pile of bull crap or an exception confirming the rule.
Most people in the east were because of all the goodies and obviously higher living standards fond of the west sometimes to the point of idolizing. At the same time official propaganda was considered just that propaganda – crude, stupid and totally unconvincing blah, blah of the communists.
This was no different in East Germany, perhaps even more so because they could see the better west literally over the fence.
For this reason the idea of an someone from east Germany being anti-western in general or anti-American in particular seems dubious.
Oh – lest I forget someone claiming to be a MENSA member should be more intelligent when making his points. There are people who had lived there, had heard it, seen it, experienced it and hence have a low threshold for BS.
I don’t know about ventilation, but I suspect that communist countries, on average, probably had better physicians than the western ones.
In the west, people often choose the medical field because it’s lucrative. It’s (typically) a purely materialistic ‘carrier choice’ to them, a way to make a bunch of money. Not the best motivation for becoming a ‘healer’…
What you read was actually the second half of my comment. The first part was for some reason cut out. For this reason I will repost all of my reply to “Mr Mensa”
Ehm … the smell of fake is hanging in the air.
Admitted I am not from any former SU country and not from the former East Germany either but from one other former Eastern Bloc.
I have a few relatives who are medical doctors and while during ‘communism’ the opportunity to visit their professional colleagues in the west was limited it is not like there was none at all. Obviously now it is not a problem.
Their impression form that time were not at all flattering for their western counterparts especially general practitioners. These western ‘doctors’ were mostly clueless and were practicing something that can be called symptoms treatment medicine – in other words the idea was to treat the symptoms, charge the individual or his medical insurance provider and move on to the next patient. Only if the alignment persisted or the condition was serious to begin with was the patient send to a specialist or a hospital. What many eastern doctors also found shocking (at least at the beginning) was the openness with which their western host would admit their ‘we are here to charge the patient’ attitude because in the east it was preached to medical students that what they are about to do is a great service to the society as a whole and to individual human beings and similar lofty stuff.
It was similar in hospitals. Even specialists were sometimes hapless when confronted with something else then an obvious case but what made a huge difference, in fact all the difference was the availability of specialist diagnostic equipment and a plethora of drugs.
While a doctor in eastern Europe frequently had only his knowledge, experience and not much more than for example a stethoscope to diagnose the patient and had to treat the man with whatever was available which was usually not much his western counterpart had diagnostic equipment & various medications that were seldom if at all available in the east. The resulting difference in treatment quality is obvious.
In addition the conditions in hospitals eastern vs. western hospital were like earth and heaven. Comfortable beds, much better food, even ventilation in the west was better.
The end result was that anybody having a choice would obviously pick a western hospital over an eastern one but that had very little to do with the competence of eastern vs. western doctors.
The above does not of course exclude that there were in fact some very competent western doctors who had individual experiences with their incompetent professional counterparts from the east.
But what really makes me smell a fake is the idea that an East German doctor was infected with anti-American propaganda. That is either a gigantic pile of bull crap or an exception confirming the rule.
Most people in the east were because of all the goodies and obviously higher living standards fond of the west sometimes to the point of idolizing. At the same time official propaganda was considered just that propaganda – crude, stupid and totally unconvincing blah, blah of the communists.
This was no different in East Germany, perhaps even more so because they could see the better west literally over the fence.
For this reason the idea of an someone from east Germany being anti-western in general or anti-American in particular seems dubious.
Oh – lest I forget someone claiming to be a MENSA member should be more intelligent when making his points. There are people who had lived there, had heard it, seen it, experienced it and hence have a low threshold for BS.
Yes. There is a very good book called “Russia”. It is free on Amazon in electronic form. The author was Donald Mackenzie Wallace who spent about 20 years in Russia after the Crimean war. He then returned briefly, 1903-1905 as I recall, when he wrote a 2nd edition describing the 1905 war against Japan and the political tension of the time. The book was written when the Russian fleet was still afloat, so he was too early for the 1905 revolution. He doesn’t use one word if ten will do but it is easy reading. His description of peasant life explains much about collectivisation and modern landownership in Russia.
No, that really exists. Germans in general are often somewhat anti-American (though there are also tons who go the other extreme and absolutely love America), and the East German propaganda about American imperialism (e.g. the Vietnam war, racial discrimination; sometimes also mixed in were specifically German, vaguely nationalist appeals, like making a big deal of the bombing of Dresden and attributing it to the US, even if that was mostly the work of the British) was effective to some degree.
Authenticjazzman exaggerates imo in his frequent anti-German statements, but to some extent they do have a basis in reality. The German Besserwisser and the strident anti-American are both types that exist in large numbers in Germany.
” Someone claiming to be Mensa should be more intelligent when making his points”
Ist ja klar dass ein Deutscher “Dichter und Poet” sich “intelligenter” als irgend ein amerikanisher Cretin, auszudrücken vermag.
Diese, Ihre, arrogante, penetrante deutsche Besserwisserei ist weltbekannt und einfach unerträglich, basta.
As I stated in my original post : I was married to a german MD, a surgeon, for several years, secondly my brother-in-law is a retired MD an internist , and my niece and her husband are both surgeons, she treating blood vessel afflictions and he joints, knee, feet etc.
So I am more than versed in the particulars of this complicated field.
Your silly romantization of the communist medical profession into an altruistic , humanistic endeavor, ist beyond comment being nothing more than the opinion of a typical leftist zealot.
Authenticjazzman “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army Vet, and pro jazz artist.
To begin with I did not call anyone a moron or equivalent neither in German nor in English.
When it comes to accusing others of what the Germans call Besserwisserei and it being unbearable a look at the mirror or at one’s previous comments, their authoritative tone in particular, would be a good idea.
Had you bothered to read my comment with comprehension you would have noticed that I did not silly romanticize communist medical profession into an altruistic , humanistic endeavor but merely stated that this what would be MDs in the east were preached during their studies (this perching having in most cases limited effectiveness such as preaching lofty stuff usually has I might add). Hence there is indeed nothing to comment on in this regard.
Also calling me leftist zealot ignors most of the content of my previous comment. In particular those parts pointing out higher material standards of almost everything in the west. It would appear that a reply at least requires to read what one retorts to.
I have also medical professionals as relatives & family members. This is not so unique among educated people.
Closing I have to say that one’s views are shaped by one’s experiences – you have yours and I have mine.
While Mr. Karlin essay and the photograph are quite good but there’s a bit of deception in his article by leaving out very pertinent facts. He makes a great deal of the German subsidies to Lenin while not mentioning at all the massive support by the Jewish Wall Street banker Jacob Schiff. Not only that he crops the picture of Lenin and guess who seems to be right beside him in the photo. The very same Jacob Schiff, Even more mysterious the photo was taken after Jacob Schiff was said to be dead. Just one good look and I think it’s reasonable that this was a lie and that he was there right next to Lenin. That guy next to him must be Schiff.
Jacob Schiff
https://web.archive.org/web/20170308055517/https://www.henrymakow.com/upload_images/THE%20SCHIFF%20TELEGRAM.jpg
Lenin and Schiff in Russia after Schiff supposedly died.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170824221130/https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/photo/1923/007.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20161115071202/http://rarehistoricalphotos.com:80/vladimir-lenin-last-photo-1923/
https://web.archive.org/web/20171016043019/http://c8.alamy.com/comp/EK3DHX/gorky-ussr-vladimir-lenin-sits-in-a-wheelchair-in-gorki-settlement-EK3DHX.jpg
It’s pre-Soviet Russia which has been regularly smeared by the likes of yourself.
Lenin and Stalin inherited a country that was a world power, predicted for even greater things. The Bolshes subverted Russia’s WW I effort.
Your reference to that war and the Russo-Japanese War are overly simplistic. The US lost in Vietnam and the Brits lost to the pro-secessionist American colonists. Yet, America remained a great power after its Vietnam experience. Ditto Britain after the American Revolutionary War.
Strong countries lose wars for a variety of reasons. The Japanese launched a surprise attack with geography on its side. Russia rebounded relatively well from that war, to the point that many saw it as a major world power destine for further greatness.
In WW I, Russia did well against the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman forces. It attacked Germany much to sooner from when its was ready. Historian Max Hastings said that had WW I started two years later, Russia might very well have succeeded, meaning no Bolshes.
A nice example of a very common trend on the left. People who achieve anything are wicked, because they maliciously did less than they claimed to want, and brutally caused suffering that was quite un-needed.
Russia was disintegrating from the fall of the Tsar. The most likely outcome was a right-wing dictatorship. Similar things had already happened in Portugal and Latin America.
Without Lenin or Stalin, who was likely to make a better job of things?
Outside of Russia, some conventional regimes did emerge from 1917. And when Hitler came to power in 1933, every one of them apart from Czechoslovakia was a right-wing dictatorship. This includes Poland, created by Pilsudsky on a Moderate-Socialist basis. Guilty also of anti-Semitism, though it would at least accept Jews who would convert.
“maybe China and India would have displaced it and the US by then”
Under what scenarios do you think India could have done so? I am curious because you are known to have a quite pessimistic attitude towards that country.
Russia would have been much better off with a Pinochet than with a Lenin or a Stalin. Pinochet did not kill millions of Chileans and Chile after Pinochet was a fairly prosperous, decent country – compare to Russia after Communism, in the 1990s.
That view of Pinochet has a good deal of support among post-Soviet Russians, including the late Alexander Lebed and some former Soviets in the US.
” His frequent anti-German statements”
You are really reading me wrong as I harbor no “anti-German” sentiments whatsoever, however I am totally pissed regarding the know-it-all german leftist “Besserwisser” who are waging an underhanded media war against DT, and they are demanding that he be removed from office as if they, these german leftist nut-cases are entitled to meddle, to intrude upon internal US politics.
Aside from this, they, said german leftist lunatics, have been demanding that that US alter their gun ownership laws to comply with the oppressive german codes, and one gets the impression that they, these leftist german crazies think somehow that they rule the entire planet, and that they are entitled to determine what each and every nation should do or not do, as according to their leftist “Gutmenschen” mindset.
And I must say that I have always held doubt regarding the sanity and rationality of a people which has no problems and even accepts and welcomes such draconian, big-brother laws such as the german “Meldepflicht/Meldegesetze” , laws which would evoke a societal crisis in a typical anglo-saxon country.
Aside from these viewpoint I realize hiow much poorer the world would be without the manifold and magnificent contributions to world culture, starting with JS Bach, L V Beethoven, W A Mozart, Shiller, Goethe, etc, etc.
Authenticjazzman “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained U S Army Vet, and pro jazz artist.
They’re merely regurgitating the talking points of liberal US media though.
I agree with your point about gun laws…these are internal matters of the US and shouldn’t be of concern to foreigners.
As for Meldepflicht, haha, really bad joke given that a government that enforces something like this then lets more than a million foreigners whose identity is often unknown into the country. Just shows what a bizarre country Germany has become.
And yes, you’re right, German lefties are indeed absolutely insufferable.
i wonder what a yemeni thinks of lenin.
im sure they would be very disturb by a russian leader a hundred years ago deliberately causing a famine.
and im sure they would also point out that the west is vastly superior in morals to such inhuman monsters who would use famine as a weapon.
that or he might ask you for some bread and beg your free western capitalist society to stop imposing famine on his country?
India has a huge population with a genotypic IQ of perhaps 95, so it seems likely that India will eventually at least converge with the United States in total economic power (while China vastly overtakes it).
Lebed was incompetent as leader, and as manager.
“The’re merely regurgitating the talking points of liberal US media though”
Yes and no, as they themselves, in tune with the infamous german megalomania, actually hold these nutty viewpoints and they apparently think that being a german “Dichter und Denker”, entitles them to inform the crude, stupid Americans as to how they should vote, run their country and that they most certainly should not be allowed to arm themselves as according to the US constitution.
“Meldepflicht” a horrible law who’s roots may be traced back to leibeigenschaft and the “Fürstenzeiten” and then forward to the NASPD, represents the epitome of “big brother” and the Germans accept this abberation of legality without questioning.
Sometime back in the seventies, while submitting my “Meldeantrag”, I said to the official : “Ich habe Ihnen meine Addresse gegeben , jetzt geben Sie mir Ihre” causing him almost fall from his chair in shock and astonishment, and the reaction of the people behind me being of pure amazement, evoking such remarks as “Er hat doch recht”.
I have a very good German friend who informed me , fifty years ago, that he simply hated this law and that he was moving to the US when possible, and he has been there for thirty-plus years.
Authenticjazzman “Mensa” quzalified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet and pro jazz musician.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks bequeathed to the world a society with healthier moral values than that of the West. If the protofascist regime of the Kerensky demagogue and Kolchak’s brutalism had prevailed, Russia would have been smashed much earlier and would be like the present Federal Republic of Germany, a political and moral vacuum parasitized by the United States.
As the 90s clearly demonstrate.
A calamity of some sort seems likely to happen before India can get their shit together (and off the streets). As the red october showed us, things don’t always retain a predictable trajectory.
FYI, Kolchak didn’t have the clout of Denikin and later Wrangel.
Kerensky didn’t endorse the Whites and vice-versa.
Lenin was a murdering elitist bastard, with Stalin being worse than him on human rights.
Lol. Yes, Mikhail, I really did l o l. Laughing in the morning brightens the whole day, thanks.
And Roosevelt was terrible on the dictatorship of the proletariat and eliminating exploiting classes.
Considering the interest of this blog with biodiversity and so forth, it would appear to be a glaring omission that the failure of Lenin to personally participate in the primary purpose of life, i.e., its continuation, has been unmentioned.
Laugh all you want Mao. Objective enough people see a significant difference between Roosevelt and Stalin.
Let Lenin sleep, he was nothing than patsy.
See the original footage, suppressed for 100 years, that proves it was Marauder-class robot who let the workers and peasants to victory!
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/185ajgyxptf9ujpg/original.jpg
http://historum.com/speculative-history/49556-robot-led-russian-revolution.html
A diligent effort to de-jewify the Bolshevik revolution: Cheka’s leadership were mostly Estonians… Germany gave (the equivalent of) $1 billion to the Bolsheviks (who? the Kaiser?) and Rosa Luxemberg was a temperate revolutionary concerned about “nations,” etc, etc. Pity that Mr Karlin ignores entirely the data in “Two Hundred Years Together.”
I read I think in Robert Service’s biography that he (and his wife) desperately wanted children but his wife was unable to conceive. The medical knowledge of the time was not enough to tell why. But he loved children and took great delight in the offspring of his associates and family members.
@Фрэнк в СПБ and reiner Tor
Committed revolutionaries do not often have children (except by accident): that would be too egotistically bourgeois.
Nadezhda Krupskaya was invariably called “Lenin’s life comrade” to the puzzlement of millions of childer indoctrinated in the USSR amd Soviet block schools (they did not dare ask “why not “wife?”). She was devoted to Lenin all her life, and lived in companionable revolutionary (but not erotic) ardor, with Nadezhda’s mother as their servant for many years.
It was only when Lenin was exiled to Siberia that they were hastily married so she would be allowed to accompany him. She was a tireless activist, distributing pamphlets to the workers they planned to ‘liberate’ but her most notable contribution after the bolsheviks took power was the legalization of abortion, which the Bolshevik Party accomplished ” largely because of the intellectual influence and political pressure placed on them by Krupskaya”, as communists proudly note.
There is a huge bronze statue (socialist realism school of art) of Nadezhda that I saw in a park in central Moscow, which represents her as a beautiful (and strong!) woman although in life she looked more like Golda Meir (she was not, however, Jewish).
So, no, no Lenin offspring, although he had an affair with Inessa Armand (Jewish and fertile–she had had 4 children with her husband). In his private as well as in his political life Lenin overtly preferred Jews and despised the Russian “duraks.” The JPost mentions Inessa Armand among Lenin’s band who accompanied him in the infamous “sealed train” and gleefully calls them (all Jews) “Russians” (in quotation marks):
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Was-the-Russian-Revolution-Jewish-514323
Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Che Guevara, the Shining Path, Mugabe. The Kim’s, Moral. Yeah. Right.
On the whole, the local Sultan, Rajah or Chief preferred the British over a local rival. “Freedom” didn’t mean anything to anyone else. Under Migabeism, you voted Once, For Ever. Not much freedom there.
The author is overestimating Lenin. He was not a Fu Manchu. The events of 1917, by their proportion, can not be credited to the simple action of an evil genius. The big problem was that the social order collapsed after the February / March revolution, and could only be restored by violence. The conservative / liberal elements of Russia did not have the means and the credibility to do so, they themselves had been careful to demoralize. The Bolsheviks won because they proposed to destroy an old order that had been delegitimized by itself.