Which showed a new record in Stalinophia, with positive views of the mustachioed Georgian BDSM master now approaching 70%.
Here is a more interesting/original poll.
https://twitter.com/MoskRussia/status/1118078387036327936
40% said they wanted the pensions they had under Stalin vs. 26% said they wanted the pensions they have under Putin.
Under Stalin, only bureaucrats and urban workers enjoyed pensions – kolkhoz workers only got them in 1956 – and they were extremely low relative to wages.
Anyhow, I wrote more indepth about modern Stalinophilia here: https://akarlin.com/tribal-stalinism/
Say this much for Stalin: He certainly had more friends – not to mention (((friends))) – in America than Putin has ever had.
On the other hand, I’m not entirely convinced that Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t at least a little bit mentally crippled, so, maybe I should not overrate Stalin’s achievement of penetrating the US gov’t and to some (arguable) degree even shaping major parts of American policy.
That’s a pretty depressing result.
It would be fun to calculate Stalin’s approval rating in America, from roughly 1938-1946, and compare it with Putin’s.
Stalinophilia was only ever strong among the morons and honest-to-God spies in Washington, but wartime necessity and propaganda probably gave it a boost in the American interior.
Whereas Putin is universally despised by the Blue + Red factions and either unknown or disliked in the rest of America.
But is Putin as hated now as Stalin was after the war, when the propaganda machine turned against him?
[snip] Although Russians still seem to hold the old scoundrel in high esteem, the Ukrainians, which according to him really are Russians (only in disguise?) don’t (at least not nearly as much). Dang, I don’t know what needs to be done to bring the opinions of Ukrainians into sync with their ‘elder brothers’ to the north??… [snip]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/RIAN_archive_535278_Laying_flowers_and_wreaths_to_Iosif_Stalin%27s_grave_at_Kremlin_wall.jpg/220px-RIAN_archive_535278_Laying_flowers_and_wreaths_to_Iosif_Stalin%27s_grave_at_Kremlin_wall.jpg
[snip]
AK: I don’t really care to have to start moderating these troll fights again.
‘Freedom fighers’ in Donbas are finally free to honor and show their respect for their ‘father’:
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a2564db07b98143cae4be96a0b6870794ac31f63/589_322_3524_2116/master/3524.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=dd24d3d88b3f9edeaf54059e3d2b37b8
Why do American media make puerile jokes about Putin?
For example, I remember a rather peculiar incident where they showed a animated clip where they showed Putin’s face on a stripper dancing on a pole on a comedy show (presumably a reference to Russia’s “anti-homosexual” laws or some such thing).
Actually, when I come across American programmes like the Daily Show or John Oliver I am unsure if it is intended to be news or comedy.
My first reaction is that it is silly comedy, but from what I find out on the internet it seems as if people actually take it seriously.
On the other hand, I think FOX and CNN and the rest of the alphabet soup might be worse, because they seem less aware (or pretend not to be aware) of the role they are playing and thus try appear as serious while behaving ridiculously as if they were in a sketch.
They seemingly do the same for Americans as well, ex. focusing on Trump’s hair (does it really matter if it is real or not?) or his “small hands” or his like for American fast food as if this had any importance what so ever.
I think it displays a lack of seriousness. Even for blood enemies like Erdoğan or the shitty Saudis I would find it undignified to not take them seriously. Or if they should be made into objects of mockery, it should be done in a more mature manner.
What troll fights? Exposing the incredulous ideas of one of the commentators at this blog should be acceptable? Perhaps, others that read this blog hold similar ideas too? I’ve always used sarcasm to try and shame the one holding an opposing view into a more rational point of view. Not a single idea expressed here is inaccurate.
Since it inevitably leads to spamfests that ruin threads I would just prefer it that Gerard2 and you/AP don’t talk to each other. Especially not when you (in this case) start trolling him right off the bat.
Sorry, got it!
Busy reading this book on Stalin:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529319/stalin-by-stephen-kotkin/9780143132158/
The most interesting part was how somebody mentioned what Stalin did was equivalent to some American founding father killing Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, etc, 20 years after the war for independence by claiming they were conspiring with the British. He killed almost all the senior staff of the military, people that were part of the communist movement before he even was and yet they did nothing, one would think they would at least attempt a coup to save their own lives, yet they all meekly accepted their fate in the purges, truly mind boggling.
Well, that’s an easy one:
Because they’re puerile. 🙂
Stalin was always able to control the spies and the security apparatchiks. He was more successful than any world leader in history in this sense. Reading about how he played Yezhov against Yagoda, then Beria against Yezhov, is remarkably interesting for studying upper management tactics! To this day, I have my suspicions about how John Wilkes Booth could possibly have approached Lincoln so easily (although I’m willing to accept incompetence and carelessness as excuses); and as for JFK, oh, how jealous he must have been of Stalin’s success. Even Hitler had a close call in 1938; according to things I recently read by Charles C. Tansill and Harry Elmer Barnes, Franklin Roosevelt’s pushing Chamberlain into appeasement helped prevent an imminent coup attempt by officers who believed a war at that point would have been unwinnable for Germany as they may have had to fight the Czechs, French, British, and Soviets. Off the top of my head, I can think of no such close calls for the great red chief.
And as an aside, I enjoyed Simon Montefiore’s accounts of Stalin’s alcoholic parties with his magnates. They used to slip tomatoes into Mikoyan’s suits. Good times.
Does Kotkin at all touch on the occasional Sovok notion that Stalin’s ’38 purge actually helped the Red Army by (supposedly) eliminating incompetents?
There is circumstantial evidence that Stalin was poisoned prior to starting another great purge and hand over the reign to a new generation of apparatchiks. The doctors’ plot was a prelude to that purge just like Kirov’s death was for the first one. Everyone, including Beria, wanted to get rid of Ole Uncle Joe to avoid another purge.
Personally, I have no warm feelings towards Stalin. From my perspective, his good deeds (rapid industrialization of Russia, which helped it win in WWII, and extermination of most “old guard” Bolsheviks) do not outweigh his crimes.
However, I see two reasons of the current surge of his approval. One is simple: the swing of the pendulum. He was over-demonized in the 1990s and is still demonized by libtards and Western propaganda. As the majority of Russians despise libtards and see Western propaganda as a pack of lies, their opposition to him works in Stalin’s favor (basically, by the principle that if the obvious scum dislikes you, you must be good). Second is likely driven by perceived threat. Current imperial policies towards Russia drive the hostility of the populace towards the Empire. Many view the Empire as an existential threat that won’t go away unless crushed. The last existential threat to Russia was Nazi Germany. So, the popularity of Stalin, who beat Nazis to pulp, increases.
In my view, if WWIII does not break out and make everything irrelevant, Stalin’s approval would subside. Objectively, he is at least as controversial as Ivan the Terrible (in Russian he is called “грозный” which means “fearsome” rather than “terrible”) and Peter the Great.
Agree. Those mudslinging fests got too repetitive and extremely boring. Nobody says anything new, just regurgitates old stuff ad nauseum, with old pictures that everyone has seen a zillion times.
Not to mention that experimental evidence perceived as unambiguous by everyone except clinically retarded would take another 10-20 years to accumulate.
I agree, that is the argument I made here: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/tribal-stalinism/
The funniest thing is, Stalin does not belong to the Russian tribe. Neither does Lavrov, Shoygu, Kadyrov, and many others. Another illustration of the difference between imperial and primeval tribal mentality.
It couldn’t have helped, but certainly many of the victims were incompetent, too.
Though a case could be made that his minions were too paralyzed to do anything. They were also not the kind of extreme risk-takers who would be likely to do things like that. But it’s at least possible.
What’s likely is that they made sure that Stalin didn’t receive medical help for a long time. They did so while maintaining plausible deniability, in case Stalin got better: they held meetings with all the important people, took their time to assemble, made very slow decisions, etc.
It’s worth mentioning that Stalin found it pretty difficult to start this planned last purge. The secret police chiefs incredibly complained of a lack of evidence. They knew well what had happened to Yezhov and Yagoda before, and they understood that one of the new victims would likely be Beria, the successor of Yezhov. They also understood that Stalin was now a very old man, who would probably die soon. So they weren’t really keen on doing Stalin’s bidding. Stalin didn’t have as much power in the early 1950s as in the 1930s.
I’m not entirely convinced that Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t at least a little bit mentally crippled
BS
FDR is easily one of top five greatest Presidents.
Both versions are plausible. On the one hand, his minions by that time were largely cowardly nonentities, not risk-takers. On the other hand, they knew that their lives were on the line, and cornered rats are remarkably dangerous. I guess they would be surprised to learn that Khrushchev, of all people, will come out a king rat and eat the rest. He was also surprised later to be deposed by another nonentity, Brezhnev. Court intrigues are full of surprises.
You forget to mention the most important part that the purge was to be Jewish/Zionist in nature.
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/world/new-study-supports-idea-stalin-was-poisoned.html
New Study Supports Idea Stalin Was Poisoned
By MICHAEL WINESMARCH 5, 2003
Fifty years after Stalin died, felled by a brain hemorrhage at his dacha, an exhaustive study of long-secret Soviet records lends new weight to an old theory that he was actually poisoned, perhaps to avert a looming war with the United States.
That war may well have been closer than anyone outside the Kremlin suspected at the time, say the authors of a new book based on the records.
The 402-page book, ”Stalin’s Last Crime,” will be published later this month. Relying on a previously secret account by doctors of Stalin’s final days, its authors suggest that he may have been poisoned with warfarin, a tasteless and colorless blood thinner also used as a rat killer, during a final dinner with four members of his Politburo.
They base that theory in part on early drafts of the report, which show that Stalin suffered extensive stomach hemorrhaging during his death throes. The authors state that significant references to stomach bleeding were excised from the 20-page official medical record, which was not issued until June 1953, more than three months after his death on March 5 that year.
Four Politburo members were at that dinner: Lavrenti P. Beria, then chief of the secret police; Georgi M. Malenkov, Stalin’s immediate successor; Nikita S. Khrushchev, who eventually rose to the top spot; and Nikolai Bulganin.
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The authors, Vladimir P. Naumov, a Russian historian, and Jonathan Brent, a Yale University Soviet scholar, suggest that the most likely suspect, if Stalin was poisoned, is Beria, for 15 years his despised minister of internal security.
Beria supposedly boasted of killing Stalin on May Day, two months after his death. ”I did him in! I saved all of you,” he was quoted as telling Vyacheslav M. Molotov, another Politburo member, in Khrushchev’s 1970 memoirs, ”Khrushchev Remembers.”
But Mr. Naumov and Mr. Brent dismiss Khrushchev’s own account of Stalin’s death, in the same memoirs, as an almost cartoonish distortion of the truth. With virtually everyone connected to the case now dead, the real story may never be known, Mr. Brent said in an interview this week.
”Some doctors are skeptical that if an autopsy were performed, that a conclusive answer to the question of whether he was poisoned could be found,” he said. ”I personally believe that Stalin’s death was not fortuitous. There are just too many arrows pointing in the other direction.”
The book, like most such volumes, paints a chilling portrait of Stalin, at once deeply paranoid and endlessly crafty, continually inventing enemies and then wiping them out as part of the terror that killed millions and kept millions more in the toil that enabled the Soviet Union to leap from czarism to the industrial age.
Yet modern Russians are torn about his memory. The latest poll of 1,600 adults by the All-Russian Public Opinion Center, released today on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his death, shows that more than half of all respondents believe Stalin’s role in Russian history was positive, while only a third disagreed.
By the poll’s reckoning, 27 percent of Russians judge Stalin a cruel and inhumane tyrant. But 20 percent call him wise and humane — among them the head of the Communist Party, Gennadi Zyuganov, who today compared Stalin to ”the most grandiose figures of the Renaissance.”
Mr. Brent and Mr. Naumov, the secretary of a Russian government commission to rehabilitate victims of repression, have spent years in the archives of the K.G.B. and other Soviet organizations.
Russian officials granted them access to some documents for their latest work, which primarily traces the fabulous course of the Doctors’ Plot, a supposed collusion in the late 1940’s by Kremlin doctors to kill top Communist leaders.
The collusion was in fact a fabrication by Kremlin officials, acting largely on Stalin’s orders. By the time Stalin disclosed the plot to a stunned Soviet populace in January 1953, he had spun it into a vast conspiracy, led by Jews under the United States’ secret direction, to kill him and destroy the Soviet Union itself.
That February, the Kremlin ordered the construction of four giant prison camps in Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Arctic north, apparently in preparation for a second great terror — this time directed at the millions of Soviet citizens of Jewish descent.
But the terror never unfolded. On March 1, 1953, two weeks after the camps were ordered built and two weeks before the accused doctors were to go on trial, Stalin collapsed at Blizhnaya, a north Moscow dacha, after the all-night dinner with his four Politburo comrades.
After four days, Stalin died, at age 73. Death was laid to a hemorrhage on the left side of his brain.
Less than a month later, the doctors previously accused of trying to kill him were abruptly exonerated and the case against them was deemed an invention of the secret police. No Jews were deported east. By year’s end, Beria faced a firing squad, and Khrushchev had tempered Soviet hostility toward the United States.
In their book, Mr. Naumov and Mr. Brent cite wildly varying accounts of Stalin’s last hours as evidence that — at the least — Stalin’s Politburo colleagues denied him medical help in the first hours of his illness, when it might have been effective.
Khrushchev and others recalled long after Stalin’s death that they had dined with him until the early hours of March 1. His and most other reports state that Stalin was later found sprawled unconscious on the floor, a copy of Pravda nearby.
Yet no doctors were summoned to the dacha until the morning of March 2. Why remains a mystery: one guard later said that Beria had called shortly after Stalin was found, ordering them to say nothing about his illness. Khrushchev wrote that Stalin had been drunk at the dinner and that his dinner companions, told of his illness, presumed that he had fallen out of bed — until it became clear things were more serious.
More telling, however, is the official medical account of Stalin’s death, given to the Communist Party Central Committee in June 1953 and buried in files for almost the next 50 years until unearthed by Mr. Naumov and Mr. Brent. It maintained that Stalin had become ill in the early hours of March 2, a full day after he actually suffered a stroke.
The effect of the altered official report is to imply that doctors were summoned quickly after Stalin was found, rather than after a delay.
The authors state that a cerebral hemorrhage is still the most straightforward explanation for Stalin’s death, and that poisoning remains for now a matter of speculation. But Western physicians who examined the Soviet doctors’ official account of Stalin’s last days said similar physical effects could have been produced by a 5-to-10-day dose of warfarin, which had been patented in 1950 and was being aggressively marketed worldwide at the time.
Why Stalin might have been killed is a less difficult question. Politburo members lived in fear of Stalin; beyond that, the book cites a previously secret report as evidence that Stalin was preparing to add a new dimension to the alleged American conspiracy known as the Doctors’ Plot.
That report — an interrogation of a supposed American agent named Ivan I. Varfolomeyev, in 1951 — indicated that the Kremlin was preparing to accuse the United States of a plot to destroy much of Moscow with a new nuclear weapon, then to launch an invasion of Soviet territory along the Chinese border.
Mr. Varfolomeyev’s fantastic plot was known in Soviet documents as ”the plan of the internal blow.” Stalin, the book states, had assigned the Varfolomeyev case highest priority, and was preparing to proceed with a public trial despite his underlings’ fears that the charges were so unbelievable that they would make the Kremlin a global laughingstock.
Mr. Naumov said in an interview today that that plan, combined with other Soviet military preparations in the Russian Far East at the time, strongly suggest that Stalin was preparing for a war along the United States’ Pacific Coast. What remains unclear, he said, is whether he planned a first strike or whether the mushrooming conspiracy unfolding in Moscow was to serve as a provocation that would lead both sides to a flash point.
”I am told that the only case when the two sides were on the verge of war was the Cuban crisis,” in 1962, he said. ”But I think this was the first case. And this first time that we were on the verge of war was even more dangerous,” because the devastation of nuclear weapons was not yet an article of faith.
Mr. Brent said he believes that fear of a nuclear holocaust could have led Beria and perhaps others at that final dinner to assent to Stalin’s death.
”No question — they were afraid,” he said. ”But they knew that the direction Stalin was going in was one of fiercer and fiercer conflict with the U.S. This is what Khrushchev saw, and it is what Beria saw. And it scared them to death.”
The authors say that Stalin knew of his comrades’ fears, citing as proof remarks at a December 1952 meeting of top Communist leaders in which Stalin began laying out the scope of the Doctors’ Plot and the American threat to Soviet power.
”Here, look at you — blind men, kittens,” the minutes record Stalin as saying. ”You don’t see the enemy. What will you do without me?”
Correction: March 8, 2003
An article on Wednesday about the death of Stalin and the possibility that he was poisoned by Politburo members to avert a looming war with the United States misstated the title and author of a memoir that included such a theory. It was by Vyacheslav M. Molotov, not by Nikita S. Khrushchev, and published in 1992 as ”Molotov Remembers.”
Which people is lavrov from?
I’ve heard he is half Armenian and half Georgian. Wiki says he had Armenian father and Russian mother from Georgia. Either way, he is another example showing that Russian is not a nationality, but a state of mind. This was best expressed by a former commander of Gorlovka (Donetsk People’s Republic) Bezler, who said: “my father is German, my mother Ukrainian; so, who am I? A Russian”.
Either you meant anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist, or you are grossly misinformed.
A few issues here affecting the counter-reaction to him in Russia:
Stalin made catastrophic decisions on land borders in the North Caucasus and central Asia that are still being felt today…on the other hand in the west he made a series of fair, brilliant decisions on land boundaries in Europe – that should result in most of the western countries bowing down to him.
Current problems in Ukraine are not because of the western regions that Stalin brought in…but because Kiev has been swamped with Soros/State Department money – it is Kiev becoming a nationalist/liberast stronghold that is the main problem – not actually the Galician f**ktards
Trotskysists spreading lies about him in order paint him as a tyrant ( many of the most notable anti-Russians in the west are ex-Trotskysists)
Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement misrepresentation – it was clearly sensible, necessary and not “pro-Hitler” Agreement
He came into a situation of the end of a vicious civil war and clear and widespread foreign attempts to destablise the country – the cost was too high – but no country in a similar situation wouldn’t have a very paranoid and powerful security apparatus
Popular music of his era in the USSR was way above that in Europe, Britain and equal with that of the Americans – & many of these great songs are war-era songs that are on the radio for a whole month in the leadup to Victory Day
Architecture of new buildings during his time was excellent throughout the Soviet Union – architecture that is commonly referred to as “communist” – particularly of the ‘brutalist’ style ( in other words architecture that many people despise, but many people appreciate) – was built in the Soviet Union a few years after he died
the other side of the repressions being reduction/low tolerance of corruption-plus part of his modern day “approval” being a reaction against modern-day nepotism (the fate of Stalin’s son being a well known issue)
I’m not sure why anyone would find Stalinophilia puzzling.
Under Stalin the Soviet Union became a superpower. Today Russia is at best a second-rate military power and a third-rate economic power with limited political influence. Russia regularly gets sand kicked in its face by the American bully. No-one ever kicked sand in Stalin’s face.
Russia has never been this weak, at least nor for centuries. From the time of the Seven Years’ War Russia was accepted as one of the Great Powers.
Admiring Stalin is the equivalent of wearing a MAGA hat. Why would people not want to Make Russia Great Again?
OK, Stalin killed a lot of innocent people. But so did Churchill, and the English still worship him. In fact Stalinophilia is very very similar to Churchillophilia. Britain and Russia are both ex-Great Powers, and there’s nothing more humiliating than being an ex-Great Power.
So where’s the mystery? I’m not sure it’s even depressing. It indicates that a lot of Russians really do want their country to be great again. That’s surely a sign of national health. It’s certainly an expression of nationalism.
Churchill killed foreigners, Stalin killed his own people.
Although considering the role Churchill has come to play in the British Tory mythology of anti-Nazism, Churchillophilia appears to be a liability for Britons now.
It is an understandable reaction for Russians, but he is a flawed figure to revere and comes with a lot of ideological baggage.
In that sense it would be healthier to admire Soviet war heroes like Zhukov or Tsarist personas like Suvorov or Potyomkin.
It doesn’t matter. You’re talking about the real Stalin. The Stalin who is admired today is a mythical figure (just like the Churchill who is admired today is a mythical figure). He’s just a symbol of a greatness that has been lost, a greatness many people would like to see restored.
Admirable heroes certainly (Suvorov was particularly awesome) but no-one outside Russia has heard of them. Part of the attraction of Stalinophilia is to upset westerners, especially Americans.
It is now obvious that Russian patriotism has to be fundamentally anti-American. The U.S. is determined to utterly destroy Russia. So the best symbolic figure is someone who will really get up Americans’ noses. And it has to be someone that Americans have heard of. Most Americans could not name a single eminent Russian historical figure but they’re certainly heard of Stalin.
Yes, 99% of Americans haven’t heard of anyone except Stalin. There is also Russian joke that the body of water between Mexico and Canada is called Stalin Straits. I am sure this also shows the admiration for the same mythological larger-than-life Stalin figure.
I’d bet this is most of the attraction. Same with most so-called “neo-Nazis,” who aren’t committed students of national socialism but instead mostly crude controversialists with a broadly anti-social outlook. In Soviet times prisoners would get Nazi tattoos just to thumb their noses at the authorities, so there’s definitely an ebb and flow to this stuff.