Author Topic: No Stalin, no Hitler?  (Read 104385 times)

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Offline RichC

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #315 on: March 11, 2009, 04:42:42 PM »

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greatest mass murderer in history except for Mao
It is offensive for you to slander Mao Zedong as a mass murderer. Chinese people honor the legacy of Mao Zedong.


Ok, now I know Zvezda is full of it...

Constantinople

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #316 on: March 15, 2009, 03:38:48 PM »
I shuddered when i read the comparison between Abraham Lincoln and Stalin.  Lincoln believed in freeing people and Stalin in exterminating them. 

I would suggest you read a good biography or the Stalinesque period.  I just finished Norman Davies Europe and he roughly estimates the death toll of Russians under Stalin to be somewhere between 30 and 40 million.
   
As for Mao Tse Dong, you just have to look at the Cultural Revolution to see the good that he did.
« Last Edit: April 11, 2009, 09:53:45 PM by Alixz »

Silja

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #317 on: March 16, 2009, 02:21:36 PM »

The right-wing leadership of the SDP stubbornly rejected the proposals of the KDP to unite for the defeat of fascism.


And rightly so. If the SPD had united with the KPD they might just as well have united with the National Socialists. The communists were just as extremist and antidemocratic as the nazis. Just like the nazi party they were hostile to democracy and aimed at the abolition of the democratic system of the Weimar Republic. The tragedy of 1932  was the fact that nearly two thirds of the German electorate had become contemptuous of the democratic system and voted for extremist parties - the Nazis and the KPD.

But such a unification with the KPD would certainly have been to the taste of a Stalinist like Zvezda. It would have anticipated what happened in 1945 in the SBZ, that is, East Germany, where the forced unification of SPD and KPD into the SED took place. Since 1990 Germany has had to invest billions of Euros to reconstruct the decrepit and completely bankrupt East. Long before 1989 East Germany managed to survive economically only by receiving huge credits from the West German class enemy.

Zvezda

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #318 on: March 16, 2009, 02:35:13 PM »
Silja, you have no idea what you're talking about. Ever since Lenin wrote "'Left-wing' Communism", Communists participated in the facade of bourgeois democracy and defended it against fascists. In Spain, Communists were at the forefront in the defense of the Republic. In France, Communists formed a coalition with the so-called Socialists. This was also the case in the post-war era.

And to characterize the Weimar system as democratic is a joke. When the workers tried to establish true democracy in January 1919, the bourgeois regime sent its goons to drown the revolution in blood. This was also true in the Bavarian Councils Republic and the March Actions of 1921 .
« Last Edit: March 16, 2009, 02:39:39 PM by Zvezda »

Zvezda

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #319 on: March 16, 2009, 06:00:18 PM »
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I wonder, Zvezda, if you are quite au courant with the recent scholarship about Sholokhov... he has a rather bad reputation in academic circles, because his authorship of And Quiet Flows the Don (or as it is elsewhere translated Silent Don) is much disputed.
To even question whether Sholokhov wrote the book is outrageous. It is you who is not not aware of recent scholarship about Sholokhov. A special investigation in the late 1920s in Russia upheld Sholokhov's authorship and the malicious slander was denounced in Pravda.

Sholokhov's archive was destroyed in a bomb raid during the war and only the 4th volume survived. Sholokhov had his friend Vassily Kudashov, who was killed in the war, look after it. Kudashov's widow then took posession of the manuscript  but she never disclosed the fact of owning it. The manscrupt was finally found in 1999 with the help of the Prime Minister Putin. It is currently held by Russia's Academy of Sciences. The manuscript consists of 885 A-4 pages and the writing paper dates back to the 1920s. 605 pages are written by Sholokhov and the rest are transcribed by his wife and sisters.

You can view PDF copies of the manuscript here
http://feb-web.ru/feb/sholokh/1927/1927.htm

JStorey

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #320 on: March 18, 2009, 04:42:35 PM »
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But just try to read Gladkov's execrable novel Cement. It's so bad it is unreadable. It only figures on graduate student reading lists at American universities today because of its historical value - much as Chernyshevskii's almost equally awful 19th-century novel, What Is to Be Done? survives on the same lists for the same reason.

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Gladkov’s “Cement” is an account of the heroic accomplishments of the working people and portrayed the Social Democrats’ inspiring ideas. Gorky valued Cement highly. He noted that the book illuminated the most important theme of the times—labor.

The novel “What is to be Done?” by Chernysehvsky is one of the finest works in Russian literature. The characters include Rakhmetov, the first professional revolutionary in literature and Vera Pavlovna, a progressive woman who devotes her life to socially useful work. The novel popularized the ideas of women’s equality and artel production. It is a synthesis of the author’s political and philosophical views and provides a plan of action for progressive youth. The novel had a great effect on Russian society and contributed to the education of many revolutionaries. 

Zvezda, while I disagree with virtually everything else you have written, in this particular case I am going to back you up 100%. 

Gladkov's "Cement" is not remotely unreadable; it is an excellent and historically important novel.  It vividly captures a profound moment in human history.  The pithy, sharp style of prose predates many similar and lauded works in western literature.  In short, I truly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone.

Chernyshevsky's novel, "What is to be Done?" is a brilliant work and one of the most influential books I have ever read, as far as shaping my world view and understanding its impact on others.  Those who argue Chernyshevsky's work falls short in fundamental areas of novel structure, plot, etc., miss the point entirely.  It is like judging the characters of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" as straw men (when that is precisely what they are:  straw men serving to illustrate a larger moral and ethical societal issue). 

Chernyshevsky, writing about a very serious topic, is both very funny and filled with brilliant asides on all variety of subjects (he is a dizzying encyclopedia of 19th century science).  Some of his insights are so profound one must put down the book and digest before moving on.  He apologizes on the first page for his "striking scenes" which he confesses outright will only serve the purpose of furthering his ideas.  In other words, he is very transparent in his agenda, to the point of humor.  And despite all that one comes to genuinely care for the characters within.  I would urge anyone interested in modern history to read it.  A world of swindlers and fools, indeed...

Gorky, incidentally, isn't a bad read either.  He's a very sentimental fellow, a humanist who is just as capable as Chekhov in capturing small, meaningful moments in life.  I'd recommend all three as vital additions to Russian literature, right up there with Bulgakov (my all time favorite), Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc.

Offline Olga Maria

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #321 on: March 19, 2009, 04:25:51 AM »
Oh, you can continue all your arguments after this comment. I would just like to ask if Russia finally admitted that the NKDV committed the Katyn Forest Murder?

Amazing colored fotos  by the most wonderful Yelena Aleksandrovna. Endless thank you very much!

Silja

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #322 on: March 19, 2009, 04:35:51 PM »
When the workers tried to establish true democracy in January 1919,

Very amusing indeed.

Offline RichC

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #323 on: March 19, 2009, 05:53:44 PM »
Oh, you can continue all your arguments after this comment. I would just like to ask if Russia finally admitted that the NKDV committed the Katyn Forest Murder?


Yes, they did in the late 1980's.  I think both Gorbachev and Yeltsin admitted it and released thousands of documents about it.  Beria, apparently played a major role in approving the details of the massacre.  But Putin has backtracked on a lot of it. 

Elisabeth

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #324 on: March 19, 2009, 10:12:46 PM »
Gladkov's "Cement" is not remotely unreadable; it is an excellent and historically important novel.  It vividly captures a profound moment in human history.  The pithy, sharp style of prose predates many similar and lauded works in western literature.  In short, I truly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone.

Chernyshevsky's novel, "What is to be Done?" is a brilliant work and one of the most influential books I have ever read, as far as shaping my world view and understanding its impact on others.  Those who argue Chernyshevsky's work falls short in fundamental areas of novel structure, plot, etc., miss the point entirely.  It is like judging the characters of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" as straw men (when that is precisely what they are:  straw men serving to illustrate a larger moral and ethical societal issue). 

Chernyshevsky, writing about a very serious topic, is both very funny and filled with brilliant asides on all variety of subjects (he is a dizzying encyclopedia of 19th century science).  Some of his insights are so profound one must put down the book and digest before moving on.  He apologizes on the first page for his "striking scenes" which he confesses outright will only serve the purpose of furthering his ideas.  In other words, he is very transparent in his agenda, to the point of humor.  And despite all that one comes to genuinely care for the characters within.  I would urge anyone interested in modern history to read it.  A world of swindlers and fools, indeed...

Well, needless to say I disagree. Gladkov is hardly "pithy" or "sharp" - in fact his style is a primary example of Soviet ornamentalism, very popular in the 1920s, and which, at its worst, as in his case, led to over-elaborate, overworked, ponderous prose.

IMHO, Chernyshevsky also couldn't write a decent novel to save his life. (I found nothing humorous in his prose, either. It was all dead serious and dead boring.) See Nabokov's novel The Gift, large parts of which serve as a commentary on Chernyshevsky and his magnum opus What Is to Be Done?. Nabokov is not unsympathetic to Chernyshevsky at all - in fact, the reader of The Gift is left weeping over the poor socialist's fate - but that doesn't mean that Chernyshevsky was a good or even a halfway decent writer, as Nabokov makes clear. What Chernyshevsky did have in abundance were... good intentions. And good intentions count for absolutely zero when it comes to aesthetics. I repeat, neither Gladkov's Cement nor Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? would even be read today if they were not important historical documents. In other words, artistically they amount to very little, but historically speaking they are of course quite interesting and illuminating.

But on the question of aesthetics... I will grant you this much... as the great writer Jane Austen so PITHILY and SHARPLY put it, "half the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other half."
« Last Edit: March 19, 2009, 10:21:51 PM by Elisabeth »

JStorey

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #325 on: March 20, 2009, 12:08:20 PM »
But Elisabeth, what about Gorky!  Don't you want to skewer him as well or are you going to leave him alone?

If you found Cement to consist of "over-elaborate, overworked, ponderous prose" I'm not sure you read the same book I did...  It is a very quick read; Gleb is a simple pragmatist who takes little time to ponder over anything!  But fair enough, I may be going overboard in comparing it to Russian greats. 

The criticisms of Chernyshevsky are of course well known...  "Dead serious" as far as I know, is not among them.  If you want to discard the artistic merit and focus on historical value, more power to you, but you are still left with a VITAL read.  If anyone here is inspired to read it, I'd recommend Michael R. Katz translation..

You're right about aesthetics; my tastes are admittedly a little eclectic (my favorite Tolstoy is "The Cossacks", for example)...  So we'll leave it to Jane Austen and agree to disagree. 

Elisabeth

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #326 on: March 20, 2009, 08:03:32 PM »
Yes, let's leave it to Jane Austen and be tolerant of one another's tastes. Most of this is purely subjective in the long run, anyway.

I wasn't going to touch on Gorky only because I found his novel Mother almost as unreadable (and laughable, in a bad way) as Cement or What Is to Be Done?. Which is to say, these are all very didactic novels, novels in the grand Russian tradition of telling people how to live their lives as the author sees fit. To be honest, I just couldn't stand Mother for its sentimentality and preachiness.

On the other hand, I liked Gorky's autobiographical novels, especially Childhood very, very much, and I would highly recommend them to anyone who is curious about working class and/or peasant life in Russia in the late nineteenth century. IMHO Gorky, unlike Chernyshevsky and Gladkov, was a writer of real talent. Unfortunately he often subjugated his artistry to didacticism, i.e., to the moral and social message he was trying to impart, or later in his life, to historical exigencies, which is somewhat but not completely understandable, given the pressures he was under living in the Soviet Union during the Stalin period. Still, he chose freely to return to the Soviet Union and he chose more or less freely to write paeans to the Stalinist regime. The passage about Gorky visiting the Gulag in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is more than a little damning. I can't imagine Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, or for that matter Chekhov, behaving in such a spineless and cowardly manner.

Zvezda

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #327 on: March 21, 2009, 01:33:42 PM »
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I repeat, the only truly great writers the Soviet Union ever produced during its brief lifespan were Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (born December 1918) and Joseph Brodsky (born 1940
None of these anti-social outcasts achieved any notable success in their native country. Because they were hopeless failures, they sold themselves out to Russia's enemies in the propaganda war against the country. When the enemies of Russia succeeded in destroying the country with the help of traitors like Yetlsin, the likes of Solzhenitsyn lost any usefulness for the imperialists and monopolists and were abandoned by the popular media. There were literally thousands of far more successful, talented and intelligent writers such as the Writers' Union chairmen Vladimir Stavsky, Alexander Fadeyev, Nikolai Surkov, Konstantin Fedin, and Georgi Markov whose works were ignored by western mass media.

Elisabeth

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #328 on: March 23, 2009, 07:26:39 PM »
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I repeat, the only truly great writers the Soviet Union ever produced during its brief lifespan were Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (born December 1918) and Joseph Brodsky (born 1940
None of these anti-social outcasts achieved any notable success in their native country. Because they were hopeless failures, they sold themselves out to Russia's enemies in the propaganda war against the country. When the enemies of Russia succeeded in destroying the country with the help of traitors like Yetlsin, the likes of Solzhenitsyn lost any usefulness for the imperialists and monopolists and were abandoned by the popular media. There were literally thousands of far more successful, talented and intelligent writers such as the Writers' Union chairmen Vladimir Stavsky, Alexander Fadeyev, Nikolai Surkov, Konstantin Fedin, and Georgi Markov whose works were ignored by western mass media.

Zvezda, you make me laugh, you really do. You think utter nonentities like Stavsky, Fadeyev, Surkov, etc., are even worthy to be mentioned in the same sentence as great authors like Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky? Let me tell you, all the best minds in the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s knew who the best Russian-born writers were, and needless to say, those writers weren't the (deservedly unknown today) communist party hacks you name here.

Zvezda

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Re: No Stalin, no Hitler?
« Reply #329 on: March 26, 2009, 03:29:09 PM »
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You think utter nonentities like Stavsky, Fadeyev, Surkov, etc
Authors like Fedin, Fadeyev, Markov, etc won several prizes and orders for their outstanding achievements in literature. Their work was highly favored by the critics and was read by millions of people. There is a monument to Konstatin Fedin in his native Saratov. The same cannot be said of mentally unstable outcasts like Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky in their native countries. The Western mass media constructed cults around the likes of Sinyavsky not because of their talent but simply as part of their propaganda warfare against Russia.
« Last Edit: March 26, 2009, 03:32:08 PM by Zvezda »