[HN Gopher] A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books
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A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books
Author : canthandle
Score : 24 points
Date : 2022-03-10 21:32 UTC (1 hours ago)
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| panick21_ wrote:
| A lot of that rings pretty true. Stephen Kotkin's own biography
| that I have been reading his some of the same points.
|
| Because of the new archives you can really get an insight into
| the day to day operation of an empire that combined the power and
| function of New York, Washington, LA, Detroit and SF into one
| centrally run from an office. Its a a baffling process where
| Stalin moves between editing movies, deciding how many tanks to
| build and what kind, who would lead what part of the local
| bureaucracy and how to respond to an inquiry from a major foreign
| state and those meeting might be on the same day.
|
| I highly recommend Kotkin two volumes on Stalin!
|
| Being interested in WW1-WW2 timeframe what always struck me is
| the difference between Hitler and Stalin based on their basic
| outlook.
|
| Hitler world-view was basically pessimistic, all races were in a
| global struggle for dominance, and its either win now or lose
| everything for ever. Low chance of success, no matter, its not or
| never. Germans were simply not close to the largest ethnic group.
|
| Stalin on the other hand was fundamentally a Communist. Being in
| the end successful was not really a question, the global
| revolution was coming and they would win. Its really only a
| question of how long it would take. History would inevitably push
| in their direction.
|
| Stalin foreign policy (not unlike Chamberlains) was to pull
| Germany to his side, because his fundamental Geo-strategic
| believe was that the global communist revolution would happen
| when the Capitalist were fighting in war against each other. But
| this time, the 'right reactionaries' would find the Red Army
| supporting the revolutionary.
|
| German attack on France/Britain was everything Stalin had dreamed
| about for 2 decades. Decades of work leading him to the promised
| land, the Great Capitalistic War. And his plan very well might
| have worked, it was a decent strategy. Germans invaded with tanks
| using Soviet fuel and many other materials. But, French Army and
| Nation were not as they were in WW1 and they collapsed like a
| house of cards within weeks. Germany had landed into total
| continental power and most nations of Eastern Europe preferred
| them to the Soviets.
|
| Stalin plan turned from mopping up weak regimes into being
| opposed by major very aggressive continental power. The Blowback
| of this strategy was gigantic, with 50+ million Soviets dying
| until it was over.
|
| I despise Stalin and all the Bolsheviks, but Russian history is
| endlessly fascinating.
| pasabagi wrote:
| I'm reminded a bit of Marx's Eighteenth Bruminaire of Louis
| Bonaparte, where the line 'once as grand tragedy, and the second
| time as rotten farce' was coined, because just like Napoleon III
| to Napoleon I, compared to Stalin, Putin is a dwarf.
|
| Sadly, I don't find the comparison particularly reassuring.
| Hilter, another 'moon-calf', with his 'first available dozen
| debt-encumbered lieutenants', did far more damage than Stalin
| ever did, and far more damage still than Bismark, who would be
| the 'big' Napoleon to Hitler's 'little'.
|
| The amount of horror a head of state can spawn has little or no
| relation to their individual talents or lack thereof. I think
| Stalin is a bit of an outlier, in that he took a fairly sane if
| shaky revolutionary party, and turned it into a cannibalistic
| monster state, essentially through his own hard work and talent.
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