[HN Gopher] A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books ___________________________________________________________________ A Voracious Reader: Stalin through his books Author : canthandle Score : 24 points Date : 2022-03-10 21:32 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (drb.ie) (TXT) w3m dump (drb.ie) | 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-10 23:00 UTC)