Allies and Soviets should not be a single command

[JerseyJohn]

Well said.

I'm bending over backwards trying to understand reasoning that is totally contrary to everything I've always believed in.

Regarding the legions of brilliant Russians who emerged under the Soviet System, those mentioned already and the long list of brilliant Russians who fled the country (Igor Stravinsky, etc.,) I can't help but think of the unlucky ones who vanished in the gulags. How could their deaths have helped the country?

Sure I feel the end result could have been achieved more quickly and with infinitely less suffering than was done under Stalin. But having said that I'd like to see if EB or anyone else can produce valid arguments to the contrary. All I can imagine is that only a cruel and ruthless dictator could have come to power at that in Russia and the alternative was a worse person than Stalin.

Lennin and Trotsky, both liberal by comparison, also resorted to what we in the West would consider cruel and extreme measures. Some historians have traced many of Stalin's policies to doctrine first stated by Lennin. Trotsky was not above mass executions and other brutal measures. Beyond that, however, I don't believe either of them would have taken those measures past the initial period of revolution. I can't imagine either the gulags or purges taking place under either of them.

But would they have maintained power with people like Stalin lurking in the shadows? I don't know, this is all only speculation. I've read a lot of Trotsky and respect him. On Lennin I'm less well informed -- most of his writings I've come across seem to deal directly with bringing him and his followers to power but there are many volumes of his writing I've never seen at all, so I can't voice an opinion. He was obviously a great leader and the right man to turn up at the right time -- Kerensky and the Duma bunch always seemed hopeless to me.

I've read a lot on Stalin's cynical ways, how the purges and forced labor amused him, how he even sent the wives of his inner circle members to the camps and thought that was funny as well.

I'm not a defender of Stalin or Stalinism -- yet it's interesting that so many Americans and Englishmen, George Bernard Shaw and others, returned from trips to Russia with the Uncle Joe image in the late thirties and during the War, when it was fashionable.

During the war Soviet victories were routinely presented as Stalin's victories. Even the final winning of the war was presented as Stalin's victory, presumably the 20 million or so who died only did so in helping him.

Even the tactics employed by the Red Army seem overly callous -- troops attacking minefields as though they were enemy positions -- were tactics like that truely necessary?

As dgaad says, EB is, no doubt, a true believer. I have no burning desire to swing him over to my viewpoint (I doubt I'd be able to), but as the only Stalinist I've yet come across I want to hear his reasoning.

None of this is intended as a put-down. EB is among the people whose views interest me most, along with the views of those who attack those views with the greatest vigour!

---

An old, admittedly very corny anecdote [also in various forms with Hitler as the subject] about Stalin's resurrection by whatever Soviet Premeir happened to be in office.

. . . .

STALIN "You thawed me out, is very good."

PREMIER "Boss, you've got to help us!"

STALIN, "No, I'm happily retired now."

PREMIER, "Please Boss, we're really in trouble!"

STALIN, "Well, okay, if Mother Russia requires it I'll take my old job back, but I say right now, this time it's no more Mr Nice Guy."

-- --

My apologies, I figure this was the last time I'd get to use it -- and I'm sure you'll agree!

[ October 22, 2002, 08:15 AM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]

[dgaad]

God, that was a funny anecdote JJ.

[Desert Dave]

As originally posted by JerseyJohn:

Russia, having been completely torn apart three times in the twentieth century, was not likely to be led by a Thomas Jefferson, the leader had to be someone who clubbed his way to the top and was willing to keep clubbing those behind him before they clubbed him.

The story I'd like to read -- and I mean the REAL DEAL, brush off the fairy-dust story, is Gorbachev's rise & fall and eventual ouster.

To accomplish what he did -- betraying a bitterly entrenched Institutional mind-set by agreeing to the blowing down of the Berlin Wall, surely suggests some other-worldly attributes, as though he saw it all in epiphany or dream -- USSR's bane and salvation as one and the same... the great fauvist bear, curled in a bedraggled ball, chewing at its paws...

(... I was fortunate enough, if that is the proper word, to have seen this jagged, barb-infested monstrosity -- this angry, pustular wall! -- the very rusty red gate of Hell itself could never look so offensive! so, idiotly... pitiful... and the ONLY time I felt a similar sort of feeling, a kind of dreadful, atavistic frisson that turned Then & Never inside out and... shriveled, was while standing in Dallas' Dealey Plaza -- 'round about midnight, under a squalid, pale yellow moon, 1966 it was, mea culpa, returning from leave and driving to North Fort Polk, La... )

I am thinking that his final, excruciating decision MUST have taken immense courage and extreme powers of steel-girded nerves. To me, it deserves mention right along with such out-of-time, out-of-bounds almost-avatars as Thoreau, Ghandi, MLK, and any others blessed with a terrific constitution and an ALL-encompassing Universe Vision.

At least I see it that way for now. Future documents may alter my opinion. Anyway, I would wonder why a modern-era Russian would not PREFER to hold dear -- such heroic deeds as Mr Gorbachev's?

[JerseyJohn]

Unless I missed it, the decisions to leave civilians unevacuated from cities like Lenningrad and Stalingrad, even though they were about to become large scale battlefields, hasn't been brought up -- the logic being soldiers would fight harder for inhabited dwellings than empty ones. It's all the more poignant in the case of Lenningrad because the probability of siege and starvation was seen even as the Germans made their way north.

An amazing thing to me is how Russians exposed to Westernization became enemies of the state; including officers returning from military missions to Germany; missions they had been sent on by the very people having them arrested! Dock workers unloading western freighters at Archangel and Murmansk, even if they never made eye contact with American or British sailors, merchant seamen, whatever -- and before the war, civilians in Vladivostok who were told to be good hosts to a visiting American cruiser.

And that reasoning didn't die with Stalin, it extended into the seventies and eighties on a lesser level when Russians, including soldiers returning from Warsaw Block assignments, were eyed with suspicion; yet Stalin was long dead and two decades had passed since Kruschev's denunciation of his methods.

Immer's last entry did a lot to put this issue, with all it's antagonisms, into perspective.

I don't think we're beating a dead horse with all this. For one thing, Hussein, more than anyone else, reminds me of Stalin. The U.S.'s handling of Iraq during the past decade and a half demonstrates that it never learned very much from dealing with Russia in the Stalin era.

From the way the U.S. has dealt with Iraq the past couple of decades it seems apparent we didn't learn very much from the Stalin era.

Seems we pretty much wait for dictators to die, then hope for the best.

As for this forum, I hate to see it turn into an open season for attacks on EB.

True, EB has expressed many views a lot of us feel hostility towards. But he's also forced us to examine our feelings about these things and express our thoughts openly -- who ever figured to be drawn into a debate on the merits of Stalin's rule of Russia? Okay, so it's not so much a debate as a seething vortex.

Then there are the many postings in this and other forums where EB is insightful and gets good discussions going on interesting topics.

Say what you will, I say, Thank you EB!

--

(okay, okay, I'll leave that other alleged anecdote buried with the unresurrected Stalin --)

--

New anecdote, hopefully not as lame as the last. This was from a cartoon in a Russian publication presumably from the sixties, can't pin it down more specifically as it was told to me by the same Russian emigree:

Brezshniev shows his mother his limos and drivers and the old Czarist palace he lives in and says, "Well, momma, what do you think of your son now!" She looks around apprehensively and says, "Very nice, Leonid, but how will you explain it to the communists?"

-- Which marks my official retirement from the entry ending anecdote business. --

[ October 22, 2002, 08:49 AM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]

[dgaad]

Originally posted by JerseyJohn:

Unless I missed it, the decisions to leave civilians unevacuated from cities like Lenningrad and Stalingrad, even though they were about to become large scale battlefields, hasn't been brought up -- the logic being soldiers would fight harder for inhabited dwellings than empty ones. It's all the more poignant in the case of Lenningrad because the probability of siege and starvation was seen even as the Germans made their way north.

There were almost no large scale evacuations during the war in Russia. EXCEPT see below.

There are a host reasons for this, so far as I know.

1. As a practical matter, the Soviets simply had neither the plans, practice, rail rolling stock, or even the expertise to conduct such operations. This was true when the Soviets launched most of the territory they were to lose in 1941, but the truth of this matter also extends into 1942 and 1943 when the Germans took over huge areas in South Russia, and during the German recovery of the Donbass and Kharkov in early 1943.

2. Stalin's general view, which was explicitly stated on several occasions, was that the people living in those areas were *responsible* for the loss of the area, not the army. Accordingly, they would have to suffer the pain of occupation. Stalin felt that this policy would have a "tonic" effect on the citizenry should the Germans push on to other cities. Of course, this is a completely skewed view of the capabilities and culpability of the Soviet citizen.

3. Stalin also stated and implemented this policy for the reason that, if there were Soviet citizens in the front line or which remained behind as the Germans advanced, it would be easy thereafter to mobilize the population either to assist the army (which was done on a large scale by, for example, digging anti-tank ditches) or to mobilize the citizenry in a partisan role.

4. As the Russians lost more and more of their prime grain producing areas, they were less and less able to feed the population remaining in Soviet-held areas. Stalin knew that if large scale evacuations had been done, the food situation in Soviet held areas would become critical -- if not impossible. So, in his view, it was better to leave the citizens to their fate at the hands of the Germans than to have to feed millions of refugees.

====

The cost to the ordinary citizen for these policies were immense. Approximately one-half of all loss of life occurred among the citizenry, mostly due to German brutality, but also due to starvation and the collateral damage of battle.

I read a story of one Soviet soldier at the front near Moscow who's hometown was in his sector of the front, but behind German lines. Late in 1941, the orders came down to begin shelling that town with all the regularity permitted by the supply of ammo. It was known among all the Soviet soldiers that the citizens of that town had been forced to stay there, and this one man pleaded with his commander to spare the town as his own relatives would be under fire and likely killed. Of course, you can guess that his request was refused, and he was sent to a penal battalion for making it.

Edit Note : just after I wrote this I remembered that there were large scale evacuations of citizens in the Soviet Union during the war. However, they were not to save the citizens.

There were large numbers of people of German stock living in various areas in Russia. I forget exactly which towns these were, but they were sort of like German colonies that had been formed in the 17th-18th-19th centuries when the Tsars had had on occasion very friendly relations with various German states such as Prussia. Stalin had these communities uprooted and sent to Siberia to work essentially as slaves for Soviet war industry. Their crime was of course being ethnically German, though they knew little of Germany and many of them no longer spoke German at all. Some of these movements involved over 200,000 souls. There were a couple of other ethnic groups this happened to during the war, but I can't remember the details. One of them I know was in the area south of the Don River.

[ October 22, 2002, 03:46 PM: Message edited by: dgaad ]

[JerseyJohn]

Makes sense, at it's height Germany had 70,000,000 Russians in it's occupied areas (according to "Stalin, the Glasnost Revelations" Walter Lacquer). I didn't see evacuations in this sort of logistical light, but it explains much.

A Russian friend told me the civilian populations in areas occupied by the Nazis were ever after looked on with suspicion by Stalin.

Another example was surrendered soldiers who were also seen as traitors and their families held responsible. Of course, when Stalin's own son was captured he was allowed to get around all that by simply disowning him.

Does the state exist to serve the people or the people exist to serve the state?

Both dictators believed the latter, of course.

A basic difference between Hitler and Stalin in this regard is Hitler chose to exalt his own people as the priveledged superior race where Stalin, perhaps because his population was so diverse, granted them universal suffering and counted on their ability to absorb hardship and arbitrary abuse to fulfill his agendas.

In planning Barbarossa Goering made a remark to the effect of, "I shouldn't like to be a Russian!" Rather than put Germany in a war economy the nazi heirarchy chose the planned plunder of an entire nation, the calculated starvation of millions -- this is as incredible as any abuse Stalin ever committed. What gets to me is it's random idiocy; why create enemies out of people who only want to be left alone?

Can't find the deported minority you mentioned but I know who you mean, Stalin considered all of them to be traitors, even those serving in the army who had been decorated in combat. They were recalled and sent to Siberia with everyone else. No doubt someone will post their identity in a day or two.

-- Mind boggling insanity, all of it!