Russia has yet to recover from the trauma of the Stalin era

The Guardian ^ | Mar 2018 | Sergey Parkhomenko

[GoldenState_Rose]

Earlier this year the Russian ministry of culture banned the satirical film The Death of Stalin, because it contained “information whose dissemination is prohibited by law”. On Russian social media, the withdrawal of the film’s licence was met with widespread laughter and scorn: what sort of secrets could this movie possibly have disclosed? Could it be that Stalin is indeed dead? – so went the irony.

Back in December, there had been an ominous precursor: Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s FSB intelligence services, told the Rossiyskaya Gazeta that Stalin-era repressions had been justified. He mentioned the need to counter Trotsky’s networks, and plots that had “ties with foreign secret services”. He also claimed that “mass-scale political repression” had ended by 1938 – a blatant rewriting of history.

Meanwhile, new monuments, banners and exhibits honouring Joseph Stalin are sprouting up around the country, while hundreds of Soviet-era representations of him have been left intact: busts and bas-reliefs of the man, statues big and small, standing or on horseback. Twice a year, on his birthday and on the anniversary of his death, admirers bring piles of red carnations to Stalin’s grave on Red Square.

But Stalinism today in Russia isn’t found in those monuments, flowers, or posters – nor is it in censorship or the double-speak of high-level officials. Instead it is hidden in the minds of many Russians, in how they perceive history, and how they relate to fundamental values.

For most Russians, those millions of victims are nothing but cold statistics. Few people care to pore over the difficult and unpleasant questions. That’s because an unprocessed, psychological trauma remains in our society.

Four years ago, I decided to do something about this. I went to the Moscow offices of the human rights organisation Memorial with an idea...

[Telepathic Intruder]

That’s especially true in Ukraine, where he wiped out most indigenous Ukrainians and replaced them with ethnic Russians. It’s also the cause of so much unrest there today, because the ethnic Russians are more closely tied to Russia than to Ukraine.

[BobL]

Once the Neocons get their way and Putin takes out a few US cities over Syria, the Russians won’t have to think about Stalin being some kind of hero - they’ll have Putin instead.

[rbmillerjr]

Putin the hero

actually he is a common thug of the same variety of the rogue states he allies with like Iran and Nk.

He’s merely a mobster who has controlled the oligarchs for a period of time.

A bad move here and their inferior military will kill sales for the next 10 years.

[BobL]

“A bad move here and their inferior military will kill sales for the next 10 years.”

Just because we sat on our asses for the past 25 years doesn’t mean that they did. You may want to read up a bit on their hypersonic cruise missiles before being so cocky about winning WW3 against them.

[livius]

Very interesting project. I just saw The Death of Stalin tonight...it’s a very funny movie, very Monty Python (Michael Palin is in it), as you see everybody frantically trying to figure out who’s in charge, save themselves and blame somebody else.

And the grim sight gags are good...there’s always someone being dragged off the street, shot, beaten, etc. In the background while everybody else just goes on with their business.

It really must be difficult to recover as a nation from something like Stalin and the world he created.

[dr_lew]

He’s merely a mobster ...

like Trump ? ... :-(

[Cronos]

Russia's case is a classic Stockholm syndrome

let's look at their greatest heroes through the centuries

1. Alexander Nevsky - basically he led a small force agaisnt a raiding force from Sweden and claimed it as a great victory. The rest of the time he was a tax colelctor for the great Khan
2. Ivan The terrible - or in Russian Ivan Grozny (the "awesome" for want of a better translation) - murdered many
3. Peter the Great - murdered many
4. Catherine the great - murdered many
5. Stalin - ditto

[rbmillerjr]

Already have...we are good.

[Cronos]

Russia see's things differently, collectively. Muscowy is not part of the West, it is a continuation of both the Mongol Empire and the Byzantine Empire.

The millions of their own killed are coincidental to the act of their great power.

Stalin was a monster, but he made them great, so goes their thinking

This is why they could never understand the Poles - both are Slavs but their mentality is so utterly different even at an individual level: you get 2 Poles together and you will have 3 political parties. poles love to debate, argue, disagree. But Ruskies don't - they get hot and bothered and will stick to the "party line"

Stalinism was a natural fit - Stalin was the Red Tsar.

Even under the Tsars, the Russian peasants were treated horribly - worse than Poles or other conquered peoples were, yet the Russians didn't revolt against the Tsar

It's what Stalin said "Communism in Poland is like putting a saddle on a bull"

[Cronos]

The thing is that the various Soviet systems were just perfections of what the Tsars from the 1700s and 1800s did -- secret police, gulags, etc.

Arguably you can go back to Ivan the terrible or even the Mongol invasion of the Rus to see that things ever since then have been pretty much the same

[Cronos]

There is a difference -- the nutzis killedJews,Poles, Russians based on race.

The commies killed everyone.....

[Cronos]

Good link, WMarshal

[Cronos]

Telepathic Intruder -

• the nutzis were not "white supremacists" --
  • they slaughtered Jews, Poles and Russians - all "white" people - arguably poles are more blue-eyed and blonde than Germans
  • They allied with Hungarians and Finns (of partly Asiatic origin through the Finno-Ugric tribes) and with the Japanese
  • They considered the "Aryan" race great, forgeting that Aryans were originally Indo-Iranis, not Germanics. Also the gysies were aryans yet were slaughtered worse than Jews
  
  
  
• Correct about the publicity - but you also forget that the US, UK etc. allied with the commies, so talking about your allies atrocities are a strict no, no. Read Hellstorm - the end of
  
  
• Correct
• Correct again, the argument going that 'communism has never been actually tried'
  
• Oh yes, so correct about the libs agreement with the omlet

---------

Dfw - we are lucky that Stalin went against Lenin and Trotsky - they wanted perpetual revolution, to carry communism into Europe and the Americas. They wanted to keep fighting continuously. Stalin wanted his own fiefdom so came up with communism in one country. If Trotsky won, then WWII would have started in 1920 with the defeat of the Poles (arguably one of the big reasons the Poles won was that Stalin was playing political games and kept a force in the south instead of sending them north to aid Tukachevsky).

If Trotsky had won, there is a strong likelihood he would have won the Polish-Soviet war, and then the German and French and English trade unions would have risen -- these trade unions already stopped aid to Poland under the slogan "hands off Russia" - they would have risen with Soviet help and we would have a communist Europe in 1930, including England.

Also, DFW, Stalin's Russification was already started in the late 1800s - after the German reunification, there was a strong process of Russification -- Marie Curie-skłodowska was forced to study only in Russian and speaking Polish in her class in the 1880s was forbidden, not even during the break times.

Teh difference is that under the Tsars it was haphazard, chaotic, while the Bolshies brought scientific methods to their process.

Telepathic - "That’s especially true in Ukraine, where he wiped out most indigenous Ukrainians and replaced them with ethnic Russians. It’s also the cause of so much unrest there today, because the ethnic Russians are more closely tied to Russia than to Ukraine." -- that's not completely true, there are few to no "indigenous Ukrainians who are distinct from the other Eastslavs: Russkies and Belarussians"

Ukraine's or rather the Ruthenians existence as a separate/distinct East Slavic nation, distinct from Russia is sketchy at the least. They along with the Belarussians and Russians are East Slavs, very similar culturally, religiously and linguistically. The similarity is between the German nations of Hesse and Baden. The Uks, Bes and Muscowites are all Orthodox (that’s how they define themselves), their langauges are mutually comprehensible and culturally they are similar with the exception that Muscowite culture developed into high culture while Ukrainiana nd Belarussian remained local, village or folk cultures (as they were ruled by stronger cultures either Polish or Muscowite)

you need to realize that Ukraine and Russia are so closely intertwined as nations due to history and blood it is difficult to separate it out. They both originate in Kievan Rus, but then the Muscowites took on the role of the Mongol Khans (I can elaborate if you want), while Ukraine became part of the Polish commonwealth and then was depopulated for a long, long time due to Tatar raids (”harvesting of the steppe”) - so the people in the Ukraine today are mostly descendants of other East Slavic people from what is now Russia, Belarus etc. admixed with Turks, Tatars, Georgians, Mordvins etc. Ukraine has only had a chance to develop its separate identity since 1990 and that was too late.

Until the Tsar's pacified the Tatars in the early 1800s, the area of the Ukraine was depopulated or populated by people escaping theheavy hand fo the Tsars or from Polish/Ruthenian lords. The Tatars kept the land depopulated with their slaving raids

By the 1930s there were people speaking different variants of East Slavic in what is now Ukraine, but you couldn't (and still can't) put a hard linguistic border

A friend of mine who is a super-linguist and speaks English, Standard German, Hessian, Bawarian, Swabian, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian pretty well (her English and Polish are flawless and standard german is her native tongue along with Schweizerdeutsch) told me that there are more differences between different "German dialects" like hessian/bawarian/Standard German than between Ukrainian and Russian or between Czech and Slovak

That goes hand in hand with the saying that

What's the difference between a language and a dialect?

A language is a dialect with an army

[Cronos]

I would suggest reading about life under the Tsars. Strangely enough, it was a precursor to Stalinism - Iosef just improved the police state (and arguably the Norks “perfected” it)

[Telepathic Intruder]

The Nazis were white supremacists mostly from a liberal point of view, as a political wedge. The "Aryan race", as they called it, were Indo-Europeans who were not really a race, but a language. A language doesn't make a race. The Nazis hated western-style democracy in favor of eastern-style autocracies. They allied themselves with such more on that basis.

It sounds like Ukraine was never a safe place to live, starting with the Mongol invasions.

[PIF]

Joe murdered 69,000,000 ... not a few million.

[PIF]

Shickelgruber murdered about 20,000,000 all totaled.

Joe got 69,000,000

Mao got 150,000,000

islam got 270,000,000 (rough very conservative estimate only)

you do the math

[Telepathic Intruder]

I only know what they tell me. Otherwise, I'd either be complicit or among the dead. 20 million is not an uncommon estimate for Hitler. But at least 100 million under communism. 200 million is not a stretch. All in the last 100 years. Islam has been murdering for the last 1,400 years however. Many, many millions, who knows. Their genocides still continue today.

I don't think it requires a lot of math skills to realize that's a lot.

[Cronos]

#1 Nutzis could be correctly put as big-government nationalist socialists.

#2 The Aryan race as who called it? To the Germans it was a sub-division of a race (Caucasians), for historians like me Aryans are the endonom for the Indo-Iran branch of Indo-European people

A langauge doesn't make a race, but in this case the IE people are genetically related from north India to Ireland going by the haplogroups -- their combination of horse-riding and iron and the agricultural revolution borne by the two made them easily overwhelm and assimilate the other native peoples in Europe (who were hunter gatherers mainly or some Middle Eastern origin agriculturalists

The Nutters were about glorification of state. Socialists...

-----

Well, the Ukraine was a safe place to live when one entity controlled the entire steppe land -- that happened rarely: before 200 AD it was the Scyths and their Sarmatian (ancestors of the Alan) Iranian lords over a proto-Slavic population.

Then came the Goths, Tervingi, Hosur etc. who caused mayhem from 200 AD until about 700 AD. At the end of this time the Western and Southern Slavs had already departed. The next peaceful time was the early Rurikid dynasty. But that was a couple of centuries.

Anyway, to my point, Ukraine was strangled at birth , so leaving no chance to grow into a developed state. Putin wants to ensure this (no comment on the rights or wrongs, just that's what he's trying to do)

[Cronos]

One figure to remember is 5%that's the percentage of the earth's population killed as part of thejihad launched by Timur-E-Lang (Tamerlane). Timur destroyed the Ancient Church of the East that was based in Ctesiphon (bagdad) and had missions and daughter churchs from Mongolia (Naiman tribe) to India and beyond. he nearly committed genocide against the Georgians too