Grump's Reviews > Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

STALIN PART 2

Holy frick, you guys. Are y’all into details? Because whoa shoot is this the book for you. It is relentless in its detail. Meetings and dudes and other meetings that happen simultaneously with different dudes. Everybody’s name is Fuckanovich or Zukaplansky. So if you’re into tedium, seek your Mecca in these pages.

Overall though, it was a pretty interesting bog to wade through. A lot of crazy stuff went down on this guy’s watch. But its Talmudic breadth made it hard for me to encapsulate the whole thing. Also, I didn’t take my usual notes as I went along. So what I’m shitting out here remains partially to completely undigested.

Stalin was kind of a hanger on during the Russian revolution. He didn’t invent communism. The whole kill-the-Tsar-and-his-family thing wasn’t his idea. He didn’t come up with the ultimate plan for a government to fill the void left by all the dead autocrats. He was just a guy who had a combination of right-place-right-time luck and ambition to worm his into inner circles of power. Dude liked power. He got himself into the position of becoming the next head guy after Lenin even though when Lenin died there was supposedly a memo from him that said “don’t put Stalin in charge.”

Still he persisted.

The beginning 600 pages or so are about his ascent to power which involved a bunch of cabinet shuffling and treachery. Dudes that were big shit during the revolution become threats to him so he’s keeping a close eye on them and figuring out ways to declare them enemies of the revolution. “Distrust is the disease of the tyrant.” - this book.

At the same time the Soviet Union is becoming a thing. See, first it was just a Russian revolution to a commie way of life. But it spread to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and all those fun places. So old Joe and his buds wrangle them into the budding USSR. This is big shit. It feels like the potential for a worldwide commie revolution could become an actual thing. Hopes are high.

Ukraine has always been sorta nebulous. It’s borders aren’t super firm, there’s a bunch of Russians that live there, etc. I’ve already read and reviewed a bunch of books about this shit but essentially it’s Russia’s breadbasket and even though a lot of Ukrainians want to do their own thing, Russia can’t let it happen if it wants to be the king shit of commie mountain. So there’s forced collectivization of the farms there and everybody starves. The commies also purge the place of successful farmers in the process of ‘dekulakization’. Kulaks. They’re any farmer that’s not the absolute bottom rung. They get killed or sent to the Gulag to die. So everybody who’s good at growing food in the food-growing place is no longer around. Cue more starving. The commies blame it on anybody and everybody that isn’t super into communism or at least their specific brand thereof. (This is thing they like/need to do all the time. The commies can’t be fallible because otherwise people would lost interest in being permanently the working poor. No can do.)

[I ADDED THIS LATER DURING A SECOND PASS: Stalin and his boys try to shape the creative output of the state. Making sure that the novels and poems coming out of a super-literary civilization reflect the values of the party and commie preferences. Remembered this and thought it was interesting. ]

Anyway.

Stalin sees the USSR through a period of super industrialization. This means initiating a lot of nonsense projects like building canals that aren’t needed. They build one to the white sea no one uses and one that drains the Aral Sea and turns that area into yet another Soviet shitpit. And factories! And mining! There was this guy who worked super hard in a coal mine and mined WAY more than his quota. This made him a hero and everyone was encouraged to follow his lead. People who did were called Stakhanovites and the drive to out-produce everyone actually ended up making things less efficient so that the next shift that came on after them would get accused of wrecking and thrown in the Gulag or something equally bummer-y.

(Side note: I’m not a fan of commie shit, but I’m sure they must have some spin on US history that makes it seem just as atarded. Better press on.)

Another brief aside: Stalin’s buddy Yezhov likes to hang out with his drinking buddies and have farting contests. (I underlined this. In pen.)

Pressing on… So the Caucasus is a pain in the ass. Stalin’s old stomping ground of Georgia is shifty and then there’s Islams and tribal shit and … it’s … well it’s just a perpetual pain in the nitz. Still is. Japan is still a worry so the commies have to wring hands about that. There’s some tit-fer-tat warring and saber rattling (yeah, I glazed over during this shit. So … ‘Please to forgive, my friend.’) They try to get Mongolia on board but Mongolia’s not having it.

Meanwhile, China starts having its own thing. They haven’t become the commie nightmare they’d become in the 50s. It’s still like 1930-something. But there’s some shit going on. Japan is trying to move in. Ching Chang Shek isn’t a commie but he’s fighting for something so he’s better than the other guys. It seems hard for the USSR to pick side in China at this time.

Spain has a civil war and it’s a threat to the global communist takeover because Franco is a nationalist (the opposite of a commie), and he’s trying to muscle his way to the top of Spanish bossiness. For real though, Franco is a fuck. Here’s a fun quote from the tome: “To induce Republic-held territory to surrender, Nationalist troops engaged in gang rapes of women, marching with panties flying from their bayonets. Some women had their hair shaved off and their mouths force-fed castor oil, a laxative, so that, when paraded through the streets, they would soil themselves.” Fun fact. Kotkin is a master of the comma.

Swivel attention over to Germany. Hitler is coming up. He’s a vegetarian and a teetotaler and prone to fits of farting. (This part of my copy of the book is SUPER-highlighted.) Hitler is open to having his minions do his bidding more or less independently. But Stalin’s guys won’t do anything he doesn’t tell them to do specifically. Most likely because he’ll accuse them of something and have them killed or sent to the danged Gulag. So there’s some comparison-y pages and it’s probably pretty profound.

Swivel back to commie-land. Trotsky! That shit. He was charismatic to people and had some original ideas. Therefore he’s a threat. Stalin gets a Spaniard commie in Mexico to punch a hole in dude’s head with an ice axe. Like a legit hole. Trotsky was Snowball in Animal Farm. Awww.

So now things in Europe are looking warlike. Hitler has an agenda and he’s a power junkie too. He’s grabbing up all these bits of Europe and everybody is just kind of sitting tight, not wanting to engage. In the USSR military training was low because most soldiers had to also work on collective farms and or on the big industrial projects. Also Stalin exiled, imprisoned or killed any good military guys because they also could have been a threat.

Stalin decides to take Finland and create some up-north buffer zone. But the Finns are fucking badasses and shoot his shitty troops to shit from trees and snow piles. There was one old boy named Simo (nicknamed The White Death) who racked up at least 505 dead Russkies. So there’s that.

By this point in the book I am gettin’ super sick of Stalin stories. Though that one about the killer Finn was pretty tight.

I can’t remember the context but the author brings up the fact that Churchill floated the idea of gassing people at one point. Rebels in India or Iraq. Kotkin was just sort of ‘just sayin’ this I think. So we the readers in the west don’t start getting all high and mighty reading about these central and eastern European scumbags. Another fun fact.

War is heating up but so far the USSR is in a treaty-ish sitch with Germany. Germany is saying the UK is its only enemy. Fucking Rudolf Hess parachuted on his own into Scotland with a bunch of pills and no ID(?). Evidently tries to convince some British uppity that the krauts mean business. It sounds bonkers but is evidently history.

Then the book winds down and tries to sum up the state that Stalin and the USSR are in. One ever-present notion I found interesting was that Stalin was alway finding enemies. Anyone could be someone against him. An enemy of the revolution, a white, a kulak, a wrecker. He thought his doctors were out to get him. The Jews were scapegoats. Along with Trotskyites, people with foreign relatives, smart people, clever people, whoever. Doesn’t matter. An infallible person/regime needs an enemy at all time to explain its imperfections (mass starvation, technological backwardness, general miasma, and so on). Also, it’s clear that whatever Stalin didn’t want to believe, he regarded as MISINFORMATION. Crop reports, science, reality, anything. If it didn’t fit his view it was, for lack of a better phrase, fake news. Yeah. Nothing is new under the danged sun I guess.

He was a fascinating and influential piece of demonic shit with a human veneer with probably the core of a frightened, inadequate-feeling, outsider boy. Fuck, why do these shitheads always seem to take the reins?

Anyway, this book was a push. I am definitely more informed about Stalin’s middle years than I was … A YEAR AGO … but heck. Dunno if I’m gonna be picking this one up again anytime before the inevitable heat death of the universe but I made it. And I leave you with three bits I typed verbatim from the end of this beast. Enjoy. Or don’t. Hopefully Ken Burns will just make this a doc you can stream at the gym.

“Stalin personified the soviet mindset. Emotionally galvanized people. He was a student of historical forces and enabled people who came from nothing to feel world historically significant.”

And:

“Stalin’s regime was not merely a statist modernization but a purported transcendence of private property and markets. Of class antagonisms and existential alienation. A renewal of the social whole rent by the bourgeoisie. A quest for social justice on a global scale. In worldview and practice it was a conspiracy that perceived conspiracy everywhere and in everything, gaslighting itself. In administration, it constituted a crusade for planning and control that generated a proliferation of improvised illegalities. A drive for order and a system in which propaganda and myths about the system were the most systemized part. Amid the cultivated opacities and patent falsehoods, even most high officials were reduced to Kremlinology. The fanatical hyper-centralization was often self defeating as well. But the cult of the parties and especially Stalin’s infallibility proved to be the most dangerous flaw of his fallible rule.”

And as a bonus:

"Stalin became haunted not by the peasants horrors under collectivization but by the party criticism of him regarding those horrors which would become the dark spur of his mass murders in the wanton terror made possible by bolshevism but driven by him. The pandemonium of widespread accusations of treason that he fomented reflected not reality or even potential threats but his own demons."


Peace out. Gonna read some Danielle Steel now.

-Mitz