Tag Stalin

The most generous SOB of them all

About ten days ago, Language Hat wrote about the 1928 novel The Cynics by Anatoly Mariengof (alternatively transliterated as Marienhof): Given its low profile, I probably wouldn’t have read it if Joseph Brodsky hadn’t called it one of the most…

Remembering March 5, 1953

I should have posted this two days ago, on March 5. Better late than never: March 5 is the day Stalin died in 1953, the so-called Cheyne-Stokes Day. In 2016, I wrote two more posts about that day of deliverance:…

Fighting words

In 1979, when Stalin turned 100, Stephen Cohen published an excellent article about Soviet de- and (partial) re-Stalinization in The New Republic. Describing Khruschev’s boldest criticism of the despot, later reversed under Brezhnev, Cohen observed: The vaunted generalissimo became a criminally…

“What if it gets worse?”

Members of Project 03/05/53 have interviewed over a hundred people who remembered the days of Stalin’s death and funeral. The stories are not representative of the whole country because most of the respondents belong to the urban educated class, but…

Stalin’s last victims

Robert Service on Stalin’s funeral in Stalin: a Biography: The funeral took place on 9 March. It was a cold, dry, grey day of late winter. The sun did not appear. Frost was heavy. The crowds were dense… The Imperial regime had…

Stalin died 63 years ago today…

…unaware that in 2016, a certain American public intellectual of anti-Communist persuasion would pick him as US president over a New York billionaire! The neoconservative historian Max Boot was born in Moscow in 1969. His last name, whatever its provenance, sounds…

“Kto kogo?” revisited

Kto kogo? (no comma), from Lenin’s 1921 speech, is often cited in various political contexts. It is often translated as “Who Whom?” (with or without a comma), which is neither technically incorrect nor particularly helpful. In old times, “Kto kogo?” was a question…

Margin notes

Thomas Mann wrote in his essay Bruder Hitler that the German dictator, in his “dreamy arrogance,” did not have the discipline to learn how to ride a horse, drive a car or pilot a plane; the man could not even…

Oleg Khlevniuk’s new biography of Stalin

Oleg Khlevniuk is the foremost Russian specialist in the history of the Soviet ruling circle from the late 1920s until Stalin’s death in 1953 and of the mass terror of the same period. In his work, Khlevniuk largely builds on…