Tag Archives: Stalin

Cuius Culpa?

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Eighty-four years ago in 1939, almost to the day, World War II broke out. Twenty years ago in 2003, again almost to the day, I gave a the following interview on the topic to the right-wing German news magazine Focus. Comments, welcome.

FOCUS: Professor van Creveld, why did Hitler attack Poland?

MvC: There can be no question but that one of Hitler’s primary objectives had long been the revision of the Versailles “Diktat” by returning to Germany the territories it had lost to Poland after World War I and adding to them if possible. This in turn was to be the first stage in the realization of his long-term plans to acquire Lebensraum for the German people. Yet the timing of the attack seems to have been determined by a different factor. Ever since 1937, when he was 48 years old, Hitler had looked at himself as a man past his prime. He believed that, health-wise he only had limited time left to carry out his plans.

FOCUS: Why did Stalin attack Poland?

MvC: That is very simple. Before 1918, much of Poland had belonged to Russia. In that sense, Stalin was doing no more than take back what was his in any case.

FOCUS: But together they unleased World War II. Right?

MvC: That is a way to look at it. But you could also argue that it was Britain’s guarantee to Poland that did the trick. Before the guarantee was given, Stalin feared, not without reason, that he might have to face Hitler on his own. After the guarantee he knew that this would not be the case. This left him free to conclude the non-aggression pact with Germany, which opened the road to the war.

FOCUS: Did Stalin deliberately wait for two weeks so as to make Hitler bear the full burden of having unleashed the war?

MvC: I am unaware of any historical source that makes this point; considering that he once said that “gratitude [and presumably other moral qualities as well] is something suitable for a dog”, I think it unlikely. Probably he needed some time to prepare and, cautious as he was, he also wanted to see what was happening first.

FOCUS: You say that Hitler attacked because he wanted to rectify the loss of territory Germany had suffered under the Treaty of Versailles and, if possible, acquire more. Yet in the documents of the German Foreign Ministry the words “encirclement” and “threat” keep appearing, Polish politicians often expressed their aggressive designs on Germany, and indeed the idea that the Polish-German border should run along the Oder goes back as far as the 1920s. Given these facts, would you say that Poland must bear part of the responsibility for the outbreak of the war?

MvC: The Franco-Polish Mutual Assistance pact dated to 1925. Ten years later, any significance it had ever had was nullified by the conclusion of the German-Polish Nonaggression Pact. Next, on 28 April 1939, Hitler cancelled that pact almost by a slight of hand, simply saying that “the basis on which it rested” no longer existed. One may accuse the Poles of many things. However, except for insisting on their territorial integrity in the face of Hitler’s demands and threats I do not see how one can blame them for the outbreak of World War II.

FOCUS: However, there is also a statement by Hitler, dating to the spring of 1939, in which he said that all he was trying to do was to apply some pressure to Poland over Danzig. That apart, though, he was prepared recognize Poland’s border; “he would not be the idiot who would start a war over Poland.” What did he mean by that?

MvC: At about the same time, Hitler also told his generals that “further successes in Europe without bloodshed are not possible”. So I would not attribute too much weight to this statement or that; the fact is that, having dismissed the nonaggression pact with Poland, Hitler staged a border incident (the occupation of Gleiwitz radio station) on 31 August 1939 and went to war early on the next day.

FOCUS: Was Poland ready for war?

MvC: This is a strange story indeed. By one account, weeks before the war a Polish general in Warsaw told a French delegation that, in case hostilities broke out, the French should worry about their eastern border while they themselves marched on Berlin. If that is true, then rarely in history can any military have overestimated itself to such an extent.

FOCUS: This confirms a statement by the Polish ambassador in Berlin, Jozef Lipski. Just one day before the outbreak of the war he said he did not have to worry about negotiations with Germany, given that Polish troops would soon be marching on Berlin. Did the Poles believe Britain and France would immediately come to their aid?

MvC: The Poles seem to have understood that the British and French could no longer avoid their obligations, and in this they proved right. However, they proved very wrong in estimating their own capabilities. In any case, as I said, it was not they who started the shooting war.

Had there been no Western commitment, would the Poles have accepted Hitler’s demands and would the outbreak of war on 1 September have been avoided? Perhaps. Would that have been better for the world? I doubt it.

FOCUS: During the years after 1939 Hitler revealed himself as a criminal, automatically causing his proposals to be discredited. However, this was 1939. The return of Danzig, an extra-territorial motor- and railway across the Polish Corridor, and a long time agreement concerning the border between the two countries. Would you say that, right form the beginning, these demands were illegitimate? 

MvC: First, I hope you agree with me that Hitler was a criminal long before 1 September 1939. Second, what do the terms “legitimate” and illegitimate” mean in this context? If Hitler’s demands were legitimate, then so, for example, was Clemenceau’s suggestion in 1919 that Germany be dismantled by taking the Rhineland and perhaps Bavaria away from it. Perhaps the only thing wrong with that proposal is that it was never carried out!

FOCUS: Supposing the world “legitimate” is out of place, do you think that for any German to seek a revision of the Treaty of Versailles was “normal” and indeed to be expected?

MvC: Normal? With Pontius Pilatus, I answer: what is normal? Perhaps you are right: the victors of 1919 should have anticipated that no German government could live with the terms they imposed. Either they should have relaxed them, or else they should have followed Clemenceau’s ideas.

In fact, they failed to do either and fell between the chairs. By this interpretation, they did in 1945 what they should have done twenty-six years earlier.

FOCUS: Did Polish abuse of the German minority in the Corridor play a role in Germany’s decision to go to war?

MvC: Yes, clearly, but perhaps more as an excuse than as a real cause. In any case I doubt whether it was for Nazi Germany, of all countries, to complain about the way minorities were treated.

FOCUS: How strong was the Polish army??

MvC: The Poles’ main problem was not the number of troops, nor their training, nor their motivation. It was the absence of a modern industry that could have provided them with modern arms. To this were added a hopeless geographical situation and Stalin’s stab in the back.

FOCUS: Is it true, as the German Center for Political Education maintains in one of the books it promoted, that the attack on Poland was “the opening stage in a war of extermination”?

MvC: From everything I have ever read it would seem that Hitler, while determined to destroy first the Jews and then uncounted numbers of Russians, had always known that the most drastic measures would only be possible under the cover of war. So the answer is, yes.

FOCUS: Did the Wehrmacht in Poland wage a war of extermination against the civilian population?

MvC: No. But it certainly stood by and even provided support as the SS did so.

FOCUS: Did you visit the exhibition, “Germans and Poles”, in Berlin’s Haus der Geschichte?

MvC: Yes, I did.

FOCUS: Do you think the exhibition provides the visitor with a good idea of what took place?

MvC: The answer is both yes and no. I thought that the parts dealing with World War II were very good—it is impossible to exaggerate the misery that the German occupation forces inflicted on the Polish people during that period. On the other hand, I thought that everything before that was presented in a very one-sided way. It was as if, starting with Frederick the Great, the Germans had always been criminals and the Poles, angels. If I had been a German, this part of the exhibition would have made me extremely angry.

FOCUS: The fact that, during World War II, Germany committed untold atrocities in Poland is beyond doubt. However, Polish efforts to drive Germans out of Poland began much earlier. So why, in your opinion, why wasn’t this fact mentioned in the exhibition?

MvC: If you want to compare Polish atrocities with German ones, then I do not agree. If you want to say that the Poles were anything but angels, then I have already said what I think.

FOCUS: But do you agree that the organizers of the exhibition, in emphasizing German mistreatment of Poland, should also have devoted at least some space to the Poles’ treatment of ethnic Germans?

MvC: It is as I told you; if I were a German, parts of this exhibition would have made me very angry.

FOCUS: Looking back from the perspective of 2003, you could argue that, of all the states involved in unleashing the war, it was Poland that gained the most. The Soviet Union no longer exists and Russia’s border has been pushed 1,000 kilometers to the east. The British Empire no longer exists. Germany lost a third of its territory. France remains France. By contrast, the poor abused Poles have reached the Oder-Neisse frontier. Danzig has become Gdansk and Upper Silesia belongs to Poland. The irony of history?

MvC: May I tell you a story? My late father in law, Gert Leisersohn, was born in Germany in 1922. His father had fought for Germany in World War I and was wounded, yet in 1936 he and his family had to flee for their lives, going all the way to Chile. He once told me that, on 1 September 1939, he felt that while he hated war as much as anybody else, he was very happy that this one had broken out because it was the only way to get rid of Hitler.

FOCUS: Are you saying that anyone who fought Hitler’s Germany was automatically and completely in the right?

MvC: Do you know a greater wrong than Auschwitz?

On Stalin (again)

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Readers, please note: The following is the text of an interview about the book I did on 8 May with Mr. Pierre Heumann of the German-Swiss weekly Weltwoche. The translation from German is my own.

Heumann: Martin van Creveld, are you a Stalin Versteher (understander/sympathizer)?

Van Creveld: Writing a good biography of someone one hates is practically impossible. That is one reason why there are so many bad books about people like Hitler. And Stalin, of course. What Stalin was aiming at was a Soviet Union which would be shaped according to his ideas and would rule, as its acknowledged master: he himself. Considering his humble origins, I find the way he achieved those aims very impressive.

Heumann: What, in your view, was the heritage he left?

Van Creveld: It depends on whom one asks. In the West he is perceived as a monster. His regime is portrayed as extremely brutal, authoritarian and corrupt. All of which is quite true. However, in Russia the situation is different. Many people respect Stalin as a ruler who played a critical role in establishing the state, then went on to industrialize it on a vast scale, and finally saved it from collapse during the so-called Great Patriotic War.

Studying the material as I did, one thing that struck me was how little charisma Stalin had. His speeches were boring—not because he did not have anything intelligent to say, but because he spoke in a monotone and, unlike Hitler, never raised his voice. Nor did he have to. As his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, once said, “when Stalin says ‘dance,’ a wise man dances.” Everyone understood that Stalin brooked no opposition.

Heumann: Wat similarities do you see between Stalin and Putin?

Van Creveld: Both used the secret services as their primary instrument of government. And both saw themselves as men who had been called upon, whether by fate or by history. Stalin wanted to prepare the world for Communism. Putin wants to prevent or at least delay the collapse of Russia. And there is something else they have in common. To both of them, Russian history is a long story in which the Russians were always the victims. Why? Because Russia has always been backward. One outcome was, and still is, the West’s tendency to look down on Russia as a backward country. Putin personally has repeatedly referred this kind of inferiority complex his countrymen labor under.

Heumann: How do you see the war in Ukraine?

Van Creveld: Stalin, having come under attack by the German Reich, Stalin had no option but to defend himself.  Unlike him, Putin had the choice: to attack or not to attack. He decided to attack. Now Clausewitz’s words have come to haunt him: any attack that does not quickly attain its ends fairly quickly will turn into a defense.

Just Published!

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Exactly 69 years ago:

Gentlemen of the celestial assembly!

I am standing here today in front of you. Not because I wanted to—it is you who have dragged me here. Not to express my regrets—my second wife’s death apart, regrets I have none. Not to justify myself—I need no justification. Not to prevent future historians from spreading even more lies about me—being dead, what do I care? Not so that you may acquit me—I know full well you won’t. Not because I believe you exist; as a historical materialist, I do not. To quote the great Marx, religion is the opium of the masses. Heaven and hell are but fables the self-styled “upper classes,” using those lick-spittles, the priests, have invented to keep those masses in their place.

And not to glorify my own role in history, not inconsiderable as it may have been. But solely to help ensure, as far as I can, that memory of the way the first-ever government of the proletariat, by the proletariat, for the proletariat, came about, overcame all obstacles, and triumphed, should not perish from the face of the earth.

So I hereby submit my res gestae. A summary, unembellished but truthful, of my deeds in the material world, the only really existent one. From this time forth I never will speak word.

 

6 March 1953

A Very Bad Man

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The war in Ukraine goes on and on. Though analysts are as numerous as flies on a heap of you know what, the truth is that one knows how it is going to end. Such being the case, I want to put my latest thoughts on record.

First, Putin may be a very bad man. However, there is no point in continually saying so. Based on historical reasoning, he is doing what he believes he must on behalf of his country. That historical reasoning itself is neither better nor worse than any other reasoning of this kind; part reality, part myth, part propaganda. Never mind. To cope with him, it is first of all necessary to understand what he thinks, why, and what can and cannot be done about it. The more so because he has enough nuclear weapons to blow up the world.

Second, this is a war of survival not only for Ukraine but for Russia as well. In the case of Ukraine, that is because defeat would reduce it to a Russian province. Much as it used to be since 1793 when Catherine the Great joined Austria and Prussia in partitioning Poland, a move which for the first time took Russia to the shores of the Black Sea. In the case of Russia it is because, should this struggle be lost, the country can expect to disintegrate into who knows many warring fragments. Just as happened in 1990. Recovery, even supposing it will be possible at all, will take decades. See, as an example of what it may be like, The Time of Troubles (1598-1613).

Third, this is going to be a long and bloody conflict. Albeit that it may have taken a little longer than was originally planned—not something at all unusual in war—the Russians have reached Ukraine’s most important cities and put them under siege. They have not, however taken them. As I have written before, urban warfare is perhaps the most difficult form of war an attacking force can engage on. Just think of the months-long battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43, and you’ll know what I mean.

Fourth, even if the Russians do succeed in occupying the cities, the war, taking the form of insurrection, guerrilla, and terrorism will go on. As, to mention but two recent examples, it did in both Afghanistan and Iraq. True Ukraine, being flat, does not present the best terrain on which to wage these forms of warfare. Compared to many others, the Russians also enjoy the important advantage of being able to understand the language. But two factors are working in the other direction. One is the sheer size of the country and the population, which threaten to swamp any occupying force (that is why, back in 1793, the Russians were able to occupy it in the first place was because it was practically uninhabited). The other, the ready availability of every kind of assistance from NATO, which can only increase as time goes on.

Fifth, Putin’s forces are said to be using some unorthodox weapons capable of causing many casualties and inflicting immense damage on buildings in particular. Particularly important are so called thermobaric weapons that operate by detonating a mixture of air and fuel, resulting in an extraordinarily powerful explosion as well as extremely high temperatures. But Putin is not the only one to use them.  Americans did so both at Hue in 1968 and at Fallujah in December 2004; and both the Americans and the British used them in Afghanistan. So who are they to complain?

Sixth, whether Russia will break under the sanctions is uncertain. My own guess it that it won’t. Partly that because the Russians can take almost anything. And partly because Germany e.g depends on Russia for 51 percent of its oil and gas; without them, German industry will soon come to a standstill. Vice versa, the one certainty is that the war will break the economy of the Ukraine.

Seventh, the only way Putin can win this war is by finding some Ukrainians able and willing to set up a government that will collaborate with him. That, however, seems unlikely to happen.

Finally, in this war as in any other the first casualty is the truth. That is one reason why anyone who believes he can see into the future is welcome to try and so so.

 

Akhmatova

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I have already devoted a post (“To Do and Not to Do,” 24 June 2021) to the Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova. Since then she has continued to haunt me, driving me to learn as much as I could about her without, unfortunately, being able to read her work in the original.

Born to a very well to do family in 1899, by the time the Revolution broke out Akhmatova had already established some reputation for herself as a poetess. Living through Stalin’s rule, stripped of practically all her and her family’s property, she did not complain about being discriminated against or having to do the dishes in her often freezing cold, one room, Leningrad apartment. She did not talk about rape, real or imagined; to the contrary, on one of the rare occasions when she described the preliminaries of a sexual encounter she had with a fellow poet her lines were full of joy. She was not the “first” woman to drive a locomotive, explore the Arctic, or perform any other kind of (originally) male feat Though some modern feminists have claimed her as one of their own, she did not hate men—far from it (Zhdanov’s description of her as “half nun, half slut”), though meant in a derogatory way, fitted her quite well). Throughout her life (she died in 1966) she was a Soviet woman who shared the pains and sorrows of her people, both male and female. Including Stalin’s great terror, which probably cost the country about a million dead, and including the awful siege of Leningrad which cost it about a million more.

Today I want to quote some of what Orlando Figs, a professor of Russian studies in London, has to say about her in his magisterial work, Natasha’s Dance (2014):

“[Her son] Lev was re-arrested in March 1938. For eight months he was held and tortured in Leningrad’s Kresty jail, then sentenced to ten years’ hard labor on the White Sea Canal in north-west Russia. This was at the height of the Stalin Terror, when millions of people disappeared. For eight months Akhmatova went every day to join the long queues at the Kresty jail, now just one of Russia’s many women waiting to hand in a letter or a parcel through a little window and, if it was accepted, to go away with joy at the knowledge that their loved one must be still alive. This was the background to her poetic cycle Requiem (written between 1935 and 1940; first published in Munich in 1963). As Akhmatova explained in the short prose piece ‘Instead of a Preface’ (1957):

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone ‘recognized’ me [she had long established herself as a poet]. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I answered, ‘Yes I can.’ Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.

In Requiem Akhmatova became the people’s voice. The poem represented a decisive moment in her artistic evolution – the moment when the lyric poet of private experience became, in the words of Requiem, the ‘mouth through which a hundred million scream’. The poem is intensely personal. Yet it gives voice to an anguish felt by every person who had lost someone.

This was when the ones who smiled

Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

and like a useless appendage,

Leningrad,

Swung from its prisons. And when, senseless from torment,

Regiments of convicts marched.
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And the short songs of farewell

Were sung by locomotive whistles.

The stars of death stood above us

And innocent Russia writhed

Under bloody boots

And under the tyres of the Black Marias.”

This was when Akhmatova’s decision to remain in Russia began to make sense. She had shared in her people’s suffering. Her poem had become a monument to it – a dirge for the dead sung in whispered incantations among friends; and in some way it redeemed that suffering.

“No, not under the vault of alien skies,

And not under the shelter of alien wings –

I was with my people then,

There, where my people,

unfortunately, were.”

An Obituary

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In the whole of history few people got as bad a name as Stalin, the Soviet dictator who died yesterday sixty-eight years ago, did. That, however, was not always the case. For those of you who are interested, I’ve copied the New York Times obituary, published two days after the dictator’s death. Word by word, without adding or omitting anything. I suggest you pay attention to what it says and, above all, to what it does not say.

*

Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State

By The New York Times, March 7, 1953

Joseph Stalin became the most important figure in the political direction of one-third of the people of the world. He was one of a group of hard revolutionaries that established the first important Marxist state and, as its dictator, he carried forward its socialization and industrialization with vigor and ruthlessness.

During the Second World War, Stalin personally led his country’s vast armed forces to victory. When Germany was defeated, he pushed his country’s frontiers to their greatest extent and fostered the creation of a buffer belt of Marxist-oriented satellite states from Korea across Eurasia to the Baltic Sea. Probably no other man ever exercised so much influence over so wide a region.

In the late Nineteen Forties, when an alarmed world, predominantly non-Communist, saw no end to the rapid advance of the Soviet Union and her satellites, there was a hasty and frightened grouping of forces to form a battle line against the Marxist advance. Stalin stood on the Elbe in Europe and on the Yalu in Asia. Opposed to him stood the United States, keystone in the arch of non-Marxist states.

Stalin took and kept the power in his country through a mixture of character, guile and good luck. He outlasted his country’s intellectuals, if indeed, he did not contrive to have them shot, and he wore down the theoreticians and dreamers. He could exercise great charm when he wanted to. President Harry Truman once said in an unguarded moment:

“I like old Joe. Joe is a decent fellow, but he is a prisoner of the Politburo.”

But the Stalin that the world knew best was hard, mysterious, aloof and rude. He had a large element of the Oriental in him; he was once called “Ghengis Khan with a telephone” and he spent much of his life nurturing the conspiracies that brought him to power and kept him there.

Opinion of Leon Trotsky

Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s brilliant and defeated adversary, regarded him as an intellectual nonentity who personified “the spirit of mediocrity” that impregnated the Soviet bureaucracy. Lenin, who valued Stalin highly as a party stalwart, characterized him as “crude” and “rough” and as a “cook who will prepare only peppery dishes.”

But those who survived the purges hailed Stalin as a supreme genius.

Although he remained an enigma to the outside world to the very end of his days, Stalin’s role as Russia’s leader in the war brought him the admiration and high praise of Allied leaders, including President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. And, indeed, only a man of iron will and determination like Stalin’s could have held together his shattered country during that period of the war when German armies had overrun huge portions of Russian territory and swept to the gates of Moscow, Leningrad and the Caucasus. Like Churchill in England, Stalin never faltered, not even at moments when everything seemed lost.

When most of the Government machinery and the diplomatic corps were moved to Kuibyshev in December, 1941, in expectation of the imminent capture of Moscow, Stalin remained in the Kremlin to direct the operations that finally hurled the Nazi hordes from the frontyard of the capital. His battle orders and exhortations to the Russian armies and people to persevere in the fight contributed immensely to final victory. Repeatedly, Churchill referred to him in Parliament as Russia’s “great warrior.”

War Role Paramount

With the turn of the tide against the Germans, Stalin proclaimed himself marshal of the Soviet Union and later generalisimo. Surrounded by a galaxy of brilliant generals, whose names will go down in history as among the greatest of Russia’s military leaders, Stalin was portrayed in the Soviet and foreign press as the supreme commander responsible for over-all strategy. To what extent this was true will have to be determined by the future historian, but that his role in the conduct of the war was paramount is undeniable.

The energy and will power he displayed both before and during the war confirmed the justification for his name, for Stalin in Russian means “man of steel,” a nom de guerre he adopted early in his revolutionary career. Long before he dreamed of becoming the supreme autocrat of Russia he had displayed the steel in his character as a political prisoner under the Czarist regime. A fellow prisoner of that period gave an illustration of Stalin’s grit. This was in 1909, in the prison at Baku. In punishment of rioting by the prisoners, the authorities ordered that they be marched in single file between two lines of soldiers who proceeded to shower blows upon them with rifle butts. With head high, a book under his arm, Stalin walked the gantlet without a whimper, his face and head bleeding, his eyes flashing defiance. It was the kind of grit he demanded from others, the kind that helped save Russia from Nazi conquest and domination. His experience under the Czarist regime and his Asiatic character taught him how to treat political opponents.

In his relations with the Allied powers during the war and in his diplomacy before and after the war Stalin won the reputation of a grim realist.

Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, later to become famous under his revolutionary name of Joseph Stalin, was born in the Georgian village of Gori Dec. 21, 1879.

His father was an impoverished and drunken shoemaker who made him sullen and resentful by regular beatings. His mother, Ekaterina, a peasant’s daughter, was a woman of singular sweetness, patience and strength of character who exercised great influence on her son. She called him Soso (Little Joe) and lived to see him dictator of the world’s largest empire.

Attended a Seminary

When he was 6 or 7, young Stalin contracted smallpox, which left him pock-marked for life. Through the efforts of his mother, who worked as a part-time laundress, Stalin entered a church school at 9. He was remembered there as a bright, self-assertive boy who loved argument and who flew into a fury with those who did not agree with him. He remained in this school from 1888 to 1893.

By heroic exertions, Stalin’s mother obtained for him a scholarship in the Theological Seminary of Tiflis, where he studied from October, 1894, to May, 1899. The seminary was a gloomy institution–a cross between a barracks and a monastery–where the students attended endless lectures on theology and spent their few spare moments plotting to obtain forbidden books from the outside.

Stalin was among the worst offenders. An entry against him in the seminary’s book of discipline has been preserved:

“At 11 A.M. I took away from Joseph Djugashvili Letourneau’s ‘Literary Evolution of the Nations.’ Djugashvili was discovered reading the said book on the chapel stairs. This is the thirteenth time this student has been discovered reading books borrowed from the Cheap Library.”

The official reason for Stalin’s expulsion was that for “unknown reasons” he failed to attend examinations. He declared he was expelled for “propagating Marxism.”

According to the results of a national study released in The Publication 43% of all females 18 to 59 years old, suffer from purchase cialis online some type of mental illness, almost 45% to 75% with moderate to severe physical illness and approximately 35% to 45% from some type of psychiatric disorders like anxiety or depression that require modifications in the lifestyle can also help an individual to cure. Few tadalafil lowest price herbal remedies are beneficial in increasing sexual drive. If a person is going through any of the above conditions can be the cause of it. tadalafil viagra The new kind of medicine offers us the new kind of generic levitra online http://amerikabulteni.com/2012/02/07/lezbiyenligim-tercih-diyen-sex-and-the-city-aktristi-buyuk-tartisma-baslatti/ treatment and at the same time low cost treatment. To support himself he obtained a temporary job as night attendant in the Tiflis Observatory, but he was more concerned with his observations at meetings of Tiflis railway workers during the day than of the stars at night. His revolutionary apprenticeship was served as an organizer of the Tiflis transportation workers. He helped stage street demonstrations and distribute revolutionary leaflets.

In April, 1899, he received his first baptism of fire at a demonstration he helped organize in the heart of the city. The demonstration was drowned in blood by Cossacks, and he went into hiding for a year to escape the police. At this time he assumed the nickname of “Koba,” after a hero in Georgian mythology.

On Nov. 11, 1901, he was elected a member of the Tiflis Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party, in his native Georgia. A few weeks later he was deputized to go to Batum, a thriving industrial and commercial center, to direct revolutionary activity. In March of that year he led a strike of oil workers in that city.

In April, 1902, he was arrested and lodged in the Batum prison, from which he was transferred to Kutais. While in prison he learned of the meeting in London, in 1903, of the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic party, at which the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks –extremists and moderates–an event that subsequently determined the entire course of the Russian Revolution. Stalin allied himself with Nikolai Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks. Trotsky was against Lenin, although in 1917, after the revolution, he joined Lenin and became his principal lieutenant in the October Revolution and in the establishment of the Soviet regime.

On July 9, 1903, while in prison in Kutais, Stalin was sentenced to three years of exile to Siberia, and in November of that year he was transferred to the bleak, remote village of Novaya Uda. There he received his first letter from Lenin in response to one posing certain questions concerning Bolshevist policy and tactics. The letter confirmed him in his adherence to Lenin, whom he glorified as “Mountain Eagle.” Determined to escape, Stalin made his way safely to Irkutsk at the end of the year. From there he proceeded to Baku, in the Caucasus, where he experienced his second baptism of fire as leader of a strike of oil workers. It was part of a wave of strikes that swept Russia with her defeat by Japan, a wave that was the harbinger of the Revolution of 1905.

Shortly after the outbreak of the general strike which was the key element in the revolution of 1905, Stalin met Lenin for the first time at a party conference in Tammerfors, Finland.

From the Tammerfors conference Stalin returned to his activity in the Caucasus, where on June 26, 1907, on Erivan Square in Tiflis, he directed the celebrated “expropriation” which netted the Bolshevik party 340,000 rubles. There had been other such “expropriations,” but this was the biggest and most dramatic. Formally, Lenin and his associates had frowned upon these acts, but they, nevertheless, accepted the proceeds to help finance the party’s work. In the Erivan Square affair a band of revolutionists directed by “Koba” fell upon a convoy of two carriages carrying Government funds from the railway station to the state bank, and after bombing the Cossack guard escaped with the money, which was sent to Lenin.

Following the “expropriation,” Stalin was arrested and lodged in Bailov fortress, in Baku, where the incident of his running the gantlet of rifle butts took place. Soon thereafter he was exiled for the second time to Solvychegodsk, in Siberia, from which he escaped on June 24, 1909. He returned to Baku to resume his revolutionary activity, but remained at liberty only eight months, when he was again arrested and sent back to Solvychegodsk. From that place he conducted secret correspondence with Lenin and his staff at Bolshevik headquarters in Cracow.

Eager to attend a party conference in Prague, Stalin again escaped and made his way to St. Petersburg, where he was arrested and exiled to Vologda. Once more he escaped and reached St. Petersburg on the day of the notorious massacre of workers in the Lena goldfields in Siberia. In St. Petersburg he helped found Pravda, the official organ of the Bolshevik party, but on the day of its first issue he was arrested and exiled to Narym, in the Urals. On Sept. 1, 1912, he escaped and returned to St. Petersburg to resume the editorship of Pravda. This time he was betrayed by the agent provocateur Malinovsky, who had him arrested together with Jacob Sverdlov, the future first President of the Soviet Union, at a concert given for the benefit of Pravda. Stalin and Sverdlov were exiled to Turuchansk, in Siberia, from which they were taken to the outlying settlement of Kureika, 800 miles north of the Trans-Siberian Railway. After twenty years of revolutionary activity and repeated imprisonments and exilings. Stalin found himself at a dead end. Letters arrived from Lenin, but they seemed very remote and futile. Then came the news of the First World War in 1914, the war that Lenin predicted would bring the downfall of the Russian autocracy and world revolution.

Stalin was transferred to Atchinsk, on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and it was there he first received word of the revolution of March 12, 1917. Almost the very first act of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, in which Alexander Kerensky was at first Minister of Justice and later Premier, was to order the release of all political prisoners. Among the many thousands who profited by this decree signed by Kerensky was Joseph Stalin. He made his way speedily to Petrograd.

On his arrival in Petrograd in March, 1917, Stalin went directly to the office of Pravda, where he was met by V. M. Molotov and Leo Kamenev. Lenin and most of his staff were in Zurich, Switzerland. It was not until April 16, 1917, that Lenin arrived in Petrograd after his famous journey through Germany in a sealed car provided by the German General Staff. The journey lead across Germany to Stockholm and through Finland. A month later Trotsky arrived from America.

Upon his arrival in Petrograd in May, 1917, from the United States, where he had lived for several months, Trotsky lost no time in associating himself with Lenin in his demand for the overthrow of the Provisional Government, conclusion of an immediate peace, a sweeping Socialist program and advocacy of world revolution. From the very beginning of this development Trotsky completely overshadowed Stalin and all others among Lenin’s lieutenants. He became Lenin’s “big stick.”

In the first Council of Commissars, formed upon the formation of the Soviet Government, Stalin was given the modest, obscure post of Commissar of Nationalities. Nevertheless, that post in the hands of Stalin became symbolic and significant, for it was under Stalin as supreme dictator that the Soviet Union, conceived as a multiple state of nationalities, achieved its greatest expansion, territorially and politically.

In the October Revolution Stalin took a relatively modest part. Although his admirers picture him as taking the initiative with Lenin in planning and executing that historic upheaval against the opposition of Trotsky and others in Lenin’s immediate encourage, the minutes of the Central Committee of the party for Oct. 23, two days before the coup d’etat, show clearly that Lenin and Trotsky took the lead in demanding approval of the uprising, while others were either opposed or hesitant. Stalin supported Lenin. On that occasion, the minutes attest, Lenin, angry and defiant over the refusal of his collaborators to approve the plans for the uprising, rose and, pointing to Trotsky, shouted, “Very well, then, he and I will go to the Kronstadt sailors,” meaning that he would summon the sailors of the Baltic Fleet to rise in rebellion against the Kerensky regime. The Baltic Fleet played a leading role in the uprising. Later these same sailors, who had been gloried by Trotsky as “the pride and beauty of the Russian Revolution,” were shot down en masse by Trotsky in their revolt against the Soviet regime in March, 1921.

During the civil war after the Bolshevik revolution Stalin and Trotsky were at loggerheads. This was particularly true during the fighting on the Tsaritsyn and Perm fronts. Repeatedly Trotsky called him to order and on various occasions Lenin had to intervene to make peace between them. The enmity and hatred between Trotsky and Stalin dated from that period.

Already during Lenin’s illness, which lasted about two years, Stalin began preparing for his future leadership of the party and of the Government. This he ultimately achieved by utilizing his new position as general secretary of the party in building a party machine loyal to him.

Member of Triumvirate

After Lenin’s death, authority was vested by the party in the hands of a triumvirate, consisting of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. There were three principal factions in the party, the left, represented by Zinoviev; the right, headed by Rykov and Bukharin, and the center, of which Stalin was regarded as the spokesman. Trotsky, who was ill a good part of the time, so much so that he had been unable to attend Lenin’s funeral, had plans of his own. He felt that ultimately, as Lenin’s chief collaborator, he would inherit Lenin’s mantle.

In the bitter factional polemics that ensued, Stalin played the left against the right and vice versa, and eventually defeated both, as well as Trotsky.

In 1936, during the period of purges, Stalin proclaimed a new Constitution for Russia, with promises of universal secret suffrage, freedom of the press, speech and assembly. It was interpreted to maintain the dictatorship and to stabilize the revolution.

Not since the days of Peter the Great, who sought to westernize Russia by force, had the country witnessed so violent a transformation. In fact, nothing in the history of revolutions could compare with the gigantic social and economic upheaval brought about under Stalin.

In 1929 Stalin began predicting a second world war and avowed that his purpose was to keep Russia clear of the conflict. Despite this policy, with the advent of Hitler to power he joined in collective security measures. He abruptly abandoned his advocacy of collective security in 1939, when he about-faced and signed a mutual nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany.

It led to World War II, into which Russia later was drawn by Hitler’s attack on her. This onslaught forged a Soviet alliance with the West, an alliance that ultimately enlarged the Soviet sphere.

70th Birthday Celebrated

Stalin’s fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays were celebrated, but the press prepared the Soviet public on his sixty-ninth anniversary for the grim reality that years had left their impress even on “the teacher and inspirer of the world proletariat.” Pictures were published showing that Stalin’s hair had whitened. Then on his seventieth birthday in 1949 his anniversary was celebrated in grand fashion.

It was the first occasion in which Stalin had permitted public participation in his private life, and hence little was known about his personal affairs. He married twice. His first wife was Ekaterina Svanidze, who died after a long illness in 1907. They had a son, Jacob, whose fate has been unknown since he became a German prisoner during World War II. In 1919 the Premier married Nadya Alliluyeva, the 17-year-old daughter of his old revolutionary crony, Sergei Alliluyev. She died in 1932 under mysterious circumstances. They had a daughter and a son. The latter, Vassily, is now a lieutenant-general in the Soviet Air Force. All that became known of the daughter was her name, Svetlana, and her intellectual interests.

*

Note that neither collectivization, nor the Gulag, are mentioned.

For Anyone Interested… It Is a Must

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Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Kindle edition, 2019.

Great books, like great teachers, are those which make you reexamine your assumptions. By that standard, there can be little doubt that Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century is a very great book. To help you understand why, let me start with a brief description of the way we in Israel have been taught Jewish history for so long.

Once upon a time—no one knows just when—there was a man called Abraham. Born in Ur, modern Mesopotamia, he was 75 years old when God revealed Himself to him and told him to move to Canaan, aka the Land of Israel, aka (much later) Palestine. Which country, He solemnly promised, would forever belong to him and his offspring. A relative handful of converts apart, it was from Abraham’s loins that all subsequent Jews were and are descended. Their history is like that of no other people; after many twists and turns, they were finally driven (almost all of them) from Canaan by the wicked Romans. Scattered in all directions, but held together by their unique religion, for close to two thousand years they lived without a homeland of their own. Now tolerated and exploited, now subject to pogroms and/or driven away from one country into another, always at the mercy of their non-Jewish neighbors, they somehow succeeded in retaining their identity like no other people on earth. Something not even Adolf Hitler, who set out to exterminate them and killed one third of their number, was able to change.

In comes Yuri Slezkine, a Russian born (1956- ) Jew who currently lives in the United States. The Jews, he explains in the first chapter of the book, are not unique at all. Instead they are one among a great many nations whom he groups together under the rubric, “Mercurian.” Including, to mention but a few, the Gypsies of Europe, the Persians and the Jain of India, the Copts of Egypt, the Fuga of southern Ethiopia, the Ibo of modern Nigeria, the Eta of traditional Japan, the Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, the Nestorians in the Middle East, the Mormons in the U.S—an example Slezkine does not mention–and, above all, the overseas Chinese.

“Mercurian” peoples were and are distinguished from the rest—Apollonians, is what Slezkine calls them—in two principal ways. First, they regard themselves as a people chosen by God. Not just any God, but specifically their own tribal one. To retain that status they develop and maintain a different religion, a different language, a different culture, different mores—as, for example, in wearing turbans (the Sikh community of India) and eating only kosher food—as well as an often strictly enforced endogamy. Second, whether out of their own will or because of the restrictions under which they live, they tend to avoid production—first agriculture, later industry—in favor of other, specifically urban, professions. Including money changers, bankers, peddlers, traders, physicians, pharmacists (both in my family and that of my wife there were several of those), scribes, writers, musicians, actors, fortune tellers, matchmakers, agents, lawyers, and middlemen of every kind. The sort of people who, compared with their mostly rural neighbors, tended to be well ahead in terms of literacy and modernity in general.

Thus, contrary to what I and countless Israelis have been taught, we Jews are not unique. True, Jews have tended to be more successful, were often persecuted more intensively, and survived longer than practically any other “Mercurians.” But that does not mean they are, in principle, different; let alone that their continued existence and the elevated socio-economic status they have achieved in many countries cannot be explained by history but is due to some special kind of divine favor.

That essential point having been made, Slezkine goes on to trace the history of his own “Mercurian” ancestors in Russia. Under the Czars Jews were discriminated against in any number of ways, though arguably not much more so than a great many other non-Russian peoples such as Poles, Greeks, Tatars, Armenians, and Turks. Their response was to leave, which was what between 1883 and 1924 well over a million of them did. Starting with Marx, who though not a Russian was the son of a converted Jew, others joined the forces that were even then preparing to launch the Revolution. Jews were attracted to socialism/communism because it promised them something the existing Russian state did not; namely, a life based on equality and brotherhood in which Jews could find their place without any regard to their ethnicity or religion.

Abdominal pain after sex tips of cialis properien pelvic inflammatory disease. You can place order for these herbal supplements can be placed from the comfort viagra buy http://icks.org/levitra-4952 of your home, you can visit an online destination to buy Kamagra online with reduced cost and many purchase benefits. This hair loss solution has been in the market longer period of time & its side effects cheap 25mg viagra icks.org found to be rare; it is quite familiar by name in the market. Men who are having some kind of lesions due to articular degenerative sickness. click now viagra pfizer prix Come the Revolution and many of these hopes were realized, at any rate on paper. With the Germans—another “Mercurian” people that had done much to form and govern Russia from the days of Peter the Great on—gone, Jews were ready for assimilation. Always distinguished by their belief in education as the highway to upward social mobility, they took up an entirely disproportionate number of positions in academia, the professions, the arts, and the bureaucracy. The higher the positions, the relatively more numerous and more visible the Jews who occupied them.

Yet Jewish vulnerability, due to their minority status over centuries on end, did not automatically vanish just because the change in regime. That is probably one reason why first Lenin—whose own paternal grandfather was Jewish—and then Stalin recruited many of their henchmen from among them. I use the term “henchmen” advisedly; in both the GPU and the NKVD between 1917 and 1945 it was often assimilated Jewish officers, completed with black cars, leather coats, and handguns, who arrested, interrogated, tortured, prosecuted, and executed the state’s prisoners by shooting them in the back of the neck. Jewish commissars also took a prominent part in some of the greatest atrocities of all, such as the destruction of the kulaks and causing millions of Ukrainians to die by starvation.

As the establishment of the “autonomous” Jewish province (oblast) in Birobidzhan shows, starting at the time he was serving as “Commissar for Nationalities” Stalin himself took an interest in the problem. The common fight against the invading Germans further reinforced the Russian Jews’ willingness, even eagerness, to assimilate, by which they meant abandoning circumcision and yarmulkes in favor of Pushkin on one hand and communism on the other.

When the time came for the state of Israel to be established it found looked for, and found, support in the Kremlin. Almost to a man, Israel’s founders were immigrants from Russia whose views on society and the economy were not too different from Stalin’s own—one Mandatory British police officer who interrogated Yitzhak Ben Tzvi, later Israel’s second president, called him “a perfect Bolshevik.” For that reason, but also because the dictator saw Israel as a lever with which to force the British to evacuate the Middle East, he supported it. By way of Czechoslovakia he even supplied it with arms; but for which the nascent Jewish State, laboring as it did under a U.N embargo, might not have survived.

What finally terminated Soviet support for Israel was the outbreak of the Korean War. As Slezkine does not say, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion worried least it might lead to a world war and thus to the severance of the country’s lifeline in the Mediterranean. This caused him to put his support, for whatever it was worth, firmly on the American/Western side. Much worse from Stalin’s point of view, Israel provided the Jews of the Soviet Union with an alternative homeland such as they had never had before. When Israel’s ambassador to Moscow, subsequent Prime Minister Golda Meir, took up her post she was absolutely mobbed by hysterically happy local Jews. No wonder the dictator changed course.

After Stalin died in 1953 his successors did not repeat anything as extreme as the notorious “doctors’ plot.” They did, however, put pressure on the Jews, subjecting them to various forms of discrimination in education and appointments to leading positions. The Jews on their part started resisting. Assisted by their co-religionists in the US, especially from 1967 on they demanded the right to leave. Once their demands were granted the newly-arrived Jews in the U.S quickly became as successful as their parents in Russia had been during the interwar years in particular. Such were their achievements in education, business, the law, the sciences, and the arts that they were even able to enter politics and make their mark there. It would be too much to say that “let my people go” (the Biblical slogan under which the fight for free emigration was waged) played the cardinal role in the success of that fight, let alone in causing the Soviet Union’s collapse; but a certain role it definitely did.

America’s gain was Russia’s loss; today fewer than a million Jews still live in the latter, as opposed to three million at the turn of the twentieth century. The other country which, following the collapse in question, became the goal of Russian-Jewish emigrants was Israel itself. In pointing out that many if not most of those Jews did not really want to go there and only started doing so in any numbers after no other option was left to them Slezkine is perfectly correct. He errs, however, in underestimating both the contribution that newly arriving Russian Jews made to Israel and the exceptional dynamism of Israel itself. Not knowing the country nearly as well as he knows Russia and the U.S, he has missed its amazing development into a military and high-tech powerhouse. Not to mention its proud ownership of the shekel, currently the strongest currency on earth. The root of the problem is found in the fact that the book was written in the early 2000s. Or else surely Slezkine would have provided a better explanation as to why so many Russian Jews did reach Israel after all than he actually does.

The period in which the book was written also explains why, in describing the U.S (and the West in general) as the new Jewish paradise, Slezkine has totally missed the new Moslem-led, (often right- but sometimes left wing), kind of anti-Semitism that seems to be gaining force on both sides of the Atlantic. Still I must confess that, to me with my Israeli education, his insistence that the Jewish nation was not nearly as unique as I had been made to believe came as a revelation. Only a little less impressive were his endless lists of successful Russian Jews, the kind that would never have been possible if Stalin had been as consistently anti-Semitic as he is often supposed to have been. Those lists in turn form but one part of an enormous body of research that has gone into this formidable, but on the whole quite readable and occasionally witty, volume. For anyone with the slightest interest in the Jewish nation, its recent past, its present and its future, it is a must.