Perception of Communism after Nazi victory
- Thread starter Ghost8472
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Cook
Banned
Hugo Gutmann. He was pulled in by the Gestapo in ’37 but was helped to escape to America by a fellow veteran. That awarding on the Iron Cross 1st class is rather dodgy since there is nothing to indicate Hitler did anything to deserve it.
Interesting, he didn't strike me as being a great orator, but perhaps singing is different from speaking...Stalin was the best singer; he's the only one who got a scholarship for it
Wolfpaw
Banned
I think it was for "Bravery Under Fire," which wouldn't really surprise me. Hitler was a messenger on the Front, which was apparently not the safest of jobs.
To a certain degree, I think this psychiatric diagnosis of Göring from 1925 could be applied to Hitler:
"Like many men capable of great acts of physical courage which verge quite often on desperation, he lacked the finer kind of courage in the conduct of his life which was needed when serious difficulties overcame him."
Wolfpaw
Banned
Well, the Georgian accent that he never lost didn't do him any favors in front of Great Russian crowds.
Not really that, but more the fact that his speeches seemed incredibly boring, from the way he talked.
Cook
Banned
He was a regimental HQ runner, not a battalion or company runner; he’d have spent his time couriering orders between Regimental HQ and the battalion HQ or between RHQ and neighbouring unit HQs, or between RHQ and division. In short, he was rear echelon. The only sources claiming he saw front line action are Hitler himself.
I Blame Communism
Banned
Then why had the Soviets spent the previous decade pursuing a policy - masterminded by Stalin himself under Leninism - which had created a 'strong national feeling' in terms we in the west would understand it. In fact half-hearted Ukrainianisation was ongoing throughout the 30s. If the tsars had ruled Ukraine for years by denigrating Ukrainian as a farmyard dialect, why did the Soviets, at their most centralistic and Russian-nationalist, never cease to idolise Shevchenko and teach Ukrainian in the primary schools?
The events of the civil war included four in five of the borot'bists (Ukrainian Left SRs, basically) who made the revolution on the land ending up in the Bolshevik party and the Ukrainianisation of the country's cities.
And of course in Kazakhstan, collectivisation wrecked things for the semi-nomdaic Kazakh population and the Slav settlers - disproportionately Ukrainian - benefitted.
Plus Bolshevik policies created famine in the lower Volga area during the civil war. Were they trying to punish the Russians?
It's not an analysis that can be sustained. The idea that there was a continuous armed conspiracy of nationalists controlled by Pilsudski from Warsaw was invented by the NKVD to have a reason for shooting all those people.
I Blame Communism
Banned
This is a British diplomat (ie, a man on a mission to reduce the size of the Bolshevik regime) circa 1918 (so the adults of the Holodomor can walk and talk), quoted by Figes in A People's Tragedy:
When it comes to nation-state history, the 'left-wing reading' is considered right (hoho) by everybody who talks seriously about the past. And it's only 'left' because Hobsbawm articulated it for us in recent times. For a lot of the time concerned, nationalism was characteristic of lefties and anti-national ideas of states of rightists, including during in the case of all kinds of Russian nationalism except tsarist-Russian state-nationalism the Russian Civil War.
I wonder how much of Russia (defined around the borders of the modern state) would give a similar answer.
It sounds like a situation where as long as the government isn't crueller or stupider than expected, it's just another day. Ideology isn't even worth paying attention to, let alone getting worked up about.
It sounds like a situation where as long as the government isn't crueller or stupider than expected, it's just another day. Ideology isn't even worth paying attention to, let alone getting worked up about.
I Blame Communism
Banned
Any peasant village. But people expect their vague pre-national identification as 'russky' (Orthodox East Slav) so it doesn't so much get in the way of egregious nation-state history.
Not ideology in the sense we might understand it, but I'd stress that the peasants in the Russian empire were quite capable of organising themselves and setting up their own kinds of authority, and of looking at the situation and choosing their sides. I get rather annoyed when people assume it would be easy to 'manipulate' the peasants into supporting so-and-so (usually anti-Bolshevik nationalist) agenda. If it was that easy maybe the Reds and Whites would have done it!
What do you mean?
That makes sense. But I'd still say ideologically netural in the sense that "revolutionary" and "reactionary" are about the same thing -
"How much are you going to oppress us and how many of us are going to die to set an example for the rest?" is more important.
I Blame Communism
Banned
Right now vast quantities of history are being written in terms of nation-states to justify them: through their state education systems they are probably the biggest guaranteed market for historical writing. But their expectations - that history should be written as if a nation is an inherent, constantly existing thing that works towards the natural state, well, a state - is profoundly misplaced (and, ironically enough, was egregiously promoted by the Soviet historiography).
In eastern Europe the situation is very extreme, with people thumbing Herodotus for the ancient Ukrainians, but everybody does it. It's quite common to read Irish history as if everybody was working for or against 'Ireland'. Ireland and the Irish nation referred to lots of different things scarcely recognisable to us now. The latest fad seems to be writing the nation-state history of Europe: 'European civil war' and all that.
When pre-national identities that get in the way of these expectations - for instance that the Ukrainians could be 'Russkiy' whilst voting and enlisting for the nationalists because to them nationalism meant something else together than the independence of a territorial state - this upsets people. But if the Russians identifies as Russkiy no problemo; the fact that it meant something completely different can be edged around.
But the peasants almost always fought - in their own, generally quite localised terms - for the 'revolution' and against the old order. Reds and whites brutalised them - who did so more depended simply on where and who you were - but in the end the reds, and blacks and blues and greens, were 'people like us' and the whites, as officers and landlords, weren't. This may seem politically immature, but it was also an assertion of human worth against the traditional figures of authority in a society where people had very recently been property. The peasants would rather not have been oppressed, but they'd rather be oppressed as 'vy' ('you') than as 'ty' ('thou', for intimates, children, pets, serfs, and pre-revolutionary soldiers). They weren't devoid of politics, it just wasn't modern party-politics.
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I suggest you look up things like the Great Purge, the Ukrainian famine of 1932, Katyn, the Gulags, the 1929-1933 collectivisation, and the extreme lengths the Soviet regime went to suppress it's peasantry. I'm not saying the Nazis were good (they were evil, no doubt), but to dismiss as "bollocks" the notion that Stalin gave Hitler a good run for his money is naive at best and a fucking insult to everyone who died at his hand at worst.
To think that the Soviets weren't as bad because the Nazis were killing for racial reasons and the Soviets for political or idealistic ones is neither here nor there. Look at the numbers. Pretty fucking diabolical on both sides.
Snake Featherston
Banned
That's not what people actually say. What they say is the Soviets were evil repressive assholes but the Nazis were intending the wholesale eradication of an entire civilization as their starting point and end-goal. More efficient repression than the already-repressive Tsarist regime v. Genghis Khan with tanks? I'd rather live in the USA of the time than in either, but if I had no choice I'd pick the USSR, where the system was just a more efficient version of what it replaced, over the Nazis where a problematic democratic system was transformed into something apocalyptically nightmarish.
Me too, I think.
However, as a heterosexual person who would probably be classified as a fairly germanic "aryan" by the Nazis, I must admit that its a tough call from an amoralistic self-preservation perspective. If I minded my Ps and Qs in Nazi Germany, I'd probably be safe from the immediate threat of death or slavery. In Stalin's USSR I'd also probably be fairly safe if I minded my Ps and Qs, but under Stalin the Ps and Qs changed a lot based on the paranoia of Stalin. I'd probably feel less secure.
The key difference to me is that something akin to the holocaust is an essential feature of the Nazis' raison d'etre. Nazisim wouldn't be Nazism without it.
Mass murder purges, starvation, and insane dictators were not an essential feature of Soviet Communism. A frequent side-effect of totalitarian communism, yes, but not the reason the Communist Party existed.
At its very core, Communism is based on far more benign humanistic notions. Stalin's (and maybe even Lenin's) rule may well have been as evil as Hitlers, but Communism is not as evil as Nazism. Idiotic maybe, but not inherently evil.
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Um, no just no. Russians and the other Soviets peoples dont breed like rats. If Stalinism (where pretty much all the deaths from Soviets repression took place, leaving aside the RCW where everyone was killing everyone else) killed that number of people. Whence came all those millions of Soviets troops Stalin raised, after the Germans overran Soviet regions with a population of about 70 million and took over 3 million POW's?
Are you saying Stalin was a necromancer & the Red Army troops were all zombies?
The Soviets in 74 years, didnt even imprision or directly repress that number of people. If you think they did you are simply nuts.
Stalin was the best singer; he's the only one who got a scholarship for it
Credit where it's due, Stalin could sing well. He and his Georgian cronies apparently still could (according to Simon Sebag Montefiore, anyway), when they made a record of their singing in one of their parties during the late 40s.
Anyway, Communism would be seen by the Nazis in a Nazi victory as insanely evil. By the West, depending on how hard its partisans are fighting, it could be seen as something vaguely heroic. And I don't want to get into the Nazi vs. Stalin debate. Finally, what on earth is a "left wing view" of nation states and nationalism? One that favours left wing nationalists over right wing ones?