"They didn't get shot" is maybe a little funnier when it's told in the shared context of a whole series of these anecdotes differing only in detail; the one I've heard involves Stalin demanding "who sneezed?" to a petrified delegation, only to say "bless you" after the guilty party has quickly been denounced by his comrades. I wouldn't be surprised if there are versions of these involving Tsars.
To be fair you have to go really far to get back to the times when the Tsar could and would execute random people for arbitrary reasons and without that the joke is no longer funny.
As I understand it, the KGB inherited their dirty tricks bag from the Cheka, whose members had learned them the hard way from being on the receiving end, taught by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana .
Not really. The USSR did not allow any members of the Imperial police to join the USSR secret service (it was initially called OGPU).
They also functioned quite differently, the Imperial security had never had a fraction of OGPU's power, so the methods were different. OGPU didn't care at all about planting evidence or manipulating witnesses, they could just torture people into signing confessions (called "the queen of all kinds of evidence" by the USSR chief prosecutor).
So any similarities are probably just a result of parallel evolution.
Sure the Tsarist regime was very brutal and oppressive however it still had a somewhat functioning and somewhat independent judicial system (of course extrajudicial murder/executions still occurred quite frequently but not even remotely as frequently as in the USSR).
But more importantly in this case Nicholas didn’t have nearly as much direct power as Stalin did (he was extremely incompetent as outright stupid as a person) and had to rely on his government to actually make the tough decisions.
Tsar, singular. One tsar was relatively liberal, Alexander II. He did well under the circumstances, but his good deeds were overwhelmed by the imperial family and system that he was a part of.
While I did appreciate Ivan Grozny seeing the Repin painting in Shurik's apartment in Ivan Vasilevich menyaet professiyu (1973), I was a bit disappointed in that (at least with the youtube version?) the actor turned his back before crossing himself in the elevator, which would've told us if Gaidai knew/cared about Old Believer sibboleths.
Atomic Cafe is a very funny take on origins of the bomb and the birth of the Cold War's nuclear standoff - with lots of grim material though, such as the original films of the effects of nuclear weapons on Japanese people, i.e. the material that was left out of "Oppenheimer". Atomic Cafe is available online in full:
Beria was not only a bolshevik mass murderer and torturer of the common kind. According to the memoirs of Khrushchev, Beria was also a serial killer. He would haunt the Moscow streets in his car at night, having his body guard pick up any girl he fancied. Those women would be taken to his house, where he'd drug them, rape them and sometimes kill them. Many times very young girls. The body guards would then be tasked with burying the corpses in his yard. Afterwards the bodyguard gave a list of more than a hundred women who had been raped by Beria.
This man almost became the Soviet leader after Stalin's death, but was outmanoeuvred and later executed. According to Khrushchev, even Stalin feared Beria at times.
From Khrushchev:
"When Rudenko began the interrogation of Beria, a monstrous person was revealed before our eyes, a dreadful beast for whom nothing was sacred."
On the other side of the story: Beria was promoting the reunification of Germany, during his short rule in 1953. His plan was to pull the Soviet army out of East Germany/German Democratic Republic. The motive was to get the Soviet Union out of the cold war with the west.
Some months later the uprising of the 17th of June 1953 happened in East Berlin, and the politburo got scared that something similar could happen with Russia.
While it might be true I think it's worth pointing out that Khrushchev and Beria were in rivalry for power.
And I would be surprised if in his memoirs he wouldn't have painted Beria as the bad guy.
So I think we should take all those memories with a grain of salt at best and understand that all those stories might be twisted or even completely false.
From the Beria wikipedia article:
In 1993, construction workers installing streetlights unearthed human bones near Beria's Moscow villa (now the Tunisian embassy). Skulls, pelvises and leg bones were found.[90] In 1998, the skeletal remains of five young women were discovered during work carried out on the water pipes in the garden of the same villa.[91] In 2011, building workers digging a ditch in Moscow city centre unearthed a common grave near the same residence containing a pile of human bones, including two children's skulls covered with lime or chlorine. The lack of articles of clothing and the condition of the remains indicate that these bodies were buried naked.
It does have a big QAnon "baby-eating" feel about it yes. Especially considering that even Soviet state leaders lived in pretty small houses by Western standards, it's pretty unlikely that they had the space to bury hundreds of corpses.
The Soviets were really big on rewriting history and they spent a lot of time editing photos of stalin with people that later fell out of grace.
But I'm sure he was a bad person indeed. I don't think you could rise to such a position without being one until the lighter age appeared that led to Gorbachev.
Yes but I'm talking more about the creepiness of the stalking of women, mass rape, personally torturing and killing for pleasure etc. It sounds a bit far-fetched. It may well be true but there was just so much history rewriting going on.
I know all the soviet leaders of that era were mass murderers but usually by delegation only.
Edit: I read up on it and it does indeed seem true. Wow..
Some people correct the opposite direction from ‘the office’ (say, spending time in nature after working at a computer all day). Some go whole hog - spending all their extra time working on hobby projects, for instance.
I guess the same thing applies if your job is being a manipulator, murderer, and genocidal maniac?
Indeed. It's always frustrating to encounter these "Well if your arguments are right then how come they sound false to me?" discussion of Soviet history, even on what are supposed to be more measured and thoughtful platforms like HN. Doubly so when the argument is just that the Stalin-era secret police committed an atrocity.
> It does have a big QAnon "baby-eating" feel about it yes. Especially considering that even Soviet state leaders lived in pretty small houses by Western standards, it's pretty unlikely that they had the space to bury hundreds of corpses.
You don't know what you're talking about, is probably the nicest thing I can say about your comment.
Khrushchev memoirs were not official Soviet history, they were recorded by him after he had fallen from grace and was living in house arrest as a retiree, later smuggled out to the West by his friends. You can read them and judge for yourself how candid they are. Of course he might paint himself in a more favourable light than somebody else would, that's expected. But your comment comes off as both rude and ignorant – unless I'm mistaken and you are of such a superior intellect that you can pass quick judgement on any historical happening without having to bother yourself with the sources.
I was just saying how it came across to me. It really sounds like something made-up in the times for political gain like the secret baby-eating clubs of Qanon :)
But I do see some corpses have actually been found and it was corroborated by multiple sources. I wouldn't consider Kruchchev a reliable source either though for the reasons mentioned. But some other one syes.
Like I said it was just my personal feelings on the subject and this is not an encyclopedia but a discussion forum. We don't always have the ability to do a full study on each subject. And I never said I was an authority on it.
>When Rudenko began the interrogation of Beria, a monstrous person was revealed before our eyes, a dreadful beast for whom nothing was sacred.
It's amusingly self-serving how Krushcev should imply that he and others in the top leadership only discovered this about Beria after the death of Stalin and Beria's arrest.
Krushcev himself, while not personally sadistic and cruel in the way Beria was, had rivers of blood pass over his hands while he worked for Stalin organizing vast purges and famine conditions.
He doesn't imply that, he knew before that how Beria was conducting his job as the secret police chief, but probably not about Beria's past time activities.
Khrushchev was far from a saint, and he is surprisingly quiet in his memoirs about his role as a judge in the troikas, and participation in purging innocent people. He was a murderer. According to himself, he was hypnotised like everyone else in the Stalin cult, unable to see anything wrong with what Stalin said or did.
Wellerstein prides himself on being able to read Russian, but he is not as good at it as he thinks. Specifically, translating the title of the section "Атомные байки" as "Atomic fun" is simply inadequate. Here <https://en.pons.com/translate/russian-english/%D0%B1%D0%B0%C...>, for instance, the second word is correctly translated as "fairy-tale, fable, old wives' tale".
So to sum up, his whole blog post is based on mistranslation
By many accounts he was actually, with quite a sense of humor about certain (often awful) things. Being a monstrous rapist serial killer genocidal secret police boss doesn't remove one from having other human traits like the ability to crack jokes.
With respect to the XKCD cartoon, I am sure it killed all cancer cells within a certain radius of the blast, and it was thus a success. It turns out hydrogen bombs have even a bigger cancer cell killing radius than atomic bombs.
> The problem is, of course, that such levity gets undercut
I don't think that's true. That is, I'm sure it's true for the author of this article, but it's not true for the people involved. Humor has always thrived in dark times and places. What is viewed as grim and humorless from the outside is often not seen that way from within, else the grimness itself is what creates the response of humor. Is the idea that Soviet nuclear researchers should have spent their lives in morose silence because their facilities were built with gulag labor? It would be one thing for a click-bait writer with no understanding of history to take this position, but being a historian, I'm surprised the author of this excellent website does.
> Or maybe it’s part of the “Stalin wasn’t so bad” nationalist revisionism that has been building in Putin’s 21st-century Russian Federation.
I think it is worth pointing out that Stalin and Beria were actually Georgian, not Russian. Additionally, the architect of what was later known as the KGB was a Pole, Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Here is an interesting excerpt from the Dzerzhinsky entry in Wikipedia about an exchange with Lenin (who was actually Russian) on the question of Soviet policy on nationalities,
April 1917 Party Conference, when Lenin accused Dzerzhinsky of Great-Russian chauvinism, he replied: "I can reproach him (Lenin) with standing at the point of view of the Polish, Ukrainian and other chauvinists."
Today Putin often says that Vladimir Lenin is responsible for giving national minorities the freedoms they continue to enjoy today (some in form of independent statehood). He says this in a negative tone, and often equates it to placing a nuclear bomb under Russia.
My reason for pointing this out is that Soviet history is really peculiar and one has to be careful with saying Soviet = Russian.
Yes, but the thing is that Poland and Ukraine did not really want to be a part of the evil empire. It just enabled some ambitious people who were not russian to raise to a leadershio position.
If a high ranking leader would have been estonian then you still could not say that because of this the soviet union would be "less russian" or something. Most of the people, officials, party members etc were russian and the soviet union was born from the russian empire.
> Or maybe it’s part of the “Stalin wasn’t so bad” nationalist revisionism that has been building in Putin’s 21st-century Russian Federation.
Putin himself seems to deplore Stalin; I think partly because it was Stalin that made Ukraine a soviet republic distinct from Russia. It's quite odd; Putin seems to be the most Stalin-like leader Russia has had since - well, Stalin. I have no way of knowing what ordinary Russians think of Stalin; I've not seen a Levada Centre poll on the question.
It wasn’t really Stalin, that’s just how the Soviet union worked pretty much from the beginning (self determination and all that stuff). Stalin gave Ukraine additional territories which might be what you’re actually referring to.
> Putin seems to be the most Stalin-like leader Russia has had since - well, Stalin
I would argue he is much closer to the tsars in the following aspects:
- incestuous state-church relationship (it took for WWII to happen for Stalin to let a bit of leeway to the Orthodox church) to enforce the state legitimacy;
- dreams about re-building an imperial Russia directly under Moscow rule (Stalin focused on “Socialism in one country” after the failure of the USSR/Poland war and then went down the “buffer-states belt” policy post-WWII);
- deliberately exhibits lavish luxury (Stalin had a life style that was closer to wealthy retired US surgeon – by which I mean a couple villas and nice cars – than imperial Archduke)
- and no realistic, well-anchored long term view for the country – safe for making him and his cronies wealthier (this is not an apology of stalinism and its hundreds of thousands of murdered, but at least Stalin had an idea of where the Soviet Union was, where he wanted it to be, and what was materially required for that).
The Russian Orthodox Church was completely subverted by the KGB and still carries that legacy and purpose. The church never reformed after the USSR went kaput. It is used by Putin to spy on and keep people in line. Putin is also a creature of the KGB.
As an example of the fascist/statist bent of this organization, check out the artwork in this cathedral:
> The Russian Orthodox Church was completely subverted by the KGB
That's true of the post-WWII, post-Stalin USSR. Up until the big changes of 1941, nearly all churches had been closed, publication of religious texts was forbidden and many popes were deported.
Conservatism is traditionally a great vector for propagating an extreme agenda. That's also why you nowadays can see the GOP being co opted by the Kremlin, while simultaneously Evangelicals are up in arms behind Trump. Some of these people really think Russia stands for traditional values and demand UA to surrender.
Same occured here before WWII, where Hitler was seen as law&order and would finally do something against undesirable elements from society.
The playbook of strong-men and their servants are boringly predictable. Lhbti-free zones (Orban, Hungary), racial rage, women needs to embrace traditional role, forbidding books, you name it.
None of it contributes to society in any meaningful way, but you can get 50% of the USA behind it.
"Nah, he is not really going to do what he says".
Yup.
> Conservatism is traditionally a great vector for propagating an extreme agenda.
Is there any ideology not prone to this? Seems like a needlessly divisive point to include in this analysis. There is also common patterns in the devolution of progressives and revolutionaries. But that's obvious.
I didn't know it is such a divisive point. You can be perfectly very traditionally religious, but be aware that today's authoritarianism tries to appeal to you. I know first hand.
-------
I will add something. Religious tradition can be a great source and motivator to uphold human values. Let's focus on that.
I propose we move away from the concept of conservatism, as I get the feeling that for the US audience this is too political. Rather, let us answer the question whether we want to do good for our neighbour.
This whole line of discussion is weird - Stalinism and the USSR was the definition of anti-conservative and authoritarian. Literally ideologically leftist to a polar extreme in many ways.
I think the confusion stems from mislabeling and the cultural associations that some people have with it. In the US, the term socialist usually means something bad, while in Europe all modern states are build around some concept of democratic socialism.
If I say progressive, some people here might identify that with some mouth foaming marxist that will apologize any non free-market dictator.
Label progressive = human rights , not economic policy.
Any suggestion for a term that works better in your habitat is welcome!
> Conservatism is traditionally a great vector for propagating an extreme agenda.
Empirically, a lot of ideologies are a great vector for propagating an extreme agenda, from Nazism through conservantism to the Big Leap Forward through progressism and many others in the middle.
I'm absolutely not sweeping liberalism with nazism, sorry if it came out this way. My point is that I don't see extremism being more characteristic of conservatism than some other ideologies.
Propagandists do like to co-opt narratives. It's a natural vector for sympathy. In terms of US politics, this has affected both of the main parties over the years. Singling out the GOP here is itself a false narrative. There are surely people in that party who are co-opted, but that is only part of what's going on. The Dems also have their useful idiots.
Speaking of WWII, Joe Kennedy (John's father) was quite useful to the Nazis.
I hope you will agree that we should not distract ourselves by, I believe not intended, false equivalency and whatabouttisms. The situation is too serious.
- We were talking about how conservatism has the weakness that it is particularly prone to siren songs of authoritarians.
- There are more bad things happening in the GOP with respect to the democratic constitutional state, but that is hardly a relief. The Dems might have their own idiots, sure, but there is no equivalency here.
- Perhaps I should not take the bait, but John Kennedy, the president, was not an anti-semite, unlike his father indeed, who was not president.
Leftist and progressive movements are equally prone to authoritarianism. We should be on guard against extremists on both sides of the political spectrum.
Revolutionary `neq` progressive, especially not in our time.
If your read up on Lenin and the Revolution no serious human rights advocate today would vouch for that.
But the early USSR was both authoritarian and progressive, with the suppression of nobility privileges, strong improvements to women's rights, legalization of homosexuality, etc.
> no serious human rights advocate today would vouch for that.
This is close to a no true Scotsman argument; virtually no older-than-30y.o. political movement would check all the boxes to be qualified as such.
Hardly. Authoritarianism is what happens when ‘the right things don’t happen’ on their own based on ideology, so they need to be forced.
Like seizing farmland from landowners and forming collectives to farm them instead (USSR).
Or forcing affirmative action despite no identifiable discriminatory actions. Which is literally openly happening right now in the West in tech and other areas.
It’s about forcing reality to confirm to an idealized ‘right’ way, despite objections or resistance - including often ignoring if the final situation/state even works. Example: Chinese Great Leap Forward and rural steel ‘mills’, USSR and collectivism, etc.
Right. Stalin's luxury was the functional luxury that anything would be done for him if he asked, if it was possible at all.
Putin is much more like a monarch: rich to the point that almost nothing makes him feel rich. Which is why he's so desperate to pretend he excels at stuff: horse riding, ice hockey, shooting.
(He probably does excel at shooting)
Or perhaps he's more like an L Ron Hubbard with truly vast resources. Quixotic performative superiority.
> Which is why he's so desperate to pretend he excels at stuff: horse riding, ice hockey, shooting.
That's not about his own psychology, but what the Russian people wanted to see in their leader. Near it's end, the USSR had long been led by decrepit old men, and no small amount of blame for the state of the state was laid on the way the country became a gerontocracy. Public displays of Putin's vigor and virility were important PR/propaganda. They came off as really weird in the west, but we were not the target audience for them.
Furthermore, every successful dictator has to project an image of excellent health.
After all, if your finance chief is loyal because you let him steal $10 million a year and he expects you to be in power for the next 10+ years, that's $100M+ for staying loyal.
If you're in poor health, though, and might only last 2 more years? Your finance chief is going to start thinking about who'll replace you. Earning that replacement's favour might be worth a lot more than the $20M he can expect from you.
Your military chief and police chief and religious chief are having similar thoughts, and before you know it your successor controls the treasury, armed forces and religion and you're forced into retirement or dead.
Granted, you can avoid the problem by having an obvious, powerful and deeply loyal successor. If Putin had a healthy young son he appointed the head of the armed forces he could be ill as much as he likes. But he doesn't have such a successor, so he's got to project an image of excellent health.
Putin doesn't have any fixed or strong beliefs. One moment he's a staunch "strong-hand" Stalinist, and another moment he's a pro-business economic liberal. And that's why Russia has no ideology, it's not a Nazi Germany or a Stalin's USSR.
(Pugacheva denounced the SMO last year, many others decamped* for Israel, and there are a few artists who stayed despite being no longer in favour and are filming clips with their phones, but as far as I can tell hi budget videos are —and have been— pretty synonymous with toeing the Kremlin line)
* the first Новогодний Голубой огонек after the invasion had to pad out the audience with military members; I had been assuming that was because either too many artists (obviously сердючка included) were elsewhere or because they had refused to guarantee their support live on-air. Haven't watched this years' yet.
(I can easily believe Putin would be happy to join in the Immortal Regiment parade while casting shade on the then-leader. Do any of the "Man Like Putin" lyrics refer to Stalin?
Perhaps I'm wrong - I've just done a little search.
Firstly, it's Lenin that he blames for Ukrainian autonomy - not Stalin. Secondly, Putin has evidently said that Stalin was a mixed blessing; he industrialized the Russian economy, and he defeated the Nazis, but the repression and murder he caused were wrong.
""The positives that undoubtedly existed were achieved at an unacceptable price. Repressions did take place. This is a fact. Millions of our fellow citizens suffered from them," Putin said.
"Such a way of running a state, of achieving results is unacceptable, this is impossible. We have not only lived through the personality cult but also witnessed mass crimes against our own nation."
Stalin needed suppression, in 2009 Putin did not need it.
As cracks starts to appear in Russia's society, we hear state television increasingly refer to Stalin in a positive way. The last years, access to Soviet historic places and sources have been closed down for researchers. History books are rewritten, militarism is reintroduced for children (already Kindergarten age).
Everything is a means to an end in a dictatorship, be it people, resources or truth. Times have changed, social contract has been broken. What lies ahead is repression, so Stalin needs a new dress.
So you are not wrong, but you should not mistake it as an ideological sincere stance.
> The last years, access to Soviet historic places and sources have been closed down for researchers.
I think you are talking specifically about the Memorial Project, that was documenting victims of Stalin's terror, and was dissolved by a Moscow judge in 2022?
I remember they were documenting the genocide of Finnish Ingrians among other Soviet crimes.
things are still looking healthy in Mar 33 (my metric: no party has more delegates than all the other parties combined; others will obviously use different metrics) but Nov 33 is completely out of hand.
the Duma at least has more than two parties, but isn't healthy by my metric. (the same occurs in the upper house)
When more repression arrives, either we'll see a Duma that's nearly 100% "ER and friends", or we'll see a Duma with the same parties but so ineffective that if Putin's horse were elected (it could easily commute from an office in the Moscow Manège?) it wouldn't be any worse than any other deputy.
Your metric is too simplistic. I'm not an expert in 1933 German politics, but the Russian state is quite involved in engineering the appearance of political choice. The FSB and friends ("siloviki") do hands-on screening of candidates from KPRF, LDPR, etc. and coercing of voters (using the "administrative resource" as they call it) and fabricating election results. The Duma has been nearly 100% ER and friends for a very long time now - representatives ("deputies") who don't fall in line are ejected, prosecuted, and sent to prison. The same thing happens with gubernatorial elections (which are a much more obvious sham as they don't have even an appearance of being binding) and local assembly elections as needed (sometimes leading to hilarious/tragic results as the FSB realizes that a particular assembly has gotten too independent).
Thanks, and serendipitously, that also explains both the absent mayor and the general hilarious/tragic atmosphere of petty larceny in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1J5lUKnD4I ...
At this point, in 2024, ordinary Russians probably choose to think of Stalin whatever Putin thinks of Stalin, and are ready to put an apology video on social media if they happen to punt in the wrong direction.
(Being downvoted for this is a trip. Yes it's a joke, and hyperbole. But you know it is also true in substance.)
Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29284537 - Nov 2021 (133 comments)