gradenko_2000 posted:

A Buttery Pastry posted:

please source your quote

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War ???

I guess better save it now before it gets rewritten or smth

John Charity Spring posted:

weren't a lot of the purges essentially bottom-up as well, as in not orchestrated by Stalin but rather a really brutal way to solve disputes and grudges at local levels by party functionaries etc? and then also being ramped up by people like Yezhov who used it as a way to advance their own position. Stalin directed and signed off on a lot of it but iirc he was also being egged on and hyped up by his subordinates, etc. a perfect storm of different motives and fuckups and paranoia and cruelty

gradenko_2000 posted:

Fish of hemp posted:

Yes, but how did it help?

HootTheOwl posted:

"I convinced hitler to invade" ... as a good thing?

vyelkin posted:

He was personally signing death lists with his big old grease pencil, and personally signing off on quotas for arrests and executions in different regions. That's how arbitrary the purges were - the guys at the top in Moscow figured "this percentage of people in this province must be counterrevolutionary, kill them" based on nothing. They weren't responding to actual plots or evidence, they were just making up numbers and telling their subordinates to get to work.

V. Illych L. posted:

estimating the number of counterrevolutionaries based on some kind of statistical inference is par for the course; misunderstanding the incentives of the junior officers involved is less forgivable

Raskolnikov38 posted:

reading accounts of the purged I’m not so sure it was statistics driving the purges but rather the insane nature of them vis a vis demanding the arrested name as many names as possible. it really just strikes me as an incredibly stupid and deadly positive feedback loop where each arrest leads to a dozen more and each of those dozen nets another dozen and so and so on.

really my only question is if it designed this way intentionally or if no one considered how the purges were feeding into themselves

Raskolnikov38 posted:

really my only question is if it designed this way intentionally or if no one considered how the purges were feeding into themselves

vyelkin posted:

So the answer is that it was both. We now know that a lot of it was orchestrated directly from the people at the top, where the buck stopped with Stalin, but the USSR was a big place and the way the purges actually played out at ground level depended a lot on the local officials. The two things fed into each other: Stalin's orders gave people carte blanche to arrest and kill perceived enemies or social rivals, officers overfulfilled quotas to try and impress their bosses or avoid bringing suspicion onto themselves, and then the people back at the centre received their memos saying "actually we found even more spies and saboteurs than your quota told us to" and concluded that the situation was even worse than they thought, therefore justifying the purges continuing to deepen in a positive feedback loop of violence.

R. Mute posted:

i think this is a limited way of looking at things, and one that's far too common in western historiography about the soviet union, because it completely ignores the possibility that people actually believed in what they were doing - or in anything at all, really. it's all settling scores, self-preservation, opportunism, but the idea that people earnestly believed they were rooting out class enemies or protecting the socialist project never comes up. it also tends to view the communist party as somehow alien to soviet society, a separate entity that merely enforced its will on the soviet people, while in reality the interaction between the communist party and the society it was a part of was integral to a lot of party decisions and acts.

there's plenty of other historical examples where we do acknowledge this dynamic - the cultural revolution being an obvious one. but if you want a non-communist example, there's also the post-war repression of collaborators - where a lot of the imprisonments and executions were driven not by a sense of justice, but by a fear of what the people and the resistance groups would do if there wasn't enough of a show of retribution.

i swear someone published a book about this recently, but i can't for the life of me remember the name.

mycomancy posted:

In a similar vein, I've long questioned how much influence the Tsarist Russian Empire had on the USSR. From what I understand, the Soviets kept a lot of the more repressive, reactionary elements from the Tsar and tried to harness them for the good of the Workers' State. Could Stalin's purges be a result of the Soviets failing to purge the real poison of reaction from their government and their society?

StashAugustine posted:

It is kinda ironic that the most anti communist people are the ones insisting that it's all the fault of the personal evil of Stalin Lenin and whoever else

Raskolnikov38 posted:

i'm not sure if he's written anything about internal soviet dynamics but vladislav zubok's failed empire's central thesis is that the soviets inherited and continued aspects of tsarist foreign policy

R. Mute posted:

i think this is a limited way of looking at things, and one that's far too common in western historiography about the soviet union, because it completely ignores the possibility that people actually believed in what they were doing - or in anything at all, really. it's all settling scores, self-preservation, opportunism, but the idea that people earnestly believed they were rooting out class enemies or protecting the socialist project never comes up. it also tends to view the communist party as somehow alien to soviet society, a separate entity that merely enforced its will on the soviet people, while in reality the interaction between the communist party and the society it was a part of was integral to a lot of party decisions and acts.

there's plenty of other historical examples where we do acknowledge this dynamic - the cultural revolution being an obvious one. but if you want a non-communist example, there's also the post-war repression of collaborators - where a lot of the imprisonments and executions were driven not by a sense of justice, but by a fear of what the people and the resistance groups would do if there wasn't enough of a show of retribution.

i swear someone published a book about this recently, but i can't for the life of me remember the name.

quote:

Until very recently the old lady who used to look after the cemetery—her name was Maria Lutsenko and she was known as Masha—still lived in the cemetery house just above the ravine.

For some reason the Germans had completely overlooked her, and never suspected that she used to make her way quietly through the undergrowth and saw everything they were doing. I used to walk round there with her and she would show me again and again just where it started, where they had dynamited the hillside and how ‘Over there and there they used to lay them on the ground. And how they screamed! … Oh, Mother of God … They would keep on hitting them with spades.’ As she said this she would be pointing beneath the surface, deep down, because we were standing over a ravine which no longer existed. It is only people like her who have lived there for a long time who can still point out the shape of Babi Yar, the remains of the dam and other traces of what happened there. But no evidence of the crimes committed remains. If you remember, the ashes were partly blown away; the rest, along with the bones, are now buried deep under the earth, so that nothing remains of the people who perished. How many there were of them we shall never find out. All the officially published figures are only estimates, changed to suit the occasion.

All the same I believe that no major crime against society can remain undetected. Some old Masha who saw everything will always turn up, or else a few people—a dozen, two or even just one—will manage to escape and live to tell the tale. However much you burn and disperse and cover over and trample down, human memory still remains. History cannot be deceived, and it is impossible to conceal something from it for ever.

AnimeIsTrash posted:

Are there any charts out there about populations before and after the partition of countries like Yugoslavia, or the USSR?

Looking for stuff like this

gradenko_2000 posted:

quote:

Stating in 1857 before a boisterous Jackson, Mississippi, crowd that the 1856 election “was known to be between democracy and the black republicans,” Mississippi U.S. senator Jefferson Davis claimed that Democrats and particularly his southern Democratic supporters had prevented treasonous Anglophile Republican abolitionists from perverting the federal government to impose inequality among whites and racial equality across the Union. The United States “[g]randly passed . . . through that most terrific of all our crisis [sic],” he boasted, “and where is that man who does not know . . . that the southern democracy saved the Union of equal rights?”1 Davis inherited a political tradition tracing back to so-called War Hawks among the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans, whose party came to be known as the Democratic Party or simply the Democracy after the War of 1812. He and his supporters held that the 1787 Constitution established a federal government that was not supposed to encroach upon rights reserved to the states but had been delegated extensive military-related powers that states were not to deny. Protecting what they took to be the correct nature of the U.S. federative system against both northern Republicans and southern states’ rights extremists loosely affiliated with their own party, Davis Democrats called themselves “conservatives” because they aimed to preserve what they thought was the true nature of the American nation, which had been forged in battle against Britain during the Revolution of 1776. That nation was characterized for them by the mutually reinforcing principles of equality among whites and white supremacy, by Jeffersonian democracy defined in opposition to British abolitionist elites espousing white inequality as well as racial equality. And they believed that the American nation’s destiny was to wage a new War of 1812 to conquer Britain’s Union-surrounding empire in the Americas.

Mindful of events across the Atlantic, Davis Democrats also recalled that Bonapartists had been de facto U.S. allies during the War of 1812. Davis’s mainly but not entirely southern “War Hawk” Democrat progenitors viewed Davis’s namesake Thomas Jefferson, the first Democratic president, as an ideological and strategic ally of Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon I) against Britain, which had, as Jefferson stated in the Declaration of Independence, “excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and . . . endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction, of all ages, sexes and conditions.” They believed that Bonaparte aimed to forge a United States of Europe that would destroy feudalism and spread equality among whites across the continent in emulation of the Union in North America. And they looked forward to the United States and Napoleonic France displacing or subjugating nonwhites for the benefit of whites, fulfilling what they saw as the purpose of the American and French Revolutions by imposing white equality and supremacy on both sides of the Atlantic. Britain, however, stood in the way. Davis’s South Carolinian mentor John C. Calhoun and his pro-Bonaparte War Hawk supporters accused the British Empire of helping advocates of white inequality oppose the United States and Bonapartist France, both of which they regarded as beset by rebellious nonwhites whom British abolitionists were inciting with promises of racial equality. They thus gladly turned the Union into a de facto ally of Napoleonic France in 1812 by impelling the United States into war against the British and their nonwhite allies, whom Bonapartists and pro-Bonaparte Democrats regarded as brutish racial inferiors. The Union, however, could not conquer British North America while France failed in Saint Domingue (Haiti) and Europe, leaving Calhoun to keep the pro-Bonaparte Democratic tradition alive throughout the vexing interregnum between the two French emperors.

gradenko_2000 posted:

maybe I should take this to the modern history thread, but jesus...

gradenko_2000 posted:

I'm finding this book quite fascinating because it describes a political dynamic that I was completely unaware of until just yesterday, and if it pleases the forum, I'm going to start posting excerpts

starting with Chapter 1

quote:

Oppenheimer was trying desperately to have that kind of conversation about nuclear weapons. He was trying to warn our generals that these are not battlefield weapons, but weapons of pure terror. But our politicians chose to silence him; the result was that we spent the Cold War engaged in a costly and dangerous arms race.

Some Guy TT posted:

Some Guy TT posted:

J. Robert Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb,” has long been a darling of the left, and not because he oversaw the creation of the most devastating weapon ever used. No, for them Oppenheimer is the tortured conscience of the Cold War and the martyred saint of McCarthyism.

Kai Bird, co-author of the excellent biography on which Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” is based, has penned a column in The New York Times lamenting the tragic life of the physicist, who lost security clearance in 1953. Oppenheimer was, writes Bird, “destroyed by a political movement characterized by rank know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues, the witch-hunters of that season are the direct ancestors of our current political actors of a certain paranoid style.” The main culprit in this ugly tale, according to the author, is Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, “who taught former President Donald Trump his brash, wholly deranged style of politics.”

There it is. You can almost picture an innocent screenwriter, who had only briefly flirted with communism as a youngster, being accused of sedition by The Donald. The Red Scare, just ask anyone in Hollywood, was the greatest crime ever visited upon mankind. Well, perhaps the second greatest after the 2016 election. “Just recall the former president’s fact-challenged comments on the pandemic or climate change,” Bird reminds us. “This is a worldview proudly scornful of science.”

The problem is, Bird doesn’t defend Oppenheimer’s science — or any science, for that matter. Rather, he defends the physicist’s political outlook, which, like his own, was fueled by utopian wish-casting and counterhistories.

It’s no accident that Bird, the Oppenheimer expert, writes an entire column about this witch hunt without once mentioning that the physicist was likely a communist — or, at best, a communist sympathizer. Bird’s column creates the impression that only hysterical and paranoid Birchers could possibly have questioned Oppenheimer’s integrity.

Even Bird’s book, American Prometheus, tells a different story. On numerous occasions, Oppenheimer admitted to being a “fellow traveler.” Indeed, Oppenheimer lied to government investigators and was often evasive about his numerous close relationships with known communist operatives. His first love, his wife, his brother, and many of his good friends and colleagues were all communists at some point.

And long before anyone ever heard the name “Roy Cohn,” the U.S. government was monitoring Oppenheimer, tapping his phones, tracing his movements and relationships. There was much consternation among U.S. officials about Oppenheimer while he was director of the Los Alamos lab. According to Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Peer de Silva, the project’s chief resident security officer, believed Oppenheimer was a spy back in 1942.

Just because they’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re innocent. There were plenty of communists operating in the U.S. government around this time. Many elites who came of age in the 1920s and 1930s, including Oppenheimer, had been supportive of the Soviet Union. When the Venona files and Soviet archives were opened, Americans learned that Alger Hiss, Laurence Duggan, Lauchlin Currie, William Remington, and many others defended by the American left had been Soviet agents. Some of the know-nothings knew something.

Indeed, Oppenheimer managed a Manhattan Project that was teeming with Soviet spies. In their book, Sacred Secrets, Jerrold and Leona Schecter produce a Soviet document sent to Stalin’s secret police henchman Beria that they claim points to Oppenheimer as being a facilitator of espionage — much like FDR’s pro-Soviet Treasury official Harry Dexter White, who let a nest of spies work under his nose.

Historians have debated the significance of the document and whether Oppenheimer was a spy. My admittedly cynical view is that many contemporary historians don’t really much care. They see little wrong with the Soviet flirtations of U.S. officials, much less their communist sympathies. Unlike fascists, communists are almost always portrayed as ideological eccentrics driven by naivety or good intentions.

Oppenheimer hagiographies almost always double as critiques of American Cold War policy. Writers, for example, love to contrast Oppenheimer’s alleged moral struggles with the stern and uncompromising nature of his great rival Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb” and template for Dr. Strangelove and other fictitious warmongers. Though the more accomplished Teller would be proven right about both the Nazi and Soviet threats, no one is ever making a movie celebrating his life.

At any rate, when the Manhattan Project was concluding, numerous participants began to argue that the U.S. shouldn’t have a monopoly on nuclear technology. Niels Bohr (not a spy) famously wanted atomic science open-sourced. Klaus Fuchs (definitely a spy) wanted the same, but simply handed the USSR atomic secrets instead. In 1995, when it was learned that another Los Alamos scientist, Ted Hall, had sent secrets to the Soviets in the 1940s, he went on television and explained that he “decided to give atomic secrets to the Russians because it seemed to me that it was important that there should be no monopoly…”

How these men conducted business matters, but the rationalization of all of them is perilously close to Oppenheimer’s thinking on the technology he had helped create.

As Bird writes:

Would Hall or Oppenheimer have wanted to break the U.S. atomic monopoly or effectively surrender our technology had the Nazis still held power? Of course not. The American left never really viewed the totalitarian Soviet Union with the same moral disdain they did other tyrannies.

Moreover, had it not been for the spies working under Oppenheimer, the United States would likely have spent more of the Cold War in a less costly and precarious position. Even still, the U.S. avoided the kind of large-scale conflict that engulfed the world in the first half of the 20th century. All the spies did was help the Soviets strip hundreds of millions of people of their basic dignity and freedom.

And those who wanted the United States to unilaterally surrender their nuclear advantage were basically arguing for the same results. That is not a position to be admired. It’s a position that sparks even more healthy curiosity about Oppenheimer.

quote:

That evening during his lecture in the dharma hall Baizhang talked about what had happened that day. Huangbo asked him, "A teacher of old gave a wrong answer and became a wild fox for five hundred lifetimes. What if he hadn't given a wrong answer?"

Baizhang said, "Come closer and I will tell you." Huangbo went closer and slapped Baizhang's face. Laughing, Baizhang clapped his hands and said, "I thought it was only barbarians who had unusual beards. But you too have an unusual beard!"

ArmZ posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXrdZ5kWRqs

gradenko_2000 posted:

Calhoun manages a half-way decent dig here at the Brits

ArmZ posted:

StashAugustine posted:

Got a question about the nuclear bombing of Japan: I know the Japanese government was seeking some sort of peace treaty for some time but refused unconditional surrender. What exactly were the sticking points and what might have happened if the Allies negotiated

quote:

The news of the Soviet offensive sent the Supreme Council into urgent session, with Prime Minster Suzuki and Minster of Foreign Affairs Togo coming out in favor of opening a negotiating channel to the United States via Switzerland and Sweden, along with Navy Minister Yonai. Togo’s proposal to accept the Potsdam Declaration with the condition that the emperor’s position be preserved (something the declaration did not specifically address). The hardliners countered with a proposal that added additional conditions (which the Allies would certainly reject). As the discussion was going on, General Amani and General Umezu were secretly taking steps to implement martial law to prevent any such negotiations from happening at all. At 1030, Suzuki reported to the council that the emperor was in favor of ending the war quickly. Nevertheless, the council was still deadlocked 3–3 at 1100 when word of the Nagasaki bomb was received, and remained so even afterward.

With the Supreme Council still deadlocked, the full cabinet met at 1430 on 9 August, again arriving at a 3–3 vote. Arguments raged in a series of meetings late into the night. Finally, Suzuki requested an impromptu imperial conference with the Supreme Council and the emperor, which commenced at midnight and continued until 0200. Finally, Suzuki informed the emperor that consensus was impossible and requested that Hirohito break the stalemate. The emperor sided with Togo’s proposal to make an offer to accept the Potsdam Declaration with the condition that the emperor’s position be preserved. Suzuki then implored the Supreme Council to accept the emperor’s will.

On 10 August, the Japanese government sent a telegram via the Swiss, which was immediately intercepted by U.S. intelligence. As U.S. leaders evaluated the Japanese proposal, President Truman ordered a halt to the bombing of Japan and that the next use of an atomic bomb would require explicit presidential authorization (the second one didn’t). As a result, Chief of Naval Operations Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King sent a “Peace Warning” message to Nimitz. Nimitz had already ordered Halsey to conduct another round of carrier strikes on the Japanese home islands, which he then countermanded.

On 12 August, the United States responded to the Japanese offer, stating that “The ultimate form of government of Japan, in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration, to be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.” The Japanese found the response to be ambiguous, which it was, provoking more heated discussion in the Supreme Council whether to hold out for an “explicit guarantee” of the emperor’s position. The same day, the emperor informed his family members that he had made a decision to surrender.

On 13 August, U.S. B-29s dropped leaflets all over Japan, making public the Japanese proposal and the U.S. counterproposal. A strong case can be made that it was actually the psychological impact of this huge leaflet drop that tipped the balance (making it one of the most effective psyops campaigns in history), although by this time the full magnitude of the collapse of Japanese defenses in Manchuria and Sakhalin Islands was also known to the Supreme Council, which finally agreed that the language in the U.S. counterproposal was good enough.

The U.S. counterproposal of 12 August directed the Japanese response to be sent in the clear. However, the Japanese sent their response message to their embassies in Switzerland and Sweden in code, which the United States initially interpreted as a “non-acceptance.” In addition,, there was a major spike in Japanese military message traffic, raising concern that an all-out banzai attack was in the works. As a result, President Truman reluctantly ordered a resumption of bombing. Over the course of 14 August, over 1,000 B-29s bombed Japan in the largest single day of strikes in the war, which also wiped out the last operational oil refinery in Japan. Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet geared up for a resumption of carrier strikes on the Tokyo area, set for daybreak on 15 August (see H-Gram 051).

On 14 August, Emperor Hirohito met with senior army and navy leaders. Admiral Toyoda, General Anami, General Umezu, and most military leaders wanted to fight on. An exception was the commander of the Second Army, who would be responsible for the defense of southern Japan and whose headquarters in Hiroshima had been obliterated. He argued that continued fighting was futile. Finally, the emperor announced that he had decided to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration with the “will of the people” caveat. The emperor having announced a decision, the Supreme Council and the full cabinet unanimously ratified it. The Foreign Ministry sent a coded message to the Japanese embassies around the world of their intent to accept the Allied terms, which was intercepted and reached Washington at 0249 on 14 August (late afternoon 14 August Tokyo time). However, the intercept of Japanese intent did not constitute the actual official Japanese response, so plans for Navy strikes on 15 August continued.

At 2300 on 14 August (Tokyo time) the emperor made a gramophone recording reading his statement to the Japanese people of his decision to surrender (without ever actually using that word), which was to be broadcast to the Japanese people over the radio at noon on 15 August. A couple of trusted members of the emperor’s personal staff then hid the copies of the recording.

Meanwhile, a coup attempt was underway, led by Major Kenji Hatanaka and other mid-grade army officers who were against surrendering. By midnight, the renegade army group surrounded the Imperial Palace and gained access under the false pretense of defending the palace against an outside revolt. Hatanaka shot and killed Lieutenant General Takeshi Mori, the commander of the Palace Guard, who had become suspicious. Other renegades fanned out across Tokyo and tried to assassinate Prime Minister Suzuki and other government officials. Despite threats of death, the palace officials who knew where the recordings were refused to acknowledge their whereabouts. The renegades then searched throughout the labyrinthine palace in an attempt to find and destroy the recordings. The search was severely hampered when Tokyo was blacked out in response to the very last B-29 bombing mission of the war, which targeted the oil refinery north of Tokyo. The rebels could not find the recordings and, by about 0800 in the morning, the coup fizzled as key army units failed to rally to the rebels’ side.

Just before dawn, aircraft from Halsey’s carriers had begun launching to attack targets in the Tokyo area. Two hours later, as the first wave of carrier aircraft were approaching their targets, the Pacific Fleet Intelligence Officer, Captain Edwin Layton, barged into Nimitz’ office with the intercept of Japan’s official acceptance of unconditional surrender. Nimitz ordered a flash message sent to cease all offensive air operations. The carrier planes were recalled before any bombs were dropped, but four U.S. Hellcats were shot down by Japanese fighters on the way back, and their pilots lost.

StashAugustine posted:

Got a question about the nuclear bombing of Japan: I know the Japanese government was seeking some sort of peace treaty for some time but refused unconditional surrender. What exactly were the sticking points and what might have happened if the Allies negotiated