[Modern History] Guns Condoms and Electricity

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vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Dreddout posted:

Supposedly the PRC looks upon Taiping as a ideological predecessor to their revolution. Sorta like how the bolsheviks viewed the jacobins.

Which is pretty interesting given that Taiping was a theocracy inspired by Western ideas, but I guess you take what you can get when it comes to historical precedence.

The Taiping Rebellion theoretically had a bunch of egalitarian and communitarian elements to it. Here's a summary from Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler, p. 239-240:

quote:

What has been called a "vast army of the poor" wended its way through the economic heartland of China and soon seized Nanjing, which was chosen as the new capital of the Heavenly Kingdom on earth. Establishing control over tens of millions of people, the Taiping leadership promoted the worship of God and, more mundanely, the liberation of the Han from foreign domination. This was joined by a social agenda: Because only God was considered to be capable of owning anything at all, the notion of private property was at least notionally rejected. Celebration of universal brotherhood was meant to gather all as if into a single family. These lofty sentiments found their purest expression in a document first published in early 1854, "The Land System of the Heavenly Dynasty." It was based on the premise that

"all people on this earth are as the family of the Lord their God on High, and when people of this earth keep nothing for their private use but give all things to God for all to use in common, then in the whole land every place shall have equal shares, and everyone be clothed and fed. This was why the Lord God expressly sent the Taiping Heavenly Lord to come down and save the world."

Ideally, all land was to be divided into equal shares for all adult men and women and half shares for children and was to be "cultivated in common." Land was to be graded according to its productivity and shared out evenly so as to achieve perfect equality. If there was not enough land for all to receive standardized shares, people were to be moved to locations where it was available. Each family was expected to rear five chickens and two sows. Every twenty-five families would set up a central treasury to pool and store their surpluses beyond subsistence. This earthly paradise of strict egalitarianism had distant historical roots in earlier notions of "equal-fields" systems but, oddly, failed to provide for periodic redistribution to preserve equality over time.

Yet this oversight, if so it was, scarcely mattered--for the simple reason that there is no sign that this program was ever implemented or indeed even widely known at the time. Although some homes and estates of the wealthy were raided in the early stages of the Taiping advance and some of the loot shared with local villagers, most of it went to the rebel organization. These activities never developed into a broader redistributive scheme, let alone systematic land reform or real-life agrarian communism. Faced with stiffening Qing resistance and eventual counterattacks, the Taiping were primarily concerned with maintaining revenue flows to fund their own operations. As a result, traditional landlord-tenant relations remained largely intact. At most, some change occurred at the margins. In Jiangnan, where numerous Qing land and tax records had been destroyed and many landlords had either fled or were no longer able to collect rents, the new regime briefly experimented with having peasants pay taxes directly to state agents. This arrangement proved short-lived. Taxes might have been lower than before, and it had become easier for tenants to resist demands for high rents. In both gross and net terms, some income deconcentration is likely to have occurred as the Taiping withheld Qing-style privileges from the wealthy. Faced with stiffened tenant resistance, and for once expected to pay their full share of taxes topped up by special levies, landlords saw their incomes come under downward pressure.

But this fell far short of any systematic leveling as envisioned in the utopian schemes that were never put into practice--or may not even have been intended to be. The latter might be signaled by the fact that on top of generally maintaining traditional land tenure arrangements, the Taiping leadership eagerly embraced hierarchical stratification by claiming a lavish lifestyle replete with harems and palaces. The Qing's violent destruction of the Taiping leadership in the 1860s, which cost millions of lives from combat and famine, did not suppress an egalitarian experiment, for there was none.

The Taiping might not have lived up to them, but they did have some stated egalitarian goals, albeit ones rooted in theocratic doctrines. I'm not surprised that Mao might have viewed them as ideological predecessors as a way to claim some historical legitimacy for a new communist state that was a much more fundamental break with the past than the Taiping had represented.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2021 19:16

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 13:32

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Ardennes posted:

By September 1945, the Soviets had propeller aircraft that could intercept American bombers (mostly B-29s), but it does also show what the US was planning even very early on.

Yeah, pretty telling that literally one month after dropping the first atomic bombs the emerging doctrine is "yeah let's just use these to immediately and with no warning completely annihilate the populations of anyone that dares cross us, including the people who until yesterday were our biggest allies"

3 years from this:

to "better stock up on 466 nuclear bombs so that we can exterminate every Russian on the planet just in case"

# ¿ Mar 27, 2021 16:15

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Thankfully for all involved, Churchill was no longer in office by the time WW2 actually ended.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2021 17:19

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Some Guy TT posted:

can any brits speak to the liveliness of the churchill cult of personality in england im curious if its as intense there as it is here or if people are just wtf no gently caress that guy the same way there tends to be a gap in terms of how thatcher is perceived

Not a Brit but it's just as much of a cult. There was a recent article on it by an academic talking about how intense the backlash is if you try and talk about Churchill's horrible racism and genocides.

quote:

Why can't Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?
Priyamvada Gopal

Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to tarnish the national myth � as I found when hosting a Cambridge debate about his murkier side

A baleful silence attends one of the most talked-about figures in British history. You may enthuse endlessly about Winston Churchill �single-handedly� defeating Hitler. But mention his views on race or his colonial policies, and you�ll be instantly drowned in ferocious and orchestrated vitriol.

In a sea of fawningly reverential Churchill biographies, hardly any books seriously examine his documented racism. Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to complicate, let alone tarnish, the national myth of a flawless hero: an idol who �saved our civilisation�, as Boris Johnson claims, or �humanity as a whole�, as David Cameron did. Make an uncomfortable observation about his views on white supremacy and the likes of Piers Morgan will ask: �Why do you live in this country?�

Not everyone is content to be told to be quiet because they would be �speaking German� if not for Churchill. Many people want to know more about the historical figures they are required to admire uncritically. The Black Lives Matter protests last June � during which the word �racist� was sprayed in red letters on Churchill�s statue in Parliament Square, were accompanied by demands for more education on race, empire and the figures whose statues dot our landscapes.

Yet providing a fuller picture is made difficult. Scholars who explore less illustrious sides of Churchill are treated dismissively. Take the example of Churchill College, Cambridge, where I am a teaching fellow. In response to calls for fuller information about its founder, the college set up a series of events on Churchill, Empire and Race. I recently chaired the second of these, a panel discussion on �The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill�.

Even before it took place, the discussion was repeatedly denounced in the tabloids and on social media as �idiotic�, a �character assassination� aimed at �trashing� the great man. Outraged letters to the college said this was academic freedom gone too far, and that the event should be cancelled. The speakers and I, all scholars and people of colour, were subjected to vicious hate mail, racist slurs and threats. We were accused of treason and slander. One correspondent warned that my name was being forwarded to the commanding officer of an RAF base near my home.

The college is now under heavy pressure to stop doing these events. After the recent panel, the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange, which is influential in government circles � and claims to champion free speech and controversial views on campus � published a �review� of the event. The foreword, written by Churchill�s grandson Nicholas Soames, stated that he hoped the review would �prevent such an intellectually dishonest event from being organised at Churchill College in the future � and, one might hope, elsewhere�.

It�s ironic. We�re told by government and media that �cancel culture� is an imposition of the academic left. Yet here it is in reality, the actual �cancel culture� that prevents a truthful engagement with British history. Churchill was an admired wartime leader who recognised the threat of Hitler in time and played a pivotal role in the allied victory. It should be possible to recognise this without glossing over his less benign side. The scholars at the Cambridge event � Madhusree Mukerjee, Onyeka Nubia and Kehinde Andrews � drew attention to Churchill�s dogged advocacy of British colonial rule; his contributing role in the disastrous 1943 Bengal famine, in which millions of people died unnecessarily; his interest in eugenics; and his views, deeply retrograde even for his time, on race.

Churchill is on record as praising �Aryan stock� and insisting it was right for �a stronger race, a higher-grade race� to take the place of indigenous peoples. He reportedly did not think �black people were as capable or as efficient as white people�. In 1911, Churchill banned interracial boxing matches so white fighters would not be seen losing to black ones. He insisted that Britain and the US shared �Anglo-Saxon superiority�. He described anticolonial campaigners as �savages armed with ideas�.

Even his contemporaries found his views on race shocking. In the context of Churchill�s hard line against providing famine relief to Bengal, the colonial secretary, Leo Amery, remarked: �On the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane � I didn�t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler�s.�

Just because Hitler was a racist does not mean Churchill could not have been one. Britain entered the war, after all, because it faced an existential threat � and not primarily because it disagreed with Nazi ideology. Noting affinities between colonial and Nazi race-thinking, African and Asian leaders queried Churchill�s double standards in firmly rejecting self-determination for colonial subjects who were also fighting Hitler.

It is worth recalling that the uncritical Churchill-worship that is so dominant today was not shared by many British people in 1945, when they voted him out of office before the war was even completely over. Many working-class communities in Britain, from Dundee to south Wales, felt strong animosity towards Churchill for his willingness to mobilise military force during industrial disputes. As recently as 2010, Llanmaes community council opposed the renaming of a military base to Churchill Lines.

Critical assessment is not �character assassination�. Thanks to the groupthink of �the cult of Churchill�, the late prime minister has become a mythological figure rather than a historical one. To play down the implications of Churchill�s views on race � or suggest absurdly, as Policy Exchange does, that his racist words meant �something other than their conventional definition� � speaks to me of a profound lack of honesty and courage.

This failure of courage is tied to a wider aversion to examining the British empire truthfully, perhaps for fear of what it might say about Britain today. A necessary national conversation about Churchill and the empire he was so committed to is one necessary way to break this unacceptable silence.

Priyamvada Gopal is an academic and author of Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/17/why-cant-britain-handle-the-truth-about-winston-churchill

Basically people are really bad at acknowledging that people can do both good and bad things. Churchill can only be either a hero or a villain, and so if you point out the villainous things he did then clearly you're saying he could never be a national hero for other things he did--and vice versa, if you say he was a national hero then you can't acknowledge his extraordinary villainy because that would undermine his supposed heroism.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2021 17:36

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

lmao that article rules

quote:

Gagarin's humble roots are a godsend for the Soviet propaganda industry. Born to peasant farmers in a small village near the western Russian city of Smolensk, Gagarin's village was invaded by the Germans when he was only seven years old; his family are evicted from their home and have to spend the next 21 months living in a mud hut. Yuri sabotages German equipment and is lucky to survive the war, though he spends several months in a hospital. He's a gifted student � especially in engineering and maths � but is no bookish wallflower � he's equally good at sports, and works in a foundry while studying. Later, after graduating as a military pilot, he flies MiG fighter jets in the far north of Russia, near the Finnish border. Out of hundreds of applicants, he is one of the first 20 chosen as the USSR�s first batch of cosmonauts.

The explanation the article chooses here is "wow they picked the perfect cosmonaut for propaganda about how the Soviet system encouraged social mobility". Another explanation is "the Soviet system encouraged social mobility."

# ¿ Apr 12, 2021 17:20

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Raskolnikov38 posted:

anyone here with history graduate school experience? if I want to get a MA as a stepping stone to a doctorate how important is the "prestigious" of the MA program vis a vis applying to phd programs later

Prestige is like the single most important thing for academia of any kind. If you have an MA from Harvard it'll make your PhD application look significantly better, if you have an MA from the University of Phoenix it'll make your application look significantly worse.

# ¿ May 14, 2021 03:04

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Zedhe Khoja posted:

also if you ever plan on actually working in the field something like 50% of all history profs went to like 4 schools. The prestige is literally everything that matters.

This is very true.

(from here)

If you want to be a history prof, the purpose of your MA is to make you competitive for a PhD at a school like Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, or Berkeley, because top-tier R1 schools like that produce the overwhelming majority of tenure-track profs even at low-ranked institutions.

# ¿ May 14, 2021 15:30

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

One of the best books about the eastern front of World War II, A Writer At War by Vassily Grossman, based on his diaries during the war, shows that during the Nazi advance in 1941 everyone knew what it would mean for Jews to be left behind in Nazi-occupied territory. Grossman, who was Jewish from Ukraine, spent the retreat frantically running around trying to get word from his family to hear if they had made it out before the Germans reached their village or not, because everybody knew that if they got left behind the Nazis would kill them. It was extremely common knowledge.

# ¿ May 18, 2021 13:47

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Maximo Roboto posted:

I was going to make a thread for stupid alternate histories, but I might as well use this one.

Suppose the German princes who historically tried to reestablish the monarchy during the Weimar Republic hooked up with the Nazi movement and rode its coattails back to power, winning the monarchist and conservative vote against Hindenburg in 1932. While in power, crown prince Wilhelm starts cracking down on socialists, and turn on the Nazis. How then would history remember the fallen National Socialist movement, and Hitler?

imo it's not a very plausible alternative, because the princes riding the Nazis' coattails would in all probability be more like the princes bringing a little bit of monarchist/conservative credibility to the Nazis rather than the Nazis bringing their large Depression-era following to the monarchists. Taking some of the conservative vote from Hindenburg in 1932 might mean Hitler taking power a year early, but it would be very unlikely to mean Hitler not having the nomination against Hindenburg in the first place.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2021 18:15

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

I really liked that guy's incredibly long posts about representing or misrepresenting medieval warfare in Lord of the Rings, so I will definitely check out the Victoria one, thanks for the reference.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2021 17:00

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

and the oil industry has been saving the environment ever since

# ¿ Sep 25, 2021 15:14

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

in addition to what's already been posted:

The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins
Russia in Revolution by S. A. Smith
The Baron's Cloak by Willard Sunderland
Former People by Douglas Smith
The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad (also The Global Cold War, by the same author)
Segregation by Carl Nightingale
King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild

# ¿ Sep 26, 2021 01:23

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

if you'd rather read about Canadian indigenous genocide, Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk is good

# ¿ Sep 26, 2021 17:43

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

you should NOT belive that

# ¿ Sep 28, 2021 22:18

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Penisaurus Sex posted:

Is there any good companion for Benjamin's "Arcades" out there?

I feel like I'm missing a lot, either because of my lack of background knowledge or the translation to English.

Fredric Jameson just published a book on Benjamin that may or may not be good. I also liked Graeme Gilloch's Myth and Metropolis on Benjamin, though it's 25 years old and may be surpassed by now

anyway the thing you need to know when reading Benjamin is that he didn't write books in a conventional way, and the Arcades is basically his effort at making a book entirely out of quotes with no analysis or narrative, and also the Arcades wasn't a book that he finished in his lifetime but more a massive compilation of notes left behind in boxes and file folders when he died so even a good translation is bound to be fragmentary and disjointed, partly because that's what Benjamin was going for and partly because the main organizational structure people go with when publishing the Arcades is "whatever stuff Benjamin had shoved into a single box is one chapter"

# ¿ Sep 29, 2021 15:59

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Some Guy TT posted:

https://twitter.com/graykimbrough/status/1443333396101541896

in early 20th century russia people were concerned that the housing crisis was bad for morality because it led to unmarried cohabitation

# ¿ Sep 30, 2021 17:26

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

gradenko_2000 posted:

Pre Napoleonic era

Reported

oh speaking of, does anyone know why there are two history threads? it's such a weird arbitrary division, im pretty sure this forum could handle talking about the ussr and the roman empire in the same thread and im pretty sure i see the same posters in both threads anyway

# ¿ Sep 30, 2021 17:27

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

that makes sense i suppose

# ¿ Sep 30, 2021 17:42

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Raskolnikov38 posted:

also grad school history is like trying to drink from a firehose, gently caress

lol yeah learn to skim and enjoy never finishing a book again

# ¿ Oct 1, 2021 02:42

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Sergg posted:

"Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland" was a great read by Christopher Browning. It's a psychological and sociological case study of a unit of brutal Nazi war criminals who are crying and having nervous breakdowns during their first massacre in Jozefow but become mass murderers by the end.

EDIT: Sorry if this one is out of place, I figured it's a good psychology book about the banality of evil.

not out of place at all, it's a psychology book but it's also an extremely influential book on the history of the Holocaust. As you say, it's really good. Extremely heavy, though. It's one of the few history books I've had to consciously take breaks from because it was mentally draining to read.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2021 12:59

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Slavvy posted:

This is reasonable, just want to note I don't somehow feel bad for any of the war crime dudes, don't know why it got taken that way. I just thought it was weird that one kind of war crime was ok but another wasn't; if the consensus is the concept of a war crime is, itself, bullshit then ok I'll take that. If we're talking what people 'deserve' then yeah the SS etc deserved the worst and hopefully most of them got it, I don't know why I have to say this.

Every combatant nation during WW2 committed war crimes. The thing that makes them official "war crimes" war crimes is whether they won or not. The people in charge of the US submarine campaign against Japan openly admitted that if they had lost the war they would have been prosecuted for war crimes the same way they prosecuted the losers. None of them are okay, but a major part of the concept of total war is that enemy civilians are enemy combatants because they are contributing to the productive forces of the enemy nation, and therefore become legitimate targets for warfare, and every side was just as committed to this way of thinking as each other. Considering every combatant country was on a sliding scale of badness with "literally doing the Holocaust with widespread civilian knowledge and support" at the bottom end, you can condemn war crimes in the abstract while still recognizing that your condemnation doesn't make any difference, and not lose much sleep over it.

Slavvy posted:

Dumb hypothetical: if someone in west Germany ~1950 found a way to round up a bunch of former SS camp guards and killed them, would that person have been prosecuted in an earnest way?

You don't have to get hypothetical about this. After the war a small group of Jews known as the Nakam tried to do just that, including a mass poisoning of thousands of imprisoned SS soldiers and officers that made them sick but didn't manage to kill any of them. Members of the Nakam then had to flee to Israel because the poisoning was a crime, and when they admitted that they had done it in the late 90s Germany considered prosecuting them even then.

Slavvy posted:

Yeah this is what I'm thinking about. The Nazis were explicitly genocidal so the war crimes were the point and they were big and bold. But with the allied nations it's a question of restraint vs whether bombing the poo poo out of cities impacted axis industry badly enough to be morally ok I guess, idk I'm just some idiot. Afaict the shipping blockades were what did most of the damage to the axis ability to fight.

Bombing the poo poo out of cities didn't achieve much in the grand scheme of the war, but it's also important to remember that postwar Germany and postwar Germans intentionally played up the bombing of cities to try and create an equivalence between German suffering and the suffering of Germany's wartime victims. The firebombing of Dresden was a bad thing to do, achieved no military goals, and killed approximately 25,000 people - for comparison, fewer than the number of people killed in a single massacre of Jews at Babi Yar. In total, the highest estimate for German civilian deaths from strategic bombing is still an order of magnitude less than the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust, to say nothing of the millions of other "undesirables" that Germany exterminated. But after the war, in an effort to try and say "well both sides were bad", there was an intellectual trend within Germany to play up the strategic bombing as an equivalent atrocity - the German far right still refer to the bombing of Germany as the "Bombenholocaust" to make the equivalence explicit. You see the same double standard applied to things like executing POWs - some Germans played up the occasional execution of German POWs to try and make a moral equivalence between the two sides, which helped absolve them of starving literally millions of POWs to death.

Yes, strategic bombing and unrestricted submarine warfare were war crimes no matter which side committed them (both sides committed them). Yes, a morally superior version of humanity might hypothetically have taken stock after the war and prosecuted literally every leader from every nation for war crimes. But I'm not going to pretend that the Allied war crimes were somehow comparable to the genocide they ended by defeating Nazism.

CoolCab posted:

it's also revisionist to imply there was no german civilian resistance, both violent and non-violent. it is a great historical irony that madame la guillotine was not used on the many many, many many many fascist civilians who deserved it and instead was used against the tiny minority who wrote pamphlets like this:

There was indeed civilian resistance, and the people who resisted should be commended. It's also important to remember that people who resisted were a very small minority of the German population, comparable to the handful of diplomats who wrote thousands of visas to help Jews escape Europe rather than the majority of diplomats who did nothing. I know less about this part of it than about the playing up of the bombing campaign, but I'm fairly certain that a similar trend in postwar Germany played up the minuscule resistance to Hitler as a way to try and say that Germany did not deserve collective guilt or punishment, when the reality was that the vast, overwhelming majority of Germans either passively did nothing or actively helped the Nazi regime. Here's a passage from an article about it:

quote:

Consider this numbing statistic. After the war, allied officials identified 13.2 million men in western Germany alone as eligible for automatic arrest because they had been deemed part of the Nazi apparatus. Fewer than 3.5 million of these were charged and, of those, 2.5 million were released without trial. That left about a million people - and most of them faced no greater sanction than a fine or confiscation of property that they had looted, a temporary restriction on future employment or a brief ban from seeking public office. By 1949, four years after the war, only 300 Nazis were in prison. From an original wanted list of 13 million, just 300 paid anything like a serious price.

Why were more of the guilty not punished? "Because it would have been a never-ending task," says David Cesarani, research professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a leading authority on the Holocaust. He cites the British attempt to convict those responsible for the killing at Belsen. The trial took nine months and left the British exhausted. "That was just one camp and there were, what, 70 camps, with hundreds of people at each one. To say nothing of the Gestapo officers and the men of the Einsatzgruppen [the mobile killing units]." Pursuing all those responsible for the slaughter of the Jews would have meant trying thousands upon thousands of people - and it would have ended in the jailing of almost the entire adult male population of Germany. "The allies put their hands up in despair."

(from here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/26/second.world.war)

When I've talked about this with other people, the discussion eventually boils down to: at some point you have to draw the line and say you're going to stop prosecuting people, because otherwise there won't be anyone left to drive trains and plow fields and run shops, because everyone was guilty. In my opinion the Allies didn't draw that line far enough, and ended up essentially rehabilitating Nazism by letting Nazis run the institutions of postwar West Germany, and by bringing thousands if not millions of them into the West's Cold War apparatus in the name of anticommunism. You can decide where you would draw that line, and you can argue that collective guilt and punishment is wrong (which it is), but I think it's immoral to place the war crimes of the two sides in this particular war on anywhere near the same level, even as a thought experiment.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2021 15:05

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/oni_blackstock/status/1452272887902187529

but but i thought newspapers were the bedrock of democracy

darkness dies in democracy

# ¿ Oct 24, 2021 16:12

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Popy posted:

I was joking with a friend about some marrying some decedent of the spanish burbon royal family and he laughed at me and told me to look up whose the current king of spain.

Did the french revolution actually matter

The French Revolution gave us nationalism, total war, and rule by the bourgeoisie.

The Haitian Revolution could have given us a much more comprehensive vision of emancipatory revolution, but it was crushed by the French revolutionaries for threatening the racial-capitalist source of their wealth and power.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2021 15:36

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

i say swears online posted:

lol that he would lose the election ten months later

the post-Cold War US wanted a post-Cold War president

# ¿ Dec 25, 2021 16:28

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

thassa big oof from this guy who remembers the, uh, to put it in bill kristol terms, "right anti-Communists" who fought the USSR from 1941-45

# ¿ Dec 30, 2021 17:02

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

imagine thinking FDR had the ability to get the Red Army to release the millions of German POWs captured on the Eastern Front

# ¿ Jan 3, 2022 18:13

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Stalin and the Red Army were just sitting on their hands guarding millions of German POWs waiting to hear what FDR thought, if FDR (history's greatest monster) had just told Stalin that actually the Gulag was bad then surely they would all have been released the next day

# ¿ Jan 3, 2022 18:43

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

I'm reading about bees right now and I think the thread will enjoy this.

quote:

One thing that makes studying honeybees so enjoyable is the way that what is
learned through curiosity-driven research often turns out, unexpectedly, to have
real practical value. My best example of this phenomenon is the way that
knowing something about the defecation habits of Asian honeybees helped
defuse tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union back in the
1980s. This story starts in the late 1970s when I had finished graduate school
and was keen to travel overseas and learn about the marvelous species of
honeybees that live in the Asian tropics: the Asian hive honeybee (Apis cerana),
the dwarf honeybee (Apis florea), and the giant honeybee (Apis dorsata). With
support from the National Geographic Society, my wife Robin and I undertook a
10-month study of the colony defense strategies of the three Asian honeybee
species living in Thailand. We set up camp in the pristine mountain forests of the
vast Khao Yai National Park in northeast Thailand, where one can still enjoy the
sight of hornbills wing ing their way between towering dipterocarp trees, the
eerie smell of Asian tiger urine deposited along a trail, the whooping calls of
white-faced gibbons shortly after sunrise, and the mysterious biology of the
Asian honeybees. Gradually we assembled a picture of each honeybee species�
fascinatingly complex array of colony defenses against such enemies as giant
hornets, weaver ants, honey buzzards, tree shrews, rhesus monkeys, and honey
bears. This was field biology done for biology�s sake, and it was a wonderful
adventure for two newlyweds. Sometimes I wonder, though, if even half a dozen
biologists worldwide have read closely the beautifully detailed, 21 page report
on the Asian honeybees that we published in the scientific journal Ecological
Monographs.

A few years later, however, and to my amazement, the knowledge that we�d
gained about the Asian honeybees proved important to a large international
audience. In 1981, the secretary of state in the Reagan administration, Alexander
M. Haig, alleged that the Soviet Union was waging or abetting chemical warfare
against opponents of the communist governments in two countries bordering
Thailand: Laos and Kampuchea. If true, this was a violation of two international
arms-control treaties, the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the 1972 Biological
Weapons Convention. The main evidence cited by Haig was a material called
�yellow rain,� that is, yellow spots less than 6 millimeters (one-quarter inch) in
diameter that were found on vegetation at alleged attack sites and that
supposedly contained fungal toxins. I realized, however, that the yellow spots
that U.S. officials called yellow rain were indistinguishable from the yellow
spots I called honeybee feces. They were identical in size, shape, and color.
Further work revealed that both contained bee hairs and were laden with pollen
grains from which the protein had been digested. Eventually, I was able to help
Matthew Meselson, a professor of molecular genetics at Harvard and an expert
on chemical and biological weapons, show conclusively that yellow rain was
indeed honeybee feces, not chemical warfare. One wag said we had uncovered
the work of �KGBs.� Shortly after yellow rain was proven to be bee poop, in
1984, officials of the U.S. State Department, without fanfare, ceased accusing
the Soviets of violating the two arms-control treaties on chemical and biological
weapons.

That's from chapter 3 of Thomas Seeley, Honeybee Democracy.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2022 04:31

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

quote:

Admiral Nimitz warned desegregation was �the Soviet way, not the American way�.72

# ¿ Feb 6, 2022 02:26

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Some Guy TT posted:

so did zinoviev actually plot to murder stalin im hearing it very taken for granted that of course he didnt and its tankie talk to suggest that he did but the main source i can find for this is stephen kotkin which is uhhh well id just like another source is all

I have read a lot of Russian history and I have never read any serious source-based suggestions that Zinoviev or any other high-ranking Bolsheviks were plotting to murder Stalin.

The connection seems to come from the fact that the guy who murdered Kirov in 1934, Leonid Nikolaev, was politically tied to Zinoviev, but since Zinoviev was the Leningrad party boss for a long time, basically everyone who was in the party in Leningrad was connected to Zinoviev in some way. After Kirov's murder the NKVD was tasked with finding any potential coconspirators among other Zinovievites, and Ezhov took that and ran with it to the point that he ended up accusing Zinoviev and Kamenev of organizing an entire circle plotting to kill Kirov and Stalin and others and replace them with Trotsky. They eventually "confessed" to the plot in their show trial, but there's very little documentary evidence to back up claims about why one way or another. Torture is one explanation, J. Arch Getty (one of the leading revisionist historians of Stalinism) offers this as a summary of other explanations:

J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror, 249-250 posted:

There are persistent rumors that Zinoviev and Kamenev agreed to confess to the scenario in return for promises that their lives would be spared, but no documentary evidence or firsthand testimony has been found to support this. Others argue that they may have confessed out of loyalty to the party, which needed their confessions as negative examples.7 This explanation of the confessions of Old Bolsheviks in the show trials of the 1930s is supported by Bukharin's last letter to Stalin from prison (see Document 198).

It's obviously basically impossible to prove a negative so it's technically possible that Zinoviev was plotting something, but there's no evidence to back it up so it is exceedingly unlikely, to the point that no serious history of Stalinism considers it a possibility. Here's Getty again:

ibid, 256 posted:

Like other public accusations and show trials of this period, the 1936 trial scenario was based on a kernel of truth that had been embellished and exaggerated. We know that in the fall of 1932 a single bloc of oppositionists uniting Trotskyists and Zinovievists had in fact been formed at Trotsky's initiative.14 But there is no evidence that this bloc was oriented toward organizing "terrorist acts" or anything other than political conspiracy. In the hands of the Stalinists, though, this event was magnified into a terrorist conspiracy aimed at killing the Soviet leaders.

During 19-24 August 1936, Zinoviev, Kamenev, I. N. Smirnov, and thirteen other former oppositionists were tried for treason in Moscow. With the exception of Smirnov, who retracted his confession, all of the accused admitted to having organized a "terrorist center" at Trotsky's instructions and to having planned the assassinations of Kirov, Stalin, Kaganovich, and other members of the Politburo. Although Yagoda and Vyshinsky assembled the scenario, we now know that Stalin (as with all the major show trials) played an active role in rewording the indictment, selecting the final slate of defendants, and prescribing the sentences. 15

Preemptive response to "why would the Soviet leadership be interested in fabricating a supposed Trotskyist plot to overthrow Stalin when one didn't exist?" is provided by the same source.

ibid, 259-260 posted:

The official face of the enemy had been reconstructed in the summer of 1936: he was a former left oppositionist who had taken the path of terror. He was an agent of Trotsky, a spy, an assassin. This version had advantages for several segments of the party. For Stalin and his circle, it provided a rationale for finally destroying personal and political enemies whose opposition went back more than a decade, and it created a climate in which future opposition obviously carried life-and-death risks. For the nomenklatura at all levels, it justified the obliteration of and final victory over a possible alternative leadership whose leaders had argued for years that the Stalinist faction should be removed. This definition-or attribution-of the enemy also benefited the ruling elite as a whole insofar as it presented a clearly defined evil and opposite "other": the groups behind Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky. They had for years stood for an alternative leadership, an alternative team to lead the country. If they won, however unlikely that might seem, the current team would be replaced in quick order. Although there seemed little chance that Zinoviev or Trotsky would return to power in the mid-1930s, the possibility always existed. Memories of nomenklatura members told them that stranger things had happened. Lenin's ascension to power in 1917 must have seemed at least as far-fetched in 1915. This evil force could be conveniently blamed for a variety of sins of the moment, including industrial failure, agricultural shortfalls, and other policy shortcomings more properly attributable to the nomenklatura itself.21 The left opposition made perfect scapegoats.

But they were scapegoats of a particularly believable kind, given the prevailing mentalities of the time. The 1917 revolutions, civil war, and party struggles of the 1920s had created a kind of conspiracy mentality among the Bolsheviks. The vicious and violent civil war, which was rich with real conspiracies and constant, nagging insecurity, was the formative experience for this generation of nomenklatura and party members. In their view of reality, politics was conspiracy, and it was not very hard for them to believe that professional revolutionaries and skilled conspirators like Zinoviev and Trotsky had been up to no good on some level. Similarly, for the Russian populace, with its cultural legacies of good vs. evil, belief in the machinations of dark forces of all kinds, and a traditional suspicion of educated intellectuals, it was not too difficult to accept the notion that Jewish Bolshevik intellectuals probably were involved in some sort of clandestine business.

There seem to have been no protests or questions raised in party leadership circles about executing these former oppositionists. Fear was one deterrent: knowing that police investigations were ongoing, who would question Stalin's leadership on such a serious matter and risk being regarded as a defender of enemies? Party discipline provides a further answer. In the crisis atmosphere of the times, which was perceived as a continuation of the "new situation" following the Riutin affair, there was strong incentive in the party to close ranks against the perceived threat.

The Zinoviev and Trotsky oppositions had broken the rules of the nomenklatura. In the 1920s (and as recently as the Riutin Platform) they had threatened to organize politically outside the party elite. Their strategy had been to agitate among the party's rank and file to gain support for their platforms against the ruling group. This was the unpardonable sin. By threatening to split the party-the Bolsheviks' worst nightmare since the civil war-the oppositionists threatened the survival of the regime and thus the Revolution.

They also threatened to turn the membership against the ruling stratum. This could not be tolerated. The opposition, therefore, represented a continuing menace to the corporate interests of the Stalinist nomenklatura that outweighed any nostalgia that the Old Bolshevik oppositionist comrades-in-arms may otherwise have inspired. The party elite did not regard the annihilation of Zinoviev and Kamenev as threatening to itself. It was not hard for the serving party leadership to support the final decimation of the left opposition out of political and personal self-interest. Once again, Stalin and the nomenklatura had common interests.

So basically no, there's no evidence they were actually plotting anything except confessions that were most likely extracted under torture and/or other forms of coercion and psychological pressure, but there are explanations that make sense for why Stalinist party cadres might have wanted to fabricate such a plot, and despite their disagreements on how to interpret the evidence, both the Kotkins and the anti-Kotkins within Soviet history are in agreement that there's no actual evidence of a plot to kill Stalin.

vyelkin has issued a correction as of 02:38 on Feb 15, 2022

# ¿ Feb 15, 2022 02:34

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

you can basically divide allied intervention in the RCW into two halves, both of which were pretty halfhearted but for their own reasons (none of which were leaders being favourably inclined to the Bolsheviks lmao). all of this was at all times coloured by the Allied countries' desire to strangle socialism in the crib, but there were additional motivating factors at play

up until November 1918, there was a sense that the Bolsheviks had betrayed the Allies by signing the Brest-Litovsk Peace, and the Allies wanted to overthrow them and reinstate a government in Petrograd that would reopen Germany's Eastern front. The motley crew of fascists, monarchists, and miscellaneous anticommunists that made up the White movement were seen as likely to do that, since the Bolsheviks were pretty much the only political faction in all of Russia agitating for immediate peace in 1917, everybody else was at minimum campaigning for revolutionary defensism and in some cases campaigning for pursuing the war just as zealously as the tsar had done. Early Allied intervention was seen through this lens, as a wartime effort to support the RCW factions that would restart the war with Germany. However, that also meant that early Allied intervention was quite limited, because any troops sent to Murmansk or Odessa or Vladivostok were troops not being sent to Flanders and Palestine and Salonika. The places where the foreign troops advanced the farthest tended to be the places where they were cooperating with the most cohesive White armies, like Kolchak's in Siberia, but those forces still tended to be pretty limited.

after November 1918, the motivation to reinstate a pro-war government vanished overnight and the only thing left was the desire to strangle socialism in the crib, which was good enough for the presidents and prime ministers and generals sending soldiers to their deaths but usually not for the soldiers themselves. Before this, anyone sent to Russia knew that it was fight in Russia or fight in the war somewhere else, but after the armistice they knew it was a choice between fighting in Russia or going home. As a result, poor morale, the threat of mutiny, and frequent actual mutinies meant allied intervention forces and their White allies were often ineffective when they were actually in combat, and increasingly the leadership stopped trying to take the fight to the Bolsheviks because it was a lost cause. The foreign troops mostly ended up guarding port cities to allow them to be used for the import of weapons for the White armies and the export of refugees and emigres fleeing the fighting or the Bolsheviks, and then withdrew when the fighting got close enough that they would have to risk finding out whether their soldiers would actually defend the city against the Red Army or would shoot the generals and switch sides.

the foreign intervention was never the deciding factor in the RCW and it was never a serious threat to the Bolsheviks, but it did prolong the fighting and enhance the strength of the White forces by facilitating the import of munitions, and it absolutely played a role in convincing the Bolshevik leadership that the world really was set against them, they really were encircled by capitalists, and any show of weakness would be met with capitalist invasion. To be sure, some of that thinking was already present in Bolshevik ideology, but the intellectual weight of having all those suspicions confirmed can't be overstated given the frequent condemnations of the Bolsheviks as conspiratorial, paranoid, and driven to authoritarianism and violence as a result.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2022 17:21

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

oh, also based on that transcript gradenko posted (I don't listen to podcasts so I can't say anything more in context) it sounds like that guy is mixing up support for the Provisional Government in 1917 with support for the Bolsheviks after 1917, which is a pretty egregious mistake imo.

The really short version is that Russia had two revolution in 1917, one in March (called the February Revolution because it happened in late February on the old-style Russian calendar) and on in November (the October Revolution, for the same reason). The first one was basically a general strike in Petrograd triggered by deteriorating wartime conditions on the home front, which led to soldiers mutinying when the tsar ordered them to suppress the strike by force, and then led to the tsar abdicating. After that, Russia had a political arrangement known as "dual power" where power was split between a Provisional Government of elected politicians left over from the State Duma, the Russian Empire's limited parliament, and the Soviets, which were spontaneous councils of workers, soldiers, and peasants that formed in basically all Russian cities - most notable, the Petrograd Soviet which had a lot of power in that it was composed of representatives from the groups that had power in the capital, the workers and soldiers of the garrison. This arrangement had a lot of flaws (basically, almost everyone accepted the Provisional Government as the temporary legitimate government of Russia, but the Soviet more or less had a veto over a lot of its actions, which led to a lot of frustration as neither the Government nor the Soviet could get much done, the Government because it often lacked the power to enact its policies and the Soviet because it lacked the desire to treat itself as a government rather than a check on the government's power). This is a big oversimplification but there you go. Over the course of the year the Provisional Government lost support, the Soviets were taken over by Bolsheviks (taken over is also an oversimplification, basically over time enough factories and military units elected new Bolshevik representatives that the Bolsheviks got a majority in the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets) who were the only political faction that didn't recognize the legitimacy of the Provisional Government, and in November the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government and instituted direct rule by the Soviets.

In simple terms, foreign capitalists loved the February Revolution and hated the October Revolution. They absolutely supported the overthrow of the tsar, which was supposed to herald the rise of liberal democracy in Russia. That's what the Provisional Government said the revolution did, that's what it tried to enact with its policy declarations, and that's what most people expected Russia's future to be (in the West, liberal democracy; in Russia, a lot of people expected some hybrid of liberal democratic politics and socialist economics). When that guy says this:

quote:

At least as many British, French and American leaders liked and supported the idea of the Soviet socialist republics as they appeared in 1917 and 1918, certainly they much preferred the socialist reds to the reactionary whites, who no doubt intended to restore barbarous absolutism.

I kinda assume that he's thinking of foreign support for the Provisional Government under the dual power construction, because otherwise it makes no sense. Foreign leaders liked and supported the Provisional Government and were even okay with the Soviets as long as the Provisional Government was in charge. But there was near-universal condemnation of the October Revolution, which was seen as throwing Russia off the rightful path of liberal democracy that it was on under the Provisional Government, and taking it onto the path of socialist barbarism. If he legitimately thinks that Western leaders supported the Reds over the Whites once the RCW was actually going on in 1918, he's just plain wrong.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2022 18:00

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Terrible Opinions posted:

Haven't gotten the episode in question but given how he talked about them before Duncan is probably referring to the Provisional Government in that statement, he has pretty consistently referred to the Provisional Government as socialists in episodes I've reached. Vyelkin is more or less the same as Duncan's episodes 64-79.

Calling the Provisional Government socialists is only partially true, because it depends what point in 1917 you're talking about. The first composition of the Provisional Government was mostly liberals and moderate politicians, because it was composed of Duma deputies who had won their seats in the 1912 election which was conducted under a very strict and undemocratic electoral system. There were some socialists in the Duma, and there was one socialist in the original cabinet of the Provisional Government (Minister of Justice Alexander Kerensky), but the rest of the cabinet was members of Russia's liberal and moderate political parties. To be fair to them, they were among the most left-wing liberals in Europe, but they weren't socialists.

What then happened over the course of the year is that about every six weeks the Provisional Government had a crisis and reformed the cabinet, each time the crisis harmed its legitimacy and each time when it reformed its cabinet after the crisis it pulled in more socialists from the Soviet to try and restore legitimacy by building a new broader coalition that would better reflect the overwhelming support for socialism among the Russian people. First in response to the April Crisis, then in response to the July Days, then in response to Kornilov, each time the cabinet reformed it had fewer liberals and more socialists until by the October Revolution the Provisional Government was primarily made up of non-Bolshevik socialists and headed by Kerensky. So he's not necessarily wrong to say that, but it needs to be qualified depending on what point in the year you're talking about.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2022 19:01

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

I read Baron Wrangel's memoir about 13 years ago and all I remember is his contention that the Whites lost because they were assholes who just wouldn't offer people anything. My summation of his very long argument is "We sucked. We just really, really sucked."

this was certainly a factor in lack of popular support for the Whites. Not every Russian wanted the Bolsheviks to run the country, but they were offering popular things like land reform, or, more realistically, legitimizing the ad hoc land reform the peasants had already done by themselves, while the Whites offered things like "we take your land back and give it back to the landlords that you hate" and "we restore the monarchy who you hate" and those weren't exactly winning messages.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2022 00:56

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Polgas posted:

When I started listening to mike duncan on the russian revolution, I only had a vague idea on how it all went down. Now after catching up I'm basically all in on Lenin was right all the time team. I was honestly surprised the bolsheviks were the only party that seemed to actually want a socialist revolution.

I figured there would more socialist parties that fought each other to become the face of the revolution but it was just the bolsheviks.

Shout outs to the Left Sr for trying to do a coup because they believed jumping back into ww1 is a popular policy.

One thing to remember is that Russia was a very underdeveloped economy at the time, and there were serious ideological disagreements among Russian socialists about what stage of history Russia was at, and therefore whether or not a socialist revolution was even possible. The short version is that the Bolsheviks were the only ones who thought Russia already had developed enough capitalism to become socialist, and the Mensheviks and SRs thought that Russia had only just become a capitalist country and had to go through a stage of capitalist development before it could transition to socialism. This arose from disagreements over Russian history and over the nature of the Russian economy and the 1917 revolution itself.

Everybody agreed that Russia had to undergo the classic Marxist teleology of feudalism -> capitalism -> socialism, but Lenin thought that the transition from feudalism to capitalism had already been completed earlier in Russian history, starting with the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, continuing with the urbanization and industrialization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and finishing with the 1905 Revolution, which established a limited parliament dominated by bourgeois and conservative parties. Russia had therefore been in the capitalist stage of development, with the existence of an industrial proletariat in the cities but the bourgeoisie in the ascendancy politically and economically, since at least 1905, and could therefore be open to a transition to socialism. The others disagreed, thinking that Russia remained a feudal country during all of that thanks to the predominance of agriculture, the political control of a conservative landowning aristocracy and an absolute monarchy, and the relative weakness of Russia's emerging capitalist economy compared to the traditional agrarian one. In this interpretation, the February Revolution was Russia's bourgeois revolution that finally overthrew feudalism, put the bourgeoisie in charge instead of the aristocracy, and would inaugurate Russia's capitalist stage of history, and so you couldn't say that Russia was ready for a transition to socialism since it had only just become a capitalist country.

These two differing interpretations were underlying (thought not exclusive) motives for the dramatically different courses of action these groups took in 1917. Lenin, from the beginning, saw 1917 as Russia's chance for a socialist revolution and so refused any cooperation with the bourgeois Provisional Government in favour of preparation and agitation for a revolution led by the Soviets. The other Russian socialists, in stark contrast, were willing to tolerate a bourgeois government running the country because they thought that was a necessary part of Russia entering the capitalist stage of development, and they thought their role was basically to serve as a check on the bourgeoisie's power during that stage of history, blunting capitalism's worst edges, constraining how much power the bourgeoisie could consolidate, and preparing the country for a future transition to socialism once it had gone through an accelerated period of capitalist growth. As a result, they were happy to (at first) cede the leading roles in the government to representatives from bourgeois liberal parties, as long as the socialists in the Soviet had de facto veto power over what those liberals actually did in office.

So yes, Lenin was the only one really agitating for a socialist party and being the socialist face of the revolution, but that was rooted in a deeper-lying argument over Marxist interpretations of where Russia was at in history, whether it was a capitalist country that could therefore transition to socialism or whether it had only just transitioned from feudalism and therefore had to go through capitalism first.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2022 14:58

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Tankbuster posted:

What did Nicky do to the jews?

In addition to what gradenko posted about the war years, it's worth considering how Nicholas and Russia's reactionaries treated Jews before the war.

Sergei Podbolotov, "'True Russians' Against the Jews: Right-Wing Anti-Semitism in the Last Years of the Russian Empire, 1905-1917, Ab Imperio no. 3 (2001), 205-206 posted:

Everywhere anti-Semites, despite of their often loud agitation, offered very little in a sense of practical solutions. In Russia the Right enjoyed a sympathy of the almost unlimited ruler, the Sovereign himself. Nicholas II had a benevolent character, but his worldview was well suited for acceptance of anti-Semitism. His rejection of modernisation, his mysticism, his confusion about the real world, his application of moral values to his allies and enemies (e.g. when the first belonged to �the good� and the latter to �the nasty�), his nationalism (e.g. when allies to autocracy were defined as �true Russians�) � all these traits led Nicholas II to the conclusion that opponents to his unlimited power were mostly �Yids�, as the tsar almost invariably and despicably called his Jewish subjects. It cannot be said that the emperor intentionally fomented anti-Semitism as a deliberate policy to direct popular discontent against a chosen scapegoats. If there were �insincere anti-Semites� as perhaps the Vienna mayor Karl Lueger who cynically used anti-Semitic rhetoric to attract certain audiences, then the sincere anti-Semitism of Nicholas II was, on the contrary, an expression of his uncomplicated nature.

The tsar simply had no idea of what to do with his Jewish subjects. Nicholas II stubbornly refused to make concessions to �indecent people� weaving secret plots. Jewish liberation, he believed, would also threaten social upheavals from the side of the illiterate anti-Semitic masses.63 However, ridding the country of Jews was impossible. Having armed himself with a combination of mystical theories and political calculations, Nicholas II blocked even cautious attempts to solve the Jewish question and induced the government to largely ignore its existence.

Nicholas himself was antisemitic but from the point of view of the ruler of a vast multiethnic empire also disliked pogrom violence that caused disorder and ethnic strife. The Russian Empire never considered exterminating Jews like certain other regimes did, though it did undertake other antisemitic actions like trying to frame Jews for blood libel (look up the Beilis Affair for details), and other high-level decisionmakers like Sergei Witte acknowledged that the only feasible future for Russia's Jews was to gradually emancipate them and give them equal civil rights. But Nicholas and others also refused to do that much, in part because they worried that doing so would provoke antisemitic violence from other parts of the population and in part because of their own antisemitism. And in the meantime, well, the reactionary monarchists who were Nicholas's most staunch supporters against socialism, liberalism, and gradual reform in other areas, like the Union of the Russian People (Black Hundreds), were also staunchly antisemitic and frequently commited antisemitic violence, and Nicholas and his government looked upon them favourably for other reasons and gave them political and financial backing even while condemning their antisemitic violence for bringing chaos and disorder with it.

Like all history, it's complicated. He was an antisemite, but they were all antisemites, and his antisemitism wasn't strong enough to overlook the dangerous disorder that antisemitic violence brought with it, but also his feelings against antisemitic violence weren't strong enough to be a dealbreaker when his strongest supporters were the ones committing pogroms.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2022 15:26

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Polgas posted:

I sorta understood the divide between socialist revolution now and lets help the bourgeois revolution but when the moderate socialist started bleeding support I was just surprised that they still refused to course correct.

a few years ago a prominent scholar in the field wrote an article about alternative histories of 1917 and when discussing this one (why didn't the moderate socialists course correct?) his conclusion was basically that if they were the kind of people who could course correct, they wouldn't have been in that situation in the first place.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2022 15:32

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Grimnarsson posted:

From what I understand, reading Kotkin's biography of Stalin, (or having read it some years past), the Bolsheviks had next to no support among the peasants precisely because they refused to legitimise the land the peasants had seized in their own unrecognised revolution. The NEP in large part was a compromise where private ownership of land was recognised as practical fact but not in principle. I think much of what you say in terms of land reform was offered by the Social Revolutionaries, "Left" in particular, but explicitly not so by the Bolsheviks because they were against private property. Russia 1917 revolution to the next revolution in 1918 and then is an incredibly tumultous time with much of the fighting being within the left. Like Kerensky is often characterised as a socialist.

Yeah I dunno what Kotkin says in the Stalin biography, but that isn't really true. One of the Bolsheviks' first decrees after the October Revolution was the Decree on Land which abolished private property and legitimized the seizure of landed estates that peasants had already done during 1917 and were currently doing at the time of the Decree (this wasn't private property in the countryside, because the seizures tended to happen at the village level, whether through a commune or through local soviets, unions, land committees, etc. It wasn't just a random peasant taking the landlord's fields and declaring they belonged to him now). It's true that the Bolsheviks didn't have a big following in the countryside - peasants mostly voted for the SRs, which wasn't surprising. The Bolsheviks were predominantly a party of the urban industrial proletariat, which during 1917 also acquired a large following among soldiers. The SRs were predominantly a peasant socialist party, which traced its roots back to the narodniki of the 1870s but with added Marxism. Their leaders were still educated intellectuals, but they thought the peasantry could be a revolutionary class like the urban workers and as a result they actually expended a lot of effort on outreach to the peasantry before and during the revolution, while the Bolsheviks were spending their resources on outreach to workers and soldiers.

During the Civil War, even the White governments that had Right SRs in them started promising to return estates to former landowners as a concession to the White officers and right-wingers they were forming coalitions with. The Whites generally ended up with confused and shifting land policies as a result of the fact that they were a loose coalition and that they had to try and win popular support somehow if they were going to win the war. Here's one of the best recent comprehensive histories of the revolution talking about the Whites on the land question:

S. A. Smith, Russia in Revolution, 171-2 posted:

White officers liked to see themselves as being 'above class' and 'above party'--a familiar trope of Kadet discourse. They sought to keep political differences at bay by avoiding thrashing out detailed political programmes, justifying this in terms of what they rather pretentiously called a principle of 'non-predetermination', that is, the postponement of policy-making until after they had won the civil war. However, faced by opponents who had a detailed social and political agenda, 'non-predetermination' proved to be a non-starter. In the course of 1919, the White administrations were forced to grapple with the thorny issues of land reform, national autonomy, labour policy, and local government. Generally, the policies they concocted proved too little and too late, and laid bare internal divisions. Kolchak's government, more stable and ramified than Denikin's peripatetic Special Conference of the Armed Forces of South Russia, tended to take the lead in policy-making.38 In March 1919 it issued a proposal to allow peasants to rent land from the state; but a month later, not to be outdone, Denikin put forward a plan to bolster peasant smallholding through compulsory expropriation of gentry land, albeit with compensation. However, he was overruled by his Special Conference, which called for the return of all land seized at the time of the Revolution, and insisted that any expropriation could only be considered three years after the end of hostilities. It is true that as the Whites faced the prospect of defeat, their policies became less uncompromising. Wrangel's land reform law of 1920 was fairly progressive, envisaging a land fund created from the compulsory alienation of lands above a certain norm, to which recipients of land would be obliged to give part of their harvest, thus enabling those whose land had been taken gradually to be compensated.

Now to be clear that all doesn't mean that the Bolsheviks were hugely popular in the countryside. War communism meant requisitioning food and conscripting peasants which were both highly unpopular. There were even large numbers of peasant uprisings against the Bolsheviks to fight requisitioning and other coercive policies. But when the cards were down, they had advantages over the Whites in that they acknowledged the reality that peasants had taken the land in 1917 and their land reform policies, while not exactly what peasants wanted, were seen as far better among the peasantry than what the Whites were offering. Smith, again:

ibid, 180-181 posted:

If military and strategic factors were paramount in explaining the defeat of the Whites, socio-political factors were also significant. If the White generals were politically inexperienced, this was hardly true of their right-wing Kadet and monarchist advisers. First, their failure to come up with credible schemes of land reform made them suspect in peasant eyes, and there were enough cases of officers returning former landowners to their estates--for instance Major General Uvarov in Stavropol' in 1918 and the Ufa Directory in 1919--to fix in peasant minds the notion that a White victory would mean the return of the landlords. The Reds certainly did not win because they had mass peasant support: their policies of requisitioning and conscription created intense animosity on the part of the rural population. Nevertheless, they were certainly seen as the lesser of two evils. Indeed it was the willingness of the rural population to swing behind the Bolsheviks whenever a White takeover threatened which meant that so long as the civil war lasted, endemic rural unrest did not pose a serious threat to Bolshevik power.

vyelkin has issued a correction as of 23:46 on Feb 18, 2022

# ¿ Feb 18, 2022 23:43

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Takanago posted:

Pardon if this was asked or mentioned earlier, but what's good further reading on the Russian revolution/civil war/bolshevik history/etc. that would be useful for people listening to the Revolutions podcast?

Can't answer based on the podcast, but there were a bunch of centenary survey histories of the revolution that were published in 2017 and for the most part they're quite good. I like Mark Steinberg's The Russian Revolution 1905-21 and S. A. Smith's Russia in Revolution, other people I know like Laura Engelstein's Russia in Flames. Ronald Grigor Suny's Red Flag Unfurled might also be good but I haven't read it myself. If you just want a good narrative of 1917 in Petrograd, you might enjoy China Mieville's October. Just avoid Sean McMeekin's The Russian Revolution because it's junk.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2022 18:57

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 13:32

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Ardennes posted:

It isn�t by academics, it is well known Figes can�t read Russian and very little actual research was done for the book.

afaik Figes can read Russian (maybe you're thinking of Anthony Beevor who can't?) but has done other dodgy academic dishonesty things like potentially faking citations and definitely publishing fake Amazon reviews of his rivals' books and then blaming his wife when he got caught. He used to be quite highly regarded because a couple of his early books (here specifically thinking of Peasant Russia, Civil War and Interpreting the Russian Revolution, the book he co-wrote with Boris Kolonitskii) were good contributions to the field but at least among younger generations of historians he now has a reputation as a weirdo who tanked his own academic reputation for no good reason.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2022 14:57

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