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It May Shock You. It Might Even Horrify You.
Writing in yesterday's New York Sun, National Review ‘s Andrew Stuttaford surveys some of the carnage and perversity featured in the intriguing new book Lenin's Brain and Other Tales from the Soviet Archives. From Stuttaford's review:
The saga begins with the removal of [Lenin's] brain in the immediate aftermath of its owner's death, to be poked and prodded, examined and venerated. From there it went on a long, strange trip from skull to jar to slide, ending up divided into 30,953 carefully selected slices. (I am unclear whether this total includes the portion that was dispatched to Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.) A German brain specialist was put in charge of the project for a while, but he proved unacceptably foreign and irritatingly independent. In the end, however, Stalin's Politburo got the result it wanted from a team of more biddable experts, "proof" that Lenin was smarter than just about anybody else—a mixture of pseudoscience and elitism that was all too typical of the Bolshevik project. As the episode reminds us, the Soviet leadership believed that the masses were inherently unreliable: Without an "enlightened elite to manage [them], there would never be a peasant-worker paradise. By this logic, the creators of this dictatorship must themselves be head and shoulders above the rest."
The Soviet horror show that particularly sticks in my brain is described in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. The scene is a district Party conference in Moscow Province. Stalin wasn't there, but of course he was celebrated at the close of proceedings. The applause was thunderous.
However, who would dare be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who'd been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first. And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn't stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks. At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly—but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?
Taktix®|5.22.08 @ 10:02AM|#
I wouldn't last eight minutes with the "Russian Beauty" in the
ad to the right...
Anyone else see that?
kinnath|5.22.08 @ 10:14AM|#
Yup I see it. But this lady is not the best looking Russian I have seen.
Jorgen|5.22.08 @ 10:19AM|#
it amazes me that there are still people living in Russia. I'm so used to the relative freedom and comfort of the United States that it's hard to imagine how you could survive the Czars, and then the Soviets, and now Putin.
kinnath|5.22.08 @ 10:23AM|#
Whats an "ad"?
It's the crap that shows up in the company mandated web browser
when you look at the Internet instead of doing your job.
|5.22.08 @ 10:24AM|#
Jorgan,
It is kind of amazing. I read in a biography of Solzhenitsyn a few
years ago that of the original Soviet generation born in the 1920s
that between the purges and World War II, 90% of the males born in
that period died an unnatural death. It is just unimaginable.
|5.22.08 @ 10:25AM|#
I think we should dump Lenin and Einstein's brain into the same
jar and watch 'em rassle!
Dillinger's penis could referee.
|5.22.08 @ 10:26AM|#
But this lady is not the best looking Russian I have
seen.
She'll do. She'll do just fine.
I have to say, the auto-ads that get matched with the stories are
endlessly amusing.
kinnath|5.22.08 @ 10:28AM|#
But this lady is not the best looking Russian I have
seen.
She'll do. She'll do just fine.
She's definitely a Euro-babe, but doesn't look Slavic. A little
bait-and-switch perhaps?
|5.22.08 @ 10:29AM|#
"She'll do. She'll do just fine.
I have to say, the auto-ads that get matched with the stories are
endlessly amusing."
They just want to marry you, get their greencard, get pregnant and
divorce you to take every dime you have. Despite the drawbacks, if
she is any indication of the quality of women avaialable, it is
still a bargin.
Colin Clout|5.22.08 @ 10:32AM|#
..."proof" that Lenin was smarter than just about anybody
else...
Soviet leaders - before and after the Revolution - liked to put on
an air of intellectual mastery. Most scholars these days would
probably argue that the ideas of most of the Bolshevik bigwigs were
derivative and that at best they at best were decent
synthesizers.
As the episode reminds us, the Soviet leadership believed that
the masses were inherently unreliable...
Some elements of the Soviet leadership were more amenable to the
masses self-organizing than others were. Those who didn't like this
idea won out however.
|5.22.08 @ 10:35AM|#
If we can find Kennedy's brain, it'll be a superbrain cage match; think of the global pay-per-view take! I bet we could get Murdoch to back us.
kinnath|5.22.08 @ 10:35AM|#
They just want to marry you, get their greencard, get
pregnant and divorce you to take every dime you have.
Supporting evidence?
Mad Ivan|5.22.08 @ 10:41AM|#
>>It is kind of amazing. I read in a biography of Solzhenitsyn a few years ago that
Mad Ivan|5.22.08 @ 10:43AM|#
Eh... This is some silly board software...
Anyway, it is rather surprising that anyone still actually would
believe anything from Solzhenitsyn's ramblings... About the only
thing that is reliable there is that he was, in fact, a KGB
informant when it suited him..
And Russians happen not only to live in Russia, but even to like
Putin... Weird, innit?
|5.22.08 @ 10:45AM|#
"Anyway, it is rather surprising that anyone still actually
would believe anything from Solzhenitsyn's ramblings..."
Yes because it is myth that Stalin killed anyone. The great terror
was just a captalist lie. Who the hell are you? Walter Duranty?
robc|5.22.08 @ 10:46AM|#
kinnath,
It's the crap that shows up in the company mandated web browser
when you look at the Internet instead of doing your job.
My company mandated web browser is firefox.
|5.22.08 @ 10:47AM|#
Oh, only the Soviet leadership believed it was just a little brighter than the masses ? Guess the Kennedys and the rest of the Washington folks don't count for nuthin'. If they are just the same as me I guess they won't mind helpin' me around the farm , only for a few days, when they're not busy doing the people's work.
kinnath|5.22.08 @ 10:49AM|#
And Russians happen not only to live in Russia, but even to
like Putin...
And a lot of Russians liked Zhirinovskii too.
Mad Ivan|5.22.08 @ 10:59AM|#
(And a lot of Russians liked Zhirinovskii too)
Some still do, if anything for entertainment value. For the vast
majority, they live better under Putin than before, and they can
see that most of the so-called "opposition leaders" are either
insane (Novodvorskaya, Kasparov) or far more dangerous
(Limonov).
(Yes because it is myth that Stalin killed anyone)
Stalin had quite a few people killed, and noone is arguing that
point. The point relevant here is that Solzhenitsyn is a
megalomaniac (and whatever language he is writing in, is not
Russian), by all accounts not a nice person (to put it mildly), and
happens to havу rather cold relationship with truth.
If one were to believe "statistics" from Gulag Archipelago (even if
it is obvious that at the time it was being written, Solzhenitsyn
could not have had access to any statistics whatsoever), there
would not be any people left in Russia by now...
Taktix®|5.22.08 @ 11:04AM|#
They just want to marry you, get their greencard, get
pregnant and divorce you to take every dime you have.
Supporting evidence?
An episode of
Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
Duh!
|5.22.08 @ 11:06AM|#
"For the vast majority, they live better under Putin than
before..."
I think a better handle for "Mad Ivan" would be "Putin on the
Ritz".
PC|5.22.08 @ 11:11AM|#
Speaking of ads, I have always noticed the totality of
commercials on TV during a certain time segment and who they are
trying to target. Like when I used to stay up late in college and
the only ads were herpes meds, bad credit counseling, and GED and
Post secondary educational institutions but lower level than
colleges. Like denture creams and senior stuff during
Jepoardy.
That said, why is Reason trying to court the NAMBLA and incest
crowd with that ad between Drew and the Buy a Bride?
Mad Ivan|5.22.08 @ 11:12AM|#
Holodomor...
Mass murder, yes, probably. Genocyde, no. At least not by any
accepted definition.
|5.22.08 @ 11:18AM|#
"Get married again? No thanks. I'll just find a woman I can't stand, and give her a house." - Rod Stewart
Colin Clout|5.22.08 @ 11:25AM|#
Mad Ivan,
So you agree with Solzhenitsyn that it wasn't an act of
genocide.
|5.22.08 @ 11:26AM|#
Mad Ivan,
Yes he is megelomaniac and not a nice person. But he also was right
about Stalin and was right when most people in the West were living
in denial. Further, that wasn't his autobiography, it was a
biography and the 90% figure doesn't come from him.
Is it your position that Stalin's death toll is overrrated? Look
there were a couple hundre million people in Russia in the 1920s.
You could kill 20 million in the war and another 20 or 30 million
in the gulags and famines and you are still left with 130 million
people plus the birth rate.
Mad Ivan|5.22.08 @ 11:36AM|#
Colin - even a stopped clock is right twice a day... Calling
holodomor an act of genocyde might be good politics for Ukraine,
but it does not make it so.
John - Considering his ideas about how Russia _should_ be, he might
have been right about Stalin, to some degree, but from an entirely
different angle than what most westerners would think. Or
like.
Stalin's death toll, as well as extent of individual atrocities is
exaggerated. No matter what Solzhenitsin says (as he does),
arresting a quarter of Leningrad population would be impossible,
counterproductive, and simply beyond belief...
I have actually read one of Solzhenitsyn's autobiographies (and
believe me, reading him in Russian is a major undertaking) and,
actually knowing some people he mentions, I would not put much
trust in any facts that he presents.
Colin Clout|5.22.08 @ 11:40AM|#
John,
By the 1970s very few people were in denial about the nature of the
Great Purge. After all, Robert Conquest's book had been published
in the 1960s.
|5.22.08 @ 11:41AM|#
I was aware that Solzhenitsyn has some loopy ideas, but I was not aware of evidence that he made things up in Gulag Archipelago. Citation? I am genuinely interested.
Colin Clout|5.22.08 @ 11:44AM|#
Mad Ivan,
It is a safe bet to say that at least one million people died in
the Soviet Union as a result of some sort of direct form of state
terror. That doesn't included all the people killed by the
murderous and rather stupid industrial and agricultural policies of
the Soviet state during Stalin's reign.
Mad Ivan|5.22.08 @ 11:57AM|#
jbd -- I only have links in Russian currently. As an example,
his estimates of people who died during construction of White Sea-
Baltic canal ranges from 1350000 to 3280000 (depending on edition).
Which would be terrible, of course, but the entire number of people
employed in the construction was 125000. Even Stalin was not able,
at least as far as I now, to kill the same person 30 times
over...
Colin - One million sounds like a more believable number. Does it
include the Civil War, or only реу following period.
People dead because of failed policies... it is sad, but for it to
be a crime there should be some intent, and given Stalin's (and
generally Soviet) preoccupation with increasing the population (to
increase both production and army size), intent seems to be
unlikely.
Joel|5.22.08 @ 12:08PM|#
I really don't know anything about Solzhenitsyn except what I
read in The Gulag Archipelago, and all I know about Stalin
is all the shit I've been told for all my life. So admitting that
everything I think I know could well be wrong, I've got no dog in
whatever flamefest is getting ready to light up.
But before it does, please let me just say that if I were in the
physical presence of the only person I've ever encountered who was
actually willing to speak up even mildly for Josef Stalin at this
very late historical date, anyone who would be so ballsy, so
gallsy, and - if any one tiny thing I've ever heard about Stalin is
even slightly true - so incredibly wrongheaded as to come out in
public and do that...well, hell. I'd want to shake his hand, just
so I could tell my grandkids I did.
That's all I want to say.
goodwin alert|5.22.08 @ 12:26PM|#
Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot . . Compare and Contrast
So what's more important, raw numbers of bodies or percentage of
starting population?
Religious/Ethnic targets versus Class/Political targets versus
Class/Intellectual targerts?
Or can be settle on bad people are bad people?
|5.22.08 @ 12:26PM|#
"jbd -- I only have links in Russian currently. As an example,
his estimates of people who died during construction of White Sea-
Baltic canal ranges from 1350000 to 3280000 (depending on edition).
Which would be terrible, of course, but the entire number of people
employed in the construction was 125000. Even Stalin was not able,
at least as far as I now, to kill the same person 30 times
over..."
Of course you can, you just replace the ones who die. For example,
if you have a work force of 125,000 and say 5,000 a month die but
are replaced by 5000 new people, in four years you will have killed
twice the number of people who are working on the project. It is
the same way divisions during World War II sufferred 300 and 400%
casualties.
As far as Stalin's arresting a quarter of the population of
Lennigrad being unbelievable. Why not? Hitler exeterminated 13
million people and the whole continent of Europe claimed not to
know. Pol Pot killed one quarter of the population of Cambodia in
about three years. Mao killed over a 100 million. Considered in the
light of what happened later in the 20th Century, there is nothing
unbelievable about it at all.
Mad Ivan|5.22.08 @ 12:43PM|#
jbd - 125000 is, supposedly, the total number of people to have
worked on the project, not the number of people to have worked on
it at any single moment.
As for the second point... emptying one quarter of a million-person
city would be rather noticeable, and I know enough people from
Leningrad/St. Petersburg, and not one of them ever mentioned the
city being emptied out like that...
Now, we're not talking about Stalin being a good person, which he
was not, but rather about Solzhenitsyn being a reliable source of
information and, tangentially, about the tendency to exaggerate
Soviet crimes, which might bring political points to some, but
does, in the end, cheapen the real issue.
Rhywun|5.22.08 @ 12:50PM|#
for it to be a crime there should be some intent
Lots of crimes don't have intent. IANAL, but I just looked up
"manslaughter" and the phrase "malice aforethought" came up -
"which may involve an unintentional killing but with a willful
disregard for life". I'd say "willful disregard for life"
accurately describes every Communist regime I've heard of.
|5.22.08 @ 12:56PM|#
Mad Ivan: Ya dovol'no khorosho chitayu po russkii. Yesli ne vozrazhayetye, khotel byi chutat' links.
BakedPenguin|5.22.08 @ 1:03PM|#
Hitler exeterminated 13 million people...
What? Are you talking about the concentration / death camps? The
highest estimates I'd seen ran about 6 million.
|5.22.08 @ 1:10PM|#
I don't know what the truth is here, and I'm interested in the
evidence. But I do not think it is convincing to argue that Stalin
would not have intentionally slaughtered millions because he was
simultaneously trying to increase population.
Many of the things he indisputably did were self-desctructive, for
example killing off most of his best military leaders in the purges
when he knew Germany was rearming and an eventual confrontation was
inevitable. He could have opted to kill off particular parts of the
population (say, for example, Ukrainian peasants resisting
collectivization), even if he wanted to increase overall
population.
Colin Clout|5.22.08 @ 1:12PM|#
Mad Ivan,
One million during the Great Terror alone.
As for the failed policies, Stalin was well aware of the suffering
that those policies wrought; indeed, if I am not mistaken, this is
one of the reasons why he made his "Dizzy with success" statement
that delayed collectivization in the early 1930s.
Mad Ivan|5.22.08 @ 1:53PM|#
jbd - try www.duel.ru for example.
http://www.duel.ru/publish/emelyanov/emelian.html or
http://www.duel.ru/200821/?21_7_1 have some interesting
iinformation, if true.
If by "best military leaders" you mean someone like Tukhachevsky,
he was beaten back any time he went against anyone other than badly
armed peasants, but he sure was quite good at slaughtering
those...
That Stalin's regime was eliminating people deemed dangerous (not
necessarily killing, but at least shipping them off to camps) is
one not really in question. But once you get to numbers like
20-30-100 millions, it requires that people involved were insane
and stupid. Stalin and Co. were "not nice" to say the least, and
they were deluded about thew ability of planned economics to work
in long term, but they most certainly were not stupid.
Rhywun - in that case, pretty much any government can be indicted.
Certainly any US administration.
Colin - since everyone seems to agree ереф people were shipped off
to Gulag or shot on site in greates numbers during the Great
Terror, then the total number can not be that much greater than a
million...
Colin Clout|5.22.08 @ 1:59PM|#
Mad Ivan,
From what I have read twenty million seems to be a fair estimate
actually.
...but they most certainly were not stupid.
Stalin proved himself to be rather dim on a number of occassions
(not that he was always so, he could also be quite sly and clever).
The classic example of this was his unerring belief that Germany
was not preparing to invade in 1941, even though his military
advisors (Zhukov was one of them I think) warned him for some time
prior to the invasion that the USSR was indeed at hand.
Mad Ivan|5.22.08 @ 2:13PM|#
Colin - every time I have read this number, it was including
people who died during famines etc., not only victims of
repressions.
I do not claim to know what was going through Stalin's head, but
apparently there was so much conflicting intelligence data coming
in at the time (i.e. from Zorge) about possible dates for German
attack that taking any premature action, in violation of the
Non-aggression treaty, would not have necessarily been any
smarter...
bill|5.22.08 @ 2:21PM|#
"enlightened elite to manage [them], there would never be a
peasant-worker paradise. By this logic, the creators of this
dictatorship must themselves be head and shoulders above the
rest."
This is a very interesting comment seeing as how all the leaders of
the Communist Revolution were Jews.
|5.22.08 @ 2:47PM|#
They just want to marry you, get their greencard, get
pregnant and divorce you to take every dime you have.
Delete the bit about the greencard, and this sounds like all too
many women I have known.
|5.22.08 @ 2:53PM|#
To make this discussion just a little stranger, Solzhenitsyn
himself published a weird little editorial in the Boston Globe a
few weeks ago, arguing that the Great Famine that happened in the
Urkraine was NOT a genocide.
So you can stop waving around Gulag Archipelago to shut down any
conversation now.
|5.22.08 @ 4:07PM|#
"What? Are you talking about the concentration / death camps?
The highest estimates I'd seen ran about 6 million."
You're confusing the number of Jews murdered, which was about 6
million, with the total number of defenseless and innocent men,
women and children murdered by the Nazis, for which 13 million is
actually a conservative estimate.
Colin Clout|5.22.08 @ 4:10PM|#
Mad Ivan,
Stalin didn't need to invade Germany to prepare for war; heck, all
he needed to do was mobilize his forces and otherwise prepare for
an invasion. He was unwilling to do so because apparently his
gigantic ego got in the way of common sense. Millions of Soviet
citizens would have been saved if he had simply been prepared to
admit that he was wrong about the original timeline he expected re:
war with Germany.
Colin Clout|5.22.08 @ 4:13PM|#
atrevete,
Yes, Roma/gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, "undesirable" Germans (be
they for political or "hygenic" reasons), also died in the camps.
Plus there are the millions of civilians and soldiers of who died
as a result of military conflict (a lot of them were told to start
walking and they died of starvation, etc. on their way to the
"destination" they were instructed to go to).
Mad Ivan|5.22.08 @ 4:39PM|#
Colin -- as I recall, they were doing some major maneuvres
around that time. In any case, getting back to the original
argument, it might be a sign of ego, but not of stupidity...
In any case, even smart people sometimes make stupid decisions.
|5.22.08 @ 6:54PM|#
Colin, Mad Ivan,
I think Hitler was so inside Stalin's head, con-man style, that
Stalin was actively working to disbelieve people who warned him
about a German invasion, including the front-line troops who
reported it the first day.
There had to be plenty of people around him who were warning him
about making a deal with the hateed fascists, saying he was setting
up the USSR for betrayal, and we know how he dealt with dissent. I
think he got to the point that he reflexively dismissed warnings
about that, and the Nazis knew this and used it against him.
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