Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

I don't get it.

I heard this wasn't that great a book. I just finished reading Koba the Dread, same topic. I thought it was gripping, and learned a lot about the horrors of Stalin, though I thought the book was weak on its real mission, to complain about the author's father and father's friends who were English communists who did not renounce Stalin fast enough. Given the hidden nature of much of what was going on in the Soviet Union, I'd like a really thorough account of who knew what, when.

Kate Gilbert

Hm. what I actually meant to say is that one major theme of Koba the Dread (and I've seen it popping up all over as a right wing meme) is that its wrong that we can tell jokes about Stalin and his murders, we can't tell jokes about nazis. I'm not sure what the beef here is, does it make it better, or worse, if we tell jokes about mass murderers? Is telling jokes about something awful a good thing, a privelege that should be extended to all victims of mass murder and their friends? Or is it a bad thing, showing that we don't take the mass murder seriously? And how does Stalin's "joke" as offered in the review fit with this? I, too, didn't exactly find it funny. Does that make me a leftist? or just humorless?
At any rate, no one who makes this argument seems to have heard of Hogans Heroes.

Kate

Yevgyeni Onyegin
Yevgeni Onegin
Yevgeny Onegin
Eugene Onegin

OK, but Yvgeny? No. The Russian "ye" is not transliterated as a single "y".

BTW, Tyrone, fikt nicht mit der rocketman!

I've felt the urge to buy the book, but I'm resisting, so far. My bookshelves have lots of Stalin/Hitler stuff.. but was it edifying? I can't say I'm any the wiser for having read it.

Ummm, I don't think you're supposed to "get"
the joke or find it funny. You're supposed to
be disgusted.

Kate Gilbert writes:

"Given the hidden nature of much of what was going on in the Soviet Union, I'd like a really thorough account of who knew what, when."

This is not "really thorough," but here is my back of a business card version of "What the West knew when":

1918-35: Massive economic growth in Soviet Union by reason of mobilization of resources. Apparently peaceful leadership transition after Lenin's death. Might have appeared in West to be a "golden age" relative to Tsarist Russia.

1938: Dewey Commission reports on Stalin's show trials. After this point, no one in West can claim to admire Stalin or Soviet system without noting serious reservations.

1939: Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact.

[1941-45: WWII. "Uncle Joe" nominally on our side. Anti-Soviet talk kept on the down low.]

1947-48: Stalin seizes control of Eastern Europe.

1956: Khruschev's "secret speech" denouncing Stalin's crimes. Ultimately reported widely. No remaining doubt in West that Soviet system is deeply bad.

1973: Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" first published in West. Becomes clear that Soviet system is not just very bad, but comparable to Third Reich.

Milovan Djilas said that all of the heads of secret-police organizations he knew (several) all had a sardonic sense of humor. They tended to come to bad ends themselves.

seedub: "OK, but Yvgeny? No. The Russian 'ye' is not transliterated as a single 'y'.

BTW, Tyrone, fikt nicht mit der rocketman!"

If you're going to be pedantic about foreign languages, make sure you know how to form the imperative in German correctly.

Also, get your noun cases straight.

"is that its wrong that we can tell jokes about Stalin and his murders, we can't tell jokes about nazis"

That is a very good question. I don't have an answer except to notice that Russians had a well-developed line of dark, subtle dissident humour to enable them to cope with the bleak manifestations of Stalinism. Perhaps part of it is that in many cases, there was and is no convincing rationale for the fate that befell many of its victims - the NKVD had arrest quotas to fulfil as per plan; to be an interpreter or translator in Russia in the late 1930s was, by many reports, sufficient to justify a long term in a gulag.

In contrast, with the nazis there was a horrific, official rationale and one made entirely explicit. The evidence is, sadly, that the nazis pre-war didn't have an internal security problem, as recent histories have made clear, whereas the Soviets evidently did.

George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) was an effective satire on the Soviet system and one that could make much fun of the gaps between the official rhetoric and the reality: "Some animals are more equal than others." But I can't think of anything remotely comparable about the nazis, except perhaps Charlie Chaplin's movie: The Great Dictator (1940). However, while there was a pre-war anti-nazi consensus in Britain and America, there was no corresponding anti-Soviet consensus, at least among the literary glitterati, many of whom, like HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw, admired Stalin. Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, was one of the notable exceptions.

Famously, Victor Gollancz refused to publish Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938), about his experience of the civil war in Spain, although Gollancz had been pleased to publish Orwell's The Road to Wigan (1937) about poverty in the north of England during the depression years. Again, in 1945, Gollancz turned down Animal Farm because it was insulting to our war-time allies.

"...many of whom, like HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw, admired Stalin."

I think this mischaracterizes Wells, though perhaps not Shaw. By the late 1930s Wells was certainly not pro-Stalin. Shaw I know less about, although he is frequently criticized for his positive comments about Stalin and the Soviet Union during a 1931 tour -- which, in fairness, was before the purges began (1934-35) or were reported in the West (late 1930s).

Hm. So what is the parallel to "Yevgeny Onegin" for the interrogators at Guantanamo?

alkali: "I think this mischaracterizes Wells, though perhaps not Shaw."

I was following:

" . . one should remember how many people in the West, including such visitors to the USSR as the Webbs, Bernard Shaw and HG Wells, were impressed by the achievements which Stalin claimed for Soviet planning, and dismissed as anti-Soviet propaganda the reports of famine in the Ukraine [1932-3] or of mass deportations to the camps. . . " - from Alan Bullock: Hitler and Stalin - Parallel Lives (1993), chp. 8

However, I'd be interested to learn of specifics as to where and how HG Wells had made explicit his rejection of Stalinism. Later biographies of Wells have tended to be increasingly critical of his temperament and character, mostly because of the way he treated people and his top-down perspective.

On the broader question of the appeal of Stalinism in the 1930s to parts of the "intelligensia" in Britain, the outstanding example is the Cambridge Five whose malign and traitorous participation in the intelligence services bedevilled effective operations from the 1940s through even to the 1970s: http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/C/Cambridge-Five.htm http://intellit.muskingum.edu/uk_folder/ukspycases_folder/ukspycasesfive.html

Man, when that Stalin told a joke,
you just HAD to laugh.

(...or else....)

"... we can tell jokes about Stalin and his murders, we can't tell jokes about nazis. I'm not sure what the beef here is, does it make it better, or worse, if we tell jokes about mass murderers?"
~~~~~

NYC has a KGB Bar that's very popular with the literary set and the trendy. http://www.kgbbar.com/

It's rather hard to imagine a Gestapo Bar being quite popular with the literary set and trendy.

I dunno, would it be a good thing if a Gestapo Bar could be so popular with the literary set?

If not, is it a bad thing that the KGB Bar is?

>>1941-45: WWII. "Uncle Joe" nominally on our side. Anti-Soviet talk kept on the down low.

Millions of Russians dying while holding down and grinding up 2/3rds of the Wehrmacht. Sounds like a pretty substantial nominative.

From what I've read about Orwell, Animal Farm was not specifically directed towards the Soviet Union--but towards ANY form of totalitarianism. That includes fascism. And I doubt if Orwell would've thought well of the current Bushist push towards decrease of individual civil liberties while greatly enhancing the power of large corporations--and a rather small elite of individuals. As in Animal Farm, Bush seems to believe that some "animals" are more equal then others--and he and his allies in Congress have done their best to make the tax system reflect those beliefs.

They used to write "SS = Sex, Sadism" books. Now it is about unsavory habits and evil jokes of Lenin and Stalin. No doubt this trash has its readers - some people just see the world through their own perversions.

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"Millions of Russians dying while holding down and grinding up 2/3rds of the Wehrmacht."

Those millions died because their leader trusted Hitler more than he did Churchill and Roosevelt. Stalin was on *his* side and no-one else's; remember the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact?

"I doubt if Orwell would've thought well of the current Bushist push towards decrease of individual civil liberties while greatly enhancing the power of large corporations"

Yada yada yada. Another drearily formulaic attempt at hijacking a thread for Bush-bashing purposes. This is what comes of a blog's incessant focus on tearing down an administration whose politics happen to come from the other side of the aisle; all the loud and unimaginative cheerleaders start to drown out reasoned opinion.
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"Animal Farm was not specifically directed towards the Soviet Union--but towards ANY form of totalitarianism."

Maybe but Animal Farm (1945) recognisably fitted what was known about the Soviet experience altogether more closely. The Soviet Union was created by revolution, just as Farmer Jones was driven off the farm by the animals in revolt, while the nazis came to power via elections and thereafter soon established a one party state, along with with a supreme leader, endorsed by large majorities in national plebiscites in November 1933 and August 1934. As mentioned, the nazis pre-war did not have an internal security problem whereas the Soviets, as well as the ruling pigs on the farm, did. A more convincing case can be made on behalf of Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), as a portrayal of an eponymous totalitarian state.

By 1945, when Animal Farm was published, there was little need to satirise the nazi model when its malign features were mostly evident and beyond serious dispute except by a lunatic fringe at the margins. By contrast, not much was known then with confidence about the inner workings of the Soviet system, which is perhaps why a satirical fable, a well-established genre in English literature, seemed the most appropriate literary vehicle to recount how the consequences of the Russian revolution had worked out despite the best intentions and aspirations of many who had enthusiastically contributed to its early success. In literary and media circles and academia in 1945, a slim but notable minority were sympathetic towards the Soviet model, with its claims of astounding production achievements, and the Soviets carried the aura of our invincible heroic allies in the war.

Apologia for the Soviet model continued in Europe for much of the post-war era. Khrushchev's denunciation of the Stalin personality cult at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 came as a startling piece of news at the time. Furious debates waged in national Communist Parties in western Europe about whether the revelations were true and, if so, how the parties should accommodate the new reality in official party lines. Some dedicated Communists went through deep personal traumas in trying to make the adjustment.

Different parties took different routes thereafter with the French Communist Party famously continuing to uphold a Stalinist line and continuing to attract up to a quarter of the vote in national elections through to the early 1980s. Even on the collapse of the Soviet system at the end of the 1980s, Georges Marchais, then secretary general of the Party in France, could say of the Soviet Union: "I tell you they didn't arrest enough! They didn't arrest enough! If they had been tougher and more vigilant, they wouldn't have got into this situation they're in now." [Jonathan Fenby: France on the Brink (1999), chp.5]

By then, the existence of the gulags and the magnitude of the victims of the Soviet model were widely known. Credit to Gorbachev, as Soviet leader from 1985 on, for dismantling the Soviet system but his diagnosis was that it started to go wrong with Stalin, not with Lenin. In fact, Lenin had established the very foundations which made Stalinism possible.

Animal Farm was still relevant. The signal achievement of Orwell was that he understood the political mechanics and social psychology of authoritarian socialism better than most at the time he was writing. And he felt impelled to communicate what he understood to a wider readership than, say, Hayek's Road to Serfdom (1944), could access and influence. To the end of his short life, Orwell retained a personal conviction in socialism as an ideal political system but his ideal was founded on a fuzzy personal notion of fostering human decency, not some elaborate plan for creating an array of state institutions to implement a blueprint and issue imperatives, and he wanted to expose the flaws of the beguiling millennialist pretensions of false prophets. Traditions of dirigisme and statism are deeply embedded in both national histories and the political practices of parts of Europe even now.

"Animal Farm" is most definitely a detailed allegory specifically about the Soviet Union -- right down to Snowball and Napoleon as Trotsky and Stalin. (As for the repulsive Marchais, he reportedly had such an appetite that he spent his life looking like a pig himself. Very appropriate.)

"'1941-45: WWII. "Uncle Joe" nominally on our side. Anti-Soviet talk kept on the down low.'"

"Millions of Russians dying while holding down and grinding up 2/3rds of the Wehrmacht. Sounds like a pretty substantial nominative."

Of course, that was after Stalin was overtly on Hitler's side divying up central Europe and providing the Nazis with vital supplies during the latter's conquest of western Europe. And Stalin would happily have stayed that side, for a good while longer at least, had Hitler not turned on him.

As noted above, Stalin was on Stalin's side, nobody else's.

Without the Eastern Front, all Germans that were killed by Russians would have to have been killed by Americans. Which would have meant more Americans killed. Every German the Russians killed was a German we didn't have to kill.

Fascinating account of CIA funding for the feature length cartoon movie of Animal Farm (1954) made in Britain by John Halas (1912-95) and Joy Batchelor (1914-91):
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,908925,00.html

One insight: "Vivien Halas [John Halas's daughter] adds that the film wasn't shown in Paris until the 1990s as it was considered too anti-communist."

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