Category: History – U.S.S.R.

Ivan’s War

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Ivan’s War, Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945” by Catherine Merridale, published in 2006.

As is well known, by the mid-1920’s, Stalin had taken over Russia, in which there had been a revolution to turn the country Communist. Beginning in 1929, Stalin forced peasant-farmers to merge their land into collectives and adopt wrong-headed agricultural methods, resulting in millions and millions of deaths from famine. Elite schools in the cities were training the upper class (and a few poor boys) for leadership.

In spring 1937, Stalin ordered many top leaders in his government and military to be fired or tortured or killed, or a combination thereof. The younger soldiers had been brainwashed from birth to be anti-Fascist and therefore to hate the Germans, so they were confused when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939. Nevertheless, when WWII came, the Russian military incited the educated young men to lead the fight to protect mother Russia. Back home, their families were still starving.

In June 1940, the Soviet military was unpleasantly surprised by an attack on their Slavic lands by the German Luftwaffe. The now-enemy had knocked out a lot of military resources and Soviet troops had been disorganized and poorly equipped previously. Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s right-hand man, used the occasion to inspire patriotism and incite additional hatred against the Germans.

Propaganda literally flew back and forth hot and heavy. German planes flying over Ukraine dropped leaflets that said Moscow had fallen and Stalin was dead. Turnover in the Red Army was extremely high due to: desertions, deaths from NKVD executions for desertions, and deaths from disease and enemy fire and bombardments.

In spring 1944, Soviet soldiers invaded Romania. They began to see peasants there and in Germany, Poland, France, Holland, Belgium and other capitalist places, who were living way better than they themselves had been, in their civilian lives. The young Soviet military men began to question how Communism was so great if they had been so economically poor.

Instead of setting fire to Romanian villages as they and the Germans had done to so many other battlegrounds as they were leaving, they looted corpses and appropriated farm animals, alcohol and material possessions for themselves. Black markets flourished.

When they finally marched into East Prussia and Budapest, the Soviets’ frenzy of hatred involved raping females, too. Peer pressure caused otherwise ethical men to become barbarians, and drunkenness made it easier to misbehave the way they did.

The Russian propaganda outlet “Pravda” portrayed the Soviets as victims of the Nazis, and called for revenge and reparations. It conveniently neglected to mention the atrocities they committed.

Stalin deflected blame from himself for millions and millions of Soviet deaths through the decades of his rule, by claiming he was suffering along with his people. He believed that Western capitalist cultures were a bad influence, so he demobilized the Russian Army from Germany in 1945– making them sign nondisclosure agreements. He also appeased them with a monetary bonus and (low quality) consumer goods. However, they were spied on by his intelligence service 24/7.

Stalin cast aspersions on the Jews during and after the war. One of numerous myths spread was that during the war, Jews held office jobs instead of fighting on the front lines. In 1945, Ukrainians in Kiev launched a pogrom.

The ravages of the war gave rise to adrenaline junkies with PTSD. After the war, they didn’t know what to do with themselves, and they continued to lead violent, empty lives. “Instead of aspiring to freedom, patriots would henceforth– wittingly or not– become complicit in the repression of the minorities, large-scale arrests, and a bleak and deadly dogma that had almost nothing in common with the libertarian promises that had drawn such crowds to Palace Square in the revolutionary months of 1917.”

After official histories of the war were published, Soviet censors prohibited the publishing of any additional war-related information. No one was allowed to see the archives. They were classified. Top secret.

Read the book to learn much more on the history of the Soviets’ experiences before, during and after WWII.

ENDNOTE: Speaking of non-disclosure and keeping up appearances, here’s a little ditty that describes Trump’s latest marital status.

FIRST LADY MELANIA

sung to the tune of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” with apologies to The Beatles, their estates and to whomever else the rights may concern.

Donald had a victory in the political race.

Melania is, standing by her man.

Donald said to Melania,

“You’ll help me save face. We’ll sign an agreement to maintain the Trump brand.”

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

Donald has a radical agenda in store.

Melania, must obey her king.

She’s stiff and aloof and doesn’t care anymore.

She knows she’s not allowed to say a thing.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

For all of their years, their marriage is a BUS-iness act.

With previous kids, their family’re reality show stars…

of Donald’s and Melania’s contracts.

Donald’s the big winner in the transactional race.

Donald lets the children lend a hand.

Melania stays at home and does her pretty face,

and at events she’s loyally standing by her man.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

For all of their years, their marriage is a BUS-iness act.

With previous kids, their family’re reality show stars…

of Donald’s and Melania’s contracts.

Donald’s the big winner in the transactional race.

Donald lets the children lend a hand.

Melania stays at home and does her pretty face,

and at events she’s loyally standing by her man.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

First laDY, MelAN-ia, fashion icON,

la la la la fashion icon.

For Donald it’s FUN.

But for Melania, it’s NOT!

John Reed: Witness to Revolution

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “John Reed: Witness to Revolution, A Biography” by Tamara Hovey, published in 1975.

According to the book (which appeared to be credible although it lacked a detailed list of Notes, Sources, References, and Bibliography), Reed was born in October 1887 in Portland, Oregon. The beneficiary of white male privilege, he graduated from Harvard, then bummed around Europe, and wrote stories and articles that were published in the magazines of the day; among them: American, Saturday Evening Post, Century, Smart Set, Colliers, and Trend. But he rebelled against the bourgeois values of his social class. The Masses did not pay its contributing writers, but featured short stories that realistically portrayed the struggling masses in America of the 1910’s. Many publications generously compensated their contributing writers, so Reed was able to scratch out a living.

Reed was given a press pass through the years by different publications to cover a few major historical events. In 1913, he wrote human-interest stories through immigrant workers’ eyes after witnessing violent labor trouble at the silk factory in Paterson, New Jersey.

Reed rubbed shoulders with the famous social activists of his generation. Showing their white-savior-complex– in June 1913, he, along with the independently wealthy Mabel Dodge (who owned a stately home on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan) and Robert Edmond Jones, staged a pageant whose performers consisted of downtrodden laborers at the old Madison Square Garden. The three served as planner and director, funder and arranger, and set designer, respectively. Their goal was to improve working conditions for the poor. After the pageant, Reed, Dodge and Jones sailed to Europe.

Reed spent four days in New Jersey’s Passaic County jail (whose conditions were very disgusting) in order to write articles that publicized the plight of striking workers who were denied due process. He was unlike journalists at most newspapers, who were puppets of: management (rather than labor), government officials, and law enforcement. Reed physically climbed into the trenches with German soldiers during WWI to get their stories. He then turned into a pacifist.

Read the book to learn what transpired when Reed developed a reputation as a radical (hint: he acquired a press credential from the American Socialist press in August 1917 in order to cover the Russian Revolution).

The Passion of Ayn Rand

The Book of the Week is “The Passion of Ayn Rand, A Biography” by Barbara Branden, published in 1986.

Born in St. Petersburg in February 1905, Ayn (rhymes with “mine”) Rand, whose father was a chemist, spent her early childhood in a cultured, Jewish family in Petrograd. After graduating from high school in the Crimea, when the family was poverty-stricken and starving due to the Bolshevik Revolution, Rand taught literacy to Red Army soldiers.

In the early 1920’s, the Russian government evilly schemed to allow “former bourgeoisie” such as Rand’s family to work in cooperatives until it felt sufficient assets were accumulated, at which time it stole those assets by force. Its attitude was: “… workers and peasants were extolled as the highest types of humanity, and intellectuals, unless they employed their intelligence in selfless service to the state, were denounced as parasitical.”

Rand was headstrong in her desire to flee to America and never return to Russia. She eventually got her wish in the mid-1920’s, thanks to her mother’s distant relatives in Chicago. After overcoming numerous obstacles, she lived with her Orthodox-Jewish relatives, and later, struck out on her own in Los Angeles. She was driven to become a writer and let nothing stand in her way.

Rand eventually wrote what became a very famous novel– Atlas Shrugged— whose theme was that if intellectuals are the ones “…who make civilization possible– Why have they never recognized their own power? Why have they never challenged their torturers and expropriators? … it is the victims, the men of virtue and ability, who make the triumph of evil possible by…” being too nice to their oppressors.

Rand thought that the American government, with its anti-trust stance, was persecuting industrialists. She thought the latter deserved to enjoy every last penny of the fruits of their labor because they were the economic engine of the nation.

In rebelling against her former country’s socialist economic system under its Communist political system, Rand thought workers were becoming too powerful, and she denounced them as parasitical. She dogmatically advocated an extreme version of “survival of the fittest” or Libertarianism.

However, when government becomes an accomplice to its donors’ activities that involve excessive greed, conflicts of interest and unfair economic advantages– society becomes economically unbalanced as wealth becomes too concentrated in a tiny percentage of the population; this situation foments class resentment. For additional information on this situation, see this blog’s posts:

  • Wikinomics / Courting Justice
  • What’s the Matter With Kansas
  • Street Without A Name
  • Sons of Wichita
  • Outsider in the White House
  • Crossing the River
  • Burned Bridge, and
  • Forty Autumns.

Whittaker Chambers wrote in his negative review of Atlas Shrugged, “Miss Rand calls in a Big Brother of her own… She plumps for a technocratic elite… And in reality too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship…”

Rand formulated the theory of Objectivism, whose purely capitalist-free-market-oriented, rational thinking completely rejected religion. Yet she never did explain– in her lucrative lectures to big-name, elitist, politically liberal (ironically!) American colleges, how that squared with her total rejection of godless Communism / Socialism.

Incidentally, the main character of the novel itself– whose cult of personality persuades intellectuals from all walks of life to go on strike– says, “Force and mind are opposites, morality ends where a gun begins… It is only in retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use.”

Along these lines, gun-control advocates in the United States have been too nice for too long. Except for short periods, whenever there’s been a proposal to:

  • curb the bearing of arms (not even all arms, just the most destructive ones–that are overkill for hunting or local law enforcement), or
  • enact stricter background checks on the granting of gun permits or licenses,

the opposition has repeatedly, through propaganda and money, convinced enough significantly powerful people that:

  • no stricter background checks should be done, and
  • no firearms should be banned pursuant to the Second Amendment of the Constitution.

Sources with more information include this blog’s posts:

  • A Good Fight
  • Undercover, and
  • Savage Spawn.

If America wants to return to “normal” (have pre-COVID gatherings of a large number of people in one place), it needs to put ILLEGAL-gun control at the top of the agenda.

Anyway, read the book to learn of Rand’s biographer’s relationship to Rand, a wealth of additional details on Rand and how she acquired her wealth, the romantic subplot in the soap opera of her life, and much more on her theories, writings and lectures.