Russian people may soon canonize Joseph Stalin

December 28, 2008 11:37 AM

The Russian people may vote Joseph Stalin as the greatest Russian to ever live. Despite the atrocities and cleansings committed by Stalin and his regime over his 30 year reign, 397,000 people have voted in a poll to recognize him as Russia's greatest countryman. Even more disturbing, the Russian government recently raided an organization and seized archives detailing Soviet repression under Stalin. A new history book for Russian teachers also describes Stalin's actions as "rational." Stalin is praised by many Russians for his defeat of the Nazi invasion forces during WWII. Even if he does not win the contest, it is amazing that such a tyrannical figure could be adored by nearly 400,000 Russians who voted for him.
posted by NationalWreck (68 comments total)

Ironic, as Stalin is Georgian.
posted by k8t at 11:41 AM on December 28, 2008 [7 favorites]

Can't imagine they polled too many Ukrainians.
posted by Afroblanco at 11:43 AM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

I thought that was ironic as well. I don't know if "ethnic Georgian" technically means he was from the portion of Georgia recently "reclaimed" by Russian forces (Abkhazian or Ossetian?) or the rest of Georgia.
posted by NationalWreck at 11:43 AM on December 28, 2008

Mightn't at least some of these people polled be voting for Stalin in the same sense as Time magazine considered Osama bin Laden for Person of the Year in 2001?
posted by orange swan at 11:44 AM on December 28, 2008

I think "person of the year" is different from "greatest person." The term "great" seems to imply they were a force for good.
posted by NationalWreck at 11:46 AM on December 28, 2008

it is amazing that such a tyrannical figure could be adored by nearly 400,000 Russians who voted for him

Out of a country of 142 million people? The only thing that would be amazing is if those 400,000 are the only ones who hold fond memories of Uncle Joe.
posted by scody at 11:47 AM on December 28, 2008 [5 favorites]

Clearly, once Stalin is declared the greatest Russian, Russia will have to annex Georgia to make things consistent.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 11:48 AM on December 28, 2008 [3 favorites]

I think you're missing the point, scody, if you look at the link it shows the poll numbers for the other candidates. The other candidates's votes for the title are very near the number of votes for Stalin. Polls are never large fractions of the population, and while this poll isn't scientific, we can at least assume the TV network that sponsored it isn't purposely calling people who are likely to vote for Stalin, which means we shouldn't expect him to come out on top unless the Russian people actually like him. (Note in the article the producer of the poll actually asked people to stop voting for Stalin.)
posted by NationalWreck at 11:50 AM on December 28, 2008

Hey NationalWreck, stop moderating your own thread.
posted by soundofsuburbia at 11:51 AM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

it is amazing that such a tyrannical figure could be adored by nearly 400,000 Russians who voted for him.

"He is known as Alexander the Great because he killed more people of more different kinds than any other man of his time."
posted by jason's_planet at 11:51 AM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

Why is it so amazing that people who feel powerless and humiliated would idealize a strong, powerful leader?
posted by jason's_planet at 12:01 PM on December 28, 2008 [5 favorites]

Here's the definition of great from Merriam Webster:

great
Pronunciation: \ˈgrāt, Southern also ˈgre(ə)t\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English grete, from Old English grēat; akin to Old High German grōz large
Date: before 12th century
1 a: notably large in size : huge b: of a kind characterized by relative largeness —used in plant and animal names c: elaborate , ample (great detail)
2 a: large in number or measure : numerous (great multitudes) b: predominant (the great majority)
3: remarkable in magnitude, degree, or effectiveness (great bloodshed)
4: full of emotion (great with anger)
5 a: eminent , distinguished (a great poet) b: chief or preeminent over others —often used in titles (Lord Great Chamberlain) c: aristocratic , grand
6: long continued (a great while)
7: principal , main (a reception in the great hall)
8: more remote in a family relationship by a single generation than a specified relative (great-grandfather)
9: markedly superior in character or quality ; especially : noble (great of soul)
10 a: remarkably skilled (great at tennis) b: marked by enthusiasm : keen (great on science fiction)
11—used as a generalized term of approval (had a great time) (it was just great)
— great·ness noun


It does seem it is possible to use the word "great" without connoting admiration, though admittedly that's not the way the term is generally used. And let's not forget, this poll would be written in Russian. I'd rather like to hear what Russsian adjective was used in this poll, and what its direct translation is.

Not that I'm arguing that the nearly 400,000 people who voted for him didn't do so out of admiration. I'm thinking this is probably yet another example of a country being unwilling to examine its own history and conscience for mistakes and atrocities. As a Canadian grade school student, I heard about Nellie McClung and her efforts to win the vote for women; I did not hear about her support for eugenics. I heard about Canada's efforts in World War II; I did not hear that Canada turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees during the thirties. I heard about slavery in the States; I did not hear about slavery in Canada.
posted by orange swan at 12:04 PM on December 28, 2008 [10 favorites]

I wonder if this is the work of the same people who voted for Rick Astley as the "Best music act ever".
posted by dunkadunc at 12:04 PM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

If nothing else, the man had an undeniably excellent moustache.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:05 PM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

There have been attempts to sanitize Richard Nixon. Currently, there are numerous conjectures about George Bush's legacy. Why not Stalin? Stand by for you know who else...
posted by Cranberry at 12:06 PM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

You know who else had an excellent moustache?
posted by DreamerFi at 12:08 PM on December 28, 2008

orange swan, you're the greatest.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 12:08 PM on December 28, 2008

ALL great men have excellent moustaches.
posted by dunkadunc at 12:08 PM on December 28, 2008

He did - as mentioned in the FPP - stop Hitler and win the Great Patriotic War (in the sense that national leaders are credited with those things which occurred on their watch). That's pretty 'great'.
posted by pompomtom at 12:15 PM on December 28, 2008

orange swan, you're the greatest.

And it seems I have roughly 11 ways in which I could interpret that.l
posted by orange swan at 12:23 PM on December 28, 2008

Anecdote time. My parents did some work for a related church in Chelyabinsk last year, and they reported that the Russians they met adored Lenin but hated Stalin. Dunno what that means vis a vis this.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:31 PM on December 28, 2008

So what did he mean when Ralph Kramden said "Alice, you're the greatest"?
posted by wendell at 12:34 PM on December 28, 2008

great
Pronunciation: \ˈgrāt, Southern also ˈgre(ə)t\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English grete, from Old English grēat; akin to Old High German grōz large
Date: before 12th century
1 a: notably large in size : huge b: of a kind characterized by relative largeness —used in plant and animal names c: elaborate , ample (great detail)

I've always said Taft was our greatest president.
posted by aswego at 12:39 PM on December 28, 2008 [3 favorites]

I'd be damn surprised if Pushkin doesn't win.

Also, Afroblanco, a voice over between breaks announces, "Vote Latvia, vote Lithuania, vote Estonia...." He names every reasonable country except Ukraine.
posted by cthuljew at 12:43 PM on December 28, 2008

As a Canadian grade school student, I heard about Nellie McClung and her efforts to win the vote for women; I did not hear about her support for eugenics.

And as a pro-choicer, I always feel a little awkward whenever someone brings up Margaret Sanger.
posted by Afroblanco at 12:50 PM on December 28, 2008

He did - as mentioned in the FPP - stop Hitler and win the Great Patriotic War

And industrialized Russia. And the people he killed or who otherwise died along the way don't get to vote (although some stuff I've read about Molotov's wife said she came out of the camps still praising Stalin to the day she died).
posted by dilettante at 12:51 PM on December 28, 2008

Admiration for historical figures has almost always been amoral -- based on how much impact they had, and certainly ignoring (or glorifying) crimes against out-group members. This is the point about Alexander the Great, above. The revisionist movement that (for example) condemns the atrocities of past US leaders is an example of a rarity. The seemingly universal condemnation of Hitler is the product of special circumstances -- not only did he lose the war, but the victors (chiefly the US) undertook a massive campaign of indoctrination to make sure that the Germans would hate him. The historical pattern is that murderous leaders are frequently among the most admired.

(As a sidenote, Hitler is admired in societies with attitudes different from our own. For example -- till a recent naming reform -- kids were named Hitler with some frequency in Venezuela. This does not reflect approval of his crimes, but an amoral attraction to greatness that doesn't bother with specifics.)
posted by grobstein at 12:55 PM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

Here's the poll's website (in Russian). The name of the poll is "Imya Rossiya"--literally, "Name Russia," but rendered as "The Name of Russia." On the website, Stalin appears as one of the "12 heroes" (12 geroyev); he's currently third in the polling, behind Alexander Nevsky (13th-century prince who defeated Germanic invaders) and Pyotr Stolypin (prime minister to Tsar Nicholas II, who tried to suppress radical groups and avert revolution). I think that ranking includes all votes, collected over the internet, by phone, etc.; in the online voting taken by itself, Stalin is fourth, trailing Pushkin by a Norm-Coleman-like margin. I believe the Russian "geroi" has roughly the same connotations as the English "hero," so Stalin's high rank seems like a pretty ringing endorsement.

It's not quite that simple, though. Various problems with the poll's voting system--for instance, people can vote as many times as they want--have led to the creation of counter-polls such as "Imena Rossii" (the Names of Russia) and, perhaps best of all, "Anti Imya Rossiya" (the Anti-Name of Russia), where you can vote for the "anti-hero" (antigeroi) of Russia. The candidates for anti-hero are the same as the original poll's "heroes."

I don't know if "ethnic Georgian" technically means he was from the portion of Georgia recently "reclaimed" by Russian forces (Abkhazian or Ossetian?) or the rest of Georgia.

He was from Gori, very close to South Ossetia; during the recent conflict, the Russian military bombed and occupied Stalin's hometown.
posted by DaDaDaDave at 1:02 PM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

I'm no fan of Stalin, but this doesn't surprise me in the list. Why should it surprise anyone? From the point of view of many Russians:

1) He saved Russia from the Germans during WWII.
2) He was one of Russia's "strongest" leaders, if not the strongest. This matters to many Russians.
3) He "cleansed" Russia of many of its internal enemies.
4) He got Russia the A-bomb.
5) He built Russia into a nation that was rivaled only by the USA in world power.

Most of these beliefs are clearly true. The only one questionable is 3), but from the Stalinist point of view, it's pretty accurate - though that's kind of revolving-door reasoning (anyone "cleansed" by Stalin was an enemy of Russia, as the leader of Russia - Stalin - defined it.)

Most Russians lack the sort of historical clarity on the reality of Stalin's regime to gauge this adequately, and even when they do, they're sensibilities are different than mine. I've met Russians who lost grandparents at the hand of Stalin, but admire him greatly. Make sense out of that.

Unlike someone such as Hitler, Stalin kind of left on a high note. From a Russian point of view, he saved the country from ruin and won the biggest war ever. He was a hero.

Anyone interested in the Ukrainian 'holocaust' should read Execution By Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust by Miron Dolot. A chilling book and amazing personal account of the starvation.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 1:03 PM on December 28, 2008 [7 favorites]

Why do I have the sinking feeling the link to this poll was already posted on 4chan's /b/, along with a list of Russian proxy servers?

VOTE STALIN AS BEST RUSIAN EVAR GOGOGOGOGOGO!
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 1:06 PM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

Maybe the people who voted for him haven't forgotten what happened to others before them who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic in their support for the Man of Steel. I have a hazy recollection from undergrad studies that some Soviet political posters came with phone numbers to contact complaint departments if people had problems with the message. Three guesses what happened to you if you called the number to complain.
posted by Law Talkin' Guy at 1:07 PM on December 28, 2008

pompomtom writes "He did - as mentioned in the FPP - stop Hitler and win the Great Patriotic War (in the sense that national leaders are credited with those things which occurred on their watch). That's pretty 'great'."

He aso made a pact with Hitler to divide Poland between them.

Of course, he didn't have much choice, as he'd spent the previous to years killing or imprisoning almost the entire military leadership of the USSR.

Which was the prime reason he needed so much of the "endless steppes" and "endless men" of Rodina to stop Hitler's ill-conceived and badly executed invasion.
posted by orthogonality at 1:18 PM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

Mao would walk a similar poll in China I'd be ready to wager, with both the Cultural Revolution and post-Great-Leap famines and attendant death-tolls laid at his feet.
I don't think that majority of Chinese people are stupid or ignorant and I'm sure the same holds for Russians. Much Western historiography fails to address the basic truth that the regimes they headed did in fact deliver better lives to the majority (a point I can stand by for China at least; don't pretend to know as much about Russia), at least in their subjective assessments. That's not hard even for callous authoritarian tyrants when you start with a large crumbling agrarian empire where life was historically hard , tenuous and cheap and in China's case over-run with imperialist invaders. And of course almost all Chinese and I guess plenty of Russian historiography plays up the achievements. For China like Russia there were also the questions of nationalist pride that Dee Xtrovert mentions.
To avoid being purged from membership here, I should perhaps point out I'm no fan of the old bastards either. Long time since I read it, but I recall Boris Souvarine's Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism as one of the best books on the man.
posted by Abiezer at 1:27 PM on December 28, 2008 [2 favorites]

I should add that dilettante's point about many of the principal victims being long dead certainly helps swing the vote too.
posted by Abiezer at 1:30 PM on December 28, 2008

As a Canadian grade school student, I heard about Nellie McClung and her efforts to win the vote for women; I did not hear about her support for eugenics.

TC Douglas, aka "The Greatest Canadian" was fairly fond of eugenics too... it was pretty popular in the Canadian left of the era. Nellie McClung and TC Douglas were just people of their times.

Reverence for historical figures is a tricky business, especially outside of the era.... Personal politics can always get in the way of the big picture. For example, quite a few repressed-but-politically-moderate ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe welcomed Nazi armies as liberators in WW2.
posted by Deep Dish at 1:34 PM on December 28, 2008

Also, why isn't there more love for Peter I? I thought he was considered the penultimate Russian leader.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 1:35 PM on December 28, 2008

Also, why isn't there more love for Peter I? I thought he was considered the penultimate Russian leader.

There have been plenty of leaders since Peter I. Isn't Viktor Zubkov the penultimate Russian leader?
posted by Justinian at 1:49 PM on December 28, 2008

To hell with Peter I, I nominate Tevye.
posted by jonmc at 1:52 PM on December 28, 2008

There have been plenty of leaders since Peter I. Isn't Viktor Zubkov the penultimate Russian leader?

I know you're not completely serious, but I am curious to know if Peter I is portrayed in Russia as the sort of hero I was taught he was in school.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 1:53 PM on December 28, 2008

Canonizing Stalin?! Might as well canonize Albert Fish, the psychopath serial murderer and cannibalizer of young children, the real life template for Hannibal the Cannibal.

This is why the general population NEEDS to study the Axis II Cluster B personality disorders, know how to see a sociopath, a malignant narcissist, like Stalin. People with these disorders are usually mesmerizingly charismatic, inspire cultic devotion. And behind the camouflage, being put on a pedestal by some, they destroy other people around them. It's often quite bizarre. Adored by some, while utterly dreaded by others. This is typical of malignant narcissists, who quite often become political leaders anywhere in the world.

Many politicians are narcissists on the low end of the continuum, which means they would suck as a spouse or parent but might be very capable leaders or administrators. However, there are traits of sociopaths or malignant narcissists that are essential to know, so voters and/or the general population, do not put these malignants in any position of power, ever.
posted by nickyskye at 1:57 PM on December 28, 2008

Also, I nominate Sergei Skachkov.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 1:57 PM on December 28, 2008

so voters and/or the general population, do not put these malignants in any position of power, ever.

Though it's not exactly like voters or the general population were the ones who put Stalin into power in the first place.
posted by scody at 2:01 PM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

Metafilter: People who aren't likely to vote for Stalin.
posted by blue_beetle at 2:05 PM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

Russian people may soon canonize Joseph Stalin

The Russian people may vote Joseph Stalin as the greatest Russian to ever live

What is this shit? You couldn't wait a few hours to post the actual result? And why not frame it as "The Russian people may vote Alexander Pushkin as the greatest Russian to ever live"? Oh, wait, I know, because that way there wouldn't be as great an opportunity for cheap moralizing.

Yes, Stalin was a very bad man, and yes, many Russians are nostalgic for his rule, either as personally remembered or as read about in history books. There are many reasons for this, ranging from historic Russian need for (and propaganda about the need for) a strong leader to the fact that Russia has been in decline pretty much since he died and in steep decline since the fall of the Soviet Union, and it's a very interesting topic, but this is a crappy way to raise it.

Note to NationalWreck: I know this is your first post, but you need to learn to avoid editorializing. Let the post speak for itself.
posted by languagehat at 2:30 PM on December 28, 2008 [2 favorites]

If I were a jerk, I'd say:

I think Slavoj Žižek put it best when he said, in a 2004 interview with The Believer, "In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers’ uprising; the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong."

But what kind of effete coffee house intellectual would quote freaking Žižek on a community weblog?

...

::cough::

Oh God, I need to take a shower.
posted by ford and the prefects at 3:00 PM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

It's pretty amazing how people can have such a one-sided government-controlled view of an historical figure that changed the world. No questions please, just uncritical acceptance of whatever they tell you in school.

And there's a lot of that in Russia too.
posted by charlesminus at 3:27 PM on December 28, 2008

Say what you will about Stalin, the man had moxy.
posted by Astro Zombie at 4:17 PM on December 28, 2008

I want to know more about the softer side of Stalin. Did he like puppies and rainbows?
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:30 PM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

The man obviously loved his mustache. You don't get a mustache that luxurious without some serious pampering.
posted by Astro Zombie at 4:33 PM on December 28, 2008

I think we have to remember that the Russians who consider Stalin a hero have learned history from completely different sources than we have. If your government controls schools and the media, you're probably going to think pretty much what the government wants you to think, regardless of how independent-minded you are, because you don't have access to all the information.

This kind of thing does happen here too. During World War I, Lord Kitchener was lionized in Britain and Canada as though he were some kind of military genius. The city of Kitchener, Ontario was renamed during WWI when its former name of New Berlin became objectionable. In actual fact Lord Kitchener was a complete idiot and asshole who sent countless regiments of calvary on charges against tanks, which he considered to just be "toys". Twenty years previously, in the Boer war, he had the distinction of running the very first modern concentration camps. He blamed the extremely high mortality rate on poor hygiene among the Boers. I am at a loss to understand this reverence, and yet it existed.

There is such openness in our public discourse now, and greater access to information, so that no one gets lionized in the same way. But even so we get things just as wrong as any Stalin-loving Russian when we don't bother to inform ourselves about the actual facts. Didn't 50% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 at one point?
posted by orange swan at 6:28 PM on December 28, 2008

I always sort of wonder about the deaths laid at the feet of Mao and Stalin. I get blaming them for the people that they actually had killed. Which yeah is way too many people but I think it is important to remember that these communist famines were a result of a failed attempt to increase agricultural production. Also Stalin was successful at industrializing a big country, was responsible for universal health care, and universal education (for both sexes). Also the beating Hitler thing. I get that a lot of people died because of things Stalin did and when I say a lot I mean a crazy big number and I have no interest in cheer leading the guy, but, there's a but.
posted by I Foody at 7:00 PM on December 28, 2008

Alexander Nevsky got the first place. Second went to Stolypin. Stalin was third.
All the amateur philosophers/historians should unclench and go back to whatever they were doing.
posted by c13 at 7:35 PM on December 28, 2008

AP story backing up c13's comment: Stalin Voted Third Most Popular Russian. A Saint and a Tsarist beats a Satan every time.
posted by cenoxo at 7:43 PM on December 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

Reuters story (AP story).
posted by cenoxo at 7:53 PM on December 28, 2008

. . . I think it is important to remember that these communist famines were a result of a failed attempt to increase agricultural production.

Most of your post is right on, but the fact of the matter is that in the USSR at least, the Ukrainian famine was pretty obviously engineered by Stalin and his cronies as a means of keeping non-Russian nationalism deeply buried. When "inspectors" come by your house to make sure that you have no foodstuffs whatsoever on hand - to the extent of poking holes around your land to make sure you've not buried anything, and to the extent of killing housewives caught with as little as a half-teacup of grain - well, that's pretty bad. But when you restrict travel even to villages a few kilometers away, where food is plentiful, and when your nation is exporting foodstuffs . . . well, that's mass murder! Agricultural production was affected by the forced collectivization of farms, but resistance to that collectivization had a lot to do with the forcing of mass starvation as well.

I read in the Austin American-Statesmen just a couple of days ago about how a Texas governor in the 1950's nearly succeeded at having a law passed which called for the death penalty for members of the Communist Party. And there's still a law on the books making it illegal to work for the state if you're a Communist! I was also reading a lot about the behavior of Austin policy only a decade or so later in Paul Drummond's biography of the 13th Floor Elevators - planting drugs on people, throwing drug users off bridges, etc etc. But still, there are a lot of people in Austin who long for the "superior" era of back then. I've never been anywhere where the majority of people truly had a deep awareness of their own space. Why should the Russians, with their typically greater disadvantages in finding the truth, be any better at it?
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 9:23 PM on December 28, 2008

The results of this poll shouldn't really be taken at their face value. The poll was spammed by different groups right from the start - first the Communists discovered it and Stalin got a lot of votes as a result; some time later, (IIRC) a few nationalist groups organized a mass voting for Peter the Great. Then the democrats/liberals discovered the poll and realized that everyone in the top 10 was either a dead monarch or a mass-murdering dictator, so they asked people to vote for Pushkin, etc.

This poll doesn't really tell us who's the most popular/greatest/most important person in Russia's history. Stalin is really popular in Russia, that's for sure, but Nevsky and Stolypin? Hardly. What the results do show, however, is which interest groups in Russia possess the greatest resources.
posted by daniel_charms at 12:39 AM on December 29, 2008 [3 favorites]

What's worse is that Americans elected Bush twice.
posted by zouhair at 12:47 AM on December 29, 2008

cenoxo: They could never have let Stalin win this poll - it would have been too big a political victory for the Communists.
posted by daniel_charms at 12:47 AM on December 29, 2008

How many Americans would nominate Presidents who supported slavery or the Native American genocides because they had other, attractive qualities?

How many French would vote for Napoleon or the hideous, genocidal anti-semitic Saint Louis?

England might give us Victoria (oversaw massacres in India, the Irish and Scottish potato famines, and the many and varied other atrocities of colonialism) or Richard the Lionheart or Elizabeth I.

Many in Spain would doubtless still rate Franco as one of the great men of Spanish history.

I could go on, but I would hope the point would be obvious. Greatness is a matter of perspective, and we're often all too willing to overlook the flaws of our own favourites.
posted by rodgerd at 1:01 AM on December 29, 2008 [1 favorite]

I don't have much to say here, because languagehat and Abiezer have said everything I wanted to say. I do, however, want to note that the reverence for Stalin is not due to the lack of adequate information and education. Russians are perfectly well-informed about how many people he actually destroyed, especially since many or most have relatives who were his victims. (I have three people in my immediate lineage who lost everything to confiscation and purges but were not actually killed.)

My thought, as a Russian, is that Russians don't really care about other dead Russians as abstract figures. An American who hears about 200 Americans dying in a terrorist attack, or whatever, will generally be horrified; to a Russian these are just numbers, means which can always be justified by the end. In this case, the end--the greatest patriotic triumph in Russian history, or so the story goes--more than compensated. This is the best explanation I can come up with.

Most of your post is right on, but the fact of the matter is that in the USSR at least, the Ukrainian famine was pretty obviously engineered by Stalin and his cronies as a means of keeping non-Russian nationalism deeply buried. When "inspectors" come by your house to make sure that you have no foodstuffs whatsoever on hand - to the extent of poking holes around your land to make sure you've not buried anything, and to the extent of killing housewives caught with as little as a half-teacup of grain - well, that's pretty bad. But when you restrict travel even to villages a few kilometers away, where food is plentiful, and when your nation is exporting foodstuffs . . . well, that's mass murder! Agricultural production was affected by the forced collectivization of farms, but resistance to that collectivization had a lot to do with the forcing of mass starvation as well.

No, this is wrong. The famine, and the inspectors, and the Great Purge itself, and all the extrajudicial executions and imprisonments in the mid-'30s---these were not "engineered," at least not in the traditional sense. They were emergent properties of a social structure that defined classes of individuals with specific goals and specific means of accomplishing them.

What do I mean by this? Take the Great Purge. It was in the immediate strategic interests of Stalin to classify his enemies as counterrevolutionaries. It was in the immediate strategic interests of the central NKVD leadership to dig up wide-ranging counterrevolutionary conspiracies, because they justified its existence. It was in the immediate strategic interests of regional NKVD leaders to a) inflate the numbers of suspected counterrevolutionaries in the region and b) to present themselves as effectively dealing with the problem. It was in the immediate strategic interests of local NKVD operatives to find and execute as many counterrevolutionaries as possible.

Stalinist repression was not distinct from Stalinist industrialization. The two systems were constantly interlinked and, more importantly, functioned identically: a coal mine had inputs (labor, equipment) and outputs (coal), which had to be accommodated and calibrated by state planning bureaus. NKVD directorates operated on the same principle, except for the fact that they had no inputs (besides ammunition) and could produce potentially unlimited output (executions), and the planning was done in the Politburo and in the central NKVD administration. NKVD directives literally give specific numbers (officially "upper limits," but really required totals) of counterrevolutionaries to be killed or deported--24,000 from this region, 13 from that village. Who specifically those counterrevolutionaries were did not matter much.

Now, the crucial point is that the Stalinist economy was not based on rigid adherence to the plan. The plan could not be simply fulfilled; it had to be overfulfilled by as much as possible, which is why the first Five Year Plan only took four years to carry out. From the point of view of socialist planning, this drive is senseless--after all, overfulfillment can only throw off the very delicate calculations involved in economic analysis. But this was a matter of revolutionary ideology, not rationality. Overfulfillment of the plan, shock work, infinite exertion in the service of socialism: these were the watchwords of Stalinist economics.

If you have a thousand coal miners, each struggling (or being forced) to overfulfill their plan, what do you get? More coal, sure. But not that much more coal; nature imposes limits, and you need to make sure you have enough inputs as well. But what do you get when you have a thousand local NKVD secretaries struggling to do the same thing--to overfulfill the plan for crushing counterrevolution? You have an infinitely ballooning number of victims, because killing people, once you get the hang of it, is very easy and very cheap. The scale of Stalinist repression represented the pinnacle of Stalinist economic achievement.

The famine is explainable along similar lines. The local security services and military forces were told to requisition food from the peasants. And they were also told that the peasants were likely to hide their food from the inspectors. Therefore, any food that they saw was food that was not yet hidden, and how do you do a good job--how do you overfulfill the food-requisitioning plan? You take everything. You have immediate strategic interests, and dying children be damned.
posted by nasreddin at 1:20 AM on December 29, 2008 [11 favorites]

I also wanted to say:

I think Slavoj Žižek put it best when he said, in a 2004 interview with The Believer, "In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers’ uprising; the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong."

Not only is this an absolutely trivial observation, it is also monstrously stupid. Stalin's "emancipatory project" was never anything other than empty words. Stalin was as much a nationalist as Hitler was. Those leftists who think there is even the tiniest molecule of justification in the Marxist trappings of the Stalinist catastrophe--who think that Stalin was even a tiny bit better than Hitler was because he talked about the classless society and the dictatorship of the proletariat--are drooling idiots who stare slackjawed at the magician's waving left hand as he picks their pockets with his right.
posted by nasreddin at 1:30 AM on December 29, 2008 [5 favorites]

What is this shit? You couldn't wait a few hours to post the actual result? And why not frame it as "The Russian people may vote Alexander Pushkin as the greatest Russian to ever live"? Oh, wait, I know, because that way there wouldn't be as great an opportunity for cheap moralizing.

The point is, unlike the germans who are repentant and constantly show remorse about their awful history, the russians are supposedly actually proud of theirs and may even still think the evil dictators of their past are some of their greatest heroes. It doesn't so much matter if Stalin is number one or number four; the point is he's on the list. If Hitler made a top ten list of "greatest germans ever", that would be bad news... Though I suppose the safer thing would be to stay away from such nationalistic nonsense to start with, really, as it's hardly a surprise you get nationalistic dictators when you give a nationalistic poll (as opposed to "greatest russian writers" or "greatest german philosophers" or whatever)
posted by mdn at 4:13 AM on December 29, 2008

Russians are perfectly well-informed about how many people he actually destroyed, especially since many or most have relatives who were his victims.

Two things I want to add to this statement. First, let's not talk about how badly/well russians are informed about their history. The whole pot-meet-kettle thing, you know? Secondly, and much more importantly, Stalin was not running around Russia with a gun in his hand, busting caps into asses left and right. It took millions of people to do what was done, from Stalin all the way down to your next door neighbor who falsely accused you, and on to the guy who dug your grave.
posted by c13 at 4:25 AM on December 29, 2008

I mean geez. He named himself "Man of Steel" right when steel really started making a difference in the world. You gotta give him that...timing, if nothing else.
posted by telstar at 5:07 AM on December 29, 2008

I always sort of wonder about the deaths laid at the feet of Mao and Stalin. I get blaming them for the people that they actually had killed. Which yeah is way too many people but I think it is important to remember that these communist famines were a result of a failed attempt to increase agricultural production.

No, it's not important to remember that quarter-truth; it's important to remember that Stalin was a mass murderer for whom far too many people (and I'm not talking about Russians here) are still willing to make excuses because of ideology. Here, let me quote from Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar:

On 6 June 1932, Stalin and Molotov declared that "no matter of deviation—regarding either amounts or deadlines set for grain deliveries—can be permitted." On 17 June, the Ukrainian Politburo, led by Vlas Chubar and Stanislas Kosior, begged for food assistance as the regions were in "a state of emergency." Stalin blamed Chubar and Kosior themselves, combined with "wrecking" by enemies—the famine itself was merely a hostile act against the Central Committee, hence himself. "The Ukraine," he wrote to Kaganovich, "has been given more than it should get."

The magnates knew exactly what was happening:* their letters show how they spotted terrible things from their luxury trains... on 18 June 1932, Stalin admitted to Kaganovich what he called the "glaring absurdities" of "famine" in Ukraine.

The death toll of this "absurd" famine, which only occurred to raise money to build pig-iron smelters and tractors, was between four to five million and as high as ten million dead, a tragedy unequalled in human history except by the Nazi and Maoist terrors. The peasants had always been the Bolshevik Enemy. Lenin himself had said: "The peasant must do a bit of starving." Kopelev admitted "with the rest of my generation, I firmly believed the ends justified the means. I saw people dying from hunger." "They deny responisbility for what happened later," wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet, in her classic memoir Hope Abandoned. "But how can they? It was, after all, these people of the Twenties who demolished the old values and invented the formulas . . . to justify the unprecedented experiment: You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Every new killing was excused on the grounds we were building a remarkable 'new' world."

*Beal, the American, reported to the Chairman of Ukraine's Central Executive Committee (the titular President), Petrovsky, who replied: "We know millions are dying. That is unfortunate but the glorious future of the Soviet Union will justify it." By 1933, it is estimated that 1.1 million households, that is seven million people, lost their holdings and half of them were deported. As many as three million households were liquidated. At the start of this process in 1931, there were 13 million households collectivized out of roughly 25 million. By 1937, 18.5 million were collectivized but there were now only 19.9 million households: 5.7 million households, perhaps 15 million persons, had been deported, many of them dead.

In the immortal words of Panait Istrati: "All right, I can see the broken eggs. Where's this omelette of yours?"
posted by languagehat at 8:50 AM on December 29, 2008 [4 favorites]

Secondly, and much more importantly, Stalin was not running around Russia with a gun in his hand, busting caps into asses left and right. It took millions of people to do what was done, from Stalin all the way down to your next door neighbor who falsely accused you, and on to the guy who dug your grave.

Yeah, but communism in practice always suffered from the cult of personality. Sure, it involved a lot of participation to make it work, but the sheer force of Stalin's personality, as nickyskye said probably malignant narcissism, gave the movement power and directives. Clearly, the leadership in the USSR had a major effect on the nation throughout history, as it was always completely top-down.
posted by krinklyfig at 7:15 PM on December 29, 2008

Secondly, and much more importantly, Stalin was not running around Russia with a gun in his hand, busting caps into asses left and right.

Hitler didn't kill too many Jews personally, but I don't notice anyone outside of David Irving argues that makes him innocent in regards to the Holocaust.
posted by rodgerd at 11:23 PM on December 29, 2008 [2 favorites]

Mightn't at least some of these people polled be voting for Stalin in the same sense as Time magazine considered Osama bin Laden for Person of the Year in 2001?

Or when Time named Stalin Man of the Year in 1940 and 1943?
posted by kirkaracha at 10:22 PM on December 30, 2008