The dark story behind Stalin’s popular photo with a Soviet girl | Hacker News Reader

The dark story behind Stalin’s popular photo with a Soviet girl

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44 pointsericdanielski46 comments

I was interested in knowing more and tried to find what her father was charged with. The best i could come up with was this from a badly translated article:

"Under the leadership of Markizova big sabotage was conducted in the livestock building, in which the cattle were exposed to cold-related diseases and deaths. The waste of young animals amounted to 40 000 heads…"

http://z-news.xyz/get-that-lousy-said-stalin-the-story-about...

They just made up charges from a more or less standard set, as Stalin purged people across the entire depth and breadth of the leadership. Her father, a high-level regional functionary, has a Russian wikipedia page - it seems seems it's not entirely clear what he was charged with although the two possible stories outlined are among the staples of the time - espionage/plotting against Stalin/ counterrevolution or some subset of the former but more about 'wrecking', deliberate economic sabotage.

Just as an item of general interest, "sabotage" was (I understand; I'm no historian!) a common charge when targets weren't met.

I've just finished reading Anne Applebaum's book on the famine in Ukraine; if impossible targets aren't met, pick some people and say they sabotaged production. The problem isn't the system, and the problem certainly isn't the impossible demands and the purges and the terrified lies from the cadres and the disasters of collectivisation and the self-defeating elimination of the best workers (in Ukraine, owning a few cows and being good at farming could qualify you as a 'kulak' and an enemy of the people, ready for execution or the gulag, so of course the most competent farmers were eliminated early). None of that; the problem is saboteurs. Pick someone, charge him and execute him (or send him to a gulag).

Even Stalin-era test pilots feared a charge of sabotage if something went wrong on a flight. Which was particularly terrifying when Stalin would give chief designers an arbitrary deadline of one or two years to build a prototype. It had to work first time or a lot of people were going to the gulag.

No-one was safe from Stalin's vengeance, except apparently General Tito of Yugoslavia who survived many of his assassination attempts and allegedly returned the favour successfully.

or a lot of people were going to the gulag.

The practical problems that might arise here were eventually elegantly solved by placing entire design bureaus and research institutes directly in the gulag system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka

I'm right in the middle of reading Martin Amis' "Koba the Dread." He raises the interesting point that most people feel a viscerally different reaction to the crimes of Hitler ("Little Moustache") than they do to those of Stalin ("Big Moustache"), even though even by conservative reckoning Josif gave Adolf a run for the money in terms of numbers killed. As someone who is politically more lefty than righty this hit home. (Amis himself acknowledges the same cognitive dissonance.)

This episode is also prominently featured in the highly recommended masterpiece "The Death Of Stalin", a dark satire movie on Stalin and Berisha.

That explains why the story is in fashion at the moment. But regarding the movie, see also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Stalin#Historical...

"the film is "fundamentally ill-equipped to locate the comedy inherent to Stalinism, missing marks it doesn't know it should be aiming for.""

In short, it doesn't give a real insight, even if it entertains. The film is anyway based on a comics:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mort_de_Staline_(bande_dess...

Which starts with: "Although inspired by real events, this story is nonetheless a fiction, freely constructed according to a fragmentary documentation, sometimes partial and often contradictory ... The authors point out, however, that they hardly needed to force their imagination, being unable to invent anything equivalent to the furious madness of Stalin and his entourage"

It's a fiction, even if there are surely the facts that are even weirder than many are able to imagine and the facts that are much harder to casually talk about.

In the photo of her on the table, her left leg looks really swollen/large. It might be some sort of lense distortion though that seems unlikely. I wonder what that’s all about?

Putting in a plug for Simon Sebag Montiefiore’s books on Russia. Specifically ‘Young Stalin’ and ‘Court of the Red Czar’. They are excellent.

She is wearing felt knee-high boots (valenki) which make both feet look thicker than you expect. The left foot is casting a shadow on the right foot, which makes the right foot appear thinner.

Stalin's propaganda was even effective in the U.S. He really deserves to be at the top of the list when evil leaders are discussed. Yes, Hitler was awful, but Stalin was far worse. But saying so often draws only criticism. That's how good his propaganda was.

I think you’re being downvoted because the conventional reasoning is that Nazi Germany would’ve likely conquered all of Europe if it wasn’t for the Soviet Union. While this is (mostly) true, if we’re operationalizing the definition of “evil” in terms of a raw body count Stalin would indeed be at the top of the list.

The USSR would've conquered all of Europe if it weren't for Germany - read _Icebreaker_, et. al. by Suvorov.

Suvorov’s books are widely considered an entertaining alternative history fiction as far as I know. I’d be curious to know of any actual historians who consider his books a realistic and plausible version of history.

Patton's letter to his wife made it clear he thought we were fighting the wrong enemy.

edit: also, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOtinTlx7yo

Patton was a general, and it was his job to consider and prepare for the worst, of course. That doesn't mean he had any magical insight into the Soviet plans before the war.

At the end of the war, Soviets were in Berlin. If they were bent on continental domination, they could've fairly easily taken the rest of the exhausted Europe. Instead, luckily, the Allies managed to work out a peace agreement that held until the shockingly peaceful dissolution of the USSR, despite several close calls.

> they could've fairly easily taken the rest of the exhausted Europe.

From Patton's journal, taken from The Patton Papers, 1940–1945, edited by Martin Blumenson:

> 18 May

> In my opinion, the American Army as it now exists could beat the Russians with the greatest of ease, because while the Russians have good infantry, they are lacking in artillery, air, tanks, and in the knowledge of the use of the combined arms’ whereas we excel in all three of these. If it should be necessary to fight the Russians, the sooner we do it the better.

Perfectly reasonable statement in his position, but I don’t see how it translates to “we were fighting the wrong enemy all along.”

Patton said, word for word, "We defeated the wrong enemy" when he was relieved of his command. Which is trivial to find had you spent 10 seconds in google.

> If they were bent on continental domination, they could've fairly easily taken the rest of the exhausted Europe.

Hmm... and what do you imagine the Americans would have been doing while this was going on, given that they still had a gigantic and completely undamaged industrial economy (the only one left in the world, at that stage), nuclear weapons, and truly massive amounts of troops and equipment that would have been available for redeployment from the Pacific after Japan's surrender?

Well, yeah. Hence peace talks, surely. Unlike a certain Hitler who decides to open a war on multiple fronts at once. I was arguing against the notion that “if it wasn’t for Germany, Soviets would have conquered Europe.”

Don't forget Churchill's Operation Unthinkable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable

> The USSR would've conquered all of Europe if it weren't for Germany

They might have tried.

Of course, without the Axis, Europe and the US would be firmly aligned against the USSR; the simultaneous existence of the Axis (which was more overtly expansionist) and the Soviet Union (whose ideology was more hostile to capitalist enterprise) split the capitalist West between those more concerned about the threat of Fascism and those more concerned about the threat of Communism.

I’m not sure any kind of “x was worse than y” makes sense on that scale of evils. How can one possibly weigh the countless lives lost due to decisions made by both? I think the only thing one can truly say is, both were terrible human beings, and hope we can detect and stop someone in the future from becoming such. Yet, I am not sure it is possible, the banality of evil is slow and unnoticeable until it is too late.

My point is really that no one calls their opponents 'Stalin' or 'Commies' the same way people in America tend to call others 'Hitler' or 'Nazis,' which is surprising, given the enormity of the crimes against humanity committed by Stalin and the Russian Communists during roughly the same time. I posit that the root cause is due to the effects of propaganda. No one has really addressed that.

Oh, if you think "commie", "pinko", or "red" was not a dead-serious, job- or even life-threatening accusation in the past, you should read up on Red Scare, Hollywood Blacklist and McCarthyism.

The question of why insult X versus insult Y survives and thrives in this day is certainly interesting. I think it's a combination of many factors

- The enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if I don't like him very much. Ergo, if we were fighting Nazis together, by definition the Commies are not as bad. Considering the huge amount of media produced in all the time since the end of the war, in which the enemy is the safely defeated Nazis rather than still-potential-adversary Pinkos, it's probably safe to say that Nazi's are worse than Commies in absolute terms as far as the collective subconscious is concerned.

- Nazis are generally seen as wishing to exterminate, subjugate or banish all people outside their narrowly accepted criteria. Commies maybe exterminate their own people for their own internal reasons, but don't really threaten our existence nearly as much - for a long time, it's "live and let live" more or less. Ergo, I am more scared of Nazis than Commies (though don't underestimate the fear of nuclear annihilation the seventies and eighties kids grew up in).

- A lot of the fear of Commies was driven by disagreements over economic models, and fear of wealth loss by the "capitalist" class, obviously. That isn't really something very threatening to the average person, not on the instinctive level of "Nazis want to kill me because I exist". Those who lived through the red revolution and escaped it to the USA would have a much more visceral reaction to communism, but they would be a vanishing minority in the general population, I imagine.

- Finally, Nazism/Fascism is in the conversation these days because it's really a thing, unlike communism. There aren't many people stridently fighting and believing in communist ideals, but there indeed are people who hold pretty clearly and openly fascist beliefs. So, when you see someone called fascist, it's not necessarily an insult but a statement of fact.

Edit: I'm not defending Stalin or USSR, like I said in the parent comment, both leaders are indescribably horrible humans, in case that needs to be said.

I think its more that the US was not directly at war with him, and thus the propaganda dollars were spent targeting Hitler.

An obvious problem here is that all for all practical purposes, all Nazis are "Hitlerists", but most modern Communists aren't Stalinists.

It's not really a naming problem.

Is that what that argument says?

Which one? It's a dorm room stoner debate type question except unlike many of those, this one has a totally straightforward answer. One of these ideologies has transparently morally repugnant goals and the other one doesn't. You can get there without even having to mention Hitler or Stalin.

Yeah I think I was trying to say that, but didn't say it well.

I'd like to get better at shooting this argument down, because it comes up a lot; most discussions about the evils of communism --- and I think communism is a very bad system! --- seem like proxies for "opposition to right wing politics is evil".

> My point is really that no one calls their opponents 'Stalin' or 'Commies'

"Commie" is not a great word to call folks in the US. Thougth weight is not as great as 'nazis', some "media" outlets still use the term.

"...fascists ... they promised that they would wipe out a part of humanity and they did wipe out a part of humanity, while the Communists promised that everyone would be equal and did wipe out a part of humanity. The two things, we see, not the same, ..."

(Péter Esterházy: A szavak csodálatos életéből / my rough translation)

The (known) body count under Stalin by far outstrips Germany. But look at the history of rarely-mentioned Belarus during that era (I only recently did) ... a people caught between these two monsters ... and at Germany's 'Generalplan Ost'.

WP says: "During that time, Germany destroyed 209 out of 290 cities in the republic, 85% of the republic's industry, and more than one million buildings.... The population of Belarus did not regain its pre-war level until 1971.... "

A pox on both their houses. If Stalin is mentioned as a monster less often, it's probably because Russia was an ally ...

Genghis Khan killed more, and yet he's considered a national hero.

Plus, none of us have any family members who can tell stories of the people he killed.

This is the final insult- if every murdered soul got a software agent, who posted under any praise/propaganda the one line. "He murdered me- name - at the age of .. age.. . Let me and what came not to be not be forgotten." that would silence this.

That, sir or madam, is an utterly fantastic idea.

In China?

Hollywood Party by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley should be required reading for all social studies classes in the US. It's staggering to consider how much of hollywood was funded by the USSR. They stopped in 1991.

That book does not appear to be well-regarded.

By whom?

I would leave out the comparison of the evils, but it is true that many forget Stalin (and others by the way; Pol Pot for instance) while Hilter is known by all as ‘most evil human’.

I think its also that with Hitler is was part of the publicized plan- while Stalin, Mao and pot just had utopian dictator work accidents by reality induced paranoia.

Possibly. Hitler was at least successful at almost owning a very large part of the world he did not own when he came into power. That probably scares people a lot more than someone taking over an existing territory and messing that up.

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