[Gothmog]

-I simply couldn´t resist.....


There used to be a joke about apparatchik perks:

It is the year-end meeting of Collective Farm Red October. A meeting has
been called of all the workers.

Party Rep: We would like to thank Maria Ivanova for her work this year with
the cows. Good work! In recognition of her services, she will receive a
vacation in Sochi.

Audience: Ura!

Party Rep: Now, Mikhail Vlashinkov has done excellent work with the chickens
this year, and so he will receive a year-end bonus!

Audience: Ura! Bravo Misha!

Party Rep: Finally, Anastasia Shmilankova has had truly impressive success
in the area of ideology and the development of discipline among the
farmworkers. For her great efforts in this direction, she will be rewarded
with a a complete set of the works of Lenin!

Audience: Serves the bitch right!

[Vivisekt]

I am amused.

[Antihero]

Audience: Serves the bitch right!

Так ей бляди и надо!
Sorry, only Russian speaking folks will get that one.

[Maxim Litvinov]

There are so many good jokes. The one you posted is a true story, though, Gothmog. I read it the other day.

It's from the Harvard Papers - a collection of interviews with Soviet workers etc.:

"When a young woman at one plant got a set of Lenin's works as a prize for her job performance, an old worker call out, "That's what the whore deserves." Laughter and some confusion followed, "but finally nothing was done about it."
[Thurston, R.W. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, p. 182]

I'm trying to think of my favourite Soviet joke. Will post it soon.

[The One.]

The workers absolutly LOVED communism

[Maxim Litvinov]

Well, that's almost true too. The Soviet Union enjoyed widespread support - particularly as evidenced by the defence of their Motherland in campaigns like Khalkin-Gal and even the Great Patriotic War.

Are you going for the "it's funny because it's true" line of joke there?

[Gothmog]

There are so many good jokes. The one you posted is a true story, though, Gothmog. I read it the other day.

It's from the Harvard Papers - a collection of interviews with Soviet workers etc.:

"When a young woman at one plant got a set of Lenin's works as a prize for her job performance, an old worker call out, "That's what the whore deserves." Laughter and some confusion followed, "but finally nothing was done about it."
[Thurston, R.W. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, p. 182]

I'm trying to think of my favourite Soviet joke. Will post it soon.

-Wow, are you reading Thurston? Some people argue this book is quite pro Stalin.

[Maxim Litvinov]

I can't imagine a book being more pro-Stalin unless it was written by an open Communist Party member.... Thurston's clearly a revisionist, although is still happy to say that Stalin wasn't a particularly nice chap.

The book makes some good points. I just finished it. It's one worth borrowing from a library, but not worth buying...

Joke time:
Q: What is the definition of a Soviet String Quartet?
A: A Soviet Symphony Orchestra after a tour of Western Europe.

Another true situation from the Harvard Papers:

During one of the periodic drives to get workers to buy government bonds, the party committee of a factory called in all the personnel to sign up. A witness remembered that "there was even a man we knew worked for [the] NKVD at the table. A girl came in - a Komsomolka. They gave her the standard speech - she had to work for nothing for a while. She just turned around, bent down, put her skirt over her head, and she said, 'Comrade Stalin and you all can kiss me whenever it is most convenient for you,' and she left. I am telling you, I saw that and I was numb with fear. All those men behind the table, they just sat silently. Finally, one of them said, 'Did you notice, she didn't have pants on?' and everybody started to laugh."

[btw - the girl got away with it scott-free]

That's from Thurston. And some anecdotes from the less-than-Soviet Montefiore:

Amidst the revelry of the May Day celebrations in Moscow, “Poskrebyshev slipped the ceremonial dagger out of Vyshinksy’s diplomatic uniform and replaced it with a pickle. Much to Stalin’s amusement, the pompous ex-Procurator strutted around for the rest of the day oblivious of the vegetable in his scabbard, and smirks of the magnates".
Montefiore, p. 437

When working through the new national anthem in 1944, the original lyrics were to state "the Fascist hordes were beaten, are beaten and will be beaten", but merely prompted laughter because "are beaten" sounded like "are fucking us" in Russian when sung. As a result, the words were changed to "We'll beat them to death and we'll beat them".
Montefiore, p. 407

[Gothmog]

Well, that's almost true too. The Soviet Union enjoyed widespread support - particularly as evidenced by the defence of their Motherland in campaigns like Khalkin-Gal and even the Great Patriotic War.

-Althought you might be somewhat critical towards the value of this evidence. Don´t forget the Germans were attempting to exterminate the Soviet people(s). In those circumstances, even Nicholas the idiot would have enjoyed massive support.

[Gothmog]

I can't imagine a book being more pro-Stalin unless it was written by an open Communist Party member.... Thurston's clearly a revisionist, although is still happy to say that Stalin wasn't a particularly nice chap.

-But don´t be so hard on revisionist. The three big ones (Getty, Thurston and Sheyla Fitzpatrick) did a lot of good historical research with Soviet files. They works are light years beyond that from charlatains like Mr. Pipes.

[Maxim Litvinov]

I adore Fitzpatrick. Getty's insightful to me too. And Thurston, if a bit erratic, seems to be very useful.

Perhaps I'm not using the term correctly, but I don't think of Fitzpatrick or Getty as revisionists. Perhaps I think of five groups:

1) pro-Soviet sources a la Ixabert which suggest the Terror is one big conspiracy.
2) reasoned historical sources, which suggest the Terror was over-rated from the standard line (eg Thurston) [revisionists]. These 'revisionists' treat the argument by feeling the need to 'rebutt' everything about the origin conceptions of the Terror - their research is motivated just as much by refutation as by exploration. Not that this makes their research 'wrong' or 'bodgy', but it does give it a certain nuance.
3) sources that don't really enter into the 'degree of evil' debate as much, but just like to explain how the system operated seemingly with no overt agenda (eg Fitzpatrick, Getty) and no 'theories' to destroy.
4) sources which deal with the terror in passing, just take as given the Conquest/Solzhenitsyn/totalitarian line and are consequently quite anti-Communist without being particularly historical.
5) sources like Pipes, Figes and Solzhenitsyn which have an overt anti-Communist, often nationalist agenda.

Gee. I talk too much.

On the GPW point. The Germans weren't really looking forward to killing all the Slavs. They wanted to destroy the Russian army, kill Jews and were quite happy to needlessly kill/rape/torture any others that stood in their way, but I think 'fear of the Germans' can only go so far in explaining the patriotism of Russians at this time. The Germans' policies towards Jews were probably more popular than the Bolsheviks from the point of view of many Russians, for instance. And the necessity to co-operate with an occupying Army was obviously a major factor that provided some support for the Germans from the Soviet population.

I brought up Khalkin-Gal, because it seems to be a good example of seeing what the army was like out of the context of such a 'messy' war as WWII (ie - no Hitler, no division of Poland, no annexation of territory, no mass rout etc.). I'd love to know more about it, but still think its 'evidence' is valuable.

[Gothmog]

5) sources like Pipes, Figes and Solzhenitsyn which have an overt anti-Communist, often nationalist agenda.

-Please, I wouldn´t group Figes and Pipes together. Figes book (A people´s tragedy), althought somewhat biased when you look to the author personal interventions (opinions), is thousand times more balanced than Pipes works. At least Figes aknowledges that the Bolshevik victory was largely due to (even hesitant) popular support. E. Hobsbawn considers Figes book a very good one (he seems to refuse to even quote Pipes when writing about Russian Revolution)

On the GPW point. The Germans weren't really looking forward to killing all the Slavs. They wanted to destroy the Russian army, kill Jews and were quite happy to needlessly kill/rape/torture any others that stood in their way, but I think 'fear of the Germans' can only go so far in explaining the patriotism of Russians at this time. The Germans' policies towards Jews were probably more popular than the Bolsheviks from the point of view of many Russians, for instance. And the necessity to co-operate with an occupying Army was obviously a major factor that provided some support for the Germans from the Soviet population.

-I understand your point, but I think the brutality of German Army in Russia has essentially no historical precedents in modern European wars. They killed 27 million people, and would have easily killed 60-100 million if they won the war. I think this is reason enough (but not the only reason) to cooperate with any legitimate Russian government. By contrast, the Germans in WWI were much more civilized, maybe less brutal towards Russian than the Czar itself...

[Maxim Litvinov]

I'm not sure what we're arguing about, exactly .

I can't comment on Figes - I admit. Nor on Pipes. The only Figes on my bookshelf is yet to be read. But, the sort of comments that his books get and their titles (A People's Tragedy, and the blurb on the back with prominent anti-Communist authors acknowledging its brilliance) had led me to the conclusion that he is a 'category 5' author. Not that that means much.

I also grouped him with Solzhenitsyn - who I like to read (particularly in fiction), who makes a lot of interesting points, but who I think is quite biased. Same with Conquest, IMHO.

Not that MO means much.

I'm not arguing with you about German bastardry. But it is clear that there are many factors in explaining the Soviets' efforts during WWII. I don't think referring to the German's brutality and the population's acquiescence is *nearly* enough in a debate on the popularity of the Soviet regime etc. Poland and France were both in a similar situation, but to say that Vichy France had much to do with the unpopularity of the French political system would be quite strange...

My personal view - of course many Soviet people would be stupid to accept German occupation. But much of the fighting spirit of the Soviet people during WWII had much more to do with their belief in the motherland, and even in Stalin. If the regime did not have widespread legitimacy then the USSR would have fallen...

[Zanzibar]

Audience: Serves the bitch right!

Так ей бляди и надо!
Sorry, only Russian speaking folks will get that one.

татс, не забавный. Хорошо это.

[TROI]

I wish I had the complete works of Lenin

[Gothmog]

I'm not sure what we're arguing about, exactly .
I can't comment on Figes - I admit. Nor on Pipes. The only Figes on my bookshelf is yet to be read. But, the sort of comments that his books get and their titles (A People's Tragedy, and the blurb on the back with prominent anti-Communist authors acknowledging its brilliance) had led me to the conclusion that he is a 'category 5' author. Not that that means much.

-You can read Figes withouth troubles. He didn´t provoke me the same nausea Pipes provoked. Figes is a somewhat biased (towards liberals ans moderate socialists and against Bolsheviks), but Pipes is a charlatain who argues that The Whites had promoted Land reform in their controlled areas
-Here is a review of Figes book

http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse. ... &user=&pw=

My personal view - of course many Soviet people would be stupid to accept German occupation. But much of the fighting spirit of the Soviet people during WWII had much more to do with their belief in the motherland, and even in Stalin. If the regime did not have widespread legitimacy then the USSR would have fallen...

-Maybe you´re right. I just think we lack evidence to establish the relative contribution of German brutality and PCUS level of support in Soviet society when we try to explain the heroic reistance of Soviet people. Considering that Stalin still is somewhat popular in Russia, it´s quite possible his regime enjoyed significant popular support. On the other hand, the majority of Russians were still peasants by 1941....would they had forgotten the collectivization? Or maybe some of the pesanats actually benefited from collectivization, at least after 1932-33???

[Antihero]

Audience: Serves the bitch right!

Так ей бляди и надо!
Sorry, only Russian speaking folks will get that one.

татс, не забавный. Хорошо это.

huh?

[Maxim Litvinov]

Hey Gothmog - trust me, I'm going to read the Figes on my bookshelf (Peasant Russia - Civil War) when I've got the time.

I agree establishing support in terms of percentages, for instance, is a very complicated task. Even with fortnightly political polls, it is very hard to plot support in open Western democracies today.

Last year I worked as a research assistant for a Professor studying the mentality of the Soviet people, particularly Soviet women, during the Great Patriotic War, and there were quite a few sources though to give you a good idea about this subject:
1) Private diaries from the 1930s.
2) Letters home from the front. (Yes, many were supposed to be censored, but lots found their way into archives without any censorship - he's got thousands of pages of them)
3) Memoirs.
4) Knowledge of what towns fell, details of numbers of resistance fighters etc.

Really, we can know a lot about this era, because there is mountains of data. There are always problems of interpretation. Most historians, however, tend to approach from teh angle that the Soviet population in the war were much more 'pro-Soviet' than they would have expected, and see explaining this support for the government as the 'big mystery'.

I think you're right about collectivisation. I think Western Ukraine and newly-annexed Poland and the Baltic states were also much more pro-German because they had only been recently annexed (and thus recently undergone collectivization measures under what they saw as a more illegitimate government)... But this is another way of evaluating the situation -- comparing what happened in a newly-occupied Soviet territory, with what happened in the agricultural areas (peasant-dominated) - Ukraine, Kuban etc. - with what happened in the cities (worker-dominated).

Anyway, I agree it's a difficult problem. But I also think there is quite a lot of data (if anything, it seems too much, as a researcher) which can provide a good insight into popular support and the reasons for it.

[Gothmog]

Last year I worked as a research assistant for a Professor studying the mentality of the Soviet people, particularly Soviet women, during the Great Patriotic War,

-It seems you know a LOT of Soviet History. Are you a historian?

Really, we can know a lot about this era, because there is mountains of data. There are always problems of interpretation. Most historians, however, tend to approach from teh angle that the Soviet population in the war were much more 'pro-Soviet' than they would have expected, and see explaining this support for the government as the 'big mystery'.

-Maybe the creation of many opportunities for social ascension due to high economic growth and massive expansion of educational system???

[Maxim Litvinov]

You seem to know lots about Soviet History, and I defer to you in many regards. I did my undergrad degree thesis on Bukharin, worked part-time for a year in this research assistant job, and am now just starting a PhD on Soviet social history (the female Bolshevik Elite) under Stalin. So, I'm not a proper historian yet

Social, employment and educational opportunities have got to have been a *huge* plus. But I think ultimately, although somewhat mundane, the best reason for Soviet support is summed up in a line from an Osip Mandelstam poem: "I love my poor land, For I have seen no other".

By 1941, everyone under 24 had been born in the USSR. Everyone under 30 would not have remembered life under the tsar. Their government was nothing but legitimate. They felt as strongly about it as any of us might about our own native land. And they had little reasons to despise the authorities in most instances. This, I believe, explains a lot.