--- andie nachgeborenen <So I'll use it anyway. I
don't care if it isn't a Russian word, I don't think
the Russians understand the Soviet era any better than
Western specialists. Which isn't very well -- I speak
having been one once.
--
Well, the Russians (Ukrainians, Latvians, etc. etc.
etc.) do have the advantage of having lived there.
Then again they had poor access to information (as did
Westerners, in a different way.)
My problem is that 1) the word "Stalinism" is used for
a whole lot of different societies and periods, so
that Romania is treated as no different from the GDR,
or the Khrushchev era is referred to as "Stalinist"
even though he denounced the Father of the Peoples,
and 2) when the word is applied in the West it is
usually tied up with a bunch of misconceptions about
what life was actually like in those countries.
---
As rto Charles and Chris' point that Stalinist
repression was selective and popular and that the
regime took account of public opinion, of course. We
revisionist Sovietologists argued that point against
the totalitarianism school for 35 years. That doesn't
mean, however, that Stalinism was democratic or that
it was controlled by ordinary working people the way
most of us here would want socialism to be. That is
obvious too, don't you agree? I mean, as the Old Man
said, a worker's state wouldn't have a political
police.
--
Oh, the backing of the people for Stalin was more like
the backing of the simple people for the tsars or the
Pharoah than anything else. In the 30s, the USSR was
still a largely illiterate peasant country with little
access to information whose populace was used to
seeing the Leader as something akin to God. Moreover,
if misfortune came their way, they would blame the
local authorities, not Stalin. ("If only Stalin knew!)
I do not see the Cult of Personality as being
particularly Stalinist: It is Russian. Consider the
following quotes from the founder of Russian science,
Lomonosov, addressing the deferated Swedes and in
other contexts (taken from
http://www.google.ru/search?q=cache:jGjH1YybTMcJ:www.jacobite.org.uk/ellis/religion.pdf+%22Peter+the+Great%22+Lomonosov+praise+swedes&hl=ru),
including the author's comments:
My address to you, our now peaceful neighbours [i.e.
the Swedes, defeated by Peter’sforces in the Great
Northern War] is intended such that when you hear this
praise ofthe martial exploits of our Hero [Peter] and
my celebration of the victory of Russian forces over
you, you do not take it as an insult, but rather as an
honour to you, for tohave stood for so long a time
against the mighty Russian nation, to have stood
againstPeter the Great, against the Man, sent from God
to the wonder of the universe, and inthe end to have
been defeated by Him, is still more glorious than to
have defeated weakforces under poor leadership.47
Lomonosov can be yet more explicit than that in his
identification of Peter with Christlike attributes. In
his Ode on the 1752 anniversary of Elizabeth
Petrovna’s coronation, he says this about Peter’s
mother Natalia Naryshkina:
And thou, blessed among women,
By whom bold Alexis
Gave to us the unsurpassable Monarch
Who opened up the light to the whole of Russia.
The correspondence here with the following well-known
words from the Gospel According to St. Luke is
palpable:
And the angel came in unto her and said,
Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord
is with thee: blessed art thou among women. (Luke 1,
xxviii)
Granted, he has not gone so far as to claim for
Peter’s mother an Immaculate Conception, orfor Peter a
physical Resurrection, and it would be more than
far-fetched to suppose that thisis simply a question
of his not wanting to compromise the continuity of the
Romanov dynasty by denying Tsar Alexis any part in
Peter’s conception; but his use of such recognisably
New Testament language would be hard to explain away
as coincidental and his identification of Peter with
Christlike or, perhaps better, messianic, qualities is
still evident.
--
Me again:
In fact, there is a Cult of Putin today, which has not
been fostered by the Kremlin but is rather a source of
embarrassment to it it -- e.g. people have named bars
and even a tomato after Putin, to the Kremlin's
intense displeasure. The Kremlin has a special office
devoted to correspondence directed to Putin from the
people -- hundreds of thousands of letters every year
-- many of which take the form of asking Putin to
intercede in people's personal problems.
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