Stalin

[GloryofGreece]

Great interview with leading Stalin scholar and professor Stephen Kotkin. Dude wrote massive volumes on the subject. And you can actually read it without tapping out. Its brutal to read but a better read than the Gulag or Red Famine etc. books. This guy can explain shit straight and can write well. Plus he even did a funnyish convo with that crazy philosopher Zizek. Anyway cheers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhi2icRXbHo

[GloryofGreece]

Same author on current affairs with Russia,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnWp_kr4tfc

[GloryofGreece]

Anyone read either volume by Kotkin? No, yes? Its a lot to read about such a complete sadistic dude and time period but its flows well and has a lot of character analysis but with more of a focus on geopolitics and ideologies at play.

[GloryofGreece]

Good interview with the author. If you don't read the book read this interview.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... tator.html

[GloryofGreece]

Loosely related. Operation Barbarossa /German Invasion of the Soviet Union...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H67ejtzSH8

[C-Mag]

I need to get into this, it interests me and my study of how Tyrants operate.

I heard that when Barbarossa kicked off Stalin got drunk for like 2 weeks, and we within minutes of ceding everything West of the Volga to Germany, but at the last minute a single staff member changed his mind.

I think it was a Paul Harvey rest of the story...………… you ever heard anything like that ?

[GloryofGreece]

I need to get into this, it interests me and my study of how Tyrants operate.

I heard that when Barbarossa kicked off Stalin got drunk for like 2 weeks, and we within minutes of ceding everything West of the Volga to Germany, but at the last minute a single staff member changed his mind.

I think it was a Paul Harvey rest of the story...………… you ever heard anything like that ?

I heard the same thing on HH Osfront series. Kotkin doesn't address it in the first volume and I haven't got to the end of volume II yet so idk...

[GloryofGreece]

Hopefully some on here will be proud of their resident Civics teacher. I got some students that wanted "extra" credit to write an essay on who was worse, Stalin or Mao.

[heydaralon]

Hopefully some on here will be proud of their resident Civics teacher. I got some students that wanted "extra" credit to write an essay on who was worse, Stalin or Mao.

Mao and Stalin were at least as bad as Hitler. There are leftist professors and tumblrites that disagree, but some honest reflection about the realities of the Great Leap Forward or Holdomor would cause them to lose their tenure. There is a great book you might enjoy called the Black Book of Communism that discusses the worldwide atrocities that this secular religion is responsible for. It is long, but it is really really good. Also, have you read Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin biography? It is a truly horrible and bizarre account of what it was like to live under and around him. I have not read anything else by Montefiore, but I think he also wrote about Stalin's life when he was a bank robber and revolutionary. I was not aware of Kotkin before this thread, but it seems like he is doing the same thing Ian Kershaw did with Hitler.

[DBTrek]

Only read this one:


Which was good, but more nuanced than presenting Stalin as simply a “completely sadistic dude”.
/shrug