Books Archives - Russia Unlocked

Stalinism and Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky’s works are often quoted by Stalinists and anti-Communists alike to score points against each other.

Dostoevsky didn’t know much about radical Marxism, at the time just an obscure strand of a wide plethora of Socialist ideas. Instead, it was Anarchism and the accompanying concept of individual terror that captivated many minds among the urban youth. The edge of Dostoevsky’s social critique was directed against its Russian followers, who he generally associated with Liberals and other admirers of the contemporary Europe.

The novel Demons is dedicated particularly against what Dostoevsky viewed as the blight of progressivism. The piece was written by Dostoevsky some 50 years before Stalin came to power. The story is about a group of revolutionaries who plot to kill one of them, suspected of intended treason.

The novel has been profusely quoted by Stalinists and anti-Communists alike to score points against each other.

Stalinists of the imperial bend agree with Dostoyevsky’s view that progressism typically germinates in people from some kind of a deep psychological issue, a fundamental personality flaw, and reveals an ongoing moral rot in those affected
Nationalists hold against Stalin his allegiance to Communism, a Western idea imported by haters and detractors of the traditional Russia. Dostoyevsky didn’t spare bad words in Demons to express his repulsion at admirers of all things European.
Liberals love Dostoyevsky’s signature expression “the administrative bliss” (elation that bureaucrats experience when exersising their power on commoners). They use it to stress the potential of unlimited power abuse inherent to Stalin’s totalitarianism, and the vestiges of it in Putinist Russia.

Dostoevsky pioneered the Russian expression demokratícheskaya svóloch (“democratic scum”) that many Stalin admirers and Putin loyalists like to apply to our liberals and their foreign soulmates. Stalin himself never used it—but it adequately describes his opinion of the proponents of Western-style democracies.

Picture: “Demons”, Sarra Shor’s attempt to visualize Dostoevsky’s idea of Russian liberals, anarchists, and admirers of the West. Stalin didn’t like the book. The entire edition with her illustrations was destroyed in 1935.

Why didn’t the poor people of the world who could afford the trip, move to the Soviet Union?

Soviet rulers vacillated between considering immigrants from other countries a resource and a security risk.

Because the USSR didn’t want them to.

The Soviet Union wanted people to make revolt in their home country, raise the red flag and join the Soviet Union as an entire happy nation, free from exploitation classes and liberal scum.

Some people were too impatient to wait for the rest of their compatriots to free themselves. They traveled to the Soviet border and soon discovered it was guarded better than Fort Knox. Look at the DMZ between North and South Korea to get an idea: that´s us who taught the Norks how to guard borders.

This is what the Soviet border looked like:

To the left, a barbed fence. In the middle, a plowed strip of mud where anyone who crossed it would leave visible footsteps, so that the incursion could be detected and hunted down by patrols who inspected it with assured frequency.

The foreign poor people who somehow managed to find an opening in the fence and didn´t get shot by border guards, would promptly be located inside the USSR thanks to all-encompassing ID checks in every nook and corner. Again, look at the North Korea. They learned from the best.

Thereafter, the people´s court of justice would swiftly get the trespasser a prolonged sentence as a foreign spy. Who else but a cunning spy would have skills and resources to travel half the world and outfox the Soviet border guards? The Soviet Union was known to live in the iron circle of capitalist powers that dreamt of annihilating us; who could blame us for the preference to be rather safe that sorry.

Much more predictable was the legal route through Soviet embassies and consulates around the world. Sure, they had strong preference for people who were not poor, but chances for success were generally good. A German-Jewish idealist Elinor Lipper was one of the lucky applicants, and wrote a book about what happened afterward s.

The number of foreigners who wanted to move to the USSR dropped after WW2. Still, there were some exciting stories. Among them the tale of Lee Harvey Oswald. He found love in our country and got a kid, but later preferred the career of an American president assassin over the safety of life as a floor operator at an assembly plant in Minsk.

Why did the Russian Empire fall?

House of Romanov fell victim to its own incompetence. In the early 1917, Czar Nicholas II found himself without allies.

The Russian Empire fell because the ruling Czarist aristocracy during the WWI lost the support of the urban middle class. The chaos created by the war resulted in a surge of peasant revolution. A disruption of state administration made possible the power grab by a small group of radical Socialists, the Bolsheviks, who were backed by the military in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg).

Which led to a tripartite Civil War between: (1) the old elite, (2) the Communists, supported by ethnic minorities and a large part of the military, (3) peasant gangs and armies. The support of peasants throughout 1919 secured the victory of Bolsheviks who established a kind of truce with them in 1922 in the form of a peasant-friendly New Economic Policy (NEP).

Stalin’s collectivization of 1928–1933, when private farmers were made de-facto state serfs, marked the ultimate defeat of the Russian peasant revolution and the final triumph of Communist revolutionaries.

The book “The Russian Revolution”, by Richard Pipes is probably the most succinct and accessible about the matter. Albeit it’s viewed by many in Russia and among leftist liberals in the West as biased against the revolutionaries, its factual base and the competence of the author are irrefutable.

Revolutionary troops take the Winter Palace by Ivan Vladimirov. — Picture: “*Revolutionary troops take the Winter Palace*”, by Ivan Vladimirov.

Three reasons to read (and not to read) “Scorched Earth”, by Jörg Baberowski

The book “Scorched Earth”, by Jörg Baberowski contains an exhaustive description of the tool set of violence used by the most successful practitioner of Communism, Iosif Stalin.

German historian Jörg Baberowski was a Communist in his youth. He learned Russian, specialized in Russian imperial history, and is now recognized as one of the leading experts on Stalinism. His approach to the issue of politically motivated violence earned him a hate on the part of German leftist groups who call him a “right-wing extremist“.

In his book Scorched Earth: Stalin’s Reign of Terror, Jörg Baberowski analyzes the preconditions and driving forces for the reign of terror installed by the Bolsheviks during the first decades of the Soviet rule.

Three reasons to READ the book

The book is a true fountainhead of quotes about Communism, Russia and Soviet Union coming from a dizzying array of personalities–from the dissident poet Joseph Brodsky to obscure Soviet functionaries. Many of the quotes are quite controversial. If you want to stir an epic discussion in an online forum with a lot of Russians and/or Communists, you find here much potent fuel to pour into the ideological flames.
The book provides an exhaustive, albeit sometimes too verbose, description of the tool set of totalitarian violence every aspiring dictator needs in order to stay on the top of the game.
Many years of anti-Stalinist research in the midst of the left-leaning European academia has taught the author to pick the words and arguments that have a lot of punch. For such a heavy subject, the book is an easy read.

Three reasons to SKIP the book

Either it’s the author’s Catholic roots, or the remorse of his Communist past–either way, the text seems way too judgmental to my taste. “Stalin was a murderer who took pleasure in destruction and harm,” Baberowski writes. This moral indignation may compromise his approach if you want to look at the issue of violence from a revolutionary’s point of view.
As a meticulous researcher, Baberowski find few details too small to add to his narrative.
Violence in a land of a triumphant Communist revolution is a gory affair–especially in Eastern Europe. The wealth of horrendous details from the basements of Stalin’s secret service and his killing fields in the book is simply too tiring.

Quotes from the book:

“People who know nothing but dictatorship develop different standards of valuation than people who were once free and then lose their freedom. After the reign of terror there were no longer any competing interpretative elites, no church as a moral institution, no emigration with a voice, no reminders of the time before communism, no Western television, no “brothers and sisters” abroad, and no occupiers to blame for the misery and oppression. There was nothing but the dictatorship, either in the present or in the past.”
“Stalin is not dead. The ax outlives its master.”
Scorched Earth: Stalin’s Reign of Terror, by Jörg Baberowski

Scorched Earth Stalin's Reign of Terror Jorg Baberowski — Cover of the German original of “Scorched Earth: Stalin’s Reign of Terror”, by Jörg Baberowski

Three reasons to read (and not to read) “A Dirty War”, by Anna Politkovskaya

The Dirty War, by Anna Politkovskaya is a book about the second Russian military campaign in Chechnya that brought to Putin the fame of an effective statesman

Anna Politkovskaya was an independent reporter killed in 2006 in Moscow. She made her name known in the 1990s by investigative reports that exposed government’s corruption and incompetence.

The book of Politkovskaya “A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya” (2003) was published at the tail end of the second Chechen War that resulted in a defeat of separatists and Islamists, and the rule of the Kremlin-backed strongmen Akhmad Kadyrov and later his son Ramzan Kadyrov.

Three reasons to READ the book

This is a solid piece of field reporting from a seasoned journalist. As a native, she could access the areas and locals in Chechnya few foreign reporters could reach. Even her haters struggled to fault her books on factual errors.
The book offers describes a repeatable pattern of interplay that often happens in areas of ethnic unrest between (1) the anti-insurgent troops; (2) insurgents; (3) high-level criminals and corrupt officials with good connections to both parties of the conflict; (4) low-level criminals and (5) civilians who do what they can in order to survive amid the chaos, blood and misery.
The author convincingly shows how the growing disillusionment and apathy on the part of the Russian public, and the steely, ruthless resolve of Putin’s men tilted the second Chechen war in favor of the Kremlin.

Three reasons to SKIP the book

The author openly defied the government’s narrative behind the Chechen war. If you are a convinced Russian nationalist, or share the Kremlin’s point of view on the Chechen insurgency as a ragtag of terrorists, Islamic fundamentalists and gangsters, you find her work very biased.
As a native, Politkovskaya has filled her text with a plethora of details that make it very vivid and riveting for Russian readers, especially from older generations. For foreign audiences though, this may be too overwhelming and confusing.
Don’t read the book if you are too impressionable. You might not find much life’s inspiration in this book. For most people, this would likely be an old, sad tale of greed, cruelty, death and misery.

Quote from the book:

“Yesterday there was a meeting of the villagers. The men decided that we would move to another place and build there. We can’t remain where we are any longer. We must wait for the prefabricated houses that Putin promised. The old Ansalta is gone for ever.”
This was the worst news anyone could have expected. In the southern mountainous area of Daghestan a family home is a potent symbol and someone without their own house is the most wretched of all human beings. A man who cannot put a roof over the heads of his wife and children is no longer a man. Until the last minute the women of Ansalta just like their sisters from the other villages obliterated in the August fighting (Rakhata, Tando and Shadroda) – could not believe their men would take this decision. Too many generations had toiled to build the massive houses now bombed out of existence. Too many tears and too much sweat had been mixed with the foundations of these fortified buildings that, it seemed, would last for ever. And now they had just got up and left, carrying only their children.”
The Dirty War, by Anna Politkovskaya

The Dirty War Anna Politkovskaya 2003 Cover — A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, by Anna Politkovskaya (2003). Cover

Samizdat: system-critical publications in the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union prohibited publication or even imports of “anti-Soviet” and “ideologically vague” books. Being caught in contact with them was a sure way to become a dissident.

Inside the Soviet Union, replication and dissemination of system-critical books and articles was an impossibility. Publishing was performed by state or co-operative agencies. Publishing was under total ideological control. State censorship covered everything. Individual citizens are not allowed to engage in such activities.

Even small print runs of the Bible and psalm books required explicit permission from the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Smuggling prohibited

Nothing deemed even remotely critical of Real Socialism was ever translated. If you traveled abroad and had such books in your luggage entering the country, they would be confiscated. If you were a foreign citizen, you risked to be expelled. Soviet citizens in possession of such books could be indicted for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”. Titles in Russian and other languages spoken in the country were considered an aggravating evidence.

Allowed readership

Single copies of “anti-Soviet” and “ideologically vague” works were available to “specialists” and “researchers” in Spetskhran, repositories of classified printed matters and publications with tightly regulated access. Selected members of Nomenklatura had access to referentskyie obzory, a kind of executive summaries on a range of classified subjects, including a description of book plots, with essential quotes.

” works were available to “specialists” and “researchers” in Spetskhran, repositories of classified printed matters and publications with tightly regulated access. Selected members of Nomenklatura had access to referentskyie obzory, a kind of executive summaries on a range of classified subjects, including a description of book plots, with essential quotes.

This job was assigned to the most trusted translators with impeccable resumes. Their work was anonymous and resembled the Wiki style.

Samizdat

Enthusiasts of reading sometimes translated some of prohibited works and spread them around in the form of Samizdat (“kitchentable publishing”). This involved producing six (sometimes more) carbon copies of a title using typing machines, which then would be handed to six other people who produced another batch for further cycles.

These Samizdat pieces circumvented state control and changed hands even when the disseminators were caught by the police. Novels, poems and songs
they contained enjoyed wide popularity, much more than most of the titles peddled by official media and mouthpieces.

samizdat title USSR — A typical Samizdat title, with minimized margins and single line spaces. The were rarely bound, so that several people could share a single copy for a night or two of binge-reading

Orwell’s 1984 in the USSR

George Orwell’s 1984 failed to impact Soviet, and later Russian culture in any meaningful way

The literary horizons of Soviet citizens were dictated by the tastes of our authorities. Few could read in English, and even fewer traveled abroad where British books were widely available.

We read James Aldridge, Bernard Shaw, Herbert Wells and other authors who held more benevolent views on the Communist project. Graham Greene, in occasional translations and a tiny circulation, was on the verge of the prohibited.

George Orwell, for understandable reasons, was not a popular author in the USSR. From time to time, we saw his name in propaganda as an example of Capitalist abomination under the guise of high literature. We were told that the story was a satire of the BBC, but the perverted mind of its author and his anti-Soviet backers projected it all on our beautiful country.

Yet, even for those few who got access to “1984”, it failed to make an impact. Orwell was way too refined and reflective, to us, to be considered effective anti-Soviet propaganda. “Big Brother”, as it was in the book, bore no allusions to our rulers or the secret service. No one in their right mind would consider these people their brothers. Stalin was our Great Father, and any brotherly affection to him in public would raise many eyebrows, to say the least.

The 1984 universe was too sanitized and rational to reflect anything of the leaden, fusty, often absurd version of totalitarianism we were used to seeing around us. It reminded us more of the Nazi ordnung, with additions of an Anglo-Saxon coolness that subtracted from the horror the story was meant to project. We knew that the Nazis were the worst enemies to us. Therefore, it was some weird story about what the world would have been, if we had not won WW2.

A total dud, propaganda-wise.

Picture: “Happy New Year, Beloved Stalin!” As you see, the portrait of Stalin bears nothing even remotely brotherly. And there was hardly anything high-tech. Our secret police always preferred unimpeded human touch.

Dostoevsky’s “Demons” and Stalinism

Dostoevsky’s Demons were greeted by Stalinists and anti-Communists alike because both saw in there a caricature of their enemies

The novel Demons was written by Dostoevsky some 50 years before Stalin came to power. The story is about a group of revolutionaries who plot to kill one of them, suspected of a treason.

Anti-liberalism

Broad appeal

The novel has been profusely quoted both by Stalinists and anti-Communists.

Stalinists of the imperial bend agree with Dostoevsky’s view that progressivism typically germinates in people from some kind of a deep psychological issue, a fundamental personality flaw, and reveals an ongoing moral rot in those affected
Nationalists hold against Stalin his allegiance to Communism, a Western idea imported by haters and detractors of the traditional Russia. Dostoevsky didn’t spare bad words in Demons to express his repulsion at admirers of all things European.
Liberals love Dostoevsky’s signature expression “the administrative bliss” (elation that bureaucrats experience when exercising their power on commoners). They use it to stress the potential of unlimited power abuse inherent to Stalin’s totalitarianism, and the vestiges of it in Putinist Russia.

Modern fans

Dostoevsky pioneered the Russian expression demokraticheskaya svoloch (“democratic scum”) that many Stalin admirers and Putin loyalists like to apply to our liberals and their foreign soul-mates. Stalin himself never used it—but it adequately describes his opinion of the proponents of Western-style democracies.

Picture: “Demons”, Sarra Shor’s attempt to visualize Dostoevsky idea of Russian liberals, anarchists, and admirers of the West. Stalin didn’t like the book. The entire edition with her illustrations was destroyed in 1935.

Dostoyevsky idea of Socialists Shigalev Sarra Shor etching — Shigalev, the revolutionaries’ theoretician, whose ears as if bear the devil’s mark. They are “*of an unnatural size*, *long*, *broad and thick, and* somehow sticking out in a peculiar way.”. Etching by Sarra Shor to the novel The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Five essential book titles for an effective politician

Top five book titles for an aspiring ruler, suggested by former Soviet propaganda executive

The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli. An absolute primer. Even though you won’t follow the man’s recipes, it’s useful to know how everyone else among the competition is thinking.
48 Laws Of Power, by Robert Greene. An expanded, updated, reader-friendly version of The Prince.
Any modern book about The Thirty-six Strategies Of Ancient China. For example, The Thirty-Six Strategies of Ancient China, by Stefan Verstappen.
The corpus of works about taking and retaining power by Communists in Russia. Lenin is a must, Trotsky and Stalin a useful extracurricular reading. A good start is the compendium National Liberation, Socialisim and Imperialisim: Selected Writings, by Vladimir I. Lenin. Take particular note of how the theory and practice of power-grabbing is seamlessly weaved in Lenin’s works with elaborate use of language and propaganda techniques.
The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. Probably the most entertaining reading on this list. Has particular focus on the psychology and anthropology behind the power game.

“One Day of the World”: a propaganda rarity

In 1936, a rare book was published in Stalinist USSR, called Den Míra (“One day of the world”). The project was repeated a few times later, last time during my work in propaganda. It described what happened around the world on September 27, 1935. As far as I know, it was only published in Russian.

(A synopsis in Russian is here. Let Google Translate help you)

The project remained pretty obscure for the Soviet public. We could control its contents about the USSR, but not the foreign part. The one-day “screenshot” of the global newsfeed couldn’t convincingly contribute to the streamlined ideological worldview were tried to disseminate. This is what the last edition looked like, the one we put together in APN in 1986 (some of its scanned contents under this link)