Trotsky on his death bed.
Trotsky on his death bed.
3,149 words
But there are in our country semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth Trotskyites, people who help us, not knowing of the terrorist organization but sympathizing with us. — Karl Radek at the Moscow show trials, 1937 (more…)
2,428 words
Sarah Cameron
The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2018
See also: What is the Metaphysics of the Left & Nietzsche and the Psychology of the Left
Strikingly ignorant, malignantly cruel, with no concept of history, with but an elementary knowledge of social production, with little productive capacity, with no constructive ability, [Bolshevism] would be ludicrous were it not for the sentimental, weak-minded followers who, steeped in idealism and fanaticism, really believe in a Bolshevik Utopia, (more…)
3,733 words
Anne Applebaum
Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine
Great Britain: Penguin Books, 2017
Robert Conquest
The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine
New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1986
The [Communist] Party’s . . . rationale for everything done to the kulaks, is summarized with exceptional frankness in a novel published in Moscow in 1934: “Not one of them was guilty of anything, but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.” — Robert Conquest (more…)
Nikita Khrushchev and Joseph Stalin in better times (at least for Stalin).
Nikita Khrushchev and Joseph Stalin in better times (at least for Stalin).
1,233 words
To be men! That is the Stalinist law! . . .
We must learn from Stalin
his sincere intensity
his concrete clarity . . . .
Stalin is the noon,
the maturity of man and the peoples.
Stalinists, Let us bear this title with pride . . .
— Pablo Neruda, “Ode to Stalin” (more…)
2,148 words
The following was originally published in Polish in July 2023 in the Do Rzeczy weekly magazine. This translation was published at the English-language Polish conservative site Sovereignty.pl.
In 2002, Vladimir Putin was asked in an interview how the Russia he rules differs from the Soviet Union of Stalin’s time. The questioner’s intention was obviously to show that the times of bloody dictatorship in Russia were past, and that its present and future were times of freedom and democracy. In a conversation with the same reporter in 1991, Putin had warned with a sad face of a possible “return to totalitarianism.” 11 years later, when he had become the country’s President, he again put on a sad face, albeit for a completely different reason. (more…)
2,469 words
Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
In all cases not involving a fully-fledged occupying army, as with Russia after its Civil War ended and with the United States currently, the hostile elites, be they native or alien, who wish to subjugate a population do so by achieving what I call the Stalin clap effect (SCE). This is named after the Soviet dictator’s unwritten policy, as reported by Solzhenitsyn, of sending the first person to stop clapping after one of his speeches to the Gulag: (more…)
The author at the Bay of Pigs.
2,962 words
Michael Malice
The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil
Independently Published, 2022
What a joy to open this book and find that whatever the author’s White Pill is supposed to be, it somehow involves Ayn Rand (AR). It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (1971, by Jerome Tuccille) was the name of an actual book that came out when I was in my teens and going through my own brief Objectivist period. The book is a funny saga about the author’s time as a militant libertarian. (more…)
General Andrei Vlasov, who commanded the German-backed Russian Liberation Army.
General Andrei Vlasov, who commanded the German-backed Russian Liberation Army.
3,698 words
The Third Reich was not profuse in mistakes; otherwise, it would not have been able to battle for almost six years against the major world powers, in numerical and material inferiority and with so few and counterproductive allies. However, it itself made a vital mistake which resulted in losing the war. (more…)
Stalin aiming a rifle at the Soviet Union’s Central Committee in 1934. His comrades took it as a joke; it’s doubtful many of them were still laughing a few years later.
Stalin aiming a rifle at the Soviet Union’s Central Committee in 1934. His comrades took it as a joke; it’s doubtful many of them were still laughing a few years later.
3,163 words
One of the more fascinating spectacles of the twentieth century’s totalitarian smoke and mirrors was the show trial, courtesy of Joseph Stalin. With his Leninist view of history and its underlying theme of the triumphal ascendency of the Socialist Man as the thematic driver, the show trial — a fake legal proceeding with built-in theatrics — would become the national stage for an elaborate morality play and “teachable moment” that affirmed the moral perfection of Big Brother. (more…)
