Take Me To The River!

eugenia — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 20:47:25 +0000

Late 1950s was an interesting epoch for the Soviet Union. The death of Stalin was like a beginning to a new era, “the Thaw” of Khrushchev, the very first signs of the Cold War and the famous Fulton speech of Churchill — all of those were the signs of uneasy times coming up. But just before the Iron Curtain fell heavily, Russia was the place to visit — and we are very grateful to the Life magazine photographers who took plentiful photos for us.

So we are going to make a 50 year leap into the past to the mid-Russia region of the Volga river — here, the sparkly brand new ships were making their first cruises. So — full throttle!

Captain Palkin on a Maiden Voyage of Krylov Ship. 1958.

From a small dingy…

Steamship Vladimir Lenin. Built in 1913, retired in 1965.

The valley of the Volga river.

Ernst Thälmann docked in Yaroslavl

Ernest Telman

Lounging on the upper deck

Sunbathing.

At a cafe

Fine Soviet dining

Sunset on the dance floor

Of course not all ships were that glamorous.

Voroshilov timber trawler

A sign of its times: such beauties disappeared in 1980s

This was the way to move timber in smaller volumes.

A firefighter

On a ferry

M189 Steamship

Uglich-town ferry terminal

Samara (then Kuibyshev) ferry terminal

Samara (then Kuibyshev) embankment. A recital before the departure.

Bon voyage!

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Declassified: the Great and Powerful Stalin.

eugenia — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:18:52 +0000

Joseph Stalin is always with you.

Joseph Stalin was probably one of the most multifaceted, controversial and yet unknown persons in the course of the world history. In January 1943 Time magazine featured Stalin as the Person of the Year, saying:

The year 1942 was a year of blood and strength. The man whose name means steel in Russian, whose few words of English include the American expression “tough guy” was the man of 1942. Only Joseph Stalin fully knew how close Russia stood to defeat in 1942, and only Joseph Stalin fully knew how he brought Russia through.

When he began climbing the power ladder (which happened shortly after the first World War and the Russian Civil War), the country was in a state close to anarchy: the ruling governments kept changing, one’s life had very little value and there was no guarantee of Human Rights of any kind. Maybe that is why he had no choice but to impose his new rules: tough and cruel, yet clear to follow and, in all honesty, viable due to the promised harsh punishments — which he was not slow to deliver.It is fair to say that the options he had were not “A free country or totalitarianism”, no. What he faced was more like “A total anarchy and chaos — or totalitarianism”. Needless to say, the difference is palpable.

Smiley face.

Now it is interesting to note that in 1930s of the 20th century there were very few countries in Europe which did not lean toward totalitarianism (apart from France or England, perhaps). The modern historians now say that Stalin was somewhat of a Hitler’s follower, and this point of view is certainly worth weighting. For instance, the Great Purge –the mass political repressions and his own personal crimes against the humanity — is now said to start on the 1st December 1934, with the assassination of Sergey Kirov, the leader of the opposition movement — which happened not long after the German “Night of the Long Knives” (30 June 1933). Stalin figured that that was a very efficient way to eliminate the critics of his regime and to bring the allies to order — so he did not contemplate the massacre as he saw it fit. The main difference to Hitler’s approach was, however, that Hitler made it to the top in a legitimate and civil way, whereas Stalin had formed a gang from a good for nothing bunch and had to control them in a very violent way. Sadly, there was a young country which suffered the most.

Stalin’s Communism Party ID card. The membership number is 000 000 2, the first one belonged to Lenin himself.

The point of all of this cruelty was that Stalin created indeed a very capable and effective system, which could only perform well under his own personal rule. So with his death in 1953 the system began to shatter and then eventually fell apart showing the imperfections of totalitarianism as a whole. But the Churchill’s notion on “Stalin who took the country with a hoe and left it with the atomic bomb” is not really very truthful. Nevertheless, Stalin’s persona has become somewhat of a mythical deity: still, about a half of those of the Russian origin would consider him the hero who rebuilt the country after the WWII, who kept everything in order and enemies at bay, and who just saved the country and its people.

The Big Three, Yalta Conference, 1945.

Funnily enough, it is virtually impossible to find any of the old photographs of Stalin among the people. When you start looking, you get photos with Churchill and Roosevelt on the Yalta conference; you get Stalin on government meetings or in Mausoleum, you get Stalin making a speech for the Communist Party. The images of Stalin among the factory workers are very rare — just like Stalin visiting a mining plant or army barracks. So he wasn’t that close to people, after all — quite the contrary, he tried to stay as far away from the regular people as possible: he never travelled to Siberia or the Urals, and when he did leave his Moscow residence (like when visiting Tehran), the whole voyage was top rank classified.

Stalin with a fellow party member M. Kalinin.

Certainly there is an array of opinions on Stalin, but there is one I find particularly interesting, by someone named S. Montefiore:

Stalin possessed a rare combination of being intellectual and murderous at the same time. He did well at school, he wrote poetry, he aspired to a lot, but he was different: he was never an idealist. At school he picked up what was necessary to succeed in those unstable times: the basics of espionage, blackmail, human hunt, violence and no account for feelings or emotions. He could have not succeeded elsewhere, apart from in those times, in those places. But back in the revolutionary Russia, surrounded by the cruel and unscrupulous people, he managed to become the most cruel and the most unscrupulous.

The police file on Stalin. Circa 1913.

Stalin’s personality has been under scrutiny for the past 60 or 70 years, not only by historians, but also by psychologists and linguists. Funnily enough, they now find his rhetoric to be of a primitive level, but his public speaking skills were excellent. L. Batkin, for instance, argues that Stalin had a tendency to keep repeating what was being said by twisting and turning the same idea around– tautology was his main speaking technique. His vocabulary was said to be poor but he was always pompous: this was his way to conceal that he did not have much to say. His logical reasoning was also poor: often he constructed his persuasive chains by saying something like A is A, and B is B, hence it is not possible because it just can’t be. The true horror of it is that it never really mattered:he was already there, at the top, before anybody could notice.

Almost a decade after his death, a poem by a prominent Russian dissident Evgeniy Evtushenko was published. The poem describes the burial of Stalin but at the end suggests that the problems are not yet over.

Grimly clenching his embalmed fists, just pretending to be dead, he watched from inside. He was scheming. Had merely dozed off. And I, appealing to our government, petition them to double, and treble, the sentries guarding the slab, and stop Stalin from ever rising again.

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Real USSR » churchill

Take Me To The River!

Declassified: the Great and Powerful Stalin.