ok what the fuck is happening in ukraine

um, this quote is the one snyder focuses on and it's pretty awful:

I do not want to blame anyone here, but serious studies should show that these were the foreign policy methods at the time. The Soviet Union signed a non-aggression agreement with Germany. They say, “Oh, how bad.” But what is so bad about it, if the Soviet Union did not want to fight? What is so bad?

the pact was indeed one of mutual non-agression from a german and russian POV, but poland would have a very different opinion of this.

bloodlands is a really impressive work and tbh i trust snyder more than most

The first thing that strikes the reader on dipping into its 500-plus pages is its tone. We are all used to sober histories that lay out a problem coolly and rationally, but right from the start it is evident that this is not Snyder’s way. Rather than analytical, the prose is white hot. He bombards the reader with phrases and concepts that are highly provocative yet do not stand up under scrutiny.

imo not correct. i found him very dispassionate considering the events that he was revisiting.

xpost

but i wonder if this is really a "revision" per snyder or just standard-issue chauvinism. i mean it's not as though the dual invasion of poland has ever figured largely in russian views of WWII.

The full quote from that section was:

Or, for example, there are still arguments about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and the Soviet Union is blamed for dividing Poland. But what did Poland itself do, when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia? It took part of Czechoslovakia. It did this itself. And then, in turn, the same thing happened to Poland.

I do not want to blame anyone here, but serious studies should show that these were the foreign policy methods at the time. The Soviet Union signed a non-aggression agreement with Germany. They say, “Oh, how bad.” But what is so bad about it, if the Soviet Union did not want to fight? What is so bad?

Moreover, even knowing about the inevitability of war, supposing that it could happen, the Soviet Union desperately needed time to modernise its army. We needed to implement a new weapons system. Each month had significance because the number of Katyusha rocket launchers or T-34 tanks in the Soviet army was in the single digits, whereas thousands were needed. Each day had significance. So idle thoughts and chatter on this matter on a political level may have a purpose, in order to shape public opinion, but this must be countered with serious, deep, objective research.

He neglected to mention that Stalin had murdered almost every senior general in the country the year before too. There's also a dig about Neville Chamberlain's 'non-aggression pact' being written out of history.

The remarks were ill judged and potentially inflammatory but Snyder's taken on them is hysterical.

Stalin entered the pact with Hitler fully aware of his partner’s anti-Semitism, and indeed accounting for it in his own diplomacy. On August 20, 1939, Hitler asked Stalin for a meeting, and Stalin was more than happy to agree. For five years the Soviet leader had been seeking an occasion to destroy Poland. Stalin had prepared by firing his Jewish commissar for foreign affairs, Maxim Litvinov, replacing him with the Russian Vyacheslav Molotov. The dismissal of Litvinov, according to Hitler, was “decisive.” On August 23, Molotov negotiated the agreement with Hitler’s minister of foreign affairs, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in Moscow.

Hysterical? I disagree.

And I don't understand what your pov here is - are you trying to rehabilitate Stalin or just excuse Putin's rehabilitation?

Polish woman I know is often heard to curse Poland's bad luck at being stuck between Germany and Russia, "the two worst countries in Europe".

i get the sense that snyder is taking too much license in interpreting putin's comments as signalling some profound shift. again, the comments are reprehensible, but i'm not sure putin is promoting a view much different than a succession of soviet historians and leaders, who also needed to explain away the nazi-soviet pact as a necessary evil (and then to emphasize hitler's duplicity rather than stalin's brutal realpolitik).

like it's not as if Stalin made a treaty w/ Hitler bc he just wanted to be left alone - taking huge swaths of poland was a big part of signing on

yeah but i'm not sure that in obscuring that putin is doing anything different than his predecessors.

and that Jacobin piece in general, idk, he's critiquing Snyder for implying that Hitler + Stalin were morally equivalent (I don't think that's a claim that comes through particularly strong in the book - which is more about how both were morally abhorrent in their own special ways) but what does Jacobin want? To explain how Stalin wasn't as bad as Hitler? This is some pretty sick stuff imho.

both were morally abhorrent in their own special ways

I don't see how this is arguable really. obviously Putin's into rehabilitating/emulating Stalin to some degree, but that doesn't change this essential fact.

America is not a fascist country, at least not yet. oh god

yeah i find my eyes rolling way up into my head with every other jacobin article. kind of the internet hardman (grad-school variety) of leftist media.

sometimes they have really smart stuff, though, and i find myself frustrated when an intelligent piece suddenly descends into callow sloganeering.

And I don't understand what your pov here is - are you trying to rehabilitate Stalin or just excuse Putin's rehabilitation?

Neither - i don't think that, if Putin was seeking to rehabilitate Stalin there's a great deal of evidence of it in his comments to the students when seen in context. The point he seems to have been making is that Russia wasn't the only country at the time to seek to appease Hitler or opportunistically take land and they were not, in any way, logistically prepared for war when the deal was struck.

Turning those comments into a wider piece about Russia attempting to create a new Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with European Neo-Nazis to divide and conquer Central / Eastern Europe is transparently silly.

A stronger case for Putin following a Stalinist model or a far-right model could be made using the evidence of him curtailing the press or the appalling treatment of migrant workers but, again, it needs to be argued on solid ground.

Has anyone seen Sergei Loznitsa's Maidan? Saw it a few days back, loved it. It really showed how much work goes into a revolution. And how much money it undoubtedly took. Some amazing imagery, and stirring moments when crowds sing or shout 'Glory! Glory!' Of course, now the whole thing looks bittersweet.

America is not a fascist country, at least not yet. oh god

― Mordy, Wednesday, 12 November 2014 17:46 (Yesterday) Permalink

yeah i find my eyes rolling way up into my head with every other jacobin article. kind of the internet hardman (grad-school variety) of leftist media.

Nah, I reckon it's ok: Ferguson, Arizona, Supreme Court gutting the voting rights act, *electric fucking shocks routinely used in courtrooms* etc, etc. There's more than enough fascistic stuff going down, and indeed on the rise, in the US for this sort of wording not to seem hysterical.

This is a much better article on the Putin comments and how they fit into his wider effort to 'control history'.

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/70906?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Ferguson, Arizona, Supreme Court gutting the voting rights act, *electric fucking shocks routinely used in courtrooms* etc, etc. There's more than enough fascistic stuff going down, and indeed on the rise

none of these things are historical anamolies, I hate to break it to you. So either the US has either always been a fascist country (ie back before there was a voting rights act, there were immigrant quotas, massive racial violence, institutionalized discrimination, lynchings) or your definition of fascism is v wrong.

'OK, what the fuck' about sums up this load of tosh.

Kadyrov claims his units have killed Al-Shishani, which is likely to be equally dubious.

Russia has a long history of fictionalised accounts of white women mysteriously turning up to fight for its enemies.

Nah, I reckon it's ok: Ferguson, Arizona, Supreme Court gutting the voting rights act, *electric fucking shocks routinely used in courtrooms* etc, etc.

not sure what specifically you're referring to re: "arizona" but as someone who actually lives there i can attest that the right-wing nutjobs who live here are generally too lazy and smug to be "fascists."

none of these things are historical anamolies, I hate to break it to you. So either the US has either always been a fascist country (ie back before there was a voting rights act, there were immigrant quotas, massive racial violence, institutionalized discrimination, lynchings) or your definition of fascism is v wrong.

o boy thx 4 schoolin me poindexter

Course there's a load of fascistic tendencies running right through US history. And there's a whole heap that continues into the present day. Therefore, *like I said*, it isn't hysterical to write something like "America is not a fascist country, at least not yet."

See? He's saying America isn't a fascist country! I agree!

this is a useful argument, let's keep it going for another 2,500 posts.

tbh i'm not sure why i should trust a writer who's appalled by the suggestion that stalin was in the same category as hitler and then turns around and throws out the blithe suggestion that america is on the road to becoming 'fascist.'

Putin Sends his Leopard to the Battlefield of Eastern Ukraine: Sophisticated Russian weapons have been spotted near Dontesk, signalling a dangerous new phase of conflict may be underway.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/images/cropsnar-10m1_1rl232-m2_ground_sea_battlefield_surveillance_radar_mt-lb_tracked_armoured_npo_strela_russia_640_001leopard.jpg

i find the residual soviet apologism among parts of the left kind of baffling.

even if it's just reflexive.

i was just thinking about that. is it just the consequence of a political ideology not sophisticated enough to distinguish categories beyond Western-Imperial hegemony and Other?

it isn't hysterical to write something like "America is not a fascist country, at least not yet."

it is hysterical, because the implication is that America was less fascist in the past and becoming more fascist now - and then you point to a bunch of examples of things that were actually *worse* in the past...

why do I bother, agree this argument is not worth having

xp

i find the residual soviet apologism among parts of the left kind of baffling.

tbf we're talking about a tiny tiny slice of people here

yeah, but the fact that /anyone/ who wasn't invested in it once upon a time would still have a kind of reflexive semi-apologist stance is weird. like why would some 30something writer for jacobin try to mince words about stalin?

idk those Int'l Socialist Organization people are just insane, is how I more or less break it down

once one of them told me I was "reading the wrong histories"

(tbf at the time he was defending Mao, not Stalin)

yeah, but the fact that /anyone/ who wasn't invested in it once upon a time would still have a kind of reflexive semi-apologist stance is weird. like why would some 30something writer for jacobin try to mince words about stalin?

― I dunno. (amateurist), Thursday, November 13, 2014 2:22 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

zizek

If describing Stalin as a "bloody tyrant", a "super-tyrant" and a "monster" is mincing words then idk what the straight butter sauce, no marinara would be. The point is not that Stalin was anything other than a grotesque horror, it's that echoing the argument that the rise of Nazi ideology and, ultimately, the holocaust, was a response to the Soviet Union and not an organic German phenomenon is hugely loaded. It's a pretty popular argument on the German right and, as Lazare says, one that Snyder has constantly narrowly skirted around. It's not about excusing Stalinism, it;s about NOT excusing Fascism.

More importantly, Snyder's using his academic position to push a nonsensical and potentially dangerous position on the West's relationship with contemporary Russia.

Snyder's juvenile Stalin = Hitler = Putin = Lions = Tigers = Bears = oh my! argument which sees Putin as nostalgic for the Hitler / Stalin accord and aiming to push the idea that contemporary collaboration with European Fascists is on the cards is utterly absurd in the context of the mainstream Russian nationalism that Putin feeds off.

The Torbakov piece is absolutely correct in saying that Russia's view of its moral authority as a great nation stems from being the country that 'saved Europe from Fascism'. It's the single greatest cornerstone of Russian nationalism. It's not universally known as the "Great Patriotic War" for nothing. Focus on justifying the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in a historical context isn't nostalgia, it's shoring up that idea that Russia bled for the rest of us when the time came to step up.

Putin has used anti-Fascism (cynically in most cases) as a justification for lots of Russia's domestic and foreign policy. Nashi - effectively the youth feeder group for United Russia - was supposedly set up as a bulwark against Fascist youth groups. More obviously, 75% of all the propaganda that Russia has been churning out about Ukraine is focused on the idea that they're a bunch of Neo-Nazis who worship Stepan Bandera. Bandera is one of the most loathed contemporary figures in Russia, not just because he fought against them but because he was a Nazi collaborator. It's pretty much literally the worst thing you can accuse anyone of being.

Putin is definitely trying to shape domestic and international views of Russian history to his own ends - not just in speeches to students but in the wholesale revision of Russian state textbooks but Synder's arguments would struggle to be more inaccurate if he was trying and only feed into the kneejerk leftist response that 'if the case against him is made in such a farcical way, it must be because he's sticking it to the west'. Bad political commentary about him discredits the good, negative coverage by association.

i got in no way from bloodlands the idea that stalin's behavior/actions ameliorated hitler's

It's not about ameliorating the actions themselves, it's framing where those actions stemmed from that's the issue. I'd agree that Snyder doesn't go fully down the Nolte route but it's not a million miles away.

Either way, agree or disagree, understanding his historical POV is important to understanding his writing on contemporary politics.

ShariVari, I complete agree that Snyder was misrepresenting the situation badly. but I also think that Jacobin publishes a lot of shrill and dubious stuff (in addition to some excellent stuff--sometimes in the same article!). those two positions are not incompatible.

i hate how these threads often seem to gravitate toward polarization, and when you say that you disagree with someone on one point it's assumed that you're disagreeing with every point they've made and have chosen a "side" in a debate. frankly it's the most annoying feature of ILX to me. maybe it's endemic to internet discussion boards; i wouldn't know since this is the only one I've really ever read.

I agree, and that whole post wasn't aimed at you. I was just taking issue with the idea that there was any apologism for Stalin in the Jacobin piece.

Apologism for Stalin on the hard left is more repellent yet makes more sense than apologism for Putin, a nationalist and social conservative.

I'm not sure many of the Putin fans on the left really care much about his domestic policies or pay attention to the increasing shift towards social conservatism and restrictions of the welfare state in Russia. His primary attraction is that he has sought to obstruct US imperialism by opposing the war in Iraq, the bombing of Syria, etc.

Those that are more involved in Russian politics would argue (correctly to some degree) that he also stands against the domestic political dominance of oligarchs and the domestic economic dominance of the IMF. Failing to do that without any recognition of the negatives is clearly NAGL though. I do think that, outside of Russia itself, the number of diehard Putin apologists is probably wildly overstated though.

The Putin apologists I know are almost exclusively also Maoists, and they'll defend him alongside the likes of Assad.

genocide is okay as long as you're an enemy of the western hegemony i guess

Life is obviously too short to argue with Maoists but idk how they square that with anti-left policies like cutting free healthcare and brutal treatment of undocumented migrants.