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The dark story behind Stalin’s popular photo with a Soviet girl

44 points by ericdanielski 8y ago

sverige 8y ago
Stalin's propaganda was even effective in the U.S. He really deserves to be at the top of the list when evil leaders are discussed. Yes, Hitler was awful, but Stalin was far worse. But saying so often draws only criticism. That's how good his propaganda was.
- remarkEon 8y ago
  I think you’re being downvoted because the conventional reasoning is that Nazi Germany would’ve likely conquered all of Europe if it wasn’t for the Soviet Union. While this is (mostly) true, if we’re operationalizing the definition of “evil” in terms of a raw body count Stalin would indeed be at the top of the list.
  - mordant 8y ago
    The USSR would've conquered all of Europe if it weren't for Germany - read _Icebreaker_, et. al. by Suvorov.
    - aeontech 8y ago
      Suvorov’s books are widely considered an entertaining alternative history fiction as far as I know. I’d be curious to know of any actual historians who consider his books a realistic and plausible version of history.
      - ropeadopepope 8y ago
        Patton's letter to his wife made it clear he thought we were fighting the wrong enemy. edit: also, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOtinTlx7yo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOtinTlx7yo
        aeontech 8y ago
        Patton was a general, and it was his job to consider and prepare for the worst, of course. That doesn't mean he had any magical insight into the Soviet plans before the war. At the end of the war, Soviets were in Berlin. If they were bent on continental domination, they could've fairly easily taken the rest of the exhausted Europe. Instead, luckily, the Allies managed to work out a peace agreement that held until the shockingly peaceful dissolution of the USSR, despite several close calls.
        ropeadopepope 8y ago
        > they could've fairly easily taken the rest of the exhausted Europe. From Patton's journal, taken from The Patton Papers, 1940–1945, edited by Martin Blumenson: > 18 May > In my opinion, the American Army as it now exists could beat the Russians with the greatest of ease, because while the Russians have good infantry, they are lacking in artillery, air, tanks, and in the knowledge of the use of the combined arms’ whereas we excel in all three of these. If it should be necessary to fight the Russians, the sooner we do it the better.
        aeontech 8y ago
        Perfectly reasonable statement in his position, but I don’t see how it translates to “we were fighting the wrong enemy all along.”
        ropeadopepope 8y ago
        Patton said, word for word, "We defeated the wrong enemy" when he was relieved of his command. Which is trivial to find had you spent 10 seconds in google.
        Turing_Machine 8y ago
        > If they were bent on continental domination, they could've fairly easily taken the rest of the exhausted Europe. Hmm... and what do you imagine the Americans would have been doing while this was going on, given that they still had a gigantic and completely undamaged industrial economy (the only one left in the world, at that stage), nuclear weapons, and truly massive amounts of troops and equipment that would have been available for redeployment from the Pacific after Japan's surrender?
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > The USSR would've conquered all of Europe if it weren't for Germany They might have tried. Of course, without the Axis, Europe and the US would be firmly aligned against the USSR; the simultaneous existence of the Axis (which was more overtly expansionist) and the Soviet Union (whose ideology was more hostile to capitalist enterprise) split the capitalist West between those more concerned about the threat of Fascism and those more concerned about the threat of Communism.
- aeontech 8y ago
  I’m not sure any kind of “x was worse than y” makes sense on that scale of evils. How can one possibly weigh the countless lives lost due to decisions made by both? I think the only thing one can truly say is, both were terrible human beings, and hope we can detect and stop someone in the future from becoming such. Yet, I am not sure it is possible, the banality of evil is slow and unnoticeable until it is too late.
  - sverige 8y ago
    My point is really that no one calls their opponents 'Stalin' or 'Commies' the same way people in America tend to call others 'Hitler' or 'Nazis,' which is surprising, given the enormity of the crimes against humanity committed by Stalin and the Russian Communists during roughly the same time. I posit that the root cause is due to the effects of propaganda. No one has really addressed that.
    - aeontech 8y ago
      Oh, if you think "commie", "pinko", or "red" was not a dead-serious, job- or even life-threatening accusation in the past, you should read up on Red Scare, Hollywood Blacklist and McCarthyism. The question of why insult X versus insult Y survives and thrives in this day is certainly interesting. I think it's a combination of many factors - The enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if I don't like him very much. Ergo, if we were fighting Nazis together, by definition the Commies are not as bad. Considering the huge amount of media produced in all the time since the end of the war, in which the enemy is the safely defeated Nazis rather than still-potential-adversary Pinkos, it's probably safe to say that Nazi's are worse than Commies in absolute terms as far as the collective subconscious is concerned. - Nazis are generally seen as wishing to exterminate, subjugate or banish all people outside their narrowly accepted criteria. Commies maybe exterminate their own people for their own internal reasons, but don't really threaten our existence nearly as much - for a long time, it's "live and let live" more or less. Ergo, I am more scared of Nazis than Commies (though don't underestimate the fear of nuclear annihilation the seventies and eighties kids grew up in). - A lot of the fear of Commies was driven by disagreements over economic models, and fear of wealth loss by the "capitalist" class, obviously. That isn't really something very threatening to the average person, not on the instinctive level of "Nazis want to kill me because I exist". Those who lived through the red revolution and escaped it to the USA would have a much more visceral reaction to communism, but they would be a vanishing minority in the general population, I imagine. - Finally, Nazism/Fascism is in the conversation these days because it's really a thing, unlike communism. There aren't many people stridently fighting and believing in communist ideals, but there indeed are people who hold pretty clearly and openly fascist beliefs. So, when you see someone called fascist, it's not necessarily an insult but a statement of fact. Edit: I'm not defending Stalin or USSR, like I said in the parent comment, both leaders are indescribably horrible humans, in case that needs to be said.
- jarfil 8y ago
  Genghis Khan killed more, and yet he's considered a national hero.
  - sverige 8y ago
    Plus, none of us have any family members who can tell stories of the people he killed.
    - Pica_soO 8y ago
      This is the final insult- if every murdered soul got a software agent, who posted under any praise/propaganda the one line. "He murdered me- name - at the age of .. age.. . Let me and what came not to be not be forgotten." that would silence this.
      - 8bitsrule 8y ago
        That, sir or madam, is an utterly fantastic idea.
  - sorokod 8y ago
    In China?
- ropeadopepope 8y ago
  Hollywood Party by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley should be required reading for all social studies classes in the US. It's staggering to consider how much of hollywood was funded by the USSR. They stopped in 1991.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    That book does not appear to be well-regarded.
    - ropeadopepope 8y ago
      By whom?
- tluyben2 8y ago
  I would leave out the comparison of the evils, but it is true that many forget Stalin (and others by the way; Pol Pot for instance) while Hilter is known by all as ‘most evil human’.
  - Pica_soO 8y ago
    I think its also that with Hitler is was part of the publicized plan- while Stalin, Mao and pot just had utopian dictator work accidents by reality induced paranoia.
    - tluyben2 8y ago
      Possibly. Hitler was at least successful at almost owning a very large part of the world he did not own when he came into power. That probably scares people a lot more than someone taking over an existing territory and messing that up.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
lostlogin 8y ago
In the photo of her on the table, her left leg looks really swollen/large. It might be some sort of lense distortion though that seems unlikely. I wonder what that’s all about? Putting in a plug for Simon Sebag Montiefiore’s books on Russia. Specifically ‘Young Stalin’ and ‘Court of the Red Czar’. They are excellent.
- aeontech 8y ago
  She is wearing felt knee-high boots (valenki) which make both feet look thicker than you expect. The left foot is casting a shadow on the right foot, which makes the right foot appear thinner.
awefawefuiweuf 8y ago
them teeth tho
mrobot 8y ago
I was interested in knowing more and tried to find what her father was charged with. The best i could come up with was this from a badly translated article: "Under the leadership of Markizova big sabotage was conducted in the livestock building, in which the cattle were exposed to cold-related diseases and deaths. The waste of young animals amounted to 40 000 heads…" http://z-news.xyz/get-that-lousy-said-stalin-the-story-about-the-girl/ http://z-news.xyz/get-that-lousy-said-stalin-the-story-about...
- pvg 8y ago
  They just made up charges from a more or less standard set, as Stalin purged people across the entire depth and breadth of the leadership. Her father, a high-level regional functionary, has a Russian wikipedia page - it seems seems it's not entirely clear what he was charged with although the two possible stories outlined are among the staples of the time - espionage/plotting against Stalin/ counterrevolution or some subset of the former but more about 'wrecking', deliberate economic sabotage.
- EliRivers 8y ago
  Just as an item of general interest, "sabotage" was (I understand; I'm no historian!) a common charge when targets weren't met. I've just finished reading Anne Applebaum's book on the famine in Ukraine; if impossible targets aren't met, pick some people and say they sabotaged production. The problem isn't the system, and the problem certainly isn't the impossible demands and the purges and the terrified lies from the cadres and the disasters of collectivisation and the self-defeating elimination of the best workers (in Ukraine, owning a few cows and being good at farming could qualify you as a 'kulak' and an enemy of the people, ready for execution or the gulag, so of course the most competent farmers were eliminated early). None of that; the problem is saboteurs. Pick someone, charge him and execute him (or send him to a gulag).
  - dingaling 8y ago
    Even Stalin-era test pilots feared a charge of sabotage if something went wrong on a flight. Which was particularly terrifying when Stalin would give chief designers an arbitrary deadline of one or two years to build a prototype. It had to work first time or a lot of people were going to the gulag. No-one was safe from Stalin's vengeance, except apparently General Tito of Yugoslavia who survived many of his assassination attempts and allegedly returned the favour successfully.
rurban 8y ago
This episode is also prominently featured in the highly recommended masterpiece "The Death Of Stalin", a dark satire movie on Stalin and Berisha.
- acqq 8y ago
  That explains why the story is in fashion at the moment. But regarding the movie, see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Stalin#Historical_accuracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Stalin#Historical... "the film is "fundamentally ill-equipped to locate the comedy inherent to Stalinism, missing marks it doesn't know it should be aiming for."" In short, it doesn't give a real insight, even if it entertains. The film is anyway based on a comics: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mort_de_Staline_(bande_dessin%C3%A9e) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mort_de_Staline_(bande_dess... Which starts with: "Although inspired by real events, this story is nonetheless a fiction, freely constructed according to a fragmentary documentation, sometimes partial and often contradictory ... The authors point out, however, that they hardly needed to force their imagination, being unable to invent anything equivalent to the furious madness of Stalin and his entourage" It's a fiction, even if there are surely the facts that are even weirder than many are able to imagine and the facts that are much harder to casually talk about.
thedailymail 8y ago
I'm right in the middle of reading Martin Amis' "Koba the Dread." He raises the interesting point that most people feel a viscerally different reaction to the crimes of Hitler ("Little Moustache") than they do to those of Stalin ("Big Moustache"), even though even by conservative reckoning Josif gave Adolf a run for the money in terms of numbers killed. As someone who is politically more lefty than righty this hit home. (Amis himself acknowledges the same cognitive dissonance.)

44 points by ericdanielski 8y ago

Stalin's propaganda was even effective in the U.S. He really deserves to be at the top of the list when evil leaders are discussed. Yes, Hitler was awful, but Stalin was far worse. But saying so often draws only criticism. That's how good his propaganda was.

remarkEon 8y ago
I think you’re being downvoted because the conventional reasoning is that Nazi Germany would’ve likely conquered all of Europe if it wasn’t for the Soviet Union. While this is (mostly) true, if we’re operationalizing the definition of “evil” in terms of a raw body count Stalin would indeed be at the top of the list.
- mordant 8y ago
  The USSR would've conquered all of Europe if it weren't for Germany - read _Icebreaker_, et. al. by Suvorov.
  - aeontech 8y ago
    Suvorov’s books are widely considered an entertaining alternative history fiction as far as I know. I’d be curious to know of any actual historians who consider his books a realistic and plausible version of history.
    - ropeadopepope 8y ago
      Patton's letter to his wife made it clear he thought we were fighting the wrong enemy. edit: also, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOtinTlx7yo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOtinTlx7yo
      - aeontech 8y ago
        Patton was a general, and it was his job to consider and prepare for the worst, of course. That doesn't mean he had any magical insight into the Soviet plans before the war. At the end of the war, Soviets were in Berlin. If they were bent on continental domination, they could've fairly easily taken the rest of the exhausted Europe. Instead, luckily, the Allies managed to work out a peace agreement that held until the shockingly peaceful dissolution of the USSR, despite several close calls.
        ropeadopepope 8y ago
        > they could've fairly easily taken the rest of the exhausted Europe. From Patton's journal, taken from The Patton Papers, 1940–1945, edited by Martin Blumenson: > 18 May > In my opinion, the American Army as it now exists could beat the Russians with the greatest of ease, because while the Russians have good infantry, they are lacking in artillery, air, tanks, and in the knowledge of the use of the combined arms’ whereas we excel in all three of these. If it should be necessary to fight the Russians, the sooner we do it the better.
        aeontech 8y ago
        Perfectly reasonable statement in his position, but I don’t see how it translates to “we were fighting the wrong enemy all along.”
        ropeadopepope 8y ago
        Patton said, word for word, "We defeated the wrong enemy" when he was relieved of his command. Which is trivial to find had you spent 10 seconds in google.
        Turing_Machine 8y ago
        > If they were bent on continental domination, they could've fairly easily taken the rest of the exhausted Europe. Hmm... and what do you imagine the Americans would have been doing while this was going on, given that they still had a gigantic and completely undamaged industrial economy (the only one left in the world, at that stage), nuclear weapons, and truly massive amounts of troops and equipment that would have been available for redeployment from the Pacific after Japan's surrender?
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > The USSR would've conquered all of Europe if it weren't for Germany They might have tried. Of course, without the Axis, Europe and the US would be firmly aligned against the USSR; the simultaneous existence of the Axis (which was more overtly expansionist) and the Soviet Union (whose ideology was more hostile to capitalist enterprise) split the capitalist West between those more concerned about the threat of Fascism and those more concerned about the threat of Communism.
aeontech 8y ago
I’m not sure any kind of “x was worse than y” makes sense on that scale of evils. How can one possibly weigh the countless lives lost due to decisions made by both? I think the only thing one can truly say is, both were terrible human beings, and hope we can detect and stop someone in the future from becoming such. Yet, I am not sure it is possible, the banality of evil is slow and unnoticeable until it is too late.
- sverige 8y ago
  My point is really that no one calls their opponents 'Stalin' or 'Commies' the same way people in America tend to call others 'Hitler' or 'Nazis,' which is surprising, given the enormity of the crimes against humanity committed by Stalin and the Russian Communists during roughly the same time. I posit that the root cause is due to the effects of propaganda. No one has really addressed that.
  - aeontech 8y ago
    Oh, if you think "commie", "pinko", or "red" was not a dead-serious, job- or even life-threatening accusation in the past, you should read up on Red Scare, Hollywood Blacklist and McCarthyism. The question of why insult X versus insult Y survives and thrives in this day is certainly interesting. I think it's a combination of many factors - The enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if I don't like him very much. Ergo, if we were fighting Nazis together, by definition the Commies are not as bad. Considering the huge amount of media produced in all the time since the end of the war, in which the enemy is the safely defeated Nazis rather than still-potential-adversary Pinkos, it's probably safe to say that Nazi's are worse than Commies in absolute terms as far as the collective subconscious is concerned. - Nazis are generally seen as wishing to exterminate, subjugate or banish all people outside their narrowly accepted criteria. Commies maybe exterminate their own people for their own internal reasons, but don't really threaten our existence nearly as much - for a long time, it's "live and let live" more or less. Ergo, I am more scared of Nazis than Commies (though don't underestimate the fear of nuclear annihilation the seventies and eighties kids grew up in). - A lot of the fear of Commies was driven by disagreements over economic models, and fear of wealth loss by the "capitalist" class, obviously. That isn't really something very threatening to the average person, not on the instinctive level of "Nazis want to kill me because I exist". Those who lived through the red revolution and escaped it to the USA would have a much more visceral reaction to communism, but they would be a vanishing minority in the general population, I imagine. - Finally, Nazism/Fascism is in the conversation these days because it's really a thing, unlike communism. There aren't many people stridently fighting and believing in communist ideals, but there indeed are people who hold pretty clearly and openly fascist beliefs. So, when you see someone called fascist, it's not necessarily an insult but a statement of fact. Edit: I'm not defending Stalin or USSR, like I said in the parent comment, both leaders are indescribably horrible humans, in case that needs to be said.
jarfil 8y ago
Genghis Khan killed more, and yet he's considered a national hero.
- sverige 8y ago
  Plus, none of us have any family members who can tell stories of the people he killed.
  - Pica_soO 8y ago
    This is the final insult- if every murdered soul got a software agent, who posted under any praise/propaganda the one line. "He murdered me- name - at the age of .. age.. . Let me and what came not to be not be forgotten." that would silence this.
    - 8bitsrule 8y ago
      That, sir or madam, is an utterly fantastic idea.
- sorokod 8y ago
  In China?
ropeadopepope 8y ago
Hollywood Party by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley should be required reading for all social studies classes in the US. It's staggering to consider how much of hollywood was funded by the USSR. They stopped in 1991.
- tptacek 8y ago
  That book does not appear to be well-regarded.
  - ropeadopepope 8y ago
    By whom?
tluyben2 8y ago
I would leave out the comparison of the evils, but it is true that many forget Stalin (and others by the way; Pol Pot for instance) while Hilter is known by all as ‘most evil human’.
- Pica_soO 8y ago
  I think its also that with Hitler is was part of the publicized plan- while Stalin, Mao and pot just had utopian dictator work accidents by reality induced paranoia.
  - tluyben2 8y ago
    Possibly. Hitler was at least successful at almost owning a very large part of the world he did not own when he came into power. That probably scares people a lot more than someone taking over an existing territory and messing that up.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

lostlogin 8y ago

In the photo of her on the table, her left leg looks really swollen/large. It might be some sort of lense distortion though that seems unlikely. I wonder what that’s all about? Putting in a plug for Simon Sebag Montiefiore’s books on Russia. Specifically ‘Young Stalin’ and ‘Court of the Red Czar’. They are excellent.

aeontech 8y ago
She is wearing felt knee-high boots (valenki) which make both feet look thicker than you expect. The left foot is casting a shadow on the right foot, which makes the right foot appear thinner.

awefawefuiweuf 8y ago

them teeth tho

mrobot 8y ago

I was interested in knowing more and tried to find what her father was charged with. The best i could come up with was this from a badly translated article: "Under the leadership of Markizova big sabotage was conducted in the livestock building, in which the cattle were exposed to cold-related diseases and deaths. The waste of young animals amounted to 40 000 heads…" http://z-news.xyz/get-that-lousy-said-stalin-the-story-about-the-girl/ http://z-news.xyz/get-that-lousy-said-stalin-the-story-about...

pvg 8y ago
They just made up charges from a more or less standard set, as Stalin purged people across the entire depth and breadth of the leadership. Her father, a high-level regional functionary, has a Russian wikipedia page - it seems seems it's not entirely clear what he was charged with although the two possible stories outlined are among the staples of the time - espionage/plotting against Stalin/ counterrevolution or some subset of the former but more about 'wrecking', deliberate economic sabotage.
EliRivers 8y ago
Just as an item of general interest, "sabotage" was (I understand; I'm no historian!) a common charge when targets weren't met. I've just finished reading Anne Applebaum's book on the famine in Ukraine; if impossible targets aren't met, pick some people and say they sabotaged production. The problem isn't the system, and the problem certainly isn't the impossible demands and the purges and the terrified lies from the cadres and the disasters of collectivisation and the self-defeating elimination of the best workers (in Ukraine, owning a few cows and being good at farming could qualify you as a 'kulak' and an enemy of the people, ready for execution or the gulag, so of course the most competent farmers were eliminated early). None of that; the problem is saboteurs. Pick someone, charge him and execute him (or send him to a gulag).
- dingaling 8y ago
  Even Stalin-era test pilots feared a charge of sabotage if something went wrong on a flight. Which was particularly terrifying when Stalin would give chief designers an arbitrary deadline of one or two years to build a prototype. It had to work first time or a lot of people were going to the gulag. No-one was safe from Stalin's vengeance, except apparently General Tito of Yugoslavia who survived many of his assassination attempts and allegedly returned the favour successfully.

rurban 8y ago

This episode is also prominently featured in the highly recommended masterpiece "The Death Of Stalin", a dark satire movie on Stalin and Berisha.

acqq 8y ago
That explains why the story is in fashion at the moment. But regarding the movie, see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Stalin#Historical_accuracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Stalin#Historical... "the film is "fundamentally ill-equipped to locate the comedy inherent to Stalinism, missing marks it doesn't know it should be aiming for."" In short, it doesn't give a real insight, even if it entertains. The film is anyway based on a comics: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mort_de_Staline_(bande_dessin%C3%A9e) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mort_de_Staline_(bande_dess... Which starts with: "Although inspired by real events, this story is nonetheless a fiction, freely constructed according to a fragmentary documentation, sometimes partial and often contradictory ... The authors point out, however, that they hardly needed to force their imagination, being unable to invent anything equivalent to the furious madness of Stalin and his entourage" It's a fiction, even if there are surely the facts that are even weirder than many are able to imagine and the facts that are much harder to casually talk about.

thedailymail 8y ago

I'm right in the middle of reading Martin Amis' "Koba the Dread." He raises the interesting point that most people feel a viscerally different reaction to the crimes of Hitler ("Little Moustache") than they do to those of Stalin ("Big Moustache"), even though even by conservative reckoning Josif gave Adolf a run for the money in terms of numbers killed. As someone who is politically more lefty than righty this hit home. (Amis himself acknowledges the same cognitive dissonance.)