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H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934)

171 points by giorgiofontana 12y ago

Jun8 12y ago
"We Bolsheviks call it “self-criticism”. It is widely used in the USSR." Indeed! Coming out of Stalin, the irony of these word is unbearable.The first Moscow trial was to take place in two years.
nmrm 12y ago
This was a particularly interested/relevant excerpt from Wells. I think of the open source ethos as one small example of what he's calling for in the second paragraph: I object to this simplified classification of mankind into poor and rich. Of course there is a category of people which strive only for profit. But are not... people in the West for whom profit is not an end, who own a certain amount of wealth, who want to invest and obtain a profit from this investment, but who do not regard this as the main object?... During the past few years I have been much engaged in and have thought of the need for conducting propaganda in favour of Socialism and cosmopolitanism among wide circles of engineers, airmen, military technical people, etc. It is useless to approach these circles with two-track class-war propaganda. These people understand the condition of the world. They understand that it is a bloody muddle, but they regard your simple class-war antagonism as nonsense.
- arethuza 12y ago
  Credit to Wells for then saying: "They understand that it is a bloody muddle, but they regard your simple class-war antagonism as nonsense." I wonder if Wells was one of the last people to disagree with Stalin who didn't end up with a bullet in the back of their heads?
  - dominotw 12y ago
    No. Lots of people disagreed with Stalin all the time. Famous example being Zhukov.
    - arethuza 12y ago
      True, but didn't Zhukov (perhaps the greatest general of WW2) come perilously close to being tried in the aftermath of WW2 - largely due to his personal reputation and international standing?
  - dang 12y ago
    The Bolsheviks cultivated celebrity visitors from the Western left. It wouldn't have worked to shoot them. (Edit: Originally this comment had a moderation bit in it as well, but someone rightly pointed out to me that it isn't helpful to wear the moderator hat and make a regular-user comment in the same post. So I've edited that out. I considered restricting myself to only making moderator comments, but (a) that's never been how HN worked, (b) I was a user long before a moderator, and (c) I'd burn out from boredom.)
    - arethuza 12y ago
      For what it's worth, I apologise, mostly for the initial comment I made that mentioned the Ukraine - it looked very much like a partisan comment intented to reference the current conflict and, in all honesty, it wasn't. Sorry for any grief caused and keep up the good work. [I promise to engage more brain cells when posting on obviously highly emotive topics in future and, if I have any doubt, to not post].
      - dang 12y ago
        Thanks for being so kind about it. It means a lot.
    - amirmc 12y ago
      Two thoughts 1. Has anyone suggested making yourself a new moderator account? eg dang_mod for all mod-related comments. It might ease the mental burden for the reader (at the cost of increased mental burden and user-switching for you - so maybe not worth it). 2. As a simpler variant of the above, why not make two separate comments? I expect readers are capable of telling apart your user comment from the moderation if they're cleanly separated. Edit: The first option would also have the benefit of a user id with its own comment history.
      - dang 12y ago
        1. That would be easy to do, but it feels wrong to me. Not sure I can articulate why, other than that it's not the way HN has always worked. 2 is more or less what's what I'm going to do from now on.
  - gaius 12y ago
    Stalin referred to his Western supporters as "useful idiots".
    - firstOrder 12y ago
      Maybe that's why Churchill stopped being a supporter of him.
  - firstOrder 12y ago
    What happened to Fred Hampton when he disagreed with how blacks were being treated like second-class citizens in Chicago? The Kent State students who protested the US invasion of Cambodia? The Jackson State students who protested the US invasion of Cambodia? And so on...
arethuza 12y ago
Not one mention of the terrible famine in the Ukraine which had occurred over the two previous years. As Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, initially a supporter of the Soviets until he witnessed what their policies actually meant as a correspondent for the Guardian in Moscow: "The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind, ... without any consideration whatever of the consequences in human suffering"
- osipov 12y ago
  Have you ever read "The Grapes of Wrath"? Did Stalin cause the famine in the United States? It is purposeful selective attention to call out the terrible famine in the Ukraine in the 1930. My ancestors died of the same famine in Russia and I know of many Russians who lost members of their family to hunger in 1930s. There was a widespread famine at the time, caused by collectivization and industrialization policies to migrate from inefficient, low capital, individual-based farming practices to highly efficient, large scale, high capital practices. In Soviet Union it was an inhumane, ruthless collectivization. In United States it was a bit more humane, financial capital driven policy of moving individual farmers off their land. In both cases, there was no nationalistic or genocidal component. Attempts to portray the famine as targeted at Ukranians serves no purpose other than to divide Russians and Ukrainians and pit them against each other. Recent events in Ukraine show that this is exactly the policy of the United States.
  - tokenadult 12y ago
    [Basis of knowledge here: descent from a large extended family of dry-land farmers who lived on the Great Plains during the Great Depression in the United States. And, yes, I have read the novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, which is required reading in many United States schools.] No, the situations in the two countries were not at all comparable. First of all, there was no widespread famine in the United States. I have close relatives who lived through that era in that place (they never moved from their family farms) and are now more than ninety years old. Second, there was no governmental effort to keep the people who thought they were best off moving from moving. Third, both before and after the interstate moves, most of the people who moved were land-owners. Fourth (maybe this should be first on the list), all of the adults in the United States during the Great Depression, other than most black people in the South, were voters and able to influence the political system. Just outside the region I wrote about first here, the region you mentioned first, were grassroots political movements to represent farmer rights. (Nothing of the kind existed under Stalin's dictatorship.) Here in Minnesota, the state branch of the Democratic Party is actually formally named the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, having been formed by a merger (just about exactly seventy years ago) between the state Democratic Party and the Farmer-Labor Party, a third-party movement so powerful that it elected a governor during its heyday. So, no, in the United States we look at the historical experience of Stalinism as a wholly negative example, one of the worst examples of mass irrationality and needless human suffering in the twentieth century. Where the various branches of my family have lived for generations, we know better than to take Stalin's policies as models of modernization or anything worthwhile.
beaknit 12y ago
great comment by nmrm Stalin, in particular, has been a fascination of mine. Anyone interested in learning how a man can literally seize control of the thoughts of millions of people - utterly - in an age when the radio was considered cutting-edge technology should read "Who Killed Kirov?" (http://amzn.to/1moOVmE http://amzn.to/1moOVmE) That book haunts me.
listic 12y ago
Very interesting. Was it ever translated into Russian? I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that it wasn't.
- alyxr 12y ago
  Stalin spoke Georgian and Russian, not English.
  - dang 12y ago
    I think what listic may be referring to is that the Soviets conducted a more liberal discourse in their interactions with the Western press than they permitted domestically.
    - listic 12y ago
      Sorry if I was unclear. As a Russian myself, I wondered whether this interview, which we can read here in English, was ever, during the period between 1934 to now, translated from English into Russian. The most direct reason for this interest being to show it to my non-English-speaking friends.
      - dang 12y ago
        Ah, I get it. Sorry for the misunderstanding. I'd bet a translation exists somewhere (because Russians translate everything, or at least used to, and this class of material would be of obvious interest), but have zero idea how to find it. (Edit: uh, other than Google :))
- krick 12y ago
  Are you kidding? Of course it was! Simply searching for "уэллс сталин" in google would reveal it. Here, http://www.situation.ru/app/j_art_1202.htm http://www.situation.ru/app/j_art_1202.htm But, anyway, I'm interested which one should be considered closer to the original one. Obviously Wells published it the first time in English. But AFAIK Stalin didn't speak English and I can't find if Wells actually spoke Russian. And in some places of the interview I was actually interested in how exactly Stalin phrased it.
dominotw 12y ago
> But I have some experience in fighting for Socialism, and this experience tells me that if Roosevelt makes a real attempt to satisfy the interests of the proletarian class at the expense of the capitalist class, the latter will put another President in his place. The capitalists will say: Presidents come and Presidents go, but we go on for ever; if this or that President does not protect our interests, we shall find another. What can the President oppose to the will of the capitalist class? Thats the truth we have all resigned to ourselves unfortunately.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  But then Roosevelt was quite effective in putting the capitalists in their place for an entire generation, perhaps longer, until Nixon and later Reagan turn us to the right again.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    That's putting it too strong. He reigned in some of their worst excesses, which were detrimental to the capitalist class as a whole just as much as it was detrimental to everyone else. "The capitalists" are not a single force - it's a mess of conflicting interests, just as the working class. And many of them have interests that are part aligned by parts of the working class. It's not black and white.
  - ArkyBeagle 12y ago
    But he wasn't, really. Government can't really do much to constrain capitalism. Most of what FDR did was wildly ineffective. Some of the weirdness in how corporate accounting works now go back to tax dodges then ( and since) . There were 90+% marginal rates; that's rather extreme. Nixon presided over the end of the Bretton Woods Accord but that particular system was already worn out. Some credit the end of Bretton Woods with the rise of international super capitalism. It's debatable. Nixon... wasn't all that clued in - he started wage and price controls. The stuff that FDR did was more like trying to coordinate things. Most of it didn't work. They did put large corporate entities into contracting big time, of course, because of the War. Reagan? Didn't really do much but talk. He had tax increases advertised as tax cuts, but the rest was rhetoric. A lot of Reagan's spending was undoing damage done by Nixon to military budgets. Some of it - like Star Wars - was just kinda crazy. Bluff. The PATCO strike was rather a one off union busting thing; it really wasn't part of a larger pattern. It's just the the large monolithic corporation was evolving out. With that went the ability of unions to bargain. McMegan has some thoughts here: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/e023c820e0110130a0d758d38561c600 http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/e023c820e0110130a0d758... Agree, disagree - she's on the money as to the issues to my limited understanding.
Tycho 12y ago
This strikes me as fake. Maybe entirely written by Wells, or someone else. I thought this bit was interesting: On the other hand we have the class of the poor, the exploited class, which owns neither factories nor works, nor banks, which is compelled to live by selling its labour power to the capitalists and which lacks the opportunity to satisfy its most elementary requirements. What are these elementary requirements and aren't they now satisfied?
- yukichan 12y ago
  Wells didn't have a recording device, so to perfectly record such large, articulate and complicated back and forths in a conversation probably involved some ghostwriting from memory on Well's part. It was a different time.
- alyxr 12y ago
  > What are these elementary requirements Food, water, housing, clothing, healthcare, education. The list is long, but basic. I'm sure you can come up with the rest. > and aren't they now satisfied? Not for the vast majority of people living in the vast majority of countries. Even in your own, I'm sure imperialist country, huge masses of the population are in want.
  - Tycho 12y ago
    Well, let's see, I live in the UK. We have running, clean water in every part of the country, I've never heard of any problems relating to people going thirsty or becoming ill from the supply. Likewise with food, I haven't heard of anyone actually starving, and while you could conceivably run out of money to buy food, there's a safety net of food banks. Clothing is very cheap - for a day's wages you could buy enough clothes to last years. Education is provided for everyone to a level beyond what is necessary for most jobs, and that's before you consider the subsidised further education and of course the vast reams of learning material available for free on the internet (access to which is provided in public libraries). Healthcare is also provided for everyone via the NHS. You can of course get better education and healthcare through private means, but most people don't bother even if they can afford it (unless they can easily afford it). Which leaves just housing - only 0.1% of the people literally do not have a place to stay, and local authorities are obliged to provide accommodation for those people if they apply. There are also large private charities to address this issue. So, is there more stuff we should add to the list that would make it more obvious how huge masses of the population are in want?
steve_benjamins 12y ago
Fascinating how important the questions of class and revolution are in this conversation (from both Stalin and Wells). Equally interesting is how theoretical and ideological the answers are. Great read!
- akirarei 12y ago
  What I find even more interesting is that in our time class is not a subject at all. We go along like the concept of social classes was never thought of. And as for the subject of revolution, we glance over it like a ghost from the past. We act as (a society and a culture) though the current system will last forever although history, as both Stalin and Wells points out, shows us that social and economic systems gets replaced, in many cases by force.
  - subdane 12y ago
    With such a huge middle class in the 20th century in the U.S. and the collapse of the Soviet empire, I think a lot of politicians, economists and media pundits felt that class was no longer an issue. I suspect it will become more widely discussed again if our current economic trends continue.
    - vidarh 12y ago
      What I'm seeing is that people are raising the questions, but are largely oblivious to the historical discussions of the same questions. E.g. people are constantly - especially in tech circles - raising the spectre of automation of production and how we will deal with it in terms of unemployment, worrying about large numbers of people being plunged into unemployment, as if this is a question nobody has considered. But that was one of Marx' core criticisms of capitalism: That he believed that while it would bring production to a point where poverty could be entirely eliminated for the first time in history, rather than doing so, its dynamics would instead lead to the paradox of overproduction and plunging millions (back) into poverty at the same time. People didn't use to ask these questions, and when they did, if you brought up Marx' you used to get into a flamewar, and death threats were not uncommon well into the 90's. Today you tend to get a reasoned discussion and honest questions.
jrochkind1 12y ago
The little preface says that Wells was critisized for being too 'deferential' toward Stalin (Wells was a socialist, of course). It is actually striking to me... today, one can imagine NO journalist engaging in as _confrontational_ an interview with ANY politician or person in political power. Politicians today don't even expect to talk about ideas, certainly not with journalists for publication, let alone to be challenged on ideas in such conversations. It's also interesting to be reminded that Stalin was indeed a guy who could talk about ideas.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  >today, one can imagine NO journalist engaging in as _confrontational_ an interview with ANY politician or person in political power. Just a guess, but are you saying this from an US POV? As an USian, I can't imagine seeing journalists confront or challenge a politician except by accident. Even when those accidents happen, the journalists and civility become the center of a follow-up media frenzy, rather than the subjects (the lives and deaths of millions.) By contrast, I see confrontation in a lot of (less consolidated, less war-profiteering) non-US media constantly. Paxman would be hounded out of the industry within days here.
  - philwelch 12y ago
    You can be selectively confrontational. Even in a dishonest way. Just watch Bill O'Reilly sometimes.
  - kybernetikos 12y ago
    I prefer Stephen Sackur to Paxman. Sometimes with Paxman it seems a bit unnecessary. Stephen Sackur treats the whole thing very professionally, but will still ask the difficult questions.
  - lostlogin 12y ago
    Came here and read your comment immediately after seeing the link I've left. A (perceived?) weak press in the US has a way to fall before it get to the level seen today in Russia. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/20/russian-politician-orders-aides-to-violently-rape-pregnant-journalist-at-press-conference/ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/20/russian-politician-ord...
vijayboyapati 12y ago
The interview is interesting from the perspective of economic history because it reveals the prevailing thinking of the era; namely that capitalism leads to "anarchy" in production. What Stalin and others did not appreciate is that the free market produces a "hidden order", which was understood by many 18th and 19th century economists. Another major error of the era was the belief that central planning of an economy - socialism - could replace capitalism. There was a major debate at the time, now known as the economic calculation debate[1], between socialist economists Harold Laski and Oscar Lange on the one hand and liberal economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek on the other. In the 20's Mises had made the stunning argument that allocation of capital was impossible without the price function that is inherent to the capitalist system[2]. Laski and Lange obviously disagreed and provided the socialist counter argument. It was many years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that socialist philosopher and historian Robert Heilbroner admitted in the New Yorker "It turns out, of course, that Mises was right. The Soviet system has long been dogged by a method of pricing that produced grotesque misallocations of effort".[3] Still, many do not understand or appreciate the importance of economic calculation and the price function in the rational allocation of capital, which has implications not only for states, but for corporations[4]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem [2] https://mises.org/econcalc.asp https://mises.org/econcalc.asp [3] Reflections after communism, Robert Heilbroner (apologies to those without a subscription) http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1990/09/10/1990_09_10_091_TNY_CARDS_000357236 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1990/09/10/1990_09_10_091_T... [4] http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae9_2_1.pdf http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae9_2_1.pdf
- pessimizer 12y ago
  Your claims are a lot more controversial than you're making them appear. It's intellectually dishonest to present them as settled fact.
  - forrealx 12y ago
    Hardly. If you suppress overt pricing system, hidden ones always emerges. Usually, they're based on "favors" and "threats." Of course, they're a lot less effective and far more dangerous since they're dictated by, and subject to, the whims of the socialists. "Women also submitted to Beria's sexual advances in exchange for the promise of freeing their relatives from the Gulag. In one case, Beria picked up Tatiana Okunevskaya - a well-known Soviet actress - under the pretence of bringing her to perform for the Politburo. Instead he took her to his dacha where he offered to free her father and grandmother from NKVD prison if she submitted. He then raped her telling her 'scream or not, doesn't matter.' Yet Beria already knew her relatives had been executed months earlier. Okunevskaya was arrested shortly afterwards and sentenced to solitary confinement in the Gulag, from which she survived." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria
dang 12y ago
All: this article is on-topic for one reason: it is historically interesting. Predictable ideological tangents are not interesting. Please keep them out of this thread and off HN altogether. If it isn't clear whether a comment counts as a predictable ideological tangent, err on the side of assuming it does. I know it sounds arbitrary to declare what's "interesting", but (a) the term has developed a specialized meaning on Hacker News over the years, and (b) editorial judgment plays a role on this site.
- fludlight 12y ago
  Since HN seems to have an interest in Soviet history, I would recommend Darkness at Noon by Koestler and Khrushchev: The Years in Power by Medvedev.
  - ArkyBeagle 12y ago
    I can't recommend all of Solzhenitsyn enough. You'll be forgiven if you don't make it all the way through "1918"... I, frankly, didn't. Perhaps someday. also it never cease to astound me how deeply Boris Pasternak drew his picture of the thing. The David Lean film is almost better than the book, but the book is amazing.
- timcederman 12y ago
  Also interesting which I found out the other week - Stalin's granddaughter in her early 40s lives in Portland (and looks very much like a local). http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=www.parismatch.com%2FActu%2FInternational%2FLa-petite-fille-de-Staline-est-une-femme-libre-160318&edit-text= http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pre...
- davidw 12y ago
  So what do you think about the resulting discussion?
  - dang 12y ago
    Poor.
vidarh 12y ago
The class war part of the interview is interesting because it really highlights the main part where Stalin (and most Leninists) diverged from marxism. You see it clearly in Stalins later statement: "You, Mr Wells, evidently start out with the assumption that all men are good. I, however, do not forget that there are many wicked men. I do not believe in the goodness of the bourgeoisie." Where Marx saw capitalists (and workers) as forced by circumstance into playing an inevitable role in society - neither inherently good or bad -, Stalin saw capitalists as "wicked men". In general, a lot of the worst flaws of the Bolsheviks boils down to the near unwavering belief that they were on the side of good in a battle between good and evil, and an idea of a "working class" that they fetishised as near super-human. While Marx would agitate against specific people, he would not categorise groups of people in moral terms. He attacked ideas and behaviour, and expected people would change with circumstance: The capitalist behaves like a capitalist because that is what he needs to do to protect his own interests, and if he don't act as a capitalist, he won't remain one - he will eventually face financial ruin and become part of the working class, where he will act as a worker. In fact, in part I of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: "Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie. Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress." This treatment of a persons class as a matter of circumstance was essential to Marx: Large parts of Marxist theory was based on the foundation that politics in the large is defined by people acting broadly in their self-interest, moderated by their understanding of that interest (e.g. the extent to which a class "buys" the justifications the ruling class gives; consider for example Marx' Critique of the Gotha program, where he points out that the proposed program is meaningless when it writes about "fairness" in part because the current system of distribution is "fair" according to bourgeois standards - without being explicit, the word says nothing) But the world becomes so much easier to deal with when one can write off ones opponents as "wicked men".
marincounty 12y ago
When ever I mention anything about the current the gap between the rich and poor; I get posts deleted? So, I won't even comment on this article. I hope the Vigilant Moderators are happy?
ArkyBeagle 12y ago
The thing that is most interesting is that neither of them seem to have ever heard of "consumer surplus". This is two of the most ... "educated" men of the time; now the concept is much more widely understood. Say what you will of Milton Friedman, he'd done a lot to at least get people familiar with these sorts of concepts.

171 points by giorgiofontana 12y ago

Jun8 12y ago

"We Bolsheviks call it “self-criticism”. It is widely used in the USSR." Indeed! Coming out of Stalin, the irony of these word is unbearable.The first Moscow trial was to take place in two years.

nmrm 12y ago

This was a particularly interested/relevant excerpt from Wells. I think of the open source ethos as one small example of what he's calling for in the second paragraph: I object to this simplified classification of mankind into poor and rich. Of course there is a category of people which strive only for profit. But are not... people in the West for whom profit is not an end, who own a certain amount of wealth, who want to invest and obtain a profit from this investment, but who do not regard this as the main object?... During the past few years I have been much engaged in and have thought of the need for conducting propaganda in favour of Socialism and cosmopolitanism among wide circles of engineers, airmen, military technical people, etc. It is useless to approach these circles with two-track class-war propaganda. These people understand the condition of the world. They understand that it is a bloody muddle, but they regard your simple class-war antagonism as nonsense.

arethuza 12y ago
Credit to Wells for then saying: "They understand that it is a bloody muddle, but they regard your simple class-war antagonism as nonsense." I wonder if Wells was one of the last people to disagree with Stalin who didn't end up with a bullet in the back of their heads?
- dominotw 12y ago
  No. Lots of people disagreed with Stalin all the time. Famous example being Zhukov.
  - arethuza 12y ago
    True, but didn't Zhukov (perhaps the greatest general of WW2) come perilously close to being tried in the aftermath of WW2 - largely due to his personal reputation and international standing?
- dang 12y ago
  The Bolsheviks cultivated celebrity visitors from the Western left. It wouldn't have worked to shoot them. (Edit: Originally this comment had a moderation bit in it as well, but someone rightly pointed out to me that it isn't helpful to wear the moderator hat and make a regular-user comment in the same post. So I've edited that out. I considered restricting myself to only making moderator comments, but (a) that's never been how HN worked, (b) I was a user long before a moderator, and (c) I'd burn out from boredom.)
  - arethuza 12y ago
    For what it's worth, I apologise, mostly for the initial comment I made that mentioned the Ukraine - it looked very much like a partisan comment intented to reference the current conflict and, in all honesty, it wasn't. Sorry for any grief caused and keep up the good work. [I promise to engage more brain cells when posting on obviously highly emotive topics in future and, if I have any doubt, to not post].
    - dang 12y ago
      Thanks for being so kind about it. It means a lot.
  - amirmc 12y ago
    Two thoughts 1. Has anyone suggested making yourself a new moderator account? eg dang_mod for all mod-related comments. It might ease the mental burden for the reader (at the cost of increased mental burden and user-switching for you - so maybe not worth it). 2. As a simpler variant of the above, why not make two separate comments? I expect readers are capable of telling apart your user comment from the moderation if they're cleanly separated. Edit: The first option would also have the benefit of a user id with its own comment history.
    - dang 12y ago
      1. That would be easy to do, but it feels wrong to me. Not sure I can articulate why, other than that it's not the way HN has always worked. 2 is more or less what's what I'm going to do from now on.
- gaius 12y ago
  Stalin referred to his Western supporters as "useful idiots".
  - firstOrder 12y ago
    Maybe that's why Churchill stopped being a supporter of him.
- firstOrder 12y ago
  What happened to Fred Hampton when he disagreed with how blacks were being treated like second-class citizens in Chicago? The Kent State students who protested the US invasion of Cambodia? The Jackson State students who protested the US invasion of Cambodia? And so on...

arethuza 12y ago

Not one mention of the terrible famine in the Ukraine which had occurred over the two previous years. As Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, initially a supporter of the Soviets until he witnessed what their policies actually meant as a correspondent for the Guardian in Moscow: "The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind, ... without any consideration whatever of the consequences in human suffering"

osipov 12y ago
Have you ever read "The Grapes of Wrath"? Did Stalin cause the famine in the United States? It is purposeful selective attention to call out the terrible famine in the Ukraine in the 1930. My ancestors died of the same famine in Russia and I know of many Russians who lost members of their family to hunger in 1930s. There was a widespread famine at the time, caused by collectivization and industrialization policies to migrate from inefficient, low capital, individual-based farming practices to highly efficient, large scale, high capital practices. In Soviet Union it was an inhumane, ruthless collectivization. In United States it was a bit more humane, financial capital driven policy of moving individual farmers off their land. In both cases, there was no nationalistic or genocidal component. Attempts to portray the famine as targeted at Ukranians serves no purpose other than to divide Russians and Ukrainians and pit them against each other. Recent events in Ukraine show that this is exactly the policy of the United States.
- tokenadult 12y ago
  [Basis of knowledge here: descent from a large extended family of dry-land farmers who lived on the Great Plains during the Great Depression in the United States. And, yes, I have read the novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, which is required reading in many United States schools.] No, the situations in the two countries were not at all comparable. First of all, there was no widespread famine in the United States. I have close relatives who lived through that era in that place (they never moved from their family farms) and are now more than ninety years old. Second, there was no governmental effort to keep the people who thought they were best off moving from moving. Third, both before and after the interstate moves, most of the people who moved were land-owners. Fourth (maybe this should be first on the list), all of the adults in the United States during the Great Depression, other than most black people in the South, were voters and able to influence the political system. Just outside the region I wrote about first here, the region you mentioned first, were grassroots political movements to represent farmer rights. (Nothing of the kind existed under Stalin's dictatorship.) Here in Minnesota, the state branch of the Democratic Party is actually formally named the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, having been formed by a merger (just about exactly seventy years ago) between the state Democratic Party and the Farmer-Labor Party, a third-party movement so powerful that it elected a governor during its heyday. So, no, in the United States we look at the historical experience of Stalinism as a wholly negative example, one of the worst examples of mass irrationality and needless human suffering in the twentieth century. Where the various branches of my family have lived for generations, we know better than to take Stalin's policies as models of modernization or anything worthwhile.

beaknit 12y ago

great comment by nmrm Stalin, in particular, has been a fascination of mine. Anyone interested in learning how a man can literally seize control of the thoughts of millions of people - utterly - in an age when the radio was considered cutting-edge technology should read "Who Killed Kirov?" (http://amzn.to/1moOVmE http://amzn.to/1moOVmE) That book haunts me.

listic 12y ago

Very interesting. Was it ever translated into Russian? I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that it wasn't.

alyxr 12y ago
Stalin spoke Georgian and Russian, not English.
- dang 12y ago
  I think what listic may be referring to is that the Soviets conducted a more liberal discourse in their interactions with the Western press than they permitted domestically.
  - listic 12y ago
    Sorry if I was unclear. As a Russian myself, I wondered whether this interview, which we can read here in English, was ever, during the period between 1934 to now, translated from English into Russian. The most direct reason for this interest being to show it to my non-English-speaking friends.
    - dang 12y ago
      Ah, I get it. Sorry for the misunderstanding. I'd bet a translation exists somewhere (because Russians translate everything, or at least used to, and this class of material would be of obvious interest), but have zero idea how to find it. (Edit: uh, other than Google :))
krick 12y ago
Are you kidding? Of course it was! Simply searching for "уэллс сталин" in google would reveal it. Here, http://www.situation.ru/app/j_art_1202.htm http://www.situation.ru/app/j_art_1202.htm But, anyway, I'm interested which one should be considered closer to the original one. Obviously Wells published it the first time in English. But AFAIK Stalin didn't speak English and I can't find if Wells actually spoke Russian. And in some places of the interview I was actually interested in how exactly Stalin phrased it.

dominotw 12y ago

> But I have some experience in fighting for Socialism, and this experience tells me that if Roosevelt makes a real attempt to satisfy the interests of the proletarian class at the expense of the capitalist class, the latter will put another President in his place. The capitalists will say: Presidents come and Presidents go, but we go on for ever; if this or that President does not protect our interests, we shall find another. What can the President oppose to the will of the capitalist class? Thats the truth we have all resigned to ourselves unfortunately.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
But then Roosevelt was quite effective in putting the capitalists in their place for an entire generation, perhaps longer, until Nixon and later Reagan turn us to the right again.
- vidarh 12y ago
  That's putting it too strong. He reigned in some of their worst excesses, which were detrimental to the capitalist class as a whole just as much as it was detrimental to everyone else. "The capitalists" are not a single force - it's a mess of conflicting interests, just as the working class. And many of them have interests that are part aligned by parts of the working class. It's not black and white.
- ArkyBeagle 12y ago
  But he wasn't, really. Government can't really do much to constrain capitalism. Most of what FDR did was wildly ineffective. Some of the weirdness in how corporate accounting works now go back to tax dodges then ( and since) . There were 90+% marginal rates; that's rather extreme. Nixon presided over the end of the Bretton Woods Accord but that particular system was already worn out. Some credit the end of Bretton Woods with the rise of international super capitalism. It's debatable. Nixon... wasn't all that clued in - he started wage and price controls. The stuff that FDR did was more like trying to coordinate things. Most of it didn't work. They did put large corporate entities into contracting big time, of course, because of the War. Reagan? Didn't really do much but talk. He had tax increases advertised as tax cuts, but the rest was rhetoric. A lot of Reagan's spending was undoing damage done by Nixon to military budgets. Some of it - like Star Wars - was just kinda crazy. Bluff. The PATCO strike was rather a one off union busting thing; it really wasn't part of a larger pattern. It's just the the large monolithic corporation was evolving out. With that went the ability of unions to bargain. McMegan has some thoughts here: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/e023c820e0110130a0d758d38561c600 http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/e023c820e0110130a0d758... Agree, disagree - she's on the money as to the issues to my limited understanding.

Tycho 12y ago

This strikes me as fake. Maybe entirely written by Wells, or someone else. I thought this bit was interesting: On the other hand we have the class of the poor, the exploited class, which owns neither factories nor works, nor banks, which is compelled to live by selling its labour power to the capitalists and which lacks the opportunity to satisfy its most elementary requirements. What are these elementary requirements and aren't they now satisfied?

yukichan 12y ago
Wells didn't have a recording device, so to perfectly record such large, articulate and complicated back and forths in a conversation probably involved some ghostwriting from memory on Well's part. It was a different time.
alyxr 12y ago
> What are these elementary requirements Food, water, housing, clothing, healthcare, education. The list is long, but basic. I'm sure you can come up with the rest. > and aren't they now satisfied? Not for the vast majority of people living in the vast majority of countries. Even in your own, I'm sure imperialist country, huge masses of the population are in want.
- Tycho 12y ago
  Well, let's see, I live in the UK. We have running, clean water in every part of the country, I've never heard of any problems relating to people going thirsty or becoming ill from the supply. Likewise with food, I haven't heard of anyone actually starving, and while you could conceivably run out of money to buy food, there's a safety net of food banks. Clothing is very cheap - for a day's wages you could buy enough clothes to last years. Education is provided for everyone to a level beyond what is necessary for most jobs, and that's before you consider the subsidised further education and of course the vast reams of learning material available for free on the internet (access to which is provided in public libraries). Healthcare is also provided for everyone via the NHS. You can of course get better education and healthcare through private means, but most people don't bother even if they can afford it (unless they can easily afford it). Which leaves just housing - only 0.1% of the people literally do not have a place to stay, and local authorities are obliged to provide accommodation for those people if they apply. There are also large private charities to address this issue. So, is there more stuff we should add to the list that would make it more obvious how huge masses of the population are in want?

steve_benjamins 12y ago

Fascinating how important the questions of class and revolution are in this conversation (from both Stalin and Wells). Equally interesting is how theoretical and ideological the answers are. Great read!

akirarei 12y ago
What I find even more interesting is that in our time class is not a subject at all. We go along like the concept of social classes was never thought of. And as for the subject of revolution, we glance over it like a ghost from the past. We act as (a society and a culture) though the current system will last forever although history, as both Stalin and Wells points out, shows us that social and economic systems gets replaced, in many cases by force.
- subdane 12y ago
  With such a huge middle class in the 20th century in the U.S. and the collapse of the Soviet empire, I think a lot of politicians, economists and media pundits felt that class was no longer an issue. I suspect it will become more widely discussed again if our current economic trends continue.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    What I'm seeing is that people are raising the questions, but are largely oblivious to the historical discussions of the same questions. E.g. people are constantly - especially in tech circles - raising the spectre of automation of production and how we will deal with it in terms of unemployment, worrying about large numbers of people being plunged into unemployment, as if this is a question nobody has considered. But that was one of Marx' core criticisms of capitalism: That he believed that while it would bring production to a point where poverty could be entirely eliminated for the first time in history, rather than doing so, its dynamics would instead lead to the paradox of overproduction and plunging millions (back) into poverty at the same time. People didn't use to ask these questions, and when they did, if you brought up Marx' you used to get into a flamewar, and death threats were not uncommon well into the 90's. Today you tend to get a reasoned discussion and honest questions.

jrochkind1 12y ago

The little preface says that Wells was critisized for being too 'deferential' toward Stalin (Wells was a socialist, of course). It is actually striking to me... today, one can imagine NO journalist engaging in as _confrontational_ an interview with ANY politician or person in political power. Politicians today don't even expect to talk about ideas, certainly not with journalists for publication, let alone to be challenged on ideas in such conversations. It's also interesting to be reminded that Stalin was indeed a guy who could talk about ideas.

pessimizer 12y ago
>today, one can imagine NO journalist engaging in as _confrontational_ an interview with ANY politician or person in political power. Just a guess, but are you saying this from an US POV? As an USian, I can't imagine seeing journalists confront or challenge a politician except by accident. Even when those accidents happen, the journalists and civility become the center of a follow-up media frenzy, rather than the subjects (the lives and deaths of millions.) By contrast, I see confrontation in a lot of (less consolidated, less war-profiteering) non-US media constantly. Paxman would be hounded out of the industry within days here.
- philwelch 12y ago
  You can be selectively confrontational. Even in a dishonest way. Just watch Bill O'Reilly sometimes.
- kybernetikos 12y ago
  I prefer Stephen Sackur to Paxman. Sometimes with Paxman it seems a bit unnecessary. Stephen Sackur treats the whole thing very professionally, but will still ask the difficult questions.
- lostlogin 12y ago
  Came here and read your comment immediately after seeing the link I've left. A (perceived?) weak press in the US has a way to fall before it get to the level seen today in Russia. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/20/russian-politician-orders-aides-to-violently-rape-pregnant-journalist-at-press-conference/ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/20/russian-politician-ord...

vijayboyapati 12y ago

The interview is interesting from the perspective of economic history because it reveals the prevailing thinking of the era; namely that capitalism leads to "anarchy" in production. What Stalin and others did not appreciate is that the free market produces a "hidden order", which was understood by many 18th and 19th century economists. Another major error of the era was the belief that central planning of an economy - socialism - could replace capitalism. There was a major debate at the time, now known as the economic calculation debate[1], between socialist economists Harold Laski and Oscar Lange on the one hand and liberal economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek on the other. In the 20's Mises had made the stunning argument that allocation of capital was impossible without the price function that is inherent to the capitalist system[2]. Laski and Lange obviously disagreed and provided the socialist counter argument. It was many years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that socialist philosopher and historian Robert Heilbroner admitted in the New Yorker "It turns out, of course, that Mises was right. The Soviet system has long been dogged by a method of pricing that produced grotesque misallocations of effort".[3] Still, many do not understand or appreciate the importance of economic calculation and the price function in the rational allocation of capital, which has implications not only for states, but for corporations[4]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem [2] https://mises.org/econcalc.asp https://mises.org/econcalc.asp [3] Reflections after communism, Robert Heilbroner (apologies to those without a subscription) http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1990/09/10/1990_09_10_091_TNY_CARDS_000357236 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1990/09/10/1990_09_10_091_T... [4] http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae9_2_1.pdf http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae9_2_1.pdf

pessimizer 12y ago
Your claims are a lot more controversial than you're making them appear. It's intellectually dishonest to present them as settled fact.
- forrealx 12y ago
  Hardly. If you suppress overt pricing system, hidden ones always emerges. Usually, they're based on "favors" and "threats." Of course, they're a lot less effective and far more dangerous since they're dictated by, and subject to, the whims of the socialists. "Women also submitted to Beria's sexual advances in exchange for the promise of freeing their relatives from the Gulag. In one case, Beria picked up Tatiana Okunevskaya - a well-known Soviet actress - under the pretence of bringing her to perform for the Politburo. Instead he took her to his dacha where he offered to free her father and grandmother from NKVD prison if she submitted. He then raped her telling her 'scream or not, doesn't matter.' Yet Beria already knew her relatives had been executed months earlier. Okunevskaya was arrested shortly afterwards and sentenced to solitary confinement in the Gulag, from which she survived." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria

dang 12y ago

All: this article is on-topic for one reason: it is historically interesting. Predictable ideological tangents are not interesting. Please keep them out of this thread and off HN altogether. If it isn't clear whether a comment counts as a predictable ideological tangent, err on the side of assuming it does. I know it sounds arbitrary to declare what's "interesting", but (a) the term has developed a specialized meaning on Hacker News over the years, and (b) editorial judgment plays a role on this site.

fludlight 12y ago
Since HN seems to have an interest in Soviet history, I would recommend Darkness at Noon by Koestler and Khrushchev: The Years in Power by Medvedev.
- ArkyBeagle 12y ago
  I can't recommend all of Solzhenitsyn enough. You'll be forgiven if you don't make it all the way through "1918"... I, frankly, didn't. Perhaps someday. also it never cease to astound me how deeply Boris Pasternak drew his picture of the thing. The David Lean film is almost better than the book, but the book is amazing.
timcederman 12y ago
Also interesting which I found out the other week - Stalin's granddaughter in her early 40s lives in Portland (and looks very much like a local). http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=www.parismatch.com%2FActu%2FInternational%2FLa-petite-fille-de-Staline-est-une-femme-libre-160318&edit-text= http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pre...
davidw 12y ago
So what do you think about the resulting discussion?
- dang 12y ago
  Poor.

vidarh 12y ago

The class war part of the interview is interesting because it really highlights the main part where Stalin (and most Leninists) diverged from marxism. You see it clearly in Stalins later statement: "You, Mr Wells, evidently start out with the assumption that all men are good. I, however, do not forget that there are many wicked men. I do not believe in the goodness of the bourgeoisie." Where Marx saw capitalists (and workers) as forced by circumstance into playing an inevitable role in society - neither inherently good or bad -, Stalin saw capitalists as "wicked men". In general, a lot of the worst flaws of the Bolsheviks boils down to the near unwavering belief that they were on the side of good in a battle between good and evil, and an idea of a "working class" that they fetishised as near super-human. While Marx would agitate against specific people, he would not categorise groups of people in moral terms. He attacked ideas and behaviour, and expected people would change with circumstance: The capitalist behaves like a capitalist because that is what he needs to do to protect his own interests, and if he don't act as a capitalist, he won't remain one - he will eventually face financial ruin and become part of the working class, where he will act as a worker. In fact, in part I of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: "Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie. Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress." This treatment of a persons class as a matter of circumstance was essential to Marx: Large parts of Marxist theory was based on the foundation that politics in the large is defined by people acting broadly in their self-interest, moderated by their understanding of that interest (e.g. the extent to which a class "buys" the justifications the ruling class gives; consider for example Marx' Critique of the Gotha program, where he points out that the proposed program is meaningless when it writes about "fairness" in part because the current system of distribution is "fair" according to bourgeois standards - without being explicit, the word says nothing) But the world becomes so much easier to deal with when one can write off ones opponents as "wicked men".

marincounty 12y ago

When ever I mention anything about the current the gap between the rich and poor; I get posts deleted? So, I won't even comment on this article. I hope the Vigilant Moderators are happy?

ArkyBeagle 12y ago

The thing that is most interesting is that neither of them seem to have ever heard of "consumer surplus". This is two of the most ... "educated" men of the time; now the concept is much more widely understood. Say what you will of Milton Friedman, he'd done a lot to at least get people familiar with these sorts of concepts.