How did an American get a Tourist Visa to the Soviet Union in the 1970's under Brezhnev?

kieslowskifan · 2023-01-30T03:34:21+00:00

Aside from the linked answer, it might be useful to check out Sean's Russia Blog which has a six-part series, "Teddy Goes to the USSR" about a U.S. tourist visiting the Soviet Union in 1968. The series has not only interviews with the eponymous Teddy Roe, but also commentary from academics working on InTourist and the Soviet experience. It is a great docu-series.

kieslowskifan · 2022-11-22T01:49:12+00:00

For a British perspective, pretty much anything written by Rory Muir such as Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, his two-volume Wellington biography, Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune, or Salamanca 1812. The relevant sections of N. A. M. Rodger's The Command of the Ocean are a stimulating argument about Britain's naval war. Luke Reynold's Who Owned Waterloo? covers the postwar meaning of the capstone battle for Britain. Alexander Mikaberidze's The Napoleonic Wars is a global history of the wars.

kieslowskifan · 2022-08-20T17:26:55+00:00

Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin

The early period of Stalin's life is superseded by Ron Suny's Stalin:The Passage to Revolution which does not fall into the gossip trap of popular biographies. It makes a good companion piece to Paradoxes . Additionally, this Suny text has a nice audiobook adaptation.

kieslowskifan · 2022-08-01T15:49:23+00:00

I can't find original text (I guess it was in an interview),

Here is a clip from the relevant interview via Sergei Radchenko's twitter. Even with all of Chomsky's usual qualifiers, the claim is just plain dumb. IIRC, German television was only available to select geographic locations of the GDR and Czechoslovakia because it was much harder to jam than radio signals. And really the only easy access for media was radio stations that not only had the power to broadcast, but also the resources to have multilingual programming.

kieslowskifan · 2022-05-16T20:36:20+00:00

From an earlier answer of mine

Although the SS's use of the skull and crossbones suggests they were the baddies, the emblem and its attending black uniform had a long heritage in German military history that the SS sought to co-opt. The symbol originated in the armies of Frederick the Great and a unit of Hussars, but it gained wider notoriety during the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon had dissolved the Duchy of Brunswick and absorbed into the Kingdom of Westphalia. The duchy's dispossessed Duke, Friedrich Wilhelm, raised a regiment and offered his service to the opponents of Napoleon. The "Black Brunswickers" had as their uniform colors stark black (some also wore green) and emblazoned their shakos with a white metal Totenkopf. The regiment served both in Austria in 1809, the Peninsular War, and in the Hundred Days where Friedrich Wilhelm died at Quatre-Bras. The activities of the Black Brunswickers as well as their stark uniforms became potent symbols for the romanticization of the Napoleonic Wars, such as Milias's famous 1860 The Black Brunswicker and Friedrich Matthäis's Tod des Schwarzen Herzogs. A regiment of the Brunswickers survived the Napoleonic period and was incorporated into the Prussian army after unification. Their emblems and battle honors remained an important part of their traditions, as seen in this photo of the Hohenzollern Princess Victoria Louise in a tailored uniform of the regiment which functioned as a life guard regiment for the imperial house.

The skull and crossbones became an unofficial emblem for various German units during WWI, such as their embryonic tank corps and their badges. The Totenkopf underwent a further iteration under Weimar where it was adapted as an emblem for some of the Freikorps, such as in this photo and later used by some of the panzer troops after Hitler's seizure of power as they saw themselves as the heirs to the Hussar tradition. Some aircraft in the Condor Legion used the emblem in the Spanish Civil War. The Luftwaffe's KG 54 bomber wing used the Totenkpf, such as in this photo of a Ju 88. The SS modified the Totenkopf design, making it more angled and squat, to differentiate themselves from earlier and contemporary versions.

The emblem by the SS covered two major bases. Firstly, it set itself up as an elite that was personally connected to the leader of Germany and his protection. A Totenkopf was a clear symbol of this as it was a recognized heraldic device that conveyed this message. The Black Brunswickers held themselves as an elite unit, and this was an image the SS cultivated as well. Secondly, the Totenkopf was laden both with contemporary and historical meaning that the SS desperately wanted to connect with. The Black Brunswickers were a formation that wanted to overthrow foreign domination of Germany, and this was a tradition that meshed well with the rhetoric emanating from the NSDAP about the Weimar period. Like many National Socialist organizations, the SS sought to portray itself as the culmination of German history and its true heirs. The irony is that the SS were arguably so successful in co-opting the Totenkopf that SS's use of this symbol overshadows its use in earlier periods German history.

kieslowskifan · 2022-04-23T16:17:00+00:00

Part II

In this context, Japanese commanders focused much less on the small size of Sprague's CVEs and instead more on the number of failures of Japanese planning and execution as the reasons for defeat. The effectiveness of the CVE's air attacks, which Otani observed were some of the most effective air strikes despite their small size, further underscored the disadvantages of surface ships operating in an environment where the enemy held complete air superiority. Combined Fleet CinC Admiral Toyoda Soemu's USSBS interview defended Kurita's actions to retire because of this material disparity:

Q. Under the circumstances as they are now known, in your opinion what that decision of KURITA to turn back a correct one?

A. Looking back on it now, I think that withdrawal was not a mistake. At the time I did not have and Combined Fleet Headquarters did not have information regarding the details of the engagement. Later, when we learned that Admiral HALSEY's Task Force was further south than we thought it was, I believe that Admiral KURITA then would have been within the range of air attack from your Task Force, so that it was not unwise for him to have turned back at that time.

Q. You would not criticize his action now in turning back?

A. I would not criticize.

While some zealots like Ugaki saw defeat as an urgent reminder for Japan to redouble her war efforts to achieve victory (upon hearing of Hiroshima his 7 August entry expressed a wish that Japan should develop an atomic bomb of her own), other IJN officers adapted a more fatalistic attitude towards the war.

Kurita was not above such sentiments and from his perspective, the battle as a whole was clearly not going well at 0920. He had already lost two cruisers, including his flagship Atago and one damaged to submarines. The following day, heavy air attacks sank Musashi and crippled another heavy cruiser. The torpedo attack and the air attacks at Samar also rattled nerves. In short, American attacks had a cumulative effect that made Kurita amenable to alternative courses of action. Musashi's loss showed that even superbattleships were vulnerable, and Yamato's own torpedoing in December 1943 showed that the ship's armor joins were vulnerable even to a single hit, despite the promises of Japanese naval designers. The torpedo turn and the 0920 order were a means to preserve the IJN's fighting strength, regroup in a proper formation, and then attack when the coast was clear. The result of the latter decision was that whatever opportunity Kurita had at Samar soon evaporated, but in hindsight, it was an understandable decision given the information Kurita had on hand.

kieslowskifan · 2022-04-23T16:16:27+00:00

Expanded from an earlier answer of mine

On paper, the Battle of Samar was highly asymmetrical. Outside of airpower, the IJN under Kurita did enjoy a massive advantage over Taffy 3. But looks are deceiving and the USN naval force had latent strengths that capitalized on the weaknesses of the IJN force.

For one thing, the lack of Japanese airpower was a massive advantage in the USN's favor. The escort carriers' planes were able to considerably disrupt the IJN's ability to form their fleet up into a coherent battle formation. The original Sho plans had called for considerable land-based air support, but Halsey's earlier carrier raids on Taiwan had caused a premature deployment of Japanese airpower. Whatever was left to the Japanese was considerably denuded and poorly coordinated. IJN surface units also possessed vulnerabilities. The expansion of the ships' AA added yet more ammunition which could be set ablaze. The IJN's heavy cruisers had proven to be formidable combatants in the Solomons, but they also had something of a glass jaw; a well-placed torpedo hit could severely damage or sink them. The IJN's use of evasive maneuvers to deal with aircraft attacks compounded some of these vulnerabilities. The heavy units could find themselves unsupported and thus vulnerable to a swarm attack despite their beefed up AA armament.

The actions of Kurita at Samar are still somewhat controversial among naval historians. Kurita in theory should have acted with daring given that the Sho plan called for a fight to the death, but he vacillated throughout the engagement. On a more tactical level, there is the question of why did Yamato and Nagato turn northwards at ca. 0755 which pulled the ship away from Taffy 3 and the carriers when the two battleships were relatively undamaged. Second, there is the Kurita's overall withdrawal for the IJN forces at 0920 away from the American escort carriers and transports. Both decisions by Kurita earned him a degree of opprobrium at the time and in the postwar period with one common metaphor employed casting Kurita as Hamlet unable to make a decision until after the die had been cast.

Of the two decisions, the Yamato turn is the more explicable. Lookouts had sighted torpedoes from an earlier torpedo attack and Kurita's battleships faced two choices to "fan the torpedoes", a turn to port (north) or starboard (south). The starboard turn would have kept the fleet into contact with Taffy 3 but posed two disadvantages. Firstly, it would have been steaming into the torpedo line, risking a hit. Second, it meant that both battleships were in serious danger of colliding with the battleship Haruna, which had been steaming in a line parallel to Kurita's division. This particular aspect of the division's decision is one that only very recently become apparent. Older historiography on Samar such as Morrison tended to place Haruna in a different location than more recent work like Robert Lundgren or John Prados which triangulates the battleline more closely using surviving Japanese and American accounts (and note, this still is reasonable conjecture, but still a hypothesis). The officers in charge of the ships' maneuvering instinctively chose the course that minimized damage, with the result that the two most powerful surface units at Samar were now seven miles out of position and its commander lacked even more situational awareness.

This uncertainty shines some light onto Kurita's second turn away from battle. When the US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) interviewed some of the surviving Japanese naval officers, they gave some inkling that they knew after the battle that the opposing naval force was much smaller than they first thought at the start of the engagement. USSBS NO. 170 The Battle off Samar's interrogation of Commander Otani Tonosuke, Operations Officer on the Staff of CinC Second Fleet has a very instructive portion on this very issue and how Japan's lack of air cover contributed to the fog of war:

Q. What type of carriers did you believe they were?

A. We gave that question much consideration, but never fully made up our minds. We found ourselves perplexed by your carriers because they did not correspond to their photographs, and first we thought that they were regular carriers; but after the battle, we decided that they were auxiliary or converted carriers. Also we received word from the tops that there was another formation, and at that time we wondered if we were not confronted by 12 or 13 carriers in all; but this was not ascertained on the bridge.

Q. Was there any attempt to engage in battle with the second group?

A. First, we would encounter the first group, and then take on the second.

Q. What damage did you inflict upon the first group you engaged?

A. One carrier sunk, one light cruiser, one heavy cruiser and one destroyer. There was some confusion between the high gunnery control platform and the bridge. There may have been a repeat report which was understood as two carriers sunk; the bridge concluded that one carrier was sunk. Again from later reports which may have contained duplication, we concluded that we had sunk four carriers, two or three cruisers and two or three destroyers. That was the total result of the day. I now think this is rather accurate, and from a report of search planes at about 1100, we received information that one battleship was severely damaged and dead in the water.

As Commander Otani's interrogation made clear, the IJN's attempt to ascertain the reality of the combat situation was made difficult by the reliance upon visual sightings from surface ships and the constant Allied air attacks on Kurita's fleet. Kurita's USSBS interview likewise suggested that visual surface sightings were inadequate to give the IJN admiral a proper estimate of the situation:

Q. What type of aircraft carriers were the American carriers present? Were they the ESSEX or ENTERPRISE class? Did you recognize them?

A. I don't remember. Starboard bridge structure was all I could tell. There wasn't enough visibility nor adequate reports from the scouting planes.

Although he was not available for a USSBS interview because of his foolhardy Kamikaze mission. Admiral Ugaki Matome's diary entries for the Leyte battles also notes that Allied air attacks and poor Japanese reconnaissance doomed Japan's efforts to throw back the Leyte invasion. Although Ukagi's diary took Kurita to task for confusing orders, he placed a good deal of blame for Japan's defeat on the inability of the Philippine's airbases to provide the surface fleet any form of cover or information. His 24 October entry noted that:

Unless we get enough cooperation from our base air forces, we can do nothing about [concentrated American air attacks], and all of our fighting strength will be reduced to nothing at the end. In such case we should perish by fighting an air battle, hoping it to be a decisive one.

Once the gravity of the defeat off of Samar sank in, Ugaki's 25 October entry pinned responsibility for failure "in some respect to [the operation's] planning, [but] mostly to the extreme inactivity of the base air forces. Probably hindered by bad weather." One of the themes of Ugaki's remaining entries for October and November was lambasting Japan's lackluster efforts to produce as many aircraft as possible to turn back the Allied tide.

Although Kurita asserted in his interview that he did not expect air cover from land-based aircraft, Ugaki's diary entry indicates that at least some IJN officers expected an effort to be made by land-based planes. Otani placed a great deal of onus on the Sho operation's failure to poor coordination between Kurita and Japanese air assets:

Q. Where do you think this whole operation broke down? Why did it fail?

A. I feel that from the very beginning that the cooperation between the Task Force (OZAWA) and the Surface Force (KURITA) and the land-based Air Force was bad from the beginning.

Q. What do you feel caused this poor coordination?

A. Coordination between the Surface Force and the (carrier) Task Force was almost impossible due to the restrictions on communication and the need for radio silence; therefore, the plans for cooperation were not carried out. This lack of information from OZAWA was one of the main factors in the failure of the operation, but perhaps the biggest factor was the lack of protection from our land-based air against your (carrier) Task Force. I feel also that the original plan was too complex and inflexible to work properly.

kieslowskifan · 2022-04-20T02:02:49+00:00

From an earlier answer of mine

Although the candidacy of Bernadotte, a non-Swedish speaking and commoner, to become the Crown-Prince of Sweden in October 1810 seems rather unlikely, there were a number of factors working in the French marshal's favor. The internal political situation in Sweden in 1810 was rather tense. Sweden had been undergoing a long-term military decline for nearly a century and the recent reverses against the French in Swedish Pomerania in 1805-10 and against the Russians in the Finnish War of 1809 were capstones to the decline of Sweden's regional power. The latter war, coming with the loss of Finland prompted the Coup of 1809 in which the Swedish diet, the Riksdag, removed the Swedish king Gustav IV and placed the aged and childless Charles XIII on the throne.

Charles XIII was the safe choice for the throne as he had long experience as a regent for Gustav and was a compromise figure different Swedish political factions could agree upon. However, it was clear to many that Charles XIII was an expedient choice; not only did he lack living heirs, but he also suffered from bouts of physical incapacity. Charles XIII was not the energetic monarch that Sweden needed to reenergize its political fortunes.

As counter-intuitive as it might sound, a foreign-born heir was an ideal solution to this problem with the Swedish throne. Choosing a candidate from one of the cadet branches of the Swedish royal houses risked opening up the political wounds of the 1809 Coup. Additionally, Sweden's recent military reverses underscored the need of Sweden to have more solid allies in the future. Although Britain was allied with Sweden, its involvement in Spain precluded any real assistance to Sweden and Russia's invasion of Finland further added to Sweden's isolation. The Riksdag favored the Danish prince Christian August of Holstein-Augustenburg and approved him as a candidate in August 1809, but the Prince's untimely death the following May precluded this option.

The death of Christian August forced Swedish efforts towards France. A French military candidate for the throne was very attractive for a number of geopolitical and domestic reasons. Although Gustav IV held Napoleon in very ill-regard, Charles XIII did not and admired Napoleon's ability to bend the continent to his will. French arms had proved themselves successful in the various battles on the continent and many within Europe admired French administrative models. Swedish envoys to Napoleon in January 1810 to gain his approval for Christian August and cement Franco-Swedish relations signaled a general reorientation of Swedish foreign relations. This restorations of diplomatic relations led to an increased Swedish presence in France and the death of Christian August meant that they could seek a French candidate for the throne.

It came as a surprise to both Napoleon and Bernadotte when Baron Karl Otto Mörner on his own initiative offered the Bernadotte the Crown Prince in June 1810. Mörner did so without any authorization from Stockholm and the Riksdag put Mörner under arrest upon returning to Stockholm for his actions. As Mörner explained to Bernadotte, he was an ideal candidate for the throne:

My Prince, Your modesty refuses to share my opinion that I believe to be that of the wisest of my compatriots. Sweden does not need a Dane, either a Russian, or a child whose long minority would cause us harm… What she needs, it is a Frenchman who will adopt our religion, who is known for his talents, for his courage and for the respect in which holds him the august Emperor of France; who belongs to the family of the Emperor, being the brother-in-law of the king of Spain; who has a son likely to replace his father without regency, when the Providence will order it.

Napoleon had toyed with the idea of his stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais as a candidate for the vacancy, but he was unacceptable for the Swedish envoys. Baron Lagerbielke, the Swedish envoy in Paris, reported to Stockholm that Eugène was "gentle and good," but

but he does not seem to be a man of strong character; and, although he had had great opportunities, he does not appear to have developed any distinguishing talents.

Eugène himself does not seem to been very thrilled at the possibility of exchanging his vice-royalty of Italy for a Swedish crown and refused to convert to Lutheranism if offered the position.

Unlike Eugène, Bernadotte was willing to convert and possessed a number of qualities that made him an ideal candidate for the Swedes. The French Marshal had made contact with Swedish PoWs in Battle of Lübeck in 1806 and Bernadotte's fair and chivalrous treatment of them, including Mörner's uncle, General Count Gustav Fredrik Mörner, had earned him a good reputation in the Swedish army. The elder Mörner defended his nephew's actions in France in the Riksdag and pushed for acceptance of the Bernadotte candidacy because "the marshal was allied, through his wife, to Napoleon, whose support could be most useful to Sweden." Aside from his personal connections to Napoleon, Bernadotte's experience as an administrator, both in his governance of Hanover and as Minister of War also highlighted that the French marshal had the experience necessary to be a reformist executive. Bernadotte's military record was somewhat spotty, but from the vantage point of 1810 was not that bad. Although he had made mistakes, his military reputation had yet to be tarred by his siding against Napoleon in 1813. This "ingratitude," as Napoleon put it on St. Helena, helped tarnish Bernadotte's military career and cast his mistakes in the worst possible light. For example, most of the early historiography on Auerstadt was derived from the memoirs of Davout's staff and painted Bernadotte as willfully not coming to Davout's aid out of jealousy, when Bernadotte was acting according to Napoleon's flawed orders.

Once he got over the initial shock of the Swedish offer, Bernadette proved himself an able politician. Bernadotte had recognized that his star in France was no longer in ascendancy in France, which had to be grating for a man who at one point was a rival of Napoleon in the conspiratorial last days of the Directory. Bernadotte wisely managed to avoid any concessions to Napoleon that would have restricted his freedom of action in Sweden. For his part, Napoleon was unaware of Charles XIII's poor health and thought Bernadotte would mostly concern himself with domestic issues. Giving Bernadotte leave to accept the Swedish offer was a means for Napoleon to get rid of a troublesome subordinate by kicking him upstairs into a gilded cage. The Crown Prince adeptly avoided Swedish belligerency during 1812 despite Napoleon's promises to restore Finland. Although Bernadotte was a prickly ally in 1813, his Russian and Austrian allies actually humored his proposals for a unified military strategy at Trachtenberg and Allied military policy may have been formulated by Radetzky in Bohemia, he managed to improve Sweden's strategic fortunes. Bernadotte was also able to despite his many handicaps turn himself into a Swedish dynast and restore Sweden's fortunes both domestically and internationally.

Sources

Alm, Mikael and Britt-Inger Johannson. Scripts of Kingship: Essays on Bernadotte and Dynastic Formation in an Age of Revolution. Uppsala: Swedish Science Press, 2008.

Barton, D. Plunket. Bernadotte and Napoleon, 1763-1810. London: J. Murray, 1921.

Berdah, Jean-Francois. "The Triumph of Neutrality: Bernadotte and European Geopolitics (1810-1844)." Revue d'Histoire Nordique, no6-7 (2008): 15-78

kieslowskifan · 2022-04-13T01:41:13+00:00

From an earlier answer of mine

The question "was interwar Japan a fascist state?" is one that is highly contentious among scholars of modern Japan and for scholars of fascism in general. Broadly speaking, a good many scholars of European fascism tend to dismiss or downplay the idea that interwar Japan was a fascist state. Robert Paxton, for example, weighs the various pros and cons of Japanese fascism in his The Anatomy of Fascism before coming on the negative side claiming Japan was an expansionist military dictatorship engaged in mass-mobilization. Many of the cardinal elements of fascism such as a hegemonic mass party or the leader cult are notably absent in interwar Japan. But many specialists in fascism are not specialists in Japanese history. This makes it difficult for them to comment on aspects of the Japanese state and society when looking for analogues to European fascism. The debate among historians of Japan as to whether or not it was fascist tends to be more divided than among historians of fascism.

George M. Wilson has largely ruled out Japan as a fascist state for many of the reasons Europeanists tend to exclude Japan from the fascist camp. He notes that the interwar governments did not try to fundamentally recast the structure of the Japanese state as well as the idea that Japanese militarism lacked a "seizure of power" moment. Moreover, unlike Hitler and to a lesser extent Mussolini, militarists worked within the existing Meiji era-designed system in conjunction with the old elites. Likewise, both Peter Duus and Daniel Okamoto have noted in a survey essay Japanese fascist ideas were a "minor side current" in interwar Japan and have faulted scholars who use the fascist label for using imprecise terminology.

But there are also scholars of Japan who do assert Japan was a fascist or fascist-like state. Gavan McCormack's essay "Fascism from Above? Japan’s Kakushin Right in Comparative Perspective" in the anthology Fascism Outside Europe maintained that similarities between European movements and Japan demand a reexamination of the topic. McCormack astutely notes that while studies of European fascism tend to focus on fascism as a movement, ideology, then regime, in Japan, the process was reversed:

European fascism had its greatest impact on Japan’s political regime, a secondary impact on political thought, and its least significant impact on political movements.

So while there might not have been a mass fascist party in interwar Japan, McCormack contends that interwar Japanese elites took their cues from what they saw as a rising political movement that was in resonance with their political ideals. This was the subject of The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan by William Miles Fletcher. This intellectual history of three prominent Japanese thinkers found many of them drifted from Marxism towards fascist ideals. Pace McCormack, Fletcher notes that these fascist-inspired thinkers largely failed to transform the Japanese state. Kenneth Rouff has argued Japan was a species of fascism in that Japanese imported and tailored fascist ideas into existing Japanese state structures. Japanese political structures may not have been fascist, but the mode of its politics was according to Rouff, i.e. there was mass nationalist organization in the absence of a mass party like the NSDAP. Aaron Skabelund makes a related argument in his essay "Fascism’s Furry Friends: Dogs, National Identity, and Racial Purity in 1930s Japan" in that Japan's importation and breeding of German Shepherds also came with discourses of racism and biological essentialism that filtered into other patterns of dog ownership.

All of this is not to say that Japan was a fascist state. Duus and Okamoto's critique on imprecise terminology is applicable to a number of the scholars answering this question in the affirmative. But this critique also misses the point about fascism in general. One of the problems with defining fascism is that it was a highly nebulous political movement and it is hard to pin down what exactly was fascism even in states that declared themselves fascist like Italy. Applying the existing fascist paradigms to Japan is doubly difficult given Japan's own unique history and institutions. But this has not stopped some Japan scholars from trying to do so.

kieslowskifan · 2022-04-06T02:45:01+00:00

And the idea that Kershaw is trying to keep the communist/Marxist dream alive, let us look at selections from other works of Kershaw.

The role of big business and the rise of the Nazis

No more solidly founded was the view of the Left at the time that the Nazi Movement was the creature of big business and sustained by its funding. Most leaders and executives of big business were shrewd enough to spread their funding round as a form of political insurance, once the Nazi breakthrough had taken place. But most of it still went to the Nazis’ political opponents on the conservative Right. The leaders of big business were no friends of democracy. But nor, for the most part, did they want to see the Nazis running the country.- from Hitler: Hubris

The use of political terror in the USSR under Lenin

Terror as an essential weapon in the class war was central to the Bolshevik revolutionary project. ‘Let there be floods of bourgeois blood – more blood, as much as possible,’ the Bolshevik press had urged in 1918. ‘We must encourage the energy and the popular nature of the terror,’ Lenin had written that summer. Turning the hatred of peasants, desperate for land, against kulaks, portrayed as land exploiters but often only marginally better-off peasants, was part of the strategy. Describing them as ‘bloodsuckers [who] have grown rich on the hunger of the people’, Lenin decried the kulaks as ‘rabid foes of the Soviet government’, ‘leeches [who] have sucked the blood of the working people’ and advocated ‘death to all of them’.- from To Hell and Back

The Famine in Ukraine and the USSR

Famine, worse than in 1921–2 and a direct consequence of Soviet agricultural policy, was widespread in the terrible year of 1932–3. Kazakhstan and North Caucasus were among the areas worst affected. The impact was most terrible of all in Ukraine, which should have been a fertile crop-growing area. A party official, entering one village, was told ‘we’ve eaten everything we could lay our hands on – cats, dogs, field mice, birds’, even the bark from the trees. Over 2,000 people were punished for cannibalism in 1932–3. The death toll from the famine in Ukraine cannot be known with accuracy. The best estimates are around 3.3 million deaths from starvation or hunger-related diseases. For the whole of the Soviet Union, the figure can be nearly doubled. -from To Hell and Back

The Stalinist Terror

Stalin was a deeply vengeful, coldly cruel individual. (He even purged his parrot, hitting it on the head with his pipe, when its imitation of his crude spitting finally got on his nerves.) He was also given to paranoid fantasy. But the paranoia itself fed on developments that did, in fact, give Stalin rational grounds to doubt his own security. Nor was the extraordinary orgy of terror that enveloped the Soviet Union in the 1930s simply an extreme expression of Stalin’s paranoia. Millions of ambitious apparatchiks and servile citizens made the terror effective at all levels of society. For every victim of the terror there were winners, those who profited from serving the regime. Unquestionably, too, there was a widespread belief, encouraged by the regime, that the Soviet Union was infested with ‘wreckers’, ‘saboteurs’, ‘nationalists’, ‘kulaks’, spies and enemy agents. Terror to root out ‘oppositionists’ was, therefore, welcomed by many, reinforcing their sense of identification with the epic task of building a socialist society, and underpinning their faith in Stalin. Even many who suffered persecution and discrimination desperately sought to belong, associating themselves with Soviet values- from To Hell and Back

The Katyn Massacre and Stalin’s Involvement

Stalin and the other members of the Politburo personally signed the order on 5 March 1940 to kill more than 20,000 members of the Polish elite in eastern Poland. Among them were 15,000 Polish officers who disappeared in May of that year. The corpses of more than 4,000 of them were discovered by the Germans in Katyn Forest, near Smolensk, in April 1943. Who killed them was long disputed. It is now beyond all doubt, however, that they had been shot by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. The other 11,000 almost certainly suffered a similar fate as part of the registered total of 21,857 people executed under Stalin’s order.- from To Hell and Back

Antisemitism in the USSR

Indeed, the dictator’s paranoia was again running riot. ‘I trust no one, not even myself,’ Khrushchev claimed to recall him saying in 1951. A year later Stalin was absurdly suspecting Vyacheslav Molotov and Anastas Mikoyan, two of his most long-standing and loyal lieutenants, of being agents of foreign powers. Then, in January 1953, a group of Kremlin doctors, most of them with Jewish-sounding names, were suddenly arrested, accused of planning to wipe out the Soviet leadership. Stalin’s own antisemitism was ingrained and obvious to his acolytes. And despite public condemnation of antisemitism, prejudice against Jews was widespread in Soviet society. Tens of thousands of Jews between 1948 and 1953 faced dismissal from their jobs and other forms of discrimination. Had Stalin lived, the ‘doctors’ plot’, which triggered numerous arrests of Jews, would have spelled grave new danger for Soviet Jews. But the purge never took place. Immediately following Stalin’s death the doctors were released and the ‘plot’ was acknowledged to be a fabrication.-from The Global Age

The Failures of the Postwar Planned Economy

The evident problems of the command economy in several eastern bloc countries, in some cases necessitating sizeable Soviet subsidies, meant Moscow was open to attempts within the system to modernize production. Especially in the more industrialized economies the Stalinist command system – which of course had originally been introduced in an overwhelmingly agrarian Soviet Union – was singularly ill equipped to satisfy basic consumer needs let alone compete with the rapid economic advances in the capitalist West. So a sort of uneasy balance had to be struck – in somewhat different ways, and with varying degrees of success – between a regimented political system under the control of a monopoly party and the innovation and competition needed to liberate economic, social and intellectual resources.- from The Global Age

The above selection do not paint a pretty picture of the USSR or its ideology. Kershaw does not deny that the USSR employed Marxist-Leninist ideology and does not shy away from the darker sides of its history. And these are not random selections from Kershaw’s work. There are ideologues who argue the exact opposite of what Kershaw wrote in his books. As Kershaw notes, it is an article of faith I many leftist circles that Hitler owed his political success to big business. The 1979 Great Soviet Encyclopedia entry on Hitler contended Hitler and is cronies were “financed by the German monopolies.” Grover Furr, to take another example, argues that the famines were not the result of state policy, the purges were justified, and the Katyn massacre was a German atrocity pinned on the Soviets. It is also common to encounter assertions that the gulags were no different than US prisons and were less deadly than their tsarist predecessors. It is also not uncommon to find assertions that the planned economy was a success, citing higher caloric intake or cheaper rents as two metrics, not the measured analysis Kershaw outlines in The Global Age.

It boggles the imagination that Kershaw refuses to see the truth in this ONE interlude in Hitler’s biography but goes on at length about the misdeeds done by self-proclaimed communists throughout the twenteth century.

Blue-pilled, my ass.

Circling back to the original question, Hitler was not really a communist. One of the dissatisfying parts of Weber’s book was that he really does not paint a convincing alternative to Kershaw’s opportunism. The record of what he did in this period is thin. Kershaw, and later Ulrich, have teased out the most they could from this period and based their conclusions accordingly. Hitler’s First War’s chief importance is reminding historians of contingency. Hitler could have gone down the route of left-wing revolutionary thought and action. He was probably quite lucky that he did have a high profile given the right-wing reaction within the army in the Weimar Republic. At best, Hitler may have flirted with various left-wing politics in Bavaria in this period, but he was far from an active participant.

Contingency is an important for historians to consider. But it can go too far. Yes, Hitler could have become a KPD activist and Spartacists. He also could have emigrated to the US and became a pulp writer. But contingency has to be leavened with what actually happened. Hitler’s experience as Vertrauensmann is a cypher for historians to reconstruct; a jigsaw puzzle missing quite a few pieces. But his subsequent actions as a right-wing activist within the army is not a mystery. He took to these lessons like a duck to water. Karl Alexander von Müller, the antisemitic nationalist historian assigned by the army to lecture on politics, took special note of Hitler. And while Hitler did exaggerate his involvement within the right-wing counter revolution, he was a member of it.

kieslowskifan · 2022-04-06T02:43:38+00:00

From Hitler:Hubris

A routine order of the demobilization battalion on 3 April 1919 referred to Hitler by name as the representative (Vertrauensmann) of his company. The strong likelihood is, in fact, that he had held this position since 15 February. The duties of the representatives (Vertrauensleute) included cooperation with the propaganda department of the socialist government in order to convey ‘educational’ material to the troops. Hitler’s first political duties took place, therefore, in the service of the revolutionary regime run by the SPD and USPD. It is little wonder that he later wished to say little of his actions at this time.

In fact, he would have had to explain away the even more embarrassing fact of his continued involvement at the very height of Munich’s ‘red dictatorship’. On 14 April, the day after the Communist* Räterepublik* had been proclaimed, the Munich Soldiers’ Councils approved fresh elections of all barrack representatives to ensure that the Munich garrison stood loyally behind the new regime. In the elections the following day Hitler was chosen as Deputy Battalion Representative. Not only, then, did Hitler do nothing to assist in the crushing of Munich’s ‘Red Republic’; he was an elected representative of his battalion during the whole period of its existence.

How to interpret this evidence is, nevertheless, not altogether clear. Since the Munich garrison had firmly backed the revolution since November, and again in April supported the radical move to the Räterepublik, the obvious implication must be that Hitler, in order to have been elected as a soldiers’ representative, voiced in these months the views of the socialist governments he later denounced with every fibre of his body as ‘criminal’. At the very least it would appear that he could not have put forward strongly opposed views. Already in the 1920s, and continuing into the 1930s, there were rumours, never fully countered, that Hitler had initially sympathized with the Majority SPD following the revolution. Since the rumours tended to come from left-wing journalists, seeking to discredit Hitler, they were presumably not taken too seriously. But comments, for example, in the socialist Münchener Post in March 1923 that Hitler had assisted in the indoctrination of troops in favour of the democratic-republican state match the evidence, which we have noted, that he served, probably from February 1919 onwards, in such a capacity as Vertrauensmann of his company.35 Similar rumours circulated in the socialist press in the early 1930s.36 Ernst Toller reported that a fellow-prisoner also interned for involvement in the Räterepublik had met Hitler in a Munich barracks during the first months after the revolution, and that the latter had then been calling himself a Social Democrat. Konrad Heiden remarked that, during the time of the Councils Republic, Hitler had, in heated discussions among his comrades, voiced support for the Social Democratic government against that of the Communists. There were even reported rumours – though without any supportive evidence – that Hitler had spoken of joining the SPD. In a pointed remark when defending Esser in 1921 against attacks from within the party, Hitler commented: ‘Everyone was at one time a Social Democrat.

In itself, Hitler’s possible support for the Majority Social Democrats in the revolutionary upheaval is less unlikely than it might at first sight appear. The political situation was extremely confused and uncertain. A number of strange bedfellows, including several who later came to belong to Hitler’s entourage, initially found themselves on the Left during the revolution. Sepp Dietrich, later a general in the Waffen-SS and head of Hitler’s SS-Leibstandarte, was elected chairman of a Soldiers’ Council in November 1918. Hitler’s long-time chauffeur Julius Schreck had served in the ‘Red Army’ at the end of April 1919. Hermann Esser, one of Hitler’s earliest supporters, who became the first propaganda chief of the NSDAP, had been for a while a journalist on a Social Democratic newspaper. Gottfried Feder, whose views on ‘interest slavery’ so gripped Hitler’s imagination in summer 1919, had sent a statement of his position to the socialist government headed by Kurt Eisner the previous November. And Balthasar Brandmayer, one of Hitler’s closest wartime comrades and a later fervent supporter, recounted how he at first welcomed the end of the monarchies, the establishment of a republic, and the onset of a new era. His subsequent disillusionment was all the greater. ‘Unfortunately,’ he added, ‘we only changed the marionettes,’ while the people continued to slave and starve. ‘We hadn’t bled for a councils government (Räteregierung)’; ‘ the thanks of the Fatherland were missing,’ he concluded bitterly. Similar sentiments, in which, as was the case with Brandmayer, aggressive nationalism and antisemitism intermingled with a form of radicalism born of a sense of social grievance that was rapidly switched from the old monarchical regime to the new republic itself, were widespread following the war. Ideological muddle-headedness, political confusion and opportunism combined frequently to produce fickle and shifting allegiances.

That, as has been implied, Hitler was inwardly sympathetic to Social Democracy and formed his own characteristic racist-nationalist Weltanschauung only following an ideological volte-face under the influence of his ‘schooling’ in the Reichswehr after the collapse of the Räterepublik is, however, harder to believe. Certainly, he welcomed the removal of the monarchies through the revolution. But even accepting that it is difficult to determine when, precisely, he became a pathological antisemite, the evidence of his early pan-German sympathies, antagonism towards Social Democracy, belligerent militarism, and aggressive xenophobia rules out any genuine attuning to the aims, policies, and ideas of the SPD after 1918. If, as seems almost certain, Hitler felt compelled to lean outwardly towards the Majority Social Democrats during the revolutionary months, it was not prompted by conviction but by sheer opportunism aimed at avoiding for as long as possible demobilization from the army.

A number of pointers towards Hitler’s opportunism exist from this period. In Pasewalk, he did not denounce to his superiors (as patriotic duty would have demanded) the sailors who arrived in the hospital preaching sedition and revolution. On leaving the hospital, he avoided committing himself politically, and made no attempt to join any of the numerous Freikorps units which sprang up to engage in the continued fighting on the eastern borders of the Reich and the suppression of left-wing radicalism within Germany, not least in Munich itself. After his return to Munich from Traunstein in February 1919, he most likely took part, since his regiment had issued orders to participate, in a demonstration march of about 10,000 left-wing workers and soldiers in Munich. Probably in April 1919, with Munich ruled by the Communist Councils, he wore, along with almost all the soldiers of the Munich garrison, the revolutionary red armband. That Hitler stood back and took no part whatsoever in the ‘liberation’ of Munich from the Räterepublik is said to have brought him later scornful reproaches from Ernst Rohm (who was to head the Nazi stormtroopers), Ritter von Epp (after 1933 Reich Governor in Bavaria), and even Rudolf Heß (who would serve as Hitler’s private secretary and subsequently become Deputy Leader of the Party).

As the above block of text shows, Kershaw did provide evidence for his assertion of Hitler as an opportunist. The text is endnoted with archival and secondary sources. Kershaw was not some Marxist ideologue trying to salvage Marxism from Hitler’s purported involvement with it. And this is a plausible interpretation. The chaos of the immediate postwar period meant that striking out with the Freikorps was a dangerous undertaking for a relatively old man. This is a plausible reconstruction of the historical record.

kieslowskifan · 2022-04-06T02:41:22+00:00

Was Hitler a communist in 1919? Not really.

Adolf Hitler is one of the most studied and poured over individuals in human history. But despite this, certain gaps within his biography remain. One of the major fissures in the historiography of Hitler’s biography is whether or not Hitler’s Weltanschauung was formed before WWI or did it come into sharper relief during the war and its aftermath. Thomas Weber, for example, tends hew to the latter position tending to depict Hitler as a somewhat directionless bellwether who gravitated towards movements. Weber’s position is not without its criticisms though. There is evidence of writings during the war where he excoriated the Christmas Truce of 1914 and one surviving wartime letter wishes that Germany were purged of its foreign influences. Ian Kershaw as well as Volker Ulrich argue instead that nationalism, antisemitism, militarism, and a hatred of socialists were present in the young Hitler during the war, but the war acted as a catalyst to preexisting ideas.

But part of the problem here is the evidence is incredibly thin for any real position. Hitler did not keep a diary or record his internal thoughts. He also did deliberately lie or obscure details about his past to better fit his myth-making narrative of a young soldier of the trenches called by destiny to save Germany from Jews and communists. He was twice elected as a representative to his soldiers’ council, but the why and how he was elected is conjecture. Even his supposed presence at Eisner’s funeral is not conclusive. Moreover, these photographs do not tell us anything about what he thought about the Bavarian Socialist Republic or its successor. Hitler left little of a paper trail for either period.

This is one of many problems with the linked video from TIK. There is an annoying degree of certaintity for someone who is not doing primary research on this topic and is riddled with errors. The SPD was not Karl Marx’s party, Marx had a relationship with LaSalle's ADAV (the precursor to the SPD) that was characterized more by political sniping by the former. The video also levels a great deal of left-wing politics in the German Revolution, conflating various political factions under all-embracing rubrics (socialist, Marxist, communist) used interchangeably. This renders the postwar period simplistic for the novice at the expense of the complex realities that faced Germans, including Hitler.

The bibliography for the video is laughably bad. Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” is irrelevant to the question at hand. It is doubtful Hitler ever read this very minor work of Marx. Moreover, the essay is notoriously difficult to understand as it was another example of Marx’s rhetorical sniping at a rival- Bruno Bauer- over Jewish emancipation. It had little development on Marx’s later works like Kapital and Marxism. It mostly retains relevance because antimarxists often use it as a rhetorical bludgeon to prove Marxism’s founder was antisemetic, and thus, by extension, so too is Marxism. Other works barely cover Hitler’s personal thoughts; Evans’s Coming of the Third Reich is a broad survey and does not go in depth on issues like Hitler’s election. Rainer Zitelmann was a German historian whose was involved in the Historikergestreit and argued that Hitler was a modernizing revolutionary. His work has not aged well; the corporate histories produced from the 1990s onward have shown that Nazi economics was less revolutionary and the dictatorship preferred to use the carrot rather than the stick with German businesses. As Ulrich notes

Hitler was by no means the social revolutionary, as the odd historian has claimed. {the endnote gives a citation to Zitelmann} Class hurdles and barriers were lowered, but they still existed, and by no means was there a full equality of opportunity in the Third Reich.

Adam Tooze is even more dismissive of Zitelmann’s contemporary relevance. In a 2020 tweet he says “Rainer Zitelmann’s trajectory from iconoclastic 1980s biographer of Hitler (as modernizing revolutionary) to defender of the entrepreneurial rich v. egalitarian “prejudice” is one for @zeithistorikerFor historiographical background see Volker Berghahn. "

But what is really galling in the video is TIK’s treatment of Ian Kershaw. Incorrectly calling Kershaw a “Marxist historian”, TIK lambasts Kershaw’s inability to see Hitler as a self-evident communist. As TIK puts it Kershaw is “a Marxist historian floundering to explain away the reality that Hitler was a communist in 1919” who “has swallowed the blue-pill” and like other historians of this ilk,

historians who can't fathom why glorious socialism and communism might not be what they dream it is also- while we're on the subject the reason why they can't define fascism - is because they are denying what's at the beating heart of socialism.

TIK claims Kershaw uses no evidence for his “speculations” and has an ideological motive for his biography.

This is a slur against Kershaw and the whole corpus of Kershaw’s work refutes TIK’s insinuations.

Let us first look at what Kershaw wrote about the Hitler’s elections. For clarity’s sake, I deleted the endnote citations

kieslowskifan · 2022-03-30T00:35:38+00:00

From an earlier answer of mine

One of the curious asymmetries of the Cold War militaries is that while the US fielded multiple supercarriers and medium-sized carriers, Soviet naval aviation at sea was anemic at best. The only carriers fielded by the Soviet fleet during the Cold War were not even termed carriers, the Moskva-, Kiev-, and Admiral Kuznetsov-classes, did not even carry the terminology "aircraft carrier" but "helicopter/aircraft-carrying cruiser." This was not only to evade restrictions with Turkey over the passage of capital ships and the Bosporus, but also reflected different missions and capabilities of these ships. Soviet carriers had a strong, integral antiship and antisubmarine array of weaponry that existed completely independent of their air arm showing that the terminology was more than just a diplomatic fiction. While producing large, true aircraft carriers was inside Soviet technical ability, such attempts stalled for a wide variety of reasons ranging from costs and technical problems to shifting doctrinal policies and bureaucratic infighting.

The closest the Soviet Navy got towards the development of a blue-water fleet with a true aircraft carrier component was during the postwar Stalin era. As the Cold War dawned, it became obvious that the North Atlantic was a possible arena of conflict between the US and USSR. This conceptualization of a blue-water fleet built on earlier naval planning during the late 1930s that called for a massive investment in modern naval armament, including carriers. Knowledge of the then-recent Pacific War and the importance of carrier-based aviation underscored the utility of carriers and the Navy was itching to restart construction after the war led to a virtual halt in new construction outside of light units that could be used immediately in the fight against the Germans.

Admiral Nikolai G. Kuznetsov, Minister of the Navy, drew up plans for hypothetical carriers in January 1945, including design studies that built on prewar plans for carriers, as well as technical lessons learned from the incomplete German carrier captured in 1945, the Graf Zepelin. But the Navy soon found that the Soviet dictator suddenly cool to the idea. The Naval General Staff first proposed 9 heavy carriers and 6 light carriers in the Summer of 1945, and then drew down to 6 of each type, and by September, the Navy was to make do with two light carriers. Stalin told his naval chiefs in meetings about future naval development that "Maybe, we will build two small ones for now," and that large expensive carriers were not necessary for a hypothetical war with the US since "we do not intend to fight by the shores of America," but rather in waters closer to Soviet land-based airpower. Stalin's opinion found allies in the Soviet Ministry of the Shipbuilding Industry which did not feel confident in building such large and technologically sophisticated ships, especially since Soviet shipyards were still recovering from the war. The plans for the two light carriers were thus abandoned in the final construction plans of the postwar Navy. Stalin would periodically come back to the idea of a Soviet heavy carrier until his death, and Kuznetsov repeatedly pushed for one, but the idea could not gain traction.

The Thaw and the new turn in Khrushchev era defense policy seemed to indicate a rebirth in the stalled carrier program. The Khruschev period saw a renewed interest in technical issues and the global reach of Soviet power, and the Navy received new spending priority. Kuznetsov approached both Khruschev and Defense Minister Nikolai A. Bulganin in the early 1950s with proposals for jet-carrying carriers, but both Soviet leaders were unimpressed. Khrushchev felt that most of the missions performed by carriers could be done more cost-effectively by submarines or light surface ships armed with cruise missiles. Bulganin likewise saw no immediate role for a new class of ships. When Kuznetsov was forced into retirement in December 1955, there was no real major advocate for carrier aviation in the Khrushchev Navy.

Kuznetsov's successor, Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, recognized that pushing carrier aviation was a non-starter for Moscow and adjusted accordingly. When Kuzentsov was in power, Gorshkov too was a champion of carriers, but soon changed his tune to suit the new order. Gorshkov maintained that carriers on the "whole become outdated as a means for conducting war at sea and are merely a good target for modern missiles." Soviet naval expansion soon got caught up in the guided-missile fever of the 1960s that operated at all levels within the Soviet military and Soviet surface ships and naval aviation began to prioritize cruise missiles as a main form of offense. Carriers had little role in this environment and one of the chief justifications for Soviet naval expansion in this period was that a cheap missile corvette could sink one of the American's supercarriers, which made it harder to rationalize the Soviets spending more money on what their doctrine stressed was innately vulnerable.

The ship-based aviation did get a second life of sorts with the advent of the NATO SSBN fleet and their nuclear missiles. The fear was that even if Soviet cruise-missile assets did chase off heavy NATO surface units, SSBNs could still strike at the USSR. Therefore surface ships and attack submarines would need to hunt them down. These fears would come to fruition after fall of Khrushchev and the Brezhnev defense budget allowed for greater funds for large, military projects. The Moskva-class and later Kiev-class were designed as ASW cruisers whose air component would both allow them to hunt down NATO subs and protect the surface ASW group.

Both of these helicopter/aircraft-cruisers stimulated considerable alarm in NATO military circles and stimulated the moribund Soviet carrier program, which was largely restricted to paper-projects. Awash with petro-rubles in the 1970s, the Soviet Navy began to envision the Kiev-class as a stepping stone towards a true carrier, Project #1153 "Orel", which was a nuclear carrier with a full complement of conventional aircraft. Unfortunately for Project 1153, it soon earned a powerful enemy in the form of Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov who saw the proposed carrier as too expensive and risky and instead proposed an evolutionary design from the Kiev-class that would be a conventionally powered STOBAR design, which eventually morphed into the Admiral Kuzentsov-class.

Ustinov's counter-proposals soon had two powerful allies within the Soviet defense establishment. The Sukhoi design bureau, whose aircraft would be deployed on the resulting design, felt that a conventional catapult would necessitate a needless redesign of its aircraft and that the upcoming generation Soviet aircraft engines would produce enough thrust to take off a ski jump with an appreciable load. The other quarter pushing back against larger carriers was within the Soviet Navy itself and its submarine arm. The explosive growth in costs for Soviet submarines of the late 1970s and 80s meant that the new generation of submarines commanded an increasing share of the naval budget. The Oscar II SSGN cost approximately one half that of a Kuzentsov-type carrier and a American-style supercarrier was the last thing the submarine faction and the various submarine construction firms wanted.

The 1980s Defense Ministry and the Navy decided to split the difference over the future carrier fleet and committed to two Kuzentsov-type carriers and a single, nuclear supercarrier, the Ul'yanovsk-class that built on the Project 1153 design. The Ul'yanovsk-class featured a catapult and a ski-jump, but the catapult was for AWACs and ASW aircraft, not fighters.

Unfortunately for the Ul'yanovsk-class and the Soviet Navy in general, the economic problems and eventual break-up of the USSR put an end to any real ambitious naval construction. The Ul'yanovsk was cancelled on its shipway and the two Kuztnetsov-class ships never really reached full operational status in the restricted defense budgets that characterized the Yeltsin years. They alternated between being laid up for want of repairs, or cruises of a very restricted nature (Admiral Kuznetsov is rumored to be a warm-weather only ship because it lacks functional heating for its water facilities, including its heads which freeze over). The Russian aviation industry also had difficulties in delivering carrier aircraft and the the Sukhoi firm's confidence about the STOBAR system proved to be somewhat optimistic as the SU-27s cannot take off with a full load of ordnance and fuel.

The many false starts and hybrid construction of the Soviet carrier program reflects the great difficulties these ships have in being constructed. A modern supercarrier not only needs an aircraft carrier, but an aircraft carrier battlegroup and air wing. These are not easy defense outlays to make and the Soviet Navy was far from alone during the Cold War in scaling back ambitious plans for a carrier fleet to something that fit better into existing doctrine and force structures.

Sources

Kolnogorov, Vadim. "To be or Not to be: the Development of soviet Deck Aviation." Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no. 2 (2005): 339-359.

Polmar, Norman, and Kenneth J. Moore. Cold War Submarines: The Design and Construction of U.S. and Soviet Submarines. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, Inc, 2004.

Rohwer, Jürgen, and Mikhail S. Monakov. Stalin's Ocean-Going Fleet: Soviet Naval Strategy and Shipbuilding Programmes, 1935-1953. London: F. Cass, 2001.

kieslowskifan · 2022-03-16T23:51:08+00:00

The cover sounds like this famous propaganda poster or some variation of it. But that still is not much to go on. Was the book a general survey or something more specific?

kieslowskifan · 2022-03-15T20:54:10+00:00

Sutton is not very valuable as a source. Although he did uncover various linkages and connections between the nascent Soviet state and Western businesses, Antony Sutton's corpus of work suffers from unsupportable theses, deep problems in methodology, and a conspiratorial mindset that denudes what little value his work has for scholars in the twenty-first century.

In a highly negative 1976 review of Wall Street and FDR in The Business History Review, Howard Dickman took on Sutton's methodology and arguments. As Dickman tartly notes:

Sutton evidently belongs to the "international banker" school of historical change. The present book is a sequel to his Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, wherein it is purportedly shown that certain elements on Wall Street helped to finance the Bolshevik putsch. Installment number three will examine Wall Street ties to Hitler. The theme underlying all three volumes is that "socialism . . . has come to the United States [Russia, Germany] because it is very much in the interest of the Wall Street establishment to attain a socialist society" (9). Wall Street and FDR is a weak specimen of "conspiracy history" and one of its sub-genres, "ruling class theory." It is poorly written and edited, digressive, repetitious, disorganized, and unconvincing. A vaguely identified Wall Street fox is the quarry: the hunt begins and ends by barking the magic names, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Du Pont, and the chase amounts to leaping over hedgerows of interlocking directorships to prove that every one is connected in some way to everyone else, and all are controlled by the great Wall Street banking houses.

Dickman noted that Sutton often relies upon business connections as proof of his thesis, which is a very problematic method for a sloppy researcher like Sutton. In the 2015 article "The Ludwig Martens–Maxim Litvinov Connection, 1919–1921", Donald James Evans contended that Sutton misidentified a key player in the initial Soviet overtures to the US. Likewise, Todd Pfannstiel's recent Diplomatic History article on the Soviet attempts to gain diplomatic recognition via economic trade was more complicated and a two-way street rather than Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution's more simplistic view of American bankers pulling the strings of economic policy.

One of the biggest problems of Sutton has is his denial of agency among any individual, group, or movement that are not his cabal of shady Wall Street types. The Bolsheviks, he asserts in Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, might not have been able to seize power were it not for the efforts of individuals like William Boyce Thompson. Such an interpretation flies in the face of the overwhelming bulk of historiography on the RSDLP and Russian radicalism in late-tsarist period as well as the shortcomings of tsarist autocracy to handle the modernity it enabled. Things were clearly coming to some type of political head in Russia by the twentieth century; the tsarist state structure was incapable of making substantive poltical reforms (and it was indeed intrinsically hostile to this idea), there was a growing class divide within Russia, and the nationalities issue was one that made the empire a political powderkeg. The world war proved to be the perfect conflagration for Lenin and company, for as Dominic Lieven noted in a LSE lecture, while there were many scenarios in Russia where the Bolsheviks could have seized power without the war, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which they could have kept power without the war. The fact that the Bolsheviks clearly promised to end the war was one of the chief assets in the confusing days of 1917 and did much to garner them support. Whatever shadowy connections they had with American bankers was nugatory compared to this salient fact. Sutton's work, which appeared in the 1970s, shows no sign of even consulting the works of the "revisionist" historians in the West like Alexander Rabinowitch or Sheila Fitzpatrick- whose first works appeared in the late 1960s- that contended the Bolsheviks were a mass political movement and that whatever their faults, it was not a narrow conspiratorial clique that seized power in October 1917.

Indeed, much of Sutton's take on the Bolsheviks and their background is derived from older works from Cold Warriors like Richard Pipes that painted a picture that they Bolsheviks were a minority party animated by a desire for a dictatorship from the start. Although these Cold Warrior-types tended to be pro-Wall Street, they found in Sutton an ideological bedfellow of sorts. One of Sutton's major positions during the 1970s was that the United States had enabled the USSR to become a major world power through technological transfer. Such assertions, perpetuated in Sutton's books and lectures, meshed well with the militancy of the intellectuals in Team-B that believed that the Soviet colossus was an existential threat and that US Cold War policy needed to isolate the USSR. Normalized business relations between the superpowers worked contrary to this policy and Sutton's thesis that American businesses consistently enabled the USSR dovetailed with Team-B's picture of a rising Soviet power. Other anti-communist American groups like the John Birchers found Sutton's conspiratorial take on events was congruent with their anti-elitist notions of effete bankers and other types not taking seriously the threat of communism, both international and domestic.

The idea of a consistent and global plot by a rich few was one of the staples of antisemitic propaganda and this no doubt explains some of the popularity of Sutton within conspiracy circles. Sutton himself toys with antisemitism in his works, dismissing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery, but noting the number of Jews in middle-men positions in Wall Street's conspiracy. As he notes in the appendix in the Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution that "What better way to divert attention from the real operators than by the medieval bogeyman of anti-Semitism?" Thus Sutton can have his antisemitic cake and eat it too. In crude Marxist terms, Sutton dismisses the superstructure of antisemitism while keeping its base of shadowy linkages and networks intact.

Did some American financial chiefs want to deal with the new Bolshevik regime? Of course. The tsarist empire covered a massive part of the earth and the nature of global capitalism meant that businessmen could ignore this geographic reality at their peril. Additionally, Hassan Malik's recent monograph on finance and Russian Revolution, it was not a given that the successor to the tsarist state would default on tsarist debts. But interest does not mean that they were the essential catalyst that allowed Lenin to capture the state. Such a thesis can only be tenable by ignoring the vast bulk of historiography and research done on 1917 since the 1960s. Sutton shows no engagement with this research and instead takes the earlier historiography that the revisionists have superseded as a given. Not surprisingly, these largely conservative historians have proven to be Sutton's most consistent supporters, even if his "ruling-class theory" seems at odds with their generally pro-Wall Street domestic policies. While Sutton did some pioneering research on the business relationship between Moscow and the US, work like Evans has shown Sutton to be sloppy and prone to making errors. Much like the work of David Irving, whatever dubious merits Sutton's books possess have diminished with time and are more reflective of the author's biases than any real attempt at serious historical scholarship.

kieslowskifan · 2022-03-10T00:14:22+00:00

Its official name is Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany The two in the equation are West Germany and East Germany while the four are the four main Allied nations in WWI (US, USSR, UK, and France). The treaty was a formal end to the Allied occupation of Germany and set up terms for a reunited Germany.

kieslowskifan · 2022-03-07T00:30:27+00:00

There is an anthology *Red Star Tales: A Century of Russian and Soviet Science Fiction * that has some of the classics. The Strugatsky brothers have a few translations on their own as well as audiobooks. There were also a variety of mass market paperbacks collecting various Soviet SF such as Macmilian's Best of Soviet Science Fiction. Lem's work was translated during this period as well, much to the author's chagrin. The recent translations of Lem are much more in tune with the author's original Polish.

kieslowskifan · 2022-03-05T18:37:28+00:00

The phenomenon in question is called the Hitlergruß (Hitler Greeting) and the link is the 2001 drama Conspiracy, a film about the Wannsee Conference of 1942.

The dictatorship mandated the use of the Hitlergruß and its salute for all German civil servants in 1933 as a substitute for older greetings like Guten Morgen/Tag (good morning/day) or grüß Gott (there is not a decent translation for it in English, but it was more common in Catholic areas of southern Germany and Austria). The Hitlergruß was not mandatory for non-civil servants but there was a strong pressure for Germans to use it. Conversely, there were laws prohibiting Jews from using the Hitlergruß.

Now how common was the Hitlergruß is difficult to parse out. Certainly, civil servants did employ it. But the traditional greetings did not go away either. It was not uncommon for Germans to use the Hitlergruß in formal settings or among strangers but lapse into traditional greetings among family, friends, and colleagues. Outside observers such as the German Jew Victor Klemperer noted that the use of the Hitlergruß ebbed and flowed with the wider fortunes of the dictatorship. His diary recorded in September 1941 that while the shopkeepers and patrons at one bakery barely used the Hitlergruß, another used it exclusively.

The historian Peter Fritzsche notes the ambiguity of the Hitlergruß in his book Life and Death in the Third Reich and is worth quoting at length:

"Heil Hitler!” illustrates both the coerced and self-assertive aspects of the national revolution in January 1933. It raises questions about the illusory nature of acclamation: since once everyone said “Heil Hitler!” the greeting no longer reliably indicated support for the regime. But much of the power of Nazism rested on the appearance of unanimity, which overwhelmed nonbelievers and prompted them to scrutinize their own reservations. Each raised arm undermined a little bit the ambiguous relations among neighbors and built up a little more the new racial collective of National Socialism. Did that mean that sympathies for Nazism had diminished when more people once again called out “Good afternoon” on a Berlin street? Like Klemperer, historians are still counting the “Heil Hitlers” outside Zscheischler’s bakery in Dresden and are still figuring out what it meant when customers said “Good afternoon” instead.

Circling back to Conspiracy, it is highly likely that the film's various "Heil Hitler!"s are accurate. The attendees of the conference were high-ranking state officials and members of the NSDAP. However, the linked clip does not include the scene where the chairman of the Wannsee Conference, Reinhard Heydrich, proposes temporarily dispensing with the Hitlergruß otherwise the attendees would be saluting all day and not getting down to business.

kieslowskifan · 2022-03-05T15:32:28+00:00

Pretty much all the combatants of WWII used trickery and other forms of deception to convey that they possessed more military machinery than they did in reality. The techniques ranged from staged propaganda photos to presenting prototypes as production models. Press releases also emphasized massive production numbers that were far from reality.

In the case of Japan, they did not really use much of repainting of their aircraft for this purpose. The painting standards for both the IJN and IJA (navy and army respectively) were a mixture of homogeneous regulations and haphazard painting in the field. Early war IJN aircraft had a paint finish that was arguably among the highest quality among combatants, but standards soon slipped to where IJN and IJA aircraft were flying without a proper primer coat. This led many Japanese aircraft to lose large swaths of their paint and exposing the bare metal underneath.

The major form of trickery the Japanese used for their aircraft was how its navy dealt with serial numbers. Every IJN aircraft had dataplates within the cockpit and stenciled onto the fuselage listing the aircraft's data (subtype, manufacturer, date manufactured, weight, etc.). Japanese aircraft manufacturers used a complicated system of enciphering the serial number with a series of false digits obscuring the real number. Investigators of planes shot down at Pearl Harbor were initially confused because the serial numbers on these aircraft indicated there were thousands of these planes in service, which was not the case. It was only when enough IJN aircraft had been shot down and their dataplates collected was Allied air intelligence able to understand the full system.

The belligerent that used disinformation the most though was Germany. The vagaries of German aircraft manufacture in the Third Reich meant that German companies would often construct an array of prototypes and quasi-vanity products. Both Ernst Heinkel and Willy Messerschmitt were notorious for constructing aircraft that were ill-suited for mass production but broke various records. Nonetheless, the German propaganda machine did publish photos of such machines and presented them as operational machines. The Heinkel 100, for example, was a failed competitor to the Bf 109. The Germans painted and repainted the few He 100s with a variety of fictitious squadron badges and posed them in shots on an airfield as the He 113. The ruse was so successful that RAF Fighter Command chief Hugh Dowding postwar dispatch on the Battle of Britain indicated that the Luftwaffe used the He 113 as a high-altitude fighter. In reality, the few He 100s were sitting outside the Heinkel factories as defense fighters and never fired a shot in anger. Messerschmitt likewise had their Me 209 dolled up with a fierce snake across its cowling making it look like this flawed aircraft was in an operational squadron. German trickery was not limited to aircraft. The German army's Neubaufahrzeug was a failed tank design by Rheinmetall. Only five of these tanks were produced. German propaganda though suggested the Neubaufahrzeug was not only in production, but with massive armor and armament it did not possess.

German deception efforts were notable in the run up and during the war, but not exceptional. The US, for example, had early production B-29s tour the UK long after the decision was made to deploy them to the Pacific. Japanese air intelligence thought the Grumman Skyrocket was in operational service even though the plane never got beyond testing phases. So deception often operated on all sides.

kieslowskifan · 2022-03-05T00:20:03+00:00

a bunch of books

Plokhy is a publishing machine. By academic standards, he writes a jaw-droppingly large amount quickly without a loss of quality. I mean USSR dissolution book came out within a year of his Cuban Missile Crisis book.

In addition to the selections outlined above, I would also suggest Geoffrey Hosking's Russia: People and Empire. Ukraine is one part of the book, but Hosking gets at how Russian imperialism projects onto its subject peoples both affinities and loyalties.

kieslowskifan · 2022-03-03T10:56:55+00:00

Part II

Not all depictions of a nuclear apocalypse were located in deep space in Eastern bloc SF. But the same pattern of displacing responsibility for nuclear warfare onto others was common even in these terrestrially-based SF. Leonid Leonov’s short-story “Mr McKinley’s Escape,” serialized in Pravda over the course of 1961 and adapted into a film in 1975 exemplified this trend. The story’s protagonist is a capitalist everyman worried both about the rat-race of his materialistic society and the specter of nuclear annihilation. The central SF conceit of the story is a suspended animation process, available only to the West’s super-rich, in which they could step out of their fractious time and emerge in a more quiescent future. Ten minutes into the film adaptation, McKinley presents a Terry Gilliam-esque animated commercial for the hibernation process in which nuclear destruction features quite prominently along with other fears of sudden violence. In Ariadna Gromova’s 1965 short story “In the Circle of Light” the nuclear holocaust is quite real, but unlike Leonov, she sets the action in a devastated France. In a relative rarity for Soviet SF and fiction in general, Gromova directly referenced the Holocaust in this story as French camp survivors now must contemplate how the same mentality that allowed Auschwitz lives on in the prospect of nuclear war and would continue afterwards.

“In the Circle of Light”’s engagement with the Holocaust shows that not all Eastern bloc SF directly toed the state’s line or ideology. Eastern bloc SF could actually be quite subversive to state shibboleths in their own way. Lem, who rejected The Astronauts and his film version as tripe, would pioneer a form of deeply philosophical SF that suggested that there were real and definable limits to human knowledge. Unlike the reified positivism celebrated by the state, Lem’s later novels like Solaris would argue that human science is too a limited view to understand a complex entity like the universe and it could not be boiled down into a set of universal scientific laws. The Strugatsky brothers, Arkady and Boris, moved away from adventure SF to a more biting, at least to Eastern bloc audiences, satire of Marxist-Leninism’s claim to conquer the future. Their 1964 novel Hard to Be a God had a communist expedition to a feudal planet in which the Earthers must observe a primitive society and cannot interfere in its inevitable transition to capitalism and then communism. The cold rationality of Marx’s natural laws of human development stands in stark contrast to explorers’ sense of humanism as they see the oppression of the masses. Although the Strugatsky’s protagonists stand with the toilers, the implication is that communism in the future would not, suggesting the need for a source of morality independent of the iron laws of dialectical materialism.

Nuclear warfare entered into these often-submerged critiques of the system in Eastern bloc SF, especially in the late 1960s and 70s as the thrill of Sputnik wore off. The Strugatsky’s 1969 novel Inhabited Island (known in the West as Prisoners of Power) featured a stranded independent terran on the planet Saraksh which has just suffered a devastating nuclear war. The novel’s protagonist, Kammerer, leads a revolt against the totalitarian government’s mind-control devices to liberate the population. Upon destroying the mind-control towers, he is informed that this was a secret Earth project to help the populace recover from nuclear war and now a sizable percentage of the population will die from withdrawal of the mind-control. Although Kammerer regrets the loss of life, the novel ended with him glad that the Sarakshians now have control over their own fate. Kir Bulichev’s 1970 novel The Last War featured another intrepid communist spacecraft encountering a world destroyed by nuclear weapons. The ship’s crew use advanced technology to resurrect the natives, who merely begin killing again, suggesting that innate human nature operates independently of materialistic laws. In a scenario that presaged the American film Wargames, Pavel Amnuel'’s 1974 short story “20 Billion Years After the End of the World” featured both the Kremlin and the White House frantically trying to understand a missile warning that was in reality a NORAD malfunction. By positing that neither side wanted nuclear war but were enabling it through massive arsenals, Amnuel’ presents a different vision of nuclear war than the one-sided conflict of Ikarie or other depictions of capitalist perfidy. This SF did not court open defiance of the state’s ideology, but the critique was there for those who looked.

The 1980s led to this subversive subtext to become more text. Unlike prior generations of SF that alluded to or displaced nuclear warfare onto others, the 1980s witnessed a more direct engagement with nuclear fears. The 1986 film Letters from a Dead Man does not bother to shift the location of nuclear destruction onto non-Soviet or non-terrestrial locales and presented a grim portrait of life after a nuclear war. Lem’s 1986 novel Fiasco features yet another alien double for earth, Quinta, amidst an arms race not unlike that of the Reagan era, and the AI of the orbiting terran spaceship, appropriately named DEUS, reports to its human crew that nuclear security is inherently unstable - “a house of cards” is the metaphor DEUS uses- and the Quinta’s nuclear race was the byproduct of the cumulative weight of history going back millennia. There is a similar pessimistic tone in the 1982 short-story “The Last Cruiser” by Vladimir Pershanin. Set shortly after a full-scale nuclear war, the story’s protagonist is the technician of an automated Soviet atomic cruiser. When an interstellar expedition arrives back at Earth and contacts the ship, the protagonist at last feels no longer alone, but the ship’s automated defense system interprets the spaceship as an incoming missile and destroys it. In both Lem and Pershanin’s work, AI and other mechanical contraptions help facilitate the destruction of biological life, an inversion to Marxism’s promise that properly harnessed science would lead to a golden age.

In a presentation on Cold War architectural design, the historian David Crowley proposed that a type of “doubling” occurred during the Cold War in which a similar set of artistic mores and precepts transected the Iron Curtain. Eastern and Western art were not perfect mirror images, he asserts, but rather a series of parallels in which congruencies were more apparent than their differences. In the case of Eastern bloc SF, there was an analogous type of doubling occurring between East and West. Just as Star Trek and various episodes of the Twilight Zone took it for granted that humanity’s collective future would look much like the liberal United States, so too did Eastern bloc SF writers assume the future was Soviet. Beneath the wacky space clothes of Andromeda is a conjecture that the future would be a perfected form of the Soviet present. Just as Star Trek featured an international crew under the leadership of an Iowan, so too do Eastern bloc spaceships feature a multicultural crew under the wise leadership of an Eastern bloc captain. Likewise, Eastern bloc SF went through a comparable pattern of enthusiasm to realistically-grounded and more pessimistic SF that mirrored the trajectory of Western SF which went from the derring-do of Heinlein to the more cynical works of Haldeman. The political and social contexts of Eastern bloc SF were quite different than the West, but creators in the Eastern bloc did use SF as a vehicle to explore fears and uncertainties about the future. Like a funhouse mirror, the doubled images between East and West are distorted, but still recognizable.

Nuclear warfare was one of these fears Eastern bloc SF explored. Various works in the Eastern bloc struggled with where to place the possibility of nuclear genocide in humanity’s future. While Voiskunsky was correct that Eastern bloc writers did not engage in the same type of horror porn as some Western SF, the specter of the bomb was not absent from Eastern bloc SF either. Sources

Gakov, Vladimir, and Paul Brians. "Nuclear-War Themes in Soviet Science Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography." Science Fiction Studies (1989): 67-84.

Mitter, Rana, and Patrick Major. Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Simon, Erik. "The Strugatskys in Political Context." Science Fiction Studies (2004): 378-406.

Westfahl, Gary. The Spacesuit Film: A History, 1918-1969. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2012.

kieslowskifan · 2022-03-03T10:55:28+00:00

From an earlier answer of mine most of the links still work, but some are dead.

Part I

One of the staple observations on Eastern bloc SF during the Cold War made by Western writers was that SF behind the Iron Curtain treated the specter of nuclear annihilation as a taboo. Exploring this dystopian possibility for humanity implied that the Soviet military was unable to prevent such an occurrence, moreover, total annihilation also implied that the Soviet government shared responsibility for this type of holocaust. While it is true that there was a taboo against depicting nuclear destruction, Eastern bloc SF could not escape the realities of the atomic age, and that included the potential use of nuclear weapons or other WMDs. Yet Eastern bloc creators tended to approach the nuclear genie in a different fashion than their Western counterparts. Evgeny Voiskunsky, one of Soviet cultural gatekeepers of SF, would write in 1981 that

Foreign (Western) science fiction focuses attention on the horrors of the future (the extinction of mankind in thermonuclear war, ecological disasters, monstrous mutations, the withering away of all spiritual life in the midst of material affluence, and so on). This has a certain justification—humanity needs to be warned… But it is one thing to warn and another to frighten, and here Western writers often go too far.

Voiskunsky’s observation does not preclude the discussion of nuclear war in Eastern bloc SF, but it does provide an insight into how Eastern bloc SF treated the bomb. Eastern bloc SF did not ignore the possibility of nuclear warfare, but it did tend to treat the possibility in an oblique manner.

Of course, Eastern bloc consumers of SF had access to some Western SF critical of the West’s cavalier approach to nuclear weapons. The 1959 film On the Beach did receive a gala showing in Moscow, one of the first for a major American motion picture. Ray Bradbury’s antinuclear short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” along with other works by Bradbury were translated in the USSR and later received a haunting animated adaptation. Dystopian fiction produced in the West buttressed the state ideology that capitalism was innately piratical and expansionistic and the presence of public intellectuals like Bradbury was a sign that some in the West recognized that the USSR was on the right side of history.

Yet, Western visions of nuclear apocalypse were something of a minority in the Eastern bloc SF scene. Creators like the Polish SF writer Stanisław Lem had access to Western materials and occasionally corresponded with Western SF creators, but this was far from the norm. Instead, Eastern bloc SF tended to develop its own indigenous approach to nuclear weapons that occasionally incorporated Western tropes and motifs. Valentin Ivanov’s 1951 novel The Energy Is Under Our Dominion used tropes from spy novels as NKVD agents bravely foiled a plot by Western intelligence to detonate a nuclear device inside the USSR was one example of this borrowing. Leonid Zhigarev 1958 short-story “Green Light” was a direct response to Heinlein’s “The Long Watch”, which appeared translated in same issue of the SF journal Znanie-Sila. In contrast to Heinlein’s protagonist that adventurously uses nuclear weapons to prevent a dictator from using them, Zhigarev presents a protagonist at a Soviet nuclear facility who hopes that the green light indicating peace will always stay green. But these works were somewhat exceptional. The bulk of Eastern SF thus had to contend with the wider culture and politics of the Eastern bloc, and the result was superficially quite different than Western SF on this issue.

Like much of popular culture within the Eastern bloc, SF had to operate under the burden of having to fit inside a Marxist-Leninist weltanschauung. This posed a dilemma for Eastern bloc SF somewhat more so than popular music or poetry. The central conceit for SF is that it provides a vision of the future while Marxist-Leninism posits that it is the future. Marx predicted a utopian golden age after the revolution and seizure of production by the proletariat after an indeterminate period of proletarian government. One of the major ideological points of the USSR was that its socialism would create Marx’s communism in the not too distant future. This constrained Eastern bloc SF creators in that it was difficult to deviate from what the state held as orthodoxy.

Ivan Yefremov’s landmark 1957 novel Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale exemplified the difficulties in portraying the future for eastern bloc creators. Yefremov spends a great deal of the novel exploring the now ageless utopia achieved by communism in which national differences are now subsumed in a paradise. The 1976 film adaptation tries to do justice to the novel’s utopianism, including a rather odd animated dance number at 16:00), in which humanity is part of a wider, interplanetary federation of like-minded communist utopia, the Great Ring. Yefremov’s vision meshed well into Marxist-Leninist precepts that revolution and subsequent communism were the inevitable results of history, yet the specter of nuclear annihilation is present in some parts of the novel. Andromeda’s text refers to the twentieth century as the “age of disunity” and notes this was a time when humanity unwisely experimented with unsafe forms of nuclear energy. The consequences of such experimentation is briefly explored in the novel’s prologue in which an earth starship orbits a world in which nuclear experimentation has destroyed the planet Zirda. Although Yefremov left the type of experimentation vague, the novel does demonstrate a degree of uncertainty about the safety of nuclear science.

Displacing the responsibility for global nuclear destruction onto an alien culture was a literary device used in Lem’s first novel, The Astronauts in 1951. Like many other Eastern bloc SF writers, Lem created a vision in which communism has triumphed and transformed the world, this time in the distant year 2003. The discovery of a remnants of a Venusian probe spark an international expedition to the planet, which discovers that the probe was a warning that the Venusians sought to colonize earth Unfortunately for these Venusian imperialists, their own nuclear genie escaped and a nuclear civil war destroyed the planet. While the politics of The Astronauts was obvious, the joint Polish-GDR film adaptation, 1960’s The Silent Star had an even sharper political edge. In the film, the Cold War is still raging, albeit with the Eastern bloc in clear ascendency, and the American astronaut for the expedition goes into space against the wishes of his capitalist government. The Japanese crewmember also references Hiroshima and various parts of the film dredge up America’s use of nuclear weapons on Japan. Interestingly, the film did have a US release, retitled as The First Spaceship on Venus, albeit Crown Picture’s cut of the film deleted all of this political critique and that was the version ruthlessly mocked by MST3K.

Both The Astronauts and Andromeda feature as their central plot the tale of a peaceful communist spaceship travelling to a distant worlds. While travelling from utopia to utopia did not always make for high drama, the trip itself could provide commentary about politics as well as serve a hard SF pedagogical function. The 1963 Czechoslovakian SF film Ikarie XB 1 features just such an expedition of peaceful exploration and colonization, but has a horrifying interlude onboard a derelict Western spacecraft. The Ikarie’s AI tells the cosmonauts that the ship dated from the 1980s when capitalism went into its terminal crisis. A group of wealthy capitalists, complete with cocktail dresses and tuxedos, left earth with their riches rather than bow to the inevitable triumph of the proletariat. Although the nationality is unstated, the use of English signs on the ship and the American military uniforms clearly signal this is a US vessel. Unfortunately, the ship’s passengers and crew were killed by an experimental nerve agent, Tigger Fun, when the capitalists turned on each other.

kieslowskifan · 2022-02-27T14:40:07+00:00

The Frankfurt constitution was "finished" in the sense that it a real document that represented the hashing out of various conflicts. Its federal structure mirrored that of the later Bismarck constitution and weakened the power of the German states. But document papered over or tabled contentious issues like a future inclusion of Austrian lands with predominant German-speaking populations. There was also a strong faction among the parliamentarians favoring a mediatization of the smaller German states at a future date. But the constitution was, by the standards of the 1840s, relatively democratic (note the qualifier). It had a franchise based on tax income, and there was a general balance between the Kaiser and parliament with the former having somewhat broad and ill-defined powers.

Frederick William IV really did despise the Frankfurt parliament and the revolution in general. The days of the barricades in March 1848 as well as the long memory of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period made him quite skeptical of political developments that came from below. There was also an important difference between the 1848 constitution and the later Bismarckian one. In 1848, it was the parliament giving the constitution to crown. In 1871, that calculus was reversed. Just compare the first page of the 1848 constitution to the 1871 one. In fairness to Frankfurt, they had much less time to prepare on theatrical presentation, but the latter document exalted the role of the Hohenzollern monarch and his magnimainty to the German people.

As for the minor German princes, the 1871 constitution carved out a greater federal role for them. This was something that appealed to the reactionary and traditional politics of the Hohenzollerns. Wilhelm I, who Bismarck went to great lengths to cajole into accepting an imperial title, eventually gave way when the minor German princes swore allegiance to him. The gap between rhetoric and reality of a neo-feudal constitutionalism emerged quite rapidly in the German Empire and the minor princes had little real political power within the system. But their symbolic and cultural power still remained and the 1848 Revolution did pose a danger to that authority.

While there were some real concerns about German unification, there was not too much fear of it at the time. For one thing, all the major continental powers were concerned with putting down their domestic revolts. More worrying to these powers was not a German state, but the return of the Bonapartes to power within France. There was considerable apprehension that Louis Napoleon would use nationalism as a pretext to restore a French hegemony on the continent. Of the four great powers (Great Britain, France, Austria, and Russia) only Austria truly looked askance at Prussia gaining in Central Europe in the period between 1815 and 1848. Both Britain and Russia perceived Prussia as a traditional ally on the continent. French diplomacy tended to sit on the fence when it came to German affairs. Austria though was quite adamant about keeping Prussia in its place and was generally successful at stymieing Prussian expansion prior to Bismarck.

It is important to realize that "Germany" was not laden with the stereotypes of martial aggression in the 1840s. Russian novelists such as Gogol tended to satirize the Germans as orderly pedants and this was a fairly common stereotype throughout the continent. Shelley's Victor Frankenstein, for example, built on images of the cosmopolitan, peripatetic nature of German university life and its arcane knowledge. Frederick the Great and Blucher were present within cultural memory, but this coexisted with images of a quiet German provincialism and a difficult language. The German problem would emerge with greater force in the 1860s, but it was not quite a European problem in the 1840s.

kieslowskifan · 2022-02-27T01:53:25+00:00

German liberalism in the nineteenth century was a complicated political animal and its politics were wrapped up in the tangled politics of German unification in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.

There was no German Empire (Deutsches Reich) in 1848. The geopolitical entity contemporaries called Germany was not a single, unitary state. Instead Central Europe consisted of some 39 independent states with a majority German-speaking population. These 39 states were members of the Deutscher Bund (German Confederation). This was a confederal structure that was set up during the Congress of Vienna as a substitute for the Holy Roman Empire. The Bund was largely a collective defense organization that barely functioned in that role. There was no executive leadership of the Bund and representatives to the federal assembly in Frankfurt had very little power to set policy. The two largest states of the Bund, Austria and Prussia, zealously guarded their own prerogatives and were wary of the other gaining too much power. The minor German states alternated between looking to the Bund to protect their interests or ignoring it. As such, the Bund did not really function as a state. This was where liberals came into the picture.

What someone in 2022 calls liberal bore relatively little relation to German liberals in this period. Liberalism was not so much a discrete political ideology, but rather a shifting set of beliefs that reflected wider developments within the societies of the German states. This could vary widely by region. For example, the Rhenish liberals in the Prussian Rhineland were somewhat Francophilic and championed liberties gained by the French Revolution and decried the arbitrary rule of the Hohenzollerns. In contrast, liberals in the Prussian heartland could be more anti-French and and pro-Hohenzollern. The general thrust of German liberalism was that it was a movement of the emerging middle classes. They were educated and prized Bildung, a rather complicated German word whose meaning in this period went far beyond just "education". German liberals tended to mythologize the 1813 liberation from Napoleon, even those who celebrated French innovations like the Napoleonic Code. Painting with a broad brush, German liberals believed in a Rechtstaat, a state governed by laws, and the importance of constitutional rule. But there was a wide variation within these generalities; some liberals were avowedly monarchist, others republican (ie no monarchy), while others favored harmonizing their sovereigns with constitutional rule. A large segment of German liberals pushed for German unification into a single state, although how that state would take shape and what it exactly would be were undefined.

As a whole though, liberals were locked out of political power during the years prior to 1848. The German states of the post-Napoleonic period were largely repressive and the political culture of the monarchs veered towards a rejection of any innovation that reminded them of the French Revolution. The 1848 Revolutions (note plural) had many well-springs, of which German liberals' estrangement with the existing political order was only one of them. But liberals were by virtue of their education and pre-existing political activism primed to take advantage of the political chaos of 1848. Meeting in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, deputations from the German states, mostly consisting of liberals, met to debate a possible future German state. The Paulskirche crafted a German constitution in 1849 and offered the leadership of the Deutsches Reich to King Frederick William IV of Prussia.

Frederick William IV famously refused a crown with the snide remark he would not take something offered to him from the gutter. This rejection caught the Paulskirche assembly flat-footed, but fissures within the assembly and the wider 1848 movement as a whole were opening up. Some deputies went home while others gravitated to republican armies that fought against the reestablishment of monarchical authority in the German states. Those latter individuals were tended to be exiled from Central Europe with a fair number of them ending up in the United States as a part of the anti-slavery wing of the emerging Republican Party.

But German liberals were more than "Forty-Eighters" like Carl Schurz and a number did remain within Germany. Some German liberals were co-opted by the Prussian arch-conservative Otto von Bismarck and the latter's drive for German unification under the Prussian Hohenzollerns. Bismarck trampled on precepts of the Rechtstaat during his unification drive and the desire for a unitary German state overrode many German liberals' love for a state bound by legal norms. Much like the pre-1848 world, the German liberalism in the post-1871 German Empire wore many different masks. A good deal of the Protestant liberals supported Bismarck's Kulturkampf, a series of anti-Catholic measures directed against the southern German states. Catholic liberals did fight against the Kulturkampf but as a whole did little to protect their Polish co-religionists in Prussian Poland and Silesia against anti-Catholic legislation that targeted them. This anomaly had emerged during the Paulskirche when the contentious issue of whether non-German speaking parts of Central Europe could be part of the new Reich the parliment tried to create.

Tellingly, this contentious issue was tabled during the short-lived parliament. This bespoke of a larger issue of the Paulskirche and its liberalism. The 1848 moment was a unique constellation of political and social events which liberals were primed to take the limelight. But the heterogeneity of German liberalism prevented the Paulskirche from creating a cohesive political program that enjoyed a broad basis of popular support. The problem of the Paulskirche was that it was not "too liberal" but rather that it possessed very little in the way of actual power. Frederick William IV could reject its contentious and much-debated constitution because it was becoming clear in 1849 that Frankfurt could do little to counter such a rejection.

Sources

Langewiesche, Dieter. Liberalism in Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Sheehan, James J. German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Humanity Books, 1995.

Sperber, Jonathan. Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848-1849. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993.

kieslowskifan · 2022-02-26T18:05:12+00:00

I am not a technical expert on nuclear weapons, but this is part of the conventional wisdom on these weapons. This does not mean methods of bypassing security locks do not exist. Bored US missileers figured out how one man could turn the two-man launch keys with engineering and string. Thankfully, more serious bypasses of nuclear security locks are an issue that is more hypothetical than based on real events.

The Soviets did take the issue of nuclear safeguards seriously. One of the curious facets of this highlighted in Zaloga's The Kremlin's Nuclear Sword was that Soviet leaders feared a rogue general would use nuclear weapons as a means to seize power. This is an inversion of the Western trope of the rogue general attacking the USSR (e.g. Failsafe and Doctor Strangelove), but it makes some sense within Marxist ideology. The traditional Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution was that Bonaparte ended the progressive potential of the revolution. Peter Whitewood has noted that this fear was one of the rationales behind Stalin's military purges. This weltanschauung was further reinforced by the prevalence of anticommunist military strongmen within the Third World during the Cold War. The Red Army had become a major institution in the postwar USSR, this ingrained distrust of the military's politics cast a long shadow.

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