From kulaks to Mariupol
Anne Applebaum starts with Stalin’s genocide of the “kulaks” in Ukraine in 1932-3.
Ukrainian peasants, deprived of food, ate rats, frogs, and boiled grass. They gnawed on tree bark and leather. Many resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Some 4 million died of starvation.
But it was all ok, because there was a story to explain why they deserved it.
Soviet propaganda had repeatedly told them that supposedly wealthy peasants, whom they called kulaks, were saboteurs and enemies—rich, stubborn landowners who were preventing the Soviet proletariat from achieving the utopia that its leaders had promised. The kulaks should be swept away, crushed like parasites or flies. Their food should be given to the workers in the cities, who deserved it more than they did.
And the Stalinist segment of the Left bought into the propaganda and tried to persuade everyone else to buy into it too, for years. There’s a grim shadow history of the Left in which way too many people allow themselves to be persuaded or coerced to believe utter bullshit.
Years later, the Ukrainian-born Soviet defector Viktor Kravchenko wrote about what it was like to be part of one of those brigades. “To spare yourself mental agony you veil unpleasant truths from view by half-closing your eyes—and your mind,” he explained. “You make panicky excuses and shrug off knowledge with words like exaggeration and hysteria.”
He also described how political jargon and euphemisms helped camouflage the reality of what they were doing. His team spoke of the “peasant front” and the “kulak menace,” “village socialism” and “class resistance,” to avoid giving humanity to the people whose food they were stealing.
See: Orwell, passim.
There was a brief window of time when Russians could and did read about this history, but that window closed long ago.
Instead of declining, the Russian state’s ability to disguise reality from its citizens and to dehumanize its enemies has grown stronger and more powerful than ever.
And, staring at that sentence, it occurs to me that the same thing is happening here in the US, with “the Russian state” replaced by whatever we want to call the Trumpist movement.
Putinism doesn’t bother with genocides, because it doesn’t have to. Now the putins and trumps can just lie on social media and get the same result.
Although Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They got angry when anyone accused them of lying, and they produced fake “evidence” or counterarguments. In Putin’s Russia, politicians and television personalities play a different game, one that we in America know from the political campaigns of Donald Trump. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But if you accuse them of lying, they don’t bother to offer counterarguments.
They just throw out a lot of competing stories, all of them absurd.
This constant stream of falsehoods produces not outrage, but apathy. Given so many explanations, how can you know whether anything is ever true? What if nothing is ever true?
This is a world in which the shiny new trans dogma is right at home. Men can be women. Men can be women better than women can. Men are the only real women.
Instead of promoting a Communist paradise, modern Russian propaganda has for the past decade focused on enemies. Russians are told very little about what happens in their own towns or cities. As a result, they aren’t forced, as Soviet citizens once were, to confront the gap between reality and fiction. Instead, they are told constantly about places they don’t know and have mostly never seen: America, France and Britain, Sweden and Poland—places filled with degeneracy, hypocrisy, and “Russophobia.”
Oh lord. Putin is taking notes.
Hate speech doesn’t always lead to genocide, but genocide is always preceded by hate speech.
The modern Russian propaganda state turned out to be the ideal vehicle both for carrying out mass murder and for hiding it from the public. The gray apparatchiks, FSB operatives, and well-coiffed anchorwomen who organize and conduct the national conversation had for years been preparing their compatriots to feel no pity for Ukraine.
They succeeded. From the first days of the war, it was evident that the Russian military had planned in advance for many civilians, perhaps millions, to be killed, wounded, or displaced from their homes in Ukraine. Other assaults on cities throughout history—Dresden, Coventry, Hiroshima, Nagasaki—took place only after years of terrible conflict. By contrast, systematic bombardment of civilians in Ukraine began only days into an unprovoked invasion.
(I think London should have been in that list, and before Dresden.)
All of this—the indifference to violence, the amoral nonchalance about mass murder, even the disdain for the lives of Russian soldiers—is familiar to anyone who knows Soviet history (or German history, for that matter). But Russian citizens and Russian soldiers either don’t know that history or don’t care about it. President Zelensky told me in April that, like “alcoholics [who] don’t admit that they are alcoholic,” these Russians “are afraid to admit guilt.” There was no reckoning after the Ukrainian famine, or the Gulag, or the Great Terror of 1937–38, no moment when the perpetrators expressed formal, institutional regret. Now we have the result. Aside from the Kravchenkos and Kopelevs, the liberal minority, most Russians have accepted the explanations the state handed them about the past and moved on. They’re not human beings; they’re kulak trash, they told themselves then. They’re not human beings; they’re Ukrainian Nazis, they tell themselves today.
Beware what you tell yourself.
And the American left still has a strong streak of denial about it. Too many leftists on this side of the pond are ready to tear into people who mention the atrocities of Stalin, for instance. They have to hang on to the illusion. I used to be conflicted, but that was in high school and early college. Once I learned about the deaths and destruction, I accepted the reliable sources and discounted those who needed to believe that Soviet Russia was a communist paradise.
Really? Stalin? I thought Stalin had been completely replaced by trans women by now.
My son got reamed on Facebook and Twitter for suggesting Stalin was a tyrant. Of course, a lot of the people saying it were also trans allies or trans themselves.
There’s certainly no shortage of Tankies in the West. Even now.
Very much this. I’ve been blowing this particular horn basically since day 1 of the invasion, as I grew up hearing the stories from my own family who lived through Soviet invasion and occupation. I don’t think that people in the West who don’t have that kind of connection with history really understand just how monstrous Stalin and the Soviets were, not only to other peoples but to their own, and certainly don’t seem to understand just how fully Putin is his ideological heir. The stories are almost too horrible to seem real to the minds of people who instituted the Marshall Plan to help rebuild their former enemies’ lives, just as something like the Marshall Plan is wholly foreign and absurd to the Soviet-now-Russian approach wherein the very history of their defeated foes was wiped out and the people deported, to be replaced by imported Russians. It’s for this latter reason that I know next to nothing about the Estonian half of my family history: because upon occupation, the Soviets confiscated and destroyed all the records, including church parish records which officially recorded births, deaths, and christenings, and deported entire families of any persons who had any kind of local influence anywhere in the country, to disappear into the frozen wastes of Siberia. The very name “Siberia” is still used in my family as the epitome of a terrible place; upon growing to adulthood, I was absolutely shocked to learn that there are people living in Siberia and that the land possesses some astonishing beauty.
I also understand the extreme German reluctance to provide heavy weaponry to Ukraine and the strong–almost obsessive–habit of German leaders to forge closer ties both to Europe as well as Russia. When I lived in Germany (from about 1995 until 1999-ish), the weekly papers published detailed descriptions of atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht in WWII on that particular day that the Sunday paper was published. Week after week, month after month, year after year. Not only were the Germans reminding themselves, everyone else was, too: I would go to Italy, and see the same thing (“This week in Nazi Atrocities”) printed in Italian newspapers. Germany and Germans have been paying penance for their sins for decades, and very publicly at that.
According to Jung Chang the same was true in China during the so called Great Leap Forward. There were villages where there was no bark left on the trees because the starving peasants had nothing else to eat after everything else had been taken from them and sold abroad in order to finance the nuclear weapons program. This very deliberate and cynical policy was justified by re-labeling the victims as “land owners” (and hence part of the oppressor class). Meanwhile fat Chairman Mao was portrayed as the true voice of the workers, the peasants, the poor, the oppressed while living like an emperor. Even after most leftists in the west had realized that Stalin was a monster, many continued to see Mao as this selfless idealist and explain away things like the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution as idealistic projects gone wrong (despite the Chairman’s good intentions) or entirely the fault of self-serving underlings. Indeed I can’t remember ever meeting a self-professed Stalinist, but I have personally known several Maoists in my lifetime.
That’s very much my experience as well. As someone who studied German, speaks the language (or at least used to…), and even lived in Leipzig for a short while, I have been to lots of German museums that deal with the Nazi era, the Second World War, the Holocaust etc., and in my experience the main focus is always on how monstrously evil the German regime was and the unspeakable atrocities of the Nazis. The one jarring note when I visited Japan back in 2016 was going to the Edo Tokyo Museum (a fantastic museum in every other way – including the building itself!) and noticing the glaring contrast. As I remember, all the horrible war crimes of the Japanese regime were compressed into a couple of vague references to “regrettable instances” (or something along those lines) while the focus otherwise was almost entirely on the (admittedly real and very traumatic!) suffering of the Japanese people. Shortly before I went Emperor Akihito had caused a bit of a stir by expressing (from memory) “deep remorse” for the atrocities of the Japanese army while then prime minister Abe was criticized for doing the politician thing, talking about “looking forward” and not dwelling on the past etc.
Peter Pomerantsev’s book about the latest assault on truth (highly recommended btw.) is called This Is not Propaganda for this exact reason. The word “propaganda” still conjures up associations to what Soviet leaders did (“[trying] to make their falsehoods seem real”, “[producing] fake “evidence” or counterarguments” etc.). Understanding what we’re seeing now in those same terms is probably more misleading than illuminating at this point. Indeed, a better description of the Putinist/Trumipst mindset is provided by the title of Pomerantsev’s first book (about modern Russia – also highly recommended): Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible. The goal is not to make you believe anything but to make you doubt everything.
As I keep saying, what distinguishes the “post truth era” from the “pre-post truth era” (after all there was never a “truth era”) is not so much the abundance of misinformation (whether in the form of outright lies, subtle lies, bullshit, half-truths, insinuations, innuendo, spin, or any of the practically endless ways of “framing” the facts to make them seem to have implications that don’t follow) as an indifference to facts. Even if people often failed to live up to established norms of truthfulness, at least it used to be implicitly understood that there were such norms and that the difference mattered, which is why even liars (at least the clever ones) used to put some effort into covering their tracks, make sure there as “plausible deniability” etc. Being caught red-handed telling obvious, unambiguous, shameless lies used to be embarrassing and come with a real cost. What seems to have changed is that there no longer seems to be any strong norm against lying, nor any particular price for getting caught.
Much of this indifference to facts in turn seems to come back to the conspiracist mindset and the notion that everything you hear is just the latest manipulative move in somebody else’s nefarious plot or hidden agenda, and one of the reasons it works so well is that it’s not entirely wrong. When people feel like they are constantly surrounded by misinformation and hidden (or not so hidden) self-serving agendas, they’re not wrong, but rather than taking this as an incentive to be extra cautious about the information they accept, people on the Left as well as the Right have embraced post-truthism as a welcome opportunity to dispense with factuality and truthfulness altogether and go with whatever serves their ideological and tribal biases.
I think we have to deal with modern media much like a critical scholar deals with the original texts of the Bible. There are more or less plausible conclusions that can deduced from the texts, but they won’t be found by taking the authors at face value. Instead you have to ask questions like “what is the agenda of this particular author?”, “who is the author responding to?”, “what does this tell us about the various power struggles and rivalries among competing groups of Jews or Christians at the time” etc. And as we have seen in the Gender Wars what people are not saying, the questions not asked, the omissions, the “best-left-unspecifieds”, can be as telling as the things they do say.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on From kulaks to […]
I watched a program in the nineties about the economic struggles in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think that Yeltsin was the mayor of Moscow at the time, and the government was in flux. While many people welcomed the freedoms that they had under Glasnost that they had not had under the Soviets. Recall that art exhibits in the public square, up until very recently, could be bulldozed by the Ministry for Culture if they included any Modern Art. I was surprised at how many of the older Russians longed for the days of Stalin. They said they knew exactly where they stood, and that the rules were clear. Under Yeltsin and Gorbachev, they had suffered too much anomie in the post-Soviet era. The lingering effects of a lifetime of propaganda in place of news had served to imprint on them, perhaps until the end of their lives, that the Soviet government really was serving everyone’s best interest. There really are people who feel safer when freedom from thought is valued over freedom of thought.
As a budding leftist, I was never under the illusion that the Soviet Union was a happy place for anyone with independent thought. I had been reading Solzhenitzyn before I read Lord of the Rings, believe it or not. If you don’t take the time to read “The Gulag Archipelago,” at least pick up “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” I read what I could by Russians, as well as Americans who visited the Soviet Union. The reason that I don’t think we should fall into the trap of thinking of “left v right” in politics is that what we often think of being as leftist is actually something different. Stalinism was a way for the apparatchik to gain wealth by the use of slave labor, and in the Worker’s Paradise, unions were under the control of the government. It always surprised me to find how much of the American left was participating in the propaganda that the Soviet Union was building a happy place; ignoring the suppression of science, ignoring the rampant rise in alcoholism, the five year plans that continued to fail, the continuation of the persecution of the Jews, industrializing the Siberian wilderness, polluting the Arctic, and on and on.
It irritates me no end when Bernie and AOC talk about socialism, because they really don’t mean that the Central government should control the means of production. They mean that they want to institute programs that provide government support to the people who are left behind by capitalism. Roosevelt and Johnson instituted their programs not to move us along the road to communism, but at least in Roosevelt’s case prevent the working class from rising up and starting a communist revolution. Roosevelt was protecting capitalism. But when the American left talk about socialism, they invoke the images of the Soviet Union bulldozing art exhibits and make it easy for the conservatives to ridicule their ideas, which may be sensible other than by their labels.
I think I need to go back and read Das Kapital because I was entirely too young when I did. But if memory serves, Marx was not saying that Communism could be forced by a revolution, he was saying that it is a stage of evolution in societies. Leninism and Stalinism always held out Communism as an ideal and that socialism was a means to get there, and it served to sway their masses in their favor like a carrot on a stick that the horse can never reach.
And don’t get me started on the Chinese. They call themselves Communist, but they are very much capitalist. The one thing they have retained is their authoritarianism.
I think that what we lack in modern politics is a real understanding of basic concepts, and so we have devolved in to a Red v Blue mindset, and a belief that if my side is right on one issue, then we are right on every issue. Which also leads to if they are wrong on this one issue that is important to me, then they are suddenly losers who are wrong on everything. We’ve tossed all our fine-tipped brushes and replaced them with broad ones. If I think that one of the purposes of government should be to mediate power so that the oligarchy doesn’t take over everything, I don’t mean to imply that I think that all corporations are evil money-grubbing bastards who don’t care if they kill all the bambis in the forest. I do think we need to make widgets the best we can while not doing too much damage to the water we rely on, etc. And I think that the goverment should step in and reduce the power of monopolists.
So, enough rambling. My original point is that the Soviet Union was effective at Propaganda and American leftists were fooled, but not me, and we need to be able to recognize authoritarianism whether it is from the left side or the right side.
War is peace.
Ignorance is strength.
Transwomen are women.
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