“Abuse of power comes as no surprise.” Reading up on the GULAG.
Annie Clark aka St. Vincent - She actually did an interview where she talked about Stalin and it’s as bad as you’d think.
How much podcast and audiobook listening do you typically do?
I’m obsessed with podcasts and audiobooks. I probably listen to more audiobooks than I do music. I mean, I certainly listen to music — for enjoyment, for research, for just making sure I know what is happening. Luckily, maybe because I’m a musician, I can retain a lot of information that comes through on the auditory side. I mean, I’ve really been brushing up on my Stalin.
You’ve brushed up on your Stalin?
It makes me feel much better about where we are today. Because they had it bad.
It’s pretty bad now.
It’s really bad now. But it was worse. I’ll go ahead and say it was worse in Stalin’s Russia. So there we are. That makes me feel bright and sunny. I’ve been on a real Stasi Gulag Stalin kick for the past many months. Cold war, espionage — all of it.
https://archive.vn/Ci86Z
Reminds me of when I real Orlando Figes lib ass "The Russian Revolution" book which trys to blitz itself through basically the entirety of 20th century Russian history 1905-1991. Every trope you could imagine was in it, except he does have this interesting bit about Nazi Germany explicitly having a genocidal plan for ethnic Slavs not dissimilar to the Holocaust of Jews . Which most liberal authors like Snyder obfuscate. About all I remember from that crap book though, still on the shelf lol.
Tropes in the popular imagination about Soviet history especially in the US are just so predictable, Stalin was a Tsar, Russia is eternally backwards and the Soviet Union was just Russian Empire 2.0, Those social democrats in Russia totally would've succeeded the dang Bolsheviks -05 rev good 1917 bad- , Gulag 20 million dead, Holdamor, Soviets started the Cold War, Molotov pact happened but British US appeasement and collaboration with Fascist Germany and Italy didn't -was actually bad for the Soviets to occupy parts of Poland rather then Nazi Germany occupying all!- , Trotsky was never a usurper and was such a bright little fella, Cuban Missile crisis wasn't the US fault , Soviet democracy was actually totalitarianism, and so on and so fourth
Generalplan Ost! One of the main reasons that the Soviets had 27M deaths in WW2 was that the German military was literally told to execute millions of civilians on the eastern front because it was taken as a given that after the war the Nazis would be able to annex a bunch of now-depopulated territory and give it to Germans.
This being absent from most pop historians' accounts of WW2 is a part of the reason why the myths of the Soviets gunning down their own troops and using human wave tactics is so pervasive.
I should have had Trotsky killed sooner. He should have never made it out of the USSR.