What are you currently reading in 2018

**JHR** · 01-08-2018

Also, credit to the translator.

**Firn** · 01-08-2018

Originally Posted by JHR

Also, credit to the translator.

Indeed. Some terms may be old-fashioned or not so precise but this fits my personal bias for, well old texts...

And still today much can be read between the lines.

**Backwards Observer** · 02-16-2018

A History of the Future by Peter J Bowler

The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodell

**Backwards Observer** · 02-26-2018

The U.S. vs China by Jude Woodward

The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg

**omarali50** · 02-28-2018

My review of Stephen Kotkin's "Stalin, Waiting for Hitler" is up on brownpundits.

Excerpts:

Stephen Kotkin is a historian who has written several outstanding books on Russian history and is now in the process of distilling his lifetime work into a monumental three part biography of Stalin. Volume 1 dealt with Stalin’s early life and his progress from relatively peripheral disciple of Lenin in 1917 to Lenin’s handpicked general secretary of communist party in 1922, to undisputed (though not yet completely all-powerful) boss and ruler of the Soviet Union by 1928. By the end of that volume, Stalin was firmly ensconced in this position, having successfully seen off the challenge from Trotsky, who lost out partly because almost nobody around him liked him, but mostly because he was neither as hardworking, nor as competent, iron-willed or crafty as Stalin. It is true that Trotsky imagined himself as the real “Marxist intellectual” in this fight, but the autodidact Stalin was no intellectual slouch, and Trotsky’s low opinion of him in this arena is also a (small) part of why he lost this fight; he underestimated his opponent. Of course, both of them believed fully in the Marxist-Leninist picture of history and society, complete with the necessity of class war, the central role of the proletariat and the idiocy of the peasants, so it is easy to dismiss the intellectual output of both parties as equally delusional, but that is not how it looked in the 1920s, so we should leave such retrospective wisdom out of the discussion. In any case, by 1928, Stalin had kicked Trotsky out of the Soviet Union, and had defanged or sidelined all his other rivals within the Bolshevik leadership.

The next phase was building socialism; As Kotkin makes abundantly clear, Stalin was power hungry and ultimately became one of history’s greatest (or vilest) despots, but he was not just power hungry. He was also an idealist who believed in the revolution and its ideals and many (if not all) of his most vicious campaigns make no sense without this crucial aspect of his personality. If all he had wanted was personal power, there was no need to collectivize the peasantry and force the industrialization of Russia at such tremendous human cost. Even the purges of 1937-39 were about more than personal power, though by the that time the personal and political were inseparable, as Stalin (and many other dedicated communists in the Soviet Union) clearly felt that his person was essential to defending and completing the work of the great Bolshevik revolution. Any way, whether all good communists felt the need for a purge or not (and surprisingly, several, including many who fell victim to it, did express approval of the idea of a purge), they all agreed that private agriculture had to go. The only question was, how quickly could this be done? and what level of coercion was justified? Many of them shrank from the massive human cost, but almost none believed that socialism could be built without it.

...
By 1934, the worse was over and the party celebrated at its congress of victors. But the celebration did not last. Hardly had the Soviet Union started to emerge from the terror of collectivization when it was pushed into the terror of the great purges of 1937-38. Kotkin argues that the ability to carry out such purges and the tendency to conduct them was built into the Leninist system (a fact that is also borne out by the experience of other Leninist revolutions), but the scale and cruelty of this particular purge did owe much to the personality and personal demons of Stalin. Starting with the Kirov assassination, Stalin turned on the party, the military and the state apparatus itself, using the NKVD to unleash a widening reign of terror that eventually led to 1.6 million arrests (out of a total adult population of 100 million) and over 800,000 executions. The terror (unlike, for example, Mao’s decentralized, bottom-up purge of the Chinese communist party in the cultural revolution) was highly bureacratized and tightly controlled from above by Stalin and his NKVD chief Yezhov. People were not killed by crazed mobs or local “people’s courts”, they were arrested and tortured by a vast and well organized system of oppression and terror. Quotas were set from above, arrests were duly recorded, as were confessions. Show trials were conducted in some cases, but most people were “sentenced” by special tribunals that decided the fate of hundreds of thousands, but even during this industrial scale slaughter, lists were made, and they were duly presented to higher ups and signed by them. At least 383 execution lists signed personally by Stalin have survived, containing the names of more than 43,000 “enemies of the people” and frequently marked with comments and underlined in various colors.

...
The book is incredibly detailed (and well sourced and documented) but even this book is enough to fully grasp all aspects of the terror. The interested reader will have to read several other books to get a truly well rounded picture of this horror. Suffice it to say that the scale of the purge defies explanation; Stalin executed almost his entire military high command, half of his central committee, tens of thousands of loyal party functionaries and scores of thousands of lower level officials, engineers and managers. He decimated his own army and intelligence service, decapitated the foreign service and undermined intelligence gathering operations all over the world; the sheer scale and indiscriminate nature of it is examined from operational, ideological or even personal psychological angles, but by all of these criteria, it still fails to make sense.

...
Through all this, Kotkin also provides us with a very balanced and nuanced analysis of world affairs and the strategic challenges faced (and frequently, met) by Stalin and the nascent Soviet state. In the first part of the book the main threat is from an increasingly aggressive and expansionist Japan, and Stalin worked hard to try and stiffen Chinese resistance (including pressurizing the Chinese communists to cooperate with the Nationalist regime in the struggle against Japan). In the second half of the book, the threat is from Germany and the last part reads almost like a thriller, as Germany, the Soviet Union and the Western powers all play games with each other as the international order falls apart; Hitler moves relentlessly towards his goal of reversing Versailles (achieved without war and more easily than he might have imagined possible) and then towards European domination. All major powers miscalculate, misstep, miscegnate and betray smaller states at various points in the story, with Hitler and Stalin appearing first as early winners (Hitler in his lightning wars, Stalin in his non-aggression pact and subsequent re-expansion of the Soviet Union to the widest Czarist frontiers and beyond, in Poland, the Baltics, Finland and Bessarabia), and then as inevitable opponents headed for the greatest military clash in human history.
The last few chapters are a relentless drumbeat of Nazi preparations for an invasion of the Soviet Union, all delivered to Stalin but so mixed up with disinformation and confusing signals that Kotkin makes Stalin’s unwillingness to believe this flood of evidence a little more understandable than it is in more propagandistic or superficial descriptions of this crucial period. Stalin’s stubborn miscalculation will of course greatly magnify the scale of early Soviet defeats and will cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of ill prepared and ill-positioned Soviet troops, but Kotkin also makes clear that the logic of total war and zero-sum international competition that had gripped Europe (overwhelmingly, but not entirely thanks to Hitler) made the overall clash inevitable, and all these setbacks and miscalculations will eventually become mere details in a much bigger drama. In the end, it was Hitler who miscalculated most fatally, not Stalin, but that is subject of the next volume, and we must wait for it.