2013: Welcome to Stalingrad
So the Kozlenko story seems to hold out some hope. And there was some more good news for the company, when the readers of Skyscanner voted (German-language link) that Aeroflot’s flight attendants had the most stylish uniforms in the world. But if you look beneath the surface of the story, the Russian world seems as bleak as always, if not bleaker.
Upon getting the axe, here’s how Kozlenko responded:
I don’t consider myself guilty! The photo was added to my page, I only tagged myself on it!!! The hand isn’t mine, the plane is not my company’s!!! I don’t understand what they spoil my life for!!! I’m asking you for help and support!!
She’s a young person, but I for one fail to see any difference between her attitude and that of the hotel clerk in the Soviet joke. Does she really believe that it might somehow be proper for a flight attendant to publicize such a photo uncritically as long as the hand wasn’t hers?
And if you think Aeroflot has turned a corner, think again. Have a close look at the “stylish” uniform that Kozlenko is sporting in her photograph. See the gold emblem in the center of her cap? It’s the hammer and sickle, the symbol of Communist mass-murder and dictatorship, flanked by a pair of cute little wings. And red, of course.
Meanwhile, if all that happens to you when you board a Russian plane is that the flight attendant spits in your borscht, consider yourself fortunate. Russia operates the world’s most unfriendly skies, in the sense of actually killing passengers. Even state-sponsored propaganda outfit Russia Today has acknowledged that the country’s litany of air disasters has made it the most dangerous place in the world to fly. The planes are old, the pilots are drunk, and worst of all, the country simply doesn’t place the same value on individual human lives that other nations do.
And the West continues to look the other way. Would Skyscanner readers have chosen a German airline uniform most stylish if the young lady’s cap sported a tiny little winged swastika?
Such outrageous acts are deemed acceptable, even normal, from Russians. World leaders are turning a blind eye to Putin’s rehabilitation of Stalin — particularly Barack Obama, whose “reset” policy smacks of Chamberlain appeasement.
Which is a big part of the reason why everything old is new again in Putin’s neo-Soviet state.
Well, you pretty much get the government you elect. Elections DO have consequences, as Americans are now finding out with the re-election of Obama. When you see what Obama has been doing and the power he has been trying to usurp from Congress (from everything to EPA regulations killing the coal industry to new gun and immigration “Executive Orders” to all of his many “czars” implementing policy without Congress’ approval), it becomes pretty evident that at least a small majority of the American people don’t really care about this and actually don’t mind Obama doing these things. Once he has that majority, democracy is finished.
The same is true with Russia. The Russians are intelligent people. They don’t live in some west African backwater nation. Yet they don’t seem to have any problems with allowing a thug like Putin in becoming another Stalin. In fact, many Russians actually admired Stalin and his absolute dictatorial powers. Unless, of course, you were one of the hapless people who were killed in one of his many purges. Then Stalin didn’t seem so great. But the fact is, if the Russians didn’t want Putin, they wouldn’t keep him in power for so long, regardless of how Putin reigns through terror and brute force. There is something in the Russian people that rejects democracy and admires centralized power possessed by a single individual. It took literally centuries before the czar was overthrown, only to be replaced by a communist czar. So I don’t really have much hope in Russia maintaining its “democracy” for much longer. And the sooner Americans realize this, the better we’ll be able to deal with it.
But it really will be funny seeing the likes of John Kerry going up against Putin. Putin will eat him for breakfast.
In his book, “The Gulag Archipelago”, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that, upen hearing the news of Stalin’s passing, there were labor camp inmates who openly wept. While there were many inmates like Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov who regarded their imprisonment as a grave personal injustice, there were more than a few inmates who regarded their own imprisonment as “for the good of the party” and resolved that, upon their release and rehabilitation, they would strive to be better citizens and avoid the “errors” that got them arrested.
Sakharov has never been imprisoned. He is also of another generation.
Further to Thunderbottom’s remarks, many of Stalin’s erstwhile closest comrades continued to sing the praises of the Communist Party and/or Stalin even as they were lead to their own executions at the behest of that same party and thug. These were Politburo members who had sometimes allied with Stalin in his various efforts to remove one threat or another, including Trotsky, then got discarded when Stalin allied with someone else. (They all feared Trotsky’s arrogance and intelligence.)
Robert Conquest and others have documented this in their books.
Hitler planned to murder tens of millions of Russians by hunger and deport the rest to Siberia. If not for the Russian victory in World War II, not just Russia but all of Europe would be speaking German. Yes, it was a costly victory. But it was not a “pyrrhic” victory.
I’m not seeing a difference with what Stalin did then of murdering millions of Russians and sending millions to Siberia. So other than German or Russian, what difference?
No difference between murder and imprisonment? Glad you are not my lawyer.
Stan,
Sadly, Stalin did much what Hitler planned to do. In 1932-33, Stalin murdered 3-3.5 million Ukrainians through starvation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor). He also deported another 3 million to Siberia before, during and after WWII. Perhaps another 14 million to Gulags and 7 or 8 million relocated to miserable places throughout his rule. I’ve heard estimates that 35-36 million people lost their lives either due to Stalin or the Great Patriotic War.
Yeah, I’m assuming Hitler would have killed more, but it’s not like Uncle Joe was a friend of the people.
I just found out a few weeks ago that once the Soviet Army marched into Poland in 1939, a couple of weeks after the Germans invaded it from the west, Stalin began having the POLISH people shipped to Siberia,men,women and children,in unheated train cars,without food or water,people who had done nothing wrong except be living in eastern Poland. It was a LONG trip,too. He was a bloodthirsty barbarian, who apparently didn’t care about anyone. His own and only son was captured by the German army,and they offered to return him in exchange for a few German POWs, but Stalin refused,and his son died in a POW camp. MILLIONS died at Stalin’s will,and his millions of murders were only exceeded by Mao’s (and perhaps also by the 13 centuries of bloodletting by Islamic armies),and to find that he is being “rehabilitated” in Russia now is appalling. Can’t the Russians READ? Haven’t they seen Russian language copies of “The Black Book of Communism”? I feel heartsick for them.
I think the single most chilling thing I ever read was a remark Stalin made to his daughter after the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union: “It’s a shame Hitler had to go and attack us. TOGETHER we could really have done some things!”
Just picture a world where those two monsters were eagerly collaborating to enslave other nations…. Would America and the British Commonwealth alone have been powerful enough to defeat Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union and their lesser allies if the Axis had been united for a few years longer? While it seems inevitable that they would have eventually turned on each other, who can say for sure? They might have realized that they would have been better off overall if they lived with their differences than if they had fallen out. And then the world would have been in a very dark place indeed, possibly for centuries.
You cannot blame Obama for lack of interest – give the guy some slack! Why, he is fully focused on the fiscal cliff thing, just as he should be. He would not have an inkling where Stalingrad might be. Or Volgograd. Or Tsaritsyn. Only those who speak Soviet would know it.
I traveled by Aeroflot quite often while in the USSR in 1969.
Not much has changed. One one flight the seatbelt…both straps
came off in my wife’s hands. I told her to keep it as a souvenir
but she was afraid she’d be hassled by customs on the way out
of the country. When a plane was needed for a flight in snowy
Novosibirsk, a truck with a jet engine mounted on it backed
up to the desired plane and the exhaust from the jet engine
blew off the snow…and off we went. Two guys tried to sneak
aboard one flight…they came on board while the attendant
wasn’t looking and hid in the coat closet. Someone ratted
on them and the beefy lady attendant opened the coat closet
doors with a flourish…as to show her power and pointed to
the boarding steps and told them to leave.
Fond Aeroflot memories.
I think you’re awfully lucky to be alive in order to have the memories!
Russia is bulking up its gold reserve September 05, 2012 Brett Arends
http://articles.marketwatch.com/2012-09-05/finance/33598259_1_gold-reserve-world-gold-council-power-politics
“a victory in the sense that Russians don’t speak German now”. You got that wrong, many wish now that Germany had won; instead these ‘victors’ are living in a 3rdW country with the difference that the citizens of the latter mostly don’t know any better whereas the Russians are there from choice.
Your comment lacks any reflection which horrors the world escaped – at the the cost of of 20 million Soviet soldiers and civilians.
The choice for the Russians (and the other Eastern Europeans) was not between a German or a Soviet dictator, it was between mere life and death.
After a hypothetical victory of the Wehrmacht, Hitler’s plan was to clear the fertile regions in Eastern Europe and Russia from the Slavs and to use the remaining people as slave labour for the to be sent Germanic settlers.
Compared to that a 3rd World country is just fine.
Your comment lacks any reflection which horrors the world escaped – at the the cost of of 20 million Soviet soldiers and civilians.
Actually, historians now believe that the total Soviet fatalities were substantially higher than 20 million. They seem to be settling on a number in the 26.5 to 28 million range.
The 20 million number was one that the Soviets themselves supplied after the war. It is widely believed that they understated the number considerably to reduce Stalin’s culpability in those deaths. You see, many of those deaths resulted from Stalin’s exceedingly incompetent leadership in the early days of the invasion. He kept insisting on attacks and refusing to allow his soldiers to rearm, regroup and reorganize. Millions of men were lost accomodating his orders. Only after this approach was clearly proven disastrous did Zhukov, his top general, persuade him to take the time to prepare before attacking. This gave somewhat better results and, eventually, victory over their German attackers.
Still to this day, Stalin is much beloved there, even by people of our YGen age.
I believe that despite the whinging, there has always a lot of contributory negligence there. I think the whole place was on board with Stalin and the rest of them, and basically thought it was the right thing to do.
It has always been a place of death and despair, with a falling longevity rate compounded with low replacement rate.
What is there not to love?
“Still to this day, Stalin is much beloved there, even by people of our YGen age.” Examples of that would be the late Howard Zinn’s revisionist “history” book, used in colleges and high schools across this country, and Oliver Stone’s recent “documentary” about the Second World War which painted President Truman as the bad guy and Stalin as the hero (Ron Radosh here at PJMedia wrote at least two articles about this piece of work).
I believe that despite the whinging, there has always a lot of contributory negligence there. I think the whole place was on board with Stalin and the rest of them, and basically thought it was the right thing to do.
I may be misunderstanding you but it sounds like you’re saying Stalin was massively popular in the Soviet Union. If so, you’re confusing appearances with reality. The Soviet Union in Stalin’s time, particularly after 1929 when he is reckoned to have dispensed with any sort of opposition within the Politburo, was a place where Stalin was praised to the skies by every media outlet in the country. The Party celebrated him and activists sung his praises and raised enormous banners to him. All sorts of places were named in his honour and he was cited as the inspiration for every achievement made in the Soviet Union, whether for Arctic exploration, scientific discoveries or works of art. A tourist visiting the country might well believe that Stalin was popular.
But this was an illusion. There was no political opposition of any kind to Stalin. The media were completely under the control of the Party. No dissenting voices were heard to the Party’s program nor its leader. No one dared speak out for fear of being shot outright or exiled to the Gulag, where six out of seven people died before completing their sentences. And no one dared criticize him even in private. A celebrated Soviet writer once protested hotly that Soviet citizens had the right to say whatever they liked – as long as it was in the privacy of their own apartment, at night, in the dark, and under their bed covers. Even that was not actually safe as many people were made to speak against their spouses but it was safer than any other form of speech if your words went against the regime. You had to be especially careful of what you said in front of your children. They were brainwashed from a very early age to report anything that anyone said against the regime, including their own parents. Read about Pavel (“Pavlik”) Morozov sometime to see how appalling things got. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Morozov].
The only way any foreigner could find out what people REALLY thought was to ask them. And to do that, you had to evade the “minders” that were inevitably assigned to foreigners, which was not easy. One person who did so was Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who visited the Soviet Union during the man-made famine that resulted from Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture. He simply rode the train as far as he was allowed, then starting walking until he found villages. There, he encountered massive starvation. As a fluent Russian speaker, he could talk to people without any interpreters. He soon determined that Stalin was the most hated man in the Soviet Union. The villagers, probably knowing that they were dying, had no qualms about speaking of their hatred for Stalin.
If you read accounts of life in the Soviet Union in those times, you will be left with a feeling that most people kept practically everything to themselves for fear that saying anything negative would get them in very deep trouble. They adopted a public face of support for the regime to preserve their own lives but a significant number of them must have known how very very rotten the whole country was. But they lacked opportunities to express those thoughts. It was simply too dangerous.
Even Solzhenitsyn, a very courageous man, said that in the first years after his release from the Gulag he did not dare to dream that anything he wrote would ever be published. He said everything was written “for the drawer”, i.e. to be kept in a drawer safe from prying eyes in the hope that someday, maybe decades in the future, it would be possible to publish it.
When I was in Moscow in 1994, Stalin’s memorial bust in the Metro was the only one of the old communist leaders that was festooned with fresh flowers eash day – Dozens of them. The only other Sov/Red leaders to be so remembered were Lenin and John Reed – both of whom got one stem each. This was not an official rememberance, but was done mostly by Stalin’s victims.
Howard Zinn’s books are basically revisionist propaganda & foolish garbage. I wouldn’t even dignify this trash by burning it in my BBQ.
RE: Stalin, it is sad that so many people still love him. Solzhenitsyn was right with what he wrote.
Also, as horrible as the WWII conflict was between Nazi Germany & Communist Russia, the Reds get a pass for helping start WWII. People sometimes forget or simply do not know that Stalin attacked Poland WITH Germany & killed executed most of the Polish officers they captured. Also, one has to remember that they were once actually allied w/ the Nazis & that the Soviets thoroughly trained the Gestapo & SS in torture methods, etc. BEFORE the start of WWII. There is documentation for this & the documents were even broadcast on Russian TV a few yrs. ago before the Dear Leader of Russia quashed it.
Bottom line: Stalin was a bloodthirsty & very intelligent monster. Sadly, Pukin’ Putin is running as fast as he can down the path to be the next Josef Stalin. He is virtually a fascist dictator now & with the help of the FSB, his cronies & millions of naive Russians, it looks like here is there to stay until he kicks the bucket. However, he will have to face the music after this eternally. There is a Judge…
These are reprehensible words:
“You can call what happened to Russia in World War II “victory” if you want; it was certainly a victory in the sense that Russians don’t speak German now. But Soviet forces stood on the opposite bank from Warsaw and watched the Nazis liquidate the Polish uprising, then marched in when the dust settled and took the Nazis’ place for half a century.”
Yes, ma’am, I do want to call what happened a “victory” and most decent human beings call it that as well. It gives no credit to the monster Stalin to call it a victory. It pays homage to the tragic, brave Russian citizens and soldiers who by the millions fought and died because they understood what stakes were even if it meant another few generations living under communist torment. It was a victory won despite the horrible Communist leadership.
It is sad to read such a flippant remark suggesting there was no difference between a Nazi or a Soviet victory. Thank goodness we had leaders like Winston Churchill and FDR, who recognized that the Nazi monster had to first be defeated at any cost, even allying with the Soviet Kremlin monster, who could then be dealt with in a different manner through containment and eventual economic victory. Apparently this historical wisdom, which our Presidents from FDR to Reagan practiced, is no longer appreciated. We disparage our politicians, but they have proven much wiser and sounder thinking than our writers and academics.
You don’t discredit the Communist and leftist revisionist history by providing a counter-skewed version of history. That is part of the reason that conservatives have failed to make much of a dent in the leftwing revisionism that dominates our culture and schools. You prevail by insisting on an accurate and balanced account of what really happened and avoid falling into the trap of the propaganda game that the left plays.
Also you are wrong. Both Hitler and Stalin were monsters. Surely. Both Nazism and Soviet Socialism were monstrous. Similarities are striking (see Orwell). In the situation of 1941-1945 there indeed was no choice: Hitler should be defeated by any cost. But the world had shear luck: Stalin died already in 1953. His followers were much less feral. Not only has he killed more people than Hitler, if he remained alive a year or maybe even a few months more, he would exterminate all Russian Jews. The latter point is important for me, for then I would not be writing these words. But he had succeeded in a number of other genocides, Jews were only the next in the cue. The action against them was scheduled in March. Stalin died on March 5, 1953.
It was a great victory by Stalin. You can call it stolen, but it does not really matter. This was this victory which kept Soviet Union going and ruling half of the world for additional 45 years.
With all due respect Ariel, you misread my post. Of course Stalin was a monster and I am well aware of what he planned to do to Soviet Jewry. But, as you made the point further on, the writer of the article was questioning whether Stalingrad was a victory – “call it a victory if you want”. Stalingrad was a monumental victory, the turning point of the Second World War and the end of unlimited Nazi ambitions. To present it as something else in order to score some rhetorical point about Putin and Stalin is to denigrate the sacrifices of the more than half million Soviet citizens who perished there.
Furthermore, as a Jew, you should not fall into the trap of comparative monstrosity in your comment about Stalin killing more than Hitler. More people perished under communism because it lasted much longer than the 12 year reign of the Nazis. There is a difference and Churchill and FDR recognized that difference. The Nazis engaged in mass murder because it was their central goal. There was nothing more important to Hitler than killing the Jews, even if it meant sacrificing the rest of the war effort. The Communists murdered because they believed that any means justified the ends.
I am sorry if you and others who misrepresent the two ideologies cannot distinguish the difference. Both are malignant ideologies, but one was an acute malignancy that had to be stopped at all costs, the other was a chronic illness that could be dealt with over time.
He’s merely suggesting that if a victorious Stalin OR a victorious Hitler had had several decades to fully carry out their intended dirty work, it’s far from clear that the latter would have killed more people in total by the end–or indeed, more Jews in particular. That’s not a terribly controversial surmise.
I have no idea what you mean here. Hitler lasted in power 12 years and killed 6 million Jews and maybe 40 million people total. Stalin lasted in power 29 years, and Jews accounted for maybe 2% of his 15 million or so victims, or about 300 thousand.
Ever notice that the left part of the spectrum always had the most wasteful, horrible, and murderous policies toward labor and people?
My guess is that leftism has built-in thinking methods which automatically preserve ignorance and lack of information. The culprit in my view is Deductive reasoning. Its natural home is in the spiritual life. Bringing it into daily life puts it where Inductive reasoning is needed.
Deductive reasoning lets one vault over bodies of knowledge and information that is not clear or poorly put into words. Manufacturing is mostly visual. Ask a worker what his job is all days and the result will be featureless generalities. Deductive reasoning lets people miss the immense amount of non-verbal knowledge that is in manufacturing. So when liquidating class enemies in the civil war in Russia, I bet they were astounded that the factories were unable to do anything any more. Military activity is worse, with huge amounts of skill and learning which cannot be put into words. Stalin undoubtedly thought that liquidating counter-revolutionary elements in the military would not have the catastrophic result of emptying the ability of the military to function.
Didn’t both Himmler and Beria end with feelings that the labor camps would produce more if everyone would just get a small amount increase in the wretched food supply?
One time on a night flight from Kiev to Donetsk when we boarded, the flight attendants guided us with flash lights to our seats because the light of the plane did not work.
OK, so that was Ukraine and not Russia but it still was part of the FSU.
There is nothing reprehensible and/or flippant in seeing little difference between two bloody tyrannies: A tyranny is tyranny is tyranny. It might be arguable whether German order or Russian mess would be more agreeable to the conquered, but surely such an argument would not be very productive – certainly not to the Poles. If anything is admirable at all, then perhaps the fact that Poland survived, albeit at a price.
Still, I would like to remind you that General Patton definitely preferred the defeated Wehrmacht to the victorious Red Army. As he saw it in 1945, American soldiers should join forces with their German counterparts and crush the Bolshevik once and for all. Then again, he was a man, not a pussy. You can thank the “wiser and sounder thinking” politicians for Korea and the rest. Yeah, what price wisdom?
This, in response to 10. steve.
You are right. Also Vietnam, Campuchia, Chinese Communism, Middle East wars, etc.
But on the other hand, then Germany (not Hitler) would be a winner. It would be never completely denazified. It won’t be a democracy. It is quite possible that Fascism would still be in power there. And where else?
There were no good solutions.
Are there now?
Mr. Fowler,
Also with due respect, I think your view is misguided. Sorry to say it that way. Patton was a formidable military commander, he was not a formidable political thinker. All tyrannies are not the same and I only hope that you will reconsider that comment.
Hitler’s goal was the remaking of humanity with mass murder as his chief tool to eliminate those whose genetics did not fit into his scheme.
The communist goal was the remaking of humanity and using mass murder as an instrument to eliminate those who would not accommodate their vision.
Other tyrants have far less ambitious goals and means.
I am sorry if you cannot distinguish the difference. Some tyrants have to be confronted and dealt with immediately and forcefully. Others can be dealt with through containment. Patton was a military man who did not think in those terms. His plan to utilize the Germans to fight the Soviets would have been folly and fortunately wiser men at the time dismissed such talk as nonsense. On a personal note, my father and many of my uncles were in the service at the time, 1945. They appreciated Patton’s aggressive military leadership despite the terrible toll it took on the GIs, but would never have thought for a minute of him as a man of political wisdom. They had a lot clearer view of reality than many people today.
Of course Patton preferred the Nazis. He was a racist, a vicious antisemite, and a Nazi sympathizer. After WWII Patton’s biggest concern was to protect the Germans from the “marauding” Jewish and non-Jewish DP survivors of the Nazi camps. He loved Nazism because it was an exemplification of what he saw as the “Anglo-Saxon” love for war.
Everything Stalin did had been started by Lenin and the first politburo members, a good number of whom btw were (and have remained) the darlings of western intellectuals and capitalists.
The present US administration (and the “global” elite) is in fact closer to them than the present Russian government will ever be. Contrary to us, they have been there, know what it is, do not want to go back and certainly have no desire to be what we have become.
The poor american people are brainwashed by the likes of Zigfeld into believing the cold war is not over and that the Russians are our enemies. Wonder why…
Putin is doing what he can to increase Russia’s catastrophically low birth rate. To convince Russians to make more Russians, Russia needs a national myth, a narrative in which Russia is the good country nobly fighting for the advancement of humanity. To misquote an old Soviet joke, Russia needs to change its past so that it can have a future.
> Putin is doing what he can to increase Russia’s catastrophically low birth rate.
But what can one man, an aging man, accomplish on his own? Maybe 10 to 12 new babies per year maximum, given his busy work schedule…
Old Soviet Joke: “Two aged and impoverished veterans of the Great Patriotic War are sitting on a park bench in Gorky Park. After a long silence, one of them mutters, ‘It’s a damn shame we defeated the fascists.’ Without skipping a beat, the other vet replies, ‘Yeah, we could be living like the Germans now.’”
Mark, I know that the idea that Hitler’s goal was to make Russians live like Germans is very popular here in the USA. However, in reality Hitler wanted to turn Russians and other Slavs into slaves. The life of a slave is not as glamorous as you think.
> France, which fell to Hitler, is now a prosperous leader in Europe.
A leader in foreign-born residents & gay rights, yeah.
The price russians payed for their victory was enormous. But they did that, survived, and proved that they are great warriors, while most other europeans just cowardly decided to become vassals for the lord Hitler & german nation. Lets worship people who are easily ready to be slaves, and lets blame those who stand up and fight. That’s sounds so nice, modern, democratic, tolerant & liberal!