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Larry Muffin At Home

Tag Archives: Soviet

Books I am reading

24 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by larrymuffin in Uncategorized

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Bolchevism, Fallada, Germany, Lenin, Nazism, Russia, Soviet, Stalin, terror, USSR, WWII

Recently I started two books, one was given to me by someone who came in for an interview at the Museum it is entitled Alone in Berlin, by German writer Hans Fallada (nom de plume) whose real name was Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen (1893-1947). He was the greatest writer of the XXth century. Fallada suggests that morality under the Nazi Dictatorship was not measured by the size of the struggle; it mattered only that one did not capitulate…the very act of writing Alone in Berlin – to say nothing of the stunning political clout of the novel itself – implies that for Fallada, the artist’s true role under fascism was chiefly one of bearing witness.

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The story starts in an apartment building in central Berlin where several families live. All have different economic conditions, a retired senior Judge, an old Jewess, a worker and his wife, a Nazi party family with sons in the SS, a shifty alcoholic and his prostitute wife and their 5 kids. Tragedy strikes when the worker Quangel and his wife learn by official letter of the death of their son Otto, a soldier in the German Army invading France, this death will make of them resisters, the book is dark and full of anguish and fear. The Quangel write postcards denouncing the Fuhrer and leave them around Berlin. The Gestapo and the SS embark on a hunt to find whoever is responsible and it is a game of Cat and Mouse. The reader understands that many Germans resisted the Nazi, hated them but given the politics of fear and the Police State with the constant threat of the Concentration Camp for anyone resisting or criticizing the Fuhrer, people kept their heads low. Fallada who lived through it all also explains how the Nazi regime financed itself through extortion of the public in general and Party members.

Primo Levi called this book ”the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis. I have read other books about German resistance and living conditions during the Nazi dictatorship, it has been 75 years now and more biographies and diaries are coming out, it was not a black and white picture many shades of grey and complex reality. The picture is one of a society in turmoil and we have to ask ourselves what would we do if we lived in such atmosphere where the police can arbitrarily arrest you, beat you up, kill you or send you to a concentration camp. Where the wrong word can mean a death sentence, where no one can be trusted, where no one will be foolish enough to come to your defence.

A few years ago I read two biographies entitled Purgatory of Fools and Berlin Diaries 1940-45, it was the stories of two sisters of Russian-German origin, Marie Princess Vassilchikov and Tatiana Princess Metternich. Both worked at the German Foreign Ministry as secretaries and were implicated in the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944. They miraculously survived the war. However they do give a gripping account of the horrors under the Nazis.

The other book is about Joseph Stalin, who was not Russian but Georgian who becomes  the all powerful dictator of Soviet Russia under the Bolcheviks. Entitled Stalin, the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore. It gives a psychological picture of the man and his family and entourage. It also re-establishes in reality what actually happened from 1917 onwards, removing all the romantic nonsense about the Revolution or that it was done for the people. What we see is how the people, the peasants, millions of people were starved, put to death, a country destroyed by fanaticism similar to what we see with the Taliban today. It was not the overthrow of the Tsar or the old Aristocratic Regime that was achieved, since the regime stop to exist in February 1917 by the sudden abdication of Nicholas II forced out by his cousins, a surprise to all including the Bolcheviks. No it was the fanatical pursuit of an inhumane ideology ”Bolchevism” to create the new man, a robot  basically who only thought in terms of means of production, devoid of any human feelings described as Bourgeois sentimentality.

The author Montefiore gives us a detailed psychological portrait of the people in Stalin’s entourage, few actual Russians, many were Jews who occupied top positions around him, their families, the children, their lack of education, their poverty and in the case of the Jewish colleagues the oppression they felt in Russian society. Even after the so called Revolution, Bolchevik Jews could not be promoted to senior positions because they were considered non-Russian, though non-Jews like the Armenians, Ukrainians, Abkazians, our other Ethnic groups could. Stalin will eventually get rid of all of them in his purges.

Montefiore did meticulous research much through interviews of the children now aged, and newly opened Kremlin State Archives , diaries and personal journals of who they were. We see Lenin the petit bourgeois, from a small noble family whose father was a Tsarist bureaucrat, Lenin who was absolutely convinced that in 1919 the world was going to fall into an orgy of blood and revolution, who believed that the people were with him, totally delusional. When he realized that nothing of the sort was happening, he turned to absolute violence against the very people he claimed to be wanting to free. As he said quote Change will come through total terror. Something Mao in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia years later will copy.

Trotsky the Jewish intellectual despised by all for his grandeur and aloofness, forced into exile and later assassinated in Mexico City on Stalin’s orders.

Stalin the Georgian street urchin, low birth and next to no education raised in a violent family background dominated by superstition and blood feud typical of the Mountains he came from, ready to kill for any reason. Stalin’s second wife Nadya, an unstable self-centred egoistical schizophrenic who after a party in 1932 will go to her bedroom in the Kremlin palace and shoot herself. Followed by the horrible vengeance of Stalin on his own family and all his close friends who he will blame for her death. Stalin himself is paranoid and violent, though highly intelligent and manipulative, always suspicious and ready to believe in conspiracy against him. A man who has no scrupules about exterminating, his own word, millions of innocent people simply because they do not fit into Bolchevik ideology. The mass starvation in the Ukraine where 10 million peasant died to satisfy the Five Year Plan for grain export to the rest of the Soviet Empire. The life of luxury on special trains taking the entourage and their families on vacation in the Crimea or to Sochi, the lavish banquets and constant drinking binges while the whole country is in flames gripped by a Civil War and then the purges 1936 of entire families, the old revolutionaries Stalin came to despise and fear, they knew too much. What the author shows us is that the entourage of Stalin who were rough necks of low birth and little education enabled him to become the Boss. He dominated them with his quick grasp of events. But also Stalin’s children how they did not fare very well, his first son Yakov from his first marriage, died during the Second World War a prisoner of the Germans in 1943, Stalin refused to save him for political reasons. He second son Vasily who will become a general in the Soviet Air Force drank himself to death unable to cope with such a father. Svetlana his daughter will fare a little better, but just, she will escape to the West and finally return to Russia to a life of oblivion, the crimes of her dead father followed her everywhere. The only one who appears to have done relatively well is Artyom his adoptive son who became a general and wrote two books about his adoptive father Stalin. He died in Moscow in 1981.

Lenin and others had no plan for the new promised Proletarian society, Bolchevism led to a dead end and Communism and Karl Marx mere shiny objects of little meaning used to retain absolute power over the masses. Stalin with the help of people like Beria, Molotov and others developed a State Secret Police to maintain a system of constant terror, creating the infamous Gulag. Even during the Second World War which again caught the Bolcheviks by surprised, so certain they were of their pact with Hitler to divide the world, Stalin would spy on his own troops at the Front and shoot here and there soldiers on the mere suspicion that they might not be faithful to him. He signed order 270 condemning as traitor any Soviet soldier who surrendered to the enemy or was made a POW.  Some 28 years in power and the total destruction of a society is the legacy of Stalin and his henchmen.

Stalin lived like a Tsar using Palaces and Dachas surrounding himself and his cronies with opulent luxury while the people had nothing. A sad commentary on a revolution that was not and almost 70 years of rule by one ideology. It explains a lot about Russia today and the many problems it faces. If you love history this is a great book.

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Warsaw, Poland, 1998.

10 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by larrymuffin in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Amman, Jordan, opera, Piaseczno, Poland, Russia, Saska Kepa, Soviet, Stalin, Vistula river, Warsaw

I arrived in Poland from my previous posting in Amman, Jordan, from the desert to a lush green land. The day I arrived it was raining in Warsaw and my hotel room was high up in a tower facing the Central Train Station and the Palace of Science and Culture, an iconic building in Warsaw, a gift of Josef Stalin to Poland, not much loved though and after 1990 there has been continuous discussion about demolishing the large monumental building in the Stalinist style. All I could see through the rain was green everywhere, it made an impression on me because a few hours before I had left dusty Amman behind.

E2

Palac Kultury i Nauki, Warsawa

In 1998 life was still changing fast for Poles and everyone had ideas about becoming rich and starting a business, everything was possible now that the Communist were gone. One funny thing was that I could not find one single former Communist Party member. It appears that no one had ever been a member of the Party despite the fact that Communist ruled Poland from 1945 to 1989 though there were many people whose parents had participated in the Warsaw uprising of 1944 against the Nazi rule. Whatever happened after 1945 was lost in a sort of collective amnesia. I came to understand that the historical period after the end of the Second World War was a painful episode for many Poles. Poland had recovered its independence in 1918 only to lose it again in September 1939 when the Nazis invaded its territory which started the Second World War. Then in 1946 Polish borders shifted yet again West and many were forced to migrate Westward in a social engineering project imposed by Stalin. You can understand why many Poles were wondering when they were going to get rid of the Russians once and for all.

After reading Polish history you can see why Poland is always weary of Russia. Though Poles are Slavs like the Russians, they have been dominated politically by their neighbour to the East for centuries. Polish language is written with Latin characters whereas Russian uses Cyrillic alphabet. Poles are Roman Catholic, Russians are Orthodox Christians. So all those differences made for very uneasy relations for a very long time.

Map_of_Poland_(1945)_corr

Warsaw is also a culturally rich city and this was a nice change from Amman where the entertainment was playing Bridge, golf or bowling and endless rounds of dinner and cocktail parties with the old Hashemite Princesses and Lebanese Bankers.

warszaw04

Seen from the air the Teatr Wielki Opera Narodowa

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the Quadriga on the main facade of the Opera house, installed in 2010 some 180 years after it was planned.

Warsaw has the Teatr Wielki Opera Narodowa (National) and the Opera Kameralna (Chamber), the Narodowe has a full seasons offering each night a program of Opera, ballet or concert. The Opera Kameralna at the time under director Stefan Sutkowski who we knew personally  a charming person and we met the company of singers many of them are international stars, like Marta Boberska and Dorota Landowska. He had started a Mozart Festival which is now in its 24th edition. Sutkowski is now 82 and he is retired, he was the creator, founder of the Kameralna from 1961 to 2012. We loved going to the Kameralna because it is a very small theatre housed in a former Protestant Church with a beautiful garden all around. The performances were intimate and absolutely charming. Since 2012 and because of drastic budget cuts from the Polish Government the program of the Opera Kameralna has changed substantially.

Then of course there is the food and Polish food is very varied with many different dishes, salads, meats, paté, deserts of all kinds etc.. In 1998 many restaurants were opening and offering good quality food, some had pretensions and the decor was often over the top. Many old houses that once belonged to Noble families were taken over and restored to their former splendour such as the Sobanski Palace on Ulica Ujadowski near the Canadian Embassy.

Upon my arrival in Poland I was assigned a staff quarter, you do not get to choose where you will live, the employer decides. It was a house in Piaseczno a small town south of Warsaw, my house was near a very big forest famous for a terrible plane crash. At that time Piaseczno was really the end of the world, we were far from everything and Russian criminal gangs still operated in Poland. Meaning that there were shootings and car bombs but within one year of my arrival much of that had disappeared, the Polish Police must have been very effective. I had been offered a much bigger house outside of Warsaw some 40 Km from the City located on the Vistula River, but it really was too far and to isolated and I could not imagine living in such a place. Until 1995 by law we as diplomats had to live in Polish Government flats in the city proper, where in the days of the Cold War the Polish Secret Service could keep and eye and an ear to our doings and goings. Those buildings were horrible, poorly built, cramped and smelly, in other words the finest of Soviet architecture. After 1995 the Polish government abolished these rules and Foreign Diplomats were allowed to live wherever they wanted. Our administrator at the Embassy was a women who loved the far, far suburb and she had gone out and bought all kinds of houses far from the city centre. She did find plenty of old rambling kind of houses with vast gardens in the middle of nowhere. No one at the Office shared her love of the suburb, so her decision quickly became a problem for everyone. I campaigned to be housed within walking distance of the Embassy and within one year, I moved to Saska Kepa a very pleasant and green residential neighbourhood across the Vistula River from the centre of the City. We had a lovely house on Dabrowiecka street with a big garden.

It really was a period of Renaissance for Poland and I am glad I arrived there at that point.

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