(Pointless) Russian Elections: Putin won by 74%!

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Re: (Pointless) Russian Elections: Putin won by 74%!

Post by Strelnikov » Sat May 12, 2018 12:57 am

....this is where I recommend that everyone watch the recently released film The Death Of Stalin. It's funny as hell and incredibly ugly. A good general display of how Russian politicians carry on in private.


So I actually did see The Death Of Stalin in an audience that chuckled at first, then fell silent. If you can let the inconsistencies slide past you then the thing is truly darkly hilarious. My problem is that I know something about Russian/Soviet history and what the place looks like, so certain things were distractions.

The weather was off. I never got a feeling that it was a cold Russian March - no snow on the ground, no really grey skies, and yet all the "Red Army" soldiers are wearing fur shapkas (just to be a stickler, the official name switched to Soviet Army after the war). The trees are green. Armando Iannucci should know or attempt to depict that the Russian weather is a constant shift as spring starts - like in Britain it can rain at the drop of a hat. I got the vibe that this was a Kiev summer (because they shot most of the exteriors with actors in Ukraine.) I know this sounds minor but it adds verisimilitude if you can sell that the weather fits the clothes.

The props were off at times. They use WW II Opel Blitz trucks as stand-ins for GAZ trucks in some scenes, and they didn't stick on different grilles to hide it. If you know what a Blitz truck looks like you ask "Why are they using Schindler's List vehicles in a Stalin comedy?" One of the Central Committee members drives a Citroën Traction Avant, the rest are in Buicks that sort of look like ZIS cars. I never saw a GAZ jeep in the film, even though they would be common in 1953, as would be Lend-Lease Studebaker trucks, and Ural motorcycles. Moscow, 1953 is not Pyongyang, 2018 - there would be a ton of vehicles on the road. They have black mourning banners with the Soviet crest in the background in the room with Stalin's memorial; that is a giant error as black flags of any sort meant "Anarchism"; that's why everybody wears red armbands with black trim at the funeral. It sounds odd, but that's how Stalin's USSR was.

The actual death was off. Stalin was totally unconscious and in a bed at 1 am on March the 1st and Khruschev and the others had been called back to see Stalin at that hour. They decided to do nothing, and Stalin was out cold all of that Sunday. Yeah, it's funny watching the Central Committee lug a piss-soaked Uncle Joe to a bed at 7am, but it didn't happen. The doctors were another element; Iannucci seems to think that the bullshit "Doctor's Plot" meant all of them had been dragged off to the Gulags, that was not true. The purge probably would have happened, but Koba the Dread kicking the bucket stopped that. The "Beria poisoned Stalin" conjecture could have been used in the film, but Iannucci said no and Stalin dies here by bureaucratic ineptitude, which is fine. I don't think that Central Committee was forced to watch Stalin's brains being exposed to open air, I can't find anything about it. Also, I can't find anything on if Stalin's dacha staff was shot and all of his things carted off by the "NKVD" (which by that point was the MVD), so I'm guessing that's Iannucci again.

Khrushchev. I can't not see Steve Buscemi as Steve Buscemi even when he is made up to look like Steve Buscemi's grandfather. Nobody who has played Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev who is a name actor can get around the fact that they can't hide in the role; Bob Hoskins came closest in Enemy at the Gates. So yes, Steve Buscemi is good doing the black comedy in this but you can't get around that I kept thinking "Mr. Pink is playing a Soviet Ukrainian now." Jeffery Tambor as Melenkov can do a better job, as long as he isn't speaking because his voice is familiar to me.

No mention of Gulag economics. Speaking of Khrushchev, there should have been a scene where some functionary from an economics ministry is telling Mr. Pink that the Gulag camps are a massive drag on the Soviet economy, inefficient for mining or canal building or Siberian town construction or doing secret scientific work (Yes, they had locked-up scientists work in their fields in "special camps") for the secret police and the military. This is why they began releasing people in larger and larger numbers after Stalin died, so they could work in the regular economy....it had gotten so bad with people being forced to hang around the Gulag camps after release (because their villages and towns didn't want them back, fearing they would be re-arrested) they were made paid Gulag laborers. Khrushchev is right about reform, but not in the mealymouthed way he presents it.

"Bang Bang", the Tokarev said. Lavrentiy Beria was a teenage-raping shit, but all the shooting in the Lubyanka basement is right out of the Great Terror of 1936-38. Don't worry about them getting the name of the secret police wrong, it constantly shifted from 1918 to 1954; most Westerners only know NKVD and KGB, not Cheka, GPU, OGPU, MOOP, etc. All that said, Simon Russell Beale is very good playing the mindgamer Georgian.

B-roll. There was no way this film was going to be made in Putin's Moscow, so they sent a second unit to shoot buildings and the Kremlin. The problem is that the film makes the viewer think that the leadership lives at Moscow State University, and not the less-imposing buildings they actually lived in (one of which now has a giant Mercedes Benz logo on the roof.) They also didn't digitally remove some of the Russian eagles Putin put up a few years ago, which says "We spent all our money hiring Michael Palin."

The niggling factoids. Zhukov was no longer Marshal of the Soviet Army - he was once again disfavored by Stalin. Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov constantly ping-ponged in stature because Stalin truly didn't trust him because he was too good at his job. The man Beria tells Stalin's daughter is dead was actually alive and released in 1953; she defected in 1967 to America and wasn't sent off to Brussels in 1953. They bring up Marshal Tukhachevsky and how he wasn't given a trial by Beria, when Beria was not head of the secret police in 1937 and the Marshal was tried....and shot. I can't find mention of the mass shooting (by MVD soldiers) of mourners trying to reach Stalin's viewing; this might be another Iannucchi invention - we do know people were crushed to death in the throng to see Koba lying in state.

Speaking of Michael Palin.... he needed to play Vyacheslav Molotov more like a faker quietly desperate to get his wife back then a mostly-clueless old man.

A joke they missed. At the end the titles say that Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev. They should have continued "and Brezhnev was replaced by Yuri Andropov after he died who was replaced by Konstantin Chernenko after he died..." and then the film should have gone to the end credits.

All in all, if you know little about Russia, this film works. I personally think it was banned in Russia because of all the errors.

Also, who conduced the faux-Shostakovitch music playing through most of the film?
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Re: (Pointless) Russian Elections: Putin won by 74%!

Post by Strelnikov » Wed Jul 04, 2018 5:15 pm

Found at random: J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov's academic paper "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence" (link here) from October, 1993.

Using the numbers from the various ministries (including the secret police), the greatest estimated amount of people arrested in 1937-38 were 3.5 million, while Robert Conquest* claimed 7-8 million. The Gulag camp population was 1.9 million in 1938, prison and Gulag population 2.0 million together in 1938, camp deaths were 160,084 in 1937-38, executions were 681,692 in 1937-38. The paper claims the entire provable number of executions from 1921-1953 was 799,455. All of these numbers are on a chart on page 1022 in the original document or page 7 in the linked pdf, with the Getty/Rittersporn/Zemskov claims compared to claims made by Conquest, Soviet dissident historian Roy A. Medvedev, Soviet/Russian historian Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko (spelled "Ovseenko" in the paper), Dmitri Volkogonov (historian and ex-head of the Soviet military's psychological warfare department), and Ol'ga Shatunovskaia (who was part of the "Shvernik Commission" set up by Khrushchev from 1961-63 to examine Stalin's crimes in detail) - the paper's numbers are far lower than everybody else's claims, except for Roy Medvedev's conjecture that 0.5-0.6 million were executed in 1936-37.

So to whom was the Great Terror of 1936-38** really aimed at? The intelligentsia of the Soviet Union and the higher-rung members of the Communist Party itself; this was Stalin as the grade school headmaster of Hell, impressing his view of the CPSU onto the Party body through force, the Cultural Revolution before Mao made it into a ten year game of Lord of the Flies for the entire Chinese population. At least the Soviet education system didn't close down. And afterward, who were in the Gulag camps? People who "broke labor discipline" and didn't show up to work enough times (because the WW II labor rules were not abolished until 1956!), dealing in the black market, and other petty nonsense. The only saving grace in all of it was that it was "a system of perpetual motion" to use Solzhenitsyn's phrase, so anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of camp members would be released in a year because their terms were up.

And now the response to the Eric Barbour question "why should we care?" Because Stalinist repression in the USSR has been used in the West and the non-Communist East to push against anything beyond a very centrist sort of politics; it's been used to help fight unionization drives, demands for single-payer healthcare, anybody standing up to the new "gig economy" (which is a new form of the '90s downsized workforce but far more extreme), etc. It is no longer said openly, but this anti-Communism is at the root of American conservatism, just as the raging asshole nationalisms of ex-Warsaw Pact countries and the flaming hatred of Ukraine towards Russia come from plain anti-Communism (or in the Ukrainian case, hatred towards Stalin for the Holodomor and the Tzars for forced Russification in the 18th and 19th centuries.) And behind this shield the various corporations and businessmen rake in a giant profit both on civilian and military fronts.

_____________

* I'm not a fan of Conquest, who was a writer at the "Information Research Department" of the British Foreign Office, where he was doing black propaganda (state propaganda that has been disguised as legitimate research material) against the USSR from 1947-1956, and then writing his stock McCarthyite anti-Communist books until he died, possibly recycling some of the same black propaganda that he wrote thirty-forty years before. Before it was called the IRD, it's original (and more obvious title) was the Communist Information Bureau. Here is Grover Furr's far angrier take on Conquest, please note that he is pro-Stalin.

** And this terror was a foreshadowing of the repression that went on during the four final years of Stalin's life and mostly known in the West for the "Doctor's Plot" that collapsed the moment "Koba" died. This ignorance was created because the West was far more involved with the Korean war and trying to repress popular memory of what an absolute bodge that war was for the UN forces while it was going on, and who that war really was for: Syngman Rhee's cruddy and gangster-like dictatorship, Chiang Kai-Shek's hopes that the war could be expanded into an invasion of mainland China, the profits of the Japanese industrialists, and Douglas MacArthur's ego.

Finally, here is J. Arch Getty in an Atlantic article from March of 2000, ripping François Furet's The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century and Stéphane Courtois et. al.'s The Black Book of Communism, which were the big books of the period that typified the idea that Communism and Nazism were the same thing (which fits a certain '90s model of totalitarianism) when they were radically different, and Getty is willing to pose the question of how monolithic Communism actually was (his answer was that there were as many different Communisms as there were countries who called themselves Communist.)
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Re: (Pointless) Russian Elections: Putin won by 74%!

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Jul 04, 2018 10:35 pm

Strelnikov wrote:Found at random: J. Arch Getty, Gabor T. Rittersporn, and Viktor N. Zemskov's academic paper "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence" (link here) from October, 1993.

Ah, yes, well, apparently academics are still arguing about how many people died in the purge, and will keep on arguing for centuries to come. Because unlike the Germans, Stalin's gang often kept poor or no records. Or the records were destroyed by later zealots trying to cover it up -- who knows?

It's a period of history that was very important to Americans because it directly influenced America's government operations ("billions for defense but not one cent for tribute") yet few Americans know very much about it. That is why the admittedly-questionable satirical movie about Stalin's death should be given more attention than it was. I still have yet to see a really good and serious documentary (for Americans!) about the development of Soviet politics after Lenin's death. "Too boring" a subject? Meanwhile people continue to love watching N*A*Z*I documentaries, which is really disgusting.

(I have to use a euphemism for German National Socialism, because this forum software is still censoring that word "N-A-Z-I". What does that tell you about our politics?)

And now the response to the Eric Barbour question "why should we care?" Because Stalinist repression in the USSR has been used in the West and the non-Communist East to push against anything beyond a very centrist sort of politics; it's been used to help fight unionization drives, demands for single-payer healthcare, anybody standing up to the new "gig economy" (which is a new form of the '90s downsized workforce but far more extreme), etc. It is no longer said openly, but this anti-Communism is at the root of American conservatism, just as the raging asshole nationalisms of ex-Warsaw Pact countries and the flaming hatred of Ukraine towards Russia come from plain anti-Communism (or in the Ukrainian case, hatred towards Stalin for the Holodomor and the Tzars for forced Russification in the 18th and 19th centuries.) And behind this shield the various corporations and businessmen rake in a giant profit both on civilian and military fronts.

And to answer my own questions, I gather it's because too many voters and "responsible adults" know little or nothing about history and are doomed to relive it. So long as political systems operate as in the past, we will continue to get violent sociopaths and petty dictators, plus corporations manipulating them. Socialist, capitalist, it all eventually ends up in the same state of semi-corrupt semi-dictatorship.

If you don't believe me, create a Facebook account, follow some local pages, and watch people shriek incoherently at each other about various issues. Most every local page I watch has at least one fat middle-aged white male Trump fan who deliberately stirs the others up, and giggles at the "librul snowflakes" attacking him. That's not a bad simulation of our political "system".

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Re: (Pointless) Russian Elections: Putin won by 74%!

Post by Strelnikov » Thu Jul 05, 2018 4:47 am

Responses:

Ah, yes, well, apparently academics are still arguing about how many people died in the purge, and will keep on arguing for centuries to come. Because unlike the Germans, Stalin's gang often kept poor or no records. Or the records were destroyed by later zealots trying to cover it up -- who knows?

No the records are there, it's just that nobody created a master list of victims because it moved too fast and once Stalin was dead, it was too damn humiliating to have one. That why it was all sekretno, secret, plus a lot of the records were in the hands of the KGB and locked in their archives. Don't thank the Germans for their record-keeping, thank the Red Army for smashing their way to East Prussia and not giving the camp clerks the chance to burn their records as ordered. You can also thank the bomber wings of the USAAF and the RAF for creating the chaotic conditions inside Germany from 1944-45 that allowed key documents to be abandoned instead of being destroyed as ordered. We only know about the Wannsee Conference because Martin Luther of the German Foreign Office never burned his copy as ordered by Reinhard Heydrich, and historian Raoul Hilberg put together the history of deportation trains and death camp train runs from Deutches Reichsbahn railway documents for his book The Destruction of the European Jews (1961). We, the people of the West and the East, put together what happened in the Holocaust - the perpetrators tried to hide what they could and fled to death or Argentina.

And to answer my own questions, I gather it's because too many voters and "responsible adults" know little or nothing about history and are doomed to relive it. So long as political systems operate as in the past, we will continue to get violent sociopaths and petty dictators, plus corporations manipulating them. Socialist, capitalist, it all eventually ends up in the same state of semi-corrupt semi-dictatorship.

My response is that today the thing that is killing the social good is the corporation; they are stepping into places not even the Gilded Age robber barons were willing to go because the profits in the older industries aren't good enough anymore. It is my belief that world capitalism is eating itself to survive, how much longer that can go on I do not know. I disagree that it all "ends up in semi-corrupt semi dictatorship" - Scandinavian social democracy has been badly warped by the EU's neoliberalism, but it still does better than the American anti-system's non-safety net. Everybody gives Venezuela hell, but the elections for Maduro were fairer then ours (thanks to our antiquated Electoral College*), and Venezuela is still more than half-capitalist. The places truly corrupted by capitalism are states like the People's Republic of China, where the founding ideology and the world capitalist model do not fit together at all, or the US, where whatever is left of the New Deal is battered by greasy technoshits like Elon Musk and Zuccerclown - many other countries (mostly the new Third Worlders and the ex-Soviet states) are inherently corrupt because Reaganoid neoliberalism is all they know, or are allowed to know. Those countries are usually the ones with the loudest worker's unions and the angriest Communist parties, because they know what a scam the end of the old system (the ex-Soviets) truly was. Also, the more authoritarian a Marxist country is the more staying power it seems to have, but that locks them into never developing towards a Communism worth the name.

....That is why the admittedly-questionable satirical movie about Stalin's death should be given more attention than it was. I still have yet to see a really good and serious documentary (for Americans!) about the development of Soviet politics after Lenin's death. "Too boring" a subject?

Remember the anti-Communism - the subject can't get a fair shake in the English language. They recently did a biopic of The Young Karl Marx in German, French, and English (because Marx moved around a lot) and it took Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck do the project, because he doesn't give a damn about the lingering anti-Communism (which now has an edge as Left-wing parties gain strength in Europe and the US Democrats are fighting a war to kill off their centrism.) I'm trying to get my former video store Guy to copy The Glastnost' Film Festival over to DVD from VHS, which is a series of short documentaries done in the USSR in the late 1980s. If he does it, then I can dump copies of these films** over to Screw'dTube and Vimeo. All of them have subtitles, a few of them are about the Stalin period, some are on the changes that Gorbachev brought. If you want to understand the USSR from the vantage of film, Chris Marker's 1992 documentary The Last Bolshevik discusses how the revolutionary vanguard of cinema transmogrified into Stalinist "socialist realism" through the life of director Alexander Medvedkin, who is best known for the Soviet silent comedy Happiness (Schastye) in 1935. You can see the film at Fandor; it's original French title is Le Tombeau d'Alexandre or Alexander's Tomb. Here is a trailer:



__________

* A system used only by the Holy See, Ireland (senate), France (senate), Germany (president), Estonia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Kazakhstan, Burundi, Madagascar, and Vanuatu. Notice that a few were under US occupation or parts of NATO, while the rest are ex-colonial and one is ex-Soviet (copying the "Great Power", I guess.)

** Another project I need to complete alongside making a YouTube and Vimeo video out of our second interview. You ever fix the first one?
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Re: (Pointless) Russian Elections: Putin won by 74%!

Post by Strelnikov » Fri Jan 29, 2021 6:37 am

More Russian shit:


Above: Alexei Anatolievich Navalny ripping Vladimir Putin's ridiculous castle-dacha that he built down on the Black Sea. This one has English subtitles that you have to turn on and Navalny and his crew go to excruciating detail to prove how corrupt the construction of the complex was and how it is emblematic of Putin's 20 years ruling the world's largest country. Pretty much Putin (as described by Alexei Anatolievich) is like the national leader variant of the Barksdale crime family in the old HBO show The Wire; they operated through fronts, never did business over the telephone, and pretty much controlled the narcotics market in Baltimore, Maryland. Putin uses front companies, has an endless string of cronies (some dating back to childhood) through which he runs his bizness (hell, on paper he does not own the property down near Gelendzhik on the Black Sea!), and like the villain in the schlocky 1960s Italian 007 knockoff Danger! Death Ray! he says funds will go to updating children's hospitals, but the money goes into this stupid house* instead. "The state is me" said The Sun King of France, but Putin has built a one-man government with no real replacement for him, condemning Russia to upper-class civil war when he croaks or the bears eat him or the Chechens drunkenly curbstomp him to death during a festival.


Google Map satellite view of the thing:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gorod ... 38.2060544

* It has a "waterdisco", all the furniture is Italian and very high-end, he has a small casino, a theater, a bar, a room to do 1:32 scale slot-car racing (!), he has a hookah bar with a stripper pole (!!)....he has an underground hockey rink next door. He can command the country from the house thanks to the HF/VHF/UHF/microwave/Internet command center on the property. He lives like a Mafioso and a James Bond villain combined.
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Re: (Pointless) Russian Elections: Putin won by 74%!

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Feb 03, 2021 1:20 am

meanwhile Navalny disappears into an unspecified "prison camp" somewhere, for "violating parole" while he was in a coma in a Berlin hospital. And Moscow streets are crawling with "riot police" doing their stupid "paper checking".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2af0b4mbZPo

"Go for Putin's money"--that's easy for him to say
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbGyGsLWPwY

"Often depicted as an authoritarian monolith, the system is something stranger and more contradictory. Though fundamentally undemocratic — since the fall of Communism, no opposition party in Russia has ever won power — it still derives its legitimacy from the support of the electorate and from an apparent observance of constitutional norms. It’s an “imitation democracy,” as the Russian political scientist Dmitri Furman termed it. However autocratic Mr. Putin may wish to be, he still requires a facade of legality and regular elections." Hope he's right that younger Russians are sick of it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/opin ... putin.html

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