Gone, the revolution

I don't think there has been as much written in the media about the centenary of the October Revolution as I expected.

There wasn't a bad interview with a couple of experts on Radio National last night - but I am not sure who's show it was on.

There was one Guardian column about it a few days ago, but I can't quickly find it again.  I was sort of expecting that outlet to be overrun with quasi sympathetic articles , but it hasn't really happened.

I see that Henry Ergas has a column in The Australian:  I doubt it's all that interesting.  The Weekend OZ may well be full of conservatives decrying it:  we shall see.

So I'm down to noting a very lengthy review of Kotkin's two volume biography of Stalin in The New Yorker, which covers the Revolution succinctly, as well as Stalin's later actions, and it's a very good read.

One minor detail amuses, in the section which discusses signs early on that Stalin would become (shall we say) a problem:

They had had some intimations: they knew he could be rude, and they even knew he could be psychologically cruel. During his Siberian exile, he had briefly lived with Yakov (Yashka) Sverdlov, a fellow-Bolshevik and later the titular head of the Soviet government, but the two broke up house because Stalin refused to do the dishes and also because he had acquired a dog and started calling him Yashka. “Of course for Sverdlov that wasn’t pleasant,” Stalin later admitted. “He was Yashka and the dog was Yashka.”

 There are many bits of information in the review which I either didn't realise, or had forgotten when I last read a long review of a book on Russian history.   For example, after a brief summary of the Terror of the late 30's..:

The numbers are hard to fathom. According to the best current estimates, Stalin was responsible for between ten and twelve million peacetime deaths, including victims of the famine. But the most hands-on period of killing was the Terror of 1937 and 1938. At its height, fifteen hundred people were being shot every day. Most of the victims were ordinary citizens, caught up in a machine that was seeking to meet its quotas. But the Communist Party, too, was devastated—in many provinces, first secretaries, second secretaries, third secretaries all gone. Entire editorial staffs were erased. The officer corps of the Army was devastated. Five hundred of the top seven hundred and sixty-seven commanders were arrested or executed; thirteen of the top fifteen generals. “What great power has ever executed 90 percent of its top military officers?” Kotkin asks. “What regime, in doing so, could expect to survive?” Yet this one did.

there is this:

In addition to everything else the Terror did, it greatly weakened the country’s international position. Stalin’s justified fear of the coming war made this war only more likely. The French and the British, contemplating a stand against Hitler over Czechoslovakia in 1938, did not feel they could count on the now depleted Red Army. Worse still, the Terror made Stalin an unacceptable ally for the British in 1939. Kotkin shows that Stalin’s first choice in the months before the war was not Hitler but Chamberlain. He sent detailed terms to Britain for a military alliance. Chamberlain was not interested, and Kotkin, refusing the benefits of hindsight, doesn’t blame him. Stalin had just murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, staged show trials of his former comrades, and carried out purges of putative socialist allies in Spain. Hitler would eventually overtake him, but as of 1939 Stalin had killed more people by far. He was, as Kotkin says, “an exceedingly awkward potential partner for the Western powers.”

I didn't know about the approaches to Chamberlain.

The 20th century had a lot going on, to put it mildly...