/lit/ - Literature

UuurRRrGhghHHH STalinbook!!!!!

>without an anti-stalinist lean
so not reality?

>>4201045
hehehe :) Nice one

you should read The Big Gay Book of Why Stalin Is Bad And Dumb

>>4201048
that sounds like what most of them are , which is what im tryin 2 avoid!

Just read The Gulag Archipelago.

bumpity

So you want to ignore history and just hear about the good things he did.

http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html

This or anything else by Grover Furr

Try reading Dialectical and Historical Materialism.

A Captive mind by Czeslaw Milosz explores totalitarianism and provides a good case for it, relating it to the soviet union and its major leaders.

I've only read 'Young Stalin' but found it quite fascinating
it talks more about his personal life and such, there really isn't much bias or disdain involved

this >>4207259

>>4201045
>implying bourgeois history is anything close to reality

If your understanding of history only comes from what you've read in school or seen on documentaries then you have no idea what actually happened, because history from the POV of upper classes and western powers isn't real history.

Stalin was terrible in many ways, he was a paranoid and ugly dude who wormed his way into a bureaucracy that shouldn't have existed (Rosa Luxemburg called that shit) and did a lot of shady things, but the loss of the socialist ideal and the massive and beautiful social experimentation that Russians took part in after the Revolution was mostly because of outside circumstances. For someone interested in this kind of theory, a book free from the kind of bias you see in books about Mao (like how he ate babies or some made up crap, a book full of interviews with members of the old nobility and upper classes does not paint an accurate picture of a period in history) etc. is useful for a materialist point of view.

Not to mention he managed to industrialize a giant shitty country that was basically feudal up until 1917 in an astoundingly short period of time. How this can't interest someone is beyond me but I guess if your ideological blinders help you through your lumpenprole life then so be it????

>>4207265
>>4207259
You forgot to write "bourgeois tripe" at the end of your sentence.

russia wasn't feudal up until 1917, it was a capitalist autocracy, you had the tsar and his authority which oversaw everything - and there was capitalism which the society functioned as, complete with the world's first shopping mall.
unfortunately however likeable nicholas II and his family was on a personal level (like how fascinating it is to look at all the pictures they took) - but he didn't want to rule and let the autocracy fall, WHILE his ministers tried to build a russian parliament - which he oversaw. you had cadets, soviets, and all manners of different parties. the soviets were actually fairly unpopular and comprised of only sailors. the country was fairly prosperous of a sorts -- but going to war against japan was devastating financially -- and WW1 followed soon after, THAT is what made russia the poor country people associate it with today. russia was always decadent and wealthy place filled fantastic stories. the poor/ working class were severely mistreated and the winters were harsh and they had enough .... the wars made them angry and they let the soviets take over -- because anything was better than working 20 hr days for peanuts.
stalin was one of these people, and frankly what became of him was pretty typical to anyone who rises to power by force. russian history is amazing!

>>4207818
not sure if troll or completely stalinist...

>A big ol' book about Stalin without anti-stalinism

TopKek. I would suggest joining the Communism group (with the most members) on facebook and asking there. Don't get your hopes up though.

>>4208559
therefore...imprison people and kill them and starve them.
Communism-I say I want equal rights for all people....but what I really want is for them all to have equally less rights than I

>>4208590
Do you believe everything your "history" books say?

>>4208765
Do you believe everything your "history" books say?

>>4208772
Not completely, but when they have actual, empirical evidence, then I feel rather inclined. I suppose you believe that Mao was a murderer as well?

biographies of stalin written while he was alive

>>4208778
yes, he definitely was.
don't apologise for the fascist tendencies of authoritarian socialism

Have you read this, OP?

>>4209496
>yes, he definitely was.
Ahhahahahahahhaa
Hoo boy. Liberals say the darndest things.

>>4210154
>Liberals
Stop using words you don't understand.

>>4210186
>tells someone not to use a word incorrectly when they used it correctly

Embarrassingly new.

>>4211824
I'm sorry, but anti-revisionism is effectively red fascism.

>>4207259


Young Stalin was imo 100x more interesting than Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar.

However I'm also in my early 20s so it was more... "relateable" in a sense.

A comming of age story of sorts. Both are still fascinating though and showed me how little I actually knew about the man.

>>4211850
A biography is the least relevant way to deal with Stalin. See Ðilas' conversations with him in the book of the same name. Compare to Andrle's works.

>>4207584

>implying bourgeois history is anything close to reality

And why should I believe a Marxist historian would be any more reliable?

>>4211881
Thompson's methodology as described in Poverty of Theory. Marxist historiography has been the methodological leader in disciplinary history.