Reddit reviews Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

No, Khrushchev did not approve Stalinist policies on a personal level, trying to undo most of them while in office in the "thaw". He wrote extensively in his memoirs about his dislike of them and the guilt he felt for not being able to do more. Don't get me wrong the man believed in the oppressive nature of the USSR(at least until Brezhnev overthrew him) but he wasn't a dictator on the level of Stalin in any way.

I would recommend https://www.amazon.com/Lenins-Tomb-Last-Soviet-Empire/dp/0679751254 for a somewhat contemporary and at the same time retrospective view other USSR and its biggest figures. Tragic and sometimes funny.

Not sure what what you mean by elaborate but basically, nearly all state records have been preserved in the USSR and its satellites after its fall. Everything from how many people were sent to the Gulag in a particular year to how many bushels of wheat were collected from Ukraine, to who rated on whom in the summer of 1934, can be found in the state archives. The only thing to keep in mind, is that the figures in most of the records are inflated (or deflated) as officials tried to make their camp, their farm, their village or city, look better to the authorities. Also, in East Germany and Poland, all the records that the Stasi (secret police) kept on its citizens were preserved and after 1989 anyone can request to see your own file and see what the gov't had on you (not sure you can do this in Russia though, can anyone confirm?). If you'd like an interesting read about the Soviet Union on communism and how bureaucratic it was (thanks to that bureaucracy we now have all these records) read Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

First, you should know that historians don't really deal in categories like "good" or "bad" or "evil" or whatever. They are just not useful historical categories. That doesn't mean, of course, that we leave our moral sentiments at the door. But the goal is to try and lay out the facts and then allow people to draw whatever moral conclusions they want from those.

On your specific questions:

1. Stalin was a dictator. This is not very debatable. Though the structure of the Soviet government was more complicated than it is often understood in the United States, Stalin ruled with an iron fist. He micromanaged Soviet life, brooked no serious opposition, and issued degrees that could not be deviated from or challenged. He even waded into areas of life that he knew nothing about, like linguistics or agriculture, and his opinion could not be challenged without risking imprisonment or death. He effectively outlawed entire fields of study (genetics, cybernetics, lots of other things). He had a cult of personality that boggles the mind. Whatever one thinks of Stalin, claiming he was not a dictator is just false beyond false. Again, the way in which power operated in the Soviet system, even under Stalin, was more complex than one man at the top simply decreeing things, but that is true of all dictatorships, and does not dilute the fact that he had unquestioned, concentrated power.
   
   
2. Did he care for his people? Did he do what was right for his country? This is all pretty debatable. In some sense, the best one can do is say that Stalin genuinely appeared to have cared about the USSR in some sort of larger sense. The individual people within it, though, were often subsumed to that greater purpose. So from Stalin's point of view, locking up a substantial portion of the population as "wreckers" was a good thing for the USSR, because "wreckers" (and Trotskyites and so on) were, by definition, bad for the USSR. Of course, we know now, and many people knew then, that most of the people locked up for political crimes were in fact fairly arbitrarily incarcerated. They were not even dissidents in any real sense; it was not about "locking up enemies" so much as "locking up people and declaring them enemies." It was also along the lines of, "locking up soldiers who saw the West during World War II," which is particularly sad (that is, the very people who brought the war to Hitler's doorstep were treated as traitors when they got home).
   
   This is entirely neglecting the disaster that was collectivization (which killed many millions), the disastrous way Stalin micromanaged World War II (almost losing everything), and the the levels of cruelty and depravity he permitted amongst his immediate subordinates (look up Beria's rape "habit" if you want to be particularly disgusted — it is like something out of a bad horror movie).
   
   What Stalin gets a lot of credit for is winning World War II and for the rapid industrialization of the USSR. He famously took over the country when it was using manual plows and left it as a nation with nuclear weapons. All of this was done with a considerable amount of unnecessary bloodshed, but they are both accomplishments of a sort. The speculative question is whether these things could have been accomplished without the great tolls that came out of Stalin's approach to accomplishing them. If one claims these things as Stalin's positive accomplishments, one still must reconcile the immense loss of life and livelihood that took place under his rule. It is hard to imagine a more bloody means to get to these ends.
   
   
3. Were things better off during Communism? This is a tough, tough question. I don't know about Georgia, but for Russia, after the immediate fall of the USSR, things got pretty bad. Today they are not quite as bad as that, but the petro-oligarchy that is currently the Russia power structure has many problems. The late stages of the USSR, from the 1970s through the 1980s, were comparatively stable. There were harsh limits on political freedom, to be sure, and there were severe economic problems at various junctures. Is that better or worse than the current condition, where inequity is clear, political dissidents are still harassed, journalists are murdered, and so on? I can completely understand why someone who grew up under the stable period before thought it was better than the current period.
   
   The desire for a "strong man" approach in post-Communist Russia, and probably Georgia as well, is understandable, and no doubt is what is behind Putin's own success. That Russia in particular did poorly in the immediate post-Cold War is not too surprising: the country never had anything like real democracy, and suddenly was supposed to convert to some kind of modern liberal state? A somewhat obviously unlikely thing to succeed. That people pine for old, stable days, and for patriotic myths, is not surprising; we see this in all countries. Liberal democracy is hard work and appears to be the historically outlier position, not the "natural" way that power gets divvied up in a state, and it comes with many disappointments and frustrations.
   
   A readable book on post-Communist Russia, and its seemingly paradoxical relationship with the memory of Stalin, is David Remnick's _Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. It is not so much a work of history as an excellent work of historically-informed journalism, but it does a lot of work in helping one make sense of the mindset you are talking about.
   
   On Stalin's various crimes, there is a wide literature. I have found David Joravksy's The Lysenko Affair_ to be quite useful in seeing the many ways in which Soviet power was more diverse than just "Stalin says so," even if Stalin was ultimately the primary axis around which it rotated. Lysenkoism is also a good case study for the complexities of asking whether Stalin was doing things for the "good" of the country; though I caution that it is much more complicated than the lay understanding of it (it was just not an ideological commitment, but an interplaying of various influenced relating to collectivization, the way the Soviet press operated, and political in-fighting).

...not that bad? Here's a quora post?!

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For about what it was actually like during that time.

Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick


About what it looked like around the fall of USSR.

Eastern Border Podcast

If you want something more casual, less dense and a podcast

If you weren't a party member there was no "pretty good win" for anyone. I would have happily been homeless in any other first world country than "middle class" in a socialist country during the 20th century.

Someone should teleport these people to Soviet era stores. From Lenin's Tomb:

>But with glasnost, the directors grew humble and put up an astonishingly frank display: “The Exhibit of Poor-Quality Goods.”

>At the exhibit, a long line of Soviets solemnly shuffled past a dazzling display of stunning underachievement: putrid lettuce, ruptured shoes, rusted samovars, chipped stew pots, unraveled shuttlecocks, crushed cans of fish, and, the show-stopper, a bottle of mineral water with a tiny dead mouse floating inside.

>All the items had been purchased in neighborhood stores. “It was time to inject a little reality into the scene here,” one of the guides told me. The exhibit was unsparing, a vicious redefinition of socialist realism. In the clothing section, red arrows pointed to uneven sleeves, faded colors, cracked soles. One piece of jewelry was labeled, simply, “hideous,” and no one argued.

>“Let me tell you a little secret,” a transport worker, Aleksandr Klebko, said as we filed past the display of rotten fruit. “This isn’t so bad. I’ve seen worse. Most stores have less than this. Or nothing at all.”

>Why?

To survive and continue an existence that provides some measure of certainty. The Chinese hukou system limits the ability of Chinese citizens to migrate to cities with more economic opportunity by barring people from legally residing, receiving social services (education, health, etc.), or working outside of their hukou. As many low-skilled Chinese workers are not allowed to live and work in economically vibrant areas such as the Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen (the Tier 1 cities), their alternatives are to move to a lower tier city/province that may not provide meaningful employment year-round, wither in their current position, or move somewhere with economic opportunity (the U.S., Europe, overseas in Asia, in neighboring Asian countries). If they choose the latter, they are often willing to illegally immigrate.

We are unlikely to see tens of thousands of Chinese pouring across the Russian border for work. Indeed, many who work there now are likely nott planning to do so permanently. However, this doesn't rule out the possibility of long-term demographic shifts in Russia's Far East.

>but I've never seen any numbers

I can think of two reasons, though I'm sure there could be more:

• The numbers are published in Chinese and Russian and researchers in the Anglosphere may not publish this in readily available format (namely, in English) outside of their academic works. People who might be otherwise interested in such a topic- policymakers, researchers, data collectors at an international organization, redditors on a geopolitics subreddit, ideologues- do not have the time, knowledge, or motivation to translate said numbers and have an easily searchable public place for such numbers.
  
  
• Both the Russian and Chinese governments are mutually interested in not drawing attention to the numbers. Like most governments in power, the Russian government (or rather, Vladimir Putin's United Russia) advertises its legitimacy to rule in a flawed democracy via economic opportunity and social stability. Having Chinese immigrants or migrant workers displace Russian workers in struggling rural areas of the Russian Far East (David Remnick's book Lenin's Tomb has a chapter that highlights the issues that plague the Russian Far East) undermines the promise of economic opportunity for Russian citizens of all ethnic groups and their status within society. The Chinese Communist Party also advertises its own legitimacy via economic opportunity and social stability, and having its citizens go to other states for employment in agriculture or manufacturing would be seen as indicative of the CCP's inability to fully provide that- lending ammunition for opposition from party "liberals" and outsiders alike. Additionally, there have been tensions regarding this issue since the dissolution of the USSR. There is no reason to disrupt recent Sino-Russian cooperation, particularly when there are no domestic incentives to push the issue.
  
  
  >China itself is big enough for all Chinese people
  
  China's seaboard (where most of its economic activity lies) is incredibly dense in terms of population. The interior of China has far less economic activity than the seaboard, and is likely the source of many of the unemployed. The hukou system is partially designed to encourage internal migration towards non-tier 1 cities, and has been notably accompanied by the infamous construction sprees by local municipalities that led to the phenomenon known as "ghost cities". Such sprees did not always end in ghost cities as documented by Western media, but were nonetheless an issue.
  
  >Russia isn't that much richer than China
  
  True, but it doesn't need to be rich so much as appear to be better than the alternatives. I'd imagine most Chinese immigrants/migrant workers to Russia were displaced from Chinese agricultural communities and would prefer that sort of lifestyle to industrial work in a non-tier 1 city that is likely facing layoffs due to China's supply-side & state-owned enterprise (SoE) reforms.
  
  >prospects of Chinese immigrant in Russia without knowing the language and local customs aren't good either
  
  Chinese immigrants/migrant workers have interacted with Russians in the area for centuries (the RAND article I listed earlier describes this). Even if you only look at the most modern manifestations of this relationship, Chinese workers have been operating in the Russian Far East since around 1993. While they're unlikely to meaningfully advance in the social structure, they have shown the capability to survive.
  
  >I can imagine that young Chinese people dream about moving to rich Chinese cities, not to Russia.
  
  If they're uneducated, they are often unable to move to rich Chinese cities. Why not move somewhere that is somewhat familiar with Chinese migrant workers/immigrants?

The best marxist history book every year is awarded the Deutscher Prize - named after Isaac Deutscher who wrote a three vol. biography on Trotsky which I'm currently in the middle of reading.

Vol. 1

Vol. 2

Vol. 3

Also not Soviet history specifically, but Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein talks about the (forceful) liberalization of markets in Poland and Russia after the collapse of the USSR - which I found pretty great. Link

I also enjoyed Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick who is the current editor of the New Yorker and was the NYT's Moscow reporter during the collapse of the Soviet Union, but some people on the left for sure have problems with him. Link

Edit: Obviously each book is biased in its own way. Deutscher seems fair now but I am slightly worried it'll drift into hagiography. And obviously David Remnick is from an American's perspective in the late 80's - and everything that comes along with that.

>I suppose if you consider the fall of Soviet Communism as a "waste", then I suppose you'd be right saying SDI was a waste as well. Although, I'm well aware of the Left-wing love and pining for the Soviet Union.

Yes, we all love and pine for a failed state. So we're going to go with the narrative that Democrats are somehow communist? Haha ok buddy, that'll sure work on anyone even remotely intelligent. In all seriousness though, claiming that Reagan and his military spending were the root cause of the fall of the USSR merely proves how very ignorant you are on the subject. Read this Remnick' novel if you actually want to learn about Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Perestorika, and why exactly all the satellite states pulled out of the union (you know, the actually reasons for its fall). We both know you won't let these facts get in the way of your narrative however.

As a journalist, Remnick really captures a lot of what went on. But short answer? The economy collapsed.

This, in my opinion, is the best book on the topic.

If you are truly interested I would read this book

https://www.amazon.com/Lenins-Tomb-Last-Soviet-Empire/dp/0679751254

> he lets the system's defects speak for themselves: the corruption, the reckoning with the Gulag, the trivial self-seeking of the apparat, the failure of social safeguards (for example, against homelessness) and much more. Even these are not described and weighed in a formal sense. The scale and nature of the corruption emerges from the tale of the Remnicks' nanny, who to bury her mother had to bribe everyone from the scheduler of funerals to the grave digger and, in the end, pay a sum equal to three months' wages. At the other end of the spectrum stands the regional Uzbek party leader who lived in a vast estate with peacocks, lions, thoroughbred horses and concubines. Thus each of the dimensions of the problem and of Gorbachev's answer is revealed.