Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

Well I guess it's easy for a non-Russian to just simply disregard all the objective positive achivements of Stalin's period. Like, you know, defeating Nazis or turning an agrarian country into a technological superpower.

Do they even out all the atrocities? No, I guess they do not. But are we supposed to just throw these away? I mean, we kinda tried to do exactly that in the Nineties and I hope you all know how that turned out.

It's not like it's just people who aren't Russian here pointing out Putin's populist garbage. Very Vile Villain's from Russia and they also pointed out Putin's willingness to embrace nationalist narratives to maintain power.

It doesn't help that in most media things either black and white or grey and grey. Which results in bunch of people either go "Kill them all" on everyone they consider an enemy or go preaching that "everything is grey", even in situation when it's clearly not.

World is "Morally Kitchen Sink", as the world includes all sides of morality, be it black, grey or white (not in"fawless being", but in being completely right on the situation).

First, we talk about Putin and his whitewashing of Stalin in particilar and Soviet Union as a whole, second, Russia calls everything demonization, if it's not goes "They were perfect and the best of men" in regards to them.Third, i'm not sure if defeating the Nazis were 100% Stalin accomplishment.

Edited by VeryVileVillian on Jun 12th 2019 at 12:00:10 PM

As others in OTC have said, the first sign of maturity is accepting that not everything is in black and white. And the second sign of maturity is accepting that some things are in black and white.

Edited by M84 on Jun 12th 2019 at 4:53:24 PM

Well I do apologise if I seemed to speak for all of Russians. Still, the majority of our left wing (including myself) are Tankies by Western standards. And a person is considered a Stalinist if he thinks Stalin did nothing wrong rather then does not think he was as evil or worse then Hitler.

Edited by Antanza on Jun 12th 2019 at 12:24:20 PM

I could mirror your statement: everyone with an anti-Soviet political stance tends to call whitewashing whenever anything good is said about the Union, true or false.

Edited by Antanza on Jun 12th 2019 at 12:35:19 PM

In these days, i never see much of them anyway (like it seems they more quiet now than before), nowdays in Russia there is "West is evil", "fucking Gayrope wants to weaken us", "Russia is perfect and Russians are Aryans" and "Soviet Union was perfect and Stalin did nothing wrong" narratives that dominate most of media.

Edited by VeryVileVillian on Jun 12th 2019 at 12:54:59 PM

Your perspective appears to be very different from mine o_0 Maybe it's because I don't watch TV since 2x2 channel moved to cable. But still, there's plenty of press, books, internet resources... The anti-soviet sentiment pretty much dominates our cultural elite.

Edited by Antanza on Jun 12th 2019 at 1:32:54 PM

Not really, if this study from a few years back is any indication.

pdf: The Stalin Puzzle: Deciphering Post-Soviet Public Opinion

The general gist of it is that a significant portion (granted not a majority) of the public in Russia think highly of Stalin, though a lower portion would actually want to have Stalin or someone like him running things again. Especially in Georgia, which isn't a huge surprise.

BTW, the whole "Stalin industrialized the USSR" is also a Stalin apologia talking point. There's an argument to be made that if the USSR had stuck with Lenin's NEP (with its market-oriented policy), they would industrialized just as quickly and possibly even sooner and with fewer losses.

It should be noted that Stalin apologia seems to be more popular among older Russians than younger ones.

Edited by M84 on Jun 12th 2019 at 6:41:44 PM

They must have post this on not as popular sources, because whenever i search for news or articles about current situation in Russia, 70% of them pretty much opposite to "anti-soviet". For sentiment, that suppose to be dominant in our media, i dont see much of it in our TV news, talk shows and news articles.

Edited by VeryVileVillian on Jun 12th 2019 at 1:46:52 PM

Personally I find the most insufferable apologists to be the ones outside of Russia. Especially since they also tend to engage in Mao apologia too. And that's a particularly sore point for me.

What can i say? There is a LOT of fans of dictators and dicatorships in the world. Just look at some of the threads in this very sites (like Fallout: New Vegas thread, when some people argue that state and land "free of criminals" is realistic depiction of dictatorship governments).

I blame the inherent appeal of just being able to entrust all of the responsibility on to someone else. Freedom from Choice and all that.

That and any dictator worth their salt knows how to craft an image of strength and awesomeness to manipulate people.

Edited by M84 on Jun 12th 2019 at 7:04:26 PM

I'm definitly not going to argue that ending NEP was a good idea == Still, Stalin actually did manage to intustrialise USSR his own way, however brutal it was. And history doesn't tolerate ifs. I mean, 'if' Russia would actually become "the second US" in the 90s like the reformers promised I wouldn't be a socialist today.

Edited by Antanza on Jun 12th 2019 at 2:16:14 PM

The problem is that some Stalin apologists use said industrialization as the justification for Stalin's atrocities. That shit like the gulags, the purges, etc. were "necessary evils" for the sake of industrialization.

Which is fucking bullshit.

Edited by M84 on Jun 12th 2019 at 7:22:13 PM

There are ways to industrialise and ways to industrialise. All have a bill.

Russia's population and infrastructure has yet to recover and move on from how Stalin did it. So, yeah. <small tooty horn> Brutal modernisation kind of achieved? <looks at the moral, ethical and governmental rubble> Woo.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jun 12th 2019 at 12:26:50 PM

Progress always has a price...but some prices are higher than others. Too high.

Stalin's approach ultimately led to too little gained for too much blood.

Edited by M84 on Jun 12th 2019 at 7:27:35 PM

There's also that dissonance over Genghis Khan.

Being purely objective, the guy was a monster so horrific it would probably make all others seem paltry in comparison. It's not everyday you get someone who can boast that the world population shrank when he was on the roll.

Yet there's few people who remember him as anything other than a "Great" Conqueror. With tons of apologia about his "inclusiveness" (join or die) or "leadership" (do as I say or die). History can be funny like that.

Stalin was all sorts of bad. The only saving grace he has is the guy whom he eventually fought against was even worse. Without Hitler, he'd be the monstrous boogeyman of the present day - he still is for plenty of people.

Much of the fanboyism in Russia is (in my - in all likelihood wrong - opinion) just Nostalgia Filter for the Glory Days. When Russia mattered to the world. As opposed to now, where it's seen as a fading power that's mostly a joke. At least, the perception of it.

Um, what do you mean by infrastructure? I'm pretty sure the infrastructural damage Russia suffered under Stalin is because of the War rather the industrialisation.

Edited by Antanza on Jun 12th 2019 at 4:06:01 PM

Building something big, but very, very crap and also hard to expand upon all at the same time... makes it very hard to level the lot, hit the drawing board and come up with something that would fit now and adapt better later.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jun 12th 2019 at 4:21:28 PM

@Genghis: Yeah, dude is so distant for us. Thought I've read that in modern day Mongolia, they really dislike media treating Genghis as a villain.

Well, in Mongolia they're more likely to see him as "our guy" who Made Mongolia Great Again(?) for a little bit, rather than a warlord who killed so many people that Warhammer 40k fancanon has him down as the true identity of Doombreed, the first Daemon Prince of Khorne.

With Genghis, it's complicated. A dark and bloody complicated, but international laws regarding the treatment of diplomats, expats and cross-border trade agreements alike as we currently have them wouldn't exist without him.

This does absolutely nothing to excuse the piles of skulls he made bashing his ideas through, of course.

But... <points at the entire concept of diplomatic immunity>

Stalin and Mao? Don't have that whole "contributed significantly to global international law" thing alongside their butchery.

You can say similar things about Charlemagne or Napoleon. Not little angels. By any stretch of the imagination. Bit key to how European law works, currently.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jun 12th 2019 at 2:38:20 PM

We have several different Glory Days fandoms here. Stalinists are more specifically about going all 1937 on our current elite's corrupt asses.

Edited by Antanza on Jun 12th 2019 at 4:34:55 PM

To reemplace them with another type of corrupt elite