--- Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote: Traditionally, Marxist intellectuals tended to treasure what they considered to be the highest achievements of bourgeois culture. Thus, Marx's affection for Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, and Beethoven. Lenin and Trotsky were similarly snobbish. Stalin, I think, had a greater interest in popular culture (he liked cowboy films and such) but did seem to have a genuine interest in classical music which didn't necessarily make life pleasant for Soviet musicians.
-- Supposedly (or so sayeth Roy Medvedev, whose last book on Putin is really good by the way, though he's mean to Kagarlitsky) the Famous Georgian Guy with the Pipe was a prodigiously well-read autodidact:
TITLE: RADIO INTERVIEW WITH ROI MEDVEDEV, HISTORIAN AND WRITER, ON JOSEPH STALIN [EKHO MOSKVY RADIO, 14:00, MARCH 5, 2003] SOURCE: FEDERAL NEWS SERVICE (http://www.fednews.ru/)
Anchor: Hello and welcome to Ekho Moskvy. It's 14:08 Moscow time. I am Alexander Klimov. And our guest is historian and publicist Roi Medvedev. Good day, Roi Alexandrovich.
Medvedev: Good day.
Anchor: We are going to talk about -- guess what? It's the 50th anniversary since the death of Stalin. And I would begin by asking you to comment on this topic. But first let me give you the number of our studio pager to which you can page your questions: 961-2222. I will read out the most interesting ones and we will all try to answer them together. Just yesterday we heard the results of a poll among Russian citizens. More than half of Russians -- 53 percent -- think that Stalin played a positive role in the country's life. A third of respondents -- 33 percent -- disagree. And 14 percent were undecided. These are the data published by VTsIOM. What can you say about it?
(big snip)
Medvedev: You see, there are many things related to Stalin that you don't know.
Anchor: Is that so?
Medvedev: Even for a historian who has studied the epoch of Stalin for 40 years, even I from time to time make a huge number of discoveries. Even during this last year I made a host of new and interesting observations. One example. For instance, during the 1930s Stalin received six times in his study in the Kremlin the most outstanding Western writers Herbert Wells, Bernard Shaw, Romain Rolland, Lion Feuchtwanger, Henri Barbusse, Alberti, the Spanish writer. He had conversations with them lasting many hours and they would leave him, captive to his personality. They would say that he was the most educated, the most intelligent and the most knowledgeable person. In those conversations, for which he prepared very well and seriously, he would outplay his opponents. The fact is that they did not live in Russia and in the Soviet Union. The NKVD sword was not suspended over them. They had a much broader picture of preparation and in what way could Stalin pursue that conversation?
Anchor: Yes, in what way? You couldn't make a transcript and that means...
Medvedev: Recently they were published and everything is recorded there. And now these conversations have been published. And we can see how confident Stalin felt and how helpless was the conduct of Romain Rolland or Lion Feuchtwanger in those conversations and even Herbert Wells. And then, getting back to Britain or France, they would write their diaries which were also published. The first impressions were admiration by Stalin and admiration felt for the Soviet Union in most cases. This has many explanations. This means that Stalin cannot be imagined as a primitive and uneducated person. He was highly educated and well-read.
Anchor: Most likely he was self-taught.
Medvedev: And self-educated. He was an excellent actor. He could make himself liked by those people. He would answer their questions. Also he was incredibly informed. This was a closed country but he knew everything. Those people coming here were like blind. They did not know what was happening in the country, what was happening in the prisons and camps. They did not know the statistics and Stalin received all information. This is the effect of a close society. The leader of the nation knows everything while you know nothing. We cannot even imagine today in what darkness we were living. Instructors and students, we did not know was happening in our university and in our city. I was studying at Leningrad University and six of my friends were arrested from my course and I did not know the charges against them and I could not ask anyone and I could not read anywhere.
===== Nu, zayats, pogodi!
_______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com