--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
Figures like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, or Bush arise in the times of increased ambiguity, uncertainly, and complexity triggered by political or technological events. They sense popular anxieties, and despite different cultural or ideological favor, they offer an essentially the same recipe to those anxieties - disciplinarian populism, rituals in which authority figures re-establish order by the acts of public destruction of "enemies of the people."
--- Yes. I think something the Western genre of "Stalin is still popular in Russia!" articles, which seem to appear once every couple of months ago, is that most people in that era did not perceive the state's violence as being directed against _them_. They saw it as being directed at the seemingly omnipresent Trotskyist wreckers against whom the Vozhd' was diligently struggling to protect the people. Even if you were accused of being a Trotskyist wrecker, you would quite possibly assume that you had been cleverly framed by Trotskyist wreckers who had infiltrated the local authorities. It was a very low level of political culture for the most part (uneducated peasants).
===== Nu, zayats, pogodi!
_______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com