Chris and Frank are almost certainly right: Stalin was loved and revered as well as feared -- not an inconsistent set of attitudes, if you think there is anything at all to psychoanalysis. And they did call him things like "The Father of Peoples." He was even loved by many of those who feared him. Sakharov (not tha that time a dissident but as an intellectual a potential target of the terror) recalls breaking down in tears on hearing of his death in 1953. Not all of intelligentsia felt this way, but the folks we hear about most over hear, dissidents of one stripe of another, were distinctly a tiny minority, especillay after the collapse of the Left Opposition.
There sre books -- I have some at home -- on the Cult of Personality, which was very real. Miloscz' The Captive Mind (based on the Polish experience) is still probably the best.
And then there is the material fact that living standards improved sharply under Stalin -- twice --; that he was credited (mistakenly) with having Won The War (by the people who did win the war!); that the purges provided a lot of room for upward mobility; and that there was a lot of Schdenfreaude in seeing the powerful brought down in those purges. So in addition to the material advantages of Stalinism, therew ere depth-psychological bases for loving him partly _because_ he was feared. Then there's the cultural factor that in Russia, Iron Czars havea certain cahet. Stalin had Eisenstein produce an adultory film about Ivan the Terrible in which Ivan is clearly a stand-in for the Father of Peoples. jks
--- frank scott <frank at marin.cc.ca.us> wrote:
> plenty of people in the soviet union had good reason
> to fear or hate
> stalin, but far more, (far, far more) who were not
> critical or
> oppositional party members or other movers and
> shakers - in other words,
> the overwhelming majority - could love him for what
> "he" brought to
> their lives: victory over the nazis, a higher
> standard of living ,a
> sense of national pride...
>
> it's almost natural that after the fact of any
> regime - when it is gone,
> has been defeated, whatever - that people will claim
> to have hated it,
> loathed it, despised the great leader...mostly,
> that's
> bullshit...especially when they tell it to
> foreigners who want,
> sometimes desperately, to hear just that, as in: we
> did the right thing
> in killing all those people in order to destroy that
> awful person...
>
> same is true for the saddamites, who would have us
> believe that the
> entire nation was beaten, jailed,or
> murdered...what's amazing is that
> these foreign monster-demon-satanic, really almost
> comic book figures ,
> leave behind any living people at all...
>
> fs
>
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