Where We Live: Stalin's Soviet Union
A new digital archive features documents from Stalin's life.
Sometimes a prominent historical figure achieves a resurgence...not necessarily in popularity, but in our daily conversation. It’s been that kind of year for Joseph Stalin.
The Soviet leader’s name has been evoked by Russia’s current leader, Vladimir Putin - who sometimes refers to him as a good leader. The Stalin name was used by another former Russian leader - Mikhail Gorbachev - as an epithet to describe Putin’s practices.
We also heard about the death recently of Stalin’s daughter at the age of 85 in Wisconsin...and now, this. Yale has unveiled a new digital archive of Stalin documents that provide new insight into this most controversial figure.
Today, we’ll look at what’s in these archives - we’ll consider Stalin’s influence on modern Russia - and we’ll talk to members of Connecticut’s Ukranian American community about the great famine of the early 1930s that killed millions of Ukranians - and was linked directly to Stalin’s policies.
Join the conversation - are you a historian of World War II or Soviet Russia? What role do you think Stalin played in shaping our world today? Are you a member of the Ukranian American community?
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Memories of Stalin, the war, etc.
I'm old enough to remember "Uncle Joe" during WW II and how the Soviets were our allies. These memories were reinforced by wonderful memories of a Russian family down the street with ties with Voronezh, and how happy my family was when we learned after the war those people had survived. I am also old enough to remember the flood of refugees from Eastern Europe who surged into the U. S. and brought with them tales of horror at the hands for Soviets. As a kid I was conflicted by these somewhat contradictory memories, and that conflict has stayed with me into my eighth decade. I guess I would sum it up by saying that perhaps it took a monster like Stalin to do the things necessary to beat back the Germans and not have the U. S. S. R. collapse the way Russia did in WW I. That said, during my various trips to the Soviet Union and then independent Russia I was happy to see signs that Stalin's crimes were at least being addressed, especially during the years 1989-1992. Two realities still perplex me, however: First, why some Western academicians still cling to the "idealism" of the Stalinist era and gloss over his horrific killings of many, many millions of innocent people, something that in some ways in analogous to diminishing the horror of the Holocaust by praising summer camps, full employment, the autobahn, etc., brought about by the Nazis, and; Second, why Hollywood has made so very few films that depict the Gulag, the Ukrainian starvation, and similar acts of state terror. The Soviet and then Russian films I have seen (e. g., Burnt by the Sun) address some aspects of this horror, but Hollywood has been AWOL in its duty to humanity and the memory of the tens of millions who suffered at the hands of Stalin. Finally, I think it is now obvious that Stalin's terror was set in motion by Lenin, and given Lenin's views of humanity, history, and Marx there was no way the Soviet people could possibly have avoided something like Stalin, or even something worse. Simply put, unchecked power always and everywhere generates catastrophe, which is one of the best moral arguments that can be made for open, liberal, tolerant Western democracies and the desire of much of humanity to adopt such systems. I am not Ukrainian, but I had fine Ukrainian teachers and some wonderful Ukrainian childhood friends (as well as some wonderful Russian teachers and friends when I was a child).
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