The struggle for improved town planning laws continues unabated…
Today’s Guardian is running an article about the controversy of renaming Volgograd to Stalingrad for the annual celebrations of that particularly brutal period in World War 2. If anyone hasn’t read Anthony Beevor’s book on this topic, I strongly recommend it – I don’t know how factual it is but it’s an excellent read anyway. Apparently, according to this article, the decision to rename Volgograd to Stalingrad for this few days of the year (covering the time when the Nazis surrendered) is controversial because it is seen as honouring Stalin, who was in charge at the time. From the article:
Communists and other hardliners credit him with leading the country to victory in the second world war and making it a nuclear superpower, while others condemn his purges, during which millions were murdered.
Stalin was definitely a bad, bad man, who did bad, bad things, and although some have argued that many of the bad things he did were necessary conditions to enable the rapid industrialization that gave the USSR the power to destroy Hitler, others would probably just as likely argue that his excesses reduced the USSR’s power to resist invasion. Beevor doesn’t make a judgment either way but certainly describes how Stalin’s behavior before the war and in the early stages of Operation Barbarossa made the Nazis’ job easier, but by contrast Aly and Heim in Architects of Annihilation argue, at least by implication, that Stalin’s programs of “de-kulakization” and industrialization – which were accompanied by famine, mass relocation and the destruction of whole communities – were essential to the later war effort and were actually copied by Hitler’s planners and demographers as they set about the extermination of the Jewish race and the residents of Eastern Europe. So in this sense it could be argued that Stalin’s specific pre-war policy framework[1] may have been an essential pre-condition to the victory in the war[2]. If so, it’s a very odious fact but it does suggest that Stalin’s role was essential to winning the war[3], as were the sacrifices of the 20 million or so people who died as a result of his policies.
Beevor on the other hand quotes a general speaking to Stalin early in the war, when Stalin was panicking. I can’t remember exactly the quote, of course, but basically the general told Stalin “It doesn’t really matter how tough they are or how badly we fare now; just pack up our industry to the other side of the Urals, and eventually we’ll destroy them.” A lesson they learnt, of course, from Napoleon, though they did have help from vampires back then.
So reading that article on the reveneration of Stalingrad’s name, and the dispute about how much Stalin needs to be tied to the victory over Nazism (and, by extension, its fascist satellites), or whether the Soviet Union (and Russia) was/is the kind of place where it doesn’t matter who is in charge, no one will ever be able to conquer it. I guess it won’t change anything about the current debate (after all, since when are these debates ever actually about historical facts?) but it’s an interesting question about Stalin’s legacy, since implicit in it is the suggestion that the only way Russia could have defeated the Nazis is by a massive program of industrialization that cannot possibly be achieved without mass suffering. If that’s the case, then it’s hard to believe that the first half of the 20th century could have followed any trajectory that would not have ended in mass suffering – at least not once WW1 was over. And if so, that really is a sad, sad state of human affairs, and points to something cruel and terrible in the heart of modernity.
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fn1: it sounds so innocuous when put like that, doesn’t it?
fn2: not to mention the massive contribution of the USA under lend-lease from 1941-1945, something for Americans to throw back in the face of unsympathetic foreigners who tell them they didn’t win the war.
fn3: another side reason that he may have been essential was that Hitler was obssessed with capturing Stalingrad because of its name, and had the city been named Puppygrad he might have been a little less focused on squandering hundreds of thousands of well-trained troops on it.
Compromise and Conceit 
February 1, 2013 at 7:56 pm
Just some odd remarks:
You might like to read Sandra Halperin’s War and Social Change in Modern Europe.
Lebensraum in eastern Europe, plus the need to reduce the slavs to obedience, were right-wing German fantasies that predated Hitler (they were common currency in Wilhelmine Germany). Likewise repression and murder in the cause of strengthening the state was not strange to Russia – Peter the Great built St Petersburg on bones. For that matter, there’s a statue of Cromwell in front of the Houses of Parliament in London – the guy who killed a third of the Irish.
Industrialisation certainly saved the Soviet Union – they might have carried on some kind of war from beyond the Urals, but it would not have been a winning one. For the other case, see Russia in World War I (brave, but unorganised and out of ammo).
Hitler was not obsessed with the name – a glance at a map tells you that you need to hold Stalingrad to secure any advance into the Caucasus (as well as cut the Volga oil supply line). It was a key point in the Russian Civil War too, for much the same reasons.
February 1, 2013 at 9:34 pm
Cromwell was an ignorant fool in a time of ignorant fools. Hitler, Churchill and Stalin were inheritors of the enlightenment tradition in a modern era. Churchill had run-ins with the suffragettes, Hitler knew all about the struggle of the Russian serfs for freedom, and Stalin knew all about the debates shaping anarchism and social democracy in Europe. While it’s possible to accept that Cromwell genuinely believed the Irish were lazy and inferior, being so informed by a very narrow and ignorant worldview, the elder men of Europe in the 30s had no such excuse. Every aspect of the modern human rights struggle was represented in Europe and some of it was writ so large as to be unmissable (e.g., the workers’ struggle and the demand of poor people to have voting and land rights). In this context, the minimum conditions for beating back the Nazis seem like an important question: if they could only be achieved by Stalinesque repression, then Stalin’s legacy is important, though that doesn’t demand minimization of his cruelty. If, on the other hand, any old rich fart could have seen off Hitler were they armed with the Soviet union’s special benefits, then everything that happened in Europe in that 30 year period was inexplicable, and the only developed nations that escape the first half of the 20th century looking peachy are … Finland. Which says something about modernity, especially when you consider the scale on which modern nations were able to inflict their cruelties (e.g Switzerland and the sterilization of gypsies, Australia’s stolen generations, etc.).
In my nameless general’s defense, Russia in world war 1 was fighting a war of conquest (of a sort), whereas in world war 2 it was fighting a defensive war (essentially). So shifting industry beyond the Urals and withdrawing was an impossible tactic in the former, and I don’t think they should be compared. Also, the Wikipedia entry on the ww1 eastern front has something about wolves. Wolves! WTF?
Beevor doesn’t dismiss the importance of the Caucasus oil, but suggests (and I think, with evidence) that Hitler insisted on hanging on long after the oil was well past his reach, out of stupid pride because he wanted to capture the named city. Incidentally, have you read The Forsaken Army by Heinrich Gerlach? It’s as close a depiction of hell as you can hope to find in literature …
February 2, 2013 at 6:16 pm
Cromwell was a man of great religious conviction in a time of religious conviction – he sits with the Duke of Alva, the Guises, Tilly and many others in some forgotten corner of hell. But everyone thought at the time that it was really important to get the religion of the state right – and persecute everyone who got it wrong.
Stalin, Hitler and Churchill were actors in a European civil war that pitted different beliefs about the relations of class, state and nation against each other – a war that started in 1870, seemed settled in 1945, and has started to re-open since 1989. Repression seems to have been a key element; more so when you had to catch up in a hurry (that is, the UK used some repression, more migration and imperial buy-off over 80-odd years; Russia did not have the same choices).
Massive industrialisation was essential to defeating Nazism – not just factories, but large numbers of educated, technically-competent people. You can move some factories – you can’t move power stations, rail lines, coal mines etc (the Red Army suffered badly from ammo shortages in 42, as the coking coal ovens that fed the nitrogen converters had been lost); and modern armies do not run without radio techs, mechanics, machinists and so on. The UK calculated that Russia beyond the Urals could maintain 40 divisions in the field – compare to the 300+ fielded. Stalin’s programs built that base. It could probably have been built with less ruthless methods, but it could not have been done gently if it were done at all.
Even if the oil was out of reach, the Volga was the key route for oil from the Caspian to the factories on the upper Volga and Moscow – so keeping a grip on the Volga as one element of the strategy. And you can’t sit outside a major city through winter – the enemy has the rail lines, the shelter and all the associated advantages both in logistics and defences. You have to either take it or fall back to the next major junction. In this case, falling back meant abandoning most of the summer’s gains and. with them, any prospect of offensive victory.
I have Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate on the pile.
February 3, 2013 at 6:15 pm
Peter T, I think you’re suggesting through these comments that you believe it had to be Stalin, i.e. that the war couldn’t have been won without the hard-nosed policies of a man like Stalin. If so, and given what the Nazis did in the territories they captured (mass starvation and murder) and to Russian prisoners of war (mass murder) and what they were planning to do to the “Jewish-bolshevik menace” (mass extermination), surely that makes Stalin a hero?
I don’t think I’ve read anything by Grossman – is Life and Fate relevant to my post?
February 4, 2013 at 12:10 pm
“Hero” definitely not. Just maybe “man for his times”.
Grossman’s novel is the Red Army frontovik’s view of the corner of hell that was Stalingrad.
February 4, 2013 at 1:50 pm
Then what sad times they were! I shall definitely have to read Grossman.