He passed a death sentence on a Hollywood star, encouraged scientists to grow plants in the desert, and finally locked all his engineers in labor camps. And these are by no means the DEADEST idea of Joseph Stalin.
In the late 1920s, Stalin planned to accelerate the revolution. The first five-year-old girl was supposed to liquidate the rich peasantry, and bring the rest together in kolkhozes. It was also decided to significantly increase the efficiency of the industry. The workers had to be forced to work above the norm, but without taking into account the fact that they performed it on old machines that still remembered the tsarist era. Exhausted, hungry people and worn-out devices - it certainly posed a risk of many accidents. And these, in turn, could have resulted in social unrest.
The Red Tsar, however, had a "brilliant" excuse and an even brighter idea on how to remedy these problems:"the cause of future misfortunes will be (...) saboteurs. Professionals and specialists, educated during the tsarist period. Of course, they hate the dictatorship of the proletariat. And they hurt. " Stalin rightly bet on the blind hatred of the dark masses towards educated and intelligent people. He also found an outlet in this hatred:in the crowd's favorite word, "hit".
The proletariat, that is, the poorest social class, immediately picked up on Stalinist slogans. Finally, officially all the evil was blamed on the rich and educated. So simple, and how "brilliant" were the ideas of the Soviet dictator. The illustration shows a lithograph from the 19th century depicting the unemployed.
Engineers are your enemy!
The Chekists, led by the highest-level officer of the USSR's secret services, Gienrich Jagoda, were eager to implement the Stalinist idea. Mass arrests affected professors, economists, specialists in science and technology. State propaganda informed the public that there was a powerful, underground, "industrial" terrorist organization in the country with 200,000 members. And she is ready to take power! The result of this "witch hunt" was a series of show trials. Some of them were carefully directed by Stalin himself. How did the common people react? Indignant, of course, demanding that vile pests be shot at rallies.
Needless to say, the consequences of this move were dire for the Soviet economy. There was a shortage of experienced specialists in the factories and mines. Since the management of the facilities was taken over by uneducated people, there were production downtimes. Stalin, however, found an antidote to this as well - ordered the management to be transported from prisons to the factories - and to put them back there for the night!
The article was inspired by the latest book by Simon Ings, “Stalin and Scientists. A history of triumph and tragedy ”(Agora 2017). It is a fascinating story about people from the world of science who turned into madmen at Stalin's services and became the laughingstock of the world.
Comrade Stalin removes indecent scenes
Sex in the Soviet state did not exist, at least in theory. According to the official line of the party, a true Bolshevik had to have pure, unblemished thoughts. This, however, did not prevent the many greats from Stalin's entourage from indulging in carnal pleasures, sometimes quite perverse. The dictator himself, apart from two wives, had numerous mistresses. Among his chosen ones there was also a housekeeper with whom he allegedly had an intimate relationship for the rest of his life.
For propaganda purposes, however, Stalin was a modest, prudish communist. Even the sight of his daughter Svetlana's bare knees or her too defiant look in the photographs made him furious. In these matters, the chief interfered with cinema, which he considered to be "the most important of all arts" (obviously due to being the main tool in perpetuating his statuesque image).
Once upon a time, a Soviet dictator was so outraged by an "too passionate" kiss in the first scene of a charming musical comedy "Volga, Volga" that he ordered it cut down . His officials, wanting to please the chief, went even further and banned any kissing in all Soviet films!
Still from the movie "Volga-Volga". Who would have thought that an innocent kiss in a black and white comedy would scandalize a Soviet leader so much. Nevertheless, it was apparently Stalin's favorite film production.
It was similar with the second part of the adaptation about Ivan the Terrible, entitled The Boyar Conspiracy directed by Sergei Eisenstein in 1948. Stalin, who strongly identified himself with the tsar, felt disgusted with the scene of Ivan's kiss. As with the previous cinematic production, he found it too long and ordered it to be cut. The film itself, however, aroused such controversy in party circles that it was put on a shelf and officially shown only in 1958.
The dictator's censorship was not limited to cinema only. When, during the opera "Eugene Onegin", one of its main characters, Tatiana, appeared on stage wearing only a nightgown, The Chief was supposed to shout:"How can a woman appear to a man in such an outfit?" It is not difficult to guess that in the following productions the director was forced to dress the woman in a slightly more puritanical outfit.
One of the Soviet dictator's passions was gardening. Not only did he set up a dacha (in the photo of the dacha in Peredelkin), which he surrounded with a plot where he could cultivate plants, but also decided to try his hand at growing lemons. So what if the Russian climate is not very conducive to their cultivation…
The gardening passion of the dictator
One of Stalin's hobbies was tending the garden. This way he spent practically every free moment. He also forced his party comrades to work in the beds. The dictator even considered himself an expert in this field. In addition to his numerous dachas, i.e. small summer houses, he ordered to build greenhouses in which he planted ... citrus . He also loved roses. As an outspoken follower of "baldness", he believed that every plant is capable of adapting to new, even extreme conditions. As Simon Ings stated in his latest book "Stalin and Scientists" :
In 1946, he focused on lemons with exceptional passion, having them planted not only on the coasts of Georgia, where they did quite well, but also in places such as Crimea, where winter frosts devastated them very quickly.
The leader, however, did not discourage him, on the contrary. In 1949, Soviet newspapers reported that scientists had found a way to turn the sandy Kara-kum desert into a flourishing cotton plantation. Similar attempts were made twenty years earlier, when a network of irrigation canals was built to supply water to the desert from the great rivers of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. The whole project ended in a fiasco because the water evaporated or soaked into the sandy soil before reaching the plantation. The Aral Lake, which today looks like a desert, began to dry up.
A lake that has turned into a desert. Some "brilliant" ideas of the Soviet leader had such effects.
Interestingly, the view that plants can be forced to live in new conditions was tried in practice also in Stalinist Poland. Rice plots have appeared at the Plant Breeding and Acclimatization Institute in Puławy. Our farms were also getting ready to take up rice farming on a large scale. Unfortunately, the experiment was expensive, the harvest was poor, and during the thaw after 1956, these experiments were abandoned at all. And thus we missed a unique opportunity to become a world power in rice production .
The first Hollywood cowboy targeted by Comrade Stalin
It is already known that Joseph Stalin was a great admirer of cinema. Moreover, his passion had quite defined boundaries. He especially loved watching historical movies and classic American Westerns. There was, however, one actor whom the dictator allegedly hated heartily. And it was John Wayne himself:a well-known, politically committed rightist who supported Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist actions.
John Wayne in one of the films from the 1930s opposite Marsha Hunt. Was Stalin really crazy enough to sentence one of Hollywood's most popular actors to death?
Nikita Khrushchev claimed that Stalin ordered the removal of the then Hollywood icon . The Soviet services in 1951 were even supposed to hire two hired killers for this purpose. One day they showed up at John Wayne's office claiming to be FBI agents. However, they did not foresee that their intentions were deciphered by real US counterintelligence officers. So they were quickly arrested. Both of them were to apply for asylum in the United States afterwards.
If Khrushchev is to be believed, there have been at least several such attempts to kill Wayne. The Chekists stopped hunting him only after Stalin's death. It was then that Nikita Khrushchev took power in the Soviet Union and canceled the death sentence given to the actor by the Red Tsar.
The article was inspired by the latest book by Simon Ings, “Stalin and Scientists. A history of triumph and tragedy ”(Agora 2017). It is a fascinating story about people from the world of science who turned into madmen at Stalin's services and became the laughingstock of the world.
A great leader discovers the truth revealed
The leader of the Soviet Union was very well-read and had a huge library. So he knew everything. In matters related to, for example, hygiene, he "guessed" in which places in Moscow should be put up public toilets . He also knew the composition of the soap best for use by the working class. He also knew how many tools would be needed to operate the T-34 tank. In fact, he could even solve such a complex problem as determining the parameters of the turbine compressor blades of the AM-35 aircraft engine! Little? Stalin was also reportedly an "outstanding" linguist . Boris Bażanow, one of his secretaries, claimed that the Chief:
is underdeveloped and unable to say anything reasonable and factual about the issues under discussion. (...) His speeches contain little content. He speaks with difficulty, he selects words by running his eyes across the ceiling. He does not write any works; what passes for his works are speeches and speeches given on various occasions - later the secretaries create a kind of literature out of the transcripts.
But all these handicaps did not prevent his work entitled "Marxism and Linguistics" from appearing in print in 1950.
As can be seen in the photo from 2009, Stalin, while realizing his absurd and terrifying ideas, is not condemned everywhere. Do some people consider his ideas great?
To be clear, "the greatest linguist in the world" - as his contemporaries at the time called him - knew only two languages:his native Georgian and Russian, in which he spoke with a distinct Georgian accent. In connection with the publication of the linguistic advances of the Leader, a real madness overwhelmed the USSR at that time. His theses were hailed as historical ones, a lot of scientific papers were published about them, and many sessions were held, also in our country. Meanwhile, quoting Professor Leszek Kołakowski, Stalin simply discovered that:
French capitalists speak French and French workers also speak French, not another language, and that Russians spoke Russian before 1917 and also Russian after 1917. Russian, not in another language.
Stalin was indeed a brilliant intellectual, was he not?