We Must Do Away Once and for All with this Papist-Quaker Babble about the Sanctity of Human Life: a Russian Revolution Poll

feel like trotsky has this locked, probably deservedly, but i'll be stumping on and off for the deep cuts. like COMMISSAR OF ENLIGHTENMENT ANATOLY LUNACHARSKY, who had to back off his quasi-mystical ideas about finding god in the oneness of humanity and the infinite power granted it by technology under the pressure of lenin's disapproval, but got a weird kind of revenge when he oversaw the committee that interred lenin's body in that climate-controlled mausoleum, very possibly in anticipation of his eventual resurrection.

suggested reading?

wait, Isaac Babel?

yeah i threw him in because mayakovsky was in wiki's old bolsheviks list and i thought it would be fun to have him in it so i let babel in alongside him. had his doubts, of course, but he was committed.

i think they were mostly doubts about human beings.

Right on. Yeah def Isaak, who apparently had a birthday on Friday...!

would've been hilarious if you included Rasputin

haha he was the last person i cut. i was like no. he'd steal votes with his eyes.

Vera Zasulich has always sounded like she was amazing.

xp my main rationale for including him is def derived from the plot of this movie:

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTYwNTA4NzY1N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwODE1NzM5._V1_SX214_.jpg

wow Zasulich would've been a great vote :/

walked right in, shot the governor, apprehended standing unresisting over the body, was acquitted. (after the assassination of the tsar a lil later, politicals got military trials.) also: had a thing w possible psychopath sergey nechaev (hugely impressed bakunin at first, ended up totally horrifying him) but i like to think held her own. there is a whole book about her that i haven't read called angel of vengeance. in books about lenin/trotsky she's always in chapters 4-7 or so, all older and cool, in swiss exile and gradually getting left behind on the iskra board by lenin's new-generation severity.

that image isn't showing up but it doesn't have to. christopher lloyd's voice evil-sneering DASVIDANYA.

the song from that was my high school graduation song.

LIFE is a road and i wanna keep going. LOVE is a river i wanna keep flowing.

gukbe: here's what i posted the last time someone asked, then a few gr8 recs from others in the posts below. looking at that now i'd move up the bertrand wolfe book, three who made a revolution, which goes from lenin/trotsky/stalin's births to 1917; it's older than you think it's gonna be but i really liked that book. i like the deutscher trilogy about trotsky a lot too but people say it's a hagiography. i also like the montefiore stalin books but people say he's a contemptuous tory. still an exciting field after all these years!

the montefiore books sometimes border on the juicy-bio type. but then that's what this thread is about.

Thanks! I only really know the broadstrokes but I get flustered trying out books and finding them lacking. Will look into those suggestions! I've got three months!

ending date will be the ummmmmmmmm 96th anniversary of october (adjusted for the gregorian calendar). i think.

alexandra kollontai or gtfo

ugh i thought she was on here! she was in the text file i made first in another window. write-in.

so disappointed in u dlh

i had to wiki everybody's patronymics. except lenin's, cuz of the big lebowski.

My name is Fyodor Andreyevich Sergeyev, but I'm "Comrade Artyom" to my friends, BITCH.

alexandra kollontai or gtfo

― whateverface (c sharp major), Sunday, July 14, 2013 8:57 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM. First name I looked for.

tempted to vote Mayakovsky, probly voting Trotsky, permanent revolution or gtfo i guess

voted babel of course (one of my favorite moments teaching high school was teaching odessa tales). great poll dlh

should have included anna akhmatova btw. i avoided her back when the list was just hardcore bolsheviks and forgot to restore her when i added everyone else. would prob vote her over mayakovsky but i'm not rigorously read in either.

babel is on my shortlist (w trotsky, zasulich, lunacharsky, """"""""stalin"""""""", yagoda because while he's a decadent murderous perv like the rest of the nkvd chiefs he gets off a great line in the lubyanka). i just finished a biggish paper on babel that got really messy and didn't live up to my hopes for it but man he is a rich seam.

kudos to Warren Beatty for making the Russia part of Reds center on Zinoviev, rubbing lemon on his teeth "for the scurvy."

Would've voted for either kropotkin or makhno but I get why they were excluded. My sympathies lie with those who denounced the revolution from the left obviously

Which future stalinist stooge will get the most votes lol

played by jerzy kosinsky! that part's great. xp

I will stan for those montefiore books

Would have voted for Akhmatova. Went with Babel over Trotsky.

http://www.eldritchpress.org/el/pix/pro05.jpg

a Buzzcocks album sleeve?

an el lissitzky 'joint' abt sm squares lookin to start somethin

martov deserves a sympathy vote for having been the specific person trotsky told to go to the ashheap of history

Montefiore's Young Stalin book is A++. Have to think about this poll and prepare a glorious manifesto.

boo @ Montefiore.

Marina Tsvetaeva was apolitical (or a White) wasn't she? bah..

mayakovsky because there isn't a single gray hair in my soul (the only line i remember from his poetry)

Would vote for Korolev, but he was only 10 when this happened.

tsvetaeva's husband was white army

had to go with my man kerensky just for thinking he could somehow win the war just by making speeches with his hand tucked into his jacket like napoleon

An artist is commissioned to create a painting celebrating Soviet-Polish friendship, to be called "Lenin in Poland." When the painting is unveiled at the Kremlin, there is a gasp from the invited guests; the painting depicts Nadezhda Krupskaya naked in bed with Leon Trotsky. One guest asks, "But this is a travesty! Where is Lenin?" To which the painter replies, "Lenin's in Poland."

one of my fave jokes - but when i first heard it (in the telushkin joke book i think) the artist was a refusnik

haha that's awesome

Made me laugh.

lollll

in real LOL

searched three different deutscher indices today for a story i swear i didn't dream in which trotsky and stalin show up early to a politburo meeting in the early 20s and are sitting together in silence shuffling papers when they become aware that behind a screen in a corner of the room one of the other members of the politburo is fooling around with his mistress; stalin, hugely amused, leans forward to trotsky to whisper-laugh about it, and trotsky just glares at him and looks really uncomfortable and upset and goes SHHHHHHHHH! stalin recoils and neither of them say anything else until the others arrive. some people don't get along. anyway this story's pointless because i don't remember who the guy behind the screen is and i was going to submit it in his favor. i did find this funny moment of exasperation for molotov, tho, whom it's easy to be much more sympathetic to (in this story) than deutscher is, especially considering the rapid rise he presumably expected would wrangle him some respect:

For sheer lack of color Molotov forms a striking contrast to Dzerzhinsky. In his late twenties, he already occupied a high position in the hierarchy: he had been secretary to the Central Committee before Stalin became General Secretary, and then he served under Stalin as his chief aid. Even at this stage his narrowness and slow-mindedness were already bywords in Bolshevik circles; he appeared to be devoid of any political talent and incapable of any initiative ... The story is told that Trotsky once appeared at the Secretariat, dissatisfied with something that had been done there, and all but pointing at Molotov taunted the dull-witted bureaucrats of the Secretariat. "Comrade Trotsky," Molotov stammered out, "Comrade Trotsky, not everyone can be a genius."

None of the real headz going to vote for Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin, surely.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I am half way through the Figes book and am also enjoying the accounts of the minor background characters of the revolution era. Like Semenov the autodidact peasant farmer, who kicked against the prevalent stupidity of his patriarchal village and travelled, learned about European agricultural advances and bravely took on the evil village patriarch, who sabotaged his every move, poisoned his cattle and had his wife beaten up by thugs. Yet he prevailed and built a lucrative business. I can't google any information on him but would assume he either perished in WW1 or was maybe given a Kulak's holiday in Siberia after the Revolution, not got that far into the book yet. i can't resist googling spoilers on which characters will end perishing during the terror.

Beilis the Jewish brick factory manager is another great story. I mean holy shit to survive a state driven anti-semitic show trial that the Tsar has thrown his weight behind must have been terrifying. Luckily it was such a badly conceived fit up. It was common knowledge amongst the liberal press and the police even that the schoolkid had been murdered by a Russian crime gang for threatening to inform on their cache of stolen goods. A bent juror was quoted as saying "How are we supposed to prosecute this guy if he doesn't even get mentioned in court?".

I have not read much on Kirov yet, guessing that he may have just been slightly less evil than Stalin had he managed to get him first.

Absolutely shocking that Martov got 0 votes in this, a real mens(c)h(evik).