stalin.htm

Notes on Stalin's Biography

The desire to control

I recently learned about Stalin, how he has continued to maneuver his influence through military leaders and propaganda. And how they had to balance their concessions to farmers with the New Economic Policy, and their desires to have a socialist republic. It has been an interesting tension between economic freedom to develop the country and the socialist vision of having control. To unify the entire country under a mantle of "equality." The curious thing has been that to reach this mantle of equality, they had to make concessions to make the country more capitalist.

Apparently, capital is needed to develop any number of projects. This is the step that even Marx recognized. To have industry, capital is needed. And capital generates the concentration of money around the people who use it innovatively.

The other interesting part of the book is the state's desire to have control, a "vision" over the entire Soviet Union. It is something that has been difficult to control due to the different races and cultures that its vast territory encompasses.

The other thing I have been learning about is from the book Laughter and Forgetfulness. How in the dynamics of changing a city, a culture, leaders can erase buildings, stories, diaries. It reminds me of 1984 when the regime rebuilt history based on its utopian vision of control over the population.

It is fascinating. The human desire to control vast territories based on their utopian idea. Controlling ideas, controlling territory, controlling thoughts, controlling history.