V I Stalin… Was He What the Khrushchyovites Claimed That He Was?

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Editor:

There’s been a great deal of comment on the RuNet about V I Stalin, I V Stalin’s son. Often, where one falls on this issue depends on one’s social position. Those who fancy themselves “intellectuals” or intelligentsia declare him evil, just as they do his father. Those who suck up to Westerners (those who act like Anglo “conservatives”, labelled “liberals” in Russian discourse) take a similar stand. However, most working-class and lower-middle Russians stand up for Vasili Iosifovich. The internet gives them a voice… a voice that the state doesn’t censor. As one of my friends at the Centre put it:

Unlike the Americans, we don’t censor the internet… for good reason. You see, we can find out where public opinion is heading, and take proper action. There’s no need to arrest people or bully them as they do in America.

Ordinary Russians RESPECT “The Vozhd*”. ALL OF THEM. Note that I didn’t say that they “love” him. No one loves I V Stalin. NO ONE. As one friend put it in an email (he’s an engine-driver on the yeliktrichka trains, a communist, and an Orthodox believer):

• Vozhd: “The Leader”, the most-common name for Stalin amongst working-class and lower-middle Russians (and their counterparts in the post-Soviet Near Abroad)… if an ordinary Russian uses “The Vozhd”, they mean I V Stalin, and no one else.

He was a hard man in a hard time. He made life better for little people, like us, and he made the bosses toe the line. No… he wasn’t a good man… but he was a great man, like Pyotr Veliki. Sometimes, harsh times call for harsh measures. Didn’t FDR trample on the bosses in your country, too?

Don’t get me wrong… I’m not sweeping I V Stalin’s actions under the rug. However, I AM saying:

Take all of his actions together… the good and the bad… weigh them in the balance. Take collectivisation and the repressions on the one hand and the victory in the VOV, the country’s industrialisation, and the mass literacy and health programmes on the other. I think that you’d come to the realisation that great men in history may not be “good” men. Think on that… think on it hard.

As for V I Stalin, I agree with most ordinary Russians. He was an honourable man who refused to malign his father and the dishonourable attacked him for that. There’s no other possible conclusion. Therefore, like most ordinary Russians, I think that V I Stalin’s refusal to cast mud at his father covers many sins… unlike his sister, who maligned her father and family at the behest of the Amerikantsy pigs.

Bright and eternal memory to Vasili Iosifovich… he refused to dishonour his father… and paid the price for doing so.

What follows is a representative selection of some of the writings of ordinary Russians on V I Stalin.

BMD

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Vasili Iosifovich Stalin (1921-62) , Lieutenant-General of Aviation, veteran of the Great Patriotic War. He went from being a pilot-instructor in an aviation regiment to being commander of the 3 Guards Aviation and 286 Fighter Aviation Divisions. Postwar, he headed the aviation units of the Moscow Military District (1948-52)! HE KEPT IN MIND THE HONOURABLE WORD OF A SOLDIER OF OUR FATHERLAND…  like his late father, unlike Khrushchyov’s renegade gang of bastards and traitors.

16 March 2016

Yevgeny Spitsyn

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They chose the Motherland as their highest ideal

Eternal memory and glory to heroes!

No one is forgotten; nothing is forgotten!

VASILI IOSIFOVICH STALIN

Soviet military leader, Lieutenant-General of Aviation, son of I V Stalin

21 March 1921-19 March 1962

Vasili Iosifovich Stalin, son of Iosif Stalin, son of Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliuyeva, born on 21 March 1921 in the Kremlin. He went to a regular Moscow school, taking an ordinary tram without a security detail. Like many other children of the Soviet nomenklatura, Vasili Iosifovich became a pilot. Aged 20, he went to the front as a captain. During the war, he flew 27 combat missions; he shot down one enemy plane; he received three Orders of the Red Banner, the Order of Suvorov (II Class), and the Order of Aleksandr Nevsky. In 1942, he became a Colonel, in 1946, he was as Major-General, and in 1947, he was a Lieutenant-General. V I Stalin was one of the youngest generals of the Soviet Army. At the end of the Great Patriotic War, he commanded a Fighter Aviation Division.

18 March 2016

СССР. Прекрасная страна, в которой мы жили

Facebook

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ON THE MEMOIRS OF V I STALIN

Soon after his father’s death, Vasili Iosifovich Stalin, who had already been sacked, asked the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China for political asylum. The son of the Vozhd had good reason to make such a request. He felt the clouds gathering above his head. He understood that the people he’d openly accused of killing his father wouldn’t leave him alone. V I Stalin’s fears weren’t groundless. On 28 April 1953, Stalin’s successors arrested him on charges of anti-Soviet propaganda and abuse of office. After an “investigation” that lasted for more than two years, they sentenced him to eight years in prison. He could’ve copped out, with a full removal of the charges and with restoration of his former status if only he’d repudiate his father and publicly condemn him. However, Vasili Iosifovich refused to do it. As a son, he couldn’t betray his father’s memory. As a communist, he couldn’t betray a leader who did great deeds or abuse his ideals.

29 February 2016

Nikolai Shirshov

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On 21 March, a legendary man was born! Vasili Iosifovich was a good fighter pilot who piloted all kinds of aircraft that were in VVS service! He didn’t sell out or betray his great father… Comrade Stalin! He never dishonoured his father’s name or that of the Stalin family! Eternal Memory to Vasili Iosifovich Stalin!

21 March 2017

Aleksandr Kharchikov

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Vasili Iosifovich Stalin (1921-62) was a Soviet military pilot, Lieutenant-General of Aviation (1949), Commander of the Moscow Military District aviation units in 1948, and the youngest son of I V Stalin. Under Khrushchyov, V I Stalin served eight years in prison, and his accusers threw all manner of accusations against him. They called him an alcoholic, a womaniser, immoral, a mediocrity, a scoundrel, a low-life, a bastard, and a spoiled son. Of course, Vasili Iosifovich wasn’t an angel; he was a drinker and married three times, so that gave his enemies many opportunities to fix on him many pejorative labels.

During the war, V I Stalin flew without a parachute, for he knew that in the event of failure, it’d be better to die than to be captured and to give the Germans a bargaining card like having another son of Stalin in captivity. He flew 26 combat missions and shot down two enemy aircraft. He wasn’t in combat long, because I V Stalin himself banned his flights when he found out that the Germans were actively hunting for his son. I V Stalin himself made him to resign as commander of the Moscow Military District aviation units, when Vasili Iosifovich showed up at a government reception drunk. Stalin’s son pulled other gaffes… his father sent him to study at the Frunze Academy, but Vasili Iosifovich defiantly didn’t attend classes and showed no interest in studying. The following year, I V Stalin died (or was killed). Vasili Iosifovich believed that his close entourage murdered his father, so he tried to pass this information to the Chinese, but state security arrested him.

Unlike his sister Svetlana, Vasili Iosifovich refused to cast aspersions at his father. Outside of official life, V I Stalin was a great promoter of sport. He formed all sorts of sport teams in the air force. V I Stalin’s son A V Burdonsky became a People’s Artist of the Russian Federation in 1996 for his activities as a theatre director.

21 March 2017

Rafik Timirgaliev

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Peacemaker: How the Soviet Tsar Bomba Helped Prevent Nuclear War

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Fifty-five years ago, the USSR detonated a 50-megaton bomb over an uninhabited island north of the Arctic Circle. The most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever built by man, aptly called the Tsar Bomba, gave the USSR nuclear parity with the USA.

The Super Bomb was a Necessity

The “thaw” in Soviet-US relations resulting from, amongst other things, Nikita Khrushchyov’s visit to the USA in autumn 1959 ended on 1 May 1960, when the Soviets shot down a US U-2 spy plane flown by CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers in their airspace as it performed photographic aerial reconnaissance of the Baikonur cosmodrome and a number of Soviet military and nuclear facilities. Powers parachuted safely, the Soviets captured him, and he admitted the military nature of his mission. As a result, Khrushchyov cancelled the scheduled opening of an east-west summit in Paris. The incident prompted a marked deterioration of US-Soviet relations, especially after US-backed Cuban emigrants bungled an attempt to invade Cuba in April 1961. The Moscow-proposed moratorium on nuclear tests by the USSR, the USA, and the UK, in effect since 1958, left the USSR lagging far behind the USA in the size of its nuclear arsenal. By 1960, the Americans used the moratorium to bring the number of their nuclear and thermonuclear warheads to 18,600 from 7,500 in 1958. In July 1961, Khrushchyov decided that he had enough of the moratorium and decided to start work on super-powerful thermonuclear weapons to restore nuclear parity with the USA. He also announced the need to build a 100-megaton thermonuclear bomb as a means of forcing the Americans to wake up to reality.

The Tsar Bomba

A four-man development team of nuclear physicists… Viktor Adamsky, Yuri Babaev, Yuri Smirnov, and Yuri Trutnev… had the responsibility to design and build a three-stage thermonuclear device in just 15 weeks. Officially designated the AN602 thermonuclear bomb, the Tsar Bomba used the common three-stage Teller-Ulam design. The primary fission reaction compressed a secondary mixed fission/fusion fuel layer, which in turn compressed a large tertiary thermonuclear payload, essentially stringing a pair of hydrogen fission reactions together to generate enough energy to activate fusion in a uranium payload.

Record-Breaking Blast

At 09.00 on 30 October 1961, a specially modified Tu-95 strategic bomber took off; it carried the Tsar Bomba and a Tu-16A flying laboratory accompanied it. They headed for a testing range on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. At 27 tonnes, the Tsar Bomba weighed nearly as much as the Tu-95 that carried it; it was so big that groundcrew had to cut off the bomb-bay doors to fit it in. At 11.30, the crew released the device from 10,500 metres, using a parachute to retard its fall so that the bomber and its companion craft had sufficient time… 188 seconds… to leave the area. The bomb went off at an altitude of 4,200 metres. The calculated power of the unprecedented explosion was 51.5 megatons. In reality, its power was between 57 and 58.6 megatons. The fireball from the explosion was 4.6 kilometres across; it was visible 1,000 kilometres away, despite dense clouds. The mushroom cloud rose up to almost 70 kilometres and had a diameter of 95 kilometres. For about an hour after the explosion, people observed radio signal distortions hundreds of kilometres from the epicentre due to ionisation of the atmosphere. The shockwave circled the planet three times. On Dikson Island, some 800 kilometres from the range, the shockwave shattered windows, bringing the sound of cannonade with it.

Aftermath

Even though the Tsar Bomba wasn’t an active service weapon, its creation confirmed the USSR’s ability to have as many megatons of nuclear might as it desired. With this realisation in mind, the USA stopped their nuclear buildup. On 5 August 1963, the USSR, the USA, and the UK signed a treaty banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater. Thus, the test of the Tsar Bomba played a crucial role in achieving nuclear parity between the USSR and the USA. This prevented nuclear war.

30 October 2016

Sputnik International

https://sputniknews.com/russia/201610301046887680-ussr-bomb-history/

Primakov: “There’s Been no Such Surge of Patriotism since the Victory in the Great Patriotic War and the First Human Spaceflight”

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On Wednesday, ex-Chairman of the RF Government Yevgeni Primakov said during a lecture at Moscow State University, “Russia’s reunification with the Crimea and Sevastopol wasn’t a well-thought-out decision, but rather a reaction to developments in the Ukrainian crisis, which outside forces orchestrated. Russia took measures to ensure security of the peninsula’s population during the vote from raids and provocations by radicals. There’s been no such surge of patriotism since the victory in the Great Patriotic War and the first human spaceflight”.

The Republic of the Crimea and Sevastopol, a city with a special status on the Crimean Peninsula, where most residents are Russians, refused to recognise the legitimacy of the new Ukrainian junta that seized power amidst riots after a coup in the Ukraine in February. Crimea and Sevastopol adopted declarations of independence on 11 March. They held a referendum on 16 March, in which 96.77 percent of Crimeans and 95.6 percent of Sevastopol voters chose to secede from the Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. President Vladimir Putin signed the reunification pacts on 18 March. In the USSR, the Crimea was part of the RSFSR until 1954, when KPSS leader Nikita Khrushchyov signed it over to the Ukrainian SSR.

Editor:

This is the reason most unreported in the Western media:

There’s been no such surge of patriotism since the victory in the Great Patriotic War and the first human spaceflight.

To put it simply, the people of Russia have unity and they have confidence in their leadership. The same isn’t true of the USA. No leader has the American people’s confidence… no one trusts the media or the government in the USA… no one… and the right opposition has LESS cred than President Obama does (would YOU trust a quitter and ignoranus like Sarah Palin or a cruel heartless harridan like Ann Coulter?).

From the outset, the junta’s done stupid shit… first, it outlawed the Russian language, then, it outlawed President Yanukovich… and then, it started to backtrack! For me, the main reality is that the junta hasn’t reined in the Euromaidan terrorists, who’re the real “power behind the throne”. The Ukraine is an anarchic mess, so, it’s no wonder that people want out. The status quo ante is unrealisable as the junta’s bumbling and pro-fascist statements shattered it. The American-fomented coup saw to that… and most “Ukrainians” don’t wish to be American slaves.

The USA doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to face down the Russians on their own turf. Make no mistake on it… the “Ukraine” IS Russia. Kiev is “the Mother of all Russian Cities”… full stop. Besides which, the Ukraine isn’t the USA’s business, after all… it’s part of the Russian sphere of influence. The world and the USA would be a better place if the USA abandoned its drive for global hegemony. Not only would it be FAR less expensive in terms of money, it’d give us peace for a generation, at least.

What shall the USA choose? It’s all dependent on what YOU choose… do choose well.

BMD

YOU SAY “Помидор”; I SAY “Помідор”

The Wednesday Morning Fights (at the Rada, not the Garden)

Sergei Yolkin

2010

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This cartoon is from two years ago… “the more things change, the more they stay the same”… pass the jug…

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Last week, fists flew in the Ukrainian parliament over the latest attempt to grant the Russian language a measure of official status in the country. Fat politicians brawled with other fat politicians, whilst outside, an angry crowd protested. From her jail cell, former Prime Minister Yuliya Timoshenko denounced the bill as a “crime”. Earlier, she had characterised it as an apparently sacrilegious assault on “an issue that’s holy for many of us”. Timoshenko, who could not speak Ukrainian until she was 36, is a demagogue. Nevertheless, the word “holy” reveals the extremes of passion felt on this subject. Politically and culturally, language is a hot kartofel (or should I say kartoplia?) in the Ukraine and the “Russian Question” provokes defensive outrage from Ukrainian nationalists.

I witnessed Ukrainian language policies in action in 2005, when I visited Kiev. I confess that I thought it rather strange that many people were speaking Russian, but all of the signage was in Ukrainian. The apotheosis of absurdity came when I watched a Russian action movie, where the credits were in Ukrainian, but the language of the film was Russian. Pretentiously, there were English language signs on some government buildings, but nothing in Russian. I also recall a story about a town in the Western Ukraine, where some micro-fascists had banned Russian pop from the airwaves. The struggle to impose the Ukrainian language by force on the country’s large Russian-speaking population, about 30% of the total, has a long pedigree. In his fascinating book, The Affirmative Action Empire, Terry Martin details a barking-mad attempt in the early revolutionary period to compel everybody working in government administration to switch from Russian to Ukrainian in two years… a move that Moscow endorsed in order to defeat “Great Russian Nationalism”. It failed because it was a stupid idea, and ground to a complete halt when Stalin, a Russifying Georgian, came to power.

Of course, it’s natural that many Ukrainians feel anxious about their language. Russia is a powerful neighbour located right next door. The Ukraine has only been independent for 20 years, and nationalists fear that the use of Russian will divide the nation, and threaten its very identity. However, the country already has sharp divisions, and what, in fact, is that identity? It’s not as if all those Russian speakers in the Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea arrived last week to destabilise a hitherto homogenous Ukrainian culture. Most Russians living in the Ukraine were born there. The only reason the Russian-speaking Crimea is part of the country because Nikita Khrushchyov “gifted” it in 1954 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Ukraine’s union with Russia. The Russian Empire captured New Russia in the south-eastern Ukraine in the 18th century, and both Russians and Ukrainians settled there. For centuries, there was no border, and Kiev is the “mother city” of Russians and Ukrainians alike. Russian is also the lingua franca of most of the other long-established ethnic minorities in the Ukraine.

The millions of Russian speakers in Ukraine are hardly interlopers, then. Some are as “indigenous” as the ethnic Ukrainians themselves. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that many object to the policy of forced Ukrainisation, active since the 1990s, which has seen education in the Russian language largely eradicated and eastern and southern government offices conducting business in a tongue predominantly spoken in the western half of the country. Embarrassingly, the independent and democratic Ukraine is more oppressive in this regard than was Brezhnev’s USSR was in 1970. At that time, in the autonomous region of Tatarstan, 70 percent of schooling was conducted in Tatar, not Russian. By 1990, schooling in Tatar had dropped to 24 percent. By 2001, however, the figure was at 49.3 percent and rising. Thus, Russia… the Grand Villain of Ukrainian nationalism… grants its linguistic minorities more rights than the independent democratic Ukraine.

Perhaps, I’m more relaxed about language because although I’m Scottish, I speak Standard English, not Gaelic, and don’t feel any less Scottish for it. I freely admit that the Scots and the English are very similar, just as Ukrainians and Russians are very similar. Life is too short to dwell on the narcissism of small differences. Meanwhile, in Texas, I see Spanish language signs all the time, most often in big stores, because the politics of immigration aside, it’s good for business if your clientele can read the signs. Second-generation immigrants assimilate and become bilingual, because if you don’t learn English you’re doomed to a life of low-paying menial jobs.

Perhaps, if Ukrainian politicians could concentrate less on punching each other in the face and focus more on giving Ukraine a prosperous future, the language issue would become less contentious. Anybody with ambition who wanted to play in the big leagues would be motivated to learn the language of the unitary centre, which is Ukrainian and will remain so. Russian speakers might look over the border at their cousins and feel pity. They might even read a volume of Taras Shevchenko’s poetry by choice instead of as a legal obligation in school. Well, OK, that last one’s probably going a bit far. However, you get my drift.

1 June 2012

Daniel Kalder

RIA-Novosti

http://en.rian.ru/columnists/20120601/173793426.html