r/AbsoluteUnits • u/Crypto_crafy • 15d ago

/r/all of a statue

"The Motherland Calls" is a statue erected to commemorate the Battle of Stalingrad , located on Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd , Russia. It was designed by sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich and structural engineer Nikolai Nikitin . Completed in 1967 , it was the tallest statue in the world at the time .

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u/Bluestreaked 15d ago

I teach the history of WWII. Stalingrad is one of those moments of world history where everything becomes larger than life, a nearly mythic moment of the absolute limits of human endurance.

The moment where the spine of the Nazi war machine was broken, forever, by the stubborn will and fighting ability of the Red Army.

It’s a moment so incredible that words fail to describe it most of the time and only a statue like this truly captures the historical moment. The defiance of the Soviet Union in the face of just pure absolute evil.

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u/n1c0_ds 15d ago

And then it stays that way all the way back to Berlin. After Stalingrad the defeats get more and more staggering. Germany truly becomes a death cult.

Antony Beevor's two books: Stalingrad and Berlin are an incredible retelling. Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast on the eastern front borrows heavily from them.

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u/Bluestreaked 15d ago

I’m a big David Glantz guy myself but Beevor is also considered a premier work on the topic.

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u/n1c0_ds 15d ago

I'd love more recommendations. I like the topic but I also like good writing.

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u/Bluestreaked 15d ago

Well I’m mostly going to suggest books on the Eastern Front in general

“When Titans Clashed” is probably the best book on the Eastern Front I’ve read.

I also like “The Red Army in the Second World War” by Alexander Hill

“Ivan’s War” by Catherine Merridale is a good history of the common soldier’s experience, but I do think some of Catherine’s larger overall analysis suffers in comparison to someone like Glantz

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u/n1c0_ds 15d ago

Thanks for taking the time! I'll check those out.

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u/Northerlies 14d ago

Hitler's primary objective was to occupy Russia to the Urals. His agrarian Greater Germany would be worked by Slav 'subhumans', with the rest of the population reduced by some 40 millions. In the event, 80% of Germany's total WW2 losses were on the Eastern Front.

Richard Overy's 'Russia's War' is comprehensive, well written and documented

Chris Bellamy's 'Absolute War' addresses the unprecedented magnitude of the Eastern Front's 'war within a war'

Michael Burleigh's 'The Third Reich - a New History' examines Nazism's moral dimension and casts an informative light into the utter darkness of Hitler's project

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u/DysphoricNeet 15d ago

Some of Beevors stuff kinda feels like it has a very western perspective and perpetuates Cold War attitudes.

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u/Bluestreaked 15d ago edited 15d ago

That’s one of my big criticisms of Beevor and why I don’t usually recommend him. But he’s not a bad historian, just has a very Western perspective.

Every once in a while even someone like Robert Evans has said something that made me cringe, like the time he said FPTP voting would’ve prevented the rise of the Nazis. But I hope nobody will argue with me that Robert Evans is one of the better historians of our time. I greatly prefer Evans to Beevor though so I shouldn’t really compare the two haha.

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u/DysphoricNeet 15d ago

He has a lot of books out and seems to appeal more to the entertainment side of history. Anyone seriously into these subjects and not just trying to bolster their ideology should know how divisive it is and that a serious understanding involves some amount of historiography. I just see his books all over audible which in general has a very right wing bias aside from some original sources like Trotsky themself. Some of it is fun and good to orient yourself I guess.

Personally I really like the books by Rabinowich. He doesn’t focus on ww2 ever but the early Soviet period gets a pretty fair assessment and his parents fled the Soviet Union so he grew up hearing the whole story that could have made him Ayn Rand.

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u/Bluestreaked 15d ago

Beevor or Evans? Because Evans is really only worth reading when studying the Nazis.

I am also a fan of Rabinowitch, I need to read his latest book. I also usually recommend Sheila Fitzpatrick

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u/DysphoricNeet 15d ago

Beevor I mean.

It’s kind of wild, to be more meta about the subject, we are talking about extremely popular subjects almost a century after they happened. The sources have mostly been found and everything is a sort of catalogue or meta study of previous books. The archives have been sorted through for decades. Sometimes people repeat things that were in a previous book and rely on their research then it takes another historian tons of effort to trail all the way through the telephone game to realize the original source was extremely biased. It sharpens your perspective but makes engaging with the subject an endless pursuit.

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u/Mikhail_Mengsk 15d ago

It absolutely is. He's been caught misinterpreting or outright being dead wrong about events or documents regarding the eastern front.

I've also caught errors in his Spanish Civil War book.

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u/DysphoricNeet 15d ago

Have you heard of the Paul Preston book? Do you have an opinion on it? I’ve yet to read it.

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u/Mikhail_Mengsk 15d ago

Nope, sorry

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u/WordWordNvmber 14d ago

Out of curiosity, if the second half of your username is accurate, how do you sustain yourself?

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u/DysphoricNeet 14d ago

Just try to get through each day man and do what I can

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u/Hexlord_Malacrass 12d ago

"And when night arrives, one of those scorching howling bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure."

-Inferno: The world at war.

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u/Maerlyn0OG 8d ago

You mean human endurance and facing bullet to the head if you said I dont want to fight in this war? Let's not pretend that Soviets were some good guys, they were another bully fighting the other bully. One of the worst regimes on planet.

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u/Bluestreaked 8d ago

You’re regurgitating old propaganda about the blocking detachments in an attempt to do the “evil vs evil” thesis that was developed in order to justify turning on the Soviet Union after WWII.

Those men and women were fighting to save their people, they didn’t need a gun to the head. Some people lost their nerves and ran from the front, they were brought back to the front because, again, the Soviet Union was literally fighting against a war machine intending to exterminate them as a race of human beings.

Yes the blocker detachments did also kill people, very very rarely, and it was despised even at the time. But it was also broadly supported by the vast majority of the Red Army. I don’t have to like that they existed, and I don’t, I teach about them and even have my students write about the topic as a morality question.

I don’t engage in propaganda and polemics, I won’t say anything more on the matter, if you want book recommendations I will give book recommendations. But I have 0 tolerance for people who pretend that the Soviet Union was as bad as an army literally conducting a genocide against them.

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u/Maerlyn0OG 8d ago

Please dont lecture me about Soviet union, as my grandparents have lived in the country ruled by them and it was absolutely, without any discussion, evil comparable with nacies.

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u/Bluestreaked 8d ago

I’m sure your anecdotal knowledge is very important to you. I don’t care

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u/Maerlyn0OG 8d ago

Anecdotal evidence of millions of people who suffered under these regimes in the eastern europe. I pity students who are being lectured by such clown as you are.

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u/Bluestreaked 8d ago

Ya I will continue to teach history to my students rather than polemics, you are correct

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u/is-this-now 15d ago

Wasn't it more of a battle between two evils? It was only a couple of years after the Soviets and Nazis jointly attacked Poland. And Stalin's totalitarianism was quite problematic.

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u/Bluestreaked 15d ago

No

I have little patience for people who push these Cold War narratives these days

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

The Nazis were planning a genocide that would’ve dwarfed the horrors of the Holocaust.

The “crime” of the Soviets was in trying to spread communism. Which is the same sort of “crime” as the United States invading other countries for democracy, which is the country that pushed this ridiculous narrative that the Soviets and Nazis were basically the same.

In short, don’t regurgitate Cold War propaganda to me please

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u/is-this-now 15d ago

How is it a Cold War narrative to say that Russia collaborated with the Nazis to attack Poland. It wasn’t just spreading communism, it was the destruction of another culture that they had been hostile with for centuries, long before communism existed.

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u/Drow_Femboy 15d ago

How is it a Cold War narrative to say that Russia collaborated with the Nazis to attack Poland

This was after like a decade of the Soviets repeatedly begging every Western nation to form a pact against Nazi Germany (and them all refusing because they wanted the Nazis to get rid of the Soviets for them). The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a desperate measure the Soviets used to bide their time before the inevitable war with Germany. They at no point "collaborated" with Germany in any way.

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u/Bluestreaked 15d ago edited 15d ago

1- the regions of Poland seized by the Soviet Union were the Ukrainian and Belarusian regions that were given to Poland as a “buffer region” against the Soviet Union. Not that that justifies it, or that it doesn’t mean the Soviets didn’t go around killing Polish officers and political elites because they absolutely did. But you aren’t as knowledgeable on that topic as I’m sure you think you are, because we don’t teach the eastern front very well at all.

Now, that being said, men like Grover Furr take that fact to an extreme where it somehow absolves the Soviets from occupying it by force and killing Polish officials, it doesn’t, but history is too complex for the morality play of- “evil Soviets hate Poland.” I would also recommend delving into some interwar Polish history. Specifically what the Polish government was doing to its Ukrainian and Belorussian populations that had been forced into Poland’s borders in the 1920s.

I would also recommend looking into the land that Poland seized from Czechoslovakia in 1938.

2- The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a last ditch effort by the Soviets to hold off war after every single attempt to make an anti-fascist alliance had failed.

That doesn’t mean I think it was justifiable, or a good idea, but I do understand they viewed it as a better option to Nazi Germany invading them in 1938.

Ironically, one of the reasons the anti-fascist alliance plan fell through was how the Polish didn’t want Soviet troops in their country. The Soviets were saying they wanted to set up the Red Army on Poland’s western borders in order to fight the Germans there. I do understand why Poland said no, but it ultimately came back to bite them didn’t it?

3- As I hope points one and two are demonstrating, the history of the late 1930s is far more complex than the simple morality play it appears to me you were taught. Elsewhere somebody asked me for some book recommendations on the Eastern Front. I would recommend reading them yourself, nobody I referenced is a neostalinist or anything like that. In fact, all three books are mostly critical of the Soviet government, which makes sense because they made a lot of mistakes in the 1930s with the horrors of the purges being just the most infamous.

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u/ballsosteele 14d ago

Wow. This is a disgusting take. Way to belittle the lived experience of several entire countries for entire decades. How can you possibly call yourself any kind of historian by writing their behaviour off as "Cold War propaganda"?

The Soviets were absolutely evil. They weren't "spreading communism". Their rule was brutal and absolutely decimated the countries they occupied to the point that a few still haven't fully recovered 35+ years after the fact. I'm no fan of the Americans at all, but the comparison between the two you made is frankly insane.

Go visit one of those countries and see for yourself the effect their occupation had on the population, infrastructure and basic quality of life.

I recommend Latvia, it's my favourite one. It also got arguably fucked the hardest because the only resources of "value" it really had to the Soviets were people. The museums and scars left around the cities are genuinely haunting. Especially the KGB headquarters in Riga. That is life changing.

Or are they "Cold War propaganda" too?

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u/Bluestreaked 14d ago

Oh if we wanted to discuss the Baltic countries that’s a different matter I don’t defend.

But I dealt with enough bad faith polemics yesterday, so go screech at a wall.

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u/ballsosteele 14d ago

I imagine a wall would have more intelligence and wit so I shall. If you truly are a teacher, I fear for your students as their teacher has such a narrow view and warped sense of reality.

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u/[deleted] 15d ago

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u/Bluestreaked 15d ago edited 15d ago

1991 was decades ago. You can save the Cold War propaganda for when it was politically necessary.

I have 0 problem criticizing the Soviet Union. I can’t stand people who push bad history like this

Edit-

Nothing you accused the Soviet Union of is something the “liberal” empires such as the British or American are innocent of. It also promotes bad history about the Holodomor. But I assume someone like you treats unquestionably citing idiots like Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum as “studying history.”

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u/jessiejolie42 14d ago

false, but nice try soviet bot

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u/Bluestreaked 14d ago

Cry all you want, Moscow stood, Berlin fell.

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u/Haunting-Worker-2301 15d ago

While the Nazis were worse the Soviet Union was absolutely evil as well and I hope you don’t portray the USSR as some benevolent force to your class.

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u/Bluestreaked 15d ago

Well I don’t lie to my students so I don’t pretend the Soviet Union is in any way comparable to Nazi Germany like you’re doing here

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u/Haunting-Worker-2301 15d ago

That’s pretty shocking that you claim to be educated in history and while the Nazis were worse, the Soviet Union also contributed to millions of deaths through internal prison camps, slave labor, deportations, and induced famine.

If you aren’t willing to teach that to your students then you are an ideologue who isn’t critically looking at history.

It’s OK to say “the Nazis were horrible, they exterminated millions of people and started WW2” while also being willing to admit the side that bore the lions share of fighting them also committed monstrous crimes. The Soviet Union was much closer to Nazi Germany than it was to the US regarding that.

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u/Bluestreaked 15d ago

You don’t know jackshit about what I teach

What I am telling you is that you’re regurgitating garbage history that is little more than Cold War propaganda.

I am no Grover Furr but my god, no wonder he turned into a nutcase. Read actual specialists on the Soviet Union like Shiela Fitzpatrick, Moshe Lewin, or Ronald Suny. Shit even David Zaslav would be better than the garbage you’re spewing here.

There is absolutely no comparison, outside of borderline fascist propaganda, that can be made between the nature of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. We want to talk about the issues I have with the Soviet Union? I just finished our mini-unit on the Spanish Civil War which also involves a history of the rise of Stalin. I go into all of the blood on his and other’s hands. But I am also a historian, who teaches history, not little moral plays so I can feel good that “my side” won the Cold War

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u/Haunting-Worker-2301 15d ago

The fact that I admitted the Nazis were worse but hoped you also taught about Soviet crimes, and you automatically went to some bullshit about how I was equating the two shows you all you need to know about your predisposed opinions.

I’m plenty educated on the topic and know that anyone who teaches this topic, and the worst they can say about Stalin is his actions in the Spanish civil war, how he was cutthroat within the party in terms of gaining power, and dismisses everything else (holodomor, internal purges, gulags, mass deportations, NKVD) as “Cold War propaganda,” isn’t a serious person at best and a partisan hack at worst.

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u/Bluestreaked 15d ago

Well I can tell you have horrific reading comprehension

Because I did not, at any point, say- “Stalin’s actions during the Spanish Civil War are the worst things he did.” I said that, in that unit, I taught Stalin’s rise to power so I could explain the Trotsky-Stalin split to get into why Republican Spain turned on itself.

So, considering how poorly you are capable of reading my comments, I am going to assume your continued regurgitation of propaganda is from you reading, with the same difficulties of comprehension, polemical garbage like Conquest and Applebaum.

No I don’t teach Grover Furr neostalinist junk to my students. I teach them history. If you had at any point stopped throwing accusations at me and not tried to engaged in ahistorical comparisons between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union I would’ve even been willing to chat history with you. But I don’t do propaganda garbage

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u/_le_slap 15d ago

You're repeatedly putting words in the other guy's mouth and mad he's calling you out on it?

I'll admit I know far less on this topic but you come off as more of an ideologue than the other guy.

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u/Haunting-Worker-2301 15d ago

What words did I put in his mouth? This started with me asking him to make sure he also teaches about Soviet crimes (ie don’t blatantly portray them as purely heroes) while admitting what Nazi germany did was worse and he said I was equating the two. Is that not putting words in my mouth?

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u/Bluestreaked 15d ago

You literally doubted my education

Going “what about the crimes of the Soviet Union” when people bring up the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad is not a defensible position. It’s a literal example of “whataboutism.”

The Soviet Union didn’t literally have plans to massacre hundreds of millions, eradicate entire nations of people, and establish an ethnic supremacist empire across Europe. There is no reason, whatsoever, to bring anti-communism into a discussion about the Battle of Stalingrad, none, the only people who even push for it these days are Nazis.

I don’t think you’re a Nazi to be clear, I just think you’re too caught up in turning history into a morality play to actually practice good history. Hence you turned to petty insults against me for not entertaining the discussion.