What an incredibly interesting read. I'm gonna have to read more about Wright's widow, who seems ... curious. And I'm not sure what to take away from this other than what a dynamic and complicated life. I can't imagine being married so much and abandoning children or a tattle tale sibling causing a partner to be sent off to a prison camp. She seems more complicated than her own family and never seemed to find a purpose or peace, captured by her own idiosyncrasies and the politics of her life which she hated so much for people to bring to her attention but what herself could not stop thinking about.
I wish the article had pictures, and I found the author a bit cold. When he reduced his frequency of writing, because he had finished his book and gotten what he needed, this seemed a bit distant.
The book about her life is heartbreaking. It’s clear she was extremely traumatized and also could hardly deal with her father’s crimes both to the country and to her family. She was in a way a victim but also a troubled person. A fascinating crazy life.
There seems to be a common theme to those. When Ceausescu visited NY he and his stupid wife (huge scientific fraud story on its own, including lot of reputable western universities going along with it) were sure Macy was just a show stocked specifically for them. I seem to remember him reacting by ordering to open a store just for show to western dignitaries/press.
the economy was designed to service the politburo elites, the army, and (maybe) the capital cities. It kinda worked for its intended purposes, a semi-artisanal system, squashed by bureaucracy and political hires dictacted by realpolitik.
I'm born in the United States and had a Russian girlfriend for a year+ in grad school: same thing, went to modern supermarket and she was freaked out with choices overload. I understood when she described it, but it was something i had tuned out unknowingly since being a little kid.
I always respected Stalin for not giving his family special privileges. His son was captured by the Nazis during the invasion and when Stalin heard it he wasn't happy that he let himself be taken alive. The Germans actually thought they had a propaganda coup. Oh how wrong they were nobody in the Kremlin gave a shit.
It is a far cry from the pathetic excuses leading Russia today who use his name but drink champagne in foreign 5 star hotels far away from the front.
I have no idea. But an itinerant individual constantly on the move with repeated divorces, bad relation with children, ill temperament yet intelligent, and a suspiciously convenient story at the American embassy in India makes the entire story seem a bit of a “rich heiress” one.
On Stalin, I recommend the HBO movie "Stalin" with a Robert Duvall playing a very realistic Stalin. The movie also covers his tortuous relationship with his daughter.
Montefiore's "Young Stalin" which covers his life from birth to the revolution is a wild book. I like Montefiore because he has a real respect for the maniac genius and energy of the guy. What kind of person does it take to overthrow a whole society?
"Court of the Red Tzar" is less fun and more of a portrait of him using his enormous capacity to work and execute to relentlessly grind out his plans to take over the world in the name of Marxism/Leninism and absolutely steamrolling over anyone or anything in the most brutal way possible that got in his way.
One of the things that people miss about Stalin is that more than any leader in the past centuries, he wasn't a puppet for a shadowy cabal, or a front man for someone else, he was fully totally in charge and running the whole thing totally outmaneuvering Trotsky and anyone else who would attempt to grab power away from him. He could do this because he had a legendary memory for people and their personalities. He was able to take over the government by remembering thousands of people who he considered loyal to him and placing them in key posts throughout the government after he was appointed party secretary. There have been very few leaders with that sort of raw cognitive capability.
Stalin's cognitive ability was dismal. His strength was his ability to connect with the infernal side of human nature. This made him an adept manipulator, this gave him the unusual energy spikes after such "connections" and this gave him a depressing aura that bent people's will. The price for such abilities is being a "puppet of the shadowy cabal", using your metaphor.
Who controlled him? Absolutely nobody. He had anyone who attempted to executed.
He was a maniac for sure, and a total jerk, but a brilliant one. In "Court of the Red Tzar" after he achieves all his narcissistic glory by winning world war II he starts torturing his inner circle making them drink to the point of passing out on a regular basis trying to find any flaws in their loyalty.
The real hero of that book is Anastas Mikoyan. The guy survives Lenin, Stalin and even Khrushchev and Brezhnev kept him around. He keeps his dignity, plays a key role in defeating fascism and his brother ran a damned good aircraft design bureau the whole way through.
The whole point of the movie is to show that part of soviet union that is not covered by historical facts. So most of it is a fiction but a very realistic one and intentionally so.
It's obviously very unrealistic, but I read Robert Service's biography about Stalin and it's interesting to see how many details in the movie are inspired by real events. I recommend the biography by the way, it's engrossing.
And also Iannucci managed to make a comedy while addressing the horror and brutality of his regime which I didn't think was possible (though there was also Benigni's Life is Beautiful). It's a comedy with an execution every 10 minutes.
The last season of the Revolutions podcast from Mike Duncan, mostly focuses on the Lenin era but does cover the ruthlessness of Stalin from way before he got even close to power, all the way to his accession to power.
> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.
If there was a simple "pay 10c to read" button, I'd click that.
If there was a subscription that I could have that would give me ad-free access to all the random news articles that get shared with me, I'd buy that (at a reasonable price, that is).
But there isn't.
Subscribing to 283894 newspapers isn't an option.
Dear Newspapers, please accept the new reality. The days of people subscribing to exactly one newspaper died with the paper editions.
Stop blaming your failure to offer a reasonable product on "Internet freeloaders".
Exactly my thoughts, going back to the paper-age pattern of reading only that one publication or two that you subscribe to isn't a customer experience that feels like money well spent now that we have been spoilt by two decades of everything available via ads.
We absolutely should find a way of returning to paying about as much of our income for news as we did before (and not indirectly via ads), but those big fat one-publication subscriptions aren't the way. Even less when they get peddled with that "first 3 months only x" lure that's essentially a promise that they'll make unsubscribe harder than a fitness studio.
What I'd love to see instead isn't a "Spotify for news" (with all the power imbalance that would come with that) but a "federated subscription" where being a subscriber at your "home publication" would give you some form of guest access at "cooperating competitors", with a fixed part of the fee passed on based on tracked cross-publication usage. The organization running the thing would ideally be a non-profit cooperative, enforcing uniform rules about what exactly would be included in "guest access" (perhaps 24h latency + ads?). The biggest issue I see with this would be that it would kind of rule out pricing competition, but we already see a very limited amount of price variation amongst consumer online subscriptions anyways. (for some reason they are almost universally just marginally lower or higher than "one Netflix", no matter what's offered).
The thing is that so little of what you read in various online news sources was actually "written" by reporters in the classical sense of the man in the beige raincoat with a "Press" ticket in his hat-band, frntically scribbling shorthand in a notebook, before phoning in his story.
The vast, vast majority of news articles concerning national and international news are pretty much copy/pasted from news agencies like Reuters [0] or AP [1]
So, yes, writers deserve to get paid. And, through news agency licensing fees, the original writers of such articles are. But how much does the person who bascially copy/pastes that into another site deserve to get paid?
Ironically, where the stereotype reporter, actually writing original content [that I portrayed above] does still exist, it tends to be in very local news gathering where the likes of a news agency has no interest. For example; your local village flower show, or the traffic congestion on the high street. And yet those very local news outlets are almost exclusively non-paywalled.
And those seem to be the ones struggling the hardest with ad-funding, at least that's what my sample suggests: full of bottom-level outbrain-level shit because their "natural" ad market (local stuff) is all gobbled up by map platforms (well, usually exactly one map platform) and the occasional "still advertises on Facebook". If being a subscriber to the local publication would take care of transparent microtransaction guest access to most of the stuff you find linked I the wide web it would be a no-brainer to subscribe.
Sounds more like he was a typical human dad with affection for his daughter. I've seen some pretty dangerous military guys behave like goofy golden retrievers in front of their daughters during playtime. Because, you know, kids like that.
Facts would be enough. There are plenty of dictators and there are plenty of stories of them around, from their mistresses. So sure in some cases influence definitely happened, but nothing to my knowledge support the idea, that the evil in the dictators comes all from women.
