A worthwhile podcast from Russ Roberts with a despicably stupid Hollywood title - Gregory on Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin. (I also deleted the video about CCCP posted here last week. I decided it was a moronic propaganda. I also deleted all my aphorisms, I decided they need more work to hone the style.)
P.S. Speaking of Hollywood. One of the tensions of the podcast is the questions how our world would have been different if Nikolai Bukharin became a communist leader or Grigory Zinoviev, etc. There is an article by Slavoj Zizek, offensively about Hollywood - Hallucination As Ideology In Cinema. Her writes about the vertigo of Stalingrad:
Further reading:“So much has already been written about the battle for Stalingrad, this battle is invested with so many fantasies and symbolic meanings – when the German troops reached the Western bank of Volga, the “apolitical” Franz Lehar himself, the author of The Merry Widow, Hitler’s favored operetta, quickly composed “Das Wolgalied,” celebrating this achievement. Let us just recall the two main “as if” scenarios: IF the Germans were to break through to the East of Volga and to the Caucasus oil fields, the Soviet Union would collapse and Germany would have won the war; IF Erich von Manheim’s deft manoeuvres were not to prevent the collapse of the entire German front after the defeat of the 6th Army in the Stalingrad Kessel, the Red Army would have rolled over into Central Europe already in 1943, defeating Germany before the Allied invasion in the Normandy, so that the whole of the continental Europe would have been Communist…”