Talk:Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

Recent additions

I removed a few recent additions from "Reception" per WP:BRD. They were very poorly written, impossible to understand or simply uninformative. My very best wishes (talk) 04:16, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

"BRD is not a justification for imposing one's own view or for tendentious editing.

BRD is not a valid excuse for reverting good-faith efforts to improve a page simply because you don't like the changes." Strictly speaking you did not revert but you still removed the majority of my contribution while distorting the remainder.

Some wordiness and ambiguity may have been present, but that is not a reason for removing reliably sourced information about the book's flaws in key areas that a scholarly review must address.

Re specific points:

1. Revisionism in the sense of "revisionist school" of Soviet history is usually styled with quotation marks, because the contrasting approach is not regarded as the mainstream but as the "totalitarian school".

2. Deleting Fitzpatrick's reasoning makes her comment look like a personal opinion. It may not have been perfectly clear from the grammar, but the object of comparison is the same as the subject of the book - how the top layer of the power elite worked. It was on that count that Fitzpatrick found Montefiore's metaphor wrong, and the passage explained why. It could be improved, but it is not an improvement to remove.

3. Deleting the introductory words for comparison with Service's book misconstrues the source information - it was not Service who compared his own work with Montefiore's, but a reviewer of Montefiore's book. That's a basic failure to read what is in the source.

The article is certainly less informative after your changes. VampaVampa (talk) 18:45, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

You included the following text:

She points out that the early modern Muscovite nobles, who offered some competition for the throne, controlled regional landed power bases, not specialised bureaucracy departments, whereas the ministers of the late Tsarist period were not organised to work as a team and did not socialise with the Tsar on equal terms.

Two questions.

1. Can you please explain what this text means? It is very difficult/impossible to understand.
2. The previous phrase says that she did not like the "metaphor in Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, that of "court politics", which implies a return of Tsarist autocracy in Communist disguise." OK. Please explain how this text/phrase disputes such metaphor? It does not say anything about the USSR.

The revisionist school does mean revisionist school, but this not important here (OK, I removed it). You are welcome to re-include anything, but the text must be understandable for a typical reader, and it also must be informative. Simply saying "a reviewer X liked or did not like it" is not informative. And yes, Stalin almost certainly worked for Okhrana, that appears in many sources. This is not a rumor. My very best wishes (talk) 21:51, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

OK, you are right that the passage is not well constructed. It should be the other way round, i.e. Fitzpatrick contends Stalin's USSR was run like this, not like Tsarist Russia which was like that. The USSR is referred to here by "specialised bureaucracy departments", and by a power elite "organised to work as a team" which would "socialise with [Stalin, not Tsar] on equal terms".

I will re-include the material - you are welcome to correct my phrasing or sharpen the points where not direct enough. Perhaps fewer quotations will be optimal since there is agreement/overlap between the criticisms made by different reviewers.

As for Stalin's work for Okhrana, even the article on Stalin has no hint about that (only that he was suspected by his comrades) - perhaps you'll want to add the sources you've seen. VampaVampa (talk) 23:14, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

Yes, this is better. She says that "Stalin's associates worked as a team of specialised bureaucrats and socialised with him on equal terms". Khmm... If she means a few people from his closest circle, they did drunk together, but they were even less equal than Russian Tsars and Boyars. Meaning he could order their executions at any moment, he kept their wives in Gulag, he was making fun of them; they were paralyzed by fear... My very best wishes (talk) 00:10, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

As about Okhrana, please see Early_life_of_Joseph_Stalin#Allegations_of_being_an_Okhrana_agent. My very best wishes (talk) 01:28, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

That's useful but there is still no evidence in this section, only evidence-free speculations (Brackman: "inundation of archives with fake documents", Shukman and Mitrokhin: supposed destruction of the file, Ellis: escaping raids). The only possible trail of evidence is the memoirs of Veselago, but there is not enough detail in that article at present about what the cited books actually say. One might want to see those books and e.g. H. Montgomery Hyde, "Was Stalin a police spy?', The Times, 10 July 1971. Service, Conquest and Kotkin will have seen them though. I will come back to this after I have been through the early Stalin article.

As for the other change you made, the rule, as with the argument advanced by Fitzpatrick, is that Wikipedia sticks to what is in the source. You do not get to doubt her published views just because in your personal opinion you find them unpersuasive. I remind you that revisionist in this context does not mean anything approximating "fringe".

Montefiore's genre is acknowledged and not in dispute as being popular history.(1)(2 - his own page, under The Independent)(3) It is not a controversial statement by any distance. VampaVampa (talk) 02:20, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

That's why I used "alleged". OK, I have no significant objections to your edits here. My very best wishes (talk) 18:24, 3 June 2024 (UTC)