#Word to Comrade Stalin

[gamium]

Mikhail Isakovsky Word to Comrade Stalin George IV Kostandi

[wolfgirliosef]

kamo as a student / soso as a young cimourdain

(stalin: my comrade and mentor, by kamo / ninety-three on wikipedia / ninety-three by victor hugo / kamo by maxim gorky)

[power-chords]

One day Stalin gets up in front of a crowd and says:

“I have here a telegram from Leon Trotsky in exile: ‘You were right. I was wrong. I should apologize.’”

A little Jewish carter gets up and says, “Excuse me, Comrade Stalin. You read the words right, but you had the intonation, the expression all wrong.”

Stalin tells the crowd: “A comrade, a humble Jewish carter, tells me I did not read Comrade Trotsky’s telegram right. Come, Comrade humble Jewish carter, you read the telegram.”

The humble Jewish carter steps to the podium, takes the telegram, and reads: “You were right? I was wrong?? I should apologize???”

[milfstalin]

hello milfstalin. stalin/hoxha ? tell me

hoxha is like so down bad for stalin's autism swag. to be fair i would too (these excerpts are from the first meeting with stalin)

That same day, full of indelible impressions and emotions, we were received by the disciple and loyal continuer of the work of Lenin. Josep Vissarionovich Stalin, who talked with us at length. From the beginning he created such a comradely atmosphere that we were very quickly relieved of that natural emotion which we felt when we entered his office, a large room, with a long table for meetings, close to his writing desk. Only a few minutes after exchanging the initial courtesies, we felt as though we were not talking to the great Stalin, but sitting with a comrade, whom we had met before and with whom we had talked many times. I was still young then, and the representative of a small party and country, therefore, in order to create the warmest and most comradely atmosphere for me, Stalin cracked some jokes and then began to speak with affection and great respect about our people, about their militant traditions of the past and their heroism in the National Liberation War. He spoke quietly, calmly and with a characteristic warmth which put me at ease.

A few days after our arrival in Moscow, together with Comrade Stalin and other leaders of the Party and Soviet state I attended an all-Soviet physical-culture display at the Central Stadium of Moscow. With what keen interest Stalin watched this activity! For over two hours he followed the activities of the participants with rapt attention, and although it began to rain near the end of the display and Molotov entreated him several times to leave the stadium, he continued to watch theactivities attentively to the end, to make jokes, to wave his hand. I remember that a mass race had been organized as the final exercise. The runners made several circuits of the stadium. At the finish, a very tall, thin runner who had lagged behind, appeared before the tribune. He could hardly drag one leg after the other and his arms were flapping aimlessly, nevertheless he was trying to run. He was drenched by the rain. Stalin was watching this runner from a distance with a smile which expressed both pity and fatherly affection.

"Mily moy," he said as if talking to himself, "go home, go home, have a little rest, have something to eat and come back again! There will be other races to run..."

Then Stalin asked mea bout a number of words of our language. He wanted to know the names of some work tools, household utensils, etc. I told him the Albanian words, and after listening to them carefully he repeated them, made comparisons between the Albanian name for the tool and its equivalent in the language of the Albanians of the Caucasus. Now and then he turned to Molotov and Mikovan and sought their opinion. It turned out that the roots of the words compared had no similarity.

At this moment, Stalin pressed a button, and after a few seconds the general who was Stalin's aide-de-camp, a tall, very attentive man, who behaved towards us with great kindness and sympathy, came in.

"Comrade Enver Hoxha and I are trying to solve a problem, but we cannot," said Stalin, smiling at the general. "Please get in touch with professor (and he mentioned an outstanding Soviet linguist and historian. whose name has escaped my memory) and ask him on my behalf whether there is any connection between the Albanias of the Caucasus and those of Albania."

After the dinner, Comrade Stalin invited us to go to the Kremlin cinema where, apart from some Soviet newsreels, we saw the Soviet feature film "The Tractor Driver". We sat together on a sofa, and I was impressed by the attention with which Stalin followed this new Soviet film. Frequently he would raise his warm voice to comment on various moments of the events treated in the film. He was especially pleased with the way in which the main character in the film, a vanguard tractor driver, in order to win the confidence of his comrades and the fanners, struggled to become well acquainted with the customs and the behaviour of the people in the countryside, their ideas and aspirations. By working and living among the people, this tractor driver succeeded in becoming a leader honoured and respected by the peasants. At this moment Stalin said:

like this is the only other semi-canonical ship with stalin outside the bolsheviks imo

[last-tarrasque]

Howdy there! 👋

So, up until recently I've primarily described myself as an Anarcho Communist, but I've recently become interested in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Do you happen to have any recommendations for a gal just starting to delve into MLM theory?

Absolutely!

The first thing you are probably going to hear trying to get into MLM is "read the classics" which yes, you absolutely should. No Marxist education is complete without reading Marx, Lenin, Engles, Stalin and Mao. However Marxism in its current hightist form, Maoism, is at this point in history so large and expansive that is incredibly intimidating to try and approach it, especially if you do not have a reading group. Where do you even begin, In chronological order? The work of Marx and Engels is old and while it still holds up, trying to decipher it, especially if you are new, can be a nightmare. Furthermore petit bourgeois and bourgeoise ideology as well as corrosive anti communist propaganda is everywhere, including our minds.

Lucky I recently found a text that helps address this issue, one that I wish I had known about much sooner. The book is titled MLM Basic Course, produced by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) Central Committee (CPI(Maoist)-CC) and was written to expand marxist education to the lower levels of the party, the people's army and the masses at large. It serves as an excellent primer to the history of the development of MLM, the history of the word proletarian revolution and the basics of MLM itself. It's very approachable as it was not meant for seasoned revolutionary scientists and doesn't throw jargon and acronyms around like some other texts. It's also free!

As for a more detailed introduction to particular concepts, here is my personal reading list (take this with a grain of salt):

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels

The State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin

Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin

Price, Value and Profit by Karl Marx (be warned, this text is confusing and hard to read, but worth it)

Anti-Dühring I, II and III by Friedrich Engels

Dialectical and Historical Materialism by Joseph Stalin

On Contractions by Chairman Mao Zedung

Quotations of Chairman Mao, by Mao Zedong but put together by the trator Lin Bao

Marxism and the National Question by Joseph Stalin

You should be able to find all of these texts on Marxism.com or BannedThought.net

As a further asied, while this is not a work of Marxist theory per say, Khrushchev Lied by Grover C Furr is the holy grail of debunking anti communist lies, though it it long.

This compilation is also useful for the same purposes

I am realizing that this is a lot, so if you have any questions feel free to ask me. Another great resource is r/communism101 and r/communism. While reddit is generally a peutred mess of awful, some decent communists have managed to generally carve out those to spaces of not awful.

Thank you for your interest comrade, I hope you find my suggestions useful! 🚩

[pisupsala]

Of All The Stars in The Sky | 16 | Bradley ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw

Summary | War looks different from high above in the sky. But when Bradley finds himself on the ground, far behind enemy lines, it becomes a race against the clock to get out. And try not to look back at what he’s leaving behind.

Pairing | Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw x fem!reader / Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw x fem!oc (no use of y/n)

Warnings |Mature content | 18+ only[WWII AU] swearing, war, violence, death, explicit smut

Words | 9.1k

Index | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17

Library

Chapter 16 - The End of The World 

That summer of 1943 that you spent with your parents will be the last light before the long and dark night that follows. The war is going badly — for your occupiers, that is. The Allies have taken Sicily, and the Soviets have booked a major victory at Kursk. News coming in is sporadic, the censors working overtime to downplay military setbacks, but rumors persist. The pincer is closing from the south and east; they whisper: Stalin’s Red Army will punch through the Eastern front after winter, and the Allies will be crossing the Alps.

More tangential proof of how the war is going is how more and more men disappear from public life — Hitler must be getting desperate, drafting reinforcements from the traitorous country that assassinated his right-hand man. And where the men disappear, women take their place. 

Registered as unemployed, you received a summons in the late fall of 1943 to report for labor in support of the war effort. At the outskirts of the capital, a car factory has been converted to produce army trucks — massive 3-ton personnel carriers. Every morning, when the sun is barely up, you get on a bus with about fifty other women of all ages, all dressed in the same drab, dirty blue coveralls. The only splash of color in the early morning twilight is the scarves everyone ties around their head to protect their hair. 

Your nimble fingers earn you a position wiring the dashboard and ignition systems; your once soft hands and manicured nails are definitely a thing of the past now. Your fingertips start forming blisters and calluses from twisting the copper wires into place; your nails are chipped and broken, caked in dirt and thick black grease. The harsh degreaser soap cracks the skin on your palms, leaving them sore — the cold winter air stinging the raw skin.

You haven’t heard from anyone in the resistance since your last encounter with Jan — he probably reported you as compromised to Emil, and everyone has been steering clear of you since then. Rationally, you know it’s not personal. But in your heart, you cannot help but be bitter: after all you’ve done, after all the risks you have taken, you end up on the assembly line building trucks for the enemy. And not a peep from your comrades. 

But you don’t need them, you think sourly. You took your first steps into resistance activities by yourself, stealing food stamps here and there to help the people you knew. It grew from there, but it wasn’t until late 1941 that you actually got in contact with the resistance proper and your activities were scaled up. And now that you’re on your own again, you’ll just do what you always did: as much as you possibly can.

The factory is run tightly. Hawk-eyed supervisors check every aspect on the line, writing up workers for faults, deficiencies, and mistakes. They are supported by the armed guards — young boys with large guns and on an even larger power trip — that patrol the grounds and the factory floor and gleefully punish poor performance. 

Poking and prodding, trying to find cracks in the system, you knew you’d push the envelope too far at some point. It’s a risk you’re willing to take — you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself if you didn’t at least try. So you experiment: wiping sand on the fine gears behind the fuel gauge, making the cursor stick. It’s simple and subtle enough not to get noticed during inspection. The first time you get caught, it’s for cross-wiring to the headlights with the windscreen wipers — which, in terms of sabotage, is mostly harmless, at most an inconvenience. A warning and compulsory study of the manual is all you get. But you know you probably overstepped when you get caught not tightening the contact cables in the ignition system, which would cause them to fall out sooner rather than later, stalling the whole machine.

“With me, missy,” Your supervisor sneers, her red-painted lips twisted into a scowl, knuckles whitening as she clutches her clipboard. It hasn’t escaped your notice how your supervisor has dressed quite nicely daily: makeup, well-fitted dresses, nylons. 

“It was a mistake,” You lie, defending yourself. “It’s cold, and my fingers-” 

You don’t finish your sentence as the supervisor grabs you by the collar of your coveralls and pulls you out of the factory hall. “Are you insane?” She hisses. “Sabotage is treason.”

“They’re going to kill us anyway,” You choke out, stumbling after her. 

Harshly pushing you out the factory door into the snowy courtyard, she stares after you, coiled with anger. “I’ll take my chances,” She spits after you. “Stay there until I come get you!” She adds, yelling.

Folding your arms, you shuffle your feet in an attempt to get warm. It’s still early in the day, and it’s freezing cold. Your breath is coming out in puffs of opaque smoke, and within a minute, you are shivering. Opportunistic bitch, you seethe.

You nearly scream out when you are suddenly doused in ice-cold water, your sopping coveralls now so cold it’s practically burning on your skin. From the boyish laughter behind you, you know these are the guards, joking in German — there’s nothing you can do. 

You stand frozen in place, the cold water trickling from your wet hair down your spine — it’s like you’ve just run a marathon; you struggle to catch your breath, thoughts running through your head in a blind panic. Finally, you sink into a squat, your legs almost giving out from under you — you need to hunker down, tucking your hands under your arms, desperately trying to preserve your core temperature. You are shivering so hard it’s making your stomach hurt, like your intestines themselves are violently shivering too.

It’s impossible to say how long you sit there. You notice it starts snowing again, but you can’t feel it. It’s like you’re frozen into place, your insides still quaking. The snowflakes stick to your lashes, making your lids heavy and your movements even more sluggish. It feels like your blood flow has slowed down to a crawl. You want to cry from pain, from humiliation. From anger. But your tears are frozen solid with the rest of your body.

When you are forcefully pulled up back onto your feet, no sound makes it out of your mouth. Your lungs hurt — your throat is so dry it’s numb. Whatever sound of pain or protest you try to make only comes out as a puff of air past your ice-cold lips. Your legs are stiff and barely cooperating, but the supervisor, who is holding you by your arm, nails digging through the layers of freezing fabric, doesn’t stop pulling until she shoves you down by the coal furnace near the offices. 

The moment she lets go of you, your legs immediately give out again — your knees skid over the concrete floor. The warm air is like relentless pinpricks on your skin. 

“Let this be a lesson for you and everyone that has any ideas,” She hisses at you venomously, grabbing your chin to force you to look up. “Warm up and return to your place on the line.”

It’s a lesson, alright.

Next time, you won’t get caught.

The winter of 1943 into 1944 is long, and the cough you’ve developed doesn’t disappear until late spring. Miraculously, you never really got sick after your punishment besides the persistent coughing, but as your grief wanes, a wave of new anger emerges in you. You never wished ill, hurt, or even death on specific people — your ultimate goal was always freedom. But now you find a macabre kind of glee as you sprinkle sand on the fuel gauge and fray the cables in the ignition. 

I hope your truck stalls as you run. I hope you run out of fuel. I hope it kills you.

When you catch sight of the supervisor, you smile sweetly at her. You’ll get yours too, you think. 

At night, you sit with your ear pressed against the radio, listening to the BBC news on the lowest possible volume, running Bradley’s bracelet between your fingers like rosary beads. You are desperate for any news of the advance. Southern Italy is so far away — is Bradley there now? The reports say the fighting is heavy; progress comes at great cost. You stopped being scared for yourself, but the more you are scared for Bradley. Alone in the dark apartment, tears roll down your tired face. 

Talking during work is forbidden, but on break, huddled together in the corner of the factory courtyard, whispered rumors swirl out of the earshot of supervisors and guards. When one of the armed guards passes, everyone dissolves in a fit of giggles, not from nerves but as a carefully honed defense mechanism. The bored guards don’t bother with women’s gossip. 

Soon, rumors and gossip are the only things to go around: rations are tightening, and more and more is getting diverted to the war effort. Cigarettes get passed around after a single puff, soup becomes more water than anything else, and you even resort to sharing mugs of ersatz coffee. The less there is, the more you care for each other. During breaks, you brush each other’s hair, braiding it or pinning it into curls. Sometimes, someone procures some hand cream, and you take turns massaging it into each other’s sore hands. It establishes a strange sense of normalcy in a world that steadily feels like it’s in free fall.

***

Every key Bradley touches on the creaky piano seems to be the wrong one. He can hear the melody so clearly in his head, but when he tries to play it or even just hum or whistle it, it’s like he cannot find the right tone. It sounds off.

He can remember the moment so clearly: the starry spring night along the river bank, the melody floating down from the open window. Flexing his hand, he can almost feel your fingers threaded through his, your body pressed against his as you followed his lead. Just like he tries to remember the melody, Bradley tries to remember your smile.

He knows he remembers, but he just can’t recall it. When Bradley tries, he is unsure if he remembers you correctly. It’s like it all happened in a dream, and he remembers shapes and colors, but the more he tries to grasp the details, the vaguer they become.

It’s January 1944, and the last six months have been one frustration after another for Bradley. At least he’s no longer grounded, but he hasn’t felt like himself since returning to England. It’s like Bradley woke up, and reality wrapped around him like a coat he had outgrown — constricting his movements, leaving him uncomfortable in his own skin. He can forget that only when he flies, at least for a moment.

Except it’s making him forget everything, he desperately wants to hold onto.

“I thought I’d find you here, Rooster,” 

Bradley sighs lightly before turning to the voice. Mav stands at the door opening, in his crisp dress uniform, an easy grin on his face. As he saunters into the empty pub, a gust of cold air follows him from outside.

“Long time no see,” Mav continues as he pulls out a chair, still grinning, plopping himself down across from Bradley. 

“Yeah, good to you again, Mav,” Bradley responds neutrally as he closes the lid on the piano, slowly turning around to face Mav. “How are Penny and Amelia?” He asks conversationally.

For a moment, the older man’s looks soften, his cocky grin faltering. “Good, good,” He nods. “Amelia sent you a letter to thank you for the postcards. Did you get it?”

“I’m not sure; it might have gotten lost in the mail,” Bradley replies vaguely. It’s probably somewhere in the packet of unread mail piling up in Bradley’s footlocker. Writing letters has been a chore because he cannot talk about what he wants to. The censor would not allow it, so putting pen to paper and pretending that everything is just okay is something Bradley rarely can summon the energy for.

He feels guilty. He knows this makes him a terrible friend, and he cannot explain why he can’t just write a short message home.

Mav just nods but doesn’t reply. An uneasy silence falls between the two men. They haven’t seen each other in a good two years, since before Bradley went on detachment to the UK. For a while, Bradley thought it would do them good — the distance would soften the sharp edges of their fraught relationship a bit more. Maybe he put too much stock in it.

“So,” Bradley starts, tone forcefully light. “What brings you here, Mav?”

“Mass mobilization,” Mav shrugs in response. “You know that something big is afoot.”

“I meant here,” Bradley’s voice is a little bit sharper as he gestures around him vaguely. He ignores the jab of guilt in his gut. “In this empty pub.” 

“Oh, yes-” Mav pulls an envelope from this heavy woolen navy coat. “You are getting recalled to the US Navy Fleet.”

Bradley reaches out and plucks the envelope from Mav’s outstretched hand. He scans the letter's contents — he’s due to report at Navy command for the European theater in five days. There’s nothing odd about the order in the larger scheme of things.

“Why are you the one delivering it?” Bradley looks at Mav, eyes tight. Is he getting picked up like a small child?

Mav’s eyes widen for a split second, before his easy grin returns. “Wouldn’t want to get this lost in the mail,” 

Another moment of silence.

“And I have shore leave, so I thought…” Mav trails off, face suddenly serious. He looks at Bradley intently, who meets his gaze almost defiantly. “I wanted to check in on you. See you are doing okay.” Mav adds levelly. Bradley sighs.

“I’m fine,” He replies softly. Even to his own ears, it sounds like a lie.

“So I thought…” Mav starts again.

“It’s funny,” Bradley cuts in, unable to stop himself. The burden of guilt is weighing him down — leaving you behind, failing his friends and family, forgetting — so he lashes out. From guilt. From shame. From pain. He wants to pretend it makes him feel better. “It’s really funny how you always tell me not to think, and yet that’s all you seem to do.” 

Mav stares at him, face neutral, unimpressed. The lack of reaction is making Bradley angrier. “So you thought — you thought what? That you know better? That you know what I need?”

“Calm down, lieutenant,” Mav simply replies, suddenly and simply pulling rank, effectively ending the conversation. Knuckles white, Bradley grits his teeth. Deep breaths. 

Mav gets up, dusting himself off, not a tremor of anger in his movement. He is the picture of calm, not sparing him a single look. Bradley stands up automatically, as he would for any ranking officer.

“Something is in the works,” Mav simply says. “Something big — bigger than we’ve ever seen.”

Finally, he meets Bradley’s eye again. Mav’s expression betrays little, but his eyes are full of hurt. “I th- I had hoped we could make amends,”

Before it’s too late.

Bradley nods — the guilt now like a stone around his neck. No one knows what is happening, only that ship upon ship of American armed forces is being unloaded and stationed in England. There are whispers of an attack on a scale never seen before. A landing. A suicide mission.

“I trust no one in the air more than you, Mav,” Bradley finally admits, the last of the frustration finally ebbing away. Why does he keep getting so angry? “It’ll be an honor to fly with you again.”

Mav cracks a smile — a genuine one. “Thank you, Bradley, and welcome back to the fleet.”

Bradley chuckles, but inside, he knows he’s not ready. Forgiveness is more difficult than a few words. 

But does it really matter?

In the end, when he will inevitably fly to his death, the very fate Mav tried to shield him from — will it matter?

“How long are you staying, Mav?” He asks instead, grabbing his coat. “Enough time for a drink or two?”

***

It’s dark in the small, crowded room. You sit on the floor, packed in like sardines. The bare bulb that had been burning in a harsh yellow light earlier spluttered before softly popping out of life. The noises from the outside are disorientating — you hear screaming and yelling, doors slamming and shots. You have your arms around a girl younger than you, softly stroking your fingers over her hairline as she cries into your shoulder. Somewhere in the distance, you hear the whine of Stukas as they fly towards the capital. You think.

The thing is, you haven’t been allowed to leave the factory for over a week now. After the news broke that Berlin had fallen and the Führer was dead, all the guards, the young boys with rifles too big for them, went into a blind panic. They locked the gates, screaming orders, pointing their surely loaded guns at the sacred factory workers. 

Since then, you’ve been sleeping on the hard concrete floor as the next shift picked up. You suppose you should be happy it’s May, so the floor is not so cold anymore.

The winter of 1944 into 1945 had been the harshest you’ve seen in years: it was bitingly cold, rations were lower than they’ve ever been, and there was no bread, milk, or flour. Soup was more water than anything else, more potato peel than vegetable. Even if you still had extra ration books, they wouldn’t do you any good — there simply wasn’t anything to trade them for. Gas and coal became a rarity, turning the city into an unforgiving ice-cold hellscape. You had never been so cold for so long in your life. 

The ugly blue coveralls were increasingly ill-fitting, hanging off your frame awkwardly.

It shouldn’t have brought you joy, but as production was being pushed into overdrive, supervisors were forced to join the line, leaving behind their clipboards and clean clothes. More shifts were added, the factory now roaring day and night — sometimes shifts were scheduled in such quick succession there was no time to go home. You would huddle up with the other girls in the corner of the factory on the cold floor (because god forbid you’d use the now-empty offices), so exhausted you couldn’t even hear the noises of the line anymore.

The guards were getting rotated out quickly, replaced by seemingly younger and younger boys — some almost dwarfed by the rifle on their back; their too-large uniforms make it look like they're playing dress-up. 

In the end, this also meant that since winter, all regulations were out the door — no more clipboards, no more testing before the trucks as they joined the motor pool, ready to be distributed over the rapidly approaching front. It made sabotage a lot easier: the majority of trucks that rolled off the line in your factory were faulty in one way or another. Knowing looks were exchanged: nuts and bolts were not fully tightened, hoses were not fully screwed in, and contacts were not fully connected. 

Everyone is doing their own part — their own small resistance. There was no discussion; there was no structure or organization. Just a hope that every little bit helps bring the war to an earlier end as the Allies and Soviets are approaching.

You hear gunshots now — the wave of terror that moves through the room is almost physical, as everyone recoils as one. You tighten your arms around the girl as she chokes out a sob.

“Shhh, it’s okay, sweetie,” You console her softly despite wanting to cry yourself. You’ve been cut off from the world, and there’s no guessing what has been happening since the fall of Berlin. Are the Allies here? 

Naively, your heart feels a little bit lighter at the thought. Far from any sea or ocean, Bradley wouldn’t be there, but — and you hate yourself for hoping it so fiercely — maybe you could ask someone to contact him? Tell you where to send a letter. If only to find out that he is still alive. To let him know you are still alive. 

That you are waiting.

In the dark room, shaking from fear, the small fantasy brings you comfort. 

More shots ring out — you hear shouting, but you cannot make out what language through the thick concrete walls of the factory. When the heavy door suddenly rattles violently, like someone is trying to force it open, the room suddenly erupts in a flurry of chaotic and panicked movements; the air is pierced by crying and screaming. Everyone is scrambling up, trying to get away from the door. In the crush, you fall back, awkwardly wedged between bodies—the girl you had been holding before has disappeared in the darkness. The door rattles again; it sounds like someone is trying to break it down. 

More screaming, the mass of people moves back even more. It’s getting hard to breathe and the uncomfortable angle of your body—upper body leaned back, feet barely touching the ground—makes it hard to push back. It’s getting hot.

The door explodes open—the last oxygen is pushed from your lungs—light streams into the room. You aren’t sure if the spots in your vision are from the sudden blinding brightness or it’s your consciousness slipping. Just when you think you’ll lose grasp, eyes fluttering closed, the bodies disperse. Stumbling forward, you follow the flow of the crowd out the door. All the noise seems far away as you try to catch your breath. 

A tall figure is motioning sternly at the door opening, commanding everyone to come out. You do your best to keep pace with the rest, coughing dryly, trying to keep yourself from tripping over your own feet. 

Hurrying out the door, tearing up from the bright May sunshine stinging your eyes, you’re stopped dead in your tracks by someone calling out your name.

“Anya? - Anya!”

You haven’t heard that voice in so long, for a moment, you are confused. You should know who that is. Turning toward the voice, eyes still struggling to focus — your breath stocks mid-cough.

“Emil!” You choke out. It’s been almost two years now since you last saw him. Blinking, you stare at him — he’s dressed in his pre-war military uniform, looking more clean-cut than you have ever seen him, two rifles slung over his back. It’s making you acutely aware you are standing there in dirty coveralls and messy hair after sleeping on the floor for the past week.

He pulls you into a hug, clapping his hand a little too hard on your shoulder, rattling your skeleton.

“I’m so glad you made it,” He admits.

“I’m glad to see you well,” You reply with a smile. “What’s the occasion?” You motion to his uniform as you pull away, awkwardly straightening your coveralls as if that would hide the grease stains.

Emil smiles at you — and it’s probably the most genuine smile you’ve ever seen on him. “We’re liberating the city.” 

“I want to fight too.” The words are out of your mouth before you fully realize the implication — but you are determined. 

“I didn’t expect anything less from you,” Emil laughs, not in an unfriendly way, but in the way a big brother humors his younger sibling. “And I could use your help right away.”

A dizzying amount has happened since the fall of Berlin, since you’ve been locked away in the factory — the Allies under Patton are crossing the border into Bohemia, while the Soviets have punched through the eastern defensive line at the Dukla pass. The Wehrmacht and SS are retreating from the oncoming fronts on both sides — which is, unfortunately, driving them straight into the valley of central Bohemia and straight into Prague.

“We will not allow them to have their last stand here,” Emil concludes as you follow him through the motor pool. You nod fiercely. If the Nazis are allowed to build a final stronghold here, the Allies and Soviets will not hesitate to raze the entire city to the ground if it will end the war. 

“But first, we need trucks,” He states, looking around pensively. “Unfortunately, the guards were probably warned of the government army mutiny in the city, and they’ve gotten rid of all the keys.”

“You need mechanics first,” You cut him off. “Most of these trucks were sabotaged in one way or another.” You add sheepishly. Emil shakes his head, laughing.

“Again, I wouldn’t expect anything less from you in a factory where they had the misfortune of putting you to work.”

“How many do you need?” You get straight to business. “I can put together teams to check the trucks and-”

“And how will we start them, Anya?” 

“Lucky for you,” You frown, trying not to sound arrogant as you pull the cabin door of the truck open. “I’m quite the expert on ignition systems now.” 

Clambering in, you waste no time ramming the heel of your boot repeatedly into the metal plating under the steering wheel. The ongoing shortages of almost everything meant that the overall quality of factory parts had decreased. The screws are weak — you’ve turned so many of them just but simply trying to affix the plating, you know that a few well-placed kicks will shake them right out of their holes. 

Emil has climbed up the steps and is looking at you skeptically. But you are right; at the fourth kick, the metal plate practically pops out of place. Prying it away with your fingers, the small screws scatter over the cabin floor. Now for the best part. Reaching into the hollow under the steering wheel, you gently tug at the contact cables. One comes out so easily; you know it would have probably disconnected at the first large bump in the road. The other one needs a little bit more cajoling before it releases from the ignition.

Triumphantly, you show the two cables to Emil, stepping on the clutch as you twist the exposed copper ends together. The truck roars to life. 

“So, how many did you need?” You reiterate lightly. Emil claps you on your back as he laughs again. You cough uncomfortably. Spending several years traveling in partisan groups has robbed Emil of some of his gentler habits.

You have a renewed energy as you pull out your toolbox and direct the women who decided to stay, check over any trucks in the motor pool and ready them for rollout. You work until your fingers bleed — but it doesn’t matter. Liberation is close, and you're determined to speed up the process in any way you can. 

It’s late afternoon as the last of the trucks rolls out from the motor pool. Emil climbs into the cabin; you are hot on his heels.

“What’s next?” You ask almost breathlessly, so wired in anticipation you can barely feel the pain in your hands and the tiredness prickling behind your eyes. Emil smiles down at you from the passenger seat, as you balance on the bottom step of the truck cabin. “Go home, Anya,” He tells you, in that same borderline patronizing voice that a big brother would use for their annoying sibling.  

“I want to help,” You defend yourself. Haven’t you proven again and again that you are capable enough? Why are you being sent home like some small child? “I can help.”

“Go home, eat, and rest up,” Emil re-iterates, undisturbed by your acerbic tone. The truck rumbles impatiently. “When you are ready, come find me.”

You deflate a little. “Find you where?” “Do you remember where old Vineyard Street is?”

“Of course I do!” You bite out, almost offended. It’s one of the main streets on the eastern side of town, leading from the river valley over the large hill and ending somewhere on the far outskirts of the metro area. It was renamed to Schweiner Street at the start of the occupation, like so many streets, but you never forgot.

“Then I’ll see you there!” He grins, hand on the door, slowly pulling it close. You jump back onto the ground. 

“Wait!” You call out over the roaring engine sound. “Where on Vinyard Street?”

The longest fucking street in the city, half of it steeply uphill.

“You’ll know it when you see it!” 

Fuck. As the trucks roll away, the energy leaves you, too. Dragging your heavy feet, you finally start getting ready to get home.

You’ll know when you see it? Fucking riddles are the last thing you need now.

***

It’s pitch dark when you finally reach the bottom of Vineyard Street. A warm shower, hot gruel, and fitful sleep strangely make for the best few hours you’ve had in weeks. Dressed in fresh clothes, hands buried deep in the pockets of your increasingly threadbare green wool coat, you keep your gaze down. 

It’s chilly for a night in early May when the sun takes all the warmth with it as soon as it goes down. But you can smell the blooms in the air, and the first lilacs are dotting the streets in happy colors. There are no stars in the sky; only an occasional flicker of the moon peeks out between the heavy clouds rolling by. 

It’s eerily quiet. The streets lights are off, and most buildings are dark. The whole city looks like this. As a precaution, you have been moving through side streets, keeping out of sight from patrols. Small groups of people are moving through the dark — you can’t tell if they are friend or foe, so you’re not staying around to find out.

There is a strange buzz in the air. It has you on edge.

Before leaving home, you emptied the old cardboard box you had wedged deep behind the heavy wooden armoire in your bedroom. It’s where you kept everything you never wanted anyone to find: the old fake identities, your gun, and Bradley’s identification bracelet. The cold metal of the gun presses uncomfortably against the small of your back. 

Ironically, what feels even stranger is the foreign weight of Bradley’s bracelet on your wrist. You’ve never worn it before — it was always tucked in your pocket or twisted around your fingers. It feels odd as it’s a bit big on you, almost sagging down your hand. But more than anything, it feels right. There’s a reason you still have it; there’s a reason you put it on tonight. If anything, it makes you feel less alone as you make your way through the darkness, preparing for the battle ahead. The road ahead of you goes up at a steep angle. From your vantage point at the bottom of the hill, the street disappears into the darkness before you. It’s eerie, like you are looking at a ghost town. Not a single light is on as far as you can see, the buildings flanking the road looming.

You’ll know it when you see it.

As you trudge up the street, you can’t help but feel hesitant. See what? What are you on the lookout for? What if you miss it?

You hear the faint echo of voices. It stops you dead in your tracks, heart beating frantically. Hands sweaty, you can fumble open your coat, reaching back for the gun tucked in your waistband. Back flat against the wall, you edge up the street. 

You can’t see over the top of the road, where it flattens out for about a block before it the way pitches up at a severe angle again. But the flicker of lights, reflected in the dark windows around you, catches your eye. Someone or something is just over the edge.

Holding your breath, afraid to make the smallest sound, you shuffle up the sidewalk. The light becomes brighter, growing from small sparks reflected in the dark windows, to a soft flickering glow cast on the walls. You hear the echo of whispers. It’s hard to pinpoint where they are coming from, the sound strangely, hauntingly, bouncing down the barren street. Craning your neck, trying to peer up, catch a glimpse of some movement at the top of the road. The closer you get, the more you expect to see over the bend, see where the voices and lights are coming from.

But there is just darkness. If it weren’t for the surrounding buildings, you’d be sure the way up was simply vanishing in never-ending darkness. Your hands are shaking, fingers gripping the gun tightly. The more you try to calm yourself down, the harder the tremors become. The strange sense of impending terror has been creeping up on you with every step, slowly completely devouring you, until your breath is stocking in your throat, your chest is tight, and your legs feel like they are filled with jello.

You can’t stop the small whimper escaping your lips. You have to keep going. Standing on an unlit street, by yourself, with a gun in your hand in the middle of the night, is bound to get you into trouble. You have to trust that you will find Emil.

Willing your legs forward, almost tripping as your ankle gives out as you put weight on it, but it doesn’t deter you. If anything, it makes you angry enough to keep going. 

It’s only another minute before you reach the top of the road, and it’s like a bubble pops and you’re stepping into a completely different world.

The cobblestone street is dug up, the stones built high in three-line deep barricades — cars, trams, and furniture are haphazardly piled between the cobblestones. The whispers are clear now, yet as unintelligible as before — there is no one source of light, just flashes of lanterns between the barricades.

You are stunned. For sure, there is no way you could have missed that, but of all the things you were expecting to find — this, whatever this is, wasn’t it. Even after years of living under occupation, bombings, and soldiers marching down the street, Bradley; you feel wholly unprepared for walking into, well, a battlefield.

Aimlessly standing before the first barricade, eyes wide, you only belatedly notice you are starting down the barrel of a rifle perched just over the top of the pile of stones. 

Shit.

“I - I,” The words barely make it out of your mouth between the shaky breaths. You put your hands up more by instinct than by rational purpose. Bradley’s bracelet is heavy on your wrist.

“Get down!” A voice hisses from behind the barricade. You practically fall to the ground, your knees buckling. Breaking your ungraceful movement downward with your hands, the gun you have been holding all this time clatters loudly against the stones. A few moments of silence pass before a hand, holding a burning cigarette between the fingers as the only source of light, beacons you with a simple wave.

“Stay low!” The voice hisses again. You scramble, clumsily cramming the gun in your coat pocket, before crawling on hands and knees to a lower spot in the barricade. Just when you start crawling over, someone grabs you by the arm and pulls you over forcefully. You yelp as you vault over the pile of rocks, landing on your elbow.

“I almost thought you wouldn’t make it, Anya,” Emil grins at you, a lit cigarette loosely hanging from his lips. His uniform still looks crisp but has a vague whiff of mothballs. Rubbing your elbow, you sit up, frowning. 

“I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” You deadpan, trying to save some of your dignity. Looking around, there are a lot more people than you anticipated. Now that you are inside the barricade, small groups of people are crouched down, huddled together. You realize that the flickering ghostly lights you have seen are matches lighting cigarettes. 

Keeping low, you follow Emil to the far end of the barricade.

“Did you sleep before you came here?” He asks, shrugging the rifle off his shoulder and sitting down, leaning against the smooth wooden surface of a dinner table jammed into the barricade as structural support.

“A couple of hours,” You reply, still glancing around, trying to understand what is happening around you.

“Good,” Emil yawns as he hands you the rifle before making himself comfortable. “You’re on night watch.”

Hesitantly, you reach for the rifle. You notice Emil’s eyes flash towards your wrist as you grab it from him. A little bit too fast, you pull the rifle from his hands, covertly trying to pull the sleeve of your coat further over your wrist before he can ask.

You’ve done nothing wrong. You have nothing to be ashamed of. It’s your business and yours alone, you think tersely. So why are you so afraid of getting questioned?

Mercifully, Emil has already pulled his cap over his eyes. 

Before you manage to settle, trying to find a comfortable spot while leaning into the high barricade, rifle aimed over the top, you hear soft snoring. 

Peering into the darkness over the river valley, distressingly few lights spread throughout the city; these are the last moments of peace and quiet you will know for a long time. Before the sun comes up, someone comes to relieve you from the watch. Emil is still fast asleep. Handing the rifle on, you huddle beside Emil, burrowing in your coat. 

You don’t feel tired at all, you think. You are wired with anticipation. This is it. This is the last stand.

Freedom or death.

Your body catches up before your brain does — you don’t know how long you have been asleep. It could have been a catnap or hours. Whatever it is, it wasn’t enough. Your eyes feel so heavy. So much so it’s a struggle to open them. You sigh tiredly. Around you, voices are chattering — you can’t really hear what they are saying, just the shape of words and sounds that reach your ears. 

When you realize that you won’t fall asleep again, your brain finally starts up, and you become much more aware of your surroundings. There’s something heavy on your head, pulled over your eyes. Lazily shrugging it off, you blink heavily against the sun, still bleary-eyed.

“Anya, are you awake?” Emil materializes next to you, crouched down. He deftly picks up his cover from your lap, where it fell, neatly setting it on his head again. Did he put that on your head to shield your eyes from the morning sun? 

As aloof as Emil always has been, awkward in friendly gestures, he is kind.

However, following Emil as a shadow is Jan. He’s hard to miss, but you didn’t notice him last night. You look at him pointedly, daring him to say something. He meets your gaze shortly before huffing and turning away. Emil doesn’t notice, or isn’t interested in noticing, as he unfolds a map in front of you.

The battle is beginning. 

***

You are running. The ground is shaking under your feet; you’ve never felt something like it. Things you are pretty sure shouldn't move, like whole buildings, are quaking. The sound of the artillery shells tearing through stone and flesh is deafening, but somehow, your heavy breathing is louder than anything else in your head.

As a shell hits so close, you almost skid down the stairs you’re running up, as it turns the whole world into jello for a moment—the paper map of the city in your pocket crinkles as your hip collides with the wall. Between the explosions and screams, it’s such a mundane sound it sticks out. You clutch onto the railing for dear life. 

Is it possible to be so scared you just stop being scared?

You are not sure if you’re feeling anything right now.

All you can think about is that you need to get to the roof. High up on the hill, you and several others were sent sprinting up the road, looking for an even higher vantage point to see where the guns are. You hesitate to really think why some doors to buildings are open: the windows smashed, the facades charred. The silence, the complete lack of human sound in the buildings, is far more chilling than the hellfire raining down on you.

It’s quiet now.

You wait for almost half a minute, frozen on the stairs you almost slipped down, hands still around the railing so tightly your knuckles have turned white. The explosions don’t return. 

They may be recalculating their trajectory, picking new targets.

You scramble up, not even bothering to dust yourself off. Part of you wants to start running again to get to the top of the building as fast as possible. But your gut tells you to tiptoe, not betray your position.

Trust your gut.

It has gotten you this far.

Threading lightly in your heavy boots, holding your breath intermittently as you make your way up the next two flights of stairs. Outside, it’s still quiet; you can even hear the birds twitter in the trees again — it’s completely surreal.

But then you hear it. At first, so softly, you think you must be imagining it. There is no one here. But it sounds like a voice. Not like someone in conversation but someone dictating — flat inflection, clipped tones. 

You tiptoe up the next flight of stairs. On the landing, you see one apartment door open. Someone is here — no one should be here. This is dangerous. Should you be scared? But try as you might, you can’t really recall the feeling: the icy grip on your heart, the knot in your stomach. Is it because you haven’t felt anything but fear in the past few days? Is it just part of you now?

You pull out your gun with a calmness you hardly thought you could possess in a moment like this. Carefully, you click the safety off. The soft click echoes through the hall, but the voice drones on undeterred.

Creeping past the entry door, the house you enter is in disarray. Whoever lived here fled — afraid of the Nazis feeling from the east, afraid of the Soviets following them or the Allies closing the pincer from the west. Who knows. 

People spent the war in many ways. Someone was always going to lose. Those who chose to support the Nazi regime are already being rounded up—those who flee run west. The Americans are kinder captors than the Russians, they say.

A small twinge in your soul. Will the Allies beat the Red Army to Bohemia? Could it be that…

You bury the thought as you move deeper into the apartment. 

Now is not the time for dreaming.

You hold the gun pointed at the ground — grip firm, not frantic. Breathing steady, not panicked. 

The voice becomes louder. The door between you and the voice is slightly ajar, muffling the sound. It’s definitely a man’s voice. And he’s speaking… German?

You falter for a moment, coming to a standstill in the hallway. 

What are you about to walk in on? A scout? A spy? A group left behind?

Holding your breath for a moment, you close your eyes. Focus. 

You can only hear one voice — that much you are sure about. But as you listen, that is not what stands out. It’s that low buzz, the crackle of static. It’s a sound so etched into your mind you are almost surprised you didn’t hear it earlier.

You’re only hearing one voice because whoever is in there is relaying something through radio in German.

With the tip of your boot, you gently push the door open. The hinges whine softly. You slink through the opening.

It looks like a bomb went off in the sitting room. The floor is covered in books and broken glass. The windows are wide open, the curtains billowing into the room.  And there, by the window, crouched between the chaos, is a figure dictating coordinates he is reading from a map.

Suddenly, it all makes sense, but you also don’t understand anything about what you see.

Glass breaks under your boot.

Jan turns around, eyes wide. Within a fraction of a second, his face turns red, like a kid that had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. 

That moment might have been less than a second; it might have been ten. You don’t know. You can’t feel. You can’t think. 

You just raise your arm, pointing your gun at his head. 

Not a single tremor in your aim. Not a hitch in your breathing. You squeeze the trigger.

The recoil is the only thing you feel. Jan slumps against the wall, the radio still buzzing. Blood gushes from this head, quickly pooling around his lifeless body. 

Methodically, like it’s just your physical form going through the motions, you simply brush past the body, turning off the radio and wrenching the Nazi map Jan had been holding. 

Every barricade on the hill is marked on it. Jan had been calling in the positions of the uprising strongholds to the artillery battery on the other bank. 

Your blood should run cold. You should be angry. One of your own.

Instead, you tear off the tricolor resistance armband off Jan’s arm. He’s not one of you. He will not be remembered as one of you. 

When you return to the barricade Emil is commanding, he’s waiting for you already. Wordlessly, you hand him Jan’s map and armband. Emil doesn’t say anything — he just looks at you. At first, you think it’s with pity.  When he claps his hand on your shoulder a little too forcefully, somewhat awkwardly, you realize it isn’t pity in his eyes. It’s sympathy.

Someone hands you tea in a chipped enamel mug. Sitting down on an upturned apple crate, the enamel too hot against your fingers, you catch sight of Bradley’s bracelet on your wrist. In just a few days, the weight has become so familiar, such a constant, you almost forgot it’s there.

Your stomach twists. It’s the first thing you’ve really felt in hours. Bradley was the first person you ever pointed a gun at. It’s very vivid in your mind how much your hands shook, how breathing in the icy mountain weather hurt your lungs, and how the terror coursed through every fiber of your body.

You felt so much, you felt so deeply then.

It’s strange. Alien. You know it happened to you but in a different lifetime. It’s like you’re fragmented. The you who was a student wasn’t the you who met Bradley. The you who said goodbye to Bradley wasn’t the you who sabotaged trucks. The you that has killed… you’re not even sure if there’s anything left of you, really.

In the hours and days to follow, you barely get the time to ponder the changes in yourself when the world is rapidly changing around you. A world born from flames and blood. The artillery batteries pound resistance positions and soon get support from the air. The high whine of Stukas, in broad daylight, rain bullets and incendiary bombs down on the city. The plumes of smoke obscure the sky. The smell of fire, burning houses, fabric… bodies, permeates.

When a breeze picks up, you think, you hope you can still smell lilacs. Just to assure yourself that the putrid smell of burnt rubber, scorched flesh, and hair has not settled in your nose permanently. 

“Why aren’t the Allies coming to help?” A young man, his old uniform jacket dirty, sleeves slightly too short, peers out of the broken cellar window into the street as a sortie passes low overhead. Emil, after days of fighting, is not looking as crisp anymore — streaks of dirt cover his face, his uniform dusty, tired look in his eyes. “After all we’ve done -” The young man turns angrily. “Where is the RAF?”

You don’t bother looking up; instead, you inspect your dirty fingertips and broken nails. Idly, you wonder if your hands will ever be clean again. Mindlessly, you tug on your coat sleeve — the seam is fraying — gently brushing your calloused fingertips across Bradley’s nameplate. Every ridge and divot of his embossed name and the insignia are a comfort, a constant. Every time you remember to feel the weight on your wrist, your heart skips a beat —  it’s still there, it’s still real. It’s your final tether to him. Your final tether to you.

“The weather over the channel still hasn’t cleared up,” Emil finally replies, voice monotone. 

“And the Americans are stopped at the demarcation line in the west,” You add, closing your eyes and leaning your head back against the bare cellar wall. When you first heard that Patton’s army crossed the border and liberated the city of Pilsen, you were so sure it was only hours until they’d make it into Prague. 

That was two days ago. 

“And we are stuck here, in hellfire, no air support, and cut off from supply lines by an entire Army Group and the SS,” The young man spits. “We are left to die while the Red Army takes its sweet time — they skipped liberating us to get to Berlin first, and now we’re the last defense for every Nazi in Europe!”

“To fight is to die, soldier,” Emil intones mildly, in that same bored tone as he plays with his lighter. “You knew that, and yet you picked up a gun.”

Silence falls in the cellar. Outside, the explosions rumble, sending tremors through the ground. You are not scared of dying. If you ever were, then you can’t even really remember anymore. Fear, anger, happiness, you know what they are, you know you’ve felt them, but now it’s like a thick fog has taken its place. All you feel is kind of nauseous, tired, and the chill from the wall behind you.

Before you know it, you are back on your feet, clambering into a truck, tearing down the hill toward Resistance HQ in the old town. Someone dumps a glug of clear alcohol over your hands, in a vain attempt to clean them. You wince as you desperately wipe down your hands with a rag, the alcohol penetrating every crack and cut in your skin. There is no running water anymore. This will have to do.

The uprising is only a few days old, but the horrors you’ve witnessed are more than you have seen in the years of occupation. The carcasses of burned-out residential buildings barely stop smoking before a new salvo of artillery lands. Bodies — fighters, civilians, enemies, limbs — litter the street. Fireballs light up the night sky so brightly it almost looks like daytime in a terrifying, incredible display. The smell is unbelievable. 

 A jumped-up schoolgirl playing at war. 

Maybe there was more truth in that than you’d like to admit.

However, you don’t have time to dwell on it as the truck finally comes to a violent halt. In the first few seconds, you barely recognize where you are. It’s like walking into a wasteland that was once the old town. You used to walk down this street every day, from the tram to class. The town hall, which was used as the HQ for the uprising, is… no there anymore. The air is thick with smoke and dust. The ground is strangely hot, and everything is cast in a strange orange glow from the surrounding fires. 

Pulling a rag from your pocket, you tie it around your face. It does little against the smell, but it at least stops some dust and smoke from choking you completely. After that, you move on autopilot. 

Save whom can be saved. 

Note who didn’t make it. 

Get out before the Luftwaffe returns.

Your heart is beating a mile a minute, adrenaline coursing through your veins. But you aren’t scared, focusing only on your task: pushing away rubble, helping victims up, trying to stop the bleeding on a too-deep leg wound, grunting in exertion as you push the stretcher with the man above your head so he can get pulled into the back to the truck—a flash.

You blink, disorientated. Colorful spots fill your vision.

Turning, you try to find the source of it in the chaos and the smoke. More flashes. Finally, your sight refocuses — someone is taking pictures. Through all the noise, you hear it clear as day.

“Let’s go; we need to get out of here.”

It’s an American. 

Your feet start walking before your brain catches up. The man is walking quickly to another truck with a Red Cross. The Red Cross is here? Your breathing is rapid now. You need to talk to them. You have no idea what you will tell the photographer, but you need to speak to him. 

You pick up your pace. The Red Cross photographer is disappearing quickly through the smoke.

“Wait!” You yell out, pulling the rag from your face. He is already climbing into the truck cabin. “Hey! Wait!” You yell louder, more desperately. 

He looks over his shoulder, straight at you. It looks like the Red Cross photographer waits for you to catch up for a moment, but then he slams the truck door shut. You break out into a sprint, almost reaching the truck before it tears away.

“Fuck you!” You scream, tears suddenly stinging in your eyes. Breathing heavily, you stay behind, seething, on the torn-up street, watching the Red Cross truck disappear in the mess of the medieval maze of the old town.

The desperate anger is the first thing you have felt in days. It’s overwhelming. Suffocating.

Distracting.

It’s only when someone almost knocks you over as they run past you in a mad dash, it’s like you wake up from the wash of madness that had you rooted in place.

A high-pitched whistle pierces the air, closing in on you at frighting speed.

You run, scrambling over the broken pieces of stone, slipping over pools of blood.

Don’t look back.

The truck with the wounded is behind you.

Don’t look back.

You need to get out of here, find any place to hide.

Don’t look back.

It must be a mere second before impact now; the whistle of the bomb is so loud your eardrums scream along with it. 

In a fatal moment, you turn your head.

A sea of flames melts the truck from sight. The pressure wave, so hot your mouth is drier than cotton on the first breath, is powerful it lifts your feet from the ground and carries you up like a feather in the wind.

“I’m flying,” Is all your brain manages to conjure up in the split second, almost with a sense of wonder and joy, before your body is flung against a wall. Crashing to the ground, you lose consciousness as fire rains down on you.

note | good news: war is almost over. bad news: everything else

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[leftistfeminista]

A Woman Communist

From this point on, Ravera’s life was a succession of increasingly important roles, including international-level responsibilities like attending the Comintern’s Fourth Congress in November 1922 as a PCd’I delegate. During these many trips abroad, Ravera got to know some of the most important figures of the international workers’ movement.

These ranged from Clara Zetkin — an early feminist and close collaborator of Rosa Luxemburg — to Khristo Kabakchiev — the Bulgarian Comintern representative who led the toast to the “Italian Bolsheviks” upon the PCd’I’s foundation — the “ever quiet, polite” Stalin, and Lenin. Ravera recalled not only the lectures the latter gave at the party school but also his biting comments on the issue of women’s emancipation: “‘on the women’s question,’ Lenin told me, ‘scratch a communist and there, too, you’ll find a reactionary.’

Telling of this relationship between gender questions and her days at the legendary L’Ordine Nuovo was one of Ravera’s most interesting anecdotes of her time as a militant in Turin. In the period just before Mussolini’s Fascists took over the government, blackshirts stepped up their attacks on union halls and the workers’ parties — and everyone at L’Ordine Nuovo also feared the possibility of an armed raid on their offices. One day, a colleague came over to Ravera and said:

“Gramsci thinks it’s maybe best you go home.” “Why,” I said, “Has something happened to my parents?” “No, but word’s going around that the Fascists are homing in. It’s better if we put you at a safe distance — who knows what could happen here.” “Are you leaving, then?” I replied. “No, I have to stay here.” “Excuse me, then, but why should I leave? I don’t follow. Go to Gramsci and tell him you need an explanation.” A little later Antonio Gramsci arrived, visibly embarrassed, and said “I understand. Stay here. We were wrong.”

In addition to leading by example by being a woman communist in a mostly male-led party, Ravera concentrated much of her political efforts on gender questions. She never called herself a “feminist” but always — and only — “an attentive observer of women’s living conditions.” Fighting with all her energy against discrimination in society, she was inevitably drawn to the particular situation of women. She waged this battle in La Tribuna delle donne, trying to give direct voice to women’s demands.

Despite her great determination, it was often difficult for Ravera to get women comrades to write. They were glad to talk about the themes she proposed, but were intimidated by the paper, by the printed press — things they had always considered to stand outside their own experience. Faced with these objective barriers, Ravera and Gramsci began to pose the problem (and this was truly revolutionary, for the Italy of the time) on how to organize a movement which, though attached to the framework of labor struggles, would not be made up of women communists alone,

but rather of women, not asked what party or religion they belonged to, and even of those women who had no intention of organizing in a party, but as women who have shared problems, in one party like another and in one class like another.

The attempts to organize a women’s movement would continue even into the early years of Mussolini’s rule; in 1924 Ravera was entrusted with running the fortnightly La compagna (“Woman comrade”). Yet what is true is that after the Fascists’ March on Rome in late 1922, the Communist Party’s priorities were rather more a matter of survival than of open struggle. In a political situation rapidly turning toward a dictatorship which sought the acquiescence of the Catholic Church hierarchy, the spaces for women’s demands narrowed to the point of disappearance.

[hydrateyoursharks]

Review of Ninotchka

Excerpt from: The New York Times guide to the Best 1000 Movies Ever Made

“Stalin won’t like it. Molotoff may even recall his envoy from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. We still say Garbo’s Ninotchka is one of the sprightliest comedies of the year, a gay and impertinent and malicious show which never pulls its punch lines (no matter how far below the belt they may land) and finds the screen's austere first lady of drama playing a deadpan comedy role with the assurance of a Buster Keaton.

Nothing quite so astonishing has come to the Music Hall since the Rockefellers landed on Fiftieth Street. And not even the Rockefellers could have imagined M-G-M getting a laugh out of Garbo at the U.S.S.R's expense.

Ernst Lubitsch, who directed it, finally has brought the screen around to a humorist's view of those sobersided folk who have read Marx but never the funny page, who refuse to employ the word "love" to describe an elementary chemico-biological process, who reduce a spring morning to an item in a weather chart, and who never, never drink champagne without reminding its buyer that goat's milk is richer in vitamins. In poking a derisive finger into these sobersides, Mr. Lubitsch hasn't been entirely honest. But, then, what humorist is? He has created, instead, an amusing panel of caricatures, has read them a jocular script, has expressed through it all-the philosophy that people are much the same wherever you find them and decent enough at heart. What more could anyone ask?

Certainly we ask for little more, in the way of thoroughly entertaining screen fare, than the tale of his Ninotchka, the flat-heeled, Five-Year-Plannish, unromantically mannish comrade who was sent to Paris by her commissar to take over the duties of a comically floundering three-man mission entrusted with the sale of the former Duchess Swana's court jewels. Paris in the spring being what it is and Melvyn Douglas, as an insidious capitalistic meddler, being what he is, Comrade Ninotchka so far forgot Marx, in Mr. Lubitschis fable, as to buy a completely frivolous hat, to fall in love, and. after her retreat to Moscow, to march in the May Day parade without caring much whether she was in step or not.

If that seems a dullish way of phrasing it, we can only take refuge in the adventitious Chinese argument that one picture is worth a million words. Mr. Lubitsch's picture is worth at least a few thousand more words than we have room for here. To do justice to it we should have to spend a few hundred describing the arrival of the Soviet delegation in Paris where they debate the merits of the Hotel Terminus (a shoddy place) and the Hotel Clarence where one need push a button once for hot water, twice for a waiter, thrice for a French maid. Would Lenin really have said, as Comrade Kopalski insisted, "Buljanoff, don't be a fool! Go in there and ring three times."

We should need a few hundred more to describe the Paris tour of Ninotchka, under Mr. Douglas's stunned capitalistic guidance; the typically Lubitsch treatment of a stag dinner party, with the camera focused on a door and only the microphone capable of distinguishing between the arrival of a cold meat platter and that of three cigarette girls on the hoof; the Moscow roommate's elaboration of the effect of a laundered Parisian chemise upon the becottoned feminine population of an entirely too-cooperative apartment house.

For these are matters so cinematic, so strictly limited to the screen, that newsprint cannot be expected to do justice to them, any more than it could do full justice to Miss Garbo's delightful debut as a comedienne. It must be mo-notonous, this superb rightness of Garbo's playing. We almost wish she would handle a scene badly once in a while just to provide us with an opportunity to show we are not a member of a fan club. But she remains infallible and Garbo, always exactly what the situation demands, aways as fine as her script and director permit her to be. We did not like her "drunk" scene here, but, in disliking it, we knew it was the writer's fault and Mr. Lubitsch's. They made her carry it too far.

We objected, out of charity, to some of the lines in the script: to that when Ninotchka reports:"The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians"; and to that when the passport official assures the worried traveler she need not fret about the towel situation in Moscow hotels because "we change the towel every week." But that is almost all. The comedy, through Mr.Douglas's debonair performance and those of Ina Claire as the duchess and Sig Rumann, Felix Bressart, and Alexander Granach as the unholy three emissaries; through Mr.Lubitsch's facile direction; and through the cleverly written script of Walter Reisch, Charles Brackett, and Billy Wilder, has come off brilliantly. Stalin, we repeat, won't like it; but, unless your tastes hew too closely to the party line, we think you will, immensely.”

—F.S.N., November 10, 1939

[stillnaomi]

On Insurrection

Let us note the foregoing and see what attitude Marx and Engels took towards armed insurrection.

Here is what Marx wrote in the fifties:

". . . The insurrectionary career once entered upon, act with the greatest determination, and on the offensive.

The defensive is the death of every armed rising. . . . Surprise your antagonists while their forces are scattering, prepare new successes, however small, but daily keep up the moral ascendant which the first successful rising has given to you; rally thus those vacillating elements to your side which always follow the strongest impulse and which always look out for the safer side; force your enemies to a retreat before they can collect their strength against you; in the words of Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known : de l'audace, de l'audace, encore de l'audace!"

...

And what does Engels say about insurrection? In a passage in one of his pamphlets he refers to the Spanish uprising, and answering the Anarchists, he goes on to say :

"Nevertheless, the uprising, even if begun in a brainless way, would have had a good chance to succeed, if it had only been conducted with some intelligence, say in the manner of Spanish military revolts, in which the garrison of one town rises, marches on to the next, sweeps along with it that town's garrison that had been influenced beforehand and, growing into an avalanche, presses on to the capital, until a fortunate engagement or the coming over to their side of the troops sent against them decides the victory. This method was particularly practicable on that occasion. The insurgents had long before been organised everywhere into volunteer battalions (do you hear, comrade, Engels talks about battalions!) whose discipline, while wretched, was surely not more wretched than that of the remnants of the old, and in the main disintegrated, Spanish army. The only dependable government troops were the gendarmes (guardias civiles), and these were scattered all over the country. It was primarily a question of preventing a concentration of the gendarme detachments, and this could be brought about only by assuming the offensive and the hazard of open battle . . . (attention, comrades, attention!). For any one who sought victory, there was no other means. . . ."

...

This is what the celebrated Marxist, Frederick Engels, says. . . .

Organised battalions, the policy of offensive, organsing insurrection, uniting the separate insurrection — that, in Engels's opinion, is needed to ensure the victory of an insurrection.

Extracts from Marx and Engels On Insurrection by J.V. Stalin

[nicklloydnow]

The Speech of Comrade Jiangqing on the Culture and Arts (c1970s)

“Jiang’s philosophy of heroism seems unusual for the wife of China’s most famous communist. Marxist analysis doesn’t obviously lend itself to individual valorization. But Marx was not Madame Mao’s teacher in these matters. That role fell to Friedrich Nietzsche.

Jiang was hardly the only Nietzschean in the red camp. Mao Zedong himself had been exposed to Nietzsche before Marx. Late Qing reformers had picked up Nietzsche’s ideas as they visited Japan and Germany; the young Mao devoured their work. The archives preserve Mao’s first writing on Nietzsche, scribbled in the margins of Cai Yuanpei’s translation of Friedrich Paulsen’s A System of Ethics. Mao admired the neo-Kantian Paulsen but had an instinctual sympathy with Nietzsche’s view that traditional morality needed to be upended. Only by harnessing powerful, buried forces did Mao see a path toward a new world.

The artists and thinkers of the early Republican period were likewise enthralled by Nietzsche, the rebel philosopher who believed in the power of culture. For those focused on sweeping away the dust of feudal China, his nihilistic attack on tradition and call to overcome slave morality translated well into the post-imperial context. It is no wonder that Nietzsche was idolized by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, who would go on to found the Communist Party.

Even once figures like Chen, Li, and Mao turned left, they continued to absorb Nietzschean ideas. His thinking permeated many of the Bolsheviks, as well as radical Russian intellectuals and artists. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Aleksandr Bogdanov, and Nikolai Bukharin all refer to Nietzsche explicitly or implicitly. Bukharin and Bogdanov, in particular, drew on him enough to be dubbed “Nietzschean Marxists” by scholars. In the words of historian Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Nietzsche was “a vital element of Bolshevism,” animating an “activist, heroic, voluntaristic, mercilessly cruel, and future-oriented interpretation of Marxism.” This line of Soviet cultural revolution intensified under the leadership of Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s: monumental art glorified the proletarian hero. There was even room for the Dionysian excess of the Russian avant-garde, though Stalin eventually turned against it.

Jiang, moving in radical circles in the 1930s, absorbed these ideas. Her study of Nietzsche came through the scholar Lu Xun. Before becoming the patron saint of socialist literature in the People’s Republic of China, Lu was its foremost interpreter, translator, and popularizer of Nietzsche. Jiang idolized him, later declaring that while Mao was her political north star, Lu Xun provided her cultural guidance. While his books had been bowdlerized to remove more provocative texts, Jiang kept an unexpurgated 1938 edition of his collected work on her bookshelf deep into the Cultural Revolution, handbound in twenty volumes.

Lu Xun was a Nietzschean through and through. His reading of ​​Thus Spake Zarathustra in Japan in 1902 changed his worldview completely. In “On Cultural Extremism,” an essay published in 1908, he pointed to the ideals of Nietzsche as the solution to China’s ills—only the will to power of supreme individuals was capable of leading the benighted masses. Jiang would certainly have read “On Satanic Poetry,” which Lu wrote under the stated influences of Nietzsche and Lord Byron. In it, he called for spiritual fighters and savage rebels to destroy the ultrastable system of Chinese ethics. Like Maxim Gorky in Russia, Lu’s political allies downplayed his Nietzschean sympathies after he moved to the left, but they continued to energize his writing, theory, and criticism until his death in 1936.

When the communists took control of China in 1949, Nietzsche was in the bloodstream of the party. His thinking would inform the psychopolitical project of creating the New Socialist Man in the ashes of the old society. When Jiang led her Dionysian artistic assault on the Apollonian state, Nietzsche was with her.

Later, when Jiang sat in Qincheng Prison, her enemies used this lineage against her. In 1977, Cao Boyan and Ji Weilong sought to protect the party’s ideological continuity by condemning the Gang of Four as Nietzscheans who contradicted Maoism. Through 1978 and 1979, articles like Zhang Wen’s “The New Disciples of Nietzschean Philosophy” and Zhang Zhuomin’s “The Will to Power and Social Fascism” attacked the Cultural Revolution as an expression of the will to power. An essay by Dai Wenlin charged Jiang with trying to create a new social fascist model of the Übermensch.

The commentary against Jiang revealed for a moment what most historiography of socialist China has worked to conceal: Nietzsche haunts all of the revolutions that China experienced in the twentieth century.

Jiang’s entry into the practice of cultural struggle began in the early 1960s when Mao found himself sidelined by his own party. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were rising in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward and the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, with pragmatic policies that Jiang saw as unacceptably revisionist. She turned to culture to defend the cause. This was not merely a means to propagate political messages or attack enemies; following Nietzsche, Jiang believed that the world’s existence was justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Following Lu Xun, she also believed that culture could overcome the hegemony of conventional ethics.

(…)

This focus on heroic cadres laboring in the provinces was politically useful, since highlighting prominent leaders could backfire in the event of a later purge. But it was also part of the Maoist endeavor to create a new revolutionary culture among Chinese peasants and workers. In his “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” Mao had previously promoted the use of folk forms and the magnification of heroic traits. Jiang’s application went even further and demanded their complete transformation:

Out of the worker, peasant, and soldier, we must enthusiastically and by any means create heroic images. As Chairman Mao told us, the world represented in art can and should surpass reality. It should be stronger, purer, more perfect, and more idealized. Don’t be limited by real people and events. Stop writing about dead heroes when we are surrounded by living heroes.

Echoing Nietzsche’s division of art from truth, Jiang called for a break from the rules of realism, revolutionary or otherwise. Other Chinese thinkers had critiqued realist ideas with the concept of revolutionary romanticism as the Sino-Soviet split took effect. Jiang outstripped them, calling for heroes that defied reality itself.

(…)

While Jiang personally directed the productions created in this process of aesthetic reorganization, her fellow Gang of Four member Yao Wenyuan later systematized these ideas. He outlined the “Three Prominences” which Jiang and Yao believed all cultural productions should highlight: the prominence of positive characters in a work, the prominence of heroes among the positive characters, and the prominence of the major heroic protagonist among the supporting heroes. Nothing was left to interpretive chance: the protagonist would always be “Red, Bright, and Clear”—accompanied by a literal red glow, projecting an aura of willful positivity, and with an unobscured role and set of virtues. A third principle, “Tall, Mighty, Complete,” set forth that the main hero must physically dominate and appear to tower over surrounding characters with an overpowering presence, free of negative characteristics.

Anti-heroes and navel-gazing introspection about the cause had no place in the revolutionary operas. While these tropes later gained popularity in China and had already become more prominent in Western literature, the apparent “moral complexity” they allowed for only served to diminish the heroic consciousness. They cultivated a suspicion toward the heroic impulse, which became seen as a mask for morally compromised souls as lowly and unworthy as everyone else.

By contrast, Jiang’s insistence on the aesthetic and physical valorization of the hero made them more real than the world they struggled against. They did not fall into the trap of slave morality by letting their enemies define them. Vividly more worthy than those they fought against, they overcame them by sheer force of will. Their noble character also served to accuse those supposed allies with compromised commitments—they were without excuse for failing to live up to the heroic ideal. Again and again in the revolutionary operas, those who join the hero’s battle end up reflecting their beauty and vitality.

(…)

Jiang did not lack collaborators. The left-wing artists that had driven Chinese culture in the 1930s were given a long leash by a party leadership made up mostly of urban intellectuals. Dance, in particular, had become a refuge for artists and composers. Jiang was uninterested in the numerous modern dance dramas, which included topical productions about the Vietnam War and Patrice Lumumba, and in experiments in adapting folk dance. It was the revolutionary modern ballets that held the most appeal for Jiang. They exemplified high-art elitism. She loved her hardened, beautiful ballerinas and the heroic themes present in ballets like Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl.

As the Cultural Revolution progressed, her guidance saw revolutionary ballets become extensively modified. New pieces were composed or sections removed to push them toward pure heroism and compliance with the “Three Prominences,” “Red, Bright, Clear,” and “Tall, Mighty, Complete.” In her selection of artistic forms, Jiang maintained the standard that what was beautiful should not be debased at the hands of popular instincts. The ballet, opera, and cinema that defined the Cultural Revolution were not vulgar kitsch, unlike much of the literature of the time. Jiang was interested in high art and her speeches and writing gave no consideration as to whether or not these forms would be appropriate for the masses. Yet, they proved popular enough that they are still performed today.

The filmed version of Ode to Yimeng, released in 1975, is the pinnacle of Jiang’s vision for ballet. While it retains a scene from older renditions of the protagonist feeding a wounded partisan from her breast, in the hands of Jiang it is less a fable of feminine sacrifice than of individual ungendered heroism. With Cheng Bojia dancing as the lead, the tall, powerful beauty seems just as prepared to toss the wounded soldier over her shoulder as she is to suckle him. Her knife fight against local goons, charged in earlier versions with fear of the woman being overpowered, becomes slightly surreal as she seems to tower over her opponents while cast in a red glow and moving effortlessly en pointe. The reels were quickly transported around the country. Urban audiences sat in theaters and villagers gathered around projectors under the stars to watch Cheng Bojia as the national embodiment of Jiang’s Nietzschean heroine.

Meeting the technical, artistic, and ideological perfection that Jiang demanded was no easy task. The heroic art Jiang envisioned required her to mobilize the best and brightest. Yu Huiyong, a composer and theorist, became Jiang’s constant companion as she oversaw this program of cultural engineering. He had originally won the right to work on revolutionary opera in a contest held by Jiang in Shanghai in 1965. The contest reflected Jiang’s demand for raw aesthetic ability: twenty composers were charged with creating an original aria inspired by a lyric from Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.

After Yu fell afoul of Jiang’s own atmosphere of persecution—he was attacked both for slavish devotion to Western forms and for failing to support Jiang’s call to add Western instruments to Chinese orchestras—she rehabilitated him. Jiang wasn’t going to be politically pedantic. Working with the right kind of visionaries came first. Those with ability could be forgiven for political transgressions that condemned the less-than-worthy. Drafted into service alongside many of the best artists and musicians, he worked with Jiang to fine-tune her favorite works in a production process similar to the Hollywood studio system.

The revolutionary opera On the Docks became a shared masterpiece between Yu and Jiang. Yu had worked earlier on experiments in combining Chinese and Western instruments and tuning, as in the incorporation of “The Internationale” as a leitmotif in The Red Lantern, and On the Docks would be the perfection of these attempts. This arrangement of Chinese and Western orchestras would eventually become common, but Yu was the first to pull it off. Yu’s compositions, like the choreography for the revolutionary modern ballet, forged something new from the deconstruction of indigenous folk forms and Western high art. The result is considered a triumph of Cultural Revolution art.

Perfection was the rule. When a film version of On the Docks was shot in 1972, it only circulated for a brief time before Jiang’s careful review found deficiencies: the color grading was too pale, robbing her heroes of their red glow, and the cinematography failed to live up to the demands of “Red, Bright, Clear.” A reshoot appeared the following year, using the same performers and crew.

(…)

When her political luck ran out, she refused submission. As one biographer wrote: “She held fast to her moral sovereignty as an individual.” Charged under Article 103 of the Chinese criminal code for committing counter-revolutionary acts that caused grave harm to the state and the people, death was a likely outcome. On the stand, she gave her final performance as the hero in chains, persecuted by the rabble. “I fear nobody,” she thundered. “I am above the law of men and of Heaven!”

In the end, Jiang lived long enough to see what Deng Xiaoping’s cultural bureaucracy did to the program she had created. Reform and Opening Up became an age of individualist ressentiment, rather than cultural affirmation. Envy, persecution, and petty hatreds became the obsessions of new waves of art and film. Writers turned to “scar literature,” detailing their suffering under the Cultural Revolution.

Popular films showed the persecution of intellectuals by the Gang of Four. The victims, unlike the peasant girl in Red Detachment of Women, did not rescue themselves. Instead, they were made pure by their suffering. Artists were encouraged to turn inwards, to find their deepest pain. In Nietzschean terms, it was a full re-embrace of the slave morality that finds moral worth in the negation of health, power, and vitality—traits now associated with the art of the Cultural Revolution. Mobilization for economic development was acceptable to the leadership, but grand visions now risked political conflict. Politically, it was more expedient for artists to brood on the troubles and resentments of daily life.

The theories of Jiang’s reformation, including both the Nietzschean impulse and the orthodox Maoist call for artistic engagement with the masses, were reversed with market-driven mass media. Cinema in this period degenerated into violent pornography; many films made in this period, like the 1988 productions Silver Snake Murders and Obsession, could not be released to overseas markets without extensive cuts by local censorship boards and cannot be screened in China today. Experiments in stream-of-consciousness work, abstract impressionism, and performance art became popular.

Compared with Jiang’s mobilization of the best artists and musicians into large-scale productions with heroic ideological goals, the new era was a managed descent into cultural chaos. The ideal artist was now an entrepreneur that could keep themselves afloat on the seas of the market economy. Locked into private competition, shock and vulgarity were the best ways to inch ahead of one’s rivals. It was not conducive to heroic impulses or high-minded political action.

The “Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution Debates” and “Campaign Against Bourgeois Liberalization” were launched in 1983 and 1986 as attempts to rein in the excesses by restoring guard rails on expression, but reformers allied with Deng ultimately cut these campaigns short. The intellectuals and artists that the party gave space to repudiate the Cultural Revolution kept going right up until the summer of 1989 when China was rocked by nationwide protests.

The years since 1989 have seen an attempt to contain what was unleashed by this cultural free-for-all. This has sometimes involved marketization, banking on the fact that existentialism is not profitable, but also an abortive revival of the Jiang Qing line. The Central Ballet staged Red Detachment of Women for the first time since the Cultural Revolution in 1992. China Central Television still broadcasts new productions of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, and the films made under Jiang Qing’s leadership in the 1970s were never actively suppressed.

But it is hard to find the heroic aesthetic of the Cultural Revolution in the official art promoted since 1989. Jiang Qing commanded high art for the masses, without any competition from the market. The newer works merely ape some of the principles.

The worthwhile lesson of Jiang Qing is in her refusal to impose powerlessness and victimhood on her subjects. She refused to sanction what Pierre Bourdieu, invoking Nietzsche, once called a “sociologically mutilated being” as a model of human excellence. Instead, she invited the masses at gunpoint to contemplate beauty and strength. The power of her project can be seen in the transformative chaos of its age. As she learned from Lu Xun, also invoking Nietzsche, the artist must be capable of driving men mad.

The popular audience for Jiang’s elite high art was large and enduring enough that these works were performed long after the appreciation mandated by the Cultural Revolution had ended. Folk culture was not, in practice, displaced; instead, it existed alongside a popular audience for the revolutionary ballets. The goal of Jiang’s art was not to push aside all that came before; it was to absorb and transform it. In her vision, the dominant must not impose ressentiment on the dominated—to do so would be aesthetically disgusting. Jiang’s heroes were personalities to aspire to, not moral battering rams. This vision was accomplished by nurturing individual and collective creativity, pursuing technical perfection, and tolerating the transgression of traditional ethics.

These were Jiang’s lessons for China and artists. The tyranny of irony can be cast off by heroic sincerity. Mythology can become a true ethos. By giving up on victimhood, one gives up on misery. Without the narcissistic compulsion for representation of one’s petty flaws, it is possible to imagine true heroes.

The pinnacles of such art require the same kind of mass mobilization as any other achievement of modern society. As far back as the 1920s, directors like Fritz Lang commanded masses of people and machines with a firm hand to create masterworks of cultural production. But this apparent stiffness shelters the artist’s disruptive impulse. Jiang tolerated the transgressions of once-in-a-lifetime geniuses like Xue Jinghua or Yu Huiyong for a reason. The real crime she did not allow was the aestheticization of petty transgressions into ideals.

Jiang was under no illusions that the average viewer would be directly transformed into a great hero by their aesthetic experience. Her own “Three Prominences” assume that such heroes are few. But by refusing to valorize the sociologically mutilated individual, Jiang swept away the conditioning of powerlessness and victimhood. Her struggle was to inculcate a new heroic consciousness. In her works, the enemy became an adversary against which the heroes test their courage, nobility, and commitment to the cause. Jiang does not allow her villains to produce envy and deforming hatred in her protagonists or her audience. Instead, the fate of the enemy is that they will be forgotten entirely in the glorious finale, swept aside by the unstoppable, superior personalities of the protagonists.

Jiang’s core message, and her alternative to the celebration of victimhood by contemporary cultural orthodoxy, was the power of heroic ideals to make even overwhelming opposition irrelevant. Armed with her culture of self-justifying strength and beauty, her noble-souled heroes cast off any thought of victimhood to pursue their own glorious visions for their own sake.” - Dylan Levi King, “Madame Mao's Nietzschean Revolution”, (Palladium Magazine; 17 March 2023)

[spyderslut]

Word of advice, there’s no point in engaging anyone who uses the term ‘tankie’ in good faith because it won’t matter if you’re a Stalinist, a Trotskyist, a Leninist, Maoist, Anarcho communist, Marxist, socialist, even if you just think that little old Gertrude down the road shouldn’t have to go into debt just to afford insulin, in their eyes we’re all the same: bloodthirsty childkilling commies who are gonna break into their houses, steal all of their gold, throw their grandpas in gulags for owning a donkey, fuck their water pipes, glue their fingers to a hammer and sickle and then burn their houses to the ground cause the ghost of Stalin said so.

The second ‘tankie’ leaves someone’s mouth in an argument is the second you’ve already won, now it’s just time to fuck with them. ESPECIALLY if they’re a self proclaimed ‘democrat’ or ‘liberal’.

i once had someone call me a tankie cause I said the word comrade. that is it.

[deviantartdramahub]

I'm not sure how often I've given this PSA to different people, but I may as well even if they're common, seeing as it's self-harm awareness month and the issue is through the roof with several people watching.

It doesn't matter who you are (whether you're a lowly citizen, someone with an infinite presence, a senior member who happens to like abusing their authority to go after people for things like tracing and be covertly ableist about it when she could just report it, or the authority somewhere who wants to jump on the enormous Triagonal-hate bandwagon and has clear influence from the other haters who you consider your ideological comrades), it doesn't matter who it's towards (be it towards someone like Triagonal, Club-Dreamiverse, Gellygirl, Monstermaster13, the friend of theirs who goes by Carol, or a monster-of-the-week as they say here), it doesn't matter how many people agree with you (whether it be none or everyone in a particular room), it doesn't matter how you do it (whether by attacking someone directly or trying to mockingly pose as them and/or their friends based on one's skewed/parodied version of their perspective to make it seem like people are hating on them when they wouldn't say the same thing about the accurately true story, also notice nobody is blocking/excommunicating the individuals), it doesn't matter how much you believe in your own actions (whether the answer to this is that you believe what you're doing to be right or if you have condemned the behavior before but then proceeded to carry it all out on other people you know you hate anyways, rules for thee but not for me I guess for the self-deletion advocate KSUniverse), and it doesn't matter what the end outcome is (whether it be their total demise or something like removing someone from a contest which is as uncalled for as Stalin airbrushing people out of photos due to not liking them), witch hunting, putting words in peoples' mouths via words or false documentation in typical style, mass reporting, and false appeal to police (who have never done anything), especially if you're only doing it based on association of an individual you hate, are perspectively wrong, especially without a game plan, and not just for aforementioned reasons.

If you have a problem with someone, and it's your opinion, that's not for you to force upon other people to share with you, as it violates their own right to have their own ideas. If you argue "it's based in ethics", either a proper debate/argument will prove them wrong or there's nothing wrong; and if you argue "it's based in fact", nothing you present should inspire any doubt whatsoever which is defined by any questions which remain without closure, though people constantly ignore that's exactly what it does (it must suck for haters though that "Lemmy" is federated which means the bans they're aiming for are comically powerless).

Funny how they'd try to get an authority to ban an authority in the same place (as well as Kat Katherine) and fail.

[thesovietbroadcast]

What's your opinion of Amadeo Bordiga?

Gramsci himself best articulated the issues with Bordiga and the practical impotence of his political thoughts:

“Comrade Bordiga limits himself to upholding a cautious position on all the questions raised by the Left. He doesn’t say: the International poses and resolves such and such a question in this way, but the Left will instead pose and resolve it this other way. He instead says: the way the International poses and resolves problems doesn’t convince me; I fear it falls into opportunism, there are insufficient guarantees against this, etc.”His position, then, is one of permanent suspicion and doubt. In this way the position of the “Left” is purely negative; they express reservations without specifying them in a concrete form, and above all without indicating in concrete form their point of view, their solutions. They end by spreading doubt and distrust, without constructing anything.

“Concerning his disagreement with Lenin, Comrade Bordiga remains skillfully on the general, while not being specific.”

“Comrade Bordiga not only fails to draw the logical consequences of his negations, he above all fails to counter-propose new directives to the criticized directives in a clear and complete form.”

- Antonio Gramsci, “Sterile and Negative Criticism“, L’Unità September 30, 1925.

In other words, Bordiga’s hyper-vigilance against opportunism made him ineffective in practice. One feature of his writings that we find correct is organic centralism since it grasped the necessary relationship between the party and the base without the pretence of party democracy. He managed to reproduce the basis of the stereotypical interpretation of Stalinism, arguing favourably of a more authoritarian society beyond what Lenin or Stalin believed in. This in turn has been turned into a meme of sorts among left-communists, which is expected from all euro-amerikan centred ideologies which amount to nothing in practice beyond debate echo chambers.

Bordiga also displayed a principled stance when denouncing opponents of decolonisation as “racists” (as what happened with Onorato Damen) while pointing out that the ‘democratic’ struggles in core countries inevitably led to fascism as without the aim towards socialism bourgeois dictatorship takes over.

Beyond the errors mentioned above one we would also add Bordiga’s failure at assessing the threat posed by fascism, and his ‘anti-anti-fascist’ view was disastrous as later demonstrated by how quickly Italy’s post-war political system was undermined by the machinations of U.S. imperialism to maintain the status quo through supporting successive reactionary governments, and the terrorism carried out through GLADIO and the mafia.

[milfstalin]

The floodlights blazed, casting an almost unbearable glare upon the makeshift stage erected in the heart of Red Square. A hush fell over the crowd, a sea of faces eager with anticipation. In the center stood a velvet-roped enclosure, bathed in a soft, inviting glow. And within, reclining on a plush chaise lounge, was him: Comrade Stalin, the collectivized leader, now an object of public affection and pleasure.

He wore a simple tunic, the rough fabric a deliberate contrast to the opulence around him. His hair, still thick but now streaked with silver, was carefully combed back, and his mustache, usually so severe, seemed almost playful. A faint smile played on his lips. He was surprisingly at ease, his eyes half-closed, as if basking in the warmth of the attention.

The first citizen to approach was an elderly woman, her face etched with the stories of a lifetime. She shuffled forward, clutching a bouquet of sunflowers, her eyes filled with a mixture of awe and reverence. A guard nodded, and she was permitted to enter the enclosure.

Slowly, tentatively, she reached out a gnarled hand and touched his arm. Stalin's eyes fluttered open, and he gave her a nod of acknowledgment. "Comrade," he murmured, his voice surprisingly gentle.

"Comrade Stalin," she whispered, her voice trembling with emotion. "Thank you. For everything." She leaned down and pressed a kiss to his cheek, her frail hand lingering on his skin. He closed his eyes, a small sigh escaping his lips.

The next was a young pioneer, his eyes wide with excitement. He carried a banner emblazoned with the slogan, "Stalin is Our Sunshine!" With youthful exuberance, he rushed forward and, with the guard's encouragement, began to gently stroke Stalin's hair.

"Comrade Stalin, you're so…shiny!" he exclaimed, his fingers running through the thick strands. "Like a well-polished samovar!"

Stalin chuckled, a bright sound that sent a ripple of delight through the crowd. "Ah, yes," he said, his voice laced with amusement. "A samovar, indeed. Keeping the revolution warm, one cup at a time."

As the day wore on, the line grew longer, each citizen eager to have their moment with the collectivized leader. A burly factory worker rubbed his calloused hand across Stalin's broad shoulders, murmuring words of gratitude for the Five-Year Plan. A blushing schoolgirl held a flower to his face, giggling as he pretended to sneeze. A grizzled veteran, his chest covered in medals, told tales of bravery and sacrifice, his hand resting on Stalin's knee.

As dusk began to settle, Stalin closed his eyes, a contented smile on his lips, and surrendered himself to the adoring touch of the masses, his body and soul now the property of the collective.

[jocrude]

"Drwoned Session-Nikolai Bukharin"

Apparently, they're a dark folk group from Copenhagen. A great, melancholy track with husky baritone vocals. Seems to recall Old Bolshevik and victim of the Moscow Trials, Nikolai Bukharin, languishing in prison.

Bukharin was a high-ranking Bolshevik during the revolution, and an important comrade of Stalin in the power struggle following Lenin's death. He supported Stalin's Centre against Trotsky's Left Opposition and was instrumental in formulating the theory of "Socialism In One Country", a vital part of what would become Stalinist theory. Nonetheless, due to certain disagreements with Stalin's policies he would fall from Stalin's good graces, and was eventually imprisoned, beaten, and forced to confess and incriminate many other old Bolsheviks (apart, of course, from Stalin and his allies), during the Great Purge.

He would communicate with his old Comrade from prison via letters:

> If I'm to receive the death sentence, then I implore you beforehand, I entreat you, by all that you hold dear, not to have me shot. Let me drink poison in my cell instead (let me have morphine so that I can fall asleep and never wake up). For me, this point is extremely important. I don't know what words I should summon up in order to entreat you to grant me this as an act of charity. After all, politically, it won't really matter, and, besides, no one will know a thing about it. But let me spend my last moments as I wish. Have pity on me!

He asked his wife be spared and Stalin initially agreed, but she was sent to a labour camp. Bukharin was shot. His last letter to Stalin stated:

"Koba, why do you need me to die?"

Calling Stalin by his old nickname, Koba, used during the early days of the party. Stalin would keep this letter in his desk until he died.

[the-outer-topic]

A Studio in ComStar - Legal Joust - Scene 8-1

The first broken lance

LIVE BROADCAST ON THE COMSTAR NEWS NETWORK – FEBRUARY 13, 3025 ComStar Legation Compound, City of Atreus, planet Atreus, Commonwealth of Marik, Free Worlds League (Terran Standard Time: 22:23) Elapsed Runtime: 1 hour, 23 minutes

LEFARGE (rising sharply)

I present the charge of seditious speech — the deliberate incitement of unrest and division within the Free Worlds League. Starkov is about to publicly vindicate a known traitor to the Captain-General. This is rebellion, dressed in vintage uniform and camera lights.

CONSUL (measured) Director Lefarge, we are on neutral ground. The ComStar Legation is extraterritorial under interstellar law. Mister Starkov has said nothing criminal — yet.

LEFARGE (coldly) Broadcasting hostile propaganda is an act of interference, Consul, infringing the Communication Protocol of 2787 about mutual non-interference in domestic affairs. Whether you claim neutrality or not, the League government will not tolerate open glorification of civil war criminals. We reserve the right to act accordingly. And we have the precedent of 2819 to claim extradition!

STARKOV (shaking head, fiddling with baton) I am gone for just ten years and one day for an errand, and when I return, I find that in the Free Worlds League they are trying to arrest people not for what they have said, but what they might say, what have we become, the Capellan Confederation?

(crowd murmurs, dismayed)

LEFARGE (firm, not amused) Very well. Say what you have to say, and we will find something to arrest you.

STARKOV That reminds me of the Soviet saying from Stalin's purges time: "Был бы человек, а статья найдется":

'If there's a suspect, a crime will be found.'

LEFARGE (seething) You’re mocking this chamber, we will wait to do you justice.

STARKOV You mock justice, milord. And if you want to wait, you better get a seat. (smirks) Look at the time on that screen (points with baton) It's past 2200 hours. You see, your precious arrest warrant — it expires at midnight, yes?

I know nothing about politics, but once per chance, while waiting at the dentist I came across some political news about Parliament debate and a word caught my attention. It was "filibuster". I found itstrange, what had to do pirates with politics?, so I looked that up and understood. It was like a delaying action. Like holding a bridge while your comrades regroup.

I know how to do that. I can talk during the interview about old war stories, horror tales from my travels to the Periphery and raunchy anecdotes from my leave at Kooken's Pleasure Pit.

Like Scheherazade. You know that one, don’t you? The Rimsky-Korsakov music? It got the name from the tale were she talked her way out of execution by telling stories. One night at a time. I think I can manage one.

(Starkov turns toward the camera as the audience murmurs, stunned by the turn of events.)

STARKOV Shall we begin?