Soviet Thaw - How Stalinism Ended - Cold War DOCUMENTARY

Video Sponsored by Ridge. Check them out here: ridge.com/tcw Use my code “TCW” for 10% off your order and for an entry to win a Hennessey Ford Bronco or $75K through September 30th! *US Only*
Our historical documentary series on the history of the Cold War continues with a video on the Soviet Thaw as we see how Stalinism ended in the USSR through Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Taiwan Under the Kuomintang Dictatorship: • Taiwan Under the Kuomi...
What Happened to the German and Japanese POWs?: • What Happened to the G...
Operation Paperclip: • Operation Paperclip - ...
German Expulsions: • German Expulsions Afte...
Soviet Education System: • Soviet Education Syste...
How Khrushchev Fed the Soviet People: • How Khrushchev Fed the...
Novocherkassk Massacre 1962: • Novocherkassk Massacre...
Soviet Tourism: • Soviet Tourism: How di...
Soviet Passport System: New Serfdom or Reform?: • Soviet Passport System...
Kaliningrad: How Russia Got a Stronghold in Europe: • Kaliningrad: How Russi...
How the Soviets Won the Early Space Race: • How the Soviets Won th...
Soviet Television and Radio: • Soviet Television and ...
Top-5 Myths About the Soviet Union: • Top-5 Myths About the ...
Support us on Patreon: / thecoldwar
KZbin membership / @thecoldwartv
✔ Merch store ► teespring.com/stores/thecoldwar
✔ Patreon ► / thecoldwar
✔ Facebook ► / thecoldwartv
✔ Instagram ► / thecoldwartv
#ColdWar #Soviet #Stalinism #Solzhenitsyn #SocialistRealism

[@TheColdWarTV]

Video Sponsored by Ridge. Check them out here: ridge.com/tcw Use my code “TCW” for 10% off your order and for an entry to win a Hennessey Ford Bronco or $75K through September 30th! **US Only**

[@AdamGhostTrapperLive]

well, you forgot to mention that Solzhenitsyn was hardcore imperialist, who rejected existence of Belarusians and Ukrainians, he minimized the leading UPA leading role in destruction of GULAG system

[@thorthewolf8801]

I remember my history teacher recommended this book to us in 11th grade maybe. Being a kid that was interested in all things communist and cold war I naturally read it. Lets see what you have to say about it!

[@stischer47]

LOL. When I was a senior in high school 64-65, my senior English paper was "The New Liberalism in Soviet Literature: The Khrushchev Year (1954-1964)". I made a B+ on it. I reworked for my college freshman year English class and made an A.

[@EntNatal]

Although factually The Gulag Archipelago hasn’t aged well (simply for being written in the 60s by a Soviet author with limited access to records), it perfectly and tragically captures the mass repression of the Soviet citizenry. Really just amazing writing.

[@kgw72]

I expected something about the Death of Stalin (the fact, not the movie) but still, very interesting. Dunno why this channel is so underrated 💪

[@christopherharmon2433]

Stalinism ended when he and Beria died, not a moment sooner.

[@joehosken3938]

What about North Korea? That's basically a Stalinist state..... and the People's Republic of China under Xi Xinping is very close to it, in all the important/repressive ways....

[@beatthegreat7020]

While the PRC is certainly a totalitarian state, that doesn't necessarily mean it's Stalinist. Stalinism, outside of the ever-present purges, is largely defined by its level of collectivization and how it deals with the outside world. In both these aspects, today's China is very different. In the case of collectivization, Stalin's Union would never allow the same kind of (relatively) privately owned businesses to operate, and certainly not on such a large scale. In terms of the outside world, Xi's China is greatly focused on trade with the outside world and with gaining influence through infrastructure projects, commercial deals, and increasingly through military bases. The Soviets under Stalin were far more insular, choosing to focus almost entirely on themselves throughout the latter 20s and earlier 30s. In fact, Stalin's doctrine of "Socialism in One Country" is the main way in which he differed from much of the Bolshevik party during the 20s. The best example of this is with the hyper-aggressive Trotskyists, who were *very* focused on exporting Communism across the globe.

[@Lightscribe225]

I don't think there is anything that can truly be called 1:1 stalinism. Even North Korea that is based around the system modeled after Stalin's Russia has its own unique brand of paranoia and one-upsmanship implemented by Kim Jong Il, so much of the work of spying and punishing "traitors" is done by the people themselves. Xi, if you absolutely need a comparison, is closer to Brezhnev or Khrushchev: not totally removing all restrictions, but not doubling down on them either.

[@joehosken3938]

@@beatthegreat7020 Obviously I would disagree with the definition of 'Stalinism' that you are using; mine being more colloquial and less economic/academic.

[@Ugly_German_Truths]

I've only read the Archipelago Gulag from Solchenizyn, but i preferred Lev Kopelev's "Chranitshy Vietshno" (retain infinitely) which has a very similar story arc but a way more approachable narrative.

[@howilearned2stopworrying508]

check out Stanislaw Lem - brilliant sci fi author and satirist - I find the Cyberiad to be as funny as anything Douglas Adams wrote. He did clever take downs of the security state but got past the censors because it was in the context of fantasy robot kings, courts, and guards.

[@berniekatzroy]

Solaris was a grear film

[@LegoLordPro]

Wonder if at some point will get some Canadian history during the cold war? Since David is Canadian, I was just curious if you have plans to talk about Canadian history at some point.

[@abchaplin]

I read /One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich/ as a 14-year-old. I felt chilled as I went through it, not that it was scary, but by the dreariness yet clarity of its depictions and the weighty oppressiveness of the camp conditions and routine. I had bought it for about two dollars through the book club that was part of the Grade 9 English programme at our high school. I had chosen it for its low price and brevity; I got more than I bargained for. I hope Solzhenitsyn got his royalty.

[@politicalridicule]

"... And grateful people The leader hears a voice: "We came Say - where is Stalin, there is freedom, Peace and majesty of the earth!” Anna Akhmatova December 1949 😄img01litfund.ru/images/lots/67/67-350-1470-3-V6248413.jpg

[@stischer47]

Unfortunately, today I'm not sure high school students of any grade would be able to buy and read such a book what with the censorship going on.

[@TheColdWarTV]

You know we mentioned in the episode that the book is available to read for free on archive.org, right?

[@ekmalsukarno2302]

The Cold War, can you make a video on Argentina during the era of Juan Peron. It would mean a lot to me if you made a video on this topic, since your audience will understand how Argentina's economy, politics and society all ended up as they are today.

[@jeffreyrodrigoecheverria2613]

I disagree, Argentina has been a disaster after there independence from Spain.

[@ekmalsukarno2302]

@@jeffreyrodrigoecheverria2613 Hold on, in what way did Argentina become a disaster immediately after its independence from Spain? Please explain to me, I really want to know.

[@jeffreyrodrigoecheverria2613]

@@ekmalsukarno2302 once Argentina got there independence (really there is no Argentina before the viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata), they became a indirect colony of England until 1940s when Juan Peron takes over who was a reaction of being a indirect colony satanic England. I could be wrong but if I am not mistaken, Argentina was important to satanic England than was Canada.

[@glendamendoza6601]

​@@ekmalsukarno2302Caudillos and Spanish colonial institution ruining the country's prospects

[@jeffreyrodrigoecheverria2613]

@@glendamendoza6601 who lied to you ?

[@brokenbridge6316]

Nice video

[@Numba003]

Well, I'm gonna have to try to read this book sometime I suppose. It sounds very intriguing. Thank you for another excellent episode (and book recommendation). God be with you out there everybody. ✝️ :)

[@Ukraineaissance2014]

I really wouldn't bother to be honest. There were far better writers in the USSR exposing the soviet system, but solzhenitsyn was so literal and bangs the reader over the head with criticisms so hard that western governments loved it, much in the same way Orwell's fiction is pushed so hard in education while ignoring the inconvenient fact he was a socialist. Solzhenitsyn was like dostoevsky with his unpleasant nationalist beliefs in the inate superiority of russians and orthodoxy but without the same talent. Pasternak and Bulgakov are far more worthwhile. Solzhenitsyn's putin love affair is also ignored. I enjoyed his book '1914' purely from a military historical point of view but I can imagine anybody without an inrerest in the minutiae of military operational history would slip into a coma reading it.

[@Numba003]

@@Ukraineaissance2014 Thank you for your recommendations.

[@dkwlin4351]

Cool!!!! Will the next episode be the story about Andrei Sakharov?😊

[@kisungyoon6662]

I have heard of his name for years, and the first time was in the 1976 US vice-presidential debate between Mondale and Dole.

[@bobdollaz3391]

I hope Eduard Norton Plays him in any upcoming biopic

[@sourabhmayekar3354]

Nice

[@wiktorberski9272]

Interesting

[@reis1185]

Please do the Cold War Olympics especially in Chess

[@RidgeWalletYT]

Cool wallet and KeyCase 💯

[@DesertAnon1295]

Last time I was this early I bumped into a Russian monk named grigori

[@CrisisMoon7]

12:52pm Dec,22,23 Friday

[@sage6211]

Do 1951 episode!

[@bigsarge2085]

Fascinating.

[@ZS-rw4qq]

I've heard he was a liar basically

[@stischer47]

Who? Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, or Solzhenitsyn?

[@ZS-rw4qq]

@@stischer47 Solzhenitsyn

[@scottkrater2131]

Because he didn't toe the party line, like a good Soviet.

[@dritzzdarkwood4727]

The thinking man's YT

[@wegder]

In 1980, the world's 17 established Marxist-Leninist states presided over roughly 1.5 billion persons (out of a total world population of approximately 4.4 billion).

[@danq.5140]

"THUMBNAIL" Is that Edward Norton in the gulag? 😅 #fightclub

[@berniekatzroy]

Love russian literature.

[@michaelporzio7384]

Solzhenitsyn"s "The Gulag Archipelago" was a very hard read, like a lot of his work. As a cautionary tale, it shows how easy it is to go from a hero to an enemy of the state in a totalitarian regime. Solzhenitsyn was not pro-west or pro-democracy but at his core was a Russian patriot. He became a cause celebre in the West in the 1970s prior to his exile. A progressive rock band "Renaissance" wrote a song about him "Mother Russia," great song worth a listen. Thanks David!

[@colindunnigan8621]

Vasily Grossman also had problems when the KGB "arrested" his manuscript for "Life and Fate." I think that was early under Brezhnev, however.

[@TheColdWarTV]

Life and Fate was submitted in 1960 and quickly rejected and the manuscripts seized. A single copy was held in secret by a friend of a friend of Grossman's and it was smuggled west in 1970, i think and then wasn't published for years after that, long after Grossman had died. Phenomenal book.

[@panoskatrin4910]

​​@@TheColdWarTV you are doing anti communist propaganda without even being aware of how ridiculous you are, you dont even know what "stalinism" is, this isnt a history channel its a propaganda one

[@williamreang7923]

The cold War subsided in the... Plz reply...

[@beepboop204]

[@alfrancisbuada2591]

When Stalin left thinks started to sink after that

[@1joshjosh1]

I never heard of any of those authors.

[@Mrgunsngear]

🇺🇸

[@dutchvanderlinde5004]

👍

[@davidpeniel7168]

You didn’t mention Dostoyevsky, F for failure

[@user-nm6op6uq9u]

Somebody, please, tell him finally that Solzhenitsyn's maculature is fiction.

[@mohammedsaysrashid3587]

A wonderful introduction of social realizim literatures under Soviet regime...it seems to me they allowed for hype and political propagandist purposes. When economical production focuses on quantitive of commodious and social services without qualified standards due to the lack of sufficient financial coverages, both producers and consumers are suffering from material and mental prosecutions besides forbidding legal, passive competitions of producing centers for producing much higher quality goods 👍🏻. Forbidding construction opinions and practicing by condemning evolutionary minded as destructive critics... all kinds of totalitarian regimes are practicing the same horrible controller of marketing, producers, and consumers besides directed literature ... Thank you for sharing

[@stischer47]

Where did you copy your post from?

[@fluffypants]

Good

[@owlthemolfar4690]

Thank you for the video! Ah, yes, thd Social Realism. My grandparent's house had a lot of that. Half of the page was enough to put me to sleep. Need to say there were some ww2 memoirs - still a lot of propaganda but some history to find too. Also, a few books by Bulgarian authors, who have much less propaganda and some just wrote about the nature of the country; completely excluding any mention of soviet or comunist system. I think my mother still has some Samizdat of Strugatsky brothers somewhere.

[@chrisvickers7928]

I have not read the boo0k, but I did see the movie in the early 70's at my universities theatre. It made me happy to be in Canada and not the Soviet Union.

[@jackiecooper9439]

Say whatever u want. Stalinism kept the USSR afloat.

[@stischer47]

And you could say Hitler did the same for Germany and Mussolini got the trains to run on time.

[@vaultsjan]

Solzhenitsyn was Russian nationalist/imperialist to the core. It just happened to be he disagreed/got swallowed by communist repressions. He was his days Igor Girkin (minus actually shooting down passenger plane).

[@egertroos-qh7hw]

Yeah

[@PaulSandersonYup]

Lmao, who would rather win a Ford Bronco™ than $75,000 in cash!? That's a no-brainer. Perhaps that's the answer as to who would rather the Bronco, the no-brainers.

[@TexasNationalist1836]

Do you have any recommendations for good reading material or documentaries on the Holodomor

[@qZbGmYjS4QusYqv5]

Start with Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Any work of James E. Mace you can found

[@TheColdWarTV]

Anna Applebaum's Red Famine, Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, Philip Wolny's Holodomor: The Ukrainian-Famine Genocide Start there.

[@konstantinkelekhsaev302]

@@TheColdWarTV So more propaganda. Got it 👌

[@konstantinkelekhsaev302]

@@Hobbes4ever And I thought this a history channel, not a shameless propaganda retranslator

[@stischer47]

@@konstantinkelekhsaev302 Ah yes, vatniks are here.

[@sandris5997]

Red beast of Revelation...

[@nodirips_8537]

The thaw was short lived. Solzhenytsin aknowledges that in the 1960s the camps are still on. The inmates of the GULAG write to the author and their message is clear everything remains the same. After 1964 Brezhnev will return to hold a tight grip on the expression of dissent.

[@TexasNationalist1836]

Get ready for the Tankies

[@neoesm]

Ok

[@AdamGhostTrapperLive]

well, you forgot to mention that Solzhenitsyn was hardcore imperialist, who rejected existence of Belarusians and Ukrainians, he minimized the leading UPA leading role in destruction of GULAG system

[@gart7511]

Based

[@WarandNews]

@@gart7511agreed, very based

[@ilyabenkhin8491]

That's bullshit people who went to the gulag got better living conditions better food than you do at a Nazi labor camp it's also depends on what you did like desert your troop in time of war political crime criminal offense it also depends on how many sentence they gave you on major of offense committed

[@HainiDjokovic1995]

So are you communist sympathizer? Then I would like to recommend you to emigrate to North Korea or Cuba. China is no longer practicing socialism economically even the Chinese Communist Party is still in power

[@victorvonsteuben1728]

Lol, soviet apologist

[@sibaprasadchakraborty9059]

Their is no word ' Stalinism ' in the Marxism-Leninism. Beloved Comrade Joseph Stalin once said that he is a student of Respected Lenin. After the death of great Stalin, Imperialists and their agent Kruschev and his gang discovered this word.

[@stischer47]

You vatniks are funny. The "great" Stalin. I guess you could say the "great" Hitler was a student of the "Respected" Mussolini.

[@TheLastSliceOfPie]

Please stop promoting Solzhenitsyn. I am begging y'all. The dude was a raging anti-semite who was into the judeo-bolshevik conspiracy theory. It was pretty central to his views on communism. Also his own ex-wife even said The Gulag Archipelago was "mostly fiction" if I recall correctly. Far from a good source about anything related to this subject.

[@bobbyokeefe4285]

Yeah,I'm sure his ex-wife would have nothing but good things to say about him.

[@Souker69]

stories from Kolima by Varlam Salamov makes Gulag Archipelago look like an easy read.

[@TheOwlofAthens]

Stalinism, weird synonym for communism.

[@qZbGmYjS4QusYqv5]

Stalinism, the only model of socialism which worked for a little while until the western money dried up

[@josepnebotrius872]

But, repression and Communist came side by side.

[@jakef.7126]

It's good but it is massive pity that this video is exclusively about russian language culture. Nothing about Ukrainian and Baltic cinema after the Thaw, Ukrainian poetic cinema, the effects of the Thaw in the Caucasus, Central Asia, occupied Eastern Europe. Conflating Soviet culture with russian Soviet culture misses out out on so much art and creativity.

[@rosswebster7877]

I'm sure it will come up in future vids. The Cold War was a 40+ year conflict, and there's a lot to cover.

[@borislavromanov8659]

Stalinism never existed but ok

[@kingofmphs]

Communism doesn’t sound to awesome. Maybe we shouldn’t try that again.👊🏼🤯🤦🏼‍♂️

[@kittycatwithinternetaccess2356]

socialism in general is terrible

[@samwill7259]

When you have to stop what people are saying or publishing, your country is failing

[@panoskatrin4910]

The gulags were prisons.Back during that time as a prisoner you were requiered to do prison labour just like any other country in the world back then, a practice that still goes on in american prisons today where the people doing the labour get almost nothing!!! It is ridiculous to demonise them most of the people after having served their time got to be able to return to soviet society and the "gulag archipelago" is considered semifiction by historians Lastly stalinism literally means nothing else than policies that took place under stalin,its not an ideology calling someone "stalinist" means nothing other than used as an insult.Marxism lennism is other hand a real ideology which the creator of this, who is not a historian doesnt know anything about it.Wikipedia articles are more objective and less anti revolutionary than this man and these are made by amateurs