Friday, July 18, 2008

History’s Mysteries

I’ve blogged many times before about the way Mao is viewed in China, and also about the way Stalin is viewed in Russia.  I was sitting in a bar one night talking to some Russians when a young gal in her 20s mentioned Stalin.

“Who is your favorite Russian from history?”

“Stalin.”

“Really?  Stalin?  You like Stalin?”

“No.  I not like Stalin, I love Stalin.”

Well, this sentiment isn’t exactly isolated.

He sent millions to their deaths in the gulag, but that has not deterred Russians from voting en masse for Josef Stalin as the face of their nation.

The Soviet tyrant and Second World War leader is battling Tsar Nicholas II for first place in The Name of Russia, a domestic version of the BBC series Great Britons. Stalin had been well ahead in the online vote until the show’s producer appealed to members of a popular Russian social networking site to back Nicholas II.

The Tsar edged in front tonight as communists and monarchists whipped up support for their candidates. Stalin has received almost 263,000 votes so far, against more than 267,000 for Nicholas II.

Lenin, the Tsar’s nemesis, was third with nearly 187,000 votes. The top dozen included Peter the Great, Pushkin, Catherine the Great, Yuri Gagarin, Boris Yeltsin and Ivan the Terrible.

Now, consider the following quote very carefully, because a similar attitude is, I think, shared by a great many Chinese.

“People remember that Stalin didn’t live for himself but for the country and the people. We see this vote as the first sign that there will be memorials to Stalin in Russia again.

“Of course there were gulags, but they did not have the widespread character that people in the West think. If they existed now, two thirds of bureaucrats would be in jail because they are so corrupt.”

This has been one of the weirdest and more fascinating aspects to living in China, being exposed to people who admire men whom the West considers genocidal maniacs.  In an odd way it’s like when I have discussions about religion with deeply religious people.  Not being religious in any sense of the word I’m continually fascinated by how people who are otherwise normal and rational in every respect can believe something that, to me, seems absolutely absurd.  Thus it is with Stalin and Mao.

I don’t get it, but there’s definitely a dynamic here, and it’s one that the West, particularly the US, had better start to understand, because there’s a whole lot of the world that views the concepts of “freedom” and “liberty” in a manner that is completely foreign to us.