Waiting For That Rocket

So, here it goes. A friend of mine, a man I was close friends with in college, put up a Lifehack post on the Book of Face about “13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.” Included on the list are things like “they don’t dwell on the past,” “they don’t fear alone time,” “they don’t waste energy on things they can’t control,” and, really, the list goes on –at least for another nine bullet points.

I have a few points of my own to bring up about this woman’s list of things that “Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.” My first observation is that she is obviously a woman that doesn’t suffer from major (maybe any) mental health issues. If she did, she would recognize that sometimes, when chemicals are misfiring in our brains, we can’t help what we feel.

I’m a fairly bright individual, I recognize that my life is some kind of cushy. I have friends and family that support me, love me, take care of me and yell at me (if that’s what I need). But when I’m in a low spot, it doesn’t matter how often I hear it or how often friends and family say it – I don’t feel it. In fact, I’m incapable of feeling it and certainly don’t feel I deserve it.

She also sets up this list as thirteen dichotomous points thereby not helping anyone, anywhere. “If you feel sorry for yourself, you’re not mentally strong”; “if you’re afraid of being alone, you’re not mentally strong” – you get the point. Here’s the thing with mental health issues, they’re not something a person can will out of existence.

There are enough stigmas associated with mental health issues, do we really have to stigmatize them even further? People don’t choose to be depressed, AD(H)D or suffer anxiety. It’s insulting to imply that if you find yourself doing any of the things on the list (as opposed to not doing them) that you are mentally weak. Because trust me, when I think back to all the times I didn’t commit suicide, didn’t self-harm, didn’t give up – despite how badly I’ve wanted to – I don’t see myself as mentally weak. So far, I’ve successfully beaten it back, and that makes me mentally strong, but feeling the feelings to begin with doesn’t make me weak.

1937 saw the expulsion of many veterans of the NKVD (that is to say the Soviet Secret Police), including Yagoda – the man who initially led the NKVD – and his staff for “breaches of soviet legality.” (Conquest, The Great Terror, 341)

We’ll leave behind, for the purposes of this post, the incongruity of Stalin and Co. accusing anyone of breaching Soviet legality and touch on the fact Yagoda, and many of his senior staffers, had started as Stalin’s henchmen. While they weren’t the first to enforce famine or send people to prison camps – and obviously they weren’t the last – they had almost always toed the line for Stalin. It wasn’t until Yagoda started being privately and publicly skeptical of Stalin’s actions that his name came up to be shipped out.

Reading what happened in the Great Purges of 1937 and ’38 has been interesting because, while they absolutely affected every person and family in the the USSR – a lot of research particularly in the first half of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, focuses on how the purges affected the power classes. However, as Conquest will say – as any Sovietologist will say, really – while the purges were focused on Party leadership, the state policies that governed the rest of the country were equally heinous.

State enforced famine, millions of men, women and children deported to prisons and camps as punishment for asking for more [insert your noun of choice]. Millions killed because they “might” be a threat to Stalin and/or the State – or because they didn’t see Stalin and the State as synonymous. It is sad just how accurate the phrase, “beatings will continue until morale improves” was in the Soviet Union – particularly during the Stalinist years.

In light of this – in light of the absurdly hysterical posturing by Stalin; in light of the unmitigated terror experienced by Russians and other denizens of the USSR from 1925 to 1953 (and, yes, beyond) – instead of complaining about all the areas of opportunity the United States has, instead of complaining about this party, that party, or that other party, just be thankful for all the things we don’t have to be worried about. There are, for sure, a lot of things I think we would all change about this country – not that they’re the same things from person to person, but there are a lot of things. Let’s just be grateful we can grouse and complain about the things we would want to change and this party, that party, or the other party.

Happy Fourth of July, friends. Be grateful, everyday but today especially, that we can bitch and complain to our heart’s content. Stalin is no longer in power (or alive, for that matter) and the USSR has long since disintegrated, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still far too many countries out there where people are punished – severely – or even killed for speaking up and out.

We have it so good here. Let’s remember that.

I did it. I got sucked in by the banner ads calling out, “SIXTEEN DOLLARS FOR NYTIMES HOME DELIVERY AND ALL INTERNET ACCESS WOO!” The problem is, in my haste I didn’t stop to look at the asterisk or the small print. Yeah, $4 a week for the first month and then it goes up from there. Okay. So, now I’m paying $33 a month for a Sunday delivery subscription. With a physical paper that I almost never read (I usually leave it for the folks at Bard to read) and unlimited articles and access to the NYTimes archives and my phone, on my tablet and on my computer. It’s an historian’s wet dream – near unfettered access to contemporary news coverage of some of the biggest world events. Yes, I have been poking in and about to find out what one of the best news organizations in the world was saying about some of the most horrific global events.

But I feel guilty. One, hundreds of printed pages that inevitably get recycled or composted without actually being read. Two, I have the paper delivered to my coffee shop since I spend far more time there than I do at home. Three, it’s not inexpensive. High value, but I wonder – since I’m not reading the physical paper – if it would make sense to drop down to solely a digital subscription. I am still left with the question of whether I do the phone/nytimes.com ($15), tablet/nytimes.com ($20) or the phone and tablet with nytimes.com subscription ($35).

I like the idea of saving money. But I like the idea of having unfettered digital access.

This is unquestionably the definition of a #firstworldproblem. I live in the lap of information luxury. Nobody is telling me what I can or can’t look at and I won’t be arrested based solely on what I choose to research or read. Yet, I can still think of other – better – ways to spend twenty not-claimed dollars a month.

What say you, Interwebs? What do you think about all this?

As discussed previously, I’m writing a book about Stalin. Right now I’m caught up principally in the Great Purges of 1937-38. Robert Conquest‘s The Great Terror, often perceived as one of the preeminent books on the Purges under Stalin, is what I’ve been slowly making my way through in small bites before going to work in the mornings.

To oversimplify a pretty horrific five years (1934-39) Stalin in his ever paranoid wisdom was working on getting rid of anyone who he felt threatened by. Men or women – if you were a part of the Party hierarchy you weren’t safe. Particularly if at some point you had spoken out against decisions that Stalin had made or was making. Stalin had a slew of musclemen who weren’t afraid to brutalize and/or murder and/or psychologically terrify anyone Stalin said to. The vast majority of the men and women arrested during this time eventually caved, admitting to whatever “crime” that Stalin wanted them to admit to. As a result the accused quickly found themselves on their way to the GULAGS (that is to say the network of prison labor camps) or the execution block. However, a couple important movers and shakers didn’t get to either place. They ended up dying by their own hand – although speculation abounds that they were assisted along the way.

The question I’m left with is this: You are speciously accused of a crime. You are tortured to within an inch of your life. You are pressured in every inhuman way possible to confess to a crime you didn’t commit. Your family is threatened. Your friends are threatened. You’re told there’s no end in sight to the torture that will be inflicted upon you if you don’t confess. As a result of these insurmountable pressures, there were some men who chose to take their own lives. Maybe they knew they were going to die, and they wanted some agency so they could control the circumstances in which they were dying. Maybe they just steadfastly refused to confess to a crime they didn’t commit. Either way, they took their own lives. But if you were going to be dead anyway, can taking your own life be considered suicide? Frankly, I’m not sure.

Some coffee shop friends say it doesn’t matter, suicide is suicide regardless of the circumstances. But I can’t help but feel Ordzhonikidze and some others took the higher road. I feel the same about terminally ill patients who say, “I don’t want to go out like this.”

In a review I read by E.A. Rees in an academic journal he says, “If the alternative to suicide is being brutally murdered, is it still suicide?” Frankly, I don’t have an easy answer. I don’t think there is an easy answer. Nor should there be when talking about the death of a human being. I’m interested in what you all think. Can you say that someone taking their own life in lieu of being brutally murdered is “suicide”?

Newsflash: I’m a love-all-the-people liberal. I mean, not so much the pedophiles, murders and rapists, but, you know. everybody else who doesn’t necessarily fall into the stereotypical mold of what it means to be male or female. Especially because what does it have to do with me?

One of my faves at the coffee shop showed me this article about an insanely talented 22-year old basketball player who’s already played in the Olympics, lead her college team to the NCAA championships, runs roughshod over the competition in the WNBA and is the first openly gay athlete to sign an endorsement deal with Nike. And, oh yeah, she’s freaking gorgy. Statuesque, built, and so much confidence and dignity that it’s no surprise at all that Nike signed her. This led to a discussion between the aforementioned fave and I about friends we have who make us sick with their perfection.

This led me to hunt down on Facebook someone that I knew in college. Back in the day, JJ was a cross-dresser/drag queen. The dude had the best legs on campus. Seriously. It was fun to watch him strut campus in his mini skirts. It might have been just the people that I often found myself hanging around with, but it was always nice to just watch JJ walk (no, strut really is the best word for it) and, despite being isolated in the middle of Northern New York, there weren’t cat calls or pejorative name calling or things like that (that I could hear). Granted, I guess there’s a difference between the liberal oasis-ness of a college campus and beyond.

I digress.

Since graduation, JJ has done the full transition. JJ is now Jasmine. And she is still slammin’. Still the best legs around. And, from the limited pictures I’ve seen, she’s rocking the model scene out in sunny Cali (I think). One of the pictures she has posted on her FB page is a shot of one of her model pictures in an article talking about a lingerie line designed specifically for MtF women.

The lead in talks about this great line created by a “transgender woman.” Which is awesome. Except I long for a day that that doesn’t need to be the opening sentence.  Why do there have to be headlines like, “First female CEO for Yahoo!”, “First Female Secretary of State,” “First African-American President,” “First Gay Professional Athlete.” What does it matter what sort of plumbing someone has or what pigment of melanin is in someone’s skin, who they sleep with at night or how many people they sleep with in the course of a night or week?

Full disclosure: I’m writing a book. Not a #nanowrimo, fiction sort of book, but a non-fiction book. One that I think needs to be written. I’m writing a book about Stalin.

Since the majority of you have either read this blog, seen my Twitter, heard me geek out in real life, it should be no shock to any of you that I have spent much of the past ten years being incredibly fascinated by Stalin. I even (kind of sort of) wrote a paper about him my senior year of college.*

Why am I here now, planning on writing a book about one of the worst despots in history? Well. Let me ask you a question (this is my elevator pitch, so be ready): what do you know about Stalin? My friends are all exceedingly bright. Many were humanities majors in college, many have gone on to attain higher degrees (JD, MA, PhD), many are just naturally curious. When I’ve posed that question to them they had the same blank look I imagine you’re wearing right now.

When I was growing up – post-Cold War, mind you – the USSR was the big, bad wolf. Alluded to as being “not good” (dirty Commies), but no real detail that I can remember. And Stalin? He came up twice in my secondary history books (certainly didn’t come up before high school): he was Lenin’s successor and he rescued the allies during World War II.**

So. Here I am. Writing a book.

Well, right now I’m in the research phases. Which means I’m reading many journal articles and books. Again, if you follow my Twitter account or are friends with me on Facebook, I’ve been spending a lot of time kvetching about the methodology that some of these “scholars” are using (for example, Sheila Fitzpatrick writes an article based almost solely on contemporary Pravda articles).

What’s been irking me the past couple days, as I work my way through Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (2008 edition), is he often holds up what he’s finding in the now-opened Soviet Archives as truth. While you can certainly round out and build up more solid conclusions based on information being released from the archives, I am having a really tough time with authors and scholars saying, “well, this OGPU/NKVD/KGB [different generations of Soviet Secret Police] file said it, so it must be true.”

I get that with the release of many millions of documents hitherto secret in the USSR in the 1980s (and in Russia in the 1990s) there was,and is, a lot more information available about what happened in the USSR, particularly under Stalin. I think that we should absolutely be using these files to round out what we have known and to draw more conclusions about the mechanics of what was going on.

What’s giving me pause, and making me so uncomfortable, is that many scholars are saying, “Well, this NKVD file says it, so it must be true!” This seems to disregard the fact that the NKVD lied about stuff. That the Russian government continues to be secretive about what happened back in the day. That many of the most dire directives and actions were never actually written down. 

We absolutely need to take into account the files that have come to light in the last twenty years. We absolutely need to listen to the contemporary voices who are, only now, starting to feel secure enough to speak out. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t still have a healthy skepticism about what the government is reporting. Chances are better than even we are never going to have a complete picture about what happened in Russia in the 1930s and 40s.

That isn’t to say we should stop trying to see the complete picture – we dishonor the memory of Stalin’s millions and millions of victims if we stop. I just wish that scholars would stop saying, “Because this official document says it, it must be true.”

*I’m still sorry the paper wasn’t better, Dr. Gabriel!

**At least I want to think he came up twice. I do remember him coming up in terms of WWII because I remember the picture of him, Churchill and Roosevelt, but I may just be hoping that my history classes touched upon the Russian Revolution. Which is to say, I might be making that up.