net/global/http:co.na/uchronia/forum/off-topic/political/
Thread: “Conspiracies V: This Time It’s Personal”
Krishna: Was watching Hughes History to watch a doc about the two Grand Tour probes, and there was an ad for the newest episode of “History’s Greatest Secrets…Revealed!” This one is apparently about how Stalin was shot by a “web of conspiracy that went to the top of the Workers’ Communist Party”.
Apparently, it’s one of those shows. Hope Sean Cinneide makes an appearance!
KillerCheng: Every time I thought that the Stalin conspiracies died down, it pops back up again.
It is, however, incredibly entertaining to see the straws that some theories grasp to come to their conclusions, especially with the events surrounding Stalin’s death.
Though to be fair, quite a lot of people, both in the Soviet Union and the greater Comintern, either had very justifiable reasons to want him dead, or would be far better off with him out of the picture. Even then, who would have time for conspiracies in the middle of a war, and especially during a battle as dire as the Battle of Moscow?
Krishna: I mean, both sides built atom bombs and not a word leaked out of either.
KillerCheng: That is true, though the creation of and secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons is a natural result of building something incredibly powerful and not wanting the other side to know the finer details. That’s different from trying to point to several events coinciding at a precise point in a chaotic environment and calling it a deliberate act. It’s a very common thing among most of the theories I’ve seen, running the gamut of Luna and Mars landing hoaxers, flat-earthers, and the tin-foil hat wearing Illuminati nuts, and that’s not getting into my own rant on the damned Time Cube nonsense.
SolomaniCommissar: Oh shit are we talking about Stalin conspiracies? I think my favorite - and probably most brain-melting - one was some insane pseudo-Strasserite from somewhere in the Balkans saying that Stalin actually went into hiding to weed out “Anglo-American revisionism” and “restore a proper, orthodox Eurasian-Leninist line in the ComIntern.” He never explained if it worked or not lmao.
KillerCheng: I think I physically felt the last few braincells I had spontaneously combust upon reading that. And I thought the whole thing with the landmine was pushing it. Then again, I may have managed to blank out one of those theories that tied itself to the Time Cube.
SolomaniCommissar: This guy was in half of my engineering courses at Polytechnic. I think he got kicked out for calling in a bomb threat or something.
Oh my god I fucking love the Time Cube Guy, but thats getting off topic lol.
KillerCheng: Sucks that you had to deal with him for any amount of time. But back on topic, I mention the Landmine theory because it’s one of those theories that assumes that everything was pre-planned in some way, not accounting for such things as the material conditions of being in war, among other things. Like, how would anyone know the precise location where Stalin would stand, beyond being at the front for morale boosting?
TheTimewalkingComrade: The degree of pre-planning would have to be utterly precise for such a thing to even remotely succeed, mind you. And that’s excluding a whole plethora of factors that could have gone wrong. Take for example, someone else triggering the mine. And the General Secretary is merely blown away by the blast, shaken but unhurt.
Krishna: How did all this Stalin business start anyways? Assassinations are always covered in conspiracy nonsense (Foster, Nixon, Lee, Innocent), but there seems to be a lot of conspiracy around this particular one.
AVeryTrueDemocrat : From my reading, there were conspiracies about Stalin’s death from just after the war ended. It was mainly low-level Soviet Army guys and some anti-American authors who originally pushed it as a general American conspiracy to eliminate Stalin and his allies like Beria in favor of moderates like Molotov who were “more malleable” to American needs.
It really didn’t gain much currency until the 1960’s, when two big events happened. Nixon is almost killed by a failed rugby player and Comintern intervenes in Albania. The Nixon assassination attempt spurs the Commission lead by Sean Cinneide, then Chairman of the Military Collegium. The Commission releases a report about the assassination that some are suspicious of. Some then accuse Cinneide of being in on a Party conspiracy. They then get their hands on his 1960 memoir, where he mentions being around the area where Stalin had died around the time Stalin died.
Some on the New Left spread it. National Communists amplify it, and that’s at least how Cinneide enters the picture.
KillerCheng: So like nearly every other conspiracy theory, it stems from bigotry, elitism, and reactionary beliefs?
Well, there’s also the thing of Stalin having been quite an influential figure before keeling, but yeah.
Krishna: What exactly did Cinneide’s memoirs say?
EtriganTDemon: Calling it a “memoir” is a stretch. It was his wartime journal, which is why it is viewed as a primary source. He was in the area, and he had noted that he had seen a group of people nearby, who he assumed was a small group of Party members and military personnel. He filed it with his commanding officer, who said that they were already evacuated. He never mentions Stalin by name or even that he had seen them when he started firing.
ElricofMelniboné: Of course he would say he wasn’t there! He was probably told not to put it down or they took it out before he was published.
The German spotter Dietrich Dohl observed Stalin and Cinneide within a short distance of each other right before the death.
EtriganTDemon: No, he didn’t. He reported he saw a large group of people in the area, that appeared to be prominent party members and military leaders. He didn’t mention Stalin at all. He reported also seeing a soldier nearby who looked vaguely like Joseph P. Kennedy. There’s no way of making a definite ID from that distance, and also, there’s a possibility he might’ve seen someone else.
Anyway, Dohl’s story is just used by both Cinneide and German intentional proponents.
MartinTheMartian : My favorite conspiracy theory surrounding Stalin’s death (courtesy of the lovely twats at the Communist Party of the Entente Cordiale) is that Stalin was assassinated by a “revisionist clique” with the express purpose of weakening the USSR and the international communist movement by “instituting weak leadership that would be unable to adequately combat global capitalism” as well as “degenerating Stalin’s strict social standards and discipline, thus ensuring capitalist infiltration of Soviet society and government”, stopping just short of throwing anti-semitic dogwhistles on top of it. Goddamn it, the CPEC is completely deranged.
TheTimewalkingComrade: For Lenin’s and Deb’s sake, spare me that bullshit. This is the point where it degenerates into political mudslinging, character assassination and Americophobic vitriol-throwing, which is practically a tradition in the CPEC.
KillerCheng: I think it’s just a thing at this point that these kinds of conspiracies lean heavily towards thinly veiled bigotry on some level, unless it’s the (Indonesia? Italy? Myanmar?) thing of everything being true all at once and done with a comical level of incompetence.
TheYugoslavJovian: Conspiracy theories are indicative of at least a small degree of false consciousness. I.e. individuals understand that there’s something wrong with society but instead of accepting the complex fact about how capitalism exploits people and how that exploitation isn’t readily visible in favor of simplistic “this group of people is inherently evil and and the cause of everything” regardless of how little sense it makes.
UncleLev’sFootlong: In that sense, it is easier to deflect people away from the root causes in favor of throwing your chosen targeted group of the week under the bus as the scapegoat, as that requires less effort to comprehend?
Cheka: “Conspiracy theory”?
Don’t lump us in with those Luna and Mars landing hoaxers, flat-earthers, and antivaxxers.
The record of American social-imperialism is well attested to. American ultras supported deviationists throughout the 30s, including their attempts to seize power from the democratic Stalin government through illegal means, including collaboration with British imperialists. American “aid” came with so many strings attached that by 1938, you can pretty much say that the whole of the Soviet government was run from DeLeon DC.
And when Bolshevik patriots like Stalin tried to fight against this opportunism by renegades like Tukhachevsky and Zinoviev, who were quite patently using Americans like the rubes they were for their own purposes, you condemned it as a “Great Purge” and “extralegal murder.”
American State-Sec cadres openly admit to arranging the murder of patriots like Beria while we were fighting a war for our survival. This is attested in declassified documents from the American StateSec, collected and reviewed by esteemed academics from Harvard and Palo Alto State University[1] with no connection to “revisionists” in my country.
The Americans had their collaborators within the Party, I’ll give you that, but it tells you all you need to know that it was the bourgeois double-agent Sean Cinneide who pulled the trigger. He was a major contact with the British imperialists through his father. Is it such a stretch to believe that you would not also conspire the death of Stalin so that he might be supplanted by men like Molotov, Frunze, and Kuznetsov who were much more amiable to the American revisionist world communism?
TheThirdMan: The father Sean never spoke with again after he was abandoned in the mainland?
ElricofMelniboné: Says him. He’s a blue blood, his family was way too ingrained in the system to be really rid of his bourgeois origin.
Also, as a card-carrying member of the CPEC, I resent the notion of us being cranks or anti-semites!
The revisionists and their American masters were very good at hiding the truth. They forged the report and fudged the autopsy to place the blame on the Germans. They then installed Molotov, who began the degeneration of communism that continues to this day.
SkaelingQueen: I’m pretty sure that never happened, given the report and the autopsy are generally consistent. There were some mistakes in the autopsy and I think that’s part of where the conspiracy nonsense arises from.
TheThirdMan: Anyway, my uncle is really into this Stalin stuff, alongside Nixon conspiracies. He doesn’t believe Cinneide was involved, but rather Jane Schafer, because she was later recruited to kill Beria.
ElricofMelniboné: Yes, she was the key. The one American who was their ruthless agent against heroes like Stalin and Beria.
SkaelingQueen : Beria? Serial rapist Beria? Child rapist Beria? Murderer Beria ?
ElricofMelniboné: Lies conceived to justify the murder.
SkaelingQueen: Yeah, no, it was pretty well-documented, if you look through the post-war commissions (which you probably think are revisionist, so nevermind).
ElricofMelniboné: Americans like you get defensive when confronted with your imperialism.
SkaelingQueen: I mean, I’m Norwegian and I live in the Soviet Union now, so.
TheTimewalkingComrade: “Patriots and heroes like Beria?” Looks like I have seen it all.
By the way, this reminds me of the views of Lazar Kaganovich regarding the United Republics.
ElricofMelniboné: What are you trying to pull off here by referencing another great patriot?
TheTimewalkingComrade: Just that ” Iron Lazar ”, who was quite responsible for the 1932 famine, and also a vital cog of the Yezhovshchina, never considered the UASR in a friendly light.
His memoirs reveal the fact that he was apprehensive about the Red May Revolution in the beginning, and as the United Republics took shape, he was filled with disgust and contempt for the American communists. In the name of “preserving the internal security of the Union” , he opposed any and all measures that would make the USSR resemble the UASR more.
Thus it comes as no surprise that in the 50’s, he began demanding “a comprehensive, unbiased investigation into the circumstances leading to the untimely demise of General Secretary Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin.” He loudly proclaimed that Stalin’s death was the result of a well-planned operation by the MDSS and the MRD.
The resultant scandal led to the VKP(b) expelling him in 1957.
SkaelingQueen: Well that and all the other stuff he did supporting Stalin’s policies.
I love that he didn’t give up on this. He became a hero, Uncle Lazar amongst NatComs like GL Rockwell because he just kept up his criticisms of how America was controlling global communism. Up to his death in 1991, too.
SolomaniCommissar: An interesting trend that the Stalin Theories buck is that usually conspiracies over a Martyr Figure tend to pick figures that are ideological ciphers so they can project their agenda on them.
Which Stalin was uh.
Not.
His positions had clearly come into a degree of alignment with the Americans, with some obvious exceptions that had more to do with the conditions in the USSR at the time than Stalin’s personal politics.
I suppose it has to do with the lingering elements of the Cult of Personality and the cheese-brained nature of conspiracy theories that’s already been covered upthread.
AVeryTrueDemocrat: Notably, the conspiracy originated amongst Soviet authors (some soldiers, some Stalinists) who were very sympathetic towards Stalin and largely believed that American politics and culture was slowly dismantling and replacing traditional Russian culture or was perverting communism into a strange thing that was distant from actual workers.
As for Schafer, she wasn’t anywhere near where Stalin was killed. She was a translator and aide-de-camp for General Zhukov in one of the front headquarters.
GeneralZapata: I’ve heard of a strange possibility: Stalin wasn’t killed, and, in fact, he simply faked his death. Let me explain: there is an image of a citizen registration document during the 50’s, related to the citizens of DeLeon-Debs, that mentions the name “Joseph Steele”. The name itself it’s strange, even for a foreigner living in America. And the name sounds somewhat similar to Stalin’s name. So people started to believe in the possibility of Stalin surviving the war and simply hiding himself.
The “theory” says that, during the Battle of Moscow, Stalin accepted that he was leading the Union into its collapse; his mistakes were unforgivable, and he was already old. He wanted peace, so he negotiated secretly with Soviet and American politicians to cover his death and go to America, as long as someone in whom he had confidence became the leader of the Soviet Union. After going to America, he changed his name to “Joseph Steele” and became a citizen of DeLeon-Debs, living peacefully in his last days. The problem is that there is no living copy of the supposed document that can verify if “Joseph Steele” is a real person, and there is also no information on who was the one who posted the image and shared it originally.
NestorMakhno : I mean, even if the image was real, the name “Joe Steele” was actually not that uncommon in the 30’s and 40’s:
[DAILY WORKER NEWSPAPER DATED “APRIL 6TH, 1936” SHOWING JOSEPH STALIN MEETING A SHORT, BALD MAN. CAPTION: “JOSEPH STALIN MEETS JOE STEELE”]
Stalin was admired enough that some changed their names to an Anglicized version.
EtriganTDemon : I think the main driver of this conspiracy theory was that the initial report of Stalin’s death was fairly vague. Just a general “killed by an errant German shell”. A lot of the details don’t match the autopsy that was declassified after the war or eyewitness accounts, which themselves varied. Some say he died from the shrapnel, some said that he was killed by a heart attack brought on by the attack (both the report and autopsy say it was the shrapnel). Even the artillery reports varied a lot. People will say that it was definitely German artillery. The evidence seems to suggest that, but there’s no real way of knowing, especially with the fact the initial report didn’t mention whether the shell was definitely a German shell, just that it was likely a German shell.
Ultimately, we won’t really know whether Stalin’s death was intentional, if there was a conspiracy, even if it was just a spur-of-the-moment thing they covered up. The fog of war, memory, the confusion. It’s hard to say how or why Stalin was killed, just that he was.
MasterD: Sheeple! Only I know how Stalin truly died:
Nobody shot him, his head just did that!
[1] Stanford *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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