
The Poignant Gulag Art by Stalin’s Doomed Meteorologist - IntronExon
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/stalins-meteorologist-gulag-drawings
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yantrams
Sad and touching story. His illustrations remind me of the Soviet children's
books[0] I grew up with as a kid.

0 [http://linkdot.link/sooviytt-prcurnnlu-childrens-
books.html](http://linkdot.link/sooviytt-prcurnnlu-childrens-books.html)

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gnarbarian
this is a great article. It's shocking how many people have never heard of
Holodomor [0]. Or the extent of Stalin's brutality long before the second
world war began.

0
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor)

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
I think part of this lies with the fact that Stalin and especially Communism
had a lot of highly placed admirers in the West. One of those was Walter
Duranty, who even won a Pulitzer Prize for for his work as the Moscow Bureau
Chief for the New York Times. He worked to deny and discredit those who tried
to tell the world about the atrocities of Stalin.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty)
[https://www.nytco.com/new-york-times-statement-
about-1932-pu...](https://www.nytco.com/new-york-times-statement-
about-1932-pulitzer-prize-awarded-to-walter-duranty/)

~~~
gnarbarian
It continues today in the social sciences:

"Overall, Marxism is a tiny minority faith. Just 3% of professors accept the
label. The share rises to 5% in the humanities. The shocker, though, is that
as recently as 2006, about 18% of social scientists self-identified as
Marxists"

[http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1...](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.html)

~~~
thedailymail
It's important to note that in the 2006 study that Caplan cites, which
reported that 18% of social scientists identified as Marxists, the other
options offered were all about political affiliation rather than economic
views (although there is certainly significant overlap between these
categories). The prevalence of self-identified Marxists in social sciences,
particuarly sociology, may reflect the important role Marx's commentaries on
the social outcomes of 19th century capitalism has had in areas like history,
sociology, and cultural studies, rather than a commitment to communist
economic structures. There are plenty of Marxist scholars who use Marx's
methods of analyzing social phenomena without subscribing to his statements
about the inevitable triumph of socialism. Marx is generally recognized as a
better diagnostician than a prescriptionist, and for fields involved in
critical analysis of social-political-economic phenomena it is not surprising
to see people who identify (politically) with his work and world view.

~~~
simula67
From the linked SlateStarCodex piece :

> Conservatives always complain that liberals “deny human nature”

> But here I have to give conservatives their due. As far as I can tell, Marx
> literally, so strongly as to be unstrawmannable, believed there was no such
> thing as human nature and everything was completely malleable.

So, it is possible Marx's economic prescription came out of his social
diagnosis

