A fabulous soporific horror book.

[NNadir]

I'm a chronic insomniac, but I just found a great tool for going to sleep which isn't pharmaceutical.

I remember when I was 18, having my first college adventure, the arguments between the Trotskyites and the Leninists in the student center, with a few Maoists thrown in the mixture just for fun.

It was New York; what can I say?

I had no idea whatsoever what it was all about, having been raised to think a commie was a commie, and being something of a Rube, it all seemed so excitingly sophisticated. I never did learn to tell the difference.

Eventually arguing over Trotsky and Lenin fell out fashion, thankfully, but in the back of my mind, as an old man, I found myself wondering, what the hell all that passionate stupidity was all about. I mean, I knew it was stupid somehow, but never knew why.

Lately I've been reading Dmitri Volkogonov's Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy. Volkogonov was a Soviet Colonel General who was charged with psychological warfare, and who, given access to the Soviet archives before the fall of the Soviet Union, became a historian. When he died, donated his papers to the US Library of Congress.

It's fascinating, because it gives a behind-the-scenes account of the rise of Stalin who, by aligning himself with Lenin's dead body, defeated Trotsky via the duplicitous manipulations of the weather vane duo Zinoviev and Kamanev who, as sophisticates, felt they could manipulate and control the rise of either Stalin or Trotsky. It was a bad bet. Zinoviev and Kamanev were executed by Stalin in the 1936 Purges.

However, one cannot read Soviet history, especially as it involves Soviet Marxist theology/"theory" without eventually thinking of conversing with Brezhnev about wonderful Soviet tires made of concrete and licorice. Three of four pages, tops, and your eyes are heavy. By the fifth page, you're asleep. Better than Ambien, safer too.

The rise of Stalin is, of course, a horror story, and one feels trepidation because you kind of know the ending, but it is fascinating because Stalin rose by seeming reasonable. I'm coming up on the great Ukrainian famine. It's scary, if one can stay awake through it.

I'm just getting to the point where we learn of "Socialism in one country," of which I've heard in reference to Stalin, but I never actually understood the background and how it differed from Trotskyism.

I wish I was 18 again, and could join in the fun in the student center.

I wouldn't care, but I do need to sleep in order to work well.

[Ferrets are Cool]

1. Good read. Yes, I wish I was 18 again too...

but only if I knew what I know now.

It would put me to sleep too. I read dialog driven epic fantasy, and while I much appreciate history, I can never read about it for long periods.

[Cirque du So-What]

2. I found a much different literary work highly soporific

Herman Hesse’s last published novel, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game. I wanted so badly to obtain something from this work, but it put me to sleep after reading only a few pages. It took around three weeks to get through it, counting all the times I had to re-read what I’d slogged through previously and then forgotten.

[NNadir]

3. I don't really speak or read German well, but I know enough to tell...

...that reading Hesse in translation is falling in love with a woman you've only seen in a chador.

I apologize if that seems crude, but it's the only analogy that comes to mind.

For me, the preface to Demian is one of the most beautiful evocations of life I have ever read, and I refer to it often, but only when I read it in German.

I am very happy that my youngest son spends his spare time learning a number of languages. I wish, when I was his age, that I'd done the same.