I have finished the first two tomes of Kotkin's Stalin. Now I must wait for the third and final to be published.

The first volume (Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928) is primarily concerned with setting up the geopolitical scene around Stalin's time of birth, and then how the young Georgian revolutionary partook in the various revolutionary movements and events of the early Russian 20th century. From being a poor Georgian kid to being the undisputed leader of 1/6th of the world. From studying at a seminary, to emerging victorious in party politics.

The second volume (Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941) has Stalinism itself appear. From forced collectivization and 5 year plans to the Great Purge and to Stalin failing to see the impending German invasion. Definitely a more Stalin-centric tome than the previous, while still providing an image of what is happening in the outside world.

The Soviet project, how it was enacted, what drove it and what allowed extraordinary suffering to fall upon the Soviet people is all categorically documented. Different characters within Stalin's sphere are in effect given their own biography, while an entire plethora of revolutionaries, oppositionists, artists and scientists also have their life briefly summed up. This allows for one to see how different people interacted with the revolution and how it interacted with them.

As one would expect from such a lengthy biography dogg both books together, disregarding notes and bibliography have over 1600 pages, took me a fugging year, Stalin's character is presented in all of its contradictions. All of his virtues and evils, the events that shaped him and how he came to be the man ordering near wholesale liquidation of his loyal followers. The image it paints of Stalin is that of a man deeply committed to his cause, a man that is both an true-believer ideologue and a Machiavellian mastermind. A despot who exercised complete control over the various bodies of government and personally oversaw various projects, displaying immense industriousness and an extremely sharp mind. A man who blundered at crucial points in history and yet displayed great tenacity in fulfilling his vision. A man who was hypersuspicious of those around him, yet failed to see Barbarossa as it became more and more obvious. A man who feared that his bodyguards would shoot him, but was happy to surprise members of the public by his presence. How Stalin became Stalin, how he built Socialism and socialism built him.
How could a man sign off execution lists of people he knew were innocent, yet remain true to his vision of a new society? How could someone break his own minions into submission, without the slightest sign of rebellion? Why didn't anyone stop him? Why couldn't anyone stop him?

And despite all of the revolutionary drive, spirit and will - The Soviet Union's fundamental problems were much alike those that Imperial government had to face. A country on a holy mission that sees itself as lagging behind the West, and realizes it must desperately catch up. In order to do this, an over reliance on the executive to create a strong central will to see the orthodox leninist project through. From one very centralized regime to another, still facing the same fundamental issues - from geopolitics to agriculture. The tools available to the new despot were far more efficient than anything the tsar ever had, yet the project was far, far more ambitious.

Now all I can do is await the release of the third tome.

>>53181
Depending how the machine works, a nano weapon could just become a big galactic problem over time because it could take just one comet or something smashing into the planet to spray it everywhere. Granted it would be on long enough timescales to be largely irrelevant in the scheme of things but still. Organic life however will eventually die. It's not likely anything would survive a trip through space, so it preserves the number one and two rule about weapon development which is never develop something you dont want used against you eventually and don't shoot yourself with your own weapon. I just think a nanoplague has too many drawbacks to actually think about using.

>>53195
You're forgetting the kinds of timescales were are talking about here. I mean yeah sure you could easily just glass it if you're in a rush, but spraying bioweapons are the kind of thing that unless you had instantaneous portals or the fleet is on standbye in orbit it's really not a problem at all waiting for several years. I suppose it would really work down to circumstances, which could also include the fact that for example simply lobbing a giant piece of rock at us from the Oort cloud or a diverting a nearer object would almost totally commit exterminatus but we would still have the opportunity for seeing it coming, which could give us a chance at stopping it or diverting its trajectory as well as generally lead to detecting it as a weapon in some circumstances if they tried it twice. A bioweapon is a stealth weapon. It would probably be a lot easier to just spray some spores and not have anyone think much of it than others which could also actively damage the planet, although I guess if you wanted to colonize their world for God knows what reason glassing it with something bigger than Chicxulub would do a pretty good job sterilizing the surface but so much microbial life would survive it's still risky.

>toxins

It's not just toxins. It would be something we had zero experience with not as a species but as a planet in history so it wouldn't be hard for something to just opportunistically invade our bodies and start digesting us. Some microbes basically eat minerals iirc. A fungus like thing could simply infest our body and start growing in us like it would a rotten log and our bodies might have no way of stopping it.

You are right though. But really we're still talking about a lot of this in terms of science fiction and all the movies, books, and videogames we've all been exposed to which is fantastical. In reality if you could not outright fold space into wormholes nothing about space wars would look like our fiction. Not a whole lot even tried to look more realistic, often making it like space is just some small pond to have WWII naval and air battles in. Realistically ships wouldn't be shooting at each other within visual range, warplans would take years with just one comms to our nearest neighbor literally being over 8 years to radio out and hear back from the closest alien planet, the sheer scale of time and distance is so immense nothing can be thought of as like our wars. This is the first mistake OP made. So a truly advanced civilization may have truly longterm plans where our battles are fought not in days weeks or even years but decades or centuries. Galactic Civilizations somewhat did this while still going back to muh warp gates because an aggressive interstellar civilization basically tricked others into building wormhole gates with no off switch to invade their world, and when one species didn't build it they had to physically lug the other end of their warp gate to their system over the course of 50,000 years or something like that.

Hallo, Ernst. It has been a while since the last issue was released but, fear not, we are here yet again to fulfill your reading needs.

This issue consists of:
New Discourse on the Roman-German Emperor
German political autism

Virtual Invasion
To what degree do the tools condition the craft?

Rise and Fall of a Third World Arms Industry
The story of how a Brazilian company tried to become a big fish and ended up drowning

Ceterum autem censeo Anglos esse delendam
Article in English complaining about how English is a shit language

pottery corner
Poetry for the masses

Security Theory in the Form of a Coordinate System
Emotional compass

The Woman is the Resting Place of the Warrior
The feminist revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race

Zeus Cross-Examined
Because Zeus is only a God after all

World Med Alliance
Analysis of the Mediterranean and the Middle Eastern theaters

If you want to see the past entries you can go to:
https://kohlzine.neocities.org/
https://github.com/FirninFactoryPostProcessor/kohlzine-texts (has the indesign files too)
https://archive.org/details/@bernd_lauert1488

If you want to contribute you can share your stuff in:

kohlzine@protonmail.com
kohlzine@tfwno.gf

>>55778

>With a corporate logo that is shaped like the five-pointed star of a US law enforcement badge, the Sheriff Company dominates nearly everything in this Russian-backed enclave. Sheriff runs almost all the supermarkets, importing much of the food that makes its way in from Moldova proper and abroad. It is the main if not the only player in the automotive industry, selling cars, spare parts, oils and lubricants, say experts on the region. The petrol stations in this Kremlin-dominated statelet are run by Sheriff, as is the local football club, which has become hugely popular. It also produces beer and wine, and manufactures textiles, and is building hotels.

>But there’s more. Sheriff, a shadowy firm managed by two former Soviet-era security officials, runs the local telecommunications network. It controls almost all of the broadcast media. And over the past three or four years, the company has dominated the presidency and the parliament through a political party which began taking over in 2016.

>“There’s virtually nothing that they do not have a role in,” says Stephen Wolff, an expert on Transnistria at the University of Birmingham. Employing at least 12,000 people, experts say the company largely runs Transnistria. In some ways, say the smattering of Balkan and east Europe specialists who keep an eye on Transnistria, Sheriff has replaced the Communist Party that ruled Moldova until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sheriff builds clinics and hospitals, and rewards promising pupils with prizes at its retail outlets. It has managed to secure an agreement by which it pays little or no taxes.

I need to know more, I need to see this nation. Goronavirus will not stop me.