Was Stalin Bulimic?

                                       U.S Signal Corps

Was Stalin bulimic? Does that explain his purges? Out of the frying pan and into the fire is the expression, but it may seem like a long road from the toilet to the gulag. But who is to say how the functioning of the GI tract and the varying sphincters of the body affect the creation of personality. Back in 2005 Paul Starobin wrote an essay in The Atlantic called “The Accidental Autocrat” about another Russian leader, Vladimir Putin. Starobin attributed some of the games Putin plays on the stage of history to morphological singularities. Starobin cites Brenda L Connors “a certified ' 'movement analyst’" at the Naval War college to show that “he seems to lack what is called contra-lateral movement and instead tends to move in a head-to-tail patern, like a fish or reptile." Starobin quotes Connors to the effect that reptiles “patrol their borders, and if an alien enters, lunge reflexively.” Like reptiles Putin is particularly border conscious. Starobin is more skeptical about Connors’ irredentist hypothesis that Putin’s “instinct to make himself whole is mirrored in his imperative to keep Russian from breaking up.” However, it would be interesting to look at whether Stalin suffered from some grave eating disorder which became the only tool available for him to deal with his paranoia. It’s easy to test the DNA from the remains of a dying person and famously Einstein’s brain was preserved in formaldehyde, but it’s impossible to get a stool sample from a corpse and even if Stalin had ever seen a GI guy for any of his complaints, it would take a pretty wily researcher to attain those records. But it’s not hard to imagine Stalin gorging himself on Chicken Kiev at some state dinner and stealthily going off to the bathroom, sticking his finger down his throat and later ordering the elimination of a good portion of the attendees.

Pornosophy

                                                 photo of Al Goldstein, AP

“He clearly coarsened American sensibilities,” Alan M. Dershowitz is quoted as saying about Al Goldstein, in today’s front page Times obit of the infamous pornosopher (“Al Goldstein, A Publisher Who Took the Romance Out of Sex, Dies at 77,”12/19/13). Dershowitz is further quoted as saying “Hefner did it with taste.” Dershowitz should know better. The fact that a first amendment advocate, who also represented Goldstein, would be deluded enough to propose that Playboy was more tasteful than Screw represents a new nadir in the history of thought and taste both. Playboy came up with the formula of using a veneer of culture to justify its pictorial spreads. It’s like the way l9th century robber barons, acquired masterpieces of art, legitimize their gluttony. In Creativity and Perversion,  the psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel makes a similar point about the use of creativity as a covering for sadistic wishes. Al Goldstein had no need for any of these shenanigans so by calling a spade a spade, he should be called the one with the taste. Screw wasn’t a glossy magazine but a tabloid and the spread shots had an immediacy that no expensively produced Taschen erotica could ever compete with. Al Goldstein was like the Trotsky of pornography. Once the revolution was over, the Lenins and Stalins took over and he was out of work--as a pornographer, at least. Goldstein fans still tuned into to Midnight Blue his Public Access television show to hear his restaurant reviews (one for Tony Roma’s featured Goldstein vomiting on camera). He gave the finger to restaurants he didn’t like. Fittingly, he ended his career, as a greeter, at one he ostensibly gave a thumbs up to, the 2nd Avenue Deli. “Hefner did it with taste.” Wherever you are Al, give ‘em the bird!

Lana Peters

The final line of Douglas Martin’s Times obituary of Stalin’s daughter, Lana Peters (“Lana Peters,Stalin’s Daughter, Dies at 85,” NYT, 11/28/11), is a quote from an interview she gave to the Wisconsin State Journal in 2010. “I will always be a political prisoner of my father’s name,” she said.  Usually fiction can take more liberties than non-fiction. But even Dickens with his vast sense of fate and destiny could unlikely have produced the dramatic story that the Times obit tells. History is not just a player in this tale. It is the stage on which it’s set and the turns of fortune are extreme. Born Svetlana Stalina, Americans might remember Stalin’s daughter from two books she published about her life in l969 (Only One Year) and l984 (Faraway Music) under the name of Svetlana Alliluyeva (Alliluyeva was her mother’s last name). In a sense she embodied the paradoxes of Soviet Communism, a dictatorship of the proletariat that produced  its own aristocracy. As Stalin’s purges raged on, proving that power is conservative, self-perpetuating and hardly geared toward the betterment of mankind, Stalin’s daughter, who changed her name to Lana Peters after marrying an American, lived the life of the poor little rich girl. Ironically what happened to her mirrored the fate of the banished  Romanovs who went from enjoying the extravagance of hereditary nobility to that of being dispossessed of all power and slaughtered. The psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold’s book Soul Murder, describes the effect of traumatic childhood experience on a number of great writers including Chekhov. According to Martin’s Times obit there had been  a plan by the KGB to assassinate the once in a future defector, but while Svetllana Alliluyeva aka Lana Peters was never murdered, it’s apparent that her soul was. “He broke my life,”  Martin quotes Peters as telling the same newspaper from the state where she’d died “after decades of obscurity, wandering and poverty.” “ I want to explain to you. He broke my life.”

Chef of the Year

The worst thing about Mario Batali mentioning Hitler, Stalin and bankers “in the same breath” (“After  Chef’s Hitler Remark, Bankers Change Lunch Plans, NYT, 11/9/11) is the reminder that Time Magazine voted Hitler and Stalin Men of the Year in l938 and 1942 respectively. It’s also a reminder of what Time once was, a part of  the fiefdom of the conservative  Henry Luce. According to the Times, Batali’s problems began when he joined a panel of movers and shakers including Brian Williams, Anita Hill and Jesse Eisenberg to publicize the “Person of the Year Issue.” Ordinary folk who want to unload their piggy banks to get into redoubts like Babbo and Del Posto will now find it that much easier— now that Wall Street is twittering itself hoarse You’d have thought Batali were Joe Paterno or worse Jerry Sandusky the way the gang who brought you credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and John Corzine indignantly responded to being compared to tyrants. How can you compare selling someone securities that you yourself are betting against to the kind of atrocities perpetrated by Stalin and Hitler? The answer might be found in digging out your previous issue of the Times with its piece on the atrocitologist Matthew White who has written a book entitled The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s l00 Worst Atrocities. Truth be told Batali himself was contrite. The Times quoted a statement issued by one of his spokes folks in which he said, “It was never my intention to equate our  banking industry with Hitler and Stalin, two of the most evil, brutal dictators in modern history.” How can Batali expiate his sins.  Like Lindsay Lohan, of course, by working in a soup kitchen.