How Stalin Would End a Twitter Argument
Modes of communication have changed drastically throughout the years, from letters to radio to TV to social media.
But what hasn’t changed is what we communicate. Humans will be humans, after all.
Specifically, I’m talking about “Twitter fights” — or arguments on any other social media platform, really — which some believe to be a trend of the modern era. The truth, however, is that what we see as twitter arguments are timeless traditions. They have occurred at every step of human civilization, and Twitter just happens to be a favored facilitator of those disputes today.
Humans will always need these places to vent their frustrations with each other.
Stalin’s penpal
For an example of a pre-digital era “Twitter war,” take one Ioseb “Soso” Jughashvili — or better known as Stalin.
I recently finished the book, “Stalin: Paradoxes of Power,” by Stephen Kotkin, and it has a bunch of rich information about the most famous of Soviet leaders.
Such as a 1927 letter correspondence with a schoolteacher from Sochi, Serafim Pokrovsky, where Stalin’s last reply was eerily similar to a beatdown we so often see on Twitter… only, Stalin didn’t limit himself to 140 characters.
For some context (you can read the entire reply here), the two were in a dispute over how the Bolshevik revolution was treating the peasantry. Should it partner with all peasants, or just the so-called “poor” ones?
Stalin argued that the policy of the Bolsheviks had shifted from a partnership with all peasants to one of just the poor. This change in policy was one that purposely and effectively kept peasants poor, as the class enemy “kulaks” — or rich peasants— were supposedly becoming a threat to the socialist revolution.
The war unleashed by Stalin on the peasantry would become hell on earth, and the “dekulakization” of Soviet Russia would kill an untold number of peasants and deport more than 5 million to remote parts of the country.
Blocked
When Stalin believed his pen pal Pokrovsky was arguing in bad faith, he blocked him.
Or, at least the equivalent of blocking. But not before getting in the last word (he was, after all, at this point, the USSR’s effective dictator):
When I began this correspondence with you I thought I was dealing with a man who was seeking the truth. Now, after your second letter, I see that I am corresponding with a self-conceited, impudent person, who sets the “interests” of his own ego higher than the interests of truth. Do not be surprised, then, if in this brief (and last) reply I shall speak bluntly and call a spade a spade.
Then, after a not-at-all brief letter of over 1,700 words, he ended with the following roast, a hint at how Stalin might end a Twitter argument today:
Conclusion: one must possess the effrontery of an ignoramus and the self-complacency of a narrow-minded equilibrist to turn things upside-down so discourteously as you do, my dear Pokrovsky.
I think the time has come to stop corresponding with you.
Ouch.
Does this not read similar to the now-popular back-and-forth Twitter spat between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Elon Musk?
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Stop hitting on me, I’m really shy ☺️</p>— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) <a href=”https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1520152887090892800?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 29, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset=”utf-8"></script>
