I was listening to a podcast (Freakonomics, if anybody’s curious) about the Cold War; and when somebody mentioned Khrushchev the host cut in, for the audience’s benefit, with “That’s Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.”
Does anybody, particularly somebody listening to a podcast about the Cold War, need to have Khrushchev identified? Is it all that far out of the collective consciousness?
Comics I Don't Understand 
Perhaps he wished to avoid confusion with Barry Darsow, who used to wrestler under the name Krusher Khrushchev?
http://www.networkplaylists.com/dev/?worker=942
It probably wasn’t necessary for most listeners, but it wasn’t unreasonable. Just because someone is listening to a podcast on the Cold War doesn’t mean they know a lot about it – they may just be learning about it from the podcast.
Khrushchev lost power in 1964, died in 1971. Someone born the day he left office will be 55 next month,
and their 15-year-old grand-kids probably don’t know who he is, but I wish they would get off my lawn.
Not everyone has memorized “The ABC’s of Dead Russian Leaders,” after all.
If he’s listed in a high-school history textbook, he’s probably a geezer reference.
Krushchev was in my high-school history textbook.
The one that I twitched at was when a New York Times article felt the need to explain what World War Two was, in case the reader had never heard of it.
WWII was a long time ago; my grandfather fought in it, and I’m almost old enough to be a grandparent myself. Yeah, there’s people who might be unclear on it.
I think it is prudent to include it. There is benefit to people who are learning the history and it has no significant negative effect except maybe making us feel old.
The Times needed to give it a name modern audiences can relate to, like WORLD WAR 2: THE RETURN OF THE GERMANS
“WORLD WAR 2: THE RETURN OF THE GERMANS”
Obviously, WWII is “The One With All the Nazis”.
James, I like yours better.
Hey, there are people who don’t know what “The Beatles” means.
Well, it depends on the assumed knowledge level of the intended audience.
If it’s a podcast of *any* depth (and what I gather from Bill is he’d find a podcast with no depth too banal to bother with) then, yes, it should be assumed. But if it’s an introductory podcast with an assumed audience with no guarantee of more than a basic college freshman level of anything then, no, it shouldn’t be presumed.
>Khrushchev lost power in 1964, died in 1971. Someone born the day he left office will be 55 next month,
and
> it has no significant negative effect except maybe making us feel old.
I’m no spring chicken and I have absolutely *zero* memory or first hand knowledge of him. I completely learned about him at one time very academically and as a historical figure of the recent past. But learning so was very early on and I wouldn’t expect I’d need to explain to anyone who he was any more than I’d have to explain what the Copernican Theory or the Periodic Table is. (Then again it always surprises me when I have to explain to people what a prime number is.)
….. Actually, yeah, I don’t we should assume anyone knows anything about the cold war. The average novice may know the Cold War existed but not know *anything* more about it.
Actually, woozy, I don’t consider Freakonomics to have much depth: their game is to throw around statistics and tell their audience what they “prove,” so I consider them the equivalent of a three-card monte huckster. I was only listening to this particular segment because I was curious what they’d be saying about a particular topic.
That said… you might not remember much about Khrushchev but you do know he’s due at Idlewild, right?
Khrushchev lost power in 1964
I half remember that this took place while there were cosmonauts in orbit, and the news outlets here made much of that for some reason. Also they noted that Brezhnev took over just one of the main roles/offices that K had filled, and somebody else the other (something like Party chair and Premier) , as though this was going to be a two-person leadership and a reform of sorts. I can’t even remember the other guy now.
Bill, you’re in agreement with something I saw recently: ‘Freakonomics: otherwise known as “How to ‘prove’ anything you want by manipulating statistics.” I think of them as the NPR version of clickbait.’
Oh, and yes, I do remember that line, though I had to look up the rest of the lyrics.
I ontly remember his banging his shoe on his desk at the UN.
There are people who would need to be told that Putin is the current Premier as they would not know.
Wow, Arthur… if you told me I’d written that description word-for-word, I wouldn’t contradict you.
If the podcast said “Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union during the Cold War” with an emphasis on “THE” leader, then they were being a bit economical with the truth. Khrushchev was leader for 11 out of the 40-45 years of the Cold War and they were forgetting about Stalin before and Brezhnev after him. More understandably they are ignoring the aged Andropov and Chernenko after Brezhnev, and Gorbachev too, though in his time it all grew less chilly.
Despite seeing the movie The Death of Stalin in 2017 where he was played by Jeffrey Tambor (it’s not a documentary) I had forgotten about Malenkov, who technically lasted about 6 months between Stalin and Khrushchev (give or take a governing troika). I had also forgotten the name of Yanayev, who apparently had two days formally in charge after Gorbachev before the USSR dissolved, though I remembered his/the attempted coup at the time that deposed Gorbachev, which led to Boris Yeltsin memorably standing on tanks and causing the coup attempt to fail.
Of the nine leaders of the USSR from 1922 to 1991, most died in office, with Khrushchev (7 years of retirement) and Malenkov (34 years) surviving their terms and Gorbachev (still alive) and Yanayev (by 20 years) surviving the USSR itself.
Odd, come to think of it, that Malenkov, who succeeded Stalin in 1953, also nearly survived the USSR (falling four years short) and was still alive when Gorbachev came to power.
I had the same thought about narmitaj regarding referring to Khrushchev as “the ” leader during the Cold War. Of course, he was the leader during two of the incidents that came closest to tipping over into a hot war (building the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile crisis). Still, I think of Brezhnev as more significant, but maybe that’s because I’m only old enough to remember the post-Khrushchev years.
I for one don’t mind the quick “verbal footnotes” on a wide range of characters, even the ones I know. It can make the programs more inclusive, i.e. it’s not a run down memory lane for insiders. If NPR did it right, every episode of a kind-of-history-type-thing would then announce “for more in-depth background, see the links on our website”. I may not want more information on every personality discussed, but it would be kind of them to offer it!
Yeah, this seems common on radio programs when a guest introduces a new “character” without preamble, even if the character is or should be well known. It doesn’t hurt to make sure listeners are all on the same page, and it gives the listener a chance to pause and incorporate the newly introduced personage into their mental map of the discussion.
My most distinct memory of The Cold War is ‘duck and cover’. And K pounding his shoe on the desk – United Nations, if I remember correctly – shouting, ‘We will bury you!’ (Well, it’s taken quite a few years and several more heads of state of both countries, but it looks as if . . . oh, never mind. That’s political.)
I think it is generally thought these days that “we will bury you” was not a specific nuclear-type threat to kill everyone in the West if the Cold War turned hot, but more for Khrushchev that our system will outlive yours and and we will be present at your funeral – as in the natural order of things, children bury their parents.
Or that the West’s working classes will bury its exploiters: “August 24, 1963, Khrushchev remarked in his speech in Yugoslavia, “I once said, ‘We will bury you,’ and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you,” a reference to the Marxist saying, “The proletariat is the undertaker of capitalism”, based on the concluding statement in Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable”. In his memoirs, Khrushchev stated that “enemy propaganda picked up the slogan and blew it all out of proportion”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_will_bury_you
@ Andréa – The “bury you” quote had nothing to do with the shoe banging, and the descriptions of the latter incident depend strongly upon whose report it is based. Despite all of that, Khrushchev still deserves credit for removing Stalin’s post mortem influence.
The ABCs are incomplete – perhaps a more physical reminder would work:
https://russian-crafts.com/nesting-dolls/political/lenin-and-other-russian-political-leaders.html
P.S. The article that narmitaj cited remarks that “…translator Mark Polizzotti suggested that the phrase [Мы вас похороним!] was mistranslated at the time and should properly have been translated as “We will outlast you,” which gives an entirely different sense…“.
P.P.S. Google and Bing both provide the “traditional” translation, but they are partly crowd-sourced, and therefore not authoritative.
A friend of mine had a related set of matryoshka dolls of the USSR leaders — but in the opposite order, with a tiny Lenin in the middle and I think it was Gorbachev outermost.
BTW, when we had a tangent thread about plot devices resembling “Groundhog Day”, did I remember to recommend “Russian Doll” (a Netflix “original” this year, and currently in the running for some Emmys)? It’s very good! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7520794/reference
Kilby: The ‘bury/outlast you’ comment was made in 1956, when I was eight years old and had only bee in USA for two years, so my ‘memory’ of it is a perceived one. The shoe-banging incident was in 1960, so I obviously conflated the two in my mind.
Kilby: Clearly Google and Bing Translate are far from authoritative (although I wouldn’t lay the blame at the fact that they’re partly crowd-sourced), but several online dictionaries also translate похороним as “bury.”
https://www.russiandict.net/translate/%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%85%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BC
So I don’t think it’s a question of literally what похороним means, so much as what the the connotations of that burying might be. In English you could use “bury” in a neutral, factual sense (“We went to bury Uncle Ted at the cemetery”), but since what you’re doing involves a dead body, it can also have aggressive connotations (“We will bury the competition with our marketing campaign,” or “We will bury our enemies alive.”) Krushchev may not have meant “we will kill you and bury you,” but I have trouble believing that in the context (Krushchev talking about the inevitable victory of the proletariat over the capitalists), похороним/burying doesn’t possess aggressive connotations. I’d suggest that Krushchev’s attempts to minimize its aggressive nature can’t be taken at face value.
Andréa: I also conflated the two. I wonder if this is a common conflation.
FWIW, I’m 41, I don’t really remember Cold War era being taught much, but I wasn’t that great a student. USA history typically ended after WWII, sometimes got through Korea briefly, some snippets of Vietnam. There’s typically a gap between “history” and “current events”
I started watching Russian Doll thinking for some reason that it was a spy drama. Imagine my confusion.
RE: conflation
I think it depends if one lived thru one or both, or read about them.
I’m always puzzled when school reformers talk about history textbooks being too old and not including an event in the recent past that the reformer thinks is important. Heck, the books include 99% of history, the recent stuff can be handled with supplements, or even skipped if you run out of time. In fact, if it’s too recent there’s probably no historical consensus and should be left to some other class.
@ WW – While he was clearly being aggressive, I think it was more of a “competitive” sense, rather than the “murderous” aspect with which it has usually been associated. The problem is that all of the linguistic nuance is stripped away when the words are delivered by a translator.
This reminds of a cold war anecdote, in which a western delegation visits a factory in an “Iron Curtain” country, and is told that when managers don’t make their quotas, they will be shot (in German: “erschossen“). Later that evening, the translator shows up at their hotel to deliver a correction: the managers will not be “shot”, they will be “fired” (German: “gefeuert“). Ooops.
“I also conflated the two. I wonder if this is a common conflation.”
I lived through the period (though young enough not to have paid a lot of attention to international affairs), and remember/remembered them as two different occasions.
What I remember more vividly about Krushchev (and his wife) was how shocked they were when they viewed an American movie depictng a can-can dance.
Do others recall the weird moment, sometimes called “the kitchen debate” when K visited the US and took in some sort of exhibition (could it have been a World’s Fair?) in company with Nixon, who was then VP. It was something like the kitchen of a “typical modern American home” and Nixon credited the convenient appliances, and domestic wealth, to the system of capitalism.
Correction after a little bit of lookup. It was 1959, and in Moscow. The two countries exchanged propaganda exhibits.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/nixon-and-khrushchev-have-a-kitchen-debate
Kilby: Hard to know what the right nuance is. (And I suspect hard even if you know Russian, since even for the English “bury,” a lot would depend on context and delivery.) But corrections like “outlast you,” and “in the natural order of things, children bury their parents” seem overly generous. It may have been more “competitive” than “murderous,” but in the context of the Cold War, the proletariat-capitalist competition was often violent, not academic, and it’s hard to see how referring to that competition in conjunction with being at someone’s grave wouldn’t have at least some violent connotations, even if not exactly a physical threat.
Re: Freakonomics. I’ve never listened to the podcast, but I wasn’t impressed by the book, despite the rave reviews. I was particuarly un-blown away with the chapter on “Why do drug dealers still live with their parents,” which basically concluded “Selling drugs on the street isn’t lucrative, like you might think from watching action movies.” Well, yeah.
“Heck, the books include 99% of history, the recent stuff can be handled with supplements”
I think you’d be extremely lucky if the books included even 1% of history — and that goes to the heart of the problem: we’re naturally more interested in stuff that happened recently, or at least somehow more directly relates to us, which is why (aside from the sheer unmanageable volume) history books only cover 1% if we’re very lucky — it’s the very small part that somehow relates to us that interests us. So at school I was always extremely frustrated that just when the history lesson was getting good (ie: just as it was approaching stuff that was within living (not mine) memory), the school year would end.
Shadz said ” the recent stuff can be handled with supplements, or even skipped if you run out of time.”
I agree in principle, and certainly there’s no reason to buy new books every year. However, when I was in high school (in the late 80’s), we really didn’t learn anything after WWII. Honestly, I still know very little about the Korean and Vietnam Wars, or much else that happened between about 1945 and 1985. I know bits and pieces about several important things that happened then, but not any real detail. I think that’s what those people Shadz was talking about are upset about. They don’t want kids to have that kind of 40+ year gap in their history education.
So returning to the topic at hand, I know the name Khrushchev, and know he was a Soviet Leader, but that’s about all I really know about him. I’ve seen video of the shoe pounding, but I don’t think I knew it was him. I couldn’t have named any other leaders of Russia since Stalin besides him, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. (And I had to look up Yeltsin because I’m terrible with names anyway.)
Re: Freakonomics
Like WW, I was not at all impressed by the books, which seemed more like an exercise in marketing than anything else. I have however been very impressed by the podcast, and the general credo of “show me the evidence”, which to my mind has always been lacking in the economics discipline. Yes, that involves a lot of numbers, and yes, you have to think critically when someone slings numbers at you, but it is still much, much better than a dearth of numbers. “Because Marx/Smith/Friedman said so” is almost totally worthless; “because these numbers seem to indicate” is at least a start in the right direction.
Not sure I’m really adding anything new here, but just because “everyone” knows who he was today doesn’t mean they will 10, 20, 100 years from now, assuming the podcast lasts that long. I am often irritated by web pages that don’ t have dates and mention “yesterday”, or (the surprisingly common) newspaper, TV, or radio station website that makes it hard to figure out what city they’re in. (Not the same thing, but the same sort of “Everybody knows this” — no, they don’t.)
@Phil Smith III: “I am often irritated by web pages that don’ t have dates and mention “yesterday”,”
Or the low-tech versions of signs stapled to telephone poles etc. saying things like “Yard Sale today 10-4 at [address]” but do not define “today” — and which are still up on the pole when I drive by again a few weeks later.
@Shrug: Yes! I’m often tempted to tear one off and go ring the doorbell, ask aggressively, “So where’s the yard sale?!” (But that would be wrong.)
PSIII, but would it be wrong? If everyone did that, people might start taking down the signs from places they didn’t have permission to put them up on.
@Arthur: Good point, but how many times do I get punched before that happens?
Just last Sunday I drove over to a neighborhood flea market that had been advertised at our local supermarket. The date was right, the time was right, but the street address did not exist.
larK, I prefer “dearth of numbers” to something that pretends to be backed up by fact.
Depending on how you want to count it, we might have 3% of human history documented. Modern humans have existed for about 200,000 years, writing for perhaps 5,400 years. That’s not quite three percent coverage. As to what actually gets written down, well that’s even less. Add in questions about bias and hearsay repeated as fact and our records are quite spotty.
Fixating on the “meaning” of a word when trying to know what someone speaking a foreign language intended is foolish. Even when a word is “right”, an attempt at word for word translation often misses the mark. I recently had to edit a long, somewhat technical people written by Dutch authors in English. While it was certainly English and coherent (mostly), it wasn’t at all natural. It was much harder than editing a piece written by a native speaker. It was “right’ but required hours of work.
When interpreting Russian, we interpret it as the nearest equivalent in English. Then there are issues of idiomatic use of the language or rhetorical or poetic flourishes. Finally, language will influence the way one thinks (though I suspect the differences in this case are often oversold). “We will bury you” very likely had some competitive braggadocio behind it, but could very well be more rhetorical than a direct physical threat.
As for Freakonomics, I considered the book an interesting pop-piece on lateral thinking and the power of opening the scope of investigation. It got rather tedious toward the end, as the last several chapters were all on the same topic, if I recall. I take the podcast in the same vein, that it’s about asking “Are we thinking about this the right way?” I don’t consider any of its conclusions as definitive.
Now when it comes to snake-oil salesmen, I’ll put Malcolm Gladwell at the front of the back. He has built an empire on tenuous inferences.
PSIII: Malcolm Gladwell says 10,000 times.
@SingaporeBill: Well then, I’m definitely not doing it!
@SingaporeBill: by definition we have 100% of history at last partly document. “History” is the part that is written down. The stuff before then is “prehistory”.
Well if we’re nominating snake-oil salesmen, I give you Oliver Sacks — just-so stories that always sound so deep and meaningful and philosophical, while nothing ever gets cured, everything seems to be a one-off, and in the end, nothing seems to ever be learned by science…
@larK, criticizing Sacks’ work because no one is cured is like criticizing CIDU Bill’s because sometimes comics get misunderstood, still. He isn’t writing a heroic narrative about himself as solver of problems, but that isn’t a failure. He’s describing the experience, as best he can, of both being a person with neurological problems and trying to help those people. Note that Sacks’ was in fact a pioneering neurologist whose work helped many, many people, he just didn’t choose to valorize himself in his writing. Are you really into mocking people for their humility?
Re Sacks: “He’s describing the experience, as best he can, of both being a person with neurological problems and trying to help those people.”
Yeah, and it is this that I choose to criticize — he may or may not be a pioneering neurologist, but his literary works fail to teach me anything useful about neurology, and in fact, because of their ubiquity and popularity without referenced or reliable information, actually make me dumber about neurology.
He actually is writing a “heroic narrative about himself”, choosing to present himself under a guise of humility, but the mode is most definitely “heroic literature”, and this is not at all a useful mode for disseminating scientific information — English majors might like it because ironically undermining the mode of heroic literature by using a humble protagonist might be interesting, but it still teaches them nothing about neuroscience, nor anyone else.
I see this has moved on past arguing over statistics and podcasts. But I hope it’s not too late to mention “More or Less” , the BBC radio(?) / world service / podcast where they fact-check (and plausibility-check) numerical claims of various sorts, as suggested by listeners. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00msxfl
@larK: odd how much people have actually learned about neurology from Sacks. Some of his books were not nearly as good as others. His best were very good indeed.
carlfink: so I’ll ask you, in the credo of the Freakonomics podcasts, to show me the evidence: I claim there is no actual neurology to be learned from the popular writings of Oliver Sacks, because I’ve read some of it, and I learned no neurology (a weak claim, to be sure, but that’s where the goal posts have been staked). So either: a) find me a reputable neurologist who claims that there is good neurology in the popular works of Oliver Sacks (are you perchance a neurologist?); b) show me data of people who have learned neurology from the popular works of Oliver Sacks; c) at least quote me a passage or two that purport to teach something about neurology.
( a) of course has certain problems, as an appeal to authority, but it’s still a start; for c) I would want more than just “neurology is a medical discipline” or “people bump there heads and have weird things happen to them”, or even the naming of a few random conditions that are indeed neurological, ie: I’d want more than just what any high school student could do with Wikipedia.)
And to give you an example of what I’m talking about, throughout the stuff of his that I’ve read, neurological conditions seem to come up as macguffins to whatever suits the need of the particular story he’s telling, and as such seem uncatalogued, unorganized, inchoate lists of convenience. They never get developed or seem to have consequences, very much like in a Star Trek episode. Specifically: he wrote about a neurological condition in which a person cannot recognize someone by their face. Being as all research I’m aware of (and I studied psychology for a BA) says that facial recognition is something the brain devotes tremendous resources to, is something that the brain does extremely well (humans recognize a face easier and faster than if it were just the sum of its parts), and is something that bleeds into other domain tasks, often inappropriately (seeing faces where there are none, eg: Face on Mars), the fact that there are some few individuals who cannot perform this most fundamental of brain tasks would seem to me to be something of tremendous importance and active research. Not only did I not learn anything about fallout from the discovery of such a condition and the many other things it should naturally lead to from his story, it turns out that apparently Sacks himself had this condition! And I still learned nothing of consequence about it! (That there is a certain amount of bathos to this condition is obvious, and I don’t need a neurologist to tell me, just as I don’t need him to tell me the irony of Beethoven losing his hearing or Monet losing his vision.) To me, all of Sacks’ stories are like this.
This might be relevant here: https://xkcd.com/1053/
larK, did Oliver Sachs steal your girlfriend?
But seriously, I have almost as big a hate-on for the reverence accorded Malcolm Gladwell.
larK, you seem to want Sacks to write textbooks. He didn’t. Some folks who learned from him can be found in these (to use Wikipedia jargon) secondary sources:
https://www.elsevier.com/connect/oliver-sacks-the-patient-focused-polymath
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-oliver-sacks-is-one-of-the-great-modern-adventurers-134428056/
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/31/9232781/oliver-sacks-tribute
Now Gladwell is seriously overrated. Eloquent writer, but doesn’t quite get how scholarship and evidence work.
carlfink: Thank you for the links. I did read each one, but it seems clear we are not going to convince each other. I will concede, from the third link, that maybe for a neurologist, his writing could be illuminating and instructive, in a troubles-talk kind of way for specialists. But I maintain my original position, that for a general lay audience (in which I include myself), his writing is basically snake-oil: it seems deep and illuminating, but in fact teaches nothing, and I think that at least one of the articles you linked (the second one), shows evidence of this. (Am I merely succumbing to the paradoxical increase in polarization of opinion despite additional information? Maybe…)
So, firstly, I am merely talking about his popular writing — whether he is or isn’t a great doctor, a great neurologist, or a great human being isn’t of interest to me, and merely because someone has been canonized in the forum of popular opinion does not automatically impart greatness to their works (Stephen Hawking, for example, I also think is vastly overrated).
In the second linked article, the author describes Sacks’ writing as “as much Dr. Hunter Thompson as Dr. Sigmund Freud”, an inadvertently damningly accurate assessment: Freud has nothing to say in modern psychology — indeed, it wasn’t until my final year as a psychology major that I had a course that even mentioned him, and this turned out to be a historical review course, frustrating because it didn’t really teach you anything about the current state of the discipline, just jumped from the wildly disparate theories of one early practitioner to the next, and the fact that all of this stuff failed to integrate almost in any way to the current state of the study is what made it so frustrating. Where I did get a lot of exposure to Freud was in my English classes, which to me is extremely telling. English majors love Freud, but psychologists don’t. (The paranoid, drug fueled scribblings of Hunter S. Thompson don’t much interest me, but then again he’s not claiming to write about science…)
So it seems to me, English majors love Sacks, but I, looking for some science, don’t. The author of the Smithsonian article, even though he clearly loves Sacks’ work, shows that he has actually failed to learn even some of the most basic aspects of neurology, such that when he is talking live to Sacks himself, he is surprised that Sacks hews to the scientific. That he feels it is some kind of special revelation on page 5 that “Sacks is skeptical of anything beyond the material” is telling; that he feels that Sacks’ use of “the illusion of free will” is a slap on the face shows me that he has understood almost nothing about neurology. He only learns face to face with Sacks himself what Sacks’ writing failed to teach him.
I don’t want a text book. But popular writing that so fails to instill even the most basic aspects of your discipline — that it comes as a surprise that the author actually hews to the scientific — that writing has failed.
Certainly we will have to agree to disagree, larK. I should mention that I’m a zoology major and biology teacher, and a lifelong neuroscience enthusiast … and I certainly learned things from Sacks’ writing.
WW: you do realize that “the historical inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat” is standard Marxist rhetoric/claptrap, right? The ‘outlast’ interpretation of “we will bury you” pretty much makes it this rhetoric warmed over. Whereas the ‘start WWIII’ interpretation has no particular relationship to standard doctrine but does pretty much exactly reflect the fears of rich Westerners that the commies are coming for their moneybags.
The thing I found the most surprising when I first started reading about the early Cold War in detail is that people believed the rhetoric, including the historical inevitability crap, not just in the Soviet bloc but also in the West.
Dave in Boston; Yes, of course I realize that “the historical inevitability” is standard Marxist rhetoric. I also realize that in the 20th century those inevitable victories invariably occurred through violence, not through some natural withering away of capitalism. You don’t have to be some caricature of Rich Uncle Pennybags to see that.
Well, I can only explain why this interpretation seems reasonable to me and is (or was not that long ago) mostly favored by historians.