Stalin's question-and-answer style
example · Stalinist/Soviet ·
retold in 3 talks
Žižek notes Stalin's characteristic rhetorical form, posing questions and answering them himself ('What are, comrades, the problems of our present moment? Comrades, the problems...'), and humorously claims to be mimicking it in his own self-interview format.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“You know how you recognize Stalin's style? Stalin always asks as a question and answer.”
“what are comrades, the problems of economy today? comrades, the problems of economy today are...”
“This guy said I often touch women between their legs the feeling there helps me in my struggle for socialism”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 2 jobsuses
Stalinism as violent return of the discourse of the Master
×1
perverse structure (Stalinist)
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
Osip Mandelstam2Leopold von Sacher-Masoch1Boileau-Narcejac1A. J. Ayer1Grace Kelly1Anthony Perkins1John Gavin1Vera Miles1
alongside works
Every retelling 3
Žižek notes Stalin's characteristic rhetorical form, posing questions and answering them himself ('What are, comrades, the problems of our present moment? Comrades, the problems...'), and humorously claims to be mimicking it in his own self-interview format., illustrating political discourse and ideology,rhetorical authority
Žižek describes Stalin's characteristic rhetorical device of posing a question and then answering it himself ('What are, comrades, the problems of the economy today? Comrades, the problems...'), and invites Kotkin to perform this as a closing move., illustrating Stalinist discourse,ideology and rhetoric
An old communist cadre, trying to please young interviewers, describes his sex life using the rigid, euphemistic language of communist struggle, creating a grotesque 'Stalinist pornography'., illustrating Stalinist style pornography