Talk:Jürgen Kuczynski

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Shelf space[edit]

100 m should be 10 000 books or less. (I must have about 40 or 50 m in my apartment.) The 70 000 books should be closer to 1 000 m than 100 m, an error of one order of magnitude. But maybe by shelf space is meant space of the bookcases on the ground, not the shelves. --Dominique Meeùs (talk) 15:56, 10 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The wording of the source - you may have spotted it already - is "Er besteht aus einer ca. 70.000 Bände und Zeitschriften umfassenden Bibliothek (der größten Privatbibliothek Deutschlands) und dem handschriftlichen Nachlass von Robert René, Jürgen und Marguerite Kuczynski. Sein Umfang wird auf ca. 100 Regalmeter geschätzt". So clearly the figure includes journals (Zeitschriften) and not just nice chunky books. But if that is not sufficient to explain the difference then (1) maybe I'm misunderstanding the German or (2) maybe there is an error in the source. If (1) maybe someone reading this will notice what I got wrong. If (2) maybe there is another source somewhere with a more believable figure! Go google? Regards Charles01 (talk) 16:15, 10 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Jürgen Kuczynski a spy?[edit]

Moved from my Talk pageParkwells (talk) 16:46, 2 November 2020 (UTC) Back in April 2018 you added the statement to the entry on Jürgen Kuczynski that the fellow "served as a spy for the Soviet Union, passing extensive information to them". I think you might be right. BUT you did not give any source for your assertion. So I took a look at one or two of the various sources already there to see whether any of them supported it. I didn't find any and I can't be bothered to look any further for now. The ones I got to already took care NOT to pass judgement on whether or not he could be classed as "a spy" though there are certainly nudges, winks and hints pointing down that path. Still, since he's dead it's not easy to see why the sources did not spell it out more plainly if they really knew - rather than merely suspecting - the simple truth of the matter.[reply]

You must, I guess, have got your stated belief that Kuczynski "served as a spy for the Soviet Union, passing extensive information to them" from somewhere. Please, can you remember where?

Better still - much better - please can you add a plausible source citation (or two) - preferably an online source citation that can be easily verified - to confirm the thing. I feel it's too important an aspect of the man's contribution to whatever it was he was contributing to - humanity I guess - to leave the thing unsourced.

Thank you "im Voraus". Be well. Charles01 (talk) 22:09, 31 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The Independent's obituary, cited as a source in the Lead, has an extensively detailed article about Kuczynski and his career, including the activities of both him and his sister gathering and passing intelligence for the Soviet Union. That satisfies my understanding of "spy". I have used this source to add cites to additional sentences, although usually content in the Lead does not need to be cited, as it is based on the body of the article. I will ensure this is the case.I'm moving our thread to the Talk page of the article, where it may benefit other editors. Parkwells (talk) 16:46, 2 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

On a related issue, the whole late section, "Kuczynski and Stalinism", appears to be mostly unsourced. I made recent editorial changes to this section, but did not contribute the original content, which has the sound of Original Research, i.e. an editor's interpretation of what Kuczynski thought.Parkwells (talk) 16:46, 2 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

For confirmation that Kuczynski served as a Soviet spy, one might check out the entry on him in The Spy Book The Encyclopedia of Espionage by Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen. The section on Kuczynski and Stalinism is very problematic-it is not only unsourced, but it seems to be an attack section, just put to let us, the readers, know what a complete bastard Kuczynski was. I think the best solution is do away with that section and treat Kuczynski's ideas in a chronological manner, which is the best way. He was a loyal Stalinist in the 30s, 40, and 50s, but his ideas later differed in some significant ways from what was the orthodoxy in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Treating to break up his ideas from his life is confusing-it is better to look at Kuczynski's ideas in a chronological manner. --A.S. Brown (talk) 02:20, 3 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]