Stalin's Net Gain

[Agnapostate]

Is it or can it be successfully argued that Stalin's administration oversaw a net gain of human lives rather than a net loss because the massive industrialization that occurred in the Soviet Union during the 1930's was integral to defeat of Nazi Germany, and prevention of their conquest of Europe?

[Proletarian Ultra]

Is it or can it be successfully argued that Stalin's administration oversaw a net gain of human lives rather than a net loss because the massive industrialization that occurred in the Soviet Union during the 1930's was integral to defeat of Nazi Germany, and prevention of their conquest of Europe?

Yes.

And Stalin fought a brutal civil war - that's essentially what the collectivization struggle was - to abolish coolie labor, like Lincoln fought a brutal civil war to abolish slavery. Conquest et al. assume that 'kulaks' were just nice people going about their business, whom Stalin decided to persecute because he was mentally unstable.

I used to think that until I saw a show on Thailand a couple of weeks ago. It was on Al Gore's channel, or GreenPlanet (is that a channel?) or some shit. A bunch of spoiled English kids went to work on a rice paddy in Thailand. Owner used hired labor to do his farming for him - essentially a Thai kulak. Seemed like a real asshole. But the real "holy shit" moment came when an English girl asked a female Thai laborer if her life was hard. The Thai woman just burst into tears. Couldn't even put a brave face on it for the camera. One of the saddest things I've ever seen; real human despair.

That's the reality of kulak agriculture. Brutal work by the landless for starvation wages from the landed. Now, there's a reasonable argument to be made that blockading the entire Ukraine during a bad harvest was the wrong way to do this. Just like there's a reasonable argument that burning down Atlanta and the entire trail leading up to it was a disproportionate response to the Slave Power.

But anyway, the whole "Stalin Death Count" industry is essentially Nazi apologetics. If someone's historical calculus determines that Stalin was worse than Hitler, that person is either mistaken in their methodology, or just willfully pro-fascist.

[Tablo]

Interesting responses. As much as I dislike Stalin and his politics as a whole I really hate the people that try to compare him to Hitler and I especially hate seeing the inflated death counts. What is the point in lying about what he did?

Was Stalin bad? In my opinion, yes.
Was he an insane murderous thug that was worse than Hitler? No.

All I care about is an honest examination of history and while I see him as a largely negative figure, he is better than a lot and is certainly not as bad as he is often characterized today.

Hope I don't sound like a Stalinist. xP

[ComradeOm]

That's the reality of kulak agriculture. Brutal work by the landless for starvation wages from the landedHmmm? Kulaks were merely rich peasants. They did not always employ labour and nor did they necessarily own the land (which was held collectively by the commune). Indeed the 'black repartition' of 1917 had significantly eased any class tensions within the peasant milieu. The collectivisation programme was first and foremost an assault on the peasantry and in particular the commune structure

Any improvement of life brought about by Stalin's reforms has to be evaluated as a comparison between industrial and peasant societies - not the abolition of some nasty, but fictional, form of bondage. And yes, the millions of deaths (many of which could have been avoided) do factor into this equation


Stalin's time was mostly great for common working class peopleExcept that the slogan "Life Has Become Better, Life Has Become Merrier" does not really survive close examination. As I've noted in previous threads (here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/soviet-economy-t121565/index.html?p=1590160) and here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/soviet-standard-living-t123776/index.html?t=123776)) Soviet living standards did not significantly rise during the Stalin period and would not do so until Khrushchev's arrival in power. To quote myself:

"The reality is that the real wages and living standards of the Soviets workers were deliberately suppressed during the Stalin era as such a curtailment of consumption was considered necessary for rapid industrialisation. Soviet living standards plunged from the late twenties onwards (rationing was a fact of life in the cities until at least 1935) during the most intense period of industrialisation and continued to be of a very poor standard (the housing crisis being the most obvious sign) until the 1950s. So to simply state that living standards follow on automatically from industrialisation is simply false

In fact it was not until the Khrushchev years, with the abandonment of the Stalinist coercive economy, that the Soviet workers saw a real and sustained increase in living standards. Philip Hanson reckons that in the decade 1953 to 1964 Soviet per capita consumption increased by 44%. In contrast even the most optimistic estimates quoted for consumption growth during Stalin's reign are no more than 11% from 1928 to 1953"

Shelia Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism is an excellent history of the, well, everyday existence of Soviet citizens

[it_ain't_me]

Is it or can it be successfully argued that Stalin's administration oversaw a net gain of human lives rather than a net loss because the massive industrialization that occurred in the Soviet Union during the 1930's was integral to defeat of Nazi Germany, and prevention of their conquest of Europe?

maybe. why would you bother? it would make a lot more sense to compare stalinist industrialization to capitalist industrialization, which was at least as ugly if not more.

[Proletarian Ultra]

Hmmm? Kulaks were merely rich peasants. They did not always employ labour and nor did they necessarily own the land (which was held collectively by the commune).

Because of the quota system, a lot of people were labeled kulaks who were in fact serednyaks, or middle peasants. Like I said, there's a strong argument to be made the methods of collectivization were too brutal and/or counterproductive


Indeed the 'black repartition' of 1917 had significantly eased any class tensions within the peasant milieu.

They had. But years of the NEP significantly eroded gains of the first phase of land reform. See this paper (http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/nep.htm) from from Louis Proyect: for example from 1921 to 1924, the percentage of Ukrainian peasants without draft horses more than doubled, from 18 to 46 percent. Even peasants who had not lost their land still depended on kulaks for access to draft animals and tractors. Stalin was not the most supple thinker but he was scary good at weighing out political percentages. If there was no angle in anti-kulak politics he would not have jumped on the bandwagon.


Except that the slogan "Life Has Become Better, Life Has Become Merrier" does not really survive close examination. As I've noted in previous threads (here and here) Soviet living standards did not significantly rise during the Stalin period and would not do so until Khrushchev's arrival in power. To quote myself:


It's true. While it's difficult to compare the Stalin-era USSR and Czarist Russia, because of the heavy reliance on non-wage benefits in the USSR, standard of living during the industrialization push was nothing to write home about.

[thälmann]

i think it is necessary to criticise stalin, even if someone thinks overall positive about him, and i do it.
first of all, the industrialization was necessary, not only to stand military pressure, also to become a socialist country. an their were increasing living standards, and that is why lots of old russians think positive about stalin. other things, like education, everyone knows. or the mechanization of farming and so on...

but on the other hand bureaucracy, zentralisation,hard repression increasing difference in wages and so on...made it easy for the revisionists in the 50 to force a capitalist development step by step...

to the famine in ukraine: even bourgois media start change their storrys, and talk about the real reasons for these problems. kulaks burned their corn, killed their animals...epidemics emerge, and the situation was like civil war...

to the death counts: after the opening of kremlin archive, there are good statistics from american scientists, proving that those high death counts wasnt correct...i only knew the german version

[ComradeOm]

Because of the quota system, a lot of people were labeled kulaks who were in fact serednyaks, or middle peasants. Like I said, there's a strong argument to be made the methods of collectivization were too brutal and/or counterproductiveThere's a strong argument to be made that the entire definition (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1761699&postcount=18) of what comprised a kulak had "no class content"


They had. But years of the NEP significantly eroded gains of the first phase of land reform. See this paper (http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/nep.htm) from from Louis Proyect: for example from 1921 to 1924, the percentage of Ukrainian peasants without draft horses more than doubled, from 18 to 46 percent. Even peasants who had not lost their land still depended on kulaks for access to draft animals and tractorsThis contradicts the works that I have read (and I'm particularly wary of the phrase "A table in a Soviet academic journal from the period..." and the sources are scarce) but unfortunately I do not have them to hand and Google Books is not obliging. I'm particularly annoyed that my Making of the Soviet System is across the sea - it had figures that charted evolving Soviet estimates as to the numbers of kulaks and the arbitrary way in which they were arrived at. I'll see what I have at home this evening

I do find it very hard to believe however that the Russian peasantry could have become so stratified in less than a decade. The commune was a highly resistant and egalitarian structure that did not lend itself to the private accumulation of capital. Particularly so in those regions where land in the village was regularly redistributed. It took great efforts from the Tsarist government (read: Stolypin) to weaken it and these programmes were undone in 1917. To so quickly rebound to a pre-1914 level seems very unlikely

I'm also got suspicions as to the figures. That the percentage of peasants without machinery seems ridiculously low (a mere 24%) for 1921; while it stretches credibility to suggest that there was less access to draft horses in 1924 than during the depths of the famine and chaos of 1924. These figures suggest that there was effectively no recovery for most middle or poorer peasants following the Civil War years. This does not seem likely

[Kléber]

What matters today is what came after Stalin, which is what most people confuse for "Stalinism": the invasions of Czechoslovakia, socialism by tanks etc. Stalin's time was mostly great for common working class people. The only people really affected were the party bureaucrats: the so called "Old Bolsheviks". So to answer your question, yes.
False. Most of those murdered by the Stalinist regime were petty criminals, shot for trespasses as small as "stealing" individual pieces of grain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Spikelets). There were more innocent workers and farmers who died of starvation or exposure to the elements in the forced migrations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Soviet_Union) than Old Bolsheviks shot.

As for the original question, it's irrelevant. If Hitler had won he would have filled the world with Aryan babies, so is Stalin better than Hitler because he was more successful? Who really cares about personal value judgments of overrated police spies turned national socialists anyway?

Increasing the size of a population isn't progressive, otherwise the Indian bourgeoisie would be some of the greatest socialists on earth.

[ed miliband]

Interesting responses. As much as I dislike Stalin and his politics as a whole I really hate the people that try to compare him to Hitler and I especially hate seeing the inflated death counts. What is the point in lying about what he did?

Was Stalin bad? In my opinion, yes.
Was he an insane murderous thug that was worse than Hitler? No.

All I care about is an honest examination of history and while I see him as a largely negative figure, he is better than a lot and is certainly not as bad as he is often characterized today.

Hope I don't sound like a Stalinist. xP

It's a testimony to the black-and-whiteness of capitalist politics that you cannot repeat such wisdom without being thought of as uncritically supporting everything Stalin ever did ever.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

"The reality is that the real wages and living standards of the Soviets workers were deliberately suppressed during the Stalin era as such a curtailment of consumption was considered necessary for rapid industrialisation. Soviet living standards plunged from the late twenties onwards (rationing was a fact of life in the cities until at least 1935) during the most intense period of industrialisation and continued to be of a very poor standard (the housing crisis being the most obvious sign) until the 1950s. So to simply state that living standards follow on automatically from industrialisation is simply false

In fact it was not until the Khrushchev years, with the abandonment of the Stalinist coercive economy, that the Soviet workers saw a real and sustained increase in living standards. Philip Hanson reckons that in the decade 1953 to 1964 Soviet per capita consumption increased by 44%. In contrast even the most optimistic estimates quoted for consumption growth during Stalin's reign are no more than 11% from 1928 to 1953"


However, the later developments with living standards during Khrushchev would not have been possible without the groundwork infrastructure that had been built during the industrialisation drive.

Khrushchev and the other revisionists did actually manage to have a robust and decent housing programme, one must give them credit for that, though, something Stalin never had.

[thälmann]

first, like somebody said it, a lot of things were free...
even if the data is right, it has to receive intention, that between 1928 and 1953 their was WW 2. in this war the SU was brought back to nothing,economical.
and finally the priority on the production of consumer goods then on means of prduction by kruchshev caused economical problems. i think its clear that the production of the means of production is the base for real increasing standard of living, not financed by credits.....

[bie]

Like I said, there's a strong argument to be made the methods of collectivization were too brutal and/or counterproductive
It certainly was in some places, but I cannot understand why to blame Stalin for that. Stalin did not personally supervise or order brutal collectivization methods, they were carried on by over-zealous middle and lower officials. And the abuse did not originate from the line of the Party - but on the contrary - from its violation. Lets have a look at what Stalin actually said about collectivization:


The successes of our collective-farm policy are due, among other things, to the fact that it rests on the voluntary character of the collective-farm movement and on taking into account the diversity of conditions in the various regions of the U.S.S.R. Collective farms must not be established by force. That would be foolish and reactionary. The collective-farm movement must rest on the active support of the main mass of the peasantry. (...)
Can it be said that this line of the Party is being carried out without violation or distortion? No, it cannot, unfortunately.
from: Josef Stalin, Dizzy with success, 1930 http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm

The point is that the mistakes made in the collectivization were not the part of the official policies, but of its violation.

[~Spectre]

Yes.

And Stalin fought a brutal civil war - that's essentially what the collectivization struggle was - to abolish coolie labor, like Lincoln fought a brutal civil war to abolish slavery.


The Civil war was certainly about slavery, in the sense that the Southern land owners rose in rebellion to protect slavery. However, it is a bit misleading to say that Lincoln fought the war to abolish slavery. He fought the war to quell the rebellion.

[ComradeOm]

However, the later developments with living standards during Khrushchev would not have been possible without the groundwork infrastructure that had been built during the industrialisation driveTrue to a degree but a statement like this glosses over the very real shift in the USSR's economic model that accompanied Khrushchev's 'revisionist' regime. There was no purely economic reason, not even the impact of WWII, as to why measures to improve living standards could not have been taken years before 1953. However these policies required the dismantling of the coercive Stalinist economy... politically impossible while Stalin still lived


That makes sense if one assumes that Stalin had powers of seeing into the future and was deliberately fooling the workers by lying about the living standards which would be lower than those in Khrushchev's time. When looked at chronologically, the living standards were better in the Stalon period than the previous decades. For example,Except that you are not looking at it chronologically. You are comparing one part of Stalin's reign with another part of Stalin's reign. At no point have you compared the pre-Stalinist economy with the post-Stalinist economy. Indeed you've, quite dishonestly, taken calorie data from the height of the famine years and merely charted its recovery

With regards calorie data I don't have the figures on hand - the link you provided is broken - but Wheatcroft has definitely demonstrated in other papers, including his work with Davies, that in 1939 food production and consumption was barely above 1928 levels. This date is important as it effectively marks the beginning of the Stalinist economy. The same is true of other criteria - Nove (Economic History of the USSR) notes that even official figures that portrayed real wages in 1937 as 35% higher than 1935 implied that they were actually 15-40% lower than 1928 wages! (Depending on the price index used)

So all you've established here is that by the late thirties the Soviet economy was recovering from the catastrophic conditions of the early thirties. Looking at the broader picture makes it quite clear that this was still poor relative to conditions prior to and following the Stalinist economy. So as I've said, its simply dishonest to pick 1932 as your reference point

As an aside, did you know that the Khrushchev era saw the introduction of the first minimum wage; shorter hours and more holidays for juveniles; reduction in the working week by two hours; a seven hour day; increased maternity leave; de-criminalising of the workplace; abolition of tuition fees for secondary and higher education; "great improvements" to pensions/benefits schemes (with an average increase of 81%); increased exemptions from income tax for low earners; and, of course, the great housing programme that doubled the availability of state housing and almost quadrupled that of private housing in five years? (Nove) This is just touching on some of the many ways in which the 'revisionists' set out to improve the living standards of the working class in a way completely alien to the previous regime


The point is that the mistakes made in the collectivization were not the part of the official policies, but of its violation.A cop-out. Soviet officials were continually urged to 'fulfil and over-fulfil' the plan. Dizzy with Success is Stalin covering his ass

[bie]

Soviet officials were continually urged to 'fulfil and over-fulfil' the plan. Dizzy with Success is Stalin covering his ass
Could you back it up anyhow?

[ComradeOm]

Could you back it up anyhow?Back up the constant pressure on officials to "fulfil and over-fulfil" the plan? Most books on the Soviet state apparatus or economic planning during the 1930s should mention it. I've already mentioned Everyday Stalinism and The Making of the Soviet System above. First meeting and then exceeding production targets, which were already ambitious, was a near-universal theme during the Stalinist reforms. The Stakhanovites were merely the most visible form of this pressure but the oath/slogan was a common one on the factory floor. It also applied to party bureaucrats who were handsomely rewarded for exceeding targets

Given that this was the constant message from the top of the Soviet state (Boterbloem's biography of Zhdanov notes an explicit CC resolution that uses that particular slogan) it is grossly hypocritical of Stalin to suddenly claim that local officials were at fault for being over-zealous. Dizzy is also perfectly consistent with what Fitzpatrick calls Stalin's "obliqueness" in communications. Stalin, and the Soviet state, almost never used explicit legislation to communicate with the party/state apparatus but rather relied on 'signals' transmitted through official journals/media/etc. This allowed the state (and often Stalin personally) to disassociate itself/himself from unpopular measures... of which Dizzy is a perfect example. Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism has a very good chapter on this

[Lulznet]

What matters today is what came after Stalin, which is what most people confuse for "Stalinism": the invasions of Czechoslovakia, socialism by tanks etc. Stalin's time was mostly great for common working class people. The only people really affected were the party bureaucrats: the so called "Old Bolsheviks". So to answer your question, yes.
The same common working class people that were being forced in Gulags and onto the battlefields of the Eastern Front due to the fact that Stalin had made a pact between the Germans and it went south on him? :rolleyes:

[ComradeOm]

That makes sense if one assumes that Stalin had powers of seeing into the future and was deliberately fooling the workers by lying about the living standards which would be lower than those in Khrushchev's time. When looked at chronologically, the living standards were better in the Stalon period than the previous decades. For example,

[Snip]

In fact I've done some digging into my own Wheatcroft papers and found the below chart in The First 35 Years of Soviet Living Standards (my excel reproduction of course). Unfortunately this paper does not extend as far as the Khrushchev years but it does compare the Stalinist reforms with the NEP (and pre-NEP) period. The chart graphs the rise and fall of food consumption in Soviet households through KCals per day and is based on Wheatcroft's investigations (drawing heavily on Soviet nutritional surveys). There is obviously a large chunk of data missing during the famine years as TsSU, which conducted the studies, was abolished in 1929 and not resurrected until 1932 (as TsUNKhU). Its pretty safe to say however that consumption did not increase during these 'missing' years :glare:


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v142/GreaterDCU/Misc/Calories.jpg
KCals consumed per day for Soviet workers and all peasants
(Not visible - peasant value for 1913 is 2913)

Its pretty clear from the above that nutrition in Soviet households improved pretty sharply during the NEP period only to crash down again with the collectivisation programme. Omitting the first period (ie, pre-1933) presents the appearance of continuous growth - only when the entire timeframe is accounted for does it become apparent that post-1933 the regime was only climbing out of a hole of its own making. Comparing 1939 consumption figures to those of 1913 reveals that Soviet workers and peasants were consuming almost 6% and 19% less calories, respectively, in 1939 than they had been before WWI. When we do the comparison to 1927/28 the difference is even more marked - a 23% decline for peasants and a whopping 30% for workers!

I didn't bother including the data stretching to 1953 because its pretty sketchy and contains a lot of blanks. There is however data for that year - 2488 and 2912 for peasants and workers respectively. Doing the same comparison (to 1927/28) shows that workers were 25% less well off (in terms of daily calorie consumption) than at the height of the NEP period and that peasants were 'merely' 19% worse off

So much for rising daily calorie consumption...

[People's War]

The lies told of Stalin are disgusting to be quite frank. What the historians rarely tell you is that the kulaks threatened to withhold food from the cities - if it had been tolerated, a mass famine would have occurred, and thus dekulakization was neccesary. If anything, collectivisation saved more lives than it took.

[Raúl Duke]

It was on Al Gore's channel, or GreenPlanet (is that a channel?) or some shit.

I think it's called Current TV and they have a series of Documentaries under "Vanguard Journalism."

You can see it all online.

[Ismail]

True to a degree but a statement like this glosses over the very real shift in the USSR's economic model that accompanied Khrushchev's 'revisionist' regime.Of course, Khruschev's regime brought state capitalism (http://www.mltranslations.org/Britain/SovietBB.htm) to the USSR.

You're free to point out how awesome everyone lived under NEP, much as capitalists can point to how awesome peasants lived under the 1980's Dengist reforms. In this case you're no different from Trotsky himself, who agreed with Bukharin's "market-socialist" views in-re the countryside.


As an aside, did you know that the Khrushchev era saw the introduction of [big list of things]... This is just touching on some of the many ways in which the 'revisionists' set out to improve the living standards of the working class in a way completely alien to the previous regimeProbably because the Soviet economy had grown to such an extent that such things were seen as possible, and/or workers were expecting such things. In 1937 the Soviet Government experimented with free bread in Moscow. Collectivization and WWII did not leave much room for economic benefits, though as always attempts were made to improve the standard of living. You're free to list all the glorious social benefits people got under Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and onwards, just as a social-democrat is able to point to FDR's reforms and therefore proclaim that FDR was a "humane capitalist" or even a "socialist."

Let's not forget Trotsky's "army of labor" idea, which workers weren't too happy about either and which, once tested in practice, saw Lenin condemn it.*

I know you, like Kléber and Barry Lyndon, like to mock the "revisionist" label, because like the Brezhnevites you equate economic benefits generally possible under social-democratic capitalist states with socialism. Unlike Kléber, however, you tend to defend Soviet social-imperialism with Barry.

Besides, it isn't as if in the late 1940's and early 1950's Stalin didn't have interesting ideas for bettering society. Ever heard of the "Stalin Plan to Transform Nature"? (See section iii. of Part 3 of this (http://ml-review.ca/aml/AllianceIssues/ALLIANCE16_ECOLOGY.htm))


A cop-out. Soviet officials were continually urged to 'fulfil and over-fulfil' the plan. Dizzy with Success is Stalin covering his assOr, as J. Arch Getty noted, Stalin's "mixed signals" were because of the fact that things needed to get done, but simultaneously with as little "excesses" as possible, which was obviously quite difficult considering the scale of the early 1930's collectivization, and the occurrences of the Great Purges of the mid-late 1930's (and the associated red tape, capital-to-countryside confusion, etc.). The point is that Stalin was playing a balancing act. Although you can cite Dizzy with Success as a "public" example of "Stalin covering his ass," it's a bit harder to explain confidential words such as these:

“These comrades do not understand that the method of mass, disorderly arrests—if this can be considered a method, represents, in light of the new situation, only liabilities which diminish the authority of Soviet power. They do not understand that making arrests ought to be limited and carried out under strict control of appropriate organs. They do not understand that arrests must be directed solely against active enemies of Soviet power... They do not understand that is this kind of action took on a massive character to any extent, it could nullify the influence of our party in the countryside.”
(J. Stalin. “Instruktsiia vsem patiino-sovetskin rabonikam i vsem organam OGPU i procuratury,” RGASPI. f. 17, op. 3, d. 922, Il. 50-55. Cited in J. Arch Getty. “‘Excesses Are Not Permitted’: Mass Terror and Stalinist Governance in the Late 1930s,” Russian Review, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), pp. 113-138.)

* "His plan, first presented in Pravda in December 1919, was approved initially by the Central Committee, but many party members argued strenuously against it. The plan provided for 'the mobilization of the industrial proletariat, liability for labor service, militarization of economic life, and the use of military units for economic needs.' He insisted that labor must be subject to the same strict discipline as the Red Army... he set about imposing this discipline. The immediate result was an angry storm of protest and rebellion. The Third Red Army was on his orders re-designated 'The First Revolutionary Army of Labor' and assigned to labor duties in the Urals. The soldiers deserted. Peasants, infuriated by the take-over of their districts by labor armies, burned the crops as they were gathered.

Trotsky came into direct conflict with the trade unions. He had plunged into the task of restoring the railway system, and, overruling the objections of the union, he had mobilized the railwaymen under army discipline. Then, again in the face of union opposition, he had set up his own transport authority, the Central Transport Committee, known as Tsektran. His highhanded treatment of this union and his threats that he would deal likewise with other unions infuriated unionist members of the party."
(Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 144-145.)

[ComradeOm]

Of course, Khruschev's regime brought state capitalism (http://www.mltranslations.org/Britain/SovietBB.htm) to the USSR.

You're free to point out how awesome everyone lived under NEP, much as capitalists can point to how awesome peasants lived under the 1980's Dengist reforms. In this case you're no different from Trotsky himself, who agreed with Bukharin's "market-socialist" views in-re the countrysideFrankly I don't give a damn what you call it. The claim was made that "Stalin's time was mostly great for common working class people". This is unquestionably false. Living standards were better before the introduction of the Stalinist coercive economy and they were better after its abolishment. You can use all the references to Trotsky, all the whataboutisms, and all the excuses you want - this fact will not change

The supposedly socialist economy of the Stalinist period witnessed the immiseration, quite arguably deliberate, of the Soviet working class. If 'socialism' always resulted in the latter then I would not consider myself to be a socialist

[thälmann]

i really dont get it. a lot of achievments were simply not existing before stalin, making live easier. and of course wages increased . when you talk to ordinary older russian people, they will tell you such things about the 30s.

it is true that in the sixties the production of some consuming goods was increased,
and the production of the means of production wasnt the priority anymore. but that, as i mentioned before, caused the coming problems, then in long term, the SU simply couldnt efford this way.
i mean sure it would be better to go on the way of stalins time. real development, small but continous increasing of living standard, and the perspective that this can go on.
the revisionist way brought not only problems because they do things they couldnt afford. some things that were free before had to be paid now(tractors for example).
and things like unemployment, crisis, and the ordinary capitalist anarchy of production came back. and this whole development was the beginning of the end. stagnation and so on follows very quick...

[Dimentio]

Yes, the world is a strategy computer game where players are judged by how large population they have at the end of their game, :D