The Stalin Thread 2: all discussion about Stalin (as a person) in this thread please

[Cumannach]

I've been looking for an opportunity to give the endless Stalin-discussions a sticky of their own for a while now. The OP is such a great post that I think I finally found it. From now on, let's keep all discussions that primarily concern Mr Stalin (as a person) in this thread. Such threads posted on the forum will be merged here.

And everyone, regardless our opinion in this issue, let's follow the advice of the OP: let's keep the discussion civil, and based on material facts that can be backed up by evidence. -- Sentinel


I thought there wasn't enough threads on this forum about Stalin's crimes, so I want to make another one. I want this one to be different from all the other ones though. Everyone's free to have their opinions about Stalin, but we have to admit that his alleged crimes either did or did not happen, as a matter of historical fact.

In this thread, I invite anyone with a criticism of Stalin to present their accusation only if they can provide what they consider is evidence for it, in the form only of fully referenced quotations from published sources. If the source is available online then a link would be helpful, so the rest of the source can be perused by anyone interested. Using the sources of course, anyone is free to make a reasoned argument to back up their condemnation or Stalin, but please no emotional vitriole. Then another poster can make known their objections. The sources and their authors of course are fully open to discussion as well obviously, but, please, only in the same fashion as above. Maybe after reading some of the posts some comrades will change their opinion of Stalin and regard him as a murderer and tyrant. Maybe some comrades will change their view on him and see him as a great communist. But no need for inter-poster attacks and insults.

Just one more thing, rather than linking to sources, please actually post the essential extracts, concisely as possible. You know, for readability.

So does any comrade care to start?

[MarxSchmarx]

This thread has exceeded 500 posts and is being restarted.

[bailey_187]

how long was his slong

[Geiseric]

I'm sure kleber has a seperate hard drive filled with crap about Stalin. inb4 getty quotation and huge tendency war where the same outcome is me raging about some bullshit, and hoping that i'm being trolled. On a seperate note, answering above poster's question, my guesstimate is his penis is 7 inches. his balls are the size of grapefruits however, he needed them.

[Rooster]

Why did Stalin support Kerensky's provisional government?

[Ismail]

Why did Stalin support Kerensky's provisional government?"On March 12 [1917], the day of his return to Petrograd, the bureau considered the question of Stalin's admission to its membership.... Three days after his return he was elected to the bureau's Presidium with full voting rights and was appointed Bolshevik representative on the Executive Committee (Excom) of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' Deputies. With Kamenev he also took over Pravda... Stalin dominated the party during the three weeks until Lenin's return. Recognizing that Lenin's violent opposition to the war and to the provisional government would antagonize most party members and people outside the party, he pursued a moderate policy. He advocated limited support for the provisional government on the grounds that the bourgeois-democratic revolution was not yet complete and that there would be a period of years before conditions were ripe for the socialist revolution. It made no sense, therefore, to work to destroy the government at this stage.

In his policy towards the war he was equally common-sensed, writing that 'when an army faces the enemy, it would be the most stupid policy to urge it to lay down arms and go home.' In response to the general demand among Social Democrats, he was even prepared to consider reunion with acceptable elements in the Menshevik party, and on his initiative the bureau agreed to convene a joint conference.

Pravda reflected this policy of moderation. Articles received from Lenin were edited, and the abusive references to the provisional government and to the Mensheviks were toned down or cut. According to Shlyapnikov, jaundiced by his summary displacement, the 'editorial revolution was strongly criticized by Petrograd workers, some even demanding the expulsion of Stalin, Kamenev and Muranov from the party.'"
(Grey, Ian. Stalin: Man of History. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979., pp. 89-90.)

Stalin later admitted (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/11_19.htm#s1) he was wrong, saying in 1924 the following:

The Party (its majority) groped its way towards this new orientation. It adopted the policy of pressure on the Provisional Government through the Soviets on the question of peace and did not venture to step forward at once from the old slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry to the new slogan of power to the Soviets. The aim of this halfway policy was to enable the Soviets to discern the actual imperialist nature of the Provisional Government on the basis of the concrete questions of peace, and in this way to wrest the Soviets from the Provisional Government. But this was a profoundly mistaken position, for it gave rise to pacifist illusions, brought grist to the mill of defencism and hindered the revolutionary education of the masses. At that time I shared this mistaken position with other Party comrades and fully abandoned it only in the middle of April, when I associated myself with Lenin's theses. A new orientation was needed. This new orientation was given to the Party by Lenin, in his celebrated April Theses.

[Cleansing Conspiratorial Revolutionary Flame]

Why isn't there a Stalin Sub-Board?

[Ismail]

Why isn't there a Stalin Sub-Board?It'd probably be about as productive as Kosovo being an autonomous republic under Serbia was.

[John Seneca]

Good ole Stalin:

purged about the entire original Politburo
re-instated puritan morale codex
kinda crapped up soviet modern art (see El Lissitsky, in the 20s Moscow was something of an emergent art capitol, similar to New York or Paris, which would've surely been a good propaganda argument)
let an awesome lot of dudes die in WWII.
liked musicals

But then again, Trotsky could have done worse. Dude didn't understand that Stalin wasn't actually arguing. Didn't purge him and his crew when the time was right. Oh well.

[Dzerzhinsky's Ghost]

Good ole Stalin:

purged about the entire original Politburo
re-instated puritan morale codex
kinda crapped up soviet modern art (see El Lissitsky, in the 20s Moscow was something of an emergent art capitol, similar to New York or Paris, which would've surely been a good propaganda argument)
let an awesome lot of dudes die in WWII.
liked musicals

But then again, Trotsky could have done worse. Dude didn't understand that Stalin wasn't actually arguing. Didn't purge him and his crew when the time was right. Oh well.

Seriously?

[John Seneca]

What do you mean "seriously"? All of those critiques of Stalin are based on facts I believe to be true. These are not the only critiques. He made a mighty fine emperor, though. Secured the continuation of the Soviet experiment.

But when we look at Trotsky, one gets a feeling that in an alt-history where he got to rule the State, he might have crapped the game up for the whole Union. Precisely the thing old Lenin said about him in his Testament. He was too confident in his own awesomeness.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Thou must not accuse the great leader Stalin. Repeat x 100.:rolleyes:

Having said that, it is true that Stalin purged a majority of the original Bolsheviks, did re-instate a conservative social society (abortion, homosexuality), Socialist Realism did hold back the culture scene and his failings in WW2 are well known.

I won't hold it against him that he liked musicals, though.:laugh:

[Ismail]

That Stalin "made a fine Emperor" is not a Marxist analysis, nor are claims that he "crapped up" arts.

[dinoantifaru]

Stalin did many mistakes as dictator . he murdered many soviets , he also had death camps for them. I am not sure, but i think that because of Stalin's arrogance now exist many neo-nazis in ex-USSR countries , cause every time i spoke to the neo nazi from Russia,Ukraine , Poland etc. ,when i ask them why they hate commies , antifascists the main theme is Stalin .

[Nox]

One thing's for certain - the Holdomor did not happen. That is fascist propaganda.

[Ismail]

Yes, claims that Stalin intentionally starved Ukrainians to "genocide" them (or intentionally starved them to begin with) are pretty much debunked outside of conservative circles. ComradeOm (who hates "Stalinists") had good posts on the subject, but any decent overview of the situation will show you that the "Holodomor" is fictitious. I don't think anyone on RevLeft believes in the "Holodomor," though.


Stalin did many mistakes as dictator . he murdered many soviets , he also had death camps for them. I am not sure, but i think that because of Stalin's arrogance now exist many neo-nazis in ex-USSR countries , cause every time i spoke to the neo nazi from Russia,Ukraine , Poland etc. ,when i ask them why they hate commies , antifascists the main theme is Stalin .Well Ukrainian nationalists and Poles basically just shout "EVIL RUSSIANS" over and over. The year 1939 for Poles represents a dark period in which the glorious Polish nation was enslaved by the evil Communist menace and the sacred, God-given independence of Poland was trampled by the monstrous mongrel Russians or whatever.

[Gustav HK]

Socialist Realism did hold back the culture scene [...].

How did it do that?

[Dzerzhinsky's Ghost]

What do you mean "seriously"? All of those critiques of Stalin are based on facts I believe to be true. These are not the only critiques. He made a mighty fine emperor, though. Secured the continuation of the Soviet experiment.


Aside from the purges and morality in the USSR circa Stalin the rest just seems like a bunch of inane bro babble "dude."


Thou must not accuse the great leader Stalin. Repeat x 100.:rolleyes:

Self-flagellation, repeat x200.


Socialist Realism did hold back the culture scene

Elaborate.


and his failings in WW2 are well known.

This could be arguable and did make mistakes in terms of military strategy and tactics but to say he just "let a bunch of awesome 'dudes' die," during WWII seems absurd.

[Ismail]

How did it do that?It prevented wonderfully moving works of art like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wcMmI0tKkQ

But seriously, the only real criticism I've seen of Socialist Realism is that it "stifled" non-Socialist Realist art (obviously) and that too much emphasis was placed on painting leaders and such, which isn't really an indictment of Socialist Realism as it is painters being required (or consciously deciding) to paint leaders to score brownie points.

[Dzerzhinsky's Ghost]

It prevented wonderfully moving works of art like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wcMmI0tKkQ

But seriously, the only real criticism I've seen of Socialist Realism is that it "stifled" non-Socialist Realist art (obviously) and that too much emphasis was placed on painting leaders and such, which isn't really an indictment of Socialist Realism as it is painters being required (or consciously deciding) to paint leaders to score brownie points.

I would like to further this point by citing the article Literature and Art Should Serve to Temper People with Class Consciousness for the Construction of Socialism (http://marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/1965/10/26.htm) by Enver Hoxha.

[John Seneca]

Sorry mates. My overall view of Stalin is actually positive. My main man Žižek is a self-proclaimed Stalinist, who am I to argue. Still,he did some questionable things. Like all that constant history-modifying, how's a worker supposed to make the right conclusions from history if the history itself is unreliable?

[Rafiq]

Zizek has said the USSR under Stalin was worse than Fascist Germany under Hitler

[Dzerzhinsky's Ghost]

Zizek has said the USSR under Stalin was worse than Fascist Germany under Hitler

Zizek says a lot of things, doesn't he?

[Ismail]

Žižek is a hack who no one should like and who demeans Marxism by associating it with his lameness. The most recent thing he's done was viciously denounce the London rioters as "animals" or some such.

[Dzerzhinsky's Ghost]

Žižek is a hack who no one should like and who demeans Marxism by associating it with his lameness. The most recent thing he's done was viciously denounce the London rioters as "animals" or some such.

At best his works can be described as philosophical junk food.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

It prevented wonderfully moving works of art like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wcMmI0tKkQ

But seriously, the only real criticism I've seen of Socialist Realism is that it "stifled" non-Socialist Realist art (obviously) and that too much emphasis was placed on painting leaders and such, which isn't really an indictment of Socialist Realism as it is painters being required (or consciously deciding) to paint leaders to score brownie points.

Can you not see the link between Socialist Realism being the approved artistic framework and the need to score brownie points?

And yeah, it stifled non-Socialist Realist art, which is more than a shame because culture is about more than politics, the party or any other manner of sectarianism. Some of the greatest musical, artistic, cultural and literary works have come from sources/events that have nothing to do with politics, Socialism etc. That is the tragedy of the artistic scene in the USSR, manifesting itself in Socialist Realist orthodoxy.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I would like to further this point by citing the article Literature and Art Should Serve to Temper People with Class Consciousness for the Construction of Socialism (http://marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/1965/10/26.htm) by Enver Hoxha.

Such dross!

Go and tell Chopin, or Beethoven, or Liszt, that they can't conceive great things in their heads and that they must work like engineers.:rolleyes:

What great art did Enver Hoxha ever conceive of? Who is he to lecture anybody on the subject?

[Roach]

Sorry mates. My overall view of Stalin is actually positive. My main man Žižek is a self-proclaimed Stalinist, who am I to argue. Still,he did some questionable things. Like all that constant history-modifying, how's a worker supposed to make the right conclusions from history if the history itself is unreliable?


Zizek uses this as a publicity stunt, people who openly support Stalin almost never refer to themselves as Stalinist, while Zizek, in his very confuse and obscure writing style, says that:


The alternative, the notion that it is even possible to compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the conclusion – explicit or implicit – that Fascism was the lesser evil, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat.

From: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/slavoj-zizek/the-two-totalitarianisms

His method of ''marxist psychoanalisis'' can hardly be called Marxist, instead of focusing on the material conditions, he throwns jargon at ideological manifestations and while not being that bad on movies, it is pretty inefficient on historical events, like in the text I qouted, which he uses the tired liberal paradigm of totalitarism.

A fact also worth noting is that, despite being a self-declared communist, he takes no part in any real political movement or organisation whatsoever.

[Dzerzhinsky's Ghost]

Go and tell Chopin, or Beethoven, or Liszt, that they can't conceive great things in their heads and that they must work like engineers.:rolleyes:

Where did he say to do this? What gives you this impression? Did you even read the essay?

Art isn't some mindless exercise, it's not painting some still lifes or learning chords on the piano as some souless bourgeois exercises, it is mean't to raise the consciousness, to make a statement; to have a purpose. Within the context of a Socialist society particularly during those times art's purpose is clear. It should be a reflection of consciousness.


What great art did Enver Hoxha ever conceive of? Who is he to lecture anybody on the subject?

In all actuality he was a very well read man, perhaps not an artist himself (that I know of anyway) but I don't see the relevancy of this question, really.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Art isn't some mindless exercise, it's not painting some still lifes or learning chords on the piano as some souless bourgeois exercises, it is mean't to raise the consciousness, to make a statement; to have a purpose. Within the context of a Socialist society particularly during those times art's purpose is clear. It should be a reflection of consciousness.



Do you even understand what art is? 'Learning chords on the piano as some soulless bourgeois exercises'. In what sense is that bourgeois? It is precisely what art is, and art is where culture comes from.

You cannot force a population over a period of time to pre-dispose itself to a new conception of artistic culture. Sorry to say it, but some of the greatest art in the world has come from painting still faces and 'learning chords on the piano'. That you demean the art of musicality to such a sorry, simplistic phrase indicates to me that you do not understand what you are talking about.

[Labor Shall Rule]

Only on Revleft could you have so many threads contributed to fighting about the class nature of the Soviet Union, Stalin v.s. Trotsky, the Ukrainian famine, etc.

I tend to agree with Mao's criticism of Stalin, mainly around how collectivization was carried out, the emphasis he placed on heavy industry, the lack of party and socialist democracy, the move towards conservatism in terms of familial relations, wage differentials, and religion, how he liked racist and genocidal American cowboy movies (I'm being serious), and how policing and terror was used. I've never understood why so many on this site were quick to defend a legacy that was so often based on bullying the people at the barrel of a gun.



Do you even understand what art is? 'Learning chords on the piano as some soulless bourgeois exercises'. In what sense is that bourgeois? It is precisely what art is, and art is where culture comes from.

You cannot force a population over a period of time to pre-dispose itself to a new conception of artistic culture. Sorry to say it, but some of the greatest art in the world has come from painting still faces and 'learning chords on the piano'. That you demean the art of musicality to such a sorry, simplistic phrase indicates to me that you do not understand what you are talking about.

Governing expression is wrong on a moral level. At the same time, would you agree that art and culture can be used as a weapon in our ideological struggle to transform society? If yes, then isn't there a way to have an open environment for all artists (even if their form and content are reactionary) while still promoting a radical rupture with former policies and habits? Just another way to look at it.

[Ismail]

Stalin apparently hated John Wayne, so he wasn't that big a fan of reactionary Westerns.

Anyway, your words for an "open environment for all artists" are reminiscent of the "Hundred Flowers Campaign." It's also part of the "two-line" analysis the Maoists always use to justify the existence of reactionaries within the Party. As Hoxha wrote in Imperialism and the Revolution, "The party is not an arena of classes and the struggle between antagonistic classes, it is not a gathering of people with contradictory aims. The genuine Marxist-Leninist party is the party of the working class only and bases itself on the interests of this class." (p. 400.) Hoxha then quoted Stalin who noted that the "Communist Party is the monolithic party of the proletariat, and not the party of a bloc of heterogeneous class elements." (Stalin, Works Vol. VIII, p. 34.) The CCP under "New Democracy" and the "Hundred Flowers Campaign" rejected this policy.

Hoxha continues: "According to Mao Tsetung, in socialist society, side by side with the proletarian ideology, materialism and atheism, the existence of bourgeois ideology, idealism and religion, the growth of 'poisonous weeds' along with 'fragrant flowers', etc., must be permitted. Such a course is alleged to be necessary for the development of Marxism, in order to open the way to debate and freedom of thought, while in reality, through this course, he is trying to lay the theoretical basis for the policy of collaboration with the bourgeoisie and coexistence with its ideology... Mao Tsetung draws the conclusion that idealism, metaphysics and the bourgeois ideology will exist eternally, therefore not only must they not be prohibited, but they must be given the possibility to blossom, to come out in the open and contend. This conciliatory stand towards everything reactionary goes so far as to call disturbances in socialist society inevitable and the prohibition of enemy activity mistaken... today there really are 100 schools contending. This has enabled the bourgeois wasps to circulate freely in the garden of 100 flowers and release their venom." (op. cit. pp. 410-412.)

In his diary Hoxha noted comments from Roger Garaudy (a pro-Soviet French "communist" who later became a Holocaust denialist) in the following way: "The day before yesterday I read an article in the French newspaper Le Monde, a correspondent of which deals with certain views of the French revisionist Garaudy, who amongst other things, expresses the same views as the Chinese about the development of art and culture, without using the expression 'a hundred flowers and a hundred schools'. The author of this article, voicing the ideas of Garaudy, says that the arts, culture and philosophy must be allowed to develop freely, according to the opinions and beliefs of all... Ideologically, the Chinese are united with and in the same positions as all the revisionist currents in the world, to which they will add the specific characteristics of Chinese revisionism, which will emerge because of the terrain of Chinese society itself, the aspirations of the revisionist clique, and the old Chinese philosophy. In other words, Chinese revisionism will be a very complicated, mystical and cunning grafting, because the Chinese will steadily advance in the defence of their eclectic revisionist theories." (Reflections on China Vol. II, pp. 660-661.)

There is a reason petty-bourgeois intellectuals were infatuated with Maoism in the 60's and 70's.

[Hiero]

One thing's for certain - the Holdomor did not happen. That is fascist propaganda.

Maybe the "Holodomor" as construted by Ukrainian nationalist did not occur in their words, but something did happen. There was a famine and many people died.

[Ismail]

Maybe the "Holodomor" as construted by Ukrainian nationalist did not occur in their words, but something did happen. There was a famine and many people died.I don't think anyone denies that there was a famine due to a variety of factors, with Stalin wanting to genocide the Ukrainians not being among them.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Governing expression is wrong on a moral level. At the same time, would you agree that art and culture can be used as a weapon in our ideological struggle to transform society? If yes, then isn't there a way to have an open environment for all artists (even if their form and content are reactionary) while still promoting a radical rupture with former policies and habits? Just another way to look at it.

It's not that governing expression is wrong on a moral level that concerns me (though that is a valid criticism). The point is that art and culture are something that develop organically. You (especially if the 'you' is the "monolithic Marxist-Leninist Party"!) cannot force art, culture, music etc. towards a working class perspective. Firstly, especially not from the monolithic M-L party. That is but one tendency in but one political philosophy. Secondly, you will end up constraining or even excluding whole careers. Shostakovitch was somebody who was massively constrained by the Socialist Realist directive in the USSR, for example. A great shame.

There are things that can be done to bring the art and culture sector in line with Socialism, mainly related to how artists are paid, copyrighting, royalties and so on. But you cannot, cannot, have non-artists directing the greatest geniuses of the day on how to go about making their art, according to some half-baked, third rate philosophical idea about what they believe art and culture should be. That is absolutely key. Unless your idea of art is some bullcrap like 'Tempering The Steel'.

[Labor Shall Rule]

Hoxha is wrong. And even if he was right, why should we be reading him like his word are parables?

Really, if revolutionaries are so afraid of conservative and anticommunist speech then how should they expect to make revolution in the first place? I can get suppressing the speech of hated and notorious reactionaries after the establishment of a new radical order, but why make routine arrests of those "poisonous" weeds that make complaints that might be legitimate? There will be contradictions and roadblocks in socialist society, and there is no way a revolutionary party has a monopoly on what the true resolution of those obstacles would be.

There was, indeed, a differentiation made between the fragrant flowers and poison weeds before the Hundred Flowers campaign started.


Mao, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Between the People

Literally the two slogans -- let a hundred flowers blossom and let a hundred schools of thought contend -- have no class character; the proletariat can turn them to account, and so can the bourgeoisie or others. Different classes, strata and social groups each have their own views on what are fragrant flowers and what are poisonous weeds. Then, from the point of view of the masses, what should be the criteria today for distinguishing fragrant flowers from poisonous weeds? In their political activities, how should our people judge whether a person's words and deeds are right or wrong? On the basis of the principles of our Constitution, the will of the overwhelming majority of our people and the common political positions which have been proclaimed on various occasions by our political parties, we consider that, broadly speaking, the criteria should be as follows:
(1) Words and deeds should help to unite, and not divide, the people of all our nationalities.
(2) They should be beneficial, and not harmful, to socialist transformation and socialist construction.
(3) They should help to consolidate, and not undermine or weaken, the people's democratic dictatorship.
(4) They should help to consolidate, and not undermine or weaken, democratic centralism.
(5) They should help to strengthen, and not shake off or weaken, the leadership of the Communist Party.
(6) They should be beneficial, and not harmful, to international socialist unity and the unity of the peace-loving people of the world.
Of these six criteria, the most important are the two about the socialist path and the leadership of the Party. These criteria are put forward not to hinder but to foster the free discussion of questions among the people. Those who disapprove these criteria can still state their own views and argue their case. However, so long as the majority of the people have clear-cut criteria to go by, criticism and self-criticism can be conducted along proper lines, and these criteria can be applied to people's words and deeds to determine whether they are right or wrong, whether they are fragrant flowers or poisonous weeds. These are political criteria. Naturally, to judge the validity of scientific theories or assess the aesthetic value of works of art, other relevant criteria are needed. But these six political criteria are applicable to all activities in the arts and sciences. In a socialist country like ours, can there possibly be any useful scientific or artistic activity which runs counter to these political criteria?


And he did stop the campaign, only after renegade antisocialist elements like the Hungarian Petofi Club were planning armed attacks on party officials. Government and party offices were burnt. Kidnappings happened here and there. But it was a success— it exposed hardcore rightists (the real bad weeds) and brought millions more who at first had reactionary habits and tendencies (or, those with the potential of being flagrant flowers) to the right side of socialism. He rightly knew that while enemies of the revolution in the party and the streets were there and had to go, there was also a non-antagonistic relationship between the masses and the party that had to be dealt with through non-coercive means. That was the genius of it all.

[Ismail]

There was, indeed, a differentiation made between the fragrant flowers and poison weeds before the Hundred Flowers campaign started.Actually that speech was revised from the original. See: http://ml-review.ca/aml/China/historyofmaopt2.html

In addition: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv6n1/bico.htm

It notes that "the document was generally welcomed by the Khrushchevites, and seen as support for their position in 1957."


Really, if revolutionaries are so afraid of conservative and anticommunist speech then how should they expect to make revolution in the first place? I can get suppressing the speech of hated and notorious reactionaries after the establishment of a new radical order, but why make routine arrests of those "poisonous" weeds that make complaints that might be legitimate? There will be contradictions and roadblocks in socialist society, and there is no way a revolutionary party has a monopoly on what the true resolution of those obstacles would be.They aren't "afraid." Reactionaries who express anti-communist views do not have "complaints that might be legitimate." Genuine criticism (and self-criticism) exists under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Party is the leading force of state and society; it is the vanguard of the proletariat. Because it analyzes things scientifically and because control of both the means of production and of society itself are under the control of the proletarian dictatorship, it is capable of overcoming contradictions through class struggle and/or being able to pinpoint the source of those contradictions through various means, and to overcome them either through coordinated work or, if the subject is economic in origin, through adjustments in planning. Of course undervaluing the vanguard in favor of the "great helmsman" is something natural for Maoists.

[Manav]

This is a very important question and perhaps the most misunderstood one....I would like to here give notes from what i read about Stalin from American Cultural Historian Bruce Franklin.....I hope they prove to be useful.....

Introduction to THE ESSENTIAL STALIN

The Essential STALIN



Introduction to book Major Theoretical writings 1905-52 By Bruce Franklin


I used to think of Joseph Stalin as a tyrant and butcher who jailed and killed millions, betrayed the Russian revolution, sold out liberation struggles around the world, and ended up a solitary madman, hated and feared by the people of the Soviet Union and the world. Even today I have trouble saying the name "Stalin" without feeling a bit sinister.

But, to about a billion people today, Stalin is the opposite of what we in the capitalist world have been programmed to believe. The people of China, Vietnam, Korea, and Albania consider Stalin one of the great heroes of modern history, a man who personally helped win their liberation.

This belief could be dismissed as the product of an equally effective brainwashing from the other side, except that the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, who knew Stalin best, share this view. For almost two decades the Soviet rulers have systematically attempted to make the Soviet people accept the capitalist world's view of Stalin, or at least to forget him. They expunged him from the history books, wiped out his memorials, and even removed his body from his tomb.

Yet, according to all accounts, the great majority of the Soviet people still revere the memory of Stalin, and bit by bit they have forced concessions. First it was granted that Stalin had been a great military leader and the main antifascist strategist of World War II. Then it was conceded that he had made important contributions to the material progress of the Soviet people. Now a recent Soviet film shows Stalin, several years before his death, as a calm, rational, wise leader.
But the rulers of the Soviet Union still try to keep the people actually from reading Stalin. When they took over, one of their first acts was to ban his writings. They stopped the publication of his collected works, of which thirteen volumes had already appeared, covering the period only through 1934. This has made it difficult throughout the world to obtain Stalin's writings in the last two decades of his life. Recently the Hoover Institute of Stanford University, whose purpose, as stated by its founder, Herbert Hoover, is to demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx" completed the final volumes in Russian so that they would be available to Stanford's team of émigré anti-Communists (In. preparing. this volume, I was able to use the Hoover collection of writings by and about Stalin only by risking jail, directly Violating my banishment by court injunction from this Citadel of the Free World.)
The situation in the U.S. is not much different from that in th7 U.S.S.R. In fact the present volume represents the first time since 1955 that a major publishing house in either country has authorized the publication of Stalin's works. U.S. Capitalist publishers have printed only Stalin's wartime diplomatic correspondence and occasional essays, usually much abridged, in anthologies. Meanwhile his enemies and critics are widely published. Since the early 1920s there have been basically two opposing lines claiming to represent Marxism-Leninism, one being Stalin's and the other Trotsky’s. The works of Trotsky are readily available in many inexpensive editions. And hostile memoirs, such as those of Khrushchev and Svetlana Stalin, are actually serialized in popular magazines.

The suppression of Stalin's writings spreads the notion that he did not write anything worth reading. Yet Stalin is clearly one of the three most important historical figures of our century, his thought and deeds still affecting our daily lives, considered by hundreds of millions today as one of the leading political theorists of any time, his very name a strongly emotional household word throughout the world. Anyone familiar with the development of Marxist-Leninist theory in the past half century knows that Stalin was not merely a man of action. Mao names him "the greatest genius of our time," calls himself Stalin's disciple, and argues that Stalin' s theoretical works are still the core of world Communist revolutionary strategy.

[Manav]

Any historical figure must be evaluated from the interests of one class or another. Take J. Edgar Hoover, for example. Anti-Communists may disagree about his performance, but they start from the assumption that the better he did his job of preserving "law and order" as defined by our present rulers the better he was. We Communists, on the other hand, certainly would not think Hoover "better" if he had been more efficient in running the secret police and protecting capitalism. And so the opposite with Stalin, whose job was not to preserve capitalism but to destroy it, not to suppress communism but to advance it. The better he did his job, the worse he is likely to seem to all those who profit from this economic system and the more he will be appreciated by the victims of that system. The Stalin question is quite different for those who share his goals and for those, who oppose them. For the revolutionary people of the world it is literally a life and-death matter to have a scientific estimate of Stalin, because he was, after all, the principal leader of the world revolution for thirty crucial years.

I myself have seen Stalin from both sides. Deeply embedded in my consciousness and feelings was that Vision of Stalin as tyrant and butcher. This was part of my over-all view of communism as a slave system, an idea that I was taught in capitalist society. Communist society was not red but a dull-gray world. It was ruled by a secret clique of powerful men. Everybody else worked for these few and kept their mouths shut. Propaganda poured from all the media. The secret police were everywhere, tapping phones, following people on the street, making midnight raids.

Anyone who spoke out would lose his job, get thrown in jail, or even get shot by the police. One of the main aims of the government was international aggression, starting wars to conquer other counties. When I began to discover that this entire vision point by point described my own society a number of questions arose in my mind.

For me, as for millions of others in the United States it was the Vietnamese who forced a change in perception. How could we fail to admire the Vietnamese people and to see Ho Chi Minh as one of the great heroes of our times? What stood out not about Ho was his vast love for the people and his dedication to serving them. (In 1965, before I became a Communist, I spoke at a rally soliciting blood for the Vietnamese victims of U.S. bombing. When I naively said that Ho was a nationalist above being a Communist and a human being above being a nationalist, I was pelted with garbage and, much to my surprise, called a "dirty Commie. But we were supposed to believe that Ho was a "tyrant and butcher." Later, it dawned on me that Fidel Castro was also supposed to be a "tyrant and butcher" although earlier we had been portrayed as a freedom fighter against the Batista dictatorship. Still later, I began to study the Chinese revolution, and found in Mao's theory and preaches the guide for my own thinking and action. But, again, we were Supposed to see Mao as a "tyrant and butcher" and also a "madman” the more I looked into it, the more I found that these "tyrants and butchers"-Ho, Fidel, and Mao -were all depicted servants of the people, inspired by a deep and self sacrificing love for them. At some point, I began to wonder if perhaps even Stalin was not a "tyrant and butcher."
With this thought came intense feelings that must resemble - what someone in a tribe experiences when violating a taboo. But if we want to understand the world we live in, we must face Stalin.

Joseph Stalin personifies a major aspect of three decades of twentieth-century history. If we seek answers to any of the crucial questions about the course of our century, at some point we find Stalin standing directly in our path. Is it possible for poor and working people to make a revolution and then wield political power? Can an undeveloped, backward nation whose people are illiterate, impoverished, diseased, starving, and lacking in all the skills and tools needed to develop their productive forces possibly achieve both material and cultural well-being? Can this be done under a condition of encirclement by hostile powers, greedy for conquest, far more advanced industrially and, militantly: and fanatical in their opposition to any people s revolutionary government? What price must be paid for the success of revolutionary development? Can national unity be achieved in a vast land inhabited by many peoples of diverse races, religions, culture, language, and levels of economic development?

Is it possible to attain international unity among the exploited and oppressed peoples of many different nations whose governments depend upon intense nationalism and the constant threat of war? Then, later, can the people of any modern highly industrialized society also have a high degree of freedom, or must the state be their enemy? Can any society flourish without some form of ruling elite?

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Stalin's Role in general.....

These questions are all peculiarly modern, arising in the epoch of capitalism as it reaches its highest form, modern imperialism, and becoming critical in our own time, the era of global revolution. Each of these questions leads us inevitably to Stalin. In my opinion, it is not going too far to say that Stalin is the key figure of our era.

All the achievements and all the failures, all the strengths and all the weaknesses, of the Soviet revolution and indeed of the world revolution in the period 1922-53 are summed up in Stalin. This is not to say that he is personally responsible for all that was and was not accomplished, or that nobody else could have done what he did. We are not dealing with a "great man" theory of history. In fact, quite the opposite. If we are to understand Stalin at all, and evaluate him from the point of View of either of two major opposing classes, we must see him, like all historical figures, as a being created by his times and containing the contradictions of those times. .

Every idea of Stalin's, as he would be the first to admit, came to him from his historical existence, which also fixed limits to the ideas available to him. He could study history in order to learn from the experience of the Paris Commune but he could not look into a crystal ball to benefit from the lessons of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. And the decisions he made also had fixed and determined limits on either Side, as we shall see.

To appraise Stalin, the best way to begin is to compare the condition of the Soviet Union and the rest of the world at two times: when he came into leadership and when he died. Without such a comparison, it is impossible to measure what he may have contributed or taken away from human progress. If the condition of the Soviet people was much better when he died than when he took power, he cannot have made their lives worse. The worst that can be said is that they would have progressed more without him. The same is true for the world revolution. Was it set back during the decades of his leadership, or did it advance? Once we put the questions this way, the burden of proof falls on those who deny Stalin's positive role as a revolutionary leader.
As World War I began, the Russian Empire consisted primarily of vast undeveloped lands inhabited by many different peoples speaking a variety of languages with a very low level of literacy, productivity, technology, and health. Feudal Social relations still prevailed throughout many of these lands. Czarist secret police, officially organized bands of military terrorists, and a vast bureaucracy were deployed to keep the hungry masses of workers and peasants in line.
The war brought these problems to a crisis. Millions went to their deaths wearing rags, with empty stomachs, often waiting for those in front of them to fall so they could have a rifle and a few rounds of ammunition. When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the entire vast empire, including the great cities of Russia itself, was in chaos.

Before the new government could begin to govern, it was Immediately set upon by the landlords, capitalists, and generals of the old regime, with all the forces they could buy and muster, together with combined military forces of Britain, France, Japan, and Poland, and additional military contingents from the U.S. and other capitalist countries. A vicious civil war raged for three years, from Siberia through European Russia, from the White Sea to the Ukraine. At the end of the Civil War, in 1920, agricultural output was less than half that of the prewar poverty stricken countryside. Even worse was the situation in industry.

Many mines and factories had been destroyed. Transport had been torn up. Stocks of raw materials and semi finished products had been exhausted. The output of large-scale industry was about one seventh of what it had been before the war. And the fighting against foreign military intervention had to go on for two more years. Japanese and U.S. troops still held a portion of Siberia, including the key port city of Vladivostok, which was not recaptured until 1922.
Lenin suffered his first stroke in 1922. From this point on, Stalin, who was the General Secretary of the Central Committee, began to emerge as the principal leader of the Party. Stalin's policies were being implemented at least as early as 1924, the year of Lenin's death, and by 1927 the various opposing factions had been defeated and expelled from the Party. It is the period of the early and mid-1920S that we must compare to 1953.

The Soviet Union of the early 1920S was a land of deprivation. Hunger was everywhere, and actual mass famines swept across much of the countryside. Industrial production was extremely low, and the technological Level of industry was so backward that there seemed little possibility of mechanizing agriculture. Serious rebellions in the armed forces were breaking out, most notably at the Kronstadt garrison in 1921.

By 1924 large-scale peasant revolts were erupting, particularly in Georgia. There was virtually no electricity outside the large cities. Agriculture was based on the peasant holdings and medium-sized farms seized by rural capitalists (the kulaks) who forced the peasants back into wage Labor and tenant fanning. Health care was almost non-existent in much of the country. The technical knowledge and skills needed to develop modern industry, agriculture, health, and education were concentrated in the hands of a few, mostly opposed to socialism while the vast majority of the population were illiterate and could hardly think about education while barely managing to subsist. The Soviet Union was isolated in a world controlled by powerful capitalist countries physically surrounding it, setting up economic blockades, and officially refusing to recognize its existence while outdoing each other in their pledges to wipe out this Red menace.
The counterrevolution was riding high throughout Europe Great Britain, and even in the U.S.A., where the Red threat was used as an excuse to smash labor unions. Fascism was emerging in several parts of the capitalist world, particularly in Japan and in Italy, where Mussolini took dictatorial power in 1924. Most of the world consisted of colonies and neo-colonies of the European powers.

When Stalin died in 1953, the Soviet Union was the second greatest industrial, scientific, and military power in the world and showed clear signs of moving to overtake the U.S. in all these areas. This was despite the devastating losses it suffered while defeating the fascist powers of Germany, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The various peoples of the U.S.S.R. were unified. Starvation and illiteracy were unknown throughout the country. Agriculture was completely collectivized and extremely productive. Preventive health care was the finest in the world, and medical treatment of exceptionally high quality was available free to all citizens. Education at all levels was free. More books were published in the U.S.S.R. than in any other country. There was no unemployment.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, not only had the main fascist powers of 1922-45 been defeated, but the forces of revolution were on the rise everywhere. The Chinese Communist Party had just led one fourth of the world's population to victory over foreign imperialism and domestic feudalism and capitalism. Half of Korea was socialist, and the U.S.-British imperialist army, having rushed to intervene in the civil war under the banner of the United Nations was on the defensive and hopelessly demoralized. In Vietnam, strong socialist power, which had already defeated Japanese Imperialism, was administering the final blows to the beaten army of the French empire. The monarchies and fascist military dictatorships of Eastern Europe had been destroyed by a combination of partisan forces, led by local Communists, and the Soviet Army; everywhere except for Greece there were now governments that supported the world revolution and at least claimed to be governments of the workers and peasants. The largest political party in both France and Italy was the Communist Party. The national liberation movement among the European colonies and neo-colonies was surging forward. Between 1946 and 1949 alone, at least nominal national independence was achieved by Burma, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Laos, Libya, Ceylon, Jordan, and the Philippines, countries comprising about one third of the world’s population. The entire continent of Africa was stirring.

Everybody but the Trotskyites, and even some of them would have to admit that the situation for the Communist world revolution was incomparably advanced in 1953 over what it had been in the early or mid 1920s. Of course, that does not settle the Stalin question. We still have to ask whether Stalin contributed to this tremendous advance, or slowed it down or had negligible influence on it. And we must not duck the question as to whether Stalin's theory and practice built such serious faults into revolutionary communism that its later failures, particularly in the Soviet Union, can be pinned on him.

[Manav]

His father formerly a village cobbler of peasant background, became a' worker in a shoe factory. His mother was the daughter of peasant serfs. So Stalin was no stranger to either workers or peasants, and being from Georgia, he had firsthand knowledge of how czarist Russia oppressed the non-Russian peoples of its empire. .

While studying at the seminary for a career as a priest, he made his first contact with the Marxist underground at the age of fifteen, and at eighteen he formally joined the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, which was to evolve into the Communist Party. Shortly after joining the party in 1898, he became convinced that Lenin was the main theoretical leader of the revolution, particularly when Lenin's newspaper Iskra began to appear in 1900. After being thrown out of his seminary, Stalin concentrated on organizing workers in the area of Tiflis, capital of Georgia, and the Georgian industrial City of Batumi. After one of his many arrests by the czarist secret police, he began to correspond with Lenin from exile.

Escaping from Siberian exile in 1904, Stalin returned to organizing workers in the cities of Georgia, where mass strikes were beginning to assume a decidedly political and revolutionary character. Here he began to become one of the main spokesmen for Lenin's theory, as we see in the first two selections in this volume. In December 1904 he led a huge strike of the Baku workers, which helped precipitate the abortive Russian revolution of 1905. During the revolution and after it was suppressed, Stalin was one of the main Bolshevik underground and military organizers, and was frequently arrested by the secret police. At the Prague Conference of 1912, in which the Bolsheviks completed the split with the Mensheviks and established themselves as a separate party, Stalin was elected in absentia to the Central Committee, a position he was to maintain for over four decades. Then, on the eve of World War I, he published what may properly be considered his first major contribution to Marxist-Leninist theory, Marxism and the National Question.

Prior to World War I, the various social-democratic parties of Europe were loosely united in the Second International.

All pledged themselves to international proletarian solidarity. But when the war broke out, the theory Stalin had developed in Marxism and the National Question proved to be crucial and correct. As Stalin had foreseen, every party that had compromised with bourgeois nationalism ended up leading the workers of its nation to support their "own" bourgeois rulers by going out to kill and be killed by the workers of the other nations. Lenin, Stalin, and the other Bolsheviks took a quite different position. They put forward the slogan "Turn the imperialist war into a civil war." Alone of all the parties of the Second International, they came out for actual armed revolution.
In February 1917 the workers, peasants and soldiers of Russia, in alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie, overthrew the czarist autocracy, which had bled the country dry and brought it to ruin in a war fought to extend the empire. The liberal bourgeoisie established a new government.
The next few months led to a key moment in history. Most of the parties that claimed to be revolutionary now took the position that the Russian proletariat was too weak and backward to assume political power. They advocated that the proletariat should support the new bourgeois government and enter a long period of capitalist development until someday in the future when they could begin to think about socialism. This view even penetrated the Bolsheviks. So when Stalin was released from his prison exile in March and the Central Committee brought him back to help lead the work in St. Petersburg, he found a heavy internal struggle. He took Lenin's position, and, being placed in charge of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, was able to put it forward vigorously to the masses. When the Central Committee finally decided, in October, to lead the workers and soldiers of St. Petersburg to seize the Winter Palace and establish a proletarian government, it was over the violent objections of many of the aristocratic intellectuals who, much to their own surprise and discomfort had found themselves in an actual revolutionary situation. Two of them, Zinoviev and Kamenev, even went so far as to inform the bourgeois newspapers that the Bolsheviks had a secret plan to seize power. After the virtually bloodless seizure by the workers and soldiers took place, a third member of the Central Committee, Rykov, joined Zinoviev and Kamenev in a secret deal made with the bourgeois parties whereby the Bolsheviks would resign from power, the press would be returned to the bourgeoisie, and Lenin would be permanently barred from holding public office. (All this is described in John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, which was first published in 1919. I mention this because Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Rykov were three of the central figures of the purge trials of the 1930S, and it is they who have been portrayed as stanch Bolsheviks in such works as Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon.)

During the Civil War, which followed the seizure of power, Stalin began to emerge as an important military leader.

Trotsky was nominally the head of the Red Army. Behaving, as he always did, in the primacy of technique, Trotsky took as one of his main tasks winning over the high officers of the former czarist army and turning them into the general command of the revolutionary army. The result was defeat after defeat for the Red forces, either through outright betrayal by their aristocratic officers or because these officers tried to apply military theories appropriate to a conscript or mercenary army to the leadership of a people's army made up of workers and peasants. Stalin, on the other hand, understood the military situation from the point of view of the workers and peasants, and with a knowledge of their capabilities and limitations.

In 1919 Stalin was sent as a special plenipotentiary to the key Volga city of Tsaritsyn. His mission was simply to assure the delivery of food supplies from this entire region. What he found was a disastrous military situation, with the city not only surrounded by the White Army but heavily infiltrated by counterrevolutionary forces. He saw that the food supply could not be safeguarded unless the military and political situations were dealt with. He instituted an uncompromising purge of counterrevolutionary elements within both the officer corps and the political infrastructure, took personal command of the military forces over the heads of both the local authorities and Trotsky, and then proceeded to save the city, the region, and the food supply. Trotsky, furious, demanded his recall. As for the citizens of Tsaritsyn, their opinion became known six years later, when they renamed their city Stalingrad.

After this episode, rather than being recalled, Stalin was dispatched far and wide to every major front in the Civil War. In each and every place, he was able to win the immediate respect of the revolutionary people and to lead the way to military victory, even in the most desperate circumstances.

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Stalin and NEP( New Economic Policy )

Certain qualities emerged more and more clearly, acknowledged by both friends and enemies. These were his enormous practicality and efficiency, his worker peasant outlook, and the unswerving way he proceeded to the heart of every problem. By the end of the war, Stalin was widely recognized as a man who knew how to run things, a quality sorely lacking among most of the aristocratic intellectuals who then saw themselves as great proletarian leaders. In April 1922 he was made General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. It was in this position that Stalin was quickly to become the de facto leader of the Party and the nation.

Stalin's career up to this point is relatively uncontroversial in comparison with everything that follows. But nothing at all about Stalin is beyond controversy. Most of his biographers in the capitalist world minimize his revolutionary activities prior to 1922. At least two influential biographies, Boris Souvarine's Stalin (1939) and Edward Ellis Smith's The Young Stalin (1967), even argue that during most of this period Stalin was actually an agent for the czarist secret police. Trotsky's mammoth biography Stalin (1940) not only belittles Stalin's revolutionary activities but actually sees his life and "moral stature" predetermined by his racially defined genetic composition; after discussing whether or not Stalin had "an admixture of Mongolian blood," Trotsky decides that in any case he was one perfect type of the national character of southern countries such as Georgia, where, "in addition to the so-called Southern type, which is characterized by a combination of lazy shiftlessness and explosive irascibility, one meets cold natures, in whom phlegm is combined with stubbornness and slyness." The most influential biographer of all, Trotsky's disciple Isaac Deutscher, is a bit more subtle, blaming Stalin's crude and vicious character not on his race but on his low social class:

The revolutionaries from the upper classes (such as Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rakovsky, Radek, Lunacharsky, and Chicherin) came into the Socialist movement with inherited cultural traditions. They brought into the milieu of the revolution some of the values and qualities of their own milieu-not only knowledge, but also refinement of thought, speech, and manners. Indeed, their Socialist rebellion was itself the product of moral sensitiveness and intellectual refinement. These were precisely the qualities that life had not been kind enough to cultivate in Djugashvili [Stalin]. On the contrary, it had heaped enough physical and moral squalor in his path to blunt his sensitiveness and his taste. (Stalin, A Political Biography, p. 26)

Although there are vastly different views of Stalin's career up to this point, his activities are relatively less controversial, because they are relatively less important. Whatever Stalin's contribution, there is still a good chance that even without him Lenin could have led the revolution and the Red forces would have won the Civil War. But, from this point on, there are at least two widely divergent, in fact wildly contradictory, versions of Stalin's activities and their significance.

Most readers of this book have heard only one side of this debate, the side of Trotsky and the capitalist world. I shall not pretend to make a "balanced presentation," but instead give a summary of the unfamiliar other side of the argument.

Everyone, friend and foe alike, would agree that at the heart of the question of Stalin lies the theory and practice of "socialism in one country." All of Stalin's major ideological opponents in one way or another took issue with this theory.

Actually, the theory did not originate with Stalin but with Lenin. In 1915, in his article "On the Slogan for a United States of Europe," Lenin argued that "the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone." He foresaw "a more or less prolonged and stubborn struggle" internationally that could begin like this in one country: "After expropriating the capitalists and organizing their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world-the capitalist world-attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed force against the exploiting classes and their states."

Of course, at the end of World War I most Bolsheviks (and many capitalists) expected revolution to break out in many of the European capitalist countries. In fact, many of the returning soldiers did turn their guns around. A revolutionary government was established in Hungary and Slovakia.
Germany and Bulgaria for a while were covered by soviets of workers, peasants, and soldiers. But counterrevolution swept all these away.

Trotsky and his supporters continued to believe that the proletariat of Europe was ready to make socialist revolution.

They also believed that unless this happened, the proletariat would be unable to maintain power in the Soviet Union.

They belittled the role of the peasantry as an ally of the Russian proletariat and saw very little potential in the national liberation movements of the predominantly peasant countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Their so-called "Left opposition" put forward the theory, of "permanent revolution," which pinned its hopes on an imminent uprising of the industrial proletariat of Europe. They saw the world revolution then spreading outward from these "civilized" countries to the "backward" regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Meanwhile there also developed what was later to be called the "Right opposition," spearheaded by Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. They were realistic enough to recognize that the revolutionary tide was definitely ebbing in Europe, but they concluded from this that the Soviet Union would have to be content to remain for a long time a basically agricultural country without pretending to be a proletarian socialist state.

Stalin was not about to give up on socialism in the Soviet Union simply because history was not turning out exactly the way theorists had wanted, with revolution winning out quickly in the most advanced capitalist countries. He saw that the Soviet revolution had indeed been able to maintain itself against very powerful enemies at home and abroad. Besides, the Soviet Union was a vast country whose rich natural resources gave it an enormous potential for industrial and social development. He stood for building socialism in this one country and turning it into an inspiration and base area for the oppressed classes and nations throughout the world. He believed that, helped by both the example and material support of a socialist Soviet Union, the tide of revolution would eventually begin rising again, and that, in turn, proletarian revolution in Europe and national liberation struggles in the rest of the world would eventually break the Soviet isolation.

There are two parts to the concept of socialism in one country. Emphasis is usually placed only on the part that says "one country." Equally important is the idea that only socialism, and not communism, can be achieved prior to the time when the victory of the world revolution has been won. A communist society would have no classes, no money, no scarcity, and no state that is, no army, police force, prisons, and courts. There is no such society in the world, and no society claims to be Communist. A socialist society, according to Marxism-Leninism, is the transitional form on the road to communism. Classes and class struggle still exist, all the material needs of the people have not as yet been met, and there is indeed a state, a government of the working class known as the dictatorship of the proletariat (as opposed to the government of capitalist nations, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie).

Neither Lenin nor Stalin ever had any illusion that any single country, even one as vast and potentially rich as the Soviet Union, would ever be able to establish a stateless, classless society while capitalism still had power in the rest of the world. But Stalin, like Lenin, did believe that the Soviet Union could eliminate capitalism, industrialize, extend the power of the working class, and wipe out real material privation all during the period of capitalist encirclement.
To do this, Stalin held, the proletariat would have to rely on the peasantry. He rejected Trotsky's scorn for the Russian peasants and saw them, rather than the European proletariat, as the only ally that could come to the immediate aid of the Russian workers.

When the Civil War ended, in 1921, with most of the Soviet Union in chaotic ruin, Lenin won a struggle against Trotsky within the Party to institute what was called the New Economic Policy (NEP), under which a limited amount of private enterprise based on trade was allowed to develop in both the cities and the countryside. NEP was successful in averting an immediate total catastrophe, but by 1925 it was becoming clear that this policy was also creating problems for the development of socialism. This brings us to the first great crux of the Stalin question.
We have been led to believe that in order to industrialize at any price; Stalin pursued a ruthless policy of forced collectivization, deliberately murdering several million peasants known as kulaks during the process. The truth is quite different.

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Stalin and Spanish Civil War

This brings us to the second great crux of the Stalin question, the "left" criticism, originating with Trotsky and then widely disseminated by the theorists of what used to be called “the New Left."

This criticism holds that Stalin was just a nationalist who sold out revolution throughout the rest of the world. The debate ranges over all the key events of twentieth-century history and can be only touched on in an essay.

Stalin's difference with Trotsky on the peasantry was not confined to the role of the peasantry within the Soviet Union.

Trotsky saw very little potential in the national liberation movements in those parts of the world that were still basically peasant societies. He argued that revolution would come first to the advanced capitalist countries of Europe and North America and would then spread to the "uncivilized" areas of the world. Stalin, on the other hand saw that the national liberation movements of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were key to the development of the world revolution because objectively they were leading the fight against imperialism.

We see this argument developed clearly as early as 1924, In "The Foundations of Leninism," where he argues that "the struggle that the Egyptian merchants and bourgeois intellectuals are waging for the independence of Egypt is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the bourgeois origin and bourgeois title of the leaders of the Egyptian national movement, despite the fact that they are opposed to socialism; whereas the struggle that the British 'Labor' movement is waging to preserve Egypt's dependent position is for the same reasons a reactionary struggle, despite the proletarian origins and the proletarian title of the members of hat government, despite the fact that they are 'for' socialism. To most European Marxists, this was some kind of barbarian heresy. But Ho Chi Minh expressed the view of many Communists from the colonies in that same year, 1924, when he recognized that Stalin was the leader of the only Party that stood with the national liberation struggles and when he agreed with Stalin that the viewpoint of most other so-called Marxists on the national question was nothing short of "counterrevolutionary" (Ho Chi Minh Report on the National and Colonial Questions at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International).

The difference between Stalin's line and Trotsky's line and the falsification of what Stalin's line was, can be seen most clearly on the question of the Chinese revolution. The typical "left" view prevalent today is represented in David Horowitz's The Free World Colossus (1965), which asserts "Stalin's continued blindness to the character and potential of the Chinese Revolution." Using as his main source a Yugoslav biography of Tito, Horowitz blandly declares: "Even after the war, when it was clear to most observers that Chiang was finished, Stalin did not think much of the prospects of Chinese Communism" (p. Ill).

Mao's opinion of Stalin is a little different:
Rallied around him, we constantly received advice from him, constantly drew ideological strength from his works.... It is common knowledge that Comrade Stalin ardently loved the Chinese people and considered that the forces of the Chinese revolution were immeasurable.

He displayed the greatest wisdom in matters pertaining to the Chinese revolution. . . . Sacredly preserving the memory of our great teacher Stalin, the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people . . . will even more perseveringly study Stalin's teaching .... ("A Great Friendship," 1953)

It is possible that this statement can be viewed as a formal tribute made shortly after Stalin's death and before it was safe to criticize Stalin within the international Communist movement. But years later, after the Russian attack on Stalin and after it was unsafe not to spit on Stalin's memory, the Chinese still consistently maintained their position. In 1961, after listening to Khrushchev's rabid denunciations of Stalin at the Twenty-second Party Congress, Chou En-lai ostentatiously laid a wreath on Stalin's tomb. Khrushchev and his supporters then disinterred Stalin's body, but the Chinese responded to this in 1963 by saying that Khrushchev "can never succeed in removing the great image of Stalin from the minds of the Soviet people and of the people throughout the world." ("On the Question of Stalin")

In fact, as his 1927 essay on China included in this collection shows, Stalin very early outlined the basic theory of the Chinese revolution. Trotsky attacks this theory, which he sneers at as "guerrilla adventure," because it is not based on the cities as the revolutionary centers, because it relies on class allies of the proletariat, particularly the peasantry, and because it is primarily anti-feudal and anti-imperialist rather than focused primarily against Chinese capitalism.

After 1927, when the first liberated base areas were established in the countryside, Trotsky claimed that this revolution could no longer be seen as proletarian but as a mere peasant rebellion, and soon he began to refer to its guiding theory as the Stalin-Mao line. To this day, Trotskyites around the world deride the Chinese revolution as a mere "Stalinist bureaucracy." The Chinese themselves do acknowledge that at certain points Stalin gave some incorrect tactical advice, but they are quick to add that he always recognized and corrected these errors and was self-critical about them. They are very firm in their belief that they could not have made their revolution without his general theory, his over-all leadership of the world revolutionary movement, and the firm rear area and base of material support he provided. Thus the only really valid major criticism comes from anti-Communists, because without Stalin, at least according to the Chinese, the Communists would not have won.

Stalin's role in the Spanish Civil War likewise comes under fire from the "left." Again taking their cue from Trotsky and such professional anti-Communist ideologues as George Orwell, many "socialists" claim that Stalin sold out the Loyalists. A similar criticism is made about Stalin's policies in relation to the Greek partisans in the late 1940s, which we will discuss later.

According to these "left" criticisms, Stalin didn't "care" about either of these struggles, because of his preoccupation with internal development and "Great Russian power." The simple fact of the matter is that in both cases Stalin was the only national leader anyplace in the world to support the popular forces, and he did this in the face of stubborn opposition within his own camp and the dangers of military attack from the leading aggressive powers in the world (Germany and Italy in the late 1930S, the U.S. ten years later).

Because the U.S.S.R., following Stalin's policies, had become a modem industrial nation by the mid-1930S, it was able to ship to the Spanish Loyalists Soviet tanks and planes that were every bit as advanced as the Nazi models. Because the U.S.S.R. was the leader of the world revolutionary forces, Communists from many nations were able to organize the International Brigades, which went to resist Mussolini's fascist divisions and the crack Nazi forces, such as the Condor Legion, that were invading the Spanish Republic. The capitalist powers, alarmed by this international support for the Loyalists, planned joint action to stop it. In March 1937, warships of GeIluany, Italy, France, and Great Britain began jointly policing the Spanish coast. Acting on a British initiative, these same countries formed a bloc in late 1937 to isolate the Soviet Union by implementing a policy they called "non-intervention," which Lloyd George, as leader of the British Opposition, labeled a clear policy of support for the fascists. Mussolini supported the British plan and called for a' campaign "to drive Bolshevism from Europe." Stalin's own foreign ministry, which was still dominated by aristocrats masquerading as proletarian revolutionaries, sided with the capitalist powers. The New York Times of October 29, 1937, describes how the "unyielding" Stalin, representing "Russian stubbornness," refused to go along: "A struggle has been going on all this week between Joseph Stalin and Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinoff," who wished to accept the British plan. Stalin stuck to his guns, and the Soviet Union refused to grant Franco international status as a combatant, insisting that it had every right in the world to continue aiding the duly elected government of Spain, which it did until the bitter end.

The Spanish Civil War was just one part of the world-wide imperialist aims of the Axis powers.

[Manav]

Stalin and Non-Aggression Pact

Japan was pushing ahead in its conquest of Asia. Japanese forces overran Manchuria in 1931; only nine years after the Red Army had driven them out of Siberia, and then invaded China on a full scale.
Ethiopia fell to Italy in 1936. A few months later, Germany and Japan signed an anti-Comintern pact, which was joined by Italy in 1937. In 1938, Germany invaded Austria. Hitler, who had come to power on a promise to rid Germany and the world of the Red menace, was now almost prepared to launch his decisive strike against the Soviet Union.

The other major capitalist powers surveyed the scene with mixed feelings. On one hand, they would have liked nothing better than to see the Communist threat ended once and for all, particularly with the dirty work being done by the fascist nations. On the other hand, they had to recognize that fascism was then the ideology of the have-not imperialists, upstarts whose global aims included a challenge to the hegemony of France, Britain, and the United States. Should they move now to check these expansionists’ aims or should they let them develop unchecked, hoping that they would move against the Soviet Union rather than Western Europe and the European colonies in Asia and Africa?

In 1938 they found the answer, a better course than either of these two alternatives. They would appease Hitler by giving him the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. This would not only dissuade the Nazis from attacking their fellow capitalists to the west, but it would also remove the last physical barriers to the east, the mountains of the Czech Sudetenland. All logic indicated to them that they had thus gently but firmly turned the Nazis eastward, and even given them a little shove in that direction. Now all they had to do was to wait, and, after the fascist powers and the Soviet Union had devastated each other, they might even be able to pick up the pieces. So they hailed the Munich agreement of September 30, 1938, as the guarantee of "Peace in our time"-for them.

Stalin had offered to defend Czechoslovakia militarily against the Nazis if anyone of the European capitalist countries would unite with the Soviet Union in this effort. The British and the French had evaded what they considered this trap, refusing to allow the Soviet Union even to participate at Munich. They now stepped back and waited, self-satisfied, to watch the Reds destroyed. It seemed they didn't have long to wait. Within a few months, Germany seized all of Czechoslovakia, giving some pieces of the fallen republic to its allies Poland and Hungary.

By mid-March 1939 the Nazis had occupied Bohemia and Moravia, the Hungarians had seized Carpatho-Ukraine, and Germany had formally annexed Memel. At the end of that month, Madrid fell and all of Spain surrendered to the fascists. On May 7, Germany and Italy announced a formal military and political alliance. The stage was set for the destruction of the Soviet Union.
Four days later, on May 11, 1939, the first attack came.

The crack Japanese army that had invaded Manchuria struck Into the Soviet Union. The Soviet-Japanese war of 1939 is conveniently omitted from our history books, but this war, together with the Anglo-French collaboration with the Nazis lind fascists in the west, form the context for another of Stalin's great "crimes," the Soviet-German non-aggression pact of August 1939. Stalin recognized that the main aim of the Axis was to destroy the Soviet Union, and that the other capitalist nations were conniving with this scheme. He also knew that sooner or later the main Axis attack would come on the U.S.S.R.'s western front. Meanwhile, Soviet forces were being diverted to the east, to fend off the Japanese invaders. The non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, which horrified and disillusioned Communist sympathizers, particularly intellectuals, in the capitalist nations, was actually one of the most brilliant strategic moves of Stalin's life, and perhaps of diplomatic history. From the Soviet point of view it accomplished five things:
(1) it brought needed time to prepare for the Nazi attack, which was thus delayed two years;
(2) it allowed the Red Army to concentrate on smashing the Japanese invasion, without having to fight on two fronts; they decisively defeated the Japanese within three months;

(3) it allowed the Soviet Union to retake the sections of White Russia and the Ukraine that had been invaded by Poland during the Russian Civil War and were presently occupied by the Polish military dictatorship; this meant that the forthcoming Nazi invasion would have to pass through a much larger area defended by the Red Army;

(4) it also allowed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which also had been part of Russia before the Civil War, to become part of the U.S.S.R. as Soviet Republics; this meant that the forthcoming Nazi attack could not immediately outflank Leningrad;

(5) most important of all, it destroyed the Anglo-French strategy of encouraging a war between the Axis powers and the Soviet Union while they enjoyed neutrality; World War II was to begin as a war between the Axis powers and the other capitalist nations, and the Soviet Union, if forced into it, was not going to have to fight alone against the combined fascist powers. The worldwide defeat of the fascist Axis was in part a product of Stalin's diplomatic strategy, as well as his later military strategy.

[W1N5T0N]

"democratic stalinist" is sadly an oxymoron :laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:

[tir1944]

Really?
http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Grover%20Furr/stalin_1.htm

[RED DAVE]

The non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, which horrified and disillusioned Communist sympathizers, particularly intellectuals, in the capitalist nations, was actually one of the most brilliant strategic moves of Stalin's life, and perhaps of diplomatic historyThe Stalin-Hitler Pact broke the heart and the back of the Left in the US.

The CP-led antifascist movement had been pumping for war against fascism. Then, suddenly, to quote Comrade Molotov, "Fascism is a matter of taste." and it was all antiwar.

Then, when the Germans invaded, it was back to war.

Gimme an O – O
Gimme a P – P
Gimme another P – P
Gimme another O – O
Gimme an R – R
Gimme an T – T
Gimme a U – U
Gimme an N – N
Gimme an I – I
Gimme an S – S
Gimme an M – M

And what does it all spell: OPPORTUNISM.

The organization of the international working class was sacrificed to the national needs of the Soviet Union.

RED DAVE

[tir1944]

The Stalin-Hitler Pact broke the heart of the Left in the US.
That just tells how rotten that "heart" was.
"Hearts of American Leftists" were,of course,USSR's first priority (their own safety of course came after the hearts of American Leftists).



Then, suddenly, to quote Comrade Molotov, "Fascism is a matter of taste." and it was all antiwar.
Yep,and ever heard of the "Phoney war"?
The Allies spent a year scratching their balls doing nothing.
Stalin reasonably assumed that they (the "Allies") could still turn Germany against the USSR.



And what does it all spell: OPPORTUNISM.
Nah-ah.What you can't forget is that the USSR had to act as a state,and a state in mortal danger,surrounded from all sides.



The organization of the international working class was sacrificed to the national needs of the Soviet Union.
So how come the working class won in,let's say,China after the war?

[RED DAVE]

The Stalin-Hitler Pact broke the heart of the Left in the US .
That just tells how rotten that "heart" was.Well, when you consider that it was led by the CPUSA, and included the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, that's a hell of thing to say. But your ignorance of American politics is only equaled by your arrogance Stalinism.


"Hearts of American Leftists" were,of course,USSR's first priority (their own safety of course came after the hearts of American Leftists).What you are saying is that the interests of the working class in other countries was sacrificed to the national interests of the Soviet Union. How is that different from the actions of any bourgeois state?


Then, suddenly, to quote Comrade Molotov, "Fascism is a matter of taste." and it was all antiwar

Yep,and ever heard of the "Phoney war"?
The Allies spent a year scratching their balls doing nothing.
Stalin reasonably assumed that they (the "Allies") could still turn Germany against the USSR.And you ever hear of "Phoney Communism" and one of the most disgusting things that a so-called Marxist ever said. The nazis have wiped out all the organizations of the German working class, triumphed in Spain, and "... it's a matter of taste."

And you scumbags did the same thing in the 60s when the Russians were testing 50 megaton bombs in the atmosphere, and you justified it. The ban-the-bomb movement in Japan was ripped apart as a result of Stalinist opportunism.


And what does it all spell: OPPORTUNISM.
Nah-ah.What you can't forget is that the USSR had to act as a state,and a state in mortal danger,surrounded from all sides.So Great Russian Nationalism triumphs over proletarian internationalism.


The organization of the international working class was sacrificed to the national needs of the Soviet Union.
So how come the working class won in,let's say,China after the war?Problem is that the working class did not win in China. The petit-bourgeoisie and, eventually, the bourgeoisie triumphed. And we have capitalism in the USSR and China.
RED DAVE

[GatesofLenin]

The Stalin-Hitler Pact broke the heart and the back of the Left in the US.

The CP-led antifascist movement had been pumping for war against fascism. Then, suddenly, to quote Comrade Molotov, "Fascism is a matter of taste." and it was all antiwar.

Then, when the Germans invaded, it was back to war.

Gimme an O – O
Gimme a P – P
Gimme another P – P
Gimme another O – O
Gimme an R – R
Gimme an T – T
Gimme a U – U
Gimme an N – N
Gimme an I – I
Gimme an S – S
Gimme an M – M

And what does it all spell: OPPORTUNISM.

The organization of the international working class was sacrificed to the national needs of the Soviet Union.

RED DAVE

Every historian that studied WWII and the Soviet Union will tell you that Stalin signed the truce pact to buy himself time. A famous quote from Josef Stalin himself on July 3rd 1941: "We secured peace for our country for one and a half years, as well as an opportunity of preparing our forces for defense if fascist Germany risked attacking our country in defiance of the pact. This was a definite gain to our country and a loss for fascist Germany."

[Sheepy]

Anyone who worships this capitalist like a god should not be allowed to call themselves a leftist.

[GatesofLenin]

Anyone who worships this capitalist like a god should not be allowed to call themselves a leftist.

You know you can't go from a capitalist society to a pure communist one overnight, right? Calling Stalin a capitalist is absurd, it's like calling Ronald Reagan a commie! :laugh:

[Rooster]

You know you can't go from a capitalist society to a pure communist one overnight, right? Calling Stalin a capitalist is absurd, it's like calling Ronald Reagan a commie! :laugh:

So... what? Did you just call Lenin and Stalin and co capitalists? Because, you know, you can't go from capitalism to communism over night, right?

[tir1944]

What's do you think of NEP?

[citizen of industry]

Every historian that studied WWII and the Soviet Union will tell you that Stalin signed the truce pact to buy himself time. A famous quote from Josef Stalin himself on July 3rd 1941: "We secured peace for our country for one and a half years, as well as an opportunity of preparing our forces for defense if fascist Germany risked attacking our country in defiance of the pact. This was a definite gain to our country and a loss for fascist Germany."

Then why were they so woefully unprepared when operation Barborossa commenced? Why did Stalin purge his whole officer corps in the late 30's? Why were millions of troops encircled? Why didn't they have a decent plane? Why were they on a peacetime footing when the shit hit the fan, with all their plans grounded in neat little rows? They had a huge army, I'll give you that, but it took two years until after they were invaded for it to become ready to fight the Nazis. From 1943-on they whooped-ass, but they certainly weren't very prepared in 1941.

[Geiseric]

wait there's another one of these threads? Holy fuck. Stalin sucked, the USSR fell apart because socialism in one country didn't work, and the revolutionaries of other countries also failed because of the comintern leadership. Get over it.

[Rooster]

What's do you think of NEP?

Oh come off it. If you're going to hold by this mechanistic view of history then at least be consistent about it. Feudalism - capitalism - socialism - communism, right? How is it possible for socialism to revert back to capitalism? Not even Napoleon could reverse the economic structure when he became Emperor. Besides, the main economic structure and organs that were created under NEP continued to be used, in the main, throughout Stalin's rule. The only difference being that private trade was pushed out by the state then reintroduced as state enterprises.

[Ismail]

Then why were they so woefully unprepared when operation Barborossa commenced?Because, as Molotov notes in his memoirs, the Soviets expected the Germans to attack one year later than they did, and this was before the fall of France. Before that the Soviets thought that the German proletariat would rise up as the Nazi army got bogged down fighting France, and thus the Soviets would more or less effortlessly move onwards and take Berlin in an offensive operation.

A good book on the subject is Stalin's Wars by Geoffrey Roberts.


Why did Stalin purge his whole officer corps in the late 30's?Because he suspected them of being Nazi agents or at the very least wanting to overthrow the government.

[citizen of industry]

Because, as Molotov notes in his memoirs, the Soviets expected the Germans to attack one year later than they did, and this was before the fall of France. Before that the Soviets thought that the German proletariat would rise up as the Nazi army got bogged down fighting France, and thus the Soviets would more or less effortlessly move onwards and take Berlin in an offensive operation.

A good book on the subject is Stalin's Wars by Geoffrey Roberts.

Because he suspected them of being Nazi agents or at the very least wanting to overthrow the government.

So annexing Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, etc. was just an added benefit of the Molatov-Ribbentrop pact, and the Red Army's performance in Finland didn't ring any alarm bells?

[tir1944]

The USSR never annexed Finland,what are you talking about?

[dodger]

"A good book on the subject is Stalin's Wars by Geoffrey Roberts"

Thanks for the suggestion...I checked the reviews at Amazon Ismail. I have ordered the book. Since the opening of archives there must be other good books out there too. This paragraph from a reviewer interested me....

"This book is a very useful corrective to myths about the Second World War and the Cold War. It shows how the Soviet Union played a key role in winning the World War, defeating more than 75% of Hitler's divisions. As President Roosevelt said, "The Russian armies are killing more Axis personnel and destroying more Axis material than all the other twenty-five United Nations put together."

[The Man]

Because, as Molotov notes in his memoirs, the Soviets expected the Germans to attack one year later than they did, and this was before the fall of France. Before that the Soviets thought that the German proletariat would rise up as the Nazi army got bogged down fighting France, and thus the Soviets would more or less effortlessly move onwards and take Berlin in an offensive operation.

A good book on the subject is Stalin's Wars by Geoffrey Roberts.

Because he suspected them of being Nazi agents or at the very least wanting to overthrow the government.

On every one of your posts you have listed atleast one book/source. You're pretty damn well-read.

By looking at your posts, and knowing that you know so much about Lenin, Stalin, and Hoxha, that I wouldn't be surprised if you knew how many corn kernels were in a shit that Stalin took in 1941.

[ColonelCossack]

On every one of your posts you have listed atleast one book/source. You're pretty damn well-read.

By looking at your posts, and knowing that you know so much about Lenin, Stalin, and Hoxha, that I wouldn't be surprised if you knew how many corn kernels were in a shit that Stalin took in 1941.

Didn't you know? Ismail knows everything... :p

[GatesofLenin]

Then why were they so woefully unprepared when operation Barborossa commenced? Why did Stalin purge his whole officer corps in the late 30's? Why were millions of troops encircled? Why didn't they have a decent plane? Why were they on a peacetime footing when the shit hit the fan, with all their plans grounded in neat little rows? They had a huge army, I'll give you that, but it took two years until after they were invaded for it to become ready to fight the Nazis. From 1943-on they whooped-ass, but they certainly weren't very prepared in 1941.

The USSR sent thousands of I-15 and I-16 Polikarpovs to supply the Republicans in the Spanish civil war. Many Russian pilots fought in that war. The heads of the Soviet military quickly found out that the Polikarpovs were no match for the German BF-109's and changed their strategy to build ground-attack planes, like the IL-2 Sturmovik instead. The change-over decision was made less than one-year before Hitler attacked.
The Soviets were not in a peacetime mode, like you state, they were building and preparing as quickly as possible. Stalin was smart enough to recognize that the Russian winter would quickly decimate the Nazis, as Hitler was so determined to capture Moscow and rule the whole USSR, he left his forward troops without any backup logistics. The Russian winter cost the Wehrmacht heavy losses as it did Napoleons troops.

[citizen of industry]

The USSR never annexed Finland,what are you talking about?

I'm talking about the USSR invading Finland in 1939, annexing 11% of it's territory and much of its economic resources, commonly known as the "Winter War" of 1939/30, where Finnish troops held off the massive Red Army for many months: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War


The USSR sent thousands of I-15 and I-16 Polikarpovs to supply the Republicans in the Spanish civil war. Many Russian pilots fought in that war. The heads of the Soviet military quickly found out that the Polikarpovs were no match for the German BF-109's and changed their strategy to build ground-attack planes, like the IL-2 Sturmovik instead. The change-over decision was made less than one-year before Hitler attacked.
The Soviets were not in a peacetime mode, like you state, they were building and preparing as quickly as possible. Stalin was smart enough to recognize that the Russian winter would quickly decimate the Nazis, as Hitler was so determined to capture Moscow and rule the whole USSR, he left his forward troops without any backup logistics. The Russian winter cost the Wehrmacht heavy losses as it did Napoleons troops.

Yeah, Hitler was incedibly stupid, and didn't bother providing Wermacht troops with winter clothing, History repeats itself. But I have a hard time believing the non-aggression pact was just a gambit to buy more time to arm, rather than a move to gobble up territory. I mean, they were sharing rifles. And the winter didn't just decimate all the German troops while the soviets sat there in the snow warm and laughing. Look at the siege of Leningrad. That victory was due as much to the civilians than the army.

[kurr]

I giggle everytime I see a Trot call out Stalin (or any Stalinist for that matter) for his overly authoritarian practices. Do you really think your fearless leader (dictator) wouldn't have done the same thing?

[citizen of industry]

I giggle everytime I see a Trot call out Stalin (or any Stalinist for that matter) for his overly authoritarian practices. Do you really think your fearless leader (dictator) wouldn't have done the same thing?

Sorry, where is "The Trotsky Thread 2: All discussion about Trotsky (as a person) in this thread please."

[kurr]

Sorry, where is "The Trotsky Thread 2: All discussion about Trotsky (as a person) in this thread please."

I get it... your a Trotskyist.

[GatesofLenin]

Yeah, Hitler was incedibly stupid, and didn't bother providing Wermacht troops with winter clothing, History repeats itself. But I have a hard time believing the non-aggression pact was just a gambit to buy more time to arm, rather than a move to gobble up territory. I mean, they were sharing rifles. And the winter didn't just decimate all the German troops while the soviets sat there in the snow warm and laughing. Look at the siege of Leningrad. That victory was due as much to the civilians than the army.

Right but the battle of Stalingrad shows what the winter can do in the Russian steppes if you're not prepared. Not to downplay the courage of the Soviet soldiers as well.

[Ismail]

I'm talking about the USSR invading Finland in 1939, annexing 11% of it's territory and much of its economic resources, commonly known as the "Winter War" of 1939/30, where Finnish troops held off the massive Red Army for many months:The USSR invaded Finland because it was refusing to lease ports which the Soviets feared would be used by the Germans to attack Leningrad. The Finnish negotiators actually backed the Soviet requests, but the anti-communist government did not. So Stalin offered a proposal more acceptable to the Finns. The Finnish negotiators thought that was even better, but the government still said no.

After the invasion the Soviets evidently viewed Finland as a pro-German state and wanted to make sure that if it tried to go to war again (note that the Finns claimed Karelia) the Soviets would be in a better position to spar with them.


But I have a hard time believing the non-aggression pact was just a gambit to buy more time to arm, rather than a move to gobble up territory.It was both. The USSR got the Baltics (although Hitler didn't like it when Soviet troops moved into Lithuania, which Nazi Germany had designs on), Bessarabia and western Byelorussia and Ukraine (aka eastern Poland.) This allowed for the USSR to be in a better military position for when the Nazis did invade.

[RED DAVE]

I giggle everytime I see a Trot call out Stalin (or any Stalinist for that matter) for his overly authoritarian practices. Do you really think your fearless leader (dictator) wouldn't have done the same thing?Yes, I don't. If you look at Trotsky's behavior when he was out of power, from about 1924 on, you will see a pattern of behavior very different from that of Stalin. You will see a man who was a great revolutionary desperately trying to keep the revolutionary spirit alive in the USSR, and the, when all was lost, trying to build a new international.

And for this Stalin had an ice pick put in his brain.

RED DAVE

[SemperFidelis]

I think Stalin should have been kept on display in the mausoleum.

[ComradeOm]

The USSR invaded Finland because it was refusing to lease ports which the Soviets feared would be used by the Germans to attack Leningrad. The Finnish negotiators actually backed the Soviet requests, but the anti-communist government did not. So Stalin offered a proposal more acceptable to the Finns. The Finnish negotiators thought that was even better, but the government still said noDuring WWIII Churchill seriously contemplated invading Ireland to secure the use of the strategically important Treaty Ports. An offer was even supposedly made to exchange Northern Ireland for the ports. This was refused by Dublin. Do you believe that Britain would have justified in invading Ireland and forcibly annexing the lands it desired?

[Ismail]

During WWIII Churchill seriously contemplated invading Ireland to secure the use of the strategically important Treaty Ports. An offer was even supposedly made to exchange Northern Ireland for the ports. This was refused by Dublin. Do you believe that Britain would have justified in invading Ireland and forcibly annexing the lands it desired?If it was in the context of WWII, yes.

Of course the USSR gave back the territories it did annex after WWII had ended.

The archives make it clear that the Soviets had no imperial ambitions. They thought that Finland would align with the Germans (as it did) and that the Germans would use Finland as a base to attack Leningrad.

[ComradeOm]

If it was in the context of WWII, yesWell at least you're consistent in your support of imperialist empires

The right of nations to self-determination supposes that nations have 'political independence' and 'state self-determination' from their former imperial masters. This is not the same as 'independence unless a good deal is offered for territory' or 'independence until an imperialist power fears for its security'. Self-determination means, can only mean, that the choice of whether to accept the Soviet ultimatum lay with Finland alone. This was not Moscow's decision to make


Of course the USSR gave back the territories it did annex after WWII had endedReally? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Karelian_Isthmus.png) I'm sure you can explain this because to the uneducated eye it appears that Russia continues to occupy Karelia. No doubt Moscow continues to fear that the Finns might try to take Petersburg :rolleyes:

[Ismail]

The right of nations to self-determination supposes that nations have 'political independence' and 'state self-determination' from their former imperial masters. This is not the same as 'independence unless a good deal is offered for territory' or 'independence until an imperialist power fears for its security'. Self-determination means, can only mean, that the choice of whether to accept the Soviet ultimatum lay with Finland alone. This was not Moscow's decision to makeOf course as Trotsky once said, "We do not only recognize, but we also give full support to the principle of self-determination, wherever it is directed against feudal, capitalist and imperialist states. But wherever the fiction of self-determination, in the hands of the bourgeoisie, becomes a weapon directed against the proletarian revolution, we have no occasion to treat this fiction differently from the other 'principles' of democracy perverted by capitalism."

The Bolsheviks granted Finland self-determination. The USSR's proposals to have some ports leased to it did not infringe upon the national rights of the Finnish people. Again, the actual negotiators accepted the Soviet proposals, only the reactionary government did not.


I'm sure you can explain this because to the uneducated eye it appears that Russia continues to occupy Karelia.I meant to say the leased ports, although the Karelian people did have their own SSR until the advent of Khrushchev. Early on the Bolsheviks also considered transferring the whole Karelian region in general to the Finns on the conclusion of a socialist revolution, but obviously that didn't happen.

[Iron Felix]

A denial of the holodomor on the first page. Great thread guys. Not unlike the denial of the holocaust on Stormfront, really.

[ComradeOm]

The Bolsheviks granted Finland self-determination. The USSR's proposals to have some ports leased to it did not infringe upon the national rights of the Finnish people. Again, the actual negotiators accepted the Soviet proposals, only the reactionary government did notNo, it was the invasion by the Red Army that violated Finland's sovereignty and made a mockery of any Soviet lip service to the right of self-determination. This was the naked aggression of a Great Power against a small former colonial subject. But hey, you're already okay with such a scenario in the case of Ireland/Britain... all in the defence of Churchill's proletarian revolution of course

And frankly what the Finnish negotiators thought is entirely irrelevant


I meant to say the leased ports, although the Karelian people did have their own SSR until the advent of Khrushchev"The Karelian people" being Russians who settled in the area in the post-war period. They don't speak Finnish in Vyborg any more

[Ismail]

No, it was the invasion by the Red Army that violated Finland's sovereignty and made a mockery of any Soviet lip service to the right of self-determination.It violated Finland's sovereignty just to go to war? That's an odd definition and conflation of sovereignty and national self-determination.


And frankly what the Finnish negotiators thought is entirely irrelevantYet what the bourgeois rulers thought was not? The same bourgeois rulers who literally praised Hitler as a "genius" (such as Ryti)? The same leaders who called on Mannerheim, who butchered countless workers during the Finnish Civil War, to take the helm of the state against the dreaded communist menace?


"The Karelian people" being Russians who settled in the area in the post-war period. They don't speak Finnish in Vyborg any moreEr, no, Karelians have been around since medieval times. Obviously lots of Russians came in after the war, but still. The Karelo-Finnish SSR of 1940-1956 was based on the Karelian ASSR set up in 1923.


A denial of the holodomor on the first page. Great thread guys. Not unlike the denial of the holocaust on Stormfront, really.No one denies that the Ukrainian famine happened.

[ComradeOm]

It violated Finland's sovereignty just to go to war? That's an odd definition and conflation of sovereignty and national self-determinationYes, invading another country in a war of aggression is, by definition, a violation of both a nation's sovereignty and right to self-determination


Yet what the bourgeois rulers thought was not? The same bourgeois rulers who literally praised Hitler as a "genius" (such as Ryti)? The same leaders who called on Mannerheim, who butchered countless workers during the Finnish Civil War, to take the helm of the state against the dreaded communist menace?All of which is true. I guess it's a good thing then that the decision was taken on behalf of the Finnish people by Russians in Moscow. Because the Soviet Politburo was much better placed to make a decision regarding the borders of Finland than any Finnish government, right?

You really should listen to yourself sometime


Er, no, Karelians have been around since medieval times. Obviously lots of Russians came in after the war, but stillA lot of Russians came in after the previous Karelians fled, never to return, during the war. Had the Soviet government not decided to invade and annex Karelia then the ethnic composition of the region would be very different today


No one denies that the Ukrainian famine happened.Lot's of people deny that the Soviet government played any role in it. An act of God is the current excuse

[Ismail]

Yes, invading another country in a war of aggression is, by definition, a violation of both a nation's sovereignty and right to self-determinationThis is assuming that the Soviets launched a "war of aggression." The intent, which I'm sure you yourself do not deny, was to secure Leningrad from a German offensive through Finnish ports. The Soviets approached the Finns on this issue, they didn't say "do this or else we'll destroy Finland." The Finnish leadership, which was demonstrably anti-communist, would rather throw its lot in with the Germans than agree to keep Leningrad secure in the case of a Nazi invasion of the USSR. The Soviet act was one of desperation, not imperial conquest.


I guess it's a good thing then that the decision was taken on behalf of the Finnish people by Russians in Moscow. Because the Soviet Politburo was much better placed to make a decision regarding the borders of Finland than any Finnish government, right?This is assuming that said Soviet Politburo thought things through as Russians rather than as communists, or even as those who were greatly concerned with the threat Finland posed to the USSR through any working relationship with Nazi Germany.

Again, the USSR had no intention to annex Finland or to subjugate its people. The anti-communism of the Finnish government was all that factored into the Finnish side of the equation. Well, that and the fact that the negotiators, who you'd think would be better posed to consider what constitutes inequality or not (unless you're going to propose they were actually secret Soviet agents or "useful idiots"), didn't mind Stalin's request.


A lot of Russians came in after the previous Karelians fled, never to return, during the war. Had the Soviet government not decided to invade and annex Karelia then the ethnic composition of the region would be very different todayThe Finnish Government also sought to conquer not just the parts of Karelia taken by the USSR but also that which belonged to the USSR even before the October Revolution. Such shows that they obviously weren't fighting merely for the defense of the Finnish nation against the evil Russian chauvinists, but were themselves adopting chauvinist positions.


Lot's of people deny that the Soviet government played any role in it.Well then they're idiots.

[Iron Felix]

No one denies that the Ukrainian famine happened.
Stalin actually denied it while it was happening. But that's irrelevant, the Holodomor was a man-made famine and what is being denied is that it was man-made. So yes, the Holodomor is being denied here. A good analogy would be saying that the Holocaust was the deportation of Jews and others to camps where they were treated very well but the ones that died, died by accident.

Though, of course, as a Nazi would say, the Germans did the concentrating and the Jews did the camping.

[ComradeOm]

This is assuming that the Soviets launched a "war of aggression."There is no question that the Soviet Union was the aggressor nation in the Winter War and that it was waged for the purpose of territorial gain. It was not a defensive war. Had the Soviet government not decided that they wanted to redraw the Finnish borders then there would have been no conflict


This is assuming that said Soviet Politburo thought things through as Russians rather than as communistsThey were, largely, Russian. And merely calling themselves Communist does not allow for a pass on this. There's a term for that social-imperialism

Again, this is very basic stuff. The decision to forcibly impose a Soviet settlement on Finland is a clear violation of the latter's right to self-determination. There's no other way to view that and the motivations of Moscow are not particularly important: a Great Power imposed its will on a former colony. It's not acceptable in Ireland (no matter what you may think) and it's not acceptable in Finland. Or Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and any other victims of Soviet territorial aggrandisement

With regards the composition of the Finnish government, it's hard to believe that their stance and that of the Finnish people (particularly those living in the border region) differed significantly on this point. In seeking to preserve Finland's territorial integrity the government was almost certainly in tune with popular opinion


The Finnish Government also sought to conquer not just the parts of Karelia taken by the USSR but also that which belonged to the USSR even before the October Revolution. Such shows that they obviously weren't fighting merely for the defense of the Finnish nation against the evil Russian chauvinists, but were themselves adopting chauvinist positionsYou have perhaps heard that two wrongs don't make a right?

But the Finnish position can probably be justified because they needed additional land to guarantee the security of their borders :lol:


Well then they're idiots.Remind me, when did the USSR officially admit that millions had died through famine? When did it admit that state policy had played a role in this disaster?

[Iron Felix]

Again, the USSR had no intention to annex Finland or to subjugate its people.

Ignoring the fact that that's exactly what Stalin's aims were attempting to achieve during the Winter War. Complete annexation. Fortunately, Stalin's armies(which, after the Great Purges, were completely useless)were not able to do destroy the Finns. The Aim of the Winter War was the complete conquest of Finland. This was prevented by the incompetence of the Soviet troops, the high morale of the Finnish troops and Franco-British plans to intervene. If not for the Franco-British plans to send troops to Finland, the would have went on until Finland could be annexed.

And don't give us this shit about Germans. A great blow to the Finnish war effort was the German blockade that prevented arms deliveries. Germany was directly helping the Soviet Union in this war of conquest. Finland was persuing a policy of independence and neutrality.

And shall we discuss the casualties of this war? Over 100,000 good, Soviet men, killed.

Perhaps Hitler's invasion of Poland was justified?(this same invasion that Stalin supported, as you know, Hitler invaded from the West, Stalin from the East) After all, the mighty Germanics need living space! Let them take it from the inferior slavs. Kind of like the Great Communist Soviets needing more territory to protect Leningrad, so let's take it from the inferior Fascist Finns!

Just stop sucking Stalin's cock.

[Ismail]

Had the Soviet government not decided that they wanted to redraw the Finnish borders then there would have been no conflictLeasing ports is not redrawing borders.


They were, largely, Russian. And merely calling themselves Communist does not allow for a pass on this. There's a term for that social-imperialismFeel free to note the imperialist objectives of the USSR in this case. Tell me how imperialism was utilized.


a Great Power imposed its will on a former colony.The USSR was not the Russian Empire. It did not treat Finland as a colony.


With regards the composition of the Finnish government, it's hard to believe that their stance and that of the Finnish people (particularly those living in the border region) differed significantly on this point.I guess it was considering that tons of Finnish Reds got massacred during the civil war and the Soviet friendship society set up after the Winter War had about 30 thousand supporters before it was banned.


Remind me, when did the USSR officially admit that millions had died through famine? When did it admit that state policy had played a role in this disaster?It admitted it in 1989. Obviously it didn't admit it in the 1930's onwards for political reasons, but that has nothing to do with what I was talking about. Anyone today who denies that a famine happened or that Soviet policies contributed to it is an idiot.


Perhaps Hitler's invasion of Poland was justified?(this same invasion that Stalin supported, as you know, Hitler invaded from the West, Stalin from the East)The USSR sent troops into eastern Poland, which was actually Western Byelorussia and Western Ukraine. Poland had refused to agree to a pact against Nazi Germany as part of greater Soviet plans for collective security against the Germans to begin with, but then again you'd probably just say Stalin would use it to annex Poland anyway.

On the Polish situation see: http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/research/mlg09/did_ussr_invade_poland.html


After all, the mighty Germanics need living space! Let them take it from the inferior slavs. Kind of like the Great Communist Soviets needing more territory to protect Leningrad, so let's take it from the inferior Fascist Finns!I was unaware that the Soviets had a war economy based on expanding into other countries, or that denouncing fascism was the same as denouncing "inferior slavs."

Also the Germans helped the Finns build the Mannerheim line. As soon as the Winter War ended German influence in Finland rose rapidly.


Just stop sucking Stalin's cock.You may take your seat with Mao, Trotsky, Fidel Castro, Khrushchev, Tito, or any other pseudo-communist and/or bourgeois nationalist who denounce Stalin. I'll side with Stalin because he was a Marxist-Leninist, because he advanced the cause of communism.

[ComradeOm]

Leasing ports is not redrawing bordersSo that's how this is going to go. You're not stupid Ismail so stop playing at it. You know perfectly well that I was referring to the proposed territory transfers that were initiated in Moscow and ultimately rejected by Finland


Feel free to note the imperialist objectives of the USSR in this case. Tell me how imperialism was utilized.I sense a race to semantics. Fundamental to the Soviet agenda in the Winter War was the conquest and annexation of land in Karelia. This is imperialism in the sense of what Harvey calls the 'territorial logic of power'; that is, the seizure of land for purposes, beyond the mere accumulation of capital, that enhance the position of the ruling elite


The USSR was not the Russian Empire. It did not treat Finland as a colony.Again and again. The USSR was unquestionably a great power in 1939. And Finland had been a colony of the USSR's predecessor state. This is not difficult so please stop making it so


I guess it was considering that tons of Finnish Reds got massacred during the civil war and the Soviet friendship society set up after the Winter War had about 30 thousand supporters before it was banned.Except that that has absolutely nothing to do with the point I raised. You have yet to prove that a) Finnish communists and sympathisers were automatically in favour of signing away a chunk of their country, and b) such pro-Soviet elements were anywhere near a majority in the country. Given the election results of 1939, this seems incredibly unlikely

[Ismail]

You know perfectly well that I was referring to the proposed territory transfers that were initiated in Moscow and ultimately rejected by FinlandTerritory around the ports. The amount of land the Soviets were in turn willing to give to the Finns areas from the USSR which were larger. This territory was also leased.


Fundamental to the Soviet agenda in the Winter War was the conquest and annexation of land in Karelia.Was it the policy of the Soviets before the war?


This is imperialism in the sense of what Harvey calls the 'territorial logic of power'; that is, the seizure of land for purposes, beyond the mere accumulation of capital, that enhance the position of the ruling eliteIt aimed to "enhance the position of the ruling elite" by significantly lessening the chance of a German takeover of Leningrad via Finland.


Again and again. The USSR was unquestionably a great power in 1939. And Finland had been a colony of the USSR's predecessor state. This is not difficult so please stop making it soMost would say the USSR became a great power after WWII. In any case my point was that the Soviets did not treat Finland as a colony and had no intention of annexing it via the peaceful treaty they wished to sign before the Winter War. Their goal was to secure Leningrad. You've provided no evidence that their goal was anything other than this.


You have yet to prove that a) Finnish communists and sympathisers were automatically in favour of signing away a chunk of their country, and b) such pro-Soviet elements were anywhere near a majority in the country. Given the election results of 1939, this seems incredibly unlikelyReal internationalism isn't based on defending the territory of bourgeois states. I'm well aware there were nationalists among the Finnish communists, including Yrjö Leino and Tuominen. In any case the Finnish CP was certainly not in a very good position in interwar Finland and thousands of Finnish Reds had been forced to flee to Soviet Russia after the civil war.

Obviously the Finnish government used the opportunity to declare that the dastardly Russians were seeking to destroy Finland as part of their dreaded rampage against Western Civilization, but there were evidently supporters of the Soviet policy who recognized that Stalin and Co. had war with Nazi Germany in mind.

[seventeethdecember2016]

Imperialist Britain was by far the biggest critique of Soviet Influence and Occupation of Eastern Europe. I'd like to point out that Britain is a country full of hypocrites, who, at this time, had an empire stretching from South Africa to Burma.

Churchill should be considered an international warlord, and it is my hope that this will happen. Churchill wasn't too different from Fascism himself.

[Commissar Rykov]

Imperialist Britain was by far the biggest critique of Soviet Influence and Occupation of Eastern Europe. I'd like to point out that Britain is a country full of hypocrites, who, at this time, had an empire stretching from South Africa to Burma.

Churchill should be considered an international warlord, and it is my hope that this will happen. Churchill wasn't too different from Fascism himself.
Would you care to explain and expound on how Winston Churchill was like a fascist dictator?

[Ismail]

For what it's worth, Churchill did express an admiration for fascism in the 20's based out of a strong dislike for the Bolsheviks. He also said some crude anti-semitic "Judeo-Bolshevik" stuff early on and did not look fondly upon Arabs.

That doesn't make him a fascist, just a reactionary, which he was despite being more prescient on, and less willing to apologize for, Nazi Germany's aggressive intentions than many British politicians of the 1930's.

[seventeethdecember2016]

Would you care to explain and expound on how Winston Churchill was like a fascist dictator?

Dimitri Kitsikis, who is a professor in the University of Ottawa, proposed a scientific model for Fascism with 13 categories.

The idea of class and the importance of agrarianism
Private ownership, the circulation of money, the regulation of the economy by the state, the idea of ethnic bourgeois class, economic self-sufficiency
The nation and the difference between nation and state
The attitude towards democracy and political parties
The importance of political heroes, i.e. the charismatic leader
The attitude towards Tradition
The attitude towards the individual and society
The attitude towards equality and hierarchy
The attitude towards women
The attitude towards religion
The attitude towards rationalism
The attitude towards intellectualism and elitism
The attitude towards the Third World

Churchill and the British Empire have at least an 11/13 on this scale, making them semi-Fascistic.

[Commissar Rykov]

Dimitri Kitsikis, who is a professor in the University of Ottawa, proposed a scientific model for Fascism with 13 categories.

The idea of class and the importance of agrarianism
Private ownership, the circulation of money, the regulation of the economy by the state, the idea of ethnic bourgeois class, economic self-sufficiency
The nation and the difference between nation and state
The attitude towards democracy and political parties
The importance of political heroes, i.e. the charismatic leader
The attitude towards Tradition
The attitude towards the individual and society
The attitude towards equality and hierarchy
The attitude towards women
The attitude towards religion
The attitude towards rationalism
The attitude towards intellectualism and elitism
The attitude towards the Third World

Churchill and the British Empire have at least an 11/13 on this scale, making them semi-Fascistic.
That would make most countries fascist at that time period. What a shitty and stupid scale. Where the fuck did he get his degree from one of those mills? God there is so much better and well researched views on fascism this shit doesn't even rate.

[Ismail]

Where the fuck did he get his degree from one of those mills?No, said professor is just a liberal who adopts a non-materialist analysis of fascism. It leads to the same logic which argues that George W. Bush is a fascist, or FDR (who was actually closer to a fascist leader, although still quite distant, than Churchill). Then it extends into everything until you are calling Robert Mugabe or Kim Jong Il fascists.

[seventeethdecember2016]

That would make most countries fascist at that time period. What a shitty and stupid scale. Where the fuck did he get his degree from one of those mills? God there is so much better and well researched views on fascism this shit doesn't even rate.
I tried to point out the word SEMI. Anyway, just because Churchill wasn't a complete Fascist, doesn't mean he can't have Fascistic traits.

[Ismail]

I tried to point out the word SEMI. Anyway, just because Churchill wasn't a complete Fascist, doesn't mean he can't have Fascistic traits.Except "fascistic traits" doesn't tell us anything. Name anything that would compare Churchill to Mussolini or Hitler.

[Le Rouge]

The Stalin Thread 3: all discussion about Stalin (as a God) in this thread please

Fixed

[seventeethdecember2016]

Except "fascistic traits" doesn't tell us anything. Name anything that would compare Churchill to Mussolini or Hitler.
Churchill was the leader of an empire that stretched from Southern Africa to Burma, from Canada to Australia. I am sure that this was a dream of Hitler and Mussolini.

[Ismail]

Churchill was the leader of an empire that stretched from Southern Africa to Burma, from Canada to Australia. I am sure that this was a dream of Hitler and Mussolini.Was Queen Victoria a proto-fascist then?

[Invader Zim]

That would make most countries fascist at that time period.

No, it wouldn't.

[Ismail]

No, it wouldn't.Yes it would. Virtually every government on earth had reactionary attitudes towards all those various issues. The only big difference is that some states were bourgeois democracies whereas others weren't.

It's a terrible way to gauge fascism.

[seventeethdecember2016]

Was Queen Victoria a proto-fascist then?
I'm not in the position to make such a claim without knowing more about her political views. However, she did portray herself as living a Middle Class life with propaganda she spread. She also was appalled at working conditions in England, the same working conditions which Marx wrote about in Capital.

In my opinion, she seems to me more of a Liberal. I will however claim that Benjamin Disraeli was something close to a Fascist, which is evident with his actions towards Ireland in 1879.

[Ismail]

The correct answer was "no."

[Invader Zim]

Yes it would. Virtually every government on earth had reactionary attitudes towards all those various issues. The only big difference is that some states were bourgeois democracies whereas others weren't.

It's a terrible way to gauge fascism.

Reactionary yes, akin to the position the actual fascist governments held, no. For example, the western powers did not hold what I would call truly 'democratic' principals, but their attitudes were very different from that of Mussolini's fascists or in Nazi Germany. I could go through the list and point out numerous other differences, as well. But you're, or at least were, the history moderator; perhaps you should try reading about these governments?

[Ismail]

I've well aware of these governments.

[Robespierre Richard]

It's not that governing expression is wrong on a moral level that concerns me (though that is a valid criticism). The point is that art and culture are something that develop organically. You (especially if the 'you' is the "monolithic Marxist-Leninist Party"!) cannot force art, culture, music etc. towards a working class perspective. Firstly, especially not from the monolithic M-L party. That is but one tendency in but one political philosophy. Secondly, you will end up constraining or even excluding whole careers. Shostakovitch was somebody who was massively constrained by the Socialist Realist directive in the USSR, for example. A great shame.

There are things that can be done to bring the art and culture sector in line with Socialism, mainly related to how artists are paid, copyrighting, royalties and so on. But you cannot, cannot, have non-artists directing the greatest geniuses of the day on how to go about making their art, according to some half-baked, third rate philosophical idea about what they believe art and culture should be. That is absolutely key. Unless your idea of art is some bullcrap like 'Tempering The Steel'.

I know that you didn't grow up in the former USSR and probably learned about the state of Soviet art from Wikipedia and possibly art history books, but soc-realism is a huge layer of Soviet culture that still remains today. Growing up both in post-Soviet Russia and the US, almost every children's book I read was soc-realist and was written in the 1920s or later and had themes of communist politics, poverty, adventure, and contributing to society. Respublika ShKID is probably the gold standard of soc-realist children's literature, describing the life of a post-civil war orphanage for 'defective' children who transform themselves into productive individuals and find interest in life.

Besides this, with the socrealist epics you may find that most of them were written before 1932 when the very term Socialist Realism was first said. Gorkiy's My Childhood was published in 1914, Ostrovsky wrote How Steel was Tempered between 1930 and 1932, Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don was written between 1926 and 1928. If anything, the state of art at the time was coming to this anyway. I don't know if you've read How Steel was Tempered, but it is a very readable novel that makes you understand the characters and the situation that they were in, historically and socially. It also tackles difficult themes such as rape, and not in the masturbatory way of Victorian novels where the woman is tired, the man is cunning, and in the next scene she is six months pregnant. It of course has a lot of propaganda, but it serves as the setting, not as painting the antiheroes as immoral capitalist bogeymen.

With avant-garde, there was nothing proletarian or revolutionary with it by itself, it simply took on revolutionary themes thanks to its existing popularity and artists generally having more diverse political views. However, besides being art, movies such as Aelita and Battleship Potemkin are really not watchable as simply movies and not art of the time because of their heavy-handed political rhetoric, lack of any real relationships between characters, and very strong use of symbolism. Over time these films faded out and were replaced by soc-realist ones that while still tackling many important themes such as revolution, war, collectivization, soviet politics, etc., are still watchable today simply for the plot and not so that you can get stirred off emotionally and march off with a rifle after watching it. There were still political epics, such as The Communist, which had self-sacrifice for the revolution, but centrally the importance of being a good person.

In terms of art scene, I am not sure what the point is of having them compete. It's not like Andy Warhol or Salvador Dali did some sort of massive damage to the USSR's image because of them being obvious symbols of Western superiority. Soc-realism was simply part of the cultural revolution of the 1930s that saw tens of millions of people become employed for the first time after many generations of being serfs and later peasants.

As for control of the process, soc-realism was "enforced" by the Union of Writers and the Union of Painters, the latter of which was an already existing organization that in the early 1920s began painting in the realist style with political and everyday themes. Of course it was not very 'balanced' in terms of having a direction, but this is because its purpose was not to win awards or be internationally renowned, it was for various clubs and social organizations throughout the union to place in recreation rooms. Regular people bought paintings too, but usually either from amateur painters or reproductions of classic paintings. Outside of political works, the most common theme for painters was nature. For writers, membership and approval of the union was important for getting published.

Of course I wish the Soviet government found something to do with the nonconformists. However, they were faced with a party of people with mostly proletarian and peasant origins who didn't understand their work and didn't see why it should be important and a public which didn't care about them, making the whole scene become reactionary over time, as such social isolation only pushed them further toward more controversial themes. Overall though, I would rate the USSR as having done a relatively good job in its war on hipsters, creating outlets for both political and apolitical youth who did not see themselves as having a prolonged career in the Komsomol and later the Party.

Activity-wise, there was a great promotion of a culture of sports, not for the purpose of macho bullshit but personal improvement and camaraderie. Of these the biggest was sport tourism, with widespread promotion beginning in 1934. That is hiking mountain climbing, and general trekking over challenging terrain such as glaciers. It also created a whole subculture of singer-songwriters, called the club of do-it-yourself songs, inspired by Vladimir Vysotsky, which pretty much was an outlet for creative expression for anyone who wanted to be heard, though this began in the 60s and 70s when society became more complex and the question of artistic expression became more actualized.

Honestly, I do wish the Soviets paid more attention to the Samizdat culture, because many of the issues tackled in it, such as alcoholism and wrecking in Moskva-Petushki were no less controversial and political as the caricatures in the satirical magazine Krokodil. Ultimately, the only way to prevent these attitudes from arising are continuous economic decentralization, or as Marx called it "gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country."

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

I remember reading that Stalin decided to ban modern music after sitting near the horn section during an orchestral performance of some dissonant piece. The idea of state control of art is profoundly anti-marxist. The only time it might be considered is if the art is DIRECTLY begin used for counterrevolutionary activities -- I can't really think of what that might be -- maybe fund raising for fascism? Otherwise the rest of this Stalinist/Hoxaista stuff is idealistic clap trap. What the fuck is proletarian art, anyway? Who the hell knows what kind of art socialist humankind will produce? We'll find out after we achieve socialism.

I'm not sure if this thread is an invitation to list Stalin's crimes against the world revolution. But I'll start with a short list detailing some especially damaging things:

Stalin's anti-Leninist theory of Socialism in One Country and his building of a nationalist bureaucracy, was one step down the road to hell for world revolution.

His gutting of the Comintern and turning it into a club of opportunist hacks who were competing to see who could bend over lower to accept the polituburo's magical pronouncements and the purging of the best elements of the CI and CPUSSR was also disasterous. (See Draper's American Communism and Soviet Russia, James Cannon's The First Ten Years of American Communism)

He played a major role in the defeats in Spain (See The Civil War in Spain by Felix Morrow and Homage to Catalonia by Orwell) and China in 1927 (See Trotsky on China and The Fate of Man).

As a last "highlight" Comintern's line in Germany, "After Hitler, us," and their refusal to form a defensive united front with the SP allowed Hitler to take power at a time when the combined SP and CP had greater numbers and support than the Nazis. (See Trotsky's The Rise of Fascism in German).

I guess I'm wading into pretty hostile waters in this thread, but, what the hell -- we are supposed to be discussing these things.

[Ismail]

Stalin's anti-Leninist theory of Socialism in One Country and his building of a nationalist bureaucracy, was one step down the road to hell for world revolution.Stalin did not have a "theory of socialism in one country." He considered himself continuing Lenin's line, as noted by Erik Van Ree in his book The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin. J. Arch Getty noted the anti-bureaucratic nature of, say, the Great Purges, while various other authors have noted that various nationalist tendencies also suffered strong setbacks in that decade.


His gutting of the Comintern and turning it into a club of opportunist hacks who were competing to see who could bend over lower to accept the polituburo's magical pronouncements and the purging of the best elements of the CI and CPUSSR was also disasterous. (See Draper's American Communism and Soviet Russia, James Cannon's The First Ten Years of American Communism)The Comintern wasn't "gutted." It was an important organization 'till the day it was dissolved. The CPUSA was more or less always a poor party. The Soviet leadership did, however, denounce Browderism when it emerged.


He played a major role in the defeats in Spain (See The Civil War in Spain by Felix Morrow and Homage to Catalonia by Orwell)Orwell in 1943:

"The much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a main cause of defeat. The Government militias were hurriedly raised, ill-armed and unimaginative in their military outlook, but they would have been the same if complete political agreement had existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average Spanish factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had never been universal conscription in Spain), and the traditional pacifism of the Left was a great handicap. The thousands of foreigners who served in Spain made good infantry, but there were very few experts of any kind among them. The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestoes would not have made the armies more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn't. No political strategy could offset that."
(George Orwell. A Collection of Essays. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc. 1981. pp. 203-204.)

Histories of the war by Paul Preston and Helen Graham provide better balance.


and China in 1927 (See Trotsky on China and The Fate of Man).Stalin in his letters to Molotov (in the aptly named Stalin's Letters to Molotov) criticized the CCP after Chiang Kai-shek's coup and blamed it for insufficiently carrying out Comintern orders. After this event Stalin would never really trust the CCP, which Mao himself noted.


As a last "highlight" Comintern's line in Germany, "After Hitler, us," and their refusal to form a defensive united front with the SP allowed Hitler to take power at a time when the combined SP and CP had greater numbers and support than the Nazis. (See Trotsky's The Rise of Fascism in German).It is true that ultra-leftist errors were made, but at the same time these errors did not come into being because of the Comintern. ComradeOm (who does not like Stalin one bit) made good posts on this subject, noting that the KPD was always bound by sectarian errors. As ComradeOm once said (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1099937&postcount=14), "Trotsky was also in power during the early twenties when the United Front strategy singularly failed to capitalise on turmoil in Germany during that crucial period. His own analysis of fascism also happens to pre-date the ComIntern's by a full two years. What a visionary"

And in another post (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1154541&postcount=2):

With all that said and done I believe that the idea that the KPD and SPD could have made up and simply stopped Hitler to be a delusion born of desperation, sectarianism, and hindsight. These were two parties that had engaged in a bitter civil war not a decade previously and remained fiercely competitive rivals. Certainly the SPD could was hardly a natural ally for communists or socialists - the policy of social fascism makes far more sense when you consider that it followed the massacre of 33 workers by SPD police on May Day 1929 (Berlin's Bloody May)

That last point deserves stressing - social fascism was only adapted by the KPD in 1929. By this time there was a decade of mutual and unforgiving animosity between both 'Marxist' parties. Blame the KPD for its own undeniable failures but don't pretend that sectarianism on its part, or the puppet masters in Moscow, were the cause, or enablers, of Hitler's rise. If you must have a scapegoat then pick the decision of the SPD leadership to betray its working class support by taking the reigns of the bourgeois state and becoming an undeniable party of reactionOf course ComradeOm didn't come up with this out of the blue. Bourgeois sources note it as well:

"A genuine misunderstanding within the ranks of the Comintern also existed. First, it did not consider seriously the possibility that conclusions could be drawn from the Italian experience. This was seen somehow as an event unique to backward, peripheral societies, and not to advanced, 'democratic' ones. Second, the Comintern on the whole tended to equate any military/authoritarian regime with fascism. Third, its dim view of social democracy as 'social fascist' was by no means new. It had used the term as early as 1924, prior to Stalin's ascendancy, when describing social democracy's role in bringing about post-war capitalist stabilization in Germany, and in doing so it had cooperated with the right-wing paramilitary Frei Korps.

Fourth, the German SPD was responsible for expelling KPD members from trade unions and killing 25 May Day demonstrators in Berlin, in 1929. Fifth, the Grand Coalition government headed by the Social Democratic Herman Müller was antagonistic towards the Soviet Union. Indeed, from a Soviet point of view the capitalist West had been hostile towards it since 1917, whatever the political hue of their governments. Sixth, while the Comintern's optimism about the rapid demise of Hitler was simplistic, this in part derived from an economism found in Marxism and Marx himself. Unemployment throughout the advanced capitalist countries had reached record levels, and few predicted that Hitler would be able to bring about a dramatic revival of the German economy...

However, even if [Trotsky's] united front recommendations, 'from above and below' were in fact implemented by a KPD leadership, the difficulties in achieving cooperation need acknowledgement. The SPD leadership had a deep distrust of the KPD, and treated the occasion offer of cooperation with a good deal of cynicism... A final obstacle to unity lay in a sociological fact: the overwhelming bulk of SPD members were relatively well-paid and unionized, while the KPD consisted largely of the unemployed."
(Jules Townshend. [I]The Politics of Marxism: The Critical Debates. New York: Leicester University Press. 1996. pp. 117-118.)

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Come on, Ismail. Calling the "Great" purges anti-bureaucratic is true only insofar as some bureaucrats were killed along with the hundreds of thousands of other people. And yes, Stalin said that he was merely following Lenin when he formulated the theory of socialism in one country. What was he going to say? "I am making a fundamental revision to Leninism to reflect the conservative desires of the emerging bureaucracy"? There is a single quote from Lenin, taken out of context that is used to bolster the crazy idea that Lenin thought that you could build socialism without a world revolution. One quote against thousands explicitly contradicting it. Stalin could not possibly have been unaware that he was going against what Lenin had said. Hell, building the CI was such a priority to Lenin and Bolsheviks that they were devoting precious resources to it during the civil war.

Oh yeah, the CI was important until it was dissolved -- Who, dissolved it comrade? Still by the late twenties it was a shell of its former self. The leadership of the national parties had to be approved of by Moscow (often picked by Moscow)-- and Moscow's primary interest was factional, to destroy all individuals and groupings that were not loyal to Stalin above all else.

Trotsky's writings on the rise of Naziism are remarkable, I highly recommend them. He was able to extrapolate from the Italian experience and predict the catastrophe for the working class that a Nazi victory would mean. And of course there was plenty of animosity between the KPD and SPD (rightly so, forget about the killings in 1929, what about the drowning of the Spartacus uprising in blood?). The KPD needed to appeal to the ranks of the SPD for action. It might have been difficult to make it happen, but that does not excuse the idiotic line of treating the SPD as worse than the Nazis. And I don't know about the specific the demographics of membership in each party, but it seems beside the point. The SPD had millions of members -- I'm sure plenty were among the less privileged. And it was after the debacle in Germany was followed by almost no discussion in CI, no post mortem, no self-criticism, that Trotsky declared the CI to be dead and called for the building of a Fourth International.

[Rodrigo]

There's a LOT to talk about Stalin or Stalin-related facts. This kind of thread disorganizes discussion. I'm for the creation of sub-forums.

[Rodrigo]

@Lev Bronsteinovich
http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Ludo%20Martens/node39.html#SECTION00730400000000000000

http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Ludo%20Martens/node79.html#SECTION00900000000000000000

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1683

[Ismail]

There is a single quote from Lenin, taken out of context that is used to bolster the crazy idea that Lenin thought that you could build socialism without a world revolution.Actually Stalin basically used like three quotes, but there's a fair amount of others. It's not a surprise that his more "radical" quotes come during the revolution and immediately after it at the height of the civil war, when the very existence of the government was at times doubted, while his more "conservative" quotes come from the 1921-1923 period.

I wrote two posts with various Lenin quotes a year ago:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2106911&postcount=14
http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2110477&postcount=16


Oh yeah, the CI was important until it was dissolved -- Who, dissolved it comrade?"We now know that on 20 April 1941, at a closed dinner at the Bolshoi Theater, Stalin... [r]effering to the fact that the American Communists had disaffiliated from the Comintern in order to avoid prosecution under the Voorhis Act... declared,

'Dimitrov is losing his parties. That's not bad. On the contrary, it would be good to make the Com[munist] parties entirely independent instead of being sections of the CI. They must be transformed into national Com. parties under various names—Labor Party, Marxist Party, etc. The name doesn't matter. What is important is that they take root in their own people and concentrate on their own special tasks. The situation and tasks vary greatly from country to country, for instance in England and Germany, they are not at all the same. When the Com. parties get strong in this fashion, then you'll reestablish their international organization.'

Stalin continued:

'The [First] International was created in the days of Marx in anticipation of an early world revolution. The Comintern was created in the days of Lenin in a similar period. At present the national tasks for each country move into the forefront. But the status of Com. parties as sections of an international organization, subordinate to the Executive of the CI, is an obstacle.... Don't hold on to what was yesterday. Strictly take into account the newly created circumstances... Under present conditions, membership in the Comintern makes it easier for the bourgeoisie to persecute the Com. parties and accomplish its plan to isolate them from the masses in their own countries, while it hinders the Com. parties' independent development and task-solving as national parties.'"
(Alexander Dallin & Fridrikh I. Firsov. Dimitrov and Stalin: 1934-1943. Hew Haven: Yale University Press. 2000. pp. 226-227.)

Yet even after the Comintern dissolved Dimitrov still managed a covert organization (whose name escapes me, although I can look it up) which was still involved in financing foreign CPs and giving them leadership and directions.


Still by the late twenties it was a shell of its former self. The leadership of the national parties had to be approved of by Moscow (often picked by Moscow)-- and Moscow's primary interest was factional, to destroy all individuals and groupings that were not loyal to Stalin above all else.I like how you trace this development to Stalin. A great many parties were financially and, for lack of better word, "leaderily" dependent on the Comintern from their start. Even at the height of the CPUSA's popularity in the 30's and 40's they were still asking for a lot of money.


The KPD needed to appeal to the ranks of the SPD for action.It did. It called for a united front on various occasions with the SPD rank-and-file, but SPD members denounced this as not being unity but "submission" or whatever.


And it was after the debacle in Germany was followed by almost no discussion in CI, no post mortem, no self-criticism, that Trotsky declared the CI to be dead and called for the building of a Fourth International.Actually, Getty notes it was more because Trotsky's offer to return to the Soviet leadership in exchange for not condemning Stalin and Co. was rejected. In Trotsky's mind both naturally followed, though.

See: http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1521611&postcount=7

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Cripes, Ismail, where to begin? I'll start with one item -- the KPD did form military blocks except it was with the Nazis against the SPD. Their violent approach to the SPD and their propaganda, labeling the SPD as being worse than the Nazis ("Social Fascists") helped to drive a wedge between potential allies in the SPD and the KPD. It is a matter of public record and documented in many places that the KPD had little interest in any kind of united fight against the Nazis. Why argue otherwise?

Do you know that Trotsky rejected overtures from the right opposition in the late twenties? Bukharin contacted him once he became afraid of Stalin. Trotsky rejected the offer out of hand saying he would not unite with the Right Opposition as it was politically worse than Stalin's faction and posed the risk of capitalist restoration. If Trotsky had been all about seizing power, why was he principled in this case? Also, as the head of the Red Army, as an extremely popular public figure, a great orator, etc. Why did he not try to leverage these things and appeal to his troops and the masses when the Triumvirate was vilifying him and stripping him of his Party posts? It is hard to understand this perhaps, but he was deeply principled, comrade. The idea of starting new parties to please his vanity or hunger for power was an anathema to him. He always avoided unprincipled blocs (e.g. with Nin in Spain), even if it might be politically expedient in the short run. Stalin liquidates the Comintern because he is such a great internationalist LMFAO. Lenin said that he would sacrifice the Russian Revolution to make the German Revolution without hesitation.

[Ismail]

Cripes, Ismail, where to begin? I'll start with one item -- the KPD did form military blocks except it was with the Nazis against the SPD. Their violent approach to the SPD and their propaganda, labeling the SPD as being worse than the Nazis ("Social Fascists") helped to drive a wedge between potential allies in the SPD and the KPD. It is a matter of public record and documented in many places that the KPD had little interest in any kind of united fight against the Nazis. Why argue otherwise?E.H. Carr (in Twilight of the Comintern) and various others note that the KPD did appeal to unity with the SPD rank-and-file via trade unions and so on. They just did it in a way which, again, was seen as sectarian and as less of a call for unity and more "join the KPD since the SPD are traitors to socialism and agents of the capitalists."

Also the KPD paramilitary was outlawed whereas its Nazi counterpart was not. That alone was seen as a strong reason to distrust the SPD.


Do you know that Trotsky rejected overtures from the right opposition in the late twenties? Bukharin contacted him once he became afraid of Stalin. Trotsky rejected the offer out of hand saying he would not unite with the Right Opposition as it was politically worse than Stalin's faction and posed the risk of capitalist restoration. If Trotsky had been all about seizing power, why was he principled in this case?Well first off, we know that Trotsky did support a left-right bloc after he was exiled, as Getty's article (which I linked to in my last post) notes, and which Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué has also noted. He distrusted the Rightists and the Rightists distrusted him, with both groups attacking each other at the Trials. Second, the Rightists had been tactically aligned with the "Centrists" under Stalin and at that time Trotsky probably viewed them as liable towards "capitulation." Naturally having just broken from the Stalin wing of the Party, the Rightists didn't look like an attractive group for the Trots to align with.


Also, as the head of the Red Army, as an extremely popular public figure, a great orator, etc. Why did he not try to leverage these things and appeal to his troops and the masses when the Triumvirate was vilifying him and stripping him of his Party posts?He'd probably be accused of trying to ferment a coup d'état or something if he tried making appeals to the Red Army. That'd undermine him further.


Lenin said that he would sacrifice the Russian Revolution to make the German Revolution without hesitation.Yet Lenin also said the following:

"Perhaps the authors believe that the interests of the world revolution forbid making any peace at all with imperialists? ... The incorrectness of this view (which was rejected, for example, by a majority of the Petrograd opponents of peace) is as clear as day. A socialist republic surrounded by imperialist powers could not, from this point of view, conclude any economic treaties, and could not exist at all, without flying to the moon.

Perhaps the authors believe that the interests of the world revolution require that it should be given a push, and that such a push can be given only by war, never by peace, which might give the people the impression that imperialism was being 'legitimised'? Such a 'theory' would be completely at variance with Marxism, for Marxism has always been opposed to 'pushing' revolutions, which develop with the growing acuteness of the class antagonisms that engender revolutions. Such a theory would be tantamount to the view that armed uprising is a form of struggle which is obligatory always and under all conditions. Actually, however, the interests of the world revolution demand that Soviet power, having overthrown the bourgeoisie in our country, should help that revolution, but that it should choose a form of help which is commensurate with its own strength. To help the socialist revolution on an international scale by accepting the possibility of defeat of that revolution in one's own country is a view that does not follow even from the 'pushing' theory....

Twist and turn them how you will, but you can find no logic in the authors' contentions. There are no sensible arguments to support the view that 'in the interests of the world revolution it is expedient to accept the possibility of losing Soviet power'."
(V.I. Lenin. Selected Works Vol. 2. New York: International Publishers. 1967. pp. 521-523.)

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

E.H. Carr (in Twilight of the Comintern) and various others note that the KPD did appeal to unity with the SPD rank-and-file via trade unions and so on. They just did it in a way which, again, was seen as sectarian and as less of a call for unity and more "join the KPD since the SPD are traitors to socialism and agents of the capitalists."

Gee, that's a real useful approach to form a united front. "Join us and leave your traitorous party." It's not serious and was not meant to be. And yes, there were a mountain of reasons not to trust the SPD, so what?


Also the KPD paramilitary was outlawed whereas its Nazi counterpart was not. That alone was seen as a strong reason to distrust the SPD.
Well first off, we know that Trotsky did support a left-right bloc after he was exiled, as Getty's article (which I linked to in my last post) notes, and which Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué has also noted. He distrusted the Rightists and the Rightists distrusted him, with both groups attacking each other at the Trials. Second, the Rightists had been tactically aligned with the "Centrists" under Stalin and at that time Trotsky probably viewed them as liable towards "capitulation." Naturally having just broken from the Stalin wing of the Party, the Rightists didn't look like an attractive group for the Trots to align with.

With you Stalinists, it's always about intrigue and factional advantage. That's the lens through which you tend to view all of the intra-party fights. I don't buy that Trotsky was seeking a bloc with the rights -- he was very clear in his writings and in practice as well. Why seek a bloc with the Right when he had rejected such a bloc before and after? Makes no sense. Just because Stalin was the supreme factional player and put personal power above all else, does not mean everyone else did.


He'd probably be accused of trying to ferment a coup d'état or something if he tried making appeals to the Red Army. That'd undermine him further.


Well yes. He was acutely aware of not wanting to be the Napoleon of the Russian Revolution -- which he certainly was in a position to be. Even in 1923 Stalin was not a particularly well known public figure. Trotsky was second to Lenin in the minds of the Soviet populace (in fact, in the period around the October Revolution, peasants were reported to have referred to Lenintrotsky as a single person). Zinoviev and Kamanev, fresh off being humiliated by Trotsky's Lessons of October, and jealous of the LT's close relationship with Lenin (after all, they had been with Lenin for much longer then Trotsky who only joined the party in 1917) and fearing being eclipsed by Trotsky, joined with Stalin (who nobody thought was a real contender for power) to fight "Trotskyism." They did fear that Trotsky was going to be the Bonaparte of the Russian Revolution, but Trotsky wanted no part of that. It was only when Zinoviev began to realize what Stalin was up to that he agreed to form a bloc with Trotsky, alas, too late. When Bukharin, who was Stalin's theoretical axeman against Trotsky realized his days were numbered he sent out feelers to Trotsky to form a bloc. Trotsky rejected it flatly saying that Bukharin's rightist policies were more dangerous than Stalin's and further, that he would form a bloc with Stalin against Bukharin and the Right Opposition if need be (in the interest of defending the gains of the Russian Revolution) never the other way around.

Yet Lenin also said the following:

"Perhaps the authors believe that the interests of the world revolution forbid making any peace at all with imperialists? ... The incorrectness of this view (which was rejected, for example, by a majority of the Petrograd opponents of peace) is as clear as day. A socialist republic surrounded by imperialist powers could not, from this point of view, conclude any economic treaties, and could not exist at all, without flying to the moon.

Perhaps the authors believe that the interests of the world revolution require that it should be given a push, and that such a push can be given only by war, never by peace, which might give the people the impression that imperialism was being 'legitimised'? Such a 'theory' would be completely at variance with Marxism, for Marxism has always been opposed to 'pushing' revolutions, which develop with the growing acuteness of the class antagonisms that engender revolutions. Such a theory would be tantamount to the view that armed uprising is a form of struggle which is obligatory always and under all conditions. Actually, however, the interests of the world revolution demand that Soviet power, having overthrown the bourgeoisie in our country, should help that revolution, but that it should choose a form of help which is commensurate with its own strength. To help the socialist revolution on an international scale by accepting the possibility of defeat of that revolution in one's own country is a view that does not follow even from the 'pushing' theory....

Twist and turn them how you will, but you can find no logic in the authors' contentions. There are no sensible arguments to support the view that 'in the interests of the world revolution it is expedient to accept the possibility of losing Soviet power'."
(V.I. Lenin. Selected Works Vol. 2. New York: International Publishers. 1967. pp. 521-523.)

Well doo dah. The USSR should not commit suicide in seeking world revolution -- Who would argue with that? Lenin's point when he made the comment about the German Revolution was that without the spread of a wider revolution to Germany and other advanced capitalist countries, the Russian Revolution was doomed -- he was proven correct on this point, although it did take a lot longer then anticipated. Lenin was an internationalist to the bone -- any depiction of him as otherwise is cynical and dishonest. You can cherry pick choice quotes that seem to bolster your argument, but surely comrade, this is simply a false view of Lenin twisted to fit what Stalin did after Lenin's death. There are MOUNTAINS of data that contradict the notion that Lenin ever supported or would support the nationalist bent of Stalin's line of Socialism in One Country.

[Ismail]

I don't buy that Trotsky was seeking a bloc with the rights -- he was very clear in his writings and in practice as well. Why seek a bloc with the Right when he had rejected such a bloc before and after?Well gee, did you read the article? It gets its sources from Trotsky's own private correspondence at Harvard. The article makes it pretty obvious that he was seeking a Left-Right Bloc.

Here's an abridged version:

"Although the Riutin Platform originated in the right wing of the Bolshevik Party, its specific criticisms of the Stalinist regime were in the early 1930s shared by the more leftist Leon Trotsky, who also had sought to organize political opposition 'from below.' ... Like the Riutin group, Trotsky believed that the Soviet Union in 1932 was in a period of extreme crisis provoked by Stalin's policies. Like them, he believed that the rapid pace of forced collectivization was a disaster... Along with the Riutinists, Trotsky called for a drastic change in economic course and democratization of the dictatorial regime within a party that suppressed all dissent. According to Trotsky, Stalin had brought the country to ruin.

At the same time the Riutin group was forging its progammatic documents, Trotsky was attempting to activate his followers in the Soviet Union...

Sometime in 1932 Trotsky sent a series of secret personal letters to his former followers Karl Radek, G.I. Sokolnikov, and Ye. Preobrazhensky and others in the Soviet Union. And at about the same time he sent a letter to his oppositionist colleagues in the Soviet Union by way of an English traveler...

More concretely, in late 1932 Trotsky was actively trying to forge a new opposition coalition in which former oppositionists from both left and right would participate. From Berlin, Trotsky's son Lev Sedov maintained contact with veteran Trotskyist I. N. Smirnov in the Soviet Union... Shortly thereafter, Smirnov relayed word to Sedov that the bloc had been organized; Sedov wrote to his father that 'it embraces the Zinovievists, the Sten-Lominadze group, and the Trotskyists (old '—').' Trotsky promptly announced in his newspaper that the first steps toward an illegal organization of 'Bolshevik-Leninists' had been formed.

Back in the Soviet Union, the authorities smashed Trotsky's bloc before it got off the ground. In connection with their roundup of suspected participants in the Riutin group, nearly all the leaders of the new bloc were pulled in for questioning. Many of them were expelled from the party and sentenced to prison or exile. Sedov wrote to his father that although 'the arrest of the 'ancients' is a great blow, the lower workers are safe.'"
(J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov. The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1999. pp. 60-63.)

Two years earlier Stalin had mentioned Lominadze:

"In 1930, the authorities were informed that RSFSR Prime Minister Syrtsov was conspiring with First Secretary of the trans-Caucasian District Committee Lominadze. Stalin took this 'Left–Right bloc' seriously. He commented to Molotov about the 'anti-party (in essence right deviationist) little factional group' and added: 'They played at a takeover.'"
(Erik Van Ree. The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism. New York: RoutledgeCurzon. 2002. p. 119.)


Zinoviev and Kamanev, fresh off being humiliated by Trotsky's Lessons of October, and jealous of the LT's close relationship with Lenin (after all, they had been with Lenin for much longer then Trotsky who only joined the party in 1917) and fearing being eclipsed by Trotsky, joined with Stalin (who nobody thought was a real contender for power) to fight "Trotskyism."Actually if anything Stalin followed Zinoviev, who was far harsher in his attacks on Trotsky than Stalin was at the time.

"He had never expected that his 'Lessons of October,' which he had written to set the record straight and to warn the party that it was on the wrong course, would loose such a hurricane of protest. Under the strain his health broke down. Doctors recommended a rest-spell in the Caucasus. He refused to leave his quarters in the Kremlin. Sick, solitary, and surrounded by hostility, he awaited the meeting of the Central Committee to be held January 17-20, 1925. He had written what is known as the letter of resignation in which, as in his speech to the Thirteenth Congress, he expressed his loyalty and submission to the party, but refused to make any confession of error.

At the committee meeting Zinoviev and Kamenev showed eagerness to make the final kill. Supported by others, they demanded the expulsion of Trotsky not only from the committee and Politburo but from the party itself. This, the final sentence of excommunication, was opposed by Stalin. Reporting later to the Fourteenth Party Congress, he explained that 'we, the majority of the Central Committee . . . did not agree with Comrades Zinoviev and Kamenev because we realized that the policy of cutting off heads is fraught with major blood-letting—and they want blood—dangerous and contagious; today you cut off one head, tomorrow a second, then a third; who would remain in the party?' It was a fateful pronouncement.

The only action taken against Trotsky at this meeting of the Central Committee was to remove him from office as president of the Revolutionary War Council and Kommissar for War. For some months he had held office only nominally. M.V. Frunze, one of his chief antagonists in the military, had been appointed Deputy Kommissar in the spring of 1924, and had virtually taken control. For the time being Trotsky remained a member of the Central Committee of the Politburo, but he was a member on sufferance. He had forfeited the support and prestige he had commanded in the party. His conduct had demoralized his few supporters. He was alone."
(Ian Grey. Stalin: Man of History. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1979. pp. 204-205.)


There are MOUNTAINS of data that contradict the notion that Lenin ever supported or would support the nationalist bent of Stalin's line of Socialism in One Country.Let's hear it.

Van Ree wrote an interesting article of Lenin in the 1915-1917 period two years back. In it he argues that although Lenin's views weren't the same as Stalin's, they were closer to him than Trotsky's.

E.g. Van Ree notes (p. 172):

At the Seventh Party Congress held [in March 1918] Lenin observed that, ‘it is an absolute truth that we would go under without a German revolution’. Years later, in July 1921, he famously remarked that, before the revolution, ‘we thought: either immediately or at least very soon the revolution will come in other, capitalistically more developed countries, or, in the opposite case, we must go under’.You can access it here: dare.uva.nl/document/199423

[Geiseric]

Show me a quote saying that Lenin was fine with selling out workers in other countries in order for trade agreements, and i'll believe you. Otherwise, show me a quote saying how Lenin was against the founding of comintern, how Lenin was fine with marching with Fascists against social dems, and a quote saying how Popular Frontism is a good idea. You can quote all of your Getty sources all you want, they're secondary sources of misinformation.

I also want a quote from Trotsky himself about how he was open to a left-right bloc. Getty saying Trotsky was doesn't mean anything at all.

And that last quote wasn't saying sell out the workers in order for the survival of our positions, it means the workers revolutions succeed, with help from the U.S.S.R. or we collapse. You're disrespecting Lenin as a person saying he was in favor of these anti-marxist views. If he was in favor of capitulating with capitalists, he would have done it during the civil war instead of fighting the whole thing in order for a chance of socialism obtaining its first victory. Quote direct sources saying clearly that Lenin was saying what you support, or there is no proof that he did.

[Ismail]

Show me a quote saying that Lenin was fine with selling out workers in other countries in order for trade agreements, and i'll believe you.Show me Stalin saying that.


Otherwise, show me a quote saying how Lenin was against the founding of comintern,Why would Lenin say that? Why would Stalin? Are you trying to create a strawman? No one was against the Comintern's founding. The Comintern was a great organization which coordinated the international communist movement at a time when it was organizationally weak and prone to ideological vacillations. When it became a fetter on the development of this movement, however, it was dissolved.


a quote saying how Popular Frontism is a good idea.The Popular Front wasn't introduced until 1935, as a response to the failure to unite with broader social forces against fascism during the preceding years. Fascism was not seen as a major threat in Lenin's time.


You can quote all of your Getty sources all you want, they're secondary sources of misinformation.Misinformation? Really? Last I heard Getty is a reliable academic source.


I also want a quote from Trotsky himself about how he was open to a left-right bloc. Getty saying Trotsky was doesn't mean anything at all.Sure thing, I'll just quote Trotsky and his son from the Getty article:

We know considerably more, however, about another clandestine communication between Trotsky and his supporters in the USSR late in 1932. Sometime in October, E.S. Gol'tsman, a former Trotskyist and current Soviet official, met Sedov in Berlin and gave him a proposal from veteran Trotskyist Ivan Smirnov and other left oppositionists in the USSR for the formation of a united opposition bloc. The proposed bloc was to include Trotskyists, Zinovievists, members of the Lominadze group, and others. Sedov wrote to Trotsky relaying the proposal and Trotsky approved. 'The proposition of the bloc seems to me completely acceptable', Trotsky wrote, 'but it is a question of bloc, not merger'. 'How will the bloc manifest itself? For the moment, principally through reciprocal information. Our allies will keep us up to date on that which concerns the Soviet Union, and we will do the same thing on that which concerns the Comintern'.19 In his view, the bloc should exclude those who capitulated and recanted: capitulationist sentiment 'will be inexorably and pitilessly combatted by us'.20 Gol'tsman had relayed the opinion of those in the Soviet Union that participation in the bloc by the Right Opposition was desirable, and that formation of the bloc should be delayed until their participation could be secured. Trotsky reacted against this suggestion: 'The allies' opinion that one must wait until the rights can easily join does not have my approval . . . .' Trotsky was impatient with what he considered passivity on the part of the Right Opposition. 'One struggles against repression by anonymity and conspiracy, not by silence'.21 Sedov then replied that the bloc had been organized. 'It embraces the Zinovievists, the Sten-Lominadze group, and the Trotskyists (old "—")'22 'The Safarov-Tarkhanov group has not yet formally entered—they have a very extreme position; they will enter soon.'Then Getty later quotes a letter Trotsky sent to the Soviet Politburo pledging not to attack the government if Trotsky and Co. were allowed back into it.

And in a footnote to the article:

21 ... In the light of the apparent similarities between his and Bukharin's critiques, Trotsky was anxious to maintain the separate identity of the Left Opposition. He wrote in 1932 that although 'practical disagreements with the Right will hardly be revealed . . . it is intolerable to mix up the ranks and blunt the distinctions'. (WLT Supplement (1929-1933), p. 174). In a secret letter to his son about the 1932 bloc, he warned Sedov not to 'leave the field to the rights' (Trotsky Papers, 13095).So, as noted, both the "Left" and Right disagreed with each other on various issues (including organization, as noted in the Moscow Trials.) Yet they were still willing to collaborate in some form against Stalin and the Soviet leadership.
And that last quote wasn't saying sell out the workers in order for the survival of our positions, it means the workers revolutions succeed, with help from the U.S.S.R. or we collapse. You're disrespecting Lenin as a person saying he was in favor of these anti-marxist views.Except I wasn't claiming anything about "selling out" workers. You're putting words in my mouth.


Quote direct sources saying clearly that Lenin was saying what you support, or there is no proof that he did.I've already provided links to a collection of quotes by Lenin that I've compiled. That's also a ridiculous argument that you're making. Remember, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (not that there's anything in the way of absence anyway.)

Again, here are the Lenin quotes:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2106911&postcount=14
http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2110477&postcount=16

[Capitalist Octopus]

This is a random question but I'm hoping someone can answer it. I've seen a quote on the internet attributed to Stalin which talks about him seeing the Swiss Alps and saying "That was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I never want to see it again". But I can't find out if he actually said it, when, context, etc.

Anyone care to help out? I have googled it.

[Ismail]

Google Books brings up nothing, so he probably never said it. There are a fair amount of quotes attributed to Stalin without basis in fact. Same thing with Lenin, Marx, etc.

[garymeyer]

Joseph Stalin (b. December 18, 1878 in the Russian Empire) served as the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. Stalin assumed the leading role in Soviet politics after Vladimir Lenin's death in 1924, and gradually marginalized his opponents until he had become the unchallenged leader of the Soviet Union.

[OnlyCommunistYouKnow]

http://red-channel.de/Ordner_Lit/Literatur_Sprache.htm#p
That is all.

[revolutionary crab]

Anyone have any thoughts on this alleged quote by Stalin that defends the rape of women by Red Army soldiers?


Does Djilas, who is himself a writer, not know what human suffering and the human heart are? Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?

[Ismail]

Anyone have any thoughts on this alleged quote by Stalin that defends the rape of women by Red Army soldiers?After the war many rapists were dealt with. Anyway, quoted in Stalin's Wars by Geoffrey Roberts, p. 264; Stalin to a Czechoslovak delegation, "Don't be surprised therefore if some of our people in your country do not behave themselves as they should. We know that some soldiers of little intelligence pester and insult girls and women and behave disgracefully. Let our Czechoslovak friends know this now so that their praise of the Red Army does not turn into disappointment."

[Geiseric]

After the war many rapists were dealt with. Anyway, quoted in Stalin's Wars by Geoffrey Roberts, p. 264; Stalin to a Czechoslovak delegation, "Don't be surprised therefore if some of our people in your country do not behave themselves as they should. We know that some soldiers of little intelligence pester and insult girls and women and behave disgracefully. Let our Czechoslovak friends know this now so that their praise of the Red Army does not turn into disappointment."

"insulting girls and women," equates to mass rape of several million woman? That's pretty cheuvanist for Stalin to say... In what way were they "dealt with," as well? Did he imprison every single soldier and force them to beg forgiveness and act as slaves for the rest of their lives to the women they raped? Anything short than that I don't see as being very productive. I'd even be ok if he shot a bunch of them as a way of making sure that trend stopped.

[Ismail]

"insulting girls and women," equates to mass rape of several million woman? That's pretty cheuvanist for Stalin to say... In what way were they "dealt with," as well? Did he imprison every single soldier and force them to beg forgiveness and act as slaves for the rest of their lives to the women they raped?IIRC Road to Berlin by J. Erickson talks about tribunals. I also recall reading that 4000 officers or so received punishment for rape-related charges (plus many more other Soviet army officials.)

[TheGodlessUtopian]

IIRC Road to Berlin by J. Erickson talks about tribunals. I also recall reading that 4000 officers or so received punishment for rape-related charges (plus many more other Soviet army officials.)

What kind of punishment(s) did they receive?

[Ismail]

Some were shot, some were imprisoned for years.

[Towarzysz Leninski]

Ismail is totally right. In a matter of decades, the merits and triumphs of socialism as constructed by the Soviet people with Stalin at the helm were so glaringly, evidently amazing that the imperialists and bourgeoisie of the world were compelled to resort to the most fantastical slanders to discredit the success of the Soviet people and their leaders, especially Stalin. And it doesn't help that all the Trotskyites, as indirect allies and agents of imperialism, have spread such slanders around to support their "arguments."

The most famous of such slanders include the tales of the "Ukrainian Genocide" (which has been proven to be a lie started by Ukrainian fascists, profited on by escaped American convicts, and spread by William Hearst and his wonderfully propagandistic and baseless newspapers only to be later sold by him to the Nazis in a multi-million dollar propaganda swap!)

If you take any famous anti-Stalin history book, such as Medvedev's "Let History Judge" or Conquest's many books, if you take the time to go through and verify each source in the footnotes, you'll see that almost 90% of them are of fascist or kulak origin, and at best mere quotations of already bourgeois accounts.

I am a Pole, and am also part Russian, and the very reactionary attitude shared by many Polish people (that has been mistakenly accepted as supposed "primary source accounts of the horrors of 'communism'"!) is really just ignorance.

Each and every slander against Stalin can be proved wrong, or proved at least an exaggeration, and it is unsurprising that Stalin, the leader and icon of the once glorious bastion of socialism and of the Marxist-Leninist movement for the emancipation of the exploited and oppressed, has been subject to more slander than any figure in history. And there is no one to thanks for such but the bourgeoisie.

[Geiseric]

Stalin only industrialised though because the Kulak insurrections and man made famines were growing so strong, beforehand he wanted to continue the N.E.P. and he executed anybody who talked about industrialisation or collectivisation.

[Ismail]

and he executed anybody who talked about industrialisation or collectivisation.Name one before the Great Purges.

[Omsk]

"insulting girls and women," equates to mass rape of several million woman?


I understand that this is normal for the "Anti-Stalin" clique on this website, but please, just explain to me how the Red Army raped "several million women" in Yugoslavia? (Or Czechoslovakia) Because that is the country of the individual Djilas, have you heard of it ?

And don't you dare mention Berlin, because the two quotes are not about Berlin, but about Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.

And with that cleared we come to an inevitable conclusion - you don't know what you are talking about but you still have the wit to come and lie, provoke, exaggerate.

[vagrantmoralist]

Is Holocaust denial allowed on this site? If it is, then I can understand why people can lie and say Holodomor wasn't caused by Stalin and the Kremlin. Otherwise, such an insult to the families of those who suffered and simple historical accuracy should be wiped.

My great-grandmother lived through the famines. My family had to personally go through the Holodomor. Do you think that the Party suffered as the ordinary person? Do you believe that a Party high-up starved just as the ordinary worker? Do you think Stalin starved? My great-grandmother saw with her own eyes how the factory manager and his family stayed fat and happy while she begged and waited in food lines, only to be told that there wasn't any food. To deny Stalin's direct role in creating the Holodomor is as repulsive as it is to deny the Holocaust or the horrific loss of life during Mao's so-called 'Great Leap Forward'.

Stalinists are no better than Fascists. In short, bastards. I do not care to be part of a site that allows such. If Stalinists are a large, active presence on this site, then I'm gone, and you lot have fun with the mass-murder deniers.

[Ismail]

Is Holocaust denial allowed on this site? If it is, then I can understand why people can lie and say Holodomor wasn't caused by Stalin and the Kremlin. Otherwise, such an insult to the families of those who suffered and simple historical accuracy should be wiped.

My great-grandmother lived through the famines. My family had to personally go through the Holodomor. Do you think that the Party suffered as the ordinary person? Do you believe that a Party high-up starved just as the ordinary worker? Do you think Stalin starved? My great-grandmother saw with her own eyes how the factory manager and his family stayed fat and happy while she begged and waited in food lines, only to be told that there wasn't any food. To deny Stalin's direct role in creating the Holodomor is as repulsive as it is to deny the Holocaust or the horrific loss of life during Mao's so-called 'Great Leap Forward'.No one is denying that Soviet policies (of which Stalin was obviously the initiator of a great many) contributed to famine conditions in the Ukraine, and no one (at least not in modern times) is denying that a famine actually occurred. What people are rejecting is the claim that Stalin purposefully caused it in order to "punish" or even genocide Ukrainians. Most historians on Soviet affairs, even Robert Conquest, hold that the Soviets did not intentionally create a famine. Soviet archives demonstrate that Stalin knew little of what was occurring until it was too late, since local officials were reporting how "wonderful" things were going.

Two examples should be sufficient. The first: "The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow [field crops] in Ukraine." The second, a letter from Stalin: "Comrade Kosior! You must read attached summaries. Judging by this information, it looks like the Soviet authority has ceased to exist in some areas of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Can this be true? Is the situation invillages in Ukraine this bad? Where are the operatives of the OGPU [Joint Main Political Directorate], what are they doing? Could you verify this information and inform the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party about taken measures." (from "Famine in the USSR: 1929-1934: New Documentary Evidence.")

J. Arch Getty on the famine and Soviet handling of events: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-russia&month=0205&week=a&msg=G9gRj0I/eXnblGCPQyYXlA&user=&pw

For a much more elaborate discussion see The Years of Hunger by Davies and Wheatcroft.

[Geiseric]

During the great purges he killed anybody who was part of the left opposition, which would have been people who pushed for collectivisation in 1925 instead of following Stalin and Bukharin's clique which was interested in continuing the N.E.P. as for the famine in Ukraine, it along with most other starvations would have been avoided if the Left Opposition's economic policies were carried out earlier rather than later, can you agree with that Ismail? My point is that the Kulaks, already a strong force by 1925, should of been assaulted as a class before they instigated the city famines, which resulted in "5 year plan in 4 years," doctrine, forcing the peasantry into cattle trucks to collective farms and robbing their belongings and personal wealth along with the Kulaks, which we all see as a tragedy.

[Grenzer]

Stalin only industrialised though because the Kulak insurrections and man made famines were growing so strong, beforehand he wanted to continue the N.E.P. and he executed anybody who talked about industrialisation or collectivisation.

I can sympathize with you on your views of the inadequacy of Soviet policy, but at the same time I would like to argue why immediate industrialization and collectivization was an impossibility.

While the left opposition's demand for industrialization seemed superficially logical, it ignored the very real material constraints and conditions that existed in Russia. You may be correct about what motivated Stalin, but at the same time I can't imagine industrialization pushing forward too much earlier than it did. Perhaps in 1927 at the earliest.

The first thing that must be understood is that the Civil War absolutely devastated the peasantry to the point where they were on the edge of revolt, in fact. The rhetoric about there being no antagonistic class contradictions between the peasantry and proletariat is actually bullshit, as I'm sure you should imagine. The peasantry is a reactionary class and was deeply hostile to the Bolsheviks. Combined with the hardships they faced in the Civil War, they were about ready to tear everything down if they had been pushed further. The NEP provided an absolutely vital period in which the peasantry could recover, and when this had happened sufficiently industrialization could take place.

It's difficult to understate the extremely precarious position the Soviet Union was in during the mid 1920's. I can't really comment much on the Kulaks, as personally I think it's a useless term that discards Marxist analysis. I don't think "rich/well to do peasants" is a scientific classification, much like the bourgeois insistence on "middle class". It is primarily a term that is used for propaganda purposes, and has few to no roots in actual scientific analysis. Anyway, to continue on the subject, I think you need to be aware of the contradictions that tore through Russian society. The Russian Empire was a huge, multi-ethnic entity that spanned dozens of different nationalities. For all the talk of "self-determination", the reality was that this was usually ignored. Personally, I don't have a principle for self-determination because I believe class analysis supersedes it. In many of the regions on the periphery of the Soviet Union, independence was a common sentiment and there were frequent revolts and rebellions. What spurred this sentiment I would say is even cruder than ordinary bourgeois nationalism, as most of the regions that displayed this separatist tendency tended to be primarily feudal in nature. Had industrialization been pushed sooner, I doubt the Soviets would have been able to do anything from preventing most of these regions from breaking off simultaneously, which leads into the next issue..

Early industrialization was a logistical impossibility. I suggest you do some research into the state of the Soviet Union's infrastructure and bureaucratic capacity. The 1920's were marked by an extreme lack of capable personnel, a poor to non-existent infrastructure, and social instability. As an example of how poor the bureaucracy's capabilities were, I don't believe that the Central Committee even gained the ability to review decisions already made until 1925. Telephone lines did not even connect most major cities to each other. They were rushing the expansion of the Party enough as it was. Most new Party members had little to no knowledge of Marxism, and were of questionable background and loyalty. In short, demands for immediate industrialization and socialism in the early/mid 1920's were completely detached from reality.

Your claim that people were executed simply for opposing the NEP is also entirely untrue, unless you are talking about the fact that people who opposed the NEP in the 1920's were later executed in the Great Purges, then yes, you are right about that. The simple fact is that Stalin adopted most of the left opposition's platforms. For all of Trotsky's criticisms of the Stalinist bureaucracy, it's important to remember that he was initially in favor of stronger centralization and bureaucratization than Stalin. Make no mistake, I'm not decrying this as opportunism, and I don't necessarily see anything inconsistent about this. Although anti-bureaucratic hysteria is fashionable these days, Trotsky realized that bureaucracy is a process. Bureaucracy is absolutely necessary, but the key is to master the bureaucracy and not let it rule us.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I can sympathize with you on your views of the inadequacy of Soviet policy, but at the same time I would like to argue why immediate industrialization and collectivization was an impossibility.

While the left opposition's demand for industrialization seemed superficially logical, it ignored the very real material constraints and conditions that existed in Russia. You may be correct about what motivated Stalin, but at the same time I can't imagine industrialization pushing forward too much earlier than it did. Perhaps in 1927 at the earliest.

The first thing that must be understood is that the Civil War absolutely devastated the peasantry to the point where they were on the edge of revolt, in fact. The rhetoric about there being no antagonistic class contradictions between the peasantry and proletariat is actually bullshit, as I'm sure you should imagine. The peasantry is a reactionary class and was deeply hostile to the Bolsheviks.

The peasantry wasn't politically reactionary enough such that blocs with it would be rendered impossible.


Your claim that people were executed simply for opposing the NEP is also entirely untrue, unless you are talking about the fact that people who opposed the NEP in the 1920's were later executed in the Great Purges, then yes, you are right about that. The simple fact is that Stalin adopted most of the left opposition's platforms. For all of Trotsky's criticisms of the Stalinist bureaucracy, it's important to remember that he was initially in favor of stronger centralization and bureaucratization than Stalin. Make no mistake, I'm not decrying this as opportunism, and I don't necessarily see anything inconsistent about this. Although anti-bureaucratic hysteria is fashionable these days, Trotsky realized that bureaucracy is a process. Bureaucracy is absolutely necessary, but the key is to master the bureaucracy and not let it rule us.

An old post of mine quoting a book said that Stalin didn't adopt the left platforms out of opportunism, but circumstances (i.e., Scissors Crisis) actually convinced him to move left even as Zinoviev and Kamenev were drifting to the right.

Unfortunately for food production, he didn't move left enough.

[Grenzer]

The peasantry wasn't politically reactionary enough such that blocs with it would be rendered impossible.

I agree. Class antagonisms will always exist, but I think there was enough common ground for things to be worked out.. especially if the state pursued a policy of Sovkhozification.




An old post of mine quoting a book said that Stalin didn't adopt the left platforms out of opportunism, but circumstances (i.e., Scissors Crisis) actually convinced him to move left even as Zinoviev and Kamenev were drifting to the right.

Unfortunately for food production, he didn't move left enough.

I have never bought the idea that everything Stalin did was political opportunism, especially both the domestic and foreign policies during the Third Period. Opportunism cannot explain the policy. As my post suggests, I believe that socialization of agriculture and industrialization could not have occurred on a practical level earlier than it did. The main problem I have is not with the fact that they did socialize, but how they did it.

I can understand why some people believe Stalin to be so repugnant, but it really is better if one examines him not with the assumption that he is some evil spider queen at the center of a web of intrigues, but on his own terms.

Some people have wondered why you bring up the question of Kolkhozy vs Sovkhozy, but it seems to me that it is related to the question of class demographics. Should the class make up of Sovkhoz workers be proletarian? A policy of Sovkhozification would then follow to quickly begin converting the peasantry into proletarians on a mass basis, in addition to bypassing the problems associated with Kolkhozification.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Sovkhoz-ization (one less syllable ;) ) would have converted peasants into farm workers fairly quickly.

[Grenzer]

Sovkhoz-ization (one less syllable ;) ) would have converted peasants into farm workers fairly quickly.

It seems that Khrushchev may have actually been to the left of Stalin on this issue. I recall reading that he began guaranteeing a minimum wage to even Kolkhozy farmers in the 1960's.

[Ismail]

No, he wasn't to the "left" on the agricultural issue, which is what must be looked at in general. Stalin called for abolishing commodity relations in the countryside (this, of course, was directed at the overwhelming majority of the countryside which was in collectives) and replacing them with products-exchange, as Lenin had originally called for. Khrushchev by contrast said that Stalin was "dogmatic" and that he "distrusted" the peasantry, and that commodities existed throughout socialism and in fact were just fine rather than a fetter on things.

For Stalin the goal was obviously to increase the amount of property of the whole people in the countryside (i.e. state farms.) Just because Khrushchev oversaw the creation of more state farms does not mean the abolition of the machine-tractor stations in 1957 or other measures which brought capitalist relations to the collectives didn't exist. Khrushchev was concerned with maximizing profit, the creation of more state farms has to be seen in that vein.

[Die Neue Zeit]

It seems that Khrushchev may have actually been to the left of Stalin on this issue. I recall reading that he began guaranteeing a minimum wage to even Kolkhozy farmers in the 1960's.

That was left to Brezhnev and co. in 1965. However, check out Khrushchev's agricultural writings from after WWII to before Stalin's death. I find his agrotown stuff interesting, to be honest.

[Geiseric]

I think Lenin was looking towards collectively owned peasant farms which included a core of proletarian elements which modernized the process while at the same time including the mass of peasantry in a modern productive mode. Stalin for the longest time ensured that state owned farms were overshadowed in number by Kulak owned farms, a major source of support for his and bukharin's political bloc. Obviously this for a bit ensured some food for the cities, however it strangled them at the point of 1925 with SEVERE famines and food shortages, so why not take the initiative as that crisis ended against the Kulaks? Did they think that it wouldn't happen again if they bribed the Kulaks with more investments? At this point, when it would of seemed logical to start collectivisation, the advocates for that were basically isolated completely by the defensists and bureaucratic apparatus that the bolshevik party became

[Die Neue Zeit]

I think Lenin was looking towards collectively owned peasant farms which included a core of proletarian elements which modernized the process while at the same time including the mass of peasantry in a modern productive mode.

Um, there were at least four models to the agricultural situation that were considered. The first three are in relation to collective farming:

1) Association for Joint Cultivation of Land, where only land was in common use;
2) Agricultural artel (initially in a loose meaning, later formalized to become an organizational basis of kolkhozy)
3) Agricultural commune, with the highest level of common use of resources;

4) Public sector wage relations in agriculture (i.e., more productive sovkhozy)

http://www.revleft.com/vb/defense-trotsky-s-t156790/index.html?p=2157302


Stalin and co. didn't need to send in the NKVD and say, "These farms are now state property, dear peasants!" Historically the First Five-Year Plan was characterized by, among other things, high inflation (related to the artificial depression of real wages that I have a major beef with). The regime could simply have used eminent domain [for the sovkhoz-ization drive] and given printed money to the peasants as "compensation" for their farm property.

Work could then have begun on reconsolidating former landlord estates into sovkhozy, and on consolidating other non-sovkhoz estates into sovkhozy. Red directors could then be installed to oversee both the explicit atmosphere of labour discipline and rising labour productivity (possibly enough to minimize or eliminate the artificial depression of real wages of the urban workers, the non-farm rural workers, and the new farm workers) way before the time of the model Gorodets state farm... and construction materials plant!

[People learn new things everyday, by the way, in regards to the industrial combination in that last statement.]

http://www.revleft.com/vb/kolkhoz-and-sovkhoz-t171068/index.html?p=2435846


Leaving aside our mutual opposition to piecework, didn't Stalin and co. introduce "socialist piecework" garbage in the countryside as well as in the factories? That shifts business risk back onto the immediate producer.

For all the barbarity, sovkhozy plus "socialist piecework" would have been a far better alternative to the kolkhozy bumblings.

[Comrade Lenin]

I have not researched the issue much... but out of curiosity what evidence do you have that the Holodomor was fictitious. I'm challenging that statement I just want evidence to back up the claim.

[Ismail]

I have not researched the issue much... but out of curiosity what evidence do you have that the Holodomor was fictitious. I'm challenging that statement I just want evidence to back up the claim.The Ukrainian famine was very real. The "Holodomor," i.e. that it was artificially engineered to either punish Ukrainian peasants or to outright genocide the Ukrainian nation, is fictitious.

On how the famine became politicized:
* http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/vv.html (http://msuweb.montclair.edu/%7Efurrg/vv.html)
* http://www.rationalrevolution.net/special/library/famine.htm

On the famine itself see The Years of Hunger by Davies and Wheatcroft, neither of whom are communists.

[Rafiq]

I find it troubling that we need a "Stalin" thread. As if Stalin could be held responsible for so much. To be quite honest, besides his rhetorical or symbolical apperence (As a cult of personality) Stalin wasn't as significant as many try to make him out to be. Yes, he represented a faction within the Bolshevik party, symbolically, but Stalin on his own?

[Silvershaft]

I was watching a document about Molotov on TV, and it said that he wasn't purged by Stalin because Stalin liked what Molotov wrote in pravda. It said that Molotov wrote something along the lines that the soviet union is led by a genius(referring to Stalin).

So is this why Molotov was one of the few original bolsheviks to survive the purges?

[Geiseric]

Well molotov survived the purges because like you said, he kissed Stalin's ass on a regular occasion, and was one of the few bolsheviks willing to negotiate with Nazis.

[m1omfg]

Why are people still debating Stalin in the 21st century. Do you all need to prove that communism is good to your conservative high school teacher or something?

[Ismail]

I was watching a document about Molotov on TV, and it said that he wasn't purged by Stalin because Stalin liked what Molotov wrote in pravda. It said that Molotov wrote something along the lines that the soviet union is led by a genius(referring to Stalin).

So is this why Molotov was one of the few original bolsheviks to survive the purges?Considering that Radek and Bukharin wrote various articles praising Stalin to the skies far more than Molotov or any other "Stalinist" (since they wanted to show how "loyal" they were to Stalin after the Left Opposition died), probably not. Stalin disliked his own cult and criticized Bukharin for his super-Stalin-praising articles. In fact it'd be difficult to find any prominent official purged in 1936-38 who didn't praise Stalin in their articles and other works, since that was pretty much mandatory.

Molotov was always associated with Stalin and was one of his trusted aides like Kaganovich and others. Still, Stalin did criticize him in the postwar period and as both he and Kaganovich note in their memoirs, Stalin increasingly distrusted them.


and was one of the few bolsheviks willing to negotiate with Nazis.Molotov was the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, he was "willing to negotiate" with anyone; that was his job, just as Litvinov, Krasin, Chicherin, Rakovsky, Radek, Kamenev and other Bolsheviks from 1917 onwards met with countless bourgeois heads of state and other reactionary figures.

[Geiseric]

Well they met to negotiate a treaty that was the best for the international working class, Molotov negotiated for how to divide up poland and later eastern europe after the war with Churchill. Very different circumstances.

[Ismail]

Well they met to negotiate a treaty that was the best for the international working class, Molotov negotiated for how to divide up poland and later eastern europe after the war with Churchill. Very different circumstances.Considering that it's pretty obvious a Poland wholly annexed to Nazi Germany would have served as a much greater danger for the Soviets after the Nazis decided to invade the USSR, and considering that the whole percentages agreement stuff after the war never really worked (Yugoslavia was supposed to be "50%" yet Tito simply ended the brief coalition government, the USSR continued aiding the Greek guerrillas until they felt that said guerrillas could not win), I don't see how this is much different from, say, Soviet foreign policy under Lenin separating Atatürk's execution of Turkish communists from establishing good diplomatic relations with the Turkish Republic.

[Geiseric]

Lenin was either in the hospital or pre-occupied working 20 hours a day trying to handle things during the when Zinoviev was in charge of Comintern, and Zinoviev is the one who thought supporting Ataturk was a good idea. There are countless examples, including his own struggle, against the so called "National Bourgeoisie," but I don't see how this really has to do with Poland.

[Ismail]

Lenin was either in the hospital or pre-occupied working 20 hours a day trying to handle things during the when Zinoviev was in charge of Comintern, and Zinoviev is the one who thought supporting Ataturk was a good idea.You're free to provide sources that Lenin somehow opposed Atatürk or was otherwise unaware of what was going on. He certainly wasn't ignorant of Turkish affairs.


but I don't see how this really has to do with Poland.When the Soviets moved into Poland they began a process which would save the lives of millions of Jews, reunify oppressed lands taken by the Poles during the Soviet-Polish war, and place the USSR in a significantly better defensive position than was hitherto the case. The government which had fled in the event of the Nazi invasion was more afraid of the Soviets than Nazi Germany and was by all accounts reactionary.

When the Bolsheviks aligned their interests with Atatürk the Turkish Communists tended to get killed, although the Turks remained generally neutral vis-à-vis the Soviets in return.

It's just an example of how "Stalinist" foreign policy wasn't much different from foreign policy under Lenin.

[Geiseric]

Of course they were reactionary, but this move proved not to help the military positions, and if anything was close to appeasement towards Hitler, selling out every jew in western poland for a temporary moment of breathing space.

I'd rather see a quote from Lenin saying how he supported Ataturk, since i've never actually seen one firsthand, although it's brought up all the time.

[Prometeo liberado]

That Stalin "made a fine Emperor" is not a Marxist analysis, nor are claims that he "crapped up" arts.

Though I am aware that he liked to play "small ball". You know, bunting, hit and run, that old chestnut.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

Of course they were reactionary, but this move proved not to help the military positions, and if anything was close to appeasement towards Hitler, selling out every jew in western poland for a temporary moment of breathing space.

I'd rather see a quote from Lenin saying how he supported Ataturk, since i've never actually seen one firsthand, although it's brought up all the time.

That "moment of breathing space" could have easily ended with Hitler going for Britain first which would have been a political master stroke by Stalin, and secured that the reactionaries in the UK not to have any ideas about a possible alliance against the Soviet Union with Hitler. But the peace treaty with Nazi Germany from late August 1939 to summer 1941 gave the Soviet Union nearly three more years to make security plans and invest into war machines a crucial part of modern war.

[Ismail]

Of course they were reactionary, but this move proved not to help the military positions, and if anything was close to appeasement towards Hitler, selling out every jew in western poland for a temporary moment of breathing space.What was the alternative? The Soviets offered to defend Poland in the event of a Nazi German attack, but the Polish government refused the offer.

By the way, let's recall the Trotskyist line on Poland vis-à-vis the "Stalinist" line not long before the invasion, recalling the strong objection of Trotskyists to the Soviet call for collective security against Nazi Germany.

"Now the tangle of imperialist rivalries in Europe is trying to straighten itself out in the form of a bloc pledged to defend Poland, and possibly Rumania, from Nazi attack. Should this arrangement work out—and that is still far from certain—we would begin to hear, no doubt about 'poor little Poland' under the Nazi heel. 'Poor little Poland'! Will the bosses of Britain, France, and this country call upon the workers to defend 'democracy' in Poland? Will the Stalinist patrioteers here and in those other countries echo this cry? We may be sure they will, if the bosses want it that way. But they will forget that in Poland the Ukrainian minority has been crushed, the Jews vilely persecuted, the Germans, Czechs, and other minorities kept in virtual bondage. They will conveniently forget that Poland has been and is a military, semi-Fascist dictatorship. This is the 'democracy' they are talking about defending!" - Socialist Appeal, April 7, 1939.

Then the Nazis invaded, the Polish government fled, the Soviets moved into what was historically not Polish territory to begin with, and Stalin confided with Dimitrov that one fascist state had ceased existence. It could have worked out differently with the USSR guaranteeing the defense of a bourgeois and semi-fascist Poland, but then the Trots would have attacked that as well.


I'd rather see a quote from Lenin saying how he supported Ataturk, since i've never actually seen one firsthand, although it's brought up all the time.Actions speak louder than words. Pretty sure there's nothing by Lenin praising Ismail Enver Pasha either, yet he still visited the USSR to the protest of various persons.

[Geiseric]

Lenin never supported Ataturk, and you can't find any proof that he did.

And the soviet government joining the allies in "mutual defense," was also not the right thing to do, what buisness does the soviet state have in recognizing any of these capitalist states as worth defending from other capitalist states?

[Ismail]

Lenin never supported Ataturk, and you can't find any proof that he did.How do you figure? Because he never wrote about it?


And the soviet government joining the allies in "mutual defense," was also not the right thing to do, what buisness does the soviet state have in recognizing any of these capitalist states as worth defending from other capitalist states?Well for one thing already under Lenin the Bolsheviks were creating mutual defense treaties, so this isn't something that originated in the Stalin period.

Nazi Germany planned to conquer Europe by military force. Nazi policy, which aimed to take advantage of the short-sightedness of other bourgeois states, was a direct threat to the USSR which was obviously Hitler's main target. Soviet policy, by contrast, was aimed at ensuring that the Nazis could not do this without suffering defeat through joint Soviet-British-French efforts. Since the British and French wanted the Nazis to march eastwards and allowed them to grow strong via building up their military and annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia, the Soviets eventually abandoned this effort in favor of simply delaying the inevitable while on the other hand extracting concessions from the Nazis via the non-aggression treaty.

So what was the "right thing to do"?

[Geiseric]

It was certainly not to cuddle up with the imperialists, who, as we saw after the war, put their efforts completely against the U.S.S.R. and international communism.

A contract for mutual defense only benefits the weak imperialist states, they would not, couldn't, and didn't come to the aid of the Soviets in any significant way untill about 1942. A pact like that only served france because for some reason, france was seen more friendly to the soviets and communism? Or wait it must of been part of the whole popular front strategy that didn't work.

[Silvershaft]

Is it true that Stalin accused Molotov's wife of spying for Israel, and after demanded that everyone shows their loyality in a public vote. According to the document Molotov didn't dare to vote and apologized Stalin a day after, but Stalin had already decided that he doesn't want to see Molotov again? Also if it was true, what happened to Molotov's wife and was she really spying or was Stalin just being paranoid?

Thanks for answers both of you.

[Geiseric]

Stalin supported Israel, whatchu talking about? Why would Molotov's wife of spied for them?

[Silvershaft]

Stalin supported Israel, whatchu talking about? Why would Molotov's wife of spied for them?

Google Polina_Zhemchuzhina and it says it on the wikipedia page, sorry can't post links.

Stalin distrusted her so much that she was imprisoned later, and the document said that Stalin thought she was spying for Israel.

[Ismail]

Stalin supported Israel, whatchu talking about? Why would Molotov's wife of spied for them?Actually the whole "Molotov's wife was arrested for treason and espionage" stuff is true, Molotov himself stated in his memoir that he reunited with his wife (who had been released after Stalin's death) at Stalin's funeral. Both Molotov and his wife, however, remained ardently pro-Stalin to the end of their days. Apparently Stalin himself suspected towards the end of his life that Molotov was possibly an American agent, which obviously wasn't true either.

As for Israel, diplomatic relations were broken off in 1951 IIRC. The Soviets in 1947-48 figured that Israel had an active workers' movement (and obviously Soviet Jews tended to support Israel), whereas its Arab opponents were feudal and their armies led by British colonial officers. After Israeli independence and the end of the war with the Arabs, relations between it and the USSR quickly soured.

Look at this for the Soviet view of Israel and Zionism (which is attacked as being founded by "nationalists and mystics") in 1949: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv12n2/ehrenburg.htm

[Geiseric]

In the begining though, Stalin did in fact support Israel, unless his view was the same as Balfour, or non capitalist jews. Anyways, Molotov is a wierd character, and I honestly wouldn't trust him any farther than I could throw him. It takes a slimy guy to survive the purges, and rise to the top of the Bureaucracy.

[Die Neue Zeit]

So what was the "right thing to do"?

Well, certainly not trade with a country that's bound to attack you in just a couple years' time! [Though I support the pact per se.]

[Ismail]

Well, certainly not trade with a country that's bound to attack you in just a couple years' time! [Though I support the pact per se.]It isn't much of a non-aggression pact if two countries refuse to trade with one-another. Various writers have noted that both the Soviets and Nazis benefited from it, the Soviets possibly more so.

[Die Neue Zeit]

It isn't much of a non-aggression pact if two countries refuse to trade with one-another.

Sure it still is. A basic non-aggression pact simply states two things: mutual recognition regarding legitimacy, and all parties committing not to attack one another. Beyond that, no party is obligated to trade with another. In fact, there can even be outright trade wars.


Various writers have noted that both the Soviets and Nazis benefited from it, the Soviets possibly more so.

The Nazis benefitted from Soviet oil and war materials to try to bite the hands that fed them. I don't think the Soviets benefitted much.

[Comrade Hill]

Sure it still is. A basic non-aggression pact simply states two things: mutual recognition regarding legitimacy, and all parties committing not to attack one another. Beyond that, no party is obligated to trade with another. In fact, there can even be outright trade wars.


For some reason, I highly doubt that refusing to trade, or having a trade war would've benefitted the USSR.



The Nazis benefitted from Soviet oil and war materials to try to bite the hands that fed them. I don't think the Soviets benefitted much.

Listen comrade, what matters is that the USSR benefitted enough to win. What is the point of speculating about what they "could've done" better?

[Geiseric]

You "seriously doubt" that a trade war would hurt the already unstabile fascist economy, or would stop Hitler AND Mussilini from flying their planes and driving their tanks with fuel from the USSR? The soviets didn't benefit from it at all, they said "military knowlege" somewhere but they already had that, they were finishing up industrialization by that point and the Red Army could of attacked, literally at any point, according to accounts from General Georgi Zhukov, through the unstabile Nazi border. Stalin's opportunism led him to count on the Nazis going against the Entente countries, before the U.S.S.R. and he put everybody who said otherwise in jail!

[Comrade Hill]

You "seriously doubt" that a trade war would hurt the already unstabile fascist economy, or would stop Hitler AND Mussilini from flying their planes and driving their tanks with fuel from the USSR?


Yes, I do. Having an unstable economy doesn't mean cutting off trade = no fuel or tanks. Much of the Third Reich's economic resources came from many parts of Europe, including Great Britain.



Stalin's opportunism led him to count on the Nazis going against the Entente countries, before the U.S.S.R. and he put everybody who said otherwise in jail


Please. It wasn't even until after Khrushchev's "secret speech" that people began to embrace this silly myth that Stalin murdered the "flower of the red army." There was quite a lot of opportunism in the Soviet government, which Stalin made an attempt to deal with. Generals such as Tukhachevsky were revealing military plans to the Third Reich. There was even a coup attempt before the war. Others who were guilty of treason admitted their guilt as well. There's really no debating this; your small-town gossip cannot change history.

[Geiseric]

well he purged the army and several marshals, the entire state apparatus, and forced confessions out of hundreds of thousands of people. That's what happened, and if you deny that you're dillusional. The opportunist elements were let in, by him, en masse into the party during the 1920s, and he might of purged some of them along with the actual revolutionaries.

[Comrade Hill]

and forced confessions out of hundreds of thousands of people.


I invite you to provide evidence that this happened. These confessions happened extremely quick, and most of these people were healthy and in their 40s. The Soviet "torturers" could've been met with much more resistance. I'm not sure who you think "actual revolutionaries" are. Hopefully you are not talking about factionalists.

[Die Neue Zeit]

For some reason, I highly doubt that refusing to trade, or having a trade war would've benefitted the USSR.

The Soviets were doing just fine during the Phoney War, with little or no trade with the Nazis.

[Geiseric]

I invite you to provide evidence that this happened. These confessions happened extremely quick, and most of these people were healthy and in their 40s. The Soviet "torturers" could've been met with much more resistance. I'm not sure who you think "actual revolutionaries" are. Hopefully you are not talking about factionalists.

I think the weight is on you, to provide actual evidence that say Trotsky's son, or Kamanev's familly were guilty, with evidence besides of "confessions." Which as we know, from the 9/11 experiance, are not the most reliable sources of truth. You can torture somebody for days, or threaten their familly and they'll admit to whatever. But the fact of the matter is that confessions are the only proof you can dig up, so your arguements will always be flawed while argueing the moscow trials.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I invite you to provide evidence that this happened. These confessions happened extremely quick, and most of these people were healthy and in their 40s. The Soviet "torturers" could've been met with much more resistance. I'm not sure who you think "actual revolutionaries" are. Hopefully you are not talking about factionalists.

As Broody said above, the weight is on you. How do you explain the Bukharin episode? How do you explain the need to put an ice pick through Trotsky's head? How do you explain the extra-ordinary number of people suddenly denounced, exiled and/or executed in the late 1930s as 'counter-revolutionaries'?

Either the accusations were false and it was an intra- and extra-party purge of opposition political forces, or the central committee was inept in allowing so many counter-revolutionaries to fester for nearly two decades. Which is it?

[Geiseric]

As Broody said above, the weight is on you. How do you explain the Bukharin episode? How do you explain the need to put an ice pick through Trotsky's head? How do you explain the extra-ordinary number of people suddenly denounced, exiled and/or executed in the late 1930s as 'counter-revolutionaries'?

Either the accusations were false and it was an intra- and extra-party purge of opposition political forces, or the central committee was inept in allowing so many counter-revolutionaries to fester for nearly two decades. Which is it?

On the contrary, Stalin supported "opening the doors," to the bolshevik party to peasants and petit bourgeois elements in the early 1920s, during the N.E.P. So if anything he purged the people who he allowed in the party whom in effect watered down the revolutionary nature of the bolshevik party.

[nihilust]

could someone please pm me in regards to questions i have on stalin? thank you comrades!

[Ismail]

As Broody said above, the weight is on you. How do you explain the Bukharin episode? How do you explain the need to put an ice pick through Trotsky's head?It's quite simple. Bukharin was a rightist and leader of the Right Opposition; he spoke of getting rid of Stalin and conspired with the Left Opposition against him. At one point during his open opposition he discussed the possibility of murdering him (http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv8n1/bukharin.htm). In his last letter to Stalin while in prison he admitted that a few years earlier at an illegal conference of his followers one of them discussed killing Stalin and that he himself took no action to report this to the authorities.

Sudoplatov, the guy who organized the assassination of Trotsky, noted in his memoirs published after 1991 that Stalin called the man a "fascist hireling." It's long been confirmed that Trotsky after his exile from the USSR was still working to build up not only a new Left Opposition, but tried to establish contacts with what still existed of the Right Opposition as well. The Moscow Trials and pre-trial testimonies, of which there is no evidence Stalin didn't believe in them (he actively inquired about them, wrote letters to Kaganovich, Molotov, etc. talking about what the confessed were saying in private testimonies, etc.), evidently laid forth the view that Trotsky had established ties with Nazi Germany, Britain, Japan, etc. in an effort to take power.


How do you explain the extra-ordinary number of people suddenly denounced, exiled and/or executed in the late 1930s as 'counter-revolutionaries'?See J. Arch Getty's works on the subject. It's worth noting that into the very last years of Stalin's leadership suspicions were still around. For instance Ivan Maisky, one of the main Soviet diplomats, worked closely with the British during WWII and was praised by Churchill (including in his memoirs), which led Soviet authorities to suspect that Maisky had in fact become a paid agent. He was arrested in February 1953 and forced to "confess" (apparently stating among other things that Kollontai, who had passed away a year earlier, was also involved in British or American intelligence.) Voroshilov was accused of being a British agent as well. Unlike Molotov, who remained loyal to Stalin to the end of his life despite growing suspicion of him while Stalin was alive (under the same fear, that he had become a British agent), Maisky endorsed Khrushchev and opposed the supposed "whitewashing" of Stalin done after the rise of Brezhnev. Voroshilov also endorsed Khrushchev.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Firstly Ismail, you sound absolutely crackers. Seriously, you could not come across as more away from reality if you tried. You celebrate the 1917 revolution yet are happy to decry most of its leaders as counter-revolutionaries deserving of death. You defend the NEP as a necessary step given material conditions, yet again are happy to decry many of its supporters and bureaucrat-implementers as anti-revolutionaries, saboteurs or spies. You love the industrialisation/collectivisation of the 1930s, yet again decry many of its party supporters as fascists, rightists or other somewhat unbelievable charges. And again, you Stalinists celebrate Sergei Kirov, yet fanatically celebrate the process that resulted in the death of most of those at the 1934 'Congress of the Victors' who voted for Kirov on the Central Committee.

Coincidence? I think not. Anyway, it matters not because the issue is an historical irrelevance.

Secondly, so what if Bukharin opposed Stalin? Is political opposition reasonable grounds for the death penalty now? Or even imprisonment? It's not a crime, even if you think their politics is 'rightist' or whatever. So what if he talked about murdering him? Surely by that logic, Stalin should have hung for the murder of Trotsky? What's your excuse for that one?

[Geiseric]

It's quite simple. Bukharin was a rightist and leader of the Right Opposition; he spoke of getting rid of Stalin and conspired with the Left Opposition against him. At one point during his open opposition he discussed the possibility of murdering him (http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv8n1/bukharin.htm). In his last letter to Stalin while in prison he admitted that a few years earlier at an illegal conference of his followers one of them discussed killing Stalin and that he himself took no action to report this to the authorities.

Sudoplatov, the guy who organized the assassination of Trotsky, noted in his memoirs published after 1991 that Stalin called the man a "fascist hireling." It's long been confirmed that Trotsky after his exile from the USSR was still working to build up not only a new Left Opposition, but tried to establish contacts with what still existed of the Right Opposition as well. The Moscow Trials and pre-trial testimonies, of which there is no evidence Stalin didn't believe in them (he actively inquired about them, wrote letters to Kaganovich, Molotov, etc. talking about what the confessed were saying in private testimonies, etc.), evidently laid forth the view that Trotsky had established ties with Nazi Germany, Britain, Japan, etc. in an effort to take power.



First off, building a political opposition isn't a bad thing, but you're a supporter of Stalin, so you wouldn't ever understand why. For some reason you believe in the myth that Trotsky, the founder of the red army and president of the Petrograd soviet, was a fascist, or was supported by Fascists. There isn't any proof for this, and Trotsky advocated for the utter destruction of fascism.

Nothing you listed that was true, i.e. establishing contacts with people inside the U.S.S.R. is worthy of being killed for.

[Ismail]

You celebrate the 1917 revolution yet are happy to decry most of its leaders as counter-revolutionaries deserving of death.Probably because helping to carry out a revolution does not make you immune from later on adopting reactionary positions, ignoring for a moment that Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov and others were originally against the prospect of a revolution and only supported it as it occurred, in line with democratic centralism.


You defend the NEP as a necessary step given material conditions, yet again are happy to decry many of its supporters and bureaucrat-implementers as anti-revolutionaries, saboteurs or spies.Bukharin and Co. didn't merely "support" NEP, they wanted to extend it indefinitely after its original purpose had run its course, at a time when its continuance would have meant harm for the Soviet state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. They adopted clearly right-wing positions on kulaks (believing they could peacefully "grow into socialism") and other subjects.


You love the industrialisation/collectivisation of the 1930s, yet again decry many of its party supporters as fascists, rightists or other somewhat unbelievable charges.Apparently the Moscow Trials had "advocates industrialization and collectivization" among the charges levied against the defendants and the world forgot to notice.


And again, you Stalinists celebrate Sergei Kirov, yet fanatically celebrate the process that resulted in the death of most of those at the 1934 'Congress of the Victors' who voted for Kirov on the Central Committee.The "they voted for Kirov" story has little basis in fact. Kirov was loyal to Stalin and Stalin became alarmed when he was assassinated.


Secondly, so what if Bukharin opposed Stalin? Is political opposition reasonable grounds for the death penalty now?It violated the ban on party factions established by Lenin, and, in line with the directives of the Party, many rightists and Trots were promptly expelled from it. There was no talk of executing anyone until the 30's.


Surely by that logic, Stalin should have hung for the murder of Trotsky?Why? Trotsky was expelled from the Party (and, indeed, from the country itself) for factional and later conspiratorial activity. He was later sentenced in absentia during the Moscow Trials for treason, which obviously carried the death penalty. He was completely discredited within Soviet society. Still seen as a potentially destabilizing force, Stalin had him assassinated.


For some reason you believe in the myth that Trotsky, the founder of the red army and president of the Petrograd soviet,Deng Xiaoping, Mehmet Shehu, and all sorts of rehabilitated post-56 pro-Soviet revisionist leaders boasted more-or-less impressive revolutionary records. I fail to see how that makes them forever glorious communists. Trotsky certainly was in opposition to Lenin before 1917, calling him a dictator among other things. Just because he fought well and was a skilled orator does not automatically make him an awesome communist who would never deviate.


was a fascist, or was supported by Fascists. There isn't any proof for this, and Trotsky advocated for the utter destruction of fascism.No one seriously claimed that Trotsky was a fascist. During the trials it was claimed at most that Yagoda, a rightist who was portrayed as a guy who would work with the Trotskyists and promptly kill them after the "Stalinists" were overthrown, was sympathetic to fascism and would establish a fascist-like government. The charges against Trotsky centered around the claim that he collaborated with fascists to overthrow the Soviet state and come to power, not that he himself was one.


Nothing you listed that was true, i.e. establishing contacts with people inside the U.S.S.R. is worthy of being killed for.Establishing contacts with people inside the USSR wasn't what the Moscow Trials defendants were charged with. It's not hard to find out the charges or even find the transcripts; they're all online.

* http://sovietlibrary.org/Library/Union%20of%20Soviet%20Socialist%20Republics/1936_Report%20of%20Court%20Proceedings_Trotskyite-Zinovievite%20Terrorist%20Centre_1936.pdf
* http://sovietlibrary.org/Library/Union%20of%20Soviet%20Socialist%20Republics/1937_Report%20of%20the%20Court%20Proceedings%20Ant i-Soviet%20Trotskyite%20Centre_1937.pdf
* http://sovietlibrary.org/Library/Union%20of%20Soviet%20Socialist%20Republics/1938_Report%20of%20Court%20Proceedings_Anti-Soviet%20Bloc%20of%20Rights%20and%20Trotskyites_19 38.pdf

[Geiseric]

Dude you're alienating so many people from the communist movement if you keep spouting this bullshit. I hope you don't claim to represent marxists if you ever defend Stalin in real life, because I and the rest of the future movement suffers if you do.

Also Deng Xioping was following Comintern's, by extension, Stalin's orders. I don't care if you ignore the bureaucratization, it's a fact.

And Trotsky never collaborated with any Fascists. Find me proof, or you're spouting nonsense. Why would he call for an overthrow of Nazism (which Stalin didn't) if he was planning on supporting them against the USSR? He didn't. If I really need to explain his position, he was calling for a revolution against the Bureaucracy which strangled the USSR and the world revolution, not establishing a "fascist like" (which is completely ridiculous if you know what fascism is) government.

[Камо́ Зэд]

I don't know that Trotsky collaborated with actual fascists. I wouldn't be all that surprised if this turned out to be true, but that's likely an attitude resultant of my prejudice against the man. I'm personally guilty of calling Trotsky a fascist on more than one occasion, and there's the famous quote about Trotsky by Gramsci, but until I know for sure that Trotsky collaborated with actual fascists, the extent to which Trotsky can be called a "fascist" is determined by how far the man's politics deviated from the theoretical framework of Marxism-Leninism. Even then, it strikes me as hyperbolic, although revisionism is the progenitor of fascistic attitudes.

[Ismail]

Also Deng Xioping was following Comintern's, by extension, Stalin's orders.Well yeah, so was Mao. Then Stalin died and Mao complained about how Stalin didn't trust him and how big bad dogmatic Stalin didn't trust the peasantry, didn't trust the CCP, etc. The point is that Mao, Deng, Liu Shaoqi, and others toed the line when it was impossible for them otherwise, and then when the coast was clear they made their rightists moves. The only difference is that Liu and Deng were to the right of Mao. But this isn't my point anyway; the point is that being in an important event, or being a veteran communist in general, doesn't mean anything when you later endorse rightist policies.

Case in point: when the Communist Party of Albania was founded, most of its founding members had no ties with the Comintern (Hoxha included.) Only Koço Tashko and later on Sejfulla Malëshova had prominent ties with it. Malëshova in particular had become a communist in the 20's and was a professor of philosophy in the Soviet Union, and had gotten in trouble for being a sympathizer of the Right Opposition under Bukharin.

During the war Malëshova, under the pretext that he was acting on orders from the Soviets, called for the National Liberation Front to promote the creation of a party from the ranks of the Balli Kombëtar, the collaborationist "resistance" organization opposed to the communists, as a way of splitting it and "broadening" the basis of the Front. Hoxha rejected this suggestion even though Malëshova insisted Hoxha's stand was in opposition to that of the Soviets. After the war Malëshova continued, promoting the formation of multiple parties within the Front. In addition he also called for Albania's revolution to basically be a bourgeois-democratic one rather than a socialist one, for an "all-Albanian cultural front" which aimed to synthesize reactionary (under the guise of being "national") literature with progressive literature, for good relations with the West, etc. In other words, he was clearly a rightist, and was expelled from the Party as a result.

As for Tashko, he was expelled in 1960 after being so absurdly supportive of the Soviet revisionist line that he accidentally pronounced, in a bout of confusion, the Russian word for "full stop" in a speech which had been presented to him by the Soviet embassy in Albania.

Even Kost Boshnjaku, pretty much the first Albanian communist and who was sent to Albania by the Comintern in 1918 to organize a communist movement there, gradually lost interest in communism but later on emerged in the postwar government as head of the State Bank and as a rightist. Llazar Fundo, another 20's communist and Cominternist, briefly flirted with Trotskyism but then became a social-democrat and collaborator with British-backed anti-communist groups during the war.



Why would he call for an overthrow of Nazism (which Stalin didn't) if he was planning on supporting them against the USSR?Lenin called for the overthrow of German imperialism alongside all other imperialisms. Lenin accepted money from the Germans with the aim of returning to Russia to organize the Bolsheviks to lead the workers' movement there. Trotsky could be against Nazi Germany and still see value in collaborating with it, although obviously this collaboration would have been in a very different situation.

As for evidence, see: http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Furr.pdf


not establishing a "fascist like" (which is completely ridiculous if you know what fascism is) government.No one said that Trotsky would aim to establish a fascist-like government. Read my post, Yagoda was accused of wanting to establish one. And yes, fascist-like governments do exist. What do you call the Baltic states of the interwar period? Interwar Poland (which Trots at the time also called quasi-fascist)? Franco's Spain? Portugal under Salazar? Obviously they were not quite fascist in the sense of Italy (and less so in the sense of Nazi Germany), yet clearly were inspired by fascism.

[Камо́ Зэд]

And yes, fascist-like governments do exist.

I'm reminded of Bill Bland's, I believe, characterization of the Soviet Union following the Liberman/Kosygin reforms as a fascist-type state. Looking at it through Marxist-Leninist theory, the D.P.R.K. could likewise be categorized a fascist-type state without having actually been "inspired" by fascism, as well. I doubt anyone would argue that North Korea is at least quasi-fascistic and has deviated significantly from the Marxist-Leninist socialist endeavor, even though its anti-imperialist efforts may be admirable.

[Raskolnikov]

The DPRK? Fascist? That's kinda ignoring the whole thing about the material situations and political situations of the DPRK from the 50s to the today-now-time.

When I consider "Fascist", I consider a regime hell-bent on protecting capitalism and the bourgeois through an authoritarian right-wing military dictatorship; usually helped via the CIA or CIA-machinations. (Free Radio of Europe anyone? How bout Operation Gladio?)

That is the entire "point" of fascism, it's purpose. The protection of Capitalism and it's machinations as a dictatorship with no smoke and mirrors. Full-on dictatorship. Sometimes (as seen in the Cold War) to protect capitalist interests' in the region, usually capitalists from Imperial(First World) Dominions.


Then Stalin died and Mao complained about how Stalin didn't trust him and how big bad dogmatic Stalin didn't trust the peasantry, didn't trust the CCP, etc.

One can question Stalin's fever in finding a KMT-CCP alliance finding fruit..though Ultimately didn't Mao oppose Khrushchev's "Secret Meeting" and his criticism of Stalin?


Why would he call for an overthrow of Nazism (which Stalin didn't) if he was planning on supporting them against the USSR?

..Which is why Stalin actually wanted an Anglo-Franco-Soviet alliance to Crush Hitler in the late 30s before the Non-Aggression Pact was signed?


If I really need to explain his position, he was calling for a revolution against the Bureaucracy which strangled the USSR and the world revolution,

During a time where the USSR was still recovering from the War, the NEP and so forth..No hazards there..None what so ever..

[Ismail]

One can question Stalin's fever in finding a KMT-CCP alliance finding fruit..though Ultimately didn't Mao oppose Khrushchev's "Secret Meeting" and his criticism of Stalin?"Ultimately" yes, at the time no. Mao praised the fall of the "Anti-Party Group," said that under Khrushchev the USSR and China were "equals," attacked Stalin for seeing in Mao a "Tito-type" person, etc.

[Камо́ Зэд]

I don't know that fascism can be really called a "no smoke and mirrors" form of oppression, in that fascists would typically assert that their intent was to move "beyond" capitalism, rather than to feverishly defend everything about it. One of Hitler's earliest comrades broke from the N.S.D.A.P. on the grounds that Hitler had "lost sight" of the supposed anti-capitalist goals of National Socialism, that the very nature of capitalism and private enterprise was "Jewish" in character.

[Geiseric]

Fascism rose because of chaotic capitalism and inevitable crisis that didn't end in a revolution. Calling trotsky an advocate of a "fascist type government" is rediculous and I find it hard to take seriously anybody who believes that. But untill the nazis invaded fascism was a matter of taste right?

[Ismail]

Calling trotsky an advocate of a "fascist type government" is rediculous and I find it hard to take seriously anybody who believes that.Yeah, good thing no one says that.

[Raskolnikov]

"Ultimately" yes, at the time no. Mao praised the fall of the "Anti-Party Group," said that under Khrushchev the USSR and China were "equals," attacked Stalin for seeing in Mao a "Tito-type" person, etc.

Stalin seeing Mao as a 'Tito-Type'? Strange..more so than the whole relationship between Yugoslavia and the USSR (formerly quite grand before that fallout) but I've never heard that phrase before.

Letters from the 50s, prior to the Doctors Plot?

[Ismail]

Stalin seeing Mao as a 'Tito-Type'? Strange..more so than the whole relationship between Yugoslavia and the USSR (formerly quite grand before that fallout) but I've never heard that phrase before.

Letters from the 50s, prior to the Doctors Plot?http://marx2mao.com/Mao/TMR56.html

Stalin did a number of wrong things in connection with China. The "Left" adventurism pursued by Wang Ming in the latter part of the Second Revolutionary Civil War period and his Right opportunism in the early days of the War of Resistance Against Japan can both be traced to Stalin. At the time of the War of Liberation, Stalin first enjoined us not to press on with the revolution, maintaining that if civil war flared up, the Chinese nation would run the risk of destroying itself. Then when fighting did erupt, he took us half seriously, half sceptically. When we won the war, Stalin suspected that ours was a victory of the Tito type, and in 1949 and 1950 the pressure on us was very strong indeed.Stalin tended to distrust leaders who were fond of "nationalizing" Marxism-Leninism in some way; he also had some distrust of Ho Chi Minh for similar reasons.

As Hoxha wrote in his diary when he read those words of Mao's, "Glancing over all the main principles of Mao Tsetung's revisionist line, in regard to all those things which he raises against Stalin, we can say without reservation that Stalin was truly a great Marxist-Leninist who foresaw correctly where China was going, who long ago realized what the views of Mao Tsetung were, and saw that, in many directions, they were Titoite revisionist views, both on international policy and on internal policy, on the class struggle, on the dictatorship of the proletariat, on peaceful coexistence between countries with different social systems, etc." (Reflections on China Vol. II, p. 385.)

[Geiseric]

Stalin tended to distrust leaders who were fond of "nationalizing" Marxism-Leninism in some way; he also had some distrust of Ho Chi Minh for similar reasons.

So he was pro capitalist relations? I'm not going to post in here, because all you reply with is what Stalin or Hoxha thought, which is meaningless, since they're the subjects of the criticism in the first place!

Interviewer: Mr. X, you murdered Mr. Y, what was your opinion on him?

Mr. X: Mr. Y was an asshole!

That's basically every arguement that i've heard here. Substitute asshole for revisionist, and that's Stalinism.

[Камо́ Зэд]

So he was pro capitalist relations? I'm not going to post in here, because all you reply with is what Stalin or Hoxha thought, which is meaningless, since they're the subjects of the criticism in the first place!

Interviewer: Mr. X, you murdered Mr. Y, what was your opinion on him?

Mr. X: Mr. Y was an asshole!

That's basically every arguement that i've heard here. Substitute asshole for revisionist, and that's Stalinism.

This confuses me, because the above seems to be in response to an open criticism of Stalin by a Marxist-Leninist, but at the same time seems to suggest that Marxist-Leninists are nothing if not constantly defensive of him. That Stalin misjudged the character of many of those who "nationalized" Marxism-Leninism (like Ho Chi Minh, a very admirable Marxist-Leninist) marks a shortcoming in Stalin's methodological approach to these questions, but it is at least as unreasonable to say that this shortcoming makes Stalin "pro-capitalist" as it is to say that Trotsky's own (many and varied) shortcomings of methodology make him "pro-fascist."

[Althusser]

Do you even understand what art is? 'Learning chords on the piano as some soulless bourgeois exercises'. In what sense is that bourgeois? It is precisely what art is, and art is where culture comes from.

You cannot force a population over a period of time to pre-dispose itself to a new conception of artistic culture. Sorry to say it, but some of the greatest art in the world has come from painting still faces and 'learning chords on the piano'. That you demean the art of musicality to such a sorry, simplistic phrase indicates to me that you do not understand what you are talking about.


If the populace makes artistic expressions that convey a socialist ideal because of happiness that springs from new socialist system, then that's just dandy, but in no way should the state determine whether a piece of art meets the level of "consciousness" required. In no way am I saying that this extreme is what some here consider "ideal" but... just say I wanted to paint the sky, sculpt a human figure or sing a "love song" (not for socialism but for man/woman) ... is this bourgeois?

I feel that people are implying that with the bourgeois mode of production gone, all everyone will live for and think about is their new glorious system. Bourgeois social relations will change but I'm sure there will be communists that find joy in painting a goddamn pine tree without [insert socialist leader here] handing fruit to children frolicking in the meadow.

If I got into art (painting/sculpting/music) in a socialist system, I would definitely make political statements myself because the "revolution", marxist theory in action, and cooperatively forging better society is what I'm interested in... but I only speak for myself.

EDIT: Sorry, I just realized how far this thread has gone. I don't mean to derail the subject being discussed now.

[Ismail]

So he was pro capitalist relations?What kind of reply is that? I said that Stalin was suspicious of those who tried to put a "national" stamp on Marxism-Leninism. Considering that such stamping often meant concessions to the bourgeoisie in some form, evidently no, Stalin was not "pro capitalist relations."

[ind_com]

This confuses me, because the above seems to be in response to an open criticism of Stalin by a Marxist-Leninist, but at the same time seems to suggest that Marxist-Leninists are nothing if not constantly defensive of him. That Stalin misjudged the character of many of those who "nationalized" Marxism-Leninism (like Ho Chi Minh, a very admirable Marxist-Leninist) marks a shortcoming in Stalin's methodological approach to these questions, but it is at least as unreasonable to say that this shortcoming makes Stalin "pro-capitalist" as it is to say that Trotsky's own (many and varied) shortcomings of methodology make him "pro-fascist."

Stalin had more serious shortcomings. He took some revisionist positions too. He declared the end of class struggle in the USSR and indirectly supported the revisionist dissolution of the communist armed struggles in India. He also didn't oppose the line of participation in imperialist wars instead of defeatism in the colonies. All of these positions helped capitalists to take over the USSR as well as defeat the communist movements in colonial countries.

[Geiseric]

Ismail, stalin originated the "national stamp" with socialism in one country, and his great russian cheuvanism towards minorities, especially in southern russia. He dissolved comintern and formed cominform, which was more or less as he said verbatum, because he thought comintern should of been used "for the purpose of foreign policy."

[ind_com]

Well yeah, so was Mao. Then Stalin died and Mao complained about how Stalin didn't trust him and how big bad dogmatic Stalin didn't trust the peasantry, didn't trust the CCP, etc. The point is that Mao, Deng, Liu Shaoqi, and others toed the line when it was impossible for them otherwise, and then when the coast was clear they made their rightists moves.

That is a more appropriate allegation for Hoxha, who took all the aid from China he could, and then changed his political line altogether as soon as the aids stopped. It is known that Mao and other Chinese communists disobeyed Stalin's and Comintern's line on the Chinese revolution again and again during the people's war. Furthermore, Stalin upheld Mao's line after completion of the new democratic revolution, as indicated in his conversations with Indian communists in which he pointed out to them the differences between tactical positions of the Indian and Chinese revolutions.

[Камо́ Зэд]

Stalin had more serious shortcomings. He took some revisionist positions too. He declared the end of class struggle in the USSR and indirectly supported the revisionist dissolution of the communist armed struggles in India. He also didn't oppose the line of participation in imperialist wars instead of defeatism in the colonies. All of these positions helped capitalists to take over the USSR as well as defeat the communist movements in colonial countries.

Regarding the bold part of the above quoted passage, Stalin actually articulated the aggravation of class struggle under socialism, and Khrushchev is really the one more known for declaring the end of class struggle and the "completion" of socialism in the U.S.S.R. As for the rest, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

[JoeySteel]

Ismail, stalin originated the "national stamp" with socialism in one country, and his great russian cheuvanism towards minorities, especially in southern russia. He dissolved comintern and formed cominform, which was more or less as he said verbatum, because he thought comintern should of been used "for the purpose of foreign policy."

You clearly misunderstand socialism in one country, but I am more curious what is the source for your quote at the end.

[Камо́ Зэд]

You clearly misunderstand socialism in one country, but I am more curious what is the source for your quote at the end.
It's also odd that a Russian chauvinist should come from Georgia, isn't it?

[ind_com]

Regarding the bold part of the above quoted passage, Stalin actually articulated the aggravation of class struggle under socialism, and Khrushchev is really the one more known for declaring the end of class struggle and the "completion" of socialism in the U.S.S.R.

Sorry, I should have framed my sentence better, which is probably the cause of confusion. Stalin declared the end of all exploiting classes in the USSR, which implied the end of class struggle. Below is an excerpt from his report to the Extraordinary Eighth Congress of Soviets of the U.S.S.R., 1936.

"The landlord class, as you know, had already been eliminated as a result of the victorious conclusion of the civil war. As for the other exploiting classes, they have shared the fate of the landlord class. The capitalist class in the sphere of industry has ceased to exist. The kulak class in the sphere of agriculture has ceased to exist. And the merchants and profiteers in the sphere of trade have ceased to exist. Thus all the exploiting classes have been eliminated."

In the next few paragraphs of the report, he acknowledged the existence of the proletariat, peasantry and intelligentsia. He stated the difference of these classes from their counterparts in capitalist countries, but failed to recognize that a bourgeoisie can arise from the latter two due to their basic class nature. More importantly, Stalin completely missed out the fact that the Soviet bureaucracy was becoming a new exploiting class that had the potential to overthrow socialism, which history has now shown to be true.


As for the rest, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Take India as a specific example. Did Stalin criticize the decision of the CPI to endorse the INC's (Indian National Congress) call for the Indian's participation in WW2? No, they let the Indian masses enter an imperialist war, fighting for imperialist interests, even though this would have been a golden opportunity to declare war against the British Raj and topple it while it was busy in Europe. After that period there were armed struggles launched by the provincial portions of the CPI. The biggest of them, the Telengana struggle, was halted by revisionists publicly using Stalin's name. Did Stalin criticize that? He didn't. He did not criticize the masterminds of this treacherous act even when he had long conversations with them a year later in the Soviet Union. These are some examples of the mistakes of Stalin.

[Geiseric]

It's also odd that a Russian chauvinist should come from Georgia, isn't it?

Dzherinsky had the same problem, if you read Lenin's thoughts on the subject circa 1923 you would know. Socialism in one country was the first step in establishing peaceful coexistance with capitalist governments.

[ind_com]

Dzherinsky had the same problem, if you read Lenin's thoughts on the subject circa 1923 you would know. Socialism in one country was the first step in establishing peaceful coexistance with capitalist governments.

Are you implying that Lenin took this first step? Because Lenin seems to have suggested Socialism In One Country long before Stalin.

[Ismail]

Socialism in one country was the first step in establishing peaceful coexistance with capitalist governments.Peaceful coexistence as a doctrine emerged under Lenin, as both revisionists and anti-revisionists pointed out. What wasn't Leninist was Khrushchev's "contributions" to it, and the proclamation that peaceful coexistence was the main aspect of Soviet foreign policy.

"Karl Radek made the Soviets' designs very clear in an interview published by the Manchester Guardian on 8 January 1920....

The Russians desired peace. In that case, the interviewer asked, what did he have to say about the Soviet threat in India through continued propaganda? Radek answered:

'The Russian government conducts no such propaganda. On the contrary, it is prepared to give to any country that establishes peaceful relations all conceivable guarantees. Of course, the march of ideas cannot be arrested, but we are ready to give guarantees that we shall use neither money nor agents, direct or indirect, for the conduct of propaganda in India as elsewhere in the British empire. We have too great [a] need for peace with England to haggle.'

Radek expressed himself quite openly, going so far as to maintain that:

'British imperialism is not merely a capitalist intrigue, but is rooted in the psychology of the masses. The British domination of India and Ireland is popular. If we desire the British masses to become socialist, we cannot do anything from outside. Salvation must come to the English proletarians and oppressed people of the empire from their own exertions. It is their own affair, not that of the Soviet government. We can only offer our sympathy; anything further would be forbidden towards a country with which we are at peace.'

At this point it was logical for the interviewer to ask if Soviet Russia really did intend to 'settle down amid a non-socialist world as one state among others.' This was Radek's reply:

'Why not? It is the standpoint of the Russian government that normal and good relations are just as possible between socialist and capitalist states as they have been between capitalist and feudal states. For example, imperialist England lived on quite good terms with czarist feudal Russia in the days of serfdom. I, personally, am convinced that Communism can only be saved through good relations with the capitalist states. All the capitalist states are moving towards socialism along their own roads... in each of these countries the battle will be won from within in the growing struggle between the peoples and governments. Revolutions never originate in foreign affairs but are made at home.'

[....]

'Our historic task [said Radek] is to reconstruct Russia, and for that peace is essential... All the talk about our plans to disrupt and destroy the British empire is the sheerest nonsense and Northcliffe bluff.'"
(Piero Melograni. Lenin and the Myth of World Revolution: Ideology and Reasons of State, 1917-1920. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International. 1989. pp. 88-90.)

"Once back in Russia, Radek was named Secretary of the Comintern – Lenin's reward to him. In his first public address, on 28 January [1920], he repeated the ideas he had been championing for months:

'If our capitalist partners abstain from counter-revolutionary activities in Russia, the Soviet government, too, will abstain from promoting revolutionary activities in capitalist countries. . . . We think that now capitalist countries can live alongside a proletarian State. We hold that it is in the interests of both sides to make peace and establish commercial relations.'"
(Ibid. p. 70.)

A good read on the difference between peaceful coexistence as understood by Lenin and Stalin, and "peaceful coexistence" as advanced by Khrushchev and his successors: http://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/polemic/peaceful.htm

[Камо́ Зэд]

\Stalin declared the end of all exploiting classes in the USSR, which implied the end of class struggle.

. . .

. . . [Stalin] acknowledged the existence of the proletariat, peasantry and intelligentsia. He stated the difference of these classes from their counterparts in capitalist countries, but failed to recognize that a bourgeoisie can arise from the latter two due to their basic class nature.

It becomes clear that Stalin's use of the word "socialism" deviates significantly from how it is understood in Marx, Engels, and, to a lesser extent, Lenin. Where Marx and Engels would use the word and "communism" interchangeably, Lenin assigned "socialism" to the lower phase of communism, during which certain vestiges of the old class society persist. These vestiges, though, do not seem to include active struggle with the infiltration of non-proletarian elements into politics and production; they are represented, for the most part, by progressively obsolete political-administrative organs. On the other hand, Stalin's use of the word "socialism" strikes me as referring to the endeavor to cultivate the lower phase, rather than the phase itself. From this point of view, the aggravation of class struggle under "socialism" begins to make more sense as a way of articulating the struggle of a proletarian state against global capitalist-imperialist influence. I am willing to accept that the national exploiter classes of the Soviet Union were eliminated, but class struggle persisted between the Soviet Union and most of the rest of the world. Stalin may have misjudged the intelligentsia and the peasantry, as well, or otherwise overestimated whatever effect the revolutionary character of Soviet society may have had on the historically determined character of those classes.


More importantly, Stalin completely missed out the fact that the Soviet bureaucracy was becoming a new exploiting class that had the potential to overthrow socialism, which history has now shown to be true.

I don't buy, at all, that Stalin "completely missed out" on this. In fact, his famous "paranoia" and his reputation for being a hardliner demonstrate the exact opposite of this, doesn't it? He was not able to prevent the restoration of capitalism some time after his death, and Michael Parenti actually makes a good point about the work necessary to ensure the socialist endeavor outlasted Stalin's lifetime having been sidetracked by intensive industrialization and the Great Patriotic War, as well as the early pressures of the Cold War. It is as idealist to attribute the collapse of the socialist endeavor in the Soviet Union to the ideas of a single man as it is to attribute the successes of the endeavor to the same.


Take India as a specific example. Did Stalin criticize the decision of the CPI to endorse the INC's (Indian National Congress) call for the Indian's participation in WW2? No, they let the Indian masses enter an imperialist war, fighting for imperialist interests, even though this would have been a golden opportunity to declare war against the British Raj and topple it while it was busy in Europe. After that period there were armed struggles launched by the provincial portions of the CPI. The biggest of them, the Telengana struggle, was halted by revisionists publicly using Stalin's name. Did Stalin criticize that? He didn't. He did not criticize the masterminds of this treacherous act even when he had long conversations with them a year later in the Soviet Union. These are some examples of the mistakes of Stalin.

I actually don't know much about Stalin's involvement in India, although I'm not sure how wise it would've been to wage war with Great Britain, especially given that they would be allies during the Great Patriotic War against fascism, which was most certainly not an imperialist war like the first World War. The fight against the threat of fascist expansion doesn't strike me as the most opportune time to foment revolution against a government with whom one is allied in said fight. Further, I don't really see how major a mistake it is that Stalin didn't criticize something years after the fact.

[Камо́ Зэд]

Dzherinsky had the same problem, if you read Lenin's thoughts on the subject circa 1923 you would know. Socialism in one country was the first step in establishing peaceful coexistance with capitalist governments.

Elsewhere, Lenin's Collected Works were quoted extensively, and Lenin seems to have developed a lot of the theoretical basis for socialism in one country.

[Geiseric]

He did not, you are lying.

"I actually don't know much about Stalin's involvement in India, although I'm not sure how wise it would've been to wage war with Great Britain, especially given that they would be allies during the Great Patriotic War against fascism, which was most certainly not an imperialist war like the first World War. The fight against the threat of fascist expansion doesn't strike me as the most opportune time to foment revolution against a government with whom one is allied in said fight. Further, I don't really see how major a mistake it is that Stalin didn't criticize something years after the fact"

LOL the war between britain, the US, and France & the Axis wasn't an imperialist war? You Stalinists are seeming more and more like Social Patriots every time I see you. However I'd like it explained more, given your logic elsewhere in the thread, as to why the USSR was instrumental in building up the Nazi and Italian war machines pre WW2.

[Камо́ Зэд]

He did not, you are lying.

"I actually don't know much about Stalin's involvement in India, although I'm not sure how wise it would've been to wage war with Great Britain, especially given that they would be allies during the Great Patriotic War against fascism, which was most certainly not an imperialist war like the first World War. The fight against the threat of fascist expansion doesn't strike me as the most opportune time to foment revolution against a government with whom one is allied in said fight. Further, I don't really see how major a mistake it is that Stalin didn't criticize something years after the fact"

LOL the war between britain, the US, and France & the Axis wasn't an imperialist war? You Stalinists are seeming more and more like Social Patriots every time I see you. However I'd like it explained more, given your logic elsewhere in the thread, as to why the USSR was instrumental in building up the Nazi and Italian war machines pre WW2.

If it were any other subject, this kind of childishness wouldn't have any currency as a response to as a disagreement. It isn't just a general tone, either; you have specifically accused me of lying.

Note the following:


I know that there are, of course, sages who think they are very clever and even call themselves Socialists, who assert that power should not have been seized until the revolution had broken out in all countries. They do not suspect that by speaking in this way they are deserting the revolution and going over to the side of the bourgeoisie. To wait until the toiling classes bring about a revolution on an international scale means that everybody should stand stock-still in expectation. That is nonsense.


Complete and final victory on a world scale cannot be achieved in Russia alone; it can be achieved only when the proletariat is victorious in at least all the advanced countries, or, at all events, in some of the largest of the advanced countries. Only then shall we be able to say with absolute confidence that the cause of the proletariat has triumphed, that our first objective—the overthrow of capitalism—has been achieved.

We have achieved this objective in one country, and this confronts us with a second task. Since Soviet power has been established, since the bourgeoisie has been overthrown in one country, the second task is to wage the struggle on a world scale, on a different plane, the struggle of the proletarian state surrounded by capitalist states.


This situation is an entirely novel and difficult one.


On the other hand, since the rule of the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, the main task is to organise the development of the country.


. . . [W]hen we are told that the victory of socialism is possible only on a world scale, we regard this merely as an attempt, a particularly hopeless attempt, on the part of the bourgeoisie and its voluntary and involuntary supporters to distort the irrefutable truth. The ‘final’ victory of socialism in a single country is of course impossible.


A United States of the World (not of Europe alone) is the state form of the unification and freedom of nations which we associate with socialism—about the total disappearance of the state, including the democratic. As a separate slogan, however, the slogan of a United States of the World would hardly be a correct one, first, because it merges with socialism; second, because it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others.


Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country, taken singly. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and organized its own socialist production, would stand up against the rest of the world, the capitalist world, attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries … A free union of nations in socialism is impossible without a more or less prolonged and stubborn struggle by the socialist republics against the backward states.


The capitalists, the bourgeoisie, can at best put off the victory of socialism in one country or another at the cost of slaughtering further hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants. But they cannot save capitalism . . .


The development of capitalism proceeds extremely unevenly in the various countries. It cannot be otherwise under the commodity production system. From this, it follows irrefutably that Socialism cannot achieve victory simultaneously in all countries. It will achieve victory first in one or several countries, while the others will remain bourgeois or pre-bourgeois for some time.

Any positive position requires positive evidence. You have yet to demonstrate that World War II was imperialist in character. Further, you have yet to demonstrate that the Soviet Union was "instrumental" in the development of Fascist-Nazi aggression.

[Geiseric]

We've been over this a million times so i'll be brief. Victory of Socialism doesn't mean socialism being achieved, it means the seizure of power by workers. Those quotes make a million times more sense if you look at it in the context in 1918, when he realized the german workers would seize power at a later point. That doesn't mean he supports perminant socialism in one country, on the contrary, he's saying that Russians could seize power at first, jumpstarting world revolutions, which it did. Why would he talk about Socialism in One Country in 1918 though, a year before he founded Comintern, and 8 years before it's even considered as legit by Stalin?

And they were instrumental because they traded millions of tons of Raw Materials after the molotov ribbentrop pact to Nazi Germany, while they shared a border. Military genius Stalin, lending his advice to those like Zhukov, who all thought it was a bad idea. In fact many red army generals suggested a pre-emptive strike, which IN RETROSPECT would of been a good idea. I mean did he honestly think that Germany was eventually not going to invade, despite mass troop movements on the polish border several months leading up to Barbarosa?

[Камо́ Зэд]

We've been over this a million times so i'll be brief. Victory of Socialism doesn't mean socialism being achieved, it means the seizure of power by workers. Those quotes make a million times more sense if you look at it in the context in 1918, when he realized the german workers would seize power at a later point. That doesn't mean he supports perminant socialism in one country, on the contrary, he's saying that Russians could seize power at first, jumpstarting world revolutions, which it did. Why would he talk about Socialism in One Country in 1918 though, a year before he founded Comintern, and 8 years before it's even considered as legit by Stalin?

We have actually not been over this issue even once. Not one person, neither Lenin nor Stalin, suggested anything like "permanent" socialism in one country. Socialism in one country is the endeavor to empower workers where they have managed to seize political power. It means not "exporting" revolution, which becomes a facade for imperialism, but supporting world revolution through various efforts where that power is achieved. It means not giving up on the workers of one country simply because the revolution failed to break out almost simultaneously throughout the developed world.


And they were instrumental because they traded millions of tons of Raw Materials after the molotov ribbentrop pact to Nazi Germany, while they shared a border. Military genius Stalin, lending his advice to those like Zhukov, who all thought it was a bad idea. In fact many red army generals suggested a pre-emptive strike, which IN RETROSPECT would of been a good idea. I mean did he honestly think that Germany was eventually not going to invade, despite mass troop movements on the polish border several months leading up to Barbarosa?

A preemptive strike on Germany at the time would have brought the German war machine upon the Soviet Union while it was engaged with Japan in Mongolia. Because of the non-aggression pact, the Soviet Union was the only primary combatant of the war that did not fight on two fronts simultaneously. Over twenty-five million Soviets were killed when the Union was giving Germany its undivided attention. Consider, also, that the country had only recently undergone the process of intensive industrialization, and the Red Army was affected by the purges. A preemptive strike would have been suicidal.

[Geiseric]

Sorry by "we," I meant me & anti stalinists vs. Stalinists. However that's what SioC turned out to be, regardless of any idealist dissection of what they thought would happen. Every major (not albania) revolutionary party was at some point subordinate to a bourgeois or coalition under Stalinist Comintern, meaning obviously, no revolution, or else the "coalition against fascism," (which is capitalism) would fall apart. And we want to keep the liberals in power because of how nice they are to communists.

"A preemptive strike on Germany at the time would have brought the German war machine upon the Soviet Union while it was engaged with Japan in Mongolia. Because of the non-aggression pact, the Soviet Union was the only primary combatant of the war that did not fight on two fronts simultaneously. Over twenty-five million Soviets were killed when the Union was giving Germany its undivided attention. Consider, also, that the country had only recently undergone the process of intensive industrialization, and the Red Army was affected by the purges. A preemptive strike would have been suicidal."

1st off, the red army was purged of those who would of supported a pre-emptive strike against the fascists. Also a strike going through southern poland, going around the german lines, according to Zhukov and other Red Army generals, would of completely bypassed the mobilizing german army which is assembling for attack, not defense, on the polish border, resulting in basically surrounding them. 25 million soviets were killed with the weapons that the USSR allowed the fascists to build with soviet raw materials, in concentration camps. As well as several million ethiopians, killed by the Italian fleet and army fueled by the Baku oil fields.

The industrialization was more or less finished by 1942 as well, soviet production far surpassed any capitalist country. The red army was the largest army in the world, and with initiative, could of annihalated the german army, which was largely not motorized. The red air force could of mobilized at least given the reports of german troop movements, and scout planes going over the sites to be invaded by the wermacht.

Secondly, Japan never invaded the USSR, they were stuck in northern china, and in the pacific against the US. What would they of wanted in the USSR that they couldn't of gotten from china? This is semantics anyways, but the japanese invasion never happened and couldn't of happened given the weak japanese economy. All of the intel pointed at a german invasion, but it was ignored, and anybody who believed it was shut out of the decision making process.

[Камо́ Зэд]

Sorry by "we," I meant me & anti stalinists vs. Stalinists. However that's what SioC turned out to be, regardless of any idealist dissection of what they thought would happen. Every major (not albania) revolutionary party was at some point subordinate to a bourgeois or coalition under Stalinist Comintern, meaning obviously, no revolution, or else the "coalition against fascism," (which is capitalism) would fall apart. And we want to keep the liberals in power because of how nice they are to communists.

Absolutely none of that makes any sense, comrade. It doesn't follow that cooperating with capitalist-imperialist countries to combat the aggression of real fascism is itself capitalism. It doesn't follow that Stalin of all people would want to keep social liberals in power in other countries; there would be nothing to be gained by that. You can call your opposition "idealist" all you like, but your analysis is notably far removed from the material reality of the immediate threat of fascism. What exactly would you have had Stalin do differently? Attack Great Britain while engaged with Germany? If Stalin had acted more appropriately, according to you, how would World War II have played out?


1st off, the red army was purged of those who would of supported a pre-emptive strike against the fascists.Comrade, you're doing yourself no favors by making things up on the spot. In any case, what you are suggesting is that Red Army officers were purged because they had suggested that they launch a strike on Germany while engaged with the Empire of Japan. If anything, this adventurism would have made them quite suitable candidates for a purge.


Also a strike going through southern poland, going around the german lines, according to Zhukov and other Red Army generals, would of completely bypassed the mobilizing german army which is assembling for attack, not defense, on the polish border, resulting in basically surrounding them.I would be willing to believe that something like that may have been on the table at some point, but what isn't certainly established is why this method was not followed. Was it ignored due to Stalin wanting to collaborate with fascists? Or was it a potentially devastating risk? As for whether it was submitted for Stalin's consideration, I doubt it ever was; Stalin listened to his generals (Roberts, Geoffrey. Stalin's Wars; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006.)


The industrialization was more or less finished by 1942 as well, soviet production far surpassed any capitalist country.On what grounds can you assert that the productive capacity of the Soviet Union surpassed that of the United States?


The red army was the largest army in the world, and with initiative, could of annihalated the german army, which was largely not motorized. The red air force could of mobilized at least given the reports of german troop movements, and scout planes going over the sites to be invaded by the wermacht.These are bold assertions to make, especially for one looking at a war from the vantage point of history. You're going to have to seriously back these up too.


Secondly, Japan never invaded the USSR, they were stuck in northern china, and in the pacific against the US. What would they of wanted in the USSR that they couldn't of gotten from china? This is semantics anyways, but the japanese invasion never happened and couldn't of happened given the weak japanese economy. All of the intel pointed at a german invasion, but it was ignored, and anybody who believed it was shut out of the decision making process.None of this is adding up, and it should be obvious why. According to your assertions, Stalin at first wanted to collaborate with Nazis, then to actively ignore opportunities to strike a decisive blow against them preemptively, then to await a Nazi invasion, and then to defeat the Nazis. That is a nonsensical analysis.

[Geiseric]

"None of this is adding up, and it should be obvious why. According to your assertions, Stalin at first wanted to collaborate with Nazis, then to actively ignore opportunities to strike a decisive blow against them preemptively, then to await a Nazi invasion, and then to defeat the Nazis. That is a nonsensical analysis."

Well the first three parts are spot on. Stalin thought for some reason the Nazis would invade a year or two after they actually did, despite reports of mass troop movements on the polish border, which wasn't fortified at all on the russian side. If you ask any military historians they'll agree with me. I mean you can't argue against this since it actually happened.

Also I don't need a source when I'm saying that "The red army was the largest army in the world." That's more or less common knowlege. The number of tanks, airplanes, artillery, and equipment in general was always higher than the Nazis. Stalin knew this but wanted to wait and see if the Nazis attacked the former Entente first.

As for japan, they didn't invade the USSR during WW2, at all, so I don't know what your point is. Also I shouldn't have to explain why a planned economy is more efficient than a privatized war economy, right?

[Камо́ Зэд]

Well the first three parts are spot on. Stalin thought for some reason the Nazis would invade a year or two after they actually did, despite reports of mass troop movements on the polish border, which wasn't fortified at all on the russian side. If you ask any military historians they'll agree with me. I mean you can't argue against this since it actually happened.

I'm not sure to what argument you're responding. Remember that your assertion was that Stalin elected to ignore opportunities to strike a decisive blow to the Nazis. This is very different from Stalin's estimate on the Nazi invasion simply being wrong. Stalin listened to his generals, who knew a thing or two about how to win a war.


Also I don't need a source when I'm saying that "The red army was the largest army in the world." That's more or less common knowlege. The number of tanks, airplanes, artillery, and equipment in general was always higher than the Nazis. Stalin knew this but wanted to wait and see if the Nazis attacked the former Entente first.

That's swell, comrade, but I never asked for you to cite a source for that. I was asking for citation regarding the claim that the Soviet Union's total productive capacity surpassed that of the United States at that time.


As for japan, they didn't invade the USSR during WW2, at all, so I don't know what your point is. Also I shouldn't have to explain why a planned economy is more efficient than a privatized war economy, right?

No, comrade, but you're going to need to back up and demonstrate that the efficiency of the U.S.S.R.'s planned economy did, indeed, overtake the United States in terms of productive capacity during World War II. It may be that you're absolutely right, but we're never going to know that without some kind of citation.

[Geiseric]

Stalin obviously didn't listen to his generals, or the troops and spies who warned him about troop movements, not days or weeks, but months ahead of the Nazi invasion. If he did, he would of done something about it, and not just stood around with his thumb up his butt, sending Molotov to berlin to negotiate how to carve up eastern europe with Hitler.

And don't change the subject to the U.S, we're not talking about that. We're talking about the eastern front. The U.S.S.R. had much better productive capabilities than the Nazis, who were bogged down by capitalists trying to profiteer from the effort. Besides, the U.S. couldn't send anywhere near as many soldiers to europe as the red army. They really didn't do shit during World War two, but I don't see why that's relevant to this conversation.

[Ismail]

Stalin obviously didn't listen to his generals, or the troops and spies who warned him about troop movements, not days or weeks, but months ahead of the Nazi invasion. If he did, he would of done something about it, and not just stood around with his thumb up his butt, sending Molotov to berlin to negotiate how to carve up eastern europe with Hitler.Actually, as Geoffrey Roberts notes in Stalin's Wars, he outright told one source to go "fuck his mother," since he considered said source a Nazi German agent. As Molotov recalls in his memoirs, the Soviets did their best to not appear as aggressors. Any Soviet mobilization not based on an absolute certainty that the Nazis were invading (and the Soviets thought the Nazis would invade a year later than they did) would be used as a pretext by Hitler to save Europe from a "Bolshevik invasion."

Also the invasion was in 1941, the "carving up" was in 1939 and 1940. Everyone knew that the Nazis would invade the USSR, the question was one of when.

[Камо́ Зэд]

Stalin obviously didn't listen to his generals, or the troops and spies who warned him about troop movements, not days or weeks, but months ahead of the Nazi invasion. If he did, he would of done something about it, and not just stood around with his thumb up his butt, sending Molotov to berlin to negotiate how to carve up eastern europe with Hitler.

The problem with the above is that I actually provided citation for my assertion originally, and the response I'm receiving for it amounts to "nuh-uh." Comrade Ismail makes a good point about why it would be, once again, completely suicidal for the Soviet Union to attack Germany preemptively.


And don't change the subject to the U.S, we're not talking about that.

In fact, we were talking about the United States, because you were the one who asserted that the Soviet Union had exceeded the total productive capacity of that country. This was your claim. You are solely responsible for the subject's introduction into this conversation.


We're talking about the eastern front. The U.S.S.R. had much better productive capabilities than the Nazis, who were bogged down by capitalists trying to profiteer from the effort. Besides, the U.S. couldn't send anywhere near as many soldiers to europe as the red army. They really didn't do shit during World War two, but I don't see why that's relevant to this conversation.

More efficient production does not make the kind of adventurist scenario you're proposing even remotely intelligent, though. There's much more to war than comparing firepower. See Comrade Ismail's post.

[fug]

It's also odd that a Russian chauvinist should come from Georgia, isn't it?
Actually Lenin once said that "Russians by adoption" are worse than Russians when they become chauvinist. I think he was aiming at Stalin.

"Lenin's anger about such practices climaxed during the notorious Georgian affair of 1922, when he denounced Dzerzhinskii, Stalin, and Ordzhonikidze as Great Russian chauvinists (russified natives, he maintained, were often the worst chauvinists). Such Bolshevik chauvinism inspired Lenin to coin the term rusotiapstvo (mindless Russian chauvinism), which then entered the Bolshevik lexicon and became an invaluable weapon in the national republics' rhetorical arsenals."

A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin by Ronald Grigor Suny

[Камо́ Зэд]

Actually Lenin once said that "Russians by adoption" are worse than Russians when they become chauvinist. I think he was aiming at Stalin.

"Lenin's anger about such practices climaxed during the notorious Georgian affair of 1922, when he denounced Dzerzhinskii, Stalin, and Ordzhonikidze as Great Russian chauvinists (russified natives, he maintained, were often the worst chauvinists). Such Bolshevik chauvinism inspired Lenin to coin the term rusotiapstvo (mindless Russian chauvinism), which then entered the Bolshevik lexicon and became an invaluable weapon in the national republics' rhetorical arsenals."

A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin by Ronald Grigor Suny

This is a tricky bit of Soviet history. Lenin had, up until the end of December 1922, initiated the concept of the Transcaucasian Federation, denounced the "Georgian deviators," and defended Ordzhonikidze. It was right when he dictated the "Testament" to Maria Volodicheva (this being the year Lenin had undergone surgery to remove a bullet and suffered several strokes to the point of seeing his body paralyzed and his speech severely impaired) that his opinions on the matter were suddenly reversed. This is notably true, also, of Lenin's complete reversal of opinion with regards to Stalin and Trotsky. This may have had something to do not only with Lenin's illness, but also with his isolation. It isn't any secret his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya was supportive of the Trotsky-Zinoviev opposition and even signed its manifesto, the Declaration of the Thirteen. It was also true that, at the time of Lenin's illness, Krupskaya was his sole contact with the outside world. Stalin rebuked Krupskaya on December 22, 1922 for feeding Lenin selective "information," and she wrote a letter of complaint to Kamenev:


"Stalin subjected me to a storm of the coarsest abuse yesterday about a brief note that Lenin dictated to me. . I know better than all the doctors what can and what cannot be said to Ilyich, for I know what disturbs him and what doesn't. And in any case I know better than Stalin. I have no doubt as to the unanimous decision of the Control Commission with which Stalin takes it upon himself to threaten me, but I have neither the time nor the energy to lose in such a stupid farce.

Afterwards, Lenin became very upset with Stalin said that he would break his friendship with Stalin off should he refuse to apologize. Lenin's sister, Maria Ulyanova, wrote to the Presidium of the 1926 Joint Plenum of the C.C. and C.C.C., noting that Stalin did indeed offer to apologize. Of interesting note is that, after Krupskaya sent the "Testament" to Kamenev, it was passed to Stalin, as General Secretary. He passed the documents on May 19 to the steering committee for the 13th Congress, due to begin in four days. At the Congress, which voted 30-10 not to publish the "Testament," Stalin offered his resignation as General Secretary in his speech to the Joint Plenum. At the first plenum of the C.C. after the 14th Congress, Stalin again offered his resignation. A year later, he put in yet another request to be released from his duties as General Secretary.

[ind_com]

It becomes clear that Stalin's use of the word "socialism" deviates significantly from how it is understood in Marx, Engels, and, to a lesser extent, Lenin. Where Marx and Engels would use the word and "communism" interchangeably, Lenin assigned "socialism" to the lower phase of communism, during which certain vestiges of the old class society persist. These vestiges, though, do not seem to include active struggle with the infiltration of non-proletarian elements into politics and production; they are represented, for the most part, by progressively obsolete political-administrative organs. On the other hand, Stalin's use of the word "socialism" strikes me as referring to the endeavor to cultivate the lower phase, rather than the phase itself. From this point of view, the aggravation of class struggle under "socialism" begins to make more sense as a way of articulating the struggle of a proletarian state against global capitalist-imperialist influence. I am willing to accept that the national exploiter classes of the Soviet Union were eliminated, but class struggle persisted between the Soviet Union and most of the rest of the world. Stalin may have misjudged the intelligentsia and the peasantry, as well, or otherwise overestimated whatever effect the revolutionary character of Soviet society may have had on the historically determined character of those classes.


I don't buy, at all, that Stalin "completely missed out" on this. In fact, his famous "paranoia" and his reputation for being a hardliner demonstrate the exact opposite of this, doesn't it? He was not able to prevent the restoration of capitalism some time after his death, and Michael Parenti actually makes a good point about the work necessary to ensure the socialist endeavor outlasted Stalin's lifetime having been sidetracked by intensive industrialization and the Great Patriotic War, as well as the early pressures of the Cold War. It is as idealist to attribute the collapse of the socialist endeavor in the Soviet Union to the ideas of a single man as it is to attribute the successes of the endeavor to the same.


In my opinion, Stalin did not deviate at all from Lenin's description of socialism. I am not claiming that Stalin was anti-Leninist in any way. The problem is, Lenin himself saw only a few years of socialism in the USSR and that made his theories insufficient to maintain and consolidate socialism. Hence, internal class struggle in a socialist society is absent from Leninism. The traitors that had to be eliminated by purges were not just a few evil individuals, they were the representatives of the new bourgeoisie emerging in the Soviet Union. Though Stalin had been leading proletarian class struggle itself, he was doing so in a mechanical manner. He did little to empower the masses, so that after his murder, things deteriorated to a mere power struggle between various revisionist groups.


I actually don't know much about Stalin's involvement in India, although I'm not sure how wise it would've been to wage war with Great Britain, especially given that they would be allies during the Great Patriotic War against fascism, which was most certainly not an imperialist war like the first World War. The fight against the threat of fascist expansion doesn't strike me as the most opportune time to foment revolution against a government with whom one is allied in said fight. Further, I don't really see how major a mistake it is that Stalin didn't criticize something years after the fact.

You mean the blood of the millions of Indians regularly slaughtered by British imperialism was somehow cheaper than that of Russians that would die in war? Or would it be very appropriate for countless communists to religiously subordinate themselves to the leadership of a distant socialist land and abandon their own struggles in dreams of deliverance from above?

[Камо́ Зэд]

In my opinion, Stalin did not deviate at all from Lenin's description of socialism. I am not claiming that Stalin was anti-Leninist in any way. The problem is, Lenin himself saw only a few years of socialism in the USSR and that made his theories insufficient to maintain and consolidate socialism. Hence, internal class struggle in a socialist society is absent from Leninism. The traitors that had to be eliminated by purges were not just a few evil individuals, they were the representatives of the new bourgeoisie emerging in the Soviet Union. Though Stalin had been leading proletarian class struggle itself, he was doing so in a mechanical manner. He did little to empower the masses, so that after his murder, things deteriorated to a mere power struggle between various revisionist groups.

I think it's a mistake to say that a new class developed rather than that extant non-proletarian elements penetrated the politics of the Party. This penetration could not be struggled against effectively in large part due to the administrative character of industrialization and the military character of war. To say that Stalin did "little" to empower the masses is false, although this isn't to say the extent to which the proletariat were empowered was sufficient to struggle effectively against the infiltration of non-proletarian elements into the politics of the Party.


You mean the blood of the millions of Indians regularly slaughtered by British imperialism was somehow cheaper than that of Russians that would die in war? Or would it be very appropriate for countless communists to religiously subordinate themselves to the leadership of a distant socialist land and abandon their own struggles in dreams of deliverance from above?

Listen, save the impassioned poetry for when what you're saying makes any sense in context. Exactly how practical is it to hamstring an ally in a time of war? If the Soviet Union had actively fomented revolution in that country, it would leave both Great Britain and India vulnerable to fascism. With fascism's record of exterminating groups of people on an industrial scale, I'd say the right choice was made.

[ind_com]

I think it's a mistake to say that a new class developed rather than that extant non-proletarian elements penetrated the politics of the Party. This penetration could not be struggled against effectively in large part due to the administrative character of industrialization and the military character of war.

The penetration of "non-proletarian" elements into party and state machinery to such an extent that state-capitalism is set against the proletariat. That is exactly what the development of a new class in a socialist society is.


To say that Stalin did "little" to empower the masses is false, although this isn't to say the extent to which the proletariat were empowered was sufficient to struggle effectively against the infiltration of non-proletarian elements into the politics of the Party.

In what ways were the masses empowered? Exactly what role did the masses play in exposing the reactionaries?




Listen, save the impassioned poetry for when what you're saying makes any sense in context.

If the mention of murder of millions of workers seems like impassioned poetry to you, then you are surely in a sorry state.


Exactly how practical is it to hamstring an ally in a time of war?

It is quite practical if that ally is still your class-enemy, and just as ferocious as your war-enemy towards the working classes.


If the Soviet Union had actively fomented revolution in that country, it would leave both Great Britain and India vulnerable to fascism.

In essence this amounts to subordinating revolutions in other countries for the sake of a place that is viewed as more precious globally. Seems like a twisted version of Trotsky's permanent revolution.


With fascism's record of exterminating groups of people on an industrial scale, I'd say the right choice was made. These numbers were matched by the mass murders made by other imperialist powers as well. So until you're outright Eurocentric, you shouldn't differentiate between fascists and other capitalists as far as mass-exterminations are concerned.

[Камо́ Зэд]

The penetration of "non-proletarian" elements into party and state machinery to such an extent that state-capitalism is set against the proletariat. That is exactly what the development of a new class in a socialist society is.

But it isn't a "new" class at all. What I was saying that it was a bourgeoisie, not a new "species," because property relations reverted to capitalism; they didn't create a new species of ownership.


In what ways were the masses empowered? Exactly what role did the masses play in exposing the reactionaries?

There's collectivization, industrialization, and the pursuit of socialism to consider, to be sure, but Stalin endeavored to democratize the Soviet Union from the 1930's on. Grover Furr outlines these endeavors in Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform. One of those endeavors includes the 1936 draft of the new Soviet Constitution that called for secret ballots, uncontested elections, and the allowance of candidates not from the Bolshevik Party to run for office.



It is quite practical if that ally is still your class-enemy, and just as ferocious as your war-enemy towards the working classes.

So your method would have been to attack Germany and Great Britain at the same time? Not every attempt at fomenting revolution results in socialism.


These numbers were matched by the mass murders made by other imperialist powers as well. So until you're outright Eurocentric, you shouldn't differentiate between fascists and other capitalists as far as mass-exterminations are concerned.

To get this straight, you're saying that if the British were to have killed at least as many Indians as German and Italian fascists would have, that means the only reasonable course of action is to leave both Great Britain and India open to fascist invasion.

[ind_com]

But it isn't a "new" class at all. What I was saying that it was a bourgeoisie, not a new "species," because property relations reverted to capitalism; they didn't create a new species of ownership.

It was a new class in the sense that it emerged from the party and state apparatus of a socialist country, and it grew into a class even when the USSR was still socialist. The overthrowal of socialism happened only when this class became more powerful than the working class and its vanguards.



There's collectivization, industrialization, and the pursuit of socialism to consider, to be sure, but Stalin endeavored to democratize the Soviet Union from the 1930's on. Grover Furr outlines these endeavors in Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform. One of those endeavors includes the 1936 draft of the new Soviet Constitution that called for secret ballots, uncontested elections, and the allowance of candidates not from the Bolshevik Party to run for office.

Again, this is not what is in question. The USSR was undoubtedly the most democratic country of its times, far ahead of even the most advanced capitalist countries. But did the masses play an active role in exposing reactionaries? Or was it just the "good part" of the government doing all that?



So your method would have been to attack Germany and Great Britain at the same time? Not every attempt at fomenting revolution results in socialism.

To get this straight, you're saying that if the British were to have killed at least as many Indians as German and Italian fascists would have, that means the only reasonable course of action is to leave both Great Britain and India open to fascist invasion.

The correct position in this situation would be a tactical alliance with British imperialism at the same time extending all support to class struggle inside its empire. Agreeing not to deploy Soviet forces to attack British forces, or even attacking German forces together are permitted in such alliances. Upholding an anti-British revolutionary line in the colonies in such a situation does not equate to leaving the colonies open to fascist invasion.

[Solidarity]

How do the Stalinist feel about forcing homosexuals into the gulag labour camps for being gay?

[Ismail]

How do the Stalinist feel about forcing homosexuals into the gulag labour camps for being gay?Homosexuality was already being persecuted in Central Asia during the 20's and obviously homophobia is nothing new to communists (originating with Marx and Engels.) In the 30's homosexuality also had the misfortune of being identified with Nazism, not just by "Stalinists" but by socialists in general. The anarchists in Spain had no shortage of homophobes either. Trotsky, who spoke out against "Stalinist" social policies, was completely silent on the issue of homosexuality. George Orwell, hero to Trots everywhere, was not only homophobic but ranted against feminism as well.

In short, it was a sign of the times. Soviet physicians and doctors had been arguing that homosexuality was an "illness" (if not worse, e.g. pedophilia) as early as the revolution itself. Such was the standard line on homosexuality in Europe at the time. In poorer regions homosexuality was also associated with patriarchy.

If it makes you sleep better at night though, homosexuality was decriminalized in East Germany (the most "Westernized" country in the Eastern Bloc, culturally) in 1968. Cuba, whose policies on gays were less than friendly, has in recent years taken a noticeably more tolerant attitude. But the fact is that the communist movement in general was more or less uniformly homophobic into the 70's, and even then most Western Trot parties took a line of "you can be gay, just pretend to be straight in public."

[Камо́ Зэд]

It was a new class in the sense that it emerged from the party and state apparatus of a socialist country, and it grew into a class even when the USSR was still socialist. The overthrowal [sic] of socialism happened only when this class became more powerful than the working class and its vanguards.

I thought you were saying something else entirely. Thanks for clearing it up; I don't disagree.


Again, this is not what is in question. The USSR was undoubtedly the most democratic country of its times, far ahead of even the most advanced capitalist countries. But did the masses play an active role in exposing reactionaries? Or was it just the "good part" of the government doing all that?

I think it would be a mistake to separate the machinations of a working class government from the class itself.


The correct position in this situation would be a tactical alliance with British imperialism at the same time extending all support to class struggle inside its empire. Agreeing not to deploy Soviet forces to attack British forces, or even attacking German forces together are permitted in such alliances. Upholding an anti-British revolutionary line in the colonies in such a situation does not equate to leaving the colonies open to fascist invasion.

See, this is what I really don't buy. A revolutionary overthrow and reorganization of government is pretty tricky business. There's also the fact that the British and the Soviets were allies, in that they had mutually agreed to help one another militarily and politically. The Soviets stood to benefit as much from the alliance as did the British. And India was a part of the British Empire at the time. You don't send troops to fight the government of the entity with whom you're allied in a time of war.

[Geiseric]

Homosexuality was already being persecuted in Central Asia during the 20's and obviously homophobia is nothing new to communists (originating with Marx and Engels.) In the 30's homosexuality also had the misfortune of being identified with Nazism, not just by "Stalinists" but by socialists in general. The anarchists in Spain had no shortage of homophobes either. Trotsky, who spoke out against "Stalinist" social policies, was completely silent on the issue of homosexuality. George Orwell, hero to Trots everywhere, was not only homophobic but ranted against feminism as well.

In short, it was a sign of the times. Soviet physicians and doctors had been arguing that homosexuality was an "illness" (if not worse, e.g. pedophilia) as early as the revolution itself. Such was the standard line on homosexuality in Europe at the time. In poorer regions homosexuality was also associated with patriarchy.

If it makes you sleep better at night though, homosexuality was decriminalized in East Germany (the most "Westernized" country in the Eastern Bloc, culturally) in 1968. Cuba, whose policies on gays were less than friendly, has in recent years taken a noticeably more tolerant attitude. But the fact is that the communist movement in general was more or less uniformly homophobic into the 70's, and even then most Western Trot parties took a line of "you can be gay, just pretend to be straight in public."

Wow I know for sure that there were gay bolsheviks. Why can't you just say, "Yeah that was fucked up."?

[Камо́ Зэд]

Wow I know for sure that there were gay bolsheviks. Why can't you just say, "Yeah that was fucked up."?

Yeah, that was fucked up.

[Ismail]

Wow I know for sure that there were gay bolsheviks. Why can't you just say, "Yeah that was fucked up."?Yeah, there was Chicherin for instance, who had been in sanitoriums for health reasons. At one point during negotiations in 1922, Chicherin was actually deemed mentally unwell by Lenin (citing Chicherin's "bad nerves" IIRC), who suggested he return to one for a period. Finally in 1925 and onwards he regularly went to Weimar-era Germany in a continuous effort to improve his health in these institutions.

The reason he couldn't find much success was because, as his cousin later noted, much of the "bad health" was actually euphemisms for homosexuality.

[Solidarity]

Trotsky, who spoke out against "Stalinist" social policies, was completely silent on the issue of homosexuality.

Was he now? I must have missed the part when the Soviet Union, under Lenin and Trotsky, took anti-sodomy laws off the books back in 1919.:rolleyes:

[Камо́ Зэд]

Was he now? I must have missed the part when the Soviet Union, under Lenin and Trotsky, took anti-sodomy laws off the books back in 1919.:rolleyes:

Yeah, while "under" Trotsky.

[Art Vandelay]

Yeah, while "under" Trotsky.

You know what he meant, don't nitpick over semantics.

[Камо́ Зэд]

You know what he meant, don't nitpick over semantics.

What he meant was that Trotsky was at all responsible for this repeal. He wasn't. "Lenin and Trotsky" were not somehow co-leaders of the Soviet Union at any point.

[Solidarity]

Yeah, while "under" Trotsky.

:glare:

Yeah ya'know. When there were no purges......

[Камо́ Зэд]

:glare:

Yeah ya'know. When there were no purges......

So, while Trotsky was around, no one ever got kicked out of the Party?

[Solidarity]

So, while Trotsky was around, no one ever got kicked out of the Party?
I'm not saying that. But they weren't killed out of the party.



What he meant was that Trotsky was at all responsible for this repeal. He wasn't. "Lenin and Trotsky" were not somehow co-leaders of the Soviet Union at any point.
Hmmmmmm.
They both lead the Russian Revolution together. Considering that fact, Trotsky would have an important say in Soviet Government regulations and laws.

[Art Vandelay]

What he meant was that Trotsky was at all responsible for this repeal. He wasn't. "Lenin and Trotsky" were not somehow co-leaders of the Soviet Union at any point.

You can read his mind can you? From what I saw, his post simply correctly concluded that when Trotsky and Lenin were in highly powerful positions in the USSR, homosexuality laws were lifted;when Stalin was at the height of his power, they were re-implemented. Now, obviously, we know that the USSR wasn't a place where one or two people had supreme decision making power, but don't attempt to distract away from the substance of what he was saying, by nitpicking over his wording.

[Art Vandelay]

So, while Trotsky was around, no one ever got kicked out of the Party?

Lenin and Trotsky were in favor of purges, the same way Marx and Engels were, however they simply kicked people out of the party, they didn't set up show trials and have communists executed.

[Камо́ Зэд]

I'm not saying that. But they weren't killed out of the party.

To purge someone from the Party means to kick someone out of it. A lot of people who were purged under Stalin actually got to come back to the Party.


Hmmmmmm.
They both lead the Russian Revolution together. Considering that fact, Trotsky would have an important say in Soviet Government regulations

That's an interesting line of reasoning, but it doesn't really have any basis in fact. Trotsky led the Red Army, but if you've ever read any of my posts, you know that in the past I've quoted Lenin quite extensively as to why Lenin thought Trotsky was a total scumbag.

[Камо́ Зэд]

You can read his mind can you? From what I saw, his post simply correctly concluded that when Trotsky and Lenin were in highly powerful positions in the USSR, homosexuality laws were lifted;when Stalin was at the height of his power, they were re-implemented. Now, obviously, we know that the USSR wasn't a place where one or two people had supreme decision making power, but don't attempt to distract away from the substance of what he was saying, by nitpicking over his wording.

Believe it or not, you don't need psychic powers to understand what someone is trying to say through their writing. In fact, and I may be wrong here, but I think that's the entire point of the written word.

There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Trotsky had anything to do with the taking of sodomy laws off the books. It's not as though Stalin wasn't influential before he became General Secretary.

[Art Vandelay]

Believe it or not, you don't need psychic powers to understand what someone is trying to say through their writing. In fact, and I may be wrong here, but I think that's the entire point of the written word.

Someone is turning into much more of a smart ass then they were when they joined up.;)


There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Trotsky had anything to do with the taking of sodomy laws off the books. It's not as though Stalin wasn't influential before he became General Secretary.

There is however, also no evidence to suggest that he did anything to stop them from being "taken off of the books." On the contrary there is alot of evidence to suggest that Stalin, being general secretary and all, must have had a little something to do with bringing them back.

[Камо́ Зэд]

S
There is however, also no evidence to suggest that he did anything to stop them from being "taken off of the books." On the contrary there is alot of evidence to suggest that Stalin, being general secretary and all, must have had a little something to do with bringing them back.

You realize that absolutely none of this is the same as saying that Leon was at all responsible for the sodomy laws being taken off the books, right? That was the point.

[Solidarity]

To purge someone from the Party means to kick someone out of it. A lot of people who were purged under Stalin actually got to come back to the Party.
Not the dead ones. Haven't you ever heard of something called the great purge? Campaigns set out to kill former Revolutionaries in the Soviet Union orchestrated by the beloved Comrade Stalin.

but if you've ever read any of my posts, you know that in the past I've quoted Lenin quite extensively as to why Lenin thought Trotsky was a total scumbag.

I must of missed that part. Considering the Fact Lenin said Trotsky is considerably the most able man to take Lenin's position when he dies:


Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated an enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution. On the other hand, Comrade Trotsky, as was proved by his struggle against the Central Committee in connection with the question of the People’s Commissariat of Ways and Communications, is distinguished not only by his exceptional abilities – personally he is, to be sure, the most able man in the present Central Committee..

I think you have Lenin's discuss confused with someone else:

Postscript: Stalin is too rude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us Communists, becomes insupportable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore, I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority – namely, more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc.

All in Lenin's Testament.

And on the Homosexuality Laws.
Whether Stalin found Homo-Sexuality to be "Moral" or Not. There was no reason for them to be thrown in the cruel labor gulag camps.

[Art Vandelay]

You realize that absolutely none of this is the same as saying that Leon was at all responsible for the sodomy laws being taken off the books, right? That was the point.

And your simply attempting to distract away from the fact that Stalin helped to implement homophobic laws.

[Камо́ Зэд]

Not the dead ones. Haven't you ever heard of something called the great purge? Campaigns set out to kill former Revolutionaries in the Soviet Union orchestrated by the beloved Comrade Stalin.

Actually, it was orchestrated by several people including Yezhov, all of whom were executed by order of Stalin for their involvement in the judicial murder of the innocent.


I must of missed that part. Considering the Fact Lenin said Trotsky is considerably the most able man to take Lenin's position when he dies:

You must not have joined when I was explaining the Testament. See, the problems with it are as follows:



Lenin had suffered so many strokes that he was considered incompetent to do anything but lie in bed;
only his wife, who was a member of the opposition, had any contact with him besides his doctors; and
everything about the Testament contradicts absolutely everything Lenin had ever said about Trotsky in the past.