Let's search the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (in English) online

[Ismail]

It seems not many people know about the existence of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in online format. Well now you shall.

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/United+States+of+America.

This article, the United States of America. (note the dot, it's because the article is so large it cannot coexist with other encyclopedia articles on the USA), is just one of many taken from the 1970-1982 Great Soviet Encyclopedia editions.

Here's another: http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Great+Britain (scroll down a fair bit to get the Soviet encyclopedia entry.)

If the Soviet encyclopedia doesn't have an article, check to make sure. Scroll all the way down and look under "Full Browser," the articles with green squares next to them may be the Soviet encyclopedia titles. Also note that all of them will be under the green square (aka Encyclopedia.)

Since this was a comprehensive encyclopedia you can pretty much expect anything that existed as of 1982 to be in it, including unique stuff like various Marxist terms and figures.

Also, since the USSR took up its very own volume, you can find parts of it by searching terms like History, Economy, Foreign Policy, Constitution and Government, etc.

[HEAD ICE]

Bordiga:


In 1930 he was expelled from the party. After World War II he was a left-wing anticommunist publicist, but he failed to gain any political influence.Gorter:

During World War I he waged a struggle against social chauvinism in Germany and the Netherlands. Lenin referred to Gorter during this period as a staunch internationalist (see Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 26, p. 251). He welcomed the October Revolution and in 1919 participated in the creation of the Dutch Communist Party. Subsequently he committed mistakes of an ultra-leftist nature, and in 1921 he left the Dutch Communist Party and founded the Communist Worker’s Party, which held ultra-leftist views. He retired from political life in 1922.Luxemburg:

She supported the greatest possible development of the extraparliamentary struggle of the masses and fought to include in the arsenal of the proletariat’s fighting methods the “Russian weapon”—the mass political strike.Leon Trotsky:
No entry

Nikolai Bukharin:
No entry

Jesus Christ:
No entry

Roosevelt:

Roosevelt was aware that fascism posed a threat to the USA, and he condemned the aggressive plans of Germany, Italy, and Japan. With the outbreak of World War II (1939–45), he advocated American support for Great Britain and France against fascist Germany. On June 24, 1941, after fascist Germany attacked the USSR, Roosevelt declared the readiness of the USA to support the struggle of the Soviet people. Opposing reactionary forces in the USA, which adopted anti-Soviet positions, he upheld the idea of rapprochement between the US and the USSR, and he favored providing material assistance to the USSR.
After the US entry into the war in December 1941, Roosevelt made an important contribution to the creation and strengthening of the anti-Hitlerite coalition. Representing the USA at conferences in Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945), he emphasized the importance of the development of postwar international cooperation and the creation of the UN. He thought highly of the courage and fortitude of the Soviet people in their struggle against the invaders. Roosevelt was a strong advocate of the postwar maintenance and strengthening of US-Soviet cooperation, which he viewed as a very important condition for the preservation of world peace.


Ribbentrop:

Born Apr. 30, 1893, in Wesel; died Oct. 16, 1946, in Nuremberg. One of the chief war criminals of fascist Germany.
Ribbentrop was a sales agent in the wine business. He joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and soon became a close associate of Hitler. When the fascists came to power in 1933, Ribbentrop headed a bureau set up to carry out special foreign policy assignments of the Nazi leadership. He was ambassador to London from 1936 to 1938 and foreign minister from February 1938 to 1945. Ribbentrop directed the diplomatic preparation for the major Hitlerite acts of aggression. He was executed by verdict of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

(hmmm)

Molotov:

Molotov was secretary of the Central Committee of the ACP(B) from 1921 to 1930, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR from 1930 to 1941, and from May 1939, commissar for foreign affairs. From 1941 to 1957 he was first deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (subsequently, the Council of Ministers). During the same period he was people’s commissar for foreign affairs (subsequently, minister of foreign affairs, 1941–49, 1953–57). From 1921 he was a candidate member and from 1926 to 1952 a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the ACP(B). During the Great Patriotic War (1941–45) he was deputy chairman of the State Defense Committee. He was a participant in the Tehran (1943), Yalta (Crimean, 1945), and Potsdam (1945) conferences of the heads of state of the three Allied powers (the USSR, the USA, and Great Britain).(hmmm)

Pornography:

vulgarly naturalistic and indecent depictions of sex in literature, art, theater, films, and so forth. Pornographic books, magazines, drawings, photographs, and films are produced in enormous quantities in the capitalist countries. In the USSR, the dissemination of pornographic writings and pictures is punishable by law (see, for example, the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, art. 228).
Homosexuality:


a sexual perversion consisting in an unnatural attraction toward individuals of the same sex. It is encountered among individuals of both sexes. Criminal law in the USSR, the socialist countries, and some bourgeois states has established a penalty for homosexuality (sodomy).

[Ismail]

Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria etc. aren't in the encyclopedia, IIRC it wasn't until like 1989 that they were added. Trotskyism is though.

[HEAD ICE]

I was trying to find a representative selection but damn I have to quote the whole thing. Every paragraph is gold

Trotskyism:

an ideological and political petit bourgeois trend that is hostile to Marxism-Leninism and to the international communist movement and that conceals its opportunistic essence with radical, left-wing slogans. Trotskyism arose within the RSDLP at the beginning of the 20th century as a form of Men-shevism. It was named for its ideologist and leader, L. D. Trotsky (real surname Bronshtein, 1879–1940).

The theoretical sources of Trotskyism are mechanical materialism in philosophy and voluntarism and schematism in sociology. The methodological basis of the trend is subjectivism, which is characteristic of the petit bourgeois world view as a whole. Since Trotskyism is a reflection of the antiproletarian views of the petite bourgeoisie, it is characterized by an anticommunist tendency in its political positions, by abrupt shifts from an extreme revolutionary stance to one of capitulation to the bourgeoisie, by a misunderstanding of the dialectics of social development, and by dogmatism in evaluating the events and phenomena of social life.

The views and principles of Trotskyism were formulated in opposition to those of Leninism on all fundamental questions concerning the strategy and tactics of the working-class movement. Trotskyism took as its point of departure the rejection of the Leninist doctrine of a new type of party. In the debate over the wording of the first paragraph of the party rules at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, Trotsky supported L. Martov’s wording, which opened the way for unstable elements to enter the party.

On the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which was a most important thesis in the party program, Trotsky asserted, as did the leaders of the Second International, that the dictatorship would become possible only when the Social Democratic Party and the working class were virtually one and when the working class made up the majority of the population.

During the Revolution of 1905–07, the Trotskyists, distorting K. Marx’ idea of permanent revolution, propounded their own theory of permanent revolution, which they opposed to Lenin’s doctrine of the hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois democratic revolution and the doctrine of the transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution. The Trotskyists repudiated the revolutionary nature of the peasant masses as well as the proletariat’s ability to establish a firm alliance with the peasantry; they ignored the bourgeois democratic tasks of the first Russian revolution and put forth the voluntaristic idea of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat as a result of the bourgeois democratic revolution. Their slogan was “No tsar, but a workers’ government.”

The Trotskyists claimed that the permanence of the revolutionary process and the fate of the socialist revolution in each country were dependent on the victory of the world revolution, and they therefore asserted that without state support of the European proletariat, the working class of Russia could not retain power. As V. I. Lenin pointed out, Trotsky’s theory in fact was helping the “liberal-labor politicians in Russia, who by ‘repudiation’ of the role of the peasantry understand a refusal to raise up the peasants for the revolution!” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 27, p. 81).

Trotskyism found little support in the Russian working-class movement. Few in number, Trotsky’s followers were Russian émigré intellectuals who had lost their connections with the proletarian movement and were attempting to profit politically from the differences of opinion between the principal trends within the RSDLP—Bolshevism and Menshevism. Lenin wrote: “Trotsky was an ardent Iskrist from 1901 to 1903. ... At the end of 1903, Trotsky was an ardent Menshevik, i.e., he deserted from the Iskrists to the Economists. ... In 1904 and 1905, he deserted the Mensheviks and occupied a vacillating position, now cooperating with Martynov (the Economist), now proclaiming his absurdly Left ‘permanent revolution’ theory” (ibid., vol. 25, p. 205).

During the reactionary period from 1907 to 1910, Trotskyism constituted a variety of Liquidationism. “Trotsky behaves like a despicable careerist and factionalism” Lenin wrote in 1909. “He pays lip-service to the Party and behaves worse than any other of the factionalists” (ibid., vol. 47, p. 188). In 1912 the Trotskyists, playing the role of “party unifiers, ” organized the August anti-party bloc, which unified all the opportunists who had been excluded from the party ranks at the Sixth (Prague) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP.

During World War I, Trotskyism was a component of international centrism, a social democratic trend that wavered between social chauvinism and petit bourgeois pacifism. The Trotskyists rejected Lenin’s conclusion that it was possible in the period of imperialism for the proletarian revolution to triumph first in a few countries or even in a single country. In opposition to Lenin’s slogan of transforming the imperialist war into a civil war, Trotsky advanced the slogan “Neither victory nor defeat, ” which essentially meant that everything would remain as before; consequently, even tsarism would be preserved. Lenin wrote: “Whoever is in favor of the slogan ‘neither victory nor defeat’ is consciously or unconsciously a chauvinist; at best he is a conciliatory petit bourgeois, but in any case he is an enemy of proletarian policy, a partisan of the existing governments, of the present-day ruling classes” (ibid., vol. 26, p. 290).

Lenin exposed the social roots of Trotskyism as well as the harmfulness of its political platform and actions. The Bolsheviks were responsible for the defeat of the August antiparty bloc, and they waged a persistent struggle against Trotskyism during World War I.

After the February Revolution of 1917, just as in 1905, the Trotskyists confused the bourgeois democratic stage of the revolution in Russia with the socialist stage; failing to recognize the bourgeois democratic stage, they demanded the immediate creation of a “true workers’ government, ” the leading role in which they assigned to conciliatory parties. They continued to advocate the alliance of the Bolsheviks with the opportunists under the aegis of Trotskyism, and they attempted to make the Mezhraiontsy, or “interfaction” Social Democrats, into a nucleus around which a united, centrist Social Democratic Party could be formed.

After the February Revolution of 1917, the Mezhraiontsy announced their agreement with the Bolsheviks, into whose ranks they were accepted at the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(B). The Trotskyists who entered the party as Mezhraiontsy, however, continued to adhere to their former ideological positions and to struggle against Leninism. Even while preparations for the October Revolution were being made, the Trotskyists rejected the possibility of its victory, and they opposed the party’s decision to carry out an armed uprising. After the Great October Socialist Revolution, the Trotskyists asserted that the victory of the revolution would be short-lived; they claimed that Soviet power would inevitably perish if socialist revolutions did not occur in the very near future in the other European countries and if the Soviet republic did not receive direct state aid from the proletariat of the West.

During the first decade of Soviet power, Trotskyism presented the greatest threat from within the ACP(B) since it sowed doubt among the ranks of the working class and the working-class party in the strength of the socialist revolution and in the cause of the socialist transformation of the country. The Trotskyists opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) and foiled the timely conclusion of the negotiations, thus exposing the still weak Soviet republic to the threat of German imperialist aggression. As a result, the Soviet government was compelled to sign a peace treaty at a later date and under worse conditions.

The Trotskyists viewed the raison d’être of Soviet power to be the fostering, or pushing, of world proletarian revolution by any means, including military measures. This interpretation was “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” (ibid., vol. 35, p. 403). The thesis of pushing world revolution by means of war is also a tenet of present-day Trotskyism.

During the difficult period of reconstruction after the Civil War of 1918–20, Trotskyism took shape as a petit bourgeois deviation within the RCP(B). The Trotskyists initiated an intraparty struggle during the trade union controversy of 1920 and 1921. They created a faction with its own political platform demanding the transformation of the unions into an adjunct of the state machinery and the reduction of the party’s guiding role in building socialism. They also attempted to impose upon the party wartime methods of leading the masses.

In 1923 and 1924 the ideological formation of Trotskyism was completed as an antiparty trend reflecting the attitudes of part of the urban petite bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intelligentsia and serving the interests of the remnants of the capitalist classes in the country. Trotskyism’s principal thesis was the rejection of the possibility of building socialism in the USSR. Echoing the leaders of the social democratic movement in the West, the Trotskyists declared that because of the capitalist encirclement of the USSR and the country’s technical and economic backwardness, the Soviet working class could not succeed in consolidating its power and in building a socialist society. The Trotskyists opposed the Leninist doctrine that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a special class form of alliance between the working class and the peasantry; instead they propounded the thesis that the peasantry was hostile to the cause of building socialism. The Trotskyists declared the Soviet socioeconomic system to be state capitalism, and they treated the New Economic Policy (NEP) as but a retreat toward capitalism. Considering the building of socialism in one country to be a sign of insularism and a departure from the principles of proletarian internationalism, they continued to advocate the adventuristic policy of pushing world revolution.

In 1922 the Trotskyists asserted that although the Soviet republic had defended itself as a state in the political and military sense, it was not approaching the creation of a socialist society; in their view a true socialist economy could not arise in Soviet Russia until after the victory of the proletariat in the major countries of Europe. In order to hold out until that time and to prepare the country for “revolutionary warfare, ” the Trotskyists during the reconstruction period proposed a “dictatorship of industry” intended to increase the USSR’s military potential; for the transition to a reconstructed national economy they advocated a policy of rapid industrialization at the expense of the peasantry, whom they called a colony of industry. The Trotskyists wanted to finance the industrialization by, for example, raising prices of industrial goods, lowering prices of agricultural products, increasing taxes on peasant farms, and extracting funds from the villages; such measures, however, threatened to break up the alliance between the working class and the peasantry and to bring about the downfall of Soviet power.

During the reconstruction period, in opposition to the general party line of pursuing a high growth rate of socialist industrialization, the Trotskyists advanced the theory of the “extinguishing curve” (polukhaiushchaia krivaia), which was intended to justify the country’s economic backwardness and hinder development. According to this theory, high economic growth rates were possible only during the recovery period; thereafter the rate of the country’s economic development should supposedly decrease sharply from year to year. The Trotskyists believed that until the victory of the world revolution the USSR would not be able to overcome economic backwardness by its own efforts and that the country’s economy was doomed to be an adjunct of the world capitalist economy. Hence, the Trotskyist platform contained such openly capitulatory proposals as the elimination of the USSR’s favorable balance of foreign trade and the carrying out of large-scale market intervention, that is, the intensified importation of industrial goods; these measures would have opened the USSR to foreign capital.

During the debate of 1923 and 1924 the Trotskyists attempted to revise the organizational principles of the party; pretending to defend intraparty democracy, they demanded freedom for factions and groups within the party, as well as the weakening of the role of the party in guiding the state machinery and economic construction. In order to cause a party split, they tried to disrupt the relationship between the party and the youth; they called upon the young people to express doubts about the correctness of party policy, and they set young party members against the nucleus of Old Bolsheviks.

In “The Lessons of October, ” an article published in the autumn of 1924, Trotsky distorted the history of Bolshevism and attempted to replace Leninism with Trotskyism. The Trotskyist leaders strove by any available means to remove their opponents in the Central Committee of the party and to take control of the Central Committee. Predicting the inevitable defeat of the USSR in the next war, they planned to use this defeat to overthrow the existing regime. Objectively speaking, the Trotskyist political and economic line would have led to the restoration of capitalism in the USSR. In 1926 the Trotskyist platform united all the opportunistic groups in the ACP(B)—including the Democratic Centralist faction, the Workers’ Opposition, and the New Opposition—to form the Trotskyist-Zinovievist antiparty bloc.
The debate that took place during the end of 1924 and the beginning of 1925 was mirrored in the Communist International: Trotskyist groups sprang up within the Communist parties of a number of foreign countries, including Germany, France, the USA and Czechoslovakia.

Lenin and the party continually exposed the capitulatory essence of the views and platform of the Trotskyists, who were invariably defeated in the debates they themselves began. Trotskyism was condemned at the Seventh, Tenth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Party Congresses, at the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Party Conferences, and at a number of plenums of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the party. The Thirteenth Conference of the RCP(B) in 1924 emphasized that the ideological essence of Trotskyism represented not only a revision of Bolshevism and a departure from Leninism but also an obvious petit bourgeois deviation. The Fifteenth Conference of the ACP(B) in 1926 pointed out that the Trotskyists’ views on the prospects for the socialist revolution were close to the views of the Western social democratic leaders, who denied the possibility of the victory of socialism in the USSR; the conference therefore described Trotskyism as a social democratic deviation within the ACP(B).

Of great importance in the ideological defeat of Trotskyism were the speeches made by General Secretary J. V. Stalin at party congresses and conferences, plenums of the Central Committee of the ACP(B), and plenums of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. Also important were his works “Trotskyism or Leninism?”, “The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists, ” and “On the Social Democratic Deviation in Our Party.”

The Trotskyists’ positions became increasingly anti-Soviet. The Fifteenth Congress of the ACP(B) in 1927 pointed out that the opposition had severed ideological ties with Marxism-Leninism, had become a Menshevist group, and had started down the path of capitulation to the forces of the foreign and domestic bourgeoisie; the congress stated that adherence to Trotskyism was incompatible with party membership. Completing the ideological and organizational defeat of Trotskyism, the congress approved the decision of the Central Committee of the ACP(B) of Nov. 14,1927, providing for the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev from the party, and it expelled other active Trotskyists from the party as well. As of 1928, Trotskyism had no affiliation with the ACP(B). The Sixteenth Party Congress in 1930 stated that Trotskyism had completely embraced counterrevolutionary Menshevik positions, and the congress warned against any efforts at reconciliation with the Trotskyists.

The defeat of Trotskyism in the ranks of the ACP(B) was accompanied by the expulsion of Trotskyists from other Communist parties. In 1928 the ninth plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern determined that adherence to Trotskyism was incompatible with membership in the Comintern; this decision of the plenum was approved by the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in the same year.

After the Fifteenth Congress of the ACP(B), some Trotskyists continued to struggle against the line of the party and of the Comintern. For his anti-Soviet activity Trotsky was exiled from the USSR in 1929 and was stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1932. Openly expounding his capitulatory views abroad, he spoke out against the first five-year plan, the industrialization of the country, and the collectivization of agriculture; during the 1930’s he predicted inevitable defeat for the USSR in a war against fascist Germany. During World War II the Trotskyists opposed the creation of an anti-Hitler coalition; they refused to accept that the coalition was engaged in an antifascist war of liberation, and they regarded both sides in the war as imperialist.

In September 1938 a conference of Trotskyist groups from 11 countries proclaimed the establishment of the Fourth International. This group never represented a unified entity; in the 1950’s it split into factions that fought among themselves, having lost all contact with the mass working-class movement. Since the 1960’s, Trotskyists have grouped around several centers, including the International Secretariat, the International Committee, the Revolutionary Marxist Tendency of the Fourth International, and the Latin-American Bureau. In spite of the discord among them, the centers are united in a struggle against the international communist movement. There are groups of Trotskyists in a number of countries, including Argentina, Bolivia, Belgium, Great Britain, Italy, the USA, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, and Japan.

Attempts have been made to modernize the positions of Trotskyism and to adapt them to new conditions. Although the Trotskyists have had to acknowledge the progressive social changes in the USSR and other socialist countries, they do not consider these countries to be socialist; they use the notion of deformed workers’ states in their attempt to discredit the historically proven method of building socialism and to cast doubt upon the possibility of building communism in the USSR.

The Trotskyists reject the principle of peaceful coexistence between states having different social structures. Slandering the foreign policy of the countries of the socialist community, they continue to assert that war is the only means of eliminating capitalism. Certain groups of Trotskyists deny the leading role of the working class in the contemporary revolutionary process, and they attempt to prove that the proletariat in capitalist countries has lost its fighting spirit; they contrast the world socialist system and the international communist movement with the national liberation movement, which they claim is the driving force in the revolutionary process.

The existence of Trotskyism and its periodic activation in individual countries are traceable to various causes, among which are the following: the attraction into the revolutionary movement of large numbers of petit-bourgeois-minded and politically inexperienced intellectuals, students, peasants, and craftsmen, who easily fall under the influence of the “ultrarevolutionary” slogans of the Trotskyists; the antirevolutionary activity of “left-wing” and right-wing revisionists, whose views and actions often coincide with those of the Trotskyists; and the use and support of Trotskyism by forces of anticommunism and imperialism, which find in Trotskyism an ally in the struggle against Marxism-Leninism.

The Trotskyists render substantial aid to the bourgeoisie in its efforts to cause schisms in working-class and national liberation movements. During periods of mass demonstrations by working people, extremist factions among the Trotskyists carry out provocative acts that provide the forces of reaction with an opportunity to arouse the politically inexperienced portion of the population against the proletariat and its vanguard, the Communists. During the general strike of 1968 in France, Trotskyists and other “ultrarevolutionaries” supported the adventuristic idea of an immediate armed uprising. In Japan the Trotskyists gave the reactionary forces a pretext for the bloody suppression of the demonstrations in Shinjuku in October 1968 and in Yokosuka in January 1969. The Trotskyists have engaged in similar activities in other countries as well. The schismatic efforts of the Trotskyists in Chile aided the fascist coup there.

The Trotskyists attempt to penetrate mass revolutionary organizations for the purpose of destroying the organizations from within. They are particularly active in youth organizations, where they take advantage of some of the young people’s political immaturity and failure to recognize the true face of Trotskyism.

Under the conditions of the intensified ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism, the further struggle against the ideology and schismatic actions of the Trotskyists remains one of the important tasks of the world communist movement.

[Ismail]

There's also an article on Maoism.

a petit bourgeois nationalist tendency in the Communist Party of China (CPC) that is hostile to Marxism-Leninism. Maoism is a conglomeration of subjectivist, voluntarist, and vulgar-materialist ideas, antithetical to Marxist philosophy, political economy, scientific communism, and the proletarian strategy and tactics of the world communist movement. Maoism is an attempt to justify the adventuristic policy of “barracks communism.” Its cornerstone is anti-Sovietism.

Maoism took shape as a separate and distinct platform in the late 1950’s. Its emergence was directly connected with the activity of Mao Tse-tung. At the Ninth Congress of the CPC in 1969, Maoism, which in China is officially called the ideas of Mao Tse-tung, was proclaimed the “theoretical basis determining the ideas of the CPC,” as well as “the Marxism-Leninism of the present day.” These assertions were reaffirmed at the Tenth Congress of the CPC in 1973.

The formation of Maoism was connected with the struggle between the two main tendencies in the CPC—one internationalist and the other petit bourgeois and nationalist. The Maoists advanced the idea of “national Marxism,” a special “Chinese” communism, an idea officially confirmed in the documents of the Seventh Congress of the CPC in 1945. Under the pretext of “combining the universal truths of Marxism-Leninism with the practice of the Chinese revolution” and promoting the “sinicization of Marxism-Leninism,” the petit bourgeois nationalist elements in the CPC attacked the fundamental premises concerning the international character of the revolutionary working-class doctrine.

Maoism is characterized by an extreme eclecticism and by subjectivism in theory and voluntarism in politics. Many traditional views of ancient Chinese political and philosophical thought have helped nourish Maoist ideology. The primitive egalitarian principles of the peasant movements, a whole range of sinocentric ideas from the late 19th-century and early 20th-century reformers T’an Ssu-t’ung, K’ang Yu-wei, and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, and the Kuomintang conception of nationalism have also contributed to the ideology. Maoism has been greatly influenced by anarchism and by revisionist currents in the communist movement, especially Trotskyism. From the anarchists Mao Tse-tung borrowed such principles as the absolutization of violence (“Power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and “To rebel is justified”) and reliance on nonproletarian, declassed elements and politically immature layers of young people to “organize” revolutions without regard to whether there is a revolutionary situation. From Trotskyism Maoism has actually borrowed the concept of “permanent revolution,” thus building upon the operating premise that the Victory of socialism is impossible without the total annihilation of imperialism. Maoism contends that under socialism, even at its mature stage, there is a continual battle between the socialist and capitalist roads of development, with a constant danger of capitalist restoration; to prevent that danger, constant “revolutions” are necessary. The “cultural revolution,” carried out under Mao’s leadership in the late 1960’s, was proclaimed as a model of such a revolution. According to Maoist declarations, similar revolutions, which in fact are a form of total purging and suppression of the real and potential enemies of Maoism, should be repeated periodically.

In actuality Maoism denies the objective laws of socialist and communist construction and the doctrine of the leading role of the Marxist-Leninist party as the vanguard of the working class; it replaces socialist democracy with the dictatorship of a military-bureaucratic clique, imposes the cult of personality, and depreciates the role of the people. Maoism denies the fundamental principles of socialist humanism.

Instead of a proletarian class line in politics, Maoism resorts to Bonapartist maneuvering between different classes and social strata. While loudly proclaiming that the “working class must lead in all things,” in fact Mao Tse-tung follows the line of minimizing the role of the working class in China.

The Maoists seek in practice to eliminate the methods and forms of organizing and planning the national economy that came into being during the first decade of existence of the People’s Republic of China; these methods had been influenced by the experiences of world socialism, above all, of the USSR. In contrast to Leninism, Maoism views the poverty and backwardness of the country and the downtrodden condition of the masses as inherent features of life under socialism and even as factors allegedly contributing to the construction of the new society. The Maoists denounce concern for raising the standard of living of the people as “revisionism” and “reactionary economism,” which lead to bourgeois “degeneration.” The preservation of poverty and backwardness allows the Maoists to divert maximum resources to building up their military machine.

In the realm of philosophy, Maoism proclaims its adherence to dialectical and historical materialism, but in fact it revises all its principles from the standpoint of subjectivism, vulgar materialism, and a primitive interpretation of dialectics. Maoism transforms philosophy into a utilitarian and pragmatic means for justifying official policies.

While recognizing the universality of contradiction, Maoism converts one aspect, the struggle of opposites, into an absolute, and ignores or minimizes the role of the unity of opposites. At the same time, Maoism greatly exaggerates the extent to which antagonistic contradictions occur, regarding them as universal, and seeing nonantagonistic contradictions merely as particular manifestations of antagonistic ones. The law of the unity and struggle of opposites is reduced to the mechanical juxtaposition of the two (“Without the upper, there is no lower; without the repulsive, there cannot be beauty”) and mechanical alternation between the two (“The bad turns into the good; the proletariat into the bourgeoisie” and “Peace becomes war, and war peace”). In epistemology, Maoism is characterized by empiricism, on which it bases its narrowly utilitarian approach to the understanding of practice as simply the direct physical participation of the individual in production or politics. Maoism oversimplifies the problem of knowledge, minimizing the role of theoretical thought and its potential for providing knowledge, and simultaneously reduces the range of social practice.

In its conception of the criterion for truth, Maoism verges on pragmatism, with its assertion that “generally speaking, that which is done successfully is correct and that which results in failure is wrong” (Mao Tse-tung, Four Essays in Philosophy, Peking, 1968, p. 195).

Abrupt vacillations in both theory and practice, at one moment veering toward “left-wing” extremism and voluntarism and at the next toward right-wing reformism, are typical of Maoism. Its subjectivism is brought into sharp relief by its thesis on the “need to constantly create contradictions,” which in politics leads to the continual maintenance of a state of tension in society and to the inclination to solve all economic, political, and cultural problems by organizing successive mass campaigns aimed at intimidating the population with such things as “threats from abroad” and domestic purges.

In 1958, Mao Tse-tung put forward the policy of the “three Red banners”: the new “general line,” the “great leap forward,” and the “people’s communes.” The implementation of the policy led the country into an economic crisis. More than half a decade was required to restore the economy to the level existing before the great leap forward. In foreign policy, the Maoists began during this period to attack the Soviet Union publicly, seriously undermined Sino-Soviet relations, unleashed a campaign to split the international communist movement, staged military confrontations with neighboring countries, and undertook a whole series of other adventuristic acts in the world arena. At the Ninth and Tenth Congresses of the CPC, anti-Sovietism was raised to the level of party and state doctrine and the USSR was slanderously declared to be China’s main enemy. Maoism tries to substantiate its malicious anti-Sovietism with trumped-up claims that there are “irreconcilable differences of principle” between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. In fact the true sources of anti-Sovietism lie in the ideology of “great Han” chauvinism, which naturally comes into conflict with the principles of proletarian internationalism upheld by the CPSU and the other Marxist-Leninist parties. Anti-Sovietism is also used by the Maoists as a way of justifying their policy of militarization and of distracting the working masses from serious internal difficulties and unsolved problems. The Maoists disseminate the slanderous claim that capitalism has been restored in the socialist countries, and they deny the existence of the world socialist system.

Maoism seeks to preserve the hotbeds of international tension and to disrupt the efforts of the socialist countries and all peace-loving forces to eliminate these sources of tension. It tries to block the struggle of the peoples of the world to widen the scope of detente and extend it to all continents, and it tries to block acceptance of the principles of peaceful coexistence between states with differing social systems.

Maoism opposes its adventurist position to the general line of the international communist movement on fundamental questions of world development. The Maoists proceed from the premise of an inevitable world war and regard it as a means of “revitalizing humanity” and as a source of world revolution.

To reinforce their pretensions to hegemony over the leader-ship of the Third World, the Maoists argue that the center of the revolutionary movement has shifted to the arena of the national-liberation movement, allegedly because the socialist countries have “degenerated” and the working class in the advanced capitalist countries has become “bourgeoisified” and has lost its revolutionary qualities.

Proof of the Maoists’ total departure from the proletarian class approach in the realm of foreign policy and from the principles of socialist internationalism may be seen in the theory they promote about “the struggle against the hegemony of the two superpowers.”

At the international Conference of Communist and Workers’ Parties in 1969 the majority of delegations characterized Maoism as a dangerous anti-Marxist tendency, which, with its disruptive activities and anti-Soviet policies, was objectively playing the role of henchman to imperialism and anticommunism.

Maoism creates serious obstacles to the building of socialism and leads to its deformation, endangers the socialist gains of the Chinese workers, hinders the solution of fundamental social and economic problems, gives rise to one crisis situation in China after another, and brings discredit to scientific socialism.

Maoism seeks to split the world communist movement and the anti-imperialist front of the peoples. For these purposes, it makes use of small groups of converts to Maoism that have sprung up in several countries. However, these groups in practice remain isolated from the revolutionary working-class movement and, more often than not, soon fall apart.

As an antiscientific tendency contradicting the laws of social development, Maoism is lacking in any prospects.

[Ismail]

BTW this is the definition of Trotskyism in the 1947 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia:

"Contemporary Trotskyism is not a political tendency in the working class, but [rather] an unprincipled, ideal-less band of wreckers, saboteurs, agents, spies, murdereres, a band of accursed enemies of the working class, acting for hire of intelligence organs of foreign governments." (Stalin, "On deficiencies of Party work in measures for the liquidation of Trotskyites and other double-dealers," 1937, p. 14).

In the past, T. was an anti-Leninist, opportunist tendency and a most dangerous agency of the imperialist bourgeoisie in the workers' movement, a vilest variety of Menshevism. T. was the most important group implanting centrism (cf).

In the course of struggling against the ACP(b) [All-union Communist Party (bolsheviks)], Trotskyism stopped being a political tendency in the working class and turned into the leading unit of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie, leading the struggle against Soviet power and the construction of socialism in the USSR, against Communism.

Trotsky always conducted a treasonable battle against Leninism, against the Party of Lenin and Stalin. At the 2nd Congress of the RSDRP (1903) Trotsky together with the Mensheviks struggled against the Bolsheviks. On the question of the 1-st paragraph of the charter of the party Trotsky defended the Menshevik formulation of Martov and heatedly came out against the formulation of Lenin, struggling for the founding of a monolithic, militant, clearly organized party. Trotsky, in essence, rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat. After the Second Congress of the party, Trotsky, together with the Mensheviks, in every possible way subverted Bolshevik party-solidarity , frustrated the decisions of the Congress, trying to seize the leading centers of the party and disorganize party work.

In the period of the Russo-Japanese War and the first Russian Revolution (1904-7) Trotsky slid into the position of “defensism”: he was against the defeat of the tsarist government, which led to the weakening of tsarism and the strengthening of the revolution. Trotsky, along with the Mensheviks, led the treasonous policy of curtailment of the Revolution of 1904-7. Trotsky led the fight against the Leninist theory of the socialist revolution. Denying the hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, he denied the possibility of alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry. Thus Trotsky even denied the victory of the socialist revolution, the victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Defending the counterrevolutionary Menshevik theory of “permanent revolution,” Trotsky did not believe in the strength and ability of the Russian proletariat and the revolutionary possibilities of a peasant movement; he claimed that the peasants were a class hostile to the proletariat.

In the years of the Stolypin reaction, Trotsky supported the Menshevik “liquidators,” aiming to dissolve the RSDRP [Russian Social-Democratic Revolutionary Party]. Being a “centrist,” Trotsky tried to reconcile and to unite the Bolsheviks and the liquidators on a liquidators’ platform. Characterizing the position of Trotsky, Lenin wrote: “Trotsky conducted himself like the worst sort of careerist and factionalist...he prattles on about the party, but conducts himself as the worst factionalist of all.” (Lenin Anthology XXV, page 38). In these very years Lenin called Trotsky “Judas-Trotsky.” In 1912 Trotsky organized the anti-Party "August bloc,” uniting all anti-Bolshevik groups and movements against Lenin and the Bolshevik party. Trotsky and the Trotskyites occupied on all fundamental questions the liquidators’ position, but concealed their liquidationism as conciliation. Exposed by Lenin and Stalin, the Trotskyite “August bloc” disintegrated under the blows of the Bolsheviks in 1913-14.

In the period of the First World War, Trotsky in all important questions of socialism and war led the struggle against Lenin and against the Bolshevik party. Trotskyites defended admitted social-chauvinists, called for the renunciation of the class struggle in time of war, supported the imperialist war, concealing their treason against the proletariat and socialism with “left” phraseology about the struggle with war, planning the deception of the working class. Slipping by means of deception into the ranks of the Bolshevik party in 1917 with the purpose of undermining and blasting it from within, Trotsky organized an antiparty counterrevolutionary group of Trotskyites, speaking out against the Bolshevik party and its leaders – Lenin and Stalin – on all fundamental questions of Marxism-Leninism and the revolution.

In the period of the preparation and carrying out of the October socialist revolution (April 1917 – 1918), Trotsky along with other traitors to the party –- Zinoviev, Kamanev, Rykov, Bukharin, Pyatakov –- tried by treacherous means to thwart the armed rebellion and turn the Bolshevik party from the path socialist revolution.

In February 1918 the Trotskyite-Bukharinite band of traitors wrecked the peace talks at Brest-Litovsk with Germany, aiming to place the as-yet unorganized Soviet Republic, lacking a strong army, under the deadly blow of German imperialism. The treason of Trotsky and Bukharin cost the Soviet state dearly. The new terms of peace were significantly more onerous than before. Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania went to Germany. The Ukraine was turned into a German puppet state. The Soviet Republic was required to pay an indemnity to the Germans. Lenin noted that Bukharin and Trotsky “in [this] matter aided the German imperialists and hindered the growth and development of revolution in Germany” (Lenin, Collected Works, vol. XXII, p. 307).

In the years of the foreign military intervention and civil war (1918-20) Trotsky and the Trotskyites treacherously disorganized work in the Red Army, attempting to weaken its fighting power; as saboteurs, they disrupted the fighting successes of the Red Army, giving direct help to interventionists and bourgeois-landowner counterrevolutionaries.

In the period of transition to peacetime work on restoration of the nation’s economy (1921-1925) Trotsky at the head of all anti-Party elements led a bitter fight against the party of Lenin and its leaders Lenin and Stalin, who were successfully leading the Soviet country to socialism by way of the New Economic Policy. In 1923 the Trotskyites, attempting to split the party, demanded a party-wide debate, in which they were utterly defeated throughout the Soviet Union. The Thirteenth Party Conference and the Thirteenth Party Congress RKP(b) (1924) condemned the Trotskyite opposition as an openly-expressed petty-bourgeois deviation from Marxism, as revisionim of Leninism. In 1927 Trotsky in his slanderous article “The Lessons of October” attempted to replace Leninism with Trotskyism. Stalin demonstrated in his speeches that the ideological defeat of Trotsky was an indispensable condition to secure the further victorious movement towards socialism, and he rallied the party around the Central Committee for the struggle for the victory of socialism. In 1925 the Trotskyites came out against the teaching of Lenin and Stalin about the victory of socialism in the Soviet land, against the party course on the victorious construction of socialism in the USSR, against the socialist industrialization of the country. To the general party line, to the Stalinist plan of socialist industrialization of the country, the Trotskyites offered in opposition a bourgeois plan of enslavement of the USSR, converting the Soviet Union into a feeble agrarian appendage of the capitalist world, disarmed and deprived of a possibility for existence in conditions of capitalist encirclement. The Trotskyites tried to corrupt and break up the Bolshevik party after the death of Lenin, to infect it with their disbelief in the cause of victory of socialism in the USSR and to create a party of capitalist restoration.

In the years of struggle for socialist industrialization of the country (1926-29), the Trotskyites continued a treasonable struggle against the party of Lenin and Stalin. In 1926, Trotsky organized the anti-Party, counterrevolutionary Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc, developing subversive work against the Bolshevist Party and Soviet government. Under the leadership of Stalin, the Party of Bolsheviks ideologically smashed and organizationally crushed the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc. At the Fifteenth Congress of the ACP(b) (1927) the Trotskyites and Zinovievites were expelled from the Bolshevist Party for counterrevolutionary activity. "Being ideologically smashed by the Bolshevist Party, losing any base in the working class, the Trotskyites ceased to be a political tendency and turned into an unprincipled, careerist clique of political swindlers, into a band of political double-dealers." [History of the ACP(b), Short Course, pp. 285-286]. In 1929, Trotsky was deported from the territory of the USSR for anti-Soviet and counterrevolutionary activity. Overseas, he continued a treasonable struggle against the Party of Lenin and Stalin and the Soviet government.

In 1932-33, Trotskyites and Bukharinites organized the anti-Soviet "Right-Trotskyite bloc." Trials in 1936, 1937, and 1938 revealed, that Bukharinites and Trotskyites headed by Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Rykov already from the first days of the Great October Socialist Revolution took part in a conspiracy against Lenin, against the Party of the Bolsheviks, against the Soviet government; long ago they had already formed one common band of the worst enemies of the people. They tried to break the Brest peace, together with "Left" SRs overthrow Soviet authority, arrest and kill V. I. Lenin, I. V. Stalin, Ya. M. Sverdlov, and form a new government of Trotskyites, Bukharinites, and "Left" SRs. They organized the despicable wounding of Lenin in the summer of 1918; prepared the anti-Soviet rebellion of "Left" SRs in the summer of 1918; deliberately aggravated disagreements in the Party in 1921, trying to loosen and overthrow from within the leadership of Lenin; they tried to overthrow the leadership of the Party during Lenin's illness and after his death. The Trotskyites and Bukharinites long before this moved into the service of foreign intelligence agencies, handed over state secrets and provided foreign intelligence agencies with espionage information; carried out wrecking, sabotage, explosions; organized despicable murders of Kirov, Menzhinsky, Kuybyshev, Gorki. Judicial proceedings revealed, that Trotsky-Bukharinite traitors, carrying out the will of their masters -- foreign bourgeois intelligence agencies, set as their goal the destruction of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet state, the undermining of the defense of the country, the facilitation of foreign military intervention, preparation of the defeat of the Red Army, the partition of the USSR, the destruction of the gains of the workers and peasants and the restoration of capitalist slavery in the Soviet Union. For these monstrous crimes, according to the sentence of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, the Bukharin-Trotskyite traitors were shot. The Soviet people approved the crushing of the counterrevolutionary "Right-Trotskyite Bloc" and rallied ever more closely around the Party of Lenin and Stalin. Trotsky was killed in 1940 by one of his [own] accomplices. Trotsky is the worst enemy of all toiling humanity, Trotskyites everywhere play the role of provocateurs and spies of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, trying to demoralize the Communist movement.

[Vanguard1917]

lol

[Susurrus]

Anarchism
a petit bourgeois social and political current hostile to proletarian scientific socialism. Its basic idea is the rejection of all state power and the doctrine of the totally unlimited freedom of each individual person.

Anarchism regards any state (even a state that is implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat) as the primal cause of all social injustices and proposes to abolish the state as a first step toward creating a new society. Thus, anarchists reject all authority (not only state authority), reject social discipline and the necessity of the minority’s submission to the majority, and oppose the political struggle of the working class and the organization of workers into a political party.

With respect to the state, V. I. Lenin indicated three basic distinctions between Marxism and anarchism: (1) Marxists, “. . . while setting as their goal the complete abolition of the state, recognize that this goal can be achieved only after the elimination of classes by the socialist revolution, as the result of the establishment of socialism, which would lead to the withering away of the state”; anarchists “... want the complete abolition of the state overnight, without understanding the conditions under which this is possible”; (2) Marxists “. . . consider it necessary that the proletariat, in winning political power, completely destroy the old state machinery and replace it with a new one . . .”; “anarchists . . . reject the use of state authority by the revolutionary proletariat and its revolutionary dictatorship”; (3) Marxists “… demand the preparation of the proletariat for the revolution through the utilization of the contemporary state; anarchists reject this” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 33, pp. 112–13).

Anarchism proclaims as its ultimate goal a free federation of small, autonomous associations of producers; thus, anarchists preach a crude, primitive leveling.

Along with the petite bourgeoisie, the social base of anarchism includes the declasse elements, the Lumpenproletariat. At the same time, through determined criticism of the defects of bourgeois society, as well as of the reformism and conciliationism waged by some of its representatives, anarchism attracts a certain stratum of participants of the revolutionary movement. Anarchism played a well-known role in stimulating protest among the working masses against exploitation. However, with the development of the workers’ movement, anarchism, which led workers along the wrong path, began objectively to obstruct the proletariat’s class struggle against the bourgeoisie.

Anarchism took shape between the 1840’s and 1870’s. It became most widespread in countries where the proportion of petite bourgeoisie was high—Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, France, Russia, Austria, the Netherlands, and certain Latin American countries. The term itself was introduced by P. J. Proudhon, but the sources of anarchism’s ideas can be traced back to the 17th—18th centuries (W. Godwin and others). The main ideologists of anarchism at different stages of its development were M. Stirner (Germany); M. A. Bakunin and P. A. Kropotkin (Russia); and P. J. Proudhon and J. Grave (France).

K. Marx and F. Engels exposed the theoretical flimsiness and social nature of anarchism. In the First International, they struggled persistently against Proudhonism, whose advocates sought to perpetuate the small, splintered system of production. After it was destroyed, they struggled against Bakunin and his followers (the dissident International Alliance of Social Democrats, created in 1868), who reduced revolution to “spontaneous action”—that is, the spontaneous rebellion of the masses, primarily the déclassé elements and peasantry. In 1872, the Hague Congress of the First International expelled the anarchist leaders Bakunin and J. Guillaume from the International. That same year, the Bakuninists created the so-called Anarchist International, which survived until 1878. In 1873, the General Council of the International resolved that all organizations which refused to recognize the common decisions of the Hague Congress would not be considered members of the International; in essence this meant the expulsion of the Bakuninists from its ranks.

In the second half of the 19th century, anarchists seriously harmed the socialist movement with their tactic of “direct action” (terrorist acts and sabotage) and opposition to political struggle and the proletariat’s political party. Anarchists attempted to disorganize the work of the Second International, which expelled them from its ranks in 1891. At the end of the 19th century, anarchism provided the source for anarchosyndicalism, which attained its greatest influence at the start of the 20th century. The dissatisfaction of the working class with the opportunistic policies of Social Democratic leaders aided the spread of anarchist moods even among a portion of the working class engaged in large-scale industry. During these years, the works of V. I. Lenin, directed against anarchistic and right-wing opportunistic distortions of proletarian theory and tactics, were extremely important in the ideological struggle against anarchism. During World War I (1914–18), many anarchist leaders (G. Hervé, P. A. Kropotkin, and others) maintained a chauvinistic position in direct contradiction to the antimilitarist doctrines which they had advanced earlier.

After the October Revolution, anarchism in the Soviet Republic lost its class basis; it degenerated into a counterrevolutionary current and was liquidated in the 1920’s. During the upsurge in the revolutionary struggle of the working class, anarchism also deteriorated in other countries. The only country in which anarchism continued to exert perceptible influence was Spain, where in 1926 an anarchist political organization, the Federation of Anarchists of Iberia (FAI), was established. During the National Revolutionary War in Spain of 1936–39 (Spanish Civil War), some anarchists and their leaders (B. Durruti and others) entered into organized struggle against fascism. Other leaders rejected the necessity of revolutionary discipline during the war. They withdrew certain units from the fronts, arranged rowdy disturbances and provocations in the rear, and demanded “immediate revolution” and “libertarian communism” (that is, communism free from state power). These actions weakened the Spanish Republic. After World War II (1939–45), anarchists showed some activity only in Spain, Italy, and certain Latin American countries. Congresses of anarchists held periodically in France since the war have been extremely small. The émigré organization of the FAI has played the leading role; only isolated individuals from Italy, Argentina, and other countries where there are small groups of adherents of anarchism have participated in the congresses. However, the attraction of ever-wider strata of the population (in particular, student youth) to the anticapitalist struggle of the 1960’s has been accompanied by a revival of ideas more or less akin to anarchism. Elements hostile to communism and sometimes outright imperialist agents have tried to exploit this phenomenon.

[bricolage]

Socialist realism is based on a concept of revolutionary and active socialist humanism. Socialist humanism fosters the harmonious development of the individual, the full realization of each individual’s moral and spiritual potentialities, and a truly humane attitude among people toward one another and toward nature and society..

[Rafiq]

Makhno, Nestor Ivanovich

Born Oct. 17 (29), 1889, in Guliaipole, now in Zaporozh’e Oblast; died July 6, 1934, in Paris. One of the leaders of petit bourgeois counterrevolution in the Ukraine from 1918 to 1921 during the Civil War. Son of a peasant.

Makhno graduated from a parochial school. During the Revolution of 1905-07 he joined an anarchist group and took part in terrorist actions and “expropriations.” In 1909 he was sentenced to death for killing a police official, but the sentence was reduced to ten years of hard labor, because he was still a minor. He served his sentence in Butyrskaia Prison in Moscow, where he became a convinced anarchist. Set free by the February Revolution of 1917, he went to Guliaipole and in April 1918 organized an anarchist armed detachment. This unit began guerrilla warfare against the Austro-German occupiers and the hetman’s authorities and won great popularity among the peasantry.

Makhno was noted for his cruelty, despite his personal bravery. In 1919 and 1920 he fought against the White Guards and the followers of Petliura as well as against the Red Army. Three times he made an alliance with Soviet power, and three times he violated his agreements and rose in rebellion. In 1921 his units degenerated into nothing more than robbers and oppressors. On Aug. 26, 1921, he fled to Rumania, moving to Poland in 1922 and then to Paris in 1923, where he worked as a cobbler and printer. He wrote two volumes of memoirs that were filled with hatred toward Soviet power.

[DarkPast]

Tito, Josip Broz
Born May 25,1892, in Kumrovec, Croatia; died May 4,1980, in Ljubljana. Figure in the Yugoslav and international labor movement; statesman and political leader of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Marshal (1943); National Hero of Yugoslavia (1944 and 1972); Hero of Socialist Labor (1950).
Tito, the son of peasants, joined the Social Democratic Party of Croatia and Slovenia in 1910, becoming active in the labor and trade union movement. In the fall of 1913 he was inducted into the Austro-Hungarian Army, and in the early months of World War I, after being arrested for spreading antiwar propaganda, he was sent to the front. Wounded in the spring of 1915, he was captured and taken to Russia. In 1917, Tito was arrested in Petrograd for taking part in the July demonstration against the Provisional Government and sent to the Urals. There, after joining the Red Guards in Omsk in October 1917, he participated with the Bolsheviks in revolutionary activities among the peasants.
After returning to his country in September 1920, Tito joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) and engaged in clandestine party activities. In February 1928 he was elected secretary of the Zagreb committee of the CPY, but in August of that year he was arrested and sentenced to five years at hard labor. Released from prison in 1934, he resumed his work for the party, now as a member of the CPY’s regional committee in Croatia, and in December was elected to the party’s Central Committee and Politburo. In 1935, Tito went to Moscow as a member of the CPY delegation to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern and stayed there to work for the Comintern until 1936, when he returned clandestinely to Yugoslavia. In December 1937 he was appointed general secretary of the CPY’s Central Committee, a position to which he was formally elected at the Fifth Congress of the CPY in October 1940.
During the National Liberation War in Yugoslavia (1941–45), Tito served as supreme commander of the National Liberation Army and partisan forces of Yugoslavia. On Nov. 30, 1943, he became chairman of the National Committee for the Liberation of Yugoslavia. In March 1945 he was appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers, minister of defense, and supreme commander of the armed forces of Democratic Federal Yugoslavia, and in August of that year he was elected chairman of the Popular Front. (The Front changed its name in 1953 to the Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Yugoslavia, and Tito remained chairman until 1954.) In November 1945, Tito became chief of state of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia; from 1953 to 1963 he also acted as chairman of the Federal Executive Council, which constituted the republic’s executive. In 1952 the Sixth Congress of the CPY adopted a resolution renaming the party the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) and elected Tito its general secretary; Tito became chairman in 1966. In 1974 the Tenth Congress elected him president of the LCY for an indefinite term.
From 1953, Tito served as president of the country. He was proclaimed president for life by the Federal Assembly in May 1974. As president he headed the Presidium of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (a power delegated to him in 1971), as well as the collective Presidency, and he was the commander in chief of the nation’s armed forces. Tito was awarded numerous Yugoslav orders. His Soviet orders included the Order of Lenin (1972), the Order of the October Revolution, the Order of Victory (1945), and the Order of Suvorov First Class (1944). He was awarded several orders by other countries.

Interesting...

[The Dark Side of the Moon]

wow, nice find

[LegendZ]

George Orwell


(pen name of Eric Blair). Born June 25, 1903, at Motihari in Bengal, India; died Jan. 21, 1950, in London. English writer and publicist.

The son of a British colonial official, Orwell graduated from Eton College in 1921. After serving with the British police in Burma, he returned to Europe in 1927. For several years he lived in poverty in London and Paris and established close ties with petit bourgeois radicals. He fought in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39 in the ranks of the POUM, an anarchist organization. He was seriously wounded and, disillusioned with revolutionary ideals, became a bourgeois liberal reformist and anticommunist. During World War II he served in the English home guard and was a commentator for the BBC and a correspondent for the newspaper the Observer.

As a writer, Orwell was greatly influenced by Jonathan Swift, Samuel Butler, Jack London, D. H. Lawrence, and E. I. Zamiatin. He first gained fame with his writings about the life of British miners in impoverished areas, his reminiscences of the war in Spain, and his literary criticism and publicistic works. However, his literary and political reputation rests almost entirely on his satire Animal Farm (1945), which advocates the pointlessness of revolutionary struggle, and his antiutopian novel 1984 (1949), in which he depicts the society that would replace capitalism and bourgeois democracy. This future society, according to Orwell, is a totalitarian hierarchical structure, based on sophisticated techniques for enslaving the masses physically and psychologically and on total scorn for the freedom and dignity of the individual. It is a society of material deprivation and universal fear and hatred.

From the standpoint of subjective idealism, Orwell examines the problems of freedom and necessity and of the truth value of knowledge. On this basis, he attempts to justify voluntarism in politics. His warnings against certain dangerous social trends and his protests against the suppression of individual freedom are intermixed with homilies on the uselessness of struggling for a better future. This attitude enabled the ideologists of reaction to make use of Orwell’s work to carry on an extensive anticommunist propaganda campaign, utilizing to this end millions of copies of his writings in many different languages and numerous radio and television broadcasts and motion pictures.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s there has been an increased interest in the West in Orwell’s ideological heritage. An intense struggle has been waged over his legacy between reactionary, ultra-right forces and petit bourgeois radicals, who view Orwell as a predecessor of the New Left and believe that many trends in modern Western society are epitomized in the Orwellian vision of 1984.

[Ismail]

Jesus Christ:
No entryApparently the reason he isn't in the encyclopedia is because Soviet authorities maintained he never actually existed. It is said he was only given two lines in the 1952 edition of the encyclopedia but was removed sometime thereafter.

[Bright Banana Beard]

what about Hoxha, Hoxhaism, or socialist Albania?

[Susurrus]

George Orwell

So the Soviets thought the same thing the Conservatives think of him?

[Ismail]

So the Soviets thought the same thing the Conservatives think of him?Orwell by the time he wrote Animal Farm and 1984 identified himself as a Labourite and claimed that the Soviets feared social-democracy because it showed how unnecessary class struggle and communism are. He said after WWII that the Soviets were planning to attack Western Europe.

Also the conservative view of Orwell was that he clearly elucidated the horrible "totalitarianism" of Soviet Russia and the evils of communism, so I doubt that.

The article on Orwell is, in fact, a very good analysis. Neither Animal Farm or 1984 are materialist works and both read by the average person will make them fear communism.


what about Hoxha, Hoxhaism, or socialist Albania?Hoxha's article has no analysis, it's just a list of positions he held. The Soviets wanted to bring Albania back into their orbit after Khrushchev was overthrown. The article on Albania basically just concludes with "then the Albanians unfortunately took a sectarian line which is harmful both to the Albanian people and to international communism." They otherwise describe Albania as a socialist state.

[Pioneers_Violin]

Wow, thanks Ismail, great find...


Stalin, Josef Vissarionovich
(real surname, Dzhugash-vili). Born Dec. 9 (21), 1879, in Gori, in what is now the Georgian SSR; died Mar. 5, 1953, in Moscow. One of the leaders of the Communist Party, Soviet state, and international communist and workers’ movement. Prominent theorist and propagandist of Marxism-Leninism.

It goes on for a while documenting Stalin's life and accomplishments and near the end points out his "mistakes"


Apart from the positive aspects of Stalin’s leadership, theoretical and political mistakes were committed, and certain of his character traits had negative repercussions. During the first years after Lenin’s death he took account of the critical remarks addressed to him, but later he departed from the Leninist principles of collective leadership and the norms of party life and overestimated his own merit in the successes of the party and people. The cult of Stalin’s personality gradually evolved, leading to flagrant violations of socialist legality and doing great damage to party work and the cause of building communism.

The Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, held in 1956, condemned the cult of personality as a phenomenon alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism and to the nature of the socialist social order. On June 30, 1956, in a decree of the CPSU Central Committee entitled On Overcoming the Personality Cult and Its Consequences, the party gave an objective, comprehensive analysis of Stalin’s work and a thorough critique of the cult of personality. The cult of personality did not and could not change the socialist essence of the Soviet system and the Marxist-Leninist character of the CPSU and its Leninist policy. Neither did it arrest the natural course of development of Soviet society. The party worked out and implemented a system of measures to ensure the restoration and further development of the Leninist norms of party life and the principles of party leadership.



It's a long one so
Full article here: http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Josef+Stalin

[Susurrus]

Orwell by the time he wrote Animal Farm and 1984 identified himself as a Labourite and claimed that the Soviets feared social-democracy because it showed how unnecessary class struggle and communism are. He said after WWII that the Soviets were planning to attack Western Europe.

Also the conservative view of Orwell was that he clearly elucidated the horrible "totalitarianism" of Soviet Russia and the evils of communism, so I doubt that.

The article on Orwell is, in fact, a very good analysis. Neither Animal Farm or 1984 are materialist works and both read by the average person will make them fear communism.


Source?


The conservatives believe that he is an anticommunist and the soviets say he is an "anticommunist."

This article falsely states that the POUM was anarchist, and says that Orwell became "disillusioned with revolutionary ideals, became a bourgeois liberal reformist and anticommunist." (false, he became anti-stalinist and anti-authoritarian, but still an ardent socialist). It states that Animal Farm "advocates the pointlessness of revolutionary struggle," which it does not, and that 1984 "depicts the society that would replace capitalism and bourgeois democracy." which it does not, instead depicting a society that has replaced capitalism(with "oligarchical collectivism" under the guise of IngSoc) and bourgeois democracy, but is not defined as the only other option. Indeed, the book pins its hope on the proles revolting once again, and creating a new, actually communist society. It also states that he makes "homilies on the uselessness of struggling for a better future" when in fact his book are entirely based on the struggle for a better future.
"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." -George Orwell

Note that democratic socialism does NOT mean social-democracy, but indeed calls for the total abolition of capitalism, but not through authoritarian means.

[Ismail]

Source?I don't want this to become a thread about Orwell, but here are the sources.

"Unless the signs are very deceiving, the USSR is preparing for war against the western democracies. Indeed, as Burnham rightly says, the war is already happening in a desultory way. How soon it could break out into full-scale conflict is a difficult question, bringing in all kinds of military, economic and scientific problems on which the ordinary journalist or political observer has no data. But there is one point, very important to Burnham's argument, which can be profitably discussed, and that is the position of the Communist parties and the 'fellow-travellers' and the reliance placed on them by Russian strategy.

Burnham lays great stress on the Communist tactic of 'infiltration'... a Communist is psychologically quite different from an ordinary human being....

No doubt, Burnham's description of the 'true Communist' holds good for a few hundred thousand or a few million fanatical, dehumanised people, mostly inside the USSR, who are the nucleus of the movement. It holds good for Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov, etc and the more faithful of their agents abroad. But if there is one well-attested fact about the Communist parties of almost all countries, it is the rapid turnover in membership. People drift in, sometimes by scores of thousands at a time, and presently drift out again... Certainly every effort is made to induce in Communist Party members the totalitarian mentality that Burnham describes. In a few cases this succeeds permanently, in many others temporarily: still, it is possible to meet thinking people who have remained Communists for as much as ten years before resigning or being expelled, and who have not been intellectually crippled by the experience. In principle, the Communist Parties all over the world are quisling organisations, existing for the purpose of espionage and disruption, but they are not necessarily so efficient and dangerous as Burnham makes out....

In left-wing circles there is the corresponding syllogism: Communism is opposed to capitalism; therefore it is progressive and democratic. This is stupid, but it can be accepted in good faith by people who will be capable of seeing through it sooner or later. The question is not whether the 'cryptos' and 'fellow-travellers' advance the interests of the USSR against those of the democracies. Obviously they do so. The real question is, how many of them would continue on the same lines if war were really imminent?

[....]

"I think he [James Burnham] is mainly right in his account of the way in which Communist propaganda works, and the difficulty of countering it, and he is certainly right in saying that one of the most important problems at this moment is to find a way of speaking to the Russian people over the heads of their rulers.... Burnham is not in favour of Stalin or Stalinism, and he has begun to find virtues in the capitalist democracy which he once considered moribund."
(George Orwell. [I]The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Vol. 4. New Hampshire: David R. Godine. 1968. pp. 318-319, 321, 325.)

"From the point of view of the Russians and the Communists, Social Democracy is a deadly enemy, and to do them justice they have frequently admitted it. Even such controversial questions as the formation of a western union are irrelevant here. Even if we had no influence in Europe and made no attempt to interfere there, it would still be to the interest of the Russian Government to bring about the failure of the British Labour Government, if possible. The reason is clear enough. Social Democracy, unlike capitalism, offers an alternative to Communism, and if somewhere or other it can be made to work on a big scale—if it turns out that after all it is possible to introduce Socialism without secret police forces, mass deportations and so forth—then the excuse for dictatorship vanishes. With a Labour Government in office, relations with Russia, bad already, were bound to deteriorate.

[....]

If you do not like Communism you are a Red-baiter, a believer in Bolshevik atrocities, the nationalisation of women, Moscow Gold, and so on. Similarly, when Catholicism was almost as fashionable among the English intelligentsia as Communism is now, anyone who said that the Catholic Church was a sinister organisation and no friend to democracy was promptly accused of swallowing the worst follies of the No-Popery organisations, of looking under his bed lest Jesuits should be concealed there, of believing stories about babies' skeletons dug up from the floors of nunneries, and all the rest of it. But a few people stuck to their opinion, and I think it is safe to say that the Catholic Church is less fashionable now than it was then."
(George Orwell. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Vol. 4. New Hampshire: David R. Godine. 1968. p. 397, 399.)

"My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism."
(George Orwell. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Vol. 4. New Hampshire: David R. Godine. 1968. p. 502.)

Also "democratic socialism" is, in fact, what the Labourites called for.

[L.A.P.]

Is this what really what the Soviet Union propagated in the post-Stalin period? Wow, that's straight up 'big brother' shit.

[Ismail]

Is this what really what the Soviet Union propagated in the post-Stalin period? Wow, that's straight up 'big brother' shit.I don't see how. Most of the articles in the encyclopedia are quite good. It has more in common with the Encyclopédie of Diderot and Co. (in that it sought to "change the way people think") than with modern, "neutrality"-focused encyclopedias.

Of course this doesn't mean that there isn't plenty of revisionism and evidence that the Soviets were on alright terms with reactionary governments. For instance in the Zaire article it never mentions Mobutu being a reactionary. It just says that before his 1965 coup the Congolese political situation was quite disruptive. Then he came along, founded a one-party state, proclaimed Lumumba a fallen hero (as if he wasn't involved in killing him to begin with), and engaged in various quasi-nationalist measures. There's no class analysis and it basically insinuates that Mobutu was, in Soviet eyes, a rather progressive figure.

[Kiev Communard]

I don't see how. Most of the articles in the encyclopedia are quite good. It has more in common with the Encyclopédie of Diderot and Co. (in that it sought to "change the way people think") than with modern, "neutrality"-focused encyclopedias.

Of course this doesn't mean that there isn't plenty of revisionism and evidence that the Soviets were on alright terms with reactionary governments. For instance in the Zaire article it never mentions Mobutu being a reactionary. It just says that before his 1965 coup the Congolese political situation was quite disruptive. Then he came along, founded a one-party state, proclaimed Lumumba a fallen hero (as if he wasn't involved in killing him to begin with), and engaged in various quasi-nationalist measures. There's no class analysis and it basically insinuates that Mobutu was, in Soviet eyes, a rather progressive figure.

Also note how any leftist current that was in disagreement with the USSR's official line was described as "petit-bourgeois", even though it is obvious that, say, Mao, Bordiga and Orwell had little in common.