perception of the number of deaths attributable to Stalin

[Black_Rose]

This thread's primary focus is not on the total number of deaths than can be attributed to Stalin (I personally accept a figure in the low-tens million), but the average person's perception of the number of deaths ascribed to his policies.

For instance, I found this:

http://rexcurry.net/socialism-red-flags-socialists1c.jpg

60 million is obviously based on an exaggerated figure.



Wikipedia says this:


Historians working after the Soviet Union's dissolution have estimated victim totals ranging from approximately 4 million to nearly 10 million, not including those who died in famines.[101] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#cite_note-100) Russian writer Vadim Erlikman, for example, makes the following estimates: executions, 1.5 million; gulags, 5 million; deportations, 1.7 million out of 7.5 million deported; and POWs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWs) and German civilians, 1 million – a total of about 9 million victims of repression.[102] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#cite_note-101)

Some have also included deaths of 6 to 8 million people in the 1932–1933 famine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_and_famines_in_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Unio n) as victims of Stalin's repression. This categorization is controversial however, as historians differ as to whether the famine was a deliberate part of the campaign of repression against kulaks and others,[51] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#cite_note-Ellman-50)[103] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#cite_note-Ellman2005-102)[104] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#cite_note-103)[105] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#cite_note-104)[106] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#cite_note-105) or simply an unintended consequence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequence) of the struggle over forced collectivization.[67] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#cite_note-davies-wheatcroft-2004-66)[107] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#cite_note-106)[108] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#cite_note-107)


Yes, anti-communists certainly used hyperbole to get a more "impressive" number. I am more interested in how embellished estimates are used to sully Stalin's legacy by anti-communists in propaganda campaigns, rather than trying to rehabilitate his legacy for the non-authoritarian leftists here.

-----------------
BTW, I have some respect for Stalin now.

[daft punk]

Stalin killed about 1 million, mostly wealthy peasants but a lot were army officers and socialists. There is nothing to respect Stalin for. These are the victims of the purges in the mid-late 1930s. There were also victims at the end of WW2 when various populations were shunted about in appalling conditions. Stalin was an anti-socialist, he abandoned socialism between 1924-8. Mao probably thought he was a socialist but his intention in China was to establish capitalism for 'several decades'. Hitler was never a socialist.

[runequester]

When a man starves to death in a communist country, it is the fault of communism.

When 35 million starve to death every year in modern free market countries, it is not the fault of capitalism.

I'd recommend Austin Murphy's "Triumph of Evil" which discusses this topic, drawing upon the information that was released from the KGB archives under Yeltsin.

http://redscans.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/austin-murphy-the-triumph-of-evil.pdf

[Krano]

Hard for me to take seriously any given figure when there are people parading with pictures like this.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

It seems the insane figures can always be traced back to Solzhenitsyn. More troubling to me than the general public in the West believing these numbers is the amount of leftists who will quote these figures without a thought to their origin.

[GallowsBird]

It seems the insane figures can always be traced back to Solzhenitsyn. More troubling to me than the general public in the West believing these numbers is the amount of leftists who will quote these figures without a thought to their origin.

Another is Robert Conquest whose job used to be propaganda against Socialist Countries such as the USSR (mostly) and China; he went on to become a principle script writer for Thatcher and Reagan. You'll also find many leftists quoting him as if he is some sort of (valid) authority.

[CommunityBeliever]

Comrades Stalin and Mao were the greatest builders of socialism in history, so naturally that makes them the greatest mass murderers in the eyes of the bourgeoisie media.

[Ocean Seal]

Yes Stalin killed 60 million people. In a nation of 150 million people.
That's 40% of the population. Yeah he definitely did that, never mind how logistically illogical that seems. I mean you pretty much have to give the half the nation rifles and tell them to shoot the other half. And of course it doesn't present itself like the smart option, but then again teh evilzzzzzz commies don't think, they just kill.
*And the fifth reason communists kill is for the sheer fun of it*

[artanis17]

The poster is there to show that Hitler the fool is innocent.

[Omsk]

Robert Conquest made many mistakes in his books,and he admited he had been playing with numbers:

In fact all our chains of evidence (treated, in general, somewhat conservatively) lead, though without any real precision, to some such figure.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York : The Macmillan Co., 1973, p. 702

We are not able to give exact figures in this field [numbers in the camps] any more than in the others.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York : The Macmillan Co., 1973, p. 706

Nevertheless, there is an invaluable accumulation of useful information on a wide variety of themes. The accounts are indeed scrappy and incomplete, and in some cases uncritically assembled on a basis more journalistic than scholarly.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York : The Macmillan Co., 1973, p. 750


Service also:

{Unproven and without supporting evidence}

He [Stalin] ordered the systematic killing of people on a massive scale
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 3

In applying physical and mental torment to his victims, he degraded them in the most humiliating fashion. He derived a deep satisfaction from this.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 5

Stalin had a gross personality disorder.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 10

In fact he was very far from being 'normal.' He had a vast desire to dominate, punish, and butcher.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 12

He had killed innumerable innocents in the Civil War.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 12

But his sense of traditional honor was non-existent.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 27

The Party General Secretary ordered the arrested individuals [engineers and industrial specialists] to be beaten into confessing to imaginary crimes.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 259

A succession of such trials occurred in 1929-30 Outside the RSFSR. there were trials of nationalists Torture, outlandish charges and learned-by-rote confessions became the norm. Hundreds of defendants were either shot or sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment.
[This is one of those statements which has a source but how do you know the source has any validity]
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 268

He demanded complete obedience and often interfered in their private lives.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 277

His [Vyshinsky] basic proposition that confession (which could be obtained by torture) was the queen of the modalities of judicial proof was music to Stalin’s ears.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 281

His memory was extraordinary, and he had his future victims marked down in a very long list.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 285

Yet his maladjusted personality was not the only factor at work.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 285

Quite possibly Stalin continued to have the odd fling with young communists; and, even if he was faithful to Nadya, she did not always believe him and was driven mad with jealousy.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 289

Stalin’s cultural program was an unstable mixture. He could kill artists at will and yet his policies were incapable of producing great art
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 305

At a time when peasants in several regions were so desperate that some turn to cannibalism,
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 311

They eat berries, fungi, rats and mice; and, when these had been consumed, peasants ate grass and bark.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 312

The verdict was execution by shooting. Zinoviev and Kamenev had been told that, if they confessed to involvement in the Kirov “conspiracy’ in 1934, their sentences would be commuted. But Stalin had tricked them.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 320

He never got over them: the beatings in his childhood,
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 344

Solitary again, Stalin had no peace of mind. He was a human explosion waiting to happen.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 345

His was a mind that found terror on a grand scale deeply congenial.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 345

Meanwhile Ordjonikidze’s brother had been shot on Stalin’s instructions.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 349

Tukhachevsky was shot on 11 June; he had signed a confession with a bloodstained hand after a horrific beating.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 349

Nearly all the accused [at the Bukharin trial] had been savagely beaten.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 355

Two days later [after the Bukharin trial] Stalin approved a further operation to purge “anti-Soviet elements.’ This time he wanted 57,200 people to be arrested across the USSR. Of these, he and Yezhov had agreed, fully 48,000 were to be rapidly tried by troiki and executed.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 355

He [Stalin] had killed Kaganovich’s brother Moisei
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 374

Stalin the Leader was multifaceted. He was a mass killer with psychological obsessions.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 379

Stalin had Maria Svanidze arrested in 1939 and sent to a labor camp. Her husband Alexander Svanidze also fell victim to the NKVD: he had been arrested in 1937 and was shot in 1941. Alexander behaved with extraordinary courage under torture and refused to confess or beg for mercy.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 434

Tortures previously reserved for non-communists were applied to Rajk, Pauker, and Slansky. The beatings were horrific.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 520

An administrative behemoth ran the USSR whose master was the pockmarked little psychopath.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 538

Mikhoels was killed in a car crash on Stalin’s orders in 1948.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 577


And i really wont even comment on that picture,yeah,like the one where Lenin is a "Bolshevik socialist" Hitler a "National Socialist" and Obama an "Democratic Socialist" . Its silly propaganda.


And for a quick note:

If Stalin killed 60 million,and 20 million died in the war,that means 80 million Soviet citizens perished,thats impossible.

[The Young Pioneer]

We all know that these three leaders had policies that led to many deaths. Each of these instances has created global discussion and hopefully awareness that strives towards preventing such things in the future.

It was bad, and we remember those individuals that were lost. But number arguments only lead to further ideological divisions, usually for political gain.

[runequester]

The poster is there to show that Hitler the fool is innocent.

It's part of a very long process of rehabilitating nazi Germany.

Fascism has been traditionally "open" to business, and plenty of western companies did indeed do business with the fascist states.

After 1945, when the threat of fascism had subsided, socialism remained, and worse still, represented an internal, persistent threat as well. Some of this could be fought by bombs and some by legal repressions, but the most important was the war of minds.

Hence why the old nazi propaganda was revived. It was important to establish that the soviets had murdered unbelievable amounts of people, in order to "upstage" the nazis and justify both repression against left movements, as well as massive arms spending and curtailing of civil liberties and positive rights.


It's really quite simple. Notice how it's all conveniently pushed aside today, when the left is reeling from its defeats, and china is supplying us with garbage consumer goods by the million tons?

[Rafiq]

Wrong chart.

Stalin killed 160 million (bear hands), Mao killed 120 million (bear hands), Hitler killed like 5 people.

[Caj]

Stalin killed 160 million (bear hands), Mao killed 120 million (bear hands), Hitler killed like 5 people.

And of course, that figure for Hitler is just grossly inflated western propaganda.

[daft punk]

Comrades Stalin and Mao were the greatest builders of socialism in history, so naturally that makes them the greatest mass murderers in the eyes of the bourgeoisie media.

You say that, but Stalin's favourite hobby was killing socialists and sabotaging revolutions. And Mao stated that his intention was several decades of capitalism. Even then Stalin didnt back Mao, he backed Chiang Kai-shek right up to 1948.

[Tovarisch]

Hitler definitely killed more than 11 million people attributed to him. Since Hitler kind of started the whole WWII thing, he should get the blame for most of its deaths. Hitler probably killed 30-40 million people if you factor in WWII

[Zulu]

You say that, but Stalin's favourite hobby was killing socialists and sabotaging revolutions. And Mao stated that his intention was several decades of capitalism. Even then Stalin didnt back Mao, he backed Chiang Kai-shek right up to 1948.

And your favorite hobby is trolling on forums by spewing trotskyist nonsense and using the word "Gulag" in plural, like "internets". Ain't it mate?

[daft punk]

And your favorite hobby is trolling on forums by spewing trotskyist nonsense and using the word "Gulag" in plural, like "internets". Ain't it mate?

And you have never shown a word I have said to be nonsense, and never will.

[daft punk]

Stalin killed a million or so in the purges. But he was responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Millions died during forced collectivisation. Stalin was partly responsible for the rise of Hitler and WW2. He was responsible of a series of fiascos in China. He was partly responsible for the Korean war and the Vietnam war. Also, the purges never really stopped in 1938. Also, after WW2 loads did as he shunted populations around.

The black book estimates 94 million killed by communism, but most are the result of Stalinism.



65 million in the People's Republic of China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_China)
20 million in the Soviet Union (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union)[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#cite_note-2)
2 million in Cambodia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodia)
2 million in North Korea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea)
1.7 million in Africa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa)
1.5 million in Afghanistan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan)
1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Bloc)
1 million in Vietnam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam)[4] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#cite_note-3)
150,000 in Latin America (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America)
10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power."(p. 4)

also, in China although millions died of hunger, there was an overall increase in life expectancy.

[thriller]

My history teacher (who says class doesn't exist in the US) says he killed over 100 million. Maybe once the red scare generations are gone people will stop exaggerating.

[Zulu]

And you have never shown a word I have said to be nonsense, and never will.

'cause I leave that job to Capt. Obvious.

[GallowsBird]

The black book estimates 94 million killed by communism, but most are the result of Stalinism.

You actually believe that the Black Book of Communism is a valid, accurate source? Surely, you jest!

Surely you do realise that even many Anti-Communists don't consider it an accurate and impartial source these days? :confused:

[Rafiq]

It's easy to just believe all of the Imperialist propaganda and brush it off with "Well, that's not my type of communism, that's stalinism".

[Omsk]

Stalin killed a million or so in the purges. But he was responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Millions died during forced collectivisation. Stalin was partly responsible for the rise of Hitler and WW2. He was responsible of a series of fiascos in China. He was partly responsible for the Korean war and the Vietnam war. Also, the purges never really stopped in 1938. Also, after WW2 loads did as he shunted populations around.

The black book estimates 94 million killed by communism, but most are the result of Stalinism.



65 million in the People's Republic of China (http://www.anonym.to/?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_China)
20 million in the Soviet Union (http://www.anonym.to/?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union)[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#cite_note-2)
2 million in Cambodia (http://www.anonym.to/?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodia)
2 million in North Korea (http://www.anonym.to/?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea)
1.7 million in Africa (http://www.anonym.to/?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa)
1.5 million in Afghanistan (http://www.anonym.to/?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan)
1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe (http://www.anonym.to/?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Bloc)
1 million in Vietnam (http://www.anonym.to/?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam)[4] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#cite_note-3)
150,000 in Latin America (http://www.anonym.to/?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America)
10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power."(p. 4)


You Trotskyites are unbelievable!You go so far in your blind hatred and lies aimed at Stalin that you would even say that Stalin is responsible for WW2,and not Hitler!Or the capitalist powers!

And to note on the Korean War: the Korean War was something Kim Il Sung started,not Stalin,and he had little to do with the start of the war,however,he did help the DPRK war effort.

And "good job" quoting the Black Book of Communism...

Do you understand that there are no "Marxists-Leninists" , "Trotskyists" or "Maoists" to the right-wingers?They do not see the differences,to them,we are all: "Commies" and we are all same to them.

Do you understand that they would use those "arguments" in a debate with both a Trotskyist,and an Marxist-Leninist.

[DrStrangelove]

The black book estimates 94 million killed by communism, but most are the result of Stalinism.

Actually, Stalin killed 100 billion people. Personally. With his bare hands. He also strangled puppies, drowned kittens, and didn't care for Noam Chomsky.

[Zulu]

Actually, Stalin killed 100 billion people. Personally. With his bare hands. He also strangled puppies, drowned kittens, and didn't care for Noam Chomsky.

He was one badass mothefucker!


Also, Time magazine misquoted him on that "No man - no problem" line. He actually said this:

http://img607.imageshack.us/img607/6797/theywereallbad.jpg

[NoMasters]

Stalin was responsible for about 30-40 million I believe.

And Mao is closer to 70.

[Rafiq]

Stalin was responsible for about 30-40 million I believe.

And Mao is closer to 70.

Yeah well judging from your posts, just about everything you believe: I wipe my ass with.

[Grenzer]

The failure of Stalin and the USSR speaks for itself, so I see no reason to lie or exaggerate. Typically when you take a closer look at the numbers, its revealed that most of it is pure bullshit.

30,000,000 is a number commonly attributed to Stalin. However, they usually count Stalin as "being responsible" for the death of every single Soviet casualty in World War 2, which is profoundly idiotic. That counts for 20,000,000 right there. These studies also tend to throw in the number of deaths that occurred during the famine, which is between 2,000,000 and 12,000,000. Probably toward the smaller limit of that.

In the end, you're left with the USSR during the Stalin era being responsible for a few million deaths, which is surely no small thing. Why exaggerate?

[NoMasters]

Stalin killed a million or so in the purges. But he was responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Millions died during forced collectivisation. Stalin was partly responsible for the rise of Hitler and WW2. He was responsible of a series of fiascos in China. He was partly responsible for the Korean war and the Vietnam war. Also, the purges never really stopped in 1938. Also, after WW2 loads did as he shunted populations around.

The black book estimates 94 million killed by communism, but most are the result of Stalinism.



65 million in the People's Republic of China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_China)
20 million in the Soviet Union (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union)[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#cite_note-2)
2 million in Cambodia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodia)
2 million in North Korea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea)
1.7 million in Africa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa)
1.5 million in Afghanistan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan)
1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Bloc)
1 million in Vietnam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam)[4] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#cite_note-3)
150,000 in Latin America (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America)
10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power."(p. 4)

also, in China although millions died of hunger, there was an overall increase in life expectancy.

Democide?

If it is I applaud you

[runequester]

It's easy to just believe all of the Imperialist propaganda and brush it off with "Well, that's not my type of communism, that's stalinism".

No True Scotsman seems to apply here.

[CommunityBeliever]

And Mao is closer to 70.

Mao killed close to 70 people? That sounds about right, he may have had to kill a few dozen in the civil war.

[NoMasters]

Mao killed close to 70 people? That sounds about right, he may have had to kill a few dozen in the civil war.

Hahaha

[Yuppie Grinder]

Hitler definitely killed more than 11 million people attributed to him. Since Hitler kind of started the whole WWII thing, he should get the blame for most of its deaths. Hitler probably killed 30-40 million people if you factor in WWII

You can believe your great man history all you want, but one man does not start something like WWII, the German Bourgeoisie are responsible for those deaths. Hitler was a pawn. A cowardly, incompetent, loathsome man can't do that sort of thing by themselves, nobody can.

[Os Cangaceiros]

The numbers of those killed under Stalin's tenure are inflated, but I don't really know how that's very significant. For example, the hundreds of thousands who were killed by the nationalists in the aftermath of the Spanish civil war is seen, justly, as a horrifying crime, but somehow when it happens under an ostensibly left-wing regime it's "all just numbers". For some people every incident ranging from an act of racist police brutality on up cuts deeply into their socialist soul, but when it comes to a judicial system that imprisoned and killed hundreds of thousands, millions even? Eh, shrug.

I don't think that legacy is worth defending.

[Grenzer]

The numbers of those killed under Stalin's tenure are inflated, but I don't really know how that's very significant. For example, the hundreds of thousands who were killed by the nationalists in the aftermath of the Spanish civil war is seen, justly, as a horrifying crime, but somehow when it happens under an ostensibly left-wing regime it's "all just numbers". For some people every incident ranging from an act of racist police brutality on up cuts deeply into their socialist soul, but when it comes to a judicial system that imprisoned and killed hundreds of thousands, millions even? Eh, shrug.

I don't think that legacy is worth defending.

I can understand your feelings, but what are we supposed to do, say that he was a terrible monster and completely abandon material analysis?

Whether we like it or not, so long as we work under the constraints of bourgeois society, Stalin and the USSR is going to be associated with Communism. The best thing to do is to tell the truth, Stalin's real inadequacies speak for themselves well enough. Personally I believe that the USSR was state capitalist, but this sort of claim will always be met with cries of "No True Scotsman" by capitalists. Since the only adopt a material outlook when it suits their interests, it's a game we have to play by.

Kind of sad an annoying in a way. This whole "body count" thing is a complete farce. The bourgeois and their apologists don't really give a shit about how many people died, and in a way it doesn't really matter. I say this because it's making an emotional appeal, not an intellectual one. If you really want to play a tit-for-tat game capitalists would lose, and they know that. Claiming that "Socialism killed x amount of people" is not a valid argument for discrediting it in my opinion, just as saying that capitalism is responsible for killing untold people by itself isn't a convincing argument.

[NoMasters]

Yeah well judging from your posts, just about everything you believe: I wipe my ass with.

You are in denial if you don't think that Stalin was responsible for at least, AT LEAST, 10 million deaths.

[Zostrianos]

Most sources I have seen puts Stalin and Hitler at around 20 million each. According to historian Timothy Snyder, Hitler actually killed more people than Stalin (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/?pagination=false):

The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations....

Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. The total figure for the entire Stalinist period is likely between two million and three million. The Great Terror and other shooting actions killed no more than a million people, probably a bit fewer. The largest human catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of 1930–1933, in which more than five million people died....

All in all, the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included. For the Soviets during the Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately six million and nine million. These figures are of course subject to revision, but it is very unlikely that the consensus will change again as radically as it has since the opening of Eastern European archives in the 1990s.


Overall the Nazis were much more effective killers than the NKVD: Stalin didn't have gas chambers and mobile gas vans like the Nazis, and stalinist terror was usually more sporadic than Hitler's savage exterminations. Especially remarkable and horrifying is that Hitler killed more people in his 12 years in power than Stalin in nearly 30 years of rule.

Here's a reasonable death toll of Nazi and Stalinist terror in eastern Europe, from Bloodlands:

The count of fourteen million mortal victims of deliberate killing policies in the bloodlands is the sum of the following approximate figures, defended in the text and notes: 3.3 million Soviet citizens (mostly Ukrainians) deliberately starved by their own government in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933; three hundred thousand Soviet citizens (mostly Poles and Ukrainians) shot by their own government in the western USSR among the roughly seven hundred thousand victims of the Great Terror of 1937-1938; two hundred thousand Polish citizens (mostly Poles) shot by German and Soviet forces in occupied Poland in 1939-1941; 4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) starved by the German occupiers in 1941-1944; 5.4 million Jews (most of them Polish or Soviet citizens) gassed or shot by the Germans in 1941-1944; and seven hundred thousand civilians (mostly Belarusians and Poles) shot by the Germans in “reprisals” chiefly in Belarus and Warsaw in 1941-1944.

As for Mao, the 60 million figure goes to him. From what I had read however, Mao only killed around 2 million people (and I use only in a relative sense), and the other 50-something millions died of famines as a result of the Great Leap Forward and other failed plans.

[runequester]

You are in denial if you don't think that Stalin was responsible for at least, AT LEAST, 10 million deaths.



The claim that Stalin and other Soviet leaders killed millions (Conquest 1990) also appears to be wildly exaggerated. More recent evidence from the Soviet archives opened up by the anticommunist Yeltsin government indicate that the total number of death sentences (including of both existing prisoners and those outside captivity) over the 1921-1953 period (covering the period of Stalin's partial and complete rule) was between 755.866 and 786.098 (Getty, Rittersporn and Zemskov 1993). Given that the archive data originates from anti-stalin (and even anticommunist) sources, it is extremely unlikely that they underestimate the true number (Thurston 1996). In addition, the soviet union has long admitted to executing at least 12.733 people between 1917 and 1921, mostly during the Foreign Interventionist Civil War of 1918-22, although it is possible that as many as 40.000 more may have been executed unofficially (Andics 1969). These data would seem to imply about 800.000 executions

He goes on to discuss that many death sentences may not have been carried out, giving a 60% figure for 1940.


Here's the thing:

Its entirely possible to disdain Stalin for that number of deaths. We need to understand why they happened, in what context, but we are not serving anyone by repeating the figures that were invented to rehabilitate fascism and nazi germany.
Ditto for the mass famines in the 30s. Some of this was preventable and some was not. Some was inflicted, and some was uncontrollable. THere's valid criticism here, so let's discuss HOW do you feed a significant population from a poor agricultural base in disastrous harvests?

The bickering about numbers that even anti-communist historians have started to question brings us nowhere, comrades

[Os Cangaceiros]

I can understand your feelings, but what are we supposed to do, say that he was a terrible monster and completely abandon material analysis?

Is that really how my post came off to you?

[NoMasters]

"How long will you keep killing people?" asked Lady Astor of Stalin in 1931.
Replied Stalin, "the process would continue as long as was necessary" to establish a communist society.

Stalin committed the same atrocities Hitler did. ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE.

5,000,000 Ukrainians, 7,000,000 peasants who had resisted collectivization, over 1,000,000 party members during the Great Terror.

http://hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB1A.GIF

At the best, Stalin killed only 20,000,000. Or rather, genocided. And more than likely it is somewhere around 40,000,000.

To say that is inflated because of western imperialism is laughable. Even if that were the case, you should STRONGLY condemn the murder by Stalin to the same degree of that of Hitler.

[runequester]

Drink every time the words "estimate", "presumed", "assumptions" show up on that chart.

[NoMasters]

Drink every time the words "estimate", "presumed", "assumptions" show up on that chart.

Do you want pictures?

I think Stalin might have some pictures where he didn't take people out.

[runequester]

Do you want pictures?

I think Stalin might have some pictures where he didn't take people out.

Again, nobody is disputing that executions occured. As I quoted above, when Yeltsin had the archives opened, they reported about 800.000 executions. This of course includes "common" criminals as well as political enemies.

Unless we're assuming that an exiled ukrainian who admitted that he was more or less guessing had access to better information than the horrifying police state that shot the people

[NoMasters]

Again, nobody is disputing that executions occured. As I quoted above, when Yeltsin had the archives opened, they reported about 800.000 executions. This of course includes "common" criminals as well as political enemies.

Unless we're assuming that an exiled ukrainian who admitted that he was more or less guessing had access to better information than the horrifying police state that shot the people


I am truly disappointed that those that call themselves Leftists would for a second not only say that Stalin didn't kill over 10,000,000 people, but also not condemn Stalin to the fullest for his genocide and crimes committed on the Russian people.

[runequester]

I am truly disappointed that those that call themselves Leftists would for a second not only say that Stalin didn't kill over 10,000,000 people, but also not condemn Stalin to the fullest for his genocide and crimes committed on the Russian people.

You're avoiding addressing what I quoted above.

In any event, let me quote myself from slightly earlier in the thread


Its entirely possible to disdain Stalin for that number of deaths. We need to understand why they happened, in what context, but we are not serving anyone by repeating the figures that were invented to rehabilitate fascism and nazi germany.
Ditto for the mass famines in the 30s. Some of this was preventable and some was not. Some was inflicted, and some was uncontrollable. THere's valid criticism here, so let's discuss HOW do you feed a significant population from a poor agricultural base in disastrous harvests?


Spelling errors included as they were the first time.

[NoMasters]

You're avoiding addressing what I quoted above.

In any event, let me quote myself from slightly earlier in the thread



Spelling errors included as they were the first time.

I don't care what you said above. Its useless.

The point is, it doesn't matter if a person died for no reason, to real leftists, that should be a crime to humanity.

Stalin was a murderer, a man of genocide and authority, and thus should be expelled from all leftist thinking to the maximum.

Stalin is in my list of evil people just like Hitler.

To even discuss any type of relativism in the amount of deaths has no use. He killed at least 20,000,000 people and did it to increase his own power. For that, he should've been chopped like King Louis.

[runequester]

Simple answers to complex questions are always incorrect answers.

[NoMasters]

Simple answers to complex questions are always incorrect answers.

What is so complex about murder by Stalin?

You are making it complex, thus accepting even the discussion of murder.

Complexity is just doublespeak for control by confusion.

Once again, you still aren't strongly condemning all actions by Stalin during his genocide of the Russian "comrades".

[Zulu]

5,000,000 Ukrainians, 7,000,000 peasants who had resisted collectivization, over 1,000,000 party members during the Great Terror.

At the best, Stalin killed only 20,000,000. Or rather, genocided. And more than likely it is somewhere around 40,000,000.


5 + 7* + 1 = 20. maybe 40.

Anti-Stalin arithmetic at it's finest.


________
* Out of 7 million peasants supposed killed resisting arrest collectivization 5 million supposedly were those supposed Ukranians.

[Ostrinski]

Stop replying to this guy.

[NoMasters]

5 + 7* + 1 = 20. maybe 40.

Anti-Stalin arithmetic at it's finest.


________
* Out of 7 million peasants supposed killed resisting arrest collectivization 5 million supposedly were those supposed Ukranians.

20 million proven to be murdered. Over 30 million died indirectly because of his policies. Mass starvation etc.

Nove: 3.1-3.2M in Ukraine, 1933
Maksudov: 4.4M in Ukraine, 1927-38
Mace: 5-7M in Ukraine
Osokin: 3.35M in USSR, 1933
Wheatcraft: 4-5M in USSR, 1932-33
Conquest: Total, USSR, 1926-37: 11M
1932-33: 7M
Ukraine: 5M

And those are what we know, or assume based on some evidence.

Imagine if the world had the technology we have today. Those numbers would be much clearer.

I do not care, Stalin killed more than any other Western Imperialists combined, and for some reason he is even allowed to be discussed in these forums.

Pathetic

[Omsk]

This is by no means a discussion,this is a wild number-throwing fest with no supporting information.

Now first let me say a number of words related to the many questions raised in this thread:

All these "proved sources" come from,of course,right-wingers,and they had good reasons to demonize Stalin.


From an anti-Communist point of view, Stalin was certainly one of the great villains of history. While he lived, the Red forces consolidated their power in one country and then led what seemed to be an irresistible worldwide revolutionary upsurge. By the time he died, near hysteria reigned in the citadels of capitalism. In Washington, frenzied witch hunts tried to ferret out the Red menace that was supposedly about to seize control of the last great bastion of capitalism. All this changed, for the time being, after Stalin's death, when the counter-revolutionary forces were able to seize control even within the Soviet Union.
...the bourgeois world view, based on competition, ambition, and the quest for personal profit and power and and portraying "human nature" as corrupt, vicious, and selfish, that is, as the mirror image of bourgeois man.
Franklin, Bruce, Ed. The Essential Stalin; Major Theoretical Writings. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, p. 37

The very image of Stalin we have,is wrong.

I have made these remarks at the opening of the present chapter because when I was in Moscow one of the first things that struck me forcibly was the attempt made by writers and even photographers to give a false impression of the Russian dictator, Stalin. The picture which one sees of him at every turn of the street and those that are sent for publication abroad are as unreal and untrue as the numerous stories that are published about him in books and newspapers and periodicals. In the new Russia there seems to be an overpowering craze for public hero-worship. Under this influence writers and artists strive to transfigure outstanding individuals of the Soviet regime into idealized types or symbols of some subjective emotion of the crowd. Hence we have a widespread falsification that in the first instance is detrimental to the individual who is the subject of this legend-monitoring. Stalin is a particular victim of this public craze....
From the portraits I had seen of him and from the stories I had heard and read, and from the sound of his name, which does not suit him at all, I had expected to meet a Grand Duke of the old regime, stern and abrupt and unfriendly. But instead of this type of person I found myself for the first time face-to-face with the dictator to whose care I would readily confide the education of my children. I had read that he does not show himself in public because his face has been much disfigured by smallpox. But as a matter of fact scarcely any traces of the scars are to be seen. I had also read that he always had an escort of five motor cars when he makes his daily journey to and fro between the city and his country home at Gorky, the palatial residence where Lenin lived during his illness and where he died. It is said to be guarded day and night by heavily armed Cossacks. One is told everywhere in Moscow that Stalin enters the Kremlin each day by a different gate and that when he takes his meals the table is furnished with the gold plate that belonged to the Czar. Popular rumor even goes to the extent of declaring that he keeps his young wife locked up at home, as if he were a Turkish Sultan.
The truth is otherwise. He has never entered the palace at Gorky since Lenin's death. When I visited him in Moscow he was living with his wife and children in a modest little house outside the city. He goes to his office alone in his own car and enters by the same gate every day, without receiving any special salute from the sentry on guard. He lives and eats as the average small tradesman does. He is very orderly and very particular about the distribution of the working time at his disposal. His tastes are quite simple, and practically the only form of entertainment he indulges in is that of the ordinary workman who sits down once in a while to a glass of wine in the company of a few friends.
He has often been pictured as an aristocratic freebooter from the Caucasus. But I could see no traces of that character in him. Nor could I imagine him as the Georgian adventurer who is said to have taken Ivan the Terrible as his model. Even the historical insinuations are incorrect here,... When I visited Stalin I found just a lonely man who is not influenced by money or pleasure or even ambition. Though he holds enormous power he takes no pride in its possession, although it must give him a certain amount of satisfaction to feel that he has triumphed over his opponents. I should say that there are two traits that dominate Stalin's character. The first is the habit of patience, which he has cultivated to a supreme degree, and the second is his ability to depend entirely on himself and entrust nothing to his fellow men. These qualities are found generally in men who move slowly and carefully towards their ends. I need not mention here his extraordinary energy, because that is a quality in all constructive men.
Everything about this man is heavy-- his gait, his look, even the movements of his will. He has a habit of laughing often as he talks.... He can carry through a policy or plan with plotting perseverance to its completion without suffering the slightest discouragement at the hitches and set-backs that occur during the effort.
...If my intuition be correct Stalin is naturally good-hearted. But his position has made him hard and unyielding. He is not without imagination, but he denies himself the luxury of indulging in its flights. He is not ambitious,...
Ludwig, Emil. Leaders of Europe. London: I. Nicholson and Watson Ltd., 1934, p. 350-352

For how much years,have we listened to : Proved sources?

70 million?40 million?10010109390135u02498 million?

Can you people stop throwing numbers like that,out from you pocket.

Even the most anti-Stalin authors recognize the situation:


(Sheila Fitzpatrick)
From the recent researches of Zemskov and Dugin in the NKVD archives, it appears that the highest Western estimates on the size and mortality rate of the GULAG'S convict population were substantially exaggerated.
[Footnote: Conquest's estimate of 8 million political prisoners (not including common criminals) in labor camps at the end of 1938 is almost 20 times greater than the figure of under half a million "politicals" in the GULAG cited by Dugin from the NKVD archives, and four times as great as the total GULAG and prison population cited by Zemskov from the same source. According to Zemskov's figures, the entire convict population (including both "politicals" and "criminals") of the GULAG'S labor camps and labor colonies on January 1, 1939, numbered 1,672,438, with an additional 350,538 prisoners held in jails in mid-January of the same year--a total of a little over 2 million.]
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 248

You people also fail to understand what is a purge.

How many people were admited back to the party after being purges?A lot.


The criticism of regional party chiefs in early 1937 also revisited the issue of who had been wrongly expelled in the recently completed membership screenings of 1935-36: the verification and exchange of party documents. As we have seen, those operations had been under the control of the regional chiefs themselves and had resulted in mass expulsions of rank-and-file party members; only rarely were any full-time party officials expelled in these screenings.
In June 1936, Stalin and others complained about this practice and ordered the territorial leaders to "correct mistakes" by speeding up appeals and readmissions of those who had been expelled for no good reason. At that time, Stalin interrupted Yezhov's speech to note that the screenings were being directed against the wrong targets. In early March 1937, top-level Moscow leaders again denounced the "heartless and bureaucratic" repression of "little people." Malenkov noted that more than 100,000 of those expelled had been kicked out for little or no reason, while Trotskyists who occupied party leadership posts had passed through the screenings with little difficulty.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 358

{again- Anti-Stalin source}

Kamenev,Bukharin,they all had their second chance.

[NoMasters]

Stalin cannot be demonized anymore than he already is.

There is no difference in killing 1 million or 100 million. Murder is murder. Stalin murdered, in mass numbers. Far exceeding the Holocaust.

[Omsk]

Do you know how many people died in the Holocaust?

[Zostrianos]

Stalin cannot be demonized anymore than he already is.
There is no difference in killing 1 million or 100 million. Murder is murder. Stalin murdered, in mass numbers. Far exceeding the Holocaust.

Actually like I had posted before, the Nazis killed more people than Stalin. It doesn't make Stalin any better, but Hitler was a much more effective killer, and managed to kill more people in 12 years than Stalin in nearly 30

[NoMasters]

13 million. About half to a quarter of what Stalin killed.

That is the Holocaust. Not WWII.

Then we will just spiral into historical arguments.

[Zostrianos]

Here it is again people:



The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations....

Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. The total figure for the entire Stalinist period is likely between two million and three million. The Great Terror and other shooting actions killed no more than a million people, probably a bit fewer. The largest human catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of 1930–1933, in which more than five million people died....

All in all, the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included. For the Soviets during the Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately six million and nine million. These figures are of course subject to revision, but it is very unlikely that the consensus will change again as radically as it has since the opening of Eastern European archives in the 1990s.

The count of fourteen million mortal victims of deliberate killing policies in the bloodlands is the sum of the following approximate figures, defended in the text and notes: 3.3 million Soviet citizens (mostly Ukrainians) deliberately starved by their own government in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933; three hundred thousand Soviet citizens (mostly Poles and Ukrainians) shot by their own government in the western USSR among the roughly seven hundred thousand victims of the Great Terror of 1937-1938; two hundred thousand Polish citizens (mostly Poles) shot by German and Soviet forces in occupied Poland in 1939-1941; 4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) starved by the German occupiers in 1941-1944; 5.4 million Jews (most of them Polish or Soviet citizens) gassed or shot by the Germans in 1941-1944; and seven hundred thousand civilians (mostly Belarusians and Poles) shot by the Germans in “reprisals” chiefly in Belarus and Warsaw in 1941-1944.

[NoMasters]

You can't be serious?

Let a scholar spit some knowledge

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB1.1.GIF

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB1A.GIF

[Omsk]

I am still waiting for NoMasters to atually bring some supporting evidence,books,quotes,even wikipedia?

Oh,the two links you provided are hardly valid.60 million?Hardly.

And they include people who lost their lives from 1917- .

[Zostrianos]

You can't be serious?
Let a scholar spit some knowledge
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB1.1.GIF
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB1A.GIF

What I posted was the latest estimate by scholar Timothy Snyder. You can find the full article here:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/?pagination=false

[NoMasters]

Overall numbers
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB1A.GIF (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB1A.GIF)

Stalin twilight
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB8A.GIF

WWII
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB7A.GIF

Pre-WWII
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB6A.GIF

Stalin Great Terror
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB5A.GIF

Stalin Collectivization
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB4A.GIF

At least 40 million.

[Zostrianos]

Well then, I don't know what else to say. I think I'm still with Snyder on this one, since it's the most recent assessment. It seems every writer has a different one....

[runequester]

Again, drink each time you read the words "assumed" and "estimate". Drink twice whenever you see Solzhenitsyn and Conquest listed.

Have you ever, in your life, questioned something told to you by your government?

[Omsk]

Are you aware that Conquest peronsally said that his research regarding the number of the people who died,was not precise,and was,"journalistic" ?

ie: maximized.



In fact all our chains of evidence (treated, in general, somewhat conservatively) lead, though without any real precision, to some such figure.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York : The Macmillan Co., 1973, p. 702

We are not able to give exact figures in this field [numbers in the camps] any more than in the others.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York : The Macmillan Co., 1973, p. 706

Nevertheless, there is an invaluable accumulation of useful information on a wide variety of themes. The accounts are indeed scrappy and incomplete, and in some cases uncritically assembled on a basis more journalistic than scholarly.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York : The Macmillan Co., 1973, p. 750

[Rafiq]

Nomasters is just pulling this shit out of his ass because he comes from a Fascist albanian family.

[daft punk]

You actually believe that the Black Book of Communism is a valid, accurate source? Surely, you jest!

Surely you do realise that even many Anti-Communists don't consider it an accurate and impartial source these days? :confused:

well Stalinism did cause millions of deaths. The Black book doesnt include the fact that Stalinists allowed Hitler to take power. I did also say that as well as millions of Chinese who died you have to factor in a longer overall life expectancy. I did not say it was accurate and it certainly isnt impartial.


It's easy to just believe all of the Imperialist propaganda and brush it off with "Well, that's not my type of communism, that's stalinism".

nobody is doing that. Stalinism is not communism



You Trotskyites are unbelievable!You go so far in your blind hatred and lies aimed at Stalin that you would even say that Stalin is responsible for WW2,and not Hitler!Or the capitalist powers!

And to note on the Korean War: the Korean War was something Kim Il Sung started,not Stalin,and he had little to do with the start of the war,however,he did help the DPRK war effort.

And "good job" quoting the Black Book of Communism...

Do you understand that there are no "Marxists-Leninists" , "Trotskyists" or "Maoists" to the right-wingers?They do not see the differences,to them,we are all: "Commies" and we are all same to them.

Do you understand that they would use those "arguments" in a debate with both a Trotskyist,and an Marxist-Leninist.

I said Stalinists were partly responsible for the rise of Hitler and WW2. Well that is a fact. Trotsky warned of the danger and urged the german Communists to unite with the social democrat workers to stop fascism. Instead the Communists formed a brief alliance with the fascists in 1931! And refused to work with the social democrats, denouncing them as 'social fascists' until it was too late.

The Korean war was the result of the USSR and America chopping Korea in half, plus Stalin installed Kim.

"Do you understand that they would use those "arguments" in a debate with both a Trotskyist,and an Marxist-Leninist."
dunno what you mean



"originally Posted by NoMasters http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2352896#post2352896) I am truly disappointed that those that call themselves Leftists would for a second not only say that Stalin didn't kill over 10,000,000 people, but also not condemn Stalin to the fullest for his genocide and crimes committed on the Russian people. "

You're avoiding addressing what I quoted above.

In any event, let me quote myself from slightly earlier in the thread

"Originally Posted by myself
Its entirely possible to disdain Stalin for that number of deaths. We need to understand why they happened, in what context, but we are not serving anyone by repeating the figures that were invented to rehabilitate fascism and nazi germany.
Ditto for the mass famines in the 30s. Some of this was preventable and some was not. Some was inflicted, and some was uncontrollable. THere's valid criticism here, so let's discuss HOW do you feed a significant population from a poor agricultural base in disastrous harvests? "



Spelling errors included as they were the first time.

Trotsky advocated the same as Lenin. Tax the rich to keep them down, and to pay for building industry plus subsidised coops for the poor peasants. Stalin did the opposite and kicked Trotsky out. Trotsky's predictions came true. There was a shortage of grain available to the government. Stalin either had to raise the price or requisition. He did the latter. The kulaks resisted so he collectivised. Tortsky had urged collectivisation all along. Stalin did it too fast, too late, very brutally, and for the wrong reasons.

Several million died of hunger in the years that followed this sudden U-turn.




All these "proved sources" come from,of course,right-wingers,and they had good reasons to demonize Stalin.

Omsk, you are wrong about all this. Stalin was the anti-communist. He purged the communists. He sabotaged revolutions. He tried to ensure China and Eastern Europe became capitalist. The sources are not anti-communist, many are communist. Some communists survived to tell the tale.

[Zulu]

I said Stalinists were partly responsible for the rise of Hitler and WW2. Well that is a fact. Trotsky warned of the danger and urged the german Communists to unite with the social democrat workers to stop fascism. Instead the Communists formed a brief alliance with the fascists in 1931! And refused to work with the social democrats, denouncing them as 'social fascists' until it was too late.

I think it's actually Trotsky's fault. If it wasn't for him, the Stalinists would have never created the USSR in the first place, right?

[runequester]

Are there actually any solid studies available on what the effect of the famines would have been, if the kulaks had remained in control of the farm land, when the failed harvests and bad weather hit?

Most pop-history assumes "collectivisation = death" but it obviously worked fine for the next 60 years. I'd love to see some actual statistical analysis.

[manic expression]

well Stalinism did cause millions of deaths. The Black book doesnt include the fact that Stalinists allowed Hitler to take power.
haha, you actually believe that? Stalin didn't even have complete control over the party in 1933, much less Germany. :rolleyes: You probably think Stalin framed Roger Rabbit, too.

[Omsk]

"Do you understand that they would use those "arguments" in a debate with both a Trotskyist,and an Marxist-Leninist."
dunno what you mean



Thats the problem.

To a right-winger,it does not matter who you "support" , Trotsky,Stalin,Mao,Lenin,etc etc,to right-wingers,we are all just "commies".

In a debate,they would use these "numbers" against you,me or any other user,in an attempt to discredit communism.

They dont care about Trotsky,or Stalin,all they care is that communism is demonized.

And you are not helping us "defend" communism by spreading such vicious anti-communist propaganda.


Omsk, you are wrong about all this. Stalin was the anti-communist. He purged the communists. He sabotaged revolutions. He tried to ensure China and Eastern Europe became capitalist. The sources are not anti-communist, many are communist. Some communists survived to tell the tale.

What?Are you joking,the "Black Books of Communism" is written by communists?

What?



I said Stalinists were partly responsible for the rise of Hitler and WW2. Well that is a fact. Trotsky warned of the danger and urged the german Communists to unite with the social democrat workers to stop fascism. Instead the Communists formed a brief alliance with the fascists in 1931! And refused to work with the social democrats, denouncing them as 'social fascists' until it was too late.


The main reason of the Hitlerite victory is capitalism,you completely left out any economic factors.

[runequester]

Thats the problem.

To a right-winger,it does not matter who you "support" , Trotsky,Stalin,Mao,Lenin,etc etc,to right-wingers,we are all just "commies".

In a debate,they would use these "numbers" against you,me or any other user,in an attempt to discredit communism as an idea.

They dont care about Trotsky,or Stalin,all they care is that communism is demonized.

And you are not helping us "defend" communism by spreading such vicious anti-communist propaganda.

Comrade Omsk here is exactly on the money.

Capitalist press will mention Trotsky repeatedly and for one very specific reason:

He serves in their view to delegitimize the soviet regime.

This has absolutely nothing to do with them preferring Trotsky in any way (the organiser of the red army, proponent of perpetual armed revolution in europe and a heavy hand in the red terror). They would hate him just as much, if he had controlled the USSR.

They will bring him up for the simple reason that he opposed the USSR. Same reason the US government gave support to some trotskyist groups, to help undermine soviet influence.

[Zulu]

Same reason the US government gave support to some trotskyist groups, to help undermine soviet influence.

And in their enormous gratitude for this support, Trotsky's fanboys throw Conquest's bullshit around in spades. That figures.

[Rooster]

Most pop-history assumes "collectivisation = death" but it obviously worked fine for the next 60 years. I'd love to see some actual statistical analysis.

It didn't. The USSR was one of the biggest recipients of US food aid.

[Zulu]

It didn't. The USSR was one of the biggest recipients of US food aid.

You mean the USSR began buying wheat on the foreign market in the 60s after Khrushchev's piss-poor reforms?

Until then the Soviets only exported it and managed to urbanize the country in the process.

[Zostrianos]

Stalin was the anti-communist. He purged the communists. He sabotaged revolutions. He tried to ensure China and Eastern Europe became capitalist. The sources are not anti-communist, many are communist. Some communists survived to tell the tale.

Stalin's treachery and hypocrisy was incredible. When he was allied with Hitler, he arrested German communists who had fled into Russia to escape the Nazis, and handed them over to the Gestapo who promptly executed them. I recall reading somewhere that Stalin killed as many communists as the Nazis and maybe more....

Later, in 1944-45, he promised the Poles that Soviet troops would come to their aid against the Nazis, and then as the Warsaw uprising was taking place, he ordered the troops to stand back and let the Nazis destroy the city and kill most of the population (one of the main reasons being that Polish resistance fighters could cause trouble in a future Soviet Poland, so it made sense to Stalin to let the Nazis kill them all, rather than have to deal with them after)

Now, a lot of people are more sympathetic toward Stalin than Hitler because Hitler was a racist antisemite and Stalin was not. But the truth is that Stalin also cracked down on Jews (beginning in the late 1940's until his death), as he had become suspicious of them. It wasn't a fraction as bad as what they'd suffered under the Nazis, but many say that if Stalin hadn't died in 1953 he would have launched his own mass murder of Soviet Jews.

[Zulu]

When he was allied with Hitler,

Stalin was not allied with Hitler. Stalin had a non-aggression treaty with Hitler, same as both of them had with many other states.




Stalin also cracked down on Jews

He didn't crack down on Jews. He cracked on Zionists, the Jewish nationalists.

[Zostrianos]

The official reason was anti-Zionism, but the crackdown affected the Jewish community at large:

"In late 1948 and early 1949, public life in the Soviet Union veered toward anti-Semitism. The new line was set, indirectly but discernibly, by Pravda on 28 January 1949. An article on “unpatriotic theater critics,” who were “bearers of stateless cosmopolitanism,” began a campaign of denunciation of Jews in every sphere of professional life. Pravda purged itself of Jews in early March. Jewish officers were cashiered from the Red Army and Jewish activists removed from leadership positions in the communist party. A few dozen Jewish poets and novelists who used Russian literary pseudonyms found their real or prior names published in parentheses. Jewish writers who had taken an interest in Yiddish culture or in the German murder of Jews found themselves under arrest. As Grossman recalled, “Throughout the whole of the USSR it seemed that only Jews thieved and took bribes, only Jews were criminally indifferent towards the sufferings of the sick, and only Jews published vicious or badly written books." (Bloodlands, chapter 5)

Also Khruschev said in his memoirs that Stalin had a marked disdain for Jews as well.

[Omsk]

I recall reading somewhere that Stalin killed as many communists as the Nazis and maybe more....




A source maybe?Where did you hear such stories?

And i presume you are thinking of German communists? [Hitler killed 15.000 and arrested thousands more,who knows how many German communists died under Hitlers regime.]

On the other hand,there are stories that "Stalin killed more communists than Hitler" are completely false,and they,in their essence,are just rumores,lies and propaganda.



When he was allied with Hitler

He was not allied with Hitler,he knew the dangers of Nazism,and he fought Nazism from the start.Not to mention that he prepared for the conflict,and knew that Hitler would attack.


Later, in 1944-45, he promised the Poles that Soviet troops would come to their aid against the Nazis, and then as the Warsaw uprising was taking place, he ordered the troops to stand back and let the Nazis destroy the city and kill most of the population (one of the main reasons being that Polish resistance fighters could cause trouble in a future Soviet Poland, so it made sense to Stalin to let the Nazis kill them all, rather than have to deal with them after)


The Warsaw uprising was ill timed and misconceived.

The uprising was directed by the British,and organized by the emigre reactionary figures,and the Soviets were not informed about the event,they didnt know it would happen.

And plus,the Red Army was not in a position to properly support the uprising,although,it tried to.

The uprising was a gamble,they ignored the Soviets,and the Germans destroyed them.



Now, a lot of people are more sympathetic toward Stalin than Hitler because Hitler was a racist antisemite and Stalin was not. But the truth is that Stalin also cracked down on Jews (beginning in the late 1940's until his death), as he had become suspicious of them. It wasn't a fraction as bad as what they'd suffered under the Nazis, but many say that if Stalin hadn't died in 1953 he would have launched his own mass murder of Soviet Jews.



And now you tried to even Stalin and Hitler..

Hitler was a nationalist,a racist,an imperialist,and aggresive Fascist.He and Stalin had nothing in common.

And who are these "many" who say that Stalin would order some kind of an extermination of Soviet Jews?

Are they Nazis by any chance?


Also Khruschev said in his memoirs that Stalin had a marked disdain for Jews as well.

Khrushchov lied about many things.

[Zostrianos]

A source maybe?Where did you hear such stories?


I don't recall where, but I'll try and find it




He was not allied with Hitler,he knew the dangers of Nazism,and he fought Nazism from the start.Not to mention that he prepared for the conflict,and knew that Hitler would attack.

There was that yes, but they also collaborated, most notoriously when they imposed a reign of terror over Poland, and all but eradicated its educated classes and culture.




The Warsaw uprising was ill timed and misconceived.
The uprising was directed by the British,and organized by the emigre reactionary figures,and the Soviets were not informed about the event,they didnt know it would happen.
And plus,the Red Army was not in a position to properly support the uprising,although,it tried to.
The uprising was a gamble,they ignored the Soviets,and the Germans destroyed them.

There were many factors, but one of them was indeed the convenient destruction of Polish resistance. Even if the Red Army wasn't prepared, they could at least have done something to help out...



And now you tried to even Stalin and Hitler..


They were both dictators responsible for millions of deaths. Their motivations and ideologies differed entirely, but their actions mirrored each other.



And who are these "many" who say that Stalin would order some kind of an extermination of Soviet Jews?
Are they Nazis by any chance?

No. Most references I've seen to Stalinist anti-semitism mentions the likelihood of an eventual terror against the Jews had Stalin lived longer: "It is generally believed that Stalin's death on March 5 of that year prevented a major disaster to Soviet Jews." (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0019_0_19032.html) I'll find other references later if you want.

[Zulu]

The official reason was anti-Zionism, but the crackdown affected the Jewish community at large:

"In late 1948 and early 1949, public life in the Soviet Union veered toward anti-Semitism. The new line was set, indirectly but discernibly, by Pravda on 28 January 1949. An article on “unpatriotic theater critics,” who were “bearers of stateless cosmopolitanism,” began a campaign of denunciation of Jews in every sphere of professional life. Pravda purged itself of Jews in early March. Jewish officers were cashiered from the Red Army and Jewish activists removed from leadership positions in the communist party. A few dozen Jewish poets and novelists who used Russian literary pseudonyms found their real or prior names published in parentheses. Jewish writers who had taken an interest in Yiddish culture or in the German murder of Jews found themselves under arrest. As Grossman recalled, “Throughout the whole of the USSR it seemed that only Jews thieved and took bribes, only Jews were criminally indifferent towards the sufferings of the sick, and only Jews published vicious or badly written books." (Bloodlands, chapter 5)

As usual, everything is mixed into a mess of anti-soviet propaganda. First of all, how is purging undesirables from various social positions based on their expressed political views an anti-semitic campaign?

Discharging Jews from the Red Army had something to do with general demobilization after the WW2, and the first to get demobilized were cadres with important civilian specialties, who were badly needed to rebuild the country and continue its development, and many Jewish officers turned out to be just such men, so now it counts as anti-semitic too, right?

Jewish writers taking interest in Yiddish culture and the Holocaust made contacts with many foreign (read: imperialist) counterparts, which automatically put them on the watch-list. That's basic counterintelligence with a little class struggle flavor. Has somebody ever tried to present the blacklisting of the "commies" in Hollywood an anti-semitic campaign?

The only real project that was supposed to affect the Jewish community specifically was the creation of the Jewish Autonomus Region in the Altai region in the Far East. That was a response to the desire of many Jews to go live together in Israel. But many of the Jews were too valuable as specialists, so losing them to the imperialist puppet state of Israel would be a counter-revolutionary crime on Comrade Stalin's part, wouldn't it? So the idea was to provide those Jews who wanted it with the opportunity to have their own ethnic autonomy within the borders of the Soviet Union.




Also Khruschev said in his memoirs that Stalin had a marked disdain for Jews as well.

Khrushchev said a lot of things about Stalin that have been proven to be outright lie. However, even assuming Stalin had certain personal qualities that negatively affected his performance as a political leader, they are completely compensated for by the enormous achievements of the Soviet Union under his leadership. That is a fact and the truth.

Also it's a fact that there were many Jews in prominent positions in the Party, Soviet government, some of whom were quite close to Stalin personally or at least were his long time associates or aides. Litvinov, Kaganovitch, Mekhlis, Pauker, etc. The latter was shot in 1937, but until then he was Stalin's chief bodyguard! So it was a classic case of "He knew too much...", probably. But it's quite telling regarding Stalin's supposed anti-semitism: what kind of anti-semite would have a Jew on such an intimate position as personal bodyguard for more than a decade!

[El Chuncho]

Actually, Stalin killed 100 billion people. Personally. With his bare hands. He also strangled puppies, drowned kittens, and didn't care for Noam Chomsky.

You forgot that he used to eat babies for breakfast too.

http://mattsko.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/soviet-stalin-baby.jpg

''Mmm, yes, nice weight. This one will do''

[El Chuncho]

There was that yes, but they also collaborated, most notoriously when they imposed a reign of terror over Poland, and all but eradicated its educated classes and culture.

There were many factors, but one of them was indeed the convenient destruction of Polish resistance.




A neutrality pact is not an alliance.

As stated in a previous thread, The USSR and NAZI Germany only agreed to not meddle in their affairs concerning their respective spheres of interest. It meant, naturally that they had to compromise on Poland. However, what is commonly called ''Poland'' by Western sources also consisted of former Russian territory (''Western Ukraine and Byelo - Russia''), territories which contained many non-Polish peoples (Byelorussia = Belarus). It is these territories that the USSR wanted to reclaim from Poland, as they didn't consider them legitimate parts of Poland.

The Western propaganda view that they sat around a table saying ''we'll aid you in your invasion of Poland if you give us a cut of the land'' is nonsense, they agreed to not cross a boundary called the Curzon line.

Russian's interests stretched to the Curzon line, as the SU wanted to reclaim parts of Russia (with majority populations of Ukrainians and Byelorussians) lost after WWI.

NAZI Germany, on the other hand, wanted to claim parts of Poland which it believed it had a right to due to the Prussian Empire owning parts of Poland. They wanted to clear the area of Slavs to Germanicize it.

[daft punk]

I think it's actually Trotsky's fault. If it wasn't for him, the Stalinists would have never created the USSR in the first place, right?
Read this

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/11/oct.htm

explains why the revolution happened and why it was justified. It doesnt discuss the regime in the USSR because the Danish government banned him from talking about that.

oh, on the numbers thing, I though the number for the purges was about a million but a mainstream history site called spartacus said 7 million by 1941. Suppose it depends what you include.

[Zulu]

Read this

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/11/oct.htm

explains why the revolution happened and why it was justified. It doesnt discuss the regime in the USSR because the Danish government banned him from talking about that.
Does it explain such an opportunistic move as the Peace of Brest? Was it Stalin's idea too?





oh, on the numbers thing, I though the number for the purges was about a million but a mainstream history site called spartacus said 7 million by 1941. Suppose it depends what you include.
Sure. Some guys include all natural deaths and all the "unborn" of the shot public enemies. That's how you get those numbers reeeeealy scary!

[Comrade Auldnik]

The number I've come to accept is in the hundreds of thousands, most of which are not directly attributable to Stalin's order; they probably required his nominal approval, though.

[Zostrianos]

Ok, I found the references to Stalin's deportation of German communists:

By 1937 the Party had virtually disappeared. Stalin did the rest of the work. During the purges he had seven members of the exiled German Politburo murdered, and 41 of the 68 KPD émigrés liquidated; as a sign of good will he deported about five hundred German communists back to Germany after signing the Nazi Soviet pact. (1945: The War That Never Ended (http://books.google.ca/books?id=PTEV0CPuhRcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=1945:+The+War+That+Never+Ended&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bVozT4zMB4rG0AHMipHKAg&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=1945%3A%20The%20War%20That%20Never%20Ended&f=false), 376)

Also:
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/soviet.html

February 1940: Stalin arrests 570 German communists and delivers them to the Gestapo.

And:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0019_0_19032.html

During his rapprochement with Nazi Germany (1939–41) he suppressed in the Soviet press and radio all mention of Nazi antisemitism and anti-Jewish atrocities, but himself refrained from using anti-Jewish allusions while attacking the Western "imperialist" powers. He extradited to the Nazi regime German communists who had fled to the Soviet Union, many of them Jews.


A neutrality pact is not an alliance.
As stated in a previous thread, The USSR and NAZI Germany only agreed to not meddle in their affairs concerning their respective spheres of interest. It meant, naturally that they had to compromise on Poland. However, what is commonly called ''Poland'' by Western sources also consisted of former Russian territory (''Western Ukraine and Byelo - Russia''), territories which contained many non-Polish peoples (Byelorussia = Belarus). It is these territories that the USSR wanted to reclaim from Poland, as they didn't consider them legitimate parts of Poland.

The Western propaganda view that they sat around a table saying ''we'll aid you in your invasion of Poland if you give us a cut of the land'' is nonsense, they agreed to not cross a boundary called the Curzon line.

Russian's interests stretched to the Curzon line, as the SU wanted to reclaim parts of Russia (with majority populations of Ukrainians and Byelorussians) lost after WWI.

NAZI Germany, on the other hand, wanted to claim parts of Poland which it believed it had a right to due to the Prussian Empire owning parts of Poland. They wanted to clear the area of Slavs to Germanicize it.

This was more than a non aggression pact. Shortly after invading Poland, the Gestapo and NKVD had several meetings where they discussed how to most effectively terrorize Poland's resistance into submission (http://www.electronicmuseum.ca/Poland-WW2/ethnic_minorities_occupation/jews_foreword.html):

They also undertook a common struggle against the Polish independence movement - to suppress "all beginnings" of "Polish agitation" and to keep each other informed of their progress. In fact, this ushered in a period of close cooperation between the NKVD and the Gestapo. Contacts between the two organizations intensified and conferences were held to discuss how best to combat Polish resistance and eradicate Polish national existence. A joint instructional centre for officers of the NKVD and the Gestapo was opened at Zakopane in December 1939. The decision to massacre Polish officers at Katyn was taken concurrently with a conference of high officials of the Gestapo and NKVD convened in Zakopane on February 20, 1940. While the Soviets had undertaken the extermination of captured Polish officers, the Germans carried out (starting March 31) a parallel "Operation AB" aimed at destroying Poland's elites.

I think the bigger issue here is what came about as a result of this pact: the mass murder of 200,000 Poles, the destruction of the country's culture, and mass repression and terror. Even if Poland was originally a part of Russia, nothing justifies what he did to that country after invading. Even if the Nazi occupation was far more brutal, Stalin's was hardly any better for the Poles. Here's some info on what the Soviets did in Poland during that time (q.v. Snyder, Bloodlands, chapter 4, Molotov-Ribbentrop Europe):

In the background, the NKVD entered the country, in force. In the twenty-one months to come it made more arrests in occupied eastern Poland than in the entire Soviet Union, seizing some 109,400 Polish citizens. The typical sentence was eight years in the Gulag; about 8,513 people were sentenced to death....

On 4 December 1939 the Soviet politburo ordered the NKVD to arrange the expulsion of certain groups of Polish citizens deemed to pose a danger to the new order: military veterans, foresters, civil servants, policemen, and their families. Then, on one evening in February 1940, in temperatures of about forty below zero, the NKVD gathered them all: 139,794 people taken from their homes at night at gunpoint to unequipped freight trains bound for special settlements in distant Soviet Kazakhstan or Siberia. The entire course of life was changed before people knew what had happened to them. The special settlements, part of the Gulag system, were the forced-labor zones to which the kulaks had been sent ten years before.... (http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_025.html#fil epos1340734)

Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenty Beria had come to a conclusion, perhaps inspired by Stalin. Beria made clear in writing that he wanted the Polish prisoners of war dead. In a proposal to the politburo, and thus really to Stalin, Beria wrote on 5 March 1940 that each of the Polish prisoners was “just waiting to be released in order to enter actively into the battle against Soviet power.” He claimed that counterrevolutionary organizations in the new Soviet territories were led by former officers. Unlike the claims about the “Polish Military Organization” a couple of years before, this was no fantasy. The Soviet Union had occupied and annexed half of Poland, and some Poles were bound to resist. Perhaps twenty-five thousand of them took part in some kind of resistance organization in 1940. True, these organizations were quickly penetrated by the NKVD, and most of these people arrested: but the opposition was real and demonstrable. Beria used the reality of Polish resistance to justify his proposal for the prisoners—“to apply to them the supreme punishment: shooting.”41 (http://www.epubbud.com/Bloodlands_Europe_Between_Hitle_split_025.html#fil epos1345261)Stalin approved Beria’s recommendation, and the mechanisms of the Great Terror began again. Beria established a special troika to deal rapidly with the files of all of the Polish prisoners of war. It was empowered to disregard the recommendations of the previous interrogators, and to issue verdicts without any contact with the prisoners themselves. It seems that Beria established a quota for the killings, as had been done in 1937 and 1938: all of the prisoners at the three camps, plus six thousand people held in prisons in western Belarus and western Ukraine (three thousand in each), plus especially dangerous elements among noncommissioned officers who were not in captivity. After a quick examination of the files, ninety-seven percent of the Poles in the three camps, about 14,587 people, were sentenced to death. The exceptions were a few Soviet agents, people of ethnic German or Latvian background, and people with foreign protection. The six thousand from the prisons were also condemned to death, along with 1,305 other people who were arrested in April.

Ultimately, I think you should look at Stalin for what he did, not who he claimed to be (a Socialist). Look at what socialism is meant to achieve, to make the world a better place, to bring equality, liberation and power to the workers, the poor and downtrodden. Having this in mind, look at Stalin's record and see if he accomplished any of this. Then you'll understand why I could never defend him, and I find it shameful that Socialism's reputation was soiled by dictators like him.

[Zulu]

The so called "occupation" of Poland, and the Baltic states by the Soviet Union was not an occupation. It was liberation. Repressions against counter-revolutionary elements were a necessity. It's especially funny to hear how Stalin "destroyed the culture" of those countries, because it's essentially the same cry-baby bourgeois White emigrants' argument about how the Bolsheviks in general killed, jailed or exiled the best of the Russian people. (Nevermind after the loss of the "best of the best" the Soviet Union managed to be the first to launch a human into space...) But of course the revolutionary repression would come against the most cultured and educated people, because the most cultured and educated people before the revolution were the bourgeoisie, the class that had viciously usurped the access to culture and education! And then the revolution takes place, and removes the cultured usurpers from the way of the proletariat to that culture... And Trotskists here say that Stalin was a couterrevolutionary! Already after they've said he stole Trotsky's revolutionary program... That's just mind-boggling! I wish they made up their mind already.

[daft punk]

Does it explain such an opportunistic move as the Peace of Brest? Was it Stalin's idea too?


The peace treaty was Lenin's idea and was voted on democratically at the 4th congress of soviets.

[Zulu]

The peace treaty was Lenin's idea and was voted on democratically at the 4th congress of soviets.

But wasn't it kinda counter-revolutionary surrendering territories and agreeing to pay tribute to a capitalist state? Maybe Lenin was an enemy of socialism and wanted Germany to win the WWI?

[daft punk]

The so called "occupation" of Poland, and the Baltic states by the Soviet Union was not an occupation. It was liberation. Repressions against counter-revolutionary elements were a necessity. It's especially funny to hear how Stalin "destroyed the culture" of those countries, because it's essentially the same cry-baby bourgeois White emigrants' argument about how the Bolsheviks in general killed, jailed or exiled the best of the Russian people. (Nevermind after the loss of the "best of the best" the Soviet Union managed to be the first to launch a human into space...) But of course the revolutionary repression would come against the most cultured and educated people, because the most cultured and educated people before the revolution were the bourgeoisie, the class that had viciously usurped the access to culture and education! And then the revolution takes place, and removes the cultured usurpers from the way of the proletariat to that culture... And Trotskists here say that Stalin was a couterrevolutionary! Already after they've said he stole Trotsky's revolutionary program... That's just mind-boggling! I wish they made up their mind already.
Stalin occupied the Baltic States because they were part of the Russian Empire, because it was agreed with Churchill and Truman, and because the locals had collaborated with the Nazis.

Poland, let's talk about Poland. Stalin had dissolved the Polish Communist Party in 1938 and killed the Polish communists in Russia. During the war it was decided they needed communists there to lead the resistance so the parachuted some in. Most were killed but Wladyslaw Gomulka (http://www.marxists.org/subject/stalinism/origins-future/biographies.htm#Gomulka) went on to lead a broad 'democratic front'. The Socialists and the Peasants' Party declined to join however. After the war most of the capitalist class, who in Poland had not collaborated with the Nazis, had been killed by the fascists. Roughly half the economy was destroyed. There was little option but to nationalise much of what was left. They couldnt build capitalism, as per the Stalinist paln in most countries, because the capitalists didnt exist. The Polish workers pushed it along, impatient for change.

You say there is a contradiction that boggles your mind. Let me explain. Stalin collectivised in 1929, ending the NEP, as Trotsky had advised for the last 5 or 6 years. but he did it for different reasons, and in a different way. So yes he was forced to do what the Left Opposition had called for, but for the opposite reasons. But bear in mind he had to pretend to be a socialist, and everyone was aware that the LO had been right all along. He collectivised mainly to save his ass. The kulaks were withholding grain and he tried requisitioning but they resisted, so in forcible requisitioning he ended up collectivising.

As well as a grain shortage, industry was not doing very well either. He had to get that going or he would be turfed out.

so it was fear of the very people he had based himself on previously, the wealthy, fear of a challenge from the people Trotsky had warned about.

But after the purges and consolidating his rule the Third period was over and it was back to Popular Fronts for all countries except the USSR itself, ie a policy that other countries should establish capitalism, from 1934 onwards.

[Omsk]

Stalin occupied the Baltic States because they were part of the Russian Empire, because it was agreed with Churchill and Truman, and because the locals had collaborated with the Nazis.




No,no.

There were several factors:

Dekanozov nevertheless reported to Stalin and Molotov in early July 1940:
"A large meeting and demonstration took place in Vilna on July 7. Some 80,000 people took part. The main slogans were 'Long live the 13th Soviet republic!'. 'Proletarians of all lands, unite!'. 'Long live comrade Stalin!' And so on. The meeting passed a vote of greeting to the Soviet Union and the Red Army. A concert was given by the band of the Lithuanian Army, attended by the president and several members of the government and general staff...."
It is reasonable to suggest that, had Soviet troops not been there, the Germans would have marched into the Baltic states before June 1941, since they already had a plan to 'Germanize' part of the population and liquidate the rest, as a 1940 memorandum by Rosenberg shows. The overwhelming majority of the Baltic population was favorable to their countries' incorporation into the Soviet Union in August 1940....
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 363


The factor of Nazi Germany,and the general defence of the CCCP,not because "they were lands of the Russian Empire" or something like that.

[Comrade Auldnik]

I like how none of the anti-communists trolling this page, including some of the ones calling themselves communists, are taking the time to check their sources. As soon as the "black book" was cited, I face-palmed so hard I knocked myself unconscious.

[Zulu]

Stalin occupied the Baltic States because they were part of the Russian Empire, because it was agreed with Churchill and Truman, and because the locals had collaborated with the Nazis.

You do know that the Soviet Union first liberated the Baltic states in 1940 - from the capitalists, and then the Nazis occupied them, and then in 1944 the Soviets liberated them again.

As to your idea that Stalin wanted the Eastern Europe to stay capitalist, it's just nuts. Sure, he promised Churchill to think about not liberating them, but that's diplomacy. The only country Stalin did "betray" was Greece.

As for the repressions against "communists", you, my friend is the best illustration to the reason those communists needed to be repressed, namely, they were not really communist, but anarchists, left liberals, social democrats, mensheviks and other types of petty-bourgeois and corrupted voluntary or puppet agents of imperialism. Granted, some genuine communists fell prey to the power politics and rivalry from regional and republican party bosses (like Khrushchev), and some were foolish enough to be swayed into opposition by the real deviationists but such perished true communists were a minority, both in the Soviet Union and in the Comintern.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

As a Trotskyist, I give a lot of leeway about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. If it helped the USSR buy time to arm to fight Germany, fine. The execution of German Communists, and the handing over of others to the Gestapo, is treasonous, however.

Trotsky contrasted what happened in Western and Eastern Poland after the German and Soviet invasions, and pointed out the contrasts. In Eastern Poland, the landholders and bourgeoisie were expropriated, sometimes spontaneously by the locals. This did not happen in German occupied sections.


And Trotskists here say that Stalin was a couterrevolutionary! Already after they've said he stole Trotsky's revolutionary program... That's just mind-boggling! I wish they made up their mind already.


Stalin's role was not always counterrevolutionary. And in fact, the left opposition was relived when he carried out the industrialization in the late 20s, even though he co-opted the some of the left's program in the process. The way it was done left a great deal to be desired to say the least.

The Stalinist bureaucracy, which was/is never a class, is a contradictory formation. A parasitic caste that sits upon proletarian property forms, but is neither necessary nor revolutionary. So they defend the proletarian state upon which their status rests, but reactively and partially. They are always nationalist and will readily sacrifice a wider international revolution for perceived gains to their own national entity.

Stalin is responsible for the deaths and torture of a lot of communists. And many of his policies were catastrophic to the cause of world revolution. But be careful comrades. Don't wind up in bed with all those fucking historians that equate Hitler and Stalin. It would be similar to saying that George Washington and Julius Ceaser were the same because they were both heads of state. The power of Stalin rested on proletarian property forms. What the bourgeois commentators hate about Stalin is the good stuff that he did, as in his own hamfisted fucked up way he lead the USSR from backward country to world power -- they do not, typically, complain about the brutality of the Romanovs -- or the white armies, or Polish nationalists.

[Omsk]

The execution of German Communists, and the handing over of others to the Gestapo, is treasonous, however.



Can you provide more information regarding this part?

For instance,Deutscher commented on that:

[Footnote]: Some of Stalin's Communist opponents (Wollenberg, Krivitsky, and others) claimed that Stalin had deliberately led the German Communists to surrender to nazism in order to save the policy of Rapallo. This version has, in our view, not been supported by convincing evidence.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 414

[daft punk]

You do know that the Soviet Union first liberated the Baltic states in 1940 - from the capitalists, and then the Nazis occupied them, and then in 1944 the Soviets liberated them again.
The Baltic states are not my specialist subject. All I know is they got annexed early on.



As to your idea that Stalin wanted the Eastern Europe to stay capitalist, it's just nuts. Sure, he promised Churchill to think about not liberating them, but that's diplomacy. The only country Stalin did "betray" was Greece.
We need to thrash this one out in detail because it can be shown for each country, some a bit clearer than others. So far on the list we have Greece.

Lets pick another, Bulgaria. Stalin and Churchill agreed that Russia would have 75% predominance.


In Bulgaria, the masses rose up in advance of the liberating Soviet army. At the end of 1944, soldiers set up soldiers' soviets, refused to recognise rank, dismissed officers who opposed them, removed local government officials and raised red flags everywhere. The Russians insisted that the removed officers and officials be reinstated and that the soldiers recognise the authority of The Fatherland Front Government being set up by the Russians as a popular front between themselves and Bulgarian bourgeois elements. For its part, the Bulgarian Communist Party solemnly declared that there would be a return to the status quo and no nationalisation. In March 1945, Stalin declared: 'We are building a democratic country based on private property and private initiative'.
http://www.marxists.org/subject/stalinism/origins-future/ch2-1.htm

I believe that quote was on the radio:


As the Red Army began moving into the Balkans, Stalin again reassured the world capitalists: on September 20 the CBS picked up a broadcast from Moscow which declared: “The Soviet Union will not introduce Its order into other states and it does not change the existing order in them. All the acts of foreign policy pursued by the USSR have completely exposed the fascist slander of the Bolshevist bogey ...”

same link as the next one

here is another


THE EVENTS IN BULGARIA In Bulgaria, the entrance of the Red Army troops was the signal for a mass uprising. We read in the dispatches of the Red Flag waving over the government buildings as well as over thousands of homes. We read of the immediate arrests of the fascists by the armed people and the holding of huge mass demonstrations in the cities; of a railway strike that paralyzed the government; of the military authorities losing effective control. Civil war had obviously started; the Bulgarian masses were preparing for the new Red dawn. All the revolutionary hopes aroused in the masses were immediately dashed to the ground. The Kremlin bureaucracy employed their local Stalinist leaders as well as the Red Army as a counter-revolutionary force to stamp out the fires of the civil war. The New York Times correspondent, Joseph M. Levy, telephoning from Sofia on September 21, reported that “In a few of the provinces ... pillaging and even killing of the suspected Fascists occurred, but these acts were soon stopped by the militia, composed of strictly disciplined young men and women.” We are further informed that “Communist (read Stalinist) leaders are doing everything they can to prevent extremists in the party from agitating for Sovietization of the country.” As for the Red Army we are told that:
“On several occasions when local Communists in the provinces tried to displace city officials and take matters into their own hands they were ordered by the Russian military authorities to return the jobs to the old officials until orders were received from the Fatherland Front government in Sofia.”
A shadow coalition government, similar to the one in Rumania, is being propped up, headed by a Bulgarian Badoglio The backbone of the new Bulgarian government is the Sveno group, which is made up of the Officers’ League. This military clique engineered a coup d’état in 1934, suspended the constitution, abolished all political parties and established a military dictatorship. The present so-called Fatherland Front government is headed by Premier Kimon Georgieff and War Minister Damian Veicheff, both members of the Zveno group and includes, of course, representatives of the Agrarian party, the liberals, the Social Democrats and the Stalinists.

COUNTER-REVOLUTION AT WORK IN BULGARIA The new government immediately undertook to “pacify” the situation and re-establish “order.” John Chamley, special correspondent of the London News Chronicle, reported that the government printed an appeal ordering soldiers to return to their barracks. They announced that part of the militia would be absorbed into the regular army while all armed civilians were ordered to report to designated places and surrender their arms. Thus the new government, propped up by the bayonets of the Red Army, began its work in the classic manner of all counterrevolutions – the campaign to disarm the insurgent masses and to restore capitalist “law and order.”
The role of the local Stalinist leaders is exclusively reactionary. As everywhere, they form the very spearhead of reaction inside the labor movement, the prime internal disrupters of labor insurgency. Their role is particularly sinister and pernicious because they clothe themselves with the authority of the October Revolution and make use of their prestige among the masses to sow illusions, head off the struggle and thus attempt to destroy the forces of the awakening revolution.
Anton Yugoff, Bulgarian Stalinist Minister of Interior, in charge of the internal police(!), made clear to the capitalists that they had nothing to fear; their Stalinist watchdogs were on the job. He said:
“This government of which I am a member and on whose behalf I speak, categorically denies that it has any intention of establishing a Communist regime In Bulgaria. There is no truth in rumors that the government intends to nationalize any private enterprise in the country.”

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol05/no10/editors.htm

A bit of food for thought for you, just from Bulgaria. It's a similar story everywhere else. Stalin supported Chiang Kai-shek in China, rather than Mao, and even Mao wanted several decades of capitalism after the war before thinking about going further.

In France, the government thanked Communist Minister for helping preserve French rule in Vietnam!

Check it all out.

The reason these countries didnt go capitalist was that the capitalists had all been killed by the Nazis (eg Poland), they had collaborated with the Nazis or Japanese (lots of places including Korea, and also Vietnam I think). The masses wanted change and pushed the local leaders over to the left.

Tito explains:


'from the first day of the struggle against the occupying forces we had to begin creating a new people’s government instead of the old government ... which under the occupation had for the most part placed itself at the service of the Germans and the Italians ... the Comintern warned us not to forget that an anti-fascist war was being waged and that it was a mistake to found new organs of government. What did this mean? What would have happened if we had accepted these instructions? It would have meant suicide. We should never have been able even to launch the uprising, we should have been unable to mobilise the majority of the people if we had not offered them a clear prospect of a new, happier and more equitable Yugoslavia rising out of that terrible war ... during this period [the Comintern] was negotiating with the Royal Yugoslav Government In Exile'.[70] (http://www.marxists.org/subject/stalinism/origins-future/footnote.htm#70)


http://www.marxists.org/subject/stalinism/origins-future/ch2-1.htm

There you have it. Stalin was negotiating with the Royals.


In October 1943, Tito sent a telegram to the 'Big Three' conference in Moscow warning that 'we acknowledge neither the Yugoslav government in exile nor the King abroad, because for two and a half years they have supported the traitor Draza Mihailoic ... we shall not allow them to return to Yugoslavia because that would mean civil war'.
By the end of the war, People’s Committees were in control of the country. Stalin had agreed with the Allies however, that King Peter and his government-in-exile in London, would be included in the government. In the post-war election, Tito was elected President with a 90 per cent vote.
After the failure of a short-lived attempt to form a coalition government with bourgeois elements, a rapid process of nationalisation was implemented in 1945.
The nationalisation of the property of former Nazi collaborators and enemy nationals painlessly brought 80% of industry into state ownership. Land was distributed to the peasants, who made up 93% of the population. There was very little collectivisation of agriculture, which remained in private hands. Despite the fact that their Soviet teachers were advocating capitalism for Yugoslavia, the Yugoslavs emulated Stalin’s model of a centrally planned economy.
Tito’s reluctant defiance of Stalin was forced upon him by the People’s Committee movement which had won the overwhelming support of the masses in the fight against fascism. For this 'crime', Tito was threatened and slandered by Stalin and in June 1948 the Yugoslav CP was expelled from the Cominform.[71] (http://www.marxists.org/subject/stalinism/origins-future/footnote.htm#71) It was only after 1948 that Tito began to develop ideas of “market socialism” and workers' co-operatives.

http://www.marxists.org/subject/stalinism/origins-future/ch2-1.htm









As for the repressions against "communists", you, my friend is the best illustration to the reason those communists needed to be repressed, namely, they were not really communist, but anarchists, left liberals, social democrats, mensheviks and other types of petty-bourgeois and corrupted voluntary or puppet agents of imperialism. Granted, some genuine communists fell prey to the power politics and rivalry from regional and republican party bosses (like Khrushchev), and some were foolish enough to be swayed into opposition by the real deviationists but such perished true communists were a minority, both in the Soviet Union and in the Comintern.

No need to get personal and write garbage. 10,000 Trotskyists were shot, the best communists.
There are witnesses who were keen communists, eg Trepper and Orlov (the latter was a Stalinist).

Over half the Central Committe were purged, half the Commonist Party expelled, and thousands shot. Anyone thought to be a Trotskyist was shot, plus their family as well.

Khrushchev admitted it was all fake and after 1989 new archives were opened.

Denying it is like denying the holocaust, stupid, there is a ton of evidence if you simply take off the stupid blinkers and bother to have a look.

Leopold Trepper was a keen young communist. He wrote about it.


Trepper was enrolled at the Marchlevski University, alongside the future leaders of the world’s communist parties, including Tito, where the students were lectured by Old Bolsheviks, like Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, the future victims of Stalin, who were already too well aware of their impending fate. Trepper remarks “When he (Bukharin) finished a lecture, he regularly received a veritable ovation – which he always greeted with a blank stare…One day, looking sadly over a roomful of students acclaiming him, he muttered, “Each time they applaud it brings me closer to my death.”

Getting applause from keen communists brought you closer to being murdered.

Trepper became a spy for Russia, risking his life in Nazi areas, sending back vital information on when the Nazis would attack.

His reward for these heroic acts when he returned was 10 years in jail. His boss who sent him there was rewarded with execution.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Can you provide more information regarding this part?

For instance,Deutscher commented on that:

[Footnote]: Some of Stalin's Communist opponents (Wollenberg, Krivitsky, and others) claimed that Stalin had deliberately led the German Communists to surrender to nazism in order to save the policy of Rapallo. This version has, in our view, not been supported by convincing evidence.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 414


In this case I don't, I was just accepting what some comrades had posted earlier in this thread. If I actually tracked it down, you would not believe my source, Omsk. All the nitpicking about exactly what Stalin did or did not do is, as comrade Daft points out, imbecilic. The big picture is clear. You never respond to our arguments that Stalin killed all the old bolsheviks. The entire CC from the time of the revolution. People with decades in the revolutionary movement who magically, when they posed a possible pole of opposition to Stalin, became agents of reaction. It has always been preposterous. And your boy's actions were very costly to the cause of world revolution. But, rah rah for the home team, baby. I'm sure you can drum up twenty five quotes from discredited Stalinist hacks that will back up every charge from the purge trials. Wake up and look at the larger picture, comrade. Read some credible sources about what happened in the USSR during and after the revolution and read about the Stalinization of the CI. Stalin prevailed in the USSR and that, in large part, is why capitalism has triumphed to this date.

[Omsk]

Dimitrov noted Stalins plans for Eastern Europe:

On 28 January 1945 Stalin said, "We have no wish to impose anything on the other Slavic peoples. We do not interfere in their internal affairs. Let them do what they can. The crisis of capitalism has manifested itself in the division of the capitalists into two factions-- one fascist, the other democratic. The alliance between ourselves and the democratic faction of capitalists came about because the latter had a stake in preventing Hitler's domination, for that brutal state would have driven the working class to extremes and to the overthrow of capitalism itself. We are currently allied with one faction against the other, but in the future we will be against the first faction of capitalist, too.
Dimitrov, Georgi, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933-1949. Ed. Ivo Banac. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2003, p. 358

And i wonder,if Stalin implemented the Soviet style state to the East Bloc countries,would you cry out calling him an "Horrible imperialist"?


the best communists.


For the USSR,and the people,the worst kind of "communists".

And on the question of Yugoslavia: Stalin fully supported the liberation struggle,more than any other foreign figure.


There you have it. Stalin was negotiating with the Royals.

No concrete proof.

And,who cares?It is obvious that Stalin supported Tito pre 1948.Everyone knew "King Peter" was no figure of importance.

You might want to read up on that.




If I actually tracked it down, you would not believe my source, Omsk.


Try to track it down.

[daft punk]

Dimitrov noted Stalins plans for Eastern Europe:

On 28 January 1945 Stalin said, "We have no wish to impose anything on the other Slavic peoples. We do not interfere in their internal affairs. Let them do what they can. The crisis of capitalism has manifested itself in the division of the capitalists into two factions-- one fascist, the other democratic. The alliance between ourselves and the democratic faction of capitalists came about because the latter had a stake in preventing Hitler's domination, for that brutal state would have driven the working class to extremes and to the overthrow of capitalism itself. We are currently allied with one faction against the other, but in the future we will be against the first faction of capitalist, too.
Dimitrov, Georgi, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933-1949. Ed. Ivo Banac. New Haven: Yale University Press, c2003, p. 358

And i wonder,if Stalin implemented the Soviet style state to the East Bloc countries,would you cry out calling him an "Horrible imperialist"?

Oh come on! You now say I am right and Stalin didnt try to establish socialism in Eastern Europe. But it was because he was letting them do what they want! This is ridiculous. He was interfering loads. And often the capitalists he tried to ally with had collaborated with the Nazis. Dimitrov was a friend of Stalin and an advocate of the Popular Front strategy which they tried to implement at the end of the war and basically failed.




For the USSR,and the people,the worst kind of "communists".

Yes, here are pictures of some of them

http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/events/terror/cc-1917.jpg


And on the question of Yugoslavia: Stalin fully supported the liberation struggle,more than any other foreign figure.





No concrete proof.

And,who cares?It is obvious that Stalin supported Tito pre 1948.Everyone knew "King Peter" was no figure of importance.

You might want to read up on that.





MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT:

We have just received the following dispatch from our representative, Mr. Bernard Yarrow, concerning a cable which Subasic has received from Stalin:




"Tonight Subasic informed me that he received a cable directly from Stalin in which Stalin stated that the National Committee of Liberation agreed to the Red Army's entrance into Yugoslavia.

"Stalin stated that the Red Army will liberate the Yugoslav people from the yoke imposed by the enemy. Stalin extended his best wishes to Subasic personally as the Prime Minister of Royal Yugoslav Government to carry out successfully the policies inaugurated by his government.

"Subasic asked that contents of cable from Stalin to him not be wired to Washington because he has not informed the British about it."

In view of the nature of this communication and the fact that the value of our informant might be seriously jeopardized, Mr. Yarrow has requested that contents of the message not be revealed.



MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT:

I believe you will be interested in the following report which we have just received from our representative, Mr. Bernard Yarrow:

"Saw King today, October 10. He related to me his conversation with Churchill on October 7, before latter's departure for Moscow. Churchill said that he is dissatisfied with Tito's continuous non-cooperation, and will find new ways to bring pressure to bear upon him. He assured the King that he will discuss with Marshal Stalin the whole situation and will seek Stalin's assistance to exert his influence over Tito with thought of forming a single government upon liberation of Belgrade."

26 October 1944

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol9no2/html/v09i2a07p_0001.htm


The CIA has a big file


wiki:


On 7 March 1945, the provisional government of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Federal_Yugoslavia) (Demokratska Federativna Jugoslavija, DFY) was assembled in Belgrade by Josip Broz Tito, while the provisional name allowed for either a republic or monarchy. This government was headed by Tito as provisional Yugoslav Prime Minister and included representatives from the royalist government-in-exile, among others Ivan Šubašić (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_%C5%A0uba%C5%A1i%C4%87). In accordance with the agreement between resistance leaders and the government-in-exile, post-war elections were held to determine the form of government. In November 1945, Tito's pro-republican People's Front, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Communists_of_Yugoslavia), won the elections with an overwhelming majority, the vote having been boycotted by monarchists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchist)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josip_Broz_Tito#Aftermath_of_World_War_II

I see you ignored the quote from Tito I posted earlier.

[Zulu]

So far on the list we have Greece.

Lets pick another, Bulgaria. Stalin and Churchill agreed that Russia would have 75% predominance.
Stalin agreed not to liberate Greece and left it to the British, and that was all his "betrayal". On all other countries he sweet-talked to the West, then told them where to shove their Marshal plan, once the War was over and all spoils taken. Why would Stalin refuse to accept the Marshal plan if he was so in love with capitalism as you're trying to paint him?




Stalin supported Chiang Kai-shek in China, rather than Mao, and even Mao wanted several decades of capitalism after the war before thinking about going further.
That's because, according to Marxism, building socialism is impossible in such agrarian backward countries that have so few industrial workers. By the way, Trotskyism is even more in denial on this matter. And while Lenin in his later works (after the revolution in Europe generally failed post-WWI) began writing that the hour is near that the East rises and becomes the new hotbed of the revolution, Stalin here was more trostkyist... Until he saw that Chan Kai-Shek had outlasted his usefulness and Mao's party was strong enough to bring about revolutionary change in China. Then he gave his full support to Mao almost unconditionally, forfeited the lease of Port-Arthur and Dalyan and apparently even shared some nuclear secrets with him to jump start the Chinese program.




In France, the government thanked Communist Minister for helping preserve French rule in Vietnam!
And after that some people dare to question why Stalin purged the Comintern! Too little purging of such "communists", if you ask me!




Tito explains:

Why was he so eager to join the Marshal Plan and Stalin did not allow that?





Leopold Trepper was a keen young communist. He wrote about it.
It's one thing writing about your being a keen communist, while actually being one is a different thing. I don't question his merits as an intelligence agent, and I actually don't deny that many things that happened under Stalin ranged from "questionable" (like the return of army ranks), to "tragic" (like the framing of innocent people by the real vermin, like Lysenko did to Vavilov). The "collateral damage" of the purges, when good communists (which the Trotskyists were not) got chopped, did actually occur. However, what you guys do is this:

1. If something bad happened, blame it on Stalin.
2. If something bad didn't happen, say it did, and proceed as in #1.
3. If something good happened, say it didn't, or it wasn't really good, because it wasn't Trotsky's idea, or it happened in spite of Stalin, or Stalin stole this idea from Trotsky.
4. ???
5. Profit.

Is that your guide to being a "good communist"?

[Omsk]

Oh come on! You now say I am right and Stalin didnt try to establish socialism in Eastern Europe. But it was because he was letting them do what they want! This is ridiculous. He was interfering loads. And often the capitalists he tried to ally with had collaborated with the Nazis. Dimitrov was a friend of Stalin and an advocate of the Popular Front strategy which they tried to implement at the end of the war and basically failed.



No,dont put words in my mouth.

He did let Eastern European states work on their own.The Soviets were a bit of passive in Eastern Europe. [With the exception of Albania and Yugoslavia]

However,they helped them greatly.

As a result of dislocations from the war, particularly in those economies already at a low, partly feudal level, all possible assistance was needed to move the whole bloc of nations toward socialism. And this the USSR, although devastated by the war, provided as best it could, giving both economic aid and political assistance; within the bloc the better-off nations, such is Czechoslovakia, aided the weaker ones. In 1949 the whole bloc formed the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). That these efforts soon paid off is clear from the economic figures. For instance, Hungary, which had produced a yearly average of 600,000 tons of steel in the years 1936-38, produced 1,540,000 in 1953. It has, as we have noted, been contended that Stalin used these nations as virtual colonies to supply raw materials for the USSR. But although the USSR certainly needed all the help it could get, there is no evidence of a colonial-like exploitation. On the contrary, the evidence indicates that the USSR often gave material and professional aid that it could well have used itself. The relationship in essence was that of the proletarian alliance that Stalin had earlier described, a relationship between a socialist country and a group of countries trying to move toward socialism.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 100

In Poland and Hungary the Communist-inspired land reform fulfilled, perhaps imperfectly, a dream of many generations of peasants and intellectuals. All over eastern Europe the Communists, having nationalized the main industries, vigorously promoted plans for industrialization and full employment such as were beyond the material resources and the wit of native 'private enterprise', notoriously poor in capital, skill, and enterprise. With fresh zeal and ambition they took to hard educational work, trying to undo the age-old negligence of previous rulers. They did much to calm nationalist vendettas and to promote cooperation between their peoples. In a word they opened before eastern Europe broad vistas of common reform and advancement. It was as if Russia had imparted to her neighbors some of her own urge for trying out new ways and methods of communal work and social organization. It ought perhaps to be added that, considering the vastness and the radical character of the upheaval, it is remarkable that Stalin and his men brought it off not without terror, indeed, not without indulging in a long series of coups, but without provoking in a single country within the Russian orbit a real civil war, such as that waged in Greece.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 535

[Anti-Stalin source]


It is the Soviet Union that has supplied the heavy machinery, modern equipment, raw materials, that have permitted the so rapid industrialization of the People's Democracies and the so rapid rise in the living standards of their peoples. It is the USSR that has sent them Soviet technicians, not to spy on them in the old Western tradition, not to take over their economies like the Nazi and American "experts," but to help them to train their own advanced technicians in the most modern techniques perfected in the Socialist Soviet Union.
Soviet long-term credits have been used by the People's Democracies to obtain from the Soviet Union metallurgical, chemical, machine-building materials. The USSR has sent them whole large-scale modern industrial installations--machine-tool factories, power plants, hydro-electric stations. With the help of Soviet equipment, the People's Democracies are now able, themselves, to produce heavy and complex industrial goods previously imported, to manufacture many machines for the first time in their history, including the machines that will lay the basis for the development of socialist agriculture.
Klugmann, James. From Trotsky to Tito. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1951, p. 183



He was interfering loads


Example.



And often the capitalists he tried to ally with had collaborated with the Nazis


This is,again,laughable.



Yes, here are pictures of some of them


You are implying that the people in that picture were all Trotskyists?



The CIA has a big file


I hope you are joking.


wiki:

No.


I see you ignored the quote from Tito I posted earlier.

Tito is not an valid source on Stalin.

[Drosophila]

That picture is total BS. It can be said that Hitler really caused over 60 million, considering he initiated WW2 (though I suppose others can be put in there for being the inspiration for it).

[daft punk]

Stalin agreed not to liberate Greece and left it to the British, and that was all his "betrayal". On all other countries he sweet-talked to the West, then told them where to shove their Marshal plan, once the War was over and all spoils taken. Why would Stalin refuse to accept the Marshal plan if he was so in love with capitalism as you're trying to paint him?
Because he was supposed to be a contributor not a recipient!




That's because, according to Marxism, building socialism is impossible in such agrarian backward countries that have so few industrial workers. By the way, Trotskyism is even more in denial on this matter. And while Lenin in his later works (after the revolution in Europe generally failed post-WWI) began writing that the hour is near that the East rises and becomes the new hotbed of the revolution, Stalin here was more trostkyist... Until he saw that Chan Kai-Shek had outlasted his usefulness and Mao's party was strong enough to bring about revolutionary change in China. Then he gave his full support to Mao almost unconditionally, forfeited the lease of Port-Arthur and Dalyan and apparently even shared some nuclear secrets with him to jump start the Chinese program.
Oops, no, sorry, you got this all wrong.

Let's start from scratch. Marx said capitalism is needed before socialism. True. He did however say one time that a revolution might start in a backward country, but it would need to be helped by advanced countries soon after:

"The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development. "
Communist manifesto, Russian edition intro
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm#preface-1882

Now then, the Bolsheviks didnt pay too much attention to this and were pretty much following the stagist line you mentioned. Trotsky however was saying that the capitalists were incapable of a progressive role in Russia, so the bourgeois revolution would have to be carried out by the workers, who would go straight on to the socialist construction.

In April 1917 Lenin came back and decided on this line too, gave the Bolsheviks a bollocking for supporting the Provisional Government, and got them to reluctantly agree that it needed to be overthrown as Trotsky had been advocating.

In Defence of October is essential reading.

Lenin and Trotsky both agreed that the revolution would fail if isolated, and needed advanced countries to help it.

This was basically the theory of Permanent Revolution.

After 1924, Stalin went back to being a Stagist, as he had been up to April 1917 when Lenin stuck a rocket up his arse.

So he said in China it was to be a bourgeois revolution, and the communists must collaborate with the capitalist KMT.

However Chiang kept massacring communists, so Mao was rightly sceptical about Stalin's idea for him to surrender to Chiang.

Instead he started a civil war against Chiang, Stalin backed Chiang.
So did the Americans who gave them loads of planes.

But the masses rose up in the hope of socialism, and Mao won. After he won Stalin promised him limited aid if he rewrote history and said that Stalin had backed him all along.







And after that some people dare to question why Stalin purged the Comintern! Too little purging of such "communists", if you ask me!

No, this was following Stalin's orders. Or at least guessing what he would want. The French CP told the Viet Minh to keep a lid on things because Stalin might not want revolution. Then France attacked Vietnam.




Why was he so eager to join the Marshal Plan and Stalin did not allow that?
Well Tito would have wanted the cash. But Russia was suppose to be a contributor and Stalin didnt like that, so he pressurised the eastern European countries into a boycot of it.




It's one thing writing about your being a keen communist, while actually being one is a different thing.
Trepper was born in Poland in 1904. He was Jewish. He joined the Bolsheviks and later moved to Palestine and joined the Communist Party there, working as a communist agent against British forces. He went to Moscow and attended the Marchlevski University, alongside the future leaders of the world’s communist parties, including Tito, where the students were lectured by Old Bolsheviks, like Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin. Then he spent years underground spying for the defence of Russia. He described himself as an ardent communist and he acted like one, in fact like the epitome of one, continually risking his life for communism.





I don't question his merits as an intelligence agent, and I actually don't deny that many things that happened under Stalin ranged from "questionable" (like the return of army ranks), to "tragic" (like the framing of innocent people by the real vermin, like Lysenko did to Vavilov). The "collateral damage" of the purges, when good communists (which the Trotskyists were not) got chopped, did actually occur. However, what you guys do is this:

1. If something bad happened, blame it on Stalin.
2. If something bad didn't happen, say it did, and proceed as in #1.
3. If something good happened, say it didn't, or it wasn't really good, because it wasn't Trotsky's idea, or it happened in spite of Stalin, or Stalin stole this idea from Trotsky.
4. ???
5. Profit.

Is that your guide to being a "good communist"?

Try to understand, do some reading, learn stuff. At the moment you are oblivious to the facts.

Tell me why you dont think the Trots were good communists. They wanted communism. They never deviated from Marx and Lenin. Stalin abandoned Marx Engels and Lenin, in words and deeds.

Trotskyists do not blame Stalin for the degeneration of the revolution, they blame the degeneration of the revolution for Stalin, but it is a dialectical relationship and while he is the personification of objective conditions he was also architect.



DP:"And often the capitalists he tried to ally with had collaborated with the Nazis"

This is,again,laughable.
"In Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania and the area of Germany under Soviet occupation the capitalists had in the main collaborated with the Nazis and now faced the vengeance of masses. In these countries the Stalinist armies facilitated the reconstruction of capitalism. "

http://www.marxists.org/subject/stalinism/origins-future/ch2-1.htm




You are implying that the people in that picture were all Trotskyists?
I am implying that most were killed by Stalin. These were the original revolutionaries, supposedly all suddenly turned.




I hope you are joking.

Well obviously the CIA are not to be trusted but there is no reason not to trust this stuff, it is basically an agent sending in info on what Stalin and Churchill etc were up to.





Tito is not an valid source on Stalin.

why not? He is simply saying they had to defy Stalin's orders. It makes sense.

[Omsk]

"In Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania and the area of Germany under Soviet occupation the capitalists had in the main collaborated with the Nazis and now faced the vengeance of masses. In these countries the Stalinist armies facilitated the reconstruction of capitalism. "

http://www.marxists.org/subject/stal...ture/ch2-1.htm (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.marxists.org/subject/stalinism/origins-future/ch2-1.htm)



The Soviets could hardly collaborate with the capitalists,in foreign countries.At best,the Soviets only sent help to the countries they liberated (By sending experts,and supplies).{Plus Albania and Yugoslavia}


I am implying that most were killed by Stalin. These were the original revolutionaries, supposedly all suddenly turned.


Suddenly?Definitely not suddenly.


Well obviously the CIA are not to be trusted but there is no reason not to trust this stuff, it is basically an agent sending in info on what Stalin and Churchill etc were up to.



Well obviously the CIA are not to be trusted


why not? He is simply saying they had to defy Stalin's orders. It makes sense.

During his break with Stalin,Tito said a lot of things,many of them being untrue.

You should understand that untill 1948,or {1947} Tito was generally Stalin's man,and the two had some disagreements,but their decissions were planned,and their relationship was quite close. {Which can be seen with the fact that Stalin trusted Tito to give him information about Albania and Hoxha's leadership.} [Dimitrov was also an important person in the post-war politics.]

[daft punk]

Of course they tried to collaborate. Coalition governments were set up in accordance with popular frontism and stagism. The Bolheviks did not all become traitors. That is preposterous. The only good guy was Stalin? Even Stalin's wife topped herself because of what he was doing and had become. The CIA stuff is just a useful starting point. The fact is the government had royalists in it at first. Tito did not lie, he was pushed left by the masses and the committees they formed. The bourgeois had collaborated with the Nazis so he nationalised their stuff.

Europe was ripe for revolution and Stalin was doing his best to stop it.

[Omsk]

Of course they tried to collaborate. Coalition governments were set up in accordance with popular frontism and stagism.


You are over-exaggerating the power of the non-communist elements in the Eastern Bloc after ww2.


The only good guy was Stalin?

Of course not,there were many good,reliable and true Marxist-Leninists beside Stalin,and many of them were members of the Bolshevik party.



Even Stalin's wife topped herself because of what he was doing and had become


That is personal,and has nothing to do with the argument.



Tito did not lie, he was pushed left by the masses and the committees they formed.


He did,for an example,when he said that the USSR acted like an imperialist power [in relations to the Eastern Bloc]

And why do you take Tito's side?He eliminated many Trotskyites,i though that Trot's refer to him as a "Stalinist".

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Y


And why do you take Tito's side?He eliminated many Trotskyites,i though that Trot's refer to him as a "Stalinist".

Of course Tito was a Stalinist. His differences with Stalin were over their own national turfs. Being Stalinist, you know they are, by definition for building socialism in one country -- THEIR OWN COUNTRY.

He's not taking Tito's fucking side. AGAIN, comrade Omsk, you and your Stalinist pals are always on about personality, and who was aligned with whom. With your head up your behinds so far, that the bigger picture eludes you.

You see, the Bolshevik CC and polituburo members slowly became reactionaries. Now I have it. And most of the soviet commanders and generals. Yes, I can see it now. After dedicating their lives to revolution, they suddenly became monarchists and fascists, to a man. THAT's the thing that obsessional argument about some overheard discussion reported at the fucking purge trials cannot begin to address. If you don't have grave doubts about that, if that doesn't cause you to scratch your head and say, "gee, this seems awfully unlikely," you have drunk too deep from the Stalinist kool aid and will never come back. It never made sense and it never will. Comrade Daft's graphic should send waves of anxiety through your CNS, that the man whom you revere was the executioner of these great revolutionaries.

[Omsk]

Of course Tito was a Stalinist. His differences with Stalin were over their own national turfs. Being Stalinist, you know they are, by definition for building socialism in one country -- THEIR OWN COUNTRY


Tito was an revisionist,and he sided with the West,opposed efforts by the Informbiro and the Eastern Bloc and also ignored Stalin.



AGAIN, comrade Omsk, you and your Stalinist pals are always on about personality, and who was aligned with whom. With your head up your behinds so far, that the bigger picture eludes you.



My "Stalinist pals"?

The big picture in regards to Tito is that he was a revisionist and an opportunist,and that he acted directly against the USSR,siding with the capitalists, [Especially after Stalin died and Nikita decided that he is a "good communist".]



After dedicating their lives to revolution, they suddenly became monarchists and fascists


The main accusation in the trials,was not that [certain people] were fascists themselves {or fascist spies} ,but that they tried to ally with Germany to overthrow Stalin and take control of the USSR.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

That picture is total BS. It can be said that Hitler really caused over 60 million, considering he initiated WW2 (though I suppose others can be put in there for being the inspiration for it).

Stalin is directly responsible for the death of many thousands if not hundreds of thousands of communists. And this includes the people in the above picture. Do you think Stalin was not directly responsible for the purges and the executions coming from them? He not only killed the communists in question, but their families. I believe these are matters of fact, not conjecture and not exaggerated. I would absolutely agree that bourgeois historians and politicos have vastly inflated the numbers that Stalin killed. They hate him for the wrong reasons, as I said above. But Stalin rewrote history every few years as needed to fit whatever bullshit he was spouting at a given moment. That's why one can find quotes where he directly contradicts himself, even regarding facts.

Omsk, Marxists don't get very excited about the differences between the various Stalinists and the bullshit squabbles between them. These were merely fights between different nationalist bureaucrats defending their own turf. How you can even bear to read the idealistic crap that they call theory? But then, you get a kick out of reading servile idiots, writing in the 1940's, who echoed every ludicrous lie that Stalin told about his political opponents.

Yes, Tito was a "revisionist." But he learned at the feet of the master. Socialism in one Country was the biggest revision of Leninism, ever. I know you can find maybe three quotes that, taken out of context, seem to show he was just following Lenin's line. Comrade, Stalin wasn't even following Stalin's line from a few years earlier. And I could find hundreds of quotes from Lenin contradicting this particularly noxious "revision" of Leninism.

Oh, and Stalin didn't say all the people he murdered were fascists and monarchists, only that they were working with them to overthrow comrade Joe. That makes a lot of sense. You see Hitler was really anxious to help Trotsky come to power in the USSR because. . . Do you get how fucking illogical this reasoning is? I guess not. Hitler, no doubt made no distinction between Trotsky or Stalin, and wanted both of them in front of firing squads. And Trotsky was not even willing to ally with Bukharin or the Right Opposition against Stalin, much less Hitler.

[A Marxist Historian]

This thread's primary focus is not on the total number of deaths than can be attributed to Stalin (I personally accept a figure in the low-tens million), but the average person's perception of the number of deaths ascribed to his policies.

For instance, I found this:

http://rexcurry.net/socialism-red-flags-socialists1c.jpg

60 million is obviously based on an exaggerated figure.



Wikipedia says this:



Yes, anti-communists certainly used hyperbole to get a more "impressive" number. I am more interested in how embellished estimates are used to sully Stalin's legacy by anti-communists in propaganda campaigns, rather than trying to rehabilitate his legacy for the non-authoritarian leftists here.

-----------------
BTW, I have some respect for Stalin now.

This is a comment on the OP, so it may be superseded by much else.

This is a strange posting.

First you accept the the tens of millions figure, which even Wikipedia says is too much.

Then we have the 6-8 million dead in Ukrainian famine, which is too many by best estimates, somewhere from two to three million is probably correct.

Then you say you "have some respect for Stalin now"? On what basis? That mass murder is cool, or what?

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Stalin killed a million or so in the purges. But he was responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Millions died during forced collectivisation. Stalin was partly responsible for the rise of Hitler and WW2. He was responsible of a series of fiascos in China. He was partly responsible for the Korean war and the Vietnam war. Also, the purges never really stopped in 1938. Also, after WW2 loads did as he shunted populations around.

The black book estimates 94 million killed by communism, but most are the result of Stalinism.



65 million in the People's Republic of China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_China)
20 million in the Soviet Union (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union)[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#cite_note-2)
2 million in Cambodia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodia)
2 million in North Korea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea)
1.7 million in Africa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa)
1.5 million in Afghanistan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan)
1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Bloc)
1 million in Vietnam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam)[4] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#cite_note-3)
150,000 in Latin America (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America)
10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power."(p. 4)
also, in China although millions died of hunger, there was an overall increase in life expectancy.

It is a really horrible embarrassment when anyone who associates with an allegedly Trotskyist organization like the CWI quotes from the infamous Black Book, which was quite literally Nazi propaganda disguised as scholarship.

The authors went on a promo book tour sponsored by the fascistic French National Front, whose leader called the Holocaust a "detail of history."

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Stalin is directly responsible for the death of many thousands if not hundreds of thousands of communists. And this includes the people in the above picture. Do you think Stalin was not directly responsible for the purges and the executions coming from them? He not only killed the communists in question, but their families. I believe these are matters of fact, not conjecture and not exaggerated. I would absolutely agree that bourgeois historians and politicos have vastly inflated the numbers that Stalin killed. They hate him for the wrong reasons, as I said above. But Stalin rewrote history every few years as needed to fit whatever bullshit he was spouting at a given moment. That's why one can find quotes where he directly contradicts himself, even regarding facts.

Omsk, Marxists don't get very excited about the differences between the various Stalinists and the bullshit squabbles between them. These were merely fights between different nationalist bureaucrats defending their own turf. How you can even bear to read the idealistic crap that they call theory? But then, you get a kick out of reading servile idiots, writing in the 1940's, who echoed every ludicrous lie that Stalin told about his political opponents.

Yes, Tito was a "revisionist." But he learned at the feet of the master. Socialism one Country was the biggest revision of Leninism, ever. I know you can find maybe three quotes that, taken out of context, seem to show he was just following Lenin's line. Comrade, Stalin wasn't even following Stalin's line from a few years earlier. And I could find hundreds of quotes from Lenin contradicting this particularly noxious "revision" of Leninism.

So true! In fact, it's stronger than that.

Long long ago, when I was deciding between Stalin and Trotsky, a Stalinist friend of mine tried to win me back to the path of righteousness by getting me to read Stalin's book "Foundations of Leninism," which I promptly checked out of my college library.

In this book, the 1924 edition, Stalin says, in so many words, that you can't build socialism in one country!

When I pointed this out to him, his response was "you are reading the wrong edition, the 1924 edition."

I have had no intellectual respect for Stalinism as a doctrine ever since.


Oh, and Stalin didn't say all the people he murdered were fascists and monarchists, only that they were working with them to overthrow comrade Joe. That makes a lot of sense. You see Hitler was really anxious to help Trotsky come to power in the USSR because. . . Do you get how fucking illogical this reasoning is? I guess not. Hitler, no doubt made no distinction between Trotsky or Stalin, and wanted both of them in front of firing squads. And Trotsky was not even willing to ally with Bukharin or the Right Opposition against Stalin, much less Hitler.

Actually Hitler did make a distinction between Stalin and Trotsky.

Many Nazis were troubled by the Hitler-Stalin pact, which they saw as going against their principles. He told them that Stalin was an Aryan, purging the Jews from the communist movement and murdering them all, therefore relatively speaking a good guy. "Critical support," to use our lingo.

Hitler was very disappointed with Stalin when he wouldn't go along with Hitler's bright idea that the USSR should invade India and liberate the people of India from British colonialism. So he decided that Stalin was probably a secret Jew himself, and set about exterminating Jews and other communists from the face of the earth, starting with the invasion of the USSR.

-M.H.-

[Zostrianos]

The so called "occupation" of Poland, and the Baltic states by the Soviet Union was not an occupation. It was liberation. Repressions against counter-revolutionary elements were a necessity.


First, that actually contradicts what happened, and secondly you have to ask yourself if it's morally right to murder people for what they might do (let alone murder people in the first place, especially people who didn't provoke such a fate, but they merely belonged to a group that was seen as potentially dangerous). This is what the Nazis did when they started executing Poles by the thousands - they were charged with being a danger to the new German order, and promptly shot.

I found this account of the Great Terror, when people were being murdered on ethnic grounds by Stalin's regime (one of the reasons being that someone had to take the blame for the failures of collectivization):

In 1937 and 1938, a quarter of a million Soviet citizens were shot on essentially ethnic grounds. The Five-Year Plans were supposed to move the Soviet Union toward a flowering of national cultures under socialism. In fact, the Soviet Union in the late 1930s was a land of unequalled national persecutions. Even as the Popular Front presented the Soviet Union as the homeland of toleration, Stalin ordered the mass killing of several Soviet nationalities. The most persecuted European national minority in the second half of the 1930s was not the four hundred thousand or so German Jews (the number declining because of emigration) but the six hundred thousand or so Soviet Poles (the number declining because of executions).
Stalin was a pioneer of national mass murder, and the Poles were the preeminent victim among the Soviet nationalities. The Polish national minority, like the kulaks, had to take the blame for the failures of collectivization. The rationale was invented during the famine itself in 1933, and then applied during the Great Terror in 1937 and 1938. In 1933, the NKVD chief for Ukraine, Vsevolod Balytskyi, had explained the mass starvation as a provocation of an espionage cabal that he called the “Polish Military Organization.” According to Balytskyi, this “Polish Military Organization” had infiltrated the Ukrainian branch of the communist party, and backed Ukrainian and Polish nationalists who sabotaged the harvest and then used the starving bodies of Ukrainian peasants as anti-Soviet propaganda. It had supposedly inspired a nationalist “Ukrainian Military Organization,” a doppelganger performing the same fell work and sharing responsibility for the famine. (Bloodlands, chaopter 3)



It's especially funny to hear how Stalin "destroyed the culture" of those countries, because it's essentially the same cry-baby bourgeois White emigrants' argument about how the Bolsheviks in general killed, jailed or exiled the best of the Russian people. (Nevermind after the loss of the "best of the best" the Soviet Union managed to be the first to launch a human into space...) But of course the revolutionary repression would come against the most cultured and educated people, because the most cultured and educated people before the revolution were the bourgeoisie, the class that had viciously usurped the access to culture and education! And then the revolution takes place, and removes the cultured usurpers from the way of the proletariat to that culture...

One thing is to go after the rich bourgeois, and take most of their wealth to help the poor and bring balance to society; another is to murder a whole class of educated people (which included teachers, writers, and other people whose only crime was that they knew too much).

These apologetics for Stalin remind me of fundamentalist Christians who, when confronted with Biblical stories of God's savagery and mass murder reply with "It's ok, it was part of a greater plan that God had for humanity". :thumbdown:

[Zulu]

Because he was supposed to be a contributor not a recipient!
LOLWUT????

Half the USSR was lying in ruins after the war, more so than much of the rest of Europe, so Marshall would be happy to lasso it with the IMF depts... Exactly like it would later happen in the Gorbachev's time and to countless other countries. Stalin said "No, thank you." And even tried to stall the entire Europe's falling into the black hole of the American imperialism, by negotiating the possibility of financial aid without Marshall's conditions. But that was quite an open game so the Americans stood firm, and Stalin stood firm too, by prohibiting the Eastern Europe (including Finland) from joining the Plan.

But understanding the necessity to counterbalance the Plan somehow he created the COMECON, and provided aid with raw materials and even some cash loans to those countries (and the New China too). So much for greedy Stalin.





Let's start from scratch.
Indeed.

That preface to the Russian translation of the Manifesto you refer to was done by Plekhanov, who had not entirely distanced himself from the Narodniki movement, and that was his own erroneous idea that the peasants' rings, which were in fact a vestige of feudalism and serfdom, would somehow aid develop socialism in Russia.

Then, Lenin favored Trotsky only during the Revolution and the Civil War. After the Civil War, Lenin had to admit that Europe might not be that quick to follow Russia's revolutionary suit, and Soviet Russia and the USSR will have to remain a "besieged fortress" for quite a while. However, after the Civil War it needed badly to recuperate, catch some breath and build up some force, so he put the NEP in effect, which went so far as to offer concessions to foreign capitalists... Trotsky in his foolishness disapproved of the NEP and demanded to bash head against the wall, and export the revolution immediately, disregarding the apparent period of reaction that befell Europe. That would have only led to a new military intervention into the USSR sometime in the 1920s already, which it would have not been able to fend off.

By the way, it was Trotsky's and his tactically and strategically incompetent protege Tukhachevsky's fault that in 1920 the Red Army expended its forces trying in vain to march on the reactionary Berlin through the reactionary Poland. At the time Stalin, who was with Budyonny's 1st Mounted Army, advocated a march to the south, which would possibly allow the Red Army to advance through the more revolutionary countries along the Danube and under favorable conditions even further along the Rhine. But alas, the revolution had to be not strategically sound, according to Trotsky, but "permanent".

As for China, and the revolutionary masses' role of swaying both Stalin and Mao into decisive action against the KMT and the local capitalists, that only supports the notion that they were true Marxist-Leninists: no point in trying to drive the capitalists from power while the masses are not ready, and once the masses show they are ready and revolutionary enough, then let's go for it!





No, this was following Stalin's orders. Or at least guessing what he would want. The French CP told the Viet Minh to keep a lid on things because Stalin might not want revolution. Then France attacked Vietnam.
Actully, I withdraw my previous comment on the matter, which was propmted by your perversion of facts. In reality the French Communists were all right, and that advise to the Viet Mihn was only meant to support their stance that France should not send troops to Indochina and the Viet Mihn should not provoke it. However, once France did send troops, Maurice Thorez strongly condemned it and was kicked from the government for that.

Also, it must be noted, that the Viet Mihn was always quite nationalist, which unsurprisingly led to their siding with the Soviet revisionists later during the Sino-Soviet Split. So if Stalin had reservations about it, they were justified.






Well Tito would have wanted the cash. But Russia was suppose to be a contributor and Stalin didnt like that, so he pressurised the eastern European countries into a boycot of it.
Not this again! Provide a single source saying that Russia the USSR was supposed to be a donor under the Marshall Plan. And even if it was so, how the boycott of the Plan would be of any help the USSR, if Stalin could simply say "I won't pay"? He could refrain from participating in that imaginary version of the Marshall Plan of yours, and still let those "capitalist" governments of Easter Europe accept aid from the USA, couldn't he?

As for Tito, he later got his way, made Yugoslavia an IMF addict and it then payed dearly for his treason.





Trepper... described himself as an ardent communist and he acted like one, in fact like the epitome of one, continually risking his life for communism.
And like I said, I don't question his personal merits as an intelligence agent. That does not mean he had good understanding of what the communism is about.





Try to understand, do some reading, learn stuff. At the moment you are oblivious to the facts.
... says guy who thinks the USSR was supposed to give money for the Marshall Plan and is unsure of when the Baltic states joined the Union, to guy who basically admits that along with his great achievements in promotion of the international Communist movement Stalin bore responsibility for quite a few excesses and wrongdoings. I lol'd.





Tell me why you dont think the Trots were good communists.
I think I've just eaten too much of Captain Obvious' bread so I'll leave that for you to guess.

[GallowsBird]

well Stalinism did cause millions of deaths. The Black book doesnt include the fact that Stalinists allowed Hitler to take power. I did also say that as well as millions of Chinese who died you have to factor in a longer overall life expectancy. I did not say it was accurate and it certainly isnt impartial.

Oh, dang, I forgot Hitler was Stalin's top agent in Germany in the 1930s. You can actually blame any evil on Stalin, he is the devil after all!

[Zulu]

to murder a whole class of educated people

There is no "class of educated people". There is only the class of oppressors, that owns the means of production, including the education. Expropriating this class makes it disgruntled and prone to all kinds of counter-revolutionary activities. However, the severest forms of repressions were used only against those who were convicted of real counter-revolutionary crimes (with the exception of the Great Terror, admittedly). And there were plenty of those among the Polish and Baltic bourgeoisie. Those who would potentially participate in counter-revolutionary activities were jailed at most, but more commonly just deported. You'd know that if you instead of the bourgeois propaganda studied some real biographies of the relatives of public enemies, all of whom surprisingly lived through the years of Stalin's totalitarianism to cry us a river about it.

Also, under socialism, any form of nationalism is reactionary, so once you see anybody complain about repressions on ethnic/national principle under Stalin, you can safely assume it's a bourgeois element, and a lackey of imperialism. National cultures and ethnic minorities in the USSR were actually receiving a lot of state support, as per Lenin's instructions, and in the hindsight it seems it may have been too much, as later on it played a significant role in the growing of the quasi-bourgeoisie and the rise of nationalism and separatism in the republics, which eventually led to the full restoration of capitalism in the 1990s. Although the great Russian chauvinism also persisted, its resurgence became significant only during the Brezhnev's time, when the nationalities policy was rendered practically non-existent.

The only ethnic groups that were deported en masse under Stalin were the Chechens, the Ingushs and the Crimean Tartars, who had massively deserted the Red Army or collaborated with the Nazis during the WW2. However, exemptions were made on request for those and the relatives of those who had distinguished themselves during the War or in civilian labor.

[daft punk]

You are over-exaggerating the power of the non-communist elements in the Eastern Bloc after ww2.
No, the Stalinists over-exaggerated their power, tried to form alliances to establish capitalism, as per Two Stage Theory (capitalism first, socialism later).

Trotsky on the other hand had said the capitalist class was incapable of playing a progressive role in most backward countries, hence Lenin agreeing with him that they should overthrow the Provisional Government.




Of course not,there were many good,reliable and true Marxist-Leninists beside Stalin,and many of them were members of the Bolshevik party.
None of the original Bolshevik Central Committee survived except Stalin obviously. Few of the old Bolsheviks survived. Half the party was purged.



That is personal,and has nothing to do with the argument.
No it is not. Stalins wife topped herself after seeing her friends disappear one by one, and she was found with a leaflet from some oppositionists. It is possible it was planted on her body, or maybe she did read it and take it seriously.




He did,for an example,when he said that the USSR acted like an imperialist power

And why do you take Tito's side?He eliminated many Trotskyites,i though that Trot's refer to him as a "Stalinist".

I am not taking Tito's side I am quoting him as part of a large body of evidence that Stalin told the Comintern to stick to Two Stage Theory and establish capitalism. I have given you a ton of evidence. You should by now be taking this seriously and researching the net to check it out. Imagine you are a detective and I have given you dozens of bits of evidence. Are you gonna bother checking them out?





The main accusation in the trials,was not that [certain people] were fascists themselves {or fascist spies} ,but that they tried to ally with Germany to overthrow Stalin and take control of the USSR.

And there is no evidence, because it is a ludicrous accusation, and has been shown to be false.

I know wiki is not a primary source, but it says:


The Moscow Trials are today universally acknowledged as show trials in which the verdicts were predetermined, and then publicly justified through the use of coerced confessions, obtained through torture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture) and threats against the defendants' families.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Trials

Universally acknowledged is a strong statement. Does this mean nothing to you?

wiki also says:


All of the surviving members of the Lenin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin)-era , except Stalin and Trotsky, were tried. By the end of the final trial Stalin had arrested and executed almost every important living Bolshevik from the Revolution. Of 1,966 delegates to the party congress in 1934, 1,108 were arrested. Of 139 members of the Central Committee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Committee_of_the_CPSU), 98 were arrested.

Does it not seem strange to you that all the people who carried out the revolution supposedly became counter-revolutionaries, even colluding with the very fascists Trotsky had spent years warning against?

Plotting a coup when Trotsky above all others stressed the importance of the working class?

Why do you think 25,000 people were posthumously rehabilitated, even by 1989?

Would you now like to produce some evidence that Trotsky wanted to conspire with the Nazis?


It is a really horrible embarrassment when anyone who associates with an allegedly Trotskyist organization like the CWI quotes from the infamous Black Book, which was quite literally Nazi propaganda disguised as scholarship.

The authors went on a promo book tour sponsored by the fascistic French National Front, whose leader called the Holocaust a "detail of history."

-M.H.-

I posted that to counter some of the wilder allegations, to sort of show the maximum that anti-socialists were claiming.

I did in fact say that Stalin had killed about a million, and later added that the website spartacus had said 7 million, which seemed a bit high, but could be true depending on what you count as it was up to 1941.




I found this account of the Great Terror, when people were being murdered on ethnic grounds by Stalin's regime (one of the reasons being that someone had to take the blame for the failures of collectivization):

[I]In 1937 and 1938, a quarter of a million Soviet citizens were shot on essentially ethnic grounds. The Five-Year Plans were supposed to move the Soviet Union toward a flowering of national cultures under socialism. In fact, the Soviet Union in the late 1930s was a land of unequalled national persecutions. Even as the Popular Front presented the Soviet Union as the homeland of toleration, Stalin ordered the mass killing of several Soviet nationalities. The most persecuted European national minority in the second half of the 1930s was not the four hundred thousand or so German Jews (the number declining because of emigration) but the six hundred thousand or so Soviet Poles (the number declining because of executions).
Stalin was a pioneer of national mass murder, and the Poles were the preeminent victim among the Soviet nationalities. The Polish national minority, like the kulaks, had to take the blame for the failures of collectivization. The rationale was invented during the famine itself in 1933, and then applied during the Great Terror in 1937 and 1938. In 1933, the NKVD chief for Ukraine, Vsevolod Balytskyi, had explained the mass starvation as a provocation of an espionage cabal that he called the “Polish Military Organization.” According to Balytskyi, this “Polish Military Organization” had infiltrated the Ukrainian branch of the communist party, and backed Ukrainian and Polish nationalists who sabotaged the harvest and then used the starving bodies of Ukrainian peasants as anti-Soviet propaganda. It had supposedly inspired a nationalist “Ukrainian Military Organization,” a doppelganger performing the same fell work and sharing responsibility for the famine. (Bloodlands, chaopter 3)



I think there is another reason Stalin killed all the foreigners. Many were emigres, ie they were revolutionaries taking refuge in a supposedly socialist country. Well that wasnt good for Stalin, having actual socialists around. I believe he disbanded the Polish CP because they supported Trotsky.

[Tim Cornelis]

Great Purge: 600,000-1,200,000
Holodomor: 3,500,000
Gulags: 1,500,000

He killed/caused the death of roughly 5,200,000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge#Number_of_people_executed]According to the declassified Soviet archives, during 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,366 victims

Holodomor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#Death_toll)

The death toll is stated as 1,258,537 with the post-release deaths included, with an estimated 1.6 million casualties from 1929 to 1953. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag)

No way he killed 60, 40, or 20 million.

[Omsk]

None of the original Bolshevik Central Committee survived except Stalin obviously. Few of the old Bolsheviks survived. Half the party was purged.



A lot of the Central Committee members died before the trials,treason and everything that follows happened.Some even in the Civil War.

How do you know that "a few of the Old Bolsheviks survived"?
We cant know for sure how many of them "survived".But since the party was huge,i would say that a huge number of people who were in the Bolshevik party,"survived".

And no,it is not true that the half of the party was purges,some 10% or less were purged,and many were let back in the party.


The criticism of regional party chiefs in early 1937 also revisited the issue of who had been wrongly expelled in the recently completed membership screenings of 1935-36: the verification and exchange of party documents. As we have seen, those operations had been under the control of the regional chiefs themselves and had resulted in mass expulsions of rank-and-file party members; only rarely were any full-time party officials expelled in these screenings.
In June 1936, Stalin and others complained about this practice and ordered the territorial leaders to "correct mistakes" by speeding up appeals and readmissions of those who had been expelled for no good reason. At that time, Stalin interrupted Yezhov's speech to note that the screenings were being directed against the wrong targets. In early March 1937, top-level Moscow leaders again denounced the "heartless and bureaucratic" repression of "little people." Malenkov noted that more than 100,000 of those expelled had been kicked out for little or no reason, while Trotskyists who occupied party leadership posts had passed through the screenings with little difficulty.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 358

Stalin echoed the theme in one of his speeches to the February-March 1937 plenum. According to him, by the most extravagant count the number of Trotskyists, Zinovievists, and rightists could be no more than 30,000 persons. Yet in the membership screenings, more than 300,000 had been expelled; some factories now contained more ex-members than members. Stalin worried that this was creating large numbers of embittered former party members, and he blamed the territorial chiefs for the problem: "All these outrages that you have committed are water for the enemy's mill."...
On the other hand, even in the darkest days of the hysterical hunt for enemies in 1937 and 1938, most of those expelled back in 1935 and 1936 who appealed to Moscow were reinstated. Virtually all those expelled for "passivity" were readmitted, and appellants charged with more serious party offenses who appealed to the party control commission in Moscow...were usually readmitted, the proportion of successful appeals reaching 63 percent by 1938.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 359

Many big figures were also let back in a number of times:
Radek: He returned to Russia in 1920 and rose to the leadership of the Comintern, but having associated with the Trotsky opposition he was expelled from the party in 1925. Readmitted in 1930, he again rose to prominence as a journalist, propagandist, and official Communist spokesman and in 1935 he was a member of the Constitutional Commission designated by the Seventh All-Union Congress of Soviets to draft the text of the new "Stalin" Constitution.... But in 1937 he was charged with treason and conspiracy and, after repudiating his former political associates at a public trial, he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 327

Bukharin for an example:

Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo in 1929, and although appointed editor of Izvestia, the official government newspaper, in 1934, he never regained his previous power or influence....
Richardson, Rosamond. Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 83

[Footnote: Roughly 264,000 people were expelled in 1935, 51,500 in 1936. In both years of "chistka" only 5.5% of those expelled were accused of opposition and .9% for being "spies" or having "connections to spies." Class- alien origins and personal corruption comprised the overwhelming majority.]
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 60

{noted by anti-Stalin source}

Between November 1936 and March 1939, including 1937, when the 'Great Purge' was at its most intense, roughly 160,000 to 180,000 people left the CPSU (for any reason). This represented about 8% of total Party members, far fewer than those who were expelled in the purge of 1933.
In 1937, at the height of the Great Purge in Moscow, 33,000 (13.4% of the total Moscow Oblast Party organization) left to the party; this compares with 133,000 in 1933 and 45,500 in 1935.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 241




I am not taking Tito's side I am quoting him as part of a large body of evidence that Stalin told the Comintern to stick to Two Stage Theory and establish capitalism. I have given you a ton of evidence. You should by now be taking this seriously and researching the net to check it out. Imagine you are a detective and I have given you dozens of bits of evidence. Are you gonna bother checking them out?



Why did you mention the Comintern,it didnt exist by the time Tito and Stalin planned the future of Yugoslavia.



Universally acknowledged is a strong statement. Does this mean nothing to you?

wiki also says


No,wikipedia is not reliable,and can be edited by anyone.



Does it not seem strange to you that all the people who carried out the revolution supposedly became counter-revolutionaries, even colluding with the very fascists Trotsky had spent years warning against?



He "warned" against fascists,and in the same time suggested that the "Stalinists" are the same and present the same threath.And that they should be eliminated,destroyed.

While presenting some kind of an idealistic view that German Nazi soldiers would betray Hitler and join the "working class" in the combat against Nazism.

Which proved to be complete bogus.
Like the most of his predictions.

[Zulu]

How do you know that "a few of the Old Bolsheviks survived"?

The better question to ask a Trotskyist is: how do you distinguish between the "Old Bolsheviks" and the "bureaucracy". It's real amusing how one minute Zinoviev&Kamenev along with their associates and supporters are dangerous bureaucrats pushing Stalin to the front to bury Trotsky's revolutionary ideas in a heap of red tape, and the next minute they are passionate "Old Bolsheviks" whom the "mediocre" Stalin was envious of, just as he was of Trotsky. Again, making up one's mind is pending here...

Fun fact: among the rest of accusations against the purged "Old Bolsheviks" one often used was "moral corruption" or "bourgeois lifestyle". So the purges were at least partially a measure against the re-birth of the Party as the new bourgeoisie.

[Omsk]

Fun fact: among the rest of accusations against the purged "Old Bolsheviks" one often used was "moral corruption" or "bourgeois lifestyle". So the purges were at least partially a measure against the re-birth of the Party as the new bourgeoisie.

If i might correct you just a little bit comrade,for the sake of historical accuracy.

In the 30' purge,the most of the accusations and reasons were:

Class-alien, hostile elements.
Double dealers, who undermine party policy .
Violators of discipline.
Defeatists.
Careerists and self-seekers.

And as Lenin pointed out:

Lenin initiated the first great "cleansing" of the Bolshevik party just as the transition had begun from "war communism" to the new economic policy. In 1922, when, as Lenin put it, "the party had rid itself of the rascals, bureaucrats, dishonest or waivering Communists, and of Mensheviks who have re-painted their facade but who remained Mensheviks at heart," another Congress took place; and it was this Congress which advanced Stalin to the key position of Bolshevik power.
It brought him into intimate contact with every functionary of the organization, enabling him to examine their work as well as their ideas.
Murphy, John Thomas. Stalin, London, John Lane, 1945, p. 145

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

A lot of the Central Committee members died before the trials,treason and everything that follows happened.Some even in the Civil War.

SO WHAT? So Stalin only murdered most of them? Some of them? What is the fucking point of this comment? Do you see how you dicker about some very specific aspect while missing the entire point that Stalin killed a boatload of the best communists. The ones that made the revolution. That is the point. Not whether he killed eleven or fifteen. I mean a couple committed suicide, no doubt because of their shame in trying to foster counterrevolution. Absolute drivel comrade Omsk.

[Omsk]

SO WHAT? So Stalin only murdered most of them? Some of them? What is the fucking point of this comment? Do you see how you dicker about some very specific aspect while missing the entire point that Stalin killed a boatload of the best communists. The ones that made the revolution. That is the point. Not whether he killed eleven or fifteen. I mean a couple committed suicide, no doubt because of their shame in trying to foster counterrevolution. Absolute drivel comrade Omsk.


That reply wasa response to this post:



None of the original Bolshevik Central Committee survived except Stalin obviously.


Where he implied that de facto all of the important Bolsheviks were removed by Stalin.Which is not true.



of the best communists


Best communists from what point of view?Trotskyist?


The ones that made the revolution

They had a big role in the revolution,but if they truly cared for the revolution,why were they prepared to put the SU to great risks,with their fractionalism and struggles with Stalin and among themselves?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Best communists from what point of view?Trotskyist?

Could we stipulate to the fact that the leadership of the Bolshevik party circa 1917 was comprised of admirable communists? They led the revolution. Hell, we can even give Stalin a little credit here. But if you don't see Stalin as some kind of God of that which is revolutionary, as the very personification of revolutionary socialism, then there is little reason to accept any of this nonsense. If Trotsky, for example, was so willing to undermine the USSR for his own gain, how come he rejected a bloc with Bukharin and the Rights -- and with prejudice. He stated he would bloc with Stalin against the rights because their program of pro-peasant reform would lead to the destruction of the Soviet Union.

In your world, this makes no sense, zero. That is, of course, because your views make no sense. They are like delusions, comrade. Internally consistent, but patently false to anyone outside the delusional system.


They had a big role in the revolution,but if they truly cared for the revolution,why were they prepared to put the SU to great risks,with their fractionalism and struggles with Stalin and among themselves?


Because they felt that Stalin was putting the revolution at greater risk, by his capricious policies and anti-marxist approach. And what about the factionalism of Stalin? That's okay cause he had the party majority?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

He "warned" against fascists,and in the same time suggested that the "Stalinists" are the same and present the same threath.And that they should be eliminated,destroyed.

While presenting some kind of an idealistic view that German Nazi soldiers would betray Hitler and join the "working class" in the combat against Nazism.

Trotsky never, anywhere, suggested that the Nazis were the same as Stalin and his followers. That is simply a lie. It was the KPD that labeled it's opponents on the left as being the same as or even worse than the Nazis. That is a fact.
So Trotsky, who was seeking an alliance with Hitler against Stalin, was trying to develop cells of communists in the Wehrmacht? LMFAO. That makes no sense at all comrade.

The supporters of the 4th International defended the USSR against Germany. And there was a large split in the SWP because some wanted to abandon Soviet Defensism. Trotsky was intransigent about this. Really, Omsk, could you take a break from the Stalinist hacks and spend a few quality days with "In Defense Of Marxism" by Trotsky? Do you a world of good.:)

[A Marxist Historian]

If i might correct you just a little bit comrade,for the sake of historical accuracy.

In the 30' purge,the most of the accusations and reasons were:

Class-alien, hostile elements.
Double dealers, who undermine party policy .
Violators of discipline.
Defeatists.
Careerists and self-seekers.

And as Lenin pointed out:

Lenin initiated the first great "cleansing" of the Bolshevik party just as the transition had begun from "war communism" to the new economic policy. In 1922, when, as Lenin put it, "the party had rid itself of the rascals, bureaucrats, dishonest or waivering Communists, and of Mensheviks who have re-painted their facade but who remained Mensheviks at heart," another Congress took place; and it was this Congress which advanced Stalin to the key position of Bolshevik power.
It brought him into intimate contact with every functionary of the organization, enabling him to examine their work as well as their ideas.
Murphy, John Thomas. Stalin, London, John Lane, 1945, p. 145

The first party purge in 1921 was actually a concession to the Workers Opposition, who had been advocating kicking bourgeois elements and not totally ex-Mensheviks and such out of the party.

And indeed Lenin went along with Zinoviev's bright idea of making Stalin General Secretary, as he, and Trotsky too, thought that the Workers Opposition with their syndicalist deviation was still a danger insufficiently recognized by other leading Bolsheviks, given peasant and Kronstadt uprisings sometimes with suspiciously similar sounding slogans.

The immediate precipitant was the failure of Lenin and Trotsky's proposal to kick the Workers Opposition members off the Central Committee for factionalism, which was turned down. In retrospect, correctly.

Lenin almost immediately regretted going along with Zinoviev on this, saying to other prominent Bolsheviks, according to Trotsky, "this cook will be responsible for too many peppery dishes." And Lenin spent the last year of his life trying unsuccessfully first to curb Stalin and then remove him. Trotsky unfortunately did not support him sufficiently in this endeavor.

As for the middle '30s party purges using the justifications you cite, which too often historians consider as identical to the Great Terror, they were preparatory to the great slaughter of 1937-38, with most of the Central Committee and indeed most top party officials at all levels killed, even a few Politburo members.

The party purges were not directed against top officials, but against the party rank and file. During the First Five Year Plan, the piatiletka, hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of rank and file workers were recruited into the party. A whole lot of them were promoted into the Soviet bureaucracy, sent off to engineering school like Brezhnev and whatnot, but it was not possible to promote all of them.

So they had to be purged, as the CPUSSR was at that point much too reflective of the Soviet working class, even though most of those hundreds and thousands had joined the party hoping to become bureaucrats. Many of them were highly discontent, either with not getting a promotion or with the famines in Ukraine and elsewhere or the many industrial fiascos resulting from blundering Stalinist industrial planning or all three.

The three successive party purges turned the party from a highly working class party into a party of bureaucrats and intellectuals, which it was ever thereafter. And then most all the bureaucrats who were veterans of 1917 and knew what Leninism was really all about could be exterminated and replaced by recently promoted workers who were either too young to remember 1917 or had been more interested in survival and feeding their families during 1917 than revolution.

The Brezhnev generation.

-M.H.-

[Zulu]

Could we stipulate to the fact that the leadership of the Bolshevik party circa 1917 was comprised of admirable communists?
We could... but not really. There is, for instance, the well known fact that Zinoviev&Kamenev voted against the armed uprising in October.

And, of course, sending people run the streets with leaflets and revolvers is one thing, and bearing the brunt of responsibility for a huge country and the world revolution in others is a whole another matter.




Because they felt that Stalin was putting the revolution at greater risk, by his capricious policies and anti-marxist approach. And what about the factionalism of Stalin? That's okay cause he had the party majority?
The system of "democratic centralism" and the prohibition of factionalism both proposed by Lenin were approved by all the future factionalists. So they were the first to break the formal rules which led to the escalation of the power struggle and eventually to their execution.

[commieathighnoon]

So what does that means, workers' parties should have no freedom of thought or expression? Everyone should have laid down for Stalin's leadership or they "got what was coming to them"?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

We could... but not really. There is, for instance, the well known fact that Zinoviev&Kamenev voted against the armed uprising in October.

Yes, they made mistakes. How about Stalin's support of the Provisional Government before Lenin returned from exile? And his desire to conciliate the Mensheviks at that time?


And, of course, sending people run the streets with leaflets and revolvers is one thing, and bearing the brunt of responsibility for a huge country and the world revolution in others is a whole another matter.

And of course being bad at leading a country is then equivalent to being traitorous scum that deserve to be killed and to have their families killed too. Flawless reasoning comrade.

[daft punk]

A lot of the Central Committee members died before the trials,treason and everything that follows happened.Some even in the Civil War.

How do you know that "a few of the Old Bolsheviks survived"?
We cant know for sure how many of them "survived".But since the party was huge,i would say that a huge number of people who were in the Bolshevik party,"survived".

http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/events/terror/cc-1917.jpg

Kollantai survived because she was out of the country. Joffe is down as suicide, but let me briefly tell you his story. He was ill and Stalin denied him medical treatment. Stalin was getting ready to expell the Left Opposition, this was 1927. Joff rote a letter urging Trotsky to stand strong against Stalin and then killed himself. He was Trotsky's friend. Thousands turned up at his funeral. Stalin saw this as a threat and made stupid claims about plots.

So as you can see, only 2 survived.

And of course this was the case lower down the ranks of the CP. The socialists were all purged and shot. This was a counter-revolution.




And no,it is not true that the half of the party was purges,some 10% or less were purged,and many were let back in the party.

I don't think so, they were purging at least 100,000 a year for several years. Look it up in Rogovin's books, he had access to the archives in Moscow and studied it for years.



Malenkov noted that more than 100,000 of those expelled had been kicked out for little or no reason, while Trotskyists who occupied party leadership posts had passed through the screenings with little difficulty.

That is ludicrous. Trots were his main target. He killed Trotsky and his children and grandchildren, and his supporters and their families. we know that 10,000 Trotskyists were in Siberia because they won a hunger strike in 1937. However most were shot or died ultimately. Rogvin showed that Stalin's terror increased in response to the Trotskyists' resistance to the purges.



Stalin echoed the theme in one of his speeches to the February-March 1937 plenum. According to him, by the most extravagant count the number of Trotskyists, Zinovievists, and rightists could be no more than 30,000 persons. Yet in the membership screenings, more than 300,000 had been expelled; some factories now contained more ex-members than members. Stalin worried that this was creating large numbers of embittered former party members, and he blamed the territorial chiefs for the problem: "All these outrages that you have committed are water for the enemy's mill."...
On the other hand, even in the darkest days of the hysterical hunt for enemies in 1937 and 1938, most of those expelled back in 1935 and 1936 who appealed to Moscow were reinstated. Virtually all those expelled for "passivity" were readmitted, and appellants charged with more serious party offenses who appealed to the party control commission in Moscow...were usually readmitted, the proportion of successful appeals reaching 63 percent by 1938.
Getty & Naumov, The Road to Terror. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, c1999, p. 359

Well, the seem to be contradicting themselves here. Anyway, so the had to let some back in to keep the factories running, great.




Many big figures were also let back in a number of times:
Radek: He returned to Russia in 1920 and rose to the leadership of the Comintern, but having associated with the Trotsky opposition he was expelled from the party in 1925. Readmitted in 1930, he again rose to prominence as a journalist, propagandist, and official Communist spokesman and in 1935 he was a member of the Constitutional Commission designated by the Seventh All-Union Congress of Soviets to draft the text of the new "Stalin" Constitution.... But in 1937 he was charged with treason and conspiracy and, after repudiating his former political associates at a public trial, he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 327

He died in the gulag. He 'confessed' after 10 weeks of 'interrogation. Is this the best you can do?




Bukharin for an example:

Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo in 1929, and although appointed editor of Izvestia, the official government newspaper, in 1934, he never regained his previous power or influence....
Richardson, Rosamond. Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 83


But they were all killed by Stalin!





[Footnote: Roughly 264,000 people were expelled in 1935, 51,500 in 1936. In both years of "chistka" only 5.5% of those expelled were accused of opposition and .9% for being "spies" or having "connections to spies." Class- alien origins and personal corruption comprised the overwhelming majority.]
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 60

{noted by anti-Stalin source}

Between November 1936 and March 1939, including 1937, when the 'Great Purge' was at its most intense, roughly 160,000 to 180,000 people left the CPSU (for any reason). This represented about 8% of total Party members, far fewer than those who were expelled in the purge of 1933.
In 1937, at the height of the Great Purge in Moscow, 33,000 (13.4% of the total Moscow Oblast Party organization) left to the party; this compares with 133,000 in 1933 and 45,500 in 1935.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 241

I dunno if these figures are accurate. In June 1937 they proposed to bring in 140,000 Komsomol members to replace the people kicked out.

According to wiki it was 10% of the party that was expelled in 1929-30. 1932-33 saw 18% expelled, 1.9 million. However in those purges you didnt usually get killed.

The great purge was later

In 1933 400,000 were expelled.

In 1934 Stalin killed a million people.

and so on.

Just to give a little taster,


1937
July 31NKVD operative order 00447 «Об операции по репрессированию бывших кулаков, уголовников и других антисоветских элементов» (The operation for repression of former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements) is approved by the Politburo. Originally the operation was planned for four months; the plan was for 75,950 people to be executed and an additional 193,000 to be sent to the GULAG. The operation was extended multiple times. Altogether, through the summer of 1938, at least 818,000 people were arrested and not less than 436,000 were executed.August 15NKVD operative order 00486 On repression of the family members of traitors, Trotskyists, and other citizens sentenced by the Military Collegium and the Special Commission. The order required wives and children older than 15 years old to be sent to the GULAG for 5 to 8 years; children younger than 15 were put in "special orphanages". There were 19,000 wives were arrested and 25,000 children were removed.Just two random days in the life of Uncle Joe


Statistics: October 1936–November 1938

In the cases investigated by the State Security Department of the NKVD (GUGB NKVD):


At least 1,710,000 people were arrested.
At least 1,440,000 people were sentenced.
At least 724,000 people were sentenced to death. Among those executed:

At least 436,000 people were sentenced to death by NKVD troikas as part of the Kulak Operation.
At least 247,000 people were sentenced to death by NKVD Dvoikas and the Local Special Troikas as part of the Ethnic Operation.
At least 41,000 people were sentenced to death by Military Courts.



Among other cases in October 1936-November 1938:


At least 400,000 people were sentenced to labor camps by Police Troikas as Socially Harmful Elements (социально-вредный элемент, СВЭ)
At least 200,000 people were exiled or deported by "Administrative procedures".
At least two million people were sentenced by courts for common crimes; among them 800,000 were sentenced to GULAG camps.

wiki













Why did you mention the Comintern,it didnt exist by the time Tito and Stalin planned the future of Yugoslavia.


Yeah the Comintern was closed down in 1943. Stalin still had contacts with all the CPs though.





No,wikipedia is not reliable,and can be edited by anyone.

It's ok as a starting point. You have to check stuff, yeah, it can be wrong sometimes.






He "warned" against fascists,and in the same time suggested that the "Stalinists" are the same and present the same threath.And that they should be eliminated,destroyed.

He did not say that, he said a new workers party needed to be built in the USSR, and if it got mass support from the workers, the Stalinist elite would be suspended in mid air. This was in 1933, before the purges got going, the later purges where expulsion usually meant death.

Trotsky, 1933:

"Today, even such congresses have been discarded. No normal “constitutional” ways remain to remove the ruling clique. The bureaucracy can be compelled to yield power into the hands of the proletarian vanguard only by force. All the hacks will immediately howl in chorus: The “Trotskyites,” like Kautsky, are preaching an armed insurrection against the dictatorship of the proletariat. But let us pass on. The question of seizing power will arise as a practical question for the new party only when it will have consolidated around itself the majority of the working class. In the course of such a radical change in the relation of forces, the bureaucracy would become more and more isolated, more and more split. As we know, the social roots of the bureaucracy lie in the proletariat, if not in its active support, then, at any rate, in its “toleration.” When the proletariat springs into action, the Stalinist apparatus will remain suspended in midair. Should it still attempt to resist, it will then be necessary to apply against it not the measures of civil war but rather the measures of a police character. In any case, what will be involved is not an armed insurrection against the dictatorship of the proletariat but the removal of a malignant growth upon it.
A real civil war could develop not between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the resurgent proletariat but between the proletariat and the active forces of the counterrevolution. In the event of an open clash between the two mass camps, there cannot even be talk of the bureaucracy playing an independent role. Its polar flanks would be flung to the different sides of the barricade. The fate of the subsequent development would be determined, of course, by the outcome of the struggle. The victory of the revolutionary camp, in any case, is conceivable only under the leadership of a proletarian party, which would naturally be raised to power by victory over the counterrevolution."








While presenting some kind of an idealistic view that German Nazi soldiers would betray Hitler and join the "working class" in the combat against Nazism.

Which proved to be complete bogus.
Like the most of his predictions.

This quote is not on the net so cannot be checked. It is possible he hoped the German soldiers might revolt, he only saw the start of the war though, before Stalin offed him.

However it would be a possibility, not a probability.

what he did say in 1940 is

"In the defeated countries the position of the masses will immediately become worsened in the extreme. Added to social oppression is national oppression, the main burden of which is likewise borne by the workers. Of all the forms of dictatorship, the totalitarian dictatorship of a foreign conqueror is the most intolerable. At the same time, to the extent that the Nazis will try to utilize the natural resources and the industrial machinery of the nations defeated by them, the Nazis will themselves become inevitably dependent upon the native peasants and workers. Only after the victory do economic difficulties always begin. It is impossible to attach a soldier with a rifle to each Polish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Belgian, French worker and peasant. National Socialism is without any prescription for transforming defeated peoples from foes into friends. The experience of the Germans in the Ukraine in 1918 has demonstrated how difficult it is to utilize through military methods the natural wealth and labor power of a defeated people; and how swiftly an army of occupation is demoralized in an atmosphere of universal hostility."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/06/course.htm

do you think he time travelled to 2003, watched Iraq for a few years and then went back?

[Comrade Auldnik]

This in-depth and accurate analysis of Stalin brought to you by ...

WIKIFUCKINPEDIA AGAIN.

[Omsk]

Kollantai survived because she was out of the country. Joffe is down as suicide, but let me briefly tell you his story. He was ill and Stalin denied him medical treatment. Stalin was getting ready to expell the Left Opposition, this was 1927. Joff rote a letter urging Trotsky to stand strong against Stalin and then killed himself. He was Trotsky's friend. Thousands turned up at his funeral. Stalin saw this as a threat and made stupid claims about plots.

So as you can see, only 2 survived.


And of course this was the case lower down the ranks of the CP. The socialists were all purged and shot. This was a counter-revolution.




1) You cant count people who died in the Civil War/died in accidents/died because of medical problems.

2)
The socialists were all purged and shot.

This is ridiculous.


I don't think so, they were purging at least 100,000 a year for several years. Look it up in Rogovin's books, he had access to the archives in Moscow and studied it for years.



Rogovin's books have many unsupported claims,i ordered one of his books,so when i get it,i could write a couple of lines.

However,there are many exmaples of him being uncertain,not geting any evidence etc,etc.

A month later, however, Olberg "confessed" that he had come from abroad on assignment from Trotsky, and that he had recruited into a terrorist organization many teachers and students at the Gorky Ped-Institute. All the people he named were brought to Moscow and shot on Oct. 3, 1936.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 3


Nevertheless, not only Kamenev's oldest son, but his middle son as well, the 16 year old Yuri, was shot in 1938-39.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 8


Stalin made a few additions to the defendants' testimony which they were supposed to give at the trial. He demanded that Reingold formulate the alleged terrorist instructions he received from Zinoviev in the following way....
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 12


Whereas Yezhov reduced the "main and principal task of the 'center'" to the assassination of Stalin, Stalin formulated it as the "assassination of comrades Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Kirov, Ordjonikidze, Zhdanov, Kossior, and Postyshev."
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 13

“Stalin's promises to spare the lives of the defendants....”
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 36

The Kemerovo Trial was the first "Trotskyist" frame-up at which the defendants were charged with sabotage.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 95

Of course, in order to convince the defendants to "voluntarily" confess, they were promised their lives in return.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 177

... the veracity of the self-slander generated in the torture chambers of the NKVD.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 250


In the spring of 1937, on orders from Moscow, the hunger strikers were told that their demands would be met. They were all sent to the "Brick Factory," a former site for special punishment, where in the fall of 1937, mass shootings of the prisoners began.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 392


However it ignores the indisputable fact that many victims of Stalin's terror signed the confessions beaten out of them at the pre-trial investigation,
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 448


For instance, Medvedev, whom we have mentioned earlier, which tortured by the same investigators who tortured the generals appearing before a military trial.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 449


We can assume that when Zinoviev and Kamenev met with Stalin and agreed to confess to the charge of terrorist activity, they asked in return to remove the charge of preparing to restore capitalist relations in the country after they had come to power.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 26


The four defendants who were spared did not outlive their codefendants for long. Radek and Sokolnikov were murdered in 1939 by criminals who were prison cellmates, apparently on orders from the "organs."
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 126


We must assume that Stalin saved the "Letter of an Old Bolshevik" in order to put psychological pressure on Bukharin during the prison investigation.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 237


But they were all killed by Stalin!

You tried to promote a view that "once purged,forever purged" and that is not true,there were many casses of people being brought back in the party.


wiki
No.


Yeah the Comintern was closed down in 1943. Stalin still had contacts with all the CPs though.


I know all of that,but why did you mention the Comintern?As you like to say,"you might read up on that".


He did not say that, he said a new workers party needed to be built in the USSR, and if it got mass support from the workers, the Stalinist elite would be suspended in mid air. This was in 1933, before the purges got going, the later purges where expulsion usually meant death.

Trotsky, 1933:

"Today, even such congresses have been discarded. No normal “constitutional” ways remain to remove the ruling clique. The bureaucracy can be compelled to yield power into the hands of the proletarian vanguard only by [I]force. All the hacks will immediately howl in chorus: The “Trotskyites,” like Kautsky, are preaching an armed insurrection against the dictatorship of the proletariat. But let us pass on. The question of seizing power will arise as a practical question for the new party only when it will have consolidated around itself the majority of the working class. In the course of such a radical change in the relation of forces, the bureaucracy would become more and more isolated, more and more split. As we know, the social roots of the bureaucracy lie in the proletariat, if not in its active support, then, at any rate, in its “toleration.” When the proletariat springs into action, the Stalinist apparatus will remain suspended in midair. Should it still attempt to resist, it will then be necessary to apply against it not the measures of civil war but rather the measures of a police character. In any case, what will be involved is not an armed insurrection against the dictatorship of the proletariat but the removal of a malignant growth upon it.
A real civil war could develop not between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the resurgent proletariat but between the proletariat and the active forces of the counterrevolution. In the event of an open clash between the two mass camps, there cannot even be talk of the bureaucracy playing an independent role. Its polar flanks would be flung to the different sides of the barricade. The fate of the subsequent development would be determined, of course, by the outcome of the struggle. The victory of the revolutionary camp, in any case, is conceivable only under the leadership of a proletarian party, which would naturally be raised to power by victory over the counterrevolution."



Moral revulsion at assassination as a political weapon was a sentiment unknown to Trotsky, for all his initial Marxist objections to individual terrorism.
"We were never concerned," wrote Trotsky, "with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the sacredness of human life. We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can be solved only by blood and iron.”
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 267

Dont be naive,do you actually think Trotsky would left any "Stalinist" standing in the USSR?Do you think,in the case of an counter-revolution in the USSR,the "Stalinists" would not fight back?

Its absurd to believe that a Trotskyist claim of power would be without blood,and mass executions.



This quote is not on the net so cannot be checked.


Books?


do you think he time travelled to 2003, watched Iraq for a few years and then went back?


Well,he could have stopped guessing and making predictions.



"In the defeated countries the position of the masses will immediately become worsened in the extreme. Added to social oppression is national oppression, the main burden of which is likewise borne by the workers. Of all the forms of dictatorship, the totalitarian dictatorship of a foreign conqueror is the most intolerable. At the same time, to the extent that the Nazis will try to utilize the natural resources and the industrial machinery of the nations defeated by them, the Nazis will themselves become inevitably dependent upon the native peasants and workers. Only after the victory do economic difficulties always begin. It is impossible to attach a soldier with a rifle to each Polish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Belgian, French worker and peasant. National Socialism is without any prescription for transforming defeated peoples from foes into friends. The experience of the Germans in the Ukraine in 1918 has demonstrated how difficult it is to utilize through military methods the natural wealth and labor power of a defeated people; and how swiftly an army of occupation is demoralized in an atmosphere of universal hostility."



Hardly any "demoralization" happened,at least among the Nazi Wermacht troops,brought to madness by Nazism and hatred.



National Socialism is without any prescription for transforming defeated peoples from foes into friends.


Was Trotsky aware that the main intention of the Nazis in Eastern Europe was to exterminate Slavs,not transform them into "friends".

[Comrade Auldnik]

Now, see, why can't you all be more like Omsk? This comrade is doing what I expect of someone who can actually support his/her own point.

[ColonelCossack]

Stalin killed everyone. The only reason we're here is because the world was repopulated with Aliens hidden in volcanoes. True story.


Well, not really. But here's something interesting; if Stalin killed 20 million, and another 27 million died in WW2, how did the USSR become the 2nd largest superpower in the World? That's like, a quarter of their population...

Also, the Nazis acc went out of their way to kill people. The deaths in the SU were probably (mostly) due to famines and deaths in prison etc. Which is still bad, but they had most of the world against them.

[Zulu]

At least 724,000 people were sentenced to death. Among those executed:

At least 436,000 people were sentenced to death by NKVD troikas as part of the Kulak Operation.
At least 247,000 people were sentenced to death by NKVD Dvoikas and the Local Special Troikas as part of the Ethnic Operation.
At least 41,000 people were sentenced to death by Military Courts.



Well, these seem to be reasonable figures. So, it's less than a million during the Great Terror.

Only it was not "the Ethnic Operation", but "national operations", meaning operations in the national republics of the USSR, meaning an ethnically Russian resident of Ukraine or Kazakhstan would count in this. There were plenty of kulaks of different ethnic descent in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Of course, there were Ukrainian and Kazakh nationalists too (and some even coming from the working class, probably), but nationalism was anti-socialist and therefore anti-Soviet activity.

So you see, your beloved Trotsky actually moaned only for the 41,000 of his buddies dealt with by the court martial, but wouldn't give a damn about the rest. If it were up to him, it's possible he'd go even more revolutionary on their kulak arses. So why do you keep pounding this "Black Book of Communism" shit?

[Bostana]

How much has America killed over the years?
100 million?
200 million?

The list goes on.
I mean they've already killed 104,000-223,000 Iraqi civilians.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Moral revulsion at assassination as a political weapon was a sentiment unknown to Trotsky, for all his initial Marxist objections to individual terrorism.
"We were never concerned," wrote Trotsky, "with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the sacredness of human life. We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can be solved only by blood and iron.”
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 267

Dont be naive,do you actually think Trotsky would left any "Stalinist" standing in the USSR?Do you think,in the case of an counter-revolution in the USSR,the "Stalinists" would not fight back?

Its absurd to believe that a Trotskyist claim of power would be without blood,and mass executions.

Omsk, we've gone over this before. Trotsky wrote clearly about political revolution. He was no wuss, and certainly made no bones about revolutionary violence. A good read on this would be "Terrorism and Communism." But Trotsky's politics were never the personal, cult politics of Stalin. And you and your Stalinist knuckleheads seem to think that if Stalin ONLY killed 41,000 left oppositionists, and only a few hundred thousand others, then he was really an OK guy.

This is the same idealistic, personalist bullshit, comrades. It is about PROGRAM PROGRAM PROGRAM. Stalin's program, such as it was, of nationalism, crippled the international fight for socialism. That he was an unusually vicious, paranoid and even sociopathic guy, well that's interesting, but not the central point. So all of your protestations about what Trotsky would have done if the LO was victorious in the USSR, is truly pointless. You like to think that he would have behaved like Stalin, only with different politics. That justifies the slaughter that Stalin unleashed. There is no evidence for this, except your own analysis of Trotsky's personality, which is highly suspect.

Trotskyists oppose Stalin from the left. We are not shocked that revolution and war lead to deaths. It is the terror against the comrades in the CPSU and the fact that the purges set back the cause of communism, maybe irreparably, that we most object to. Obviously, bourgeois historians and political commentator want to equate Stalin with Hitler to discredit communism. We have a very different analysis of him. The poison of Stalinism in the international worker's movement has, to a large extent, brought us to the current pass. Congrats.

[manic expression]

Stalin's program was not nationalism. Not at all. If it were, then he would have never sent vital aid to Spain or attempted to bring about an anti-Nazi alliance.

But I do fail to see what Trotsky would have done so differently. His main argument was not that the Soviet Union was no longer a worker state (because he admitted as much), his main argument was that he didn't like the person in charge. So why the charge of "idealistic, personalist bullshit" when that seems to be the entire raison d'etre for Trotskyism?

[Omsk]

Omsk, we've gone over this before. Trotsky wrote clearly about political revolution. He was no wuss, and certainly made no bones about revolutionary violence. A good read on this would be "Terrorism and Communism." But Trotsky's politics were never the personal, cult politics of Stalin.

Yes,we've gone trough all of this before,but the question remains,would Trotsky eliminate all of his political enemies in the USSR after he got the power?What would happen to the party?Purges?Violence was no new thing to him,and many anti-Stalin historians noted that,for an example:

As Joel Carmichael writes:
"Trotsky also gave full expression to the ferocity inherent in civil war; in the nature of things anything short of the death penalty can be thought rectifiable by the victory of one's own side.
Trotsky's wholehearted identification with an Idea made him implacable--"merciless" was a favorite word of his own. He had a certain admiral (Shchastny) executed on an indictment of sabotage. This admiral had been appointed by the Bolsheviks themselves; he had saved the Baltic Sea Fleet from the Germans and with great difficulty brought it from Helsingfors to Kronstadt and the mouth of the Neva. He was very popular among the sailors; because of his strong position vis-a-vis the new regime he behaved quite independently. This is what annoyed Trotsky, who was, in fact, the only witness to appear against him, and who denounced him without itemizing any charges; he simply said in court that [Shchastny] was a dangerous state criminal who ought to be mercilessly punished....
Trotsky also instituted a savage general measure-- the keeping of hostages: he had a register made up of the families of officers fighting at the fronts."
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 105

Another instance,Isaac Deutscher,notes that Trotsky was no stranger to executions and violence.

Trotsky had not shrunk from using terror in the Civil War; but he can be said to have been as little fond of it as a surgeon is fond of bloodshed.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 292

There are a lof of examples.


Another well-known incident was his taking of harsh reprisals against a regiment that abandoned its position without orders. Trotsky ordered not only the commander and the commissar but also every tenth Red Army man in the regiment to be shot.
Through such severity Trotsky accumulated many enemies among party and military workers.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 105

I don't like guessing games,and talking about the what-if subjects,but this is not the history subforum,this is learning,so i think it is all right if we go into this kind of an conversation,no?


But Trotsky's politics were never the personal, cult politics of Stalin.
But the better part of his writing and books do have an emphasis on Stalin,and the USSR which he led,right?A lot of his works,were indeed personal,and his policies,he was egoistic,he was also very hard to work with,for an example:
Somewhat weakly, it must be said, Trotsky agreed and allowed Stalin to join the war staff on the Southern front. That was an error if Trotsky firmly believed that it was fatal to allow young communists to run the army rather than ex-officers of the Tsar's army.
In any case, he proceeded to get rid of all Stalin's "heroes" in Tsaritsyn. In December he demanded of Lenin that Voroshilov be relieved as he could not work with him. And with Voroshilov the rest of the staff was dismissed and Trotsky had a new staff of his own choosing and a new commander.
Graham, Stephen. Stalin. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1970, p. 53


This is the same idealistic, personalist bullshit, comrades. It is about PROGRAM PROGRAM PROGRAM. Stalin's program, such as it was, of nationalism, crippled the international fight for socialism. That he was an unusually vicious, paranoid and even sociopathic guy, well that's interesting, but not the central point. So all of your protestations about what Trotsky would have done if the LO was victorious in the USSR, is truly pointless. You like to think that he would have behaved like Stalin, only with different politics. That justifies the slaughter that Stalin unleashed. There is no evidence for this, except your own analysis of Trotsky's personality, which is highly suspect.


Some of you Trotskyists claimed that Stalin used/stole the program of the Left Opposition.Do you share that view?Stalin never ignored internationalism,but he was a realist,like Lenin was,[The surge for internationalism led to the over-hastened spread of the revolutionary influence in Europe,in some casses,it led to a military defeat,like in Poland,and in others,to a crushing of the revolution,like in the more industrialised countries of Europe.

[daft punk]

1) You cant count people who died in the Civil War/died in accidents/died because of medical problems. Joffe was denied medical treatment, he was as good as murdered.

Only 2 survived.






Rogovin's books have many unsupported claims,i ordered one of his books,so when i get it,i could write a couple of lines.

However,there are many exmaples of him being uncertain,not geting any evidence etc,etc.

A month later, however, Olberg "confessed" that he had come from abroad on assignment from Trotsky, and that he had recruited into a terrorist organization many teachers and students at the Gorky Ped-Institute. All the people he named were brought to Moscow and shot on Oct. 3, 1936.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 3 [/QUOTE]
Olberg was a NKVD spy. Orlov was probably the source of the info that the people at the Institute got shot.

The CIA say:
"In Moscow Olberg was first assigned to the GPU political department, which was then under the direction of Molchanov.32 (https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol16no1/html/v16i1a03p_0001.htm#32-probably-georgiy-aleksandrovich) In the drive to suppress Trotskyist tendencies in Soviet universities the latter assigned him, as an expert, to act under cover as a history professor at the Gorky Institute. However, both the academic staff and the local CP secretary, Yelin, who controlled it, found Olberg unqualified to teach history or anything else. In the interview he gave contradictory responses; he was not a Party member, as required of all the staff; he had no record of Party education, or of any previous employment. He was not even a Soviet citizen but a Latvian who had entered the USSR with a Honduran passport. The Institute's rejection was immediately overruled, however, by Molchanov and his boss, Yezhov. Olberg became a historian overnight, while all those who objected, and an even larger number of "Trotskyists" whom he reported, were executed.33 (https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol16no1/html/v16i1a03p_0001.htm#33-with-the-exception)"
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol16no1/html/v16i1a03p_0001.htm






Nevertheless, not only Kamenev's oldest son, but his middle son as well, the 16 year old Yuri, was shot in 1938-39.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 8

Why are you saying this is unsupported? Kamenev's elder son was an Air Force officer, A.L.Kamenv age 33 shot with a bullet to the head in jail July 15 1939. The younger son was shot aged 17 a year earlier. Kamenev's widow was shot in 1941. Kamenevs other son somehow survived in jail, his mother was shot in 1937. As far as I know they are listed in NKVD documents and / or people like Orlov knew about it. They certainly weren't abducted by aliens.



Stalin made a few additions to the defendants' testimony which they were supposed to give at the trial. He demanded that Reingold formulate the alleged terrorist instructions he received from Zinoviev in the following way....
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 12

Source is Orlov



Whereas Yezhov reduced the "main and principal task of the 'center'" to the assassination of Stalin, Stalin formulated it as the "assassination of comrades Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Kirov, Ordjonikidze, Zhdanov, Kossior, and Postyshev."
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 13


source is Reabilitatsiia p 186

it is all sourced, so dont say it's not








You tried to promote a view that "once purged,forever purged" and that is not true,there were many casses of people being brought back in the party.
Not the dead ones



Moral revulsion at assassination as a political weapon was a sentiment unknown to Trotsky, for all his initial Marxist objections to individual terrorism.
"We were never concerned," wrote Trotsky, "with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the sacredness of human life. We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can be solved only by blood and iron.”
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 267

Dont be naive,do you actually think Trotsky would left any "Stalinist" standing in the USSR?Do you think,in the case of an counter-revolution in the USSR,the "Stalinists" would not fight back?

Its absurd to believe that a Trotskyist claim of power would be without blood,and mass executions.


Trotsky organised the Russian revolution. Two people died. Sure there was a civil war after, but that was different, it was the capitalists vs the workers.

You read what Trotsky wrote. People like Trotsky and Lenin always wrote what they believed. They were revolutionaries not conspirators.



Well,he could have stopped guessing and making predictions.

He was usually right





Hardly any "demoralization" happened,at least among the Nazi Wermacht troops,brought to madness by Nazism and hatred.
He is talking about what might happen if the Nazis won, talking about how occupied people put up resistance.

[Zulu]

He is talking about what might happen if the Nazis won, talking about how occupied people put up resistance.

That was a great advice, full of wisdom. "Just surrender to the Nazis, people, it'll all be okay, once I kick that pesky Stalin out of the Kremlin!"

[GoddessCleoLover]

I am not a Trotskyist and usually try to stay out of the Stalin-Trotsky polemics, but do you really believe that is an accurate characterization of Trotsky's position, to encourage surrender to the Nazis?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Stalin's program was not nationalism. Not at all. If it were, then he would have never sent vital aid to Spain or attempted to bring about an anti-Nazi alliance.

But I do fail to see what Trotsky would have done so differently. His main argument was not that the Soviet Union was no longer a worker state (because he admitted as much), his main argument was that he didn't like the person in charge. So why the charge of "idealistic, personalist bullshit" when that seems to be the entire raison d'etre for Trotskyism?

It absolutely is nationalism. He sent vital aid to the Spanish Popular Front, hoping to stabilize a friendly bourgeois regime. He strangled the revolution there. The anti-Nazi alliance was again, to preserve Stalin's source of power and privilege, the USSR, he was perfectly willing to and often did, sacrifice other revolutions to "protect" the USSR. He first ruined and then dissolved the Comintern. He put forth the deeply anti-Leninist formulation of building socialism in one country then advanced the Menshevik two-stage revolution in underdeveloped countries, with failure after failure.


Yes,we've gone trough all of this before,but the question remains,would Trotsky eliminate all of his political enemies in the USSR after he got the power?What would happen to the party?Purges?Violence was no new thing to him,and many anti-Stalin historians noted that,for an example:

Comrade, we can only go by his history and his writing. But there is no definitive answer. So your point is ultimately that "Trotsky would have done the same thing, so there." It's idiotic -- you are speculating, and badly at that. Stay with PROGRAM, forget the personalist shit.

[Zulu]

I am not a Trotskyist and usually try to stay out of the Stalin-Trotsky polemics, but do you really believe that is an accurate characterization of Trotsky's position, to encourage surrender to the Nazis?
He uses the same rationale as the Bolsheviks used during the WWI: turn the imperialist war into a civil war. In reality it worked only for Russia, and the Ukraine was temporarily occupied by the Kaiser's troops. But that doesn't account for the Nazi ideology, let alone everything else.

[Omsk]

Comrade, we can only go by his history and his writing. But there is no definitive answer. So your point is ultimately that "Trotsky would have done the same thing, so there." It's idiotic -- you are speculating, and badly at that. Stay with PROGRAM, forget the personalist shit.


Well,i posted some information which could support my claim,that his ruling style would probably be quite bloody,and that anyone who supported Stalin,would probably end up executed.I posted why i think so,and you posted,in a response,"Its idiotic".
If you are asking people to forget 'presonalism',than you could tell that to your Trotskyists comrades,who's entire argument is,at times : "Stalin hated socialism" "Stalin this Stalin that".And tell me,why i am speculating about this "badly"?Many of the Trotskyist on this board insist that Stalin followed the program of the Left-Opposition?


So your point is ultimately that "Trotsky would have done the same thing, so there."

Dont misenterperate my position on this,and dont resort to simplicism,i just pointed out that,if we look at some examples from history,we can assume that Trotsky,in the case of an successful counter-revolution in the CCCP,would not be kind to the party members loyal to Stalin.And from there,another point comes out - what would happen to the "Stalinists" in the USSR?[For an example,they were rounded up and thrown into a prison camp in Yugoslavia] Their program also had faults.



Orlov was probably the source of the info that the people at the Institute got shot.




Orlov is not a valid source,and a lot of people really question or completely throw aside his information.


Not the dead ones

Dont create strawmen.


Trotsky organised the Russian revolution. Two people died. Sure there was a civil war after, but that was different, it was the capitalists vs the workers.

And,as i have noted in a response to Lev,he was no stranger to executions.[Find that post if you want]


You read what Trotsky wrote. People like Trotsky and Lenin always wrote what they believed. They were revolutionaries not conspirators.


Really?

Did Trotsky believe in these lines he wrote:

“The wretched squabbling systematically provoked by Lenin, that old hand at the game, that professional exploiter of all that is backward in the Russian labour movement, seems like a senseless obsession…. The entire edifice of Leninism Is built on lies and falsification and bears within itself the poisonous elements of its own decay.”


He was usually right

"Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question we will answer as frankly; if the war should only remain a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union will be inevitable. In a technical economic, and military sense, imperialism is incomparably more strong. If it is not paralysed by revolution in the west; imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October Revolution" (Revolution Betrayed, p. 216).

Was he right in the prediction?

"Stalin cannot make a war with discontented workers and peasants and with a decapitated Red Army"

Or this one?

"Stalin cannot wage an offensive war with any hope of victory.



He is talking about what might happen if the Nazis won, talking about how occupied people put up resistance.


Among other things,he talked how the Nazis would lose strenght,combat morale,etc etc.That did not happen for the better part of the war.[At least in Eastern Europe] - They fought like maniacs.

[Comrade Auldnik]

But Trotsky's politics were never the personal, cult politics of Stalin.

Are you kidding me? Trotskyism's anti-communist polemic relies almost entirely on personal politics. Trotsky's whole claim to ideological legitimacy was based on the idea that he was essentially Lenin's best buddy.

[daft punk]

That was a great advice, full of wisdom. "Just surrender to the Nazis, people, it'll all be okay, once I kick that pesky Stalin out of the Kremlin!"

surrender? Trotsky told his followers in America to go and get conscripted. But only so they could be where the workers were, to agitate for socialist revolution.

In a war it gets complicated. Some say fighting is fighting for the bourgeois of your country so should be avoided, some say defeat would be better for revolution, as I think you think Trotsky thought. I think there is confusion over what Trotsky thought.



"We can’t oppose compulsory military training by the bourgeois state just as we can’t oppose compulsory education by the bourgeois state. Military training in our eyes is a part of education. We must struggle against the bourgeois state; its abuses in this field as in others. We must of course fight against the war not only “until the very last moment” but during the war itself when it begins. We must however give to our fight against the war its fully revolutionary sense, opposing and pitilessly denouncing pacifism. The very simple and very great idea of our fight against the war is: we are against the war but we will have the war if we are incapable of overthrowing the capitalists."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/07/letter04.htm




Workers must learn military arts
The militarization of the masses is further intensified every day. We reject the grotesque pretension of doing away with this militarization through empty pacifist protests. All the great questions will be decided in the next epoch arms in hand. The workers should not fear arms; on the contrary they should learn to use them. Revolutionists no more separate themselves from the people during war than in peace. A Bolshevik strives to become not only the best trade unionist but also the best soldier.
We do not wish to permit the bourgeoisie to drive untrained or hall trained soldiers at the last hour onto the battlefield. We demand that the state immediately provide the workers and the unemployed with the possibility of learning how to handle the rifle, the hand grenade, the machine gun, the cannon, the airplane, the submarine, and the other tools of war. Special military schools are necessary in close connec tion with the trade unions so that the workers can become skilled specialists of the military art, able to hold posts as commanders.

This is not our war!
At the same time we do not forget for a moment that this war is not our war. In contradistinction to the Second and Third Internationals, the Fourth International builds its policy not on the military fortunes of the capitalist states but on the transformation of the imperialist war into a war of the workers against the capitalists, on the overthrow of the ruling classes of all countries, on the world socialist revolution. The shifts in the battle lines at the front, the destruction of national capitals, the occupation of territories, the downfall of individual states, represent from this standpoint only tragic episodes on the road to the reconstruction of modern society.
Independently of the course of the war, we fulfill our basic task: we explain to the workers the irreconcilability between their interests and the interests of bloodthirsty capitalism; we mobilize the toilers against imperialism; we propagate the unity of the workers in all warring and neutral countries; we call for the fraternization of workers and soldiers within each country, and of soldiers with soldiers on the opposite side of the battle front; we mobilize the women and youth against the war; we carry on constant, persistent, tireless preparation for the revolution—in the factories, in the mills, in the villages, in the barracks, at the front, and in the fleet
This is our program. Proletarians of the world, there is no other way out except to unite under the banner of the Fourth International!

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fi/1938-1949/emergconf/fi-emerg02.htm


Manifesto of the Fourth International on Imperialist War and the Imperialist War

Imperialist War And The Proletarian World Revolution

Adopted by the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International
May 19-26, 1940

[daft punk]

Orlov is not a valid source,and a lot of people really question or completely throw aside his information.

support




And,as i have noted in a response to Lev,he was no stranger to executions.[Find that post if you want]

Who did Trotsky execute?





Really?

Did Trotsky believe in these lines he wrote:

“The wretched squabbling systematically provoked by Lenin, that old hand at the game, that professional exploiter of all that is backward in the Russian labour movement, seems like a senseless obsession…. The entire edifice of Leninism Is built on lies and falsification and bears within itself the poisonous elements of its own decay.”
Yes we know that in private letters to different people Lenin and Trotsky slagged each other off loads in those days.




"Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question we will answer as frankly; if the war should only remain a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union will be inevitable. In a technical economic, and military sense, imperialism is incomparably more strong. If it is not paralysed by revolution in the west; imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October Revolution" (Revolution Betrayed, p. 216).

Was he right in the prediction?


and then just after that he says

"The situation would be radically different, of course, if the bourgeois allies received material guarantees that the Moscow government stands on the same side with them, not only of the war trenches, but of the class trenches, too."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch08.htm

I think you should look these quotes up and check them out before posting.

By the way, after WW2 the capitalists started the cold war and now the USSR no longer exists.




"Stalin cannot make a war with discontented workers and peasants and with a decapitated Red Army"

Or this one?

"Stalin cannot wage an offensive war with any hope of victory.

Find the proper quotes online, I need the context etc.

[Omsk]

Who did Trotsky execute?


Here are some examples,i can find more if you want.


As Joel Carmichael writes:
"Trotsky also gave full expression to the ferocity inherent in civil war; in the nature of things anything short of the death penalty can be thought rectifiable by the victory of one's own side.
Trotsky's wholehearted identification with an Idea made him implacable--"merciless" was a favorite word of his own. He had a certain admiral (Shchastny) executed on an indictment of sabotage. This admiral had been appointed by the Bolsheviks themselves; he had saved the Baltic Sea Fleet from the Germans and with great difficulty brought it from Helsingfors to Kronstadt and the mouth of the Neva. He was very popular among the sailors; because of his strong position vis-a-vis the new regime he behaved quite independently. This is what annoyed Trotsky, who was, in fact, the only witness to appear against him, and who denounced him without itemizing any charges; he simply said in court that [Shchastny] was a dangerous state criminal who ought to be mercilessly punished....
Trotsky also instituted a savage general measure-- the keeping of hostages: he had a register made up of the families of officers fighting at the fronts."
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 105

Another instance,Isaac Deutscher,notes that Trotsky was no stranger to executions and violence.

Trotsky had not shrunk from using terror in the Civil War; but he can be said to have been as little fond of it as a surgeon is fond of bloodshed.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 292

There are a lof of examples.

Another well-known incident was his taking of harsh reprisals against a regiment that abandoned its position without orders. Trotsky ordered not only the commander and the commissar but also every tenth Red Army man in the regiment to be shot.
Through such severity Trotsky accumulated many enemies among party and military workers.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 105


support


A simple example:
(You can find others on the web,the point is - he had a personal role in many of the events,and he lied at times)


Many historians believe there is the ring of truth to Orlov's tales, though the reader should remember that some of the stories were told second-hand, that Orlov himself was deliberately dishonest about his own complicity in these affairs.




Yes we know that in private letters to different people Lenin and Trotsky slagged each other off loads in those days.

Well,since you said Trotsky always believed in what he wrote,i am asking you,did he believe in that too?A simple yes or no would be adequate.


Find the proper quotes online, I need the context etc.

I will try.

Can you show me at least 3-4 quotes where his predictions proved to be right?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Are you kidding me? Trotskyism's anti-communist polemic relies almost entirely on personal politics. Trotsky's whole claim to ideological legitimacy was based on the idea that he was essentially Lenin's best buddy.

Are you joking? What original material written by Trotsky or his close followers have you ever read? Must not be much comrade. Trotsky's claim to legitimacy was his PROGRAM -- the continuation of Marxism and Leninism. Back that comment up with a quote.

And Omsk, as for Stalin taking the LO's program, he did, very reactively adopt the policy of industrialization and collectivization which the Left had been screaming about as the Kulaks became stronger and started to starve the cities. It was better he did it than not, but the way he did it probably set back Soviet agriculture many years. They initially had collective farms with no machinery. So, it's not that Stalin never did the right things comrades, it's that his program was a nationalist, bureaucratic perversion of Leninism that ultimately led to the restoration of capitalism in the USSR and delayed world revolution indefinitely.

But, I guess because he was handsome, and had boundless energy, and was a mighty military man, his program doesn't matter. That's what cult of personality is all about.

[daft punk]

Here are some examples,i can find more if you want.


As Joel Carmichael writes:
"Trotsky also gave full expression to the ferocity inherent in civil war; in the nature of things anything short of the death penalty can be thought rectifiable by the victory of one's own side.

Er, the clue is in the word war. However although he sometimes threatened the death penalty it wasnt always carried out.




Trotsky's wholehearted identification with an Idea made him implacable--"merciless" was a favorite word of his own. He had a certain admiral (Shchastny) executed on an indictment of sabotage. This admiral had been appointed by the Bolsheviks themselves; he had saved the Baltic Sea Fleet from the Germans and with great difficulty brought it from Helsingfors to Kronstadt and the mouth of the Neva. He was very popular among the sailors; because of his strong position vis-a-vis the new regime he behaved quite independently. This is what annoyed Trotsky, who was, in fact, the only witness to appear against him, and who denounced him without itemizing any charges; he simply said in court that [Shchastny] was a dangerous state criminal who ought to be mercilessly punished....
Trotsky also instituted a savage general measure-- the keeping of hostages: he had a register made up of the families of officers fighting at the fronts."
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 105


Yeah, you know why people protested at this? Because the Bolsheviks had abolished the death penalty. But Trotsky considered him too dangerous. He was refusing to obey orders, spreading the idea that things were all going badly to the navy and so on. For example Trotsky told him that id the situation looked hopeless regarding Fort Ino, and it looked like the Germans were gonna take it, he should blow it up. What did he do? He went and said to everyone Trotsky wants the fort blown up! This caused great alarm in Petrograd, nobody could understand why Trotsky wanted the fort blown up. This was sabotage. He never told anyone that it was only supposed to be if the Germans were about to capture it! You cant run a war like that. There was loads more

Trotsky:

"But these purposes were self-evident. Shchastny persistently and steadily deepened the gulf between the fleet and the Soviet power. Sowing panic, he steadily promoted his candidature for the role of savior. The vanguard of the conspiracy – the officers of the destroyer division – openly raised the slogan of a ‘dictatorship of the Baltic fleet’. This was a definite political game – a great game, the goal of which was the seizure of power. When Messrs. Admirals and Generals start, during a revolution, to play their own personal political game, they must always be prepared to take responsibility for this game, if it should miscarry. Admiral Shchastny’s game has miscarried

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch16.htm



Another instance,Isaac Deutscher,notes that Trotsky was no stranger to executions and violence."

Trotsky had not shrunk from using terror in the Civil War; but he can be said to have been as little fond of it as a surgeon is fond of bloodshed.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 292

He was not fond of it. How does this help your 'case'?


There are a lof of examples.

Another well-known incident was his taking of harsh reprisals against a regiment that abandoned its position without orders. Trotsky ordered not only the commander and the commissar but also every tenth Red Army man in the regiment to be shot.
Through such severity Trotsky accumulated many enemies among party and military workers.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 105


No, I dont think this is true. There is a rumour that when an entire regiment deserted the front he ordered that, well these things happen in wars, the people at the top have to make decisions about a lot of stuff like that.

But when troops were retreating at Petrograd, Trotsky details how he grabbed a horse, chased the retreating soldiers, and encouraged them to go back on the attack, including the regimental commander, and it worked, without shooting anyone except the enemy.





A simple example:

"Many historians believe there is the ring of truth to Orlov's tales, though the reader should remember that some of the stories were told second-hand, that Orlov himself was deliberately dishonest about his own complicity in these affairs."
(You can find others on the web,the point is - he had a personal role in many of the events,and he lied at times)


Your source, wiki, preceeds that with

"A textual comparison of the Secret History with Walter Krivitsky's In Stalin's Secret Service reveals that, for both books, the authors' secret informant on the history of the Moscow Trials (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Trials) was Abram Slutsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Slutsky), head of NKVD Foreign Intelligence."

It also says Orlov promised Stalin he wouldnt publish til after his death, and he honoured that. Anyway, the CIA treat him as a credible source.

Krivitsky was another Soviet intelligence officer with lots of knowledge of the NKVD. Other witnesses are people like Trepper and Berzin.





Well,since you said Trotsky always believed in what he wrote,i am asking you,did he believe in that too?A simple yes or no would be adequate.
No, I dont think they really meant it, Trotsky was trying to educate a younger comrade. It was a private letter. Lenin and Trotsky both used this sort of language.




I will try.

Can you show me at least 3-4 quotes where his predictions proved to be right?


Er, ok.

1931
"The mistakes of the German Communist Party on the question of the plebiscite are among those which will become clearer as time passes, and will finally enter into the textbooks of revolutionary strategy as an example of what should not be done."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/310825.htm
This was after the communists formed an alliance with the Nazis!

1931
"Germany is now passing through one of those great historic hours upon which the fate of the German people, the fate of Europe, and in significant measure the fate of all humanity, will depend for decades. "

"Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!"
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/311208.htm

1934
"Hitler is preparing for war."
this was just after Hitler had accepted arms reduction and was sounding very pacifist, and at a time when American companies were staring to increase their investments in Germany.

In fact Trotskr predicted WW2 in 1932 apparently, though I dont have a source and I assume it wasnt definite as the Nazis could still have been stopped if his plans were adopted.

It's a bit embarrassing to list really, he predicted the rise of the USA (you can see that on video), and I think the pact between Hitler and Stalin, and Germany breaking the pact.

In regards to Russia obviously at the start of 1917 Trotsky was the only one talking about a socialist revolution there.

In 1936 Trosky predicted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, if the dictatorship wasnt replaced with a workers democracy.

He also predicted that Israel would be a bloody trap for Jews, and he predicted Stalin would murder him.

In the 1920 he predicted that Stalin's policies would lead to a clash with the kulaks.

[Omsk]

Er, the clue is in the word war. However although he sometimes threatened the death penalty it wasnt always carried out.




It was carried out,and you got examples.


He was not fond of it. How does this help your 'case'?

It is a comment on Trotsky,and his actions during the war,and i think it has some weight.He after,all,did order the execution of many people,he was,after all,one of the head figures in the army.


No, I dont think this is true. There is a rumour that when an entire regiment deserted the front he ordered that, well these things happen in wars, the people at the top have to make decisions about a lot of stuff like that.


Why do you think it is a lie?Because it is showing that Trotsky was not the saint you try to present him as?


But when troops were retreating at Petrograd, Trotsky details how he grabbed a horse, chased the retreating soldiers, and encouraged them to go back on the attack, including the regimental commander, and it worked, without shooting anyone except the enemy.



That,is likely a lie,plus,its coming from Trotsky,he was very egoistic,and it is likely that he wrote that,i mean,he would probably not write how he executed commisars and sailors.


the CIA treat him as a credible source.

The CIA,conservatives,and a couple of Trotskyists.


No, I dont think they really meant it, Trotsky was trying to educate a younger comrade. It was a private letter. Lenin and Trotsky both used this sort of language.



You said he believed in everything he wrote,and now you say he didnt [and i dont see why he would not believe in what he wrote],all right,you can change your opinion,no problem.



And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory.



This was not proved.

[daft punk]

It was carried out,and you got examples.

You gave an example of one dangerous traitor who was shot, a treacherous admiral who's actions could have cost many lives.




It is a comment on Trotsky,and his actions during the war,and i think it has some weight.He after,all,did order the execution of many people,he was,after all,one of the head figures in the army.

Yeah, he was the leader of the Red Army, it was a civil war, people do get shot sometimes.




Why do you think it is a lie?Because it is showing that Trotsky was not the saint you try to present him as?
because I could only find it in one book on the net.




"But when troops were retreating at Petrograd, Trotsky details how he grabbed a horse, chased the retreating soldiers, and encouraged them to go back on the attack, including the regimental commander, and it worked, without shooting anyone except the enemy. "
That,is likely a lie,plus,its coming from Trotsky,he was very egoistic,and it is likely that he wrote that,i mean,he would probably not write how he executed commisars and sailors.
So when he reported it to the Central Committee, and got a medal, did anyone stand up and say it was a lie?

Things were so bad that Lenin wanted to abandon Petrograd. Trotsky argued to defend it. He went there with his train and went into the city, roused the workers, went to the fleeing soldiers, grabbed a horse, encouraged them to turn round, and led them back on the attack. It was the only time he had to take over the job of regimental commander, as the commander was also fleeing, but then the commander got his act together after Trotsky's encouragement.






This was not proved.

What do you mean it was not proved? The social democrat workers and communists united would have been greater in number than the fascists, so obviously they could have stopped them. the KPD did offer a united front in the end but it was too late.

What do you think of the communists' brief alliance with the Nazis?

[Omsk]

You gave an example of one dangerous traitor who was shot, a treacherous admiral who's actions could have cost many lives.




I gave you one example.(More actually)


Yeah, he was the leader of the Red Army, it was a civil war, people do get shot sometimes.


Yeah,Stalin was the leader of the USSR,people do get shot sometimes.


Do you accept this logic,you yourself are using?

Now you dont,eh?


Things were so bad that Lenin wanted to abandon Petrograd. Trotsky argued to defend it. He went there with his train and went into the city, roused the workers, went to the fleeing soldiers, grabbed a horse, encouraged them to turn round, and led them back on the attack. It was the only time he had to take over the job of regimental commander, as the commander was also fleeing, but then the commander got his act together after Trotsky's encouragement

Stalin also advised Lenin to stay in Petrograd.



What do you mean it was not proved? The social democrat workers and communists united would have been greater in number than the fascists, so obviously they could have stopped them. the KPD did offer a united front in the end but it was too late.






"They could have" is not concrete proof.


What do you think of the communists' brief alliance with the Nazis?

What does this "question" have to do with anything?

[daft punk]

I gave you one example.(More actually)

I already know some people got executed during the civil war, it was a few thousand actually.



Yeah,Stalin was the leader of the USSR,people do get shot sometimes.

Oh yeah, right, like Trotsky shot a million people in peace time, including all the communists.



Do you accept this logic,you yourself are using?

Now you dont,eh?

You cannot compare shooting a few thousand enemy in a war with killing a million innocent people in peace time, many of whom were the best socialists in Russia, the original Bolsheviks for example, all but two of the surviving ones murdered by Stalin.




Stalin also advised Lenin to stay in Petrograd.

Amazing, he actually did the right thing.




"They could have" is not concrete proof.

What a stupid statement, like revolutions come with money-back guarantees. 2 years, parts and labour, or full refund.



What does this "question" have to do with anything?

Oh, finding it hard to tell me are you?

Do you not have an opinion on the Stalinist-Nazi alliance in 1931, which Trotsky said would go down in revolutionary text books as what not to do?

Do you never feel like the fact that your horse ran in the wrong direction, you backed the wrong one, especially since it happened before you even made the bet?

[Drosophila]

Stalinist-Nazi alliance in 1931

Are you referring to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact?

[GoddessCleoLover]

It seems to be a reference to the "Social Fascism" strategy that led the KPD to refuse to form an anti-Nazi front with the SPD. IMO that was on of many erroneous policies promulgated by Stalin.

[daft punk]

1931 July 21: KPD leaders present ultimatum to sPD coalition leaders in Prussia: make a united front with us or we’ll back the Nazis. SPD leaders reject it. The KPD backs the Nazis, despite the fact it might put the Nazis in power—though now the KPD calls it the “Red referendum”. Nazis and German Communists campaign together to remove Prussia’s SPD-led government.

1931 August 9: Prussian Referendum fails. SPD stays in control.
1931 September: SPD leaders expel Reichstag deputies Max Seydewitz and Kurt Rosenfeld for open opposition to SPD support of Brüning regime. The expelled deputies favor a united front against fascists.
1931 October: More SPD expulsions/resignations. SPD splits. Left Social Democrats unite with SPD youth, pacifists, and some of the Brandlerite Communist Party Opposition (KPO) to form the Socialist Workers Party (SAP). Six SAP leaders are deputies in the Reichstag.
Trotsky takes a positive attitude toward new group, hoping that its members will overcome SPD centrism. But SAP is a confused body with no real impact on working-class politics. (In July 1932 elections, SAP gets merely 72,630 votes and lose all six Reichstag seats. In the November 1932 election, their vote drops further still. SPD rank and file can not be dislodged from their party that easily. So rather than destroy the SPD in this time of crisis, one should work to save it.)
1931 December: SPD leaders create the Iron Front for Resistance Against Fascism. The organization seeks to engage the old Reichsbanner, the SPD youth, and labor and liberal groups. SPD rallies to the Iron Front, holds mass demonstrations, fights fascists in the streets, and arms selves. This is more than the SPD leaders wanted. But SPD workers don’t care and grow increasingly revolutionary. Meanwhile, the KPD has no ideological concept of a united front—hell, they just supported the Nazis in the “Red referendum.”


http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/index.htm

Trotsky comments

"The mistakes of the German Communist Party on the question of the plebiscite are among those which will become clearer as time passes, and will finally enter into the textbooks of revolutionary strategy as an example of what should not be done."
Leon Trotsky

Against National Communism!
(Lessons of the “Red Referendum”)

(August 1931)

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/310825.htm

[daft punk]

1928 May: Reichstag elections (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/elect.htm#a285) return the SPD to cabinet with Chancellor Hermann MÜller. KPD get a third of the SPD’s vote (Nazis get less than a tenth). This SPD leadership is further right than before and opts for something called the Great Coalition—including the People’s Party—and holds power for about two years.
Meanwhile, the Comintern adopts the ultra-left doctrine of the Third Period and something called social fascism. The doctrine says the collapse of the world’s capitalist nations is supposedly following a handy pattern:



The First Period (1917-1924): Capitalist crisis and revolutionary upsurge;
The Second Period (1925-1928): Capitalist stability;
The Third Period (now): Capitalist crises return and proles are ready to rise up again.

The Comintern concludes it’s time to end Second Period collaboration with Social Democrats (and their powerful working class base). In the case of Germany, it means these SPD workers are really just “social fascists,” a sort of left wing of fascism.

[daft punk]

1930 September 14: Election day (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/elect.htm#a309). SPD votes tumble by 6 percent, while the KPD rises by 40 percent. However, their combined vote falls from 40.4 per cent of electorate to 37.6. The real change is the Nazi vote—up 700 per cent. The Nazis go from ninth to second-largest party. Meanwhile, the Comintern-led KPD dubs this a victory for the Communists and “the beginning of the end” for the Nazis. The Comintern concurs.
Trotsky’s opinion was slightly different. To paraphrase him, the KPD is like a singer who sings wedding songs at funerals, and funeral songs at weddings ... and is soundly thrashed at each occasion.

[u.s.red]

It's not a question how many people Stalin killed. It's a question how many capitalists, petty-bourgeoisie, Social Democrats, and enemies in his paranoid mind Stalin killed.

[Omsk]

I already know some people got executed during the civil war, it was a few thousand actually.
Than why did you ask me who was executed during Trotskys carrier as a military commander?
Well,now that you know,you should remember the information i gave you.


Oh yeah, right, like Trotsky shot a million people in peace time, including all the communists.I was just using your logic.

You cannot compare shooting a few thousand enemy in a war
Where did you get the exact number of people executed during the civil war,ie killed? (In combat also,due to starvation,bad tactical orders)

Amazing, he actually did the right thing.
yes,there are a lot of examples,did you hear about a thing called the GPW?


What a stupid statement, like revolutions come with money-back guarantees. 2 years, parts and labour, or full refund.
They could have,is not concrete proof.Its just an idea,thought.It cant be checked.Please,stay away from hypothetical questions,especially bad ones.